“That is, of course, a very reasonable point of view.” Before committing himself to this judgment, Stringfellow had with great deliberation masticated another biscuit. “A plague on both their houses. But surely you might have been ahead of either of them? And if you had managed that, instead of leaving us – and for the second time in your life – so abruptly, their feud wouldn’t have reached quite its present pitch. Miss Fontaney has the papers; I have your assurance that railroads flourish; wouldn’t it have been sensible to put down hard cash?”
“I suppose it would.” Quail found that he didn’t at all resent this practical realism in the old person beside him. “But the attempt might have met with rebuff. Miss Fontaney is known not to like the idea of her father’s manuscripts going abroad.”
“You could have doubled the offer.”
Quail was silent. He couldn’t tell Stringfellow that he would have felt that sort of shouting to be indelicate, for the words would sound absurd as soon as uttered.
“Tandon hasn’t a farthing, and Jopling and his wife must run to about twopence between them.” Stringfellow spoke as one millionaire might to another. “So your lack of pertinacity surprises me.”
“I guess I just don’t like a market scramble for wares of that sort.” Driven to defend himself, Quail collected his thoughts. “Who gets Fontaney’s journals doesn’t matter all that much, if you ask me. Whether through one channel or another, they’ll make their way into print – and competently enough edited and so forth – in the end. I’d like them, I won’t deny. But I’m not going to scramble – particularly when it’s not a very clean scramble, either. The great day for my family, I’d say, was when my father determined he’d get some things done as they should be done on our railroads. I’ve kept up on that. But I’m not going to get things done as they ought to be done in Oxford. It would be presumptuous. It’s not my job, sir. If Arthur Fontaney’s journals set heads of houses horse-trading and tempt fellows of colleges to run mad, I say I go home.”
“But you’ve been home, my dear Quail. And now you’re back again. There is really very little logic, I sometimes think, left in you younger men.” Stringfellow took a snap at a new biscuit. “It is something I have occasion to note in the present generation of Assyriologists. The processes of discursive thought are virtually fontes signati to them. Observation and reflection convince me that the ultimate explanation is physiological. I attribute it to faulty principles of diet.”
“That’s most interesting.” Quail watched his companion finish the biscuit. He told himself that he rather hoped Stringfellow would simply continue on this extraordinary tangent; and that the feud he had mentioned would not again be referred to. But the charge of lack of logic a little rankled, and he found himself putting up a defence against it. “I do feel rather concerned about the ladies. They’re Fontaney’s daughters, after all; and you can appreciate the sort of duty I feel I owe them. They know that if it’s money they have to think of, they have only to drop me a line for the best offer they’ll get. And while the thing’s unsettled, I’d like them to feel I’m here and waiting. But I repeat I’m not entering a sort of learned brawl – and plumb outside their front gate, you might say, in the Bradmore Road.” Quail paused on this.
He had an uncomfortable and unaccustomed sense that what he was saying wasn’t wholly clear and wasn’t wholly true. “What’s this, anyway,” he inconsequently asked, “about a feud? And who’s coming out on top? I’d better know. For perhaps I’m talking nonsense. Perhaps I’d still take a hand if I could – and even if only as a second. That farthing Tandon hasn’t got. I believe that at a pinch I’d find it for him.”
Stringfellow appeared to be interested in this. He might even have been rather shocked. “You judge that Tandon is the less unsympathetic character on the whole?”
“Decidedly. Don’t you agree?”
“My dear fellow, I am reminded of what Dr Johnson said of Voltaire and Rousseau, when a somewhat similar discussion arose. He remarked, you will remember, that he found it difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them.”
Quail laughed. “That’s pretty stiff, isn’t it?”
“You may say that Jopling is the more obviously detestable of the two. I will grant it to you.” Stringfellow gave this an air of the most benign chat. “Mark you, there was a time when a man’s becoming a parson was decidedly auspicious. It meant that presently he would quite probably clear out. But on the whole I’ve never cared for them. Have you?”
This wasn’t a subject upon which Quail felt it necessary to declare himself. “But I don’t know,” he said, “that Jopling makes much of being a parson. And it’s not a point that comes into my estimate of him.”
“It comes into Tandon’s. If you ask me, Tandon’s grand stroke of malice is going to turn on it.”
Quail found this quite incomprehensible. “Shall we take a turn about the Meadow?” he suggested. It had come into his head that the cold, after all, was perhaps affecting his companion to the point of setting his mind wandering.
“Certainly. I ought to have thought of it.” Stringfellow rose and with his stick thrust vigorously at the snow. “To detain you sitting here, my dear Quail, is to risk catching a chill. So come along.”
Quail accepted this meekly. “I wouldn’t have thought there was malice in Gavin Tandon,” he presently said. “I know he can take offence, and even nurse absurd suspicions. But that’s not quite the same thing.”
“You have to consider the degree of provocation. Tandon has been developing this interest in Fontaney. Now would you, Quail, who are an authority, say it was a reputable sort of interest?”
