The conversation was desultory. Stephen did not utter a word. But at dessert Angus suddenly glanced down the board at his son and raised his nightly glass of champagne in an unusual and friendly salute.
“I have just had Dr. Lockwood on the telephone, my boy. It seems there’s a good opening there next fall, and he urged me to persuade you to take it. What could I say but yes? Learning about family securities will just have to wait, I suppose. I assume you’ll need the interim to prepare your courses. Including an introduction to American art. For I told him I’d give that gallery my serious consideration.”
So he knew too. They all knew. His mother had done quick work. Wasn’t it just as well? But in the first flush of his gratitude and in his sudden surge of warmth for this distant and rarely confiding father, he found himself wondering if the latter’s impenetrable restraint might not have been a needed armor against the emotional ravages of his spouse.
After dinner Angus retired as usual to his study, and Stephen was left in the parlor with his sisters. Neither Janine nor Susan had their mother’s beauty; both were conventionally, even a bit boringly pretty. They had flat, round faces that would probably bear the years ill, but their eyes were appealing and their smiles not without charm, and they dressed well. That they were still unmarried at twenty-five and twenty-three worried no one, including themselves; it was so obvious they were destined for good matches. Janine was the more sophisticated, the more practical of the two; Susan liked to think of herself as romantic, like Stephen, but they were essentially alike.
Janine now revealed that their mother had indeed summoned them to tell them about Annette. She and Susan were sufficiently sympathetic to him, but it was perfectly evident that they considered his affair a bit ridiculous. Susan at least tried to see it as a gainful experience.
“Anyway, you can say you’ve had a great love in your life,” she pointed out. “I thought I might have had one with Brian Emden last winter, but I got over it too soon. I guess you have to work on those things.”
“Isn’t it rather futile to work on one if you’re going to have to give it up in the end?” Janine asked her.
“But doesn’t everyone want a great love?”
“Only if it’s going to end in marriage.”
“But that’s so prosaic, Janny!”
“Look at Mother and Father. They had a great love and married.”
Susan glanced dubiously in the direction of Angus’s study. “I can’t really imagine having a great love for Father,” she said in a lower voice. “A love, yes, of course, but not a great one.”
Janine appealed to their still silent brother. “What do you think, Steve? Do you think Mother and Father had a great love?”
Stephen glanced from one to the other to show them his awareness that they were trying to distract him from a supposed obsession.
“Well, I think Father must have, for her,” he replied at last. “At least in the beginning. But Mother, no. I don’t suppose Mother was ever subject to great passion. It’s not really her thing, is it?”
“What is her thing, then?” Susan demanded.
“To inspire one, I guess.”
And looking at his sisters he wondered if indeed any woman was capable of a great passion. Was, that why Averhill had seemed to him such a citadel of romantic feeling? Precisely because it was a male monastery?
9
ON A CLOUDLESS October morning, as cold as it was bright, a month after the commencement of his first term as a master at Averhill, Stephen stood before the blackboard of his classroom and chalked carefully the first stanza of John Donne’s “A Valediction: On Weeping.”
Let me pour forth
My tears before thy face, whilst I stay here;
For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear,
And by this mintage they are something worth,
For thus they be
Pregnant of thee;
Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more:
When a tear falls that thou falls which it bore;
So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore.
As he wrote, a small select English class, the sixth form (or senior) “Upper A,” scribbled the daily ten-minute theme on their assigned reading. There were a dozen of them; some had been first formers in Stephen’s last year as a student in the school, and they treated him with a friendly if at times sarcastic respect. Two were prefects in his dormitory and helped him to keep order there. He cherished the hope that he had achieved a precarious balance between intimacy and authority.
Beside the text now he drew two crescents to represent two eyes confronting each other, labeling one M and one F. Between and below the crescents he drew several small circles in each of which he placed a human figure, using five lines for the body and limbs and a dot for the head, and differentiating the sexes with oblongs for pants and a triangle for a dress. Then he turned to address the class. Their writing time was up.
“What do you think the poet means, Evarts, by the clause ‘that thou falls which it bore’?”
“That got me, sir. I haven’t a clue.”
“Emerson?”
“Could it mean, sir, that the lady is of easy virtue? ‘Fall’ could mean that she had been seduced. And that might explain the last line. The man and woman have become nothing because she has lost her virtue and he has been guilty of seduction.”
“Well that is certainly ingenious,” Stephen commented in surprise. “Though I don’t know that in a day of double standards a successful male lover would be considered a nothing. I suppose you could argue that the divers shore meant that she was no longer respectable and he still was.”
A grave stout boy with thick-lensed glasses raised his hand.
“Yes, Dixon.”
“The lady is certainly going to lose her reputation because we know she’s pregnant.”
“I think you’re confused there. Isn’t it the tear that’s pregnant?”
“I suggest, sir, if I may put it so, that the tear is the symbol of the female egg that has received the male sperm.”
