Dr Cressy didn’t know Mr Pattullo, and received the introduction with a thin smile not suggestive of taking much satisfaction in being thus required to enlarge the circle of his acquaintance. I looked with some curiosity at the hero or anti-hero of the rape of the Blunderville letter-book. This was the easier because he had barely looked at me – or at his hostess or Atlas either. He was occupied with a preliminary survey of Mrs Gender’s gathering – in the hope, one somehow instantly felt, either of larger intellectual stimulus than one was oneself likely to afford or (even more desirably) of association with persons of higher social consequence. I hadn’t myself set eyes on Christopher Cressy since the moment at which he had walked composedly out of the college library with the letter-book under his arm. Now here he was, still its deeply wrongful possessor, bestowing his company with complete assurance upon people who were supposed to be furious with him.
I believed that I’d have recognised Cressy at once, although this must be unusual with somebody encountered only on a single occasion many years ago. He was of a type that doesn’t perceptibly age except suddenly and belatedly at a close. His hair was dark and abundant; his complexion was fresh and clear, and congruous with features singularly unlined and an expression somewhat on the impassive side – set, as it were, in a static mould of temperate and somewhat inattentive benignity; his eyes, although they possessed that disconcerting trick of wandering from you, remained as bright as a boy’s.
‘We are discussing a problem of college entrance,’ Mrs Gender said to him. ‘And Charles is our authority on the subject. He must tell you about it.’ And at this our hostess glided away. Some sticky corner of her entertainment must have hove into view, and to disengage herself for it she had adopted the first resource that came into her head. Atlas – declared an authority on the strength of being Tutor for Admissions – was displeased. He glanced at me with some severity, as if the introduction of this unsuitable topic had been my fault. I said nothing, and it was left to Cressy to speak. He did so with his glance upon our retreating hostess.
‘I wonder,’ he murmured, ‘whether Jimmy was the first of his family to make that sort of marriage? One knows about the Genders. Gender’s Original Canine Biscuit – you’ll have seen the advertisement in Victorian magazines. Hence their present commanding position in the pet food industry. But now this problem of college entrance. It sounds not exactly convivial ground. But Charles’—and Cressy turned to me urbanely—’can irradiate any subject with his wit. With Charles conversing, one forgets all time, all seasons and their change. My dear Charles, proceed.’ Cressy’s glance was again wandering round the room. Atlas, a serious young man in whom I had never remarked either the ambition or the ability to coruscate, must have been perfectly capable of recognising insolent banter when it came to him. But he gave no indication of this, merely glancing at me as if to make sure of his bearings.
‘Is it the boy whose brother died?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s something sad and rather difficult.’ Atlas had turned to Cressy. ‘One of our last year’s scholars, a most promising man, mucked his Mods. He felt he’d done something silly, and it seems he was a depressive type. He went home and took his own life. And now we find that a younger brother, not nearly so clever, wants to follow him here. With a mission to succeed where the dead boy failed. That’s all.’
I supposed it would be all – since Atlas clearly wanted it that way, and Cressy’s mind appeared occupied elsewhere. Cressy, however, pursued the matter.
‘No doubt there is a problem,’ he said. ‘Just how do you propose to deal with it?’
‘I suppose – although I’m not happy about it – that we must judge the boy entirely on the merits of what he writes for us and on what interviewing him reveals. It’s the safest thing from his own point of view. Nothing else would be fair to him in the long run.’
‘If you manage to be fair to him in the short run you will have done very well. But your proposal, you know, is entirely unrealistic. What will this boy do? Write borderline papers, indistinguishable from those of half a dozen other weakish candidates. As soon as you try to discriminate his quality further you are bound to be influenced by temperamental responses – conscious or unconscious – to what you know of his situation. Detached intellectual appraisal of schoolboy scribblings is a will-o’-the-wisp. Were the brothers at the same school?‘
‘Yes, they were.’
‘Then the same consideration must apply to any estimate of the younger boy his headmaster sends you. Your only resource, as I see the matter, is to employ some examiner whom you keep totally in ignorance of the lad’s situation.’
‘I don’t think we’d care to abnegate responsibility in that way.’
