The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  And so on to—but I really mustn’t weary my readers—to the gymnasium, the fives court, the tennis courts, the cricket pavilion, all scenes of many personal triumphs which my Virgil recounted to me so lightly that each might have been part of another boy’s history, and a school museum, to the treasures of which—Roman pottery, flints, a few miscellaneous weapons of medieval warfare—the youth’s father, yet again, had been an anonymous major contributor. Whoever could this Maecenas possibly be . . .?

  I cannot pretend I wasn’t relieved—while fearing imminent boredom—when my Virgil said: “And now for the Chapel.”

  Well, we approached this culmination of any proper St. Stephens tour from the second quadrangle one entire side of which was flanked by the cloisters. Above these “please note the fine row of Y-tracery plain-glass lancet windows . . .” Then after I’d duly noted them, and we were standing on the tiles of the cloisters floor, “There are two distinct doors into the Chapel, the one nearest the altar for the beaks and us prefects, the other for the rest of the school.”

  “Prefects stand a little nearer to God than the rest of ’em?” I suggested humorously, but my companion was obviously not amused. “Beresford Hope himself approved the scheme,” he said, “because he thought it gave men here a due sense of the different stations proper to any society and how these should be properly respected.”

  With a reverential movement of his young sportsman’s hands he now lifted the heavy bronze latch of the first of these two doors and motioned me inside. To the right lay the body of the chapel, the nave filled with rows of chairs but with pews on either side for seniors, perhaps those not yet elevated to prefectorial status, perhaps indeed of the rank of crinkle-top and his Horace-conning friend. To the left a flight of wide stone steps led up in a series of decreasing arcs to the altar. On reaching the communion table and the lofty Italianate crucifix presiding above it, the favored had two directions they could take—the one to choir-stalls and a grandiose pulpit, its sides carved with a pattern of lions and roses, and the other to further choir-stalls, the organ and some larger pews with something of the aspect of boxes at a theatre.

  “That is where we fellows sit to pray,” my informant told me.

  “You fellows?” I queried. But I should have guessed.

  “Yes, those of us with the School Colors.” And just perceptibly he touched with his refined-shaped, neat-nailed fingers the light blue hem of his blazer. “As under the oak tree; as in that corner of the library.”

  I had of course got the point. I did not really like my guide, he was not my kind of person; after almost an hour in his company I could say this quite definitely. And I did not like the Chapel either, being unaccustomed to such places. I felt a need to turn the talk between us in as secular a direction as could be managed.

  “For which sport did you get your colors?” I asked, in perhaps an inappropriately loud voice for this hushed place.

  The prefect looked a little pained at both my matter and my manner, but he answered me nonetheless: “For almost all of ’em, actually. Footer, squash, Eton fives, and—naturally—cricket. I have represented the Coll in every one of those, at the highest level.”

  I remembered Barton Cunningham. “They might make you Victor Ludorum one day.”

  It was an impercipient remark. “But they did that last year. And from the point of view of the records, they should this year, too, for I have broken earlier achievements. But they may not want to make the same chap victor two years in succession. And I may not want to accept it, for the same reason.”

  “No, I can see that!” Personally, I didn’t care one way or the other whether he got the cup; why indeed should I? Another nauseous current had sped through me. And the clammy adherent to my inside—that would surely vanish when my interview with the mighty Mr. Whittington was over and done with, but maybe not till then. I didn’t want to stay in this Chapel much longer, so stuffily damp in this nice warm spring weather, and shuffled my feet as if in impatience.

  But how was it that this red-brick building with its clear glass windows, not so unlike the great salon at Banstead Lodge, was penetrated on this clear sunny morning by shafts of deep emerald green and topaz blue which splashed the steps up to the altar? I raised my head and saw, high above the crucifix, a circular window set high above the window and depicting—even at casual glance this was clear enough—Jesus Christ walking on water. The now almost painfully bright emerald green was the banks of Lake Galilee, the painfully bright blue the waves on which He was treading.

