Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

“What about the Vice-Chancellor?”

“He’s only got to see reason, hasn’t he?” said Leonard.

Vicky had told me that, if she had appealed to him to go easy on her father, he would have done it. She (for once confident) was sure that she could do anything with him. But that was the one appeal she couldn’t make. One oughtn’t to use love like that, unless one can pay it back. And also I, having heard her secrets, couldn’t use it either: she had said so, direct as usual. Well, that did credit to the decency of her feelings. And yet, for once confident, she was for once over-confident. Listening to him, I didn’t believe that, if she had promised to marry him tomorrow, she would have changed one of his decisions about Arnold, or even his tone of voice.

Was it possible that, miserable about her, he — who was as decent as she was, and no more malicious — was taking it out of her father? I didn’t believe that either. It was hard to accept, but personal relations often counted not for more, but for far less than one expected. There were people who in all human affairs, not only politics but, say, the making of a painter’s reputation, who saw a beautiful spider’s web of personal connections. Such people often seemed cunning, abnormally sophisticated in a world of simple men: but when it came to practice, they were the amateurs and the simple men were the professionals.

“Can’t you really go a step or two to meet him?” I asked.

“I think it is for him to meet us.”

Dead blank. So, killing time before the Court, I chatted about some of the scientists I knew of his father’s generation — Constantine, O—, B—, Mounteney. As usual, I found an obscure amusement in the way in which Leonard and his contemporaries discussed fellow scientists twenty or thirty years older than themselves. Amiable dismissal: yes, they had done good work; once, they deserved their awards and their Nobels: but now they ought to retire gracefully and cease cluttering up the scene. Mounteney — “It’s time,” said Leonard, “that he was put out to grass.” With the same coolness Leonard remarked that he himself, at thirty-one, might very well be past his peak. His was probably the most satisfying of all careers, I said: and yet, for the reason he had just given, I was glad that it had not been mine.

Somehow, casually, I mentioned Donald Howard. It was good of Leonard to have found him a niche. No, merely sensible, said Leonard. Of course, he added vaguely, you knew something about the affair in your college, didn’t you? Yes, I knew something, I said (I felt sarcastic, but Leonard, like other conceptual thinkers, had a thin memory, didn’t store away the things he heard). I even knew Howard a bit. Would I like to see him for a minute? Out of nothing but curiosity, I said yes. Leonard spoke to the apparatus on his desk, beside Vicky’s picture. Within minutes, Howard came, head bent, into the room. He shook hands, conventionally enough. He wasn’t quite as graceless as I remembered, though he had some distance to go before he became Lord Chesterfield. His shock of hair, which used to push out from his brow, had been cut: he looked more like the soldier that most of his family had been. He wasn’t cold to me, but equally he wasn’t warm. Did he like living in the town? He’d seen worse, he said, without excess. How did he enjoy the university? It was better than a technical college, he said, without excess. He seemed to think that some conversational initiative of his own was called for. What was I doing in this place, he ventured? I had come down for the Court, I replied. I shouldn’t have thought that was worth anyone’s time, said Howard. After that, he felt that he had done his duty, and escaped.

Leonard grinned at me.

“How good is he?” I asked.

“Oh, he’s better than Francis (the Getliffe family, like Edwardian liberals, called their parents by their first names) used to think. By a factor of two.” Leonard went on to say that at the time of his dismissal from the college, and during the research which led up to it, Howard had been paralytically lacking in confidence: so much that it made him look a scientific fool. But that he wasn’t. Now he had been given a “good problem” and was having some success, he showed a certain amount of insight. He’d never be really first-rate: he’d probably never make the Royal Society, said Leonard, as though that were the lowest limit of man’s endeavour. But he could develop into a competent professor, conscientious with his students and with half-a-dozen respectable scientific papers to his name.

That sounded like a firm professional judgment. When I asked about other parts of Howard’s life, Leonard had picked up or remembered little. He didn’t know — as I had heard and believed to be true — that Howard had ceased to be a fellow traveller. He hadn’t gone through a dramatic conversion, he had just moved without explaining himself into the centre of the Labour party. About his marriage — yes, Leonard did know, coolness breaking, showing the tentative nervous interest of a man who should be married himself that Howard had divorced his wife. She had gone off with Eric Sawbridge, who, unlike Howard, had stayed a communist, pure and unbudgeable, and wouldn’t budge until he died. He had served nine years in jail, after passing on some of the early atomic information, and had come out unchanged.

“One of the bravest men I ever knew,” I said to Leonard.

“Francis says the same,” Leonard replied. But to him all this, all those crises of conscience which had riven his scientific predecessors, all the struggles, secret and public, in which his father and I had spent years of our lives, seemed like history. If he had been our age, he would have felt, and done, the same as we did. As it was, he signed the “liberal” letters, but otherwise behaved as though there were nothing else that a man of goodwill could do.

It was getting on for three, and I got up.

“I still can’t persuade you to come?” I said.

“I’m afraid not, Lewis,” he answered, with an unyielding but gentle smile.

In the Court room, one side wide open to the afternoon sun, in fact so open that curtains had to be drawn to avoid half the table being blistered, the first item on the agenda took three minutes. And those three minutes were the stately minuet. Resolution of confidence in Disciplinary Committee . The secretary reported that three of the students had found accommodation elsewhere: Miss Bolt had announced her engagement, and did not wish to undertake further study. “Any discussion?” said Arnold Shaw, sharp eyes executing a traverse. Not a word. “May I ask for a motion?” This had been prearranged: resolution of confidence, moved by a civic dignitary, seconded by an academic. “Any further discussion?” Not a word. “Those in favour?” Denis Geary looked across at me while hands were going up. No, there was no point in indulging oneself, though he, unlike me, wasn’t interested in guarding Arnold Shaw. His hand went up, so did mine. “Unanimous,” said Shaw, giving a pursed smile, with a satisfaction as great as Metternich’s after one of his less commonplace manoeuvres.

The whole of the rest of the proceedings was dedicated to the October congregation. Flummery, of course; but then people, even serious people like Denis Geary, enjoyed flummery: there were wafts of pleasure, as well as mildly dotty practical suggestions, in the air. Lord Getliffe would preside. Honorary degrees would be presented. The Court had already approved the names of the honorary graduands. Dinner. Speeches. Who should speak? That particular topic took up a long time. I sat absent-minded, while the general enjoyment went on. At last (though it was actually only about half past four) I got out into the summer air. Would I have tea? Shaw was pressing me. No, I had an engagement soon. That was embroidering the truth. For the first time on any of my visits to the town, George Passant had sent me a note — like all the letters I had ever received from him, as short and neat as a military despatch — saying that he was otherwise occupied and couldn’t meet me for our usual drink. All I had to do was call on the Patemans, when the father was home from work, and settle my account. Then I could go to the Residence, obligations fulfilled, though (I was still thinking of Leonard) not in a fashion anyone could congratulate himself upon.