The Lords of Discipline (55 page)

“Is that why you seem so unhappy, sir? Because of history?”

“On the contrary, Mr. McLean. History is my single pleasure. My unhappiness stems from the fact that I have contributed nothing to the study of history. My unhappiness is due to my mediocrity at the craft in which I once felt I was born to excel.”

“But you wrote
The History of Carolina Military Institute
, sir.”

“Yes, Mr. McLean, and Gibbon wrote
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
And Prescott wrote about the Conquest of Mexico. I chose a small insignificant topic because I had such pitiful gifts. Reynolds chose to write about an obscure military college located in an obscure Southern state. Do you know why I chose that subject, Mr. McLean? Do you have any idea why?”

“No, sir. Except that you love the school.”

“I chose to write that book because I knew that no one else would want to. I would have the field completely to myself. I had to choose a subject small enough to fit my talents. I lacked the style, the vision, and the courage to undertake a grand project. . . . But this is not what I have come to talk to you about, Mr. McLean.”

“I know I could do better in English history, Colonel. Now that basketball season is over, I promise to do better, to study a lot harder, and to make better grades.”

He looked at me with complete bemusement.

“I give not a scat for your performance or lack thereof in the field of English history. You are an Irishman and a scoundrel, Mr. McLean, and I cannot expect you to master the sweep and scope of an alien and enemy culture. No, I have called you here today to make a confession to you.”

“A confession, sir?” I said, puzzled.

“I do not stutter and I do not slur the King’s English,” he thundered imperiously. “A confession I said, and a confession I meant, Mr. McLean. Since when do I need to explain the meaning of the word to a sniveling papist? I have something to tell you that I should have told you that day you came to my office. But first, I want to make an inquiry of you.”

“An inquiry, sir?”

“Yes, goddammit. I want to ask you a bloody question!”

“A question, sir?” I said, grinning up at his broad flustered face. Teasing Colonel Reynolds always afforded me enormous pleasure.

“Why did you come to my office to question me about my knowledge of The Ten?” he asked.

“Because I thought you’d be the one person who would answer me honestly if he knew anything at all. Also, I trust you and consider you a friend, even though you’re not fond of the Irish.”

“It’s not that I am not
fond
of the Irish, Mr. McLean,” he explained. “You have not fully comprehended my feelings for those godforsaken wretches. I absolutely loathe the Irish. It is an effort for me even to look at your face, so strongly do you bear the mark of your lowborn race. I only wish Cromwell had been less lenient and humane in his dealings with these pitiful, contemptible brutes. But I must apologize to you and tell you that I betrayed the trust you so ingenuously proffered me.”

“How, sir?”

“I wrote a small section in my history book tracing the history of The Ten. It was almost pure speculation, and I had only one source.”

“There was nothing in your book about The Ten, Colonel,” I interrupted. “Not a single word.”

“There was when I sent it to the Institute print shop, Mr. McLean,” he said. “I mentioned only the barest facts that I could garner by piecing together the rumors and innuendoes that I had heard over a lifetime at the Institute. Do you remember my telling you that I attended the funeral of General Homer Stone, the hero of the Bulge?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, “that’s where you counted the ten carnations and the ten doves.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Well, the Widow Stone, a steely-eyed harridan of penurious Scottish stock, handed over to me her husband’s correspondence of a lifetime. You would have thought she was entrusting me with the Rosetta Stone. The letters were boring and nearly illiterate. Literacy is the hallmark of neither generals nor heroes. But there was one letter of utmost interest to me. In it, General Stone was discussing the character and personality of a junior cadet who was about to be inducted into the ranks of an unnamed organization. The letter stated that the cadet met all the criteria for membership save one. He was an outstanding leader, an excellent student, was militarily sound, and had exhibited exemplary loyalty to the Institute. He lacked, according to General Stone, the physical stamina that the organization deemed necessary.”

“And you think General Stone was talking about The Ten.”

“He was not talking, Mr. McLean,” Colonel Reynolds stated with impatience. “He was writing a letter.”

