In Their Wisdom

by C. P. Snow

  Sedgwick’s voice: ‘I find it slightly tedious.’

  Tompkin reminded himself, he was finding it more than that.

  The second nurse had, minutes before, placed X-ray plates under and alongside Sedgwick’s head. The entire operating party, during the minutes of waiting, had moved over to the end of the room, close to a viewing box, just like a group of crystallographers during a new experiment. Would it have been better to have someone to talk to Sedgwick? Some prefer to be alone. Anyway, too late to detail anyone now.

  The surgeon was at work on the X-ray film. Pemberton assumed that he was marking the target: there wasn’t much tolerance to play with, millimetres at most. Nothing had been said, it was still dead quiet, while Tompkin whispered a couple of measurements. He went back to adjust the probe.

  Nine thirty-two a.m. ‘According to plan, Professor,’ he said. The others had reassembled in their places, and he asked Sedgwick to hold up his right hand. It was shaking like something with its own will, more than anyone there had seen it shake before.

  ‘Is that enough for you?’ said Sedgwick.

  ‘Quite enough.’

  Tompkin’s tone was cool. Just as coolly, he began pushing the probe into the brain. Quite slowly. By calculation, by reason, it should have reached home now. Coolly again, he asked Sedgwick to say something. There was a hesitation: the surgeon had a spasm of anxiety: but it was the hesitation of someone in a radio studio being tested for sound level.

  ‘William I, 1066-1087. William Rufus 1087-1100–’ came Sedgwick’s voice.

  ‘Fine. Fine.’ Tompkin was for the first time overhearty.

  ‘I take it,’ Sedgwick was making another effort, ‘you don’t want to destroy the speech centre.’

  ‘That’s why I have to keep you awake. To hear you talk, sir.’

  ‘It would be inconvenient. Not being able to speak.’

  More X-rays, rapid this time. Tompkin nodded: calculation confirmed.

  More lifting of Sedgwick’s arm. Quivering more violent.

  Nine forty-three a.m. Tompkin spoke to the technician. Liquid nitrogen was now running into the probe. Tompkin asked for the temperature. Minus ten. He asked Sedgwick to speak again.

  ‘Henry I, 1100-1135. Stephen and Matilda, 1135-1154.’ Speech as clear as Sedgwick’s had been the day before.

  ‘Lift your arm again, Professor.’

  Shaking, quivering, unchanged.

  ‘So that’s it,’ Sedgwick muttered into the quiet room.

  Without change of tone, Tompkin called for minus forty. Then, for an instant, his decisiveness was shaken. He seemed to begin asking Sedgwick to lift his arm again, stopped, and instead left his stool and walked round to the right-hand side of the operating table. There without speaking he took hold of Sedgwick’s right hand and wrist. Minus fifty, he called. Pause. Nothing said. More finger work. Longer pause.

  Nine fifty-three a.m. Minus eighty. Longer pause. Tompkin, after pressing, relaxing, pressing once more, the hand within his grasp, let it go. He exchanged an eye-flash with the other surgeon and the nurse. Eyes in masked faces carried no expression to onlookers like Pemberton.

  Tompkin said, voice also expressionless: ‘Professor, will you lift your arm again?’

  The hand rose, like a tired man’s, as though not wanting to. The fingers didn’t quiver. The arm went higher. To those watching, there wasn’t a tremor visible. Arm and hand stayed steady; those watching wanted to turn their eyes away before the sight broke down.

  ‘Professor, please separate the first finger.’

  The finger moved apart.

  ‘Now bring that finger round and touch your nose.’

  With a slow, and almost graceful, sweep, the hand came round, and the index finger without a falter did as it was told.

  Pemberton, astonished at the sight, astonished at what he was feeling, felt a pleasant choking sensation.

  ‘Good God.’ Sedgwick spoke loudly. ‘I couldn’t have done that for years.’

  ‘I thought it was coming right,’ said Tompkin. It was the only personal remark he had made since entering the room. This was what the eye-flash had conveyed, minutes before, to those who knew him best. Underneath the mask, he had been smiling, and so had they. Now everyone was smiling, and though they didn’t see much of anyone else’s face they took for granted that it was as joyful as their own.

