The Rector of Justin

by Louis Auchincloss

  Frank nodded to me at last, and we left the chapel. “That was bully, wasn’t it?” he asked, and I was embarrassed again by the unexpected adjective.

  We walked down to watch the football which bored me but which seemed of unending fascination to Frank. A play had just ended in a violent scrimmage, involving most of the members of both teams, when an odd thing happened. We suddenly saw the headmaster hurrying across the field, waving his umbrella and shouting in a shrill tone. I had never seen him on the athletic field before, much less running. When he reached the scrimmage heap he tried to pull away one of the boys by his legs, and I could now make out his high voice exclaiming: “Don’t kill him! Don’t kill the boy underneath! What are you doing? Dear God, what are you doing to him?”

  All the boys stood up now bewildered, and we heard the embarrassed but respectful coach explaining to Dr. Howell that the scrimmage, far from being an organized pogrom, was a natural, indeed an integral part of the game. Dr. Howell, however, did not seem in the least embarrassed by his mistake and proceeded on the spot to draw up a new code of rules. Why was it necessary for the boy carrying the ball to be brought to the ground? Why should it not be sufficient simply to touch him? I was thoroughly enjoying the discomfort of the players when I realized that I was alone, and, turning, saw Frank striding swiftly away towards the Dublin Lake Road. I ran after him and caught his arm, but he shook me impatiently off.

  “Don’t you want to see how they settle it?” I asked. “Honestly, it’s a circus!”

  “To you it is. You don’t care about football.”

  “Well, if you care so much, why don’t you stay and argue with him?”

  “Oh, what the hell, Horace!” he exclaimed impatiently. “We’ll be out of here in the spring. Let’s go on to the lake. I need a walk and some air. Let that old baboon turn it into a game of tag if he wants.”

  “You call Dr. Howell a baboon?” I cried, scandalized. “I thought you admired him.”

  “Admired him!” Frank stopped and looked at me in perplexity as if he would never come to the end of my quixoticism. “For what do you take me? Admire that bigoted, sanctimonious jackass?”

  I remember distinctly that it was then and there that I decided that I would have to establish limits to the domination of Frank Prescott. “You go too far,” I retorted. “You always go too far and get violent about things. Dr. Howell is rather superb, really. He’s a kind of symbol, like a sovereign or pope. He’s above the vulgar hurly-burly of school competition.”

  “Above it!” Frank shouted. “What business does he have being above his boys? Football is a tough, hard game, the way life is, except for a few favored souls like the Havistocks. A headmaster ought to be down on that field playing with the boys himself. He ought to be in that scrimmage, not whimpering about it!”

  “Dr. Howell? Would you want to kill him?”

  “Well, he ought to know the rules, then, and what a scrimmage is. You’re the most impossible romantic, Horace. You have to visualize him as some kind of Michelangelo prophet with flowing robes and a thunderstorm in the background. You can’t bear to see him as a silly, preoccupied old boy in a dirty black suit pulled around the campus in a pony cart because he’s too lazy to walk!”

  I burst out laughing. “Can you blame me?”

  “Oh, to hell with him.” Frank gave it up and slapped me painfully on the shoulder. “He’s not worth a row. But I can promise you there won’t be any Howells in my school.”

  “In your school? Are you going to have one?”

  “Maybe some day.” He shrugged, but I knew at once by his suddenly averted eyes and the quick set of his jaw that he was entirely serious. “Why not? Don’t you think I could manage one?”

  “On the contrary, I think you’d manage it very well. Would it be a church school?”

  “Certainly.”

  “But wouldn’t you have to be a minister?”

  “I’m going to be a minister, Horace.” He turned to look at me hard now, and those glittering brown eyes defied me to smirk. “I’m going to be a minister and a schoolmaster. You asked me once what I was going to be, and I put you off. Well, there it is. I’m going to England next year because I think an American schoolmaster should know all there is to know about English schools. My guardian’s arranging to get me into Balliol, at Oxford. Would you like to go to Oxford with me?”

  “I should love it!” It was all very startling, but I have always made decisions quickly, and this was an easy one. Harvard had loomed before me like an extension of St. Andrew’s, and the prospect of a life abroad and shared with Frank seemed almost impossibly glamorous. “Perhaps I could teach at your school, too. You remember I taught you French.” But a sudden horrid doubt assailed me. “Would I have to play football?”

  Frank threw back his head and roared with laughter. “God forbid! No, you could teach French and handle the mothers when they thought I was being too hard on their precious darlings.”

  I was enchanted that in two minutes’ time my entire future, which until then had been such a dreary blank, should now be so cheerfully disposed of. “Where will the money come from?”

  “For the school? What about yours?”

  “I don’t think I have any,” I reported ruefully. “Father always tells me I’ll have enough to live on ‘decently,’ whatever that means, provided I stay a bachelor. If I want to marry, I shall have to work.”

