George Passant

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 gusto; 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 come 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.

It surprised me how during this transaction Jack’s manner towards George became casual and brusque. Towards anyone else Jack would have shown more of his finesse, as well as his mobile good nature. But I felt in him a streak of ruthlessness whenever he was intent on his own way: as he talked to George, it came almost to the surface.

I mentioned this strange relation of theirs to Morcom, the evening before I went to London for my examination: but he drove it out of my head by telling me he was himself worried over Martineau.

There was no time for him to say more. But in the train, returning to the town after the examination, I was seized by the loneliness, the enormous feeling of calamity, which seems lurking for us — or at any rate, all through my life it often did so for me — when we arrive home at the end of a journey. I went straight round to George’s. He was not in, although it was already evening. His landlady told me that he was working late in the office; there I found him, in his room on the same floor as those which carried on their doors the neat white letters ‘Mr Eden,’ ‘Mr Martineau’. George’s room was smaller than the others, and in it one could hear trams grinding below, through the centre of the town.

‘How did you get on?’ George said. Though I felt he was wishing the inquiries over so that he could pass on to something urgent, he insisted on working through my examination paper.

‘Ah,’ George breathed heavily, for he had been talking fast, ‘you must have done well. And now we’ve got a bit of news for you.’

‘What is it? Has anything gone wrong?’ I was full of an inexplicable impatience.

‘I’ve got the case absolutely cut and dried,’ said George enthusiastically. I heard his explanation, which would have been interesting in itself. When he had finished, I asked: ‘Anything new about Martineau?’

‘Nothing definite.’ George’s tone was uncomfortable, as though the question should not have been put. ‘By the way,’ he added, ‘Morcom rang up to ask if he could come in tonight and talk something over. I believe it’s the same subject.’

‘When?’ I said. ‘When is he coming?’

‘Well, as a matter of fact, quite soon.’

‘Do you mind if I stay?’ I said.

‘There’s a slight difficulty,’ said George. He added: ‘You see, we’ve got to consider Morcom. He’s inclined to be discreet—’

‘He’s already spoken to me about it,’ I said, but George was unwilling until I offered to meet Morcom on his way.

When I brought him back, Morcom began: ‘It’s rather dull, what I’ve come to you about.’ Then he said, after a question to me: ‘But you know a good deal about Martineau, George. And you’re better than I am at figures.’

George smiled, gratified: ‘If that’s what you want, Lewis is your man.’

‘All the better,’ said Morcom. ‘You can both tell me what you think. The position is this. You know that Martineau is my landlord. Well, he says he can’t afford to let me keep on my flat. It seemed to me nonsense. So I asked for an account of what he spends on the house. I’ve got it here. I’ve also made a note of what I pay. That’s in pencil; the rest are Martineau’s figures. I want to know what you think of them.’

George was sitting at the table. I got up and stood behind him, and we both gazed for some minutes at the sheet of notepaper. I heard George’s breathing.

‘Well?’ said Morcom.

‘It’s not very — careful, is it?’ said George, after a long hesitation.

‘What do you say?’ Morcom said to me.

‘I should go further,’ I said. ‘It’s either so negligent that one can hardly believe it — or else—’ I paused, then hurried on: ‘something like dishonesty.’

‘That’s sheer fatuity,’ George said. ‘He’s one of the most honest people alive. As you both ought to know. You can’t go flinging about accusations frivolously against a man like Martineau.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that. I meant, if one didn’t know him and saw that account—’

‘It’s a pity,’ said George, ‘that you didn’t say that.’

‘How do you explain the figures?’ Morcom asked.

‘I reject the idea of dishonesty,’ George said. ‘Right from the beginning; and if you don’t, I’m afraid I can’t continue with the discussion.’

‘I shouldn’t believe it. Unless there turned out nothing else to believe,’ Morcom said.

George went on: ‘I grant it might have been dishonest if Lewis or I had produced an account like that. But we shouldn’t have done it with such extraordinary clumsiness. Anyone could see through it at a glance. He’s put all sorts of expenses down on the debit side that have got as much to do with his house as they have with me.’

‘I saw that,’ said Morcom.

‘That proves it wasn’t dishonesty,’ George was suddenly smiling broadly. ‘Because, as I say, a competent man couldn’t have done it without being dishonest. But on the other hand a competent man wouldn’t have done it so egregiously. So the person who did it was probably incompetent and honest. Being Martineau.’

‘But is he incompetent?’

‘He’s not bad at his job,’ George admitted slowly. ‘Or used to be when he took the trouble. He used to be pretty good at financial things—’

Morcom and I leapt at the same words.

‘Took the trouble?’ said Morcom. ‘When has he stopped? What do you mean?’

‘I didn’t want to say anything about this.’ George looked upset. ‘You’ll have to regard it as in absolute confidence. But he’s been slacking off gradually for a long time. The last month or two I’ve not been able to get him to show any kind of recognition. I tried to make some real demands on him about the case. He just said there were more important things. He’s become careless—’

‘That was what you were quarrelling about,’ I cried out. ‘That Friday night — do you remember? I found the two of you alone.’

‘Yes,’ said George, with a shy grin. ‘I did try to make one or two points clear to him.’

‘I heard him,’ I said to Morcom, ‘before I left the gardens.’

Morcom smiled.

‘I don’t know what is possessing him,’ said George. ‘Though, as I told him the night we had our disagreement, I can’t imagine working under anyone else.’

‘It’s a pity for his sake,’ I said, ‘but the most important thing is — what does it mean to you?’

‘Yes,’ said Morcom. ‘We haven’t much to go on yet.’

‘You’ll tell me if you get any news,’ said George.

‘Of course.’

They were enjoying this co-operation. They each found that pleasure we all have in being on the same side with someone we have regularly opposed.

George walked to the window. It was almost nine, and the summer night had scarcely begun to darken. George looked over the roofs. The buildings fell away in shadow, the roofs shone in the clear light.

‘I’m glad you came round,’ said George. ‘I’ve been letting it get on my nerves. It doesn’t matter to you so much. But it just possibly might upset all the arrangements I have built up for myself. I’ve always counted on his being perfectly dependable. He is part of the scheme of things. If he’s going to play fast-and-loose — it might be the most serious thing that has happened since I came here.’

11: A Firm of Solicitors

THE firm of Eden & Martineau had been established, under the name of G J Eden, Solicitor, by Eden’s father in the eighties. It was a good time for the town, despite shadows of depression outside; by the pure geographical chance of being just outside the great coal- and iron-fields, it was beginning to collect several light industries instead of a single heavy one. And it was still a country market and a centre for litigious farmers. The elder Eden got together a comfortable business almost from the beginning.

His son became junior partner in 1896; Martineau joined when the father died, ten years later. Through the next twenty years, down to the time when George was employed, the firm maintained a solid standing. It never obtained any unusual success in making money: a lack of drive in the Edens seemed to have prevented that. The firm, though well thought of in the town, was not among the most prosperous solicitors’. It is doubtful whether Harry Eden ever touched £3,000 a year.

From the moment he entered it, George bore a deep respect for the firm, and still, nearly three years after, would say how grateful he was to Martineau for ‘having somehow got past the opposition and wangled me the job’. His pride in the firm should not have surprised us, though it sometimes did. It seemed strange to notice George identifying himself with a solid firm of solicitors in a provincial town — but of course it is not the Georges, the rebels of the world, who are indifferent to authority and institutions. The Georges cannot be indifferent easily; if they are in an institution, it may have to be changed, but it becomes part of themselves. George in the firm was, on a minor scale, something like George in his family; vehement, fighting for his rights, yet proud to be there and excessively attached.

In the same way, his gratitude to Martineau and his sense of good luck at ever having been appointed both showed how little he could take himself and the firm for granted. As a matter of fact, there was no mystery, almost no manoeuvring, and no luck; they appointed him with a couple of minutes’ consideration.

The only basis for the story of Martineau’s manoeuvres seemed to be that Eden said: ‘He’s not quite a gentleman, of course, Howard. Not that I think he’s any the worse for that, necessarily,’ and Martineau replied: ‘I liked him very much. There’s something fresh and honest about him, don’t you feel?’

At any rate, George, who was drawn to Martineau at sight, went to the firm with the unshakeable conviction that there was his patron and protector.

Eden, George respected and disliked, more than he admitted to himself. It was dislike without reason. It was an antipathy such as one finds in any firm — or in any body of people brought together by accident and not by mutual liking, as I found later in colleges and government departments.

About the relations of Eden and Martineau themselves, George speculated very little. Their professional capacity, however, he decided early. Martineau was quite good while he was at all interested. Eden was incompetent at any kind of detailed work (George undervalued his judgment and broad sense). Between them, they left a good deal of the firm’s work to George, and there is no doubt that, after he had been with them a couple of years, he carried most of their cases at the salary of a solicitor’s clerk, £250 a year.

With Martineau to look after his interests George felt secure and happy, and enjoyed the work. He did not want to leave; the group at the School weighed with him most perhaps, but also his comfort in the firm. He was not actively ambitious. He had decided, with his usual certain optimism — by interpreting some remark of Martineau’s, and also because he thought it just — that he would fairly soon be taken into partnership. Martineau would ‘work it’ — George had complete faith. Meanwhile, he was content.

And so the first signs of Martineau’s instability menaced everything he counted on.

It was the first time we had seen him anxious for his own sake. We were worried. We tried to see what practical ill could happen. I asked George whether he feared that Martineau would sell his partnership; this he indignantly denied. But I was not reassured, and I could not help wishing that his disagreement with Eden last autumn, the whole episode of the committee, was further behind him.

I talked it over several nights that summer with Morcom and Jack; and also with Rachel who, for all her deep-throated sighs, had as shrewd a judgment as any of us. We occupied ourselves with actions, practical prudent actions, that George might be induced to take. But Olive, her insight sharpened by the lull in her own life, had something else to say.

‘Do you remember that night in the café — when we were trying to stop him from interfering about Jack?’ she said. ‘I had a feeling then that he was unlucky ever to come near us. He’d have done more if he’d have gone somewhere that kept him on the rails. Perhaps that’s why the firm is beginning to seem important to him now.’

She went on: ‘I admire him,’ she said. ‘We shall all go on admiring him. It’s easy to see it now I’m on the shelf. But he’s getting less from us — than we’ve all got from him. We’ve just given him an excuse for the things he wanted to do. We’ve made it pleasant for him to loll about and fancy he’s doing good. If he hadn’t come across such a crowd, he’d have done something big. I know he’s been happy. But don’t you think he has his doubts? Don’t you think he might like the chance to throw himself into the firm?’

Even at that age, Olive had no use for the great libertarian dreams. Perhaps her suspicions jarred on Rachel, who was, like me, concerned to find something politic that George might do. We suggested that it would do no harm to increase Eden’s goodwill. ‘Just as an insurance,’ Rachel said. We meant nothing subtle or elaborate; but there were one or two obvious steps, such as getting Eden personally interested in the case and asking his advice now and then — and taking part in some of the Edens’ social life, attending the parties which Mrs Eden held each month and which George avoided from his first winter in the town.

