The Fall of Doctor Onslow (4 page)

Primrose sighed.

They were silent for a while, and Louisa turned the gig back towards Charton. After a few minutes’ trotting, she turned to her brother and said cheerfully:

‘Well, whatever else, you and I and Dr Onslow find ourselves in agreement when it comes to the odiousness of Evangelicals. I must take what comfort I can from that.’

‘Very true!’ said Primrose. ‘I promise to confine my conversation on religious matters to abusing them in the most unchristian way imaginable.’

Louisa smiled, and slapped the reins down on the horse’s back, making him break into a canter.

Winter sunlight cut like ice through the high and glittering windows, firing the red and blue glass in the chancel to painful intensities of colour. It bleached the faces of the boys who sat rank upon rank in their shallow pews, four hundred and sixty of them all in black and white, and showed up the grey at the back of their necks. The shadows cast by pillars were not dim and peaceful, but divided the space like knives, and between them on the south wall, colder than snow, there stood out the new marble tablet inscribed with names of Charton boys killed in the Crimea.

The sound of the organ died away. Onslow mounted the steps of the pulpit, and waited for total silence to descend, his eyes daring the boys to fidget and cough. The pulpit concealed his lack of physical stature, and he leant forward, and said:

‘My text is taken from the Book of Ecclesiastes, chapter four, verses nine and ten: “Two are better than one … for, if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth”.’

Christian Anstey-Ward perceived no merit in what he saw as the unpleasantly earthbound melancholy of Ecclesiastes, Onslow’s favourite book of the Old Testament.

Before he discovered Plato and ‘Hellas’, Christian had passed through an intensely religious phase, during which he had fed his inchoate longings for a spiritual home with medievalism and Gothic art, and with memories of all Onslow had told him in confirmation classes about the sublime beauty of doctrine. Not until after ‘Hellas’ came to occupy his mind did Christian acknowledge to himself that
he was in fact repelled by much of what conventional religion had to offer: the impossibilities and immoralities of the Old Testament, the barbarian imagery of Heaven’s promise in Revelation, the cold dogmatism of St Paul. Yet having acknowledged this, he continued to believe that the more amiable parts of the New Testament were compatible with the
Symposium,
and though his interest in the Gothic faded, and his flirtation with extreme High Churchmanship came to an end, at seventeen he still considered himself to be a Christian of a kind. He was only just beginning to blame Christianity for his masters’ inability to see anything but grammar in the works of Greek literature they professed to understand: he imagined Onslow thought it theologically unsafe to see the world as he did, in the light of Platonic truth, and this gave him a thrill of daring.

Onslow preached an impeccably orthodox sermon on his chosen text, though he secretly admired Ecclesiastes for its unchristian stoicism, the permission it gave to retire from the struggle for endless improvement and contemplate reality in stony acceptance. He was a good preacher, whose sermons had been published and compared to Dr Arnold’s, and Christian thought those parts of his discourse he heard when his mind was not wandering were admirable, after their fashion. But he found it hard to concentrate, partly because this was the third service and second sermon of the day. Arthur Bright, who was sitting next to him, was finding it equally difficult.

Ten days had passed since Bright had kissed his lover in front of Christian. Since then, Christian had ignored him, and Bright was not indifferent to this. It was the attention of others which served to stave off the loneliness that threatened him like a fog in all his waking hours: even the attention of someone he did not greatly care for was worth having, especially when that person lived in Taylor’s. Looking now at Christian’s profile, Bright remembered how they used to share an interest in church architecture, and how Christian had become bored with it. He wondered that anyone so plain and so dull should dare to think ill of
him and his interests, should prefer loneliness to his company – without sufficient cause.

Onslow had begun his sermon by giving a description of true friendship and the help it afforded in the struggle to attain godliness; he had now moved on to describe counterfeited friendships, which he said were all too common in Public Schools.

