An Oxford Tragedy (3 page)

Taken together, a set of men such as might have been seen at any high table at Oxford that night. But I have been compelled to describe them in some detail, for each one of them, little though he knew it, was by the accident of his presence there that evening, destined to be involved more or less intimately in a grim drama of tragedy and crime.

I looked up from the list of diners, and heard the Bursar asking the Dean whether he expected much noise and excitement in college that night. The question was a not unnatural one. I have often maintained, and am still prepared to do so, that it would be difficult to find a better behaved and more reasonable set of young men than the undergraduates at Oxford as a whole, and St Thomas's in particular. Contrary to the ideas which are sometimes promulgated by the cheaper newspapers, and by authors of these Oxford novels whose foible would appear to be the crime of Almamatricide, scenes of riot and disorder are almost unknown; so too is habitual drunkenness. But there are times when authority turns a blind eye to a certain amount of high-spirited rejoicing, and to-night was
one of these occasions. For it was the Wednesday night after the last day of the Torpids. After six days of racing which had followed a long and severe period of training it would not be in human nature to refrain from some sort of celebration. Besides, both our boats had done well; both of them had gone up several places – not enough, it is true, to warrant the official recognition of a Bump Supper, but enough to induce a feeling of legitimate exultation. No doubt there would be a considerable turmoil in the Quad, a certain number of fireworks would fly into the air, and a certain proportion of those who had just come out of training would become noisily, if only mildly, intoxicated. Such scenes one could afford to treat with tolerance.

Maurice answered the Bursar's question carelessly. ‘Oh, I don't think so,' he said. ‘There might be a bit of noise and even a few broken windows. Perhaps some of them will try to start a bonfire, but if they do J. D. will have to go out and stop it.'

Doyne grinned. He really rather enjoyed quelling scenes of disorder, for his good temper made his interference effective, and he liked the exercise of authority.

The mention of possible undergraduate excesses recalled Scarborough and Garnett to Maurice Hargreaves' mind, and he began to relate their misdoings at some length to his neighbours. He liked to tell a story, and their misdeeds lost nothing in the telling. His voice was powerful and peculiarly resonant, and I noticed that the whole table was listening to him. The episode of the revolver made a real sensation, and even Shirley seemed to think that its use was something of an outrage. Personally I was growing more and more annoyed. It seemed to me improper as well as unfair to give these young men a bad name and so hang them, as it were, out of hand. So I suppose there was irritation in my voice when I spoke to Maurice, as he completed his tale.

‘I do wish that you wouldn't leave that loaded revolver lying on the table just inside your room,' I said. ‘It's childish to say that you mean to use it as the text for a lecture on the danger of lethal weapons to-morrow morning, and it's positively dangerous to leave it loaded where it is.'

‘My dear Francis,' he answered, ‘you really are, if I may say so with all due respect, tending to become the least bit of an old woman. For consider …' He ticked off the points as he made them on his fingers. ‘One, it is only in books that loaded firearms go off. In my limited experience it requires some human agency to pull the trigger. Two. There are no children, women, or imbeciles within the walls of this college. Three. What grown man would point a revolver at himself or at any other living creature before he pulled the trigger to discover whether it was loaded? And four. I have sported the oak of my rooms, and the key lies safely in my pocket. Is the peril which you suggest really so very imminent?'

His easy bantering tone had its usual effect on me. I felt both impotent to reply and irritated at my own insignificance.

‘Well,' I said, ‘it can't be right to leave loaded weapons lying about. If someone's shot don't say that I didn't warn you. I was brought up in the belief that all firearms are loaded and that all horses kick, and that both are dangerous. A very good lesson to teach a boy, too!' I turned to Brendel, anxious to change the conversation.

‘Do you know that before I came in I was quite frightened about you,' I said. ‘I expected to be either overwhelmed with learning, or else compelled to carry on an interchange of polite inanities in a language which I know very imperfectly.'

