Time of Hope (12 page)

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?’