“For these are but the first and faintest signs of a disease that will as certainly engulf your body as it imperils your immortal soul. Swiftly the insidious and pleasurable poison saps your very vitals. It invests your nerves and strips them of all power of coherence. Step by step it leads on to paralysis and insanity. Not ten miles from where you now sit is an institution dignified by the name of ‘academy.’ But it is a very different place from this.
“True, you will find boys there, some no older than yourselves. But never again will they taste the sweet intercourse of family life. In the few dishonoured years—or days—that remain to them, the empty rooms and corridors of their minds will ring to the insistent demands of one unceasing, lewd, disgusting passion. They are so far gone in depravity that even the fond embrace of a dear sister or a loving mother would serve only to kindle a lust that dares not own a name. But no sister or mother, however loving, could bring herself to embrace them. For they have grown quite furious and noisy. They are filthy and bloodless. Lacking all appetite but one, their flesh and strength is mere wreckage. And there they lie in reeking cubbyholes, chattering inane and loathsome suggestions, poor, pale, sightless, hairless creatures, abandoned by all as they have abandoned themselves, waiting daily—some even hourly—on a death as certain as it is pitiable.
“Yet even from those depths I am assured that the love of Christ has effected some amazing rescues. I have been told of a pastor who visited one such pitiable wreck of a human being and, finding him in a somewhat calm mood, talked to him quietly and manfully of Christ’s love even for such as him; whereupon the frail creature foreswore all his wantonness and within two weeks was visibly on the road to recovery; within six months he was sane again and restored to full and excellent health.”
Among chief’s hearers there was a perceptible welling up of relief. His picture of the final stages of sensual degradation had made many of them tremble and sweat. The smell of fear in that hall was strong. Boy was more affected than most. He was still shivering in terror, wiping his palms on his clothing and finding them, moments later, as wet as ever. He had no idea of the dangers to whose brink his light indulgences had brought him. Light indulgences! Dear God, now a veil had fallen from his eyes, the pit yawned ghastly deep at his very feet. Two more steps…one more, perhaps, and he might be tumbling into hell! And his dear mother and lovely sisters, how he had sullied their spotless purity with his vileness!
He looked at his body, his hands, his knees, his dirty schoolboy clothes, his coarse, clodhopping boots and saw, for the first time, how loathsome they were. He felt so utterly unworthy.
An image flashed into his mind: Mary Coen. The crippled servant girl on the Stevenson farm in Ireland. She had been crippled in one foot from childhood. Then there had been a terrible eviction when the police had set fire to a shelter of turf and furze her father had built. And all one side of her face and neck had been very badly burned because, being crippled, she couldn’t get out in time. Boy’s father had witnessed this appalling visitation of “justice,” had rescued the girl and had her nursed back to life, and then had given her work in their house in Connemara. Now Boy found himself—suddenly and unaccountably—wishing that his flesh, too, was as disfigured and slighted as Mary Coen’s, so that it carried upon it a visible and outward sign of its own inward degradation.
The image of Mary was so powerful, his yearning so all-consuming, that he missed the next part of chief’s preconfirmation talk. “How much more heinous, then,” chief was saying, “is the same abuse not in self but in mutuality, for there the pollution spreads not north but south as well, not east but west too, not up but down also. And I say now, I say it to you most solemnly with all the awful weight of a promise made before God Himself, that any boy who is found out in either act, whether solitary or mutual, will be required to quit this school and the company of decent fellows before another sun has set.”
Then he read them some passages from St. Paul, speaking of the great virtues and well-being that flow from controlling the spirit—not crushing it. “God’s plan,” he concluded, laying aside his book, “has never fairly been tried, m’boys. I most earnestly entreat you now to try it. Women were created expressly to help men in their life’s work. Now, in our own advanced and elevated state of society, the influence of good women is greater than ever, for they and they alone may lift mankind up to a rarer, purer life. You may think that here, where you are, far from your mothers and sisters, far from all soft influence, they are powerless to render you that pious service. But they are not! They are not! Their influence is so all-pervading that you may help them reach across time and space and pluck you up to a knowledge of your own manliness whenever you think you are about to fall among the beasts. Try it, m’boys, and you will feel their power. As the darkness closes around you, as Satan steals into your fingers, conjure up the image of some good woman in your life—a mother, no doubt, a sister, an aunt, a pious neighbour—and feel her eyes upon you. Let her disgust be yours. Borrow her purity as it were a shield. Beg her take a brush to every unswept corner in you. And I promise you, I promise you, within six weeks you will find abstinence to be your natural order. Self-control will be easy.”
“My sister,” de Lacy muttered to Boy as they filed out, “is such a vile-looking hag she’d put you off any thought of fructification for life—never mind six weeks. I’ll sell you her portrait for a quid.”
“I ain’t got a sister,” said a boy called Capon-Smith. “And I barely see me mater above twice a year. I somehow think Manhole Kate is going to fit the good-woman bill the best. Good for a bit of fructification, anyday!”
“Manhole Kate” was one of the alleged loose women of Langstroth; a hundred fellows boasted her conquest for every one who even attempted it.