All the little wrinkles showed round his eyes. ‘And you find the foreign professor not all too alarming?' he answered with a smile.

‘On the contrary; and conversation a pleasure instead of a burden.'

He made me a quaint little half bow. ‘Thank you. I also. But you know I was perhaps a little nervous too – one poor lawyer from Vienna and a dozen great English professors!'

‘Yes,' I said, ‘I can understand that. I remember a rather famous admiral dining here one night. He was the best company you can imagine, and kept us all in roars of laughter the whole evening. I never saw anyone who captured a roomful of people so quickly or held them all so easily. What the moderns call getting it across. As he was going away I thanked him for the pleasure his yarns had given us. “Well,” he said, “you know when I arrived I was in the devil of a fright at spending the evening among a crew of highbrows, but as I came into your Common Room I heard a white-haired old professor complaining bitterly to a sympathetic circle of the price of bottled beer, and I felt at home right away. Human nature doesn't vary much when you get down to fundamental issues like the price of beer.”'

Brendel chuckled. ‘That's it,' he said. ‘We've generally got plenty in common with everyone we meet if only we'll let ourselves talk about it. Now I feel a kind of fascination when you begin to talk of loaded revolvers, for, you see, the study of crime and its detection is my passion. Yes, that kind of thing is really my one great hobby. What did your Lord Birkenhead write? “I have surrendered myself often and willingly to the deception of the detective tale.” Something like that, wasn't it? Well, I suppose that I've read almost every good detective tale that has ever been written, and a good many thousand bad ones as well, and all that only as a kind of appetizer to the study of the true tale of crime. There's no great murder trial of the last twenty years that I've not followed from start to finish – and in one or two of them – well, I had some small part to play myself.'

‘By Jove, that's interesting,' said Doyne, who was listening from the other side of the table. ‘You must tell us more about this, Professor. We thought that you were just an ordinary man of prodigious learning, and now we find that we are entertaining an angel unawares. A new Sherlock Holmes from Vienna, with all the modern improvements. You'll find that everyone in this Common Room has a theory of his own about the art of detection, especially Mitton, who thinks that Providence always leads the culprit to repentance and confession about three days after the crime.'

Mitton became so alarmingly pink at this garbled account of his views that I thought it best to break off the discussion. Dinner was over, so I got up and said grace. Then we trooped together down to Common Room.

To a middle-aged don, as I might describe myself, or to an old don, as I might almost be described, there is no place more pleasant than Common Room, no hour more wholly pleasurable than that spent in it immediately after dinner. For here the Fellows of St Thomas's, having dined, settled down to enjoy the comfort of port and dessert, of coffee and cigars. I had come, as I grew older, to look forward all day to that hour in the evening which I most enjoyed. The good wine, the flow of conversation, the ritual of the table at once dignified and almost stately and yet homely as well, exercised a soothing effect on my nerves and filled me with a sense of physical and mental well-being. Providence gave me, I think, an imperfect appreciation of the beauties of nature; I can't enthuse over the grandeur of hills or seas, nor even over the more placid loveliness of the countryside. But as some sort of compensation I have a real aesthetic love of the lighted interior, the scene of social intercourse and good fellowship at their best. For me a Dutch interior by Maes or Terborch, or an eighteenth-century conversation piece is worth more than any landscape or seascape that was ever painted. Nor was it only the externals of the Common Room which I loved; it seemed rather that life there suited itself to my every mood. If I felt festive and sociable there were always others ready to meet me halfway. If on the other hand a black shadow of pessimism was on me, the room seemed to attune itself to me. I thought of it then as the home of a multitude of my predecessors – who had drunk their wine and lived their short lives there since the foundation of the college. A sorrowful thought, made more poignant by that deep misgiving from which few can escape.

