Charles Snow - The New Men

Luke’s face was flushed; his tone was quiet and sincere. ‘I’m not even asking you,’ he said.

Martin considered, rubbing the back of his forefinger across his lip. He was steady with the well-being of success; but he was also resentful, pinched with shame, as a prudent man is on being rushed by a leader much braver than himself.

‘I wish I could let you risk it by yourself,’ said Martin. ‘If I thought it was quite justified, I think I might.’

‘I’d rather do it myself,’ said Luke.

‘It may not be possible to let you.’

Suddenly Luke jumped down from the desk.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s no need to make the decision yet awhile. It’s something that we should be fools to settle until we can look at it in cold blood.’

‘If you ask me,’ said Martin, rubbing his forefinger across his lip again, ‘I’m afraid the decision is already made.’

The decision was, in fact, already made. There were months in which to draw back, but no one suggested that Luke could or would. Even to those who disliked and envied him, he gave an impression of simple physical courage; it was the one virtue which, like any other group of men, the Barford scientists uncritically admired.

In those months, he received more respect than ever before.

‘Perhaps we ought to be doing something for Luke,’ I heard a rotund voice say in the Athenaeum. That meant, give him a decoration: he was passing into the ranks of solid respectable men.

Just about the same time, people at Barford noticed that Drawbell, whose Christian name no one had been known to utter, whose friends called him ‘C F’, had begun to sign himself with a large, plain, mesomorphic ‘Cyril Drawbell’.

‘A bad case of knight starvation,’ said someone. It was the kind of joke the scientists did not get tired of.

It was true that Drawbell spent many days in London, calling on Rose and the new Minister; no longer non-committal, but instead proclaiming ‘the success of our Barford policy’. With urgency he told Rose one day that the ‘team’ deserved some public credit. Rose, who had decided not to meet him halfway, responded with even more than his usual civility.

Drawbell tried his set of personal arts against Rose’s politeness, but could not get the response he was playing for. Yes, it was wonderfully exciting, yes, the Minister was well informed of the history of the project, Rose went on mellifluously, but gave no outright official praise to Drawbell, who, with the meeting inconclusive, returned with me to my room.

For once he looked dejected and tired, as though his vitality had sunk low. Suddenly he asked: ‘Eliot, do you hate this life?’ He meant the life of officials.

‘Sometimes I hate it,’ said Drawbell. He stared at me.

‘If anyone asked my reason for existence, what should I tell them?’ I tried to cheer him up, but he interrupted me: ‘I’m just a pedlar of other men’s dreams.’

Like many tricky men, he was wishing his character were simpler. He wished he were not self-seeking. But he did not exude the pathos one often finds in tricky men; his nature was harder than most of theirs. He was angry with himself, still more angry with Rose, and he took it out of me as Rose’s proxy.

At Barford he made one intervention, after trying to persuade Luke and Martin to go slow until the health risks were worked out. The only thing he had a right to insist on, he said, was this: they must not both expose themselves to danger at the same time. If one should happen to be laid out, the other must be left intact. It was reasonable and the two of them promised it.

All that winter they were experimenting with protective clothing, with various kinds of divers’ suits in order to do chemistry-at-a-distance. Sawbridge, who was still asserting his claim to take part, had developed a set of instruments for manipulating the rods out of sight.

Martin spent many of his evenings reading case histories of radiation illness. It seemed probable, he decided, that they would find, as well as the radiation hazards, that plutonium was also a chemical poison.

Luke scoffed at what he called Martin’s ‘visits to the morgue’. To him, if you could do nothing about a danger, it was best to forget it. But Martin’s attitude was the exact opposite; if he were going to face a danger, he wanted to live with it beforehand. If he could become familiar in advance with the radioactive pathologies, he could more easily bear the moment of test. His clinical researches, which seemed to the others morbid, stiffened his resolve. With nothing like Luke’s or Sawbridge’s bravery of the fibres, Martin was training himself to face the March experiments with resignation.

Meanwhile, he continued to enjoy his taste of success. He was getting rather more than the credit due to Luke’s right-hand man; scientific elder statesmen, civil servants like Rose, found him comfortable to talk to, after Luke; he was cagey in speech, he showed some respect for etiquette, he had good manners; they were glad when he attended London committees instead of his chief, and on those visits he was taken to the Athenaeum more frequently than Luke had ever been.

He liked it. He seemed to view this official life with detachment, but really he saw it through a magnifying glass. I thought to myself that those like Martin, who were born worthy, were always half taken in by the world.

Even with March 1st coming on him, he still kept his satisfaction at having, in a modest sense, ‘arrived’. In January, he and Irene, when they came to London for a week’s leave, stood me a celebratory dinner. They had borrowed a flat in the first stretch of the Bayswater Road, just opposite the Albion Gate; it was still a luxury to let light stream out across the pavements, striking blue that night from the unswept snow. As we looked out, the middle of the road was dark, for the street lamps had not yet been lit.

We were saying (it was the kind of commonplace that we did not want to escape, since we were so content) how time had slipped by unnoticed, how the street lamps had now been dark for five and a half years. It was six years since Irene and I first met in my old rooms in Cambridge.

‘Too long for you, dear?’ said Irene to me, mechanically asking for approval.

‘You won’t go back there, will you?’ said Martin to me.

I shook my head: we were each talking at random, the past and future both seemed close.

‘You’ll have to make your plans, this can’t last much longer,’ said Martin. We all knew that the war must soon end; as he spoke, Irene started to reply, but stopped herself, her eyes restive.

Martin asked her to bring in the child to say goodnight. As she carried him in he stayed quiet, and Martin took him in his arms. Their glances met, the child’s a model of the man’s, fixed, hard, transparently bright; then, with a grave expression, the child turned in to his father’s shoulder.

Martin’s glance did not move from the child’s head.

‘We must make some plans for you too,’ he said. ‘I’ve told you, we’ve made one or two plans for you already.’

It was after dinner that Martin spoke with an openness that came out of the blue, that I had not heard more than twice in his life. He was smoking a cigar, emblem of the celebration that night, but he had drunk little and was cold sober. He had just been mentioning Hector Rose, for whom perversely he had taken a liking — and I teased him about his friends at court.

Martin smiled and without any preliminary said: ‘It’s nice to have a little confidence.’

He said it simply, naturally, and with gratification.

‘I never had enough,’ he said to me.

Perhaps it was true, I was thinking: in his struggle to be a scientist, to live in the same air as Mounteney or Luke, he had never believed in himself.