Charles Snow - The Masters

Jago was smiling, but his face was so drawn that one forgot the heavy flesh.

‘I’ve been for a walk,’ I said.

‘So have I,’ said Jago. ‘I’ve been trying to think straight.’

We walked together towards the college. After a moment’s silence, Jago broke out: ‘Would it be a nuisance if I begged a cup of tea in your rooms?’

‘Of course not.’

‘I’ve been trying to collect my thoughts,’ he smiled, ‘and it’s not a specially pleasant process. It hurts my wife to see me, very naturally. If I inflict myself on you, you won’t mind too much, will you?’

‘Come for as long as you like,’ I said.

In the first court, Brown’s windows gleamed out of the dusk, but on the other side of the court the Lodge was dark behind drawn blinds.

‘It is very hard to accept that he is dead,’ said Jago.

We went up to my sitting-room, I ordered tea. And then I asked, feeling it kindest to be direct.

‘You must be worrying about the election now?’

‘Intolerably,’ said Jago.

‘You couldn’t help it,’ I said.

‘I should be on better terms with myself if I could.’

‘You wouldn’t be human,’ I said.

‘I haven’t been able to forget it for an instant this afternoon. I went out to clear my head. I couldn’t put it aside for an instant, Eliot. So I’ve been trying to think it out.’

‘What have you been trying to think out?’

‘How much it means to me.’

He burst out: ‘And I’m quite lost, Eliot, I don’t know where I am.’ He looked at me in a manner naive, piercing, and confiding. ‘I can tell you what I shouldn’t like to tell Chrystal and good old Arthur Brown. There are times when it seems absolutely meaningless. I’m disgusted with myself for getting so excited about something that doesn’t matter in the slightest. There are times when I’d give anything to run away from it altogether.’

‘And those times are when—’

Jago smiled painfully: ‘When it seems quite certain I shall get it,’ he said. ‘Often I feel quite certain. Sometimes I think it will be taken from me at the last. Whenever I think that,’ he added, ‘I want it more than anything in the world. You see, I’ve no use for myself at all.’

‘I should be the same,’ I said.

‘Should you? Do you really know what it is to have no use for yourself?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said.

‘You seem more sensible than I am,’ said Jago. ‘Perhaps you wouldn’t want so badly to run away from it altogether.’

‘Perhaps not,’ I said.

‘Chrystal ought to be standing himself. He would have enjoyed it,’ said Jago with a tired and contemptuous shrug.

I was thinking: it was the core of diffidence and pride flaming out again. He would have liked, even now, to escape from the contest. He told himself ‘it did not matter in the slightest’. He assured himself of that, because he could not bear to fail. Then again he revolted from the humiliations he had consented to, in order to gain an end that was beneath him. He had been civil to Nightingale, for months he had submitted himself to Chrystal’s lead. He had just revealed something I had already guessed, something I believed that had worried Arthur Brown all along. Jago had always been far away from Chrystal. In the course of nature, as Chrystal ran the campaign, Jago liked him less. He came to think that Chrystal was a soulless power-crazed businessman, and it irked him to bow: his temper over the candidates’ vote had been an outburst of defiance. Yet even that night he had been forced to retract, he could not bear to ruin his chances, he needed this place more even than he needed his pride.

‘We must get it for you,’ I said, with a feeling I had never had for him before.

There was a pause. Jago said: ‘I think I want it more than anything in the world.’

‘It’s strange,’ he added in a moment. ‘It’s extremely strange. When I was a young man, Eliot, I was ambitious. I wanted everything that a man can want. I wanted honour, riches and the love of women. Yes, I was ambitious. I’ve suffered through it. And now this is what I have come to want. It can’t be long now—’

He passed on to talk, with a curious content, of some appointments he would make as Master. He was enjoying in advance the pleasure of patronage: in his imagination the future was golden: for he pictured the college in years to come looking back upon his reign — ‘the greatest of our Masters’. Then that vision left him. He glanced at me almost fiercely and said: ‘You’ll be surprised how splendid my wife will turn out in the Lodge. She always rises to the occasion. I couldn’t bear to lose it now, on her account. She’s looking forward to it so much.’

I felt he wanted to say more about her, but he could not manage it. It had been a relief to talk of his ambition; perhaps it would have been a greater relief to let someone see into his marriage. But it was impossible. Certainly with me, a friendly acquaintance, a supporter, a much younger man. I believed that it would have been impossible with anyone. I believed he had never laid bare his heart about her. He had many friendly acquaintances, but, despite his warmth and candour, he seemed to have no intimate friends. I had the impression that he had not spoken even of his ambition so nakedly before.

Over tea, though he could not confide about his own marriage, he talked of one that would never happen. He had seen that Joan Royce longed to marry Roy. Jago switched from that one challenging remark about his wife to talk of them. Perhaps the switch showed what he was feeling in the depth of his heart. She ought to have been right for Roy, said Jago. Jago had once hoped that she would be. But she simply was not. And so it would be madness for Roy to marry her. No one outside can tell who is right for one. There are no rules. One knows it without help. Sometimes the rest of the world thinks one is wrong, but they cannot know.

Then his thoughts came back to himself. December 20th.

‘It can’t be long now,’ he said.

‘Thirteen days.’

‘Each day is a long time,’ said Jago.

Next afternoon, the bell tolled and the chapel filled up for the funeral. Lady Muriel and Joan sat in the front rows with their backs like pokers, not a tear on their faces, true to their Spartan training: they would not show a sign of grief in public and it was only with Roy that they broke down. All the fellows attended but Pilbrow, from whom there was still no news; even Winslow came into the chapel, for the first time since Royce’s election. Many of the heads of other colleges were there, all the seven professors of divinity, most of the orientalists and theologians in the university; and also a few men who went by habit from college to college for each funeral.

The wind had dropped, but the skies were low outside and a steady rain fell all day. Every light in the chapel was burning, and as they entered people blinked their eyes after the sombre daylight. The flowers on the coffin smelt sweet and sickly. There was a heavy quiet even when the chapel was packed.

Despard-Smith recited the service, and Gay, less dispirited than anyone there, chanted his responses with lusty vigour. ‘Lord, have mercy upon us,’ cried Despard-Smith: and I could distinguish Roy Calvert’s voice, light, reedy, and abnormally clear, as he said Amen.

Despard-Smith put into the service an eulogy of Royce. On the night the news of the death came to the combination room, Despard-Smith had spoken simply and without thinking: ‘he was a very human man’. But by now he had had time to think, and he pronounced the same praise as he had done so often. ‘Our first thoughts must go to his family in their affliction… Greater as their loss must be, we his colleagues know ours to be so catastrophic that only our faith can give us hope of building up this society again. We chiefly mourn this day, not the Master whom we all venerated, not the leader in scholarship who devoted all his life to searching for truth, but the kind and faithful friend. Many of us have had the blessing of his friendship for a lifetime. We know that no one ever turned to him for help in vain; no one ever found him to hold malice in his heart or any kind of uncharitableness; no one even believed he was capable of entertaining an unkind thought, or heard him utter an unkind word.’