The Light and the Dark (18 page)

It was in the early summer that he told her he could not marry her.

Rosalind let herself go. She had been crying, reproaching him, imploring him, for some days when I first heard what had happened. I went round to Connaught Street one night, and found Roy lying on the sofa, his face pale and tired. Rosalind was sitting in an armchair; the skin under her eyes was heavily powdered, but even so one could see that she had not long since been in tears.

They were in silence when I entered.

“Hallo, old boy,” said Roy. He was relieved to see me.

“I’d better tell Lewis,” said Rosalind.

“You needn’t,” said Roy. “It would be better if you didn’t.”

“You’ll only tell him yourself the minute you’ve got rid of me,” she said, angrily, pathetically.

Roy turned his face away. She faced me with open, brimming eyes.

“He’s got tired of me,” she said.

“Not true,” said Roy, without turning round.

“He won’t marry me. He’s told me that he won’t marry me.” She spoke to Roy. “You can’t deny that you’ve told me that, can you?”

Roy did not reply.

“I’m no good to him,” said Rosalind. She took out a crumpled handkerchief and began to cry, very quietly.

In time she said to me: “What do you think of it, Lewis? I expect you think it’s right.”

“I’m very sorry: that’s all one can ever say.”

“You think he’ll be better off without me, don’t you?” she cried.

I shook my head. “It’s for you two only,” I said.

She made a pretence of smiling.

“You’re a nice old thing, Lewis. If you don’t think he will be better off without me, everyone else will. All the people who think I’m a little bitch – they’ll all feel I’ve got what I deserve. Oh, what do I care what they all think? They don’t matter, now he’s turning me out.”

“I’m not turning you out.”

Roy’s voice was flat and exhausted, and Rosalind found it easier to talk to him through me. She looked at his back and said: “I’ve told him that I’ve got to get married some time. I can’t wait for ever. And someone quite nice is rather anxious to marry me.”

Whether it was an invention or not, I could not guess. In any case, she had used it in order to force Roy’s hand. She had thrust it in front of him: he could not be elusive any more, she thought. She had first mentioned it, hopefully, plaintively, three days before, and since then she had been blackmailing and begging. She had not reckoned that he would be so firm.

At this point Roy broke in: “I can only say it again. If you need to marry, you should marry him.”

It was very harsh. But it was harsh through a cause I had not expected. He was jealous. As a rule he was the least jealous of men. He was resolved not to marry her, yet he was jealous that she should marry another.

“I don’t know whether I could bear it.”

“I expect he will make you happier than I ever could.”

“You’re horrible,” said Rosalind, and sobbed again.

She did not move him, either then or later. He stayed firm, though he became more gentle when the first shock wore off. He wanted to go on living with her, but he would not marry her. Rosalind still kept coming to see him, though more fitfully. I heard nothing more about her engagement to the other man.

The scene left Roy quiet and saddened. For some days I dreaded that he was being overcome by another wave of depression. But it fell away. It was good to see him light-hearted with relief. Yet I thought, as the summer passed, that he was never as carefree after the scene with Rosalind; even at his gayest, he never reached the irresponsible, timeless content of Monte Carlo. He became more active, impatient, eager, more set on his own search. He spent much more time with Ralph Udal in Lewisham. He persuaded me to try to trace old Martineau for him: but Martineau had moved from the Leeds pavement, no one knew where.

One afternoon in August I saw something which surprised me and set me thinking. I was being driven over the Vauxhall bridge, when through the car window I saw Rosalind and Ralph Udal walking together. Neither was speaking, and they were walking slowly to the north side of the river. What was she doing now, I thought? Did she think that he had become the most powerful influence on Roy? Was she playing the same game that she had once played with me?

