Cucumber Sandwiches

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Nothing of the kind.’ The Jarvie liked this ability to be cheeky without being impertinent. ‘There’s always a bit of a young entry. Just get yourself made a don, Miles, and I’ll have them elect you at once.’

  ‘It’s an attractive proposition, and I’ll think it over. But I’m sorry you won’t hear Idomeneo.’

  ‘At least you can. Just drop in, and turn it on. It’s Crumble’s half-day, so you’ll have the place to yourself – unless that nice man Roderick Dundark is fit enough to come. He usually turns up for Mozart.’

  ‘Fit enough? Is there something wrong with Roderick?’

  Like Alastair Davoch and the Jarvie himself, Roderick Dundark was a Scot. Unlike these two, he was hazy about even his great-grandparents. His father was a dentist, his home was in Glasgow, and the Jarvie, who highly approved of the college’s accepting a certain number of youths of humble origin, had taken a great fancy to him.

  ‘It’s confidential, in a way. Men don’t like it getting round that they’ve put on a bit of a turn, eh? But I can rely on your discretion, Miles?’

  ‘I’ve got lots, Jarvie. So I think you can.’ Miles was now looking at the Jarvie with what an objective observer of their relationship might have described as an uncustomary genuineness of attention. ‘Has Roderick gone sick?’

  ‘I suppose it may be called that. You know how reluctant I am, Miles, to discuss intimate matters with you men.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ There was no hint of irony in Miles’s voice. ‘You don’t think Roderick has been going with women?’ This weird phrase of the Jarvie’s – ‘going with women’ – had long ago become part of the mythology of the college. On a wall in Miles’s own rooms hung a lithograph by Toulouse-Lautrec with the query Going with women? pencilled neatly in the margin. But again no faintest trace of mockery had attended Miles’s use of it now.

  ‘It might be that.’ The Jarvie looked gravely doubtful. ‘Sleepless nights, eh? Fact is, he dropped off – and on that very sofa you’re sitting on at this moment.’

  ‘Went to sleep?’

  ‘Yesterday, after tea. He was sitting there smoking – and in what you might call rather a dreamy way. I’d put something on the gramophone, so we weren’t talking much. And Roderick fell asleep. Nothing very remarkable in that. Only I couldn’t wake him up again when I thought it was time to do so. Fortunately Crumble came in.’

  ‘Crumble?’ There was something almost sharp in Miles Honeybeare’s voice.

  ‘The man’s a rascal, of course.’ It was one of the Jarvie’s conceivably upper-class vagaries that he never ceased to take satisfaction in the presumed scoundrelism of his attendant. ‘But resourceful, all the same. We got Roderick more or less on his feet. Something funny about his eyes, though.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Oh, Crumble got him back to his rooms, and tucked him up. No fuss of any sort. Would you describe yourself as one of Roderick’s intimates, Miles?’

  ‘I know him pretty well.’

  ‘It just occurs to me that you might have a word with him. You know how reluctant I am to tread on delicate ground myself.’

  ‘I have heard you say so, sir.’

  ‘It’s just possible’—the Jarvie had lowered his voice—’that he may be masturbating excessively. Don’t you think?’

  ‘I can’t say I have thought.’ For a moment Miles Honeybeare’s eyes had really rounded in honest wonder on the Jarvie. ‘But it’s an idea no doubt.’

  ‘There’s a great deal of pious rubbish talked about self-abuse. By the parsons, chiefly.’ There was a vein of stiff anti-clericalism in the Jarvie. ‘Endless damage done in private schools by telling boys they’ll go insane, and so on. Still, μηόέυ άγαυ, eh? Loses its point when overdone.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Honeybeare would have been obtuse had he supposed the Jarvie consciously to have touched a note of levity. ‘Whatever the situation is, I’ll try to look into it.’

  ‘Capital! Roderick Dundark is an extremely nice man, but he hasn’t had the advantages you and I are so ashamed of.’ This time, the Jarvie was being amusing. Most suitable men had heard, in contexts of similarly slender relevance, this particular crack. ‘And perhaps you’ll let me know.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Miles Honeybeare scrambled to his feet, removed a patch of mud from a naked thigh, and considerately tossed it into the fire. ‘I’ll tell you anything I can.’

