The Light and the Dark

by C. P. Snow

  Roy was going through his first practice flights at night. He said simply that he hated it.

  “Why?” said Arthur Brown.

  “It’s dreadful, flying at night. Dark. Cold. Lonely. And you lose your way.”

  It was the last phrase which made Arthur Brown frown. He interrupted Roy. He just could not believe it. Hadn’t our aeroplanes got to learn to attack individual factories? Roy replied, that up to six months ago they had done well to get to the right country. Brown was angry: what was all this he had heard about factories going up in sheets of flame? And all this about pin-pointing targets? He regarded all those reports as too well established to doubt. I joined in on Roy’s side. Arthur Brown was discomfited, out of humour with both of us, still not convinced. For a man so shrewd in his own world, he was curiously credulous about official news. (I remembered Schäder’s remarks on how propaganda convinced everybody in time.) Here were Roy and I, his protégés and close friends: he loved us and trusted us: he realised that we both knew the facts, Roy in the flesh, I on paper: yet he found it hard to believe us, against the official news of The Times and the BBC.

  But he smiled again, benignly, enjoying the treat he had prepared for us, as soon as we got back into the combination room. Two decanters stood ready on the table, one of port, one of claret. In front of them was a basket of silver wicker work, full of walnuts.

  “They’re a bit special,” said Arthur Brown, as he confided in a discreet whisper what the two wines were. “I’m going to ask for the pleasure of presenting them. I thought they’d be rather bracing on a foggy night. It’s splendid to have the two of you back at once.”

  We filled our glasses. The crack of the nuts was a cheerful noise. It was a night in that room such as we had often known in other autumns. There were wisps of mist in the courts, and the leaves were falling from the walls. Here it was warm; the rich curtains glowed placidly, the glasses gleamed; even though one liked claret better than port, perhaps one could do no better than drink port with the nuts.

  Arthur Brown smiled at Roy. Despard-Smith expressed thanks in a grating voice, cracked more nuts than any of us, rang the bell and asked why salt had not been served. He finished his first glass of port before the decanter had come round to him again.

  We talked as we had talked in other autumns. The Master of another college had died suddenly, whom would they elect? We produced some names in turn. Despard-Smith rejected all of ours solemnly and disapprovingly. One: “I have heard things against him.” Another: “That would be catastrophic, Eliot. The man’s no better than a bolshevik.” A third (whose wife had deserted him twenty years before): “I should not think his college would be easy about his private life. They ought not to take the risk of electing someone unstable. It might bring the place down round their ears.”

  Then he made his own suggestion.

  “Isn’t he extremely stuffed?” said Roy lightly.

  Despard-Smith looked puzzled, deaf, and condemnatory.

  “Stuffed,” Roy repeated.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, Calvert. He’s a very sound man. He’s not a showman, but he’s sacrificed himself for his college.”

  Once, I thought, Roy would have followed up with mystifying questions. But he sat back, smiled, drank his wine, and played no trick. By now Despard-Smith had got into his stride. He was, in the Master’s absence, acting as chairman of the livings committee. It happened that the college’s best living was still vacant. The last incumbent had gone off to become an archdeacon. The committee, which for the moment meant Despard-Smith, could not make up its mind. In reality, the old man could not bear to bestow so desirable a prize. Most of the college livings were worth four or five hundred a year, since they had not risen as the value of money fell; but this one was nearly two thousand. In the nineteenth century it had meant riches, and there had been some resolute jockeying on the part of fellows to secure it in time for their marriage. It was then, and still remained, one of the richer livings of the Church of England. Even now, it would give some clergyman a comfortable middle-class life.

  “It’s a heavy responsibility,” said Despard-Smith. He began to run through all the old members of the college who were in orders. He disapproved of all of them, except one or two who, for different reasons, could not be offered this living. One man had the month before taken one at three hundred and fifty a year. “It would be no kindness to him,” said Despard-Smith, “to go so far as mention this vacancy. He is a man of conscience, and he would not want to leave a charge he has just undertaken.”

  Brown pleaded this man’s cause. “It’s wretched luck,” he said. “Can’t we find a way round? I should regard it as legitimate to put in someone for a decent interval, say a year or two–”

  “I’m afraid that would be a scandalous dereliction of duty,” said Despard-Smith. No one ever got more relish out of moral judgments. No one was more certain of them.

  Winslow drank another glass of claret, and took no part. He used, in his style as a nineteenth-century unbeliever, to make caustic interjections on “appointments in this mysterious profession”. He used to point out vinegarishly that he had not once attended chapel. Now he had not the heart for satire.

  Despard-Smith looked at Roy with gloomy satisfaction.

  “I seem to remember that Udal was a friend of yours, Calvert. He was your exact contemporary, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Just so,” said Roy.

  “I needn’t say that we have carefully considered whether we could invite him to take Melton. He is a man of higher intellectual quality than we are accustomed to get in the Church in its present disastrous condition. We have given Udal’s name the most careful consideration, Calvert. I am very sorry to say that we don’t feel able to approach him. It would only do him harm to give him exceptional promotion at his age. I was very sorry, but naturally we were thinking entirely of the man himself.”

