“Excellent. I needed you to meet him. He is an interesting man.”
I asked what exactly his job was. Roy said that he was the equivalent of a Minister in England, the kind of Minister who is just on the fringe of the cabinet.
“He’s extremely young,” said Roy. “About your age. You must forget your preconceived ideas. He’s not a bit stuffed.”
They had arranged that Roy should invite the party. He found one German friend already booked, but got hold of Ammatter, the orientalist whom I had met in Cambridge. Then he rang up Joan. She was demanding to see him at once, that afternoon, that night: Roy nearly weakened, but held firm. At last she acquiesced. I could imagine the fierce, sullen, miserable resignation with which she turned away. She was to bring Eggar “if he does not think it will set him back a peg or two”. Roy also invited Eggar’s wife, but she was expecting a child in the next fortnight. “It looks like being Joan and five men,” he said. He was smiling fondly and mockingly, as he must have done when they were in love.
“That’s her idea of a social evening. A well-balanced little party. She likes feeling frivolous, you know. Because it’s not her line.” He sighed. “Oh — there’s no one like her, is there?”
The next morning, he was well enough to take me for a walk through the Berlin streets. It was still freezingly cold, and the sky was steely. The weather had not changed since the German army marched into Prague, a few days before I set out. Outside Roy’s house, the pavement rang with our footsteps in the cold: the street was empty under the bitter sky. Roy was wearing earcaps, as though he were just going to plunge into a scrum.
He took me on a tour under the great grey buildings; lights twinkled behind the office windows; the shops and cafés were full, people jostled us on the pavements, the air was frosty and electric; an aeroplane zoomed invisibly overhead, above the even pall of cloud. We walked past the offices of the Friedrichstrasse and the Wilhelmstrasse; the rooms were a blaze of light. Roy was only speaking to tell me what the places were. He showed me Schäder’s ministry, a heavy nineteenth century mansion. Official motor cars went hurtling by, their horns playing an excited tune.
We came to the Linden. The trees were bare, but the road was alive with cars and the pavements crammed with men and women hurrying past. Roy stopped for a moment and looked down the great street. He broke his silence.
“It has great power,” he said. “Don’t you feel that it has great power?”
He spoke with extreme force. As he spoke, I knew for sure what I had already suspected: he had brought me to Berlin to convert me.
For the rest of that morning we argued, walking under the steely sky through the harsh, busy streets. We had never had an argument before — now it was painful, passionate, often bitter. We knew each other’s language, each of us knew all the experience the other could command, it was incomparably more piercing than arguing with a stranger.
When once we began, we could not leave it all day; on and off we came back to the difference between us. Most of the passion and bitterness was on my side. I was not reasonable that day, either as we walked the streets or sat in his high cold rooms. I kept breaking out with incredulity and rancour. We were still talking violently, when it was ten o’clock and time to leave for the Adlon.
He seemed to be using his gifts, his imagination, his penetrating insight, his clear eyes, for a purpose that I detested. He had not wanted me to become absorbed in the rag tag and bobtail of the Knesebeckstrasse. He loved them, but it was not that part of Germany he wanted me to see. They did not talk politics, except to grumble passively at laws and taxes which impinged on them; the only political remarks on the night I arrived were a few diatribes against the régime by the school teacher, who was as usual opinionated, hot-headed and somewhat half-baked. Roy warned her to be careful outside the house. There was an asinine endearingness about her.
Roy wanted me to see the revolution. That day he made his case for it, in a temper that was better than mine, though even his was sometimes sharp; sometimes he put in mischievous digs, as though anxious to lighten my mood. He had set out to convince me that the Nazis had history on their side.
The future would be in German hands. There would be great suffering on the way, they might end in a society as dreadful as the worst of this present one: but there was a chance — perhaps a better chance than any other — that in time, perhaps in our life time, they would create a brilliant civilisation.
“If they succeed,” said Roy, “everyone will forget the black spots. In history success is the only virtue.”
He knew how to use the assumptions that all our political friends made at that period. He had not lived in the climate of “fellow travellers” for nothing. Francis Getliffe, like many other scientists, had moved near to the communist line: we had all been affected by that climate of thought. Men needed to plan on a superhuman scale, said Roy with a hint of the devil quoting scripture; Europe must be one, so that men could plan wide and deep enough; soon the world must be one. How could it become one except by force? Who had both the force and the will? No price was too high to pay, to see the world made one. “It won’t be made one by reason. Men never give up jobs and power unless they must.”
Only the Germans or Russians could do it. They had both got energy set free, through a new set of men seizing power. “They’ve got the energy of a revolution. It comes from very deep.” They had both done dreadful things with it, for men in power always did dreadful things. But the Promethean force might do something wonderful. “Either of them might. I’ve told you before, the truth lies at both extremes,” said Roy. “But I’ll back these people. They’re slightly crazy, of course. All revolutionaries are slightly crazy. That’s why they are revolutionaries. A good solid well-adjusted man like Arthur Brown just couldn’t be one. I’m not sure that you could. But I could, Lewis. If I’d been born here, I should have been.”
Not many people had the nature to be revolutionaries, said Roy. And those who had, felt dished when they had won their revolution and then could not keep their own jobs. Like the old Bolsheviks. Like Röhm. The Nazis had collected an astonishing crowd of bosses — some horrible, some intensely able, some wild with all the turbulent depth of the German heart. “That’s why something may come of them,” said Roy. “They may be crazy, but they’re not commonplace men. You won’t believe it, but one or two of them are good. Good, I tell you.”
It was that fantastic human mixture that had taken hold of him. They were men of flesh and bone. They were human. He said one needed to choose between them and the Russians. He had made his choice. Communism was the most dry and sterile of human creeds — “no illustrations, no capital letters. Life is more mixed than that. Life is richer than that. It’s darker than the communists think. They’re optimistic children. Life is darker than they think, but it’s also richer. You know it is. Think of their books. They’re the most sterile and thinnest you’ve ever seen.” Roy talked of our communist friends. “They’re shallow. They can’t feel anything except moral indignation. They’re not human. Lewis, I can’t get on with them any more.”
Inflamed by anxiety and anger, I accused him of being perverse and self-destructive: of being intoxicated by the Wagnerian passion for death; of losing all his sense through meeting, for the first time, men surgent with a common purpose: of being seduced by his liking for Germany, by the ordinary human liking for people one has lived among for long.