Operation Pax

by Michael Innes

  The bus cornered sharply and Routh was flung against the inscrutably shrouded form beside him. What he seemed to feel, through every nerve of his arm and side and thigh, was an unyielding sinewy strength, implacably planted in his path to freedom, poised and ready to –

  Like a train running into a cutting, the bus plunged out of clear sunshine and between two thickly wooded slopes. In the same instant the shrouded figures both rose and turned upon Routh. It was a moment of absolute horror. The voices of the young airmen behind him seemed to rise in diabolic mockery. Routh understood that he was in hell. In another instant the bus was again in sunlight, and the hooded shape that had been no more than a silhouette bending over him took on interior form and feature. With a tremendous effort Routh looked it in the face. He saw a wizened old woman with steel spectacles. She clutched an umbrella in one small, clawlike hand. With the other she had been steadying herself on the back of the seat close by Routh. But now, glancing at him and seeing something of what was in his face, she touched him lightly on the shoulder, murmured an indistinguishable phrase and went swaying down the gangway. The second nun was younger and went past with lowered eyes. The bus stopped. Routh glimpsed them a moment later, walking slowly up an avenue towards a conventual-looking building behind a high wall. And the shouting and laughing of the airmen was again entirely human.

  Routh fell back in his seat, knowing that fear, unintermitted through all that day, had pushed him to the very verge of madness.

  The bus swung right-handed round a corner and descended a hill. Routh found that he was looking down at a gas works. Beyond the gas works, mellow in the misted sunlight of a late afternoon in autumn, were the towers of Oxford. And from these, very faintly, there came the chiming of innumerable bells.

  Part 3

  Routh and Others in Oxford

  Turrets and Terrases, and glittering Spires.

  – PARADISE REGAIN’D

  1

  Mr Bultitude stepped out of the main gateway of Bede’s and looked about him in mild surprise. It was true that nothing had much changed since his performing the same operation on the previous day. Directly in front of him the Ionic pillars of the Ashmolean Museum supported a pediment above which Phoebus Apollo continued to elevate the dubious symbolism of a vestigial and extinguished torch. On his right, the martyrs Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley, perched on their Gothic memorial, presided over a confused area of cab ranks, bicycle parks, and subterraneous public lavatories. To the left, and closing the vista of Beaumont Street, Worcester College with its staring clock kept a sort of Cyclopean guard upon the learned of the University, as if set there to prevent their escaping to the railway station.

  All this was familiar to Mr Bultitude. But it is proper in a scholar, thus emerging from his cloister, to survey the chaotic life of everyday in momentary benign astonishment. Few, in point of fact, neglect this ritual. Mr Bultitude, having performed it punctiliously, turned left, rolled sideways to give a wide berth to a plunging young woman in a BA gown – Mark Bultitude was a renowned misogynist – and proceeded to propel himself laboriously forward. Mr Bultitude’s form was globular and his legs were short; he had much the appearance of a mechanical toy designed to exploit the force of gravity upon a board or tray judiciously inclined; only he never seemed to enjoy the good fortune of facing a down gradient. In conversation with his pupils, indeed, he was accustomed to refer to Beaumont Street as ‘that damned hill’; and to attribute to the fatigues and dangers attendant upon tackling this declivity his own indisposition to stir at all frequently from his rooms.

  Witticisms of this water, reiterated over many years (which, in Oxford, can be a crucial point) had earned for Mr Bultitude a notable reputation as a University character. Freshmen would nudge each other in the street and intimate with awe that there was Mark Bultitude. If they were scientists they cherished hopes that their own tutors (who had proved to be insufferably dull) might be persuaded to arrange for their transfer to the care of this scintillating intelligence. If on the other hand they pursued more humane studies, but were sufficiently well born, wealthy, good-looking or clever to have some hope of making Mark Bultitude’s dinner table, they importuned sundry uncles, godfathers, former house masters, and others of the great man’s generation and familiar acquaintance, to open up some avenue to this grand social advancement. Of all this Mark Bultitude approved. He valued highly his reputation as Oxford’s most completely civilized being.

