‘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.