The Rector of Justin

by Louis Auchincloss

  “But I would have thought that just the time to write memoirs.”

  “Also I’m lazy, Mr. Aspinwall.” He shook his head solemnly as if he were proclaiming a virtue. “I was born for the oral and not the written word. Some of the pages were all right, but oh, the work it took. I have a nice little thing on Réjane and a few good stories about Anatole France. But the only one I completed was the piece on Frank Prescott. About our early days.”

  My mouth went suddenly dry. “You wouldn’t let me see it?”

  “Oh, good gracious no. It’s highly confidential.”

  “But if I swore I’d never repeat a word of it?”

  He looked up at me, surprised at my eagerness. “Why should you care? When you have Frank in the flesh, what is the fascination of ancient memories?”

  “Because I want to know everything about him. How it all started, for example. The whole idea of Justin!”

  “You wish to write his life?”

  “Oh no, sir. I’m not so ambitious. I simply want to know.”

  “You have no axe to grind?”

  “But the very sharpest! I feel . . . how shall I put it? That to know Dr. Prescott is to be enriched. The more I know, the richer I shall be. Oh, yes, I’m quite selfish.”

  Mr. Havistock smiled almost pleasantly. “But not vulgar. Not yet anyway. You are still uncorrupted. I tell you what, Mr. Aspinwall. When I am settled in Long Island, where I have rented the only Ogden Codman house I could find, I shall go over my papers, and I will consider your request. Yes, I will consider it.”

  He now tasted a piece of toast from the second tier of the tea stand, one on which marmalade had been spread, and it was evidently not his special brand, for poor Mrs. Midge had to be rung for, and a long discussion ensued. I was disappointed in him. He had taste and perception, no doubt, but the world that he tasted and perceived existed only for his own amusement. He liked marmalade and he liked Proust, which seemed to put them on the same footing. I wonder if the Edwardian era did not contain many such figures in the background, if behind the beauty of James’ fiction and of Sargent’s portraits there were not a good many limp pieces of toast that had to be buttered on both sides.

  May 27. Apparently I passed muster with Dr. Prescott’s friend for I was asked to a small dinner tonight at the headmaster’s house. It was not a success. Following our host’s lead, we all deferred as respectfully to Mr. Havistock as if he had been Walter Lippmann or Dorothy Thompson, but the old boy was in a foul mood (perhaps his valet forgot to “turn” him last night) and answered our questions about the war in grumpy monosyllables. It was obvious that he has no use for any schoolteachers outside of Francis Prescott. He ended by being positively offensive to poor Mr. Ruggles who had the misfortune to suggest the invincibility of a Frenchman “fighting on his own soil.”

  “As proved, I suppose, in 1815 and in 1870,” he snapped. “Unhappily for Europe the cliches of the American tourist will not save the day. The French peasant may be brave enough; peasants usually are. But in this black century of ours a country is no stronger than its ruling class, and I have known the ruling class of France for forty years.”

  When the others rose to go, shortly after the silence that followed this outburst, Dr. Prescott winked at me to indicate that I should stay on. Old Horace continued to sit morosely by the fireplace and sip his brandy as he descanted on the horrors of the war.

  “Over here you see that things are bad, but you have no conception of how catastrophic they really are. You see that the old world of grace and leisure and art, my world if you will, or the remnants of it, is doomed. Obviously. But what you don’t see, Frank, is that your world is doomed, too.”

  “What do you call my world, Horace?” the headmaster asked in the milder tone that he used with this old friend.

  “The world of the private school,” Mr. Havistock answered with a snort. “The world of the gentleman and his ideals. The world of personal honor and a Protestant God. When a civilization crumbles, it crumbles all together. The colors run out, the good with the bad. Roman virtue goes with the Roman arena. Voltaire and Watteau with the lettre de cachet. Francis Prescott with Horace Havistock. You can’t pick and choose in a flood.”

  “Please! You make me feel like an old piece of antimacassar.”

  “You may laugh, my friend, but it’s just what you are.”

