The Rebel Angels

1

It was near the end of November before all Cornish's possessions were sorted and ready for removal to the public bodies for whom they were intended. The job, which had seemed unmanageable to begin with, had called for nothing but hard work to complete it and Hollier and I had worked faithfully, giving up time we wanted and needed for other tasks. Urquhart McVarish had not exerted himself to the same extent, and possessed some magic whereby a lot of his sorting and note-making was undertaken by the secretary from Arthur Cornish's office, who in her turn was able to provide a couple of strong men who could lift and lug and shuffle things about.

Hollier and I had nobody to blame but ourselves. McVarish was in charge of paintings and objects of art, which can be heavy and clumsy, so he could hardly have been expected to do the work by himself. But Hollier was in charge of books, and he was the kind of man who hates to have anyone else touch a book until he has examined it thoroughly, by which time he might as well put it in its final place. Except that there rarely is any final place for books, and people whose job it is to sort them seem always to be juggling and pushing them hither and yon, making heaps as tall as chimneys on the floor, when the space on tables has been filled. My job was to sort and arrange the manuscripts and portfolios of drawings, and it was not work I could very well trust out of my own hands. Indeed, I wanted no help.

None of us wanted interference, for a reason we never completely acknowledged. Cornish's will had included a special section naming in detail what was to go to the National Gallery, the Provincial Gallery, the University Library and the College of St. John and the Holy Ghost. This list had been made two or three years before his death. But between the making of the list and his last days he had continued to buy with his usual avid recklessness. Indeed, large packages continued to arrive after he was buried. Thus there was quite a lot of stuff that was not named in the will, and much of it was of the first quality. But the will had a clause that provided that each of his executors was to be free to choose something for himself, provided it was not already named as a bequest, as a recognition of the work he had undertaken and as a gift from a former friend. All else became part of his estate, under Arthur Cornish's care. Clearly our choice was to be made from these most recent acquisitions. I suppose our behaviour could be described as devious, but we did not want the galleries and the libraries casting a possessive eye over everything that was available, because we did not want to have to argue, or perhaps wrangle with them as to what we might take. Our right was indisputable, but the high-minded covetousness of public bodies is so powerful and sometimes so rancorous that we did not wish to arouse it needlessly.

We kept the librarians and archivists and curators at bay, therefore, until after our final meeting; once that was over they could strip the place to the walls.

I was first on the spot on that great November Friday, and next to come was Urquhart McVarish. This gave me the chance I needed to do the job I dreaded.

"All the stuff in my department is accounted for," I said, "except for one thing that is mentioned in a memo of Cornish's that I can't quite figure out. He speaks of a manuscript I haven't been able to find."

Urky looked inquiring, but non-committal.

"Here it is," I said, producing the pocket-book from one of the boxes that had been packed up for the University archivists.

"You see here, he speaks of what he calls a "Rab MS" that he lent to "McV." last April. What would that have been?"

"Haven't a clue," said Urky.

"But you are obviously McV. Did you borrow something from him?"

"I'm not a borrower, because I hate lending myself."

"How do you explain it?"

"I don't."

"You see it puts me in a spot."

"There's no sense in being too pernickety, Darcourt. Counting all the books and manuscripts and things there must be thousands of items here. Nobody in his senses would expect us to check every scrap of paper and old letter. In my department I've lumped a lot of things together under Miscellaneous, and I presume you and Hollier have done the same. With a man like Cornish, who was fiercely acquisitive but utterly unsystematic, things are bound to be mislaid. Don't worry about it."

"Well, but I do, rather. If there's a manuscript somewhere that ought to be here, I have an obligation to recover it and see that the Library gets it."

"Sorry I can't help you."

"But you must be McV."

"Darcourt, you're pressing me in a way I don't much like. Are you by any chance suggesting I've pinched something?"

"No, no; not at all. But you see my position; I really must follow up this note."

"And on the basis of that, taken from a lot of scribbles that seem to be phone numbers and addresses, and reminders of God knows what past events, you are pressing me rather forcibly. Have you traced all the rest of the stuff in all this mess of notebooks?"

"Of course not. But this one is not like the rest; it says he lent something to you. I'm just asking."

"You have my word that I don't know anything about it."

When somebody gives you his word, you are supposed to take it, or else be prepared to make an unpleasant fuss. There is a moment when one should be bold, but I hesitated and the moment passed. In these confrontations the stronger will prevails, and whether it was that I had eaten the wrong things for lunch, or because I am naturally a hater of rows, or because Urky's Sheldonian type has the edge on my Sheldonian type in such matters, I lost my chance. I was resentful, but the code which is supposed to govern the dealings of scholars prevented me from saying any more. Of course I was uncomfortable, and my conviction hardened that Urky had kept the Rabelais manuscript Hollier had described. But if I couldn't make him disgorge it by the sort of inquiry I had made, was I now to denounce him and demand – what? A search of his house? Impossible! An appeal to Arthur Cornish? But would Arthur understand that a misplaced manuscript was a serious matter, and if he did would he be willing to pursue it? Would Hollier stand by me? And if I went through all this uproar, and the manuscript finally reached the Library, would Hollier and his Maria ever get their hands on it? If McVarish produced it, might he not take the important letters from the pocket in the back of the cover, and deny any knowledge of them? All the muddle of arguments that rush into the mind of a man who has been worsted in an encounter streaked through my brain in a few seconds. Better face the fact: I had backed down, and that was all there was to it. Urky had won, and I had probably made an enemy.

More unpleasantness was avoided because the man from the lawyer's office and the man from Sotheby's arrived, and the secretary Cornish had put on the job, and shortly afterwards came Hollier and Arthur Cornish. Necessary business was completed: the Sotheby representative swore that the valuation his firm had prepared was in conformity with modern estimates of such things; we three swore that we had carried out our duties to the best of our abilities, and that was that. It was all eyewash, really, because the only way to find the current value of Cornish's art collections was to sell them, and our abilities as executors rested on Cornish's opinion of us, rather than on any professional experience. But documents were necessary for probate, and we did what was necessary. The lawyer and the Sotheby man went away, and the moment came that we had all been waiting for.

"Now gentlemen, what are you going to choose?" said Arthur Cornish. He looked at McVarish, who was the oldest.

"This, for me," said Urky going to a table in a far corner of the room and putting his hand on a bronze figure that stood with a huddle of similar pieces. But though similar, they were not of equal value. Urky had chosen the best, and why not?

It was a Venus; the Sotheby man had identified it as a Canova, and a good one.

I was grateful that Urky had in this way set the tone for Hollier and myself; what he had chosen was unquestionably valuable, but among Cornish's treasures it was not conspicuous. There were obviously better things. It was a substantial, but not a grabby, choice.

"Professor Hollier?" said Arthur.

I knew how much Hollier hated having to reveal his choice. There was about it too much the air of the child who is taken into a candy-shop on its birthday and told to choose, under the eye of indulgent adults. For such a private man this was deeply distasteful. But he spoke up. "These books, if nobody objects."

He had chosen the four volumes of Konrad Gesner's Historia Animalium, a splendid piece of sixteenth-century book-making. "Well done, Hollier," said Urky; "The German Pliny – just your boy."

