An Oxford Tragedy (7 page)

It was in 1927 that Ruth married. I can still feel the shock which the announcement of her engagement gave me. Men, I remember to have thought, are difficult to understand, but women are impossible. For with all Oxford at her feet, Ruth must needs become engaged to Shirley. Shirley, who of us all was least sociable and most forbidding, who went less often than any to the President's Lodgings, who more than any of us was harshly intolerant of women, who went out of his way to scarify their intelligence and their influence. They fell in love with one another; no amount of words could explain it further. I think when he married that Shirley made an honest effort to curb his tongue and modify the bitterness of his nature. When his wife was present he was a gentler and more human person; at least I never heard him address to her one of those caustic remarks from which in male society he could never for long abstain. But it is difficult at forty-five to alter the habits of a lifetime. I hoped that he might mellow, but I was disappointed. A failure in 1928 to secure appointment to a Professorship which he had long coveted left him as bitterly disgruntled and as uncompromisingly sarcastic as he had been before his marriage. Ruth felt her husband's unpopularity deeply, though she hid her feelings from the world. She made heroic efforts to soften him, and to make him take pleasure in society. Herself the most happy-natured and companionable of people, she suffered intensely as she saw that Shirley was shunned and disliked by almost all who came in contact with him. We all tried to help her but help was really impossible. Young men, who, for Ruth's sake, had lunched or dined at her house, would
almost invariably be the victims of some mordant sarcasm from their host – a sarcasm which bit the deeper because it was almost invariably based on a fiendishly accurate insight into character. And so, though she put a brave face on it, Ruth knew, as we knew, that she had failed. Yet she loved Shirley, and in some curious, to me incomprehensible, way I believe that she was happy.

When Ruth married, Mary took over the care and management of her father's house. She was then twentyfour, and in the full flush of her beauty. A little quieter than her sister, a little harder to know at first, yet she had the same sunny disposition, the same irresistible charm. Yes, irresistible is the word; where she was seen, there she conquered. With her as hostess, the President's Lodgings continued to be the centre of college life. We all went there, dons and undergraduates alike – not out of any sense of college duty, but because we liked to go, because Mary would be there to welcome us, to cheer us, to make us feel that the world in general, and St Thomas's in particular, was a good and a cheerful and a happy place.

It was in autumn of 1929 that
The Times
announced the second impending blow as it had announced the first. Mary, so I read on one ill-fated morning, was engaged to Maurice Hargreaves. I confess that I was profoundly and irrationally annoyed. In many ways the engagement was in the highest degree suitable. Maurice had a comfortable income of his own, he was handsome, popular, and distinguished in his own sphere. Moreover he was a dominant personality at St Thomas's, with strong claims to succeed Henry Vereker as President when the time for a change should come. And yet I hated the thought of that engagement. I told myself that Maurice was too old, though he was after all only forty; I remembered that he had the reputation of being something too much of a ladies' man in the worse sense of that term. But really, I think, I hated the thought of his
early success. Why should everything fall into his lap? He had conquered too easily the worlds of scholarship and sport, and now it seemed he had only to hold out his hand and beckon to him the best and kindest of women. The man's everlasting success alienated all my sympathy from him. Did he realize, was he sufficiently thankful for all his good fortune? For me, though I struggled to subdue the thought, he became the symbol of success too easily won, too obviously expected. I thought that he suffered from
, I longed in spite of myself to see him in some way chastened and humbled. I don't excuse my own attitude, I only chronicle it. For the first time I admitted to myself what I had long known subconsciously, but carefully concealed. I did not really like Maurice, I envied him, I was jealous. Three months now had passed since the engagement had been announced; they were to be married in the summer.

When Prendergast asked his question we all looked at one another uncomfortably. Shirley had been to most of us so inhuman that his sudden end seemed, I believe, to each of us like an event outside our own lives. Prendergast told me afterwards that when first he saw him lying there dead it seemed to him, after the first shock had passed, like a problem in crime set before him for solution. But the moment that Ruth's name was mentioned everything was changed. It ceased to be a problem and became a human tragedy, with which we had to deal. Who was to tell Ruth? It was no pleasant task, yet clearly it had to be done. She expected her husband back that night in North Oxford, she might not improbably be sitting up for him; she could not be left in ignorance till the morning. As usual I hesitated and wavered. I was the oldest man there, I knew her better than did any of the others; was it my duty, I wondered, to proffer my services? I was rescued from my doubts by little
Mitton. I had never thought very highly of our Chaplain, but at that moment I admired his courage.

