The Red Door

by Iain Crichton Smith

His landlady was about sixty years old and had no other lodgers but him. Thirty years before, he had arrived at her door with a green case, had pressed the bell and waited there calmly for someone to answer it. No one could have told that he had just spent three hours looking for lodgings, his expression was so cool and patient. She had studied him with sharp care, but the final verdict in his favour had been made simply because he was a man. Her two previous lodgers – both at the same time – had been two girls who had monopolised the bathroom, had kept odd hours (one had fallen over the umbrella stand one night coming home from a party), and had not shown her what she considered to be proper respect.

  This man, however, talked quietly and politely, his clothes were neat without being ostentatious, he seemed sound and professional, and she accepted him. In doing this she made no error, for he raised his rent steadily without being told and he made furniture for the house, an unexpected bonus. When he came first he was paying three pounds a week, now he was paying seven and she had never had to ask him for the money. By what procedure he decided that he should raise the rent (whether he vaguely noticed in shops that prices were going up) she couldn’t tell: perhaps he had some sixth sense which learned Mrs Sharpe’s desires without words. She didn’t actually see much of him. She knocked at his door in the morning at eight o’clock precisely. He rose immediately and went into the bathroom. He was out of there by fifteen minutes past, dressed and ready for breakfast by twenty-five minutes past, and by twenty to nine was out of the house. He had no finicky tastes in food and accepted without question what she set before him. For this reason, he had been eating porridge followed by bacon and egg for the best part of thirty years. He came home for his dinner and also took his tea there. He hardly ever went out and never dined in a restaurant, so that he had no other food with which to compare hers. He never told her anything about the school and never gossiped. This was the only thing she had against him, for she would dearly have loved some inside information, but she was sensible enough to content herself with her other blessings.

  She thought him wise and clever, though a bit odd. Once he had gone out in a thick overcoat on a blindingly hot summer day and once he had come home in his gown. She thought it wasn’t good for him to be closeted in the house all the time and suggested sometimes that he might go to an exhibition or the local theatre, but he simply ignored her, wiping his mouth delicately with his napkin. She herself was in the habit of going to visit her sister-in-law on Tuesday night and playing bingo on a Friday night. She was quite sure he didn’t know what bingo was, and therefore considered herself superior to him in this, though inferior in other things. She had seen his Latin and Greek books and had heard that he was a meticulous, though just and successful teacher, and a man of strong convictions who was held in great respect. He hardly ever wrote letters and rarely received any. Perhaps he had no living relations. Perhaps he was an orphan who had done well for himself. In any case, there was something mysterious about him.

  He hated cruelty in any form, and once when she had read out to him a passage from the local newspaper which told of violent and disorderly conduct at a dance, and described in a certain amount of detail a murderous assault which had taken place as a result, he had told her to stop. He seemed to believe, however, that such violence was confined to the lower classes, and as he never came into contact with them he comforted himself with dreams of peace. She knew that her own knowledge of life was greater than his. Many years before she had gone out on to the stair and stopped a fight which was taking place between a Protestant and a Catholic, and she had been greatly respected for it. He would never have gone out; not so much, she guessed, because he was a coward, but because he would appear undignified. Nowadays, there were no fights. Only respectable people lived in the tenement, which was strong with good stone, probably granite, though she wasn’t sure.

  As has been said, Mr Trill was greatly respected by his colleagues, who treated him with a certain protectiveness for he was inclined to be absent-minded, though he could also be difficult in argument. Over the years, he grew to believe that education was declining and he was not in favour of what he called ‘creative indiscipline’. Once there had been in the school a young teacher of twenty-three or so, fresh from what he considered to be the triumphs of training college and brimful of innovations and enthusiasm. He would hold forth in the staffroom about the outdated nature of the teaching in the school. He would say,

  ‘Scottish education hasn’t changed for centuries. They are always boasting that it is the best in the world, but it is in fact inferior to English and even to American. The Americans have allowed their children to create out of chaos but we don’t allow them to create at all. We make them sit at their desks for five hours a day, and if they make a noise they must be punished. They are taught Tennyson but no Eliot. Literature stopped dead with Browning or even earlier, as far as their examination setters are concerned.’

  This young man, whose popularity was therefore not great, had begun all manner of projects. He had told his pupils not to call him sir. He got them to compose plays, which they acted on the floor. He allowed them to use in their plays the language of the working classes and to borrow from television some of the worst language that they heard there. He took them to visit distilleries, sailors’ homes, agricultural colleges. His room was full of models, pamphlets and charts. He used a tape recorder and made them write compositions based on film music which he played on a record player. He made them run round the school and asked them to write about how they felt while doing so.

  His room was next door to Mr Trill’s. One day the latter who was working on Lucretius’ The Nature of Things, had been unable to bear the noise. He had gone to the young man’s door and said to him,

  ‘Why is it that when you put your theories of creative chaos into action, it prevents other teachers from doing their own work? The dictionary has a word for this: it is not experimentalism, it is thoughtlessness.’ With this majestic rebuke he had gone back to Lucretius, leaving the young man open-mouthed at the door. After that the room next door had been quieter.

