by C. P. Snow
He spoke so warmly that I had to answer in kind.
‘I can’t give her up,’ I said. ‘I love her.’
‘I’ve noticed that,’ said Jack, smiling good-naturedly. ‘Though why you didn’t tell me earlier I just can’t imagine. We might have dangled a few distractions before your eyes. Why in God’s name should you fall for that – horror?’
‘She’s not a horror.’
‘You know very well she is. In everything that matters. Lewis, you’re healthy enough. Why in God’s name should you choose someone who’ll only bring you misery?’
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘Once or twice’, I said, ‘I’ve been happier with her than I’ve ever imagined being.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Jack. ‘If you didn’t get a spot of happiness when you’re first in love, it’d be a damned poor lookout for all of us. Look here, I know more about women than you do. Or if I don’t’, he grinned, ‘I must have been wasting my time. I tell you, she’s a horror. Perhaps she’s a bit crazy. Anyway, she’ll only bring you misery. Now why did you choose her?’
‘Has one any choice?’ I said.
‘With someone impossible,’ said Jack, ‘you ought to be able to escape.’
‘I don’t think I can,’ I said.
‘You’ve got to,’ said Jack, with more vigorous purpose than I had ever heard from him. ‘She’ll do you harm. She’ll make a mess of your life.’ He added: ‘I believe she’s done you a lot of harm already.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said.
‘I bet you don’t know when to make love to her.’
The hit was so shrewd that I blushed.
‘Damn the bitch,’ said Jack. ‘I’d like to have her in a bedroom with no questions asked. I’d teach her a thing or two.’
He looked at me.
‘Lewis,’ he said, ‘it’s the cold ones who can do you harm. I expect you wonder if any woman will ever want you.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I do.’
‘It’s absurd,’ said Jack, in his flattering, easy, soothing fashion. ‘If you’d run across someone warm, you’d know how absurd it is. Why, with just a bit of difference, you’d have a better time than I do. You’re sympathetic. You’re very clever. You’re going to be a success. And – you’ve got a gleam in your eye… It’s like everything else,’ he went on. ‘You’ve got to believe in yourself. If she’s ruined that for you, I shall never forgive her. I tell you, it’s absurd for you to doubt yourself. There are hundreds of nicer girls than Miss Sheila who’d say yes before you’d had time to ask.’
When he cared, he was more skilful than anyone I knew at binding up the wounds.
Jack looked across the table. I was certain that he had something else to say, and was working his way towards it. He was using all his cunning, as well as his good nature.
‘Now Marion’, he said, as though casually, and I understood, ‘would be a hundred times better – for any purpose that you can possibly imagine. I don’t mind telling you, I’ve thought of her myself. I just can’t understand why you’ve done nothing about it.’
‘I’ve been pretty occupied,’ I said. ‘And I wasn’t–’
‘I should have thought’, said Jack, ‘that you might have found time to think of her. After all, she’s been pining for you long enough.’
I was forced on to the defensive. I said, in confusion, that I knew she was rather fond of me, but he was exaggerating it beyond all reason.
‘You bloody fool,’ said Jack, ‘she worships the ground you walk on.’
I still protested, Jack went on attacking me. If I did not realize it, he said roughly, it must be because I was blinded by Sheila. The sooner I got rid of her the better, if I could not notice what was going on round me. ‘Remember too,’ said Jack, ‘if anyone falls in love with you, it is partly your own fault. It’s not all innocence on your side. It never is. There’s always a bit of encouragement. You’ve smiled at her, you’ve been sympathetic, and you’ve led her on.’
I felt guilty: that was another stab of truth. I argued, I protested again that he was exaggerating. I was confused: I half wanted to credit what he said, just for the sake of my own vanity; I half wanted to be guiltless.
‘I don’t care about the rights and wrongs,’ said Jack. ‘All I care about is that the young woman is aching for you. Just as much as you ache for your girl. And without any nonsense about it. She wants you, she knows she wants you. But remember she can’t wait for ever. If I never advise you again, Lewis, I’m doing so now. Get free – not next week, tonight, go home and write the letter – and take Marion on. It will make all the difference to you… I’m not at all sure’, he said surprisingly, ‘that you wouldn’t be wise to marry her.’
26: Meeting by Accident
The examination did not trouble me overmuch. It was not a decisive one; my acquaintances who were taking law degrees, like Charles March, were exempt from it; unless I did disgracefully badly, nothing hung upon the result. Once I got started, I felt a cheerful, savage contempt for those who tried to keep me in my proper station. I had only taken one examination in my life, the Oxford, but I found again that, after the first half-hour, I enjoyed the game. In the first lunch interval, certain that I was not going to disgrace myself, I reflected realistically, as I had done before, that my performance this year would be a guide to my chances twelve months hence in the Bar Finals – on which, in my circumstances, all depended.
