George Passant (39 page)

‘It’s bad,’ said Roy.

‘How is she going to live?’ I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘We ought to go and see him.’

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

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

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

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

‘It’s nothing.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Will he save it–?’

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

‘I meant nothing like that.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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