  My guide had noted my gaze: “Nothing is dearer to us than our rose window,” he told me, though his tone was no more emotional than when he’d told me that naturally he’d got colors for cricket. “Mr. Beresford Hope of the Ecclesiastical Society wanted this to be one of the few school chapels distinguished by one, he felt it was in key with both the principles and practices of the place, the rose being so important to our religion, and so—as is often the case with Mr. Beresford Hope’s ideas—it came to pass. Three of our leading artists working in unison designed it, and its execution was, to a good extent, made possible”—I quickly guessed what was to come—“by the generosity, once more, of my father.” Perhaps I shouldn’t keep my eyes on this brilliantly-colored circle, that looked as it if were turning into an orb, but the window was unusually magnetic. So much on it appeared as if in motion; Jesus was surely coming a bit further toward me, and as for the waves of the sea, were they not actually rippling?

  “It was installed only last year, in a service conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. Some four hundred people were present. One lady looking at the figure of Our Lord asked, ‘Who is that handsome Boy from the Sea?’”

  This remark—for who was my Boy from the Sea but Hans of last night’s intimacy?—made me for a matter of seconds so giddy I was obliged to clutch on to the front of one of the pews. I had to avert my eyes from the window now lest this Holy Boy approach me still more closely. Yet wish to leave this place though I did, I did not feel just at that moment steady enough to do so. Perhaps I should never have caught the Swots’ Express, perhaps I should have had a longer, more leisurely breakfast, and traveled straight to my interview with no conversations touching on the Fullers, invaluable though I felt it had been, and no prefectorial tour guide. Too late to think all that now. But to keep myself just a few moments longer where I was, and not to disturb my inner clamminess any further, I found myself saying—what indeed I’d been rather irreverently and irrelevantly thinking: “Whatever do you School Colors chaps think about when you’re praying up there in those stalls?”

  No sign whatever he thought me impertinent or offensive. On the contrary, out the answer came as lightly, as effortlessly as if I had asked him his name: “I can only speak for myself, obviously. What a fellow prays about is very much his own concern. But I try to think about the Coll and how I can best serve her, and I try also to put my mind to this great country of ours, and what I can do for her both at home and overseas. And I pray for the happiness and prosperity of my own family who are so good to me.” This was so overwhelmingly different from the movements of my own mind in almost any situation that I felt an intensification, more, a worsening, of my physical unease, could feel too the blood draining away from me . . .

  “Here, are you all right? No, you’re not, sir. I can see that. Come we better get you out of here!” All the youth’s leadership qualities were in those words, given out, I should add, with instantly palpable concern, and in the action he suited to them. Seconds later I was, almost without knowing I was doing so, entrusting myself to him and being led out of the Chapel and into the cloisters outside which the whole quadrangle, with its huge velvet-green lawn, might just as well have been swaying upon the disturbed waters of Galilee so unstable was it to my gaze.

  The prefect gripped my arm with muscular tightness. Then, “You going to chuck?” he asked.

  And as he spoke that one vernacular word, all his snooty coolness, all his tendency
to sanctimony, all his assumption of the airs of a “man” of rank, and all his dubious relish in exercising his allotted power fell away, and he became—well, a boy speaking to a boy. And I felt, surprising myself even amid my chagrin, greatly comforted.

  “Mmm!” I made such noises, one, because I couldn’t trust myself to speak, and two, I was sure that this was exactly what I was about to do.

  “Trust me!” The prefect spoke to me as an intimate might, as old Will Postgate himself might do, and it was impossible not to acknowledge the kindness in his voice. “I know the place for the job, and it’s not far. Between these Cloisters and the Library there’s a little Garden of Remembrance, planted to honor Old St. Stephensites who joined the Services and fell for their country. Only beaks and those with School Colors are permitted to tread there. I’ll lead you and you just concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other.”

  What a company-leader in India or West Africa he will make, I couldn’t but think (rightly, as it’s turned out!).

