The Light and the Dark

by C. P. Snow

  Sometimes Rosalind thought he was elusive: he was distant from her because he had to attend to something else – is it beginning again? Those occasions were very rare in the winter after his outburst. The period of near-grace, of almost perfect safety, lasted right through the weeks on the Mediterranean, the months of the Cambridge spring. Rosalind came often to Cambridge, and spent weekends in the flat in Connaught Street. She was pressing, persuading, bullying him into marrying her – with tears, pathos, storms, scenes of all kinds. But she did not know of those moments of fear.

  She did not know also of his brilliant, insatiable hopes. Those he tried to tell her of; she listened indulgently, they were part of the meaningless discontent with which so many men fretted themselves. If she had been as lucky as Roy, if she had what he had, she would have been ineffably happy. God? If she had been born in a religious time, she would have enjoyed the ceremonies, she would have assumed that she believed in God. As it was, she disbelieved just as cheerfully. There was no gap in her life; it was full and it would always have been full; she was made for the bright and pagan world, and in her heart she would always have found it.

  So she dismissed, tenderly, half-contemptuously, half-admiringly, all that she heard of Roy’s hopes. She thus failed to understand the second reason why he was “elusive”. For her, love was an engrossing occupation. She had not been chaste when she met Roy, she was physically tolerant, she could have loved many men with happiness; but, loving Roy, she could make do without any other human relation, either in love or outside it. She liked her friends in a good-natured casual way, she had a worldly-wise gossipy interest in those round her, she liked to talk clothes and scandal to her women confidantes, she liked to show off her knowledge of books and art to men – but, if Roy had suddenly taken her to the Pacific, she would have missed nothing that she left behind.

  She could not begin to realise how profoundly different it was with him. He lived in others more than any man I knew. It was through others that he drew much of his passionate knowledge of life. It was through others, such as the Master and Ralph Udal, that he tried to find one way to belief in God. Into anything human he could project himself and learn and feel. In the stories people told him, he found not only kinship with them, but magic and a sense of the unseen.

  By contrast, he often seemed curiously uninterested and insensitive about non-human things. Places meant little to him except for the human beings they contained, and nature almost nothing at all. It was like him to talk of the Boscastle finances as we drove that night along the beautiful coast. He had very little feeling for traditional Cambridge, though no one had as many friends in the living town. He was amused by my interest in the past of the college: “romantic”, he called it scornfully: even when I produced sharp, clear facts about people in the past, he was only faintly stirred; they were not real beside the people that he knew.

  Because he lived so much in others, his affections had some of the warmth, strength, glamour and imagination of love. His friendship with me did not become important to either of us until we were both grown men, but the quality he brought to it transformed it: it was different from any other of my friendships, more brilliant than anything I expected when I was no longer very young. He made others feel the same. They were the strangest variety, those to whom he brought this radiance: Lady Muriel – the “little dancer” (who was a consumptive woman in Berlin) – Winslow, who soon looked for Roy to sit next to him in hall – Mrs Seymour – the Master. There were many others, in all sorts of places from Boscastle to the tenements of Berlin, and the number grew each year.

  In nearly all those affections he gave himself without thinking twice, though his parodic interest went along with his love. He had no scrap of desire to alter or “improve” those he loved. He was delighted by Lady Boscastle’s determination to reform me, but he was himself quite devoid of any trace of reforming zeal.

  There were only one or two in all his human relations where there seemed the friction and strain of self. He was fond of Ralph Udal, but he was never so utterly untroubled and unselfconscious with Udal as with ten or twenty people who mattered to him less, as with, say, Mrs Seymour or Lord Boscastle. It puzzled me for a long time until I saw that with Udal Roy for once wanted something for himself. He wanted to know how to find the peace of God.

