The Light and the Dark (40 page)

He was excited again in just that fashion, as we got into the aircraft. He was stimulated, became more brilliantly alive, through the faint tang of danger. I envied him, reading my book with forced concentration, hearing him chat to a Portuguese business man. He knew that I should be frightened, that I should prefer to be left sullenly alone. His imagination was at least as active as mine, but it produced an utterly different result: the thought of danger made him keen, braced, active, like a first class batsman who requires just enough of the needle, just enough tingle of the nerves, to be brought to the top of his form. Portuguese was a language Roy had never had reason to look at, but he was asking his acquaintance to pronounce some words: Roy was mimicking the squashed vowel sounds, apparently with accuracy, to judge from the admiring cries.

My first quota of pages dragged by, then in time another, then another. I had to read a good many pages again, to draw any meaning from them; not that they were obscure (they were about lords and ladies of the Japanese court in the year 1000, making an expedition to view the beauty of the autumn flowers), but I was listening too intently for noises outside. I wondered for an instant how the Genji circle would have faced times like ours. They happened to live in an interval of extreme tranquillity, though their civilisation was destroyed a couple of generations later. The Victorians too – they lived in an interval of tranquillity, though they did not feel it so. How would they have got on, if they had been born, like Roy and me and our friends, into one of the most violent times? About the same as we did, I thought. Not better. They would have endured it, for human beings are so made that they struggle on. The more one saw of human beings in violence and adversity, the more astonishing it was how much they could bear.

The plane began to lose height earlier than I calculated. I was alarmed, but Roy had picked up a word, and smiled across at me affectionately, mockingly, with an eyebrow lifted: “We’re here, old boy. Lisbon.”

It was comforting to feel the bumps beneath the wheels, comforting to walk with Roy across the aerodrome.

“Five o’clock,” said Roy. “In time for tea. You need some tea. Also some cakes.”

We were staying that night in Lisbon, and we strolled through the brilliant streets in the warm and perfumed air. For five minutes, it was a release after the darkness of England. The lights streamed from the shops and one felt free, confined no longer. But almost at once, one forgot the darkness, we were walking in lighted streets as we had done before. Roy went from shop to shop, sending off presents; except that the presents were mostly parcels of food, it might have been a night in Cambridge in days past.

We caught the German aeroplane next day. It seemed a little bizarre, but not so much as when I first heard that this was the most practical way. The lap was a short one, Lisbon to Madrid; the windows were not darkened, I looked down on the tawny plains of Estremadura and Castille; we were all polite, everything went according to plan. I had been in Madrid just before the beginning of the civil war; it was strange to sit in a café there again, to read newspapers prophesying England’s imminent defeat, to remember the passions that earlier war had stirred in England. It had been the great plane of cleavage between left and right; we could recall Arthur Brown, the most sensible and solid of conservatives, so far ceasing to be his clubbable self as to talk about “those thieves and murderers whom Getliffe and Eliot are so fond of”.

Roy mimicked Arthur Brown making that reproachful statement, and one saw again the rubicund but frowning face by the fire in the combination room. “I regard a glass of port as rather encouraging on a cold night,” Roy went on mimicking. We were sometimes nostalgic for those cosy autumn nights.

The Lufthansa plane, on the run Madrid-Barcelona-Lyons-Stuttgart, was full of German officials, business men and officers. They knew we were English; one or two were stiffly courteous, but most of them were civil, helpful, anxious to be kind. Roy’s German was, of course, an aid: there is something disarming in a foreigner who speaks one’s language within a shade of perfection and who knows one’s country from the inside. I could now carry on some sort of conversation myself, and one youngish business man pressed sandwiches on us with a naïf, clumsy, puppyish kindness.

I was not expecting to be treated with such simple, amiable consideration. I did not understand why they should have gone out of their way to be kind. They were worried about our reception at Lyons, but anxious to assure us that we should be well looked after at Basel. “It is like a German town,” they said. “Yes, it is a fine town. All will be well when you come to Basel.”

