Buch lesen: «Love Lies Bleeding»

2
Find out Moonshine

‘For I have learned,’ said Simblefield, a small, spotty, cowardly boy, ‘to look on nature not as in the hour of thoughtless youth but hearing oftentimes the still sad music of humanity nor harsh nor grating though of ample power to chasten and subdue.’

He paused, and an expression of pleasure appeared on his unprepossessing features. Simblefield’s highest aim, in the recitation of poetry, was to get through his allotted portion without actually omitting any of the words; and this he had succeeded in doing. That there were subtleties of interpretation beyond and above this simple ambition he was, of course, vaguely aware, but in the flush of his present triumph he held them of no account.

In the silence which followed his breathless intoning, Mr Hargrave, the school’s most savage disciplinarian, could be heard in the next room booming Latin at his cowed and sycophantic form. Simblefield looked expectantly at Mr Mathieson, who was gazing with folded arms out of the classroom windows. Being an exceptionally naive and stupid boy, Simblefield supposed that Mr Mathieson was seeking for words adequate to commend his performance; but in this diagnosis Simblefield was mistaken, for in fact Mr Mathieson had fallen into a transient and inchoate daydream, and was momentarily unaware that Simblefield had finished. He was an untidy, heavily built man of middle age, clumsy in his movements; and he wore an ancient sports coat with leather pads sewn to the elbows, and a pair of baggy grey trousers.

The sound of fidgeting aroused him, and his reverie merged discouragingly into the austere reality of the classroom. It was a large, box-like place, the lower reaches of its walls liberally decorated with ink and fingermarks. The master’s desk, ponderous and antiquated, stood on a dais beside a pitted and pock-marked wall blackboard. There were a few cheerless pictures of indefinite rustic and classical scenes. A thin film of chalk covered everything. And some twenty boys sat behind wilfully collapsible desks, occupying their brief intermission in various more or less destructive and useless ways.

Mathieson observed that Simblefield was no longer giving tongue, but was, instead, gazing at him with much complacency.

‘Simblefield,’ he said, ‘have you any notion at all of the meaning of this poem?’

‘Oh, sir,’ said Simblefield feebly.

‘Just what is our attitude to nature in our thoughtless youth, Simblefield? You must be well qualified to answer that question.’

There was some laughter of a rather insincere kind. ‘Potty Simblefield,’ said someone.

‘Well, Simblefield? I’m waiting for an answer.’

‘Oh, sir, I don’t know, sir.’

‘Of course you must know. Think, boy. You don’t take much notice of nature, do you?’

‘Oh, yes, sir.’

‘No, you don’t, Simblefield. To you, it’s simply a background for your own personality.’

‘Yes, sir, I see, sir,’ said Simblefield rather too readily.

‘I have grave doubts, Simblefield, as to whether in fact you do see. But some of the others may.’

There was an instant clamour. ‘I understand, sir.’ ‘Only a fool like Simblefield wouldn’t understand.’ ‘Sir, it’s like when you go for a walk, sir, you don’t really notice the trees.’ ‘Sir, why do we have to read Wordsworth, sir?’

‘Quiet!’ said Mr Mathieson with determination. An uneasy hush ensued. ‘Now, that is precisely the way in which Wordsworth did not look at nature.’

‘Wordsworth was a daft fool,’ someone said sotto voce.

Mr Mathieson, after briefly considering tracing this remark to its source, and deciding against it, went on, ‘That is to say that for Wordsworth nature was more than a mere background.’

‘Sir!’

‘Well?’

‘Didn’t Wordsworth nearly have his head cut off in the French Revolution, sir?’

‘He was certainly in France shortly after the Revolution. As I was saying—’

‘Sir, why do they cut people’s heads off in France and hang them in England?’

‘And electrocute them in America, sir?’

‘And shoot them in Russia, sir?’

A further babel arose. ‘They don’t shoot them in Russia, you fool, they cut off their heads with an axe.’ ‘Sir, is it true that when they hang a man his heart goes on beating long after he’s dead?’ ‘Oh, Bagshaw, you idiot.’ ‘Yes, you fool, how could he be dead if his heart was beating?’

