Before my first visit, Short described some of this background with care; and he seemed to feel certain qualms of conscience regarding what he termed “Sillers’s snobisme.” He explained that it was natural enough that Sillery should enjoy emphasising the fact that he numbered among his friends and former pupils a great many successful people; and I fully accepted his plea. Short, however, was unwilling to encounter too ready agreement on this point, and he insisted that “all the same” Sillery would have been “a sounder man” — sounder, at any rate, politically — if he had made a greater effort to resist, or at least conceal, this temptation to admire worldly success overmuch. Short himself was devoted to politics, a subject in which I took little or no interest, and his keenest ambition was to become a Member of Parliament. Like a number of young men of that period, he was a Liberal, though to which of the various brands of Liberalism, then rent by schism, he belonged, I can no longer remember. It was this Liberal enthusiasm which had first linked him with Sillery, who had been on terms with Asquith, and who liked to keep an eye on a political party in which he had perhaps once himself placed hopes of advancement. Short also informed me that Sillery was a keen propagandist for the League of Nations, Czechoslovakia, and Mr. Gandhi, and that he had been somewhat diverted from earlier Gladstonian enthusiasms by the success of the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Short had taken me to Sillery’s two or three times before I found myself — almost against my own inclination — dropping in there en Sunday afternoon. At first I was disposed to look on Sillery merely as a kind of glorified schoolmaster — a more easy going and amenable Le Bas — who took out the boys in turn to explore their individual characteristics to know better how to instruct them. This was a manner of regarding Sillery’s entertaining so crude as to be positively misleading. He certainly wanted to find out what the boys were like: but not because he was a glorified schoolmaster. His understanding of human nature, coarse, though immensely serviceable, and his unusual ingenuity of mind were both employed ceaselessly in discovering undergraduate connections which might be of use to him; so that from what he liked to call “my backwater” — the untidy room, furnished, as he would remark, like a boarding-house parlour — he sometimes found himself able to exercise a respectable modicum of influence in a larger world. That, at least, was how things must have appeared to Sillery himself, and in such activities his spirit was concentrated.
Clay, for example, was the son of a consul in the Levant. Sillery arranged a little affair through Clay which caused inconvenience, minor but of a most irritating kind, to Brightman, a fellow don unsympathetic to him, at that time engaged in archaeological digging on a site in the Near East. Lakin, outwardly a dull, even unattractive young man, was revealed as being related through his mother to an important Trade Union official. Sillery discovered this relative — a find that showed something like genius — and managed to pull unexpected, though probably not greatly important, strings when the General Strike came in 1926. Rajagopalaswarm’s uncle, noted for the violence of his anti-British sentiments, was in a position to control the appointment of a tutor to one of the Ruling Princes; Sillery’s nominee got the place. Dwight Wideman’s aunt was a powerful influence in the women’s clubs in America: a successful campaign was inaugurated to ban the American edition of a novel by an author Sillery disliked. Flannigan-Fitzgerald’s brother was a papal chamberlain: the Derwentwater annulment went through without a hitch. These, at least, were the things that people said; and the list of accessories could be prolonged with almost endless instances. All were swept into Sillery’s net, and the undergraduate had to be obscure indeed to find no place there. Young peers and heirs to fortune were not, of course, unwelcome; though such specimens as these — for whose friendship competition was already keen — were usually brought into the circle through the offices of secondary agents rather than by the direct approach of Sillery himself, who was aware that in a society showing signs of transition it was essential to keep an eye on the changing focus of power. All the same, if he was known to incline, on the whole, to the Right socially, politically he veered increasingly to the Left.
In the course of time I found that much difference of opinion existed as to the practical outcome of Sillery’s scheming, and I have merely presented the picture as first displayed to me through the eyes of Short. To Short, Sillery was a mysterious, politically-minded cardinal of the academical world, “never taking his tea without an intrigue” (that was the phrase Short quoted); for ever plotting behind the arras. Others, of course, thought differently, some saying that the Sillery legend was based on a kind of kaleidoscope of muddled information, collected in Sillery’s almost crazed brain, that his boasted powers had no basis whatever in reality: others again said that Sillery certainly knew a great number of people and passed round a lot of gossip, which in itself gave him some claim to consideration as a comparatively influential person, though only a subordinate one. Sillery had his enemies, naturally, always anxious to denigrate his life’s work, and assert that he was nothing more than a figure of fun; and there was probably something to be said at least for the contention that Sillery himself somewhat exaggerated the effectiveness of his own activities. In short, Sillery’s standing remained largely a matter of opinion; though there could be no doubt about his turning out to be an important factor in shaping Stringham’s career at the university.
Stringham had been due to come into residence the same term as myself, but he was thrown from a horse a day or two before his intended return to England, and consequently laid up for several months. As a result of the accident, he did not appear at his college until the summer when he took against the place at once. He could scarce be persuaded to visit other undergraduates, except one two that he had known at school, and he used to spend hours together sitting in his room, reading detective stork and complaining that he was bored. He had been given small car by his mother and we would sometimes drive round the country together, looking at churches or visiting pubs.
On the whole he had enjoyed Kenya. When I told him about Peter Templer and Gwen McReith — an anecdote that seemed to me of oustanding significance — he said: “Oh, well, that sort of thing is not as difficult as all that,” and he proceeded to describe a somewhat similar incident, in which, after a party, he had spent the night with the divorced wife of a coffee planter in Nairobi. In spite of Madame Dubuisson, this story made me feel very inexperienced. I described Suzette to him, but did not mention Jean Templer.
“There is absolutely nothing in it,” Stringham said. “It is just a question of keeping one’s head.”
He was more interested in what I had to report about Widmerpool, laughing a lot over Widmerpool’s horror on hearing the whole truth of Le Bas’s arrest. The narrative of the Scandinavians’ quarrel struck him only on account of the oddness of the tennis court on which we had been playing the set. This surprised me, because the incident had seemed of the kind to appeal to him. He had, however, changed a little in the year or more that had passed since I had seen him; and, although the artificial categories of school life were now removed, I felt for the first time that the few months between us made him appreciably older than myself. There was also the question of money — perhaps suggested by Widmerpool’s talk on that subject — that mysterious entity, of which one had heard so much and so often without grasping more than that its ownership was desirable and its lack inconvenient: heard of, certainly, without appreciating that its possession can become as much part of someone as the nose on the face. Even Uncle Giles’s untiring contortions before the altar of the Trust, when considered in this light, now began to appear less grotesque formerly; and I realised at last, with great clearness, that a sum like one hundred and eighty pounds a year might indeed be worth the pains of prolonged and acrimonious negotiation. Stringham was, in fact, not substantially richer than most undergraduates of his sort, and, being decidedly free with his money, was usually hard-up, but from the foothills of his background was, now and then, wafted the disturbing, aromatic perfume of gold, the scent which, even at this early stage in our lives, could sometimes be observed to act intoxicatingly on chance acquaintances; whose unexpected perseverance, and determination not to take offence, were a reminder that Stringham’s mother was what Widmerpool had described as “immensely wealthy.”