Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

Sometimes Rosalind thought he was elusive: he was distant from her because he had to attend to something else — is it beginning again? Those occasions were very rare in the winter after his outburst. The period of near-grace, of almost perfect safety, lasted right through the weeks on the Mediterranean, the months of the Cambridge spring. Rosalind came often to Cambridge, and spent weekends in the flat in Connaught Street. She was pressing, persuading, bullying him into marrying her — with tears, pathos, storms, scenes of all kinds. But she did not know of those moments of fear.

She did not know also of his brilliant, insatiable hopes. Those he tried to tell her of; she listened indulgently, they were part of the meaningless discontent with which so many men fretted themselves. If she had been as lucky as Roy, if she had what he had, she would have been ineffably happy. God? If she had been born in a religious time, she would have enjoyed the ceremonies, she would have assumed that she believed in God. As it was, she disbelieved just as cheerfully. There was no gap in her life; it was full and it would always have been full; she was made for the bright and pagan world, and in her heart she would always have found it.

So she dismissed, tenderly, half-contemptuously, half-admiringly, all that she heard of Roy’s hopes. She thus failed to understand the second reason why he was “elusive”. For her, love was an engrossing occupation. She had not been chaste when she met Roy, she was physically tolerant, she could have loved many men with happiness; but, loving Roy, she could make do without any other human relation, either in love or outside it. She liked her friends in a good-natured casual way, she had a worldly-wise gossipy interest in those round her, she liked to talk clothes and scandal to her women confidantes, she liked to show off her knowledge of books and art to men — but, if Roy had suddenly taken her to the Pacific, she would have missed nothing that she left behind.

She could not begin to realise how profoundly different it was with him. He lived in others more than any man I knew. It was through others that he drew much of his passionate knowledge of life. It was through others, such as the Master and Ralph Udal, that he tried to find one way to belief in God. Into anything human he could project himself and learn and feel. In the stories people told him, he found not only kinship with them, but magic and a sense of the unseen.

By contrast, he often seemed curiously uninterested and insensitive about non-human things. Places meant little to him except for the human beings they contained, and nature almost nothing at all. It was like him to talk of the Boscastle finances as we drove that night along the beautiful coast. He had very little feeling for traditional Cambridge, though no one had as many friends in the living town. He was amused by my interest in the past of the college: “romantic”, he called it scornfully: even when I produced sharp, clear facts about people in the past, he was only faintly stirred; they were not real beside the people that he knew.

Because he lived so much in others, his affections had some of the warmth, strength, glamour and imagination of love. His friendship with me did not become important to either of us until we were both grown men, but the quality he brought to it transformed it: it was different from any other of my friendships, more brilliant than anything I expected when I was no longer very young. He made others feel the same. They were the strangest variety, those to whom he brought this radiance: Lady Muriel — the “little dancer” (who was a consumptive woman in Berlin) — Winslow, who soon looked for Roy to sit next to him in hall — Mrs Seymour — the Master. There were many others, in all sorts of places from Boscastle to the tenements of Berlin, and the number grew each year.

In nearly all those affections he gave himself without thinking twice, though his parodic interest went along with his love. He had no scrap of desire to alter or “improve” those he loved. He was delighted by Lady Boscastle’s determination to reform me, but he was himself quite devoid of any trace of reforming zeal.

There were only one or two in all his human relations where there seemed the friction and strain of self. He was fond of Ralph Udal, but he was never so utterly untroubled and unselfconscious with Udal as with ten or twenty people who mattered to him less, as with, say, Mrs Seymour or Lord Boscastle. It puzzled me for a long time until I saw that with Udal Roy for once wanted something for himself. He wanted to know how to find the peace of God.

There were others too, besides Udal, whom Roy marked down as having spiritual knowledge denied to him. He felt they could be of use to him; he tracked them down, got to know them; he had a sharp eye for anyone who could be of this special use, as sharp an eye as a man develops who is out to borrow money or on the make. They were always youngish men, as though he felt no old man’s experience could help him (he was deeply fond of the Master, he envied his religious faith, but it neither drew them closer nor came between them). Yet he was never easy with them. He gave each of them up, as soon as he felt sure they had not known his own experience. Udal was the only one for whom he had a strong personal feeling. Rosalind did not realise that, through Udal, through some of those others, Roy was living an intent and desperate search. She did realise, as she had shown with the Boscastles and with me, that Roy’s friends captured his imagination and that she must know them. That was all she could see; it was a move in her plan to marry him. His hopes, his sense of life through others, his search — they would go, he would cease to be elusive, once she had him safely in the marriage bed.

It was in the early summer that he told her he could not marry her.

Rosalind let herself go. She had been crying, reproaching him, imploring him, for some days when I first heard what had happened. I went round to Connaught Street one night, and found Roy lying on the sofa, his face pale and tired. Rosalind was sitting in an armchair; the skin under her eyes was heavily powdered, but even so one could see that she had not long since been in tears.

They were in silence when I entered.

“Hallo, old boy,” said Roy. He was relieved to see me.

“I’d better tell Lewis,” said Rosalind.

“You needn’t,” said Roy. “It would be better if you didn’t.”

“You’ll only tell him yourself the minute you’ve got rid of me,” she said, angrily, pathetically.

Roy turned his face away. She faced me with open, brimming eyes.

“He’s got tired of me,” she said.

“Not true,” said Roy, without turning round.

“He won’t marry me. He’s told me that he won’t marry me.” She spoke to Roy. “You can’t deny that you’ve told me that, can you?”

Roy did not reply.

“I’m no good to him,” said Rosalind. She took out a crumpled handkerchief and began to cry, very quietly.

In time she said to me: “What do you think of it, Lewis? I expect you think it’s right.”

“I’m very sorry: that’s all one can ever say.”

“You think he’ll be better off without me, don’t you?” she cried.

I shook my head. “It’s for you two only,” I said.

She made a pretence of smiling.

“You’re a nice old thing, Lewis. If you don’t think he will be better off without me, everyone else will. All the people who think I’m a little bitch — they’ll all feel I’ve got what I deserve. Oh, what do I care what they all think? They don’t matter, now he’s turning me out.”

“I’m not turning you out.”

Roy’s voice was flat and exhausted, and Rosalind found it easier to talk to him through me. She looked at his back and said: “I’ve told him that I’ve got to get married some time. I can’t wait for ever. And someone quite nice is rather anxious to marry me.”