No Graves As Yet Read online

  The master, Aidan Thyer, had been very considerate, asking Joseph if he was sure he was ready to come back so soon. He was valued, of course, and irreplaceable, but nevertheless he must take more time if he needed it.

  Joseph answered him that he did not. Everything had been done that was required, and his responsibilities to work were a blessing, not a burden. He thanked him and promised to take his first tutorial the following morning.

  It was difficult picking up the threads after an absence of almost two weeks, and it required all his effort of mind to make an acceptable job of it. He was exhausted by the end of the day, and happy after dinner to leave the dining hall, the stained-glass windows scattered with the coats of arms of benefactors dating back to the early 1500s, the magnificent timbered ceiling with its carved hammer beams touched with gold, the oak-paneled walls carved in linen-fold, and above all its chattering, well-meaning people. He longed to escape toward the river.

  He started across the narrow arch of the Bridge of Sighs with its stone fretwork like frozen lace, a windowed passageway to the fields beyond. He would walk across the smooth grass of the Backs, stretching all the way from Magdalene Bridge past St. John’s, Trinity, Gonville and Caius, Clare, and King’s College Chapel toward Queen’s and the Mathematical Bridge. Perhaps he would go as far as the millpond beyond, and over the causeway to Lammas Land. It was still warm. The long, slow sunset and twilight would last another hour and a half yet, perhaps more.

  He was on the slow rise of the bridge, glancing out through the open lattice at the reflections on the water below, when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned to see a young man in his early twenties. His face was beautiful, strong-boned, clear-eyed, his brown hair bleached gold across the top by the long summer.

  “Sebastian!” Joseph said with pleasure.

  “Dr. Reavley! I . . .” Sebastian Allard stopped, his fair skin a little flushed with consciousness of his inadequacy to say anything that matched the situation, and perhaps also that he had missed the funeral. “I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how bad I feel.”

  “You don’t have to,” Joseph said quickly. “I would far rather talk about something else.”

  Sebastian hesitated, indecision clear in his half-turned shoulder.

  Joseph did not want to press him, yet he felt Sebastian had something to say, and he could not rebuff him. Their families had lived in neighboring villages for years, and it was Joseph who had seen the promise in young Sebastian and encouraged him to pursue it. He had been his mentor for the last year while they had both been at St. John’s. It had become one of those friendships that blossomed so naturally he could not believe there was ever a possibility it would not have happened.

  “I’m going for a walk along the Backs,” Joseph said. “If you want to join me, you are welcome.” He smiled and began to turn away, so as not to place an obligation on the younger man, as if it were a request.

  There were a few moments of silence, then he heard the footsteps quickly and lightly on the bridge after him, and he and Sebastian emerged into the sunlight, almost side by side. The air was still warm, and the smell of cut grass drifted on the slight breeze. The river was flat calm, barely disturbed by three or four punts along the stretch past St. John’s and Trinity. In the nearest one a young man in gray flannel trousers and a white shirt stood leaning on the pole with effortless grace, his back to the sun, casting his features into shadow and making an aureole around his head.

  A girl with red hair sat in the back looking up at him and laughing. Her muslin dress looked primrose-colored in the fading glow, but in the daylight it could have been ivory, or even white. Her skin was amber where she had defied convention and allowed the long, hot season to touch her with its fire. She was eating from a basket of cherries and dropping the stones into the water one after another.

  The young man waved and called out a greeting.

  Joseph waved back, and Sebastian answered as well.

  “He’s a good fellow,” Sebastian said a moment later. “He’s at Caius, reading physics. All terribly practical.” He sounded as if he were about to say something more, then he pushed his hands into his pockets and walked silently on the grass.

  Joseph felt no need for speech. The slight splash of punt poles and the current of the river slurping against their wooden sides, the occasional burst of laughter, were a wordless communication. Even grief could not entirely mar its timeless peace.

