Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

“He’ll be no good to her,” said Francis.

“She’s very happy now.”

“She’s happy because he’s good at making love,” said Francis curtly. “It won’t last. She wants someone who’ll marry her and make her a decent husband. Do you think he will?”

Francis was right about Joan. She needed marriage more than most women, because she had so often felt diffident and unlike others. It was more essential to her than to someone like Rosalind, who had never tormented herself with thoughts of whether men would pass her by. Joan recognised that it was essential to her, if ever she were to become whole. She thought now, like any other girl, of marrying Roy, sometimes hoped, sometimes feared: but she was much too proud to give him a sign. She was so proud that she told herself they had gone into this love affair as equals; she had done it with her eyes open, and she must not let herself forget it.

So she behaved like a girl in love, sometimes like a proud and unusual girl, sometimes like anyone who has just known what rapture is. But I saw her when she was no longer rapturous, no longer proud, no longer exalted by the wonder of her own feelings, but instead compassionate, troubled, puzzled by what was wrong with him, set upon helping him. For she had seen him haunted in the summer, and she would not let herself rest.

She was diffident about attracting him: but she had her own kind of arrogance, and she believed that she alone could understand him. And she was too healthy a woman, too optimistic in her flesh and bone, not to feel certain that there was a solution; she did not believe in defeat; he was young, gifted, and high-spirited, and he could certainly be healed.

It was not made easy for her — for, though he wanted her help, he did not tell her all the truth. He shut out parts of his nature from her: shut them out, because he did not want to recognise them himself. She knew that he was visited by desperate melancholy, but he told her as though it came from a definite cause: if only he could find peace of mind he would be safe. She knew he was frightened at any premonition that he was going to be attacked again: she believed, as he wanted to, that they could find a charm which kept him in the light.

The Master lay overlooking the court through that lovely, tranquil autumn. Joan tried to learn what faith would mean to Roy.

She found it unfamiliar, foreign to her preconceptions of him, foreign to her own temperament. One thing did not put her off, as it did Francis Getliffe and so many others; since she loved him, she was not deceived by his mischievous jokes; she could see through them to the gravity of his thought. But the thought itself she found strange, and often forbidding.

He was searching for God. Like me, she had heard her father’s phrase. But she discovered that the search was not as she imagined. She had expected that he was longing to be at one with the unseen, to know the immediate presence of God. Instead, he seemed to be seeking the authority of God. He seemed to want to surrender his will, to be annihilated as a person. He wanted to lose himself eternally in God’s being.

Joan knew well enough the joy of submission to her lover; but she was puzzled, almost dismayed, that this should be his vision of faith. She loved him for his wildness, his recklessness, his devil-may-care; he took anyone alive as his equal; why should he think that faith meant that he must throw himself away? “Will is a burden. Men are freest when they get rid of will.” She rebelled at his paradox, with all her sturdy protestant nature. She hated it when he told her that men might be happiest under the authority of the state — “apart from counter-suggestible people like you, Joan.” But she hated most his vision, narrow and intense, of the authority of God.

In his search of religion, he did not give a thought to doing good. She knew that many people thought of him as “good”, she often did herself — and yet any suggestion that one should interfere with another’s actions offended him. “Pecksniffery”, he called it. He was for once really angry with her when she told him that he was good himself. “Good people don’t do good,” he said later, perversely. In fact, the religious people he admired were nearly all of them contemplative. Ralph Udal sponged on him shamelessly, wanted to avoid any work he did not like, prodded Roy year in, year out to get him a comfortable living, and was, very surprisingly, as tolerant of others as of himself. None of this detracted from Roy’s envy of his knowledge of God. And old Martineau, since he took to the religious life, had been quite useless. To Roy it was self-evident that Martineau knew more of God than all the virtuous, active, and morally useful men.

Joan could not value them so, and she argued with him. But she did not argue about the experience which lay at the root of Roy’s craving for faith. He told her, as he told me that night we walked on the Roman road, about his hallucination that he was lost, thrown out of God’s world, condemned to opposition while all others were at rest. That sense had visited him once again, for the third time, during the blackness of the summer.

Joan had never met anything like it, but she knew it was a passionate experience; everything else dropped away, and her heart bled for him. For she could feel that it came from the depth of his nature; it was a portent that nothing could exorcise or soften. While the remembrance haunted him, he could not believe.

She called on all she knew to save him from that experience. She pressed love upon him, surrounded him with love (too much, I sometimes thought, for she did not understand the claustrophobia of being loved). She examined her own heart to find some particle of his despair. If she could know it herself, only a vestige, only for a moment, perhaps she could help him more. She asked others about the torments of doubt and faith — loyally, sturdily and unconvincingly keeping out Roy’s name. She talked to me: it cost her an effort, for, though she had with difficulty come to believe that I admired her and wished her well, she was never at ease with me as Rosalind was. Rosalind had confided in me when she was wildly unhappy over Roy — but it had been second nature to her to flatter me, to make me feel that in happier days she might not have been indifferent to me. With Joan, there was not a ray of flirtatiousness, not the faintest aura of love to spare. Except as a source of information, I did not exist. Each heart beat served him, and him alone.

She came to a decision which took her right outside herself. Wise or unwise, it showed how she was spending her imagination in his life. Herself, she stayed in her solid twentieth-century radical unbelief: but him she tried to persuade to act as though he had found faith, in the hope that faith would come.

It was bold and devoted of her. And there were a few weeks, unknown at the time to anyone but themselves, when he took her guidance. He acted to her as though his search was over. He went through the gestures of belief, not in ritual but in his own mind. He struggled to hypnotise himself.

He could not keep it up. Sadness attacked him, and he was afraid that the melancholy was returning. Even so, he knew that his acts of faith were false; he felt ashamed, hollow, contemptible, and gave them up. Inexplicably, his spirits rose. The attempt was at an end.

Joan did not know what to do next. The failure left its mark on her. She was seized with an increased, an unrestrainable passion to marry him. Even her pride could not hold down a sign.

It became obvious as one saw them together in the late autumn. Often she was happy, flushing at his teasing, breaking out into her charming laugh, which was richer now that she had been loved. But more than once I saw them in a party, when she thought herself unobserved: she looked at him with a glance that was heavy, brooding, possessive, consumed with her need to be sure of him.