Charles Snow - The New Men

‘If ever you think I’m becoming one, Lewis,’ said Luke, ‘you come and kick my behind.’

He was limping as he walked. His knee was still giving him pain, and at the back of his mind there was the ache of not knowing whether he had recovered. Nevertheless, limping, grey at the temples, not disguising his fear of whether his life was going to be cut short, he seemed physically to expand as he took me into bay after bay of the new buildings. By this time they stretched for many acres on both sides of the river: in and out of the rain we dodged, as he took me to see the new piles being built, where the floors were busy with scientists and artisans. Then he took me to the two piles already working, working in the humanless space. The building looked less crude now; above was a large chimney, and there hummed the faint noise of fans. This had become Luke’s empire.

Like any sentient man, he had had his hesitations about this project (for my benefit, he was reckoning up, as we stood beside the working pile, just how many such machines existed in the world). He had given his reasons why he went on with it, and why he believed all might turn out well. But now he had shut both doubts and justifications within him. He was not one of those who can work and at the same time remain detached about whether or not they are doing good. This was Luke’s empire, and as he looked over it he thought of nothing but how best to make it run.

‘That evening, in Martin’s rooms in Cambridge, which by a touch of college sentiment were those I had lived in before the war, I described that talk with Luke. Martin and I were alone, and there was an hour before dinner; only the first fringe of rain had reached Cambridge, and the sun was shining, after a shower which filled the room with a smell of wisteria from the court beneath.

There, in the high room, which the sunlight did not reach, Martin questioned me about Luke: how was his régime turning out? How were the latest plans working? For Martin, although he had changed his life, did not pretend that he could will away his interest, and liked to talk of the place where he had had an influence which would not come to him again.

He disagreed with one of Luke’s arrangements and gave his reason, which sounded sensible.

‘Why doesn’t someone tell him so?’ he said.

‘Some people are going to get more than they bargained for,’ I said.

‘It’s not necessary,’ Martin was not displeased to find fault. I said that, though Luke’s methods might be rough and ready, under him Barford would be a success.

‘Poor old Walter!’ Martin said, with a smile, with an edge of envy. Martin had not gone back on his choice, although by this time be knew, what one can never imagine until one lives it, the wear and tear, hour by hour and day by day, as one tries to reshape a life. He knew precisely what it was like to work in the same laboratory as his juniors, and realize that they were outclassing him He came to them as a man with a big outside reputation, and felt a nobody. At colloquia and laboratory teas he became nervous in front of young men whose confidence, unlike his own, was absolute.

He believed now that his critics were right: from every practical point of view, his choice had been stupid: he would stay there, doing his college teaching, without a realistic chance of achievement for the rest of his life.

He had always been quiet, but in the days of his power it had been the quietness, trained and confident, of a high functionary, the quietness of Hector Rose. Now it had changed; it had the special quality that you see in one who has learned something from life and who has lost his high spirits during the lesson. His interest had become passive. Sitting in the darkness of his room, looking out of the window at the court brilliant in the rain-clear sunlight, he had none of the authority of action that men like Luke carried on their brow.

But he was happy. It was a curious kind of happiness that had come upon him almost without his knowing it. It occurred to me that I had seen others make renunciations similar in kind to his: in each case they gained happiness. It might have been otherwise, it might have been one of the ironies of the human condition that, when you throw away the game with a chance of winning it, you regret it ever after: but, in the cases I had seen, it proved the contrary.

I was glad that he should be happy. Suddenly I thought that, hoping so much for him, with the fraternal concern that identified myself in him, I had worried little about his happiness. Even now — in the room where he had first mentioned the proof of fission, which had led us both to the fringe of such events as had darkened our consciences and given him the chance of secret power — he could not, now that he had resigned the power and found his happiness, share any part of it with me.

My concern for him had, in the midst of those convulsions, shown the flaw which exists in any of its kind, which, if we had been luckier, might not have come out so clear.

If we had been luckier, if events had not taken hold of us, there might have been no occasion for him to tell me, as he had done in St James’s Street, when I said that I had wanted much for him:

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

It was the truth; it was the reason why the most sacrificial of human affections twist into the most self-seeking of all. It can cripple those who receive it, and those who give can never find anything of what they seek.

I had looked to him to go the way I chose for him. In the Sawbridge affair, he had done the opposite, and, whichever of us was right in the abstract, that was why I had felt it like a betrayal. It was clear now. As men went, we were sensible and did not expect over much from human beings: but events had taken hold of us, and had shown up the nature of my concern.

As Irene perceived, with the insight of jealousy, the time came when he had to cut himself quite free.

If you identify yourself in another, however tough the tie between you, he cannot feel as you do, and then you go through (you who have been living your life in another) a state for which the old Japanese found a name, which they used to describe the sadness of a parent’s love: a darkness of the heart.

I ought to have known it, for my mother had tried to relive her life in me; and I had not been able to return that kind of love. I too had been compelled to cut myself quite free.

It was a little thing, the human price that Martin and I had paid, as a result of those events which Hector Rose called ‘too big for men’ — and yet that was what I thought of sitting in that dark room, the sky brilliant over the roofs opposite, waiting for the college bell. Through being forced together in our corner of those events, I had out of the nature of my affection done him harm. I had brought some sadness on myself. We were both too realistic to expect that our intimacy could be complete again.

The dinner bell began to toll, Martin gave an indrawn, sarcastic smile. As we stood up I was thinking that, though we had paid our modest price, we had regained most of the ease of old habit in each other’s company. We were on our way to repairing something of what had happened between us. Of the human relations I had so far known, I had found, despite our mistakes, none more steady and comforting than that with my brother; I hoped that in time he would feel the same.

The passage about diplomatic overtures, for example, only complicated the argument.