Saving the Queen Read online

  “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.”

  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.