Skinny Island (7 page)

"Very well, dear boy, come to us, come to us, by all means. We shall profit by your fine appreciation of letters and be heartened by your faith in our undertakings. And it need not be forever. We can always release you when occasion beckons. Oh, yes, we can even push you up the ladder of fame!"

"When I leave Clare," Marcus cried in the passion of his gratitude, "it will be feet first!"

In the classroom Marcus would confront his pupils without a textbook. He would make no reference to the given assignment for the day. Pulling up the old map of the Roman Empire that covered his blackboard he would reveal the sonnet or short poem or quotation that he had chalked thereon, without indication of date or author. He would then, for the given hour, limit the discussion to the phrases and words before the eyes of the class, reciting the lines one by one in different tones, from the mocking to the sublime, revealing feelingly towards the end of the period, his own emotions, either for or against the poem, and calling for assent or dissent. At first he encountered sullen silence, then ridicule and at last applause. Little by little Mr. Sumner became "the thing." Some boys actually began to read poetry without its being assigned. Others became enthusiasts. A few even caught fire.

The most brightly burning of these, Rodman Venable, was a dark, handsome boy, tall and very thin, with enormous brooding eyes, who would stare at Marcus as if he could not believe that the latter could really mean anything as daring and original as he seemed to be saying, which made the disconcerted teacher search his mind to see if he could not come up with something that would not let the boy down. Rodman became a quick, too quick convert to the doctrine of Walter Pater; he wanted to burn with a hard, gemlike flame, and it was he who suggested to Marcus that he invite a select group of students to spend a part of their summer vacation with him.

"I understand, sir, that you have a shingle palace on Long Island Sound and a trim sailing yacht. We could recite Keats and Shelley as we buffeted the waves of the wine-dark sea! Aren't such vacation visits common between masters and boys in the English public schools?"

Well, of course they were, and Marcus was enchanted with the idea. The month of July was chosen, and the visitors, all poetry enthusiasts, were selected by Rodman. He hilariously compared the project to that in
Love's Labour's Lost
where the king and peers agree to abjure the company of women in favor of study. They would sail in the morning, read in the afternoon and engage in Platonic dialogues at night.

When Marcus told the headmaster of his plan, however, the latter showed a decidedly guarded enthusiasm, and the very next weekend Marcus was asked to meet Rodman's father in Mr. Forrester's study, vacated by the headmaster for the occasion.

Mr. Venable was a species of gentleman with whom Marcus was not familiar: the New Yorker who emulated the cultural aspirations of Boston. He sat in his armchair with an artful combination of stiffness and ease, as if he were a visiting legate to whom the proconsul had had temporarily to yield his bench of authority. He was serene, bald, glacial, and absolutely still, except for a finger that stroked the full, silky mustache.

"I do not for a minute, Mr. Sumner, wish to convey any disapproval of your inspiring my boy to a love of fine poetry. Yours is a noble calling and one, if I may say so between ourselves, that fills a definite need at Clare. Mr. Forrester, for all his undoubted virtues and vibrant faith, is hardly an intellectual man."

Marcus clenched his fists in a sudden spasm of uncontrollable resentment. "Oh, sir! How can you say that?"

Mr. Venable's bland, tan eyes widened slightly. "My dear Mr. Sumner, his verse! Surely you, of all men, are not going to defend 'Oh, Jesus, have I hurt you? Your pain lies at my door'?"

Marcus's heart seemed to be rolling about under his rib cage. He had so successfully suppressed all awareness of the headmaster's revivalist hymns that any reminder of them came as a whiplash across the cheek. "We might say that his stanzas are the crumbs of the feast of his faith," he muttered.

"Very well put, Mr. Sumner! And I value loyalty above all other qualities in a schoolmaster. But to the matter in hand. I am of the opinion that Rodman would be better at home this summer than with you. I am aware that you have a charming house on the North Shore and a beautiful sailing yacht, but I understand that the company will be entirely male and that there will be long sessions where music and art and beauty will be ardently discussed."

"And that is objectionable?"

"Surely you are not unaware, Mr. Sumner, of the excesses to which sentimentality among ardent and impressionable young men may lead?"

Marcus looked at him with horror. "To what do you refer, sir?"

"Well, you are too young, of course, to remember the Oscar Wilde business, but surely you have heard of it?"

"Mr. Venable!" Marcus leaped to his feet. "You cannot think—?"

