Staircase in Surrey: The Gaudy Part 4

I must have started in Miss Miller's form rather older than most seven and a few days, say, over against six and a few months. It had occurred to n.o.body to send me to any sort of toddlers' school before that, or to have somebody come in and teach me my ABC. In Miss Miller's there was a boy called Douglas James, who could stand up and confidently communicate to us from a printed page such striking circ.u.mstances as that the Cat sat on the Mat. I was quite, quite certain that never in life (which I had an obscure intuition of as going on for a long time) could I beat Douglas James. By the end of the year, however, I had done this. In reading and writing, in sums and in looking after tadpoles, in mixing up the three primary colours in my paint-box until they turned to mud: in these and other lores and skills I had Douglas James where I quite ardently wanted him. In Miss Fuller's in the following year it was just the same. I defeated even Bobbie Dalgetty, who was judged to have developed cheating to so fine an art as to be virtually impregnable.

But after this they pushed me into Miss Frazer's. This meant skipping Miss Clarke's something I was glad of, since Miss Clarke beat phrenetically on a piano and screamed like a c.o.c.katoo. The idea was that I ought to be among older, not younger, boys as I moved up, form by form, through the school. This didn't work, since it reckoned on my being an academic rather than a merely lively little boy. Latin appeared to have been happening briskly in Miss Clarke's, and I didn't in the least enjoy the privilege of now learning its rudiments on the side and on my own. Instead of being 'top' I was now regularly fourth, fifth, or sixth-a shame emphasised by the fact that we spent most of the day actually changing, minute by minute, the seats on which we sat. Whenever you successfully answered an oral question you moved up above all those who had failed in turn to do so. The move up was easy: you simply collected your books and walked. But if you moved up twelve boys had to shuffle down one. Sir Walter Scott describes the system in the Edinburgh High School when he was a boy there, and we may well have adopted it from that ancient inst.i.tution. I don't know whether such archaic educational techniques anywhere survive today. It was vastly time-consuming. It was also undeniably rather fun, just as Snakes and Ladders can be. (I was sometimes to wish that I could subst.i.tute Snakes and Ladders for Scrabble in Old Road, Headington.) I can still feel as a physical sensation the heady business of occasionally reaching top again (or, in English, of recklessly rather than doggedly defending that position day after day and week after week).

In Miss Frazer's I entirely cracked up, all the same. I suppose I wasn't willing to do the work; was temperamentally incapable of undergoing the discipline. So I ought to have accepted the small spectacle of boys with what I knew to be very much my own quantum of intelligence sitting confidently above me. But I didn't manage it. And this was how my short but rather splendid career as school liar began.

My reading at that period was exclusively in what my mother anachronistically called penny dreadfuls supplies of juvenile pulp fiction being already un.o.btainable at less than fourpence a time. What happened was that I simply enlisted myself in the universe of these publications. As soon as I left the school gates I became Duncan the Secret Service Boy or something equally glamorous. The fantasies must have been extremely fluent, and I conjecture that I myself was in a state in which I more or less believed them to be true. I doubt odd as the paradox is whether it crossed my mind that anybody else would believe them to be so. But this was to reckon without a certain hypnotic effect which a precocious verbal facility must have been capable of generating for the time; and also without the difficulty inexperienced children must encounter in distinguishing between what is credible and what is not. It is certain that a number of my companions half-believed in the prodigy they were entertaining in their midst. In fact it required a nascent intellect out of the ordinary McKechnie's, indeed not to be taken in. Probably McKechnie was a little shaken himself. I was providing him with a first glimpse of the irresponsible character of what he would later learn to call the imagination. This was why, as we sat side by side as grown men, I was still capable of engendering in him a vague irrational alarm.

One person who could not be deceived was my brother. Ninian, a year my senior and both harder-headed and physically stronger, eventually took it upon himself to expel the aberration which he regarded as a deepening of our general family disgrace by means of corporal persuasion. The process took him a couple of terms, since it seldom went beyond a vigorous knuckle-scrubbing of my imprisoned scalp. But it was entirely successful. My skald-like powers and proclivities eventually vanished as abruptly as they had appeared.

