'Maggie' Bryan

I

MAGNUS BRYAN was a nervous teacher at the boarding school I went to as a boy. I call him nervous not because he had a timid drop of blood in his body, but because he twitched; and he twitched because twitching was clearly the only possible outlet for his overwhelming store of energy. One of his tricks, while waiting impatiently for a slow mind to work, was to brush an invisible bit of fluff from his left shoulder with a flash of his hand and a jerk of his head. He was small and lean, with a long leathery face and a thin red nose that he used to seize in moments of despair, and a long red upper lip that snapped up and down over his words like strong elastic. His clear blue eyes were blue as a winter sky and bright as a lens, and pointed at their objective like the round muzzles of converging rifles.

He was a fine man, in many ways a great man — a quick little terrier-like great man; and the finest teacher I ever knew. Though he regarded boys as his natural enemies, and carried himself with an air of expecting good from none of us, he somehow contrived to mix with his wary disillusionment a consistent demand for perfection. He would consent to nothing less. (No wonder he twitched!) He had an ironic humor that was as much a part of him as the nose on his face; a sarcastic tongue that he used very sparingly (the threat of it was enough); and he simply couldn’t be fooled: he knew all the answers. He was infallible, objective, experienced,and utterly impartial. He would have held a low opinion of Mr. Chips: I don’t believe it ever occurred to him to give a damn whether we liked him or not. If he wanted our respect (and of course he had it) it was solely as a means to the end of more effective teaching. He taught with passion, as if every minute in the hour were precious. He wore himself out teaching, quite literally wore himself out: he was still in his thirties when he died, victim of his own energetic quest for perfection.

II

To wake up his classes Maggie used a devilish scheme of his own invention. He’d stride into the classroom (German, say) at his usual rapid walk, slam his books on the desk, fire a round from his blue eyes for perfect silence, and haul out of his coat pocket his pack of white filing cards, each inscribed with a boy’s name. For a moment he’d stand there facing us, grimly shuffling the cards; then: —

‘Prepositions governing the dative!’ he’d snap out of his rat-trap mouth, and turn the top card: ‘Brown!’

Uneasy silence, focused on the miserable Brown, who seemed to fade in his chair, like a light going out. A couple of the bright lads would be brandishing their arms. Maggie’s time limit was five seconds. He turned another card: ‘Willetts!’

‘Er —’ (Maggie reached frantically for his nose, gave it a desperate tug, then slapped down another card like a pitchplayer in a railway smoker.)

‘Hagen!'

‘Aus — ausser — er —’

‘I have told you before, Hagen, and I now tell you again: there is no preposition er in the German language. Crowell!'

‘Durch — fur — gegen — ohne — um — wider!’ gasped Crowell — a splendid tackle and first-baseman — and fell back in his seat, spent, to realize at once that he had confused the dative and accusative prepositions. Maggie gave a kind of low growl. His face darkened. He turned another card with a weary air.

‘Mitchell.'

‘Aus — ausser — bei — mit — nach — seit — von — zu.’ Mitchell’s soft and infallible voice always came as a relief. We relaxed for a moment.

So it went. The inquisition usually lasted about ten minutes. Maggie marked each card with a check or circle and totted them up every week. He was a stiff marker. Nobody ever got a perfect grade from Maggie, though there were those who broke their hearts trying. Himself a perfectionist, he believed perfection to be unattainable, the effort more important than the goal. The ‘go at the cards,’ as he called it, had the virtue not only of nailing down our attention for fifty minutes, but also of teaching us the stuff for keeps. By the end of the period every boy was empty, exhausted by concentration; and Maggie himself — his voice rising progressively from a bark to a thin rasp of pain — was a wreck. We could relax on the soft bosom of the gentlemanly English teacher who followed Maggie’s German. Maggie had it all to do over again with his senior American History class. He got results: his students learned the history of their country; and I think I can truthfully say that no member of his course ever flunked his college entrance. By some strange divagation of our native educational system I had had no American history whatever from the age of ten until, at seventeen, I took Maggie’s course — and there learned for the first time and with a vague feeling of disappointment that the dimly remembered Nebraska Bill was not in fact a glamorous early rival of Buffalo Bill but an Act of Congress.

