Afterwards I had a chat with one of the assistant masters, with whom I happened to be on fairly intimate terms.
'A wonderful fellow, the Head,' he told me. 'Do you know he's made that same speech at prize-giving for the last twenty years. Hardly a phrase different. He wants to send the parents away in a good temper. They'll get their account to-morrow. Of course he doesn't know that's why he's doing it. But it's the reason right enough. And how clever that bit is about the young gentlemen who've been a little troublesome. It makes every mother feel that her boy is better than her neighbour's.'
I suggested that such an opinion was likely to be revised under the influence of the terminal report. 'Not a bit of it,' he answered. 'All our reports are strictly censored. We write them out on a piece of foolscap and the Head gets them typed; but where we write "lazy and unintelligent," the parents read "moderate." You can take my word for it that the boy who gets "moderate" in his report from here is one of earth's best dunces.'
That was, of course, at a private school; but, even at the most prosperous Public Schools there is a tacit understanding that parents should be stroked down after the manner of refractory cats. The half-term report contains frequently enough a quantity of pungent critical writing, but the parental visit to the school is invariably the occasion for much conversational flattery. Freddie, unless he has become involved in any particularly unfortunate adventure, is the object of restrained, perhaps qualified, but still potential commendation. The father is assured by the house-master that everything is going on splendidly: 'A little low in form, perhaps, rather too boisterous at times in the day room, but a sound fellow at heart, the sort of fellow that the house will be proud of one day.' And the mother's qualms are put at rest by the house-master's wife. 'The tone of the house is so excellent, you see. No bullying at all, and Freddie's manners are so charming. Every one likes him.'
It is possible that if the house-master were taken to task in the privacy of his own study, he might be persuaded to confess himself a pragmatist. 'One has to keep them quiet,' he might say. 'The young rascal'll get on all right as long as they don't start meddling with him.' But it is hard to be honest with oneself. The schoolmaster cannot help regarding the parent in much the same way that the junior subaltern regarded the brigadier. We all know what happened when the runner brought the news that at such an hour the brigadier would visit Lieutenant Jones's gun emplacements. Lieutenant Jones specially called the brigadier's attention to what he knew would please him. He put his smartest men on guard. He assured the brigadier that everything was going quite all right, that the men were perfectly comfortable and that the supply of rations was adequate; Lieutenant Jones did everything, in fact, to get the brigadier into the next trench as soon as possible.