George Passant

33: Courtroom Lit by a Chandelier

THE morning of the trial was dark, and all over the town lights shone in the shop windows. In front of the old Assize Hall, a few people had gathered on the pavement, staring at the policemen on the steps.

It was still too early. I walked into the entrance hall, which was filling up. George came in: when, after a moment, he saw me in the crowd of strangers, his face became suddenly open and bewildered.

‘There are plenty of people here,’ he said.

We stood silently, then began to talk about the news in the morning papers. In a few minutes we heard a call from inside which became louder and was repeated from the door.

‘Surrender of George Passant! Surrender of George Passant!’

George stared past me, buttoned his jacket, smoothed down the folds.

‘Well, I’ll see you later,’ he said.

In the robing-room Getliffe was sitting in his overcoat taking a glance at his brief. As I came in, he stood up hurriedly.

‘Time’s getting on,’ he said. ‘We must be moving.’

I helped him on with his gown; he chatted about Eden.

‘Pleasant old chap, isn’t he? Not that he’s as old as all that. He must be this side of sixty. You know, L S, I was thinking last night. First of all I was surprised he has been contented to sit in a second-rate provincial town all his life — and then I realised one could be very happy here. Just limiting yourself, knowing what you’ve got to do, knowing you’re doing a useful job which doesn’t take too much out of you. And then going away from it and remembering you’re a human being. Clocking in and clocking out.’

He was speaking more breathlessly than in normal times. This nervousness before a case — which he had never lost — was mainly a physical malaise, a flutter of the hands, a catch in the voice: perhaps it had once been more, but now it was worn down by habit. He was putting on his wig, which, although it was faintly soiled, at once gave his face a greater distinction. He stared at himself in the mirror; his bands were awry, he was still a little dishevelled, but he turned away with a furtive, satisfied smile.

‘All aboard,’ he said.

He led the way into court. Olive and George were in the dock, looking towards the empty seats on the bench, which spread in a wide semi-circle round the small, high, dome-shaped room. It had been repainted since the July afternoon when George won a verdict in it; otherwise I noticed no change.

We came to our places, two or three steps beyond the dock; I turned and glanced at it. Jack was not there. I heard Porson, the leader for the prosecution, in court ten minutes early, greet Getliffe, in a rich, chuckling voice: I found myself anxious about nothing except that Jack should appear for the trial.

The gallery was nearly full. The case had already become a scandal in the town. Suddenly, I heard the last call for Jack and saw him walk quickly towards the dock. The judge entered, the indictment was read, they pleaded. George’s voice sounded loud and harsh, the others’ quiet.

‘You may sit down, of course,’ the judge said. His eyes were dark, bright and inquisitive in a jowled, broad face. There was only a small bench in the dock, barely enough for three. ‘Why are there no chairs for them? Please fetch chairs.’ His voice was kindly but precise.

The voice of the clerk swearing the jury fell distantly on my ears, deafened by habit. I looked round the courtroom. Eden was sitting upstairs, near the benches set aside for the Grand Jury; Cameron, the Principal of the School, had a place close by. Beddow, the chairman of that meeting over seven years before, bustled in, fresh and cheerful, to an alderman’s seat. In the small public space behind the dock, several of George’s friends were sitting, Mr Passant among them; Roy Calvert was looking after Mr Passant, and stayed at his side throughout the trial.

Just before Porson opened, a note was brought to me from Morcom. ‘They say I’ve just missed rheumatic fever. There is nothing to worry about, but I can’t come.’ That was all. I kept looking at it; the oath had reached the last man on the jury. In the diffused light of the winter morning, added to by the single chandelier of bulbs hanging over our table, our fingers made shadows with a complex pattern of penumbra, and faces in the court were softened.

The case for the prosecution took up the first two days. It went worse for us than we feared.

Porson’s opening was strong. From the beginning he threatened us with George’s statement over the circulation of the Arrow.

‘We possess a piece of evidence that no one can deny,’ he said. He drew everyone’s attention to a sheet of notepaper which was to be produced at the proper time. He concentrated much of his attack on the agency; then he pointed out how, when they had ‘obtained some practice’ in their methods, George and the others had gone ‘after bigger game’. The farm business needed larger sums, but they had found it easy to misrepresent what its true position was. ‘They didn’t trouble to change their methods,’ said Porson. ‘They had learned after their little experience with the Arrow that it was child’s play to give false figures. This time they needed larger sums, and you will hear how they obtained them from Miss Geary, Mrs Stuart and—’

He finished by telling the jury that he would produce a witness, Mrs Iris Ward, who would describe an actual meeting at the farm when the three of them decided they must buy it — ‘decided they must buy it not only as a business, but because they had reasons of their own for needing somewhere to live in private, out of reach of inquisitive eyes’.

Porson did as he threatened.

The only point which Getliffe scored was made before lunch on the first morning. One of the witnesses over the agency, a man called Attock, said that, before he lent Jack money, he had looked over all the figures of the firm with an accountant’s eye. He was a masterful, warm-voiced man, with a genial, violent laugh: Getliffe saw through him, and brought off an ingenious cross-examination. In the end, Getliffe revealed him as a man always priding himself on his shrewdness and losing money in unlikely ventures: and as one who had never managed to finish his accountant’s examinations.

At lunch on that first day, Jack and Olive were more composed than before the trial. Even George, sunk in a despondency which surprised those who remembered his optimism but did not know him well, referred to Getliffe’s handling of Attock.

It was, however, a false start. First thing in the afternoon, Porson produced the quiet kindly witness of the police court, who told the same story without a deviation. Then two more followed him, with the same account of the acquaintanceship with Jack, the meetings with George, the statement of the circulation of the Arrow. They testified to a statement written by George, which now, for the first time, Porson produced in court. It read:

‘We are not in a position to give full figures of the Agency’s business. So far as we have examined the position they do not seem to exist. One important indication, however, we can state exactly. The advertising paper run by the Agency — The Advertisers’ Arrow — has had an average circulation of five thousand per issue. This figure is given on the authority of Mr Martineau, now retiring from the firm.’

Porson gave the sheet of paper to the jury. They passed it round: at last it came to Getliffe and myself. It was as neatly written as a page from the diary. We knew there was no hope of challenging it.

Pertinaciously, good-temperedly, Getliffe worked hard. Questions tapped out in the room as the sky darkened through the lowering afternoon. The illuminated zone from the chandelier left the judge half in darkness. Getliffe did not shake any of the three witnesses. He tried to test their memory of figures by a set of numerical questions which he often used as a last resource. Several times, still good-tempered but harassed, he became entangled in names, that odd but familiar laxness of his — ‘Mr Passmore,’ he said, ‘you say you were met by Mr Passmore.’

Then Porson called Exell, Martineau’s partner in the agency. Getliffe, breathing hard, sweat running down the temples from under his wig, asked me to take him.

‘You know, of course, the state of your business just before it was sold?’ Porson was asking.

‘Yes,’ said Exell. He had grown almost bald since I last saw him, at the time of Martineau’s departure.

‘Was it at its most prosperous just then?’

‘Nothing like it. Times had got worse,’ said Exell.

‘When was it at its most prosperous?’

‘Just about the time that Mr Martineau entered it.’

‘You would regard the circulation of your paper, the Arrow, as some indication of the state of the firm?’

‘I’m not certain.’ A series of questions followed, in which Porson tried to persuade him. He gave at last a rather unwilling and qualified assent.

‘Now you have accepted that figure as an indication, I want to ask you — when did it reach its highest point?’

‘At the time I told you. Seven years ago, nearly.’

‘What was the circulation at the highest point?’

‘Twelve hundred.’

‘I should like you to repeat that. I should like the jury to hear you say that again. What was the circulation at the highest point?’

Exell repeated the words.

‘There is just one thing else you might tell us, Mr Exell. The jury may find this important. We have been told this afternoon that the circulation at some time — never mind who told us or what the reason was — was estimated at five thousand. Was that ever a conceivable figure?’

‘Never. I have told you the highest.’

‘And just before the end it didn’t rise for any reason?’

‘It must have been lower.’

I tried everything I could invent. I asked him about the agency’s books. Weren’t they singularly carelessly kept? Hadn’t he neglected them for years before Martineau joined him? Wasn’t it Martineau’s task to supervise the books during the months he was a partner? Wasn’t it true that Exell could only have a vague knowledge of the agency’s finances in general, this circulation in particular, during Martineau’s time? Wasn’t it true that he was always concerned — and his partner also — with activities outside the ordinary run of business? That Martineau was entirely preoccupied with religion? That Exell himself gave much time to eccentric causes — such as spiritualism and social credit? Wasn’t it possible his estimate of the figure was simply a guess without any exact information? He was uneasy, but we gained nothing. His tone grew thinner and more precise. Once his eyes dropped in that mannerism of hampered truculence which in some men is like a child beginning to cry. He would not budge from his figure. ‘Twelve hundred’s correct,’ he said.

When I had finished, Porson said: ‘I want the jury to be certain of the figure, Mr Exell. First of all, you have no doubts whatever, despite anything that has been hinted?’

‘No.’

‘That’s right. You have been telling us, with expert authority, the largest figure that the circulation can ever have reached. Now will you let the jury hear it again — for the last time?’

‘Twelve hundred.’

As I left the court on that first night, Porson threw me a word, friendly, triumphant and assertive. I saw George hesitate in front of me; then Jack called him, and he walked away with the other two. Having dinner with acquaintances, I heard speculations going on, coolly and disinterestedly, over George and the others: I kept thinking of their evening together. It made me escape early, back to useless work on the case.

The farm evidence took up all the next day. It was heavy and suspicious, as Porson had promised, though there was nothing as clear as George’s statement of the circulation. It was a story of Jack mixing in odd company, making friends, inspiring trust: meetings of his new friends with Olive and George: talk of the farm as a business, mention of accounts, figures on the table.

The stories fitted each other: Getliffe could not break any of them: it only needed those figures to be preserved for our last hope to go. But no one possessed a copy. Miss Geary, the witness who gave the sharpest impression of accuracy, said that in her presence no written figures had ever been produced; the whole transaction had been verbal. She obviously blamed herself for a fool, she was bitterly angry with Jack in particular, and she showed herself overfond of money. Yet I thought she inclined, even now, to the side of George and Jack when she was not entirely sure. Once or twice, certainly, she seemed pleased to put Porson off with a doubt.

Her very fairness, though, acted against us. And she was followed by Iris Ward, whom Porson kept to the last.

As her name was called ‘Mrs Iris Ward! Mrs Iris Ward!’ I caught sight of George’s face. She had once been, before her marriage, an obscure member of his group; she was Mona’s half-sister, but George had never paid much attention to her. Now he showed an anxiety and suffering so acute that it was noticed by many people in the court.

Her face was pleasant-looking, a little worn and tired. She was a year or two from thirty. She smiled involuntarily in a frank and almost naïve manner when Porson addressed her.

‘Mrs Ward,’ he began, ‘did you hear Mr Passant and his friends talk about buying the farm?’

‘I did.’

‘When was this?’

‘The last year I ever went there. I mean, to the farm itself. Nearly three years ago.’

‘That is,’ Porson remarked to the jury, ‘ten months before the farm was actually bought. Can you describe the occasion for us?’

‘I went over one Saturday evening.’

‘Who was there?’

‘Mr Passant, Mr Cotery, Miss Sands (Rachel)—’ She gave several other names.

‘Was Miss Calvert there?’

‘No.’

‘Can you tell us anything that was said at that meeting — about the transaction?’

‘We were sitting round after supper. They were all excited. I think they had been talking before I arrived. Mr Cotery said: “It would be a good idea if we ran this place. So that we could have it to ourselves whenever we wanted it. We shan’t be safe until we do.”’

Porson stopped her for a moment: then he asked: ‘What was said then?’

‘Mr Passant said it would be useful if we could, but he didn’t see how it could conceivably be managed. Mr Cotery laughed at him and called him a good old respectable member of the professional classes. “Haven’t I got you out of that after all this time?” he said. “Of course it can be managed. Do you think I can’t raise a bit of money for a good cause?” and he went on arguing with Mr Passant, saying it was for an absolutely essential cause. He said: “It takes all the pleasure away. And it’s dangerous. I don’t propose to stand the strain if you do. Just for the sake of a little money.”’

Her voice was quiet, clear and monotonous. Everyone was believing her story. It sounded nothing like an invention: she seemed to draw on one of those minutely accurate memories, common among many people with an outwardly drab and uneventful life.

‘What did Mr Passant say?’

‘He argued for a while — he talked about the difficulties of raising the money. He said he didn’t propose to find himself the wrong side of the law.’

Getliffe made a note. She continued: ‘Mr Cotery said how easy it would be to raise the money. “You see,” he said, “as soon as we own the place we can kill two birds with one stone. We can make a good deal of money out of it ourselves. It would be a good investment for the people we borrow from. And it’s child’s play persuading them. We’ve got all the cards in our hands. We’ve been here more often than everyone else put together. No one else knows how many people might use a hostel like this. We can tell people what its possibilities are.”’

‘From that remark,’ Porson said, ‘you gathered Mr Cotery was suggesting they should give false information?’

‘I can’t say.’

‘That’s what you understood at the time, isn’t it?’

‘I’d rather not say. I may have got a wrong impression. I’m certain of what was said, though.’

‘Very well. What happened afterwards?’

‘Mr Cotery went on at Mr Passant. No one else said much. At last Mr Passant said: “It would be magnificent! It will have to be done! I’ve respected my obligations long enough and they go on ignoring me. Besides, the suspense is wearing us down.”’

‘We are hearing about this suspense again. What suspense did they both mean?’

Getliffe objected. He was getting on better with the judge than Porson was, and had begun to play on Porson’s truculence. He also knew that the case was important in Porson’s career, which hadn’t been a lucky one.

Porson turned to the judge. ‘I have just supplied what the jury will consider a discussion of a future conspiracy. I wish to carry this line further.’

The judge smiled perfunctorily. ‘You may ask the question.’

‘What suspense did they mean?’

‘He meant — they were afraid.’

‘What of?’

‘Some of their relations being discovered.’

‘You had no doubt of that at the time?’

‘None at all.’

Porson’s tone was comradely and casual: ‘You mean some of them had immoral relations with each other?’

‘Is this necessary?’ put in the judge. ‘I take it you only want to demonstrate that they had a strong reason for attempting to get this farm to themselves? Surely you have asked enough to make the position clear.’

‘I consider it’s desirable to ask one or two more questions,’ Porson said.

‘I don’t think I can let you proceed any further along this line,’ the judge said.

‘I wish to make the jury aware of certain reasons.’

‘They will have gathered enough.’

‘Under protest, I should like to ask one or two relevant questions.’

‘Go on,’ said the judge.

‘Well, Mrs Ward. I shan’t keep you long in the circumstances. Can you just tell us whether there was any change in the attitude of Mr Passant and his friends — the attitude of these people whom we have learned to call the group — when strangers came to the farm?’

The judge was frowning. Getliffe looked at him, half-rose, then did not object.

‘There was a great deal of talk about discretion after the scares began.’

‘What were these scares?’

‘You may not ask that,’ said the judge.

‘I should like—’

‘You may not ask that.’

Porson turned round to the witness box.

‘I hope the jury will have understood how afraid these people were of any discovery of their activities. Although I haven’t been permitted to establish the point to my own satisfaction. However, perhaps I’m allowed to ask you whether you thought any of them, Mr Passant for example, were afraid of having their careers damaged if their activities came out?’

‘I thought so.’

‘Would you say any of them felt an even more compelling fear?’