‘That's my job, I think,' he said, and began to button up his coat. I realized dimly that even if he might at times cut a rather foolish figure he had underneath that a real belief in the dignity of his cloth and a belief in his calling. I respected him as I had never done before. The others agreed, and Mitton prepared to set off on his gloomy errand. ‘Don't let her come down to-night whatever you do,' said Maurice. ‘She can do no good, and it's too ghastly to think of her seeing him like this here in the middle of the night. We won't tell the President and Mary till to-morrow. It can't be right to wake them all up now. God knows it'll be bad enough for them in the morning.'

I was thankful for that decision, for I felt that my nerves would stand no more that evening. We locked up first the inner room, and then the oak, and took our way back to the empty Common Room. Only three hours before in that same place Brendel had theorized on murder and the detection of crime. As we entered the room I heard him mutter to himself; it sounded as though he said, ‘I am very much to blame.'

In retrospect the next morning appears to me as a prolonged and loathsome nightmare. Bad news travels quickly, and, when I got up after a feverish and miserable night, it seemed as though everyone knew already of the tragedy of the evening before. I was torn from my academic calm and plunged into a world which was utterly new and strange to me. I spent an hour assisting Maurice in making practical arrangements, in interviewing the police, in agreeing with them on a brief and non-committal statement for the press, in cancelling the various engagements with pupils that I had for that day. Never till then had I realized how sheltered my life had always been; how everything had been done decently and in order; and how unfitted I was for dealing with a harder and less academic world. In the middle of the morning came the summons which I had both expected and dreaded. ‘The President's compliments and would Mr Winn call upon him as soon as he conveniently could.' I put on my gown and walked to the President's Lodgings.

I knew well enough before I entered that the President would take the news hardly. Since his wife had died he had had two great interests in his life – his daughters and the college. Now both the things that he loved best were stricken at the same time. He loved the college with the devotion of a man who had dedicated to its interests all his life and energies, but his affection was of a fastidious and discriminating kind. Above anything else he hated vulgarity and advertisement, and, though no one was prouder than he if St Thomas's men distinguished themselves in the schools or on the playing-fields, yet he hated to see such successes paraded in the daily press. Mention of the college he could tolerate if it took the form of allusion to our great traditions,
our noble buildings, our historic names. An account of this kind if couched in the choicest eighteenth-century Johnsonian prose might even give him pleasure. But if, for example, one of our undergraduates was fined for some trivial motoring offence, and the words ‘undergraduate at St Thomas's College, Oxford,' appeared in the paper after his name, the President would feel that he had been personally insulted. In all our long acquaintance I had only once seen him really angry, and that was when a well-meaning but injudicious friend had sent him a cutting from an Australian paper in which a returned Rhodes scholar had written an account, accurate enough, but perhaps a little too blatantly appreciative, of the life and personnel of St Thomas's. The happiest moment of the President's life had been, I think, when a guest one night at dinner had said to him, ‘President, I think that St Thomas's is the best college at Oxford, and talks about it least.' And now this courtly old gentleman, who all his life had shrunk from contact with the world, was faced with the horrible publicity of a murder inside his own college, and that the murder of his own son-in-law in the rooms of another son-in-law to be. No Grand Inquisitor could have devised for him a more refined form of slow torture. In my mind's eye I saw the headlines in the papers for the next few days, and I saw, too, the poor old man's face as he read them.

My interview with him was painful, and I will not dwell on it. ‘This is a dreadful thing for the college, and for my poor daughter.' That was the burden of his cry, and I could do or say nothing to help. I could only tell him all that I knew of the crime, and of the investigations of the Oxford police. They had found, so I had been told, no clue of any kind, and had no theory to explain the murder. With commendable promptitude they had decided that the best assistance available was needed and they had already
telephoned to London. Inspector Cotter, from Scotland Yard, was to arrive by the two o'clock train. I promised to report any new developments and took my leave.

As I went out I met Mary; she must have been waiting for me in the hall. ‘Mr Winn,' she exclaimed, ‘this is terrible. I can't understand it. It all seems so horrible and so unreal. Who could wish to shoot him, and in Maurice's rooms?' I saw that she was overwrought, and tried to pacify her as best I could.

‘Mary,' I said, ‘your first duty is to Ruth. You must keep calm, if only to help her. I suppose she has come down here?'

‘Poor Ruth! Yes, she has come home for the time being. Of course I'll do my best to help. But, Mr Winn, we must find out the truth about this wicked murder. It's the mystery which makes it so hideous. Promise me that you'll find out.'

I had never refused a request from Mary in my life, and I could not now.

‘Yes, Mary,' I said, ‘I promise you I'll find out. Now, good-bye.'

How I was to fulfil my promise I had not the remotest idea, but somewhere in the back of my mind I had a childlike faith in Brendel. If any man could get at the truth, surely it was he.