But this didn’t prove easy. Once he called on Tandon in college, found him engaged with a pupil, and withdrew – in face of no very cordial stare – upon a murmur that he would call again. His second visit found Tandon out, and he left on the desk, scrawled on the back of a card, a cheerful message suggesting some informal meeting. When this brought no reply, he wrote inviting Tandon to lunch with him at his hotel. Tandon declined on the score of a previous engagement – and did so, moreover, in the third person. There could be only one meaning to this; it was a bleak and uncouth way of breaking off their acquaintance. Quail had to think again.
He could, he supposed, force himself into the other’s presence and make a last appeal to reason, insisting on a recognition that his own conduct had been wholly straightforward. But this seemed rather drastic. Or he could write at some length, giving Tandon every assurance of wishing him well. Only he doubted whether anything other than an appeal in person had the least chance of success. The deadlock looked as if it would best be resolved through the Bradmore Road. From Miss Fontaney, who once or twice appeared in the library to discuss the journals, he had rather gathered that Tandon was either fallen definitely into disfavour with her or had on some initiative of his own ceased to avail himself of the very substantial privilege Quail had won for him. Yet Quail’s impression was that Tandon’s visits to the house were not entirely at an end; and if his moments with Marianne had been more frequent he would have enquired whether she had any light to throw on Tandon’s new disposition.
The day came, indeed, when, upon reflection, Quail decided to pay a call specially in the interest of this enquiry. Tandon had walked straight past him in the street – and although he might well be the sort of person who seldom noticed anybody, Quail believed that he had on this occasion been aware of him. Did he similarly now cut Jopling whenever they met? It was utterly absurd that the mind of Arthur Fontaney, which, if at one time turbulent enough, had ended its course in a high philosophic serenity of which the full evidences were yet to give to the world, should now be the direct occasion of unseemly relations between men moving through the immemorial civilities of Oxford. The small foolish situation showed like an indecent gesture made in the shadow of some monument of human dignity. Or so Willard Quail, who had by no means ceased to be romantic, thought.
He was setting out, then, to determine, if he could, just how matters stood at least between Tandon and the Bradmore Road, when fate in the guise of a page-boy handed him a cable. This time, business was interrupting to major effect. Within five hours he was talking to a group of German gentlemen in Paris, and within forty-eight, he was in conference with several discreet South American bankers in New York.
His absence from Oxford was a matter of no more than three weeks, all told. He realised as he once more entered his hotel that it seemed to have been a good deal longer. This was partly a matter of the sharpness of the break, which had plunged him quite unexpectedly into important and intensively conducted negotiations not at all like those which might settle, one way or another, the fate of the literary remains of Arthur Fontaney. But partly it was a matter of Oxford itself having changed dramatically. Michaelmas Term was over; some thousands of young men and women had been banished for six weeks; and the city and university, as if resolved upon a spectacular act of penance for this act of routine deprivation, had donned an enveloping garment of snow. There was more of it than Quail ever remembered there before. It sat like so many periwigs on the eroded pates of the emperors before the Sheldonian, and transformed the elegant Mercury in the great quadrangle of Christ Church into the likeness of a performing polar bear. This last appearance Quail remarked on his second morning when, as a mild expedient of re-acclimatisation, he had thought to deliver one of his luncheon invitations to an old acquaintance in that college. When he had performed this task he remembered his earlier recourse of a turn in the adjoining Meadow, and he accordingly directed his steps in that direction.
Fortune favoured him, for when he reached the Broad Walk the whole prospect there revealed lay in brilliant sunshine. On any winter day, with the trees stripped bare that conceal the city behind its surviving wall, the uncrowded composition disposed on its shallow arc between Tom Tower to the west and the crowning glory of Magdalen Tower to the east, constituted a harmony which he would instantly have averred to be unsurpassed in any other part of Europe. But the snow threw over everything an unfamiliar guise; the reflected light, striking gently yet brilliantly up from below, had a disrealising quality, produced a subtle architectural confusion, such as the process of flood-lighting coarsely travesties. In short, the scene held a particular enchantment, exercised such a spell as
Quail had not undergone before, and he lingered before it for more minutes than he had intended.