“Who was the letter addressed to, Colonel?”

“It was addressed to Colonel Adamson, at whose funeral I first noticed the carnations and doves in the year of our Lord 1958. It did not take a grand creative leap on my part to speculate that the organization of which he spoke was the elusive Ten. So with caution and restraint and citing the letter as a source, I wrote a rather jocular account of The Ten in my history, carefully stating that no one knew for sure whether The Ten existed or not, but that the rumor of its existence had always had a powerful hold on the imagination of the Corps and the alumni.”

“What happened to that section, Colonel?”

“It disappeared,” he answered. “It disappeared as though I had never written it.”

“Did you ask the printer about it?”

“I asked the printer nothing, sir. I screamed at the printer and threatened to throttle him within an inch of his worthless life. But he told me that he printed the material that was handed to him, and indeed, upon investigation, he spoke the literal truth. Someone had removed that section. Not that it made any difference as to the quality of the work. The work is mediocre, though quite workmanlike. Not disgraceful, mind you, just mediocre.” As he spoke, his face clouded over with a painful melancholy, as though he were uttering a truth that froze the very roots of his soul. “I complained to the head of the department who complained to the academic dean who complained to General Durrell. I received a note from the General saying that the printer had made an honest mistake, and perhaps that mistake had saved me from the embarrassment of being exposed for shoddy and inaccurate historical research. Imagine the nerve of Durrell, that upcountry dandy, chiding me for shoddy scholarship. He even assured me that he himself had personally searched for some small clue about the existence of The Ten and had come up with nothing at all.”

“Did you show him the letter, Colonel? That letter proves something.”

“The letter proves nothing, Mr. McLean, because nothing is stated directly or resolutely. I was taking historical license, and I did not wish to confront a military man with a concept too difficult and complex for him to understand. But I wanted to clear this matter up with you, Mr. McLean. You scored a direct hit on an intellectual wound when you asked me why I had not mentioned The Ten in my history.”

“Why didn’t you tell me all of this when I asked you, Colonel?”

“Because of an incident that happened after my encounter with the printer. When I went back to study the letter from General Stone to Colonel Adamson, Mr. McLean, the letter was gone. The letter had been stolen out of my files.”

“You could have told me that,” I said. “That has nothing to do with you or with me.”

He put a heavy arm around my shoulder and steered me against the railing of the seawall facing Sullivan’s Island across the harbor. I could not look at Sullivan’s Island.

“I believe The Ten exists, Mr. McLean,” he said with sudden explosive passion. “I believe they exist and I am afraid of them.”

“Even if it exists, Colonel, there’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just a club.”

“If it was just a club they would not censor history books. They would not enter a man’s house to steal letters. Nothing else in my study was touched. Nothing else was moved or disturbed. One single letter disappeared. I wanted to suggest to you, Mr. McLean, that if you are looking for The Ten, you must proceed with restraint and caution. I also wanted to apologize for lying to you. By nature, I am a truthful man and the truth means a great deal to me. I have tried to develop a moral vision in my life and I have tried to live by it. I deceived you, and it has been sometimes difficult to sleep since we spoke in my office.”

“Why didn’t you tell somebody, Colonel? Breaking and entering is against the law. That’s against
anybody’s
moral vision.”

“No, Mr. McLean”—he sighed—“there is no such thing as morality in these distressing times. What we are witnessing is the death of courtesy in Western civilization. I do not speak of the mincing, effete courtesy of these desperate times, but the virile, robust courtesy born in that most violent of times, the Middle Ages. I lament the passing of that form of chivalry which was the way that civilized men had agreed to treat each other during times of peace. It was a code and a hallmark of civilization, and men would rather have died by their own hand than break the code. But enough of this, I have done my duty by warning you. If they will rob an historian of his sources, there is no telling what the scoundrels will do.”

“We need another source,” I said, half-speaking to myself.

“Pardon me?” the Colonel asked.

“We need one more source that The Ten really exists. That’s one of the lessons I learned from your history class.”

