‘Ah, so,’ said Barnaby, ‘but Algy was twenty years threatening to rebuild those latrines. It was fortunate I concealed the source of my information concerning the euphemistic “Noble”. As it is, what the devil can you do, without sacrificing your dignity?’
‘You let me worry about my dignity,’ and he moved up to the staff dining table, choosing a seat between Bouncer, who had not been present when the ultimatums were issued, and old Rapper Gibbs, who never spoke at mealtimes. Fifteen minutes before the bell signalled the first of the afternoon periods he made his way to Alcock’s study.
He had not been in here since Algy left and was stunned by the changes. The place had always looked a regular tip, with papers spilling from every chair, books from every shelf, and every inch of wall-space covered with group photographs of Bamfeldians in operatic or athletic costume. Now, he mused, it looked like a specialist’s waiting-room. Every book and paper was in its proper place, and the walls, freshly distempered, were quite bare. He wondered what Alcock had done with all those yellowing groups, including the one Algy had pointed out the first afternoon he stood here – Bamfylde’s Fifteen of the 1913/14 season, the names of all but two inscribed on the cross outside. Alcock was at his desk, writing. He even had the look of a specialist, an exclusive and very expensive specialist, very scrubbed, very clinical. His manner, without being friendly, was polite.
‘Do take a seat, Powlett-Jones. I won’t keep you a moment,’ and he wrote an address on an envelope and used a sponge to seal it. ‘He would,’ David thought, ‘licking would be out for him,’ and as Alcock raised his head he said, ‘It’s about that little notice, Headmaster. There’s no occasion to cancel the holiday.’
‘You have identified the culprit?’
‘In a sense I have. It was me.’
‘You removed that notice?’
‘I had a good reason.’
‘Of course. What was it?’
‘It was defaced.’
‘You mean you caught someone defacing it?’
‘No. Everyone was at lunch when I found it.’
‘I see. You kept it, I hope?’
‘No, I didn’t. It was scrawled over and if I could make a suggestion, Headmaster, I should advise replacing it and leaving the matter there. It won’t be interfered with again, they’ve had their warning.’
‘I rather think that’s a matter for me to decide, Powlett-Jones.’
‘Yes, of course. I was offering a suggestion.’
‘It’s good of you.’ There was a moment’s silence, Alcock occupied in lifting and clasping his hands, as if in prayer. ‘Damn it, the man doesn’t even doodle,’ David thought, ‘he probably did once and cured himself of the habit.’ Then, from Alcock: ‘I made my first appeal two days ago. You seem to have been reluctant to tell me. Was there a reason for that? Possibly you suspect a boy from your house?’
‘I haven’t the least idea who it was. In the circumstances, however, I think you’ll agree that any member of the staff would hesitate to admit that he had removed a notice posted up by the headmaster.’
‘I really can’t see why.’
‘You don’t think he would have found it embarrassing?’
‘That depends on the nature of the defacement. Just how was it defaced?’
For a moment David was almost inclined to tell him, and see what he made of it, but he thought better of it. He said ‘Nothing particularly obscene, if that’s what you’re thinking. Just a piece of schoolboy mischief.’
‘In other words, you refuse to tell me in what way the notice was interfered with?’
‘Yes, I do. The main thing is that you now know that a boy didn’t remove it.’
‘I don’t think that’s relevant, Powlett-Jones. The main factor is surely that one of my staff, and a housemaster at that, refuses to co operate with me in the maintenance of discipline.’
‘I’m sorry, Headmaster, I still think it’s best forgotten.’
He had expected some reaction but there was none. Alcock had himself completely in hand. The familiar empty expression had returned to his oddly puckish face. He said, standing, ‘Well, then, we shall have to leave it there, won’t we? Regretfully, on my part, I may add.’
