He smiled again, and said: “It makes things a bit sharper, that’s all. One can’t change one’s mind. It holds one to it. That’s all.”
The fire had flared up now, and his face was rosy in the glow. The shadows exaggerated his smile. We talked on, so attuned that each word resounded in the other’s heart. And at the same moment that I felt closer to him than I had ever done, I was seized and shaken by the most passionate sense of his nature, his life, his fate. It was a sense which shook me with resentment, fear and pity, with horror and unassuageable anxiety, with wonder, illumination and love. I accepted his nature with absolute gratitude; but I could not accept how fate had played with him and caught him. While I delighted in our talk that night, I cried to myself with the bitterness of pity; to know him was one of the two greatest gifts in my life; and yet it was anguish to see how his life had brought him to this point.
He had once said, just before the only flaw in our intimacy, that I believed in predestination. It was not true in full, though it was true as he meant it. I believed that neither he nor any of us could alter the essence of our nature, with which we had been born. I believed that he would not have been able to escape for good from the melancholy, the depth of despondency, the uncontrollable flashes and the brilliant calm, the light and dark of his nature. That was his endowment. Despite his courage, the efforts of his will, his passionate vitality, he could not get rid of that burden. He was born to struggle, to pursue false hopes, to know despair — to know what, for one of his nature, was an intolerable despair. For, with the darkness on his mind, he could not avoid seeing himself as he was, with all hope and pretence gone.
Most men are saved from that tragic suffering. Nothing could have saved him. Knowing him — as I realised on that walk by the Serpentine years before — I was bound to watch him go through his journey, sometimes hopeful, sometimes tormented, often both together, until in the white and ruthless light of self-knowledge, he perceived himself.
So far, I believed in what he called “predestination”. I believed that some parts of our endowment are too heavy to shift. The essence of our nature lay within us, untouchable by our own hands or any other’s, by any chance of things or persons, from the cradle to the grave. But what it drove us to in action, the actual events of our lives — those were affected by a million things, by sheer chance, by the interaction of others, by the choice of our own will. So between essence and chance and will, Roy had, like the rest of us, had to live his life.
It was the interplay of those three that had brought him to that moment in my room, smiling, talking of his “bad end”. They had brought him to his present situation. I felt the delight of our intimacy — and from his situation I shrank back in anguish and appalled.
For it could have happened otherwise. In any case, perhaps, he would have known despair so black that he would have been driven to “throw in his hand”, he would have felt it was time to “resign”. That was what he meant by a “bad end”. If we had been born in a different time, when the outside world was not so violent, it was easy to imagine ways along which he might have gone. He might not have been driven into physical danger: he might have tried to lose himself in exile or the lower depths. But that was not his luck. He had had to make his choice in the middle of a war. And war, as he said, “held one to it”. It made his choice one of life and death. It was irrevocable. It gave no time for the obstinate hope of the fibres, which underlay even his dark vision of the mortal state, to collect itself, steady him, and help him to struggle on.
And I felt that hope was gathering in him now. Through his marriage, through his child, perhaps ironically through the very fact that he had “resigned” and needed to trouble no more, he had come out of the dark. Perhaps he had married Rosalind because he did not trouble any more; it was good for him not to care. He was more content than he had been since his youth. Hope was pulsing within him, the hope which is close to the body and part of the body’s life, the hope that one possesses just because one is alive.
He was going into great danger. He said that it was “inconvenient” to hope now. The mood in which he had made his choice should have lasted. But he was not to be spared that final trick of fate. He was to go into danger: but his love of life was not so low; it was mounting with each day that passed.
He was smiling, happy that we should be enjoying this evening together by my fire. Each second, each sound, seemed extraordinarily distinct. I was happy with him — and yet I did not want to see, I wished my eyes were closed, I could not bear the brightness of the room.
37: Mist in the Park
Roy began to fly on bombing raids in the January of 1943. From that time, he came to see me regularly once a fortnight; it was his device for trying to ease my mind. He could come to London to visit me more easily than I could get away. He had far more leisure, which seemed a joke at my expense. His life had become strangely free; mine was confined; I did not so much as see a bombing aerodrome through the whole length of the war.
When we met, Roy kept nothing from me. Sometimes I thought of the days, long before, when we sat by the bedside of the old Master. He had known he must soon die for certain; the end was fixed; and, for me at least, it was more terrible because he talked only of his visitors’ concerns — he, who lay there having learnt the date of his death.
Roy knew me too well to do the same. He was more natural and spontaneous than the old Master; he took it for granted that I was strained, that he was strained himself; he left it to instinct to make it bearable for us both. And, of course, there was one profound difference between his condition and the old Master’s; Roy did not know for certain whether he would live or die.
As a rule, he called at my office in the afternoon and stayed with me until he caught a train at night. In that office he looked down into Whitehall, and told me simply that he was getting more frightened. He told me of his different kinds of fear: of how one wanted to stop short, throw the bombs away, and run for home. He smiled at me.
“It’s peculiarly indecent for me to bomb Stuttgart, isn’t it? Me of all men.” (He had worked in the library there.)
I nodded.
“They’ll want me to bomb Berlin soon. Think of that.” Then he said: “But you don’t believe in bombing anyway, do you?”
“No,” I said.
“You don’t think it’s any use? It won’t win the war?”
“I don’t believe so.”
“You’re pretty sure?”
“Reasonably.”
“What does he think?” Roy pointed to the door which led through to the Minister’s room.
“The same.”
“Just so,” said Roy. “He’s a wise old bird. So are you, aren’t you?”
He smiled brilliantly, innocently, laughing at himself and me. He said: “There’s never been a place for me, has there?”
On those afternoons I heard something about his crew. He had become interested in them, realistically, affectionately, with amusement, just as with everyone he met, just as with the inmates of No. 32, Knesebeckstrasse. They were nearly all boys, and the oldest was twenty-six, seven years younger than himself. “I’m getting too old for this game,” said Roy. There was a Canadian among them. Most of them were abnormally inarticulate, and Roy mimicked them to me. Some were extremely brave. “Too brave for me,” he said.
I often speculated about what they thought of him. So far as I could gather, they did not consider him academic, donnish, or learned; it had always surprised people to discover his occupation. But they also did not think him intelligent or amusing. They liked him, they respected him as a pilot, and thought he was a kind, slightly eccentric old thing. I suspected he had gone in for some deliberate dissimulation — partly to stay anonymous, partly to shield them from what he was really like. For instance, they certainly did not know that he was a notorious lover of women. They just placed him as an uxorious married man, devoted to his daughter and inclined to show them photographs of his wife and baby.