  I trembled with indignation to hear Dr. Prescott so slighted. For if he was jesting, Mr. Havistock was not. How did this old fop dare to come up to Justin to taunt the headmaster in his bereavement!

  “You’ll be telling me I should retire next,” Dr. Prescott said in a gloomier tone.

  “Of course I will,” Mr. Havistock retorted promptly. “It’s precisely what I’ve come up to tell you.”

  “But if everything is going to pieces,” I protested in dismay, too upset now to be silent in the presence of my elders, “why does it matter whether Dr. Prescott retires or not?”

  They both looked up at me as if they had forgotten I was there, and I had a sharp sense of intrusion upon an ancient intimacy.

  “Because there’s such a thing as dignity,” Mr. Havistock explained coldly. “And dignity requires one not to hang on.”

  At this I lost all restraint. “What a cruel thing to say!”

  “It’s a cruel world.”

  Dr. Prescott, turning from both of us, had arisen and was staring moodily into the fire. “There must be a limit to what is expected of the old,” he said in a grave, melancholy tone. “If we do our job, must our years be thrown in our teeth? Where am I weaker, Horace, than I used to be?”

  “You read the service now from the prayer book. The time was when you recited it right through by heart.”

  Dr. Prescott turned on him, stung. “And you claimed it was theatrical. Must I be condemned by my own high standards?”

  Mr. Havistock seemed to relent a bit at this. He passed his fingertips over his temples in a brushing gesture that made me suddenly realize that for him, too, the scene might be proving a strain. “Do you remember, Frank, when you used to admire Browning? And ‘Pheidippides’? ‘Never decline, but, gloriously as he began, so to end gloriously’? Don’t decline now.”

  “But the years have taken me from Browning to Tennyson,” Dr. Prescott came back at him. “Like Ulysses, I claim that ‘old age hath yet its honor and its toil.’ How do you know, Horace, that no ‘work of noble note’ remains for me to do?”

  Mr. Havistock shook his head relentlessly. “The work of noble note is to quit while you’re still ahead. I’ve always given you good advice, Frank. You won’t get it from your graduates or your trustees. They’re all too scared of you. Believe me, my friend.”

  Dr. Prescott had turned back to the fire, and his face was drawn down in an expression of bitterness. Suddenly he gripped the mantel with both of his hands and kicked a log viciously. “Nobody’s scared of me,” he muttered. “Sometimes I wish they were.”

  “Harriet would have told you the same thing.”

  “Oh, go to bed, Horace, and stop croaking! You just want everyone else’s world to come apart because yours has.”

  Mr. Havistock did not seem to resent this in the least. He asked me if I would be good enough to fetch his valet, and when I returned from the kitchen with Jules, he and Dr. Prescott were actually laughing!

  Of course, I know that at eighty Dr. Prescott cannot go on forever, but I doubt if there is a single master or boy at the school who thinks him inadequate for his job. I had hoped that he might continue a few more years and perhaps have the blessed luck to die in office. But tonight I know there is no such chance. Old Havistock is too practiced a vulture to have come prematurely to the scene of demission. It is perhaps his very undertaker’s face that Dr. Prescott has awaited.

  June 2. Prize Day, and Mr. Havistock’s seed have borne bitter fruit. Dr. Prescott made the announcement of his retirement at the close of the ceremonies. It came as a complete surprise and shock to his audience.

  The weat
her, at least, was perfect. The whole school, in Sunday blue, and the parents sat on benches in the middle of the campus facing the dais for the headmaster and visiting dignitaries. I have never seen so brilliant an azure sky, so emerald a lawn. The awakened earth seemed to burst with promises that had nothing to do with disaster across the seas.

  When the last diploma had been handed out and the last prize given, the headmaster stood silent for a long moment before the amplifier, both hands in his pockets, his eyes fixed beyond the crowd at the point where the river path disappeared into the woods.

  “I have one more brief statement to make. Since the death of my beloved wife I have felt the moral support of every boy and of every master in the school. I have been buoyed up in a difficult time by close to five hundred pairs of arms. With such a backing I have almost fooled myself that I could go on forever. But time is remorseless, and I have passed by a whole decade the biblical limit of threescore years and ten. I shall remain in office for one more year so that my successor may have time to prepare for the transition. In June of 1941 the Reverend Duncan Moore will become headmaster of Justin Martyr. God bless you all. We will now adjourn for lunch.”