George was angry at the suggestions. ‘He wants me to do his work for him. He doesn’t want to see me anywhere else—’ and then, as a second line of defence: ‘I’m sorry. I don’t see why I should make myself uncomfortable without any better reasons than you’re able to give. I am no good at social flummery. As I think I proved, the last time you persuaded me to make a fool of myself. I should have thought I’d knocked over enough cups for everyone’s amusement. I tell you I’m no good at social flummery. You can’t expect me to be, starting where I did.’

Dinner at the Edens’ was an ordeal in which the right dress, the right fork, the proper tone of conversation, presented moments of shame too acute to be faced without an overmastering temptation. As he grew older he was making less effort to conquer these moments.

‘You can’t expect me to, starting where I did.’ That was one motive — I knew — why he built up a group where he was utterly at ease, never going out into the uncomfortable and superior world.

None of us could move George to cultivate Eden’s favour. We pressed him several times after he returned from vague but disturbing conversations with Martineau. He said: ‘I’d rather do something more useful — which meant engross himself in the case. Through the uncertainty, it had come to assume a transcendental importance in his mind. Sensibly, Eden was letting him argue it in the court.

Throughout June and July, George worked at it with extraordinary stamina and concentration. I saw him work till the dawn six nights running, and although I made up sleep in the mornings and he went to the office, he was fresher than I each evening and more ready for the night’s work to come.

12: Evening by the River

UNTIL just before the final hearing of the case, George was searching for money to salvage Jack’s business. It was a continual vexation; he did not endure it quietly. ‘This is intolerable,’ he shouted, as his work was interrupted. ‘Intolerable!’

I had, in fact, used it as an argument for getting Eden’s interest. Even in the Calvert trouble, Eden had shown a liking for Jack; and it would have been easy, I argued — if George were on friendly terms with Eden — to explain the position and secure an advance of salary for Jack’s sake.

Instead, George was harassed by petty expedients. He borrowed a few pounds from Morcom and Rachel, pawned his only valuable possession, a gold medal won at school, increased his overdraft by ten pounds, up to the limit allowed by his bank.

George managed to raise nearly sixty pounds in all, a few days before Jack’s grace expired.

‘Well, here it is,’ he said to Jack. He was sitting in his room for one of his last nights’ work on the case. ‘You can thank heaven you didn’t need any more. I don’t know how I could have scraped another penny.’

‘Thank you, George,’ Jack said. ‘Saved again. It won’t happen any more, though.’

‘I warn you I’m just helpless now,’ George said.

‘I’ll pay it back by the end of the year. I expect you think that I shan’t,’ Jack said. ‘But, you wouldn’t believe it, but I’m more confident after this collapse than I was at the start.’

George stared down at his papers.

‘There is one other thing.’

‘Yes, George?’

‘I don’t know whether you realise how near you have been to — considerable danger.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I mean something definite. Your methods of getting hold of some of that stock were just on the fringe of the law. You didn’t know, I expect, but if you hadn’t met your bills and they had sued — you stood an even chance of being prosecuted afterwards.’

‘I was afraid you were worrying over those figures,’ said Jack. ‘You’re seeing more than is really there, you know.’

‘I don’t propose to say another word,’ George said. ‘The whole thing is over. I want you to know that I don’t retract anything I’ve said about expecting you to make a tremendous success. You were unlucky over this affair. You might just as easily have been gigantically lucky. It was probably a bigger risk than you were justified in taking. Perhaps it’s wiser not to attempt long-range prophecies. They’re obviously the interesting things in business; but then, you see, I’m still convinced that successful business is devastatingly uninteresting. But if you don’t reach quite as far, you’ll simply outclass all those bloated stupid competitors of yours. It’s unthinkable that you won’t. I refuse to waste time considering it.’ His eyes left Jack, and he began studying one of his tables of notes. ‘I’m afraid I shall have to neglect you now. I’ve got to make certain of smashing them on Thursday.’

The last hearing of George’s case took up a July afternoon. I sat in the old Assize Hall, where the Quarter Sessions had been transferred this year. The hall was small, intimate, and oppressive in the summer heat. Thunder rolled intermittently as George made his last speech, aggressive, closely packed with an overwhelming argument. He was more nervous than in his attack on the School committee.

The judge had been a little short with him, provoked by his manner. Eden, who allowed George complete charge in the later stages, sat with his lips in a permanent but uneasy smile. When George was given the case, in words slightly peremptory and uncordial, Eden shook his hand: ‘That was an able piece of work, Passant. I must say you’ve done very well.’ Then Martineau, who had not attended a hearing throughout the case, entered, was told the news, and laughed. ‘You’ll go from strength to strength, won’t you, George? You’ll be ashamed of being seen with your old friends—’

When they had gone, I stayed alone with George while he packed his papers: he bent his head over the desk and made a neat tick on the final page; he was smiling to himself. We went together to a café by the river; when we sat down at the little table by the window, he said, with an exultant sigh: ‘Well, we’ve pulled that off.’ A happy smile spread over his face. ‘This is one of the best occasions there have ever been,’ he said.

‘I’ve never seen anyone look quite so jubilant,’ I said, ‘as when you got the verdict.’

George shook with laughter.

‘I don’t see why anyone shouldn’t look pleased,’ he said, ‘when you damned well know you’ve done something in a different class from the people round you.’ His voice calmed down. ‘Not that I ever had any serious doubts about it.’

‘Not last week?’ I said. ‘Walking round the park?’

‘You can’t expect me not to have bad moments,’ George said. ‘I didn’t get a reasonable chance to have any faith in myself until — not long ago. Being as shy as I am in any respectable society doesn’t help. I’ve never got over my social handicaps. And you realise that I went through my childhood without anyone impressing on me that I had ability — considerable ability, in fact.’ He chuckled. ‘So you can’t expect me not to have bad moments. But they’re not very serious. Fortunately, I’ve managed to convince myself—’

‘What of?’

‘That I’m capable of doing something useful in the world and that I’ve found the way of doing it.’

Contentedly he leaned back against the wall, and looked beyond me through the window. It was a cloudy evening, but the sky was bright towards the west; so that in the stream that ran by the café garden the clouds were reflected, dark and sharply cut.

‘It was extremely important that I should be a success in the firm,’ George went on. ‘I regard that as settled now. They couldn’t do without me.’

‘Do they realise that?’

‘Of course.’

‘Are you sure?’

George flushed. ‘Of course I am. I’m not dealing with cretins. You heard yourself what Martineau said an hour ago.’

‘You can’t rely on Martineau.’

‘Why not?’

‘In his present state, he might do anything. Sell his partnership and go into the Church,’ I smiled, stretching my invention for something more fantastic than the future could possibly hold.

‘Nonsense,’ said George. ‘He’s a bit unsettled. People of imagination often have these bouts. But he’s perfectly stable, of course.’

‘You’ve forgotten what Morcom said the other night?’

‘I’ve got it in its right proportion.’

‘You were desperately anxious about him. A few days ago. You were more anxious than I’ve seen you about anything else.’

‘You can exaggerate that.’

‘So you expect everything to be always the same?’

‘As far as the progress of my affairs goes,’ said George, ‘yes.’

I burst out: ‘I must say it seems to me optimism gone mad.’

But actually, when George was shelving or assimilating the past, or doing what was in effect the same, comfortably forecasting his own future, I was profoundly moved by a difference of temperament: far more than by a disinterested anxiety. At that age, to be honest, I resented George being self-sufficient, as it seemed to me, able to soften any facts into his own optimistic world. He seemed to have a shield, an unfair shield, against the realities and anxieties that I already felt.

Also, for weeks I had been working with him, sympathising with his strain during the case, arguing against the qualms which oddly seemed to afflict him more than they would a less hopeful man. It had been easier to encourage him over the doubtful nights than to sit isolated from him by this acceptance of success, so blandly complete that the case might have been over a year ago and not that afternoon. And so, guiltily aware of the relief it gave me, I heard my voice grow rancorous. ‘You’re making a dream of it,’ I said, ‘just to indulge yourself. Like too many of your plans. Do you really think it’s obvious that Martineau will stay here for the rest of his life?’

‘I don’t see what else he’s going to do,’ said George, smiling. But I could detect, as often when he was argued against, a change in tone. ‘In any case,’ he said, with his elaborate reasonableness, ‘I don’t propose to worry about that. He’s done almost everything I required of him. He’s stayed in the firm long enough for me to establish my position. He’s given me the chance, and I’ve taken advantage of it. It doesn’t matter particularly what happens now.’

George’s face suddenly became eager and happy.

‘You see,’ he said, ‘I have the right to stay here now. I could always have stayed before. Even Eden would never have seriously tried to get rid of me, whether Martineau was there or not. But I couldn’t really be entirely satisfied until I’d established to myself the right to go on as I am. I’ve never had much confidence, and I knew it would take a triumph to prove to myself that I’ve a right to do as I please. That’s why this is so splendid. I’m perfectly justified in staying, now.’

In my resentful state, I nearly pretended to be mystified. But I thought of Olive’s premonition; and I was captured by his pleasure in his own picture of himself. One could not resist his fresh and ebullient happiness.

‘The people at the School?’ I said.

‘Obviously,’ said George. ‘What would happen to everyone if I went away?’

I replied, as he wanted: ‘One or two of us you’ve affected permanently,’ I said. ‘But the others — in time they’d become what they would have been — if you’d never come.’

‘I won’t have it,’ said George. ‘Good God above, I won’t have it.’ He laughed wholeheartedly. ‘Do you think I’m going to waste my time like that? You’re right, it’s exactly what would happen. And it’s simply inconceivable that it should. I refuse to contemplate it,’ he said. ‘We must go on as we are. God knows, there isn’t much freedom in the world, and I’m damned if we lose what little there is. I’ve started here, and now after this I can go on. I tell you, that’s why this mattered so much to me.’

I looked across the table; his eyes were shining in the twilight, and I was startled by the passionate exultation in his voice. ‘You’ve understood before, I’ve found the only people to whom my existence is important. How can you expect anything else to count beside that fact?’

His voice quietened, he was smiling; the evening light falling from the window at my back showed his face glowing and at rest.

13: An Unnecessary Confession

WITH the success behind him, George remarked more often about a partnership ‘being not too far away’. For the first time, he showed some impatience about his own future: but he was no longer worried over Martineau. Both Morcom and I began to think he was right; during July and August, I almost abandoned my fear that Martineau might leave and so endanger George’s prospects in the firm.

Martineau’s behaviour seemed no more eccentric than we were used to. He was still doing everything we wanted of him; we went to Friday nights, we saw him walking backwards and forwards between the sofa and the window, his shadow leaping jerkily into the summer darkness. It was all as it had been last year; just as with any present reality, it was hard to imagine that it would ever cease.

We smiled as we heard him use a mysterious phrase — ‘the little plays’.

‘Of course, the man’s religion is at the bottom of it all,’ said George, back into boisterous spirits which were not damped even when Olive had to leave the town; her father’s health had worsened, and she took him to live by the sea. George compensated himself for that gap by his enormous pride in Jack’s and my performances; for my examination result was a good one, and Jack at last had achieved a business coup.

