The Light and the Dark

by C. P. Snow

  All Roy’s rooms were high, dark, and panelled in pine which had been painted a deep chocolate brown; they were much more sparsely furnished and stark than anywhere else he had lived, although he had added to them sofas, armchairs, and his inevitable assortment of desks. The family of von Haltsdorff must have lived there in dark, dignified, austere poverty; now that Roy had leased the flat from them they had gone to live in austere poverty on their estate on the Baltic. They had permitted themselves one decoration in the dining-room; on the barn-like expanse of wall, there stood out a large painted chart on which their eyes could rest. It was the family genealogy. It began well before the Great Elector. It came down through a succession of von Haltsdorffs, all of whom had been officers in the Prussian Army. They had intermarried with other Prussian families. None had apparently had much success. The chart ended with the present head, who was a retired colonel.

  We had to pass through the dining-room on the way to Roy. I glanced at the chart, and wondered what Lord Boscastle would have said.

  Roy’s bed was placed in the middle of another high, spacious room: the bed itself had four high wooden posts. Roy was lying underneath a great pillow-like German eiderdown.

  “How are you?” I said.

  “Slightly dead,” said Roy.

  But he did not look or sound really ill. He was pale, unshaven and somewhat bedraggled. I gathered that he had had a mild influenza; his friends in the house, Ursula Mecke and the rest, had rushed round fetching him a doctor, nursing him, expressing great distress when he wanted to get up. He could not laugh it off without hurting them.

  That night I sat at his bedside while he held a kind of levee. A dozen people looked in to enquire after him as soon as they arrived home from work (they did not get home so early as their equivalents in England). Several of them stayed talking, went away for their supper, and returned after Roy had eaten his own meal. There was a clerk, a school teacher, a telephone girl, a cashier from a big shop, a librarian, a barber’s assistant, a draughtsman.

  Some of them were nervous of me, but they were used to calling on Roy, and he talked to them like a brother. It mystified them just as much. His German sounded as fluent as theirs, and after supper, when I was alone with Ursula, I asked how good it was. She said that she might not have known he was a foreigner, but she would have wondered which part of Germany he came from. It was not surprising he was so good; he was a professional linguist, had been in and out of Germany for years, and was a natural mimic. But I envied him, when I found the fog of language cutting me off from his friends. Both he and I picked up so much from words and from the feeling behind words. He could tell from the form of a sentence, from the hesitation over a word, some new event in the librarian’s life, just as piercingly as though it were Despard-Smith saying “in his own best interests”. I wanted to know these people, but I could not begin to. I saw an interesting face, Roy told me a scrap of a story, and that was all. It was a frustration.

  Faces told one something, though. The lined forehead of the librarian, with the opaque pallor one often sees in anxious people: he had a kind, gentle, terrified expression, frightened of something he might have left undone. The hare eyes and bulbous nose of the elderly woman school teacher, who had strong opinions on everything, not much sense of reality, and an unquenchable longing for adventure: at the age of fifty-eight, she had nearly saved up enough money for a holiday abroad. The diagonal profile of the draughtsman; he was musical, farouche and shy. The hot glare, swelling neck and smooth unlined cheeks of the clerk, who was a man of forty: he had got religion and sex inextricably mixed up. It was he who was keeping the barber’s assistant, Willy Romantowski; though some of the rooms in the house were very cheap, like Ursula’s, none of them would have come within that boy’s means.

