CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

‘ELEVEN O’CLOCK. It never gets quite dark now.’ Radzyn turned his dark-grey, close-cropped head and looked out of the high western window of the laboratory. It was the last night of June and the roofs and spires were clear cut against a green sky. The light in the green made Kenn imagine the East, deserts, a remote stillness in thought. The quiet tones of his chief’s voice did not seek an answer and both men remained in an easy silence.

Radzyn was a Pole whose brilliance was held in leash by an unremitting conscientiousness. This quality of thoroughness was also Kenn’s. In both men it was an implacable force. Radzyn on rare occasions gave utterance to a philosophic phrase. Kenn perceived it as a use of invisible irony, and from the moment Radzyn surprised the shadow of derision at the corner of his lips, there began to grow between them a delicate friendship.

Not that Kenn always understood his chief’s references. He recognised the irony, but too frequently missed its bearing. For his education, he regretfully realised, had been too circumscribed, directed too purposefully to one specific end. Radzyn’s range of knowledge, on the other hand, was wide and deep, so deep that it was of the stuff of his silence.

He had been driven, Kenn could see, by an innate need ‘to find out’. Something disturbingly beyond even love of learning for its own sake. Whereas he, Kenn, had started out with no more than the narrow Scottish idea of ‘getting on’, of making the conquest of a certain limited knowledge subserve the material need to establish himself.

There seemed a profound distinction here in their respective approaches to knowledge. And Kenn certainly did a lot of private reading to try to meliorate the harshness of his ignorance. But the more he read the more he realised the distinction was not really so profound as it seemed. Radzyn, for example, had a far keener personal ambition to excel as a scientist than ever Kenn would have, however complex the motive behind. In flashes, Kenn saw this in him, and admired therefore all the more the infinite patience of the man, his incorruptible integrity. But it meant, at odd moments, that expression of quietude, which Kenn instinctively felt was a holding of restlessness in iron fingers. Kenn realised he was spared those personal stresses and inner conflicts, but whether because of the narrowness of his knowledge or of something native to his character, he could not be sure.

‘I suppose’, Radzyn added, ‘in the far north it hardly gets dark at all.’

‘Practically not at all,’ said Kenn. ‘The red of sunset and sunrise merge. They play bowls at Thurso at midnight.’

‘And what will you do with yourself?’

‘Oh, I’ll knock about and fish and that.’ He paused. ‘Though actually I have one small idea—I intend to walk a certain river to its source.’

Radzyn turned from the window and looked at him.

Kenn’s eyes brightened in humour. ‘It’s a thing I have wanted to do for a long time. That’s all really.’

‘Not a pilgrimage?’

‘Hardly!’

‘You mean that it is—slightly?’

‘Well, perhaps, slightly.’ And pin-point gleams in his eyes held a certain challenge.

‘Very interesting.’ Radzyn never nodded. His dark eyes had at certain moments a just perceptible Mongol cast. Kenn had early been attracted by this, though why he could not say. Possibly from some irrational feeling that Radzyn belonged to a folk, had a native background or thickness rather than a European or continental polish. Though his social manners were indeed exquisite. ‘Nothing like that Yogi’s pilgrimage to Lake Mānas?’

‘Not exactly!’ said Kenn.

‘What, by the way, did you think of that?’

‘I really don’t know what to think of it. The details of the early part of his journey were recorded quite precisely. But that at the end of it he sat without moving for three days and three nights on a frozen lake high up the mountain in a snow-storm and then had his vision and came away—I begin to wonder how he checked his time; I am assailed by our Western scepticism.’

‘And yet you have a feeling that things may have happened as he said?’

‘I just—don’t know.’

‘You have been thinking of this pilgrimage up your river for a long time?’

‘I suppose I have.’

‘However elementary, unconscious, you too therefore must have a vision?’

‘Yes.’

‘You admit that?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘You smile—but the psychologist might find something here.’ Radzyn smiled, too, in the way that subtly composed his face. But Kenn saw that he was restless a little, wanted to probe, out of the mood induced by the evening, or by some temporary wash of loneliness at thought of parting, possibly. ‘I have observed the way some of your Celtic poets have lately been inclined towards the East. You had better be careful.’