  In this little garden sandwiched between the two largest structures of the school, grew bushes of lavender and rosemary, deliciously, cleansingly fragrant, and here, supported by the prefect who seemed to entertain for me and my malady no hint of that disdain I’d earlier found in him, I threw up copiously. The coffee I’d drunk, the kippers and the toast reluctantly served by Sarah at so early an hour and hastily bolted—out of me, in stinking little jets they all issued.

  And confirming my feeling that my guide had changed radically in approach to me, “You poor chap!” he said. “It’s the worst feeling in the world, isn’t it?”

  At that moment it was certainly hard not to assent. The “chucking” was not over until I’d given about five irregularly spaced heaves.

  Then came the blessed moment when I could take a deep breath, and then another, and draw myself up into normal posture again. I accepted his offer of a handkerchief to augment my own for the wiping of mouth and face. And then thanked him for being my guide with a hearty sincerity I would not have envisaged possible a quarter of an hour before.

  “I never caught your name,” I apologized.

  “I don’t think I ever gave it you. Prefects don’t usually do that when showing a visitor ’round; we prefer to be thought of as mere representatives of the greater whole, The Coll. But since you ask—it’s Donaldson. Donaldson Major, or Ma as school usage has it.”

  Sometimes now I wonder if I hadn’t already guessed. Nevertheless, weak as I was still feeling, I stepped back from him in recoil. And—just my luck! I thought—just as I was beginning to, well, like him. For I couldn’t but remember that Barton Cunningham had said all the adulation at The Old Hole of the Donaldson family was enough to make one “chuck.”

  At this point bells began to ring out; the roast-meat-red walls of the symmetrically arranged blocks made them reverberate, while their peals swung up, as it seemed, to bounce against the blue panoply of the sky.

  “That means five to ten, sir,” my guide-and-helper told me, “and you’re expected at the Headmaster’s study—in School House—at ten. He is a very busy man, and appointments with him must be kept promptly.”

  “You best start leading me to him then!” I said. After vomiting, your whole bodily frame aches, as after cruel abuse. And what a state for a young reporter eager to be thought well of to find himself! Why, it might be thought that he’d spent the previous evening “on the ale”! Could have been true of some of Will’s pals, could have been true of Will himself—occasionally—but never true of myself.

  We walked slowly across the Old Quad, past the aged oak tree. I liked the former manor that was School House more than any of the buildings put up in more recent times for educational purposes, the Chapel included, and admired its line of mullioned windows now catching the sun, and the shape of its many tall old chimneys erect against the bright sky.

  “You reacted to my name as if you knew it already,” Donaldson remarked, “but it was doubtless the Pater of whom you’d heard. Sir Greeley Donaldson.”

  “But, of course!” I said. Barton should never hear of this encounter if I could help it!

  “Here is the door to the Headmaster’s study. I shall knock on it myself, and do whatever explanation I deem necessary, for in truth we are only two minutes late of the appointed hour . . .” My heart was thumping with agitation, more like a schoolboy’s than that of an already fledged if still young man-of-the-world, while, to my disconcertion, another wave of giddiness, similar to what I’d just experienced in the Chapel, broke over me. “And may I thank you, sir,” Donaldson was continuing, “for being so receptive and interested a visitor to the Coll, and may I express the hope that you will favor us some day soon with more of your time.”

  Readers, is this the point at which I should confess that I did actually attend the First of June Founder’s Day which I was now to hear about, and with a seat reserved me in one of the front rows for that part of the ceremony (which included the Headmaster’s speech) in Chapel Quad itself? For this day was to prove a turning-point in my Dengate life; of that I am now sure.

  No sooner had Donaldson got out the first half of his sentence—“Here is your visitor, sir, and I am sorry to tell you that he has been in—” (indisposed, presumably)—than the tall, tonsured, clerical-garbed personage he was addressing cut in decisively with:

  “The poor fellow! No need to say any more, Donaldson. He is clearly in need of ministrations!” His voice was loud, resonant, commanding, and kindly. “You may now leave everything to me, but once again very many thanks!”

