Cucumber Sandwiches

by J. I. M. Stewart

  Miles Honeybeare seemed unembarrassed now, and even indisposed to accept the injunction to cut along. Instead, he threw back his head – which was his way of getting his hair out of his eyes – and offered the Jarvie something uncommonly like a quid pro quo in the way of reticent approval.

  ‘It must be rather fun,’ Honeybeare said – and he had exactly the tone, approved by the Jarvie, which balances deference to seniority against the perfect unconstraint which should subsist between gentlemen, ‘It must be rather fun to live in college as you do, Jarvie. It’s like the eighteenth century. We all envy you enormously. I even envy you Crumble.’

  ‘Envy me Crumble?’ The Jarvie was amused. ‘Why, the fellow’s a rascal. I believe he beats his wife.’

  ‘At least he’s not always exclusively occupied with other people’s shoes and tea-pots, like the other college scouts. But perhaps he’s not a scout at all? He doesn’t seem to take up with them. They all go to the Leather Bottle, you know. But Crumble doesn’t.’

  ‘He’s my own man.’ The Jarvie was careful not to speak shortly. Young men are extremely sensitive to rebuke, and Honeybeare when he went away might become conscious of having spoken a shade out of turn. ‘And quite often I have Mrs C. on my hands as well.’ The Jarvie gave his short barking laugh as he said this. ‘They certainly don’t mingle with the college servants.’

  ‘So you’re a little world apart, sir. A kind of piccolo mondo antico.’

  ‘No doubt, Miles, no doubt.’ The Jarvie was delighted that here was a man who knew his Fogazzaro (a writer much admired by the Jarvie’s mother), and who could exploit the fact in delicate mockery. ‘But now I must get into the Lodging. A palazzo moderno nowadays, eh? And I’m a traveller from an antique land.’

  ‘Good luck, sir.’ Honeybeare had laughed, but not too heartily. He was certainly among the most engaging of the second-year men. ‘And may I drop in one evening – perhaps with a friend or two?’

  ‘Any evening you like – and turn on the wireless, or make free with the record-player, if I haven’t got back. On Tuesdays and Fridays that’s not before eleven.’ The Jarvie delivered his familiar formula with the brusquerie proper to it. ‘And now, Miles, get off to your abominable bun.’

  And Miles Honeybeare got off, achieving his previous pace with the rapidity of acceleration beloved by advertisers of sports-cars. Yet it had not been before, ever so fleetingly and in taking his leave, he had given the Jarvie yet another appraising glance. It was almost as if, like the boy (not the man) in Browning’s poem, he had been stung by the splendour of a sudden thought.

  3

  Although it was with the young that the Jarvie was supposed to constitute Mrs Finch’s special support, the dinner party turned out to be entirely a dons’ affair. But this was as he had expected, and he addressed himself to conscientious conversation with his colleagues’ – strictly, his former colleagues’ – wives. In many ways he was out of things, and it was the women, somehow, who chiefly made him aware of the fact. Perhaps merely because they didn’t understand his position, they seemed perpetually to be referring to matters he didn’t yet know about and they had no business to know about at all. Dons oughtn’t to chatter about the confidential affairs of a college to their wives. But there was no doubt they did.

  ‘I am so distressed about Larry Thimble,’ Mrs Purchase said to him. It was before they went in to dinner, and Mrs Purchase, who was quite young, was uncertainly waving a glass of sherry halfway between her own nose and his, so that he found himself wondering in horror whether she drank. ‘We are all so distressed. It seems such a shame.’

  ‘Thimble?’ the Jarvie repeated, and tried not to seem upset. Larry Thimble was a particularly nice man. If some misfortune had befallen him it was intolerable that this woman, who was not even the wife of Thimble’s tutor, should be running round chattering about it while he himself was still in ignorance.

