Russ
At any previous time in his life such a letter would have thrown Hector into a well-controlled ecstasy. Signal preferment was offered as an examiner in the provincial examination system, and the prospect of a job in the Department of Education, that Moslem Paradise of ambitious teachers! Here was his old friend, Russell McIlquham, himself a rising man with that most.desirable of all departmental benefactions, “the ear of the Deputy”, practically assuring him that it was only a matter of time before he, Hector, would revel in departmental authority with a good chance of imposing his pet schemes upon other, reluctant teachers. But as so often happens in an unsatisfactory world, this good news came at the wrong time. His cup of professional ambition was filled at a moment when he hankered after other, strange delights. What should he do? Should he act,—a course from which his common sense told him he was unlikely to derive any benefit except his own satisfaction—or should he put out his hand and pluck this plum which had ripened in his professional life? He was somewhat astonished at himself to find that he hesitated in making his choice.
He had worked his way almost to the end of his coconut chiffon pie. He ate methodically, devouring the cardboard-like crust at the back of his segment of pie (his trained eye told him that it was a reasonable, but not an exact, sixth of a pie ten inches in diameter) but leaving one last mouthful of cream and coconut, to be chomped voluptuously when the crust was done. It was as he was about to raise this tidbit to his mouth that he lifted his eyes and saw a vaguely familiar figure standing at the counter, some distance from him.
Hector had an excellent memory for names and faces. He sometimes amused his colleagues at teachers’ entertainments by reciting the nominal roll of some class which he had taught ten or twelve years before; he never hesitated over a name. He knew that this young man was Lieutenant Roger Tasset, whom he had met briefly one hour and twenty-five minutes earlier in The Shed at St Agnes’.
Tasset was talking to the waitress behind the counter. Hector could not hear what was said, but the girl leaned toward Roger, and her face was stripped of the suspicious, somewhat minatory expression which waitresses often wear when dealing with young male customers. She appeared to glow a little, and her lips parted moistly as she listened to what he said. He was, in fact, making some mention of the heavy tax on the box of cigarettes which he had bought. But to Hector’s eye the girl seemed to be responding to the easy gallantry which was plain in Roger’s figure and face, if not in his words.
Hector popped the gob of coconut cream into his mouth with unaccustomed haste, seized his black notebook and drew a line under the two columns. But instead of writing, as was his custom, the name of the victorious column in capitals under this line, he wrote instead: “There are some decisions which cannot be made on a basis of reason.”
In the glare of the lamp the small but distinct bald spot on Mrs Bridgetower’s head glowed dustily as she bent over her dish of oyster stew. It was an ugly lamp, but there was a solemnity, almost a grandeur, about its ugliness. Hanging from one of the false oak beams in the dining-room by an oxidized bronze chain which the passing of years had made even more rusty, it spread out like a canopy over the middle of the dining-table. The shade was of bronze strips, apparently held together by bronze rivets, and between the strips were pieces of glass so rough in texture, so shot with green and yellow and occasional flecks of red, that they seemed to be made of vitrified mucus. When she and the late Professor Bridgetower had built this house, before the First World War, it had been a beautiful lamp, for it accorded with the taste of the period. So did the rest of the room—the oak table and chairs which owed so much, but not perhaps enough, to William Morris; the “built-in” buffet at the end of the room, with its piece of cloudy mirror and its cabinets with leaded-glass windows, in which cups and saucers and the state china were imprisoned; the blue carpet upon the floor.
It was in the manner which had been current when her house was built that Mrs Bridgetower ordered her meals and caused them to be served. The table at which she and Solly were seated was spread with a white linen cloth; she thought, quite rightly, that people who used mats did so to save washing, and she thought it unsuitable to save in that way. She did not approve of careless, quick meals, and although she did not care greatly for food herself she coursed Solly through soup, an entree, a sweet and a savoury every night that she faced him at that table. She insisted, making a joke of it, that he wear at least a dark coat, and preferably a dark suit, to dinner. And she insisted that there be what she called “suitable conversation” with the meal. Suitable conversation involved a good many questions.
