The Light and the Dark (6 page)

Anyway, through the third and fourth centuries the religion spread. The Manichæan missionaries followed the trade routes, into Egypt, the African coastal fringe, Persia; churches were founded, psalmbooks and liturgies and statements of faith were translated from their original Syriac. And very soon the Manichees were being systematically and ruthlessly persecuted. For some reason, this subtle and gentle faith, or anything resembling it, like that of the Albigenses in Provence or the Bogomils in Bulgaria, always excited the savage hatred of the orthodox. Before long the Manichæan congregations had been exterminated in the Levant and round the Mediterranean; others were driven out of Persia and found a home for a while in what is now Chinese Turkestan. Then they too were finished off by the Moslems.

It is an error, of course, to think that persecution is never successful. More often than not, it has been extremely so. For hundreds of years, this religion, which once had rich churches in the most civilised towns in the world, which attracted to its membership such men as Saint Augustine (for whom Roy had a special and personal veneration), would not have been known to exist except for the writings of its enemies. It was as though communism had been extirpated in Europe in the nineteen twenties, and was only known through what is said of it in
Mein Kampf
. No words of the Manichees themselves were left to be read.

During the twentieth century, however, the technique and scale of archaeological expeditions were each developed, and there were one or two Manichæan finds. A psalm book and a hymnal, translated into a Coptic dialect, were discovered in upper Egypt; and one of the expeditions to Turkestan brought back what was recognised to be a complete liturgy. But it was written in an unknown variety of Middle Persian called Early Soghdian; and for a year the liturgy stayed unread.

The committee who had charge of it intended to ask an Oxford scholar to make an edition but, just at that time, he fell ill. Quite by accident, Sir Oulstone Lyall and Colonel Foulkes happened to be consulting the Master about other business. He mentioned Roy to them and introduced him. They thought he was intelligent, they knew that he had picked up Syriac at an astonishing speed; it was possible that Colonel Foulkes’ devotion to cricket disposed him to take a favourable view of Roy’s character. There was an amateur flavour about all this esoteric scholarship – anyway, they asked if he would like to have a shot.

Only a man of means could have risked it. If he did not get the language out, he had wasted critical years. Something caught in Roy’s imagination, perhaps the religion itself, and he said yes.

That was over two years before, in the January of 1932. Within eighteen months he had worked out the language, so precisely that no one need touch it again. His Soghdian grammar and lexicon were just in proof, and were to be published during 1934. He had already transcribed part of the liturgy, and he was working faster than ever. It was a remarkable record, unbelievable to those who knew a little of his life, the loves, the drinking, the games and parties. But to me, who saw more of him, the miracle disappeared like a conjuring trick which is explained. I knew how, even in the blackest melancholy, he could throw himself with clear precise attention into his work for seven or eight hours a day. I had seen him drink himself into stupor, sleep it off, recover over breakfast, and be back at work by nine o’clock.

His own attitude to his work was one of the most matter-of-fact things about him. His preoccupation was in the words themselves and what they meant; the slightest hitch in the text, and he was absorbed, with all his imagination and powers in play. He was intent on knowing precisely what the words of that liturgy meant, to the priests who translated it, to the scribe who copied it somewhere in a Central Asian town in the sixth century.

Outside the text his imagination, so active upon the words themselves, so lively in his everyday life, seemed not to be much engaged. He gave only a passing thought to the societies where this religion grew or to the people in the congregations which used his liturgy. There was something in such speculations which offended his taste – “romantic” he called them, as a term of abuse. “Romantic,” said Roy scornfully, who himself was often described in that one word.

Yet, right from the beginning, there were times when his work seemed nothing but a drug. He had thrown himself into it, in revulsion from his first knowledge of despair. Despair: the black night of melancholy: he had already felt the weight of inexplicable misery, the burden of self. I thought that too often his work was a charm against the dark. He did not seem to revel in success, to get any pleasure apart from a mild sense of skill. I watched him when he finished his Soghdian grammar. He knew it was a nice job – “I am rather clever,” he said with a mocking smile. But when others praised him, he became irritated and angry, genuinely, morbidly angry, took to a fit of drinking and then worked such immoderate hours at the liturgy that I was afraid for his health, tough as he was.

