The Light and the Dark Page 4

  “How did it go?” I said.

  “I tried to find a corner to hide in. But it’s not very easy when there are only four.”

  “You got a small prize,” Roy said to her. “Not the first prize. Only the second. You did very nicely.”

  I guessed that she had been diffident, had not taken much part. But it was not as bad as she feared, and with her indomitable resolve she would try again. Roy was smiling at her, amused, stirred to tenderness because she made such heavy weather of what would, at any age, have been his own native air.

  He said to me: “By the way, old boy, you’ve made a great hit with Lady B. I’m extremely jealous.”

  “She wanted to know all about you,” said Rosalind.

  “I think she likes very weighty men.” Roy chuckled. “Old Lewis is remarkably good at persuading them that he’s extremely weighty.”

  He went on to tease Rosalind about Lord Boscastle’s compliments. I noticed that Roy and Rosalind were very easy with each other, light with the innocence that may visit a happy physical love.

  The telephone bell rang: it was for Roy, and as he answered he exclaimed with enthusiasm – “excellent”, “of course”, “I’m sure he would”, “I’ll answer for him”, “come straight up”.

  “You see, you’ve got to be civil now,” said Roy. “It’s Ralph Udal. He’s just back from Italy. It’s time you met him.”

  Roy added, with a secret smile: “Now, I wonder what he wants.”

  Udal himself came in as Roy finished speaking. I had found out something about him since the episode of the bookshops: now I saw him in the flesh, I was surprised. I had not expected that he should have such natural and pleasant manners. For the stories I had heard were somewhat odd. He was an exact contemporary of Roy’s at the college, and they had known each other well, though they were never intimate friends. Udal came from a professional family, but he was a poor man, and he and Roy moved in different circles. They had known each other as academic rivals, for Udal had had a brilliant undergraduate career. Then his life became very strange. He spent a year among the seedy figures of Soho – not to indulge himself, not to do good works, but just to “let the wind of God blow through him”. Then he had served another year in a church settlement in Poplar. Afterwards, he had, passively so it seemed, become ordained. But he had not taken a curacy or any kind of job; he had written his little book on Heppenstall, and had gone off to Italy for six months.

  He was a big man, tall, loose-framed, dark-haired, and dark-skinned. He looked older than his age; his face was mature, adult and decided. As he greeted us, there was great warmth in his large, dark, handsome eyes. He was dressed in old flannels and a thin calico coat, but he talked to Rosalind as though he also had been to a smart lunch, and he settled down between her and me without any sign that this was a first meeting.

  “How’s the book going?” asked Roy.

  “It’s very gratifying,” said Udal. “There doesn’t seem to be a copy left in Cambridge.”

  “Excellent,” said Roy, without blinking, without a quiver on his solemn face.

  Udal had arrived back from Italy the day before.

  “Didn’t you adore Italy? Were the women lovely? What were you doing there?” asked Rosalind.

  “Looking at churches,” said Udal amiably. Rosalind had just remembered that he was a clergyman. She looked uncomfortable, but Udal was prepared to talk about anything she wanted. He thought the women were beautiful in Venetia and Friulia, but not in the South. He suggested that one required a dash of nordic blood to produce anything more than youthful comeliness. He had gone about with his eyes open, and spoke without inhibition. Rosalind was discomfited.

  She was discomfited again when, with the same ease, he began talking of his practical requirements.

  “Roy,” he said, “it’s time I found a job.”

  “Just so,” said Roy.

  “You don’t mind me talking about myself?” Udal said affably to Rosalind and me. “But I wanted to see Roy about my best moves. I’m not much good at these things.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said to Roy. “A country living would suit me down to the ground. I can make do on three hundred a year. And it would mean plenty of leisure. I shouldn’t get so much leisure in any other way.”

  “That’s true,” said Roy.

  “How do I set about getting one?”

  “Difficult,” said Roy. “I don’t think you can straightaway.”

  They talked about tactics. Udal knew exactly what he wanted; but he was oddly unrealistic about the means. He seemed to think it would be easy to persuade the college to give him a living. Roy, on the other hand, was completely practical. He scolded Udal for indulging in make-believe, and told him what to do; he must take some other job at once, presumably a curacy; then he must “nurse” the college livings committee, he must become popular with them, he must unobtrusively keep his existence before them. He must also cultivate any bishop either he or Roy could get to know.

