by H. S. Cross
He sighed wistfully. Morgan got up from the floor. The debate had got out of hand. If he didn’t haul Laurie down to earth, they’d careen into even more trouble than the day had already brought. He pulled up a chair and prepared to kill Laurie’s illusions:
—The trouble with you is you’re jealous.
—Jealous?
—That you never did anything half as good.
—I did the skull! Laurie protested. I even had you two going.
—If you start on that, Nathan said, I’ll swear I’ll break your nose.
Morgan recaptured Laurie’s attention:
—Face it, Lydon, the only reason you’re exercised is you wish you were in Alex’s place. You’d love nothing more than to march into S-K’s study and confess the whole thing.
—He could still do that, Nathan observed.
Laurie brightened.
—Don’t encourage him!
—I could do it! Laurie declared. I could tell S-K everything, the lab, the wax, the gunpowder—
—And get yourself a public licking!
—It’d be worth it, though.
—No, Morgan said, it wouldn’t! Have you completely lost your mind?
—No more than you have lately, Nathan muttered.
Morgan kicked him and turned an icy gaze on Laurie:
—I’ve had quite enough bollixing from S-K today. I don’t need you confessing to the worst crime in the history of the Cad.
—It is the worst, isn’t it?
Laurie was growing more envious by the moment.
—Look, Morgan exhorted him, just think this through! You confess to S-K. He whacks you from here to Christmas, in front of the whole school.
—Maybe you’d get the birch! Nathan added.
Morgan kicked him again.
—Then you’re the one who can’t sit down for a week, and all three of us will be under suspicion, so we won’t be able to go anywhere or do anything!
Laurie’s face had acquired a dreamy expression:
—And once it blew over—
—Don’t—be—moronic! The Third will know you didn’t do it. Alex will know you didn’t do it. They’ll tell everyone, and you’ll be left looking like … like …
The association that sprang to mind was too prurient to voice in front of Nathan.
—Like someone who thought quicker than they did, Laurie said.
Morgan resorted to kicking Laurie:
—You’ll look like Frank bloody Fane.
Laurie blushed.
—Who? Nathan asked.
—The point, Morgan continued, is everyone will know you’re a fake. They’ll think you’re deranged or pathetic, and they’ll think the same of us.
—You’ll be a pariah, Nathan concluded, at last catching on.
—And so will we!
Laurie sat down slowly, as crestfallen as a child informed that Christmas was canceled.
—Right, Nathan said firmly. You’re not going to S-K. At least not to confess.
—None of us are going to S-K for bloody anything! Morgan cried. Because—it is absolutely—nothing—to—do—with—us!
—Shh, Nathan scolded. You’ll have yon bunglers in here.
—If it’s nothing to do with us, Laurie retorted, then why did you have JP thump your face open and tear down our photo bracket?
Nathan and Laurie were glaring at him, united again. They had no right to cross-question him; the point was—a combativeness seized him. They were both mentally defective, he told them, and so were S-K and his entire apparatus. Any sane person could in five minutes concoct a way to sort out Alex and the fags. Why not publically ignore the whole thing? Deny the Third their hour of persecution. More important, he continued, deny them the chance to invoke their ridiculous Covenant. Have the locks cleaned. Then, after a brief interval, oppress the Lower School in ways small enough to evade protest but persistent enough to chafe. Occupy their time with extra Games. Send them on long daily runs, ostensibly to build their fitness, but actually to drain their energy. Expand the list of fagging duties. Summon them for pastoral chats in Housemasters’ studies on half holidays. Schedule extra confirmation lessons. Seat them together at meals under the supervision of prefects to reform their table manners. Do anything, in short, to keep them busy and exhausted but to avoid the impression of deliberate persecution. Keep the atmosphere benign, but take their leash and shorten it until they hadn’t an inch.
And that was only one idea.
Laurie shook the crumbs from their biscuit tin into his mouth. Nathan slipped their flask from the bookshelf and took a pull.
