by C. P. Snow
Morcom had criticised, sensibly and much as Olive did later, George’s devotion to our group. He had said, in short, that it was not close enough to the earth to satisfy a man of power for long. On paper George answered the criticisms, so elaborately that he showed his own misgivings: and finished:
And what else lies in my powers? The gift of creation, worse luck, was not bestowed on me: except, I dare sometimes think, in the chance to help my protégés, beside whom all the artistic masterpieces of the world seem like bloodless artifices of men who have never discovered what it is to live. I must concentrate on the little world: I shall not get esteem, except the esteem which I value more than any public praise; I shall get no fame, except some gratitude which will soon be forgotten; I shall get no power at all. But I shall do what with all your gifts, Morcom, you may never do: I shall enjoy every moment of every day, and I shall gain my own soul.
In the first pages he showed me, Jack played very little part; there was a word in August:
I am still enjoying the fruitful association with Jack Cotery as much as ever. I have never been so lucky in my friends as I am now.
Then the idea of helping Jack came into the forefront of the diary, and continued there for weeks. There were descriptions of days which I remembered from another side: our first telling him the news, his attack on the committee (written with curious modesty), the visit to Nottingham, his resolve to find money for Jack.
ISSUES OF JACK Jack himself is easily disposed of. He is obviously the most gifted person I have a chance of helping. It is a risk, he may fall by the wayside, but it is less risky than with any other of the unfortunates. Morcom mustn’t think he is the only person to spot talent. We mustn’t forget that I first discovered that in spite of his humorous, lively warmth, there is a keen and accomplished edge to Jack’s mind.
Jack’s flattery, however, he mentioned, to my surprise:
We must perhaps remember that Jack is not completely impartial just now, though I should repudiate the suggestion if it were made…
And the opposition by his mother, he described a little oddly:
QUIET EVENINGS AT HOME WITH INTERMISSIONS There had been little visible sign of misunderstanding or incompatibility, but one or two needless scenes.
But there was one thing which astonished me, more than it should have done, since, when I myself rejected George’s advice about becoming a solicitor, there must have been similar entries about me. I knew that he had been angry at Jack preferring to experiment in business instead of accepting George’s scheme of the law. Until I read George’s entries, though, I could not have realised how he felt deserted, how deeply he had taken it to heart.
COTERY REVEALS FEET OF CLAY Cotery wantonly destroyed all my schemes for him…after destroying his feeble case for this fatuous project, I went away to consider closely the reasons for this outburst. It is fairly clear that he is not such a strong character as I tried to imagine. He may have been subject to underhand influences. I must not blind myself to that; and no doubt he is reacting to his complete acceptance of all I stand for. But, though understandable, such liability to influence and reaction are the signs of a weak character; and it is abundantly certain that I shall have to revise parts of my opinion of him. He will never seem the same again…
Then, a week later, there came the last entry he showed me that night:
I REACH EQUILIBRIUM ON THE COTERY BUSINESS
FRIDAY, SEP. 28
KERNEL OF COTERY’s BEHAVIOUR I have settled the difficulty about Cotery at last. I do not withdraw a word of my criticism, either of the wisdom of his course or the causes behind it. In a long and, on whole, profitable conversation with Morcom, I forced him to admit that I had been unfairly treated. Morcom is, no doubt, regretful of using his influence without either thought or knowledge. Apart from that, Jack seems, in short, to be handicapping himself at the outset because of an unworthy reaction against me. But that doesn’t dispose of my share in his adventure.
PROPER ATTITUDE UNAFFECTED I have decided that I owe it to myself to maintain my offer…he must be helped, as though he were acting more sanely…I talk about freedom, about helping people to become themselves; I must show the scoffers that I mean what I say, I must show that I want life that functions on its own and not in my hothouse. I have got to learn to help people on their terms. I wish I could come to it more easily.
THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM As for the money, I shall cease worrying and hope that finance will arrange itself in the long run. I shall carry through this offer to Jack Cotery; then I shall wait and see, and, somehow, pay.
Part Two
The Firm of Eden & Martineau
9: The Echo of a Quarrel
THE winter was eventful for several of us. Olive, as she had foreshadowed that Saturday night at the farm, told Morcom that she could not marry him; she began to spend most of her time at home, looking after her father. Morcom tried to hide his unhappiness; often, he was so lonely that he fetched me out of my room and we walked for hours on a winter night; but he never talked of his own state. He also tried to conceal something else which tormented him: his jealousy for Jack Cotery. It was the true jealousy of his kind of love; it was irrational, he felt degraded by it, yet it was sharp and unarguable as a disease. Walking through the streets on those bitter nights, he could not keep from fearing that Jack might that very moment be at the Calverts’ house.
Although Morcom was older than I was, too much so for us to have been intimate friends, I understood something of what he was going through, for it was beginning to happen to me. In time, I lost touch with him, and never knew what happened to him in later life. Yet, though I was closer to the others that year, he taught me more about myself.
