“On Tuesday week – at seven, meeting in my rooms? Don’t change.”
“I’ll look forward to it. Good night.” Quail went through the revolving door. His business was not much furthered. Still, it had been a satisfactory day.
CHAPTER IX
Quail called on Miss Fontaney next morning.
It was a decision arrived at over his solitary dinner – the solitude being of a kind which, after all, he found himself glad not to have asked Robin Warboys to relieve, so many issues seemed to present themselves for his serious consideration during the meal. The people around him were once more, for the most part, his compatriots – resolute persons at shuttle, as it were, with those whom he had seen departing from Oxford in the morning. Having, that is, but lately laved from themselves the dust of Stratford-upon-Avon or Cambridge, and recruited their energies upon pre-prandial gin or whisky, they were now austerely sipping iced water while fingering a new section of their guide-books. Quail eyed them with affection, and was even disposed to deprecate the half-bottle of modest Beaujolais that stood on his own table. Most of them would undoubtedly applaud, even if not upon a basis of the widest information, the transaction to which he was addressing himself. None of them would share his young friend’s sheerly humorous vision of the establishing of a Fontaney Museum in American City – even if they could be persuaded that a town so improbably named lurked somewhere in the Middle West.
At this point in his dinner – it had brought him to his second glass – Quail caught one of those objective glimpses of himself by which he was occasionally visited. It was a vision of himself as having, for such of his Oxford acquaintance as he might revive, a delicately—or was it, conceivably, broadly?—”period” appeal. While he was regarding them, through a haze merely sentimental, no doubt, as breathing the last enchantments of the Middle Age, they would be viewing him – characteristically with far more precision – as a quaint survival from the Edwardian era, the Edith Wharton phase; an American of the vanished epoch of the wandering princes and dispossessed heirs.
Nothing of which self-awareness – he told himself as he meditatively turned over a residuum of boiled cabbage on his plate – absolved him from going soberly ahead. He had given – and incontestably with a special propriety – to his own first, as it was already respectably ancient, university, a collection of books and manuscripts very substantially interesting to anyone concerned with Arthur Fontaney and his circle; there were men of high distinction at work on it; and indeed he modestly knew himself to be thoroughly capable, in such further leisure as he might doubtfully find, of a second fit of profitable investigation on his own account. Were he to leave the house in the Bradmore Road as bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard – and it was something he didn’t at all intend to do – he would have nothing to fear from posterity, even supposing posterity to be given the sharpest of prompting nudges by the Comic Spirit herself. And, again, if to muse on such a Meredithian abstraction as that was almost super-eminently the mark of a most desperate old codger, then a most desperate old codger he would contentedly be, snatching in the brief respite from labours which were increasingly formidable and absorbing his little opportunity to set his own grace-note to the majestic symphony of English literary history.
His mind turned to Gavin Tandon. As a factor in the affair, Tandon had been unexpected – which was something, Quail now saw, that he ought not to have been. That there might be others interested in the fact that Fontaney’s papers could now lawfully be coaxed to a market was a consideration of which he had been well aware, naturally enough. One or two names, even, whether of individuals or of institutions, had travelled through his head. But he just hadn’t got around to thinking of Tandon, although Tandon was an obvious enough man on the spot, and one with a claim which, as far as scholarship went, nobody with proper information on the matter could ignore. It was probable that Tandon hadn’t much money, since one could glimpse in him the student who had made his way from circumstances as simple as might be. It was very certain that he would not be the one to falsify Lady Elizabeth’s generalisation that here – in point of the long purse – was a particular in which Quail himself must lead any field.
