Molyneaux shifts and coughs. He has been separated from his errant friend and brought back to the school. But illness and the night linger, their shame a bond. His body has functions and incapacities alike he scarcely can control.
He looks about him at the luxury of wood in Colonel Stallbrook’s Wargrave set, a suite facing the quad with lancet windows, bays, two ottomans, and pile carpet the color of young leaves throughout. The bronze-pinned steps up to the living room are empaneled on either side and bossed with quatrefoils. They bring a visitor into a long, high-ceilinged gallery of formal domesticity. Tall bookcases and heavy portrait frames look taller, heavier in the mullioned light.
The gowned master, sitting behind a desk, in silhouette against one of the shallow bays, rattles his cup in its saucer. He is accelerating with the earth.
“That’s better, Molyneaux.” He stops, and turns, frowning, into the sun. “Don’t be alarmed. I’ve no desire to punish you.”
The thought that there might be such a desire spins its quiet web.
“Foolish, to go along with Pryor’s schemes, no doubt—but that is punishment enough for now. For the future, we’ll see.”
The young boy takes a breath, and then one more, and tries to stretch his lungs against the pain. But Stallbrook sees. His voice changes. That hint of amateur theatricality, of clownish mascotry, that makes a master masterful is set aside.
“You’re going home today. Your parents will be here quite soon. I spoke to them this morning on the telephone. They are worried, of course.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“No, no. It’s clear to us you are—not well. But Molyneaux, aside from that, aside from, well, let’s call it pure bad luck… there is another matter I cannot ignore.”
The spider, in its spiral scheme, listens. Stallbrook assures his somber pupil of his confidence. This is a confidential chat, the runners’ pause before a race.
“It is for you to decide, now, how much of weakness your whole character will tolerate.” The Colonel frowns. “D’you see, I think a person with your gifts, your very, I may say… fraternal compassion for others, needs to be careful.”
“Please, sir.”
The boy is horribly ashamed, red-faced, adrift. Nothing like that, not anything. It was a dream—Deauville, the shelter and the bed. A temptation: unreal. His voice cracks, penitent, high-low, low-high, the amateur choir of youth.
“I make no excuses,” Stallbrook remarks. “Any small school, any small institution, tends to concentrate the joys and miseries of existence. Your kindness to Pryor’s a case in point. It is doubtless commendable. He is the sort to be picked on, let us be frank. It shows how difficult a very solitary life must be without loyal support. But you must think, a little, of your own claims on society.”
Molyneaux cannot hear the words—Stallbrook’s, his own—for blood, though their meaning is clear. He’s being asked to choose. Between two versions of himself. Two abstractions, or maybe one with two faces—a variable. Two paths in life. One path that forks. (If Alec were here now, he’d laugh: “Poincaré! This is what he meant! The art of giving different names to the same thing!”)
In all his shame and confusion, he has the sense that he is being asked to break with a good friend, and in the same moment to turn away from something in himself, to join a club. Occasionally, at school, he has glimpsed masters chortling in the SCR, behind their oak. It looks so comfortable in there.
“Sir, he is—Pryor—sometimes it is hard to—catch his drift…”
The words come fast. They are oblique. An emotion pushing at glass.
“I’ve always been a good influence, I think. I’m good, at least, in ways examiners can understand.” (Stallbrook inflates his chest, swallows his amusement.) “But Pryor’s fast. He has the answers all at once. That’s why he makes a mess. He has to go back over things to fill in all the blanks for us—to make us see. For someone with a mind like that, it’s very hard to explain what he knows. To be like him, you have to leave others behind. It makes me cross. I’d like to think that way—and he imagines that I can—but honestly I can’t. He’s brilliant. We’re not the same—”
The young man’s speech unnerves the Colonel, who balks. He is about to spoil a better person’s life. His guilt gives him that strange feeling of being watched. A tiny awareness clicking its postulates into shipshape, mid-sail, mid-web.
Stallbrook presses a thumb into his brow. “You may be luckier than you know,” he says. “It is not unequivocally a gift, that sort of brain.” His thumb presses harder. “If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say that Pryor’s life will be a disaster.” His eyebrows lift as if the thought had just occurred to him. “He is brilliant, of course, you’re right, but quite beyond the reach of all morality. Such persons never integrate.”
“Sir.”
“Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you?” The friendliness has gone. “We do not need to be prophets to make a prophecy. Certain dismay awaits your friend. That boy already senses it. And he will lead you to a similar reward, however much you admire him.”
It would make perfect sense, Molyneaux thinks, if only it were not so mean. In front of him, Stallbrook is hung upon the moment like a moth. It doesn’t make a form of words, this quivering desire of upright men to draw a line.
He comes upon the revelation like a beggar in the road. One kind of person, the self-willed, cannot be helped. The beggar has beggared himself! The other must be made to give up who he really is, and in so doing choose a better fate.
Molyneaux hears an engine in the arch below. His parents’ car.
“I sometimes wonder if I’ve got a future, sir.”
Stallbrook sits motionless, a light-backed shape.
“I sometimes feel someone is watching me. I don’t know what you mean by a reward. Soon now, I’m going to be taken away.”
The boy leans forward into pain, a silent doubling. The person others see, the thing he is. The cough leaves mucus on his fist and little cauliflower clusters of red.
“You will be well looked after in the sanatorium.”
“I want to get out of this room.”
The master’s hand is palm down on his desk.
“You will be made quite comfortable.”
Christopher Molyneaux goes on, “I’ve often imagined these rooms—a master’s set, I mean. We live in dorms, downstairs. The funny thing, now that I’m here, is that it’s very similar—to how I saw it in my head. Just a bit off. Now, why is that? Who gave me the layout, or put it in my head? The panels, carpet, and the ottomans. It’s just as if another person read my mind and put them there. Though, come to think of it, I added the windows. A Gothic touch.”
“And ottomans,” Stallbrook reflects. “Never devoid of mystery.”
“Beg pardon, sir, but you half-sound as if you were expecting this. I feel—”
“You feel?”
“—something, an instinct, pressing me to—make a run for it. I want to get out of this room. I have to leave—or I will… I will have betrayed…”
Molyneaux stands, blue-thin and young, the twilit memory of an original, brow working, fingers white. Stallbrook’s expression stays unreadable.
“When you have taught a dozen generations of young minds, young man, you’ll learn to tolerate passion. The door is waiting for you over there.”
Turning to go, Molyneaux sees the panel and the door absurdly still and unnegotiable.
“I’ve changed my mind,” the poor boy says, slumping, a flush upon his cheeks.
I can’t, he tells imagination’s whisperer. I’m neither brilliant nor brave. I’m not unusual. That is my mother stepping off the Daimler’s running board with a light gasp at the high step. I will be ill, cautious, confused. I will be good.