Read Online Death at the President's Lodging by Michael Innes - Free Book Online

feeling that he had gained a point. The Reverend and Honourable the Dean, for the past half-hour so elevated and so correct, had condescended to a fragment of downright gossip.

4
     
    One of the nicest of academic fantasies is Zuleika Dobson , that pleasing narrative of Max Beerbohm’s in which an entire undergraduate population, despairing of its heroine’s affection, casts itself into the fatal waters of the Isis. The great touch, it will be remembered, comes at the end. Life goes on undisturbed; that night the dons file into the halls of their several colleges as usual; and at the high-table dinner proceeds, in complete unawareness of the deserted benches where armies of perished undergraduates had sat.
    Inspector Appleby had this fable flitting in his head as he entered the hall of St Anthony’s on the morrow of a less comprehensive academic fatality. The college had already assembled as he was guided up to the dais by Mr Deighton-Clerk. Round the high-table there stood, gowned and for the most part dinner jacketed, the Fellows – looking grave certainly, but no graver than the ceremonial preprandial moment commonly demanded. Stretching down the length of the hall were the lines of those in statu pupillari : two tables of commoners in the oddly diminished, vestigial-looking gowns of their order; an equally long table of more generously-swathed scholars; a short and bunchy table of completely enfolded Bachelors. By a lectern near the high-table, ready to say grace, was the bible-clerk, a blue-eyed cherubic undergraduate, doing his best to disguise an undisguisable constitutional breeziness. The few whispers in the hall died away as the Dean took off his cap and bowed gravely to the cherub – who bowed profoundly, if not exactly gravely, in return and proceeded to deliver himself with miraculous speed of a flood of medieval latinity. The bible-clerk bowed; the Dean bowed; the Dean sat down; the college – and Appleby with it – did the same; ritual was preserved. But there was no instant babble of voices such as customarily would have arisen. St Anthony’s conversed but conversed sparely and quietly. The high-table set the tone, and the cherub, in occasional brief remarks to his neighbour the senior scholar, seconded. From around the lofty dark-panelled walls the vanished statesmen, divines, poets and philosophers whom St Anthony’s had, in one century or another, produced, looked down on a decorum amply maintained.
    Appleby considered his neighbours. A rapid count made one fact evident: all the Fellows of the college had made a point of turning up in hall. Decorum once more, thought Appleby. Decorum too in the fact that nobody seemed to regard him with any curiosity – and decorum finally, he reflected, required that he should not begin a too-curious circumspection himself. He was on the right of the Dean; on his own right there sat, as a murmured introduction had informed him, Mr Titlow – middle-aged, handsome, with a touch of encroaching flabbiness, nervous. And Titlow’s present nervousness, he quickly decided, was something that went with a good deal of chronic irritability or internal excitement. Alone among the diners that night Titlow had the look of an imaginative man – a man, as used to be said, of quick invention. Those long, square fingers, alone preserved from some old portrait, would have suggested just that mobile mouth and lively eye. What they would not have suggested was so negative a nose. If features could be read, Appleby concluded, Titlow was a brilliant but unreliable man.
    Directly opposite Appleby was Dr Barocho, a round, shining and beaming person, eating heartily and happily. He was a clear specimen of the stage foreigner – the foreigner who remains obstinately foreign. Which by no means prevented him from being an equally clear specimen of the maturest thing in the world – Latin culture. Dr Barocho, Appleby’s considering mind told itself, was master by right of birth of