  There was a stunned, staggered silence and then gasps and then cries of “Oh, no!” Dr. Prescott walked abruptly to the edge of the dais, and we heard the quick click of his heels descending the steps. He strode rapidly down the aisle and was almost out of sight before next year’s senior prefect, very red in the face, leaped to his feet and screamed hoarsely: “Let’s have a long cheer for Dr. Prescott!”

  We all rose and roared that cheer. It echoes in my ears as I write this.

  June 3. Dr. Prescott has, of course, been surrounded by people since his great announcement. Graduates, parents and trustees mill about him to try to impress their little pinpricks of sympathy and admiration into his bland, impersonal attention. I have a discreditable feeling of resentment, as if they were taking him away from me and had no right to, as if I alone and not they had any true appreciation of his greatness. Of course this is nonsense and egotism, yet I cannot help feeling that the man I see when we’re alone is different from the idol of the crowd.

  He sent for me tonight before supper in his study and asked me if I wished to go to divinity school in the fall. He had spoken to the Dean at Harvard about me. He was so gentle, and I was so touched that he should remember my problems that I stammered too badly to be understood.

  “Oh, sir,” I protested at last, “I only want to stay and help you!”

  “But I shan’t need you now, Brian. I only needed an assistant while I was trying to conserve my energy. Now that I’m going to retire I can be a spendthrift. I can blow it to the winds.”

  “Well, if you don’t need me, sir,” I pleaded, “then I need you!”

  He coughed with a hint of disapproval. He disliked any demonstration of feeling, particularly with regard to himself. “You don’t need me, young man, but perhaps you need another year at Justin. Particularly if you want to come back here when you’ve taken orders. What will you do this summer?”

  “I thought I might go to Columbia for a course in Elizabethan drama.”

  He laughed. “It’s better reading than the papers today. Perhaps I may try a bit of it myself.”

  August 1. New York. Since the last entry France has surrendered, and England has entered her hideous ordeal. I have been unable to write. I sit in my rented room on upper Broadway with windows open on a sultry silent avenue and immerse myself in Beaumont and Fletcher. It has been as if a dark curtain had blessedly been lowered over the agonizing vividness of the past year, over death in Europe and death in Justin Martyr. It has been as if I had died and gone to a seventeenth century spirit kingdom inhabited by jealous sovereigns and crafty nephews, by ambitious cardinals and cynical clowns, by melancholy and madness, bones and diadems.

  This morning I received a large brown envelope from Mr. Havistock containing the typescript of his chapters on Dr. Prescott and the following note:

  Deaf Aspinwall: Here is the “Prescottiana” that you wanted. I make you a present of it. The world is full of asses, but they are particularly abundant among the loyal graduates of New England church schools. Justin Martyr is no exception. Poor Frank is so surrounded that you may be the only chink through which he can be seen. Unless you become an ass, too. Don’t.

  Your friend from another century,

  H.H.

  As I read the words I felt again the throb of my ancient faith. God’s presence had been suspended, not withdrawn, and I blush for my craven doubts and turn to Mr. Havistock’s piece.

  5

  From Horace Havistock’s “The Art of Friendship”

  AS I LOOK back upon a long and (I hope) non-useful lifetime over decades devoted to cultivating the luxuries and letting the necessities go scrape for their sordid selves, I am perfectly clear that the greatest and most indispensable of the former has been that of my friendships. The art of making these, distrusted of women, has never been much cultivated in America, and I have had largely to pursue it abroad, but I will always remember and will here gratefully record that my first lesson was taken under the ashen sky of a New England winter.

  I met Frank Prescott when we were sixteen, at St. Andrew’s School in Dublin, New Hampshire, in the fall of 1876. Had he not been in my form, I should certainly not have been able to last out till Christmas. It was bad enough that I was at once a new boy and a fifth former, an incongruous situation, but it was a good deal worse that I had been brought up exclusively by nurses and tutors and kept safe until well past puberty from the savage competition of my contemporaries. How I happened to be suddenly shorn of my curls and stripped of my velvet suits and isolated with members of my own sex—total strangers every shrieking one of them—involves my telling something of my own beginnings.

