Holding such liberal views, he could not hope for the bishopric or deanery which might have been his due had he been more orthodox, but Primrose did not care. He did not care even when people said that it was wrong for him to be a clergyman at all. Onslow was among those who believed this, though neither he nor his wife would have dared to tell him so, for fear of distressing him and losing his friendship.
‘I confess,’ Primrose said now, ‘that I wish George had found it possible to hold by Dr Arnold’s churchmanship as he has held by his schoolmastership, if there is such a word.’
‘He must wish it were possible too, or so I imagine, for he has never said so directly. He always says Dr Arnold was a father to him.’
‘He does not talk about such things to you very often, does he?’
‘No.’
Onslow knew that Louisa, like her brother and her parents, was a Latitudinarian – but she never attempted to argue with him, and he passed the matter over in silence.
‘Oh dear,’ said Louisa suddenly, looking along the road. An open carriage was bowling towards them. ‘I am sure that’s Mrs Salcombe – I expect she is trying to play the great lady, visiting cottagers. I wonder whether they are grateful?’ She added: ‘I shall have to cut her. She left cards on me the other day, and I never returned, but she did not take the hint – when I happened to see her in the street she tried to treat me as an old acquaintance. It is so hard to know what to do when people will not abide by society’s rules. Here she comes.’
Louisa drove on, looking straight ahead, and Primrose, raising his hat a fraction, noticed Mrs Salcombe waggling her hand. The cut was accomplished, Louisa said.
‘There! it makes me feel unkind, but I cannot endure the thought of having to recognise someone whom I thought both ill-bred and dull when she was introduced to me. Am I right in thinking Dr Onslow wishes he were still true to Dr Arnold’s notions, Martin?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Primrose. ‘We have discussed it – not quarrelled, Louie, discussed. As I say, he regrets it, but he maintains that of all the world, only Dr Arnold was capable of remaining a good man while holding lax views on doctrine.’
‘Hm!’ said Louisa. ‘I am very sure he added that you too are so capable.’
Primrose said nothing to this, because Louisa was right. He sighed, and went on: ‘He insists that for everyone else sound doctrine alone is the protector of morals, which, you must own, is a High Church position. But to go back to your worry, Louie, I can only promise you that if there was no lasting breach between us when George truly was a high churchman, there will not be one now.’
‘When was that?’ said Louisa with interest.
‘My dear, did he never tell you? He was once not merely high, but a full-blown Tractarian. Remember we were at the university when the Tracts were just coming out. He was entirely seduced for quite a year?
She was so startled that she dropped the reins.
‘Directly after you had left Rugby! I cannot believe it, when Dr Arnold was still alive – and you were not even at Oxford, you were at Cambridge!’ Cambridge had been largely unaffected by the exciting demands which poured out from Oxford in the series of pamphlets called Tracts for the Times – demands for a dedicated Catholic priesthood with spiritual powers far above those of the laity, for the revival of fasting and confession, for clerical supremacy in church affairs, and for an attitude of deep mystical reverence towards the Sacrament. Unlike ordinary high churchmen, who merely stuck close to the doctrines and traditions of the Church of England and hated dissenters, the Tractarians cherished a medieval vision of the Church set against the World, of a ship afloat on a black sea, outside which there could be no salvation.
Primrose laughed at Louisa’s amazement.
‘Certainly George never dared mention it to Dr Arnold, though I believe he reproached himself for not seeking a martyr’s crown in doing so. I ought not to laugh – the poor fellow suffered considerably, torn between his new convictions and his old loyalties.’
‘Did he fast?’ said Louisa. ‘Did he have minute struggles with his conscience over whether or not he could celebrate a saint’s day by eating a second piece of bread and butter? Did he rail against Protestantism, like Mr Hurrell Froude?’
‘Well, I do not think he went quite so far as to echo Froude in condemning Latimer and Ridley to the stake a second time, but I promise you, it was all most distressing.’
