Operation Pax (24 page)

Jane felt that the conversation in which she had become involved was somewhat lacking in direction. Dr Ourglass appeared to have the same feeling, and again changed the subject with unusual abruptness. ‘Jane,’ he asked, ‘has Geoffrey ever shown any disposition to
write
– for example, a play?’

‘I never heard him speak of such a thing.’ Jane was puzzled. ‘Geoffrey is simply a straight-out tip-top scientist. And they don’t usually write plays. Of course Geoffrey is fond of acting, but that’s a different matter. Why do you ask?’

‘Mr Bultitude had a notion that a long-continued retirement and – um – neglect of one’s friends is sometimes to be accounted for by absorption in a literary task.’

‘I see.’ Jane thought this decidedly a poor idea. Nor did Bultitude seem pleased at its being aired again. Perhaps Dr Ourglass was innocently labouring something that had really been one of his companion’s obscure jokes. Anyway, she was not going to stand any longer at a street corner gossiping like this. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘I’d better go off and do some work.’

Bultitude nodded benevolently, as if here were another of the touching frailties of the young. ‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘What sort of acting?’

For a moment Jane was at a loss. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘What sort of acting is the young man fond of? Has he taken part in any plays here in Oxford?’

‘Oh, I see. No – Geoffrey hasn’t, I think, done any acting in a regular way since he left school. I just meant that he likes putting on turns. He can dress up a bit, and then pass himself off in a pub as pretty well anything. It’s a sort of freakish amusement that he gets quite a lot of fun out of from time to time.’

‘Impersonations, in fact.’

‘I suppose it may be called that.’ Jane found herself obscurely resenting the word. ‘Only not of individuals, you see. Just of types.’

‘Quite so. Impersonation, one might say, on the Theo-phrastan model. It doesn’t sound a particularly dangerous hobby. The hazards ought not to extend much beyond a black eye.’

At this Jane felt really cross. ‘You’d have to be quite tough, Mr Bultitude, to take to punching Geoffrey. He’d be back and finding a soft spot or two in no time.’

‘Capital – capital. Young men are too neglectful of those manly accomplishments nowadays. Have you ever joined in these impersonations, Miss Appleby? And has the young man any favourite turns?’

Jane ignored the first part of this questioning. ‘He can do dons. And bewildered foreigners. And – let me see – yes, young clergymen, and down-and-outs.’

‘Young clergymen!’ It was Dr Ourglass who spoke, and he was apparently a little shocked. ‘I had no idea of this – and in a person of high academic promise!’ He paused as if looking for a more reassuring view of the matter, inoffensive to his nephew’s betrothed. ‘Versatility,’ he pursued, ‘is a wonderful endowment, I am all too conscious of being sadly without it myself.’

But by this time Jane had turned her bicycle. A momentary break in the stream of traffic could be made the civil occasion, she felt, of a tolerably brisk farewell to her interlocutors. ‘Sorry,’ she said suddenly. ‘Here’s my chance.’ And at that she darted away.

Although it had been accompanied by her best smile, Jane was not altogether happy about this manoeuvre. It was perhaps neither mannerly nor courageous; and she had only an obscure sense of why the encounter thus rather abruptly terminated had rattled her. When safely on the farther side of the road, therefore, she turned her head for a moment, intending to locate her companions of a second before and impart what cordiality she could to a parting wave. It was a movement involving her in a mishap which just escaped being serious.

Dr Ourglass and Mark Bultitude appeared to have moved off, and Jane’s eye continued to search for them a fraction of a second longer than was compatible with wary cycling. In the same instant a man stepped blindly off the kerb in front of her; there was a bump; and Jane found herself in the unpleasant position of lying flat on the road, with the wheel of a bus hurtling past her head.

