Charles Snow: The Affair

Martin said that he hoped we could convince the others so. As he spoke, we were eating dinner.

“You haven’t got to go out again tonight?” Margaret asked me. “You’ve had a horrible day, you know you have.”

In fact, I was very tired. But I was not too tired to think, with the disrespect of love, that Margaret was not above a bit of rationalisation when she wanted something for herself. Was she really so sure that Howard had got his deserts? Was she really speaking as impartially as her academic relatives would have done? When she wanted to forget it all, stop them wearing me out, and be together?

Martin had already called a meeting. It would be dangerous, he said, not to “tie up” the offer at once. By a quarter to nine we were back in college, sitting in Martin’s rooms, cold that night after the house we had just left.

Francis Getliffe arrived soon after. We had brought our chairs round the table, which stood between the chimney-piece and the windows, the curtains of which were not drawn, so that one could see the cloudy, darkening sky. A standard lamp stood by the table, leaving one end in shadow: Martin switched on a reading-light on a desk nearby. As Francis sat down he said: “Of course, we’ve got to accept it.”

“I don’t know whether there’s going to be any trouble,” said Martin. “But look—” he was speaking to Francis, “you’d better let me run this. You’ve done enough already.”

He said it in a considerate tone. I believed he was speaking out of fairness. Though he had not told me, I still fancied that, when the election came, he intended to vote for Brown: but he knew, no one better, that, in saving Howard, Francis had done himself harm. Martin had, of course, foreseen it on the evening when Francis volunteered to speak out. Martin, with the fairness into which he was disciplining himself as he grew older, was not prepared to let him do more. Certainly Francis seemed to take it so, for he said: “Good work.” It was the most friendly interchange between the two that I had seen.

Skeffington and Tom Orbell came in together, Tom with that air of being attached to balloons by invisible strings, which emanated from him when he had been drinking. He gave us a euphoric good-evening. Then Howard followed, with a nod, but without a word, and sat in the remaining chair, head bent on his chest, eyes glancing to the corner of the room.

“I couldn’t collect any of the others who signed the memorandum,” said Martin. “They’re nearly all away, but this is a quorum. I suppose you all know the terms of the Seniors’ decision?”

“I should think we do,” said Tom ebulliently.

“It seems to me to give you” — Martin was addressing himself down the table to Howard — “everything essential. What do you think?”

“I think,” said Howard, “that it’s pretty mingy.”

“It’s a bad show,” said Skeffington, paying no attention to Howard, almost as though he were invisible. Loftily he bore down on me: “It’s a bad show. I can’t understand how a man like you could let them give us a slap in the face like that.”

“Do you think it’s quite as easy?” I said in temper. It occurred to me that I had not received a word of thanks, certainly not from the Howards. It occurred to me simultaneously that I did not remember seeing a group of people engaged in a cause they all thought good, who did not end in this kind of repartee.

“It ought to be,” said Skeffington.

“You’re not being realistic, Julian,” Martin said.

“If this is being realistic, then I’m all in favour of trying something else,” said Skeffington. “What do you think?” he asked Francis Getliffe.

“I agree with the Eliots,” said Francis.

“Really,” replied Skeffington, with astonishment, with outrage.

It was Francis’ remark, made quietly and without assertion, that sent Tom Orbell over the hairline — the hairline which, when he was drunk, separated the diffuse and woofy benevolence from a suspicion of all mankind. He was not very drunk that night: he had come in exuding amiability and good-will. Of all the young men in the college, he was the most interesting, if one had the patience. He had by a long way the most power of nature; he was built on a more abundant scale. Yet it was hard to see whether that power of nature would bring him through or wreck him. Suddenly as he heard Francis’ remark, he once more saw the lie in life.

“So that’s what you think, is it?” he said, talking down his nose.

“We’ve got no option,” said Francis.

“That’s all right. If you think so.” Tom thrust his great head forward. “But some of us don’t think so. We’ve got the old men on the run, and this is the time to make them behave decently for once. I don’t know what Lewis was doing not to make them behave decently, except” — his suspicions fixed themselves on me — “that’s the way you’ve got on, isn’t it, playing safe with the old men?”

“That’s enough, Tom.” Martin spoke sharply.

“Who says it’s enough? Haven’t you done exactly the same? Isn’t that the whole raison d’être behind this precious bargain? I don’t like the Establishment. But I’m beginning to think the real menace is the Establishment behind the Establishment. That’s what some of you” — he looked with hot eyes at Martin, at Francis, at me — “are specialists in, isn’t it?”

“Can it,” said Skeffington. He was the only man who could control Tom that night. “What I want to know is, how are we going to set about it?”

“Set about what?” asked Martin.

“Getting this decision altered, of course.”

Gradually, as Tom sobered himself, the two of them began to shape a proposition. The time ticked by as we sat round the shadowed table. Only Howard, at the end removed from the rest of us, did not speak at all. The argument was bitter. Martin was speaking on the plane of reason, but even his composure grew frayed. Francis was getting imperative. I heard my own voice sounding harsher. While Skeffington would not budge from his incorruptibility. Somehow absolute and full recompense had to be given, pressed down and running over.

“We’re going to have our pound of flesh,” cried Tom. “We insist on complete reinstatement. Payment in full for the period of deprivation. And the Fellowship to run from this day with the period of deprivation added on. We won’t be fobbed off with less.”

“That’s stretching it,” said Skeffington. “We can’t ask for payment for the deprivation if we get the period tagged on. That’s the decent thing.”

“So that’s what you think,” said Tom, turning on his ally.

“It’s not on, to ask for money too.”

“Very well, then.” Tom lowered at us across the table. “Julian Skeffington’s willing to let you off lightly. I’d disown you first, but I’ll come in. You’ll have to go back to your friends and make them give us what he’s pleased to call the decent thing.”

“You’re seriously suggesting that we go back to the Master straight away?” said Martin.

“What else do you think we’re suggesting?” Tom burst out.

“Look here,” I intervened, “I’ve sat through the whole of these proceedings. I know, and you don’t know, what the feeling is. I tell you that we shouldn’t stand a chance.”

“You want to make it easy for everyone, don’t you?” Tom attacked me again.

“He’s dead right,” said Francis.

“Now we listen to the voice of Science, disinterested and pure, the voice of Intellect at its highest, the voice that we shall always associate with Sir Francis Getliffe,” Tom declaimed.

“Hold it,” said Skeffington. “You say,” he turned to me, angry with Tom as well as with us, stiff-necked, “that if we go back to them we shan’t get any change?”