It was to a sense of anti-climax that Willard Quail woke up in his hotel next morning. He had cherished, for one thing, the fond supposition that what would draw him out of slumber would be the sweet insistent chime of collegiate and matutinal bells. In point of fact, he was roused by the passing of a convoy of heavy vehicles belonging to the United States Air Force. When he got downstairs, it was to breakfast among compatriots who were pausing only to bolt their orange-juice before piling into the largest of hireable English cars and making rapidly for Cambridge or Stratford-upon-Avon.
But in all this there lay nothing really disturbing. Quail could candidly claim to have very little of the expatriate psychology; and upon challenge he would have declared that it is only the English who are rendered noticeably uneasy upon brushing up against their countrymen when abroad. If Quail was indeed not wholly happy now, the reason lay in his consciousness of having made a disingenuous start to his enterprise. Like most cultivated Americans, he owned a slow and ruminative mind, and this instrument gave itself with some insistence during breakfast to canvassing the propriety of his having been, on the previous afternoon, rather close with old Dr Stringfellow.
Quail’s father had owned a sufficient mission in life in an activity which he was accustomed to phrase as getting horse-trading right off the railroads. Quail had himself found, it is true, that nothing effective could be done in the way of keeping up this family tradition without a frequent large recourse to guile. But in Oxford, he felt, it was not even to the most laudable ends that guile would at all do. He judged it chargeable that he ought to have been more candid with his yesterday’s travelling-companion. But at least the encounter had been a warning against adopting an unbecoming deviousness in the small and surely not culpable enterprise ahead of him.
He was conscious of this interior debate as enhancing the dubiety with which he presently ventured upon the streets – streets leading past colleges and churches to not all of which he found that he could instantly put a name. At one level, the visual, his walk was all delighted recognitions and surprised bumpings up against novelty – and he felt, indeed, at times as bewildered as a ball making its first traverse of a partly reconstructed pin-table. There were sights, moreover, that aroused emotions whose threatening massiveness was embarrassing; but at least he experienced no awakened feeling that he would have felt it beyond his power tolerably to define. With his other senses it was different. Oxford has a good many characteristic sounds – the bells which he had missed earlier were not altogether silent during the morning – and it has even more in the way of characteristic smells. Many of the colleges possess semi-subterraneous offices giving upon one or another public road; and it seemed to Quail that from each of these in turn – whether kitchens, wash-places, or butteries – came odours at once unique and unchanging. Balliol still suggested an odd contiguity of boot-polish and pickles, and in the bathrooms of Oriel, they remained faithful to the old brand of soap. All this was again no more than a matter of recognition. Yet the experience was of a different order to any channelled through the eye; and there were moments when Quail felt more than ever, as one might say, knocked sideways. It was as if a giant hand took him as he passed and whipped him through not space but time. After an hour of these assaults he had an inspiration, and took shelter in Mr Blackwell’s shop.
It is perhaps only in the field of fiction that a majority of the books published aim with any deliberation at a sedative effect. But on this occasion Quail found himself notably tranquillised, at least, after turning over a dozen or so volumes of an entirely miscellaneous character – so much so that he would presently have bought something and resumed his walk, had not his eye chanced to fall upon a wholly familiar object. Mr Blackwell was offering for sale a copy of the revised edition of The Early Years of Arthur Fontaney.
There was nothing remarkable in this. Quail knew that the English reissue of his book had appeared only within the last few weeks. What was perhaps a little impressive was the position of the copy he had here come up against. Mr Blackwell’s is a large shop. It has one shelf that is much shorter than any of the others – that is no more, indeed, than what, in a domestic context, would be called a book-slide. This exiguous receptacle is traditionally given over to what are adjudged the really important new books. Into it, Regius Professors and other ripe scholars have been detected endeavouring to convey, from less prominent corners of the establishment, lately published labours of their own. And Quail’s book was here.
For a moment he wondered if The Early Years was a good biography, after all. He had written it in the first instance, he knew, out of a vast inexperience alike of literature and life. But he had been lucky with his materials, and Fontaney – the young Fontaney – had virtually written himself. Quail’s memory was vivid of his own sense, as he worked, of being no more than secretary to that remarkable mind in its swift unfolding amid the aesthetic aridities of Mid-Victorian England. Fontaney had been foolproof – at least in that regard he had been so – so the book had perhaps its points, after all. It might even have a touch of the high merits of order and clarity, which was what Dr Stringfellow had courteously implied when at his most amiable on the previous day. But certainly The Early Years wasn’t positively and flatly good. Quail was sure of that. For one thing, it was only half a book. The story simply broke off. The farther reaches of the prodigal unlikely building sketched themselves uncertainly in air, beyond a perfunctorily run-up blank surface diversified only by here and there a hopefully protruding brick. But for this effect of opera interrupta there had been, of course, reasons conclusive enough.
