The Masters (23 page)

‘My dear Roy,’ cried Jago, ‘you couldn’t possibly do me a disservice. You’ve always been too kind to me. It even makes me forgive you your imitations.’

It was not only at the claret party that Roy mimicked Jago; he could not resist the sound of that muffled, sententious, emphatic voice; most of those round the table that night had heard him, and even Despard-Smith grinned.

As we went out that night, Arthur Brown reflected: ‘You heard the reason Roy Calvert gave for presenting a bottle? Now I wonder exactly what he meant by it. Put it another way: a few years ago, whenever he said anything that wasn’t straightforward, I used to expect one of his queer tricks. But I don’t worry much about him now. He’s become very much more stable. I really believe that he’s settling down.’

I did not disagree. It was better for Brown to speculate amiably, just as fellows in the future, studying the wine book, might wonder what that singular entry could mean.

I told Brown that I was taking action to protect Luke. Francis Getliffe had returned for the meeting that morning, and his wife Katherine had asked me to dinner later in the week, for the first time since our quarrel in January. I intended to use the opportunity: it would be easy to let drop the story of Nightingale’s threat, and it was too good a chance to miss.

When I arrived for dinner at their house in the Chaucer Road they welcomed me as in the old days. As Francis poured out sherry and took his wife a glass, he seemed less fine-drawn than in college. He looked at her with love, and his restlessness, his striving, his strenuous ambition, all died away; his nerves were steadied, he was content to the marrow of his bones. And she was happy through and through, with a happiness more continuous than a man could know.

The children were in bed. She talked of them with delight, with a pretence of not wanting to bore me. As she indulged her need to linger over them, she sat with matronly comfort in her chair; it seemed a far cry from the excited, apprehensive, girl of eighteen whom I met in her father’s house at Bryanston Square nearly ten years before. I had been taken there by her brother Charles, the most intimate friend of my London days: it was the first big house I ever entered.

She talked of the past and her family, as we sat at dinner. Had I seen her brother recently? Then with great gusto, the nostalgia of a happy woman, she recalled days at her father’s country house when Francis and I had both been staying there.

After dinner we moved into the garden at the back of the house. There we sat in the last of the light, as the western sky turned from flaming yellow to a lambent apple-green. The air caressed our faces. And languorous and heavy in the warm night wafted the scent of syringa, which brought back, with a voluptuous pain, the end of other summer terms.

Drowsy in the scented air, I was just going to drop a hint about Luke when, to my astonishment, Katherine got in before me.

‘I have been wanting a word with you, Lewis.’

‘Have you?’

‘You do agree that Francis is right about the Mastership, don’t you? It is essential for us to have a liberal-minded Master, don’t you agree?’

So they had invited me to play the same game. I was curiously saddened, as one is saddened when the gulf of marriage divides one from a friend. Once Katherine had listened to each word that her brother and I spoke, she had been friend and disciple, she saw things with our eyes. Now she was happy with her husband, and everyone else’s words were alien.

‘I think Francis is quite wrong,’ I said.

‘If we get saddled with a reactionary Master,’ said Francis, ‘Lewis will be responsible.’

‘That’s unfair.’

‘Be honest, man,’ said Francis. ‘If you did what we should have expected you to do, Crawford would walk in. Several people would come over with you.’

‘I must say,’ Katherine broke in, ‘it seems rather gross, Lewis. This is important, don’t you admit that it is important? And we’ve got a right to expect you not to desert our side. It’s no use pretending, it does seem pretty monstrous to me.’

I knew they felt that I was being ungrateful. When I was in distress, so that I wanted a refuge to hide in, Francis had set to work to bring me to the college. He had done it with great delicacy, for three years they had felt possessively pleased whenever I dined at their house – and now, at the first major conflict, I betrayed him. I thought how much one expects from those to whom one does a good turn; it takes a long while to learn that, by the laws of human nature, one does not often get it.

‘Look,’ I said to Katherine, ‘your brother Charles has got as much insight as anyone I’ve ever known. When you let yourself go, you’re nearly as good. You know something of Crawford and Jago. Tell me, which is the more remarkable man?’

There was a pause.

