Parlour Four

by J. I. M. Stewart

  From this my speculations moved to Martin. Why had Martin been so promptly upset by the mere possibility that the Pro-Provost had, so to speak, climbed into the Provost’s boat? When at length I did begin to hear the first stirring of general gossip about what had occurred, I noted that its tone of amusement about what had befallen the two men proceeded from the fact of its childishness; its suggestion of one kid catching the mumps or whatever from the kid at the next desk. And at this thought a fuller light came to me. It seemed that Martin Brand had made himself something of an authority on dyslexia, or at least was known to have been long interested in it. Did his prompt dismay as the Pro-Provost seemed unable to read what was on his ping-pong bat proceed from a sudden apprehension that the disability was catching, that there was, to put it crudely, a bug involved – whereas all his own theorising hitherto had been in a different direction? Other hazy perceptions about Martin followed upon this one. As well as perturbation, I felt I had detected in him something like glee. What had he meant by saying that the situation held ‘possibilities’? It came to me that the Galen Professor of Physike and Chirurgerie, for all his air of large self-confidence and heartiness of address, and perhaps in accord with that strong hint of hidden streaks or strains in him, had to be judged as essentially an unstable personality. I think I can honestly say that I recoiled from this notion almost as soon as it came to me. The man was generally liked; I had myself as a boy positively been fond of him; I had a genuine hope that he would wholly distinguish himself in his treatment of his new patient, the Provost of Judas.

  It was not to be. The Provost did not return to that High Table. The Pro-Provost, too, was an absentee. A non-anti-phonal, but equally elaborate grace was now being pronounced by an undergraduate.

  But that was not all. Quite quickly, that was far from being all. It was a time of year at which the reading-rooms of the Bodleian Library ought to have been crowded with young men and women – with young persons, perhaps I ought to say – belatedly preparing themselves for the mild horrors of the Examination Schools. But those reading-rooms were now almost forsaken. Row upon row of untenanted desks testified to there being something badly wrong. Eventually, so sparse was the attendance that it took even a drastically depleted staff scarcely a couple of hours to fetch a required volume from the labyrinthine bowels of the institution. It was as if, after six hundred years, the Black Death was abroad once more in England.

  But nobody, of course, died. And, at least among the young, few went into seclusion. Already at an ungodly morning hour – eleven o’clock say, or even ten – the semi-affluent and the affluent, scions of nobility and loitering heirs of city-directors, crowded the streets in their sports cars as they went off to fish, to shoot whatever the month allowed, to sport with the tangles of Neaera’s hair in little temples, major follies, unfrequented recesses in stately homes and mere country seats. In the afternoons the river was more than commonly gay with punts, canoes, juvenile tuck-boxes, portable radios and record-players. Of an evening the poky restaurants were crowded, and money flowed the more freely because nobody could read the menu, or the prices against one bogus speciality or another. The student body – so wide and fair a congregation in its budding-time of health and hope and beauty – concluded without effort that books are a dull and endless strife, and that there was only blessing in the fact that all such – folios and quartos and duodecimos – had become a closed book to them. Only here or there a pale scholar or exhibitioner, sequacious of the ultimate glory constituted by a fellowship at All Souls, wandered, a lost soul, amid the throng of his liberated and unalphabetic contemporaries.

  Inevitably, the thing rapidly became a national sensation. Nothing remotely to be thought of as an outbreak or epidemic of dyslexia had ever been heard of before. It was as unheard of as an outbreak or epidemic of two-headed calves. That it had occurred, of all places, in Oxford, a community relying for its livelihood and existence on reading and copying from books even more than on manufacturing motor cars, added a piquancy – indeed, a weirdness – to the affair. And it was, at least for the present, an entirely localised phenomenon. Nowhere else in England, in all Great Britain, in the entire Western World was any change in the incidence of dyslexia reported. In Oxford itself, and with surprising speed, a whole new commercial activity sprang up. Working in respirators, and segregated as far as possible from the community at large, competent and unafflicted teams of hastily recruited persons toiled with tape-recorders to render audible what had been only legible hitherto: Stubbs’s Charters, for instance, and Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon. An acute shortage of magnetic tape was made good by supplies flown in from Hong Kong; there was a hastily smothered scandal about a boom in what were called video nasties.