“And what have you been doing this afternoon?”
“I had to go to St Agnes’, mother, to look at the site for the play.”
“Oh, and so we are to be vouchsafed a glimpse of the gardens at St Agnes’, are we? I’m sure the Little Theatre is privileged.”
“Mr Webster is lending the upper lawn.”
“As Griselda is to play a leading role, I suppose he could not very well refuse.”
“The play was provisionally cast before he was asked for the gardens, mother.”
“That does not alter the position as much as you appear to think. Not that I care whether he lends his garden or why. He is not a man I care for greatly.”
“I didn’t know that you knew him.”
“I don’t.”
Silence. The soup gave place to a pork tenderloin. Solly wondered what to talk about. He must keep his mother away from international politics. This had been her study—no, not her study, her preoccupation and her particular source of neurosis—for as long as he could remember. Before her marriage, as an alert college girl determined to show that women could benefit from higher education every bit as much as men, Mrs Bridgetower had been greatly alarmed, in a highly intelligent and realistic manner, of course, by the Yellow Peril. The years of the War had been devoted, patriotically, to the Prussian Menace, but she had returned to her earlier love immediately afterward. The rise of totalitarianism had kept her busy during the ‘thirties, but when the Second World War began, and Japan entered it, she brought dread of the Yellow Peril to a particularly fine flowering. Since the subjugation of Japan she had developed several terrors and menaces in Latin America and South Africa, and had, of course, given the Red Menace a great deal of attention; but, by determinedly regarding Russia as an Asiatic power she was able to make the Red Menace seem no more than a magnification of the old Yellow Peril. She was growing old and set in her ways, and old perils and dreads were dearer to her than latter-day innovations.
The trouble was that when Mrs Bridgetower was talking about any subject less portentous than the Oriental plottings in the Kremlin, she was apt to be heavily ironical, and Solly did not like to expose anything in which he was truly interested to her ill-nature. However, he must say something now, or she would hint that he did not care for her company, and stage a long and humiliating scene in which he would have to protest his affection, his concern about her weak heart, and end by making it clear that so long as she lived, the outside world held no comparable charm for him. He plunged.
“I think the play may be rather good. We’ve got together quite a strong cast.”
“Didn’t you say that Professor Vambrace was playing a leading part?”
“Yes. Prospero.”
“Hmph. He’s thin enough. Who are your women?”
“Well, there’s Pearl Vambrace, she will probably play Miranda, and Cora Fielding, who will be one of the goddesses.”
Mrs Bridgetower pounced. “But that leaves only the part of Ariel free; you don’t mean to tell me that you have cast Griselda Webster for that? You are confident, I must say.”
“I did not cast the play, mother; a tentative list of the cast has been drawn up, but Mrs Forrester did that before I was asked to have anything to do with it.”
“I suppose Mrs Forrester cast her because of her looks. Well, I for one have never thought much of them; she looks a regul
ar Dolly Varden, in my view.” Just what Mrs Bridgetower meant by this condemnation was not clear. But Solly knew it of old, as a phrase used by his mother to describe any girl to whom she thought he might be attracted.
Aha, so that was it? Mother thought he admired Griselda? No wonder she was being so ugly.
At this point the tenderloin gave place to a Floating Island. Gobbets of meringue sat motionless upon a chocolate sea.
He must be cautious. He must reveal no hint of feeling for Griselda, to whom, in fact, he was reasonably indifferent, nor must he hasten to agree with his mother. She would at once suspect agreement as a form of duplicity and be more than ever convinced of this attachment.
“There are not many girls available at present who would do at all,” he said. “I don’t suppose you would prefer to see Ariel played by Pearl Vambrace?”
This was an astute move. His mother’s contempt for the Vambraces was one of her lesser intellectual amusements.
“It will be six of one and half-dozen of the other, I should say. Though the Vambrace girl would probably be a little more hesitant about showing her legs. And with good reason.”
