Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

Roy questioned Willy up to dinner, through the meal, through the first part of the night. Roy mentioned the clerk, Willy’s old patron, the “black avised” — Willy shrugged his shoulders: “I do not know where he is. He was tiresome. I left him. I do not know him any more.”

Roy scolded him: “It is hard to be kind to those who love you, Willy. But you need to try. It is shameful not to try.” It was strange that he took the trouble to rebuke Willy, who had always seemed to me inescapably hard, petty and vain. Perhaps Roy saw something else. Perhaps he remembered that he himself had sometimes behaved unforgivably to those who loved him.

From the black avised, he switched to Willy’s own adventures. Here we became inextricably entangled for a long time: it was difficult to pick out exactly where he was lying. His first, as it were official, story was this: he had been called up in the summer of 1939, had gone with an infantry division into Poland, had spent the winter with the army of occupation, had been transferred to the western front in the spring of 1940. His division had been sitting opposite Verdun, and had done no fighting; in the winter, they were moved across Europe again to the eastern front. It was then that Willy “got tired of it”. He had deserted, on the way through Germany, and smuggled himself over the Swiss frontier. Since then he had been living in Basel. “How are you keeping alive?” asked Roy.

“Thanks to friends,” said Willy, turning his eyes aside modestly — but added in a hurry: “I am poor. Will you please help me, Roy?”

Most of those statements were lies. That was quite clear. It was also quite clear that, if he wanted to make a proposition to Roy, he would have to admit they were lies. So we examined him, tripped him up on inconsistencies, just to give him a chance to come down to the real business. Meanwhile I was hoping, in the exchange, to collect a few useful facts.

I ought to say in passing that the results were disappointing. Willy was sharp, quick-witted, acquisitive, but he did not know enough. All he could have told us, even if he had had the will, was the day-to-day gossip of Berlin and the personal facts he had observed. Roy made some deductions from the gossip which proved more right than wrong: I missed the significance of something Willy let fall. He said that the draughtsman at No. 32 had not been able to find a job for months. I ought to have pounced on that remark, but I was just obtuse: it seemed incredible then that their administration should be fundamentally, for all its streamlined finish, less sensible, less directed, less businesslike than ours.

We drank a good deal before and during dinner. We hoped to get him drunk, for we were both, of course, accustomed to wine. But he turned out to have, despite his youth, an abnormally strong head. Roy said to me in English, over dinner: “We shall be dished, old boy — if he sees us under the table.”

However, after dinner Willy made some pointed hints that I should leave him and Roy alone. I did not budge. Willy pouted. He might be acquiring great gentility, I thought, but he still had some way to go. His patience was not lasting — all of a sudden he began commiserating with Roy on the dangers of life in England. “You too will be destroyed. It is stupid to stay in England. Why do you not come to Germany? It can be arranged. We will have everything nice for you.”

So that was it. I glanced at Roy. It was certain now that he would get more from Willy if I went away. He nodded. I made an excuse. “Don’t be too late,” said Roy. “He won’t have gone when you come back.” Willy regarded me with an absence of warmth.

I sat at a café in the Petergraben, not far away. The night was warm enough for all the windows to be open; lusty young men and girls went by on the narrow pavement. It was all cosy, cheerful, jolly with bodily life. It was different from anything we should know for long enough.

I bought a paper, ordered a large glass of beer, and thought about this affair of Willy Romantowski. It was grotesque. I was not worrying; I had faith that Roy would behave like the rest of us. Yet it was grotesque. Who had suggested it? What lay behind it? Maybe the motives were quite commonplace. In the middle of bizarre events, it was hard to remember that they might be simply explained. Yet I doubted whether we should ever know the complete truth behind Willy’s invitation.

I was sure of one minor point — that Willy himself was a singularly unheroic character. He was terrified of the war and determined to avoid it. It seemed to me distinctly possible that he had volunteered to fetch Roy in order to establish a claim on a good safe job back in Berlin. I remembered Roy’s judgment on how gallant these epicene young men would be: this was a joke against him.

I returned to the Spalenbrunnen. From outside, I could see Roy and Willy still sitting at the dinner-table. When I joined them, I noticed with a shock that Willy was in tears.

“Nearly finished, Lewis,” said Roy to me. “I’ve been telling Willy that I can’t go back with him. I’ve asked him to tell my friends that I love them. And that I love Germany.”

“I only came for your good,” said Willy, full of resentment, plaintiveness and guilt.

“You must not pretend, Willy,” said Roy gently. “It is not so.”

Willy gulped with distress — perhaps through disappointment at not bringing off his coup, perhaps through a stab of feeling. He shook hands with Roy: then, though he hated me to perdition, he remembered his manners and shook hands with me. Without another word, he went out of the room.

“Very remarkable,” said Roy. He looked tired and pale.

I took him out of the smoky room, and we sauntered along the street. Roy had packed a black hat for the journey, and he pulled it down low over his forehead. The lights were uneven in the gothic lanes, and his face was shadowed, a little sinister. I laughed at him. “Special hat,” he said. Whatever else left him, the mockery stayed. “Suitable for spying. I chose it on purpose.”

He was now certain that the first move had come from Schäder, though Willy did not have much idea. Someone from the “government” (no doubt an official in Schäder’s ministry) had gone to the Knesebeckstrasse to discover whether anyone knew Roy. Willy had been there, and had been only too anxious to please.

That was intelligible. But why had he been despatched to Basel, long before they had the slightest indication that Roy would come? That was one of the puzzling features of the whole story. Roy brought out the theory that Willy was given other work to do in Switzerland. This was only one of his jobs. He was the kind of low-grade agent that the Germans used for their petty enquiries, and no doubt other governments as well. He had a nose for private facts, particularly when they were unpleasant. Probably he mixed pleasure with business, and put in a little blackmail on the side.

But Roy had not been able to make him confess. It was no more than a guess. About the connection with Schäder, however (whom Willy had hardly heard of, any more than a bright cockney of the same class would have heard of a junior cabinet minister), Roy was able to convince me. For Willy had produced, parrot-like, several messages which he could not possibly have invented. The most entertaining ran thus: a few days before the war began, the university had resolved that Roy’s work during his stay in Berlin “had been of such eminence as to justify the title of visiting professor, and this title could properly be bestowed upon him, if he did similar work at a later period.” That is, the opposition had stone-walled until they got a compromise which must have irritated everybody. It was a piece of stately academic mummery, and we stood by the gold-painted fountain at the corner roaring with laughter.