"Professor Darcourt?" said Arthur.

I suppose I disliked revealing my choice as much as Hollier, but there is no sense in being a fool about such things. When would such an opportunity come again? Never. So after some pretence of not knowing where to look, I laid on the table a brown paper folder containing two caricatures, elegantly drawn and palely coloured, that could have come from one hand only. "Beerbohms!" said Urky, darting forward. "How sly of you, Simon! If I'd known there were any of those I might have changed my mind."

Not a very serious comment, but why did I feel that I should like to kill him?

Our choices made, we moved the things to a central table, and everybody had a look. The secretary asked us for descriptions that could be included in the information for the lawyers. She was a nice woman; I wished that she too could have something. Arthur Cornish asked Hollier about Gesner, and Hollier was unwontedly communicative.

"He was a Swiss, actually; not a German. An immensely learned man, but greatest as a botanist, I suppose. In these four volumes he brought together everything that was known about every animal that had been identified by scholars up to 1550. It is a treasure-house of fact and supposition, but it aims at being scientific. It's not like those medieval bestiaries that deal simply in legend and old wives' tales."

"I thought old wives' tales were your stock in trade, Hollier," said Urky.

"The growth of scientific knowledge is my stock in trade, if that's what you want to call it," said Hollier, without geniality.

"Let's see the Beerbohms," said Urky. "Oh, marvellous! College Types; look at Magdalen, would you! What a swell! And Balliol, all bulging brow and intellectual pride; and Brasenose – huge shoulders and a head like a child's! And Merton – my gosh, it's a lovely little portrait of Max himself! – What's the other one? The Old Self and the Young Self; Cosmo Gordon Long. What are they saying? Young Self: I really can't decide whether to go on the Stage or into the Church. Both provide such opportunities… Old Self: You made the right choice; the Church gave me a role in a real Abdication. Oh Simon, you old slyboots! That's really valuable you know."

Of course it was valuable, but that wasn't the point; it was authentic Max. How Ellerman would have loved it!

"It won't be sold," I said, perhaps more sharply than was wise. "I'll leave it as a treasure in my will."

"Not to Spook, I hope," said Urky.

What a busybody the man was!

Arthur saw that I was being harried. He ran his hand appreciatively over the splendid back of the nude bronze. "Very fine," he said.

"Ah, but do you see what finally decided me?" said Urky. "Look at her. Doesn't she remind you of anyone? Somebody we all four know?… Look closely. It's Maria Magdalena Theotoky to the life."

"There's a resemblance, certainly," said Arthur.

"Though we can't – or I'd better say I can't – answer for the whole figure," said Urky. "Still, one can guess at what lies under modern clothes. Who was the model? Being Canova, it was probably a lady from Napoleon's court. He must have known her intimately. Observe the detail of the modelling."

The bronze Venus was about twenty-five inches tall; the figure was seated, one foot resting on the other knee, lovingly tying the laces of a sandal. What was unusual about it was that the vulva, which sculptors usually represent as an imperforate lump of flesh, was here realistically defined. It was not pornographic; it had the grace and the love of the female figure Canova knew so well how to impart to his statuary.

It is hard for me to be just to Urky. Certainly he appreciated the beauty of the figure, but there was a moist gleam in his eye that hinted at an erotic appreciation, as well… And why not, Darcourt, you miserable puritan? Is this some nineteenth-century nonsense about art banishing sensuality, or some twentieth-century nonsense about a human figure being no more than an arrangement of masses and planes? No, I didn't like Urky's attitude towards the Venus because he had linked it with a girl we knew, and whom Hollier knew especially well, and Urky was seeking to embarrass us. What I would have accepted without qualm from another man, I didn't like at all when it came from Urky.

"You agree that it looks like Maria, don't you Hollier?" he said.

"I certainly agree that it looks like Maria," said Arthur, unexpectedly.

"A stunner, isn't she?" said Urky to Arthur, but with his eye on Hollier. "Tell me, just as a matter of interest, where would you place her in the Rushton Scale?"

We all looked blank at this.

"Surely you know it? Devised by W. A. H. Rushton, the great Cambridge mathematician? Well, it's this way: Helen of Troy is accepted as the absolute in female beauty, and we have it on a poet's authority that her face launched a thousand ships. But clearly "face" implies the whole woman. Therefore let us call a face that launches a thousand ships a Helen. But what is a face that launches only one ship? Obviously a millihelen. There must be a rating for all other faces between those two that have any pretension whatever to beauty. Consider Garbo; probably 750 millihelens, because although the face is exquisite, the figure is spare and the feet are big. Now Maria seems to me to be a wonder in every respect that I have had the pleasure of examining, and her clothes are plainly not meant to conceal defects. So what do we say? I'd say 850 millihelens for Maria. Anybody bid higher? What do you say, Arthur?"

"I'd say she's a friend of mine, and I don't rate friends by mathematical computation," said Arthur.

"Oh, Arthur, that's very square! Never mention a lady's name in the mess, eh?"

"Call it what you like," said Arthur. "I just think there's a difference between a statue and somebody I know personally."

"And Vive la différence?" said Urky.

Hollier was breathing audibly and I wondered what Urky knew – because if Urky knew anything at all, it was a certainty that the whole world would know it very soon, and in a form imposed on it by Urky's disagreeable mind. But I did not see how, under the circumstances, Urky could know anything whatever about Hollier's involvement with Maria. Nor did I see why I should care, but plainly I did care. I thought the time had come to change the subject. The secretary from Arthur's office was looking unhappy; she sniffed a troublesome situation she did not understand.

"I have a suggestion to make," I said. "Our old friend Francis Cornish's will says that his executors are to have something to remember him by, and we have been going on the assumption that he meant the three of us. But isn't Arthur an executor? You mentioned a picture that took your eye the first day we met here, Arthur; it was a little sketch by Varley."

"It was named for the Provincial Gallery," said Urky. "Sorry, it's spoken for."

"Yes, I knew that," I said. There was no reason why Urky should be the only one to know best. "But I've been told you're a music enthusiast, Arthur. A collector of musical manuscripts, indeed. There are one or two things not spoken for that might interest you."

Arthur was flattered, as rich people often are when somebody remembers that they, too, are human and that not everything lies within their grasp. I fished out the envelope I had put handy, and his eyes gleamed when he saw a delicate and elegant four-page holograph of a song by Ravel, and a scrap of six or eight bars in the unmistakable strong hand of Schoenberg.

"I'll take these with the greatest pleasure," he said. "And thanks very much for thinking of me. It had crossed my mind that I might choose something, but after my experience with the Varley I didn't want to push."

Yes, but we knew him and liked him much better than when he cast longing eyes at the Varley. Arthur improved with knowing.

"If that finishes our business, I'd like to get along," I said. "We're expecting you at Ploughwright at six, and as I'm Vice-Warden I have some things to attend to."

I took up my Beerbohms, Hollier tucked two big volumes of Gesner under each arm, and McVarish, whose prize was heavy, asked the secretary to call him a taxi. To be charged, I had no doubt, to the Cornish estate.

