The Light and the Dark (29 page)

“Someone once said,” Roy put in, “that the truth lies at both extremes. But never in the middle. You don’t believe that, Brown, do you?”

“I do not,” said Brown comfortably. “I should consider it was a very cranky and absurd remark.”

At last Udal said that he thought he could soon give a reply. Brown stopped him short.

“I’m not prepared to listen to a word tonight,” he said. “I’m not prepared to listen until you’ve slept on it. I’ve always regretted the occasions when I’ve spoken too soon. I don’t presume to offer advice to people like Eliot and Calvert here, but I’ve even sometimes suggested to them that they ought to sleep on it.”

Brown departed for his home in the town, and the rest of us went from his room to mine. It was dark, bare, inhospitable after Brown’s; we drew the armchairs round the fire.

Roy said to Udal: “You’re not taking this job, are you?”

“No,” said Udal. “I don’t think I shall.”

“Less money. Much more work.”

“It’s not quite as simple as that,” said Udal, slightly nettled.

“No?” Roy’s smile was bright.

“No,” said Udal. “I don’t specialise in bogus reasons, as you know. But there are genuine ones why I should like to come. It would be pleasant” – he said with easy affection – “to be near you.”

“What for?” said Roy sharply.

“It doesn’t need much explanation.”

“It may,” said Roy. “You used to hope that you’d catch me for your faith. Isn’t that true?”

“I did hope so,” said Udal.

“If you were here, you think it might be more likely. Isn’t that true as well?”

“It had crossed my mind,” said Udal.

“You can forget it,” said Roy. “It will never happen now. It’s too late.”

“It’s not too late,” said Udal impassively.

“Listen, Ralph. I know now. I’ve known for some time.” Roy was speaking with absolute finality. I was reminded of that scene with Bidwell. It was as though he were driven restlessly on, cutting ties which had once been precious. Bidwell’s was a minor one; now he was marking the end of something from which he had hoped so much. He was excited, sad but excited. He had to make this dismissal to go on. He said clearly: “I shall not come your way now. I shall not believe. It’s not for me.”

Udal could not mistake the tone. He did not dissent. He said, with compassion and warmth: “I’m more sorry than I can say.”

For the first time, I saw Udal uncertain of himself, guilty, hesitating. He added: “I can’t help feeling some of this is my fault. I feel that I’ve failed you.”

Roy did not speak.

“Have I failed you?” said Udal.

Roy’s eyes, acutely bright, pierced him. Roy could have answered yes. For a second, I thought he was going to. It was at Boscastle that Roy knew without the slightest particle of doubt that Udal was no use to him – when he heard him plan his days, allow one day’s exercises for the integral knowledge of God. It was a little thing, but to Roy it meant much. It turned him away without hope from Udal’s experience, that seemed now so revoltingly “hygienic”, so facile and easy. He had once thought that Udal, never mind his frailties, had discovered how to throw away the chains of self. Now it seemed to Roy that he was unbelievably self-absorbed, content to be self-absorbed.

Roy answered gently: “No one could have made any difference. I should never have found it.”

“I hope you’re speaking the truth,” said Udal simply.

“I think I am,” said Roy.

“I haven’t failed you,” said Udal, “because of Rosalind?”

“Of course not.” Roy was utterly surprised: had she been on Udal’s mind all the time?

“You see,” Udal went on, “I’m thinking of marrying her.”

“Good luck to you,” said Roy. He was taken aback, he gave a bewildered smile, full of amusement, memory, chagrin and shock. “Give her my love.”

“It isn’t certain,” said Udal.

Udal was lying back in his chair, and I watched his face, heavy featured and tranquil. It was a complete surprise to me. I wondered if he could be as confident as he seemed. I wondered about Rosalind, and why she had done it.

Then Roy leaned forward, so that his eyes gleamed in the firelight. He did not speak again about Rosalind. Instead, he said, very quietly: “Could there be a world, Ralph, in which God existed – but with some people in it who were never allowed to believe?”

“It would be a tragic world,” said Udal.

“Why shouldn’t it be tragic?” Roy cried. “Why shouldn’t there be some who are rejected by God from the beginning?”

