Then I thought I saw what had changed. He had become much fatter, but fatter in a way that did not suggest self-indulgence. As a younger man he had had a paunch, but moved lightly: now he showed that special kind of discouraged heaviness which sometimes seems linked with a life of dissatisfaction or strain.
“Darling,” he turned to his wife with an elaborate mixture of protectiveness, courtesy and love, “I think you remember—” Formally he introduced me. “I think you know him, don’t you?”
Of course she knew me. I must have been inside her house twenty or thirty times. But she dropped her eyes, gave me a limp hand and what appeared to be her idea of a grande dame being gracious to someone who might, in the multitude of her acquaintances, conceivably be one.
“Do you spend much time in Cambridge—?” and she addressed me in full style as though it were a condescension on her part.
“I think he’s kept pretty busy in Whitehall,” said Jago. She knew it perfectly well.
“I wish we could offer you better weather,” said Alice Jago. “Cambridge can look very attractive at this time of year.”
Now she was speaking as if I did not know the town. She too had grown fatter, but she was stronger-boned and muscled than her husband and could carry it better. She was a big woman with a plain, white, anxious face. She had a sensibility so tight-drawn that she could detect a snub if one said good morning in the wrong tone; but it was the kind of sensibility which took it for granted that though her own psychological skin was so thin, everyone else walked about in armour. She was so insecure that the world seemed full of enemies. In fact, she had made many. She had done her husband much harm all through his career. But for her, he might have got the Mastership. They both knew it.
His manner to her, which had always been tender, had become more so. When he spoke, he was trying to make her happy, and even while he listened to her he seemed to be taking care of her.
“How are you?” I asked him.
“I’ve quite retired now, I’m thankful to say.”
“He has to spend all his time with me,” said Mrs Jago.
“We’re reading all the books that we’ve always wanted to read,” said Jago. “I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.”
I asked: “Do you see any of our old friends?”
“Oh, I run into them now and then,” said Jago. He said it as though he wished to drop the subject.
“Don’t you think they miss him?” I let slip the remark to Alice Jago.
“If you think I try to prevent my husband going to the college, then you’re very much mistaken.”
“No,” said Jago, “I was glad when I’d shaken hands with my last pupil. The chains had been chafing for a long time, can you understand that? When I used to go into my study in the morning, for my first tutorial hour, I used to think, I shall only have to do this another thousand times. Then another hundred. Then another ten.”
I had seen many people get through years of routine, and come to their last day. Nearly all of them were sad. I asked, didn’t he feel just a tinge of regret at the end?
“Not for a single instant,” said Jago with a flash of pride. “No, I felt that for a good many years I had been wasting too much of my life. Now I was ceasing to. And I was also ceasing to be reminded of some associations that I should willingly forget.”
He looked at me. He was a man of quick human sympathy and recognised it in others. He knew that I had followed him.
“Mind you,” he went on, “I’d taken care not to be reminded of them more than I could help. It was one thing to go on with my pupils and do my best for them. It was quite another to inflict myself on some of our colleagues. I hadn’t seen some of them for years, apart from college meetings, which I couldn’t cut until I gave up office—”
“And now you needn’t go to any more of them,” cried Alice Jago triumphantly.
“I think I can bear that deprivation, don’t you?” he said to me.
“I suppose, while you were still attending, you heard of this Howard business, didn’t you?”
I hesitated about trying it. Mrs Jago looked blank and resentful, as though the name meant nothing and I was shutting her out.
“I couldn’t very well help hearing, could I? I might have had to waste some time over it, because I was third Senior and was due to serve on the Court. But I thought that that was another deprivation I could bear, and so I begged leave to be excused.”
“I should think you did,” she said.
He seemed quite uninterested in the case. I wanted to find out if Francis Getliffe’s circular had reached him: but apparently he did not open his college documents until days after they arrived.
He asked after my doings. He still couldn’t keep back his interest and looked friendly when I spoke about my wife and son. But he brought out no kind of invitation. He did not suggest that I should see him again.
“Well,” he said, a little over-busily, “we mustn’t take up your time. We must be going ourselves.”
“I hope,” said Alice Jago graciously, “that you enjoy the rest of your visit.” She added, “And good luck in your career,” as though I were one of her husband’s pupils and she was safely projecting me into the future.
Getting back to my rooms after tea, I found a letter on the table. It was addressed in an old man’s hand that I had either forgotten or did not know. When I opened it and looked at the signature, I saw to my astonishment that it was M H L Gay. The handwriting was bold in outline, only a little shaky, and the letter read:
My dear Eliot,
I learn upon good authority that you are residing temporarily in the college. I must ask you most urgently to visit me tonight after my evening meal, which I take at six-thirty upon medical advice, and before eight, which is the time when I nowadays have to suspend my labours for the day. Pray regard this visit as having first priority. The question we have to discuss will brook no delay. You are essential to me because of your legal studies.
I shall await you at seven-fifteen or thereabouts.
Yours ever sincerely,
M H L GAY.
I was irritated even more than astonished. Perhaps it wasn’t so odd that he should, out of the blue, remember who I was: even when he was less senile, his memory had come and gone. Why should he want me? I was irritated, because I had planned to see Arthur Brown in hall and on the side pick up such gossip as was going. I didn’t fancy missing my dinner for the sake of conversation with someone who might not recognise me. Still, there seemed nothing for it. One could not refuse the very old. I had to telephone Brown, saying that instead of that night in hall it would have to be Sunday. I explained why, and Brown, who had guessed the reason for my visit and was at his most impenetrable, nevertheless gave a fat man’s chuckle over the wire. “You’ll find him pretty exigent, old chap. He’ll never let you get away at eight o’clock. If I were you, I should make sure that there are some sandwiches waiting for you in your rooms when you get back.”
The joke seemed even more against me as I walked up the Madingley Road. I had made a mistake in walking at all, because it had begun to rain, a steady seeping rain; the road was dark, Gay’s house was close to the Observatory, and the lights of the Observatory seemed a long way off. The rain was percolating inside the collar of my overcoat: I could feel the damp against my neck, and wet sleeves against my wrists.
In the hall of Gay’s house, the pretty young housekeeper gazed at my clothes. In a foreign accent she asked if I wanted a towel.
From an open door, Gay’s voice resounded: “No, indeed, he doesn’t want a towel! He wants to get down to business! You be sure he does.”