I left Cornish's spreading complex of apartments, where I had often cursed the work he had imposed on me, with regret. Emptying Aladdin's Cave had been an adventure.

2

Being Vice-Warden was not heavy work, and I accepted it gladly because it ensured me a good set of rooms in the College; Ploughwright was for graduate students, a quiet and pleasant oasis in a busy University. On Guest Nights it was my job to see that things went well, guests properly looked after, and the food and wine as good as the College could manage. They cost us something, these Guest Nights, but they perpetuated a tradition modern universities sometimes appear to have forgotten, the old tradition of scholarly hospitality. This was not food and drink provided so that people might meet to haggle and drive bargains, not the indigestive squalor of the "working lunch", not the tedium of a "symposium" with a single topic of conversation, but a dinner held once a fortnight when the Fellows of the College asked some guests to eat and drink and make good cheer for no other reason than that this is one of civilization's triumphs over barbarism, of humane feeling over dusty scholasticism, an assertion that the scholar's life is a good life. Ozy Froats had typed me as a man fond of ceremonies, and he was right; our Guest Nights were ceremonies, and I made it my special care to ensure that they were ceremonies in the best sense; that is to say, that people took part in them because they were irresistible, rather than merely inevitable.

Our guests on this November Friday night were Mrs. Skeldergate, who was a member of the Provincial Legislature at the head of a committee considering the financing of universities, and I had arranged that the others should be Hollier and Arthur Cornish – which meant the inclusion also of McVarish – as a small celebration of our completion of the work on the Cornish bequests. Arthur might well have asked us to dinner for this purpose, but I thought I would get in ahead of him; I dislike the idea that the richest person in a group must always pay the bill.

Apart from these, fourteen of the Fellows of Ploughwright attended this Guest Night, not including the Warden and myself. We were a coherent group, in spite of the divergence of our academic interests. There was Gyllenborg, who was notable in the Faculty of Medicine, Durdle and Deloney, who were in different branches of English, Elsa Czermak the economist, Hitzig and Boys, from Physiology and Physics, Stromwell, the medievalist, Ludlow from Law, Penelope Raven from Comparative Literature, Aronson the computer man, Roberta Burns the zoologist, Erzenberger and Lamotte from German and French, and Mukadassi, who was a visitor to the Department of East Asian Studies. With McVarish from History, Hollier from his ill-defined but much-discussed area of medievalism, Arthur Cornish from the world of money, the Warden who was a philosopher (his detractors said he would have been happier in a nineteenth-century university where the division of Moral Philosophy still existed), and myself as a classicist, we cast a pretty wide net of interests, and I hoped the conversation would be lively.

I was not alone in this. Urky McVarish took me by the arm as we came downstairs from Hall, to continue our dinner in the Senior Common Room, and murmured in my ear, in his most caressing voice – and Urky had a caressing voice when he wanted to use it.

"Delightful, Simon, totally delightful. Do you know what it reminds me of? Of course you know my Rabelaisian enthusiasm – because of my great forebear. Well, it puts me in mind of that wonderful chapter about the country people at the feast where Gargantua is born, chatting and joking over their drinks. You remember how Sir Thomas translates the chapter-heading? – How they chirped over their cups; it's been splendid in Hall, and the junior scholars are so charming, but I look forward to being in the S.C.R. where we shall hear the scholars chirping over their cups even more exuberantly."

He darted off to the men's room. We allow an interval at this juncture in our Guest Nights for everybody to retire, to relieve themselves, rinse their false teeth if need be, and prepare for what is to follow. I know I am absurdly touchy about everything McVarish says, but I wished that he had not compared our pleasant College occasion to a Rabelaisian feast. True, we were going to sit down in a few minutes to nuts and wine and fruit, but chiefly to conversation. No need for Urky to talk as if it were a peasant booze-up as described by his favourite author. Still – Urky was not a fool; as Vice-Warden charged with the duty of ensuring that the decanters were replenished, that Elsa Czermak had her cigar and the gouty Lamotte his mineral water, I should have a freedom given to no one else to move around the table and hear how the scholars chirped over their cups.

"Oh, how lovely this looks!" said Mrs. Skeldergate, entering the Senior Common Room with the Warden. "And how luxurious!"

"Not really," said the Warden, who was sensitive on this point. "And I assure you, not a penny of government money goes to pay for it; you are our guest, not that of the oppressed taxpayers."

"But all this silver," said the government lady; "it's not what you think of in a college."

The Warden could not let the subject alone, and considering who the guest was, I don't blame him. "All gifts," said he; "and you may take it from me that if everything on this table were sold at auction it wouldn't bring enough to support the weekly costs of such a laboratory as that of –" he groped for a name, because he didn't know much about laboratories – "as that of Professor Froats."

Mrs. Skeldergate had a politician's tact. "We're all hoping for great things from Professor Froats; some new light on cancer, perhaps." She turned to her left, where Archy Deloney stood, and said, "Who is that very handsome, rather careworn man near the top of the table?"

"Oh, that's Clement Hollier, who rummages about in the ash-heaps of bygone thought. He is handsome, isn't he? When the President called him an ornament of the University we didn't quite know whether he meant his looks or his work. But careworn. 'A noble wreck in ruinous perfection', as Byron says."

"And that man who is helping people find their places? I know I met him, but I have a terrible memory for names."

"Our Vice-Warden, Simon Darcourt. Poor old Simon is struggling with what Byron called his 'oily dropsy' – otherwise fat. A decent old thing. A parson, as you see."

Did Deloney care that I overheard? Did he intend that I should? Oily dropsy, indeed! The malice of these bony ectomorphs! The chances are good that I shall still be hearty when Archy Deloney is writhen with arthritis. Here's to my forty feet of gut and all that goes with it!

Professor Lamotte was looking pale and patting his brow with a handkerchief, and I knew that Professor Burns must have trodden on his gouty foot. She was distressed, but "It doesn't matter in the least," said Lamotte, who is the perfection of courtesy.

"Oh, but it does," said Roberta Burns, an argumentative Scot, but a kind heart. "Everything matters. The Universe is approximately fifteen billion years old, and I swear that in all that time, nothing has ever happened that has not mattered, has not contributed in some way to the totality. Would it relieve you to hit me fairly hard, just once? If so, may I suggest a clout over the ear?" But Lamotte was regaining his colour, and tapped her ear playfully.

The Warden had heard this and called out, "I heard you, Roberta, and I agree without reserve; everything matters. This is what gives vitality to the whole realm of ethical speculation."

The Warden has no talent for small talk, and the younger Fellows like to chaff him. Deloney broke in: "Really Warden, you must admit the existence of the trivial, the wholly meaningless. Like the great dispute now raging in Celtic Studies. Have you heard?"

The Warden had not heard, and Deloney continued: "You know how they are always boozing – the real hard stuff, not the blood of the grape like our civilized selves. At one of their pow-wows last week Darragh Twomey was as tight as a drum, and asserted boldly that the Mabinogion was really an Irish epic, and the Welsh had stolen it and made a mess of it. Professor John Jenkin Jones took up the gauntlet, and it came to a fist-fight."

"You don't say so," said the Warden, pretending to be aghast.

