Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

Brave as he was, full of life as he was, he was not stoical. Many blows he would have taken incomparably better than I; wherever his response could be active, he was better fitted to cope. But this affliction — it was easy to think so, but I believed it was true — I should have put up with more stubbornly than he. He could not endure the thought of a life preyed on meaninglessly, devastated all for nothing. For him, the realisation was an acute and tragic experience. He could not mask it, cushion it, throw it aside. It took away the future with something of the finality that stunned the old Master when he was told that he was dying of cancer. Roy felt that he was being played with. He felt intensely humiliated — that he should be able to do nothing about it, that his effort and will did not begin to count! Angrily, hopelessly, frantically, he rattled the bars of his cage.

I could not forget the darkness of his face that morning in the college garden. For him it had been the starkest and bitterest of hours. He could not recover from it. Though for the next year or more he did not undergo the profoundest depression again, he never entered that calm beautiful high-spirited state in which his company made all other men seem leaden; with me he was usually subdued, affectionately anxious to help me on, controlled and sensible. His cries of distress only burst out in disguise, when he talked about the war.

He hated it. He hated that it should ever have happened. He hated any foreseeable end.

He did not simply dread, as I did, that England might be defeated. He knew what I felt; he felt my spirits fall and rise with the news, in the bad days he encouraged me. But his own dread was nothing like so simple. He shared mine up to a point; he too was chilled by the thought that his own country might lose; but he went further. He had an intensely vivid picture of what defeat in this war must bring. He could not shut it out from his imagination. He could not stand the thought for his own country — and scarcely less for Germany. Whatever happened, it seemed to him hideous without relief. Any world in which it could come about seemed meaningless — as meaningless as a life shadowed by the caprice of fate.

So he watched me through the bright and terrible summer of 1940 with protective sympathy, with a feeling more detached and darker than mine. And, as the news got a little better in my eyes, as it became clear through the winter that the war would not end in sudden disaster, I had to accept that he could not share my pleasure and relief. For me the news might turn better; for him all news about the war was black, and brought to his mind only the desert waste to come.

It was an evening in the early spring of 1941, and already so dark that I had to pick my way from the bus stop to Dolphin Square. It had become a habit to arrive home late, in the dark, tired and claustrophobic. I had to pull my curtains and tamper with a fitting, before I could switch on the light. I lay on my sofa, trying to rouse myself to go down to the restaurant for dinner, when Roy came in. He usually called in at night, if he was not entertaining one of his young women.

Although our flats were two miles apart, he visited me as often as when we lived on neighbouring staircases. His face had changed little in the last years, but he was finding it harder to pretend that his hair still grew down to his temples. That night he seemed secretly amused.

“Just had a letter,” he said. “I must say, a slightly remarkable letter.”

“Who from?”

“You should have said where from. Actually, it comes from Basel.”

“Whom do you know in Basel?”

“I used to be rather successful with the Swiss. They laughed when I made a joke. Very flattering,” said Roy.

“It must be some adoring girl,” I said.

“I can’t think of any description which would please him less,” said Roy. “No, I really can’t. It’s an old acquaintance of yours. It’s Willy Romantowski.”

I said a word or two about Willy, and then exclaimed how odd it was.

“It’s extremely odd,” said Roy. “It’s even odder when you see the letter. You won’t be able to read it, though. You’re not good at German holograph, are you? Also Willy uses very curious words. Sometimes of a slightly slangy nature.” Roy looked at me solemnly and began to translate.

It was a puzzling letter.

“Dear Roy,” so his translation went, “Since you left Berlin I have not had a very good time. They made me go into the army which made me sick. So I got tired of wasting my time in the army, and decided to come here.”

“He makes it sound simple,” I interjected.

“I have arrived here,” Roy went on, “and like it much better. But I have no money, and the Swiss people do not let me earn any. That is why I am writing you this letter, Roy. I remember how kind you were to us all at No. 32. You were always very kind to me, weren’t you? So I am hoping that you will be able to help me now I am in difficult circumstances. I expect you have a Swiss publisher. Could you please ask him to give me some money? Or perhaps you could bring me some yourself? I expect you could get to Switzerland somehow. I know you will not let me starve. Your friend Romantowski (Willy).” And he had added: “There were some changes at No. 32 after you left, but I have not heard much since I went into the army.”

The letter was written in pencil, in (so Roy said) somewhat illiterate German. He had never seen Willy’s handwriting, so he had nothing to compare it with. It gave an address in a street in Basel, and the postmark was Swiss. The letter had been opened and censored in several different countries, but had only taken about a month to arrive.

We were both excited. It was a singular event. We could not decide how genuine the letter was. As stated, Willy’s story sounded highly implausible. From the beginning Roy was suspicious.

“It’s a plant,” he said. “They’re trying to hook me.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps Reinhold Schäder. They think I might be useful. They’re very thorough people.”

I could believe that easily enough. But I could not understand why, if Schäder or Roy’s other high-placed friends were behind the move, they should use this extraordinary method. It seemed ridiculous, and I said so.

“They sometimes do queer things. They’re not as rational as we are.” Then he smiled. “Or of course they may have mistaken my tastes.”

He considered.

“That shouldn’t be likely. Perhaps Willy was the only one who’d volunteer to do it. You can’t imagine the little dancer trying to get hold of me for them, can you? But Willy wasn’t a particularly scrupulous young man. Or do you think I’m misjudging him?”

I chuckled, and asked him what he was going to do about it.

“You’re not going to reply?” I asked.

“Not safe,” said Roy. I had half-expected a different reply, but he was curiously prudent and restrained at that time. “I need to stop them getting me into trouble. It might look shady. I’m not keen on getting into trouble. Particularly if they’re trying to hook me.”

He had, in fact, already behaved with sense and judgment. The letter had arrived the day before. Roy had at once reported it to his departmental chief, and written a note to Houston Eggar, who was back at the Foreign Office handling some of the German work. Roy had told them (as Eggar already knew) that he had many friends in Berlin, and that this was a disreputable acquaintance. He added that one or two of the younger German ministers had reason to believe that he was well-disposed to them and to Germany.

He was far more cautious than he used to be, I thought. His chief and Eggar had both told him not to worry; it was obviously none of his doing; Eggar had gone on to say that the Foreign Office might want to follow the letter up, since they had so little contact with anyone who had recently been inside Germany.