At evening prayers in the chapel some of the exalted state of the afternoon came back to him. It was rather unexpected because he had come to loathe the unctuous tones with which the headmaster, the Rev. C.W. Margetson conducted the rite. Sitting almost opposite Margetson, he watched the man closely as he knelt at his desk praying, as he always did, extempore. The hands like polished yellowed ivory were knotted together; the balding cranium sprinkled with sparse black hairs nodded in tune with his holy ejaculations. Caverner who had once been impressed and frightened by these pieties now knew more of the man inside, or thought he did.
That evening Caverner saw him without the usual feelings of revulsion. He saw a hypocrite, but he also saw what a hypocrite was: a man in torment. Pity and compassion was not what he felt; perhaps, he thought later, such things are beyond a thirteen year old, but he did have a fleeting intuitive understanding. Caverner had been momentarily touched by the suffering behind the cant. The thin, bony, mean looking man opposite him was somehow appropriate to the occasion, part of the necessary furniture of evening prayers in St Cyprian’s chapel, even of the world and universe beyond it.
Then Margetson had announced the hymn: The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended, and Caverner allowed the drowsy sentimentalism of the tune and words to wash over him and carry him away. His cheeks burned from his day in the sun and the wind from the sea. All was well, even Margetson.
As far as he could remember, Caverner had never actually hated Margetson; his feelings towards him were always more complex. He had begun his life at St Cyprian’s by fearing him and his punishments. Margetson possessed two canes of differing thickness and suppleness which he called Minos and Rhadamanthus after the judges in Hades, the Classical Land of the Dead; then there was the wooden paddle with which he would punish his very youngest charges, and this he called Cerberus after its guard dog. None of the boys knew why Margetson had given names to his instruments of torture, nor did they understand the significance of those names, beyond the fact that they had to do with final judgement and retribution. No-one would have dared to ask The Head, as he was called; but the very fact that these instruments had names invested their exercise with an additional and sinister terror.
Caverner never again knew such fear as he had known between the ages of seven and eleven at St Cyprian’s; not even in the trenches in the seconds before the whistles blew and he and his men had climbed over the parapet to begin the treacherous walk through No-Man’s Land. Then the fear had been acute, but purely physical. The terror he had known then was also moral and spiritual. When he was summoned to ‘see The Head’ he felt acutely the anticipation of physical agony, but more acutely still what he came to know as ‘conviction of sin’. The Head used the word sin a great deal and made his victims feel that the pains he inflicted were but a pale foretaste of the eternal agonies meted out to sinners in the life to come. Some boys pretended to shrug this side of the matter off, but Caverner could not. His parents were somewhat remote, god-fearing people whom he knew would be grieved to know that he was a miserable sinner and that, thanks to Margetson, he had already sampled the torments of the damned.
Margetson had a curious way of dealing with his victims. In the first instance they would be summoned to ‘see him after lunch’, and that usually rather disgusting meal would be further blighted by his reading, before Grace, of a list of those who were to see him. In this post lunch interview he would tell the boy at some length quite why and how he had offended so grievously; then he would ask the boy in question to come to see him ‘after tea’, at about six o’clock, for what he invariably called ‘a licking’, or, if he was feeling particularly judgmental, ‘a good licking’. To the day of his death Caverner could never hear the word ‘licking’ without a physical feeling of nausea rising in his throat. Its metaphorical resonances had sickened him from the very first.
So, after tea, the thing itself would happen. In the spring and Michaelmas terms sentence was carried out in The Head’s study in the main school building, but in summer Margetson chose to use the cricket pavilion on the Great Field as his place of punishment. The ostensible reason for this was convenience: the hour after tea was the time he spent coaching the first eleven in the nets next to the pavilion.
