Quail didn’t know what to think. He was considerably startled. He couldn’t believe that Miss Fontaney, even if her judgment was now somewhat impaired by her illness, could have developed a very high regard for Jopling. But Jopling’s position in the university was another matter. She might conceivably have the feeling that Jopling himself had actually claimed her as having. She might feel that there was some august academic recognition of her father’s eminence implicit in the Warden’s interest. “I just don’t know,” he said to Stringfellow. “Miss Fontaney would really like to hand over to a Fontaney – I’m clear about that. But, of course, there isn’t one. So what will happen is quite obscure.”
“Whether Jopling is serious or not, he has certainly convinced Tandon that he is. And it’s become a regular feud, as I say.” Stringfellow spoke with placid satisfaction. “You haven’t dined in your college since you came back?”
“I’ve scarcely done so at all. One doesn’t want to impose on that sort of hospitality.”
“No doubt. But you’d better go and have a look. I’m told the issue has had a most unseemly effect upon the whole body of the fellows. Wagers, you know, and that sort of thing. Hints, and jocular remarks, and the younger men hatching little plots to exacerbate the situation in the interest of general jollity. And Tandon, as we say nowadays, can’t take it. Or so I’m told. Half off his head, they say. Doesn’t often appear. And when he does, people note that his manner has changed.”
Quail was distressed by this. “Can anything be done? Has he any relations?”
“Relations?” It was with something of the effect of being introduced to an unfamiliar technical term that Stringfellow echoed the word. “It isn’t the sort of thing anybody knows. Have I relations? It’s a long time since I’ve enquired. If you asked my colleagues, they would report a general impression that at one time I had a mother, who may now, however, be presumed dead. I should be inclined to suppose an a priori likelihood that Tandon had a mother too. Yes, I should be inclined to conjecture that he was that sort of man. But I see no means of determining whether she be alive or dead.”
For some moments Quail was silent. He found this sort of humour displeasing and even ghoulish. At the same time he recognised it as not simply silly. It held authentic, if acrid, reference to the queer semi-monasticism that still streaked the place. “Then, what about friends?” he asked. “Do you know whether he has any intimates among his colleagues – either in the college or in his own faculty?”
“I’ve no idea.” Moving down the Long Walk, Stringfellow got through the snow at so brisk a toddle that Quail found he had to quicken his own pace. “On the whole, I’d say that Tandon was rather solitary. And that’s a bad thing. As they get older, you know”—Stringfellow spoke as might an anthropologist of a remote tribe—”they turn odd and careless in various ways. Cut a queer figure in the streets, and so on. I should be apprehensive of Tandon’s eventually going that way. Not that it is common, nowadays. Come to think of it, I notice very few old chaps of that sort about.”
Again it was some time before Quail found anything to say. “You think,” he then asked, “that Tandon might go quite mad?”
“Oh, yes—oh, dear me, yes.” Stringfellow’s high quavering placid voice carried far over the snow, so that a couple of young men fifty yards ahead of them both looked round. “It’s not a thing of which to exaggerate the importance, however. Lunacy is, happily, not a ground for vacating a fellowship. The dangerous thing is flagrant immorality. Try that, my dear Quail, and you come on dangerous ground.”
“So I’ve supposed.”
“Quite so. How it stands with common assault upon the head of a house, I can’t say.”
“Common assault!” Quail was startled. “Surely it hasn’t come to that? There hasn’t actually been a scene, a crisis?”
“Indeed there has. Tandon had to be restrained, coaxed, or hustled into the butler’s pantry, and calmed down with brandy.”
Quail wondered whether it was the butler who had judged brandy proper for this purpose. “I guess that was a most disagreeable incident,” he said – and was aware that, so far as his own feelings were concerned, this represented a large understatement. His conviction grew that he wanted to have nothing to do with these people; or even with the further celebrating of Arthur Fontaney, were a necessary concomitant of that to be implication in brawls and buffoonery – with Quail buffoonery was a very strong word – in the college once presided over by Dr Warboys. He felt no disposition to question Stringfellow, and in consequence their walk now proceeded for some time in silence. The river had begun to freeze, and it was only in the centre that the current discernibly flowed. The line of barges and houseboats, each weighed down beneath obliterating snows, might have been so many prehistoric monsters caught by an advancing ice age while on trek. Quail tried to recall which of these queer floating dressing-rooms belonged to which college, and had just identified the Oriel barge by its superior elegance, when his companion embarked upon further communication. “When words passed in this way, and Jopling picked up the decanter—”
“Picked up the decanter!” Quail found himself aghast.
“Quite so, quite so. There has been, I may say, a good deal of discussion of the incident – tolerably well-informed discussion. And it appears to be agreed that it is virtually without precedent in living memory. If you except, that is, the notorious affair in eighty-two, when the Master of—” Stringfellow checked himself. “But that is irrelevant, no doubt. The present point is this: when words, I say, passed in this deplorable way, there is a very general impression that it was Jopling who was mainly at fault.”
“I’m not at all surprised to hear that.”
