Charles Snow - The Affair

NEXT day, when Martin came to my rooms to take me to lunch, neither of us had any more news. In hall, where half a dozen Fellows were already sitting, no one spoke a word about the case, though there were some there, such as Nightingale and Tom Orbell, who must have known each move that had been made. Apart from an old man, a deaf clergyman from a village outside the town, who had come in to lunch each day since before my time, the rest of them had been lecturing or working in the laboratories. Lester Ince announced that he had been talking to a class about Beowulf. “What have you been telling them?” asked Tom Orbell.

“That he was a God-awful bore,” said Ince.

Below the high table, relays of undergraduates came in and out. The doors flapped, the servants slapped down plates. It was a brisk, perfunctory meal, the noise level in the hall very high: afterwards only four of us, Martin and I, Nightingale and Orbell, went into the combination room for coffee.

After the cosiness of the room at night, it looked bleak, with no fire to draw the eye, no glasses on the table to reflect the light. Through the windows one could see the head and shoulders of a young man running round the court; but the room seemed darker than at night, the beams of the ceiling nearer to one’s head.

The four of us sat round the gaping fireplace, with the coffee jug on a low table close by.

“Shall I be mother?” said Nightingale, as though he were in the mess, putting on a cockney accent. As he poured out, he seemed in high spirits, quite unresentful of my presence, less worried by the situation than either Crawford or Brown had been the night before. He was not exactly indifferent to it, but full of a suppressed, almost mischievous satisfaction. He behaved like a man with inside knowledge, concealed from us, which if it were disclosed would make us recognise that we did not stand a chance.

He was talking about his plans for a new building. He had an ambition, perhaps the last ambition he had left, to leave his mark upon the college. He wanted to put up a building with another eighty sets of rooms.

“If we’re going to do it, we’ve got to do it properly,” said Nightingale, “I intend to do the young gentlemen well.”

Of course, he said, in the minatory tone of someone talking about past waste of money, if the college had built in the ’30s it would have cost only seventy thousand. “That’s what we ought to have done in your time, Eliot.” As it was, the building he was determined on would “run us in” for a quarter of a million. “But the college has got to pay for its mistakes,” said Nightingale. “I won’t have bed-sitters. I mean to put up a building that we shall be proud of when we’re all dead and gone.”

He explained his scheme for choosing an architect. He intended to select two “orthodox” men and two “modernists”, and ask them to submit plans. “Then it will be up to the college!” said Nightingale triumphantly.

“Do you know, Bursar,” I said, “I’m prepared to have a modest bet in bottles that I’ve just the faintest sneaking suspicion which the college in its taste and wisdom will prefer?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that, Eliot. I don’t know about that.”

Brisk and busy, Nightingale stood up, said that he had a Bursar’s meeting at two-thirty, and must spend half an hour in his rooms briefing himself beforehand. He glanced at Tom Orbell. Nightingale was a little chary of leaving him with Martin and me.

“Coming, Orbell?” he said affably.

“Not just yet, Bursar. Will you excuse me?” said Tom in his most honeyed tone. “As a matter of fact, I’ve got a letter I ought to send off. Is that all right?”

I was puzzled that he was willing to face us. I was even more puzzled when, after we had heard Nightingale’s steps down the passage, Tom said: “Well, now, how is the Affair going?”

“From whose point of view?” Martin was on his guard.

“It came over me, when we were here last night, that it is pure Dreyfus, you know. At least, there really is something similar between Dreyfus and poor old Howard. And Julian Skeffington would make a reasonably good Picquart, at a pinch. I can’t cast you, Martin, you don’t seem to fit in. And one’s got to stretch a point to cast the others, I suppose. But still, hasn’t it ever struck you, either of you, that it is a bit like ‘ l’Affaire ’?”

Tom Orbell was flushed, excited, apparently with the sheer beauty of the historical analogy. Martin shook his head.

“No, it hadn’t,” he said. “Actually, things are going none too badly—”

“I’m very glad. I mean that, very sincerely.”

“How do you cast yourself?” I said.

“No, that isn’t so easy either.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” I was saying, when Tom gave me what seemed a defiant stare, and said: “You haven’t got your majority yet, have you?”

“Not yet,” said Martin, “but we shall.”

“How are you going to do it?”

Tom knew too much of the detail for Martin to bluff.

“If the worst comes to the worst, the Master will have to make it up. Just to give us a hearing—”

“That’s exactly the kind of thing he would do,” Tom burst out. He rushed on: “Yes, that’s what he was chewing over last night, God rot those awful old men and their beastly, puritanical, unbelieving, Godless, so-called liberal souls. Well, I can save him the trouble, or alternatively we can stop him having the satisfaction. I’ll come in with you, by God I will!”

“You’re sure?”

“I mean it.”

“Do you need some time to change your mind?” said Martin deliberately.

“By God, I’ve got to come in with you. I can’t stand awful old men. When I heard Crawford talking about ‘troublemakers’, that was the last straw. Troublemakers! What else in the name of heaven and earth do they expect honourable men to be? Have they forgotten what it was like to think about one’s honour? God knows I don’t like Howard; but was one word said last night, was one word even thought, about the man himself? It was so de-humanised it made my blood boil. Have they forgotten what it’s like to be human?”

“This business apart,” I said, “Arthur Brown is a very human man.”

“I’m very glad to hear you say that,” said Tom, “because it’s only on this business that I’ve changed sides, remember. Mind you, I don’t agree with either of you on many things. We think differently. Nothing’s going to persuade me that Getliffe ought to be the next Master of this college. What I’m saying now isn’t going to affect what I do this autumn. I’m not going along with you about him — that is, presuming you want him?”

Martin did not reply, and Tom stormed on: “I’d sooner have Arthur Brown a hundred times. Even though some of your friends say he’s a stick-in-the-mud. But as for the rest of the old guard, I just can’t sit down under them. Troublemakers. Judgment. Keeping us in our places till we’re fifty! I can’t abide it, and I won’t. It’s about time someone spoke up for honour. By God, this is the time to do it!”

With a smile both forced and curiously sweet he said: “Anyway, it’ll be nice being on the same side as you two again. We’re all in the same lobby this time, aren’t we?”

We had known, for minutes past, almost from his first question, that he was changing sides. But his tone was not what one might have expected. He kept some of his desire to please; he was trying to sound warm, to feel what most of us feel when we are giving our support. He did not manage it. He had thrown away his prudence, his addiction to keeping in with the top; but he had not done it out of affection for us. Nor out of devotion to Hanna. Nor out of the honour that he was protesting about. Instead he seemed to be acting partly from direct feeling for a victim, partly from frustrated anger. One felt, under the good-living, self-indulgent, amiable surface, how violent he was to himself. He was a man who couldn’t take authority just as it was; he surrounded it with an aura, he longed for it and loathed it. He couldn’t listen to the Master as though he were just a brother human being speaking. In fact, he listened wrong. The phrase which had inflamed him — “troublemakers!” — he attributed to the Master, but it had actually been spoken by Arthur Brown.