  “We have to protect this!” Sebastian said suddenly and with fierce emotion. His voice was thick, his shoulders tense as he half turned to stare across the shining water at the buildings beyond. “All of it! The ideas, the beauty, the knowledge . . . the freedom to think.” He drew in his breath. “To discover the things of the mind. We are accountable to humanity for what we have. To the future.”

  Joseph was startled. He had been letting himself sink into a sort of vacancy of thought, where emotion was sufficient to carry him. There was a glory here like the best music, filling everything. Now he was jerked back by Sebastian’s words. He deserved a considered answer, and it was apparent from the passion in his face that he needed one.

  “You mean Cambridge specifically? What do you think endangers it?” Joseph asked, puzzled by the heat in him. “It’s been here for over half a millennium, and it seems to be growing stronger rather than weaker.”

  Sebastian’s eyes were grave. His fair skin had been caught by the sun, and in the burning amber light now he looked almost made of gold. “I don’t suppose you’ve had time to read the news,” he answered. “Or the inclination, for that matter.” He turned his head away, not wanting to intrude into Joseph’s feelings, or else hiding his own.

  “Not much,” Joseph agreed. “But I know about the assassinations in Sarajevo, and that Vienna is unhappy about it. They want some sort of reparation from the Serbs. I suppose it was to be expected.”

  “If you occupy somebody else’s country, it is to be expected that they won’t like it!” Sebastian responded savagely. “All sorts of things come to be expected.” He repeated the word with sarcastic emphasis. “Strike and counterstrike, revenge for this or that—justice, from the other point of view. Isn’t it the responsibility of thinking men to stop the cycle and reach for something better?” He swung his arms wide, gesturing toward the exquisite buildings on the farther bank, their western facades glowing pale in the light, the shadows deepening to the east. “Isn’t that what all this is for, to teach us something better than ‘you hurt me, so I’ll hurt you back’? Aren’t we supposed to be leading the way toward a higher morality?”

  There could be no argument. It was the aim not only of philosophy, but of Christianity as well, and Sebastian knew Joseph would not deny that.

  “Yes,” he agreed. He sought the supreme comfort of reason. “But there have always been conquests, injustices, and rebellions—or revolutions, if you prefer. They have never endangered the heart of learning.”

  Sebastian stopped. A burst of laughter came up from the river where two punts almost collided as young men drinking champagne tried to reach across and touch glasses in a toast. One of the boys nearly overbalanced and was perilously close to falling in. His companion grasped him by the back of his shirt, and all he lost was his straw boater, which floated for a moment or two on the shining surface before someone from the other punt caught it on the end of his pole. He presented it to its owner, who took it, dripping wet, and put it back on his head, to shouts of approval and a loud and hilarious guffaw.

  It was so good-natured, a celebration of life, that Joseph found himself smiling. The sun was warm on his face, and the smells of the earth and grass were sweet.

  “It’s not easy to imagine, is it?” Sebastian replied.

  “What?”

  “Destruction . . . war,” Sebastian answered, looking away from the river and back at Joseph, his eyes dark with the weight of his thoughts.

  Joseph hesitated. He had not realized Sebastian was so deeply troubled.

  �
��You don’t think so?” Sebastian said. “You’re mourning a loss, sir, and I am truly sorry for it. But if we get drawn into a European war, every family in England will be mourning, not just for those we loved, but for the whole way of life we’ve cherished and nurtured for a thousand years. If we let that happen, we would be the true barbarians! And we would be to blame for more than the Goths or the Vandals who sacked Rome. They didn’t know any better. We do!” His voice was savage, almost on the point of tears.

  Joseph was frightened by the note of hysteria in him. “There was revolution all over Europe in 1848,” he said gently, choosing his words with care and unarguable truth. “It didn’t destroy civilization. In fact, it didn’t even destroy the despotism it was supposed to.” This was reason, calm history of fact. “Everything went back to normal within a year.”

  “You’re not saying that was good?” Sebastian challenged him, his eyes bright, assured at least of that. He knew Joseph far too well to suppose he did.

