The Rector of Justin

by Louis Auchincloss

  “I hear that you have become the official reader to the headmistress,” he began this morning in his lilting, half-mocking tone. Now that I know him better, I realize that this tone has merely become a habit and does not reflect, as I had first assumed, an attitude of sustained contemptuousness. “In the court of France it was a coveted position.”

  “It was a career open to humble gentlewomen,” I retorted mildly. “I trust I do not seem presumptuous in aspiring to it.”

  Mr. Ives glanced sidewise at me as he had a way of doing before changing his emphasis. “My dear fellow, we’re all very happy indeed that you’re able to do anything to amuse poor Mrs. Prescott. We others have tried and failed.”

  “But I do nothing!” I exclaimed, embarrassed by his novel note of gravity.

  “In a sense, of course, there is nothing one can do,” he agreed. “But that makes the tiniest thing loom large. Harriet Prescott is dying, and she resents the process. When you reach my age, you’ll know how common it is to resent death. At the same time she has come to resent most of her old friends. We can only love her in silence. But to you, a newcomer, has fallen the privilege of amusing her. Some of us may be jealous, but I assure you that all of us are grateful.”

  “I’m glad that you call it a privilege, for that is certainly the way I look upon it. If it is true that I have amused her, which I very much doubt.”

  “Oh, she likes you. You have not yet become identified with the school. It is natural that as the end draws near, she should have a jaundiced eye for the institution which has been her greatest rival and which will soon have her husband all to itself. You must have noticed how impatient she is with Dr. Prescott.”

  “I have indeed. And I’ve found it very painful.”

  “You needn’t. He understands. Few husbands, Brian, can have been loved as that man has been. And yet she must have always known, as I have always known, that for every gram of love that comes back from Francis Prescott, a pound goes to the school. That is the way things are.” He looked at me now with his hard, birdlike stare, and I had my first sense of how much emotion it might curtain. “That’s the way things always are with great men. But sometimes, for aging wives and senior masters, it’s a bit hard.”

  I made no answer, for we had reached the steps of the chapel doors, and I could hear the tumbling notes of the organ in a Bach fugue.

  December 5. My heart is low tonight for I fear I have seen the last of my dear new friend. Please, God, make her parting swift and painless. She will indeed be one of thy ministering angels. I received word at three o’clock that she wanted to see me, and I went for the first time to her bedroom where I found her very feeble and gaunt, but still inclined to talk. The nurse told me I must stay only ten minutes, but when my time was up and the warning white figure appeared in the doorway, Mrs. Prescott sent her away, saying sharply: “I have all eternity in which to rest, Miss Mitchell. Leave us be.”

  I was uncomfortable about this, but it seemed to me that it would probably be worse for her to be frustrated than tired. She was lying back on the pillow with her eyes closed and talking more to herself than to me. Her thoughts seemed to dwell no longer with famous personalities of the past but with her own youth. I made as few comments as possible, just enough to steer her drifting craft down that quiet stream.

  “Oh, that was before I was married,” she murmured. “That was when I was only twenty and spending the winter in Paris. We had a tiny apartment in an old hôtel on the Rue Monsieur, I and my sister and a maiden aunt. I shall never forget the uproar in the family when it was discovered that we had a sofa in the living room.”

  “A sofa? What was wrong with a sofa?”

  “Why, can’t you see what unimaginable intimacies it suggested?” Her eyes were still closed, but the hint of a smile passed over her thin white lips. “There had to be only stiff little chairs for our nonexistent callers. And there were rules about these, too. Oh, yes, those were still the days of maintien. One could never, for example, offer a guest a chair in which one had been sitting.”

  “You mean he always had to have a fresh one?”