‘I can’t answer that,’ she said.

‘Why can’t you?’

‘I’m not certain.’

All of a sudden, Porson was back in his seat, leaning against the bench, his legs crossed and his lids half over his eyes.

Getliffe cross-examined at length. She had left the School and George’s company months before the farm was bought. This conversation was long before they made any attempt to raise money? She had not been in their confidence at the critical time? The conversation might have been utterly at random? Obviously this danger which had been so much stressed could not have been urgent — as they went on for months without acting on it?

She answered the questions as straightforwardly as Porson’s; she did not seem either malicious or burdened by her responsibility. I had learned only a few random facts about her; she had become a Catholic since she married, the marriage was apparently happy, she now lived in the school house of a country grammar school. She had always been intimate with her half-sister, Mona. None of us understood her part in the trial.

Getliffe finished by a number of questions on the after-supper conversation. Had she never heard people making plans for the fun of it? Had she never made plans herself of how to get rich quick? Had she never even heard people speculating on how to commit the ideal murder? For a moment, her answers were less composed than at the direct and critical points. Then Getliffe asked her about George’s remark: ‘I don’t propose to find myself the wrong side of the law.’ ‘You are quite certain that was said?’ Getliffe said.

‘Yes.’

‘You believed it at the time?’

‘It struck me as a curious remark to make.’

She replied to Porson’s re-examination just as equably. Now, however, with people excited by the scandal, he raised several bursts of laughter: it was, for the first time, laughter wholly on Porson’s side. It was a sound which George could not escape. A wind had sprung up, the windows rattled, and at times the sun shone in beams across the room; in that rich, mellow, domestic light the court grew more hostile through the afternoon.

34: Dinner Party After a Bad Day

AS soon as the court adjourned, we heard a great deal of talk upon Iris Ward’s evidence. Everyone who spoke to us seemed to have believed her account; there was a continuous stir of gossip and curiosity about the lives of George and his friends. They were disapproved of with laughter and excitement: people thought that Porson had been right to force a scandal into notice. ‘He’s won the case and shown them up at the same time,’ someone said in my hearing.

Getliffe himself was unusually grave. He kept talking of Iris’ evidence, and seemed both moved and despondent. He was anxious over the result, of course — but something else was taking hold of him.

Though we were to meet at Eden’s house for dinner, he kept on talking in the robing-room long after the court had cleared. Then I went straight to George’s and stayed for a couple of hours. The three of them were there alone; they had eaten every meal together since the trial began; only my presence tonight prevented an outburst of reproaches — my presence, and the state into which George had fallen.

He scarcely spoke or protested; yet, as his eyes saw nothing but his own thoughts, his face was torn with suffering — just as when he heard the call for Iris Ward.

When Jack spoke now, he assumed that George would obey. Only once did George make an effort to show himself their leader still. He heard me say that Martineau, who had promised to be in the town by that afternoon, had still not arrived. George stirred himself: ‘I insist on your tracing him at once. I tried to make Getliffe realise that it was essential to keep in touch with Martineau — on the one occasion when Getliffe spared me a quarter of an hour. He didn’t trouble to recognise that my opinion was more valuable than theirs.’ He looked at the other two.

When I returned to Eden’s house, I rang up Canon Martineau, to ask if he had any news of his brother: and also Martineau’s housekeeper in his old house in the New Walk. Neither had heard from him.

As I hurried downstairs to Eden’s drawing-room, there came a jolly and wholehearted peal of laughter. Eden and Getliffe were waiting for me, glasses of sherry standing by their chairs on the broad rail by the fireside. I was five minutes late for dinner, and Eden was a little put out; though, when I said that I had been trying to find Martineau, he smiled at Getliffe’s jokes at my expense.

Getliffe, so dejected at the end of the afternoon, was in high spirits now, and as we sat down to dinner Eden looked at him with a broad and happy smile. He enjoyed entertaining him. He liked the reflection of the busy and successful world, and also the glow that Getliffe brought to so many people. With an aftertaste of envy, not unpleasant or bitter, Eden at times insisted on his own travels and tastes.

‘I want you to try another wine,’ he said, ‘I brought it from a place just behind Dijon when I was there — why! it must be five or six years ago.’

Getliffe said: ‘One doesn’t ask any better than this, you know.’ He took a gulp at his glass.

‘I don’t want you to miss the other,’ said Eden. ‘I can’t let you leave without having something a little unusual.’

‘Yours to command,’ Getliffe answered.

Getliffe held his glass up to the light.

‘I could go on drinking that,’ he said. Then he chuckled. ‘When I think of all the wine in my ancient Inn I always think it’s a shame that there are chaps like me — who could drink any of it and not be much the wiser. But as for this you’ve given us — well, L S, you and I can tell our host that if he gives us nothing worse we don’t care who’s getting amongst the bottles at out respective ancient halls.’

‘I’ve got up another bottle,’ Eden said. ‘We must finish it before the night’s over.’ He talked contentedly on, though he looked at me once with kindly concern. ‘Those days’ came in often, he told stories of counsel he had met at the Assizes, men of the generation in front of Getliffe’s. They listened to each other with enjoyment; Getliffe began telling anecdotes about judges. ‘That reminds me,’ he said, in a few minutes. ‘It reminds me of the best remark ever made by a judicial authority within the Empire of His Britannic Majesty. It was actually made by the Chief Justice of a not unimportant Colony, you understand. He was delivering judgment. You must guess the sort of case for yourself when you’ve heard the remark. He said, “However inclement the weather, His Majesty’s police stations must in no circumstances be used for the purpose of fornication.”’

Getliffe was still contented with the joke when we returned to the drawing-room. Then he and Eden found another pleasure in talking of London streets, dark during the war.

‘I remember going across to the Inn one night when I was home on leave,’ said Getliffe.

‘I had to go up to see one of your men in the Temple,’ Eden replied, ‘it must have been the same year.’

‘We might have run across each other,’ said Getliffe. ‘Perhaps we did for all you know.’

At last I could not help coming back to the trial.

On the instant Getliffe’s face was clouded.

‘I’m worried,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind saying I’m worried—’

Eden broke in: ‘Of course we’ve noticed that it’s on Eliot’s mind. But I’m afraid I am going to forbid you to discuss it now. We are all exercised about it. I dare say it’s specially so with Eliot, because he’s been friendly with the three of them for a few years now—’

‘I’m worried on their account,’ said Getliffe. ‘Of course, one likes to win one’s cases — but they count more—’ He looked at me. ‘I’m asking you to believe that,’ he said.

‘You mustn’t begin discussing it,’ Eden continued. ‘You must keep your minds off it tonight. I can’t give either of you much advice, but I’m going to make sure that you follow this.’

His mouth was curved in a firm, kindly, gratified smile. But circumstances were too strong for him. He was himself rung up twice within half an hour. The second call was from Martineau, saying that he had arrived and would come round to Eden’s house at ten o’clock. Seeing my relief, Eden said: ‘Well, I didn’t mean to let you worry tonight. I decided to guard you from some depressing news. But perhaps you’d better hear it now. That first conversation over the phone — it was with Cameron, the Principal at the School.’

‘Yes?’

‘He was just informing me, as a matter of courtesy, that if Passant couldn’t deny the immorality stories, they would be obliged to dismiss him from the School. That applies, of course, whatever the result of the case.’

‘I suppose you’d expect them to,’ said Getliffe.

‘You can’t blame them,’ said Eden. ‘After all they’re running an educational institution. They can’t be too careful. They’re entitled to say that Passant has abused a position of trust.’

I remembered George using exactly those words before the committee years ago: I remembered how he repudiated a suggestion by Jack in Nottingham that same night.

‘Shall you get rid of him yourself?’ said Getliffe.

Eden considered, and answered deliberately: ‘I don’t regard that as quite on the same footing. If he’s convicted, of course, the question doesn’t arise. But if you get them off, I don’t think I should feel entitled to dismiss someone who’s been found innocent in a court of law. It’s true that his private life will have damaged the firm; but I set off against that the good solid work he’s done for me in the past. I think, taking everything into account, I shall have to let him stay. Though naturally I shouldn’t be able to give him so much responsibility. It would mean harder work than I want until I retire.’

‘I must say, you’re more tolerant than most of us would be,’ said Getliffe. ‘I respect you for it.’ He broke off: ‘As for getting them off, I don’t know. We may as well try to find out what Martineau has to say.’

‘He’ll be here in half an hour,’ said Eden.

‘Can I get a word with him?’ said Getliffe.

‘It’s not exactly correct, is it?’ Eden was frowning.

‘But if you’re there? I’ve done it before, believe me.’

‘I’d rather Hotchkinson was here too. But maybe in the circumstances there’ll be no harm done.’

‘Not that I hope for much,’ Getliffe said.

‘I’m beginning to be sorry I inflicted it on you,’ said Eden.

‘Never mind that. One’s got to do one’s job,’ Getliffe said. Then he added: ‘I wish one of you would tell me what those three were trying to do. It’s getting me down.’

‘I’m afraid it isn’t very difficult. They wanted money to go the pace,’ said Eden. ‘They weren’t the sort to keep within their means. It’s a pity.’

‘I should have thought they could have made it like the rest of us. If they were as keen on it as all that. Or do you mean, they didn’t care a cherub’s apron for the way the money comes? With all due respect, I don’t see them quite that way. God knows, I don’t think much of them—’

‘I’ve sometimes thought,’ said Eden, ‘that the greatest single difference between our generation and theirs is the way we look at money. It doesn’t mean anything like the same as it did when we were starting. You can’t altogether blame them, when you look at the world that’s coming.’

‘That’s not true,’ I said, ‘of two of them at least. George Passant always had strict views about financial honesty, though he throws his own money about. And Olive — she would be perfectly sensible and orthodox about it.’

‘I’ve generally found that people who are loose morally — are loose the other way too,’ said Eden.

‘You’re meaning Cotery was the centre of the piece?’ Getliffe said to me.

‘I’ve always rather taken to him,’ Eden put in. ‘He’s a bit weak, that’s all. He’s the sort of man who’d have done well in different company. Somehow I can’t see him just sweeping the other two along.’

‘Can you, L S?’ Getliffe said.

‘As for Passant,’ Eden went on, ‘you’ve always had too high an opinion of him, you know. As you get older, you’ll lose your illusions about human nature. I dare say he did have strict views about financial honesty — when people he disliked were making the money.’

‘I believe,’ I said, ‘that he’s been as ashamed of the money part as you would have been yourself.’

‘I must say,’ said Getliffe, ‘that it makes more sense if you take our host’s line. It looks as though Passant went in up to the neck right at the beginning. He had no sooner talked to this man Martineau than he was ready to cook his figures. It doesn’t leave you much to stand on, L S.’

I told him, as I had done before, that I believed George’s own account; somehow Martineau had let him take away the idea of a large circulation. We had already arranged for him to press this story of George’s when Martineau gave evidence. At first Getliffe had welcomed it as a glimmer of hope: tonight he did not pretend to accept it.

‘There’s only one chance of excusing them that I’ve been able to believe in,’ said Eden. ‘That is, Martineau may have been vague when Passant approached him. You must remember he was slightly eccentric at the time. You’ll see for yourself soon. You’ll find him a very likeable fellow, of course. But, you know, I’ve been trying to keep that doubt in their favour — and, between ourselves, I can’t credit it for a minute. Martineau was always a bit queer — but he was the sharpest man on money matters I ever knew. It’s very peculiar, but there — there’s nowt as odd as fowk. I don’t believe he had it in him not to know exactly what the paper was doing — even if he was going to give it away.’

‘And if he was vague — you can’t really console yourself with that,’ said Getliffe. ‘There’s too much difference altogether. Passant would have to misunderstand on purpose.’

For a time they talked about the farm. ‘If I’d been Porson, I should have given us more of that little business. Just our friends raising money, that’s all,’ said Getliffe.

Just before ten, I went up to my room. I heard Martineau being received below a few minutes afterwards. Getliffe had told me to be ready to join the interview; nearly an hour passed, but they did not send for me. At last footsteps sounded on the stairs. I opened my door, and from below heard Eden saying: ‘Goodbye, Howard. We shall see you tomorrow, then.’

I went back into my room, and walked up and down, unable to keep still. On his way to bed, Getliffe looked in.

‘It wasn’t worthwhile bringing you down. I didn’t get anywhere,’ he said. He looked jaded and downcast.

‘What happened?’

‘I couldn’t get anything out of him.’

‘Did you tell him Passant’s story? Did you let him see that some of us believe it?’

‘I went as far as anyone could,’ said Getliffe.

‘Shall I see him?’

‘I told him you’d satisfied yourself about Passant’s version. I tried to make him believe I had too. But’ — Getliffe’s voice was tired — ‘he simply didn’t seem interested. He didn’t remember it very well. It was all hazy. He couldn’t have told Passant anything but the real figures. Even though he didn’t have any recollection of it now.’

‘You mean, he’s going to deny Passant’s story?’

‘As near as makes no matter,’ said Getliffe. ‘All I can do is try to make him say that he’s forgotten.’ He added: ‘I never thought Passant’s side of it would hold water for a minute.’

35: The Park Revisited

AFTER Getliffe left me, I tried to read. Then I heard the front door bell ring below: it was just before midnight. There was a long delay: the bell rang again. A maid scampered down the stairs. In a moment a heavy tread ascended towards my door. George came in.

‘Has Martineau been?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did he say?’

‘I didn’t meet him.’

‘Why not?’

‘He saw Getliffe,’ I said. ‘Getliffe couldn’t get anything out of him. It seems — unpromising.’

‘I must see him tonight,’ said George. ‘I should like you to come too.’

It was the first time George had visited me since the inquiries began. For weeks before the trial he had scarcely left his lodgings. Now his angry questions seemed like life stirring in him again — but a frightening, persecuted life. As we walked from Eden’s house into the town, he said twice: ‘I tell you I must see him tonight.’ He said it with an intensity such as I had never heard from him before.

Since the preliminary inquiries he had shown only rare moments of anything like open fear. Instead, he had been sunk into the apathetic despair which many of us had noticed. For much of the time, he was shut away from any other person. He had been living with his own thoughts; often with reveries of the past, the meetings of the group at the farm; ‘justifications’ still came to his mind, and even sensual memories. In his thoughts he sometimes did not escape quite trivial shames, of ‘looking a fool’ to himself.

But tonight he could no longer look inwards. His thoughts had broken open, and exposed him to nothing but fear.

George made for Martineau’s old house. There was a light in what used to be the drawing-room: the housekeeper opened the door.

‘I want to see Mr Martineau,’ said George.

‘He’s not in yet. I’m waiting up for him,’ she said.

‘I’m afraid that it’s essential for us to see him tonight,’ said George. ‘I shall have to wait.’

Then she recognised him. She had not seen him since the morning we came to bid Martineau goodbye.

‘It’s you,’ she said. ‘When I heard of your goings-on, I said that I always knew you’d driven him away.’

‘I shall have to wait,’ said George.

She kept her hand on the latch. She would not ask him into the drawing-room. ‘I’m alone,’ she said, ‘and until he tells me, I can please myself who I let in—’

We argued; I tried to calm her, but she had brooded on losing Martineau all these years; she took her farcical revenge, and we had to wait outside in the raw night.

We walked up and down the end of the New Walk. From the park we could see the gate of Martineau’s and the light in the drawing-room, just as we had done that night of Jack’s confession.

George, his eyes never leaving the path to the house, began to talk. He had heard, not many minutes after Eden, of the intention to dismiss him from the School. It had leaked out through an acquaintance on the staff; his friends at the School already knew. Then I told him what Eden had said about his position in the firm. He hardly listened.