‘Oh I know pretty definitely what to expect.’

‘You mean you expect, at the source, to find something?’

Kenn held his eyes. ‘I do.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

They continued to look at each other in the dimming light. Then into Radzyn’s expression, without perceptible facial change, there came a politeness of profound derision.

‘That sounds very philosophic.’

‘It’s quite literal,’ Kenn answered simply.

‘I think I look for too much.’

‘I think, perhaps, you do.’

‘How old are you, may I ask?’

‘Thirty-seven,’ said Kenn.

‘I am fifty-five,’ said Radzyn. ‘Perhaps when I look now I look for something. It is age.’

There was silence for a short time.

‘By nothing I meant no vision.’

‘I understand,’ said Radzyn. ‘The scientist has no beliefs: he has only his eyes and his brain. He has nothing else.’

Here was the moment of enigmatic humour that Kenn sometimes found difficult, yet rarely to the point of being unresponsive to its essence or colour.

‘Of all the creeds—how it is the most difficult.’

‘I suppose it is,’ Kenn answered quietly.

‘You suppose.’

Kenn darkened slightly and kept silent.

‘How much more entertaining for us if you had been going to be enceinte with a vision.’

Under the irony was often a slash of cruelty almost savage, and yet—as Kenn felt now—utterly impersonal. Not directed against him, but against the bitterness of the unknown withheld, of the dark, and at the same time against the soft assurance of religions, of visions, of satisfying philosophies. In a sense it hardly touched Radzyn at all, so much at home was he to the state of mind.

‘I suppose it would,’ Kenn answered, with his pleasant, shy smile. ‘But—when I think over it—I have never had any vision. Nor any belief. I don’t think, perhaps, many of us had where I was brought up. Don’t think we ever really believed in our church any more than we believed in the sort of clan landlord we had, though they were the two most unavoidable of realities. That’s the sort of thing that becomes clear to me when thinking of the river.’

‘It’s a good sort of vision to get.’ Radzyn turned to the window again and his eyes grew still. ‘Yet some sort of living or working belief you must have.’

‘I don’t know that one bothers trying to formulate it much.’

‘Supposing you try now.’

‘Without thinking, I would say at once that the work you are doing is the most important in the world. Nothing can be equally important with investigation into the nature of things. It is also the most difficult. It is also so infinitely slow. The greatest step any one man can take into the unknown is almost negligible. There are no spiritual rewards or divine assurances. Not even the sensuous pleasure that artists presumably get. And if a man is fortunate enough to make some critical discovery, the thing is not his creation, it is the discovery of what is already created. I mean he cannot hang it up on his wall or stick it on his piano.’

‘I have rarely heard you so eloquent. You would think the scientist was the modern saint. And you dismiss the artist and literary men—sensuous pleasure.’ It was clearly a point.

‘That’s the worst of talking.’ Kenn tried to smile away the embarrassment that comes from talking too much. But he had a point to make. And it was not any statement of his own belief but a need, quick in him, to reassure this man for whom he realised, in the quiet of the evening, he had so deep a respect. There was no such need to reassure himself. He was not subtle and various in knowledge; he was not given to any internal doubts and stresses. To himself he was simple and obvious. But this man’s use of the word saint was somehow extraordinarily suggestive and potent.

‘We have to do a little talk sometimes. And your point of view is refreshing—perhaps because, in religion and the arts, if I may be permitted to say so, you are not weighted down with knowledge.’

Kenn smiled in sheer relief.

Radzyn looked at him and his eyes glimmered in friendliness. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘what you really think of the arts.’

‘Do you mean modern theories—words like surrealism and so on?’

‘Well, even these?’