"That's absolutely not true, Archy," Professor Penelope Raven said; she was circling the table looking for her place-card. "Not a blow was struck; I was there, and I know."

"Penny, you're just defending them," said Deloney. "Blows were exchanged. I have it on unimpeachable authority."

"Not blows!"

"Pushing, then."

"Perhaps some pushing."

"And Twomey fell down."

"He slipped. You're making an epic of it."

"Perhaps. But University violence is so trifling. One longs for something full-blooded. One wants a worthy motive. One must exaggerate or feel oneself a pygmy."

This is not the way a Guest Night is supposed to be conducted. When we are seated we converse politely to left and right, but with people like Deloney and Penny Raven there is a tendency to yell, and interfere in conversations to which they are not party. The Warden was looking woeful – his way of suggesting disapproval – and Penny turned to Aronson, and Deloney to Erzenberger and behaved themselves.

"Isn't it true that when you cut Irishmen open, four out of five have brass stomachs?" Penny whispered.

Gyllenborg, a Swede, pondered for a moment, and said, "That has not come within the range of my experience."

Hitzig said to Ludlow: "What have you been doing today?"

"Reading the papers," said Ludlow, "and I am tired of them. Every day a score of Chicken Lickens announce over their bylines that the sky is falling."

"Don't tell me you are one of those who asks why the big news must always be bad news," said Hitzig. "Mankind delights in mischief; always has, always will."

"Yes, but the mischief is so repetitious," said the lawyer. "Nobody finds a variation on the old themes. As our friends down the way were complaining, crime is trivialized by its dowdiness. That's why detective stories are popular; the crimes are always ingenious. Real crime is not ingenious; the same old story, again and again. If I wanted to commit a murder I should devise a truly novel murder weapon. I think I should go to my wife's freezer, and take out a frozen loaf of bread. Have you looked at those? They are like large stones. You bash your victim – let's say, your wife – with the frozen loaf, melt it out and eat it. The police seek in vain for the murder weapon. A novelty, you see?"

"They would discover you," said Hitzig, who knew a lot about Nietzsche, and was apt to be dismal; "I think that notion has been tried."

"Very likely," said Ludlow. "But I should have added a novelty to the monotonous tale of Othello. I should go down in the annals of crime as the Loaf Murderer. Admittedly we live in a violent world, but my complaint is that the violence is unimaginative."

"I gather that it is some time since violence has played much part in student life," said Mrs. Skeldergate to the Warden.

"God be praised," said he. "Though I think people exaggerated the violence there was; they spoke and wrote as though it were something wholly without precedent. But European universities are unceasingly violent, and the students are tirelessly political. History rings with the phrase 'The students rioted in the streets'. Of course we treat our students much more humanely than the European universities have ever done. I have colleagues at the Sorbonne who boast that they have never spoken to a student except in the lecture-hall, and do not choose to know them personally. Quite unlike the English and American tradition, as you know."

"Then you don't think the uproars really changed anything, Warden?"

"Oh, they did that, right enough. Our tradition of the relationship between student and professor had always been that of the aspirant towards the adept; part of the disturbances arose from a desire to change it to a consumer-retailer arrangement. That caught the public fancy too, you know, and consequently governments began to talk in the same way, if you will allow me to say so. 'We shall require seven hundred head of engineers in the next five years, Professor; see to it, will you?' – that sort of thing. 'Don't you think philosophy a frill in these stern times, Professor? Can't you cut down your staff in that direction?' Education for immediate effective consumption is more popular than ever, and nobody wants to think of the long term, or the intellectual tone of the nation."

Mrs. Skeldergate, to her dismay, had turned on a tap she could not shut off, and the Warden was in full spate. But she was an experienced listener, and there was no disturbance in her appearance of interest.

Professor Lamotte was still recouping his powers after the assault on his gouty foot, and he was startled when McVarish leaned across him and said to Professor Burns: "Roberta, have I ever shown you my penis-bone?"

Professor Burns, a zoologist, did not turn a hair. "Have you truly got one? I know they used to be common, but it's ages since I saw one."

Urky detached an object with a gold handle from his watch-chain and handed it to her. "Eighteenth century; very fine."

"Oh, what a beauty. Look, Professor Lamotte, it's the penis-bone of a raccoon; very popular as toothpicks in an earlier day. And tailors used them for ripping out basting. Very nice, Urky. But I'll bet you haven't got a kangaroo-scrotum tobacco pouch; my brother sent me one from Australia."

Professor Lamotte regarded the penis-bone with distaste. "Don't you find it rather disagreeable?" he said.

"I don't pick my teeth with it," said Urky; "I just show it to ladies on social occasions."

"You astonish me," said Lamotte.

"Oh come off it, René; you – a Frenchman! Subtle wits like to refresh themselves with a whiff of mild indecency. La nostalgic de la boue and all that. Indecency and even filth – letting the hard-run intellect off the chain. Like Rabelais, you know."

"I know Rabelais is very much your man," said Lamotte.

"A family connection," said Urky; "my ancestor, Sir Thomas Urquhart – the first and still the greatest translator of Rabelais into English."

"Yes, he improved on Rabelais a good deal," said Lamotte. But Urky was insensitive to any irony but his own. He proceeded to inform Professor Burns about Sir Thomas Urquhart, with occasional gamy quotations.

As I prowled round the table, about my Vice-Warden's business, Arthur Cornish, I was glad to see, was getting on well with Professor Aronson, the University's big man on computer science. They were talking about Fortran, the language of formula and translation, in which Arthur, as a man deeply concerned with banking and investment, had a professional interest.

"Do you think we ought to tackle Mrs. Skeldergate later about what is being said in the Legislature about poor Ozias Froats?" said Penelope Raven to Gyllenborg. "Really, they've got him all wrong. Not that I know anything about what he's doing, but nobody could be such a fool as some of those idiots are pretending."

"I wouldn't, if I were you," said Gyllenborg. "Remember our rule: never talk business or ask for favours on Guest Night. And I'll add something: never attempt to explain science to people who want to misunderstand. Froats will be all right; the people who know have no misgivings about him. What's going on in the Legislature is just democracy on the rampage; everybody having his uninformed say. Never explain things; my lifelong rule."

"But I like explaining," said Penny. "People have such nutty ideas about universities and the people who work in them. Did you see the obituary that appeared of poor Ellerman? You wouldn't have known it was the same man we knew. The facts were more or less right, but they gave no sense of what he had been, and he was damned good. If they'd wanted to crucify him, of course, it would have been easy. That crack-brained continuous romance he wrote, which was supposed to be such a secret and which he kept confiding in everybody about; a sort of Dream-Woman he invented for his private delectation, and made love to in quasi-Elizabethan prose. If anybody got hold of that –"

"They won't," said Professor Stromwell, from across the table; "it's gone forever."

"Really?" said Penny. "What happened?"

"I burned it myself," said Stromwell. "Ellerman wanted it out of the way."

"But oughtn't it to have gone to Archives?"

"In my opinion, too much goes to Archives, and anything that is in Archives gains a wholly ridiculous importance because of it. Judge a man by what he publishes, not by what he hides in a bottom drawer."

"Was it as raunchy as he hinted?"

"I don't know. He asked me not to read it, and I didn't."