‘Precisely! My poor Charles, how readily you involve yourself in contradiction.’ Cressy said this in an absent manner, as if it were a judgement so universally acknowledged as to be incapable of engaging serious attention. Suddenly he raised a hand delightedly in air, and his normally frozen features were lit up with pleasurable expectation. He had spied, it seemed, somebody with whom it would be agreeable to converse. Then his glance returned for a moment to Atlas and myself – the glance of a man whom inflexible courtesy constrains to suffer all.’ The fact is’, he said, ‘that your problem must be declared insoluble. How fortunate, then, that it is totally insignificant.’ He offered us his bleakest smile, and walked away.
‘Well, I’m blessed!’ I said. ‘What a god-awful man.’
‘Christopher?’ Atlas was startled. That he was also shocked appeared in his delaying further utterance until he had indulged his habit of a momentary tautening of the lips. ‘I suppose,’ he then said, ‘that his tone tends to be astringent at times. But he’s terribly good company, you know. That about the dog biscuits, for instance. It just came into his head.’
‘You mean he made it up on the spot?’
‘Oh, I’d suppose so – wouldn’t you? It’s a kind of holiday from history, that freakish strain in him. His history’s tiptop. Christopher has a marvellously objective mind.’
For a moment or two I was left on my own, with leisure to ponder what some men can get away with. Atlas had withdrawn – had backed away, indeed, so that I suffered a sense of having misconducted myself in offering so frank an estimate of a fellow-guest. There was also the consideration, perhaps of greater weight, that Cressy, although for long attached to another college, remained a member of our own common room: this no doubt made my solecism doubly heinous. Yet treating as bad form any personal censure not phrased obliquely or periphrasically struck me as tiresome – and as having little to do with the substance of charity. I resolved that, upon challenge, I would always declare my conviction that Christopher Cressy was a god-awful man.
Ruffled as this absurd resolution shows me to have been, I glanced round Anthea Gender’s party and found assuagement in the spectacle of Cyril Bedworth gesturing to me across the length of the room. It was Bedworth’s habit thus to call me into any circle of which he formed a part at the moment – an action the gratifying spontaneity of which was commonly pointed by something physically inept in the achieving of it. This time his beckoning hand had more or less brushed the nose of a stout elderly woman – demonstrably as academic as everybody else in the room – with whom he was conversing. Robert Damian was on his other side, and all three were standing by a window. I made my way across the crowded floor.
‘Oh, Duncan!’ Bedworth said – and since our second term as undergraduates I couldn’t recall his ever having begun to address me other than in this vocative fashion. ‘Oh, Duncan – do you know Professor Babcock?’
I failed to identify Professor Babcock. If anything faintly signalled recognition it was the sense of her suggesting some picturesque figurehead in a maritime museum: one designed to actualise the common metaphor which describes a ship as breasting the waves. Bedworth, accordingly, performed an introduction in due form. My memory still functioned uncertainly, so he went on to produ
ce for the lady a useful word about me, and for me a useful word about the lady. Professor Babcock, however, rejected this channel for polite intercourse.
‘Are you related to the painter?’ she asked briskly. ‘I once met him at a dinner-party at the Pocockes.’
‘Yes, indeed. I’m his younger son. And you met me as well. I was there too – the only near-child in the company. You were extremely kind to me.’
‘Then I ought to be recalling a double pleasure.’ As if to make clear that a mild facetiousness was designed to attend this courteous expression, Professor Babcock advanced her cutwater (for the nautical image must be retained) and afforded me a surprising nudge – the more surprising for having been administered not by a shoulder (figureheads aren’t strong on shoulders) but by a more protuberant part of her person. The effect of this idiosyncrasy was magical. There was instantly nothing I didn’t seem to remember about Professor Babcock.
‘Your father was a most impressive person, Mr Pattullo. But of course I had expected that. He was also quite delightful, which is a different thing. We admired your college pictures in the library, and then there was something about another picture. We went to look at it somewhere, but there was a hitch.’
It was by my father, and in my own rooms. Young Picts watching the arrival of Saint Columha. Only somebody had substituted another picture as a silly joke.’ Suddenly I found that I was staring at Damian. ‘Robert,’ I said, ‘it was you!’