‘You might as well see something. Another sheet of paper,’ he said.

I had to light a match to read it. As the flame smoked, I thought of the other sheet of paper, the bill of the little plays which Jack had produced beside these trees. But he did not mean that. He meant the sheet of paper on which he had written down his statement on the circulation — the sheet of paper which lay before the court.

In the match light, I read some of this letter.

Dear George,

We are writing in the name of twelve people who have known you at the School, and who are indignant at the news tonight. We wish there was something we could do to help, but at least we feel that we cannot let another day go by without saying how much you have meant to us all. Whatever happens or is said, that cannot be taken away. We shall always remember it with gratitude. We shall always think of you as someone we were lucky to know…

There were four signatures, including those of a young man I had met at the farm in September.

‘They meant it,’ I said.

‘It’s too late to be written to now,’ said George. With desperate attention he still watched for Martineau. ‘Though I don’t entirely accept Jack’s remarks on the letter.’

‘What were they?’

‘That the people who wrote it didn’t realise that he and I weren’t so very different nowadays—’

Without interest, George mentioned a quarrel over the letter. Jack had laughed at George’s devotion to his protégés; he took it for granted, he expected George to take it for granted also, that it was just a camouflage to get closer to the women.

George was listening only for footsteps: he had no more thought for Jack’s remark. Yet he had resented it little — suddenly, in this park where he might have finished with Jack, I saw their relation more closely than I had ever done.

Jack’s power over George had grown each year. It was not the result of ordinary affection or admiration. It did not owe much to the charm which Jack exercised over many people. At times, George actively disliked him. But now, in the middle of this night of fear, George submitted to having his aspirations mocked.

The fact was, from the beginning Jack had never believed in George’s altruistic dreams. For a time — until he had been an intimate friend for years — Jack entered into them, and in George’s company talked George’s language. But it was always with a wink to himself; he judged George by the standard of his own pleasures; by instinct and very soon by experience he knew a good deal about the erotic life. He saw the sensual side of George’s devotion long before George would admit it to himself. Jack thought none the worse of George, he took it as completely natural — but he was often irritated, sometimes morbidly provoked, by the barricade of aspirations. He had spoken of them tonight as ‘camouflage’; he had never believed they could be anything else. As soon as George ‘got down to business’ — his affair with Freda — Jack showed that he both knew and had suspected it all along.

From then onwards, in their curious intimacy, George seemed to be almost eager to accept Jack’s valuation — to throw away all ‘pretence’ and to share his pleasures with someone who was a rake, gay, frank, and unashamed.

That mixture of intimacy and profound disbelief was at the root of Jack’s power over George. George was paying a sort of spiritual blackmail. He was, in a fashion, glad to pay it. Very few men, the Georges least of all, are secure in their aspirations; it takes someone both intimate and unsympathetic to touch one’s own doubts — to give one, for part of one’s life at least, the comfort of taking oneself on the lowest terms. At times we all want someone to destroy our own ‘ideals’. We are ready to put ourselves in the power of a destructive, clear-eyed and degrading friend.

The light in the drawing-room went out. Immediately George ran to the house, rang the bell, hammered on the door.

‘Where is Mr Martineau? I’ve got to see him,’ he shouted. His voice echoed round the road.

A light was switched on in the hall. The housekeeper opened a crack of door, and said: ‘He’s not coming home tonight.’

‘Let me in,’ George shouted.

‘He’s rung up to say he’s sleeping somewhere else.’

She did not know where, or would not say. I thought she was speaking the truth, and did not know.

George and I were left outside the dark house.

‘Why didn’t you see Martineau? Why wasn’t I sent for myself?’ George cried.

Afraid also, I tried to give him reasonable answers.

‘Getliffe was absolutely clear on the importance. We were talking about it at dinner.’

‘With Eden?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think I’m going to be deluded for ever? You can’t expect me to believe that Eden is devoted to my welfare. I tell you, I insist on being certain that Getliffe is aware of the point at issue. And that someone whom I can trust must be present with Getliffe and Martineau when this point is being made. You ought to see that I’m right to insist on that. Are you going to desert me now?’

‘You don’t believe we’ve missed anything so obvious,’ I said. ‘I know Getliffe was going to ask Martineau about the figure. He’s very good at persuading people to say what he wants them to say. It’s his chief—’

‘And he doesn’t think that he’s persuaded Martineau?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t you admit he would if there had been any serious attempt on my behalf? You come to me saying he’s so good — and then apparently he wasn’t interested enough to get the one essential piece of information. And then you think I ought not to insist that he’s taken every step to get it.’

‘It’s no use—’

‘You know what depends on it,’ George cried. ‘Do you think I don’t know what depends on it?’

‘We all know that.’

‘But none of you will lift a finger,’ he said. ‘I’m beginning to realise why Eden imported Getliffe—’

‘That’s nonsense.’

‘I’m not going to listen to that sort of defence. There’s one thing more precious than all your feelings,’ he shouted. ‘It’s got to be settled tonight.’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘I want to hear Getliffe and Martineau discuss the figure of the circulation. With you and myself present.’

I repeated the arguments: it had all been done. We did not know where Martineau was. He attacked me with bitterness and violence. At last, he said: ‘I knew you would do nothing. I can’t expect any help.’

We argued again. He began to repeat himself. He accused me of taking everyone’s side against him. Nothing I said could bring him even a moment’s relief.

36: Martineau’s Day in Town

WHEN I turned out of — Street towards the court next morning, George and Martineau were standing on the pavement, outside a newspaper shop. Martineau cried: ‘Ah, Lewis! You see I’ve come! I ran up against old George two minutes ago!’ His cheeks were sunburnt and half-hidden by a rich brown beard. His skin was wrinkled with laughter, and his eyes looked clear and bright. In George’s presence his gaiety was oppressive; I began a question about his evidence, but he would not reply; I asked quickly about the journey, how did he travel, how was the ‘settlement’?

‘They’re shaking down,’ he said. ‘Soon they will be able to do without me. I might be justified in making a move—’

To my astonishment, George laughed; not easily — by the sound alone, one would have known him to be in distress — and yet with a note of genuine amusement.

‘You don’t mean that you are going to start again?’

‘I’m beginning to feel I ought, after all.’

‘What ought you to do? What more can you do along those lines? There’s simply nothing left for you to give up—’

‘It doesn’t seem to me quite like that—’ Martineau began.

I had to leave them, as I saw Getliffe climbing the hall steps.

The court was not so full as the afternoon before. Getliffe opened, and from his first words everyone felt that he was worried and dispirited. He told the jury more than once that ‘it may be difficult for you to see your way through all the details. We all feel like that. Even if you’ve been forced to learn a bit of law, you often can’t see the wood for the trees. You’ve got to remember that a few pieces of suspicion don’t make a proof.’

Much of his speech was in that dejected tone.

The first witnesses before lunch were customers of the advertising agency. Getliffe’s questions did not go beyond matters of fact; he was untidy and restless; several times he took off his wig and the forelock fell over his brows. Porson, resting back with his eyes half-closed, did not cross-examine.

As I met the three at lunch, Jack said: ‘How was that?’

‘He’s trying to begin quietly, and go all out in the last speech. It’s his common-man technique,’ I said.

Olive looked into my face.

‘Why are you lying?’ she cried. ‘Is it as bad as that?’

Jack said: ‘It’s got no worse. What do you expect him to say?’

‘It’s your own examination that matters most,’ I said. ‘Not anything he says. You’ve got to be at your best tomorrow—’

‘We can put a face on it. If you tell us the truth,’ she said.

‘You’ve got to be at your best,’ I said to George, ‘you above all.’

He had not spoken to the others. Once he looked at a stranger with a flash of last night’s fear. On the outside, his manner had become more indrawn than before. It was seconds before he replied to me: ‘It’s scarcely worthwhile him putting me on view.’

After lunch there was one other witness, and then Martineau was called.

‘Howard Ernest Martineau!’ The call echoed in the court, and was caught up outside: it occurred to me inconsequently that we had never before heard anyone use his second name. When he mounted into the box he apologised with a smile to the judge for being late. He took the oath and stood with his head a little inclined; he was wearing a suit, now creased, dirty, and old-fashioned, that I thought I had seen in the past.

‘Mr Martineau, you are a qualified solicitor?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve practised in this town?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long were you in practice here?’

‘Quite a long time.’ Martineau’s voice made a contrast to the quick, breathless question; he seemed less self-conscious than anyone who had spoken in the court. ‘Let me see, I must think it out. It must have been over twenty — nearly twenty-five years.’

‘And you gave it up a few years ago? How long ago, exactly?’

There was a pause.

‘Just over six years ago.’

‘And you joined Mr Exell in his advertising agency?’

‘Yes.’

‘What were the arrangements, the business arrangements, I mean, you understand, Mr Martineau — when you joined that firm?’

‘I think we worked out the value of the business roughly, and I bought half of it from Mr Exell.’

‘How much did you pay?’

‘Five hundred pounds.’

Getliffe had asked the question at random. The answer went directly against us: George and Jack had borrowed half as much again.

‘You ran the business yourself for a time?’

‘I helped, I can only say that. I was also interested in — other fields.’

‘You remember the little paper, The Advertisers’ Arrow, which the agency used to publish?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Your other interests didn’t leave you much time to keep acquainted with it, I suppose?’

Martineau hesitated for a moment.

‘I think they did, on the whole. I think I knew more about it than anyone else.’

Many people noticed the dejection and carelessness that Getliffe had shown at the beginning of the examination; only a few realised the point at which his manner changed. Actually, it was when he heard this answer. He immediately became nervous but alert, pertinacious, ready to smile at Martineau and the jury. No one understood completely at the time; myself, I suddenly felt that he must be getting a different response from his last night’s talk with Martineau.

‘How long were you busy with the agency?’

‘Not quite a year, not quite a year.’

‘And towards the end of that time you received suggestions that you might sell again?’

‘Not quite, not quite. It was after I had already got on the move once more. We talked over the possibility of other people buying it. You must forgive me if my memory isn’t perfect — but it’s some time ago and my life has changed a little since.’ He turned to the judge, who smiled back. ‘I think that was the first step, though.’

‘Whom did you talk over the matter with?’

‘Mr Passant, chiefly.’

‘What kind of conversation did you have with Mr Passant?’

Martineau laughed.

‘That’s rather a tall order, I’m afraid. I talked to him a great deal then,’ he looked in a friendly way at George, ‘and I have talked a good deal since of different things, you know. I can’t guarantee to remember very exactly. But I think we discussed the natural things — that is, whether Mr Passant ought to try to buy this business, and the state it was in, and its prospects in the future. My impression is, we touched on all those things—’

‘You touched on the Arrow, did you?’

‘Yes, we certainly did that.’

‘Did you come to the conclusion that Mr Passant ought to try to buy the agency?’

‘I think we did.’

‘Can you recall what you said about its state just then?’

‘That’s a little difficult.’

‘You stated that you did discuss the — condition at that time?’

‘Naturally he was interested in those matters, I told him all I could.’

‘You must have discussed profits and the turnover and the expenses — and the circulation of the Arrow, I expect?’ Getliffe was still eager and excited.

‘I think so, I think we did.’

‘I’m afraid I’ve got to push on about the circulation. We should all be clearer if you could remember, do you think you can remember? — if you gave him a definite figure?’

‘I may have done, but I can’t be certain.’

‘Is it likely you did?’

‘I should have thought I told him in general terms, so that he could make an estimate of the possibilities for himself. I should have thought that was the most likely thing.’

‘You think you told him that the circulation was, say, large — or in the thousands, or very small?’

‘That was the way. I’m sure that was the way.’

‘Now, Mr Martineau, can you think what indication you actually gave him? Did you say that it was very small?’

‘No, no.’

‘That it was reasonably large?’

Martineau smiled.

‘I think I said — something of that nature.’

‘If you put it in numbers?’

‘I don’t believe we were absolutely exact.’

‘But if you had to, what would “reasonably large” have meant? More than a thousand?’

‘Yes, surely.’

‘Several thousand?’

‘Something like that, perhaps.’

‘You don’t mind repeating that, Mr Martineau?’

‘Of course not.’

‘You’re fairly certain that was the kind of number Mr Passant gathered from your discussions?’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘Thank you very much, Mr Martineau,’ Getliffe said. He sat down, and as he took up a pencil to write a note his fingers were trembling. He leaned close to me: ‘That’s something, anyway,’ he whispered.

Porson began in a level voice, spacing the words out: ‘You said you gave up your profession as a solicitor six years ago?’

‘Yes.’

‘How are you earning your living at present?’

‘I’m scarcely doing so at all.’

‘You mean, you’ve retired?’

‘No, no, I mean almost the opposite. It’s only since I’ve left that I’ve become active — but that hasn’t helped me much to make a living.’ Martineau smiled.

‘Come, Mr Martineau, where are you living now?’

‘I’ve been living in a little settlement. We try to support ourselves and earn our luxuries by selling what we have left over. But, as I said, that doesn’t always do so well.’

‘You’ve been there for long?’

‘Nearly two years. But perhaps I may not stay much longer.’

‘I think the jury will understand your temporary association with the agency if you will tell us something about your movements. From the time you gave up your profession — first of all, you had a short period with the agency, and then—?’

Martineau mentioned his changes: the ‘Brotherhood of the Road’, the solitary vagrancy, some of his humiliations and adventures (someone in the gallery laughed as he mentioned he slept in casual wards; Martineau turned towards him and laughed more loudly), the settlement. He did not say any word about his future. As the story went on Getliffe stiffened into attention. The whole court was tense.

‘Very well,’ said Porson, ‘I suppose we can take it for granted you performed this very eccentric behaviour on religious grounds?’

Martineau nodded his head. ‘Myself, I should call it trying to find a way of life.’

‘Well — you were already trying to do that when you bought part of Mr Exell’s business?’

‘I think I was.’

‘You weren’t entirely interested in it as a business?’

‘Not entirely.’

‘Scarcely at all, in fact?’

‘I couldn’t say that.’

‘You had every reason not to trouble to get any accurate knowledge of it at all?’

‘I’m afraid that isn’t true,’ said Martineau. ‘I knew it — pretty well.’

‘You won’t pretend you seriously thought of this paper, for instance — as a business proposition? You don’t deny that you wrote religious articles for it?’

‘I thought perhaps I should find others — well, who were trying to find the way too.’

‘I’m glad you admit that. You’ll also admit, won’t you, that you weren’t in touch with more prosaic things — like its circulation?’

Martineau shook his head. ‘No. I was in touch with them. They were still very close.’

‘I hope you’ll admit, though, that Mr Exell still had something to do with it?’

‘Yes.’ Martineau smiled again.

‘Perhaps even more than yourself?’

‘Very likely he had.’

‘Well, then, Mr Martineau, will it surprise you to know that Mr Exell has given the court exact information upon the circulation of this paper, and his information was very different from that which you remember — you vaguely remember — giving to Mr Passant?’

‘It doesn’t surprise me so very much,’ Martineau said.

‘So I put it to you that you were incorrect in your recollection of your talk to Mr Passant? You told him a figure very much less than you suggested a few minutes ago?’

‘That’s not true. Not true.’

‘You realise you are contradicting yourself? You have told us you were thoroughly acquainted with the state of the firm.’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve also agreed that Mr Exell knew it well, as well and better than yourself? I’ve told you that he gave evidence that the Arrow at no time had a circulation of more than twelve hundred.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then, Mr Martineau, I put it to you that either your recollection of your talks with Mr Passant is untrustworthy or—’

Martineau broke in: ‘No, no, no. Those talks are returning more and more.’

