An Oxford Tragedy (2 page)

We both got up, I feeling abashed and irritated at the collapse of my negotiation. Of course Maurice was right, but I could not help feeling that in some indefinable way I had been made to appear small and ridiculous. On the way to the door I made another effort to assert my dignity.

‘I hope,' I said, ‘that you'll unload that revolver. To leave loaded weapons lying about is unpardonable.'

‘On the contrary,' he replied, ‘I shall put it exactly as it is just here,' and he laid it on a large octagonal table, which stood close to his door. ‘The malefactors can then hardly fail to see it when they come into the room at nine o'clock to-morrow morning, and I shall begin by explaining to them the extreme danger involved in their conduct. But now I really must dress.'

I could hardly resist this second dismissal. In a state of considerable annoyance I walked out into the Quad and entered the Senior Common Room.

It was our custom at St Thomas's, as at most other Oxford colleges, to meet in Common Room some minutes before dinner, and to walk together from there by the small winding staircase which leads to the Hall above. We had little or no ceremony; those who were present at half-past
seven would walk together to Hall; those who were late came one by one and took the vacant places at the high table there. But that night I was anxious to be in good time in order that I might make the acquaintance of a distinguished person, who was to be the guest of the college for the next week. Not infrequently foreigners of distinction are invited to Oxford to deliver learned lectures to exiguous audiences, and ‘during their stay are usually the guests either of friends in the University or of colleges. Of Ernst Brendel, whom I was now to meet for the first time, I knew nothing save that he was a Viennese lawyer of European reputation, who was to deliver three lectures in Oxford for the faculty of Law. Both Prendergast, our law don, and the President, who had many friends among German men of learning, had been anxious that St Thomas's should offer him hospitality. We had asked him to stay with us, and he had accepted. As Senior Tutor, I was accustomed to preside at dinner in Hall and afterwards in Common Room, for the President seldom joined us, except on Sundays. Prendergast had undertaken to meet his fellow lawyer at the station, to show him his rooms, and to bring him to dinner, but I was anxious to be in Common Room to extend a welcome to him before dinner began.

I confess that the prospect did not fill me with pleasurable anticipation. I could remember with miserable clarity previous guests who had made Common Room life burdensome for the duration of their visits – a gentleman from Sweden so taciturn as to make human intercourse almost impossible, a German so voluble as to make all thought of it abhorrent, another who discussed so persistently and exclusively his own special subject – and that an abstruse affair of physics and mathematics – that the very words
Gelehrter
and
Sachverständiger
became to me as red rags to a bull. I hoped desperately, though without much confidence, that Brendel would at least speak sufficient English to make
conversation bearable, and that he would have grasped that great truth of polite society, the truth that guests have duties in entertainment no less than hosts. I opened the door and walked into the Senior Common Room.

Though it still wanted some ten minutes to dinner time, there were already two figures by the fire, and, as I came towards them, Prendergast stepped forward and introduced me to Brendel. In a moment all my fears and misgivings seemed to disappear. I saw before me a man rather below the middle height, but stoutly and compactly built. He appeared to be about fifty, with thick but greying hair, and glasses which twinkled in the reflexion of the lights. His dinner jacket was cut in a fashion vaguely but indefinably foreign, otherwise he had the appearance of a solid middleaged English family lawyer. But it was not his outward appearance which immediately impressed me, nor yet his voice, though that was pleasant enough; it was rather the immediate impression which he made upon me of security and understanding. Here, I said to myself, is a man who can be trusted; a man to whom secrets will be confided, and by whom they will never be betrayed; a man who will not easily be shocked and embarrassed but who will give good counsel in times of difficulty, a man full of sympathy, who is wise and tolerant because he has looked deep into human nature. And a man with it all who is humorous and kindly as well as learned. I glanced again at his face and noted the network of wrinkles round the corners of his eyes. Yes, emphatically, a man to know as a friend and to value as a counsellor. I don't mean, of course, that all these thoughts flashed immediately through my mind – no doubt they came to me gradually – but I do mean that in all my life I have never met another man for whom I felt a more immediate liking, respect, and sympathy. I have often thought since how I could describe Brendel, and I have never succeeded to my own satisfaction. If I lay stress on his look of friendliness and good nature I should not do justice
to the intelligence of his face, for good nature is too often stupid. If, again, I speak of the sensation of stability and confidence with which he inspired me, I should run the risk of forgetting that he retained all the alertness of a man half his age. He belonged, I think, to that class of persons who, because they are profoundly interested in and sympathetic towards their fellow men, can never in nature grow old.

