by C. P. Snow
In a few minutes the butler brought a message that the Professor’s taxi was waiting at the porter’s lodge. This was part of the ritual each Thursday and Sunday night, for on those nights, in any weather, he left his house in the Madingley Road, and was driven down to the college for dinner. There was more of the ritual to come: Chrystal helped him into his overcoat again, he replaced his gown on top of it, and said goodnight to each of us one by one. Goodnights kept coming back to us in his sonorous voice, as he shuffled out of the room, with Roy Calvert to help him over the frozen snow.
‘Those old chaps were different from us,’ said Chrystal, after they had gone. ‘We shan’t do as much as that generation did.’
‘I’m not quite convinced that they were so wonderful,’ said Nightingale. There was a curious carefulness about his manner, as though he were concealing some pain in order not to embarrass the party. About his face also there was a set expression: he seemed to be disciplining himself to behave well. His lips were not often relaxed, and lines of strain etched the fine skin. He had a mane of fair wavy hair, brushed across his brow. His face was drawn, but not weak, and when he was pleased there was charm in his looks.
‘No one has ever explained to me,’ said Nightingale, ‘what there is original about Gay’s work.’
‘I’ll take you up on that, Nightingale,’ Chrystal said. ‘He’s better known outside the college than anyone we’ve got. It will be time enough for us to talk when we’ve done as much.’
‘I agree,’ said Brown.
‘If anyone sat down to his sagas for four hours a day for sixty years, I should have thought they were bound to get somewhere,’ said Nightingale.
‘I wish I could feel sure there is one man among us,’ Chrystal retorted, ‘who’ll have as much to his credit – if he lives to be Gay’s age.’
‘From what the German professors have written,’ Brown put in, ‘I don’t think there’s any reasonable doubt that Calvert will make as big a name before he’s done.’
Nightingale looked more strained. ‘These gentlemen are lucky in their subjects,’ he said. ‘It must be very nice not to need an original idea.’
‘You don’t know anything about their subjects,’ said Chrystal. He said it sharply but amicably enough, for he had a hidden liking for Nightingale. Another thought was, however, troubling him. ‘I don’t like to hear old Gay criticized. I’ve got as great a respect for him as anyone in the college. But it is lamentable to think that we shall soon have to elect a Master, and the old chap will have his vote. How can you expect a college to do its business, when you’ve got people who have lost their memories but are only too willing to take a hand?’
‘I’ve always thought they should be disfranchised,’ said Nightingale.
‘No,’ said Brown. ‘If we cut them off at sixty-five or seventy, and didn’t let them vote after that, we should lose more than we gained.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I think I mean this: a college is a society of men, and we have to take the rough with the smooth.’
‘If you try to make it too efficient,’ I said, ‘you’ll suddenly find that you haven’t a college at all.’
‘I thought you were a man of advanced opinions,’ said Nightingale.
‘Sometimes I am,’ I said.
‘I don’t know where I come down,’ said Chrystal. He was torn, torn as he often was, torn as he would have hated anyone to perceive. His passion to domineer, his taste for clean efficiency, all his impulses as a party boss with the college to run, made him want to sweep the old men ruthlessly away – take away their votes, there would be so much less dead wood, they impeded all he wanted to do. Yet there was the other side, the soft romantic heart which felt Gay as larger than life-size, which was full of pious regard for the old, which shrank from reminding them that they were spent. ‘But I don’t mind telling you that there are times when I consider the college isn’t a fit body to be entrusted with its money. Do you really mean to tell me that the college is fit to handle a capital endowment of a million pounds?’
‘I’ll give you an answer,’ said Brown cheerfully, ‘when I see how we manage about electing a Master.’
‘Is anything being done about that?’ Nightingale asked.
‘Nothing can be done yet, of course,’ said Brown. ‘I suppose people are beginning to mention names. I’ve heard one or two already.’ As he talked blandly on, he was watching Nightingale. He was usually an opponent, he was likely to be so now, and Brown was feeling his way. ‘I think that Winslow may rather fancy the idea of Crawford. I wonder how you’d regard him?’
There was a pause.
‘I’m not specially enthusiastic,’ said Nightingale.
‘I’m interested to hear you say that,’ said Brown. His eyes were bright. ‘I thought it would be natural if you went for someone like Crawford on the scientific side.’
Suddenly Nightingale’s careful manner broke.
‘I might if it weren’t Crawford,’ he said. His voice was bitter: ‘There’s not been a day pass in the last three years when he hasn’t reminded me that he is a Fellow of the Royal, and that I am not.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Brown consolingly. ‘He’s got a good many years’ start, hasn’t he?’
‘He reminds me that I’ve been up for election six times, and this year is my seventh.’
Nightingale’s voice was harsh with envy, with sheer pain. Chrystal left all the talk to Brown.
‘Well, I might as well say that at present I don’t feel much like going for Crawford myself,’ said Brown. ‘I’m beginning to doubt whether he’s really the right man. I haven’t thought much about it so far, but I have heard one or two people speak strongly for someone else. How do you regard the idea of Jago?’
‘Jago. I’ve got nothing against him,’ said Nightingale.
