As they walked along, Gavin said, “You are newcomers here, but you will have observed the guard we keep posted along the walls. The guard is perhaps hardly necessary; certainly it is hardly efficient. But those old men are pensioners; they come here when there is nowhere else for them to go, and we are bound in all charity to take them in. We make them earn their keep by doing guard duty. We are not a charity, you understand; our coffers would not allow us to be; whatever our hearts said. Everyone, Mr. Greybeard, everyone would come here and live at our expense if we let them. No man wishes to labour once he is past his half-century, especially if he has no future generations who may profit by his labours.”
“Precisely so, Gavin,” Vivian agreed, tapping his stick along the worn flags. “We have to make this place pay its way in a manner quite foreign to our predecessors and our founders. Cardinal Wolsey would have died the death… that is why we run the place as a mixture of tavern, auction room, cattle market, and bawdy house. One cannot escape the cash nexus.”
“I get the message,” Greybeard said, as they turned into Morton’s chambers, where the same sharp-nosed fellow they had met on their first day in the college hurriedly put a stopper back in one of his master’s bottles and disappeared into the adjoining rooms. “You expect me to pay for what is mine.”
“Not necessarily,” Morton said, bending before a bright fire and stretching out thin hands towards it. “We could, if the point were conceded that it was your vehicle, charge you a parking fee… A garaging fee, don’t you know. Let me see — the Bursar would have a record somewhere, but we must have kept the vehicle in our luxurious ecclesiastical garage for seven or eight years now… Say a modest fee of three shillings per diem, er… Vivian, you are the mathematician…”
“My head isn’t what it was.”
“As we are aware…”
“It would be a sum of approximately four hundred pounds.”
“That’s absurd!” Greybeard protested. “I could not possibly raise that amount, or anything like it. How did you acquire the vehicle, I would like to know.”
“Your labouring pursuits are telling on you somewhat, Mr. Greybeard,” Morton said. “We raise glasses but never voices in this room. Will you drink?”
Martha stepped forward. “Mr. Morton, we would be delighted to drink.” She placed a coin on the table. “There is payment for it.” Morton’s lined face straightened and achieved such a considerable length that his chin was lost inside his coat.
“Madam, a woman’s presence does not automatically make of this room a tavern. Kindly pocket money you are going to need.”
He poked his tongue round his upper gum, smiled sourly, raised his glass, and said, in a more reasonable voice than he had used before, “Mr. Greybeard, it was in this manner that the vehicle in which you are so interested came into our possession. It was driven here by an aged hawker. As friend Gavin will remember, this hawker boasted one eye and multitudinous lice. He thought he was dying. So did we. We had him taken in, and looked after him. He lingered through the winter — which was something a good many stronger men failed to do — and recovered after a fashion in the spring. He had a species of palsy and was unfit even for guard duty. To pay for his keep, he handed over his truck. Since it was worthless to us, he got good value for his money. He died after a drinking bout some months ago, cursing — as I heard the story — his benefactors.”
Moodily, Greybeard swigged his wine. “If the truck is valueless to you, why not simply give it to me?”
“Because it is one of our assets, we hope an asset about to be realized. Suppose the garaging dues to be roughly as Vivian has estimated, four hundred pounds; we would let you take it away for two hundred pounds. How’s that?”
“But I’m broke! It would take me… you know how little I earn with Joe Flitch… It would take me four years to put that amount by.”
“We could allow you reduced garage rates for the period, could we not, Gavin?”
“If the Bursar were agreeable we might, yes.”
“Precisely. Say a shilling a day for four years… Vivian?”
“My head is not what it was. An additional seventy-five pounds, do I make it?”
Greybeard broke into an account of DOUCH(E)’s activities. He explained how often he had reproached himself for letting the truck go to the hawker, although the exchange had saved half Sparcot from starving. The Students remained unmoved; Vivian, in fact, pointed out that since the vehicle was so valuable, and since he had not clearly established his ownership, they really ought to sell it to him for a thousand pounds. So the discussion closed, with the college men firm in their demand for money.
Next day, Greybeard went to see the venerable Bursar, and signed an agreement to pay him so much every week, until the garage fee was settled.
He sat in their room that night in a gloomy mood. Neither Martha nor Charley, who had come round with Isaac to see them, could raise his spirits.
“If everything goes well, it will take us all but five years to clear the debt,” he said. “Still, I do feel honour bound to clear it. You see how I feel, don’t you, Martha? I took on the DOUCH job for life, and I’m going to honour my obligations — when a man has nothing, what else can he do? Besides, when the truck is ours again, we can get the radio working and we may be able to raise other trucks. We can learn what has been happening all over the world. I care about what’s going on, if the old fools who rule this place don’t. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could get in touch with old Jack Pilbeam in Washington?”
“If you really feel that way, Algy,” Martha said, “I’m sure five years will soon go.”
He looked her in the eye. “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said.
The days yielded one to another. The months went by. Winter gave way to spring, and spring to summer. The summer gave way to another winter, and that winter to a second summer. The Earth renewed itself; only men grew older and were not replenished. The trees grew taller, the rookeries noisier, the graveyards fuller, the streets more silent. Greybeard embarked upon the Meadow Lake in most weathers, drawing the swathes of green reed into his boat, taking each day as it came, not fretting that a time would soon come when people would no longer have the energy to thatch or want thatch.
Martha worked on among the animals, helping Norman Morton’s assistant, the gnarled and arthritic Thorne. The work was interesting. Most mammals were now bringing forth normal young, though the cows, of which they possessed only a small herd, still threw miscarriages as often as not. As healthy beasts were reared, they were auctioned in the quad market alive, or slaughtered and sold as meat.
To Martha it seemed that a kind of eclipse overtook Greybeard’s spirit. When he came back from Joe Flitch’s in the evening, he rarely had much to say, though he listened with interest to her store of gossip about the college, acquired through Thorne. They saw less of Charley Samuels, and very little of Jeff Pitt. At the same time, they were slow to make new friends. Their putative friendship with Morton and the other Students withered directly the financial deal was struck.
Martha let this altered situation make no difference to her relationship with her husband. They had known each other too long, and through too many stresses. To strengthen her purpose, she thought of their love as the lake on which Algy laboured day in, day out; the surface mirrored every change of weather, but below was a deep undisturbed place. Because of this, she let the days run away and kept her heart open.
She returned to their rooms — they had moved to better rooms on the first floor in Peck — one golden summer evening, to find her husband there before her. He had washed his hands and freshly combed his beard.