I stayed at Mrs Reed’s, for no better reason than habit, but this time I did not have to look in entreaty at the hall table each time I entered the house. Sheila’s letter arrived on my second morning, according to her promise. For I had seen her before I left town, not listening to Jack Cotery, despite the comfort he had given me. The letter was in her usual allusive style, but contained a passage which made me smile: ‘My father has lost his voice, which is exceedingly just. He croaks pathetically. I have offered to nurse him – would you expect me to be good at the healing word?’ And, a little farther on, she wrote: ‘Curiously enough, he inquired about you the other day. He is probably thinking you might be useful some time for free legal consultations. My family are remarkably avaricious. I don’t know whether I shall inherit it. Poor Tom used to have to prescribe for my father. But Tom was a moral coward. You are evasive and cagey, but you’re not that.’
Evasive and cagey, I thought, in the luxury of considering a beloved’s judgement, in the conceit of youth. Was it true? No one else had ever said so. So far as I knew, no one had thought so. She had seen me get on, in harmony, with all kinds of people – while she shrank into a corner. And she alone had seen me quite free.
She wrote in the same vein about her father, her mother, herself. She was unsparing; equally remote from moral vanity or visceral warmth; she saw no reason to give herself or anyone else the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes her judgements were lunatic, and sometimes they went painfully deep. Those judgements were her revenge. People got through life with their lies and pretences, with their spontaneity, with their gluey warmth denied to her. She was left out of the party. So she told them that the party was false and the good-fellowship just a sham, and in telling them so she was sometimes no truer than a hurt child; but sometimes she tore the façade off the human condition, and made us wince at the truth.
Her letter brought her near, and I went undisturbed through the rest of the papers. I saw Charles March at dinner, with his usual party of Cambridge friends. He undertook to find out my marks in detail; he had no idea why I was so curious, nor that next year’s examination was a crisis in my career, but he was a sensitive, quick-witted man, pleased to be of help. I envied his assumption that it was easy to discover what was going on behind the scenes. Some day, I thought, I too must be as sure of myself, as much able to move by instinct among the sources of information and power. Twenty years ahead, and it was ironical to meet Charles March, and for us to be reminded that I had once resolved to emulate him.
I remained in London for an extra afterno
on, in order to go to Lord’s and watch some cricket. There, in the sunshine, I felt peace seep over me like a drug, steadying my heart, slowing my pulse. The examination was safe. Soon I should be seeing Sheila. There was not even the shadow of care, as there had been that day – it suddenly came back to memory and made me smile – when my father watched his first and only cricket match and I sat beside him, eight years old.
But that evening, as the train rushed through the midland fields and in half an hour I should be home, that mood of peace seemed separated from me by years or an ocean. I was fretted by anxiety, as though my mind were a vacuum, and immediately one ominous thought left it, another bored in. I had an irresistible sense that I was returning into trouble, every kind of trouble. I struggled with each item of anxiety, but the future was full of pain. I was angry with myself for being the prey of nerves. It was time to remember that I was strained by this kind of apprehension whenever I came home from a journey. I had just to accept it, like a minor disease. If I did not, I should become as superstitious as my mother. But as I stepped on to the station platform I was looking round in dread, expecting some news of Sheila that would break my heart. I bought an evening paper, dreading against all reason that she might have chosen this day to become engaged. I rang her up from the station; she sounded surprised, amused, and friendly, and had no news at all.
For a moment I was reassured, as though in a fit of jealousy. Then I felt anxious about George, and went to see him; in his case, there had been some faint cause for worry, though neither he nor I had taken it seriously; that night, it still seemed faint, though he did produce some mystifying information about Martineau.
My nerve-storm dropped away; and for weeks after my examination all was smooth. George had a piece of professional success, the alarm over Martineau began to seem unreal; Jack Cotery had begun, by luck or daring, to make some money. Sheila was uncapricious and gay, and had set herself the task of teaching me to take an interest in painting. My examination result appeared in The Times, and had gone according to plan. It reappeared in the local papers, having been sent there by Aunt Milly, who had now finally decided to admit that I was less foolish than most young men. Their curious alliance still operating, George impressed on her that I was fulfilling my share of the bargain. He went on ‘to gain considerable satisfaction’, as he said himself, by ramming the fact of my performance in front of anyone who had ever seemed to doubt me.
I received a few letters of congratulation, a bland one from Eden, an affectionate and generous one from Marion, a fantastically florid one from Mr Vesey – and a note from Tom Devitt. My father professed a comic gratification; and Sheila said: ‘I didn’t expect anything else. But if you make me celebrate, I shall quite like it.’ It was my first taste of success, and it was sweet.
Nevertheless, I had returned into trouble. As the summer went on, some of the ominous thoughts of the journey came back; but this time they were not a trick of the nerves, they were real. The first trouble – the first sign that the luck had changed, I found myself thinking, in the superstitious way of which I was ashamed – was a mild one, but it harassed me. It followed close behind the congratulations, and was a disappointment about my examination. Charles March had kept his word. Somehow or other he had obtained the marks on my individual papers. They were not bad, but I was not high up the list of the first class. They were nothing like good enough if I were to make a hit next year.
There was no option. Next year I had to do spectacularly well. It was an unfair test, I thought, forgetting that I had once faced these brutal facts – when I first made my choice. But it was different facing facts from a long way off: and then meeting them in one’s nerves and flesh. It was very hard to imagine a risk, until one had to live with it.