  Frank seemed to find this enormously funny. In fact, his mood was exuberant now, almost hilarious. “Let’s hope that no such terrible sacrifice will be required of you. Don’t worry about the money. I have some rich cousins. There’s always a bit of money to be had for a worthy cause in Boston. For example, my guardian was able to find a trust fund to pay for the education abroad of any descendant of my great-grandfather.”

  “So that’s why we’re going to Oxford!”

  Frank winked. “Let’s put it that I’m killing two birds with one stone.”

  I realized that the half bantering, half solemn temper of the conversation had been Frank’s way of telling me that my long submitted bid for his friendship had been accepted. There was never anything else said to establish this, but nothing else, to a boy of Frank’s reticences, was necessary. I had weathered his coldness, his rebuffs, his actual insults; now they would cease. Once admitted to Frank’s intimacy—and I am proud to say that very few have been—one found oneself a life member. He expected to be the dominant partner; he expected me, for example, to attend the college of his choice and to help him in the creation of a school of which he would be headmaster. But that was the way I wanted it. I was quite willing to settle for the junior position provided only that I was at liberty to speak my mind.

  For the rest of the school year we walked together on Sunday afternoons and made elaborate plans for the future. He lectured me about my triviality and sophistry and tried to interest me in sport, while I mocked him when he took himself too seriously and laughed at his moodiness. The element of the female in my nature matched well with the masculine in his; in many ways our relationship was like that of a strong, single-minded husband and a clever, realistic wife. I quite realize that in the days in which I am writing, it will be impossible for a reader of the last sentence not to jump over a Freudian moon, but I belong to a simpler and less polluted generation. I have always gloried in my conception of friendship, and I will insist to my dying day that it has nothing of sex in it.

  For a time it seemed that I had everything in life that I could possibly want: a friend whose approval made me at last a respectable figure on the little campus of St. Andrew’s and a European future, just around the corner, that loomed, like the great pack on a Santa Claus’ back, with spires of old cathedrals and castle turrets jutting out of its open end. I had, for the first time in my life, everything that I seemed to desire, with everybody’s blessing, to boot. And what did I feel? Simply a small, half-recognized, vaguely tickling ennui. It was my first lesson from the gift-bearing Greeks.

  The
trouble, I found, lay in the very core of my supposed happiness: in my intimacy with Frank. He, too, had never had a confidant before, and once he had overcome his initial reticences, he helped himself, in increasingly liberal doses, to my extravagantly offered attention. He would have listened to me, no doubt, had I had confidences of my own of equal value. But I had little to show for my years of loneliness but my daydreams and fantasies, and he had the whole complicated structure of his school, created in his mind over the adolescent years, course by course, master by master, building by building. No wonder he had been a silent and moody boy. Like Frankenstein, he had been locked away in a mental laboratory, creating his monster.

  I call it a monster because I had already begun to fear that it would swallow me. To him it was something far, far different. To him it was nothing less than the source of regeneration of a modern world that had been corrupted by carpetbaggers and venal politicians. Frank believed passionately that the maw of civil strife had swallowed all that had been finest in the generation before us and had ended, fittingly enough for such a holocaust, with the assassination of the sainted Lincoln. Grant was to him the body of the hero which has lost its soul, the plight of a nation of ex-warriors grubbing for gold. And God would work through Francis Prescott, a humble instrument selected to reward his father’s sacrifice, to raise up new leaders of men.

  “I know it is what my father would have wanted of me,” he would tell me somberly, over and over. “It is the only way I can give to God what he gave.”

  I used to visualize Frank’s God with a little shudder as a despondent general, sitting, chin in hand, on a campstool by a tent, like one of those lithographs of Napoleon in Russia, surveying the field of that day’s defeat and waiting for a miracle in the morning. Frank’s father, his own faith and his projected school were all inextricably intertwined, and my early knowledge of this gave me an insight into some of his later peculiarities as a minister which were to baffle and shock so many. Frank was never to be interested in any souls but those of his boys.

  Not only did I have to learn more than I wanted about the administration of Frank’s still fictional academy; I had to try to improve my own spiritual qualifications to become a member of his imagined faculty. He sought to discover the state of my religious life and asked me questions about my family with the sometimes brutal frankness of one who had none of his own. I have always been the kind of egotist who likes to talk around, rather than about, myself, and I found his probing painful. Our talks on Sunday used to go something like this:

  “I’m afraid you must face the fact, Horace, that your family is a peculiarly worldly one. I doubt if I’ve ever in my life seen such an emphasis on appearances. Indeed, your father seems to believe in nothing but the appearance of believing.”

  “That’s what he calls ‘setting an example.’”

  “You admit, then, he’s a Pharisee?”

  “I admit he’s a magnificent one! If you’re going to be a Pharisee, you may as well do it with style.”

  Frank would shake his head, whistle and quicken his pace, and I, stumbling after him, would simply pray that the glories and fascinations of old England would soon divert him from his favorite topic. My prayer was to be fully answered in six months’ time, and I was again to learn the malevolence of those seeming generous Greeks.

  6

  From Horace Havistock’s “The Art of Friendship”

  OUR three years at Balliol were a happier time for me than for Frank. I developed my character into the essential shape which it possesses to this day, while he pursued his down a side street that dwindled to a dead end. Yet of the two of us he seemed the more content.

