The Conscience of the Rich (32 page)

Mr March said in a low voice to his brother: ‘As I’ve already told you, whether it is in our power or not depends on my son’s wife.’

‘I still don’t believe it,’ said Sir Philip.

‘Will you tell my brother whether she’s responsible for this, or not?’ said Mr March to me.

‘How much do you know about this?’ Sir Philip asked me.

‘Have you told Sir Philip,’ I asked Mr March, ‘that she’s tried to set it right?’

‘I remain to be convinced of that,’ said Mr March.

‘I assure you.’

‘All I can do,’ said Mr March, ‘is acknowledge your remark.’

‘Why are you making it worse than it need be?’ I cried. I explained as much as I was free to do of her share in the story, and of how she had made her plea to Seymour and been refused. As I was speaking, Sir Philip’s face was lighter, more ready to credit what I said, than his brother’s, which was set in an obstinate, incredulous frown. Yet at last Mr March said, as though reluctantly:

‘Apparently she has expressed some concern.’

I repeated part of what I had said. All of a sudden he shouted: ‘Do you deny that if she wished she could still stop this abomination?’

I hesitated. Yes, she could inform against the
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. She could finish it for good. The loyalties that she would have to betray went through my mind, inhibiting my answer. The hesitation made me seem less straightforward than I was really being. Mr March shouted: ‘Do you deny it?’

‘It’s possible, but–’

‘Lewis Eliot knows very well,’ Mr March said to Sir Philip, ‘that it’s more than possible.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s only possible by a way that no one would like to use. I don’t think many people could do it.’

‘Can you explain yourself?’ said Sir Philip.

I had to shake my head.

‘I should be breaking a confidence,’ I said.

‘At any rate,’ said Sir Philip, ‘I can take it that this is all part and parcel of her cranky behaviour?’

‘In a sense, yes.’ I said I could not add to that answer.

Sir Philip became brisk, almost relieved. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that is the best news I’ve heard today. Charles must bring her to heel. I’ve always thought it was scandalous for him to let her indulge in this nonsense. Particularly a young woman as good-looking as she is. He ought to keep her busier himself.’ Into the yellowing parchment face there came a smile, appreciative and salacious. It might have been a flicker of himself as a younger man, the Philip who had an eye for the women, the Philip who, so the family gossip said, had kept a string of mistresses.

‘I cannot let you delude yourself,’ said Mr March.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You are inclined to think the position is less dangerous because my son’s wife is responsible for it.’

The weight of Mr March’s words told on Sir Philip.

He replied irritably: ‘I don’t understand what you’re getting at. I’ve always heard that the young woman is devoted to Charles.’

‘I have no reason to believe the contrary.’

‘Then she’ll do what he tells her, in the end.’

There was a silence, Mr March cried: ‘I cannot answer for what my son will tell her.’

‘You’re not being reasonable.’ Sir Philip’s tone was harassed and sharp. ‘Charles has always had decent feelings for me, hasn’t he? You’ve only got to let him know that this is serious for me. If they go on far enough, they may make it impossible for me to stay in public life. Well then. Be as considerate as you can, and tell him none of us would interfere with his wife’s activities as a general rule, though he might take it from me that she should have something better to do with her time. But tell him this is too important for me and the family for us to be delicate. We must ask him to’ assert himself.’

‘You don’t know how much you’re asking,’ I broke out.

‘If the thing’s possible, it’s got to be done,’ said Sir Philip.

‘I will make those representations,’ said Mr March. ‘But I cannot answer for the consequences.’

‘If you prefer it,’ said Sir Philip, ‘I am quite prepared to speak to Charles.’

‘No, Philip,’ Mr March said. ‘I must do it myself.’

Sir Philip stared at him, and then said: ‘I’m not willing to leave anything to chance. I expect Charles to act immediately.’

He looked at his brother for agreement, but Mr March barely moved his head in acquiescence.

