The Early Stories (36 page)

England itself seemed slightly insane to us. The meadows skimming past the windows of the Southampton–London train seemed green deliriously; they were so obsessively steeped in the color that my eyes, still attuned to the exhausted verdure and September rust of American fields, doubted the ability of this landscape to perform useful work. England appeared to exist purely as a context of literature. I had studied this literature for four years, and had been sent here to continue this study. Yet my brain, excited and numbed by travel, could produce only one allusion; “a' babbled of green fields,” that inconsequential Shakespearean snippet rendered memorable by a classic typographical emendation, kept running through my mind, “a' babbled, a' babbled,” as the dactylic scansion of the train wheels drew us and our six mute, swaying compartment-mates northward into London.

The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea where we spent the night in the flat of a vague friend, the Dickensian nightmare of fog and sweating pavement and besmirched cornices that surrounded us when we awoke—all this seemed too authentic to be real, too corroborative of literature to be solid. The taxi we took to Paddington Station had a high roof and an open side, which gave it to our eyes the shocked, cockeyed expression of a character actor in an Agatha Christie melodrama. We wheeled past mansions by Galsworthy and parks by A. A. Milne; we glimpsed a cobbled eighteenth-century alley, complete with hanging tavern boards, where Dr. Johnson might have reeled and gasped the night he laughed so hard—the incident in Boswell so beautifully amplified in the essay by Beerbohm. And underneath all, underneath Heaven knew how many medieval plagues, pageants, and conflagrations, old Londinium itself like a buried Titan lay smoldering in an abyss and tangle of time appalling
to eyes accustomed to view the land as a surface innocent of history. We were relieved to board the train and feel it tug us westward.

The train brought us into Oxford at dusk. We had no place to go. We had made no reservations. We got into a cab and explained this to the driver. Middle-aged, his huge ears frothing with hair, he seemed unable to believe us, as if in all his years he had never before carried passengers who had not already visited their destination. He seemed further puzzled by the discovery that, though we claimed to be Americans, we had never been in Stillwater, or even in Tulsa. Fifteen years ago he had spent some months in the depths of Oklahoma learning to fly Lend-Lease planes. Now he repaid his debt by piloting us down a narrow street of brick homes whose windows—queerly, for this was suppertime—were all dark. “We'll give you a try at the Potts',” he explained briefly, braking. He went with us up to the door and twisted a heavy wrought-iron knob in its center. A remote, rattling ring sounded on the other side of the opaquely stained panes. At length a tall saturnine man answered. Our driver explained to him, “Potty, we've two homeless Yanks here. They don't know the score as yet.”

Early in the evening as it was, Mr. Pott wore a muttering, fuddled air of having been roused. The
BED AND BREAKFAST
sign in his window seemed to commit him to no hospitality. Only after impressing us with the dark difficulty of it, with the unprecedented strain we were imposing upon the arrangements he had made with a disobliging and obtusely technical world, did he lead us upstairs and into a room. The room was large, chill, and amply stocked with whatever demigods it is that supervise sleep. I remember that the deliciously cool sheets and coarse blankets were topped by a purple puff smelling faintly of lavender, and that in the morning, dressing, my wife and I skipped in and out of the radiant influence of the electric heater like a nymph and satyr competing at a shrine. The heater's plug was a ponderous and dangerous-looking affair of three prongs; plugging it in was my first real work of acclimatization. We appeared for breakfast a bit late. Of all the other boarders, only Mr. Robinson (I have forgotten his actual name) had yet to come down. Our places were laid at the dining table, and at my place—I couldn't believe my eyes—was set an insanity, a half of a cooked tomato on a slice of fried bread.

Mr. Robinson came down as Mr. Pott was finishing explaining to us why we must quickly find permanent lodgings. Our room would soon be needed by its regular tenant, an Indian undergraduate. Any day now he
would take it into his head to show up. It was a thankless job, keeping students' rooms; they were in and out and up and talking and making music at all hours, and the landlord was supposed to enforce the midnight curfew. “The short of it is,” Mr. Pott snarled, “the university wants me to be a nanny and a copper's nark.” His voice changed tone. “Ah, Mr. Robinson! Good morning, Professor. We have with us two lovebirds from across the Atlantic.”

