‘I certainly fail to see why it was necessary to write such lurid and untruthful descriptions of bullying, and fights. The monster Flashman, and so forth. I suppose a certain class of reader is attracted to them.’
‘Oh, that! No, the truth is that you were held in such awe you were left in peace, and you were so much preoccupied by higher matters that you noticed nothing that was sordid. I am thinking of the shameful misrepresentation of Dr Arnold.’
‘I liked the description of his preaching, the chapel,’ said Primrose. ‘Did you not, Louie?’
‘Yes, though naturally I do not know how truthful it is,’ said Louisa.
‘That was all very well, I grant you, but how can you tolerate Mr Hughes’s implying that our master’s conception of a manly character resembled Tom Brown? You told me he was at Rugby himself; how could he have come to think that he – Arnold – revered an honest blockhead?’
‘He certainly thought it more important to be a Christian than to be a scholar.’
‘Certainly! But do you think he would have considered Tom Brown a Christian? Where is his awareness of his Saviour, his awareness of sin? He cares less for Christ than for cricket. And yet Mr Hughes declares at the end of the book that the Doctor was satisfied with him.’
Onslow got up to poke the fire, and Louisa raised her head to look at him. It seemed to her that he was being unduly vehement, and she glanced across at her brother. Meditatively she sucked the end of a piece of silk before using it to thread her needle; this was a habit of which none of her governesses had succeeded in breaking her.
‘A manly character,’ said Onslow briskly to the fire, ‘is not one possessed of what I believe is called a punishing right, or left – do you remember Mr Hughes’s remarkable paean in favour of fisticuffs? – but one who is aware of the need to combat sin in himself and in others. Is there one hint in that book that this was our master’s view?’ It was rare for Onslow to talk in this firmly moral strain outside the pulpit. ‘Instead he is portrayed almost as believing that most schoolboy crimes are mere pieces of mischief, scarcely deserving the name of sin. How well I remember his teaching me otherwise.’
‘So do I, indeed,’ said Primrose.
Onslow turned to him, and said almost angrily:
‘My dear Martin, you were as innocent as a newborn kitten, you have never understood sin because you are incapable of committing it and you always were. Do not attempt to make me believe that Arnold ever found it necessary to show you the heinousness of your offences, for you committed none.’
‘What nonsense!’ Primrose said, though it was true that Dr Arnold had never once found it necessary to correct him. ‘Really, I am quite insulted to learn you think that I, in my profession, have no understanding of sin.’
‘Your goodness sprang from the heart, as everyone could see,’ Onslow went on regardless. He seemed about to say something else, but Louisa interrupted.
‘Were you ever naughty?’
‘Yes,’ said Onslow. ‘Yes, I was what you choose to call naughty. That was before I knew you, Martin – I was in the Fifth and you were already in the Sixth.’
‘What did you do?’ said Primrose, looking interested.
‘Oh, let us say I broke most of the rules devised for our social and spiritual benefit,’ said Onslow. ‘But I was never detected, possibly because whatever I did outside school, I was always careful not to neglect my schoolwork. Surely I have told you this before?’
‘And I suppose you must have been very careful in other ways,’ said Louisa.
‘Yes, Louisa, highly skilled in the art of deceit.’
‘If you were never detected,’ said Primrose, making a steeple of his fingers and raising them to his lips, ‘how and why did Arnold show you the error of your ways?’
There was a long pause. Then Onslow replied:
‘I entered the Sixth. Is that not a sufficient explanation – that I was thereafter constantly exposed to his mind and his eye?’ Having said this, he left his place by the fireplace, went to sit down again, and continued: ‘But knowing what I do of parents, I cannot be surprised that the book has been so successful. What a comfort it must be to them to think that the more loutish are their sons, the more they are possessed of Mr Hughes’s new cardinal virtue of Englishness.’
Louisa and Primrose both smiled, and the subject was changed.
*
The same evening, Christian found a letter from Bright waiting for him on the table in his room. It was in a sealed envelope, and when he opened it he read:
My dear Anstey-Ward,
I give you my word that what I told you in chapel is true, and I take it very hard that you refuse to believe me, only on the grounds, as I suppose, that what I wrote is shocking to your sensibilities.