She knew, however, that she was unhurt, and she scrambled hastily to her feet. It is bad to have been within inches of death. But, when one is young, it is almost worse to have made a fool of oneself, and to see a little crowd gathering, most of whom have just observed one come down hard on one’s behind, and to expect at any moment a policeman, solemnly insistent upon making copious notes. Jane therefore hastily grabbed her bicycle and looked anxiously at the man with whom she had collided. He too, blessedly, was on his feet. If he were only unhurt and disposed not to make a fuss –

He was backing away through the little knot of people whom the incident had collected. Jane stared at him in surprise. He was a little rat of a fellow, shabby and unshaven, and – what was the odd thing about him – in a state of palpable terror. And it was not, Jane could see, what
had
happened that was the occasion of his miserable state; it was what
might
happen. The man as he tried to back out of the crowd glanced about him in vivid apprehensiveness; when he knocked into somebody he drew back as from a blow; his complexion was of an alarming pallor which emphasized his possession of one badly scratched cheek. That, Jane supposed, had been her fault – as must be also the sadly dusty and crumpled state of the man’s attire. She moved forward at once, wheeling her bicycle. ‘I’m most terribly sorry. It was entirely my fault. I hope–’ Jane paused, disconcerted. The man’s eyes had swept past her quite blindly; his unscarred cheek was twitching; his tongue went rapidly over his lips with an effect that was reptilian and repellent. Suddenly he turned, ducked, dodged, and ran. Jane was addressing her apologies to empty air.

Or rather she was addressing them to a small group of people uncertain whether to be puzzled or amused. The handlebars of her bicycle had got twisted, and to this a couple of undergraduates were attending with expressions so solemnly solicitous that Jane suspected them of concealing coarse amusement at the unlucky manner of her tumble. The one bright spot in the picture was the absence of any bobbing policeman’s helmet. ‘Thank you very much
indeed
,’ she said. Her intention was to speak with an awful and freezing coldness. Unfortunately much of the breath appeared to have been knocked out of her body, and the words emerged with a panting effect proper to an adoring maiden chivalrously rescued from a ravisher or a dragon. She took the bicycle and thrust its nose not very gently into the crowd. Now, thank goodness, she was clear, and had edged into Broad Street. She mounted, settled herself rather gingerly in the saddle, and put this deplorable
contretemps
rapidly behind her. But the consciousness of having been vastly idiotic remained with her oppressively. The oddity of the terrified man’s behaviour went entirely out of her head. So too did her encounter with Mark Bultitude and Dr Ourglass, and the latter’s unexplained suggestion that they were going to make an expedition.

The upper reading room of the Bodleian Library is frequented in the main by persons occupying a middle station in the elaborate hierarchy of Oxford learning. In a university, as in the republic of literature, extreme longevity is a prerequisite of the first eminence; and in Bodley (as the great library is compendiously termed by its frequenters) those in whom extreme fullness of years and exceptional depths of erudition are thus naturally conjoined commonly inhabit studies, niches, carrels and (it may be) cubicles of superior distinction in other parts of the building – notably in what is known as Duke Humphrey’s Library and the Selden End. These latter, although not places of the highest antiquity, are very, very old; and the pursuit of learning has for so long transacted itself within them as to have generated not only a peculiar aura but also an indescribable smell. As long as this smell endures Oxford will endure too. If its undergraduate population were dispensed with, Oxford would not be very much changed. If its bells, even, fell silent, something would be left. But if this smell evaporated it would be a sign that the soul of Oxford had departed its tenement of grey, eroded stone, and that only its shell, only its tangible and visible surfaces, remained.

It is normally only for the purpose of consulting the great catalogue of the Library that these ancients of the place repair to the upper reading room; and this they (and they alone) may do by means of a lift – a lift the nether terminus of which is a jealously guarded secret, and from which egression at its upward limit is almost equally mysterious, since none of the sages is ever observed actually stepping from it, being invariably first remarked advancing down the reading room with measured tread against a background of unbroken lines of books.

Nor do the young largely frequent the upper reading-room, since for them, in sundry dependent libraries, judiciously selected books, independently catalogued, are provided in what, to their large innocence, appears inexhaustible abundance. It is only occasionally that – like those stripling cherubs who, in the first stainlessness of this terrestrial world, were drawn by curiosity to take a peep at Eden – undergraduate members of the university toil upwards to this unwonted sciential eminence. Those who do not take the lift to the upper reading-room must mount a flight of sixty-four steps, involving twelve right-angled turns. It was to this that Jane Appleby addressed herself shortly after this misadventure hard by Bede’s College.

