by C. P. Snow
I asked, impatient at this new turn, where that would be.
‘Rudd thinks he will get them all,’ said Drawbell.
‘Will he?’
‘Not on your life. It’s not good for anyone to think they’re the only runners in the field.’
He gave a cheerful, malevolent chuckle. One could tell how he enjoyed using his power, keeping his assistants down to their proper level, dividing and ruling.
To complete the surprise, he was proposing to reinforce Luke whom he disliked, whom he had heard disparaged for weeks.
‘It doesn’t matter who brings it off,’ he said, ‘so long as someone does.’
He nodded, for once quite natural: ‘I don’t know whether you pray much, Eliot, but I pray God that my people here will get it first. Pray God we get it.’
7: Voice from a Bath
LOOKING back, I re-examined all I could remember of those early conversations at Barford, searching for any sign of troubled consciences. I was tempted to antedate the conflict which later caused some of them suffering. But it would have been quite untrue.
There was a simple reason why it should be so. All of them knew that the enemy was trying to make a fission bomb. For those who had a qualm of doubt, that was a complete ethical solvent. I had not yet heard from any of the scientists, nor from my friends in government, a single speculation as to whether the bomb should be used. It was just necessary to possess it.
When Drawbell prayed that the Barford project might succeed, he was not speaking lightly; he happened to have kept intact his religious faith. In different words, Puchwein and the fellow-travellers, for just then there was no political divide, would have uttered the same prayer, and so should I.
When I first heard the fission bomb discussed in the Minister’s room, my response had been the same as Francis Getliffe’s, that is, to hope it would prove physically impossible to make. But in the middle of events, close to Martin and Luke and the others, I could not keep that up. Imperceptibly my hopes had become the same as theirs, that we should get it, that we should get it first. To myself I added a personal one: that Martin would play a part in the success.
During my November visit to Barford my emotions about the project were as simple as that, and they remained so for a long time.
Yet, soon after that visit, I was further from expecting a result even than I had been before. Within quite a short time, a few weeks, the wave of optimism, which had been stirred up by Drawbell, died away; others began to accept what Martin had warned me of by the Barford bridge. It was nothing so dramatic as a failure or even a mistake; it was simply that men realized they had underestimated the number of men, the amount of chemical plant, the new kinds of engineering, the number of years, before any of the methods under Rudd could produce an ounce of metal.
Then America came into the war, and within a few weeks had assigned several thousand scientists to the job. The Barford people learned of it with relief, but also with envy and a touch of resentment. There seemed nothing left for them to do. A good many of them were sent across to join the American projects. The Minister, whose own post had become shaky, was being pushed into letting others go.
By the early summer of 1942, the argument had begun as to whether or not Barford should be disbanded.
Just as that argument was starting, we heard the first rumours of Luke’s idea. Could the Canadians be persuaded to set up a heavy-water plant? the Minister was asked. If so, Luke saw his way through the rest.
No one believed it. The estimates came in, both of money and men. They were modest. No one thought they were realistic. Nearly all the senior scientists, though not Francis Getliffe, thought the idea ‘long-haired’.
Following suit, Hector Rose was coming down against it, and deciding that the sensible thing was to send the Barford scientists to America. High officials like Rose had been forced to learn how much their country’s power (by the side of America’s) had shrunk; Rose was a proud man, and the lesson bit into his pride, but he was too cool-minded not to act on it.
I did not believe that Luke’s idea would come to anything. I did not know whether anything could be saved of Barford. As for Martin, I was angry with him again because his luck was so bad.
I was wondering if I could help find him another job, when in July I received a message that he urgently wished to talk to me and would be waiting at my flat.
It was a hot afternoon, and the Minister kept me late. When I arrived at Dolphin Square I could see no sign of Martin, except his case: tired, out of temper, I began to read the evening paper, comfortless with the grey war news. While I was reading, I heard a splash of water from the bath, and I realized that Martin must be there. I did not call out. There would be time enough for the bleak conversation in front of us.
Then I heard another sound, inexplicable, like a series of metallic taps, not rhythmical but nearly so, as though someone with no sense of time were beating out a very slow tattoo on the bathroom wall. Inexorably it went on, until I cried out, mystified, irritated: ‘What are you doing?’
‘Trying to lodge the pumice-stone on the top of the shaving-cupboard.’
It was one of the more unexpected replies. From his tone, I knew at once that he was lit up with happiness. And I knew just what he was doing. He kept his happiness private, as he did his miseries; and in secret he had his own celebrations. I had watched him, after a success at Cambridge, stand for many minutes throwing an india rubber up to the cornice, seeing if he could make it perch.
‘What have you been up to?’ My own tone had quite changed.
‘I moved into Luke’s outfit a few weeks ago.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve got in on the ground floor.’
It was a phrase quite out of character – but I did not care about that. I had ceased to respond to his joy, I was anxious for him again, cross that I had not been consulted.
‘Was that wise?’ I called.
‘I should think so.’
‘It must have meant quarrelling with your boss.’ (I meant Rudd).
‘I’m sorry about that.
‘What about Drawbell? Have you got across him?’
