‘Nothing of the sort. Your husband doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ The Jarvie had spoken so brusquely to this idiotic crawling woman that he felt some amends must be made. He honestly believed that he had been brought up to be undeviatingly courteous to servants. ‘But it’s true that our life in college is not quite what it was. Something of the sort was in my mind not an hour ago. No doubt rightly, family commitments occupy a great part of my colleagues’ time. What has become, I ask myself, of the most important hours in an Oxford college? The two or three hours before midnight, that is, and sometimes an hour or two after that. In my time as Dean, I used to gate the ablest men quite regularly. On trumped up charges, if necessary.’ As he produced this implausible reminiscence, the Jarvie gave a surprisingly savage little laugh. ‘And then they would go round paying calls. For that matter, a man might invite one to drop in the very evening after one had gated him. And one would have real talk. There was a serious interest in philosophy in Oxford in those days.’ The Jarvie checked himself, conscious that it was a little odd to be talking to Mrs Crumble like this. And once more he frowned at the untouched crumpets, decently invisible beneath their cover. ‘And now, Mrs Crumble, I think you can take away the tea.’
‘Yes, sir. But first I’ll just fill your coal-scuttle.’
‘Thank you, no.’
‘Oh, it’s no trouble at all, sir.’
‘I didn’t say it was. But put that thing down.’ The Jarvie was now so annoyed with Mrs Crumble that he spoke very gently indeed, with the paradoxical result that Mrs Crumble dropped the scuttle as abruptly as if she had been bawled at. ‘And please ask Crumble to come up the moment he reaches college. He must go over to common room for a bottle of brandy. It is likely that some of the men will be coming in for music later. Good evening, Mrs Crumble.’
As soon as the woman had gone away, the Jarvie moodily turned on one of the electric heaters with which the bursar had insisted on providing him. The contraption purred officiously, much like Mrs Crumble calling attention to the assiduity with which she performed her offices. He found himself pacing restlessly about his large, lofty, rather murkily commodious room. It was full of the battered and worm-eaten but impressive objects which a younger son will contrive to carry away from a great house. On the walls, between the books, were eighteenth-century copies of seventeenth-century portraits. Most of the men supposed these to be of college worthies, but they were Jerviswoodes and Crawfords and Grahams, including that James Graham, Marquess of Montrose, who (as the Jarvie might have reminded some particularly favoured man) had written ‘My dear and only love’.
... But if thou wilt be constant then,
And faithful of thy word,
I’ll make thee glorious by my pen,
And famous by my sword.
I’ll serve thee in such noble ways
Was never heard before:
I’ll crown and deck thee all with bays,
And love thee evermore.
The Jarvie, whom one would not have suspected of harbouring in memory much amatory verse, repeated the stanza silently to himself as he stood before the portrait. Then he moved back to the window.
Moist autumn dusk was seeping into the quad, nosing out for a start only retired corners and the already cavernous mouths of staircases; elsewhere it was not yet an assured objective presence, so that the Jarvie fleetingly wondered if his sense had clouded, his vision taken some swift treacherous jump towards growing dim. But nothing of the sort. He saw very well, and heard too. From quite far away he could hear clearly now – for he had thrown up the lower sash on an impulse – the shouts and laughter of the Provost’s young children, romping in their high-walled garden after tea. Then, from near at hand, came a burst of laughter much louder than this.
He looked down. Two young men, back from squash, were passing beneath his windows. Foreshortened as they were, their naked legs appeared to issue directly from beneath a superincumbent voluminousness of scarves and sweaters. The laughter had sprung simultaneously from each, as if only the most intuitive impulse had prompted it. And now they stopped before an archway before taking their several paths. Unconsciously they shifted from poised foot to foot, their bodies swaying like saplings. They half-circled each other, and their rackets took small token swipes in air. They had enjoyed their game and were talking nonchalantly and gaily, acknowledging a faint casual reluctance to part.