‘Good gracious! I should think it must have been!’ Though she said this, Louisa was smiling at the picture in her mind’s eye of her husband being so childish.
‘I think the problem was that George’s temperament is somewhat melancholy, he is sadly apt to lose faith in human nature,’ said Primrose. ‘I know it seemed to him in those days that our national faith was in so much danger we could only save it by retreating into ecclesiasticism, ignoring all progress, thundering anathemas. The perfect opposite of all Dr Arnold had taught us.’
He hesitated, and Louisa looked inquiringly at him, knowing there was more.
‘I do not know,’ he said, ‘but I fancy – I fancy that removed from the Doctor’s immediate influence, he may have come close to losing his faith altogether. It must have shocked him most dreadfully, it was not something he could ever have expected, and he rushed into the arms of Newman in an attempt to save himself – buried himself in ritual and mortifications, took to himself all their notions of the possibility of losing baptismal grace. He must have thought that had happened to him. Remember how very full of wickedly despairing ideas about the unwisdom of trusting to God’s love and mercy Newman was – I suspect it would all have seemed very plausible to George, if he felt himself suddenly gripped by doubts. Then when he became sure of his faith again – if I am right – he grew more moderate, and of course, since Newman went over to Rome he has regarded all Ritualists with suspicion.’
‘Do you think he ever thought of going over to Rome himself?’ said Louisa.
‘Oh no. Remember this phase of his fortunately did not last for long – less than two years, he never had time to wonder about that.’
‘I wish he had told me about this.’
‘I daresay he has forgotten, or he is ashamed.’
Louisa said, a little fretfully:
‘I can only think all these divisions and distinctions are the height of folly, and unchristian, too. We ought all to tolerate each other.’
‘An admirable sentiment, Louie, but you must remember things are a little more complicated in real life. Remember how much harm the high churchmen do, with their refusal to compromise over subscription. They won’t allow us to be tolerant, and neither in their own way will the Evangelicals – you know you’ve said so yourself.’
‘Like Dr Onslow,’ said Louisa, ‘now that he is so secure in his faith that he cannot perceive why anyone else should be less so.’
Primrose sighed.
They were silent for a while, and Louisa turned the gig back towards Charton. After a few minutes’ trotting, she turned to her brother and said cheerfully:
‘Well, whatever else, you and I and Dr Onslow find ourselves in agreement when it comes to the odiousness of Evangelicals. I must take what comfort I can from that.’
‘Very true!’ said Primrose. ‘I promise to confine my conversation on religious matters to abusing them in the most unchristian way imaginable.’
Louisa smiled, and slapped the reins down on the horse’s back, making him break into a canter.
4
Winter sunlight cut like ice through the high and glittering windows, firing the red and blue glass in the chancel to painful intensities of colour. It bleached the faces of the boys who sat rank upon rank in their shallow pews, four hundred and sixty of them all in black and white, and showed up the grey at the back of their necks. The shadows cast by pillars were not dim and peaceful, but divided the space like knives, and between them on the south wall, colder than snow, there stood out the new marble tablet inscribed with names of Charton boys killed in the Cri
mea.
The sound of the organ died away. Onslow mounted the steps of the pulpit, and waited for total silence to descend, his eyes daring the boys to fidget and cough. The pulpit concealed his lack of physical stature, and he leant forward, and said:
‘My text is taken from the Book of Ecclesiastes, chapter four, verses nine and ten: “Two are better than one … for, if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth”.’
Christian Anstey-Ward perceived no merit in what he saw as the unpleasantly earthbound melancholy of Ecclesiastes, Onslow’s favourite book of the Old Testament.
