It seemed to me that the conversation was growing rather too warm. I sought to cool it. Now, one of my disabilities as Master of this College is that I really don’t know much about anything. But I am paid part of my salary because of a pretence that I know a little about the theatre. I fished in the dank tarn of my memory for a cooling fact, and came up with a beauty. “If you don’t mind another pair of deaths,” I said, “the world of popular entertainment lost two of its brightest luminaries just a hundred years ago.”
But I was not to have things all my own way. I never am. “Of course one of them was William Henry Betty, the Young Roscius, who died on August 24, 1874,” said Professor Jacques Berger, with an unconvincing affectation of carelessness. I was directing a look of scholarly rigour toward him when Professor Hume struck in: “I don’t know why you worry about theatrical deaths when 1874 was the birth-year of both Harry Houdini and Lilian Baylis,” said he. I was furious, but I smiled as sweetly as any Finch. “I only wished to draw attention to the death, in 1874, of the original Siamese Twins, Eng and Chang. I supposed its biological interest might appeal to you.” But irony is lost on scientists who have just speared a humanist and beaten him at his own game.
While this was going on my young companion on my right had been getting rather heavily into the port, and the academic world was undulating before her in its brightest colours.
“It’s all so romantic,” she cried; “I just love Olden Times. Oh, how I wish I could make a journey backward in time; I know I’d be somebody fascinating. I’ve sometimes thought that I’m a reincarnation of one of those marvellous women of an earlier day—one of those mistresses, they called them then.”
We all turned to her with looks in which pity and dismay were mingled. She was a clever girl; I won’t tell you what she was studying, but it was one of the really clever subjects. She had a blazing array of marks and prizes, but it is precisely these clever people who reveal a very soft core when the port engulfs them.
It was Dr. von Hohenheim who pounced. “You really wish to journey back into Time?” said he.
“Oh, yes I do. You see I have this very, very, very strong conviction that I’m a reincarnation,” said our young guest.
Dr. Abu Ben Adhem struck in. “Do be very careful, I entreat you,” said he. “We are all reincarnations, but of course we are simply reincarnations of our own forbears. Travel backward in time and you will only find yourself your own great-great-great-grandmother, or somebody of that order.”
“Oh, but I’m sure she must have been somebody wonderful,” shouted the girl; “Marie Antoinette or somebody like that. I’ve always understood there was French blood in the family.”
“That might very well be,” said Dr. Swinton, unexpectedly. “Though as our friend here says, it’s a wise child that knows its own father. How wise does a child have to be to know its own great-great-grandfather?”
“I’d love to know,” cried the girl, who was now in a high state of excitement. “I’d love to go back—back to 1774, for instance—and see who I was.” She saw the doubt on my face, and shook me by the arm. “Think how it would be—all that graciousness and politesse and lovely clothes and lots of servants and things.”
I was about to suggest that one of the other ladies present take her out for a brisk walk around the quad in the cold air. But to my dismay Dr. Theophrastus von Hohenheim rose to his feet, dominating the table.
“It can be managed,” said he calmly, and took out his beautiful watch, which he held aloft. “Be as thou wast wont to be; See as thou wast wont to see,” he intoned, solemnly. Then he pressed the spring and the watch chimed so sweetly, so melodiously that I—I have always been sensitive to music—thought I lost consciouseness for a moment, and when I opened my eyes, what a scene confronted me!
Oh for the pen of my great master, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffman, to describe what I saw! It was our Upper Library still, and our table was the same. Our company was the same too, but we were all in the dress of 1774, and we were all—I knew it with sickening conviction—our great-great-great-great-great-great grandfathers or grandmothers of that time, though which of the one hundred and twenty-eight possibilities I could not, of course, tell. “That is where chance comes in,” I thought to myself. And what a crew we were!
It was pleasant enough for some. There, at one end of the table, Professors Swinton and Wilson were still disputing, but now they were the great Swinton of Swinton, arrayed in the height of Edinburgh elegance, and, in the splendid panoply of a Highland chieftan, Wilson of Gunn. (I had occasionally heard Jock Wilson spoken of by his envious colleagues as a son-of-a-gun, but I never felt the truth of it till that moment). They were still deep in a haggle about Scottish Nationalism, for time had made little difference to them. They looked like portraits by Raeburn, and gave a lustre to the room far warmer even than the candle-light. The Librarian, too, was still obviously a librarian, though he had no beard, and wore a wig that had seen better days; on his left arm was a black band, and I heard him explaining to his neighbour that it was mourning for the Scots poet Robert Fergusson, who had died a few weeks ago, on the 16th of October, 1774. “The name of Fergusson will never die,” he declared, and Dr. von Hohenheim, who was in an ominous suit of unrelieved black, murmured, “No, never so long as it is linked with the name of Massey.”
My eyes roamed round the table. A stunning figure was Professor Baines; always the most fashionably dressed of our Senior Fellows, he was now, obviously, Beau Baines, the darling of Bath society. But our Bursar, what was he? Bearded to his waist, and swathed from head to foot in heavy, uncouth garments, with huge felt boots upon his feet, a Russian moujik in every detail, he was gazing across the table with extreme bitterness at George Ignatieff, the Provost of Trinity, who was our guest that evening; Ignatieff, like Friesen, was heavily dressed, but with what a difference! The sables and velvets of a Russian Boyar enwrapped him, and upon his head was a fur hat so immense that it might have broken the neck of a lesser man; he was drinking port straight from the decanter, and when it was empty he flung it with aristocratic nonchalance against the wall. But he was not silent; I gathered that he was attempting to secure a vast loan from a figure at his side whom I recognized as a forbear of Professor Abraham Rotstein, who was looking at his superb neighbour with the subtlety and amusement of an economist who knows financial innocence when he meets it.
Who were those unhappy creatures at the other end of the table? That Scotsman—for he could be nothing else—almost naked except for a much-worn plaid, and bearing every mark of crushing poverty—could it be Walter Gordon? Yes, it was, and he was discussing the prospect of emigration to the New World with a figure who was so swathed in bandages that for some time I did not recognize him as Dean Safarian; he was explaining the intricacies of a recent difference of religious opinion his people had been having with the Turks; he said that as soon as he was fit to travel he, too, was going to America. These two were agreeing that to live in subjection to a master-race was hell indeed.
Nor were they the only ones who were talking of oppression. There was Robert Finch, even more elegant in the eighteenth century than in this—you never saw such a wig!—assuring Professors Stacey and Careless that any talk they had heard about imminent revolution in France was utterly without foundation. It was propaganda, he said, put about by people who did not understand the rock-like unshakeability of the French throne. But Stacey and Careless were not wholly convinced. Stacey, obviously a Tory of the darkest blue, was becoming very angry with Careless, whose less formal dress suggested some revolutionary sympathies. He insisted that revolution in the American colonies was no more than a few months away, but Professor Stacey would have none of it. “Sir,” he roared—and I could tell by his form of speech that during some recent visit to London he had fallen much under the influence of Dr. Samuel Johnson—”Sir, I perceive that you are a vile Whig! The terms in which you speak of the man Jefferson must stand among the rankest effusions of encomiastic adulation.” “Sir,” countered Professor Careless, “your praise of King George is hyperbolical cant, but as it springs from ignorance rather than malignance I forgive you, and I’ll trouble you for the port, if that Russian hasn’t drunk it all.” “ ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’—quel blague!” said Professor Finch—perhaps I had better say the Abbé Finch—and laughed musically while getting the port first. Professor LePan, I saw, was chasing a squirrel out of the plate of nuts—a squirrel that Jacques Berger, a zoologist even in the eighteenth century, carried about in his pocket.