“Jopling had made some confident statement about Miss Fontaney’s intentions, and Tandon had replied that he didn’t know what he was talking about. That was no doubt uncivil, but scarcely occasion, you will agree, for an abrogation of all social decency. Jopling, however, appeared to be irritated by a marked assumption of confidence on Tandon’s part—”
“Confidence?” Quail was struck by this.
“Precisely. And Tandon declared, rather cryptically, that there had been one master key to the situation all the time; that it had not been in Jopling’s power to go for that; and that now he, Tandon, had it safely in his pocket. This was the point at which Jopling made his regrettable gesture with the port.”
“I see.” For a moment all this hung on Quail’s ear as simply so much more of scandalous nonsense. And then, as if on another and remoter ear, something in Stringfellow’s words set up an odd reverberation. “Did you say ‘key’?” he asked.
“Just that.” Stringfellow was surprised. “’Master key’ was the expression.”
“Thank you.” Quail affected to look at his watch – though for the moment his head was swimming in a fashion that would, in fact, have prevented his making sense of it. “You must excuse me, I’m afraid.”
“An appointment, my dear fellow?”
“Well—something that I ought to have kept in mind.” He turned and walked quickly away.
It is one of several peculiarities about Oxford’s traffic that some taxi-cabs may be hailed and some may not. Forgetting this, Quail twice gestured in vain. Then he remembered a depot into which one may dive just off St Aldate’s, and within five minutes he was part of a line of traffic moving circuitously north. There was no great sense in all this haste; perhaps it suggested a certain lack of self-control; or perhaps it was to be justified as a carry-over from his sound business habit of clearing up a muddle without waste of time. He thought he saw outrage and tragedy; and if he felt guilty it was from a sense that the tragedy wouldn’t be in any sharp full way his. Perhaps he had been an ass, and entirely failed to notice in himself something that really was there for the noticing. But that failure spoke little for the force or depth of anything that had in fact obscurely stirred in him. His own role was hopelessly, fatally cast for sentimental comedy. Of the other thing he could only be
a spectator now. And he would be that unless he had, so to speak, entirely mistaken the theatre, and was now hurrying to a stage upon which there was in fact no play at all.
His money was ready before the cab stopped. The Bradmore Road, never noisy, was ominously mute under the pall of snow, less like a theatre, after all, than a primitive cinema with the piano stopped. The two lines of houses on their gentle curve, some mildly and some extravagantly sequacious of an imaged Middle Age, might have been part of the set, the décor for an old silent film of spectacular enchantment: Hollywood’s introduction to a fairy-story turning on some charm or spell. He pushed open the garden gate and it made a tiny creak against the compacted snow – a first faint sound upon which, to the happiest artistic effect, a multitude of others might succeed as the enchantment broke. But in sentimental comedy that sort of thing hasn’t a place. He walked up to the front door – a staid elderly figure, suitably clothed for the rigours of the season – and rang the bell.
It was an hour at which the person with the mop might be expected still to be on duty. But when the door opened – and it opened almost at once – it was Marianne Fontaney with whom he stood confronted. He wondered if it was a trick of the snow that made her look so pale and her eyes so bright.
“Mr Quail!” She shook hands with a smile of pleasure and led him into the hall – that small authentic antechamber to the treasures of which she was joint guardian.
Then she turned to him again with enquiries about his absence, his journey. But these were uncompleted when she broke off. It was as if she had glimpsed in his face something requiring from her another course. “But I must tell you,” she said. “I have news. I must tell you at once. Mr. Tandon and I are engaged to be married.”
PART THREE
WAKING UP
CHAPTER I
So, after all, it had happened: the fatality of being Arthur Fontaney’s daughter had asserted itself against her again. It represented – he repeated to himself extravagantly – outrage and tragedy; it represented the advance upon her of some moment of humiliating disillusion that he would have done anything to see her escape. And he reached out for comfort, as she led him into the drawing-room, to young Robin Warboys’ assertion, or impression, that Tandon wasn’t a bad chap. But if that were so his action was incredible. He had seen the substance of precisely the suggestion which Jopling had so offensively made to Quail; he had even, on one occasion, openly expressed it, and in precisely the same image. Marianne Fontaney was a key to the possession of Arthur Fontaney’s journals. And he had put the key in his pocket.
One doesn’t absolutely need to congratulate a prospective bride. One can murmur something about the good fortune of the groom. Quail had managed this; and now in the drawing-room he had a moment to look at her. He had read vaguely of plain women turning beautiful and of elderly women looking younger in such a situation as Marianne’s now seemed to be. But with her it didn’t appear to have worked that way. He would still have hesitated about putting her on the one or the other side of fifty; and, in a way, she now looked plainer just because she now looked even more as her father must have looked. He noticed again that her eyes were brighter; then he withdrew his own on the impulse of delicacy which – rather comically, he owned – was apt to assail him in such situations. “And your sister?” he asked.
“Eleanor strongly disapproves.”
He was disconcerted. It was Miss Fontaney’s health that it had seemed natural to him – however important Marianne’s news – to make early enquiry about; and this reply showed him how much the younger sister was at last seeing things quite spontaneously from her own point of view. That, in a sense, was all to the good; it wasn’t, as they said, before time. But what waited for her on the farther side of this absorption? He didn’t like to think. “Do you know,” he asked, “why your sister disapproves?”
