The Light and the Dark (20 page)

Yet, as Roy said that night, they had lived together for twenty-five years. They had had children. They had had some kind of life together. They had not been happy, but each was the other’s only intimate. Perhaps they felt more intimate in the supreme crisis just because of the unhappiness they had known in each other. It was not always those who were flesh of each other’s flesh who were most tied together.

So, with that life behind them, she had to tell him. She screwed up her resolve, “and if I know Lady Mu at all, poor dear,” said Roy, “she rushed in and blurted it out. She hated it too much to be able to tell him gently. Poor dear, how much she would have liked to be tender.”

He did not reproach her for not having told him before, he did not hate her, he scarcely seemed aware of her presence. He just said: “This alters things. There’s no future then. It’s hard to think without a future.”

He had had no suspicion, but he did not mind being fooled. He did not say a word about it. He was thinking of his death.

She could not reach him to comfort him. No one could reach him. She might as well not be there.

That was what hurt her most, said Roy, and he added, with a sad and bitter protest, “we’re all egotists and self-regarding to the last, aren’t we? She didn’t like not mattering. And yet when she left him, it was intolerable to see a human being as unhappy as she was. I told you before, I’ve never seen such misery and loneliness. How could I comfort her? I tried, but whatever could I do? She’s not been much good to him. She feels that more than anyone thinks. Now, at the end, all she can do is to tell him this news. And he didn’t seem to mind what she said.”

Roy was speaking very quietly. He was speaking from the depth of his dark sense of life.

Silently, we sat by the dying fire. At last Roy said: “We’re all alone, aren’t we? Each one of us. Quite alone.” He asked: “Old boy – how does one reach another human being?”

“Sometimes one thinks one can in love.”

“Just so,” he said. After a time, he added: “Yet, sometimes after I’ve made love, I’ve lain with someone in my arms and felt lonelier than ever in my life.”

He broke out: “If she was miserable and lonely today, what was it like to be him? Can anyone imagine what it’s like to know your death is
fixed
?”

After she left him, Lady Muriel had gone to his room once again, to enquire about his meals. Joan had visited him for a few minutes. He had asked to be left alone for the evening. That was all Roy knew of his state.

“Can you imagine what he’s gone through tonight? Is he lying awake now? Do you think his dreams are cheating him?”

Roy added: “I don’t believe he’s escaped the thought of death tonight. It must he dreadful to face your death. I wonder how ours will come.”

When he knew the truth, it was a long time before the Master asked to see any of his friends. He told Roy, who alone was allowed to visit him, that he wished to “get used to the idea”.

He talked to Roy almost every day. Throughout those weeks, he saw no one else, except his family and his doctor. He no longer mentioned the book on the heresies. He said much less than he used to. He was often absent-minded, as though he were trying to become familiar with his fate.

Then there came a time, Roy told me, as his own spirits darkened, when the Master seemed to have thought enough of his condition. He seemed to have got bored – it was Roy’s phrase, and it was not said lightly – with the prospect of death. He had faced it so far as he could. For a time he wanted to forget. And he became extraordinarily considerate.

That was at the end of term, and he invited us to call on him one by one – not for his sake, but for ours. In his detached and extreme consideration, he knew that each of us wanted to feel of some help to him. He felt, with a touch of his old sarcasm, that he could give us that last comfort.

Everyone who talked to him was impressed and moved by his disinterested kindness. Yet I was appalled to receive so much consideration from him, to be asked about my affairs with wise detached curiosity – and then face the eyes of a dying man. His cheeks were hollow and yellow, and his skin had a waxy texture; his clothes hung on him in folds, on him who had been the best preserved of men, and as well groomed as Roy. And there was one macabre feature of his appearance, which I learned afterwards had upset him for a time. He had always been slender, he was now emaciated – but under his waistcoat swelled the round pseudo-paunch of his disease.

He had never been so kind, and I went out of the room with dread. It struck me with more distress than anyone, even Roy. For Roy, each hour in the Master’s bedroom had been an agony; he had seen too much of suffering, too much of the inescapable human loneliness; yet this state of detached sub-ironic sympathy, to which the Master had now come, seemed to Roy a triumph of the spirit as the body died. He was moved to admiration and love; I was moved too, in the same way; but I also felt a personality dissolving in front of my eyes, a human being already passing into the eternal dark and cold.

At the beginning of the summer, the disease seemed to slow down. The doctors had guessed that he would be at the point of death by May or June: they admitted now that they had calculated wrong. He sat up a little each day in his bedroom above the sunny court. He was slightly more exhausted, still disinterestedly kind, still curious about each of us. It was clear that he might live for several months yet.

This lengthening of the Master’s life had several effects upon those round him. The tension in the college about the next Master had been growing; everyone had reckoned that the election would be settled by the summer. Now the uncertainty was going to be indefinitely prolonged – and the news did not relax the tension, but increased it. The hostility between the two main parties, the talks at night, the attempts to cajole the three or four wavering votes – they all grew more urgent. And so did the campaign of propaganda and scandal. There were all kinds of currents of emotion in that election – men were moved, not only by personal feelings in the intimate sense, but also by their prejudices in subjects, in social origins, in political belief. At least two men were much influenced by the candidates’ attitude to the Spanish war, the critical test in external politics. And there was a great deal of rancour set free. On the side which Winslow led, there was a determined attempt to label us others as rackety and disreputable. Winslow himself did not take part, although he was too much committed to the struggle to control his own party. He was set on getting his candidate in. Old Despard-Smith did some sombre calumny, and one or two others became virulent.

