The Gate of Angels (3 page)

‘It sounds like chaos,' said Fred.

‘The chaos will be in their minds only. It, too, will not be observable.'

‘What do you think is to be done?'

‘Admit the wrong direction, and go back to what can be known through the senses. If they don't depend on true evidence, scientists are no better than gossips.'

Professor Flowerdew had, he said, been fortunate. The university during the last ten years or so had been surprisingly ready to create—by Grace, to use their own terms—posts, and even professorships, which would last only for as long as was thought necessary. There were, for instance, travelling bachelorships ‘for the encouragement of investigation into foreign countries', established by the Special Board for Military Studies—scholarships in other words for spies. As a kind of counterweight some of the appointments had no apparent practical use whatsoever. Herbert Flowerdew had been offered a temporary Professorship in Observable Experimental Physics.

Fred was shocked by the word ‘fortunate'. He felt that luck and chance should have no place in science, and above all at the Cavendish.

‘The Cavendish is becoming very crowded,' said Flowerdew. ‘There is a pot-house atmosphere. I have arranged to have a small laboratory of my own in the Department of Mechanical Philosophy.' His own experiments were
in the principles of equivalence and reciprocity. He couldn't, then, be altogether cracked.

But was it, Fred broke out in distress, that he had no interest in the work of Wilson, and Rutherford, and Planck, and Niels Bohr, whose almost inaudible lectures Fred had also heard that year?

‘Not at all. I follow all that they printed with great interest, both through the German and the English journals. I am impressed with their results. I admire their great talents. But when I think of their future I hear the sadness of old men and those whom the gods have deserted.'

Flowerdew needed an assistant at £100 a year, which he would pay himself, to instruct his students in physics and take them off his hands generally. He could guarantee this assistant, too, a Junior Fellowship at St Angelicus. There was a vacancy in the college, not through death, but through a lecturer in Propellant Explosives being unexpectedly recalled to Germany. In explaining this Flowerdew made it quite clear that the Junior Fellow would also have to lend a hand with the library, the catering and the accounts, act as assistant organist, and keep the collection of fifteenth-century musical instruments in repair and, as far as possible, tuned. Here Fred jibbed.

‘I can't do that. All I could ever do was to help out at home with the hymns. I've never even seen a fifteenth-century instrument.'

‘Let us forget them for the moment. Don't answer me now. Think it over.'

By ‘don't answer me now' Flowerdew had meant, ‘don't accept straight away because you're a scholarship boy from a rectory with nothing to live on.' Fred was struck by this, and by other things which the Professor was not doing. He was not, like the great ones of Cambridge, keeping a princely look-out for young followers. He wasn't asking Fred to agree with him, either, about the unsoundness of atomic physics; not that. Clearly he was a lonely man, but he had made nothing of
his loneliness, either. And there was a lack, not of self-confidence, but of self-assurance, in all this, that Fred liked. He was not vain himself, and only the humble can value humility. It appealed to him, too, that Flowerdew stood as one against many, not because he knew too little, but because he understood too much. ‘Stood' was not the right word, though. He was no more likely to make a stand than Fred's own father, gazing out of the window at the Rectory.

Without seeing Flowerdew again, Fred went home to the Rectory, where he was asked by the neighbours (called in to celebrate his First Class in physics) what he expected to do next, and, by the Rural Dean, whether he was going to blow them all up. Then Fred went with two of his friends for a walking holiday in Austria. For the first time in his life he felt he had no obligation to anyone. They went to the Salzburg Alps. At Bruckmann's Hotel, by candlelight, the two waitresses and the daughter of the house appeared at the door of the three-bed commercial travellers' room which they had taken for cheapness' sake. Fred was the only one not asleep. The situation struck him as like a folk tale. He woke his two friends, and went down with the daughter, who had the keys, to fetch two bottles of wine from the dining-room. More she dare not take. When they got back upstairs the others were all sitting stiffly on the edge of the beds, not undressed, not even speaking, as though waiting for permission to begin. Fred found it hard not to laugh, then they all laughed. The wine was Grüner Weltliner, tasting violently of pepper. They blew out the candles and opened the shutters, to let the stars shine in. The room smelled of the just extinguished candlewicks, of the peppery wine, of strong young women's flesh and of starch, because the maids had been doing the ironing.