‘Jago,’ she said reluctantly. Then she recovered herself, and asked: ‘But do you want a remarkable man as Master, don’t you admit that other things come first?’

‘Good work,’ said Francis. ‘Lewis likes human frailty for its own sake.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I like imagination rather than ordinariness.’

‘I’m afraid at times,’ said Francis stiffly, ‘that you forget about the solid virtues.’

‘If you prefer it,’ I spoke with anger, ‘I like self-torment rather than conceit.’

They were profoundly out of sympathy with me, and I with them. We knew each other well enough to know there was no give on the other side. They became more obdurate in resisting any claim I made for Jago: my tongue got harsher when I replied about Crawford.

‘Anyway,’ said Katherine at last, ‘
she
is appalling.’

‘She’s pathetic,’ I said. ‘There’s much humanity in her.’

‘That’s monstrously far-fetched, don’t you admit it?’

‘If you’d watched Jago take care of her, you might understand what I’ve been telling you about him,’ I said.

‘She’d be an intolerable nuisance in the Lodge,’ said Katherine.

‘We’re not electing her,’ I said. ‘We’re electing her husband.’

‘You can’t get out of it as though she didn’t exist,’ said Francis.

For a moment we broke off the argument. Without our having noticed the light go, the garden now lay in deep twilight; the apple-green sky had changed to an illuminated, cerulean blue; the first stars had come out.

It was then that I spoke of Luke – not, as I had planned, in the way of friendly talk, but at the moment when we had got tired of our barbed voices.

‘I resent some of the comments that your side have made about her,’ I said. ‘But I don’t want to talk about that now. There’s something more important. It’s another piece of tactics by one of your side. Did you know that Nightingale has been trying to coerce young Luke?’

‘What do you mean?’ said Francis.

I gave them the story.

‘Is this true?’ cried Francis. ‘Are those the facts?’

‘I’ve told you exactly what Luke told me,’ I said. ‘Would you believe him?’

‘Yes,’ said Francis, with no warmth towards me, angry with me for intruding this complaint, and yet disturbed by it.

‘If you believe him,’ I said, ‘then it’s quite true.’

‘It’s nasty,’ Francis broke out. I could only see him dimly in the crepuscular light, but I was sure that his face had flushed and that the vein in his forehead was showing. ‘I don’t like it. These things can’t be allowed to happen. It’s shameful.’ He went on: ‘I needn’t tell you that nothing of this kind will affect Luke’s future. I ought to say that his chances of being kept by the college can’t be very strong, so long as I stay. But that has nothing to do with this shameful business. Luke’s very good. He ought to be kept in Cambridge somehow.’

‘He’s a very nice boy,’ said Katherine. She was not three years older, but she spoke like a mature woman of a child.

‘By the way, it won’t make the slightest difference to the election,’ I said. ‘Luke may be young, but he’s not the first person one would try to cow. But I wanted to make sure you knew. I wasn’t ready to sit by and see him threatened.’

‘I’ll stop it,’ said Francis with angry dignity. ‘I’ll stop it,’ he repeated. Yet his tone to me was not softened, but harder than it had been that night. His whole code of behaviour, his self-respect, his uprightness and sense of justice, made him promise what he had done; and I was certain, as certain as I should be of any man, that he would carry it out. But he did not embrace me for making him do so. I had caused him to feel responsible for a piece of crooked dealing; it would not have mattered so much if I had still been an ally, but now it stiffened him against me. ‘You ought to remember,’ he said, ‘that some of your side are none too scrupulous. I’m not convinced that you’ve been too scrupulous yourself. Didn’t you offer Nightingale that you wouldn’t be a candidate for the tutorship, if only he’d vote for Jago? While you know as well as I do that Nightingale stands as much chance of becoming tutor as I do of becoming a bishop.’