It may seem improbable in your eyes, but Onslow is passionately in love with me, and if you will not believe me, I can show you all his letters. In the meantime, as I suppose you will doubt that I do in fact have such letters and will merely think I am lying, I enclose an extract from the latest.
A. J. Bright.
There were words in Onslow’s very small and neat but distinctive writing on the enclosed piece of paper, which had been cut off from the bottom of a letter. Trembling now, Christian read:
Beloved boy, it is become an agony to me to see you among your fellows, so keen is my delight in your beauty, so passionate is my wish to separate you from them, to have you alone upon the sofa where we have enjoyed so many, all too brief, moments of love. Can you indeed not come to me on Saturday? Of your loving mercy I ask it.
Dear Arthur, I beg of you, do not avoid me – I have no time to write more now. I remain, yours through eternity,
G. R. Onslow.
Christian stared at this for a long time. At length he lowered his candle, put Bright’s letter and the signed extract back on the table, and sat down slowly and carefully, caressing his beardless chin all the while like an old man.
*
After giving his opinion of Mr Hughes’s novel, Onslow had retired to his study, saying to Primrose and Louisa that he had letters to write: he sat now on the sofa, thinking about sin.
Onslow’s study was a low, dark room, hung with green paper, lined with books, and floored with a thick Turkey carpet. It was precious to him because he liked its enclosed quality, which none of the other rooms in the house shared. When alone there he felt safe, shut away from the world, in control of his surroundings and his emotions – yet it was there that on many occasions he had given free rein to his most dangerous emotions, both in the flesh and on paper.
At present, it was not Arthur Bright who was first in Onslow’s thoughts, but Thomas Arnold. By force of contrast, the false portrait of Arnold in Tom Brown’s Schooldays had aroused half-forgotten memories of the real man, including one particularly painful memory which Onslow believed he would have confided to his brother-in-law had his wife not been present. He knew that his comments upstairs on the novel’s inadequacies had been not so much scathing, as he meant them to be, as anguished; and this embarrassed him. Now, pinch-lipped, he could imagine himself telling Primrose just how and why Dr Arnold had shown him the error of his ways, could imagine himself receiving holy understanding – but then he saw himself confessing exactly how, as a man, he had betrayed Arnold’s trust in him. Onslow did not think that Primrose would necessarily recoil in horror if he mentioned Arthur Bright. It was conceivable that he would forgive this sin which he could not imagine: but Onslow wanted understanding, not bewildered, sorrowing acceptance, and a plea for him to abandon his evil ways.
The painful image which Onslow dreamt of unloading onto Primrose was a long-suppressed memory which ought to have been wholly pleasurable – the memory of himself aged fifteen, crying and crying with Arnold’s hand on his shoulder, weeping with relief at the easing of a vast mental burden.
Onslow remembered how he had approached Arnold with sickly trepidation, driven by a conscience he had not known he possessed. He had been still in
the Fifth Form, still deeply afraid of ‘Black Arnold’, as the man was known to most of his pupils, and had waited in agony for the periodic signal that Arnold was at home to boys who wished to consult him on a personal matter – the hoisting of a flag above the School-house. He went to him expecting to be flogged and expelled; Arnold’s kindly smile at his entrance made him blurt out that he deserved both these things.
The truth did not emerge from Onslow’s tangled and shivering euphemisms for some time. It was that he and another boy, whom he did not name, had indulged in mutual masturbation in Onslow’s minute cubicle of a study. When Dr Arnold learnt this, he was relieved. He had begun to suspect that this most promising of his Fifth Formers was guilty of what he considered the worst of all sins: lying. The sight of Onslow shaking with pain and distress over a moral failing which he regarded as comparatively slight therefore moved him deeply, and so he put a hand on his shoulder, and spoke words of gentle reassurance.
