“I’m glad to hear it. I was afraid there was some little coolness between Tandon and the Joplings.”
“Oh come, sir!” Warboys was innocently reproachful over this lack of adequate response to his bombshell. “Don’t you see it’s a plot?”
“You mean to dish the museum in American City?” Quail laughed. “Well, even so, I’d have no right to complain. Your Warden may perfectly properly concern himself with keeping documents and so on of literary importance in this country. It’s a very suitable interest for him to have.”
“But has he?” Warboys put his whisky down in the fender, where it seemed probable that he was presently going to forget about it. “I don’t believe the Lion has any interests of that sort.”
Quail considered this. “Well, I didn’t feel he had any notion that I was in Oxford for a specific purpose – or, for that matter, that he had the slightest regard for Arthur Fontaney. My memory is that Mrs Jopling knew vaguely about my book, and that her husband merely made some polite but uninformed remark. But Tandon may very well have made an appeal to him since then. I know that Tandon wasn’t acquainted with the ladies, for he said so when I met him. It’s perfectly right that he should wish to make their acquaintance now, and that he should call in the Warden’s assistance. That must have been the way of it.”
“Isn’t it stealing a march, after all?”
“Certainly not. Tandon and I are not remotely committed to keeping each other posted about our moves, my dear boy.”
Warboys had produced a pipe. He had the air of one elderly colleague proposing extended deliberations with another. “I’m bound to say,” he presently offered, “that I don’t think your appreciation of the incident is a bit sound. Tandon appealing to the Lion, and then this lunch being arranged. It’s not true to the psychology of the college nowadays. I’d say it was much more likely that the Lion was doing himself a bit of fun.”
“Fun?” Quail was so startled by this that he knew it must correspond with some smothered apprehension of his own.
“The Lion is malicious. It’s his line. He practises the art of the Oxford conversational sandwich.”
“I guess I haven’t got around to hearing about that.”
“You say something frightfully smooth and appreciative about a chap, and then something—what’s the word?—derogatory, and then something smoother still. Or the middle can be a vicious little anecdote. The Lion collects them tremendously. And I think he just tumbled to the notion that this would be a comical sort of lunch to have.”
Quail found himself responding to this with unexpected warmth. “It sounds absolutely revolting,” he said.
“Micky says it really was a bit weird. The old ladies might have crawled out of the woodwork—”
“I don’t think, Robin, that I like the sound of this Lord Michael Manningtree at all.”
“And Tandon, he said, behaved as if he had really come about the drains, and been brought in to grace the Lizard’s groaning board quite by mistake. Of course Micky Manningtree has a disgusting mind – but I can imagine it, all the same. Tandon so frightfully dislikes and distrusts women, anyway; and here he was, under the eye of the Lizard, committed to making headway with these two old ladies—”
“Miss Marianne Fontaney, for what it’s worth, isn’t all that old.”
“Well, committed to impressing himself on the formidable Miss Fontaney senior, the guardian dragon of all those treasures. Micky says that Tandon tried very hard.”
Quail set down his glass with something of a bump. “You don’t mean, Robin, that this young man has any notion—?”
“Oh, of course not. Micky Manningtree probably never heard of Arthur Fontaney in his life. He was just aware that Tandon, for some reason, was terribly anxious to get on good terms with the old women. And he says that, once Tandon got over the man-about-the-drains stage of awkwardness, he succeeded quite well – for a while.”
“Only for a while?”
“He talked very earnestly to the older one, and for a time she was quite struck. No doubt he’s well clued up in all the Fontaney stuff. But then he went on and on, and she got a bit restive. Micky says she probably decided he wasn’t quite out of the old family drawer. And the Lion egged things on.”
For a moment Quail was silent. This was all so disagreeable that he had an impulse to drop it and take his leave. But he felt that he must ask one more question.
“The Warden was positively concerned to—to let Tandon expose himself in a boring or tactless fashion?”
“That’s how Micky saw it. Does it strike you, sir, that the Warden’s plot may have been the other way round, so to speak? What if his notion was to give you a leg up?”
