by C. P. Snow
‘Good work,’ said Francis Getliffe.
‘It’s very civil of him to have written,’ said Crawford – and went on to talk without hurry of a new theory of electrical impulses in nerves. Francis Getliffe was making a suggestion for an experiment, Nightingale was listening with the strained attention that nowadays came over him in Crawford’s presence, when Jago threw open the door and said: ‘Crawford. I should like you to spare me a minute.’
Everyone looked up at Jago. He did not say good evening, his eyes did not leave Crawford.
‘Very well,’ said Crawford, not quite at ease. ‘Can we talk here, or would you prefer to go outside?’
‘Nothing I have to say is secret,’ Jago replied. ‘I’m obliged to say it to you, because I’m not certain to whom it should be said by right.’
Crawford rose and said. ‘Very well’ again. By the fire Despard-Smith and Getliffe made a pretence at conversation, but none of us could shut our ears to Jago’s words.
‘I do not hold you responsible for the outrages of your supporters, but I hope that you cannot be utterly indifferent to them.’
‘You’re going too fast for me,’ said Crawford. ‘I don’t begin to know what you’re referring to.’
‘I shall explain myself.’
‘I should much prefer it,’ said Crawford, looking up into Jago’s eyes, ‘if we could keep this business on a friendly basis.’
‘When you hear what I have to say,’ said Jago, ‘you will realize that is no longer easy.’
Jago’s temper smouldered and suddenly flared out and smouldered again. It was different from one of his outbursts of indignation; no one in that room had seen this consuming rage. As they faced it, most men would have been uneasy; Crawford may have been, but his voice was steady and sensible. Angrily, I had to confess that he was holding his own.
‘If that turns out to be true, I shall be very sorry for it, Jago,’ he remarked.
‘If you are elected, none of my friends would suggest that your wife was not entirely fit to adorn the Lodge,’ Jago said.
‘I should be very much surprised to hear it.’
‘I was a little surprised to hear that my wife had received a copy of the flysheet written by your supporter Nightingale.’
Jago’s words were not loud, but Crawford stood silent in front of him.
‘You have seen the flysheet I mean?’
‘I am afraid that I have,’ said Crawford.
‘Can you faintly imagine what it would mean to a woman?’
Crawford stirred.
‘Jago, I very much regret that this should have happened. I shall write to your wife personally, and tell her so.’
‘That is not enough.’
‘It is all I can do, unfortunately.’
‘No,’ said Jago. ‘You can discover through what source the flysheet reached her. I may tell you that it was deliberately sent.’
Jago was at the limit of his anger. Crawford shook his head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I can understand your feelings, but you exaggerate my responsibility. I am sincerely sorry that your wife should suffer through any circumstances in which I am even remotely concerned. I consider it my duty to tell her so. But I don’t consider it my duty to become a private detective. I have consented to be a candidate at this election, but I have taken no part whatever in any of the personal complications which have taken place, and I might take this opportunity of saying that I deprecate them.’
Jago was quietened for an instant, by the solidity of that reply. Then he said: ‘This attack on my wife is intended to make me withdraw.
‘I can’t express any view on intentions in which I am not interested,’ said Crawford.
‘If you are not interested, your supporters may be,’ said Jago. ‘I shall protect my wife in all ways open to reason but also, while any of my colleagues are prepared to give me their votes, I shall remain a candidate for the Mastership.’
There was no reply from Crawford, and the whole room was silent, for the conversation round the fire had died right away.
The bell began to peal for dinner, and Crawford said, as though anxious for a cordial commonplace: ‘Are you coming into hall, Jago?’
‘No,’ said Jago. ‘I shall dine with my wife.’
There was a constrained hush as he walked out. Crawford was frowning, the smooth composed impassive look had gone. He sat next to me in hall, did not speak until the fish, and then complained: ‘Speaking as a reasonably even-tempered person, I have the strongest possible objection to being forced to listen to those who insist on flying off the handle.’
‘I’m glad he spoke to you,’ I said.
