Curiosity rather than family feeling may have prompted this episode; if so, it was in the key of a good deal of my behaviour during these first weeks of return to Oxford. My colleagues seemed to regard intellectual curiosity as the first of human virtues, and the older among them would lament its virtual desuetude among latterday undergraduates. Over against intellectual curiosity, I imagine, they would have placed a vulgar variety, oriented towards, and flourishing upon, personal inquisitiveness and gossip. I don’t think that the intellectual sort is the prerogative of persons learnedly or scientifically inclined. No artist can get far without it. Yet here novelists and playwrights are in an equivocal position. The whimsies and vagaries of human conduct being an essential part of their stock in trade, they are obliged to go in for vulgar curiosity too, and there are instances in which major works of fiction are spun exclusively out of the prattle of drawing-rooms and the confidences of saloon bars. I myself hover between these two modes of mental operation – the first so much more exalted in its nature than the second. And Oxford touched me up on both flanks. I don’t think I’d otherwise have been prompted to the trip with Dr Pococke I must presently describe.
It would be difficult to say whether it is intellectual curiosity that prompts to the inspection of a copy of the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays which happens to bear on its fly-leaf the signature of John Dryden. Indeed, the interest of such a volume appears to be of a personal character, so here is a border-line case. I had never viewed – which would be the word – this notable college treasure, and the afternoon came on which I took it into my head to do so. The library was almost deserted, since the period between luncheon and tea is one at which the display of any inclination to study remains taboo in Oxford. For a little while I wandered around. The library had changed since the time when I used occasionally to work in it. The pictures had been bundled away elsewhere, and the ground floor was occupied by two reading-rooms. The effect, while lacking the magnificence of the single chamber overhead, was sufficiently impressive to suggest that the pursuit of polite letters is a dignified and gentlemanlike occupation, not to be entered upon by the inferior orders of society. The books, although constituting what was known as the ‘working’ part of the library, rested for the most part so undisturbed on their shelves as to hint an assumption of their owning a magical efficacy: perhaps raining down or radiating learning upon anybody who cared to drop in for a nap. There was, indeed, an old lady fast asleep in one snug and dusky corner. But as she had an expanse of manuscript music spread on a table before her and a pencil gripped firmly in her teeth it was to be conjectured that she had been overtaken when engaged upon some quite active pursuit of knowledge. For a moment I wondered whether she was dead – the pencil suggesting what one reads of in detective stories as the bizarre possibilities of rigor mortis. It seemed not possible to find out. If I were to bellow in her ear, and she was only asleep, my behaviour would be censurable as eccentric and unmannerly.
I now made my way to the librarian’s room, since it was clear that Shakespeare as given to the world in 1623 would be kept securely locked up in the nineteen-seventies. Penwarden received me without much enthusiasm. He had been librarian since I first entered the college, and had remained unchanged in the interval – except for its being averred that there had not unnaturally built up in him a librarian’s constitutional aversion to books. He had also put on weight, without – so far as I could see – having provided himself with a corresponding change of clothes; indeed, he appeared less clothed than corseted, and thus suggested one of those elaborated toy balloons, often hawked round fairs, which when inflated take on a manikin-form, with a trunk and limbs variously bulbous and randomly proportioned according to the strength of the puff that has gone into them.
It was only our second encounter. At the first, which had been over dinner, he had told me – if not censoriously yet as with a wise resignation to human frailty – that few of our colleagues entered the library from term’s end to term’s end. If this were so I thought my own quite prompt arrival ought to have cheered him up. In fact he exhibited a melancholy reserve. This deepened as we inspected the First Folio – the pages of which he turned over for me himself, as if suspecting my fingers of having been imperfectly cleansed of shoe polish or raspberry jam. He thawed a little when I happened to remark that Shakespeare seemed to have been uncommonly careless in his shaving before submitting himself to sitting for Martin Droeshout’s portrait. There exists, he explained to me, an earlier and very rare state of the portrait in which this negligence is much less prominent.
I had thus been lucky enough to afford Penwarden an opportunity for the casual and unobtrusive deployment of a fragment of erudition. He closed the volume with a proper regard to its hinges, and then held up his hand to a surprising effect of muted drama.
‘I don’t know whether you’ve heard,’ he said. ‘There has been a development in the affair.’
‘The affair?’ The remark had left me at sea.
‘Christopher Cressy’s theft from us.’ Penwarden produced this amplification in a tone of surprise, as if nobody in the college ought to be ignorant that the phrase could refer to nothing else. I recalled Lempriere’s extravagant-seeming assertion that so cobwebby a depredation as Cressy’s ancient rape of the Blunderville Papers was still a live issue around the place. Penwarden was now glancing at me with a wariness it would have been easy to mistake for hostility. He might have been a barrister embarking upon a tricky but necessary interview with a hardened criminal whom it was going to be his business to defend. ‘Incidentally,’ he said, ‘it may be useful if you should prove to retain an exact recollection of the incident.’
