The Rector of Justin

by Louis Auchincloss

  It was not until I was out of his study that I realized how cleverly I had been handled. By accepting my complaint about the method of demolition, he had obliged me to accept its fact. It was a formidable matter for a schoolboy to be up against a diplomat as well as a general.

  In the year that followed this incident I brooded much over my wrongs, but my overt resistance was confined to sniping in sacred studies class. This was Dr. Prescott’s one vulnerable period, for if there was anything sincere in his vaudeville nature it was his belief in his mission to persuade boys to join the company of Jesus Christ. He would, no doubt, have liked to have ordered them to sign up and to have damned the recalcitrant, but he knew that his God was as mean as himself and would never let him get away with anything as easy as that. He could order a boy to play football or to take a cold shower or to destroy a hut, but he could not order a boy to love God. This was a matter of propaganda, and sacred studies was its allotted time. He and I would have dialogues in class such as the following:

  “Please, sir, we always seem to take for granted that monotheism is superior to polytheism. But is it so? Why should it not be just as good to have many gods as to have one?”

  “That is a good question, Griscam. I’m glad you asked it. It seems to me that a faith diffused in many gods must lose much of its efficacy. Which one, for example, do you pray to? And after you have chosen, can you be sure that your god will not be thwarted by the jealousy of another god? That is why, in great cultures that have practiced polytheism, like the Roman and Greek, there is always a high degree of fatalism. The believing man tends to regard himself as a mere plaything of gods absorbed in their own internecine conflicts. There is nothing like the magnificent strength and consolation of knowing that there is one God, here and everywhere, in you and in every particle of nature.”

  “That may be, sir. But the fact that it might be nicer if there were only one God doesn’t mean that there is, does it?”

  There was an ominous blink of those brown eyes, a twitch of those shaggy eyebrows. The word “nicer” had been a dangerous touch. “Of course, it doesn’t, Griscam. That is a matter of faith. And in this school, which is a church school, we are dedicated to the sustenance of that faith. We hope that every graduate will know the joy of believing, but it is only a hope.”

  In church history I was always ready with questions about the mercenary motives of the Crusades, the jealous destruction of pagan literature by priests, the burning of heretics, the religious wars. Dr. Prescott would shake his head heavily and agree that terrible things had been done in the sign of the cross, but when I suggested that we at Justin Martyr could avoid the guilt of these associations by dating our religion from the ordainment of Phillips Brooks, whom he was always quoting, I had finally gone too far.

  “You are not sincere, Griscam,” he told me wrathfully after class. “You are making mock of sacred things. Doubt I allow. Intellectual curiosity I encourage. But there is no place in this classroom for cheap cynicism.”

  “But I only want to learn, sir,” I protested in a tone so earnest that I almost convinced myself. “I only want to be sure that the church has not done more harm than good. How can I be confirmed until I have answered that question?”

  “I am sorry to say that I doubt you.”

  “Oh, sir, I mean it!”

  “If you do, then I have made an error to speak to you so. Perhaps a grave one.” He sighed heavily. “But I make them. Oh, yes, I make them. You will be excused from sacred studies for the rest of the term, Griscam. You may spend that hour with extra lines of Virgil. We may as well derive some benefit from your preference for the pagan authors.”

  Once again I was worsted by the old charlatan, but this time with more dramatic consequences. It was apparently unique in school history for a boy to be suspended from sacred studies, and I was made to feel like a Lutheran priest imprisoned in the somber courtyards of the Escorial. The absorbent powers of the school were strong and could in time embrace most mavericks, but there were limits to the permissible period of dissent, and Chanler Winslow and I had let ours expire. We came to be permanently regarded as “outsiders,” and my only answer (for Chanler was far too inert and indifferent to have one) was to win an occasional recruit to our isolated fraternity.

