am lying, I enclose an extract from the latest.
A. J. Bright.
There were words in Onslow’s very small and neat but distinctive writing on the enclosed piece of paper, which had been cut off from the bottom of a letter. Trembling now, Christian read:
Beloved boy, it is become an agony to me to see you among your fellows, so keen is my delight in your beauty, so passionate is my wish to separate you from them, to have you alone upon the sofa where we have enjoyed so many, all too brief, moments of love. Can you indeed not come to me on Saturday? Of your loving mercy I ask it.
Dear Arthur, I beg of you, do not avoid me – I have no time to write more now. I remain, yours through eternity,
G. R. Onslow.
Christian stared at this for a long time. At length he lowered his candle, put Bright’s letter and the signed extract back on the table, and sat down slowly and carefully, caressing his beardless chin all the while like an old man.
*
After giving his opinion of Mr Hughes’s novel, Onslow had retired to his study, saying to Primrose and Louisa that he had letters to write: he sat now on the sofa, thinking about sin.
Onslow’s study was a low, dark room, hung with green paper, lined with books, and floored with a thick Turkey carpet. It was precious to him because he liked its enclosed quality, which none of the other rooms in the house shared. When alone there he felt safe, shut away from the world, in control of his surroundings and his emotions – yet it was there that on many occasions he had given free rein to his most dangerous emotions, both in the flesh and on paper.
At present, it was not Arthur Bright who was first in Onslow’s thoughts, but Thomas Arnold. By force of contrast, the false portrait of Arnold in Tom Brown ’ s School days had aroused half-forgotten memories of the real man, including one particularly painful memory which Onslow believed he would have confided to his brother-in-law had his wife not been present. He knew that his comments upstairs on the novel’s inadequacies had been not so much scathing, as he meant them to be, as anguished; and this embarrassed him. Now, pinch-lipped, he could imagine himself telling Primrose just how and why Dr Arnold had shown him the error of his ways, could imagine himself receiving holy understanding – but then he saw himself confessing exactly how, as a man, he had betrayed Arnold’s trust in him. Onslow did not think that Primrose would necessarily recoil in horror if he mentioned Arthur Bright. It was conceivable that he would forgive this sin which he could not imagine: but Onslow wanted understanding, not bewildered, sorrowing acceptance, and a plea for him to abandon his evil ways.
The painful image which Onslow dreamt of unloading onto Primrose was a long-suppressed memory which ought to have been wholly pleasurable – the memory of himself aged fifteen, crying and crying with Arnold’s hand on his shoulder, weeping with relief at the easing of a vast mental burden.
Onslow remembered how he had approached Arnoldwith sickly trepidation, driven by a conscience he had not known he possessed. He had been still in the Fifth Form, still deeply afraid of ‘Black Arnold’, as the man was known to most of his pupils, and had waited in agony for the periodic signal that Arnold was at home to boys who wished to consult him on a personal matter – the hoisting of a flag above the School-house. He went to him expecting to be flogged and expelled; Arnold’s kindly smile at his entrance made him blurt out that he deserved both these things.
The truth did not emerge from Onslow’s tangled and shivering euphemisms for some time. It was that he and another boy, whom he did not name, had indulged in mutual masturbation in Onslow’s minute cubicle of a study. When Dr Arnold learnt this, he was relieved. He had begun to suspect that this most promising of his Fifth Formers was guilty of what he considered the worst of all sins: lying. The sight of
A. J. Bright.
There were words in Onslow’s very small and neat but distinctive writing on the enclosed piece of paper, which had been cut off from the bottom of a letter. Trembling now, Christian read:
Beloved boy, it is become an agony to me to see you among your fellows, so keen is my delight in your beauty, so passionate is my wish to separate you from them, to have you alone upon the sofa where we have enjoyed so many, all too brief, moments of love. Can you indeed not come to me on Saturday? Of your loving mercy I ask it.
Dear Arthur, I beg of you, do not avoid me – I have no time to write more now. I remain, yours through eternity,
G. R. Onslow.
Christian stared at this for a long time. At length he lowered his candle, put Bright’s letter and the signed extract back on the table, and sat down slowly and carefully, caressing his beardless chin all the while like an old man.
*
After giving his opinion of Mr Hughes’s novel, Onslow had retired to his study, saying to Primrose and Louisa that he had letters to write: he sat now on the sofa, thinking about sin.
Onslow’s study was a low, dark room, hung with green paper, lined with books, and floored with a thick Turkey carpet. It was precious to him because he liked its enclosed quality, which none of the other rooms in the house shared. When alone there he felt safe, shut away from the world, in control of his surroundings and his emotions – yet it was there that on many occasions he had given free rein to his most dangerous emotions, both in the flesh and on paper.
At present, it was not Arthur Bright who was first in Onslow’s thoughts, but Thomas Arnold. By force of contrast, the false portrait of Arnold in Tom Brown ’ s School days had aroused half-forgotten memories of the real man, including one particularly painful memory which Onslow believed he would have confided to his brother-in-law had his wife not been present. He knew that his comments upstairs on the novel’s inadequacies had been not so much scathing, as he meant them to be, as anguished; and this embarrassed him. Now, pinch-lipped, he could imagine himself telling Primrose just how and why Dr Arnold had shown him the error of his ways, could imagine himself receiving holy understanding – but then he saw himself confessing exactly how, as a man, he had betrayed Arnold’s trust in him. Onslow did not think that Primrose would necessarily recoil in horror if he mentioned Arthur Bright. It was conceivable that he would forgive this sin which he could not imagine: but Onslow wanted understanding, not bewildered, sorrowing acceptance, and a plea for him to abandon his evil ways.
The painful image which Onslow dreamt of unloading onto Primrose was a long-suppressed memory which ought to have been wholly pleasurable – the memory of himself aged fifteen, crying and crying with Arnold’s hand on his shoulder, weeping with relief at the easing of a vast mental burden.
Onslow remembered how he had approached Arnoldwith sickly trepidation, driven by a conscience he had not known he possessed. He had been still in the Fifth Form, still deeply afraid of ‘Black Arnold’, as the man was known to most of his pupils, and had waited in agony for the periodic signal that Arnold was at home to boys who wished to consult him on a personal matter – the hoisting of a flag above the School-house. He went to him expecting to be flogged and expelled; Arnold’s kindly smile at his entrance made him blurt out that he deserved both these things.
The truth did not emerge from Onslow’s tangled and shivering euphemisms for some time. It was that he and another boy, whom he did not name, had indulged in mutual masturbation in Onslow’s minute cubicle of a study. When Dr Arnold learnt this, he was relieved. He had begun to suspect that this most promising of his Fifth Formers was guilty of what he considered the worst of all sins: lying. The sight of
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