The Light and the Dark (23 page)

It was not that she had any obvious escape to offer him. She was not a happy young woman, except when she caught light from his presence. She had left her father’s faith, and in her beliefs and disbeliefs she was typical of her time. Like me, she was radical in politics and sceptical in religion. But Roy felt with her, as he had done with me, that deep down he could find a common language. She was unusually clever, but it was not her intellect that he valued. He had spent too much time with clever men; of all of us, he was the most indifferent to the intellect; he was often contemptuous of it. It was not Joan’s intellect he valued, but her warm heart and her sense of life. He thought she might help him, and he turned to her with hope.

Meanwhile, the Master’s state seemed to change very little. Over the months Joan told us that she could see the slow decline. Gradually he ate less, was sick more often, spent more of his time in bed; he had had little pain throughout the illness, and was free of it now; the curve dipped very slowly, and it was often hard for her and her mother to realise that he was dying. Sometimes they felt that he had reached a permanent state, weak, tired, but full of detached kindness. He was so mellow and understanding that it humbled everyone round him, and they spoke of him with wonder and magnified affection. They spoke of him in quiet tones, full of something like hero worship. Lady Muriel, so Joan said, was gentler than anyone had ever known her.

I thought of that comment when I next saw her. Throughout the year, at the Master’s request, she had stoically continued some of her ordinary entertaining, and the official Lodge lunches had gone on without check. She had, however, asked no guests at night. It was Joan’s idea that Roy and I should call in after dinner one night in July, and treat her to a four at bridge. Like Lord Boscastle, Lady Muriel liked a game of bridge more than most things in the world; she had deprived herself of the indulgence since the Master fell ill.

Roy and I entered the drawing-room that night as though we had been invited by Joan, and Lady Muriel was still enough herself to treat me so.

“I am always glad for my daughter to have her friends in the house, Mr Eliot,” she said. “I am only sorry that I have not been able to see as much of the fellows recently as I used to set myself.”

She sat in her armchair, stiff, formal, uncompromising. She looked a little older; her eyelids had become heavier, and her cheeks were pinched. But, as she spoke to me, her back was as poker-like as ever, and her voice just as unyielding. She said: “How is your wife, Mr Eliot? I do not remember seeing her for a considerable time.”

“She’s rather better, Lady Muriel.”

“I am very glad to hear it. I am still hoping that you will find a suitable house in Cambridge, so that you will not be separated so often. I believe there are suitable houses in Grantchester Meadows.”

She looked at me suspiciously, and then at her daughter, as though she were signalling my married state. It seemed incredible that she should think me a danger when she could see Joan in Roy’s presence. For Joan was one of those women who are physically transmuted by the nearness of their lover, as it seemed by the bodily memory of the act of love. Her face was softer for hours together, the muscles relaxed, the lines of her mouth altered as she looked at him. Even her strong coltish gawky gait became loosened, when he was there.

Roy had been deputed to propose bridge. Lady Muriel was gratified, but at once objected: “I couldn’t, Roy. I have not touched a card for months.”

“We need you to,” said Roy. “Do play with us.”

“I think it would be better if I left you three to yourselves,” she said.

“You don’t think you ought, do you, Lady Mu?” Roy asked quietly.

She looked confused.

“Perhaps it isn’t the most appropriate time–”

“Need you go without the little things?” said Roy. “I’m sure the Master would tell you not to.”

“Perhaps he would,” said Lady Muriel, suddenly weak, unassertive, broken down.

We played some bizarre rubbers. Roy arranged for stakes of sixpence a hundred, explaining, out of pure devilry, that “poor old Lewis can’t afford more. If he’s going to save up for a suitable house”. (Lady Muriel’s idea of a “suitable house” for me was something like the house of a superior college servant: and Roy had listened with delight.) Even at those stakes, Lady Muriel took several pounds from both Roy and me. It gave her great pleasure, for she had an appetite for money as well as for victory. The night passed, Lady Muriel’s winnings mounted; Joan was flushed and joyful with Roy at the same table; Lady Muriel dealt with her square, masterful hands and played with gusto and confidence. Yet she was very quiet. Once the room would have rung with her indignant rebukes – “I am surprised you had such diamonds, Mr Eliot”. But now, though she was pleased to be playing, though she enjoyed her own skill, she had not the heart to dominate the table. After Roy’s word about the Master, she was subdued.

