Saving the Queen (10 page)

His trouble was with Latin. Although he had had a year of it at Scarsdale and was only in second-year Latin at Greyburn, here the boys were already reading Caesar, and Blackford found Caesar
utterly impenetrable
. The master, Mr. Simon, was a veteran of generations of ineptitude in teaching Latin and reacted to student mystification with a blend of scorn and tyranny. A grizzled man in his late fifties, with sideburns and spectacles. Mr. Simon—one of the boys told Blackford—had many years ago proposed to a lady in Latin and, on finding her response ungrammatical, resolved upon celibacy. Latin was his wife, and mistress, and catamite. He wooed his muse with seductive little mannerisms he had over the years satisfied himself were endearing to young boys, and marvelous instruments of a successful pedagogy.

Blackford began on the wrong side of Mr. Simon by suggesting that, as an American, he should, by all rights, be permitted to continue to inflect Latin nouns according to the American sequence rather than the English sequence—on the grounds that to change now from nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative to the English sequence would terribly and prejudicially confuse him.

The other twenty boys in the class were awed into silence. Only the older boy in the back row, a fifth-former and prefect who, because he too was behind, was required to take third-form Latin with his juniors, dared to speak out.

“Sir, that's a pretty good point.”

The boys all laughed, because he was the
other
American; though in fact he had begun Latin, last year, at Greyburn, and had been trained ab initio in the English sequence.

Mr. Simon replied: “You will have harder adjustments to make, Oakes, than slightly to rearrange the order of noun inflections. I
suggest
you resolve to learn it the right way, or, I suppose, I had better say”—and he smiled, lifting his hands to tug on the lapels of his academic robe, the characteristic posture when he thought himself about to say something withering or amusing—“the English way.”

“Hear, hear!” the boys said, at once docile and chauvinistic.

“Do you also conjugate the
verbs
differently in America, Oakes? Another habit acquired from the Indians?”

The boys roared. Oakes flushed, doodling on his pad, conscious that everyone was looking at him, unlearned in the artifices of appearing indifferent. Mr. Simon then delivered what Blackford came to recognize as his favorite homily: the necessity of learning Latin nouns and their declensions, and Latin verbs and their conjugations, particularly the irregular verbs, by repeating them to oneself
in every circumstance
.

“Don't put the subject
out of your mind
when you leave the classroom.
Think
about a
difficult
verb when you are walking along the corridors between classes. When you are having your
tea
. When you are
running out to the playing field
. Remember:
Qui cogitat quod debet facere
,
solet conficere quod debet facere.
” Mr. Simon beamed as he attempted to dittify his maxim in English: “Those who think about their duty / Are those who end by doing their duty!”

At tea that afternoon—the sole, blissful repast at which the boys were unsupervised, and their banter unheard by a presiding master—Blackford remarked to the boy opposite, who was also in the class, that Simon was a pompous ass, and the boy replied in the public school drawl (one Blackford was determined would never be allowed to creep into his own speech) that how else could he have achieved such high standing at Greyburn? The veteran Greyburnian remarked: “Simon's been here practically since he left his blubbing mother's arms. He used to recite an original poem in Latin at Class Day exercises, until five years ago when he just plain overdid it—he recited thirty-two verses. When Dr. Chase came in, he changed the ceremony, moving Mr. Simon back to the ‘Academic Reminiscences' hour scheduled the day before, which is voluntary.… He's always in a bad humor now, because he really thinks that, though he is tops in Latin, he really ought to be a
general!
”

The boys laughed. “He was a lieutenant in the last war. He'll tell you about it.”

“He'll tell you about it for three hours, if you don't watch yourself,” another boy chimed in, reaching over Blackford for the jam.

“
I'm
surprised,” a third boy said, munching a piece of bread piled high with butter and marmalade, “he doesn't begin his classes with ‘God Save the King.' He tunes in to the BBC five times a day to get the war news. The man he hates most in the world, after Hitler, is Charles Lindbergh.”

Blackford said nothing. He was paralyzed with indignation. The great hero of world aviation! Charles Lindbergh, the scientist and patriot! Charles Lindbergh, the great advocate of American peace! Charles Lindbergh, his father's
earliest and best friend!

