Time of Hope

Part Two Towards a Gamble

During the summer after my mother’s death I used to walk to the office in the warm and misty mornings; there was a smell of rain freshening the dusty street, and freshening my hopes as well, as I walked along, chafing at another wasted day ahead.

I ticked off names, names written in violet ink that glared on the squared paper. I read each date of birth, and underlined in red those born before 31 August 1908. I gazed down into the sunlit street, and my mind was filled with plans and fancies, with hope and the first twist of savage discontent. My plans were half-fancies still, not much grown up since my first days in the office, when I walked round the town hall square at lunchtime and dreamed that I had suddenly come into a fortune. I still made resolutions about what to read, or what prospectus to write for next, with an elation and sense of purpose that continued to outshine the unromantic act of carrying the resolution out. But there was some change. I had my legacy. I was angry that I could not see my way clear, I was angry that no one gave advice that sounded ambitious enough. Gazing down, watching the tramcars glitter in the sun, waiting with half an ear for Mr Vesey’s cry of complaint, I began to suffer the ache and burn of discontent.

Yet I was sidetracked and impeded by that same discontent. There were days when the office walls hemmed me in, when Mr Vesey became an incarnate insult, when I was choking with hurt pride, when Darby in all kindness gave me grey and cautious advice. Those were the days when I felt I must be myself, break out, not in the planned-for distant future, but now, before I rusted away, now, while my temper was hot.

It was a temptation then to show off, get an audience by any means I could, and at that age I could not resist the temptation. I scarcely even thought of trying, it seemed so natural and I got so fierce a pleasure. I had a quick, cruel tongue, and I enjoyed using it. It seemed natural to find myself at the ILP, getting myself elected on to committees, making inflammatory speeches in lecture halls all over the town. Only the zealots attended in the height of summer, but I was ready to burst out, even before a handful of the converted, and still be elated and warm-tempered as we left the dingy room at ten o’clock of a midsummer evening and found ourselves blinking in the broad daylight. The town was not large enough for one to stay quite anonymous, and some of my exploits got round. A bit of gossip even reached Aunt Milly, and the next Sunday, when I visited her house for tea, she was not backward in expressing her disapproval.

To myself, I could not laugh that attack away as cheerfully as I did most of Aunt Milly’s. I was practical enough to know that I was doing nothing ‘useful’. As I strolled to my lodgings (‘my rooms’, I used to call them to my acquaintances, with a distinct echo of my mother, despite my speeches on the equality of man) late on those summer nights, I had moments of bleak lucidity. Where was I getting to? What was I doing with my luck? Was I so devoid of will, was I just going to drift? Those moments struck cold, after the applause I had won a few hours earlier with some sarcastic joke.

But once on my feet again, with faces in front of me, or distracted in a different fashion by Jack Cotery and his talk of girls, I was swept away. My own chilling questions were just insistent enough to keep me going regularly to the law classes at the School, and that was all. I intended to get to know George Passant, and I may have had some half-thought that his advice would be grander than that of Darby and the rest; but my first expectations were forgotten for ever, in the light of what actually happened. I had not, however, forced myself into his notice before the School closed for the summer holidays. Occasionally I saw him from my office window, for the firm of Eden and Martineau occupied a floor on the other side of Bowling Green Street. On many mornings I watched George Passant cross over the tramlines, wearing a bowler hat tilted back on his head, carrying a briefcase, swinging a heavy walking stick. I was due at nine, and he used to cross the street with extreme punctuality half an hour later.

All that summer, when I was not what Aunt Milly denounced as ‘gassing’, I spent lazy lotos-eating evenings in the company of Jack Cotery. At school he had been too precocious for me; now he was a clerk in the accounts branch of a local newspaper, he ate his sandwiches at midday in the same places as I did, and we drifted together. He had become a powerfully built young man, still short but over-muscled; he had the comedian’s face that I remembered, fresh, lively, impudent, wistful. His large ardent eyes shone out of his comedian’s face, and his voice was soft and modulated, surprisingly soft to come from that massive chest and throat. He was eighteen, a few months my senior; and he was intoxicated by anything that could come under the name of love. In that soft and modulated voice he talked of girls, women, romance, passion, the delights of the flesh, the incredible attraction of a woman he had seen in the tram that morning, the wonderful prospect of tracking her down, the delights not only of the flesh but of first hearing her voice, the delight that the world was so made that, as long as we lived, the perfume of love would be scattered through the air.

It was talk that I was ready and eager to hear. Not primarily because of the interest of Jack himself, though, when I could break through the dreams his talk induced, he was fun in his own right. In his fashion, he was kind and imaginative. It had been like him, even as a boy, to try to console me on that shameful morning of the ten-shilling note. When one was in his company, he lavished all his good nature, flattering and sweet as honey.

But he was the most unreliable of friends.

He was also a natural romancer. It came to him, as easy as breathing, to add to, to enhance, to transmogrify the truth. As a boy he had boasted — utterly untruthfully — how his father had plenty of money. And now ‘I’m on the evening paper,’ he could not resist saying, when someone asked his job, and proceeded — from the nucleus of fact that he worked in the newspaper office — to draw a picture of his daily life, as a hard drinking, dashing, unstoppable journalist. He had enough of a romancer’s tact to point out that the glamour of the journalist’s occupation had been grossly overdrawn. He shrugged his shoulders like a disillusioned professional.

It was the same with his stories of his conquests. He had much success with women, even while he was still a boy. If he had stuck to the facts, he would have evoked the admiration, the envious admiration, of all his companions, me among them. But the facts were too prosaic for Jack. He was impelled to elaborate stories of how a young woman, obviously desirable, obviously rich and well-born, had come into the office and caught his eye; how she had come in, on one pretext after another, morning after morning; how in the end she had stopped beside his desk, and dropped a note asking him to meet her in the town; how she had driven him in her own car into the country, where they had enjoyed a night of perfect bliss under the stars. ‘Uncomfortable at times, clearly,’ said Jack, with his romancer’s knack of adding a note of comic realism.

He knew that I did not believe a word of it. I was amused by him and fond of him, and I envied his impudence and confidence with women, and of course his success. Chiefly, though, he carried with him a climate in which, just at that time, I wanted to bask; because he was so amorous, because everything he said was full of hints, revelations, advice, fantasies, reminiscences, forecasts, all of love, he brought out and magnified much that I was ready to feel.

For at this stage in our youth we can hold two kinds of anticipation of love, which seem contradictory and yet coexist and reinforce each other. We can dream, delicately because even to imagine it is to touch one of the most sacred of our hopes, of searching for the other part of ourselves, of the other being who will make us whole, of the ultimate and transfiguring union. At the same time we can gloat over any woman, become insatiably curious about the brute facts of the pleasures which we are then learning or which are just to come. In that phase we are coarse and naked, and anyone who has forgotten his youth will judge that we are too tangled with the flesh ever to forget ourselves in the ecstasy of romantic love. But in fact, at this stage in one’s youth, the coarseness and nakedness, the sexual preoccupations, the gloating over delights to come, are — in the secret heart where they take place — themselves romantic. They are a promise of joy. Much that Jack Cotery and I said to each other would have been repulsive to a listener who forgot that we were eighteen. The conversations would not stand the light of day. Yet at the time they drove from my mind both the discontents and the ambitions. They enriched me as much as my hope, my anticipation, of transfiguring love.

Autumn came, and I was restless, full of expectation. The School reopened. In the bright September nights I walked down the Newarke to George Passant’s classes, full of a kind of new-year elation and resolve. Going back to my lodgings under the misty autumn moon, I wondered about the group that Passant was collecting round him. They were all students at the School, some of whom I knew by name; young women who attended an occasional class, one or two youths who were studying full-time for an external London degree. They gathered round him at the end of the evening, and moved noisily back into the town.

Their laughter rang provocatively loud as they jostled along, a compact group, on the other side of the road. I felt left out. I was chagrined that George Passant had never asked me to join them. I felt very lonely.

Not long afterwards I took my chance and forced myself upon him. It happened in October, a week after my eighteenth birthday. I had come out of the office late. There, on the pavement ten yards ahead, George Passant was walking deliberately with his heavy tread, whistling and swinging his stick.

I caught him up and fell into step beside him. He said good evening with amiable, impersonal cordiality. I said that it was curious we had not met before, since we worked on opposite sides of the street. George agreed that it was. He was half-abstracted, half-shy; I was too intent to mind. He knew my name, he knew that I attended his class. That was not enough. I was going to cut a dash. We passed the reference library, and I referred airily to the hours I spent there, the amount of reading I had done in the last few months; I expounded on Freud, Jung, Adler, Tolstoy, Marx, Shaw. We came to a little bookshop at the corner of Belvoir Street. The lights in the shop window shone on glossy jackets, the jackets of the best sellers of the day, A S M Hutchinson and P C Wren and Michael Arlen, with some copies of The Forsyte Saga in an honourable position on the right.