“My dear lad, I can’t see why he should do that.”
“You’re tremendously wealthy, aren’t you – and so a prospective benefactor of the place? And then—”
“It won’t do. Your Warden doesn’t care ten cents for me. It’s true he asked me to lunch. But he dismissed me afterwards as if I hadn’t made the slightest impression on his mind.”
“Cunning.” Warboys offered this suggestion with gusto. “The Lion always knows far more than you’d think. And that’s what he was up to, if you ask me. It’s going to make a terribly good story at one of those gluttonous bibulous dining clubs that dons love.” Warboys, seated before the remains of his own late prodigal entertainment, said this with something of the distaste of an anchorite recording the orgies of Domitian or Heliogabalus. “How he did his best for Tandon in the business of Fontaney’s journals; and how grotesquely inept the poor fellow was. That’s it!”
Quail walked back to his hotel in a less happy mood than Oxford had yet induced in him. Young American Service men seemed to fill the pavements and overflow upon streets still uncomfortably full of vehicles. Some were in uniform, and others in civilian clothes that would not have appeared out of place a long way away. Many had female companions whom they would have been reluctant to introduce to their mothers. They didn’t seem to have any very lively idea of what to do. They were, in fact, quite as much displaced persons as was the Misses Fontaney’s Central European with the mop. It didn’t please Quail to see a large body of his countrymen thus floating loose upon the surface of Oxford. He would have preferred to see them, even if in smaller numbers, right inside; and he suspected that a good many of them would make more of the privilege than Lord Michael Manningtree.
But these were vexing and idle reflections, and he turned his mind to his own situation. This, too, gave him no pleasure. Warboys’ odd little revelation had disturbed him more than he hoped he had revealed. Despite his defence of the Warden, he couldn’t quite banish from his head the feeling that Jopling had been disingenuous. But then – and here was the true core of his vexation – he had not been entirely forthright himself. His notions of Oxford were still conditioned by the length of the journey he had first taken to it, and one particular in which everyone wouldn’t have followed him was in his fancy of what is due to any head of one’s old college. His impression of Jopling had been unfavourable, and he saw no reason to believe that he would ever revise it. But this judgment of the man ought not to have affected his behaviour to the Warden; and in fact it would have been proper to state what, in Oxford, he was about. As it was, the Warden had simply tumbled to his game – and so ought not to be harshly censured for taking his obscure and covert hand in it.
But Quail didn’t commonly let his scruples falsify his feelings; and nothing in this train of thought prevented his robustly wishing Charles Jopling to the devil – both on his own account and, queerly enough, on Gavin Tandon’s too. Unless the story he had heard of the luncheon party was wholly perverted, Tandon had been bidden to it in some double-faced way; had been served, in fact, much more scurvily than Quail himself. It almost seemed as if a little web of deceit and malice was weaving itself round what ought to be the honourable business of giving more of Arthur Fontaney’s thought to the world. And nothing, to Quail, could be more distaste
ful than that.
What, then, about the lady whom Robin Warboys had called the guardian dragon of those treasures? Quail would certainly not wish any lady to the devil, and he was even very reluctant to let his mind settle for a single moment to the conclusion that he was receiving cavalier treatment from the Bradmore Road.
And this reluctance he was presently glad to have been able to heed. A note was handed to him as he entered his hotel. It had been delivered by hand, and he had enough intuition to tear it open at once. Eleanor Fontaney wrote in formal but very proper terms. She apologised for making no earlier communication, referred to Quail as the distinguished biographer of her dear father, and invited him to tea on the following day.
CHAPTER II
It looked as if Quail’s morning would drag. But the mail brought a batch of business documents which somebody had decided must be referred to him, and he worked steadily till lunch-time. There was always satisfaction in getting a surprising lot done without either a stenographer beside him or a contrivance on the table into which to drone, and it was only with the half-pint of bitter in which he indulged as crown to his labours that his mind emerged again upon the Oxford scene. After his meal he took a turn round Christ Church Meadow – a resource, he reflected, that must have tranquilised a good many men facing occasions considerably more momentous than his. All in all, he contrived to make his eventual walk north in very tolerable nervous trim.
