Invitation to Life

4

4

F

ortunate

was Tregan when Alan Keithley came to the Academy to exert a brief but refreshing influence upon the few score stifled children.

Keithley was one of those clear-faced and mentally sound young men which every country in the world turns out at times—and which each nation rejoices in considering as typical of her own product. Had he been a German or a Scandinavian he would have skied, hiked with a rucksack and entered the army. Had he been American he would have been a thoroughly sound catcher on his college nine, a trustworthy tackle or guard on the varsity squad, and would have gone on into life as a minor official in a Wall Street concern. Being an Englishman he played a sturdy game on the Rugby field as fullback, held a straight bat on the cricket pitch, and found himself at twenty-three with no satisfactory field of future endeavor. It is because she offers so few opportunities for the Alan Keithleys that Britain is able to send such steady streams of capable and healthy young men to God-forsaken stations in the extremely remote and just as extremely unhealthy spots of the world.

Grasping at a straw Keithley took an assistant master’s post at Dr. Rex’s Academy, where he spent many hours chucking yorkers to the young cricket hopefuls (thereby becoming something after the manner of a godhead) and some few minutes speaking blunt truths at the master’s table (thereby becoming something of a hated rara avis to the browbeaten staff).

When, on one half-holiday, Keithley wandered far from the institutional aura of the school and found Tregan belly-down in the coarse grass on a clifftop, reading one of the forbidden paperbacks, the boy looked at the master with an expression much akin to that which both were to see later on the faces of German prisoners brought back in a sudden and bloody raiding party.

That such a fear should strike a young boy amazed and horrified Keithley. He felt as though he were in contact with some unclean thing—and as though, curiously, he were the less clean. He squatted beside the boy, who gazed at him steadily, meanwhile trying to hide the penny dreadful behind his back.

“Jack, Sam and Pete?” asked Keithley, in an effort to disarm the boy of fear.

Tregan did not answer—he only stared. Long ago he had learned that the ways of masters were strange and devious; that a gentle question was but guile to bring open confession which would be followed by punishment, cold and calloused. Sometimes, Tregan knew, the punishment was preceded by these one-sided orations in which the master, both accuser and judge, argued a complete case before himself, awarded himself the verdict, and appointed himself the executor of swift justice. It was part of the game at Dr. Rex’s Academy to hold thus the sword of punishment over the head of the helpless accused—although none of the masters would have been anything but horrified to hear of the exploits of Count de Sade.

So Tregan looked at the master without answering. Keithley felt the enormous importance of dispelling the horrible fear in the boy. He started talking against time.

“You know, I used to read them all myself,” he said. “I’d read them now, I think, if I had time.”

He hardly knew how to go on in face of the boy’s silence.

“Look here,” he said. “Why are you so afraid?”

The boy was still silent.

“Fear, Tregan,” said the young master, “is a rotten thing—much worse than the crime that inspires it. Don’t ever be afraid like you are now. You can lie and cheat and steal, but as long as you’re not afraid you’re still a man. You don’t learn that in school—but I’d like to teach it. Here you are, Tregan, afraid just because I caught you reading a penny dreadful—and they’re not bad. I used to read ’em.”

The boy half smiled. Perhaps, he thought, old Keithley wasn’t going to get him caned.

“Where are they now?” asked Keithley.

“In Madagascar,” Tregan almost whispered.

“Madagascar! Great place, that!”

“Have you been there, sir?”

“Me? Goodness, no—never been further than Switzerland in my life. Have an uncle out there, though. Writes letters—sends us pictures. Raising coffee—married to a Portuguese woman—she’s very handsome—can’t talk English. He doesn’t ever want to come home again. Rummy fellow.”

They sat quietly for a while.

“What do they raise in Madagascar?” If he could only get the boy talking, Keithley thought.

His ruse worked quickly. The question, more normal in its relationship between master and boy, swept Tregan up in a breeze of interest. Like all youngsters with a keen mind he loved to show off.

“Coffee, sir—you said that. And bananas, pineapples, sugar-cane, cocoanuts, all kinds of fruit. The natives catch fish and dry them in the sun.”

“Where do you get that?”

“It says so in this week’s, sir. They’re on a plantation where they rescue the owner’s daughter from the natives. She falls in love with Jack but he’s never going to marry anyhow—he never does like any of the girls they rescue.”

The boy chattered on while the cool English sun slanted down on the clifftop. The larks climbed, twittering egocentrically, as if to climb to the ultimate height and to sing beyond all capacity of a tiny body was the only matter of importance. The sun slanted lower and lower and the cool wind turned in from the sea.

“Well, young man, we’d better cut back,” said Keithley, finally, tapping his pipe on his boot. “Incidentally, you’d better give me that paperback. I’ll stuff it in my pocket. I’ll give you something else instead. That is, if you like to read.”

