The Rector of Justin

by Louis Auchincloss

  As he stared at me blankly I arose and cried out for all to hear: “Well, if you feel that way, why don’t you get the hell out?”

  Bert rose slowly. “I’ll get out all right,” he said sullenly. “I’d never have come if I’d known whose room it was.” He was so convincing that I thought my plan was ruined until, as he turned to go, I noticed that the eye away from the room was closed in a long wink.

  Two nights later I sat in Bert McKim’s room and watched his small, glittering eyes as I told him the story, or rather a story, of what had happened to Sandy. I started with the episode of the overturned canoe on the Lawrence River when Chanler Winslow had swum out to rescue Sandy, and I made much of the docile devotion with which Sandy had affixed himself thereafter to the bumpy course of Chanler’s school career. But the beautiful little twist that I added and that made Bert’s sullen breathing come suddenly in gasps was to suggest that Dr. Prescott, who had a notorious aversion to “sentimentality,” had diagnosed Sandy’s affection for Chanler as being of that nature and had surveyed them from afar with brooding eyes.

  What under this interpretation had been the whole ridiculous episode of the turned key in the door but the old man’s long awaited chance to get rid of Sandy and Chanler on the shallow pretext of a failure in their duties as sixth formers? Had not the indignation of the parents and trustees, nay, of the whole graduate body, sufficiently testified that the official story was too flimsy? And now that I was giving to Bert, and only to Bert, this more convincing explanation, I could reflect with exhilaration that he would never be able to check on it without the danger of starting up the very rumor whose accuracy he was testing. Oh, how it fitted. How it all fitted.

  The effect on Bert was almost too great. He could hardly speak for several minutes. “And is such a man to get away with that?” he finally stuttered. “Is the old fiend to go on from glory to glory? With his praises sung by every idiot in Massachusetts? Is he to croak without knowing what I think of him?”

  I stared at him sternly until he was calmer. Then I smiled and crossed my legs. “I have given the matter the most careful thought, and I think I have found a way to get at Prescott. I believe I have discovered the chink in his armor through which we can jab the burning needle.”

  “Where? Tell me.”

  “Patience, my friend.” I held up a restraining hand. “And listen. To comprehend requires a bit of philosophy. The old man is wily and quick and crooked as a corkscrew. He can persuade you and even himself that Christ came down to earth to found a boys’ academy under the tuition of Francis Prescott. But one thing he must believe, and that is the ‘mystique’ of his school.”

  “What are you leading to?”

  “You will see. To strike Dr. Prescott where he can be hurt one must commit an act of desecration on the school grounds. The act must be clearly that of a Justinian, and it must be anonymous, so the old man will never know again, in shaking a graduate’s hand, whether or not he is shaking the hand of the desecrator.”

  Bert nodded slowly as my idea settled in his mind. “You think that would really hurt him?”

  “I think it might even destroy him.”

  “How would you perform this . . . this desecration?”

  “Ah, that is the crux. After much thought, I have decided on three things. The face must be cut out of the portrait of Phillips Brooks in the school dining room.” I smiled grimly as I heard the click of Bert’s closed teeth. “The manuscript of the school hymn by Richard Watson Gilder in the library must be torn to shreds. And a hole must be poked through the figure of Justin Martyr in the altar window in chapel.”

  “Oh, no!” Bert protested, shocked. “What do the saints have to do with Prescott? Can’t we leave the chapel out of it?”

  I shook my head very firmly. “There is a mystical significance in these three things. Any one or two is useless. All three must be perpetrated. If it makes you feel any better, my father gave that window, so I have a quasi right to its disposition.”

  Bert looked at me suspiciously, but a bit in awe. “When would we do this?”

  “You mean when would you do it, my dear Bert.”

  “Me? Me alone?”

  “I’m afraid so. I will plan the operation in such a way as to be practically devoid of all risk. But I cannot go myself. In fact, I must have an airtight alibi the night it’s done, for I will obviously be the first suspected. Nobody, on the other hand, would ever think of you. You didn’t even go to the school, so how would you know its symbolism?”

  Bert was silent and motionless for at least two minutes. Then he got up to get a bottle of whiskey out of his desk. “Tell me your plan,” he said tersely.

