An Oxford Tragedy

by J. C. Masterman

  ‘How long has he been dead?’ asked the Inspector.

  ‘About an hour, perhaps more, perhaps less,’ said Kershaw. ‘I can’t tell more nearly than that.’

  I saw Brendel make a rapid entry in a little note-book which he had drawn from his pocket.

  ‘That would make it about ten o’clock?’ he said.

  Kershaw nodded. ‘But don’t tie me down to any pronouncement of that sort,’ he said. ‘I think he’s been dead about an hour, but that’s only a guess, after all.’

  Again my mind refused to live up to the situation. I was thinking now only of absurd little details. Ought I to offer a drink to the policemen before they went? Would it be indecent to smoke in that outer room next door to the murdered body? Wherever was Maurice to sleep? The scouts all went out of college to their homes about nine o’clock, and there would be no one to make up a bed for him. But he couldn’t sleep, surely, in his bedroom with the corpse lying next door. Should I offer him a shake-down in my own spare room? Ought I to explain to the Inspector who Brendel was and his reputation as an investigator of crime? Or would that be a tactless exposure of something which ought to be kept secret? Round and round in my head went all those stupid questions; more and more I felt certain that whatever I did would certainly be wrong. I felt an almost insane desire to say or do something which would stamp me as a practical man, able to deal with any crisis.

  But while I hesitated how to begin, decisions were already being taken.

  ‘We can’t do anything more here to-night,’ said the Inspector. ‘The rooms must be locked up, and I think that the night porter had better keep an eye on them, too. I’ll be round first thing in the morning. Have you got a key of the outer room, Sir?’

  ‘I think,’ said Maurice, ‘that my key’s probably in his pocket.’ He indicated Shirley’s body with a movement of his head.

  Rather gingerly, I thought, the Inspector crossed the room and fumbled in the dead man’s pocket. He pulled out a key and showed it to Maurice.

  ‘Is that the one?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. Now we had better lock up. But first I’ll get a few things for the night from my bedroom.’ He seemed now to have recovered his usual habit of command. As he collected pyjamas and shaving tackle from the room within he decided all the questions which had been agitating my mind. ‘Francis, you must give me a shake-down in your room for the night. Inspector, you and your men must come down and have something to drink before you leave – and you, too, Kershaw – we all need something pretty stiff after this. The Common Room will still be open, and there are drinks there. Brendel, we shall want your help over this matter. If this isn’t a real murder then nothing is.’ I felt that the direction of affairs had been assumed by stronger hands than mine.

  It was just then that Prendergast spoke, and presented us without warning with a new problem.

  ‘Who,’ he said quite suddenly and very quietly, ‘who is going to tell Ruth?’

  Chapter Five

  When first I started this chronicle I said that I would tell a plain tale in a straightforward way, nor, in my simplicity, did it occur to me that that would be any very difficult task. And yet what could be harder? For here I have already written four chapters, and still the most important characters have not appeared. What should I say to a pupil who wrote me an essay and never really began to grapple with the subject till his essay was a third done? How easily I should point out the importance of striking at once to the heart of a problem, of fixing the interest of the reader on the main topic, of concentrating upon the essential figures. How easy is criticism, how woefully difficult is construction! How now, at long last, I begin to respect the artist, be his creation never so humble! It is a humiliating confession for me, who all my life have watched and encouraged and criticized, and always with the secret thought that I could easily outshine the writers and the doers if only I cared to make the effort. And now I begin to see that it is not just fastidiousness, not even just idleness which has restrained me, but a lack, a miserable lack, of creative energy and artistic power. Humiliation indeed! I, who in my superior wisdom have lightly criticized so many youthful essays and reviewed so many books, cannot now set a plain tale on paper without hesitations and omissions and turnings back to events that should have been narrated three chapters since. I cannot now start this chronicle again; such as it is it must stand. But at least I must postpone no longer an account of the Verekers – of the President of St Thomas’s and his two daughters. For how otherwise could I face old members of the college? They might read a few chapters of this book out of loyalty to their old college, or even out of curiosity, but would they not then throw it impatiently aside? ‘Nothing about the Verekers,’ they would say, ‘but then it’s not St Thomas’s’.’ So the effort must be made, however unfitted the author to the task. And first for the bald facts.

