Half an hour later I said good-bye to Mary and Robin, left my respects for Julian, and caught a bus back to Oxford. Arthur had left word that he would not be home until evening, and I concluded that it would be in college that I’d find him in order to say good-bye to him as well. I was not quite sure, however, that I ought in fact to go home. If Arthur was as worried as Mary appeared to think him – and Mary was not one to exaggerate in such a matter – there might be something to be said for my remaining in Oxford for a further few days. I rather thought I was Arthur’s closest friend – certainly I couldn’t confidently name a closer one – and I was without question his friend of longest standing. I had no doubt that if I wanted to stay on for a short time the college bursar would be kind enough to agree. And to Arthur himself I could represent my reading assignment in the Bodleian as not fully discharged. He wouldn’t care for the notion that I was staying on with the idea of holding his hand.
By the time that my bus had worked its way through the alarming confluence of relief roads by which Oxford endeavours, more or less unsuccessfully, to fend off the horrors of modern traffic, I had resolved upon this course of action. There was only one awkwardness. Perhaps with unnecessary formality – for my provincial habits were often astray in such things – I’d made an afternoon appointment with Dr Cropley for the purpose of thanking him for the college’s hospitality, and saying farewell. But I could easily, I reflected, fulfil this obligation while murmuring that my actual departure might still be a day or two off. Cropley, after all, had another sort of departure on his mind, and wasn’t likely to pay much attention to me.
My bus was on Folly Bridge. Tom Tower, that superb southern sentinel of the sacred town, was in front of me. I wondered about dying in Oxford. Would the last longing, lingering look behind of which a great Cambridge poet had spoken be the more poignant for being taken in such a place? I realised that I would myself choose to feel the first chill breath of my mortality when sitting at my desk in Mrs Cowley’s modest room – perhaps with my first novel unfinished beneath my suddenly stricken hand – while before me the lights came out one by one in the little houses in which my pupils were working late over whatever task I had set them for a morrow I was not now to know. This was, I suppose, a morbid reflection. I rose and walked down the upper deck of the swaying bus, without much sense of infirmity, as it crossed Carfax. I should be in college just in time for lunch.
Arthur failed to appear, nor was there any sign of him in his room when I called there afterwards. But on the desk in my own room, I found a hastily scrawled note to the effect that he’d look in at about five o’clock. As that would be within an hour of what I had mentioned as the time of my departure, I had to suppose that he didn’t feel the need of any extended conference. Perhaps I ought to have been reassured by this. In fact, it made me slightly uneasy, and I remained in that state until I was due to call on the Provost.
Cropley’s state of health, I had to remember, was something which I ought probably not to have been told about, and which it would certainly be improper to appear aware of. There was no great difficulty about this. Cropley was a slightly-built man, gentle in manner and oddly careful in his movements. You felt that he might have been brought up in an overcrowded china shop; that he was in a perpetual apprehension of knocking over invisible cups and saucers; and that he had himself taken on something of the fragility of the wares displayed. He could never have been robust, but correspondingly he gave little suggestion of a man whose health has markedly deteriorated of late. As I shook hands with him – for he avoided the Oxford habit of dropping this ceremony – I even wondered whether Jeremy Shefford’s could have been an exaggerated report.
‘I greatly hope,’ he said, ‘that you feel our small experiment to have been not wholly unsuccessful.’ He led the way cautiously to a couple of chairs in a large oriel window. ‘Speak kindly of us, if you can conscientiously do so – and please send us a pupil from time to time.’
I expressed myself on the value of Schoolmaster Fellow-Commonerships. I said how much I hoped that, now and then, one of my best boys might prove up to the standards of the college. The Provost regretted that his wife was away from home, and gave me some message with which he declared she had expressly charged him. I asked the Provost to thank Mrs Cropley for her kindness. After a little more of this, I wondered how the rest of a civil fifteen minutes was going to be played out. It was Cropley who found a topic.
