by C. P. Snow
‘What campaign?’
‘The one that Ann March and Charles are coming about.’
‘Oh that.’ He gave a gnome-like grin.
‘Why did you start on Philip March at all?’
‘Do you think we’re really interested in him?’ said Seymour with cheerful contempt. ‘He’s never been more than a city figurehead. No, the chaps we’re really interested in are Hawtin and his pals. I think we might be able to put them on the spot, don’t you?’
I asked him – what facts had he really got hold of? About Philip March? About Hawtin? What facts were there, beside those about the Getliffe dealings?
Seymour grinned again, but did not answer. Instead he said: ‘Should you say old March cut any ice among that gang?’ (‘That gang’ meant the people who had the real power, the rulers, the establishment: Seymour, like other communists I knew, had a habit of breaking into a curious kind of slang: from him, in his cultivated tone, it sounded odd.)
‘That’s the sort of thing you know,’ I said.
‘Hawtin’s quite a different cup of tea,’ said Seymour. ‘Now he does cut some ice, and if we get his blood the rest of the gang will feel it, won’t they now?’
I asked again, what facts had he got about Hawtin? And when was the next instalment due to appear? To the second question, he gave a straight answer. Not for some weeks. They were not ready yet. If they had to delay for months rather than weeks, he might repeat what he had already printed – ‘just to remind some of our friends that we’re still thinking about them.’
It was the same answer as he had given to Ann: so there was time, I thought. Meanwhile, as we waited for Ann and Charles, Seymour went on talking, dismissing the ‘Hawtin racket’, elated and obsessed by ‘stories’ which, to him, mattered out of comparison more.
Below us, the haze of London was changing from blue to grey as night fell, and through the haze the lights were starting out. From second to second a new light quivered through, now in the Pimlico streets beneath us, now on the skyline. Soon there was a galaxy of lights. It made me think of the press of human lives, their struggles and their peace.
The bell of Seymour’s flat rang, and on his way to open the door he switched on his own lights. Outside in the passage were standing Ann and Charles. Seymour grinned up at Charles.
‘Late bill,’ he said. It was a recognition-symbol, a token of their days at school: I had heard Seymour use it before as a kind of upper-class password.
As we sat down, all of us except Seymour were unrelaxed: but he, just as confidently as he had done with me, started talking: his trip, the ‘low-down’ which he had collected, he went on just as with me. It took Ann an effort to say: ‘Look, Humphrey, do you mind if we get this over!’
Her voice was tight. I could feel how much she respected him. On his side, he was at once polite and considerate. ‘Of course, we’d better if you want to,’ he said with a kind, friendly, praising smile.
‘I think I’ve got to bring up this Philip March story,’ she said.
‘Right,’ said Seymour.
Though she looked strained, she began her appeal with extreme lucidity. It was agreed by everyone, wasn’t it, she said, that Philip March had had nothing whatever to do with any recent dealings? Seymour nodded his head. Philip March was absolutely in the clear, she said; last year’s rumours had nothing to do with him? Seymour nodded. If she herself hadn’t brought in the name of Herbert Getliffe, and an almost forgotten piece of gossip, no one would have remotely considered any smear against Philip March?
‘Absolutely true,’ said Seymour. ‘I was just telling Lewis, he never seriously counted, with all due respect to your family, Charles.’
He was sitting back with one leg crossed over the other. For all his cockiness and the tincture of the grotesque, he was a man in whom one could feel authority. It was an authority that did not come just from his commitment, from his position in the party: it was the authority of his nature. Even Charles, leaning forward on the sofa, watching him with hard eyes, paid attention to it. Certainly Ann, more given than Charles to admit authority in others, recognized it. She sat with her backbone straight as a guardsman’s by Charles’ side, and said: ‘Well then, I shouldn’t ask for anything impossible. I shouldn’t ask to call off anything that was important. But it isn’t important, is it? I didn’t even know that anyone would think it worth while to revive the Getliffe business. I should have thought it was too long ago to count. I should have thought whatever Philip March did or didn’t do at that time, it was too long ago to count. And anyway it’s more obscure than the Getliffe business, we couldn’t get it cut and dried. I think there would be pretty strong arguments for leaving him alone, in any case. But of course we want him left alone because it’s bound to affect my husband’s family. It’s not often that one can ask for special treatment, is it? I think I can, this time.’