—Do you think, Laurie asked Nathan, that our panjandrum will offer his insights to the Reverend Headmaster?
—Can’t think how S-K’s got on without him.
—If you ask me, Laurie continued, our resident percher will flit straight over prefect and join the SCR, next term.
Nathan gasped theatrically and hid the flask from Morgan’s sight. Laurie fell to his knees:
—Before thy throne, O God, we kneel: give us a conscience quick to feel—
—Shut up.
—A ready mind to understand the meaning of thy chastening hand.
Nathan joined Laurie belting out the hymn S-K made them sing at least once a month:
—Wean us and train us with thy rod—
—Very funny—
—Teach us to know our faults, O God!
Morgan shoved past them to the far side of the table and slammed open an exercise book.
—For love of pleasure—
—Just what do you think you’re doing? Nathan barked at him.
—Prep.
Laurie stopped singing:
—What prep?
—History.
Laurie reached for his exercise book and threw it across the room:
—No one is doing that.
—I am.
They sniped at him with further recitals of the hymn, but he fetched his exercise book and compelled his mind to return to the relative simplicity of the history classroom, where Rees had so thoroughly violated Code by submerging himself without reserve into something that wasn’t Games. Such a performance, if delivered by someone like Spaulding, would have had the opposite effect, of course. It would have amused and inspired them. Spaulding undergoing their interrogation would have composed himself in Grieves’s chair, tossing off answers and admissions of torture as the ashes of a cigarette, which he would have smoked with an insouciance that bordered the erotic.
But the erotic had no place in prep. The subject at hand was Fawkes, not Spaulding (though he wouldn’t mind Spaulding’s hand at—), Fawkes, in re gunpowder, torture, apostasy, and so forth. From the moment of his capture, Fawkes was doomed to execution. His inquisitors employed torture to uncover conspirators, not to force him to renounce his faith. His Catholicism, in fact, was a valuable point for the Crown. If he were to disavow his faith, it would undermine the object lesson the Crown wished to present, namely that Catholics were depraved in every way and would, if not suppressed, destroy parliamentary government. If Fawkes had wished merely to assassinate the King, he might have found more support, but to threaten the British Parliament with explosion by gunpowder was to launch an attack on the Magna Carta and on the birthright of every man, woman, and child in the land. This was the reason Fawkes had become the most reviled man in British history and why they burned his effigy each November. Guy Fawkes would never have apostatized because he would never have been asked to apostatize. It simply did not happen.
The bell released them from hostile tedium, but even as they groaned their relief, it summoned them to prayers. In the crowds, shoving had an edge. Prefects cuffed indiscriminately. They filed into the chapel and collapsed into House pews, fractious and exhausted. Laurie polled the area for gossip. Morgan closed his eyes.
Whyever had Grieves given such a lesson? And what hand moved behind Rees’s chance selection of Fawkes and apostasy? If the Gunpowder Plot represented narrowly avert
ed chaos of the worst sort, were the Fates attempting to draw a parallel with Alex’s conspiracy? Certainly by casting the horrible Rees as Guy Fawkes, the Fates had rallied everyone’s antipathy. But what about the selection of apostasy just after S-K had renewed his accusation towards Morgan of the same? Perhaps he’d misunderstood what the word meant, after all. He’d always had the idea that apostasy meant denying one’s faith out of expediency, but when he had refused confirmation, there had been nothing expedient about it. S-K had pressed him about what he didn’t believe, but Morgan had been unable to explain. Haltingly, he had confessed that he couldn’t pronounce the vows. When asked which words troubled him, he declared that they all did.
He no longer remembered what the vows were, other than some proclamation about renouncing evil. Did he not wish to renounce evil? Put like that, of course he did, but as he recalled, it had not been put like that. Then as now, the Headmaster treated his refusal as a grave falsehood, a perverse rejection of a thing Morgan purportedly knew in his heart to be true. He might not be sure, then or now, what was true, but he certainly wasn’t going to abandon his position after all this time. Besides, S-K’s harangue that morning had not been designed to convert, but to broadcast the Headmaster’s dedicated mistrust of him. Guy Fawkes had not been invited to apostatize and neither had he!
