He was a man of fifty, and some, seeing that he had gone both bald and grey, thought he looked older. But the first physical impression was deceptive. He was tall and thick about the body, with something of a paunch, but he was also small-boned, active, light on his feet. In the same way, his head was massive, his forehead high and broad between the fringes of fair hair; but no one’s face changed its expression quicker, and his smile was brilliant. Behind the thick lenses, his eyes were small and intensely bright, the eyes of a young and lively man. At a first glance, people might think he looked a senator. It did not take them long to discover how mercurial he was. His temper was as quick as his smile; in everything he did his nerves seemed on the surface. In fact, people forgot all about the senator and began to complain that his sympathy and emotion flowed too easily. Many of them disliked his love of display. Yet they were affected by the depth of his feeling. Nearly everyone recognized that, though it took some insight to perceive that he was not only a man of deep feeling, but also one of passionate pride.
At this time — it was 1937 — he had been Senior Tutor of the college for ten years. I had met him three years before, in 1934, when Francis Getliffe, knowing that I wished to spend most of my time in academic law, proposed to the college that they should give me a fellowship. Jago had supported me (with his quick imagination, he guessed the reason that led me to change my career when I was nearly thirty), and ever since had borne me the special grateful affection that one feels towards a protégé.
‘I’m relieved to find you in, Eliot,’ he said, looking at me across the fireplace. ‘I had to see you tonight. I shouldn’t have rested if I’d had to wait until the morning.’
‘What has happened?’
‘You know,’ said Jago, ‘that they were examining the Master today?’
I nodded. ‘I was going to ask at the Lodge tomorrow morning.’
‘I can tell you,’ said Jago. ‘I wish I couldn’t!’
He paused, and went on: ‘He went into hospital last night. They put a tube down him this morning and sent him home. The results came through just before dinner. It is utterly hopeless. At the very most — they give him six months.’
‘What is it?’
‘Cancer. Absolutely inoperable.’ Jago’s face was dark with pain. He said: ‘I hope that when my time comes it will come in a kinder way.’
We sat silent. I thought of the Master, with his confidential sarcasms, his spare and sophisticated taste, his simple religion. I thought of the quarrels he and Jago had had for so many years.
Though I had not spoken, Jago said: ‘It’s intolerable to me, Eliot, to think of Vernon Royce going like this. I can’t pretend that everything has always been easy between us. You know that, don’t you?’
I nodded.
‘Yet he went out of his way to help me last term,’ said Jago. ‘You know, my wife was ill, and I was utterly distracted. I couldn’t help her, I was useless, I was a burden to everyone and to myself. Then one afternoon the Master asked me if I would like to go a walk with him. And he’d asked me for a very definite reason. He wanted to tell me how anxious he was about my wife and how much he thought of her. He must have known that I’ve always felt she wasn’t appreciated enough here. It’s been a grief to me. He said all he’d set out to say in a couple of dozen words on the way to Waterbeach, and it touched me very much. Somehow one’s dreadfully vulnerable through those one loves.’ Suddenly he smiled at me with great kindness. ‘You know that as well as anyone alive, Eliot. I felt it when you let me meet your wife. When she’s better, you must ask me to Chelsea again. You know how much I enjoyed it. She’s gone through too much, hasn’t she?’ He went on: ‘That afternoon made a difference to all I felt for Royce. Do you wonder that it’s intolerable for me to hear this news tonight?’
He burst out: ‘And do you know? I went for another walk with him exactly a month ago. I was under the weather, and he jogged along as he always used to, and I was very tired. I should have said, I believe anyone would have said, that he was the healthier man.’
He paused, and added: ‘Tonight we’ve heard his sentence.’
He was moved by a feeling for the dying man powerful, quick, imaginative, and deep. At the same time he was immersed in the drama, showing the frankness which embarrassed so many. No man afraid of expressing emotion could have been so frank.
‘Yes, we’ve heard his sentence,’ said Jago. ‘But there is one last thing which seems to me more ghastly than the rest. For there is someone who has not heard it.’
He paused. Then he said: ‘That is the man himself. They are not going to tell him yet.’
I exclaimed.
‘For some reason that seems utterly inhuman,’ said Jago, ‘these doctors have not told him. He’s been given to understand that in two or three months he will be perfectly well. When any of us see him, we are not to let him know any different.’
He looked into my eyes, and then into the fire. For a moment I left him, opened my door, went out into the glacial air, turned into the gyp room, collected together a bottle of whisky, a syphon, a jug of water. The night had gone colder; the jug felt as though the water inside had been iced. As I brought the tray back to the fireside, I found Jago standing up. He was standing up, with his elbows on the mantelpiece and his head bent. He did not move while I put the tray on the little table by my chair. Then he straightened himself and said, looking down at me: ‘This news has shaken me, Eliot. I can’t think of everything it means.’ He sat down. His cheeks were tinged by the fire. His expression was set and brooding. A weight of anxiety hung on each of those last words.
I poured out the whisky. After he took his glass, he held it for an instant to the firelight, and through the liquid watched the image of the flames.
‘This news has shaken me,’ he repeated. ‘I can’t think of everything it means. Can you,’ he asked me suddenly, ‘think of everything it means?’
I shook my head. ‘It has come as a shock,’ I said.
‘You haven’t thought of any consequences at all?’ He gazed at me intently. In his eyes there was a question, almost an appeal.
‘Not yet.’
He waited. Then he said: ‘I had to break the news to one or two of our colleagues in hall tonight. I hadn’t thought of it myself; but they pointed out there was a consequence we couldn’t put aside.’
He waited again, then said quickly: ‘In a few weeks, in a few months at most, the college will have to elect a new Master.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘When the time arrives, we shall have to do it in a hurry,’ said Jago. ‘I suppose before then we shall have made up our minds whom we are going to elect.’
I had known, for minutes past, that this was coming: I had not wanted to talk of it that night. Jago was longing for me to say that he ought to be the next Master, that my own mind was made up, that I should vote for him. He had longed for me to say it without prompting; he had not wanted even to mention the election. It was anguish to him to make the faintest hint without response. Yet he was impelled to go on, he could not stop. It harassed me to see this proud man humiliating himself.
Yet that night I could not do as he wanted. A few years before I should have said yes on the spot. I liked him, he had captured my imagination, he was a deeper man than his rivals. But my spontaneity had become masked by now; I had been too much knocked about, I had grown to be guarded.
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘we’ve got a certain amount of time.’
‘This business in the Lodge may go quicker even than they threaten,’ said Jago. ‘And it would be intolerable to have to make a rush election with the college utterly divided as to what it wants.’