Joan was smiling lovingly. For he had entered into it out of good nature, but she knew that he was irritated. He chose to do things expertly, or not at all.
At last Lady Muriel said: “Do you like playing bridge, Roy?” He smiled.
“I like playing with you, Lady Mu.”
She was just ready to deal, but held the pack in her hand.
“Do you like the game?”
“Of course I do.”
“Do you really like the game, Roy?” Her tone was not her usual firm one, but insistent. Roy looked at her, and gave her an affectionate smile.
“No, not very much, Lady Mu,” he said.
“It’s good of you to give up your evening,” she said. She added, in a low, almost inaudible murmur: “I wonder if the Master ever liked the game. I don’t remember asking him. I’m afraid he may have felt the same as you.”
She still did not deal. Suddenly we saw the reason. A tear rolled down her face.
She had been subjugated by the Master’s disinterested kindness. She felt ashamed, she tried to imagine now things which had not troubled her for thirty years. It was almost incredible, as Roy said to me late that night in the garden, that she could have played with him night after night and never have known if he enjoyed the game. She was broken down by his heightened understanding, as he came near to death. Her imagination was quickened; she wanted to make up for all her obtuseness had cost him; she could not rest with her old content, formidable and foursquare inside herself. She felt unworthy. If his illness had made him more selfish, had worn her out with trouble, she would have undergone less pain.
I was asked myself to call on the Master towards the end of August. Roy had been obliged to return to Berlin in order to give a course of lectures, and it was Joan who gave me the message. She had heard from Roy the day before, and could not help telling me so. “He doesn’t keep me waiting for letters,” she said, happily and humbly. “I never expected he’d write so often.” She longed to confess how much she loved him, she longed to throw away her self-respect.
By this time the Master did not often leave his bed, and I looked at him as he lay there. His face had become that of a very old man; it was difficult to remember him in the days when he seemed so well-preserved. The skin was dried up, waxy-yellow, lined and pouched. His eyes had sunk deeply in their orbits, and the lids were very dark. Yet he managed to keep his voice enough like its former self not to upset those who listened to him.
He spoke to me with the same kind, detached curiosity that had become his habit. He asked after my affairs as though nothing else interested him. Suddenly he saw that he was distressing me.
“Tell me, Eliot,” he said gently, “would it embarrass you less if I talk of what it’s like to be in this condition?”
“Much less,” I said.
“I believe you mean that,” he said. “You’re a strange man.”
“Well,” he went on, “stop me if I ramble. I’ve got something I particularly want to say to you, before you go. I can think quite clearly. Sometimes I fancy I think more clearly than I ever did in my life. But then the ideas start running away with me, and I get tired. Remember, this disease is something like being slowly starved.”
He was choosing the tone which would distress me least. He went on to discuss the election of his successor; he asked about the parties and intrigues, and talked with his old sarcastic humour, with extraordinary detachment, as though he were an observer from another world — watching the human scene with irony, and the kind of pity which hides on the other side of cynicism. He made one or two good jokes. Then he asked whether the college had expected to get the election over before now. I said yes. He smiled.
“It can’t be long,” he said quietly. “There are days even with this disease when you feel a little better. And you hope. It’s ridiculous, but you hope. It seems impossible that your will should count for nothing. Then you realise that it’s certain that you must die in six months. And you think it is too horrifying to bear. People will tell you, Eliot, that uncertainty is the worst thing. Don’t believe them. Certainty is the worst thing.”
He was very tired, and closed his eyes. I thought how he was facing death with stoicism, with detachment, and with faith. Yet even he would have prayed: take this from me at least. Do not let me be certain of the time of my death. His faith assured him that he would pass into another existence. But that was a comfort far away from the animal fact. Just like the other comfort that I should one day have to use myself: they tell me that, when I am dead, I shall not know. Those consolations of faith or intellect could not take away the fear of the animal fact.
He began to talk again, but now he seemed light-headed, his words flew like the associations of a dream. I had to remind him: “You said you had something important to tell me, before I go.”
He made an effort to concentrate. The ideas set off in flight again, but he frowned and gathered up his will. He found a clue, and said: “What is happening about Roy Calvert?”
“He’s in Berlin. The proofs of the new part of the liturgy are just coming in.”
“Berlin… I heard some talk about him. Didn’t he take my daughter to a ball?”
“Yes.”
He was quiet. I wondered what he was thinking.
Again he frowned with concentration.
“Eliot,” he said. “I want you to do me a favour. Look after Roy Calvert. He’s the great man of the future in my field. I like to think that he won’t forget all about my work. Look after him. He’ll need it. People like him don’t come twice in a generation. I want you to do me a favour. Look after Roy Calvert.”
That cry came partly from the sublimed kindness in which he was ending his life. I was moved and shaken as I gave him my promise.
But it was not only self-forgetting kindness that brought out that cry; it was also a flicker of his own life; it was a last assertion of his desire not to be forgotten. He had not been a distinguished scholar, and he was a modest man who ranked himself lower than he deserved. But he still did not like to leave this mortal company without something to mark his place. For him, as for others I had sat by in their old age, it was abhorrent to imagine the world in which he had lived going on as though he had never been. It was a support, bare but not illusive, to know that he would leave a great scholar behind him, whom he could trust to say: “You will find that point in one of old Royce’s books. He made it completely clear.” A shadow of himself would linger as Roy became illustrious. His name would be repeated among his own kind. It was his defiance of the dark.
I thought by his bedside, and again a few minutes later when I met Joan, how tough the core of our selves can be. The Master’s vanities had been burned away, he was detached and unselfish as he came towards his death, and yet the desire to be remembered was intact. And Joan was waiting for me in the drawing-room, and her first question was: “What did he say about Roy?”
She knew that the Master had wished to tell me something. It was necessary for her to know any fact which affected Roy.
I told her that the Master had asked me to do what I could for Roy.
“Is that all?”