by C. P. Snow
When at last he admitted to a partial recovery, Mrs Knight introduced me. She explained volubly the reason for my eccentric attire, taking credit for her speed of action. Then, since they seemed still to be worrying her, she repeated my statements about doing nothing but read for the Bar, as though trusting him to solve the problem.
Unlike his wife, Mr Knight was indirect. He gazed at Sheila, not at me.
‘You never tell me anything, do you, my dear girl,’ he said. ‘You never tell me anything.’
Then slyly, still looking at her, he questioned me. His voice stayed carefully fatigued, he appeared to be taking a remote interest in these ephemeral things. In fact, he was astute. If he had been present, I should never have succeeded for a minute in putting up my bluff with Mrs Knight. Without asking me outright, he soon got near the truth. He took a malicious pleasure in talking round the point, letting me see that he had guessed, not giving me away to his wife.
‘Isn’t there a regulation’, he inquired, his voice diminishing softly, ‘by which you can’t read for the Bar if you’re following certain occupations? Does that mean one has to break away? I take it, you may have had to select your time to break away – from some other occupation?’
It was not the reason, but it was a very good shot. We talked for a few minutes about legal careers. He was proud of his ability to ‘place’ people and he was now observing me with attention. Sometimes he asked a question edged with malice. And I was learning something about him.
He and his wife were each snobbish, but in quite different fashions. Mrs Knight had been born into the comfortable moneyed middle class; she was a robust woman without much perception, and accepted those who seemed to arrive at the same level; just as uncritically, she patronized those who did not. Mr Knight’s interest was far more subtle and pervading. To begin with, he was no more gently born than I was. I could hear the remains of a northern dialect in that faint and modulated voice. Mr Knight had met his wife, and captured her for good, when he was a young curate. She had brought him money, he had moved through the social scene, he had dined in the places he had longed for as a young man – in the heart of the county families and the dignitaries of the Church. The odd thing was, that having arrived there, he still retained his romantic regard for those very places. All his shrewdness and suspicion went to examine the channels by which others got there. On that subject he was accurate, penetrating, and merciless.
He was a most interesting man. The time was getting on; I was wondering whether I ought to leave, when I witnessed another scene which, though I did not know it, was a regular feature of the vicarage Saturday teas. Mrs Knight looked busily, lovingly, at her husband.
‘Please, darling, would you mind giving us the sermon?’ she said.
‘Ican’t do it, darling. I can’t do it. I’m too exhausted.’
‘Please. Just give us the beginning. You know Sheila always likes to hear the sermon. I’m sure you’d like to hear the sermon.’ Mrs Knight rallied me. ‘It will give you something to think over on the way home. I’m sure you want to hear it.’
I said that I did.
‘I believe he’s a heathen,’ said Mr Knight maliciously, but his fingers were playing with the manuscript.
‘You heard what he said, darling,’ urged Mrs Knight. ‘He’ll be disappointed if you don’t give us a good long piece.’
‘Oh well.’ Mr Knight sighed. ‘If you insist, If you insist.’
Mrs Knight began to alter the position of the reading lamp. She made her husband impatient. He was eager to get to it.
The faintness disappeared from his voice on the instant. It filled the room more effortlessly than Mrs Knight’s. He read magnificently. I had never heard such command of tone, such control, such loving articulation. And I had never seen anyone enjoy more his own reading; occasionally he peered over the page to make sure that we were not neglecting to enjoy it too. I was so much impressed with the whole performance that I could not spare much notice for the argument.
He gave us a good long piece. In fact, he gave us the whole sermon, twenty-four minutes by the clock. At the end, he leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. Mrs Knight broke into enthusiastic, worshipping praise. I added my bit.
‘Water, please, darling,’ said Mr Knight very faintly, without opening his eyes. ‘I should like a glass of water. Just water.’
