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For Jim
Inspired by E. M. Forster’s Maurice
I
ST. JOHN’S BONFIRE
1
Early in the spring of 1893, in the village of Osmington in Dorset, the Scudders, Aderyn (née Prothero, from Cardiff) and her husband, Elwood (the butcher), were surprised and not entirely pleased to discover that she was with child. They had believed themselves long since finished with nappies and crying spells. Fred, their “baby,” was nearly ten; Aderyn herself, forty-three. Moreover, the pregnancy conjured ghosts of heartbreak she believed she’d put to rest years ago: Susan, who would have been eighteen now, dead in her cradle with scarlet fever; and the twin boys, stillborn, unnamed, taken from her and buried before she had seen them (as was the practice then). But, come November, she had cause for joy: after a straightforward labor, she gave birth to a winsome infant. They christened him David Alexander: the first name for his grandfather and for the patron saint of Wales; the second for the grand sound. Thriving at the plentiful table provided by his father’s line of work and his mother’s skill, Alec grew to be a cheerful, sturdy boy and then a good-looking teenager, with bright brown eyes, thick wavy hair, and a reputation in school for brains and diligence.
He benefited from England’s progress in free education. From age seven to thirteen, he learned to read (well), write (poorly), and do arithmetic (accurately). Because his father prospered and Alec behaved himself, his teachers encouraged him to stay on for three more years. He studied basic mathematics, history, a little Latin and French, and read the English poets. He liked geometry: spheres, planes, lines, angles, volumes. They gave the schoolboy pause—maybe what seemed the random stuff of everyday life partook of a complex, cosmic order, like that of the planets and stars. As for English history, he enjoyed the Wars of the Roses and the ensuing mayhem of Tudors and Stuarts; but after Cromwell things got dull in his opinion and stayed that way. Latin and French were no fun at all: the smattering they offered at the village school got barely further than grammar. As for poetry, it baffled but intrigued him; when he spent enough time, letting sound and sense come together, it could stir unnameable feelings.
His parents were delighted with Alec’s schooling. Little enough had been offered to them. Even their older son had not been required to attend school so strictly as the younger; laws and customs were changing that fast. Still, they knew Alec’s school days would end at age sixteen. They had no money to send him further; nor, if they had, would the gates of higher learning unlock for a village butcher’s son.
Meantime, blessed with excellent health, Alec kept up with his schoolmates in sports. He played football because everybody did, though he liked cricket better because the persnickety rules prevented getting trampled by an oaf. (Also he thought the white clothes were smart.) With his good looks and quiet ways, he attracted the notice of girls. He enjoyed flirting with them, especially when they were sassy—like Rowena Blunt, who had a long braid, mocked the gentry, and made fun of everyone’s name, not sparing her own or that of her brother, Ivanhoe. (“I’m-a-whore Cunt,” she called him.) But Alec felt none of that lust to get under their skirts that his schoolmates hooted about. On the other hand, he did find some of those mates appealing in a way that excited him. Whenever he caught himself staring, he’d look away, because he knew that staring meant he was one of those, which was true.
His schooling, however (and contrary to its intention), taught him not to despise his queerness. The insight came about this way: His teachers encouraged him, an advanced and trustworthy student, to visit the public library in Dorchester, with holdings far richer than those in the village reading room. They let him spend whole afternoons there on his own, browsing assigned subjects, among them classical history, which he liked as much as the modern stuff bored him. The myths of Greece and Rome were best, where the gods mucked things up for the human race, and then the heroes (whose ranks he never doubted he was fated to join) fought back. He found a whole room of such books, some illustrated with plates of sculpture: Apollo and Hercules, or massive Laocoön with his two teenage sons, all three writhing in agony as the serpents strangled them. Their nudity thrilled him.