There was nothing for it. Next year I had to do better. I had to improve half a class.
I consulted George. At first, he was unwilling to accept that anything was wrong. I was exaggerating, as usual, said George stormily; I was losing my sense of proportion just because this man March, whom George had never heard of, reported that I had not done superlatively well in a couple of papers. No one was less ready than George to see the dangerous sign. He had to be persuaded against his will, in the teeth of his violent temper, that a disquieting fact could conceivably exist, particularly in a protégé’s career. He denounced Charles March. ‘I see no reason’, shouted George, ‘why I should be expected to kowtow to the opinions of your fashionable friends.’ He denounced me for being an alarmist. I had to be rough and lose my own temper and tell him that, however much he deceived himself about others, he must not do it about me. These were the official marks, never mind how they were obtained. Brusquely I told him that it was just a problem of cramming; the facts were clear, and I was not going to argue about them: I wanted to know one thing – how could I pull up half a class?
Immediately, without the slightest rancour, George became calm and competent. He proceeded to analyse the marks with his customary pleasure in any kind of puzzle. Neither George nor I had been certain that I should need such a degree of detailed knowledge. ‘Though’, said George, ‘I was under the impression that you had got hold of most of the classic cases. They didn’t ask you much that was really out of the way. I imagined that you’d conquered most of this stuff months ago.’
It was too much of a temptation for George to resist saying tactfully: ‘Of course, I realize there have been certain complications in your private life.’
‘What’s to be done?’ I said.
‘Your memory is first class,’ said George. ‘So you simply can’t have read enough, that’s all. We’d better invent a new reading programme for you. We’d better do it now.’
Without needing to look up a single authority, without asking me one question about the syllabus of the Bar examinations (which he had, of course, never taken himself) or what books I had already read, George drew up a working timetable for me for each week between that day and the date of the finals. ‘Nine months to go,’ said George with bellicose content, and wrote down the first week’s schedule. He forgot nothing; the programme was well-ordered, feasible, allowed time for a fortnight’s revision at the end, and then three days free from work. I preserved that sensible document, so neat and orderly, in George’s tidy legal handwriting. It might have been the work of one of nature’s burgesses.
But there were many days in the months ahead when George did not speak or act in the slightest respect like one of nature’s burgesses; and that was the second trouble into which we were plunged. It seemed grave then. In retrospect it seemed more than grave, it seemed to mark the point where the curve of George’s life began to dip. At this point, I need only say a few words about it. The upheaval in our circle began with Martineau. We had always known that he was restless and eccentric; but we expected him to continue his ordinary way of life, entertaining us on Friday nights, and safeguarding George’s future in the firm. Suddenly he went through a kind of religious conversion. That autumn he relinquished his share in the practice. It was a few months later, early in 1927, that he completed his abnegation; then he sold all his remaining possessions, gave the money away, and at fifty-one began to wander round the country, begging his way, penniless and devout.
It was now left to Eden to decide whether George should ever become a partner. We all urged George at least to establish a modus vivendi with Eden. George, dogged by ill fortune and his own temperament, promptly performed a series of actions which made Eden, who already disliked him, rule him out of the running, not only then, but always. And so at twenty-seven George was condemned to be a managing clerk for the rest of his life. There were many consequences that none of us could have foreseen; a practical one was that George began to cooperate in Jack Cotery’s business.
To me, that trouble was light, though, compared to a quarrel with Sheila – a quarrel which I said to myself must be the last. It came with blinding suddenness, after a summer in which most of our meetings had been happy, happier than any si
nce the days of innocence a year before. We amused each other with the same kind of joke, youthful, reckless, and sarcastic. I had discovered that I could often coax and bully her out of her indrawn, icy temper. It was the serene hours that counted. I was not much worried when, in the early autumn, days followed each other when she sat abnormally still, her eyes fixed in a long-sighted stare, when if I took her hand it stayed immobile and I seemed to be kissing a dead cheek. I had been through it before, and that removed the warning. She would emerge. Meanwhile, she was not giving me any excuse for jealousy. For weeks she had not mentioned any other man. And, in those fits of painful stillness, she saw no one but me.
One day in September we had been walking in the country, and were resting on the grass beside the road. She had been quiet, wrapped deep in herself, all afternoon. Suddenly she announced ‘I’m going shooting.’
I laughed aloud, and asked her when and where. She said she was travelling to Scotland, the next week.
‘I’m going shooting,’ she repeated.
Again I laughed.
‘What’s funny about that?’
Her tone was sharp.
‘It is funny,’ I said.
‘You’d better tell me why.’
Her tone was so sharp that I took her shoulders and began to shake her. But she broke loose and said ‘I suppose you mean that I only know these people because my father married for money. I suppose it is a wonderfully good joke that my mother was such a fool.’
With bewilderment I saw that she was crying. She was staring at me in enmity and hate. She turned aside, and dried the tears herself.
On the way back, I made one effort to tell her that nothing had been further from my mind. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, and we went along in silence. Intolerably slowly (and yet I could not bear to part), the miles went by. We came to the suburbs and walked in silence under the chestnut trees.