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.But it did not need explanation.She was trying both to write and to keep it secret: was she thinking of Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson? Had she a sisterly feeling for women as indrawn as herself? Usually, when we had spoken of them, she had – it was cool, I thought, coming from her – shown no patience with them, and felt that if they had got down to earth they might have done better.Anyway, neither she nor I referred to her writing, until the night of the Barbican dinner.The Barbican dinner was one of the festivals I had to attend, because of my connexion with Paul Lufkin.The Barbican was an organization consisting largely of members of banks, investment trusts and insurance companies, which set out to make propaganda for English trade overseas.To this January dinner Lufkin was invited, as were all his senior executives and advisors, and those of his bigger competitors.I would have got out of it if I could; for the political divide was by this time such that even people like me, inured by habit to holding their tongues, found it a strain to spend a social evening with the other side.And this was the other side.Among my brother and his fellow scientists, in the Chelsea pubs, in the provincial back streets where my oldest friends lived – there we were all on one side.At Cambridge, or even among Betty Vane’s aristocratic relatives, there were plenty who, to the test questions of those years, the Spanish Civil War, Munich, Nazism, gave the same answer as I did myself.Here there was almost none.I could hear my old master in Chambers, Herbert Getliffe, the rising silk, wise with the times as usual: he was singing in unison, as it were, and so were the active, vigorous, virile men round him: yes, Churchill was a menace and a war-monger and must be kept out at all costs: yes, war was getting less likely every day: yes, everything had been handled as well as it possibly could be handled, everyone knew we were ready to play ball.I was frightened just as I had been on the night of Munich.I knew some of these men well: though they were less articulate than my friends, though they were trained to conform rather than not to conform, they were mostly able: they were tougher and more courageous than most of us: yet I believed that, as a class, they were self-deceived or worse.Of all those I knew, there was only one exception.It was Paul Lufkin himself.He had taken his time, had tried to stay laodicean, but at last he had come down coldly among the dissidents.No one could guess whether it was a business calculation or a human one or both.There he sat, neat-headed, up at the benefactors’ table, listening to the other bosses, impassively aware that they sneered about how he was trying to suck up to the Opposition, indifferent to their opinion or any other.But he was alone, up among the tycoons: so was I, three or four grades down.So I felt a gulp of pleasure when I heard Gilbert Cooke trumpeting brusquely, on the opposite side of the table not far from me, telling his neighbours to make the most of the drinks, since there would not be a Barbican dinner next year.‘Why not?’‘We shall be fighting,’ said Gilbert.‘Let’s hope it won’t come to that,’ said someone.‘Let’s hope it will,’ said Cooke, his face imperative and flushed.Men were demurring, when he brought his hand down on the table.‘If it doesn’t come to that,’ he said, ‘we’re sunk.’He gazed round with hot eyes: ‘Are you ready to see us being sunk?’He was the son of a regular soldier, he went about in society, he was less used to being over-awed than the people round him.Somehow they listened, though he badgered and hectored them, though he was younger than they were.He saw me approving of him, and gave a great impudent wink.My spirits rose, buoyed up by this carelessness, this comradeship.It was not his fault that recently I had seen little of him.He had often invited me and Sheila out, and it was only for her sake that I refused.Now he was signalling comradeship [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]