At the dinner party Mrs Seymour had cried out how much he was to be envied. She was a silly woman, but she only said what everyone round him thought. Some people resented him because he had so much. Many saw the gaiety and felt that he could not have a worry in the world. None of them saw the weight that crushed him down.

Even Roy himself did not see it. In his boyhood and youth, he had been buoyed up by the animal spirits of the young. His spirits at twenty, like those of any vigorous man, were strong enough to defy fate or death; they drew their strength from the body, and for a time could drive away any affliction that was lying in wait. Now he was a little older he had passed through hours and days of utter blackness, in which his one feeling was self-hatred and his one longing to escape himself. But those hours and days passed off, and he still had the boundless hope of a young man. He hoped he could escape – perhaps in love (though he never counted much on that), perhaps in work, perhaps in a belief in which he could lose himself. He hoped he could escape at last, and come to peace and rest.

He did not know then that he had the special melancholy which belongs to some chosen natures. It did not come through suffering, though it caused him to suffer much. It came by the same fate as endowed him with his gifts – his intelligence, his attraction for women, his ability to strike a human response from anyone he met, his reckless bravery.

By the same fortune, he was inescapably under the threat of this special melancholy, this clear-sighted despair in which, more than anyone I knew, he saw the sadness of man’s condition: this despair which drove him to outbursts of maniacal gaiety. He was born with this melancholy; it was a curse of fate, like an hereditary disease. It shadowed all his life. Perhaps it also deepened him under his caprices, perhaps it helped to make him the most selfless of men. I did not know. But I knew that I should have wished him more commonplace and selfish, if only he could cease to be so haunted.

Since I was close to him, I could see that little distance. But he exhilarated me with his gaiety, pierced me with his selflessness, deepened all I knew of life, gave my spirit wings: so I too did not see much that fate had done to him and I hoped that he would be happy.

The Master’s campaign to get Roy elected did not make much progress. All decisions in the college had to be taken by a vote of the fellows, who in 1934 numbered thirteen, including the Master himself: and most formal steps, such as electing a fellow, needed a clear majority of the society, that is seven votes.

For various reasons, the Master was not finding it easy to collect seven votes for Roy. First, one old man was ill and could not come to college meetings. Second, the Master was not such a power in the college as in the university; his intimate sarcasms had a habit of passing round, and he had made several irreconcilable enemies, chief among them the Bursar, Winslow, a bitter disappointed man, acid-tongued in a fashion of his own. Third, the Master, fairminded in most ways, could not conceal his dislike and contempt for scientists, and had recently remarked of one deserving candidate “What rude mechanical are we asked to consider now?” The comment had duly reached the three scientific fellows and did not dispose them in favour of the Master’s protégé.

As a result, the political situation in the college was more than usually fluid. For most questions there existed – though no one spoke of it – a kind of rudimentary party system, with a government party which supported the Master and an opposition whose leader was Winslow. When I first arrived, the government party generally managed to find a small majority, by attracting the two or three floating votes. In all personal choices, particularly in elections to fellowships, the parties were not to be relied on, although there were nearly always two hostile cores: the remainder of the college dissolved into a vigorous, talkative, solemn anarchy. It was an interesting lesson in personal politics, which I sometimes thought should be studied by anyone who wanted to take a part in high affairs.

Through the last half of 1934 Winslow and his allies devoted themselves with some ingenuity to obstruction, for which the college statutes and customs gave considerable opportunity. Could the college afford another fellow? If so, ought it not to discuss whether the first need was not for an official rather than a research fellowship? If a research fellowship, was not the first step to decide in which subject it should be offered? Did the college really need another fellow in an out-of-the-way subject? Could it really afford such luxuries, when it did not possess an engineer?