‘What can you do?’ I demanded of George Passant. ‘If that’s what you give people to read?’ I waved my arm at the window. ‘If that’s what they’re willing to take? I don’t suppose there’s a volume of poetry in the shop. Yeats is one of the greatest poets of the age, and you couldn’t go into that shop and buy a single word of his.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know anything about poetry,’ said George Passant, quickly and defensively, in the tone of a man without an ounce of blague in his whole nature. ‘I’m afraid it’s no use expecting me to give an opinion about poetry.’ Then he said: ‘We ought to have a drink on it, anyway. I take it you know the pubs of this town better than I do. Let’s go somewhere where we shan’t be cluttered up with the local bell-wethers.’

I was bragging, determined to make an impression, roaring ahead without much care of what he thought. George Passant was five years older, and many men of his age would have been put off. But George’s nerves were not grated by raw youth. In a sense, he was perpetually raw and young himself. Partly because of his own diffidence, partly because of his warm, strong fellow feeling, he took to me as we stood outside the bookshop. Shamelessly I lavished myself in a firework display of boasting, and he still took to me.

We sat by the fire at the Victoria. When we arrived, it was early enough for us to have the room to ourselves: later it filled, but we still kept the table by the fire. George sat opposite me, his face flushed by the heat, his voice always loud, growing in volume with each pint he drank. He paid for all the beer, stood the barmaids a drink and several of the customers. ‘I believe in establishing friendly relations. We shall want to come back here. This is a splendid place,’ George confided to me, with preternatural worldly wisdom and a look of extreme cunning: while in fact he was standing treat because he was happy, relaxed, off his guard, exhilarated, and at home.

It was a long time that night before I stopped roaring ahead with my own self-advertisement. The meeting mattered to me — I knew that while living in it, though I did not know how much. I was impelled to go on making an impression. It was a long time before I paid any attention to George.

At close quarters, his face had one or two surprises. The massive head was as impressive as in the lecture room. The great forehead, the bones of the jaw under the blanket of heavy flesh — they were all as I expected. But I was surprised, having only seen him tense and concentrated, to realize that he could look so exuberantly relaxed. As he drank, he softened into sensual content. And I was more surprised to catch his eyes, just for a moment, in repose. His whole being that night exuded power, and happiness, and excitement at having someone with whom to match his wits. He smacked his lips after each tankard, and billowed with contented laughter. But there was one interval, perhaps only a minute long, when each of us was quiet. It was the only silent time between us, all that night. George had put his tankard down, and was staring past me, down the room and into vacant space. His eyes were large, blue, set in deep orbits; in excitement they flashed, but for that moment they were mournful and lost.

In the same way, I heard occasional tones in his speech that seemed to come from different levels from the rest. I listened with all my attention, as I was to go on listening for a good many years. He was more articulate than anyone I had heard, the words often a little stiff and formal, his turns of phrase rigid by contrast to the loud hearty voice with its undertone of a Suffolk accent. He described his career to me in that articulate fashion, each bit of explanation organized and clear. He was the son of a small town postmaster, had been articled to an Ipswich firm, had done well in his solicitors’ examinations. George did not conceal his satisfaction; everything he said of his training was cheerful, abounding in force, rational, full of his own brimming optimism. Then he came to the end of his articles, and there was a change in tone that I was to hear so often. ‘I hadn’t any influence, of course,’ said George Passant, his voice still firm, articulate, but sharp with shrinking diffidence. I recognized that trick in the first hour we talked, but there were others that puzzled me for years, to which I listened often enough but never found the key.

At Eden and Martineau’s, George was called the assistant solicitor, but this meant no more than that he was qualified. He was in fact a qualified managing clerk on a regular salary. I could not be sure how much he earned, but I guessed about three hundred pounds a year. Yet he thought himself lucky to get the job. He still seemed a little incredulous that they should have appointed him, though it had happened nearly a year before. He told me how he had expected them to reject him after the interview. He believed robustly enough that he was a competent lawyer, but that was something apart. ‘I couldn’t expect to be much good at an interview, of course,’ said George. He was naïf, strangely naïf, in speculating as to why they had chosen him. He fancied that Martineau, the junior partner, must have ‘worked it’. George had complete faith and trust in Martineau.

‘He’s the one real spot of light’, cried George, ramming down his tankard, ‘among the Babbitts and bell-wethers in this wretched town!’

But we did not talk for long that night of our own stories. We wanted to argue. We had come together, struck fire, and there was no time to lose. We were at an age when ideas were precious, and we started with different casts of mind and different counters to throw into the pool. Such knowledge as I had picked up was human and literary; George’s was legal and political. But it was not just knowledge with which he bore me down; his way of thinking might be abstract, but it was full of passion, and he made tremendous ardent plans for the betterment of man. ‘I’m a socialist, of course,’ he said vehemently. ‘What else could I be?’ I burst in that so was I. ‘I assumed that,’ said George, with finality. He added, still more loudly: ‘I should like someone to suggest an alternative for a reasonable man today. I should welcome the opportunity of asking some of our confounded clients how I could reconcile it with my conscience if I wasn’t a socialist. God love me, there are only two defensible positions for a reasonable man. One is to be a philosophical anarchist — and I’m not prepared to indulge in that kind of frivolity; the other’, said George, with crushing and conclusive violence, ‘is to be exactly what I am.’

As the evening passed he assaulted me with constitutional law, political history, how the common man had won his political freedom, how it was for us and our contemporaries to take the next step. He made my politics look childish. George had bills for nationalization ready in his head, clear, systematic, detailed, thought out with the concentration and mental horsepower that I had admired from a distance. ‘The next few years’, said George, having sandbagged all of my criticisms, ‘are going to be a wonderful time to be alive. Eliot, my boy, have you ever thought how lucky you and I are — to be our age at this time of all conceivable times?’

Giddy with drink, with the argument and comradeship, I walked with him through the town. We had not finished talking for the night. We ate some sandwiches in a frowsty café by the station, and then strolled, still arguing, down the streets near our offices, deserted now until next morning, the streets that had once been the centre of the old market town — Horsefair Street, Millstone Lane, Pocklington’s Walk. George’s voice rang thunderously in the deserted streets, echoed between the offices and the dark warehouses. At the corner of Pocklington’s Walk there shone the lighted windows of a club. We stood beneath them, on the dark and empty pavement. George’s hat was tilted back, and I saw his face, which had been open and happy in the heat of argument all night long, turn rebellious, angry, and defiant. The curtains were not drawn, and we watched a few elderly men, prosperously dressed, sitting with glasses at their side in the comfortable room. It was a scene of somnolent and well-to-do repose.

‘The sunkets!’ cried George fiercely. ‘The sunkets!’ He added: ‘What right do they think they’ve got to sit there as though they owned the world?’

In the next days I thought over that first meeting. From the beginning, I believed that I could enlist George’s help. His fellow feeling was so strong, one could not doubt it, and he knew much more than I. Yet I found it painfully hard to explain my position outright and put the question in his hands. Not from scruple, but from pride. I was seeing George regularly now. He took me as an equal: I was more direct than he, I could meet him on something like equal terms; it was wounding to upset the companionship in its first days and confess that I was lost.

While George, for all his good will, made it more awkward because of his own heavy-footed delicacy. He was not the man to take a hint or breathe in a situation through his pores. He needed an explicit statement. But he was too deliberately delicate to ask. It was not for a fortnight that he discovered exactly what I did for a living. Even then, his approach was elaborate and oblique, and he seemed to disbelieve my answers.

It happened, George’s first attempt to help me, on a Saturday afternoon, on our way to a league football match. George had a hearty taste for the mass pastimes, chiefly because he enjoyed them, and a little out of defiance. We were jostling among the crowd, the cloth-capped crowd that hustled down the back streets towards the ground; and George, looking straight in front of him, asked a labyrinthine question.

‘I take it that when you’ve got to the top in the education office — which I assume will be in about ten years’ time — you won’t find it necessary to make the schools in this town change over to the more gentlemanly sport of rugger?’

I was already accustomed to George’s outbursts of anti-snobbery, of social hatred. I grinned, and assured him that he could sleep easy; but I knew that I was evading the real question.

‘By the way,’ George persisted, ‘I take it that my assumption is correct?’