Seymour smiled at her, and said: ‘There isn’t any such thing as private news, is there?’
She repeated ‘I think I can, this time’, because his tone was so light that it did not sink in. It took her seconds to realize that he had turned her down flat.
Charles had realized at once. In a harsh and angry voice he said: ‘You admit that you’ve got no foundation at all for any scandal last year – as far as my uncle is concerned. You admit the same about Herbert Getliffe, don’t you? Is there any foundation for the scandal at all, even about this man Hawtin? Or are you just wishing that it happened?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Seymour.
‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’
‘Precisely what I say.’
Bitterly Charles went on with his questions. About 1935 there was nothing proved or provable at all: it seemed most likely that there was nothing in the rumour. But, as Seymour said jauntily, the 1929 dealings were on the record – the transactions of Getliffe’s brothers-in-law and, as he hoped to demonstrate, those of Philip March.
‘You’re proposing to use those, in fact,’ said Charles, ‘to give a bit of credibility to a sheer lie?’
‘That’s putting it rather more strongly than I should myself. If there was jiggery-pokery some years ago, there’s no reason why there shouldn’t have been some last year.’
‘But you’re really pretty certain that there wasn’t?’
Seymour shrugged his shoulders.
‘I must say,’ said Charles, ‘it’s more dishonest even than I thought.’
‘I shan’t have time for your moral sensitivity,’ said Seymour, his voice suddenly as passionate as Charles’, ‘until we’ve beaten the fascists and got a decent world.’
In the angry silence I put in: ‘If you’re seriously proposing to print rumours without even a scrap of evidence, the paper isn’t going to last very long, is it?’
‘Why in God’s name not?’
‘What’s going to stop a crop of libel actions?’
‘The trouble with you lawyers,’ said Seymour, jaunty once more, ‘is that you never know when a fact is a fact, and you never see an inch beyond your noses. I am prepared to bet any of you, or all three if you like, an even hundred pounds that no one, no one, brings an action against us over this business. Trust old Father Mouse and bob’s your uncle.’
He went on, enjoying himself: ‘While I’m about it, I’m prepared to bet you that the paper never runs into a libel action. You trust old Father Mouse. I’m nothing like as wild and woolly as I seem. No, the only thing that could ever finish the paper is that we might come up against the Official Secrets Act. That’s the menace, and if we had bad luck that would be the end. I don’t suppose I’m telling any of you anything you don’t know. Anyway, Ann’s seen how we collect some of our stuff and she must have enough documents in her own desk to finish the poor old paper off in a couple of hours.’
It sounded like an indiscretion, like a piece of his cocksureness. Listening, I believed it was the opposite. He had done it deliberately. He was not the man to underestimate just how competent and ruthless other
people could be. He took it for granted that Ann and Charles knew that she had it in her power to kill the paper; he took it for granted too, that, after his refusal, having no other conceivable way to protect Charles’ family, they would consider it.
He knew her well. It would have been stupid to hide anything, it was good tactics to bring the temptation into the open, brandish it in front of her and defy her with it. He knew, of course, that she was as much committed to the party as he was himself. Outside her marriage, it was her one devotion. It was so much a devotion – only a religious person could know something similar in kind, perhaps – that she had not been shocked when Seymour admitted that he was fabricating a set of scandals. To Charles, it was a moral outrage. To her, so upright in her own dealings, it was not. Any more, oddly enough, than it was to Seymour himself. Both she and Seymour were believers by nature. At times it gave them a purity and innocence that men like Charles never knew: at times it gave Seymour, and perhaps even Ann, a capacity to do things from which Charles, answering to his own conscience, would have been repelled.
