Charles Snow - The Masters

Jago enjoyed the dramatic impact of power, like Chrystal: but he was seeking for other things besides. He was an ambitious man, as neither Brown nor Chrystal were. In any society, he would have longed to be first; and he would have longed for it because of everything that marked him out as different from the rest. He longed for all the trappings, titles, ornaments, and show of power. He would love to hear himself called Master; he would love to begin a formal act at a college meeting ‘I, Paul Jago, Master of the college…’ He wanted the grandeur of the Lodge, he wanted to be styled among the heads of houses. He enjoyed the prospect of an entry in the college history — ‘Dr P Jago, 41st Master’. For him, in every word that separated the Master from his fellows, in every ornament of the Lodge, in every act of formal duty, there was a gleam of magic.

There was something else. He had just said to Chrystal ‘we can make it a great college’. Like most ambitious men, he believed that there were things that only he could do. Money did not move him in the slightest; the joys of office moved him a great deal; but there was a quality pure, almost naive, in his ambition. He had dreams of what he could do with his power. These dreams left him sometimes, he became crudely avid for the job, but they returned. With all his fervent imagination, he thought of a college peaceful, harmonious, gifted, creative, throbbing with joy and luminous with grace. In his dreams, he did not altogether know how to attain it. He had nothing of the certainty with which, in humility, accepting their limitations, Chrystal and Brown went about their aims, securing a benefaction from Sir Horace, arranging an extra tutorship, making sure that Luke got a grant for his research. He had nothing of their certainty, nor their humility: he was more extravagant than they, and loved display far more; in his ambition he could be cruder and more predatory; but perhaps he had intimations which they could not begin to hear.

When I arrived in the combination room that evening, Winslow, Nightingale and Francis Getliffe were standing together. They had been talking, but as they saw me at the door there was a hush. Winslow said: ‘Good evening to you. I hear you’ve been holding your adoption meeting, Eliot?’

Nightingale asked: ‘Did you all get the reception you wanted?’

‘It was very pleasant. I’m sorry you weren’t there,’ I said. It was from him, of course, that they had heard the news. There was constraint in the air, and I knew that Francis Getliffe was angry. He had returned from Switzerland that day, deeply sunburned; his strong fine-drawn face — I thought all of a sudden, seeing him stand there unsmiling — became more El Greco-like as the years passed.

‘Aren’t you even going to see your candidate?’ I asked Winslow. ‘Do you prefer to do it all by correspondence?’ Sometimes he liked to be teased, and he knew I was not frightened of him. He gave an indulgent grin.

‘Any candidate I approved of would be fairly succinct on paper,’ he said. ‘Your candidate, if I may say so, would not be so satisfactory in that respect.’

‘We are appointing a Master, you know, not a clerk,’ I said.

‘If the college is misguided enough to elect Dr Jago,’ said Winslow ‘I shall beg to be excused when I sometimes fail to remember the distinction.’

Nightingale gave a smile — as always when he heard a malicious joke. He said: ‘My view is, he will save us from worse. I don’t object to him — unless someone better turns up.’

‘It should not be beyond the wit of men to discover someone better,’ said Winslow. Though he had talked once of ‘going outside’, Brown assumed that he would ‘come round’ to Crawford; but he had not so much as mentioned the name yet.

‘I don’t see this college doing it. It always likes to keep jobs in the family. That being so, I’m not displeased with Jago,’ said Nightingale.

I heard the door open, and Chrystal walked up to shake hands with Francis Getliffe, who had not spoken since I came in.

‘Good evening to you, Dean,’ said Winslow. I said, in deliberate candour: ‘We were just having an argument about Jago. Two for, and two against.’

‘That’s lamentable,’ Chrystal stared at Getliffe. ‘We shall have to banish the Mastership as a topic in the combination room. Otherwise the place won’t be worth living in.’

‘You know what the result of that would be, my dear Dean?’ said Winslow. ‘You would have two or three knots of people, energetically whispering in corners. Not but what,’ he added, ‘we shall certainly come to that before we’re finished.’

‘It’s lamentable,’ said Chrystal, ‘that the college can’t settle its business without getting into a state.’

‘That’s a remarkable thought,’ said Winslow. As Chrystal was replying tartly, the butler announced dinner: on the way in, Francis Getliffe gave me a curt word: ‘I want a talk with you. I’ll come to your rooms after hall.’

We were sitting down after grace when Luke hurried in, followed by Pilbrow, late as he had been so often in his fifty years as a fellow. He rushed in breathlessly, his bald head gleaming as though it had been polished. His eyes were brown and sparkling, his words tumbled over each other as he apologized: he was a man of seventy-four, with the spontaneity, the brilliance, the hopes of a youth.

Chrystal had not been able to avoid Winslow’s side, but he talked diagonally across the table to Francis Getliffe.

‘Have we fixed the date of the next feast, Getliffe?’ he asked.

‘You should have written it down in your pocketbook, my dear Dean,’ said Winslow. Chrystal frowned. Actually, he knew the date perfectly well. He was asking because he had something to follow.

‘February the 12th. A month tomorrow,’ said Francis Getliffe, who had during the previous summer become Steward.

‘I hope you’ll make it a good one,’ said Chrystal. ‘I’m asking you for a special reason. I happen to have a most important guest coming.’

‘Good work,’ said Francis Getliffe mechanically, preoccupied with other thoughts. ‘Who is he?’

‘Sir Horace Timberlake,’ Chrystal announced. He looked round the table, ‘I expect everyone’s heard of him.’

‘I am, of course, very ignorant of these matters,’ said Winslow. ‘But I’ve seen his name occasionally in the financial journals.’

‘He’s one of the most successful men of the day,’ said Chrystal. ‘He controls a major industry. He’s the chairman of Howard and Haslehurst.’

From the other side of the table, Francis Getliffe caught my eye. The name of that company had entered his wife’s life, and I knew the story. In the midst of his annoyance, he gave a grim, intimate smile of recognition.

Nightingale smiled.

‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘he might be called one of these business knights.’

‘He’s none the worse for that,’ retorted Chrystal.

‘Of course he’s none the worse for that,’ Pilbrow burst out from the lower end of the table. ‘I’ve never been much addicted to business-men, but really it’s ridiculous to put on airs because they become genteel. How else do you think anyone ever got a title? Think of the Master’s wife. What else were the Bevills but a set of sharp Elizabethan business men? It would be wonderful to tell her so.’ He exploded into joyful laughter. Then he talked rapidly again, this time to Winslow, several places away at the head of the table. ‘The trouble with your ancestors and mine, Godfrey, isn’t that they made money, but that they didn’t make quite enough. Otherwise we should have found ourselves with titles and coronets. It seems to me a pity whenever I order things in a shop. Or whenever I hear pompous persons talking nonsense about politics. I should have liked to be a red Lord.’