This called for explanations. In the course of them I realised that Professor Babcock’s memory was entirely of her meeting with my father. Of the stray undergraduate who had been present she had no recollection at all. I found this vexing – a fact illustrating the oddity of the filial relationship. Lachlan Pattullo was a memorable man, and I hadn’t in the least been a memorable boy.
‘But just what did you and I talk about, Mr Pattullo?’ Unexpectedly – for scholars are not commonly sensitive to what Nick Junkin would have called vibes – Professor Babcock had become aware of this small stir of feeling in me.
‘We made fun of somebody who’s at this party now: Christopher Cressy. You rather led me on, I think, and were amused when I didn’t quite know how cheeky and clever I was allowed to be. My schooldays, you must remember, weren’t far behind me.’
‘We vied with one another,’ Professor Babcock asked me, ‘in the fabricating of destructive epigrams?’
‘Something like that.’ I didn’t offer this reply with much conviction. I had been precocious at that time only in my reading, and I could now recall my chief feeling as having been that the alarming lady who had befriended me was a little too anxious to talk like somebody in a book: Meredith’s Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson, perhaps, or a figment of that kind. Of course I’d done my best to play up. Conversationally, Professor Babcock had toned down by now. So probably had I.
‘And do you still, Mr Pattullo, view Dr Cressy as a figure of fun?’
This improper question had to be thought of, I supposed, as a trick of the old rage in Professor Babcock. It was a shade on the lively side. So, equally, would have been my keeping faith with myself to the extent of announcing that I judged Cressy to be god-awful.
‘Still as a figure of fun?’ I repeated. ‘Well, no. Perhaps he rather enjoys making other people just that.’
‘I agree with you. But one has to remember—’ Professor Babcock broke off. ‘Good heavens I’ she said. ‘It must be another of those vexatious demonstrations.’
It was certainly that. For the second time within a few days I was listening to the voice of young Oxford in insurgence. The same sort of shouting in ragged unison was coming from the same sort of distance. As demos commonly assembled at one point and marched to another the sound would presently fade or swell according to the objective in view.
‘They don’t usually come out again after tea,’ Professor Babcock said. ‘And they always break up in time for it – just as with their rowing and rugger and so on.’
In this remark I recognised one resource of senior Oxford in coping with the phenomenon unleashed on it. Demos were rags and nothing more. It was becoming apparent, however, that few people were continuing to find this vision plausible. I doubted whether Professor Babcock did, although she had offered a kind of token bob at it.
‘I think,’ I said, ‘we’re going to have a closer view of this lot. They’re coming our way.’
‘Are they indeed?’ There was a pause while Professor Babcock superintended the replenishing of her glass. ‘Then their goal is probably my own college. They are interesting themselves in the sad case of Mr Elijah.’
‘I haven’t heard of him.’
‘I’m sure that Mr Bedworth and Dr Damian have. Indeed, he has stalked abroad in the public prints. He is, or was, our boilerman. A nice fellow, but unfortunately liable to get most terribly drunk – and incipiently psychotic into the bargain. Do you know our hall, Mr Pattullo?’
‘I don’t think I happen ever—’
‘I shall hope to persuade you to dine in it. It’s not unpleasing, as Victorian structures go, and we use it for our more formal lectures. Our annual Samuel Wilberforce Lecture – commonly delivered by a dignitary of the church – is a case in point. This year’s lecture was particularly impressive. The bishop’s peroration rose to the most elevated considerations. But it was just then, unfortunately, that the central heating went wrong. It is no doubt of somewhat old-fashioned design. Mr Elijah, it appears, had sunk into a vinous stupor and let the boiler out. Any drop in temperature was scarcely perceptible in the short space of time involved. Not so the acoustic effect. That, Mr Pattullo, is not describable with any approximation to delicacy. The pipes and radiators excelled themselves in digestive noises. There was general embarrassment. But the bishop, needless to say, behaved very well. Some appearance of edification was preserved.’
‘And Elijah?’ Damian asked.
‘Ah, here is the sad part of the matter. Our domestic bursar judged it to be her duty to admonish him. She declares he took it very well. Unfortunately, having withdrawn and thought the matter over, he deemed it useful to return to her office and resume the discussion while provided with a cleaver.’
