The Rector of Justin

by Louis Auchincloss

  “And you believe in me?”

  He smiled, for the first time, at the intensity of my tone. “I do believe in you, my boy,” he said and patted me on the head. “Now get some rest.”

  During the three weeks of my convalescence Prescott tutored me for an hour a day, and when I rejoined my classes I was actually ahead of the others. Even at that age I had some dim appreciation of the remarkable keenness and scope of his mind which could reduce anything, an eclogue by Virgil or the War of the Spanish Succession, to a few vivid terms that would glue the material in all but the stupidest mind at least until whatever test was pending. But Prescott was being far more than a brilliant tutor; he was nursing a sick soul. His kindness was overwhelming, without ever being in the least sentimental, without even, perhaps, being personal. He raised the great beaker of his hope to my lips like a communion cup and watched with grave countenance as I drank, and when he took it away, I knew that it was because I had had enough. There was no question of turning my convalescence into a party.

  He talked to me of God and of his early doubts and of the loneliness of his own childhood. He talked of the futility of any action in life that was not service to others. He explained to me and made me believe that happiness had nothing to do with one’s outward circumstances, but could be created only within. And then he made me laugh, too, by talking of the past and poking fun at the Joneses and persuading me not only that they were less formidable than they appeared but that they might even be human. When he came to my room with the telegram announcing poor old Grandpa’s death we knelt together in prayer by my bed, and I found that I was actually weeping.

  I was too clever, and also at this point too well acquainted with the headmaster’s character, to make the smallest effort, after my return to a normal schedule, to trade upon convalescent days. I adored Mr. Prescott as I had never adored another human being, but it was a worshipful kind of emotion, and I was able to sublimate it into violent activities and studies. I rose to be second in my form, and in my last year I was one of the school prefects. I was not big enough to be very effective at football, but I played it hard, and I edited the school paper, The Justinian. The best part of sixth form year was that the prefects were in constant contact with the headmaster, and we could feel that we ran the school in a sort of partnership. Mr. Prescott treated us almost as equals and even allowed me to share in one of his melancholy moments. We had been out together on a cold winter afternoon, snowshoeing on the crisp surface, and as we came back, it was already dark, and we paused for a moment on the crest of the hill overlooking the school and stared down at the lighted building so far below. My heart was so full that I exclaimed: “I can’t bear to have spring come!”

  “Why not, Davey? Are you so fond of the winter of our discontent?”

  “I’m so fond of Justin, sir. I can’t bear the thought of graduation.”

  “But Justin is only a prelude,” he protested. “It is nothing but a simple first course. If I thought I had made it the whole banquet of life for any boy, I should know I had failed indeed.”

  “But it’s the whole banquet of life for you, sir.”

  “It is that, Davey.” His smile was grave as he stared down at his school. “It is that indeed.”

  “And how happy it must make you!”

  “Very happy,” he agreed in a rather somber tone. “I am most blessed. I have what I wanted. I have what I prayed for. And do you know what I pray for now, Davey?”

  “What, sir?”

  “That the sin of boredom shall never fall upon me.”

  I said nothing, awed, for I knew that in that moment we were as intimate as we ever again should be.

  Graduation was a sad time for me, although Mother came up for it, urged, no doubt, by Mr. Prescott. My friends thought me very emotional, for there were tears in my eyes, but in those days such emotion was still respectable. I felt that I was emerging from a Garden of Eden that might be artificial by the standards of a world that had first applauded and later persecuted my father, but I was armed with the faith that that garden had nonetheless prepared me for that world.

  I went to Harvard and made a good record there, but I was never as happy as I had been at school. Harvard was already the world, and although I could cope with it I had not learned to cope with it joyfully. I went back to Justin, now rapidly expanding, on so many weekends that at length Mr. Prescott had to warn me in a friendly fashion that I might be neglecting the social duties of a college man. It was then that I asked him if he would consider me for the faculty of Justin when I graduated. We were walking to the river, and he grasped my elbow as he debated, too long for my comfort, the answer.

