The kitchen porters brought in tea at four o’clock. The excitement broke; we split into twos and threes; muffin in hand, Chrystal talked quietly to me about Sir Horace’s visit a month hence. Then, as had been arranged, Jago came into the room.
‘Good afternoon, Dean. Good afternoon, Brown. You mustn’t let me interrupt. I expect you haven’t finished your business. I should be so sorry to interrupt.’
He was restless with anxiety, and at his worst. Chrystal stood up, stiff and dominating. If Jago was to be Master, he wanted it clear between them that he had brought it about. His expression was hard, almost threatening.
‘We’ve finished, Jago,’ he said. ‘I can tell you that we’ve had a satisfactory meeting.’
‘Just so,’ said Roy Calvert, trying to soothe Jago’s nerves.
‘I mustn’t ask about your secrets,’ said Jago. His smile was vivid but uneasy. There was a lull, and then Pilbrow asked about some old member in the Foreign Office. Would he help about a refugee? Was he approachable? What was he like?
‘You’ll find his general attitude utterly unsatisfactory according to your views,’ said Jago. ‘He’s what the Dean and Brown and I would consider sound.’
‘Sound,’ Pilbrow said. ‘You’ll lose the bloody empire and everything else, between you. Sound.’
‘I was going to say, however much we’re on different sides, we’re none of us above doing a job for a friend. I should be very much upset if—’
He promised to write that night about Pilbrow’s refugee, and Pilbrow, mollified, asked about others at the Foreign Office. Jago was still on edge, eager to say yes, eager to keep the conversation alive. Did he know H—? A little. Sir P — J—? Reluctantly, Jago said no. Did he know P—?
‘Do I know P—?’ cried Jago. ‘Do I know P—, my dear Eustace? I should think I do. The first time I met him, he asked my advice about a minister’s private life!’
He stayed in that vein, at his most flamboyant, until the party broke up. Roy Calvert and Brown knew the reason, and Roy, as though in fun, actually in kindness, laughed at him as if it were a casual tea party and gave Jago the chance to score off him in reply. Jago took it, and amused us, especially Nightingale, with his jokes at Roy’s expense. But the anxiety returned, and with it his flow of extravagance. Chrystal did not respond much, and went away early; then Pilbrow and Luke. Nightingale seemed to be enjoying himself, and I began to listen to the quarters, each time they chimed outside. So long as he stayed, Jago could not ask.
At last he went. The door closed behind him, and Jago turned to Arthur Brown with a ravaged look. ‘Well?’
‘Well,’ said Brown comfortably, ‘if the election had been this afternoon, you would have got in nicely.’
‘Did everyone here—’
‘Everyone you’ve seen said that, as things stood at present, they were ready to vote for you.’
‘That’s wonderful.’ Jago’s face lit up the room. ‘That’s wonderful.’
His smile was still radiant, but became gentler as he added: ‘I’m touched to think of dear old Eustace Pilbrow throwing away his prejudices and being ready to support me. I don’t suppose we’ve agreed on a single public issue since I became a fellow. We’ve disagreed on everything two men could disagree on. Yet he is willing to do this for me.’
‘You ought to be touched about young Luke,’ said Brown. ‘He’s the most enthusiastic supporter you’ve got. And he’s acting against his own interests.’
‘Ah, I think I’m better with young men than with people my own age.’ He added with a flash of extraordinary directness and simplicity: ‘I don’t have to show off to them, you see.’ Roy caught my eye. His smile was sharp.
Then Brown spoke: ‘I don’t want to be a skeleton at the feast, because I’ve been feeling very gratified myself, but I think it would be remiss not to remind you that the thing’s still open.’ Brown settled himself to give a caution. ‘You oughtn’t to let yourself think that we’re completely home. If the election had come off today, as I told you, you would be Master. But you realize that these people can’t give a formal pledge, and one or two actually made qualifications. I don’t think they were important qualifications, but you mustn’t think it’s absolutely cut-and-dried. The picture might just conceivably alter — I don’t think it’s at all likely, but it might — before things happen to the present Master as they must.’
‘But you’re satisfied?’ said Jago. ‘Are you satisfied? Will you tell me that?’
Brown paused, and said deliberately: ‘Assuming that the college was bound to be rather split, I consider things couldn’t look much healthier than they do today.’
‘That’s quite good enough for me.’ Jago sighed in peace, and stretched his arms like a man yawning. He smiled at the three of us. ‘I’m very grateful. I needn’t tell my friends that, I think.’
He left us, and we stood up and walked towards the window. It was a clear winter evening, the sky still bright in the west. The lamps of the court were already lit, but they seemed dim in that lucid twilight. The light in the Master’s bedroom was already shining.
‘I hope I didn’t say too much,’ said Brown to Roy Calvert and me. ‘I think it’s all right. But I’m not prepared to cheer until I hear the votes in the chapel. Some of us know,’ he said to me, with his wise, inquisitive smile, ‘that you’ve got astonishing judgement of men. But, if you’ll believe anyone like me, there are things you can only learn through having actually been through them. I’ve seen elections look more certain than this one does today, and then come unstuck.’
I was beginning to watch Jago walk slowly round the court.
‘You see,’ said Brown, ‘we haven’t much weight in our party. Pilbrow doesn’t count for very much, and you’re too young, Roy, and Eliot hasn’t been here long enough. I suppose Chrystal and I are all right, but we could do with a bit more solid weight. Put it another way: suppose another candidate crops up. Someone who was acceptable to the influential people on the other side. I think it’s just imaginable that Chrystal would feel we hadn’t enough weight to stand out against that. He might feel obliged to transfer. You noticed that he covered himself in case that might happen. I don’t say it’s likely, but it’s just as well to keep an eye open for the worst.’
Jago was walking very slowly round the court, past the door of the Lodge, past the combination room window, past the hall, back under Brown’s window. He walked slowly, luxuriously, with no sign of his usual active, jerky step. He began to walk round again, and as he turned we saw his face. It was brilliant with joy. He looked at the grass as though he were feeling: ‘my grass’. He trod on the path, and then strayed, for the love of it, on the cobbles; ‘my path, my cobbles’. He stood for a long moment in the middle of the court, and gazed round him in exaltation: ‘my college’.
He glanced at the lighted window in the Lodge, and quickly turned his head away.
‘He looks happy, doesn’t he?’ said Arthur Brown, in a steady, affectionate, protective tone. ‘He takes everything so much to heart. I only hope we manage to get him in.’
Part Two
Waiting
13: Progress of an Illness
The light in the Master’s bedroom shone over the court each night; the weeks passed, and we still had to pay our visits, talking of next year’s fellowships and how soon it would be before he could come into hall. Chrystal could not bear it, and made some ill-tempered excuse for not going into the Lodge. Hearing the excuse and taking it at its face value, Lady Muriel was contemptuous: ‘I always knew he was common,’ Roy Calvert reported her as saying.