Читать книгу The Oaken Heart онлайн

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Auburn's reaction was prompt and indignant. It was the same sort of reaction which you might get if you took a very old hat away from a dotard snoozing in the sun, with a brisk "You don't need that any more, do you, Grandpa? Here comes the salvage van."

It was in many ways a remarkable and even an epic struggle lasting the best part of two years. There was genuine bitterness in it, and real triumph; fear, exasperation, astounding endurance and tenacity of purpose, together with as much brains and leverage on both sides (as well as nearly as many distinguished people) as it takes to get a controversial bill through its second reading in Parliament.

Finally the closing order was rescinded at the eleventh hour and the school remains, if only to prove that the present generation of Auburn men is much the same as its predecessors. With the train the Church School is ours, small, obsolete, and remarkably if obscurely useful.

Yet all this time, according to even our kindliest critics, we ought to have been watching the Germans. But to be honest, I do not see what good that would have done. We hardly ever watch foreigners ourselves for the simple reason that, as old 'Anry said over in Suffolk, "we can't make head nor tail on 'em." Moreover, we have got our work cut out when it comes to watching, keeping an eye on Flinthammock in the east and Heath in the west. Flinthammock, in our possibly somewhat biased opinion, is "wuss nor Paris, if a b'y gets down there alone." They have a population of nearly two thousand people down there, and there, according to Auburn, everybody is fabulously rich and "nobody don't do no work, which is remarkably strange, so it is now." This rank libel has no foundation whatever in fact, but it goes to show that we have not by nature quite that broadminded imagination which would let us as individuals become citizens of the world without considerable mental and moral discipline.