  ‘But haven’t you heard? The Drug Squad again. They pounce, you know – and the result is that some rather harmless boy vanishes from Oxford. Of course one realises it’s a problem, and that the police have a terribly hard job. But Charles says they work in too much with the University, and that the colleges get by-passed. And I did so like Larry. He was perfectly brilliant—didn’t you think, Jarvie?—in that last OUDS production. He came to one of my parties afterwards.’

  ‘That was delightful of him.’ The Jarvie, when provoked, could produce this kind of dry remark. He thought poorly of imbecile women who hunted undergraduate celebrities, and he was disturbed by what Mrs Purchase had said about colleges being by-passed. He hadn’t quite followed, but he did know that he always had been and always would be very much a college man. Here seemed another instance of the fact that the University had to be kept an eye on. And he recalled – rather oddly, as he managed to break away from this tiresome lady – his momentary sensation earlier that evening as he heard the ambulance or fire-engine go past. Beyond the curtilage of the college, without a doubt, lay a world he made less and less of.

  At dinner he found himself placed on Mrs Finch’s right. Although not particularly gratified by this tribute to his seniority, he felt it saved him, or half-saved him, from worse things. He must by this time be said to know the Provost’s wife rather well, and this couldn’t be said of Mrs Purchase or of three or four even younger females scattered round the table. And at least Mrs Finch, unlike those nervous juniors, wouldn’t wait to have conversation made to her; she was a vehement woman, and the Jarvie judged that her vehemence would see him comfortably through until the point, a good deal later on in the meal, at which he would have to turn to the woman on his other side.

  This expectation was not belied. Mrs Finch had much to say, and it was only occasionally that she signalled – actually by a curious click of the tongue which was like a sophisticated phonograph telling itself and others that here was the end of a record – any request for more than a confirmatory murmur from her interlocutor. Mrs Finch had not heard about Larry Thimble, or if she had he was not within her sphere of interest. It was not for Mrs Finch to have been impressed by a twenty-year-old who had given an athletic and tremendously audible performance as King Lear. Mrs Finch’s stamping-ground was less the college than the University, and less the University than all the other universities of the United Kingdom. There was nothing parochial about her. She was said to have taken it into her head that her husband should go away and become a Vice-Chancellor somewhere – a move not very positively to be regarded as promotion except in Mrs Finch’s own mind – and she abounded in more or less statistical information about Essex and Sussex and Warwick and Keele.

  The Jarvie knew very little about these institutions. He supposed that they were to be spoken of with respect, but left to go about their own affairs. Mrs Finch appeared to have arranged them, along with more places of the same sort than he had at all known to exist, in a kind of league table. And chiefly in point of Student Power.

  The Jarvie had given some thought, although not perhaps notably consecutive or analytical thought, to this phenomenon – one which had declared itself only in his senescence and which there was every reason to suppose would accompany him into dotage. It was true that he had no great grip of its terminology. A teach in and a sit in, a free university and an anti-university, young people of Maoist or Trotskyist persuasion, Revolutionary Socialists, placards about the N.L.F., pin-ups (as they had to be called) of a handsome bearded character called Che Guevara, chantings in the street of mysterious vocables such as Ho-Ho-Ho: these formed a mere compost in the Jarvie’s mind. But from springs very deep in his nature there rose in him the persuasion – logically quite indefensible, as laughing and affectionate colleagues would point out – that there is not merely a special pathos, but also a special merit, in being in one’s nonage. When things had happened in Paris he had sat in front of his television set like a child, merely and simply hoping that the police would lose and the students win. And this was really because the police were older than the
students. When the college’s tutor in French, a severe scholar for whom he had a great regard, had passionately declared that these students were profaning Latin civilisation, the Jarvie was much too bewildered to be angry. And when American professorial guests, sitting over dessert in common room, discoursed of recent happenings at Berkeley or Columbia, the Jarvie either jumped up to get them brandy, or put on his turn as a frigid aristocrat strayed within the groves of academe, according as to whether these rather serious and solemn persons were for or against the young.

  Not that the Jarvie was not uneasy about the whole thing. He became more uneasy, simply listening to Mrs Finch now.

