George Passant

by C. P. Snow

  From the point of view of the case, they were exaggerating the day’s significance. People there felt that George’s cross-examination ‘had settled the business. He can’t get away with that’; just as, in the street, I had overheard two men reading the evening paper and giving the same opinion in almost the same words. Yet, for all the talk of his ‘hypocrisy’, ‘the good time he had managed for himself’, there were some ready to defend him in this room. ‘I can believe it of the other two easier than I can of him,’ one of them said. ‘I shouldn’t have thought swindling was in his line.’ But no one believed that he had ever devoted himself to help his friends.

  I returned to dinner at Eden’s. Getliffe told Eden that he thought it was ‘all right’. He added: ‘I’d be certain if it weren’t for this prejudice they’ve raised. I must try to smooth that down.’ Yet he was not so cheerfully professional as he sounded; something still weighed on him. As soon as he had finished eating, he said: ‘I had better retire now. I must get down to it. I’ve got to pull something out of the bag tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ve heard people wondering what you will say,’ said Eden.

  ‘One must take a line,’ said Getliffe. Soon afterwards, without drinking any wine, he left us. Eden looked at me and said: ‘It’s no use worrying yourself now. You can’t do any more, you know.’

  I went to my room, and lay down on the sofa in front of the fire. After a time, footsteps sounded on the stairs, then a knock at the door. The maid came in, and after her Olive. At once I felt sure of what she was going to say. She stood between me and the fire.

  ‘You’ve worn yourself out,’ she said. Then she burst out: ‘But you’ve finished now, it doesn’t matter if I talk to you?’

  She threw cushions from the chair on to the hearthrug, and sat there.

  ‘There’s something – I shall feel better if I tell you. No one else must know. But I’ve got to tell you, I don’t know why. It can’t affect things now.’

  ‘It couldn’t at any time,’ I replied.

  She laughed, not loudly but with the utter abandonment that overtook her at times; the impassiveness of her face was broken, her eyes shone, her arms rested on the sofa head.

  ‘Well, I may as well say it,’ she went on in a quiet voice. ‘This business isn’t all a mistake. We’re not as – spotless as we made out.’

  ‘Will you tell me what happened?’

  Without answering, she asked abruptly: ‘What are our chances?’

  ‘Getliffe still thinks they’re pretty good.’

  ‘It oughtn’t to make much difference,’ she said. ‘I keep telling myself it doesn’t matter.’ She gave a sudden sarcastic laugh, and said: ‘It does. More than you’d think. When I heard you say there was still a chance I was more shaken – than if I suddenly knew I’d never done it at all.’

  She was silent for a moment. Then she said: ‘I’m going to tell you some more. I can’t help it.’ She broke into a confession of what had happened between the three of them. She was forced on, degraded and yet relieved, just as Jack had been that night in the park years ago. Often she evaded my questions, and more than once she concealed a fact that she clearly knew. There were still places where I was left baffled, but, from what she said and what I already knew, their story seemed to have gone on these lines:

  They actually did begin to raise money for the agency in complete innocence. George believed Martineau’s account, and Olive took George’s opinion; so probably did Jack, for a time. Jack had suggested the idea of taking over the agency – for him it was a commonplace ‘flutter’, and it was easy to understand George catching at the new interest. He was genuinely in need of money, compelled to see that he had no future in the firm, and, though he would not yet admit it to himself, tired of the group in its original form.

  Olive, less clear-sighted on herself than on any other person, gave confused reasons for joining in. I thought that, even so early, she had wanted to control Jack – and that also, as she half-saw, she had been dissatisfied with herself for going back to her father and reverting to the childish, dependent state. This business seemed a ‘hand-hold on real things’.

  They borrowed their first amount, still believing in their own statements. George and Jack seemed to have realised the true position at about the same time. Neither said anything to the other. All through the transactions, the pretence of ignorance was kept up. Jack only made one hint to Olive (this happened, of course, some time before they were lovers): ‘You might get some interesting information if you called on Exell. But it’s always safer to wait until we’ve got the money in.’

  As soon as he knew the truth, George passed through a time of misery and indecision. He thought for weeks that he alone had discovered it. He still wanted to consider himself responsible for the other two. At times he came near to stopping the entire business. He went so far as to call a meeting of the others and two of their creditors: and then made an excuse to cancel it. No doubt he was justifying himself: ‘after all, we still have Martineau’s authority’ …‘anyway, we have raised most of the money now. The harm’s done, whatever we do.’ He could also tell himself that, despite the false statement, they would make a success of it and bring money to their creditors. Most of all, perhaps, he was afraid of disclosing his knowledge to the others: because he dreaded that Jack’s influence would be too strong – and that Jack would force him through it with both of them knowing everything.

  George had few illusions about Jack. He remembered Jack’s early attempt at something like fraud over the wireless company. But he could not escape from the power which Jack had obtained over him, as their relation slowly developed through the years.

