George Passant (13 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I was looking for you,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George was embarrassed and distressed.

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

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

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

‘I made that slip about the train.’

‘Oh,’ said George.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes,’ said Jack.

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

‘Perhaps so,’ said Jack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Has anything happened?’

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

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

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

His optimism had vanished now.

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

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

‘Whatever can he be thinking of doing?’

‘God knows what he’s thinking of.’

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

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

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

‘I do.’

‘After all, he’s in a queer state.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Can you say no?’

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

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

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

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

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

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