  ‘Order or disorder: which do we want?’ As Mrs Finch put this bald choice she looked challengingly at the Jarvie, but without producing her gramophonic click. And she at once made additionally clear the rhetorical character of her question by adding briskly ‘It’s as simple as that. Disorder spells death to the academic life.’

  ‘I rather think that in the mediaeval universities—’ The Jarvie broke off without completing his remark. The often turbulent character of the institutions to which he had been going to refer was no doubt a historical irrelevance, whereas Mrs Finch had obviously studied the whole contemporary problem. It would be civil to listen to her. ‘I suppose it differs a good deal from place to place,’ he offered placatingly and vaguely. ‘And has made very little impact here.

  ‘Quite the contrary. Oxford is sinking into indiscipline. Disorder is becoming the order of the day. We can’t afford it.’

  ‘A Board School can’t afford it.’ It was with some astonishment that the Jarvie heard himself snap out this. ‘But if we can’t assimilate a good deal of disorder here, there’s not much good to be said of us.’

  There was a small silence, and the Jarvie realised that again he had been irrelevant. There had been the men who, in the middle of the night, had turned the J.C.R. of a rival college into a rural landscape: turfed all over, with a purling brook, and at dawn resounding to the song of blackbirds. There had been the men who, also in the small hours, had rounded up the cattle in Christ Church Meadow and firmly padlocked them within the precincts of Merton. There had been the men who had hired a hippopotamus – but all that, although certainly disorderly, was not the disorder that Mrs Finch had in mind. The Jarvie understood this. And now she was talking about the O.R.S.S. He had no notion of what the O.R.S.S. was, except that he glimmeringly supposed that the R stood for ‘Revolutionary’. Bewildered, he took refuge in his icy note.

  ‘I find nothing much wrong with the tone of the college,’ he said.

  But Mrs Finch had turned to the man on her left. Her conscience was clear. She had done her best with old Mr Strathalan-Jerviswoode, that rather pathetic relic of the Goldengrove era.

  It was better when the women had withdrawn, and the men for a brief but blessed interval had clumped together at the Provost’s end of the table. These were, for the most part, the college tutors who had hurried off at five o’clock. They had returned, accompanied by their wives, a couple of hours later. In the interval, the Jarvie supposed, they had read a chapter of Redgauntlet or David Copperfield to their children, and performed other duties – replenishing coal buckets, exercising dogs, overseeing home-work – incidents of the married state. But here they were, and the Jarvie, although with a glance always carefully cool and ironical, surveyed them with secret admiration and affection. Not even anywhere else in Oxford, he told himself, would one find such a concentration of ability. The scientists (he supposed) were mostly Fellows of the Royal Society and the humanists were mostly Fellows of the British Academy – not quite the same thing, perhaps, but obviously a most respectable citadel of learning. They printed papers in professional periodicals, published books which they presented to the college library, bobbed up on television screens, and proliferated in shilling weeklies. The Jarvie, who had never in his life done any one of these things, judged them to be without parallel in the kingdom. At times, it is true, he judged them in other regards and to a different effect. Some, for example, were so innocent in matters of deportment taught in the nursery as to be positively perplexing until one recalled that they had probably never had a nursery, and were thus not in a position to know better. Others were intellectually aggressive at unseasonable times, or had weird personal idiosyncrasies such as having their suits made without waistcoats or associating insomnia with port and even madeira. But at least not one of them was a bore. Being for long habituated – thanks to the collegiate structure of the University – to the society mainly of people in disciplines quite remote from their own, they had almost wholly learnt to eschew shoppy talk. But larger academic issues were proper enough, and it was these that were being canvassed now.

  Student Power, it seemed, owned a substantial existence outside the untutored fancy of Mrs Finch. It was around and there was some hazard of its getting in the way of such more or less sensible purposes as Oxford had hitherto been able to retain for itself in a modern world. It was therefore worth enquiring into, getting to the roots of, steering use fully back – since there was a great deal of energy in it – into the mainstream of university life.