McKechnie and I were now talking, and we kept it up for some time. It wasn't, however, with any real sense of increasing intimacy. There was a substantial, if grotesque, reason for my feeling discomfort in neighbouring the regenerate P. P. Killiecrankie, since with him I was rather in the position of a revived Actaeon required to sit demurely beside an elderly Artemis, or of Ham at a family party subsequent to the drunkenness of Noah. Actually, with Killiecrankie I felt no awkwardness at all. But between McKechnie and myself there was a cause of embarra.s.sment which, lying just as far back in time, retained some vitality because it was mutual. Faintly but perceptibly, we were enc.u.mbered as we conversed by the memory of having spent three years pointlessly avoiding each other here in Oxford.

I did most of the talking, being for some reason anxious to contravert McKechnie's simplistic view of my juvenile taradiddles as pointing the way to my eventual career as a writer. I was now totally, I explained, without the faculty of improvisation; I couldn't even 'tell stories' to my brother's children; my case was that of a total surcease of one habit of mind before the close of childhood, and the emergence of a radically different one in adolescence. McKechnie must have judged me to be on decidedly uncertain as well as boring ground, and he no doubt reflected on the egocentricity of the artistic character. But if I was talking about myself in this way it was at least partly because I quite failed to coax him into anything of the sort himself. I suppose he would have answered direct questions whether or not he was married, for example but he carried about with him an indefinable air that somehow discouraged challenge. It wasn't reticence; one didn't feel him to be, for example, the sort of man who regularly leaves something painful at home and doesn't want his mind drawn back to it. It was almost as if, apart possibly from that violin, he had no private or personal life to be reticent about. It hadn't occurred to him to stock up with anything of the kind. He had been, after all, just the sort of boy who develops into an obsessional scholar.

Having come to this conclusion about Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie, and decided that our dim decent impulse to reach out or back to one another wouldn't come to much, I was relieved to notice him beginning to show signs of interest in a man sitting opposite. The nearer of the brick-faced men being the next thing to a brick wall so far as my schoolfellow was concerned, here was a propitious development. The tables in hall, indeed, although so long that they appear very narrow, are in fact as broad as a marriage-bed (the comparison had been Tony Mumford's), and I remembered that conversation across them, and against a background of noisy dining, had never been easy. But McKechnie was addressing himself with surprising vigour to overcoming the difficulty, and I caught enough of the exchange to grasp the reason. He had discovered from his dinner-list that the man opposite was qualified to discuss with him some third man's edition of Martial. Each knows the man his neighbour knows, the poet says disparagingly of scholars. But here at least, on just that basis, was McKechnie comfortably fixed up until speech-time.

My own attention was drawn across the table by this shift of balance. For a moment I looked blankly at the man facing me. Then I noticed that he was amused, and realised that it was my blankness which was the cause of this.

'Come, come, Duncan!' this man said. 'Wake up. Acknowledge the obscure companion of your youth.'

'Robert-well I'm blessed!' It was odd not to have recognised Robert Damian. The boyish complexion had turned florid, or at least ruddy, and he had put on a little weight. He seemed otherwise unchanged. I told him this at once.

'Duncan, you are changed changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. Spruced up, groomed, metropolitanised, admirably smoothed all over. And wearing almost alarmingly well. I give it as my professional opinion that you will live to be a hundred, and end up indistinguishable from Graham Sutherland's Somerset Maugham. Or will it be his Beaverbrook? I'm not quite sure.'

'Thank you very much, my dear Robert. Have they put you back on the staircase for the night, as they have me?' Damian had succeeded a man called Kettle directly above my head above what would now be Nick Junkin's head.

'Not needed. My humble home's in Oxford.'

'Oh, Lord! Then I've done it again.' 'It?'

'Getting people wrong. Cyril Bedworth, for a start. He came into my room this evening, and I asked him in a kindly way if they'd put him back in his little attic for the Gaudy. And it turned out he was a fellow of the college a status it's seemly that all old members should revere. And now you too. Fellow and Tutor in Physiology, I suppose. Or is it Regius Professor of Medicine?'

'Nothing of the sort. I'm a simple GP in a respectable North Oxford practice pretty well a professional embalmer, really, since most of my patients are nonagenarians. But I'm college doctor as well, and attend to the young gentlemen's injuries whether sustained on the rugger field or in bed. It makes a nice change.'

'In bed? Do you mean a chap can ....?' Much to Damian's amus.e.m.e.nt, I hesitated to complete this juvenile inquiry.

'Lord, yes. I put it down to the Kama Sutra, and j.a.panese pillow-books, and so forth. Occidental joints and sinews just don't seem to be up to it. A pity but there it is.'

'I see.' I'd have supposed Damian to be talking outrageous nonsense if I hadn't remembered, absurdly enough, the manual my near neighbour the Bishop had been distressed to find in his room. 'Do you attend to the dons too?' I asked.

