Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

“It might be a slightly expensive excitement,” I said.

He smiled.

“It won’t do me any good with Oulstone, will it?”

There was a trace of satisfaction in his tone. “Oh, never mind. I wasn’t cut out to be stuffed. I’ll go on doing my work. But I don’t want anything in return that those people can give me. I need them to leave me alone, that’s all. I’ll go on with the work. It’s become a habit. But it isn’t going to settle me, old boy. Once I hoped it might. Now I know it can’t. I need to search elsewhere. I shall get there in the end.”

The wind blew, his voice was clear and happy. He said earnestly: “Pity me for the gloom. But it made me see things — that otherwise I never could have seen. Don’t think that all I told you was nonsense. Don’t think I’ve forgotten what I saw.”

“I believe that,” I said.

He stopped suddenly, and held my arm.

“Lewis, why are you so sombre? What is hurting you?”

I did not reply.

“Are you thinking that this will happen to me again?”

“It may,” I said, half-miserably, half-intoxicated by his hope. “Anyway, you ought to be ready. You won’t always be so happy, will you?”

“It may,” Roy repeated. “It may. I need to take it if it comes.” He had spoken evenly, then his voice rose: “It’s something to know the worst.” He was smiling in the dark, with no cover and no reserve: it seemed as though for a second he were deliberately challenging fate.

The next time he spoke, it was very quietly and intimately. We were getting near the water, as he said: “I shall be all right if I can only find somewhere to rest.”

He added, gently: “I shall find my way there. Dear old boy, it may not be the way you’d choose for me. But that doesn’t matter so much to you, does it?”

We walked along the bank, the gale grew louder, the little waves lapped at our feet. He passed from his hopes to mine, selflessly mischievous, selflessly protective. For a while, in the magic of his spirits and the winter night, I could almost believe as he believed, hope as he hoped, and be as happy.

Yet my heart was rent. Never in my life had I so passionately longed to forget all that life had taught me. I wanted the magic to endure, I wanted to believe that he would find rest.

I could not. All I might do was try not to shorten by a minute this calm and beautiful state. If he must learn, let it not be through me. He was the clearest-sighted of men: for once his eyes were dulled: let them stay dulled, rather than see what I saw. Much of my life I had been in search of truth, of the truth about personalities, about the natures of those round me; I would have rather thrown it all away, lose such insight as I might have, sacrifice what I knew, than that I should be seeing the truth now. And if, and if I were seeing the truth, then I prayed that Roy never would.

For I believed that he would not find peace on this earth. He hoped so calmly that night, with such a calm and beautiful hope, that he could escape the burden of self, struggle from under the weight of life, and so leave melancholy and despair behind for ever; he knew they threatened him, but he could conquer them once he broke loose from the chains of self. He tasted, for the illusory moments that we all know, what it was like to be free — to be free of the confines of one’s personality, through another person, through the enchantments of the many forms of love, through the ecstasy of the flesh (for Roy was freer, less clamped in his own mould, because of the odd secret nights he spent with women he would never see again). He had tasted what it was like to long to believe in God. And that night, while we walked in the winter gale, the Augustinian phrase kept ringing through his mind — “Thou has created us for Thyself and our hearts can never rest until they rest in Thee”.

It sounded not as a threat, but as a promise. Perhaps that was the way he would find rest. That night he felt almost certain that it was the way. But yet, he was so confident and liquid in his hope, if not that way he would find another. There was a state of grace: perhaps it would come to him through God, perhaps in some other fashion. But he would find it, and be safe from the night of despair.

If it could be so, I thought in pain. If it could be so. Yet now I had seen him go through a bout of melancholy to the end, through the desperate sadness to the fantastic release. I believed it was part of his nature to feel that suffering, to undergo that clear-eyed misery, as much a part of him as his mischief, his kindness, his physical elegance, his bone and flesh. It was so deep that nothing could change it. He might think he had escaped, but the melancholy would crush him down once more. It was a curse that no one could take away until he died.

He was teasing me, his laugh was blown away on the wind. I would have given all the future for that moment to stay still. I did not dare to see the future. This was a moment of grace.

If I were right, there must come a time when he would know his nature. Some day his clear eyes would see. When would he know?

Roy returned to college for the rest of the Michaelmas term. His reading lamp was alight all day; his window in the turret gleamed above the court through the dark afternoons and the December evenings. He dined regularly at high table; and no one meeting him there, polite, cheerful, teasing with a solemn face, could have guessed what he had just passed through. Though I had seen it, I often forgot. His step on my stairs at night now meant ease, and well-being. He was quite unstrained, as though he had only to wait for good things to happen.

After he had talked to them at dinner, some of his opponents felt he had been misjudged. He sat by Winslow’s side for several nights running. He had a respect for the cross-grained, formidable, unsuccessful man, and he happened to know his son. It was generally thought that Dick Winslow was nothing but a stupid waster, but Roy both liked him and felt his father’s vulnerable, unassuageable love. So they talked about Dick — Winslow pretending to be ironic, realistic, detached. Roy was very gentle, both at the time and afterwards, when he said to me: “It must be dreadful, never being able to give yourself away. He needs to stop keeping his lips so tight, doesn’t he?”

Roy did not, however, make the slightest progress towards melting Despard-Smith. He began by making a genuine attempt, for Ralph Udal’s sake: Despard-Smith was the most influential member of the livings committee, and, if Udal were to have a chance of a college living, the old man had to be placated. But Roy met with a signal failure. He suppressed the glint in his eye that usually visited him in the presence of the self-satisfied and self-important, those who seemed to him invulnerable and whom he called “the stuffed”. Deferentially he discussed the Church of England, college finance, and early heresies. Despard-Smith replied bleakly and with certainty, looking at Roy with uncompromising suspicion. Roy led up to the question of a living for Udal. “I can’t speak for my colleagues, Calvert,” said Despard-Smith, meaning that he could. “But I should personally regard it as nothing short of scandalous to let a man of Udal’s age eat the bread of idleness. It certainly would not be in the man’s own best interests. When he has got down to the c-collar for twenty or thirty years, then perhaps he might come up for consideration.”

“He wants peace to think,” said Roy.

“The time to get peace, as some of us know,” said Despard-Smith, “is when one has borne the heat and burden of the day.”

Roy knew it was no good. But his next question was innocent enough. He asked who would get the vacant living, which was the second best in the college’s gift.