The Guardians Read online

  From a low brick wall fronting, the road iron railings had been removed during a war-time drive for scrap-metal, and were replaced by a line of uncertainly poised hurdles. These were at least sufficiently in a state of decay to be congruous with the looming Venetian fantasy beyond. Quail judged them pleasingly rural in effect, as hinting the poet’s wattled cotes. But they prevented any glimpse of the lower part of the house until one passed through a gate; and when Quail negotiated this, it was to pause in perplexity.

  There could be no doubt of his having found the right address. Nevertheless, a good deal in the immediate prospect struck him as totally unexpected. Before an elaborately gloomy porch, with a low roof supported on stumpy stone pillars, two prams were standing like gondolas at the water-gate of a magnifico. In one a purple- faced baby was screaming itself into what had all the appearance of a fit. In the other – even more alarmingly – hung a second baby, upside-down, inert, and evidently self-strangled in the toils of a complicated harness. Inside the house, and to an effect of requiem for this untimely fatality, somebody was playing subtly and sadly on a flute, undisturbed by a number of powerful voices, seemingly mechanically reproduced, which could be interpreted as offering the world morceaux choisis of French classical drama.

  Quail looked farther afield. To his right a profusion of washing had been exposed, in bold defiance of the dank air, on clothes-lines straggling across a large untidy garden. In front of this, with an even more surprising disregard of climate, three Ethiopians were walking up and down, seriously conversing. When their eyes rolled and their teeth showed it was as if holes had been punched in their faces and the sheets and pillow-slips were showing through.

  As Quail surveyed this scene in continued uncertainty, a bell rang imperiously behind him. He stepped aside just in time to let a small boy on a tricycle shave past his legs and brake sharply in front of him. Here seemed to be a possible source of intelligence. It was true that the small boy was rather ragged and rather grubby. Quail conjectured that he belonged to what might be called the care-taking and house-keeping section of the community. But this was no reason for his not possessing the information required. “Can you tell me,” Quail asked, “if Lady Elizabeth Warboys lives here?”

  The child gave this a moment’s serious consideration.

  “I’m most frightfully sorry,” he said, “but I’m afraid that I really haven’t the slightest idea.” The child’s tones were cultivated, courteous, and deprecatory – like those, Quail thought, of a professor of Biblical Exegesis who has been appealed to about the destination of a street-car or the result of a ball-game. And now the child, having delivered himself of his mature reply, rang his bell again, reversed sharply, and vanished. But at the same moment, from round a corner of the house, a whole army of children appeared. Mounted on bicycles, tricycles, scooters or toy motor-cars, jeeps, and tanks, they swept past Quail in some intent pursuit of their vanished companion. Many had high bumpy foreheads, or surveyed the world with severity through round studious lenses. It was evident that they were, in fact, the progeny of the surrounding academic society. But they certainly had no claim to be called quiet children. Held up by the bottle-neck of the garden gate, they were jostling and pummelling each other, ramming vehicle against vehicle with passion, and at the same time yelling the place down. The uproar encouraged the screaming baby in a pram to increased effort. The strangled baby, abruptly resuscitated, joined in.

  As the greater part of the tumult died away, and as Quail was about to approach the house, a young man appeared from the road – striding in at the gate so confidently that Quail at once turned to him and renewed his application. As he did so he saw with some surprise that this was the youth whom he had observed buying The Early Years of Arthur Fontaney in Mr Blackwell’s shop that morning.

  “Yes, this is Lady Elizabeth’s.” The young man’s complexion was as clear as a girl’s, and his features were as softly moulded. Yet he was wholly masculine, and might have tumbled straight out of one of the hockey-matches

  Quail had recently been skirting. “I’m a relation, Robin Warboys. Dr Warboys was my great-uncle. Or he would have been, that is, if he hadn’t died a little before I was born. Lady Liz always calls me cousin. It sounds rather absurd, don’t you think? But I suppose it was the old-fashioned thing.” The young man paused and flushed faintly, as if feeling that these explanations had been too elaborate to supply before some ritual of introduction had been performed. “Are you Mr Quail? Lady Liz said I was going to meet you.”

  “I’m Willard Quail, all right.” Quail shook hands and smiled. “Was it because you were reckoning to meet me that you bought my book?”

  It was a question no sooner uttered than regretted. Robin Warboys didn’t appear to Quail to be materially older than the infant on the tricycle, but this was no excuse for such an abrupt familiarity. The young man, however, seemed far from offended. “I say, sir – did you see me? What fun! And that is rather why I bought it – though lots of people have told me it’s frightfully good.”

  “It’s shockingly expensive however.” Quail propounded this gravely.

  “Yes, appallingly.” The young man checked himself, and looked at Quail in candid reproach over this little trap. “But, of course, one expects to have to pay a lot for absolutely tip-top books. And with Lady Liz, you know, one has to mind one’s p’s and q’s. She can be pretty stiff.”

  Quail remembered that Lady Elizabeth could be pretty stiff. “And this really is her house?” he asked. “I was a bit doubtful about it.”

  “This is it, certainly.” Robin Warboys seemed surprised. “Haven’t you been here before?”