Mathieson banged on his desk.

‘If anyone speaks again without permission,’ he said, ‘I shall report him to his housemaster.’

This was at once effective – being, indeed, an infallible specific against any form of disorder. At Castrevenford, to be reported to one’s housemaster was a serious affair.

‘Now,’ said Mr Mathieson, ‘let us return to the subject in hand. What, Simblefield, do you suppose Wordsworth to mean by “the still, sad music of humanity”?’

‘Oh, sir.’ Simblefield was clearly dismayed at this further demand on his meagre intellectual resources. ‘Well, sir, I think it means…Look here, sir, suppose a mountain, or a bird, or something…’

Luckily for Simblefield, whose ability to camouflage his ignorance was held in well-justified contempt by the rest of the form, he was not required to finish; for it was at this moment that the headmaster entered the room.

The boys got hastily to their feet, amid a scraping of desks and banging of chairs. It was rare for the headmaster to visit a form room during school hours, and their curiosity was tempered by an apprehensive mental inventory of recent misdeeds.

‘Sit down, gentlemen,’ the headmaster remarked benignly. ‘Mr Mathieson, can you spare me a minute or two?’

‘Of course, headmaster,’ said Mathieson; and to the boys, ‘Go on reading until I come back.’

The two men went out into the corridor. It was bare, echoing, with uneven wooden boards; and owing to the fact that the teaching block had not been designed for its present purpose, being actually a converted lunatic asylum (a circumstance which regularly provoked a good deal of mediocre wit), the light was insufficient. At present, however, the corridor had the merit of being comparatively cool.

‘Aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem,’ said Mr Hargrave in the adjacent room, ‘does not mean, “Remember to keep a month’s water for the hard roads”, and only a blockhead like you, Hewitt, would credit Horace with making such an asinine remark.’

The headmaster said, ‘How did the rehearsal go last night, Mathieson?’

‘Oh…well enough, headmaster. I think we shall get a reasonable performance.’

‘No troubles or hold-ups of any kind?’

‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘Ah.’ The headmaster appeared to be listening to the sounds which emanated from the Modern Lower Fifth – abrupt crescendos of chatter alternating antiphonally with panic-stricken outbursts of shushing. He applied his forefinger judicially to the centre of his lower lip.

‘This girl who’s playing the part of Katherine,’ he resumed. ‘How does she strike you?’

‘She acts well,’ said Mathieson.

‘But apart from that – as a personality.’

Mathieson hesitated before replying. ‘To be frank, headmaster, she seems to be rather a sexy young creature.’

‘Yes, I’m glad to have you confirm that. The situation is that she arrived home from last night’s rehearsal in a state of considerable agitation, and we can’t find out what upset her.’

‘She was perfectly all right during the rehearsal,’ said Mathieson. ‘Almost too lively, in fact.’

‘Yes. Well, I’m pleased to hear it; it lessens our responsibility to some extent…Do you know if she has – ah – designs on any particular boy?’

‘I may be quite wrong, but I rather thought that Williams…’

‘Williams? Which Williams? There are dozens.’

‘J. H., headmaster. In the Modern Sixth. He’s playing Henry.’

‘Oh, yes, of course. I think I’d better have a word with him…By the way, your dress rehearsal’s this evening, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I’ll try and look in,’ said the headmaster, ‘if I can find the time.’

So Mathieson returned to the task of instilling Wordsworthian metaphysics into the barren intellects of the Modern Lower Fifth, and the headmaster made his way to the porter’s office, where he left instructions that J. H. Williams was to be summoned to his study immediately after morning school.

When Wells, the porter, entered the Modem Sixth room ten minutes before the end of the last period, he found Mr Etherege expounding the technics of demonology and black magic.

Wells was not greatly surprised at this. Mr Etherege was one of those leavening eccentrics who are sometimes to be found at a large public school, and he had been at Castrevenford for so long that he now legislated for himself, both as to what he taught and as to how he taught it. He had a fancy for the esoteric and remote, and among his more recent obsessions were yoga, Notker Balbulus, an obscure eighteenth-century poet named Samuel Smitherson, the lost island of Atlantis and the artistic significance of the blues. No boy passed through his hands without acquiring some knowledge of whatever obscure and useless subject happened to interest him at the moment.