  Amid all this, Martin Brand’s position was peculiar and – after quite a short time – increasingly disagreeable. His connection with dyslexia, which was in fact clearly substantial, was much hyped by the press. He was described as the world’s prime authority on a horrible and newfangled scourge, and it was felt and declared that Oxford was fortunate in possessing on the spot the right man at the right time. But soon the attitude changed. Was it not at least a strange coincidence, it was asked, that the right man had been on the very spot on the world’s surface upon which the hitherto unexampled calamity had occurred? Might there have been carelessness, criminal carelessness in some laboratory in which a quite minor and infrequent medical ‘condition’ was being studied? Had there been – it was a deadly word – a leak? The modern equivalent of Pandora’s fatal box is a test-tube, and it is widely believed among the vulgar that a fractured test-tube may unloose unimagined pestilence over the planet. And whereas at the bottom of Pandora’s box of evils Hope was found to linger, nothing of the kind has ever been discovered in a broken test-tube.

  III

  When I did run into Martin again it wasn’t in the Hall or common room of his distinctly imposing college. It was in a pub: one of those small and inconspicuous pubs, presumably on the site of mere drinking shops in a former age, which tuck themselves away in Oxford even amid important shops and offices in high-rental areas. This one, I believe, was frequented in the main by college scouts and messengers, rather than by even the humblest academics. From across the street, I had suddenly become aware of Martin dodging into it, and for a moment I had the uncomfortable feeling that he had done so to avoid an encounter with me. But at once I saw that this was impossible, since I had turned out of a side street only in time to glimpse his disappearing profile and back. So I crossed over, and went in after him. There was a small and, at the time, empty bar, in which Martin was in the act of ordering a pint of bitter. I told myself that he wasn’t looking well, and then saw that I was judging only by the irrelevancies of his being unshaven and rather carelessly dressed.

  ‘Hullo, Martin,’ I said cheerfully. ‘I’ll have the same – and on you.’

  At this, and with a mere nod of recognition, Martin silently held up two fingers to the barman. I believe this was meant merely as a facetious suggestion of ungraciousness and resignation, and I record it only because of a curious and fugitive aberration it occasioned in me. I really did, that is to say, for a fraction of a second believe that what had stricken a large number of people in Oxford was not word blindness but mutism. Then – equally oddly and as if from a remote past – I seemed to hear Martin saying, ‘a large number of people can be quite a small percentage of everybody’. This, in turn, put into my head something I wanted to know. But – in turn again – I went about attempting to satisfy this curiosity with a cautious obliqueness. It was a time, of course, at which we were all a good deal on edge.

  ‘Did you ever,’ I asked, ‘read that thing about triffids?’

  ‘The day of them? Yes, rather a good yarn.’ Martin glanced at me suspiciously. ‘So what?’

  ‘The earth passes through the debris of a broken-up comet, or perhaps some nuclear missiles collide in orbit. As a result, a high proportion of the human race is inst
antly struck blind. But we’re not told just how high. And I’m wondering about this little epidemic here in Oxford. Just what percentage of the population has it hit?’

  ‘I don’t know. I know nothing about it.’

  ‘My dear Martin!’ I was shocked that he should adopt so absurd an attitude.

  ‘Well, then – I know as much as the next man.’ Professor Brand had the grace to look slightly ashamed of himself. ‘But just consider, Leonard. If you’re blind, you can’t move a dozen paces without manifesting the fact. But if it’s just that you are suddenly unable to read, the conclusion need be apparent to nobody as long as you keep clear of print. And people are ashamed of being unable to read. Remember Howe. And they’re ashamed of it even when it’s a sudden physiological thing. Many keep quiet for as long as they can. I suppose the majority here in Oxford divulged the thing at once, and tried to have something done about it. The surgeries of the wretched G.Ps were crammed straight away, and there were queues at the hospitals. Up at the John Radcliffe the car-parks were full. Just think of that.’ Martin was now speaking fluently and forcibly. ‘But respectable statistics remain hard to collect. Moreover, there’s nothing to say to people when they clamour. If you have no clear view of the damned aetiology of the thing, you’re not likely to be too hot on prognosis. That’s what I mean when I say I know nothing about it. And it’s bloody awkward, believe you me. Why am I in this rotten little pot-house? Because here I’m unlikely to run into the inquisitive and pestering professional classes.’

