The Guardians Page 7

  But now Quail had no more time for reflection on this new situation. As he was still standing beside Lady Elizabeth it naturally happened that the introduction of the two men to one another was accomplished immediately. And this time their hostess, with what motive Quail didn’t know, moved away at once. Conceivably she simply had Tandon in her head as heavy going. He looked that sort of man.

  What ought first to pass between them, it occurred to Quail, was some small cautious signal: an acknowledgment that if there was a game to be played out between them it might take at least its preliminary tone from what was frankly amusing, even if embarrassing, in the implications of their earlier encounter. But a glance at Tandon told him that here was not a man given to any very ready awareness of the humorous. Quail was casting about in his mind, therefore, for some safe generality with which to break a disquieting silence, when Tandon abruptly spoke. “What did you think,” he asked, “of that thing in the last number of The Modern Language Review?”

  This, if surprising, was at least easy to answer. “I’m afraid I haven’t seen it. I go through journals of that sort once a year, in a group.”

  There was a moment’s further silence, during which Quail had the impression that Tandon was looking at him with indignation. He quickly discerned, however, that this was not so. Tandon’s eyes were slightly protuberant; they glittered behind lenses that increased their prominence; and they had the trick of remaining steady. The effect was of an angry glare. But it was possible that Tandon was the mildest of men. His fresh fit of silence was perhaps occasioned by an effort to get the range, so to speak, of one whose habits with learned journals were so unorthodox. “Addison’s influence on the aesthetic speculations of Kant,” he presently said. “Intensely interesting.”

  “I shall certainly look forward to reading that.”

  “But some careless slips. The writer is a young man called Grant.”

  Quail nodded. “I think I know of him. He was at Harvard for a time. Isn’t he a lecturer in Leeds?”

  “At Leeds. In philosophy.” Tandon, who was looking steadily past Quail’s left ear and across the room, was clearly one who didn’t let careless slips go by. But that he meant no offence by this rapid magistral correction seemed attested by his next remark. “I’ve had the new issue of your Early Years. The appendix on the Gottingen period is a real accession to our knowledge. I realised at once that it opens up a wide field of reference.”

  “Thank you.” Quail, although gratified by the conjecture that Tandon’s last pronouncement was in the nature of a resounding testimonial, could not help adding: “But I expect there are a good many slips?”

  Tandon glanced at him swiftly – and with the consequence of Quail’s recognising that this elderly man, if a pedant, was not of the sort that is wholly self-absorbed. He would take implications and shades. “Slips?” he said. “I noticed only a few. They’re in the post to you now.”

  “Thank you for that, too.” Quail felt that he had lost a round. “I think I’ve managed to follow, in my amateur way, most of your own work,” he said. “And I’ve looked forward to meeting you.”

  Tandon was again silent. He might have been engaged in translating some phrase pitched at him in a foreign language. “You must have gone down,” he said presently, “in the year I got my fellowship. Have you been into college? The Warden told me you were coming to Oxford.”

  “I thought I ought to write to him, although not personally acquainted with him. He hadn’t been elected Warden, of course, in my time.”

  “It has been a satisfactory appointment. Jopling is an excellent administrator.”

  There was certainly, Quail thought, no affectation of cordiality in Tandon’s tone. But the words expressed a proper institutional loyalty such as had at times been notably lacking in the conversation of the Warden himself. And Jopling, it fleetingly crossed Quail’s mind, was perhaps more aware of people’s interests and likely intentions than it pleased him to divulge. If Tandon was seriously attracted by Fontaney’s papers, Jopling might be planning a little amusement from the new situation. “And very kindly,” Quail went on, “he asked me to lunch today. I hadn’t, naturally, met Mrs Jopling before.” He paused. “She seems,” he added experimentally, “a delightful woman.”

  “Yes – a very nice woman.” Tandon, although the greater part of his mind had plainly passed to more abstract speculations, responded without any effect of insincerity. “She doesn’t,” he continued, “plague one with evening parties, and so on . . . oh—thank you very much.” This was addressed to Robin Warboys, who had come up with a plate of biscuits. Tandon helped himself – there was something ungainly in his movements – and watched the young man as he moved away. “I wonder,” he said, “would he be one of our undergraduates? One ought to know. It is awkward not to know.”

