The Fall of Doctor Onslow Read online

  From his study window, Onslow could see boys passing in the street. Looking up from his letter just before it was time to have the curtains closed, he noticed one of his favourite sixth-formers walking arm in arm with a younger boy, earnestly talking. He smiled to see them. Both were carrying sketch-books, and he guessed that they had been drawing some part of the parish church’s architecture, for the sixth-former was fascinated by all things medieval and loved to communicate his interest.

  Inspired by the sight of the two boys, Onslow was able to finish his difficult letter to The Times on a high, bold note. He turned it into a passionate defence of the old English system of education, in which boys were largely untroubled by masters outside lesson-hours, and kept discipline themselves. This system, he said, favoured the development of a manly character. Responsibility turned boys into men. Freedom enabled them to develop intense, improving friendships, and keen interests of their own which might be of great consequence in later life. Faults committed outside the schoolroom ought therefore to be the province of masters only in exceptional cases. To be sure, there were sometimes unfortunate incidents when older boys enforced discipline, but so there were when masters did. On the whole, the products of a modern public school compared very well with those of schools run on the Continental model, where boys were constantly supervised, like children.

  Onslow concluded by pointing out that whereas it used to be the case that masters ignored boys entirely outside school, nowadays the Headmaster attempted to be a Christian guide and friend to his pupils: a friend and pastor, he emphasised, not a policeman. Then he laid down his pen, wondered whether he could be said to live up to his own ideal, and sealed the letter.

  *

  That evening after chapel, when Onslow and his wife and brother-in-law were finishing their dinner in a crimson dining-room, the boys of Mr Taylor’s house discussed the events of the morning in surroundings of noisy decay.

  Taylor’s was a typical boarding-house, modern and cheaply built, with rattling windows, mean fireplaces, and leaky gas-brackets. It smelt of latrines, mice and cabbage. Directly inside the boys’ entrance there was a rickety staircase, overshadowed by walls coated with arsenic-rich, dark green paint. On each landing there were many doors, for the boys of Charton did not sleep in dormitories and prepare their lessons in classrooms as at many schools, but slept and worked in rooms for two or three at most – some tried to make them homelike, with pictures and ornaments and improvised curtains. From after supper until morning chapel at seven, the boys were supposed to be in their rooms, but sometimes they slipped out. Their master Mr Taylor took little interest in them: he left their discipline largely to his head-of-house, a thin shy Sixth Form boy called Christian Anstey-Ward, who detested him, the house, and the school, and found it hard to discipline anyone.

  Christian Anstey-Ward and another sixth-former were helping each other to prepare their next day’s lessons when they heard the flimsy door of the next room being roughly pushed open.

  ‘How’s your arse, Brandon? Let a fellow see!’

  ‘Hang it, let me alone can’t you?’

  ‘He’s only sitting on one cushion; can’t be so very bad,’ said a third voice.

  ‘Come, how many cuts did you get?’

  Christian Anstey-Ward got up to poke his little fire, and when he turned back, he saw that his companion was grinning.

  ‘What’s so amusing, Bright?’ he said pleasantly.

  ‘Oh, don’t you know? Brandon was fool enough to try to make an assignation with that pretty little bitch of his from Montague’s – he passed a note in school, and of course he was caught. Onslow read it – I’d give a sovereign to know just what the note said.’ ‘Bitch’ was the usual Charton term for the young lover of an older boy.

  Christian blinked with interest, but all he could find to say was:

  ‘Onslow?’

  ‘Don’t you remember that he was examining the lower forms this morning?’

  ‘Oh, of course. So – so what happened?’

  ‘So Onslow flogged him for it.’

  ‘I still do not understand why it is amusing,’ said Christian, sitting down.

  ‘Oh, I promise you, it’s mightily amusing.’

  ‘Why so?’ said Christian.

  Bright lowered his eyes.

  ‘Oh, only because he thinks he’s up to snuff, when he is not. How would it be if he knew how many of us play the same game as Brandon?’

  Christian stared at the book in front of him, and tore at the corner of a page.

