Charles Snow - Time of Hope

After such a night, I would get up tired, prick my finger, extract a drop of blood and go through my meaningless test, then I had breakfast on the terrace, looking out at the shining sea. My Austrian friend would come slowly along, resting a hand on the parapet. She used to look at me and ask: ‘How is it this morning, my dear friend?’

I said often ‘A little better than yesterday, I think. Not perfect—’ For it was difficult to disappoint her. A bright concern came to her eyes, intensely alive in the old face.

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘when autumn is here, perhaps we shall both be better.’

Then each day I had to wait for the post from England. It arrived just before teatime; and as soon as it arrived I was waiting for the next day. I had written to Sheila on my first morning there, a long, loving, hopeful letter; the days passed, the days became weeks, August was turning into September, and I had heard nothing. For a time it did not worry me. But suddenly, one afternoon, as I waited while the porter ran through the bundle, it seemed that all depended on the next day — and so through afternoons of waiting, of watching the postman bicycle along the road, of the delay while they were sorted. At last, each afternoon, the sad and violent anger when there was nothing from her.

In cold blood, knowing her, I could not understand it. Was she ill herself? She could have told me. Had she found another man? In all her caprices she had never neglected a kind of formal etiquette towards me. Was it an act of cruelty? Had I thrown myself too abjectly on her mercy, that last day? It seemed incredible, even for her, I thought, with my temper smouldering, on those evenings as the lights came out along the shore. I had loved her for five years. I would not have treated the most casual acquaintance so, let alone one in my state. Whatever she was feeling, she knew my state. I could not forgive her. I wanted her to suffer as I did.

I wrote again, and then again.

There were other letters from England, some disquieting rumours about George’s indiscretions in the town; the news of the birth of Marion’s child, a girl; a story of Charles March’s father; and, surprisingly, a letter from Salisbury, saying that he had thought I was not so tireless as usual last term and that — if this was not just his imagination — I might like to know that he himself had a minor collapse just after he began to make a living at the Bar. Was he probing, I thought? Or was it a generous impulse? Perhaps both.

From all that news I got no more than a few minutes’ distraction. I was more self-centred than ever in my life. I had no room for anything but my two concerns — my illness, and my obsession with Sheila. All else was trivial; I was utterly uninterested in the passing scene and, for once, in other human beings. I knew that my two miseries played on each other. I had the sense, which all human beings dread, which I was to see dominate another’s existence, of my life being outside my will. However much we may say and know that we are governed by forces outside our control, and that the semblance of volition is only an illusion to us all, yet that illusion, when it is challenged, is one of the things we fight for most bitterly. If it is threatened, we feel a horror unlike anything else in life.

In its extreme form, this horror is the horror of madness, and most of us know its shadow, for moments anyway, when we are in the grip of an overmastering emotion. The emotion may give us pleasure or not, for most of its duration we can feel ourselves in full control; but there are moments, particularly in love, particularly in such a love as mine for Sheila, when the illusion is shattered and we see ourselves in the hands of ineluctable fate, our voices, our protests, our reasons as irrelevant to what we do as the sea sounding in the night was to my wretchedness, while I lay awake.

It was in such moments that I faced the idea of suicide. Not altogether in despair — but with the glint of a last triumph. And I believed the idea had come in that identical fashion to other men like me, and for the same reason. Not only as a relief from unhappiness, but also a sign, the only one possible, that the horror is not there, and that one’s life is, in the last resort, answerable to will. At any rate, it was so with me.

In much the same spirit as I entertained the idea of suicide, I made plans for the future that ignored both physical health and Sheila. I’ve been unhappy for long enough, I thought. I’m going to forget her and get better. I must settle what steps to take. Framing plans that assumed that the passion was over, that I could make myself well by a resolution, plans of all the things I should never be able to do.

Beyond the horror of having lost my will, there was another, a simpler companion of those days. That was suffering. Suffering unqualified and absolute, so that at times the anger fled, the complaints and assertions became squallings of my own conceit, and there was nothing left but unhappiness. It was a suffering simple, uneventful, and complete. It lay upon me as weakness lay on my body. I thought I could never be as unhappy again.

It was the middle of September. I had known this suffering for some weeks, during which it was more constantly with me than any emotion I had known. I was sitting by the rocks, looking over to the mountains, arid in brown and purple, overhung by rotund masses of cloud. The water was as calm as in my first days there, and the clouds threw long reflections towards me — thin strips of white across the burnished sea. Mechanically I puzzled why these lattice-like separate strips should be reflected from clouds which, seen from where I sat, were flocculent masses above the hills.

It was as tranquil a sight as I had seen.

Then, for a moment, I knew that I was crying out against my fate no more. I knew that I was angry with Sheila no more (I was thinking of her protectively, reflecting that she must be restless and distressed); that all my protests and plans and attempts to revive my will were as feeble as a child’s crying to drown the storm; that my arrogance and spirit had left me, that I could no longer keep to myself the pretence of self-respect. I knew that I had been broken by unhappiness. In that clear moment — whatever I protested to myself next day — I knew that I had to accept my helplessness, that I had been broken and could do nothing more.

October came. Term would begin in a few days. I had to make a practical decision, Should I return?

In the past weeks letters had arrived from Sheila, one every other day, remotely apologetic, without any reason for her silence, yet intimate with a phrase or two that seemed to ask my help. I tried to dismiss those letters as I made my decision. I had to dismiss all I had felt by that shore or seen within myself.

My physical condition was no better, but not much worse. Or rather my blood count was descending, though the rate of descent seemed to have slowed. In other respects I was probably better. I was deeply sunburned, which caused me to look healthy except to a clinical eye. That would be an advantage, I thought, if I tried to brazen it out.

If I were not going to get better, it did not matter what I did.

For any practical choice, I had to assume that I should get better.

That assumed, was it wiser to return to Chambers, persist in concealing that I was ill, and try to carry it off? Or to stay away until I had recovered?

There was no doubt of the answer. If, at my stage, I stayed away long, I should never get back. One term’s absence would do me great harm, and two would finish me. I might scrape a living or acquire a minor legal job, but I should have been a failure.

No, I must return. Now, before the beginning of term, as though nothing had happened.

There were grave risks. I was very weak. I might, with discipline and good management, struggle through the paper work adequately; but I was in no physical state to fight any case but the most placid. I might disgrace myself. Instead of losing my practice by absence, I might do so by presence.