  Listening more or less in silence to this talk, the Jarvie found the uneasiness generated in him by Mrs Finch to be abating. He had lost the habit of following undergraduate journalism, since its topics had become progressively unfamiliar, and the writing seemed mostly to be done by men who were not quite his sort of men. Nor, as it happened, had he chanced to stumble in the streets upon the species of near-riot known as a demo. Only a few days before, indeed, on walking down the Broad, he had been mildly astonished to find the entire front of Balliol – up to the height which could be reached by one young man standing on the shoulders of another – covered with white chalk graffiti. But it was a habit, he recalled, for which there was respectable, or at least interesting, classical precedent. He had once read in a learned journal (in the days when he still read the learned journals) a paper which had explored in some detail the fondness of the citizens of Pompeii for this form of self-expression. On the walls of Balliol most of the slogans had been incomprehensible to him, and a few had struck him as quite funny. For example, there had been Egg-heads of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your yolks. It seemed a passable pun. Some were in the form of newspaper headlines: More dons abuse undergraduates. (The Jarvie was back in his rooms before his eyes had suddenly rounded upon a full view of that one.) If the entire exhibition had a little disconcerted him, he had reminded himself that chalk, unlike paint, is a harmless stuff; and that the whole affair might be construed as a species of sympathetic identification with students less happily circumstanced than in England.

  ‘I have the most unbounded faith in the young,’ a man called Judlip was saying. Judlip was not a don, but an old member of the college and now a prominent Q.C., whom some streak of piety brought up to stay with the Provost from time to time. ‘There they are,’ Judlip said, ‘long hair, filthy clothes, brawling with the police, waving seditious placards, and every now and then up before the beaks. Deuced perplexed beaks, too, not at all knowing what to do with the offensive young idiots so as not to make martyrs of them. But what happens? A couple of years pass. And there they are: umbrellas, bowler hats, bristles hogged short, and Yes Sir and No Sir the moment you speak to them. Splendid fellows, really. You just have to be patient and give them a chance.’ Judlip paused, and appeared favourably impressed by the silence greeting this speech. ‘They come back on an even keel,’ he corroborated himself authoritatively. ‘Common sense prevails.’

  Charles Purchase, husband of the woman whose party had been graced by the now rusticated Larry Thimble, was the only person to respond to this. But as his response took the form merely of a sharp, contemptuous laugh, the conversation received no impetus from it. Finch, in consequence, showed some signs of intending to rise and lead the way back to his wife’s drawing-room. The Jarvie found that he didn’t want this; having heard as much as he had about a
state of affairs which had been passing him by, he was anxious to hear more. Nothing rational on the subject was to be expected from the women upstairs. But Finch himself might have something to say. Although a wretched enough epigone in the succession to Tony Goldengrove, the man wasn’t without brains.

  But as these thoughts went through the Jarvie’s head his glance unfortunately travelled over his other companions and lighted on Gifford – William Oldfield Gifford. A man can be silent without being dim – the Jarvie himself had been fairly silent – but to be both is offensive. Or at least it could be offensive to one Jarvie – the Jarvie who (obscurely in the interest of the honour of the college) could grow arrogantly intolerant after that third glass. If a man couldn’t talk like a gentleman over his wine, at least he could look like one! It was in this insufferable character (which so fortunately was only occasionally irruptive in him) that he addressed Gifford now.

  ‘Wog,’ he called out, ‘have you been at all offering us your attention? Have you anything to say for yourself?’

  Gifford had certainly fallen into an abstraction, and seemingly a sombre one. He was having difficulty in keeping his cigar alight (which was another thing always likely to irritate the Jarvie), and now it did a panicky wobble between his lips. The two youngest men present, who happened not yet to have become much aware of the old man except as a legendary and reclusive presence about the quads, exchanged startled glances. But Gifford, whose dimness was a matter of the social surface, and whose abstraction stemmed from certain personal circumstances which the Jarvie ought to have remembered, contrived adequately to respond to challenge.