As I changed into my own clothes in the bathroom, I was wondering how I could say goodbye to Sheila alone. In the general haze of excitement, I was thinking also of her father. He was vain, preposterously and superlatively vain, and yet astute; at the same time theatrical and shrewd; malicious, hypochondriac, and subtle; easy to laugh at, and yet exuding, through it all, a formidable power. He was a man whom no one would feel negligible. I believed that it was not impossible I could get on with him. I should have to suffer his malice, he would be a more effective enemy than his wife. But I felt one thing for certain, while I hummed tunelessly in the bathroom: he was worried about Sheila, and not because she had brought me there that afternoon; he was worried about her, as she sat silently by the fire; and there had been a spark, not of liking, but of sympathy, between him and me.
On my way downstairs I heard Mrs Knight’s voice raised in indignation.
‘It’s much too wet to think of such a thing,’ came through the drawing-room door. When I opened it, Mrs Knight was continuing: ‘It’s just asking to get yourself laid up. I don’t know when you’ll begin to have a scrap of sense. And even if it were a nice night–’
‘I’m walking back with you,’ said Sheila to me.
‘I want you to tell her that it’s quite out of the question. It’s utterly absurd,’ said Mrs Knight.
‘I don’t know what it’s like outside,’ I said half-heartedly. ‘It does sound rather wild.’
The wind had been howling round the house.
‘If it doesn’t hurt you, it won’t hurt me,’ said Sheila.
Mr Knight was still lying back with his eyes closed.
‘She oughtn’t to do it,’ a whisper came across the room. ‘She oughtn’t to do it.’
‘Are you ready?’ said Sheila.
Her will was too strong for them. It suddenly flashed across my mind, as she put on a mackintosh in the hall, that I had no idea, no idea in the world, how she felt towards either of them.
The wind blew stormily in our faces; Sheila laughed aloud. It was not raining hard, for the gale was too strong, but one could taste the driven rain. Down the village street we were quiet; I felt rapturously at ease, she had never been so near. As we turned down a lane, our fingers laced, and hers were pressing mine.
We had not spoken since we left the house. Her first words were accusatory, but her tone was soft ‘Why did you play my mother’s game?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Pretending to be better off than you are.’
‘All I said was true.’
‘You gave her a wrong impression,’ she said. ‘You know you did.’
‘I thought it was called for.’ I was smiling.
‘Stupid of you,’ she said. ‘I’d rather you said you were a clerk.’
‘It would have shocked her.’
‘It would have been good for her,’ said Sheila.
The gale was howling, the trees dashed overhead, and we walked on in silence, in silence deep with joy.
‘Lewis,’ she said at last. ‘I want to ask you something.’
‘Darling?’
‘Weren’t you terribly embarrassed–?’
‘Whatever at?’
‘At coming in wet. And meeting strangers for the first time in that fancy dress.’
She laughed.
‘You did look a bit absurd,’ she added.
‘I didn’t think about it,’ I said.
‘Didn’t you really mind?’
‘No.’
‘I can’t understand you,’ she said. ‘I should have curled up inside.’ Then she said: ‘You are rather wonderful.’
&n
bsp; I laughed at her. I said that, if she were going to admire me for anything, she might choose something more sensible to admire. But she was utterly serious. To her self-conscious nerves, it was incredible that anyone should be able to master such a farce.
‘I curled up a bit myself this afternoon,’ she said, a little later.
‘When?’
‘When they were making fools of themselves in front of you.’
‘Good God, girl,’ I said roughly, lovingly, ‘they’re human.’
She tightened her grip on my hand.
At the end of a lane we came in sight of the farm. There was one more field to cross, and the lights blazed out in the windy darkness. I asked her to come in.
‘I couldn’t,’ she said. I had an arm round her shoulders as we stood. Suddenly she hid her face against my coat. I asked her again.
‘I must go,’ she said. She looked up at me, and for the first time I kissed her, while the wind and my own blood sang and pounded in my ears. She drew away, then threw her arms round my neck, and I felt her mouth on mine.
