Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

Why had Schäder taken this trouble to lure Roy? It was true that Roy knew things that would be of use — but how had they discovered that? was it in any case sufficient reason? I suggested that it might be, in part, friendly concern.

“They must be absolutely confident that they’ve got it won,” I said. “It must be easy to sit back and do a good turn for a friend.”

“I wonder if they are so confident,” said Roy. “I bet they still think sometimes of defeat and death.”

He knew them so much better than I did. He went on: “Reinhold Schäder is a bit like you, old boy. But he’s very different when it comes to the point. He’s a public man. He never forgets it. He might think of doing something disinterested. Such as fetching me out for the good of my health. But he wouldn’t do it. Unless he could see a move ahead. No, they must think I could be some use. It’s very nice of them, isn’t it?”

Then there was the final puzzle. Schäder, or his subordinates, must have thought it out. Roy said that there were complete arrangements for passing him into Germany. How likely had they reckoned the chance of getting him? Did Schäder really think that Roy would go over?

Roy shook his head.

“Too difficult,” he said.

Then he said simply: “Did you think I should go?”

I replied, just as directly: “Not this time.”

“You came to watch over me, of course,” said Roy, not as a question, but as a matter of fact.

“Yes.”

“You needn’t have done,” said Roy. His tone was casual, even, sad, as though he were speaking with great certainty from the depth of self-knowledge. It was a tone that I was used to hearing, more and more. Suddenly it was broken humour. “If I’d wanted to go, what would you have done, old boy? What could you have done? I wish you’d tell me. It interests me, you know.”

I would not play that game. We walked silently out by the old town gate, and Roy said, again in that even tone which seemed to hold all he had learned of life: “It wouldn’t be easy to be a traitor.”

He added: “One would need to believe in a cause — right to the end. If our country went to war with Russia — would our communist friends find it easy to be traitors?”

I considered for a second.

“Some of them,” I said, “would be terribly torn.”

“Just so,” said Roy. He went on: “I may be old-fashioned. But I couldn’t manage it.”

So we walked through the old streets of Basel, talking about political motives, the way our friends would act, the future so far as we could see it. Roy said that he had never quite been able to accept the Reich. It was a feeble simulacrum of his search for God. Yet he knew what it was like to believe in such a cause. “If they had been just a little different, they would have been the last hope.” I said that was unrealistic: by the nature of things, they could not have been different. But he turned on me: “It’s as realistic as what you hope for. Even if they lose, the future isn’t going the way you think. Lewis, this is where your imagination doesn’t seem to work. But you’ll live to see it. It will be dreadful.”

He spoke with extreme conviction, almost as though he had the gift of foresight. In all our lives together, it was the one subject on which we had deeply disagreed. Yet he spoke as though he were reading the future.

We turned back, each of us heavy with his thoughts. Then Roy said: “I used to be sorry that I hurt you. When I tried to fall in on the opposite side.”

Between the gabled houses, the shadows were dramatic; Roy’s face was pale, brilliantly lit on one cheek, the features unnaturally sharp.

“I was clutching at anything, of course,” he said.

“Yes.”

“It was my last grab.” He smiled. “It left me with nothing, didn’t it? Or with myself.”

The clocks struck from all round us. He said lightly: “I’m keeping you up. I mustn’t. High officials need to become respectable. It’s time you did, you know. Part of your duties.”

Shortly after we returned from Basel, Roy’s department was moved out of London, and I did not see him for some months. But I heard of him — just once, but in a whisper that one believes as soon as one hears, one seems to have known it before. I heard of him in a committee meeting: it was Houston Eggar who told me, in a moment’s pause between two items on the agenda.

We used to meet in the Old Treasury, in a room which overlooked Whitehall itself, just to the north of Downing Street. It was a committee at under-secretary level, which was set up to share out various kinds of supplies; there were several different claimants — Greece, when she was still in the war, partisan groups which were just springing up by the end of the summer of 1941, when this meeting took place, and neutrals such as Turkey.

The committee behaved (as I often thought, with frantic irritation or human pleasure, according to the news or my own inner weather) remarkably like a college meeting. Each of the members was representing a ministry, and so was speaking to instructions. Sometimes he was at one with his instructions, and so expressed them with energy and weight; Houston Eggar, for instance, could nearly always feel as the Foreign Office felt. Sometimes a member did not like them; sometimes a strong character was etching out a line for himself, and one saw policy shaped under one’s eyes by a series of small decisions. (In fact, it was rare for policy to be clearly thought out, though some romantics or worshippers of “great men” liked to think so. Usually it built itself from a thousand small arrangements, ideas, compromises, bits of give-and-take. There was not much which was decisively changed by a human will. Just as a plan for a military campaign does not spring fully-grown from some master general; it arises from a sort of Brownian movement of colonels and majors and captains, and the most the general can do is rationalise it afterwards.) Sometimes one of the committee was over-anxious to ingratiate himself or was completely distracted by some private grief.

As in a college meeting, the reasons given were not always close to the true reasons. As in a college meeting, there was a public language — much of which was common to both. That minatory phrase “in his own best interests” floated only too sonorously round Whitehall. The standard of competence and relevance was much higher than in a college meeting, the standard of luxurious untrammelled personality perceptibly lower. Like most visitors from outside, I had formed a marked respect for the administrative class of the civil service. I had lived among various kinds of able men, but I thought that, as a group, these were distinctly the ablest. And they loved their own kind of power.

Houston Eggar loved his own kind of power. He loved to think that a note signed by him affected thousands of people. He loved to speak in the name of the Foreign Office: “my department”, said Houston Eggar with possessive gusto. It was all inseparable as flesh and blood from his passion for getting on, his appetite for success — which, as it happened, still did not look certain to be gratified. It had become a race with the end of the war. He was forty-eight in 1941, and unless the war ended in five or six years he stood no chance of becoming an ambassador. However, he was a man who got much pleasure from small prizes; his CMG had come through in the last honours list, which encouraged him; he plunged into the committee that afternoon, put forward his argument with his usual earnestness and vigour, and thoroughly enjoyed himself.

He was propounding the normal Foreign Office view that, since the amount of material was not large, it was the sensible thing to distribute it in small portions, so that no one should be quite left out; we should thus lay up credit in days to come. The extreme alternative view was to see nothing but the immediate benefit to the war, get a purely military judgment, and throw all this material there without any side-glances. There was a whole spectrum of shades between the two, but on the whole Eggar tended to be isolated in that company and had to work very hard for small returns. It was so that day. But he was surprisingly effective in committee; he was not particularly clever, but he spoke with clarity, enthusiasm, pertinacity and above all weight. Even among sophisticated men, weight counted immeasurably more than subtlety or finesse.