The Masters

by C. P. Snow

  ‘Dr Redvers Thomas Arbuthnot Crawford,’ he called. Crawford rose.

  ‘Senior Fellow,’ he said.

  ‘I declare you elected this day Master of the college,’ said Gay.

  He added, with a superb and natural air: ‘And now I give the college into your charge.’

  ‘I thank you, Senior Fellow,’ said Crawford imperturbably. ‘I thank the college.’

  Without a word, Jago leaned across the table, shook Crawford’s hand, and walked out of the chapel. Everyone watched him go. It was not until the outer door swung to that chairs were pushed back and men surrounded Crawford. We all congratulated him. Nightingale smiled at him, admiringly. Chrystal said: ‘I’m very glad, Crawford.’ Brown shook him by the hand with a polite, formal smile. Crawford was good-humoured and self-assured as ever while people talked to him. It was strange to hear him for the first time called Master.

  46: The Master Presides

  I went away from the chapel with Roy Calvert, and we stood in the great gate, watching women bustle by to their morning shopping: the streets were full, the buses gleamed a brilliant red under the slaty sky.

  ‘Dished,’ said Roy. ‘Old boy, one never feels the worst until it happens. I’m deflated.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why does one mind so much about things which don’t matter? This doesn’t matter to us.’

  ‘It matters to Jago,’ I said.

  ‘Ought we to see him? I should be frightened to, you know. Did you see how he looked?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘I should be frightened while he’s so wretched. It’s more in your line, Lewis.’ He smiled, mocking both me and himself.

  Soon he left me to get some money for his journey, and I turned back into the court. There was a knot of people at the chapel door, and I went toward them. Gay, Brown, Despard-Smith, and Winslow were standing together, with the head porter a yard away: I. saw that they had been pinning a notice to the door.

  ‘What do you think of that, Nightingale?’ Gay greeted me.

  ‘Not Nightingale,’ said Brown.

  ‘What do you think of that?’ said Gay. ‘There’s a notice and a half for you. There’s no doubt about that. If they want to see who’s been elected, they’ve only got to come and read. And they can see my signature at the bottom. I like a good, bold signature. I like a man who’s not ashamed of the sight of his own name. Well, my friends, it’s all gone like clockwork. You couldn’t have a better election than that. I congratulate you.’

  ‘I’ve taken part in four elections,’ said Despard-Smith. ‘I don’t expect to see another.’

  ‘Come, come,’ said Gay. ‘Why, there is plenty of time for one or two more for all of us. I hope to do my duty at another one or two myself.’

  He waved a jocular finger at Winslow.

  ‘And there’ll be no slackness, Winslow, my dear chap. Declarations in full, mind. I can see I shall have to keep you up to the mark.’

  Winslow smiled caustically.

  ‘I still maintain I was right,’ he said. ‘I want it discussed. I’ve never believed in multiplying mummery–’

  He flanked Gay on one side, Despard-Smith on the other, and they kept pace with his shuffle as they moved off arguing. ‘Good morning to you,’ said Winslow to Brown and me. ‘Good morning, my dear chaps,’ Gay shouted to us behind him.

  I remained with Brown, and asked him what Roy had asked me: ought one of us to look after Jago? Would he go round himself?

  ‘I should be useless to him,’ said Arthur Brown. ‘I’m very much afraid that I shouldn’t be acceptable. I must reconcile myself to the fact that my company will distress him for a long time to come. He won’t want to be reminded of our disaster.’

  Brown spoke evenly, with resignation but with deep feeling. His concern would not flag, would not be snubbed away: his was not a nature to forget. Yet it was like him to have stayed behind with Gay to make sure that the formalities were properly complied with. No one else of Jago’s party would have cared whether or not the notice was affixed: Brown could not help scrutinizing the ceremony to the end: even though Crawford was elected, the ceremonies must be performed, the college must be carried on. And now, standing by the chapel door, he said: ‘I suppose everyone will want to drink some healths tonight. I’d better see that they’re not forgetting to have a few bottles ready.’

