Saving the Queen (11 page)

The end came early in December. The French teacher announced that he would have to leave his class at a quarter before the hour because he had to catch the eleven-fifteen train to London. So, finding ten minutes of leisure, the six boys from the French class who would also meet together for Latin III at ten strolled down the hallway, passing a half-dozen classrooms in session, reaching Mr. Simon's ten minutes early. It was empty. Blackford, giving way to a pent-up fancy, found himself at the blackboard, chalk in hand, sketching furiously. From the swift authoritative strokes there emerged a most recognizable caricature of Mr. Simon, bushy sideburns and all, academic cape flowing in the wind. His legs, however, were awkwardly separated, his member exposed, the stream issuing from it arcing splashily to the ground. A dotted line from the lips of the master led to a balloon, within which Blackford, imitating the holographic style of his teacher, who a few days earlier had explained the English evolution (“micturate”) of Caesar's word to describe his soldiers' careless habits when emptying their bladder, indited the words: “Mingo, Mingere, Minxi, Mictum.” Triumphantly, Blackford autographed the sketch: “B. Oakes, discipulus.”

The boys howled with laughter and glee, overcome with pleasure at the artistic feat of retaliation. One of them in due course said, “Oakes, you had better rub it off. It's five minutes to ten.”

But Mr. Simon was always
exactly
on time, and Blackford wanted to share his creation with more of his classmates, who already were dribbling in and, alerted to the cause of the excitement, looked instantly at the cynosure on the blackboard and exploded in squeals of delight and ribaldry.

It was those yells, issuing from his own classroom, that prompted Mr. Simon to snuff out his cigarette, rather than finish it outdoors, so as to time his entry, as was his habit, to ten o'clock exactly, and stride into the Caulfield Center building. As senior master, he had title to the first classroom on the right. Thus he entered the room two and one-half minutes before the hour. There was sudden, stunned silence. He followed the boys' eyes to the blackboard. He lifted his head slightly to study the sketch through the appropriate lenses of his bifocals. He then shut the classroom door and walked deliberately down the passage to the teacher's platform, up the single step, sat down at his desk, hinged open the cover, and drew out stationery and, from his vest pocket, a fountain pen.

“Jennings,” he said, without even looking in the direction of the boy who that week was in charge of wiping the blackboard before, during, and after Latin III, “wipe the board.”

Quickly, nervously, Jennings, plump and bespectacled, slid in the continuing silence to the board and with a few vigorous strokes, beginning furtively with one that erased Blackford's signature, eliminated the lapidary caricature of the Latin master, shown constructively engaged in following his own advice of Thinking Latin on every occasion.

You could hear in the room only the stroking of Mr. Simon's pen on his note pad.

“Dr. Chase,
FOR IMMEDIATE ATTENTION
,” he wrote.

Sir:

B. Oakes, who is in my division Latin III, has committed an offense, gross, insolent, and obscene—a drawing on the blackboard seen by all the other students—more disgusting than anything I have seen in my thirty-three years' experience as a teacher. I request—nay, I require—that he receive the most vigorous punishment, or else that he be expelled from Greyburn. No alternative treatment of him would make it possible for me to continue to discharge my responsibilities.

Yours truly,

A. Simon.

He folded the note into an envelope, scratched out “Dr. Chase, For Immediate Attention,” and called out, “Prefect.”

“Yes, sir.” The other American stood at the rear of the room.

“You will take this message to the headmaster at his study and conduct Oakes there—immediately.”

Anthony Trust waited at the door as Blackford, turned faintly white, rose, walked across the classroom, and came back along the length of it to where the prefect stood waiting. Trust closed the classroom door quietly behind them and led the way to the front door.

The headmaster's office was diagonally across the huge campus, a ten-minute walk.

“What will he do?” Oakes found himself asking, as he walked alongside Trust. The morning's frost lingered on the pathway in the cold winter gray of Berkshire.

“What will he do? He'll beat you.”

“When?”

“Probably this afternoon, after tea. I doubt he'll put it off a whole week till the usual time on Friday, if I can guess what's sizzling inside this letter. Maybe he'll even do it right now.”

“Has it ever happened to you?”

“Sure. Twice, last year—once in the fall, once in the winter.”

“Is it pretty … bad?”