He nodded and David moved out into the corridor, leading to Big School. He had a strong sensation of having been dismissed, or having narrowly escaped a thrashing for some silly prank, of the kind Boyer had perpetrated when he was in the Lower Fourth. There was no victory here for either of them, just stalemate, leaving their relationship, an important one for Bamfylde he would say, precisely where it had been before he tampered with that damned notice. He mooched off to take the Upper Fifth in his favourite nineteenth century but there was neither pleasure nor profit in the period. Gilroy, still stuck with the name ‘Strofe’, on account of mispronunciation of ‘apostrophe’ years ago, remarked to Fogaty, as second bell rang and David moved off, ‘What’s eating old Pow-Wow these days? He’s been moody all term, hasn’t he?’ and Fogaty, who missed very little, replied, ‘He isn’t hitting it off with Noble. Wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t pack it in after a term or two.’
‘I hope to God not,’ Gilroy said. ‘We could do a lot worse than Pow-Wow. At least he can make a period pass quicker than some of them.’
3
It did, in fact, occur to him to start hunting up another job during the Christmas break, when he and Grace went to Wales for a fortnight, and afterwards spent a long weekend in town with Beth’s folk, but then he realised that resignation, at this stage, would be an empty gesture he would live to regret. He had small hopes of learning to live with Alcock, as all but he and Carter seemed able to do, and apart from that silly business of the notice there had been no open conflict between them, only a dragging sense of impermanence and disarray that hung over the school, as though he and everyone else were experiencing everything second-hand. It astonished him that only Carter, whom he had always regarded as a very insensitive man, shared this sense of strain.
Then, towards the end of the Lent term, the ‘Stoker’ Monk crisis was upon them, reducing the litter-notice tiff to insignificance.
Monk was a seventeen-year-old in the Upper Fifth, whose addiction to pipe tobacco had earned him his nickname as a Third Former. Returning from a visit to Austria he startled the hard core of Bamfylde’s smokers by squatting on a trunk in the hideout above the covered playground (the smokers’ favourite retreat) and puffing away at a huge, ungainly pipe, with a bowl carved in the shape of a Tyrolean peasant’s head.
The addicts had laid bets that Monk would throw up in something under three minutes, but he did not. On the contrary, he seemed proof against the fumes of the strong Longshoreman’s Flake he was using, and henceforth refused anything less lethal, declaring that a cigarette was a little lad’s smoke. Soon it was rumoured that Stoker got through two ounces of pipe tobacco every week. He was caught on three occasions, twice by prefects, who beat him, and once by Carter, his housemaster, who lectured him for the better part of forty minutes and beat him into the bargain, but at least Carter refrained from carrying out his threat to write to Monk senior. Stoker, a quick-witted boy, pleaded that Monk Senior had a serious heart condition, and hinted that a letter home might lay Carter open to a charge of manslaughter.
Beating and lectures notwithstanding, however, Stoker refused to be parted from his pipe, replacing the three that were confiscated by a fourth of equally extravagant design. Apart from his incurable smoking habits, he was an amiable, law-abiding boy, and his academic progress better than average. Somewhere along the line he had acquired the habitual pipesmoker’s habit of cool reflection, and could digest everything he imbibed in class. He thus sailed through exams and trick questions held no terrors for him. He could sniff them out, he said, in the phraseology they employed.
His end-of-term reports were spattered with commendations. He was living proof, his contemporaries declared, that the warning alleging the habit caused dire shortness of wind was a load of codswallop.
Monk made the Junior Fifteen while he was still in the Upper Third, and the First Fifteen a year later, where he played as scrum-leader throughout the season Bamfylde never lost a game. He was also a long-distance runner, and came close to winning his running colours last season, so that Carter, himself a non-smoker, was baffled by Monk and through bafflement came to conceive a deep respect for the boy. Perhaps he saw him as a medical phenomenon, to whom ordinary rules of health did not apply. At all events, he made him a house prefect and looked the other way if he had reason to believe that yet another pipe had replaced the one with the negro’s head, now reposing in the Outram repository of confiscated items. He was heard to say, on the last occasion Stoker’s name came up over common room coffee, ‘He’s going to have quite a collection of keepsakes when he leaves. As well as three pipes, all made in appalling taste, there are two catapults and an air-pistol, dating from his pre-smoking days. I suppose we should rejoice that the Stoker took to the weed. Harmful it may be but only to Stoker.’ They deduced from this that Monk qualified as one of Carter’s favourites.
