The Music School by John Updike Read Free Book Online

told him, “I’d go to my college and see if they could help.”
    “Which college?” he asked. His face became jealously alert.
    “Keble.”
    “Ah,” he crowed, “they won’t help.
They won’t help
. They know
nothing
. They
wish
to know nothing.
Nihil ex nihilo
.”
    “It’s a game they play,” Mr. Pott muttered sourly, “called Hands Off.”
    “Really?” my wife said, her voice brimming.
    “Nevertheless,” I insisted, “we have to begin somewhere. That weekly you got for us had only one possibility, and the woman’s husband didn’t like Americans.”
    “Your ruddy airmen,” Mr. Pott explained, “from out Norton way have given you a name. They come into town with their powder-blue suits and big shoulders, some of ’em black as shoe polish, and give the local tarts what-for.”
    My mention of the weekly had set off a sequence in Mr. Robinson’s mind, for now he clapped his hands to his head and said, “That book. I promised to lend you that book. Forgive, for
give
a rattlebrained old man. I will get it for you
instanter
. No protest, no protest. Youth must be served.”
    He went upstairs to his room, and we glanced at Mr. Pott inquisitively. He nodded. “I’d beat it now, in your shoes,” he said.
    We had made three blocks and felt safely lost in the crowd along Cornmarket when Mr. Robinson caught up with us. He was panting and wearing his bedroom slippers. “Wait,” he whined, “
wait
, you don’t
see
. You can’t run blind and headlong into these situations, you don’t understand the
circumstances
.” He carried his paper shopping bag and produced from it a book, which he pressed upon me. It was a turn-of-the-century edition of Arnold’s essays, with marbled end papers. Right there, on the jostling pavement, I opened it, and nearly slammed it shut in horror, for every page was a spider’s web of annotations and underlinings, in many pencils and inks and awild variety of handwritings. “Cf.,” “
videlicet
,” “He betrays himself here,” “19th cent. optmsm.”—these leaped at me out of the mad swarm. The annotations were themselves annotated, as his argument with the text doubled and redoubled back on itself. “Is this so?” a firm hand had written in one margin, and below it, in a different slant and fainter pencil, had been added, “Yes it is so,” with the “is” triple-underlined; and below this a wobbly ballpoint pen had added, without capitals, “but is it?” It made me dizzy to look into; I shut the book and thanked him.
    Mr. Robinson looked at me cleverly sideways. “You thought I had forgotten,” he said. “You thought an old man’s brain didn’t hold water. No shame, no shame; in your circumstances you could hardly think otherwise. But no, what I promise, I fulfill; now I will be your guide. A-hem. Everyman, I will go with thee: hah!” He gestured toward the ancient town hall and told us that during the Great Rebellion Oxford had been the Royalist headquarters.
    “ ‘The king, observing with judicious eyes / The state of both his universities, / To Oxford sent a troop of horse, and why?’ ” he recited, ending with a sweep of his arm that drew the eyes of passersby to us.
    Just as, by being pronounced definitely insane, a criminal curiously obligates the society he has injured, so now Mr. Robinson’s hold upon us was made perfect. The slither of his shuffling slippers on the pavement, the anxious snagging stress of periodic syllables, the proud little throat-clearings were so many filaments that clasped us to him as, all but smothered by embarrassment and frustration, we let him lead us. Our route overlapped much of the route of the day before; but now he began to develop a new theme—that all this while he had been subjecting us to a most meticulous scrutiny andwe had passed favorably, with
flying
colors, and that he was going to introduce us to some of his friends, the really
important
people, the grand panjandrums, the people who knew where