III

A small boy in his first year at boarding school can be one of the unhappiest mortals on earth. Homesickness is only part of his misery, and in any case is normally soon done with. No, it’s the New England cold: the bleak New England eye, the flat New England voice, the celebrated New England conscience, just, implacable, unemotional — or rather perhaps fearful of emotion, longing the while to give expression to a genuine inner warmth but helpless under the discipline of a habit generations old. Steaming radiators are no substitute for the kind of warmth a new little boy needs, or thinks he needs. The warmth is there, of course, but safely hidden: he must earn the right to it. If he can learn to keep his mouth shut, his opinions to himself, his idiosyncrasies buttoned under his jacket; if he can play the part of communal enthusiast without original ideas, tastes, or emotions; and, embracing these and other afflictions, if he can learn to submit unflinchingly to the impersonal discipline of conformity — then, at the first year’s end, he may find that he has won an emotional balance that couldn’t well be gained in any other manner, and be the better for it. But woe to the stubborn individualist! Colder than the January winds that whistle through the bleak red school buildings is the wind of lonely indifference that pierces and chills his unhappy little soul!

I must have been an extraordinarily fresh kid, probably spoiled by the soft comfort of a warm and affectionate childhood, as well as by earlier attendance at a little-boy school in which I and my gang had ruled the roost. Boarding school came, of all possible forms of shock, doubtless as the most necessary for my airy, flip complacency. An elder brother had done his best to warn me. For a fortnight. I managed to keep my mouth shut and wear the new-boy habit with becoming meekness. Then I began to feel at home. It was much, much too soon. I found that a wag at home is not so waggish at school. I discovered the folly of talking back to a sadistic little classmate who had attained the social seniority of a previous year of school. Older boys and masters took to snubbing me with enthusiasm; and my own classmates — my equals, I supposed — went about with lips in a permanent curl. Foolishly stubborn, I continued to walk the perilous ways of pride; and the evening came when I received a written invitation from the head of my class to present myself behind Abbot Hall after supper.

It was a shock. Yet I suppose it did me good; it must have, for I survived. Even Mr. Willard, my housemaster, apparently thought I needed the discipline, so tactfully did he keep his face turned away.

Ingenious brutality in the dark! They were so many, and they seemed to enjoy it so heartily! I went down fighting. For a moment, when one of my random swings landed on a nose, I even felt that life was good. After it was over I crept up to my room, bruised, dirty, ashamed, and bawling with rage and ruined pride. Later I took a kind of secret satisfaction in the knowledge that never before had a new boy been so fresh as to require the organized attention of his entire class. And if my years at school were never quite free from the memory of this episode, and I as a result never entirely happy there, I was ready to admit before I graduated that the fault had been mine and not the school’s. I had it coming.

That first year was a long and painful struggle to repair the dents in my pride, to carry without showing it the heavy, lonely burden of fancied unpopularity. There was an occurrence (it’s funny the little things a boy remembers) that helped me enormously: Mr. Willard called me to his study one day after the term examinations and accused me point-blank of cheating. He said I had sneaked a preview of his algebra examination — and in a way he had good reason to believe it: I was rotten at algebra, yet by sheer luck had turned in an almost perfect paper. Though I think I seldom resented being caught and punished for a crime I had committed, I never did learn to take personal injustice sitting down; and it so happened that one of my little sources of secret pride was that I never cheated. (Every boy must have a private store of self-respect, some kind of hidden reservoir of integrity which he can tap at need. Mine happened to be not cheating.) It wasn’t at all like Mr. Willard to fling such random accusations about; I knew it and he knew it; and so I was able to prove my genuine innocence through the simple medium of sheer passion. Mr. Willard ended, in fact, by apologizing.

Afterwards Maggie Bryan found me triumphantly brooding in the musty, oak-paneled Common Room.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ he demanded in his customary truculent bark. I told him.