  “No, of course not. I’m saying that the order of things is set in very deep foundations, and it will take far more than the assassination of an archduke and his duchess, brutal as it was, to cause any radical change.”

  Sebastian bent and picked up a twig and hurled it toward the river, but it was too light and fell short. “Do you think so?”

  “Yes,” Joseph replied with certainty. Private griefs might shake his personal world, tear out the heart of it, but the beauty and the reason of civilization continued, immeasurably greater than the individual.

  Sebastian stared across the river, but unseeingly, his eyes clouded by his vision within. “That’s what Morel said, too, and Foubister. They think the world won’t ever change, or not more than an inch at a time. There are others, like Elwyn, who think that even if there is war, it will all be quick and noble, a rather more dramatic version of a good Rider Haggard story, or Anthony Hope. You know The Prisoner of Zenda and that sort of thing? All high honor and clean death at the point of a sword. Do you know much of the truth about the Boer War, sir? What we really did there?”

  “A little,” Joseph acknowledged. He knew it had been ruthless, and there was a great deal for Britain to be ashamed of. But perhaps there was for the Boers, too. “That was Africa, though,” he said aloud. “And perhaps we’ve learned from it. Europe would be different. But there’s no reason to think there’ll be war, unless there’s more trouble in Ireland and we let it get completely out of hand.”

  Sebastian said nothing.

  “Sarajevo was the isolated act of a group of assassins,” Joseph went on. “Europe is hardly going to go to war over it. It was a crime, not an—”

  Sebastian turned to him, his eyes astonishingly clear in the waning light. “Not an act of war?” he interrupted. “Are you sure, sir? I’m not. The kaiser restated his alliance with Austria-Hungary last Sunday, you know.”

  The twilight breeze rippled faintly across the surface of the river. It was still warm, like a soft touch to the skin.

  “And Serbia is on Russia’s back doorstep,” Sebastian continued. “If Austria demands too much reparation, they could get drawn in. And there’s always the old enmity between France and Germany. The men who fought the Franco-Prussian War are still alive, and still bitter.” He started to walk again, perhaps to avoid the group of students coming toward them across the grass. It was clear he did not want to be caught up in their conversation and interrupted in his infinitely more serious thoughts.

  Joseph kept pace with him, moving into the shadow of the trees, their leaves whispering faintly above them. “There may be an unjust suppression of the Serbs,” he said, trying to return to the safety of reason. “And the people in general may be punished for the violent acts of a few, which is wrong—of course it is. But it is not the catastrophe for civilization that you are suggesting.” He, too, spread his hands to encompass the fading scene in front of them, with its sudden dashes of silver and blue on the water. “All this is safe.” He said it with unquestioning certainty. It was a thousand years of unbroken progress toward even greater humanity. “We shall still be here, learning, exploring, creating our own beauty, adding to the richness of mankind.”

  Sebastian studied him, his face torn with conflicting rage and pity, almost tenderness. “You believe that, don’t you?” he said with incredulity verging on despair. Then he continued to walk again without waiting for the answer. Somehow the movement suggested a kind of dismissal.

  “What is it you think will happen?” Joseph asked firmly.

  “Darkness,” Sebastian answered. “Complacency without the vision to see, or the courage to act. And it takes courage! You have to see beyond the obvious, the comfortable morality everyone else agrees with, and understand that at times, terrible times, the end justifies the means.” His voice dropped. “Even when the cost is high. Otherwise they’ll lead us blindly down the path to a war like nothing we’ve ever even imagined before.” His words were cutting, and without the slightest hesitation. “It won’t be a few cavalry charges here and there, a few brave men killed or injured. It’ll be everyone—the ordinary man in the street sucked into endless mind- and body-breaking bombardment by even bigger guns. It’ll be hunger and fear and hatred until that’s all we know.” He squinted a little as the sun blazed level with the treetops to the west and painted fire on the top of the walls of Trinity and Caius. “Think of the towns and villages you know—St. Giles, Haslingfield, Grantchester, all the rest—with black on every window, no marriages, no christenings, only deaths.” His voice dropped and was filled with a hurting tenderness. “Think of the countryside, the fields with no men to plant them or to reap. Think of the woods in April with no one to see the blossom. Schoolboys won’t dream of this.” He gestured toward the rooftops. “Only of carrying guns. Their only ambition will be to kill and to survive.”

