Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

It was not gallant. In secret (it sounded hard, but I had seen more of her than the others had) I thought that she was not only frightened, which was natural enough, but self-regarding and abnormally vain.

She spoke in a tiny voice. Quite gently, Shaw told her to speak up. She couldn’t. Whether she was crying or not, she wouldn’t have been able to. Anyone used to interviewing would have known that there are some people who can’t. Anyone used to interviewing would also have known that — despite all superstitions to the contrary — the over-confident always get a little less good treatment than they deserve, and girls like this a little more.

Someone asked her, who had influenced her? She said: “The rest of them.” She wouldn’t, to do her justice, put special blame on Dick Pateman, her own lover. One of the academics who had taught her, asked her what, if she continued with her degree work, she hoped to do? She wanted to go on to a Ph.D. What on? Henry James. She began to cry again, as though she felt herself shut out from great expectations, and Arnold Shaw was in a hurry to ask the dismissive questions.

It had done harm: it might have been worse. David Llewellyn, though he was as nervous as she was, gave a good performance. This was the one I liked, a small neat youth, sensitive and clever. When one compared him and Myra, there was no realistic doubt about who had done the seducing. Probably she was his first woman (they had been sleeping together some months before the party), and I expected that he was proud of it and boasted to his friends. But how he got led into the ‘orgy’ I couldn’t understand, any more than if it had been myself at the same age. When I had asked him, he looked lost, and said: “Collective hysteria. It can’t have been anything else.”

After his name was announced, people round the table may have been surprised to hear him talk in a sub-cockney accent. His parents, I had discovered, kept a small shop in Southend. Of the four of them, only Pateman lived with his family in the town. But then, the great majority of the university’s students came from all over the country, to be put up in the new hostels: just as the local young men and women travelled to other parts of the country to be put up in identical hostels elsewhere. It might have seemed odd, but not to anyone acclimatised to the English faith in residential education.

Llewellyn did well, without help from me or Geary. He was ready to apologise for what had happened: it had given trouble, it had stirred up a scandal. The circumstances were bad. So far as they were concerned, he had no defence. The party was inexcusable. He was nervous but precise. No one pressed him. If they had, he would have been honest. His private sexual behaviour was his own affair. On that he and Myra had made a compact: and their student political adviser was backing them. But Llewellyn didn’t require any backing. He was ambitious, and shaking for his future. He had his own code of belief, though. An attempt by Shaw or one of the others to make him deny it would have got nowhere.

However, that didn’t happen. Leonard Getliffe, not preoccupied as on the night before, asked him some questions about his physics course: Leonard, sharp-witted, was talking like a master of his job, but without any condescension at all: the answers sounded sharp-witted also.

In the silence, after he had left and we were waiting for Pateman, someone said: “I must say, that seems a pity.”

Across the table, Leonard Getliffe said: “He has talent.”

For the next quarter-of-an-hour, Dick Pateman sat at one end of the table arguing with the Vice-Chancellor and the others. Pateman’s head was thrown back, whether he was listening or speaking: he had staring light eyes in deep orbits, a diagonal profile, and a voice with no give in it. Less than any of the others, he did not want to make human contact: with his contemporaries, this gave him a kind of power; he seemed to them uninfluenceable, waiting only for them to be influenced. It was the kind of temperament which wasn’t necessarily linked with ability — he was not clever, he ought to have been finishing his degree but had been dropped back a year — but which is sometimes dangerous and not often negligible. It did not seem negligible at the table that morning — though his logic-chopping and attempts at legalism were stirring up Arnold Shaw’s contempt, which Pateman met by a contempt, chilly and internal, of his own.

On the surface it might have sounded like a trade union boss negotiating with an employer. On one side stood the student body, Pateman was grating away (I had anticipated this, tried to stop it, could only sit by): on the other “the authorities”. It was necessary for matters of discipline to be settled by the two sides in combination.

“Nonsense,” said Arnold Shaw.

Shaw’s temper was seething. The young man seemed to have no temper. He went on: “If that’s the attitude the authorities take up, then the students will have to join forces with students of other universities—”

“Let them,” said Arnold Shaw.

So it went on. The authorities had no right to impose their own laws unilaterally on the students, said Pateman. The students had their own rights.

“In that sense,” said Shaw, “you have none at all.”

Pateman said that they were free citizens. They paid their fees. They were prepared to collaborate in drafting laws for the university, and would abide by them. They accepted that the authorities had their own rights about examinations. Everything else should be settled by mutual consent. Or, alternatively, the students should simply be subject to the laws of the land. In the present case, there was no suggestion that anything had been done contrary to the laws of the land.

“Look here,” said Denis Geary, “this isn’t very profitable.”

“I was speaking for the students—”

“You’d better speak for yourselves. You’ve behaved like damned fools, and messy damned fools, and you know it. You’d better give us one good reason why we should be spending our time here this morning—”

Young Pateman gave something like a smile. He must have realised, since Geary was well-known in the town, that here was one of their best hopes: he didn’t mind, he was enough of a politician to be easy with rough words.

“I don’t take back the students’ case,” he began, and Geary broke in: “Drop that.”

“I should have thought the practical thing you’ve got to consider this morning,” Pateman went on, in precisely the same ungiving tone, “is whether you want to ruin us.”

“Ruin’s a big word,” said Geary.

“What else do you think you’re doing?”

The Vice-Chancellor was interrupting, but Denis Geary had his own authority and went on: “I want to know one thing. How much do you feel responsible?”

“What do you mean, responsible?”

“If it hadn’t been for you, would this have happened?”

“I don’t know about that.”

“You’re the oldest of this group, aren’t you?”

“Joyce is older than I am. So is David.”

“Never mind about calendar age. You’re a grown man, aren’t you?”

He was young enough to be softened, for an instant. Geary asked: “Do you think it’s a good idea to get hold of youngsters like this—”

“It depends on the co-operation I get.”

The answer was brash. Geary used more force: “But you ought to feel responsible, oughtn’t you?”

“I don’t know about that.” Pateman was repeating himself.

“You do feel responsible, though, don’t you?”

There was a long pause. Pateman said, slowly, his voice more grating still: “I don’t want to see anyone ruined.”

Geary glanced at me, a partner’s glance. That was the most he could extract. I touched the Vice-Chancellor’s sleeve. He didn’t want to let Pateman go, but he acquiesced.