IN the Fellows’ Garden, the tea-roses, the white roses, the great pink cabbage-roses glowed like illuminations in the heavy light. The garden, when I entered it that afternoon, had looked like a steel-engraving in a Victorian magazine, the sky so boding, the roses bulbous. A week earlier, there would have been young men lying on the grass, staying in college to receive their degrees: but this was the last Friday in June, and as I strolled by the rose bushes, scuffing petals over the turf, the garden was dead quiet, except for the humming by the bee-hives.
It was a cold day for midsummer, so cold that I could have done with a coat. I had seen no one since I arrived in Cambridge that lunch-time. In fact, I had taken care to see no one. This was my last chance to get my thoughts in order before tomorrow, the first day of the Seniors’ hearing.
The college clock struck four. The time had gone faster than I wanted, the garden had a chilly, treacherous, rose-laden peace. It was irksome to be obliged to leave: but there had been an invitation waiting for me in the guest room, asking me to tea with the Master to meet my “opposite number”, Dawson-Hill.
As I walked through the college it seemed deserted, and I could hear my own footsteps, metallic on the flag-stones. The only signs of life in the second court were a couple of lights (Winslow’s for one) in the palladian building. Once past the screens, though, and the first court was as welcoming as on a February afternoon, with windows lighted in the Bursary, in Brown’s set, Martin’s, the drawing-room and study in the Lodge. As I let myself into the Lodge and went upstairs, I could hear Crawford’s laugh, cheerful, pawky, and quite relaxed.
In the study, Dawson-Hill was in the middle of an anecdote. Crawford was contentedly chuckling as I came in. At once Dawson-Hill, slender and active as a young man, though he was a year my senior, was on his feet shaking my hand.
“My dear Lewis! How extremely nice to see you!”
He spoke as though he knew me very well. It was not precisely true, though we had been acquaintances on and off since we were pupils in the same Inn over twenty-five years before.
Looking at him, one found it hard to believe that he was fifty. He stood upright in his elegant blue suit, and with his Brigade tie discreetly shining he might have been an ensign paying a good-humoured, patronising visit to his old tutor. His face was smooth, as though it had been carved out of soapstone; his hair, sleekly immaculate, had neither thinned nor greyed. His eyes were watchful and amused. In repose, the corners of his mouth were drawn down in an expression – similar to that of someone who, out of curiosity, has volunteered to go on to the stage to assist in a conjuring trick – surprised, superior, and acquiescently amiable.
He said: “I was just telling the Master about last weekend at–” He mentioned the name of a ducal house. Crawford chuckled. He might be an old-fashioned Edwardian liberal, but he wasn’t above being soothed by a breath from the high life. The ostensible point of the story was the familiar English one, dear to the established upper-middle classes – the extreme physical discomfort of the grand. The real point was that Dawson-Hill had been there. Crawford chuckled again; he approved of Dawson-Hill for being there.
“She is rather sweet, though, isn’t she, Lewis?” Dawson-Hill went on, appealing to me as though I knew them as well as he did. He wasn’t greedy or exclusive about his social triumphs. He was ready to believe that nowadays I had them too. His own were genuine enough; he had been having them since he was a boy. He never boasted, he just knew the smart world, more so than any professional man I had met: and the smart world had taken him into themselves. Why, I had sometimes wondered? He had been born reasonably luckily, but not excessively so. His father was a modest country gentleman who had spent a little time in the army, but not in the kind of regiment Dawson-Hill found appropriate for himself in the war. Dawson-Hill had been to Eton; he had become a decently successful barrister. He had agreeable manners, but they were not at first sight the manners one would expect to make for social triumphs. He was no man-pleaser, and he wasn’t over-given to respect. His humour was tart, sarcastic, and as his hosts must have known by now, not what they would describe as “loyal”. And yet – to an extent different in order from that of any of the tycoons I knew, or the bureaucrats, or the grey eminences, the real bosses of the establishment, or even of the genuine aristocrats – he was acceptable everywhere and had become smart in his own right.