The first part of the liturgy was published in the summer. In due course, often after months of delay, there followed respectful reviews in three or four scholarly periodicals. Colonel Foulkes, as usual putting in his word without a pause, got in first with his review in the
Journal of Theological Studies
; he wrote that the complete edition of the liturgy looked like being the most authoritative piece of oriental scholarship for a generation. But apart from him English scholars did not go out of their way to express enthusiasm. The reviews were good enough, but there was none of the under-current of gossipy personal praise. I had no doubt that, if Roy had kept quiet at the December meeting, he would have had different luck, his reputation would have been as good as made; Sir Oulstone would have paid a state visit to the college, all Sir Oulstone’s friends would have been saying that Roy had once for all “arrived”. But none of those things happened. Sir Oulstone and his school were cold and silent.

The Master was painfully disappointed. Arthur Brown said to me with sturdy resignation: “I want to tell them, Eliot, that our young friend is the best scholar this college has had since the war. But it looks as though I shall have to wait for a few years.” He warned me comfortably: “It’s never wise to claim more than we can put on the table. People remember that you’ve inflated the currency, and they hold it against you next time.”

We were downcast and angry. Roy’s own response was peculiar. He was amused, he treated it as a good joke at his own expense – and also at ours, who wanted him to be famous. “It’s a flop, old boy,” he said mischievously in his room one afternoon. He developed the habit of referring to his work as though he were a popular writer. “It’s a flop. I shan’t be able to live on the royalties. I’m really very worried about the sales.”

I wanted him to make his peace with Lyall, but he smiled.

“Too late. Too late. Unsuccessful author, that’s what I shall be. I shall need to work harder to make ends meet.” He jumped to his feet, and went towards the upright reading desk. He was busy with a particularly difficult psalm. “Can’t stay talking,” he said. “That won’t buy Auntie a new frock.”

He was gaining a perverse satisfaction. I realised at last that he did not want the fame we wanted for him. He would do the work – that was a need, a drug, an attempt at escape – but if he could choose he would prefer to be left obscure.

Most men, I thought, are content to stay clamped within the bonds of their conscious personality. They may break out a little – in their daydreams, their play, sometimes in their prayers and their thoughts of love. But in their work they stay safely in the main stream of living. They want success on the ordinary terms, they scheme for recognition, titles, position, the esteem of solid men. They want to go up step by step within their own framework. Among such men one finds the steadily and persistently ambitious – the Lyalls and the Houston Eggars.

Roy always shied from them. He thought of them as “stuffed”. It had been obtuse of us to imagine he would seek a career as they might seek it. Arthur Brown and I were more ordinary men than he was. We were trying to impose on him the desires we should have had, if we had been as gifted. But one could not separate his gifts from the man he was.

No one was less willing, less able, to stay clamped within the bonds of self. Often he wished that he could: he cried out in envy of the comfortable. But he was driven. He was driven to his work by the same kind of compulsion that drives an artist. It gave him the obsessed, the morbid concentration that none of the ordinary healthy ambitious scholars could achieve; it did not give him the peace he hoped, although he knew he would be lost without it; above all it did not give him the matter-of-fact ambition that everyone round him took for granted. In his place, they would all have longed to be distinguished savants, men of weight, Fellows of the British Academy, recipients of honorary degrees – and in time they would have got there. Yet, at the prospect Roy felt caught, maimed, chained to the self he was trying to leave behind. At the prospect he was driven once more, driven to fly into obscurity.

Perhaps it had been wrong of Arthur Brown and me to see that he became a fellow. He seemed to want it – but perhaps even then we were reading our desires into him. Was his outburst a shriek of protest against being caught? Was it a wild flight as he saw a new door closing?

Yet I had my own minor amusement. Roy’s enemies in the college had heard the Master prophesy an overwhelming triumph; the book came out, and with gratification Despard-Smith and others slowly sensed that there was an absence of acclaim.

Despard-Smith said one night: “I have always been compelled to doubt whether Calvert’s work will s-stand the test of time. I wish I could believe otherwise. But it will be a scandal for the college if his work turns out to be a flash in the pan.”

Roy was not dining, but I told him afterwards. He was no more consistent than other men, and he became extremely angry.