Boy left them and walked alone as soon as he could. His mind—his whole body—were still in a turmoil. How could these others treat their own impurity so lightly, especially when it led directly to such terrible things: insanity and death, and the perdition of your soul? And expulsion, too!
Even worse, how could they fail to respond to the nobility that seemed to pour out of chief? What a power that great and good man had. As he had spoken, his every look and gesture seemed to convey to Boy, as flashing directly from one heart to another, a rugged masculine understanding of the trials of youthful flesh. Boy knew how strong were his own dangerous impulses, yet the warnings came from one whose every move and word proclaimed an animal nature as vigorous and as enjoying as his own. Brockman had not spoken out of mere convention of some abstract battle with the senses; that struggle had been felt and suffered and known to every degree.
But that alone had not won Boy over to the army of righteousness. Something even deeper, even less tangible had passed from man to boy in that encounter; a rarer and a high power had worked. Brockman had seemed to radiate an intense feeling for the value of a life. Of any life. Of each and every life. So that when Boy had felt at his worst, at his least deserving, at his most ungraced and ungifted, that stern and tender fire in Brockman’s eyes had cast its beam on him and found him wonderfully ripe for rescue. His broad, plain words had given Boy an enchanted glimpse of all he might become, of all that life itself might be.
Why, then, he found himself thinking, it is infinitely worthwhile to try to be good; chief has found me worthy of that promise. And so I shall be. Lord, help me now!
Part Two
1859–60
Chapter 17
I’ve spoken to her and it’s all arranged,” Nick Thornton said. He and Boy were walking around the garden at Thorpe Old Manor, waiting for dinner to be called. The Thornton children had come up to spend most of the summer holiday with the Stevensons—a week first in Yorkshire, then the best part of two months in Connemara.
“She’s not too young,” Nick went on. “I don’t know about you, I don’t get on too happily if they’re too young.”
Boy cleared his throat.
“Older ones are—I don’t know—nicer, somehow. Friendlier. Don’t you find?”
“Mmmm…er…”
“Anyway, she said she’d let us both do it for five bob. But only tomorrow afternoon.” He took a half-crown from his pocket and flipped it. The silver coin shimmered through a steep arc before Nick trapped it between palm and fist. He looked at it. “Tails!” he giggled. “That’s appropriate.”
He held the half-crown between thumb and forefinger. “Anyway, there’s my half-kick. Where’s yours?”
“I haven’t got that much money,” Boy said, only just managing to stifle the relief he felt.
Over the last four years he had manfully waged the struggle for which Brockman’s lecture, repeated annually with variations, had armed him. It had not been easy—it still was not easy. Time upon time he had imagined the battle was won, and effortless chastity had seemed within his grasp—only to awaken in the small hours and discover something more substantial there instead. Then, when his intellectual and moral faculties were at their lowest ebb, he would find himself the kidnap victim of his own body, whisked off on a detumescent romp that would last until the dawn came to save him and shame him.
Shame would then bind him at the wheel of carnal slavery for days or weeks while his higher faculties gathered their shattered forces and began their labours again…and yet again. These were always times of fierce desolation within him, times when he remembered as an outcast the great, high days of his near-triumph. He was that rare kind of outcast who knows he has deserved to lose the best of mankind and gain, in exchange, the worst of himself—and so must endlessly dwell on his own abjection.
How he used to hate his own body then. He would go without washing for as long as he could get away with it, rubbing his fingers into stinking crevices of his flesh and sniffing them to fire his own self-disgust. The early saints were said never to have washed. He knew why: the odour of sanctity is the stink of self-made-insufferable—and then suffered voluntarily.
He would walk out on the dales, too, saying his own name to himself—John, John, John…at each step until his mind begged relief from the all-obliterating boredom of it; but he would stop only when he came to some rocky cleft into which he could wedge his head and bear down until the pain made him cry aloud.
And in these ways he would usually elevate himself once again from the depths of sensual sloth to a new season of moral vigour. Always there came a moment when the struggle turned deeply joyful, worthwhile for itself alone. He knew then that before long he would be out of the mire, cleansed again, convinced that this time it was for good.
But there was a corresponding moment at the farther end of that sunny plateau—a moment when the glory began to hurt. Then goodness itself became an obsession, a burden to heap him, a rage. Then he knew that dark forces within were massing for one more assault—that, far from being cleansed, he was merely whited over. Most insidious of all was the cloying siren call of his senses, which became infected with precisely those yearnings he sought above all to suppress. Then anything—quite literally anything: the bark of a dog, paper blowing over the playing field, a merry shout, the smell of horsedung, the sight of his name on a team list—would dry his throat and set his heart a-flutter; a cavernous hollow settled on his guts; his muscles shivered for love. A shrieking for love bore in upon him from every angle of the day and night.
And it was while he stood on the brink of such a descent from the plateau that Nick Thornton had arrived with this loathsome and enticing suggestion. On arrival at York, Nick had slipped away from the rest of his family for long enough to meet this Station Road bedwarmer and arrange tomorrow’s assignation.
“I haven’t got that much money,” Boy said.
“Go on!” Nick laughed. “The eldest son of one of the richest men in England hasn’t got half-a-kick!”
