Operation Pax (25 page)

The man was completely at sea about the sort of place he had landed in. An unsensational explanation of his appearance would be simply that he had taken the wrong turning when searching for the picture gallery. But if, to a gaze once bent upon him, he had not the air of a man concerned to read old books, neither did he very convincingly suggest any interest in old portraits. He was looking neither for knowledge nor for aesthetic delectation. He was looking for refuge.

To this conclusion Jane was, of course, assisted by recalling the man’s odd behaviour when she had collided with him in the street. He had simply got up and bolted. Either, then, he was mentally deranged (which was the most likely explanation) or he was in actual fear of pursuit and apprehension. He was alternatively either a bit of a lunatic or a bit of a criminal.

Jane’s mind reacted with no special interest to either of these notions. Although much given to reading – and over large mugs of cocoa discussing solemnly with her friends – the most recondite psychopathic aberrations chronicled by Freud or Stekel, her conviction was that at the casual sight of such distresses peeping out from some individual, good manners and natural instinct combine to make one look the other way. Nor did crime remotely interest her: she left that to her brother John. Despite all which, she now bent a steady but covert observation upon the fugitive. Between them, after all, was a common bond: they had lately almost delivered one another to death on the high road.

The man had now realized that he was in a library. He glanced over the rows of bent figures and made as if to sit down. But in the upper reading-room every desk is commonly loaded with books reserved for one reader or another, and although it is the convention that one may take any place not actually occupied at the time, a stranger will always be likely to feel that there is standing room only.

For a minute or so the fugitive stood. In this there was nothing that was likely to call attention to him. The walls between the square Tudor windows are lined with books and bound journals supposed to be in common use, and before these, scholars will stand for hours on end, either running through the pages of one and another volume or simply studying their spines with an air of profound research. The man plainly hesitated to take a book from the shelf, but he contrived to let his eye run over several rows as if in search of some specific work. In this, even if it had been generally detected as a subterfuge, there would have been little to excite remark. For it frequently happens that scholars, seized suddenly as they are walking past by some irresistibly enticing train of speculation, and being brought to an abrupt halt thereby, avoid (what would be odious to them) the appearance of any singularity of conduct by going through just this conventional inspection of whatever shelves are nearest to hand. From these, nothing much distinguished the man with the scratched face save this: that every few seconds his gaze ran furtively along the stretching lines of books to the door of the reading-room.

Several people wandered in, and Jane believed that she could see the fugitive quiver each time. The Emett-like conveyor belt behind the scenes emitted one of its faint clankings, and the man gave a sort of jump as he stood. Nevertheless he was demonstrably getting the hang of the place. He had now boldly taken a volume from the shelf, opened it, and turned round so that he could survey the room over the top of it – a technique, in fact, closely approximating to Jane’s own.

Seen full face, he looked very tired as well as frightened. Jane remembered that free libraries of the municipal order arc frequently the resort of the homeless, who will sit with an unmeaning book before them for the sake of shelter and a meagre warmth. Perhaps even this august chamber had been put to not altogether dissimilar use on some occasion or another. But this man was not minded to shelter from the elements. He was sheltering from his own kind.

At this moment somebody else entered the room. He was a man with high, square shoulders, and his appearance was eminently orthodox. His features held the mingled stamp of intelligence, authority and mild inquiry. His clothing was so quiet as to lend positive assertiveness to an extremely faded Harrovian tie. He carried a sheaf of papers yellowed with age, and under his arm was what appeared to be a mortar board – more correctly known as a ‘square’ – and a crumpled MA gown. He was, in fact, the very type of the consciously busy don, dropping into Bodley to order a book before hurrying off to lecture.

The man with the scratched face had been scanning the readers with some particularity. And now the entry of the donnish person, from whom he was momentarily concealed, seemed to touch off in him a spring of activity. His eye had been on Jane. He thrust the book he had been holding back on the shelf and came straight towards her.

Jane experienced a second’s ridiculous panic. There came to her an intuitive understanding of what the fugitive was about. He had recognized her. And – just because she was the only person in this strange reading-room not absolutely unknown to him – he was going to direct at her some urgent appeal. Nothing could be more irrational. But the man had reached a breaking point at which only instinctive responses were left to him.

And then he faltered. Jane wondered, with a quick compunction, whether she had shown herself overtly hostile to his approach. However this might be, the man halted not beside her desk but beside Dr Undertone’s. He had been feeling in a pocket. Jane saw that he now held a paper in his hand.

The quintessentially donnish person was scanning the room. If it was the man with the scratched face he was seeking, he had not yet located him. And now the man was leaning over Dr Undertone’s desk. Dr Undertone took no notice. Since his eyes were closed in meditation, and since he was ninety-six, there was nothing surprising in that. Nor did anybody else except Jane appear to pay any attention either. As books but not desks are reservable in the reading-room it is necessary to do quite a lot of prowling round other people’s property.

The man with the scratched face thrust the paper he was carrying into one of Dr Undertone’s books and walked straight on across the room.

It was, as the vulgar say, a new one on Jane Appleby. And before she could decide what action, if any, was required, her attention was riveted upon the next act of the drama being played out covertly before her.

The donnish person had seen the fugitive and was advancing upon him. Between himself and this advance the fugitive was concerned to put a barrier. And one obvious barrier was available to him. Beginning at that end of the reading-room which is nearest the door, and extending in two parallel lines down a substantial part of its length, run low, double-fronted cases containing the major portion of the great manuscript catalogue of the Bodleian Library. To move round these massive islands is to circumambulate a brief record of the entire intellectual and imaginative achievement of the race. And this was what the two men – pursuer and pursued – were doing now. They were playing a sort of hide-and-seek round this monumental guide to universal knowledge.