  As George went through this period, Jack looked on with a mixture of contempt, anxiety, and even amusement. Himself, he was enjoying the excitement of raising the money and ‘putting it across’. He found the same kind of exhilaration that a business deal had always given him – but now far more intense. Often he seemed little more affected than when he first invoked George’s help. He told Attock the false story with the same single-mindedness, the same sense both of anxiety and of life beating faster, that he had once experienced when going round, Roy’s present in his pocket, to call at George’s house.

  ‘He enjoyed it. It was part of the game,’ said Olive. She did not talk, however, of the pleasure and authority which Jack now felt completely in George’s presence. At last he had become the real leader. Though George still talked as though they all accepted his control, each of them in secret knew what the position was.

  Olive said that, about this time, she hated Jack and found herself on George’s side. She wanted to break up the whole business. She told Arthur Morcom something of it; she wondered how she could withdraw without throwing suspicion on the others. ‘Arthur tried everything he knew to get me out of it. But I couldn’t trust him then. If I had been on my own, I should have had more chance of escaping.’

  At that time she was not yet living with Arthur, and it was a few months before Jack seduced her. Throughout the confession, her tendency was to see her immersion in the business as a result of her relations with these two. I thought she always undervalued how much she needed to influence and manage and control. As she watched Jack at the drunken party after the police court, she had seen herself more clearly and tonight, with a flash of penetration, she said: ‘You used to tell me that I insisted too much on how I liked being someone else’s slave, didn’t you? I used to say how I wanted someone to make me feel small and dependent. Yet that’s always been true. At least it’s seemed true. But as soon as I looked at what I’d done, I had to see myself trying to get the exact opposite. I still wanted him to order me about. But in all the big things I was trying to make sure that I should have him in my hands.’

  For all her passions of subjection, she actually – in another aspect of her nature – was a strong and masterful person. Perhaps stronger than e
ither George or Jack. Those passions were so important to her that they often obscured her insight. She did not realise how violently she wanted her own kind of power.

  Neither she nor George could face easily the actual thought of fraud. All three were often seized by anxiety and almost physical fear – from their first realisation of Martineau’s lie down to tonight. But there was something different in Olive and George; they were sometimes conscience-stricken in a way which Jack did not know. They could not excuse themselves for these dishonesties over money. They felt cheapened in their own eyes. They did not even possess a ‘rational’ excuse to themselves. It was different from their sexual lives; for there, when they acted in an ‘irregular’ fashion, they had at least a complete rationale to console them. Many of the people whom they had known for long talked and acted against the sexual conventions. On the surface, George, Olive and Morcom would, each of them, recognise them only ‘out of convenience’. On the levels of reason and conscience, they were completely at ease about the way they had managed their sexual lives; one had to penetrate beyond reason and conscience, before one realised how misleading George’s ‘justifications’ were.

  Over their affairs with money, however, they possessed nothing like these justifications. Even superficially, they had not been accustomed to reason away the conventions. In particular, Olive had been brought up to a strict moral code in money matters – in a circle where openly confessing one’s income was improper and brought a hush into the room. As I told Eden and Getliffe, George, though himself prodigal, had always ‘recognised obligations over money’, and felt a genuine and simple contempt for dishonesty. I remembered in the past hearing him say, after looking through one of Eden’s cases: ‘Bellwethers on the make again! And I’m supposed to see they do it safely.’ Once or twice, years ago, he was shocked and angry when the waitress came up after tea in a café and asked: ‘How many cakes?’ – and Jack looked at her and deliberately undercounted.

  And so, as they went on borrowing money on Martineau’s statement, there were times when they winced at their own thoughts.

  However, the agency was bought and Jack worked hard to make it a success. It was the best continuous work of his life, and Olive said: ‘It shows what he could have done if he had had the chance. Or a scrap of luck.’ In a small way, it was a remarkable achievement, only possible to a man of unusual personal gifts. He was glad to be doing ‘something solid at last’, Olive said. ‘He kept telling me that.’

  George and Olive were overcome with relief as they watched the interest steadily paid off. They were reminded less and less often of what had happened. It had still never been mentioned between the three of them.

  After their first perfunctory affair, Olive saw little of Jack. Yet her attitude to him was changing during the months she lived with Arthur. From Arthur she had expected more than their relation ever gave her. If he had been described without her knowing him, she would have thought ‘that’s the man who’ll give me everything I’ve longed for’. While actually she found herself half-pitying and half-despising him, and her imagination began to fill itself with Jack again. It was not, as one might have thought, Jack the adept lover that she missed. As a matter of fact, she was excitable in love, and, perhaps as a consequence, she did not feel for either Jack or Arthur the kind of exclusive passion which can overwhelm less nervous temperaments. She missed something different. For now she realised or imagined that in Jack she had found what she would never have believed: someone who satisfied two needs of her nature: someone who made her feel utterly submissive and dependent, and yet whom – she thought this less consciously, but it helped to fill her with a glow of anticipation – she could control. She had seen what he could do; she was quite realistic about his character. And yet, he was the only man she had ever known who could imbue her with passionate respect.