Before he discovered Plato and ‘Hellas’, Christian had passed through an intensely religious phase, during which he had fed his inchoate longings for a spiritual home with medievalism and Gothic art, and with memories of all Onslow had told him in confirmation classes about the sublime beauty of doctrine. Not until after ‘Hellas’ came to occupy his mind did Christian acknowledge to himself that he was in fact repelled by much of what conventional religion had to offer: the impossibilities and immoralities of the Old Testament, the barbarian imagery of Heaven’s promise in Revelation, the cold dogmatism of St Paul. Yet having acknowledged this, he continued to believe that the more amiable parts of the New Testament were compatible with the Symposium, and though his interest in the Gothic faded, and his flirtation with extreme High Churchmanship came to an end, at seventeen he still considered himself to be a Christian of a kind. He was only just beginning to blame Christianity for his masters’ inability to see anything but grammar in the works of Greek literature they professed to understand: he imagined Onslow thought it theologically unsafe to see the world as he did, in the light of Platonic truth, and this gave him a thrill of daring.
Onslow preached an impeccably orthodox sermon on his chosen text, though he secretly admired Ecclesiastes for its unchristian stoicism, the permission it gave to retire from the struggle for endless improvement and contemplate reality in stony acceptance. He was a good preacher, whose sermons had been published and compared to Dr Arnold’s, and Christian thought those parts of his discourse he heard when his mind was not wandering were admirable, after their fashion. But he found it hard to concentrate, partly because this was the third service and second sermon of the day. Arthur Bright, who was sitting next to him, was finding it equally difficult.
Ten days had passed since Bright had kissed his lover in front of Christian. Since then, Christian had ignored him, and Bright was not indifferent to this. It was the attention of others which served to stave off the loneliness that threatened him like a fog in all his waking hours: even the attention of someone he did not greatly care for was worth having, especially when that person lived in Taylor’s. Looking now at Christian’s profile, Bright remembered how they used to share an interest in church architecture, and how Christian had become bored with it. He wondered that anyone so plain and so dull should dare to think ill of him and his interests, should prefer loneliness to his company – without sufficient cause.
Onslow had begun his sermon by giving a description of true friendship and the help it afforded in the struggle to attain godliness; he had now moved on to describe counterfeited friendships, which he said were all too common in Public Schools.
‘The commonest counterfeit of friendship,’ he said, ‘is that sort of connection which one of you forms with another by the accident of being inmates of the same house or room, of having the same master or tutor, or by some more entire accident still, which has thrown you together whether you would or no, and out of which has sprung something which either deserves or assumes the name of a friendship. How many of these intimacies, think you, deserve that name, and how many are counterfeits of friendship? Are you and your friend any help to one another? any help, that is, in matters in which it is any advantage to help one another? any help in doing your duty, in resisting your temptations, in advancing towards the goal of life; the near goal, a useful manhood, the further goal, a happy eternity? Again, have you and your friend a common object? Do you even know anything about one another’s objects? Are not matters of the highest moment entirely suppressed between you?’
Out of his pocket Bright took a receipted bill and a pencil-stub. Pressing down on his Bible, he scribbled:
‘Do you remember once telling me that you suspected Onslow of being something of a hypocrite? You were perfectly right, but you didn’t know the half of it. I am tempted by the sermon to reveal to you the Shocking Truth: I have been his bitch for the past 6 months. Do you think this is a counterfeited friendship, or not? I long to know.’ This he laid in the gap between Christian’s thighs: his eyes were sparkling, his cheeks flushed, his lips twitching, and his heart beating fast.
For two minutes he watched the other read it, and he calmed down rapidly as he did so. At length Christian held out his right hand for the pencil, looking up at Onslow as he did so, not down at the note or at Bright’s anxious face. Without lowering his eyes, he wrote:
‘Do you expect me to believe you?’ at the bottom of the paper. Then, as Bright laid a finger on it, he clamped it down on his leg and added in a scrawl: ‘What a very disgusting lie.’
Bright made a sound as he read this. Christian, with a face as motionless as Onslow’s when listening to a bad lesson, quickly folded up the note and pushed it deep down into his right trouser-pocket, from where Bright could not extract it without a struggle. No struggle was possible in chapel.
