No Graves As Yet

They listened to him politely, waiting for him to answer their needs for assurance, and he knew from their eyes, the tension still there in their voices, that the old power to comfort was not enough.

On Saturday evening he called by at Harry Beecher’s rooms and found his colleague reclining in his armchair and reading the current edition of the Illustrated London News. Beecher looked up, laying the paper flat immediately. Joseph could see, even upside down, a picture of a theater stage.

Beecher glanced at it and smiled. “Eugene Onegin,” he explained.

Joseph was surprised. “Here?”

“No, St. Petersburg. The world is smaller than you think, isn’t it! And Carmen.” Beecher indicated the picture at the bottom of the page. “But apparently they’ve revived Boito’s Mefistofele at Covent Garden, and they say it’s very good. The Russian Ballet has Daphnis and Chloe at Drury Lane. Not really my kind of thing.”

Joseph smiled. “Nor mine,” he agreed. “How about a sandwich or a pie and a glass of cider at the Pickerel?” It was the oldest public house in Cambridge, just a few yards along the street, across the Magdalene Bridge. They could sit outside in the fading light and watch the river, as Samuel Pepys might have done when he was a student here in the seventeenth century, or anyone else over the last six hundred years.

“Good idea,” Beecher agreed immediately, rising to his feet. The room was a pleasant clutter of books. Latin was his subject, but his interest lay in the icons of faith. He and Joseph had spent many hours positing theory after theory—serious, passionate, or funny—as to what was the concept of holiness. Where did it move from being an aid to concentration, a reminder of faith, into being the object of reverence itself, imbued with miraculous powers?

Beecher picked up his jacket from the back of the old leather chair and followed Joseph out, closing the door behind them. They went down the steps and across the quad to the massive front gate with its smaller door inset, and then out into St. John’s Street, and left to the Magdalene Bridge.

The terrace outside the Pickerel was crowded. As usual, there were punts on the river, drifting along toward the bridge, silhouetted for a moment beneath its arch, then gone as they turned and followed the stream.

Joseph ordered cider and cold game pie for both of them, then carried the provisions to a table and sat down.

Beecher regarded him steadily for a moment or two. “Are you all right, Joseph?” he asked gently. “If you need a little more time, I can take some of your work. Really—”

Joseph smiled. “I’m better working, thank you.”

Beecher was still watching him. “But?” he questioned.

“Is it so obvious?”

“To someone who knows you, yes.” Beecher took a long draft of his cider, then set the glass down. He did not press for an answer. They had been friends since their own student years here, and spent many holidays walking together in the Lake District or along the ancient Roman wall that stretched across Northumberland and Cumbria from the North Sea to the Atlantic. They had imagined the legionaries of the Caesars who had manned it when it was the outer edge of empire against the barbarian.

They had tramped for miles, and sat in the sun staring over the moors in the light and shadow, eaten crusty bread and cheese, and drunk cheap red wine. And they had talked of everything and nothing, and told endless jokes, and laughed.

Joseph wondered whether to say anything to Beecher about his father’s death and the fear of a conspiracy of the magnitude he had suggested, but he and Matthew had agreed not to speak of it, even to their closest friends.

“I was contemplating the ugly situation in Europe,” he said aloud, “and wondering what sort of future lies ahead for the men who graduate this year. Darker than for us.” He looked at his cider, sparkling a little in the long amber light. “When I graduated, the Boer War was over, and the world had all the excitement of a new century. It looked as if nothing would ever change except for the better—greater wisdom, more liberal laws, travel, new art.”

Beecher’s slightly crooked face was grave. “There are shifts of power all the time, and socialism is a rising force—I don’t think anything can stop it,” he said.

“Nor should it. We’re moving to a real enlightenment, even votes for women in time.”

“I was thinking more of the crisis in the Balkans,” Joseph said, taking another bite of his pie and talking with his mouth full. “That’s what many of our students are worried about.” He said many, but he was thinking primarily of Sebastian.

“I can’t see any of our students joining the army.” Beecher spoke just before swallowing the last mouthful of his pastry. “And no matter how heated it gets between Austria and Serbia, it’s a long way from us. It’s not our concern unless we want to make it so. Young men always worry before leaving university and stepping out into the world.” He smiled broadly. “In spite of the competition, there is safety here, and a multitude of distractions. The college is a hotbed of ideas most of them have never even imagined, and of the first temptations of adulthood—but the only real yardstick is your own ability. You may not get a first, but the only person who can prevent you succeeding is yourself. Outside it’s different. It’s a colder world. The best of them know that.” He finished his cider. “Let them worry, Joseph. It’s part of growing up.”

Again Joseph thought of Sebastian’s tortured face as he had stared with such intensity across the burnished water toward the dark outlines of the college. “It wasn’t anxiety for himself. It was for what war in Europe would do to civilization in general.”

Beecher’s face split into a good-natured grin. “Too much poring over dead languages, Joseph. There’s always something ineffably sad about a culture whose people have vanished when an echo of their beauty remains, especially if it is part of the music of our own.”

“He was thinking of our language being overtaken and our way of thought lost,” Joseph told him.

“He?” Beecher’s eyebrows rose. “You have someone particular in mind?”

“Sebastian Allard.” Joseph had barely finished speaking when he saw a shadow in Beecher’s eyes. The still evening light was unchanged. The sound of laughter from a group of young men drifted on the twilight breeze from the green swath of the Backs, but inexplicably the air seemed colder. “He’s more aware than the others,” he explained.

“He’s got a better intellect,” Beecher agreed, but he did not look at Joseph.

“It’s more than intellect.” Joseph felt the need to defend himself, and perhaps Sebastian. “You can have a brilliant brain without delicacy, fire, vision. . . .” He had used the same word again, but there was no other to describe what he knew in Sebastian. In his translations the young man had caught the music and understood not only what the poets and philosophers of the past had written, but the whole regions of passion and dream that lay beyond it. To teach such a mind as his was the wish of all those who wanted to pass on the beauty they themselves had seen. “You know that!” he said with more force than he had intended.

“We’re not in any danger of going the way of Carthage or Etruria.” Beecher smiled, but it did not reach his eyes. “There are no barbarians at the gates. If they exist, then they are here among us.” He looked at his empty glass but did not bother to catch the barman’s eye. “I think we are equal to keeping them at bay, at least most of the time.”

Joseph heard a note of pain in his voice and knew that it was real, the tip of something he had not seen before. “Not all the time?” he asked gently.

Then into his mind burst back the crushed foxgloves on the verge of the road, the scars of the caltrops on the tarmacadam, the screaming of metal in his imagination, and the blood. And he understood violence and rage completely, and fear.

“Of course not all of it,” Beecher replied, his gaze beyond Joseph’s head, unaware of the emotion all but drowning his friend. “They are young minds full of energy and promise, but they are also morally undisciplined now and then. They are on the edge of learning about the world, and about themselves. They have the privilege of education in the best school there is, and of being taught—forgive the immodesty—by some of the best mentors in the English language. They live in one of the most subtle and tolerant cultures in Europe. And they have the intellect and the ambition, the drive and the fire to make something of it. At least most of them have.”

He turned to meet Joseph’s eyes. “It’s our job to civilize them as well, Joseph. Teach them forbearance, compassion, how to accept failure as well as success, not to blame others, nor blame themselves too much, but go on and try again, and pretend it didn’t hurt. It will happen many times in life. It’s necessary to get used to it and put it in its place. That’s hard when you are young. They are very proud, and they haven’t much sense of proportion