  He turned to face Joseph again, his eyes clear as seawater in the long light. “Isn’t it worth any price to save us from that? Isn’t it what human beings are here for, to nourish and protect what we’ve been given, and add to it before we pass it on? Look at it!” he demanded. “Don’t you love it almost more than you can bear?”

  Joseph did not need to look to know his answer. “Yes, I do,” he said with the same depth of absolute knowledge. “It is the ultimate sanity of life. In the end, it is all there is to hold on to.”

  Sebastian winced, his face looking suddenly bruised and hollow. “I’m sorry,” he said in a whisper. He moved his hand as if to touch Joseph’s arm, then withdrew. “But this is a universal sanity, isn’t it? Bigger than any one of us, a purpose, a healing for mankind?” His voice was urgent, begging for assurance.

  “Yes, it is,” Joseph agreed gently. He meant it more profoundly than he had imagined he would, but as had happened so many times in their friendship, Sebastian put it in exactly the words that framed his own belief. “And yes, it is the duty of those who have seen it and become part of it to protect it with all our power.”

  Sebastian smiled very slightly and turned away as they started back again. “But you don’t fear war, do you, sir? I mean real, literal war.”

  “I would fear it horribly if I considered it a real danger,” Joseph assured him. “But I don’t think it is. We’ve had many wars before, and we’ve lost many men. We’ve faced invasion more than once and beaten it off. It hasn’t broken us irreparably; if anything, it’s made us stronger.”

  “Not this time,” Sebastian said bitterly. “If it happens, it’ll be pure, blind destruction.”

  Joseph looked sideways at him. He could see in Sebastian’s face the love for all that was precious and vulnerable, all that could be broken by the unthinking. There was a pain in him that was naked in this strange, fierce light of dusk, which cast such black shadows.

  Time and again they had talked of all manner of things, no boundaries of time or place had held them: the men half human, half divine in the epic legends of Egypt and Babylon; the God of the Old Testament, who was the creator of worlds, yet s
poke face-to-face with Moses, as one man talks with another. They had basked in the lean, golden classicism of Greece, the teeming magnificence of Rome, the intricate glories of Byzantium, the sophistication of Persia. All had been the furniture of their dreams. Wherever Joseph had led, Sebastian had followed eagerly, grasping after each new experience with insatiable joy.

  The light was almost gone. The color burned only on the horizon, the shadows dense on the Backs. The water was pale and polished like old silver, indigo under the bridges.

  “We could disappear into the ruins of time if there’s war,” Sebastian resumed. “In a thousand years’ time, scholars from cultures we haven’t even imagined, young and curious, could dig up what’s left of us, and from a few shards, scraps of writing, try to work out what we were really like. And get it wrong,” he added bitterly.

  “English would become a dead language, lost, like Aramaic or Etruscan,” Sebastian went on with quiet misery. “No more wit of Oscar Wilde, or grandeur of Shakespeare, no more thunder of Milton, music of Keats, or . . . God knows how many more . . . and worst of all, the future culled. All that this generation might do. We have to prevent that—whatever it costs!”

  “It is impossible to care too much,” Joseph said gently. “It is all infinitely precious.” He must bring back reason, ground this fear in the lasting realities.

  “There is nothing you or I can do to affect the quarrels of Austria and Serbia,” he went on. “There will always be fighting somewhere, from time to time. And as inventions like telephones and wireless get better, we will know of them sooner. A hundred years ago it would have taken weeks for us to learn about it, if we did at all. And by that time it would all have been over. Now we read about it the day after, so we feel it to be more immediate, but it’s only a perception. Hold on to the certainties that endure.”