My fourth form English class (for I am to teach that as well as sacred studies) is reading Persuasion, and I am disheartened by my utter incapacity to make them see what an exquisite thing it is. I feel woefully inadequate when I contemplate all the delights which Jane Austen might offer them if only I had the ability to get her across. I know that Mr. Dahlgren, the head of mathematics, would call me absurdly naïve. He believes that only a tiny number can be expected to see the light. But to me this is Calvinism. Why should only a few, arbitrarily chosen, be saved?
October 21. Dr. Prescott came up behind me this afternoon as I was leaving the garth and grabbed me by the arm. “Won’t you walk with me, Brian? Have you been avoiding me, dear fellow? We seem to be the sole pedestrians in an autumn world prostrate before the idol of football. Can we not unite our forces?” I stammered that I had thought he might wish to be alone. “Alone? Wait till you’re an octogenarian widower. You’ll find you have your fill of solitude.” And holding my arm he walked beside me, asking me questions about my classes and the boys and whether I was satisfied at having become a minister. There was a warmth and a kindness and an interest that made me tremble like an idiot and want to fall down on my knees and kiss his hand. How the richness of his loving nature fills in the crannies of the somber buildings and acts as a great red Romanesque arch over the bleak fall sky! One cannot understand the architecture of Justin without its necessary complement in Dr. Prescott’s personality. And what bliss to have back our old friendship again!
I told him of my troubles, of my worries in English class, and he nodded gravely. “If you could transmit some of the beauty of Jane Austen, you would be transmitting a small vision of God. But don’t blame yourself too much. It is desperately hard work. Perhaps with that particular novel and those particular boys, it is impossible. I wonder you don’t try Melville. I sometimes wish we didn’t divide our curriculum into subjects. An equation, a Keats ode, a Gothic Cathedral, a Mozart aria, the explosion of gases in a laboratory, they should be seen by boys as related—and divine. I tried in this campus to convey a sense of oneness and Godliness. Now that, for example, is plural and non-God.” He pointed with a frown to a white refrigerator truck passing the Schoolhouse to park by the football field.
“I would never have allowed it in my day,” he continued more somberly. “You may ask, can soda pop be sinful, if consumed in moderation? Perhaps not. But that truck is sinful here.” And watching the truck as it passed the chapel, white against dark, a flash of absurdity against the seeming permanence of our place of worship, it appeared in the instant of its silhouette to symbolize the transiency of our commercial mores. I could only agree with Dr. Prescott that so discordant a note was somehow meretricious. Perhaps, as he said, even sinful. As it would be sinful to insert a chapter of John O’Hara into the chaste pages of Persuasion.
November 2. I was having a particularly bad time with fourth form English this morning when Dr. Prescott appeared suddenly in the doorway, put his hand to his lips in a gesture that indicated the class was not to be disturbed and noiselessly took a seat in the back. None of the boys who were facing me saw him, so their bad behavior continued. The poem under discussion was Browning’s “Meeting at Night: Parting at Morning,” and the little devils were pretending that they did not understand what had happened during the night to make the narrator need “a world of men” the next day. Of course, they knew that I blushed easily. Sloane, a dreadful, tall, thin, slick New Yorker was the ringleader.
“But tell me, sir, if he had been with a woman and yearned for a world of men, mustn’t there have been something unsatisfactory about the woman?”
“Not necessarily, Sloane.” I dared not glance in Dr. Prescott’s direction. “He simply needed action after so much emotion. That’s understandable, isn’t it?”
“You mean there had been no action during the night?” The class tittered, and I felt my cheeks burning. “You don’t think, sir,” Sloane continued in a false tone of intellectual curiosity, “that he was what is known as a queer’?”
“You may leave the room, Sloane.”
“But, sir, I was only asking a question!”
“Leave the room, please.”
“But, my God, sir, it’s not fair when I’ve just asked a question . . .”
