Sons of Fortune (17 page)

“She has some letters to write,” Nora explained.

“I hope you will return and take some tea with us, Mrs. Stevenson,” Mrs. Brockman said.

“I hope it may be possible,” Nora answered, not yielding an inch.

As soon as they set off for Old School, Brockman came at once to the point. “Of all the troubles sent to plague a headmaster, Mrs. Stevenson, I make no secret to you that parents are usually far and away the worst. But in this case I have to confess I stand, as it were, at your shoulder. I look around at this place, which is and will be the work of my life, and I feel for it some of that loathing which you surely feel.”

“I doubt it…” Nora began, annoyed with him for grasping this initiative.

“Oh, more keenly, I assure you, since I am the more deeply involved.”

“It’s an odd word, ‘involved,’ from a man who locks up two hundred boys at eight each night and never goes near them till next morning…who lets drunken bullies flog the flesh off ten-year-olds. ‘Involved,’ Dr. Brockman? If you drew a line at neglect, where would it run!”

He was silent for a while. “How may I put it?” he said at last. She could sense a frustration in him. His great hand squeezed at the air near her elbow, as if he would rather squeeze her arm to force his view upon her. “When your husband’s firm builds a viaduct, now, do the men not…?”

She flared up at that. “Don’t you dare patronize me, Dr. Brockman, with your simple parables. If you’ve a straight reason for what you did to my son, you’ll tell me straight. If you’ve none, there’s an end to it, and we’ll waste no more of each other’s time.” She was glad to have back the initiative.

He was silent again but his restlessness was even more intense. They had almost reached Old School before he spoke. “Then I will not tell you,” he said. “I shall show you. You shall see it all with your own eyes. And then I’ll attempt to explain.”

He showed her over Old School then. Even with Young John’s praises to forewarn her she found it shocking. But Brockman did not try to excuse it or to modify her judgements—indeed, she grew annoyed at the way he agreed with and even surpassed them in severity.

“Small wonder,” he said, showing her the pathetic study cupboards that littered the dark, dank, cold, outer passages, “that they take themselves off to messes in the town!”

“Over which you appear to have no control,” Nora added.

“Only the ultimate control of expulsion. The messes do no harm to the young ones. Indeed they somewhat bridge the gulf between home and…these barracks. But the older boys find they may keep money there, and spirits, and they bring in wenches. And then we must expel them, if they are found out. Now, I think that is a disgraceful way for a school to fail its pupils—to force them upon the town, to expose them to temptations, then to wash its hands of them. It shames me.”

He spoke of everything in that vein until Nora, thinking she saw through the stratagem, said, “Tell me, doctor, suppose you were headmaster here. How would you change it?”

She had wanted him to take offence but he merely smiled, somewhat grimly. “Ah! You, too, think it is easy. I wish I could tell you how many parents actually approve these arrangements. Eton, I promise you, is very much worse than this. When I was a scholar there—the very month I arrived—there was a rebellion against Dr. Keate, the headmaster. To crush it he flogged every boy on the school list from the letter A to the letter Z—some eighty boys. It went on from ten till past midnight. And when he retired to his bed, the whole school, from A to Z, lined up and cheered him. And the boys of that generation are now, like myself, parents. I dare swear that most of them—deplorable as it may sound—most of them would approve of what happened to Caspar.”

Seeing the incredulity in her face he beckoned her outside. “Come and see my new Houses,” he said. “They are everything Old School is not. And you will not believe the opposition I have met in trying to establish them. Opposition from the Trust that nominally manages Fiennes (though most of them never set foot here). Opposition from parents—some parents, who object to the greater fees. From my colleagues—and, of course, from the boys.” He looked shrewdly at her, sidelong. “If I were a sporting man and wagered that your two boys, after less than a term here, have already told you how preferable is life at Old School to life in the new Houses, would I lose?”

She had to allow that he would not.

“The sad truth is,” he said when they were outdoors again, “that you and I, Mrs. Stevenson, are not a majority.”

Nora marvelled that she and he were suddenly on the same side of the fence, but she was interested enough in what she sensed was coming to make no more than a noncommittal noise in reply.