That must have been the reason, I thought, why, when Crawford and Brown were, out of the college’s three or four QCs, choosing one to advise them at the Court of Seniors, they had picked on him. At one time Herbert Getliffe, Francis’ half-brother, would have been the automatic choice: but Brown was too shrewd not to have smelled the air of failure, not to have suspected, as I had heard Brown say, that “the unfortunate chap does seem to be going down the hill”. Nevertheless, the college, usually pretty good judges of professional success, had overestimated Dawson-Hill’s – not very much, but still perceptibly. He was a competent silk, but not better. He was earning, so my old legal friends told me, about £9000 a year at the Common Law bar, and they thought he’d gone as far as he was likely to. He was clever enough to have done more, but he seemed to have lacked the final reserve of energy, or ambition, or perhaps weight. Or conceivably, just as the college was dazzled by his social life, so too was he.
“Well,” said Crawford, loth to say goodbye to high life, “I suppose we ought to have a few words about this wretched business.” He began asking whether we had been supplied with all the “data”.
“I must say,” said Dawson-Hill, suddenly alert, “it isn’t like being briefed by a solicitor, Master. But I think I’ve got enough to go on with, thank you.”
“I fancy our friend Eliot, who has been in on the ground floor, so to speak, has the advantage of you there.”
“That’s the luck of the draw.” Dawson-Hill gave a polite, arrogant smile.
“About procedure, now,” said Crawford. “You’ll appreciate that this isn’t a court of law. You’ll have to be patient with us. As for your own procedure,” he went on massively, “we were hoping that you’d be able to agree at least in principle between yourselves.”
“We’ve had some talk on the telephone,” said Dawson-Hill. I said that we proposed to spend the evening after hall working out a modus operandi.
Crawford nodded, Buddha-like. “Good business,” he said. He went on to ask if he was correctly informed that Wednesday night, June 30th, five days hence, was the latest Dawson-Hill could spend in Cambridge. If that were so, we had already been told, had we not, that the Court was willing to sit on all the days between, including Sunday? We had already received the names of the Fellows who wished to appear before the Court? We both said yes.
“Well, then,” said Crawford, “my last word is for your ear particularly, Eliot. My colleagues and I have given much thought to the position.” He was speaking carefully, as though he had been coached time and time again by Arthur Brown. “We feel that, in the circumstances of this hearing, the onus is on you, representing those not satisfied with the Seniors’ previous and reiterated decision, to convince the Court. That is, we feel it is necessary for you to persuade a majority of the Court to reverse or modify that decision. There are, as you know, four members, and if we can’t reach unanimity I shall be compelled to take a vote. I have to tell you that, according to precedents in the Court of Seniors, which so far as we can trace has only met three times this century, the Master does not possess a casting vote. Speaking not as Master but as an outside person, I’m not prepared to consider that that precedent is a wise one. But those are the conditions which we have to ask you to accept.”
All this I knew. The college had been seething for weeks. Minute-books, diaries of a nineteenth-century Master, had been taken out of the archives. I contented myself by saying: “Of course I have to accept them. But it doesn’t make it easy.”
“The only comfort is,” said Crawford, “that, whatever rules one has, sensible men usually reach a sensible conclusion.”
Dawson-Hill caught my eye. He was deeply conservative, snobbish, perfectly content to accept the world he lived in: but I thought his expression was just a shade more like a conjurer’s assistant’s, just a shade more surprised.
“And now,” Crawford shrugged off the business and Arthur Brown’s coaching, and became his impersonal, courteous self, “I should like to say, speaking as Master, that the entire college is indebted to you two for giving us your time and energy. We know that we’re asking a good deal of you without any return at all. I should like to thank you very much.”
“My dear Master,” said Dawson-Hill.
“I wish,” said Crawford, still with imperturbable dignity, “that the next stage in the proceedings were not an extra tax on your good nature. But, as I expect you know, we have to reckon with a certain amount of personalia in these institutions. In any case, I think you have had due notice?”