“Sloane!” Dr. Prescott’s deep voice filled every cubic inch of the room, and the whole class jumped. Though he had retired before any of them had come to Justin, he was still an awesome campus figure. “Stand up, Sloane, and turn around!”
Sloane leaped to his feet and spun about. “I’m sorry, Dr. Prescott, sir, I didn’t see you.”
“That is neither here nor there. Your language should not be regulated according to who is present.”
“But, sir, it was a word I’ve heard my own father use. I did not know it was so bad.”
“It is not a bad word, Sloane. It was your use of it that was bad.”
Sloane looked utterly at a loss. “Queer?” he mumbled.
“No, not that word!” Dr. Prescott thundered, rising now himself, and the class rose with him. “I admit, I never expected to hear such a term used in a classroom in this school, but that’s a relatively minor matter. The important thing, and the one that you do not even seem to recognize, is that you used the name of God in vain!”
Sloane’s face cleared as he recognized at last what must have struck him as a minor misdeed. “Oh, that’s true, sir. I did, didn’t I? It must have slipped out. I’m very sorry, sir.”
“Slipped out? And you’re merely sorry? We’ll see what the headmaster has to say. You will proceed, Sloane, to Mr. Moore’s study where you will report to him exactly what you said. If he is not there, you will wait till he comes.”
Sloane hastily left the room, and Dr. Prescott nodded to me. “You may proceed with your class, Mr. Aspinwall. Pray forgive my intrusion.”
When he had gone, and the class was seated I enjoyed for the first time the undivided attention of the boys as we turned with subdued monotones to a discussion of “My Last Duchess.”
After school, as I was walking to Lawrence House for lunch, I was touched on the shoulder, and Mr. Moore, holding a black velvet bag with the Justin arms on it, where he kept his papers, adjusted his long legs in step with mine.
“Tell me, Brian,” he began in his vigorous, amiable fashion, “how did Dr. Prescott happen to be in your classroom today?”
“He just dropped in, sir.”
“You had suggested that he pay you a visit?”
“No, sir. Except that I had confided in him some of my teaching problems. I think he wished to help me.”
“I see. It’s unfortunate that he should have been there when Sloane said what he did. Obviously, we cannot allow swearing on the campus, but neither can we treat it as quite so grave an offense as Dr. Prescott would wish. The boys simply use the expressions they pick up from their fathers, and I fear, even their mothers.”
“It was my fault, sir, for allowing the discussion to get out of hand.”
“Well, we won’t worry about it,” Mr. Moore said with a rather forced smile. “These little hitches are bound to occur with the old gentleman being around so much. But if you have teaching problems, Brian, you can always confide them in me, you know. I am never too busy to talk to one of my masters.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said in a voice chastened enough to acknowledge the mild rebuke in his tone. “I happened to mention them to Dr. Prescott because we walk together.”
“Naturally, naturally. And an enviable experience to know the great man. I wish I had more time to see him. I do, indeed.”
When I joined Dr. Prescott that afternoon, I found him silent and moody. I dared not apologize or even mention the lamentable scene of that morning, and we walked without exchanging a word. Yet Dr. Prescott’s silences, like those of royalty, are not embarrassing. One simply understands that his mind is closed to audiences. On our way back from watching the football practice we passed the headmaster’s house and saw
Sloane under the porte-cochere washing Mr. Moore’s Buick. Dr. Prescott paused.
“We meet again, Sloane,” he said gravely.
“Yes, sir,” Sloane replied ruefully. “I guess I’ve learned my lesson this time. I had to miss football practice which means I won’t be able to play in the game on Saturday.”
“Is your punishment confined to these ablutions?”
“You mean to washing this car? Oh, no, sir, I have to do Mr. Langborne’s as well.”
“Indeed? We live under a stern regime, Sloane.”
“You can say that again, sir!”
Dr. Prescott moved on, and I accompanied him to the door of his house. As I took my leave, he stared down at the flagstone path, and I lingered, unsure whether or not I had been dismissed. At last he muttered sadly: “To have to wash two cars, Brian. For taking God’s name in vain. Think of it! In my day he’d have been lucky not to be suspended for the rest of the term!”