‘The commonest counterfeit of friendship,’ he said, ‘is that sort of connection which one of you forms with another by the accident of being inmates of the same house or room, of having the same master or tutor, or by some more entire accident still, which has thrown you together whether you would or no, and out of which has sprung something which either deserves or assumes the name of a friendship. How many of these intimacies, think you, deserve that name, and how many are counterfeits of friendship? Are you and your friend any help to one another? any help, that is, in matters in which it is any advantage to help one another? any help in doing your duty, in resisting your temptations, in advancing towards the goal of life; the near goal, a useful manhood, the further goal, a happy eternity? Again, have you and your friend a common object? Do you even know anything about one another’s objects? Are not matters of the highest moment entirely suppressed between you?’

Out of his pocket Bright took a receipted bill and a pencil-stub. Pressing down on his Bible, he scribbled:

‘Do you remember once telling me that you suspected Onslow of being something of a hypocrite? You were perfectly right, but you didn’t know the half of it. I am tempted by the sermon to reveal to you the Shocking Truth: I have been his bitch for the past 6 months. Do you think this is a counterfeited friendship, or not? I long to know.’ This he laid in the gap between Christian’s thighs: his eyes were sparkling, his cheeks flushed, his lips twitching, and his heart beating fast.

For two minutes he watched the other read it, and he calmed down rapidly as he did so. At length Christian held out his right hand for the pencil, looking up at Onslow as
he did so, not down at the note or at Bright’s anxious face. Without lowering his eyes, he wrote:

‘Do you expect me to believe you?’ at the bottom of the paper. Then, as Bright laid a finger on it, he clamped it down on his leg and added in a scrawl: ‘What a very disgusting lie.’

Bright made a sound as he read this. Christian, with a face as motionless as Onslow’s when listening to a bad lesson, quickly folded up the note and pushed it deep down into his right trouser-pocket, from where Bright could not extract it without a struggle. No struggle was possible in chapel.

The sermon came to an end, and Onslow left the pulpit. During the remainder of the service, Christian did not once look in Bright’s direction, and when it was over and they were at last able to leave, he flung away from him and walked swiftly off alone, up towards the open country behind the parish church. After half a mile, he came to a five-barred gate, set back a little from the road, and climbed over. Hidden behind the hedge there was an old tree-stump, which he had discovered his first term at Charton, and on this he went to sit down. The countryside round about offered nothing better in the way of a private place.

Seated at last, Christian blinked miserably at the orange and gold of the westering sun, gleaming out from under a cold eiderdown of cloud. His flesh soon became chilled, for his clothes were inadequate and the tree-stump was icy, but he did not consider going back yet. He had come here to think. It was hard to think. When he tried to do so, he only realised that his reaction to Bright’s note had not been that of someone who honestly believed what it said to be a stupid lie intended to shock him; and this distressed him, for it meant he would be laughed at. The thought of gross laughter at his expense was unbearable, almost worse than the thought that Bright had not lied.

Possessed of the knowledge that whether Bright’s allegation were true or false, the last straw had been laid on his back, all Christian could do for the present was think how much he detested Onslow’s school, where such things could happen – especially did he detest its everlasting, dreary
religion. Suddenly he resented that religion with extreme bitterness. He remembered Onslow preaching in the pulpit less than an hour ago, preaching calmly, gracefully, as he did every Sunday. Always he preached not on doctrine, but on morals. He reserved the delicate consideration of doctrine for his confirmation classes.

Blowing on his hands to warm them, Christian suddenly remembered how on the night after Brandon was caught making an assignation in school, Bright had dropped certain hints about Onslow’s reaction being exceedingly amusing in the circumstances. He remembered his saying that if he indeed thought he knew the worst of Charton … His mind now cleared a little, Christian tried to force himself to consider rationally whether Bright had been telling the truth. It was still hard to do so directly, but he remembered Onslow’s once placing a hand on his knee when he was reading an essay to him on the sofa in his study. He blushed vividly. At the time he had thought nothing of it, had thought it a mere friendly gesture of warmth and encouragement – a hand on the upper thigh might have been differently interpreted. As it was, it had been agreeable to learn that Onslow was not altogether cold, was more like other men than he seemed. Gestures of physical affection were normal, admirable – sometimes Hellenic.