  He took immediately to English life and English ways. It was as if he had suddenly discovered his natural environment. He was heartier, louder, funnier, more companionable and far better dressed, for the Prescott trust permitted him to become a bit of a dandy. He loved the solid masculine comfort of the English gentleman’s life, the large cold stone houses with their roaring fires, the hunting on foggy moors and the long dinners at long tables glittering with more jewelry and silver than seemed quite decent.

  He had many letters of introduction from Boston, some to the highest places, and he was much taken up as a Yankee who could talk back without being rude, who could praise his own country without seeming shrill and who was a first class oar and shot. It seemed to me that he spent rather more time visiting castles than schools and that his talk was more of foxes and of wines than it was of masters and boys, but I supposed that this was all part of his education. That is one of the joys of going to school abroad; whatever one does can be chalked up to the imbibing of atmosphere. If Frank, however, seemed to be neglecting the project of his lifework, he did not neglect his courses, for he ended up with a first in “greats” and was offered a fellowship.

  I was more Yankee than he in that my eyes kept straying in the direction of Paris. On vacations in France I was apt to spend my time in the capital glutting myself on theatres and art galleries, while Frank bicycled alone through the countryside from cathedral town to cathedral town. When he did come to Paris, he was taken up with pursuits where my presence would have been only an encumbrance, or at least so I assumed, for unlike most young men even of that era, Ave rarely discussed girls. He was always extraordinarily tactful (when he was not deliberately being rude), and knowing my nature less earthy than his own, he must have supposed that I did not like to be reminded of my unearthiness. Actually, however, I would have been delighted to hear of his conquests. I had grown up while in Oxford and had learned to apologize to nobody for taking my pleasures primarily through the eye and ear.

  The crisis towards which we were heading and that I was too obtuse to anticipate exploded at the end of our second year when Frank lost his faith. This was an experience not unusual to serious young men in the last century and was treated as a very grave event. Today, of course, it couldn’t happen because nobody has any faith, or if they do, they find it unfashionable to talk about it. But Frank had a very deep one and had been confirmed at his own request at the age of fourteen. His idea of teaching was inextricably tied up with the Episcopal Church, and the only kind of school that he could contemplate founding had always been a church school. I knew instantly, therefore, what a serious matter it was when, pacing back and forth before the fire in my room one night, and stopping occasionally to take a somehow wrathful sip from the glass of whiskey on the mantel, he announced to me that he doubted the divinity of Christ.

  “You’ve been reading too much Renan,” I suggested.

  “I’ve been reading a great deal besides Renan,” he said with a snort. “I’ve been reading the early Christian fathers. But you can’t get away from the fact that Renan has one terribly valid point. Jesus obviously believed that the resurrection of the dead would occur within the lifetime of his contemporaries. ‘Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.’” He became very dry of tone now, like a lawyer with citations. “Matthew 16:28. And again in 10:23. And again in 24:34. And again in Mark, 9:1. And again in Mark, 13:30. And again in Luke, 9:27. And again in Luke, 21:32.”

  I couldn’t help smiling at this show-off of memory. “But not in John? Hasn’t John always been your favorite gospel?”

  “I find it trivial of you, Horace, to describe a gospel, like a magazine, as a favorite.”

  “Well, whatever you want to call it then. The most spiritual?”

  Frank seemed even more pained at this. “I think I may have described it once as the most sophisticated. In any case, you are partially right. The prediction is not made in the same words in John. But you will remember that Jesus hinted that John might not have to die. Which could only have meant that he would live to see the second coming.” Here he paused and shook his head. “Matthew, Mark and Luke must have meant something by all those statements. And certainly the early fathers took them literally. It explains so much of the c
asting away of the world. The church had to be totally reconstructed when Christians finally realized that they were in for the long pull.”

  His worries must seem absurd to twentieth century readers. The teachings of a protestant Christ have long been watered down to a gentle ripple of aphorisms about the poor and meek, and nobody troubles his head any more about the question of divinity. It is probably the work of thousands of loose thinkers like myself. I had read Renan and found his pastoral idyll of a mortal Jesus struggling under his messianic illusion and finding relief in death from his impossible, self-imposed mission a charming one. I now suggested this to Frank.

  “Charming!” he cried in disgust. “Is there nothing more important to you than charm? Is that all the gospels mean to you? Charm?”

  “Well, I don’t see the point of getting all worked up about them. Maybe the Catholics are right in not encouraging the reading of the Bible. Look at the funk it’s got you in!”

  “How can a man not be in a funk if his whole life depends on it?” Frank paused to take another fierce gulp of his drink. “Don’t you see, I want to be a minister? How can I preach the gospel of a deluded mystic who traveled about the countryside foretelling the end of a world that never came? And consider, Horace, the presumption of such a man if he was not God. How did he dare threaten the multitudes with damnation? Oh no, my friend, I tell you, he’s God or nothing.” Frank shook his head again, slowly and gravely, half a dozen times.