The Masters by C. P. Snow Page B

certain that there was a web of plans from which he would lose and others gain. If I had told him I, too, was thinking of Jago, he would have seen meanings behind that choice, and it might have turned him from Jago himself. As it was, Jago’s seemed the one name that did not arouse his suspicion and envy that night.
    I looked round his sitting-room. It was without feature, it was the room of a man concentrated into himself, so that he had nothing to spend outside; it showed nothing of the rich, solid comfort which Brown had given to his, or the eccentric picturesqueness of Roy Calvert’s. Nightingale was a man drawn into himself. Suspicion and envy lived in him. They always would have done, however life had treated him; they were part of his nature. But he had been unlucky, he had been frustrated in his most cherished hope, and now envy never left him alone.
    He was forty-three, and a bachelor. Why he had not married, I did not know: there was nothing unmasculine about him. That was not, however, his abiding disappointment. He had once possessed great promise. He had known what it was to hold creative dreams: and they had not come off. That was his bitterness. As a very young man he had shown a spark of real talent. He was one of the earliest theoretical chemists. By twenty-three he had written two good papers on molecular structure. He had, so I was told, anticipated Heitler-London and the orbital theory; he was ten years ahead of his time. The college had elected him, everything seemed easy. But the spark burnt out. The years passed. Often he had new conceptions; but the power to execute them had escaped from him.
    It would have been bitter to the most generous heart. In Nightingale’s, it made him fester with envy. He longed in compensation for every job within reach, in reason, and out of reason. It was morbid that he should have fancied his chances of the tutorship before Brown, his senior and a man made for the job; but it rankled in him after a dozen years. Each job in the college for which he was passed over, he saw with intense suspicion as a sign of the conspiracy directed against him.
    His reputation in his subject was already gone. He would not get into the Royal Society now. But, as March came round each year, he waited for the announcement of the Royal elections in expectation, in anguish, in bitter suspiciousness, at moments in the knowledge of what he might have been.

 
6:  Streets in the Thaw
     
    It began to thaw that night, and by morning the walls of my bedroom carried dank streaks like the tracks of a snail. Lying in bed, I could hear the patter of drops against the window ledge. ‘Dirty old day underfoot, sir,’ Bidwell greeted me. ‘Mr Calvert sends his compliments, and says he’d send his galoshes too, if he could persuade you to wear them.’
    I had scarcely seen Roy Calvert alone since he returned; he called in for a few minutes after breakfast on his way to pay visits round the town. ‘They’d better know I am alive.’ He grinned. ‘Or else Jago will be sending out a letter.’ It was one of Jago’s customs to ‘send out a letter’ whenever a member of the college died; it was part of the intimate formality which, to Roy Calvert, was comic without end. He went out through the slush to pay his visits; he had a great range of acquaintances in Cambridge, and he arranged to visit them in an order shaped partly by kindness, partly by caprice. The unhappy, the dim, the old and passed over, even those whom anyone else found tedious and ordinary, could count on his company; while the important, the weighty, the established – sometimes, I thought in irritation, anyone who could be the slightest use to him – had to wait their turn.
    Before he went out, he arranged for us both to have tea in the Lodge, where he was a favourite. He would go himself earlier in the afternoon, to talk to the Master. So at teatime I went over alone, and waited in the empty drawing-room. The afternoon was