The framers of education acts have little use for such dominies as Mr Etherege; but in this, as in so many other things, they are grossly impercipient. The fact is that every large school requires an advocatus diaboli – and at Castrevenford Mr Etherege occupied this important post. He was flagrantly lacking in public spirit. He never attended important matches. He was not interested in the spiritual welfare of his boys. He lacked respect for the school as an institution. In short, he was impenitently an individualist. And if, at first sight, these characteristics do not appear particularly commendable, you must remember their context. In a school like Castrevenford a good deal of emphasis is necessarily laid on public spirit, and the thing is liable to develop, if unregulated, into a rather dreary fetish. Mr Etherege helped to keep this peril at bay, and consequently the headmaster valued him as much as his more sternly dutiful colleagues. His divagations from the approved syllabus were the price that had to be paid, and its evils had in any case been minimized by the removal from his timetables of all work for important examinations.

Cautiously skirting the mirific sign of the pentagram which was chalked on the floor, Wells delivered the headmaster’s message to Mr Etherege, who passed it on, embroidered with pessimistic conjecture, to J. H. Williams. Wells departed, and Mr Etherege commented briskly on the Grand Grimoire until an electric bell, shrilling violently throughout the building, indicated that morning school was over; at this he uttered a cantrip, designed, as he said, to protect J. H. Williams from bodily harm during his interview with the headmaster, and dismissed the class. Williams – a dark, clever, good-looking boy of sixteen – at once made his way through a jostling, clamorous, rout of his contemporaries to the headmaster’s study, his vague apprehensions unallayed by Mr Etherege’s promise of supernatural protection.

He found the headmaster gazing out of his window, with his hands clasped behind his back.

‘Williams,’ said the headmaster without preliminary, ‘you must not make assignations with young women.’

A moment’s reflection had persuaded him that this was the likeliest gambit for their interview. He knew that Williams was a candid and sensible boy, who would deny such an accusation only if it were untrue.

Williams went red in the face. ‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

‘Be more accurate, Williams,’ the headmaster admonished him mildly. ‘If, at your age, you’re sorry that you arranged to meet an attractive girl, then you ought to be examined by a doctor…The phrase you should use in such circumstances is: “I apologize”.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Williams agreed, rather helplessly.

‘And where exactly was this rendezvous?’

‘In the science building, sir.’

‘Ah. I take it, then, that the arrangement was made during last evening’s rehearsal?’

‘Yes, sir. The rehearsal ended at nine forty-five. So there was a quarter of an hour to spare before I needed to be back at my house.’

The headmaster made a mental note that this gap must not be allowed to occur next year.

‘This appointment,’ he said, ‘was it made on your own initiative?’

‘Well, sir’ – Williams risked an apologetic grin – ‘one might say it was a cooperative effort.’

‘Indeed.’ The headmaster considered for a moment. ‘Have you any excuses to make?’

‘Well, sir, I don’t know if you’ve actually seen Brenda, sir—’

The headmaster interrupted him. ‘Yes, that’s obviously the only justification you could offer: Vénus tout entière à son Williams attachée. Being in the Modem Sixth, you should know your Racine.’

‘It’s only natural at my age, sir,’ Williams murmured hopefully, ‘as you said yourself.’

‘Did I?’ said the headmaster. ‘That was indiscreet of me. But if we all gave way to our natural impulses as and when we felt like it, we should soon be back at the Stone Age…What exactly happened during your meeting with this young woman?’

Williams looked surprised. ‘Nothing, sir. I wasn’t able to turn up.’

‘What?’ the headmaster exclaimed.

‘Mr Pargiton caught me, sir, just as I was leaving the hall. As you know, sir, we’re supposed to go back to our houses immediately the rehearsal’s over, even if it finishes early…And of course, I was heading at the time in the opposite direction to Hogg’s. Mr Pargiton’ – Williams’ tone betrayed considerable resentment – ‘took me back and handed me over to Mr Fry.’