‘What assumption, George?’

‘You will be properly recognized at the education office in ten years’ time?’

I made myself speak plainly.

‘In ten years’ time,’ I said, ‘if I stay there — I might have gone up a step or two. As a clerk.’

‘I’m not prepared to accept that,’ said George. ‘You’re underestimating yourself.’

We came to the ground. As we passed through the turnstiles, I asked: ‘Do you realize what my job is?’

‘I’ve got a general impression,’ said George uncomfortably, ‘but I’m not entirely clear.’

We clambered up the terrace, and there I began to tell him. But George was not inclined to believe it. He proceeded to speak as though my job were considerably grander and had more future than I had ever, in all my wishes, dared to imagine.

‘It may be difficult now,’ said George, ‘but it’s obvious that you’re marked down for promotion. It’s perfectly clear that they must have some machinery for pulling people like you to the top. Otherwise, I don’t see how local government is going to function.’

That was a typical piece of George’s optimism. I was tempted to leave him with it. Like my mother, I had to struggle to admit the humble truth — even though I managed to keep a hold on it, sometimes a precarious one. It was bitter. Yet, again like my mother, I felt that I must swallow the bitterness in order not to miss a chance — to impress on George that I was nothing but a clerk.

‘I’m a very junior clerk, George. I’m getting twenty-five shillings a week. I shall be ticking off names for the next five years. Just as I’m doing now.’

George was both angry and abashed. He swore, and the violence of his curse made some youths in white mufflers turn and gape at him. He hesitated to ask me more, and then did so. Awkwardly he tried to pretend that things were not as bad as I painted them. Then he swore again, and he was near one of his storms of rage.

He said brusquely: ‘Something will have to be done about it.’

He was brusque with embarrassment. I too was speaking harshly.

‘That’s easy to say,’ I replied.

‘I shall have to take a hand myself,’ said George, still in a rough and offhand tone.

Now I had only to ask for help. I wanted it acutely; I had been playing for it; now it was mine for the asking, I was too proud to move. I turned as awkward as George.

‘I expect I shall be able to manage,’ I said.

George was abashed again. He stared fixedly at the empty field, where the turf gleamed brilliantly under the sullen sky.

‘It’s time these teams came out,’ he said.

George was embarrassed at having his interest repulsed. For days and weeks he made no reference to my career or even to my daily life. He did not see so much of me alone. Cross with myself, incensed at my own involuntary stiffness, I tried half-heartedly to open the conversation again. But George went by rule, not by shades of feeling. He had made a mistake which caused him to feel inept. More than most men, he was paralysed when he felt inept. So he studied his mistake, so as to teach himself not to repeat it.

Without any embarrassment at all, however, he plunged me into the centre of the ‘group’. That was our name, then and always, for the young men and women who gathered round George and whose leader he became. Theirs was the laughter I had envied, walking on the other side of the road, before George took me up. In the future, although we had no foresight of it then, he was to devote to them a greater and a greater share of his vigour; until in the end he lived altogether in them and for them. Until in the end, through living in them and for them, he destroyed his own blazing promise — so that he, who had led us all, came to look down into the gulf of ruin.

But George’s is a story by itself. When I first knew him, the crisis of his life was years ahead, and he was assembling the ‘group’ round him, heartening and melting everyone within it, so brimful of hope for each one of us that no one could stay cold. All the group were students at the School, and, though the number increased later, in my time it was never larger than ten. Most of them were girls — some from the prosperous middle class, who went to the School to pass their time before they found a husband, and saw in George an escape from the restrictions of their homes. Most of the group, however, were poor and aspiring — young women working in the town, secretaries and clerks or elementary schoolteachers like my friend Marion Gladwell. They went to the School to better themselves professionally, or because they were hungry for culture, or because they might there find a man. They were always the backbone of George’s group, together with one or two eager and ambitious young men, such as I was then.

That was the material George had to work on. We sat hour after hour at night or on Sunday afternoons in dingy cafés up and down the town, the cafés of cinemas or, late at night, the lorry drivers’ ‘caff’ beside the railway station. In those first years, George did not find it easy to collect the group together, but soon we developed the practice of all going to spend weekends in a farmhouse ten miles away, where we could cook our own food, pay a shilling a night for a bed, and talk until daybreak.

Under the pink-shaded lights at the picture-house café, round the oil lamp on the table at the farm, we sat while George made prophecies of our future, shouted us down for false arguments, set us on fire with hope. He gave us credit for having all his own qualities and more. I knew he was overestimating the others, and sometimes, even with the conceit of eighteen, I did not recognize myself in his descriptions, and wished uncomfortably that they were nearer to the truth. He endowed me with all varieties of courage, revolutionary and altruistic zeal, aggressive force, leadership, unbreakable resolution, and power of will. He used to regret, with his naïve and surprising modesty, that he was not blessed with the same equipment. I was inflated, and acted for a time as though George’s picture of my character were accurate, but I had a suspicion lurking underneath — for I was already more suspicious of myself and other human beings than George would be at fifty — that I was quite unlike George’s noble picture, and that so also were all living men.

Yet George gave us such glowing hope just because he was utterly unsuspicious of men’s nature and the human condition. As a child I had been used to my mother’s roseate hopes of a transformation in her life, but by those she meant nothing more nor less than a fulfilment for herself — sometimes that she might find love, always that she might live like a lady. George’s hopes were as passionate as hers, and more violent, but they were different in kind. He believed, with absolute sincerity and with each beat of his heart, that men could become better; that the whole world could become better; that the restraints of the past, the shackles of guilt, could fall off and set us all free to live, happily in a free world; that we could create a society in which men could live in peace, in decent comfort, and cease to be power-craving, avaricious, censorious, and cruel. George believed, with absolute sincerity and with each beat of his heart, that all this would happen before we were old.

It was the first time, for Jack Cotery and me and the rest, that we had been near a cosmic faith. But these were the middle twenties, and the whole spirit of the time was behind George Passant. It was a time when political hope, international hope, was charging the air we breathed. Not only George Passant was full of faith as we cheered the Labour gains in the town hall square on the election nights in twenty-two and twenty-three. And it was a time of other modes of hope. Freud, D H Lawrence, Rutherford — messages were in the air, and in our society we did not listen to the warnings. It was a great climacteric of hope, and George embodied it in his flesh and bone.

At another period he would have thrown himself into a religion. As it was, he made a creed out of every free idea that spurted up in those last days of radical and rootless freedom. He believed that it was better to be alive in 1923 than at any other moment in the world’s history. He believed — with great simplicity, despite his wild and complex nature — in the perfectibility of man.

That faith of his did not really fit me at all — though for a time it coloured many of my thoughts. In due course I parted from George on almost all of the profound human questions. For all his massive intelligence, his vision of life was so different from mine that we could not for long speak the same mental language. And yet, despite that foreignness, despite much that was to happen, I was grateful always that, for those years in my youth, I came under his influence. Our lives were to take us divergent ways. As I have said, we parted on all the profound human questions — except one. Though I could not for long think happily as he did of the human condition, I also could not forget the strength of his fellow feeling. I could not forget how robustly he stood by the side of his human brothers against the dark and cold. Human beings were brothers to him — not only brothers to love, but brothers to hate with violence. When he hated them, they were still men, men of flesh and bone — and he was one among them, in their sweat and bewilderment and folly. He hoped for so much from them — but if he had hoped for nothing, he would still have felt them as his brothers and struggled as robustly by their side. He took his place among them. By choice he would not move a step away from the odour of man.

There I never wanted to part from him. His fellow feeling had strengthened mine. There he was my master, and throughout my life I wished he would stay so until the end.

Quite soon after George took me into the group, our difference began to show. Yet I too was full of hope. I might attack George’s Utopian visions, but then at times George provoked all my destructive edge. There were other times I remembered afterwards, in which I was as unshielded as my mother used to be, in which I had learned nothing of disappointment.

I remembered the first time that Marion Gladwell asked me to call on her at school. She had been promising to lend me a book, but whenever we met in the group she had forgotten it; I could have it, she said, if I went round to her school in the lunch hour.

The school was in Albion Street, near to the middle of the town, a diminutive red-brick barracks drawing in the children from the rows of red-brick houses in the mean streets near. Marion had only taught there a year, since she came out of her training college. She was twenty-one, and engrossed in her work. She often talked to us about the children, laughed at herself for being ‘earnest’, and then told us some more.

When I arrived in her classroom that afternoon she was just opening a window. The room was dark and small, and there was a faint, vestigial, milky smell of small children. Marion said, in her energetic, overemphatic, nervous fashion, that she must let some oxygen in before the next lesson. She moved rapidly to the next window, opened it, returned to the blackboard, shook the duster so that a cloud of chalk hung in the air.