“And the more I have my way with Fiennes, the less it will resemble other leading schools.” He smiled at her as he went on. “If you will permit me just one ‘simple parable,’ what should we say to a farmer who neglected to drain his land and who let weeds flourish, and yet who could find in an acre of wheat perhaps a dozen ears of prize quality—and who offered them as proof of the value of his method of farming! Of course we should laugh him to scorn. Why then do we not laugh to scorn all our leading schools—for that is precisely their principle!”

They were crossing the playing field and had to go aside to avoid a marshy patch. Brockman laughed. “You see! I cannot even drain my land!”

Nora could not help warming to him. At least her dislike was softened to the extent that she was prepared to admit his heart was in the right place. But that did not change the basis of her problem. Very well, he was not an evil man, merely a weak one. But neither kind of man was fit to have charge over her sons. “You say parents approve?” she prompted. She wanted to judge just how weak he was.

He nodded sadly. “For most parents, and for most teachers too, education is an obstacle race. A school is, for them, a place where a boy is provided with opportunities, and slight encouragement, to excel. But no extraordinary effort should be made to reach the laggard, the slow, the wayward, the indifferent. It is, as they see it, a sink-or-swim world. And school must mirror it.”

“It
is
a sink-or-swim world,” Nora said. “But we do not throw newborn babies into deep water on that account!”

He stopped and looked at her with some excitement, forgetting himself so far as to grip her arm, just as he gripped every boy he talked to. She became aware then what a very physical man he was, to need this contact in order to feel he was communicating. Yet it was true. The passion of his convictions was there in the way his hand trembled. “How I wish I had said that,” he told her. “These are
not
young men!” He raised his voice as if to shout down an argument held in the very air around him. “These are children! And we throw them together in conditions where ninety men in a hundred could not be trusted. Then we whine over breaches of trust.”

He saw her wince under his grip and at once fell into a stammering, blushing confusion. His embarrassment could not have been greater, she thought, if the assault had been indecent. To prevent him from shrinking out of sight, she said, “Let me repeat my earlier question, doctor, in a different spirit. If you were headmaster and had absolute powers here…I mean, what will the school be when you have had your way?”

“This is Crecy.” He held open the gate, glad of this activity to rescue him from the confusion he still felt. “Mr. Carter’s house. The Carters are in Dorset for Christmas so I’m sorry you will not meet.” Then he stopped halfway up the drive and grew thoughtful. “My school,” he mused. “My ideal school. Hmm. My ideal school”—he watched her keenly now for her reaction—“will devote as much effort and expend as much of its resources on the least promising boy as on the most. Every boy will feel he is a person and is
known
.” A few drops of rain began to fall but Nora made no move toward the door, only yards away; she sensed that Brockman’s words were very close to the core of his convictions. At that moment the last shreds of her animosity toward him fell away. She was even prepared to concede that he was not a weak man.

“Every boy,” Brockman went on, oblivious of the raindrops, “must feel impelled—and I say
im
pelled, not
com
pelled—to give of his best. His intellectual best in the schoolroom. His physical best on the playing field. And his moral best in all his dealings with others. Of the three this last far outweighs the former two. I would be happy for indifferent scholarship and moderate athletic prowess to flourish here if every boy showed moral excellence.”

The rain was now falling so heavily that even he noticed it. They ran to the shelter of the porch. Again he apologized in confusion, just as when he had gripped her arm.

She saw then that there was something of the boy still in him. For all his impressive size and handsome masculinity, for all the scholarship he possessed, for all the moral passion that burned in him, there was something endearingly immature in his lack of social ease. Suddenly she could imagine him among the trustees whom he scorned so deeply—worldly aristocrats and bluff, foxhuntin’ squires no doubt, of a type she knew so well. She could see exactly how bad he would be in such company, he would rub their fur the wrong way, most of all by assuming they had a common interest in the school. To a man they would prefer Old School, where the premium was on courage, tribe loyalty, self-reliance, and indifference to pain or discomfort, if the school accidentally turned out a few scholars, well and good. But Brockman’s ideal of a well-rounded athletic Christian scholar as the standard boy would be anathema to them. She was surprised he had survived a single term; he was certainly no weak man to be headmaster still after—what was it—two or three years.

