“I’m sure you would have,” she said placatingly, retreating before my sharpened tone. “You must remember that as an only child I’ve had very little to do with boys. However,” she continued with a sigh, looking pensively across the Mall, “it appears that yawning gap is going to be amply filled.”
I glanced around. “You mean you’re going through with it?”
Her answering look was aloof and steady. “I thought that I had told you. Frank and I are engaged.”
“But it hasn’t been announced. I should think you were both still free to withdraw.”
“What makes you think I want to?”
What indeed? And what made me so sure that she ought to? When I look back upon my decision of that afternoon, it strikes me as sufficiently uncanny. How did I, who had never interfered to the smallest degree in the affairs of others, who had confined myself to chatter over the past and passive speculation as to the future, have the courage, or perhaps I should say the nerve, to betray my best friend by plunging into the troubled tub of his engagement and pulling out the stopper? And how, furthermore, did I manage to do it without any qualms of conscience (besides the shivering from my natural tension at the idea of any action at all) when I knew that my soul was full of a complicated jealousy that Eliza and Frank should each be taking the other from me? Yet I seemed to have had no doubt at all that I was doing the right thing. Could the angel or imp that had sent Frank’s father to him have intervened again through me?
“Don’t marry him,” I said flatly. “Don’t marry him, I beg of you.”
Eliza did not even blink as she stared at me. Yet she seemed to sense that such impudence must have sprung from a strong conviction, based on something she had yet to learn. “Why should I not?”
“Because you’d make each other miserable.”
She drew a quick breath. “I think you underestimate me, Horace.”
“Oh, no, I don’t! You’d be superb. You’d handle them all magnificently, the little boys, the mothers, the masters and their wives. You’d be beautiful and gracious and decorative and brave. Oh, you’d do it to the queen’s taste. And the better you did it, the worse it would be for both of you. Frank would see that he had taken you from the great world where your talents were meant to shine and squandered them in a New England backwater. And you would see it, too. Oh, you would, Eliza! No matter how desperately you tried to hide it from him. You would both always know that you had been sacrificed.”
Eliza ran the tips of her forefingers gently across her eyelashes. I wondered if she was catching a stray, rebel tear. If so, her gesture had made the others retreat. It was difficult to tell such things with Eliza. “Perhaps I should be subtler than you think.”
“Impossible.”
“Why impossible?” she asked, annoyed. “There’s one thing that you discount. That you, of course, would have to discount. It so happens that I love Frank.”
“Oh, love.”
“Yes, love!” she exclaimed angrily. “Don’t smile at me in that cool, cynical way. If you could see how immature you looked! Only little boys and old men sneer at love. I happen to love Frank Prescott, and he happens to love me.”
“Great lovers have made great sacrifices.”
She opened her lips to retort and then closed them. Something about my persistence evidently frightened her. “How can you go on that way?” she cried in exasperation. “How can you be so sure about what other people should do and not do?”
“Because I know you, Eliza. I know what we have in common. Something that has nothing to do with Frank. We’re hopeless egoists, you and I. We want the nicest things, oh, the very nicest things, for ourselves and others, but the best thing about those nice things is always going to be the little personal touch that we can give them. You’d never see Frank’s school in any other light than as a backdrop for a beautiful headmistress. An inadequate backdrop, at that. And ultimately it would become a backdrop for the pageant of the splendid good sportsmanship of Mrs. Prescott who has given up the world for her husband. I can see you, Eliza, in maturer years, grey and slim and still so lovely, confiding to some soft, admiring longhaired sixth form Horace Havistock, over tea and crumpets, the secret chagrin of your sacrifice.”
Eliza’s eyes really blazed at this. “Stop, Tom!” she called to her coachman. “Mr. Havistock is getting out.”
“Really, Eliza!” I protested. “In the middle of the Park!”
