My own thoughts did eventually a little wander. Individuals commonly interest me more than their institutions, and what came into my head was the fact of a certain similarity (which I am sure had never struck me as a young man) between Cyril Bedworth and Gavin Mogridge. It is usually easy to analyse how characters differ; consequently, a more beguiling exercise is sometimes to be found in rendering articulate an obscure sense of where they overlap. I couldn’t imagine Bedworth writing Mochica − but then there had certainly been a time when I couldn’t have conceived of the ‘cello-bashing Mogridge doing such a thing either. Mogridge, if he addressed himself to the task, could possibly produce a book with a title like Proust and Powell, but it would be a distinctly plodding affair. Yet Bedworth’s own book might be that. (I felt guilty at having been for so long unaware of its existence.) In fact, where these two men came together was in the common possession of slow to medium paced minds, and perhaps in certain consequent similarities of speech-rhythm as well. Mogridge, however, was certainly capable of changing into a different gear at will; unless Tony and I had been mistaken in identifying the position which enabled him to spirit Ivo across the Atlantic at the drop of a handkerchief, it was inconceivable that his mind couldn’t, in a crisis, work very rapidly indeed. And I doubted whether Bedworth’s could do that.
These speculations were checked by the sudden appearance of the tiled roof of the Talberts’ house towering above our heads. This effect was occasioned by the fact that the building, itself of the most modest elevation, stood perched on a high bank or terrace which had to be scaled by a flight of steps resembling a ship’s accommodation ladder. We went up in single file. I remembered how, on the previous day, I had quarrelled with Surrey Quad (the scene of my renewed acquaintance with Talbert) for not being as I had come to imagine it, and I wondered whether a similar experience was immediately in front of me now. It seemed not possible that I could find this suburban dwelling smaller than I had come to suppose; quite probably, indeed, it would prove larger. Oxford dons − who are all assumed to be much of a muchness, socially regarded − had housed themselves in my undergraduate time at a striking variety of economic levels. Some almost approximated to what is fancifully provided for them in popular films of academic life − being exhibited as receiving or harbouring their mistresses (since their morals are commonly represented as of a highly enlightened sort) in what would appear to be the remoter wings of large Cotswold manor- houses. Others lived very simply indeed, and the Talberts had been among these. Viewing the exterior of their villa, one felt surprise that so inconsiderable a structure could be so ugly. Once inside, one asked oneself how apartments traversable in three or four strides came so notably short of rendering any impression of the cosy or snug.
As our heads emerged above what here became ground level, I saw that the locus of the Talbert’s heroic services to scholarship had lived on perfectly faithfully inside my head. I thought now, as I had perhaps thought on my very first visit, that the house ought to have two little porches instead of one, so that Talbert might bob out to the left by way of presaging fine weather, or Mrs Talbert appear to the right, announcing rain. The front door was ajar, and I wondered whether, as is common at parties nowadays, we were expected simply to walk in. Bedworth, however, pressed a bell with polite brevity. The door was opened at once, and through an agency impossible to become aware of without surprise. A canine paw had appeared in the interstice and effected the operation with what was evidently practised skill. The creature thus revealed could not conceivably be Boanerges; he must be, at the least, a grandson − if only a spiritual grandson − of that vigorous third pedestrian. He regarded us for a moment mournfully, acknowledged our presence with what could only be called an unfriendly but respectful bow, turned, and led us into the house. It was unnervingly like being received by honey at the provost’s lodging.
‘Cyril,’ I asked cautiously, ‘is that brute called Boanerges?’
‘It’s called Thunderbox.’
‘I don’t believe you!’
‘It’s certainly no name to give a respectable dog.’ Bedworth frowned, as if feeling there had been discourtesy or even disloyalty in thus aspersing the taste of his immediate colleague. ‘Of course, one sees the joke,’ he added anxiously. ‘A kind of affectionate reference to poor old Boanerges. I remember him very well.’
‘Quite so,’ I said − and again thought of Mogridge, himself somewhat given to otiose explanations.
