BACK in my rooms after the day’s session, I lay on the sofa. On the carpet the angle of the sunbeams sharpened, while I made up my mind. At last I put through two telephone calls: one to the kitchens, to say that I should not dine that evening: the other to Martin, asking him to collect the leaders of the pro-Howard party after hall.
“In my rooms?” said Martin, without other questions. For an instant I hesitated. In college, nothing went unobserved. The news would go round before we had finished talking. Then I thought, the more open the better. This wasn’t a trial-at-law, where an advocate mustn’t see his witnesses. The only tactics left to us were harsh. So, after eating alone, I went to Martin’s rooms in the full, quiet evening light.
As I was going up the staircase, Francis Getliffe followed me, on his way across from the combination room. We entered Martin’s sitting-room together. There Martin was waiting for us, with Skeffington and – to my surprise – Tom Orbell.
It was Tom who asked me first: “How did it go?”
“Badly,” I said.
“How badly?” put in Martin.
“Disastrously,” I said.
As we brought chairs round by the windows, from which one looked westward over the roofs opposite to the bright, not-yet-sunset sky, I told them that Howard was the worst witness in the world. I added that I had been pretty inept myself.
“I find that hard to believe,” said Francis Getliffe.
“No,” I said. “I wasn’t much good.”
I went on: “A lot of people would have done it better. But, and this is what I wanted to talk to you about, I’m not sure that anyone would have done the trick. I’ve got to tell you that, as things are and as they look like going, I don’t believe that this man stands a chance.”
In the golden light, Skeffington’s face shone effulgent, radiant, furious.
“That simply can’t be true,” he cried.
“As far as I can judge, it is.”
Skeffington was in a rage, which did not discriminate clearly between Howard, the Seniors and myself. “Are any of us going to wear this? Of course we’re not.”
As for Howard, Skeffington was ready to abuse him too. In fact, I had noticed in Skeffington the process one often sees in his kind of zealot. He was still, as he had been from the day of his conversion, more integrally committed to getting Howard clear than anyone in the college. His passion for giving “that chap” justice had got hotter, not more lukewarm. But as his passion for justice for Howard boiled up, his dislike for the man himself had only deepened. And there was something else, just as curious. For Howard’s sake – or rather, for the sake of getting him fair play – Skeffington was prepared to quarrel with his natural associates in the college: the religious, the orthodox, the conservative. All this on behalf of a man whom Skeffington, not now able to bear him and not given to subtle political distinctions, had come to think of as the reddest of the red. The result of this was to make Skeffington, in everything outside the affair itself, more conservative than he had ever been before. He had taken on a rabid, an almost unbalanced, strain of anti-communism. It was said, I did not know how reliable the rumour was, that he was even having doubts about voting for Francis Getliffe at the magisterial election – after all, Francis had been known to have a weakness for the left.
So he was lashing out at the Court, at Howard, and, somehow, projecting all his irritation, at me.
“I can’t credit that you haven’t got it wrong,” he cried.
“I wish I had,” I said.
“They can’t help giving him his rights. Anything else – it’s dead out.”
“Listen,” I said, “this is the time that you must believe me.”
Francis said: “We do.”
Martin nodded his head, so did Tom. I was sitting at the end of the semicircle, watching them as they faced the glowing cyclorama of the sky – Francis fine-featured and deep-orbited, Tom like a harvest moon, Martin composed, his eyes screwed up and hard. I looked at Skeffington, his head rearing handsomely above the others.
“You must believe me–” I said.
He said: “Well, you’ve been in there all day.” It was an acquiescence, it occurred to me, about as graceful as one of Howard’s.
Martin intervened: “Right, then. Where do we go next?”
He knew that I had come with something to propose. What it was, he had not guessed.
Then I started. I wanted to shock them. It was no use going in for finesse. I said that the only question which might make the Court think twice was a question we had all thought about and kept to ourselves. That is, how had the photograph got removed from the old man’s notebook? Could it have been removed deliberately? If so, by whom?
“The answer to that is simple,” I said. “If it was removed deliberately, then it was by Nightingale.”