‘Arthur Aylwin dropped in this morning,’ he said. ‘We commiserated with each other over your departure. But then you are happily an occasional visitor at Greyswood. We shall hope to continue to see something of you in college, from time to time. I hadn’t realised that you and Arthur first appeared here together. I gather it was for a History Scholarship examination?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And the best man won.’
‘There were too few of these things in those days.’ The Provost produced this polite regret with confidence. ‘The situation is a little better now. But then again, your true subject was English, was it not? And we had no English Scholarships at that time. That put you at a disadvantage vis-à-vis Arthur.’
‘There may have been boys almost as able as Arthur competing. But I wasn’t one of them. He must have been the best scholar our school had produced within living memory.’
‘Is that so?’ The Provost contrived a courteous air of finding this a very striking circumstance indeed. ‘Well, Arthur is a brilliant fellow still. I have the highest regard for him. His old tutor has by no means forgotten him. Did you meet George Elford on that distant occasion? He is alive still, you know.’
‘So Arthur told me last night. And of course I remember Elford very well. He interviewed me.’
‘It’s a long time back.’ Cropley paused, and for the first time his face assumed a momentarily sombre expression. Talking thus of time, I supposed, had brought him a glimpse of the shadow.
‘Arthur suggested, as a matter of fact, that he take me out to see Elford one day.’ I continued with this subject only because a pause might have been awkward. ‘It seems he still receives callers.’
‘Yes, indeed.’ The Provost had appeared almost startled for a moment. ‘Several of us go to see him, from time to time, although I believe that only Sammy Pym can recall him as an active colleague. But for many years after becoming an Emeritus Fellow he came in and dined occasionally. He has become something of an eccentric, I think it may be fairly said. An eccentric and a recluse, indeed. My wife made some attempts to organise him’—Cropley smiled fleetingly as he made use of this juvenile expression—’but I cannot claim that it was a success.’
‘Elford must be in his eighties. A man is entitled to a little eccentricity at that age.’
‘My dear Deasy, the old boy will never see ninety again. We are all youngsters in his regard. I believe, incidentally, that he always had some very odd persuasions. We hope, by the way, that you are taking a good crop of Oxford anecdotes away with you. It’s what we exist for in the outer world, I sometimes think.’
This harmless subject lasted us until I rose to take my leave. But Cropley detained me.
‘I know,’ he said gently, ‘that you are in Arthur’s confidence about this unfortunate affair of his son’s. He told me about it this morning. To be quite frank, I think that was why he dropped in on me. He is naturally upset.’
‘I haven’t seen him, Provost, since he heard just what the trouble was. But his wife says that he is very upset indeed.’
‘What a pity!’ Cropley shook his head sadly. ‘It’s a wretched thing to have happened, of course. But Arthur must simply be forbidden to make too much of it. For one thing, there is no merit at all in such an affair becoming widely known. And it simply needn’t be’—Cropley was suddenly impatient—’unless Arthur goes about the land loudly despairing over it.’
‘I entirely agree, sir.’
‘Here in college, for example, it has no relevance whatever. Even to talk about it would be to descend to vulgar gossip.’
‘I suppose that’s true.’ I had been surprised by the mingled vehemence and contempt in Cropley’s voice. During our few meetings I had never heard him speak other than dispassionately and out of a settled tolerance upon any topic whatever. ‘But Robin Aylwin’s slip might become relevant, I suppose, if he were to seek entry to this college.’
‘Strictly within limits.’ Cropley’s expression was now almost grim. ‘This is a place in which we greatly value harmonious corporate decisions. There is nothing which I would more wish you to have become aware of.’
‘I certainly have, Provost.’
‘Nevertheless admissions are by Statute entirely in the hand of the Provost. And in this case I would not suffer a debate on the proprieties of the matter for a moment. I know the boy, and I have formed my opinion of him. What he has done, moreover, appears to have been freakish rather than criminal. It speaks against him, of course. That is not to be denied. It also speaks against the school. There is something wrong there, clearly enough. My dear Deasy, can you imagine such a piece of nonsense in your school?’ The Provost performed what I detected as a tour de force of memory. ‘Can you imagine it at the Royal?”’
