The Rector of Justin Read online

  October 14. Mr. Ives is a small man, with hands and feet that are proportionately even smaller, and he wears shoes without laces or buckles that look like fairies’ slippers. He has yellowish-white hair which descends over his high, egglike forehead in a soft, neat triangle and yellow, stary eyes which, with his small hooked nose, might give him the appearance of a sparrow hawk, did not his habit of wearing thick fuzzy suits and of moving his head forward and backward as he walks suggest a less distinguished bird.

  In character as well as appearance he seems the opposite of Dr. Prescott, which perhaps a good executive officer should be; his glory is in detail, and he makes no secret of it. To the headmaster is left the field of intangibles: God, a boy’s soul and school spirit; Ives reigns over the minutiae of the curriculum and infractions of discipline. The boys credit him with second sight in such matters; he seems to know by instinct who is smoking in the cellar and who has gone canoeing on the Lawrence without leave. Yet for all his deviousness, for all his biting sarcasms, for all his lilting reprimands and snapping fingers, this epicene martinet is extremely popular, and to be asked to play bridge in his study on a Saturday night is deemed the highest social honor that a sixth former can attain.

  But for the younger boys and, alas, for the younger masters he is Mephistopheles, and he has been eying me as a coyote might eye a wounded cow. I am sure that nothing has happened that has not been brought instantly to his notice, and I imagine that he must be debating whether to let me go now, with all the trouble of a midterm replacement, or to patch me up so that I’ll last the school year. He summoned me this morning to his office in the Schoolhouse and told me that there had been complaints about noises in my dormitory after lights.

  “Surely, Mr. Aspinwall, you have not left the boys unsupervised?”

  “Oh, no, sir. I’m always there.”

  “Have you been having any trouble with your hearing?”

  “No, sir. I shall try to do better.”

  “Do so, Mr. Aspinwall.” Here he snapped his fingers. As he always spoke in the same mocking tone he must have adopted this mannerism to put his hearer on notice when he was serious. “Do so, I beg of you. You will find that you have my full backing and that of Dr. Prescott in any disciplinary measures that you seek to impose. The law of a boys’ school is the law of the jungle. When you’re strong, we’re behind you, but if you’re weak, we throw you to the boys.”

  As if he had to tell me. As if I didn’t know that the whole lot of them, boys and masters, were part of the same pack! But perhaps now reading the despair in my eyes and not wishing to overwhelm me, he added: “What about your prefects? Where have they been?”

  “I haven’t wanted to interrupt their studies at night. I thought I should be able to handle the dormitory myself.”

  “Sometimes it’s hard to get started,” he said more kindly, looking at me as he appeared to debate something. “I shall see that you have one prefect on duty every night for the next two weeks.”

  And as I am making this entry at my desk tonight, Bobbie Seymour, one of the football team, is seated on the sofa opposite, reading a movie magazine which is supposed to be banned from the school grounds. But never mind. In the ominous black of the dormitory beyond the open door an absolute silence reigns. I may have been humiliated by the calling in of extra police, but it is better to be humiliated than lynched. I shall now be able to read in peace another delightful chapter of Clarissa. Escape? Who calls it escape? It’s salvation!

  October 17. I have at last met Mrs. Prescott. Every Sunday after lunch the faculty and their wives foregather for coffee in the headmaster’s study, a large, square, book-lined room added like a box to the back of the Prescotts’ house. Today, Mrs. Prescott’s nurse wheeled her in in her chair and stationed her in a corner, and we all stood about, in a respectful half-circle, while Dr. Prescott, in what must have been for him the unaccustomed role of court chamberlain, brought people up, one by one, for a half minute’s conversation.

  The poor woman is terribly emaciated and gaunt; her face seems to have been absorbed into her great aquiline nose so that with her dyed thin hair and half-closed eyes she suggests a turkey buzzard sleeping on a dead limb. Yet there is still something rather magnificent about her, something that suggests the grim character and determined intellectualism of an earlier New England. Or is it just that I happen to know she is a great-niece of Emerson?