Blackford had had experience in America, as the divisions over there hardened between the interventionists and the isolationists, with boys who, usually echoing their parents' views, disparaged Lindbergh, the leader of the America First movement. Blackford had a fist fight with a Lindbergh iconoclast at Scarsdale. But here, three thousand miles away from America, he found it a corporate affront that a sacrosanct master should feel free to belittle so great a man (who, when Blackford was ten years old, had taken him up in his own airplane for a joy ride that unforgettable afternoon when his family visited the Lindberghs in Rhode Island).

Dear Aunt Alice:

This is very important. Please, even if you forget to send me the Milky Ways, don't forget this. I want you to send me right away two buttons (the kind you stick into your lapels), one button that just says on it
America First
, another button that has Lindbergh's face on it, with his name under it. If you don't have these buttons around, please go, or send Billy, to the America First Headquarters, where they will give them to you for nothing. It is on 44th Street, Lexington Avenue,
DON'T FORGET
!!!

Much love,

Blacky

At the end of the second week at Greyburn, he attended the third, and final, compulsory lecture about school life given for new boys, of whom there were thirty in the Upper School, twenty of them third-formers. The first two lectures had touched on school practices, holidays, vacations, sports, academic schedules, regulations involving health, writing home. This one concerned discipline.

The speaker was a tall, spare, youngish man whose title was School Secretary and Assistant to the Headmaster. He taught one class in ancient history and was otherwise occupied helping the headmaster with his administrative chores, interviewing prospective students, collating the grades that went out to the parents, and occasionally representing the headmaster at official functions. His face was pallid, and without expression, except for what seemed like a running, permanent, ineradicable leer (his name, as if to rub it in, was Mr.
Leary!
). His accent was the most exaggeratedly British Blackford had ever heard. It was a strain even to understand him.

What Mr. Leary said was that the standards of Grey-burn had always been high, but that in time of war they would be set higher than ever before, that this was a time of great national tribulation, that the sons of England's most privileged families in particular should recognize their special obligation to grow quickly, to do their work well, and to obey their superiors.

“Now,” he continued, “as some of you no doubt have heard, Dr. Chase, on becoming headmaster, withdrew from the school's prefects the privilege, or rather the
duty
—a much better way to put it—of administering the rod. It was widely suggested among some Old Boys that Dr. Chase was ‘modernizing' the school and permitting its standards to deteriorate.
That”—
Mr. Leary leered—“
any
boy who has been at Greyburn during the past five years would now know better than to believe. Although the use of the rod is now reserved to housemasters and to the headmaster, its use is not for that reason any the more … disdained. There is no reason for anybody sitting in this room,” said Mr. Leary, “to experience the birch before graduating from Greyburn. But,” he warned, with a tight smile, “the statistics are heavily against such a probability—that boys
will be
boys is
more
than a
mere
truism—but after all, the
purpose
of punishment is to
advance
a boy's understanding of his obligations, and therefore the use of the rod is, really,
designed
to bring boys to the stage where they
do not need the rod
to behave like civilized human beings.”

Friday, he said, is the day in which the headmaster interviews miscreants and administers punishment, after weighing reports on the behavior of individual boys. At tea time, any boy who is to report to the headmaster's office will find a blue slip on his plate with his name on it.

“As for the housemasters, they attend to their own corrections in their own way at their own time.”

Were there questions?

There were none. The room was as silent as any Blackford had ever been in. He could hear only his heart beating, and he noticed that even after Mr. Leary had left the platform, the boys stayed briefly in their chairs, before getting up and, silently, filing out.

Another month went by, and now instead of cheering the team, Blackford was on it—the junior team to be sure—being cheered. He had quickly adjusted to rugger, and his fleet-footedness and natural sense of tactical guile were of great advantage—to be preferred, he reluctantly concluded, to the hulking Maginot Line of football at Scarsdale, where the huge shoulder and hip pads always made him feel a little creaky, and the quarterbacks thought in terms of feet and even inches gained, as against tens of yards. He made dazzling runs on three successive Saturdays, and there was even talk that he might be put on the senior team, though he was a little light for the senior scrum, and it was said that Mr. Long thought it advisable to wait until the next season. Meanwhile, Oakes would be tried out in cricket.