So, in that odd company, I had my first glimpse of the Mediterranean for three years, as we flew over the Catalan coast. Since we landed at Lisbon, I was not so timid about physical danger; but I had two other cares on my mind. I was not sure whether it was a convenience for both sides to let Englishmen travel under this deception of ours. If not, it was always possible that someone here would report our names when he got to Germany: Roy was well enough known in Berlin for it to be a finite risk. I did not believe that the German intelligence would be taken in for a moment by our Red Cross status – and we were due to return on this same route.

For the same reason, I was nervous about the weather. If it did not let us touch down at Lyons, we should inevitably be taken on to Stuttgart. Could we possibly get away with it? Roy would have to do most of the talking: could I trust him to throw himself into whole-hearted lying? This time I was more afraid for him: of all men, he was the least fit to stand prison. I watched the clouds rolling up to the east.

Once (it was an ironical memory) we had been forced down at Lyons. Flying home from Monte Carlo after that happy holiday with the Boscastles, we had met a snowstorm. It was uncomfortable to remember now.

This time the weather did not interfere with us. We made our proper landing. Our German acquaintances inside the aeroplane wished us good luck, and I felt that now we had put the last obstacle behind us. It turned out otherwise. The French officials were not willing to let us disembark: they held the aircraft, the German officers getting first bleakly, then bitterly angry, while we were questioned. Our papers were in order; they could not find anything irregular; they remained sharp, unsatisfied, hostile, suspicious. Both Roy and I lost our tempers. Though I was too angry to note it then, I had never seen him abandoned to rage before. He thumped on the table in the control-room; he was insolently furious; he demanded that they put us in touch immediately with the protecting power; he treated them like petty officials; he loved riffraff and outcasts and those who were born to be powerless – but that afternoon, when he was crossed, he assumed that authority must be on his side.

Suddenly, with a good many shrugs and acid comments, they let us through. They had no formal case against us – but they might have persisted longer if we had kept our tempers and continued with rational and polite argument. As we walked into the town to the railway station (there was no car and they would not help us to find any sort of vehicle) it occurred to me that we were angry because of their suspicions: we were the more angry because the suspicions happened to be entirely justified. It was curious, the genuine moral outrage one felt at being accused of a sin of which one was guilty. I told Roy.

“Just so,” he said, with a smile that was a little sour.

The train was crowded up to the frontier, with people standing in each carriage. It arrived hours late at Annemas, and there we had another scene. At last we sat in a Swiss train, clean and empty.

“Now you can relax,” said Roy. He smiled at me protectively; but that smile vanished, as the excitement and thrill of the journey dropped from him. He looked out of the window, as the train moved towards Geneva; his face was pensive, troubled, and grave.

When there was no excitement to brighten his eyes, he had become by this time in his life sad without much intermission. It was not like the overmastering bouts of melancholy; he had not been invaded by irresistible melancholy since that last summer of peace. I wondered if it was creeping on him now. It was hard to tell, when so much of his time he was burdened – burdened without much up and down, as though this was a steady, final state. As he looked out of the window, I wondered if he was specially burdened now. Was he thinking of what awaited him at Basel?

He turned away from the window, and found my eyes upon him. His own gaze met mine. I noticed his eyes as though it were the first time. They were brilliant, penetrating: most people found them hard to escape: they had often helped him in his elaborate solemn dialogues, in the days when he played his tricks upon the “stuffed”.

“Anxious?” he said.

“Yes.”

“About me?”

“Yes.”

“You needn’t worry, Lewis,” he said. “I shan’t disgrace you. I shan’t do anything unorthodox.”

He looked at me with a faint smile.

“There’s no need to worry. I promise you.”

He spoke as he had come to speak so often – quietly, sensibly, kindly, without fancy. There was still just a vestigial trace of mischief in his tone. I accepted the reassurance implicitly. I knew I had nothing to fear at the end of this journey. It was a relief. Whatever happened now, I could cease to worry at the level of practical politics, at the level where Houston Eggar would be concerned.

