After dinner we moved into the garden at the back of the house. There we sat in the last of the light, as the western sky turned from flaming yellow to a lambent apple-green. The air caressed our faces. And languorous and heavy in the warm night wafted the scent of syringa, which brought back, with a voluptuous pain, the end of other summer terms.
Drowsy in the scented air, I was just going to drop a hint about Luke when, to my astonishment, Katherine got in before me.
‘I have been wanting a word with you, Lewis.’
‘Have you?’
‘You do agree that Francis is right about the Mastership, don’t you? It is essential for us to have a liberal-minded Master, don’t you agree?’
So they had invited me to play the same game. I was curiously saddened, as one is saddened when the gulf of marriage divides one from a friend. Once Katherine had listened to each word that her brother and I spoke, she had been friend and disciple, she saw things with our eyes. Now she was happy with her husband, and everyone else’s words were alien.
‘I think Francis is quite wrong,’ I said.
‘If we get saddled with a reactionary Master,’ said Francis, ‘Lewis will be responsible.’
‘That’s unfair.’
‘Be honest, man,’ said Francis. ‘If you did what we should have expected you to do, Crawford would walk in. Several people would come over with you.’
‘I must say,’ Katherine broke in, ‘it seems rather gross, Lewis. This is important, don’t you admit that it is important? And we’ve got a right to expect you not to desert our side. It’s no use pretending, it does seem pretty monstrous to me.’
I knew they felt that I was being ungrateful. When I was in distress, so that I wanted a refuge to hide in, Francis had set to work to bring me to the college. He had done it with great delicacy, for three years they had felt possessively pleased whenever I dined at their house — and now, at the first major conflict, I betrayed him. I thought how much one expects from those to whom one does a good turn; it takes a long while to learn that, by the laws of human nature, one does not often get it.
‘Look,’ I said to Katherine, ‘your brother Charles has got as much insight as anyone I’ve ever known. When you let yourself go, you’re nearly as good. You know something of Crawford and Jago. Tell me, which is the more remarkable man?’
There was a pause.
‘Jago,’ she said reluctantly. Then she recovered herself, and asked: ‘But do you want a remarkable man as Master, don’t you admit that other things come first?’
‘Good work,’ said Francis. ‘Lewis likes human frailty for its own sake.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I like imagination rather than ordinariness.’
‘I’m afraid at times,’ said Francis stiffly, ‘that you forget about the solid virtues.’
‘If you prefer it,’ I spoke with anger, ‘I like self-torment rather than conceit.’
They were profoundly out of sympathy with me, and I with them. We knew each other well enough to know there was no give on the other side. They became more obdurate in resisting any claim I made for Jago: my tongue got harsher when I replied about Crawford.
‘Anyway,’ said Katherine at last, ‘she is appalling.’
‘She’s pathetic,’ I said. ‘There’s much humanity in her.’
‘That’s monstrously far-fetched, don’t you admit it?’
‘If you’d watched Jago take care of her, you might understand what I’ve been telling you about him,’ I said.
‘She’d be an intolerable nuisance in the Lodge,’ said Katherine.
‘We’re not electing her,’ I said. ‘We’re electing her husband.’
‘You can’t get out of it as though she didn’t exist,’ said Francis.
For a moment we broke off the argument. Without our having noticed the light go, the garden now lay in deep twilight; the apple-green sky had changed to an illuminated, cerulean blue; the first stars had come out.
It was then that I spoke of Luke — not, as I had planned, in the way of friendly talk, but at the moment when we had got tired of our barbed voices.
‘I resent some of the comments that your side have made about her,’ I said. ‘But I don’t want to talk about that now. There’s something more important. It’s another piece of tactics by one of your side. Did you know that Nightingale has been trying to coerce young Luke?’
‘What do you mean?’ said Francis.
I gave them the story.
‘Is this true?’ cried Francis. ‘Are those the facts?’
‘I’ve told you exactly what Luke told me,’ I said. ‘Would you believe him?’
‘Yes,’ said Francis, with no warmth towards me, angry with me for intruding this complaint, and yet disturbed by it.
‘If you believe him,’ I said, ‘then it’s quite true.’
‘It’s nasty,’ Francis broke out. I could only see him dimly in the crepuscular light, but I was sure that his face had flushed and that the vein in his forehead was showing. ‘I don’t like it. These things can’t be allowed to happen. It’s shameful.’ He went on: ‘I needn’t tell you that nothing of this kind will affect Luke’s future. I ought to say that his chances of being kept by the college can’t be very strong, so long as I stay. But that has nothing to do with this shameful business. Luke’s very good. He ought to be kept in Cambridge somehow.’
‘He’s a very nice boy,’ said Katherine. She was not three years older, but she spoke like a mature woman of a child.
‘By the way, it won’t make the slightest difference to the election,’ I said. ‘Luke may be young, but he’s not the first person one would try to cow. But I wanted to make sure you knew. I wasn’t ready to sit by and see him threatened.’
‘I’ll stop it,’ said Francis with angry dignity. ‘I’ll stop it,’ he repeated. Yet his tone to me was not softened, but harder than it had been that night. His whole code of behaviour, his self-respect, his uprightness and sense of justice, made him promise what he had done; and I was certain, as certain as I should be of any man, that he would carry it out. But he did not embrace me for making him do so. I had caused him to feel responsible for a piece of crooked dealing; it would not have mattered so much if I had still been an ally, but now it stiffened him against me. ‘You ought to remember,’ he said, ‘that some of your side are none too scrupulous. I’m not convinced that you’ve been too scrupulous yourself. Didn’t you offer Nightingale that you wouldn’t be a candidate for the tutorship, if only he’d vote for Jago? While you know as well as I do that Nightingale stands as much chance of becoming tutor as I do of becoming a bishop.’
Soon after I thanked them for dinner and walked back into the town through the midsummer night. We had parted without the glow and ease of friendship. Walking back under the stars, at the mercy of the last scents of early summer, I remembered a May week four years before, on just such a night as this. Those two and I had danced in the same party; we had loved our partners, and there had been delight to spare for our friends. Yet, a few minutes past, I had said goodnight to Francis and Katherine with no intimacy at all. Was it only this conflict between us? Or was it a sign of something inevitable, like the passing of time itself? The memory of anyone one had truly loved stayed distinct always and with a special fragrance, quite unaffected by the years. And the memory of one’s deepest friendships had a touch of the same magic. But nothing less was invulnerable to time, or chance, or one’s private trouble. Lesser friendships needed more care than the deepest ones; they needed attention and manners — and there were times, in the midst of private trouble, when those one could not give. Was it my fault that I could not meet Francis and Katherine as I once did?