‘Sit down, Lewis,’ she said. ‘I want to talk to you.’

She stood by the blackboard, twisting the duster. At the group she was overemphatic, overdecisive, but no one minded it much from her, since she was so clearly nervous and anxious to be liked and praised. She was tallish and strong, very quick and active physically, but a little clumsy, and either her figure was shapeless or she dressed so sloppily that one could not see she had a waist. But she had an open, oval, comely face, and her eyes were striking. They were not large, but bright and continually interested. Despite her earnestness, they were humorous and gay.

That afternoon she wrung out the duster, unusually restless and nervous even for her.

‘I’m worried about you,’ she said.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘You mustn’t burn the candle at both ends.’

I asked what she meant, but I had a very good idea. Marion, like most of the girls in the group, came from a respectable lower-middle-class home, and their emancipation had still not gone far. So Marion and the others were shocked, some of them pleasantly shocked, at the gossip they heard of our drinking parties and visits to Nottingham. The gossip became far more lurid than the facts — Jack saw to that, who was himself a most temperate man — and George and the rest of us acquired an aura of sustained dissipation.

I was not displeased. It was flattering to hear oneself being snatched from the burning. I tried to pare off the more extravagant edges of the stories, but Marion wanted to believe them, and I should have had to be much more wholehearted to persuade her.

‘You mustn’t wear yourself out,’ said Marion obstinately.

‘I’m pretty good at looking after myself,’ I said.

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Marion. ‘Anyway, you mustn’t waste yourself. Think of all you’ve got to do.’

She was watching me with her clear, bright eyes. She must have seen a change in my expression. She knew that I was softened and receptive now. She gave up twisting the duster and put it in its box. In doing so she knocked down a piece of chalk, and cried, ‘Oh, why do I always upset everything?’ Her eyes were lit up with gaiety, and she leaned against the desk. Her voice was still decisive, but it was easy to confide.

‘Tell me what you want to do. Tell me what you want.’

My first reply was: ‘Of course, I want to see a better world.’

Marion nodded her head, as though she would have given the same answer. We were sufficiently under George Passant’s influence to make such an answer quite unselfconsciously. We were children of our class and time, and took that hope as unchallengeable. That afternoon in Marion’s schoolroom in 1923, both she and I expected it to be fulfilled.

‘What do you want for yourself?’ asked Marion.

‘I want success.’

She seemed startled by the force with which I had spoken. She said: ‘What do you call success?’

‘I don’t mean to spend my life unknown.’

‘Do you want to make money, Lewis?’

‘I want everything that people call success. Plus a few requirements of my own.’

‘You mustn’t expect too much,’ said Marion.

‘I expect everything there is,’ I said. I went on: ‘And if I fail, I shan’t make any excuses. I shall say that it is my own fault.’

‘Lewis!’ she cried. There was a strange expression on her face. After a silence, she asked: ‘Is there anything else you want?’

This time I hesitated. Then I said: ‘I think I want love.’

Marion said, her voice emphatic and decisive, but her face still soft with pain ‘Oh, I haven’t had time for that. There’s too much else to do. I wonder if you’ll have time.’

I was too rapt to attend to her. Just then, I was living in my imagination.

Marion contradicted herself; and said ‘Oh, I suppose you’re right. I suppose we all want — love. But, Lewis, I wonder if we mean the same thing by love?’

I was living in my imagination, and I could not tell her the essence of my own hope, let alone come near perceiving hers. I had confessed myself to her with ardour. I began to inquire about what she would teach that afternoon.

That winter I found the days in the office harder than ever to bear. At night I drank with George, stood at coffee stalls, sat in his room or my attic, tirelessly walked the streets until the small hours, while we stimulated each other’s answers to the infinite questions of young men — man’s destiny, the existence of God, the organization of the world, the nature of love. It was hard to wake up, with the echoes of the infinite questions still running through my head, to get to the office by nine and to stare with heavy eyes at the names of fee-paying children at one of the secondary schools.

Mr Vesey did not make it easier. He considered that I was living above my station, and he disapproved intensely. He had heard that I was seen in the London Road one night, excessively cheerful with drink. He had heard also of my political speeches. Mr Vesey was outraged that I should presume to do things he dared not do. He said ominously that the life of his clerks out of hours was part of his business, whatever we might think. He addressed the office in characteristically dark and cryptic hints: how some people deliberately drew attention to themselves, either by sucking up to authority or by painting the town red, with only one intention, which was to discredit their superior and obstruct his promotion.

He was watching for a chance to report me. But here his mania for promotion made him cautious. He knew that I was in favour higher up. He realized he must have a cast-iron case, unless he were to lose his reputation for ‘knowing his men’. He would rather sacrifice his moral indignation, let me go unpunished for a time, than make a false move. ‘One doesn’t want to drop a brick,’ said Mr Vesey cryptically to the office, ‘just when they must be realizing that certain things are overdue.’

Of course, it made him dislike me more. The story of my relation with Mr Vesey became a good one with which to entertain the group but it was not so funny during the monotonous, drab, humiliating days. Dislike at close quarters can be very wearing, and it does not console one much if the dislike shows on a comic face. I used to look up from my desk and see the enormous spectacled eyes of Mr Vesey fixed upon me. I could not make myself impervious to the thought that I had become an obsession within him, part of his web of persecution. When I described him to George and the rest, he was a trim spectacled figure, crazed with promotion-fever, keeping in the public eye; but in the office, where I spent so many desert hours, he became a man, a feeling and breathing man, who loathed me, every action I performed and every word I spoke.

Sitting in the office on winter afternoons, looking out into the murk of Bowling Green Street, I was angry that I had delayed taking George’s help, even by a week. I was paying for my pride. Very soon I was ready to humble myself, apologize, and ask his advice. It was early in twenty-four, not more than a couple of months after his first approach. But I was spared having to eat my words: George had been considering his ‘mistake’, and he was not prepared to let me waste more time. He got in first. Stiffly he said, one night, with the formality that came over him when he was feeling diffident about expressing concern or affection: ‘I propose that we adjourn to my place. I want to make some points about your career. I don’t feel justified in respecting your privacy any longer. I have certain suggestions to make.’

This time I fell over myself to accept.

It was not until we had reached his lodgings, and settled ourselves by the fire, that George began with his ‘suggestions’. It surprised people that he, one of the most turbulent of men, should sometimes behave so punctiliously and formally, as though he were undertaking a piece of delicate official diplomacy. That night he propitiated his landlady into making us a pot of tea, propitiated her because she was truculent and did nothing for him. George lived among the furniture of an artisan’s front room; all he contributed were pipes, a jar of tobacco, a few books, documents from the office, and sheaf upon sheaf of foolscap.

We drank our tea. At last George thought it was a fitting time to begin.

‘Well,’ he said, firmly and yet uncomfortably, ‘I propose to start on the basis of your legacy. I assume that I should have been told if the position had altered to any material extent.’

Aunt Za’s will had taken a long time to prove, and I had often thought how inevitably my mother would have seen the sinister hand of Uncle Will. But in fact I had actually received the three hundred pounds a few weeks before.

‘Of course you would have been told,’ I said. ‘It’s still there.’

‘The sum is three hundred pounds?’ asked George unnecessarily, for his memory was perfect.

‘Less what I owe you,’ I said.

‘I don’t intend to consider that,’ said George, for the first time hearty and comfortable. With money, he was lavish, easy, warm-hearted, and prodigal. At the end of each month, when he received his pay, he had taken to asking if he could lend me a pound or two. ‘I don’t intend to consider that for a minute. Three hundred pounds is your basis. You’ve got to use it to establish yourself in a profession. That’s the only serious question, and everything else is entirely irrelevant.’

‘I’m not going to disagree.’ I smiled. I was on tenterhooks, excited, vigilant.

‘Excellent,’ said George. ‘Well, I expect other people have made suggestions, but unless you stop me I propose to present you with mine.’

‘If other people had made suggestions,’ I said, ‘I should probably have got a move on by now. You don’t realize how you’ve altered the look of things,’ I went on, with spontaneous feeling — and with a hint of something he wanted to hear mixed in the feeling, for that too came just as naturally.