  And an infallible index of civilization, he maintained, was simplicity of taste. His present expedition might have been instanced as evidencing his own possession of this quality. For his intention – as he had explained to a mildly astonished porter on turning out of Bede’s – was to venture as far as the Oxford Playhouse, where he proposed later in the week to provide two of his favourite pupils with an evening’s wholesome entertainment. They were to see a delicious old comedy by Mr Noel Coward. And he was now going to book seats.

  Mr Bultitude, pausing only to pat on the head the youngest son of the Professor of Egyptology (a serious child who had been spending the afternoon in numismatic studies in the University galleries), moved steadily up (or, as it may have been, down) Beaumont Street, and presently arrived at the theatre without mishap. Having secured his tickets he emerged through the swing doors and stood, puffing gently as from healthful exercise, and contemplating with evident misgiving the toilsome hundred yards of his return journey. In this posture he was discovered and greeted by an acquaintance.

  ‘Good afternoon, Bultitude. Like myself, you are taking a turn in this mild autumn sunshine.’

  Mr Bultitude, who disliked having positive statements made about himself in this way, nodded curtly. ‘Good afternoon, Ourglass. What some take, others give.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Dr Ourglass was an obscure man from an obscure college, and understood to be wholly occupied with obscure speculations on Phoenician trade routes. ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘Then let us proceed side by side. I was suggesting that, in the vulgar phrase, you gave me quite a turn. You look wretched, Ourglass.’

  ‘Wretched?’ Dr Ourglass was dismayed.

  ‘No doubt it is no more than a bilious attack – a passing error of the table. But to a stranger, Ourglass, your appearance would suggest dissipation.’

  ‘Dissipation!’ For a moment Dr Ourglass was indignant. Then some fuller light seemed to break upon him. ‘You are gamesome,’ he said. ‘This is merriment.’ And Dr Ourglass laughed conscientiously. Bultitude’s high acclaim as a humorist had often been mentioned in his presence, and he understood that he was now in the experience of it. ‘Evening is closing in,’ he said. ‘But it might yet be possible to take a stroll in the Parks.’

  Mr Bultitude soberly assented to this proposition – but with no sense of its bearing any application either to himself or his interlocutor.

  ‘I mean,’ pursued Dr Ourglass, rather feebly, ‘that we might take a stroll in the Parks.’

  The massive placidity and benignity of Mr Bultitude’s countenance gave place to looks of the liveliest consternation and alarm. ‘The Parks! and how do you propose, my dear Ourglass, that we should get to the Parks? Have you a conveyance? I see no sign of it.’

  Although the University Parks might have been reached in some five minutes’ leisured walking, Dr Ourglass was abashed. ‘Perhaps it is rather far,’ he said. ‘And, you, Bultitude, are a very busy man.’

  Mr Bultitude, although again disrelishing being thus dealt with in the present indicative, extended an arm more or less horizontally before him, and succeeded thereby in extracting a gold watch from his waistcoat pocket. ‘Shall we walk,’ he inquired courteously, ‘to the farther end of Beaumont Street? Shall we even venture to turn for a few yards into Walton Street itself?… My dear Ourglass, you have taken to walking devilish fast – particularly up this damned hill.’

  Dr Ourglass slackened his pace. ‘Reverting to your jest–’ he began.

  ‘Ugh!’

  Mr
Bultitude’s grunt might have been the consequence of unwonted exertion, or it might have been an exclamation of disgust. Dr Ourglass interpreted it in the former sense. ‘Reverting to your jest upon my appearance, I am bound to admit the possibility of my not appearing quite in the – um – pink. You, after all, are a man of keen observation.’

  Mr Bultitude continued to feel resentment at his companion’s fondness for character-sketching. He contented himself, however, with what was virtually an imperceptible movement – that of coming to a full stop.

  ‘And you may have noticed,’ pursued Dr Ourglass, ‘that I am worried. The fact is, Bultitude, that my nephew has disappeared.’

  Mr Bultitude, although a man of various information and extensive views, possessed a discriminating mind. That Dr Ourglass had a nephew was information that he was disinclined to treat as momentous, and from this it necessarily followed that the nephew’s vagaries could be of no interest to him. Nevertheless he looked at his companion as if in sudden naked horror. ‘My dear Ourglass,’ he said, ‘were you present when this surprising phenomenon took place? And was any lingering appearance left behind? A smile, for example, as in the case of the Cheshire cat?’

