A Letter of Mary - Laurie R. King [92]
"If it's in thunder and in rain, I'm going to throw Miss Small's accursed shoes out the window and wear my Wellingtons," I grumbled. "Not tomorrow— I'll be back late. Tuesday?"
It was agreed, and we dispersed.
* * *
Holmes and I drove back with few words. He had to return the cab to its owner, and as it was still raining hard, he stopped in front of the boardinghouse to let me out. I looked out the window at the unwelcoming door, with my fingers on the car's door handle.
"You won't be long?" I asked. It would be just like him to disappear again for some days.
"Twenty minutes. If he's there, I'll have him drive me back."
I nodded and moved to open the door. His voice stopped my hand.
"You know, Russell, one of the damnable things about working in partnership is that one has to take the other person's proprietary feelings into account— Russell proponit sed Holmes disponit. It's not everyone who will put up with being run roughshod over in the course of the chase and then be willing to brush himself off and set to again as if nothing had happened. It was one of Watson's most valuable strengths as a partner, his doglike devotion. However," and here he turned his face towards me, though there was not enough light to reveal his expression, "you will no doubt have noticed that I did not consider this a strength when it came to a permanent partnership."
It was a generous apology, for Holmes, and I grinned at him.
"Woof," I said, and ducked out into the rain.
PART FIVE
Monday, 3 September 1923-
Wednesday, 5 September 1923
The poet's pen ... gives to airy nothings a local habitation and a name.
— Shakespeare
NINETEEN
tau
I never tire of Oxford. Cambridge is stunning, of course. Cambridge is sweet and ethereal, and the air in Cambridge bubbles in the mind like fine champagne, but I cannot imagine getting any work done there. Oxford is a walled city still, and within her black and golden, crumbling, scabrous, aged, dignified, and eternal walls lie pockets of rarefied air, places where, turning a corner or entering a conversation, the breath catches and for an instant one is taken up into ... if not the higher levels of heaven, at least into a place divine. And then, in the next moment, there comes an eddy of grit, and the ghostly echo of mediaeval oxcarts is heard rumbling down past Christopher Wren's bell tower on their way from Robert D'Oilley's castle to his grand bridge over the river. Even in Oxford University's holy of holies, the Bodleian Library, there comes an occasional grumble and whiff of the internal combustion engine.
The grit that morning was palpable, for the haze that softened the sunlight of what might otherwise have been a shimmering morning was the result of burning stubble in the surrounding countryside, and even at the early hour of my arrival, the black skeletal remains of the hard stalks rained gently onto the city, forming drifts that swirled up at the passing of motorcars. I saw no washing hung up to dry that Monday morning as I walked into town from the train station, along the sluggish canal, under the shadow of the otherworldly castle mound, looking in its vernal leaf more like a setting for Puck and Titania than it did a hillock for undergraduate picnics overlooking the prison, then past the decrepit slums of Greyfriars and out onto the deceptive everyday face of the most beautiful high street in any city I have seen, dodging carts, autos, trams, and bicycles, the town centre strikingly incomplete without its normal complement of fluttering black gowns, like a friend with a new and extreme haircut. Up the High towards the tantalising curve, but before entering it, at the very foot of St Mary's wise divinity, I made an abrupt turn north, and there, oddly satisfying in its scorn for a deliberate and formal perfection, was the quadrangle with the rotund earthiness of the Radcliffe Camera in its centre, bounded on its four sides by the tracery of All Souls on my right, the height of St Mary's at my back, Brasenose College on the left giving