  In the end she went to Jack. For a long time he would not ‘accept her terms’, as they both told me. It was on this point that Jack had been provoked to his outburst today. She had tried, not once but several times, to make him live on her. He had to defend himself there: his romantic attitude represented his one streak of aspiration, his one ‘spiritual attempt’, and was precious in his own eyes on that account.

  Meanwhile, George had given way to Jack’s influence and had become engrossed in Daphne; in the autumn of 1930 they all wanted to buy the farm. The ‘scares’ deeply affected George, and the scene recounted by Iris Ward took place; but, although at that gathering Jack spoke as if frightened of a scandal himself, he probably only acted the part to play on George’s fears. Himself, he wanted the farm as another business venture, and this was a way to bring George in. He was also exercising his power over George for its own sake.

  When George said that he did not propose to get on the wrong side of the law, he was referring to the agency and half-excusing the way it had developed. But the remark bore for himself, and Jack and Olive, a deeper significance. He meant that, if they adopted Jack’s suggestions, they would be acting with full knowledge from the beginning. Each would be going into fraud with his eyes open and knowing the others were aware of it.

  From the moment that remark was made, they all three knew this business could not be done like the other. Iris Ward’s evidence suggested that they decided to proceed the same night. That must have been a mistaken impression. George said the words when she remembered, but she did not realise how violently he would retract them the next day.

  For weeks Jack kept the fear of scandal in front of him – and all the time suggested that he knew George’s objections were sham fighting. He said that he knew George wanted the farm for his own pleasures. He assumed in Olive’s presence that George felt no deeper objections than he felt himself. He often took the line that they were in complete agreement.

  Olive said: ‘I made myself argue for George. But I began to see him just as he looked this afternoon.’ (She meant, when he answered Porson’s question on why he was willing to give up the group.) ‘I knew Jack was the better man. I knew I should always think that.’

  This was the time when she tried most strenuously to finance and marry Jack. She found him obstinate. From her account, she went through a mood of complete mistrustfulness of her own intentions. ‘I knew there had been sharp practice over the agency, so I told myself I was saving him from trying some more. But it wasn’t that. If he had been trying the most creditable object in the world, I should have wanted to buy him out just then. I didn’t want him to get on top of the world – and then marry me on his own terms.’ Uncertain of herself, she withdrew her opposition to the farm scheme. Then George gave way.

  That night, George said, apathetically after the bitter arguments: ‘We may as well follow your plan, I suppose.’ As soon as he spoke, they were all three plunged for hours into an extraordinary sense of intimacy. They felt exhausted, relieved, and full of complete understanding. They made schemes for Jack to bring in the ‘victims’. They discussed the methods by which they could alter the farm’s record of visitors. They laughed, ‘as though it were an old joke’, about the way they had borrowed money for the agency. ‘I never felt three people so close together – before or since,’ said Olive. ‘We forgot we were separate people.’

  The mood of that night did not visit them again. They went ahead with the plans, but for days and months their relations were shifting and suspicious. At times, in those days, Olive was overtaken by ‘morbid waves’ of dislike for Jack. She repeated to herself that she had always admired George, and that he was now not much to blame. George did not once try to withdraw from the arrangement; but he broke into violent personal quarrels with Jack. ‘I insist on being treated with respect,’ he complained to Olive one night. He needed that she herself should behave towards him as she had done in earlier days.

  They did not take long to gather in their money. Jack found most of the investors, but he never settled down to manage the farm. He treated it differently
from the agency. He did not make the same effort towards an honest business: he was thinking of extending their hostels into a chain and raising more capital. With a mixture of triumph and pity, he used to talk to George of the ‘bigger schemes ahead’.

  Now – with the admitted fraud behind them – their relations advanced to the state which I had noticed during the trial. George felt himself undermined and despised, half with his own consent. He obtained moments of more complete naturalness in Jack’s company than anywhere else. But much of his nature was driven to protest. As in his cross-examination, he broke out in private and claimed his predominance. It seemed possible that he would be able to cut away from Jack in the future. Since there was no affection left on George’s side, I could imagine that after the trial he might suddenly put Jack out of his mind.

  Olive had already shown a similar change of feeling towards George. Or rather, her cold and contemptuous words tonight indicated openly something which had been latent for long. She already felt it that orgiastic night after they had been committed for trial: when, with a gesture that was disturbing to watch, she went to his side as he lay drunk on the sofa. She was thrusting her loyal comradeship in our faces – insisting on it, as one insists on a state which has irrecoverably passed. Just as George himself had most insisted on his devotion to his protégés when, in its true form, it was already dead.