  “I happen to have the information that he is. And he is Lady Elizabeth’s great-nephew.”

  “Ah, yes – Warboys. R. Warboys. I ought to have known at once. Most attractive.” Tandon frowned behind his glittering glasses, as if he had said something surprising and unaccountable. “These young men . . . there is something very . . . I almost wish—” He broke off, and Quail watched him curiously – curiously and with a sudden sympathy which he in his turn was conscious of as not immediately explicable. For a moment the two men looked at each other in silence – a silence which, while it held, was without the awkwardness attending the earlier silence after Lady Elizabeth had introduced them. And then Tandon was once more looking past Quail’s left ear. “That German book on Croce,” he said abruptly. “What did you think of it?”

  It would not have occurred to Quail that a fellow of his old college could do other than, in the current phrase, know his stuff. As he listened to Gavin Tandon he had the pleasure of realising how well grounded the confidence could be. Tandon had a weak husky voice that seemed to direct itself, like his gaze, into some farther and ideal space unembarrassed by the presence of flesh-and-blood hearers. He was probably one sort of rather good lecturer – the sort that is unaware either of an auditory or of the clock. This didn’t mean that his discourse held much charm. But certainly it was lucid and orderly – so orderly that one almost imagined those glinting glasses to be focused upon a list of headings and sub-headings hung in some obscure dimension holding no correspondence with Lady Elizabeth’s attic. Aesthetics can be a nebulous subject, and in Tandon’s talk it held more of the grey than of the silver or the gold. But at least he gave his clouds their sufficient architecture, and they obligingly stayed put in his sky long enough for any reasonable flight of inspection to which one was minded. For a substantial space of time Quail found himself thus occupied, and at least sufficiently air-borne not to mark that the tea-party was thinning out. It was only the return of Lady Elizabeth herself, that put a term to this purely intellectual interlude.

  “I am sorry to say that Miss Fontaney is unwell.” Lady Elizabeth addressed herself to Quail. “Her sister, Marianne, that is, has just rung up to excuse her. She had hoped to feel up to it, but was forced to give in at the last moment. So my plan for your meeting her here has come to nothing for the time being.” Lady Elizabeth turned to Tandon, the fixity of whose gaze upon infinity might have been judged as intensified during these remarks. “Is it not very strange that Mr Quail has never yet met either of Arthur Fontaney’s daughters?”

  Tandon received this with an abrupt and disconcerting bow, as if the speaker were somebody to whom he was being presented for the first time. “I have never met them myself,” he said huskily, “although, like Mr Quail, I take a great interest in their father’s work. It has been explained to me – I think by the Warden – that they live very much retired.”

  “They live just round the corner. No doubt you know the house?”

  “Yes—yes, I think I know the house.” Tandon, whose characteristic stance Quail had already remarked as a leaning far forward on his toes, swayed backward as he spoke, rather like a boxer who has been rocked by a shrewd
blow. At the same moment his glance caught Quail’s – but so fleetingly that Quail was left still in uncertainty as to whether that signal had passed or not.

  “A most interesting house. Almost what the popular papers call an historic house.” Lady Elizabeth sat down, and Quail realised that the three of them, together with Robin Warboys, were alone left in the room. “Almost everything is there still.”

  “Everything?” Tandon had returned to challenging infinity, but his weak voice had gone a shade huskier, so that Quail wondered if he was suppressing some strong excitement. “You mean his papers, Lady Elizabeth?”

  “Oh – of course there are those. But I am thinking of all the things he gathered around him . . . Robin—come here.”

  “Yes, Lady Liz?” Warboys, who had been making a tour of the room for the purpose of unobtrusively gleaning the remaining chocolate biscuits, advanced rather warily upon his elders.

  “Sit down, cousin. And when you have finished your mouthful, tell me, if you please, what you take to be the main difference between Arthur Fontaney and John Ruskin.”