Stephen glanced about the class. No one was smiling, but that didn’t mean they weren’t riding him. Indeed it probably meant they were. He decided, anyway, to take the suggestion seriously.
“And I suppose you would then argue,” he continued, turning to the blackboard, “that the impregnated cell is an emblem of more grief because the lady’s fault will soon become apparent to the world. But why should the tears be fruits of grief? There must have been some pleasure in the making of them. And why should the man be weeping? Is that a likely reaction to being told of the lady’s plight?”
“Men always weep in poetry. It’s a convention.”
“But they weep at noble things, not at embarrassing ones. I suggest that he’s weeping because they’re about to be parted. He may have been called to the wars. At any rate, it seems clear that he’s going away.”
“I don’t see why he should weep at that. Isn’t it the best thing that could happen to him under the circumstances?”
The class burst into laughter, and Stephen was sure now that it had all been planned. But he decided it would be better to join in the mirth.
“Let’s be serious, gentlemen,” he proceeded when the room was quiet. “Craven, will you give us your version of what the stanza is about.”
“Certainly, sir.” Craven now read from the theme he had just completed. “The lovers, gazing into each other’s eyes, are weeping over their imminent separation. The image of each, reflected in the eye of the beholder, becomes encapsulated in a tear and necessarily falls and dissolves when the tear falls. Thus the lovers envision their own annihilation in weeping.”
“Very good, Craven! That’s it, I think. And the tears suggest the sea that will soon be between them, which prepares the way for the great emotive language of the third stanza.” Stephen now recited in a full voice:
“O more than moon,
Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere,<
br />
Weep me not dead in thine arms, but forbear
To teach the sea what it may do too soon.”
After a pause he took his seat at the desk. “To me those four lines are the greatest poetry,” he said gravely.
“Sir?” The raised hand was that of Giles Woodward, whose small, dark ferret face seemed to challenge anyone to deny his position as brightest of a bright class. “May I offer a different interpretation?”
“Of course.”
“You told us last week that a poem does not have to be chained—I believe that was your term—to the century of its composition. That it could be used as a flexible instrument to serve the uses—or even the images—of a later time.”
“To some extent.”
“Oh, only to some extent? To what extent?” There was a shade of impertinence in Woodward’s inquiring mien.
“Let’s have that interpretation, Giles.”
First names were not used in classroom, and Giles’s grin showed that he was prepared to take full advantage of the slip. He proceeded now with confidence. “Well, the little sticks that you have drawn to show the sex of the persons in each tear remind me of the signs on washroom doors. I seem even to hear the cascade of the flushed toilets within that sweep away the lovers and make them nothing indeed.”
Woodward turned with a show of indignation to confront the laughter in the row behind him. “No, I’m serious! The dropping tears, droppings, can represent excretion, the pouring out of love, all cleansed and removed by the water, the sea, the flushing of plumbing. Isn’t something like that what Donne’s getting at?”
There was no doubt now that he was faced with a serious and challenging impertinence, but Stephen still wondered if he could not make something out of it.
“Are you suggesting, Woodward, that the poet is relating love to a less exalted bodily function?”
“Does he have to? Can’t we? Isn’t that your theory? And what about that Yeats poem we read last week?
“A woman can be proud and stiff
when on love intent,
But love has pitched his mansion
In the place of excrement?”
Stephen threw up his hands. “Excellent, Giles. First rate.”
And he nodded in approval as the class applauded.
He was still feeling his way with care in his second month at Averhill. It was his hope that, being the only master who was himself a graduate of the school, and having been out a mere five years, he might provide a useful bridge between the students and faculty. In this he was encouraged by the headmaster himself, who used to insist that the greatest fault of pedagogues lay in their assumption that the workings of the juvenile mind in any way resembled their own.
“You must give your imagination daily calisthenics, Stephen. Academia tends to paralyze it. Our masters adore classifications. If I had my way we’d have no classes or courses. We’d simply sit in a circle, like Socrates and his young friends, and merge all subjects in a single pursuit of knowledge and the love of God.”
Stephen of course was aware that Lockwood was prone to such flights of hyperbole. A master in a physics lab who lectured on Wordsworth’s intimations of immortality might find himself reproved for taking his superior’s theory too literally. Nobody was more precise in his expectations of just what ground had to be covered by which teacher than the Socratic headmaster. But Stephen liked to emphasize to himself the similarity at least of his and Lockwood’s ideals.
He knew that a master at Averhill could not really be a friend of the younger boys, but he saw no reason that some helpful congeniality could not be established between himself and members of the graduating class, and he cultivated particularly the three prefects in his dormitory, inviting them to sit up late in his study on Saturday nights drinking cider and discussing their lives and ambitions and what the school was and what it could be. He knew he had attained some degree of success when the prefects began inviting the prefects in the two neighboring dorms to join them. The danger was always that when the talk turned to sex, the formality of the master-student relationship might be fatally eroded, but Stephen tried to avoid this by keeping the discussion on a general plane and outlawing illustrations drawn from personal experience.
