The Rector of Justin

by Louis Auchincloss

  March 15. This afternoon Dr. Prescott and I watched a great snowball fight between the first and second forms, “new kids” against “old kids.” Except in a few individual struggles, the latter prevailed; they were bigger and stronger and had been toughened by an additional year of the rigors of Justin Martyr. The scene was like a battle canvas of the Victorian academic school. At a distance it was picturesque, even cheerful, full of red faces and brightly colored jerseys against a white background cut by stark, slaty elms. But on closer inspection the details were more lurid. I saw one little boy with a bleeding lip cut open by a piece of ice and another carried off the field with what turned out later to be a cracked ankle. Dr. Prescott did not seem in the least disturbed.

  “You’ve got to let the boys be animals once in a while,” he answered my protest as we walked away. “Social life was more attractive when gentlemen defended their honor with swords and not with lawsuits.”

  “You don’t mean you’re in favor of dueling!”

  “No, no, of course not,” he growled. “I said that life was more attractive, not better. When every sniveling calumniator knew that he ran the chance of being called out. Just the way boys are more attractive when they’re allowed to take justice into their own hands and not squeal!”

  I was learning, little by little, not to be overwhelmed by him. “Do you suggest that boys are mollycoddled at Justin today, sir?”

  The question obviously irritated him, for he stomped ahead of me and did not answer, but after a few moments, when I had caught up with him, he said mildly enough: “Well, of course, there’s no hazing now. All the schools have done away with it, and we had to, too. The snowball fight is the last vestigial remnant of it. You have just witnessed a rare survival, my friend.”

  “It did not make me nostalgic.”

  “Perhaps you are right.” He had resumed now his more reasoning tone. “Perhaps my bias for things English made me see a moral value in hazing where none existed. There was a great deal of cruelty in English public schools in the last century, but it went hand in hand with a certain intensity of friendship between boys—almost a passion, you might say—that gave a kind of golden glow to Victorian youth. Of course in America this sort of thing was understood only at its lowest level, with the result that we took over the hazing and discouraged the friendships. It may have been this that gave our boarding schools their peculiar dryness. Oh, yes, Brian.” Here he paused to nod his head affirmatively. “The hazing had to go.”

  “But you never discouraged close friendships between boys, did you, sir?”

  “Did I not?” He grunted loudly. “I was one of the worst!”

  “Why, sir?”

  “Because, sir,” he exclaimed loudly, driving his stick into the snow, “I did not think a hundred examples of David and Jonathan were worth one of sodomy!”

  I was too shocked to say more. But I am beginning to glimpse some of the conflicts in his nature. He is an artist as well as a preacher, an intellectual as well as a man of God. He probably adores Swinburne and forces himself not to read him. In this he differs from the famous Dr. Peabody of Groton who preached here last week. Peabody would not see the beauty in Swinburne or be tempted by the Loreleis of art. His is a simpler path.

  March 16. I asked Dr. Prescott this afternoon his opinion of Peabody. He gave me one of his foxy, sidelong looks and snapped: “A man who considers that Theodore Roosevelt was America’s greatest statesman and In Memoriam England’s finest poem is well equipped to train young men for the steam room of the Racquet Club.”

  “That’s not where Franklin Roosevelt ended up,” I pointed out.

  Dr. Prescott threw back his head and roared with laughter. “No, but ninety percent of the Grotties wish he had! And evaporated there!” His laugh ended in a spluttering cough, and he leaned over until he recovered himself. “Of course, I’m being facetious. Cotty Peabody is a great man, in his way. What I really resent is that my graduates are not more different from his. For all my emphasis on the humanities and his on God, we both turn out stockbrokers!”

  “Oh, come, sir. You’re not being fair to yourself. Or to Dr. Peabody.”

  “And yet it may be just what explains our popularity,” he continued in a more speculative tone, ignoring my comment. “Most fathers would rather see their sons dead than either cultivated or devout. They commend our efforts, but even more our failures. Yes, the greatness of the private school, Brian, is not that it produces geniuses—they grow anyway, and can’t be made—but that it can sometimes turn a third-rate student into a second-rate one. We can’t boast publicly of such triumphs, but they are still our glory.”