“Then I‘ll get out!” she retorted, and in another moment she was out of the carriage and walking at a rapid pace eastward along the sidewalk. “Take Mr. Havistock home!” she called back over her shoulder. “I’ll walk.”
I told Tom to trail her at a discreet distance, and although she must have known we were there, she never turned her head as she strode resolutely forward. At first I was amused, but as I continued to watch her straight, fast-moving figure from the slowly joggling carriage I became uneasy. Could I have been wrong? Had I underestimated that strong, beautiful creature who swept along ahead of me, causing every passerby to turn and stare? For fully half an hour we must have continued our strange procession, while I shifted back and forth between conviction and doubt, until I noticed that she had stopped and was waiting, still without turning, for us to catch up. As Tom brought the carriage slowly abreast of her, she turned abruptly and got in. “Home now,” she said and sat in silence, her head averted from me, her brooding eyes taking in the brown sky line to the south.
“I tell you what I’ve decided,” she said at last, still without looking at me. “If I do give Frank up, I shall expect you to do the same.”
“You mean, give him up as a friend?”
“No. I mean, give up the idea of being a schoolteacher. In his school, at least.”
“I doubt if I’d be asked in any other.”
“Then there it is. You won’t be a schoolteacher.”
I had not really thought I had much wanted to be, but now, in the perverse way of humans, I felt that I might be giving up the one occupation for which I was suited. “But why?” I demanded in bewilderment. “Why should you care? Is it just spite?”
“You should know me better,” she retorted scornfully. “I don’t do things out of spite. I may, as you say, be an egoist, but I hope I’m not a petty one. No, if I give Frank up, it will be because I want him to be free and untrammeled in his new life. If you can sense the corruption in me, it is, by your own admission, because there’s a dose of it in you. Let there be none of it at all in Frank’s school.”
It is odd, but I think I was flattered. I had always been considered such a nonentity where human relations were concerned that the idea that I might have an influence, even a corrupting influence, on one as strong as Frank penetrated my heart with a fierce little sting of pleasure. To be allied with this magnificent girl in a team that might detract Parsifal from his quest of the Grail was to be given at last, was it not, a role in the opera? And wasn’t Eliza correct? Had I not felt in my own heart that things were most right with Frank when he had been most alone with his God? I made up my mind in a moment.
“I give you my word,” I told her solemnly, “that I will never be a schoolteacher.”
“Even if I should marry Frank?”
“Oh, particularly not then!” I exclaimed. “I couldn’t bear to see a chapter of the gospel turned into a chapter of Trollope.” After this, we finished our drive in silence, for I understood, with absolute clarity and for the first time in my life, what a woman was like. I knew then and there that Eliza would never forgive me.
I did not see Frank for several days, but when he called next at the house I was at once aware from his somber face that Eliza must have communicated her decision. Walking about my room as I sat by the fire, he told me about it in harsh, clipped phrases. A life in the church, he said dryly, was evidently not the life for Eliza. He then excoriated New York, its society, its money, its worldliness. We lived in the vilest of ages. By my silence I agreed.
“Oh, what a bloody ass I
am!” he cried suddenly, turning on me with a violence that made me jump. “As if a girl like that would want to tie herself up with a shaveling priest who hasn’t even taken his orders! I wooed her under false pretenses, Horace. It is I who am vile!”
Then he came and sat by the fire and stared into it moodily for five good minutes. When he spoke his voice had a curious softness that I did not remember having heard before, like a sigh after the passage of some terrible pain.
“I thought I was not going to have anything to give up, Horace. I thought I was to have no test. I knew that I could leave the Central and all its rails and the fortune that glittered at the end of them with joy. With joy! But I dreamed that I would step forward into the service of God with a strong, beautiful woman on my arm, a helpmate, like an illustration for the last chapter of a Thackeray novel. O God, what fatuousness!” He leaned his head suddenly down in his hands and actually sobbed. “Of course, she was the sacrifice you wanted, Lord. So be it. Thy will. Thy will. I should be happy to be able to give up something so dear!”