Once again Solly was compelled to admire the fire which his mother could rouse in herself by the mention of young women’s legs. They were an iniquity which she attacked with the violence and vituperative strength of a Puritan divine. Not that she lacked reason in the present case; Griselda’s legs were not a matter upon which anyone remained indifferent; those who did not condemn them as incitements to worldliness were lost in admiration. In her latest speech she had scored a double; she had condemned Griselda’s legs because they were beautiful, and sneered at poor Pearl Vambrace’s because they were not. Mrs Bridgetower had indeed benefited from higher education.
“When do you begin rehearsals?”
“At once, mother.”
“I suppose you have been busy preparing the play? A good many of your cast will find it coming quite freshly to them, I am sure.”
“I’ve done a good deal of work. But I shan’t really be directing.”
“Oh? And why not?”
“Miss Valentine Rich has come back to Salterton for the summer, and Mrs Forrester has asked her to do it. When they asked me to step down I was glad enough to do so. After all, she’s a professional. I shall work with her, and I hope to learn a good deal.”
“Valentine Rich? That granddaughter of old Professor Savage who went on the stage?”
“She has made quite a reputation.”
“So she ought. There was brains in the family. I see. And is she here now?”
“She arrived this afternoon. I think she has come home to settle up the old man’s affairs.”
“I presume she was his heir. Well, she might have come back sooner. He was entirely alone at the end.”
“Not entirely, mother. He had many friends, and I heard that they were very good during his last years and his illness.”
They were no kin. I hope I shall not have to die with only strangers at hand. However, one must take whatever Fate has in store for one.”
Solly recognized danger. When under stress of emotion it was his mother’s habit to speak of herself as “one”; somehow it made her self-pity appear more truly pathetic. But by this time the Floating Island had been consumed, and prunes wrapped in fried bacon had also come and gone. His mother rose.
“Shall we have coffee now, or will you join me later?”
This was a survival from the days when, for a few months, the late Professor Bridgetower had sat at table for precisely five minutes after his wife, drinking a glass of invalid port which had been ordered as a tonic. The notion that men lingered over their wine had taken hold, and Mrs Bridgetower still pretended that Solly might take it into his head to do so. There was no wine in the house, only the brandy kept against Mrs Bridgetower’s “spells” and Solly’s own private bottle which he kept in his sitting-room cupboard. He did not trouble to answer his mother, but rose and followed her to the gloomy drawing-room, where a great many books lived in glass and leaden prisons, like the china in the dining-room. There, in the gloom, they took coffee ceremoniously and joylessly, as though it were for their health. And thus concluded what they would have been surprised to learn was the most ceremonious and ample dinner eaten that night in Salterton. It was Mrs Bridgetower’s notion that everyone lived as she did, except people like the Websters, who ate much more, and took longer to do it.
“Well,” she said, as she put down her cup, “it will be a pleasure to see The Tempest once again. I have seen the Ben Greet Players perform it, and also Beerbohm Tree when I was a girl. Your father and I saw it at Stratford on our memorable trip of 1934. Whatever Miss Rich and Griselda Webster concoct between them, I shall have my rich memories.”
As soon as he decently could, Solly composed his mother with a book about geopolitics, and retired to his own room in the attic, saying that he had work to do. His mother’s enmity toward Griselda had produced the effect that anyone but Mrs Bridgetower could have predicted; by nine o’clock, as Griselda was reheating her bath for the third time, and wishing vaguely that she had something more interesting to do than pursue the placid love of Mary Lawther, Solly was sitting in his attic, drinking rye and tap water, and wishing that he had the courage to call her, and suggest that they meet for—what? He could not have his mother’s car; he knew of no place to go. His impotence and his fear of his mother saddened him, and he poured some more rye into his glass, and put a melancholy piece of Mozart on his gramophone.
It was at this time, also, that Valentine Rich, who had escaped from the Forresters’, stood in her grandfather’s deserted house, holding in her hand a bundle of letters which she had written to the old man during the past twelve years. Each was dated on its envelope; all were neatly bound together with a piece of ribbon. They were the first things which she found when she had opened his old-fashioned domestic safe. She had loved and honoured him, and although she did not wish him alive again, she missed him sorely. Before she continued her search she sat in his revolving desk chair, and wept for the passing of time, and the necessary death of the well-loved, wise old man.
