



Produced by Polly Stratton








THE MORALS OF MARCUS ORDEYNE


by William J. Locke







PART I





CHAPTER I


For reasons which will be given later, I sit down here, in Verona, to
write the history of my extravagant adventure. I shall formulate and
expand the rough notes in my diary which lies open before me, and I
shall begin with a happy afternoon in May, six months ago.


May 20th.

_London_:--To-day is the seventh anniversary of my release from
captivity. I will note it every year in my diary with a sigh of
unutterable thanksgiving. For seven long blessed years have I been
free from the degrading influences of Jones Minor and the First Book of
Euclid. Some men find the modern English boy stimulating, and the old
Egyptian humorous. Such are the born schoolmasters, and schoolmasters,
like poets, _nascuntur non fiunt_. What I was born passes my ingenuity
to fathom. Certainly not a schoolmaster--and my many years of
apprenticeship did not make me one. They only turned me into an
automaton, feared by myself, bantered by my colleagues, and sometimes
good-humouredly tolerated by the boys.

Seven years ago the lawyer's letter came. The post used to arrive just
before first school. I opened the letter in the class-room and sat down
at my desk, sick with horror. The awful wholesale destruction of my
relatives paralysed me. My form must have seen by my ghastly face that
something had happened, for, contrary to their usual practice, they sat,
thirty of them, in stony silence, waiting for me to begin the lesson. As
far as I remember anything, they waited the whole hour. The lesson over,
I passed along the cloister on my way to my rooms. I overheard one of my
urchins, clattering in front of me, shout to another:

"I'm sure he's got the sack!"

Turning round he perceived me, and grew as red as a turkey-cock. I
laughed aloud. The boy's yell was a clarion announcement from the
seventh heaven. I _had got the sack_! _I_ should never teach him
quadratic equations again. I should turn my back forever upon those
hateful walls and still more abominated playing-fields. And I was not
leaving my prison, as I had done once or twice before, in order to
continue my servitude elsewhere. I was free. I could go out into the
sunshine and look my fellow-man in the face, free from the haunting,
demoralising sense of incapacity. I was free. Until that urchin's shriek
I had not realised it. My teeth chattered with the thrill.

I was fortunately out of school the second hour. I employed most of
it in balancing myself. A perfectly reasonable creature, I visited the
chief. He was a chubby, rotund man, with a circular body and a circular
visage, and he wore great circular gold spectacles. He looked like a
figure in the Third Book of Euclid. But his eyes sparkled like bits of
glass in the sun.

"Well, Ordeyne?" he inquired, looking up from letters to parents.

"I have come to ask you to accept my resignation," said I. "I would like
you to release me at once."

"Come, come, things are not as bad as all that," said he, kindly.

I looked stupidly at him for a moment.

"Of course I know you've got one or two troublesome forms," he
continued.

Then I winced. His conjecture hurt me horribly.

"Oh, it's nothing to do