Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

In his study, though it was a warm night, he was sitting by a lighted fire. Margaret knelt by him, and kissed him. “How are you?” she said in a strong maternal voice.

“As you see,” said her father.

What we saw was not old age, although he was in his seventies. It was much more like a youngish man, ravaged and breathless with cardiac illness. Over ten years before he had had a coronary thrombosis: until then he had lived and appeared like a really young man. That had drawn a line across his life. He had ceased even to be interested in pictures. Partly, the enlightenment that he spoke for had been swept aside by fashion: he had been a young friend of the Bloomsbury circle, and their day had gone. But more, for all his stoicism, he couldn’t come to terms with age. He had gradually, for a period of years, got better. He had written a book about his own period, which had made some stir. “It’s not much consolation,” said Austin Davidson, “being applauded just for saying that everything that was intellectually respectable has been swept under the carpet.” Then he had weakened again. He played games invented by himself, whenever Margaret or his other daughter could visit him. Often he played alone. He read a little. “But what do you read in my condition?” he once asked me. “When you’re young, you read to prepare yourself for life. What do you suggest that I prepare myself for?”

There he sat, his mouth half-open. He was, as he had always been, an unusually good-looking man. His face had the beautiful bone structure which had come down to Margaret, the high cheekbones which Charles also inherited. Since he still stumbled out to the garden to catch any ray of sun, his skin remained a Red Indian bronze, which masked some of the signs of illness. But when he looked at us, his eyes, which were opaque chocolate brown, quite different from Margaret’s, had no light in them.

“Are you feeling any worse?” she said, taking his hand.

“Not as far as I know.”

“Well then. You would tell us?”

“I don’t see much point in it. But I probably should.”

There was the faintest echo of his old stark humour: nothing wrapped up, nothing hypocritical. He wouldn’t soften the facts of life, even for his favourite daughter, least of all for her.

“What can we do for you?”

“Nothing, just now.”

“Would you like a game?” she said. No one would have known, even I had to recall, that she was in distress.

“For once, no.”

Charles, who had been standing in the shadows, went close to the fire.

“Anything I can do, Grandpa?” he said, in a casual, easy fashion. He had got used to the sight of mortal sickness.

“No, thank you, Carlo.”

Austin Davidson seemed pleased to bring out the nickname, which had been a private joke between them since Charles was a baby, and which had become his pet name at home. For the first time since we arrived, a conversation started.

“What have you been doing, Carlo?”

“Struggling on,” said Charles with a grin.

There was some talk about the school they had in common. But Austin Davidson, though he had been successful there, professed to hate it. How soon would Charles be going to Cambridge? In two or three years, three years at most, Charles supposed. Ah, now that was different, said Austin Davidson.

He could talk to the boy as he couldn’t to his daughter. He wasn’t talking with paternal feeling: he had little of that. All of a sudden, the cage of illness and mortality had let him out for a few moments. He spoke like one bright young man to another. He had been happier in Cambridge, just before the first war, than ever in his life. That had been the douceur de la vie . He had been one of the most brilliant of young men. He had been an Apostle, a member of the secret intellectual society (Margaret and I had learned this only from the biographies of others, for he had kept the secret until that day, and had not given either of us a hint).

“You won’t want to leave it, Carlo.” Davidson might have been saying that time didn’t exist, that he himself was a young man who didn’t want to leave it.

“I’ll be able to tell you when I get there, shan’t I?” said Charles. Again, all of a sudden, timelessness broke. Davidson’s head slumped on to his chest. None of us could escape the silence. At last Davidson raised his head almost imperceptibly, just enough to indicate that he was addressing me.

“I want a word with you alone,” he said.

“Do you want us to come back when you’ve finished?” asked Margaret.

“Not unless you’re enjoying my company.” Once again the vestigial echo. “Which I should consider not very likely.”

On their way out Margaret glanced at me and touched my hand. This was something he would not mention in front of Charles. She and I had the same suspicion. I said, as though a matter-of-fact statement were some sort of help, that I would be back at home in time for dinner.

The door closed behind them. I pulled up a chair close to Davidson’s. At once he said: “I’ve had enough.”

Yes, that was it.

“What do you mean?” I said automatically.

“You know what I mean.”

He looked straight at me, opaque eyes unblinking.

“One can always not stand it,” he said. “I’m not going to stand it any longer.”

“You might strike a better patch—”

“Nonsense. Life isn’t bearable on these terms. I can tell you that. After all, I’m the one who’s bearing it.”

“Can’t you bear it a bit longer? You don’t quite know how you’ll feel next month—”

“Nonsense,” he said again. “I ought to have finished it three or four years ago.” He went on: he didn’t have one moment’s pleasure in the day. Not much pain, but discomfort, the drag of the body. Day after day with nothing in them. Boredom (he didn’t say it, but he meant the boredom which is indistinguishable from despair). Boredom without end.

“Well,” he said, “it’s time there was an end.”

He was speaking with more spirit than for months past. He seemed to have the exhilaration of feeling that at last his will was free. He wasn’t any more at the mercy of fate. There was an exhilaration, almost an intoxication, of free will that comes to anyone when the suffering has become too great and one is ready to dispose of oneself: it had suffused me once, when I was a young man and believed that I might be incurably ill. At the very last one was buoyed up by the assertion of the “I”, the unique “I”. It was that precious illusion, which, on a lesser scale, was a consolation, no, more than a consolation, a kind of salvation, to men like my brother Martin when they make a choice injurious (as the world saw it) to themselves.

“You can’t give me one good reason,” he said, “why I shouldn’t do it.”

“You matter to some of us,” I began, but he interrupted me: “This isn’t a suitable occasion to be polite. You know as well as I do that you have to visit a miserable old man. You feel better when you get outside. If I know my daughter, she’ll have put down a couple of stiff whiskies before you get back, just because it’s a relief not to be looking at me.”

“It’s not as simple as that. If you killed yourself, it would hurt her very much.”

“I don’t see why. She knows that my life is intolerable. That ought to be enough.”

“It isn’t enough.”

“I shouldn’t expect her,” said Davidson, “to be worried by someone’s suicide. Surely we all got over that a long while ago.”

“I tell you, it would do more than worry her.”

“I thought we all agreed,” he was arguing now with something like his old enthusiasm, “that the one certain right one has in one’s own life is to get rid of it.”