  The picking was not good. By fifth form year our group consisted of only two besides Chanler and myself: Gus Crane, a snippety, effeminate, crabby old maid of a boy who had at last given up a fawning cultivation of the form leaders, and Sandy McKim, a small, dull, gentle, inarticulate lad who worshiped Chanler because the latter, traditional for once, had pulled him out of the Lawrence on a school holiday when his canoe had capsized. They all followed my lead, not because of the strength of my personality but because I alone had the will and imagination to clothe our mere unpopularity in the robes of a creed.

  For I gloried in standing for art and the individual against football and the mass. I did not realize that my revolt was as hackneyed as the conformity of the majority. I had not then read the dreary heap of English and American fiction that deals with unhappy boyhoods. I thought my independence wonderfully unique, my hate fresh and pure. When I walked by the river on glorious October Saturday afternoons, I reveled less in the golden brown of the foliage and in the cold melancholy of the fall breeze than in the smug knowledge that I was not attending the football game and that I would attend none for the entire season, not even the final one with Chelton that marked the climax of the athletic year, the great patriotic event of the school calendar. I realized my project, but the sixth form decided that I should be “pumped.”

  Pumping was a penalty that fell in a semi-official zone between the boys and faculty. It was given for “bad school spirit,” a crime that subjected the offender to no official penalty, but that was particularly odious to the headmaster. On a pumping day the whole school was assembled for roll call by the senior prefect, and no master was present. The sixth form stood about, their arms tightly folded, glaring at us and frowning. “Wipe it off, Jones!” one of them would bark if Jones dared, in his tension, to let his lip crease into a nervous smile. It was well done, on the whole. It was a bit of a nightmare even to me. But on the terrible day of my ordeal I was borne up by the ecstasy of my passionate sense of wrong and the idea that, like the Count of Monte Cristo, I might have a lifetime for my revenge.

  I had decided in advance how I would act. When the senior prefect shouted: “Griscam, go to the cellar! On the double!” I would not jump up like a scared rabbit and scamper from the room followed by a line of six executioners, ponderously, ridiculously, pacing in step. This would be no Mexican sacrificial ballet with a cooperating victim, decked in flowers, swaying up the steps of the altar to bare his throat to the obsidian knife. No, if they wanted me, they could come and get me.

  When I heard, through the haze of my brave resolution, as if from another, meaner world, the rasp of my name and the well-known order, I simply folded my arms, in mocking parody of the sixth formers, and remained at my desk. They had to come and lift me and carry me out, and when in retaliation they nearly drowned me, ducking me in the big sink of the laundry below, as I gasped for my breath, I made myself remember the laughter that had broken out in the schoolroom over my act, the laughter that could blow away the sixth form like chaff.

  They had at last gone too far. The old man had gone too far. There was a deep reaction in my favor, and in the days that followed I felt surrounded by nods of sympathy. Never again was it suggested that I attend an athletic event. If I had lost one hut, I had gained another, built with the bricks of rebellion on the very grass of the campus, and I was to be allowed to occupy it thenceforth unmolested. The sixth form and the faculty might surround it by a cordon sanitaire, but they would not again try to level it.

  My own sixth form year, when it came, was something of a triumph. I made independence almost the fashion. By submitting a poem which had been rejected by the Justinian to Frank Crowninshield and having it published in Vanity Fai
r I won a glory that even Dr. Prescott could not ignore.

  “You have put us on the map, Griscam,” he told me gruffly one morning after chapel. “There may be a question in some minds if that is where we wish to be, but nobody can belittle the feat of getting us there.”

  So it seemed that my school career might be ending on an actually pleasant note, that my long duel with the headmaster might conclude in the banality of exchanged salutes. And so it might have had I not, by the simple act of turning a small piece of metal in a three hundred and sixty degree arc, brought about a series of catastrophic events that were to shake the school to its very foundations. Nothing could illustrate more graphically the shifting sands on which the whole absurd structure had been jerry-built than the fact that my act was the simple physical one just described, that it hurt nobody and that it had not been designed to hurt anybody. But Prescott, like all the great idiots of history, was always willing to burn the world for a toy, a prayer, a cross, a thimble.