I judged it doubtful whether it would prove useful to me. I wanted nothing less than any involvement in such a moth- eaten and surely nugatory vendetta. The truth, however, had to be told.
‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘I have. I was a freshman, as you know, snatched up and exposed for the first time to the mores of his seniors. The occasion has revived itself quite remarkably in my head.’
‘Capital! Then you probably remember the precise sequence of events. Cressy had picked up the letter-book, realised its significance, and carried it over to Mountclandon. That’s right?’
‘Exactly right.’
‘Cressy said something to the effect that it ought to prove interesting.’
‘He said it would probably be amusing to turn over.’
‘Precisely. And Lord Mountclandon – a most courteous man – said, “Then do by all means glance over it”.’
Penwarden paused on this – which might have been fairly described, I felt, as a disguised leading question. But it would have been impossible to swear that he was being disingenuous. The thing had happened half a lifetime back. He might be innocently confusing fact with helpful fiction.
‘I don’t recall it as just like that,’ I said. ‘It was Cressy who suggested something like a simple glancing at the book there and then. Mountclandon said, “Entirely at your leisure, pray”. I remember noting that “pray”, used in that sense, couldn’t, as I’d have imagined, have wholly passed out of colloquial use.’
‘You must have been an uncommonly literary young man.’ Penwarden made this comment with a certain grimness.
‘Yes, I was. And Mountclandon then said, “It’s entirely yours”. I agree about the courtesy. He definitely wasn’t making Cressy a gift of the thing. It was only a kind of hyperbolical graciousness. But that, you know, isn’t evidence. It’s just an impression.’
‘You’ve never talked to Cressy about this?’
‘I’ve never talked to him about anything. I don’t know the man.’ Penwarden’s question had astonished me.
‘It’s simply that your report chimes with his.’ Penwarden got out this necessary avowal with difficulty. ‘But you agree that the man is impudently perverting the true facts of the case?’
‘It would seem so.’ I didn’t feel I need go further than this. And Penwarden, although sunk in gloom, evidently regarded me as behaving tolerably well. ‘But what’s the development?’ I asked. Is Cressy proposing to publish the stuff?’
‘That depends on the trustees. The copyright in all the unpublished material is naturally under their control. ‘
‘The trustees of what?’
‘Oh, the whole Blunderville concern. The settled estates and everything else.’ Penwarden here spoke vaguely, like a man on unfamiliar ground. ‘And, of course, they tend to be the sort of people that Cressy knows how to get in with. He has the art of making himself agreeable to the right people in the right clubs.’
‘I remember something of that too. And he certainly had Lord Mountclandon where he wanted him.’
‘It’s astonishing that the man’s a competent scholar as well. But what’s happened is this. The trustees have appointed a new boy. Co-opted him, perhaps – -I don’t know what the jargon would be. An old member of the college, as it happens. Marchpayne’s father, Cedric Mumford. Do you know him?’
If this information was surprising to me the question with which it concluded was positively awkward. I was aware, not for the first time, of the tangled web deception weaves. My sole meeting with Tony’s father had been in college on the night of the Gaudy, and its circumstances had been such (or young Ivo’s circumstances had been such) that it had seemed injudicious to divulge that the perturbed Cedric had been in the place at all. As a consequence I had blankly denied to somebody on the following morning that the most senior of the Mumfords had ever been known to me, and an hour later had admitted to somebody else having met him on an unspecified occasion. This uncandid behaviour couldn’t now be of the slightest moment. But for a perceptible instant the memory of it held me up.
‘I did once meet him,’ I said. ‘He wouldn’t strike one as a particularly appropriate person for such a job.’
‘Oh, he was a useful party man in his time, I suppose, and I believe he worked for old Blobs Blunderville in a small way. Money too, of course. Anyway, the point is we think a discreet approach should be made to him. There’s no doubt, you see, that the trustees could insist on the letter-book’s being restored to us if they had a mind to. We’ve taken counsel’s opinion as to that.’
‘I see.’ I wondered about the ‘we’ thus being referred to. It might mean the college’s Governing Body solemnly assembled, or it might mean some faction or cabal. At least here was evidence that the affair of the purloined papers did agitate other minds than that of the patently obsessed Penwarden. ‘How are you going to set about it?’
‘One thinks naturally of Marchpayne, with whom we have more recent associations than with his father himself. Marchpayne has been highly successful; he would be absolutely the coming man, they say, if he hadn’t so rashly got himself into the Lords. He regrets that, if you ask me.’