He was popular with the boys quite apart from his athletic prowess. They liked his natural manners, his frankness of expression, his ingenuous American informality, especially in tight situations involving the masters and the prefects. Mr. Manning, his housemaster, observed him with something like fascination and desisted from pulling him up short, which he had several concrete provocations for doing, most concretely after
twice
discovering Oakes calmly reading in bed with a flashlight—strictly forbidden in the rules. He excused his indulgence on the grounds that Blackford was after all American and needed time to make the sharp adjustment to English ways. At a faculty tea, Mr. Manning defended his permissiveness toward Oakes in a casual comment that suddenly engrossed the entire company in a general discussion about the extraordinarily self-assured young American who was lightheartedly making his way through Greyburn with an indefinable cultural insouciance, the most palpable feature of which was a total absence of that docility which was universally accepted as something on the order of a genetic attribute in Greyburn Boys.

“I tell him to fetch the atlas,” the geography teacher, lowering his teacup, remarked, “and he pauses—for
just a moment
—as if he is
considering
whether he will
grant
my request! And then, just one second short of refractoriness, he will say, with an incandescent smile, ‘Sure!' Somehow
I can't make myself
say to him: ‘Say, “Yes,
sir!
'” It would leave me feeling not only the martinet, but as if I had earned his absolutely predictable condescension … the strangest, most independent boy I have ever known, and frankly, one of the most attractive.”

Mr. Long, the athletic coach, saw an opening and moved in heavily—as an outspoken defender of Oakes. “I have never found him insolent, and he is every bit the team player. With his legs and lungs he could hang on to the ball and play only for the gallery. He works with the team, though, and they like and admire him even though he is … different.”

Dr. Chase, in an infrequent appearance at the weekly faculty tea, said nothing.

Nor did Mr. Simon, for fear he would betray his very strong feelings about Oakes.

Mr. Long—under fire from Oakes's history teacher—admitted that Oakes's outspoken advocacy of the cause of American isolation
was
galling.

“You would think,” the history teacher said, “he would keep his views to himself for so long as he is a student at a British school.”

At this Mr. Simon could not keep silent. “You would think he would take the trouble to learn something about Hitler's global ambitions before urging the position that only the British should shed blood in defense of the English-speaking world.”

“Actually,” Mr. Long persisted, “I overheard him yesterday arguing with two of the boys at lunch, and his arguments are remarkably well marshaled. He made it a point of saying that
he
doesn't bring up the subject except when one of the English boys does, and that far from being presumptuous in speaking out on the subject, he is presumptively—that wasn't the word he used—better entitled to express himself on what America should do than Englishmen.”

Dr. Chase spoke up, lifting an eyebrow customarily set in concrete. “He' said that?”

“Yes, Head; exactly that.”

Dr. Chase was silent; then he rose, and without looking to right or left, intoned quietly, “Come along, Leary,” and they filed out of the faculty lounge, the headmaster and the assistant to the headmaster.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he said on reaching the door, again without looking aside.

“Good afternoon, Head,” was the chorused response.

By early December, it was somehow palpable that the crisis of Blackford Oakes must come. It had to happen was the consensus, and even the strongest partisans of Blackford sensed inevitability—the institutional integrity of Greyburn required the formal subjugation of this coltish alien. Last week he had shown up at Mr. Simon's class, a serene expression on his handsome boyish features, flaunting, on his lapels, an
America First
button and a
Lindbergh
button. Mr. Simon had looked down on him—Blackford sat, as a new boy, in the front row—very nearly speechless (indeed he had to clear his throat the better part of a full minute before proceeding), and then delivered, defensively and to gain the time necessary to settle his emotions, his standard lecture on the need to Think Latin outside the classroom. Blackford pocketed the buttons on leaving Mr. Simon's classroom; but every day, at ten in the morning, which was the Latin III hour, he would reach into his pocket, fasten the two buttons on his lapels, and stride jauntily into the room, sometimes whistling a tune. At this he was not competent, since he could not carry a melody, but those who listened hard could discern an effort at “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”