The Retrospect. Ada Cambridge

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ later years her letters were like novels themselves. Her reticence about things one burned to know concerning the private lives of her royal employers was impenetrable, but outside of that what food for the romantic imagination! There was the death of her pupil, a young princess of S – , and later the semi-dissolution of her father's kingdom – two events that the youngest aunt took bitterly to heart and discoursed of eloquently. There was that mandate of the Czar to her and another pupil, wintering in Dresden, to return instantly to St Petersburg, and the journey of the party in bullet-proof railway carriages through Poland in revolt. The train crawled along so slowly, on account of the fighting on the line, that they were nearly starved, and when it reached a station where food might be obtained no one but the youngest aunt had the pluck to leave its shelter. The English tutor of her pupil's brother (the children were fatherless wards of the Russian Emperor) cowered in his corner paralysed with fright; the youngest aunt could not find words to express her contempt for him. She gathered up her skirts – it was necessary to hold them high, she said, because the ground was running with blood – and sallied forth to forage alone, returning with a little black bread and some dirty water, procured with great difficulty and by a heavy bribe. I remember that the youngest aunt was all indignation against "ungrateful Poland," which shows how the finest judgment can be affected by the personal point of view. At the end of the perilous journey there was a solemn service of thanksgiving for the deliverance of the Lord's Anointed out of the hands of bloodthirsty rebels. Her sketches of these and other stirring scenes taught me something of the world outside my village or country town; they supplied plots for many early romances that never saw the light.

      On the whole, school work was a deadly uninteresting, and therefore unprofitable, business in my time, no matter what the qualifications of teachers. The notion of making it a pleasure as well as a discipline, of breathing into its dry bones any breath of knowledgeable life, seemed not to occur to anybody. The idea that it was anything but a penalty for being young certainly never occurred to us. It is not surprising when one considers other aspects of the social system prevailing at the period. But it does seem strange that a theory of education so essentially stupid on the face of it should still persist to the extent we see in these more enlightened days. And yet – not so strange. Nothing is really strange when you think it out. The schools, most humanly and naturally, keep their old alliance with the Church, clinging to the old dogmas which have been the roots of their being and the symbols of their power for so long; inevitably resisting, while they can, on behalf of all sorts of vested interests, the Spirit of Progress which they must know to be ultimately irresistible. When I see growing children who have spent morning and afternoon at school fagging wearily at "prep" through the evening when they ought to be recruiting with a game or in their beds, I marvel at the hidebound conservatism which can thus ignore the laws of health and the rights of the individual, freely recognised as paramount in other directions. But again – what is there to marvel at? There are scores of good, common-sense business men to whom Compulsory Greek is a sacred thing, and there are thousands and thousands of truly saintly women who would not have a hand laid on the Athanasian Creed for anything. Not to speak of the innumerable brave fellows, souls of honour, flowers of chivalry, who believe as devoutly as they believe in God that the world would go to pieces utterly without its armies and navies.

      How often we hear elderly people gushing over their school days! "Ah, those were the happy days!" When I hear them I know exactly what they mean – not the school part of school days, but the free parts in between. I am not of those who sentimentally deceive themselves in this matter – the school parts to me were never happy. I have always known it. And when I came back to the scenes of my schooldays, when I stood in that quiet road at D – and looked up at the window of the room under the crow-stepped gable, I realised with a shudder how unutterably wretched they had been sometimes.

      But it is time I dragged my spirit eyes from that sad little nook in the house of dreams. I will not look at it again. I will take Memory through the ghost-haunted attics behind it and down the twisty stairs, to the lower floors and the garden and the company of my dear family, where she can play about much more cheerfully.

      Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

      Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

      Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

      Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

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

СКАЧАТЬ