Snow, C.P. - George Passant (aka Strangers and Brothers).txt

by Unknown

  "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 sensual 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. There is a profounder insight, and he had not seen deeply into George; but what he saw was half-true.

  George, of all men, however, could not be seen in halftruths. It was more tolerable to hear him dismissed with enmity and contempt. He could not be generalized 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-atease, lonely, a diffident stranger in the hostile world of men.

  Through that sleepless night, I could not bear ho have him explained by Getliffe's half-truth. And, with a renewed disstress, 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 civilization. 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 parts 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. To night, I knew it without any relief, that was all.

  FORTY-THREE

  THE LAST DAY

  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 it true--which I don't for a moment believe, which you in 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 imp
ortant 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 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 of 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.

  In the afternoon he gave them a competent, tabulated account of the evidence over the businesses. It was legally fair, it was tidy and compressed. It went definitely in our favour.

  He came to Martineau: "One witness has attracted more attention than any other. That is Mr. Martineau, whom you may consider as the most important witness for the defence and whom the counsel for the prosecution wishes you to neglect as utterly untrustworthy. This is a matter where I cannot give you direct guidance. It is a plain question of whether you believe or disbelieve a witness speaking on oath. There is no possibility, you will have decided for yourselves, that the witness can be mistaken. It is a direct conflict of fact. If you believe Mr. Martineau you will naturally see that a considerable portion of the prosecution's case about the agency is no longer tenable. If you disbelieve him, it will no doubt go a long way in your minds towards making you regard the defendants as guilty of that particular charge. If you believe him, you will also no doubt reflect that the most definite part of the prosecution's case has been completely disposed of.

  "In such a question, you would naturally be led by your judgment of a witness's character. Here, if I may say so, you are considering the evidence of a witness of unusual character--against whom the counsel for the prosecution was able to bring nothing positive but eccentricity and who has certainly undertaken, we must believe, a life of singular selfabnegation. I must ask you to consider his evidence in the light of all the connected evidence. But in the end you must settle whether you accept it by asking yourselves two questions: first, whether such a man would not estimate the truth above all other claims; second, whether even a good man -whom you may think eccentric and unbalanced--might not consider himself justified in breaking an oath to save a friend from disgrace.

  "I think it necessary to remind you that, according to his own account, you are required to believe him capable of an irresponsible lie."

  One of the jury moistened his lips. The judge paused, passed a finger over his notes, continued: "That is all I wish to direct your attention towards. But there is one matter which makes me detain you a little longer: and that is to require you to forget, while you consider your verdict, much that you have heard during the conduct of this case. You have been presented with more than a little about the private lives of these three young people. You heard it in evidence; both counsel have referred to it with feeling in their closing speeches. I ask you to forget as much of it as is humanly possible. You may think they have behaved very foolishly; you may think they have behaved very wrongly, as far as our moral standards allow us to judge. But you will remember that they are not being tried for their behaviour; and you must not allow your condemnation of it to affect your deliberations on the real charge against them. You must be as uninfluenced as though you accepted the eloquent plea of the counsel for the defence and believed that the world is in flux, and that these actions have a different value from what they had when most of us were young." For a moment he smiled.

  "That is not to say, though, because you are to assume what may be an effort of charity towards some of the evidence that you have heard, that you are to regard the case itself with lightness. Nothing I have said must lead you to such a course. If you are not entirely convinced by the evidence for the prosecution you will, of course, return, according to the practice of our law, a verdict of not guilty. But if you are convinced in the relevant evidence, beyond any reasonable shade of doubt in your own minds, then you will let nothing stand between you and a verdict of guilty. Whatever you feel about some elements in their lives, whether you pity or blame them, must have no part in that decision. All you must remember is that they are charged with what is in itself a serious offence against the law. It is the probity of transactions such as theirs that is the foundation of more of the structures of our lives than we often think. I need not tell you that, and I only do so because the importance of the offence with which they are charged must not become submerged."

  Several people later mentioned their surprise on hearing, after the tolerant advice and stiff benevolence of his caution upon the sexual aspect of the case, this last sternness over money.

  As the jury went out, the court burst into a murmur of noise. One could distinguish no words, but nothing could shut out the sound. It rose and fell in waves, like the drone of bees swarming.

  The light from the chandelier touched the varnish on the deserted box.

  Getliffe and I walked together outside the court. He said o one of the solicitors, in his breathless confidential whisper: "I want to get back to the house tonight. One deserves a night to oneself-----"

  My watch had jerked infinitesimally on. "They can't be back for an hour," we were trying to reassure ourselves. At last (though it was only forty minutes since they went out) we heard something: the jury wanted to ask a question. When we got back to our places, the judge had already returned; his spectacles stood before him on his pad, their side arms standing up like antennae; his eyes were dark and bright as he peered steadily into the court.

  Through the sough of noise there came Porson's voice, unrestrained and full. "It's inconceivable that he shouldn't send it before Easter," he was saying to his junior. His face was high-coloured, but carried heavy purplish pouches under the eyes. He was sitting, one leg over the bench, a hand behind his head, his voice unsubdued, with a bravura greater than anyone's there. He laughed, loud enough to draw the eyes of Mr. Passant, who was standing between his wife and Roy, at the back of the court.

  The door clicked open. Then we did not hear the shuffle of a dozen people. It was the foreman alone who had come into court.

  "We should like to ask a question. We are not certain about a point of law," he said, nervously brusque.

  "It is my place to help you if I can," said the judge.

  "I've been asked to inquire whether we can find one of them definitely had nothing to do with--with any of the charges. If we do that, can we leave out that person and consider the others by themselves?"

  The judge said: "I tried to give you instructions about the law under which they are charged. Perhaps I did not make myself sufficiently clear." Again he explained. His kindness held a shade of patronage. Two of them could be g
uilty of conspiracy without a third. It was possible for any of them to be guilty of conspiracy and not guilty of obtaining money by false pretences. (If the jury considered that any of them had not, in fact, profited after joining in a conspiracy.) If they were not guilty of conspiracy, in the circumstances they could not be guilty of obtaining money by false pretences. Unless the jury considered only one person to be responsible--in which case there was no conspiracy, but one person alone could be found guilty of obtaining money by false pretences.

  "You are certain you understand?" the judge went on. "Perhaps you had better write it down. Yes, it would remove any uncertainties if you wrote it down and showed it to me."

  Many found this interruption the most intolerable moment of the trial. Someone said the most sinister--meaning perhaps the confusion, the sudden flash of other lives, of human puzzlement and incompetence.

  Through the hour of waiting which still remained, it shot new fragments of thought to many of our minds. Whom did they mean? What were they disagreeing on? But none of us could go on thinking for long: we were wrapped in the emptiness of waiting. The apprehension engrossed us like an illness of the body.

  The message came. The jury were coming back. The three were brought up, and took their seats in the dock again. George's arms were folded on his chest. His face was curiously expressionless: but his hands were as livid as though he had been hours in the cold.