  Roy was looking at him with bright, piercing, steady eyes.

  “You must not say that, Despard,” said Roy, in a clear and deliberate tone. “It is not so.”

  “What do you mean, Calvert?” said Despard-Smith, with grating anger.

  “I mean that you’ve not thought of Udal at all. You don’t know him. He is a very difficult man to know. You have no idea what is best for him. And you do not care. You must not say these things.”

  “I’m not prepared to listen,” Despard-Smith was choking. “Scandalous to think that my responsibility–”

  Roy’s eyes were fixed on the old clergyman’s, which were bleared, full, inflamed.

  “You like your responsibility,” said Roy. “You like power very much. You must not disguise things so much, Despard. You must not pretend.”

  Roy had spoken throughout calmly, simply, and with extreme authority. It was exactly – I suddenly remembered – as he had spoken to Willy Romantowski; he had even used the same words. I had seen him with many kinds of human beings, in many circumstances: those two, the old clergyman and the young blackmailing spy, were the only ones I had ever heard him judge.

  Arthur Brown hurriedly filled Despard-Smith’s glass. I thought there was a faint appreciative twinkle under Winslow’s hooded lids. The party got back to ordinary small talk. That room was used to hard words. The convention was strong that, after a quarrel, the room made an attempt at superficial peace.

  So, for a few minutes, we did now. Then we broke up, and Arthur Brown took Roy and me to his rooms. He finished off his treat for us by giving us glasses of his best brandy.

  Then he settled himself down to give a warning.

  “I must say,” he scolded Roy, “that I wish you hadn’t gone for old Despard. I know he’s maddening. But he’ll stick about in this college for a long time yet, you know, and he still might be able to put a spoke in your wheel. There’s no point in making an unnecessary enemy. I wish you’d wait till you’ve absolutely arrived.”

  “No, Arthur.” Roy smiled. “We wait too long, you know. There isn’t so mu
ch time.”

  “I expect you think I’m a cautious old woman,” said Arthur Brown, “but I’m only anxious to see you getting all the honours this place can give you. I am anxious to have that happiness before I die.”

  “I know, Arthur,” said Roy. “But I shall need to say a word now and then.”

  He said it with affection and gratitude, to the man who had guarded his career with such unselfishness and so much worldly skill. But he meant more than he said. He meant that his pupilage was quite over. He was mature now. He had learned from his life. For the rest of his time, he would know what mattered to him, whom and what to take risks for, and when to speak.

  Roy took another brandy, and set Arthur Brown talking about his water colours. Roy was in no hurry to be left alone with me; he had sensed what I had come to ask, and was avoiding it. Brown liked staying with us, and it was reluctantly that he pressed our hands, said how splendid it would be when we both returned for good, promised to save “something special” to celebrate the occasion.

  Roy and I went up to my sitting-room. It struck dank through being empty for so long; there was a low smouldering fire, built up of slack.

  “The old devil,” said Roy, grinning at the thought of Bidwell: since I went away, my rooms were being slowly and methodically stripped of their smaller objects.

  I pulled down the old iron draught-screen to its lowest socket. Soon the flames began to roar. Roy pushed the sofa in front of the fireplace, and lay with his legs crossed, his hands behind his head.

  I sat in my armchair. Those had been our habitual places in that room. I looked at him, and said: “I want to talk a little.”

  “Better leave it,” he said. “Much better to leave it,” he repeated insistently.

  “No,” I said. “I must know.”

  “Just so,” said Roy.

  “I didn’t say much when you chose to–”

  I hesitated, and Roy said, in a light, quiet tone: “Try to get myself killed.”

  “It was too clear,” I said.

  “I got tired of struggling,” he said. “I thought it was time for me to resign.”

  “I knew that,” I said. “I hadn’t the heart to speak.”

  “I told you once,” he said with desperate feeling, “you’d done all you could. Believe me. No one on earth could have done as much.”

  I shook my head.

  “I was no use to you in the end,” I said.

  “Everyone is alone. Dreadfully alone,” said Roy. “You’ve thought that often enough, haven’t you? One hates it. But it’s true.”

  “Sometimes,” I said, in pain, “it does not seem so true.”

  “Often,” Roy repeated, “it does not seem so true.” Suddenly he smiled brilliantly. “I’m not as tough as you. Sometimes it wasn’t true. I’ve not been alone always. You may have been – but I’ve not.”

  I could not smile back.

  “I hadn’t the heart to speak,” I said slowly. “It was too clear what had happened to you. But I didn’t understand one thing. Why did you make that particular choice? Why did you decide to go and fly?”

  With one quick move he sat upright. His eyes met mine, but they were troubled, distraught, almost – shifty.

  He was for once not ready with a word.

  “Was it,” I said, “because of that night in Dolphin Square? When you asked me what was the most dangerous thing to do?”

  “Oh God,” said Roy, “that was why I kept it from you. I was afraid you’d guess. I didn’t want you to learn from other people. But if I’d told you myself what I was doing, I should have given it away. You’d have remembered that night.”

  “I remember it now,” I said.