  “Are you so sure you want to teach, Davey?”

  “If I could teach here, sir.”

  “No, that won’t do. You’d have to want to teach anywhere to be able to teach here.”

  “Then I want to teach anywhere!”

  “It might work out.” He removed his hand and strode on. “But not until several years after your graduation. You must see more of the world first, Davey, if you’re to teach boys to deal with it. And I can’t help but wonder if a life at Justin would be the happiest life for you. Your father’s name received its blemish in New York. Isn’t it there that you must seek to remove it?”

  “Is that so important?”

  “Not to my thinking. But I thought it was to yours.”

  “You mean I should pay his debts?” My question, I fear, was belligerent.

  “No, Davey,” he said patiently. “I mean you should bury his old reputation under the monument of your new one.”

  Of course he was being reasonable and kind, and who but I had given him the notion of the importance of my father’s crime to me? Of course he saw instantly that Justin was a haven for me, a refuge from a world that I deemed cold, if not actually sneering. He wanted no escapists in his school, and he was right. But at the time I refused to discuss the matter any further, and we reached the river in silence. I had been rejected by too many people in my life to be a good sport about being rejected by Francis Prescott.

  10

  David Griscam’s Notes

  ONCE I had squarely turned my back on schoolteaching and resolved to become a lawyer, I never wavered again. My poor mother died only a year after Grandpa Jones, and my inheritance was just sufficient to put me through Harvard and Harvard Law. After that I got a job with Prime & Ballard, a small but lucrative “family” law firm, which is now Prime & Griscam and one of the last of its kind on Wall Street. We get our clients everything from theatre tickets to divorces; we file their birth certificates and we bury them. I started as Mr. Prime’s law clerk and became in turn his son-in-law, his partner and his executor. It was an old-fashioned success story.

  I discovered not only that I enjoyed my law practice, but that I was admirably adapted to it. I am by nature reserved, patient, of even temper and a good listener, and I love the challenge of domestic puzzles. I became a specialist in the multiple prejudices under which Americans suffer in the spending of their money, according to whether it has been earned, married or handed down, and I learned to stay within the framework of the sacred mores surrounding these categories while putting the dollars to work to the greatest advantage of the whole family. I even found that it was occasionally possible to persuade old New Yorkers that money could be used for pleasure.

  Once Mr. Prime had made me his partner everything seemed to go my way. I was even assisted by the kind of windfall that is usually the lot only of fictional heroes. I bought from my father’s creditors some supposedly worthless gold-mining stock at the price for which he had pledged it, and it turned into a very good thing. What happier ending could there be to the grim saga of the paternal obligations? Was it not what ought to have happened to the conscientious, debt-assuming Victorian son? Paradise was on this earth, where it belonged, and I thrilled with my first sense of the Midas touch.

  But the greatest reward of my successful professional life came with a lette
r that I received from Mr. Prescott on the occasion of my twenty-ninth birthday. He wrote that he had for some time wanted a younger point of view represented on the school board and that he was suggesting my name to Mr. Depew as the first graduate trustee of Justin! It was like him not even to ask my permission. He knew only too well that I would jump at the chance.

  From the very beginning, except for my diplomatic years, I never missed a meeting of the board. These were always held at the school, and it would have been worthwhile to attend them if only to watch Frank Prescott handle my fellow members. He would stare hard at the one who was putting the question, not a muscle moving, his big brown gaze seeming to encompass not only the question but the motive behind it. He would nod briefly, express his satisfaction that the point had been raised, immediately associate himself with the complaint, if any, contained, sometimes even rephrasing the question to give it a sharper lunge, and then proceed to defend his administration, then to counterattack, then to defend it again. It was Prescott against Prescott in a duel whose brilliance distracted the attention of the audience from the fact that Prescott was also the referee. I asked few questions myself for I found it more instructive to gather knowledge on my own.