It was a long time before she seemed to notice the heterogeneous play. For it was the oddest four. Lady Muriel herself was an excellent player, quick, dashing, with a fine card memory. Joan was very good. I was distinctly poor, and Roy hopelessly bad; I might have been adequate with practice, but he could never have been. He was quite uninterested, had no card sense, disliked gambling, and had little idea of the nature of odds. It was curious to see him frowning over his hand, thinking three times as long as anyone at the table: then he would slap down the one card for which there was no conceivable justification. It was hard to guess what could be going on in his mind.

Joan was smiling lovingly. For he had entered into it out of good nature, but she knew that he was irritated. He chose to do things expertly, or not at all.

At last Lady Muriel said: “Do you like playing bridge, Roy?” He smiled.

“I like playing with you, Lady Mu.”

She was just ready to deal, but held the pack in her hand.

“Do you like the game?”

“Of course I do.”

“Do you really like the game, Roy?” Her tone was not her usual firm one, but insistent. Roy looked at her, and gave her an affectionate smile.

“No, not very much, Lady Mu,” he said.

“It’s good of you to give up your evening,” she said. She added, in a low, almost inaudible murmur: “I wonder if the Master ever liked the game. I don’t remember asking him. I’m afraid he may have felt the same as you.”

She still did not deal. Suddenly we saw the reason. A tear rolled down her face.

She had been subjugated by the Master’s disinterested kindness. She felt ashamed, she tried to imagine now things which had not troubled her for thirty years. It was almost incredible, as Roy said to me late that night in the garden, that she could have played with him night after night and never have known if he enjoyed the game. She was broken down by his heightened understanding, as he came near to death. Her imagination was quickened; she wanted to make up for all her obtuseness had cost him; she could not rest with her old content, formidable and foursquare inside herself. She felt unworthy. If his illness had made him more selfish, had worn her out with trouble, she would have undergone less pain.

I was asked myself to call on the Master towards the end of August. Roy had been obliged to return to Berlin in order to give a course of lectures, and it was Joan who gave me the message. She had heard from Roy the day before, and could not help telling me so. “He doesn’t keep me waiting for letters,” she said, happily and humbly. “I never expected he’d write so often.” She longed to confess how much she loved him, she longed to throw away her self-respect.

By this time the Master did not often leave his bed, and I looked at him as he lay there. His face had become that of a very old man; it was difficult to remember him in the days when he seemed so well-preserved. The skin was dried up, waxy-yellow, lined and pouched. His eyes had sunk deeply in their orbits, and the lids were very dark. Yet he managed to keep his voice enough like its former self not to upset those who listened to him.

He spoke to me with the same kind, detached curiosity that had become his habit. He asked after my affairs as though nothing else interested him. Suddenly he saw that he was distressing me.

“Tell me, Eliot,” he said gently, “would it embarrass you less if I talk of what it’s like to be in this condition?”

“Much less,” I said.

“I believe you mean that,” he said. “You’re a strange man.”

“Well,” he went on, “stop me if I ramble. I’ve got something I particularly want to say to you, before you go. I can think quite clearly. Sometimes I fancy I think more clearly than I ever did in my life. But then the ideas start running away with me, and I get tired. Remember, this disease is something like being slowly starved.”

He was choosing the tone which would distress me least. He went on to discuss the election of his successor; he asked about the parties and intrigues, and talked with his old sarcastic humour, with extraordinary detachment, as though he were an observer from another world – watching the human scene with irony, and the kind of pity which hides on the other side of cynicism. He made one or two good jokes. Then he asked whether the college had expected to get the election over before now. I said yes. He smiled.

“It can’t be long,” he said quietly. “There are days even with this disease when you feel a little better. And you hope. It’s ridiculous, but you hope. It seems impossible that your will should count for nothing. Then you realise that it’s certain that you must die in six months. And you think it is too horrifying to bear. People will tell you, Eliot, that uncertainty is the worst thing. Don’t believe them. Certainty is the worst thing.”

