The Guardians Page 2

  “In corners thrown.”

  “Just that. One might, I discern, come to bear the character of a picturesque survival, a slippered pantaloon about the place. In my own case, I can see the possibility of its beginning to happen quite soon – say in twenty, or even fifteen years time. There goes old Stringfellow, I can hear them saying, the last of the true Oxford eccentrics. You follow me?”

  “I think I do.” Quail offered this reply soberly. Dr Stringfellow, he realised, could not in fact have been, all those years ago, a grand old man about the place. But he had contrived that impression – perhaps it was one of Oxford’s queer roads to prominence – and now at last the real thing was catching up on him. He was like a capable actor who, having long specialised in senile roles, eventually sees the threat of being adjudged past them. Quail was far from certain that he found this perception amusing. The measure of comedy which it held was of the savage order. His literary studies reminded him that academic comedy had frequently been like that.

  “Not mark you, that there isn’t a sufficient insurance in the matter.” Dr Stringfellow selected with apparent care another ginger nut. “Keep your teeth.”

  “Your teeth?” Quail was startled – the more so because his companion had accompanied this prescription by smartly biting his rock-like biscuit in two. This had the effect of making uncertain whether the conversation was proceeding on a literal or a figurative level.

  “Keep your teeth – and show them from time to time. When the exigency to which I have been referring turns up – as I say, in fifteen or twenty years – that is the precept which I propose to remember. I suppose you came in an aeroplane?”

  “I came by sea.” Quail was less surprised by this abrupt change of subject on Dr Stringfellow’s part than by a change in manner and appearance which accompanied it. The squirrel had vanished – so it might have been phrased – and a badger had appeared instead: an old grey badger incomprehensibly driven to fight.

  “You astonish me, Quail.” Dr Stringfellow’s eyes, suddenly revealed as rheumy and bloodshot, took on a glare distressing to entertain. “Haven’t your countrymen elevated virtually all the amenities of life into the empyrean – where you must pursue them, surely, if you are to do yourself at all tolerably well?”

  Quail was puzzled. “You mean that air travel is the luxurious thing?”

  “Certainly.” Dr Stringfellow gave what was now a malign chuckle. “Gracious living—a notable phrase, is it not?—is to be sought more than ever only in high life: about four miles high, they tell me. When I was a young man there was a song that looked forward to the time when pigs should begin to fly. Now, it is not only the pigs, I understand, but the truffles as well.”

  “I don’t know that I was ever offered truffles on a plane.” Quail, uncertain about the direction of the obscure animus suddenly released in his companion, took refuge in literal consideration.

  “But a Latour ‘24, my dear fellow – or at least a sound Mouton-Rothschild? Poor Keats, ignorant lad, associated vintage wine with the deep-delved earth. But now it is carried per ardua ad astra and served free of charge to persons smoking cigars and wearing bowler hats.”

  “Bowler hats?” Quail burst out laughing. He saw that this dip into acrid badinage was not prompted by hostility to either his country or himself. Dr Stringfellow, having been moved to think about his teeth, was simply assuring himself that they were in tolerable working order. And no doubt this was only a mild taste of his quality. The badger could do better if he chose. “Bowler hats?” It was entirely amicably that Quail repeated the words. “No—I guess I never saw just that. It’s true that I’ve had to submit pretty freely, now and then, to the fashion for hurrying round, and of course the air’s the natural place to do it. I’ve even been constrained to a fairly regular consumption of those vintage wines served free. But I’ve clung, I can fairly plead, to a dim persuasion that the near-sonic is not the pace designed by God for that sort of tipple.”

  “Ha!” As Dr Stringfellow uttered this exclamation, the glare departed and the badger faded. He was again applying himself with the squirrel’s contentment to his paper bag. “Do you know,” he said, “that there are only two left? And no chance of picking up anything at Reading – although as a town you might describe it as one vast biscuit-tin. This train doesn’t stop there. Another instance of hurry-scurry. And you yourself, my dear Quail, are doing no more than coming and going? A pity.” Dr Stringfellow was now again mildly gay and wholly benign. “You will find it regretted. There is admiration, you know, for how you manage it.”