The Jarvie listened – like a high-born maiden, he told himself humorously, in a palace-tower. He listened innocently, since it was so little anything like private communication that was going on. The words came up to him clearly, yet conveyed nothing at all. Perhaps he lacked some key to them. Or perhaps it was not really the particular remarks of particular young men that he was listening to.
There was an impatient shout from an invisible source. One of the squash-players bellowed a cheerful and rude reply, regardless of disturbing the calm of more studious persons on nearby staircases; then he turned from his companion and went with long strides at a slow double across the quad. Meleager, the Jarvie said to himself, Meleager at the chase. The second young man had disappeared beneath the archway, and the quad was silent again. It was suddenly very silent, and also a little melancholy. The Jarvie was about to close the window, but first he looked at his watch. It was within a minute of six o’clock, and he waited for the bells.
They would come with the delicate disregard for brute synchronism for which Oxford bells are famous. The first were both small and far away, so that one would hear only notes on the verge of silence, as at the start of the New World Symphony. (The music to which the Jarvie was always ready to entertain the men tended to be of a sort much in esteem forty years before.) Then there would be medium-sized bells quite close at hand, and then small bells again in the middle distance. Next there would be a mélange of many bells all over the place, and finally – far away again, but loudest of the lot – the great Christ Church bell.
So the Jarvie paused, and not in vain. But what he heard was not what he had awaited; it was the sudden clangour of first one and then a second ambulance—or was it a fire-engine?—clamouring for way through some traffic-jammed street beyond the college. These bells rang demoniacally, and behind them the siren of a police-car added ululation to uproar. Neither spire nor tower nor belfry had a chance. The Christ Church bell alone asserted itself, and that only on its concluding boom.
He closed the window. He hoped that a life had been saved, or at least property preserved. But the urgent alarm had been like a tocsin. It had seemed to speak to him disturbingly of a world outside the college walls, which was sudden, violent, and unexpected: no world of his.
2
But within the walls, also, there was one world that was alien to him. He would refer to it – without facetiousness and merely in the antique phraseology which he found natural – as the praeposital Lodging. When Goldengrove, a bachelor and his oldest friend, had been Provost the Jarvie had taken on the role (as it used to amuse him to say) of Provost’s lady; he had done this to the extent, at least, of constantly lending Goldengrove a hand at entertaining the men. Goldengrove had been properly interested in the men. When they had departed (with the trustworthy correctness of former days) from the praeposital library in which whisky had signalled the conclusion of the entertainment, the two friends would linger over the fire till midnight, happily gossiping about this man and that. Young Howard was tipped for a First in Greats. Somerset was the split image of his grandfather. The rather awkward Open Scholar from Huddersfield was a delightful lad, but that grandson of old Berryman’s, having got into Pop at Eton, showed no sign of any ability to get out of it. And you only had to glance at the shoulders of that quiet Rhodes Scholar from Harvard to know that the college was going to go head of the river.
Oh, golden nights with Tony Goldengrove! The Jarvie’s eyes – for he was an old man – would grow moist as he thought of them.
Not that he bore the new order in the Lodging any ill-will. It wa
s only after that injudicious third brandy in common room that he had murmured to one of the droopy-moustached Scottish lairds that over there the Lion and the Lizard now kept the Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep – or as deep as is proper in the Head of a House entertaining freshmen. Nor would he have ventured so rite a quotation but for the inviting fact that Finch, the new Provost, wore his hair in a fashion consciously leonine, and that Mrs Finch, though doubtless a charming woman, was, with her dartingly protrusive tongue, most damnably like a lizard.
