An Oxford Tragedy (19 page)

‘At Oxford it was the same story. I worked day and night, but I was starved for friendship. Partly I couldn't afford to have friends, partly I hadn't the time for them, partly I hadn't the knack of making them. I was obsessed with the idea that I would carve out a great career for myself in medicine, and then pick up all the other things I'd missed. But you can't do it that way. If you postpone pleasures you never taste them. In a sort of way again I succeeded. Everyone prophesied great things for me; they said that I'd done better work in the schools than anyone for the last twenty years, and when I was elected to your research fellowship at St Thomas's I thought that at last I had reached the end of a long trail, and that the good days would begin. I saw a vista of happy and well-filled days, of congenial society and steady friendships, and of work which would bring me recognition and fame and contentment.

‘It didn't work out like that. You weren't unkind to me, but no one seemed to care. I suppose it was my fault. I'd lost or wasted all the human contacts I might have had, and I just didn't know how to set about making friends. I can never forget my first night in Common Room. Half the table was discussing a political novel which had just been published, and I had never heard the author's name, much less those of the people about whom he wrote; Hargreaves was discussing cricket, and I had never seen or even wished to see a first-class match; Shepardson was
speaking of wine, and I could not tell a claret from a burgundy. All your interests and your conversation and even your jokes were strange and alien and incomprehensible to me. One by one you tried to draw me into conversation, and one by one you gave me up. I was a member of Common Room, but I might just as well not have been there, for all the difference my presence made. I blame no one; you all had your language and it wasn't mine. So I became lonelier than ever. Of course I ought to have gone out into the world, but I wanted to conquer in my own way. I determined that in my laboratory I would triumph. There at least I was master of my fate, there I might win distinction which would make me someone in the world at last. And so I worked harder than ever before.

‘There was one exception to the general indifference. I refused the first two invitations which came to me from the President's Lodgings because I was too shy and too self-conscious to accept them, but I couldn't decently refuse the third. Ruth wrote to me the sort of note which made a refusal impossible. “I do hope you will come this time,” she said, “for my sister and I can't bear to think that there is a Fellow of St Thomas's whom we've never even met. It's not a party – there will only be my father and ourselves – so please say Yes.” I went because I had to, but I found what I had always wanted – understanding and friendship, and sympathy. They saw at once that I had no small talk and very few interests, and so they talked about my work and about the medical school and also about themselves. And somehow they made me talk too. For the first time I didn't feel shut out.

‘I think I fell in love with Ruth the first time I entered that house; I knew that I was deeply, irrevocably, in love with her before my first term here was over. Did she know or guess? I can't tell. Perhaps I was never anything more
to her than the dim little research Fellow with clumsy manners and no conversation, to whom she was kind because I belonged to St Thomas's, and because she was kind by nature. But she changed my whole world for me, and I began to dream dreams of a future so happy that I hardly dared to contemplate it. Then the blow fell. I'd been here more than two years when Ruth became engaged to Shirley, and I'd never suspected that she even liked him. When I heard the news it seemed as though my whole world had crashed and that there was nothing more to live for. I remember leaving my rooms and walking blindly out into the country; I walked all day and somewhere about nightfall I reached Swindon. I suppose I looked pretty wild, and I had no money and of course no luggage – anyhow, no one would give me a bed, so I tramped back again all through the night. I was all in when I got to Oxford, but I knew by then what I had to do. For Ruth's sake I had to carry on as though nothing had happened; I must disguise my feelings and go through all the polite motions of congratulation and good wishes and general rejoicing.