There was no party. So informal was any designed occasion, indeed, that the Talberts were absorbed in their common pursuit as Thunderbox ushered us into the sitting-room. They sat on hard chairs facing each other across a square table, each with the prescriptive brace of enormous volumes deployed − lost, it had to be supposed, in the textual quiddities of The Great Duke of Florence or A New Way to Pay Old Debts. It was possible, of course, that our arrival wasn’t designed at all, Talbert having failed to inform his wife of any hospitable proposal he had made whether to the Bedworths or myself. Mrs Talbert was not, in any case, perturbed − or not perturbed by people turning up for tea. She was in some agitation, all the same, since she had just discovered in the text before her a lurking typographical nuance conceivably holding portentous implications which she at once fell to expounding to us. Like Mrs Pococke, she had changed more than her husband, so that it was now less evident that she was by a good way the younger of the two. The rise and fall of her voice, with its extraordinary ability to produce precise articulations on an indrawn breath, had become a little uncomfortable to listen to, since it seemed no longer merely a nervous eccentricity but rather a physical disability having to do with a troublesome chest. Mentally, however, she struck me as wearing the better of the two. Although I had no understanding whatever of the learned matters she was pitching at me (and could only be amused and gratified that I was being taken for learned too) I did receive an impression that she was dead on the ball herself. Talbert listened to her respectfully, but as if being carried over technical ground a little beyond him. The higher bibliographical mysteries with which they were involved no doubt grew more complicated and rarified with the years, and it was Mrs Talbert who was athletically keeping up with them. When at length there was a pause Talbert introduced another subject.
‘I have been most sorry,’ he said to Bedworth in his huskiest tone, ‘to hear the sad news about poor Luxmoore.’
‘Luxmoore?’ Bedworth repeated. ‘Has anything happened to him?’
But Talbert had turned to me at once − whether as Dalrymple or as Pattullo I had no means of knowing.
‘Did you know poor Luxmoore?’ he asked. ‘The most brilliant of our junior research fellows. And now the unhappy man has made away with himself.’
‘Made away with himself?’ Bedworth was horrified.
‘In Bethnal Green, it seems − which is a peculiar thing. He must have had relatives in humble circumstances there. His father is a substantial landowner in Yorkshire.’
‘Good God, Albert! You’ve picked it up entirely wrong.’ Bedworth spoke almost with irritation. ‘It’s an undergraduate called Lusby who has died in Bethnal Green − a pupil of Jimmy Gender’s. Nothing whatever to do with Luxmoore, who is a most disgustingly cheerful man at all times and seasons.’
This speech of Bedworth’s surprised me. I judged it out of character − or did so until I recalled that by his ‘character’ I must still largely mean how he had struck me more than twenty years before. I was also surprised by his wife. Mabel Bedworth didn’t indeed, speak. But she raised her eyes from the carpet (a very threadbare carpet) for the astonishing purpose of giving me a faint but unmistakable wink. I am certain that she had very proper feelings about Paul Lusby. She was bidding me note, however, that it was not solely the little women who could get college affairs muddled.
‘I am relieved to hear it.’ Talbert said this only after a moment’s deliberation. He had perhaps been tempted to dispute the matter, having − once more − a natural dislike of being corrected i
n a question of fact by a former pupil. ‘Yes, it is a great relief to me. I think we ought now to have tea. Weak tea.’
‘But, Geoffrey, there can be no question of a relieved mind.’ Mrs Talbert said this to my complete perplexity for a moment, since I had forgotten her habit of addressing Albert Talbert in this way. ‘The untimely death of one young man is no less sad than the untimely death of another.’ Mrs Talbert wrung her hands as she said this, and her voice went up and down quite wildly. I realised that when her switchback of a nose was not effectively buried in Massinger and his kidney she was probably rather a tiresome person about the house.
‘But, my dear, Luxmoore is a scholar of altogether exceptional promise.’ Talbert, I imagine, felt himself on weak ground, since the effect of weight he gave to this assertion was something of a tour de force.
