An Oxford Tragedy

by J. C. Masterman

  Only a Philistine of the first water could fail to be impressed by the beauty of the dining-hall of St Thomas’s. The long tables and benches almost black with age, the lights on the tables which left the great space above dark and mysterious, the beautiful sixteenth-century roof, now only dimly seen, the rows of stately portraits along the walls; the high table where the silver showed white against the background of the bare oak table beneath it – all these made up a picture, which no amount of familiarity could ever make other than a marvel of beauty to my eyes. Brendel, seeing it for the first time, and passing a long lingering glance over it all, was visibly impressed.

  ‘Now I think I begin to understand your Oxford traditions,’ he said to me, as all the little wrinkles round his eyes showed themselves in a new pattern.

  Prendergast, who was sitting on the other side, began to compliment him on his English. It was, in fact, quite exceptionally good. Now and then some slight turn of phrase or trick of intonation betrayed the foreigner, but for the most part he spoke correctly and almost without effort. ‘But how should it not be good?’ he answered. ‘For you know I spent a year studying in London before the war, as well as a semester at the Harvard Law School, and during the war – well, I was a prisoner here for more than two years. Not all what you call a picnic, that, either,’ he added with a laugh; ‘but everywhere one learns as one lives.’ And he began to tell Prendergast something of English prison camps.

  Meanwhile I glanced round the table to see who was dining, and to compare them with the list of names which lay by my plate. I frowned a little as I noticed that we were thirteen. Naturally it happens not infrequently with our changing numbers that thirteen sit down to dine, but I am by nature superstitious, and it always gives me an irrational feeling of discomfort when I notice that particular omen of misfortune. Of those who were dining that night I have already said something of Brendel, Maurice Hargreaves, and Prendergast. On my left was Shirley, silent as usual, handsome, cold, almost grim. I have already mentioned him, but now I may say more. I never saw him without recalling that famous description of Charles X—‘He bore proudly on his shoulders the burden of his immense unpopularity.’ Of all our number Shirley had perhaps the greatest reputation outside the walls of the college. He was indeed a great scholar, bold and adventurous in emendations and suggestions, but contemptuous of the views of others, and bitter and unrestrained in his criticisms of his fellows. The harshness of his character and his total lack of adaptability had prevented him time and again from receiving the recognition and advancement which were undoubtedly his due, and this fact had served only to make him more austere and more bitter. Amongst his colleagues he was at best taciturn and icily polite, at the worst cynically and even cruelly critical. And yet I could not bring myself wholly to dislike him. He was now over fifty, and I had known him for twentyfive years. I had recognized the disappointments which had marred his career, and I knew how deeply he resented teaching unwilling undergraduates, when he would fain have occupied a professorial chair. I respected his intellectual brilliance, and I had somehow contrived, though with difficulty, to avoid any open quarrel with him. He in return treated me with a kind of grudging politeness which he did not accord to most of the other tutors of St Thomas’s. His books, like himself, were a compound of brilliance and bitterness. A married man, he dined seldom, and I was surprised to see him there that night.

  It was with a sigh of relief that I noticed that Shepardson, our other classical tutor, was sitting at the far end of the table, and well removed from Shirley. Shepardson was keen and zealous, and a competent scholar, but he was not always very prudent, and he had recently published a book which had shown some traces of careless compilation and hasty judgements. His sanguine complexion, his face which gave an impression of size although no feature in it was at all prominent, and his high-pitched voice gave the clue to his character. He was well-meaning enough, and good-natured though easily provoked, but he was too easily gullible and often foolish. It was characteristic of Shirley that the fact that Shepardson was his colleague had not deterred him for one moment from accepting the latter’s book for review. He had cut it to pieces in a savage article, in which almost every sentence was like the cut from a whip. The two men had not spoken to one another since the article appeared, and the unfortunate Shepardson vainly and almost pathetically waited for some heaven-sent opportunity for revenge. Public opinion was all on his side. We felt that Shirley had shown a lack of taste and of esprit de corps, but our sympathy did little to smooth down poor Shepardson, who had, after all, been publicly pilloried and held up to contempt.