“Certainly.” Quail was emphatic. “Tandon’s thoroughly sound; and better equipped than I am, by a long way, in important parts of the field.”
“Very good – very good, indeed.” Stringfellow paused in his perambulation to give an approving nod at this magnanimity. “Now, it’s being said, that as far as concerns Tandon and yourself—”
“Me?” Quail, too, stopped as he made this rather naive interjection. “You mean I’m part of the picture people gossip about?”
“It’s said”—Stringfellow ignored the unnecessary question—”that you and Tandon would settle things amicably enough. But now Charles Jopling comes along, remembering or having been told that Fontaney’s diaries, or whatever they are, contain a great deal of Oxford scandal—”
“I wouldn’t call it that.” Quail shook his head in serious concern. “Indeed, I’d thank you to contradict such a misconception when you hear it. There is a good deal of perceptive and mordant comment on the academic scene as it appeared to a privileged outsider on the spot. But I wouldn’t think of it as scandal.”
“Very well, my dear fellow – but the point is that Jopling does. And he has in consequence, as you know, a fancy for all this material – or at least so he has persuaded Tandon.”
“You think it might be, as they say, all a game; that he only does it to annoy?”
“Because he knows it teases?” Stringfellow was delighted. “I don’t know. And I’d say that, if you don’t know, nobody knows. But it’s certain that, during the last fortnight or thereabouts, Jopling has convinced Tandon that the stuff is pretty well within his, Jopling’s, hands. He has only to give a nod at this old Miss Fontaney, and she’ll hand over. Now, what do you think of that?”
Quail didn’t know what to think. He was considerably startled. He couldn’t believe that Miss Fontaney, even if her judgment was now somewhat impaired by her illness, could have developed a very high regard for Jopling. But Jopling’s position in the university was another matter. She might conceivably have the feeling that Jopling himself had actually claimed her as having. She might feel that there was some august academic recognition of her father’s eminence implicit in the Warden’s interest. “I just don’t know,” he said to Stringfellow. “Miss Fontaney would really like to hand over to a Fontaney – I’m clear about that. But, of course, there isn’t one. So what will happen is quite obscure.”
“Whether Jopling is serious or not, he has certainly convinced Tandon that he is. And it’s become a regular feud, as I say.” Stringfellow spoke with placid satisfaction. “You haven’t dined in your college since you came back?”
“I’ve scarcely done so at all. One doesn’t want to impose on that sort of hospitality.”
“No doubt. But you’d better go and have a look. I’m told the issue has had a most unseemly effect upon the whole body of the fellows. Wagers, you know, and that sort of thing. Hints, and jocular remarks, and the younger men hatching little plots to exacerbate the situation in the interest of general jollity. And Tandon, as we say nowadays, can’t take it. Or so I’m told. Half off his head, they say. Doesn’t often appear. And when he does, people note that his manner has changed.”
Quail was distressed by this. “Can anything be done? Has he any relations?”
“Relations?” It was with something of the effect of being introduced to an unfamiliar technical term that Stringfellow echoed the word. “It isn’t the sort of thing anybody knows. Have I relations? It’s a long time since I’ve enquired. If you asked my colleagues, they would report a general impression that at one time I had a mother, who may now, however, be presumed dead. I should be inclined to suppose an a priori likelihood that Tandon had a mother too. Yes, I should be inclined to conjecture that he was that sort of man. But I see no means of determining whether she be alive or dead.”
For some moments Quail was silent. He found this sort of humour displeasing and even ghoulish. At the same time he recognised it as not simply silly. It held authentic, if acrid, reference to the queer semi-monasticism that still streaked the place. “Then, what about friends?” he asked. “Do you know whether he has any intimates among his colleagues – either in the college or in his own faculty?”
“I’ve no idea.” Moving down the Long Walk, Stringfellow got through the snow at so brisk a toddle that Quail found he had to quicken his own pace. “On the whole, I’d say that Tandon was rather solitary. And that’s a bad thing. As they get older, you know”—Stringfellow spoke as might an anthropologist of a remote tribe—”they turn odd and careless in various ways. Cut a queer figure in the streets, and so on. I should be apprehensive of Tandon’s eventually going that way. Not that it is common, nowadays. Come to think of it, I notice very few old chaps of that sort about.”
Again it was some time before Quail found anything to say. “You think,” he then asked, “that Tandon might go quite mad?”
“Oh, yes—oh, dear me, yes.” Stringfellow’s high quavering placid voice carried far over the snow, so that a couple of young men fifty yards ahead of them both looked round. “It’s not a thing of which to exaggerate the importance, however. Lunacy is, happily, not a ground for vacating a fellowship. The dangerous thing is flagrant immorality. Try that, my dear Quail, and you come on dangerous ground.”
“So I’ve supposed.”
“Quite so. How it stands with common assault upon the head of a house, I can’t say.”
“Common assault!” Quail was startled. “Surely it hasn’t come to that? There hasn’t actually been a scene, a crisis?”
“Indeed there has. Tandon had to be restrained, coaxed, or hustled into the butler’s pantry, and calmed down with brandy.”