‘I shouldn’t like to go out under a cloud,’ said Sir Philip. ‘Of course, we’ve all got to go some time, but no one likes being forced out.’ Suddenly his tone altered, and he said quickly: ‘Mind you, I’m not ready to admit that my usefulness is over yet. I’ve some pieces of work in this department I want to carry through, and after that–’

Inexplicably his mood had changed, and he began to talk of his expectations. He hoped to keep his office for six months, until there was a reshuffle in the government; he speculated on the reshuffle name by name, knowing this kind of politics just as he knew the March family. If one combination came off, he might still get a minor ministry for himself. For that he was hoping.

It was strange to hear him that afternoon. It was stranger still to hear Mr March, after a time, join in. Preoccupied, with occasional silences, he nevertheless joined in, and they forecast the chances of Sir Philip’s acquaintances, among them Holford’s son. Lord Holford – to whose party Charles had taken me years before – had a son whom he was trying to manoeuvre into a political success. Both Sir Philip and Mr March were anxious to secure that he did not get so much as a parliamentary private secretaryship.

It was strange to listen to them. No one, it seemed to me, had the power continuously to feel old. There were moments, many of them, when a man as realistic as Mr March was menaced by the grave – as in the club that afternoon, when he saw that his contemporaries were decrepit men. But those moments did not last. There were others, as now, when Sir Philip and Mr March could fear, could hope, just as they would have feared and hoped thirty years before. They were making plans at that moment: Sir Philip at seventy-three was still hoping for a ministry. There was no incongruity to himself: he hoped for it exactly as a young man would. The griefs and hopes of Mr March or Sir Philip might seem to an outsider softened and pathetic, because of the man’s age: but to the man himself, age did not matter, they were simply the griefs and hopes of his own timeless self.

After the talk with Sir Philip, Mr March went straight back to Haslingfield. He made no attempt that afternoon to get into touch with Charles; it was several days before he wrote to him. I heard from Katherine that a letter had at last been sent – a noncommittal letter, she gathered, just asking Charles down. We were struck by the procrastination.

Meanwhile, Ann and Charles, in a state when they wished to see no one but each other, did not know what she should do. It was either/or, and whichever she did there was not a tolerable way out.

She did not need to tell Charles what it would be like to betray all she believed in. In fact, I got an impression that they did not talk much about what each feared most, they were too close for that. When I was with them, the discussion was oddly matter-of-fact. If she should decide that the less detestable course was to get the paper stopped, what was the quickest way of doing it? She asked the question without expression. It was not difficult to give practical answers. She possessed, as Seymour had said in his defiant bluff, documents which would do the job: she had only to pass them to someone like Ronald Porson, and an injunction would be out within a few hours.

Charles went down to Haslingfield with nothing settled between them, but resolved to speak intimately and affectionately to his father. None of us knew precisely what was said at that meeting, but it did not go like that. All the news I had came from Katherine, who was, without any qualification at all, on Mr March’s side. She felt nothing but hostility to Ann: she had only a residue of sympathy, the faintest residue from the past, for Charles. Yet even she admitted that Mr March had made it more bitter for himself and his son with each word he said. He had never shown less control or less understanding of Charles. He seemed to have exemplified the law of nature according to which, when a human relation has gone profoundly wrong, one is driven to do anything that can make it worse.

Mr March, having delayed for so many days in seeing his son at all, received him with a storm of accusations. He insisted that Charles had deliberately dissimulated, had professed ignorance, had given lying reassurances, whenever Mr March had asked. Charles was outraged. He had gone to see his father with a feeling of guilt: he was in one of those situations where one is half-guilty and half-innocent, or rather guilty at one level and innocent at another. He deserved reproaches, he was forming them against himself – but he was maddened at being accused of behaviour he could never have committed.

Katherine believed that there had been the bitterest words about Ann. It seemed, very strangely, that Mr March had spoken of her as though she were just a slave of Charles’, not an independent human being. What had really been said no one knew but themselves.