Quail was looking at the spine of his book. On the front of the dust-cover, he knew, was Millais’ portrait. Familiar as it was, he was prompted to look at it. But he found himself hesitating to put out his hand – a sense of mild indecency must always attend the proposal to pick up a work of one’s own in a book shop, unless indeed one’s scholarship is of the ripest order – and in this brief irresolution, he became aware that close beside him stood another student of Mr Blackwell’s important books. The newcomer was an undergraduate, wearing a commoner’s gown stuffed round his neck like a muffler. He was looking at the important books with an expression which Quail interpreted as of disappointment or disfavour – and so young did he seem, so pink and white was his complexion and so untouched were his features by any hint of the pressure of adult experience, that it was Quail’s impulse to attribute his present displeasure to the absence from the shelf before him of the latest recension of The Wonder Book of Trains. But this thought had no sooner entered his head than he heard the undergraduate give an exclamation of satisfaction, and saw him reach out, pick The Early Years from its place, and walk off with it to the cash-desk.
This incident took Quail out into the street again. It had moved him – and it continued to do so, even when he told himself that his day was threatening to become an orgy. In some twenty years, he had been so venturesome as to offer the world three rather quiet books. They had been decently received. He sometimes noticed them in the houses of his friends. But he couldn’t remember ever before actually detecting a prospective reader buying a copy. The sight of anybody at all so doing would have been an event. Yet he knew – crossing Broad Street in the bleak October sunshine – that had this customer of Mr Blackwell’s been to his certain knowledge the most eminent of living men of letters the thing would have made no more impact upon him than it ought to make upon any sensible man. And that, of course, would be very little. Yet he was a sensible man – it was one of the facts he could assert about himself at once with confidence and undisturbed modesty. Pondering this as he passed through the short tunnel that pierces the Clarendon Building, Quail saw the necessary conclusion. To the place around him – or to memories of it, or perhaps conceivably to the idea of it – he had reserves of attachment, the sum total of which his conscious mind would have little notion of how to set about totting up. Perhaps it amounted to what they now called a fixation. Perhaps it was no more than commonplace sentimentality. There was a possibility – he glimpsed – that it put him in a category of menaces.
He was again in open air, and on his right stood the Sheldonian Theatre. He stopped in dismay at the sight of it. In Oxford, the material fabric of learning is always in dilapidation. River vapours steal upon it nightly with an effect as mysteriously corrosive as that of a caress in some morbid work of the Romantic Decadence. Everywhere there are buildings crumbling and buildings being refaced or re-edified – to an effect that may be aesthetically displeasing but which yet remains un-alarming, since there is rendered a general sense of a community vigorously occupied with other matters, yet giving a reasonable eye to patching up and making do. Of this impression, pre-existing in his mind, Quail had already felt the lively reinforcement. But the present spectacle operated differently.
The structure before which he stood at gaze has more than the unassuming and commodious dignity of much in the streets around it – architecture honestly domestic in key and making only here and there any augustly institutional gesture. The Sheldonian asserts a high elegance which sometimes prompts young people to announce that it is irrational and hideous. And now, lately pounded to a peeled and pied condition by masons concerned to knock away the more ruinous surfaces, it presented a forlorn face only to be lined – Quail thought – by the most bizarre analogy. It was like the surviving stern of a tettered galleon, immemorially imprisoned and supported by a Sargasso Sea. Or – and this was much better – it was like Dr Stringfellow in his town clothes. But whatever fancy-picture one might paint – and with Quail such flights were unusual, and yet another symptom, surely, of the excitement of the day – it remained true that at this point the pervasive flaking and crumbling of Oxford grew ominous, as if throwing out a hint of secular and Roman decay. As he walked on, Quail frowned. His mind, mounting another flight of the grotesque, had glimpsed his own image as a fossicker amid ruins – a small acquisitive figure in a large Piranesi drawing.
The bells were at it again. But this time they summoned him to practical response. Pausing in Radcliffe Square, he took out his watch and checked by it the large syllables pulsing in the air above him. Then he walked on more quickly. Within a space of minutes that need not be recorded, his own old college was before him.