David’s first knowledge of the crisis at Outram’s came when Carter stopped him in the quad after morning school one gusty March day. He seemed extremely agitated and the signs were so obvious that David enquired if he was ill. ‘Not ill,’ Carter said, breathlessly, ‘but more upset than I can remember being since the day those asses appointed that brute over both our heads. Will you oblige me by stepping inside a moment, P.J.?’
David, mystified, followed him up the steps into Outram’s, remembering the occasion he had gone there to complain of Carter’s snide comment on his political sympathies. It seemed a long time ago. Already the benign reign of Herries was receding into history. Carter closed the door and stood with his back to it, still breathing very heavily, and looking dazed and distraught.
‘You won’t believe it, P.J.,’ he spluttered at length, ‘nobody would who really knew the old Stoker. It’s clear against the rules. Everybody knows that. But in every other way Stoker’s a brick, an absolute brick! Besides, he’s due to sit for matric in June. Why the devil did he have to do it there, of all places? Why didn’t the idiot stick to the plantation? That’s where they go since we rooted them out of the covered playground, isn’t it?’
‘You aren’t making much sense. Do I gather Alcock caught Monk smoking one of his gaudy pipes?’
‘In the coke-hole, after prep. He should have known the wretched man is always poking about in premises that were always left to the maintenance staff. And now he’s been sacked. Sacked, you hear? And without so much as a reference to me, if you please! I wouldn’t have known a thing about it if the boy hadn’t made a direct approach to me.’
‘Alcock sacked Monk for smoking? Is that what you’re telling me?’
‘I said you wouldn’t believe it. Hang it, if every boy caught smoking had been expelled over the time I’ve been here, we should have been reduced to a handful of prep school boys by now. You know it and I know it! Everybody knows it except that… that iceberg over there!’
‘Have you tried to talk him out of it?’
‘Good God, man, of course I have but I didn’t make the slightest impression. I pointed out that Stoker was a splendid type in every other respect, and that no one had ever been expelled for smoking, but he kept insisting that Monk was a previous offender and he was going to make an example of him. I begged and pleaded. Practically grovelled before him, but the man has no human feelings, P.J. I even suggested a compromise, that we let Stoker stay on, take the exam in June, and leave in July, but he didn’t take kindly to that either. Now old Stoker is packing and that brute is putting him on the four o’clock train. How did he know Stoker had been caught once or twice in Herries’s time?’
‘He probably keeps a dossier on everyone, us included. But what did you think I could do about it, beyond sympathising?’
Carter looked evasive, then said, with a rush, ‘You’re… you’re very popular here, P.J. More popular than any of us, I’d say. You get along with people in a way I never could.’
‘Good of you to say that, Carter, but I’m less popular with the Noble Stoic than anybody. If you want someone to intercede, and I don’t think it would do any good, why not approach Barnaby, Howarth or both?’
‘I mean to,’ Carter said, knitting his sandy brows, ‘but… er… through you, if you follow me, P.J.’
‘I don’t, but I’ll do anything I can to help.’
‘Well, then, suppose you tackle Barnaby, Howarth and some of the others, and get them to add their names to this. They’d do it for you. I don’t think they would for me,’ and he took a paper from his ‘in’ tray and thrust it under David’s nose.
It was a sheet of letterheaded Bamfylde notepaper, rubber stamped ‘Out-ram’s’, and closely written in Carter’s neat, legible hand. It said:
Sir, we, the undersigned, respectfully request a reprieve on behalf of C.J. Monk. We do this in the hope that you will reconsider three factors, all of which we regard as extenuating, viz:
We have all known Monk since he first came here four years ago and can testify, (corroborating the opinion of his housemaster) that he has proved a great asset to the school; socially, academically, athletically.
No previous warning has been issued to the effect that smoking carries a mandatory penalty of expulsion. We feel one such warning should be given.
Monk is due to sit for University Entrance in June.
In our view he is certain to gain exemption from matriculation. Dismissal now would have a disastrous effect upon his career.