  For the rest of the day, until dinner, I heard only one more comment. It was from Chrystal, whom I met as he was walking out of college after lunch.

  He looked at me with bold eyes, and gave his brisk good afternoon. ‘I tell you what, Eliot,’ he said sharply, ‘I didn’t like Jago’s behaviour this morning. He oughtn’t to have gone off like that.’

  ‘He’s had something to put up with.’

  ‘I know what he feels. I shouldn’t like it myself. But one’s got to put a face on things.’

  It was true, I thought: he did not know what it was like to be wounded.

  ‘It makes me feel justified in the line I took,’ said Chrystal. ‘I know you disagree with me. I wasn’t happy about it myself. But he’s not dependable enough. He’s a likeable man. But he wouldn’t have done.’

  I did not want to carry on the argument.

  Before we parted, he said: ‘You’ll come and thank me in time, Eliot. I shouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t turn up tonight. That won’t be so good.’

  By custom, all fellows came in to drink the new Master’s health on the night of his election; it was to provide for this occasion that Brown had gone to the cellars.

  Roy was busy packing and getting ready his notebooks for the Vatican library, so I spent the afternoon alone. I went out for tea in the town, and on my way ran straight into Mrs Jago. I began to tell her how distressed I was. She cut me dead.

  In my rooms that evening, I kept thinking of that strange incident. It was easy to see it as a joke – but I had come to feel fond of her, and it was no joke at all. What state must she be in. How completely was she possessed? I tried to write her a note, but thought of the meanings she would read behind each word. I was more upset than I should have confessed even to Roy.

  I went into the combination room some time before dinner, and found Crawford, Getliffe, and Nightingale already there. Nightingale had accepted a glass of sherry from Crawford, and was as coy with it as a girl over her first drink. He had not touched a drop, he was saying, since Flanders. Crawford asked me to have a drink with impartial cordiality, and spoke to us all: ‘Speaking now as Master,’ he said, ‘I expect one will have to exercise considerable selection over the meetings one addresses. I don’t want to parade opinions which part of the college vehemently objects to but, speaking as a responsible citizen, I can’t remain entirely quiescent in times like these.’

  The room was filling rapidly. Despard-Smith, Chrystal, Brown, and Winslow joined the group round Crawford. Francis Getliffe took me aside.

  ‘Well, it’s over,’ he said.

  ‘It’s over.’

  ‘I’m sorry if you’re too disappointed, Lewis.’

  ‘I don’t pretend to be overjoyed,’ I said.

  ‘It will shake down.’ He smiled. ‘Look, I need your advice. Come out and see us tomorrow night.’

  I said yes as spontaneously as I could.

  ‘Good work,’ said Francis.

  Nearly all the fellows had arrived. Each time the door opened, we looked for Jago. But first it was Pilbrow, sparkling with delight because he had received an invitation to go to Prague in the spring – then Gay, although he was breaking the routine of his nights. ‘Ah, Crawford, my dear chap,’ he said. ‘I thought you would feel the gilt was off the gingerbread unless I put in an appearance. Master I must call you now. I congratulate you.’

  We were still waiting for Jago when the butler announced to Crawford that dinner was served.

  ‘Well,’ said Crawford, ‘this seems to be the whole party. Gay, will you take my right hand? Eustace, will you come in on my left?’

  He sat at the
head of the table in hall, looking slightly magnified, as men do when placed in the chief seat. His face was smooth and buddha-like as he listened to old Gay through dinner. Down the table, I caught some whispers about Jago, and a triumphant smile from Nightingale. None of Jago’s friends referred to him. We could not explain why he had not come. We said nothing: Luke looked at me and Brown, hurt that no one could put up a defence.

  When we returned to the combination room, there were several decanters on the table, the glass glittering, the silver shining. Near them stood a pile of peaches in a great silver dish, which was reflected clear in the polished wood. Gay’s eyes glistened at the sight. As he was congratulating the steward, Crawford started to arrange us in our seats.

  ‘I think we must have a change,’ said Crawford. ‘Gay, you must take my right hand again. That goes without saying. Chrystal, I should like you up here.’