  I am the youngest child of a marriage of June and January, and, alas, I cost June her life. My father, Gridley Havistock, had children of an earlier match who were older than my mother; he was sixty at my birth and survived to my thirtieth year. He was a huge, big-bellied, bulbous-nosed, pig-eyed be-whiskered old-school New York gentleman, magnificent in his authoritarianism, but testy, snappish and accustomed to obedience. A great deal that he said was banal, and all of his aphorisms were platitudes, but he looked like a business leader and certainly acted like one, and in his generation appearances counted for more than they counted later when scalawags like Gould and Fiske had taught New Yorkers to be suspicious of everyone.

  I doubt if Father would have been president of the Merchants’ Bank and a trustee of New York Central a generation later. He was not in the league, financially, mentally or immorally, with the new magnates of steel and rail, but he had the happy good sense to have learned to get on with them and to be able to make them feel that an invitation to 310 Fifth Avenue or “Gridley Court” in Newport was one of the things they had dreamt of in their log cabins or steerage days. This good sense, I may add, he conveyed to his children, and it has proved the most valuable gift of the few with which he endowed us.

  My older brothers of the second bed enjoyed Father’s rude health, but I was a rheumatic child, subject to constant respiratory complaints, and was turned over at a tender age to the ministrations of the one person who wanted me, a faded, ailing, old maid half-sister who presided timidly over her terrifying father’s table and who, because of the difference in age of more than a generation, was addressed by her demi-siblings as “Sister Sue.” She, dear creature, was full of recipes and quaint medicinal superstitions; she ventured out of doors in only the balmiest weather and then swathed in furs and scarfs over the black of her perpetual mourning for perpetually dying cousins. My childhood was spent in upstairs parlors before small well-tended fires, reading English and French fiction while Sister Sue worked on her needlepoint, and in the blur of early memories Grant in the Wilderness, Sherman riding to the sea, my brother Archie winning a tennis match or the bray of laughter from downstairs at Number 310 where Father was en
tertaining the Hone Club, were part and parcel of a men’s world, happily no more real and not nearly as exciting as the romances of Dumas or Jane Porter.

  I managed to protract this dreamlike existence to my fifteenth year and might have stretched it to my own maturity had poor Sister Sue not died of a breast cancer. Of course, it was not put that way to me. “She was tired and went to sleep,” was the Havistock diagnosis. And I was discovered, or perhaps I should say “realized,” by my family for the first time, an ungainly, despairing, dressed up doll, abandoned on top of the pathetic little heap of her possessions. Everyone tried to be kind, but their kindness congealed into something more brittle when the great doctor, from whom Sister Sue had guarded me behind the opaque wall of her quacks, pronounced me to be in fully adequate health for boarding school.

  My brother Archie, as oldest of the second bed, now “took me in hand,” promising Father that he would have me ready in a few months’ time for St. Andrew’s where all my brothers had gone. He went straight to work, firmly and I think fairly, with lessons and exercises and instruction in sports, but all his preparations were blown to bits by the first crisp blast of an autumnal New England wind and the terrifying shouts from the football field on the day that he delivered me to and abandoned me at my new abode.

  It is important briefly to describe St. Andrew’s, as it existed in the seventies, because it later became the model of all that Frank Prescott thought a school should not be. Life there, outside of classes, was totally disorganized. The boys played informally at football and baseball, making up their own rules, but they were quite at liberty, if they pleased instead, to roam the New Hampshire countryside and fish or trap in their afternoons. They were equally at liberty to haze the weak and to group themselves into fierce little competing clubs. They bathed but once a week and never changed, even when exercising, from their stiff collars and itchy flannel underwear, so that the evening meal after a hard game of soccer was a trial for the sensitive. I will admit that they seemed to have enjoyed themselves, but to me the school was another Dotheboys Hall.