‘That’s a hard question.’ I laughed, feeling that it was also a question to be taken lightly. ‘Sometimes I find myself believing that anything might happen with us. But – to speak the truth – frankly not.’
‘Precisely.’ The Provost had the air of having made an important point. ‘Nevertheless, one does, of course, want to steer a discreet course. Robin Aylwin might do well to go to Cambridge. My mind is moving a little that way. And I see no difficulty. There is still, thank God, a decent flexibility in these things.’ I found that Cropley had opened a door for me; this was the note on which we were to part. ‘Arthur mustn’t go off his head, that’s all.’ He put out his hand. ‘The college feels so lucky to have had you,’ he said. ‘You have given our small scheme a flying start. Good-bye.’
I looked at my watch as soon as I’d left the Provost’s Lodge.
It was just three o’clock, so I still had two hours until Arthur should pay his promised call on me. I knew that I ought to seek out the bursar to discuss the possibility of my remaining in college a few days longer. But for some reason I put this off. Arthur’s disappearance had now become slightly mysterious to me. I could think of nothing to settle to, and decided to go for a walk.
In my imagination, the streets of Oxford are always filled with undergraduates: gowned figures, hurrying whether on foot or on bicycles about the pursuit of learning. None were in evidence now, for the summer vacation was well advanced, and they had all long since departed. The pavements were not appreciably less thronged as a result, for the university, so far as mere population goes, has for a long time been swamped by the industrial town. Residents have become gradually used to this face of things. But Oxford, despite my ten weeks residence, was still essentially an idea, even a picture, in my head, and as I walked down the Cornmarket at this busy afternoon hour the sense that I might have been in Oxford Street or Tottenham Court Road irked me. Not much marking what route I took, I made my way instinctively towards more open spaces.
The parks and playing-fields were largely untenanted; here and there unhurrying groundsmen were erecting goal-posts for a football season which was still two months off. For a time I stood watching some elderly people playing tennis. But this is never an invigorating occupation, and I was glad when presently I came upon a cricket match. I sat down on a bench to watch, wondering as I did so where these young men came from. The batsman facing the bowler played a faultless stroke – or at least a stroke that looked faultless by the book. It can’t, however, have been the stroke actually needed, for his middle stump fell to the ground behind him. Not at all discomposed, he turned and walked with dignity from the crease. He walked straight towards me, and I saw that he was, in fact, a boy in a boys’ game. White flannel trousers, viewed at a distance, can turn twelve-year-olds into young men. And this twelve-year-old was Julian Aylwin, batting on his own school ground. I had no more than recognised him, when he saw me, deflected his course, and was addressing me.
‘The time this nonsense takes up is staggering,’ he said. ‘Think of it going on in every school in England. Think of the man-hours wasted. Or boy-hours, I suppose one should say.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Another hour before it’s safe to clear out.’ He sat down beside me. ‘I had made fourteen,’ he added.
‘Fourteen isn’t too bad.’ I was amused that Julian’s scorn of this time-consuming game didn’t prevent his wanting me to know that he’d performed with reasonable credit. ‘I left messages with your mother this morning. But now I can say good-bye in person.’
‘You’re going away at once?’
‘Well, either this evening or in a day or two.’
‘I see.’ Julian appeared to give this some thought. ‘I hope you’ve had a nice time here.’ He offered this polite expression very much as Dr Cropley might have done. ‘Do you mean that you might stay on a little in order to back up my father?’ He paused for an answer, but I was too startled by the alarming child’s acuteness to afford one. ‘Daddy will be quite all right, you know, although he is so very much upset. He just hates this idiotic thing.’
