The Sleep of Reason by C. P. Snow Read Free Book Online

the night before, the easier for Arnold Shaw.
    How had they ever got into it? They didn’t usually have this kind of party, did they? I was speaking casually. Myra answered: no, there’d never been anything like it before. She added: “I suppose we all got carried away. You know how it is.”
    “Had you been drinking?”
    “A bit. I must say, it was a bit off.”
    That was mollifying. But she was preoccupied – as she had been when I talked to her – by the fact of the two couples in the same room, what in her language they called an orgy.
    “If David and I had gone off in my car that evening, and the other two in somebody else’s, then I don’t suppose we should have heard another word about it.”
    That was less mollifying. Across the table, nearer to Myra, one of the women members of the Court broke in. She had a beaky profile, fine blue eyes, and a high voice. She said, in a sharp, sisterly, kindly tone: “You didn’t think you were doing anything wrong?”
    “That depends on how you look at it, doesn’t it?”
    “But how do you look at it?”
    “Well,” said Myra, “I’m sorry other people got dragged in. That wasn’t so good.”
    The women member nodded. “But what about you?”
    “What about me?”
    “I mean, do you think you’ve done anything wrong?”
    Myra answered, more lucidly than usual: “I don’t think there’s anything wrong in making love, if you’re not hurting anybody else.” She went on: “I agree with Mrs What-do-you call her, wasn’t she an actress, that it doesn’t matter what people do so long as they don’t stop the traffic.”
    It was like her, in her bumbling fashion, to get the reference wrong. Some of the Court wondered, however, where she had picked it up. Probably from one of their student advisers, trying to rehearse them.
    But, bumbling or not, when Denis Geary asked her about the consequences of the punishment, she did her best. Denis was playing in with me: he was experienced, he knew the tone of the people round this table much better than I did: he didn’t sound indulgent or even compassionate: but what did the punishment mean? To herself, she said, nothing but a headache. She could live at home or get a job with one of her father’s friends (what she meant was that she would find someone, probably someone quite unlike her student fancies, to marry within a year or two). But to the others, who wanted careers, it meant they couldn’t have them. Unless some other university would take them in. But they were being expelled in squalid circumstances: would another institution look at them? David Llewellyn, for instance (he had been Myra’s partner: she didn’t pretend to love him, but she spoke up for him) – he wanted to be a scientist. What chance would he have now?
    “Has any member of the Court anything further to ask Miss Bolt?” Arnold Shaw looked implacably round the table. “Have you anything further you wish to say, Miss Bolt? Thank you.”
    With the next girl, I had one aim and only one, which was to get her out of the room with the least possible strain. She wasn’t in a fit state to be interviewed. That she showed, paradoxically helping me, by beginning to cry as soon as Arnold Shaw asked his first formal question. “Miss Darby, we understand–” She was a delicate-looking girl, actually a year older than Myra, but looking much younger. She appeared drab and mousey, but dress her up, make her happy, and she would have her own kind of charm. She came from a poor family in industrial Lancashire, a family which had been severe with her already. She was a bright student, expected to get a First, and that, together with her tears, made Shaw gentler with her. All she said was: “I was over-influenced. That’s as much as I can tell you.”
    It was not gallant. In secret (it sounded hard, but I had seen more of her than the others had) I thought that she was not only frightened, which was natural enough, but self-regarding and abnormally