Miss Fontaney was alone, although it was some seconds before he could be sure of this, so much did the drawing-room lie in shadow. Lowered blinds and half-drawn curtains shut out all but a few rays of the clear afternoon sunshine; and the effect created in the gloom by the answering gleam, here and there, of some old warm glowing thing in tapestry or porcelain or enamel was just that of such a treasure-filled cavern as a dragon might fitly guard. He thought at first that the light must be excluded in the interest of preserving all this. Arthur Fontaney hadn’t, like poor Ruskin, kept his pictures behind little curtains; but it might be all in character that his daughter Eleanor carried her curatorship to lengths of this sort. Then he remembered that Marianne had received him here with nothing of such a crepuscular effect, and on this followed the realisation that what Eleanor was keeping the light from was not the surrounding assemblage of material objects but herself.
And as he shook hands his perception went further. It was astonishing that she had been lunching in Oxford the day before, and not at all surprising that her younger sister had betrayed serious anxiety about her health. Eleanor Fontaney was a sick woman; she was this much more noticeably than she was an elderly one. She had been cast in a physical mould larger than Marianne’s. But it seemed to Quail that if the sisters were tipped into a pair of scales they would be roughly in a state of equipoise, and neither of them at all likely to strain the machinery. Marianne had never filled out, and Eleanor had shrunk in upon herself in a manner wholly ominous.
Her greetings were of a kind to which her note of invitation had already given a clue, being devoted largely to a correct degree of curiosity on the prosperousness or otherwise of his recent voyage, and hopes that he was now finding pleasant entertainment in a society more active than she was at present herself able to mingle with. As he satisfied her in these regards and proceeded to conventional enquiries of his own, what was chiefly striking him was her voice. It covered an abnormally wide scale without ever dropping to a normal pitch, so that he found himself recalling the distressing little instruments upon which imaginative children fondly suppose that they can imitate the calls of birds. Moreover, when Miss Fontaney ceased speaking – and it was often on her highest note – her lips, as if rehearsing further observations, oddly continued to move, and it was thus hard not to believe that her voice had simply passed beyond the scope of a human ear, like one of those apparently mute and futile whistles that are instantly attended to by dogs.
Her features, as he became able more clearly to distinguish them, revealed themselves as not at all like Marianne’s. In fact, they were not Fontaney features at all. They did, however, stir some memory in Quail, and at once he knew what it was. On the whole, American women have been slower than American men in evolving a range of national types. But some are not so much evolving as becoming obsolete. And what Quail saw in Eleanor were sundry indefinable signs recalling a species of august lady already vanishing from New York when he was a boy. There could be no doubt that Arthur Fontaney’s elder daughter took after her mother. Quail hoped there was something promising in this.
“I have sent Marianne out for a walk, but on the understanding that she will not be too late to see you.” At its almost alpine height, Miss Fontaney’s voice delivered itself with cultivated precision. Its tone conjured up a Marianne of decidedly less than her present years, and seemed to approximate Quail’s call to that of a music- master or a visiting dentist. “Marianne has too few opportunities, at present, of struggling against a disabling diffidence. It is my wish to bring her forward.”
On this frigid pronouncement Miss Fontaney paused; or at least through her moving lips nothing more was to be heard. Quail said that he had found Miss Marianne entirely agreeable.
“I am glad to think my sister does her best. She must soon, after all, have heavier duties to discharge.”
Quail supposed this to refer to the control of family business upon the elder sister’s death. But as it was just possible that its intended application was to no more than some impending elevation in the hierarchy of Brown Owls, he thought it safest to say nothing.
“I am conscious of having permitted Marianne to live too much retired. Our dear father’s memory has been paramount with her, and a great part of her energies have gone into keeping in a worthy condition such poor memorials of him as we possess.”