He is a pasha in a harem of boys, thought Christian now, forgetting that Bright had alleged only that Onslow was engaged in a love-affair with him. The vision of Headmaster Onslow luxuriating in vice like a second Tartuffe was too fascinating to be thrust away, for it would provide a complete explanation of Charton’s loathesomeness – but Christian was attempting to be sensible, and after a short while he concluded that the vision could not possibly resemble reality, in spite of that hand on his knee. He could only be thankful that he had called Bright a liar, that if his actions had conveyed doubt, his words had not, and therefore he could not be mocked.

Slowly he got up from his tree-stump, and made his way back to school in the dismal twilight.

Though for the boys at Charton most of Sunday was filled with religious services, Onslow was not a devout sabbatarian, and saw no gross immorality in reading secular works or even fiction once church was over. That evening in the drawing room, after dinner and prayers, he said:

‘Well, Martin, I finished
Tom
Brown
’
s
Schooldays
this afternoon.’

Tom
Brown
’
s
Schooldays
had been published the year before, and was enjoying a great success, but it had not come Onslow’s way till Primrose gave him a copy, insisting that he read it in spite of his contempt for novels. It was the fact that the book concerned Dr Arnold’s Rugby which made Primrose so determined.

‘Do you think it gives a fair portrait of Rugby?’ said Primrose. ‘I cannot think so – I remember nothing whatever of such shocking violence as he describes.’

‘My dear Martin, of course it is not a fair portrait of Rugby. It is almost a disgrace.’

‘I certainly fail to see why it was necessary to write such lurid and untruthful descriptions of bullying, and fights. The monster Flashman, and so forth. I suppose a certain class of reader is attracted to them.’

‘Oh, that! No, the truth is that you were held in such awe you were left in peace, and you were so much preoccupied by higher matters that you noticed nothing that was sordid. I am thinking of the shameful misrepresentation of Dr Arnold.’

‘I liked the description of his preaching, the chapel,’ said Primrose. ‘Did you not, Louie?’

‘Yes, though naturally I do not know how truthful it is,’ said Louisa.

‘That was all very well, I grant you, but how can you tolerate Mr Hughes’s implying that our master’s conception of a manly character resembled Tom Brown? You told me he was at Rugby himself; how could he have come to think that he – Arnold – revered an honest blockhead?’

‘He certainly thought it more important to be a Christian than to be a scholar.’

‘Certainly! But do you think he would have considered Tom Brown a Christian? Where is his awareness of his Saviour, his awareness of sin? He cares less for Christ than for cricket. And yet Mr Hughes declares at the end of the book that the Doctor was satisfied with him.’

Onslow got up to poke the fire, and Louisa raised her head to look at him. It seemed to her that he was being unduly vehement, and she glanced across at her brother. Meditatively she sucked the end of a piece of silk before using it to thread her needle; this was a habit of which none of her governesses had succeeded in breaking her.

‘A manly character,’ said Onslow briskly to the fire, ‘is not one possessed of what I believe is called a punishing right, or left – do you remember Mr Hughes’s remarkable paean in favour of fisticuffs? – but one who is aware of the need to combat sin in himself and in others. Is there one hint in that book that this was our master’s view?’ It was rare for Onslow to talk in this firmly moral strain outside the pulpit. ‘Instead he is portrayed almost as believing that most schoolboy crimes are mere pieces of mischief, scarcely deserving the name of sin. How well I remember his teaching me otherwise.’

‘So do I, indeed,’ said Primrose.

Onslow turned to him, and said almost angrily:

‘My dear Martin, you were as innocent as a newborn kitten, you have never understood sin because you are incapable of committing it and you always were. Do not attempt to make me believe that Arnold ever found it necessary to show you the heinousness of your offences, for you committed none.’

