The Masters

by C. P. Snow

  ‘I am dreadfully sorry about Dick,’ he said.

  ‘That’s nice of you.’

  ‘And I am dreadfully sorry you’ve had to sit here today. When one’s unhappy, it’s intolerable to have people talking about one. It’s intolerable to be watched.’

  His tone was full of pain, and Winslow looked up from the table.

  ‘You don’t care what they say,’ Roy cried, ‘but you want them to leave you alone. But none of us are capable of that much decency. I haven’t much use for human beings. Have you, Winslow, have you? You know what people are feeling now, don’t you? They’re feeling that you’ve been taken down a peg or two. They’re remembering the times you’ve snubbed them. They’re saying how arrogant and rude you’ve been. But they don’t matter. None of us matter.’

  His voice was very clear, throbbing with a terrible elation. Winslow stared at him.

  ‘There is something in what they say, young man,’ he said.

  ‘Of course there is. There’s something in most things that they say about anyone.’ Roy laughed.

  I went round the table to stop him. Roy was talking about the slanders on himself. I had him by the shoulder, but he shook me off. He told Winslow there was something in what Nightingale said.

  ‘Would you like to know how much there is in it?’ he cried. ‘We’re both miserable. It may relieve you just a bit.’

  Winslow raised his voice: ‘Don’t trouble yourself, Calvert. It’s no concern of mine.’

  ‘That’s why I shall do it.’ There was a sheet of blank paper in front of Winslow. Roy seized it, and began to write quickly. I took hold of his arm, and jogged his pen. He cursed. ‘Go away, Lewis. I’m giving Winslow a little evidence.’ His face was wild with pure elation. ‘This is only for Winslow and me.’ He wrote more, then signed the page. He gave it to Winslow with a smile.

  ‘This has been a frightful day for you,’ Roy cried. ‘Keep this to remind you that people don’t matter.’

  He said good afternoon, and went out of the room.

  ‘This is distressing,’ said Winslow.

  ‘He’ll calm down soon.’

  ‘I never had any idea that Calvert was capable of making an exhibition of himself. Is this the first time it has happened?’

  I had two tasks. I had to safeguard Roy as much as I could. And I had to think of politics. I told some of the truth, and some lies. I had never seen Roy lose control until this afternoon, I said. It was a shock to me. Roy was upset over the Master: it had worn his nerves to breaking point to see such suffering.

  ‘He’s a considerable scholar, from all they say,’ said Winslow. ‘I had my doubts about him once, but I’ve always found him an engaging young man.’

  ‘There’s nothing whatever to worry about.’

  ‘You know him well,’ said Winslow. ‘I expect you’re right. I think you should persuade him to take a good long holiday.’

  Winslow was studying the sheet of paper. At last he said: ‘So there is something in the stories that have been going round?’

  ‘I don’t know what he has written there,’ I said. ‘I’ve no doubt that the stories are more highly painted than the facts. Remember they’ve been told you by people who envy him.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Winslow. ‘Maybe. If those people have this ammunition, I don’t see how Master Calvert is going to continue in this college. The place will be too hot to hold him.’

  ‘Do you want to see that happen?’

  ‘I’m comparatively indifferent about the young man. He can be amusing, and he’s a scholar, which is more than can be said for several of our colleagues.’ Winslow stared at me. ‘I’m comparatively indifferent, as I say. But I’m not indifferent about the possibility of your candidate becoming Master.’

  ‘You mean,’ I said, ‘that if you let other people see Calvert’s note, you could make a difference to Jago’s chances?’

  ‘I did mean that,’ said Winslow.

  ‘You can’t do it,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You can’t do it. You know some of the reasons that brought Calvert to the state he was in this afternoon. They’re enough to stop you absolutely, by themselves.’

  ‘If you’d bring it to a point–’

  ‘I’ll bring it to a point. We both know that Calvert has lost control of himself. He got into a state pretty near despair. And he wouldn’t have got into that state unless he’d seen that you were unhappy and others were pleased at your expense. Who else had any feeling for you?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other,’ said Winslow.

  Then I asked: ‘Who else had any feeling for your son Dick: You knew that Calvert was upset about him. Who else had any feeling for your son?’

  I was taking advantage of his misery. Winslow looked as though he had no strength left. He stared down at the table, and was silent for a long time. At last, in a flat, exhausted mutter, he said: ‘What shall I do with this?’ He pointed to the sheet of paper.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps you’d better have it.’

  Winslow did not so much as look when I burnt the paper in the grate.

  24: Argument in the Summer Twilight

  I went straight from Winslow to Roy’s room. Roy was lying on his sofa, peaceful and relaxed.