  I was surprised when the headmaster took me by the elbow to propel me to his wife’s corner, having assumed that her brief visiting time would be taken up by my seniors, but he explained that she always wanted to meet the new masters. Harry Ruggles, of the history department, one of those wiry fellows with thick black curly hair who are always smiling, was talking to her as we came up, but he did not have the tact to rise, so I was left standing awkwardly between the wheelchair and the sofa arm on which Ruggles was familiarly perched. He was being tedious on the subject of what he called “labor novels,” and I was glad to see that Mrs. Prescott was obviously bored.

  “There’s a great deal of solid fiction being written today,” he was telling her, “by men who understand that the fundamental structure of our society changed with the New Deal. You may not like it, Mrs. Prescott, but I don’t see how you can deny it.”

  “Why do you assume I don’t like it?” she asked in a tone that would have warned anybody but Ruggles.

  “Well, I thought, ma’am, a lady of your background and generation would be instinctively opposed to F.D.R.”

  “I’m not a background or a generation, thank you very much. I happen to be a human being, and I was a democrat before you were born, young man.”

  “Well, fine! Then you will sympathize with my idea of having the boys read some of our more important labor novels. It ought to be fun to see their self-satisfied bubbles pricked.”

  Mrs. Prescott glanced at me here, and I had a distinct feeling that she had somehow divined my sympathy. “Labor novels?” she demanded. “What are labor novels? I know only good novels and bad novels.”

  “What do you consider a good novel?”

  “The Egoist.”

  “Meredith?” Ruggles’ smile just acknowledged him. “He was all very well for his day, I suppose. People had time for him then.”

  “I have time for him now,” Mrs. Prescott insisted. “Don’t you, Mr. Aspinwall?”

  I do not know if it was the surprise that I felt on her remembering my name or the unexpected tremor of real feeling that I may have imagined in the old woman’s flat tone that made me think I might at last have found an ally at Justin Martyr. All I know is that in that minute I fell in love with Mrs. Prescott, and that my love made me bold. “I will always have time for Meredith,” I responded warmly. “I will always have time for good novels. And I agree that there are only good ones and bad ones. In art the subject can make no difference.”

  “There speaks the English department,” Ruggles said sneeringly. “I suppose Aspinwall would rate Jane Austen with Tolstoy.”

  “Higher!”

  Dr. Prescott came up now to take us away, but his wife reached out to put her hand on my wrist. “Leave me Mr. Aspinwall, Frank. He and I have something to say to each other.” When Ruggles had departed with the headmaster, she shrugged. “What an ass that fellow is. Can you imagine the pricking of his self-satisfied bubble? It would be like the explosion of the Hindenburg. Why does teaching always seem to attract the intellectually flabby?”

  “Perhaps because we want to seem infallible and think that little boys may find us so. How wrong we are.”

  Mrs. Prescott grunted. “How wrong indeed. The only people Mr. Ruggles could hope to fool would be his contemporaries. But don’t worry. He won’t last. I can tell by the way Frank holds his elbow that he’s seen through him.”

  I had heard that Mrs. Prescott had become embarrassingly candid with old age, but this still struck me as excessive. After all, I was the most junior of the faculty and she was the headmaster’s wife. “I fear he held mi
ne the same way,” I ventured.

  “No, there was a difference. I can always tell.” Her nurse was approaching; it was time to go. “Tell me, Mr. Aspinwall, would you come to see me some afternoon? I’m at my best in the afternoons, though I’m afraid my best isn’t much these days. But perhaps we could talk. Or are you a brute, to prefer football to philosophy?”

  “Oh, no, I should love to come!”

  “Maybe tomorrow then. Any time after three. Only don’t tell my husband. He would undoubtedly set you to some violent form of exercise.”

  At this she was wheeled away, head down, staring at her knees, acknowledging none of the bows or greetings from the faculty on either side. I wonder, when I present myself tomorrow, if she will even remember her invitation. Surely the thread that holds her strong spirit to this world is of gossamer, and I could well sympathize if she identified all other humans with her own body which, decaying, has ceased to be her friend.

