Charles Snow - The New Men

He told me in so many words that he had not lost faith that science — though maybe not in his lifetime — would turn out for good. From some, after his history, it would have sounded a piece of facile scientists’ optimism. From him it had a different note. For to Martin it was jet-clear that, despite its emollients and its joys, individual life was tragic: a man was ineluctably alone, and it was a short way to the grave. But, believing that with stoical acceptance, Martin saw no reason why social life should also be tragic: social life lay within one’s power, as human loneliness and death did not, and it was the most contemptible of the false-profound to confuse the two.

‘As long as the worst things don’t happen—’ said Martin. ‘That’s why some of us must get clear of office and friends and anything that ties our hands.’

‘Is that what you thought of most?’

‘I hope they’ll leave me alone,’ he said. ‘But there may come a time when people like me have to make a nuisance of themselves.’

He went on: ‘I’m the last man for the job. It may be dangerous and I’m not cut out for that.’

It might not be necessary, I said. In my view, the danger was overrated and the betting was against it.

‘All the better,’ said Martin. ‘All the more reason for having a few sensible men who aren’t committed.’

He meant, good could happen as well as evil; men might run into a little luck; if we were too much hypnotized by the violence we had lived through, if each man of good will was mobilized, paid and silenced, we might let the luck slip.

That, may be the best reason of all for getting outside the machine,’ said Martin. ‘If a few of us are waiting for the chance, we might do a little good.’

He turned in his chair. In the tenebrous afternoon, the room had gone dark outside the zone of the desk light; and past the window, flakes of snow were dawdling down on to the Whitehall pavement.

He was looking at me. Suddenly, with no explanation necessary between us, he said: ‘You know, I shall never have the success you wanted me to have.’ Again we were speaking without ease, as though each word had to be searched for.

‘If I had not wanted it for you, would you have liked it more?’

‘I said before, you can see too much in personal causes.’

‘Have they made it harder for you?’

‘That doesn’t matter,’ he replied. ‘In the end, I should have done what I am doing now.’

Our intimacy had not returned, but we were speaking of ourselves more deeply than we had done before.

That afternoon, at last, Martin was answerable to no one. Speaking of his future, he had lost the final residue of a younger brother’s tone, and took on that of equal to equal, contemporary to contemporary, self-made to self-made.

Martin left Barford at the end of the year: Luke became Chief Superintendent the following May. A few weeks later, I went down to do some business with him on my way to Cambridge, where Martin had invited me to a college feast.

The Drawbells had not yet finished moving house, although Drawbell’s own new appointment had been announced. It was a come down. Perhaps that was why, more bullyingly even than in the past, he insisted that I should stay my night at Barford with them, not with the Lukes. I could not say no: in his decline he was hard to resist, partly because his personality was one of those that swell, become more menacing, the more he saw his expectations fade away.

He and his wife had waited for each post the preceding November, looking for a letter about the New Year’s honours list; and they were doing it again before the birthday list. There was nothing for them. They still pretended to expect it. At breakfast, in a room with covers on some of the chairs, ready to move that week, Drawbell made believe to threaten me, fixing me with his sound eye.

‘My patience is exhausted,’ he said, as though making a public speech — but it was the kind of joke which is not a joke. ‘It’s high time the Government did its duty.’

He may have suspected that I knew his chances. I did. But, for the last time with Drawbell, I had to follow his lead, do my best to be hearty and say nothing.

For his chances were nil. I had heard Hector Rose rule him out. It was the only time I had known Rose be, by his own standards, less than just. By Rose’s standards, Drawbell had done enough for a knighthood: Barford had ‘made its contribution’, as Rose said, and Drawbell had been in charge for five years. According to the rules, the top man got the top decoration; but for once Rose would not have it so. He asked cold questions about who had done the work; with the methodicalness of a recording angel, he put down to Drawbell’s credit the occasions when he had backed the right horse — and then turned to the other side of the sheet. The final account, in Rose’s mind, did not add up to a knighthood.

At the breakfast table, Drawbell, still ignorant of that decision, hoping against hope, put on his jocular act, and threatened me. His wife regarded me, monumental, impassive; she was looking forward to getting Mr Thomas Bevill down to the new establishment. Between her and her husband, I had never seen more than a thread of that friendliness-cum-dislike which comes in lifelong marriages that are wrong at the core: yet she remained his loyal and heavy-footed ally. She was no more defeated than he was. And when finally his last hope wilted, they would, without knowing it, be supports to each other.

That morning, Drawbell gave just one open sign of recognition that he was on the way down. He refused to come with me to his old office, which Luke was already occupying. He could not face the sight of someone who had passed him, who had — in Drawbell’s eyes and the world’s — arrived.

Yet Luke himself would have had his doubts, I thought, sitting beside his desk, behind which, in his shirtsleeves, he tilted back in his chair — in that room where he had made his first proposal about the pile. He would have had his doubts about his arrival, if ever he had spared time to consider it, which — as he remained a humble and an immediate man — he was most unlikely to.

He knew that he would not now leave much of a scientific memorial behind him. You could not do real scientific work and become a ‘stuffed shirt’, as he used to argue rudely in the past. Ironically, he, so richly endowed for the pure scientific life, had, unlike Martin, put it behind him. There were times when he felt his greatest gift was rusting. His corpus of work would not stand a chance of competing with Mounteney’s.

Nevertheless, Luke was enjoying himself. His chair tilted back against the wall, he gave the answer I had come for. Gave it with the crispness of one, who in reveries, had imagined himself as a tycoon. Once or twice he shot a response out of the side of his mouth.

‘Curtains,’ he said once, indicating that the discussion was at an end.

‘Come off it, Walter,’ I said.

Luke looked startled. As always, he had got into the skin of his part. Then he gave a huge cracked grin.

I had come to clear up one or two administrative tangles, which in Martin’s time would have been dealt with at Barford, and we were talking of getting Luke a second in command to tidy up after him. Luke was determined to appoint Rudd, who had, as soon as Drawbell was superseded, transferred his devotion to the new boss.

‘He’s a snurge,’ said Luke. ‘But he can be a very useful snurge.’

Was he the man that Luke wanted? In my view, Luke needed someone to stand up to him.

‘No,’ said Luke. ‘I can make something of him. I can make a difference to that chap.’

Already, I thought, Luke was showing just a trace of how power corrodes. As we walked round the establishment, in the drizzling rain, I teased him, bringing up against him his old ribald curses at ‘stuffed shirts’.