The sermon came to an end, and Onslow left the pulpit. During the remainder of the service, Christian did not once look in Bright’s direction, and when it was over and they were at last able to leave, he flung away from him and walked swiftly off alone, up towards the open country behind the parish church. After half a mile, he came to a five-barred gate, set back a little from the road, and climbed over. Hidden behind the hedge there was an old tree-stump, which he had discovered his first term at Charton, and on this he went to sit down. The countryside round about offered nothing better in the way of a private place.
Seated at last, Christian blinked miserably at the orange and gold of the westering sun, gleaming out from under a cold eiderdown of cloud. His flesh soon became chilled, for his clothes were inadequate and the tree-stump was icy, but he did not consider going back yet. He had come here to think. It was hard to think. When he tried to do so, he only realised that his reaction to Bright’s note had not been that of someone who honestly believed what it said to be a stupid lie intended to shock him; and this distressed him, for it meant he would be laughed at. The thought of gross laughter at his expense was unbearable, almost worse than the thought that Bright had not lied.
Possessed of the knowledge that whether Bright’s allegation were true or false, the last straw had been laid on his back, all Christian could do for the present was think how much he detested Onslow’s school, where such things could happen – especially did he detest its everlasting, dreary religion. Suddenly he resented that religion with extreme bitterness. He remembered Onslow preaching in the pulpit less than an hour ago, preaching calmly, gracefully, as he did every Sunday. Always he preached not on doctrine, but on morals. He reserved the delicate consideration of doctrine for his confirmation classes.
Blowing on his hands to warm them, Christian suddenly remembered how on the night after Brandon was caught making an assignation in school, Bright had dropped certain hints about Onslow’s reaction being exceedingly amusing in the circumstances. He remembered his saying that if he indeed thought he knew the worst of Charton … His mind now cleared a little, Christian tried to force himself to consider rationally whether Bright had been telling the truth. It was still hard to do so directly, but he remembered Onslow’s once placing a hand on his knee when he was reading an essay to him on the sofa in his study. He blushed vividly. At the time he had thought nothing of it, had thought it a mere friendly gesture of warmth and encouragement – a hand on the upper thigh might have been differently interpreted. As it was, it had been agreeab
le to learn that Onslow was not altogether cold, was more like other men than he seemed. Gestures of physical affection were normal, admirable – sometimes Hellenic.
He is a pasha in a harem of boys, thought Christian now, forgetting that Bright had alleged only that Onslow was engaged in a love-affair with him. The vision of Headmaster Onslow luxuriating in vice like a second Tartuffe was too fascinating to be thrust away, for it would provide a complete explanation of Charton’s loathesomeness – but Christian was attempting to be sensible, and after a short while he concluded that the vision could not possibly resemble reality, in spite of that hand on his knee. He could only be thankful that he had called Bright a liar, that if his actions had conveyed doubt, his words had not, and therefore he could not be mocked.
Slowly he got up from his tree-stump, and made his way back to school in the dismal twilight.
5
Though for the boys at Charton most of Sunday was filled with religious services, Onslow was not a devout sabbatarian, and saw no gross immorality in reading secular works or even fiction once church was over. That evening in the drawing room, after dinner and prayers, he said:
‘Well, Martin, I finished Tom Brown’s Schooldays this afternoon.’
Tom Brown’s Schooldays had been published the year before, and was enjoying a great success, but it had not come Onslow’s way till Primrose gave him a copy, insisting that he read it in spite of his contempt for novels. It was the fact that the book concerned Dr Arnold’s Rugby which made Primrose so determined.
‘Do you think it gives a fair portrait of Rugby?’ said Primrose. ‘I cannot think so – I remember nothing whatever of such shocking violence as he describes.’
‘My dear Martin, of course it is not a fair portrait of Rugby. It is almost a disgrace.’
The Fall of Doctor Onslow Page 4
