The Masters

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.

He waited. Then he said: ‘I had to break the news to one or two of our colleagues in hall tonight. I hadn’t thought of it myself; but they pointed out there was a consequence we couldn’t put aside.’
He waited again, then said quickly: ‘In a few weeks, in a few months at most, the college will have to elect a new Master.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘When the time arrives, we shall have to do it in a hurry,’ said Jago. ‘I suppose before then we shall have made up our minds whom we are going to elect.’

‘I’m relieved to find you in, Eliot,’ he said, looking at me across the fireplace. ‘I had to see you tonight. I shouldn’t have rested if I’d had to wait until the morning.’
‘What has happened?’
‘You know,’ said Jago, ‘that they were examining the Master today?’
I nodded. ‘I was going to ask at the Lodge tomorrow morning.’
‘I can tell you,’ said Jago. ‘I wish I couldn’t!’
He paused, and went on: ‘He went into hospital last night. They put a tube down him this morning and sent him home. The results came through just before dinner. It is utterly hopeless. At the very most – they give him six months.’
‘What is it?’
‘Cancer. Absolutely inoperable.’ Jago’s face was dark with pain. He said: ‘I hope that when my time comes it will come in a kinder way.’
We sat silent. I thought of the Master, with his confidential sarcasms, his spare and sophisticated taste, his simple religion. I thought of the quarrels he and Jago had had for so many years.
Though I had not spoken, Jago said: ‘It’s intolerable to me, Eliot, to think of Vernon Royce going like this.

Jago was walking very slowly round the court, past the door of the Lodge, past the combination room window, past the hall, back under Brown’s window. He walked slowly, luxuriously, with no sign of his usual active, jerky step. He began to walk round again, and as he turned we saw his face. It was brilliant with joy. He looked at the grass as though he were feeling: ‘my grass’. He trod on the path, and then strayed, for the love of it, on the cobbles; ‘my path, my cobbles’. He stood for a long moment in the middle of the court, and gazed round him in exaltation: ‘my college’.

The quarters chimed, first from a distance away, then from Great St Mary’s, then from the college clock, then from a college close by