  “For how I manage it?” Quail, for the first time in years, felt himself flush. His fellow-traveller’s words appeared to him incredible – and yet it would be affectation, he supposed, to deny at least some vague understanding of their reference. “You mean for how I’ve managed a little to keep up with old interests?”

  “For how you’ve managed to look after all those railways, and so on. I know no instance of a scholar contriving to control large business interests in his spare time. It’s a remarkable achievement, Quail – a most remarkable achievement.”

  “But I’m not a scholar in the remotest sense!” Quail was distressed. “It’s a total misconception. I’ve scarcely talked to academic folk, or walked across a campus, a dozen times in twenty years.”

  “My dear fellow, we do of course know that you have remained a Privatgelehrter, as our Teutonic friends say. Heaven forfend that it should be otherwise. For who, that could escape, would be furnished with undergraduates, research students and a lecture-room? No, no! But of your standing there can be no question. My old friend Gibson of Keble was mentioning The Early Years only the other day. He recommends it, as a model of ordonnance, to the young people we quaintly term the Advanced Students.” Dr Stringfellow paused to chuckle over this. “But I think you said the length of your stay would depend on how things go? You mean, I suppose, how quickly you get through some planned reading in Bodley?”

  “I certainly have some reading I’m reckoning to do there.”

  Dr Stringfellow appeared to feel that a little time might profitably be given to perpending this answer. He fell once more to mastication, and his next question was unexpected. “I suppose the railways are all right?” As he spoke he turned his head and took an appraising glance at Quail’s suitcase. The effect was somehow to endow that wholly unremarkable receptacle with an appearance of almost indecent opulence. “All that sort of thing does very well over there?”

  “Tolerably well. We have our ups and downs.”

  “Quite so, quite so.” Dr Stringfellow offered this as might a man of the largest financial views. “And have you any other plans while in Oxford?”

  Quail hesitated. “As a matter of fact—”

  He broke off. The ticket-collector had entered the compartment. It was evident that he was in no doubt about the status of Dr Stringfellow, whom he saluted with respect. Dr Stringfellow, after some thought, produced his ticket from inside the upper of the more reliable of his two boots. Quail had been equally methodical but less idiosyncratic. He brought out his billfold, opened it, and found his own ticket. As he did so his eye fell on something tucked away behind it: a ten-dollar bill.

  There is nothing precisely overweening in a ten-dollar bill; and this particular one it had merely not come into Quail’s head to part with when doing business with his English banker that morning. But now he found himself glancing from the bill to Dr Stringfellow, who was engaged in returning his ticket to its place of security. He received the fleeting impression that Dr Stringfellow dispensed with socks; and it struck him that the entire appearance of this venerable person was of one to whom ten dollars and a full command of what he had acidulously called gracious living were each as remote as the other.

  Quail had, indeed, more than a suspicion that personal eccentricity rather than national penury was on exhibition before him, and that Dr Stringfellow’s state of extreme disrepair was not to be considered as of a piece with that rat
her pervasive absence of fresh paint of which the modern explorer of Europe is so soon aware. But despite these rational reflections it was something of a symbolical quality that he appeared to detect as glinting out from the bill when his eye went back to it. And it was this that dictated his next words.

  “Other plans?” He spoke as soon as the ticket-collector had left the compartment. “No; I don’t think I can mention anything else that I particularly want to do.”

  CHAPTER II

  It was to a sense of anti-climax that Willard Quail woke up in his hotel next morning. He had cherished, for one thing, the fond supposition that what would draw him out of slumber would be the sweet insistent chime of collegiate and matutinal bells. In point of fact, he was roused by the passing of a convoy of heavy vehicles belonging to the United States Air Force. When he got downstairs, it was to breakfast among compatriots who were pausing only to bolt their orange-juice before piling into the largest of hireable English cars and making rapidly for Cambridge or Stratford-upon-Avon.

