The Fall of Doctor Onslow (6 page)

Port was laid on the table, the servants withdrew, and the men moved closer to their host. They talked briefly about the coming abolition of the East India Company, and the French Emperor’s ludicrous fear of English assassins, but it was not long before they moved on to discuss a subject which was of far more concern to the four clergymen present. Even the very junior cleric whom Dr Tait had invited to make up the numbers at the last minute was more interested in the new ministry’s likely views on high ecclesiastical preferments, and who should fill them, than in French and Indian affairs. The laymen were not so fascinated.

‘How good to think that for a while at least we will no longer have Lord Shaftesbury packing the bench with bad scholars and narrow Evangelicals,’ said Primrose, finishing his first glass of port. ‘It always astonished me that Lord Palmerston listened to him; I suppose it was sheer lack of interest combined with affection made him give Lord Shaftesbury his head.’

‘So long as he chose men not likely to vote against the Government in the House of Lords,’ said Onslow.

‘I think, my dear Primrose,’ said Dr Tait, smiling, ‘that you are forgetting
I
was one of Lord Palmerston’s and Lord Shaftesbury’s choices.’

‘Tait! My dear fellow, you know perfectly well that I did not mean you. Yours was his one truly admirable appointment – no one in his senses would call you a narrow Evangelical.’

‘But I am not so good a scholar as I ought to be.’

Looking at Dr Tait now, Onslow remembered how sixteen years ago, immediately after Dr Arnold’s death, they had been rivals competing for the Headmastership of Rugby. He remembered how Tait had been chosen by the trustees even though he was the inferior scholar: Onslow, the Cambridge Senior Classic, had been rejected as too young at twenty-six.

‘I only wish I were such a scholar as your lordship,’ said the junior cleric.

‘Of one thing I’m very sure. Soapy Sam has been hankering after a more important bishopric for I don’t know how many years, but there was not a scrap of hope for him while Lord Palmerston remained in office. Oh, I do hope we shall not see him translated to Winchester or Durham, he is intolerable enough as it is, with his mixture of pugnacity and toadying,’ said Primrose. Soapy Sam was Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford.

‘Mr Gladstone wanted to send him to York, Martin, and I am sure was very nearly successful,’ Onslow teased. ‘Perhaps he will be so when he is back in office, if the Archbishop obliges him by dying in the meantime.’

Primrose went on regardless. ‘I detest men with ingratiating manners, and no one has ever been able to discover whether he has any consistent views. I am surprised he did not turn himself almost into a follower of Mr Spurgeon to please Lord Shaftesbury, instead of making a fool of himself with that attempt of his to make adultery a criminal offence. But I suppose I must do him justice: in some respects he has been growing steadily Higher, even though it is contrary to his temporal interests.’

‘Very true, alas,’ said Dr Tait. He added: ‘I must point out, Primrose, that in attacking Lord Palmerston’s appointments you find yourself in perfect agreement with the man you so dislike. Does not that appal you?’

‘So I do! you are quite right – I must retract my abuse at once. After all,’ he said, suddenly grave again, ‘it is more important for a bishop to be a good pastor than anything else.’

Dr Tait, as a good host, thought of trying to bring the
laymen into this discussion, but he saw they were absorbed in a three-cornered conversation of their own.

‘Dr Onslow, what do you think the new ministry is likely to do?’ he said.

Onslow gently swung the port in his glass and said:

‘It is a pity the Bishops of Oxford and Exeter between them have given both the public and any prospective government a distaste for the mere idea of bishops with High Church sympathies, however vague. I doubt Lord Derby will seek to correct the real imbalance of parties on the bench of bishops – though I daresay he will not prefer even more Evangelicals, Lord Palmerston’s policy has been too unpopular.’

‘I think you are right in thinking that all parties ought to be represented on the bench,’ said Dr Tait, ‘but I cannot think of a High Churchman of note who ought to be preferred. Dr Pusey is out of the question.’

‘Quite so, my lord,’ said Onslow, without denying his real beliefs – he was nothing like so High Church as Dr Pusey.

‘It is time Dr Pusey followed Newman to Rome,’ struck in the young clergyman. ‘He ought not to remain in the Church of England.’