  Dr Ourglass took no offence at this. Possibly he supposed that Bultitude had entirely misheard his remark. Patiently he began again. ‘I am speaking of a nephew of mine, Geoffrey Ourglass, who came up to Bede’s last year to read Physiology. This term he has simply not appeared. You have, perhaps, heard his disappearance discussed at a meeting.’

  The nethermost of Bultitude’s chins contrived a caressing movement across his chest. It held the negative significance which a physically more reckless man would have achieved by shaking his head. ‘So far this term, I have managed to attend only the wine committee. We discussed the disappearance of three dozen of vintage port. A graver matter, you will agree, Ourglass, than the mere evaporation of an undergraduate, however talented and charming. But have you yourself heard nothing from this young man?’

  ‘Nothing whatever, although it has been his custom to write to me regularly when he is away. A friend, however, claims to have caught a glimpse of him some weeks ago in a place called Milton Porcorum.’

  ‘It sounds, my dear Ourglass, as if your nephew, with all the generosity of youth, may be casting his pearls before swine. But let me set your anxieties at rest.’ Bultitude, as he spoke, laid an arm on his companion’s shoulder and exerted an encouraging pressure – with the consequence that Ourglass almost buckled at the knees. ‘A young man who withdraws into the heart of the English countryside is most infallibly engaged upmon one of two ventures. He is writing a play, or he is pursuing a woman. It is true that both activities are singularly futile, and that a young physiologist, oddly enough, stands no special chance of success at either. But at least the first pursuit is never, and the second is very seldom, dangerous. Whether it is a tragedy or a trollop, Ourglass, you may depend upon your nephew’s turning up again as soon as he has completed the last act to his satisfaction… Dear me! We have got to the very end of Beaumont Street.’

  2

  Although expressed with some extravagance, the fact was undeniable. Like stout Cortez in the poem, Bultitude had now toiled to an eminence from which he could survey, on his right, the illimitable Pacific of Walton Street. He eyed it with disfavour, however; took out his watch once more; and then shook his head. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that we must abandon the more ambitious part of our design. For Walton Street, the hour is too far advanced. It is chill. It lacks colour. We will therefore turn left, Ourglass, and make a little tour of Gloucester Green. We will survey the buses.’

  They walked for a minute in silence. ‘This nephew of yours,’ Bultitude asked abruptly; ‘is he a schoolboy; or out of the Services?’

  ‘Certainly not a schoolboy.’ Ourglass beamed at this show of spontaneous interest. ‘And Geoffrey was certainly in the army for a time. After that, he was engaged on some other government work, and his decision to come up to Oxford was quite sudden. I greatly welcomed it, I must confess to you. His abilities have always impressed me – and I hope not entirely as a consequence of – um – avuncular partiality. He might do very well. He might even prove quite a scholarly person.’

  ‘Ugh.’

  Bultitude’s ejaculation was occasioned, Ourglass supposed, by the efforts of changing course in order to propel himself directly towards his confessed goal of the bus station. ‘Or if not that,’ Ourglass pursued with innocence, ‘Geoffrey might at least enter politics with some chance of becoming a minister. There is our family connexion, you know, with the Marquis of Horologe.’

  ‘Your connexion with Lord Horologe?’ Bultitude looked at his companion with quickened interest.

  ‘Quite so. Adrian Chronogramme – as you know, the present marquis – and I were Collegers together. The 1910 election. And Geoffrey’s aunt, Clepsydra… But, really, I must not bore you with genealogies.’

  ‘Not at all – not at all.’ Bultitude appeared to make one of those rapid social reassessments which even the most finely intuitive Oxford men are sometimes obliged to in deceptive cases. ‘I am most interested in your nephew. From all you tell me, I have no doubt that he has the seeds of scientific distinction in him. We must find him. We must bring him back. Milton Porcorum, after all, is not an ultima Thule. It would by no means surprise me to learn that there is a bus waiting to go there now. Come, my dear fellow – come along.’ With altogether surprising vigour Mark Bultitude waddled quite rapidly forward.