But money wasn’t everything: it mightn’t be everything to Miss Fontaney, and it oughtn’t to be everything to the abundant possessor of it. Yet Quail wasn’t sure that Gavin Tandon had any claim of the high order that ought to override the honest will and ability to sign a big cheque. If he did have such a claim – Quail uncomfortably discerned – it would have to be classed as compassionate. Something like obsession very conceivably lurked in Tandon, who had not the resource of putting in most of his time on railroads. Yet to think of him as a poor devil who ought to be given what he craved was certainly premature, and probably unwholesome as well. Tandon, after all, could be put on the editorial panel. It wouldn’t take Quail ten minutes to persuade one or another of the great educational foundations of America to invite so respectable an authority over for a year or even a couple of years – and on the most handsome terms. With Tandon – Quail was convinced on consideration – there just wasn’t a problem. Or there wasn’t a problem yet.
The real problem was Miss Fontaney. That he had decently celebrated her father’s earlier career gave him, he hoped, at least some shadowy claim to her regard. Far more substantial was the blessed fact that her mother had been not an American citizen merely, but eldest daughter of a President of that great centre of American learning to which he was designing that the journals and much else should go.
Yet upon this comfortable circumstance he must not build too much. Fontaney’s married life had famously had its stresses, and one could be by no means certain of how the children of such a union would feel. Miss Fontaney might find no significance in her mother’s nationality, but a great deal in having herself lived in Oxford all her life. Were she to announce it as her intention that every memorial of her father’s genius should find its last home in the Bodleian Library, Quail would assuredly have nothing to say. Or again, Miss Fontaney might be a little mad. This was a prosaic possibility to be allowed for, he supposed, when any elderly spinster was in question. He had made cautious enquiries without learning anything very much. Her character was declared by one acquaintance to be pronounced. But this was an expression not very illuminating in itself. The question seemed rather to be what the lady would pronounce for.
But at least he himself had better pronounce for action. This decision, coming to Quail with his coffee, led at once to a rapid review of ways and means. He had arrived, it might be held, a little too early on the scene, there being still that space of some days to pass before any formal consideration could be given to his proposals. But, having arrived, he ought not to lurk – the more particularly as Lady Elizabeth, in arranging what had turned out to be her abortive tea-party, must have made Miss Fontaney aware of his presence in Oxford. And the disposition to lurk, it had appeared, might safely be left to Tandon – who had presumably been engaged in that nervously exhausting occupation for months, if not for years.
Again, there was the fact that Miss Fontaney was unwell. This, as a circumstance of which Quail had been put in possession that afternoon, seemed absolutely – at least to the old codger in him – to demand some gesture of civil enquiry. For this purpose two conveniences offered themselves in the Bradmore Road: a younger sister – that Marianne Fontaney who might, or might not, prove to be a ponderable factor in his grand equation – and a telephone. But the telephone certainly wouldn’t do; in a stranger’s hand it was an instrument of intolerable intrusion. The only thing, in fact, was to present himself. And even this had a certain haziness for Quail’s mind as he endeavoured to envisage it. The congruous picture seemed to be of a carriage, horses, and what would be termed a morning call, although made at three o’clock in the afternoon. But this, of course, was nonsense. The Fontaney ladies were less antique than Lady Elizabeth Warboys by a long way. He was tending to think in terms of that vanished world in which Oriel Bill c
ame home from football matches in a hansom. Round about eleven, the unpretentious hour of the butcher’s boy and the baker, he would simply set out across the Parks once again and declare himself at Miss Fontaney’s door.
It was a different sort of day. A brisk breeze fluttered the black stuff gowns of young women rapidly propelling themselves on bicycles towards the Examination Schools, stirred the silver locks of retired professors perambulating with lethargic spaniels, and tossed into a lively conversation the tips of the three tall poplars near the river. Fallen leaves, as if rejoicing to have disengaged themselves from the learnedly labelled trees, whirled and scurried round Quail’s deliberately advancing feet, and their rustle seemed to whisper the disturbing suggestion that even in one’s fifties a variety of vigorous physical activities might constitute the most wholesome employment for Michaelmas Term. Ahead, the first enormous villas of the suburb peered through denuded boughs. College tutors, when first permitted matrimony, must have gone about the business in the largest spirit of enthusiastic research, stacking tier upon tier of rapidly accreting progeny in these fascinatingly anti-monastic novelties. No doubt the pace had slowed up since then, and the average age of the inhabitants risen pretty steeply. Perhaps it was, as Robin Warboys had declared, a part of the world in which a great deal of embalming went on. And perhaps this was a thought to which Quail should accustom himself before reaching his goal in the Bradmore Road.
