Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

When they had all gone, I asked Roy their stories; he lay smoking a cigarette, and we speculated together about their lives. What would happen to the little dancer? Was there any way of getting her into a sanatorium? She must have been a delightful girl ten years before: she had wasted herself in hopeless devotions for married men: why had it happened so? Might she find a husband now? How long would Romantowski stay with his patron? Would the school teacher be disappointed in her holiday, if ever she achieved it?

Roy was fond of them in his own characteristic fashion — unsentimental, half-malicious, on the look-out in everyone for some treat he could give without their knowing, attentive to those secret kindnesses which appeared like elaborate practical jokes.

Perhaps he had a special tenderness for some of them, for they were riff-raff and outcasts: and often it was among such that he felt most at home.

But I had a curious feeling as we talked about those friends of his. He was interested, scurrilous, tender — but he was cross that I had seen them. He was impatient that I had become caught up, just as it might have been in Pimlico, in a tangle of human lives. Whatever he had invited me for, it was not for that.

Although Roy got up the day after I arrived, it was too cold for him to leave the house. Through the afternoon and evening, we sat in the great uncomfortable drawing-room, and for a long time we were left alone.

All the time, I knew that Roy did not want us to be left alone. He was listening for steps in the hall, a knock on the door — not for any particular person, just anyone who would disturb us.

I was distressed, apprehensive, at a loss. He was affectionate, for that was his first nature. He was even amusing, as he made the minutes pass by mimicking some of our colleagues: but he would have done the same to an acquaintance in the combination room. I felt he was desperately sad, but he did not utter a word about it: once he had been spontaneous in his sadness, but not now. He seemed to be suppressing sadness, suppressing any relief, suppressing any desire to let me know. It was as though he had fixed his eyes on something apart from us both.

There was one interruption, when for a few minutes he behaved as in the old days. By the afternoon post he received a letter with a German stamp on; I saw him study the postmark and the handwriting with a frown. As he read the note, which was on a single piece of paper, the frown became fixed and guilty.

“She’s run me down,” he said. Joan had arrived in Berlin, and was staying with the Eggars. Roy looked at me, as he used to when he was out-manoeuvred by a woman from whom he was trying to escape. For Joan he had a special feeling; he thought of her more gravely than of any woman, and with incomparably more remorse; yet there were times when she seemed just another mistress, and when he felt he was going through the accustomed moves.

He was confused. Clean breaks did not come easy to him. He would have liked to spend that night with Joan. If it had been someone who minded less, like Rosalind, he would have rung her up on the spot. But he could not behave carelessly with Joan. He had done so once, and it was a burden he could not shift.

So he sat, irresolute, rueful, badgered. There was something extremely comic about the winning end of a love affair, I thought. It needed Lady Boscastle’s touch. For she never had much sympathy with the agony of the loser, the one who loved the more, the one who ate out her heart for a lover who was becoming more indifferent. Lady Boscastle had not suffered much in that fashion. She had been the winner in too many love affairs — and so she was superlatively acid about the comic dilemmas of love.

At last Roy decided. There was no help for it: he must meet Joan; it was better to meet her in public. He started to arrange a party, before he spoke to her. From his first call, it was clear the party would be an eccentric one. For he rang up Schäder, his most influential friend in the German government. From Roy’s end of the conversation, I gathered that Schäder was free for a very late dinner the following night and that he insisted on being the host. When Roy had put down the telephone, he looked at me with acute, defiant eyes.

“Excellent. I needed you to meet him. He is an interesting man.”

I asked what exactly his job was. Roy said that he was the equivalent of a Minister in England, the kind of Minister who is just on the fringe of the cabinet.

“He’s extremely young,” said Roy. “About your age. You must forget your preconceived ideas. He’s not a bit stuffed.”

They had arranged that Roy should invite the party. He found one German friend already booked, but got hold of Ammatter, the orientalist whom I had met in Cambridge. Then he rang up Joan. She was demanding to see him at once, that afternoon, that night: Roy nearly weakened, but held firm. At last she acquiesced. I could imagine the fierce, sullen, miserable resignation with which she turned away. She was to bring Eggar “if he does not think it will set him back a peg or two”. Roy also invited Eggar’s wife, but she was expecting a child in the next fortnight. “It looks like being Joan and five men,” he said. He was smiling fondly and mockingly, as he must have done when they were in love.

“That’s her idea of a social evening. A well-balanced little party. She likes feeling frivolous, you know. Because it’s not her line.” He sighed. “Oh — there’s no one like her, is there?”

The next morning, he was well enough to take me for a walk through the Berlin streets. It was still freezingly cold, and the sky was steely. The weather had not changed since the German army marched into Prague, a few days before I set out. Outside Roy’s house, the pavement rang with our footsteps in the cold: the street was empty under the bitter sky. Roy was wearing earcaps, as though he were just going to plunge into a scrum.

He took me on a tour under the great grey buildings; lights twinkled behind the office windows; the shops and cafés were full, people jostled us on the pavements, the air was frosty and electric; an aeroplane zoomed invisibly overhead, above the even pall of cloud. We walked past the offices of the Friedrichstrasse and the Wilhelmstrasse; the rooms were a blaze of light. Roy was only speaking to tell me what the places were. He showed me Schäder’s ministry, a heavy nineteenth century mansion. Official motor cars went hurtling by, their horns playing an excited tune.

We came to the Linden. The trees were bare, but the road was alive with cars and the pavements crammed with men and women hurrying past. Roy stopped for a moment and looked down the great street. He broke his silence.

“It has great power,” he said. “Don’t you feel that it has great power?”

He spoke with extreme force. As he spoke, I knew for sure what I had already suspected: he had brought me to Berlin to convert me.

For the rest of that morning we argued, walking under the steely sky through the harsh, busy streets. We had never had an argument before — now it was painful, passionate, often bitter. We knew each other’s language, each of us knew all the experience the other could command, it was incomparably more piercing than arguing with a stranger.

When once we began, we could not leave it all day; on and off we came back to the difference between us. Most of the passion and bitterness was on my side. I was not reasonable that day, either as we walked the streets or sat in his high cold rooms. I kept breaking out with incredulity and rancour. We were still talking violently, when it was ten o’clock and time to leave for the Adlon.

He seemed to be using his gifts, his imagination, his penetrating insight, his clear eyes, for a purpose that I detested. He had not wanted me to become absorbed in the rag tag and bobtail of the Knesebeckstrasse. He loved them, but it was not that part of Germany he wanted me to see. They did not talk politics, except to grumble passively at laws and taxes which impinged on them; the only political remarks on the night I arrived were a few diatribes against the régime by the school teacher, who was as usual opinionated, hot-headed and somewhat half-baked. Roy warned her to be careful outside the house. There was an asinine endearingness about her.