by Owen Stanley
Chapter X
Harry recognised that Frank’s intellectual powers were now formidable and knew the robot’s social skills had also developed considerably thanks to the patrons of the Drunken Badger. So he decided that he could risk taking Frank for a test drive, as it were, to Christminster University, to see if he could hold his own in the most intellectually challenging company in the country. Quite apart from Frank’s conversational powers, he also wanted to see if this highly discerning group could detect anything odd or amiss with him and guess that he was a robot.
Christminster, less than an hour’s drive away, was considered the country’s leading university and by chance Harry had an old friend there, Dr. Martin Fentiman. He was a biologist whom he had known during their days together at MIT, and was now a Visiting Fellow at St. Samson’s College. This seemed an excellent opportunity to arrange for an invitation from the College to dine one evening, and with Fentiman’s recommendation the Provost was happy to send one.
St. Samson’s College was a fine Baroque building in the High Street, and under an elegant cupola in the centre of the arcaded front stood a very naked statue of Samson beating a Philistine to death with the jawbone of an ass. This had long been a source of outrage to the Student Union, who regarded it as an insult to multiculturalism and a flagrant incitement to racial violence, as well as a Zionist provocation. They had demanded its removal, and the College had replied that the Union was very welcome to come and try to remove it themselves, but warned them that this would incur the severe resentment of the College’s undergraduate members, and that the Union should ensure its supporters all had plentiful medical assistance, including ambulances, on hand. After this communication, no more was heard from the Union on the subject.
It is to be regretted, however, that Samson’s heroic example over the centuries had rather failed to inspire much enthusiasm for the life of the mind in either the undergraduates or the Fellows. Instead, the College had become notoriously devoted to sports of the more violent and unscrupulous kind, among which dog-fighting, dwarf-tossing, pugilism, and badger-baiting were ranked high on the list of favourites.
The College possessed immense endowments, bequeathed to them by one of King Charles II’s mistresses, who was also a great admirer of male endowments. It had made astute use of this wealth over the centuries by well-placed donations to the University to ensure that its activities were not supervised too closely. This had been an especially important tactic in recent years, after the College had decided it would be politically astute to join the inclusiveness bandwagon and admit a few token women. But numerous ravishings and abductions by the young gentlemen of the College, worthy of a Gothic horror novel, had so terrified prospective female applicants that the experiment had been abandoned. (The speedy donation of a million pounds by the Provost and Fellows for a centre of lesbian and gay studies had done wonders for the College’s subsequent reputation.)
When Harry and Frank were delivered by Carl the driver to the College’s main entrance under the cupola, they were greeted by Dr. Fentiman and the Provost, who was hoping that the College might extract a generous donation from Mr. Hockenheimer’s legendary wealth. In hindsight, donating a million pounds to the gays and lesbians had been a trifle over-generous.
But as they passed through the Front Quadrangle, the visitors were somewhat disconcerted by various scenes of mayhem among the undergraduates, including a bare-knuckle boxing contest being cheered on by a large group of enthusiasts, a number of whom had ferocious dogs on leashes of tarred string. As they pushed their way through the baying crowd, the Provost, vague and benign, only murmured, “Just the boys letting off a little steam after exams. It’s one of our traditions at St. Samson’s.”
They all went up the polished antique staircase to the Senior Common Room, the usual low-ceilinged, dark oak panelled room, whose walls were almost concealed by portraits of earlier Provosts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Lives devoted to sloth, gluttony, lust, and malice had seared their marks on this gallery of hideous old gargoyles, who seemed to be looking down with contempt on their effete successors. The drunken brawling that had enlivened so many of their social evenings in the Senior Common Room during those robust centuries had now shrivelled into the malicious gossiping of the feeble modern age. The Provost excused himself as he had an urgent matter to attend to, and everyone was offered sherry. Fentiman introduced his guests to one or two of the Fellows, the nearest of whom was Dr. Higginbotham, a querulous pedant who had spent his whole career editing the letters and laundry lists of a long forgotten British philosopher called McTaggart.