“Fellowships” occurred on the agenda for meeting after meeting in 1934. By the end of the year, the debate had scarcely reached Roy by name. This did not mean that gossip was not circulating against him at high table or in the combination room. But even in private, arguments were phrased in the same comfortable language: “could the college afford…?” “is it in the man’s own best interests…?” It was the public face, it was the way things were done.

Meanwhile, nothing decisive was showing itself in Roy’s life. The months went by; the grammar was published, highly thought of by a handful of scholars; he tired himself each day at the liturgy. He saw Rosalind sometimes in Cambridge, oftener in London; she persuaded him to take her to Pallanza in September, but she had got no nearer marrying him. There were other affairs, light come, light go.

He became a greater favourite with Lady Muriel as the months passed, was more often at the Lodge, and had spent a weekend at Boscastle.

He knew this roused some rancour in the college, and I told him that it was not improving his chances of election. He grinned. Even if he had not been amused by Lady Muriel and fond of her, the thought of solemn head-shaking would have driven him into her company.

Yet he wanted to be elected. He was not anxious about it, for anxiety in the ordinary sense he scarcely knew: any excitement, anything at stake, merely gave him a heightened sense of living. At times, though, he seemed curiously excited when his fortunes in this election rose or fell. It surprised me, for he lacked his proper share of vanity. Perhaps he wanted the status, I thought, if only to gratify his father: perhaps he wanted, like other rich men, to feel that he could earn a living.

At any rate, it mattered to him, and so I was relieved when Arthur Brown took control. The first I heard of the new manoeuvres was when Brown invited me to his rooms on a January evening. It was wet and cold, and I was sitting huddled by my fire when Brown looked in.

“I suppose,” he said, “that you don’t by any chance feel like joining me in a glass of wine? I might be able to find something a bit special. I can’t help feeling that it would be rather cheering on a night like this.”

I went across to his rooms, which were on the next staircase. Though he lived in domestic comfort with his wife and family, those rooms in college were always warm, always welcoming: that night a fire was blazing in the open grate, electric fires were glowing in the corners of the room, rich curtains were drawn, the armchairs were wide and deep. The fire crackled, and on the windows behind the curtains sounded the tap of rain. Brown brought out glasses and a bottle.

“I hope you like marsala on a cold night,” he said. “I’m rather given to it myself as a change. I find it rather fortifying.”

He was a broad plump well-covered man, with a broad smooth pink face. He wore spectacles, and behind them his eyes were small, acute, dark, watchful and very bright. He was the junior of the two tutors, a man of forty-four, though most of the college, lulled by his avuncular kindness, thought of him as older.

He was a man easy to under-estimate, and his colleagues often did so. He was hospitable, comfort-loving, modestly self-indulgent. He disliked quarrels, and was happy when he could compose one among his colleagues. But he was also a born politician. He loved getting his own way, “running things”, manipulating people, particularly if they never knew.

He was content to leave the appearance of power to others. Some of us, who had benefited through his skill, called him “Uncle Arthur”: “the worthy Brown,” said Winslow contemptuously. Brown did not mind. In his own way, deliberate, never moving a step faster than he wanted, talking blandly, comfortably, and often sententiously, he set about his aims. He was by far the ablest manager among the Master’s party. He was a cunning and realistic, as well as a very warm-hearted, man. And in the long run, deep below the good fellowship, he possessed great obstinacy and fortitude.

We drank our wine, seated opposite each other across the fireplace.

“It is rather consoling, don’t you think?” said Brown amiably, as he took a sip. He went on to talk about some pupils, for most of the young men I supervised came into his tutorial side.

He was watching me with his intent, shrewd eyes and quite casually, as though it were part of the previous conversation, he slipped in the question: “You see something of our young friend Calvert, don’t you? I suppose you don’t feel that perhaps we ought to push ahead a bit with getting him considered?”