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Date Posted: 13:30:11 11/05/07 Mon
Author: celtgirl
Subject: Inside>>>
In reply to: celtgirl 's message, "Again ladies thank you for participating in the 'Mermaid' discussion. Just thought I'd mention here that occasionally I'll post excerpts from my WIP 'Flights of Angels' or the Famine book. That way the board sees some action and you all know that I actually am getting something done here. :) That being said, here's a small snippet of someone you may or may not recognize. ;)" on 13:24:59 11/05/07 Mon

copyright 2007 Cindy Brandner

The legend of Professor Archibald Swansea loomed large over Oxford and had done so, some said, for the last fifty years. Though this was hardly possible as the first time he’d taught was only twelve years ago, for one thing was certain, anyone who had ever sat through one of his classes on ‘the Poetics of the Self’ was to never forget the experience. He taught rarely, only on the occasions that Professor John Wexler could not arise from his hangover and take the long punishing walk to the classroom that boys from around the British Isles and some even beyond would have sold close family members to be allowed into. Jonathan Euclidus Wexler was in the way of being legendary himself and likely the only Professor who could get away with replacing himself, en absentia, with a man whose credentials were, at best, circumspect.

No one had been able to pin down exactly who Archibald Swansea was though the tales about him flew thick and fast and grew disproportionately over the years. That he was an Oxford man himself was undisputed, such brilliance could only have been brought forth and moulded by the grand mother of universities herself. When however he had actually been a tender student within the hallowed halls was rather harder to fix upon and so it happened, as it often does in such cases, that every generation claimed him as their own, including a few that had been taught by him.

That he was a most odd looking creature was also a point not up for disputation, on this everyone agreed. That, for such an ungainly, motheaten man, he also had the most outrageous good fortune with women was also part of legend, and for anyone who’d ever witnessed him walking across the grounds, with his strange, dreamy gait, trailed by legions of pastel clad, otherwise stupendously serious females like so many sleek wellbred cats after a most inappropriate tom, it was a detail they knew to be without embellishment or exaggeration.

And so it was that each year devotees of the English language and its finer forms would dutifully and reverently become the audience to John Wexler’s stage performance of said subject and every once in awhile, perhaps in the dark depths of November or within the cruel lavender fronds of April, there would appear, perched at elegant odds with his own appearance, swirled about and tossed into ill-fitting and ancient frock coats, striped and dandy coloured, with some exotic bud protruding from a frayed buttonhole, the electric presence of Professor Archibald Swansea. And again would begin the rumours, as full of holes as the Professor’s attire, and again a new class of young minds would be caught up in the slippery filaments that constituted the story of Archibald Swansea. And in the weeks to follow, ancestral closets, closed and ignored for years would be looted and young men would begin to affect styles that had disappeared with the Victorians. Deep, throaty drawls would start to crop up in speeches that had been flawlessly and hopelessly overbred upper class before, a certain lilac-hued dreaminess would infect even the least romantic of them and they would take, without warning and without reason, to streaming off great chunks of poetry. Nothing, perhaps so alarming within the eyes of people given over to making their entire way in the world in the higher devotion of the mother tongue. Except that when combined with that peculiar gait and the rather ripacious scent of eighty-two port hangovers on Monday morning, it did become just a tad worrisome.

Perhaps, had anyone been able to pin the man down it would have become an issue, but when the Professor trailed off campus, toting his ancient and battered leather suitcase behind him, he seemingly disappeared into the fog and clutter of an altogether older and more exciting England.

Many had tried to track him down during ill-spent weekends in London, where it was reputed he kept digs in the seedy trenches of Soho. But he was, like the elusive fox, never run to ground.

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