Free Honorable Men by Louis Auchincloss

do, ultimately exhausted him. Nothing at last seemed worth the tension in which he lived. The next time Chessy came to his cubicle, he allowed him to slip into his bed.
    ***
    The peculiar horror of the next weeks was that Chip could not seem to focus steadily for more than a few minutes at a time on what had happened, with the result that the shock of his guilt was a constantly repeated blow. He would be walking in the morning to chapel, or returning from the gymnasium against a reddening sky, or ascending the broad varnished stairway to the dormitory to don the stiff collar and tie required for supper, and he would feel a gasp of hope, as if, sinking in the ocean, he had just grasped the spar of safety, or, awakening from a nightmare, he had felt the blessed damp beads of relief on his brow, only to have the spar collapse, the illusion vanish, and know that he was doomed. The present was hopelessly spoiled, and also the future, even the years at Yale that his father had always assured him should be the happiest of his life.
    Chessy was astonished at the violence of his friend’s reaction. When Chip told him, the morning after the episode in the cubicle, that they must no longer be friends, he protested vigorously, running after Chip’s retreating figure and grabbing him by the arm.
    â€œLook, don’t be an ass. It didn’t mean anything. It’s just till we get home and can see girls. Isn’t it better than masturbating?”
    Chip looked at him in horror. “I don’t want to talk about it. I’m going to treat it as if it never happened. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe it really didn’t!”
    â€œYou mean we just dreamed it?”
    â€œYes!”
    â€œYou must be crazy!”
    â€œIt would kill my parents. If you ever breathe a word of it, I’ll swear you’re a liar!”
    Chessy whistled. “Breathe a word of it? Do you think I’m proud of it?”
    â€œIt was your idea.”
    â€œAnd I had a ready pupil! Boy, how ready!”
    Chip left him without another word. Chessy was like one of those little devils in the choir screen at Albi whose job it was to prod the damned with pitchforks. It was not his fault; it was his function. Chessy at length accepted the situation with a shrug and found his way to more hospitable cubicles.
    Chip now had no close friends, but he found some relief in his semi-isolation. Without intimates he had no spies; without spies he could, in his own way, relax and learn to live with the grim but silent companion of a guilt that he knew now would never leave him.
    Listening to his grandfather’s sermons, watching the sunlight through clouds making first jewels and then dark blobs of the scarlet and green robes and turbans in the great west window, he would find himself lulled into a kind of torpor by the mellifluous phrases.
    â€œThere are those today, boys, who will tell you that a man is not truly the master of his being. The thief, they will maintain, cannot help reaching his hand into another’s pocket; the adulterer is the prey of his own lust; even the murderer is propelled helplessly towards his victim by a rage that overpowers him. Our leaning to sin is a compulsion, like alcoholism or drug addiction. But always remember this, boys. Those who argue thus seek to deprive you of your own free will, of your very soul! For without sin, how can there be virtue? Without the struggle, where is the reward? Any man can do anything that he wills to do. What is an alcoholic but one who has chosen to destroy his will? But if he has destroyed it, must he not once have had it to destroy?”
    Towards the end of March a sluggish spring brought mud puddles to the campus, and a white sky made the bare branches of the elms seem like bones. The winter had been so long and cold that it seemed too late for leaves. The boys were bored, the masters irritable, the wait for spring had become interminable. And then the one thing that everybody