Charles Snow - The Masters

Its shape was changed partly because another table, almost as long as the main one, was brought in specially for these occasions. This table was covered with a most substantial tea — great silver teapots and jugs, shining under the windows, plates of bread and butter, white, brown, wholemeal, bread with currants in it, bread with raisins in it, gigantic college cakes, black with fruit and already sliced, tarts, pastries, toasted teacakes under massive silver covers. It was for this tea that the bell pealed half an hour before the meeting; and it was for this tea that we came punctually when we heard the bell.

Old Gay was already there. He seemed to have been there a considerable time. The rest of us stood round the table, holding our cups, munching a teacake, reaching out for a tart; but Gay had drawn up a chair against the table, and was making a hearty meal.

‘Ah. How are you getting on, Chrystal?’ he said, looking up for a moment from his plate. ‘Have you had one of these lemon curd tarts?’

‘I have,’ said Chrystal.

‘I congratulate you,’ said Gay promptly.

In a moment he looked up again.

‘Ah, I’m glad to see you, Calvert. I thought you’d left us. Have you had any of this excellent stickjaw cake?’

‘I was wondering whether it was too heavy for me,’ said Roy Calvert.

‘I must congratulate the Steward. Winslow, I congratulate you on the remarkably fine tea you’ve given us.’

‘My dear Professor,’ said Winslow, ‘I was a most uninspired Steward: and I gave up being so five-and-twenty years ago.’

‘Then congratulate the new Steward for me,’ said Gay, quite unabashed, picking out a chocolate eclair. ‘Tell him from me that he’s doing splendid work.’

We stood round, occupied with tea. Everyone was in the room except Crawford; snatches of conversation kept reaching me and fading away. Chrystal and Brown had a quiet word, and then Chrystal moved to the side of the Master’s Deputy, Despard-Smith, who was listening with a solemn, puzzled expression to Roy Calvert. Chrystal plucked the sleeve of his gown, and they backed into the window: I heard a few words in Chrystal’s brisk whisper — ‘Master…announce the position…most inadvisable to discuss it…dangerous…some of us would think it improper.’ As in all the whispered colloquies before meetings, the s’s hissed across the room.

The half hour struck. Despard-Smith said, in his solemn voice — ‘It is more than time we started,’ and we took our places in order of seniority, one to the right, and one to the left of the chair. Round the table clockwise from Despard-Smith’s left hand, the order became — Pilbrow, Crawford (whose place was still empty), Brown, Nightingale, myself, Luke, Calvert, Getliffe, Chrystal, Jago, Winslow, Gay.

There was one feature of this curious system of seating: it happened at that time to bring side by side the bitterest antipathies in the college, Jago and Winslow, Crawford and Brown, Nightingale and myself.

Despard-Smith looked round the table for silence. His face looked grey, lined, mournful above his clerical collar, grey above his black coat. He was seventy, and the only fellow then in orders, but he had never held a living; in fact, he had lived continuously in college since he entered it as a freshman fifty-one years before. He had been second wrangler in the days of the old mathematical tripos, and had been elected immediately after, as was often the practice then. He did no more mathematics, but became bursar at thirty and did not leave go of the office until he was over sixty. He was a narrow, competent man who had saved money for the college like a French peasant, and at any attempts to spend, predicted the gravest catastrophe. He had the knack of investing any cliché with solemn weight. At seventy he still kept a curious brittle, stiff authority. He prided himself on his sense of humour: and, since he was also solemn and self-assured, he accordingly became liable to some of Roy Calvert’s more eccentric enquiries.

It lay in the Master’s power to name his own deputy: and Despard-Smith had been appointed by the Master under seal in December, at the beginning of his illness — probably because the Master, like all the older fellows, could not struggle free from the long years in which Despard-Smith as bursar had held the college down.

‘I shall now ask for the minutes,’ he said. He stuttered on the ‘m’: he sometimes stuttered slightly on the operative word: it added to his gravity and weight.

Everyone there was anxious to come to the question of the Mastership. Some were more than anxious: but we could not do it. Custom ordained a rigid order of business, first college livings and then finance. The custom was unbreakable. And so we settled down to a desultory discussion about who should be offered a country living worth £325 a year. It carried with it a rectory with fourteen bedrooms. In the eighteenth century it had been worth exactly the same figure, and then it had been a prize for which the fellows struggled. Now it was going to be hard to fill. Despard-Smith considered that a contemporary of his might listen to the call; Roy Calvert wanted it for a young Anglo-Catholic friend.

The college was inclined to think that Despard-Smith’s contemporary might be a trifle old. As for Roy’s nominee, he never stood a chance, though Roy pressed him obstinately. Roy never got the ear of a college meeting. He became too ingenious and elaborate; tête-à-tête with any of these men, he was perceptive, but when they were gathered together he became strangely maladroit. But Arthur Brown himself could not have manoeuvred a job for an Anglo-Catholic. At the bare mention, Jago, who was in fact an eloquent agnostic, invariably remembered that he had been brought up an Irish protestant. And all the other unbelievers would follow him in a stampede and become obdurate low churchmen.

So it happened that afternoon. The college would not take either of the names.

At that point, Crawford came in, and slipped quietly but noticeably into his place. He moved sleekly, like a powerful man who has put on weight.

‘My apologies, Mr Deputy,’ he said. ‘As I informed you, I had to put in an appearance at the faculty board.’

Despard-Smith gloomily, competently, recapitulated the arguments: it appeared to be ‘the sense of the meeting’ that neither of these men should be offered the living, and the question would have to be deferred until next meeting: it was, of course, deplorable: had Dr Crawford any advice to give?

‘No, Mr Deputy, I have no observations to make,’ said Crawford. He had a full, smooth voice, and a slight Scottish accent. He assumed that he would be listened to, and he had the trick of catching the attention without an effort. His expression stayed impassive: his features were small in a smooth, round face, and his eyes were round and unblinking. His hair was smoothed down, cut very short over the ears; he had lost none of it, and it was still a glossy black, though he was fifty-six. As he spoke to the Deputy, he wore an impersonal smile.

The financial business did not take long. The college was selling one of its antique copyholds at twenty years’ purchase; the college owned property in all the conceivable fashions of five hundred years; some early gifts had, by their legal form, kept their original money value and so were now more trouble than they were worth. When it came to property, the college showed a complete lack of antiquarian sentimentality.

‘If that is all,’ said Despard-Smith with solemn irritation, ‘perhaps we can get on. We have not yet dealt with our most serious piece of business. I cannot exaggerate the catastrophic consequences of what I have to say.’

He stared severely round from right to left. Luke, for one moment free from scribbling notes for minutes, had been whispering to Roy Calvert. He blushed down to his neck: he, and the whole room, became silent.