This access of spiritual warmth didn’t prevent the occasion from being physically chilly; and he was glad, as he returned by Dead Man’s Walk, of shelter, and what was at least the illusion of a gently radiated heat, from the high sunlit wall on his right hand. There was nobody else in sight, or at least there was nobody moving. Only a little way ahead, on a convex bench following the line of an embrasure in the ancient masonry, an old man with a stick was disposed with every appearance of comfort, like a sun-bather in the warmth of an alpine snow-field.
It came back to Quail’s memory as he approached this figure that those in whom the custody of this Meadow lay gave notice, at its gates, of their intention to exclude or expel ragged persons or persons carrying bundles. The old man looked as if, upon closer inspection, he might prove ragged, or near it. And he did have what suggested itself as a small bundle. Then Quail saw that it was not a bundle but a paper bag. The old man was Dr Stringfellow.
And Quail recalled – what wasn’t easy to give much substance to – that this was in fact young Tommy Stringfellow, the unremarkable son of a notable eccentric, and one whose chief claim to distinction lay not in having picked up a little learning from his father the Assyriologist, but in having enjoyed something of the regard of Oriel Bill. Quail had to admit to himself that all this didn’t much help him to see Dr Stringfellow in a new light; only the clear sunshine itself did that; and what that sunshine emphasised was, so to speak, the seams and spots and patches. This time, it was true, Dr Stringfellow was a little less oddly shod, there being a stout boot on his either foot. But one of these was black and the other brown; and the effect, as he now lay back with closed eyes, open mouth, and a distinctly cadaverous look, was of the essential exhibit in some romance of crime and detection, whom the ingenuity of the author had thus managed to equip by way of a sufficiently enigmatic clue.
Dr Stringfellow looked as if he was asleep. It was Quail’s first impulse to walk past, but this was succeeded by the notion that it would perhaps be prudent to wake the old man up. Warmth from this sunshine was not much more than a trick of the sight, and it would be horrid to read next morning that an aged scholar had actually perished in Christ Church Meadow. Under the impulsion of this morbid fancy Quail was about to stop and act when the initiative was taken from him by Dr Stringfellow himself. Although he had opened his eyes, he hadn’t appeared to glance round; yet he was in no doubt as to who was approaching him. “Good morning, Quail,” he said. “Do you walk here as a regular thing?” He peered into the paper bag. “Rich Tea,” he said with satisfaction, and held it out hospitably before him. “Elevenses,” he added. “Particularly important in weather like this.”
These amiabilities made it necessary that Quail should sit down. He accepted a biscuit – Rich Tea, he saw with relief, meant something much less formidable than ginger nuts – and only wished that Dr Stringfellow had the habit of carrying round a vacuum flask of coffee. “This is my first walk here since the snow,” he said. “I’ve had to be back in New York since I saw you last.”
“Quite so.” Dr Stringfellow’s tone made it go without saying that Quail should be at a constant shuttle across the Atlantic. “But no doubt you have kept in touch. You are aware of the
developments.”
This found Quail at a loss. It seemed probable that his companion was referring to some issue of university politics on which he supposed that Quail’s gaze, in common with that of the rest of the world, was anxiously fixed. The senescence of professors was to be officially postponed, or undergraduates were to be allowed to smoke in lectures. And yet Quail knew already that one could never be sure with Stringfellow; he had a trick of knowing more about one than could readily be explained. “No,” he said carefully, “I’ve been in no sort of correspondence with the place. My trip was about affairs that proved rather absorbing.”
Stringfellow nodded. “Naturally, naturally.” He spoke with a casualness from which it might have been inferred that his own course of life took him regularly amid the complexities of international finance. “But unfortunate, all the same.”