  I suppose that, like most of those who try to describe the characters of their acquaintances, I am easily led into exaggeration. I must guard myself, then, against overestimating the unpopularity of Shirley. Besides myself, Maurice Hargreaves had always remained on tolerably good terms with him. The two men liked to discuss questions of classical learning and ancient history, and they had always tended to agree on matters of college policy and business. It was indeed to discuss some such matter, as I learned later, that Shirley had come in to dine that night. Furthermore, with one other of our number he was on terms which amounted almost to friendship. That other was Mottram, who now sat beside him, and their mutual liking was to me always something of an enigma. Mottram had been a scholar at one of the smaller colleges, had studied medicine and had been appointed to a research fellowship at St Thomas’s after a series of consistently brilliant examinations in the schools. We had been told when we elected him that he was destined for scientific eminence, perhaps for European fame. Socially, however, Mottram was hardly a success. He was shy and silent, sometimes almost farouche. In manner he seemed almost always to be on the defensive, and he had little or none of the easy companionability of most of the men of his generation. A doctor would have noticed at once that he was a myope – and he suffered, perhaps for that reason, from an inferiority complex, which tended to increase rather than to diminish as he grew older. Most of his time was spent in his laboratory, he cared little for sport or literature or society, and after a time he sank as it were into the background of our Common Room life. Like the furniture, we accepted his presence without comment; we should possibly have noticed his absence had he been away for a term, his presence we hardly remarked at all. And yet I sometimes felt that in him hidden fires were smouldering. Very, very occasionally some stray remark would indicate that his mind was occupied with strong ideas and vital issues. I guessed, though dimly, that this silent and retiring man had also depths of thought and feeling which he concealed from the world in which he lived. Curiously enough something like friendship had sprung up between him and Shirley, widely different though their interests were. Perhaps the natural aloofness of each was a bond between them, perhaps each recognized and admired instinctively the intellectual quality of the other. In any case, Mottram spoke more freely and more often to Shirley than to any of the rest of us, and Shirley treated him in return with respect and even almost with amiability. I had even heard him, in Mottram’s absence, defend the latter from criticism with a kind of warmth and feeling.

  Of the others who were dining that night there is less to say. The Bursar, Major Trower, was there, most military in manner and possessing a soldierly brusqueness of speech, which entirely belied his natural kindliness of heart. All the younger men were genuinely fond of him, and delighted in the harmless pastime of pulling his leg. For his part the ‘brutal and licentious soldier’, as they liked to call him, was entirely happy among them, and spent his whole time and energy in increasing the material comforts and social harmony of the college. As befitted one of his profession his bark was prodigious, but his bite was antiseptic. Farther along was a little group of three, Dixon, a physicist, Whitaker, our mathematical tutor, and a guest of his from Balliol, whose name I had not heard. All three were deep in some scientific discussion, quite meaningless to me. Two others completed the party. John Doyne, the Junior Dean, cheerful, ruddy-complexioned and pe
rpetually laughing, was everybody’s friend, and the enemy of none. No don and no undergraduate was able to resist his infectious high spirits. Lastly there was little Mitton, our chaplain, rather pink and white in appearance, and prone to blushing, a failing which filled him with embarrassment and everyone else with amusement. He was not a bad fellow, though apt to be spiky and cantankerous where ecclesiastical questions were involved. He had not quite enough humour to defend himself adequately against the playful assaults of some of his colleagues. Prendergast, I regret to say, took an unholy pleasure in ragging him and exciting his blushes. The undergraduates, with their flair for choosing nicknames both appropriate and inappropriate, called him ‘the frozen mitt’, a name which, for some obscure reason, filled the little man with an unreasonable annoyance. Prendergast, with desire to tease, would sometimes announce his intention of ‘thawing the frozen mitt’, a remark which never failed to bring the desired blush to the chaplain’s cheeks.