  ‘It sounds almost as though he punished Brandon for writing a note in school, not for the note’s contents, and for my part I cannot think that right,’ he said. ‘A flogging of three cuts is what one would get for failing to learn a lesson, or some offence of that kind.’

  ‘How very strict you are,’ responded Bright, thinking that this perhaps had something to do with the fact that Christian was plainer than most of the boys at Charton. He had thin sandy hair, a poor complexion, a very wide mouth, and deep-set eyes that seemed to have no lids. ‘Since you can’t order Brandon’s expulsion, why don’t you at least put a stop to the unseemly behaviour next door?’

  ‘I will if it does not stop soon.’

  There was no unseemly behaviour, but there was a good deal of rowdy talk. One of the boys echoed Bright, saying:

  ‘Suppose he flogged every fellow who has a bitch? Think of his poor arm.’

  ‘Don’t forget the bitches too.’

  ‘You’ll have to have your precious Lucy spread ointment on your sores tomorrow, Brandon. What a pity he ain’t in this house.’

  ‘Ain’t it just?’ said Brandon, trying to resign himself to being teased. ‘Go away, won’t you?’

  ‘Not I. I’ve been a good boy, done all my verses for tomorrow: at least, I don’t intend to do any more. Are those macaroons over there? Let me have one, you’re too fat as it is, you shouldn’t eat them.’ The speaker seized the cracked plate and passed it round.

  ‘Very good, most delicious. I’m sure your mama would be pleased to know you bought them for your friends not for yourself, she must be so much worried about your being fat. The thought of you munching them all alone would very likely give her a spasm, you know, Brandon, and you ought to think of that, you know.’

  Two other boys giggled sycophantically as they ate the macaroons, and one of them took up the theme, saying thickly:

  ‘Not to mention your governor’s spasm when he learns about your bill at the pastrycook’s. You shouldn’t have gone on tick, my boy, not a good idea at all, and damme if I won’t ask Onslow to flog you for it.’

  ‘Give them back!’ said Brandon against the laughter.

  ‘No, you’re well served for being such a muff as to be caught by Onslow. I’ll bet we have to endure a damn lowering sort of sermon on Sunday, all about the lustful and Kibroth-Hathaavah, and you know how in general he leaves that sort of thing alone. He’ll tell all the monitors to watch us and report to him. And the masters too, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘Little does he know the nature of monitors.’

  ‘Or masters?’

  They went on attempting to be witty. Next door, neither Bright nor Christian was able to concentrate on work. Bright had no objection to listening through the wall, but Christian, who did object, was temporarily lost in thoughts of the contrast between life in this smelly house and life in his dream-world, which he called ‘Hellas’.

  Yet the contrast was not absolute, for the conversation in Brandon’s room was not wholly unlike certain conversations in ‘Hellas’.

  ‘Hellas’ was the idea of ancient Greece which Christian had derived from the Phaedrus and Symposium of Plato. He had watered these works with his own imagination, and built up a vivid picture of a world in which men’s pure and spiritual love for each other was a ruling principle. Though ‘Hellas’ was the historical Greece, about whose civilization Christian meant one day to write books, winter, work and women did not exist there. Corn and
wine and olives sprang up effortlessly from the soil, and under the olives, grave philosophers and handsome athletes talked about beauty, truth, the stars, and their love. Their love was passion for the Ideal as it happened to be embodied on earth, thought Christian, after Plato.

  ‘Lejeune and Sillitoe were nearly caught in bed together yesterday,’ said one of the boys in Brandon’s room.

  Christian’s brief vision of ‘Hellas’ was over, and he heard this. He looked up angrily, and his eyes met Bright’s.

  Bright was reckoned to be an attractive youth: he had a good figure, dark wavy hair, neat little features, and slanting eyes of a curiously light, brilliant brown. Christian did not think him handsome, perhaps because he had a prejudice against curly hair dating back to his early childhood, when an older cousin happened to say that in his opinion curly hair was vulgar. He noticed now that Bright also had a nose so far removed from the Grecian that it barely escaped being snub.

  ‘Why can’t they for once talk about football, or bird’s-nesting, or food?’ Christian blurted out. ‘Surely to goodness this subject has been sufficiently thrashed out!’