  Henry Vereker had been elected President of St Thomas’s nineteen years before – to be exact, in the glorious warm summer of 1911, and since then he had ruled over us – a courtly, white-haired, gentle, rather frail man, who lived still, as it seemed to most of us, in the more leisured atmosphere of Edwardian, or even of late Victorian times. His wife had been at once a stronger and a finer type. As I remember her, indeed, she had been a remarkable woman, not very artistic, not very clever, and yet, by virtue of character and a deep instinctive sympathy for others, a kind of natural leader; devoted to her family, and adored by them. Other women had a deep respect and liking for her, and, since it was her habit to speak ill of no one, everyone had nothing but good to speak of her. As wife of the Head of one of Oxford’s greatest colleges she was happily and fortunately placed, but in 1913, very suddenly, she died, and from that grief the President never quite recovered. He fulfilled his duties, and fulfilled them admirably – no Head of a House was better liked or more generally respected – but his heart was buried in the past. There were two daughters, Ruth who was fourteen when her mother died, and Mary who was four years younger; each of them in turn had filled her mother’s place in the President’s Lodgings, and each had filled it to admiration.

  Ruth and Mary. How can I describe them? I guess well enough how some of the great artists might have painted them; I can imagine how some of my favourite poets might have pictured their charm; most clearly of all I can see them illuminating the pages of George Meredith. But I am an old bachelor of sixty. If anything here is lacking to them of youthful charms and womanly allure, blame me, not them. It is the fashion among men of my generation when they wish to bestow the highest praise on a young woman to say, ‘Thank God, she isn’t one of those modern, cocktail-drinking, cigarette-smoking, jazzing modern creatures.’ It would be true to say that of Ruth and Mary, and yet it would be only a fraction of the truth. For they were both children of their own post-war generation, though they escaped, as it seemed naturally, its less attractive traits … The secret, as I believe, of their charm was an intense enjoyment of life, and a love and comprehensive sympathy for the lives of others. If you had tea with Ruth you knew that she would rejoice with you in your minor triumphs, and sympathize with understanding in your petty disappointments; if you took Mary to the theatre you knew before you started that she as well as you would enjoy every moment of the evening. Like Lady Everingham in Coningsby, they possessed the two fine qualities which make the art of conversation. They could originate, and they could sympathize, for they possessed at the same time ‘the habit of communicating and the habit of listening.’ They had inherited their character and their sympathy from their mother, their charm of manner and their good looks from their father. They seemed, too, to exercise their sway over callow undergraduates and middle-aged dons with equal facility. How often in their drawing-room had I seen a crusty professor thaw and become youthful and enthusiastic, or a shy and tongue-tied undergraduate cast aside his stiff and clumsy mannerisms to grow gay, and natural and happy. It used to be a saying in the years after the war that every undergraduate at St Thomas’s was in love with one of
the Verekers, and every don with both. It pleased me, as a confirmed bachelor, to suppose that my affection for them was of a semi-paternal kind. Perhaps it was – I cannot be quite sure. But I am certain that of all the young ladies whom I have met none could hold a candle to Ruth and Mary Vereker. I know I am a sentimentalist, but where they are concerned, who could be otherwise? They had, of course, been brought up in college and I think they loved St Thomas’s and all that belonged to it almost as much as St Thomas’s loved them.

