I backed Professor Babcock up as required, and wondered why she should make me uneasy. If she liked to talk as if she were somebody in a book, why shouldn’t she? Perhaps, being an absorbed and serious scholar, she didn’t often go out to dinner parties, and believed that a certain artificial vivacity was required on such occasions. For that matter, I seemed to be believing this myself.
‘Mr Cressy doesn’t quite get top marks,’ I said. ‘He ought to be torn between the charm of the pictures and the fascination of Lord Mountclandon’s conversation – and Lord Mountclandon ought to win. As it is, he’s just treating the pictures as out of the running from the start.’
‘We don’t seem to be goggling at them ourselves,’ Buntingford said.
‘Perhaps they are too familiar to him.’ Professor Babcock offered this charitably. ‘Wasn’t Mr Cressy a member of your college in the first place?’
‘Oh, yes – and he was a lecturer here for some years before gaining a fellowship elsewhere. He’s a member of our common room still, and exercises his dining rights from time to time. He entertains us with ludicrous portraits of his new colleagues. We aren’t wholly gratified, since we suspect that, when dining elsewhere, his old ones are also in his repertory. But he’s undeniably witty. And you can get away with murder if you’re witty enough. Duncan here has already grasped this great human truth – and has examined it in a serious essay, illustrated from Shakespeare’s Richard the Third, for his tutor, the learned Albert Talbert.’
‘You wouldn’t get away with petty theft on the strength of that? I said viciously.
‘Very true, Duncan. I was being funny, not witty. Cressy, incidentally, must be rather regretting his move to another college. I suspect he’d quite like a go at the Blunderville Papers himself.’
‘Is that so?’ Professor Babcock, to whom the last remark had been addressed, was immediately interested. ‘I believe we are to be permitted a glimpse of them presently. Perhaps the Provost designs to afford us a reading from them. In his Holy Writ voice, which is always an impressive experience. Not, I suppose, that the Papers are exactly Scripture.’
‘They’re said to be everything under the sun. Mountclandon has simply turned them in on us for our historians to examine and classify and what-not – and make suggestions about what it might be discreet to publish. It’s all very august and hush-hush. State papers and personal papers all muddled up over several generations. Our chaps will have the whale of a time. Better them than me.’
‘But surely we shan’t have to mull over them now?’ I asked in some dismay – this chiefly because I didn’t much fancy the Young Picts ordeal being deferred any longer.
‘I’d hope not, certainly. I imagine his lordship is simply to be gratified by a glimpse of how they’re cherished. How tight the security, and how shiny the fireproof boxes in which they’re accommodated.’ Buntingford turned once more to Professor Babcock. ‘That’s why our librarian, Tommy Penwarden, is so fidgety. Do you notice how he keeps on scratching himself? The pictures, you know, are the Provost’s thing. Everybody realises the Provost is no-end aesthetic. But the papers are Tommy’s stamping-ground, and he feels it’s time his turn had come.’
‘So it is.’ Professor Babcock had glanced down at her watch, which she wore in the manner of a medal far out on her bosom. ‘But the aesthetic front, I see, is to detain us for a few moments longer. And we are being remiss. I observe a general movement in the direction of some cows. We must join it.’
We hastened across the gallery in the wake of the other visitors. The cows, of course, were by Cuyp, and the canvas was a very large one. There were three cows, disposed in a triangle, and a voluminously skirted woman (whom I thought of as Mrs Triplett) was approaching them, carrying a pail and stool, so that one had a very fair idea of what was going on. Behind this lay a canal with a boat on it, and behind that stretched a sky borrowed from beyond the Alps. It was a charming picture, well deserving the manifest sensibility with which the Provost’s right hand was restrainedly gesturing in front of it. My father was standing beside him, quite still, and with his hands in his pockets. For no distinguishable reason at all, I felt suddenly apprehensive.
The Provost concluded his exposition. My father brought his own right hand out of his pocket, and raised it very slightly. I have remarked that he had the quality known as presence, and he exhibited it now. A pronouncement was to be made; there was a respectful hush; my father’s index finger came forward and pointed at one of the cows.
