Charles Snow - The Masters

‘Of course,’ he said, following his process of free association, ‘snobbery is the national vice. Much more than other things which foreigners give us credit for.’ He often talked so fast that the words got lost, but phrases out of Havelock Ellis bubbled out — ‘ le vice anglaise ’, I heard.

Pilbrow was delighted with the comparison. When he had quietened down, he said: ‘By the way, I’ve hooked an interesting guest for the feast too, Getliffe.’

‘Yes, Eustace, who is it?’

Pilbrow produced the name of a French writer of great distinction. He was triumphant.

In matters of art, the college’s culture was insular and not well informed. The name meant nothing to most men there. But nevertheless they wanted to give Pilbrow the full flavour of his triumph. All except Chrystal and Nightingale. Chrystal was piqued because this seemed to be stealing Sir Horace’s thunder; Sir Horace had been jeered at by Nightingale that night, and Chrystal was sensitive for his heroes; he also liked solid success, and a French writer, not even one he had heard of, not even a famous one, was flimsy by the side of Sir Horace. He was huffed to notice that I took this Frenchman seriously, and told Pilbrow how much I wanted to meet him.

Nightingale did what seemed impossible, and detested Pilbrow. He was full of envy at Pilbrow’s ease, gaiety, acquaintance with all the cultivated world. He knew nothing of Pilbrow’s artistic friends, but hated them. When Pilbrow announced the French writer’s name, Nightingale just smiled.

The rest of us loved Pilbrow. Even Winslow said: ‘As you know, Eustace, I understand these things very little — but it will be extremely nice to see your genius. I stipulate, however, that I am not expected to converse in any language but my own.’

‘Would you really like him next to you, Godfrey?’

‘If you please. If you please.’

Pilbrow beamed. All of us, even the youngest, called him by his Christian name. He had been a unique figure in the college for very long. He would, as he said, have made a good red Lord. And, though he came from the upper middle classes, was comfortably off without being rich (his father had been the headmaster of a public school), many people in Europe thought of him in just that way. He was eccentric, an amateur, a connoisseur; he spent much of his time abroad, but he was intensely English, he could not have been anything else but English. He belonged to the fine flower of the peaceful nineteenth century. A great war had not shattered his feeling, gentlemanly and unselfconscious, that one went where one wanted and did what one liked.

If nostalgia ever swept over him, he thrust it back. I had never known an old man who talked less of the past. Long ago he had written books on the Latin novelists, and the one on Petronius, where he found a subject which exactly fitted him, was the best of its kind; all his books were written in a beautifully lucid style, oddly unlike his cheerful, incoherent speech. But he did not wish to talk of them. He was far more spirited describing some Central European he had just discovered, who would be a great writer in ten years.

He went round Europe, often losing his head over a gleam of talent. One of his eccentricities was that be refused to dress for dinner in a country under a totalitarian regime, and he took extreme delight in arriving at a party and explaining why. Since he was old, known in most of the salons and academies of Europe, and well connected, he set embassies some intricate problems. He did not make things easier for them by bringing persecuted artists to England, and spending most of his income upon them. He would try to bring over anyone a friend recommended — ‘everything’s got to be done through nepotism’, he said happily. ‘A pretty face may get too good a deal — but a pretty face is better than a committee, if it comes to bed.’

He had never married, but he did not seem lonely. I believed that there were days of depression, but if so he went through them in private. In public he was irrepressible, an enfant terrible of seventy-four. But it was not the exuberant side of him that I most admired; it was not that no one could think of him as old; it was that he, like other people who do good, was at heart as tough as leather, healthily self-centred at the core.

Chrystal came back to the feast.

‘There’s one thing we can’t overlook. I’ve already warned my guest. I don’t know how others feel, but I can’t bring myself to like having a feast here with the Master dying in the Lodge. Still, we’ve got no option. If we cancel it, it gives the show away. But, if they’ve told the Master the truth before the time of the feast, we should have to cancel it. Even at an hour’s notice. I shouldn’t have much patience with anyone who didn’t agree.’

‘I think we should all agree,’ said Winslow. ‘Which is a very surprising and gratifying event, don’t you think so, Dean?’

He spoke with his usual caustic courtesy, and was surprised to find Chrystal suddenly rude. He had not realized, he still did not, that Chrystal had spoken with deep feeling and was shocked by the sarcastic reply. In turn, Winslow became increasingly caustic, and Nightingale joined in.

I noticed young Luke, the observant and discreet, watching this display of conflicts, and missing nothing.

There was no wine that night. Pilbrow left for a party immediately after hall; cultivated Cambridge parties were not complete without him, he had been attending them for over fifty years. Between the rest of us there was too much tension for a comfortable bottle. Winslow gave his ‘Goodnight to you’, and sauntered out, swinging the cap, which, in his formal style, he was the only one of us to bring into the room. I followed, and Francis Getliffe came after me.

He said, the moment we were inside my sitting-room: ‘Look, I’m worried about this talk of Jago.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s bloody foolish. We can’t have him as Master. I don’t know what you can be thinking about.’

We were still standing up. A vein, always visible when he was angry, stood out in the middle of Francis’ forehead. His sunburn made him look well, on the surface; but under the eyes the skin was darkened and pouched by strain. He had been doing two men’s work for months — his own research, on the nature of the ionosphere, and his secret experiments for the Air Ministry. The secret was well kept, neither I nor anyone in the college knew any details until three years later, but he was actually busy with the origins of radar. He was tired, and overloaded with responsibility. His fundamental work had not received the attention that he looked for, and his reputation was not yet as brilliant as we had all prophesied. He was seeing some of his juniors overtake him; it was hard to bear.

Now he was throwing every effort into a new research. It had not yet started smoothly. It was an intolerable nuisance for him to come back to this trouble over the Mastership. He did not want to think about it, he was overtaxed already with the anxieties of air defence and the gnawing doubt that his new thoughts about the propagation of waves would not quite work out. Plunged into the middle of this human struggle he felt nothing but goaded irritation and impatience.

We had been friends since we first met, nearly ten years before — not intimate friends, but between us there was respect and confidence. We were about the same age: he was now thirty-four and I thirty-two. We had much the same views, and a good deal of experience in common. He had brought me to the college when I decided that I did not want to go on competing all out at the Bar. In my three years in the college, we had been allies, trusting each other, automatically on the same side in any question that mattered. This was the first time we had disagreed.