During his early years at St Cyprian’s Caverner had simply been in awe of The Head, and, at times, desperately afraid. Then one summer term, shortly after his eleventh birthday, he had been found convicted of a particularly heinous misdemeanour. Caverner could not quite remember what it was: was it talking after lights out, or laughing during one of The Head’s sermons? No, he had forgotten the crime, but not its consequence. After lunch he had been told to meet The Head in the pavilion after tea at six.
The pavilion itself was an innocent looking building of white-painted weather boards with steps leading up to a veranda, fretwork on the eaves and balustrade giving it a touch of the picturesque. Inside it was slightly stuffy after a long day in the sun, smelling of creosote and linseed oil. There were team photographs on the wall, pads and bats scattered about on the wooden benches. Caverner had waited a good five minutes for Margetson to arrive, terror and shame increasing with every derisive tick of the pavilion clock.
When Margetson came he was carrying his two canes, Minos and Rhadamanthus. He told Caverner to ‘prepare’ himself, a ghastly euphemism which meant that Caverner was to take down his shorts and underpants, then bend over one of the benches. As Caverner did as he was told Margetson asked him whether he preferred the punishment to be inflicted by Minos or Rhadamanthus. Caverner by this time was trembling so much that he could not speak, but something about the tone of Margetson’s question—‘Minos, or Rhadamanthus?’—had astonished him. There had been a higher pitch to his voice, and a tremor which Caverner could not mistake for anything other than pure excitement.
It was just as the dreadful business was coming to an end that quite by chance Caverner noticed something. His head had been bowed and turned away from his torturer, but the force of one of Margetson’s blows had shifted him slightly so that he saw what he had never seen before: The Head in action. He saw the look on the man’s face, the disarray of his clothes, the gross physical evidence of sensual excitement.
Caverner had been an innocent boy, brought up in innocence, but there are times when innocence knows and can see farther than experience. Caverner not only saw, but somehow knew. Margetson too knew that he had been discovered. He immediately stopped the beating and told Caverner to ‘get dressed at once’. Caverner did so and came out of the pavilion before Margetson. He walked down the steps in a state of numbness, almost a trance as he reflected on what he had seen. He had been horrified, but also, somehow, liberated. Conviction of sin would not torment him again. He began to understand that evil may not have a motive, but it must have a cause.
It would not be true to say that Margetson never punished Caverner again, but Minos and Rhadamanthus were rarely used on him. He preferred to give Caverner ‘lines’ instead. This meant copying out a hundred or more hexameters of Virgil, a task which Caverner, a dreamy but studious boy, found almost congenial.
Caverner kept his experience in the pavilion to himself, but he gave it a great deal of thought and, as he did so, certain aspects of Margetson’s curious character began to make sense. Long afterwards Caverner realised that it was this speculation which kept him from simply hating The Head.
In the first place there was Margetson’s wife, invariably and rather strangely called ‘Mrs Head’. Mrs Head was a lumpy, doughy woman, with deep-set, suspicious eyes, curiously dull and featureless of countenance. She acted as head matron in the school, frequently forcing castor oil, liquorice powder and hot poultices on her charges with the same dedicated ferocity with which Margetson applied Minos and Rhadamanthus. From what little casual conversation she let fall Caverner gathered that she was the daughter of a bishop and something of a snob. Childless, she lavished what few maternal instincts she possessed on the occasional sprig of nobility that came as a
pupil to St Cyprian’s. Those, like Caverner, whose parents were neither rich nor aristocratic, she treated as barely tolerable nuisances.
Caverner, like most children of his age, regarded almost all adults as more or less physically repulsive, but he recognised gradations of hideousness, and Mrs Head he thought of as belonging to the lowest circles of Hades. What little he understood of carnal relations convinced him of the impossibility of their existing between The Head and his wife. This, he later realised, could have been the prejudice and aesthetic snobbery of youth, but he certainly could detect nothing tender in their relationship.