It wasn’t that Arthur Fontaney himself belonged to so deep a past. He could be accurately described as an elder contemporary of Lady Elizabeth’s. Nor had he died young and, therefore, long ago. His daughters had continued in their former home for no greater span of years than must be perfectly common among unmarried ladies left with such a property. What was a little unnerving was the feeling that, in continuing so to live in this particular house, they must insensibly have added to their filial character that of guardians, or even priestesses. They couldn’t quite – at least to a person with his head full of their father – belong with the living. A little care might be needed if one was to avoid giving the impression of taking them for something under glass.
Finding himself before the house, Quail without pause rang the bell. It was still the kind at which one gives a cautious tug; and to Quail’s ear it was distinguishable as still ringing in some subterraneous quarter. There was a little delay – the delay during which a visitor just begins to wonder when he may venture on a second attempt – and then the door, which was covered with a ramifying wrought iron of forbiddingly defensive suggestion, opened beneath its Gothic arch.
It was at once apparent that the ladies were not wholly without attendance. Confronting Quail was a young woman who revealed, first, an uncompromisingly grasped mop and bucket and, second, a bafflingly tenuous acquaintance with the English language. But the presentation of a visiting-card turned out to be an intelligible ritual, and he was at once admitted to the hall. The woman disappeared. He had just time to see that the hall, if not spacious, was decidedly Arthur Fontaney’s, when there was a murmur of voices and the woman came back. She had abandoned the bucket but was still carrying the mop. It was thus with something of the appearance of one ceremoniously ushered by a court chamberlain into the presence that Quail found himself being conducted into a drawing-room at the back of the notable house.
There was only one lady in the room, and as she came forward hesitantly to greet him, not raising her eyes from the carpet until the moment at which politeness made this course imperative, Quail’s first impression was that here stood Miss Fontaney herself. Then he realised, as he bowed and took the hand held out to him, that this was not an old woman, but rather one giving precise illustration to the common phrase in which a maiden lady is sometimes described as of uncertain years. Marianne Fontaney – for at once she quietly named herself – might have been by five years on either side of fifty. A dress plain to the point of severity – indeed, of shapelessness – did nothing to render attractive a figure like a meagre boy’s. It was easier to imagine the Marianne of the future than the Marianne of the past. Nubility might have eluded her during her journey towards the barren years.
“Eleanor . . . my sister . . . is so sorry that she can’t come down.” Marianne Fontaney’s voice was low and husky, so that Quail thought fleetingly of Gavin Tandon. “Lately she has not been well. It is very worrying . . . but of course she will be able to see you one day soon, all the same. She looks forward to it.”
Quail murmured expressions of concern. He was in no danger of forming any further ungallant impression at the moment. That Marianne’s complexion was poor and her skin uncared for and dry were unnoticeable facts the moment he realised that her face was her father’s to the life. Fontaney had been a very handsome man. But looks can behave oddly when they cross the barrier of sex, and by an unhappy irony the same features made of the daughter rather a plain woman. Yet the generosity was there – and perhaps something of the sensibility too. It was only of the fire that he could see nothing at all. Marianne’s expression was passive, withdrawn, perhaps a little bewildered, as her father’s could never have been.
But the likeness, seeming to authenticate the portraits he knew so well, had taken Quail unawares and he was moved by it – so much so that he was prompted to gesture, taking this elderly woman’s hand again in both his. “It is very wonderful to me,” he said, “to meet either of Arthur Fontaney’s daughters.”