Quail wondered whether it was the butler who had judged brandy proper for this purpose. “I guess that was a most disagreeable incident,” he said – and was aware that, so far as his own feelings were concerned, this represented a large understatement. His conviction grew that he wanted to have nothing to do with these people; or even with the further celebrating of Arthur Fontaney, were a necessary concomitant of that to be implication in brawls and buffoonery – with Quail buffoonery was a very strong word – in the college once presided over by Dr Warboys. He felt no disposition to question Stringfellow, and in consequence their walk now proceeded for some time in silence. The river had begun to freeze, and it was only in the centre that the current discernibly flowed. The line of barges and houseboats, each weighed down beneath obliterating snows, might have been so many prehistoric monsters caught by an advancing ice age while on trek. Quail tried to recall which of these queer floating dressing-rooms belonged to which college, and had just identified the Oriel barge by its superior elegance, when his companion embarked upon further communication. “When words passed in this way, and Jopling picked up the decanter—”
“Picked up the decanter!” Quail found himself aghast.
“Quite so, quite so. There has been, I may say, a good deal of discussion of the incident – tolerably well-informed discussion. And it appears to be agreed that it is virtually without precedent in living memory. If you except, that is, the notorious affair in eighty-two, when the Master of—” Stringfellow checked himself. “But that is irrelevant, no doubt. The present point is this: when words, I say, passed in this deplorable way, there is a very general impression that it was Jopling who was mainly at fault.”
“I’m not at all surprised to hear that.”
“Jopling had made some confident statement about Miss Fontaney’s intentions, and Tandon had replied that he didn’t know what he was talking about. That was no doubt uncivil, but scarcely occasion, you will agree, for an abrogation of all social decency. Jopling, however, appeared to be irritated by a marked assumption of confidence on Tandon’s part—”
“Confidence?” Quail was struck by this.
“Precisely. And Tandon declared, rather cryptically, that there had been one master key to the situation all the time; that it had not been in Jopling’s power to go for that; and that now he, Tandon, had it safely in his pocket. This was the point at which Jopling made his regrettable gesture with the port.”
“I see.” For a moment all this hung on Quail’s ear as simply so much more of scandalous nonsense. And then, as if on another and remoter ear, something in Stringfellow’s words set up an odd reverberation. “Did you say ‘key’?” he asked.
“Just that.” Stringfellow was surprised. “’Master key’ was the expression.”
“Thank you.” Quail affected to look at his watch – though for the moment his head was swimming in a fashion that would, in fact, have prevented his making sense of it. “You must excuse me, I’m afraid.”
“An appointment, my dear fellow?”
“Well—something that I ought to have kept in mind.” He turned and walked quickly away.
It is one of several peculiarities about Oxford’s traffic that some taxi-cabs may be hailed and some may not. Forgetting this, Quail twice gestured in vain. Then he remembered a depot into which one may dive just off St Aldate’s, and within five minutes he was part of a line of traffic moving circuitously north. There was no great sense in all this haste; perhaps it suggested a certain lack of self-control; or perhaps it was to be justified as a carry-over from his sound business habit of clearing up a muddle without waste of time. He thought he saw outrage and tragedy; and if he felt guilty it was from a sense that the tragedy wouldn’t be in any sharp full way his. Perhaps he had been an ass, and entirely failed to notice in himself something that really was there for the noticing. But that failure spoke little for the force or depth of anything that had in fact obscurely stirred in him. His own role was hopelessly, fatally cast for sentimental comedy. Of the other thing he could only be a spectator now. And he would be that unless he had, so to speak, entirely mistaken the theatre, and was now hurrying to a stage upon which there was in fact no play at all.
His money was ready before the cab stopped. The Bradmore Road, never noisy, was ominously mute under the pall of snow, less like a theatre, after all, than a primitive cinema with the piano stopped. The two lines of houses on their gentle curve, some mildly and some extravagantly sequacious of an imaged Middle Age, might have been part of the set, the décor for an old silent film of spectacular enchantment: Hollywood’s introduction to a fairy-story turning on some charm or spell. He pushed open the garden gate and it made a tiny creak against the compacted snow – a first faint sound upon which, to the happiest artistic effect, a multitude of others might succeed as the enchantment broke. But in sentimental comedy that sort of thing hasn’t a place. He walked up to the front door – a staid elderly figure, suitably clothed for the rigours of the season – and rang the bell.
It was an hour at which the person with the mop might be expected still to be on duty. But when the door opened – and it opened almost at once – it was Marianne Fontaney with whom he stood confronted. He wondered if it was a trick of the snow that made her look so pale and her eyes so bright.
“Mr Quail!” She shook hands with a smile of pleasure and led him into the hall – that small authentic antechamber to the treasures of which she was joint guardian.
Then she turned to him again with enquiries about his absence, his journey. But these were uncompleted when she broke off. It was as if she had glimpsed in his face something requiring from her another course. “But I must tell you,” she said. “I have news. I must tell you at once. Mr. Tandon and I are engaged to be married.”