  October 21. I have had two visits with Mrs. Prescott this week, one on Monday and the second today, each of about forty minutes in length. The second went better than the first because I at last divined what it is she wants of me. She wants to be read to, and by someone whom she doesn’t regard as a total simpleton. On my first visit I tried to talk of some of my passions: Balzac, Daudet, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, but I soon found out that talking tired her. Besides, whereas my education—if it can be called that—is almost entirely in poetry and fiction, hers is vastly broader, encompassing philosophy and history and the visual arts. George Eliot leads her immediately to John Stuart Mill and Virginia Woolf to Bertrand Russell. She smiled tolerantly, her eyes half closed, as I chattered on, interrupting me with an occasional grunt or brief comment, but when I mentioned Henry James she stopped me.

  “You know he dictated the later novels,” she said. “People think that odd for so accomplished a stylist, but of course it’s not odd at all. He always wanted to be read aloud, and how could he know how it would sound unless he thought aloud?” She paused here and seemed to be studying me. “Of course, now that my eyes are so bad it’s the only way I can know James.”

  “Do you have him on records?” There was an old gramophone in the corner of the living room, but it had an air of not having been played in years.

  “There are records, of course, for the blind,” she muttered “but very little of what I want. Those unfortunates seem to be an uncultivated lot.”

  “I’d be only too happy to come in and read to you, but I fear I’m not very good at it. The boys get quite restive in the reading period before their bedtime.”

  “I’m not the boys, Mr. Aspinwall,” she said with the ghost of a smile. “I should be grateful. But don’t you have athletic duties?”

  I thought of the headmaster’s injunction and shuddered. “Not really.”

  It was touching how eagerly she caught me up. “Perhaps we could start next time you come. Do you like The Ambassadors?”

  “It’s my favorite!”

  And indeed we did. Today I read for three quarters of an hour before the nurse came in. I thought I did very well, but I had read over the chapter in advance and was prepared. Mrs. Prescott seemed to sleep during part of it, but even that may be good in her present state of health. At least I can hope that I am finally doing something for somebody at Justin Martyr.

  October 30. It is curious how much my readings to this silent, still old woman mean to me. She offers a contrast to the noisy, active school that is like a little chapel by a thronged highway. Some tiny fragment of her dauntlessness may have shaken off upon my frail shoulders for I actually believe that I am more at ease with my dormitory now and in my classes. Not much, surely, but a little. It helps to know that there is one other soul in this dark male world that cares about beautiful things.

  My admiration extends to her surroundings. The big, square parlor in which poor Mrs. Prescott now spends all of her long days is to me everything that a room should be, probably because it is everything. By that I mean there seems to be nothing either of the Prescotts or of Justin Martyr missing from it. The school is represented by the number of chairs and small round tables, some of simple porch wicker, used for games on “parlor” night, by the big mahogany chest in the corner that will never quite close, crammed as it is with sets of parchesi, halmar and checkers, by the snapshots everywhere of beloved graduates, by the citations of those gloriously dead in war. The Prescotts are represented by an oval portrait of the three dark-eyed daughters as rather formidable children, inappropriately clad in white silk with big blue ribbons in their hair, by a wonderful sketch of Emerson in profile, by a watercolor of Dr. Prescott’s father as an officer of the Union Army, and by Mrs. Prescott’s books, in German, French and English, in old bindings, in modern, and in paperbacks, filling the cabinets, piled on tables, even stacked on the floor. True, the room is cluttered and the furniture is of every period, yet over the whole there reigns a certain harmony, a curious dignity, an even more curious simplicity.

  One begins to note fine things among the junk; a superb little Boudin under a framed cartoon from The New Yorker with a joke about the school, a first edition of Johnson’s dictionary looming over the bound volumes of Punch, a gleaming Sheraton breakfront full of mediocre China-trade porcelain. But the real reason for my net impression that the room is so innately civilized is in Mrs. Prescott herself. It is not only the inner temple of the school; it is at the same time her refuge from the school. She knows where to lay her fingers at once on even the smallest item, nor is there any object without its function of present utility or fond association. What seems at first a pot-pourri is in fact the perfectly catalogued and constantly functioning collection of her life.