Jane watched, fascinated. It must, she realized, be some sort of symbolic comedy, arranged expressly for her benefit, although she had not the key of it. This weird ballet was being danced for a stake somehow commensurate with the tremendous character of its setting.

And nobody else noticed. For the strangest behaviour, Jane perceived, can pass undetected in the most sober places. To anyone not persistently attentive to the whole sequence of events she was witnessing, nothing in the least out of the way had occurred or was occurring. That one man should be patently pursuing round the catalogue of Bodley another man who as patently fled, was a phenomenon offering in itself no difficulty whatever to a casual analysis. There are always in Oxford colleagues prone to engage with one at unseasonable times; there are always legitimate lengths to which one may go in side-stepping their approach. In Bodley the right-thinking greet only with the most distant nod (if at all) their fathers, mothers, sons, daughters or most intimate friends. But there are always those who default upon this convention: fellow workers importunately desirous of learned communication, sociably disposed persons thinking to give (or receive) an invitation to dinner, deans and senior tutors allowing so exaggerated a regard to administrative affairs as to be willing even here to whip up a vote or debate a college by-law; there are all these, and there are plain bores as well.

Had the donnish man and his quarry positively broken into a run, or had the former offered to vault the long breastwork of enormous manuscript volumes standing in his way, this open breach of decorum would doubtless have been visited with the severest censure on the part of the assembled readers. But nothing of this sort was in question. The pursuit here in progress was a pursuit in slow motion. Presently it was to strike Jane that this was a very odd circumstance indeed. For the moment she was absorbed in watching it.

Half a dozen people were moving about the catalogue – lugging out a volume here and there, hoisting it by its leathern loop to the desk like top of the long case, finding some desired entry and copying it upon a slip, replacing the volume and moving on to hunt for something else. Both the man with the scratched face and his pursuer were making some show of doing the same thing. Nevertheless their actual preoccupation was clear. The one was concerned to edge up and the other was concerned to edge away. This went on for some time. It was like some crazy sequence in a dream.

And that was it. There was an element of the hypnotic or the hypnoidal in the affair. And it was only in a minor degree that the donnish man was concerned physically to corner his victim. That, indeed, he had in a sense done already. What was now in question was an obscure battle of wills. The object of the pursuer was to compel the other man to leave the reading-room, to walk quietly out of the library. And his weapon was this: that his person, or personality, was so repulsive to his victim as to make it physically impossible for the latter to bear any approach to contiguity. As the donnish person advanced, in the same measure was the man with the scratched face irresistibly obliged to withdraw. Watching the two of them at their covert manoeuvring around the catalogue was like watching some ingenious toy. Or it was like watching a child forcing one piece of magnetized metal jerkily across a table by nosing towards it the answering pole of another.

For Jane there was a moment of queer horror in this discovery of a sentient human being reduced to the condition of an automaton. And the donnish man was gaining in authority – was gaining in repulsive or expulsive power – as the unnatural game progressed. She wondered if her own collision with the fugitive had borne any part in the apparently fatal breaking of his nerve. And perhaps it was he who was presently to be dropped through a trap into some chilly Oxford Bosphorus… Jane jumped. Close to her, the door round which she had been building that foolish fantasy quietly opened. But no guard of janizaries was revealed. All that emerged was Bodley’s Librarian – an elderly man with a high, domed forehead, quite bald, on which were symmetrically disposed several tiers of spectacles. Bodley’s Librarian lowered one tier of spectacles to his nose and mildly surveyed the reading-room at large; then he elevated these again, brought down another, and consulted his watch; finally he substituted a third pair, glanced at the people more immediately around him, and moved slowly down the room. Occasionally he paused to pat a reader benevolently on the back, for he took a fatherly interest in his flock. Among others he patted the donnish person as he edged along the catalogue – an attention which the donnish person received with every symptom of restrained and learned pleasure. He glanced into the apartment concealing the Emett-like engine – at which the engine gave a subdued clank by way of respectful greeting – and then drifted out of the room.

A long, low wheeze, as of air let gently out of a bicycle tyre, made Jane glance to her left. Dr Undertone had opened his eyes and was looking at her in great astonishment – rather as if, on returning to his immediate surroundings, he had discovered himself seated next to a studious walrus or erudite dromedary. This was disconcerting to Jane, but, upon reflection, not at all surprising. During a large part of Dr Undertone’s reading life, it had to be remembered, women – and particularly young women – must have been an unusual sight in Bodley. Dr Undertone’s eyes went back to his book – to that one of the small litter of books on his desk that lay open before him. He looked no younger than his years, and he seemed to Jane tired and ill. But he also seemed very dogged. There was a story that on his ninety-fifth birthday he had been discovered at his tailor’s demanding to be shown a good, hard-wearing cloth. And now with a clawlike finger he was tracing out the words on the page in front of him. Jane wondered with what coherence and cogency they reached his brain, and what large labour of research he was embarked upon… She turned her head. Both the man with the scratched face and his pursuer were gone.

So now she could get on with her book. The comedy which she had been watching had come to the indecisive and obscure conclusion which comedies of real life – or for that matter tragedies either – are always likely to exhibit. But was it a comedy? If so, it had the quality of leaving its audience obstinately uneasy. Jane’s book was no more attractive to her than before. The woman on her right – Jane forty years on – was unattractive. Dr Undertone was an uncanny old creature, uncomfortable to sit beside. The upper reading-room, usually so dear to her serious mind, had gone spectral and insubstantial around her. What was important was not the slow march of intellect going forward invisibly but irresistibly at these rows of desks, but the physical pursuit of that wretched little man by a spurious don – a pursuit now, presumably, continuing below, or outside the building. Jane thrust aside her book and rose. Dr Undertone gave her a glance of grim satisfaction. She hurried as briskly as decorum permitted from the reading-room.