Two
Having decided that he would ask for a part in the play, Hector Mackilwraith acted quickly, within the limits imposed by his temperament. He did nothing that Friday night. He returned to his room at the YMCA and passed a pleasant evening marking a batch of algebra tests. To this work he brought a kind of mathematical elegance, and even a degree of wit. He was not the kind of schoolmaster who scribbles on exercise papers; with a red pencil as sharp as a needle he would put a little mark at the point where a problem had gone wrong, not in such a way as to assist the erring student, but merely in order to show him where he had fallen into mathematical sin. His assessment of marks was a miracle of even-handed justice; there were pupils, of course, who brought their papers back to him with complaints that they had not been given proper credit for their work, but they did it in a perfunctory manner, as a necessary ceremonial rather than with a hope of squeezing an extra mark out of Hector.
It was in dealing with stupid pupils that his wit was shown. A dunce, who had done nothing right, would not receive a mark of Zero from him, for Hector would geld the unhappy wretch of marks not only for arriving at a wrong solution, but for arriving at it by a wrong method. It was thus possible to announce to the class that the dunce had been awarded minus thirty-seven out of a possible hundred marks; such announcements could not be made more than two or three times a year, but they always brought a good laugh. And that laugh, it must be said, was not vaingloriously desired by Hector as a tribute to himself, but only in order that it might spur the dunce on to greater mathematical effort. That it never did so was one of the puzzles which life brought to Hector, for he was convinced of the effectiveness of ridicule in making stupid boys and girls intelligent.
If he had dealt in ridicule wholesale, and if he had joyed in it for its own sake, he would have been a detestable schoolroom tyrant, and his
classes would have hated him. But he dealt out ridicule in a selfless, almost priestly, manner, and most of his pupils admired him. Mackilwraith, they said among themselves, knew his stuff and would stand no nonsense. There is a touch of the fascist in most adolescents; they admire the strong man who stands no nonsense; they have no objection to seeing the weak trampled underfoot; mercy in its more subtle forms is outside their understanding and has no meaning for them. Hector, with his minus awards for the stupid, suited them very well, insofar as they thought about him at all.
The class upon whose work he was engaged on this particular evening lacked any remarkable dunce, any girl with a hopelessly addled brain, or a boy who was incapable of recognizing even the simplest sets of factors. But there were certain papers upon which he put a cabbalistic word which he had taken over from a teacher of his own younger days. Written always in capitals, and flaming like the Tetragrammaton on the breastplate of the High Priest, the word was TOSASM, and it was formed from the initials of a teacher’s heartcry—The Old Stupid and Silly Mistake.
The following morning, however, as soon as he had taken breakfast at the Snak Shak, he went to a bookshop and bought a copy of The Tempest. He then made his way to the Salterton Collegiate and Vocational Institute, for although there were no classes on Saturdays it was Hector’s custom to enjoy the freedom of the empty building. He let himself in, nodded to a couple of janitors who were, as school janitors so often are, mopping at something invisible in the corridors, made his way to the Men Teachers’ Room, and settled down to read the play, and to make up his mind which part he would request for himself.
Hector’s acquaintance with the works of Shakespeare was not extensive. When himself at school he had been required to read and answer questions about Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice and Henry V; owing to some fold or tremor in the curriculum he had been compelled to spend two years upon this latter play. In his mind these plays were lumped together with Hiawatha, The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Sohrab and Rustum, as “literature”—that is to say, ambiguous and unsupported assertions by men of lax mind. But as he had grown older, he had grown more tolerant toward literature; there might be, he admitted to himself, “something in it”. But it was not for him, and he had had no truck with it. He very rarely read a book which was not about mathematics, or about how to teach mathematics; he subscribed to The American Mathematical Monthly; he read newspapers and news magazines, and occasionally he relaxed with The Reader’s Digest, for he had a taste for amateur doctoring, and liked to ponder over the miraculous drugs and therapeutic methods described there.
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