  November 1. Mrs. Prescott surprised me today by asking me to skip to the great chapter in Gloriani’s studio where Strether warns Little Bilham not to waste his life as he has done. She told me, in the most matter-of-fact of tones, that in her physical condition she had to pick the high spots of a long book. But, of course, I was not prepared, and James is difficult to read at sight. I would rush into the sentences only to find myself caught up by the undertow of an unexpected construction and cast back, breathless, on the sands of my unfamiliarity. On one of these occasions, observing Mrs. Prescott’s closed eyes and motionless head, I decided it would be safe to push on without rereading the passage.

  “You’d better try that sentence again,” she interrupted me, without opening her eyes. “I think you’ll find the second ‘he’ refers to Chad and not Strether.”

  Not a nuance escapes her. She is one of those rare people who can read James with the whole magnificent forest constantly in mind and yet not miss a single tree. Her husband, apparently, does not share her admiration for the master. One of the take-offs that he sometimes performs on “parlor night” is called “Mr. James Takes the Shuttle at Grand Central.” But then one cannot imagine Dr. Prescott troubling his head over the refinements of moral choice open to James or Strether. Obviously, had he been sent to Paris to collect the erring Chad, he would have had the young man back in Woollett by the end of the first chapter!

  November 5. The dissension between Dr. Prescott and his wife in their estimates of Henry James resulted in a scene this afternoon that I found embarrassing. Towards the end of my hour with Mrs. Prescott the headmaster made an unexpected appearance. Immediately I closed the book. He had never come in at other readings, and I could not but speculate uncomfortably that this visit was more to check up on me than on his wife. Was it not implicit in the whole Justin tradition that a young master should find more vigorous employment on a glorious fall afternoon than sitting in a close room with an old woman reading The Ambassadors? Indeed, when I saw the glance with which he took me in, I assumed that a final judgment of my poor case had already been made.

  “Let me not interrupt the reading,” he rumbled. “Let me slip quietly into a seat over here and enjoy it.”

  “No, no, nobody could read James in front of you, Frank,” Mrs. Presc
ott said testily. “You’ll just sit there and make faces. Go away and leave us be.”

  “There’s a friendly greeting,” he replied imperturbably, settling himself on a small straight armless chair. The very bareness of the seat belied the sincerity of his intention to remain. “I promise I shall make no faces. Proceed, Aspinwall. Which of the novels are you reading?” I murmured the title. “Ah, yes, the fine flower of the later style. It has all that is gorgeous in the master, all that is sublime. And all that is ridiculous.”

  “What do you mean, ridiculous?” Mrs. Prescott demanded at once. “What is ridiculous about The Ambassadors?”

  “Simply that it has nothing whatever to do with life on this poor planet of ours.”

  “It has a great deal to do with my life.”

  “Do you see yourself, my dear, as a Lambert Strether?”

  “Certainly I do!” his wife exclaimed with sudden violence. “Strether didn’t know until he saw Paris that he’d wasted his life. Well, it took more than Paris to teach me that. It took this abominable wheelchair!”

  The moment that followed this outburst was almost unbearable. I clenched my fists and stared at the faded old Persian rug and prayed idiotically that it would sweep me up in the air and carry me far away from all the terrible things in Justin Martyr. In that moment I think I learned the real tragedy of living too long. It is not losing one’s health or one’s memory or even one’s mind; it is losing one’s dignity. For I am absolutely sure that Mrs. Prescott’s outburst was uncharacteristic. The woman who could throw that reproach in her husband’s face was a different woman from the proud creature that she had so obviously been all her life.

  If I dared not look at her husband’s face to see the pain that I had no doubt he was concealing, I could not avoid his voice. He was talking now, in a quiet tone, filling in a pause that had to be filled in, addressing me in the knowledge that after what his wife had just said, any further reading aloud was out of the question.