Next morning they went on and up the mountain to the haymeadows, past the first rocky slopes where the wild raspberries were almost over, through ice-cold shadow into the sunlight of the upper slopes and almost to the edge of the glacier. They sat down, and the elder of Fred's two friends,
who was a chemical engineer, told them that he was going back to Bruckmann's, as he had fallen in love with one of the waitresses. They had their valises with them. He picked up his, took his stick and walked away down the path, the stones slipping away beneath his boots. The remaining friend said that he was doing all he could to get to Manchester, in the hope of training with Rutherford. Fred must come too, everything of importance was happening in Manchester.

‘No, I'm going back to Cambridge. Herbert Flowerdew has offered me a post as his assistant.'

The friend burst into tears. He had been working far too hard and for too long. He regarded Fred as lost. ‘You never said anything about this before.'

‘I've only just decided to accept.'

‘Come to Manchester.'

‘I've decided to accept.'

4

When James I said that a man should pray at King's, dine at Trinity, and study at Jesus, he added (on one occasion at least) ‘and he should sleep in peace at Angels'. This did not mean that you got a poor dinner at St Angelicus—quite the contrary,—only that room could hardly have been found at the table for the King's bodyguard and followers. Adapting to the allotted space was, and continued to be, a matter of practice. At other colleges, sherry was served in the combination room, dinner in Hall, brandy in some other sanctuary. At Angels there was the Hall only. Gas-lighting had never been introduced, or even suggested. The candles burned in ancient holders which grasped them in twisted silver rings that held them absolutely straight. Yet that was hardly necessary, since Angels was the only Hall in Cambridge which was not a meeting place of cold draughts. The college silver, acquired at intervals over four hundred years, was largely Spanish, mostly bought from needy church treasuries. Possibly not all of it had been designed as tableware. There were silver objects whose use was not known—a set of instruments, for example, which appeared to be tooth-pullers, and another like a horse comb. Of what use could this have been in the
iglesia mayor
of Morella? However, they glittered on the table every night, and were put back into drawers in the silver pantry. There was an endearing carelessness about it all. Round the table (not the High Table, because there was only one), the company, sitting close together, looked like friendly conspirators. They drank manzanilla imported for them from San
lúcar, until the butler came in. ‘The Master is on his way.' Everyone got to their feet. With his chair drawn back for him to exactly the right distance, the Master needed no guidance, and none was offered. The Chaplain pronounced a grace which was used on domestic occasions by Benedict XIII himself, followed by the menacing Spanish words—
El Juicio Final descubrirá las secretas de la Historia
. All the chairs trundled back, and those who had dropped their napkins disappeared for a moment, recovering them. The manzanilla continued with the soup, and changed to champagne for the fish course only. After that it was claret at St Angelicus. At the end the guests were always offered preserved fruits, of the kind which failed to poison their Founder.

Only one guest could be invited at a time, and the honour went strictly in turns. One who came quite often, since several of the Fellows were fond of inviting him, was Dr Matthews, the Provost of James's. He was a mediaevalist and palaeographer, who, as a form of relaxation, wrote ghost stories. If he had written one recently, he brought it with him in an envelope and read it aloud after dinner. He did not care to be asked to do this. But the shape of the envelope, if he had it with him, was clearly visible in his overcoat pocket. His host for the evening would speak unobtrusively to the butler. ‘Foley, I want to know whether Dr Matthews brought a large envelope with him.' Foley was quite up to this. ‘He didn't, sir, not tonight, sir.' Then there would be no reading, but perhaps music. In some colleges—King's, for example—they talked all evening, but then King's was full of historians and philosophers, who had no need to relax. What else did they ever do? But the Fellows of Angels, by statute, were all scientists, or mathematicians.

