Charles Snow - The Masters

I was tired and weighed down. Sometimes I felt that the burden on me was unfair, that I got the worst of it. I told him that I should not always be there to pick up the pieces.

He was anxious to make amends. Soon he asked: ‘I haven’t dished Jago, have I?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘How did you work it? You’re pretty competent, aren’t you?’

I shook my head.

‘It didn’t need much working,’ I said. ‘Winslow may like to think of himself as stark, but he isn’t.’

‘Just so,’ said Roy.

‘I had to hit below the belt, and it wasn’t pretty,’ I said. ‘He hates Jago. But it isn’t the sort of hate that takes up much of one’s life. All his real emotions go into his son.’

‘Just so,’ said Roy again. ‘I think I’m lucky.’

‘You are.’

‘I couldn’t have borne putting paid to Jago’s chances.’ said Roy. ‘I’ll do what I can to make up for it, old boy. I shall be all right now.’

That evening in hall Roy presented a bottle in order to drink Jago’s health. When he was asked the occasion, so that Luke could enter it in the wine book, Roy smiled and said precisely: ‘In order to atone for nearly doing him a disservice.’

‘My dear Roy,’ cried Jago, ‘you couldn’t possibly do me a disservice. You’ve always been too kind to me. It even makes me forgive you your imitations.’

It was not only at the claret party that Roy mimicked Jago; he could not resist the sound of that muffled, sententious, emphatic voice; most of those round the table that night had heard him, and even Despard-Smith grinned.

As we went out that night, Arthur Brown reflected: ‘You heard the reason Roy Calvert gave for presenting a bottle? Now I wonder exactly what he meant by it. Put it another way: a few years ago, whenever he said anything that wasn’t straightforward, I used to expect one of his queer tricks. But I don’t worry much about him now. He’s become very much more stable. I really believe that he’s settling down.’

I did not disagree. It was better for Brown to speculate amiably, just as fellows in the future, studying the wine book, might wonder what that singular entry could mean.

I told Brown that I was taking action to protect Luke. Francis Getliffe had returned for the meeting that morning, and his wife Katherine had asked me to dinner later in the week, for the first time since our quarrel in January. I intended to use the opportunity: it would be easy to let drop the story of Nightingale’s threat, and it was too good a chance to miss.

When I arrived for dinner at their house in the Chaucer Road they welcomed me as in the old days. As Francis poured out sherry and took his wife a glass, he seemed less fine-drawn than in college. He looked at her with love, and his restlessness, his striving, his strenuous ambition, all died away; his nerves were steadied, he was content to the marrow of his bones. And she was happy through and through, with a happiness more continuous than a man could know.

The children were in bed. She talked of them with delight, with a pretence of not wanting to bore me. As she indulged her need to linger over them, she sat with matronly comfort in her chair; it seemed a far cry from the excited, apprehensive, girl of eighteen whom I met in her father’s house at Bryanston Square nearly ten years before. I had been taken there by her brother Charles, the most intimate friend of my London days: it was the first big house I ever entered.

She talked of the past and her family, as we sat at dinner. Had I seen her brother recently? Then with great gusto, the nostalgia of a happy woman, she recalled days at her father’s country house when Francis and I had both been staying there.

After dinner we moved into the garden at the back of the house. There we sat in the last of the light, as the western sky turned from flaming yellow to a lambent apple-green. The air caressed our faces. And languorous and heavy in the warm night wafted the scent of syringa, which brought back, with a voluptuous pain, the end of other summer terms.

Drowsy in the scented air, I was just going to drop a hint about Luke when, to my astonishment, Katherine got in before me.

‘I have been wanting a word with you, Lewis.’

‘Have you?’

‘You do agree that Francis is right about the Mastership, don’t you? It is essential for us to have a liberal-minded Master, don’t you agree?’

So they had invited me to play the same game. I was curiously saddened, as one is saddened when the gulf of marriage divides one from a friend. Once Katherine had listened to each word that her brother and I spoke, she had been friend and disciple, she saw things with our eyes. Now she was happy with her husband, and everyone else’s words were alien.

‘I think Francis is quite wrong,’ I said.

‘If we get saddled with a reactionary Master,’ said Francis, ‘Lewis will be responsible.’

‘That’s unfair.’

‘Be honest, man,’ said Francis. ‘If you did what we should have expected you to do, Crawford would walk in. Several people would come over with you.’

‘I must say,’ Katherine broke in, ‘it seems rather gross, Lewis. This is important, don’t you admit that it is important? And we’ve got a right to expect you not to desert our side. It’s no use pretending, it does seem pretty monstrous to me.’

I knew they felt that I was being ungrateful. When I was in distress, so that I wanted a refuge to hide in, Francis had set to work to bring me to the college. He had done it with great delicacy, for three years they had felt possessively pleased whenever I dined at their house — and now, at the first major conflict, I betrayed him. I thought how much one expects from those to whom one does a good turn; it takes a long while to learn that, by the laws of human nature, one does not often get it.

‘Look,’ I said to Katherine, ‘your brother Charles has got as much insight as anyone I’ve ever known. When you let yourself go, you’re nearly as good. You know something of Crawford and Jago. Tell me, which is the more remarkable man?’

There was a pause.

‘Jago,’ she said reluctantly. Then she recovered herself, and asked: ‘But do you want a remarkable man as Master, don’t you admit that other things come first?’

‘Good work,’ said Francis. ‘Lewis likes human frailty for its own sake.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I like imagination rather than ordinariness.’

‘I’m afraid at times,’ said Francis stiffly, ‘that you forget about the solid virtues.’

‘If you prefer it,’ I spoke with anger, ‘I like self-torment rather than conceit.’

They were profoundly out of sympathy with me, and I with them. We knew each other well enough to know there was no give on the other side. They became more obdurate in resisting any claim I made for Jago: my tongue got harsher when I replied about Crawford.

‘Anyway,’ said Katherine at last, ‘ she is appalling.’

‘She’s pathetic,’ I said. ‘There’s much humanity in her.’

‘That’s monstrously far-fetched, don’t you admit it?’

‘If you’d watched Jago take care of her, you might understand what I’ve been telling you about him,’ I said.

‘She’d be an intolerable nuisance in the Lodge,’ said Katherine.

‘We’re not electing her,’ I said. ‘We’re electing her husband.’

‘You can’t get out of it as though she didn’t exist,’ said Francis.

For a moment we broke off the argument. Without our having noticed the light go, the garden now lay in deep twilight; the apple-green sky had changed to an illuminated, cerulean blue; the first stars had come out.

It was then that I spoke of Luke — not, as I had planned, in the way of friendly talk, but at the moment when we had got tired of our barbed voices.