Yet, in those quiet, intimate words, there was an undercurrent of something more profound. Perhaps I did not hear it at its sharpest. I was not then attuned. But could anyone, still struggling with hope, still battling on with the selfish frailty of a human brother, be so considerate, so imaginatively detached, so desperately kind?

We arrived at Basel late at night, and went at once to Willy Romantowski’s address. We were met by an anticlimax. Yes, he was living there. No, he was not in. He had been staying with some friends for a night or two. He was expected back tomorrow or the next day.

“Willy must have found someone very, very nice,” said Roy with a grin, as we left the house. “Really, I’m surprised at the Swiss. Very remarkable.”

I grinned too, though I was more frustrated than he by the delay. I wanted to get it over, return safely to England, clear off the work that was waiting for me. Roy did not mind; he was relaxed, quite ready to spend some time in this town.

He remarked that Willy was not doing himself too badly. It was midnight, and difficult to get an impression of a strange street. But it was clearly not a slum. The street seemed to be full of old middle-class houses, turned into flats – not unlike the Knesebeckstrasse, except that the houses were less gaunt, more freshly painted and spick-and-span. Willy was living in a room under the eaves.

“His standard of living is going up,” said Roy. “Why? Just two guesses.”

Willy did not get in touch with us the next day, and we spent the time walking round Basel; I was still very restless, and Roy set out to entertain me. At any other time, I should have basked in the Gothic charm of the streets round our hotel, for the consul had found us rooms in a quarter as medieval as Nuremberg. There were only a few of these Gothic streets, which led into rows of doctors’ houses, offices, shops, as trim as the smart suburb of a midland town in England; but, if one did not walk too far, one saw only red roofs, jutting eaves, the narrow bustling old streets, the golden ball of the Spalenthor above the roofs, gleaming in the spring sunlight. It took one back immediately to childhood, like the smell of classroom paint; it was as though one had slept as a child in one of those tiny bedrooms, and been woken by the church bells.

We used an introduction to some of the people at the university. They took us out and gave us a gigantic dinner, but they regarded us with a regretful pity, as one might look at someone mortally ill. For they took it for granted that England had already lost the war. They were cross with us for making them feel such painful pity – just as Lord Boscastle sounded callous at having his heart wrung by Roy’s sorrow. I found myself perversely expressing a stubborn, tough, blimpish optimism which I by no means felt. They became angry, pointing out how unrealistic I was, how like all Englishmen I had an over-developed character and very little intelligence.

Roy took no part in the argument. He was occupying himself, with the professional interest that never left him, in learning some oddities of Swiss-German.

Roy had left a note for Willy, and we called again at his lodging house. At last he came to our hotel, on our second afternoon there. His mincing mannerisms were not flaunted quite so much; he was wearing a pin-stripe suit in the English style, his cheeks were fatter, he looked healthy and well-fed. He was patently upset to find me with Roy. Roy said that he was sure Willy would be glad to see another old friend, and asked him to have some tea.

Willy would love to. He explained that he had become very fond of tea. He had also become, I thought, excessively genteel.

Roy began by asking him about the people at No. 32. Willy said that he had not seen them for eighteen months (both Roy and I thought this was untrue). But the little dancer had unexpectedly and suddenly married a schoolmaster, back in her native town; she had had a child and was said to be very happy. We were delighted to hear it. In the midst of strain, that news came fresh and calm. We sent for a bottle of wine, and drank to her. For a few moments, we were light-hearted.

Roy questioned Willy up to dinner, through the meal, through the first part of the night. Roy mentioned the clerk, Willy’s old patron, the “black avised” – Willy shrugged his shoulders: “I do not know where he is. He was tiresome. I left him. I do not know him any more.”

Roy scolded him: “It is hard to be kind to those who love you, Willy. But you need to try. It is shameful not to try.” It was strange that he took the trouble to rebuke Willy, who had always seemed to me inescapably hard, petty and vain. Perhaps Roy saw something else. Perhaps he remembered that he himself had sometimes behaved unforgivably to those who loved him.