Shame and Consciences
adapted by Mihangel
11. The temple defiled
Christmas weather set in before the holidays. On the last Saturday of term, Old Boys came trooping down from Oxford and Cambridge and stood in front of their old hall fires in astonishing ties and wondrous waistcoats, patronising the Loder of the house, familiar only with the Charles Cave. But the Old Boys' football match could not take place. The ground was thick with snow, and a swept patch proved as hard and slippery as the slide in Heriot's quad. This slide was an authorised institution, industriously swept by the small fry under the supervision of old Mother Sprawson, who sent more than one of them down it barefoot as a remedy for the chilblains which they had rashly pleaded as an excuse for shirking their duty.
On the Sunday, morning chapel was dominated by the Old Boys' presence. But before dinner they had all dispersed, and by second chapel the school had returned to business as usual. The first lesson was the story of Naaman and his leprosy, and from it the Headmaster took the inspiration for his sermon.
"Your bodies are the temple of God," he began, "and are not to be defiled." What exactly he had in mind he did not spell out in so many words.
"In the struggle between purity and impurity of thought and deed lies for many of you, perhaps for most of you, one of the first decisive turning-points of life. Acquaintance with your own constitution and the functions of life, combined with knowledge of the fatal consequence of sins of impurity, can alone be trusted as a safeguard."
But by now only the youngest and most innocent of his listeners could have failed to understand. What he meant by the sin of impurity was what a fellow did, by himself, with his own right hand. Five minutes later, for he kept his sermons short, the Headmaster ended:
"Leprosy was chosen by God to mark the curse of sin by a visible vileness in the body. Suppose that every secret sin came out in leprous spots upon us, that our foreheads and faces bore the dead white mark of the sin within. What a ghastly revelation there would be; for the very best amongst us would have brought home to him, in a way he never had before, the secret curse of sin in the world. However much the rush of True Life would overmaster it, surely a great horror would come upon him, as he felt his own flesh deaden and reflect the struggles which hitherto had gone on silently in his heart; and when he saw all round the ghastly evidence written in every human form, the presence of sin would be a reality more than he could bear."
Jan was accustomed by now to being stirred by what this fierce little man pronounced from the pulpit, and tried to listen with care. Today, the second Sunday after their encounter in the Sixth Form classroom, he listened with unusual care. The consistent message of these sermons boiled down to a demand. It might at root be a demand for the team-work required of a soldier, it might be a demand for a decent and honourable way of life. The message was mounted, it need hardly be said, in a frame of religion, designed for the listener who at least pretended to piety. But ignore that frame, and the message could equally appeal to the impious. For all his impiety, Jan had no objection to team-work or to a decent and honourable way of life, as he saw them; quite the reverse.
But today's sermon irritated him, for he could not see that it carried any message for him. He could not see why the so-called impurity castigated by that stern old voice should detract from a decent way of life. To Jan, it was no sin, but a relief, a consolation for the buffets of life, a norm. So it was too, from all that he had deduced and from what old Jerry clearly assumed, to practically every other boy in the school. Jan did not often think deeply, but this thought occupied him throughout the final hymn.
As he left the chapel another thought was bothering him, and to tackle it he stood aside while the chattering hordes dispersed. The Bible might insist that leprosy was the visible mark of sin. But in Norfolk, shortly before term had started, there had been a sermon by a visiting preacher, a missionary from darkest Africa where, it appeared, leprosy abounded. Was sin, then, so much more prevalent in Africa than in England, where leprosy was virtually unknown? No, it was not. Leprosy, the missionary had made plain, was a disease, just like mumps or measles but much worse. Was it the victim's fault? No, it was not, any more than mumps or measles were. The Headmaster was backing the wrong horse today, or rather two wrong horses.
Still deep in reflection, Jan picked his slow way along the slippery pavement to Heriot's, remembering that he had agreed to go for a walk with Chips. That put a further thought into his head, which made him chuckle dourly. If leprous patches were the reward of impurity, then only the likes of Chips would remain unblotched. The sermon seemed to have put a similar thought into the disreputable head of Shockley, who was hovering, hands deep in the trouser pockets that were allowed to older boys, outside the gate which led from the street into the quad. With him, as usual, was Buggins.
As Jan passed the studies, Chips opened his window above, stuck out his head, and called down, "Wait there for me, Tiger! I'm coming!"
"Small chance of him coming!" Shockley remarked to Buggins, none too quietly. "Too pi and too young to come." Buggins obligingly guffawed.
As Chips closed his window, Jan boiled with internal rage, but he held his peace. Chips might not have heard that cruel crudity or, if he had, might not have understood; whereas if Jan made a scene, Chips would undoubtedly ask why. In a minute Chips emerged from the gate, swaddled in overcoat and muffler, and joined Jan in the street. They headed for the open country, and the moment they were out of earshot of the dangerous pair, Chips showed that he had indeed heard but not understood.
"Tiger, what did Shockley mean? I know they call me pi, but what did he mean that I'm too young to come?"
Jan groaned silently.
