Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

“I wasn’t sure,” I said, just as easily.

“I thought you might feel that I did it when I was lashing out. As I did with poor old Winslow once. No, it wasn’t so. I haven’t had one of those fits for quite a long time. But I’d been depressed for years. Until I threw in my hand. I was sad enough when you saw me, wasn’t I? I was much worse when you weren’t there. It was dreadful, Lewis.”

“I knew,” I said.

“Of course you did. I was quite lucid, though. All the time. Just like that night in May week. When I threw in my hand, I was frightfully lucid. Perhaps if everyone were as lucid as that, they would throw in their hand too.” He smiled at me. “I’ve always felt you covered your eyes at the last minute. Otherwise why should you go on?”

It was half-envious, half-ironic: it was so intimate that it lit our faces: with magic, it lit up the room.

“You’ll always have a bit of idiot hope, won’t you?” said Roy. “I’m glad that you always will.”

“Sometimes I think you have,” I said. “Deeper than any of your thoughts.”

Roy smiled.

“It’s inconvenient — if I have it now.”

He went on: “What would have happened to me, Lewis, if there hadn’t been a war? I don’t know. I believe it wouldn’t have made much difference. I should have come to a bad end.”

He smiled again, and said: “It makes things a bit sharper, that’s all. One can’t change one’s mind. It holds one to it. That’s all.”

The fire had flared up now, and his face was rosy in the glow. The shadows exaggerated his smile. We talked on, so attuned that each word resounded in the other’s heart. And at the same moment that I felt closer to him than I had ever done, I was seized and shaken by the most passionate sense of his nature, his life, his fate. It was a sense which shook me with resentment, fear and pity, with horror and unassuageable anxiety, with wonder, illumination and love. I accepted his nature with absolute gratitude; but I could not accept how fate had played with him and caught him. While I delighted in our talk that night, I cried to myself with the bitterness of pity; to know him was one of the two greatest gifts in my life; and yet it was anguish to see how his life had brought him to this point.

He had once said, just before the only flaw in our intimacy, that I believed in predestination. It was not true in full, though it was true as he meant it. I believed that neither he nor any of us could alter the essence of our nature, with which we had been born. I believed that he would not have been able to escape for good from the melancholy, the depth of despondency, the uncontrollable flashes and the brilliant calm, the light and dark of his nature. That was his endowment. Despite his courage, the efforts of his will, his passionate vitality, he could not get rid of that burden. He was born to struggle, to pursue false hopes, to know despair — to know what, for one of his nature, was an intolerable despair. For, with the darkness on his mind, he could not avoid seeing himself as he was, with all hope and pretence gone.

Most men are saved from that tragic suffering. Nothing could have saved him. Knowing him — as I realised on that walk by the Serpentine years before — I was bound to watch him go through his journey, sometimes hopeful, sometimes tormented, often both together, until in the white and ruthless light of self-knowledge, he perceived himself.

So far, I believed in what he called “predestination”. I believed that some parts of our endowment are too heavy to shift. The essence of our nature lay within us, untouchable by our own hands or any other’s, by any chance of things or persons, from the cradle to the grave. But what it drove us to in action, the actual events of our lives — those were affected by a million things, by sheer chance, by the interaction of others, by the choice of our own will. So between essence and chance and will, Roy had, like the rest of us, had to live his life.

It was the interplay of those three that had brought him to that moment in my room, smiling, talking of his “bad end”. They had brought him to his present situation. I felt the delight of our intimacy — and from his situation I shrank back in anguish and appalled.

For it could have happened otherwise. In any case, perhaps, he would have known despair so black that he would have been driven to “throw in his hand”, he would have felt it was time to “resign”. That was what he meant by a “bad end”. If we had been born in a different time, when the outside world was not so violent, it was easy to imagine ways along which he might have gone. He might not have been driven into physical danger: he might have tried to lose himself in exile or the lower depths. But that was not his luck. He had had to make his choice in the middle of a war. And war, as he said, “held one to it”. It made his choice one of life and death. It was irrevocable. It gave no time for the obstinate hope of the fibres, which underlay even his dark vision of the mortal state, to collect itself, steady him, and help him to struggle on.

And I felt that hope was gathering in him now. Through his marriage, through his child, perhaps ironically through the very fact that he had “resigned” and needed to trouble no more, he had come out of the dark. Perhaps he had married Rosalind because he did not trouble any more; it was good for him not to care. He was more content than he had been since his youth. Hope was pulsing within him, the hope which is close to the body and part of the body’s life, the hope that one possesses just because one is alive.

He was going into great danger. He said that it was “inconvenient” to hope now. The mood in which he had made his choice should have lasted. But he was not to be spared that final trick of fate. He was to go into danger: but his love of life was not so low; it was mounting with each day that passed.

He was smiling, happy that we should be enjoying this evening together by my fire. Each second, each sound, seemed extraordinarily distinct. I was happy with him — and yet I did not want to see, I wished my eyes were closed, I could not bear the brightness of the room.

Roy began to fly on bombing raids in the January of 1943. From that time, he came to see me regularly once a fortnight; it was his device for trying to ease my mind. He could come to London to visit me more easily than I could get away. He had far more leisure, which seemed a joke at my expense. His life had become strangely free; mine was confined; I did not so much as see a bombing aerodrome through the whole length of the war.

When we met, Roy kept nothing from me. Sometimes I thought of the days, long before, when we sat by the bedside of the old Master. He had known he must soon die for certain; the end was fixed; and, for me at least, it was more terrible because he talked only of his visitors’ concerns — he, who lay there having learnt the date of his death.

Roy knew me too well to do the same. He was more natural and spontaneous than the old Master; he took it for granted that I was strained, that he was strained himself; he left it to instinct to make it bearable for us both. And, of course, there was one profound difference between his condition and the old Master’s; Roy did not know for certain whether he would live or die.

As a rule, he called at my office in the afternoon and stayed with me until he caught a train at night. In that office he looked down into Whitehall, and told me simply that he was getting more frightened. He told me of his different kinds of fear: of how one wanted to stop short, throw the bombs away, and run for home. He smiled at me.

“It’s peculiarly indecent for me to bomb Stuttgart, isn’t it? Me of all men.” (He had worked in the library there.)