Death at the President’s Lodging by Michael Innes

Author:Michael Innes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Death at the President’s Lodging
ISBN: 9780755120024
Publisher: House of Stratus
Published: 2012-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

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10

It is in our universities that the conservative spirit finds its most perfect expression. Long after the reform of our ecclesiastical institutions, medieval habits and conventions survive within these venerable establishments. “The Monks” (as the learned denizens were indignantly described by the sciolistic historian of the Roman Empire) are seldom up-to-date. They loll deep in what economists call a “timelag.” They teach out-moded subjects by exploded methods. They remain obstinately unconvinced of the necessity of the modern amenities either for themselves, their wives or their children. Only recently, indeed, did they discover wives and children. Only yesterday did they discover baths. Only today, despite much undergraduate example, are they beginning to discover the motorcar. It is notorious that the late Master of Dorchester, who died only a few months before Dr Umpleby, maintained to the last that the convenience of a private locomotive was far outweighed by the dangers arising from the proximity of the boiler: himself, he would always travel by rail, and in a carriage towards the rear of the train.

But the motorcar does gain ground. For one thing, unlike the train (another institution that won but tardy acceptance and distant sufferance), it can change its mind. And there is something in the mental constitution of the retiring scholar to which this is a grateful circumstance. How delightful to set off of a morning in pursuit of the high dry air of the British Museum – to end the day instead in Beaconsfield churchyard, meditatively scanning the epitaph of the poet Waller, inter poetas sui temporis facile princeps! And earlier on this same road – many miles indeed before one reaches Aylesbury – there is a spot especially associated with such changes of plan. A by-road branches off – perhaps in the direction of Bicester, perhaps in the direction of Tring – and brings the initiated truant after a few miles to a most excellent – indeed a most Chestertonian – inn. Here one may lunch, here one may dine well : there is bortsch not inferior to that once known at the –, and a simple schnitzel that would have won the commendations of the eminent Sacher himself. There is a good straight claret; there is a genuine Tokay; there is a curious Dalmatian liqueur. The garden is erudite, remarkable in summer and winter alike. If you are lucky, you will find no similarly knowing colleague there; only an alien and abstracted savant from the academic deserts of Birmingham or Hull, come to meditate in solitude the remoter implications of the quartic curve, or a London novelist of the quieter and more prosperous sort, giving a lazy week to the ruinous correction of page-proofs. Only one disturbing presence there may be: that of undergraduates – for undergraduates too, with a sad inevitability, have discovered this earthly paradise. But even undergraduates become more urbane, less restless, in the milieu of the Three Doves.

It was an undergraduate party that was in possession of the Three Doves now. Mr Edwards,

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