This fanfic was originally written in February 2010, for the second Dickensblog fanfic challenge - "Show a Dickens character (or more than one, if you'd like) at a moment of crisis." The scene I'm writing about was never one Dickens wrote, surprisingly - and I would have loved to see his take on it! Bradley Headstone is such a scary but fascinating character, so I hope I can do him justice in this one-shot. ;)
Question for a Schoolmaster
"Going to grade papers tonight, Mr. Headstone?"
"No, Hexam, no. Not tonight."
The schoolmaster ground his hands over a pale handkerchief, and fixed his glance on his desk, scarcely noting the thirty heads that filed past, in perfect order, out into the dim April twilight.
"I can't say that I blame you," Charley Hexam resumed, as he leant against the desk, and watched the students alongside his superior. "It's a hellishly warm night. And, if I may say so, it doesn't appear you are holding up too well, sir." Again the handkerchief appeared, and again it disappeared, as a testament to this observation. A gloomy aspect lay on the schoolmaster's face that evening. Gloomy, because the face of young Hexam had a family resemblance to another Hexam, much as a dull star calls into recollection a brighter point of light. And Bradley did not particularly wish to be thinking of that other Hexam, on this night of all nights. He scarcely saw his favored pupil bid him farewell, fade into the twilight, and bang the rickety door behind him, leaving the schoolroom in near darkness.
The evening was in spring, but it possessed none of those airy, charming aspects commonly associated with that time. It was an oppressive night, when the air hung thick, and could not decide between a chilling coolness and a heavy warmth that laid drops of perspiration beneath the snow-white collars of the boys and masters. Of course, this must have been why Bradley Headstone continually ground his damp hands across the pale handkerchief, or dragged it across his wet forehead, as he observed the boys file out onto the cobblestone pathway leading from the schoolhouse, as he sat within. Quite alone.
One bleary candle, a sentinel on the desk, seemed to bear the burden of Atlas as it propped the darkness on its trembling form, and illuminated the face of the schoolmaster. Bradley was not at ease in the quietude of his solitary post, for he communed with himself in a voice that sounded sepulchral and foreboding, alone in the classroom used to the echo of thirty students' speech. He was discussing a problem. Was it a question that had arisen during that day's instruction? Would that it were! But there is no scholarly question that can provoke such emotion, such twitching and shifting of the face, as was present in Bradley Headstone's countenance that night.
"It is a problem without an answer. A problem without a precedent from which to work." Clasping his hands together beneath his chin (with the handkerchief crushed between them like a shroud), he appeared as though he were praying the prayer of a penitent. But Bradley Headstone never revealed his thoughts - the bitter and frightening visions that coursed through his academic mind, greeting calculus with fury - with man or spirit; his was a nature of powerful suppression. And like all things suppressed for any long time, it had its breaking point.
"Suppose…there is an algebraic solution for it. Assume two variables, X and Y." After sitting in his chair for a space, silent and thinking in the same position, Bradley took up a piece of chalk that lay within his reach on the desk, passed it between his hands absently, and approached the blackboard, which loomed on the wall, large and hulking, like a window to a dark world. He regarded it for a moment, in a curious fashion. It was as though he were struggling with himself as he stood there, rigidly; as though whatever problem tormented him should not be written out for him to see.
"Suppose...I were X. We solve for…E. Elimination of the variable - Y - is the only solution. It must - it shall be - either X or Y. Not both."
What a problem it was, indeed. Yet how cold and mechanical and utterly bare it sounded from his dry lips! And what a mechanical, foolish way of solving it, as though the pathetic science of arithmetic were any substitute for the emotion of a human heart! But Bradley's mind was a mechanical mind, and the feelings of the human heart had no place there, no more place there than on the floor of any great factory.
And what had long been on to crumbling - the respectable character that was the mask of Bradley Headstone - broke at last. The schoolmaster's struggle ended and the chalk seemed to scorch his hand as he began to write, write madly, showing his work in good scholarly form to himself, and the candle.