‘I did it somehow – the hardest thing I'd ever done – and I even went further. Day by day I forced myself to try to know and to like Shirley; I wanted to see in him someone who was worthy of Ruth's love and who would make her happy. There again, in a sort of way, I succeeded. That was how I came to know Mary. I'd hardly noticed her before, because I'd had eyes for no one but Ruth, but gradually I came to think more and more of her. Winn, you must understand all this, or no one ever will. I've read somewhere that no man can ever really love two women in his life, but that's not true. I believe I loved Ruth as truly as any man can love a woman, yet I came to love Mary no less. I can't properly analyse my state of mind at that time. Bertrand Russell says somewhere that common
dislike of a third party is one of the great instinctive causes of mutual liking, but I believe there's a stronger motive than that. For Ruth's sake both Mary and I had made up our minds independently to like Shirley. We were always defending him against criticism, excusing his faults, softening down his asperities, concealing his angularities. Both of us were determined that Ruth should be happy in her married life, and because I wanted to do all that I could to help I forced myself to go not less but more often than ever before to the President's Lodgings. It was torture to me at first, but not for very long. So, you see, Mary and I fell into a kind of tacit alliance – an alliance to protect Ruth and Shirley from a censorious world – and gradually what had been a conscious deception became, for both of us, I believe, the simple truth. We saw that for all his bitterness and cynicism Shirley was indeed a good man at heart, a man with whom Ruth might be happy, and we struggled to make the world think so too. That was how Mary and I came together, and gradually, more and more, she herself filled my mind, until one day I came to the knowledge that I loved her, and that life might still hold for me a happiness which I had supposed lost for ever.

‘Pride made me dissemble, and in my blindness I saw no danger in delay. It became an
idée fixe
with me that I would never go to her as a penniless and obscure scholar; I would wait until my work had brought me fame and a position in the world of learning. How different everything would be if I could speak to her as a man who had already made his mark, whose future was assured, who had some claim to hold up his head wherever he might be! I could not bear to think that she should ever be ashamed of me. So I worked with a new incentive and redoubled zeal, and I came very near to a great scientific triumph. Miserable, pathetic pride! I see my mistake all too clearly now. I fancy that she guessed my love, I believe that she was
ready to reciprocate it. But as time passed and I made no sign I think she convinced herself that she had been wrong, and that I cared less for her than for my wretched research. She had her pride, too. You know the outcome. If Wimpfheimer had never followed out that particular line of inquiry at Freiburg I might now have my European reputation, but what does that matter? It's paltry, anyhow. It was Mary's engagement to Hargreaves last October that broke me, and destroyed my life.

‘I can't talk of him with reason or restraint. To me from the first day I met him he represented every quality that I most dislike. It wasn't only that he was supercilious in a well-bred kind of way and that he was obviously contemptuous towards me and my work. No one likes that kind of attitude; it rankles when more important things are forgotten. But there was something more. He hadn't an ideal in him – he was just the materialist and the sensualist through and through. When I think of selfishness and egotism it is Hargreaves who springs at once to my mind. I don't believe that he ever gave one hour's thought to the good or well-being of anyone except himself. I know that he was popular and brilliant and successful, but who were his real friends? Weren't they all the self-satisfied, prosperous, successful people? Have you ever known him stretch out a hand to anyone who belonged to other classes of persons than those? How I hate what men call success! Just because he had been a good scholar and a notable athlete, and because he was well-off and well-connected, you all fell for him. You all thought of him as the finest product of Oxford and St Thomas's. Perhaps I'm unjust, but you know that he dominated you all. And yet he hasn't an ounce of pity or humanity or sympathy in his composition. Would he have sacrificed a single day's pleasure to help any one of us? Did he even think of any of the women in his life as anything more than a satisfaction to his desires
or a plaything for his vanity? You know those buildings with a great pretentious façade and behind only a few mean shallow rooms; that's how I think of Hargreaves.

‘Not that I worried at the beginning. He could go his way and I could go mine. I cared nothing for him – nothing until last October, when he became engaged to Mary. Fool that I was not to have foreseen some such disaster! How could I have imagined that no competitor would rob me of my prize? Yet how could I have thought that she would be deceived by such a man as Hargreaves? And yet again, why not? For being what she was she would only see his better side; the brilliance, the dominating masculinity. He had always the power to charm women when he wished.