Such a thing had never happened to Onslow before, and it made him burst into passionate tears, an orgy of grief which gradually eased off into the soft weeping of one comforted. Then Arnold began to speak to him about the need to resist temptation, the need both for Christ and for good friends who would assist in the struggle against something which, though minor, could be perilous. Listening to this, sucking in Christian words with new understanding, Onslow thought of how badly he had behaved for months, without ever being caught; and to this new kind father so unlike his own he confessed how he had gone poaching, and drinking, and had broken bounds countless times. He swore that if Arnold would only allow him to remain at Rugby he would never do wrong again. Dr Arnold willingly accepted his assurance, and when Onslow was at last calm enough to leave, he said:
‘My dear boy, it is a great pleasure to me to think that I shall have you in the Sixth very soon. Abide by the resolutions you have made today, put your trust in God, and you will become an ornament to the school in the near future, and to the world when you are a man.’
Thereafter, throughout his years in the Sixth Form, Onslow had been treated by Arnold with grave tenderness. He was loved even more than Primrose, because he was a returned prodigal and had had to battle with a difficult nature. Dr Arnold was stern, he often rebuked Onslow for a slight tendency to levity and for intellectual arrogance, but the love he gave him was real, and Onslow struggled to amass more and more of it. With the vast incentive of respect and affection from both Arnold and Primrose, he had found it easy to direct his energies away from every kind of wrongdoing which had tempted him before. He learnt to love Christ, and he never masturbated with another boy again. Those had been the happiest years of his life.
Onslow got up, walked over to his desk, and stood there looking blankly at the text of that day’s sermon. Fingering it, he tried to remember exactly why, at fifteen, his conscience had been so very active when the other boy’s had not. Then, from deep down inside him, there rose up the memory of his mother discovering him with his hands on his penis when he was six years old. She had beaten him more severely than he had ever been beaten since, and told him that he would certainly go to Hell, a place which she described in great detail, making him scream. Thereafter, till adolescence with its unbearable urges came upon him, he had been too frightened of his own genitals even to look at them. Now Onslow covered his face with his hands, realising that nine years after that incident, he had expected Dr Arnold to behave like his mother. His mother had been a rigid Evangelical, with a fierce hatred of sexuality which was the result of her having suffered a long series of painful miscarriages: but Dr Arnold had been a happily married Latitudinarian, and had taken the official Christian view that lust was the least of the seven deadly sins.
Few who considered themselves truly pious took that official view, which Onslow began to think had corrupted him. He knew now that for years, he had secretly allowed himself to believe that Dr Arnold had sanctioned his little pleasures – it had taken Tom Brown’s Schooldays to jerk him back into reality. He wondered whether he would have succumbed to temptation in manhood if Dr Arnold had, after all, behaved like his mother – perhaps his sin could have been beaten out of him, even though beating so seldom eradicated sin in the boys at Charton. Perhaps terror would have been effective. But now, he thought, because he had not been doubly terrorised in youth, he could not wholly believe that his keening lust was so very wrong; and thus he went on, from day to day and month to month, loving Arthur Bright without return.
6
‘Dr Onslow,’ said Louisa next day at luncheon, when Primrose happened to be out, ‘I want you to resolve a small difficulty for me. It is very small.’
‘Certainly, my dear, if I can.’
‘I have spent all morning in trying to decide what to wear to the Taits this evening. It is a choice between pearl grey and pale yellow – which shall it be?’
‘But I know nothing of such matters,’ said Onslow, picking up his knife and fork again.
‘You can surely decide between two colours. I am not asking you to look at the dresses.’
Louisa’s two hobbies were her clothes and her garden. When gardening, she wore an old stuff dress with its skirts looped up over a short petticoat, but at all other times her clothes were extremely fashionable and elegant: too much so for a clergyman’s wife, Onslow sometimes thought, but he never bothered to speak seriously to her about it.
Onslow’s mind was now occupied with Arthur Bright, who had been provocatively idle in school that morning. He said:
‘I am very sure it is immaterial which you wear, Louisa. I advise you to spin a coin, if your maid’s opinion will not do.’
‘But I am asking you,’ said Louisa. ‘Can you not give me a simple answer?’