Meanwhile, Jack himself had plunged into his business. One bright idea had come off: another, a gamble that people would soon be buying a cheap type of valve set, engrossed him all the winter and by spring still seemed to be about an even chance.
But George remained cheerful and content, in the middle of his friends’ concerns. He was sometimes harassed by Jack’s business, but no one found it easier to put such doubts aside; the group occupied him more and more; he spent extra hours, outside the School, coaching me for my first examination; he was increasingly busy at Eden & Martineau’s.
The rest of us had never envied him so much. He was sure of his roots, and wanted no others, at this time when we were all in flux. It was not until the spring that we realised he too could be threatened by a change.
On the Friday night after Easter, I was late in arriving at Martineau’s. Looking at the window as I crossed the road, I was startled by a voice from within. I went in; suddenly the voice stopped, as my feet sounded in the hall. Martineau and George were alone in the drawing-room; George, whose voice I had heard, was deeply flushed.
Martineau welcomed me, smiling.
‘I’m glad you’ve come, Lewis,’ he said, after a moment in which we exchanged a little news. George stayed silent.
‘Everyone’s deserting me,’ Martineau smiled. ‘Everyone’s giving me up.’
‘That’s not fair, Mr Martineau,’ George said, with a staccato laugh.
Martineau walked a few steps backwards and forwards behind the sofa, a curious, restless mannerism of his. ‘Oh yes, you are.’ Martineau’s face had a look at once mischievous and gentle. ‘Oh yes, you are, George. You’re all deciding I’m a useless old man with bees in his bonnet who’s only a nuisance to his friends.’
‘That simply is not true,’ George burst out.
‘Some of my friends haven’t joined us on Friday for a long time, you know.’
‘That’s nothing to do with it,’ said George. ‘I thought I’d made that clear.’
‘Still,’ Martineau added inconsequently, ‘my brother said he might drop in tonight. And I’m hoping the others won’t give us the “go-by” for ever.’ He always produced his slang with great gu
sto; it happened often to be slightly out-moded.
The Canon did not come, but Eden did. He stayed fairly late. George and I left not long afterwards. In the hall George said: ‘That was sheer waste of time.’
As we went down the path, I looked back and saw the chink of light through the curtains, darkened for an instant by Martineau crossing the room. I burst out: ‘What was happening with Martineau before anyone came in? What’s the matter?’
George stared ahead.
‘Nothing particular,’ he said.
‘You’re sure? Come on–’
‘We were talking over a professional problem,’ said George. ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything else.’
Outside the park, under a lamp which gilded the chestnut trees, I saw George’s chin thrust out: he was swinging his stick as he walked. A warm wind, smelling of rain and the spring earth, blew in our faces. I was angry, young enough to be ashamed of the snub, still on edge with curiosity.
We walked on silently down to the road where we usually parted. He stopped at the corner, and I could see, just as I was going to say an ill-tempered ‘Goodnight,’ that his face was anxious and excited. ‘Can’t you come to my place?’ he said abruptly ‘I know it’s a bit late.’
Warmed by the awkward invitation, I crossed the street with him. George broke into a gust of laughter, good-humoured and exuberant. ‘Late be damned!’ he cried. ‘I’ve got a case that’s going to keep me busy, and I want you to help. It’ll be a good deal later before you get home tonight.’
When we arrived in his room, the fire contained only a few dull red embers. George, who was now in the highest of spirits after his truculence at Martineau’s, hummed to himself, as, clumsily, breathing hard, he held a newspaper across the fireplace; then, as the flames began to roar, he turned his head: ‘There’s something I’ve got to impress on you before we begin.’
He was kneeling, he had flung off his overcoat, one or two fair hairs caught the light on the shoulders of his blue jacket; his tone, as whenever he had to go through a formal act, was a trifle sententious and constrained (though he often liked performing one).
‘What are you going to tell me?’ I said, settling myself in the armchair at the other side of the fire. There was a smell of charring; George’s face was tinged with heat as he crumpled the paper in the grate.
‘That I’m relying on you to keep this strictly confidential,’ he said, putting on a kettle. ‘I’m laying you under that definite obligation. It’s a friendly contract and it’s got to be kept. Because I’m being irregular in telling you this at all.’
I nodded. This was not the first of the firm’s cases I had heard discussed, for George was not always rigid on professional etiquette; and indeed his demand for secrecy tonight served as much to show me the magnitude of the case as to make sure that I should not speak. It was their biggest job for some time, apart from the routine of conveyancy and so on in a provincial town. A trade union, through one of its members, was prosecuting an employer under the Truck Act.
Eden had apparently realised that the case would call out all George’s fervour. It was its meaning as well as its intricacy that gave George this rush of enthusiasm. It set his eyes alight and sent him rocking with laughter at the slightest joke.