"And thus another great romance is lost," said Penny. "He may have been a considerable artist in pornography."

"No, not a man who was so devoted to the university ideal as Ellerman," said Professor Hitzig. "If he had been an artist primarily he would not have been so happy here. The characteristic of the artist is discontent. Universities may produce fine critics, but not artists. We are wonderful people, we university people, but we are apt to forget the limitations of learning, which cannot create or beget."

"Oh, come on!" said Penny; "That's going too far. I could name you lots of artists who have lived in universities."

"For every one you name, I'll name you a score who didn't," said Hitzig. "Scientists are what universities produce best and oftenest. Science is discovery and revelation, and that is not art."

"Aha! "The reverent inquiry into nature," said Penny.

"Finding a gaping hole in exact knowledge and plugging it, to the world's great benefit," said Gyllenborg.

"Then what do you call the Humanities?" said Penny. "Civilization, I suppose."

"Civilization rests on two things," said Hitzig; "the discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, and voluntary ability to inhibit defecation. And I put it to you, where would this splendidly civilized occasion be without both?"

"Fermentation is undoubtedly science," said Gyllenborg; "but voluntary inhibition must be psychology, and if anybody suggests that psychology is a science I shall scream."

"No, no; you are on my ground now," said Stromwell; "inhibition of defecation is in essence a theological matter, and unquestionably one of the effects of the Fall of Man. And that, as everybody now recognizes, means the dawn of personal consciousness, the separation of the individual from the tribe, or mass. Animals have no such power of inhibition, as every stage-manager who has to get a horse on and offstage without a mishap will assure you. Animals know themselves but dimly – even more dimly than we, the masters of the world. When Man ate the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge he became aware of himself as something other than a portion of his surroundings, and he dropped his last, carefree turd, as he, with wandering steps and slow, from Eden took his solitary way. After that he had, literally, to mind his step, not to speak of his Ps and Qs."

" 'His solitary way'," said Penny Raven. "Just like Milton, the old sour-belly! What about Eve?"

"Every child repeats the experience of recognizing himself as unique," said Hitzig, ignoring the feminist outburst.

"Every child repeats the whole history of life, beginning as a fish, before he begins to experience inhibition," said Gyllenborg.

"Every child repeats the Fall of Man, quits the Paradise of the womb, and is launched into the painful world," said Stromwell. "Sub-Warden, have those people up the way completely forgotten that decanters are supposed to be passed?"

I tore myself away from a disquisition by Arthur Cornish on loan-sharking – of which of course he disapproved, although it fascinated him – and made another tour of the table to see that everyone was all right, and speed the decanters on their way. They had come to rest in front of Professor Mukadassi, who did not drink wine, and seemed absorbed in the talk of Hollier. I was glad Clem was enjoying himself, because he is not really a clubbable man.

"What I call cultural fossils," he was saying, "are parts of human belief or behaviour that have become so imbedded in the surrounding life that nobody questions them. I remember going to church with some English relatives when I was a boy, and noticing that a lot of the country women, as they came in, made a tiny curtsy to a blank wall. When I asked why, nobody knew, but my cousin inquired of the vicar, and he said that before the Reformation a statue of the Virgin had stood there, and although Cromwell's men had destroyed it, they could not destroy the local habit, as evinced in the women's behaviour. Years ago I paid a brief call at Pitcairn Island, and it was like stepping back into the earliest days of the nineteenth century; the last immigrants to that island were soldiers from Wellington's troops, and their descendants still spoke the authentic speech of Sam Weller, and said "Veil, sir", and "Werry good". When my Father was a boy every well-brought-up Canadian child learned that "herb" was pronounced without the "h"; you still hear it now and again, and modern Englishmen think it's ignorance, though it's really cultural history. These things are trifles, but among races that keep much to themselves, like some of the nomads of the East, or our surviving real Gypsies, all kinds of ideas persist, that are worth investigating. We tend to think of human knowledge as progressive; because we know more and more, our parents and grandparents are back numbers. But a contrary theory is possible – that we simply recognize different things at different times and in different ways. Which throws a new light on the whole business of mythology; the myths are not dead, just different in understanding and application. Perhaps superstition is just myth, dimly perceived and unthinkingly revered. If you think superstition is dead, visit one of our examination halls, and count the fetishes and ju-jus that the students bring in with them."

"You don't take that seriously?" said Boys.

"Quite seriously," said Hollier.

"You speak of one of the great gaps in understanding between East and West," said Mukadassi. "In India we know that men every bit as good as we believed things that the advanced members of society look on as absurdities. But I agree with you, Professor; our task is not to scorn them but to try to discover what they meant and where they thought they were going. The pride of Science encourages us to this terrible folly and darkness of scorning the past. But we in the East take much more account of Nature in our daily life than you do. Perhaps it is because we are able to be out-of-doors more than you. But if I may say it – and you must not think I would wound your susceptibilities, Professor – no, no, not for the world – but your Christianity is not helpful about Nature. None the less, Nature will have her say, and even that Human Nature that Christianity so often deplores. I hope I do not give offence?"

Hollier was not offended; Mukadassi exaggerated the hold Christianity had on him. "One of my favourite cultural fossils," said he, "is the garden gnome. You have observed them? Very cute objects; very cute indeed. But do people want them simply for cuteness? I don't believe it. The gnomes provide some of that sugar in the drink of belief that Western religion no longer offers, and which the watered-down humanitarianism that passes with so many people for religion offers even less. The gnomes speak of a longing, unrecognized but all the stronger for its invisibility, for the garden-god, the image of the earth-spirit, the kobold, the kabir, the guardian of the household. Dreadful as they are, they have a truth you won't find in the bird-bath and the sundial."

Professor Durdle was airing a grievance to Elsa Czermak, who had been complaining about an economic weekend of seminars she had been attending at a sister university. "But at least you talk about your subject," said he; "you don't have to listen to atmospheric burble."

"Don't we?" said Elsa; "that shows how much you know about it."

"Can one burble about economics? I wouldn't have thought it possible. But surely you don't have to put up with the kind of thing I was listening to this afternoon. A Big Bloomsbury Man is visiting us, you know? And his message to the world about the mighty past of which he was a tiny part was chiefly this sort of thing: 'Of course in Bloomsbury in the great days we were all absolutely mad. The servants were mad. You might go to sit down and find a plate of food on youah chah. Because the maids were simply mad… We had a red doah. There were lots of green doahs and blue doahs and brown doahs, but ours was a red doah. Completely MAD!' It is quite extraordinary what charity universities extend towards people who have known the great. It's a form of romanticism, I suppose. Any wandering Englishman who remembers Virginia Woolf, or Wyndham Lewis, or E. M. Forster can pick up a fee and eat and drink himself paralytic in any university on this continent. Medieval, really; taking in jugglers and sword-swallowers who are on the tramp. And the American cadgers are just as bad though they are usually poets and minnesingers who want to show that they are very close to the young. It's this constant arse-creeping to youth that kills me, because it isn't the youth who pay them. God, you should have heard that fatuous jackass this afternoon! 'I shall nevah forget the night Virginia stripped absolutely naked and wrapped herself in a bath-towel and did Arnold Bennett dictating in the Turkish bath. We simply screamed! Mad! MAD!' "

"We have our own lunatic raconteurs," said Elsa. "Haven't you ever heard Deloney telling about the Principal at St. Brendan's who had the mynah bird that could talk Latin? It could say Liber librum aperit and a few classical nifties of that sort, but it had had a rough background, and was likely to shout 'Gimme a drink, you old bugger' when the Principal was ticking off a naughty student. I must say Deloney does it very well, but if he ever goes out as a touring lecturer I can see it developing into a star turn. Economists are just the same; long tales about Keynes not being able to make change for taxis, and that sort of thing. Universities are great repositories of trivia. You need a sabbatical, Jim, you're getting sour."