Yes, we had had due notice. I felt irritable – for I was anxious enough about next day to have lost my taste for farce – that it was something we could have been spared. The college had had to buy old Gay off. The way they had found, the only way to placate him and prevent him from insisting upon his place on the Court, was to resurrect the eighteenth-century office of Moderator. This was an office I had never heard of, but the antiquaries had got busy. Apparently, in days when the Fellows had been chronically litigious, one of the Seniors had been appointed to keep the ring. So solemnly in full college meeting, M H L Gay, Senior Fellow, had been elected “Moderator in the present proceedings before the Court of Seniors” – and that evening after tea, Crawford, Winslow and Nightingale in one taxi, Brown, Dawson-Hill and I in another, were travelling up the Madingley Road to Gay’s to be instructed in our duties.
I said that this must be one of the more remarkable jaunts on record. Brown gave a pursed smile. He was not amused. Not that he was anxious: in times of trouble he slowed himself down, so that he became under the surface tougher and more difficult to shift. No, he was not anxious. But he was also not viewing the proceedings with irony. For Brown, when one was going on a formal occasion, even on a formal occasion he had himself invented, the ceremonies had to be properly performed.
We filed, Crawford leading us, into the old man’s study. Gay was sitting in his armchair, beard trimmed, shawl over his shoulders. He greeted us in a ringing voice.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen! Pray forgive me if I don’t rise for the present. I need to husband my energies a little nowadays, indeed I do.” Then he said disconcertingly to Crawford: “Tell me, my dear chap, what is your name?”
Just for a moment Crawford was at a loss. His mouth opened, the impassive moon of his face was clouded. He replied: “I am Thomas Crawford, Master of the College.”
“I absolutely remember. I congratulate you, my dear chap,” said Gay, with panache. “And what is more, I absolutely remember why you have attended on me here this very evening.”
He had not asked us to sit down. The room was dark. Out of the window, one saw, under the platinum sky, more roses. That day the town seemed to be full of them.
“I trust you had a comfortable journey out here, gentlemen?”
“Where from?” Crawford replied; he was still off his stroke.
“Why, from the college to be sure.” Gay gave a loud, triumphant laugh. Someone said that it was a cold afternoon and an awful summer.
“Nonsense, my dear chap. Bad summer? You young men don’t know what a bad summer is. Indeed you don’t. Now, ’88, that was a bad summer if ever there was one. Why, I was in Iceland that summer. I was just getting into the swim of what some critics have been kind enough to call my great work on the Sagas. Great work – ah, indeed. Mind you, I’ve always disclaimed the word ‘great’. I’ve always said, call the work distinguished if you like, but it’s not for me to approve of the higher appellation. Certainly not. I was telling you, gentlemen, that I was in Iceland, that bitter summer of 1888. And do you know what I found when I got there? None of you will guess, I’ll be bound. Why, they were having the best summer for a generation! It was fifteen degrees warmer than in our unfortunate Cambridge. Iceland – that country was very poor in those days. They were living hard lives, those poor people, like my Sagamen. Do you know, that year they managed to grow some fresh vegetables? And for those poor people that was a luxury and a half. I remember sitting down to a meal with a dish of cabbage, I can taste it now, and I told myself, ‘Gay, my boy, this country is welcoming you. This country is giving you all it can.’ I’m not ashamed to say it seemed like an omen for my future work. And we should all agree that that was an omen which pointed true.”
We were still standing up. Crawford coughed and said: “Perhaps I ought to introduce my colleagues to you–?”
“Quite unnecessary, my dear chap. Just because one has a slip of memory with your face, it doesn’t mean that one forgets others. Indeed it doesn’t. Welcome to you all.”
He waved magnanimously to Brown, Winslow and Nightingale, who were standing together on Crawford’s left. None of us was certain whether he really knew who they were. “In any case,” Crawford started again, “I expect you don’t remember our legal advisers here. May I present–?”