“It's bad. It is indescribably bad. But really, Oakes, you
were
, as the guys here say, an awful
ass.
”

They passed by his dormitory, and Oakes's housemaster, walking in the opposite direction, gave him a cheerful greeting, which Oakes returned, with effort.

“How do they do it?”

“How?”

Trust groaned at the ignorance of his compatriot. “Well, you get a lecture first. Then Leary-deary will pull over the library step—what you use to reach for a book on a high shelf—and drag it over until the back is up against the arm of Dr. Chase's big black leather sofa. Then you kneel on the block—that's what they call it—over the arm of the chair. But before, they make you take off your coat and loosen your suspenders—they call them braces here, in case you don't yet know that. Then Leary slides up your shirt and pulls down your shorts.”

“
Pulls down my shorts!
” Oakes stopped in mid campus, his mouth open, eyes flashing. “You're
kidding!
”

“I am
not ‘kidding.
' They've been doing it that way for three hundred years, and the Old Boys wouldn't want any detail to change, no siree. After all, they went through it, and look how
marvelous
they are—that's the argument.”

Oakes was silent again as they resumed their walk toward Execution Hall.

“How many strokes will I get?” he suddenly asked.

“It's usually six maximum. You'll get the maximum, all right.”

“What does a birch rod look like?”

“Like a lot of long twigs, maybe a dozen, tied together at the bottom by string. They're made up by Johnson.” Oakes liked Johnson, Greyburn's kindly man of all trades who only last week had fixed Blackford's bicycle chain. “After two weeks, Leary will tell you with great pride,
all
Dr. Chase's rods are automatically replaced. He doesn't like them to get stale. Less sting. Only the best of
everything
at Greyburn.”

“Will I … cry?”

“If you're normal.”

“Is it only Leary and Dr. Chase in the room?”

“No. There's a prefect. I hope to
God
he does it after tea, or next week, because then some other prefect will be there. If he does it now, it will be me, sure as shooting. How do you like that! Come all the way from Toledo, Ohio, to Berks., England, to hold down a kid from New York being spanked on his ass—that's great!”

They arrived at the stone building, the Elizabeth Caulfield Memorial Building, the first floor of which was occupied by the record and bill keepers, the second reserved for the headmaster. Trust led the way, going up the steep stone staircase. He knocked on the door of the headmaster's antechamber. Mr. Leary's voice sounded through the thick oak door.

“Come in.”

Mr. Leary sat at his desk, opposite a sofa. At the far end of the long room eight or ten chairs were spread about and a few old magazines on a small table. On the walls, a half-dozen etchings and photographs of Greyburn, four of them, dating back to the eighteenth century, faded into a sepia brown.

“What is it?” asked Leary, looking up at the two boys.

“I have been instructed by Mr. Simon to bring Dr. Chase this, sir,” Trust said, handing the letter to him.

Leary seized it. Though it was addressed directly to Chase, he broke the seal without a moment's hesitation, passing his eyes, unhurriedly, over the enclosure.

He looked up.

“Sit down, both of you.” And to Oakes, softly, with a hint of the hangman's humor: “… while you can.”

He opened the door on the left end of the room by his desk, closed it, and strode down the length of the dark library, past the single window, opening, without knocking, a door at the left, at the far corner.

Dr. Chase was on the telephone.

The inner sanctum of Greyburn College was not large. When Dr. Chase had more than two visitors, he would elect to sit with them in the roomy library next door. Here it was just the two chairs opposite his authoritative desk, a few shelves of books, one or two pictures, a door to a private lavatory, and, through a bay window, a fine view of the college quadrangle. But the light, in the winter, was weak, so that the lamp on Dr. Chase's desk was lit, X-raying his long thin hand, outstretched, now, to receive the envelope his automated servant Leary had wordlessly extended to him.

Whoever was on the line was doing most of the talking. By the time Dr. Chase had got around to saying, “Very well, then, we'll meet in London rather than here, Your Grace,” he had read the missive Mr. Simon had handed him. He hung up the telephone and eased his chair forward into the light's territory, no longer a penumbral figure with a disembodied hand reaching like a tentacle from under the rock into the lit spaces of the world to transact necessary business. His rhythm through it all was unbroken, from the shadow of his telephone to the operating-table brilliance of the appointments calendar on his desk.

