Charles Snow - The Masters

At last he went. The door closed behind him, and Jago turned to Arthur Brown with a ravaged look. ‘Well?’

‘Well,’ said Brown comfortably, ‘if the election had been this afternoon, you would have got in nicely.’

‘Did everyone here—’

‘Everyone you’ve seen said that, as things stood at present, they were ready to vote for you.’

‘That’s wonderful.’ Jago’s face lit up the room. ‘That’s wonderful.’

His smile was still radiant, but became gentler as he added: ‘I’m touched to think of dear old Eustace Pilbrow throwing away his prejudices and being ready to support me. I don’t suppose we’ve agreed on a single public issue since I became a fellow. We’ve disagreed on everything two men could disagree on. Yet he is willing to do this for me.’

‘You ought to be touched about young Luke,’ said Brown. ‘He’s the most enthusiastic supporter you’ve got. And he’s acting against his own interests.’

‘Ah, I think I’m better with young men than with people my own age.’ He added with a flash of extraordinary directness and simplicity: ‘I don’t have to show off to them, you see.’ Roy caught my eye. His smile was sharp.

Then Brown spoke: ‘I don’t want to be a skeleton at the feast, because I’ve been feeling very gratified myself, but I think it would be remiss not to remind you that the thing’s still open.’ Brown settled himself to give a caution. ‘You oughtn’t to let yourself think that we’re completely home. If the election had come off today, as I told you, you would be Master. But you realize that these people can’t give a formal pledge, and one or two actually made qualifications. I don’t think they were important qualifications, but you mustn’t think it’s absolutely cut-and-dried. The picture might just conceivably alter — I don’t think it’s at all likely, but it might — before things happen to the present Master as they must.’

‘But you’re satisfied?’ said Jago. ‘Are you satisfied? Will you tell me that?’

Brown paused, and said deliberately: ‘Assuming that the college was bound to be rather split, I consider things couldn’t look much healthier than they do today.’

‘That’s quite good enough for me.’ Jago sighed in peace, and stretched his arms like a man yawning. He smiled at the three of us. ‘I’m very grateful. I needn’t tell my friends that, I think.’

He left us, and we stood up and walked towards the window. It was a clear winter evening, the sky still bright in the west. The lamps of the court were already lit, but they seemed dim in that lucid twilight. The light in the Master’s bedroom was already shining.

‘I hope I didn’t say too much,’ said Brown to Roy Calvert and me. ‘I think it’s all right. But I’m not prepared to cheer until I hear the votes in the chapel. Some of us know,’ he said to me, with his wise, inquisitive smile, ‘that you’ve got astonishing judgement of men. But, if you’ll believe anyone like me, there are things you can only learn through having actually been through them. I’ve seen elections look more certain than this one does today, and then come unstuck.’

I was beginning to watch Jago walk slowly round the court.

‘You see,’ said Brown, ‘we haven’t much weight in our party. Pilbrow doesn’t count for very much, and you’re too young, Roy, and Eliot hasn’t been here long enough. I suppose Chrystal and I are all right, but we could do with a bit more solid weight. Put it another way: suppose another candidate crops up. Someone who was acceptable to the influential people on the other side. I think it’s just imaginable that Chrystal would feel we hadn’t enough weight to stand out against that. He might feel obliged to transfer. You noticed that he covered himself in case that might happen. I don’t say it’s likely, but it’s just as well to keep an eye open for the worst.’

Jago was walking very slowly round the court, past the door of the Lodge, past the combination room window, past the hall, back under Brown’s window. He walked slowly, luxuriously, with no sign of his usual active, jerky step. He began to walk round again, and as he turned we saw his face. It was brilliant with joy. He looked at the grass as though he were feeling: ‘ my grass’. He trod on the path, and then strayed, for the love of it, on the cobbles; ‘my path, my cobbles’. He stood for a long moment in the middle of the court, and gazed round him in exaltation: ‘my college’.

He glanced at the lighted window in the Lodge, and quickly turned his head away.

‘He looks happy, doesn’t he?’ said Arthur Brown, in a steady, affectionate, protective tone. ‘He takes everything so much to heart. I only hope we manage to get him in.’

The light in the Master’s bedroom shone over the court each night; the weeks passed, and we still had to pay our visits, talking of next year’s fellowships and how soon it would be before he could come into hall. Chrystal could not bear it, and made some ill-tempered excuse for not going into the Lodge. Hearing the excuse and taking it at its face value, Lady Muriel was contemptuous: ‘I always knew he was common,’ Roy Calvert reported her as saying.

Roy had become Lady Muriel’s mainstay. He was the only man from whom she would ask for help. It fell to him to spend hours at the Master’s bedside, keeping up the deception — and afterwards to sit with Lady Muriel in the great drawing-room, listening to doubts and sorrows that she could never manage to articulate.

Roy loved them both, and did it for love, but he was being worn down. For any of us, this service would have been nerve-racking; for Roy, with melancholia never far away, it was dangerous. But it was he who had to watch the Master’s astonishment, as, after weeks of pseudo-recovery, he found himself getting thinner and more exhausted.

We all knew that soon Lady Muriel would have to tell him the truth. Many of us wanted her to do it, just to be saved the pretence at the bedside. Men as kind as Brown and Pilbrow could not help thinking of themselves, and wanted to be saved embarrassment even at the cost of agony for the Master and his wife. Theirs was the healthy selfishness which one needs for self-protection in the face of death. If one sees another’s death with clear eyes, one suffers as Roy Calvert was suffering. Most of us see it through a veil of our own concerns: even Brown wanted Lady Muriel to tell the Master, so that Brown himself need no longer screw up his self-control before he went into the Lodge. Even Brown wanted her to tell him — but not before the feast, with everything arranged to receive Sir Horace Timberlake. As Brown said, with his usual lack of humbug: ‘It can’t make things worse for the Master if we have the feast. And we may not find another chance of getting Sir Horace down. So I do hope Lady Muriel doesn’t have to break the news till afterwards.’

As the day of the feast came near, that hope became strong all over the college. Some of us were ashamed of it; one’s petty selfishnesses are sometimes harder to face than major sins. Yet we did not want to have to cancel the feast. As though by common consent, although we did not discuss it, not a hint was dropped in the Lodge. They were not likely to have remembered the date, or to have heard of Sir Horace’s visit. We were too much ashamed to mention it. Lady Muriel must be left, we thought, to choose her own time.

The feast was fixed for Shrove Tuesday, and on the Sunday before I met Joan Royce in the court, both of us on our way to the Jagos for tea. She made a pretext for bringing in Roy’s name with the first words she spoke: and I thought how we had all done the same, in love.