The Masters by C. P. Snow Page A

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