Charles Snow - The Masters

‘I hope,’ said Francis Getliffe, when we were left alone, ‘that Crawford tells him to shut up.’

I could not resist saying satirically: ‘I thought that Crawford was remarkably judicious.’

‘I thought he was pretty good. If he always handles situations as well as that, I shan’t complain,’ said Francis, with irritation.

‘Some people would have gone further.’

‘No responsible person could have gone further, on that evidence,’ said Francis. ‘Damn it, man, she’s an unbalanced woman. Do you expect Crawford to take as absolute fact every word she says?’

‘I think you do,’ I said. He hesitated.

‘It’s more likely true than not,’ he said.

‘You’re finding yourself in curious company,’ I said.

‘There looks like being enough of it to win,’ said Francis.

We could not get on terms of ease. I asked after his work; he replied impatiently that he was held up. I invited him to my rooms, but he made an excuse for going home.

The next morning, December 14th, neither Brown nor Chrystal came into college, and it was from a few minutes’ talk with Winslow in the court that I heard there might be a meeting. ‘Not that any of my way of thinking were much impressed by that remarkable suggestion,’ he said. ‘We’re comparatively satisfied with things as they are. But if it pleases you, it doesn’t hurt us.’

His grin was still sardonic, but more friendly and acquiescent than it used to be. He was on his way to the bursary to clear up his work, so that he could resign as soon as the Master was elected. Nothing, he said with a trace of sadness, would make him stay a day longer.

That afternoon Roy and I were not baulked before we set out for Gay’s. We walked through the backs, going under the mourning sky, under the bare trees; Roy was in the best of spirits. It was with a solemn expression that he rang the bell of Gay’s house, which stood just by the observatory. ‘This is an occasion,’ he whispered.

Gay was sitting in his drawing-room with a paper in his hands.

‘Ah. Splendid,’ he said. ‘You’re come to see my exhibits, I’ll guarantee. I’m glad to see you, Calvert. I’m glad to see you, Nightingale.’

I avoided Roy’s glance.

‘Not Nightingale,’ I said.

‘No. Indeed. Tell me your name, will you?’

‘I’m Eliot.’ It was difficult to conduct this conversation without feeling uncomfortable.

‘I absolutely remember. And what is your subject?’

‘Law.’

‘I congratulate you,’ said Gay with splendid finality.

Although both Roy and I had been to the house several times before, he insisted on our looking round the room and out into the garden. It was all that befitted a middle-class donnish home in Cambridge — the furniture heavier and more old-fashioned than at the Getliffe’s, but nothing except the difference of years to pick it out from theirs. Gay, however, regarded it with singular satisfaction.

‘I always say that I built this house out of my masterpiece. Three thousand pounds I made out of that work, and I put every penny of it into bricks and mortar. Ah, that was a book and a half. I haven’t any patience with these smart alecks who tell us that one can’t get fine scholarship home to the reading public. Why, I shouldn’t have this fine house if they didn’t lap it up. Lap it up, they did, Calvert. What do you think of that?’

‘Wonderful,’ said Roy.

He glanced at us affably and stroked his beard.

‘I will give you young men a piece of advice. Satisfy the scholars first. Show them that you’re better than any of them, that’s the thing to do. But when you’ve become an authority, don’t neglect your public. Why, I should welcome my books being presented by the films. I don’t despise these modern methods. Fine films my sagas would make too. Nothing namby-pamby about them.’

Roy then produced greetings from a letter — I did not know whether it was invented — from one of the linguistic scholars in Berlin. Gay beamed. He seized the chance to tell us again of his honorary degree at Berlin — ‘the great authority on the sagas’.

I made an attempt to get down to business.

‘We very much wanted your advice,’ I said. ‘Now you’ve got this responsibility for presiding over the college till the election—’

‘Ah. Indeed.’

‘We should value your guidance over the Mastership. It’s been on our minds a good deal. Are you satisfied with the way things are shaping?’

‘December the twentieth,’ said Gay resonantly. ‘That’s the great day. Six days from this morning. Splendid. I have everything in hand. I read the statutes each night before I go off to sleep. It’s all in safe hands. You can be sure of that. Now you’ll have been getting impatient to see my exhibits. That’s something more interesting for you.’

We had seen the ‘exhibits’ each time we had gone to the house, but it was impossible not to see them again. Gay’s wife, tiny and birdlike, as old as he but very active, came and wrapped his muffler round his neck and helped him into his great coat. Then he led us at his shuffling pace to the bottom of the garden. All the ‘exhibits’ were connected with his life’s researches on the sagas, and this first one was an enormous relief model of Iceland, at least a hundred feet long — so long, in fact, that on it he was able to make visible each farmstead mentioned in the whole of the saga literature.

‘No towns my saga-men had,’ said Gay proudly. ‘Just healthy farms and the wild seas. They knew what to do with towns. Just burn the houses and put the townsmen to the sword. That was the way to deal with towns.’

He remembered each farm as though he had lived among them as a child. And when we went back into the house, and his wife, coming in almost at the run, had taken off his coat again, he showed us models of Icelandic halls, longships, pictures drawn by himself of what, from the curt descriptions, he imagined the saga heroes to have looked like. His interest was as fervent, as vivid and factual, as it must have been when he was a young man. Some of the sketches had the talent of a portrait painter: there was one of Gudrun that had struck me on my last visit, and another of Skarphedinn, pale, fierce, scornful, teeth projecting, carrying his great axe over his shoulder.

‘Ah. That was a terrible weapon,’ said Gay. ‘That was an axe and a half.’

He loved each detail. And that was, I thought, part of the explanation of his fabulous success. He was not a clever man in the sense that Winslow was, who had done nothing at all. He was simple, exuberantly vain, as pleased with himself as a schoolboy who had just received a prize. But he had enormous zest and gusto, unbounded delight in his work. He had enjoyed every minute of his researches. Somehow all his vitality, mental and physical, had poured into them without constraint or inhibition or self-criticism. He did not trouble himself, he had not the equipment to begin, with the profound whys of existence — but in his line he had a strong simple unresting imagination. And he had the kind of realism which exactly fitted in. He could see the houses of his saga-men, their few bits of furniture, their meagre food and stark struggle for a livelihood: he could see them simply as they were, often as men puzzled, ill-adjusted, frail, trained to a code of almost Japanese courage; and at the same time he could see them as a good deal larger than life. He had thrown every scrap of himself into their existence, and won — and no one could say it was unjust — success on a scale denied to more gifted men.

He talked about each model until a maid brought in a very large tea tray.

‘Ah ha. Tea,’ said Gay, with a diffident but equal enthusiasm. ‘That’s a splendid sight.’