Mr. Robinson ceremoniously shook our hands. Was he a professor? He was of middle size, with a scholar's delicate hunch and long thinning yellowish-white hair brushed straight back. In speech, he was all courtesy, lucid patter, and flattering attention. We turned to him with relief; after our host's dark hints and dour discontents, we seemed to be emerging into the England of light. “Welcome to Oxford,” he said, and from a bright little tension in his cheeks we could see he was about to quote. “ ‘That home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties.' That's Matthew Arnold; if you want to understand Oxford, read Arnold. Student of Balliol, fellow of Oriel, professor of poetry, the highest bird as ever flew with a pedant's clipped wings. Read Arnold, and read Newman. ‘Whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age'—which he did not
mean
, you know, entirely sympathetically; no, not at all. Arnold was not at all church-minded. ‘The Sea of Faith / Was once, too, at the full … But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long,
withdrawing
roar, / Retreating, to the breath / Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear / And naked shingles of the world.' Hah! Mr. Pott, what is this I see before me? My customary egg. You are a veritable factotum, a Johannes Factotum, of kindness. Mr. Pott of St. John's Street,” he confided to us in his quick, twinkling way, “an institution no less revered by the student body than the church of St. Michael's-at-the-North-Gate, which contains, you should know, and will
see
, the oldest standing structure in”—he cleared his throat, as if to signal something special coming—“Oxnaford: the old Saxon tower, dating from the ninth century at the least. At the
least
, I insist, though in doing so I incur the certain wrath of the more piddling of local archaeologists, if we can dignify them with the title upon which Schliemann and Sir Leonard Woolley have heaped so much indelible honor.” He set to his egg eagerly, smashing it open with a spoon.

My wife asked him, “Are you a professor of archaeology?”

“Dear madam,” he said, “in a manner of speaking, in a manner of speaking, I have taken all knowledge for my province. Do you know Ann Arbor, in, I believe, the very wooded state of Michigan? No? Have no
shame, no shame; your country is so vast, a poor Englishman's head reels. My niece, my sister's daughter, married an instructor in the university there. I learn from her letters that the temperature frequently—
frequently
—drops below zero Fahrenheit. Mr. Pott, will this charming couple be spending the term with us here?” When it was explained to him, more readily than tactfully, that our presence here was an emergency measure, the result of a merciful impulse which Mr. Pott, his implication was, already regretted, Mr. Robinson bent his face low over the table to look up at us. He had perfect upper teeth. “You must know the
way
,” he said, “the ins and outs, the little shortcuts and circumlocutions, circumflexions, the
circumstances;
else you will never find a flat. You have waited long, too long; in a few days the Michaelmas term will be upon us and from Woodstock to Cowley there won't be a room to be
had
. But I, I”—he lifted one finger and closed one eye sagely—“I may be of help.
‘Che tu mi segui,'
as Vergil said to Dante,
‘e io sarò tua guida!'
”

We were of course grateful for a guide. The three of us walked down St. John's Street (all the shades were drawn, though this was daylight), up Beaumont past the sooty, leonine sprawl of the Ashmolean, and down Magdalen Street to Cornmarket, where indeed we did see the Saxon tower. Mr. Robinson indicated points of interest continuously. His lower jaw seemed abnormally slender, as if a normal jaw had been whittled for greater flexibility and lightness. It visibly supported only one lower tooth, and that one hardly bigger than a fleck of tobacco, and set in the gum sideways; whereas his upper teeth were strikingly even and complete. Through these mismatched gates he poured an incessant stream of frequently stressed words, broken only when, preparatory to some heightened effort of erudition, he preeningly cleared his throat. “Now we are standing in the center of town, the very hub and beating heart of Oxfordshire, Carfax, derived—uh-uh-hem—from the Norman
carrefor
, the Latin
quadrifurcus
, meaning ‘four forks,' or ‘crossroads.' Do you know Latin? The last international language, the—uh-hem—Esperanto of Christendom.” He carried an old paper bag, and we found ourselves in a vast roofed market, surrounded by blood-flecked butcher's stalls and bins of raw vegetables smelling of mud. Mr. Robinson methodically filled his bag with potatoes. He examined each potato, and hesitated with it, as if it would be his last; but then his anxious parchmenty hand would dart out and seize yet another. When the bag could hold no more, he shrugged and began to wander away. The proprietress of the stall shouted in protest. She was fat; her face looked scorched; and she wore a man's boots and numerous unravelling sweaters. Without a word, Mr. Robinson returned
and rather grandly dumped all the potatoes back into the bin. Along with the potatoes some papers fluttered out, and these he put back in the bag. He turned to us and smiled. “Now,” he said, “it is surely time for lunch. Oxnaford is no town to storm on an empty stomach.”