'No-it doesn't seem to be in the contract. But they give me the freedom of the feast. There's a tacit understanding, as a matter of fact, that I turn up every year as a sort of casualty service. Last year, when it was the dotards, we had to carry out a couple of them on stretchers. Mild CVA's as the port went round the second time.'

'I hope they made a good recovery.' It seemed unnecessary to ask Damian to decode his jargon. 'Have you run into Tony yet?'

'I've had a gracious wave and a cheerful smile. Quite up with the n.o.bs, isn't he?'

'Cabinet rank. Today's headline news.'

'Well, well!'

'He's in his old rooms opposite mine. Full of 'esprit de I'escalier. He says it's his ancestral stair. But there's something odd about our Tony. He hasn't come up just for the claret.'

'Tony has a son.'

'Yes, I know-Ivo. It seems he believes in taking sugar with his brandy and champagne. He hasn't been injuring himself on the rugger field?'

'Wrong time of year, old boy and most improbable at any season. Still, there's a spot of trouble in that direction, it seems. I'll tell you later ....' Damian paused on this spark of discretion an impulse which didn't, however, survive his now taking a glance at P. P. Killiecrankie, who was again absorbed in grave conversation with the Bishop. 'Natty ecclesiastical outfitter, P. P. must have.' Damian had leant forward, and was speaking in a kind of loud murmur. 'He must have forgotten his old persuasion that there's more enterprise in walking naked.'

I remembered suddenly and there had already been several occasions upon which it might have come back to me that Yeats had been for a time something between a cult and a joke on the staircase. I also realised that Robert Damian must have been among the privileged few to whom either Tony Mumford or I had confessed our culpable spectatorship of Killiecrankie's pleasures.

VI.

The hall butler had rapped on high table, and the Provost was on his feet. The uninstructed majority, which included myself, grabbed their gla.s.ses as they stood up, loyally prepared to drink the health of the Queen.

'Benedicto benedicatur.'

We shoved our gla.s.ses furtively aside, and a.s.sumed expressions of solemnity. The Provost's manner of delivering this decorous supplication was notable. Into the Latin words there had been fed the most cultivated modulations of the English tongue, and the pause between each syllable, fractionally longer than might have been expected, seemed to declare a just repose within unchallengeable authority.

I thought again of those extraordinary prayers at school prayers in which, as at some Council of State, inordinate demands are preferred in tones suggesting the moderate and level private exchanges of gentlemen. I thought again of my own favourite: that all things may be so ordered and settled by their endeavours, upon the best and surest foundations, that peace and happiness, truth and justice, religion and piety, may be established among us for all generations. These and all other necessaries, for them, for us, and thy whole Church It seemed odd that the Provost's modest request should recall this omnibus prayer to my mind. What united them, perhaps, was an underlying social a.s.sumption. G.o.d is the most powerful of our connections, and we are ent.i.tled to his patronage and regard provided we hit off with him, as head of the family, the right note of respect without servility.

Differently phrased, these thoughts might not be incompatible with orthodoxy, and that they came to me satirically slanted told me how much a Scottish presbyterian I remained in bone. I wondered about Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie's sense of this matter, and might have startled him with an inquiry if the Provost hadn't now been on his feet again. It really was the Queen this time. A kind of unb.u.t.toning succeeded, and soon the first cigar smoke began to drift about the hall. I sat back and made a more comprehensive survey than I had yet done.

The hall if stripped to its sombre panelling and dusky raftered roof would still be impressive; as it is, it is dominated by the portraits that stretch in an unbroken line round its walls. As freshmen we had ticked them off as one witness to our having arrived within an ambience of gratifying grandeur. After that we had more or less forgotten about them, and certainly didn't study them very much. Between ourselves and these notabilities so confidently filling out their frames there had been a gulf alike of years and of circ.u.mstances and expectations which worked against any sense of relationship.

But tonight, as not when it was simply rows of hungry undergraduates at the tables, there was a connection of sorts between the living and the dead. These diners were in process of closing the gap. Two or three of them would be hanging on the wall when the twenty-first century came round; already many were taking on the weight, the lineaments, the a.s.sumption of knowledgeableness and authority, the obligation to be unaffected because eminent, which Reynolds and Gainsborough, Hudson and Knapton and Devis, had recorded of the judges and bishops, the soldiers and scholars and statesmen looking down on a festivity familiar to them in their time. If there was a marked contrast, it was perhaps in flesh tones or complexion. The men sitting around me were ruddy; those on the walls were pale. This was partly because the hour was drawing on and the wine good; partly, too, it was a matter of certain conventions of portraiture long ago, when to be pallid, ashen, or faintly green had been the distinguished thing. Only Raeburn my father had once remarked acknowledges that men live on beef and ale.