“It isn’t my picture of the world,” said Udal.

Suddenly Roy’s face, which had been sombre, set and haunted, lit up in his most lively and impish smile.

“No,” he said, “yours is really a very nice domestic place, isn’t it? Tragic things don’t happen, do they? You’re an optimistic old creature in the long run, aren’t you?”

Udal could not cope with that lightning change of mood. Roy baited him, as though everything that night had passed in fun. It was in the same light, teasing tone that Roy said a last word to Udal before we went to bed.

“I expect you think I ought to have tried harder to believe, don’t you? If one tries hard enough, things happen, if you’re an optimistic old creature, don’t they? I did try a bit, Ralph. I even pretended to myself that I did believe. It didn’t come off, you know. I could have gone on pretending, of course, I could have pretended well enough to take you in. I’ve done that before now. I could even have taken old Lewis in. I could have taken everyone in – except myself and God. And there wouldn’t have been much point in that, would there?”

We walked with Udal through the courts towards the guestroom. On the way back, I stumbled over a grass verge: there was no moon, the lamps in the court had been put out at midnight, and I could not see in the thick darkness. Roy took my arm, so that he could steer me.

“I shouldn’t like to lose you just yet,” he said.

I knew that he was smiling. I also knew that he was within an inch of confiding. There had been horror behind what he had said a few minutes before – and yet there was still hope. It was not easy just at that moment to reject our intimacy.

The moment passed. He took me to the foot of my staircase.

“Good night, old boy. Sleep well.”

“Shall you?” I said.

There I could see him smile.

“I might,” he said. “You never know. I did, last Tuesday.”

Roy went back to Berlin just after Christmas. I did not hear from him, but one morning in February I received a letter with the Boscastle crest. It was from Joan, saying that she urgently wanted to talk to me about Roy – “don’t misunderstand me,” she wrote with her bleak and painful honesty. “There is nothing to say about him and me. I want your advice on something much more important, which concerns him alone.”

She suggested that she should give me dinner at her London club. I nearly let her, for I was far less considerate than Roy in the way I behaved to my women friends. Part of this was due to my taste for the company of beautiful women – for beautiful women needed, of course, much less attention, could be entertained much more casually, since one’s bad manners did not touch their self-respect. It was this taste of mine which drew me to Lady Boscastle; I should no doubt have fallen in love with her, if we had been born in the same generation. Roy did not share at all the taste for beauty, and some people found the difference between us the opposite of what they had expected.

But I had learned much from him, and I took Joan to the Berkeley. She dressed herself up, and, though her mission was an anxious one, she was glad to be there. As she sat on the other side of the table, I thought her face was becoming better looking as she grew older; she had lost the radiance of happy love, but the handsome structure of her cheekbones was beginning to give her distinction; it was a face in which character was showing through the flesh.

She went straight to it.

“I’m very worried about Roy,” she said, and told me her news. Houston Eggar had recently got a promotion, after steady and resolute pushing; he had left Rome and been sent to Berlin as an extra counsellor. Late in January, he had written out of the blue to Lord Boscastle about Roy. He said that he was presuming upon his wife’s relationship to Lord Boscastle’s family; he knew that Roy was a friend of theirs, and the whole matter needed to be approached with the utmost discretion. I thought as I listened that Eggar was in part doing his duty, in part showing his natural human kindness, and in part – and probably a very large part – seizing an opportunity of getting into Lord Boscastle’s good books. If he exerted himself, he could be valuable to Eggar’s career. But thoughts of Eggar soon vanished as Joan described his report. It sounded factual, and we both believed it.

Roy, so Eggar said, was being a great social success in Berlin. He was being too great a social success. He was repeatedly invited to official and party functions. He was friendly with several of the younger party leaders. With some of them he had more influence than any Englishman in Berlin. “I wish I could be satisfied,” ran Eggar’s letter, which Joan gave to me, “that he was using his influence in a manner calculated to help us through this difficult period. It is very important that Englishmen with contacts in the right quarters should give the authorities here the impression that they are behind the policy of HMG. Calvert has gone too far in the direction of encouraging the German authorities that they have the sympathy and understanding of Englishmen like himself. I can give you chapter and verse of several unfortunate remarks.”