“What does he know about it?” said Roy furiously, while I laughed at him. “He’s never written a line in his life, except asking some wretched farmer to pay the rent. Why should some tenth-rate mathematician be allowed to speak about my work? I need to talk to him.”

Roy spoke to Despard-Smith the next night.

“I hear that you’ve become an oriental scholar, Despard?”

“I don’t know what you mean, Calvert.”

“I hear that you doubt the soundness of my edition. I suppose that you needed to study it first?”

Roy was still angry, and his subtle, mystifying, hypnotic approach had deserted him. Despard-Smith felt at home, and a gleam of triumph shone in his eye.

“No, Calvert, that wasn’t necessary. I relied on my judgment from what I picked up round me. Exactly as one has to do – in electing a fellow. One has to rely on one’s judgment. I don’t pretend to be clever, Calvert, but I do congratulate myself on my judgment. I might tell you that some people never acquire it.”

Roy had no reply. I was very much amused, but it was a joke that he did not see.

It was not long before the Master and Arthur Brown were able to score a success for Roy within the college. Roy’s reputation had been high with German scholars since he brought out his grammar, and the liturgy was praised at once, more immediately and vociferously than in England. The Professor of Oriental Religions at Berlin and a colleague came to London for a conference in October, and wrote to the Master asking if he could present them to Roy. They stayed in the Lodge for a weekend and met Roy at dinner. The Professor was a stocky roundfaced roguish-looking man called Ammatter. When Roy was introduced to him, he clowned and pretended not to believe it.

The Master translated his remark with lively, victorious zest. “Professor Ammatter says,” the Master addressed himself to Despard-Smith, “that it is impossible anyone so young should have done such work. He says that we must be foisting an impostor upon them.”

Despard-Smith made a creaking acknowledgment, and sat as far down the table as he could. The Master and Roy each spoke excellent German; Ammatter was tricky, fluid, entertaining, comic and ecstatic; the wine went round fast in the combination room, the Master drinking glass for glass with Ammatter and Roy. Old Despard-Smith glowered as they laughed at jokes he did not understand. The Master, cheerful, familiar, dignified though a little drunk, broke off their conversation several times in order to translate; he chose each occasion when they were paying a compliment to Roy. The Master spoke a little more loudly than usual, so that the compliments carried all over the room. It was one of his happiest evenings, and before the end Roy had arranged to spend the next three months in Berlin.

I received some high-spirited letters from Germany, in which there were references to acquaintances all over Berlin, from high party officials to the outcasts and those in danger; but I did not see Roy again until early January, after we had heard bad news.

The Master had been taken ill just before Christmas; he had not been in his briskest form all through the autumn, but in his spare, unpampered fashion he thought little of it. He got worse over Christmas, vomited often and could not eat. In the first week of January he was taken to hospital and examined. They gave him a gastroscopy, and sent him back to the Lodge the same night. They had found the answer. He had an inoperable cancer. There was no hope at all. He would die within a few months.

The day after the examination, all the college knew, but the doctors and Lady Muriel agreed that the Master should not be told. They assured him that nothing was seriously the matter, only a trivial duodenal ulcer. He was to lie still, and would recover in a few weeks. I was allowed to see him very soon after they had talked to him; I knew the truth, and heard him talk cheerfully of what he would do in two years’ time, of how he was looking forward to Roy’s complete edition. He looked almost as fresh, young and smooth-faced as the year before in the hills above Monte Carlo. He was cordial, sharp-tongued and indiscreet. His anxiety had been taken away, and so powerful was the psychological effect that he felt well. He spoke of Roy with intimacy and affection.

“He always did insist on behaving like a gilded dilettante. I wonder if he’ll ever get over it. Why will he insist on going about with vineleaves in his hair?”

He looked up at the ceiling of the great bedroom, and said quietly: “I think I know the answer to that question.”

“What do you think?”

“I think you know it too. He’s not a trifler.” He paused. He did not know that he was exhausted.

He said simply: “No, he’s searching for God.”

I was too much distressed to find what he knew of Roy’s search. Did he really understand, or was it just a phrase?