‘In that case, you were never acquainted with the real figures? You’ve been misleading us?’

‘No. I knew them not so badly, not so badly.’

‘How can you possibly justify what you have just said?’

Martineau replied: ‘Because I should have agreed with Mr Exell.’

There was an instant of silence.

‘Yet you said you remembered telling Mr Passant an absolutely different state of affairs? Is it true that you gave Mr Passant to understand that the paper had a large circulation?’

‘That is also true.’

‘While you yourself knew, with Mr Exell, that it was quite otherwise?’

‘That’s true as well. As well.’

‘You’re now saying, Mr Martineau, that you were responsible for telling a dangerous lie. You realise you’re saying this?’

‘I do.’ He smiled. ‘Naturally I do.’

The judge coughed, and said quietly: ‘Would you mind telling us whether you actually knew the position of your paper in detail at this time?’

‘Yes.’

‘On the other hand, you gave Mr Passant a different estimate, a very much larger figure?’

‘I think I never gave him a figure exactly. I’ve said before, I don’t remember too well. But I let him get an impression of something much larger. I certainly let him get that impression.’

‘Can you explain why you did that?’

‘I think so. I’ve already said, m’lord, that the little paper contained some of my plans to find others on the same — well, “exploration” as myself, and it wasn’t always easy in those days to confess how unsuccessful I had been.’

The judge pursed his lips into a smile of recognition (not his friendly smile), inclined his head, and made a note.

Porson kept on, his tone angrier and more hectoring.

‘Was there any reason why a man who had apparently given up something for his beliefs should go in for indiscriminate lying?’

Martineau said: ‘I’m afraid I found there was.’

Could he expect the jury to believe this ‘extraordinary thing’? It was not part of his ‘new religion’ to damage and mislead his friends? The lie might make it more possible to obtain money from his friends, but that was scarcely likely to enter his thoughts? Was the only explanation that Martineau could offer for his ‘completely pointless lie’ simply his own ‘vanity and conceit’?

It was commented on as the bitterest cross-examination which the trial had so far seen; Porson seemed full of personal antipathy. Many people in the court felt pleased at the tranquillity with which Martineau answered. He was still calm when Porson asked his last questions.

‘In fact, your way of life has made you a person with no respect for the truth as the jury and all honest men must understand it?’

‘I don’t feel that’s true.’

‘You’re aware, of course, that if the jury believe this story of your lie it may be of some slight advantage to your friend, Mr Passant?’

‘Yes.’

‘There’s no more reason for them to trust you now than Mr Passant had — according to your story?’

‘I hope they will trust me now.’

When Porson sat down, Martineau rested a hand on the box. Getliffe asked him the one question: ‘You can say for certain, Mr Martineau, that you gave Mr Passant to understand that the circulation was a largish number, in the thousands?’

‘I’m certain,’ said Martineau, in a full, confident and happy voice.

37: Night With the Passants

Two more witnesses were called before the judge rose. I stayed with Getliffe in the robing-room after Porson had gone out, leaving us with a loud laugh and a goodnight. Getliffe sat on the edge of the table.

‘Old Martineau did us proud,’ he said. I nodded.

‘You’re lucky to have known him,’ he said with a warm, friendly smile. ‘He’s the sort of man who sometimes makes me want to do something different. You can understand my wanting that, can’t you?’ He was speaking with great eagerness.

‘I knew you would,’ Getliffe said. We took up our cases and walked through the empty hall. Suddenly Getliffe took my arm. ‘I knew you’d understand,’ he said. ‘You pretend not to be religious, I know that, of course. But you can’t get away from your own nature, whatever you like to call it. You can’t pull the wool over my eyes. It’s something we’ve got in common, isn’t it?

‘I don’t mean we’re better people in one way,’ he went on. ‘You know I’m not. You’ve seen enough of me. I can do — things I’m ashamed of afterwards. You can too, can’t you? I expect we can both do more bad things than people who’ve not got the sense of — “religion”. In many ways I’m a worse man than they are. But somehow I think there are times when I get a bit further than they manage to. Because I want to, that’s all, L S.’

He laughed. ‘Take Porson, for instance. I know what they say about his morals; I’m not taking any notice of them. If you rule that out, he’s a better man than I am. He’s more honest, he wouldn’t have to watch himself as I do. Yet there isn’t a scrap of anything deep in him. I’ll swear there isn’t. He’s never prayed. He’s never wept at night.’

As we walked on through the street, crowded with the first rush of the evening, Getliffe said: ‘What happened to old Martineau, anyway? Did he lie to Passant or did he think of that later?’

‘I think he lied to Passant,’ I said. I told him of the entry in George’s diary: and of that inexplicable chicanery over Morcom’s flat years ago — when George had protested, angrily and loyally, that Martineau could never do a dishonest act.

Getliffe said: ‘I don’t know. He’s not got much to lose now, of course — and Passant might gain a good deal. He liked Passant, I could tell that. Anyway, it’s given us a chance. With our friend Porson going all out after that set of figures on paper. He never ought to have made so much of it. But as for Martineau — you know, he might have invented it for Passant’s sake.’

‘It’s difficult to believe,’ I said. ‘He was always fond of George Passant — but personal affections mattered less to him than anyone I’ve ever met. His own story—’

‘What about it?’

‘You believed him last night?’

‘I fancy I did,’ said Getliffe. ‘It went just as I told you. It was all a long time ago, he said. He did just remember talking to Passant, but he hadn’t any recollection of what they said. He never knew much about the agency or the paper. He had forgotten the little he ever knew. He obviously wasn’t going to make any effort to remember, either.’

‘Was that all?’

‘That was all I got him to say. Once or twice I did wonder whether he really had forgotten. He seemed to be making it too vague altogether. But I tell you, L S, I’m certain of one thing. Last night he hadn’t the slightest intention of saying what he did today. I don’t believe he had any intention of doing it — until he got into the box. It just came to him on the spur of the moment. I should like to know whether he invented it.’

‘I’m certain he lied to Passant,’ I said. ‘Of course, if he did, Passant would believe him. He would never be suspicious of a friend, particularly of Martineau—’

‘I don’t think I should have been,’ said Getliffe. He smiled at me. Because of these last hours, we were on better terms than we had ever been.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘You might have believed him for the moment, but as soon as he went away you’d have taken care to find out.’

‘We’ve got to remember,’ said Getliffe, ‘that Passant himself must have had his suspicions. He’s too able a man not to have seen some snags and — they must all have known for certain there was something wrong. Very soon—’

‘When?’

‘We can both make our own guess, can’t we?’

Before the money was borrowed, he was thinking. But his imagination had been caught by Martineau.

‘The old chap must have gone through a good deal,’ he said, ‘getting no one to believe in his faith, at that time. I know you will say this is all too cut and dried, L S — but I fancy there is one thing he held on to longer than most. That’s his self-respect. And I fancy his performance today had something to do with that.’

‘You mean, he might have been trying to free himself — even from self-respect?’

‘At times — I can imagine doing it myself.’

‘But still,’ I thought aloud, ‘it’s stronger with him than most men — even after today. There’s part of it he never will lose. He would be the last man to be able to get free.’

Getliffe laughed affectionately.

‘Anyhow, he got rid of a dash of it today.’

At Eden’s Olive and Jack were waiting: their solicitor had sent for them, to have a last word before their examination the next day. Olive told me that Martineau was leaving the town within the hour.

Soon I left them, and took a taxi to the omnibus station. George, his father and Roy were standing close to a notice of the services to the North.

Martineau was on the steps by the conductor, and as I hurried towards them he went inside. The engine burred, they lurched off; Martineau was still standing up, waving.

‘It’s a pity he had to go away tonight,’ Mr Passant said. Then he burst out: ‘He never ought to go without an overcoat, going right up there in this weather. He ought to know it isn’t doing any good—’

We were all sad that he could leave so casually, before the end of the trial. They were angry that he was free of their sorrows. Mr Passant said several times on the way to the Passants’ house: ‘I should have thought he might have stayed another day or two.’

He repeated it to Mrs Passant, who was waiting in her front room. ‘I didn’t expect much of him,’ she said.

‘He used to flatter you very nicely, though,’ said Roy, who had replaced Jack in her favour. For one instant her face softened in a pleased, girlish smile.

‘He couldn’t have made any difference—’ Mr Passant began.

‘If he had been a decent, sensible man everything would have been different. I shall always say it was his fault. He ought to have looked after you properly,’ she said to George. She got up and put a kettle on the fire; since I last saw her, her movements had grown stiff, although her face had aged less than her husband’s.

‘But he wasn’t worried by them this afternoon,’ said Mr Passant. ‘They couldn’t get him to say anything he didn’t mean.’

Mrs Passant was saying something in an undertone to George. Mr Passant looked at them, then said to me: ‘I couldn’t follow what Mr Martineau had been doing himself. I’m not pretending I could help him because I haven’t fallen into the same mistakes or misunderstandings. It isn’t that, Lewis.’

‘No one followed what he’d been doing,’ said Roy. ‘Believe me. That is so.’

‘The main thing is, we ought to be grateful to him,’ said Mr Passant. ‘When I heard them getting at him this afternoon—’

‘I suppose we ought to be grateful to him,’ George broke in.

‘Of course we ought,’ said Mr Passant. ‘It’s contradicted all they were saying.’

‘It’s very easy to exaggerate the effect of that.’ George turned round to face his father. ‘You mustn’t let it raise false hopes. There are a great many things you must take into account. First of all, even if they believe him, this is only one part of the case. It isn’t the chief part, and if they hadn’t been wanting to raise every insinuation against me, they could have missed it out altogether.’

Mr Passant questioned me with a glance. I replied: ‘It’ll have some effect on the other, of course. But perhaps George is right to—’

‘What’s more important,’ George went on, ‘is whether they believe him or not. You can’t expect them to believe a man who has left his comfort and thrown his money away, and who would sooner sleep in a workhouse than fritter away an evening at one of their houses. You can’t expect them to take him seriously. You’ve got to realise that they’ll think it their duty to put him and me in the same class — and feel proud of themselves for doing it.’

‘No, that’s not quite right,’ Mr Passant said.

‘You don’t know.’

‘I’ve been watching and listening—’

‘You don’t know what to listen to. I’ve had to learn. I’ve been fairly competent at my profession. If you want anyone to tell you whether my opinion is worth having, you had better ask Eliot.’

‘I know it, you can’t think I don’t know it—’

‘It can’t be much of a consolation for you,’ George said.

He was hoping more from Martineau’s evidence than he could let his father see. During their argument, I felt it was one of the few occasions on I had seen George deliberately dissimulate. Perhaps he had to destroy his own hopes. I wondered if he also consciously wanted to keep up the pretence that there was nothing in the case; and so told Mr Passant that his persecutors would disregard favourable evidence, just as they had invented the whole story of the fraud.

Yet, listening to him, we had all been brought to a pitch of inordinate strain. He had started out to dissimulate, but his own passion filled the words, and he did not know himself how much was acted. Before he stopped, he could not conceal an emotion as violent as that of the night before.

We all looked at him. No one spoke for a time. Then George said: ‘Where are you preaching on Sunday?’

‘I don’t know for certain.’

‘The trial will be over,’ said George. ‘Whatever happens, I want you to preach. Where’s the circuit this week?’

Mr Passant mentioned the name of a village.

George said: ‘It’s grotesque that they always give you the furthest places. You’ve got to insist on fair treatment.’

‘It doesn’t matter, going a few miles more,’ said Mr Passant.

‘It matters to them and it ought to matter to you. But anyway, this place is presumably fixed for Sunday. I want you to go.’

Mrs Passant suddenly tried to stop their pain.

‘That’s the place old Mr Martineau started his acting tricks, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I should like to know what culch he’s getting up to now.’

‘I don’t know,’ said George.

Mrs Passant said: ‘He ought to have looked after you. He used to think you would do big things. When you went to Mr Eden’s, he used to think you wouldn’t stay there very long.’

‘If I had wanted, I could have moved.’

‘I never thought you would, somehow,’ she said.

‘Because I found something valuable to do,’ George said.

‘You found something you liked doing more. I always knew you would. Even when I told people how well you were getting on.’ She spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, with acceptance and without reproach. George looked at her with something like gratitude. At that moment, one felt how close she had been all his life. She understood him in the way Jack did; she, too, did not believe in the purpose and aspirations, she had always seen the weaknesses and self-deceit. Like Jack, she had discounted the other sides of his nature, and possessed a similar power, the greater because of the love between them.

38: Impressions in the Court

FOR a time the next morning, the feeling of the court was less hostile. Martineau’s evidence had raised doubts in some onlookers; and they responded to Getliffe’s new zest. Jack’s examination went smoothly and he soon made a good impression. The touch of genuine diffidence in his manner seemed to warm people, even in court, to his frank, spontaneous, fluent words. As he answered Getliffe, I thought again how there was a resemblance between them.

He gave an account of his positions in the years before they bought the agency — he was twenty-nine, a year older than he used to tell us in the past, a fact which I should have known if I had studied the register of our old school. He said of the transaction over the agency: ‘I wanted money very badly, I’m not going to pretend anything else.’

‘About the information you gave to people when you were borrowing money,’ said Getliffe, ‘that was never false?’

‘No. I’d got a good thing to sell, and I was selling it for all I was worth.’

‘You told them what you believed to be the truth?’

‘Yes. Naturally I was as enthusiastic as I could honestly be.’

‘You were certain it was a good thing, weren’t you?’

‘I put every penny I had got into it, and I spent every working hour of my time improving it for months.’

‘You felt like that yourself after you had received Mr Martineau’s information?’

‘Yes,’ said Jack. ‘If I’d heard — for instance, that the circulation of the Arrow was much smaller — I shouldn’t have become as keen. But even so, I should have known there were possibilities.’

‘It was a perfectly ordinary business venture, wasn’t it? That is how you would look at it?’

‘It was a good deal sounder than most. It did quite well, of course. There’s a tendency to forget that.’

Once or twice he drew sympathetic laughter. He kept to the same tone, responsible and yet not overburdened, through most of Porson’s cross-examination. He denied that he had known the real state of the agency.

‘I was a bit puzzled later, but all sorts of factors had to be taken into account. I set to work to put it right.’ About the farm he would not admit anything of the stories of Miss Geary and the others. It was noticed on all sides that Porson did not press him. But after several replies from Jack, Porson said: ‘The jury will observe there are two accounts of those interviews. One was given by several witnesses. The other was given by you, Mr Cotery.’ He added: ‘Incidentally, will you tell us why you gave different people so many different accounts of yourself?’

Getliffe objected. Porson said: ‘I consider it essential to cross-examine this witness as to credit.’

The judge said: ‘In the circumstances, I must allow the question.’

Porson asked whether Jack had not invented several fictitious stories of his life — one, that he had been to a good school and university, another that he had been an officer in the army? Jack, shaken for the first time, denied both.

‘It will be easy to prove,’ said Porson. He looked at the jury. He had given no warning of this surprise. ‘Do you deny that—’

‘Oh, I don’t deny that I’ve sometimes got tired of my ordinary self. But that had nothing to do with raising money.’ Jack had recovered himself. He replied easily to Porson’s questions about his stories: some he just admitted.

At last Porson said: ‘Well, I put it to you, Mr Cotery, that you’ve been living by your wits for a good many years?’

‘I think that’s true.’