As he developed the case itself, he was more at home even than among his friends at the Farm. There, an unexplained jarring note could suddenly stab through his amiability; or else he would be hurt and defensive, often by a remark which was not intended to bear the meaning he wove into it. But here for hours, he was completely master of his surroundings, uncriticised and at ease; his exposition was a model, clear and taut, embracing all the facts and shirking none of the problems.
George himself, of course, was led by inclination to mix with human beings and find his chief interest there. There is a superstition that men like most the things they do supremely well; in George’s case and many others, it is quite untrue. George never set much value on these problems of law, which he handled so easily. But, whatever he chose for himself, there was no doubt that, of all the people I knew in my youth, he was the best at this kind of intellectual game; he had the memory, the ingenuity, the stamina and the orderliness which made watching him arrange a case something near an aesthetic pleasure.
As he finished, he smacked his lips and chuckled. He said: ‘Well, that reduces it to three heads. Now let’s have some tea and get to work.’
We sat down at the table as George wrote down the problems to which he had to find an answer; his saucer described the first sodden circle on a sheet of foolscap. I fetched down some books from his shelves and looked up references; but I could not help much – he had really insisted on my coming in order to share the excitement, and perhaps to applaud. On the other side of the table George wrote with scarcely a pause.
‘God love us,’ George burst out. ‘If only’ – he broke into an argument about technical evidence – ‘we should get a perfect case.’
‘It’ll take weeks,’ I said. ‘Still–’ I smiled. I was beginning to feel tired, and George’s eyes were rimmed with red.
‘If it’s going to take weeks,’ said George, ‘the more we do tonight the better. We’ve got to get it perfect. We can’t give Eden a chance to make a mess of it. I refuse to think,’ he cried, ‘that we shan’t win.’
In the excitement of the night, I forgot the beginning of the evening and the signs of a quarrel with Martineau. But, as George gathered up his papers after the night’s work, he said: ‘I can’t afford to lose this. I can’t afford to lose it personally – in the circumstances,’ and then hurried to make the words seem innocuous.
10: Roofs Seen from an Office Window
MOST nights in the next week I walked round to George’s after my own work was done. Often it was so late (for my examination was very near, and I was reading for long hours) that George’s was the only lighted window in the street. His voice sounded very loud when he stood in the little hall and greeted me.
‘Isn’t it splendid? I’ve got another argument complete. You’d better read it.’
His anxiety, however, was growing. He did not explain it; I knew that it must be caused by some trouble within the firm. Once, when Martineau was mentioned, he said abruptly: ‘I don’t know what’s come over him. He used to have a sense of proportion.’ It was a contrast to his old extravagant eulogies of Martineau, but he soon protested: ‘Whatever you say, the man’s the only spiritual influence in the whole soulless place.’
Then tired over the case, vexed by this secret worry, he was repeatedly badgered by the crisis in Jack’s business. For a time Jack had taken Morcom’s advice, and managed to put off an urgent creditor. He did not confide the extent of the danger to George until a promise fell through and he was being threatened. George was hot with anger at being told so late.
‘Why am I the last person who hears? I should have assumed I ought to be the first.’
‘I didn’t want to worry you.’
‘I suppose you don’t think it’s worrying me to tell me now in the middle of as many difficulties as anyone ever had?’
‘I couldn’t keep it back any longer,’ said Jack.
‘If you’d come before, I should have stopped you getting into this absurd position.’
‘I’m there now, said Jack. ‘It’s not much comfort holding inquests.’
Several nights in the middle of the case, George switched off to study the figures of the business. They were not over-complicated, but it was a distraction he wanted to be spared: particularly as it soon became clear that Jack was expecting money to ‘set it straight’. George discovered that Morcom had heard of this misfortune a week before; he exploded into an outburst that lasted a whole night. ‘Do you think I’m the sort of man you can ignore till you can’t find anyone else? Why don’t you let other people finish up the business? There’s no need to co
me to me at all.’ He was half-mollified, however, to be told that Morcom’s advice had only delayed the crisis, and that he had volunteered no further help.
Affronted as he was, George did not attempt to throw off the responsibility. To me in private, he said with a trace of irritated triumph: ‘If I’d asserted myself in the first place, he’d have been settling down to the law by now.’ But he took it for granted that he was bound to set Jack going again. He went through the figures.
‘You guaranteed this man–?’
‘Yes.’
‘What backing did you have?’
‘It hasn’t come off.’
In the end George worked out that a minimum of fifty pounds had to be provided within a month. ‘That will avoid the worst. We want three times as much to consolidate the thing. I don’t know how we shall even manage the fifty,’ George said. As we knew, he was short of money himself; Mrs Passant was making more demands, his sister was going to a different school; he still lived frugally, and then frittered pounds away on a night’s jaunt.