Operation Pax

by Michael Innes

  She knew, however, that she was unhurt, and she scrambled hastily to her feet. It is bad to have been within inches of death. But, when one is young, it is almost worse to have made a fool of oneself, and to see a little crowd gathering, most of whom have just observed one come down hard on one’s behind, and to expect at any moment a policeman, solemnly insistent upon making copious notes. Jane therefore hastily grabbed her bicycle and looked anxiously at the man with whom she had collided. He too, blessedly, was on his feet. If he were only unhurt and disposed not to make a fuss –

  He was backing away through the little knot of people whom the incident had collected. Jane stared at him in surprise. He was a little rat of a fellow, shabby and unshaven, and – what was the odd thing about him – in a state of palpable terror. And it was not, Jane could see, what had happened that was the occasion of his miserable state; it was what might happen. The man as he tried to back out of the crowd glanced about him in vivid apprehensiveness; when he knocked into somebody he drew back as from a blow; his complexion was of an alarming pallor which emphasized his possession of one badly scratched cheek. That, Jane supposed, had been her fault – as must be also the sadly dusty and crumpled state of the man’s attire. She moved forward at once, wheeling her bicycle. ‘I’m most terribly sorry. It was entirely my fault. I hope–’ Jane paused, disconcerted. The man’s eyes had swept past her quite blindly; his unscarred cheek was twitching; his tongue went rapidly over his lips with an effect that was reptilian and repellent. Suddenly he turned, ducked, dodged, and ran. Jane was addressing her apologies to empty air.

  Or rather she was addressing them to a small group of people uncertain whether to be puzzled or amused. The handlebars of her bicycle had got twisted, and to this a couple of undergraduates were attending with expressions so solemnly solicitous that Jane suspected them of concealing coarse amusement at the unlucky manner of her tumble. The one bright spot in the picture was the absence of any bobbing policeman’s helmet. ‘Thank you very much indeed,’ she said. Her intention was to speak with an awful and freezing coldness. Unfortunately much of the breath appeared to have been knocked out of her body, and the words emerged with a panting effect proper to an adoring maiden chivalrously rescued from a ravisher or a dragon. She took the bicycle and thrust its nose not very gently into the crowd. Now, thank goodness, she was clear, and had edged into Broad Street. She mounted, settled herself rather gingerly in the saddle, and put this deplorable contretemps rapidly behind her. But the consciousness of having been vastly idiotic remained with her oppressively. The oddity of the terrified man’s behaviour went entirely out of her head. So too did her encounter with Mark Bultitude and Dr Ourglass, and the latter’s unexplained suggestion that they were going to make an expedition.

  6

  The upper reading room of the Bodleian Library is frequented in the main by persons occupying a middle station in the elaborate hierarchy of Oxford learning. In a university, as in the republic of literature, extreme longevity is a prerequisite of the first eminence; and in Bodley (as the great library is compendiously termed by its frequenters) those in whom extreme fullness of years and exceptional depths of erudition are thus naturally conjoined commonly inhabit studies, niches, carrels and (it may be) cubicles of superior distinction in other parts of the building – notably in what is known as Duke Humphrey’s Library and the Selden End. These latter, although not places of the highest antiquity, are very, very old; and the pursuit of learning has for so long transacted itself within them as to have generated not only a peculiar aura but also an indescribable smell. As long as this smell endures Oxford will endure too. If its undergraduate population were dispensed with, Oxford would not be very much changed. If its bells, even, fell silent, something would be left. But if this smell evaporated it would be a sign that the soul of Oxford had departed its tenement of grey, eroded stone, and that only its shell, only its tangible and visible surfaces, remained.

  It is normally only for the purpose of consulting the great catalogue of the Library that these ancients of the place repair to the upper reading room; and this they (and they alone) may do by means of a lift – a lift the nether terminus of which is a jealously guarded secret, and from which egression at its upward limit is almost equally mysterious, since none of the sages is ever observed actually stepping from it, being invariably first remarked advancing down the reading room with measured tread against a background of unbroken lines of books.