‘You are too harsh, Mr Lincoln,’ said Dr Tait, making him blush.

‘How would Denison do for a High Church bishop?’ said Primrose, looking innocent. Onslow raised his eyebrows.

‘My dear Martin, what an excellent idea. Yes, he is exactly what we need – another bishop prepared to spend his time taking those who disagree with his views to law with all possible publicity.’

‘You are quite right, he would be a second Philpotts,’ said Dr Tait, who appeared to have taken Primrose’s suggestion seriously. ‘I hope we are spared – but in all honesty I cannot think it likely the question will arise.’

‘I suppose now that he has been vindicated by the judicial committee there will be no holding him even in Convocation, one dreads to think what he might do in the House of Lords,’ said Primrose.

‘I heard that his parishioners dragged his carriage home themselves after the decision,’ said Onslow. ‘Is it true, or a mere rumour?’

‘True, I believe,’ replied Dr Tait. ‘I sincerely wish the prosecution had never been begun – he has been made to look a martyr to Low Church and dissenting bigotry, and nothing could be more unfortunate.’

‘No, indeed!’ said the young clergyman.

Primrose said happily: ‘But I am so glad that in spite of the legal decision in his favour the purely doctrinal question remains effectively undecided. I don’t mean that I have the least sympathy with the Archdeacon’s view of the sacrament or anything else, but latitude is the glory of the Church of England – exactly the view he was trying to combat, of course.’

Dr Tait saw that Onslow was frowning, and said:

‘Do you like matters to be a little more clear-cut, Dr Onslow?’

In general, Onslow did: but he was glad that thanks to the muddled case of Archdeacon Denison, it was now possible to hold that the sacrament could be inwardly received by the wicked as well as the faithful. Though he doubted its Anglican legitimacy, that view was a comfort to him. He told Dr Tait:

‘It comes of having been a schoolmaster for fourteen years. Latitude and lessons do not mix well – one learns to demand exactness in all things.’

‘Oh come,’ said Primrose, ‘in Dr Arnold’s case latitude and lessons mixed perfectly.’

‘Martin,’ said Onslow suddenly, ‘do you never think that even Dr Arnold had his faults?’

‘Faults?’ said Primrose.

Since the beginning of Primrose’s visit to Charton two weeks before, Onslow had listened to constant praise of Arnold, and had agreed with every word of it.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Consider his temper – remember March.’

March was a boy whom Arnold had flogged harshly and unjustly in 1832; a scandal had been made of the case in the newspapers.

‘But – think how noble was his apology, his public apology to him when he discovered he had not lied and it was all a dreadful mistake! The
Northampton
Herald
took up the case out of dislike for his politics – you cannot deny it!’ exclaimed Primrose.

Onslow looked at the decanter in front of him.

‘No, I don’t deny it. But he had no business to lose his temper in such a way. A flogging of eighteen strokes is impermissible in even the worst cases.’ Like Arthur’s incorrigible idleness, he thought, and flushed. The light in the room was too dim for others to notice his changed complexion.

‘I agree with you,’ said Dr Tait.

‘I am glad of it,’ Onslow told him.

‘None of us is perfect,’ said Primrose unwillingly. ‘And a hasty temper is a very natural failing – his nature was passionate, not cold like –’ He stopped: he had been about to say ‘like yours’. Onslow guessed it, and his lips twisted in a kind of smile. After a moment’s pause, he said, finishing his port:

‘You must not think I do not reverence him as I ever did. I have tried not to share his faults, but I do not share his virtues either – and if I could only have the half of them, I would willingly have ten times his faults. Believe me.’

‘I believe you,’ said Primrose.

One of the laymen, a member of Parliament, said:

‘I was a fag at Rugby when you and Dr Onslow were in the Sixth, Mr Primrose. A very grubby urchin! I lived in mortal terror of Dr Arnold – and of you.’

All the clergymen were surprised at his entering into the conversation, but Primrose laughed and said politely:

‘Oh, surely not!’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘So you are inclined to my view?’ said Onslow.

‘I suppose I might say so, but I never was properly acquainted with him, for I never reached the Sixth.’