  It takes very little longer to change into evening clothes unassisted than it does when supported by a valet. But the Jarvie had forgotten this, and in Crumble’s absence had begun the operation earlier than need be. So he found himself with time on his hands, and decided to make his way across the city on foot to Magdalen. When he went out at night nowadays – which, as he had told Honeybeare, was very seldom – it had become his habit to take a cab. So this walk was virtually a novelty.

  Almost at once, he felt his surroundings to be alien and bewildering. There were too many people he couldn’t conceive himself as talking to, and too many shops he couldn’t imagine entering. Quite small things disconcerted him: the sudden appearance in an unexpected place of a lighted window with the surely rather engaging legend Dear Friend’s Restaurant; a street-vendor selling clockwork toys that tumbled on the pavement in the London manner; the fact that there seemed to be a vogue among young men—could they be undergraduates?—for going about in their mothers’ fur coats. He passed one of the women’s colleges. A number of men were hanging about outside it, and every now and then a girl would run out, throw herself into the arms of one of them, and embrace with a passion – or at least sustained motility – which the Jarvie judged improper in a public street. Nor did there probably exist any reason why these escorts should not have called for their ladies within the decent privacies of the college, since the dons in such places were widely acknowledged to be sensible women. The spectacle, the Jarvie told himself, represented an upward percolation from the customs of the folk. It was just thus that the outdoor men and the farm lads would have waited beyond the moat at Jerviswoode, for his mother’s innumerable maidservants to scurry out to them. Only there would have been more decency and gentleness at Jerviswoode. The gallants would have had to coax their mistresses into some deeper shade, pay them the tribute of murmured semi-articulate speech, before anything quite like that jigging began.

  The Jarvie quickened his pace, frowning. He was very deeply displeased.

  And he had muddled the date of his dining club. Fortunately, he had not penetrated so far into Magdalen as to embarrass an unprepared host. A porter in the lodge, asked by an old gentleman in a dinner-jacket as to where Dr Furness was receiving his guests, had respectfully touched on the possibility that Dr Furness was expecting them tomorrow. The truth of this had flashed upon the Jarvie at once. Sharply enjoining upon the porter a maximum of reticence, he had withdrawn precipitately to that indeterminate territory where Oxford’s famous High Street transforms itself into Oxford’s equally famous Magdalen Bridge. It was cold, and had begun to rain.

  The hour was too late to get into Hall. It was the evening of the week upon which neither Crumble nor his spouse could be summoned at short notice without tyranny. The Jarvie had no opinion of himself as one who, in a crisis, has the power to turn to upon pots and pans. He could indeed boil an egg, but there is a crucial gap between that and making an omelette. The Jarvie walked approximately eighty yards towards Carfax, and entered the hospitable portals of the Eastgate Hotel. More than fifty years before, he had eaten a sequence of hurried but satisfactory luncheons here between writing morning and afternoon papers in the Final Honour School of Literae Humaniores. It was probable that they still turned on a decent meal.

  This they did. But although he didn’t feel at all odd in his solitude and his dinner-jacket (since with aged Wykemists certain sorts of unselfconsciousness are absolute), there wasn’t all that to linger on. And this was why he got back to his college rooms at an odd betwixt-and-between sort of hour.

  Mount
ing his worm-eaten but reassuringly massive staircase, he recognised with pleasure the strains of Idomeneo, re di Creta. The man to whom inscrutable Nature denies the path to fatherhood is at least spared the risk of having to sacrifice a son to Poseidon. But the Jarvie would gladly have taken the risk. He would have liked a son, were a son not the gift of something as inconceivable as a wife. It was why he had spent his life in this place, with other men’s sons around him.