Mrs Finch was very conscious of the Jarvie as the late Provost’s friend, and as therefore peculiarly associated with a departed order. It would have been inaccurate and unfair to say that, because of this, she set out to be gracious to him. More troublesomely, she was determined to be friendly. In the past the Jarvie had been accustomed to give in his rooms each term a single luncheon party to which ladies were invited. In the way of hospitality returned, these somewhat formal occasions had served to balance as many incursions into general society as politeness constrained him to adventure upon. The system would have brought the Finches in contact with the Jerviswoode silver (‘Strike agayne’ was the motto on the spoons and forks) once a year, and the Jarvie to fiddling with Mrs Finch’s pretentious Venetian finger-bowls not much oftener than that. But Mrs Finch let it be known at once that these exiguous and equipoised exchanges would by no means do; that she was going to rely upon the Jarvie a great deal; and that her absolute gratitude would go out to him if he accepted as many of her invitations as he could. The Jarvie, Mrs Finch said, stood for all that was most important in the continuing life of the college (she abounded in phrases of this kind) and above all would be invaluable to her in her efforts to get to know the undergraduates. It was universally recognised that the Jarvie had an unrivalled understanding of young men.
The Jarvie’s first exposure to all this cost him a sleepless night. But Crumble had hardly brought in his early morning tea before it came to him that Mrs Finch must be obeyed. Or obeyed more often than not. He would respond to, say, three summonses out of five. Her lights might be dim, but it was honestly according to them that she was making an effort to be a Provost’s wife. He didn’t at all see himself in the character of what was now called a P.R.O. – private relations and not public relations were what he judged as important in civilised behaviour – but it was his duty to back the woman up even if he was to be treated in her drawing-room as a minor institution. He had also to remember that, being now a mere Emeritus Fellow, he continued to reside in college only by favour of the Provost himself. It would scarcely be sensible to offend the Finches.
Nothing of this was in the Jarvie’s head as, having closed his window on the defeated bells, he turned and walked back to his fireplace. He had remembered that the Eroica Symphony was to be broadcast that evening, and at a time which would enable him to spend a quietly convivial hour in common room before coming back to hear it. But no sooner had he registered his satisfaction over this than his glance chanced to fall upon a square of pasteboard on the mantelpiece. It was one of Mrs Finch’s too-frequent dinner invitations, and it was for this very evening. He had inexplicably forgotten about it. Being unread in the psychopathology of everyday life, the Jarvie found this unaccountable as well as tiresome. There was nothing to be done but submit. It was all the more vexatious in that there was such a probability that men would be coming in for the music. The Jarvie went over to his desk, took a piece of scrap-paper (for most of his habits evinced the Jerviswoode frugality), and wrote:
Third on Third at 9.30
Go in and turn on
Back not long after 10
V. S-J.
The Jarvie laughed barkingly at this, recognising in it the authentic Jarvie flavour. He would pin the invitation up on his unsported oak before presenting himself in Mrs Finch’s drawing-room.
An hour later, having admonished Crumble in the matter of the coal and transferred himself into the dinner-jacket laid out by his chastened factotum, the Jarvie emerged into the dark quadrangles – quiet, deserted, and almost unlit at this hour when few people were not in Hall. From five to seven the men had been reading their texts or writing their essays, each in the roomy solitude of his set (although the college’s New Building, indeed, consisted of bed-sitters: atrocities brought into being by the pressure of external forces incomprehensible to the Jarvie). Or perhaps some of them had been talking – for that is all-important too – in small groups of intimates sharing a bottle of sherry. And now all the life of the college (as Mrs Finch would say) had been drawn together for the common meal. The Jarvie counted the flight of time chiefly in terms of the diminishing number of these sacramental occasions that could lie ahead of him. It was the fact of missing one of them, rather than the mere boredom almost certainly impending in the Lodging, that irked him as he cautiously skirted the invisible ancient grass. Caution was necessary because the flagstones beneath his feet were cracked, uneven, and in places slippery. Moreover, although it was debatable whether the Jarvie was yet to be described as failing, there was undeniably the hint of an old man’s totter in his walk. It was as if in each setting down of a foot there lurked a minute element of deliberation. At this moment his head was registering a motion which did not in fact exist, that of a gently rolling deck beneath his tread. But physical disabilities can bring odd compensations. Entering the main quad, and thus having the long line of lighted Hall windows at some remove on his right hand, the Jarvie seemed suddenly to be in the presence of a great ship, a great liner, sailing by. Behind it was a sky powdered with stars.