A rustle at the back announced the arrival of the Common Room, which processed down the aisle followed majestically by S-K. Clement shuffled to the piano, adjusted reading glasses, and announced in his wavering voice the hymn, the same one Laurie and Nathan had just wielded against Morgan. Of course, the Headmaster would deploy it on such a night when he wished to make a moral point. They hauled themselves to their feet and prepared for reproach.
Before thy throne, O God, we kneel.
Give us a conscience quick to feel.
His conscience was sentient, thank you very much, and it didn’t take a change of posture to spot the shadow, at hand, sowing doubts about the vile confirmation affair and injecting him with a fully out-of-the-question urge to sort out the entire Lower School. But the shadow could sod off—
Bring us, O Father, nearer thee.
And take with it obnoxious sentiments such as this one, which were in any case below the belt. He may have craved such drawing near to his own father one time, but that era was as dead as the War; such pangs did not belong in his chest today. And as for drawing near to Spaulding, let him not deceive himself. Spaulding had gone along with a bit of miking off lessons, but he had not followed it up with glances across refectory or chapel. He was surely not thinking of Morgan now. By no stretch of the imagination could he be considered passport to another—
For sins of heedless word and deed,
The last thing Morgan was going to do was to start feeling remorse for mocking people like bloody Rees. Only some tragic George Arthur type would regret knocking Rees off his pompous perch. Morgan wasn’t sorry for starting the penny-for-the-guy rag, and he wasn’t sorry for a single punch or kick he’d ever given the beast. S-K adored a Tom Brown morality. He probably learned it from Arnold himself somewhere in the depths of the last century. Even the name of this tune was out of date: St. Petersburg? Ha. The Tsar’s palace lay beneath the tanks of Leningrad.
For lives bereft of purpose high
Forgive, forgive, O Lord, we cry.
The Academy had called him once to great things, but that had been the ambition of a little boy who knew nothing of the world, nothing of himself, and nothing of the bites life could and would dispense. The present was no place for old-fashioned longings, to do good, act good, love as he had been made to love, loving them all with all their failings, in dusty balconies or the dead of night with nothing to offer besides biscuit crumbs, tea, and a squeaky bicycle.
Consume the ill, purge out the shame
O God, be with us in the flame
A newborn people may we rise
More pure, more true, more nobly wise.
They sat in disgust, cramming hymnbooks back into the pews. If they indeed required forgiveness for anything, it was for lives of low purpose, or none. There was no essential purpose in the Fags’ Rebellion, in the intrigues of House and Games, no purpose to his father’s toil at the firm, nor to the hideous babies his sisters were sprouting or the hysteria over radio towers, Germany, the weather—none of it mattered in the slightest degree.
S-K moved to the pulpit. Morgan braced himself.
—I do not intend to waste precious words on this damnable business, S-K announced. Yes, damnable. That is the word this business merits.
If only fire would consume all this.
—Over the past fifteen hours you have made it abundantly clear—and I include each and every boy in that pronoun—abundantly clear that you hold with disdain everything I have devoted my life to offer you. My life. Night and day, my life.
The Headmaster looked small inside the pulpit. He was not wearing his gown, merely suit and school tie.
—Others, too, have devoted their lives to your service.
He gestured to the SCR.
—And are continuing this devotion in the face of callousness. In the face of indifference. In the face of hearts grown cold.
Cold, hot, shadow, fire, his head couldn’t hold all of this.
—I am perfectly aware of what you think—all of you, each of you. You regard this business as a prank. And I am perfectly aware that the target of a prank ought not to exercise himself, but to take it in good humor. Having registered my disapproval and having encountered your wall of silence, I ought to bow to convention and exit the pitch. Ought I not?
