The Rector of Justin Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  FIRST MARINER BOOKS EDITION 2002

  Copyright © 1964, renewed 1988 by Louis Auchincloss

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-618-22489-0

  eISBN 978-0-547-52423-8

  v3.1118

  For Two John Winthrops

  My Son and Brother

  1

  Brian’s Journal

  SEPTEMBER 10, 1939. I have always wanted to keep a journal, but whenever I am about to start one, I am dissuaded by the idea that it is too late. I lose heart when I think of all the fascinating things I could have described had I only begun earlier. Not that my life has been an exciting one. On the contrary, it has been very dull. But a dull life in itself may be an argument for a journal. The best way for the passive man to overtake his more active brothers is to write them up. Isn’t the Sun King himself just another character in Saint-Simon’s chronicle?

  In Europe a world war has started while in this country Brian Aspinwall is about to go to work in his first job. Surely if I am ever to keep a journal, now is the time. A first job at twenty-seven! I shall be an instructor of English at Justin Martyr, an Episcopal boys’ boarding school thirty miles west of Boston. The telegram from a Mr. Ives came in only yesterday. One of the masters wants to go to Canada to enlist in the RCAF which is why I have been taken on without interviews. It makes me feel better about my rejection by the British Army before I left Oxford in July. Naturally, they were not keen about an untrained Yankee student with a heart murmur! Perhaps had I stayed over there, now that war has actually come, they might have lowered their standards, but at least this way I can feel that I am releasing an able-bodied man to fight the antichrist in Berlin.

  It is the obvious moment for stock-taking. In the questionnaire that was sent out this year by my class secretary at Columbia, I had nothing to contribute but the meager fact that I had gone abroad to study for a master’s degree. And now because I was too sensitive to stay in Oxford out of uniform I will not even get that! I suppose all I have basically done since my seventeenth year has been to seek refuge in literature from the agony of deciding whether or not I am qualified to be a minister. Perhaps life in a church school will help me. Please God it may.

  But I must try not to be too hard on myself. That is, after all, another kind of conceit. It is a fact that I suffered all during my boyhood from ill health. It is another fact that as the only child of elderly parents I had to spend a great deal of time with them in their last illnesses. It was a joy—and I write the word sincerely—to be able to help them, but it was still time out of a career. So it is not altogether my fault that I have made so late a start—if it can be said I have even yet started.

  With God’s grace I shall learn my true capacities at Justin Martyr. It is a good size for a school (450 boys), and its headmaster and founder, the Reverend Francis Prescott, D.D., is probably the greatest name in New England secondary education. He is old now, nearly eighty, but he is a minister, and may have much to teach me. It may even turn out that I have been “called” to Justin.

  I am shy and lack force of personality, and my stature is small. I stammer when I am nervous, and my appearance is more boyish than manly. All this will be against me. But I am not afraid to say what I mean, and I think in a real crisis I can be counted on to stand up for the right, if only because I have such a horror of letting God down. Let us hope I add up to a teacher.

  September 16. Justin Martyr. I arrived the day before yesterday, a week ahead of the boys, to work up my courses with Mr. Anders of the English department. It is all very rush, but everyone knows I am an emergency replacement and Mr. Anders is kindness itself.

  I am not yet entirely sure what I think of the looks of the school. On Monday it depressed me; on Tuesday I felt better about it; today (in glorious weather) I like it. It is fairly consistently in the H. H. Richardson tradition, with masses of dark red brick, Romanesque arches in rock-faced granite, rotundas and long colonnades. A certain leaning to heaviness, suggestive of some medieval monastery in southern France, or, less remotely, of some solid New England summer colony at the turn of the century, is lightened by the profusion of verdurous lawns and hedges and by the glory of elm trees. God, as usual, has done a better job than man.

  To be more particular, the school is built around an oval campus at whose northern end stands Lawrence House, the main building, which contains the library, the dining hall and the headmaster’s residence. Moving clockwise next comes the schoolhouse, with high Gothic windows in its great assembly hall and an octagonal open bell house from which the “outside” tolls each morning at seven; then the gymnasium, with a Florentine note of large stones and small windows, then the dormitories: Depew, Griscam and Lowell, and finally the brownstone chapel, a relief after so much red and grey, with its square craggy tower rising to dwarf the academic community huddled at its feet.

  It is a remarkable tower. The eye travels upward to follow its mighty thrust past the narrow open window slits to the castellated top over which a shingle pyramided roof rises and then climbs yet dizzily further into a pointed round angle turret. Mr. Anders says it is like Dr. Prescott’s faith, bold and big, beautiful in its disdain of beauty.

