Charles Snow - The Masters

‘I was very tactful,’ said Jago. ‘I was despicably tactful, Brown. Do you know that he doubted my word when I said that Eliot here couldn’t take a tutorship if it was offered him? He said he might believe it if he heard it from Eliot himself. I ought to have kicked the man out of my study. Instead of that, I inflicted him on Eliot, so that he could have the satisfaction of hearing it. I am so sorry, Eliot.’

‘You had to do it,’ I said.

‘I call it statesmanlike,’ said Brown.

‘I call it despicable,’ said Jago.

The garden was quiet with winter, the grass shone emerald in the sunlight, the branches of the trees had not yet begun to thicken. In the wash of greens and sepias and browns stood one blaze of gold from a forsythia bush. Roy and Chrystal were standing under a great beech, just where the garden curved away to hide the inner ‘wilderness’.

‘God forgive me,’ said Jago bitterly, as we stepped on to the soft lawn. ‘I’ve never prevaricated so shamefully. The man asked me outright what my intentions were. I replied — yes, I’ll tell you what I replied — I told him that it might put us both in a false position if I gave a definite answer. But I said that none of those I knew best in the college could possibly take a tutorship. That’s where your name came in, Eliot. He insisted on discussing you all one by one.’

‘I hope you let him,’ said Brown.

‘I let him.’

‘I hope you didn’t give him the impression that you’d never offer him the job,’ said Brown.

‘I should be less ashamed,’ said Jago, ‘if I could think I had.’

Jago was angry and anxious. He was angry at what he had been forced to do: anxious that it might not be enough. But, most of all that morning in the sunny garden, he was angry, bitterly angry, at the insult to his pride. He had lowered himself, he had thrown his pride in front of his own eyes and this other man’s, and now, ten minutes later, it had arisen and was dominating him. He was furious at the humiliation which policy imposed: was this where ambition had taken him? was this the result of his passion? was this the degradation which he had to take?

Brown would not have minded. A less proud man would have accepted it as part of the game: knowing it, Jago looked at his supporter’s kind, shrewd, and worldly face, and felt alone. The shame was his alone, the wound was his alone. When he next spoke, he was drawn into himself, he was speaking from a height.

‘I assure you, Brown, I don’t think you need fear a defection,’ he said, with a mixture of anxiety, self-contempt, and scorn. ‘I handled him pretty well. I was as tactful as a man could be.’

After lunch that day Roy Calvert stopped me in the court. His lips twitched in a smile.

‘Everyone was worried whether we should have the feast, weren’t they?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Just so. Well, I heard a minute ago that it wasn’t necessary. Joan and her mother never intended to tell him before the feast. They’d marked down the date weeks ago. They knew the old boy was coming down to unbelt — which he didn’t — and they decided that we mustn’t be disturbed. Isn’t that just like the appalling sense of women?’

I could not help laughing.

‘We’ve been sold,’ said Roy. ‘Not only you and me — but all those sensible blokes. We’ve been absolutely and completely and magnificently sold.’

But, though he was smiling, he was already sad, for he had guessed what was to happen that day. I did not see him again all afternoon and evening. His name was on the dining list for hall, but he did not come. Late at night, he entered my room and told me that he had been with Lady Muriel for hours. She had broken the news to the Master early in the afternoon.

I was distressed not only on their account, but on Roy’s. He was beginning to have the look and manner which came upon him during a wave of depression. And I was not reassured when, instead of telling me anything that had been said in the Lodge, he insisted on going to a party. For, as he and I knew too well, there was a trace of the manic-depressive about his moods. I was more afraid for him in a state of false hilarity than in sadness.

However, he was genial at the party, although he did not speak of the Master until we had returned to college and were standing in sight of the Lodge windows. It was well into the small hours, but one light was still shining.

‘I wonder,’ Roy said, ‘if he can sleep tonight.’

We stood looking at the window. The court was quiet beneath the stars.

Roy said: ‘I’ve never seen such human misery and loneliness as I did today.’

Beside the fire in his sitting-room, he went on telling of the Master and Lady Muriel, and he spoke with the special insight of grief. Theirs had not been a joyous marriage. The Master might have brought happiness to many women, Roy said, but somehow he had never set her free. As for her, there was a terrible story that, when the Master was engaged to her, an aunt of hers said to him: ‘I warn you, she has no tenderness.’ That showed what her facade was like, and yet, Roy had told me and I believed him, it was the opposite of the truth. Perhaps few husbands could have called her tenderness to the surface, and that the Master had never done. She had given him children, they had struggled on for twenty-five years. ‘She’s never had any idea what he’s really like,’ said Roy. ‘Poor dear, she’s always been puzzled by his jokes.’

Yet they had trusted each other; and so, that afternoon, it was her task to tell him that he was going to die. Roy was certain that she had screwed herself up and gone straight to the point. ‘She’s always known that she’s failed him. Now she felt she was failing him worst of all. Because anyone else would have known what to say, and she’s never been able to put one word in front of another.’

Occasionally we had imagined that the Master saw through the deception, but it was not true. The news came as a total shock. He did not reproach her. She could not remember what he said, but it was very little.

‘It’s hard to think without a future.’ That was the only remark she could recall.

But the hardest blow for her was that, in looking towards his death, he seemed to have forgotten her. ‘I was less use than ever,’ Lady Muriel had cried to Roy.

It was that cry which had seared Roy with the spectacle of human egotism and loneliness. They had lived their lives together. She had to tell him this news. She saw him thinking only of his death — and she could not reach him. It did not matter whether she was there or not.

After she had gone out, and Joan had visited him for a few minutes, he had asked to be left to himself.

Roy said: ‘We’re all alone, aren’t we? Each one of us. Quite alone.’

Later, he asked: ‘If she was miserable and lonely today, what was it like to be him? Can anyone imagine what it’s like to know your death is fixed ?’

After his demand on Jago, Nightingale seemed to be satisfied or to have lost interest. Brown’s explanation was that he was enough open to reason to realize that he could go no further; for his own practical ends, it was sensible to stop. Brown did not let us forget Nightingale’s practical ends: ‘He may be unbalanced,’ said Brown, ‘he may be driven by impulses which I am sure you understand better than I do, but somehow he manages to give them a direction. And that concerns me most. He wants some very practical things, and he’s going to be a confounded nuisance.’

That was entirely true. I learned a lot about men in action, I learned something of when to control a psychological imagination, from Arthur Brown. But it was also true that Nightingale was right in the middle of one of those states of anxiety which is like a vacuum in the mind: it fills itself with one worry, such as the tutorship; that is worried round, examined, explored, acted upon, for the time being satisfied: the vacuum is left, and fills immediately with a new worry. In this case it was the March recommendations of the council of the Royal Society: would he get in at last? would his deepest hope come off?