The Masters (39 page)

But those words were not spoken. Perhaps Brown had just managed to stop them. They confronted each other: Chrystal’s face was fierce and sullen, Jago’s ravaged by the encroaching pain: it was Chrystal who turned away.

‘I’m going into hall,’ he said

‘I rather think they’re expecting me at home,’ said Brown.

‘I shall see you in chapel then. Tomorrow morning,’ said Chrystal.

Brown inclined his head. Chrystal gave a short goodnight, and went out.

Jago threw himself, as though both restless and exhausted, on to the sofa.

‘So this is the end,’ he said.

‘I’m afraid it is, Paul,’ said Brown steadily. ‘Unless something very unexpected turns up to help us – and I couldn’t let you hope anything from that.’

‘I’ve got no hope left,’ said Jago.

‘I’m afraid we must resign ourselves,’ said Brown. ‘I don’t need to tell you what your friends are feeling.’

‘It’s bitter,’ I said.

‘Thank you both,’ said Jago, but his tone was far away. Suddenly he cried, as from a new depth of pain: ‘How can I inflict this on my wife? How can I face seeing her being so much hurt?’

Neither Brown nor I replied. Jago twisted on the sofa, drew up his knees and turned again. The bell began to ring for hall.

‘I can’t dine with them,’ said Jago. ‘It would be intolerable to let them see me.’

‘I know,’ said Brown.

‘I do not see,’ said Jago quietly, ‘how I am going to stay here. I shall be reminded of this for the rest of my life.’

‘It sounds trite,’ said Brown, ‘but these wounds heal in time.’

‘I’ve got no money,’ said Jago. ‘I am too old to move. Every time they see me, I shall be ashamed.’

He added: ‘I shall have to watch another man in the place I should have filled. I shall have to call him Master.’

It was not a conversation. For minutes together he lay silent: then came a broken outburst. It was painful to hear the spurs of defeat wound him in one place, then another. Will the other side know tonight? Are they celebrating in hall at this very moment? When will the news go round the university? Has it got outside the college yet? Who would be the first of his enemies to laugh? Why had he allowed himself to be a candidate?

His grief became so wild that he rounded on Brown.

‘Why did you expose me to this danger? No one has ever done me so much harm before.’

‘I misjudged the situation,’ said Brown. ‘I regard myself as very much to blame for lack of judgement.’

‘You oughtn’t to take risks with your friends’ happiness.’

‘I shall always be sorry, Paul,’ said Brown with affectionate remorse, showing no sign that he resented being blamed.

After an interval of quiet Jago suddenly sat up and faced us.

‘I want to ask you something. Is it quite certain that this man will get a majority tomorrow?’

‘I’m afraid it is. So far as it’s given to us to be certain.’

‘Is it?’ cried Jago. ‘Why should I vote for him? Why should I make up his majority? I was coerced into it by Chrystal. Why should I do it now?’

‘I think you’re bound by your promise,’ said Brown. ‘I never liked it, but I think you’re bound.’

‘That is for me to say,’ said Jago.

‘Yes, it is for you to say,’ said Brown in the same even tone. ‘But there is another reason why I hope you won’t break your promise. If you do, people will say that Crawford would never have done so in similar circumstances. And that this was the best proof that they had been right all the time.’

‘Do you think now that they have been right all the time?’

‘I am as sure they are wrong as I’ve ever been.’

‘Even though I’ve shown you that I’m prepared to break my promise?’

‘I know,’ said Brown, ‘that you feel temptations that I’m lucky enough to escape. But I also know that you don’t give way to them.’

‘You’re a good friend, Arthur,’ said Jago. It was his first familiar touch that night.

He stared at us with his eyes distraught, and said: ‘So I’m asked to sign my own rejection tomorrow morning. That’s something else I have to thank Chrystal for – I know he’s been your friend, Arthur. But he’s more detestable than any of the others.’

‘It’s natural for you to say so,’ said Brown. ‘But it isn’t true.’

‘Are you going to trust him again?’

Brown gave a sad, ironic, firm-hearted smile: I thought it meant that he would trust Chrystal as much or as little as he had trusted him before. For Brown loved his friends, and knew they were only men. Since they were only men, they could be treacherous – and then next time loyal beyond belief. One took them as they were. That gave Brown his unfailing strength, and also a tinge, deep under the comfortable flesh, of ironic sadness.

