“Yes.”
“There was nothing else?”
I repeated one or two of the Master’s observations, looking at us from a long way off.
“I mean, there was nothing else about Roy?”
She was deeply attached to her father, she had suffered by his side, she had been touched beyond expression as his self-forgetful kindness grew upon him in the last months of his life — but it counted for nothing beside her love for Roy. She was tough in her need for him. All her power was concentrated into feeling about him. Human beings in the grip of passion are more isolated than ever, I thought. She was alone with her love. Perhaps, in order to be as healthy and strong as she was, one had to be as tough.
The Master had asked me to look after Roy. As I listened to that girl, I felt that she would take on the task, even if she knew as much as I did. She would welcome the dangers that she did not know. She cross-examined me with single-minded attention. She made me hope.
21: Towards the Funeral
Roy came back from Berlin in October, and I watched contrasts in Joan as sharp as I had seen them in any woman. Often she was a girl, fascinated by a lover whom she found enchanting, seeing him hazily, adoringly, through the calm and glorious Indian summer. The college shimmered in the tranquil air, and Joan wanted to boast of him, to show off the necklace he had brought her. She loved being teased, having her sulkiness devastated, feeling mesmerised in front of his peculiar mischief. She was too much a girl not to let his extravagant presents be seen by accident; she liked her contemporaries to think she was an abandoned woman, pursued by a wicked, distinguished, desirable and extremely lavish lover. Once or twice, in incredulous delight, she had to betray her own secret.
She confided it to Francis Getliffe and his wife, and Francis talked anxiously to me. He liked and understood her, and he could not believe that Roy would bring her anything but unhappiness. Francis had never believed that Roy was a serious character; now he believed it less than ever, for Roy had come back from Berlin, apparently cheerful and composed, but ambiguous in his political attitude. Francis, like many scientists of his age, was a straightforward, impatient, positive socialist, with technical backing behind his opinions and no nonsense or frills. He was angered by Roy’s new suggestions, which were subtle, complex and seemed to Francis utterly irresponsible. He was angered almost as much by Roy’s inconsistency; for Roy, despite his friends in high places in the Third Reich, had just smuggled into England a Jewish writer and his wife. It was said that Roy had taken some risks to do it; I knew for certain that he was spending a third of his income on them. Francis heard this news with grudging approval, and was then maddened when Roy approached him with a solemn face and asked whether, in order to ease relations with Germany, the university could not decree that Jewish scholars were “Welsh by statute”.
“He’ll be no good to her,” said Francis.
“She’s very happy now.”
“She’s happy because he’s good at making love,” said Francis curtly. “It won’t last. She wants someone who’ll marry her and make her a decent husband. Do you think he will?”
Francis was right about Joan. She needed marriage more than most women, because she had so often felt diffident and unlike others. It was more essential to her than to someone like Rosalind, who had never tormented herself with thoughts of whether men would pass her by. Joan recognised that it was essential to her, if ever she were to become whole. She thought now, like any other girl, of marrying Roy, sometimes hoped, sometimes feared: but she was much too proud to give him a sign. She was so proud that she told herself they had gone into this love affair as equals; she had done it with her eyes open, and she must not let herself forget it.
So she behaved like a girl in love, sometimes like a proud and unusual girl, sometimes like anyone who has just known what rapture is. But I saw her when she was no longer rapturous, no longer proud, no longer exalted by the wonder of her own feelings, but instead compassionate, troubled, puzzled by what was wrong with him, set upon helping him. For she had seen him haunted in the summer, and she would not let herself rest.
She was diffident about attracting him: but she had her own kind of arrogance, and she believed that she alone could understand him. And she was too healthy a woman, too optimistic in her flesh and bone, not to feel certain that there was a solution; she did not believe in defeat; he was young, gifted, and high-spirited, and he could certainly be healed.
It was not made easy for her — for, though he wanted her help, he did not tell her all the truth. He shut out parts of his nature from her: shut them out, because he did not want to recognise them himself. She knew that he was visited by desperate melancholy, but he told her as though it came from a definite cause: if only he could find peace of mind he would be safe. She knew he was frightened at any premonition that he was going to be attacked again: she believed, as he wanted to, that they could find a charm which kept him in the light.
The Master lay overlooking the court through that lovely, tranquil autumn. Joan tried to learn what faith would mean to Roy.
She found it unfamiliar, foreign to her preconceptions of him, foreign to her own temperament. One thing did not put her off, as it did Francis Getliffe and so many others; since she loved him, she was not deceived by his mischievous jokes; she could see through them to the gravity of his thought. But the thought itself she found strange, and often forbidding.
He was searching for God. Like me, she had heard her father’s phrase. But she discovered that the search was not as she imagined. She had expected that he was longing to be at one with the unseen, to know the immediate presence of God. Instead, he seemed to be seeking the authority of God. He seemed to want to surrender his will, to be annihilated as a person. He wanted to lose himself eternally in God’s being.
Joan knew well enough the joy of submission to her lover; but she was puzzled, almost dismayed, that this should be his vision of faith. She loved him for his wildness, his recklessness, his devil-may-care; he took anyone alive as his equal; why should he think that faith meant that he must throw himself away? “Will is a burden. Men are freest when they get rid of will.” She rebelled at his paradox, with all her sturdy protestant nature. She hated it when he told her that men might be happiest under the authority of the state — “apart from counter-suggestible people like you, Joan.” But she hated most his vision, narrow and intense, of the authority of God.
In his search of religion, he did not give a thought to doing good. She knew that many people thought of him as “good”, she often did herself — and yet any suggestion that one should interfere with another’s actions offended him. “Pecksniffery”, he called it. He was for once really angry with her when she told him that he was good himself. “Good people don’t do good,” he said later, perversely. In fact, the religious people he admired were nearly all of them contemplative. Ralph Udal sponged on him shamelessly, wanted to avoid any work he did not like, prodded Roy year in, year out to get him a comfortable living, and was, very surprisingly, as tolerant of others as of himself. None of this detracted from Roy’s envy of his knowledge of God. And old Martineau, since he took to the religious life, had been quite useless. To Roy it was self-evident that Martineau knew more of God than all the virtuous, active, and morally useful men.
Joan could not value them so, and she argued with him. But she did not argue about the experience which lay at the root of Roy’s craving for faith. He told her, as he told me that night we walked on the Roman road, about his hallucination that he was lost, thrown out of God’s world, condemned to opposition while all others were at rest. That sense had visited him once again, for the third time, during the blackness of the summer.