‘Not when I am not qualified to answer.’
‘You are perfectly well qualified to say grey or yellow. That is all I am asking.’
They looked at each other across the table. Onslow said in a worried voice:
‘My dear Louisa, I see that something is amiss. You are not at all yourself.’
‘I am perfectly well. I only want an answer instead of a dismissal of my concerns.’
Onslow paused for a moment.
‘I think this particular concern of yours is of little moment and no business of mine, but since you are so determined to extract my opinion, I will say grey. There, are you happy now?’
‘Thank you!’ said Louisa. ‘Thank you for paying me such distinguishing attention.’
In general, Louisa was the most cheerful and least demanding of wives, and Onslow loved her nearly as much as her brother did.
*
The Onslows and Primrose were to dine at Fulham Palace with Dr Tait, the Bishop of London. Dr Tait was an old friend of Primrose’s, and they had worked together on the commission which advocated reform of Oxford University some years before; but Onslow did not know the Bishop quite so well, though he too had been a member of the commission.
Both Onslow and Louisa wished to keep Dr Tait’s good opinion, because although as Headmaster of Charton Onslow was not subject to his authority, the Bishop of London might prove useful when the time came for him to resign his post. Advancement to a bishopric or deanery was virtually automatic for the retiring headmaster of a great public school, but Onslow’s dread was that if prelates and politicians thought little of him, he would be fobbed off with the deanery, and would then be forced to accept a drastic cut in income from nearly six thousand a year to less than a fifth of that – not for a year or two’s waiting, but for good. It was for the Prime Minister to decide what should become of him, but the Prime Minister might be influenced by the opinion of senior bishops, especially those appointed by himself. Lord Palmerston, who had appointed Dr Tait, had just resigned from office, but Onslow did not think the new Conservative ministry would last long, and thus he thought it as well to conceal his High Church leanings from Dr Tait in so far as he could do so without hypocrisy, while Louisa sought to appear wise, discreet and serious, without
being dowdy. It was to this end she had asked Onslow to choose between two of her more sober evening dresses.
Though quiet in colour and trimmed only with a single fall of lace from the shoulders, Louisa’s grey dress was as fashionable as all her others. Its cage crinoline was so large that when they set out to drive to Fulham it took her, her maid and Primrose several minutes to ease it into the carriage, and when at last she was inserted, there was barely room for the two men, though neither of them was large. This gave her an obscure pleasure. Onslow, who had seen Arthur Bright alone that afternoon, made no comment on his wife’s taking up so much space, but merely squeezed her hand and complimented her on her looks. Primrose saw the hand-squeeze and wondered very much at the way Onslow sometimes behaved as though he were still courting his wife, when in general he appeared to have no more than an indifferent sort of fondness for her. He said:
‘I am being crushed by your skirt, Louie. There is a great steel bar digging into my knee.’
‘What you mean,’ said Louie, ‘is that my skirt is being crushed by you.’
*
Fourteen people sat round the yellow-lit dinner-table, and Onslow thought he was the worst off of all the guests, certainly worse off than his wife and brother-in-law. Louisa was sitting between her host and a fashionable young man of the type known as a swell, while Primrose had a sensible-looking spinster on one side and a pretty young lady on the other. On Onslow’s left there sat Mrs Tait, whom he did not dislike, but on his right there was the elderly and double-chinned wife of a judge, whose idea of conversation was to ask him his opinion on various controversial religious matters, and nod or purse her lips at his replies. She made him feel like a candidate for ordination.
She had already asked him what he thought of Sunday travel, of confession, and of religious sisterhoods – she was inclined to condemn all three, while Onslow was more prone to condemn those who agreed with her, who were nearly always Evangelicals, like his mother. Yet he thought it unwise to express himself as strongly as he might have done, for Dr and Mrs Tait were sympathetic to the more moderate kind of Evangelical. Now, as the entrees were brought in, the judge’s lady asked for his opinion of geology and geologists, and of those who admired Strauss’s Life of Jesus.
The Fall of Doctor Onslow Page 5