  From his sitting-room, where the music was, there came the sound of voices as well. Miles Honeybeare must have been joined by somebody else. It was odd, perhaps, that they should be talking while the opera went on. And was there not something odd, too, about the way the voices were behaving? This question only brushed the Jarvie’s mind. For there was a light under his bedroom door – perhaps he had left it on when changing – and noticing it put into his head a notion which he didn’t quite clearly formulate. A dinner-jacket is a dreary garment, whereas in his bedroom hung a smoking-jacket in faded rose-coloured velvet of which he was rather fond. He would first go into his bedroom and change jackets. That he would be doing this for Miles was the element in his project that he didn’t quite let crystallise in his mind. So he opened his bedroom door – but only to stop dead on the threshold. There was a girl lying on the bed, curled up on top of the coverlet. She was asleep. And she had almost nothing on.

  The Jarvie was very angry. Other emotions might follow but he felt nothing but simple anger now. As a consequence of this, he had no disposition to be deflected from action by the indecent exiguity of the girl’s attire. He marched over to her, seized her by the shoulder, and gave her a good shake.

  ‘Wake up,’ he said. ‘Wake up, dress yourself, and be so good as to leave these rooms at once.’

  It was a rousing injunction. But, at least for some moments, it simply didn’t arouse. The Jarvie had a queer sense of being back with Roderick Dundark – and when the girl did open her eyes and stare at him this impression was for some reason enhanced. But now his attention was recalled to the other room. The music had been turned off abruptly, and this made the voices more audible. Two men were talking. One was Miles and the other was Crumble. The voices were angry, and suddenly one of them – Crumble’s – rang out very loud. It was as if the man had lost control of himself.

  ‘Twenty bloody quid!’ Crumble was saying. ‘Are you kidding? It’s a cool hundred from you, young man, and plenty from the others as well.’

  The Jarvie had never heard a speech like this, and he didn’t take in quite all of it. But he no longer had any disposition to bother his head about the little slut on his bed. She could go to the devil without any assistance from him. He made for his sitting-room in strides recaptured from twenty years’ back, and flung open the door.

  Miles Honeybeare, too, wasn’t very completely dressed. But he didn’t, somehow, look like a lover awkwardly detected in his pleasures. He looked much more like a small boy at a prep school who has been caught out in some nocturnal prank. And, the Jarvie told himself, at a damned bad prep school, where discipline is slammed into the children with a cane. The distressing fact had to be faced that Miles was cutting up a poor show. He was extremely scared.

  It annoyed the Jarvie that Miles, even if badly caught out, should be unable to hold his own with a servant. But at least the job could be done for him. It had better be done in as few words as possible.

  ‘Miles,’ the Jarvie said, ‘is my man attempting to extort money from you?’

  Miles, looking even more scared than before, just managed to nod his head dumbly.

  ‘Speak up, please. Is Crumble trying to blackmail you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Crumble, you are dismissed. It would be improper that I should give you any money in lieu of notice. And you are to leave at once. If you have any property in my rooms, it must be collected by messenger. You will not again be admitted within the bounds of the college. I am only sorry for your wife, who is a decent woman enough. You may go.’

  ‘You’ll bloody well pay too, you old bastard,’ Crumble said. ‘Or you’ll bloody well suffer too. And no mistake. I can still have this kid student of yours gaoled, for a start.’

  The Jarvie’s reaction to this was unexpected and resourceful. He turned and walked back into his bedroom. The young woman was now dressed, and in the act of making for the door. The Jarvie did no more than take a further good look at her. Then he returned to the other room.

  ‘Crumble,’ he said, ‘you’re a fool. The girl is twenty, if she’s a day. It is true that you have it in your power to embarrass Mr Honeybeare in his relations both with his parents and with the college authorities. But nothing more. On the other hand, were a prosecution for blackmail to be brought against you, I am not a witness who would be disbelieved. Only let me hear of you opening your mouth about this wretched affair to a living soul, and I make you an absolute promise of a stiff term of imprisonment. Clear out.

  And Crumble cleared out. He did so in a cowed manner but with muttered threats and imprecations, like a villain in melodrama who has suddenly been reduced to wholesome impotence. Miles Honeybeare, however, didn’t appear to view his exit in this light.