‘I am aware of it. But Mr Lusby, Geoffrey, may have held the highest promise too − even should the fact not yet have manifested itself.’ Mrs Talbert clutched her bosom and threw her head in air. ‘Not, perhaps, as a scholar. But as an actor, or an artist, or an aviator—’
‘But we should neither of us have known him had he passed us in the street.’ Talbert rallied to cut short what had threatened to be an alarming enumeration. ‘And it is idle, Emily, to encourage oneself in metaphysical distresses.’ He paused on this crushing aphorism, which I had a dim sense of once having quoted to him myself in my essay on Samuel Johnson. ‘May I suggest that we make no reference to this in the presence of the children? They might be upset by it.’
I wondered whether Talbert’s faculties were much more in decay than had hitherto appeared, so that his mind was slipping back over a long term of years. Alternatively − and it was a more cheerful thought − the Talberts were now grandparents, and we had arrived upon the occasion of a family reunion. These speculations, however, were short-lived. The door opened, and a large and bearded man came into the room, followed by a not quite young woman who, although somewhat plain, had an intelligent expression and, if on the abounding side, a good figure.
‘I think you will remember Charles and Mary,’ Mrs Talbert said to me.
There were greetings and − on my part and that of the children − proper assurances that we remembered each other very well. Thunderbox was active at this point; he gambolled with Charles and Mary in a manner suggesting that, although a dog of something more than mature years and temperamentally disposed to regard himself as of the graver sort, he nevertheless possessed (like his owner) a spring of submerged gaiety which sought issue from time to time. He now even offered quite amicable advances to the Bedworths and myself. So there followed for some moments one of those episodes of general attention to a family pet which are so useful upon rather flat social occasions.
Mrs Talbert then produced tea − which was not notably weak − together with a plate of those tea-time standbys which are well denominated rock buns. Talbert, who at one point on the previous day had been aware that I was to hold a weighty conversation with the Provost, now gave no hint that he had so much as heard of Modern European Drama. But he addressed me accurately by my Christian name, and embarked upon a long story about an encounter with an unknown American in the North Library of the British Museum. This unlucky scholar had, in some fashion that remained obscure, deeply offended Talbert. ‘I gave him the rough side of my tongue,’ Talbert concluded with extraordinary grimness − and suddenly his eyes sparkled with glee, while his subterranean laughter rumbled within him like something gone wrong with the plumbing. I remembered that he took the darkest view of American students. He was convinced that they pilfered books from the great libraries of England − not to sell them (as would be comprehensible, and even sensible, granted a certain ethical stance) but to display them as souvenirs to their folks back home. (Talbert would produce ‘folks back home’ with enormous malice, and also as exhibiting a recondite acquaintance with the American language.)
I concurred in the view that there was something peculiarly repellent in the notion of books as souvenirs, and then began cautiously to inquire into the present condition of Charles and Mary Talbert, whose continued domestication within the parental home I found vaguely disturbing. This − illogically enough − was a consequence of the mere spatial dimensions of the place, or of this in combination with their own general largeness of physical effect. Had the senior Talberts commanded one of those Cotswold manor houses, the continued presence of their progeny would not so immediately have suggested a state of existence cabined, cribbed and confined. One could have thought of the robust Charles as more and more taking on the running of the estate (or at least of a market-garden), and of Mary as multifariously occupied with Brownies and good works. Recalling their father’s apprehensiveness lest the news of a fatality in college might upset the children, I wondered whether Charles and Mary were afflicted to a disabling degree by nervous distresses. Their mother, after all, was a jumpy woman, and a married couple long in the grip of obsessional scholarship would doubtless be regarded in Harley Street as an ominous phenomenon.
This last, however, was a modish conjecture. As actual children, Charles and Mary (unlike the personages of literary history after whom I supposed them to have been named) had shown no signs of a neurotic constitution, although they were perhaps a little more docile and well-behaved than would accord with modern notions of the wholesome. Presumably they had simply elected, in a rational manner, to lead quiet lives. If any wish to startle the world had lurked in them it had conceivably been satisfied in such devious ways as giving a scandalous name to a dog. Albert Talbert’s sense of humour was occult and unpredictable. But I doubted whether it would have run to Thunderbox.