‘You’ve never settled down to a serious occupation? If you like, I can take you through a list of things you’ve done—’

‘You needn’t trouble. It’s perfectly clear.’

‘You’ve spent your entire time trying to get rich quick?’

‘I’ve spent my time trying to make a living. If I’d been luckier, it wouldn’t have been necessary.’

Porson asked a number of questions about the ways in which he had made a living. To many, there was something seedy and repellent in those indications of a life continuously wary, looking for a weakness or a generosity — they were identical when one was selling an idea. But most people actually in court still felt some sympathy with Jack; he was self-possessed, after the moment of anger about his romances, and he answered without either assertiveness or apology. Once he said, with his old half-comic ruefulness: ‘It’s harder work living by your wits than you seem to think.’

Porson said, after a time: ‘You don’t in the least regret anything you’ve done? You don’t regret persuading people to lose their money?’

‘I’m sorry they’ve lost it — just as I’m sorry I lost my own. But that’s business. I expect to get mine back some day, and I hope they will.’

Porson finished by a reference to Olive’s part in the transactions; she had been trying to raise money for the purchase, he suggested, at a time when Jack was taking other women to the farm.

‘She was already your mistress as well, wasn’t she?’

‘Need I answer that?’

As Jack asked the question, several people noticed the distress and anger in his face, but they nearly all thought it was simulated. The general view was that he had chosen his moment to ‘act the gentleman’; curiously enough, some felt it the most unprepossessing thing he had done that morning.

‘I don’t think you need,’ said the judge.

Jack’s reputation with women was well known in the town, and it was expected that Porson would make a good deal of it. To everyone’s surprise, Porson let him go without another question.

Olive entered the box: Getliffe kept to the same lines as with Jack. All through she was abrupt and matter-of-fact; she made one reply, however, which Porson later taxed her with at length. It happened while Getliffe was rattling through his questions over the agency.

‘You had considered buying other businesses?’

‘Several.’

‘Why didn’t you go further with them?’

‘We wanted a run for our money.’

‘But you became satisfied that this one was sound?’

‘It was a long way the best we had heard of.’

‘Can you tell me how you worked out the possibilities?’

‘On the result of Mr Passant’s talk with Mr Martineau.’

‘You didn’t actually see Mr Martineau yourself, I suppose?’

‘I didn’t want to know any more about it.’

Very quickly, Getliffe asked: ‘You mean, of course, that you were completely satisfied by the accounts Mr Passant brought? Obviously they convinced all three of you?’

‘Of course. There seemed no need to ask any further.’

Many people doubted whether there had been a moment of tension at all. But when Porson cross-examined her, he began on it at once.

‘I want to go back to one of your answers. Why did you say that “I didn’t want to know any more about it”?’

‘I explained — because I was perfectly well satisfied as it was.’

‘Do you think that’s a really satisfactory explanation of your answer?’

‘It is the only one.’

‘It isn’t, you know. You can think of something very different. Just listen to what you said again: “I didn’t want to know any more about it.” Doesn’t that suggest another phrase to you?’

‘Nothing at all.’

‘Doesn’t it suggest — “I didn’t want to know too much about it”?’

‘I should have said that if I meant it.’

‘I suggest you meant exactly that, though — before you had your second thoughts?’

‘I meant the opposite. I knew enough already.’

Porson kept her an inordinately long time. His questions had become more slowly and truculently delivered since Martineau’s evidence, his manner more domineering. It was his way of responding to the crisis of the case, of showing how much he needed to win it: but that would have been hard to guess.

He left no time to begin George’s examination before lunch. Irritating the judge, he involved Olive’s relations with Jack into his questions over the farm. He brought in a suggestion, so over-elaborate that it was commonly misunderstood, about her raising money in secret, without Jack’s knowledge; Porson’s insinuation being that she was trying to win Jack back from other women, and using her money as the bait.

But, though he had confused everyone by his legal argument and annoyed the judge, Porson had not entirely wasted his time. Olive was often admired at first sight, but seldom liked: and it had been so in court. Porson had been able to whip up this animosity.

As we went out for lunch, the crowd was full of murmurs about her evidence. Rachel met me, her face full of pity. She said several times — ‘If only she’d thrown herself on their mercy.’ Her pride had made many people glad to hear Porson’s attack. And the impassiveness with which she had received the questions about ‘running after a man who didn’t want her’ had added to their resentment.

Olive and Jack walked slowly together into lunch; they were not speaking when they arrived. George stared at her.

‘What did you think of that?’

‘Not much. They’re waiting for you now.’

We tried to keep up a conversation, but no one made the effort for long. About us all, there hung the minute restlessness of extreme fatigue. Before the meal was finished Jack pushed his chair back.

‘I want some air before this afternoon. I’m going for a walk,’ he said to Olive. She replied: ‘It’ll be better if I stay here.’

Without smiling, they looked at each other. Their faces were harassed and grave, but full of intimacy.

‘You’d better stay too,’ Jack said to George. ‘You’ll want to get ready.’ George inclined his head, and Jack asked me to go with him into the street.

We found people already on the pavements, waiting for the afternoon’s sitting to begin. Jack walked past them, his head back. He was wearing neither overcoat nor hat, and many of them recognised him.

‘We gave them something to listen to,’ he said.

‘You did pretty well.’

‘You would expect me to, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes, I should.’

‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘when I was in the box and saw them looking at me — I felt they were envying me, just like these people who’re staring now?’

Even then, he was drawing some enjoyment from the eyes of the crowd. But a little later he said: ‘There isn’t so much to envy, is there? I still don’t know why I have never pulled things off. I ought to have done. A good many others would have done in my place. I might have done, of course I might—’ He began speaking very fast, as though he were puzzled and astonished.

‘Lewis, if I’d been the man everyone thinks, this would never have happened. Do you realise that? I know that I’ve done things most men wouldn’t, clearly I have. But I could have saved myself the trouble if I had lived on Olive from the start. She would have kept me if I’d let her. The man Porson struck something there. But I just couldn’t. Why, Lewis, a man like you would have found it infinitely easier to let her than I did!’

‘Yes, I should have taken her help,’ I said.

‘I couldn’t,’ said Jack. ‘I suppose I was too proud. Have you ever known me to be too proud in any other conceivable circumstances before? It’s incredible: but I couldn’t take the help she wanted to give.’

Jack was reflecting. I recalled how Olive knew that he was struggling against being dependent on her — when we were afraid that he might run. We turned back towards the steps. He again felt curious eyes watching him, and casually smoothed back his hair.

‘They think I’m a man who lives on women,’ he said. ‘It’s true that I haven’t lost by their company, in my time. The curious thing is — the one occasion when I ought to have let a woman help me, I couldn’t manage it.

‘I’m not the man they think,’ said Jack. ‘I’ve always envied people who’ve got the power of going straight ahead. I don’t think there’s much chance I shall learn it now.’

39: The Last Cross-Examination

WHEN George walked from the dock to the witness box, the court was full. There were acquaintances whom he had made at the School and through Eden’s firm; as well as close friends, there were several present whom he had quarrelled with and denounced. Canon Martineau, who had not attended to hear his brother, was in court this afternoon, by the Principal’s side; Beddow and Miss Geary were also there, of that committee which George once attacked. Roy’s father was the only one of the five who had not come to watch. Roy himself stood at the back of the court, making a policeman fetch chairs for Mr and Mrs Passant. Daphne and Rachel stood near to Roy. Eden sat in the place he had occupied throughout the trial. And there were others who had come under George’s influence — many of them not ready to believe what they heard against him.

As he waited in the box, the court was strained to a pitch it had not reached before. There was dislike, envy and contempt ready for him; others listened apprehensively for each word, and were moved for him so that their nerves were tense.

At that moment, just as Getliffe was beginning his first question, the judge intervened with a businesslike discussion of the timetable of the case. ‘Unless you finish by tomorrow lunchtime,’ (Saturday) he said to Porson, ‘I shall have to leave it over until Monday. I particularly want to have next week clear for other work. If you could cut anything superfluous out of your cross-examination this afternoon — then perhaps you’ (he turned to Getliffe) ‘could begin your final speech today.’

Getliffe agreed in a word; he felt the suspense in the court, tightened by this unexpected delay. But Porson argued for some minutes, and said that he could not offer to omit essential questions. In fact, George’s evidence took up the whole afternoon.

Throughout the hours in the box George was nervous in a way which altered very little, whether it was Getliffe who questioned him or Porson. Yet he was, in many ways, the best witness the trial had seen. His hands strained at the lapels of his coat and his voice kept breaking out in anger; but even here, the rapidity and coherence of his mind, the ease with which his thoughts formed themselves into words, made the answers come clear, definite and undelayed.

In the examination, George gave a more elaborate account of their businesses, and one far more self-consistent and complete than either of the others or Getliffe himself in the opening speech. The answers explained that he and Jack heard of Martineau’s leaving the town and wanting to sell the agency. He, as an old friend, undertook the task of asking Martineau about it, in particular whether it was an investment they would be justified in inviting others to join. Martineau told him the agency was in a particularly healthy state — and that the Arrow had a circulation of about five thousand. His memory was absolutely precise. There were no vague impressions. He had not thought of any misrepresentation (‘It would have been fantastic,’ George broke out, ‘to inquire further’). Jack and Olive had approached Attock and the others; the firm was bought; it had brought in a reasonable profit, not as large as they expected. He had been puzzled for some months at the small circulation of the Arrow after they took it over. They had not been able to repay more than a fraction of the loan, but had regularly raised the interest. The disorganisation of industry in the town during the economic crisis had also diminished the business, just as it was becoming established. But still, they had maintained some profit and paid the interest regularly. The agency would still have been flourishing, if, in George’s words, ‘I had not been attacked’.

After the steady results of the agency, they had thought of other ventures. The farm, which he knew through visits with his friends from the School, struck him as a possibility, and he examined its finances together with Jack. They decided that, running it with one or two smaller hostels, and finally a chain, they could make it give profits on a scale different from their first attempt with the agency. They were anxious to make money, George said vehemently, in answer to Getliffe’s question: it was also a convenience to manage the farm, as he and a group of friends spent much of their time there. Essentially, however, it was a business step. He gave a precise account of the meeting with Miss Geary and others.

In the middle of the afternoon, when the windows were already becoming dark, Porson rose for the last cross-examination of the trial. He wrapped his fingers in his gown and waited a moment. Then he said: ‘In your professional career, haven’t you done a good deal of work on financial transactions, Mr Passant?’

‘Yes.’

‘You would consider yourself less likely than most to make a mistake through ignorance — or vagueness — or any incompetence that a man can fall into out of inexperience?’

‘I should.’

‘Thank you for admitting that. I don’t want to take up the court’s time questioning you about the financial cases — very much more complicated than the ones you engaged in yourself — which you handled for Mr Eden during the last five or six years. So, with your knowledge of financial matters, what was your first impression when Mr Martineau described the state of the agency?’

‘I accepted it as the truth.’

‘You didn’t think it remarkable that an agency of that kind — at that time — should be flourishing so excessively?’

‘I was interested that it should be doing well.’

‘With your experience and knowledge, it didn’t occur to you that it might be said to be doing too well?’

‘I was told it on the best of authority.’

‘I suggest to you, Mr Passant, that if you had been told anything so remarkable, even by Mr Martineau, you would naturally, as a result of your knowledge of these matters, immediately have investigated the facts?’

‘I might have done if I hadn’t known Mr Martineau well.’

Porson continued with questions on George’s knowledge of the agency. He kept emphasising George’s competence; several times he seemed deliberately to invite one of the methodical and lucid explanations. Many, however, were now noticing the contrast between the words and the defensive, bitter note in George’s voice.

‘Obviously, Mr Passant,’ Porson said, ‘you would never have believed such a story. Whoever told it to you. I put it to you that this tale of Mr Martineau telling you the circulation as a large figure — actually never took place?’

‘You’ve no grounds for suggesting that.’

At last, as George’s tired and angry answer was still echoing in the court, Porson left the agency and said: ‘Well, I’ll put that aside for the present. Now about your other speculation. You gave some explanation of why you embarked on that. Will you repeat it?’

‘I wanted money. This looked a safe and convenient method.’

‘That’s what you said. You also admitted it had some connection with your work at the Technical College and School of Art’ — he gave the full title, and then added — ‘the institution that seems to be referred to as the School? You admitted this speculation had some connection with your work there?’

‘It had.’

‘Let us see what your work at the School really amounted to. You are not a regular member of the staff, of course?’

‘I’ve been a part-time lecturer—’

‘For the last nine years your status, such as it is, hasn’t altered? You’ve given occasional classes in law which amount to two a week?’ By chance, he exactly repeated the Principal’s phrase of over seven years before.

‘That is true.’

‘That is, you’ve just been a casual visitor at the School. Now can you explain your statement that one reason for buying the farm was this — itinerant connection?’

‘I have made many friends among pupils there. I wanted to be useful to them. It was an advantage to have a place to entertain them — entirely at my disposal.’

‘Surely that isn’t a very important advantage?’

‘It’s a considerable one.’

‘I suggest there were others a good deal more urgent, Mr Passant. Wasn’t it more important to keep the activities of your friends secret at this time?’

‘It was not important in the sense you appear to be insinuating.’

‘Do you deny,’ Porson asked, ‘after all that’s been said — that you wanted to keep your activities secret?’

‘I saw no reason to welcome intrusion.’

‘Exactly. That is, you admit you had a particularly urgent reason for buying the farm at this time?’

‘It was no more urgent than — since I really became interested in a group of people from the School.’

‘You know — you’ve just admitted that you were afraid of intrusion?’

‘I knew that if strangers got inside the group, then I should run a risk of being attacked. That was also true since the first days that I began to take them up.’

‘You are trying to maintain that that was the same several years ago as in the summer when you bought the farm?’

‘Naturally.’

‘There is no “naturally”, Mr Passant. Haven’t you heard something of these scares among your friends — the fear of a scandal just at the psychological moment?’

‘I’ve heard it. Of course. I believe they’ve all missed something essential out of the idea of that danger.’

Porson laughed.

‘So you admit there was a danger, do you?’

‘I never had any intention of pretending there wasn’t.’

‘But you’re pretending it was no greater the summer when you wanted very urgently to buy the farm than it was years before?’

‘It was very little greater.’

‘Mr Passant: the jury has already heard something of the scandals your friends were afraid of when you were buying the farm. What do you expect us to believe, when you say there was no greater danger then?’

George cried loudly: ‘I said the danger was very little greater. And the reason for it was that the scandals were only the excuse to destroy everything I had tried to do. Some excuse could easily have been found at any time.’ His outburst seemed for a moment to exhaust and satisfy him. He was left spent and listless, while Porson asked his next question.

‘I shall have to ask you to explain what you mean by that. Do you really believe anyone threatened your safety for any length of time?’

‘I should have thought that events have left little doubt of that.’

‘No. You had good and sufficient reasons for fear at the time you wanted to buy the farm. What could you have had before?’

‘I was doing something which most people would disapprove of. I didn’t deceive myself that I should escape the consequences if ever I gave an excuse. And I wasn’t fool enough to think that there were no excuses during a number of years. I was vulnerable through other people long before Mr Martineau himself acquired the agency.’

‘You say you were doing something most people would disapprove of. That’ — Porson said — ‘is apparent at the time I am bringing you to. The time the scandals among your friends were finding their way out. But what were you doing before, what are you referring to?’

‘I mean that I was helping a number of people to freedom in their lives.’

‘You’d better explain what you mean by helping people to “freedom in their lives”.’

