Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

He became slightly too genial, and stood us a dinner the night before we left.

We flew from Bristol on a halcyon spring afternoon. But we saw nothing of it, for the windows of the aircraft were covered over, and let in only a dim, tawny, subfusc light. The dimness made my plan for getting through the journey a little more difficult; I had to reckon on three hours’ sheer fright before we landed at Lisbon, and to help myself through I read quotas of fifty pages at a go before letting myself look at my watch. I had taken the Tale of Genji with me. Subtle and lovely though it was, I wished it had more narrative power. I could not keep myself from listening for unpleasant sounds. Once more I cursed and was ashamed of my timidity. I very much envied Roy.

He was lively, exhilarated, much as he had been in the most joyous days. He had been exhilarated ever since he was asked to make the journey. He seemed glad that I was going, as though it had been a holiday when we were much younger; he had not shown the slightest suspicion or resentment; he had not asked a single question why I should be there. Yet I felt he was too incurious. He could not accept it as naturally as he seemed to. He was much too astute not to guess. Still, his face lit up at the news of our journey, just as it used before any travel. He had always been excited by the thought, not of anything vague like the skies of Europe, but the unexpected and exact things which he might hear and see: I remembered the post-cards that used to arrive as he went from library to library: “Palermo. The post office here has pillars fifty-six feet high, painted red, white and blue.” “Nice. Yesterday a Roumanian poetess described her country and France as the two bulwarks of Latin civilisation.” “Berlin. The best cricketer of German nationality is called Maus. (All German cricketers appear to have very short names). He is slightly worse than I am, slightly better than you.”

He was excited again in just that fashion, as we got into the aircraft. He was stimulated, became more brilliantly alive, through the faint tang of danger. I envied him, reading my book with forced concentration, hearing him chat to a Portuguese business man. He knew that I should be frightened, that I should prefer to be left sullenly alone. His imagination was at least as active as mine, but it produced an utterly different result: the thought of danger made him keen, braced, active, like a first class batsman who requires just enough of the needle, just enough tingle of the nerves, to be brought to the top of his form. Portuguese was a language Roy had never had reason to look at, but he was asking his acquaintance to pronounce some words: Roy was mimicking the squashed vowel sounds, apparently with accuracy, to judge from the admiring cries.

My first quota of pages dragged by, then in time another, then another. I had to read a good many pages again, to draw any meaning from them; not that they were obscure (they were about lords and ladies of the Japanese court in the year 1000, making an expedition to view the beauty of the autumn flowers), but I was listening too intently for noises outside. I wondered for an instant how the Genji circle would have faced times like ours. They happened to live in an interval of extreme tranquillity, though their civilisation was destroyed a couple of generations later. The Victorians too — they lived in an interval of tranquillity, though they did not feel it so. How would they have got on, if they had been born, like Roy and me and our friends, into one of the most violent times? About the same as we did, I thought. Not better. They would have endured it, for human beings are so made that they struggle on. The more one saw of human beings in violence and adversity, the more astonishing it was how much they could bear.

The plane began to lose height earlier than I calculated. I was alarmed, but Roy had picked up a word, and smiled across at me affectionately, mockingly, with an eyebrow lifted: “We’re here, old boy. Lisbon.”

It was comforting to feel the bumps beneath the wheels, comforting to walk with Roy across the aerodrome.

“Five o’clock,” said Roy. “In time for tea. You need some tea. Also some cakes.”

We were staying that night in Lisbon, and we strolled through the brilliant streets in the warm and perfumed air. For five minutes, it was a release after the darkness of England. The lights streamed from the shops and one felt free, confined no longer. But almost at once, one forgot the darkness, we were walking in lighted streets as we had done before. Roy went from shop to shop, sending off presents; except that the presents were mostly parcels of food, it might have been a night in Cambridge in days past.

We caught the German aeroplane next day. It seemed a little bizarre, but not so much as when I first heard that this was the most practical way. The lap was a short one, Lisbon to Madrid; the windows were not darkened, I looked down on the tawny plains of Estremadura and Castille; we were all polite, everything went according to plan. I had been in Madrid just before the beginning of the civil war; it was strange to sit in a café there again, to read newspapers prophesying England’s imminent defeat, to remember the passions that earlier war had stirred in England. It had been the great plane of cleavage between left and right; we could recall Arthur Brown, the most sensible and solid of conservatives, so far ceasing to be his clubbable self as to talk about “those thieves and murderers whom Getliffe and Eliot are so fond of”.

Roy mimicked Arthur Brown making that reproachful statement, and one saw again the rubicund but frowning face by the fire in the combination room. “I regard a glass of port as rather encouraging on a cold night,” Roy went on mimicking. We were sometimes nostalgic for those cosy autumn nights.

The Lufthansa plane, on the run Madrid-Barcelona-Lyons-Stuttgart, was full of German officials, business men and officers. They knew we were English; one or two were stiffly courteous, but most of them were civil, helpful, anxious to be kind. Roy’s German was, of course, an aid: there is something disarming in a foreigner who speaks one’s language within a shade of perfection and who knows one’s country from the inside. I could now carry on some sort of conversation myself, and one youngish business man pressed sandwiches on us with a naïf, clumsy, puppyish kindness.

I was not expecting to be treated with such simple, amiable consideration. I did not understand why they should have gone out of their way to be kind. They were worried about our reception at Lyons, but anxious to assure us that we should be well looked after at Basel. “It is like a German town,” they said. “Yes, it is a fine town. All will be well when you come to Basel.”

So, in that odd company, I had my first glimpse of the Mediterranean for three years, as we flew over the Catalan coast. Since we landed at Lisbon, I was not so timid about physical danger; but I had two other cares on my mind. I was not sure whether it was a convenience for both sides to let Englishmen travel under this deception of ours. If not, it was always possible that someone here would report our names when he got to Germany: Roy was well enough known in Berlin for it to be a finite risk. I did not believe that the German intelligence would be taken in for a moment by our Red Cross status — and we were due to return on this same route.

For the same reason, I was nervous about the weather. If it did not let us touch down at Lyons, we should inevitably be taken on to Stuttgart. Could we possibly get away with it? Roy would have to do most of the talking: could I trust him to throw himself into whole-hearted lying? This time I was more afraid for him: of all men, he was the least fit to stand prison. I watched the clouds rolling up to the east.