‘It’s silly my trying to say anything about it. But from what I can gather it’s pretty much a case of the old trinity again. There is the purely objective and the purely subjective. They marry and externalize the offspring. Most of the argument, as far as I can make out, is a matter of where to place the emphasis. The purely objective is photographic. The purely subjective is incommunicable. How to give form to the fusion so that the most arresting communication is made? And so on. Now all that is important, no doubt, but it is really social. It is decorative; it is cultural; in a million years it would never get us anywhere—that is from the point of view of apprehending the real nature of the universe in which we live. It’s the same with literature. If poetry is the highest expression of literature, how is it that the modern age has produced no great poetry, no poetry anyway that dominates intelligent minds, holds them with a sense of being an absolute—as it has done in the past? It must be surely because its principal attributes of wonder and curiosity and the thrill of new forms or new beauty are today to be found in science. The way in which science has opened out the universe is the real saga or drama of our day. New words, exciting and strange, and yet more exact than words in the starkest ballad. The scientist is the discoverer. It’s he who is on the peak of Darien. But I’m afraid I’m not getting my words very exact!’

‘You do not seem to consider much the value of the social effort.’

‘Well, if it comes to that—what effect has any of man’s preoccupations had on life compared with science? Take away scientific discovery and consequent mechanical invention and what would our age be like? The last time I was going home I crossed the Forth Bridge. No one whom I asked knew the architect’s or engineer’s name. Like the great cathedrals of the medieval age. Already a sort of nameless communal effort. The work of the folk. I felt there was something rather fine in the idea. I got, I suppose, a sort of vision!’

‘You have the folk idea strong in you.’

‘That may come out of our past, for we were a fairly communal folk until we were thoroughly debauched by predatory chiefs and the like. A feeling lingers that the poor have always been wronged. It goes pretty deep. And anyway, deep or not, it’s time they were freed—as far as freedom is possible to the animal. And ultimately science will free them.’

‘That seems a piece of dialectical materialism rather than what one would expect from the Celtic—fringe, is it? Are you forsaking your Twilight?’

‘I never had any experience of this Twilight. An old woman in the old days in my country knew the nature of what grew around her quite precisely. She gathered her roots and her lichens and out of them made the vivid dyes you see in tartans. That was what happened in fact. It is clear, too, that they achieved in their way a very tolerable communal life, and worked to the rhythm of their own music and that sort of thing. In fact if a Scot is interested in dialectical materialism or proletarian humanism, it seems to me he should study the old system in order to find out how the new system would be likely to work amongst his kind. It might help him at least to get rid of his more idealistic wind.’

‘Possibly! But how can you compare the complex Marxian dialectic with the social simplicities that obtained amongst your primitives?’

‘That’s one thing I have wondered about. The use of this word primitive—I am not so sure. How would you define it? They were primitive only in their lack of machinery and therefore of a complex industrialism. But they were not primitive in their humanism or social recognition of one another. For example, where in English we have only the one word, man, and a few adjectives to differentiate all the kinds of men, they had scores of exact words in their language, each one of which at once evoked a different kind of man. In this matter they were much more complex than we are. Our lack of capacity for precise verbal discrimination here shows us as primitives to them.’

Radzyn’s smile flashed a gleam from his dark eyes.

‘I like your simplicity. Whether it is great—or merely naïve—I am not so sure. You do not appear to have experienced the pressure of great systems of thought. Possibly you are too naturally pagan to be worried. But that apart— and perhaps I am glad it is apart—are you not avoiding the pressure of life around us today? In our laboratory here, are we not secluded and safe? While outside—every newspaper has its records of human slaughter. Foreign wars, civil wars, and steady preparation for another great world war. And beneath that, the pits of human misery, with communism— the new creed of your folk—recognising with a sort of religious fervour that there can be no hope for the folk except by revolution. Not only that, but what little we as scientists find out is being used instantly and with diabolic cunning to perfect the art of universal slaughter. And you believe we are important. Well, in that diabolic sense, I suppose we are. But it is hardly one which at the moment I think we can afford to stress. Do you?’

‘I hardly see it like that. Everyone who reads a paper knows the facts. But I believe that the scientist is the one man who with certainty is going to make war impossible. The golden age of Pericles went down before the black death. So did the Mayas before yellow jack. Typhus, malaria, smallpox, diphtheria, leprosy, have been more terrible in their time than any number of armies with banners. But science has beaten them all. The scientist cannot work in his laboratory today and at the same time be outside trying to chain up the predatory animal. He can leave that, I think, to the slow but sure emergence of the folk. It must be their job anyway. They must of themselves make it impossible for the predatory animal to function—on any large scale, at least. And they will. I am quite certain of that. Why? Because I am one of the folk myself. I know them, because I know what moves me.’