‘I thought it out’ – he seemed amused that I should be accusing him of rashness ‘–before I moved.’
‘I doubt if Luke’s scheme will ever see the light of day,’ I cried.
‘It must.’
‘How many people believe in it?’
‘It’s the way to do it.’
There was a pause. Once more, there came a tinkle on the bathroom floor, meaning that he had missed his aim again.
‘Do you really think that?’ I said.
‘I’m sure.’
‘How long have you been sure?’
‘I was more sure when I got into this bath than I’ve ever been.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It came to me. It was all right.’
Without altering his tone, still relaxed and joyful, he announced that he was going to leave off his efforts with the pumice; he would get out and join me soon. As I waited, although I was trying to think out ways and means, although I had a professional’s anxiety (how could we manoeuvre Luke’s scheme through?), although I could not keep my protectiveness down, yet I was enthused with hope. Already I was expecting more for him than he did himself.
I passed as a realistic man. In some senses it was true. But down at the springs of my life I hoped too easily and too much. As an official I could control it; but not always as I imagined my own future, even though by now I knew what had happened to me, I knew where I was weak. Least of all could I control it when I thought of Martin: with myself, I could not help remembering my weaknesses, but I could forget his. So, given the least excuse, as after listening to his voice from the bath, I imagined more glittering triumphs for him than ever, even fifteen years before, I had imagined for myself.
He came in wearing a dressing-gown of mine, and at once I was given enough excuse to hope as much as I could manage. As with
most guarded faces, his did not lose its guard in moments of elation – that is, the lines of the mouth, the controlled expression, stayed the same; but his whole face, almost like one of the turnip masks that we used to make as children, seemed to be illuminated from within by a lamp of joy.
We did not begin at once to discuss tactics, for which he had come to London. Sometime that night we should have to; but just for this brief space we put the tactics out of our minds, we gave ourselves the satisfaction of letting it ride.
Martin had been visited by an experience which might not come to him again. So far as I could distinguish, there were two kinds of scientific experience, and a scientist was lucky if he was blessed by a visitation of either just once in his working life. The kind which most of them, certainly Martin, would have judged the higher was not the one he had just known: instead, the higher kind was more like (it was in my view the same as) the experience that the mystics had described so often, the sense of communion with all-being. Martin’s was quite different, not so free from self, more active: as though, instead of being one with the world, he held the world in the palm of his hand; as though he had, in his moment of insight, seen the trick by which he could toss it about. It did not matter that the trick had been invented by another; this was a pure experience, without self-regard, so pure that it brought to Martin’s smile, as well as joy, a trace of sarcastic surprise – ‘Why has this happened to me?’
He told me as much, for that evening there was complete confidence between us. Suddenly, he began to laugh outright.
I asked what was the matter.
‘I just thought what an absurdly suitable place it was, to feel like this.’
I was at a loss.
‘What was?’
‘Your bath.’
Then I remembered the legend of Archimedes.
‘He must have had the feeling often enough,’ said Martin.
With a smile, sharp-edged, still elated, now eager for the point of action, he added: ‘The trouble is, the old man was a better scientist than I am.’
Part Two
The Experiment
8: Gambling by a Cautious Man
Soon after Martin’s visit, people in the secret began to become partisans about Luke’s scheme, either for or against. A decision could not be stalled off for long. Luke had managed to arouse passionate opposition; most of the senior scientists as well as Hector Rose, and his colleagues, wanted to kill the idea and despatch Luke and the others to America. But Francis Getliffe and a few other scientists were being passionate on the other side. And I also was totally committed, and, while they argued for Luke in the committee rooms, did what little I could elsewhere.
I made Hector Rose listen to the whole Luke case. Although we had come to dislike each other, he gave me a full hearing, but I did not shift him.
I did better with the Minister, who had in any case felt a sneaking sympathy with the scheme all the time. The difficulty was that he was losing his influence, and was above all concerned for his own job. While I was trying to persuade him to pay a visit to Barford, he was on edge for a telephone call from Downing Street, which, if it came, meant the end.
However, he agreed to pay the visit.
‘If I can see those prima donnas together, I might get some sense out of them,’ he said to Rose.
Rose politely agreed – but he was speculating on how many more weeks Bevill would stay in office. Rose had seen ministers come and go before, and he wanted all tidy in case there was a change.
Lesser functionaries than the Minister could have travelled down to Barford by government car; Hector Rose, who himself had no taste for show, would at least have reserved a compartment for the party so that he could talk and work. Bevill did neither. He sat in a crowded train, reading a set of papers of no importance, exactly like a conscientious clerk on the way to Birmingham.
The train trickled on in the sunshine; troops yobbed out on to the little platforms, and once or twice a station flower garden which had been left intact gave out the hot midsummer scents. There was no dining car on the train; after several hours of travelling the Minister pulled out a bag, and with his sly, gratified smile offered it first to Rose and then to me. It contained grey oatmeal cakes.
‘Bikkies,’ explained the Minister.
When Drawbell received us in his office, he did not spend any time on me, and not much (in which he was dead wrong) on Hector Rose. Drawbell had no illusions about the dangers to Barford. His single purpose was to get the Minister on his side; but his manner did not overdo it. It was firm, at times bantering and only obscurely deferential.
