• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I went for breakfast and then returned to the telephone. My informant had the college address and private telephone number I needed, which I wrote in my notebook. I thanked him, took up my hat, gloves, and increasingly light handbag, and called a farewell to the concierge (such a grand name for that dried-up figure!). Taxis beckoned, but I resolutely turned my steps toward the Underground. Ridiculous as it seemed, after the depredations of generosity the other night to the East End poor, my purse was emptying fast, and no reinforcements were due until the banks opened on Monday. As I walked down the steps into the noisy station, a sudden thought made me laugh aloud: The cost of the clothes the elves were making for me amounted to precisely five pounds more than the total allowance I had drawn during my three years at Oxford, and here was I hoarding my last few shillings. Monday a ragged-coated philanthropist, Friday too poor for a taxi, and Sunday on the edge of being a millionaire (in dollars, perhaps, if the market was strong and the exchange rate very good).

In Oxford, I walked through a low drizzle and presented myself at the address in my notebook, where I was surprisingly well received despite the fact that I was obviously interrupting the great man’s work. I spent an instructive two and a half hours and came away with a list of books and names. The former, I tracked down in the Bodleian, where I spent the afternoon skimming several thousand pages. I spent a few shillings on a stodgy pub meal, worked a while longer, and on my way out of the town centre stopped for a brief chat with the colleague (whom I had dubbed Duncan) with whom I was doing the public presentation in January. The brief visit turned into dinner and a lengthy consultation, and I returned late to my digs on the north end of town, read for another couple of hours, and slept fitfully.

Saturday morning, I rose early, made myself a pot of tea, and began to read Evelyn Underhill’s massive (in scope, if not number of pages) treatise on mysticism. At a more reasonable hour, my landlady came in with a tray of coffee and buttered toast. Reluctantly, I closed Miss Underhill and picked up the material Duncan had given me the previous evening. At mid-morning, I walked to his house, an amiable shambles of loud children and a wife every bit as absentminded as he, and after an hour’s friendly argument, I took myself on a contemplative stroll through the Parks and Magdalen’s deer park to a converted laundry in Headington, a building that smelt oddly of starch and scorched sheets when warm, at whose whitewashed front window passersby often drew up, startled at the noises coming from within.

Watson called this form of martial art “baritsu,” for reasons best known to himself. (There was in his day a form of glorified grappling by that name, invented by an Englishman and dignified with an Oriental title, but had Holmes depended on it, he would never have survived Reichenbach.) That day, out of condition from weeks at my books and distracted as well, I called it torture, and I collected a handsome variety of bruises from my gentle and ever-genial teacher. I bowed to him gingerly and crept away to the train, reflecting on how salutary it is occasionally to put one’s self in the hands of a ruthless superior.

I arrived at the Temple promptly at five o’clock, at the everyday business doors down the street from the meeting hall. As we had arranged, Veronica met me and spent the next hour showing me the workings behind the doors. It was an enlightening experience. We saw the Refuge, open to poor women in trouble, with long tables to feed them, a small surgery to treat their ills, and a tiny garden in the back with swings for the children. (“The only garden some of them have ever seen,” commented Ronnie.) I saw the classrooms, with readers designed for children but used mostly, said Veronica, by grown women (“We’re writing a simple adult reader”); the commissary, with its stores of food and clothing for the destitute;