It added to Jack’s own liveliness. He was warmed by having made a little money and by feeling sure of his flair. And it was like him to signalise it by taking Mrs Passant to the pictures — her who was suspicious of all her son’s friends, who had denounced Jack in particular as an unscrupulous sponger. Yet he became the only one of us she liked.

It was also Jack who brought the next news of Martineau. One evening in September, George and I were walking by the station when we saw Jack hurrying in. He seemed embarrassed to meet us.

‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I can’t wait a minute. I’m staying at Chiswick for the weekend — my mother’s brother, you know.’

‘There’s no train to London for an hour, surely,’ said George. Jack shook his head, smiled, and ran into the booking hall.

‘Of course there’s no train at this time.’ George chuckled to me. ‘He must be after a woman. I wonder who he’s picked up now.’

The following day was a Saturday; at eight George and I were sitting in the Victoria; I mentioned that at exactly this time last year, within three days, Jack had been presented with a cigarette case. George was still smiling over the story when Jack himself came in.

‘I was looking for you,’ he said.

‘I thought you were staying with your prosperous uncle,’ said George.

Jack did not answer. Instead, he said: ‘I’ve something important to show you.’

He made us leave the public house, and walk up the street; it was a warm September night, and we were glad to. He took us into the park at the end of the New Walk. We sat on a bench under one of the chestnut trees and looked at the lights of the houses across the grass. The moon was not yet up; and the sky, over the cluster of lights, was so dense and blue that it seemed one could handle it. Jack pointed to the lights of Martineau’s. ‘Yes, it’s about him,’ he said.

He added: ‘George, I want to borrow your knife for a minute.’

With a puzzled look, George brought out the heavy pocket knife which he always carried. Jack opened it; then took a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and pinned it to the tree by the knife blade.

‘There,’ he said. ‘You’d have seen plenty of those last night—’ if we had gone with him to a neighbouring village.

It was too dark to read the poster in comfort. George struck a match, and peered in the flickering light.

The sheet was headed ‘Players of the Market Place’ and then, in smaller letters, ‘will be with you on Thursday night to give their LITTLE PLAYS. Titles for this evening, The Shirt, Circe. Written by us all. Played by us all. There is no collection,’ and in very large letters ‘WE WOULD RATHER HAVE YOUR CRITICISM THAN YOUR ABSENCE.’

It was a printed poster, and the proofs had been read with typical Martineau carelessness: so that, for instance, ‘evening’ appeared as ‘evenini’, like an odd word from one of the lesser-known Latin tongues, Romanian or Provençal.

The match burnt down to George’s fingers. He threw it away with a curse.

Jack explained that the ‘little plays’ purported to carry a religious moral: that they were presumably written by Martineau himself. Jack had watched part of one — ‘painfully bad’, he said.

George was embarrassed and distressed.

‘We can’t let him make a fool of himself in public. We must calm him down,’ he said. ‘He can’t have lost all sense of responsibility.’

‘He’s just kept enough to hide these antics from us,’ said Jack. ‘Still, I found him out.’ Then he laughed, and to my astonishment added: ‘Though in the process, of course, I managed to let you find me out.’

‘What do you mean now?’ said George, uninterested by the side of his concern for Martineau.

‘I made that slip about the train.’

‘Oh,’ said George.

‘And, of course, I remembered as soon as I spoke to you last night. I’ve always told you that my father’s brother lived in Chiswick. Last night I said it was my mother’s. After you’d noticed that, I may as well say that I’ve got no prosperous uncles living in Chiswick at all. I’m afraid that one night — it just seemed necessary to invent them.’

Jack spoke fast, smiling freshly in the dusk. Neither George nor I had noticed the slip: but that did not matter; he wanted to confess. He went on to confess some more romances; how he had wrapped his family in mystery, when really they were poor people living obscurely in the town. I was not much surprised. He was so fluid, I had watched him living one or two lies; and I had guessed about his family since he took pains to keep any of us from going near their house. I still was not sure where he lived.

He went on to tell us that one of his stories of an admiring woman had been imaginary. That seemed strange; for, more than most young men, he had enough conquests that were indisputably real. Perhaps he felt himself that this was an inexplicable invention — for he looked at George. The moon was just rising, and George’s face was lit up, but lit up to show a frown of anger and incomprehension.

‘I suppose it must seem slightly peculiar to you, George,’ said Jack. ‘But you don’t know what it is to be obliged to make the world a trifle more picturesque. I’m not defending myself, mind. I often wish I were a solid person like you. Still, don’t we all lie in our own fashion? You hear Martineau say, “George, I’m sure the firm’s always going to need you”. You’d never think of departing from the literal truth when you told us the words he’d said. But you’re quite capable, aren’t you, of interpreting the words in your own mind, and convincing yourself that he’s really promised you a partnership? While I’m afraid that I might be obliged to invent an offer, with chapter and verse. Lewis knows what I mean better than you do. But I know it makes life too difficult if one goes on after my fashion.’

He was repentant, but he was high-spirited, exalted. ‘Did you know,’ he went on, ‘that old Calvert told the truth at that committee of yours? He had warned me a month or two before that there wasn’t an opening for me in the firm.’

‘I didn’t know,’ said George. ‘Otherwise, I shouldn’t have acted.’

‘I can say this for myself,’ said Jack, ‘that the Roy affair brought him to the point.’

‘But you let me carry through the whole business under false pretences,’ George cried. ‘You represented it simply to get an advantage for yourself — and make sure that I should win it for you under false pretences?’

‘Yes,’ said Jack.

‘No,’ I said. ‘That was one motive, of course. But you’d have done it if there’d been nothing George could bring off for you. You’d have done it — because you couldn’t help wanting to heighten life.’

‘Perhaps so,’ said Jack.

‘I should never have acted,’ said George. He was shocked. He was shocked so much that he spoke quietly and with no outburst of anger. I thought that he sounded, more than anything, desperately lonely.

He stared at Jack in the moonlight. At that moment, their relation could have ended. Jack had been carried away by the need to reveal himself; he knew that many men — I myself, for example — would accept it easily; he had not realised the effect it would have on George. Yet, his intuition must have told him that, whatever happened, they would not part now.

George was seeing someone as different from himself as he would ever see. Here was Jack, who took on the colour of any world he lived in, who, if he remembered his home and felt the prick of a social shame, just invented a new home and believed in it, for the moment with his whole existence.

While George, remembering his home, would have thrust it in the world’s face: ‘I’m afraid I’m no good in any respectable society. You can’t expect me to be, starting where I did.’

That was his excuse for his diffidence’s and some of his violence, for his constant expectation of patronising treatment and hostility. In that strange instant, as he looked at Jack, I felt that for once he saw that it was only an excuse. Here was someone who ‘started’ where George did, and who threw it off, with a lie, as lightly as a girl he had picked up for an hour: who never expected to find enemies and felt men easy to get on with and easier to outwit.

George knew then that his ‘You can’t expect me to, starting where I did’ was an excuse. It was an excuse for something which any man finds difficult to recognise in himself: that is, he was by nature uneasy and on the defensive with most of his fellow men. He was only fully assured and comfortable with one or two intimate friends on whose admiration he could count; with his protégés, when he was himself in power: with women when he was making love. His shame at social barriers was an excuse for the hostility he felt in other people; an excuse for remaining where he could be certain that he was liked, and admired, and secure. If there had not been that excuse, there would have been another; the innate uneasiness would have come out in some other kind of shame.

That aspect of George, he shared with many men of characters as powerful as his own. The underlying uneasiness and the cloak of some shame, class shame, race shame, even the shame of deformity, whatever you like — they are a combination which consoles anyone like George to himself. For it is curiously difficult for any human being to recognise that he possesses natural limitations. We all tend to think there is some fundamental ‘I’ which could do anything, which could get on with all people, which would never meet an obstacle — ‘if only I had had the chance’. It was next to impossible — except in this rare moment of insight — for George to admit that his fundamental ‘I’ was innately diffident and ill-at-ease with other men. The excuse was more natural, and more comforting — ‘if only I had been born in gentler circumstances.’

George stood up, plucked his knife out of the tree and handed the poster to Jack.

‘Thank you for taking that trouble about Martineau,’ he said. ‘I know you did it on my account. You’ll let me know the minute you discover anything fresh, of course. We’ve got to help one another to keep him from some absolutely irretrievable piece of foolishness.’

14: The Last ‘Friday Night’

FOR some time we heard no further news. Friday nights went on in their usual pattern. But one day in November, when I was having tea with George, I found him heavy and preoccupied. I tried to amuse him. Once or twice he smiled, but in a mechanical and distracted way. Then I asked: ‘Is there a case? Can I help?’

‘There’s nothing on,’ said George. He picked up the evening paper and began to read. Abruptly he said, a moment later: ‘Martineau’s letting his mania run away with him.’

‘Has anything happened?’

‘I found out yesterday,’ George said, ‘that he was asking someone to value his share in the firm.’

‘You actually think he’s going to sell?’ I said.

‘I shouldn’t think even Martineau would get it valued for sheer enjoyment,’ said George. ‘Unless he’s madder than we think.’

His optimism had vanished now.

‘I thought he was a bit more settled,’ I said. ‘After he was headed off the plays.’

‘You can’t tell with him,’ said George.

‘Whatever can he be thinking of doing?’

‘God knows what he’s thinking of.’

‘There may be enough to live on,’ I suggested. ‘He might retire and go in for his plays and things — on a grandiose scale. Or he might take another job.’

‘It’s demoralising for the firm,’ George broke out. ‘I never know where I’m going to stand for two days together.’

‘You’ve got to forgive him a lot,’ I said.

‘I do.’

‘After all, he’s in a queer state.’

‘It’s absolute and utter irresponsibility,’ said George. ‘The man’s got a duty towards his friends.’

George’s temper was near the surface. He went to the next Friday night at Martineau’s; and sat uncomfortably silent while Martineau talked as gaily as ever, without any sign of care. Then, as for a moment Martineau left the room, George came over to Morcom and myself and whispered: ‘I’m going to tackle him afterwards. I’m going to ask for an explanation on the spot.’

When, at eleven, the others had gone, George said rapidly: ‘I wonder if you could spare us a few minutes, Mr Martineau?’

‘George?’ Martineau laughed at the stiffness of George’s tone. He had been standing up, according to his habit, behind the sofa: now he dropped into an armchair and clasped his fingers round his knee.

‘We simply want to be reassured on one or two matters,’ George said. ‘Sometimes you are an anxiety to your friends, you know.’ For a second, a smile, frank and affectionate, broke up the heaviness on George’s face. ‘Will you allow me to put our questions?’

‘If I can answer,’ Martineau murmured. ‘If I can answer.’

‘Well then, do you intend to give up your present position?’

‘My position!’ said Martineau. ‘Do you mean my position in thought? I’ve had so many,’ he smiled, ‘that some day I shall have to give some of them up, George.’

‘I meant, do you intend to give up your position in the firm?’