  Udal took it well. He was not proud; he accepted the fact that Roy was more worldly and acute.

  “I’ll talk to people. I’ll spy out the land,” said Roy. He smiled. “I may even make old Lewis get himself put on the livings committee.”

  “Do what you can,” said Udal.

  Rosalind was upset. She could not understand. She could not help asking Udal: “Doesn’t it worry you?”

  “Doesn’t what worry me?”

  “Having – to work it all out,” she said.

  “I manage to bear it. Would it worry you?”

  “No, of course not. But I thought someone in your position–”

  “You mean that I’m supposed to be a religious man,” said Udal. “But religious people are still ordinary humans, you know.”

  “Does it seem all right to you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said.

  “I’m afraid I still think it’s peculiar.” She appealed to Roy. “Roy, don’t you think so?”

  “No,” he said. “Not in the least.”

  His tone was clear and final. Suddenly I realised she was making a mistake in pressing Udal. She was exposing a rift between herself and Roy. In other things she would have felt him getting further away: but here she was obtuse.

  “I’m not able to speak from the inside,” said Roy. “But I believe religion can include anything. It can even include,” his face, which had been grave, suddenly broke into a brilliant, malicious smile, “the fact that Ralph hasn’t just called on me – for valuable advice.”

  “That’s not fair,” said Udal. For a moment he was put out.

  “You need someone to unbelt. I’m sure you do.”

  “I am short of money,” said Udal.

  “Just so,” said Roy.

  Roy’s gibe had been intimate and piercing, but Udal had recovered his composure. He turned to Rosalind.

  “You expect too much of us, you know. You expect us to be perfect – and then you think the rest of the world just go about sleeping with each other.”

  Rosalind blushed. Earthy as she was, she liked a decent veil: while he had the casual matter-of-fact touch that one sometimes finds in those who have not gone into the world, or have withdrawn from it.

  “You’re not correct either way, if you’ll forgive me,” Udal went on. “Roy here wouldn’t let me call him a religious man yet: but do you think he’s done nothing so far but chase his pleasures? He’s already done much odder things than that, you know. And I’m inclined to think he will again. I’m just waiting.”

  He spoke lightly, but with immense confidence. Then he smiled to himself.

  “This is the right life for me, anyway,” he said. “It will give me all I want.”

  “Will it?” said Rosalind sharply.

  He was relaxed, strong in his passiveness.

  But she opposed her own strength, that of someone who had gone into the world and could imagine no other life. It was not a strength to be despised. Udal looked at her, and his fac
e was no more settled than hers.

  Roy watched them with a glance that was penetrating, acute, and, it suddenly seemed to me, envious of each of them.

  4: A Nature Marked Out by Fate

  From the afternoon when he forced me to confide, my relation with Roy became changed. Before, he had seemed a gifted and interesting young man whose temperament interested me, whom I listened to when he was despondent, whom I liked seeing when I had the time. Now he had reached out to me. He had put self aside, risked snubs, pierced all the defence I could throw in his way. He had made me accept him as an intimate on even terms. Insensibly, perhaps before I knew it, my friendship with him became the deepest of my life.

  I had met him first, as I have said, when he was a boy of fifteen. It was only for an hour, but the circumstances were strange, and had stayed in my memory. For Roy had fallen in love, with an innocent and ecstatic adolescent passion, with a young man whom I knew. His innocence made him indiscreet – or perhaps, even then, he cared nothing for what people thought. At any rate, there was a commotion among a group of my acquaintances. Roy was brought in to tell his story: and I remember him, entirely composed, his face already sad when he was not smiling, although his smile was brilliantly and boyishly gay. His speech was curiously precise, and one heard the echoes of that precision years later; as an affirmative when we questioned him, he used a clear “just so”.