  “If there was one. Of course! Can you think of anything more horrid than a warm seat? Voilà qui serait dégoutant!” She was silent after this so long that I thought she might be unconscious. When she spoke again her voice had a trace of thickness. “Ah, those innocent, happy days. How I rebelled and loved rebelling. My daughters have suffered terribly from frustration because they couldn’t shock me. How mean of me it was, as I look back. I wonder if it hasn’t been the thing that has hurt them most in life, that desperate, unsatisfied need for a convention to hit at.” Here she seemed to be trying to catch her breath. “The mealy nothingness of a civilization that has no hates or loves!”

  “But should a parent pretend to be stuffy?” I protested. “Should a mother assume a prejudice if she has it not?”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps indeed she should.” Again she was silent for at least a minute, and when she talked her voice was very low, and her thoughts seemed to linger in the French past already evoked. “It’s all so—so hopeless to convey. Like Paris then. Not a Renoir, no. Not a Pissarro.” The pauses between her phrases increased. “No, it wasn’t that. I see it more brightly. More lighted. It’s funny, isn’t it? More like a bad academy picture. A Meissonier. A Gerome. Rose-cheeked girls with dogs. The Bois. A carriage. And all those market scenes.” She smiled again. “How funny if the impressionists were wrong. How—how—funny. And Mother would never let me—Mother would never—” Here I could no longer make out her words, and I rose in alarm to get the nurse whom I found just outside the door.

  “Go now,” Miss Mitchell whispered angrily. “Please go.”

  But I was beyond Miss Mitchell’s anger now. I went to the bed and leaned down to kiss my poor dear friend’s bony withered hand.

  “Crébillon,” she murmured, very distinctly, and I left the room. I had thought she was wandering, and only just now, as I wrote the word, did I remember that he was the author of Le Sopha.

  December 6. Mr. Ives told me this morning as we were going into breakfast that Mrs. Prescott had died just before midnight. I had to go back to my study because I could not have the boys at my table see my tears. But after a few minutes I was under control, and I came down. Would I have wanted her to live longer? No. Dear God, she is one of thy angels now, and I have no doubt one of the most beautiful. A bell in the chapel tolled a deep note every minute for an hour this morning from eight to nine. In a curious way the notes seemed to accumulate and spread, as in a basin slowly filled by drops, until a rich deep grief overflowed and saturated the campus. It was quite wonderful to me that a sense of death should sit so easily and nobly on a school dedicated to youth. It was as she would have wished it.

  December 8. I have seen Dr. Prescott for the first time since her death. I was summoned to his study where I found him at his desk in an attitude of deep contemplation. He did not even look up at me as he asked in a low voice: “It occurs to me, Aspinwall, that you must have been the last person to hear my wife speak. Would you be good enough to tell me what were her last words?”

  There was an odd chill in his tone, almost as if he were jealous of this final intimacy. It was noticeable that he did not call me “Brian” as he had before. I had heard something from Mr. Ives of the “hard” period of his life, before the benignity of his old age, and I wondered if his present demeanor might not be a vestige of it. But I was too full of sympathy and love to bear the least resentment. “Crébillon,” I murmured. “Crébillon was the last word I heard her utter.”

  “What?”

  Stupidly, I repeated the name.

  “Surely, you don’t mean the French eighteenth century author of salacious novels?”

  Haltingly, wretchedly embarrassed, I explained the context while he stared at me with total gravity. When I had finished he was silent.

  “How peculiarly unfitting,” he said at length in the same solemn tone, “that the last recorded
utterance of the woman who contributed more than any other person to this school should be the name of a writer whose books are not even allowed in the library.” Then, without smiling, he winked at me. “How like Harriet. How gloriously like her. To go out on such a note of protest. Thank you, my dear Brian. Thank you for telling me that.” He rose and reached his hand across the desk to me. I grasped it and then to my horror I began to sob. I covered my face and sobbed. “It’s all right, dear boy,” I heard him say in the kindest of tones. “You loved my wife, and I deeply appreciate it.”

  “Oh, I did, sir,” I murmured, “but what a shocking scene I’m making.” I looked up at him, in sudden beseeching despair. “Do you suppose a man with so little control could ever become a minister?”