‘I don’t know about that,’ said George, and hurried on with his speech. ‘I can’t see that there is any alternative to my case. (a) You’ve got to establish yourself in a profession. (b) You insist that you haven’t any reasonable contacts anywhere, and (c) I haven’t any influence, of course. With one exception that I regard as important, and that is obviously Martineau. Which brings up the possibility of my own profession and my own firm. (d) It goes without saying that you’d become an incomparably better solicitor than most of the bell-wethers and sunkets who disfigure what I still consider a decent profession for a reasonable man. I can tell you here and now, from what I’ve seen of your work, that you would pass the examinations on your head, if you only follow my old maxim and work when there is nothing else to do. If you manage three hours’ work a night before you come out for a drink, there will be nothing to stop you. (e) Your basic sum of three hundred pounds is enough to pay the cost of your articles, even if Martineau can’t manage to get you in free. I can’t be expected to answer for other professions, but I haven’t been able to think of another where you won’t have financial difficulties. (f) Martineau can be persuaded to let you serve your articles in our firm, which would be very convenient for all concerned.’ George leant back in his chair with an expression seraphic and complacent. ‘I’m afraid I can’t see any alternative,’ he said contentedly. ‘Everything points to your becoming articled to the old firm of Eden and Martineau. I propose you give the egregious Vesey a parting kick, and get your articles arranged in time for the spring. That’s my case.’ He stared challengingly at me. ‘I should like to hear if you can find any objections.’

‘How much would it need? What would it cost?’

George answered with mechanical accuracy. No one was ever more conversant with regulations.

‘If there’s any snag,’ said George, ‘I should expect you to look on me as your banker. I don’t see how you can possibly need more than a hundred pounds on top of your basic sum. Somehow or other, that will have to be found. I insist that you don’t let a trivial sum affect your decision.’

I tried to speak, but George stopped me with a crashing, final shout: ‘I regard it as settled,’ he cried.

But I did not. I was touched and affected and my heart was thumping, just as I was affected all my life by any kindness. For another to take a step on one’s behalf — it was one of the most difficult things to become hardened to. And I was attracted by George’s proposal. It was a way of escape, a goodish way compared with my meaningless and servile days in the education office. With George’s praise to bolster me up, I did not doubt that I should make a competent solicitor. As my mother would have said, it would be ‘better than nothing’ — and, sitting in George’s room, excited, touched by his comradeship, avid with the drawing near of my first leap, I thought for a moment how gratified my mother would have been, if she had seen me accept his suggestion, become a solicitor, set up in a country town, make some money and re-establish the glory of her Wigmore uncle when she was a girl.

I was softened and mellow with emotion. In the haze of George’s tobacco my head was swimming. Through the haze, George’s face, the mantelpiece, the framed diploma hanging over the whatnot, all shone out, ecstatically bright. For the first time, as though my sight had sharpened, I read some words in the diploma. Suddenly I was seized by laughter. George looked astonished, then followed my finger, started across the room at the diploma, and himself roared until the tears came. For it was a certificate, belonging presumably to his landlady’s husband, which testified to a record of ten years’ total abstinence — it was issued by one of Aunt Milly’s organizations.

Yet, all the time, I was wondering. At bottom I was warier than George, shrewder, far more ambitious and more of a gambler. If I was going to take this jump, why not jump further? — that question was half-formed inside me. George was not a worldly man, I realized already. Outside the place where chance had brought him, he did not instinctively, know his way about. I never forgot the first night we talked, when George stood in the dark street and cursed up at the club windows; for him, it was always others who sat in the comfortable places, in the warm and lighted rooms.

With delight I accepted his invitation to take me to the next of Martineau’s ‘Friday nights’ — ‘To carry out our plan, which I regard as settled, in principle,’ said George complacently. Yet there might be other ways for me. Even that evening, with the excitement still hot upon me, I found time to ask some questions about a barrister’s career. Not that I was contemplating it for a moment myself, I said. Becoming a solicitor might be practicable: this was not. But, just as a matter of interest, how well should I cope with the Bar examinations? George thought the question trivial and irrelevant, but said again that, with three or four years’ work, I should sail through them.

He might not be worldly, but he was a fine lawyer, whose own record in examinations was of the highest class. Decisions are taken before we realize them ourselves: above all, perhaps, with those that matter to us most. I did not know it, but my mind may have been made up from that moment.

I set out to win the support of Martineau and Eden. Whichever way I moved, I should need them. I could not afford to fail. When George took me, first to Martineau’s house, then to Eden’s office, I was nervous; but it was a pleasurable nervousness that sharpened my attention and my wits. Unlike George, who was embarrassed at any social occasion, I was enjoying myself.

I got airy encouragement from Martineau, but no more. Although none of us realized it then, he was losing all interest in his profession. He welcomed me to his ‘Friday night’ parties; it was the first salon I had ever attended, and knowing no others I did not realize how eccentric it was. I enjoyed being inside a comfortable middle-class house for the first time. I could not persuade him to attend to my career, though he made half-promises, chiefly I thought because he was so fond of George.

It was quite different with Eden. Before ever George introduced me, I knew that the meeting was critical, for Eden was the senior partner. I guessed that I had disadvantages to overcome. Before I had been in Eden’s office three minutes, I felt with an extra tightening of the nerves that I had more than a disadvantage against me: I was struggling with Eden’s unshakeable dislike of George.

The office was warm and comfortable, with a fire in an old-fashioned grate, leather-covered armchairs, sets of heavy volumes round the walls. Eden sat back in his chair, smoking a pipe, when George awkwardly presented me; and then George stood for a time, not knowing whether to leave us or stay, with me still standing also. Eden was just going to speak, but George chose that moment to say that he did not agree with Eden’s general line of instructions about a new case.

Eden was bald and frog-faced, substantial in body, comfortably and pleasantly ugly. His manner was amiable, but he ceased to be so bland when he replied to George. They had a short altercation, each of them trying hard to be courteous, Eden repressing his irritation, George insisting on his opinion and his rights. Soon Eden said ‘Well, well, Passant, this isn’t the best time to discuss it. Perhaps you might leave me with this young man.’

‘If you prefer it, Mr Eden,’ said George, and backed away.

Eden might have been designed to extract the last ounce of misunderstanding out of George. He was a solid, indolent, equable, good-humoured man, modest about everything but his judgement. He was often pleased with his own tolerance and moderation. He respected George’s intellect and professional competence — it was comfortable for him to respect the latter, for Eden was not overfond of work, and, having once assured himself of George’s skill, was content to let that dynamo-like energy dispose of most of the firm’s business. But everything else about George repelled him. George’s ‘wildness’, formality, passion for argument, lack of ease — they infuriated Eden. In his private heart he could not abide George. Before he spoke to me, when George at last left us alone, I knew that I was under the same suspicion. Some of George’s aura surrounded me also, in Eden’s eyes. I had to please right in the teeth of a prejudice.

‘Well, young man,’ said Eden with a stiff, courteous but not over-amiable smile, ‘what can I do for you?’ I replied that above all things I needed the guidance of a man of judgement. And I continued in that vein.

My brashness and spasms of pride with George were not much like me, or at least not like the self that in years to come got on easily with various kinds of men and women. Even in the months between my meetings with George and Eden, I was learning. In casual human contacts, I was already more practised than George, who stayed all his life something like most of us at eighteen. I was much more confident than George that I should get along with Eden or with anyone that I met; and that confidence made me more ready to please, more unashamed about pleasing.

Eden became much less suspicious. He went out of his way to be affable. He did not make up his mind quickly about people, but he was very genial, pleased with himself for being so impartial, satisfied that one of Passant’s friends could — unlike that man Passant — make so favourable an impression. Eden liked being fair. Passant made it so difficult to be fair — it was one of his major sins.

Eden did not promise anything on the spot, as Martineau had done. He told me indulgently enough that I should have to ‘sober down’, whatever career I took up. In a local paper he had noticed a few violent words from a speech of mine. The identical words would have damned George in Eden’s mind, but did not damn me. At first sight he felt he could advise me, as he could never have advised George. ‘Ah well! Young men can’t help making nuisances of themselves,’ he said amiably. ‘As long as you know where to draw the line.’

It would have offended Eden’s sense of decorum to form an impression in haste, or to make a promise without weighing it. He believed in taking his time, in gathering other people’s opinions, in distrusting impulse and first impressions, and in ruminating over his own preliminary judgement. He spoke, so I heard, to Darby and the director. He had a word with my old headmaster. It was a fortnight or more before he sent across to the education office a note asking me if I would make it convenient to call on him.

When I did so, he still took his time. He sat solidly back in his chair. He was satisfied now that the investigation was complete and the ceremony of forming a judgement properly performed. He was satisfied to have me there, on tenterhooks, waiting on his words. ‘I don’t believe in jumping to conclusions, Eliot,’ he said. ‘I’m not clever enough to hurry. But I’ve thought round your position long enough now to feel at home.’ Methodically he filled his pipe. At last he came to the point.

