Charles Snow - The New Men

Her eyes glinted triumphant, good-natured, malicious at my expense. She said: ‘You won’t be able to influence him now, will you?’

Martin did not give his answer to Bevill until the last day of his period of grace. He called in my office first, just as he used to — but we were both constrained, On the window the frost, coming early that winter, masked the buses in Whitehall. Martin swept a pane with his sleeve, saying that after he had had the interview with Bevill and Rose, he would like to talk to me.

He assumed that I knew what his answer was going to be. When he actually delivered it, he spent (so I learned later) much skill in saving his supporters’ credit. He did not once suggest a moral choice; he just used the pretext that, unless he did some real science soon, he never would; in which case his usefulness would be finished in ten years.

The scientists took the explanation at its face value. It was only Bevill who smelt that there was something wrong. In his experience men did not turn down good jobs unless by doing so they got a better. So he fell back on what was always his last resource, and put the blame on to Martin’s wife.

Bevill and Rose had been too long at their craft not to recognize the inevitable; that morning, while Martin was on his way back to my office, they had already decided that now, well or ill, wild man or not, it had to be Luke. Rose’s sense of justice made him insist that they could not even attempt to put Luke in leading strings, as they had Martin. Thus it was to be Luke in full power.

Meanwhile Martin had returned to my room. His gestures were relaxed, as though to light a cigarette were a pleasure to be taken slowly; yet we could not speak to each other with ease. With anyone else, I felt, he would be smiling with jubilation, with a trace of sadness too.

With me, he could not be so natural.

‘That’s settled,’ he said.

He asked if he could waste the rest of the afternoon for me and I said: ‘Of course.’ I added, meaninglessly ‘Can you spare the time?’

‘Very soon,’ said Martin, with a sarcastic grin, ‘I shall have plenty of time.’

For many minutes we sat there, looking down over Whitehall, saying nothing to the point, often falling into silence. It was not until we took a walk in the icy park that Martin made his first effort.

‘I’m happy about this,’ he said, as we trod along the path where, on the verges, each blade of grass stood out separated by the frost.

He added: ‘It’s a change from the last time.’

He meant the last time we had walked there, the day after the bomb had dropped. It had been sixteen mouths before. The leaves had been thick then; now we looked past the bare trees, into the mist fuming above the leaden water.

‘Since then,’ said Martin, ‘I haven’t found a place to stand.’

He spoke slowly, as though with the phrase he recalled that afternoon when, in the Dolphin Square bathroom, he saw the scientific way ahead.

He went on: ‘Up till now.’

In return I made my effort.

‘I hope,’ I said, ‘that I haven’t made it harder for you to find it.’

There seemed a long interval before Martin replied. Our steps rang in the frost. We were both evasive, reticent men, who used irony to cheat out of its importance the moment in which we breathed: each of us that afternoon had set ourselves to speak without easing the moment away. That was why we stumbled so.

‘You can see too much in personal causes,’ he said.

‘They exist,’ I said.

‘Without them,’ said Martin, ‘I think I should have done the same.’

‘I should like to be sure,’ I said.

‘Motives aren’t as important to me as they are to you,’ he said. ‘I’m more concerned with what one does.’

‘You have done some contradictory things,’ I said,

‘I can tell you this. That night we went to Pratt’s — it hasn’t affected me one way or the other. As far as I can answer for myself at all, I tell you that.’

He groped less when he spoke of his Sawbridge policy. He did not have to stumble; there we understood each other. We both knew the temptations of action, and how even clear-sighted men did not inquire what their left hand was doing. It was nonsense to think that Martin had been dissimulating all the time and that he had always intended to retire. Men were not clever enough to dissimulate for long.

He had, of course, been after the top job. Until quite recently he consciously intended to take it. For months he had been acting, as many men were acting on both sides of the great divide, out of the cynicism of self-preservation. Many men, delicate in their personal relations, had come to behave, and even to think, with that kind of cynicism, even though we concealed it from ourselves.

Some of us have been too delicate about personal relations,’ said Martin, back in my office, sitting by the window in the murky afternoon. ‘People matter; relations between them don’t matter much.’

I stood looking out of the window, where the lights scintillated under a sky ochreous and full of snow,

‘Lewis!’ His voice was quiet: it was rare, when we were alone, for us to use each other’s name.

‘That night after old Bevill left you said some true things,’ he said.

‘You also,’ I said.

‘I am colder hearted than you are. I care much less for the people round me.’

‘Why are you saying this?’

‘If it weren’t so, I couldn’t have made this choice.’

For any of us who had been concerned with the bomb, he repeated Luke’s earlier comment, there was no clear-cut way out. Unless you were a Sawbridge. For the rest of us, said Martin, there were just two conceivable ways. One was the way he had just taken: the other, to struggle on, as Luke was doing, and take our shame of what had been done and what might still be done, and hope that we might come out at the end of the tunnel. Being well meaning all the time, and thinking of nothing worse than our own safety.

‘For a warm-hearted man who’s affected by the people round him,’ said Martin, ‘perhaps it’s the only way. It’s the way you’re going, though you’re more far-sighted than they are.’

‘It wouldn’t be easy for me,’ I said after a pause, ‘to break right away.’

‘If you do choose their way,’ he said with sudden energy, ‘I’ve shown you how to do it.’

He meant that you could not compromise. If you accepted the bomb, the burnings alive, the secrets, the fighting point of power, you must take the consequences. You must face Sawbridge with an equal will. You were living in a power equilibrium, and you must not pretend; the relics of liberal humanism had no place there.

‘I completely disagree,’ I said.

‘You can’t find a compromise. But your personal ties keep you making them,’ said Martin. ‘That’s why you leave it to worse men to take the other way.’ He went on: ‘Sometimes it’s only the cold who can be useful.’

It had taken him a long time to be positive about what he must do: but now he spoke as though he had it in the palm of his hand. Previously he had wondered about leaving science altogether. He had contemplated ‘doing a Charles March’ (a friend of mine who, years before, had given up society and career in order to become a doctor) — but Martin decided that for him it was too ‘artificial’, too much out of his line. For him, there was only one course, to go back to pure science.

Most unusually for him, he showed a flicker of bravado.

‘I shall be just a little better than those pundits say,’ he said.

He had not many illusions, though perhaps, just as he contrived to see Irene both with realistic observation and also surrounded with a romantic aura, he could still feel, in the depth of his heart, a tremor of the magic that science had once evoked there.