  “Is that what you want to be?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  Dr. Prescott came around to my side of the desk and put a hand on my shoulder. “It’s a good thing to have feeling, Brian. One can’t really control it unless one has it, can one? You’ll be all right. You have a great deal to give to others, and I think your calling may be a true one. But I don’t think you’re ready yet. I think maybe a year or two at Justin may be precisely what you need.”

  I rubbed my eyes, grasped his hand again and hurried from the room. I, who should have been consoling, had asked consolation and had received it munificently! Will a lifetime of good works make up for the blessings I have received? Help me, dear God, to be worthy.

  3

  Brian’s Journal

  MARCH 8, 1940. I have made no entries now for three months, not because nothing has happened but because so much has. When I started this journal last September it served no definite purpose, but as time went on it came to serve two. I had a confidant in the first lonely weeks of teaching and a record of my prayers and aspirations from which I hoped to assess my qualifications for the ministry. But now I am not only happy at Justin; I am beginning to be boldly and wonderfully convinced that if God continues willing I shall one day be ready to enter divinity school. And yet I still feel a mysterious compulsion to continue these entries.

  I think I know what this compulsion may be, and I am going to write it down now. I am going to make myself do it, no matter how presumptuous it may sound. After all, what is more seemingly presumptuous than the act of becoming a minister? It is robbed of its presumption only by the fact that one is called, and one must learn to distinguish between true and false calls.

  What I am trying to say is that I may have a call to keep a record of the life and personality of Francis Prescott.

  There, I have said it.

  Was it not thus that the gospels and the lives of the saints came to be written? It is not, of course, that there will be any lack of lives written of Dr. Prescott. But since Mrs. Prescott’s death I have had opportunities to talk to some of the graduates who have visited the school to offer their sympathies to the headmaster, and it has struck me that they do not see him as I see him. The legend has begun to obliterate the man, and I have the temerity to wonder if the truer vision may not rest with the newer eye, if Dr. Prescott may not be most closely revealed to a non-Justinian.

  Mr. Ives, I think, may see him clearly and see him whole, but I wonder if Mr. Ives isn’t satisfied with his private vision. Somehow I do not see him memorializing it. He strikes me as a man who has no faith in anything but Dr. Prescott and hence who would not see the point in writing anything that survived Dr. Prescott. I do not mean by this that I am trying to make this journal a biography of Dr. Prescott. I am simply seeking to capture something that may ultimately save him from the obliteration of the “official” biography.

  If again I am not presumptuous. But then I must learn not to be so afraid of presumption. Such fear may be temptation.

  To resume: after his wife’s funeral there was a great deal of pressure on Dr. Prescott from friends and family to take the winter off. Each of his daughters wanted him to come to her, but he insisted on going on with his duties. Mrs. Turnbull, the youngest, firm of flesh and manner and loud of voice, with a goodly remnant of the dark looks that won her two husbands, and of the temper that must have driven them away, came up from New York to settle in the headmaster’s house and cheerfully to patronize us all, but after a month of paternal snubs she departed. Dr. Prescott was finally to be allowed to handle his grief in his own fashion.

  It was then that Mr. Ives called me to his study to tell me his proposition.

  “The only way we can help Dr. Prescott is to lighten his load, and the only master who can accomplish this is you. Your stock is high at the moment because of your friendship with Harriet. I am therefore creating a new faculty position for you: assistant to the headmaster. You will help him with his mail and correct the themes of his sacred studies classes. You will be available to walk or drive with him in the afternoons. It’s a job, of course, that you’ll have to play by ear as you go along. If he lets you, there’ll be plenty to do.”

  “But will he let me?”

  “I don’t know. When I told him about it, he simply grunted. But he didn’t refuse. He didn’t knock my head off, as I thought he might. All we can do is try. I shall take over your fourth form English, and you will be relieved of study hall periods.”

  “Oh, sir, that won’t be necessary.”

  “Perhaps not. But in case this plan does work, I want you to be free. Don’t worry about not carrying your load. If you can be the least help to Dr. Prescott, you’ll be doing more for Justin than any other way.”

