Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [58]
The highwayman makes no impression on Mr Whelan. Mr Whelan’s pale eyes flicker across the page, his pencil comes down: 6½. 6½ is the mark he almost always gets for his essays; never more than 7. Boys with English names get 7½ or 8. Despite his funny surname, a boy named Theo Stavropoulos gets 8, because he dresses well and takes elocution lessons. Theo is also always allotted the part of Mark Antony, which means that he gets to read out ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,’ the most famous speech in the play.
In Worcester he had gone to school in a state of apprehension but of excitement too. True, he might at any time be exposed as a liar, with terrible consequences. Yet school was fascinating: each day seemed to bring new revelations of the cruelty and pain and hatred raging beneath the everyday surface of things. What was going on was wrong, he knew, should not be allowed to happen; furthermore he was too young, too babyish and vulnerable, for what he was being exposed to. Nevertheless, the passion and fury of those Worcester days gripped him; he was shocked but he was greedy too to see more, to see all there was to see.
In Cape Town, by contrast, he feels he is wasting his time. School is no longer a place where great passions are aired. It is a shrunken little world, a more or less benign prison in which he might as well be weaving baskets as going through the classroom routine. Cape Town is not making him cleverer, it is making him stupider. The realization causes panic to well up in him. Whoever he truly is, whoever the true ‘I’ is that ought to be rising out of the ashes of his childhood, is not being allowed to be born, is being kept puny and stunted.
He has this feeling most despairingly in Mr Whelan’s classes. There is a great deal more that he can write than Mr Whelan will ever allow. Writing for Mr Whelan is not like stretching one’s wings; on the contrary, it is like huddling in a ball, making oneself as small and inoffensive as one can.
He has no wish to write about sport (mens sana in corpore sano) or road safety, which are so boring that he has to force out the words. He does not even want to write about highwaymen: he has a sense that the slivers of moonlight that fall across their faces and the white knuckles that grip their pistol-butts, whatever momentary impression they may make, do not come from him but from somewhere else, and arrive already wilted, stale. What he would write if he could, if it were not Mr Whelan who would read it, would be something darker, something that, once it began to flow from his pen, would spread across the page out of control, like spilt ink. Like spilt ink, like shadows racing across the face of still water, like lightning crackling across the sky.
To Mr Whelan is also allotted the task of keeping the non-Catholic boys of Standard Six busy while the Catholic boys are in catechism class. Mr Whelan is supposed to read the Gospel of St Luke with them, or the Acts of the Apostles. Instead they hear from him stories about Parnell and Roger Casement and the perfidy of the English, over and over again. On some days he comes to class bearing the day’s Cape Times, boiling with rage at the newest outrages of the Russians in their satellite countries. ‘In their schools they have created classes in atheism where children are forced to spit on Our Saviour,’ he thunders. ‘Can you believe it? And those poor children who remain true to their faith are sent off to the infamous prison camps of Siberia. That is the reality of Communism, which has the impudence to call itself the religion of Man.’
From Mr Whelan they hear news of Russia, from Brother Otto about the persecution of the faithful in China. Brother Otto is not like Mr Whelan: he is quiet, blushes easily, has to be coaxed into telling stories. But his stories have more authority because he has actually