‘It’s no concern of mine. He ought to know that I have never lent an ear to local tittle-tattle. I’m not prepared to begin now, and I shall wash my hands of the whole stupid business.’
But Crawford was, in his fashion, a man of justice and fair dealing, and he was shaken. He took the chair in the combination room with a preoccupied expression, when Despard-Smith left the hall. None of us asked for wine that night, and Crawford lit his pipe over the coffee.
‘It does look,’ he said, ‘as though somehow Mrs Jago has come into possession of that circular of yours, Nightingale. I must say that it is an unfortunate business.’
‘Very unfortunate – but I fancy she might have benefited if she’d learned what people thought of her before.’ Nightingale smiled.
‘Naturally,’ said Crawford, ‘it can’t have been sent to her by anyone connected with the college. Every one of us would take a grave view of an action of that kind.’
His tone was uncomfortable, and no one replied for some moments. Then Nightingale said again.
‘Is there anything to show,’ he asked, ‘that she wasn’t looking through her husband’s letters on the quiet, and found one that wasn’t meant for her?’
I looked at him.
‘I believe she did not read your note by accident,’ I said.
‘How did you form that opinion?’ he said.
‘I spent the afternoon with her just after she’d read it.’
‘That’s as may be. What does it prove?’
‘She was so miserable that I believe what she said,’ I replied.
‘Do you really expect us to be impressed by that?’
‘I expect you to know that it was the truth.’
His eyes stared past mine, he did not move or blench. Nothing touched him except his own conflict. Find the key to that, and one could tear him open with a word. Touch his envy, remind him of the Royal Society, his other failures, and he was stabbed by suffering. But to everything else he was invulnerable. He did not see any of his actions as ‘bad’. So long as he did not feel ‘put upon’ as weak, he did not worry about his actions. He regarded his attempts to blacken Jago’s circle as a matter of course. He was not at peace enough to go in for the luxuries of conscience.
‘I can’t say your claim is completely convincing, Eliot,’ said Crawford. ‘She may have enemies, nothing to do with the college, who wanted to play an unpleasant practical joke.’
‘Is that how you see it?’ I said.
‘Perhaps it is a storm in a teacup,’ said Crawford. ‘After all she is just going through an awkward time of life. And Jago has always been over-emotional. Still we must try and calm things down. I have occasionally felt that this election has generated more heat than light. We’ve got to see that people know where to stop.’
Then he laid down his pipe, and went on: ‘I always think that the danger with any group of men like a college is that we tend to get on each other’s nerves. I believe that everyone, particularly the unmarried fellows, ought to be compelled by statute to spend three months abroad each year. And also – and this I do suggest to you all as a practicable proposition – I think we ought to set for ourselves an almost artificially high standard of manners and behaviour. I suggest to you that, in any intimate body of men, it is important to have the rules laid down.’
I noticed that as Crawford delivered his s
teady impersonal reproof, Nightingale was watching him with anxious attention and nodding his head. It was more than attention, it was devoted deference.
As Crawford rose to go, he said: ‘Nightingale, are you busy? You might walk part of the way home with me.’
The moment he heard the invitation, Nightingale’s harsh, strained face broke into a smile that held charm, pleasure, and a youthful desire to please.
I was to blame, I told myself, for not having seen it before. No doubt he still craved Crawford’s support for getting into the Royal Society, but somehow that longing for a favour had become transmuted into a genuine human feeling. He would do anything for Crawford now.
‘I hope,’ said Francis Getliffe, when we were left alone, ‘that Crawford tells him to shut up.’
I could not resist saying satirically: ‘I thought that Crawford was remarkably judicious.’
‘I thought he was pretty good. If he always handles situations as well as that, I shan’t complain,’ said Francis, with irritation.
‘Some people would have gone further.’
‘No responsible person could have gone further, on that evidence,’ said Francis. ‘Damn it, man, she’s an unbalanced woman. Do you expect Crawford to take as absolute fact every word she says?’
‘I think you do,’ I said. He hesitated.
‘It’s more likely true than not,’ he said.