Soon after I thanked them for dinner and walked back into the town through the midsummer night. We had parted without the glow and ease of friendship. Walking back under the stars, at the mercy of the last scents of early summer, I remembered a May week four years before, on just such a night as this. Those two and I had danced in the same party; we had loved our partners, and there had been delight to spare for our friends. Yet, a few minutes past, I had said goodnight to Francis and Katherine with no intimacy at all. Was it only this conflict between us? Or was it a sign of something inevitable, like the passing of time itself? The memory of anyone one had truly loved stayed distinct always and with a special fragrance, quite unaffected by the years. And the memory of one’s deepest friendships had a touch of the same magic. But nothing less was invulnerable to time, or chance, or one’s private trouble. Lesser friendships needed more care than the deepest ones; they needed attention and manners – and there were times, in the midst of private trouble, when those one could not give. Was it my fault that I could not meet Francis and Katherine as I once did?

Throughout the long vacation most of the fellows did not go far away. We all knew that, as soon as the Master died, there would be a last series of talks, confidences, negotiations, until the day of the election, and we wanted to be at hand. Only two went out of England. Roy Calvert was giving a course of lectures in Berlin, and had to leave by the end of July; he went in cheerful spirits, promising to fly back at a day’s notice if I sent for him. Pilbrow had departed for the Balkans shortly after Brown’s claret party, and no one had heard a word from him since. He had guaranteed to return in time for the election, but when I last saw him he had no thoughts to spare for college conflicts.

During the summer no one changed his party. The bricks in Roy Calvert’s room did not require moving; the score was still 6–5 for Jago, but not a clear majority of the whole 13 electors. Brown kept on persuading us to wait before we tried an attempt on Gay, or any other move. Chrystal, however, did make the first signs of an approach about Jago, one night when the old man was dining; he found him aware of the position but stubborn, and so went no further. In fact Chrystal was frustrated for lack of action, and his temper became shorter; they had heard nothing fresh from Sir Horace, apart from a long, effusive letter thanking Brown for his nephew’s success. In that letter, for the first time, there appeared no encouraging hints about the college’s future at all, and Chrystal and Brown were at a loss.

At the end of August the Master sent for me. He had a special message he wanted to give me, and he told me, almost as soon as I arrived, that I was to remind him of it if he rambled. He wanted to give me the message before I went.

His face was now an old man’s. The flesh was dried and had a waxy sheen. His eyes were sunken. Yet his voice was a good imitation of its old self, and, with his heightened insight, he knew the tone which would distress me least. And he spoke, with his old sarcastic humour, of his reasons for changing the position of his bed. It stood by the window now.

‘I prefer to lie here,’ said the Master, ‘because I got tired of the remarkable decoration’ – he meant the painted college arms – ‘which we owe to the misguided enthusiasm of one of my predecessors who had somewhat grandiloquent tastes. And, between you and me, I also like to look out of the window and see our colleagues walking about in twos and threes.’ He smiled without sadness and with an extraordinary detachment. ‘It makes me wonder how they are grouping themselves about the coming vacancy.’

I looked into the emaciated, wasted, peaceful face. ‘It is surprisingly easy to face that kind of fact,’ he said. ‘It seems quite natural, I assure you. So you can tell me the truth. How much has been done about choosing my successor: I have only heard that Jago might be in the running – which, between ourselves, I could have guessed for myself. Will he get it?’

‘Either he or Crawford.’

‘Crawford. Scientists are too bumptious.’ It was strange to hear him, even when so many of the vanities of self had gone, clinging to the prejudice of a lifetime.

I described the present position of the parties. It kept his attention and amused him. As I spoke, I did not feel anything macabre about his interest; it was more as though an observer from another world was watching the human comedy.

‘I hope you get Jago in,’ he said. ‘He’ll never become wise, of course. He’ll always be a bit of an ass. Forget that, and get him in.’

Then he asked: ‘I expect there’s a good deal of feeling?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘It’s remarkable. People always believe that, if only they support the successful candidate, they’ve got his backing for ever. It’s an illusion, Eliot, it’s an illusion. I assure you, one feels a certain faint irritation at the faces of one’s loyal supporters. They catch one’s eye and smirk.’

A recollection of the Getliffe’s garden came to me, and I said: ‘Gratitude plays some queer tricks.’

‘Gratitude isn’t an emotion,’ he said, watching the human comedy. ‘But the expectation of gratitude is a very lively one.’

His mind was very active, but began to leap from point to point.