Charles Snow - The New Men

It was a piece of domestic routine, and I felt I could have spent the three hours better. I should have been astonished to know that, two years later, I was forcing my memory to recall that interview with Sawbridge. When it actually happened, I wrote it off. On the other hand, I could not dismiss the conversation I had with Mounteney and Martin late that night.

After the interviews, Mounteney had come away intransigent. He was irritated because he had lost over Sawbridge, and could not understand just where Martin had been more adroit. He also could not understand why Martin, like himself an unbeliever, had allowed his son to be baptized.

‘Rain making!’ said Mounteney. He went on denouncing Martin: if traditions led to decent men telling lies (‘what else have you been doing except tell lies?’) then they made us all mentally corrupt.

His affection for Martin did not soften Mounteney’s remarks, nor, when we returned to the house, did his wife’s gaze, at once cocky and longing for a transformation, as though she expected him to give up controversy and say that he had come home in search of her. In fact, he and Martin and I drove in by ourselves to Stratford, where, since there was no room for me in Martin’s house, I was staying the night. There all of a sudden Mounteney became gentler.

The three of us had had dinner, and walked down past the theatre to the river’s edge. There was little light in the sky, and over towards Clopton Bridge the dim shapes of swans moved upon the dark water. Under the willows, the river smell brought back a night, not here, but in Cambridge: I had been thinking of Cambridge all through dinner, after Martin had mentioned a friend of mine who had been killed that spring.

On our way past the dark theatre, I heard Mounteney whisper to Martin: to my astonishment he seemed to be asking what was the matter with me. At any rate, as we stood by the river, he tried, with a curious brusque delicacy, to distract me: that was how the conversation began.

So awkwardly that he did not sound kind, Mounteney asked me if I were satisfied with the way I had spent my life — and at once started off saying that recently he had been examining his own. What had made him a scientist? How would he justify it? Ought his son and Martin’s to be scientists, too?

Soon we were talking intimately. Science, said Mounteney, had been the one permanent source of happiness in his life; and really the happiness was a private, if you like a selfish, one. It was just the happiness he deprived from seeing how nature worked; it would not have lost its strength if nothing he had done added sixpence to practical human betterment. Martin agreed. That was the obscure link between them, who seemed as different as men could be. Deep down, they were contemplatives, utterly unlike Luke, who was as fine a scientist as Mounteney and right out of Martin’s reach. For Luke, contemplation was a means, not a joy in itself; his happiness was to ‘make Mother Nature sit up and beg’. He wanted power over nature so that human beings had a better time.

Both Mounteney and Martin wished that they shared Luke’s pleasure. For by this time, their own was beginning to seem too private, not enough justification for a life. Mounteney would have liked to say, as he might have done in less austere times, that science was good in itself; he felt it so; but in the long run he had to fall back on the justification for himself and other scientists, that their work and science in general did practical good to human lives.

‘I suppose it has done more practical good than harm to human lives?’ I said.

Mounteney’s dialectic was not scathing that night. Everyone asked these questions in wartime, he said, but whatever the appearance there was no doubt about the answer. It was true that science was responsible for killing a certain number in war — Mounteney broke off and apologized: ‘I am sorry to bring this up.’

The friend we had talked of, Roy Calvert, had been killed flying.

‘Go on,’ I said.

We got the numbers out of proportion, he said. Science killed a certain number: it kept alive a much larger number, something of a quite different order. Taking into account war danger, now and in the future, this child of Martin’s had an actuarial expectation of life of at least sixty-five years. In the eighteenth century, before organized science got going, it would have been about twenty-five. That was the major practical effect of science.

‘It’s such a big thing,’ said Mounteney, ‘that it makes minor grumbles insignificant. It will go on whatever happens .’

It was then that I mentioned the fission bomb.

‘If you people bring that off—’

‘I’ve done nothing useful towards it,’ said Mounteney counter-suggestibly.

‘If someone possesses the bomb,’ I said, ‘mightn’t that make a difference?

There was a pause.

‘It could,’ said Mounteney.

‘Yes, it could,’ said Martin, looking up from the water.

The river-smell was astringent in the darkened air. Somewhere down the stream, a swan unfolded its wings and flapped noisily for a moment before settling again and sailing away.

‘If those bombs were used in war,’ said Mounteney, ‘they might be as lethal as an epidemic.’ He added: ‘But that won’t happen.’

‘It mustn’t happen,’ said Martin.

I told them how, in my conversation with old Bevill at Pratt’s, he could not think it incredible that the bomb would be used.

‘What else do you expect,’ said Mounteney, ‘of a broken-down reactionary politician?’

‘He wasn’t approving,’ I said. ‘He was just saying what might happen.’

‘Do you believe it could?’

I was thinking of what the Third Reich had done, and said so.

‘That’s why we’re fighting them,’ said Mounteney. Mounteney had brought some buns for his family. Martin begged one and scattered crumbs on the water, so that swans sailed towards him out of the dark, from the bridge, from down the Avon where it was too dark to make out the church; they moved with a lapping sound, the bow waves catching glimmers of light like scratches on a mirror.

Did I believe it would be used?

‘Do you believe it?’ Mounteney returned to the question.

‘Assuming that it’s our side which gets it—’

‘Of course,’ said Mounteney.

‘If anyone gets it,’ said Martin, touching wood. It was his turn to ask me: ‘You don’t believe that we could use it?’

I took some time to answer.

‘I find it almost incredible,’ I said.

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Mounteney. ‘Particularly as you’re a pessimistic man.’

‘I think it is incredible,’ said Martin.

His voice was harsh. He was more moved than Mounteney who, despite his cantankerousness, was a gentle man, to whom any kind of cruelty seemed like a visitation from another planet. Mounteney had never had to struggle with a sadic strain in his own nature. It is men who have had to struggle so who hate cruelty most. Suddenly, listening to the revulsion in Martin’s voice, I knew he was one of them.

Sternly, he went on speaking: ‘But we ought to take a few sensible steps, just to make sure. I suppose they can be taught to realize what dropping one bomb means.’

We all knew the estimates of deaths the bomb would cause: we knew also the manner of those deaths.

‘We can teach them,’ said Mounteney. ‘We’d better see that the scientists are ready to assert themselves in case there is any whisper of nonsense.’

I said: ‘Why scientists specially?’

Mounteney answered: ‘Because no one could do it if they could imagine the consequences. The scientists can imagine the consequences.’ He gave an ironic smile, unfamiliar on him. ‘After all, scientists are no worse than other men.’