At right angles to the dais, three long tables ran in parallel down the hall. At a smaller table immediately behind me I discovered that there were seated the young men who had formed part of the choir. These undergraduates, who must have remained in residence to grace their seniors' festive occasion by singing for their supper, were presumably surveying an unfamiliar scene. I wondered what they made of such outmoded if innocent ostentation: the florid satisfied faces, the confident commanding voices, the varying degrees of fancy dress, tables unfamiliar beneath their load of silver and silver-gilt everywhere cups and bowls and goblets of a size suggesting the potations of giants. To this question, as it happened, I was later to receive an answer.

My glance went back to the portraits, and I decided that most of these silent witnesses, at least, approved what they saw. Only here and there a poet, a lean and tormented philosopher, an old religious man, cast on us what was perhaps an alienated regard: these might have been sniffing in the cigar smoke, in the vinous miasma, in the considered after-dinner eloquence now getting under way, an odour and a resonance foreign and profane. And it was indeed arguable that, as the old members with the decorations glinting under their white ties pursued their nostalgic and sentimental exercise, the deeper life of the place, which was the life of teachers and taught, was in abeyance.

I looked round for the teachers. Apart from those whom seniority, or an appointed part in the proceedings, placed at high table, the dons were scattered thinly over the hall. Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie apart, the nearest to me was Talbert, and he was a dozen yards away. He was putting a good deal of vigour into smoking a cigar, so that his large white moustache had the appearance of vaporising at its tips and floating away in air. His gaze was into the rafters, and I wondered whether he was listening to what was being said; it was exactly the speculation which had frequently beset me when I was reading him my weekly essay. I used to believe that he had developed some power of total recall over his texts of the moment, and was in a position to collate one with another as a pure act of memory.

The first speech of the evening was well advanced. A junior fellow of the college had the task of proposing the health of the guests, and the job consisted in the main of taking felicitous notice of each of the princ.i.p.al visitors in turn. He had begun nervously, and a lank lock of black hair falling over his forehead gave the impression of some stiff physical labour being performed. But brief applause was punctuating his speech, since it was the business of the company at large to express admiration tinged with affection for a number of people about whom most of us probably knew very little. The young man gained confidence from this, and as he finally raised his gla.s.s he was relaxed and secretly radiant knowing that he had brought it off and gained some sort of decent alpha mark from his colleagues. His colleagues were on their feet; both those at high table beside him and the scattering of thirty or so around the hall. A further small round of applause followed the toast, mixed with a little coughing; men who had been too diffident to strike matches during the speech did so now; servants moved in to plant replenished decanters in the place of empty ones. It was one more phase of the ritual accomplished.

'A very good speech,' McKechnie murmured to me whether conventionally or sincerely, it was impossible to say. 'Are you fond of this sort of thing, Duncan?'

'It wouldn't be too civil to turn up and then declare the affair a bore.' McKechnie's question had surprised me. 'And it all doesn't lack its interest. About a third of these people ring a bell with me either faintly or middling loud. And that's quite fun. But I've been thinking I'd rather be seeing the college in working clothes, and with the young men around. Do you know, Ra.n.a.ld, I think I'd like to become a don? For a couple of years, say. I believe I could hold my own, after a fashion, for just about that long.'

'And write a play about us?' McKechnie had given me a glance of a sharpness which seemed unmerited by my wholly fanciful remark. 'There was a man who did something of the kind at Cambridge. His name escapes me, but he wrote two or three novels about the place. Rather good as stories, holding the interest well.' McKechnie paused on this; he seemed to have a flair for temperate praise. 'But not quite getting his academics in their habit as they live.'

'I think I'd myself produce a merely rambling sort of record. No hold on the interest at all. Mere expatiation.'

'I doubt that very much. Are you not a thoroughly Aristotelian man? What I notice about your plays is that you are careful to give them middles as well as beginnings and ends.'

I was more surprised still at this serious scholar's being prompted to make fun of me. But it was, of course, agreeable to be called an Aristotelian man. I replied that middles are the great difficulty, and that it is in the middles that the muddles come.

'Have you had any talk with the Provost yet?'