“I know of no other written source, Mr. McLean. And I had access to every letter and diary of every deceased alumnus and many of the living ones who played a significant role in the development of the Institute. That was the one hint, the single breakdown of secrecy I found.”

“Did you interview any boys or men who were run out of the Institute?” I asked.

“Of course not, Mr. McLean,” he said scornfully. “I was writing about the men who made the Institute great, not the swine who could not bear the stern test of her ministries. There is nothing, except venomous reprisals, that cravens who fled their freshman year could cast on the history of the Institute.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, thinking of my own freshman year. “But they might be able to reflect directly on the history of The Ten.”

“Scoundrel!” he cried out, thumping me broadly on the shoulder. “There is a very minor historian beating his way out of that thick Irish skull of yours. Very, very minor but a presence nevertheless.”

“I think I know who can tell me all about The Ten. If I can find him and if it exists and if it has the mandate to keep the Corps pure and undefiled that you say it has.”

“I did not say I knew that for certain.”

“Do you know anything for certain, Colonel?”

“That they are discourteous men. I think they are well-intentioned, but I know they are discourteous and uncivil.”

“Is that all?”

“No, that is not all, Mr. McLean.”

“What else, sir?”

“I know that I am afraid of them. That they stole the letter is unspeakable. That they eradicated their name from my historical account is unspeakable. They are scoundrels of the first order.”

“And how should I find them, sir?” I asked, looking at him directly in the eyes.

“You need a primary source,” he said, turning back toward Broad Street. “A primary source.”

“I’m going to take off next weekend, Colonel. And I bet you a nickel I find one.”

Chapter Thirty five

C
olumbia, South Carolina, is a difficult city to love once you have lived in Charleston. It is a functional city, located in the dead center of the state, a hundred miles from the mountains and a hundred miles from the sea. Its summers are merciless and its winters are bitter and it has all the homeliness of America’s industrial midlands. But it is a vital, frisky city unburdened by the pretensions and the genealogical sinuosities of Charleston. Sherman had razed Columbia during the Civil War. It made you wonder how much the nature of Charleston depended on its deliverance from pillage and fire.

As we drove into the city, Mark said, “Columbia! What an armpit of a city. The whole place looks like it caught polio, then killed Doctor Salk.”

We parked at Five Points, a busy district of student bars and small shops near the campus. The University of South Carolina had eighteen thousand more students than the Institute and fully half of them seemed to be staring at us as we walked down the street in our uniforms. Carolina was well-known around the state for its beautiful girls and its callow fraternity boys whose IQ’s hovered around the cut-off point for morons. We passed by several college girls whom I would have married on the spot, without bloodtests or references.

“We’re here, boys,” I said, pointing to the entrance to a bar. “We’re going to meet an old friend.”

We walked upstairs to the Second Level, a tavern frequented by students and professors. It took a full twenty seconds for our eyes to adjust to the darkness. You needed a Seeing-Eye dog to find a seat even in midafternoon. Our uniforms attracted the curious and mildly hostile attention of the room as soon as we entered.

A young man approached me out of the darkness. He was heavier than I had remembered him and his hair was full and luxuriantly swept back on his head. His clothes were stylish and well-kept. He wore a neatly trimmed moustache and in the terminology of the day could have been described as “collegiate.”

“Hello, Will McLean,” he said, standing in front of me.

We shook hands warmly.

I said, loud enough for Pig and Mark to hear, “Hello, Bobby Bentley, of Ocilla, Georgia.”

“Bobby, is that you?” Pig said, sweeping around me and pummeling Bobby on the back.

“How did you find Bentley, Will?” Mark asked, clearly displeased.

“I called his house in Ocilla. I think there’re only two or three houses in the whole town of Ocilla, Georgia, and there was only one Bentley in the phone book. His mother told me he was at Carolina.”

“Come on over here, boys,” Bobby said, gesturing with his arm. “I’ve got a pitcher of beer and some glasses. Where’s Tradd, Will?”