The chalk rambled over the clear black slate, the letters smearing as Bradley crossed and recrossed the board with his pouring hands, his eyes half wild, his light hair limpidly hanging on his face. Oh, what a melancholy sight, that mingling of what he had once been, there in the schoolroom, represented by the perfect penmanship, the scholarly dress and tools, the blackboard - yet written in those words was his true self; what, to solve the problem, he was to become! It was as though his former life were crumbling to pieces before him, like the chalk that he ground to powder in his fierce grasp. There was a perverseness in the way, in his feverish scrawling, he seemed to have drawn his very soul from himself, and pinned it, writhing and bare, upon the wall, in the fullness of its decay and deadly passion. And ever and anon, that face that haunted him - that one bright point of light that guided him to every evil like a weary lost seaman, would rise before him in his distempered fancy. That face that urged him on! The owner of it would have disfigured herself if it would prevent this madness.
The writing curved across the board, frantic and erratic, words blending into sentences with shameful punctuation (perhaps neatness didn't count). Yet despite the convoluted jumble, the words spelled out plainly how Y could be eliminated from the equation. Spelled plainly how the task could be done; how – we shall call him Y – could be tracked and hunted; how the schoolmaster could do it, and yet escape suspicion of the deed - how, once all was out, there would be no earthly obstacle (as he thought) between the schoolmaster and the face that was the ruin of him –
How Y could be eliminated from the equation with a blow to his brains. A blow to his brains and a watery grave.
At last, the madness passed like a breath – or, at least, this new madness left the schoolmaster, and he stepped back, and surveyed the blackboard, with a sort of sordid satisfaction at his wretched handiwork. The white chalk lent a dull reflective glow to the written soliloquy, and Bradley had been gazing at it for some time, with a throbbing in his head, when he heard a movement at the door behind him.
Oh God! The words on the board seemed to leap out of the darkness with a scalding whiteness as Bradley whirled, and his distorted glance rested on the newcomer. It was the pinched, grave face of a third form boy – one of Bradley's daily pupils – though it seemed to be only the white face, and collar, and tie, and shirt cuffs, with no body attached. It was not much of a visitor, but in that room, at that hour, his presence was horrific. He had a question. He had a question, sir! The schoolmaster barely heard him, and the gears of his mechanical mind urged him to pin his glare on the boy's eyes and fix them where they were. But, happy for him, the boy's stare did not shift from the schoolmaster's face, and so, at length, Bradley Headstone breathed more easily. "Speak."
The boy's white cuffs disappeared, suggesting that he had assumed the proper schoolboy position of hooking his arms behind his back, in a scholarly sort of way. Then he spoke, in that simple accent that lends an unearthly tinge to all words:
"Mr. Headstone," said the head of that third-form student, in a voice as pinched as his face, "what would happen if you were to fail the final examination?"
Why was the schoolmaster's face so pale? Was it that he did not understand the everyday question issuing from that floating head – and thought it was, instead, a fatal question of the consequences of that night, conveyed by some otherworldly changeling?
"If I were to fail the final examination?" The schoolboy craned his ears to hear his master's voice. "What do you mean by "I" sir?"
"Oh! Oh, not you, Mr. Headstone! The general you, the plural form."
"Oh - you refer to the exam." The schoolmaster seemed to be awaking from a nightmare. "The test. On Friday." He swallowed, and nodded. "Of course."
"Why yes, sir - what were you thinking of? Or rather, of what were you thinking?" The boy seemed quite pleased with himself and his moment of academic success, until he observed his master's damp expression.
It was like the face of one damned.
The schoolmaster wetted his lips, and adjusted his respectable tie, and smoothed his respectable hair, and put on the mask he had hitherto worn every day of his life. But now it had a severe gash down the middle of it, through which something uglier peered.
"If you have worked hard," Bradley Headstone reasoned, "kept working with an attempt to advance yourself, to develop a store of useful knowledge, to maintain an air of integrity, of – respectability, then…that ought to be…enough."
"But," came the voice from the pinched face, "what if that wasn't enough?"
Bradley Headstone shuddered, and fixed his eyes on his desk; stared down and murmured something satisfactory of the boy's grade, and at last the face left, the student it belonged to applauding himself on the assurance of an easy exam and a good night.
But the bleary candle testified to quite a different scene within the schoolhouse – it showed in stark relief, a frantic figure of a man, pacing the room, striking the white writing from the wall with a bleeding hand, as though he would grind the very letters into the earth. And if it were a church, and not a school, he might be deemed possessed, with all his thousand demons muttering from the depths of his spirit, "Oh, what a question for a schoolmaster!"