November 4. Pierre Dahlgren has taken a fancy to me, which improves my position a bit, not only in the faculty but with the boys. For Pierre, as head of the mathematics department and master of Lowell House, is number three, after the head and senior masters. Indeed, he should by rights have become senior master when Mr. Ives retired, but it was felt that a younger man was needed. No doubt he resents this.
Pierre, at fifty-three, is a tubby, white-haired, mincing, round-eyed, baby-faced bachelor who loves to sit up late and gossip in his beautiful study hung with eighteenth century French and Italian drawings (Pierre is rich, at least for a Justin master). He is a perfect example of what unlikely material Justin can assimilate and turn to its own profit. For all his silliness, he has a lucid, beautiful mind which enables him to teach mathematics as I would love to teach poetry, and his stentorian dignity counteracts his plump softness, so the boys know he is not one to be trifled with. And then he has a passion for the school which for twenty-five years has been his entire life. Dr. Prescott (whom he worships) must have seen from the beginning that there was a place on his faculty for at least one Pierre.
My dormitory is near Pierre’s bedroom and study, and he has taken to asking me in after lights for coffee. This is his best time, enthroned in a great armchair covered in blue velvet, before a silver tray and coffee urn, a cigarette always dangling from his lips, an ash always on his silk tie, his eyes snapping as he chews up the juiciest bits of gossip of the school day. Nothing is sacred to Pierre: neither the boys, nor their demanding parents, nor the poor faculty wives who try so hard to look well at lunch, nor even Mr. and Mrs. Moore. He will burst into dry gusts of laughter and then hold his fat hands to his thin lips as the coughing overcomes him. Sometimes he even serves brandy, which is against the rules, but he has a dispensation because of a weak heart.
I told him of the Sloane episode and of Dr. Prescott’s reaction to the punishment.
“Well, at least there’s one boon,” he commented with a wicked chuckle, “and that is we’ve finally got that jalopy of Mr. Moore’s cleaned. I had been on the verge of paying the local garage to do it. Only if I were Moore and had the disposition of Sloane’s services I would employ them indoors.” Here he smiled nastily. “My maid Ida tells me the girls at the headmaster’s house sweep everything under the rugs.” Here Pierre went through a pantomime of glancing to his left and right and then leaned forward to hiss at me: “And she says their kitchen’s a sight.”
It seemed to me that we had got a long way from blasphemy. “I’m afraid Dr. Prescott was very upset. Of course, to him swearing is as bad as lying.”
“And he’s quite right, the poor old superseded darling.” Pierre startled me with his sudden stern tone which meant that no sarcasm was intended. It was remarkable how quickly that magistrate could emerge from the dotted garb of the clown. “Dr. Prescott has forgotten more about running a school than Moore will ever learn! He knows that everything is interrelated: the clean collar, the shined shoes, the hard-played game, the deeply felt prayer.” Pierre might now have been Dr. Prescott himself; I quailed before his flashing eye. “It is reverence that must be taught, day and night, if boys are not to be apes. When I think what a beautiful thing a disciplined boy can be, I feel a positive hatred for those who allow him to wallow in his native grossness. It’s as if some thug had wandered through a gallery of Caravaggios and smeared the faces of his charming youths with brown paint!”
“Perhaps it would be better if Dr. Prescott moved away,” I suggested, a bit embarrassed by this outbreak.
“Perhaps it would be better if Dr. Prescott had never retired. He can do a lot more going downhill before he meets Moore coming up.”
Even such an admirer of Dr. Prescott as myself was taken aback by the idea that he should still be in office at eighty-five. “He keeps complaining that his memory is going,” was all I could think to say.
“He only thinks his memory is going. Because he’s old. You, for example, Brian, are presumably not worried about yours. Yet you forgot to read out the detention list before dismissing schoolroom yesterday, and you left your term papers on the desk in faculty hall.”