It was inevitable that much of this virulence should direct itself at Roy. He was unusual, brilliant, disturbing; some of the men who had opposed his election, though not Winslow, envied and hated him still. And by now they knew more about him. They had had him under their eyes for nearly two years. They knew a little, they suspected much more. In such an intimate society, small hints passed into circulation; often the facts were wildly askew but the total picture preserved a sort of libellous verisimilitude. With a self-righteous satisfaction, Roy’s enemies acquired a sense, groping but not everywhere false, of a wild and dissipated life. They knew something of drunken parties, of young women, of a separate existence in London. They knew something of Joan’s love for him.

The slander became more venomous, as though in a last desperate campaign. One heard Roy attacked night after night in hall and the combination room and in private gossip. Very often women’s names were mentioned: as the summer term went on, Joan’s was the most frequent of all.

It was a curious technique, attacking our candidate through his friends and supporters. But it was not altogether ineffective. It cost us a good deal of anxiety. We tried hard to conceal these particular slanders from Roy himself, but in the end they reached him.

If he had been untroubled, he would have laughed them away. No one cared less for what others thought. He might have amused himself in executing some outrageous reprisal. But in fact he had no resilience left. He did not laugh when he heard he was being maligned. He took it darkly. It was a weight upon him. He went from the Master’s bedroom to face his own thoughts through interminable sleepless nights, and harsh, jeering voices came to him as he lay lucidly and despairingly awake. For what he had been waiting for had happened. The melancholy had gripped him again. He made less fight this time. He was both more frightened and more resigned.

It did not stop him spending all his spare time at the Lodge. He worked as hard as ever, he was drinking alone at night; but, whenever they wanted him, he was there. Perhaps it was because of them that he did not make his old frantic attempts to escape from his affliction. He did not see Udal at all, he scarcely left Cambridge for a day, he had not spent a night with Rosalind for months. He was living more chastely than at any time since I knew him. He did not talk to me about his wretchedness or hopes; he seemed resigned to being alone, lost, terrified.

I knew, though he said nothing, that thoughts pressed in on him with merciless clarity as he lay staring into the long bright summer dawns. In the Lodge he had seen the approach of death, the extreme of loneliness, faith, despair, the helpless cries of human beings as they try to give each other help. He had seen it, and now saw himself in this torment of his own melancholy. I believed later that in those nights he learned about despair.

He was looking harrowed and ill. Depriving himself of his minor pleasures, he played no cricket that summer; he was mewed up all the day time with his manuscripts, or inside the Lodge, and for the first time one saw his face with no sunburn at all. There was no colour in his face, except for the skin under his eyes.

I had to submit myself again to watch him suffer so. Much of the time I lived in apprehension. Some things I feared less than the first time, some more. I knew roughly now the course of these attacks. They differed a little among themselves; this was quieter, more despondent, more rooted in human grief; but even so I had already seen the occasional darts of fantastic elation. I had not to worry so much about the unknown. I expected that, after the melancholy had deranged and played with him, in another outburst it would end. All I could do was take such precautions as I could that this outburst would not hurt him or his friends.

But I feared something much more terrible, which last time I had not feared at all. I wanted to turn my mind away from what he must bear – not because of his present misery, but because it had overcome him
again
. He must have faced it often, in his loneliness on those summer nights. He must have seen it, in different lights and shades of recognition. And all were intolerable. Sometimes –
this
was a doom he was born with.
He was as much condemned as the Master. There was no more he
could do
. He would be swept like this all through his life; at times, as now, he would be driven without will; he would not have the appearance of will which gives life dignity, meaning and self-respect.

The Master still had will, facing his death.
He was more condemned
. He must be ready to suffer aimlessly, for no reason, whenever this affliction came. He would always be helpless.

Sometimes –
he could still escape. But why were the doors closed
? If he could escape, why was it so preposterously harder than for others? He had to struggle, to push back the sense of doom, and still the doors would not open, and misery came upon him again. He should have escaped before this attack, and yet he was caught. It was worse to feel that he could escape, and yet be caught. It was harder to endure, if there was a way out which he could not find.

I remembered that winter evening by the Serpentine, and I was wrung by pain and by acute fear. There were nights when I too lay awake.

It was during May that Joan first told Roy that she loved him. The reprieve to her father seemed to act as a trigger to her love. It had begun long since, in the days when as an awkward girl she used to decry Roy in company and quarrel with him whenever she could make the opportunity. It had accumulated through those harsh winter days in the Lodge, when they all rested on him. Now it was set loose and pouring out.

I knew it, because she talked to me about his unhappiness. Unlike Rosalind, she could not take it as a matter of course. She was forced to discover what had stricken him. She was the proudest of young women, and yet she humbled herself to ask me – even though she thought I was her enemy, even though she felt she alone should possess his secrets. Whatever it cost her, she must learn him through and through. I was touched both by her humility and her pride. So she watched him in those weeks of affliction with eyes that were anxious, distressed, loving, hungry to understand. But she was spared the climax.

I was nervous about him almost to the end of Arthur Brown’s claret party. Brown gave this party to his wine-drinking colleagues each year at the beginning of June.

That summer he arranged it for the second night of May week. As a rule this would have been the night of the college ball, but, though the Master asked that all should continue normally, it was not being held this year. The undergraduates took their young women to balls at other colleges: Roy had danced with Joan at Trinity the previous night. Now he turned up at Brown’s party, heavy-eyed for lack of sleep, and deceived all the others into believing that his sparkle was the true sparkle of a joyous week.

All through the evening, I could not keep my eyes away from him for long. Time after time, I was compelled to look at him, to confirm what I dreaded. For this was the sparkle I had seen before. I wished I could take him out of danger.

Six of us sat in Brown’s rooms on that warm June night, and the decanters stood in a shapely row in the evening light. Brown was giving us the best clarets of 1920 and 1924.