25: An Observer’s Smile
Throughout the long vacation most of the fellows did not go far away. We all knew that, as soon as the Master died, there would be a last series of talks, confidences, negotiations, until the day of the election, and we wanted to be at hand. Only two went out of England. Roy Calvert was giving a course of lectures in Berlin, and had to leave by the end of July; he went in cheerful spirits, promising to fly back at a day’s notice if I sent for him. Pilbrow had departed for the Balkans shortly after Brown’s claret party, and no one had heard a word from him since. He had guaranteed to return in time for the election, but when I last saw him he had no thoughts to spare for college conflicts.
During the summer no one changed his party. The bricks in Roy Calvert’s room did not require moving; the score was still 6–5 for Jago, but not a clear majority of the whole 13 electors. Brown kept on persuading us to wait before we tried an attempt on Gay, or any other move. Chrystal, however, did make the first signs of an approach about Jago, one night when the old man was dining; he found him aware of the position but stubborn, and so went no further. In fact Chrystal was frustrated for lack of action, and his temper became shorter; they had heard nothing fresh from Sir Horace, apart from a long, effusive letter thanking Brown for his nephew’s success. In that letter, for the first time, there appeared no encouraging hints about the college’s future at all, and Chrystal and Brown were at a loss.
At the end of August the Master sent for me. He had a special message he wanted to give me, and he told me, almost as soon as I arrived, that I was to remind him of it if he rambled. He wanted to give me the message before I went.
His face was now an old man’s. The flesh was dried and had a waxy sheen. His eyes were sunken. Yet his voice was a good imitation of its old self, and, with his heightened insight, he knew the tone which would distress me least. And he spoke, with his old sarcastic humour, of his reasons for changing the position of his bed. It stood by the window now.
‘I prefer to lie here,’ said the Master, ‘because I got tired of the remarkable decoration’ — he meant the painted college arms — ‘which we owe to the misguided enthusiasm of one of my predecessors who had somewhat grandiloquent tastes. And, between you and me, I also like to look out of the window and see our colleagues walking about in twos and threes.’ He smiled without sadness and with an extraordinary detachment. ‘It makes me wonder how they are grouping themselves about the coming vacancy.’
I looked into the emaciated, wasted, peaceful face. ‘It is surprisingly easy to face that kind of fact,’ he said. ‘It seems quite natural, I assure you. So you can tell me the truth. How much has been done about choosing my successor: I have only heard that Jago might be in the running — which, between ourselves, I could have guessed for myself. Will he get it?’
‘Either he or Crawford.’
‘Crawford. Scientists are too bumptious.’ It was strange to hear him, even when so many of the vanities of self had gone, clinging to the prejudice of a lifetime.
I described the present position of the parties. It kept his attention and amused him. As I spoke, I did not feel anything macabre about his interest; it was more as though an observer from another world was watching the human comedy.
‘I hope you get Jago in,’ he said. ‘He’ll never become wise, of course. He’ll always be a bit of an ass. Forget that, and get him in.’
Then he asked: ‘I expect there’s a good deal of feeling?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘It’s remarkable. People always believe that, if only they support the successful candidate, they’ve got his backing for ever. It’s an illusion, Eliot, it’s an illusion. I assure you, one feels a certain faint irritation at the faces of one’s loyal supporters. They catch one’s eye and smirk.’
A recollection of the Getliffe’s garden came to me, and I said: ‘Gratitude plays some queer tricks.’
‘Gratitude isn’t an emotion,’ he said, watching the human comedy. ‘But the expectation of gratitude is a very lively one.’
His mind was very active, but began to leap from point to point.
‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Did they think I was going to die before this?’
‘Yes.’
‘They expected to get the election over before next academic year?’
‘Yes.’
He smiled.
Soon after his mind began to wander, and I had to remind him about his message. Setting his will, his thoughts drifting, he forced himself to remember. At last it came back. He talked of Roy Calvert, his protégé and pupil, who had already outstripped him. He praised Roy’s work. He wanted me to promise to look after him.
26: Stalemate
At the beginning of October, the great red leaves of Virginia creeper flamed on the walls and blew opulently about the court. In the garden the leaves blazed on the trees. The mornings were misty, the days bright in a golden haze; in the evenings, the lights in the streets and the college were aureoled in the autumnal mists. In the evenings, a light still shone from the great bedroom of the Lodge.
The fellows came back from their September holidays: the freshmen waited in queues on Brown’s staircase and walked round the courts in search of Jago’s house. The college became noisy, the street trilled with cycle bells as young men rode off to games in the afternoon. High table filled up: Brown presented a bottle to greet the new academic year: the whole society had returned to residence, except for Pilbrow and Roy Calvert.
It was only a few days later that Roy Calvert came back. He ran up my staircase one afternoon, looking very well. He had been free of depression since June, often he had managed to forget it. I had never seen him so settled. He was anxious to amuse me, concerned to help Brown and his other friends, eager to intrigue for Jago.
Tension in the college soon mounted again. Winslow had recovered some of his bite, and Nightingale ground away at his attacks with the stamina of a passion. Whispers, rumours, scandals, came to us at second- or third-hand. Roy Calvert figured in them less than in the summer; his actual presence as he was that autumn, equable, full of high spirits, prepared to devote himself to the shyest diner at high table, seemed to take away their sting — though once or twice I saw Winslow regarding him with a caustic glance. But the slanders were fuller than ever of ‘that impossible woman’. Nightingale had the intuitive sense of propaganda that one sometimes finds in obsessed men; he knew how to reiterate that phrase, smiling it out when anyone else would have got tired; gradually all his outcries gathered round her. Even the sober members of his side, like Winslow and Francis Getliffe, were heard to say ‘it’s unthinkable to have that woman in the Lodge’, and Brown and Chrystal were perturbed in private and did not know how to reply.
Brown, Roy, and I considered how to stop every hole by which these slanders might get through to Jago. We were as thorough as we knew how to be; but there were nights when Jago sat silently in hall, his face white, ravaged. The long anxiety had worn him down, his outbursts of nervous emotion were more unpredictable. But it was the sight of him, his face engraved with his own thoughts, intolerably vulnerable, that distressed us most.
Did he know what was being said? Neither Roy nor I had any doubt.
The Master was spending more time asleep now; one still saw his room lit up when one came back to college on those hazy October nights under the serene and brilliant moon. An Indian summer had visited the town, and the buildings rested in the warmth. It made Jago’s pallor more visible, as he walked through an evening so tranquil that the lines of the palladian building seemed to quiver in the haze.