  It was in 1927 that Ruth married. I can still feel the shock which the announcement of her engagement gave me. Men, I remember to have thought, are difficult to understand, but women are impossible. For with all Oxford at her feet, Ruth must needs become engaged to Shirley. Shirley, who of us all was least sociable and most forbidding, who went less often than any to the President’s Lodgings, who more than any of us was harshly intolerant of women, who went out of his way to scarify their intelligence and their influence. They fell in love with one another; no amount of words could explain it further. I think when he married that Shirley made an honest effort to curb his tongue and modify the bitterness of his nature. When his wife was present he was a gentler and more human person; at least I never heard him address to her one of those caustic remarks from which in male society he could never for long abstain. But it is difficult at forty-five to alter the habits of a lifetime. I hoped that he might mellow, but I was disappointed. A failure in 1928 to secure appointment to a Professorship which he had long coveted left him as bitterly disgruntled and as uncompromisingly sarcastic as he had been before his marriage. Ruth felt her husband’s unpopularity deeply, though she hid her feelings from the world. She made heroic efforts to soften him, and to make him take pleasure in society. Herself the most happy-natured and companionable of people, she suffered intensely as she saw that Shirley was shunned and disliked by almost all who came in contact with him. We all tried to help her but help was really impossible. Young men, who, for Ruth’s sake, had lunched or dined at her house, would almost invariably be the victims of some mordant sarcasm from their host – a sarcasm which bit the deeper because it was almost invariably based on a fiendishly accurate insight into character. And so, though she put a brave face on it, Ruth knew, as we knew, that she had failed. Yet she loved Shirley, and in some curious, to me incomprehensible, way I believe that she was happy.

  When Ruth married, Mary took over the care and management of her father’s house. She was then twentyfour, and in the full flush of her beauty. A little quieter than her sister, a little harder to know at first, yet she had the same sunny disposition, the same irresistible charm. Yes, irresistible is the word; where she was seen, there she conquered. With her as hostess, the President’s Lodgings continued to be the centre of college life. We all went there, dons and undergraduates alike – not out of any sense of college duty, but because we liked to go, because Mary would be there to welcome us, to cheer us, to make us feel that the world in general, and St Thomas’s in particular, was a good and a cheerful and a happy place.

  It was in autumn of 1929 that The Times announced the second impending blow as it had announced the first. Mary, so I read on one ill-fated morning, was engaged to Maurice Hargreaves. I confess that I was profoundly and irrationally annoyed. In many ways the engagement was in the highest degree suitable. Maurice had a comfortable income of his own, he was handsome, popular, and distinguished in his own sphere. Moreover he was a dominant personality at St Thomas’s, with strong claims to succeed Henry Vereker as President when the time for a change should come. And yet I hated the thought of that engagement. I told myself that Maurice was too old, though he was after all only forty; I remembered that he had the reputation of being something too much of a ladies’ man in the worse sense of that term. But really, I think, I hated the thought of his early success. Why should everything fall into his lap? He had conquered too easily the worlds of scholarship and sport, and now it seemed he had only to hold out his hand and beckon to him the best and kindest of women. The man’s everlasting success alienated all my sympathy from him. Did he realize, was he sufficiently thankful for all his good fortune? For me, though I struggled to subdue the thought, he became the symbol of success too easily won, too obviously expected. I thought that he suffered from , I longed in spite of myself to see him in some way chastened and humbled. I don’t excuse my own attitude, I only chronicle it. For the first time I admitted to myself what I had long known subconsciously, but carefully concealed. I did not really like Maurice, I envied him, I was jealous. Three months now had passed since the engagement had been announced; they were to be married in the summer.

  When Prendergast asked his question we all looked at one another uncomfortably. Shirley had been to most of us so inhuman that his sudden end seemed, I believe, to each of us like an event outside our own lives. Prendergast told me afterwards that when first he saw him lying there dead it seemed to him, after the first shock had passed, like a problem in crime set before him for solution. But the moment that Ruth’s name was mentioned everything was changed. It ceased to be a problem and became a human tragedy, with which we had to deal. Who was to tell Ruth? It was no pleasant task, yet clearly it had to be done. She expected her husband back that night in North Oxford, she might not improbably be sitting up for him; she could not be left in ignorance till the morning. As usual I hesitated and wavered. I was the oldest man there, I knew her better than did any of the others; was it my duty, I wondered, to proffer my services? I was rescued from my doubts by little Mitton. I had never thought very highly of our Chaplain, but at that moment I admired his courage.