  “You will hire a car in Boston. I have the place and the money. The school is forty minutes’ drive. I have a map that will show you just where to park. The buildings are open at night. You can enter the dining hall easily and cut the portrait. The library, as you know, is in the adjoining wing, and the key to the glass manuscript case hangs on a hook by the librarian’s desk. Finally the chapel. I will give you a bamboo pole with a steel head that will reach to the window. This is the only act that will make any noise, but it need make very little, and the chapel is far enough from the nearest dormitory so that it shouldn’t be heard.”

  “Is there no watchman?”

  “There’s old Pete, but he reads newspapers and drinks coffee in the housekeeper’s kitchen. He makes a tour of the campus every hour on the hour. You can start at a quarter past, and you should be finished in twenty minutes.”

  “How do you know some of these things haven’t changed? You haven’t been at the school since last year.”

  “Nothing changes at Justin. At least nothing sacred does.”

  “We hope! Supposing I’m caught? Do I take the rap alone?”

  “I will give you a letter setting forth our scheme. All you will have to do to inculpate me is deliver it to the authorities.”

  Bert was silent again and then nodded. “I’ll think it over,” he conceded grimly. “I admit it doesn’t sound so bad.”

  Only two days later I received a laconic note in the mail saying “Okay” and fixing our next appointment in Bert’s room. From then on our plan raced ahead, for Bert wanted it executed while his enthusiasm was at its peak. He studied my map that showed the exact locations of the picture and manuscript and selected a night of half-moon. We agreed not to meet the next day which would be a Wednesday, but that on Thursday, when we both had a class in Adams Hall, we would meet briefly in the washroom at eleven.

  …

  I decided that I would spend the night of the great deed with Chanler in the flat of two of his tart friends. When the detectives reported to the headmaster and to my distinguished father the whereabouts of Jules Griscam, they would have an added shock to the one already inflicted. Yet in point of fact I was too excited to do anything but drink and sit up late, reciting poetry and talking wildly about school days to the disgust of Chanler and the boredom of the girls. All the next day I kept looking in the faces of my classmates, of my professors, of people in the street for some indication that the deed was done. I even kept turning my eyes in the direction of the distant school as if I expected to see a red glow in that portion of the sky. But nothing, of course, occurred to distinguish the day from other days.

  On Thursday at eleven I waited tensely in the Adams washroom until Bert, astonishingly self-possessed, swung the door open. He glanced about to be sure that we were alone and then took a brown manila envelope from under his jacket.

  “Here’s the portrait face. Do you want to see it before I burn it?”

  “Yes! And the poem?”

  “That’s destroyed.”

  “Oh, Bert! My Achilles! And the window?”

  He shook his head curtly. “I couldn’t do it. At the last moment. After all, God damn it, it’s a church. This is enough.”

  I winced as if he had drawn a razor across my cheek. “Let me see the portrait, anyway,” I hissed.

&n
bsp; He pulled a piece of canvas out of the envelope and flashed it before my unbelieving eye. What I saw was a part of the cheek, oddly cream-colored, the hooked nose, oddly red, and one great eye and one great, fatally familiar, bushy eyebrow.

  “But that’s not Brooks,” I gasped in horror. “That’s Prescott. It’s the Laszlo portrait!”

  “Yes, I thought it would be better to cut up the old bastard himself than Bishop What’s-his-name. I thought perhaps you hadn’t remembered that his portrait was there. Sst! Someone’s coming.” And Bert snatched back the bit of canvas and left me to the explosion of the heavens and the downpour of despair.

  I don’t remember how I got back to my room. My next memory is of lying on my bed and biting my pillow between angry sobs. Macbeth was no more frustrated by the escape of Fleance than I by this grisly chance that had turned the beautifully conceived eagle of my revenge into a croaking blackbird. For what would Prescott care about such petty vandalism? That some embittered Justin boy should have attacked his likeness—how small, how puerile, how like a cashiered servant, a disgruntled janitor! And, indeed, if suspicion were to fall on me, either as principal or agent in the deed, how easily could he not shrug his shoulders and say: “After all, what more could one expect from a boy who got his friends fired in an effort to save his own skin?” It was too much, after everything, too much for my hate, for my pride, for my love of self to bear. I sat up and drank from a bottle of gin until I was full of fire.