Quail felt that at this he ought to prick up his ears, for it could surely only mean that Stringfellow was aware of what had first brought him over, and now had what he considered as unfavourable news to give. There wouldn’t really be anything very surprising about Stringfellow’s knowing. Potentially there was quite a lot of entertainment for the common rooms of Oxford in the problem of what would happen to Arthur Fontaney’s remains, and the place wasn’t one which normally allowed such sources of diversion to go unexploited. But, granted this, just what Stringfellow had to say was something that Quail found himself unexpectedly unconcerned to hear. “Unfortunately?” he echoed vaguely. It was coming to him with an effect of discovery that Tandon, Jopling, and the grand problem of the journals were no longer all that urgent in his mind. He couldn’t even be quite certain that he was back in Oxford because of them. On the other hand, he had no sense, unless it was the vaguest, of being back because of anything else. His present feeling was of a relaxation, almost of a full pause in whatever forces governed his life. He was glad he hadn’t been permitted to walk past Stringfellow – glad of this simply because he found there was pleasure in sitting even thus freezingly beside the old man, with the broad carpet of snow, everywhere glinting in tiny points of fire, stretching to the distant line of college barges on the Isis. He was for the moment so sunk in this that he heard in a sort of further echo his own voice echoing Stringfellow’s. “Unfortunate?” he had said – and not even heard the reply. Stringfellow was having to repeat it now.
“Tandon, my dear Quail – Gavin Tandon.”
“Gavin Tandon? Oh, bother him!” Quail paused, surprised at himself. Then sincerity prompted him to add: “And, if you’re going to tell me something about Warden Jopling, bother Warden Jopling too!”
CHAPTER IX
“That is, of course, a very reasonable point of view.” Before committing himself to this judgment, Stringfellow had with great deliberation masticated another biscuit. “A plague on both their houses. But surely you might have been ahead of either of them? And if you had managed that, instead of leaving us – and for the second time in your life – so abruptly, their feud wouldn’t have reached quite its present pitch. Miss Fontaney has the papers; I have your assurance that railroads flourish; wouldn’t it have been sensible to put down hard cash?”
“I suppose it would.” Quail found that he didn’t at all resent this practical realism in the old person beside him. “But the attempt might have met with rebuff. Miss Fontaney is known not to like the idea of her father’s manuscripts going abroad.”
“You could have doubled the offer.”
Quail was silent. He couldn’t tell Stringfellow that he would have felt that sort of shouting to be indelicate, for the words would sound absurd as soon as uttered.
“Tandon hasn’t a farthing, and Jopling and his wife must run to about twopence between them.” Stringfellow spoke as one millionaire might to another. “So your lack of pertinacity surprises me.”
“I guess I just don’t like a market scramble for wares of that sort.” Driven to defend himself, Quail collected his thoughts. “Who gets Fontaney’s journals doesn’t matter all that much, if you ask me. Whether through one channel or another, they’ll make their way into print – and competently enough edited and so forth – in the end. I’d like them, I won’t deny. But I’m not going to scramble – particularly when it’s not a very clean scramble, either. The great day for my family, I’d say, was when my father determined he’d get some things done as they should be done on our railroads. I’ve kept up on that. But I’m not going to get things done as they ought to be done in Oxford. It would be presumptuous. It’s not my job, sir. If Arthur Fontaney’s journals set heads of houses horse-trading and tempt fellows of colleges to run mad, I say I go home.”
“But you’ve been home, my dear Quail. And now you’re back again. There is really very little logic, I sometimes think, left in you younger men.” Stringfellow took a snap at a new biscuit. “It is something I have occasion to note in the present generation of Assyriologists. The processes of discursive thought are virtually fontes signati to them. Observation and reflection convince me that the ultimate explanation is physiological. I attribute it to faulty principles of diet.”
“That’s most interesting.” Quail watched his companion finish the biscuit. He told himself that he rather hoped Stringfellow would simply continue on this extraordinary tangent; and that the feud he had mentioned would not again be referred to. But the charge of lack of logic a little rankled, and he found himself putting up a defence against it. “I do feel rather concerned about the ladies. They’re Fontaney’s daughters, after all; and you can appreciate the sort of duty I feel I owe them. They know that if it’s money they have to think of, they have only to drop me a line for the best offer they’ll get. And while the thing’s unsettled, I’d like them to feel I’m here and waiting. But I repeat I’m not entering a sort of learned brawl – and plumb outside their front gate, you might say, in the Bradmore Road.” Quail paused on this.