'I haven't so much as made a bow to him. And he wouldn't remember me from Adam.' I was about to add: 'Or if he did remember me, it would be as my father's son; they once discussed Drer together.' But I refrained from this I suppose because of the reminiscence it carried in my own mind of the Dreich and Wee Dreichie. The inconsequence of McKechnie's question had struck me this and the fact of its somehow echoing a remark of Talbert's shortly before we entered hall. I might have put some answering question to McKechnie now had the butler not banged on a table again. The aged Swedish physicist was going to reply for the guests.

This turned out to be a long speech, delivered in fluent although at times erratic English. The savant's voice was more powerful than his appearance of advanced decrepitude would have led one to expect; every now and then, whether by accident or rhetorical design, he would simultaneously raise its pitch, increase its volume, and thrust his mouth hard up against the microphone standing on the table before him. The effect was of an intermittent divagation into Tamil, Telugu, or Chinese emitted through a loud-hailer. These exercises, moreover, could be judged to perform a cadenza-like function. Acoustically brilliant in themselves, they appeared to serve as bridge-pa.s.sages between one theme and another in the course of a singularly wide-ranging oration. Into the punctuating uproar would vanish thoughts on molecular physics or the whaling industry; out of it would emerge reflections on contemporary architecture or on Oxford as a perennial battleground between science and religion. This bizarre eloquence was variously received. Talbert, I felt certain, wasn't listening to a word; he had pa.s.sed into brooding reverie on the incompetence of the Rev. A. B. Grosart or the ignorance of Sir Edmund Gosse. The Provost, courteously inclined towards the speaker and thus presenting a n.o.ble profile to the body of the hall, remained grave except when some relaxation into the mirthful became mandatory. McKechnie was taking in what was intelligible, and would have his appraising word to murmur at the end of the speech. But, broadly, I felt him to fall within the same bracket as Talbert; he would have preferred to be continuing that conversation about the edition of Martial. As for Bedworth, who turned out to be sitting in a position of semi-distinction looking straight up one of the long tables, I wondered whether I was not suddenly glimpsing in him some curious current of hostility to the whole affair. Among the ma.s.s of us there were numerous men whose walk of life took them to a dozen functions of the sort every month; these sat impa.s.sive and relaxed with perhaps one occasionally catching the eye of another across the hall. But the great majority of the guests were unaffectedly enjoying themselves. Some were in a state of delighted admiration as they contemplated in the versatile orator standing before them one whose actual dwelling lay presumably amid the farther mysteries of the cosmos.

The eminent Swede reached his peroration at last. Oxford, and this the most prominent of its colleges, were, most properly, well to the fore. So were Roger Bacon, Robert Boyle, Newman, Sh.e.l.ley, and Matthew Arnold. The distinguished physicist had been doing his homework well. 'Beautiful city!' he bellowed, and seized the microphone with both hands. I found myself wondering how he was going to cope with the overtone of irony which Arnold's celebrated apostrophe carries. 'Home of lost grouses,' he suddenly shouted, 'and unpopular games, and impossible royalties!' He sat down.

Had I, as I listened, invented this incursion into the world of Finnegans Wake? Perhaps I had, since n.o.body seemed startled and nothing except the regulation applause succeeded. Nevertheless, it had been a speech not easy to follow in the batting order. The elderly statesman who next stood up must have been aware of this, and may even have noticed that the decanters were all but empty down the long tables. Practised, apt and witty, he moved rapidly to the business of proposing the toast of the college. Here the formula for success is adequately to modulate from the light and amusing into a final warmth of sentiment in the expression of which words like loyalty, affection, and love are honestly spoken out. They were very well received now. For brief moments the evening touched the sacramental. And then brandy or a liqueur was being served. The more resolute even had opportunity to possess themselves of a second cigar.

The Provost came last, and struck me as having the most difficult a.s.signment. His wasn't the role of a raconteur, or of one fondly recalling golden generations long ago. What was prescriptively expected of him was an account of how, in the past two or three years, the college had been getting along. And this was something in which, curiously enough, the loyal old members showed little more interest than did the miscellaneous distinguished guests who knew nothing about the place. The news was news about dons: how one had died, another had been promoted or translated, and a third had retired. Such matters, and all those problems of university politics and administration which are as life and death to the governing bodies of colleges, were clearly felt as of small significance by men who had for long been breathing the larger air of the world of affairs. Only when the Provost began to talk about the present generation of undergraduates did interest momentarily quicken. But his remarks here were of the considered rather than the informative sort. The college had its problems with the young men but then when had it not? Present intellectual standards gave perhaps some cause for concern; in the Examination Schools, at least, recent performance could not be called outstanding. But we need not be too downcast. The junior members today were quite as kind to their tutors, quite as active, versatile, well-mannered and charming as their predecessors had been a quarter of a century before.