  The story was hushed up. Roy’s father behaved with a mixture of energy, practical sense, and an obstinate refusal to believe that his son could do anything irregular or eccentric. Roy himself was not embarrassed by the incident either then or later. I sometimes thought, in fact, that it gave him an added and gentler sympathy. He was not the man to respect any conventions but his own. With his first-hand knowledge of life, he knew that any profound friendship must contain a little of the magic of love. And he was always as physically spontaneous as an Italian. He liked physical contact and endearing words. He would slip his arm into a friend’s on the way to hall or as the team went out to field: if anyone had recalled that scandal of the past, he would only have met Roy’s most mischievous and mocking grin.

  After that single hour, I did not meet him again until he went to Cambridge. It was only by chance that his outburst had affected my circle, and, in the large town where we were both born, our paths were not likely to cross. I lived in the shabby genteel fringe of the lower middle class, while his father had made a considerable fortune and moved among such society as the town could give. His career and way of life were, as a matter of fact, fairly typical of the rich manufacturers of that day. His father, Roy’s grandfather, had risen from the artisan class, and made enough money out of boots to send his son to a minor public school: then Roy’s father, a man of obstinate inarticulate ability with an obsessional passion for detail, expanded the business and took his chance in the 1914–1918 war. He became really rich, much richer than many of my London friends who were thought wealthy and lived in greater style: by 1934 he cannot have been worth less than £300,000. He did very little with it, except buy a local newspaper and a large house on the outskirts of the town, and take every opportunity of spending money on his only son. He idolised Roy, in a speechless, embarrassed, puzzled fashion; he sent him to the most fashionable preparatory and public schools (it was only by a personal accident that he came to the college, which was not particularly fashionable; his house master, whom Roy liked, happened to be a loyal old member); from the time Roy was twenty-one, his father allowed him £1,500 a year, and settled a substantial sum on him as well.

  When I ran across him in his undergraduate days, he was more outwardly eccentric than he later seemed – not in dress, for he was always elegant, but in actions which at the time I thought were only a very young man’s whims. I found him one night sleeping on a seat on the embankment. He did not explain himself, although he was, as usual, polite, easy-mannered, affectionate and direct. He went in for bouts of hard drinking which seemed more abandoned than an undergraduate’s blinds, more deliberately an attempt to escape. And he started his love affairs quite early. Yet each examination was a triumph for him, and he was the outstanding classic of his day.

  After taking his degree, he was at a loss. He felt vaguely drawn to some kind of scholarly research, but he did not make any determined start. He drank more, went into more dissipated company, felt a despondency overcome him of which previously he had only known the shadow’s edge. This was the first time that he was forced, without any help or protection at all, to know the burden of self.

  In a few weeks that darkness left him, and he tried to forget it. The Master, whose subject was comparative religion, suggested that he should apply himself to oriental languages. To help himself forget the period of melancholy not long past, Roy threw all his attention into Syriac and Aramaic: and then, partly by sheer chance, came the offer of the research which was to occupy so much of his working life.

  It was an odd story, how this ever reached him.

  Of all the Christian heresies, one spread the furthest, touched imaginations most deeply, and had the richest meaning. Perhaps it should have been called a new religion. It was the heresy of Mani. It began towards the end of the third century ad in the pleasure city of Antioch and the decadent luxurious towns of Syria; it swept through them as a new religion might sweep through California today.

  It was a new religion, but it drew its strength from something as old and deep as human feeling; for, just as the sexual impulse is ineluctably strong, so can the hate of it be; the flesh is seductive, beyond one’s power to resist – and one hates the flesh as an enemy, one prays that it will leave one in peace. The religion of the Manichees tried to give men peace against the flesh. In its cosmology, the whole of creation is a battle of the light against the dark. Man’s spirit is part of the light, and his flesh of the dark. The battle sways from side to side, and men are taking part in it, here and now. The religion was the most subtle and complex representation of sexual guilt.

  Such a subtle and complex religion must have drawn its believers from the comfortable classes. There was none of the quick simple appeal that helped Christianity to spark from man to man among the hopeless dispossessed of the Roman slums. Manichæism must have been chiefly the religion of those with time to think – and probably of a comfortable leisured class in a dying society, a class with little to do except pursue its sensual pleasures and be tormented by their guilt.

  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 Turkes
tan 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.