  18

  Jules Griscam’s Memoir

  IT HAPPENED, like all bad things at school, at the end of the winter term. Spring was coy that year, and the cold season had a long and fretful death. We blotted out the days, one by one, with elaborate inkings on the calendars in our sixth form studies and talked interminably of girls and Easter dances. And beyond the lagging spring loomed graduation and the unbelievable prospect of liberty. The once formidable school was shrinking around us to the dimensions of a small provincial village, as quaint as Cranford, and poor boys on scholarships, who had once scorned me as a nonconformist, began to show unlovable signs of awakening to the values of a world beyond the campus where the friendship of families like mine might count more than the silver plate trophies of the athletic field. Only the figure of Dr. Prescott remained the same, and it may have been his failure to fade, along with an institution that was proving less durable than himself, into the backyard of discarded childhood things that made me try to push him there.

  One morning after classes, just before the bell announcing the roll call that preceded lunch, I was standing with Chanler Winslow, Gus Crane and Sandy McKim in the Audubon Corridor by the main schoolroom where all the forms were about to assemble. The headmaster’s study, from which he would shortly emerge, after the bell had ceased ringing, to proceed to the schoolroom for the midday announcements, was just adjacent, and the door was closed. I happened to notice that the key was in the lock. The study was never locked from the inside, only from the out when it was unoccupied.

  “Do you know what would be fun?”

  The other three glanced at me curiously, for my tone had been sharp. I suddenly remembered the windmill on Granny Prime’s place in Long Island. It had a shaky wooden ladder leading up to the platform under the vanes, and Sylvester used to dare me to climb it. I always did, hating it, because anything was better than to be afraid.

  “What would be fun?” Gus demanded suspiciously.

  “To turn the key and lock the old bastard in!”

  Three pair of eyes followed mine to the door, and in a sudden tense exchange of looks, I understood that my friends had seized the feasibility of the project. There must have been forty boys moving up and down the corridor, talking or reading their mail which had just been distributed. Detection would be almost impossible.

  “Shall I?” I asked.

  It was the terrible moment of the first rung in the windmill ladder. I read assent in their eyes, even in Gus’s, and I walked quickly past Prescott’s door, pausing just long enough to turn the key and pull it out. In three steps I was back, smiling at the horror in Gus’s eyes as they took in that key.

  “Jesus God!” he whispered. “Put it back, you fool!”

  “Put it back?” I sneered. “When all I need do is this?” I rubbed it quickly with my handkerchief and dropped it out the open window. “Now move on, all of you. Move quietly. Be natural.”

  Twenty seconds later the bell for assembly shrieked through the building, and we walked to our places on the back benches for the upper school behind the desks of the lower. Mr. Coogan, the master in charge, stood on the dais until all were seated and then nodded to the prefect at the door who took his hand from the bell. He then turned to the other door through which Dr. Prescott always emerged and waited.

  He waited for a full minute. I stared at him, careful not to look to either side to catch the eyes of my friends. Then he scurried down the steps from the dais, crossed the floor to the hall and stood before the headmaster’s door. We heard first the rap and then the sound of a knob being violently turned.

  “Are you all right, sir?” Mr. Coogan shouted, and we heard a muffled angry, indistinguishable sound from the other side of the door. “Did you say it was locked, sir?” Coogan inquired. “No, there is no key on this side. Are you sure it’s not on the floor in there, sir?” There was another incoherent rumbling from behind the door, implying both a negative and an angry reproach for the question. “Shall I get a ladder to the window?” The answer to this put Mr. Coogan in a real flurry, for he hurried off, and a little group of masters began to gather about the door, until they, too, were dispersed by another muffled roar.

  At last Mr. Ives, the senior master, appeared. He ignored the commotion about the headmaster’s door, sauntered to the schoolroom dais, read out the announcements with his usual imperturbability and dismissed the school to Lawrence House for lunch. As I looked back across the campus ten minutes later I saw a ladder by the headmaster’s window supported by a group of prefects with heads raised. Then I saw the large familiar figure, like a great beetle, move slowly out the window and slowly down. When Gus Crane poked me, I gave him an aloof stare and passed before him into the washroom.