The Provost moved smoothly on to other thoughts. He was profoundly sensible of the support which the college received from all its members, present or past. He was deeply grateful to his colleagues for the loyalty he unfailingly received from them. The Senior Tutor, the Dean, the Chaplain, the Bursar: all were paragons. Last, but not least, there were the servants, to whom our debt was so incalculable. We mourned the death of Lickfold, which had taken place shortly after his completing forty years of devoted labour as scout on Howard Six. Gelly, the Head Porter, had retired that day; at a small presentation made to him there had been a very large turn-out. Freeguard, although no longer able to work in the b.u.t.tery ....

Freeguard, I conjectured, had succ.u.mbed to the professional risk of operating amid kegs of ale. The Provost's corresponding risk was a Ciceronian copia. But now he was preparing to wind up the formal part of the feast. The night he urged upon us was still young, and the college's resources in the way of modest entertainment were by no means exhausted. In the common rooms and in the garden, too, so mild was the air further refreshment awaited us should we care to partake of it.

We got to our feet. The Provost bowed ceremoniously to the Swede and to the Chancellor, and made a gesture indicative of his intention to escort them from the hall. The other men at high table, taking their tone from this, began also to move out as a body and in a formal fashion. Tony was an exception; he had slipped rapidly along the table, detained in his place the junior fellow who had made the first speech, and had now sat down beside him and begun to talk. It was obvious as with everything Tony did that this was quite in order. In the body of the hall most of the guests were strolling out but some lingered either continuing to gossip with their neighbours or rea.s.sorting themselves in casually seated groups. I supposed that Tony was making promptly sure of having an opportunity to congratulate this low-ranking youth on his performance. Lord Marchpayne, I realised again, had trained himself never to miss a trick. It was an art in which he had taken his first distinguishable steps as an undergraduate.

I spent some time wandering round the hall, talking to people not all of whom I very clearly remembered, or who at all clearly remembered me. Yet another man asked me if I still wrote plays; the implication seemed to be that, like basket-ball or hurdling, it was an activity scarcely to be pursued with any dignity into middle life. If one is to attend reunions at all, I told myself, one ought to attend them regularly. This feeling made disagreeable for the moment the thought of now plunging into some crowded and noisy common room. The garden might be more attractive for the next half hour.

As I thus made my way, unaccompanied, out of hall, my progress was impeded by a small group of the choral scholars (as I remembered them to be called) who had dined with us after singing grace. They were blocking the wide doorway with a casual regardlessness which, although wholly unaggressive, failed quite to square with the Provost's a.s.surance about the continued good manners of the young. One of them, a handsome lad who was for some reason wearing a large nosegay by way of b.u.t.tonhole, was haranguing his fellows excitedly as I edged past.

'I've never heard such a load of self-exaggerating c.r.a.p in all my life!'

These were the first distinguishable words I had caught from an undergraduate that day. They may have been intended as applicable to the evening's eloquence as a whole, but I rather suspected that the Provost's speech was being specifically alluded to. In which case one saw the point. It had been a good speech, but one certainly delivered under the persuasion that it is the business of a Provost to project a praeposital persona. I wondered whether the young man would denounce with equal vehemence a contemporary of his own similarly sustaining an elected role in a discotheque. And I felt momentarily for it was in a moment that this entire encounter was over an elderly indignation. I wanted to murmur to the speaker as I went by that even all his life hadn't been all that long as yet, and perhaps that one doesn't denounce one's host with a brio borrowed from his wine. But I also felt, and in the same instant, something quite different: that it would be entertaining to enter into casual talk with these youths, drift away with them to some hospitable haunt of their own, and hear everything subversive or otherwise instructive that they had to say. Unfortunately the second of these impulses would be as inadmissible as the first. I went on out of the hall aiming for the garden but taking a circuitous route through Rattenbury.