Without any of those difficult pauses and artificial conversational gambits which usually make the first five minutes in the company of a stranger almost unbearable to me we had glided into conversation, as though we had known one another for years. He spoke of life in a college at Oxford and of the undergraduates there, as though he knew instinctively where the real interests of my life lay. But already others of our society had come into the room, introductions were made, and, as half-past seven struck, we moved up to the Hall for dinner.

Only a Philistine of the first water could fail to be impressed by the beauty of the dining-hall of St Thomas's. The long tables and benches almost black with age, the lights on the tables which left the great space above dark and mysterious, the beautiful sixteenth-century roof, now only dimly seen, the rows of stately portraits along the walls; the high table where the silver showed white against the background of the bare oak table beneath it – all these made up a picture, which no amount of familiarity could ever make other than a marvel of beauty to my eyes. Brendel, seeing it for the first time, and passing a long lingering glance over it all, was visibly impressed.

‘Now I think I begin to understand your Oxford traditions,' he said to me, as all the little wrinkles round his eyes showed themselves in a new pattern.

Prendergast, who was sitting on the other side, began to compliment him on his English. It was, in fact, quite exceptionally good. Now and then some slight turn of phrase or
trick of intonation betrayed the foreigner, but for the most part he spoke correctly and almost without effort. ‘But how should it not be good?' he answered. ‘For you know I spent a year studying in London before the war, as well as a semester at the Harvard Law School, and during the war – well, I was a prisoner here for more than two years. Not all what you call a picnic, that, either,' he added with a laugh; ‘but everywhere one learns as one lives.' And he began to tell Prendergast something of English prison camps.

Meanwhile I glanced round the table to see who was dining, and to compare them with the list of names which lay by my plate. I frowned a little as I noticed that we were thirteen. Naturally it happens not infrequently with our changing numbers that thirteen sit down to dine, but I am by nature superstitious, and it always gives me an irrational feeling of discomfort when I notice that particular omen of misfortune. Of those who were dining that night I have already said something of Brendel, Maurice Hargreaves, and Prendergast. On my left was Shirley, silent as usual, handsome, cold, almost grim. I have already mentioned him, but now I may say more. I never saw him without recalling that famous description of Charles X—‘He bore proudly on his shoulders the burden of his immense unpopularity.' Of all our number Shirley had perhaps the greatest reputation outside the walls of the college. He was indeed a great scholar, bold and adventurous in emendations and suggestions, but contemptuous of the views of others, and bitter and unrestrained in his criticisms of his fellows. The harshness of his character and his total lack of adaptability had prevented him time and again from receiving the recognition and advancement which were undoubtedly his due, and this fact had served only to make him more austere and more bitter. Amongst his colleagues he was at best taciturn and icily polite, at the worst cynically and even cruelly critical. And yet I could not bring myself wholly to dislike
him. He was now over fifty, and I had known him for twentyfive years. I had recognized the disappointments which had marred his career, and I knew how deeply he resented teaching unwilling undergraduates, when he would fain have occupied a professorial chair. I respected his intellectual brilliance, and I had somehow contrived, though with difficulty, to avoid any open quarrel with him. He in return treated me with a kind of grudging politeness which he did not accord to most of the other tutors of St Thomas's. His books, like himself, were a compound of brilliance and bitterness. A married man, he dined seldom, and I was surprised to see him there that night.

It was with a sigh of relief that I noticed that Shepardson, our other classical tutor, was sitting at the far end of the table, and well removed from Shirley. Shepardson was keen and zealous, and a competent scholar, but he was not always very prudent, and he had recently published a book which had shown some traces of careless compilation and hasty judgements. His sanguine complexion, his face which gave an impression of size although no feature in it was at all prominent, and his high-pitched voice gave the clue to his character. He was well-meaning enough, and good-natured though easily provoked, but he was too easily gullible and often foolish. It was characteristic of Shirley that the fact that Shepardson was his colleague had not deterred him for one moment from accepting the latter's book for review. He had cut it to pieces in a savage article, in which almost every sentence was like the cut from a whip. The two men had not spoken to one another since the article appeared, and the unfortunate Shepardson vainly and almost pathetically waited for some heaven-sent opportunity for revenge. Public opinion was all on his side. We felt that Shirley had shown a lack of taste and of
esprit de corps
, but our sympathy did little to smooth down poor Shepardson, who had, after all, been publicly pilloried and held up to contempt.