  Taken together, a set of men such as might have been seen at any high table at Oxford that night. But I have been compelled to describe them in some detail, for each one of them, little though he knew it, was by the accident of his presence there that evening, destined to be involved more or less intimately in a grim drama of tragedy and crime.

  I looked up from the list of diners, and heard the Bursar asking the Dean whether he expected much noise and excitement in college that night. The question was a not unnatural one. I have often maintained, and am still prepared to do so, that it would be difficult to find a better behaved and more reasonable set of young men than the undergraduates at Oxford as a whole, and St Thomas’s in particular. Contrary to the ideas which are sometimes promulgated by the cheaper newspapers, and by authors of these Oxford novels whose foible would appear to be the crime of Almamatricide, scenes of riot and disorder are almost unknown; so too is habitual drunkenness. But there are times when authority turns a blind eye to a certain amount of high-spirited rejoicing, and to-night was one of these occasions. For it was the Wednesday night after the last day of the Torpids. After six days of racing which had followed a long and severe period of training it would not be in human nature to refrain from some sort of celebration. Besides, both our boats had done well; both of them had gone up several places – not enough, it is true, to warrant the official recognition of a Bump Supper, but enough to induce a feeling of legitimate exultation. No doubt there would be a considerable turmoil in the Quad, a certain number of fireworks would fly into the air, and a certain proportion of those who had just come out of training would become noisily, if only mildly, intoxicated. Such scenes one could afford to treat with tolerance.

  Maurice answered the Bursar’s question carelessly. ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘There might be a bit of noise and even a few broken windows. Perhaps some of them will try to start a bonfire, but if they do J. D. will have to go out and stop it.’

  Doyne grinned. He really rather enjoyed quelling scenes of disorder, for his good temper made his interference effective, and he liked the exercise of authority.

  The mention of possible undergraduate excesses recalled Scarborough and Garnett to Maurice Hargreaves’ mind, and he began to relate their misdoings at some length to his neighbours. He liked to tell a story, and their misdeeds lost nothing in the telling. His voice was powerful and peculiarly resonant, and I noticed that the whole table was listening to him. The episode of the revolver made a real sensation, and even Shirley seemed to think that its use was something of an outrage. Personally I was growing more and more annoyed. It seemed to me improper as well as unfair to give these young men a bad name and so hang them, as it were, out of hand. So I suppose there was irritation in my voice when I spoke to Maurice, as he completed his tale.

  ‘I do wish that you wouldn’t leave that loaded revolver lying on the table just inside your room,’ I said. ‘It’s childish to say that you mean to use it as the text for a lecture on the danger of lethal weapons to-morrow morning, and it’s positively dangerous to leave it loaded where it is.’

  ‘My dear Francis,’ he answered, ‘you really are, if I may say so with all due respect, tending to become the least bit of an old woman. For consider …’ He ticked off the points as he made them on his fingers. ‘One, it is only in books that loaded firearms go off. In my limited experience it requires some human agency to pull the trigger. Two. There are no children, women, or imbeciles within the walls of this college. Three. What grown man would point a revolver at himself or at any other living creature before he pulled the trigger to discover whether it was loaded? And four. I have sported the oak of my rooms, and the key lies safely in my pocket. Is the peril which you suggest really so very imminent?’

  His easy bantering tone had its usual effect on me. I felt both impotent to reply and irritated at my own insignificance.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it can’t be right to leave loaded weapons lying about. If someone’s shot don’t say that I didn’t warn you. I was brought up in the belief that all firearms are loaded and that all horses kick, and that both are dangerous. A very good lesson to teach a boy, too!’ I turned to Brendel, anxious to change the conversation.