She walked to a window and raised a blind, as if she must have time for this. “No,” she said, “I don’t know. But of course I hope to find out.”
He was silent for a moment. The reply might hold a sort of blind irony that he didn’t relish. At the same time there was a kind of grim hope in the circumstance. And it was needed. For Tandon was coming clearer in his mind. All Oxford except the woman now standing here, it might be said, knew his large distaste for women; and his proposing marriage for an ulterior motive did at first represent him as inexplicably unprincipled. But such a view missed out an essential part of his character. And it was this, when one considered it, that really suggested in this distressing situation something like the full scope of tragic action. Character and circumstance were conspiring to create it. Almost the first thing Quail had learned about Tandon was that he possessed virtually no personal life, and conversation with him suggested his being only intermittently aware that such a thing existed. Yes, perhaps there was an explanation in that. What might be called, euphemistically, a marriage of convenience might appear all right to Tandon, even when the convenience was all on one side and never overtly expressed.
But now Marianne had sat down, and he did the same. “I tell myself,” she said quietly, “that I must allow for Eleanor’s rather old-fashioned ideas. For I am sure they are old-fashioned. Don’t you agree they are?” She had looked at him in sudden appeal.
He didn’t know what to say. In Eleanor’s disapproval, he repeated to himself, there was a grim sort of hope. Unless her mind had badly failed her, she at least must surely have glimpsed what prompted Tandon’s unlikely appearance in the guise of a suitor. And she might well judge that it was kinder to disenchant Marianne at once than let so inauspicious – almost so fraudulent – a union proceed. “Are you sure it is that?” he asked cautiously. And he rather hastily added: “I mean, could your sister’s having what you call old-fashioned notions be so terribly relevant?”
“Perhaps you don’t know.” As she did on rare occasions, she had faintly flushed. “Gavin’s father was . . . abutcher.”
He blessed himself for not suddenly rather wildly laughing. The little speech had come absurdly from her with all the air of being spoken in a period or costume piece. He felt indeed vaguely that in what he had just heard there was some further and important implication. But he was diverted from this by the necessity of making Marianne a decorous reply. “I know that your sister has what may be called a high family pride. But I shouldn’t expect it to operate in just that way. I mean that I should be surprised to find that her objection to your – your marriage was simply on grounds that could be called simply snobbish. Wouldn’t you?”
“I do think there may be something else in Eleanor’s mind. But you see, just at present—” She broke off, suddenly distressed. “And I haven’t told you! Is it very shocking that my head is so full of my own affairs? Eleanor is in hospital. There has been a successful operation. It is thought that the seriousness of her condition will be much relieved . . . at least for a time.”
This, for a change, was news to which there was no difficulty in finding an appropriate response. And Quail, as he made what further enquiries were proper, tried to think a little ahead. At least he was relieved, for the moment, from adopting one course about which he would in any ease have misgivings. He couldn’t very well pursue Miss Fontaney into hospital and have the matter out with her. For some little time she must remain a question mark in the affair. But there were whole areas of Marianne’s mind over which the same symbol metaphorically hung. It wasn’t a mind that could be called capacious; and you wouldn’t pick out its owner in a crowd as one likely to cherish an interior at all surprising. Still, from the first he had been aware of the terra incognita as existing, and he only didn’t know whether he had the least business – or for that matter ability – to start exploring. There was surely something almost involuntary, therefore, in his now drastically doing so. “But apart from your sister’s attitude,” he asked, “you don’t yourself feel any doubts about the match?” He hesitated, hoping that the words had somehow saved themselves from vast impudence. “There aren
’t,” he more vaguely added, “any difficulties impressing you as formidable?”
She looked at him gravely, and it struck him that she didn’t now nearly so much keep her gaze on the floor. “But of course!” she said. “If only because we’re such late starters, for one thing. We may even seem ridiculous, for all I know.”
He might have said something that was merely confused, for suddenly he felt ridiculous himself. He was more certain still that what he had been so obscurely afraid of had happened; that being Arthur Fontaney’s daughter was once more defining her fate; and that this marriage was a trap in the awful sense that she had entirely mistaken why it was happening. And there was really nothing he could do about it. He had only to look at her now to know that she was deep in a situation of which, for her, the vast simplicity was the overriding fact. There was nobody in the world who could rightly take on the responsibility of breaking in upon it. But at least he saw there was one thing that he could say. “You will never seem ridiculous to me, Marianne – never.”
She received it – even the first use of her Christian name – without surprise, but with a smile he thought he would remember. “Of course,” she said, “I wouldn’t think of marrying without Eleanor’s approval. I have told Gavin that.”
It ought to have sounded no less fantastically of the past than had her reference to the unexalted station of Tandon’s father. But somehow it did not. “You really mean that?” he asked.
She inclined her head. She was very serious. “Yes. Yes, indeed. We have been too long together for . . . anything else.”
“And you think you will bring your sister round? She shows some sign of it?”
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