Dr Tait, who had found it necessary to curtail the excessive powers of the Sixth when he succeeded Arnold at
Rugby, agreed that neither he nor his system had been flawless. He did not wish to say so, because he had no desire to unsettle Primrose more than he had been unsettled already; therefore, when the conversation began to peter out, he merely said:

‘Shall we join the ladies?’

The hot sun, made hotter by glass, lent a golden surface to Arthur Bright’s brown curls. He took a step away from the window and the light as Onslow handed him his leaving present: a morocco-bound copy of Catullus’s poems with an English inscription on the fly-leaf instead of the usual Latin. Onslow’s message read:
To Arthur John Bright, on his leaving Charton School, with all kind wishes from his Headmaster. August 7th, 1858.

‘I remembered that you liked Catullus,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir. Thank you.’

The simple words were spoken in a way that Onslow thought voluptuous. Like Onslow, Bright had never had much to say.

‘Do you know, I could wish you had been a better pupil,’ Onslow said now, smiling faintly. ‘You have parts, but you never cared to use them to the full. I wish – I wish I had been able to interest you in the works of authors other than Ovid and Catullus. But like me, you prefer the Romans to the Greeks, do you not? In so far as you enjoy the classics at all.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘It is a rare thing. I could name five men whose preference is for the Greeks for every one who shares our taste.’

Onslow stretched out a hand in the approximate direction of Bright’s head, then quickly let it drop. He wanted to say: ‘Did you burn all my letters? Promise me that you did,’ but he did not. He had never once mentioned his letters, into which he had poured all the emotion which he
was too embarrassed to voice in Bright’s presence: once they were written, he thrust them from his mind. Only in his very first note, written last November, the first he had ever written to any boy, had he scribbled ‘Pray burn this’ at the end – he had trusted Bright to treat the others similarly.

‘So you are leaving us,’ he said aloud.

Bright met his eyes for the first time since he entered the room, and said: ‘Yes’, without the ‘sir’.

Onslow thought the irises of Bright’s eyes looked like two translucent, new-fallen horse-chestnuts. It was an image which had occurred to him before.

‘Will you ever visit us, do you think?’

‘I doubt it, sir. I –’

‘You have not been happy here?’

‘Happy enough, sir, um, especially this last year in the Sixth,’ said Bright. Very occasionally, he would make some remark which showed he had a regard for Onslow.

‘My dear boy,’ said Onslow, ‘you give me pleasure when you tell me that.’

‘I am glad,’ said Bright, thinking how much he had enjoyed the idea of having the Headmaster in love with him. Love of the idea had always outweighed the discomfort of the reality.

‘I hope you will like Trinity. I liked it very well when I was up, though perhaps not quite so much as I had liked Rugby. Of course it will be much changed in many ways since my day. We had a Rugby Debating Society, there were so many of us up from Rugby – it was very enjoyable.’

‘I’m sure I shall like it, sir.’

‘There seems to be nothing else to say,’ said Onslow, turning away. ‘Goodbye, Arthur.’

‘Goodbye, sir.’ Bright put out a hand, but saw against all his expectation that Onslow was unwilling to take it: suddenly it seemed that the Headmaster was treating him like an unclean thing. ‘Goodbye!’ he said loudly, and went straight to the door, outside which three other boys were waiting to take their final leave of Onslow.

As the door shut behind him, the Headmaster gripped
the back of the nearest chair, closed his eyes, and waited.

*

Christian Anstey-Ward had received a copy of Plato’s
Repbublic
as his leaving-present from Onslow, and the Headmaster’s choosing Plato took much of the pleasure out of quitting Charton for good. Christian had come to think of Plato as his private property, or at least as the shared property of himself and a few other, likeminded men whom he had never met, but whom in optimistic moments he dreamt of meeting at Oxford. The idea that Onslow secretly nursed some corrupt version of ‘Hellas’ was not only intolerable, but frightening. Onslow belonged to the coal-and money-driven world of Queen Victoria’s England, out of which nothing but sordidness could be expected to come, towards which no man of sense could have anything but a wearily cynical attitude.