‘I’ve done one thing you could never do,’ he said to the Minister.
The Minister looked mild and surprised.
‘Just before the war,’ Drawbell went on, ‘I saw you on my television set.’
The Minister gave a happy innocent smile, He knew precisely what was going on, and what Drawbell wanted; he was used to flattery in its most bizarre forms, and, incidentally, always enjoyed it.
But Bevill knew exactly what he intended to do that afternoon. Drawbell’s plans for him he sidestepped; he did not want Rose or me; he had come down for a series of private talks with the scientists, and he was determined to have them.
It was not until half past five that Martin came out of the meeting, and then he had Mounteney with him, so that we could not exchange a private word. Old Bevill was still there talking to Rudd, and Mounteney was irritated.
‘This is sheer waste of time,’ he said to me as we began to walk towards their house, as though his disapproval of old Bevill included me. Although at Cambridge we had been somewhere between acquaintances and friends, he did at that moment disapprove of me.
He was tall and very thin, with a long face and cavernous eye sockets. It was a kind of face and body one often sees in those with a gift for conceptual thought; and Mounteney’s gift was a major one. He was a man of intense purity of feeling, a man quite unpadded either physically or mentally; and he had an almost total inability to say a softening word.
‘It would have been more honest if you had all come here in uniform,’ he said to me.
He meant that the government was favouring the forces at the expense of science, in particular at the expense of Barford. It seemed to him obvious – and obvious to anyone whose intelligence was higher than an ape’s – that government policy was wrong. He was holding me responsible for it. All other facts were irrelevant, including the fact that he knew me moderately well. It was shining clear to him that government policy was moronic, and probably ill-disposed. Here was I: the first thing was to tell me so.
I gathered that the Minister had talked to them both privately and in a group. Luke had been eloquent: his opponents had attacked him: Martin had spoken his mind. The discussion had been rambling, outspoken and inconclusive. Mounteney, although in theory above the battle, was not pleased.
‘Luke is quite bright,’ he said in a tone of surprise and injury, as though it was unreasonable to force him to give praise.
He then returned to denouncing me by proxy. Bevill had said what wonderful work they had done at Barford. Actually, said Mounteney, they had done nothing: the old man knew it; they knew it; they knew he knew it.
‘Why will you people say these things?’ asked Mounteney.
Irene was sitting in a deckchair in what had once been the garden behind their house, though by this time it was running wild. The bindweed was strangling the last of the phlox, the last ragged pansies; the paths were overgrown with weed. When Mounteney went in to his children, Martin and I sat beside her, on the parched grass, which was hot against the hand. At last Martin was free to give a grim smile.
‘Well,’ he said to me, ‘you’d better see that Luke’s scheme goes through.’
‘What have you been doing?’ she asked.
Martin was still smiling. ‘Not only for patriotic reasons,’ he went on.
‘What have you been doing?’ She sounded, for the moment, as she might
have done if accusing him of some amatory adventure, her voice touched with mock reprobation and a secret pride.
‘Something that may not do us any good,’ he said, and let us hear the story. He had told Bevill, in front of Drawbell and Rudd, that he and the other young scientists were agreed: either they ought to concentrate on Luke’s scheme, or else shut Barford down.
‘If I had to do it, it was no use doing it half-heartedly,’ he said.
‘I’m glad you did it,’ she said, excited by the risk. The teasing air had faded; there was a high flush under her eyes.
‘Wait until we see whether it was worthwhile,’ said Martin.
‘Never mind that,’ she said, and turned to me. ‘Aren’t you glad he did it?’
Before I answered Martin looked at her and said: ‘We may not get our way, you know,’
‘I don’t care.’
‘It would be an odd time to move.’
They were glancing at each other with eyes half challenging, half salacious.
‘Why would it be so odd?’ I asked, but did not need an answer.
‘You can tell Lewis,’ said Martin.
‘I am going to have a child, dear,’ she said.
For the first time since their marriage, I felt nothing but warmth towards her, as I went to her chair and kissed her. Martin’s face was softened with delight. If he had not been my brother I should have envied him, for my marriage had been childless, and there were times, increasing as the years passed, when the deprivation nagged at me. And, buried deep within both Martin and me, there was a strong family sense, so that it was natural for him to say: ‘I’m glad there’ll be another generation.’
As he went indoors to fetch something to drink in celebration, Irene said to me: ‘If it’s a boy we’ll call it after you, Lewis dear. Even though you don’t approve of its mother.’
She added: ‘He is pleased, isn’t he? I did want to do something for him.’
‘It’s very good news,’ I said, as she got up from her chair in the low sunlight, and began to walk about the patch of derelict garden. The evening scents were growing stronger, mint and wormwood mingled in the scorched aromatic tang of the August night. Irene came to a clearing in the long grass, where a group of autumn crocuses shone out, amethyst and solitary, flowers that in my childhood I had heard called ‘naked ladies’. Irene bent and picked one, and then stood erect, as though she were no longer concealing the curve of her breast.