  There were others too, besides Udal, whom Roy marked down as having spiritual knowledge denied to him. He felt they could be of use to him; he tracked them down, got to know them; he had a sharp eye for anyone who could be of this special use, as sharp an eye as a man develops who is out to borrow money or on the make. They were always youngish men, as though he felt no old man’s experience could help him (he was deeply fond of the Master, he envied his religious faith, but it neither drew them closer nor came between them). Yet he was never easy with them. He gave each of them up, as soon as he felt sure they had not known his own experience. Udal was the only one for whom he had a strong personal feeling. Rosalind did not realise that, through Udal, through some of those others, Roy was living an intent and desperate search. She did realise, as she had shown with the Boscastles and with me, that Roy’s friends captured his imagination and that she must know them. That was all she could see; it was a move in her plan to marry him. His hopes, his sense of life through others, his search – they would go, he would cease to be elusive, once she had him safely in the marriage bed.

  It was in the early summer that he told her he could not marry her.

  Rosalind let herself go. She had been crying, reproaching him, imploring him, for some days when I first heard what had happened. I went round to Connaught Street one night, and found Roy lying on the sofa, his face pale and tired. Rosalind was sitting in an armchair; the skin under her eyes was heavily powdered, but even so one could see that she had not long since been in tears.

  They were in silence when I entered.

  “Hallo, old boy,” said Roy. He was relieved to see me.

  “I’d better tell Lewis,” said Rosalind.

  “You needn’t,” said Roy. “It would be better if you didn’t.”

  “You’ll only tell him yourself the minute you’ve got rid of me,” she said, angrily, pathetically.

  Roy turned his face away. She faced me with open, brimming eyes.

  “He’s got tired of me,” she said.

  “Not true,” said Roy, without turning round.

  “He won’t marry me. He’s told me that he won’t marry me.” She spoke to Roy. “You can’t deny that you’ve told me that, can you?”

  Roy did not reply.

  “I’m no good to him,” said Rosalind. She took out a crumpled handkerchief and began to cry, very quietly.

  In time she said to me: “What do you think of it, Lewis? I expect you think it’s right.”

  “I’m very sorry: that’s all one can ever say.”

  “You think he’ll be better off without me, don’t you?” she cried.

  I shook my head. “It’s for you two only,” I said.

  She made a pretence of smiling.

  “You’re a nice old thing, Lewis. If you don’t think he will be better off without me, everyone else will. All the people who think I’m a little bitch – they’ll all feel I’ve got what I deserve. Oh, what do I care what they all think? They don’t matter, now he’s turning me out.”

  “I’m not turning you out.”

  Roy’s voice was flat and exhausted, and Rosalind found it easier to talk to him through me. She looked at his back and said: “I’ve told him that I’ve got to get married some time. I can’t wait for ever. And someone quite nice is rather anxious to marry me.”

  Whether it was an invention or not, I could not guess. In any case, she had used it in order to force Roy’s hand. She had thrust it in front of him: he could not be elusive any more, she thought. She had first mentioned it, hopefully, plaintively, three days before, and since then she had been blackmailing and begging. She had not reckoned that he would be so firm.

  A
t this point Roy broke in: “I can only say it again. If you need to marry, you should marry him.”

  It was very harsh. But it was harsh through a cause I had not expected. He was jealous. As a rule he was the least jealous of men. He was resolved not to marry her, yet he was jealous that she should marry another.

  “I don’t know whether I could bear it.”

  “I expect he will make you happier than I ever could.”

  “You’re horrible,” said Rosalind, and sobbed again.

  She did not move him, either then or later. He stayed firm, though he became more gentle when the first shock wore off. He wanted to go on living with her, but he would not marry her. Rosalind still kept coming to see him, though more fitfully. I heard nothing more about her engagement to the other man.

  The scene left Roy quiet and saddened. For some days I dreaded that he was being overcome by another wave of depression. But it fell away. It was good to see him light-hearted with relief. Yet I thought, as the summer passed, that he was never as carefree after the scene with Rosalind; even at his gayest, he never reached the irresponsible, timeless content of Monte Carlo. He became more active, impatient, eager, more set on his own search. He spent much more time with Ralph Udal in Lewisham. He persuaded me to try to trace old Martineau for him: but Martineau had moved from the Leeds pavement, no one knew where.