  Bright shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but as far as food is concerned, I’ve a meat-pie in my room, and some beer. When we have finished you can share it with me if you will.’ Bright and Christian were not close friends, but each found the other the least disagreeable person in Taylor’s.

  ‘Anything except this filth!’

  ‘It ain’t filth, it’s only nature. If we had access to – female society, it would not happen.’

  ‘Nature!’

  ‘You happen to prefer art. I’m not sure but what I don’t too.’ Bright hesitated, and dug his hands deep in his pockets. ‘There are one or two things I’d like to tell you, if you really think you know the worst –’

  ‘I’m going to put a stop to it.’

  ‘I have been wondering why you did not do so ages ago, if it disgusts you so.’

  Christian went out, threw open the door of Brandon’s room, and nearly tripped over a crate containing a hibernating tortoise.

  ‘Go to your own rooms, this has been going on long enough.’

  They paused, not daring to defy him openly because he had the power to cane them, and when he was angry he used it. Like Onslow, when he did strike, he struck hard.

  ‘I mean what I say. Go now.’

  They filed out slowly. Christian, turning, saw that Bright had joined him on the landing.

  ‘Oh, so you were in there were you, Dolly?’ he said to a blond boy of fourteen. He had been able to distinguish his bitch’s voice quite clearly. ‘Go and see to the fire in my room, and then you can clean my boots, they’re by my bed. But give me a kiss first.’

  Bright shot a quick look at Christian, who blushed deeply, flung himself back into his room, and slammed the door. Bright’s little bitch was nearly lovely enough to live in ‘Hellas’ – but he was neither sufficiently intelligent nor sufficiently pure in heart.

  3

  The air was crisp but the sky was dull, and tired snow lay in patches under the hedgerows and on the faded pasture. Black tree-tops full of old rooks’ nests swept the grey clouds, and down below, early and feeble primroses which had opened in a mild spell lay frozen, not worth the picking. Rotten leaves with a lace edging of frost clogged the sides of the lane, and a multitude of puddles contained squeaking shards of ice.

  ‘What a dreary winter this is, and I suppose we may expect more snowfalls,’ said Louisa Onslow to her brother Martin. ‘Such horrid weather for the poor Princess Royal’s wedding journey. I wonder the Queen did not put it off till the spring.’

  They were driving along the lane in a smart gig, and Louisa was handling the reins. Although she complained of the weather, she was an active woman, and did not like to stay indoors all day even when it was cold.

  ‘I wonder too,’ said her brother, ‘though even a few months’ difference would not have made a child out of the nursery old enough to be married.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ smiled Louisa, who knew he was teasing her, but took the bait. ‘I was scarcely older when I married Dr Onslow.’

  Louisa rarely called her husband by his Christian name. She had been married to him for eleven years, but the wifely ‘George’ was beyond her; to her it seemed in an odd way more solemn and formal than ‘Dr Onslow’. Martin Primrose thought it was as though Louisa’s early and childless marriage had shut her into perpetual girlhood: she was nearly thirty years old, but she looked more like twenty-four.

  She and her brother were very much alike, yet where Louisa was attractive, her brother was remarkably plain. Louisa was not a beauty. Her thick hair was flaxen, not golden as she would have liked, and her face was too pointed at the chin, with very high, wide cheekbones, and a thin narrow nose. Her ears were a great trouble to her, for they were undeniably too large, and stuck out too much – but the prevailing mode of dressing the hair in a smooth bag-like arrangement effectively concealed this. She was also too thin to show rounded shoulders and a hint of round bosom when she wore evening dress, but all these faults were carried off into insignificance by her tiny, pretty mouth, and her remarkable eyes. Her eyes were almost as large as a cat’s or a child’s, with unusually heavy lids, an upward tilt at the outer corners, and light specks in their grey-green irises which when she was animated could look like bubbles of liveliness.