‘People will feel there are certain objections,’ Brown reflected.
‘Some people will object to anyone.’
Brown smiled.
‘They’ll say that Jago isn’t so distinguished academically as – for instance, Crawford. And that’s a valid point. The only consideration is just how much weight you give to it. Put it another way – we’re unlikely to get everything we want in one man. Do you prefer Jago, who’s respectable on the academic side but not a flyer – but who seems admirably equipped in every other way? Or do you prefer Crawford, who’s got other limitations that you’ve made me realize very clearly? Wouldn’t those limitations be unfortunate in a Master?’
‘I’m ready to support Jago,’ said Nightingale.
‘I should sleep on it if I were you,’ said Brown. ‘But I value your opinion–’
‘So do I,’ said Chrystal. ‘It’ll help me form my own.’
He and Brown went off together, and Nightingale and I were left alone.
‘Come up to my rooms,’ said Nightingale.
I was surprised. He was the one man in the college whom I actively disliked, and he disliked me at least as strongly. There was no reason for it; we had not one value or thought in common, but that was true with others whom I warmly liked; this was just an antipathy as specific as love. Anywhere but in the college we should have avoided each other. As it was, we met most nights at dinner, talked across the table, even spent, by the force of social custom, a little time together. It was one of the odd features of a college, I sometimes thought, that one lived in social intimacy with men one disliked: and, more than that, there were times when a fraction of one’s future lay in their hands. For these societies were always making elections from their own members, they filled all their jobs from among themselves, and in those elections one’s enemies took part – for example, Jago disliked Winslow far more intensely than I Nightingale, and at that moment he knew that, until the election was over, he was partially in Winslow’s power.
We climbed a staircase in the third court to Nightingale’s rooms. He was a teetotaller, the only one in the college, and he had no drink to offer, but he gave me a cigar
ette. He asked a few uninterested questions about my holidays. But though he tried, he could not keep to his polite behaviour. Suddenly he broke out: ‘What are Chrystal and Brown up to about the Mastership?’
‘I thought Brown had been telling us – at some length.’
‘I know all about that. What I want to hear is, has one of those two got his eye on it for himself?’
‘I shouldn’t think so for a minute,’ I said.
‘We’re not going to be rushed into that, are we?’ he asked. ‘I wouldn’t put it past them to try.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said. He was irritating me. ‘They made it clear enough – they’ll run Jago.’
‘I’ll believe that when I see it. I’ve never noticed them exert themselves much for anyone else. I’ve not forgotten how they squeezed Brown into the tutorship. I was two or three years junior, but there’s no doubt I had the better claim.’
Suddenly he snapped out the question: ‘What are you going to do?’
I did not reply at once.
‘Are you going to propose Chrystal as a bright idea at the last moment?’
He was intensely suspicious, certain that there was a web of plans from which he would lose and others gain. If I had told him I, too, was thinking of Jago, he would have seen meanings behind that choice, and it might have turned him from Jago himself. As it was, Jago’s seemed the one name that did not arouse his suspicion and envy that night.
I looked round his sitting-room. It was without feature, it was the room of a man concentrated into himself, so that he had nothing to spend outside; it showed nothing of the rich, solid comfort which Brown had given to his, or the eccentric picturesqueness of Roy Calvert’s. Nightingale was a man drawn into himself. Suspicion and envy lived in him. They always would have done, however life had treated him; they were part of his nature. But he had been unlucky, he had been frustrated in his most cherished hope, and now envy never left him alone.
He was forty-three, and a bachelor. Why he had not married, I did not know: there was nothing unmasculine about him. That was not, however, his abiding disappointment. He had once possessed great promise. He had known what it was to hold creative dreams: and they had not come off. That was his bitterness. As a very young man he had shown a spark of real talent. He was one of the earliest theoretical chemists. By twenty-three he had written two good papers on molecular structure. He had, so I was told, anticipated Heitler-London and the orbital theory; he was ten years ahead of his time. The college had elected him, everything seemed easy. But the spark burnt out. The years passed. Often he had new conceptions; but the power to execute them had escaped from him.
It would have been bitter to the most generous heart. In Nightingale’s, it made him fester with envy. He longed in compensation for every job within reach, in reason, and out of reason. It was morbid that he should have fancied his chances of the tutorship before Brown, his senior and a man made for the job; but it rankled in him after a dozen years. Each job in the college for which he was passed over, he saw with intense suspicion as a sign of the conspiracy directed against him.
His reputation in his subject was already gone. He would not get into the Royal Society now. But, as March came round each year, he waited for the announcement of the Royal elections in expectation, in anguish, in bitter suspiciousness, at moments in the knowledge of what he might have been.
6: Streets in the Thaw
It began to thaw that night, and by morning the walls of my bedroom carried dank streaks like the tracks of a snail. Lying in bed, I could hear the patter of drops against the window ledge. ‘Dirty old day underfoot, sir,’ Bidwell greeted me. ‘Mr Calvert sends his compliments, and says he’d send his galoshes too, if he could persuade you to wear them.’