  “It was only a chance,” he said violently. “We happened to be talking. If I hadn’t seen you that night, I should have asked someone else. We happened to be talking, that was all.”

  “What I said – decided you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You might have spared me that,” I cried.

  We looked at each other; quite suddenly, reproach, remorse, guilt, all died away; the moment could hold them no more. There was no room for anything but the understanding which had sustained us for so long. We had the comfort of absolute acceptance.

  In a tone that was simple and natural, Roy said: “I wasn’t mad when I decided to resign, you know. I couldn’t struggle any more, but I wasn’t a bit mad. Did you think I should be?”

  “I wasn’t sure,” I said, just as easily.

  “I thought you might feel that I did it when I was lashing out. As I did with poor old Winslow once. No, it wasn’t so. I haven’t had one of those fits for quite a long time. But I’d been depressed for years. Until I threw in my hand. I was sad enough when you saw me, wasn’t I? I was much worse when you weren’t there. It was dreadful, Lewis.”

  “I knew,” I said.

  “Of course you did. I was quite lucid, though. All the time. Just like that night in May week. When I threw in my hand, I was frightfully lucid. Perhaps if everyone were as lucid as that, they would throw in their hand too.” He smiled at me. “I’ve always felt you covered your eyes at the last minute. Otherwise why should you go on?”

  It was half-envious, half-ironic: it was so intimate that it lit our faces: with magic, it lit up the room.

  “You’ll always have a bit of idiot hope, won’t you?” said Roy. “I’m glad that you always will.”

  “Sometimes I think you have,” I said. “Deeper than any of your thoughts.”

  Roy smiled.

  “It’s inconvenient – if I have it now.”

  He went on: “What would have happened to me, Lewis, if there hadn’t been a war? I don’t know. I believe it wouldn’t have made much difference. I should have come to a bad end.”

  He smiled again, and said: “It makes things a bit sharper, that’s all. One can’t change one’s mind. It holds one to it. That’s all.”

  The fire had flared up now, and his face was rosy in the glow. The shadows exaggerated his smile. We talked on, so attuned that each word resounded in the other’s heart. And at the same moment that I felt closer to him than I had ever done, I was seized and shaken by the most passionate sense of his nature, his life, his fate. It was a sense which shook me with resentment, fear and pity, with horror and unassuageable anxiety, with wonder, illumination and love. I accepted his nature with absolute gratitude; but I could not accept how fate had played with him and caught him. While I delighted in our talk that night, I cried to myself with the bitterness of pity; to know him was one of the two greatest gifts in my life; and yet it was anguish to see how his life had brought him to this point.

  He had once said, just before the only flaw in our intimacy, that I believed in predestination. It was not true in full, though it was true as he meant it. I believed that neither he nor any of us could alter the essence of our nature, with which we had been born. I believed that he would not have been able to escape for good from the melancholy, the depth of despondency, the uncontrollable flashes and the brilliant calm, the light and dark of his nature. That was his endowment. Despite his courage, the efforts of his will, his passionate vitality, he could not get rid of that burden. He was born to struggle, to pursue false hopes, to know despair – to know what, for one of his nature, was an intolerable despair. For, with the darkness on his mind, he could not avoid seeing himself as he was, with all hope and pretence gone.

  Most men are saved from that tragic suffering. Nothing could have saved him. Knowing him – as I realised on that walk by the Serpentine years before – I was bound to watch him go through his journey, sometimes hopeful, sometimes tormented, often both together, until in the white and ruthless light of self-knowledge, he perceived himself.

  So far, I believed in what he called “predestination”. I believed that some parts of our endowment are too heavy to shift. The essence of our nature lay within us, untouchable by our own hands or any other’s, by any chance of things or persons, from the cradle to the grave. B
ut what it drove us to in action, the actual events of our lives – those were affected by a million things, by sheer chance, by the interaction of others, by the choice of our own will. So between essence and chance and will, Roy had, like the rest of us, had to live his life.

  It was the interplay of those three that had brought him to that moment in my room, smiling, talking of his “bad end”. They had brought him to his present situation. I felt the delight of our intimacy – and from his situation I shrank back in anguish and appalled.

  For it could have happened otherwise. In any case, perhaps, he would have known despair so black that he would have been driven to “throw in his hand”, he would have felt it was time to “resign”. That was what he meant by a “bad end”. If we had been born in a different time, when the outside world was not so violent, it was easy to imagine ways along which he might have gone. He might not have been driven into physical danger: he might have tried to lose himself in exile or the lower depths. But that was not his luck. He had had to make his choice in the middle of a war. And war, as he said, “held one to it”. It made his choice one of life and death. It was irrevocable. It gave no time for the obstinate hope of the fibres, which underlay even his dark vision of the mortal state, to collect itself, steady him, and help him to struggle on.

  And I felt that hope was gathering in him now. Through his marriage, through his child, perhaps ironically through the very fact that he had “resigned” and needed to trouble no more, he had come out of the dark. Perhaps he had married Rosalind because he did not trouble any more; it was good for him not to care. He was more content than he had been since his youth. Hope was pulsing within him, the hope which is close to the body and part of the body’s life, the hope that one possesses just because one is alive.