Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

I muttered.

“I’ve got a chance,” he said. “But it will be a near thing. I need to have nothing hold me back. You can see that, can’t you?”

“I can see that,” I said.

“You believe in predestination, Lewis,” he said. “It doesn’t prevent you battling on. It would prevent me, you know. You’re much more robust than I am. If I believed as you believe, I couldn’t go on.”

He went on: “I think you’re wrong. I need to act as though you’re wrong. It may weaken me if I know what you’re thinking. There may be times when I shall not want to be understood. I can’t risk being weakened, Lewis. Sooner than be weakened, I should have to lose everything else. Even you.”

A punt passed under the bridge and broke the reflections. The water had ceased swirling before he spoke again.

“I shan’t lose you,” he said. “I don’t think I could. You won’t get rid of me. I’ve never felt what intimacy means, except with you. And you—”

“It is the same with me.”

“Just so,” said Roy.

He added very quietly: “I wouldn’t alter anything if I could help it. But there may come a time when I get out of your sight. There may come a time when I need to keep things from you.”

“Has that time come?” I asked.

He did not speak for a long time.

“Yes,” he said.

He was relieved to have it over. As soon as it was done, he wanted to assure me that nearly everything would be unchanged. On the way back to the college, he arranged to see me in London with an anxiety, a punctiliousness, that he never used to show. Our meetings had always been casual, accidental, comradely: now he was telling me that they would go on unchanged, our comradeship would not be touched; the only difference was that some of his inner life might be concealed.

It was the only rift that had come between us. During the time we had known each other, his life had been wild and mine disordered, but our relation had been profoundly smooth, beyond anything in my experience. We had never had a quarrel, scarcely an irritable word.

It made his rejection of intimacy hard for me to bear. I was hurt, sharply, sickly and bitterly hurt. I had the same sense of deprivation as if I had been much younger. Perhaps the sense of deprivation was stronger now; for, while as a younger man my vanity would have been wounded, on the other hand I should still have looked forward to intimacies more transfiguring even than this of ours; now I had seen enough to know that such an intimacy was rare, and that it was unlikely I should ever take part in one again.

Yet he could do no other than draw apart from me. If he were to keep his remnant of hope, he could do nothing else. For I could not hope on his terms: he had seen into me, and that was all.

It had been bitter to watch him suffer and know I could not help. That was a bitterness we all taste, one of the first facts we learn of the human condition. It was far more bitter to know that my own presence might keep him from peace of mind. It was the harshest of ironies: for he was he, and I was I, as Montaigne said, and so we knew each other: just because of that mutual knowledge, I stood in his way.

I had thought I was a realistic man — and yet I took it with dismay and cursed that we are as we are. But I tried not to make the change harder for him. As I told Joan in the spring, I had learned more from Roy than he from me. I had watched the absolute self-forgetfulness with which he spent himself on another, the self-forgetfulness he had so often given to me. I was not capable of his acts of selflessness, I was not made like him. But I could try to mutate him in practice. There was no question what I must do. I had to preserve our comradeship in the shape he wished, without loss of spirits and without demur. I had to be there, without trouble or pride, if he should want me.

Roy and Joan became lovers during that summer. I wondered who had taken the initiative — but it was a question without meaning. Roy was ardent, fond of women, inclined to let them see that he desired them, and then wait for the next move: in his self-accusation to Winslow, he said that he “coaxed invitations” from women, and that was no more than the truth. At the same time, Joan was a warm-blooded young woman, direct and canalised in all she felt and did. She was not easily attracted to men; she was fastidious, diffident, desperately afraid that she would lack physical charm to those she loved. But she had been attracted to Roy right back in the days when she thought he was frivolous and criticised his long nose. She had not known quite what it meant, but gradually he came to be surrounded by a haze of enchantment; of all men he was the first she longed to touch. She stayed at her window to watch him walk through the court. She thought of excuses to take a message to his rooms.

She told herself that this was her first knowledge of lust. She had a taste for the coarse and brutal words, the most direct and uncompromising picture of the facts. This was lust, she thought, and longed for him. She saw him with Rosalind and others, women who were elegant, smart, alluring, and she envied them ferociously, contemptuously and with self-abasement. She thought they were fools; she thought none of them could understand him as she could; and she could not believe that he would ever look at her twice.

She found, incredulously, that he liked her. She heard him make playful love to her, and she repeated the words, like a charm, before she went to sleep at night. At once her longing for him grew into dedicated love, love undeviating, whole-hearted, romantic and passionate. And that love became deeper, richer, pervaded all her thoughts, during the months her father lay dying and Roy sat with them in the Lodge.

For she was not blinded by the pulse of her blood. Some things about him she did not see, for no girl of twenty could. But others she saw more vividly, with more strength of fellow-feeling, even with more compassion, than any woman he had known. She could throw aside his caprices and whims, for she had seen him comfort her mother with patience, simplicity and strength. She had seen him suffer with them. She had heard him speak from the depth of feeling, not about her, but about her father’s state and human loneliness: after his voice, she thought, all others would seem dull, orotund and complacent. She had watched his face stricken, or, as she put it, “possessed by devils” that she did not understand. She wanted to spend her life in comforting him.

So her love filled her and drove her on. I thought it would be like her if, despite her shrinking diffidence, she finally asked to become his mistress. It was too easy to imagine her, with no confidence at all, talking to him as though fiercely and choosing the forthright words. But that did not really mean that she had taken the initiative. Their natures played on each other. Somehow it would have happened. There was no other end.

From the beginning, Roy felt a deeper concern for her than for anyone he loved. She was, like her mother, strong and defenceless. Stronger and abler than her mother, and even less certain of love. Roy was often irresponsible in love, with women who took it as lightly as he did. But Joan was dependent on him from the first time he kissed her. He could not pretend otherwise. Perhaps he did not wish it otherwise, for he was profoundly fond of her. He was amused by her sulkiness and fierceness, he liked to be able to wipe them away. He had gone through them to the welling depths of emotion, where she was warm, tempestuous, violent and tender. He found her rich beyond compare.

Like her, he too had been affected by their vigil in the Lodge. It had surrounded her, and all that passed between them, with its own kind of radiance — the radiance of grief, suffering, intense feeling, and ineluctable death. In that radiance, they had talked of other things than love. He had told her more than he had told any woman of his despair, his search, his hope. He was moved to admiration by her strength, which never turned cold, never wilted, stayed steady through the harsh months in the Lodge. There were times when he rested on that strength himself. He came to look upon her as an ally, as someone who might take his hand and lead him out of the dark.