Perelandra (33 page)

The next item was one of those which the majority of the Fellows could not understand. It involved the recapitulation (by Curry) of a long correspondence between the College and the Senate of the University about the proposed incorporation of the NICE in the University of Edgestow. The words ‘committed to’ kept recurring in the debate that followed. ‘We appear,’ said Watson, ‘to have pledged ourselves as a college to the fullest possible support of the new Institute.’ ‘We appear,’ said Feverstone, ‘to have tied ourselves up hand and foot and given the University
carte blanche
.’ What all this actually amounted to never became clear to any of the outsiders. They remembered fighting hard at a previous meeting against the NICE and all its works, and being defeated; but every effort to find out what their defeat had meant, though answered with great lucidity by Curry, served only to entangle them further in the impenetrable mazes of the university constitution and the still darker mystery of the relations between University and College. The result of the discussion was to leave them under the impression that the honour of the College was not involved in the establishment of the NICE at Edgestow.

During this item the thoughts of more than one Fellow had turned to lunch, and attention had wandered. But when Curry rose at five minutes to one to introduce item Three, there was a sharp revival of interest. It was called, ‘Rectification of an anomaly of the Stipends of Junior Fellows.’ I would not like to say what the most junior Fellows of Bracton were getting at this time, but I believe it hardly covered the expenses of their residence in College, which was compulsory. Studdock who had only recently emerged from this class felt great sympathy with them. He understood the look in their faces. The Rectification, if it went through, would mean to them clothes and holidays and meat for lunch and a chance to buy a half, instead of a fifth, of the books they needed. All their eyes were fixed on the Bursar when he rose to reply to Curry’s proposals. He hoped that no one would imagine he approved the anomaly which had, in 1910, excluded the lowest class of the Fellows from the new clauses in the eighteenth paragraph of Statute 17. He felt sure that every one present would
wish
it to be rectified; but it was his duty, as Bursar, to point out that this was the second proposal involving very heavy expenditure which had come before them that morning. He could only say of this, as he had said of the previous proposal, that it could not be isolated from the whole problem of the present financial position of the College, which he hoped to lay before them during the course of the afternoon. A great deal more was said, but the Bursar remained unanswered, the matter was postponed, and when, at quarter to two, the Fellows came surging out of the Soler for lunch, hungry and headachy and ravenous for tobacco, every junior had it fixed in his mind that a
new wall for the Wood and a rise in his own stipend were strictly exclusive alternatives. ‘That darn Wood has been in our way all morning,’ said one. ‘We’re not out of it yet,’ answered another.

In this frame of mind, the College returned to the Soler after lunch to consider its finances. Busby, the Bursar, was naturally the principal speaker. It is very hot in the Soler on a sunny afternoon; and the smooth flow of the Bursar’s exposition, and even the flashing of his level, white teeth above his beard (he had remarkably fine teeth) had a sort of hypnotic power. Fellows of colleges do not always find money matters easy to understand: if they did, they would probably not have been the sort of men who became Fellows of colleges. They gathered that the situation was bad, very bad, indeed. Some of the youngest and most inexperienced members ceased to wonder whether they would get a new wall or a rise of stipend and began to wonder instead whether the College would continue to function at all. The times, as the Bursar so truly said, were extraordinarily difficult. Older members had heard of such times very often before from dozens of previous Bursars and were less disturbed. I am not suggesting for a moment that the Bursar of Bracton was in any way misrepresenting the position. It is very seldom that the affairs of a large corporation, indefinitely committed to the advancement of learning, can be described as being, in a quite unambiguous sense, satisfactory. His delivery was excellent. Each sentence was a model of lucidity: and if his hearers found the gist of his whole statement less clear than the parts, that may have been their own fault. Some minor retrenchments and reinvestments which he suggested
were unanimously approved and the College adjourned for tea in a chastened mood. Studdock rang up Jane and told her he would not be home for dinner.