  I suppose that many people today would find this architecture ponderous, even banal. They would insist that youth should be educated in modern buildings with plenty of glass to let in God’s out-of-doors. Yet I wonder if it is altogether sentimentality that makes me begin to find this campus a heartening place. It seems to me that Dr. Prescott must have recognized from the beginning that boys have no eye for architecture and yet are influenced by it. I imagine that he may have wanted a style that would suggest ruggedness and strength while offering at the same time a certain solid comfortableness, and how better could he attain it than by going back to a Christian tradition of days when the faith was not wholly secure from pagan assault?

  For there are aspects of the fortress everywhere: in the machicolated roof of the infirmary, in the grey walls and slit windows of the gymnasium, even in the great tower of the chapel itself. It was this that initially depressed me. Now I see that the sweeping lawns and shady elms make the idea of war retreat into a past of muffled drums. Peace prevails on the campus, and on a brilliant fall day like this one it seems almost a sleepy peace, at least while the boys are still away, and only the hum of an automatic lawnmower breaks the stillness. But it is a peace of dignity, a peace of honor, against the quiet pageant of pinkish red and grey, a peace in which strife has not been forgotten, nor toil neglected, the peace of the Church Militant.

  Yes, I think I shall like Justin Martyr.

  September 17. Perhaps I have spoken too soon. Yesterday I had not met the headmaster.

  He has been here all su
mmer as his wife is very ill, and I ran into him quite by chance as I was passing his front door. I say “ran into him.” Let me correct that. One does not “run into” Dr. Prescott.

  My pen is a poor substitute for the camera to describe a man so magnificently photogenic and so often photographed. He is short for one that dominating, about five feet six, which is accentuated by the great round shoulders, the bull neck, the noble square head, the thick shock of stiff, wavy grey hair. I wonder if he is not a bit vain about his hair, for they say he never wears a hat—even in seasons when it is required of the boys. This afternoon he had on a blue opera cape with a velvet collar fastened by a chain, and he carried a black ebony walking stick, a combination that might have seemed theatrical had it not been so exactly right for him.

  His face is remarkably clear for his years, except for deep lines at the corners of his mouth; he has a wide pale brow, thick bushy eyebrows, a straight nose with an almost imperceptible hook at the end, and large eyes, far apart, of a dark brown streaked with yellow. Mr. Anders says that his critics claim that he looks too much like a great man to be one.

  I paused when I saw him coming down the steps, not wishing to intrude upon his privacy, but when he paused also, I realized that he was waiting for me to come up to him. He can summon one to his side without a word or a twitch of his great eyebrows.

  “You are Aspinwall?” His voice has a deep, velvety melancholy. “We were happy to get you at such short notice. Have you been assigned a football team?”

  I assumed that he had mistaken the nature of my duties. “I believe I’m to be in the English department, sir.”

  His stare was cold. “I’m quite aware of that. But it is our custom at Justin—as you will find it is at other schools—for the younger masters, particularly the unmarried ones, to take part in the athletic program. We might find you a team to coach in one of the lower forms. The Fourth Monongahelas.”

  “The fourth what, sir?” I dared not confess that I did not even know the rules of football.

  “The whole school is divided into two teams for the purpose of intramural sports,” he explained in the deliberate, patient tone of one who never repeats. “The Monongahelas and the Shenandoahs.” There was not even the hint of a smile as he brought forth these wonderful Indian names. “Of course, the varsity team which plays other schools is made up of both. The Monongahelas wear blue jerseys and the Shenandoahs red. A boy is assigned to one or the other in his first week at the school and remains in that team until his graduation.”

  When I am nervous I should be silent. I was appalled to hear myself answer: “That’s nice.” Would he think I was making fun of him? But he took no note of it.

  “You were at Oxford?” he inquired.

  “Yes, sir. Christ Church.”

  “I’m a Balliol man myself.” He pursed his lips in a way that pulled his cheeks down and turned the square of his countenance into a triangle of speculation. “We must have a talk one of these days. Poor old England, she’s in for it now.” And he turned away to proceed on his walk.

  So this is the famous Rector of Justin! Not a word about the subject that I am hired to teach; only a lecture on intramural sports. I had not realized that the god of football had conquered even the church schools. It is a dim augury.

  September 28. The boys have been here now for five days. I did not wish to record my impressions of the school in session before, as I have learned to make allowance for the timid and apprehensive side of my nature which has a way, like a ghostly and mischievous extra brush, quite beyond the painter’s control, of dubbing clouds and rain squalls into the sunniest landscape. If I am ever to be a minister, with God’s help, I must learn joy. But now, after more than a hundred hours of boys, when my spirits are still in my boots, I begin to wonder if I will ever be able to adjust my trudge to the noisy march of Justin. I had not imagined there could be so much noise. I have a constant sense of being about to be overwhelmed.

  The other masters have been kind, but in the way people are kind who expect you to swim after the first plunge. Mr. Ives, the senior master, whose relation to Dr. Prescott is that of an executive officer to a ship’s captain, a small, delicate birdlike man with a yellow stare that seems to take in everything, patiently briefed me in my duties the first day, but as he obviously expected me to take it all in the first time, I was seized with panic and could only nod stupidly to the meaningless flow of his perfectly organized sentences. It is a sad feeling to stand on the threshold of the school year and know that one’s day of reckoning may be tomorrow.

