Charles Snow - The New Men

‘You soon found out that he was left wing?’ said Smith.

‘I tell you, I haven’t anything to say about him.’

Smith persisted.

‘When did you first hear that he was left wing?’

All of a sudden, Sawbridge broke into sullen anger.

‘I shouldn’t call him left wing?

‘What would you call him?’ I said.

‘He’s no better,’ said Sawbridge, ‘than you are.’

His voice was louder, at the same time impersonal and rancorous, as he let fly at Francis Getliffe, Luke, me, all liberal — minded men. People who had sold out to the enemy: people who would topple over at the first whistle of danger, that was what he thought of liberal men.

‘That chap Puchwein isn’t any better than your brother,’ said Sawbridge. Impersonally, he lumped Martin in with the rest of us, only different in that he was more effective, ‘I’m not sure he isn’t worse. All Puchwein knows is when it’s time to sit on the fence.’

‘I thought you’d nothing to tell us about him,’ said Smith.

‘Well, I’ve told you something, haven’t I?’ said Sawbridge. ‘We’ve got no use for chaps like that.’

Back in a café in Westminster, Smith, sipping China tea with his masquerade of preciousness, went over Sawbridge’s replies.

‘We didn’t get over much change out of our young friend,’ he said.

‘Very little,’ I replied.

‘No, I wouldn’t say that, old son,’ said Smith. But, as he argued. I was thinking of Sawbridge — and it was a proof of his spirit that, neither in his presence nor out of it, did I think of him with pity. Faith, hope, and hate: that was the troika which rushed him on: it was uncomfortable to remember that, for the point of action, hate was a virtue — but so also, which many of us were forgetting in those years, was hope.

Could one confront the Sawbridges without the same three forces? He was a man of almost flawless courage, moral and physical. Not many men would have bent as little. Then, against my will, for I was suppressing any comparison with Martin, I was teased by a thought in my brother’s favour, the first for long enough. It was difficult to imagine him taking Sawbridge’s risk; but, if he had had to pay Sawbridge’s penalty, his courage would have been as stoical and his will as hard to crack.

Two nights later (it was Sunday) I was walking up Wigmore Street towards Portman Square, hurrying because of the extreme cold. The weather had hardened, the lights twinkled frigidly across the square. I was paying attention to nothing except the minutes before I could get back to a warm room. There were few people in the square, and I did not notice the faces as I hurried past.

I did not notice the couple standing near the corner, in the half-shadow. Without knowing why, I looked over my shoulder. They were standing oblivious of the cold, the man’s overcoat drooping open, flapping round his knees. They were Irene and Hankins.

At once I turned my head and started down the side street, out of sight. A voice followed me, Irene’s — ‘What are you running away for?’

I had to go back. As they came towards me under the lamp, they both looked pinched, tired, smiling.

‘Why haven’t I seen you all these months?’ said Hankins. We went into a hotel close by and sat drinking in the lounge, among the palms and the sucking noise from the revolving door.

Hankins was quieter than usual, and when he spoke the words seemed dredged up through other thoughts. We asked about each other’s careers. He had just got a good job; he had made a reputation before, but now, for the first time in his life, he was free from worry about his next year’s rent, I congratulated him, but his thoughts absented themselves again.

Soon he looked at Irene with an odd expression. His face, like that of many with a quickly changing inner life, was emotional but hard to read, ‘I think I must be going now,’ he said. Her eyes sharpened.

‘Goodbye,’ said Hankins, and the revolving door sucked round behind him, sucking empty air.

He had gone so quickly that they might have arranged to meet again, when I was disposed of.

Irene stared at me with full eyes.

‘I had to see him,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t sit down under things any longer.’

‘What are you going to do?’

She did not reply, but continued to stare at me as though I knew. Just for a second, on her mouth there appeared a tart smile. She settled herself against the arm of her chair, and I noticed that her shoulders were getting rounder. In the last year she had thickened both in the throat and the upper arm. It was easy to imagine her in middle age, lolling in her dressing-gown.

‘Fancy the old thing pulling in a regular salary at last,’ she said.

‘Both of them have done pretty well for themselves,’ I replied.

She looked puzzled. I had to explain that ‘both of them’ meant Hankins and Martin, the two men who had meant most to her. They were coming to the top of their professions at the same time.

‘The top?’ she said.

‘The head of Barford,’ I replied.

‘Oh.’ She fixed me with a glance which seemed malicious, regretful, sympathetic.

‘And as for Hankins,’ I said, ‘so far as there is anything left of literary London, this job will put him in the middle of it.’

‘He’ll dote on that!’ she cried. Quietly she added: ‘And so should I.’

She spoke straight out: ‘It would suit me better than anything I have ever had with Martin, or anything that I could ever have.’

Once more she gave me a glance edged with fellow-feeling. Without explanation, with her expression malicious and ominous, she went on: ‘I’m not cut out for it. I can see Martin going on patiently and getting a bit drier every year. What sort of life do you think that means for me?’

We looked at each other, without speaking for some moments. I said: ‘But you’re going to live it, aren’t you?’

‘You don’t think I’m going off with E H?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I could stop his marriage. I could have everything I wanted ten years ago. Why shouldn’t I now?’

‘You won’t,’ I said.

‘You’re positive?’ Suddenly she slumped down, her hand fell on her breast, her tone no longer brittle, but flat, lazily flat, as she said: ‘You’re right.’

She went on: ‘I never knew where I was with E H. I never even knew if he needed me. While Martin doesn’t need me — he could get on without me or anyone else, but he wants me! He always has! I never had much faith that anyone would, until he came along.’

So at last, under the palm trees of that aseptic lounge, preoccupied by the suspicion, which she had provoked, of a crucial turn in Martin’s life, I was given a glimpse of what bound Irene to him. In the past I had speculated often. Why should she, in the ultimate run, be anchored to Martin instead of Hankins? I had looked for qualities in Martin which could make some women love him, rather than another man. They were present, but they did not count.

It was true that Martin was the stronger: it was true also that Martin was, if these cant terms mean anything, the more masculine. Hankins was one of those men, and they are not uncommon, who invest much emotion in the pursuit of women without having the nature for it; he thought he was searching for the body’s rapture, but his profoundest need was something less direct, the ambience of love, its meshes of unhappiness, its unfulfilled dreams, its tears for the past and its images of desire. Many women found it too delicate, but not Irene.

With her, there was a hypnotic charm about his capacity for feeling; he could feel as she did, he had the power to enter into, as all important, each emotion of love. It was that which she first loved in him, and which held her fascinated for years, her whom other women obtusely thought was searching only for a partner in bed. Against that emotional versatility Martin could not compete. Yet never once, if she had been faced with the choice, would she have left Martin.