  ‘Meaning me. I apologise.’

  ‘Oh, you! You’re useful, Leonard. A harmless old crony, to whom I can blow off steam.’

  ‘Then go on doing it. What’s so awkward? Is it just that you are the top authority, at least in these provincial parts’—I scarcely know why I pitched this stupid barb at Martin—’who finds himself baffled and unable to come up with anything?’

  ‘Well, not exactly.’ Martin plainly felt that I had put this too steeply. ‘I can talk, you know. I can even do a bit of literary talk – triffids and whatever. Do you remember The Doctor’s Dilemma?’

  ‘Bernard Shaw’s play? Certainly I do.’

  ‘The phagocytes, and all that. There’s a doctor who knows how to boost their action, but it’s fifty-fifty whether or not it’s at an advantageous moment. The Duke of York comes into it.’

  ‘I don’t remember Shaw’s saying anything about the Duke of York.’

  ‘It’s my own façon de parler. The noble Duke was sometimes going up the hill, and sometimes down. According as to whether the little buggers in the patient’s body were going down or up – and to that there wasn’t a clue – the doctor was going to cure him or kill him. At least that’s my recollection of the nonsense in what’s an uncommonly amusing play. My present position isn’t exactly an analogous one. But it’s not far off.’

  ‘Another pint, Martin? It’ll be on me.’

  ‘Another pint then. I haven’t been exactly idle, you know. In fact I’ve been working on this monstrously atypical outbreak of acquired dyslexia like mad. Probably exactly that. Like mad.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure I could now induce the thing, even if I’m short on the wherefore and why. But I’m damned if I know how to stop it.’

  We were both silent for a moment. If I didn’t positively gape at this extraordinary assertion, I certainly ought to have. The barman, who may or may not have been attending to our conversation, produced those second pints.

  ‘So I have to mind my Ps and Qs,’ Martin presently went on. ‘Otherwise, I might find myself locked up. But I don’t mind telling you that some uncommonly odd ideas come into my head. For example, that a malign and supernal intelligence is at work. A Spirit Sinister or Spirit Ironic, as one of your poet-johnnies has it. Just consider where the pest has been directed to operate. In Oxford, I ask you! Where more noses are stuck into books per square mile than anywhere else on earth.’

  ‘The irony is apparent,’ I said. ‘It has even come into my own dull head.’ I don’t think I said this in any very good temper. I had, of course, brought this conversation on myself by following Martin into the pub. So I was being ungenerous if I was now feeling him to be a bit of a bore.

  ‘But where else would be more ironic still? Or rather – to be perfectly frank – more devastating? It’s an intriguing speculation, wouldn’t you say?’

  I may well have gaped again at this. Certainly I wasn’t yawning. In fact, the notion of Martin Brand as a bore abruptly faded. And this was less because of what he had said than because of how he had looked. It was as if the boy rather than the professor was suddenly before me, and the pint pot of beer ought to have been a bottle of ginger pop. The boy, it will be recalled, had long ago struck me as nursing a fondness – as I may now put it, having Bernard Shaw in mind – for upsetting apple-carts if they came his way.

  At this point we parted, and I went about my proper business. I hadn’t ventured to say to Martin that if Oxford is full of libraries and books, so is it full of laboratories and establishments for medical research, and that there were those rumours going round of a broken test-tube or the like for which he himself might eventually have to carry the can. He had probably thought up this one for himself. Anything of the kind was, surely, next to nonsense. Nevertheless, it was possible that some thought of it had prompted his odd remark that, failing due care, he might find himself locked up.