  Somehow I was not killed in my wild drive in Chanler’s car to the school. Somehow I stumbled from the road to the shadowy hulk of the chapel, clutching a rock that I had carried all the way from Cambridge, and made my way to the back where I could see by the moonlight the high, black arched panes of the great Justin Martyr window over the altar. And somehow, even more miraculously, I was able to spot the two figures scurrying towards me from each side and was able to heave the rock and hear that soul-satisfying crash of glass before I was pinioned and hurled to the ground by detectives.

  I had plenty of time the next morning, lying on the cot in my cell at the New Paisley jail and feeling the long, shuddering throbs of my hangover, to contemplate the nadir of my short and unhappy career. Here I was at last, sin incarnate. At least I could hope that the rock through the altar window had elevated me to the dignity of sin. Sin, the real sin, in the eyes of our society is almost always a symbolic act. For what, after all, had I done? Had I killed anybody? Had I even hurt anybody? Did a single mortal ache in any joint or go thirsty or hungry because of me?

  All I had done from the beginning was to turn a piece of metal in a full circle and toss that piece of metal out a window to the grass where it had ultimately been recovered. Then I had caused the destruction of a piece of paper on which were traced the lines of a very bad poem, of which, unfortunately, thousands of other copies existed. More seriously, perhaps, my agent had slashed a painting and I had broken a window, both inferior artifacts and one of which was easily reparable. Had all my little damages been accidents, nobody would have been in the least concerned. It was my intent that made the sole difference, my contempt for the little jumble of lares and penates, in short, my desecration of the holy things of our superstitious Christian society. Could I hope, in a lifetime, to do a fraction of the more real harm to others that was accomplished by “good” men like Prescott and approved by “good” men like Father? If Satan was not a headmaster, he was at least a parent. Where in the world was there room for anyone as wicked and harmless as myself?

  Dr. Prescott came to my cell late that afternoon in the guise of the weary philosopher who has tried all, lost all and accepted all. It was a superb performance, enhanced by his beautiful, rumpled, cashmere grey suit and black vest and by the melancholy modulations of his address.

  “When I leave, Jules, you will be free to go yourself,” he told me. “The school will press no charges. Unhappily, Harvard has been less forgiving. You may not return there. But it may perhaps interest you to hear that I interceded on your behalf with President Lowell. Alas, to no avail. He is quite adamant. One night’s bad work might have been forgiven. Not two.”

  “Two?” I demanded sharply. “What do you mean by two?”

  “A copy of your letter to Bert McKim was found in your rooms this morning,” he replied dryly. “It cleared up the mystery of your having been with Winslow at a place of ill repute last Tuesday night. Once again, Jules, you have managed to implicate another. I am glad to tell you, however, that President Lowell may reconsider McKim’s case.”

  I shrugged. I cared very little about Bert McKim. Perhaps I had hardened since my sixth form year. Perhaps I was simply disgusted at the way he had bungled the job. “Where am I to go when I go?” I asked. “Does Father know?”

  “Your father is here. I asked him to let me see you first. He is talking now with Mr. Ives about the possibility of your continuing your education abroad.”

  “Good old Father!” I exclaimed with a mocking laugh. “Always at work over a piece of broken crockery. If he can put this one together, he should be in line for a commission on Humpty-Dumpty.”

  The dark line down the center of Dr. Prescott’s forehead deepened as he sighed windily. “Tell me, Jules, have you no remorse?”

  “Remorse? For what you’ve done to me?”

  “There was a time when people were considered as being possessed. Possessed by the devil.” He shook his head to and fro vigorously. “I sometimes wonder if we have not too easily flung it away as superstition. How else can I explain the extraordinary malevolence that you have evinced against the school and myself from the very beginning?”

  “Mightn’t we both be possessed? Mightn’t our devils have recognized each other?”

  As he stared back, it seemed to me that I could make out in those big eyes a mixture of apprehension, curiosity and something like awe. “Tell me what you mean by that.”