His early sense of success, however, received a mortifying blow only a week after his class on the Donne “Valediction.” Roy Evans, head of the English department and senior master of the school, a man whom Stephen had much admired as a student and liked and trusted as a cohort, administered the reproof as tactfully as possible.
“I hear you’re getting on splendidly with the sixth Upper A,” he told Stephen one morning in the faculty coffee room. “You’re going to be a real help in proving my theory that these special groups of brighter students should not be held back by the slower ones. But don’t you think they’re still a bit young for Yeats’s Crazy Jane poems?”
“Would Yeats have been, at seventeen?”
“I don’t mean that they’re too young individually, but as a class. As a group they still tend to giggle at an association of love and excretion.”
“So you heard about that.”
“I did. And not from any of the sixth Upper A, either. Your little discussion of love and plumbing has been the subject of smirks and tee-hees at my fourth form lunch table.”
“I’m hardly responsible for that.”
“Oh, but you are, my boy. That’s the Averhill system.”
“I thought I could decide what I could teach my class.”
“And what made you think that?” Roy’s goggle of astonishment was meant to be comic, but it nonetheless underlined the basic gravity of their dispute. “Do you think I can?” He gripped Stephen’s shoulder in friendly fashion and led him to a corner, farther away from the other masters. “Look, my friend, you know I wouldn’t give a tinker’s damn myself. You could have them reading Lady Chat-terley’s Lover as far as I’m concerned. Suppose they do giggle? That’s not the end of the world. But you must know from your own experience here that the old man finds out everything that goes on on this campus.”
“Dr. Lockwood can be very broad-minded at times.”
“Yes, but he decides what times those are. And he particularly dislikes to have them chosen by his subordinates.”
Stephen had nothing more to say, but when Roy left him, he took the matter up with Tommy Barnes, who had constituted himself his special friend and advisor. Together they coached third form football. Stephen liked the friendly young minister, whom he remembered with affection from his own school days, though he found his big brother attitude verging at times on the fatuous. And Tommy was indeed horrified at his project of appealing Roy’s implied interdict to the headmaster himself.
“You mean you’d actually quote that Yeats poem to Dr. Lockwood!” Tommy demanded, gaping. “Are you out of your mind? When he gets roused on a moral point, he actually likes to hurt people. Even his protégés.”
“And I’m one of those?”
“Well, you are now.”
Tommy was so upset that Stephen should even be considering so suicidal an idea that he asked him to come to supper at his little cottage the following night. His wife, he explained, had worked for the headmaster the year before and was something of an expert on the imperial moods. “See what she will think of your project,” he said, rolling his eyes to express the extremity of her probable view.
Stephen had met Natica Barnes at lunch at the school and at tea at Mrs. Lockwood’s and had wondered why that pretty little brunette, who had a reputation for brains, should have chosen so un-stellar a mate. In her home the question presented itself more forcibly. There was not much, it was true, that one could do with the tiny rooms, but it struck him nonetheless that Tommy’s wife had done the minimum. The prints of flowers and birds on the walls were at worst dull and at best conventional, and the too bright new chintz in the living room seemed to proclaim its owners’ need to have it take on all the job of decorating. The meal was adequate but, in Dr. Joh
nson’s phrase, “not one to ask a man to.” Stephen got the impression that her husband bored Natica, not by any sullenness of her demeanor or even by any failure of attention, but by the quickness with which she apprehended what he was trying to say and the slight sharpness with which she interrupted him.
“I know the poem you mean, dear,” she put in, after Tommy had spent minutes trying to put delicately what Yeats had expressed more forcefully. “It’s where love has pitched his mansion, isn’t it”? I quite agree that Dr. Lockwood would find that objectionable in any master’s class at Averhill. It’s conceivable, I admit, that he would be capable of introducing it in one of his own. There’s no telling where his self-dramatization might lead him. But if Stephen is thinking of asking his approval to include the Crazy Jane poems in his own course, yes, I agree, he had much better forget it.”
Stephen expressed his surrender with a smile. “I guess that’s that, then.”
The telephone rang towards the end of their meal, and Tommy answered it. It was a summons from the headmaster, and he left after a hurried final bite and a mumbled apology.
“The school does reach a rather long arm into your life, doesn’t it?” Stephen commented. “It must be hard at times to be a master’s wife.”
“It’s not always easy, certainly.”
She was distinctly more relaxed with her husband away. She went into the pantry to get the bottle of white wine he had frugally recorked, and refilled both their glasses.
“You must sometimes wish that Tommy had a more impersonal boss, like a bank or a business.”
She glanced about the room in mock fear of eavesdroppers. “Are you seeking to entrap me? How do I know you’re not a spy sent by the most high?”
“Me? The tiniest cog in the academic machine?”
“But that’s not the way we see you here at all. We see you as the son and heir of a powerful trustee, a favorite of the headmaster, in short, a comer.”
The Lady of Situations Page 11