"Perhaps so," said Durdle. "As a matter of fact, I'm working up a turn of my own about the last Canada Council 'site visit' I was mixed up in. You know how they work? It's really like an episcopal visitation in the Middle Ages. You spend months preparing all the material for an application for money to carry on some special piece of work, and then when everything's in order they send a committee of six or seven to meet your committee of six or seven, and you wine them and dine them and laugh at their jokes, and tell them everything you've already told them all over again, and treat them as friends – even equals. Then they go back to Ottawa and write to you that they really don't think your plan is quite strong enough to merit their assistance. Overpaid, over-pensioned running dogs of bourgeois philistinism!"

"Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens," said Erzenberger.

"Translation, please," said Elsa.

"The gods themselves struggle vainly with stupidity," said Erzenberger and could not keep a note of pity out of his voice as he added,"Schiller."

Elsa ignored the pity and turned again to Durdle. "Well, when you go begging you must sometimes expect to have the door slammed, or the dogs loosed on you. Scholars are mendicants. Always have been, and always will be – or so I hope. God help us all if they ever got control of any real money."

"Oh Christ, Elsa, don't be so po-faced! It's those damned cigars you smoke; they breed resignation. Every academic worth his salt wants to be a Philosopher King, but that takes a lot of money. I wish I had a small independent income; I'd get away from everything and write."

"No you wouldn't, Jim. The University has you in its grip forever. Academicism runs in the blood like syphilis."

Nobody gets drunk at a Guest Night. The wine performs its ancient magic of making the drinkers more themselves, and what is in the fabric of their natures appears more clearly. Ludlow, the law don, was being legalistic and Mrs. Skeldergate, whose preoccupation was with society, was trying to arouse his indignation, or his pity, or something other than his cool judgematical observation of the degradation she knew about in our city.

"It's the children, of course, that we must think of, because so many of the older people are beyond reclaim. The children, and the young. One of the hardest things I had to learn when I began the sort of work I am doing now is that many women have no concern for their children whatever. And the children are in a world of which they have no comprehension. A little girl told me last week that an old man came to their house and he and her mother fought on the bed. Of course she did not recognize sexual intercourse. What will she be when she does – which must be soon? A child prostitute, one of the saddest things in the world, surely. I have been trying to do something about another child, who cannot speak. Nothing wrong with her speech organs, but neglect has made her dumb. She doesn't know the commonest words. Her buttocks are covered with triangular burns; her mother's lover touches the child up with the iron, to cure her stupidity. Another child dares not speak; he lives in mute terror and his tortured, placatory grimace makes his mother hit him."

"You describe a dreadful, Dostoevskian world," said Ludlow, "and it is grim to know that it exists not more than two miles from where we sit, in circumstances of comfort – indeed, of luxury. But what do you propose to do?"

"I don't know, but something must be done. We can't shut our eyes to it. Have you people no suggestions? It used to be thought that education was the answer."

"University life makes it amply clear that education is not an answer to anything, unless it is united to some basic endowment of common sense, goodness of heart, and recognition of the brotherhood of mankind," said Ludlow.

"And the Fatherhood of God," said the Warden.

"You must allow me to withhold my opinion about that, Warden," said Ludlow. "Wrangling about God is not for lawyers, like me, but for philosophers like you, and priests like Darcourt. Mrs. Skeldergate and I have to come to grips with the actualities of society, she in her social work and I in the courts; we have to deal with what society gives us. And although I do not in the least underestimate the problems you attribute to poverty and ignorance, Mrs. Skeldergate, some rough-and-tumble court work has convinced me that much the same sort of thing comes under the consideration of the law from parts of society that are not poor and not, in the ordinary sense, ignorant. Inhumanity, cruelty, and criminal self-seeking are not the exclusive property of the poor. You can find lots of that sort of thing right here in the University."

"Oh, come, Ludlow, you are simply talking for effect," said the Warden.

"Not at all, Warden. Every senior person in the University world knows how much thieving, for instance, goes on in that world, and everybody conspires to keep quiet about it. Probably the conspiracy is a wise one, because there would be a row if it ever became a matter of public knowledge. But what are you to expect? A university like this is a community of fifty thousand people; if you lived in a town of fifty thousand, wouldn't you expect some of them to be thieves? What is stolen? Everything from trifles to costly equipment, from knives and forks to whole sets of Communion vessels from the chapels, which are whisked off to South America, I happen to know. It is stupid to pretend that students have no part in it, and probably members of faculty, if we knew. There are explanations: all institutions arouse the larceny in the human heart, and pinching something from the Alma Mater is a revenge taken on behalf of some unacknowledged part of the human spirit, for the Bounteous Mother's superiority of pretension. Not for nothing were students known to our ancestors as St. Nicholas's clerks – learned and thievish alike. Good God, Warden, have you forgotten that only three years ago a visiting professor who stayed in this College tried to get away with the curtains off his windows? He was a learned man, but he was also in the grip of the universal desire to steal."

"Come now, Ludlow, you don't expect me to admit any such universal desire."

"Warden, I put it to you: have you never stolen anything in your life? No, I'll retract that; your position is such that you are, by definition, honest; the Warden of a college does not steal, though the man under the Warden's gown might do so. I won't ask the man. But you, Mrs. Skeldergate – have you never stolen?"

"I wish I could say I haven't," said Mrs. Skeldergate with a smile, "but I have. Not very seriously, but a book from a college library. I've tried to make restitution – quite a bit more than restitution. But I can't deny it."

"The soul of mankind is incurably larcenous," said Ludlow, "in the olive-groves of Academe as well as anywhere else; and thefts of books and property by students, servants, and faculty, and betrayal of trust by trusted persons must be expected to continue. A world without corruption would be a strange world indeed – and a damned bad world for lawyers, let me say."

"You talk as if you believed in the Devil," said the Warden.

"The Devil, like God, lies outside the legal sphere, Warden. But I'll tell you this: I've never seen God, but twice I've caught a glimpse of the Devil in court, once in the dock, and once on the Bench."

McVarish and Roberta Burns were at it, hammer and tongs, across the body of Lamotte, who seemed not to relish their conversation.

"It's no good talking to a zoologist about love as if you meant sex," said Professor Burns. "We see sex as it works among the humbler creation – If they are humbler – and you can count on the fingers of two hands the species that seem to show any tenderness for their mates. With the others it's just compulsion."

"And what about mankind?" said Lamotte. "Do you agree with the terrible Strindberg that love is a farce invented by Nature to fool men and women into propagating their species?"