Rattenbury is a mid-Victorian exercise in Venetian Gothic, and supposed to be very ugly. Perhaps because of this, and despite the comfort of its large solid rooms and a provision of baths and privies dating from the first great age of such amenities in England, it had been regarded in my time, if not as a dump or slum, at least as a species of academic Stellenbosch to which young men of unimpressive personality or inferior social consideration were apt to find themselves, through the operation of some wholly mysterious mechanism, relegated in a second or third year. I had always felt a pleasing quaintness as attending the pile. It is enormous, like an only slightly stunted St Pancras Station, but runs to a variety of decorative features and excrescences executed in the spirit, and on the scale, of a Pugin parsonage. Thus in front of each staircase there protrudes a hutch-like porch entered through a pointed archway so symbolically low that anybody of normal height has to behave like a double-decker bus approaching an arched bridge carefully centring himself, that is to say, in order to pa.s.s through without b.u.mping his shoulder or even his forehead. It was as I pa.s.sed one of these orifices that I heard, yet again, the voices of young men. They were as was customary expertly shouting above the clatter of their own shoes as they came tumbling down a stone staircase. A moment later they had shot through the archway into open air in a huddle so compacted that it was incomprehensible that they hadn't tripped over one another's flying feet. There was a lantern above us, and I had an instant's impression of tossing hair, of alarmed and flashing glances all around me, of a kind of graceful mock-panic and the swift scattering of long-limbed bodies in all directions. A crackling of undergrowth; fawns breaking clear of a dark wood, momentarily at gaze with an alien creature, darting away, startled, vanishing: this, once more, was the effect I fleetingly received. Then the young men had turned a corner, and there came back from them a sudden burst of laughter. They were not laughing at any spectacle I had casually afforded them; however wild their spirits, that wouldn't come into their heads. Their laughter belonged to an inviolable world of their own, untouched by the irruption among them of tail-coated elders toddling round behind cigars. These were not singers. They must be among the undergraduates who, according to Plot, had been obliged to take a plunge into examinations in this midsummer week. It didn't at all appear that the irksome circ.u.mstance had got any of them down.

VII.

The day had been unremarkable for June, but the night was of that Mediterranean sort which, straying beneath English skies, troubles like a portent. There was no moon, and the stars hung in an electric brilliance suggesting frost but frost powerless to chill the skin of air through which the earth's warmth breathed. In the great dimly blottesque garden it was an air heavy from the scented limes; and heavy here and there, too, with tobacco smoke where in twos and threes guests like placid penguins perambulated. Some, still wearing their doctoral robes, were like flower-beds gone adrift in the dark. One large area was garish with coloured lights left over from the Commemoration Ball which I knew the undergraduates to have held, no doubt with prescriptive lavishness, a couple of nights before. Elsewhere it was by starlight that one moved. At a middle distance the cigars and cigarettes danced like fireflies, or glowed and faded like lighthouse signals very far away.

I looked round for fresh company. One had to get close up to people before it was possible to identify them. But most of the men taking this after-dinner breather had wandered into the garden in groups, and any of these was likely to contain one or two fellow guests known to me at least as well as those with whom I had been talking in hall. I was about to move over to the first such gathering I saw when a hand was laid on my shoulder from behind. I turned round and saw Tony, with Gavin Mogridge beside him. Tony seemed not quite sober.

'Oh, Duncan,' Mogridge said at once, 'I'm so sorry.' He spoke on a note of serious self-reproach. 'I quite forgot. Many happy returns of the day.'

It was certainly my birthday. But Tony was the man I'd have thought of as able to recall the fact. He had given me a complete Anatole France on my twenty-firster, and by that time we had exchanged such presents on a smaller scale on a couple of occasions. This memory reinforced my sense of what intimates we had been. It would never have crossed our minds that years might later pa.s.s without so much as a meeting. At the present reunion there were probably a number of people being visited by similar reflections.

'Thank you very much,' I said. Mogridge had not been so close a friend. But his prime characteristic was tenacity, and this extended to a memory surprising in one so much given to absence of mind. 'I suppose we're known to our hosts as the middle-aged lot.'

'Tempus fugit,' Tony said. 'Tempus f.u.c.king fugit.' He radiated, for the moment, a mild alcoholic gloom.

'At least it brings in its revenges. Do you know who I was sitting next to? Killiecrankie! He's made the higher clergy as something called a Prebendary. In Ireland, I think.'

'A kind of Venerable?' My information cheered Tony up to the extent of making him shout with laughter, but then his mood changed again instantly. 'The Rat Race Dinner,' he said. 'That's what this affair should be called. Hundreds of chaps getting on ever so nicely. Look at the labels round their necks. Some P. M. ought to have found you a K., Duncan. What's known in literary circles, I'm told, as the poor man's C. H.'