Mary Talbert, it presently appeared, taught classics in a girls’ school of a genteel order only a stone’s throw away. Her brother was constrained to earning his living farther afield − across the length of Oxford, indeed, since he was a proof reader of the more learned sort of books uttered by the Oxford University Press. But the bearded Charles had another distinction. He had invented something.
‘I believe Cyril and Mabel have had a glimpse of it,’ Talbert said huskily. (These were two names of which he appeared to be in unintermitted control.) ‘But I am sure, Duncan, it will interest you a great deal. Charles, my dear boy, do fetch it down.’
Charles abandoned his rock bun at once, and left the room. He was either a submissive creature or an uncommonly good-natured one. I waited in some curiosity for what he should produce. Would it be a machine for contriving the perpetual motion? Or perhaps one for the rapid collating of texts merely by pressing a button or turning a handle? Talbert’s next words, although interesting, failed to afford much of a clue.
‘We are inclined to think,’ he said, ‘that there may be money in it.’ His voice had taken on that note − as of confidential discussion between men of affairs − which distinguished it when the question of the economics of dramatic composition had been touched on between us on the previous afternoon. ‘Charles,’ he continued, ‘has a strong business sense, which ought to take him far in publishing. And, of course, in Walton Street the opportunities are unlimited. He may well become Secretary to the Delegates one day.’
I was expressing my own confidence that Charles would attain this elevation when the young man returned to the room. What was to be produced became, in its general nature, instantly apparent. He was carrying a large folded board and a shallow oblong cardboard box. Almost as if from the dawn of life, memories of one or another form of the Talbert family addiction returned to me.
‘The really difficult thing,’ Charles said, ‘is to find a good name for it.’ He set down his burden on the square table, from which his sister had removed the tea things. ‘I’ve thought of Babylon. It would carry a play on babble on, and of course the Tower of Babel would come in too.’
‘An alternative is Liddell and Scott? Mrs Talbert had expanded her lungs as if about to embark upon an aria. ‘We believe it might be catchy − particularly in schools, where the chief
market is likely to lie. But we are a little disturbed by a lack of precedent. There appears to be no instance of proper names being used to distinguish a really successful game.’
‘That’s a pity,’ I said. The cardboard box had now been opened, and its contents tumbled out. The appropriateness of calling the projected new divertissement after two eminent lexicographers was at least apparent. The little wooden oblongs had letters of the Greek alphabet in red on one side and of the Russian alphabet in black on the other. The effect of second-cousinship gave a most confusing appearance to the whole, but one had to suppose that the game, whatever it was, would be played in one language at a time. I poked a finger amid the litter of epsilons and sigmas. ‘Do you include a digamma?’ I asked.
This learned inquiry was well received, and a short discussion ensued. Too plainly, however, it only put off the moment when we should all settle down to playing word-grabbing in ancient Greek. (Only Charles, Talbert explained with innocent pride, was capable of any sort of expert performance in Russian, a tongue in which he largely traded at the O.U.P.) Mabel Bedworth, I was fairly sure, could know not a word of Greek, and would have the spirit and good sense to say so at once. About Bedworth himself the probability was that he had conscientiously addressed himself to the rudiments of the language round about the time that I was happily forgetting them.
Fortunately, Mary Talbert proved to take less for granted than the other members of her family, and tactfully ensured that what now succeeded should be not a contest but a demonstration. It was possible to enjoy this without fatiguing the intelligence. There was something very pleasing in the absorption of these four learned persons in their harmless pursuit − and even, indeed, in their preposterous persuasion that it would prove a money-spinner. When eventually I glanced at my watch (inevitably in a covert and undergraduate manner) it was to find the hour later than I had supposed. Just as had happened long before, I was feeling at home with the Talberts. It was even with a sense of recovered familiarity that I found Thunderbox to appreciate, as Boanerges had once appreciated, a respectful scratching between the ears.
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