Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

I remembered that winter evening by the Serpentine, and I was wrung by pain and by acute fear. There were nights when I too lay awake.

It was during May that Joan first told Roy that she loved him. The reprieve to her father seemed to act as a trigger to her love. It had begun long since, in the days when as an awkward girl she used to decry Roy in company and quarrel with him whenever she could make the opportunity. It had accumulated through those harsh winter days in the Lodge, when they all rested on him. Now it was set loose and pouring out.

I knew it, because she talked to me about his unhappiness. Unlike Rosalind, she could not take it as a matter of course. She was forced to discover what had stricken him. She was the proudest of young women, and yet she humbled herself to ask me — even though she thought I was her enemy, even though she felt she alone should possess his secrets. Whatever it cost her, she must learn him through and through. I was touched both by her humility and her pride. So she watched him in those weeks of affliction with eyes that were anxious, distressed, loving, hungry to understand. But she was spared the climax.

I was nervous about him almost to the end of Arthur Brown’s claret party. Brown gave this party to his wine-drinking colleagues each year at the beginning of June.

That summer he arranged it for the second night of May week. As a rule this would have been the night of the college ball, but, though the Master asked that all should continue normally, it was not being held this year. The undergraduates took their young women to balls at other colleges: Roy had danced with Joan at Trinity the previous night. Now he turned up at Brown’s party, heavy-eyed for lack of sleep, and deceived all the others into believing that his sparkle was the true sparkle of a joyous week.

All through the evening, I could not keep my eyes away from him for long. Time after time, I was compelled to look at him, to confirm what I dreaded. For this was the sparkle I had seen before. I wished I could take him out of danger.

Six of us sat in Brown’s rooms on that warm June night, and the decanters stood in a shapely row in the evening light. Brown was giving us the best clarets of 1920 and 1924.

“I must say, Tutor,” said Winslow, “that you’re doing us remarkably proud.”

“I thought,” said Brown comfortably, “that it was rather an opportunity for a little comparative research.”

Although it was late evening, the sun had scarcely set, and over the roofs opposite the sky glowed brilliantly. From the court there drifted the scent of acacia, sweet and piercing. We settled down to some luxurious drinking.

Roy had begun the evening with some of his malicious imitations, precise, unsparing, and realistic, which rubbed away the first stiffness of the party. Winslow, who had once more come to see him in the glare of propaganda, was soon melted.

Since then Roy had been drinking faster than any of us. The mood was on him.

He talked with acute intensity. Somehow — to the others it sounded harmless enough — he brought in the phrase “psychological insight”. One of the party said that he had never considered that kind of insight to be a special gift.

“It’s time you did, you know,” said Roy.

“I don’t believe in it. It’s mumbo-jumbo,” said Winslow.

“You think it’s white man’s magic?” Roy teased him, but the wild glint had come into his eyes.

“My dear young man, I’ve been watching people since long before you were born,” said Winslow, with his hubristic and caustic air. “And I know there’s only one conclusion. It’s impossible for a man to see into anyone else’s mind.”

Roy began again, the glint brighter than ever.

Suddenly I broke in, with a phrase he recognised, with a question about Winslow’s son.

Roy smiled at me. He was half-drunk, he was almost overcome by desperate elation — but he could still control it that night when he heard my signal. Instead of the frantic taunt I had been waiting for, he said: “You’ll see, Winslow. The kind of insight that old Lewis here possesses. It may be white man’s magic, but it’s quite real. Too real.”

He fell quiet as Winslow talked, for the second time that evening, about his son. Soon after he entered, Brown asked about his son’s examination, which had just finished. Winslow had been rude in his own style, professing ignorance of how the boy was likely to have got on. Now, in the middle of the party, he gave a different answer.

“My dear Brown,” he said, “I don’t know what kind of a fool of himself the stupid child has really made. He thinks he has done reasonably well. But his judgment is entirely worthless. I shall be relieved if the examiners let him through.”

“Oh, they’ll let him through,” said Brown amiably.

“I don’t know what will happen to him if they don’t,” said Winslow. “He’s a stupid child. But I believe there’s something in him. He’s a very nice person. If they give him a chance now, I honestly believe he may surprise you all in ten years’ time.”

I had never heard Winslow speak with so little guard. He gazed at Brown from under his heavy lids, and recovered his caustic tone: “My dear Tutor, you’ve had the singular misfortune to teach the foolish creature. I drink to you in commiseration.”

“I drink to his success,” said Brown.

After the party, Roy and I walked in the garden. It was a warm and balmy night, with a full moon lemon-yellow in the velvet sky. The smell of acacia was very strong. On the great trees the leaves lay absolutely still.

“I shall sleep tonight,” said Roy, after we had walked round once in silence. His face was pale, his eyes filmed and bloodshot, but the dionysiac look had gone. “I shall sleep tonight,” he said, with tired relief.

He had not been to bed for forty-eight hours, he was more than a little drunk, yet he needed to reassure himself that he would sleep.

The smell of acacia hung over us.

“I think I’ll go to bed, old boy,” he said. “I shall be able to sleep tonight. You know, I’ve been getting out of practice.”

The last college meeting of the academic year took place a fortnight after Brown’s claret party. By tradition, it was called for a Saturday morning, to distinguish it from all other meetings of the year. For this was the one at which examination results were considered; the last of the results were published that morning, and Brown and I studied them together, a couple of hours before the bell was due to ring. There were several things to interest us — but the chief was that we could not find Dick Winslow’s name. Brown thought it might be a clerical mistake, and rang up the examiners to make sure. There was no mistake. He had done worse than one could have believed.

The meeting began at half-past eleven. As the room filled up, whispers about young Winslow were passing round the table; Winslow himself had not yet come. In the whispers one could hear excitement, sometimes pity, sometimes pleasure, sometimes pity and pleasure mixed. At last Winslow entered and strode to his place, looking at no one there.

An old man, who had not picked up the news, said a cheerful good morning.

“Good morning to you,” said Winslow in a flat leaden desolate voice. He was remote, absent-minded in his misery.

There were some minor courtesies before the meeting. Winslow was asked a question. He sat mute. He could not rouse himself to a tart reply. His head had sunk down, bent towards the table.

Despard-Smith, who had taken the chair since the Master fell ill, at last opened the business. The sacramental order was followed, even at this special examination meeting. There was only one trivial matter connected with livings: then came the financial items, when as a rule Winslow did most of the talking and entertained us in his own style. He could usually be relied on to keep us for at least half-an-hour — just as he had done at Roy’s election. That morning, when Despard-Smith asked: “Bursar, will you take us through your business?”