‘How are
you
going to live in this college?’ said Jago.

‘Paul,’ said Arthur Brown, ‘I’ve failed in the thing I’ve most wanted to bring off here. You’re right to blame me, but perhaps you will remember that it isn’t going to be pleasant even for me yet awhile. I don’t welcome having this difference with Chrystal. And I abominate the thought of Crawford as Master more than anyone in the college. After you, I believe I’m more affected than any of our friends.’

‘I’m sure that’s true,’ I said.

‘Still,’ said Brown, ‘I’m not prepared to become a hermit because we’ve lost. We’ve shown some bad management and we’ve had some bad luck, and I don’t forgive myself for what it’s going to mean to you. But it has happened, and we’ve got to make the best of it. We’re not children, and we must go on living decently in this place.’

‘For myself,’ he added, ‘I propose to try and make the college as friendly as possible. We ought to be able to heal some of these rifts. I admit that it will take time. It will be a few years before we stop being more divided than I should like.’

Jago looked at the most devoted of his supporters. Each of them took calamity according to his nature. To Jago, those last words were meaningless, were nothing but a noise that sounded outside his distress. He felt inescapably alone.

Brown saw Jago look more than ever harrowed, and yet could not begin to console him again. He had done all he could. He said to me: ‘I always insisted that it wasn’t a foregone conclusion. I expect you remember me giving you occasional warnings. I’m afraid they’ve turned out more than justified.’

He was moved for Jago to the bottom of his heart; he was defeated on his own account; and yet, I was all but sure, there came a spark of comfort as he thought how far-sighted he had been.

The telephone rang. It was Brown’s wife, asking why he was half an hour late for dinner. Brown said that he did not like to leave us, but I offered to take Jago into my rooms and find him food.

Jago sat down by my fire. The flames, flaring and falling, illumined his face, left it in shadow, at times smoothed out the lines of pain. He gazed into the fire, taking no notice of me. I smoked a cigarette, and then another. At last I went quietly, as though he were asleep, to see what I could give him to eat.

There was not much in my gyproom. Bidwell had seen to that. But there was a loaf of bread, cheese, and butter, and, very surprisingly, a little jar of caviar (a present from a pupil), which Bidwell happened not to like. I put them on the little table between us, in front of the fire. I went out again to fetch some whisky and glasses. When I returned, Jago had already begun to eat.

He ate with extreme hunger, with the same concentration that a man shows when he has been starved for days. He did not talk, except to thank me when I filled his glass or passed a knife. He finished half the loaf and a great wedge of cheese. At the end he gave a smile, a youthful and innocent smile.

‘I was glad of that,’ he said.

He smiled again.

‘Until tonight,’ he said, ‘I intended to give a celebration for my friends. Of course it would have been necessary to keep it secret from the rest. They mustn’t – it would have been fatal to let them feel there were still two parties in the college. But we should have had a celebration to ourselves.’

He spoke very simply and freshly, as though he had put the suffering on one side and was able to rest. I was certain that he was still
hoping
. In his heart, this celebration was still going to take place. I knew well enough how slow the heart is to catch up with the brute facts. One looks forward to a joy: it is snatched away at the last minute: and, hours later, there are darts of illusory delight when one still feels that it is to come. Such moments cheat one and pass sickeningly away. So, a little later, the innocence ebbed from Jago’s face. ‘There will be no celebration for my friends,’ he said. ‘I shall not even know how to meet them. I don’t know who they are.’

It was worse for him than for a humbler man, I thought. A humbler man could have cursed and moaned among his friends and thrown himself without thinking upon their love. Jago could not lower himself, could not give himself away, could not take pity and affection such as soften fate for more pedestrian men. It was the fault of his pride, of course – and yet, one can be held back by one’s nature and at the same time long passionately for what one cannot take. Jago could bring sympathy to young Luke or me or Joan Royce or twenty others; but he could not accept it himself. With him, intimacy could only flow one way. When he revealed himself, it was in the theatre of this world, not by the fireside to a friend and equal. He was so made that he could not bear the equality of the heart. People blamed him for it; I wondered if they thought it enviable to be born with such pride?