  “Oh, I say!” Warboys evidently regarded his kinswoman’s demand, made in the presence of one of the dons of his college, as distinctly far from fair. He sat down obediently, nevertheless. Quail, watching, was prompted to try to imagine him as an American boy – to glimpse his mind and manner as they would be had Quail himself, say, had some share in the breeding of him. He had to abandon this odd and surely futile speculation, however, as the young man faced up to the conundrum which had been pitched at him. “The difference between Fontaney and Ruskin? Well, I think it might be called a matter of impact. I know Fontaney is tremendously interesting, and all that. But I’ve never heard that anything much happened because of him.”

  “Quite right – a very good start.” It was Tandon who spoke – huskily still, but yet in a tone that was incisively appreciative. Quail was amused. It was the tutorial manner, he supposed, peeping out.

  “Whereas Ruskin, although right round the bend—”

  “Although what, Robin?” Lady Elizabeth was understandably baffled.

  “I mean that Ruskin, although as mad as a hatter, did get people moving. England’s full of objects that would look quite different if he hadn’t. This house, for instance, and Keble and the University Museum – and small pubs and railway stations all over the country as well. But Fontaney just didn’t make that grade.”

  “Very true.” Tandon was again approving. “It’s not always the finer and more constructive minds, you see, that make their mark on all and sundry. But now, look at the thing the other way. Ruskin’s thought was essentially incoherent. It would have been so, even if he had not suffered those increasingly severe bouts of mania. Fontaney’s was orderly and synthesising. That’s where I would put the difference. When Ruskin died, all that he left unpublished was mere rhetoric. Whereas I am convinced that Fontaney—” Tandon’s voice, which had gone huskier still, trembled and for a moment seemed to fail him. Then he recovered himself. “Fontaney kept clear of wildcat schemes and emotional involvements. His intellect remained in working order through a meditative old age. And that, I think you will agree, is the best gift the gods have to bestow.”

  “Certainly one of the best.” Quail looked cautiously at Tandon, feeling that for a moment something of the inner man had peeped out. “But if you were to hand me Aladdin’s lamp, I don’t reckon it’s the first thing I’d ask for.”

  “Fontaney had this long period in which to order his maturest thought, and I am convinced of the likelihood that he left a system.” Tandon had ignored Quail’s remark, and now it appeared to strike him that this had been unmannerly. “But you know much more about Fontaney than I do,” he continued with genuine courtesy. “And perhaps you have another view.”

  “What you say interests me greatly. But I certainly think there’s another difference between the two men. Ruskin, one must admit, didn’t make much of human beings.”

  Tandon rocked gently, as if he found this at least momentarily perplexing. “You mean—?”

  “Apart from one or two individuals with whom he became obsessed at one time or another, Ruskin just didn’t notice people. In the end, that had a terribly isolating effect – and intellectually as well as socially. He wasn’t even aware of what other eminent men were doing in the studies he was himself devoted to. He became more and more of an amateur, in the disabling sense of the word. Fontaney was quite different. Even in his quiet old age, a widower domesticated with his two daughters in an Oxford villa, he remained tremendously up with the world – with its ideas and even with its gossip. Have you considered why he wanted this interval of time to elapse before any of his journals of that period were examined and made public?”

  “Of course I have. It is a most curious circumstance.” Tandon’s manner carried something like animation. “Fontaney was aware that he had arrived at speculative positions well in advance of his age. So he felt that some delay—”

  “I’ve no doubt there’s something in that. But I’m pretty sure there was another reason as well – and indeed I’ve already touched on it. Both in England at large and here in Oxford in particular, he became increasingly a great collector of personalia. He loved a good story, you remember – and particularly if there was something wry or odd or disconcerting to it.”

  “That’s certainly true.” Lady Elizabeth gave a nod so decisive that Quail found himself fearing for the stability of her elegant lace cap. “My husband used to say that Mr Fontaney might, or might not, be a great philosopher of art, but that he undoubtedly brought to the large circle of his acquaintance a curiosity and a penetration that might have served to establish him as one of the great English satirists.”