As Seymour told Ann that she could ruin the paper next day, I watched her glance at Charles. Their faces were set, but their eyes met with recognition, with understanding.
They left soon after. I stayed behind, so that they could talk alone the minute they got outside.
Seymour did not say another word about them, or the paper. He had the knack of turning off his attention with a click, as though he had pressed a switch. He did not make a comment. Instead, cheerful and unflagging, he insisted on driving me to White’s for a night-cap. There, just for once, his cocksureness let him down. A member whom I faintly knew brought in a guest of distinguished appearance. I asked Seymour who he was.
‘Oh, that’s Lord Kilmainham,’ he said, with supreme confidence.
It was not. Enquiring a little later in the lavatory, I found that the guest was an income-tax accountant.
35: The Future of Two Old Men
Since the first instalment in the Note, Charles and Mr March had not met nor spoken to each other. Charles had, however, telephoned to Katherine after the visit to Seymour. He had told her, so I gathered, that Ann had done her best to call the paper off. Whether either Katherine or Mr March believed this, I had no means of judging. But they knew I had been present. Within a few days I received a letter from Mr March, telling me that he needed my ‘friendly assistance’: would I lunch with him at his club, so that we could go together to Sir Philip’s office afterwards.
The club servants were surprised to see Mr March there in the month of August, having got used to the clockwork regularity of his life; he had not left Haslingfield during his summer stay for twenty years. Just as, though he went to the club for tea each day he was in London, he had not lunched there since Charles was a child. He did not know where or how to write his order, and had to be helped by the servants. They teased him for it: he, usually so uncondescending, was gruff with them.
He said little at the meal. We had a table to ourselves, but those round us were soon filled. I saw one or two faces I knew, all of civil servants from the departments close by. I felt that Mr March, unable to talk of the bitter anxiety in his mind, was also depressed because he recognized so few. There were only two men he nodded to, and they were very old.
In Pall Mall, on our way to Sir Philip’s ministry, he tried to rouse himself from his gloom. We turned into St James’s Park towards Whitehall, and Mr March looked over the trees at the dome of the India Office, the roofs and towers, all soft and opal grey in the moist sunlight.
‘I must say,’ he remarked, ‘that it looks comparatively presentable. But I have never been able to understand the fascination which makes my brother Philip and others wish to spend their entire lives in this neighbourhood. I once said as much to Hannah, and she replied that it was sour grapes on my part. No doubt I was envious on account of my failure to cut any kind of figure in the world. Nevertheless, Lewis, if I hadn’t been a failure, and had been given my choice of where to have a reasonable success, I should not have chosen this particular neighbourhood.’
His face darkened in a scowl of misery and anger. ‘But my brother Philip did. I cannot endure the thought that, because of these happenings, he may find it harder to continue here.’
In the ministry we were led down the corridors to the office of Sir Philip’s secretary, who was a youngish man called Williams, smooth-faced, spectacled, dressed for his job in black coat and striped trousers, and full of self-importance in it. ‘I will go and find out when the Parliamentary Secretary will be free,’ he said, enjoying the chance to bring out his master’s appellation. He came back promptly and announced: ‘The Parliamentary Secretary will be glad to see you at once.’
We went through the inside door, and Sir Philip came across his room to meet us. He shook hands with Mr March, then said ‘How do you do?’ to me with his stiff, furrowed smile. As he sat down at his desk by the window which overlooked the park, I saw that his skin had taken on a yellowness, a matt texture, such as one sometimes sees in ageing men. He was seventy-three, only three years older than Mr March, but in the bright summer light the difference looked much greater.
‘I expect you’re dying of drought as usual at Haslingfield,’ Sir Philip began their ritual of brotherly baiting. ‘The country is under water everywhere else.’