‘I don’t hope for it to be understood. But I believe that while people are young they have a chance to become themselves only if they’re preserved from all the conspiracy that crushes them down.’

Porson interrupted, but George did not stop.

‘They’re crushed into thinking and feeling just as the world outside wants them to think and feel. I was trying to make a society where they would have the chance of being free.’

‘But you’re asking us to regard that — as the work which would bring you into disrepute? That was the work you seemed to consider important?’

‘I consider it more important than any work I could possibly have done.’

‘We’re not concerned with your own estimate, you know. We want to see how you could possibly think your work a danger — until it had developed into something which people outside your somewhat unimportant group would notice?’

‘Work of that kind can’t be completely ignored.’

‘I suggest to you that it would have remained completely unknown — if it hadn’t just one external result. That is, this series of scandals.’

‘I do not admit those as results. But there are others which people would have been compelled to notice.’

‘Now, Mr Passant, what could you imagine those to be?’

‘The lives and successes of some of my friends.’

‘Do you pretend you ever thought that those would be very easy to show?’

‘Perhaps,’ George cried loudly again, ‘I never credited completely enough how blind people can be. Except when they have a chance to destroy something.’

‘That’s more like it. You’re beginning to admit that you couldn’t possibly have attracted any attention, either favourable or unfavourable? Until something was really wrong—’

‘I’ve admitted nothing of the kind.’

‘I’ll leave it to the jury. In any case, there was no serious scandal threatened until somewhere about the time you considered buying the farm? For several years you had been giving them the chance of what you choose to call “freedom in their lives” — but nothing had resulted until about the time you all got alarmed?’

‘There were plenty of admirable results.’

‘The more obvious ones, however, were that a good many of your friends began to have immoral relations?’

‘You’ve heard the evidence.’

‘Most of them had immoral relations?’

George stood silent.

‘You don’t deny it?’

George shook his head.

‘Your group became, in fact, a haunt of promiscuity?’

George was silent again.

Porson said: ‘You admit, I suppose, that this was the main result of your effort to give them “freedom in their lives”?’

‘I knew from the beginning that it was a possibility I had to face. The important thing was to secure the real gains.’

‘You don’t regret that you brought it about? You don’t feel any responsibility for what you have done to your — protégés?’

‘I accept complete responsibility.’

‘Despite all this scandal?’

‘I believe it’s the final example of the stupid hostility I’d taught them to expect and to dismiss.’

‘You have no regrets for these scandals?’

‘They are an inconvenience. They should not have happened.’

‘But — the happenings themselves?’

‘I’m not ashamed of them,’ George shouted. ‘If there’s to be any freedom in men’s lives, they have got to work out their behaviour for themselves.’

‘So your only objection to this promiscuity was when it became a danger? The danger that suddenly became acute at the time you said, in Mrs Ward’s hearing: “If we don’t get secrecy soon, we shall lose everything”.’

‘I should feel justified if much more had happened.’

‘You also felt justified in practising what you preach?’

George did not answer. Porson referred to Iris Ward’s evidence, the hints of Daphne and other girls. There was a soft, jeering laugh from the court.

George said: ‘There’s no point in denying those stories.’

‘And so all this,’ Porson said, ‘is the work of which you were so proud? Which you told us you considered the most important activity you could perform?’

There was another laugh. With a flushed face, the judge ordered silence. ‘You needn’t answer that if you don’t want,’ he said to George, a kindly curious look in his eyes.

‘I prefer to answer it,’ said George. ‘I’ve already described what I’ve tried to do. I can’t be expected to give much significance to these incidents you are bringing up — when you compare them with the real meaning they mattered very little one way or the other.’

Porson drank some water. When he spoke again, his voice was a little husky, but still full of energy and assertion.

‘You’ve told us, Mr Passant, that work with your group of friends was a very important thing in your life?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you always realised it might involve you in a certain danger? Shall we say in social disapproval?’

‘Yes.’

‘You still repeat, however, that the danger at the time of these alarms — just before you considered buying the farm — seemed to you little greater than in previous years?’

‘It was an excuse presented to anyone wishing to be hostile. Before, they would have been compelled to invent one. That was all the difference.’

‘I’m asking you again. You still deny that the danger really was desperate enough to affect your actions? To force you to make an attempt to buy the farm at all costs?’

‘I deny it, naturally.’

Porson paused.

‘How then do you explain that you were willing — just about that time — to give up your group of friends altogether? To have nothing more to do with work that you’ve told us was the most important thing in your life?’

‘It’s not true.’

‘I can recall a witness to prove you said these words also at the farm.’

There was a silence. George began speaking fast.

‘In a sense I grant it. It was the only course left for me to take. I’d finished as much as I could do. I’d tried to help a fair number of my friends from the School. I’d given them as much chance of freedom as I could. Doing it again with other people would merely mean repeating the same process. I was willing to do that — but if it was going to involve me in continual hostility with everyone round me, I wasn’t prepared to feel it a duty to go on. I’d done the pioneer work. I was satisfied to let it go at that.’

As he spoke, George had a helpless and suffering look. This last answer scarcely anyone understood, even those of us who knew something of his language, and the barrier between his appetite for living and his picture of his own soul. He was alone, more than at any time in the trial — more than he had ever been.

For a moment, I found myself angry with him. Despite the situation, I was swept with anger; I was without understanding, as though I were suddenly much younger, as though I were taken back to the night of his triumph years before. For all his eagerness for life — I felt in a moment so powerful that no shame could obscure it — for all the warmth of his heart and his ‘vision of God’, he was less honest than his attackers, than the Beddows, Camerons, and Canon Martineau’s, the Porsons, Edens and Iris Wards. He was less honest than those who saw in his aspirations only the devices of a carnally obsessed and self-indulgent man. He was corrupt within himself. So at the time when the scandal first hung over him, he was afraid, and already dissatisfied, tired of the ‘little world’. But this answer which he made to Porson was the manner in which he explained it to himself.

At that moment, he suddenly seemed as alien to me, who had been intimate with him for so many years, as to those who laughed in court the instant before. I was blinded to the fire and devotion which accompanied this struggle with himself; through that struggle, he had deceived himself; yet it had also at moments given him intimations such as the rest of us might never know.

Even our indignations and ideals tend to be made in our own image. For me, to whom a kind of frankness with myself came more naturally than to George, it was a temptation to make that insight and ‘honesty’ a test by which to judge everyone else — just as an examiner, setting his papers and marking his questions, is always searching to give marks to minds built on the same pattern as his own.

I was blinded also to something as true and more simple. His words sounded less certain to him than to any of his listeners; they were more than anything an attempt to reason away his own misgivings. I ought to have known that he, too, had lain awake at night, seeing his aspirations fallen, bitterly aware of his own fear and guilt, full of the reproach of failure, remorse and the loss of hope. He too had ‘wept at night’, in a suffering harsher than Getliffe would ever feel, with all excuse seeming useless and remote; he had felt only degrading fear and the downfall of everything he had tried to do.

Yes, there had been self-reproach. I did not know, I couldn’t foresee the future, whether it would last, or for how long.

Porson passed on to the money transactions over the farm. Nothing unexpected happened in the rest of the cross-examination, which ended in the early evening.

40: Confession While Getliffe Prepares His Speech

I went from the court to some friends who had invited me to drink sherry; a crowd of people were already gathered in the drawing-room. Many of them asked questions about the trial. No one there, as it happened, knew that I was so intimate with George. They were all eager to talk of the evidence of the day, discussing Olive’s infatuation for Jack, the kind of life they had both led. Several of them agreed that ‘she had done it because he was involved already’. It was strange to hear the guesses, some as superficial as that, some penetrating and shrewd. The majority believed them guilty. There was a good-humoured and malicious delight in their exposure, and the gossip was warm with the contact of human life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It couldn’t at any time,’ I replied.

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

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

‘Will you tell me what happened?’

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

‘Getliffe still thinks they’re pretty good.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

During the first days of the fraud, when Olive felt repelled by Jack, she tried to restore her former admiration and half-dependence on George. But that had gone; and when she could not help still loving and respecting Jack, she transferred to George a good deal of hate and blame. He should have stopped it all. If he had been equal to his responsibilities, this would never have happened. He had made great pretensions to guide her life and Jack’s, and he had proved himself to be unavailing and rotten. When she compared him with Jack, frank and spontaneous despite all they were doing, she felt that the one quality which she once admired in George now seemed only a sham. The aspirations which he still talked of appeared to her, as they did to Jack, simply a piece of self-deceit. She had no more use for him.

While Getliffe prepared his speech in his room close by, I defended George against her. This night of all nights, I had to defend him, who had lost the most, against those who had helped to bring him where he was. She was not moved by his fall. At last I said, angry and desolated, ‘Whatever happens, Jack won’t be much harmed. But George — he will never be able to endure looking back to what he once was. Do you remember telling Roy one afternoon years ago — “he is worth twenty Jack Coterys”? Even if this was inevitable, I believe what you said then. Do you think that such a man will forget this afternoon?’

‘You’re being sentimental,’ she said, and was not even interested. She now thought only of her future with Jack. She realised that, if they got off, he would not be much scarred. If they could move to another town, he would soon put it all behind him. She knew he would become restless with ideas again. Left to himself, he might in time break the law in some similar fashion. She would keep him from that, now.

He would have to marry her. His gratitude and immediate respect for her — they would soon disappear. She talked about the prospect, forcing herself to sound matter-of-fact. She knew that she desired it. In a way, she believed that the life she wanted was only just beginning.

41: Getliffe’s Speech

GETLIFFE’S final speech, which lasted for two hours on Saturday morning, surprised us all. It was in his usual style, spasmodic, still bearing the appearance of nervousness, interjected with jerky asides, ill at ease and yet familiar; he was showing all the touch which made men comfortable with him. He was showing also the fresh enjoyment which seldom left him when he was on his feet in court.

But there was another note which made many of us feel that he was deeply moved. For those, like Eden and myself, who had been close to him through the week, there could be no doubt that something had affected him personally; and as we heard him reiterate a phrase — ‘the way in which Mr Passant’s freedom has worked out’ — we knew at last what it was. He kept using these words, slurring them in his quick voice. Last night, we had heard him promise ‘to pull something out of the bag’. We knew that he had chosen this line to divert the jury’s prejudice. Yet — I was certain — it was not only as an advocate he was speaking. I had never seen him so possessed by seriousness in court.

He began, in his simple, emphatic, salesman’s way, hammering home the division of the case to the jury. The three of them were being tried for a financial offence, and, on the other hand, their manner of life was being used against them. ‘First of all,’ said Getliffe, ‘I’m going to put the financial business out of our way.’ He went over the transactions again, quickly, full of impatient liveliness, once or twice forgetting a figure; he described the agency and came to George’s buying it from Martineau. ‘A lot of this is dull stuff to you and me,’ Getliffe smiled at the jury, ‘but about that incident we had what I at any rate found an unforgettable experience. I mean, the evidence of Mr Martineau. Now we have all knocked about the world. We know that there are reasons why we’re all capable of telling lies and even giving false evidence in a court of law. We all know that, though sometimes we pretend we don’t. I’m going to admit to you now that some of the witnesses for the defence, in this case, have had reasons which would explain their telling lies. You would know that even if I hadn’t told you. You’re able to judge for yourselves. But in Mr Martineau we had someone — I think more than any witness I’ve ever had the privilege of calling — who is completely removed from all the pettiness that we are ashamed of and that we never manage to sweep out of our lives. You can’t imagine Mr Martineau lying to us. You heard all about his story, didn’t you? He’s done something that most of us, if we are ordinary, decent, sinful men’ — he laughed again — ‘with one foot in the mud and one eye on the stars — have thought of at least once in our lives. That is, just cutting away from it all and trying to live the things we think we believe. Of course, we never manage it, you and I. It isn’t our line of business. I’m not sure it would be a good thing for the world if we could. But that isn’t to prevent us recognising something beyond us when we do see it — in a life like Mr Martineau’s, for instance. I don’t mind saying — whatever you think of me — that there’s something saintly about a life like his. Renouncing, deliberately renouncing, all the things you and I worry about from the time we are young men until we die. I’m not going to persuade you that his evidence is true. It would be insulting you and me and all we hope for if it wasn’t true.’

Some thought that this was an example of the craft, apparently naïve but really subtle, which made him, for all his deficiencies, a success at his profession. But they had not heard his confidence on the night of Martineau’s examination. If this was subtle, it was all instinctive. He believed what he was saying; he did not need to persuade himself.

He spent a long time over the details of the agency and the farm. Martineau’s evidence, he repeated again and again, acquitted them on the first. On the second — this was far vaguer than the agency; if it had not been for ‘that curious definite figure of the circulation’, then the second charge could never have been brought. He dealt with the figures of the farm, sometimes wrapping them round and complicating them.

All this, both the complication and the air of authority, was not much different from an ordinary defence. It was done with greater life and was less well ordered than most speeches at the end of such a case; but, if he had finished at that point, he would have done all that was expected of him. Instead, he began his last appeal, and for a quarter of an hour we listened in astonishment.

‘I submit that you would never think of convicting these three on the evidence that has been put forward, neither you nor I would think they were guilty for a moment — if it were not for something else we have all had in our minds this week. I mean, the way Mr Passant’s freedom has worked out. That is, you’ve heard of some people who have been breaking a good many of the laws that are important to decent men. I don’t mean the laws of this country, I mean the laws which lie behind our ordinary family way of life. I won’t try to conceal it from you. They haven’t shown any shame. I don’t know whether it’s to their credit that they haven’t. They have been living what some would call “a free life”. Well, that’s bound to prejudice them in your eyes, in the eyes of anyone older who doesn’t believe a thing is good just because it is new. I don’t mind confessing that it upset me when I discovered the pleasures they took for granted — as though there was nothing else for them to do. I think — I’m positive we think alike — that they are all three people of gifts. But chiefly I want to say something about Mr Passant, because I think we all realise that he has been the leader. He is the one who set off with this idea of freedom. It’s his influence that I’m going to try to explain.

‘You’ve all seen him. You can’t help recognising that he’s a man who actually made his way up to a point, who might have gone as far as he wanted. He could have done work for the good of the country and his generation — no one has kept him from it but himself. No one but himself and the ideas he has persuaded himself to believe in: because I’m going a bit further. It may surprise you to hear that I do genuinely credit him with setting out to create a better world.

‘I don’t pretend he has, mind you. You’re entitled to think of him as a man who has wasted every gift he possesses. I’m with you. I look on him like that myself. He’s chased his own pleasures. I’ll go as far as any of you in accusing him. I’ll say this: he’s broken every standard of moral conduct we’ve tried to keep up, and he’s put up nothing in their place. He is a man who has wasted himself.

‘I know you’re feeling this, and you know I am. I’m reminding you what one has to remind oneself — that he is not on trial, nor are the others, for having wasted himself. But if he was? But if he was? I should say to you what I have thought on and off since I first took on the case. I should say: he started off with a fatal idea. He wanted to build a better world on the basis of this freedom of his: but it’s fatal to build better worlds until you know what human beings are like and what you’re like yourself. If you don’t, you’re liable to build, not a better world, but a worse one; in fact you’re liable to build a world for one purpose and one only, that is just to suit your own private weaknesses. I’m certain that is exactly what Mr Passant has done. And I’m certain that is exactly what all progressively minded people, if you’ll let me call them that, are always likely to do unless they watch themselves. They usually happen to be much too arrogant to watch themselves. I don’t think we should be far wrong to regard Mr Passant as a representative of people who like to call themselves progressive. He’s been too arrogant to doubt his idea of freedom: or to find out what human beings are really like. He’s never realised — though he’s a clever man — that freedom without faith is fatal for sinful human beings. Freedom without faith means nothing but self-indulgence. Freedom without faith has been fatal for Mr Passant himself. Sometimes it seems to me that it will be fatal to most of his kind in this country and the world. Their idea of progress isn’t just sterile: it carries the seed of its own decay.

