“The danger about pistols,” said Crawford, “is that sometimes they go off.”
That was as near to a joke as I had heard him make. Tom Orbell gave a suppressed snort, and for an instant Crawford beamed, like a humorist who is appreciated at last. Brown was not beaming, and said: “In a small society, I’ve always felt that it’s a mistake to rush your colleagues as he’s tried to do. Some of us are not all that fond of being threatened.”
“Agreed,” said Crawford.
“If he’d come to see you about his difficulty, Master,” Brown was now turning his full weight on to Crawford, “I might feel differently about it. That would have been the proper thing to do. He ought to have spoken to you before he put a word on paper. Then perhaps we could have smoothed things down in a reasonable fashion. But the way he’s gone about it, it’s making the college into a bear-garden.”
“Again, I agree,” said Crawford. “One would have thought that Getliffe wouldn’t have wished to create unnecessary commotion. I’ll try to have a word with him next Thursday at the Royal Society.”
“Meanwhile,” Brown was continuing to talk, not to the rest of us but to the Master, “I’ve thought about the proper position to adopt, and I think I can say I’ve come down to this. If the college chooses to let itself be rushed, and there’s a majority for asking the Seniors to re-open the case, then by the statutes the Seniors naturally have to do so. That’s all cut and dried. But I don’t see the college losing its head like that. I believe we’re interpreting the wishes of the college if we go on resisting attempts to sweep us off our feet against our better judgment.”
“Are you sure you’re interpreting the wishes of the college?” asked Martin.
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to do too much counting heads,” Martin went on, speaking Brown’s own language, “but there are nine out of nineteen feeling the other way.”
“Is that a firm figure, Martin?” Crawford asked.
“There are nine Fellows willing to vote for re-opening.”
“I confess I should be happier,” said Crawford, “if there were clearer weight of opinion one way or the other.”
“I accept Martin’s figures,” said Brown. Well he might, I thought: those two knew each other’s measure and also the score, ball by ball. “But I’m sure he’d agree with me when I say that the nine he’s referred to don’t include, apart from Getliffe and himself, any of our more influential and senior members.”
“That’s quite true,” said Martin. He was not going to overstate his case.
“Still,” said Crawford, “it would be more satisfactory to all concerned if the numbers were wider spaced.”
Once again Martin and I glanced at each other and saw that we agreed. It was time to stop. Quickly I got in before Brown and said that they might be in for another kind of trouble. I explained that old Gay was asking advice about how to sue the college.
Crawford did not think that that was funny. He went to a cupboard and fetched a copy of the statutes. He showed us that, in order to disqualify Gay from the Court of Seniors, the college would have to pass a formal motion. That had never been done, so far as the college history had been traced. So they — not only the Master, but Brown and Winslow — had visited him, written him letters, assuming that he was withdrawing of his own free will. He had not made much protest, once or twice he had verbally acquiesced: but, with a kind of old man’s cunning, more animal than senile, he had not acquiesced on paper.
I had a feeling that Brown felt the Master had not been resourceful or punctilious enough. When Crawford asked me what the legal position was, I said that they didn’t have much to worry about. I could help them string the old man along for a time. If he went to his solicitors, they wouldn’t let him bring such an action. It was just possible that, if he had enough stamina, he could get into touch with an unscrupulous firm — but I couldn’t imagine a man of ninety-four keeping up a grudge long enough, not even Gay.
“I shan’t believe we’re out of that particular wood until we’ve attended his memorial service in the chapel,” said Arthur Brown. His previous annoyance made him less emollient than he would normally have been. Conscientiously he added, “Not that he hasn’t been a grand old boy in his way.”
17: Contracting Out
A few minutes later, Martin and I were in a taxi on our way to Lester Ince’s house in Bateman Street. Martin was asking: didn’t I think that, when the argument over the case got sharp, Brown had spent all his effort keeping the Master up to scratch? Yes, I said. It wouldn’t take much, probably one conversation with Getliffe, for the Master to decide that the case ought to be re-heard.
That meant the majority was in the bag, said Martin. He went on: “But we don’t want it to come like that, do we? They’ve made a mistake, not offering a re-hearing the minute three or four people wanted it. Just for once, Arthur hasn’t played his hand right. It’s a point to us if we can force this majority on them, so that they’re up against it as soon as they start the case again. We don’t want them to let us have it as a favour.”
On the pavement in Bateman Street we could hear the noise of the party three storeys above. After I rang the bell we could still hear the noise, but no footsteps coming downstairs. It took minutes of ringing before Ince came down to let us in. Out of the hall, lights streamed into the dark and dripping street. “Hallo, Lew,” said Lester Ince. There were two prams in the hall, and the smell, milky and faecal, of small children. As we climbed up the stairs of the old, high, narrow-fronted Victorian house, Martin and I were whispering. “You needn’t bother,” said Ince in his usual voice, “it would take the crack of doom to wake them up.”
Bits of the wall were peeling, a banister leg was loose. The four children were sleeping “dotted about”, said Ince, on the first two floors. He owned the whole of the shabby house, and let off the basement. When we got into the party, it seemed to me — I thought it must have seemed to Martin — like going back to parties we used to know when we were poor young men in the provincial town. Beer bottles on the table: the room, which in earlier days would have been a main bedroom, cleared for dancing: a gramophone in the corner: the floor full of couples. There were just two differences. Ince’s gramophone was a handsome new record-player, and the couples were jiving.
Ince picked up a glass of beer from the table, drank it, grinned all over his robust, pasty face, and said: “I’m not going to miss this.” He crooked his finger at a pretty young woman, and began swinging her round with vigour. His wife winked at him. About the whole party, certainly about Ince, there was a cheerful, connubial, sexy air.
Like his wife, I was thinking, even more than his wife, Ince was a bit of a social fraud. But a fraud in reverse, so to speak. Instead of wanting to be taken for something grander than he was in fact, he seemed to be aiming at the opposite. He was actually a doctor’s son, born in the heart of the middle classes, educated like the quintessence of the professional bourgeoisie, middling prep school, middling public school. He insisted on behaving, talking, and often feeling, as though he had come up from the ranks. Just as with the other kind of social mimic, one listened to his speech. Beneath the curious mixture of what he thought, often not quite accurately, to be lower-class English or happy-go-lucky American, one could hear the background of an accent as impeccably professional as Arthur Brown’s.