‘Do you know, young man,’ said Eden, ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t make a job of it.’

Unlike Martineau, he made a definite offer. If I wanted to serve my articles as a solicitor, he would accept me on the usual footing, I paying my fee of two hundred and fifty guineas. It was entirely fair: it was exactly as he had treated any other of the articled clerks who had gone through the firm. He explained that he was not making any concessions to partiality or to the fact that I was so poor. ‘If we started that, young man, we should never know when to stop. Pay your way like everyone else, and we shall all be better friends,’ said Eden, with the broad judgement-exuding smile that lapped up the corners of his mouth. But he knew that, when I had paid the fee, I should not have enough to live on. So he was prepared to allow me thirty shillings a week while I served my time. With his usual temperateness he warned me that, before I took articles in the firm, I ought to be reminded that there was not likely to be a future for me there ‘when you become qualified, all being well’. For George Passant was not, so far as Eden knew, likely to move, and the firm did not need another qualified assistant.

I thanked him with triumph, with relief. I said that I ought to think it over, and Eden approved. He had no doubt that I was going to accept. I said that I might have other problems to raise, and Eden again approved. He still had no doubt that I was going to accept.

How much doubt had I myself, that day in Eden’s room? Or back at my desk, under Mr Vesey’s enormous and persecuted eyes, on those spring afternoons, waiting for the day’s release at half past five? There is no doubt that, on the days after Eden’s offer, I often steadied myself with the thought that I need not stand it. I had a safe escape now. I could end the servitude tomorrow. If I did not, it was of my own volition.

I assuaged each morning’s heaviness with the prospect of that escape. Yet I had a subterranean knowledge that I should never take it. The nerves flutter and dither, and make us delay recognizing a choice to ourselves; we honour that process by the title of ‘making up our minds’. But the will knows.

I had rejected George’s proposition the minute it was uttered — and before I set out to work for Martineau’s and for Eden’s help. I wanted that help, but for another reason. I was going — there was at bottom no residue of doubt, however much I might waver on the surface — to choose the wilder gamble, and read for the Bar.

I had not yet admitted the intention to the naked light, even in secret; but it was forcing its way through, flooding me with a sense of champagne-like risk and power. It was hard to defend, which I knew better than all those I should have to argue with, for I felt the prickle of anxiety even before I admitted the intention to myself. If all went perfectly, I should have spent my ‘basic sum’ by the time I took Bar Finals. There was no living to look forward to immediately, nor probably for several years; it meant borrowing money or winning a studentship. It left no margin for any kind of illness or failure. I should have to spend two thirds of the three hundred pounds on becoming admitted to an Inn. If anything went wrong, I had lost that stake altogether, and so had no second chance.

I did not even escape the office. For I should leave myself so little money, after the fees were paid, that my office wages would be needed to pay for food and board. Instead of crossing Bowling Green Street and working alongside of George, I should have to discipline myself to endure the tedium, the hours without end of clerking, Mr Vesey. All my study for the Bar examinations I should have to do at night; and on those examinations my whole future rested.

In favour of the gamble, there was just one thing to say. If my luck held at every point and I came through, there were rewards, not only money, though I wanted that. It gave me a chance, so I thought then, of the paraphernalia of success, luxury and a name and, yes, the admiration of women.

There was nothing more lofty about my ambition at that time, nothing at all. It had none of the complexity or aspiration of a mature man’s ambition — and also none of the moral vanity. Ten years later, and I could not have felt so simply. Yet I made my calculations, I reckoned the odds, I knew they were against me, almost as clear-sightedly as if I had been grown-up.

When I knew, with full lucidity, that the decision was irrevocably taken, I still cherished it to myself for days and weeks.

I was intensely happy, in that spring and summer of my nineteenth year. The days were wet; rain streamed down the office window; I was full of well-being, of a joyful expectancy, now that I knew what I had to do. I was anxious and had some of my first sleepless nights. But it was a happy sleeplessness, so that I looked with expectation on the first light of a summer dawn. Once I got up with the sun and walked the streets that were so familiar to George and me at the beginning of the night. Now in the dawn the road was pallid, the houses smaller, all blank and washed after the enchantment of the dark. I thought of what lay just ahead. There would be some trouble with Eden, which I must surmount, for it was imperative to keep his backing. Perhaps George might not be altogether pleased. I should have to persuade them. That would be the first step.

It was in those happy days that, attuned so that my imagination stirred to the sound of a girl’s name, I first heard the name of Sheila Knight. I was attuned so that an unknown name invited me, as I had never been invited before, attuned because of my own gamble and the well-being which made the blood course through my veins, attuned too because of the amorous climate which lapped round our whole group on those summer evenings. For George’s pleasures could not be long concealed from us at our age, thinking of love, talking of love, swept off our feet by imagined joys. In Jack’s soft voice there came stories of delight, his conquests and adventures and the whispered words of girls. We were at an age when we were deafened by the pounding of our blood. We began to flirt, and that was the first fashion. Jack’s voice murmured the names of girls, girls he had known or whom he was pursuing. I flirted a little with Marion, but it was the unknown that invited me. Sheila’s name was not the first nor only one that plucked at my imagination. But each word about her gave her name a clearer note.

‘She goes about by herself, looking exceedingly glum,’ said Jack. ‘She’s rather beautiful, in a chiselled, soulful way,’ said Jack. ‘She’d be too much trouble for me. It isn’t the pretty ones who are most fun,’ said Jack. ‘I advise you to keep off. She’ll only make you miserable,’ said Jack.

None of the group knew her, though Jack claimed to have spoken to her at the School. It was said that she lived in the country, and came to an art class one night a week.

One warm and cloudy midsummer evening, I had met Jack out of the newspaper office, and we were walking slowly up the London Road. A car drove by close to the pavement, and I had a moment’s sight, blurred and confused, of a young woman’s face, a smile, a wave. The car passed us, and I turned my head, but could see no more. Jack was smiling. He said: ‘Sheila Knight.’

For weeks no one knew that, instead of taking articles, I was determined to try reading for the Bar. I delayed breaking the news longer than was decent, even to George, most of all to George. I was apprehensive of his criticisms; I did not want my resolution shaken too early. The facts were harsh: I could face them realistically in secret, but it was different to hear them from another. Also I was uneasy. Could I still keep Eden’s goodwill? Could I secure my own way without loss? I screwed myself up to breaking the news one afternoon in September. I thought I would get it over quickly, tell them all within an hour.

I took the half-day off, incidentally raising Mr Vesey’s suspicions to fever point. I went into the reference library, so as to pass the time before Eden returned from lunch. I meant to tell George first, but not to give myself long. The library was cool, aquarium-like after the bright day outside. Instead of bringing calm, the chill, the smell of books, the familiar smell of that room only made me more uneasy, and I wished more than ever that I had this afternoon behind me.

Just before my appointment with Eden I looked into George’s office and told him what I was going to say. I saw his face become heavy. He said nothing. There was no time for either of us to argue, for we could hear Eden’s deliberate footsteps outside the open door.

Eden settled himself in his armchair. Now that the hesitation was over, now that I was actually in the room to make the best of it, I plunged into placating him. I told him how his support had stimulated and encouraged me. If I was attempting too much, I said with the mixture of deference and cheek that I knew would please him, it was really his fault — for giving me too much support. I liked him more, because I was seeing him with all my nerves alive with excitement — with the excitement that, when plunged into it, I really loved. I saw him with great clarity, from the pleased, reluctant, admonishing smile to the peel of sunburn on the top of his bald head.

He was pleased. There was no doubt about that. But he was too solid a man to have his judgements shaken, to give way all at once, just because he was pleased. He was severe, reflective, minatory, shocked, and yet touched with a sneaking respect. ‘These things will happen,’ he said, putting his fingertips together. ‘Young men will take the bit between their teeth. But I shouldn’t be doing my duty, Eliot, if I didn’t tell you that you were being extremely foolish. I thought you were a bit more level-headed. I’m afraid you’ve been listening to some of your rackety friends.’

I told him that it was my own free choice. He shook his head. He had obstinately decided that it must be Passant’s fault, and the more I protested, the more obstinate he became.

‘Remember that some of your friends have got through their own examinations,’ he said. ‘They may not be the best company for you, even if they seem about the same age. Still, you’ve got to make your own mistakes. I know how you feel about things, Eliot. We’ve all been young once, you know. I can remember when I wanted to throw my cap over the windmill. Nothing venture, nothing win, that’s how you feel, isn’t it? We’ve all felt it, Eliot, we’ve all felt it. But you’ve got to have a bit of sense.’

