The Early Stories (37 page)

“Oh—well, I'm not an airman. I'm a student. And I'm already married. It would just be me and my wife, we have no children.”

“Hooh, Jack!” The exclamation sounded off focus, as if she had turned her mouth from the receiver. Then she returned close to my ear, confidential, murmurous. “My husband's this minute come in. Would you like to talk to him?”

“No,” I said, and hung up, shaky but pleased to have encountered a conversation I could end.

The next morning, Mr. Robinson had reached the breakfast table before us. Perhaps it had cost him some sleep, for his hair was mussed and its yellow tinge had spread to his face. His eagerness in greeting us was now tipped with a penetrating whine. The falseness of his upper teeth had become painfully clear; spittle sparked from his mouth with the effort of keeping the plate in place. “ ‘Noon strikes on England,' ” he recited at our appearance, “ ‘noon on Oxford town, / Beauty she was statue cold, there's blood upon her gown, / Proud and godly kings had built her long ago, / With her towers and tombs and statues all arow, / With her fair and floral air / And the love that lingers there, / And the streets where the great men go.' ”

“I thought this morning,” I told him, “I'd go to my college and see if they could help.”

“Which college?” he asked. His face became jealously alert.

“Keble.”

“Ah,” he crowed, “they won't help.
They won't help
. They know
nothing
. They
wish
to know nothing.
Nihil ex nihilo
.”

“It's a game they play,” Mr. Pott muttered sourly, “called Hands Off.”

“Really?” my wife said, her voice brimming.

“Nevertheless,” I insisted, “we have to begin somewhere. That weekly you got for us had only one possibility, and the woman's husband didn't like Americans.”

“Your ruddy airmen,” Mr. Pott explained, “from out Norton way have given you a name. They come into town with their powder-blue suits and big shoulders, some of 'em black as shoe polish, and give the local tarts what-for.”

My mention of the weekly had set off a sequence in Mr. Robinson's mind, for now he clapped his hands to his head and said, “That book. I promised to lend you that book. Forgive, for
give
a rattlebrained old man. I will get it for you
instanter
. No protest, no protest. Youth must be served.”

He went upstairs to his room, and we glanced at Mr. Pott inquisitively. He nodded. “I'd beat it now, in your shoes,” he said.

We had made three blocks and felt safely lost in the crowd along Cornmarket when Mr. Robinson caught up with us. He was panting and wearing his bedroom slippers. “Wait,” he whined, “
wait
, you don't
see
. You can't run blind and headlong into these situations, you don't understand the
circumstances
.” He carried his paper shopping bag and produced from it a book, which he pressed upon me. It was a turn-of-the-century edition of Arnold's essays, with marbled end papers. Right there, on the jostling pavement, I opened it, and nearly slammed it shut in horror, for every page was a spider's web of annotations and underlinings, in many pencils and inks and a wild variety of handwritings. “Cf.,”
“videlicet,”
“He betrays himself here,” “19th cent. optmsm.”—these leaped at me out of the mad swarm. The annotations were themselves annotated, as his argument with the text doubled and redoubled back on itself. “Is this so?” a firm hand had written in one margin, and below it, in a different slant and fainter pencil, had been added, “Yes it is so,” with the “is” triple-underlined; and below this a wobbly ballpoint pen had added, without capitals, “but is it?” It made me dizzy to look into; I shut the book and thanked him.

Mr. Robinson looked at me cleverly sideways. “You thought I had forgotten,” he said. “You thought an old man's brain didn't hold water. No shame, no shame; in your circumstances you could hardly think otherwise.
But no, what I promise, I fulfill; now I will be your guide. A-hem. Everyman, I will go with thee: hah!” He gestured toward the ancient town hall and told us that during the Great Rebellion Oxford had been the Royalist headquarters.

“ ‘The king, observing with judicious eyes / The state of both his universities, / To Oxford sent a troop of horse, and why?' ” he recited, ending with a sweep of his arm that drew the eyes of passersby to us.

Just as, by being pronounced definitely insane, a criminal curiously obligates the society he has injured, so now Mr. Robinson's hold upon us was made perfect. The slither of his shuffling slippers on the pavement, the anxious snagging stress of periodic syllables, the proud little throat-clearings were so many filaments that clasped us to him as, all but smothered by embarrassment and frustration, we let him lead us. Our route overlapped much of the route of the day before; but now he began to develop a new theme—that all this while he had been subjecting us to a most meticulous scrutiny and we had passed favorably, with
flying
colors, and that he was going to introduce us to some of his friends, the really
important
people, the grand panjandrums, the people who knew where there were rooms and rooms. He would write letters, perform introductions, secure our admission to secret societies. After lunch, at about the hour when on the day before he had introduced us to the paper seller, he shepherded us into the library of the Oxford Union Society and introduced us to the fastidious boy behind the desk. Mr. Robinson's voice, somehow intensified by whispering, carried to every crusty corner and sacrosanct gallery. The young librarian in his agony did not suppress an ironical smile. When his eyes turned to us, they took on a polite glaze that fell a little short of concealing contempt. But with what a deal of delighted ceremony did Mr. Robinson, who evidently really was a member, superintend the signing of our names in a huge old ledger! In return for our signatures we were given, with a sorcerer's flourishes, an application form for membership. There was this to be said for Mr. Robinson: he never left you quite empty-handed.