Eggar had done so. They had the tone of Roy. Some of them might have been jokes, uttered with his mystifying solemnity. One or two had the touch, light, first-hand and grave, which Joan and I had heard him use when he was most in earnest. And Eggar also quoted a remark in “very embarrassing circumstances” about the Jewish policy: at an august official dinner, Roy had recklessly denounced it. “You’re a wonderful people. You’re brave. You’re gifted. You might begin a new civilisation. I wish you would. I’m speaking as a friend, you see. But don’t you think you’re slightly mad? Your treatment of the Jews – why need you do it? It’s unnecessary. It gets you nowhere. It’s insane. Sometimes I think that, whatever else you do, it will be enough to condemn you.”

It had been said in German, and I did not recognise the phrases as typically Roy’s. But the occasion was exactly in his style. It had given offence to “important persons”, and Eggar seemed as concerned about that as about the other “indiscretions”. All his reporting seemed objective, and Joan and I were frightened.

We were not simply perturbed, as Eggar was, that he might commit a gaffe at an awkward time. Eggar obviously thought that he was a frivolous and irresponsible young man, who was flirting with a new creed. Eggar was used to Englishmen in society who for a few months thought they had discovered in Rome or Berlin a new way of life, and in the process made things even more difficult for a hard-working professional like himself. To him, Roy was just such another.

Across the table, Joan and I stared at each other, and wished that it were so. But we knew him too well. We were each harrowed because of him and for him.

Because of him – since we were living in a time of crisis, and it was bitter to find an opponent in someone we loved. Both Joan and I believed that it hung upon the toss of a coin whether or not the world would be tolerable to live in. And Roy was now wishing that we should lose. It was a wound of life. We had taken our stand, we each knew we should not change: but this positive news of Roy weakened our will. For we should be the last people to dispose of him as frivolous. Our doctrinaire friends would no doubt feel convinced that he was nothing but a rich man out to preserve his money: to us, that was a crassness that broke the heart. No one alive knew his vagaries as deeply as we did. We could not pretend to disregard anything he truly believed. We thought his judgment was dead wrong; but anything he felt, came from the depth of his sense of life: anything he said, we should have to listen to.

We were harrowed for him. We could only guess what he was going through, and where this would lead him. But he was without fear, he was without elementary caution. He had none of the cushions of self-preservation which guard most men; he did not want success, he cared nothing for others’ opinion, he had no respect for any society, he was alone. There was nothing to keep him safe, if the mood came on him.

“Ought I to go and see him?” said Joan.

I hesitated. She was distracted for him, with a devotion that was unselfish and compassionate – and also she wanted any excuse to meet him again, in case the miracle might happen. Her love was tenacious, it was stronger than pride, she could not let him go.

“He might still listen to me,” Joan insisted. “It will be difficult, but I feel I’ve got to try.”

Nothing would put her off. That was the advice she had come to get. Whether she got it or not, she was determined to go in search of him.

I heard another, and a very different, account of Roy a few days later. It came from Colonel Foulkes, whom I ran into by chance when I was lunching as a guest at the Athenaeum. Oulstone Lyall had died suddenly at the end of 1938 (I was interested to see in one of the obituaries a hint of the Erzberger scandal: it seemed now that the truth would never be known) and Foulkes had become the senior figure in Asian studies.

“Splendid accounts of Calvert,” he said without any preliminaries, as we washed our hands side by side. The Oriental faculty at Berlin University had decided, Foulkes went on, that Roy was the finest foreign scholar who had worked there since the 1914–18 war. “They’re thinking of doing something for him,” Foulkes rapped out. “Only right. Only right. Subject’s cluttered up with old has-beens. Such as me. Get rid of us. Get rid of us. That’s what they ought to do.”

He had also heard that Roy was sympathetic to the régime, but it did not cause him the slightest concern. “Great deal to be said for it, I expect,” said Foulkes, briskly towelling his hands. “Great deal to be said for most things. People ought to be receptive to new ideas. Only way to keep young. Glad to see Calvert is.”