His election to the College had been a serious mistake, precipitated by an urgent need to find a philosophy tutor without delay. The Fellows had had good reason to repent their choice but had been much consoled to find that he was an ideal candidate for bullying, so much so that he was now known as the College Dog. He was particularly upset by people whistling, a weakness which soon became known to the undergraduates, who thereafter mercilessly tormented him by whistling outside his door as he tried to hold tutorials.
Fentiman had introduced Higginbotham as the College’s Tutor in Philosophy and Harry as a prominent manufacturer from the United States.
“What do you manufacture?” asked Higginbotham.
“A whole range of products in the fashion and cosmetics industries,” Harry replied. Higginbotham displayed not the slightest interest in such frivolous commercialism, turned his back on him, and asked Frank what he did.
“I’m just generally curious,” he replied. “What’s your line in philosophy?”
“The works of a distinguished philosopher I would hardly expect you to have heard of: Ellis McTaggart.”
“On the contrary, I’m very familiar with his work. He was an early twentieth-century exponent of Hegel whose interpretation of Hegelianism gathered very little support at the time and was ultimately abandoned by McTaggart himself.”
Frank went on in this vein for several minutes, and gave a brief but devastating review of McTaggart’s views on Spirit, the Absolute, and Time, before concluding that it was hardly surprising that he had been forgotten.
“That is a most impertinent attack on a great philosopher,” replied Higginbotham angrily.
“I thought impertinence was, in a sense, what philosophy was supposed to be about, but if you think my criticisms were in error, perhaps you can tell me why.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you there,” snapped Higginbotham, and he turned his attention to the nearest portrait of a bygone Provost.
“Take no notice of Higginbotham,” said Fentiman, laughing. “None of us do. Let me introduce Dr. Dunwoody, our Tutor in Law.”
Unusually for an academic, Dunwoody specialised in criminal law, particularly sexual offences and personal violence, and undergraduate members of the College crowded into his classes at the beginning of each term, all hoping for his invaluable tips on evading the law on drunkenness and battery as well as for his highly entertaining anecdotes of human depravity drawn from the records of the English courts.
“Ah, a lawyer,” said Frank. “What is your particular specialty?”
Dunwoody explained his interests.
“I’m very glad to have met you,” said Frank. “If I could talk shop for just a moment, there is a case in the law of battery which has always puzzled me. I’m sure you know it: the Crown versus Eldredge, All England Law Reports, 1978.”
Dunwoody was all attention, and the two of them happily discussed the intricacies of the case for some minutes. Standing nearby and listening to this conversation with increasing disdain was the Bursar, Commander Nicholson. Lean, and tanned, and in his fifties, he had retired from the Navy and was an anti-intellectual and a frustrated disciplinarian.
Surveying the Fellows as though from his quarter-deck, Nicholson saw them less as brother officers than as a slovenly and mutinous rabble who needed to be kept in some sort of order. He considered their academic activities a
complete waste of time and thought the College spent far too much on hospitality, its wine cellar, and gourmet meals instead of on its investments and disapproved in particular of the Fellows bringing guests to High Table during the week. It is worth noting that the ship he had actually commanded was not a warship, but rather a supply ship carrying food and other necessities to the fleet, and despite the College’s immense wealth, he was a miserly penny-pincher.
Rather too obviously turning his back on Harry and Frank, he walked over to the sideboard and replenished his sherry glass. At this point the elderly and gnome-like Provost rejoined the gathering; the urgent summons a little earlier had been to adjudicate the ownership of a tin of baked beans that was being bitterly disputed by two of the Fellows and which had threatened to cause a major rift within the Governing Body.
