In Bragdon bricht this ende dai Herde ich Merlin ther he lai Singende woo and welawai.
It is good enough evidence that the well with the British-Roman pavement was already “Merlin’s Well,” though the name is not found till Queen Elizabeth’s reign, when good Warden Shovel surrounded the Wood with a wall “for the taking away of all profane and heathenish superstitions and the deterring of the vulgar sort from all wakes, May games, dancings, mummings, and baking of Morgan’s bread, heretofore used about the fountain called in vanity Merlin’s Well, and utterly to be renounced and abominated as a gallimaufrey of papistry, gentilism, lewdness and dunsicall folly.” Not that the College had by this action renounced its own interest in the place. Old Dr. Shovel, who lived to be nearly a hundred, can scarcely have been cold in his grave when one of Cromwell’s major-generals, conceiving it his business to destroy “the groves and the high places,” sent a few troopers with power to impress the country people for this pious work. The scheme came to nothing in the end: but there had been a bicker between the College and the troopers in the heart of Bragdon, and the fabulously learned and saintly Richard Crowe had been killed by a musket ball on the very steps of the Well. He would be a brave man who would accuse Crowe either of popery or “gentilism”: yet the story is that his last words had been “Marry, sirs, if Merlin who was the Devil’s son was a true King’s man as ever ate bread, is it not a shame that you, being but the sons of bitches, must be rebels and regicides?” And always, through all changes, every warden of Bracton, on the day of his election, had drunk a ceremonial draught of water from Merlin’s Well in the great cup which both for its antiquity and for its beauty, was the greatest of the Bracton treasures.
All this I thought of, lying beside Merlin’s Well, beside the Well which must certainly date from Merlin’s time if there had ever been a real Merlin: lying where Sir Kenelm Digby had lain all one summer night and seen a certain strange appearance: where Collins the poet had lain, and where George the Third had cried: where the brilliant and much-loved Nathaniel Fox had composed the famous poem three weeks before he was killed in France. The air was so still and the billows of foliage so heavy above me, that I fell asleep. I was wakened by my friend hallowing to me from a long way off.
IV
The most controversial business before the College meeting was the question of selling Bragdon Wood. The purchaser was the N.I.C.E., the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. They wanted a site for the building which would worthily house this remarkable organisation. The N.I.C.E. was the first-fruit of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world. It was to be free from almost all the tiresome restraints—“red tape” was the word its supporters used—which have hitherto hampered research in this country. It was also largely free from the restraints of economy, for, as it was argued, a nation which can spend so many millions a day on a war can surely afford a few millions a month on productive research in peace-time. The building proposed for it was one which would make a quite noticeable addition to the skyline of New York, the staff was to be enormous, and their salaries princely. Persistent pressure and endless diplomacy on the part of the Senate of Edgestow had lured the new Institute away from Oxford, from Cambridge, from London. It had thought of all these in turn as possible scenes for its labours. At times the Progressive Element in Edgestow had almost despaired. But success was now practically certain. If the N.I.C.E. could get the necessary land, it would come to Edgestow. And once it came, then, as everyone felt, things would at last begin to move. Curry had even expressed a doubt whether, eventually, Oxford and Cambridge could survive as major universities at all.
Three years ago, if Mark Studdock had come to a College meeting at which such a question was to be decided, he would have expected to hear the claims of sentiment against progress and beauty against utility openly debated. To-day, as he took his seat in the Soler, the long upper room on the south of Lady Alice, he expected no such matter. He knew now that that was not the way things are done.
The Progressive Element managed its business really very well. Most of the Fellows did not know when they came into the Soler that there was any question of selling the Wood. They saw, of course, from their agenda paper that Item 15 was “Sale of College land,” but as that appeared at almost every College meeting, they were not very interested. On the other hand they did see that Item 1 was “Questions about Bragdon Wood.” These were not concerned with the proposed sale. Curry, who rose as sub-warden to introduce them, had a few letters to read to the College. The first was from a society concerned for the preservation of ancient monuments. I think myself that this society had been ill-advised to make two complaints in one letter. It would have been wiser if they had confined themselves to drawing the College’s attention to the disrepair of the wall round the Wood. When they went on to urge the desirability of building some protection over the Well itself and even to point out that they had urged this before, the College began to be restive. And when, as a kind of afterthought, they expressed a wish that the College could be a little more accommodating to serious antiquaries who wanted to examine the Well, the College became definitely ill-tempered. I would not like to accuse a man in Curry’s position of misreading a letter: but his reading of this letter was certainly not such as to gloss over any defects in the tone of the original composition. Before he sat down, nearly everyone in the room desired strongly to make the outer world understand that Bragdon Wood was the private property of Bracton College and that the outer world had better mind its own business. Then he rose again to read another letter. This was from a society of Spiritualists who wanted leave to investigate the “reported phenomena” in the Wood—a letter “connected” as Curry said, “with the next which, with the Warden’s permission, I will now read to you.” This was from a firm who had heard of the Spiritualists’ proposal and wanted permission to make a film, not exactly of the phenomena, but of the Spiritualists looking for the phenomena. Curry was directed to write short refusals to all three letters.
Then came a new voice from quite a different part of the Soler. Lord Feverstone had risen. He fully agreed with the action which the College had taken about these impertinent letters from various busybodies outside. But was it not, after all, a fact, that the wall of the Wood was in a very unsatisfactory condition? A good many Fellows—Studdock was not one of them—imagined they were watching a revolt on Feverstone’s part against “Curry and his gang” and became intensely interested. Almost at once the Bursar, James Busby, was on his feet. He welcomed Lord Feverstone’s question. In his Bursarial capacity he had recently taken expert advice about the wall of the Wood. “Unsatisfactory” was, he feared, much too mild a word to describe its condition. Nothing but a complete new wall would really meet the situation. With great difficulty the probable cost of this was elicited from him: and when the College heard the figure it gasped. Lord Feverstone enquired icily whether the Bursar was seriously proposing that the College should undertake such an expense. Busby (a very large ex-clergyman with a bushy black beard) replied with some temper that he had proposed nothing: if he were to make a suggestion it would be that the question could not be treated in isolation from some important financial considerations which it would become his duty