  Before I almost realized what was happening to me, I was asked to sit in a deep, soft armchair covered in dark green silk. It enveloped me, most welcomingly, as if made out of some miraculous soothing unction, and as it did so, I shut my eyes and tried to rectify my whole position to the world outside my body. Now at least I knew what Hans had experienced when he’d fainted at the Gateway. But I was not going to faint. I opened my eyes and looked up to see the ecclesiastical giant who was St. Stephen’s Headmaster standing close beside me, smiling away.

  “I wouldn’t mind betting I know what’s up with you, my dear Mr. Bridges,” he said. “You got out of bed and did your ablutions too quickly this morning; you bolted your breakfast; you hastened to catch the train, up at an earlier hour than that usual for you as employee of The Advertiser; and, then—our fault perhaps, though we meant well—you went around sightseeing instead of quietly preparing for this meeting of ours.”

  “How—do—you—know—that?” I gasped out, impressed, because emotional factors apart, was he not right in his assumptions?

  Mr. Whittington smiled yet more broadly: “I’ve been a young parish priest in my time who didn’t look after himself sufficiently, have I not? And who thought he could dispense with doing so. When I’d given early morning communion, I’d rush back to my presbytery, and gobble my breakfast so fast it’s a wonder any of it went down at all. However—I have made time for you, so let’s have you sitting composedly a while and drinking some good hot tea—and then to business!”

  Mr. Whittington had the sleeves of his soutane rolled up on this warm morning so that I could see that they were egregiously muscular, those of a formidable spin-bowler perhaps, an impression not contradicted by his disproportionately large, and equally muscular, hands. (I was later to learn that he was an ardent gardener.) Barton Cunningham had spoken, a little bit contemptuously, of “Dick” as being abbot-like, “monkish,” and his noticeably round head did rather endorse this adjective. His hair proceeded in very straight strands from his tonsured crown, and in the morning light looked white, if surely not with age (I put the man at forty-five at the most). On scrutiny its color was shown to be the palest possible yellow, as though the sun had bleached it when he was performing his outdoor manual tasks.

  The room that was his study Edmund Hough could well have called “cheerful,” and it was far tidier than any of my Editor’s. Bookshelves full of leather-bound volumes covered
two walls, rugs soft to the feet and bright to the eye (Bokhara? Shiraz?) lay on the well-polished old boards of the floor; French windows, this morning about a quarter open, let in the aromas of the walled garden beyond, larger than that of Castelaniene, and full of lilacs, ornamental cherries, and in the borders, stocks and Sweet Williams. Near them, so that the sweet air could drift over him, stood the Headmaster’s handsome rosewood desk. This was of the type, made in the earlier years of our century, called a Register Desk—a sloping writing surface above a fitted well on the top, with, on either side of it, a small band of drawers so convenient for the lighter tools of the writer’s trade, and complementing the larger, more capacious drawers below. I coveted it at once, and my respect for the individual who owned it and kept it in such excellent and appetizing order (again, unlike Edmund back at the paper) increased.

  There’s further admission to come. When we eventually and unhurriedly got down to the matter of our meeting, I was—I can find no other expression!—won over by the man’s enthusiasm for what had been arranged for Founder’s Day in every corner of the College: friendly matches, contests in which members of boys’ families could join in, instrumentalists’ performances, readings of extracts from the gems of English Literature, and so on. As the Head expatiated on all the many and various festivities for the First of June, I was able to envisage the setting for each one, to see its intrinsic advantages and perceive how it would relate (either by attractive contrast or by naturally blending in) to what was going on in adjacent parts of the Coll. I was still engaged in doing this when the “great man” broke off, leaned forward and said:

  “Donaldson Ma has, I can see, done a very good morning’s work, your knowledge of the College—which to my absolutely certain knowledge you had never visited before—is absolutely exemplary. But I will go one further. Donaldson Ma had an egregiously good student. In fact, I will say that I have never met someone who has picked up the features of our establishment so quickly, so interestedly and been so tenacious of detail. You are truly to be congratulated.”