‘Do you?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I suppose so.’ Julian found my question a little surprising. ‘I rather hate it for being idiotic. But Daddy hates it for being dishonourable. What about you, sir? Do you join in the hating?’
‘I don’t think I do.’ Julian’s question, I thought, had been a fair return for mine. ‘But I deplore it very strongly indeed.’
‘I see.’ Julian betrayed a faint sense of finding this distinction entertaining. ‘It was pretty pointless, I must say.’ He put down his bat, and began to unstrap one of his pads. ‘Have you heard of un acte gratuit?’
‘I think I have.’
‘I read it somewhere lately. It means—doesn’t it?—doing something for the hell of it. Well, it seems to have been pretty well like that.’
For a moment I said nothing. I remembered that Robin Aylwin had given an account of his exploit at the family breakfast-table, but it hadn’t occurred to me until now that Julian might have been present. Apparently he had been. It didn’t seem to me to have been wise.
‘We must regard it as pretty private for the present,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think?’
Julian received this only with a chilly glance – which was perhaps what it deserved. He was certainly not a boy to run around with a story to the discredit of his family. It wasn’t until he had got off both pads, and strapped them neatly round his bat, that he spoke again.
‘I suppose most people have cheated, or tried to cheat, at one time or another. But I’d have thought the Aylwins an exception.’ He paused on this, as if to make sure that I didn’t find it odd. ‘My father would never cheat. And I haven’t, as a matter of fact, cheated myself. Of course, I’m very young.’
‘If one doesn’t begin young, I doubt whether one takes to it later on.’
‘You mean that Robin probably has a career of crime behind him?’
‘No, Julian, I don’t think I do. And this affair doesn’t seem to me to have been quite simple. It looks as if cheating was to have been involved, but that cheating wasn’t the primary motive. Do you understand that?’
‘Of course.’ Julian didn’t spare his impatience with my foolish question.
‘It started with something different: rebellion against authority, dislike of somebody, being bored or browned off – something of that kind.’
‘If I felt like that – and I sometimes do feel like that – I think I’d find a less random kind of protest.’
‘I’m sure you would.’ I remembered Robin Aylwin’s describing his younger brother as a straight egg-head type. It seemed, if anything, an under-statement.
‘As a matter of fact—’ Julian broke off, as a ripple of applause came from a group of his fellows a little way along the field. Somebody had scored a boundary. ‘Oh, well hit!’ he said, and added to the applause three perfunctory claps of his own. ‘As a matter of fact, although I’ve never cheated, I’ve been swiped for cheating. Unjustly.’ Julian produced this word with irony. ‘Did you ever read James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? But of course you have. You’re an English master. Well, Stephen Dedalus is beaten unjustly – and is terribly upset because it is unjustly. How absurd! A beating is equally painful, whether you deserve it or not.’
‘I think that requires a little more analysis.’ I said this in the assured conviction that Julian would give my assertion fair scrutiny on some convenient occasion. In the strict sense of the word, at least, he was clearly a docile child. ‘But tell me about this shocking occasion.’
‘Very well. Have you ever come across Kelly’s Keys to the Classics?’
‘Of course I have. They’re extremely literal translations from Latin and Greek. Cribs, in fact. And they were going strong in my day.’
‘Which was Daddy’s day too, wasn’t it? I found one in a dump of his old school-books. It was the Fourth Book of The Aeneid – and quite comical. I mean it was trying to follow the Latin so closely that it was hardly in what you could call English at all. Daddy must have had it as a joke.’
‘No doubt.’ It would scarcely have been proper to tell Julian that his father, like almost all the rest of us, had been in possession of this humble publication for a purpose which our masters would have found reprehensible. ‘So what did you do with it?’
‘I took it to school. I thought some of the other boys – those at the top of the form, I mean – would find it funny, as I had. And I forgot about it, before showing it to anybody. And our Latin master found it lying under a desk.’
‘I see. But you don’t mean to say he made a fuss about it?’
‘He made a shocking fuss. He’s very young and inexperienced.’
