The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne

The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne

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Title: The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
Author: William J. Locke
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THE MORALS OF MARCUS ORDEYNE
by William J. Locke

CHAPTER I
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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