‘I must go,’ she said. I touched her cheek, wet in the rain, and she pressed my hand. Then she walked down the lane, dark that night as a tunnel-mouth, her strong, erect stride soon losing her to sight against the black hedges. I waited there until I could hear nothing, no footsteps, nothing but the sound of the wind.
I returned to the group, who were revelling in a celebration. Jack was starting on his new business, and after supper George sat in our midst, predicting success for us all, for me most of all, complacent with hope about all our futures. It was not until the next, Sunday, night I spoke to George alone. The others had gone back by the last bus; I was staying till the morning, in order to have the first comfort of my emancipation. That night, when we were left alone, George confided more of his own strange, violent, inner life than he had ever done before. He gave me part of his diary, and there I sat, reading by the light of the oil lamp, while George smoked his pipe by my side.
When I had finished, George made an inquiry about my love affair. He had only two attitudes towards his friends’ attachments. First, he responded with boisterous amusement. Then, when he decided that one was truly in love, he adopted an entirely different manner, circumlocutory, obscure, packed with innuendo, which he seemed to have decided was the height of consideration and tact. In the summer he had jovially referred to Sheila as that ‘handsome bitch’, but for some time past he had spoken of her, with infinite consideration, in his second manner. On that Sunday night his actual opening was ‘I hope you reached your destination safely yesterday afternoon?’
I said that I had.
‘I hope that it all turned out to be’ – George pulled down his waistcoat and cleared his throat – ‘reasonably satisfactory?’
I said that it did.
‘Perhaps I can assume’, said George, ‘that you’re not completely dissatisfied with your progress?’
I could not keep back a smile – and it gave me right away.
21: Deceiving and Pleasing
Even after that visit to Sheila’s house I still did not tell her simply how much I loved her. Her own style seemed to keep my tongue playful and sarcastic; I made jokes about joy and hope and anguish, as though it were all a game. I was not yet myself released.
Once or twice she kept me waiting at a meeting place. The minutes passed, the quarters; I performed all the tricks that a lover does to cheat time, to make it stand still, to pretend not to notice, so as suddenly to see her there. It was an anguish like jealousy, and, like jealousy, when at last she came, it was drowned in the flood of relief.
I complained. But still my words were light; I did not speak from the angry pain of five minutes before. I scolded her, I asked her not to expose me to looks of schadenfreude in the café – but I did it with the playful sarcasm that had become our favourite way of speaking to one another. Nevertheless, it was my first demand. She obeyed. At our next meeting, she was ten minutes early. She was trying to behave, and I was gay; but she was also strained and ill-tempered, as though it were an effort to subdue her pride even by an inch.
During my next visit to eat dinners at the Inn, I was waiting for a letter. It was the beginning of December, I was in London for my usual five nights, and I had made Sheila promise to write to me. Hopefully I looked for a letter on the hall table the morning after I arrived. I used to stay in a boarding house in Judd Street, rather as though, with a provincial’s diffidence, I did not want to be separated too far from my railhead at St Pancras. The dining-room, the hall, the bedroom, all smelt heavily of beeswax and food; the dining-room was dark, and we used to sit down to breakfast at eight o’clock in the winter gloom; there were twelve or so round the table – maiden ladies living there on a pittance, clerks, transients like myself. Through having students pass through the house, the landlady had acquired the patter of examinations. With a booming heartless heartiness, she used to encourage them, and me in my turn, by giving them postcards on the day of their last paper. On the postcard she had already written ‘I got through, Mrs Reed’; she exhorted one to post it to her as soon as the result was known.
After each breakfast on that stay, I went quickly to the hall table. There lay the letters, pale blue in the half-dark – not many in that house: none for me, on the first morning, the second, the third. It was the first time I had been menaced by the post.
Just as when I waited for her, I went through all the calculations of a lover. She could not have written before Monday night, it was more likely she would wait till Tuesday, there was no collection in the village after tea, it was impossible that I could get the letter by Wednesday morning. I was beginning to learn, in those few days, the arithmetic of anxiety and hope.