"No, I don't," said Roberta. "Not a farce at all. Mankind did plenty of propagation before the notion of love had any place in his world, or we shouldn't be here. My point is that love and sex needn't be lumped together. You see it among students; some are sick with love and some are roasting with sex; some are both."

"I had a student once who wanted to be a devil with the girls," said Urky, "and he was taking some muck he got from a quack – a sort of soup made of bull's balls. Did him no good, really, but he thought it did, which was probably effective, but don't let Gyllenborg know I said so. At the same time I had another student who was mooning over a ballerina he hadn't a chance of approaching, but he beggared himself sending her an orchid every time she danced. Both silly, of course. But really, Roberta, do you mean to separate love from the old houghmagandy? Isn't that going too far?"

"The old houghmagandy, as you call it, is all very well in its way, but don't take it as a measure of love, or I'll go scientific on you and point out that the greatest lover in Nature is the boar, statistically speaking; he ejects eighty-five billion sperms at every copulation; even a stallion can only rise to thirteen billions or so. So where does man rank, with his measly dribble of a hundred and twenty-five millions? But man knows love, whereas the boar and the stallion hardly look at their mates, once they've done the trick."

"I am glad I have not had a scientific education," said Lamotte; "I have always thought, and shall continue to think, of woman as a miracle of Nature."

"Of course she's a miracle," said Roberta, "but you don't appreciate how much of a miracle. You're too spiritual. Look at a splendid girl – is she a spirit? Of course she is, but she's a lot of other things that are absolutely galvanizing, they are so miraculous. Look at me, even, though I assure you I'm not parading my middle-aged charms; yet here I sit, ears waxing, snots hardening, spit gurgling, tears at the ready, and after a dinner like this one, what miracles within! Gall and pancreas hard at it, faeces efficiently kneaded into nubbins, kidneys at their wondrous work, bladder filling up, and my sphincters – you have no idea what the whole concept of womankind owes to sphincters! Love takes all that for granted, like a greedy child that sees only the icing on the splendid cake!"

"I can manage very happily with the icing," said Lamotte. "To think of a woman as a walking butcher's shop revolts me."

"And the icing is so various that it is a life study in itself," said McVarish. "The tricks women get up to! I know a hairdresser who tells me that women come to the manicurist-and-superfluous-hair lady in his salon, and the things they ask for! The pubic hair plucked and shaped into hearts, or darts, and they will endure any amount of hot-wax treatment to get the desired result. Then they want it hennaed! 'There's fire down below', as the sailors sing – certainly as they sing when they behold the result!"

"They needn't bother," said Roberta. "People will put up with anything for the old houghmagandy. Or rather, Nature gently assists them to do so. Intercourse brings about a considerable loss of perceptive capacity; sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell are all dulled, whatever the sex-technique books pretend to the contrary. The plain lover looks handsome for the moment; the broken veins and the red nose are scarcely perceptible, the grunting is not comic, bad breath is hardly noticed. And that's not love, René, but Nature coming to the rescue of love. And man is the only creature to know love as a complex emotion: man is also, in the whole of Nature, the only creature to turn sex into a hobby. Oh, it's a complex study, let me tell you."

" 'Love not as do the flesh-imprisoned men,' " said Lamotte, pretending to stop his ears. "I'll bet neither of you can continue the sonnet."

It was getting on for the time when I should suggest to the Warden that we rise for coffee and cognac, if anybody wanted it. I had some trouble getting his attention because he and Mrs. Skeldergate and Ludlow were still hard at it about the nature of a university.

"Ludlow talks about the university as a town," said the Warden, "but I'm not so sure that's the right definition."

"Surely a university is a city of youth," said Mrs. Skeldergate.

"Not a bit of it," said the Warden. "Lots of youth in a university, fortunately, but youth alone could not sustain such an institution. It is a city of wisdom, and the heart of the university is its body of learned men; it can be no better than they, and it is at their fire the young come to warm themselves. Because the young come and go, but we remain. They are the minute-hand, we the hour-hand of the academic clock. Intelligent societies have always preserved their wise men in institutions of one kind or another, where their chief business is to be wise, to conserve the fruits of wisdom and to add to them if they can. Of course the pedants and the opportunists get in somehow, as we are constantly reminded; and as Ludlow points out we have our scoundrels and our thieves – St. Nicholas's clerks, indeed. But we are the preservers and custodians of civilization, and never more so than in the present age, where there is no aristocracy to do the job. A city of wisdom; I would be content to leave it at that."

But he was not permitted to leave it at that, for in universities nobody is ever fully satisfied with somebody else's definition. Deloney spoke: "Not just a city, I think, Warden; more like an Empire, in a large university like this, composed of so many colleges that were once independent, and which still retain a measure of independence under the federation of the University itself. The President is an Emperor, presiding over a multitude of realms, each of which has its ruler, and the Principals, Rectors, Wardens, and so forth are very like the great dukes and rulers of mighty fiefdoms, with here and there a Prince Bishop, like the head of St. Brendan's, or a mitred abbot, like the Rector of Spook; all jealous of their own powers, but all subject to the Emperor. Universities were creations of the Middle Ages, and much of the Middle Ages still clings to them, not only in their gowns and official trappings, but deep in their hearts."

"When you speak of 'learned men', Warden, don't you think you should say 'and women', to avoid any injustice?" said Mrs. Skeldergate.

"As the Warden's legal counsellor I can assure you that whenever he says 'men' the word 'women' is also to be understood," said Ludlow.

"And neuter, to avoid any discrimination or hurt feelings in a university community," said the Warden, who was not wholly without humour.

"Will you take coffee, Warden?" said I, in the approved formula. The Warden rose, and the table broke up, and for the last few minutes of the evening, new groups formed.

Arthur Cornish approached me. "I haven't had a chance to tell you how much I appreciate what you did this afternoon," he said. "Of course everybody assumes that I have inherited enormously from Uncle Frank, but in the complexity of a big family business it becomes impersonal, and I wanted something to remember him by. We were more alike than you might suppose. He got away young and devoted himself to his art collections; I think he pretended to be more impractical than he was to escape the burdens of business. He was extraordinarily sharp, you know, after a bargain. Steal a dead fly from a blind spider, he would, when he was among dealers. But he was kind to lots of painters, as well, so I suppose it cancels out, in a sort of way. But tell me, how did you know I was interested in musical manuscripts?"

"A friend of yours, and a friend of mine, told me: Miss Theotoky. We were talking one day after class about methods of musical notation in the early Middle Ages, and she spoke of it."

"I remember mentioning it to her once, but I didn't think she was paying much attention."

"She was. She told me everything you said."

"I'm glad to hear that. Her taste in music and mine aren't very close."

"She's interested in medieval music, and in trying to find out what she can about earlier music. It's very mysterious; we know Nero fiddled, but what precisely did he fiddle? When Jesus and the Apostles had sung an hymn, they went up into the Mount of Olives; but what was the hymn? If we heard it now, would we be appalled to hear the Saviour of Mankind whining and yowling through his nose? It's only in the past few hundred years that music of the past has been recoverable, yet music is the key to feeling, very often. Something Hollier ought to be interested in."