It was not till six o’clock that all the converging lines of thought and feeling aroused by the earlier business came together upon the question of selling Bragdon Wood. It was not called, ‘the sale of Bragdon Wood’. The Bursar called it the ‘sale of the area coloured pink on the plan which, with the Warden’s permission, I will now pass round the table’. He pointed out quite frankly that this involved the loss of
part
of the Wood. In fact, the proposed NICE site still left to the College a strip about sixteen feet broad along the far half of the south side but there was no deception for the Fellows had the plan to look at with their own eyes. It was a small scale plan and not perhaps perfectly accurate – only meant to give one a general idea. In answer to questions he admitted that unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – the Well itself was in the area which the NICE wanted. The rights of the College to access would, of course, be guaranteed; and the Well and its pavement would be preserved by the Institute in a manner to satisfy all the archaeologists in the world. He refrained from offering any advice and merely mentioned the quite astonishing figure which the NICE was offering. After that, the meeting became lively. The advantages of the sale discovered themselves one by one like ripe fruit dropping into the hand. It solved the problem of the wall; it solved the problem of protecting ancient monuments; it solved the financial problem; it looked like solving the problem of the junior Fellows’ stipends. It appeared further that the NICE regarded this as the only possible site in Edgestow; if by any chance
Bracton would not sell, the whole scheme miscarried and the Institute would undoubtedly go to Cambridge. It was even drawn out of the Bursar by much questioning that he knew of a Cambridge college very anxious to sell.

The few real ‘Die-hards’ present, to whom Bragdon Wood was almost a basic assumption of life, could hardly bring themselves to realise what was happening. When they found their voices, they struck a discordant note amid the general buzz of cheerful comment. They were manoeuvred into the position of appearing as the party who passionately desired to see Bragdon surrounded with barbed wire. When at last old Jewel, blind and shaky and almost weeping, rose to his feet, his voice was hardly audible. Men turned round to gaze at, and some to admire, the clear-cut, half-childish face and the white hair which had become more conspicuous as the long room grew darker. But only those close to him could hear what he said. At this moment Lord Feverstone sprang to his feet, folded his arms, and looking straight at the old man said in a very loud, clear voice:

‘If Canon Jewel wishes us
not
to hear his views, I suggest that his end could be better attained by silence.’

Jewel had been already an old man in the days before the first war when old men were treated with kindness, and he had never succeeded in getting used to the modern world. For a moment as he stood with his head thrust forward, people thought he was going to reply. Then quite suddenly he spread out his hands with a gesture of helplessness, shrunk back, and began laboriously to resume his chair.

The motion was carried.

After leaving the flat that morning Jane also had gone down to Edgestow and bought a hat. She had before now expressed some contempt for the kind of woman who buys hats, as a man buys drinks, for a stimulant and a consolation. It did not occur to her that she was doing so herself on this occasion. She liked her clothes to be rather severe and in colours that were really good on serious aesthetic grounds – clothes which would make it plain to everyone that she was an intelligent adult and not a woman of the chocolate-box variety – and because of this preference, she did not know that she was interested in clothes at all. She was therefore a little annoyed when Mrs Dimble met her coming out of Sparrow’s and said, ‘Hullo dear! Been buying a hat? Come home to lunch and let’s see it. Cecil has the car just round the corner.’

Cecil Dimble, a Fellow of Northumberland, had been Jane’s tutor for her last year as a student and Mrs Dimble (one tended to call her Mother Dimble) had been a kind of unofficial aunt to all the girls of her year. A liking for the female pupils of one’s husband is not, perhaps, so common as might be wished among dons’ wives; but Mrs Dimble appeared to like all Dr Dimble’s pupils of both sexes and the Dimbles’ house, away on the far side of the river, was a kind of noisy
salon
all the term. She had been particularly fond of Jane with that kind of affection which a humorous, easy natured and childless woman sometimes feels for a girl whom she thinks pretty and rather absurd. For the last year or so Jane had been somewhat losing sight of the Dimbles and felt rather guilty about it. She accepted the invitation to lunch.

They drove over the bridge to the north of Bracton and then south along the bank of the Wynd, past the
cottages, then left and eastward at the Norman church and down the straight road with the poplars on one side and the wall of Bragdon Wood on the other, and so finally to the Dimbles’ front door.

‘How lovely it’s looking,’ said Jane quite sincerely as she got out of the car. The Dimbles’ garden was famous.