Margetson would sometimes mention the scholastic achievements of his youth in a tone which suggested a grievance that he had not risen higher in the world. He had taken a good degree at Oxford, and had once played cricket for his university. He had taken holy orders; he had married the daughter of a bishop. Caverner studied the appropriate reference books and discovered that the bishop had died shortly after his daughter’s marriage. Perhaps, thereby, hopes of preferment had been dashed. Caverner tried to imagine the brilliant, hopeful young curate Margetson might once have been, but failed. Something had happened to him. Had it been an event; or was it simply the heavy foot of time that had trodden him into the mud?
Once or twice Caverner thought he had caught glimpses of the old Margetson, the fine classical scholar. There were times during a lesson when Margetson would quote Horace or rhapsodise over the gobbets of Virgil they were construing; then with a sigh he would return to the dreary business of drilling his charges for the scholarship examinations, or for Common Entrance. At this stage of his education Caverner did not quite understand how a piece of Latin could be regarded as a thing of beauty, which was mainly Margetson’s fault because most of the time learning was taken simply to be a means to a marketable end. Scholarships on the honours board of St Cyprian’s attracted parents: another pupil, another fee.
For a Christian cleric, Margetson was curiously obsessed by pagan mythology. The legends even entered his sermons, which were long, rambling and might, for all Caverner knew or cared, have been brilliantly erudite. In these discourses Jesus remained the blonde-bearded, white-gowned aryan scoutmaster of the sunday school poster; even the bloody warriors and thundering prophets of the Old Testament remained pale and sickly figures. But when, in an odd aside, Margetson turned to the classical legends, it was as if he had turned a light on in a strange but very real world. Caverner remembered Actaeon, torn to pieces by his own hounds, Agave holding the severed head of her own son believing it to be that of a mountain lion; here were Odysseus and Aeneas venturing underground and visiting the land of the dead. The boys of St Cyprian’s became oddly familiar with the geography and personnel of Tartarus.
To Margetson the Greek and Roman Hells were more interesting than the Christian one whose torments, even in Dante, were seldom entirely bespoke. Margetson revelled in the particularity of pain. So Caverner and his fellows heard about Ixion on his wheel, Sisyphus and Tantalus, or Tityos whose liver perpetually regenerated itself in order to be pecked to bloody fragments again and again by vultures.
Caverner did not question the validity of this world of punishments, even after his encounter in the cricket pavilion. He only questioned Margetson’s justification of his own activities: that pains were to be inflicted in this life in order to warn the offender against those of the life to come. Caverner, who could summon up no great affection for the scoutmaster Jesus with which he was presented, saw himself as more or less doomed in any case. One punishment more or less in this life would make no difference in the life to come.
Once, towards the end of his time at St Cyprian’s Caverner had found himself on what was called ‘the private side’, that part of the school buildings that was reserved for the Margetsons’ domestic use. He had been sent to The Head with a message by one of the masters. Not finding Margetson in his study he ventured further into this secret domain than he had ever been before. It was not particularly exciting. Margetson’s home territory was not exactly Spartan—certainly not by comparison with the conditions in which his charges existed—but they were drab. Ornament was discarded in favour of severe and unostentatious conformity. What pictures there were consisted mainly of monochrome steel engravings of church buildings, or portraits of ecclesiastical dignitaries. Then Caverner saw, in a corridor, a picture that he actually liked. He could not help but stop before it. This picture was different from the others. It was admittedly not in colour, but it was the sepia print of a recent painting.
In front of a vague, rocky landscape were seven tall beautiful young women, one of them bare breasted, draped in flowing, classical robes. They carried rounded metallic water pots which some of them were emptying into a cauldron in the centre of the picture. The general atmosphere was one of slow, dreamlike tranquillity. The only slightly troubling element in this scene was that the cauldron had an opening in its bulbous side in the shape of a grotesque head, like a flattened mask of tragedy, from whose wide, angry mouth the water poured away into a dark hole. The activity of these beauties appeared to be futile.
‘Do you know who they are?’
