“Those last two are very badly fogged, you know,” said Bredon, refusing the invitation to digress. “It looks to me as if there was something wrong with your shutter. You wouldn’t like me to have a look at it, I suppose? I know something about cameras.”
For the first time in the interview, Nigel seemed really taken off his guard. “What? … The camera? … Oh, well, it’s packed. In fact, I believe it’s sent off. It’s extremely kind of you—but of course, you are a sort of foster-father to these picture-children of mine. You must really keep the copies you have taken; I can have some others printed. I wish you would have had some absinthe. By the way,” he continued abruptly, “where was it exactly that you picked up the film? In a hedge, you said?”
“You remind me, I must apologize for forgetting something; I found it wrapped in a waterproof tobacco-pouch, which presumably belongs to you too. Here it is. Yes, I was joining my wife, you know, on a river trip, and she had gone on ahead—she was to pick me up at Shipcote Lock. So I went to Shipcote Station, and took the field path to the weir. You may remember, perhaps, that there is a point at which two paths join, one leading to the weir and the other to a farm. It was just at the junction I found the thing, lying half hidden in the grass. I had read in the papers, of course, that you took the train at Shipcote Station after you had left your cousin. So naturally it occurred to me that the films might be yours.”
“That would be it, to be sure. I was a little hurried, you know, at the end of my walk to the station. The train was there, standing in the station, and one always assumes that a train like that is just about to move—why, I don’t know, for it is contrary to all one’s experience of country trains. Anyhow, I ran, and the films must have been jolted out of my pocket. It is pathetic to think of them in the hedgerow, stretching out their orphaned hands to an unnatural father. And with all those undeveloped possibilities about them! It affects me deeply.”
“Funny the way things do disappear and don’t. It’s more than two days now, isn’t it, since you first missed your cousin, and nothing’s been heard of him alive or dead. You’ll excuse a stranger’s impertinence, I hope, but I should be tremendously interested to know if you yourself have any guess what has happened. One’s always hearing the thing talked of, don’t you know, and it seems so silly to be able to say I’ve met you, without being able to say what you thought about it all.”
“Oh, personally I think he committed suicide. There wasn’t much else to do, you know; he was a hopeless crock, and he couldn’t get on without the dope.”
“But the hole in the bottom of the boat …”
“Ah, there I’m afraid you trespass on family history. I don’t think he wanted it to be known that he’d committed suicide, because there’s some property I should fall heir to if he died. He hadn’t much imagination, Derek, but he hated me with a hatred that was almost artistic. He wanted everybody to think that he had just disappeared. And in his vague, stupid way he thought the canoe had better disappear too. So he dug a hole in the bottom of it, expecting that it would sink.”
“That’s a very interesting idea. Very interesting. But I really oughtn’t to be keeping you from your packing any longer. I suppose you’ll be off tomorrow?”
“Unless they find anything, and there’s an inquest. My last term, you know. Poor Oxford!”
“May I have the envelope back with the prints? I’ve nothing else to take them in. It’s very kind of you to let me keep them as a memento of my little rencontre. No, please don’t come down. I shall find my way out all right. Good evening.” And, as the door closed behind him, Bredon added, “If Providence ever turned out such another ghastly little worm as you, I should begin to doubt whether there was a Providence.” However, he had the picture of Nigel’s appearance, and the imprint, if he wanted it, of Nigel’s thumb, so that the afternoon’s work had not been wasted. His evening, too, for all the hasty anathemas he pronounced against Uncle Robert, was destined to be not entirely uneventful.
A Common-room dinner is an experience which strikes a chill into the heart of the bravest, when it comes to him for the first time. True, it has not all the horrors of High Table; he has not to endure the fancied scrutiny of an undergraduate perspective. But in Common-room the academic atmosphere is all the more pervasive for being concentrated at such close quarters. Who is this man next to you, to whom you have not been introduced? Is he a mere guest like yourself, or is he a Fellow? In the latter case, presumably, there is some subject on which he is a European authority, if only you could find out what it was. Are the frigid advances occasionally made to you an attempt at welcome? And if so, can you gauge from their frequency or heartiness the local popularity of your host? Uncle Robert was a supernumerary member of the Common-room, and a bore at that. His guests were usually men of his own kidney, and there was a general tendency to glare at them without speaking. Bredon felt, in an expressive modern phrase, like something the cat had brought in.
The conversation turned, at first, on greyhound-racing, a subject which the company treated with a broad-mindedness that sprang from inexperience. One very old gentleman had to
