“As I think I’ve told you, I should find it very hard to admit that.”
It was then I thought Jago had come to the end, and so had we all.
Jago switched again.
“I should like to tell you something about myself, Arthur.”
He had spoken intimately. Brown, still on guard, said yes.
“I should like to tell you something about my wife. I’ve never said it to anyone, and I never thought I should.”
“How is she, Paul?” asked Brown. He said it with warmth.
“You never liked her much, did you? No” — Jago was smiling brilliantly — “none of my friends did. It’s too late to pretend now. Oh, I can understand how you feel about her. And I hope you understand that I’ve loved her all my life and that she is the only woman I have ever loved.”
“I think I knew that,” Brown said.
“Then perhaps you’ll know why I detest speaking of her to people who don’t like her,” Jago flashed out, not only with love for his wife, but with intense pride. “Perhaps you’ll know why I detest speaking of her in the way I’ve got to this very moment.”
“Yes, I think I do.” Now Brown was speaking intimately.
“I’ve never spoken to you or anyone else about the last election. I suppose I’ve got to now.”
“It’s better to let it lie,” said Brown.
“No. I suppose everyone still remembers that this man Nightingale sent round a note with a reference to my wife?”
“I hope that’s all long forgotten,” said Brown, as though to him it really was a distant memory, one pushed for good sense’s sake deep down.
“I can’t believe that!” cried Jago.
“People don’t remember these things as you think they do,” said Brown.
“Do you imagine I don’t remember it? Do you think that many days have passed when I haven’t had to remember every intolerable thing that happened to me at that time?”
“It’s no use saying so, but I’ve always wished you wouldn’t dwell on it.”
“It’s no use saying so. Don’t you think my wife remembers everything that happened? Most of all, the note that this man Nightingale sent round?”
Brown nodded.
“If it hadn’t been for what Nightingale did then, she believed then and she still believes things might have gone the other way. So she thinks she ruined me.”
“Looking back,” said Brown, “for any comfort it may be worth, I don’t believe it made a decisive difference—”
“That’s neither here nor there,” said Jago, brilliant, set free. “My wife does. She did so at the time. That is what I have to tell you. Do you know what she did, three months after the election was over?”
“I’m afraid I can guess,” said Brown.
“Yes, she tried to take her life. I found her one night with her bottle of sleeping-pills empty beside her. And a note. You can imagine what the note said.”
“I can.”
After an instant’s pause, Jago glanced straight at Brown and said: “And so I feel entitled to ask you not to rule out the possibility, the bare possibility, that this man Nightingale may have done something else. I admit there’s no connection. So far as I know, he may have been spotless ever since. But still I feel entitled to ask you not to rule the possibility out.”
Brown said: “You’re not making this easy for either of us, are you?”
“Do you think,” cried Jago, “that it’s been easy for me to tell you this?”
Brown did not reply at once. I heard the hiss and tinkle as Jago refilled his glass.
Then suddenly Jago, as though in a flash he had seen Brown’s trouble, made another switch.
“You won’t admit the possibility, not even the possibility, that in any circumstances Howard might be innocent?”
For an instant Brown’s face lightened, as though he welcomed Jago’s question, put that way round.
He said: “Will you repeat what you’ve just asked me?”
When Jago had done so, Brown sat without expression. Then he said, slowly and deliberately: “No, I can’t be as positive as that.”
“Then you do admit the possibility that the man’s innocent?” Jago threw back his head in triumph.
“The bare possibility. I think I shouldn’t be comfortable with myself unless I do.”
I lit a cigarette. I felt the anticlimax of relief.
“Well, what action are you going to take?” Jago pressed him.
“Oh, that’s going much too far. I shan’t even have my own mind clear until tomorrow.”
With friendly roughness Jago went on: “Never mind the formalities. There’s some action you must take.”
“I’ve still not decided what it is.”
“Then it’s pretty near time you did.”
Jago drank some whisky, laughing, exhilarated because he had got home.
“An old dog can’t change his tricks. I’m not as quick as some of you,” said Brown, domesticating the situation. “You mustn’t expect too much. Remember, both of you, I’ve only admitted the bare possibility. I’m not prepared to see other people blackguarded for the sake of that. And that’s as far as I’m able to go tonight. Even that means eating more of my words than I like doing. I don’t mind it with you, Paul, but it isn’t so congenial elsewhere. Still, I’ve got this far. I think I shouldn’t be entirely easy if we didn’t make some accommodation for Howard.”
Brown did not like saying he had been wrong. He liked it less than vainer men: for, genuinely humble as he was, believing without flummery that many men were more gifted, he nevertheless had two sources of pride. One was, as Jago had told him, in his summing-up of people: the other was in what he himself would have called his judgment. He believed that half his colleagues were cleverer than he was, but he didn’t doubt he had more sense. Now, for once, that modest conceit was deflated. And yet he seemed, not only resentful, but relieved. For days, I suspected, maybe for weeks, his stubbornness — which, as he grew older, was becoming something more than tenacity, something more like an obsession — had been fighting both with his realism and his conscience. Brown had had his doubts about the Howard case. Perhaps, as with many characters of exceptional firmness, he had them and did not have them. He didn’t mind, in secret he half-welcomed, the call Jago had made on his affections. For Brown had been able to use it as an excuse. Just as Jago was not above working his charm, his intensity, for his own purposes (was this half-revenge, I had been thinking? had he exaggerated the story he had just told?), so Brown was not above working the strength of his own affections. He was really looking for an excuse inside himself for changing. The habit of stubbornness was becoming too strong for him. He was getting hypnotised by the technique of his nature. He was glad of an excuse to break out. His affection for Jago gave him precisely that. It allowed him, as a visit from me alone almost certainly would not have done, to set his conscience free.
There was another reason, though, not so lofty, why Brown welcomed an excuse to change. His own stubbornness, his own loyalties, had been getting in the way of his political sense. He knew as well as anyone that during the affair he had mismanaged the college. If he “stuck in his heels”, he would go on mismanaging it. In the end, since much of Brown’s power depended on a special kind of trust, it would take his power away.
It had been astonishing to me, throughout the affair, how far stubbornness could take him. He was a supreme political manager. Nevertheless, his instincts had ridden him; they had ridden him right away from political wisdom; for the only time in his career as a college boss, he had not been sensible.
But now at last, triggered by that night, his conscience and his sense of management, which pulled in the same direction, were too strong.