‘A cleaver!’ I exclaimed.
‘A butcher’s chopper for cutting up carcasses, Mr Pattullo. Fortunately as it happened, our bursar keeps in a drawer of her desk her father the general’s pistols. She has a sentimental regard for them, I suppose. Needless to say, the weapons were unloaded – but the appearance of one of them gave Mr Elijah occasion for second thoughts. While he was perpending these the police were summoned, and our college doctor along with them. The poor man was hospitalised forthwith, and has since retired on a pension. But the victimisation of Mr Elijah has been much in the generous minds of the young, and I think they are letting off a little steam about it this evening.’
Professor Babcock having delivered herself of this narrative at proper Meredithian leisure, the demo was now in sight and its vociferations were beginning to drown even the hubbub of a large Oxford cocktail party. Few of Mrs Gender’s guests appeared much to react to the disturbance. They were rather carefully neither amused nor indignant nor even attentive. Was it fondly believed that, if simply ignored, this unprecedented behaviour on the part of our juniors would go away? Or were people really taking it very seriously, so that I was witnessing something like the preserved sang-froid of an aristocratic French salon as the mob howled and the tumbrels rumbled in the next faubourg?
‘They’re chanting “Basket Out”,’ I said. ‘Who’s Basket?’
‘Our bursar, Mr Pattullo. We have the highest regard for Cecilia Basket. She combines looking after our practical affairs with maintaining a considerable reputation as a research chemist.’
‘I see.’ I said this mechanically, and if I was really seeing anything it was only my own bewilderment. I could glimpse that, once one had picked up the habit of this sort of noisy parade, the Mr Elijahs of society were a pretext as good as another. I thought I could hear in th
e shouting (only of this I wasn’t sure) quite as much generalized high-spirits as focused hostility. Still, here were a couple of hundred young men employing the full force of their lungs in objurgating Miss Basket by name in the public street. It was true that the lady was a general’s daughter and the proprietor of a brace of pistols. And I found, curiously enough, that I had some memory of her. She had been the very young don in whose society I had exhibited an extreme of social ineptitude on the same occasion as my meeting with Professor Babcock herself. It was by way of rallying from that debacle, no doubt, that I had later in the evening so determinedly kept my end up with the elder lady. In all probability Miss Basket was now no more tender a flower than was her senior colleague. But bellowing ‘Basket Out’ seemed to me not one of the numerous forms of bad behaviour in which it is held venial for young men to indulge.
I saw Robert Damian glancing at me with amusement. He must have caught my feeling, and been tickled to recognise something of the undergraduate in the middle-aged man. As a boy I had been genuinely possessed of some old-world views; where they came from I don’t know; perhaps it was from my mother’s reading aloud in Scott’s novels. Now here I was, inwardly aspersing as louts beyond the pale a crowd of excited young men taking unmannerly freedoms with a woman’s name.
‘But what’s it truly all about?’ I asked hastily. ‘Robert, you always used to say a college doctor is essentially a child psychiatrist. So how is all this diffused disturbance generated? Just what makes the kids tick that way?’
‘Social mobility, for a start. Patterns from the field of industrial conflict taking over. Fags expect to become prefects, but workers hang bosses from lamp-posts. That clear?’
‘Crystalline,’ I said. ‘What next?’
‘Earlier maturition. Enormous problems there. Then consider a related thing: the revolution in sexual mores in society at large, and the muck we make of coping with it in these immemorially monastic dumps we call the colleges. Take what all this demo-nonsense is most frequently about at the moment. It’s the providing, at the university’s or the government’s expense, of a kind of Kubla Khan pleasure dome with everything laid on. A common meeting-place for all students – and the running of it probably more or less left to them. Fairly rational, I suppose. But it’s prompted by the imitative instinct and a rather dreary reversed snobbery – being as like a polytechnic or whatever as possible. It’s also prompted – much more it’s prompted – by straight anti-college feeling. They don’t want any longer to live in groups of two to four hundred chaps, presided over by fatherly dons and big-brotherly don-lets. They want to be out on their own – ten thousand of them, or thereabout.’
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