Whither, though, was it voyaging? The question was sufficiently puzzling to occupy the Jarvie until the Provost’s front door lay obliquely before him. It was beneath the clear light shining from it, indeed, that he found himself almost on a collision course with a running undergraduate. Or not really almost, since the Jarvie had scarcely needed to modify his careful stride. So it was hardly incumbent upon the young man to check his flying speed, turn round, and apologise. Yet this the young man did. The Jarvie’s satisfaction in a show of decent manners increased when he saw that here was Miles Honeybeare, one of the nicest of the second-year men.
‘Jarvie! I’m so sorry.’ The men addressed the Jarvie either thus or as ‘Sir’, and it was generally felt that about fifty-fifty was what the old fellow liked. ‘I oughtn’t to have been going at such a lick.’ The friendliness of Honeybeare’s smile was delightful; it had a warmth that was somehow set off by the bleak light beating down on him. Honeybeare’s features were soft and dusky, and above them, and sometimes across them, tossed a tumble of long dark hair. ‘Are you going to dine with the Provost, sir?’
‘Yes, Miles. It happens from time to time.’ The Jarvie felt that between Miles Honeybeare and himself there flashed a glance of discreet and merry understanding. ‘But—do you know?—I’d clean forgotten about it. And they’re doing the Eroica on the Third Programme.’
‘Oh, too bad, Jarvie.’ Although Honeybeare had been in such a tearing hurry a minute before, no flicker of impatience appeared in him now. He might have been one of those squash-players – it came to the Jarvie with a stab of pleasure – idly pleased to prolong his chatter with his fellow.
‘But would you care to hear it, Miles? It’s at half-past nine. Do go in if you’d like to. One or two other men may be there, and I suppose Crumble won’t have forgotten something to drink. With luck I’ll be back by ten.’
‘It’s most frightfully kind of you, sir.’ Honeybeare was the sort of young man who could say such things without seeming faintly to sound a false note. ‘But I’ve got my essay, as a matter of fact. That’s why I’m going over the way to get a bun at the Stag. You save about half an hour by cutting Hall. As it is, I’m afraid I’ll have to work till two or three. My tutor’s given me a subject on which I’m quite criminally ignorant.’
‘Ah well, another time.’ Through long habituation, the Jarvie was able to approve these studious professions without quite believing
in them. Nowadays, he knew, many of the men actually formed acquaintanceships in the ladies’ colleges, took girls out to meals in restaurants, and even – within permitted hours – entertained them in college rooms. The Jarvie did not conceal from himself that he regretted these changed ways. They took something away from the place, away from a surely magical three or four years set beyond the rumour of the common world. Yet he did not tell himself that it would be better were such contacts postponed until the men went down. Certain misfortunes and even disasters, well known to his generation, were obviated by this particular sort of maturation coming earlier. The Jarvie wasn’t a fool. It is scarcely possible for a Fellow of an Oxford college to be that. But he was of a simple mind. And this simplicity certainly showed no sign of attenuating itself upon the approaches of old age.
‘Then you’d better cut along,’ he said now. As he spoke he turned upon Miles Honeybeare the particular regard with which (although he would never have conceived of it in this way) he had for long been accustomed to captivate young men. The conventional word for what was most obvious in this look would have been ‘quizzical’. It was appraising, and the issue of the appraisal appeared to be a faintly amused yet friendly scepticism. At the same time something in his expression – or it may even have been the slightest of conceivable movements of the head – remotely signalled the passing of a test. And if the Jarvie thus approved you it wasn’t because you were good-looking, or clever, or in some way a charmer, or notably well-bred. These things might be ponderable counters with him. But what he had essentially concluded about you was that you would be all right in an open boat, or in any similar exigency in which what may be called manhood is rather to the point. The Jarvie got away with this (for it can be considered in that light) because he managed it in a fashion so reassuringly remote from, say, the shaming explicitness of a sermon in a school chapel. There had just flickered between you and him the existence of a code which would utterly violate itself by utterance. It was something too momentary to be embarrassing.
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