  ‘Have I dished everything?’ he asked.

  He was happy. I had seen the course of his affliction often enough to know it by heart. It was, in fact, curiously mechanical. There was first the phase of darkness, the monotonous depression which might last for weeks or months: then that phase passed into another, where the darkness was lit up by flashes of ‘gaiety’ – gaiety which nearly overcame him at Brown’s party, and which we both dreaded so much. The phase of gaiety never lasted very long, and nearly always broke into one frantic act, such as he had just committed. Then he felt a complete release.

  For months, perhaps for longer, he knew that he was safe. When I first knew him well, in his early twenties, the melancholy had taken hold of him more often. But for two or three years past the calm and beautiful intervals had been winning over the despair. That afternoon he knew that he would be tranquil for months to come.

  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 f
ew 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.

  ‘I resent some of the comments that your side have made about her,’ I said. ‘But I don’t want to talk about that now. There’s something more important. It’s another piece of tactics by one of your side. Did you know that Nightingale has been trying to coerce young Luke?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Francis.

  I gave them the story.

  ‘Is this true?’ cried Francis. ‘Are those the facts?’

  ‘I’ve told you exactly what Luke told me,’ I said. ‘Would you believe him?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Francis, with no warmth towards me, angry with me for intruding this complaint, and yet disturbed by it.

  ‘If you believe him,’ I said, ‘then it’s quite true.’

  ‘It’s nasty,’ Francis broke out. I could only see him dimly in the crepuscular light, but I was sure that his face had flushed and that the vein in his forehead was showing. ‘I don’t like it. These things can’t be allowed to happen. It’s shameful.’ He went on: ‘I needn’t tell you that nothing of this kind will affect Luke’s future. I ought to say that his chances of being kept by the college can’t be very strong, so long as I stay. But that has nothing to do with this shameful business. Luke’s very good. He ought to be kept in Cambridge somehow.’

  ‘He’s a very nice boy,’ said Katherine. She was not three years older, but she spoke like a mature woman of a child.

  ‘By the way, it won’t make the slightest difference to the election,’ I said. ‘Luke may be young, but he’s not the first person one would try to cow. But I wanted to make sure you knew. I wasn’t ready to sit by and see him threatened.’

  ‘I’ll stop it,’ said Francis with angry dignity. ‘I’ll stop it,’ he repeated. Yet his tone to me was not softened, but harder than it had been that night. His whole code of behaviour, his self-respect, his uprightness and sense of justice, made him promise what he had done; and I was certain, as certain as I should be of any man, that he would carry it out. But he did not embrace me for making him do so. I had caused him to feel responsible for a piece of crooked deali
ng; it would not have mattered so much if I had still been an ally, but now it stiffened him against me. ‘You ought to remember,’ he said, ‘that some of your side are none too scrupulous. I’m not convinced that you’ve been too scrupulous yourself. Didn’t you offer Nightingale that you wouldn’t be a candidate for the tutorship, if only he’d vote for Jago? While you know as well as I do that Nightingale stands as much chance of becoming tutor as I do of becoming a bishop.’

  Soon after I thanked them for dinner and walked back into the town through the midsummer night. We had parted without the glow and ease of friendship. Walking back under the stars, at the mercy of the last scents of early summer, I remembered a May week four years before, on just such a night as this. Those two and I had danced in the same party; we had loved our partners, and there had been delight to spare for our friends. Yet, a few minutes past, I had said goodnight to Francis and Katherine with no intimacy at all. Was it only this conflict between us? Or was it a sign of something inevitable, like the passing of time itself? The memory of anyone one had truly loved stayed distinct always and with a special fragrance, quite unaffected by the years. And the memory of one’s deepest friendships had a touch of the same magic. But nothing less was invulnerable to time, or chance, or one’s private trouble. Lesser friendships needed more care than the deepest ones; they needed attention and manners – and there were times, in the midst of private trouble, when those one could not give. Was it my fault that I could not meet Francis and Katherine as I once did?

  25: An Observer’s Smile

  Throughout the long vacation most of the fellows did not go far away. We all knew that, as soon as the Master died, there would be a last series of talks, confidences, negotiations, until the day of the election, and we wanted to be at hand. Only two went out of England. Roy Calvert was giving a course of lectures in Berlin, and had to leave by the end of July; he went in cheerful spirits, promising to fly back at a day’s notice if I sent for him. Pilbrow had departed for the Balkans shortly after Brown’s claret party, and no one had heard a word from him since. He had guaranteed to return in time for the election, but when I last saw him he had no thoughts to spare for college conflicts.