“Well, I suppose we shall have to have him come in after tea. No, dash it, I see I shan't be here—a council meeting in the town … tomorrow seems too far away. Sunday is bad for this kind of thing. And anyway, it's no way to placate old Simon. He is very riled, and”—Dr. Chase exposed for the first time his extra-perfunctory interest in Blackford Oakes—“I wouldn't say I'd blame him, dealing with that cheeky American brat.”

“May I make a suggestion, sir?” Leary was valuable not only for making helpful suggestions but for making suggestions of particular, though not obvious, appeal to Dr. Chase. “Why not do it now? Your appointment with Dr. Keith isn't until eleven, and it's only ten-twenty. You wouldn't have to leave here for fifteen or twenty minutes in any case.”

Dr. Chase reflected, primarily for the sake of appearing deliberate. He made decisions quickly.

“Very well. But is there a prefect about?”

“Mr. Simon thinks of everything,” Mr. Leary smiled. “He sent Anthony Trust along as an escort.”

“Very well.” Dr. Chase was now the man of action. “Never mind bringing the boy in here first. We'll omit that. Put him straight down. I'll talk to him when he's ready.”

Mr. Leary walked back to his office, saying nothing to the boys as he opened the door of the antechamber and posted, on the permanent hook outside, the frayed cardboard notice, “
PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB
,” normally reserved for late Friday afternoons and for faculty meetings. Then he turned to the boys, who had risen respectfully on his entrance. “Follow me.”

They went into the library. Sitting in a chair and leafing through a black-bound register, Leary addressed Anthony without looking up at him, standing across the way, selfconsciously, in the gray light, Oakes at his side. “Trust, it hasn't been all that long since you were here on … official business. You do remember what is expected of a prefect?” Trust said nothing, from which Leary assumed he had the answer he wanted.

To Oakes:

“Take off your coat, put it on the chair over there”—he pointed to an upright chair all but hidden behind the window light—“and loosen your braces. It's quite
simple
, Oakes, merely unbutton the buttons forward and back; or, if you prefer, take off your vest and slide the braces off your shoulders.”

Leary went off to the corner of the room and lifted the two-tiered block from under the bookcases, depositing it up against the sofa. It reposed now directly under the window, the shaft of light sharply but severely illuminating the block, isolating it altogether from the shadowed arm of the sofa to which it was now conjoined.

Oakes stood, coatless, not knowing, exactly, what to do. His trousers did not need the braces to keep them up, so his arms hung limp by his sides.

“Come here,” Leary motioned.

Oakes approached him.

“Unbutton your fly buttons.” He waited.

“Now, kneel on the
lower
step, and bring your arms over the arm of the sofa.”

Blackford did so. He felt, then, the cold hands of Mr. Leary taking up his shirttail and tucking it, tidily—was there an unnecessary motion there?—under his vest. And then, with a snapping motion, Leary yanked down the shorts, leaving Oakes with naked posteriors, cold, and—he thought in his fright and amazement—trembling, as they jutted up at a forty-five-degree angle, as exquisitely postured as any guillotine block to oblige the executioner.

“Ready, Head,” Mr. Leary sang out without actually approaching the headmaster's door.

Dr. Chase did not materialize instantly. There was a long minute's wait before Blackford could hear the steps approaching. He looked up as best he could at the tall and silent face of this man who ruled thus conclusively over the bodies and minds of 625 boys. Dr. Chase moved to a long cupboard directly opposite from that part of the sofa over which Black's head was suspended, took a key chain from his pocket, located the right key, and opened the cupboard. At that moment, back in the study, the telephone rang. Leaving the door open, Dr. Chase walked resolutely, unhurriedly, back into his study, and though the sounds of the brief conversation reached the library, the words did not. Meanwhile Black, bent over, stared at the contents of the open closet. Two or three bundles of birch rods, several bamboo canes, and what appeared to be a collection of slippers, sitting at the bottom. Dr. Chase returned, selected, after some deliberation, a particular birch rod, withdrew it, laid it on the table by the far end of the sofa, sat down opposite Oakes, and took the black leather register handed to him by Mr. Leary, opened at the right page. Dr. Chase spoke for the first time.