‘You’d better take a good look at it then,’ said Dr Dimble.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Jane.

‘Haven’t you told her?’ said Dr Dimble to his wife.

‘I haven’t screwed myself up to it yet,’ said Mrs Dimble. ‘Besides, poor dear, her husband is one of the villains of the piece. Anyway, I expect she knows.’

‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,’ said Jane.

‘Your own College is being so tiresome, dear. They’re turning us out. They won’t renew the lease.’

‘Oh, Mrs Dimble!’ exclaimed Jane. ‘And I didn’t even know this was Bracton property.’

‘There you are!’ said Mrs Dimble. ‘One half of the world doesn’t know how the other half lives. Here have I been imagining that you were using all your influence with Mr Studdock to try to save us, whereas in reality –’

‘Mark never talks to me about College business.’

‘Good husbands never do,’ said Dr Dimble. ‘At least, only about the business of other people’s colleges. That’s why Margaret knows all about Bracton and nothing about Northumberland. Is no one coming in to have lunch?’

Dimble guessed that Bracton was going to sell the Wood and everything else it owned on that side of the river. The whole region seemed to him now even more of
a paradise than when he first came to live there twenty-five years ago, and he felt much too strongly on the subject to wish to talk about it before the wife of one of the Bracton men.

‘You’ll have to wait for lunch till I’ve seen Jane’s new hat,’ said Mother Dimble, and forthwith hurried Jane upstairs. Then followed some minutes of conversation which was strictly feminine in the old-fashioned sense. Jane, while preserving a certain sense of superiority, found it indefinably comforting; and though Mrs Dimble had really the wrong point of view about such things, there was no denying that the one small alteration which she suggested did go to the root of the matter. When the hat was being put away again Mrs Dimble suddenly said,

‘There’s nothing wrong, is there?’

‘Wrong?’ said Jane. ‘Why? What should there be?’

‘You’re not looking yourself.’

‘Oh, I’m all right,’ said Jane aloud. Mentally she added, ‘She’s dying to know whether I’m going to have a baby. That sort of woman always is.’

‘Do you hate being kissed?’ said Mrs Dimble unexpectedly.

‘Do I hate being kissed?’ thought Jane to herself. ‘That indeed is the question. Do I hate being kissed? Hope not for mind in women –’ She had intended to reply, ‘Of course not,’ but inexplicably, and to her great annoyance, found herself crying instead. And then, for a moment, Mrs Dimble became simply a grown-up as grown-ups had been when one was a very small child: large, warm, soft objects to whom one ran with bruised knees or broken toys. When she thought of her childhood, Jane
usually remembered those occasions on which the voluminous embrace of Nurse or Mother had been unwelcome and resisted as an insult to one’s maturity; now, for the moment, she was back in those forgotten, yet infrequent, times when fear or misery induced a willing surrender and surrender brought comfort. Not to detest being petted and pawed was contrary to her whole theory of life; yet, before they went downstairs, she had told Mrs Dimble that she was not going to have a baby, but was a bit depressed from being very much alone, and from a nightmare.

During lunch Dr Dimble talked about the Arthurian legend. ‘It’s really wonderful,’ he said, ‘how the whole thing hangs together, even in a late version like Malory’s. You’ve noticed how there are two sets of characters? There’s Guinevere and Launcelot and all those people in the centre: all very courtly and nothing particularly British about them. But then in the background – on the other side of Arthur, so to speak – there are all those
dark
people like Morgan and Morgawse, who are very British indeed and usually more or less hostile though they are his own relatives. Mixed up with magic. You remember that wonderful phrase, how Queen Morgan “set all the country on fire with ladies that were enchantresses”. Merlin too, of course, is British, though not hostile. Doesn’t it look very like a picture of Britain as it must have been on the eve of the invasion?’

‘How do you mean, Dr Dimble?’ said Jane.

‘Well, wouldn’t there have been one section of society that was almost purely Roman? People wearing togas and talking a Celticised Latin – something that would sound to us rather like Spanish: and fully Christian. But
further up country, in the out-of-the way places, cut off by the forests, there would have been little courts ruled by real old British under-kings, talking something like Welsh, and practising a certain amount of the druidical religion.’