So, carrying with me that faint ache of worry, knowing that when I returned to the boarding house my eyes would fly to the hall table, I went out to eat my dinners at the Inn. On two of the nights I joined a party of my Cambridge acquaintances, Charles March among them; we went away from dinner to drink and talk, before they caught their train from Liverpool Street.
They were the kind of acquaintances on whom I should have sharpened my wits, if I had gone to a university. I had not yet spoken to Charles March alone, but him I felt kinship with, and wanted for a friend. The others I liked well enough, but no better than many of my friendly acquaintances in the town. I was soon easy among them, and we talked with undergraduate zest. When I was alone I compared their luck and mine. Some of them would be rivals. Now that I knew something of them, how did my prospect look?
I thought that, for intellectual machinery, between me and Charles March there was not much in it. I had no doubt that George Passant, both in mental equipment and in horsepower, was superior to both of us – but Charles March and I had a great deal more sense. Of those other Cambridge acquaintances, I did not believe that any of them, for force and precision combined, could compete with either Charles March or me, much less George Passant.
I was reassured to find it so. And I went on, once or twice, to envy them their luck. One of these young men was the son of an eminent KC, and another of a headmaster: Charles March’s family I guessed to be very rich. With that start, what could I not have done? I should have given any of them a run for their money, I thought. By their standards, by the standards of the successful world from which they came, it would have been long odds on my being a success. Whereas now I had, in my young manhood, to take an effort and endure a strain that they did not even realize. I felt a certain rancour.
I was capable, however, of a more detached reflection. In one way I had a priceless advantage over these new acquaintances of mine. They had known, at first hand, successful men; and it often took away their confidence. They had lived in a critical climate. Their families had been bound to compare them, say, to an uncle who had ‘come off’. There were times, even to a man as vigorous as Charles March, when all achievement seemed already over, all the great things done, all the books written. That was the penalty, a
nd to many of them a crippling penalty, of being born into an old country and an established class. It was incomparably more easy for me to venture on my own. They were held back by the critical voices – or, if they moved at all, they tended to move, not freely, but as though they could only escape the critical voices by the deafening noise of their own rebellion.
I was far luckier. For I was, in that matter, free. From their tradition I could choose what I wanted. I needed neither to follow it completely, nor completely to rebel. I had never lived in a critical climate. There was nothing to hold me back. Far from it; I was pushed forward by the desires, longings, the inarticulate aspirations, of my mother and all her relatives, my grandfather and his companions arduously picking up their artisan culture, all my connexions who had stood so long outside the shop window staring at the glittering toys inside.
Later in my life I should not have wanted to alter any of that reflection. By twenty, in fact, I had a fair conception of most of my advantages and disadvantages, considered as a candidate in worldly affairs. I knew that I was quick-witted and adaptable – after meeting Charles March and the others, I was sure that I could hold my own intellectually. I could get on easily with a large number of human beings, and by nature I knew something of them. That seemed to me my stock-in-trade. But I left something out. Like most young men of twenty I found it impossible to credit that I had much will. George, for example, who had a will of Cromwellian strength, wrote of himself in his diary as being ‘vacillating’ and ‘weak’. Often he thought, with genuine self-condemnation, that he was the most supine of men. It was much the same with me. I should have been surprised if I had been told that I had a tough, stubborn, deep-rooted will, and that it would probably be more use to me than my other qualities all added together.
A letter came. My heart leapt as I saw the envelope on the hall table. But it was the wrong letter. Marion wrote to say that she had a half holiday on the Thursday; she wanted to buy a hat, and she needed an impartial male opinion – she could trust me to be impartial, couldn’t she? Could I spare her an hour that afternoon? And perhaps, if I were free, we might go to a play at eight. She would have to catch the last train home, so I should get her off my hands in good time.