  But in all this there lay nothing really disturbing. Quail could candidly claim to have very little of the expatriate psychology; and upon challenge he would have declared that it is only the English who are rendered noticeably uneasy upon brushing up against their countrymen when abroad. If Quail was indeed not wholly happy now, the reason lay in his consciousness of having made a disingenuous start to his enterprise. Like most cultivated Americans, he owned a slow and ruminative mind, and this instrument gave itself with some insistence during breakfast to canvassing the propriety of his having been, on the previous afternoon, rather close with old Dr Stringfellow.

  Quail’s father had owned a sufficient mission in life in an activity which he was accustomed to phrase as getting horse-trading right off the railroads. Quail had himself found, it is true, that nothing effective could be done in the way of keeping up this family tradition without a frequent large recourse to guile. But in Oxford, he felt, it was not even to the most laudable ends that guile would at all do. He judged it chargeable that he ought to have been more candid with his yesterday’s travelling-companion. But at least the encounter had been a warning against adopting an unbecoming deviousness in the small and surely not culpable enterprise ahead of him.

  He was conscious of this interior debate as enhancing the dubiety with which he presently ventured upon the streets – streets leading past colleges and churches to not all of which he found that he could instantly put a name. At one level, the visual, his walk was all delighted recognitions and surprised bumpings up against novelty – and he felt, indeed, at times as bewildered as a ball making its first traverse of a partly reconstructed pin-table. There were sights, moreover, that aroused emotions whose threatening massiveness was embarrassing; but at least he experienced no awakened feeling that he would have felt it beyond his power tolerably to define. With his other senses it was different. Oxford has a good many characteristic sounds – the bells which he had missed earlier were not altogether silent during the morning – and it has even more in the way of characteristic smells. Many of the colleges possess semi-subterraneous offices giving upon one or another public road; and it seemed to Quail that from each of these in turn – whether kitchens, wash-places, or butteries – came odours at once unique and unchanging. Balliol still suggested an odd contiguity of boot-polish and pickles, and in the bathrooms of Oriel, they remained faithful to the old brand of soap. All this was again no more than a matter of recognition. Yet the experience was of a different order to any channelled through the eye; and there were moments when Quail felt more than ever, as one might say, knocked sideways. It was as if a giant hand took him as he passed and whipped him through not space but time. After an hour of these assaults he had an inspiration, and took shelter in Mr Blackwell’s shop.

  It is perhaps only in the field of fiction that a majority of the books published aim with any deliberation at a sedative effect. But on this occasion Quail found himself notably tranquillised, at least, after turning over a dozen or so volumes of an entirely miscellaneous character – so much so that he would presently have bought something and resumed his walk, had not his eye chanced to fall upon a wholly familiar object. Mr Blackwell was offering for sale a copy of the revised edition of The Early Years of Arthur Fontaney.

  There was nothing remarkable in this. Quail knew that the English reissue of his book had appeared only within the last few weeks. What was perhaps a little impressive was the position of the copy he had here come up against. Mr Blackwell’s is a large shop. It has one shelf that is much shorter than any of the others – that is no more, indeed, than what, in a domestic context, would be called a book-slide. This exiguous receptacle is traditionally given over to what are adjudged the really important new books. Into it, Regius Professors and other ripe scholars have been detected endeavouring to convey, from less prominent corners of the establishment, lately published labours of their own. And Quail’s book was here.

  For a moment he wondered if The Early Years was a good biography, after all. He had written it in the first instance, he knew, out of a vast inexperience alike of literature and life. But he had been lucky with his materials, and Fontaney – the young Fontaney – had virtually written himself. Quail’s memory was vivid of his own sense, as he worked, of being no more than secretary to that remarkable mind in its swift unfolding amid the aesthetic aridities of Mid-Victorian England. Fontaney had been foolproof – at least in that regard he had been so – so the book had perhaps its points, after all. It might even have a touch of the high merits of order and clarity, which was what Dr Stringfellow had courteously implied when at his most amiable on the previous day. But certainly The Early Years wasn’t positively and flatly good. Quail was sure of that. For one thing, it was only half a book. The story simply broke off. The farther reaches of the prodigal unlikely building sketched themselves uncertainly in air, beyond a perfunctorily run-up blank surface diversified only by here and there a hopefully protruding brick. But for this effect of opera interrupta there had been, of course, reasons conclusive enough.