‘Ah,’ said Martineau. Morcom leant forward, half-smiling at the curiously naïve attempt to hedge. ‘It’d be easier if you hadn’t asked—’

‘Can you say no?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t — not a No like yours, George.’ He got up from the chair and began his walk by the window. ‘I’ve asked that question to myself, don’t you see, and I can’t answer it properly. I can’t be sure I’ve made up my mind for certain. But, perhaps I can tell you, I sometimes don’t feel I have any right to remain inside the firm.’

I had a sense of certainty that the hesitation was not there: I felt that he was speaking from an unequivocal heart. Whether he knew it or not. I wondered if he knew it.

‘Right,’ said George. ‘Of course you have a right. According to law and conventional ethics and any conceivable ethics of your own. Why shouldn’t you stay?’

‘It isn’t as straightforward,’ Martineau shook his head with a smile. ‘We touched on this before, George. I’ve thought of it so often since. You see, I can’t forget I’ve got some obligations which aren’t to the firm at all. I may be wrong, but they come before the firm if one has to choose.’

‘So have I,’ said George. ‘But the choice doesn’t arise.’

‘I’m afraid it does a little,’ Martineau replied. ‘I told you, I shouldn’t be able to stop the things that I feel I’m called for most. I can’t possibly stop them.’

‘No one wants you to,’ said George.

Martineau rested his hands on the sofa.

‘But I haven’t been able to see a way to keep on with those — and stay in the firm.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I oughtn’t to be part of a firm and doing it harm at the same time, surely you agree, George? And these other attempts of mine — that I can’t give up, they’re damaging it, of course.’

‘You mean to say the firm’s worse off because of your—’ George shouted, stopped and said, ‘activities?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘What’s the evidence?’

‘One or two people have said things.’ Martineau stared at the ceiling.

‘Have they said, plainly and definitely, that they think the firm’s worse off than it was a couple of years ago?’

‘They haven’t said it in quite so many words, but—’

‘They’ve implied it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who are they?’

‘I forget their names, except—’

‘Except who?’

‘Harry Eden said something not long ago.’

‘Then Eden’s a fool and a liar and I shall have pleasure in telling him so to his face,’ George was shouting again. ‘He wants to get rid of you and is trying a method that oughtn’t to take in a child. It’s simply nonsense. This is a straightforward matter of fact. The amount of business we did in the last nine months is bigger than in any other twelve months since I came. And we did more last month than during any similar time. It’s only natural, of course. Anyone but Eden would realise that. And even he would if he hadn’t a purpose of his own to serve. We’re bound to have more cases, considering the success we had not long ago.’

‘What do you mean?’ Martineau, who had been frowning, inquired.

‘It’s only reasonable to imagine,’ George said in a subdued voice, ‘that the case in the summer had something to do with it.’

‘Oh yes,’ Martineau became passive again.

Morcom said: ‘Do you think George is wrong, Howard? Do you really think the firm is suffering?’

His voice sounded cold and clear after the others.

‘I think perhaps we’re talking of different things,’ said Martineau. ‘I’m sure George’s figures are right. I wasn’t thinking of it quite in that way. I mean, I believe, I’m doing — what shall I say? — a kind of impalpable harm — just as the work I’m trying to do outside the firm is impalpable work. Which doesn’t prevent it’ — he smiled — ‘being the most practical in the world, in my opinion.’

‘I want to know,’ George’s voice was raised, ‘what do you mean by impalpable harm to the firm?’

They argued again: Martineau became more evasive, and once he showed something like a flash of anger.

‘I’m trying to do the best thing,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry you seem so eager to prevent me.’

‘That’s quite unfair.’

‘I hoped my friends at any rate would give me credit for what I’m trying.’ Then he recovered his light temper. ‘Ah well, George, when you do something you feel is right, you’ll know just what to expect.’

‘Have you definitely made up your mind’, said Morcom, ‘to sell your share in the firm?’

‘I can’t say that,’ said Martineau. ‘Just now. I will tell you soon.’

‘When?’

‘It can’t be long, it can’t possibly be long,’ Martineau replied.

‘Next Friday?’ I asked.

‘No, not then. I shan’t be in that night.’

Since any of us knew him, he had never missed being at home on Friday night. He announced it quite casually.

‘I’ll see you soon, though,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell George when we can arrange one of our chats. It’s so friendly of you to be worried. I value that, you don’t know how I value that.’

In the street there was a mist which encircled the lamps. For a moment we stood outside the park gate; I felt a shiver of chill, and an anxious tension became mixed with the night’s cold. Morcom said: ‘We’d better go and have a coffee. We ought to talk this out.’

We walked down the road towards the station, chatting perfunctorily, our footsteps ringing heavily in the dank air. We went — there was nowhere else in this part of the town at night — to the café where we held the first conference about Jack.

‘Can we do anything?’ Morcom asked, as soon as we sat down. ‘Have either of you any ideas?’

‘He must be stopped,’ said George.

‘That’s easy to say.’

‘If only he could be made to recognise the facts,’ George said.

‘That doesn’t help.’

‘Of course it would help. The man’s simply been misled. By the way,’ George added with an elaborately indifferent smile, ‘I thought you might have taken the opportunity to enlighten him. About the importance of the work I’ve done for them. Particularly the case.’

I saw a light, a narrowed concentration, in Morcom’s eyes; I was on edge. I expected him to be provoked by the insistence and say something like, ‘I could have explained, George, how important the case seems to you.’ Morcom hesitated, and said: ‘I would. But it wouldn’t have been useful to you — or to him.’

‘That’s absurd,’ George burst out. ‘If he could really see.’

‘It wouldn’t make the slightest difference.’

‘I refuse to accept that.’

‘Don’t you see,’ Morcom leaned forward, ‘that he’s bound to leave?’

I knew it too. Yet George sat without replying. He seemed blind: he was a man himself more passionate and uncontrolled than any of us, but now he was not able to see past his own barricade of reasons, he was not able to perceive the passions of another.

‘You must recognise that,’ Morcom was saying. ‘You don’t think all these arguments matter to him? Except to bolster up a choice he’s already been forced to make. That’s all. I expect it pleases him’ — he smiled — ‘to be told how much he’s giving up, and how unnecessary it is. It’s just a luxury. As for affecting him, one might as well sing choruses from The Gondoliers. He’s already made the decision in his mind.’ He smiled again. ‘As far as that goes,’ he added, ‘he may already have made it in fact.’

‘You mean he’s actually sold his share?’ George said.

‘I don’t know,’ said Morcom. ‘It’s possible.’

‘To some bastard,’ said George, ‘who happens to have enough money to make a nuisance of himself to other people. Who’ll disapprove of everything I do. Who’ll make life intolerable for me.’

15: Martineau’s Intention

I walked past Martineau’s, the following Friday night. The drawing room window was dark: Martineau, so George thought, was visiting his brother, the Canon. Next day, when I was having supper with Morcom, George sent a message by Jack: Martineau wanted to see us tomorrow (Sunday) afternoon: we were to meet at George’s.

‘Martineau’s getting more fun out of all this than anyone else,’ said Jack. ‘Like your girl’ — he said to Morcom — ‘when she decided to sacrifice herself. Blast them both.’ He could speak directly to Morcom about Olive, as no one else could; and he went out of his way to ease Morcom’s jealousy. ‘How is she, by the way? No one else ever hears a word but you.’

‘She seems fairly cheerful,’ said Morcom.

‘Blast her and Martineau as well. Send them off together,’ said Jack. ‘They deserve each other. That’d put them right if anything could.’ His face melted into a mischievous, kindly grin. I had heard him say the same, with even more mischief, about Sheila.

When I arrived at George’s the next day, he was smoking after the midday meal. His shout of greeting had a formal cheerfulness, but I could hear no heart behind it.

‘You’re the first,’ he said.

‘Martineau is coming?’

‘I imagine so,’ said George. ‘Even Martineau couldn’t get us all together and then not turn up himself.’

We sat by the window, looking out into the street. The knocker on the door opposite glistened in the sun.

Soon there were footsteps down the pavement. Martineau looked in and waved his hand. George went to let him in.

‘Come in,’ I heard George saying, and then, ‘Isn’t it a beautiful day?’

Martineau sat down in an armchair opposite the window; his face, lit by the clear light from the street, looked tranquil and happy. George pushed the table back against the wall, and placed two chairs in front of the fire.

‘Have you seen Morcom lately?’ he said to Martineau. ‘I sent him word.’

‘He may be just a little late,’ Martineau said. ‘He is having lunch with’ — he smiled at George — ‘my brother.’

‘Why’s that?’ George’s question shot out.

‘To talk over my little affair, I’m afraid,’ Martineau answered. ‘I’ve never made such a nuisance of myself before—’ his laugh was full of pleasure.

‘What does your brother think of it?’

‘Very much the same as you do, George. He rather took the line that I owe an obligation to my relatives.’ Martineau stared at the ceiling. ‘I tried to put it to him as a Christian minister. I pointed out that he ought to sympathise with our placing certain duties higher than our duties to relatives. But he didn’t seem to agree with my point of view.’

‘Nor would any man of any sense,’ said George.

‘But is sense the most important thing?’ Martineau asked ‘For myself—’

‘I refuse to be bullied by all these attacks on reason. I’m sorry, Mr Martineau,’ said George, ‘but I spend a great deal of my own time, as you know perfectly well, in activities that don’t give me any personal profit whatever; but I’m prepared to justify them by reason, and if I couldn’t I should give them up. That isn’t true of what you propose to do, and so if you’ve got any respect for your intellectual honesty you’ve got no option but to abandon it.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t see it like that.’ Martineau moved restlessly; his eyes met mine and then looked into the fire.

‘There is no other way of seeing it,’ said George.

(Many years later, near the end of George’s life, I had to recall that justification of his.)

Through the uproar of George’s voice I thought I had heard a knock at the door; it came again, now. I got up, and brought Morcom in. He spoke directly to Martineau.

‘Eden’s made a suggestion—’

‘Where have you been?’ George interrupted.

‘Having lunch with Eden and Howard’s brother.’

‘I’m afraid,’ Martineau broke in, ‘I’ve been rather guilty this afternoon. I was trying to break it gently, you see, George. You must forgive me!’

‘I’d better be told now.’

‘Well, I spent all the early part of last week thinking over everything that had been said,’ Martineau began. ‘It was very difficult with so many friends that I really respect — you must believe that I respect your opinion, George — with so many friends — disapproving so much. But in the end I felt that I had to let them disapprove. The way I’d come to did really seem to be the only way.’ He smiled. ‘It does still.’

George had flushed. Morcom was looking at Martineau.

‘So I told Harry Eden on Monday afternoon,’ Martineau went on. ‘He said he’d like to see my brother. That’s why I arranged for them to meet.’

‘You’d arranged that a week ago. So you’d made up your mind then,’ George burst out.

‘Not quite made up.’ For a moment Martineau looked a little distraught. ‘And in any case I felt I should like to have his advice, whether I had decided or not, you see. And Eden thought he’d feel easier if he could talk to one of my relatives, naturally.’

‘I was brought in,’ Morcom said, ‘because Martineau hasn’t any close friends of his own age in the town. You were ruled out because you were in the firm yourself, George. So Eden asked me in.’

To me, it was natural enough. Morcom at twenty-eight was a man who seemed made for responsibility; and most people thought of him as older.

