Nevertheless the thumb-screw was relaxed a little during this second half year.Philip was so advanced in his studies and so apt, that Mr Stelling could obtain credit by his facility which required little help, much more easily than by the troublesome process of overcoming Tom's dulness.Gentlemen with broad chests and ambitious intentions do sometimes disappoint their friends by failing to carry the world before them.Perhaps it is, that high achievements demand some other unusual qualification besides an unusual desire for high prizes; perhaps it is that these stalwart gentlemen are rather indolent, their divinae particulam aurae being obstructed from soaring by a too hearty appetite.Some reason or other there was why Mr Stelling deferred the execution of many spirited projects - why he did not begin the editing of his Greek play, or any other work of scholarship in his leisure hours, but, after turning the key of his private study with much resolution, sat down to one of Theodore Hook's novels.Tom was gradually allowed to shuffle through his lessons with less rigour, and having Philip to help him, he was able to make some show of having applied his mind in a confused and blundering way, without being cross-examined into betrayal that his mind had been entirely neutral in the matter.He thought school much more bearable under this modification of circumstances; and he went on contentedly enough, picking up a promiscuous education chiefly from things that were not intended as education at all.What was understood to be his education, was simply the practice of reading, writing and spelling, carried on by an elaborate appliance of unintelligible ideas and by much failure in the effort to learn by rote.
Nevertheless, there was a visible improvement in Tom under this training;perhaps because he was not a boy in the abstract existing solely to illustrate the evils of a mistaken education, but a boy made of flesh and blood, with dispositions not entirely at the mercy of circumstances.
There was a great improvement in his bearing, for example, and some credit on this score was due to Mr Poulter, the village schoolmaster, who, being an old Peninsular soldier, was employed to drill Tom - a source of high mutual pleasure.Mr Poulter, who was understood by the company at the Black Swan to have once struck terror into the hearts of the French, was no longer personally formidable.He had rather a shrunken appearance, and was tremulous in the mornings, not from age, but from the extreme perversity of the King's Lorton boys which nothing but gin could enable him to sustain with any firmness.Still, he carried himself with martial erectness, had his clothes scrupulously brushed, and his trousers tightly strapped, and on the Wednesday and Saturday afternoons when he came to Tom, he was always inspired with gin and old memories Which gave him an exceptionally spirited air, as of a superannuated charger who hears the drum.The drilling lessons were always protracted by episodes of warlike narrative much more interesting to Tom than Philip's stories out of the Iliad ; for there were no cannon in the Iliad , and besides, Tom had felt some disgust on learning that Hector and Achilles might possibly never have existed.But the Duke of Wellington was really alive, and Bony had not been long dead - therefore Mr Poulter's reminiscences of the Peninsular War were removed from all suspicion of being mythical.Mr Poulter, it appeared, had been a conspicuous figure at Talavera, and had contributed not a little to the peculiar terror with which his regiment of infantry was regarded by the enemy.On afternoons when his memory was more stimulated than usual, he remembered that the Duke of Wellington had (in strict privacy, lest jealousies should be awakened)expressed his esteem for that fine fellow Poulter.The very surgeon who attended him in the hospital after he had received his gunshot wound had been profoundly impressed with the superiority of Mr Poulter's flesh: no other flesh would have healed in anything like the same time.On less personal matters connected with the important warfare in which he had been engaged Mr Poulter was more reticent, only taking care not to give the weight of his authority to any loose notions concerning military history.Any one who pretended to a knowledge of what occurred at the siege of Badajos was especially an object of silent pity to Mr Poulter: he wished that prating person had been run down and had the breath trampled out of him at the first go-off, as he himself had - he might talk about the siege of Badajos then!Tom did not escape irritating his drilling master occasionally, by his curiosity concerning other military matters than Mr Poulter's personal experience.
`And General Wolfe, Mr Poulter? wasn't he a wonderful fighter?' said Tom, who held the notion that all the martial heroes commemorated on the public-house signs were engaged in the war with Bony.
`Not at all!' said Mr Poulter, contemptuously.`Nothing o' the sort!...
Heads up!' he added in a tone of stern command, which delighted Tom and made him feel as if he were a regiment in his own person.
`No, no!' Mr Poulter would continue, on coming to a pause in his discipline.
`They'd better not talk to me about General Wolfe.He did nothing but die of his would; that's a poor haction, I consider.Any other man 'ud have died o'the wounds I've had....One of my sword-cuts 'ud ha'killed a fellow like General Wolfe.'
`Mr Poulter,' Tom would say, at any allusion to the sword, `I wish you'd bring your sword and do the sword-exercise!'
For a long while Mr Poulter only shook his head in a significant manner at this request, and smiled patronisingly, as Jupiter may have done when Semele urged her too ambitious request.But one afternoon when a sudden shower of heavy rain had detained Mr Poulter twenty minutes longer than usual at the Black Swan, the sword was brought - just for Tom to look at.