I looked at Martin and reminded him that we had asked ourselves those questions. I believed that, even to stand a chance of getting Howard off, it had to be asked in Court. I could not guarantee that it would work. It was risky, distasteful, and at the best would leave rancour behind for a long time. Nevertheless, for the short-term purpose of justice for Howard, I had to tell them that there was no alternative move at all.
The point was, were we justified in making it? It might do Nightingale harm – no, it was bound to do him harm, innocent or guilty. How certain were we of our own ground in suspecting him? Were we going to take the responsibility of harming a man who might be innocent?
The room was hushed. Martin looked at me, brilliant-eyed, without expression. Francis’ face was dark.
It was Julian Skeffington who broke the silence.
“I’ve never been able to see how that photograph came unstuck,” he said, without his loftiness or confidence. “I don’t know what could make a chap do a thing like that. It’s not a thing I expected to think of a chap doing. Especially when he’s your senior and you’re used to seeing him at dinner.”
“Well?” I asked him.
“I don’t pretend to like it. I wish there was another way.”
“There’s no other way of giving Howard a chance. Well?”
“If you put it to me like that,” said Skeffington, reluctant but straightforward, “then I say we’ve got to go ahead.”
“So do I,” said Tom Orbell. “The trouble is, we’ve been too scrupulous all along!”
Francis cleared his throat. He disregarded Tom, and spoke straight to me.
“You were asking if we were justified, Lewis? I should like to say we weren’t. But I can’t do that.”
This startled me.
“You really think we’re right to do it?” I said.
“I’m afraid I’ve had a suspicion, from very early days.”
“Since when?”
“I’m afraid – since the three of you came to see me in the lab. last Christmas.”
That was a shock. Then, an instant later, I had another, when Martin remarked: “I’m sorry, but I disagree with you all.”
“Have you altered your mind?” I broke out.
“No, I thought about it when we last talked, but I came down on the other side.”
Mixed with my irritation, I was moved by sarcasm at my own expense. I had felt telepathically certain that we had agreed. It hadn’t been necessary to say the words. It seemed bizarre to have been so wrong, about someone one knew so well. In the whole course of the affair, this was the first occasion when Martin and I had not been at one.
“What are you holding back for?” said Tom.
“I don’t believe we’re entitled to do it.”
“Don’t you think it’s possible that Nightingale pulled that photograph out–?” Skeffington’s voice was raised.
“Don’t you remember that it was Nightingale who had it in most for Howard?” Tom joined in.
“Yes, I think it’s possible,” Martin replied to Skeffington. “But I’m not convinced it happened.”
“I’m afraid I think it’s ninety per cent probable,” said Francis.
“I don’t,” said Martin. “You’ve always distrusted Nightingale, I know. So have you, even more so,” he turned to me. “From what you’ve told me, it would have been remarkable if you hadn’t. But you don’t really believe in people trying to make a better job of their lives, do you? I know Nightingale isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, let alone yours. He’s close, he’s narrow, he’s not very fond of anyone except himself and his wife. Still, I should have thought he’d tried to become a decent member of society. I’m not prepared to kick him downstairs again unless I’m absolutely sure.”
Of these four, I was thinking, Martin was by a long way the most realistic. Yet it was the men of high principle, Skeffington and Francis, whom no one could imagine doing a shady act, who could themselves imagine Nightingale doing this. While Martin, who had rubbed about the world and been no better than his brother men, could not believe it. Was it that realistic men sometimes got lost when they met the sensational – as though they had seen a giraffe and found that they couldn’t believe it? Or was it more personal? In being willing to defend Nightingale’s change of heart, in showing a heat of feeling which came oddly from him, and which had surprised us all, was Martin really being tender to himself? For he, too, of course, had tried to make something different out of his life.
“I think there’s substance in what Martin says,” said Francis, “but still–”
“Look here,” cried Tom, eyes flat, face thrust forward, with the touch of cheerful hypomania which sometimes changed trigger-quick into temper, “from what old Lewis tells us, you’ve got this choice. Either you raise a doubt about Nightingale – which I must say seems to me a perfectly legitimate one, and it ought to have been brought out long ago – or else you leave Howard to be done down. What do you say, Martin? Is that all right?”