‘I suppose it’s understandable,’ George said. ‘But if you’ve made up your mind’ — he looked at Martineau — ‘however fantastic it seems to everyone else, why should Eden become so officious all of a sudden? It’s simply a matter of selling your share. I should have thought even Eden could have done that without family conferences.’

There was a pause. Martineau said, his voice trailing off: ‘There is one matter that isn’t quite—’

‘It’s this,’ said Morcom. ‘Martineau doesn’t want to sell his share. He insists on giving it up to Eden.’

We sat in silence.

‘It’s raving lunacy,’ George cried out.

‘George! You won’t be the last to call it that kind of name.’ Martineau laughed.

‘I’m sorry,’ said George, heavily. ‘And yet — what else can you call it?’

‘I should like to call it something else.’ Martineau was still laughing. ‘I should like to call it: part of an attempt to live as I think I ought. It’s time, George, it’s time, after fifty years.’

‘Why do you think you ought?’

‘The religion I try to believe in—’

‘You know you’re doubtful whether you can call yourself a Christian.’

‘This world of affairs of yours, George,’ Martineau was following another thought — ‘why, my chief happiness in your socialism is that one ought to give up all one has to the common good. It’s always been a little of a puzzle how one can fail to do that in practice and keep the faith.’

George was flaring out, when I said: ‘“Give it up to the common good” — but you’re not doing that. You’re giving it to Eden.’

‘Ah, Lewis!’ Martineau smiled. ‘You think at least I ought to dispose of it myself?’

‘I should have thought so.’

‘Don’t you see,’ he said, ‘that I can’t do that? If I admit I have the power to dispose of it, why then I haven’t got rid of the chains. I’ve got to let it slide. I mustn’t allow myself the satisfaction of giving it to a friend’ — he looked at George — ‘or selling it and giving the money to charity. I’m compelled to forgo even that. I must just stand by as humbly as I can and be glad I haven’t got the power.’

I looked at Morcom and George. We were all quiet. It was in a flat, level voice that George said: ‘No doubt Eden hasn’t raised any objections.’

‘That’s not fair,’ said Morcom. ‘He’s behaved very well.’

Martineau looked cheerfully at George. He still enjoyed a thrust at his partner’s expense.

‘He’s a good fellow,’ he said lightly.

‘I prefer to hold to my own opinion.’

‘He’s behaved well,’ said Morcom again. ‘Better than you could reasonably expect. He refused to do anything at all until he’d seen Martineau’s brother. He said today that he doesn’t like it and that he won’t sign any transfer for three months. If anything happens to make Martineau change his mind during that time, then Eden wants the firm to go on as before. And if it doesn’t, well, he said he was a businessman and not a philanthropist, and so he wasn’t going to make gestures. He’ll just take the offer. He’s very fond of Martineau, he’s as sorry as anyone else that this has happened—’

‘I wish,’ Martineau chuckled, ‘everyone wouldn’t refer to me as though I were either insane or dead.’ We all laughed, George very loudly.

‘It’s good of him,’ said Martineau. ‘But I’m afraid he might as well save the time. I consider that it isn’t mine any longer, you see. For — it isn’t decided by a form of law—’

Soon afterwards Martineau left. When I heard the door click outside, I said: ‘Whatever’s going to become of him?’

On George’s face injury struggled with concern: he shook his head. Morcom said: ‘God knows.’ But, at that time, even our most fantastic prophecies would not have approached the truth.

‘The first thing,’ said George, ‘is to satisfy ourselves that he can find a living. We can’t take any other steps until we’re sure of that.’

‘Apparently he told his brother he was going to earn enough by various methods. Which he wouldn’t give any details of,’ said Morcom. ‘I simply don’t know what he means.’

‘Though how he reconciles giving up his share,’ said George with an impatient laugh, ‘and earning a living in any other way, is just beyond me. I suppose consistency isn’t his strong point. Oh God!’ he broke out, ‘don’t you find it hard to realise that this has happened?’

‘Of course he won’t starve,’ Morcom said. ‘That’s one comfort. There is plenty of money in the family. In fact, that’s one of his brother’s chief anxieties. That they’ll have to support him. The Canon’s a hard man, by the way. I don’t think I like him much.’

‘Not so much as you like Eden, I suppose,’ George said.

Morcom paused slightly: ‘Nothing like,’ he said.

The strain between them was showing in every word. I said hastily: ‘What’s he going to do with the house? Does he own it or not?’

‘He’s got some scheme for turning it into a boarding house,’ said Morcom. ‘With his housekeeper in charge.’

‘That means we’ve had the last “Friday night”,’ I said. ‘I shall miss them,’ I added.

‘You have to realise,’ said Morcom deliberately, ‘that he’s cutting himself away from his present life. That means cutting himself away from us as much as from the firm. You have to understand that. He doesn’t want to see much of us again.’

Suddenly George burst into gusts of laughter. I found myself grow tense, watching him shake, seeing the tears that came so easily.

‘I’ve just thought,’ he wiped his eyes, then began to laugh again as helplessly. ‘I’ve just thought,’ he said at last in a weak voice: ‘Martineau’s position is exactly this. He thinks a man couldn’t hold his share in the firm if he’s either a Christian or a socialist. So he gives it up, being neither a Christian nor a socialist.’

It was a typical George joke, in its symmetry, in the incongruity that would strike no one else. But he had been laughing more for relief than at the joke. Soon he was saying, quite soberly: ‘We’ve been assuming all the time that everything’s settled. We haven’t given ourselves a chance to do anything in the matter.’

‘Of course we can’t do anything,’ said Morcom.

‘I don’t know whether I accept that completely,’ said George. ‘But if so we shall have to set to work in another direction.’

I did not know what those words foreshadowed; I was easier in mind than I had been that afternoon, to see his spirits enlivened again.

16: Walk in the Rain

AFTER he went away from George’s, none of us saw Martineau for weeks. There were some rumours about him; he was said to have bought a share of a small advertising agency, and also to have been seen in a poor neighbourhood visiting from house to house. Several times at Eden’s we talked of him and speculated over his next move. The whole episode often seemed remote, as we sat in the comfortable room, hung with a collection of Chinese prints, and heard Eden say: ‘These things will happen.’ He said it frequently, with a tolerant and good-humoured smile.

Now that ‘Friday nights’ no longer existed, he had suggested that we call on him instead. He changed the day to Sunday, explaining that Friday was inconvenient for him, as his wife entertained that night. His real reason, I thought later, was a delicacy we did not appreciate enough. He gave us good food and drink, and the conversation was, more often than not, better than at Martineau’s. The liking I had formed for Eden after casual meetings strengthened now. It was difficult to remember that this was the man whom George so much disliked.

Though by this time I knew something of George’s antipathies, I tried to argue him out of this, the most practically important. It seemed more than ever urgent for him to gain Eden’s approval. He protested angrily, but was less obdurate than in the summer. One Sunday I persuaded him to come to the house, and he was nervously silent apart from a sudden quick-worded argument with Eden upon some matter of political history; it was the first time I had seen that drawing room disturbed. When Morcom and I disagreed with Eden, it meant only one of his good-humoured aphorisms, followed by a monologue that did not lead to controversy.

George said, as he stopped outside the gate to light a pipe: ‘I hope you’re satisfied now.’

In the match light, he was smiling happily. To him, I suddenly realised, for whom most meetings and most people were full of unknown hostility, the night had been a success.

‘You must go again,’ I said.

‘Naturally,’ said George. ‘After all, I’ve truckled for three years, in the firm. I must say, though, that he went out of his way to be civil tonight.’

It began to rain heavily, and we got on a tram-car. As it moved towards the town, we pieced together the rumours about Martineau. Often George guffawed: ‘Fancy having one’s goods advertised by Martineau,’ he burst out. ‘And fancy giving up,’ he chuckled, ‘a perfectly respectable profession to take up one more disreputable by any conceivable standards in the world. The only advantage being that it’s almost certain to fail.’ He laughed and wiped his eyes. ‘Oh, Good God in Heaven, whatever is the point? Whatever does he think is the point?’

Suddenly George said, without any introduction: ‘I think we’ve exaggerated this upheaval in the firm.’

I shook my head, and said: ‘I am quite certain of one thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That, whatever happens, Martineau will never come back to the firm. I’m sure that’s true. It’s unpleasant for you. But you must resign yourself—’

George said: ‘I did that weeks ago. I assumed it as soon as Martineau disappeared.’

‘Then what did you mean?’ I said. ‘About the upheaval in the firm being exaggerated. Whatever could you mean?’

‘Oh,’ said George. ‘I decided, as I said, that Martineau could be ruled out. He obviously wouldn’t be any further help. But what I meant was, I couldn’t see why Eden shouldn’t do as much for me as Martineau ever did. And I began to realise there were reasons why he should do a great deal more.’

‘At once?’

‘I don’t see why he shouldn’t be taking steps to make me a partner. Fairly soon.’

‘Is that likely?’ (I was thinking: this ought to have been foreseen.)

‘I don’t see why not.’

The tram was rattling to a stop: I rubbed the window with my sleeve. The rain had ceased, though it was dripping from the roofs. We were near the railway bridge, by some old mean streets.

‘Look here,’ said George. ‘I’ve got a bit of a head. Let’s walk from here.’

The gutters were swirling as we got off. George said: ‘I don’t see why not. After all, he’ll be gaining enough by this business. He can afford to take a partner without any capital. He would have to get someone in my place, naturally. But Eden would still be better off by a very decent amount, compared with what he has been. With the advantages of having me as a partner.’

‘Those being? I mean, from Eden’s point of view?’

We were walking under the bridge. Our footsteps echoed, and I shivered in the cold. George’s voice came back.

‘The first is one we all tend to forget. That is, there is such a thing as ordinary human justice. Eden can’t be too comfortable if I’m doing more work than the rest of the firm put together — which I have been doing for the last two years — and getting the money, which doesn’t matter so much, and having the position, which matters a great deal, of a fairly competent clerk.’

‘Are you sure he realises that — altogether?’

‘If he doesn’t,’ said George, ‘it’s simply because he doesn’t want to see. But even then — it must be perfectly obvious.’ He walked along, looking straight ahead. ‘The other reason is what plain blunt practical men would consider a great deal more important. That is, Eden doesn’t know anything about half the cases we have to deal with. You know perfectly well, we’ve got a connection in income tax and property law and other kinds of superior accountancy. Well, Martineau could cope with those before he began to be troubled with doubt’ — he chuckled — ‘and even lately he could give people the impression that he knew something about it. Well, Eden simply couldn’t. He’s grotesquely incompetent at any piece of financial detail. In three or four years he’d have ruined our connection. It’d be too ridiculous, he’s bound to realise it.’ He went on, very quickly, as though to dismiss any argument: ‘No, so far as I can see, there’s only one possible reason for his not taking me in, and that is, he hasn’t much sympathy for my general attitude.

‘But I can’t believe he’d let that outweigh everything else,’ George went on. ‘There are limits, you can’t deny there are limits. And also he’s shown signs recently that he’s coming round. I think it’ll be all right. Anyway we must see it is all right. You realise,’ he said, ‘that Eden can be influenced nowadays.’