The thrill led him to explore the shelves of volumes devoted to ancient art—not just sculpture, but pottery too. The clay vessels of Greece, red-figured or black, showed stories of athletes in action: runners racing naked—bearded, thick-muscled for distance (said the captions), or smooth-faced and lean for the sprints. Some pots showed wrestlers and boxers; others, boys playing and dancing together—naked and fine. His heart would pound while he gazed; his face would flush; his cock would strain between his legs. He wanted to live in that world, to be one of those athletes, to run naked and grapple—admire, be admired—to love.
Some vessels showed scenes more dramatic: a young man with a handsome profile and dark curly beard offering a gift to a younger athlete, reaching to fondle him, seeking his love. Sometimes the athlete accepted; sometimes he refused by stopping the hand that reached. Alec thought he would welcome the gift and the touch of a man so fit and gentle; he would give love as he received it. With these noble images pleasing him, he decided there must be more to being one of those than the world’s contempt, mockery, and determination to make him hate himself.
Back in the village, he’d report to his teachers that he’d read about Athens and Rome in the library—i.e., about democracy and empire. He said he thought modern-day Britain was in some ways like both. They would praise his patriotic insight and send him back for more.
Among those teachers was St. Osmund’s curate, a short, scrawny man with thick glasses and a scruff of hair growing up from under the back of his collar, and whose eyebrows pumped up and down when he spoke. He came to school sometimes to give moral instruction. He took the older boys off by themselves. “Men,” he’d say, “you all hail from God-fearing families and I know you’re above disgracing them with any untoward behavior. But let me warn you, man-to-man: the tempter was the brightest angel in heaven before he defied the Lord God with his pride. He’s cleverer than you know. He’ll mask sin with beauty and innocence, like a beguiling girl’s face. So guard your thoughts; thoughts too can lead you astray. Thoughts lead to words, words to action. Degenerate thoughts sap your manhood.”
But thoughts were all that Alec owned, and he believed his glorious athletes had more to teach him about manhood than this repulsive clerical scarecrow, who smelled like someone who never washed below his chin. Fortunately for Alec, religious orthodoxy at home was tamed by the influence of Welsh Unitarianism on his mother’s girlhood. Not that the Scudders were openly skeptical; they attended Church of England services regularly. For his parents, though, worship was more a matter of good citizenship than faith. If a Sunday sermon got around to such rarefied doctrine as the Virgin Birth or the Trinity, Alec might hear Ma mutter, “Hogwash,” and he’d snicker. This down-to-earth attitude spared him the torture of scrupulosity. But the Church was not his only enemy. There was the very family who cherished him. He knew for sure that even his mild-mannered father would rage if he could read his son’s degenerate thoughts; as for his doting mother, she’d turn against him with tears and spite and insults. A dunce they could love; a swaggering thug or a thief they’d defend as their own. But a nancy-boy, a poofter? Never.
And then there was the law, m
erciless as granite. Certain phrases terrified him, young as he was: “gross indecency” or “unspeakable crimes.” So he told no one about his longings, and he was lonely.
Sports helped, since they wore him out. Alec would race full speed down the football field, fearless if often inept, undaunted by getting slammed or scraped. But his friends’ torn shirts and slipping-down shorts tantalized him, as did the melees, a dozen boys sliding all over and grabbing one another as they fought for the ball. Once, he scrambled up from a fracas so distracted he kicked the ball the wrong way and scored for the opposite team. He was pelted with scorn for weeks. He needed a release more reliable than football.
One day at the library he noticed a pamphlet left on the table: Five Pound Dumb-Bell Exercise; Illustrated With 30 Halftone Plates, by a Professor Attila. His heart started to pound at the sight. The cover showed the photo of a handsome bare-chested athlete, more appealing even than the figures on the Greek urns, with a smooth symmetrical torso and his calves ideally rounded. Inside was a picture of the author, mustachioed, in tights and a leopard skin. He claimed that a young man who followed his course in physical culture could achieve strength and beauty. Then came pages of plates showing the ravishing model doing the exercises, wearing only tight-fitting shorts. Alec gazed and gazed. At closing time, he decided to steal the pamphlet.