In the five months since he learned about Onslow’s relations with Bright, Christian had come to resemble some of his more sophisticated contemporaries. Like them, he imagined that nothing about the world in which he was forced to live could shock him. He no longer looked always anxious, as though perpetually searching for something, and he felt that hard knocks had made him grow a hard shell inside which ‘Hellas’ could flourish better than before. Yet he feared that by thinking in this way, he had somehow betrayed ‘Hellas’. Onslow had forced him to become so cynical about external reality that one day he would become fit for nothing but that reality: his Grecian vision would die.

The day after his last interview with the Headmaster, Christian caught the train from London down to Salisbury. Once on it, he took Onslow’s copy of the
Republic
out of his portmanteau, leafed through it, and read a few pages with concentration: but in the end he left it in the railway-carriage, even though he had no copy of his own and meant to buy one.

*

‘Louisa,’ said Onslow, making his wife jump, ‘shall you miss this garden very much when we leave here?’

‘Goodness, Dr Onslow, how you startled me!’ She laid down her trowel, tilted her hat back, and looked at him. Then she got to her feet, and Onslow thought that in her huge round hat and short petticoat she looked like nothing so much as a curious toadstool, with a fragile cap and a thick, frilled stalk. She had spent most of the day entertaining parents with Onslow, but her duties had come to an end early enough to allow her half an hour in the garden before it was time for dinner. After the last parents were gone, Onslow had stayed in his study, but then thoughts of Bright drove him to seek the distraction of talking to his wife. ‘Why do you ask me such a question? You are not thinking of leaving soon, are you?’

‘Not precisely,’ said Onslow, though he was. Bright’s departure had made him think of it with such panicking seriousness that he thought it worthwhile to drop hints to his wife.

‘Shall I miss the garden – well, yes, I shall, but I shall take those plants which can be moved with me.’ Louisa’s interest was rather in individual plants than in the effect they made when combined in flowerbeds. She had always been a keen botanist, and it amused Onslow to hear her swap long Latin names with fellow enthusiasts. ‘You look fagged to death, Dr Onslow.’

‘I am certainly tired.’

‘The last day of term is always tiring – so many parents wishing to see you without notice.’

‘Yes.’

‘And having to be unfailingly polite to them is not always the easiest thing in the world.’

‘Exactly so.’

Onslow now wished he had not decided to broach the subject of leaving with Louisa, but he had been feeling very much alone. His wife’s company and sympathy had seemed better than none, even though it was impossible for her ever to understand.

‘Dr Onslow, why this sudden mention of leaving? Is it only that you are worn out?’

‘Yes, only that.’ He hesitated: the temptation to speak was still there. ‘But after all, you will own that I cannot remain a headmaster all my life.’

‘No, of course not. Another five years, perhaps?’ said Louisa, delighted that Onslow was consulting her as though she were an adult person. In another five years Onslow would still be under fifty: the perfect age for a new bishop.

‘Perhaps. Yet I believe I have already accomplished the work God sent me to do here, as well as I can.’

‘Indeed, you have accomplished it very well – better than anyone else could have done, I am sure.’

‘No, Louisa, many others would have done far better than I.’

‘Stuff!’ she said.

‘I wish you would not use such unladylike expressions. Do you pick them up from the boys?’ As he said this, Onslow drew Louisa’s arm through his own, and studied her little hand in its brown leather gardening glove. Then he removed the glove, and caressed the bare hand because it was his legitimate property. He thought of Bright, whom he had tried to give up before the final break yesterday – but it had been as though he were a drunkard asked to abstain while there was a bottle of spirits on the table in front of him.

Louisa watched his exploring hand, and curled her fingers. Onslow thought that if Bright could be compared to a bottle of brandy, Louisa could be compared to one of her own plants – one of the less unusual and more colourful plants. She was Primrose’s sister, and she did not repel him. It was not always necessary to think of her as his own little sister by adoption. He liked the fact that she was so small, and rather too slim for a woman. The softness of her body was as pleasant and inessential as a rose.

Onslow’s sudden idea of retiring, retreating, escaping from what he loved, began to fade.

‘No, I do not think there is any need for me to go just
yet,’ he said, thinking that now Bright was gone, with Louisa’s help, he would resist temptation. He tipped his wife’s chin up, pushed off her hat, and dryly kissed her lips.