  “I wonder if Dr. Peabody would agree with that.”

  “Dr. Peabody doesn’t believe in laughing at sacred things,” he said dryly. “And Dr. Peabody is right. A sense of humor is excess baggage in a boys’ school. Except to fight snobbishness.” He nodded ruefully. “Yes, we need it to fight snobbishness.”

  “Is there so much snobbishness at Justin?”

  “My dear fellow, we’re riddled with it! Every private school is. Snobbishness is a cancer in America because we pretend it’s not there and let it grow until it’s inoperable. In England it’s less dangerous because it’s out in the open. In fact, they glory in it. But if a boy can only see it, there may be one chance in ten that he’ll fight it.”

  “You mean that ninety percent of Justinians are snobs?”

  “‘I have answered three questions, and that is enough,’” he quoted irritably, “‘be off, or I’ll kick you downstairs’!”

  That was the end of our conversation for that afternoon, and it has taught me a valuable lesson. When he is in one of his destructive moods, it is fatal to try to check him. It is as if on the heath I tried to argue with the raging Lear. My function is to listen, not to console.

  April 18. The Reverend Duncan Moore, Rector of St. Jude’s Church in New York, was the visiting preacher this morning. I listened with the keenest interest for he is generally regarded as the most likely candidate to succeed Dr. Prescott. I’m afraid I did not like him. He is a big, beaming, smiling, balding, large-nosed man, handsome in an aggressive way and too good a speaker (I think) to be truly spiritual. But of course I am horribly prejudiced. I cannot bear to think of anyone succeeding Dr. Prescott.

  As a preacher he is drawn to humility like a lemming to the sea. His theme this morning was the war in Europe which he seems to regard as a judgment upon us for the arrogance and materialism of the inter-war decades. Mr. Moore may not actually believe that God sent the war as a scourge, but he seems to think that we should pretend he did, that we should assume a superstition if we have it not.

  I walked to Lawrence House after the service with Mr. Ives and found him at his most sarcastic.

  “I feel so reassured, don’t you, Brian? I have been foolishly worried about the war. Isn’t it nice that Mr. Moore has found time to desert his fashionable parish and travel north to give us the good word? To think that all along it has been a blessing in disguise!”

  I no longer glanced about to see if any boys were within earshot. I had learned that they never were. Mr. Ives’ indiscretions were totally discreet.

  “I suppose it’s only human to try to make the best out of things,” I urged. “Even war.”

  “Rot, Brian,” he retorted sharply. “And you know it, too. Nothing but death and destruction come out of war. England and France are fighting Hitler. If they can put him down, that’s all they can expect. The patient after surgery doesn’t emerge better than if he’d never had a tumor.”

  “Even if he has faith that he will?”

  “Then it will be the faith that has done it and not the operation.”

  I shrugged. “I can’t argue with you. You know I agree.”

  “Then will you kindly admit that Duncan Moore is an egregious ass!”

  “How can I?” I pleaded in pain. “How can I admit that Dr. Prescott has anointed an ass?”

  “Because it’s precise
ly what great men do.”

  “Moore may improve with responsibility. He will have you to advise him.”

  “Oh, no, he won’t!” Mr. Ives exclaimed in a barklike tone that came closer to expressing fervor than any of his others. “I shall not remain in Justin a minute after Dr. Prescott goes. And I am very much afraid he will go soon.”

  I stopped to stare in dismay at the small hawklike figure at my side. “What makes you say that?”

  “There are signs,” he said flatly. “I am very sensitive to signs. There was one, for example, in the sermon today. The new edifice to be erected on the site of the old. The fresh air in stale rooms. Don’t you get it? A glittering new Justin Martyr to be fabricated by Duncan Moore out of the rotten timbers of the old.”