Now she wanted to know all about him and his methods. “Those are your principles,” she said, cutting once again through his confusion. “They do not run square with what Young John has told me of your system, Dr. Brockman.”

A servant opened the door, saw the headmaster, and pulled it wide to let them pass. She noticed that Brockman thanked the man.

“Machinery, machinery, machinery!” the headmaster said as he led her toward the boys’ part of the House. “The perfect school will leave nothing to chance. It will never rely on the merit of this or that teacher. The machinery, the arrangements, must secure excellence. The governance of the school must be liberal—by which I mean each boy must be given unlimited trust in his actions. It must also be protective—by which I mean suspicion must permeate the very fibres of the system. It must also be individual—each boy must feel his honour is indivisible from the honour of the House and the school.”

They were in a light, cold, airy corridor, windows all down one side, doors all down the other. “These are the studies,” Brockman said. “One to each boy in the House. It is here that boys are prevented from becoming a mob—the sort of mob, I fear, we still have in Old School. You see what I mean—machinery? The only difference between the boys here and the boys of Old School is”—he pushed open a door—“the individual study. Machinery!”

It was a very plain little room. A table, two chairs, a bookcase, a cupboard; no fire, no gas ring. Still, she thought, the gaslight was probably enough to heat so small a room.

“There is one other difference,” he added, taking her the full length of the corridor to a large common room. “All the boys in the House, except the pharaohs, do their evening study here under Mr. Carter. Now if you were to witness it, you would probably think it a very commonplace matter of teaching and intellectual guidance. And so it is. But it also means that between seven and nine—the two most dangerous hours of the twenty-four—everyone is under a master’s eye.” Up went his finger. “Machinery!”

“And the pharaohs?”

He gave a bitter laugh. “I could not hope for a better example of my difficulty, Mrs. Stevenson!” He led her back along the corridor toward the dormitories. “I intended the word to be
pharos
.”
He spelled it out. “The pharos was the legendary lighthouse at Alexandria—a wonder of the ancient world. My idea was that the boys so favoured were to be as beacons to guide their fellows. But my ‘beacons’ came up under the old barbarism. It is they who have perverted the spelling to ‘pharaohs’ [again he spelled the word out] the hated slavemasters and pagan idolaters of the ancient world. Fortunately, in a school each generation is short. From your son’s generation, now, I hope to rekindle my beacons and banish my slavemasters back into the dark where they belong.”

The cubicles around each bed in the dormitory were high enough to cut off each boy from his recumbent neighbours but low enough for any master or pharaoh to see over. “Machinery! Machinery!” Brockman said yet again, waving his big hands vaguely toward the honeycomb of partitions; but this time he did not elaborate. Then, determined that she should see all, he took her down to the kitchens.

As they walked back over the field to Agincourt, Brockman’s House, she realized that John had not been deceived and that Brockman was far from being a weak man. She also began to understand that Fiennes, once it approached his ideal school, could indeed give her sons something they would not get at home—a magnification of everything the best of homes could provide.

“You must build your other Houses as soon as possible, Dr. Brockman,” she said.

He snorted and stopped. “I could build them all tomorrow,” he said.

“But?”

His eyes resumed the audit they had practised when she and he first met. “Tell you straightly, you said? Very well, Mrs. Stevenson. When I came here the headmaster had a monopoly of boarders. You see, your sons—the boys in Old School and in Hospice—are not, strictly speaking, boarders. They are scholars, the last vestige of that medieval band of students who once camped hereabouts and studied at the Abbey school. D’you know that at the peak of its fame the Abbey had thirty thousand scholars—from all over Europe! That was when the celebrated Aloyis was teaching here. It is hard, looking at the valley as it is now, to imagine thirty-thousand camped out there. And how could one man have taught them?” He lifted his hands in ironic answer to his own question. “Your sons, as I say, are scholars rather than boarders. And when I came here, the headmaster had a monopoly of boarders. The result was that the other teachers were mere migrants—birds of passage. Good fellows maybe, but only by accident. They had no stake in the school—no sense that here was, or could be, a permanent home for them. Mr. Cusack was such a man. Well, I determined at once that if I was to put my ideas into practice, I had to gather around me a corps of masters who shared my aspirations and who had at least as much stake in Fiennes as I. So I broke my own monopoly.”