"Oh, but I
do,
Mr. Sumner. Not that you would in any way foster such horrors, of course. I am talking only of possibilities. And with boys all things are possible. Boys can be vicious, sir! And if you don't know that, you should learn it as soon as possible."

Marcus sat down again, crumpled. "You mean such things go on here? At Clare?"

"My son has implied to me that they do."

"Not surely...? I mean ... not
he}
"

"Oh, no." Venable shook his head decisively. "But he has not manifested as much disgust at those who may have been guilty as I should like to see. He seems to have adopted what I hesitate to call a fashionable tolerance for vice and perversion. There is a kind of 'Oh, Daddy, don't be provincial' sneer in his attitude that I find most disturbing. That is why I think he will do better this summer with his family in Narragansett where there will be golf and tennis and young ladies and dances. We can safely leave Keats and Shelley until the fall."

"And Oscar Wilde."

Venable's eyes at this showed a hint of concern that he might have gone too far. He contemplated the devastated creature before him with something like dismay. "You mustn't take these things too hard, Mr. Sumner. Perhaps you will come in July and visit us for a week. I think Rodman would like that."

"I'm afraid I must stay on Long Island. I have asked the other boys. Though perhaps that should be canceled now."

"My dear Mr. Sumner, you are going much too far!"

"How can I?" cried Marcus as he hurried from the room.

Late that night, after the boys in his dormitory had gone to bed, the headmaster himself knocked at Marcus's study door.

"Venable said he had upset you. May we discuss it?" Taking in now the younger man's emotional state, Forrester closed the door leading to the dormitory. Then he put his arm around Marcus's shoulders and allowed him to sob. "You take it too hard, my boy. Venable accused you of nothing."

"Except of living in a fool's paradise!"

"Well, that may be a very sensible place to live."

Marcus broke away from his senior. "Does that mean you think I
do,
sir?"

"No, no, of course not. Calm yourself."

"How can I? If that kind of thing goes on here among the boys!"

"Oh, did he say that?"

"He said that Rodman had implied it. And that Rodman tolerated it, too."

Forrester pursed his lips as if he were about to whistle. Then he turned and paced the length of the little chamber and back, swinging his arms slowly, pondering something. "Tell me, Marcus. If Venable were your father, might you not find him a difficult parent to love?"

"I'm afraid I should find him difficult not to hate."

"And do you not suppose that Rodman may also experience some of that difficulty?"

"Perhaps."

"And if Rodman disliked his father, would it not be natural for him to wish to hurt him?"

"I suppose so."

"And how better could he do that than by instilling in the paternal mind the suspicion that his son had had at least a taste of vicious activities?"

"But that would be at his own expense, sir!"

"I wonder, Marcus, if you have any conception of how far a child will go to revenge himself upon a parent."

Marcus quailed before the worldly wisdom of his god. Then he closed his eyes as he made himself consider the grievous problems that faced a headmaster. And he, puny ridiculous Marcus, dared to question the warrior in the front row of so savage a battle!

"I resign my post, sir. I am unworthy of it."

"Now, now, my boy, we'll sleep on this. Things will take their proper shape in the light of morning. You have been hurt. That is regrettable, but in the long run the experience may be of value. It will toughen you. Go to bed now. And remember: Clare needs you. And I am happy to think that you need Clare."

Marcus, however, did not sleep that night. Through the long hours the features of Rodman Venable bobbed up and down in his fevered brain. The dark eyes had become yellow, leering. He was like the young Apollo of the medieval legends of the survival of pagan gods into the Christian era, disguised, proscribed, but still possessed of magical powers, inciting the youths with his charm and flute and dancing feet to the pursuit of strange pleasures, unspeakable joys, until in their frenzy they would tear him to pieces. Rodman's ears began to seem pointed; now he was Pan, capable of killing as well as loving. Now he was nude and beckoning with a lewd smile that seemed to mock Marcus's reluctance. And Marcus, leaping from his bed and hurrying to the window to look up at the stars and pray, saw Rodman's laughing eyes in the pale horror of the morn. Yes, he wanted to do those things, whatever they were; he wanted to do them with Pan!