  Ourglass followed, apparently bewildered but much pleased. The celebrated Bultitude, he perceived, had begun to treat him with altogether higher consideration. Perhaps he had recalled that Ourglass was the author of that really very searching monograph on the Phoenicians in Spain. That must be it. And now he seemed disposed to take the matter of Geoffrey’s worrying disappearance as a matter of personal concern. He had plunged among the buses like a bather resolved to breast the flood. Ourglass panted after him.

  There is nothing exclusive about Gloucester Green. It bears no resemblance to Oxford railway station at, say 9 a.m., when an endless line of first-class carriages rolls in, to bear whole cohorts of the eminent to their learned occasions in the metropolis – nor to the same shot at six o’clock in the evening, when the same cohorts, exhausted by the implacable pursuit of knowledge throughout the day, are smoothly decanted into lines of waiting taxis, to be carried off to a refreshing bath before the ardours of dinner in hall and long hours of keen intellectual discussion in common room. Gloucester Green is given over not to Heads of Houses but to mothers of families – massive women for the most part who, having been sucked in from the surrounding countryside by the lure of Woolworths or Marks and Spencer, reappear at this evening hour with bulging baskets, knobbly parcels, and jaded and vocal children brandishing glutinous confections on short sticks. For the more convenient reception of these hordes there has been erected a complicated system of tubular pens or runs, suggestive of arrangements whereby some race of gigantic and reluctant sheep might be driven to be dipped. And in and out between the pens rumble the big, red buses – extruding one horde, gobbling up another, and then winding themselves with altogether miraculous dexterity round several awkward corners before making for the open country. It was into the thick of this animated scene that Bultitude had now plunged.

  Engines raced and roared; horns blew; across impenetrable masses of compressed humanity mothers separated from children, and children separated from lollipops, cried out in a dismal and surprising manner. It was a peak hour. The whole place throbbed like a mighty heart, governing with its deep pulsations the converging and diverging streams of red.

  ‘Bultitude,’ called out Ourglass, ‘might it not be simpler to inquire at the office? I believe there is always someone–’

  ‘No, no – nothing more fatal.’ Bultitude was already forcing his way into the thickest of the crowd. ‘To inquire there, my dear fellow, is invariably a labour de longue haleine.’ The better to make himse
lf heard he shouted this last phrase virtually in the ear of a large woman in front of him – with the satisfactory result that she gave ground in suspicion and alarm, and thus enabled him to press more rapidly forward. ‘Always make your inquiries of the drivers – or of the conductors as second best. Particularly when it’s a matter of connections. Know the surrounding counties like the back of your hand.’ And Bultitude continued to thrust through the press, peering up now at one bus and now at another. Ourglass, impressed by this superior savoir faire, laboriously followed.

  ‘Now, here’s Burford. I shouldn’t be at all surprised–’ With the head of his cane Bultitude tapped authoritatively on the windscreen of the bus before which he paused. ‘Can you tell me,’ he called up to the driver, ‘if you connect with the bus for Milton Porcorum…yes. Porcorum?’

  The reply was lost on Ourglass, but was presumably in the negative, since Bultitude again plunged forward. Ourglass made a great effort and caught up with him. The quays of ancient Carthage, he was reflecting, must have presented just such a bustle as this. The consideration afforded him mild comfort as he was bumped about.

  A bus had just moved in beside them, and Bultitude sidestepped to peer at it. ‘Abingdon,’ he said. ‘No good at all. Chipping Norton would appear to me to be much the most likely thing. Hullo! There’s Kolmak – I wonder what he has been doing? You know Kolmak, our Research Lecturer?’

  Ourglass looked obediently at the crowd pouring off the Abingdon bus. First came a small mob of young airmen; then a nondescript man, weedy and pale, and with a scratch across one cheek; then, following close behind, the person called Kolmak, whom Ourglass just knew by sight. But already Bultitude had lumbered off and was conversing with another driver; in a few seconds he was back, nodding his head in placid satisfaction. ‘As I thought,’ he said. ‘The Chipping Norton driver knows the place quite well. And there is a connexion, should we care to go by bus.’