Francis was good enough at his work to escape any particular notice; he was always in the upper half of his form, undistinguished but respectable. He was able to hold his place, while having plenty of time to study the masters, whose personal character was often more educational than anything they taught.
It was on Prize Day that they presented the most interesting spectacle, when they appeared on the platform of the Prayer Hall in their gowns, beneath which they wore, in some cases, old-fashioned morning coats, preserved from far-off weddings. About half of them were Englishmen, and rather more than half were veterans of the recent war. They wore their medals of honour, some of substantial distinction. One or two limped; Mr. Ramsay had a wooden leg and walked with a clumping gait; Mr. Riviere had an artificial hand under a black glove; Mr. Carver had a silver plate in his head, and was known to have had spells when he climbed the water-pipes in his classroom and taught from that elevation. Their hoods were old and crumpled, but some of them were from ancient universities and spoke of a brilliance that had not brought any reward except a position as a schoolmaster. In the eyes of the boys as a whole, they were glorious; but to Francis there was an air of melancholy about them, for he was perhaps the only person in the Hall who saw what was in front of his nose, who really observed how they stood, and what their faces were really saying. Of course, he never spoke to anyone about what he saw.
His life held many secrets—things he could not talk about to anyone, although he had friends, and was passably well-liked. The religion of the School, for instance; it was a kind of middle-brow Anglicanism, not too heavily stressed because the School contained boys of all denominations, including several Jews, and some richly coloured boys from South America who were probably Papists. The hymns were loud, chiefly unexceptionable admonitions to live decently and honourably, and the music to which they were sung was superior stuff from the Public School Hymnal—Hoist, Vaughan Williams, and unsentimental tunes that would not have been strange to Luther. The Headmaster preached a short extempore sermon every Sunday night, and because he was a man whose enthusiasms sometimes outran his judgement, he was likely to say things which a more discreet man would have left unsaid. Musing on the theme of sin and perhaps forgetting where he was, he once quoted Nietzsche, declaring: “Sins are necessary to every society organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the only reliable weapons of power; the priest lives upon sins; it is necessary to him that there be sinning.” Fortunately few boys were listening, and of those who were, few understood what he was saying. Francis may have been the only one of those who hugged this wisdom to his heart. But upon the whole the School’s religion puzzled him. It seemed to lack heart. There was nothing in it of the mystery, the embracing warmth, the rich gravy of the religion of Mary-Ben. It was a religion well suited to Old Money and to the toadies of Old Money. It was a religion that Never Went Too Far.
Never too far. That was the constant admonition of Old Money and the toadies of Old Money. Those who had any pretension to classical education likened it to the Greek doctrine: Nothing in excess. Some, who had dabbled a little in Shakespeare, might say “Look that you o’erstep not the modesty of Nature”. Of the blatant immodesty of Nature they had no conception. But Francis had; he had sensed it in the abyss that lay at his feet in Carlyle Rural, and in what he had seen of the exactions and vengeance of life among the corpses in Devinney’s embalming room. Francis knew in his heart that life was broader, deeper, higher, more terrifying, and more wonderful than anything dreamed of by Old Money. A schoolboy is not supposed to know such things, and he scarcely admitted them even to himself. But they emerged, sometimes, in his drawings.
In the circumstances of life in a large boarding-school it is impossible to draw without being observed. As a fag he was required to do an extensive business in decorating raincoats; these were slickers made of yellow oilskin, on the back of which, between the shoulders, it was demanded that he draw a funny face, which was then shellacked, so that it was permanent. These raincoats were greatly prized. Two or three came dangerously near to being identifiable caricatures of masters; one in particular, a severe Scottish face with beetling brows and an extraordinary amount of hair growing from its nose, was certainly Mr. Dunstan Ramsay, the history master. Mr. Ramsay called Francis into his study one night after prayers.
“Caricature is a rare and fine gift, Cornish, but you ought to consider it carefully before it gets you completely in its grip. It’s the exaggeration of what is most characteristic, isn’t it? But if you see nothing as characteristic except what is ugly, you’ll become a man who values nothing but ugliness, because it’s his trade. And that will make you a sniggering, jeering little creature, which is what most caricaturists have been—even the best. There are some quite good art books in the library. Look at them, and learn something larger than caricature. Don’t forget it, but don’t make it the whole of what you can do.”
Francis was glad not to be caned for lèse-majesté and super-cheek, and promised that he would look at the art books in the library. And there, in a not very extensive or distinguished collection, he found what he missed in the religion of the school.
As is likely to happen (to people who have a daimon) the discovery coincided with something else, not obviously related to it. The fags often sang, when they were mustered to haul the big roller over the cricket pitch, or sweep snow from the open-air hockey rink, and what they sang was what they liked, not what the music master made them sing in class; his taste was for “Searching for Lambs” and other folksongs he valued because they were in five-quarter time and demanded some musical skill. But the fags sang a sentimental song in waltz time that a few of them knew and the others quickly learned:
How many knew what the Grail was, or why it should gleam, does not matter. Francis knew, for he had read it in a book that came, of course, from Aunt Mary-Ben. The Grail was the Cup from which Christ had drunk at the Last Supper, and anybody lucky enough to catch sight of it was ensured a very special life forever after.
Among the art books recommended by Buggerlugs—which was what the boys called Mr. Ramsay—was one that dealt with the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and in the illustrations—Francis did not bother much with the text—was something of the Grail in the light that shone from the eyes of the men, and the rich, swooning beauty of the women. It was a light that fed the hunger he felt because of the starved, wholly external religion of the school, and a lush depiction of Nature that balanced the world of wretched desks, spattered ink, chalk dust, constipating food, and the unceasing, unimaginative, perfunctory obscenity of schoolboys’ talk. It was an enlargement that made even compulsory games and the Rifle Corps open up to a light that came from somewhere outside the school. And then the Headmaster, who kept his ears open, seized upon the slave-song of the fags and preached one of his Sunday-night sermons about the Grail, as a vision, an unresting aspiration, and with his usual fine disregard of probability urged the boys to read Malory at once, and to make the Grail quest a part of their own lives.
Francis hunted down Le Morte d’Arthur in the school library, and was soon compelled to recognize that it was a dense, intractable, difficult book and he could not get through enough of it to find the Grail or anything else he wanted. Nor was the encyclopaedia more helpful, with its tedious explanation of where parts of the legend came from, and its dowdy, scholarly rejection of all the good stuff about Joseph of Arimathea and King Arthur—the stuff that fed his imagination and made the Grail a glowing reality. So he hugged the book about the Pre-Raphaelites, and kept it out of the library far longer than was permitted, even though nobody else wanted it. He considered stealing it, but a strong feeling from the Blairlogie past told him that A Certain Person would not like it—His wounds might even be reopened—and that a life of noble feeling could not be founded on a crime, especially a crime that would be so easily detected.