‘Well, that’s how I think of Mr Passant and progress or liberalism or anarchy or whatever you like. I believe that’s why he’s wasted himself. But you can say — it’s still his own fault. After all, he chose this fatal idea. He adopted it for himself. To that, I just want to say one thing more.

‘He’s a man on his own. I’ve admitted that. But he’s also a child of his time. And that’s more important for the way in which he has thrown himself into freedom without faith. You see, he represents a time and generation that is wretchedly lost by the side of ours. It was easy to believe in order and decency when we were brought up. We might have been useless and wild and against everything round us — but our world was going on, and it seemed to be going on forever. We had something to take our places in. We had got our bearings, most of us had got some sort of religion, some sort of society to believe in and a decent hope for the future.’ Eagerly, he laughed. ‘We’d got something to stick ourselves on to. It didn’t matter so much to us when the war — and everything the war’s meant since — came along. We had something inside us too solid to shift. But look at Mr Passant, and all the generation who are like him. He was fifteen when the war began. He had four years of chaos round him just at that time in his life, just at the time when we had quietness and discipline and hope all round us. It’s what we used to call “the uncounted cost”. You remember that, don’t you? And I’m not sure those four years were the worst. Think of everything that has happened in the years, it’s nearly nineteen years now, since the war began. Imagine people, alive and full of vitality and impressionable, growing up without control, without anyone believing in control, without any hope for the future except in the violence of extremes. Imagine all that, and think what you would have become yourself if you’d been young during this — I’ve heard men who believe in youth at any price call it an “orchard time”. I should say it was one of the swampy patches. Anyway, imagine you were brought up among these young people wasting themselves. That is, if you’re one of us, if you are a normal person who could go either way, who might go either Martineau’s or Passant’s. Well, if you were young, don’t you think you could have found yourself with Passant?

‘That’s what I should have said. I’ve let it out because it’s something that has been pressing inside me all through this trial, and I couldn’t be fair to Mr Passant and his friends unless I — shared it with you. You see, we’re not trying them for being wasted. Unless we’re careful we shall be. The temptation is to feel they’re pretty cheap specimens anyway, to give the benefit of doubt against them. We’ve got to be careful of our own prejudice. Even when the prejudice happens to be absolutely right, as right as anything we’re likely to meet on this earth. But we’re not trying them for their sins and their waste of themselves. We’re not trying them for a fatal idea of freedom. We’re not trying them for their generation. We are trying them for an offence of which there is scarcely a pennyworth of evidence, and which, if it were not for all this rottenness we have raised, you would have dismissed and we should all have been home long ago. You’ve got to discount the prejudice you and I are bound to feel…’

42: Fog Outside Bedroom Windows

As soon as Getliffe finished his speech, the court rose for the weekend. He had created an impression upon many there, particularly the strangers and casual spectators. Even some who knew George well were more disturbed than they would admit. Someone told me that he thought the whole speech ‘shoddy to the core’; but by far the greater number were affected by Getliffe’s outburst of feeling. They were not considering whether it was right or wrong; he was reflecting something which had been in the air the whole week, and which they had felt themselves. Whatever words he used, even if they disagreed with his ‘ideas’, they knew that he was moved by the same emotions as themselves. They were certain that he was completely sincere.

I went to George’s house after lunch. We did not mention the speech. For a time, George talked in a manner despondent and yet uncontrollably nervous and agitated. He had received that morning from the Principal the formal notice of dismissal from the School.

He took a piece of paper and began drawing a pattern like a spider’s web with small letters beside each intersection. Some time later, Roy arrived. George did not look up from his paper for a moment. At last he raised his head slowly.

‘What is it now?’ he said.

‘I just called in,’ said Roy. He turned his head away, and hesitated. Then he said: ‘Yes, there is something. It can’t be kept quiet. They’ve gone for Rachel.’

‘What?’

‘They’ve asked her to leave her job.’

‘Because she was connected with me?’

‘It’s bad,’ said Roy.

‘How is she going to live?’ I said.

‘I can’t think. But she mustn’t sit down under it. What move do you suggest?’ He looked at George.

‘I’ve done enough damage to her,’ said George. ‘I’m not likely to do any better in the present situation.’

Roy was sad, but not over-anxious: melancholy he already fought against, even at that age, but anxiety was foreign to him. He and I talked of the practical steps that we could take; she was competent, but over thirty-five. It would be difficult to find another job. In the town, after the trial, it might be impossible.

‘If necessary,’ said Roy, ‘my father must make her a niche. He can afford to unbelt another salary.’

We thought of some people whose advice might be useful; one he knew well enough to call on that afternoon. George did not speak during this discussion, and when Roy left, made no remark on his visit. I turned on the light, and drew my chair closer to the fire.

‘How is Morcom?’ George asked suddenly. ‘Someone said he was ill, didn’t they?’

‘I’ve not heard today. I don’t think he’s much better.’

‘We ought to go and see him.’

For a moment I tried to put him off. I suggested that Morcom was not well enough to want visitors, but George was stubborn.

We walked towards Morcom’s; a fog had thickened during the day, and the streets were cold and dark.

Morcom’s eyes were bright with illness, as he caught sight of George.

‘How are things going?’ George said, in a tone strangely and uncomfortably gentle.

‘It’s nothing.’

I walked round to the other side of the bed. Morcom lay back on the pillow after the effort to shake hands. Beyond the two faces, the fog was shining through the window; it seemed to illuminate the room with a white glare.

George made Morcom tell him of the illness. Unwillingly, Morcom said that when he had last seen me at tea with Olive, he had not been well: a chill had been followed by a day of acute neuritic pain; then the pain lessened, and during the trial he had been lying with a slight temperature.

George sympathised, with his awkward kindness. Their quarrels of the past had been patched up long since; they had met as casual acquaintances in the last few years. Yet, with an inexplicable strain, I remembered the days when Morcom played a special part in George’s imagination — the part of the disapproving, persecuting world outside. Now George sat by his bed.

It was strange to see: and to remember how George had once invented Morcom’s enmity. Still, more or less by chance, Morcom had done him some bad turns. George did not know that if Morcom had conquered his pride and intervened, the trial might never have happened. Perhaps — I suddenly thought — George, whose understanding sometimes flashed out at random, felt that Morcom also was preyed on, was broken down by remorse.

‘This illness is a nasty business,’ George was saying. ‘You’ll have to be careful of yourself. It’s a shame having you laid up.’

‘You’re worrying too much. Your trouble isn’t over yet?’

George’s face was, for a moment, swept clear of concern and kindness; he was young-looking, as many are at a spasm of fear.

‘The last words have been spoken from my side,’ he said. ‘They’ve said all they could in my favour. It’s a pity they couldn’t have found something more.’

‘Will he save it—?’

‘He told them,’ George said, ‘that I probably didn’t do the frauds they were charging me with. He told them that. He said they weren’t to be prejudiced because I was one of the hypocrites who make opportunities for their pleasures, while persuading themselves and other people that they had the highest of motives. I’ve been used to that attack since you began it years ago. It’s suitable it should come in now—’

‘I meant nothing like that.’

‘He said I believed in freedom because it would ultimately lead me to self-indulgence. You never quite went to the lengths of saying that was the only object in my life. You didn’t need to tell me I wanted my sexual pleasures. I’ve known that since I was a boy. I kept them out of my other happiness for longer than most men would have done. With all the temptations for sexuality for years, I know they have — encroached. You don’t think there haven’t been times when I regretted that?’ He paused, then went on: ‘Not that I feel I have hurt anyone or damaged the aims I started out with. But this man who was defending me, you understand, who was saying all that could be said in my favour against everyone there trying to get rid of me — he suggested that I have never wanted anything but sexuality, from the time I began till now. He said I thought I wanted a better world: but a better world for me meant a place to indulge my weaknesses. I was just someone shiftless and rootless, chasing his own pleasures. He used the pleasant phrase — a man who has wasted himself.’

‘He was wrong,’ said Morcom. He was staring at the ceiling; I felt that the interjection was quite spontaneous.

‘He suggested I was “a child of my time”.’ George went on, ‘and not really guilty of my actions because of that. As though he wanted to go to the limit of insulting nonsense. There are a lot of accusations they can make against me, but being a helpless unit in the contemporary stream — that is the last they can make. He said it. He meant it. He meant — running after my own amusement, living in a haze of sexual selfishness, because there’s nothing else I wanted to do, because I have lost my beliefs, because there’s no purpose in my life. I tell you, Arthur, that’s what he said of me. It would be a joke if it had happened anywhere else. With that offensive insult, he dared to put up the last conceivable defence I should ever make for myself. That I had been guilty of a good many sins, that I had been a hypocritical sensualist, but that I wasn’t responsible for it because I was “a child of my time”. He dared to say that I wasn’t responsible for it. Whatever I have done in my life, I claim to be responsible for it all. No one else and nothing else was responsible for what I have done. I won’t have it taken away. I am utterly prepared to answer for my own soul.’

The echo died away in the room. Then George said to Morcom: ‘Don’t you agree? Don’t you accept responsibility for anything you may have done?’

There was a silence. Morcom said: ‘Not in your way.’

He turned towards George. I listened to the rustle of the bedclothes. He said: ‘But after a fashion I do.’

‘There are times when it’s not easy,’ George said. ‘When you’ve got to accept a responsibility that you never intended. This afternoon I heard of the last thing they’ve done to me. They’ve dismissed Rachel from her job. Just for being a supporter of mine. You remember her, don’t you? Whatever they say against me, they can’t say anything against her. But she’s going to be disgraced and ruined. I can’t lift a finger to help. And I’m responsible. I tell you, I’m responsible. If they want to attack me any more they can say that’s the worst thing I’ve done. I ought not to have exposed anyone to persecution. It’s my own doing. There’s no way out.’

Morcom lay still without replying. George got up suddenly from his chair.

‘I’m sorry I’ve been tiring you,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think—’ He was speaking with embarrassment, but there was also a flicker of affection. ‘Is there anything I can do before we go?’

Morcom shook his head, and his fingers rattled with the switch by the bedside. The light flashed back from the windows.

‘Are you sure there’s nothing I can do?’ George asked. ‘There’s nothing I can fetch? Shall I send you some books? Or is there anything else you’d like sent in?’

‘Nothing,’ Morcom replied, and added a whisper of thanks.

That night I woke after being an hour or two asleep. The road outside was quiet. I listened for the chimes of a clock. The quarters rang out; I could not get to sleep again.

The central fear kept filling itself with new thoughts. Beyond reach, beyond the mechanical working of the mind, there was not a thought but the shapeless fear. I was afraid of the verdict on Monday.

Sometimes, in a wave of hope, memory would bring back a word, a scrap of evidence, a juror’s expression, a remark overheard in court. The fear ebbed and returned. One part of the trial returned with a distress that I could not keep from my mind for long; it was that morning, Getliffe’s final speech for the defence.

I could look back on it lucidly and hopelessly, now. There might have been no better way to save them. He had done well for them in the trial; he had done better than I should ever have done; I was thankful now that he had defended them.

And yet — he believed in his description of George, and his excuse. He believed that George had wanted to build a ‘better world’: a better world designed for George’s ‘private weaknesses’. As I heard those words again, I knew he was not altogether wrong. His insight was not the shallowest kind, which is that of the intellect alone; he saw with the emotions alone. Yet what he saw was half-true.

George, of all men, however, could not be seen in half-truths. It was more tolerable to hear him dismissed with enmity and contempt. He could not be generalised into a sample of the self-deluded radicalism of his day. He was George, who contained more living nature than the rest of us; whom to see as he was meant an effort from which I, his oldest friend, had flinched only the day before. For in the dock, as he answered that question of Porson’s, I flinched from the man who was larger than life, and yet capable of any self-deception; who was the most unselfseeking and generous of men, and yet sacrificed everything for his own pleasures; who possessed formidable powers and yet was so far from reality that they were never used; whose aims were noble, and yet whose appetite for degradation was as great as his appetite for life; who, in the depth of his heart, was ill-at-ease, lonely, a diffident stranger in the hostile world of men. How would it seem when George was older, I thought once or twice that night. Was this a time when one didn’t wish to look into the future?

Through that sleepless night, I could not bear to have him explained by Getliffe’s half-truth. And, with a renewed distress, I heard also Getliffe’s excuse — ‘a child of his time’. I knew that excuse was part of Getliffe himself. It was not invented for the occasion. It was the working out of his own salvation. Thus he praised Martineau passionately: in order to feel that, while most aspirations are a hypocrite’s or a sensualist’s excuse, there are still some we can look towards, which some day we — ‘with our feet in the mud’ — may achieve.

But there was more to it. ‘A child of his time.’ It was an excuse for George’s downfall and suffering: as though it reassured us to think that with better luck, with a change in the world, his life would have been different to the root. For Getliffe, it was a comfort to blame George through his time. It may be to most of us, as we talk of generations, or the effects of war, or the decline of a civilisation. If one could accept it, it made his guilt and suffering (not only the crime, but the whole story of his creation and its corruption) as impermanent, as easy to dismiss, as the accident of time in which it took place.

In the future, Getliffe was saying, the gentle, the friendly, the noble part of us will survive alone. Yet at times he knew that it was not true. Sometimes he knew that the depths of harshness and suffering will go along with the gentle, corruption and decadence along with the noble, as long as we are men. They are as innate in the George Passants, in ourselves, as the securities and warmth upon which we build our hopes.

That had always appeared true, to anyone like myself. Tonight, I knew it without any relief, that was all.

43: The Last Day

PORSON’S closing speech lasted until after twelve on the Monday morning, and the judge’s summing up was not quite finished when the court rose for lunch. The fog still lay over the town, and every light in the room was on all through the morning.

Porson’s tone was angry and aggrieved. He tried to develop the farm business more elaborately now. ‘He ought to know it’s too late’; Getliffe scribbled this note on a piece of paper and passed it to me. The feature that stood out of his speech was, however, his violent attack on Martineau.

‘His character has been described to you as, I think I remember, a saint. So far as I can see, Mr Martineau’s main claim to the title is that he threw up his profession and took an extended holiday — which he has no doubt enjoyed — at someone else’s expense. Mr Martineau told you he wasn’t above deceiving someone who regarded him as a friend. In a way that might damage the friend seriously, just for the sake of flattering Mr Martineau’s own powers as a religious leader. Either that story is true — which I don’t for a moment believe, which you on the weight of all the other evidence can’t believe either — or else he’s perjuring himself in this court. I am not certain which is regarded by my learned friend as the more complete proof of saintliness. From everything Mr Martineau said, from the story of his life both in this town and since he found an easier way of living, it’s incredible that anyone should put any faith in his declaration before this court.’

From his bitterness, one or two spectators guessed that the case was important to him. Towards the end of his speech, which was ill-proportioned, he made an attempt to reply to Getliffe’s excursion over ‘a child of his time’. He returned to the farm evidence before he sat down, and analysed it again.

As we went out to lunch, Getliffe said with a cheerful, slightly shamefaced chuckle: ‘He thought because I could run off the rails, he could too.’

Outside the court, most of those who spoke to me were full of the attack on Martineau. Some laughed, others were resentful. As I listened, one impression strengthened. For several Porson had spoken their minds, and yet, at the same time, distressed them.