‘What nonsense!’ Primrose said, though it was true that Dr Arnold had never once found it necessary to correct him. ‘Really, I am quite insulted to learn you think that I, in my profession, have no understanding of sin.’

‘Your goodness sprang from the heart, as everyone could see,’ Onslow went on regardless. He seemed about to say something else, but Louisa interrupted.

‘Were
you
ever naughty?’

‘Yes,’ said Onslow. ‘Yes, I was what you choose to call naughty. That was before I knew you, Martin – I was in the Fifth and you were already in the Sixth.’

‘What did you do?’ said Primrose, looking interested.

‘Oh, let us say I broke most of the rules devised for our social and spiritual benefit,’ said Onslow. ‘But I was never detected, possibly because whatever I did outside school, I was always careful not to neglect my schoolwork. Surely I have told you this before?’

‘And I suppose you must have been very careful in other ways,’ said Louisa.

‘Yes, Louisa, highly skilled in the art of deceit.’

‘If you were never detected,’ said Primrose, making a steeple of his fingers and raising them to his lips, ‘how and why did Arnold show you the error of your ways?’

There was a long pause. Then Onslow replied:

‘I entered the Sixth. Is that not a sufficient explanation – that I was thereafter constantly exposed to his mind and his eye?’ Having said this, he left his place by the fireplace, went to sit down again, and continued: ‘But knowing what I do of parents, I cannot be surprised that the book has been so successful. What a comfort it must be to them to think that the more loutish are their sons, the more they are possessed of Mr Hughes’s new cardinal virtue of Englishness.’

Louisa and Primrose both smiled, and the subject was changed.

*

The same evening, Christian found a letter from Bright waiting for him on the table in his room. It was in a sealed envelope, and when he opened it he read:

There were words in Onslow’s very small and neat but distinctive writing on the enclosed piece of paper, which had been cut off from the bottom of a letter. Trembling now, Christian read:

Christian stared at this for a long time. At length he lowered his candle, put Bright’s letter and the signed extract back on the table, and sat down slowly and carefully, caressing his beardless chin all the while like an old man.

*

After giving his opinion of Mr Hughes’s novel, Onslow had retired to his study, saying to Primrose and Louisa that he had letters to write: he sat now on the sofa, thinking about sin.

Onslow’s study was a low, dark room, hung with green paper, lined with books, and floored with a thick Turkey carpet. It was precious to him because he liked its enclosed quality, which none of the other rooms in the house shared. When alone there he felt safe, shut away from the world, in control of his surroundings and his emotions – yet it was there that on many occasions he had given free rein to his most dangerous emotions, both in the flesh and on paper.

At present, it was not Arthur Bright who was first in Onslow’s thoughts, but Thomas Arnold. By force of contrast, the false portrait of Arnold in
Tom
Brown
’
s
School
days
had aroused half-forgotten memories of the real man, including one particularly painful memory which Onslow believed he would have confided to his brother-in-law had his wife not been present. He knew that his comments upstairs on the novel’s inadequacies had been not so much scathing, as he meant them to be, as anguished; and this embarrassed him. Now, pinch-lipped, he could imagine himself telling Primrose just how and why Dr Arnold had shown him the error of his ways, could imagine himself receiving holy understanding – but then he saw himself confessing exactly how, as a man, he had betrayed Arnold’s trust in him. Onslow did not think that Primrose would necessarily recoil in horror if he mentioned Arthur Bright. It was conceivable that he would forgive this sin which he could not imagine: but Onslow wanted understanding, not bewildered, sorrowing acceptance, and a plea for him to abandon his evil ways.

The painful image which Onslow dreamt of unloading onto Primrose was a long-suppressed memory which ought to have been wholly pleasurable – the memory of himself aged fifteen, crying and crying with Arnold’s hand on his shoulder, weeping with relief at the easing of a vast mental burden.