“You mean books, sir?”

“Why, yes. Don’t you like to read books?”

“I don’t know, sir. I didn’t like Pilgrim’s Progress much.”

Keithley felt angry—an anger that surged partly against the boy but more against the system that charted such arid educational paths. There it was—the barren answer—and against it the wealth of literature in English, the only art that this foggy island has touched with deep understanding.

“Wait until I light my pipe,” said Keithley. They stood and he thought quickly.

“I don’t want to jaw you, son,” he said, finally, “but try to remember this—if you don’t savvy it now try to remember it later on. These paperbacks are good stuff—no doubt about that. They’re full of life and they’re talking idiom. But there’s so much to read in the world. You wouldn’t get time for it all if you started reading now and went on until blazes. Some day you’re going to be amazed at the number of things you want to read. Then you’ll wish that you had some of the time you spent on Jack, Sam and Pete.

“You’ll find out some day that all books are not like schoolbooks. There are books, thousands and thousands of ’em, that are exciting and vivid and alive. Better even than Jack, Sam and Pete. You understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do I mean, then?”

“You mean I ought to start reading good books.”

“Well, not exactly, but something after that manner I suppose. I don’t know whether they’re good books or not. I don’t know what a good book is. The word good means so many things to so many people. But maybe you’ll understand more of this later if you can remember it. At any rate, take this—and come over to my place when you’ve finished it if you like and I’ll give you another.”

Keithley turned and hurried over the quadrangle. Tregan stood looking at a battered pocket copy of Lavengro. That evening he lived the idyll of George Borrow’s gypsies.

The amazing discovery of books deluged the boy. His voracity was as limitless as his taste was catholic. The days that followed saw him ripping through The Vicar of Wakefield with little regard for the good doctor. The Shropshire Lad puzzled him. Pickwick Papers and its verbal cartoon characters hardly touched his consciousness. Unaware of its satire he dismissed Gulliver’s peripatetics as childish. Soldiers Three, Sherlock Holmes, a treatise by Havelock Ellis, and Three Musketeers he romped through with blithe ease. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Hunchback of Notre Dame he read on one Sunday. King Solomon’s Mines fascinated him.

But it remained for Lorna Doone, Westward Ho! and Don Quixote really to hold him. These tales of bold doings submerged him in their atmosphere. His daily life in school became a thing of shadowy fiction. It was a thing to be lived but half-consciously during the impatient hours until he could cut away to Keithley’s room—there to lie prone on a carpet which became in turn a rock overlooking the country of the dour Doones, a tar-seamed deck that burned the bare feet of a bold mariner sniffing the spice-laden breeze of the Spanish main, or that sunbaked Castilian plain where a Don rode with a Sancho.

And while Tregan read, wallowing in new worlds, a storm raged above his head. Keithley was unpopular with the staff in proportion to the reverse regard in which the students held him. So there was a devious whispering from a master to a master, and from him to another one, all of which, of course, finally reached the ear of Dr. Rex, who had never failed to hear a whisper in thirty-four years of schooling. And Keithley was called into the most august, and equally dusty, sanctum of the head.

Did he, Keithley, realize, began Dr. Rex, just what impression was caused by the continual presence in his room of a member of the fourth form?

Keithley, with hardened face, refused to take a short cut. He felt an enormous necessity for making this smug man mouth words which he was skirting as gingerly as a cat walks a puddled pavement. So while Dr. Rex perspired a little and fumed a little and tried devious routes, the young man pushed him toward a precipice of bald statement.

“But of a certainty,” Dr. Rex said, “you must apprehend readily the impression that people will get. A . . . ah . . . thoroughly false one . . . ça va sans dire . . . of course . . . there could be no doubt whatsoever of that.”

And Dr. Rex looked over his glasses as if to imply that he was imbued with an all-encompassing magnanimity for thus giving Keithley the benefit of a doubt.

“But as long as one is in a school,” Dr. Rex went on, “there is always a necessity for . . . ah . . . moral safeguards.”

Keithley, looking upon the mass of cells that lived, moved and had being, just as a worm lives, moves and has being, remarked quietly that he had as yet to discover the particular . . . ah . . . moral safeguard that was shattered by carefully furthering a boy’s pursuit of knowledge in an institute founded exactly for that purpose. Would Dr. Rex speak more plainly?

Dr. Rex oozed a little more perspiration, wished most heartily that he had never started the conversation—wished indeed that he had never engaged this most unpleasant young man who stared so directly and who refused to show himself aware of topics that other masters discussed freely in low tones and often with smug relish. So, finally, Dr. Rex spoke words that tasted badly in his mouth. And Keithley replied with words that sounded hotly in the doctor’s ears. Dr. Rex’s dignity went on the rack, and Keithley’s resignation at the end of the term was tendered and accepted.