  It was a moment of communion. You didn’t need to take a lofty view of human beings, you could take one as contemptuous as Dr Pemberton’s, to recognise that it was a moment of selflessness. Their pleasure was unique and pure. Later on, maybe, Tompkin would be less pure, as he thought about his own credit: conversely, the other surgeon might reflect that he needed one of the star operations for himself. But not now. They were all united in a kind of species loyalty. Viscera, mind and spirit were at one. A sick man was better. Something had been done. Life was shining bright, and they were happy.

  None of them had known of old Ryle, in depression, brooding that people needed a victory. Perhaps this was a victory. Only a small one, of course. An elderly man (never mind his being a clever one, men were equal anywhere near the extreme conditions) had been freed of an affliction. Conceivably, not for the rest of his life. The surgeon would have to remind him soon that there might be recurrences, or the need for another operation on the left-hand side.

  Still, it was a victory. It might even give pessimistic people ground for a little hope. They might think, and they mightn’t be wrong, that much evil, and certainly much suffering, had been caused by false optimism about human beings. It was better to start with a bleaker view: then what you built might stand. But there was something, perhaps not much, on which to build. Human beings were skilful. The people in this room had seen, inside one hour, a prodigy of skill. They had been visited by a totally selfless joy. They knew the pleasure of species loyalty. Human beings were capable of that. Combined with skill, skill above all, intelligence if you wanted to give it a more grandiose name, that gave something irreducible on which to build. Veils stripped away, old Hillmorton before he died, Ryle, Sedgwick himself (who had lived better than the other two) had seen much go wrong, but would have agreed on this. It wasn’t much, but it gave the lot of them a chance, and reason to preserve some hope.

  37

  At breakfast the morning after Sedgwick’s operation, Pemberton received a letter from someone whom he knew by name. The name was Swaffield, and the letter was almost word by word identical with that to Jenny over two years before which had started the lawsuit and disturbed a number of lives. There was nothing particularly strange about Swaffield sending such letters. He was used to summoning people to see him. It was one of the perks of wealth.

  It didn’t seem strange to Pemberton either, as he read it. One didn’t play the markets as he did without some idea of Swaffield’s doings. Pemberton assumed that this invitation was connected with money. In fact his first thought was that the man wanted to sound him. He had always imagined that, once he came into his title, he might be offered seats on a few boards. He had been disappointed that so far no one appeared to have noticed the desirability of this step. Very likely this odd man out (Pemberton had read profiles of Swaffield before now) was ready to lead the way.

  It would be interesting to meet someone who understood money. Perhaps a more delicately organised man, or a more aspiring one, would have felt some letdown or incongruity after the nature of the day before. Pemberton didn’t. Healing the sick, admiration for someone, was one thing. Money was another. Pemberton didn’t worry about, or even notice, having to switch from one to the other. In a street near his house was a doctor who stood in for him when he took – reluctantly – his annual fortnight’s holiday. He arranged for this doctor to look after his surgery patients the following evening: and on that Thursday duly drove himself to Hill Street.

  When he entered the big drawing-room, the butler calling out Lord Hillmorton, he observed much less than Jenny on her original visit: but even he couldn’t avoid get
ting a sense of opulence pressing upon him. So even he, not given to gratifying remarks, couldn’t avoid saying, as the short dominant figure advanced towards him: ‘Fine place you have here.’

  Which gave Swaffield a chance to make his favourite reply: ‘It’s a nice home.’

  The two men shook hands, Pemberton looming a full head above the other. Professional habit made him give a passing attention to Swaffield’s physique: thick chest, low slung, the sort of body you met in professional footballers, unusually tense and active for a man in his sixties.

  ‘So you’ve come, have you?’ said Swaffield, the question making up in force what it lacked in the necessity for an answer.

  Pemberton was dislodged from detached attention.

  ‘Have a glass of champagne,’ said Swaffield, and explained, as he had to Jenny, that he drank two before dinner each night, never less nor more.

  Pemberton said, only a little for him. He might be called out later.

