The Sleep of Reason Read Online Free PDF Page B

senior members existed to add to knowledge. If they couldn’t do that, they shouldn’t be there. Some of them had to teach. The students existed only to be taught. They came to learn. They weren’t there for social therapy. They weren’t there to be made useful to the state: that was someone else’s job. Very few people could either add to knowledge, or even acquire it. If they couldn’t, get rid of them. He wanted fewer university students, not more. Fewer and better. This university ought to be half its present size.
    I heard Hargrave, who didn’t speak often, say that he couldn’t agree. I heard Denis Geary arguing patiently, and turned my head away. I met Vicky’s frown, troubled and cross. I tried to distract her, but she was on edge, like someone conducting an intolerable interview, waiting to call time.
    For myself, I couldn’t intervene: Shaw thought that I was not stupid, but misguided, perhaps deliberately so, and that provoked him more. I let my thoughts drift, wondering why, when I was young, I hadn’t known Denis Geary better. He was a good man, and his character had worn well: he had become more interesting than many who had once, for me, outshone him. But, of course, one doesn’t in youth really choose one’s friends: it is only later, perhaps too late, that one wishes, with something like the obverse of nostalgia, that it had been possible to choose.
    The men alone, the port, more of the political testimony of Arnold Shaw. But, despite the luxurious meals, parties at the Residence had a knack of finishing early. All the guests had left, with suitable expressions of reluctance, by 10.45.
    Tyres ground on the gravel, and Arnold returned to the drawing-room, lips pursed in triumph.
    “I call that a good party,” he proclaimed to Vicky and me, challenging us to deny it. Then he said to Vicky, affectionate, reproachful: “But I must say, you might have kept young Getliffe behind a bit–”
    I had to save her. I said: “Look, Arnold, I do rather want a word with you.”
    “About what?”
    “You know about what, don’t you?”
    He glared at me with hot, angry eyes. He decided that there was nothing for it, and said with increasing irascibility that we had better go to his study.
    Before I had sat down, beside the reading lamp in front of the scholar’s bookshelves, ladder close by, he said: “I warn you, it’s no use.”
    “Listen to me for a minute.”
    “It’s no use.”
    “I’m thinking of you,” I said.
    “I don’t want anyone to think of me.”
    What I had just told him happened to be true. I was not exerting myself, and not crossing wills, entirely – or even mainly – for Vicky’s sake. I should have been hard put to it to define my feeling for him, but it contained strata both of respect and affection. Whether he believed that or not, I didn’t know: he was not used to being liked: if someone did appear to like him, it affected him with something between exasperation and surprise.
    He poured out whiskies for us both, but became more ugly-tempered still. It was the kind of temper that is infectious, and I had to make myself keep my own. I told him that tomorrow’s meeting wasn’t just a matter of form: if he pressed for the Court to confirm his verdict, then he would certainly get a majority: some would vote against, certainly Geary, probably Leonard Getliffe and two or three of the younger academics. I should, I said in a matter-of-fact tone, vote against it myself.
    “Vote against anything you like,” he snapped.
    “I shall,” I said.
    He would get a clear majority. But didn’t he realise that most of the people voting for him nevertheless thought he had been too severe?
    “That’s neither here nor there.”
    “It is, you know,” I said.
    I tried another tactic. He must admit, I said, that most of the people we knew – probably most people in the whole society – didn’t really regard fornication as a serious offence. In secret they didn’t regard it as an