‘She’s well in milk, that one,’ my father said approvingly.
This performance, only mildly mischievous by my father’s standards, brought to a close the visit to the picture gallery. What had taken place would have been describable a decade later as a send-up. The Provost was far too intelligent not to understand it in that sense, but he hadn’t seemed offended. This was to his credit, and perhaps a little to my father’s as well. It illustrated something I was fully to understand in Edward Pococke only many years later. Any fool could have told at sight that he was a vain and sensitive man, swiftly aware of mockery. But a strong intellect had murmured to him – almost, one imagined, in his cradle – the saving admonition nosce teipsum, with the consequence that, in his maturity, he got along with his own frailties comfortably enough.
We trooped upstairs to the library proper. The Provost, being slightly the younger man, took my father’s arm to ensure him against a tumble. Was this a counter-stroke, a suggestion that a second brandy had been a brandy too many? The thought would have delighted his guest, but would, I believe, have been fallacious. The marble treads were even more slippery than the floor of the picture gallery, and the Provost was a solicitous host. We paused to admire the wrought-iron balustrade; there was a further unlocking of doors, this time with keys Penwarden did possess; the great library was before us, and the spectacle necessitated a pause for admiring remarks. It was a place having nothing to do with the life of undergraduates, and I had never entered it before. I wondered whether anybody ever took a book from these towering shelves, whether even the unfathomable erudition of Albert Talbert would be up to tackling the obscurity they obviously enshrined, whether it would be physically possible for a single man to manipulate some of them. Surely there were areas where they grew six feet high? These were like tomes painted on the backcloth of a necromancer’s cell when some illusion of cosiness has to be created on the huge stage of an opera house. At this moment the college’s great bell, of which all other Oxford bells are but miniaturised epigones, began banging out the hour. The vast chamber trembled; from the shelves I heard, or thought I heard, slumbering folios faintly stir, creak in their ancient joints like a door breathed upon by the ghost of a wind and shifting on a rusty hinge. From the shelves I saw, or thought I saw, rise a pale miasma, a quintessence of dust, which eddied, rose, sifted itself through the chandeliers to lose itself against the pale rose and blue of the ceiling, and then sank, wheeled, drifted, and returned whence it came. But when I think I remember this perhaps I am remembering something I was to see in Martin Fish’s company some weeks later: the pigeons of St Mark’s Square in Venice, also moving under the impulsion of a bell.
At least the pagoda lady responded to the deep vibration from without; her costume jewellery rang faint but clear, like tinkling harness audible across the stillness of Russian snows. She hadn’t in my hearing produced any other sound, and as I was now advancing across the library beside her I tried to think of some feasible brief utterance. Unexpectedly, she produced one herself.
‘Say!’ the pagoda lady said. ‘Isn’t Mr Penwarden cute?’
A few years later it would have surprised me thus to discover the speaker’s nationality, since I should have come to know that American women don’t commonly disguise themselves as trinket-shops. Now, however, my surprise was concentrated upon Penwarden himself. He didn’t strike me as particularly cute, but he did look like a man gone demented. Having hurried ahead of the rest of us, he had dropped first on his hands and knees, and now actually o
n his belly. In this posture he was snaking his way forward in a manner suggesting Cowboys and Indians. Perhaps it was under the persuasion that he was actually proposing a divertissement of that sort to the company at large that the pagoda lady had advanced her question.
‘If you wouldn’t mind standing still,’ Penwarden said to us collectively from the floor. His voice (as seemed reasonable in the circumstances) was embarrassed as well as smothered. ‘The system has been changed, and I’m not too clear about the switch. The ray is of the thermal type, which we are assured is more sensitive than the obvious sonic affair. It’s not a rustle or a creak it picks up. It’s body temperature – really a remarkable thing.’
‘The security,’ the Provost said in the clear tones of one who allays alarm. ‘Harmless, we are assured. But it would be humiliating were the police to arrive and take us all into custody. Dear lady, have a care.’ This injunction was addressed to Professor Babcock, whom he judged in danger of advancing the forward part of her person into some line of fire. ‘Ah, the Librarian has been successful.’ There had been a faint click. ‘The way to the Blunderville Papers is clear.’