‘Mr. Willard admitted he was wrong, didn’t he?’ I said he did.

‘Then forget it!’ And he bustled away, on the run as usual. Excellent advice!

IV

Maggie did me good in more ways than I can possibly tell. Some of them I remember, many more are forgotten. For three years I hated him with a dull grinding hatred; then came my final year, and I woke up on the second morning to the horrid realization that I was to have him in two courses and three sports — that I should, in other words, practically be living in his lap till I graduated. He taught German and history; he coached hockey, second-team baseball, and helped with football. There must have been some episode, some unusually dramatic or subtle incident, that marked the turning point in our relations. If there was, I’ve forgotten it. All I know is that I ended the year his wholly devoted slave. At last I knew him, through and through, understood his character, his fairness, his passion for the best. Perhaps, too, he began to know me. God knows I was trying, at last, with all I had in me — and with Maggie the effort was all: success to him was merely a pleasing by-product. I don’t know how to reconcile this principle with his perfectionism; but Maggie did.

He rightly never had a high opinion of my intelligence, especially of my athletic intelligence. His own mind worked with the speed of flame; a cow mired in a swamp would be by contrast an appropriate figure for mine. In the spring of my last year I caught on Maggie’s second baseball team. As a backstop I had one outstanding virtue: I was the only catcher available, and Maggie knew it. The plain and regrettable fact was that Maggie didn’t have the proper temperament for secondteam coaching. He deserved the best material. He loved baseball, all baseball, and in particular he loved accurate, ‘heads-up’ baseball, such as he had enjoyed at college. We gave him, I’m sorry to say, the kind of game in which the centre fielder is the busiest man on the team: the ball had a way of ending up there whenever our opponent got a man on base. Maggie suffered severely, and kept plugging away at us with all the weapons he commanded: derision, cajolery, patience, temper, reason — whichever he thought each case required. I, who could be counted upon to lose my head in the pinch, must have been among the heaviest of his burdens.

Playing at St. Mark’s one sunny Saturday in May, — a close game, — I got so excited in one of the late innings that I forgot to put on my mask. Maggie noticed the omission after a couple of pitches and shouted courteously to the St. Mark’s coach on the opposite bench, ‘Is it all right to remind my catcher to put on his mask?’

‘By all means,’ laughed the coach.

I remember this not because it was the first time I’d forgotten my mask, but because it was the last.

At Milton, on another day, he used another method. The Milton pitcher, a chubby youth, had a slow roundhouse curve that was poison to my batting technique. (That’s what I called it, so help me: my ‘batting technique’; it consisted of a blind and terrific wallop at the spot where the ball had last been seen, and it left me, too often, face down on the ground.) When I walked back to the bench after striking out for the third time, shaking my head in the conventional way, Maggie fixed me with his high-power eye and growled in a quivering voice, too low for the others to hear: ‘Moffat, if you strike out your next time up, I’ll throw you off the team for good! ‘ His threats were never vain. I knew he meant it. And his force of character was such that I actually singled to left field, my next turn at bat, and knocked in the winning run. Did Maggie pat me on the back? Not he! He had already stated his terms; I had merely met them. In Maggie’s code there were medals only for actions beyond the line of duty.

Only once was I able to surprise us both by this kind of meritorious conduct. We were playing the Groton Seconds. They had men on first and second, the batter laid down a hit-and-run bunt along the third-base line, and I, throwing off my mask, was on it quick enough to catch the batter at first — if I’d cared to. Instead, I deliberately used my head, an experiment Maggie had been urging me to try all spring long. Out of the corner of my eye I had seen the second-base runner rounding third: I picked up the ball, turned and faked the throw to first, and tagged the ambitious Grotty as he ran into my arms. It was the third out. As I walked over to the bench I wore a becomingly dead pan, one ear pricked at Maggie.

‘Good play, Moffat,’ he grunted. ‘How did you think of it?’

‘You taught it to me one day in practice, sir,’ I smugly replied.

‘I did, did I? Good for you!’