  I have seen almost nothing of Dr. Prescott. Thank God he has forgotten the football team! His poor wife is not expected to live, so he has been spending much of his time with her. However, he conducts the chapel service every morning and presides at assembly in the Schoolhouse. The awe which he inspires among the boys and faculty has to be seen to be credited. The masters are always telling tales of his prodigious memory, his uncanny perspicacity, his terrible temper. To hear them go on one would assume that he still handles every detail of school administration, yet in sober fact I suppose it is the ubiquitous Ives who really runs the school. A headmaster, particularly one so venerable, must be like a constitutional sovereign. He performs his function by being seen.

  September 30. Worse and worse. My fourth form dormitory has been sizing me up, and now they have decided they can ride me. There were terrible squeals after lights tonight, and I was in a wretched quandary. How does one cope with forty fifteen-year-olds in the dark? Finally in a panic lest the sounds would come to the all-hearing ears of Mr. Ives, I strode to the door into the dormitory, turned on the overhead lights by the switch and called out in what I fear was a trembling falsetto: “Who is talking in this room?” Someone shouted back: “You are!” and the roar of laughter that followed must have been heard all over Lawrence House. In desperation I cried: ‘“I am going to report the whole dormitory to the headmaster!” and slammed the door. Sitting at my desk again, my hands clasped to my throbbing temples, I took in gradually that the dormitory at last was silent. But what good does it do when in the morning they will all realize I have not carried out my threat?

  For I never will. How can I? How can I afford to admit that the boys were out of control? I can only pull out this journal and foolishly wish that I could climb inside of it and pull its covers close over my shamed and ridiculous head. Oh, Journal, if you could only hide me, if I could only turn myself into ink! Dear God, will I ever make a go at teaching? And if I can’t handle a few boys, is it feasible that I can ever be a missionary? Or even administer a parish? Perhaps all I am good for is to embrace the Roman Church and join a contemplative order. Please, dear God, keep my dormitory quiet.

  October 4. I had my second talk with the headmaster this afternoon. Like the first, it arose from a chance meeting. I was on my way to the river, walking past the athletic fields, when I encountered the stocky figure in the sweeping blue cape. He was crossing the road from the first squad field where he watches the football practice for a daily half hour, leaning silently on his walking stick. When he saw me, his expression was not friendly.

  “Good afternoon, Aspinwall. Whither are you bound?”

  “To the river, sir,” And with the instinctive good manners of the nonacademic world I inappropriately added: “Would you care to join me? It’s such a beautiful day.”

  His stare dismissed the irrelevance of weather. “Don’t you have one of the lower school teams to coach? I thought Mr. Hinkley was going to assign you one.”

  “He was, sir. But when he found I didn’t know the rules, he gave it up as a bad job.”

  “Then I suggest you come with me and learn them,” he said sternly. “Football is more than a game, you know. It’s a combination of training body and character. If you want to understand the boys here, you must understand it. Let us see what the second squad is up to.”

  For forty miserable minutes I stood dumbly by the empty bleachers and watched the play as Dr. Prescott
explained it. At first he was gruff and short, but as the forward passes of one fifth former, evidently a rising star, began to arouse his enthusiasm, he became more friendly, and after a particularly long one, successfully completed, he actually hit me on the shoulder. “By Jove, that Craddock can throw like an angel! Do you begin to see what I mean, Aspinwall?”

  When he left me at last, he suggested that I should remain and continue to study the play. I thanked him and murmured that I hoped Mrs. Prescott was better. He shook his head, as if it were not my place to ask. “She is doing as well as can be expected,” he said gloomily. “I shall see that Mr. Hinkley gives you a football manual. Good day, Aspinwall.”

  And this is the man with whom I had meant to discuss my hopes for the ministry! This is the spokesman for the Church of Christ at Justin. Who, spotting my one poor rag of consolation, my free hour in the afternoon, strips it off that my whole pelt may be exposed to the pricks of his institution.

  October 10. A new low. In my third form English class this morning the five boys in the back bench managed with their feet to move it completely around while I was writing the test questions on the blackboard so that they had their backs to me when I turned. I gave each a black mark, but the three in the middle protested so vigorously that only the two on the ends had perpetrated the revolution of the bench that I cravenly gave in and suspended all five marks. I noticed that the faces of the rest of the class were now frankly contemptuous. Dear God, if I become a pitiable creature, spare me at least from the sin of self-pity. I have a terrible leaning to it.

  October 12. I found a dead frog in my bed last night, and the touch of it against my bare foot scared me so that I was sick to my stomach. I wonder if such a trick has ever before been played on a master at Justin. But obviously I’ll never know, as I shall never dare admit that it happened. Dear God, will it ever be over?