  My great project, which I nursed for a year before I even began to sound out the other trustees, was to double the size of the school. Justin in 1906 had reached an enrollment of two hundred where Prescott had arbitrarily cut it short as the maximum number of boys that a headmaster could get to know personally. I doubted that he could get to know even that many. It seemed to me that the attractive intimacy of the school’s early days had been lost forever when the roll call had passed fifty and that having lost that, we might as well push on to four or five hundred. If we went too far, of course, the essential character of the school would be lost. The point was to find the greatest number of boys on whom Prescott’s genius could still successfully operate. Otherwise we were wasting him. Could any other conclusion follow?

  The trustees, on the whole, were responsive, particularly when I made it clear that I would take charge of the necessary fund raising. I had already discussed this with Mr. Prime who had promptly offered me a leave of absence.

  “It’s precisely the little push that your career needs at precisely this moment!” he exclaimed, briskly rubbing his hands. “You should see every big man in New York, Philadelphia and Boston. They’ll all have heard of the great job that Prescott is doing at Justin, and they’ll be glad to see you, even if they don’t give you a cent. You’ll be identified with a great cause. We lawyers have to take advantage of these things, you know. After all, we can’t advertise. Go to it, my boy, with all my blessing!”

  “I wasn’t thinking so much of what it would do for me,” I protested, taken aback by such crassness. “I was thinking of Prescott and the school and perhaps a little bit of the rehabilitation of my father’s name.”

  “Well, that’s fine, dear boy, that’s fine,” Mr. Prime said soothingly. “There’s no reason you shouldn’t knock off several birds with a stone as round and smooth as this one.”

  It was agreed among the trustees, after the project had been reduced to a simple outline listing the proposed new buildings and masterships, that I should be the one to approach Prescott, and with the paper in my pocket and their blessing on my head, I journeyed apprehensively up to Justin for the first conference.

  In his study, leaning over the surface of his large uncluttered desk, a fist in each cheek, Prescott moved only his eyes as I talked: to my face, to the blotter, back to my face again. There was not even a hint of surprise in his own and certainly none of gratification. Obviously, he had been forewarned. I began to feel as if I were making a too lengthy confession of a misdeed that was more unattractive than criminal. When I leaned down to pull the outline from my briefcase he finally raised a hand.

  “Whoa, David, whoa!”

  “Don’t you even want to see it?”

  “I don’t want to see anything for just a minute, thank you,” he said in a cool, gruff tone as he stared, seemingly through me, at the window behind my back that looked out at the chapel. “I need a little time to pull myself together now that your proposition has finally come.” As he sighed, some of the frostiness went out of his tone. “I always knew it would, you know. From you or another. No matter how much the conception of a school may be one’s own, sooner or later, if it has any use, any currency, it is bound to pass into the public domain. We can keep only our failures. Obviously, I cannot keep Justin.”

  “But it seems to me, sir,” I suggested, for I now called him “sir” and “Frank” alternately, “that with two hundred boys you’re already pretty well in that domain.”

  “I had hoped not, David.” He shifted his gaze to me from that imaginary audience that he so often seemed to be addressing. “I have tried to preserve some remnant of family atmosphere.”

  “And you have succeeded!” I exclaimed. “My point is precisely that what is left of it is still compatible with a larger school. You have to recognize, sir, that not only has Justin quadrupled since its beginning, but you yourself have changed. You can’t expect to be as intimate with the boys as when you were a younger man. You have become a rather awe-inspiring figure, like Arnold of Rugby. But the advantage of being on a pedestal is that more people can see you.”

  Of course, I was an idiot to have used such an image, but I was excited and nervous, and now that it was out, I could only bow my head to the angry storm.

  “Then why not expand the school to a thousand or more?” he demanded, spreading his arms mockingly. “Why not build auditoriums throughout New England so that all the world may see me?”

  “I doubt we could raise the money.”