  “Don’t people with devils feel them early?” I exclaimed. “I’m sure I’ve always been aware of mine. Like a lazy tapeworm, all warm and comfortable, feeding on the jumble of my cerebrations. But yours, I suspect, had a harder time. For when you first became aware of his coiled presence, you saw instantly all the possibility of staging a great drama about your conflict with him. You built the school as your amphitheatre where through the decades generations of wondering boys could watch your Laocoon act. Oh, it was something! Until the devil peered out and saw his supposed victim strutting about on the rostrum, praying and preaching and exhorting, and realized that a new Barnum had put him on the boards and was making a fortune as a snake charmer!”

  “And then what did he do?” Prescott’s question came almost in a whisper.

  “Well, devils have a way of having the last word, you know,” I said, looking at him hard, “particularly with those who are making a peepshow of God’s mercy. Who are using God’s things as props in vaudeville. And so it was that your beautiful academy, your palace of lies, should have at last a graduate—a moral graduate, shall we say—who carries your act to its ultimate degree and shatters for a gaping multitude the great glass window of your idolatry.”

  Prescott dropped his big head into his hands and groaned: “Jules, Jules, my boy, what have I done to you?”

  When he looked up and gazed at me wretchedly there were actually tears in those great brown eyes! Tears, while mine were dry! The tears of his defeat, of his collapse, tears that would fall and splash until the very tower of the school with its clanging bell would crack and be submerged. He wept, ah, yes he wept at last, but what was there left for me in a world of water?

  20

  Brian’s Journal

  OCTOBER 8, 1945. It seems unbelievable to be back at a Justin Martyr of which Dr. Prescott is no longer head. Of course I have come here, since his retirement, as a visitor, but it doesn’t really hit you until you return, as I do now, once more a master. Not that Mr. Moore is doing such a bad job. Far from it. He is big and cheerful and forceful and probably more popular with the boys th
an Dr. Prescott ever was. But what one cannot imagine is how he can have the courage (perhaps some would say the nerve) to move so jauntily along paths hallowed by his great predecessor, particularly when that predecessor is watching from so close at hand. For every brick of Justin, every fountain and porch, every structure from the glorious dark struggling chapel, a drama in stone of the Protestant soul, to the old green bleachers by the football field are impregnated with the Prescott personality. It is as if God had paused and withdrawn to a misty mountain-top to see how man will manage his creation.

  Only in the afternoons now does the familiar figure with the long blue coat and stick appear, on the still daily round of the campus and grounds: once about the lawn, thence to the garth for ten minutes’ meditation on a memorial bench, thence to the football practice, thence to the river and back. It is quite a stint for one of eighty-five. He stops to speak to boys and masters; he smiles and sometimes laughs his high-pitched laugh. He seems with his every gesture and syllable to defer to the new order, but how I would hate to be that new order under that glassy eye!

  October 12. As a clergyman, I have been relieved of even the most formal athletic duties, and I have taken to walking of an afternoon. I watch from my study window until Dr. Prescott has passed before going out and taking the opposite direction. I do not wish to intrude upon him, for I still feel constraint about working for his successor. It is not, God knows, any feeling that I am being disloyal, for Dr. Prescott was the person who championed my return to Justin, but as a minister I am more identified with the new order than others of the old faculty. I assist the headmaster in chapel, and I mark his term papers in sacred studies. No doubt I am unduly sensitive, but I will wait for Dr. Prescott to make the first move in resuming our old intimacy. So far he has not done so.

  My clerical status does not seem to have improved my disciplinary powers. In fact, I am almost back where I was when I first started. I fear that my reversed collar (unlike Mr. Moore’s or Dr. Prescott’s—oh, so unlike!) is taken for a symbol of weakness. I am again aware of whisperings and giggles in the back row of my classroom and odd noises in my dormitory after lights. The boys know that it is painful for me to give black marks and, all too naturally, they take advantage of this. Yet I have qualms about penalizing them for my own failure to be obeyed. If I were interesting, my classroom would be silent, and if I had a shadow of “command presence” (instead of its opposite) there would be no moving between the cubicles at night.