On the day of the Court meeting, which was the twenty-second of June, I arrived at the station early in the afternoon and went straight out to the university. The Court was to meet at 3.0: the proceedings would be formaclass="underline" but (so I had heard from Vicky) Leonard Getliffe and two of the younger professors had decided that, since it wasn’t necessary for them to attend, they wouldn’t do so. Arnold Shaw had expressed indifference: he was going to get his vote of support, there would be no dissension. Had the man no sense of danger? I thought. The answer was, he hadn’t. Among his negative talents as a politician, and he had many, that was the most striking. If one had watched any kind of politics, big or little, one came to know that a nose for danger was something all the real performers had. They might lack almost every other gift, but not that. Trotsky, like Arnold Shaw, whom he didn’t much resemble in other respects, had singularly little nose for danger. He got on without it for a few years. If he had had it, he might have held on to the power for longer.
Thus I was sitting in Leonard Getliffe’s office (they used the American term by now) in the physics department. Outside, it was a bright midsummer afternoon, just like the weather twenty-two years before, when Leonard was nine years old, the day we heard that Hitler’s armies had gone into Russia. A motor mower was zooming over the lawn, and through the open window came the smell of new-cut grass. In the room was a blackboard covered with symbols; there were three or four photographs, among whom I recognised Einstein and Bohr: on the desk, notebooks, trays, another photograph, this time of Vicky Shaw. Not a flattering one. She wasn’t photogenic. In the flesh she had both bloom and vital force, but in two dimensions she looked puddingy.
There the picture stood, in front of him. I said, wouldn’t he reconsider and come along to the Court? After all, we had done what we could for the students. Yes, said Leonard, even Pateman had got fitted up. “The Scots can cope with him now,” I said.
“No, not the Scots.” Leonard gave the name of a university close by, only twelve miles away. “They’ve accepted him,” said Leonard.
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t see why he should invent the story, do you?” Leonard’s grey eyes were regarding me cat-humorously through his glasses. “Especially as it stops us exerting ourselves.”
No doubt that was why I hadn’t been badgered on the telephone for several days. It hadn’t been thought necessary to tell me that I wasn’t to trouble myself further.
“Well then,” I said. “It’s only a formality today. Why not come along?”
“It’s only a formality,” said Leonard. “Why come along?”
“You know as well as I do. Just to patch things up.”
“In that case, it’s not precisely a formality, is it?”
It resembled an argument with his father — over tactics, or principles, or choices — such as we had had since we were young men. But it wasn’t quite like that. Leonard was just as immovable, but gentler and at the same time more certain. The matter had been mishandled. He and his colleagues (but I now felt sure that his was the authority behind them) weren’t willing to appear placated, until they had made their own terms. They weren’t being noisy. They were merely abstaining. It was the quietest form of protest. Maybe others would understand.
“What about the Vice-Chancellor?”
“He’s only got to see reason, hasn’t he?” said Leonard.
Vicky had told me that, if she had appealed to him to go easy on her father, he would have done it. She (for once confident) was sure that she could do anything with him. But that was the one appeal she couldn’t make. One oughtn’t to use love like that, unless one can pay it back. And also I, having heard her secrets, couldn’t use it either: she had said so, direct as usual. Well, that did credit to the decency of her feelings. And yet, for once confident, she was for once over-confident. Listening to him, I didn’t believe that, if she had promised to marry him tomorrow, she would have changed one of his decisions about Arnold, or even his tone of voice.
Was it possible that, miserable about her, he — who was as decent as she was, and no more malicious — was taking it out of her father? I didn’t believe that either. It was hard to accept, but personal relations often counted not for more, but for far less than one expected. There were people who in all human affairs, not only politics but, say, the making of a painter’s reputation, who saw a beautiful spider’s web of personal connections. Such people often seemed cunning, abnormally sophisticated in a world of simple men: but when it came to practice, they were the amateurs and the simple men were the professionals.
“Can’t you really go a step or two to meet him?” I asked.
“I think it is for him to meet us.”
Dead blank. So, killing time before the Court, I chatted about some of the scientists I knew of his father’s generation — Constantine, O—, B—, Mounteney. As usual, I found an obscure amusement in the way in which Leonard and his contemporaries discussed fellow scientists twenty or thirty years older than themselves. Amiable dismissaclass="underline" yes, they had done good work; once, they deserved their awards and their Nobels: but now they ought to retire gracefully and cease cluttering up the scene. Mounteney — “It’s time,” said Leonard, “that he was put out to grass.” With the same coolness Leonard remarked that he himself, at thirty-one, might very well be past his peak. His was probably the most satisfying of all careers, I said: and yet, for the reason he had just given, I was glad that it had not been mine.
Somehow, casually, I mentioned Donald Howard. It was good of Leonard to have found him a niche. No, merely sensible, said Leonard. Of course, he added vaguely, you knew something about the affair in your college, didn’t you? Yes, I knew something, I said (I felt sarcastic, but Leonard, like other conceptual thinkers, had a thin memory, didn’t store away the things he heard). I even knew Howard a bit. Would I like to see him for a minute? Out of nothing but curiosity, I said yes. Leonard spoke to the apparatus on his desk, beside Vicky’s picture. Within minutes, Howard came, head bent, into the room. He shook hands, conventionally enough. He wasn’t quite as graceless as I remembered, though he had some distance to go before he became Lord Chesterfield. His shock of hair, which used to push out from his brow, had been cut: he looked more like the soldier that most of his family had been. He wasn’t cold to me, but equally he wasn’t warm. Did he like living in the town? He’d seen worse, he said, without excess. How did he enjoy the university? It was better than a technical college, he said, without excess. He seemed to think that some conversational initiative of his own was called for. What was I doing in this place, he ventured? I had come down for the Court, I replied. I shouldn’t have thought that was worth anyone’s time, said Howard. After that, he felt that he had done his duty, and escaped.
Leonard grinned at me.
“How good is he?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s better than Francis (the Getliffe family, like Edwardian liberals, called their parents by their first names) used to think. By a factor of two.” Leonard went on to say that at the time of his dismissal from the college, and during the research which led up to it, Howard had been paralytically lacking in confidence: so much that it made him look a scientific fool. But that he wasn’t. Now he had been given a “good problem” and was having some success, he showed a certain amount of insight. He’d never be really first-rate: he’d probably never make the Royal Society, said Leonard, as though that were the lowest limit of man’s endeavour. But he could develop into a competent professor, conscientious with his students and with half-a-dozen respectable scientific papers to his name.