  “I will certainly try my hardest.”

  This conversation took place a month ago, just after the Christmas vacation. The next morning, according to my instructions, I presented myself at the headmaster’s office and asked if I could help with his mail. He waved me to a seat and proceeded to read his letters and dictate answers to his secretary, Miss Burns, without paying the least attention to me. I left at eleven, for first form grammar. It was awful.

  The next morning, when I again presented myself, he handed me a belligerent letter from a graduate asking how many courses the school gave in “dead languages.”

  “They’re always trying to brand me as a classicist,” he grumbled. “Actually, despite my own fondness for Greek poetry, there’s less emphasis on the ancient tongues in Justin than in most of the other schools. The older I get the more I realize that the only thing a teacher has to go on is that rare spark in a boy’s eye. And when you see that, Brian, you’re an ass if you worry where it comes from. Whether it’s an ode of Horace or an Icelandic saga or something that goes bang in a laboratory.”

  He made no comment on the answer that I drafted, but he signed it, and thereafter, without further discussion, I found myself in charge of the letters from graduates.

  It fascinated me that there were so many of these. At times it seemed to me that Justinians had nothing better to do than write their old headmaster. Some of the letters were childishly boasting. “You will observe from the letterhead that I am now a partner in . . .” or “Did you ever, Dr. P, expect to address me as a fellow doctor?” In others the writers criticized Dr. Prescott bitterly, holding him responsible for unfortunate developments on the national or international scene, even the war itself. There was a shrill note to these, a “Now it can be told,” an ultimate twisting, at a safe postal distance, of the old lion’s tail. See what has come of your emphasis on football, Latin, cold showers, compulsory chapel, grace before meals or stiff collars on Sunday! “Would it interest you to know, Dr. P, how many of my formmates have been swindlers, dope addicts, alcoholics, lechers, pederasts? And whose fault was it, Dr. P?” “Do you know, Dr. P, that I never really felt like a man until I tore up the prayer book you gave me?”

  I mention these first because the others, the encomiums, the congratulations, the almost tear-drenched tributes, were in the vast (and ultimately tedious) majority. I concluded that the common denominator of bad and good, favorable and unfavorable, was that in respect to Dr. Prescott most of his graduates had never grown u
p. They continued to love him or hate him as if they were still at school and to praise or excoriate him as if they were in a “bull session” in the cellar or a canoe on the Lawrence River. He did not seem to dwindle, as childhood figures usually do, and when they came back to visit the school, instead of seeming a sort of quaint Mr. Chips (was this what awed me at fourteen, this lovable Meissen granddaddy with his finger athwart his nose?) they saw the same rector, except indeed that he was even more formidable, for the school having dwindled, he suddenly loomed over it, grotesquely large, the manipulator of the puppet show revealed after the final drop of the curtain. The Prescott they had remembered, by God, was the real Prescott!

  His schedule is phenomenal for a man of eighty. He rises at six, in the tradition of the great Victorians, and reads for an hour before breakfast. He claims that a mind continually soaked in small school matters needs this daily airing to preserve any freshness. He reads speedily and broadly, with an emphasis on philosophy and history, and although he keeps abreast of modern fiction, he is happiest with the Greek poets. He then officiates at morning chapel, presides over assembly and spends a busy morning in his office at the Schoolhouse. Lunch at the head table is followed by a half hour of faculty coffee, known as the “time for favors,” when he is at his most easy and affable. The afternoon is devoted to the physical inspection of his plant, and in the course of a week he visits every part of the school grounds, some of them many times over: the playing fields, the infirmary, the gymnasium, the locker rooms, the dormitories, even the cellars and lavatories. Dinner is at home, with guests, usually visiting graduates, but after the meal he retires to his study for two more hours of paper work and conferences with boys. At ten o’clock he has a couple of strong whiskeys and the day is over. During prohibition he gave these up, and he tells me that it was a sore denial.