After this outburst, which left me in a rigid shock of embarrassment, he played backgammon with me in morose silence for a full hour and then went home. Never again would he discuss Eliza with me. In fact, he reverted to the fifth former at St. Andrew’s who had had no need to communicate his inner discomforts. But then why should he have? Presumably he had discovered a higher source of consolation.
He resigned from Central the following week with the full approval of Mr. Depew who was much impressed that a call to the ministry should have been heard above the worldly bustle of his office. Frank even received a hand-written letter of good wishes from Mr. Vanderbilt which went far to allay Archie’s violent objections to his step. He then departed for Cambridge to commence his divinity studies, which were apparently to be paid for by another of the mysterious Prescott trusts, and for the first time in seven years I ceased to see him regularly. It was a great light out of my life, but I had learned that one had to have spare luminaries.
I visited Frank in Boston on several occasions in the next two years. I stayed with his dear old aunt in Marlborough Street, and he came over from Cambridge to spend the evenings with me. He seemed in good spirits, but preoccupied with his work, and it was no surprise to any of us when he graduated first in his class. He spoke in a kindly tone of his classmates, but I knew him well enough to sense that he was discouraged by the quality of their intellects. He was to struggle all his life to avoid condescension to his fellow clergymen. “If the church,” he once told me, “appealed to the kind of young men who went into New York Central, it would soon conquer the world.” But, of course, it didn’t so appeal. It didn’t, if the truth be told, fundamentally appeal to Frank. He took orders only because he wanted to found a church school, and he sought to get his studies and ordination behind him as quickly as possible.
He had one diversion, however, and that was Harriet Winslow. She was totally different from all the girls in whom I had ever observed him to take an interest, but in her own way she was quite as individual and quite as remarkable as Eliza Dean. She was plain, but magnificently plain, with a high, intellectual brow, a large, thin, very white aquiline nose and green eyes that seemed to look through the toughest barricade of one’s own complacency. A grand-niece of Emerson, she could read Latin and speak German, but she had the reticence of a lady about pushing herself forward. She was neat, efficient, quiet, firm and, to my mind, charming. She belonged to the inner circle of Boston society, the only society in America that Frank ever really enjoyed, being like its English counterpart, unpretentious, self-assured, eccentric and, in parts, genuinely intellectual.
Harriet won my everlasting loyalty by understanding from the beginning that, different though we were, Frank had no better friend than I. She proceeded promptly to establish her own independent relationship with me and on two occasions invited me to lunch at her family’s without Frank. It was evident to me that in her quiet but unyielding fashion she was determined to marry him and had accepted as entirely natural that his feeling for her was never going to be what hers was for him. I applauded her resolution in my heart (needless to say, we never discussed it), for it seemed to me that she had everything Frank needed in his chosen life, and so indeed it has proven. I think she even had money, but how does one tell with Bostonians?
I have never known how much she knew about Eliza Dean, but, if she did, she always had the heart and the intelligence neither to resent nor to apologize for the fact that she was second best. When, standing at the side of the newly ordained Francis Prescott, I watched his bride approach us down the aisle, I knew that on that afternoon in Central Park by the Bethesda Fountain I had done the best job in my life.
Nor was it only for him. It was for Eliza, too. She gave up the false start of Manhattan and returned to the West when her father died where she married the man who had bought his mines. He was much older and left her hugely rich. Thereafter she married Byram Shaw, of Wilson’s cabinet, and had a splendid career in Paris when he was ambassador. She lives today in a Genoese palazzo on Du Pont Circle in Washington and gives those great diplomatic-political receptions of which everybody knows. She has aged gracefully, but she has become even more Western in tone and manner than she was in the early days in New York. In fact, it has become her distinctive mark.