However, for the hour or more he’d been worshipping his newfound god, his prick had been throbbing under his knickerbockers. When he leaned over the table to pick up his copybook, said prick got pressed between the tabletop and his belly; on encountering warm flesh, albeit his own, it started to spasm, overwhelming him with exquisite pleasure. He sat back down and closed his eyes while this euphoric, if ill-timed, event went on and on and on. When the spasms stopped at last, he glanced around to be sure his deep breathing had drawn no eyes. Then he tiptoed out of the library with the pamphlet tucked into his copybook, which he carried in front to hide anything that might have leaked through.
“How flooshed you are, Licky, all red in the face,” Aderyn said when her boy came home. “Let me feel for fever.”
“No, Ma, it’s only this tight collar the school makes us wear.”
“Well, you appear quite the gentleman in it.”
“A gentleman might buy hisself one that don’t choke. Or send his valet to buy one. I’ll just take it off now,” he said and skittered away.
In the cramped bedroom he shared with his brother, he sat on his cot. With grown-ups around, he’d been too scared even to peek at the pamphlet on the tram back from Dorchester, but now he took the prize out of his copybook. He touched the image on the cover as tenderly as he might have touched the model himself. Here was Alec’s ideal, the one he wanted both to possess and to become.
He soon learned that dumbbells like those recommended by Professor Attila were not to be had in Osmington. What he did find was a rusty pair of heavy plow-horseshoes in the shed by the old outhouses. He figured they must weigh about five pounds apiece. He cleaned them and made grips from rags. For half an hour each day, between school and sweeping up at the butcher shop, he’d sling them around in accord with the professor’s regimen. There was barely enough room between his cot and his brother’s iron bedstead to do so. If he stood on Fred’s bed and crouched, he could just see himself in the tarnished mirror screwed to the top of the chest of drawers and gauge his progress.
Alas, he could see none—no Olympian shoulders or arms, no deep manly bosom. Sometimes he thought maybe he discerned a new ripple in the mirror, but then the mattress would shift under his feet and it would prove only a shadow. The regular practice did however produce two undeniable, if invisible, results. First, his appetite became bottomless, requiring Aderyn to pile on more chops and liver and to try to fill in the gaps with puddings. It made no sense to her that, much as he ate, his school clothes and Sunday trousers were getting loose in the waist.
“I wonder could it be tapeworm?” Aderyn said to her husband.
“The boy’s growing, my dear,” was all Elwood said.
The second was this: At night, Alec was entirely fagged, too tired to roil on his cot, think degenerate thoughts, or quietly hump an imaginary beloved while trying to keep his hands off himself and not wake Fred. Thanks to Professor Attila, once under the covers, he was fast asleep till morning.
He needed his sleep, because in this last term of school, there was a grave matter to reckon: What would he do with his life? In Osmington, sons of working families by custom followed in their father’s line, the way his brother was doing. Fred had been training for years now alongside Elwood and was becoming a skillful butcher. But since the senior Scudder did not own the business, he could not name his elder son his successor. So Fred planned to work a few more years as a hireling and then take his trade to the New World. He would emigrate to Argentina with its enormous cattle ranches, and set up shop in that land, where he’d find no contemptuous ruling class playing high-and-mighty with him. His sweetheart was already stockpiling goods for the home they would make there.
Though Alec hated the uncertainty about his future, he was glad enough to escape the life of a butcher. Not that he was squeamish, but on trips to the slaughterhouse to choose the big carcasses, he thought he recognized some of the cattle and sheep from the farms of his schoolmates’ families. Too bad the animals were so good to eat, because he preferred them alive, or at least when they had a sporting chance, like the rabbits and birds he hunted sometimes with Freddy and Da. Besides, a butcher stayed indoors, day in and day out, waiting on people, always the same housewives or the gentry’s uppity servants, who expected a man to grovel to them the way they did to their masters.