Ah, but the Apparition
–
the dumb sign –
The beckoning finger bidding me forgo
The fellowship, the converse and the wine,
The songs, the festal glow!
And ah, to know not, while with friends I sit
And while the purple joy is pass'd about,
Whether 'tis ampler day divinelier lit,
Or homeless night without

How well that great but misjudged modern poet voices my blacker mood! But that mood was rare. For the most part I was supremely contented and happy in that place. The Common Room of St Thomas's was indeed my spiritual home. In earlier days I had been accustomed to work after dinner, but now I tended more and more to sit talking and smoking until it was time for a book and bed.

I moved to my seat at the end of the table, where the decanters and the snuff lay before me, and invited Brendel to sit at my right hand. On the other side of me I put Whitaker's guest. The rest of the party seated themselves as they pleased. I observed with a good deal of satisfaction that the younger members moved quickly to sit near the Viennese; it was obvious that they had capitulated to his charm of manner as easily as had I.

Hardly had we settled down, and the wine begun its first leisurely journey round the table, when Doyne reminded Brendel of his remark in Hall.

‘You must tell us more about your views on detection, Professor. Here we all belong to different schools of thought. Apart from Mitton, who has a school of his own, simple faith and all will come well, you know' (the chaplain made an inarticulate murmur of protest which passed unheeded), ‘we're really divided into three groups. Let me see. There are Dixon and Whitaker, who belong to the pseudoscientific school. They've discarded cigarette ends and heel marks as belonging to an earlier age, but they still believe
that by picking up hairs and putting them under microscopes they can prove that the murder has been committed by a man of about fifty-five, going bald at the temples. Prendergast and I, on the other hand, believe in sitting in arm-chairs and smoking pipes, until we have discussed all the possible murderers and their motives. We then get up and point with unerring finger at the guilty man. Lastly, there's the Bursar, who believes in official methods and the trained detective. He would have everyone who was within half a mile of the murder lined up and presented with a questionnaire of the most searching description. The man who can't answer the questions to the Major's satisfaction is the murderer. What could be simpler? Now, Professor, which school gets your vote? Are you for clues, or are you for logical deduction, or are you for military methods and death at dawn?'

We all laughed, Brendel with us. I could see that he liked the young and their talk. Yet his answer, when it came, was carefully phrased and his tone was oddly serious.

‘You must forgive me,' he said, ‘if I take it all a little more seriously than that. I said that I read detective tales, and so I do, but that's only as a kind of relaxation. What fascinates me, yes at times obsesses me, is the real crime – the murder that has actually been committed. Listen.' (I had already noticed that Brendel had a habit of saying ‘listen' in a curiously compelling tone of voice before any sentence which he regarded as especially important.) ‘I must beg leave to tell you gentlemen how I came to be immersed in that special study. I was a young lawyer in Vienna, and a client of mine was murdered, suddenly, horribly, inexplicably. I was drawn into the investigations which followed; I could not escape from them. And gradually there was unfolded before my eyes a drama of feeling and passion, of hidden desires and secret motives, of a sort that I had never dreamed of. It so happened that
I saw more clearly than the rest; I was able to suggest a line of investigation that led eventually to the arrest of the murderer. Through that I won a sort of. …' He hesitated for a moment for a word. ‘
Renommée?
'

‘Reputation,' said someone.

‘Yes, reputation. How ridiculous it is that one suddenly fails to find the simplest word when one is speaking a language not one's own. I acquired a sort of reputation. The police consulted me not once but many times; sometimes I could help them, often I could not. And so I learned the grammar and the syntax of murder.'

He paused for a minute, and seemed to be diving into his memories.

‘Have you ever really considered,' he went on, ‘the drama behind a murder, the play of human passions, the desperation, the daring? And think of the stake at issue! Your scientist can do most things, but he can't create life, and it is life that you are, by one quick act, taking away. And to take it you risk everything; not just your future or your goods or even your happiness, but everything you have – everything – your own life! And remember, once the stake is thrown on the board it cannot be removed. What gamble is there comparable to that, a gamble in human life?' He held up his forefinger almost menacingly as he spoke, and his voice had grown harsh with suppressed feeling.