  They were interesting people, and I wished I could talk to them as Roy did. Of them all, I found the little dancer the most sympathetic. I did not much like young Romantowski, but he was the oddest and perhaps the ablest of them. He had the kind of bony features one sometimes meets in effeminate men: so that really his face, and his whole physique, were strong and masculine, and his mincing smile and postures seemed more than ever bizarre. His manner was strident, he insisted on getting our attention, he was petulant, vain, selfish and extremely shrewd. He was not going to be content with a two-room flat in the Knesebeckstrasse for long. He was about twenty-two, very fair and pale: Roy called him the “white avised”, by contrast with his patron, who was the “black avised” and who doted on him,

  When they had all gone, I asked Roy their stories; he lay smoking a cigarette, and we speculated together about their lives. What would happen to the little dancer? Was there any way of getting her into a sanatorium? She must have been a delightful girl ten years before: she had wasted herself in hopeless devotions for married men: why had it happened so? Might she find a husband now? How long would Romantowski stay with his patron? Would the school teacher be disappointed in her holiday, if ever she achieved it?

  Roy was fond of them in his own characteristic fashion – unsentimental, half-malicious, on the look-out in everyone for some treat he could give without their knowing, attentive to those secret kindnesses which appeared like elaborate practical jokes.

  Perhaps he had a special tenderness for some of them, for they were riff-raff and outcasts: and often it was among such that he felt most at home.

  But I had a curious feeling as we talked about those friends of his. He was interested, scurrilous, tender – but he was cross that I had seen them. He was impatient that I had become caught up, just as it might have been in Pimlico, in a tangle of human lives. Whatever he had invited me for, it was not for that.

  26: Loss of a Temper

  Although Roy got up the day after I arrived, it was too cold for him to leave the house. Through the afternoon and evening, we sat in the great uncomfortable drawing-room, and for a long time we were left alone.

  All the time, I knew that Roy did not want us to be left alone. He was listening for steps in the hall, a knock on the door – not for any particular person, just anyone who would disturb us.

  I was distressed, apprehensive, at a loss. He was affectionate, for that was his first nature. He was even amusing, as he made the minutes pass by mimicking some of our colleagues: but he would have done the same to an acquaintance in the combination room. I felt he was desperately sad, but he did not utter a word about it: once he had been spontaneous in his sadness, but not now. He seemed to be suppressing sadness, suppressing any relief, suppressing any desire to let me know. It was as though he had fixed his eyes on something apart from us both.

  There was one interruption, when for a few minutes he behaved as in the old days. By the afternoon post he received a letter with a German stamp on; I saw him study the postmark and the handwriting with a frown. As he read the note, which was on a single piece of paper, the frown became fixed and guilty.

  “She’s run me down,” he said. Joan had arrived in Berlin, and was staying with the Eggars. Roy looked at me, as he used to when he was out-manoeuvred by a woman from whom he was trying to escape. For Joan he had a special feeling; he thought of her more gravely than of any woman, and with incomparably more remorse; yet there were times when she seemed just another mistress, and when he felt he was going through the accustomed moves.

  He was confused. Clean breaks did not come easy to him. He would have liked to spend that night with Joan. If it had been someone who minded less, like Rosalind, he would have rung her up on the spot. But he could not behave carelessly with Joan. He had done so once, and it was a burden he could not shift.

  So he sat, irresolute, rueful, badgered. There was something extremely comic about the winning end of a love affair, I thought. It needed Lady Boscastle’s touch. For she never had much sympathy with the agony of the loser, the one who loved the more, the one who ate out her heart for a lover who was becoming more indifferent. Lady Boscastle had not suffered much in that fashion. She had been the winner in to
o many love affairs – and so she was superlatively acid about the comic dilemmas of love.

  At last Roy decided. There was no help for it: he must meet Joan; it was better to meet her in public. He started to arrange a party, before he spoke to her. From his first call, it was clear the party would be an eccentric one. For he rang up Schäder, his most influential friend in the German government. From Roy’s end of the conversation, I gathered that Schäder was free for a very late dinner the following night and that he insisted on being the host. When Roy had put down the telephone, he looked at me with acute, defiant eyes.

  “Excellent. I needed you to meet him. He is an interesting man.”

  I asked what exactly his job was. Roy said that he was the equivalent of a Minister in England, the kind of Minister who is just on the fringe of the cabinet.