In fact it was one such servant who proposed the answer to Alec’s big question. The housekeeper of the nearby manor usually sent a maid to the butcher shop, but once each month she herself came after closing (with a footman to carry her parcels) to settle the account. On inquiring politely about Mr. Scudder’s wife and sons, she learned that young Alec would soon finish school and was about to start seeking work. This she found interesting because her brother-in-law—the gamekeeper at the grandest estate, she claimed, in all of Dorset—had recently been authorized to hire a boy as his assistant. Knowing the Scudders to be a respectable family, she would be pleased to mention Alec for the post, if Mr. Scudder wished her to do so. Indeed Mr. Scudder so wished.
“A sarvant?” said Alec (aghast) at supper. “Deliverin’ me into bondage, yer own son?”
“Oh, the high dudgeon,” said Elwood, rolling his eyes. He turned to his wife: “That’s from your side.”
“If so,” Aderyn quipped, “then it comes with good looks and quick wits.”
Alec pled, “I’m to bow down to toffs and kiss their patent-leather shoes?”
“Now, Alec, a gamekeeper’s different—you’ll be out in the healt’y fresh air all the day, not dancin’ attendance at table.”
“How far away is this place?” said the mother. “Whenever will we see the boy?”
“I wouldn’t do it, not me,” said Fred. “I treat no man as my better; it degrades the whole family.”
Elwood looked askance at his elder son. “Thanks, Fred, for your learned opinion.”
The younger one groaned: “It’s the twentieth century, Da—no more peasants and serfs; mankind’s evolved.”
“I’m aware of the date, and we’ve not yet evolved out of eating.”
“But sarvitude…,” Alec said. “It’s come to that? After all me hard work in school, even stoodyin’ Latin…”
“A noddin’ acquaintance with Caesar won’t feed you—which, these days, God love ya, has become no paltry expense. What skills have you, son? Learn a skill for yourself, as our Freddy has butchery, and then take it wherever you will. You’re always a free man. You might even go overseas someday and join your brother.”
“Not Licky too!” said Aderyn.
“Don’t fret for your baby, Ma,” said Fred. “There’s no gamekeepers in the Argentine—it’s
only toffs have gamekeepers, and there’s no toffs there.”
“Frederick!” Elwood said, smacking the table. “Ain’t it time you go visit your sweetheart?”
After many such conversations, wherein Alec invoked both Magna Carta and the Rights of Man; after scrounging with no luck for work in Osmington and losing all hope when his mother suggested he might go north to join her distant cousin near Leeds (where he pictured himself expiring, consumptive and half-blind, in a windowless sweatshop); after many tests of his father’s long-suffering Alec agreed to give service as a gamekeeper’s boy a try.
2
But before Alec left school and home, Osmington had one more lesson to teach him. On what he knew would be his last visit to the library, he saw a notice for a theatrical event of particular interest to him to be held in Dorchester: EPIC PHYSIQUE CONTEST. The poster featured a clichéd strongman, swiped from a circus ad, but the copy promised a contest of strength, artistry, health, and muscular development, to be judged by William L. Murray of Nottingham, winner of the 1901 Grand Competition in Royal Albert Hall, produced by Eugen Sandow. There would be the substantial prize of twenty guineas.
Sneaking into the show on the next Saturday afternoon proved easy enough among the crowd. He figured that if he wore his school clothes, he could pass for a shopkeeper’s son. The trick worked: he slipped unnoticed under the nose of an usher who’d been handed several tickets at once. Inside, he found the house full to overflowing. He weaseled down a side aisle and stood close as he could to the stage.
The MC called for quiet; then he spoke about the friendship of King Edward with the great Sandow. His Majesty loved all sport and held that the health and strength of Englishmen were key to the might of the empire. The king himself had deigned to patronize the first Grand Competition in London. Now Dorchester was honored by the champion of that contest, who would judge today’s contest. The criteria were as follows: general muscular development, strength, symmetry, health, and tone of the skin. To begin this athletic display, Mr. Murray himself would give a short exhibition of his award-winning physique. The crowd applauded as Murray entered, his red robe bound with a sash. He untied the sash and let the robe slide to the floor: he was naked except for a loincloth and sandals laced up to his shins. Everyone clapped and whistled.
Alec Page 1