Penwarden had got to his feet, and was again holding in his hand a common-or-garden key. We all relaxed. Lord Mountclandon, who might have been expected to find an element of the ridiculous in these excessive precautions, appeared, on the contrary, gratified. I saw that Cressy had now removed himself from Mountclandon’s elbow, as one who feels modestly that he has enjoyed his due share of the countenance of the great. With engaging humility, he was offering his conversation to my father. My father, once more on his best behaviour, listened to him attentively.
‘Stop grinning, young Pattullo.’ Buntingford breathed this in my ear. ‘Of course it’s all lunacy, sure enough. You could bone the Cuyp or the Caravaggio downstairs more easily than the junk this old donkey has unloaded on us. But mind your manners.’
‘Belt up,’ I said – for I had finally resolved to treat Buntingford as if no vast five-years gap existed between us. ‘My manners are in working order, thank you. And at least I’m not a bloody drunk.’
‘Good man, Duncan. You’re coming on.’ And Bundngford outrageously patted me on the head. He must really have been rather tight, whereas I was myself as sober as I had resolved to remain from the start of the evening. Young Picts was before me still.
It was no doubt because of this preoccupation that I was only intermittently attentive to what was presently going on around me, and there were aspects of what I did notice the implications of which I didn’t grasp. The micro-rays, or whatever they were, which Penwarden had courageously contrived to throw out of operation might, indeed, have suggested drama of the gangster variety to a fanciful mind: hold-up and robbery on a large scale. But academic life (as I believe Dr Johnson remarked) puts one little in the way of extraordinary casualties, and as this night represented my first substantial immersion in that life I might well have expected unflawed decorum all through. Almost everything in the general atmosphere suggested this. My father was apparently subdued to the element in which, for the occasion, he had agreed to swim. The suavity of the Provost perfectly matched that of Lord Mountclandon, and the suavity of Cressy exceeded that of either. About Cressy’s features in repose there was, as I have mentioned, something fixed and glassy; one would not have expected from him, under any circumstances, a warm flow of human sympathy. He could, however, radiate a mild and seemingly benign intelligence, together with the unobtruded diffidence of one naturally well-mannered. He was doing so now. This was the posture of things as Penwarden embarked upon an account of how the college was coping with the Blunderville Papers.
Penwarden was at once revealed as a conscientious man, who had given proper thought to the occasion. Of the shiny fireproof boxes there were a great many, and in addition the walls of the medium-sized room to which we had been admitted were lined with formidable-looking steel filing-cabinets. It wasn’t to be supposed that we were going to rifle these. But on various tables a number of particularly choice exhibits had been laid out for inspection: diaries, engravings, miniatures, genealogies, decorations, swords, cocked hats, letters from exalted persons, and similar family lumber which it had presumably occurred to Lord Mountclandon as proper to lump in with the documents of severer historical interest. About the whole loan – or bequest or whatever it was – Penwarden had prepared a speech, but one carefully pitched to an informal and colloquial note. Perhaps he overdid this a little, so that the general effect was more mumbling and bumbling than it need have been, but it was well-adapted to the occasion, nevertheless. I ought to have listened more attentively than I did; I was in fact calculating that the dinner-party would almost certainly break up as soon as we returned to the Lodging, so that I should have no opportunity of telling Penny how much I looked forward to bringing my friend Martin Fish to tea with Mrs Triplett on Sunday. But at least I should be able to say good-night to her. It wasn’t indeed clear how this could greatly advance Fish’s suit (as I now almost thought of it), but I was impatient for the opportunity, nevertheless. So all I gathered about the Papers was that they were being worked on by Penwarden himself and two of his colleagues in the college; that the operation must be highly confidential until it was known what was what; and that the mere sorting and calendaring would in itself be a formidable task. I was ignorant enough to think it odd that even a grandee like Lord Mountclandon could have such a chore performed for him, probably for free, by a trio of high-powered dons. It seemed as if the stuff that had silted up in the cupboards of the Blundervilles over the generations or centuries must afford the raw material for the making of a good many learned reputations. Yes, it must be something like that.