‘Do you think for a moment,’ I said, ‘that it will make a difference to any of us?’

‘Thank you for saying that,’ said Jago, but none of us was close enough. We were allies, young men to be helped, protégés whom it was a pleasure to struggle for: we could not come closer. That was true of us all. Brown had a strong, protective affection for Jago – but I had just seen how Jago could not receive it. To him, Brown was another ally, the most useful and dependable of all. He was never easy with Brown. So far as he found ease with men at all, it was with his protégés.

‘Do you think,’ I persisted, ‘we value men according to their office? Do you think it matters a damn to Roy Calvert or me whether you’re called Master or not?’

‘I wanted to hear it,’ said Jago nakedly. His imagination turned a knife in his bowels. He could not keep it from running after all the humiliations to come. They passed before his eyes with the sharpness of a film. He could not shut away the shames of his disgrace. He was drawn towards them by a morbid attraction. He had to imagine Crawford in
his
place.

His
place: he had counted on it with such defenceless hope. He had heard himself being called Master: now he would hear us all call Crawford so. Among the wounds, that rankled and returned. He saw – as clearly as though it were before his eyes – Crawford presiding in hall, taking the chair at a college meeting. He could not stand it. He could not go to dinner, with that reproach before him in the flesh.

He thought of meeting his acquaintances in the streets. The news would rush round Cambridge in a week: people would say to him, with kindness, with a cruel twinkle ‘I was surprised. I’d always hoped you’d be elected yourself’. Others would see the announcement in
The Times
. Had he kept his hope strictly to himself? He had dropped words here and there. The stories would go round; and they would gain colour as time passed, they would not be accurate, but they would keep the frailty and the bite of human life. Crawford’s election – that was the time when Jago thought he had it in his pocket, he had actually ordered the furniture for the Lodge – Chrystal changed his mind on the way to the chapel, and said it was the wisest decision he ever made in his life.

They were the ways in which Jago would be remembered. Perhaps the only ways, for there would be nothing that did not die with the flesh; he would never get high place now, there was no memorial in words, there was no child.

The evening went on, as Jago sat by my fire: the chimes clanged out, quarter by quarter, hour by hour: the shames bit into him. They pierced him like the shames of youth, before one’s skin has thickened. Jago’s skin had never thickened, and he was at their mercy.

Shames are more acute than sorrows, I thought as I sat by him, unable even to soften that intolerable night. The wounds of self-consciousness touch one’s nerves more poignantly than the deepest agonies of the heart. But it is the deep agonies that cut at the roots of one’s nature. It is there that one suffers, when vanity and self-consciousness have gone. And Jago suffered there.

It was not only that he winced at the thought of seeing his acquaintances in the streets. That wound would mend in time. He had also lost something in himself, and I did not see how he could get it back. He was a man diffident among his fellows in the ordinary rub and wear of life: it was hard for him to be a man among ordinary men; he was profoundly diffident about his power among men. That diffidence came no one knew from where, had governed so many of his actions, had prevented him from reaching the fame and glory which he believed was his by right. Very slowly he had built up a little store of confidence. Somehow men had come to respect him – he nearly believed it at the age of fifty. This Mastership was a sign for him. That explained, as I had already thought, the obsessive strength of his ambition. The Mastership meant that men esteemed him; they thought of him as one of themselves, as better than themselves. Listening to Brown and Chrystal when they asked him to stand, Jago had felt that he could have had any kind of success, he felt infused by confidence such as he had never known, It was one of the triumphant moments of his life.

He had become obsessed by the ambition: he had hated the path along which it had led him; the disappointments, the anxieties, the inhibitions, the humiliations – they corroded him because they brought back his diffidence again. But always he was buoyed up when he thought of his party and the place they would win for him. Above all, he was buoyed up by the support of Brown and Chrystal. He did not like Chrystal; they were as different as men could be; but that antipathy made Chrystal’s support more precious. He resented Chrystal’s management, he thought Chrystal was a coarse-minded party boss – but even when he wanted to quarrel, he thought with wonder and delight ‘this man believes in me! this man is competent, down-to-earth – and he’s ready to make me Master! If such a man believes in me, I can believe in myself!’