“Quite unnecessary once more. This is Eliot, who was a Fellow of the College from 1934 until 1945, although he went out of residence during the war and then and subsequently did service to the State which has been publicly recognised. He has also written distinguished books. Distinguished, yes; I never protested about people calling my own work that. It was when they insisted on saying ‘great’ that I felt obliged to draw in my horns. And this must be Dawson-Hill, whom I don’t recall having had the pleasure of meeting, but who was a scholar of the college from 1925 to 1928, took silk in 1939, became a major in the Welsh Guards in 1943, and is a member of the Athenaeum, the Carlton, White’s and Pratt’s.”
The old man beamed, looking proud of himself.
“You see, I’ve done my homework, my dear–?” He looked at Crawford with a smile, unabashed. “I do apologise, but your name obstinately escapes me.”
“Crawford.”
“Ah, yes. Our present Master. Master, I’d better call you. I’ve done my homework, you see – Master. Who’s Who, that’s a fine book. That’s a book and a half. My only criticism is that perhaps it could be more selective. Then some of us would feel at liberty to include slightly fuller particulars of ourselves.”
He turned in the direction of Dawson-Hill. “I apologise for not welcoming you before.”
Dawson-Hill who, unlike Crawford, was quite at ease, went up and shook hands.
“I attended a lecture of yours once, Professor Gay,” he said.
“I congratulate you,” said Gay.
“It was a bit above my head,” said Dawson-Hill, with a mixture of deference and cheek.
Gay was disposed to track down which specific lecture it had been, but Winslow, who had managed to support himself by leaning on a chair, enquired: “I confess I’m not quite clear about the purpose of this conference–”
“You’re not quite clear, my dear chap? But I am. Indeed I am. But thank you for reminding me of my office. Yes, indeed. I must think about my responsibilities and the task in front of you all. Ah, we must look to the immediate future. That’s the place to look.”
“Do you wish us to sit round the table?” Brown asked.
“No, I think not. I shall very shortly be addressing you about your mission. I shall be giving you your marching orders. This is a solemn occasion, and I shall make every effort to stand up for my work. Yes, I want to impress on you the gravity of the task you are engaged in.” He moved his head slowly from left to right, surveying us with satisfaction. “I remember absolutely the nature of my office and its responsibilities. I remember absolutely the circumstances that have brought you to me this evening. Meanwhile, I’ve been refreshing myself by the aid of some notes.” From the side of his chair he pulled out a handful of sheets of paper, held them at arm’s length, catching some light from the window, and studied them through a large magnifying glass. This took some time.
He announced: “To what I have to say in the preliminary stages, I must request Eliot and Dawson-Hill to pay special attention. I should like to call them our Assessors. Assessors. That’s a term and a half. But I find no warrant for the term. However. The Court of Seniors – as I hope you have been informed – it would be gross remissness on someone’s part if you have not been so informed – has recently decided upon the deprivation of a Fellow. That decision hasn’t been received with confidence by a number of Fellows. Whether they would have had more confidence if the Court of Seniors, as by right it should, had had an older head among them – it’s not for me to say a wiser one – whether in those altered circumstances the Fellows would have had more confidence, why, again, it’s not for me to say. This isn’t the time to cry over spilt milk.” Viewing his papers through the magnifying glass, he gave us a history of what had happened. It was a surprisingly competent history for a man of his age, but again it took some time.
At last he said to Dawson-Hill and me: “That’s as much counsel as I’m able to give you. The details of this regrettable incident – why, that’s the task you’ve got to put your minds to. It’s a task and a half, I can tell you. Now I propose to give you all my parting words.”
He gripped the arms of his chair and tried to struggle to his feet.
“No, come, you needn’t stand,” said Brown.
“Certainly I shall stand. I am capable of carrying out my office as I decide it should be carried out. Indeed I am. Will you give me an arm, Eliot? Will you give me an arm, Dawson-Hill?”
With some effort we got him to his feet.
“That’s better,” cried Gay. “That’s much better. Pray listen to me. This is the last chance I shall have of addressing you before your decision. As Moderator in this case of a deprived Fellow, being re-examined before the Court of Seniors, I give you my last words. To the Court of Seniors I have to say: This is a grave decision. Go now and do justice. If you can temper justice with mercy, do so. But go and do justice.”