Fred's own unhappy moments in college were connected with the cittern, the vielle, the zinke and so forth, which he wasn't persuaded were ever meant, even if tuned, to be played together. It was only the knowledge that the blind Master delighted in them that kept him tinkering away at them. He
was more at home with the positive organ, with a keyboard of twenty-two long and thirteen short keys, which was installed in a shadowy corner of the little chapel. Fortunately, the bellows were in poor condition, and it could not be pumped. But Dr Matthews, in any case, was not particularly fond of music. In fact, he was tone-deaf, preferring to look at old manuscripts and to examine ancient inscriptions. He had a running joke, for example, with the Master about the strangely tall and narrow gate, as old as the college itself, in the south-west wall. ‘The only opening, dear Master,—apart from your front entrance—and quite inexplicable, since the only thought in the mind of the builders seems to have been to keep visitors out.' There was no inscription on the gate, and no entry, in the records of the college expenses, for installing it. On the other hand it was noted in the annals that it had twice been found standing open, once on the 21st of May 1423, the night of Pope Benedict's death, and once in 1869, when the first women's college, though not, of course, officially part of the University, was permitted to open. ‘There was no mention, on either occasion, of who opened your gate,' said Dr Matthews, ‘nor of who shut it again.'

‘No-one, not even the Master, has any authority to do either,' said the Treasurer.

‘But if anyone had, or even if they had not, and if it were to stand open, who or what do you imagine might come in?'

‘I should not like to think about that,' said the Master.

Dr Matthews turned to another subject—the manuscripts in the Angels' library. Earlier on he had been looking, he said, at a mediaeval Book of Hours, fantastically illuminated by Jean Pucelle. Wherever there was a space between the lines on the page it would be filled with a long, lean, sinuous tail, belonging to a rat, a monster, or a devil. The devil's tails were frequently curled, like a noose, round the neck of unfortunate men. ‘Ready, I fancy, to carry them off,' said Dr Matthews, with his delightful smile. He pointed out that most of these victims were alchemists or heretical arithmeticians, and that
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries all his kind hosts, at present sitting round the table, might well have been condemned to hell.

The Fellows of St Angelicus listened to Dr Matthews with amusement. He was a great scholar, but his lifework seemed to them musty. Dr Matthews, for his part, was amused by the Angels. Science, he thought, was leading them nowhere, and quite conceivably backwards.

5

At the end of his first year as a Junior Fellow, Fred thought it only right to tell his father that he was no longer a Christian, but in such a way as to distress him as little as possible. All this sounded more like 1857 than 1907. He had heard family stories, distant echoes or reminiscences of giant battles from what seemed heroic days. Two of his uncles had quarrelled over Strauss's
Leben Jesu
and struck each other and one of them had caught his head on the edge of the fender and broken his skull. The other one, Uncle Philip, had been known for the rest of his life, though never in the family, as Slayer Fairly. In his mother's family there were some who hadn't spoken to each other for many years, and there were women, once young, who had broken off their engagements because their betrothed had ceased to believe and who had bleached and withered into spectres of themselves behind church missionary society typewriters and the stalls of jumble sales. Fred, who was kind-hearted towards the past as well as the present, felt that he ought not to fall short, in the new century, of what had cost so dear. He ought to go home and explain to his father in person, even giving his reasons, as sons had once done on this subject where reason, not much to its credit, is powerless. So much was only decent politeness. But his father was certain to be deeply distressed. The time of day for discussing this, long enough to give pain and, if possible, to lessen it to some extent, was between five and six o'clock, when his father sat patiently in his study ready to give advice to his parishioners, who, however, always chose some other
time to come. The study windows faced the front lawn, and in summer Fred and his two sisters had not been supposed to cross it, between five and six, so as not to disturb the pastoral hour. Fred, Hester and Julia did, of course, cross it, as Apaches, flat on their stomachs, close to the bitter-smelling roots of the laurel hedge where the cat left the remains of her mice. Looking, in those days, up the slight incline of the lawn Fred used to see his father at his desk, determinedly wide awake, his head a little on one side, presumably to show that he was willing and ready to listen, staring out into the late afternoon.