The Friend of Women and Other Stories by Louis Auchincloss Page A

of you yet. This thing we’re discussing is an excellent example of how a headmaster can keep a school both successful in a worldly sense and decent, to boot. How, if you want to put it that way, he can have his cake and eat it. To begin with, I cannot afford totally to ignore the prejudice that many of our parents have about not wishing their sons to be brought up cheek by jowl with Jewish boys. So I compromise. I rule that there will be no place for an orthodox Jew in a church school. But if he’s converted, I take him. Oh, yes, there are some parents who will still growl, but they know, fundamentally, that they don’t have a leg to stand on, and I have shown myself a consistent man of principle. Do you get it now?”
    â€œBut the Catholic boys don’t have to convert.”
    â€œAh, you spy an inconsistency. Life is full of them. Let me point out that our parents and alumni may have a prejudice against Catholicism but not against Catholics themselves. They have no objection to having their sons raised with Catholic boys so long as Catholicism is not taught or advocated in the school. So what do I do? I require that Catholic students attend all our chapel services but send them to Mass in the village in a bus.”
    â€œMightn’t an orthodox Jewish boy accept the same treatment? And go to the temple in a bus?”
    â€œAs Lewis Carroll’s Father William put it, I have answered three questions, and that is enough. Be off or I’ll kick you downstairs!”
    But I left him wondering if being kicked downstairs was enough. Mightn’t it be better if I was kicked out of the school? Hadn’t I had a glimpse of the complete amorality of this supposedly devout Christian? Hadn’t he sufficiently demonstrated that, if he had no prejudices, neither did he have any convictions, and that he would go to any lengths, perhaps even improper, to promote the worldly prosperity of the academy to which he had dedicated his life? He might fool everyone else, but could he fool God? Or was it that he was sparring with God? Challenging God on seemingly equal terms with sword drawn? Ah, Satan! Wasn’t Satan as real as God?
    That night I had a grim nightmare. As often takes place in my dreams, I was an anchorite living in a community of mud huts in a North African desert in early Christian times. I was seeking, as usual, peace of the soul, communion with God, and had little difficulty resisting the lewd temptations of the imps who danced around the pious village, hoping to lure one or another of its inmates to the fleshpots of the nearest city. I was wholly intent on the wise and comfortable words of the old abbot who was our self-constituted leader. He appeared as none other than Dr. Lockwood himself, though not the arbitrary and formidable headmaster I saw in the schoolroom, but the gentler cleric I sometimes saw in chapel when his velvet tones swelled to plangent oratory in the pulpit or when he knelt in prayer, his eyes tightly closed, his hands clasped, his voice trembling in a kind of pious ecstasy.
    What turned this placid dream into a nightmare was my happening to see, when I was passing his hut at dusk and he was unaware of my proximity, that he was addressing a respectful half-circle of imps seated quietly at his feet and evidently receiving his instruction!
    I sat up with a cry that awakened Hilda, to whom I related my dream. Ordinarily I shouldn’t have done this, for she had little patience with my nocturnal fantasies, but in my dismay I blurted it all out. She simply laughed.
    â€œSo that’s how you see him edifying his sacred school! Well, all I can say is that I wouldn’t put anything past him.”
    A week later Hilda, as with her basic kindness she sometimes did, invited Miss Ethelinda Snyder, a small, giggling, and gossip-loving old maid, to supper with us. She was Dr. Lockwood’s secretary and, of course, his awestricken slave. Yet his treatment of her, unlike