  “He’s extremely young,” said Roy. “About your age. You must forget your preconceived ideas. He’s not a bit stuffed.”

  They had arranged that Roy should invite the party. He found one German friend already booked, but got hold of Ammatter, the orientalist whom I had met in Cambridge. Then he rang up Joan. She was demanding to see him at once, that afternoon, that night: Roy nearly weakened, but held firm. At last she acquiesced. I could imagine the fierce, sullen, miserable resignation with which she turned away. She was to bring Eggar “if he does not think it will set him back a peg or two”. Roy also invited Eggar’s wife, but she was expecting a child in the next fortnight. “It looks like being Joan and five men,” he said. He was smiling fondly and mockingly, as he must have done when they were in love.

  “That’s her idea of a social evening. A well-balanced little party. She likes feeling frivolous, you know. Because it’s not her line.” He sighed. “Oh – there’s no one like her, is there?”

  The next morning, he was well enough to take me for a walk through the Berlin streets. It was still freezingly cold, and the sky was steely. The weather had not changed since the German army marched into Prague, a few days before I set out. Outside Roy’s house, the pavement rang with our footsteps in the cold: the street was empty under the bitter sky. Roy was wearing earcaps, as though he were just going to plunge into a scrum.

  He took me on a tour under the great grey buildings; lights twinkled behind the office windows; the shops and cafés were full, people jostled us on the pavements, the air was frosty and electric; an aeroplane zoomed invisibly overhead, above the even pall of cloud. We walked past the offices of the Friedrichstrasse and the Wilhelmstrasse; the rooms were a blaze of light. Roy was only speaking to tell me what the places were. He showed me Schäder’s ministry, a heavy nineteenth century mansion. Official motor cars went hurtling by, their horns playing an excited tune.

  We came to the Linden. The trees were bare, but the road was alive with cars and the pavements crammed with men and women hurrying past. Roy stopped for a moment and looked down the great street. He broke his silence.

  “It has great power,” he said. “Don’t you feel that it has great power?”

  He spoke with extreme force. As he spoke, I knew for sure what I had already suspected: he had brought me to Berlin to convert me.

  For the rest of that morning we argued, walking under the steely sky through the harsh, busy streets. We had never had an argument before – now it was painful, passionate, often bitter. We knew each other’s language, each of us knew all the experience the other could command, it was incomparably more piercing than arguing with a stranger.

  When once we began, we could not leave it all day; on and off we came back to the difference between us. Most of the passion and bitterness was on my side. I was not reasonable that day, either as we walked the streets or sat in his high cold rooms. I kept breaking out with incredulity and rancour. We were still talking violently, when it was ten o’clock and time to leave for the Adlon.

  He seemed to be using his gifts, his imagination, his penetrating insight, his clear eyes, for a purpose that I detested. He had not wanted me to become absorbed in the rag tag and bobtail of the Knesebeckstrasse. He loved them, but it was not that part of Germany he wanted me to see. They did not talk politics, except to grumble passively at laws and taxes which impinged on them; the only political remarks on the night I arrived were a few diatribes against the régime by the school teacher, who was as usual opinionated, hot-headed and somewhat half-baked. Roy warned her to be careful outside the house. There was an asinine endearingness about her.

  Roy wanted me to see the revolution. That day he made his case for it, in a temper that was better than mine, though even his was sometimes sharp; sometimes he put in mischievous digs, as though anxious to lighten my mood. He had set out to convince me that the Nazis had history on their side.

  The future would be in German hands. There would be great suffering on the way, they might end in a society as dreadful as the worst of this present one: but there was a chance – perhaps a better chance than any other – that in time, perhaps in our life time, they would create a brilliant civilisation.

  “If they succeed,” said Roy, “everyone will forget the black spots. In history success is the only virtue.”