  Prescott turned sullenly to the outline that I now placed on his desk. “But you think you could for this,” he muttered. I must have sat for fifteen minutes in silence while he studied it “Is this supposed to be final?” he asked at last.

  “Oh, no, sir. It’s simply a draft. A suggestion.”

  “A draft.” His mood seemed to deepen dismally. “It would have to be changed, of course. But that’s not the point. It could be changed. The point is that so could the headmaster. And I think that you may well need a new headmaster for this magnificent new academy of yours.”

  This struck me at last as a false note, and for the first time in my term as trustee I showed impatience. After all, I had worked for months on the project, and he had not even suggested that I might, however mistakenly, have the school’s welfare in mind. “If you don’t like the plan, Frank, the plan will be scrapped. The idea was not so much to sell Justin Martyr as it was to sell Francis Prescott. I’m sorry if you find the admiration of your board so offensive.”

  He looked up at me quizzically, taking in my change of mood and reflecting, perhaps, that there might be grounds for it. “I’m not acting, David, or putting on airs. You don’t know what you ask of me. It’s hard on the personality to be a headmaster.” He tightened his lips into the thin line that always marked his moments of peculiar candor. “It’s particularly hard on mine. It develops all my tendencies to strut and bully. Here I am, covered with mud from the bottom of my own little puddle, and you want to pitch me into a larger one!”

  “It wouldn’t be like you, Frank, to deflate the school because you were afraid it might innate your own ego.”

  He gave me a shrewd look, grunted and returned to the outline. After another long silence I realized that the conversation was over, at least for that day, and I left his study without even an interchange of farewells.

  The following weekend I returned to the school, but Frank hardly spoke to me, and when he did, he was barely civil. At tea on Sunday afternoon, before leaving for my train, in Harriet Prescott’s living room, which for all its clutter of books and family photographs and heavy, dark boy-proof furniture still managed to suggest some of its mistress’s early New England austerity, I watched her fill my cup from the fine old silver urn that I remembered from “parlor nig
ht” in my own school days. Harriet was the bony kind of woman who begins to look old at thirty-five but after fifty seems younger than her contemporaries and more distinguished. At this point she had just started to dye her hair the chestnut color that it was always to remain. She did it, I am sure, not to seem young but to seem ageless, which, with her pale skin, her big, Emerson nose and dull brown dresses, she always succeeded in seeming. I told her that I feared Frank was put out with me.

  “Oh, he is that,” she agreed readily. “You should hear the catalogue of your iniquities. But don’t worry. It will pass.”

  “Do you think I should not have brought the matter up?”

  She considered this a moment, putting down the cup that she had half filled. “It’s hard to say. If I thought that nobody else ever would have, I might say yes. You see, I like the school as it is. But now it can never be as it is again. If your plan is rejected, we’ll always be a small school that could have been a big one. We’ll always be justifying ourselves.”

  “You make me feel very badly.”

  “You shouldn’t. You’re probably quite right. If one goes in for education, one might as well educate as many as one can. It’s up to Frank and myself to live up to your plan.”

  “You’re laughing at me!”

  “Far from it,” she said very seriously. “One should never laugh at growth. It’s like laughing at life.”

  “You resent me, anyway,” I said gloomily. “Of course you do. Frank will never forgive me for interfering with his school.”

  “If he doesn’t, it will be because he can’t forgive himself for wanting what you want.”

  I stared in astonishment at those cool green eyes in which a glimmer of amusement was just discernible. “He wants a bigger Justin?”

  “Oh, yes. Frank is ambitious, you know. For himself and the school, though they’re sometimes confused. But don’t imagine he’ll admit it. On the contrary, he’ll growl and grumble. He’ll blame the whole thing on you. He’ll talk about the vulgarity of size. Only he’ll go along. At the last moment. He’ll go along, fighting you every inch of the way. Don’t fool yourself, David. It’s going to be a bumpy road!”