‘I've come to the hardest part of my tale, and again I beg you to try to understand. When that second blow fell my dislike of Hargreaves turned to a blazing hatred. It was an obsession, filling my life and my thoughts and my whole being, blotting out everything else. I would go to sleep thinking of him, I would wake up hating him with a new intensity. I could do no work, I could read no book. If I'd had one friend in whom I could have confided it might have been different, for there's healing in confession, but there was no one. So I brooded alone and stoked the fires of hate. Pray God, Winn, that you never know what human hate can mean. Brendel's quite right. You must know the man you hate inside out. Never have I known a fellow-creature as I came to know Hargreaves. I felt an overmastering desire to explore and expose every hidden chamber in that dark and selfish mind. My every hour was filled with the thought of him, and every hour the determination in me grew stronger that somehow, by hook or by crook, I would prevent him from marrying Mary. Surely in some way I could make it impossible for such a man to marry her – and kill all her happiness with his
selfishness. For every other evil quality is forgivable, as it seems to me, except only that one. There's no hope and no forgiveness for the purely selfish man.

‘It was madness, I suppose, madness and hate combined. I plunged into his life like a private detective tracking down a crime, or like a surgeon opening up a body for a major operation. But I wanted to kill rather than to cure. And the deeper I delved the more I was confirmed in my estimate of his character. It's wonderful what you can learn about a man if you make up your mind to find out, and I gave up all my time to the task. Conversations with those who had travelled with him in vacations, hints here, suggestions there. I see now how history can be written, if the historian applies himself wholeheartedly to his task, as I did to mine. Slowly I filled in the picture. We all knew, or guessed, that Hargreaves didn't live exactly a cloistered life out of term – why should he? – but none of you, except myself, knew how much of his life was spent in sordid amorous intrigues and in the pursuit of casual pleasure. It's not a pretty picture, but then the selfish sensualist is never an agreeable sight, and Hargreaves was nothing if not promiscuous. And somehow the fact that he lived his life in compartments – that up here in term he was, to all seeming, a respectable and respected member of society – made it worse in my eyes. I thought of that façade again, with all its magnificence and display, but behind it I seemed to picture mean tenements and festering slums.

‘Then I discovered something else. Men that live the life that Hargreaves lived are apt to run risks, and he had not escaped. I needn't tell you in detail how I found that out. You know that I do blood-tests for Lorimer, and Hargreaves happened to be Lorimer's patient. Of course I oughtn't to have known whose tests I was making – but no one is always discreet, and even medical men among themselves sometimes let out secrets. I don't excuse myself
for a moment; I had a suspicion and I ferreted out that secret. That's all there is to say about it. It was mean of me, no doubt, but I would have wormed knowledge of Hargreaves from the Sphinx herself if it had been necessary. Anyhow, I did find out, no matter exactly how. I'm not prudish – hardly any medical man is or can be. We think of disease of that kind rather as a stroke of ill-fortune than as a punishment for wrongdoing. Don't think for a moment that I set up as a moralist, or as a judge of my fellow-men. But there was something in this particular case which gave me a feeling of loathing and repulsion, and fanned my hatred to a more savage blaze. I mustn't be technical, but it was just this. When Hargreaves became engaged in October I was still getting positive reaction from his blood-tests; in other words, he had no right to ask any woman then to share his life. A decent man must have waited, must have postponed that step until he had the certainty of a cure. For a cure can be certain and generally is. But you can't fathom the selfishness of a man like Hargreaves.

‘Wasn't it natural that I should bend all my energies to prevent that cursed marriage? Wasn't I justified a hundred times over in trying to do so? Day by day the conviction became stronger that, by fair means or foul, I would stop him from ruining Mary's life. But how could I do it? There's too much of the Hamlet in every one of us; I thought and schemed and brooded, but I couldn't screw up my courage to act. Time and again I rehearsed all that I might – that I must – say, and time after time I could not bring myself to the scratch. I saw in anticipation all too vividly how he would receive me. He would sneer at my interference and bludgeon down my arguments. How could I, who had always failed, hope to find words to move Hargreaves, who had always dominated, always succeeded, always had his own way? I felt the miserable burden of my own weakness –
I loathed my own incompetence and powerlessness. So for weeks I hesitated, torn between timidity and overwhelming hatred.