“It’s a hard choice,” said Martin.
“Well, you’ve got to make it.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Martin replied, without any cover at all, “Howard’s case will have to take its chance.”
“I can’t and won’t sit down under that,” said Skeffington.
“So that’s what you’d let happen, is it?” said Tom.
“No,” said Francis, “I’m afraid I’ve got to choose the other way. What about you, Lewis?”
“I’m with you,” I said.
So we settled it. Then I came to the harder part. Who was going to “raise the doubt”? I told them that it would be useless for me to do it: I gave them the reasons I had thought over to myself the night before. And also, Nightingale and I had once been enemies. Though it was years ago, men like Brown would not have forgotten that. Did they agree?
There were frowns and heavy faces as they nodded. They had all seen where this must lead. “So it’s got to be one of us,” Tom said.
“Yes,” I replied: the doubt would have to come out in Court next day, while I examined one of them.
Tom Orbell said the one word: “Who?”
There was a long pause. The sky in the west was a luminous apple-green shading into cobalt blue above the college.
“I’m damned if I like it,” said Skeffington, “but I’d better do it.”
“I don’t know enough about it, do I?” asked Tom. He was glad to be out of it, and yet half-disappointed.
Of them all, Skeffington was the last I should have selected. He did not carry weight. He had been so much the head and front of the Howard party that men did not listen to him any more. They would just dismiss this as another outburst, and the last.
I gazed at Martin. He would have been far more effective. He shook his head. “No, I can’t go back on what I said. I’ll do anything else I can: but not that.”
Just as I was turning to Skeffington, resigned to making do with him, Francis said, in a tone strained, embittered and forced: “No. I’m the best person to do it.”
Martin looked at him in consternation. They had never been specially fond of each other, but Martin said with a touch of affection, almost protectively: “But it’s not much in your line, you know.”
“Do you think I shall enjoy it?” Francis said. “But they’ll listen to me, and I’m the best person to do it.”
No man would more detest doing it. He was a man so thin-skinned that he didn’t like the ordinary wear and tear of a college argument, much less this. He was less cushioned than the rest of us. Although he had played a part in scientific affairs, he had done so by force of will, not because he fitted in. He had never toughened his hide, as most men do for self-protection, when they live in affairs. He had never acquired the sort of realistic acceptance which I, for example, could switch on. He continued to be upset when men behaved badly.
Yet despite all that, or really because of it, he was, as he said himself, the man the Court would have to listen to. Not only for his name, his seniority, but also because he was a little purer than most men.
Martin asked him to think again, but Francis was impatient.
His decision was made. He didn’t want any more talk. He wanted to do it and get it over. He knew, just as well as the politically minded, Martin and Tom Orbell, what in practical terms he was losing. All of us knew that up to that night he had a clear lead in the magisterial election. By this time next day, he would have lost one vote for sure, possibly more.
In Martin’s room, no one mentioned the election. But I did, later that night. As soon as Francis had said that he was “the best person to do it”, he got to his feet. All of us were constrained. There was some relief, certainly some expectancy in the air, but even a fluent man like Tom couldn’t find any easy words. While they were saying goodnight, Francis asked me if I would care to drive out with him and see his wife.
On our way out to their house, the same house I used to visit when we were young men, we scarcely spoke. I looked from the dashboard to the beautiful grape-dark dusk. Francis, silently driving, was both resentful at the prospect of next day, and also diffident. He had been in authority for so long, sometimes people disliked him for being overbearing, and yet he still curled up inside.
In the drawing-room, as soon as I went in, his wife Katherine cried out with pleasure. When I had first known her, nearly thirty years before, she had been a sturdy pony of a girl; now she was a matriarch. The clear, patrician Jewish features were still there, the sharp, intelligent grey eyes: but she sat statuesque in her chair, a big, heavy woman, her children grown up, massive, slow-moving, indolent, like those aunts of hers, other matriarchs, whom I had met at her father’s dinner-parties when she and I were young. And yet, though the physical transformation was dramatic, though time had done its trick, and she sat there, a middle-aged woman filling her chair – I did not quite, at least not with photographic acceptance, see her so. I did not see her as I should have seen her if I had that night come into her house for the first time, and been confronted with her – as I had been confronted with those great matriarchs of aunts, having no pictures of their past. Somehow anyone whom one has known from youth one never sees quite straight: the picture has been doubly exposed; something of themselves when young, the physical presence of themselves when young, lingers till they die.