His instant solution, accepted as the wisdom of Solomon, had been to consume the beans himself. He was in fact an expert on Biblical studies, especially on some of the more obscure legislation of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and was only lightly in touch with the real world, or at least the real world as represented by St. Samson’s. He was regarded as rather a saint by some of the Fellows’ wives, but as an imbecile by the Fellows themselves, which was exactly why they had elected him Provost: to allow them to indulge their vices unhindered by God or man. He smiled ingratiatingly at one of the Fellows, evidently a Scotsman, who ignored him.
This was in some ways the most notable Fellow of the College, Dr. Habakkuk McWrath, Reader in Extreme Celtic Studies (principally devoted to Highland warfare), and regarded as something of a hero or a mascot by the College undergraduates. Stocky, thick necked, and bullet headed, with hair of coarse grey bristles, and a pair of furious, bloodshot blue eyes, he was unchallenged as the rudest man in Christminster.
He had broken both hips playing rugger for Scotland, and broken many more of his opponents’ bones, and on holiday occasions liked to buckle on the ancient, rusting, blood-clotted sword of the McWraths. At such events the Fellows were careful not to allow Campbells or Papists within a thirty-yard radius of him. But on this particular evening he was wearing nothing more threatening than his kilt in the blood-red tartan of the McWraths. Unlike the Bursar, he was a great believer in College hospitality, considering it one of the social duties of chieftainship, and he came over, walking stiffly from his old injuries, to be introduced to the guests of the evening. As he approached, Frank’s opto-electronic skin picked up the colouration of McWrath’s kilt, and sympathetically adjusted his skin and hair tones to a slightly more ginger hue.
Unlike Higginbotham, McWrath was highly amused when told of Harry’s source of wealth.
“So, ye beautify the ladies, do ye? I congratulate you. Would there were more like you, tho’ most of the sapless creatures in this Common Room would’nae notice a lady if she were stark naked in front of them.”
Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed Higginbotham on the edge of the group. It was hay-fever season, and Higginbotham was naturally a chronic sufferer, with weeping red eyes and a dripping nose. McWrath eyed him with disgust, as though he were a soiled bandage on a tropical ulcer.
“I’ll thank ye to stand doon-wind of us, Higginbotham,” he said. “Ye look fitter for the plague pit than for human company.”
Before this conversational theme could be developed further, they were interrupted by the sound of a trumpet from the quadrangle outside to announce that dinner was served. They all formed a procession down to the great Hall and took their seats at High Table, which was raised a couple of feet above the tables and benches of the undergraduates, who were busily hurling bread rolls and insults at each other in good-natured bedlam.
The Hall was magnificent in white and gold and hung with pictures of violent death in many forms, such as battles, shipwrecks, hurricanes, revolutionary outrages, and the headsman’s axe. But above High Table hung the most dramatic picture of all, which depicted Samson bringing down the temple of his persecutors in a chaos of shattered pillars and screaming victims crushed under falling masonry. Houndstooth, the Senior Common Room Butler, banged his gavel for silence, the Provost said grace, and the soup was served.
There were two women Fellows in the College, only one of whom was present that evening: the Professor of Anthropology, Dame Alice Proudfoot. The University presently held anthropology in such contempt as a non-subject that it had amused the Administration to persuade St. Samson’s, of all Colleges, to accept her as a Fellow, and they had felt equal amusement in agreeing to do so. While she was, of course, aware of the College’s infamous reputation for misogyny, as an evangelical feminist she felt it was her duty to convert them. Keenly committed to multiculturalism, human rights, and social justice, she regarded the traditional anthropological focus on primitive society, in particular, as reactionary colonialist nonsense.
Dr. McWrath, on the other hand, was a keen admirer of primitive societies as composed of men after his own heart and where women knew their place, and regarded social justice as mere pandering to weaklings. Naturally, he was delighted to see her that evening, as he always made a special point of baiting her.
She was just back from a sabbatical in the States, and when she realised that Harry was an American, she gave him a beaming smile.