He let his question hang, apparently unironic, for their consideration. They didn’t dare murmur, but Morgan could feel tremors coursing through the pews, eager to shout back Yes! and Yes! Yet even as they suppressed their cries, uneasiness stole upon them like mustard gas. Their Headmaster had just violated a profound point of etiquette. He had made visible a code that had never been spoken directly, because the light of day exposed it as hollow, cynical, cold.
—It will come as no surprise, S-K continued, that I am no disciple of convention. If I were, I would not have devoted the last forty-six years, perhaps my final years, to founding and building up this academy, here in the far reaches of Yorkshire, apart from city, university, cathedral, apart from the men whose society might have given me—the personal me, Andrew Saltford-Kent—pleasure and satisfaction. If I adhered to convention, I would have passed these years elsewhere, doing work that might have brought me acclaim, or at least personal comfort.
Grieves was gazing into the middle distance. Burton-Lee regarded the Headmaster intently. The Eagle looked pent-up.
—I am a man, as you repeat scornfully to one another, from another age. Of another age. An age that permitted things to matter. An age where a word such as purpose meant something. Noble meant something. Conscience meant something. Those boys cut down in their finest hour, boys I loved, we all loved, those boys gave their lives because they believed we had made something in this land, something worth defending to the death.
Bodies rustled in pews, full of impatience and vexation.
—I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that those boys died because the things they believed in were an illusion. There is something I must tell you. It is essential. Are you listening?
He looked down the rows, catching eye after eye.
—Those boys we loved died because of woeful leadership, because of failures, because of disease and wickedness and apocalyptic advances in the machinery of destruction. That, boys, is why they died. They died because there is evil in the world.
Morgan shivered. Here was their Headmaster, a man finished in every sense of the word, clutching the corners of his pulpit as if this were his last chance of saving them, and what did he tell them? They died because there was evil in the world.
—Their convictions, the convictions of this Academy, were part of the force laboring to keep evil in check. They were not a can
dyfloss dream for which those boys died. They were the reason those boys lived.
From lives devoid of—
—Boys …
His voice soft, paternal, full of regret almost tender.
—Whatever you believe, try to make sure that it’s true.
As if he loved them so deeply, so secretly, as much as he had loved those other boys.
—By their fruits you shall know them. Evil mocks. Evil scorns. Evil lies. Evil destroys. Please, boys, please …
He spoke as if there were tears in his eyes, as if they, not he, were about to be cut down.
—Try to do the other thing. Speak truth, build up. Do as that one man did. Do as we are bid: with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength, love.
His voice a whisper:
—Love.
15
John was dreaming of summer at the Bishop’s house in the years when he used to go there, before everything in the middle chapter went wrong. The first chapter, he explained to himself in the dream, covered the time before his mother departed. The middle chapter stretched from that mangling hour until the day he met Meg at Cambridge. It encompassed the time he called his youth, the time he made it a rule never to review. Why, he asked himself, had his imagination trespassed into the middle chapter? He might be dreaming, but he had not entirely relinquished reason, else how could he so discourse with himself?
The air in the Bishop’s garden swarmed with pollen. The Bishop’s son, his former friend, played noisily just out of view. His own father lounged on the patio, his collar unfastened in the heat—but it wasn’t right, he insisted, his father was dead, and he had never unfastened his collar where anyone could see.
John was roaming the kitchen, and Mrs. Hallows was giving him a plum. The Bishop wanted to see him, she said. John, nervous but somehow eager, drifted up the paneled staircase to the Bishop’s study.
Inside, the Bishop bade him stand before the desk, as he always did when chastising John and Jamie. Only now John was alone, the Bishop’s son still playing loudly in the garden. The Bishop remonstrated with him about his decision to forgo confirmation. Didn’t he realize the error into which he was slipping? John tried to explain: it was a matter of conscience.