  Just as we were seated and Crawford had filled Gay’s glass and his own and was pushing the first decanter on, the door opened and Jago came into the room. He was pale as though with an illness. All eyes were on him. The room was quiet.

  ‘Jago,’ said Crawford. ‘Come and sit by me.’

  Chrystal moved down one, we rearranged ourselves, and Jago walked to the place on Crawford’s left.

  ‘I am so very sorry,’ he said, ‘to have missed your first dinner in hall. I had something to discuss with my wife. I thought I might still be in time to drink your health.’

  The decanter was still going round. As glasses were being filled, Jago said, in a voice to which all listened: ‘I think I can claim one privilege. That is what my wife and I have been discussing. We feel you should be our guest before you go to anyone else. Will you dine with us tomorrow’ – Jago paused, and then brought out the word – ‘Master?’

  He had got through it. He scarcely listened to Crawford’s reply. He raised his glass as Gay proposed the health of ‘our new Master’. Jago did not speak again. He went out early, and I followed him, but he did not wish to say a word or hear one. He did not even wish for silent company along the path. In the blustering night, under the college lamps, he walked away. I watched him walk alone, back to his house.

  Appendix

  Reflections on the College Past

  Often, during that year of the Mastership election, I thought how much the shape of our proceedings was determined by the past. Coming back for that first college meeting in January, I began thinking about the agenda, and wondered how long that rigid order had stayed unchanged. The minutes were, of course, a recent innovation; within living memory there had been no record of any decisions except for the most formal acts, such as elections and the sale of land. It had been left to the recollection of the senior fellows – which suggested some not uncolourful scenes. But first the livings, second money: it seemed our predecessors had kept that order for at least two hundred years.

  Many forms had stayed unchanged in this place for much longer still. Fellows had elected their Master, as we had to do that year, by a practice that scarcely varied back to the foundation. The statute Despard-Smith had recited at that January meeting was dated 1926, but the provisions were the same as those of Elizabeth. And the period of thirty days after the death, if the vacancy happened out of term, was a safeguard to prevent a snap election without giving men time to ride across country to Cambridge.

  The forms had stayed so much unchanged that it was sometimes hard to keep one’s head and see the profound differences between us and our predecessors. It was very hard in a college like this, where so much of the setting remained physically unchanged. True, the college antiquaries told us that the windows had been altered in the seventeenth century, that the outer walls over the college had been at least twice refaced, that the disarray of the garden was an eighteenth-century invention, that no one could trace the internal arrangement of the rooms. But those were small things: a sixteenth-century member of the college, dropped in the first court now, would be instantaneously at home. And we felt it. However impervious one might be to the feeling of past time, there were moments when one was drugged by it. It was a haze which overcame one as one walked on the stones of the first court, touched the panelling in a room such as mine, looked over the roof to King’s: all these had been so long the same.

  One felt it even in the streets of Cambridge. Walking as Roy and I had done on a rainy night, we passed through streets whose shape would have been comfortably familiar to our predecessors. The houses, the buildings, except for the colleges and churches, had all gone; but the colleges and churches defined the streets, and it was hard not to think of other men walking as we did, of the chain of lives going back so long a time, of others walking those same narrow streets in the rain.

  As I said, this physical contact with past time made it hard to keep one’s head. It was so easy to imagine our predecessors as they walked through the same court, dined in the same hall, drank their wine in the same combination room, elected a Master according to the same forms. It was easy to go a step further and think the election of a Master two or three hundred years ago was almost indistinguishable from ours now: it was easy to think that our predecessors and ourselves could be exchanged with no one noticing. One lost one’s sense of fact. Of course, there would be resemblances between any elections to the Mastership; take a dozen men, ask them to elect their own head, and they will go through the same manoeuvres as we were going through now; put an ambitious man like Jago in the college three hundred years ago, and he would have wanted the Mastership – put Brown there too, and he would have tried to work it for him.