It was the first time he had ever mentioned me, so to speak, in dispatches. The praise went to my head: my last time at bat the Grotty pitcher hit one of my horizontal swings fair on the nose, the ball soared high and handsome to pastures green, the centre fielder misjudged it, and — thanks to a subsequent fumble by the third-baseman — I slid safely into third for the only triple I ever made in my life. It goes without saying that the scene is still fresh in my memory and that even today I think of myself as a powerful hitter. The credit is wholly Maggie’s.

V

Granted that icy discipline is prone to nip the seed of self-expression, to blight the soft green bud of latent genius, the fact is that the creative gift is rare, and the main wheels, the big wheels that make a school go round, must of necessity be geared to the pedestrian pace of the ungifted average. If talent is real, it will probably survive any kind of treatment except indulgence. The autobiographies of countless great figures of British arts and letters testify with a sort of boastful bitterness to the numbing effect of public-school discipline on their free and tender souls. A point to be argued, however, is whether or not their talents would ever have ripened without having undergone the discipline they so hotly resented. May not the violence of their rebellion against tyranny, injustice, and traditional brutality have been the very instrument of their release, the springboard that flung them high into the regions of their subsequent triumphs? Whether Maggie ever thought consciously along such lines may well be questioned. If he did, he never let on. An expert opportunist, he doubtless trusted rather to his instinctive knowledge of what boys needed ‘for the good of their souls.’ Tradition, as such, never bothered him in the least; nor did the old school tie ever form a part of his professional wardrobe. He regarded boys as individuals, subject to certain ancient laws of juvenile behavior, but nonetheless to be handled according to their separate colors and shapes. He found something soft in me that needed hardening, and so, with what I took for discriminating brutality, he kept bearing down.

Sympathy! I craved it; he made sure that I didn’t get it. Each spring we used to hold an interhouse track meet between teams selected in time trials run off by the older boys. My house boasted as its chief ornament the school god, John Hill — fleet as the cyclone, powerful as a Percheron, captain of everything in school (except perhaps his soul), worshiped by the younger boys, and gratefully trusted by weary masters: character incarnate. There’s one in every class in every school. Sometimes they grow up.

Hill, of course, was conducting the time trials for our house. My turn came. I toed the line, — skinny, anxious, clumsy, — crouched in my own version of the sprinter’s start, and listened to the thumping of my heart. Hill stood over me, watch in hand, grim of face.

‘Ready,’ he trumpeted, ‘on your mark — get set — go!’

I lurched forward in a shower of gravel and do-or-die, and fell flat on my face. As a reasoning creature I naturally expected to get up and start fresh: it was a time trial, not a race. And there was Hill, leaning over me even before I had time to rise, his voice twisted with passion.

‘What are you lying there for? Get up and run, you little yellow dog!’

I got to my feet in honest amazement. ‘What the heck!’ I piped, brushing off the sand, ‘This is a time trial,’ and walked back to the starting line.

Hill placed his face close to mine. ‘You’ve had your chance,’ he said, and pointed sternly towards the house. ‘Now get out!’

I laughed shrilly in his face (none of the other boys joined me; they looked coldly virtuous), and I was still laughing, though with a growing bitterness, when I reached the house and met Maggie Bryan, going somewhere in a hurry.

He took a quick look at me. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he asked. God knows I was wholly used to this form of greeting from Maggie.

‘Gee whiz, sir —’ and I told him, surging with injustice.

He listened till I had finished. ‘Hill’s running the trials,’ he remarked, and was off about his business. It was good for me, I suppose, more especially because I knew that he treated the great John Hill exactly as he did the rest of us.

VI

My first year of Maggie was the toughest. There was no doubt in my mind that for him the day was lost on which he couldn’t indulge in a round of sadistic recreation at my expense. How I loathed the man! By night I lay in my white iron bed muttering intricate plans for revenge; saw him apologizing to me before the assembled school, a shabby figure of remorse, while I accepted his selfreproaches with a manly nod of forgiveness and the boys crowded round to congratulate me.