"Perhaps Maria is doing it for Hollier; she seems to be very much under his spell."

"Did I hear the name of Maria?" said McVarish, joining us. "That marvellous creature pops up everywhere. By the way, I hope you didn't think I was being too familiar with her presence this afternoon? But ever since I spotted that little Venus among your uncle's bits and pieces I have been obsessed by its resemblance to her, and now I've had it home and studied it in detail I'm even more delighted. I shall have her always near me – tying her sandal, so innocently, as if she were quite alone. If you ever want a reminder, Arthur, do come to my place. She's very fond of you, you know."

"What makes you think so?" said Arthur.

"Because I know a lot about what she thinks. A friend of mine whom you don't know, I believe – a most amusing creature called Parlabane – knows her intimately. He devils for Hollier – calls himself Hollier's famulus, which is delightful – and so he sees a lot of Maria, who works in Hollier's rooms. They have great old chats, and Maria tells him everything. Not directly, I gather, but Parlabane is an old hand at reading between lines. And though of course Hollier is her great enthusiasm, she likes you a lot. As who wouldn't, my dear boy."

He touched Arthur lightly on the sleeve, as he had touched me before this evening. Urky is a great toucher.

"You mustn't imagine I'm trying to muscle in," he went on, "although Maria comes to my lectures and sits in the front row. Which gives me immense pleasure, because students are not, on the whole, decorative, and I can't resist decorative women. I adore women, you know. Unlike Rabelais, but very much like Sir Thomas Urquhart, I think." And he moved on to say good night to the Warden.

"Sir Thomas Urquhart?" said Arthur. "Oh, yes, the translator. I'm beginning to hate the sound of his name."

"If you know Urky, you get a good deal of Sir Thomas," I said. Then I added, spitefully I admit but Urky maddened me: "If you look him up in the dictionary of biography, you will find that it is widely agreed that Sir Thomas was crazy with conceit."

Arthur said nothing, but he winked. Then he too moved off to take leave of the Warden, and I remembered that as Sub-Warden I ought to call a taxi for Mrs. Skeldergate. And when that had been done I hurried up to my rooms over the gate, to note down, in The New Aubrey, what I had heard during the evening. How they chirped over their cups.

3

I was beginning to dread The New Aubrey. What I had begun as a portrait of the University, drawn from the life, was becoming altogether too much like a personal diary, and a confessional diary of the embarrassing sort. Not nearly enough about other people; far too much about Simon Darcourt.

I don't drink much, and what I drink doesn't affect me, but I had a feeling after our Guest Night that I wasn't myself in a way that a few glasses of wine, taken between six o'clock and ten, could hardly explain. I had finished a day that ought to have been enjoyable; some good work done in the morning, the completion of the Cornish business in the afternoon, and the acquisition of two first-rate Beerbohms that had never been published, and thus were very much my own and a sop to that desire for solitary possession which collectors know so well; Guest Night, which had gone well, and the Cornish executors entertained at my own expense. But I was melancholy.

A man with a theological training ought to know how to deal with that. A little probing brought the cause to light. It was Maria.

She was a first-rate student, and she was a girl of great personal charm. Nothing unusual there. But she played far too large a part in my thoughts. As I looked at her, and listened to her in class, I was troubled by what I knew about her and Clement Hollier; the fact that he had once had her on his wretched old sofa was not pleasing, but it was the kind of thing that happens and there is no use making a fuss over it – especially as Hollier had seemed to be in the state of lowered perception at the time that Roberta Burns had so briskly described. But Hollier thought she was in love with him, and that troubled me. Whatever for? Of course he was a fine scholar, but surely she wasn't such a pinhead as to fall for an attribute of a man who was in so many other ways wholly unsuitable. He was handsome, if you like craggy, gloomy men who look as if they were haunted, or perhaps prey to acid indigestion. But, apart from his scholarship, Hollier was manifestly an ass.

No, Darcourt, that is unjust. He is a man of deep feeling; look how loyal he is to that miserable no-hoper John Parlabane. Damn Parlabane! He had been prattling to McVarish about Maria, and when Urky said "reading between the lines" it was obvious that they had both been speculating in the wholly unjustified way men of unpleasant character speculate about women.

Fond of Arthur Cornish, indeed! No, "Very fond" had been his expression. More exaggeration. But was it? Why had she dragged Arthur Cornish into her conversation with me, when we were talking about medieval musical notation? Something about his uncle's collection, but had that been relevant? I know well enough how people in love drag the name of the loved one into every conversation, simply to utter that magical word, to savour it on the tongue.

The trouble with you, Darcourt, is that you are allowing this girl to obsess you.

More inner tumult, upon which I tried to impose some of the theological stricture I had learned as a method of examining conscience.

The trouble with you, Darcourt, is that you are falling in love with Maria Magdalena Theotoky. What a name! Mary Magdalene, the woman with seven devils; and Theotoky, the divine motherhood of Mary. Of course people do carry the most extraordinary names, but what a contradiction! It was the contradiction that would not give me any peace.

Oh, fathead! Oh, jackass! Oh, triple-turned goof!

How far can absurdity carry a supposedly sane man? You, a stoutish, middle-aged priest… but not a priest of a church that denies marriage to its priests, remember that… shut up, who said anything about marriage?… it was in your mind and the link between love and marriage marks you forever as a bourgeois and a creature from the past, as well… get back to your point. How far can absurdity carry a supposedly sane man? You have a successful career, and your way of life is comfortable… but lonely… who will smooth the pillow when you lie at the hour of death?… are you seriously expecting that superb creature to slide you into the grave? How far can absurdity carry a supposedly sane man? What have you to offer her? Devotion. Pooh, she can expect devotion from scores of men – handsome, young rich men, like Arthur Cornish. He must love her; remember the way he resented Urky's references to her this afternoon, and again not an hour ago? What chance have you against him? Or Handsome Clem? You are a fool, Darcourt.

Of course I could love her hopelessly. There has been a good deal of that sort of thing throughout the ages. Since the time Roberta Burns speaks of, when our hairy ancestors gave up biting their women and throwing them the bones after they had finished their uncooked feast. A good deal of hopeless love has saddened mankind since the Idealist and the Sex-Hobbyist became different aspects of the same, infatuated human creature.

An Idealist I certainly was. But a Sex-Hobbyist? I am not a wholly inexperienced creature but it has been some little time… and I can't really say I've missed it much. But Maria is young and in the flower of her beauty. Adoration and amusing talk wouldn't be enough for her.

Oh, God, how did I ever get into this?

4

That was where I was, however. Deep in love with one of my students, a situation in which a professor must appear as either a knave or a fool. For the weeks to come I did the best I could: I never addressed Maria except in class; I was over-scrupulous in valuing her work, but as it was admirable that didn't make much difference. I was determined to keep my folly bottled up.

It was a blow to my resolve, but a mighty fire in my heart, therefore, when she lingered after the last lecture before Christmas, and said, shyly: "Professor Darcourt, is there any chance that you could come to my Mother's house for dinner on Boxing Day? We'd be so happy if you could."

Happy! Happy!! Happy!!!