Signed,
T. S. CARTER, M.A. (London)
‘Good God,’ David exclaimed, ‘this is a bit of a belly-crawl, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it is,’ said Carter, readily, ‘but that’s the point. An appeal like that, signed by all the old hands, will be a feather in Alcock’s cap, even if it means him climbing down. If that petition is in his hands before Monk’s train leaves, I’ve got a feeling he’ll act on it, in his own interests. It isn’t blather, either. The old Stoker is aiming for the F.O., and expulsion would put paid to that, unless he could bring some powerful influence to bear. I happen to know he couldn’t. His father is an ironmonger. Will you do it, P.J.? For him, and for me? I can’t tell you how much I’d appreciate it.’
It was not only Carter’s pitiful earnestness that prevailed but David’s curiosity concerning the reaction of Alcock and the staff to his extraordinary petition. Especially, now that he came to think about it, that of men who had been his own and Carter’s colleagues for more than ten years. One assumed that one got to know people very well in these confined circumstances, but clearly this was taking too much for granted. Why if Howarth, Barnaby and old Rapper Gibbs were friends, was he quite unable to predict in advance how any one of them would respond to a move that would diminish them in the eyes of Alcock. There were several unknown factors here. How much loyalty and comradeship existed between them, now that Algy had retired? How many would be likely to put themselves in Carter’s place? Or in Stoker Monk’s place? How much dignity would, say, Howarth, be prepared to sacrifice in the cause of Carter and Monk? Answers to these imponderables might be interesting.
Tucking the letter into his jacket pocket he said, ‘I’ll give it a try, Carter. I haven’t got much faith in it working but you’d probably do the same for me.’
‘I would, I would, P.J.’
‘Maybe you’ll have to, if things don’t take a turn for the better,’ and to bypass Carter’s gush of gratitude he hurried out, crossing the quad and making his way up the staircase over the Fifth to Barnaby’s quarters.
It would be best, he thought, to start with an easy one, and Barnaby was by far the most congenial man on the staff. Aware of the need to cut corners he explained the situation in a few sentences, then produced Carter’s plea, having added his own signature before knocking on Barnaby’s door. At least one man was predictable. Barnaby, regarding the thing as a huge joke, signed without hesitat
ion.
‘We seek tears from the Noble Stoic of the woods? I think the hope is vain, P.J., but I should be delighted to be proved wrong. Whom will you tackle next? Howarth? He’ll refuse, shooting quills in all directions. Come to think of it, I doubt if he’d sign a bleat like that for you, much less Carter.’
Bouncer and Rapper both signed, the one gladly, because he agreed with Carter that the sack for smoking was ‘a bit much’. His standard punishment, four penal marks, would have been more seemly, he thought. Rapper Gibbs, the music master, signed reluctantly, and after a good deal of persuasion on David’s part.
‘I’m not doing it for Carter or Monk,’ he grunted, ‘but because you’ve got yourself mixed up in it. Seems to me I owe you a favour or two, Powlett-Jones, but maybe you’ve forgotten.’
‘I’m afraid I have. What favour do you owe me?’ Rapper sniffed and rubbed his long nose, a habit he had picked up from Algy during the countless operatic rehearsals they had shared over the years.
‘Well, not you, exactly,’ he said, ‘your wife.’
‘Beth?’
‘I was very fond of her, did you know that? Best leading lady we ever had, and the easiest to coach. No sulks and no temperament, just hard graft, ending in a rattling good performance, even when she was carrying those twins of yours.’ He looked glum for a moment. ‘They were the salad-days, Powlett-Jones. We aren’t likely to see their like again under him. This is the first year since 1904 we haven’t produced a Gilbert and Sullivan. He thinks they’re frivolous, you know. So what did we have to cheer us along last Christmas?’
‘Excerpts from Molière.’
‘Ah, yes. Lot of piffle. Who the devil wants to listen to a lot of French gibberish? Nobody, save that rackety chap. Molyneux. Place isn’t what it was, is it?’
‘If it was I wouldn’t be standing here asking you to put your name to a document of this kind,’ David said, and Gibbs signed, advising him to try Molyneux next, for Molyneux and Carter had ‘once been thick, hadn’t they?’
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