'I don't think I've ever heard it called that.' Mogridge said this at his flattest and most serious, and it wasn't clear to me whether or not he was intending to rebuke Tony's gibe. 'They call some car or other the poor man's Rolls-Royce. And that reminds me of something rather odd I saw as I arrived.' Mogridge sat down on a garden chair after inspecting it carefully; he might have been suspecting it of harbouring a tarantula or a lethal tropical snake. 'Somebody I didn't know drove up in a Rolls. It was an old Rolls but you may have noticed how, the older they are, the bigger and grander they come. Of course there were half a dozen Rollses, but this was certainly the largest one.' Mogridge paused, as if feeling that he had been going too fast for us. 'You may have noticed, too, that Rollses have a little statuette-thing on the radiator. You'd perhaps suppose it was a Winged Victory. But it isn't. It has a head, you see, and for some reason Winged Victories have all lost their heads. It's probably conceived as the Spirit of Speed, or something of that sort.'

'Well?' Tony said humorously. He seemed again amiably disposed.

'The first thing this chap did when he got out of his car was to unscrew this figure and lock it up inside. Then he brought a perfectly plain radiator-cap out of his pocket. It's probably called a radiator-cap. Anyway, it's what screws on radiators.'

'And he screwed it on instead?' Tony asked.

'Yes just that. And bang in the middle of our own private car park. It was curious behaviour. Do you know what I think?'

'One seldom does,' Tony said.

'I think it's possible that people sometimes souvenir such things, and that Rolls owners regularly take that precaution. Only I've never noticed it happen before. I must keep a look out.'

A spell of silence succeeded upon this not very striking anecdote. We were now all three seated within what, in sunlight, would have been the impenetrable shade of a cedar of Lebanon, the grandest tree in a garden not lacking in impressiveness. Above our heads it blotted out half the pierced and powdered sky. Only conspirators, it occurred to me, would seek out so insp.i.s.sated a gloom. Perhaps we really were going to conspire. The effect was mitigated, however, by a glimmer from those coloured lights which had been left undisturbed after the undergraduates' Ball. It would have made a good stage set.

I remembered that I hadn't yet congratulated Tony on his elevation to the Cabinet, and I did so now. His reply was adequate, and yet there was something edgy about it. Did this promotion only emphasise that his career had got itself out of shape? Why so early in it as such things go had he been railroaded into that disabling Upper Chamber? Was he perhaps not, of his sort, quite first cla.s.s? Was he liable to m.u.f.f things? He was in college now, I had no longer a doubt, in the pursuance of some design. In such circ.u.mstances it couldn't, surely, be a good idea to get slightly tight? Or could it? There wasn't the least impropriety, during a feast like the present, in letting liquor temperately show. It was an open question whether there wasn't an unslumbering cunning in Tony. The situation deserved sounding.

'You're both dead sober,' Tony said, much as if he had been reading my thoughts. 'And so can I be you'll be relieved, Duncan, to hear at the drop of a hat. So what about a drink? There's a buffet in a marquee at the other end of the garden another left-over from the youngsters' Ball, I'd suppose.'

'Not yet,' I said. 'Queues for drinks and queues for loos. And all top people. I'm tired of ribbons and gongs.'

'That gong-tormented pee.'

Tony could scarcely have produced a less witty or more nonsensical remark. But it was the Yeats joke again, and both Mogridge and I responded to it. I wondered how I could have been at sea (or pee) when Tony had declared earlier that day that the staircase was his ancestral stair. And now I saw an opportunity of gaining some information.

'I never went to a Commem Ball,' I said. 'I wasn't able to dance anything except foursome and eightsome reels. Did Ivo go to this one?'

'No need to fish for information about the boy, Duncan.' Tony put out a hand and touched my arm, apparently to make quick amends for this unreasonable rebuke. 'It's all coming out in the next five minutes. Indeed, you've guessed the trouble already.'

'They don't feel he's making any very good use of his time here?'

'Just that except that "they" needs defining. They're not quite all of them dreary pedants, mumbling about their betas and gammas.'

'But some feel he'd do best to go down?'

'Some feel he ought to be sent down, which isn't quite the same thing.'

'Is Ivo not all that keen on his books?' In the gloom I could just distinguish the glint of Mogridge's spectacles directed slantwise upon Tony as he asked this. He spoke as if here were a doubtful point which ought to be determined at once.

'Ivo's no scholar, if that's what you mean. But I suppose he may get something out of the life of the place without that.'