I reflected that it was small wonder that Pierre could control the boys. “I’m sorry. How stupid of me.”
“It’s quite all right, I put them in your locker,” he continued, brushing the ashes from his waistcoat and tie. “You had neglected to lock it.”
November 7. Eric Langborne was at Pierre’s last night after lights. He is Pierre’s age, or a bit younger, and also a bachelor, but in other respects they are opposites. He is skinny and bald, with a long oblong face and white perfect teeth that he likes to show as he articulates his syllables in a dry, superior tone. He is head of the Latin department, and being English born and a Rugby graduate, he obviously considers himself Justin’s leading intellectual. Listening to him and Pierre hold forth gravely on such “dangerous” innovations as Moore’s suspension of the requirement of blue suits for Sunday wear, one begins to wonder if Dr. Prescott’s faculty was not an orchestra that only Dr. Prescott could conduct.
November 10. Eric was particularly lugubrious last night. After a silence of some moments he announced: “Obviously neither of you has heard.”
“What?” I asked.
“You haven’t heard what he’s done today?”
“No, what?”
“Latin is to be made optional after the fourth form!”
Pierre and I exchanged glances. We knew what a blow this must be to Eric’s pride. “And what is to be put in its place?” Pierre demanded. “Jujitsu? The history of vaudeville? Or needlepoint?”
“Art appreciation,” Eric answered grimly. “The mother of languages must veil her eyes in a darkened room where smirking boys will gape at slides of Dufy and Matisse.”
“But they can still choose Latin,” I murmured consolingly.
“Few boys will choose a difficult subject,” Eric retorted. “They will choose you, Brian, where they can read Jane Eyre and Lorna Doone.”
“Eric, the time has cornel” Pierre announced abruptly.
“What?”
“The time has come,” he repeated solemnly.
Eric now nodded, but as I continued to stare, Pierre explained: “The time has come to ask Dr. Prescott to join our little meetings. He has wanted to come, I know, but he has been restrained by delicacy of feeling. Now we must tell him that it is his duty. His duty to save the school!”
I had not realized that our “little meetings” had such significance or that we constituted a nucleus of organized dissent. I see now that I must have been cultivated by Pierre because of my intimacy with Dr. Prescott. I have a horror of disloyalty, but it still does not seem possible to me that any gathering could be stained with that quality at which Dr. Prescott is present. Pierre, for a soft man, talks a great deal about the softness of our age. Dr. Prescott may convince him that it did not all originate with Duncan Moore.
November 15. Dr. Prescott came to Pierre’s last night, but the meeting did not go off very well. In the first p
lace the great man was in an obviously sour and despondent mood, and in the second Pierre, very foolishly, had placed four brandy glasses on the silver tray by the decanter. Dr. Prescott glared at these before sitting down and pursed his lips disapprovingly.
“I was aware that you had a dispensation, Dahlgren, from the rule about liquor on school premises,” he began in the dry, bleak, weary tone that he used to school offenders. “I was not aware that it had been extended to your visitors. Or is that another of the new regulations?”
“Indeed not, sir,” Pierre replied heartily, whisking away the offending tray. “I think my poor old Ida must have set them out in your honor.”
Dr. Prescott chose to ignore this transparent falsehood. “I shall certainly not break Mr. Moore’s rules while I am criticizing his administration.”
The discussion went very slowly after this. Dr. Prescott held forth in a melancholy voice about the importance of Latin in the curriculum. It seemed to me that he stressed it much more than he had in the past, and he was obviously tired. Pierre spoke of the importance of daily calisthenics at noon, and Eric deplored the fact that the boys no longer had to wear stiff collars at supper. I had nothing to add and was surprised, when we broke up, to hear Dr. Prescott suggest that we meet again the following week. I had thought he would be through with the Dahlgren circle. I hope to be myself, but so long as Dr. Prescott goes, I will go with him.
The Rector of Justin Page 28
