‘Thank you, Dean, thank you. Don’t let me run away with myself.’ Jago was friendly, gracious, full of joy. ‘But I’m glad that we’ve got the younger men on our side. I wouldn’t exchange those two old warriors for Calvert and Eliot here. If we can call on the young men, Dean, we can do something with the college. It’s time we took our rightful place. We can make it a great college.’
‘We shall need money,’ said Chrystal, but his own imagination was stirred. ‘We’re not rich enough yet to cut much of a dash. Perhaps we can get money. Yes—’
‘It’s inspiring to listen to you,’ Brown said to Jago. ‘But, if I were you, I shouldn’t talk too much in public about your plans. People might think you were too ambitious. We don’t want to put their backs up. I’m anxious that nothing you say in the next few months shall give them a handle against you.’
I watched their heads, grouped round the desk, their faces glowing with their purpose — Brown’s purple-pink, rubicund, keen-eyed, Chrystal’s beaky, domineering, Jago’s pale, worn with the excesses of emotion, his eyes intensely lit. Each of these three was seeking power, I thought — but the power each wanted was as different as they were themselves. Brown’s was one which no one need know but himself; he wanted to handle, coax, guide, contrive, so that men found themselves in the places he had designed; he did not want an office or title to underline his power, it was good enough to sit back amiably and see it work.
Chrystal wanted to be no more than Dean, but he wanted the Dean, in this little empire of the college, to be known as a man of power. Less subtle, less reflective, more immediate than his friend, he needed the moment-by-moment sensation of power. He needed to feel that he was listened to, that he was commanding here and now, that his word was obeyed. Brown would be content to get Jago elected and influence him afterwards, no one but himself knowing how much he had done. That was too impalpable a satisfaction for Chrystal. Chrystal was impelled to have his own part recognized, by Jago, by Brown, and the college. As we spoke that evening, it was essential for Chrystal that he should see his effect on Jago himself. He wanted nothing more than that, he was no more ambitious than Brown — but irresistibly he needed to see and feel his power.
Jago enjoyed the dramatic impact of power, like Chrystaclass="underline" but he was seeking for other things besides. He was an ambitious man, as neither Brown nor Chrystal were. In any society, he would have longed to be first; and he would have longed for it because of everything that marked him out as different from the rest. He longed for all the trappings, titles, ornaments, and show of power. He would love to hear himself called Master; he would love to begin a formal act at a college meeting ‘I, Paul Jago, Master of the college…’ He wanted the grandeur of the Lodge, he wanted to be styled among the heads of houses. He enjoyed the prospect of an entry in the college history — ‘Dr P Jago, 41st Master’. For him, in every word that separated the Master from his fellows, in every ornament of the Lodge, in every act of formal duty, there was a gleam of magic.
There was something else. He had just said to Chrystal ‘we can make it a great college’. Like most ambitious men, he believed that there were things that only he could do. Money did not move him in the slightest; the joys of office moved him a great deal; but there was a quality pure, almost naive, in his ambition. He had dreams of what he could do with his power. These dreams left him sometimes, he became crudely avid for the job, but they returned. With all his fervent imagination, he thought of a college peaceful, harmonious, gifted, creative, throbbing with joy and luminous with grace. In his dreams, he did not altogether know how to attain it. He had nothing of the certainty with which, in humility, accepting their limitations, Chrystal and Brown went about their aims, securing a benefaction from Sir Horace, arranging an extra tutorship, making sure that Luke got a grant for his research. He had nothing of their certainty, nor their humility: he was more extravagant than they, and loved display far more; in his ambition he could be cruder and more predatory; but perhaps he had intimations which they could not begin to hear.
9: Quarrel with a Friend
When I arrived in the combination room that evening, Winslow, Nightingale and Francis Getliffe were standing together. They had been talking, but as they saw me at the door there was a hush. Winslow said: ‘Good evening to you. I hear you’ve been holding your adoption meeting, Eliot?’
Nightingale asked: ‘Did you all get the reception you wanted?’
‘It was very pleasant. I’m sorry you weren’t there,’ I said. It was from him, of course, that they had heard the news. There was constraint in the air, and I knew that Francis Getliffe was angry. He had returned from Switzerland that day, deeply sunburned; his strong fine-drawn face — I thought all of a sudden, seeing him stand there unsmiling — became more El Greco-like as the years passed.
‘Aren’t you even going to see your candidate?’ I asked Winslow. ‘Do you prefer to do it all by correspondence?’ Sometimes he liked to be teased, and he knew I was not frightened of him. He gave an indulgent grin.
‘Any candidate I approved of would be fairly succinct on paper,’ he said. ‘Your candidate, if I may say so, would not be so satisfactory in that respect.’
‘We are appointing a Master, you know, not a clerk,’ I said.
‘If the college is misguided enough to elect Dr Jago,’ said Winslow ‘I shall beg to be excused when I sometimes fail to remember the distinction.’
Nightingale gave a smile — as always when he heard a malicious joke. He said: ‘My view is, he will save us from worse. I don’t object to him — unless someone better turns up.’
‘It should not be beyond the wit of men to discover someone better,’ said Winslow. Though he had talked once of ‘going outside’, Brown assumed that he would ‘come round’ to Crawford; but he had not so much as mentioned the name yet.
‘I don’t see this college doing it. It always likes to keep jobs in the family. That being so, I’m not displeased with Jago,’ said Nightingale.
I heard the door open, and Chrystal walked up to shake hands with Francis Getliffe, who had not spoken since I came in.
‘Good evening to you, Dean,’ said Winslow. I said, in deliberate candour: ‘We were just having an argument about Jago. Two for, and two against.’
‘That’s lamentable,’ Chrystal stared at Getliffe. ‘We shall have to banish the Mastership as a topic in the combination room. Otherwise the place won’t be worth living in.’
‘You know what the result of that would be, my dear Dean?’ said Winslow. ‘You would have two or three knots of people, energetically whispering in corners. Not but what,’ he added, ‘we shall certainly come to that before we’re finished.’
‘It’s lamentable,’ said Chrystal, ‘that the college can’t settle its business without getting into a state.’
‘That’s a remarkable thought,’ said Winslow. As Chrystal was replying tartly, the butler announced dinner: on the way in, Francis Getliffe gave me a curt word: ‘I want a talk with you. I’ll come to your rooms after hall.’
We were sitting down after grace when Luke hurried in, followed by Pilbrow, late as he had been so often in his fifty years as a fellow. He rushed in breathlessly, his bald head gleaming as though it had been polished. His eyes were brown and sparkling, his words tumbled over each other as he apologized: he was a man of seventy-four, with the spontaneity, the brilliance, the hopes of a youth.