  But there would have been one deep difference between then and now. The dozen fellows would have been mostly youths in their early twenties. The core of solid, middle-aged, successful married men who now gave the college its strong and adult character – of these there could be no trace. The Winslows, Browns, Chrystals, Jagos, Gays, Getliffes, Crawfords could have no counterparts at all. Of the present society, one might expect to find in a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century college one or two old bachelors like Despard-Smith and Pilbrow – and apart from them only the very young. The average age of the fellows in 1937 was over fifty. In 1870 it was twenty-six. In 1800 it was twenty-seven. In 1700 it was twenty-five. For 1600 the figures are not so certain, but the average age seems to have been even less.

  This juvenile nature of the society meant incidentally that the Master had a predominance quite unlike the present day. He was often elected as a young man (Francis Getliffe or I would have been a reasonable age for a seventeenth-century Master), but his dividends were much greater than the fellows’, he did most of the administration of the college, including the work of the modern bursar, he remained in the post for life and could be married. It was not an accident that the Lodge had its stately bedroom, while fellows’ sets, even those as handsome as mine, contained as sleeping places only their monastic cells. The Masters down to 1880 lived a normal prosperous adult life in the midst of celibates, young and old: and they inclined in fact to form a separate aristocratic class in Cambridge society.

  By now that segregation had disappeared. The Mastership which Jago longed for would not make him rich among the fellows: as Brown calculated, he would lose a little money on it: in the comfortably middle-class Cambridge of the thirties, most dons drew in between £1,000 and £2,000, Masters as well as the rest. The old predominance and powers had gone. The position still had glamour, repute, a good deal of personal power. It carried a certain amount of patronage. But its duties had faded away. Anyone who filled it had to create for himself the work to do.

  This was one of the signs which showed how the college itself was changing. The forms remained, but the college was changing now, as it had changed in essence before in its six hundred years.

  Few human institutions had a history so continuous, so personal, so day-to-day, I thought one night, listening to the rain on the windows. The cathedral schools of Milan and the like have histories of a kind which takes one back to the Roman E
mpire; but they are not histories like the college’s, of which one could trace each step in the fabric, in the muniment-room, in the library, in the wine books, in the names scratched on the windows and cut into the walls. Over the fireplace, a couple of yards from my chair, there were four names cut in the stone: in the sixteenth century they had shared this room, and slept in bunks against the panelling: those four all became (it is strange that they came together as boys) leaders of the Puritan movement: they preached at Leyden, wrote propaganda for the Plymouth plantation, advised Winthrop before he went to Boston. Two of them died, old men, in America.

  It was astonishing how much stood there to be known of all those lives. The bottles of wine drunk by each fellow were on record, back almost for two hundred years.

  I looked at the names carved into the fireplace, and I reverted to my thought of a few moments before. All this physical intimacy with the past could fill one’s imagination as one sat before the fire; but there were times when it intoxicated one too much to see what the past was like. It was hard to remember, within these unchanging, yard-thick walls, how much and how often the college had changed, in all it stood for and intended to do.

  It had begun as nothing very lofty. It had begun, in fact, as a kind of boarding-house. It was a boarding-house such as grew up round all the medieval universities; the universities drew students to the town, and there, as quite humble adjuncts, were houses for students to lodge – sometimes paid for by their clubbing together, sometimes maintained by an older man who paid the rent and then charged his lodgers.

  The medieval universities came to full existence very quickly. They happened, it seems, because the closed, settled, stagnant world of the dark ages was at last breaking up; the towns, which had become small and insignificant in the seventh and eighth centuries, were growing again as – for some reason still not clear – trade began to flow once more over Europe, though still nothing like so freely as under the Antonines. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the exchange of trade was becoming lively; and there was a need for an educated professional class to cope with affairs that were daily growing more complex. This seems to have been the reason why western Europe suddenly broke out in universities – Bologna, Salerno, Pisa, Paris. In England Oxford became in the thirteenth century a university of European reputation; Cambridge, which originated by the simple process of a few masters leaving Oxford, setting up in the little fen market town, and starting to teach, was not a rival in the same class for a long time.