  Mr Trill believed that new methods were often the result of restlessness.

  ‘Why should they spend hours on amateurish plays of their own immature creation when they could be working on the excellent productions of others?’ he would ask.

  Or, ‘What is the connection between a visit to a distillery and the teaching of English?’

  One of his witticisms was, ‘Do you think it would improve my pupils if I taught them Latin music?’

  He had once inadvertently heard Edmundo Ros on the radio and had been so disgusted that his favourite term of abuse was, ‘You are as bad as Edmundo Ros.’ This surprised some of his earlier pupils, but as many of his later ones hadn’t heard of Edmundo Ros the comparison lost its point.

  His teaching was thorough and successful. He believed in making all his pupils competent in grammar, and when it was stated by the Education Department that this was not necessarily a training in intelligence, he laughed. He told them that the wisest men had been the earliest writers and poets, and that those who came after had only embroidered thoughts which had first been conceived by others. It cannot be said that his pupils were great Latinists as a result of his teaching, but at least they were meticulous ones. He was well liked because he never changed and was always predictable, and this gave his pupils a feeling of security. At Christmas he would often be surprised by small presents such as a tie pin or a wallet. He would accept these with gravity and secret jubilation.

  His main weakness was that he lectured too much, though he often practised what he called the Socratic method. He was often impatient but always kind to those who tried. He thought that it was very important to be good and if you couldn’t be a good scholar you could at least be a good person.

  In the last year of his work as principal Classics teacher, there came into his class a boy called Carruthers who was tall, dark, good-looking, superficially lazy and exceedingly
clever. He wrote advanced poems which had no rhyme and which used long words like ‘vertiginous’. The poems had such titles as ‘The Life and Death of a Hippopotamus’ or ‘Requiem for a Clarinettist’. Carruthers had long legs which stretched out from below the desk, and this made him appear to lounge, as did also his habit of resting his head on his right hand.

  At first Mr Trill didn’t like him, mainly because he appeared supercilious, but then he grew to like him more because the boy stammered a little and this suggested that he was nervous. Apart from that the boy did his work neatly and well (and with a certain panache), handed it in on all the right days and laughed at Mr Trill’s jokes without superiority. After Mr Trill had spoken to them about Johnson, Carruthers was once seen carrying a copy of Johnson’s works (this was the only day that Mr Trill could recollect him forgetting his exercise).

  He could construe beautifully and was very quick. In fact, he was potentially the best scholar Trill had ever had and for this reason he grew proud of him. He had done off his own bat several translations into verse of passages from Virgil and Homer. One of the sections he had worked on was that one translated by Dryden from Virgil:

  The gates of hell are open night and day

  Smooth the descent and easy is the way

  But to return and view the cheerful skies

  In this the task and mighty labour lies.

  As has already been remarked, Mr Trill didn’t come into contact with the ‘low’ rough elements of the school, those which were disorderly and riotous. As he usually had only twenty-five or so scholars in the Sixth, and as they were well orientated towards school by their parents, he had no trouble with discipline. He did not believe that there was much evil in the school, only mischief, and he only half listened to the complaints of those teachers who were in closer contact with the lower classes than he was himself.

  One day he said to Carruthers, ‘Carruthers, I think you should study for the Bursary Compeitition. I think you would have a good chance of winning it.’

  Carruthers had looked at him in his easy smiling polite way and had said,

  ‘If you think so, sir.’

  ‘I do think so, Carruthers. Otherwise I wouldn’t have said it. You will have to work hard though, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  And Carruthers had worked hard. He read his Homer. Book Three of the Odyssey was the main text assigned, but he read a number of other books as well. Nor did he only concentrate on his Classics. His marks in English were very high and his marks in languages also. He was in charge of the School Magazine and was a notable footballer. Everything he tried turned to gold. Other teachers, however, would complain that he spent rather a lot of time in cafés, and it was rumoured that he had been caught drinking at a dance. If he were taken on a school excursion he had a habit of getting lost, always emerging later on with a plausible excuse. All these things Trill would forgive because of an essay he might write on ‘Was Virgil Really a Christian?’ or ‘Lucretius and the World of the Atom’. Trill sometimes felt that he ought to have him up to the house for fuller discussion, but he couldn’t very well do so since the house was not his own.

  However, in spite of his casual brilliance (or because of it) accusations against Carruthers mounted. He had been seen late at night with a girl from the hostel. There was even a story that he had stolen some money. Many of the stories had been corroborated and proved to everybody’s satisfaction. Mr Trill would look at him as he lounged in the sunlit room and think: I wonder how a boy of such intelligence can be enticed into evil courses.