  Swaffield didn’t enquire the reason, his intelligence service kept him well informed. He merely said: ‘It must be a dog’s life.’

  Pemberton wasn’t used to meeting men as assertive as himself. However, he had an instant’s satisfaction. They were sitting on the sofa, glasses on the table in front of them. Swaffield turned his full-eyed gaze straight on to Pemberton, and said: ‘I’m glad you came. I sent for you because I wanted a word about a financial matter.’

  Pemberton felt like congratulating himself. Just what he had expected. But the instant was not a long one. When Swaffield continued, it was not at all what Pemberton expected.

  ‘I suppose you know all about the Massie will,’ said Swaffield.

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Oh come man, of course you must. Your niece, or whatever she is, old Hillmorton’s daughter, she’s all mixed up in it, you know that better than I do. She’s running round with that bleeding gigolo Underwood, and he’s run away with the cash. Well, you’ll have to make her do the decent thing.’

  ‘I have nothing to do with her or any of that family.’

  ‘Tell that to your Aunt Jemima.’

  ‘I tell you, I have nothing to do with them.’

  It was possible that for once Swaffield hadn’t been completely informed, or that no one had discovered the relation between Pemberton and his predecessor. Swaffield shoved aside any disclaimer, and said that the result of the case was an outrage and the other man knew it. Pemberton, angrily on the retreat, began to defend the legal verdict and, to his own surprise, the integrity of Liz and the Hillmorton family. Swaffield, experienced negotiator as the other wasn’t, said that meant that he was admitting responsibility. Also like an experienced negotiator, he gave away a point that the other was anyway capable of knowing. He, Swaffield, would have liked to carry the appeal to the House of Lords (that is, the highest judicial court, nothing to do with the Lords as a senate) on behalf of his friend Jenny, Lady Lorimer – but that probably wouldn’t be permitted. So he was demanding a gentleman’s agreement. Julian and Liz had to be made to arrange a settlement for Jenny.

  ‘I wouldn’t do it if I could,’ said Pemberton.

  ‘It’s easier to get a gentleman’s agreement,’ said Swaffield, with a frog-like grin, ‘when you are dealing with gentlemen.’

  ‘I’ve heard that you are an authority on that.’

  ‘Then perhaps you’ve heard other things about me. You might have heard that Reg Swaffield isn’t a good man to tangle with. Even if it means a bit of trouble. I warn you, it might result in making some of you uncomfortable.’

  ‘You’re bullying me, are you? I warn you as well, I don’t like being bullied.’

  ‘That’s your privilege.’

  They were still sitting on the sofa, a foot apart. Quite unlike dramatic convention, they didn’t get up and quarrel with their backs to each other. Swaffield’s eyes had taken on the unblinking, unfocused look which Jenny would have recognised. Pemberton’s acreage of face, which at no time had any colour, had none now.

  They were each of them outsiders, and hugged the image to themselves when no one else did. They went about much of their time in a state of subdued but comforting rage. Neither of them had much regard for the world. Whatever opinion each had of himself, he had a distinctly lower one of the people around him: and the longer they lived, the more that opinion seemed to them just. One might have thought that they would have been natural allies. Those natural allies had now met for ten minutes, and a spark had flashed between them. It happened to be a spark of mutual fury. Whatever Swaffield had set himself to achieve, and he could usually control his internal smouldering, as he had done with Meinertzhagen and the others, all his energy had gone into reducing this big fellow, as though in an old French cartoon of deux enragés.

  While Pemberton, who like other persons with unqualified faith in their first-hand experience also had an unreasonable faith in folk wisdom, felt the old adage that bullies were always cowards running through his mind. It didn’t occur to him that others, reasonably, thought that he was a bully himself, and that it would have taken an effort of absurdity to think that he was a coward.

  So he began to threaten in return. And, with an effort of absurdity all his own, mentioned the topic of the House of Lords. Did Swaffield realise that questions could be asked? On anything? On business deals? Questions which were privileged, no libel or slander, no holds barred? Pemberton spoke with marmoreal ominousness.