Returning, frantic and dazed, to our room at the Potts', we were able to place the application blank and the annotated Arnold beside our first trophy, the Oxfordshire weekly. I lay down on the bed beside my wife and read through the lead article, a militant lament on the deterioration of the Norman church at Iffley. When I had regained some purpose in my legs, I walked over to Keble and found it was much as I had been warned. The patterns of paternalism did not include those students tasteless enough to have taken a wife. Flats were to be had, though, the underling
asserted, absurdly scratching away with a dip pen in his tiny nook with its one Gothic window overlooking a quad; his desk suggested the Tenniel illustration of all the cards flying out of the pack.

I was newly enough married not to expect that my wife, once I was totally drained of hope, would supply some. She had decided in my absence that we must stop being polite to Mr. Robinson. Indeed, this did seem the one way out of the maze. I should have thought of it myself. We dressed up and ate a heartily expensive meal at a pseudo-French restaurant that Mr. Robinson had told us never,
never
to patronize, because they were brigands. Then we went to an American movie to give us brute strength and in the morning came down to breakfast braced. Mr. Robinson was not there.

This was to be, it turned out, our last breakfast at the Potts'. Already we had become somewhat acclimatized. We no longer, for example, glanced around for Mrs. Pott; we had accepted that she existed, if she existed at all, on a plane invisible to us. The other boarders greeted us by name now. There were two new faces among them—young students' faces, full of bewilderingly pertinent and respectful questions about the United States. The States, their opinion was, had already gone the way that all countries must eventually go. To be American, we were made to feel, was to be lucky. Mr. Pott told us that Karam had written he would be needing his room by the weekend and pushed across the table a piece of paper containing several addresses. “There's a three-room basement asking four pounds ten off Banbury Road,” he said, “and if you want to go to five guineas, Mrs. Shipley still has her second floor over toward St. Hilda's.”

It took us a moment to realize what this meant; then our startled thanks gushed. “Mr. Robinson,” I blurted in conclusion, groping for some idiom suitable to Mr. Pott and not quite coming up with it, “has been leading us all around the Maypole.”

“Poor Robbie,” said Mr. Pott. “Daft as a daisy.” He tapped the bony side of his lean dark head.

My wife asked, “Is he always—like that?”

“Only as when he finds an innocent or two to sink his choppers in; they find him out soon enough, poor Robbie.”

“Does he really have a niece in Michigan?”

“Ah yes, he's not all fancy. He was a learned man before his trouble, but the university never quite took him on.”

“ ‘So poetry, which is in Oxford made an art,' ” a familiar voice sweetly insisted behind us, “ ‘in London only is a trade.' Dryden.
Not
a true
Oxonian, but an excellent poet and amateur scholar nevertheless. If you enjoy his jingling style. Mr. Pott. Can that egg be mine?” He sat down and smashed it neatly with his spoon and turned to us jubilantly. Perhaps the delay in his appearance had been caused by an effort of grooming, for he looked remarkably spruce, his long hair brushed to a tallowish lustre, his tie knotted tightly, his denture snug under his lips, and a plaid scarf draped around his shoulders. “Today,” he said, “I will devote myself to your cause wholeheartedly, without intermissions, interruptions, or intercessions. I have spent the last hour preparing a wonderful surprise,
mirabile dictu
, as faithful Aeneas said to his natural mother, Aphrodite.”

“I think,” I said, in a voice constrained by the presence of others around the table, “we really must do other things today. Mr. Pott says that Karam—”

“Wait,
wait
,” he cried, becoming agitated and rising in his chair. “You do not understand. You are
innocents
—charming, yes, vastly potential, yes, but innocents, you see. You must know the
way
, the ins, the outs—”

“No, honestly—”

“
Wait
. Come with me now. I will show you my surprise
instanter
, if you insist.” And he bustled up from the table, the egg uneaten, and back up the stairs toward his room. My wife and I followed, relieved that what must be done could now be done unwitnessed.

Mr. Robinson was already coming out of his room as we met him on the second-floor landing. In his haste he had left the door open behind him. Over his shoulder I glimpsed a chaos of tumbled books and old magazines and and worn clothes. He held in his hands a sheet of paper on which he had made a list. “I have spent the last hour preparing,” he said, “with a care not incomparable to that of
—ih-ih-humm
—St. Jerome transcribing the Vulgate, a list; these are the people that today we will
see
.” I read the list he held up. The offices and titles and names at the top meant nothing to me, but halfway down, where the handwriting began to get big and its slant to become inconstant, there was the word “Chancellor” followed by a huge colon and the name “Lord Halifax.”

Something in my face made the paper begin to tremble. Mr. Robinson took it away and held it at his side. With the other hand he fumbled with his lapel. “You're terribly kind,” I said. “You've given us a
won
derful introduction to Oxford. But today, really, we must go out on our own. Absolutely.”

“No, no, you don't seem to comprehend; the
circum—
”

“Please,”
my wife said sharply.

He looked at her, then at me, and an unexpected calm entered his features.
The twinkle faded, the jaw relaxed, and his face might have been that of any tired old man as he sighed, “Very well, very well. No shame.”

“Thank you so much,” my wife said, and made to touch, but did not quite touch, the limp hand that had curled defensively against the breast of his coat.

Knees bent, he stood apparently immobilized on the landing before the door of his room. Yet, as we went down the stairs, he did one more gratuitous thing; he came to the banister, lifted his hand, and pronounced, as we quickened our steps to dodge his words, “God bless. God bless.”

Still Life