The next day Marcus resigned his position at Clare. Forrester pleaded with him for a day and most of a night, but he was adamant. He finished the term, to give the school time to find his replacement, and never again addressed a single word in private to Rodman Venable. When he was free at last, he closed his house on the North Shore and sailed for France. He took rooms at the Crillon in Paris where he decided to remain indefinitely, adopting an unvarying solitary routine. His mornings were devoted to walks and museums; his afternoons to reading in his suite; his evenings to theatre and ballet. He had no idea of what he was going to do with the rest of his life, and he tried not to think about it.

He went four times to see
Phèdre
at the Comédie Française. It seemed to him that Racine, through Ré jane, was speaking directly to him. But what was the message? He pondered every scene, every couplet of the great play. Always before he had thought of the heroine as evil because she falsely accuses her stepson of attempted rape. But now it began to seem to him that Racine was showing Phèdre as too distracted by passion and baffled by circumstance to be responsible for her acts. Her real sin is the mere existence of her passion.

But could that really be? Marcus asked himself as he wandered through the brilliant gardens of the Tuileries in the incomparable spring of 1914. Phèdre doomed to eternal fire for a merely inward feeling? Suppose she had never confessed her love, never got herself tangled up with the other characters? Suppose she had died in sole possession of her guilty secret? Would she still have been damned?

No! His very soul revolted at last from the idea. He could not believe there was sin even in the grossest lust if the lusting man shut the gates to its escape and held it tightly within. On the contrary, might not repressed emotion ferment like the juice of the grape and turn itself into fine wine? Might that not even be a way in which art was born? Might God not have put lust into the world like a vineyard to bring forth a harvest of beauty?

What was Paris itself, Paris shimmering in that glorious spring, all white and gold and light green, but an example of this? Everyone knew what revolting things went on in the French capital; they were attested to by winks and "Oo-la-la's" the world over. But was there anything more beautiful than the center of the great city, a soul much finer than the vulgar body that encased it? And in his own case, was there any reason that a certain stirring within should not be converted to a purely aesthetic sense and guide? If Oscar Wilde had carried his urgings to the depths of vice, had not Walter Pater raised them to the heights of which the poets sing?

So absorbed was Marcus in his own thoughts that the outbreak of war caught him almost by surprise. The only friend he had in Paris was an old one of his mother's, a Bostonian expatriate, Mrs. Lyman Perkins, at whose house in the Pare Monceau he paid a weekly visit at tea time. She vigorously counseled him not to "slink home," but to stay in France and do war work.

"It's going to be a long war, the wiser folk are saying." They were seated on the little terrace by her rose garden, a setting of elegant peace that seemed to deny her fiery tone. "Don't believe this 'home by Christmas' rot. You say you have no goal in life. Why not work for civilization? The poor Belgians are pouring over the frontier. They're going to need everything: shelter, food, clothing. I propose to organize all the Americans in Paris. We can set up an office right here in this house. Oh, I'll keep you busy!"

He always thought afterwards that Mrs. Perkins had provided just the tonic he needed. She was a perfectionist; her garden had the finest roses, her drawing room the loveliest
boiseries,
her table the most succulent food. She spoke French almost too well, and knew her French history and literature in depth. Yet she remained an unreconstructed New Englander who judged herself and her fellow Americans by the strict old Yankee moral standards from which she regarded her French friends as somehow exempted. She was always practical and realistic, uninterested in philosophical or political speculations. The here and now was good enough for her; she had little use for shadows or subtleties, even in her friendships. She seemed to believe that if insight was keen enough, intimacy was unnecessary. As to the war, she adopted the prevailing violence. The Germans were barbarians who had to be crushed, and that was that.

Marcus found the war years in Paris curiously happy ones. He worked hard enough in the organization of the refugee camps and later in hospitals to feel some relief from the sense of guilt at his own exemption from the horror of the trenches. He knew, after all, that he was doing all that could be expected of one of his fragile physique, and he was content to be bossed about by his own indomitable and indefatigable general. There were moments, particularly in the dark days of 1917 before the arrival of the American troops, when he wondered if it was possible that such concentrated carnage, month after month, year after year, could be justified by any moral goal, but then he would tell himself that it was not up to him to decide these matters and that, anyway, the more carnage, the more necessary was the work that even one as puny as himself was performing. He saw unspeakable horrors in the wards that he visited, but he was somewhat consoled by the thought that for every hideous wound there was a courageous heart, that for every act of destruction there was a brave deed of defense, that for every devil there seemed to be an angel. God had a use for every seeming ill.