Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

By this time the Master did not often leave his bed, and I looked at him as he lay there. His face had become that of a very old man; it was difficult to remember him in the days when he seemed so well-preserved. The skin was dried up, waxy-yellow, lined and pouched. His eyes had sunk deeply in their orbits, and the lids were very dark. Yet he managed to keep his voice enough like its former self not to upset those who listened to him.

He spoke to me with the same kind, detached curiosity that had become his habit. He asked after my affairs as though nothing else interested him. Suddenly he saw that he was distressing me.

“Tell me, Eliot,” he said gently, “would it embarrass you less if I talk of what it’s like to be in this condition?”

“Much less,” I said.

“I believe you mean that,” he said. “You’re a strange man.”

“Well,” he went on, “stop me if I ramble. I’ve got something I particularly want to say to you, before you go. I can think quite clearly. Sometimes I fancy I think more clearly than I ever did in my life. But then the ideas start running away with me, and I get tired. Remember, this disease is something like being slowly starved.”

He was choosing the tone which would distress me least. He went on to discuss the election of his successor; he asked about the parties and intrigues, and talked with his old sarcastic humour, with extraordinary detachment, as though he were an observer from another world — watching the human scene with irony, and the kind of pity which hides on the other side of cynicism. He made one or two good jokes. Then he asked whether the college had expected to get the election over before now. I said yes. He smiled.

“It can’t be long,” he said quietly. “There are days even with this disease when you feel a little better. And you hope. It’s ridiculous, but you hope. It seems impossible that your will should count for nothing. Then you realise that it’s certain that you must die in six months. And you think it is too horrifying to bear. People will tell you, Eliot, that uncertainty is the worst thing. Don’t believe them. Certainty is the worst thing.”

He was very tired, and closed his eyes. I thought how he was facing death with stoicism, with detachment, and with faith. Yet even he would have prayed: take this from me at least. Do not let me be certain of the time of my death. His faith assured him that he would pass into another existence. But that was a comfort far away from the animal fact. Just like the other comfort that I should one day have to use myself: they tell me that, when I am dead, I shall not know. Those consolations of faith or intellect could not take away the fear of the animal fact.

He began to talk again, but now he seemed light-headed, his words flew like the associations of a dream. I had to remind him: “You said you had something important to tell me, before I go.”

He made an effort to concentrate. The ideas set off in flight again, but he frowned and gathered up his will. He found a clue, and said: “What is happening about Roy Calvert?”

“He’s in Berlin. The proofs of the new part of the liturgy are just coming in.”

“Berlin… I heard some talk about him. Didn’t he take my daughter to a ball?”

“Yes.”

He was quiet. I wondered what he was thinking.

Again he frowned with concentration.

“Eliot,” he said. “I want you to do me a favour. Look after Roy Calvert. He’s the great man of the future in my field. I like to think that he won’t forget all about my work. Look after him. He’ll need it. People like him don’t come twice in a generation. I want you to do me a favour. Look after Roy Calvert.”

That cry came partly from the sublimed kindness in which he was ending his life. I was moved and shaken as I gave him my promise.

But it was not only self-forgetting kindness that brought out that cry; it was also a flicker of his own life; it was a last assertion of his desire not to be forgotten. He had not been a distinguished scholar, and he was a modest man who ranked himself lower than he deserved. But he still did not like to leave this mortal company without something to mark his place. For him, as for others I had sat by in their old age, it was abhorrent to imagine the world in which he had lived going on as though he had never been. It was a support, bare but not illusive, to know that he would leave a great scholar behind him, whom he could trust to say: “You will find that point in one of old Royce’s books. He made it completely clear.” A shadow of himself would linger as Roy became illustrious. His name would be repeated among his own kind. It was his defiance of the dark.

I thought by his bedside, and again a few minutes later when I met Joan, how tough the core of our selves can be. The Master’s vanities had been burned away, he was detached and unselfish as he came towards his death, and yet the desire to be remembered was intact. And Joan was waiting for me in the drawing-room, and her first question was: “What did he say about Roy?”

She knew that the Master had wished to tell me something. It was necessary for her to know any fact which affected Roy.

I told her that the Master had asked me to do what I could for Roy.

“Is that all?”

“Yes.”

“There was nothing else?”

I repeated one or two of the Master’s observations, looking at us from a long way off.

“I mean, there was nothing else about Roy?”

She was deeply attached to her father, she had suffered by his side, she had been touched beyond expression as his self-forgetful kindness grew upon him in the last months of his life — but it counted for nothing beside her love for Roy. She was tough in her need for him. All her power was concentrated into feeling about him. Human beings in the grip of passion are more isolated than ever, I thought. She was alone with her love. Perhaps, in order to be as healthy and strong as she was, one had to be as tough.

The Master had asked me to look after Roy. As I listened to that girl, I felt that she would take on the task, even if she knew as much as I did. She would welcome the dangers that she did not know. She cross-examined me with single-minded attention. She made me hope.

Roy came back from Berlin in October, and I watched contrasts in Joan as sharp as I had seen them in any woman. Often she was a girl, fascinated by a lover whom she found enchanting, seeing him hazily, adoringly, through the calm and glorious Indian summer. The college shimmered in the tranquil air, and Joan wanted to boast of him, to show off the necklace he had brought her. She loved being teased, having her sulkiness devastated, feeling mesmerised in front of his peculiar mischief. She was too much a girl not to let his extravagant presents be seen by accident; she liked her contemporaries to think she was an abandoned woman, pursued by a wicked, distinguished, desirable and extremely lavish lover. Once or twice, in incredulous delight, she had to betray her own secret.

She confided it to Francis Getliffe and his wife, and Francis talked anxiously to me. He liked and understood her, and he could not believe that Roy would bring her anything but unhappiness. Francis had never believed that Roy was a serious character; now he believed it less than ever, for Roy had come back from Berlin, apparently cheerful and composed, but ambiguous in his political attitude. Francis, like many scientists of his age, was a straightforward, impatient, positive socialist, with technical backing behind his opinions and no nonsense or frills. He was angered by Roy’s new suggestions, which were subtle, complex and seemed to Francis utterly irresponsible. He was angered almost as much by Roy’s inconsistency; for Roy, despite his friends in high places in the Third Reich, had just smuggled into England a Jewish writer and his wife. It was said that Roy had taken some risks to do it; I knew for certain that he was spending a third of his income on them. Francis heard this news with grudging approval, and was then maddened when Roy approached him with a solemn face and asked whether, in order to ease relations with Germany, the university could not decree that Jewish scholars were “Welsh by statute”.