Quail murmured something to the effect that this was highly pious and proper. But he remembered that Marianne herself didn’t seem much disposed to talk in this strain, and he had his doubts about nature having given her any overpowering slant that way. Miss Fontaney was now making tea – it was a ritual involving concentration upon various silver utensils and a spirit lamp – so that he allowed himself one of his glances about the room. It lost nothing on a further approach towards familiarity. Yet he was not quite sure that he liked it as much as he had done.
And certainly he didn’t want it. He wanted the journals tremendously – in fact, far more than ever – but in this room he would be quite glad to see an auctioneer with a hammer. And if that happened – as, after all, it might – he would himself bid only for an isolated object here and there. This was a change of mind; even a change of heart. But Quail wasn’t disconcerted. When such changes glimmered up, the great thing was to distinguish and acknowledge them. To keep Arthur Fontaney’s things magnificently and comprehensively together for all time was a grand idea – or it was that until you saw them with another generation of human beings camped among them. Massed here, they were dangerous. Massed in a museum, they would be dead. Scattered, they would gain more in life than they would lose from the disruption of their present exquisitely harmonious organisation. For scores of people to have something of Fontaney’s—he saw it!—was really the thing.
It was about the greatest satisfaction in Willard Quail’s life – and in business he had achieved it again and again – to penetrate through a long-cherished bad idea to a suddenly apprehended good one. If this had been business he would have had his cheque-book – metaphorically, at least – out before him in a twinkling, and be offering Miss Fontaney a round sum for the whole collection – with the sole object, now, not of preserving it but of scattering it judiciously among the deserving. Not that this idea was, after all, tip-top, since the deserving would deserve yet better if they could be induced to come along with modest cheque-books of their own. He decided that if Miss Fontaney died – and he suspected this to be pretty well her proximate intention – he would briskly advise Marianne to pack up everything and despatch it to the best London sale-room. On the proceeds, withou
t a doubt, she could treat herself to a very sufficient little nook at Hove – conceivably with a paddling pool plumb opposite.
“And of late, I fear that Marianne has gone out even less than formerly.” Miss Fontaney had arrived at a critical moment. She was delicately warming each cup in turn, and then pouring a single drop of water into the corresponding saucer. “She requires my support, if even quite simple social occasions are not to be a trial to her. And in recent weeks I have been almost confined to the house. That, as you know, is why I failed Lady Elizabeth. Yesterday, it is true, I managed to attend a luncheon party – but that was a matter less of social duty than of business . . . sugar?”
Quail watched Miss Fontaney’s filigree sugar-tongs poised over the Crown Derby. Her physical emaciation was extreme; but she was not, as the young people said, past it. She was aware that there was a situation, and she believed herself to be in control of it. Probably she was. Quail now suspected – and it must have been intuitively, since no real ground had as yet appeared – that somewhere in Miss Fontaney there harboured a strong streak of eccentricity. North Oxford was probably as rich in what might be called crypto-eccentrics as the university was in those, such as old Dr Stringfellow, whose eccentricity was more or less extensively on view. Miss Fontaney was very far from being, in Robin Warboys’ phrase, round the bend. But, sooner or later, something not easy to regard as wholly rational was going to appear in her. And already she wasn’t all that easy to converse with. Ought he to challenge her on this statement that she had gone to the Joplings’ on business? This was a difficult question – which meant that it was of an order that Quail had a trick of answering rapidly. “Business?” he echoed easily as he took his cup. “Are you thinking of doing business with Warden Jopling?”
Miss Fontaney was now peering into a silver kettle that hung over a little blue flame on a sort of high tripod at her side. Had she begun to murmur an incantation, Quail would not have been altogether surprised. But all she did was to reply to his question without any appearance of being disconcerted. “Dear me, no. The Warden was simply acting as intermediary. He persuaded Mrs Jopling to give the luncheon. Mrs Jopling is a very amiable woman.” Miss Fontaney paused as if to give this a second thought. “That is to say, she is well connected. One would suppose her origins to be plebeian, but in fact they are not.”
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