‘How?’

‘I should have thought it was obvious.’

‘How?’

‘Morcom, of course,’ George said. ‘Obviously Eden’s very much impressed with him for some reason. You noticed how he sent for him for that rather absurd conference with the Martineau’s. And Morcom sees him very often—’

‘Only on Sundays.’

‘I’ve seen them in the town.’ George frowned. ‘It’s absolutely patent that Morcom counts for a great deal with him. Well, we’ve got to take advantage of that.’

‘He can’t—’

‘I know what you’re going to say,’ said George. ‘I know as well as you do that Morcom doesn’t approve of most of the things I do. I realise that and I’ve considered it. And I’ve decided I’ve a right to demand that he forgets it. He must talk to Eden about me. It’s too important to let minor things stand in the way.’ He paused, and then turned to me. Before, he had been looking straight ahead down the dark street. ‘You mustn’t know anything about this. Not even to Morcom. I’ll deal with him myself.’ Then his voice suddenly became friendly, and he talked as though he was pleasantly fatigued.

‘It’s important that Eden should take me in,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to stay there as a subordinate and watch myself getting old.’

‘That won’t happen,’ I said.

‘I don’t know,’ said George. ‘Things have never fallen in my lap.’

I had a rush of friendship for him, the warm friendship which sometimes at this period I was provoked into forgetting.

‘It’s time they began,’ I said.

‘It isn’t that I’m not ambitious,’ said George. ‘I am, you know, to some extent. I know I’m not as determined as you’ve turned out to be — but matters never shaped themselves to give ambition a chance. I had to take the job here, there wasn’t any alternative to that. When I got here, I couldn’t do anything different from what I have done. Of course, I got interested in making something of people at the School. But I couldn’t help myself.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘It’s important from every point of view that I get promoted,’ he said quickly. ‘For the group as well. If I’m really going to do much for anyone. I haven’t got the money. I’m often powerless. I nearly was about Jack. God! how crippled one feels when there’s someone who only wants money to give them a start.’

‘You’d be worse off than you are now.’ I smiled. ‘Giving it away.’

George’s own smile grew vaguer.

‘There’s another possibility,’ he said. ‘I don’t know, but I may feel some time that I’ve done as much as I can with the School. After all, the present people will go away in time. I don’t know that I shall want to get interested in any more.’

It was the first time I had heard him permit such a suggestion.

‘I may want to do something useful in a wider field,’ said George. ‘And for that, I must be in with Eden. The group’s all very well in its way, but its success is inside oneself, as you’ve said before now. As one gets older, perhaps one isn’t pure enough to be satisfied with that.’

I tried to laugh it off. ‘Martineau seems to be satisfied pretty easily,’ I said. ‘If his success isn’t inside himself—’

George laughed. Then he said: ‘I may even want to get married.’

Although a wish, it was no clearer than the others. It was one of many wishes springing from the unrest, the hope, that brought to his face a happy and expectant smile.

17: A Slip of the Tongue

I was upset by that talk with George.

He was mistaken, I knew, when he suddenly discovered that he was ambitious. If he had been truly ambitious, I should not have been so concerned; for, when this partnership failed him, he would have found something else to drive for. While George valued it more acutely, precisely because he did not usually care — just as a man like Morcom, not easily surrendered to love, may once in his life long for it with a passion dangerous to himself.

George at this moment longed for the place and security to which, for years, he had scarcely given a thought.

But that was nothing like all. I realised that Olive had been right. Months before, by a lucky guess or clairvoyance, she had divined something more important. ‘I think he sometimes knows he was unlucky to get amongst us. Sometimes he wants to get away,’ she said. He was trying to break from his present life, the School, the little world, the group. Jack’s confession might have weakened him — but Olive felt it long before, long before his most vehement declaration of faith, that night in the café by the river. I believed that she was right.

However much he was satisfied by the little world he had built up, he was able to think of breaking free. Perhaps he half realised the danger, the crippling danger to himself. Anyway, he seemed to know that for just these months there was a chance to break loose from his own satisfaction. He also seemed to know that, if this failed, he would never bring himself to the point again.

Hearing George express his want for a respectable position, a comfortable middle-class income, the restraints of a junior partner in a firm of solicitors in a provincial town, I could not help being moved. Knowing the improbability, knowing above all this new suspicious faith in Morcom’s influence, I was afraid. There was only a short time before Eden’s period of grace ran out; it need not be final, but it would deprive George of his hopes.

I heard nothing, until a fortnight later, when Morcom and I were on our way towards Eden’s. Abruptly Morcom said: ‘George thinks Eden will offer him a partnership.’ I exclaimed.

‘He stands exactly as much chance as I do,’ said Morcom. He gave a short laugh, and talked about George’s unrealistic hopes. Then I said: ‘They’re quite fantastic, of course. But that doesn’t prevent him believing in them. It doesn’t prevent him attaching as much importance to them as you might to something reasonable. Surely that’s true.’

‘I expect it is,’ said Morcom. His voice sounded flat, his manner despondent and out of spirits. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I can’t do anything. Eden will settle it completely by himself.’

‘You might sound him,’ I said.

‘It’s a lot of trouble simply because George believes the world revolves round him,’ said Morcom.

‘If he knew it had been mentioned—’ I said. ‘You see,’ I added, filled with an inexplicable shame as well as anxiety, ‘he’s always got a dim feeling that you’re antagonistic. If that grows, it’s going to make life unpleasant.’

Morcom’s face, as we came near a street lamp, looked drawn. I was surprised that the statement should have affected him so much. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’d better try tonight.’

For most of the evening I sat listening to Eden’s anecdotes, laughing more easily to make up for my impatience. The room was warm, there was a fire blazing, stoked high in the chimney: Eden was sitting by its side in his customary armchair, in front of which stood the little table full of books and pipes and a decanter. He wore a velvet smoking jacket. Morcom sat opposite to him. I in the middle: behind Morcom, the light picked out the golden lines in one of the Chinese pictures.

At last there was a lull. Eden filled his glass. Morcom was leaning forward, the fingers of one hand tight over his knee.

‘By the way, the time you gave Martineau to make up his mind — it’ll be over soon, won’t it?’

‘I hadn’t thought of it just lately.’ Eden sipped, and put down his glass. ‘Why, do you know, I suppose it will.’

‘There’s no chance of his coming back,’ said Morcom.

I added: ‘None at all.’

‘I’m afraid you’re right,’ said Eden. It was a comfortable fear, I could not help thinking. ‘It’s a queer business. It’s one of the queerest things I’ve ever struck.’

‘What are you going to do about it? About the firm, I mean?’ The questions were sharp. I could feel Morcom, as I was myself, responding to a slight, an amiable unwillingness in Eden’s manner.

‘I dare say it will go on,’ Eden smiled. ‘When once you’ve really started, it’s not a difficult proposition to keep going, you know.’

‘You’re not thinking of filling — Martineau’s place?’

‘I needn’t make any decision yet,’ Eden said. ‘There isn’t any hurry, of course. But my present belief is that I shan’t take another partner. I’m an old-fashioned democrat in affairs of state’ — he smiled — ‘but the older I get, the more I believe smaller things ought to be controlled by one man.’

‘I can believe that,’ said Morcom. ‘But it’s a lot of work for one man.’

‘There’s plenty of responsibility,’ said Eden. ‘But that’s the penalty of being in control. No one wants it, but it’s got to be shouldered. As for the detailed work, I shan’t do any more than I’m doing now. I can trust the staff for anything in the way of routine. And to some extent I can trust Passant to work on his own.’

‘He is very capable?’ said Morcom.

‘Very capable. Very capable indeed.’ Eden was talking affably, but his lips had no tendency towards their smile. ‘So long as he’s working under someone level-headed. I know he’s a friend of you two. I’m speaking as I shouldn’t, you mustn’t let it go beyond these four walls. But Passant’s a man who’d have a future in front of him if only he didn’t spoil himself. He’s got a brilliant scholastic record, and though that isn’t the same as being able to take your coat off in an office, he’s done some good sound work for the firm. An outsider might think that I ought to give him a chance in a year or two to buy a share in the firm. But unless he takes himself in hand I don’t believe I shall be able to do it. I couldn’t feel I was doing the right thing.’

‘Why not?’

‘You’ll be sure not to let this go any further?’ Eden looked at us. ‘Though a hint from you’ — he glanced at Morcom — ‘on your own account wouldn’t be amiss. The trouble about Passant is — he’s rackety. He’s like a tremendous number of young men of your generation. There’s nothing to keep him between the rails.’

I suddenly could hear, among the moderate ordinary words, a dislike as intense as that which George bore him.

‘I know you can say that’s a matter for the man himself. It’s no one else’s business how he lives. He’s a grown man, he’s free to choose his own friends and his own pleasures. If he wants to spend his spare time with these young men and girls he collects together, no one’s going to stop him. But’ — Eden shook his head — ‘it’s got to be remembered when you’re thinking of his position here. I mightn’t mind — except that they take up too much of his time — but the great majority of our clients would. And it’s very hard to blame them. When you see a man night after night sitting in cafés with hordes of young girls, and you haven’t much doubt that he’s pretty loose-living all round; when you hear him laying down the law on every topic under heaven, telling everyone how to run the world: when above all you find him making an officious nuisance of himself in matters that don’t concern him, like that affair of Calvert’s: then you have to be an unusually tolerant man’ — Eden leaned back and smiled — ‘to feel very happy when you pay the firm a visit and find he’s your family solicitor.’

‘Particularly if he insists on telling you that you ought to follow his example,’ Morcom said. ‘And that you ought to bring your daughter just to show there’s no ill-feeling.’

Involuntarily, I smiled myself. Then I stared in dismay at Morcom, while Eden continued to laugh. I was thinking, more bitter in my reproaches because I might have committed it myself, that the gibe was less than deliberate. It was one of those outbursts, triumphantly warm on the tongue, whose echo afterwards makes one wince with remorse. It was one of those outbursts that everyone is impelled to at times, however subtle and astute. In fact, I was to discover, the more subtle and astute one was, the more facilely such indiscretions came. Until, like the politicians I knew later, one disciplined oneself to say nothing spontaneous at all.

But that was not the whole of it, I knew, as I listened to Eden’s slow and pleasant voice again. For while we listen to a friend being attacked, there are moments of sick and painful indignation, however untrue the charge: and, at other moments such as those when we make Morcom’s joke — however untrue the charge — we find ourselves leaping to agree. We find ourselves, ashamed and eager with the laugh, on Eden’s side. Again, until we have hardened our characters, eliminated the trendiness along with the free-flowing.

‘After all,’ Eden was saying, ‘Martineau can’t have done us any good. People might respect him if they understood what he was getting at — but they don’t want a saint, they want a sensible solicitor. We’ve got to win a certain amount of confidence back. We couldn’t afford another Martineau. I’m afraid Passant would cause a bigger hostility even that that.’

‘He’s far more competent,’ Morcom insisted.

‘I suppose he is,’ slowly Eden agreed.