‘I know he does. He’s told me so.’
‘Of course, of course! I was forgetting, Duncan, that you were so close a friend.’ (This was the first occasion upon which Penwarden had addressed me by my Christian name, and I made a note that I must call him ‘Tommy’ before this conversation came to an end. It was the convention that one switched to this mode of utterance spontaneously and without palaver.) ‘So one might expect Marchpayne to carry weight with his father. Unfortunately our relations with him at the moment are a little delicate. I expect you know about that too.’
‘Ivo.’
‘Just so – if that’s his son’s name. The boy refuses to pass examinations—’
‘I doubt whether he’s up to them, Tommy. Ivo’s terribly stupid. I’d say he was a bad and hasty boy.’
‘You know the lad?’
‘He came to lunch with me earlier in the term.’
‘Well, what you say may be true.’ Penwarden appeared impressed by my modest exercise of hospitality. ‘And errors of that sort can raise perplexing questions. But the fact is that the boy’s father – Tony Mumford, as we naturally think of him – is very much exercised over the possibility of his son’s being sent down.’
‘So, I ought to tell you at once, is the grandfather. In fact Cedric Mumford is quite savage about it. He’s as unreasonably angry as Tony, and insolent into the bargain. Cedric’s a shocking old chap, Tommy.’
‘Oh dear!’ It was apparent that Penwarden was dismayed by this appraisal. It was also apparent that he was impressed by the degree of intimacy with the Mumfords which I had, perhaps rashly, revealed.
‘It certainly doesn’t make too good a climate,’ I said, ‘for getting at your blessed trustees. But aren’t there any other former members of the college among them? I’d suppose it almost certain there are. I’d drop the Mumfords, if I were you, and find another route in.’
‘You may be right, Duncan. It’s a point I’ve discussed, as a matter of fact, with the Provost. He’s reluctant to forgo what you might call the Mumford Passage – or at least to do so quite yet. I believe he has an instinct it can be navigated. And he’s a very astute man.’
‘I’m sure he is.’
‘There’s another point about the grandson. I don’t know whether you are aware of this, but it appears he bore a somewhat discreditable part in a sad affair at the end of last term.
A young man—’
‘Yes, Tommy – I do know about Lusby.’
‘Ah, yes. Well, I don’t suppose Marchpayne has heard of it.’
‘Yes, he has. I told him myself.’
‘You told him about that wretched wager?’ Penwarden didn’t sound pleased.
‘Yes – and about Ivo’s being rather out of favour as a result. With his contemporaries, that is.’
‘You were quite right, Duncan. In following your own judgement about telling him, I mean. You are his closest friend in the college. Nobody could criticise you.’
‘I should damned well think not.’ I didn’t react favourably to the notion of people debating whether I had spoken out of turn to Tony Mumford. ‘But what’s this about Ivo, anyway?’
‘The Provost thought of giving the Mumfords an account of the Lusby disaster himself. Most sympathetically, and making it absolutely clear that the college wouldn’t countenance the slightest suggestion that Ivo had been other than merely thoughtless and silly in the matter, or do other than support him against any injurious misconceptions. It’s the Provost’s idea, of course, that this might be thrown into the balance against the examinations issue, and show that we are a fair-minded lot, perfectly well disposed to the boy.’
‘I see.’ For a moment the notion of the Provost’s thus exploiting the death of Paul Lusby in the interest of Tommy Penwarden and the idiotic Blunderville Papers absolutely revolted me. Yet he would be saying nothing about Ivo that wasn’t the proper thing to say, and would be putting himself on record as behind the boy to any academically admissible extent. I doubted whether there was much future for this, or if the Provost would suppose there was were he made aware of Ivo’s present intention of producing an indecent magazine. But this was not an issue to raise with Penwarden – from whom it was, in any case, time that I should disengage myself.
‘Does Cressy’—I asked by way of diversion, and as I got to my feet—’ever venture into this college nowadays?’
‘Oh, yes – from time to time. He has rights, you know, as a former junior fellow or the like, and he dines every now and then.’ Penwarden gave me this information without disapproval and as if it held nothing to surprise. ‘Christopher is very good company. He talks very well.’ These further remarks came in a tone of amiable indifference. ‘Have you read his last book? It’s very able – very able indeed. I recommend it to my pupils as a model of good historical writing. I’m afraid the library copy will be out. But you ought to get hold of it one day.’
‘Perhaps I might even buy it,’ I said.
‘Yes indeed.’ Penwarden spoke as one whose mind kindles to an unusual but not unattractive idea – that of conceivably accreting books around oneself other than willy-nilly. ‘And he’s concise,’ he said – this time with almost overt approval. ‘Doesn’t take up much shelf-room. I’ll say that for him.’