He was very tired, and closed his eyes. I thought how he was facing death with stoicism, with detachment, and with faith. Yet even he would have prayed: take this from me at least. Do not let me be certain of the time of my death. His faith assured him that he would pass into another existence. But that was a comfort far away from the animal fact. Just like the other comfort that I should one day have to use myself: they tell me that, when I am dead, I shall not know. Those consolations of faith or intellect could not take away the fear of the animal fact.

He began to talk again, but now he seemed light-headed, his words flew like the associations of a dream. I had to remind him: “You said you had something important to tell me, before I go.”

He made an effort to concentrate. The ideas set off in flight again, but he frowned and gathered up his will. He found a clue, and said: “What is happening about Roy Calvert?”

“He’s in Berlin. The proofs of the new part of the liturgy are just coming in.”

“Berlin… I heard some talk about him. Didn’t he take my daughter to a ball?”

“Yes.”

He was quiet. I wondered what he was thinking.

Again he frowned with concentration.

“Eliot,” he said. “I want you to do me a favour. Look after Roy Calvert. He’s the great man of the future in my field. I like to think that he won’t forget all about my work. Look after him. He’ll need it. People like him don’t come twice in a generation. I want you to do me a favour. Look after Roy Calvert.”

That cry came partly from the sublimed kindness in which he was ending his life. I was moved and shaken as I gave him my promise.

But it was not only self-forgetting kindness that brought out that cry; it was also a flicker of his own life; it was a last assertion of his desire not to be forgotten. He had not been a distinguished scholar, and he was a modest man who ranked himself lower than he deserved. But he still did not like to leave this mortal company without something to mark his place. For him, as for others I had sat by in their old age, it was abhorrent to imagine the world in which he had lived going on as though he had never been. It was a support, bare but not illusive, to know that he would leave a great scholar behind him, whom he could trust to say: “You will find that point in one of old Royce’s books. He made it completely clear.” A shadow of himself would linger as Roy became illustrious. His name would be repeated among his own kind. It was his defiance of the dark.

I thought by his bedside, and again a few minutes later when I met Joan, how tough the core of our selves can be. The Master’s vanities had been burned away, he was detached and unselfish as he came towards his death, and yet the desire to be remembered was intact. And Joan was waiting for me in the drawing-room, and her first question was: “What did he say about Roy?”

She knew that the Master had wished to tell me something. It was necessary for her to know any fact which affected Roy.

I told her that the Master had asked me to do what I could for Roy.

“Is that all?”

“Yes.”

“There was nothing else?”

I repeated one or two of the Master’s observations, looking at us from a long way off.

“I mean, there was nothing else about Roy?”

She was deeply attached to her father, she had suffered by his side, she had been touched beyond expression as his self-forgetful kindness grew upon him in the last months of his life – but it counted for nothing beside her love for Roy. She was tough in her need for him. All her power was concentrated into feeling about him. Human beings in the grip of passion are more isolated than ever, I thought. She was alone with her love. Perhaps, in order to be as healthy and strong as she was, one had to be as tough.

The Master had asked me to look after Roy. As I listened to that girl, I felt that she would take on the task, even if she knew as much as I did. She would welcome the dangers that she did not know. She cross-examined me with single-minded attention. She made me hope.

Roy came back from Berlin in October, and I watched contrasts in Joan as sharp as I had seen them in any woman. Often she was a girl, fascinated by a lover whom she found enchanting, seeing him hazily, adoringly, through the calm and glorious Indian summer. The college shimmered in the tranquil air, and Joan wanted to boast of him, to show off the necklace he had brought her. She loved being teased, having her sulkiness devastated, feeling mesmerised in front of his peculiar mischief. She was too much a girl not to let his extravagant presents be seen by accident; she liked her contemporaries to think she was an abandoned woman, pursued by a wicked, distinguished, desirable and extremely lavish lover. Once or twice, in incredulous delight, she had to betray her own secret.