Caverner started violently and his back brushed against something. It was Margetson’s rusty black suit; he had crept up unheard close behind him. Caverner, blushing and terrified, turned round to face The Head, who seemed, however, to be in a genial mood and appeared almost amused by Caverner’s obvious discomfiture. Caverner rapidly explained his presence there and presented the note to Margetson who put it in his pocket without even a glance at the contents. His steel blue eyes, slightly magnified by heavy round spectacles, fixed themselves on Caverner.
‘Do you know what is being represented?’
Margetson was not a handsome man, but he was impressive looking. He was tall, loose-limbed and spare, with a beak of a nose, a long neck and an unusually prominent Adam’s apple. His skin was the colour and texture of polished ivory. Caverner had always felt that there was something not quite real about the man.
‘Well, boy?’
Caverner shook his head.
‘Then I shall tell you that you may be better informed.’ Margetson often talked in this ironic, stylised way. It contributed to the air of remoteness and unreality.
‘These are the daughters of King Danaus of Egypt,’ he said pointing to the seven beauties. ‘They were commanded by their father Danaus to murder their husbands on their wedding night. All but one did so. The murderous daughters were subsequently killed, and in Hell they are condemned by the inexorable judges of that place perpetually to pour water into a leaking vessel which will never be filled. This is the scene which that excellent modern artist Mr John William Waterhouse has chosen to depict.’
Caverner stared at the picture again. What had seemed like serenity was now shown to be a profound melancholy sadness. For Caverner it overwhelmed all the dreamlike beauty he had once found in it. If Margetson had not been there he might have wept; instead he fought back the tears. His grief was tinged with indignant anger: whatever these lovely creatures had done they did not deserve this.
‘You appear to be moved, boy. What is the matter? Do you think that the dread crime of killing one’s spouse should not be punished with the utmost severity?’
Caverner shook his head.
‘Run along then.’
Caverner recalled the moment with vividness, standing there by the pavilion some ten years later, but the grief had somehow gone out of it. So much, so many terrible things had intervened. Again he began to wonder what had brought him back to St Cyprian’s when he could have been spending his leave in London.
He was not quite sure how long he had been there. It seemed an age to him, yet it could not have been. The shadow of the pavilion had barely lengthened, the even, golden light was not yet ensanguined by the sun’s fall towards the horizon. The only change to the scene was that it was not now entirely deserted. A small black figure was moving towards him across the Great Field.
At the opposite edge of the field from the pavilion was a line of trees masking a knapped flint wall. Behind this lay the scout huts, the carpentry shed and the school buildings to which access could be obtained through a gap in the wall. From this gap had come the black figure that resembled a strange, ragged flapping bird. As it approached, Caverner could see that this crow of a man was in fact a schoolmaster in a black suit with a black gown over it. Then he began to make out the white dog-collar below the long pale neck, the familiar slightly bounding stride, the glint of spectacles. It was Margetson.
Caverner retreated to the steps of the pavilion, then stood his ground. He was, after all, an officer in uniform; there were three wound stripes on his sleeve. Nevertheless he waited as if waiting for a battle. Margetson only noticed him when he was half way across the square of the cricket pitch. He hesitated, a puzzled frown on his face. After a while he came on again. When he was about six feet away from Caverner he stopped once more and peered at him through his spectacles.
‘Caverner, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right, Margetson.’
Margetson was taken aback by the naked use of his surname. There was a pause before he was able to say: ‘Ah. On leave, are you?’
‘On leave. Yes. A leavite, you might say.’
‘Hmm. Not a deserter, then?’ Caverner did not dignify his remark with a reply. ‘My little jest,’ added Margetson, almost apologetically, ‘Just my little jest. One of our brave boys, then, eh? Splendid. Splendid.’ Having delivered himself of this conventional piece of patriotic piety he seemed at a loss again. His rusty black suit looked to Caverner rustier and shinier than ever. Could it possibly be the same one after nearly ten years? In a lower, less confident voice, Margetson said: ‘What do you want, Caverner?’
Mrs Midnight and Other Stories Page 34