He had an uncomfortable and unaccustomed sense that what he was saying wasn’t wholly clear and wasn’t wholly true. “What’s this, anyway,” he inconsequently asked, “about a feud? And who’s coming out on top? I’d better know. For perhaps I’m talking nonsense. Perhaps I’d still take a hand if I could – and even if only as a second. That farthing Tandon hasn’t got. I believe that at a pinch I’d find it for him.”
Stringfellow appeared to be interested in this. He might even have been rather shocked. “You judge that Tandon is the less unsympathetic character on the whole?”
“Decidedly. Don’t you agree?”
“My dear fellow, I am reminded of what Dr Johnson said of Voltaire and Rousseau, when a somewhat similar discussion arose. He remarked, you will remember, that he found it difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them.”
Quail laughed. “That’s pretty stiff, isn’t it?”
“You may say that Jopling is the more obviously detestable of the two. I will grant it to you.” Stringfellow gave this an air of the most benign chat. “Mark you, there was a time when a man’s becoming a parson was decidedly auspicious. It meant that presently he would quite probably clear out. But on the whole I’ve never cared for them. Have you?”
This wasn’t a subject upon which Quail felt it necessary to declare himself. “But I don’t know,” he said, “that Jopling makes much of being a parson. And it’s not a point that comes into my estimate of him.”
“It comes into Tandon’s. If you ask me, Tandon’s grand stroke of malice is going to turn on it.”
Quail found this quite incomprehensible. “Shall we take a turn about the Meadow?” he suggested. It had come into his head that the cold, after all, was perhaps affecting his companion to the point of setting his mind wandering.
“Certainly. I ought to have thought of it.” Stringfellow rose and with his stick thrust vigorously at the snow. “To detain you sitting here, my dear Quail, is to risk catching a chill. So come along.”
Quail accepted this meekly. “I wouldn’t have thought there was malice in Gavin Tandon,” he presently s
aid. “I know he can take offence, and even nurse absurd suspicions. But that’s not quite the same thing.”
“You have to consider the degree of provocation. Tandon has been developing this interest in Fontaney. Now would you, Quail, who are an authority, say it was a reputable sort of interest?”
“Certainly.” Quail was emphatic. “Tandon’s thoroughly sound; and better equipped than I am, by a long way, in important parts of the field.”
“Very good – very good, indeed.” Stringfellow paused in his perambulation to give an approving nod at this magnanimity. “Now, it’s being said, that as far as concerns Tandon and yourself—”
“Me?” Quail, too, stopped as he made this rather naive interjection. “You mean I’m part of the picture people gossip about?”
“It’s said”—Stringfellow ignored the unnecessary question—”that you and Tandon would settle things amicably enough. But now Charles Jopling comes along, remembering or having been told that Fontaney’s diaries, or whatever they are, contain a great deal of Oxford scandal—”
“I wouldn’t call it that.” Quail shook his head in serious concern. “Indeed, I’d thank you to contradict such a misconception when you hear it. There is a good deal of perceptive and mordant comment on the academic scene as it appeared to a privileged outsider on the spot. But I wouldn’t think of it as scandal.”
“Very well, my dear fellow – but the point is that Jopling does. And he has in consequence, as you know, a fancy for all this material – or at least so he has persuaded Tandon.”
“You think it might be, as they say, all a game; that he only does it to annoy?”
“Because he knows it teases?” Stringfellow was delighted. “I don’t know. And I’d say that, if you don’t know, nobody knows. But it’s certain that, during the last fortnight or thereabouts, Jopling has convinced Tandon that the stuff is pretty well within his, Jopling’s, hands. He has only to give a nod at this old Miss Fontaney, and she’ll hand over. Now, what do you think of that?”
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