“I was so impressed by the sensitivity of your universities to the needs of marginalised minorities and the importance of providing safe spaces for them. There’s far too much emphasis on so-called free speech, which is just an excuse for male aggressiveness and competition. It’s long overdue for retirement, and what we really want instead is much more encouragement of community harmony. Your trigger warnings about potentially disturbing material for the students are also an excellent American idea that I shall be introducing in my department as soon as possible.”
“I would think that as an anthropologist, you would need trigger warnings all the time, with all that cannibalism, and human sacrifice, and sex orgies, and tribal warfare and massacres,” said Frank.
Dame Alice looked at him with amused contempt. “I’m afraid, young man, that you have a very outdated and, if I may say so, a very simplistic notion of what modern social anthropology is all about.”
“Surely it’s about the study of primitive societies,” replied Frank.
She snorted indignantly. “There is no such thing as primitive society. That’s an absurdly outdated and colonialist view. Modern anthropology is simply about people and their differences, and the problems they face in today’s world. Problems like access to the Internet by shut-ins, the use of recreational vehicles by the retired, tourism, child care, social housing, hair fashions, and so on. My own field of study, for example, is knitting patterns and how they vary from culture to culture.”
“I’m afraid I don’t find that very convincing,” replied Frank. “Are you really claiming that there are no qualitative, organizational differences between small-scale societies of hunter-gatherers and early farmers, organized on the basis of kinship, age, and gender, without money or markets, or writing or political centralisation, as opposed to modern mass societies with many millions organized as industrial states on centralised and bureaucratic principles? If there are such fundamental differences, then surely it makes sense to have a special academic discipline for the scientific study of the simpler societies, whether or not you call them primitive?”
Dame Alice was struck dumb by this onslaught, delivered quietly and politely by the strange young man sitting opposite her. She was intellectually quite incurious and had achieved her present position by simply absorbing the fashionable opinions around her as uncritically as a sponge. Red-faced and flustered, she stammered to make some kind of coherent reply.
McWrath had been listening to this interchange of ideas with a growing smile and pounced on her humiliation with delight. “He has ye. He has ye, ya daft woman with ya knitting patterns. Professor, are ye? Ah tell ye the young lad here should be the Professor, not you. He has great penetration, he has the nub of it, as I know well fro
m the life and times of my Highlanders, which were as different from modern life as chalk from cheese. I’d like to see you try to live among them even for a day.”
“I expect that if I had lived among your appalling Highlanders, I would have been raped repeatedly.
“Raped?” laughed McWrath. “Raped? Ye flatter yerself, woman. Cooking the bannocks would have been the only use they’d have found for an auld heifer like you.”
“You’re even more offensive than I remember, McWrath!” she snapped.
“That’s as may be, but better be offensive than feckless, like you and your wee snivelling students, with your safe spaces and your trigger warnings. Ah tell ye, in mah classes about the misdoings of the MacGregors, for example, if half o’ the class aren’t cryin’ their eyes out and callin’ for their mothers, Ah think the lecture must have been a failure. A taste o’ real red-blooded life like that is what education should be—a good kick in the teeth—but you and your kind cannae face up to it. Awa’ wi’ ye back to the nursery and yer cuddly toys.”
“Don’t you ever get any protests?” asked Harry.
“Aye, from time to time, one or two.”
“How do you deal with them?”
McWrath smiled.
“The last one, Ahm ashamed to say, was a Scotsman who had the impudence to tell me Ah was bringing the name of Scotland into disrepute. But he didnae stay long. It was the scruff o’ the neck and the toe of mah boot through the classroom door for him.” Then, he added, reflectively, “In mah rugger-playing days I used to kick the penalties for Scotland, ye know.”
These reminiscences of McWrath’s educational techniques were brought to a temporary halt by the serving of the main course, Beef Wellington, a luxury prepared by the Chef in gleeful defiance of the Bursar’s disapproval of such extravagance.