  “Never. I’m terribly a stranger to Oxford, I’m sorry to say. Your great-uncle and Lady Elizabeth were still in the Lodge when I was here last.”

  “Good Lord!” The young man was impressed, and Quail would not have been surprised to feel a strong arm put out to guide his tottering steps. “They must have moved across here about the time of Noah’s flood. But it’s only recently that Lady Liz has moved up.”

  “Up?” Quail was startled. “You mean that Lady Elizabeth lives right at the top of this monstrous house? Is there an elevator?”

  “There’s this – and it’s the quickest way, so come along.” Much amused, Warboys led the way to the fire-escape. Quail followed, rather flattered at being supposed capable of some agility after all. “Have you been in college, sir? It’s my college too, I should say. I’m in my second year there.”

  “I’ve lunched with the Warden and Mrs Jopling. Perhaps that’s not quite being in college.”

  “I don’t think it is.” Warboys, who was now climbing, turned round to grin cheerfully, as if at a suddenly discovered contemporary. “Still, it’s something to have got a meal out of the Lion and the Lizard. Did they talk about our delightful Micky Manningtree?”

  “He was mentioned.” Quail made this reply discreetly. “But why do you call them—?”

  “Omar Khayyam. They say the Lion and the Lizard keep the courts where—”

  “I see.” Quail felt that he had been dull over this.

  “It’s a family joke, not a college one. And the Lizard isn’t too bad an old soul, really – although her conversation expresses such a love of French culture, and all that. I wonder if my great-uncle drank deep, like Jamshyd? I expect so.”

  “The old Warden was a very temperate man.” Climbing almost vertically upwards behind this buoyant youth, Quail spoke with some severity. “But I’ll grant you that he gloried – and that Lady Elizabeth did too. The Lodge was a very remarkable place in their time – or at least that’s how it struck a young American. There always seemed to be undergraduates there – and not just the presentable ones.”

  “But all Americans are presentable.” With the largest innocence, Warboys enunciated this as something having value as an encouraging social truth. “Although, of course, I don’t know about long ago.”

  Quail stopped climbing, the better to indulge himself in
laughter. This had tickled his fancy greatly. “As a matter of fact, Mr Warboys, I wasn’t thinking of Americans. I was thinking of some of your own English undergraduates, from what were still probably called national schools. There they would be, at Lady Elizabeth’s table, and they might have to talk to the Prime Minister, or a famous philosopher, or a young German musician or a French poet.”

  “I hope they made a better show than I should, sir. And I think the young German musician would be the worst, don’t you?” Warboys’ voice floated down from above, cheerfully mocking. “But it’s at least not so alarming now. At the Joplings’ you won’t meet the simpler classes of society who are so abundantly among us in these days, and you won’t meet the Prime Minister either. Only that oaf Micky Manningtree, supposing he consents to turn up. But won’t you agree, sir, that we’ve got the present occupants of the Lodge neatly named?”

  “I can see something of the lizard in the lady, I confess. And your Warden has a sort of mane. But I didn’t hear him growl.” Quail was having to raise his voice. The yelling babies and the flute had both a little faded, but the French voices were reverberant through windows they were now passing. “Does Lady Elizabeth hire out this whole place in apartments?”

  Warboys nodded. “During the war she had it filled with evacuees and people like that. And afterwards she decided to divide it into what you call apartments. They’re known as flats here.”

  “Ah, yes – flats.” Quail accepted this instruction becomingly. “But she’s not—?” He hesitated. The thought of Lady Elizabeth as conceivably being in reduced circumstances was shocking to him.

  “Oh, I don’t think she’s broke, sir. No more than everybody else. But the place would only be useful to her if she could keep a lot of servants and entertain in the ancient way. It’s sensible of her, I think, not to have gone on living like a mouse in a cathedral. There’s a great deal of embalming goes on hereabouts.”

  “Embalming?”

  “Old parties quietly settled in on the job of mummifying very slowly.” Warboys spoke with the inoffensive callousness of the young. “This part of Oxford has some pretty weird survivals in that line. Relicts of deceased scholars of tremendous eminence, living alone, or perhaps in couples, in large decaying houses. Existing on the gas-ring and the tin-opener. In the end the tin-opener gets a bit beyond them, and then I suppose it’s just tea and biscuits.”

  Quail thought of old Dr Stringfellow’s paper bag. “It’s not a very cheerful spectacle.”

  “It’s quite horrid. I think in former times, you know, there was more sense of family responsibility.” Warboys produced this with an air of suddenly opening a store of ripe sagacity. “Nowadays it seems to be felt that it’s up to the state to run places for the aged. But that’s not awfully nice, either.”

  “No, it isn’t. As a matter of fact, I’m wondering whether I shall find something like the conditions you describe—” Quail hesitated and broke off. “But here we are?”

  “Here we are, sir.” Warboys had opened a door between two chimney-stacks. He turned and smiled charmingly. “I don’t expect we’ll find the Prime Minister. But Lady Liz usually has somebody about.”