  One afternoon in August I saw something which surprised me and set me thinking. I was being driven over the Vauxhall bridge, when through the car window I saw Rosalind and Ralph Udal walking together. Neither was speaking, and they were walking slowly to the north side of the river. What was she doing now, I thought? Did she think that he had become the most powerful influence on Roy? Was she playing the same game that she had once played with me?

  The first part of the liturgy was published in the summer. In due course, often after months of delay, there followed respectful reviews in three or four scholarly periodicals. Colonel Foulkes, as usual putting in his word without a pause, got in first with his review in the Journal of Theological Studies; he wrote that the complete edition of the liturgy looked like being the most authoritative piece of oriental scholarship for a generation. But apart from him English scholars did not go out of their way to express enthusiasm. The reviews were good enough, but there was none of the under-current of gossipy personal praise. I had no doubt that, if Roy had kept quiet at the December meeting, he would have had different luck, his reputation would have been as good as made; Sir Oulstone would have paid a state visit to the college, all Sir Oulstone’s friends would have been saying that Roy had once for all “arrived”. But none of those things happened. Sir Oulstone and his school were cold and silent.

  The Master was painfully disappointed. Arthur Brown said to me with sturdy resignation: “I want to tell them, Eliot, that our young friend is the best scholar this college has had since the war. But it looks as though I shall have to wait for a few years.” He warned me comfortably: “It’s never wise to claim more than we can put on the table. People remember that you’ve inflated the currency, and they hold it against you next time.”

  We were downcast and angry. Roy’s own response was peculiar. He was amused, he treated it as a good joke at his own expense – and also at ours, who wanted him to be famous. “It’s a flop, old boy,” he said mischievously in his room one afternoon. He developed the habit of referring to his work as though he were a popular writer. “It’s a flop. I shan’t be able to live on the royalties. I’m really very worried about the sales.”

  I wanted him to make his peace with Lyall, but he smiled.

  “Too late. Too late. Unsuccessful author, that’s what I shall be. I shall need to work harder to make ends meet.” He jumped to his feet, and went towards the upright reading desk. He was busy with a particularly difficult psalm. “Can’t stay talking,” he said. “That won’t buy Auntie a new frock.”

  He was gaining a perverse satisfaction. I realised at last that he did not want the fame we wanted for him. He would do the work – that was a need, a drug, an attempt at escape – but if he could choose he would prefer to be left obscure.

  Most men, I thought, are content to stay clamped within the bonds of their conscious personality. They may break out a little – in their daydreams, their play, sometimes in their prayers and their thoughts of love. But in their work they stay safely in the main stream of living. They want success on the ordinary terms, they scheme for recognition, titles, position, the esteem of solid men. They want to go up step by step within their own framework. Among such men one finds the steadily and persistently ambitious – the Lyalls and the Houston Eggars.

  Roy always shied from them. He thought of them as “stuffed”. It had been obtuse of us to imagine he would seek a career as they might seek it. Arthur Brown and I were more ordinary men than he was. We were trying to impose on him the desires we should have had, if we had been as gifted. But one could not separate his gifts from the man he was.

  No one was less willing, less able, to stay clamped within the bonds of self. Often he wished that he could: he cried out in envy of the comfortable. But he was driven. He was driven to his work by the same kind of compulsion that drives an artist. It gave him the obsessed, the morbid concentration that none of the ordinary healthy ambitious scholars could achieve; it did not give him the peace he hoped, although he knew he would be lost without it; above all it did not give him the matter-of-fact ambition that everyone round him took for granted. In his place, they would all have longed to be distinguished savants, men of weight, Fellows of the British Academy, recipients of honorary degrees – and in time they would have got there. Yet, at the prospect Roy felt caught, maimed, chained to the self he was trying to leave behind. At the prospect he was driven once more, driven to fly into obscurity.

