Free Corridors of Power by C. P. Snow Page A

have you?’ Roger asked the question with a flick, his glance moving towards his wife. ‘I can tell you, if a few of us had his spirit and his idealism, then we should be doing a lot better than we are.’
    Caro had flushed right up to her hair-line. She was anxious for Roger, she knew he was being unwise: but she was proud of him, proud because he had put her first. She had not known what to expect, had tried to persuade herself that she hoped for his silence. But he had not been silent: and she was filled with joy. I saw Margaret flash her an exhilarated glance, then flash me a worried one.
    ‘Aren’t you forgetting judgement, Quaife?’ asked Lord Bridgewater.
    Roger swept on. ‘No, I’m not forgetting judgement. But we’re too inclined to talk about judgement when we mean the ability to agree with everyone. That’s death. Let’s have a look at what this man has really done. He’s stated a case – pretty roughly, that I’ll grant you: he hasn’t taken the meaning out of everything he said, which is another gift we tend to over-value. In one or two places he’s overstated his case. That I accept, and it’s a fault you’re always going to find in sincere and passionate men. But still, the major points in his book are substantially true. What is more, everyone in this room, and almost everyone competent to express an opinion, knows they are substantially true.’
    ‘I can’t agree,’ said Collingwood.
    ‘You know it. You may disagree with the attitudes, but you know the points are true. That’s why you’re all so angry. These things are true. The sin this man has committed is to say them. It’s quite all right for people like us to know these things. But it’s quite wrong for anyone to say them – outside our charmed circle. Aren’t we all coming to take that for granted more and more? Isn’t it becoming much more desirable to observe the etiquette rather than tell the truth? I don’t know whether it frightens you, but it certainly frightens me. Politics is too serious a business to be played like a private game at a private party. In the next ten years, it’s going to be more serious than anything we’ve ever imagined. That’s why we need every man who’s got the spine enough to say what he really thinks. That’s why we need this man you’re all so bitter about. That’s why–’ he finished, in a conversational tone, speaking to Collingwood – ‘if there is any question of his being pushed out, I shouldn’t be able to sit quietly by.’
    ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t,’ Collingwood replied, in his own awkward kind of conversational tone. He was quite composed. There was no sign of what effect Roger had made on him, or whether he had made any effect at all. ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t.’
     

 
     
7:   Another Home
     
    The next night, Monday, Margaret and I were due to dine at the Osbaldistons’. As our taxi drew up, we could not help reflecting that it was something of a change from Basset; for the Osbaldistons lived in a house, detached, but only just detached, on the west side of Clapham Common. It might have been one of the houses I had visited as a boy, feeling that I was going up in the world, in the provincial town where I was born, the houses of minor professional men, schoolmasters, accountants, solicitors’ clerks.
    We went up the path between two rows of privets; the front door had a panel of coloured glass, leaded, in an acanthus design, and the passage light shone pinkly through.
    Inside the house, I was thinking that there was no need for Douglas Osbaldiston to live like that. The decoration and furnishing had not been changed from the fashion of the early twenties: beige wallpaper with a satin stripe and a discreet floral dado: some indifferent romantic landscapes, water-colours, in wooden frames, gate-legged tables, a sideboard of fumed oak with green handles. At the top of the Civil Service, he could have done much better for himself. But, just as some men of