‘He’s in a different class intellectually,’ Morcom leaned forward. ‘He’s got an astounding mental energy. You ought to remember that when you talk of him wasting time. He’s capable of amusing himself till midnight and then concentrating for five or six hours.’

‘And be worn out next day.’ Eden looked a little disturbed.

‘No, he’d be tired. But not too tired to work. He’s got a curious loyalty. Which we should naturally see more of than you would. He’d never do anything deliberately to harm the firm. Even for his beliefs — which are very real. That affair of Calvert’s: he only did it because of his beliefs. He is rather a remarkable man.’

The sentences were rapped out, jerkily and harshly. Eden’s face was calm and kindly as he listened, his head thrown back, his eyes looking down so that one saw a half-closed lid.

‘Perhaps he’s too remarkable,’ Eden said, ‘for a solicitor in a provincial town.’

When we left, it was late, the cars had stopped, we had to walk through the cold still night. We were both silent; I looked at the stars, without finding the moment’s ease they often gave. As we parted, Morcom spoke: ‘It would have done no good, whatever I said.’

18: I Appeal

I saw none of them for several days. As it happened, I was sleeping badly and in a state of physical malaise. I stayed in my room, goading myself to work with an apprehension never far from my mind.

At last, on an evening in the week that Eden’s period ran out, I was driven to visit Martineau. I had not been out for days.

I had heard that his advertising agency was run under the name of a partner called Exell. It took me some time to find their office; it was a tiny room on the fifth storey of an old block of buildings, at the corner of the market place. Martineau sat there alone, and greeted me with a cheerful cry.

‘So nice to see you,’ he said. ‘This is where we keep body and soul together.’

He was dressed untidily in an old grey suit: but the habitual buttonhole still gleamed white and incongruous on his breast.

‘Can we do anything for you, Lewis? There must be something we can do.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I only came to talk.’

‘Nearly as good,’ said Martineau. ‘Nearly as good. But I must show you one or two of our little schemes—’

He was so full of them that nothing could stop him describing them, fervently and happily. There were several: from one or two he did make a small income for some time: one I had cause to remember afterwards. They had bought a local advertising paper, which appeared weekly. It was sold at a penny, circulated among shopkeepers in the town, and carried some suburban news. Martineau had published some religious articles in it; he read them aloud enthusiastically, before asking me: ‘Have you come for anything special, Lewis?’

‘It’s dull and private,’ I said.

‘Fire away,’ said Martineau.

As it was cold in their room, however, I took him out to a café. When I explained that I was not well, Martineau said: ‘You do look a bit under the weather!’

And when we went into the café lounge, he looked round with his lively curiosity, and said: ‘Do you know, Lewis, I’ve not been in one of these big cafés for years.’

I was too strung up to pay attention then, but later that remark seemed an odd example of the geographical separations of our lives. For nearly two years I had seen Martineau each week. Yet the territory we covered — in a town a few miles square — was utterly different: draw his paths in blue and mine in red, like underground railways, and the only junction would be at his house.

We sat by a window: in the marketplace, as I glanced down, the light of a shop suddenly went out.

‘You remember what Saturday is?’ I said.

‘I don’t think I do,’ Martineau reflected.

‘It’s the day Eden said he’d accept your share in the firm — if you didn’t change your mind.’

‘He’s an obstinate old fellow.’ Martineau smiled. ‘I told him he could have it months ago — and he wouldn’t believe me. Ah well, he’ll have to now.’

‘Yes, I know,’ I said quickly. ‘There’s something important about all this. Which may be a calamity to some of your friends. And you can stop it. Shall I go on?’

‘You’re trying to persuade me to come back?’ He laughed.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not that now. I want to ask — something a good deal less.’

‘Go on, Lewis,’ he said. ‘Go on.’

‘It’s about your partnership,’ I said. ‘George has set his heart on having it himself.’

‘Oh,’ said Martineau. ‘I can see one or two difficulties.’ His tone was curiously businesslike. ‘He didn’t behave very wisely over Calvert, you know.’

‘You can’t hold that against him,’ I cried.

‘Of course I don’t,’ said Martineau quickly. ‘But he’s very young yet, of course.’

‘It wouldn’t have mattered about his age,’ I said. ‘If he’d the money to buy a partnership somewhere.’

‘I believe that’s true,’ said Martineau.

‘It’s entirely a matter of money. Of course, he hasn’t any.’

‘You’re sure he really wants to be tied down like that?’

‘More than anything in the world. Just at this minute.’

‘He used to put — first things first,’ said Martineau.

‘He still does, I think,’ I said. ‘But he’s not entirely like you. He wants the second things as well.’

‘Well done, well done,’ he said. Then as he quietened down into a pleased smile, he said: ‘Well, if old George really wants to go in, I do hope Eden asks him. George deserves to be given what he wants — more than most of us.’

The affection was, I had always known, genuine and deeper than for any of us. It was as unquestionable as Eden’s dislike of George.

‘Except,’ said Martineau, ‘that perhaps none of us deserves to be given what we want.’

‘Eden certainly won’t ask him,’ I said. ‘He’s said as much.’

‘Such a pity,’ said Martineau. ‘I’m sorry for George, but it can’t be helped.’

I was as diffident as though I were asking for money for myself. Of all men, he seemed the most impossible to plead with for a favour: for no reason that I could understand, except a paralysis of one’s own will.

‘It can be helped,’ I said. ‘You can help it.’

‘I’m helpless.’ Martineau shook his head. ‘It’s Eden’s firm now.’

‘You needn’t give your share to him. You can give it to George instead.’

Very gently, Martineau said: ‘You know how I should like to. I’d like to do that more than most things. But haven’t I told you already why I can’t? You know I can’t—’

‘I know you said you were giving up everything — and it’s being false to yourself to hold on to your share. Even in this way. Can’t you think again about that?’

‘I wish I could,’ said Martineau.

‘I wouldn’t ask you if it weren’t serious. But it’s desperately serious.’

Martineau looked at me.

‘It’s George I’m asking you for. This matters more for George’s well-being than it does for all the rest of us put together. It matters infinitely more to him than it does to you.’

‘I don’t believe George cares as much for ordinary rewards—’

‘No. That is trivial by the side of what I mean. I mean this: that George’s life is more complicated than most people’s. He may make something of it that most people would approve. Even that you might yourself. Or he may just — squander himself away.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ said Martineau.

‘I can’t explain it all, but I’m convinced this is a turning point. If George doesn’t get this partnership, it may do him more harm than anything we could invent against him. I’m only asking you to avert that. Just to take a nominal control for George’s sake. Can’t you allow yourself an — evasion in order not to harm him more than he’s ever been harmed? I tell you, this is critical for George. I think he sometimes knows himself how critical it is.’

There was a silence. Martineau said: ‘I’m sorry, Lewis. I can’t do it, even for that. I can’t even give myself that pleasure.’

‘So you won’t do it?’

‘It’s not like that. I can’t do it.’

‘Of course you could do it,’ I burst out, angry and tired. ‘You could do it — if only you weren’t so proud of your own humility.’

Martineau looked down at the table.

‘I’m sorry you should think that.’

I was too much distressed to be silent.

‘You’re proud of your humility,’ I said. ‘Don’t you realise that? You’re enjoying all this unpleasantness you’re inflicting on yourself. All this suffering and neglect and squalor and humiliation — they’re what you longed for, and you’re happy now.’

Martineau’s eyes looked, smiling, into mine and then aside.

‘No, Lewis, you’re a little wild there. You don’t really think I relish giving up the things I enjoyed most?’

‘In a way, I think you do.’

‘No. You know how I used to enjoy things, the ordinary pleasant things. Like a hot bath in the evening — and looking at my pictures — and having a little music. You know how I enjoyed those?’

I nodded.

‘I’ve given them up, you know. Do you really think I don’t miss them? Or that I actually enjoy the things I have now in their place?’

‘I expect there’s a difference.’

‘You must try to see.’ Martineau was smiling. ‘I am happy, I know. I’m happy. I’m happier because I’ve given up my pleasures. But it’s not because of the actual fact of giving them up. It’s because of the state it’s going to bring me to.’

19: George Calls on Morcom

I spent the weekend alone in my room: on Sunday I felt better, though still too tired to stir. I could do no more, I worked all day and at night sat reading with a convalescent luxury. But on Monday, after tea, that false calm dropped away as I heard a tread on the stairs. George came in — a parody of a smile on his lips.

‘They’ve arranged it,’ he said. He swore coldly. ‘They’ve managed it very subtly. And insulted me at the same time.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘I went to remind Eden today that the time had lapsed.’

‘Was that wise?’

‘What does it matter whether it’s wise or not? Did the man think he could keep me in suspense forever? I’d got a perfect right to go and ask him what he had decided about the firm.’

‘And he told you—’

‘Yes, he told me.’ George laughed. ‘He was very genial and avuncular. He was quite glad to tell me. He went so far as to reassure me — I wasn’t to be afraid the change would make any difference to my position. The swine had the impertinence to hint that I thought of myself like any office boy in danger of being dismissed. That’s one of the pleasant features of the whole business: Eden having the kindness to say he wasn’t going to dismiss me. He even went so far as to mention that he and Martineau had both had a high opinion of my ability, and that I’d done good work for the firm. That was the second insult. And the third was when he said I might have slightly more work to do under the new arrangement: so he proposed to give me an extra twenty-five pounds a year.’

‘He meant it good-naturedly.’

‘Nonsense,’ George shouted. ‘If you say that you’re merely associating yourself with the insults. It was completely deliberate. He knew he could go as far as he wanted. And he knew, if he insulted me with an offer like that, I had to accept it. But I don’t think I left him under the illusion that I accepted it very gratefully.’

‘What did you say?’

‘After he’d made it quite clear that he intended to do nothing for me, I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t let him know that he was acting atrociously. So I inquired point blank whether he had considered asking me into the firm. Anyway, I had the satisfaction of making him feel ashamed of himself. He said he had thought about the matter — very carefully — very carefully.’ In the middle of George’s violence, I saw his eyes were bewildered. ‘And although he’d like to very much for many reasons, he thought the present time wasn’t very opportune. I told him there would never be a more opportune one. Then he tried to stand on his dignity and said he proposed not to discuss it now. I asked him when there would be an opportune time and when he proposed to discuss it. He hedged. I kept at him. In the end he said it wouldn’t be until he saw how I developed in the next few years. I asked him what he was implying. He said it was too embarrassing for us both for him to discuss it with me there and then, but that he’d had a few words about it with a friend of mine. He might be able to give me a fairer idea. You realise who that is?’ George’s voice filled the room.

‘Morcom, I suppose,’ I said.

‘I shall go and get things straight with Morcom,’ George said.

‘Wait until tomorrow.’

‘Why should I wait? I only want to explain a few things.’

‘Look here,’ I said. ‘I was there one night when Morcom was trying to defend you—’

‘I don’t believe it,’ said George. ‘You’d better come. I don’t want you to be deluded. In any case, I’m going there now.’

When we had walked through the back streets, I was in one of those states of fatigue, almost like extreme well-being, when one is lighter than the dark streets round one, the rain, and the rushing wind; the glowing windows of the shops by the tramlines at the bottom of the road seemed like the lights scattered round a waterfront.