  Mr Trill, as has been said, lived in a protected world. True, there had been violence in the days of the Romans and the Greeks, but that violence had been transformed into great art and was therefore respectable. Also the Greeks had been just. Mr Trill was very fond of telling a story which illustrated this. The story occurred, he said, in a history written by a Greek. A Spartan had arrived home alive from a war. This Spartan had naturally been ostracised by the other Spartans for, after all, Spartans were supposed to return home from a defeat only on their shields, that is, dead. A new battle was to be fought and this Spartan went out to fight with the others, consumed with zeal in order to gain his lost honour. He fought well and was in fact the bravest of the brave. However, in that battle there was another Spartan who, though not so brave as the first one, was nearly so. He fought, not with manic enthusiasm, but with resolution and steadiness. The palm was given to him because, according to this Greek historian, the second one was fighting for his country, the first one only to justify himself.

  Mr Trill would say,

  ‘Can you not imagine which one of the two the Daily Express would have honoured?’ He did not think that this question required an answer.

  Mr Trill himself had never fought in any war, being young enough to miss the first one and old enough to escape the second. He had never seen violence at first hand, except once when he had witnessed an accident in which a pedestrian had been run over, and a police car with a pulsing blue light had raced up, followed by the ambulance.

  Once he said to Carruthers,

  ‘I have been hearing certain things about you.’

  ‘What things, sir?’ said Carruthers, speaking with innocence and politeness.

  ‘That you drink, that you are undependable, that you haunt these cafés with low elements late at night, that you have been seen at the girls’ hostel, that you smoke. Is all that true?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘None of it?’

  ‘Some of it, sir. Not all.’ All this time Carruthers, tall and easy, had smiled as if thinking of something else, and Trill had been a little frightened for he felt himself in the presence of a superior intelligence. The girls in the class, of course, adored Carruthers, not because he was clever, but because he was handsome. Sometimes Trill would wonder (for he was an honest man) if the reason why he was growing to dislike Carruthers was that he himself had never married and had never had the adoration of women. He thought about this long and deeply, and at last came to the conclusion that of this accusation at least he was innocent. From that moment he dismissed the thought from his mind, for he was quite capable of being his own executive Freud.

  Once by accident he discovered that Carruthers had cheated. A translation which he had handed in had come from a crib. He asked Carruthers whether the translation was his own and the latter, secure in the knowledge that the crib was not likely to be known to any but a few, denied it. For this he was given five hundred lines and a tongue-lashing in front of the class. Carruthers regarded him with a certain smiling impudence but said nothing.

  Sometime after this his phone had rung incessantly and when he picked it up, a voice at the other end said, amidst the giggling of girls,

  ‘I am ringing up to discover the meaning of the following words: Pedicabo et irrumabo vos. They occur we believe in Catullus. I am a Nigerian scholar and I have to pass an examination and hearing that you were an authority on these matters and happening to be in town I thought I would enquire. I hope I am not discommoding you in any way.’

  He could never actually prove that the voice was Carruthers’, but his hate for Carruthers dated from that night.

  This hate was completely irrational, so irrational and blinding that he could hardly bear to look at Carruthers in class. If it hadn’t been for his strong sense of duty he would have got rid of him, but he decided that he would be fair to the very end. He spoke to him more politely than to the others, but his politeness was chilly though correct. He already was convinced that Carruthers was dangerous and that neither scholarship nor brilliance could justify evil.

  Even at night in the house he could not forget him and his knuckles would whiten on the hammer or the chisel. What seemed to him to make the whole affair even more incomprehensible was that Carruthers was the offspring of good though rather bewildered parents who had done their best, but had failed mainly because they had left him to go his own way.

  Nevertheless, his wor
k was still good. His translation showed not only accuracy but insight. He was going to be the dux of the school and he would most probably win a high place in the Bursary Competition. Sometimes Trill would consider the rest of the scholars, how they worked hard, how they did all that could be expected of them, how their lives were models of patient virtue, and how they would never attain a position in the world. This made him angry and confirmed him in his resolution never to go to church. He began to believe that Carruthers was simply lucky, that his gifts were not his own to dispose of, that he had been born with them though he acted as if they belonged to him alone and by right. The other sloggers showed no envy but rather admiration for one who was essentially inferior to themselves.

  Often Mr Trill would read over the lines from Johnson’s ‘London’:

  Others with softer smiles and subtler art

  can sap the principles or taint the heart;

  with more address a lover’s note convey,

  or bribe a virgin’s innocence away.

  Well may they rise, while I, whose rustic tongue

  ne’er knew to puzzle right or varnish wrong,

  spurned as a beggar, dreaded as a spy,

  live unregarded, unlamented die.

  Perhaps if he had gone out more, perhaps if he had lived like some of the teachers in the outer world, or had a better sense of proportion, what did happen might never have happened. Perhaps if he had been willing to discuss golf or the painting of houses, the fevers of other people’s children or the mowing of a lawn, perhaps if he had been capable of these things he would not have done what he did. However, as he himself would doubtless have said, ‘In all true living there is no perhaps.’

  Time and time again, Trill did in fact make an effort to forgive Carruthers. After all, hadn’t Johnson himself written at the end of one of his essays:

  Of him that hopes to be forgiven it is indispensably required that he forgive. It is therefore superfluous to urge any other motive. On this great duty eternity is suspended and to him that refuses to practise it the Throne of Mercy is inaccessible and the Saviour of the world has been born in vain.