I suppose that, like most of those who try to describe the characters of their acquaintances, I am easily led into exaggeration. I must guard myself, then, against overestimating the unpopularity of Shirley. Besides myself, Maurice Hargreaves had always remained on tolerably good terms with him. The two men liked to discuss questions of classical learning and ancient history, and they had always tended to agree on matters of college policy and business. It was indeed to discuss some such matter, as I learned later, that Shirley had come in to dine that night. Furthermore, with one other of our number he was on terms which amounted almost to friendship. That other was Mottram, who now sat beside him, and their mutual liking was to me always something of an enigma. Mottram had been a scholar at one of the smaller colleges, had studied medicine and had been appointed to a research fellowship at St Thomas's after a series of consistently brilliant examinations in the schools. We had been told when we elected him that he was destined for scientific eminence, perhaps for European fame. Socially, however, Mottram was hardly a success. He was shy and silent, sometimes almost
farouche
. In manner he seemed almost always to be on the defensive, and he had little or none of the easy companionability of most of the men of his generation. A doctor would have noticed at once that he was a myope – and he suffered, perhaps for that reason, from an inferiority complex, which tended to increase rather than to diminish as he grew older. Most of his time was spent in his laboratory, he cared little for sport or literature or society, and after a time he sank as it were into the background of our Common Room life. Like the furniture, we accepted his presence without comment; we should possibly have noticed his absence had he been away for a term, his presence we hardly remarked at all. And yet I sometimes felt that in him hidden fires were smouldering. Very, very occasionally some stray remark
would indicate that his mind was occupied with strong ideas and vital issues. I guessed, though dimly, that this silent and retiring man had also depths of thought and feeling which he concealed from the world in which he lived. Curiously enough something like friendship had sprung up between him and Shirley, widely different though their interests were. Perhaps the natural aloofness of each was a bond between them, perhaps each recognized and admired instinctively the intellectual quality of the other. In any case, Mottram spoke more freely and more often to Shirley than to any of the rest of us, and Shirley treated him in return with respect and even almost with amiability. I had even heard him, in Mottram's absence, defend the latter from criticism with a kind of warmth and feeling.

Of the others who were dining that night there is less to say. The Bursar, Major Trower, was there, most military in manner and possessing a soldierly brusqueness of speech, which entirely belied his natural kindliness of heart. All the younger men were genuinely fond of him, and delighted in the harmless pastime of pulling his leg. For his part the ‘brutal and licentious soldier', as they liked to call him, was entirely happy among them, and spent his whole time and energy in increasing the material comforts and social harmony of the college. As befitted one of his profession his bark was prodigious, but his bite was antiseptic. Farther along was a little group of three, Dixon, a physicist, Whitaker, our mathematical tutor, and a guest of his from Balliol, whose name I had not heard. All three were deep in some scientific discussion, quite meaningless to me. Two others completed the party. John Doyne, the Junior Dean, cheerful, ruddy-complexioned and perpetually laughing, was everybody's friend, and the enemy of none. No don and no undergraduate was able to resist his infectious high spirits. Lastly there was little Mitton, our chaplain, rather pink and white in appearance, and prone to blushing, a
failing which filled him with embarrassment and everyone else with amusement. He was not a bad fellow, though apt to be spiky and cantankerous where ecclesiastical questions were involved. He had not quite enough humour to defend himself adequately against the playful assaults of some of his colleagues. Prendergast, I regret to say, took an unholy pleasure in ragging him and exciting his blushes. The undergraduates, with their flair for choosing nicknames both appropriate and inappropriate, called him ‘the frozen mitt', a name which, for some obscure reason, filled the little man with an unreasonable annoyance. Prendergast, with desire to tease, would sometimes announce his intention of ‘thawing the frozen mitt', a remark which never failed to bring the desired blush to the chaplain's cheeks.