  CHAPTER VI

  The room in which Quail presently found himself was undoubtedly an attic. It sprawled in irregular bays and alcoves over a large area of the house below, with a ceiling so sharply pitched in places as to menace the heads of unwary explorers. The furniture showed an unconsidered mingling of the elegance of Louis XV with sundry large objects evidently retrieved from the workroom of a nineteenth-century scholar: book-cases with convoluted tops, massive mahogany desks and writing-tables, unlikely lecterns, smaller book-cases hazardously designed to revolve in the manner of office chairs. There were photographs everywhere – scores of unidentifiable aristocratic persons, presumably relations of Lady Elizabeth’s, in small silver frames; and interspersed among these, signed and on a larger scale, the intellectually or artistically eminent: Tennyson in a cloak, Huxley pointing to a microscope, Bishop Wilberforce examining a Bible, Darwin palpating a skull. Despite what Robin Warboys had said, Lady Elizabeth was alone among these presences.

  Her letter, awaiting Quail at his hotel, had been in the handwriting of advanced age. That was inevitable. A quick reckoning had assured him that she would quite soon be a centenarian. He had never, in fact, known her other than as an old woman; and he was reposing some faith in this as likely to mitigate any painful impression which he must receive now. To meet after a quarter of a century a woman enshrined in one’s memory as thirty-five would be to become pretty sharply aware of mortality. But at the extreme verge of life, Quail conjectured, it might be rather as with the thermometer in the tropics – a hundred and fifteen in the shade being not very perceptibly different from a hundred.

  He was almost prepared, then, to find Lady Elizabeth unchanged. It might have been to relieve him of any pious effort to persuade himself that it was actually so, that she received him standing before Herkomer’s portrait of her husband. His impression was immediately of overwhelming age. Lady Elizabeth was upright still, and she had her old habit of immobility except when she was moving to some definite purpose. But she might have been the mother of the old man in the frame behind her. The flesh had fallen way from her face in some way that seemed to modify the bony structure beneath, so that even her nose had not the contour he remembered. To turn from his image of her to the present fact was like exchanging an earthly for a lunar landscape. Only Lady Elizabeth’s eyes were unaltered – or showed even darker amid her grey pallor and beneath the lace cap perching where her silver hair had wound in its abundant coil.

  “How long is it since you came to tea with me?” She had a stick in her hand, and was stepping forward with a careful confidence to greet her guest. “I wouldn’t forgive you—never—if I didn’t know how well you were going to talk. But don’t think too much of yourself.” It was her old quick mockery – or at least some moving ghost of it. “Almost any American would do.”

  “Almost any American would try.” Quail was in these first moments not at ease. He had to shake off an irrational feeling of there being something unnatural – an automatism, a trick – in the remembered speech coming from this ruined face. It was speech changed in pitch and volume, indeed, yet recognisable – like a familiar voice making a long-distance call. “And you have been so kind,” he went on, “to so many. There must have been tremendous bores among them.”

  “Only poor Mr Russell Lowell.” Lady Elizabeth made this pronouncement with all the old authority, so that one instantly felt there was no appeal from it. “I can’t remember a single other one. And that was partly because Mr Lowell had been an ambassador – to have been an ambassador is always stultifying – and partly because on the day he called on me, they had been giving him an honorary degree. A man requires a good dinner before recovering from that.”

  “I’m sure he does.” The little joke came to Quail like an echo from very far away, as if here were something which had once been said on some apposite occasion to Meredith or Browning. And Lady Elizabeth’s manner had become curiously expository. She spoke with the gentle clear emphasis of one habitually engaged in explaining the world to small children, so that second childhood appeared less a quality inherent in herself than a condition that she discovered progressively in those around her.

  “But that reminds me.” Lady Elizabeth arrived with deliberation at this. “There are several people coming to tea. Robin, put on the kettle – the large one.”

  “Oky-doke, Lady Liz.”

  “And don’t, Robin, use that horrible expression. Mr Quail would not use it. Mr Quail’s son would not use it.”

  Quail laughed. “You’re right only about me. If I had a son, he’d certainly use it.”

  “You didn’t marry?”

  “No.” Quail was a little struck by the tense in which this question had been cast. “No – I never did.” He paused. “You still see a good many Americans?”

  “A grea
t many delightful boys I know nothing about – and just occasionally somebody’s grandson or great-nephew. There was an Adams only last term. And a year or two ago there was an Eliot – a quiet young man, interested in poetry. But Mr Emerson was surely your best poet. My father took me to visit him at Concord. He gave me a book.”

  “I should very much like to get around to seeing that, some day.” Quail perceived that time no longer preserved quite its normal dimensions within the mind of Lady Elizabeth. “It is kind of you to have invited this young man to meet me.” Quail had noticed that Robin Warboys was still absent from the room, being presumably in attendance upon the large kettle. “He is most entertaining.”

  “He is quite deplorably uninformed. I have been giving some thought to prescribing a course of reading for him.”

  “So I’ve gathered. And I think I can tell you that he reads the books you suggest. Or at least that he gets hold of them.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. And I believe Robin can be useful to you. While you are here, you must a little get in with the young people.”

  “You really think so?” Quail recalled with what trepidation one had ventured to demur to any injunction of Lady Elizabeth’s. “I don’t know that I’ll be here for long.”