‘I regard the rainfall as having been reasonable for once,’ said Mr March. ‘And I am pleased to report that I have sufficient water for my requirements.’
These exchanges went on for a few moments. They had made them for so many years, and Sir Philip at least could not let go of them now: Mr March’s replies were forced and mechanical. Sir Philip was, as the afternoon began, by far the less perturbed of the two. Soon he said: ‘I suppose we must get down to business. I should like to say, Eliot, that I am obliged to you for giving me your time. I should be glad to regard it as a professional service, of course, but my brother informs me that you are certain to prefer it otherwise. I appreciate your feelings and, as I say, I am obliged to you. I think you know some of the facts of this affair. In May there was some gossip about myself and some of my colleagues. We were alleged to have used our official knowledge during the past twelve months to buy holdings in companies where government contracts were soon going to be laid. This gossip also included some names outside the government, one of them being that fellow Getliffe. It has now been published, or at least a first instalment has. I believe you’ve seen it?’
I nodded.
‘I can answer for myself and my colleagues,’ Sir Philip went on. ‘So far as we are concerned, there’s not a word of truth in it. When I came back into the Government last year, I decided to spend the rest of my life being as useful to the country as I could, if they wanted me. It was a sacrifice, but I believe that some of us have got to accept responsibility. These aren’t easy years to hold responsibility: I needn’t tell you that.’
Even Sir Philip, I was thinking, could not avoid the expressions of convention, talked about ‘sacrifice’, perhaps used the word to himself – even Sir Philip, who was not a humbug but a hard and realistic man, who loved office and power and knew that he loved it.
‘I was prepared to make the sacrifice,’ Sir Philip went on. ‘I had to resign my directorships when I became a minister, naturally. I also decided to finish with all speculation. I’ve already told Leonard this.’ He glanced at Mr March.
‘I acknowledged your assurance,’ said Mr March, ‘on hearing it at your bedside during your period of incapacity owing to gout.’
‘I finished with it,’ said Sir Philip. ‘I am not a rich man, of course, but I can get along. I have not taken part in any single transaction since I entered the government last November. I cannot make such a categorical statement for my colleagues whose names have been bandied about, but I’m completely satisfied that they are clear.’
‘You mentioned people outside the government,’ I broke in. ‘I’m also satisfied in the same way about Getliffe.
’
‘You mean he’s bought nothing in the last twelve months?’
‘Nothing that could be thought suspicious.’
‘What evidence are you going on?’
‘Nothing as definite as yours,’ I said. ‘But I’ve talked to him on this actual point, and I know him well.’
‘I reported Lewis Eliot’s observations on this matter,’ said Mr March.
Sir Philip’s eyes were bright and alert. ‘You’re convinced about this fellow Getliffe?’
‘Quite convinced,’ I said.
‘I accept that,’ said Sir Philip. ‘And it makes me certain that the whole campaign is a put-up job and there’s no backing to it at all.’
Mr March, who had been listening with painful attention, showed no relief as he heard these words. He looked at his brother, with an expression stupefied, harassed, distressed.
‘That being so,’ I said, ‘your solicitors are telling you to go ahead with a libel action, aren’t they?’
‘It’s not quite so easy,’ Sir Philip replied without hesitation, in a tone as authoritative as before. I admired his hard competence. Professionally, I thought, he would have been an ideal client. ‘They’ve tied up this affair with certain other transactions. The other transactions are supposed to have happened when I was in the government in 1929. You will notice that, in the case of Getliffe, they have taken care to tie these two allegations together. It is clever of them. I detest their politics, I’ve no use for their general attitude, and if I can put them in their place, I shall – but we mustn’t imagine that we are dealing with fools.’
‘I have never thought so,’ said Mr March.
‘If they go ahead with these allegations about last year, I should win a libel action, shouldn’t I?’ Sir Philip asked me.
‘Without the slightest doubt,’ I said.
‘I should also do myself more harm than good,’ he went on.
I was thinking how precisely Seymour had calculated the risk.