The last child, Tom, was considerably younger than his
brothers, so had belonged rather to the company of his sisters.
He was his mother's favourite. She roused herself to
determination, and sent him forcibly away to a grammar-school in
Derby when he was twelve years old. He did not want to go, and
his father would have given way, but Mrs. Brangwen had set her
heart on it. Her slender, pretty, tightly-covered body, with
full skirts, was now the centre of resolution in the house, and
when she had once set upon anything, which was not often, the
family failed before her.
So Tom went to school, an unwilling failure from the first.
He believed his mother was right in decreeing school for him,
but he knew she was only right because she would not acknowledge
his constitution. He knew, with a child's deep, instinctive
foreknowledge of what is going to happen to him, that he would
cut a sorry figure at school. But he took the infliction as
inevitable, as if he were guilty of his own nature, as if his
being were wrong, and his mother's conception right. If he could
have been what he liked, he would have been that which his
mother fondly but deludedly hoped he was. He would have been
clever, and capable of becoming a gentleman. It was her
aspiration for him, therefore he knew it as the true aspiration
for any boy. But you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear,
as he told his mother very early, with regard to himself; much
to her mortification and chagrin.
When he got to school, he made a violent struggle against his
physical inability to study. He sat gripped, making himself pale
and ghastly in his effort to concentrate on the book, to take in
what he had to learn. But it was no good. If he beat down his
first repulsion, and got like a suicide to the stuff, he went
very little further. He could not learn deliberately. His mind
simply did not work.
In feeling he was developed, sensitive to the atmosphere
around him, brutal perhaps, but at the same time delicate, very
delicate. So he had a low opinion of himself. He knew his own
limitation. He knew that his brain was a slow hopeless
good-for-nothing. So he was humble.
But at the same time his feelings were more discriminating
than those of most of the boys, and he was confused. He was more
sensuously developed, more refined in instinct than they. For
their mechanical stupidity he hated them, and suffered cruel
contempt for them. But when it came to mental things, then he
was at a disadvantage. He was at their mercy. He was a fool. He
had not the power to controvert even the most stupid argument,
so that he was forced to admit things he did not in the least
believe. And having admitted them, he did not know whether he
believed them or not; he rather thought he did.