  IV

  As the term drew on, the academic community – and, I suppose, the citizenry as well – grew more and more on edge. The Provost of Judas had emerged from his seclusion, and dined three or four times a week in Hall, as his custom had been for many years. Any important guest was, of course, set down at his right hand, and for this person he would produce a decent minimum of conversation – as again his habit had for long been. His disability, alleviated in no degree, was cautiously respected by all – no servant venturing so much as to place before him the little typed card enumerating the men both dining at his table and proposing to take wine thereafter. And if he glanced down the long benches of undergraduates with more than common severity, it was probably because of an exacerbating circumstance unknown on the occasion, say, of the plague in Shakespeare’s London. Nobody pretended to have the plague. But a good many undergraduates of the more than commonly idle sort were darkly suspected of feigning dyslexia, and of thereby freeing themselves from the more irksome aspects of the student life. Dyslectic dons could, of course, still listen to essays in the few instances in which pupils were available to read them. But it was useless for them to wake up thereafter and hurry off to the delights awaiting them in the Bodleian or elsewhere, since these repositories had become for them veritable fontes signati. More than commonly, learning was virtually at a standstill.

  In such a strained society it was inevitable that irrational persuasions should begin to form. And they thus formed, most unfortunately, round the Galen Professor of Physike and Chirurgerie.

  I have mentioned the conviction or suspicion – itself sufficiently grotesque – that our strange visitation had resulted from some culpable lack of care in a laboratory, and presumably in a laboratory under the control of Martin Brand, who was known to conduct research into dyslectic disorders. For this, which I may call the test-tube theory, there was, I imagine, no ponderable evidence at all, and it is therefore shocking enough that it should have gained even momentary credence within a learned community. But yet more shocking is what further came to blow around. The disaster, it was whispered, had by no means been inadvertent. Brand, who was known to speak scornfully of the university and its ways, had acted as deliberately as Aeolus when, at Juno’s command, he struck with his trident and loosed the fury of the winds upon the Trojan voyagers to Latium. This elegant comparison (thought up by the Corpus Christi Professor of Latin Language and Literature) grossly flattered the squalid and demented act thus attributed to the wretched Martin Brand. And ‘demented’ became the operative word. There was born and p
ropagated what may be called the theory of the mad scientist. And a scientist by no means just lately, and perhaps passingly, overtaken by madness. It was known to many of his intimates – the story ran – that Brand even in his infancy had planned diabolical operations against his fellow creatures. From his earliest days in medicine he had interested himself in dyslexia with just the present fiendish joke in view. And if that isn’t madness, what is?

  It would appear probable that it was precisely as a joke that this version of the matter began. But mere reiteration gained it credence or at least a kind of half-belief. I didn’t, of course, even half-believe it myself. Yet I did believe that Martin’s interest in the dyslectic state had been generated in an Oxfordshire garden long ago. But for that, he would have no particular interest in it now, and not have become the centre of disobliging speculations to which he might indeed react not in the most responsible or stable of ways. In this last persuasion I was to prove well in the target area.

  I have known Cambridge men surprised to learn that their university city is actually a few miles nearer London than Oxford is. For Cambridge, much to its advantage, substantially keeps itself to itself; it is from Oxford that there is a constant stream of busy-bodying academic worthies. In my own earlier time there, many dons enjoyed every week what they called their ‘London day’. For this they would don their ‘London suit’; equip themselves further with a bowler hat, an umbrella and a briefcase; and travel, first-class return, to Paddington. Their pupils of the better sort, identical in turn-out but minus the briefcase, were frequently doing the same thing; and with these they would amiably and approvingly converse. Latterly, the res angusta domi has a good deal cut into this, so far as the rank and file of learning goes. But a new and smaller race has arisen of persons much more august than these: that upper crust even of the Oxford élite, heavies even among the Heads of Houses, whose wisdom is sought in the arcana of government. These go up to town to say a word in the Cabinet Office; to give the right nudge in the right Ministry at the right moment; even to stand up and deliver a deeply informed speech in the House of Lords. Returned to Oxford, they will occasionally murmur to an unassuming colleague in a corner some breath of what has been transpiring in the very councils of princes.