She has always been cordial to me, but our intimacy has never been resumed. When David Griscam was making his big fund drive for Justin Martyr and asked me for the names of possible donors, I gave him Eliza’s. He wrote to her twice, but received neither acknowledgment nor contribution. She must have felt that she had done enough for the school.
8
Brian’s Journal
NOVEMBER 15, 1940. Here I have been back at Justin for two months without a single entry, but the purpose of my journal is Dr. Prescott, and I have not seen him alone more than twice since the term started. However superior I run the risk of sounding, I cannot feel that it is my mission to record what everybody could record and what, it now seems, everybody is recording. Poor Dr. Prescott has become a public event.
I am no longer his assistant because Mr. Ives, who is also retiring in the spring, has turned over his own executive duties to Mr. Anders and now has time himself to help the headmaster. But worse than this, it is difficult even to get near Dr. Prescott. The whole world of Justin’s graduates and friends is awake to the fact that it is his final year, and all want a last glimpse of him in office. Every week that goes by contains a “last” something that must be duly commemorated: the headmaster’s speech on the school birthday dinner, his “fight talk” before the Chelton game, his halloween monologue on parlor night.
Graduates come up for a look, a handshake, a snapshot, a bit of talk. Dr. Prescott lives as publicly as a monarch at Versailles. But whereas Louis XIV had only one Saint-Simon among his courtiers, the Rector of Justin seems to have as many as he has graduates. I sometimes feel that I’m the only person on the campus who’s not actively engaged in “writing him up,” and I’ve only stopped because I want to be the only one.
There is a professional cameraman here now to make a film, commissioned by the trustees, of a typical day in the headmaster’s life. A recording has already been made of one of his sermons. And there is a big easel up in his study in the School-house where an artist paints him as he works at his desk. I feel that if I so much as stop by to bid him good morning, I run the risk of seeming to be trying to encroach my little ego on the glorious illuminated page of his personal history.
Yet he himself has never been more wonderful. He seems totally resigned to the circus of these final months; he is more than philosophic—he is benign. He smiles with unfailing charm at the gaping world about him. The agony of decision is over, and he appears to be reconciled to the prospect leaving his creation in inferior hands. Perhaps he has reflected that those hands, after all, are also in God’s. Nothing in his head-mastership becomes him more than the leaving it.
January 21, 1941.
He sent for me last Monday and suggested that I attend one of his sacred studies classes.
“If you do become a minister and if you decide to go on with teaching, you will have to face the fact that you’ll always be stuck with sacred studies. It might not do you any harm to see how I do it. After all, I’ve been at it half a century.”
This morning I sat in the back of the classroom hung with maps of the Holy Land and the Roman Empire which adjoins his office and watched him with the second division of the fifth form. Like all great plans, his is basically a simple one. Fifth formers have had their biblical and church history, and Dr. Prescott tries to tie the church into their other courses. He calls on a boy and asks what he is studying that day in Latin, history or mathematics and takes the discussion from this.
Today he chose history, and Jimmie Abercrombie answered on the day’s assignment.
“The Thirty Years’ War, sir.”
“Dear me, all of it?”
“Well, I think, sir, today Mr. Evans was planning to discuss the role of Richelieu.”
“Ah. The role of Cardinal Richelieu. Do you know, Abercrombie, what the Pope is supposed to have said when Cardinal Richelieu died?”
“No, sir. I don’t believe it was in the lesson.”
“Must we limit ourselves to the lesson, Abercrombie? May we not talk, you and I? May we not seek a bit of truth, hand in hand, so to speak?”
“Oh, yes, sir. I suppose so, sir.”
“Thank you, Abercrombie. The Pope is supposed to have said: ‘If there be a God, the cardinal will have much to answer for. If not . . .’” Here Dr. Prescott gave a monumental shrug. “‘Well, if not, he led a successful life.’ Have you any comment on that, Abercrombie?”
“Well, of course, I believe in God, sir. It seems strange that a pope should say a thing like that.”
The Rector of Justin Page 11