  ‘Oh, sweet Jesus, is that all you have to offer? That mausoleum. We’ll soon get rid of that lot of nonsense.’ Swaffield gave a savage jeer. He continued: ‘In the name of reason, man. That is, if you are capable of reason. Why should you be sitting there when people who have done something are not?’

  ‘You mean, you’re not.’

  ‘Yes, I mean that.’

  Pemberton became committed to a defence of the institution, in particular, of the hereditary peers, whom in the flesh he had not surveyed with superlative admiration. Swaffield, falling back on his old irregular radicalism, produced a good sound radical critique, such as Adam Sedgwick’s father and his Cambridge apostolic friends would have taken for granted in Trinity before the First World War. Pemberton, contemptuous but not suspicious, did not detect that Swaffield had invested considerable personal resources, and sizeable sums of money, in getting appointed to the place himself, and still had hopes.

  ‘Coming down to cases,’ said Swaffield, ‘if we have any kind of second chamber, what blasted right under Heaven has anyone like you to get in? When I haven’t.’

  ‘Coming down to cases,’ said Pemberton, ‘what blasted right have you to be a very rich man? When I’m not.’

  He gazed, balefully expressionless, into a face not so expressionless, though difficult to read.

  He went on: ‘That is, I suppose it is true what they say, that isn’t a front as well? I suppose I have to call you a millionaire?’

  ‘You can call me a multi-millionaire.’

  ‘I’d sooner call you something else. What right do you think you have to make money like that?’

  ‘I could make money at the North Pole. It’s just as well for this country that someone can.’

  ‘Nonsense. Anyone can make money if he thinks about nothing else.’

  ‘Do you think you could? I should want some evidence of that before I paid you in washers.’

  Curiously, that piece of off-hand abuse, which might have been routine in the workshops of Swaffield’s youth, silenced Pemberton. Or else the quarrel had exhausted its own dynamic. Swaffield, acting as though he had prevailed, offered another glass of champagne. Without any effort at politeness, Pemberton said no. The best he could think of, as he departed, was to utter, standing up: ‘If you’ll take my advice, speaking as a medical man, you’ll ask your own doctor to have a look at you. I’m not sure I like that tremor in your hand. You are a shade too restless for your own good, considering your age.’

  Driving home to Fulham, Pemberton was not too proud of that final remark. The
re was no use pretending, he had been outfaced. It wasn’t that he was worried by Swaffield’s threat or warning. Ten to one the man was bluffing. If he wasn’t, Pemberton didn’t care, or rather he cared with approval, since any trouble to Liz or her family was a contribution, only a little one, but still a contribution, towards settling the elephantine account.

  Yet Pemberton was miserable. It wasn’t that he minded himself and Swaffield not giving a demonstration of human beings at their best. Some, perhaps some among those he had watched the day before, might have disliked that drawing-room spectacle: but Pemberton had a less lofty view of the possibilities of others’ behaviour and his own. He still didn’t feel any incongruity between the day before and now. He was the last man to be irked by the grit of this our mortal life.

  Nevertheless he was miserable. He had gone to see that man with faint but lively hopes of a directorship. All he had received was a despising grin, not even commonplace respect. He had been outfaced. The old fear, the old dread, was seething inside him. He had not only been outfaced, but humiliated. Humiliation, if any more than when young, he couldn’t bear.

  At that same time, Swaffield was sitting alone in the drawing-room. He didn’t feel specially successful. He had discomfited too many people in his time, and was a little discomfited himself. He had, as Pemberton guessed, been bluffing. But that didn’t stay in his mind. One cut one’s losses. He had had plenty of practice at that too. He had nothing solid to attack the Underwoods with. This had been worth trying, but he hadn’t counted on it (if he had, he would have been more careful with Pemberton). He had come to the end of that particular game. Let it go.

  He was a little discomfited, though. He felt both lonely and old. Pemberton would have been happier if he had been told he had made an impression on Swaffield, and even inspired a kind of envy. But it was true. Envy chiefly – this was also true – for sheer brute force and strength. Swaffield held out a hand at arm’s length. Were his fingers shaking more than an elderly man’s ought to? In his own estimation, he was never quite well, never quite ill. Maybe a long voyage would be good for his asthma.