Lord Mountclandon himself obviously felt he was being done quite proud by his old college. He made approving remarks, and to Professor Babcock and the pagoda lady he even offered explanations (not, I suspected, always too well informed) of various documents, and in particular of various pieces of knick-knackery, which had been singled out for exhibition. He picked up an ambassadorial-looking hat smothered in feathers, and invited my father to put it on. My father declined this (and quite right too) but avoided any appearance of displeasure by placing it gently on my own head instead. There was general merriment. The occasion was proving a mild success.
Christopher Cressy was wandering around on his own. I noticed for the first time that he had a small sharp nose which, if not impressive, somehow suggested an organ likely to be useful on a scent. Like Professor Babcock’s pectoral region, it firmly took the van. He was now led by it into a corner of the room, and when he returned to us he was carrying delicately in both hands – for it was a bulky affair – a battered leather-bound volume. He walked up to Lord Mountclandon with an air of gracefully amused discovery. Lord Mountclandon, as it happened, had moved over to me for the purpose of delivering whimsical congratulations on the fit of the hat; he was determined to show proper attention to the well-conducted schoolboy (as he may have thought of me) who was with a slight mysteriousness a member of the party. This trivial circumstance, curiously enough, was going to complicate my life for a time more than twenty years later. Oxford memories are tenacious and long.
‘A letter-book of the fourth marquis,’ Cressy said – and with a casualness which was yet wholly polite. ‘And I believe – for I’ve ventured just to peep – covering some rather significant years. Interesting, don’t you think?’
‘Undoubtedly – yes, very interesting indeed.’ Lord Mountclandon’s ready smile indicated how effectively he had been softened up. At the same time he scarcely looked very convincingly ‘with it’. Like so many Blundervilles before him, he had been a practical politician all his days. He probably had a brother or a cousin to whom he relegated the business of being clued up in family history, and anybody as remote as the fourth marquis didn’t mean all that to him. He had been – he doubtless believed himself still to be – a much burdened man.
‘With probably a good many pages it would be amus
ing to turn over,’ Cressy said. ‘But not without your permission, of course. You wouldn’t mind?’ Cressy continued to speak lightly – and certainly as of an activity which would transact itself within minutes. Nevertheless I was aware of Penwarden as taking a couple of rapid steps towards us. The guardian of these treasures was alert to anything that was going on.
‘Yes, of course. By all means, my dear fellow. Entirely at your leisure, pray.’ Lord Mountclandon’s graciousness was now seignorial. ‘It’s entirely yours.’
‘Thank you very much.’ Cressy articulated this expression much in the manner in which I was accustomed to offer it to Talbert or our jumpy Domestic Bursar. As he spoke, he tucked the volume nonchalantly under an arm and promptly appeared to forget about it. Considerable muscular effort must have been required to maintain it there, nevertheless.
I was conscious that something distressing was happening to Penwarden’s breathing. He took a further but indecisive step forward, and then turned away and hurried from the room. He was back within a minute, carrying a slip of paper I recognised at once; it was the small form which had to be filled in and signed when we borrowed a book from the ‘working’ library in another part of the building. Silently – for he was clearly beyond speech – he handed the form to Cressy. Cressy took it in his free hand, glanced at it, and then looked up at Penwarden with a glare as icy as could have been achieved by a refrigerated basilisk. Having thus expressed himself about this busybody pitifully intruding upon a transaction between gentlemen, he slowly crumpled the borrowing-slip and let it fall to the floor. A moment later, he was talking with courtly ease to the pagoda lady.
The incident had attracted no general notice, and I am sure that I myself made less of it than this account, coloured as it is by hindsight, may suggest. I felt vaguely that there had been some small rumpus between dons and that Cressy had got away with something, and I may even have told myself it was unsurprising that so freezing a character had failed to activate the thermal security system. Penwarden, certainly, had lost out on that brief eyeball to eyeball confrontation. The Provost would have done better, had he been aware of what was happening.
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