  Nor do the young largely frequent the upper reading-room, since for them, in sundry dependent libraries, judiciously selected books, independently catalogued, are provided in what, to their large innocence, appears inexhaustible abundance. It is only occasionally that – like those stripling cherubs who, in the first stainlessness of this terrestrial world, were drawn by curiosity to take a peep at Eden – undergraduate members of the university toil upwards to this unwonted sciential eminence. Those who do not take the lift to the upper reading-room must mount a flight of sixty-four steps, involving twelve right-angled turns. It was to this that Jane Appleby addressed herself shortly after this misadventure hard by Bede’s College.

  There is surely something unique, if indefinable, in the atmosphere generated in the reading-room of a great library. So many minds intently employed in divided and distinguished worlds; black men beside yellow men, and yellow men beside white; shoes and ships and sealing wax all being studied in a row; the vision of that mysterious Goddess, alluring within the multitudinous and inexplicable folds of her sable robe, who at once unifies the spectacle and makes it possible: all these make a library a solemn place to an exploring cherub of twenty-one. No doubt Jane Appleby came in order to master a book that she knew to be confined here. But she came, too, for the smell of old leather and vellum and wood that permeated the approaches to the place; for the sound, strangely magnified in the stillness, of a fly buzzing on a window pane, or for the muted clanking of the Emett-like contrivance which, behind the scenes, drew its continuously moving train of books up through the secular darkness from crepuscular repositories below. She came, in short – an unconfessed tourist disguised as a scholar of Somerville – for atmosphere. But if Jane came for sensations, she certainly did not come for sensation. She was not at all prepared for the spectacle that was presently to be afforded her.

  The reading-room appeared to be less frequented than was common at this hour. Nobody occupied the desk where Jane’s book was waiting, and she settled down to it at once. Or rather she endeavoured to do this – and with no expectation of difficulty. Her mind was well-disciplined, and the constant subacute anxiety in which she now lived did not (as has already been remarked) seriously interfere with her working. And as for the upper reading-room as atmosphere – that, she was convinced, was something that came to one most exquisitely as a faint wash of surface awareness when the greater part of the mind was plunged deep in its task.

  But, this morning, Jane’s mind proved reluctant to plunge at all – reluctant (as she told herself fretfully) even to wet its toes. Surface awareness turned out to be her sole stock-in-trade. She buried her nose in her book – which was a very big one – and peeped guiltily over its upper margin at the world about her. This, persisted in, was conduct so monstrous, that she positively expected some dramatic consequence to ensue. A bell might ring loudly, the little door magnificently labelled Protobibliothecarius Bodleianus open with an ominous creak, and hitherto unsuspected attendants, garbed in a Byzantine splendour congruous with that resounding inscription, seize her and bind her in every limb. She would be delivered into the maw of the Emett-like machine; that machine – unprecedently – would be thrown into reverse; and she would be conveyed to the icy embrace of some subterranean Oxford Bosphorus. Come to think of it, Oxford did have at least one underground river. Her brother had told her that, as an undergraduate, he had once traversed it in a canoe…

  Jane felt a sudden chill. It was a feeling none the less horrid for being familiar – for being a sensation that gripped h
er whenever chance brought any occasion of danger into her head. She remembered now that just this thought had come to her half an hour before, when the rumbling bus had gone by within inches of her nose. Perhaps Geoffrey, having unaccountably strayed in the vacation to some outlandish place, had been inches less lucky. Or perhaps he had thought to make the solitary exploration of that hidden Oxford river, and his canoe had struck a snag, had pitched him –

  Abruptly Jane emerged from the dark, dank tunnel into which her fearful imagination had carried her. Without her being at all aware of what it was, something in the actual and present world around her had plucked at her attention. It was not – deplorably – the printed page before her. It was not the neighbour on her right: a grey-haired woman copying from a book the size of a postage stamp – barring Geoffrey, Jane thought, myself forty years on. Nor was it that picturesque Oxford figure, old Dr Undertone, on her left. For Dr Undertone, surrounded by eighteenth-century theology, had sunk, with closed eyes, into that species of profound cerebration, to a vulgar regard deceptively like simple slumber, which is not unfrequently to be observed in the upper reading-room. It was neither of these people. It was, in fact, the man with the scratched face.