  “That’s to put it rather high. But I haven’t the slightest doubt that into those later journals Fontaney tumbled, day by day, not only his most mature aesthetic speculations but his most searching observations on men and manners as well. So one sees another reason for—well, a latent period.”

  “Oh, I say!” Robin Warboys was amused. “Do you mean that these unpublished journals are salted with the most frightful scandal?”

  “Hardly that. But they will contain much personal comment, which might have given pain thirty years ago.”

  “I don’t at all see that they might not do so still.” Lady Elizabeth was either indignant or pleasing herself by appearing to be so. “I would not take at all kindly the unearthing of a satirical account of my early dinner parties.”

  Tandon once more swayed nervously on his toes. “This is an aspect of the matter I hadn’t thought of,” he said. “This element of personalities, I mean. But you are almost certainly right. In the journals there will be a good deal of such dead wood.”

  But this – plainly to Tandon’s alarm – made Lady Elizabeth laugh aloud. “Dear Mr Tandon,” she said, “everybody might not judge an inspired picture of my dinner parties quite that.”

  “Of course not. It was not my intention . . . that is to say—” Tandon broke off in mere confusion. He would be scared, Quail guessed, by an invitation to cross swords with any woman – let alone with Lady Elizabeth, whom her great-nephew had so sagely described as pretty stiff.

  “I remember it being asserted, by one who knew all the men well, that Arthur Fontaney could be as witty as either Wilde or Whistler.” Lady Elizabeth paused, but seemingly with no notion that she was adding to the intimidating effect by evoking legendary names. Her nursery manner was undisturbed; she might be engaged simply in telling the children some bedtime story of the three bears. “And now I must give my own answer to the question. For certainly there was yet another way in which Mr Fontaney differed from poor Professor Ruskin. Did I ever tell you of my visit to Brantwood?”

  Dusk filled the alcoves and crept across the carpet of the attic drawing-room. On the piano Lord Tennyson, a creature of the half-light and the gloom, gave the impression of enveloping himself yet further in his voluminous cloak. Robin Warboys, whose appetite for literar
y reminiscence was wholesomely moderate, found diversion in wandering round the room and turning on a number of feeble electric lights lurking behind opaque parchments and silks. It was no longer possible to discern that a yellow vapour had crept up to lick at the pointed windows.

  “Brantwood?” Tandon was saying incredulously. “You mean, Lady Elizabeth, while Ruskin was still alive?”

  “Dear me, yes. It was long before his death. My husband and I drove over from Keswick – being on holiday there, I recall, shortly after our marriage. You can imagine how much I looked forward to so remarkable an occasion. And do you know what I chiefly remember? That everything was quite hideous! The Professor had, of course, his Turners, and a number of other remarkable paintings he had collected. But immediately one allowed one’s eye to stray beyond their frames one was conscious of nothing that would have been out of the way in the horrid villa of his papa and mama at Denmark Hill. He had no instinct whatever for the creating around himself”—Lady Elizabeth paused, as if acknowledging that there was, after all, a little effort now in achieving the precision of statement for which she had been famous—”for the creating around himself of any physical setting congruous with the deep beauty and high elevation of his thought. Mr Tandon, don’t you consider that very remarkable? Around the great teacher of my generation there was a litter of geological specimens; but beyond that nothing that would negative the supposition that he was a successful wine-merchant. Was not that strange?”

  “Strange?” Tandon knitted his brows, much as if he had been presented with a formidable intellectual problem. “Yes,” he said hesitantly, “yes—I think I see what you mean. It wouldn’t have occurred to me. But—yes—I do perfectly understand you.”

  “Whereas, believe me, it was so different with Mr Fontaney, so much the minor master though he may have been. He was not, of course, at all a wealthy man. He had neither the private fortune nor the large literary income of Professor Ruskin. But he did instinctively collect and blend and harmonise. And everything, I repeat, is there still – within a stone’s throw, almost, of this room.”