Across the road from Morcom’s new lodgings, the trees smelt mustily in the rain: the window (I hoped to see it in darkness) was a square of tawny light, and Morcom let us in himself.

‘Good,’ he said, with a smile of pleasure.

‘I’m afraid,’ said George, following him into the room, ‘I’ve only come for a short talk.’

Morcom turned quickly at the tone. ‘Sit down,’ he said.

‘I should like you to explain,’ said George, ‘something that Eden said to me this afternoon. I don’t expect it’s necessary to tell you that he refuses to take me into the firm. He suggested you might be able to tell me the reason better than he could himself.’

‘Lewis knows as much as I do,’ Morcom said.

‘Eden mentioned you by name,’ said George.

‘He’d no right to throw this on me.’

‘That’s irrelevant,’ George said. ‘I’m not interested in Eden’s behaviour. I’ve seen enough of that. I want to know the conversations you’ve had about me.’

‘The only time I’ve heard him speak of you at any length,’ said Morcom, ‘was’ — he looked at me — ‘that Sunday. A fortnight ago. I said what you asked me — and tried to find out what he thought of you. I didn’t tell you the result because I thought it would hurt you. If you must have it — he admitted rather reluctantly that you’d got ability, but he didn’t think you’re reliable enough to be in a responsible position and he’s afraid you’d be a danger to the firm.’

‘What sort of danger?’

‘Roughly that your present way of life would put clients off. It was also pretty clear that it put him off.’

‘What does he know of my way of life?’

‘A fair amount,’ said Morcom.

‘He had the impertinence to mention the Calvert incident. I suppose he knows about the people at the School.’

‘He couldn’t very well help it.’

‘I don’t see why he should imagine anyone disapproving of that.’ George’s voice was penetrating and subdued, as though he were keeping it low by will alone.

‘Simply because he thinks you get the young women together in order to seduce them.’

‘That’s the kind of cheap suspicion a man like that would have. I suppose you didn’t tell him the truth? Did you deny it?’

Morcom flushed. ‘I did what I could.’

‘Eden didn’t give me that impression.’

‘It’s certainly true,’ I broke in. ‘Arthur was as near being rude as I ever heard him.’

As I looked at Morcom, we could not forget one remark in another sense.

‘Even if that’s true,’ said George, ‘you gave different impressions on other nights.’

‘Do you seriously mean,’ Morcom suddenly broke out, ‘that I’ve been blackguarding you in private?’

‘Eden said that most people who knew me thought I was good at deceiving myself. Who said that if you didn’t? Do you mean to say that you never dropped those other hints — to Eden about my behaviour?’

‘If you want me to pretend that I’ve treated you as an entirely sacred subject in conversation with Eden or anyone else,’ Morcom said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t. It isn’t so easy for an outsider to believe in your divine inspiration, you realise.’

‘You mean I’m a megalomaniac?’

‘At times, yes.’

‘That’s an honest remark at last. It’s a relief.’

Morcom raised himself in his chair: ‘We oughtn’t to quarrel. Let’s leave this now.’

There was a silence; then George said: ‘No, one honest remark isn’t enough. It’s time some more were made. This has been going on too long already.

‘You don’t think I’ve been completely taken in, do you?’ George went on. His voice was getting louder now. ‘I’ve credited you with every doubt I could until now. But it wouldn’t be charitable to doubt any more, it would merely be culpable madness. Even when I was giving you the benefit of the doubt, I was all but certain you had been working against me at every single point.’

‘This is sheer mania,’ Morcom said.

‘Mania? I dare say you call it mania to be able to see a connection between some very simple events. Do you call it mania to remember that you discouraged me from taking any steps about Jack Cotery? — one of the few effective things I’ve managed to do in this town. You wouldn’t believe it when I brought it off. You went on to advise him to go into business against my judgment — that might have been disastrous for me. You don’t deny that you tried to take Olive away. With slightly more success. Though not quite as much as you set out for. You hung round her as soon as you realised she was valuable to me.’

One side of Morcom’s mouth was drawn in.

‘Or that you discouraged Jack Cotery and Eliot from everything I believed and wanted to do? You did it very subtly and carefully. The great George joke, the silly amiable old ass, with his fatuous causes, just preaching nonsense that might have been fresh fifty years ago, and then cuddling one of the girls on the quiet. Fortunately they had too much independence to believe you altogether — but still it left its mark—’

‘Of course not—’ I said.

‘I can give you plenty of proof of that. Principally from Jack’s behaviour.’ George turned on me, then back to Morcom. ‘And when you’d finished on my friends you tried to stop my career. You encouraged Martineau in his madness, you didn’t stop him when he might have been stopped. You let him go ahead with the little plays, blast them to hell. You made suggestions about them as though they were useful. You let him think it was right to allow the firm to go to Eden, and you carefully kept him away from thinking of giving it over to me. Then you made really certain by this business with Eden. I’ll admit you’ve been thorough. That’s about all I will admit for you. It’s the meanest deliberate attempt to sin against the human decencies that I’ve come across so far.’

George stopped suddenly: the shout seemed to leave a noise in the ears when his lips were already still.

‘I’m not going to argue with you,’ said Morcom. ‘It isn’t any good telling you that quite a lot of things happen in the world without any reference to yourself. It’s possible to talk to someone like Martineau about his life without thinking of you for a single instant. But you’re pathologically incapable of realising that. It’s out of your control—’

‘In that case, the sooner we stop pretending to have human intercourse the better. I don’t much like being victimised; I dislike even more being victimised by someone who pretends that I’m not sane.’

‘The only thing I should like to know,’ Morcom said, ‘is why you thought I should flatter you — by all these exertions.’

‘Because we’ve always stood for different things,’ George cried. ‘And you’ve known it all the time. Because I stand for the hopeful things, and you for their opposite. You’ve never forgiven me for that. I’m doing something to create the world I believe in — you’re sterile and you know it. I believe in human nature. You — despise it because you think all human nature is as twisted as your own. I believe in progress, I believe that human happiness ought to be attained and that we are attaining it. You’re bitter because you couldn’t believe in any of those things. The world I want will come and you know it — as for yours, it will be inhabited by people as perverted as yourself.’

Morcom sat with his eyes never leaving George’s, his arms limp at his sides.

‘Good God above, do I wonder you hate me?’ George shouted on. ‘You’ve got everything that I needed to make me any use. You could have done everything — if only you could bear to see someone else’s happiness. As it is, you can only use your gifts against those who show you what you’ve missed. You try to get your satisfaction by injuring people who make you feel ashamed. Well, I hope you’re satisfied now. Until you find another victim.’

20: Two Progresses

THE winter passed. George spent less time with me than formerly; partly because I was working intensively for my final examination in the summer — but also it was now Jack who had become his most confidential friend.

As soon as Eden’s decision was made, George had thrown himself into the interests of the group. Several young men and women from the School had been added to it; George talked of them all more glowingly than ever. On the few occasions I went out to the farm that winter, I felt the change from the group which George first devoted himself to. George and Jack, I know, formed parties there each weekend.

George never visited Eden’s house again, after the Sunday night when we walked back in the rain. I scarcely heard him mention Eden or the firm; and at Eden’s the entire episode of Martineau and George was merely the subject of comfortable reflections.

It was Eden, however, who told me in the early spring that Martineau was making another move, was giving up the agency. He had found some eccentric brotherhood, not attached to any sect, whose members walked over the country preaching and begging their keep. This he was off to join.

‘Ah well,’ said Eden, ‘religion is a terrible thing.’

We heard that Martineau was due to leave early one Saturday morning. I went along to his house that day and outside met George, who said, with a shamefaced smile: ‘I couldn’t very well let him go without saying goodbye.’

We had to ring the bell. Since the house had been transformed, we did not know where Martineau would be sleeping. The bell sounded, emptily, far away; it brought a desolation. At last his housekeeper came, her face was hostile, for she blamed us for the catastrophe.

‘You’ll find him in his old drawing-room,’ she said. ‘And if things had been right you’d never have had cause to look for him at all.’

He had been sleeping in the drawing-room, in one corner. A rough screen where the sofa used to be; in the bend of the room, between the fireplace and the window, where we used to sit on the more intimate Friday nights, a bed protruded, and there was an alarm clock on the chair beside it. The Ingres had been taken down, the walls were bare, there was a close and musty smell.

Martineau was standing by the bed, packing a rucksack.

‘Hallo,’ he cried, ‘so glad you’ve come to see the last appearance. It’s specially nice that you managed to find time, George.’

His laugh was wholehearted and full of enjoyment, utterly free from any sort of sad remembrance of the past. He was wearing an old brown shirt and the grey coat and trousers in which I had last seen him; he had no tie, and he had not shaved for days.

‘Could I possibly help you to pack that?’ said George.

‘I’ve always been better with my hands than with my head,’ said Martineau. ‘But still, George, you have a shot.’

George studied the articles on the bed. There were a few books, an old flannel suit, a sponge bag and a mackintosh.

‘I think the suit obviously goes in first,’ said George, and bent over the bed.

‘This is a change from the old days in the firm,’ said Martineau. ‘You used to do the brainwork, and I tried on the quiet to clean up the scripts you’d been selecting as ashtrays.’

George laughed. He could forget everything except their liking: and so (it surprised me more) could Martineau.

‘How is the firm, by the way?’ asked Martineau.

‘As tolerable as one can reasonably expect,’ said George.

‘Glad to hear it,’ said Martineau indifferently, and went off to talk gaily of his own plans. He was going to walk fifteen miles today, he said, down the road towards London, to meet the others coming from the east.

‘Will there be any chance of seeing you here? On your travels?’ said George.

‘Some time,’ Martineau smiled. ‘You’ll see me when you don’t expect me. I shall pass through some time.’

He went to the door, called ‘Eliz-a-beth,’ as he used to when he wanted more coffee on a Friday night. He ran down the stairs and his voice came to us lilting and cheerful: we heard her sobbing. He returned with a buttonhole in his shirt. When we had left the garden and turned the corner, out of sight of the house, he smiled at us and tossed the buttonhole away.

Just before we said goodbye, George hesitated. ‘There’s one thing I should like to say, Mr Martineau. I don’t know what arrangements you are making with your connections here. As you realise, they’re not people I should personally choose to rely on in case of difficulties. And you’re taking a line that may conceivably get you into difficulties. So I thought I ought to say that if ever you need money or anything of the sort — I might be a more suitable person to turn to. Anyway, I should like you to keep that in mind.’

‘I appreciate that, George.’ Martineau smiled. ‘I really appreciate that.’

He shook our hands. We watched him cross over the road, his knapsack lurching at each stride. Up the road, where the houses rested in the misty sunshine, he went on, dark between the trees, until the long curve took him out of sight.

‘Well,’ said George.

We walked the other way, towards the town. I asked if I should meet him out of the office at midday, as I often did on Saturdays.

‘I’m afraid not,’ said George. ‘As a matter of fact, I thought of going straight over to the farm. I don’t suppose you can allow yourself the time off, can you? But Jack is taking over a crowd by the one o’clock bus. I want to work in a full weekend.’