‘You’re finding yourself in curious company,’ I said.
‘There looks like being enough of it to win,’ said Francis.
We could not get on terms of ease. I asked after his work; he replied impatiently that he was held up. I invited him to my rooms, but he made an excuse for going home.
36: Visit to an Authority
The next morning, December 14th, neither Brown nor Chrystal came into college, and it was from a few minutes’ talk with Winslow in the court that I heard there might be a meeting. ‘Not that any of my way of thinking were much impressed by that remarkable suggestion,’ he said. ‘We’re comparatively satisfied with things as they are. But if it pleases you, it doesn’t hurt us.’
His grin was still sardonic, but more friendly and acquiescent than it used to be. He was on his way to the bursary to clear up his work, so that he could resign as soon as the Master was elected. Nothing, he said with a trace of sadness, would make him stay a day longer.
That afternoon Roy and I were not baulked before we set out for Gay’s. We walked through the backs, going under the mourning sky, under the bare trees; Roy was in the best of spirits. It was with a solemn expression that he rang the bell of Gay’s house, which stood just by the observatory. ‘This is an occasion,’ he whispered.
Gay was sitting in his drawing-room with a paper in his hands.
‘Ah. Splendid,’ he said. ‘You’re come to see my exhibits, I’ll guarantee. I’m glad to see you, Calvert. I’m glad to see you, Nightingale.’
I avoided Roy’s glance.
‘Not Nightingale,’ I said.
‘No. Indeed. Tell me your name, will you?’
‘I’m Eliot.’ It was difficult to conduct this conversation without feeling uncomfortable.
‘I absolutely remember. And what is your subject?’
‘Law.’
‘I congratulate you,’ said Gay with splendid finality.
Although both Roy and I had been to the house several times before, he insisted on our looking round the room and out into the garden. It was all that befitted a middle-class donnish home in Cambridge – the furniture heavier and more old-fashioned than at the Getliffe’s, but nothing except the difference of years to pick it out from theirs. Gay, however, regarded it with singular satisfaction.
‘I always say that I built this house out of my masterpiece. Three thousand pounds I made out of that work, and I put every penny of it into bricks and mortar. Ah, that was a book and a half. I haven’t any patience with these smart alecks who tell us that one can’t get fine scholarship home to the reading public. Why, I shouldn’t have this fine house if they didn’t lap it up. Lap it up, they did, Calvert. What do you think of that?’
‘Wonderful,’ said Roy.
He glanced at us affably and stroked his beard.
‘I will give you young men a piece of advice. Satisfy the scholars first. Show them that you’re better than any of them, that’s the thing to do. But when you’ve become an authority, don’t neglect your public. Why, I should welcome my books being presented by the films. I don’t despise these modern methods. Fine films my sagas would make too. Nothing namby-pamby about them.’
Roy then produced greetings from a letter – I did not know whether it was invented – from one of the linguistic scholars in Berlin. Gay beamed. He seized the chance to tell us again of his honorary degree at Berlin – ‘the great authority on the sagas’.
I made an attempt to get down to business.
‘We very much wanted your advice,’ I said. ‘Now you’ve got this responsibility for presiding over the college till the election–’
‘Ah. Indeed.’
‘We should value your guidance over the Mastership. It’s been on our minds a good deal. Are you satisfied with the way things are shaping?’
‘December the twentieth,’ said Gay resonantly. ‘That’s the great day. Six days from this morning. Splendid. I have everything in hand. I read the statutes each night before I go off to sleep. It’s all in safe hands. You can be sure of that. Now you’ll have been getting impatient to see my exhibits. That’s something more interesting for you.’
We had seen the ‘exhibits’ each time we had gone to the house, but it was impossible not to see them again. Gay’s wife, tiny and birdlike, as old as he but very active, came and wrapped his muffler round his neck and helped him into his great coat. Then he led us at his shuffling pace to the bottom of the garden. All the ‘exhibits’ were connected with his life’s researches on the sagas, and this first one was an enormous relief model of Iceland, at least a hundred feet long – so long, in fact, that on it he was able to make visible each farmstead mentioned in the whole of the saga literature.