The judge’s face was flushed as he began his summing up.

‘A great deal of our time has been spent over this case,’ he said, the words spread out with the trace of sententiousness which made him seem never quite at ease. Despite the slow words, his tone held a smothered impatience, as it had throughout the last days of the trial. ‘Some of you may think rather more time than was necessary; but you must remember that no time is wasted if it has helped you, however slightly, to bring a correct verdict. I propose to make my instructions to you as brief as possible; but I should be remiss if I did not clear up some positions which have arisen during this trial. First of all, the defendants are being tried for conspiracy to defraud and for obtaining money by false pretences—’ he explained, carefully and slowly, the law relating to these crimes. There was a flavour of pleasure in his speech, like a teacher who is confident and precise upon some difficulty his class has raised. ‘That is the law upon which they are being tried. The only task which you are asked to undertake is to decide whether or not they are guilty under that law. The only considerations you are to take into account are those which bear directly on these charges. I will lay the considerations before you—’ At this point he broke off for lunch.

In the afternoon he gave them a competent, tabulated account of the evidence over the business. It was legally fair, it was tidy and compressed. It went definitely in our favour.

He came to Martineau: ‘One witness has attracted more attention than any other. That is Mr Martineau, whom you may consider as the most important witness for the defence and whom the counsel for the prosecution wishes you to neglect as utterly untrustworthy. This is a matter where I cannot give you direct guidance. It is a plain question of whether you believe or disbelieve a witness speaking on oath. There is no possibility, you will have decided for yourselves, that the witness can be mistaken. It is a direct conflict of fact. If you believe Mr Martineau you will naturally see that a considerable portion of the prosecution’s case about the agency is no longer tenable. If you disbelieve him, it will no doubt go a long way in your minds towards making you regard the defendants as guilty on that particular charge. If you believe him, you will also no doubt reflect that the most definite part of the prosecution’s case has been completely disposed of.

‘In such a question, you would naturally be led by your judgment of a witness’ character. Here, if I may say so, you are considering the evidence of a witness of unusual character — against whom the leader for the prosecution was able to bring nothing positive but eccentricity and who has certainly undertaken, we must believe, a life of singular self-abnegation. I must ask you to consider his evidence in the light of all the connected evidence. But in the end you must settle whether you accept it by asking yourselves two questions: first, whether such a man would not estimate the truth above all other claims; second, whether even a good man — whom you may think eccentric and unbalanced — might not consider himself justified in breaking an oath to save a friend from disgrace.

‘I think it necessary to remind you that, according to his own account, you are required to believe him capable of an irresponsible lie.’

One of the jury moistened his lips. The judge paused, passed a finger over his notes, continued: ‘That is all I wish to direct your attention towards. But there is one matter which makes me detain you a little longer: and that is to require you to forget, while you consider your verdict, much that you have heard during the conduct of this case. You have been presented with more than a little talk about the private lives of these three young people. You heard it in evidence; both counsel have referred to it with feeling in their closing speeches. I ask you to forget as much of it as is humanly possible. You may think they have behaved very foolishly; you may think they have behaved very wrongly, as far as our moral standards allow us to judge. But you will remember that they are not being tried for this behaviour; and you must not allow your condemnation of it to affect your deliberations on the real charge against them. You must be as uninfluenced as though you accepted the eloquent plea of Mr Getliffe and believed that the world is in flux, and that these actions have a different value from what they had when most of us were young.’ For a moment he smiled.

‘That is not to say, though, because you are to assume what may be an effort of charity towards some of the evidence which you have heard, that you are to regard the case itself with lightness. Nothing I have said must lead you to such a course. If you are not entirely convinced by the evidence for the prosecution you will, of course, return, according to the practice of our law, a verdict of not guilty. But if you are convinced by the relevant evidence, beyond any reasonable shade of doubt in your own minds, then you will let nothing stand between you and a verdict of guilty. Whatever you feel about some elements in their lives, whether you pity or blame them, must have no part in that decision. All you must remember is that they are charged with what is in itself a serious offence against the law. It is the probity of transactions such as theirs which is the foundation of more of the structure of our lives than we often think. I need not tell you that, and I only do so because the importance of the offence with which they are charged must not become submerged.’

Several people later mentioned their surprise on hearing, after the tolerant advice and stiff benevolence of his caution upon the sexual aspect of the case, this last sternness over money.

As the jury went out, the court burst into a murmur of noise. One could distinguish no words, but nothing could shut out the sound. It rose and fell in waves, like the drone of bees swarming.

The light from the chandelier touched the varnish on the deserted box.

Getliffe and I walked together outside the court. He said to one of the solicitors, in his breathless confidential whisper: ‘I want to get back to the house tonight. One deserves a night to oneself—’

My watch had jerked infinitesimally on. ‘They can’t be back for an hour,’ we were trying to reassure ourselves. At last (though it was only forty minutes since they went out) we heard something: the jury wanted to ask a question. When we got back to our places, the judge had already returned; his spectacles stood before him on his pad, their side arms standing up like antennae; his eyes were dark and bright as he peered steadily into the court.

Through the sough of noise there came Porson’s voice, unrestrained and full. ‘It’s inconceivable that he shouldn’t send it before Easter,’ he was saying to his junior. His face was high-coloured, but carried heavy purplish pouches under the eyes. He was sitting, one leg over the bench, a hand behind his head, his voice unsubdued, with a bravura greater than anyone’s there. He laughed, loud enough to draw the eyes of Mr Passant, who was standing between his wife and Roy, at the back of the court.

The door clicked open. Then we did not hear the shuffle of a dozen people. It was the foreman alone who had come into court.

‘We should like to ask a question. We are not certain about a point of law,’ he said, nervously brusque.

‘It is my place to help you if I can,’ said the judge.

‘I’ve been asked to inquire whether we can find one of them definitely had nothing to do with — with any of the charges. If we do that, can we leave out that person and consider the others by themselves?’

The judge said: ‘I tried to give you instructions about the law under which they are charged. Perhaps I did not make myself sufficiently clear.’ Again he explained. His kindness held a shade of patronage. Two of them could be guilty of conspiracy without a third. It was possible for any of them to be guilty of conspiracy and not guilty of obtaining money by false pretences. (If the jury considered that any of them had not, in fact, profited after joining in a conspiracy.) If they were not guilty of conspiracy, in the circumstances they could not be guilty of obtaining money under false pretences. Unless the jury considered only one person to be responsible — in which case there was no conspiracy, but one person alone could be found guilty of obtaining money by false pretences.

‘You are certain you understand?’ the judge went on. ‘Perhaps you had better write it down. Yes, it would remove any uncertainties if you wrote it down and showed it to me.’

Many found this interruption the most intolerable moment of the trial. Someone said the most sinister — meaning perhaps the confusion, the sudden flash of other lives, of human puzzlement and incompetence.

Through the hour of waiting which still remained, it shot new fragments of thought to many of our minds. Whom did they mean? What were they disagreeing on? But none of us could go on thinking for long: we were wrapped in the emptiness of waiting. The apprehension engrossed us like an illness of the body.

The message came. The jury were coming back. The three were brought up, and took their seats in the dock again. George’s arms were folded on his chest. His face was curiously expressionless: but his hands were as livid as though he had been hours in the cold.

The jury came in. Automatically I looked at the clock; it was after half-past four. Their walk was an interminable, drumming sound. The clerk read out the first charge — conspiracy over the agency — with a meaningless emphasis on the name of the town. ‘Do you find them guilty or not guilty?’

The foreman said quickly and in a low voice, ‘Not guilty.’

Then the second charge — conspiracy over the farm. Again the name of the town started out.

‘Guilty or not guilty?’ There was a pause. In the silence someone coughed. Suddenly — ‘Not guilty.’

Then the individual charges of obtaining money by false pretences. There was a string of ‘Not guilty’ for Jack and Olive, and finally the charges against George were read out for the last time; the foreman replied ‘Not guilty’ twice again, in a manner by this time repetitive and without hesitation.

The judge pressed his lips together, and spoke to them with a stiff formal smile: ‘You are free to go now.’

44: Walk into the Town

THE court seethed with whispers. The three were surrounded by friends and walked to the door. I waited, with Porson and Getliffe, until we could leave ourselves, watching Mr Passant come out of the crowd and take George’s hand. Gossip was already in the air. ‘They didn’t expect—’ someone said as I went out with Getliffe. People were laughing with excitement, face after face suddenly leapt to the eyes, vivid and alive.

Getliffe talked in the robing-room until Eden fetched him.

‘It’s been nice to be together again.’ And then: ‘Well, one’s pulled it off for your people. It was a good case to win.’ He smiled. We’ll have a crack about it in the train tonight. I’ve learned from it, L S, I’ve learned from it.’

When he had shaken hands with Porson and followed Eden out, we heard his voice, cheerful and a little strident, down the corridor. I went across the room to say goodbye to Porson myself. His eyes were narrow with unhappiness.

‘I ought not to say it to you, I suppose,’ he said, ‘but it’s incredible these clods of juries should—’ then he stopped and laughed. ‘Still, goodbye, my boy. We’ll run together again one of these days. I hope the job goes well. Let me know if I can be of any use, I expect I can.’

On the pavement outside the court, George and the others were being congratulated by a large party. Olive and Jack had their arms round each other’s waists. Soon I was shaking Mr Passant’s hand, listening to Olive and Jack and their friends, being invited to visit them later, saying goodbye. In the crowd, someone had put an arm through mine, our voices were raised, there was a great deal of laughter; simply by being together, we were filled with intimacy and excitement. We were careless with the relief, greater and unmixed because others were there to share it. It was only for a few minutes: then Olive took Jack to her car, and Daphne followed after making a sign to George.

The others scattered. I was leaving the town that night, and George told his mother that he would join them in an hour. Roy took the Passants home, and George and I walked up the street alone. The fog had cleared but the sky was low and heavy. Lights were shining in the windows. Neither of us spoke for a few minutes, and then George said: ‘This mustn’t prevent me doing the essential things.’ His voice was sad and defiant. ‘I’ve not lost everything. Whatever they did, I couldn’t have lost everything.’

We walked on; he began to talk of his plans for the future, the practical necessities of making a living.

‘I shall have to stay with Eden for a few months, of course,’ he said. ‘Unless they’re going through with their persecution. After that—’ He became cheerful as he invented schemes for the years afterward: how he would leave Eden’s, and get a job at some similar firm where he could work his way through to a partnership. ‘I’m ready to leave this place,’ he said. ‘You used to try to persuade me against my will. I’m prepared to go anywhere. You won’t find me so enthusiastic to spend myself without any return.’

It was strange to hear how he enjoyed developing the details of these plans, and the gusto with which he worked them out.

‘I’ve still got time to bring it off. I mustn’t leave anything to chance. I can work it out beforehand.’

It reminded me curiously of some of Martineau’s happiness as he gave up his career, except that George’s hopes were not wild, but modest and within his powers. He was inventive and happy, walking under a sky which seemed darker now we were in the middle of the town. He was in the mood, full of the future, and yet not anxious, which I had not seen since the nights when we first walked in these streets; years before, when he was delighted with the idea of his group of friends, luxuriously thinking of their lives to come and the minor, vaguer, pleasant plans for success in his own life.

After one bitter remark, when we were first alone, everything he said was hopeful and full of zest; several times he laughed, hilariously and without resentment. Just as we were passing a shop, a bicycle, which had been propped up by its pedal against the kerb, toppled over on to the pavement. At the same moment, we happened to notice a man with an unconcealed, satisfied, and cunning smile.

‘I wonder,’ said George, ‘if he’s smiling because that bicycle fell over?’ Then he broke into a shout of laughter. ‘No, it’s not that, of course it isn’t. He’s smiling with relief because there was no one on it.’

We ended the walk at the café near the station, where we held our first conference over Jack. But the café had been respectabilised since then. There were now two floors, and neat waitresses. We went upstairs and sat by the window. We looked down the hill, over the roofs below, out to the grey, even sky.

George elaborated his plans, laughed, drank cup after cup of tea. Then, when I spoke to him, I found his face grown preoccupied. He replied absently several times. At last he said: ‘I’ve got to show them that I’ve not lost everything. They’ve got to realise that I’ve not lost anything. Not anything that I put a value on. They mustn’t think they’ve dispensed with me as easily as that. I shall keep the essentials. Whatever happened, I couldn’t be myself without them. I mean, one way or another. I’m going to work for the things I believe in. I still believe that most people are good, if they’re given the chance. No one can stop me helping them, if I think another scheme out carefully and then put my energies into it again. I haven’t finished. You’ve got to remember I’m not middle-aged yet. I believe in other people. I believe in goodness. I believe in my own intelligence and will. You don’t mean to tell me that I’m bound to acquiesce in crippling myself?’

His expression was strained and haggard, the opposite of his words. By contrast to the trial, when often he looked young with fear, now his face was older than I had ever seen it.

‘I don’t deny that I’ve made mistakes. I gave too much opportunity for jealousy. It’s natural they should be jealous, of course. But I shan’t leave so many loopholes this time. I didn’t make enough concessions. Perhaps I oughtn’t to have confined myself to a few people. That was bound to make my enemies hate me more. Whatever I do, it won’t have the same completeness this has had for me. But we’ve got to accept that this is finished. I’m willing to make some concessions now. The main thing is, I shall be keeping on. Everyone would like me to live as they do — shut up in their blasted homes. I’m not going to give them the satisfaction.’

He had not said a word about the substance of the case; he seemed to have dismissed the transactions and charges from his mind.

After a time, feeling he had spoken himself out, I asked about Daphne. As he replied, his voice was quieter.

‘I hope she’ll marry me,’ he said. He smiled in a friendly, almost bantering way. ‘It’s a pity I didn’t find her when you found Sheila.’ (He didn’t know it, he hadn’t guessed it, but that night, as we talked, I was thinking how I could break my marriage.) ‘I didn’t expect to find everything I wanted in one person then, did I? Still, I ought to have married someone by now, I ought to have made myself.’

‘As a result of this trouble—’

George broke out again: ‘They’ve tried to insinuate that everything I’ve done was because I was sex-crazy. They’ve tried to explain away the best years of my life — by saying I spent them doing nothing but plot to get a few minutes of pleasure. I ought to have known they would do it. I trusted them too much. It’s senseless letting your faith in goodness run away with you. It would have been easy to shape things differently. I shall profit by it now. Marriage with Daphne will leave me free. As it was, I shan’t blame myself. It was bad luck things went the way they did. It wasn’t my fault — but when they did, well, they were all round me, I’m not a celibate, my taste is pretty wide. And so I gave them the chance to destroy everything I’d spent all these years in building.’

He paused, then said, in a flat voice, with all the bitterness gone: ‘That’s why, you see, I’ve got to show them that it hasn’t affected me. I’ve got to show them for certain that I’m keeping on.’

I could not help but feel that he meant something different and more tormenting. It was himself in whose sight he needed to be seen unchanged. In his heart a voice was saying: ‘You can’t devote yourself again. You never have. Your enemies are right. You’ve deceived yourself all this time. And now you know it, you can’t begin deceiving yourself again.’

There were to be times — I felt at this moment — when he would want to give up struggling against that voice. There were to be times, darker than now, when he would have to see himself and ask what was to become of him. Yet, in those dark moments, would he — as he was now — be drawing a new strength from his own self-searching, even from his own self-distrust?

After his last remark, both he and I were still eager for what life would bring him. He could still warm himself and everyone round him with his own hope.