Retailing small concerns at leisure as I am, I may well be giving the impression that life in the university of Oxford is a slow-motion and even dolce far niente affair. In fact, things tend rather to hurry along. This may be due to the curious fact that a ‘full’ term (as statutes describe it) lasts eight weeks, and that there are only three such terms in a year. The tempo of undergraduate life is controlled by the ephemeral calendar thus created. Every activity is announced at short notice and achieved at the double, and the most exacting demands may be made in the confident expectation of their being fulfilled the day after tomorrow. The spectacle can at times resemble that presented by an old Keystone comedy in which the camera has been speeded up to achieve effects of ludicrous expedition. In the years about which I am now writing this was particularly evident in the field of juvenile politics. A term would begin in calm, while the young men and women rapidly hatched their plots in privacy. Then there would be eruptions. ‘Demos’ would be held, buildings sat in by sitters-in, strikes and boycotts decreed, walls scrawled over with cheerfully inflammatory graffiti – all in the interest of programmes beyond the power of man to achieve. It is very hard to render a correct impression of this. It could be peculiarly bewildering to wandering scholars from across the Atlantic, who were inclined to swing from the apprehension that their lives and property were in danger to the view, almost equally delusive, that it was all very much a matter of paper tigers. One strove to meet and acknowledge what it is nice to think of as the burning sincerity of youth, and what one was grappling with in no time was tiresome if innocent frivolity and a natural delight in rough-and-tumble games. Then suddenly it would all be over, since the proponents of various forms of revolution had switched to fixing up their charter flights for vacations in Isfahan or Cathay.
A little of this eight-week brio rubs off on senior members. They may pay not all that attention to the young – who in the regard of many of them, indeed, constitute a minor and even inessential part of the academic scene. The bright speed of their juniors influences them, all the same, and with results that may catch a newcomer off balance. Something of this sort was the effect of a letter from the Provost delivered to me on the morning after my visit to the library.
Dear Duncan,
Tommy Penwarden has told me of a most valuable discussion which you were good enough to hold with him about the small yet perplexed matter of the missing Blunderville letter-book. I confess that I have become tired of hearing of it over the past twenty-five years – as you may already have done over a much shorter period! An affair of the sort has indeed an odd power of rumbling on, and also a mischievous capacity for getting itself damagingly tied up with other issues. It is high time that it should be composed. We have now arrived – at least in my fallible judgement – at a propitious moment for something of the kind. The point is one upon which I shall greatly value your opinion.
But more – and let me be frank with you! I view you as a linchpin in whatever may be set rolling. Cedric Mumford’s accession to the trusteeship of which you have heard, and your own long-standing friendship with his son, may be much to our advantage. With the senior Mumford himself I have now had some correspondence, and I gather he would not be entirely averse to holding a further discussion of the matter in the course of a visit to him at Otby. You are, I know, busier than any of us at the moment, and it is therefore with the greatest diffidence that I suggest our running down there together. If by any chance you feel this to be possible, I shall be most deeply grateful. Mumford’s convenience once considered, I should be entirely at your disposal as to a date.
Yours ever, Edward
My first reaction on reading this letter was naturally to ask myself just what the Provost was after – a problem, I imagine, with which his correspondents frequently found themselves confronted. If Penwarden was to be believed, that most unsatisfactory junior member of the college, Ivo Mumford, was somewhere to be lurking in the picture. His grandfather was to be told about the unfortunate end of Paul Lusby, and to be assured that the college took the most temperate view of any blame that Ivo must bear – this with the notion of emphasising how even-handed the justice dished out by the place. It was in itself a harmless proposal, although I didn’t myself see Cedric Mumford making much of it. If, on the other hand, the Provost were to offer a deal – saying, in effect, ‘You get us back that letter-book and we’ll refrain from turning out your grandson’ – this would be something which Cedric Mumford would at once regard as talking sense. That the Provost would be capable of squaring anything of the sort with his conscience appeared to me, however, highly improbable. Again, he was a man very well able to distinguish between small issues and large ones, and it was hard to understand how he could regard the matter of the letter-book as meriting any great deployment of his diplomatic powers. There was certainly enough of a puzzle in this to set curiosity stirring. And it was stirred too, I found, at the thought of encounter between two characters so little likely to delight each other as Cedric Mumford and Edward Pococke. Otby, moreover, was quite unknown to me, so that the scene of Ivo’s grave and nearly disastrous misconduct in the course of the past summer existed only as a vaguely conjured up terrain in my head. All this prompted me to agree with a good grace to the Provost’s proposal, although I found it impossible to envisage any useful part I could play. But even if I had totally disrelished the plan I could scarcely have got out of it. It was the first request I’d received from the impeccably courteous Dr Pococke since returning to the college.