Charles Snow - The New Men

I said that he was so self-centred that no human being mattered to him — not a friend, not his wife, not even his son. He would sacrifice anyone of them for his next move. He had been a failure so long that he had not a glimmer of warmth left.

There were lulls, when our voices fell quiet or silent, even one lull where for a moment we exchanged a commonplace remark. Without noticing it we made our way down the street again, near the corner where (less than half an hour before) Martin had said goodnight, in sight of the door out of which we had flanked old Thomas Bevill.

I said: What could he do with his job, after the means by which he had won it? Was he just going to look on human existence as a problem in logistics? He didn’t have friends, but he had colleagues; was that going to be true of them all?

I said: In the long run he had no loyalty. In the long run he would turn on anyone above him. As I said those words, I knew they could not be revoked. For, in the flickering light of the quarrel, they exposed me as well as him. With a more painful anger than any I had heard that night, he asked me: ‘Who have you expected me to be loyal to?’

I did not answer.

He cried: ‘To you?’

I did not answer.

He said: ‘You made it too difficult.’

He went on: I appeared to be unselfish, but what I wanted from anyone I was fond of was, in the last resort, my own self-glorification.

‘Whether that’s true or not,’ I cried, ‘I shouldn’t have chosen for you the way you seemed so pleased with.’

‘You never cared for a single moment whether I was pleased or not.’

‘I have wanted a good deal for you,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You have wanted a good deal for yourself.’

I did not attend Sawbridge’s trial. Like the others of the series, it was cut as short as English law permitted; Sawbridge said the single word ‘Guilty’, and the only person who expressed emotion was the judge, in giving him two years longer than Smith had forecast.

The papers were full of it. Hankins wrote two more articles. Bevill said: ‘Now we can get back to the grindstone.’ I had not spoken to Martin since the night in St James’s Street, although I knew that several times he had walked down the corridor, on his way to private talks with Bevill.

It was the middle of October, and I had to arrange a programme of committees on the future of Barford. Outside the windows, after the wet summer the leaves were turning late. Rarely, a plane leaf floated down, in an autumnal air that was at the same time exhilarating and sad.

One morning, as I was consulting Rose, he said: ‘Your brother has been colloguing with Bevill a little.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I wondered if you happened to know.’ Rose was looking at me with what for him was a quizzical and mischievous glance.

‘Know what?’

‘My dear chap, it’s all perfectly proper, nothing could possibly have been done more according to the rules. I rather reproach myself I hadn’t started the ball rolling, but of course there was no conceivable chance of our forgetting you—’

‘Forgetting me?’ I said.

‘I shouldn’t have allowed that to happen, believe me, my dear Eliot.’

I said: ‘I know nothing about this, whatever it is.’

‘On these occasions,’ Rose was almost coy, the first time I had seen him so, ‘it’s always better not to know too much.’

I had to persuade him that I knew nothing at all. For some time he was unusually obtuse, preferring to put it down to discretion or delicacy on my part. At last he half-believed me. He said:

‘Well, it’s a matter of reckoning your deserts, my dear Eliot. The old gentleman is insisting — and I don’t think there will be anyone to gainsay him — that it’s high time you had a decoration.’

He paused, with a punctilious smile. ‘The only real question is exactly what decoration we should go for.’

This was what Martin had been prompting the old man about. I was not touched.

It might have appeared a piece of kindness. But he was being kind to himself, not to me. It was the sort of kindness which, when there is a gash in a close relationship, one performs to ease one’s conscience, to push any intimate responsibility away.

Meanwhile Martin’s own reward was coming near. The committee sat in Rose’s room, and on those autumn mornings of sun-through-mist, I went through the minutes that by this time I knew by heart. These men were fairer, and most of them a great deal abler, than the average: but you heard the same ripples below the words, as when any group of men chose anyone for any job. Put your ear to those meetings and you heard the intricate labyrinthine and unassuageable rapacity, even in the best of men, of the love of power. If you have heard it once — say, in electing the chairman of a tiny dramatic society, it does not matter where — you have heard it in colleges, in bishoprics, in ministries, in cabinets: men do not alter because the issues they decide are bigger scale.

The issues before Bevill and his committee were large enough, by the standards of this world. Barford: the production plant: a new whisper of what Bevill called the hydrogen bomb: many millions of pounds. ‘The people who run this place arc going to have plenty on their plate,’ said Bevill. ‘Sometimes I can’t help wondering — is one Top Man enough? I’m not sure we ought to put it all under one hat.’ Then they (Bevill, Rose, Getliffe, Mounteney, and three other scientists) got down to it. Drawbell must go.

‘That can be done,’ said Hector Rose, meaning that Drawbell would be slid into another job.

Next there was a proposal that Mounteney and another scientist did not like, but which would have gone straight through: it was that Francis Getliffe should go to Barford and also become what Bevill kept calling Top Man of atomic energy. It would have been a good appointment, but Francis did not want it; he hesitated; the more he dickered, the more desirable to the others the appointment seemed, but in the end he said No.

That left two possibilities: one, that Luke, who appeared to have partially recovered, though the doctors would not make a certain prognosis either way, should be given Barford, which he was known to want.

The other possibility had been privately ‘ventilated’ by Bevill and Rose ever since Rose mentioned it to me in the summer: assuming that there was a doubt about Luke, couldn’t one set up a supervisory committee and then put M F Eliot in as acting superintendent?

They were too capable to have brought up this scheme in the committee room, unless they had found support outside. But Rose mentioned it — ‘I’m just thinking aloud,’ he said — on a shining autumn morning.

For once Francis Getliffe spoke too soon.

‘I’m not happy about that idea,’ he said immediately.

‘This is just what we want to hear,’ said Bevill.

‘I know Luke has his faults.’ said Francis, ‘but he’s a splendid scientist.’

Mounteney put in: ‘Even if you’re right about Luke—’

‘You know I’m right,’ said Getliffe, forgetting to be judicious, a vein swelling angrily in his forehead.

‘He’s pretty good,’ said Mounteney, in the tone of one who is prepared to concede that Sir Isaac Newton had a modest talent, ‘but there’s no more real scientific thinking to be done at Barford now, it’s just a question of making it run smooth.’

‘That’s a dangerous argument. It’s always dangerous to be frightened of the first rate.’

I had seldom seen Francis so angry. He was putting the others off and he tried to collect himself. ‘I’m saying nothing against M F Eliot. He’s a very shrewd and able man, and if you want a competent administrator I expect he’s as good as they come.’