520
PARTISAN REVIEW
school, when Brown, the second master, was permitted to take one
or two boys for an afternoon of butterfly hunting on a common a few
miles away. Brown was a man with white hair and a red face like a
strawberry, who was good at natural history, making models and
plaster casts, operating magic lanterns, and things of that kind. He
and Mr. Batchelor were the only adults in any way connected with
the school whom I did not either dislike or fear. Once he took me
into his room and showed me in confidence a plated, pearl-handled
revolver-his "six-shooter," he called it-which he kept in a box
under his bed. And oh, the joy of those occasional expeditions! The
ride of two or three miles on a lonely little branch line, the after–
noon of charging to and fro with large green nets, the beauty of the
enormous dragon flies which hovered over the tops of the grasses,
the sinister killing-bottle with its sickly smell, and then tea in the
parlor of a pub with large slices of pale-colored cake! The essence of
it was in the railway journey, which seemed to put magic distances
between yourself and school.
Bingo, characteristically, disapproved of these expeditions, though
not actually forbidding them. "And have you been catching
little
butterflies"
she would say with a vicious sneer when one got back,
making her voice as babyish as possible. From her point of view,
natural history ("bug-hunting" she would probably have called it )
was a babyish pursuit which a boy should be laughed out of as
early as possible. Moreover it was somehow faintly plebeian, it was
traditionally associated with boys who wore spectacles and were no
good .at games, it did not help you to pass exams, and above all it
smelt of science and therefore seemed to menace classical education.
It
needed a considerable moral effort to accept Brown's invitation.
How I dreaded that sneer of
little butterflies!
Brown, however, who
had been at the school since its early days, had built up a certain
independence for himself: he seemed able to handle Sim, and
ignored Bingo a good deal.
If
it ever happened that both of them
were away, Brown acted as deputy headmaster, and on those
occasions, instead of reading the appointed lesson for the day at
morning chapel, he would read us stories from the Apocrypha.
Most of the good memories of my childhood, and up to the
age of about twenty, are in some way connected with animals. So
far as Crossgates goes, it also seems, when I look back, that all my