‘That was a pity, I’m sure.’ To be young, inexperienced and probably of modest intellectual endowment, and at the same time to have Julian Aylwin on the bench in front of one, struck me as a hard fate. ‘So what happened?’
‘He said the owner had been cheating with it, and was to own up. And he got out his stupid gym-shoe.’
‘So you owned up?’
‘Of course not!’ Although my question had been consciously provocative, I was unprepared for the sudden flash of characteristic Aylwin contempt which accompanied Julian’s reply. ‘And then he said that if the culprit – “culprit” was his word – didn’t confess, he’d swipe the whole form. Nobody could believe his ears. Such a thing had never happened. It was the sort of thing you find in idiotic school-stories.’
‘One certainly finds it in them. But it was a little awkward, all the same. What happened?’
‘He swiped the lot. Two each. It had its absurd side. The boys near the top – near me, that is – were fearfully injured and indignant and surprised.’
‘Because they are always little models of good conduct?’
‘Just that.’ Julian, although he had gone oddly pale, gave me a swift conspiratorial grin. ‘And by this time the master knew he was making a fool of himself. He was all red and flustered. He tried to do the job as if we were all in a jolly game together. That was shaming, rather. But funny, all the same.”
‘You didn’t feel bad afterwards?’
‘Only where the idiot meant me to. And not as bad there as if he’d given me four. He might even have behaved like a brute, you know, and made it six. And if I had owned up, people might have believed that I had brought the absurd book in to cheat with. That would have been unbearable – in another way.’
‘I can see your dilemma.’ I glanced curiously at Julian as I said this. It was evident that the childish and unremarkable episode he’d been recounting had affected him in a manner his tone was intended to disguise.
‘I don’t think there was a dilemma.’ Julian had taken a moment to trace the word in some dictionary inside his head. ‘An affair like that is entirely clear. You have somebody behaving like a savage, and you have to act so that he inflicts as little pain as possible.’
‘But surely, Julian, the way you acted led to his inflicting a great deal. How many boys are there in the form?’
‘Sixteen. But pain doesn’t add up, you know. Less is’—Julian cast round for a word—’less is experienced if sixteen boys are swiped twice than if one boy is swiped four times. We don’t all share one behind.’
I found no reply to this. Taken on the ground of cold logic, Julian’s proposition was unchallengeable.
‘On the other hand, the silly ass did have one arm and one wrist. That was what was tiresome. If he was getting fun out of all this swiping – and of course he was, even although feeling foolish – then he got eight times as much fun out of it as if he’d given me four. I rather resented that.’
This further development of a hedonistic calculus on Julian’s part would simply have repelled me, I suppose, if I hadn’t realised that what I was being offered in so coldly adult a tone had essentially the quality of confession. Julian was seeking absolution. If it could be done without portentousness, I supposed I ought to give it.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘that was a cautionary tale. For a schoolmaster, I mean. And it has its comical aspect. Of course you were funking something, Julian. But only the possible misunderstanding about why you had taken in the crib. Not the chap with his gym-shoe.’
‘Both.’ Julian seemed resolved to be rational to the last. ‘But more the misunderstanding than the gym-shoe.’ He stood up. ‘I think I ought to be saying good-bye,’ he said politely, and watched for me to put out my hand. ‘I’d better be getting back to the pavilion.’
‘Good-bye, Julian.’ I shook hands gravely. ‘I hope I shall see you again before very long. By the way, have you told that story at home?’
‘Not yet. I suppose I shall, one day. It might amuse Daddy, although one can’t be sure. He’s rather anti-school, you know. He’s inclined to think schoolmasters—’ Julian broke off, as well he might, seeing impossible ground before him. ‘I mean, it makes it odd that he should be so worried when Robin sets up as a rebel in a big way. I suppose it’s Robin having chosen such an inept manner of doing it.’ Julian paused, so that I had a feeling he had saved up this phrase – probably a recent acquisition – for the end. ‘Good-bye, sir. I hope you have a pleasant journey.’