"Well --"
Am I my brother's keeper? he asked himself, for the language of the chapel and of divinity lessons was beginning, willy-nilly, to rub off on him. Chips was younger than he was. His voice had not yet broken but, from the glimpses of his nakedness which Jan had had in the lavatory when changing after fives, it soon would. Half of Shockley's comment might already be untrue. The other half, though, was valid. Chips was undoubtedly a pious innocent. But he could hardly pass his whole life in pious innocence. Somebody, at some point, had to enlighten him. If Jan ignored his question now, or laughed it off, the answer might soon be supplied more hurtfully by Shockley & Co with their crude insinuations, or even by Joyce with his untrammelled vocabulary. Chips might be an old ass, but he was Jan's only companion. Yet more to the point, Jan was Chips's only companion. As such, Jan had a duty. In perhaps the first conscious act of responsibility in his life, he took the plunge.
"Well -- did you understand what Jerry was talking about in chapel?"
Chips blushed bright scarlet. "Yes," he said, after a long pause.
"Well --" Jan suddenly realised that, in this realm, his own vocabulary was limited to what he had picked up in the stables. He had not the faintest idea of the words which gentlemen used -- pious well-bred gentlemen, that is, as opposed to the Shockleys or Joyces of this world -- when talking about these things, assuming they ever did talk about them. He had to fall back on such mother wit and delicacy as he could muster.
"Well, 'coming' means -- it's a low word for -- for what happens when -- when you do what Jerry was talking about. As you finish doing it. I don't know if you know about that. And I'm sorry, I don't know the proper word for it."
Chips was still bright red. "Ejaculation," he muttered through his teeth.
The word was completely new to Jan, but he had enough Latin in him by now to see that it fitted.
"Then you do know! How do you know, Chips? Have you -- done it yourself?"
"No! My father told me about it. And told me not to do it. He said it made you go blind."
"That's rot, Chips, absolute rot." It did not cross his mind that it might be tactless to contradict Carpenter senior so bluntly. "If it was true, almost every boy in the school would have gone blind long since. Almost every man in the country. But they haven't. Any more than they've got Jerry's leprosy. After all, I'm not blind, am I?"
He could have bitten his tongue off, but it was too late to retract. Chips was gaping at him, open-mouthed in raw astonishment.
"Tiger! How did you -- well, learn about it?" he asked at last.
"Oh, I -- heard about it at my last school."
That was not the whole truth. The older boys at the National School in the suburbs of Middlesbrough had indeed talked about it, but Jan had first heard of it at an early age in the stable, and there, a year or so ago, it had also been demonstrated to him. He had hidden himself in the hayloft one evening to indulge, out of his father's sight, in another illicit practice. He was just filling his pipe when he heard Ted the groom climbing the ladder to his own retreat. The end of the hayloft was divided off by a crude wooden partition into a little cubicle where Ted occasionally slept when there was a sick horse to tend or even -- so rumour told -- when there was not. On this occasion, being surprised and curious, Jan had abandoned his designs on his pipe and peeped cautiously through a crack in the partition. What he saw he imitated; not only there and then, but regularly thereafter in his truckle bed in the coachman's cottage. But this was a story not for Chips's ears.
"Tiger, why do you do it?"
"Because -- well, because it's the next best thing to doing it for real. It makes you feel so good."
"Good? How can you say that? It's a sin!"
That irritated Jan, just as the Headmaster had irritated him from the pulpit. "It's only a sin if you believe in sin. It doesn't hurt you, it doesn't hurt anyone else. It might hurt God, if you believe in God. But I don't. So I don't believe this is a sin either."
Jan had never consciously reasoned in that way before, not even in chapel just now, and the words had flowed out unrehearsed. Hearing them from his own lips, he was quite impressed, and emboldened.
"There's no God, Chips," he blurted out. "Not the way I see it. There's nobody up there to help us along, or to kick us down. There's only people. Other people -- good ones helping us along, bastards kicking us down. And there's us. We have to help ourselves along. And shagging helps me along, shagging and thinking of ..."
Jan shut his mouth, regretting his impulse, conscious that for once he had said too much, dimly aware that this philosophy could be seen as revolutionary and subversive, determined -- almost too late -- not to reveal who or what he thought about while shagging. But Chips had not even winced at "bastards" or at "shagging." Maybe he had never heard that last word before, even though it was regular school slang; but he could hardly miss its meaning. Instead, he was looking Jan full in the face again, open-mouthed once more. They had stopped abreast of a field entrance, and after a full minute Chips turned round and leant on the gate, breathing hard, his breath steaming the air, gazing across the fields where misty winter twilight was already muting the white tones of the landscape. A pair of crows, in bad-tempered conversation nearby, made up their differences and flew off together in apparent amity. Jan waited with apprehensive patience, growing steadily colder, and after another five minutes Chips turned back to him, the faintest of smiles on his face.
"Better not let anyone else hear that, Tiger," he said mildly. "Specially not Jerry. Let's get home."
They walked back to Heriot's without another word between them. Shockley and Buggins were as usual hanging around the door into the studies, and favoured Chips with pitying leers. But Chips, rather than scuttling hastily past as he normally would, stopped and gave them a tight-mouthed and inscrutable look, so unexpected from him that it momentarily wiped the leers from their faces. Chips abruptly turned his back on them and marched with determination to his study, and Jan heard him lock his door.
A hour later there was a knock at Jan's own door, and Chips stuck his head in. He seemed elated now.
"Thank you, Tiger," he said simply. "Shockley was wrong!"
With that, he was gone, leaving Jan at first bewildered, then relieved and amused as Chips's meaning sank in, and finally thinking more highly of the old ass than he had ever thought before.
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