‘And so you see your job now, your job as a scientist, as being a great contribution to the folk, as being the new faith that will liberate them? By its means they will for the first time really inherit the earth? And they will inherit not only its wealth but also some knowledge of its true nature, and out of it all make their new art and their new literature. And all this will be charged with dynamic joy and with splendid loyalties. These loyalties will generate their own morality. And for religion there will continue to be, as always, the Unknowable—to provide us with our search for truth.’

For the first time Kenn used hidden irony against his chief. ‘I admit,’ he said, smiling blandly, ‘that you make me shy at so much ideal speculation.’

Radzyn looked narrowly at him, at the smiling unwavering eyes, and saw deep in the eyes the indissoluble hard core, the native, inalienable residuum, saw it with the surprise one might come on a face in a mirror or a still adder-head in a pleasant bunch of heather.

Radzyn experienced a sharp and exciting shock. The sort of shock a stranger might have in a strange land when suddenly one of the people of that land comes near to him, nearer to his spirit than could one of his own blood.

Radzyn got up. So did Kenn. The hour certainly was getting late. But now Radzyn showed no sign of preparing to walk away with Kenn. He held out his hand, his manner very polished, very precise.

‘I have enjoyed our talk. I wish you a pleasant holiday.’

Kenn thanked him. Their hands fell to their sides. They bowed. ‘You have been very good to me,’ said Kenn. Then he turned and walked away.

On the pavement, Kenn felt himself tingling with pleasure. ‘Hang it, he’s a nice fellow!’ he said aloud. What the conversation had been about did not much matter. Too often in fact a lot of talking left the feeling that what really mattered had got smothered. Making a point of view or upholding an attitude was so often a sententious exercise.

The thought now was good fun. For Kenn knew that somehow he had achieved his purpose of complimenting Radzyn; and not only that but of bringing conviction to the man’s own lonely convictions. Without having said anything at all to the point really! Perhaps this bore out his idea about the complexity of the Highlander in the matter of human relationship! Folk did say the Highlander was two-faced! Kenn would have liked to have laughed aloud on the street because it appeared so good a joke. Like the saying, too— once whispered to him very privately by a Highland divine— that the Highlander had no ethical basis. There was so much acute observation in both sayings that to appreciate the lack of the slight extra penetration necessary to permit the turning of the corner to revelation required the sort of mood he himself was in at the moment!

And Radzyn, too: he had some of the divine’s conception of the ethical. Not the same at all really—yet parallel. Radzyn’s gravity or solemnity had something in it of black chasms in a fair earth. The nearest thing to it that Kenn had struck was a certain period of the Renaissance when thought had pushed itself by infinite refinements to a sort of face-to-face with death. Only in Radzyn’s case there was no refined sensuous artistry. The thing was sheer— the scientific visualization! Radzyn’s quietism of the East was flawed in this way.

And it wasn’t as if he had practised a fraud on Radzyn. On the contrary, he hadn’t conveyed anything like the sincerity of assurance he should have liked to have conveyed. It was the sincerity, the glimmer of ultimate integrity, and nothing else, that now induced his mood of fun. And he knew it; but knew also that if Radzyn saw his expression, with its broad grin, he might well get the shock of misgiving!

For the truth of life to Kenn was that at its core there was a wise pagan laughter. Behind importance and solemnity, it lay in wait. It was cunning and evasive; it was charming and amusing; it was hard as a tree knot; it was perhaps the old serpent myth that his folk had forgotten how to interpret. The serpent that stuck its tail in its mouth to suppress its laughter!

The folk—and goodness and kindness and loyalties. True, Herr Radzyn!

A girl, sauntering past, looked into his face, but did not speak. The words of sly invitation faded on her lips; the brightness that came to her eyes faded also, slowly, into a half-bitter envy or regret. When she had gone a little way, she turned and walked back, her steps quickening but then falling slack again, for he had passed from the streets.