Onslow remembered how he had approached Arnold
with sickly trepidation, driven by a conscience he had not known he possessed. He had been still in the Fifth Form, still deeply afraid of ‘Black Arnold’, as the man was known to most of his pupils, and had waited in agony for the periodic signal that Arnold was at home to boys who wished to consult him on a personal matter – the hoisting of a flag above the School-house. He went to him expecting to be flogged and expelled; Arnold’s kindly smile at his entrance made him blurt out that he deserved both these things.

The truth did not emerge from Onslow’s tangled and shivering euphemisms for some time. It was that he and another boy, whom he did not name, had indulged in mutual masturbation in Onslow’s minute cubicle of a study. When Dr Arnold learnt this, he was relieved. He had begun to suspect that this most promising of his Fifth Formers was guilty of what he considered the worst of all sins: lying. The sight of Onslow shaking with pain and distress over a moral failing which he regarded as comparatively slight therefore moved him deeply, and so he put a hand on his shoulder, and spoke words of gentle reassurance.

Such a thing had never happened to Onslow before, and it made him burst into passionate tears, an orgy of grief which gradually eased off into the soft weeping of one comforted. Then Arnold began to speak to him about the need to resist temptation, the need both for Christ and for good friends who would assist in the struggle against something which, though minor, could be perilous. Listening to this, sucking in Christian words with new understanding, Onslow thought of how badly he had behaved for months, without ever being caught; and to this new kind father so unlike his own he confessed how he had gone poaching, and drinking, and had broken bounds countless times. He swore that if Arnold would only allow him to remain at Rugby he would never do wrong again. Dr Arnold willingly accepted his assurance, and when Onslow was at last calm enough to leave, he said:

‘My dear boy, it is a great pleasure to me to think that I shall have you in the Sixth very soon. Abide by the resolutions you have made today, put your trust in God,
and you will become an ornament to the school in the near future, and to the world when you are a man.’

Thereafter, throughout his years in the Sixth Form, Onslow had been treated by Arnold with grave tenderness. He was loved even more than Primrose, because he was a returned prodigal and had had to battle with a difficult nature. Dr Arnold was stern, he often rebuked Onslow for a slight tendency to levity and for intellectual arrogance, but the love he gave him was real, and Onslow struggled to amass more and more of it. With the vast incentive of respect and affection from both Arnold and Primrose, he had found it easy to direct his energies away from every kind of wrongdoing which had tempted him before. He learnt to love Christ, and he never masturbated with another boy again. Those had been the happiest years of his life.

Onslow got up, walked over to his desk, and stood there looking blankly at the text of that day’s sermon. Fingering it, he tried to remember exactly why, at fifteen, his conscience had been so very active when the other boy’s had not. Then, from deep down inside him, there rose up the memory of his mother discovering him with his hands on his penis when he was six years old. She had beaten him more severely than he had ever been beaten since, and told him that he would certainly go to Hell, a place which she described in great detail, making him scream. Thereafter, till adolescence with its unbearable urges came upon him, he had been too frightened of his own genitals even to look at them. Now Onslow covered his face with his hands, realising that nine years after that incident, he had expected Dr Arnold to behave like his mother. His mother had been a rigid Evangelical, with a fierce hatred of sexuality which was the result of her having suffered a long series of painful miscarriages: but Dr Arnold had been a happily married Latitudinarian, and had taken the official Christian view that lust was the least of the seven deadly sins.

Few who considered themselves truly pious took that official view, which Onslow began to think had corrupted him. He knew now that for years, he had secretly allowed
himself to believe that Dr Arnold had sanctioned his little pleasures – it had taken
Tom
Brown’s
Schooldays
to jerk him back into reality. He wondered whether he would have succumbed to temptation in manhood if Dr Arnold had, after all, behaved like his mother – perhaps his sin could have been beaten out of him, even though beating so seldom eradicated sin in the boys at Charton. Perhaps terror would have been effective. But now, he thought, because he had not been doubly terrorised in youth, he could not wholly believe that his keening lust was so very wrong; and thus he went on, from day to day and month to month, loving Arthur Bright without return.