  ‘That’s my job, I think,’ he said, and began to button up his coat. I realized dimly that even if he might at times cut a rather foolish figure he had underneath that a real belief in the dignity of his cloth and a belief in his calling. I respected him as I had never done before. The others agreed, and Mitton prepared to set off on his gloomy errand. ‘Don’t let her come down to-night whatever you do,’ said Maurice. ‘She can do no good, and it’s too ghastly to think of her seeing him like this here in the middle of the night. We won’t tell the President and Mary till to-morrow. It can’t be right to wake them all up now. God knows it’ll be bad enough for them in the morning.’

  I was thankful for that decision, for I felt that my nerves would stand no more that evening. We locked up first the inner room, and then the oak, and took our way back to the empty Common Room. Only three hours before in that same place Brendel had theorized on murder and the detection of crime. As we entered the room I heard him mutter to himself; it sounded as though he said, ‘I am very much to blame.’

  Chapter Six

  In retrospect the next morning appears to me as a prolonged and loathsome nightmare. Bad news travels quickly, and, when I got up after a feverish and miserable night, it seemed as though everyone knew already of the tragedy of the evening before. I was torn from my academic calm and plunged into a world which was utterly new and strange to me. I spent an hour assisting Maurice in making practical arrangements, in interviewing the police, in agreeing with them on a brief and non-committal statement for the press, in cancelling the various engagements with pupils that I had for that day. Never till then had I realized how sheltered my life had always been; how everything had been done decently and in order; and how unfitted I was for dealing with a harder and less academic world. In the middle of the morning came the summons which I had both expected and dreaded. ‘The President’s compliments and would Mr Winn call upon him as soon as he conveniently could.’ I put on my gown and walked to the President’s Lodgings.

  I knew well enough before I entered that the President would take the news hardly. Since his wife had died he had had two great interests in his life – his daughters and the college. Now both the things that he loved best were stricken at the same time. He loved the college with the devotion of a man who had dedicated to its interests all his life and energies, but his affection was of a fastidious and discrim
inating kind. Above anything else he hated vulgarity and advertisement, and, though no one was prouder than he if St Thomas’s men distinguished themselves in the schools or on the playing-fields, yet he hated to see such successes paraded in the daily press. Mention of the college he could tolerate if it took the form of allusion to our great traditions, our noble buildings, our historic names. An account of this kind if couched in the choicest eighteenth-century Johnsonian prose might even give him pleasure. But if, for example, one of our undergraduates was fined for some trivial motoring offence, and the words ‘undergraduate at St Thomas’s College, Oxford,’ appeared in the paper after his name, the President would feel that he had been personally insulted. In all our long acquaintance I had only once seen him really angry, and that was when a well-meaning but injudicious friend had sent him a cutting from an Australian paper in which a returned Rhodes scholar had written an account, accurate enough, but perhaps a little too blatantly appreciative, of the life and personnel of St Thomas’s. The happiest moment of the President’s life had been, I think, when a guest one night at dinner had said to him, ‘President, I think that St Thomas’s is the best college at Oxford, and talks about it least.’ And now this courtly old gentleman, who all his life had shrunk from contact with the world, was faced with the horrible publicity of a murder inside his own college, and that the murder of his own son-in-law in the rooms of another son-in-law to be. No Grand Inquisitor could have devised for him a more refined form of slow torture. In my mind’s eye I saw the headlines in the papers for the next few days, and I saw, too, the poor old man’s face as he read them.