  He was still only on the threshold of the room. Subconsciously, she must have become aware of him the instant his pale – his curiously haunted or hunted – face appeared at the door. But, if Jane saw him, nobody else appeared to do so. Very few people in the upper reading-room ever sit peeping over the top of their books.

  The man had no business in the place. She was, somehow, quite certain of that. But he had not, apparently, been asked if he were a reader. This was not surprising, for it is only very infrequently that any official of the Library murmurs to anybody a courteous inquiry of the sort. Nor, really, did he look out of the way. He was shabby, but scholars can be shabbier than anybody else in the world. He was grubby, but that is not absolutely unknown among the learned. He was harassed to what was quite evidently the point of nervous collapse, and he had the appearance of one whose mind is bent with maniacal concentration upon the solution of some single, urgent and ever-present problem. But this is not uncommon among those who pursue the historical Homer or the origins of the Sabellian heresy, or who are hounded by urgent conundrums concerning the comparative phonology of the dialects of the upper Irrawaddy.

  The man was completely at sea about the sort of place he had landed in. An unsensational explanation of his appearance would be simply that he had taken the wrong turning when searching for the picture gallery. But if, to a gaze once bent upon him, he had not the air of a man concerned to read old books, neither did he very convincingly suggest any interest in old portraits. He was looking neither for knowledge nor for aesthetic delectation. He was looking for refuge.

  To this conclusion Jane was, of course, assisted by recalling the man’s odd behaviour when she had collided with him in the street. He had simply got up and bolted. Either, then, he was mentally deranged (which was the most likely explanation) or he was in actual fear of pursuit and apprehension. He was alternatively either a bit of a lunatic or a bit of a criminal.

  Jane’s mind reacted with no special interest to either of these notions. Although much given to reading – and over large mugs of cocoa discussing solemnly with her friends – the most recondite psychopathic aberrations chronicled by Freud or Stekel, her conviction was that at the casual sight of such distresses peeping out from some individual, good manners and natural instinct combine to make one look the other way. Nor did crime remotely interest her: she left that to her brother John. Despite all which, she now bent a steady but covert observation upon the fugitive. Between them, after all, was a common bond: they had lately almost delivered one another to death on the high road.

  The man had now realized that he was in a library. He glanced over the rows of bent figures and made as if to sit down. But in the upper reading-room every desk is commonly loaded with books reserved for one reader or another, and although it is the convention that one may take any place not actually occupied at the time, a stranger will always be likely to feel that there is standing room only.

  For a minute or so the fugitive stood. In this there was nothing that was likely to call attention to him. The walls between the square Tudor windows are lined with books and bound journals supposed to be in common use, and before these, scholars will stand for hours on end, either running through the pages of one and another volume or simply studying their spines with an air of profound research. The man plainly hesitated to take a book from the shelf, but he contrived to let his eye run over several rows as if in search of some specific work. In this, even if it had been generally detected as a subterfuge, there would have been little to excite remark. For it frequently happens that scholars, seized suddenly as they are walking past by some irresistibly enticing train of speculation, and being brought to an abrupt halt thereby, avoid (what would be odious to them) the appearance of any singularity of conduct by going through just this conventional inspection of whatever shelves are nearest to hand. From these, nothing much distinguished the man with the scratched face save this: that every few seconds his gaze ran furtively along the stretching lines of books to the door of the reading-room.

  Several people wandered in, and Jane believed that she could see the fugitive quiver each time. The Emett-like conveyor belt behind the scenes emitted one of its faint clankings, and the man gave a sort of jump as he stood. Nevertheless he was demonstrably getting the hang of the place. He had now boldly taken a volume from the shelf, opened it, and turned round so that he could survey the room over the top of it – a technique, in fact, closely approximating to Jane’s own.