  ‘I say!’ Miles said. ‘I don’t think you ought to have done that. I expect I could have found him some money.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ The Jarvie, although he was looking at Miles Honeybeare more coldly than he had perhaps ever looked at a young man before, was careful to keep anything like disapprobation out of his voice. ‘You have broken certain college rules, I suppose, but you certainly haven’t broken the law. Therefore—’

  ‘I . . . I didn’t even have her, as a matter of fact. You see, when one’s on a—well, when one’s in rather a funny state—’

  ‘Miles, I have no wish to discuss these details.’ The Jarvie was shocked that the young man should have said ‘I didn’t even have her’ instead of ‘we didn’t even make love’, for he was quite as faithful to what he conceived to be the idiom of his class as to its mores. ‘As you know, I never comment on affaires before marriage, except on strictly practical lines. But I do resent your behaving as you have done in my rooms. It has been an abuse of hospitality such as I wouldn’t expect.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Miles Honeybeare wasn’t so perturbed as not to get in this apology swiftly and adroitly.

  ‘Thank you. We need not think of that again. As for Crumble, he is of course a rascal. I’ve always known he was a rascal. But put him out of your head. He is not going to risk trouble simply for the pleasure of indicting an undergraduate of . . . of ineffectual fornication.’

  As he said this, the Jarvie produced, unexpectedly, his famous short bark of laughter. But Miles didn’t seem at all relieved.

  ‘Look, Jarvie, you don’t understand! I ought to have taken fright, after hearing about Roderick.’ Miles didn’t pause to let the Jarvie make anything of this remark. ‘It’s the hell of a mess! As things are now, they pounce simply on the strength of a single anonymous tip off. If once—’

  ‘You’re talking nonsense. I don’t know how undergraduates can imagine such things. Neither the Provost nor the Dean would dream of giving countenance to anonymous letters. And now, Miles, you had better go to bed. And perhaps next term will be time enough for us to meet again.’

  ‘Good night, sir – and thank you.’ If Miles Honeybeare looked a little like one despairing in the face of obstinate incomprehension, he yet got this out creditably enough. And as he moved towards the door, the Jarvie laid a hand fleetingly on his shoulder.

  The Jarvie, who seldom so much as shook hands with a man after their first meeting, hadn’t permitted himself so extravagant a gesture for years.

  7

  It was a week later, and thus not long before the end of term, that the Jarvie went for an afternoon stroll along the tow-path. A good deal of more or less inexpert rowing was going on, for Torpids were as yet far off, and the freshmen were mostly at the stage of being promoted from constant tubbing to seeing what they coul
d make of one another when shoved into an eight. The spectacle of free born Britons comporting themselves like galley-slaves at the command of bicycling coaches in enormous Leander scarves always pleased and amused the Jarvie, and the rhythm of the young bodies driving through from the stretcher, tugging back the oar to the expanded chest feathering with a strong flexure of the wrists, thrusting apart their knees as they came forward for the next stroke he judged a sight which the elders of Sparta themselves might envy.

  Not that the Jarvie stared. He lacked the rowing man’s expert eye which alone would have rendered seemly anything of the sort. Moreover, he had to give care to his step, just as he had to do in a quad at night. He moved forward using his walking-stick with precision, and one would have supposed him to be just one more elderly don (which he was) sunk in some wholly learned abstraction (which he was not). The Jarvie was thinking about the men, and in particular about his handling of Miles Honeybeare when that nasty business had so suddenly blown up. He was also giving thought to quite practical affairs. The departure of Crumble, the departure even of Mrs Crumble, had produced inconvenience, only imperfectly resolved by his having managed to arrange with the bursar for the temporary part-time services of a college scout. But Crumble had been a good riddance, all the same. The Jarvie smiled to himself as he thought of the scoundrel’s vain threats as he shuffled away.

  But the men, almost literally, had shuffled away too. He had surely been right in telling Miles to make himself scarce until next term, when time would have eased the constraint such a miserable rencontre had been bound to generate. But he hadn’t meant to tell Miles to take his friends with him. Yet this seemed to have happened. Nobody had been near the Jarvie for days. The members of Miles’s set whom he had encountered around the college had appeared alarmed and shifty; one or two of them had even walked past him with their eyes on the ground or the heavens, which was the most ill-mannered conduct of which a man could, in the Jarvie’s view, be convicted. It looked as if Miles, far from keeping his mouth shut about his bad behaviour, had vindictively set going a kind of boycott.