I walked rapidly back to college, because I didn’t want, by any possible chance, to miss Arthur. I wasn’t sure what I had to say to him about Robin’s affair. But I had a strong sense that something fell to be said, and a feeling that just what it was would come to me as soon as we were together. Meanwhile, I thought about Julian’s story. Although prompted by Robin’s misdemeanour, it had proved, so to speak, to have nothing to do with the case. It lingered in my mind, all the same. I had been, it seemed, the first person to hear it, and I was troubled by the thought that I had, perhaps, made too light of it. For the incident appeared to symbolise for Julian something I’d failed to get hold of. Possibly it had been what psychologists call traumatic. I certainly wondered whether Julian, with his intolerance and quick pride, was really entitled to scoff at the Stephen Dedalus with whom he had so precociously acquainted himself.
It was only a little after half-past four when I reached my room, and I was about to settle down to wait for Arthur when I saw that he had again left something for me on my desk. This time it was a sealed letter, and as soon as I opened it I was conscious of perplexity and a renewed uneasiness. Arthur’s notes were usually hurried and scrawled affairs, full of false starts and scratchings-out. There were scratchings-out here, but I had an uncomfortable sense that they were manufactured, and that what I was looking at was a fair copy. I am looking at it again now, as I write. It is, I believe, the only document I shall have to present.
My dear Frank,
I’m sorry I shall not, after all, be able to see you before you go. It has come into my head that the sooner Robin is off the better. He must feel a dreadful sense of guilt, poor boy, and I suppose he always will. But these first horrible weeks will be best got through elsewhere, and I have remembered that at Perugia there is a very good Università per Stranieri which goes on full-blast through the summer. So I have decided to go straight up to London now. I know that immediate arrangements can be made there.
I’m sorry that right at the end of your stay here you have been bothered with this rotten business. What the boy actually did has come like a bolt from the blue. I was supposing something or other quite different, as you know – but perhaps not without some sort of foreboding, all the same. It’s like one of those ghastly plays. But good-bye for the present. I know you will feel you ought to stay and see if you can help. You have always been incredibly generous, my dear Frank. But don’t think of it. I don’t want it, as a matter of fact, and the thing is best treated as a family matter. So get right off. In haste.
Yours ever, Arthur
What I carried through a first reading of this was, I think, its abruptly dismissive opening. ‘I shall not be able to see you’ was a phrase which somehow disconcerted me in a way that equivalent expressions might not have done. And the letter returned to the same note at the end. That Robin’s misfortune was best treated as ‘a family matter’ was a statement that didn’t allow me now to do other than finish packing my bags. I’ve no doubt that I felt a good deal hurt. Certainly I realised that I held Arthur Aylwin in deep affection, and I was disappointed that he seemed so little disposed to let his present trouble be my trouble too.
But what exactly was Arthur’s trouble? Looking back now – and looking again at the letter here on the desk before me – I try to remember whether some glimmer came to me. I saw, of course, that he was far from seeing Robin’s misdeed in its just proportions. I saw, too, that he was far from seeing Robin himself at all clearly. Possibly the boy could, in a fashion, be described as feeling guilty – although I suspected that he was only feeling a fool and ashamed of himself, which isn’t quite the same thing. But, whether in Oxford or Perugia, Robin certainly wasn’t going to spend ‘horrible weeks’ or feel himself as in ‘one of those ghastly plays’. It was to Arthur himself that the thing was coming in such extravagant terms.
I don’t believe a glimmer did come to me. If it had, I’d surely not have been so dumbfounded later on. I am not, I fear, a particularly perceptive or intuitive person. But I have at least a normal dislike of unhappiness and confusion in people near to me. I spent a troubled journey north. Dining on the train, I first ordered a half bottle of mine, and then changed my mind. I must have been disinclined to do anything which would recall that home-coming with Arthur long ago.