I had scarcely seen Roy Calvert alone since he returned; he called in for a few minutes after breakfast on his way to pay visits round the town. ‘They’d better know I am alive.’ He grinned. ‘Or else Jago will be sending out a letter.’ It was one of Jago’s customs to ‘send out a letter’ whenever a member of the college died; it was part of the intimate formality which, to Roy Calvert, was comic without end. He went out through the slush to pay his visits; he had a great range of acquaintances in Cambridge, and he arranged to visit them in an order shaped partly by kindness, partly by caprice. The unhappy, the dim, the old and passed over, even those whom anyone else found tedious and ordinary, could count on his company; while the important, the weighty, the established – sometimes, I thought in irritation, anyone who could be the slightest use to him – had to wait their turn.
Before he went out, he arranged for us both to have tea in the Lodge, where he was a favourite. He would go himself earlier in the afternoon, to talk to the Master. So at teatime I went over alone, and waited in the empty drawing-room. The afternoon was leaden, the snow still lay on the court, with a few pockmarks at the edges; the fire deep in the room behind me was reflected in the heavy twilight. Roy Calvert joined me there.
It had been worse than he imagined, and he was subdued. The Master had been talking happily of how they would collaborate – the ‘little book on the heresies’. This was a project of the Master’s which Roy had been trying to avoid for years. Now he said that he would do it as a memorial.
When Lady Muriel came in, she began with her inflexible greetings, as though nothing were wrong in the house. But Roy took her hand, and his first words were: ‘I’ve been talking to the Master, you know. It’s dreadful to have to pretend, isn’t it? I wish you could have been spared that decision, Lady Mu. No one could have known what to do.’
She was taken aback, and yet relieved so that the tears came. No one else would have spoken to her as though she were a woman who wanted someone to guide her. I wished that I had been as straightforward.
She was already crying, she said that it was not easy.
‘No one could help you,’ said Roy. ‘And you’d have liked help, wouldn’t you? Everyone would.’
He took care of her until Joan joined us, and then they began to argue about the regime in Germany. ‘Just so,’ said Roy, to each of Joan’s positive statements. Both women knew that he had no liking for disputation; both laughed at the precise affirmative, which had once been affected but now was second nature.
Joan’s tenderness for Roy was already near to open love, and her mother indulged him like a son. She must have known something of his reputation, the ‘vine leaves in his hair’ (as the Master once quoted), the women who pursued him. But she never said to Joan, as she had said about any other man whom her daughter brought to the Lodge, ‘My dear Joan, I can’t imagine what you can possibly see in him.’
I talked about Joan as we walked out of the Lodge into the dark, rainy night.
‘That girl,’ I said, ‘is falling more in love with you.’
He frowned. Like many of those who attract passionate love, there were times when he wanted to forget it altogether. And that night, despite his sadness over the Master, he felt innocent and free of the shadows.
‘Come and help me do some shopping,’ he said. ‘I need to buy some presents at once.’
We walked along Sidney Street in the steady rain. Water was swirling, chuckling, gurgling in the gutters; except by the walls, the pavements were clear of snow by now, and they mirrored the lights from the lamps and shopfronts on both sides of the narrow street.
‘We shall get much wetter.’ He smiled. ‘You always looked remarkable in the rain. I need to get these presents off tonight.’
We went from shop to shop, up Sidney Street, down John’s Street, Trinity Street, into the market place. He wanted the presents for his disreputable, unlucky Berlin acquaintances who lived above his flat in the Knesebeckstrasse, and he took great care about choosing them.
‘That might do for the little dancer.’ I had heard of ‘the little dancer’, by the same title before. ‘She weighs 35 kilos,’ Roy commented. ‘Light. Considerably lighter than Arthur Brown.’
In one shop, he suddenly asked, quietly,
with complete intimacy, about Sheila, my wife. He knew the whole story of my marriage, and what I had to expect when I went each Tuesday to the Chelsea house. I was glad to talk. In the street, he looked at me with a smile full of affectionate sharp-edged pity. ‘Yet you go on among those comfortable blokes – as though nothing was the matter,’ he said. ‘I wish I could bear as much.’
Without speaking, we walked past Great St Mary’s into the market place. He could say no more, and, with the same intimacy, asked: ‘About those comfortable blokes, old boy. Who are we going to have for Master?’
We were loaded with parcels, our coats were heavy with the damp, rain dripped from our faces.
‘I think I want Jago,’ I said.
‘I suppose there’s a move for Crawford.’
‘I’m against that,’ I said.
‘Crawford is too – stuffed,’ said Roy Calvert. ‘He’ll just assume the job is due to him by right. He’s complacent. I’d never vote for a man who was complacent.’
I agreed.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘old Winslow is the most unusual man among that lot. He bites their heads off, he’s a bit of a bully, he’s frightfully ill-adjusted. But no one on earth could call him tug. They wouldn’t have him at any price.’
‘No one on earth could call Jago tug,’ I said. ‘He’s the least commonplace of men.’
‘There are plenty of things in favour of Jago,’ said Roy. ‘But they’re not the things we’re going to hear.’
‘He stands a fair chance,’ I said.
‘He’s not a commonplace man, is he?’ said Roy. ‘Won’t he be kept cut because of that? They’ll never really think he’s “sound”.’