“But,” I said, “Mr. Robinson, what about the place we have to find?”

He audibly exhaled, as if he had just tasted a superb wine. “
Aaaaah
. I have not forgotten, I have not forgotten. We must tread cautiously; you do not know, you see, the
way
. The ins and outs, the
circumstances
.” He led us to a cafeteria above a furniture store on the Broad and through the chips and custard tried to distract us with a profuse account of Oxford in its medieval heyday—Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, the “Mad Parliament” of 1256, the town-gown riots of St. Scholastica's Day in 1355. Down on the street once more, he took to plucking our arms and making promises. One more little trip, one harmless excursion that would be
very
useful for us, and then down to business. He escorted us all the way down High Street to the Magdalen Bridge, and thus we received our first glimpse of the Cherwell. No punts were out at this time of year, and swans generally stayed downriver. But, looking back toward the center of town, we were treated to the storybook view of Oxford, all spires and silhouette and flaking stone, under a sky by John Constable, R.A.

Weak, distraught, I felt myself succumb; we surrendered the day to Mr. Robinson. Triumphantly sensing this, he led us down Rose Lane, through the botanic gardens orange and golden with fall flowers, along Merton Field, and back through a series of crooked alleys to the business district. Here he took us into a bookstore and snatched a little newspaper, the Oxfordshire weekly, out of a rack and indicated to the man behind the counter that I would pay for it. While I rummaged the fourpence out of my pocket, Mr. Robinson pranced to the other wall and came back holding a book. It was a collection of essays by Matthew Arnold. “Don't buy this book,” he told me. “
Don't buy it
. I have it in a superior edition, and will lend it to you. Do you understand? I will
lend
it to you.” I thanked him and, as if all he had wanted from us was a little gratitude, he announced that he would leave us now. He tapped the paper in my hand. He winked. “Your problems—and don't think,
don't
think they have not been painfully on my mind—are solved; you will find your rooms in here. Very few,
very
few people know about this paper, but all the locals,
all
the locals with
good
rooms advertise in here; they don't
trust
the regular channels. You must know the
way
, you see, the ins and outs.” And he left us, as at the edge of Paradise.

It was growing dark, in that long, slow, tea-shoppe-lit style of English
afternoons, and we had tea to clear our heads. Then there seemed nothing to do but return to Mr. Pott's house, on St. John's Street. Now we noticed for the first time students in the streets, whirring along on their bicycles like bats, their black gowns fluttering. Only we lacked a roost. My wife lay down on top of our purple puff and silently cried. Her legs ached from all the walking. She was—our heavy secret—three months pregnant. We were fearful that if this became known not a landlord in Oxford would have us. I went out in the dusk with my newspaper to a phone booth. In fact, there were few flats advertised in the weekly, and all but one lacked a kitchen; this one was listed as on St. Aldate's Street. I called the number and a woman answered. When she heard my voice, she asked, “Are you an American?”

“I guess, yes.”

“I'm sorry. My husband doesn't like Americans.”

“He doesn't? Why not?” It had been impressed upon me, with the award of my fellowship, that I was to act as an ambassador abroad.

There was a pause, then she said, “If you must know, our daughter's gone and married an airman from your base at Brize Norton.”