‘No towns my saga-men had,’ said Gay proudly. ‘Just healthy farms and the wild seas. They knew what to do with towns. Just burn the houses and put the townsmen to the sword. That was the way to deal with towns.’
He remembered each farm as though he had lived among them as a child. And when we went back into the house, and his wife, coming in almost at the run, had taken off his coat again, he showed us models of Icelandic halls, longships, pictures drawn by himself of what, from the curt descriptions, he imagined the saga heroes to have looked like. His interest was as fervent, as vivid and factual, as it must have been when he was a young man. Some of the sketches had the talent of a portrait painter: there was one of Gudrun that had struck me on my last visit, and another of Skarphedinn, pale, fierce, scornful, teeth projecting, carrying his great axe over his shoulder.
‘Ah. That was a terrible weapon,’ said Gay. ‘That was an axe and a half.’
He loved each detail. And that was, I thought, part of the explanation of his fabulous success. He was not a clever man in the sense that Winslow was, who had done nothing at all. He was simple, exuberantly vain, as pleased with himself as a schoolboy who had just received a prize. But he had enormous zest and gusto, unbounded delight in his work. He had enjoyed every minute of his researches. Somehow all his vitality, mental and physical, had poured into them without constraint or inhibition or self-criticism. He did not trouble himself, he had not the equipment to begin, with the profound whys of existence – but in his line he had a strong simple unresting imagination. And he had the kind of realism which exactly fitted in. He could see the houses of his saga-men, their few bits of furniture, their meagre food and stark struggle for a livelihood: he could see them simply as they were, often as men puzzled, ill-adjusted, frail, trained to a code of almost Japanese courage; and at the same time he could see them as a good deal larger than life. He had thrown every scrap of himself
into their existence, and won – and no one could say it was unjust – success on a scale denied to more gifted men.
He talked about each model until a maid brought in a very large tea tray.
‘Ah ha. Tea,’ said Gay, with a diffident but equal enthusiasm. ‘That’s a splendid sight.’
He appeared to eat as his daily tea a meal not much less copious than the one he put away before college meetings. He did not talk, except to ask us to pass plates, until he was well through. Then I decided to come back to our attempt.
‘You’re occupying an exceptional position in this election,’ I said.
‘Ah. Indeed,’ said Gay, munching a slice of black fruit cake.
‘You’re the great scholar of the college.’
‘The greatest Northern scholar of the age, my Berlin friends used to say,’ Roy put in.
‘Did they now, Calvert? Splendid.’
‘You’re also responsible as senior fellow for seeing that this election is properly carried out,’ I went on. ‘And we’ve noticed that you don’t interpret that in a purely legalistic sense. You’re not concerned simply with the ceremony. We know that you want to see the proper choice properly made.’
‘Just so,’ said Roy.
‘I shall never want to escape my duty,’ said Gay.
‘Isn’t that your duty?’
‘I agree with you,’ said Gay, cutting another piece of cake.
‘We need a lead. Which only you can give. We’re extremely worried,’ said Roy.
‘Ah. Indeed.’
‘We want you to advise us on the two candidates,’ I said. ‘Crawford and Jago. We want you to show us how to form a judgement.’
‘Crawford and Jago,’ said Gay. ‘Yes, I think I know both of them. Let me see, isn’t Jago our present Bursar?’
This was baffling. We could not predict how his memory would work. Everything about the world of scholarship was clear before his eyes: but he would suddenly enquire the name of Despard-Smith, whom he had known for fifty years.
‘I thought,’ said Roy, ‘that you had promised to support Crawford?’
‘Perhaps I have, perhaps I have.’ Suddenly he seemed to remember quite well, and he nodded his head backwards and forwards. ‘Yes, I recollect indicating support for Crawford,’ he said. Then, with a kind of simple, cheerful cunning he looked at us: ‘And you two young men want me to change my mind?’ He guffawed: it seemed to him the best of jokes.