They parted in anger, Mr March’s wildly possessing him, Charles’ hard and strained. But as he went without a goodbye, Charles, still not knowing where to turn in spite of his harsh replies, offered to see Mr March again when he returned to Bryanston Square. It was an attempt to keep a card of re-entry, such as one makes when one is not prepared to face an end. Violently and ungraciously, Mr March accepted it.

The second reference in the
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was published before the end of August. It went just as Seymour had told me; in itself, it was innocuous. It produced no more facts, hinted at Hawtin as the chief figure in the case, contained nothing which pointed specifically at Sir Philip, and ended by promising to produce the whole story in ‘three–four weeks’.

There were no consequences, at any rate none in the open. I heard some gossip, went to a political dinner party and listened to the hostess moving pieces about the chessboard. Did this mean that Alex Hawtin would soon have a brilliant future behind him? Would there be a reshuffle in the government before long? Would they take the opportunity to put one or two men ‘out’? But I was used to that kind of gossip, in which reputations rose and fell in a week: however informed the gossips were, however shrewd, their judgements had a knack of reversing themselves when one was not looking, and next month they would, with equal excitement, malice, and human gusto, be deciding that Alex Hawtin was safely ‘in’ and that someone else had ‘blotted his copybook’.

In the March family, nothing happened for some days: except that Mr March closed Haslingfield and, breaking his seasonal ritual by a fortnight, which had not happened since he took the house forty years before, was back in Bryanston Square by the first week in September. It was known that he had seen the second article, but he said nothing and made no attempt to have another private talk with Charles. In fact, the only action he took as soon as he returned to Bryanston Square was a singular one: he invited Charles and Ann, his niece Margaret March, and several others, including me, to dine with him, on the pretext that he wished to celebrate the birth of Katherine’s child.

The child, her second son, had been born a week before Mr March moved back to London. With all his physical exuberance he rejoiced in a birth. He was pleased that Katherine should have called the child after him. But no one believed that this was the true reason for his invitation. Margaret March, who knew most of the facts, thought he was making the opportunity for a scene with Ann: she was nervous at having to be a spectator, although her sympathies were mainly with Mr March.

Others of his relations believed much the same. They knew that a disaster hung over Mr March and Charles, and they felt that Mr March could not endure it any longer. Several of them were apprehensive enough to make excuses not to go. Most of them had learned something of the situation, pitied Mr March, and took his side; this was the case even with the younger generation. They did not begin to understand Charles’ position, though he attracted a kind of baffled sympathy from some, simply because he was liked and respected. Ann got no sympathy at all.

Ann herself had no doubt of the reason behind Mr March’s invitation. I called at Antrobus Street on my way home one night, just after we had all received the letters asking us to dine; I found Ann alone. For the first time in the years I had known her, her courage would not answer her. She was trying to screw up her will, but she was frightened.

I tried to hearten her. I said that it was possible Mr March had invited us for a much simpler reason. He might want to prove that he had not yet broken with his son. When Charles left Haslingfield, he had shown his card of re-entry and now perhaps Mr March was playing to it.

It did not sound likely. When Charles came in, I saw that she was not only frightened, but torn, just as Charles himself was torn. With her he was tender and protective. It was clear that he had not made her choice for her, and that he was not prepared to.

Nevertheless, that night I believed that, however much he kept from forcing her, however much he respected her choice, she would do as he wanted. I believed it more positively when she mentioned Mr March’s invitation, and said that she did not want to go.

‘When did it arrive?’ said Charles quietly.

‘This morning. It’s too much of an ordeal, and it couldn’t do any good. Even if I did go, it couldn’t do any good.’

Charles paused and said: ‘I’m afraid that I want you to.’

‘Why do you?’ Her face was open, but hurt and clouded.

‘You must see why. He’s made an approach, and I can’t refuse him. I’m afraid that I want you to go.’

‘Must I?’ said Ann.

‘Yes,’ said Charles.

Ann asked me to call for her on the night of Mr March’s dinner party. She had been away from home for some nights, and had not seen Charles since she got back; he had an engagement at his old hospital, and would have to go to Bryanston Square direct.