By day, however, things went rather differently. Maggie continued to hound me — or so I believed; continued to invent humiliations for my benefit. It happened one evening that he replaced the junior master at study hour (this was not one of Maggie’s ordinary duties), and I seized the opportunity to show him what an earnest student I really was. Getting out my Latin, I put on an act for his benefit, part deliberate, part unconscious. Such writhing, such stifled groans and pain-wrung grimaces, such ruffling of the hair and furrowing of the brow, have probably never been witnessed from that school day to this. Maggie sat sideways at his raised desk, quietly reading. Not once did he glance in my direction. Yet presently into the pool of silence dropped, and exploded like a bomb, my name, in Maggie’s softest voice — soft at the edges, round a core of cut steel: —

‘Moffat.’

‘Yes, sir?’ I sat violently erect, innocent as a dove — least innocent of birds.

‘It isn’t really as hard as that, is it?’

‘No, sir,’ I answered feebly. Maggie turned back to his book, I to my mortification, aware of the snickers rippling round me.

Little things like that!

VII

The incident that formed the kernel round which all my anti-Maggie feelings grew had, however, a more definite shape and substance. I felt, perhaps with reason, that the trap he set for me was unfair; and I save it for the climax of these rambling reminiscences not because of its intrinsic importance, or because of its effect on me, but because its curious sequel was to me so surprising. Even after he had won — as I have said — my deep affection as well as the whole of my respect, the memory of the thing used to stir and whimper like an uneasy wind in the secret caverns of my soul.

Our main field of battle, that first year, was beginners’ German. I got off to a bad start, and as time oozed along I found myself gummed in a sticky mass of nouns, verbs, adverbs, and pronouns, all basted in the thick gravy of that nonsensical backhanded German construction. (I still think of German as a language in which nothing comes out even.) At the term examination I miserably failed. My report — not too bad except in German — went home, and in due course one of my mother’s weekly letters contained a ‘How come?’ clause. I replied at some length, laying my cards frankly on the table and basing my defense on the broad premise that (1) German is an abominable language and (2) trying to learn it a waste of valuable time. Nevertheless, I continued, I work at it hard and faithfully; it is obvious therefore that (3) my failure isn’t really my fault at all, but due to causes beyond my control: i.e. Mr. Bryan. Mr. Bryan is notoriously unfair in general — all the guys say so — and down on me in particular. However, I concluded, I will continue to do my best in spite of all handicaps, because, as you know, Mother, that is my nature — or suggestive hints to that effect. I ended on a strong don’tblame-me note. Mine was the plea of a manly victim of calculated injustice. I haven’t a doubt that I sincerely believed everything I said — or did after I’d written it, anyway. That’s one trouble with writing things down.

The winter term ran on in the sluggish, sinister way of winter terms, and in spite of what I chose to call my best efforts the tongue of Goethe continued to elude me. Then one evening Maggie told me to come to his room after study hour: he wanted to have a talk with me. That, and nothing more.

At the appointed hour I shivered across the black arctic campus and climbed the stairs to his office and knocked on the door.

‘Come in!’ . . .

‘Sit down, Moffat.’ Maggie’s study was in darkness except for the powerful green-shaded reading lamp that stood on his desk. It was a bare little room, the working retreat of a busy man impatient of all but professional necessities. It contained, besides the desk, Maggie’s own swivel chair, a table with a few magazines in neat piles, a shelf of books along one wall, and a Morris chair of yellow oak, upholstered in brown corduroy. There was one curtained window, and a door leading to the inner bedroom. I perched on the edge of the easy-chair, he sat at his desk and turned the lamp so that it shone full in my face. He was a voice from the darkness, a piercing eye, and a shadowy beak of nose.

For a moment he gazed at me, blinking in my chair. Then: —

‘Moffat,’ he said quietly, in a let’s-getdown-to-business tone of voice, ‘why can’t you do better in German?’

‘I — I — don’t know, sir. I do my best, really I do, sir.’ My voice sounded very small and thin, even to me.

‘You’re not stupid.’ It was a statement, not. a question. I remained silent. ‘And yet your work is consistently abominable,’ he continued, with a jab at his left shoulder, a jerk of the head.