We talked about our children. It seemed to her funny that her two eldest should be married while mine was six years old. We talked of her brother, to whom she was, after a break of years, at last reconciled. We talked of her father, who had died the year before. Then I said, in the warmth of associations flowing back: “Katherine, my dear, I’ve just done Francis a bad turn.”
“That’s pretty gross, isn’t it?” She glanced at her husband with her penetrating eyes. “What have you been up to, Lewis?”
“No,” said Francis, “we’ve all got trapped. It’s not his fault.”
“In effect, I’ve done him a bad turn.”
I explained what had happened. She knew all about the affair: she was vehemently pro-Howard. Morally, she had not altered. She still kept the passion for justice, argumentative, repetitive, but quite incorruptible, that I remembered in her and her brother when they were young. At that time, that sharp edged passion had seemed to me to be specifically Jewish: had I ever met non-Jews who felt for justice just like that? But now I had lived with Margaret for years. She had the same passion, just as contemptuous of compromise, as any of my Jewish friends. If Margaret had been present that night, she would have judged the case precisely as Katherine did.
“You hadn’t any option,” she said to Francis. “Of course you hadn’t. Don’t you admit it?”
“No doubt that will comfort me a bit, when it comes to tomorrow afternoon.” Francis, who still loved her, made that gallows-joke as though with her he had managed to relax.
“But it’s an intolerable nuisance. No, it’s worse than that–” I began.
“It’s monstrous to have to make yourself unpleasant in just that way, of course it is,” said Katherine to her husband.
“I meant something less refined,” I put in. The way I spoke recalled to her, as it was meant to recall, a private joke. When I had first entered the great houses in which she was brought up, I had been a poor young man determined to get on. I had had to play down my sensibilities, while she and her friends had been free to indulge and proliferate theirs. So they had made a legend of me, as a sort of Bazarov, unrecognisably monolithic, utterly different from what I really was, and from what they knew me to be. Somehow this legend had lasted half a lifetime: so that Katherine, whose fibres were tougher than mine, sometimes pretended at odd moments that she was a delicate, fainéante relic of a dying class being attacked by someone implacable and raw.
“Much less refined,” I said. “Look, Katherine, if Francis doesn’t become Master next autumn, it will be because of what he’s going to do tomorrow. Perhaps he’ll still get it. But if he doesn’t, it’ll be on account of this business. I want you to realise that I am partly responsible.”
“Why, I suppose he is,” she said to Francis, in a tone I did not understand – angry? sarcastic?
“It’s neither here nor there,” he replied.
“If I’d not spoken as I did tonight–”
“It would have added up to the same thing in the end.”
“Anyway,” I said to Katherine, “I’m sorry it had to be through me.”
She had been gazing at me. Her eyes were keen, appraising. Suddenly she laughed. It was a maternal laugh, a fat woman’s laugh.
“You don’t think I mind all that much, do you? I know the old thing wants it” – she grinned affectionately at Francis – “and of course anything the old thing wants he ought to get. But between ourselves I’ve never really understood why he wants it. He hasn’t done so badly anyway. And it would be an absolutely awful nuisance, don’t you admit it? I don’t mind telling you, I’m not panting to live in any beastly Lodge. Think of the people we should have to entertain. I’m not much good at entertaining. I’m getting too old to put up with being bored. Why should we put up with being bored? Answer me that.”
She chuckled. “To tell you the truth,” she said, “I’ve only got one ambition for the old thing now. That is, for him to retire. That’s the only one.”
Francis smiled at her. It had been a good marriage. But just at that instant, as she said “that’s the only one”, he couldn’t lie to himself or even pretend to us that it was the only one for him.