“Honestly! A shilling’s all I could raise—without my mother finding out.”
“How? I don’t believe that.”
Boy shook his head, glad the talk was straying from its starting point. “You know her. If a farthing was to go rolling by on that highway up there”—he nodded toward the road, which was out of sight over the brow of the hill above the house—“she’d get to hear of it somehow.”
“Borrow from one of the servants then. I do that a lot.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that. I’ve never done that.”
Nick became agitated. “But you’ve got to! She won’t take me alone for half-a-crown. I tried that. This is a special price for two of us. So you have to. Don’t you want to?”
When Boy stayed silent, Nick gave a crafty smile. “Not scared, are you, Boy? Not that?”
“’Course I want to!” Boy answered angrily. “Look!” He held forth a trembling hand. “That’s how much I want to. But it’s not as simple as that, is it!”
Nick, impressed by Boy’s earnestness, did a stage bow. “I say! Let’s go up the tower and see if we can peep into the girls’ rooms!”
“Not our sisters!”
“No—the servants—fool!”
“Too early for them yet,” Boy said unthinkingly.
“Ha haa!” Nick taunted. “You know their times then!”
Boy blushed—Boy, whose many nightly vigils from the tower top over the last few years had but once been rewarded with a glimpse of what might have been a breast (or a shoulder, a hand, a handkerchief, a bowl of starch…something pale, anyway). In the end the greatest wonder had been the persistence that endured such cold and cramps for so meagre a return. The power that forced him to it was frightening.
Nick skipped up the steps of the old tower. Boy plodded behind him.
“Wouldn’t Caspar loan it you?” Nick asked before Boy was halfway.
Boy just shook his head. He walked past Nick and leaned against the parapet. The land fell gradually from the dry moat at the foot of the tower; then, a field and a half away, it curved over more steeply so that the bottom woods of Painslack Dykes were hidden. The southerly wind carried the gurgling of the brook to them on the parapet. Strangely, it was a sound you could never hear from the house, not even from the upstairs windows, though it was only a hundred yards or so farther up the hill.
“Oh, I say—lace curtains. That’s new,” Nick said, looking at the servant girls’ windows. “Someone must have noticed you’ve begun to shave. D’you know there’s four sets of stairs go up to their quarters?”
Boy laughed wearily. “Don’t you ever think of anything else?”
“Do you?”
Boy punched him playfully.
“And they all creak like pensioners,” Nick added.
“What would your mother say, Nick, if she knew what you were planning for tomorrow?”
Nick laughed uproariously, startling a jackdaw out of the ivy that clad the tower. “She’d throw a fit and die, I’m sure.”
“But don’t her wishes mean anything to you?”
The question left Nick solemnly puzzled. “I don’t exactly seek her consent, you know.”
“But that shouldn’t alter it. You know what she would say.”
“Exactly so. That’s why I don’t distress her by asking.”
“What if you should think of her while doing it, though?”
Nick made the sound of vomit. “Are you quite sane?” he asked. “Why in God’s name should I do that?”
Boy stared glumly over the waving corn. He remembered lovely guessing games with his father up here—and Winifred—in the days of his long-dead innocence. The best of his life was out there.
If only he could explain it to Nick the way Brockman would; but he knew that if he even tried it, Nick would laugh him to scorn. “What about yourself?” he asked. “What about what it does to you?”
“It sets me to rights, of course. Good heavens, Boy, you’re like an old woman!”
Boy despera
tely searched for facts, remembered facts from chief’s annual talks. Surprising how few they were. “Each spending,” he said, recalling one, “is like a shovel of soil on your grave.”
Nick did not laugh; he imitated a deflating balloon. “Tell it to the stud boar!” he sneered. “Ask him who outlives all the rigs! Oh, come on, Boy—it’d be fun. It’s what women are there for. It’s what we are for.” He spun the coin again and almost failed to catch it. “It’s what half-crowns are for!”
It would be more than mere fun, Boy thought. It would be one of the greatest adventures ever. It would clear away so many mysteries—what are they like down there? What do they feel like to touch? You could run your hands over a hundred marble statues and never know. It would be crossing the Rubicon.
“Very well—I’ll borrow another bob off of someone and go solo,” Nick said.
“No!” Boy cried, without thinking.
“Ha!” Nick shrieked in delight as the cry of dinner! came from the house. “You old fraud!”
***
Their ostensible reason for going down to York was to meet Nick’s father off the mid-afternoon train. Their ostensible reason for going early was that Walter Thornton, being a senior engineer on the Great Western Railway, was apt to borrow engines (on the excuse that they needed a test run) and drive them himself, often arriving earlier than scheduled.
When they reached the station they told Willet, the coachman, to come back at three. Then Boy and Nick told Caspar to wait for them on the platform. “We’re going for a drink, Steamer,” Nick said conspiratorially. “Keep my pater busy if he turns up early.”
Caspar, being a few days short of sixteen, was not thought an adequate companion for this most grown-up of treats.
“He’ll be happier watching the trains,” Boy said as they went out into Station Road. They both laughed at the juvenile amusements of the young ’un.
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