  ‘Do you know that before I came in I was quite frightened about you,’ I said. ‘I expected to be either overwhelmed with learning, or else compelled to carry on an interchange of polite inanities in a language which I know very imperfectly.’

  All the little wrinkles showed round his eyes. ‘And you find the foreign professor not all too alarming?’ he answered with a smile.

  ‘On the contrary; and conversation a pleasure instead of a burden.’

  He made me a quaint little half bow. ‘Thank you. I also. But you know I was perhaps a little nervous too – one poor lawyer from Vienna and a dozen great English professors!’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I can understand that. I remember a rather famous admiral dining here one night. He was the best company you can imagine, and kept us all in roars of laughter the whole evening. I never saw anyone who captured a roomful of people so quickly or held them all so easily. What the moderns call getting it across. As he was going away I thanked him for the pleasure his yarns had given us. “Well,” he said, “you know when I arrived I was in the devil of a fright at spending the evening among a crew of highbrows, but as I came into your Common Room I heard a white-haired old professor complaining bitterly to a sympathetic circle of the price of bottled beer, and I felt at home right away. Human nature doesn’t vary much when you get down to fundamental issues like the price of beer.”’

  Brendel chuckled. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘We’ve generally got plenty in common with everyone we meet if only we’ll let ourselves talk about it. Now I feel a kind of fascination when you begin to talk of loaded revolvers, for, you see, the study of crime and its detection is my passion. Yes, that kind of thing is really my one great hobby. What did your Lord Birkenhead write? “I have surrendered myself often and willingly to the deception of the detective tale.” Something like that, wasn’t it? Well, I suppose that I’ve read almost every good detective tale that has ever been written, and a good many thousand bad ones as well, and all that only as a kind of appetizer to the study of the true tale of crime. There’s no great murder trial of the last twenty years that I’ve not followed from start to finish – and in one or two of them – well, I had some small part to play myself.’

  ‘By Jove, that’s interesting,’ said Doyne, who was listening from the other side of the table. ‘You must tell us more about this, Professor. We thought that you were just an ordinary man of prodigious learning, and now we find that we are entertaining an angel unawares. A new Sherlock Holmes from Vienna, with all the modern improvements. You’ll find that everyone in this Common Room has a theory of his own about the art of detection, especially Mitton, who thinks that Providence always leads the culprit to repentance and confession about three days after the crime.’

  Mitton became so alarmingly pink at this garbled account of his views that I tho
ught it best to break off the discussion. Dinner was over, so I got up and said grace. Then we trooped together down to Common Room.

  Chapter Three

  To a middle-aged don, as I might describe myself, or to an old don, as I might almost be described, there is no place more pleasant than Common Room, no hour more wholly pleasurable than that spent in it immediately after dinner. For here the Fellows of St Thomas’s, having dined, settled down to enjoy the comfort of port and dessert, of coffee and cigars. I had come, as I grew older, to look forward all day to that hour in the evening which I most enjoyed. The good wine, the flow of conversation, the ritual of the table at once dignified and almost stately and yet homely as well, exercised a soothing effect on my nerves and filled me with a sense of physical and mental well-being. Providence gave me, I think, an imperfect appreciation of the beauties of nature; I can’t enthuse over the grandeur of hills or seas, nor even over the more placid loveliness of the countryside. But as some sort of compensation I have a real aesthetic love of the lighted interior, the scene of social intercourse and good fellowship at their best. For me a Dutch interior by Maes or Terborch, or an eighteenth-century conversation piece is worth more than any landscape or seascape that was ever painted. Nor was it only the externals of the Common Room which I loved; it seemed rather that life there suited itself to my every mood. If I felt festive and sociable there were always others ready to meet me halfway. If on the other hand a black shadow of pessimism was on me, the room seemed to attune itself to me. I thought of it then as the home of a multitude of my predecessors – who had drunk their wine and lived their short lives there since the foundation of the college. A sorrowful thought, made more poignant by that deep misgiving from which few can escape.