He was certain that I must have made up my mind in a hurry, and he asked me to promise that I would do nothing irrevocable without thinking it over for another fortnight. If I did not consent to that delay, he would not be prepared to introduce me to an acquaintance at the Bar, whose signature I needed to support me in some of the formalities of getting admitted to an Inn.

‘I’m not sure, young man,’ said Eden, ‘that I oughtn’t to refuse straight out — in your own best interests. In your own best interests, perhaps I should put a spoke in your wheel. But I expect you’ll think better of it anyway, after you’ve cooled your heels for another fortnight.’

In one’s ‘own best interests’ — this was the first time I heard that ominous phrase, which later I heard roll sonorously and self-righteously round college meetings, round committees in Whitehall, round the most eminent of boards, and which meant inevitably that some unfortunate person was to be dished. But Eden had not said it with full conviction. Underneath his admonishing tone, he was still pleased. He felt for me a warm and comfortable patronage, which was not going to be weakened. I left his room, gay, relieved, with my spirits at their highest.

Then, along the corridor, I saw George standing outside his own room, waiting for me.

‘You’d better come out for a cup of tea,’ he said in a tone full of rage and hurt.

The rage I could stand, and in the picture-house café I was denounced as a fool, an incompetent, a half-baked dilettante, an airy-fairy muddler who was too arrogant to keep his feet on the ground. But I was used to his temper, and could let it slide by. That afternoon I was prepared for some hot words, for I had behaved without manners and without consideration, in not disclosing my plans to him until so late.

I had imagined vividly enough for myself what he was shouting in the café, oblivious of the customers sitting by, shouting with the rage I had bargained on and a distress which I had not for a minute expected. The figures of ‘this egregious nonsense’ went exploding all over the café, as George became more outraged. He extracted them from me by angry questions and then crashed them out in his tremendous voice. Two hundred and eight pounds down! At the best, even if I stayed at that ‘wretched boy’s job’ (cried George, rubbing it in brutally), which was ridiculous if I were to stand any chance in the whole insane venture — even if nothing unexpected happened and my luck was perfect, I should be left with eighty pounds. ‘What about your fees as a pupil? In this blasted gentlemanly profession in which you’re so anxious to be a hanger-on, isn’t it obligatory to be rooked and go and sit in some nitwit’s Chambers and pay some sunket a handsome packet for the privilege?’ George, as usual, had his facts right. I wanted another hundred pounds for my pupil’s fees, and support for whatever time it was, a time which would certainly be measured in years, before I began earning. Against that I had my contemptible eighty pounds, and any money I could win in studentships. ‘Which you can’t count on, if you retain any shred of sanity at all, which I’m beginning to doubt. What other possible source of money have you got in the whole wide world?’

‘Only what I can borrow.’

‘How in God’s name do you expect anyone to lend you money? For a piece of sheer fantastic criminal lunacy—’

He and Aunt Milly were, in fact, the only living persons from whom I had any serious hope of borrowing money. When he was first persuading me to become articled as a solicitor, George had, of course, specifically offered to be my ‘banker’. How he thought of managing it, I could not imagine; for his total income, as I now knew, was under three hundred pounds a year, he had no capital at all, and made an allowance to his parents. Yet he had promised to find a hundred pounds for me and, even that afternoon, he was conscience-stricken at having to take the offer back, As well as being a generous man, George had the strictest regard for his word. That afternoon he was abandoned to anger and distress. He washed his hands of my future, as though he were dismissing it once for all. But even then he felt obliged to say ‘I am sorry that any promise of mine may have helped to encourage you in this piece of lunacy. I took it for granted that you’d realize it was only intended for purposes within the confines of reason. I’m sorry.’

He went away from the café abruptly. I sat alone, troubled, guilty, anxious. I needed someone to confide in. There was a pall of trouble between me and the faces in the streets, as I walked up the London Road, my steps leading me, almost like a sleepwalker, to Marion. I sometimes talked to her about my plans, and she scolded me for not telling her more. Now I found myself walking towards her lodgings. I was voraciously anxious for myself; and mixed with the anxiety (how could I set it right?) I felt sheer guilt — guilt at causing George a disappointment I could not comprehend. I had been to blame; I had been secretive, my secrecy seemed like a denial of friendship and affection. But secrecy could not have wounded George so bitterly.

His emotion had been far more violent than disappointment, it had been furious distress, coming from a depth that I found bafflingly hard to understand. Very few people, it did not need George’s response to teach me, could give one absolutely selfless help. They were obliged to help on their own terms, and were pained when one struggled free. That was the pattern, the eternally unsatisfactory pattern, of help and gratitude. But George’s distress was far more mysterious than that.

On the plane of reason, of course, every criticism he made was accurate. It was only years later, after the gamble was decided, that I admitted how reasonable his objections were. But no one, not even George, could become so beside himself because of a disagreement on the plane of reason. He had been affected almost as though I had performed an act of treachery. Perhaps that was it. In his heart, I think, I seemed like a deserter.

In his urge to befriend, George was stronger than any man. But he needed something back. On his side he would give money, time, thought, all the energy of his nature, all more than he could afford or anyone else could have imagined giving: in return he needed an ally. He needed an ally close beside him, in the familiar places. I should have been a good ally, working at his side in the office, continuing to be his right-hand man in the group, sharing his pleasures and enough of his utopian hopes. In fact, if I had accepted his plan, become articled to Eden and Martineau’s, and stayed in the town, it might have made a difference to George’s life. As it was, I went off on my own. And, from the beginning, from that violent altercation in the picture-house café, George felt in his heart that I had, without caring, left him isolated to carry on alone.

But that evening, as I told Marion, I could not see my way through. I could not understand George’s violence; I was wrapped in my own anxiety. As soon as I went into her sitting-room, Marion had looked at me, first with a smile, then with eyes sharp in concern.

‘What’s the matter, Lewis?’ she said abruptly.

‘I’ve run into some trouble,’ I said.

‘Serious?’

‘I expect I’ll get out of it.’

‘You’re looking drawn,’ said Marion. ‘Sit down and I’ll make you some tea.’

She lodged in the front room of a semi-detached house, in a neat privet-hedged street just at the beginning of the suburbs. The hedge was fresh clipped, the patch of grass carefully mown. She was only just returned from her holidays, and on her sofa there was a notebook open, in which she was preparing her lessons for the term. Outside in the sun, a butterfly was flitting over the privet hedge.

‘Why haven’t I seen you before?’ said Marion, kneeling by the gas ring. ‘Oh, never mind. I know you’re worried. Tell me what the trouble is.’

I did not need to explain it all, for she had written to me during her holiday and I had replied. On paper she was less brisk and nervous, much softer and more articulate. She had asked when I was going to ‘take the plunge’, assuming like everyone else that I was following George’s plan. In my reply I had told her, with jauntiness and confidence, that I had made up my mind to do something more difficult. She was the first person to whom I told as much. Even so, she complained in another letter about ‘your cryptic hints’, and as she gave me my cup of tea, and I was at last explicit about my intention, she complained again.

‘Why do you keep things to yourself?’ she cried. ‘You might have known that you could trust me, mightn’t you?’

‘Of course I trust you.’

‘I hope you do.’ She was sitting on the sofa, with the light from the window falling on her face, so that her eyes shone excessively bright. Her hair had fallen untidily over her forehead; she pushed it back impatiently, and impatiently said: ‘Never mind me. Is it a good idea?’ (She meant my reading for the Bar.)

‘Yes.’

‘No one else thinks so — is that the trouble?’ she said with startling speed.

‘Not quite.’ I would not admit my inner hesitations, the times that afternoon when my doubts were set vibrating by the others. Instead, I told her of the scene with George. I described it as objectively as I could, telling her of George’s shouts which still rang word for word in my ears. I left out nothing of his fury and distress, speculated about it, asked Marion if she could understand it.

‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Marion shortly. ‘George will get over it. I want to know about you. How much does it mean to you?’

Though she was devoted to George, she would not let me talk about him. Single-mindedly, with an intense single-mindedness that invaded my thoughts, she demanded to know how much I was dependent on George’s help. I answered that, without his coaching, I should find the work much more difficult, but not impossible; without a loan from him, I did not see how I could raise money even for my pupil’s year.

Marion was frowning.

‘I think you’ll get his help,’ she said.

She looked at me.

‘And if you don’t,’ she said, ‘shall you have to call it off?’

‘I shan’t do that.’