To his surprise, she was discomposed, and he could feel her impulse to draw her hand away swiftly, before she let it rest again for the necessary consenting moment in his. It had been a queer motion of untutored sexual protectiveness, as if he had been attempting a gallantry. And at once she knew that she had been clumsy. He could see the blood mount behind her sallow skin. “I am glad . . . to have been in.” She was almost whispering. “Lucky . . . you see, I’m a Brown Owl.”
Ludicrously, he felt for a moment an impulse of sheer horror, as if she had categorically announced that she was insane. In some play of Strinberg’s, he thought, there was a woman who lived in a cupboard, believing herself to be a parrot. But even as this came to him, he realised that her statement had some utterly prosaic significance. “Is it interesting?” he tentatively asked.
“Oh—very. I like it so much more than anything else. Mine is only a small pack. Friends, you see, have a school for young children, only a little way off. And today is the day for the Brownies – which is why I might not have been at home. Only, as it happens, it’s the half-term holiday.”
As soon as the tenure of this explanation became clear, Quail had a little allowed his attention to take in the room in which the dim lady had received him. And at once he knew that it was true – true that everything was here; every object, one might say, as Fontaney had last put his hand to it. An ordinary modern taste would have pronounced the effect crowded; and it was possible that some extraordinary ones, privileged to exercise habitually a high connoisseurship in opulent places, would be disposed to murmur that here, after all, there wasn’t anything so very much; that it was a collection for those middling sort of people, genuinely endowed with some capacity for discrimination, who are constrained to excite themselves over obscure marks on the underside of old plates. But an arrogant judgment would certainly have been a fallacious one; it would have ignored not only a number of individual things intrinsically tremendous in their way, but also the sense of composition that had been at play over the whole.
All this Quail had hoped for, and now he was struck by something else. The impression of care was exquisite, so that he had a vague vision of both the Misses Fontaney, assisted by the inarticulate woman with the mop, perpetually at work in keeping bright the shrine. And this in turn prompted him to vague speech. “You have great responsibilities,” he said.
“Oh—but yes, I have! The Red Cross canteen on Thursdays, for instance. I can manage that – although it is not so nice as the children. And now, since Eleanor is sometimes so unwell, I have the English Speaking Union. That worries m
e, I am afraid. And sometimes, even, I have to do things for the Victoria League. That is very worrying, I must confess. Because the Victoria League is so peculiarly important. Don’t you think?”
“Yes, indeed.” Quail, although he had only an uncertain notion of the functions of this institution, felt that he could stretch a point and agree with emphasis. “It must all make your life very full,” he added.
“Yes, it’s very full.” There was a little silence, which Marianne herself apparently found it necessary to break with rather more of vivacity than she had yet attempted. “We are, you know, in Oxford, all so busy!” She made a quick movement, which was at once distressed and suggestive of an easier physical elasticity than one would have supposed in her. “But won’t you sit down? I am so forgetful, I am afraid. And Eleanor, of course, usually receives our visitors.”
He sat down, and there was a pause, so that he felt he might now, without impoliteness, take a more open glance about the room. It exceeded – he confirmed himself in the judgment – by a large measure all his expectations; and the words to which he was prompted were again of the order of mere statement. “You live,” he said, “among your father’s things.”
“We do try to take very great care of them.” Marianne’s tone was anxious, as if she felt that at last the stewardship of Arthur Fontaney’s daughters was being called formally to account before posterity. “That is why we don’t have a dog – I have sometimes thought a dog would be nice – and why, of course, we can’t ever have the Brownies in the house. I hope you will like the library.”
“I certainly shall.”
Quail’s voice had been eager, and the effect was to make Marianne Fontaney take alarm. “Eleanor will certainly wish you to see it. One day, she will certainly wish to take you in. It really surprises us that we have never had the opportunity. It is strange—isn’t it?—that we shouldn’t ever have met before. Because, I mean, you are so distinguished a student of my father’s works.” Marianne stopped and nervously smoothed her dress. Her colour had mounted again, as if she had found such a formal speech as this a considerable effort to frame and utter. “But how unfortunate,” she added almost despairingly, “that Eleanor is unwell!”
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