  He knew how to use the assumptions that all our political friends made at that period. He had not lived in the climate of “fellow travellers” for nothing. Francis Getliffe, like many other scientists, had moved near to the communist line: we had all been affected by that climate of thought. Men needed to plan on a superhuman scale, said Roy with a hint of the devil quoting scripture; Europe must be one, so that men could plan wide and deep enough; soon the world must be one. How could it become one except by force? Who had both the force and the will? No price was too high to pay, to see the world made one. “It won’t be made one by reason. Men never give up jobs and power unless they must.”

  Only the Germans or Russians could do it. They had both got energy set free, through a new set of men seizing power. “They’ve got the energy of a revolution. It comes from very deep.” They had both done dreadful things with it, for men in power always did dreadful things. But the Promethean force might do something wonderful. “Either of them might. I’ve told you before, the truth lies at both extremes,” said Roy. “But I’ll back these people. They’re slightly crazy, of course. All revolutionaries are slightly crazy. That’s why they are revolutionaries. A good solid well-adjusted man like Arthur Brown just couldn’t be one. I’m not sure that you could. But I could, Lewis. If I’d been born here, I should have been.”

  Not many people had the nature to be revolutionaries, said Roy. And those who had, felt dished when they had won their revolution and then could not keep their own jobs. Like the old Bolsheviks. Like Röhm. The Nazis had collected an astonishing crowd of bosses – some horrible, some intensely able, some wild with all the turbulent depth of the German heart. “That’s why something may come of them,” said Roy. “They may be crazy, but they’re not commonplace men. You won’t believe it, but one or two of them are good. Good, I tell you.”

  It was that fantastic human mixture that had taken hold of him. They were men of flesh and bone. They were human. He said one needed to choose between them and the Russians. He had made his choice. Communism was the most dry and sterile of human creeds – “no illustrations, no capital letters. Life is more mixed than that. Life is richer than that. It’s darker than the communists think. They’re optimistic children. Life is darker than they think, but it’s also richer. You know it is. Think of their books. They’re the most sterile and thinnest you’ve ever seen.” Roy talked of our communist friends. “They’re shallow. They can’t feel anything except moral indignation. They’re not human. Lewis, I can’t get on with them any more.”

  Inflamed by anxiety and anger, I accused him of being perverse and self-destructive: of being intoxicated by the Wagnerian passion for death; of losing all his sense through meeting, for the first time, men surgent with a common purpose: of being seduced by his liking for Germany, by the ordinary human liking for people one has lived among for
long.

  “This isn’t the time to fool yourself,” I cried. “If ever there was a time to keep your head–”

  “Are you keeping yours?” said Roy quietly. He pointed to the mirror behind us. His face was sombre, mine was white with anger. I had lost my temper altogether. I accused him of being overwhelmed by his success in Berlin, by the flattery and attentions.

  “Not fair,” said Roy. “You’ve forgotten that you used to know me. Haven’t you?”

  Out of doors, as we walked to the Adlon, the night was sullen. The mercury-vapour lamps shone livid on the streets and on the lowering clouds. We made our way beneath them, and I recovered myself a little. Partly from policy: it was not good to let a man like Schäder see us shaken. But much more because of that remark of Roy’s: “You used to know me”. He had said it without a trace of reproach. Deeper than any quarrel, we knew each other. Walking in the frosty night, I felt a pang of intolerable sorrow.

  At the hotel, we were shown into a private room, warm, glowing, soft-carpeted, the table glittering with linen, silver, and glass. Houston Eggar had decided that the party would not harm his prospects; he gave us his tough, cheerful greeting, and talked to us and Joan in a manner that was masculine, assertive, anxious to make an impression, both on the niece of Lord Boscastle and on a comely woman. He had also noted me down as potentially useful – not useful enough to make him fix a lunch during my remaining days in Berlin, but quite worth his trouble to say with matey heartiness that we must “get together soon”. I had a soft spot for Eggar. There was something very simple and humble about his constant, untiring, matter-of-fact ambitiousness. Incidentally, he was only a counsellor at forty-five: he had still to make up for lost time.