  Seen full face, he looked very tired as well as frightened. Jane remembered that free libraries of the municipal order arc frequently the resort of the homeless, who will sit with an unmeaning book before them for the sake of shelter and a meagre warmth. Perhaps even this august chamber had been put to not altogether dissimilar use on some occasion or another. But this man was not minded to shelter from the elements. He was sheltering from his own kind.

  At this moment somebody else entered the room. He was a man with high, square shoulders, and his appearance was eminently orthodox. His features held the mingled stamp of intelligence, authority and mild inquiry. His clothing was so quiet as to lend positive assertiveness to an extremely faded Harrovian tie. He carried a sheaf of papers yellowed with age, and under his arm was what appeared to be a mortar board – more correctly known as a ‘square’ – and a crumpled MA gown. He was, in fact, the very type of the consciously busy don, dropping into Bodley to order a book before hurrying off to lecture.

  The man with the scratched face had been scanning the readers with some particularity. And now the entry of the donnish person, from whom he was momentarily concealed, seemed to touch off in him a spring of activity. His eye had been on Jane. He thrust the book he had been holding back on the shelf and came straight towards her.

  Jane experienced a second’s ridiculous panic. There came to her an intuitive understanding of what the fugitive was about. He had recognized her. And – just because she was the only person in this strange reading-room not absolutely unknown to him – he was going to direct at her some urgent appeal. Nothing could be more irrational. But the man had reached a breaking point at which only instinctive responses were left to him.

  And then he faltered. Jane wondered, with a quick compunction, whether she had shown herself overtly hostile to his approach. However this might be, the man halted not beside her desk but beside Dr Undertone’s. He had been feeling in a pocket. Jane saw that he now held a paper in his hand.

  The quintessentially donnish person was scanning the room. If it was the man with the scratched face he was seeking, he had not yet located him. And now the man was leaning over Dr Undertone’s desk. Dr Undertone took no notice. Since his eyes were closed in meditation, and since he was ninety-six, there was nothing surprising in that. Nor did anybody else except Jane appear
to pay any attention either. As books but not desks are reservable in the reading-room it is necessary to do quite a lot of prowling round other people’s property.

  The man with the scratched face thrust the paper he was carrying into one of Dr Undertone’s books and walked straight on across the room.

  7

  It was, as the vulgar say, a new one on Jane Appleby. And before she could decide what action, if any, was required, her attention was riveted upon the next act of the drama being played out covertly before her.

  The donnish person had seen the fugitive and was advancing upon him. Between himself and this advance the fugitive was concerned to put a barrier. And one obvious barrier was available to him. Beginning at that end of the reading-room which is nearest the door, and extending in two parallel lines down a substantial part of its length, run low, double-fronted cases containing the major portion of the great manuscript catalogue of the Bodleian Library. To move round these massive islands is to circumambulate a brief record of the entire intellectual and imaginative achievement of the race. And this was what the two men – pursuer and pursued – were doing now. They were playing a sort of hide-and-seek round this monumental guide to universal knowledge.

  Jane watched, fascinated. It must, she realized, be some sort of symbolic comedy, arranged expressly for her benefit, although she had not the key of it. This weird ballet was being danced for a stake somehow commensurate with the tremendous character of its setting.

  And nobody else noticed. For the strangest behaviour, Jane perceived, can pass undetected in the most sober places. To anyone not persistently attentive to the whole sequence of events she was witnessing, nothing in the least out of the way had occurred or was occurring. That one man should be patently pursuing round the catalogue of Bodley another man who as patently fled, was a phenomenon offering in itself no difficulty whatever to a casual analysis. There are always in Oxford colleagues prone to engage with one at unseasonable times; there are always legitimate lengths to which one may go in side-stepping their approach. In Bodley the right-thinking greet only with the most distant nod (if at all) their fathers, mothers, sons, daughters or most intimate friends. But there are always those who default upon this convention: fellow workers importunately desirous of learned communication, sociably disposed persons thinking to give (or receive) an invitation to dinner, deans and senior tutors allowing so exaggerated a regard to administrative affairs as to be willing even here to whip up a vote or debate a college by-law; there are all these, and there are plain bores as well.