  I had figured that no boy could have seen me except my comates, and I had figured correctly. But there was someone whom I had not seen. That amateur sleuth, Mr. Ives, a man who always looked at his watch if he heard an unusual sound to be prepared, if necessary, to testify in court as to the exact time of its occurrence, had left Dr. Prescott’s study just four minutes before the assembly bell, closing the door behind him. He had observed—for he observed everything—the proximity of my group to the headmaster’s threshold. At four o’clock that afternoon he had found the key under the window near which we had been standing. This, plus our bad reputation, was all he needed. We were summoned to Dr. Prescott’s study after supper, where Ives, in his passionless, singsong tone, recited his findings and his deadly conclusion. One of us four must have done it.

  Dr. Prescott glanced up from his brooding pose as his junior finished. We were standing in a row before his desk. “Which?” he asked, in a weary, seemingly bored tone.

  We were silent. We exchanged no glances.

  “Let me tell you something,” he went on somberly. “You are sixth formers. As such you are officers of the school. You are, or should be, above the code of little boys who will not ‘snitch.’ To tell on a fellow officer who has tried publicly to humiliate his commander-in-chief is a simple duty. If that fellow officer is too cowardly to confess, seeking to implicate you in his contemptible conduct, why should you protect him? I ask you again: which did it? Was it you, Griscam?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Was it one of you?”

  “I couldn’t say, sir.”

  “You couldn’t or you wouldn’t?”

  “I couldn’t, sir. I didn’t see it.”

  He turned to Chanler. “And you, Winslow? Was it one of you?”

  “I didn’t see, sir.”

  “And you, McKim?”

  “I didn’t see, sir.”

  “And you, Crane?”

  “I saw who did it, sir, but I don’t think I should be asked to tell. It wasn’t me.”

  How I despised Gus Crane! Until then the old man had evidence, good evidence, but no proof. We could have bluffed it out. But now!

  “It wasn’t ‘I,’” the headmaster corrected him without a smile. “If you will not tell me who it was, you must share in his pu
nishment.”

  “But that’s most unfair, sir!”

  “It would be, if you were not a sixth former.” Prescott now stared slowly from one to the other of us. “Very well, gentlemen. I will give you twenty-four hours. If within that time one of you has not given me the name of the culprit, I shall not consider that any of you has the right to protest whatever penalty I may see fit to impose.” He paused again, for he was a master of dramatic emphasis. “No matter how heavy that penalty may be. You are all excused from classes tomorrow morning. I wish you to have full time to reflect. Or to telephone your families for their advice.”

  It was a curious twenty-four hours that ensued. In the morning the four of us trudged through the mud to the river and sat on the crew dock, chewing grass and watching the sluggish, eddying Lawrence. Dirty patches of melting snow under the stark trees and the bleak sunlight emphasized the belt of void that surrounded the little shrill idealism of the marooned school. I had stepped to the perimeter and was ready and willing to fall into that void. So was Chanler, whose truculent defiance of the universe I tried to interpret as loyalty to myself. So was Sandy McKim, whose loyalty to Chanler was impervious to any test that a mere Prescott might impose. Only Gus showed any inclination to consider the value of what we might be turning our backs upon, and as the morning drew on he became strident and vindictive.

  “Why should we all be punished for what you did, Jules?”

  “We all did it,” Chanler retorted. “We all agreed.”

  “I never agreed!” Gus spouted. “Jules said it would be fun, and before I knew what he was talking about, he went over and turned that key. Nobody could say it was my fault.”

  “Why don’t you go and tell, then?” Chanler jeered. “Why don’t you go to Dr. P, like a good little girl, and tell him what a naughty boy Jules was?”

  “Because I don’t want to be a snitcher, of course! Who wants to be a snitcher and have the whole school know? That’s why Jules has got us so neatly on the spot. I’d be as infamous as Benedict Arnold. But why doesn’t Jules confess? Why, if he’s going to be kicked out anyway, does it do him any good to have the rest of us kicked out with him?”