There is surely something unique, if indefinable, in the atmosphere generated in the reading-room of a great library. So many minds intently employed in divided and distinguished worlds; black men beside yellow men, and yellow men beside white; shoes and ships and sealing wax all being studied in a row; the vision of that mysterious Goddess, alluring within the multitudinous and inexplicable folds of her sable robe, who at once unifies the spectacle and makes it possible: all these make a library a solemn place to an exploring cherub of twenty-one. No doubt Jane Appleby came in order to master a book that she knew to be confined here. But she came, too, for the smell of old leather and vellum and wood that permeated the approaches to the place; for the sound, strangely magnified in the stillness, of a fly buzzing on a window pane, or for the muted clanking of the Emett-like contrivance which, behind the scenes, drew its continuously moving train of books up through the secular darkness from crepuscular repositories below. She came, in short – an unconfessed tourist disguised as a scholar of Somerville – for atmosphere. But if Jane came for sensations, she certainly did not come for sensation. She was not at all prepared for the spectacle that was presently to be afforded her.

The reading-room appeared to be less frequented than was common at this hour. Nobody occupied the desk where Jane’s book was waiting, and she settled down to it at once. Or rather she endeavoured to do this – and with no expectation of difficulty. Her mind was well-disciplined, and the constant subacute anxiety in which she now lived did not (as has already been remarked) seriously interfere with her working. And as for the upper reading-room as atmosphere – that, she was convinced, was something that came to one most exquisitely as a faint wash of surface awareness when the greater part of the mind was plunged deep in its task.

But, this morning, Jane’s mind proved reluctant to plunge at all – reluctant (as she told herself fretfully) even to wet its toes. Surface awareness turned out to be her sole stock-in-trade. She buried her nose in her book – which was a very big one – and peeped guiltily over its upper margin at the world about her. This, persisted in, was conduct so monstrous, that she positively expected some dramatic consequence to ensue. A bell might ring loudly, the little door magnificently labelled Protobibliothecarius Bodleianus open with an ominous creak, and hitherto unsuspected attendants, garbed in a Byzantine splendour congruous with that resounding inscription, seize her and bind her in every limb. She would be delivered into the maw of the Emett-like machine; that machine – unprecedently – would be thrown into reverse; and she would be conveyed to the icy embrace of some subterranean Oxford Bosphorus. Come to think of it, Oxford
did
have at least one underground river. Her brother had told her that, as an undergraduate, he had once traversed it in a canoe…

Jane felt a sudden chill. It was a feeling none the less horrid for being familiar – for being a sensation that gripped her whenever chance brought any occasion of danger into her head. She remembered now that just this thought had come to her half an hour before, when the rumbling bus had gone by within inches of her nose. Perhaps Geoffrey, having unaccountably strayed in the vacation to some outlandish place, had been inches less lucky. Or perhaps he had thought to make the solitary exploration of that hidden Oxford river, and his canoe had struck a snag, had pitched him –

Abruptly Jane emerged from the dark, dank tunnel into which her fearful imagination had carried her. Without her being at all aware of what it was, something in the actual and present world around her had plucked at her attention. It was not – deplorably – the printed page before her. It was not the neighbour on her right: a grey-haired woman copying from a book the size of a postage stamp – barring Geoffrey, Jane thought, myself forty years on. Nor was it that picturesque Oxford figure, old Dr Undertone, on her left. For Dr Undertone, surrounded by eighteenth-century theology, had sunk, with closed eyes, into that species of profound cerebration, to a vulgar regard deceptively like simple slumber, which is not unfrequently to be observed in the upper reading-room. It was neither of these people. It was, in fact, the man with the scratched face.

He was still only on the threshold of the room. Subconsciously, she must have become aware of him the instant his pale – his curiously haunted or hunted – face appeared at the door. But, if Jane saw him, nobody else appeared to do so. Very few people in the upper reading-room ever sit peeping over the top of their books.

The man had no business in the place. She was, somehow, quite certain of that. But he had not, apparently, been asked if he were a reader. This was not surprising, for it is only very infrequently that any official of the Library murmurs to anybody a courteous inquiry of the sort. Nor, really, did he look out of the way. He was shabby, but scholars can be shabbier than anybody else in the world. He was grubby, but that is not absolutely unknown among the learned. He was harassed to what was quite evidently the point of nervous collapse, and he had the appearance of one whose mind is bent with maniacal concentration upon the solution of some single, urgent and ever-present problem. But this is not uncommon among those who pursue the historical Homer or the origins of the Sabellian heresy, or who are hounded by urgent conundrums concerning the comparative phonology of the dialects of the upper Irrawaddy.