‘I — I work harder at German than everything else put together — honestly I do, sir,’ I replied hopefully.

‘I thought I knew something about teaching German,’ he continued, half to himself, ‘but you’ve got me beaten. There must be some explanation. . . . Do you think my methods are wrong?’

‘Oh no, sir, not at all, sir!’ In my anxious voice rang the conviction that, of all teachers since the world began, Mr. Bryan was the first and finest. The lamp was beginning to hurt my eyes; I felt mesmerized by a Voice, issuing from blazing light.

‘Then it isn’t that.’ He turned away, humming thoughtfully to himself, leaning back in his swivel chair and rocking a little as he picked up a pipe and slowly filled and lit it. Then he swung round and faced me again, and his voice took on an unusual gentleness.

‘You think I’m fair?’ he remarked casually, as if determined not to leave even the ultimate absurdity unplumbed. ‘You don’t think I’m harder on you than on the others? It isn’t that, is it?’ (Oh, sucking dove; oh, milking tiger!)

‘Oh no, sir, of course not, sir!'

He pounced: slam went his chair as he leaned forward, one arm pointed at my head, and the letter in the outstretched hand terribly visible in the beam of light. ‘Then why did you write to your mother that. I was down on you?’

Nemesis! Doom appalling! A roaring blackness shot with stabbing flame! (Of course I’d forgotten all about that letter weeks before.) What happened next, what I said, how and when I got out of that evil room — I remember nothing whatever about it. When I came to, I was halfway home, gripped in an agony of shame and a dull rage directed equally at Maggie and my mother — Maggie for trapping me under that light, my mother for an act of criminal naivety in passing my excuse on to the Headmaster. That night I lay long awake, plotting futile revenge on Maggie and composing a dignified yet piteous rebuke to my mother.

Maggie never referred to the episode again, by look or word. I had learned my lesson and he knew it. And from that time on my German improved. I don’t know why. Yet, despite our subsequent friendship, many years passed before I could think of Maggie except in terms of a bright light, an accusing eye, and a piece of white paper.

It is the sequel, however, that lifts the incident out of the commonplace — the astonishing sequel that waited eight years to be revealed. One evening during my senior year at college, Maggie dropped into my room in Holworthy for a smoke — as he did now and then — and we chatted for an hour or so before he got up to go. He was driving back to school. He was twitching more than usual. The bit of fluff on his left shoulder seemed harder than ever to brush away. I thought he looked tired and not too well, and had told him so. He shrugged, smiling, and murmured something about its being a tough life. It was not till then, not till we had shaken hands at the door, standing together in the semidarkness and laughing in close community of spirit, that I suddenly and without premeditation plucked memory from its hiding place and showed it to him. Even then it came out hard; I felt, even then, that this phantom shape, to me so long familiar, might turn into a thing of horror under the light. And I knew as I spoke that what I really feared was the thought of shaming him with it. Of course he’d remember; of course he’d feel ashamed — as I, secretly, still was for his sake.

‘Maggie,’ I said, trying to keep my voice casual, ‘do you remember the time, my first year at school, when you hauled me up to your study and confronted me with that letter from my mother?’ I watched his face with my whole soul — and learned the truth.

Maggie didn’t remember! He obviously had no idea what I was talking about. He repeated, in a puzzled tone: ‘Letter? What letter? From your mother?’

I told him the story.

‘Do you mean to tell me,’ he said after a long pause, in a low voice and very slowly, ‘do you mean to tell me you’ve remembered it all these years?’

‘I sure do! ‘

‘Strange,’ he mused. ‘I haven’t the faintest recollection of it myself. . . . Strange what boys remember.’ Then he gave me his quick smile and held out his hand. ‘Damn dirty trick, wasn’t it? Do you mind if I say I’m sorry now? Good night!’

‘Good night,’ I called after him down the stairs.

The ghost was laid. I felt a great release. ‘Strange what a boy remembers!’ True enough! Maggie himself has a pretty good kind of immortality in the memory of every boy he ever taught.