  The calm clear blank sky, the few, almost stationary wispy clouds, the hard pink buds on the dogwood trees by the School-house, the sudden whoop of a group of boys, the twittering swallows above my head and the deep clang of the Schoolhouse bell that tolled the quarter hour filled me with a sense of sadness at the transiency of good things. My soul seemed to cry out: let me enjoy it, dear God, if this is all there will be to enjoy! The campus of Justin may be a haven from the war, a haven from reality, but when reality is so grim, to be a haven may be a virtuous thing. Soon, only too soon, reality will burst the walls and swell the gutters of the school to boiling livid streams, but the interim is ours and is not the interim as real as reality?

  4

  Brian’s Journal

  MAY 15, 1940. This is my first entry since the catastrophic invasion of the lowlands. Dr. Prescott has great faith in the English and French armies, particularly the English, but I have a sad tendency to identify the “good” side in any conflict with the weak side and to see the war as Brian Aspinwall against a German tank division. It seems curious that I should have such faith in God and so little in man. But then barbarians have prevailed before, have they not? The dark ages did exist.

  May 18, 1940. The fiend in Europe goes from triumph to triumph. If only I were there. If only I had stayed in Oxford. Surely, even with my heart murmur they would have accepted me now. But there I go again, thinking of the war in terms of what I could do in it, even though I’d be a rotten soldier. What would my enlistment amount to but the placation of my own grubby little sense of guilt? Oh, ego, ego, burning like an ember in the conflagration of the world!

  May 21. Even Dr. Prescott is beginning to be depressed. “If they get France, it’s all over,” he told me this morning. “What can England do without a proper army or air force? If she had time, yes, but where is the time coming from? Oh, to be able to fight, Brian, to be able to fight. Every useless old man like myself should be given a rifle and rushed to the front.” He, too!

  May 22. The fall of Brussels. It’s wonderful how little the boys care. But that must be the hope of the world, indifference. If we cared, how could we live?

  May 23. Disaster has sent a peculiar ambassador into our peaceful midst. It is Mr. Horace Havistock, Dr. Prescott’s oldest friend, who has lived in Paris for fifty years and who, with rare foresight, decided to repatriate himself only two weeks before the blitzkrieg. He stays shut up in the headmaster’s house and has appeared only once in the school dining room, where he sat at Dr. Prescott’s right. He seems much older than his host, though they are supposed to be the same age. He is very bent and brown, with thick snowy hair, and he leaned heavily on Dr. Prescott’s arm as he hobbled in and out of the dining room. Yet taken as a remnant of the mauve decade he is rather superb. He was wearing a high wing collar, striped trousers, a morning coat and black button boots of lustered polish. Mr. Ives tells me that his valet has to get up every night at two to “turn” him in bed.

  May 25. Stories about Mr. Havistock, who remains secluded, continue to enliven the faculty coffee hour. A school is like a small town, and we all need a bit of comic relief in these grim days. Dr. Prescott’s houseguest has the function as the porter in the second act of Macbeth; he keeps the suspense from becoming unbearable.

  Apparently he requires constant service. Breakfast must be on the dot of eight, and when poor old Mrs. Midge, the housekeeper, comes toiling up the stairs with his heavy tray, she is apt to find him waiting on the landing, his eye fixed to his great gold pocket watch, demanding: “Pray tell me, Mrs. Midge, is my watch fast? I have eight-one.” A pity he didn’t wait in Paris for the Germans. They’d have fixed him!

  How on earth did Dr. Prescott ever become intimate with this elegant old dandy? Mr. Ives says it must be a case of opposites attracting.

  May 26. Dr. Prescott told me this morning that he was much upset by Mr. Havistock’s opinion of the inner state of France. “He says it’s rotten right through. That we must anticipate not only defeat but active collaboration with the enemy.”

  “You don’t suppose he’s judging it by his own social circle?”

  Dr. Prescott looked up with a trace of amusement in his eyes. “What do you know about his social circle?”

  “Nothing. But isn’t it the same one that Proust wrote about?”