  Perhaps it had been wrong of Arthur Brown and me to see that he became a fellow. He seemed to want it – but perhaps even then we were reading our desires into him. Was his outburst a shriek of protest against being caught? Was it a wild flight as he saw a new door closing?

  Yet I had my own minor amusement. Roy’s enemies in the college had heard the Master prophesy an overwhelming triumph; the book came out, and with gratification Despard-Smith and others slowly sensed that there was an absence of acclaim.

  Despard-Smith said one night: “I have always been compelled to doubt whether Calvert’s work will s-stand the test of time. I wish I could believe otherwise. But it will be a scandal for the college if his work turns out to be a flash in the pan.”

  Roy was not dining, but I told him afterwards. He was no more consistent than other men, and he became extremely angry.

  “What does he know about it?” said Roy furiously, while I laughed at him. “He’s never written a line in his life, except asking some wretched farmer to pay the rent. Why should some tenth-rate mathematician be allowed to speak about my work? I need to talk to him.”

  Roy spoke to Despard-Smith the next night.

  “I hear that you’ve become an oriental scholar, Despard?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Calvert.”

  “I hear that you doubt the soundness of my edition. I suppose that you needed to study it first?”

  Roy was still angry, and his subtle, mystifying, hypnotic approach had deserted him. Despard-Smith felt at home, and a gleam of triumph shone in his eye.

  “No, Calvert, that wasn’t necessary. I relied on my judgment from what I picked up round me. Exactly as one has to do – in electing a fellow. One has to rely on one’s judgment. I don’t pretend to be clever, Calvert, but I do congratulate myself on my judgment. I might tell you that some people never acquire it.”

  Roy had no reply. I was very much amused, but it was a joke that he did not see.

  It was not long before the Master and Arthur Brown were able to score a success for Roy within the college. Roy’s reputation had been high with German scholars since he brought out his grammar, and the liturgy was praised at once, more immediately and vocif
erously than in England. The Professor of Oriental Religions at Berlin and a colleague came to London for a conference in October, and wrote to the Master asking if he could present them to Roy. They stayed in the Lodge for a weekend and met Roy at dinner. The Professor was a stocky roundfaced roguish-looking man called Ammatter. When Roy was introduced to him, he clowned and pretended not to believe it.

  The Master translated his remark with lively, victorious zest. “Professor Ammatter says,” the Master addressed himself to Despard-Smith, “that it is impossible anyone so young should have done such work. He says that we must be foisting an impostor upon them.”

  Despard-Smith made a creaking acknowledgment, and sat as far down the table as he could. The Master and Roy each spoke excellent German; Ammatter was tricky, fluid, entertaining, comic and ecstatic; the wine went round fast in the combination room, the Master drinking glass for glass with Ammatter and Roy. Old Despard-Smith glowered as they laughed at jokes he did not understand. The Master, cheerful, familiar, dignified though a little drunk, broke off their conversation several times in order to translate; he chose each occasion when they were paying a compliment to Roy. The Master spoke a little more loudly than usual, so that the compliments carried all over the room. It was one of his happiest evenings, and before the end Roy had arranged to spend the next three months in Berlin.

  15: Tea in the Drawing-Room

  I received some high-spirited letters from Germany, in which there were references to acquaintances all over Berlin, from high party officials to the outcasts and those in danger; but I did not see Roy again until early January, after we had heard bad news.

  The Master had been taken ill just before Christmas; he had not been in his briskest form all through the autumn, but in his spare, unpampered fashion he thought little of it. He got worse over Christmas, vomited often and could not eat. In the first week of January he was taken to hospital and examined. They gave him a gastroscopy, and sent him back to the Lodge the same night. They had found the answer. He had an inoperable cancer. There was no hope at all. He would die within a few months.