Still frowning, Marion inquired about George’s objections. How much was there in them? A great deal, I told her. She insisted that I should explain them; she knew so little of a career at the Bar. I did so, dispassionately and sensibly enough. It was easy at times to face objection after objection, to lay them down in public view like so many playing cards upon the table. It was some kind of comfort to put them down and inspect them, as though they were not part of oneself.

Marion asked sharply how I expected to manage. I said that there were one or two studentships and prizes, though very few, if I came out high in the Bar Finals. ‘Of course, you’re clever,’ said Marion dubiously. ‘But there must be lots of competition. From men who’ve had every advantage that you haven’t, Lewis.’

I said that I knew it. I mentioned Aunt Milly: with luck, I could conceivably borrow a hundred or two from her. That was all.

From across the little room, Marion was looking at me — not at my face, but looking me up and down, from head to foot.

‘How strong are you, Lewis?’ she said suddenly.

‘I shall survive,’ I said.

‘I’m sure you’re highly strung.’

‘I’m tougher than you think.’

‘You’re packed full of vitality, I’ve told you that. But, unless you’re careful, aren’t you going to burn yourself out?’

She got up from the sofa and sat on a chair near mine.

‘Listen to me,’ she said urgently, gazing into my eyes. ‘I wish you well. I wish you very well. Is it worth it? It’s no use killing yourself. Why not swallow your pride and do what they want you to do? It’s the sensible thing to do after all, And it isn’t such a bad alternative, Lewis. It will give you a comfortable life — you might even make another start from there. It won’t take anything like so much out of you. You’ll have time for everything else you like.’

My hand was resting on the arm of my chair. She pressed hers upon it: her palm was very warm.

I met her gaze, and said: ‘Do you think that I’m cut out to be a lawyer in a provincial town?’

She left her hand on mine, but her eyes shrank away.

‘All I meant was — you mustn’t damage yourself.’

Wretched after my day, I wanted to leave her. But before I went she made me promise that I would report what Eden said next, whether George came round. ‘You must tell me,’ said Marion. ‘I want to know. You mustn’t let me think I shouldn’t have spoken. I couldn’t help it — but I want everything you want, you know that, don’t you?’

In fact, I soon had good news to tell Marion — and I did so at once, to make amends for having been angry with her. This time she did not stop me describing both George’s words and Eden’s.

George had spoken to me, only three or four days after our quarrel, stiffly, still half-furiously, in great embarrassment. He could not withdraw any single part of his criticisms. He regarded me as lost to reason; but, having once encouraged me to choose a career and offered his help, he felt obliged to honour his word. He would be behind me, so far as lay in his power. If I wanted money, he would do his best, though I must not count on much. He would, naturally, coach me in private for the Bar examinations. ‘I refuse to listen to any suggestion that you won’t find the blasted examinations child’s play,’ said George robustly. ‘That’s the one item in the whole insane project that I’m not worrying about. As for the rest, you’ve heard my opinions. I propose from now on to keep them to myself.’

He spoke with a curious mixture of stubborn irritation, diffidence, rancour, magnanimity, and warmth. I was disarmed and overjoyed.

As for Eden, when I told him that I had not changed my mind, he shook his head, and said: ‘Well, I suppose young men must have their fling. If you are absolutely determined to run your head against a brick wall, I shan’t be able to stop you.’ That did not prevent him from giving me a series of leisurely sensible homilies; but he was willing to sign my certificates of character and to introduce me to a barrister. He wrote the letter of introduction on the spot (there were one or two technical difficulties about my getting admitted to an Inn). The name on the envelope was Herbert Getliffe.

All that was left, I said to Marion, was to pay my fee.

It was a few days later, in the October of 1924, on a beautiful day of Indian summer — I was just nineteen — that I announced that my admission was settled and the fee paid. Now it was irrevocable. I went to Aunt Milly’s house on Friday evening, and proclaimed it first to Aunt Milly and my father. On recent visits there for tea, I had hinted that I might spend the legacy to train myself for a profession. Aunt Milly had vigorously remonstrated; but now I told them that I had paid two hundred pounds in order to start reading for the Bar, she showed, to my complete surprise, something that bore a faint resemblance to approval.

‘Well, I declare,’ said my father, equably, on hearing the news.

Aunt Milly rounded on him. ‘Is that all you’ve got to say, Bertie?’ she said. Having dismissed him, she turned to me with a glimmer of welcome. ‘I shan’t be surprised if it’s just throwing good money after bad,’ said Aunt Milly, automatically choosing to begin with her less encouraging reflections. ‘It’s your mother’s fault that you want a job where you won’t dirty your hands. Still, I’d rather you threw away your money failing in those examinations than see you putting it in the tills of the public houses.’

‘I don’t put it in the tills, Aunt Milly,’ I said. ‘Only the barman does that. I’ve never thought of being a barman, you know.’

Aunt Milly was not diverted.

‘I’d rather you threw your money away failing in those examinations’, she repeated, ‘than see you do several things that I won’t mention. I suppose I oughtn’t to say so, but I always thought your mother might get above herself and put you in to be a parson.’

Aunt Milly seemed to be experiencing what for her was the unfamiliar emotion of relief.

I had arranged to meet George in the town that evening; he liked to have a snack before we made our usual Friday night call at Martineau’s. ‘Drop in for coffee — or whatever’s going,’ George remarked, chuckling, munching a sandwich. He was repeating Martineau’s phrase of invitation, which never varied. ‘I’d been to half a dozen Friday nights before it dawned on me that coffee was always going — by itself.’

I broke in ‘This is a special occasion. The deed’s done.’

‘What deed?’

‘I sent off the money this afternoon.’

‘Did you, by God?’ said George. He gazed at me with a heavy preoccupied stare, and then said ‘Good luck to you. You’ll manage it, of course. I refuse to admit any other possibility.’

The street lamps shimmered through the blue autumnal haze. As we strolled up the New Walk George said, in a tone that was firm, resigned, and yet curiously sad ‘I accept the fact that you’ll manage it. But don’t expect me to forget that you’ve been as big a firebrand as I ever have. Some of the entries in my diary may embarrass you later — when you get out of my sight.’

Very rarely — but they stood out stark against his blazing hopes — George had moments of foresight, bleak and without comfort. In the midst of all his hope, he never pictured any concrete success for himself.

Then he went on heartily: ‘It’s essential to have a drink on it tonight. This calls for a celebration.’

We left Martineau’s before the public houses closed. George, as always, was glad of the excuse to escape a ‘social occasion’: even in that familiar drawing-room, he felt that there were certain rules of behaviour which had paralysingly been withheld from him; even that night, when I was proclaiming my news to Martineau, I noticed George making a conscious decision before he felt able to sit down. But once outside the house, he drank to my action with everyone we met. There was nothing he liked more than a ‘celebration’, and he stood me a great and noisy one.

Arriving at my room after midnight, I saw something on the chest of drawers which I knew to be there, which I had remembered intermittently several times that evening, but which would have astonished all those who had greeted my ‘drastic’ step, George most of all. It was a letter addressed in my own handwriting. After midnight, I was still drunk enough from the celebration, despite our noisy procession through the streets, to find the envelope glaring under the light. I saw it with guilt. It was a letter addressed in my own handwriting to my prospective Inn. Inside was the money. It was the letter, which, for all my boasts, I had not yet screwed up my courage to send off. I had been lying. There was still time to back out.

They thought of me as confident. Perhaps they were right in a sense, and I had a confidence of the fibres. In the very long run, I did not doubt that I should struggle through. But they, who heard me boast, were taken in when they thought I took this risk as lightly as I pretended. They did not see the interminable waverings, the attacks of nerves, the withdrawals, the evenings staring out in nervous despondency over the roofs, the dread of tomorrow so strong that I wished time would stand still. They did not detect the lies which I told myself as well as them. They did not know that I changed my mind from mood to mood; I used an uprush of confidence to hearten myself on to impress Eden that I was absolutely firm. But a few hours later that mood had seeped away and I was left with another night of procrastination. That had gone on for weeks. My natural spirits were high, and my tongue very quick, or else the others would have known. But in fact I concealed from them the humiliating anxieties, the subterfuges, the desperate attempts to find an excuse, and then another, for not committing myself without any chance of return. They could not guess how many times I had shrunk back from paying the fee, so that I could still feel safe till another day. At last, that Friday, I had brought myself to sign the letter and the cheque; in ebullient spirits I had told them all, Aunt Milly, my father, George, Martineau, all the rest, that the plunge was taken, and that I was looking ahead without a qualm; but in the small hours of Saturday the letter was still glaring under the light, on the top of the chest of drawers.

It was Monday before I posted it.