  “Or what’s left of it,” Dr. Prescott conceded with a chuckle. “As a matter of fact, he was a friend of Proust’s. He took Harriet to call on him once in the cork-lined chamber. He wouldn’t take me; he said I was too noisy. But you mustn’t judge Horace’s intellect by Horace’s social life. He may be a hothouse plant, but he sees a great deal from his hothouse windows. He is wise, Horace. Very wise.”

  “He is wise, anyway, in his choice of friends,” I ventured.

  “Oh, Horace only cut his teeth on me,” Dr. Prescott said with a laugh. “We were at school together. Since then he has gone way beyond me. But he is loyal. He remembers the old days.”

  “I shouldn’t think a life in the Paris salons was necessarily going so far beyond Justin Martyr.”

  Dr. Prescott seemed thoroughly amused by my reservations about his friend. “Ah, but Horace did not confine himself to duchesses. He knew your hero, James. He knew Conrad and Hardy. He was intimate with Proust. Redon did the panels in his living room, and Braque the drawings in his study. Horace has an instinctive understanding of the problems of important people. He loves them as our Lord loved little children.”

  “And how does he feel about little children?”

  “Perish the thought!” Dr. Prescott threw up his hands. “I see you have been listening to school tattle about poor Horace. No doubt Justin can make little enough of him. But come and have tea with him this afternoon and judge for yourself.”

  “What on earth will I talk to him about?” I cried in dismay.

  “James! The master,” he retorted with mocking emphasis and turned to his mail.

  Well, I went. I was nervous all day and my nervousness was not diminished when I came into Mrs. Prescott’s old drawing room and found Mr. Havistock seated before her tea tray checking each plate before dismissing the hovering Mrs. Midge. He paid no attention whatever to my entrance.

  “Now, let me see. Is my half piece of lime there? Ah, yes, I see it is. And is the toast buttered on both sides? It wasn’t yesterday.” He inspected a piece. “Oh, good. Well, I think that will be all for now, Mrs. Midge. I’ll ring if I need anything.”

  The world in flames and he worries about his toast being buttered on both sides! There must have been five minutes of fussing with the tea things before he finally leaned back in Mrs. Prescott’s old chair, touched the tips of his long fingers together before his hawk nose and gazed at me shrewdly.

  “Well, Mr. Aspinwall! Frank tells me you were a friend of Harriet’s. I can imagine no greater recommendation, for she was a woman of perfect taste. Oh, perhaps not always in clothes . . .” He raised his dark eyebrows which formed a striking contrast to his snowy hair and coughed. “And yet even her clothes, in a wonderful basic Bostonian way, had style.”

  I looked back now into his small cold grey eyes with a greater sympathy. “It is true. She had great style.”

  “It is to your credit that you recognize
it, young man, for your generation has had little opportunity to observe it. It went out with the last war. Or even before.” There was a long pause as he took a sip of his tea and a bite of his doubly buttered toast. “Style,” he repeated reflectively. “Odette in the Bois as Proust describes her in Swann.” He looked up at me now with sudden aggressiveness. “Do you agree there have been no writers since Proust?”

  “Not Hemingway?” I protested. “Not Lewis or O’Neill or Fitzgerald?”

  “They had talent.” His shrug implied that this was to the man what the cravat was to the wardrobe. “I knew Lewis and young Fitzgerald. But they were not presentable. You couldn’t depend on what they’d do or say. They bore in their souls the malaise of a dying world. It was art but corrupt art.”

  I saw there was no purpose in going on with that. “Dr. Prescott tells me you knew Henry James.”

  “My dear fellow, of course I knew him. Don’t you know the Lubbock correspondence? There are several letters to me in it.”

  So he was that Havistock, the “dear, dear boy”! Was it possible that this relic before me had once been young? I can quite see Dr. Prescott as a youth, but not Mr. Havistock. Perhaps it was only one of James’ hyperbolean compliments.

  “Have you ever written your memoirs, sir?”

  “Not really. I started a little book that was to be entitled ‘The Art of Friendship,’ but I never got very far with it, and now I never shall.” He smiled complacently. “I’m too old.”