  It was as though a clever modeller had taken her brother Martin’s long face and given it tiny, charming twists, taking off the slightly bulbous tip to his nose, reducing the size of the ridiculous ears by an important fraction, enlarging the eyes, thickening the hair, removing the lantern jaw. Onslow, who loved his brother-in-law and old school-friend dearly, thought that the expert modeller had taken away not only Martin’s plainness, but also the masculine intelligence of his expression, and the innocence and freshness of a novice’s attempt at making a human face.

  Martin Primrose was a canon of Maidstone, and he cared nothing for his lack of beauty; not because as a Christian he ought not to, but because he had never found himself in a situation where a handsome face would have been an advantage. He was unmarried, and had never wanted to marry, or do anything but continue to live with his mother, who had kept house for him since she was widowed ten years before. Like Onslow, he was forty-two, but he still felt too young for a wife.

  ‘I am so glad you agreed to drive out with me,’ said Louisa. ‘Dr Onslow does not like me to go alone in a gig, he seems to think it not only dangerous but nearly as improper as going alone in a hansom in London. So the result of it is that I am scarcely ever able to drive. I suppose I might take a groom up beside me, indeed I do when I am on some errand, but it quite spoils the pleasure. Having you is quite another matter.’

  ‘You drive very well,’ said Primrose. He paused. ‘Louie, I have a feeling there is something on your mind – you are speaking too intently of trivialities. What is it? Do you want to tell me?’

  ‘I must, for it concerns you,’ said Louisa, sighing. ‘How right you always are!’ She turned the gig round an awkward corner, and then told him: ‘I am so much afraid that you and Dr Onslow will quarrel, and I couldn’t bear it. If we did not see you often I do not think I could – I would be so lonely!’ She said no more.

  He squeezed her arm: he knew that Onslow did not confide in her as a man ought to in his wife.

  ‘Quarrel? My dear Louie, why should we?’

  ‘About religion. You know how your views differ, and Dr Onslow was so much shocked by that sermon you preached in December, the one about Hell that caused such a storm. Please, please do not mention it to him, and if he mentions it, I beg you to be as conciliating as possible.’

  ‘Of course I won’t mention it if you do not wish me to, but I promise you, you have no need to be in a worry. However I may regret George’s high-churchmanship, he is my dearest friend, just as he says I am his. We may disagree, but we shan’t quarrel seriously – not about anything, Louie.’

  ‘I do not think i
t is fair to call him a high churchman.’

  ‘My dear, let us only say that he so detests Evangelicals and to some extent Broad Churchmen, he often finds himself in agreement with the more moderate kind of high churchman.’

  Primrose himself was an extreme Broad Churchman. He minimised the importance of difficult or unpleasant doctrines, rejected the substitutionary theory of the Atonement as immoral, regretted all divisions between Protestant Christians, considered that the terms of clerical subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles ought to be relaxed, and was a keen supporter of State supremacy in religious affairs. He was tolerant of everything except bigotry. Had the bodily resurrection of Christ been proved to be untrue by archaeological researches, Primrose would not have been seriously disturbed, because to his mind the message of Christianity would remain unaffected even by the discovery of Christ’s body. As it was, he maintained a discreet silence on the subject of Christ’s divinity and resurrection, and this made people suspect him not merely of Latitudinarianism but of Socinianism, of actual disbelief in these two tenets of his faith.

  Primrose was a well-known man in the Church of England, a writer and a leader of his party, which was called Broad Church or Arnoldian by its friends, and Latitudinarian by its enemies. He was in the forefront of every movement for liberalisation or reform, not only in the Church but in the universities. A few years before, he had drawn scandalized attention to himself by giving passionate support to Frederick Denison Maurice, a professor at King’s College London who had been deprived of his post for stating that Hell, though eternal, could not be everlasting because it was outside time. In December, he had trumped Maurice by preaching and publishing a sermon which most people believed said there was no Hell at all: though in fact, Primrose had said that while Hell was not a lake of fire and brimstone or a place of positive spiritual torment, it was the absence of consciousness, and therefore of the Beatific Vision – it was, literally, eternal death. He had also hinted that no more than a tiny fraction would be condemned even to this mild Hell, and that any other view was incompatible with the doctrine of God’s mercy.