He stopped for a breath, and went on, turning to Dawson-Hill and me: “To these gentlemen, members of the College, experienced in the law, I have to say this. See that justice is done. Be bold. Let no man’s feelings stand in your way. Justice is more important than any man’s feelings. Speak your minds, and see that justice is done.”
Then he called to us, and we helped him back into his chair. “Now I wish you all success in your tasks. And I wish you goodbye.”
He whispered to us, as the others began to leave the study: “Was that well done?”
“Very well done,” I said.
Dawson-Hill and I had followed the others and were almost out of the room, when the old man called us all back.
“Ah! I had forgotten something essential. Indeed I had. I must insist on your all hearing it. This is positively my last instruction.” He looked at one of his pages of notes. “You intend to reach a decision on or before Wednesday next, am I right?”
“That’s what we hope. But, speaking as Master, I can’t guarantee it,” said Crawford.
“Well spoken,” said Gay. “That’s a very proper caution. That’s what I like to hear. In any case, the time’s of no consequence. There will come a time when, I hope and pray, you’ll be able to reach your decision. Stick to it, all of you, and you’ll get there in the end. This is where my instruction comes in. I wish to be informed, before there is any question of your decision taking effect. As Moderator, I must be the first person to receive your decision. I do not feel inclined to insist on the whole Court of Seniors making this journey to my house again. It will meet my requirements if these gentlemen, Eliot and Dawson-Hill, are sent to me with the findings of the Court. Is that agreed?”
“Is that all right with you two?” Brown said under his breath.
“Agreed,” said Dawson-Hill. I said yes.
“Our two colleagues have undertaken to do that,” said Crawford.
“I shall be waiting for them day or night,” Gay cried with triumph. “This is my last instruction.”
As we went out, he was repeating himself, and we could hear him until we were out on the step. All this time the taxis had been waiting. When Brown got into ours, he peered at the meter and whistled through his teeth.
That was the only comment Brown allowed himself. Otherwise, while the taxi jingled back over the bridge, he did not refer to the next day, or the reason why the three of us were bundled incongruously together, driving through the Cambridge streets. He just domesticated this situation as he had done others before it. He enquired roundly, affably, prosily, about my family as though there was nothing between us. With banal thoroughness he asked if I or Dawson-Hill would find the time to see any of the university match: he speculated about the merits of the teams. It was all as flat and cosy as a man could reasonably manage. I wondered if Dawson-Hill saw through, or beneath, the cushioned prosiness of Brown.
There was nothing flat or cosy about dinner in the combination room that night. There were eight Fellows dining, beside Dawson-Hill and me. Those eight were split symmetrically, four for Howard, and four against. The sight of Dawson-Hill and me seemed to catalyse the clash of tempers. A harmless question by Tom Orbell – how many nights would they be dining in the combination room before they went “back into hall” – brought a snub from Winslow. G S Clark was asking Skeffington, politely but with contempt – “How can you possibly believe that? If you do, I suppose you’re right to say so.” This was not over anything to do with the affair, but upon a matter of church government.
Someone made a reference to our visit. Winslow, who was presiding, said: “Yes, I must say that this is a very remarkable occasion. But I suppose we oughtn’t to ventilate our opinions while this business is what I believe in the singular language of our guests’ profession is called sub judice.”
“It’s all one to me,” said Dawson-Hill nonchalantly, “and I’m sure I can speak for Lewis.”
“No, I suggest we’d better restrain ourselves for the time being,” said Winslow. “Which, since I am credibly informed that some of our number are not now on speaking terms, may not be so difficult as might appear.”
The air was crackling. Dawson-Hill set himself to make the party go, but instead of getting less, the tension grew. At the end of the meal, I told Winslow that he would have to excuse the two of us, since we wanted to discuss the procedure. He seemed glad to see us go. As we left the combination room, I noticed that Winslow was lighting his pipe, and Skeffington reading a newspaper. No one was willing to sit round to talk and drink wine.