  Quail was looking at the spine of his book. On the front of the dust-cover, he knew, was Millais’ portrait. Familiar as it was, he was prompted to look at it. But he found himself hesitating to put out his hand – a sense of mild indecency must always attend the proposal to pick up a work of one’s own in a book shop, unless indeed one’s scholarship is of the ripest order – and in this brief irresolution, he became aware that close beside him stood another student of Mr Blackwell’s important books. The newcomer was an undergraduate, wearing a commoner’s gown stuffed round his neck like a muffler. He was looking at the important books with an expression which Quail interpreted as of disappointment or disfavour – and so young did he seem, so pink and white was his complexion and so untouched were his features by any hint of the pressure of adult experience, that it was Quail’s impulse to attribute his present displeasure to the absence from the shelf before him of the latest recension of The Wonder Book of Trains. But this thought had no sooner entered his head than he heard the undergraduate give an exclamation of satisfaction, and saw him reach out, pick The Early Years from its place, and walk off with it to the cash-desk.

  This incident took Quail out into the street again. It had moved him – and it continued to do so, even when he told himself that his day was threatening to become an orgy. In some twenty years, he had been so venturesome as to offer the world three rather quiet books. They had been decently received. He sometimes noticed them in the houses of his friends. But he couldn’t remember ever before actually detecting a prospective reader buying a copy. The sight of anybody at all so doing would have been an event. Yet he knew – crossing Broad Street in the bleak October sunshine – that had this customer of Mr Blackwell’s been to his certain knowledge the most eminent of living men of letters the thing would have made no more impact upon him than it ought to make upon any sensible man. And that, of course, would be very little. Yet he was a sensible man – it was
one of the facts he could assert about himself at once with confidence and undisturbed modesty. Pondering this as he passed through the short tunnel that pierces the Clarendon Building, Quail saw the necessary conclusion. To the place around him – or to memories of it, or perhaps conceivably to the idea of it – he had reserves of attachment, the sum total of which his conscious mind would have little notion of how to set about totting up. Perhaps it amounted to what they now called a fixation. Perhaps it was no more than commonplace sentimentality. There was a possibility – he glimpsed – that it put him in a category of menaces.

  He was again in open air, and on his right stood the Sheldonian Theatre. He stopped in dismay at the sight of it. In Oxford, the material fabric of learning is always in dilapidation. River vapours steal upon it nightly with an effect as mysteriously corrosive as that of a caress in some morbid work of the Romantic Decadence. Everywhere there are buildings crumbling and buildings being refaced or re-edified – to an effect that may be aesthetically displeasing but which yet remains un-alarming, since there is rendered a general sense of a community vigorously occupied with other matters, yet giving a reasonable eye to patching up and making do. Of this impression, pre-existing in his mind, Quail had already felt the lively reinforcement. But the present spectacle operated differently.

  The structure before which he stood at gaze has more than the unassuming and commodious dignity of much in the streets around it – architecture honestly domestic in key and making only here and there any augustly institutional gesture. The Sheldonian asserts a high elegance which sometimes prompts young people to announce that it is irrational and hideous. And now, lately pounded to a peeled and pied condition by masons concerned to knock away the more ruinous surfaces, it presented a forlorn face only to be lined – Quail thought – by the most bizarre analogy. It was like the surviving stern of a tettered galleon, immemorially imprisoned and supported by a Sargasso Sea. Or – and this was much better – it was like Dr Stringfellow in his town clothes. But whatever fancy-picture one might paint – and with Quail such flights were unusual, and yet another symptom, surely, of the excitement of the day – it remained true that at this point the pervasive flaking and crumbling of Oxford grew ominous, as if throwing out a hint of secular and Roman decay. As he walked on, Quail frowned. His mind, mounting another flight of the grotesque, had glimpsed his own image as a fossicker amid ruins – a small acquisitive figure in a large Piranesi drawing.