The Conscience of the Rich

by C. P. Snow

  Then, though Ronald Porson made no move, rumours spread through the Marches. One reached Charles; Katherine heard others hinted at. It was known that the Getliffe brothers had been discussed on the past Friday night, when Mr March happened to be away. No one was sure how the rumours started; but it became clear that Sir Philip knew more about Herbert Getliffe than anyone in the family did, and had described him with caustic contempt.

  Both Charles and Katherine accepted that without question. Philip had his code of integrity. It was a worldly code, but a strict one. He did not forgive an offence against it. He was indignant that Herbert Getliffe should have laid himself open to suspicion, whether the suspicion was justified or not.

  All the family were impressed by his indignation. Charles and Katherine were told by several of their cousins to expect him to visit Mr March. Katherine waited in anxiety. Night after night she could not get to sleep, and Charles played billiards with her at Bryanston Square. For three mornings running, Mr March grumbled at them; then he suddenly stopped, the day after Philip’s visit.

  Philip called at Bryanston Square on a Tuesday afternoon: the wedding was fixed for ten days ahead. He went into Mr March’s study, and they were there alone for a couple of hours. On his way out, Philip looked into the drawing-room, said good afternoon to Charles and Katherine, but would not stay for tea and did not refer once to seeing her at her wedding.

  When Philip left, they waited for Mr March; they expected him to break out immediately about what he proposed to do. But he did not come near them all the evening: the butler said that he was still in the study: at dinner he spoke little to them, though he made one remark about ‘a visit from my brother about your regrettable connections’.

  When Katherine tried to use the opening, he said bad temperedly: ‘I have been persecuted enough for one day. It is typical of my family that when they wish to make representations to me, they select the only relative whom I have ever respected.’

  By the time I arrived for tea the next day, Charles had already heard, from various members of the family, versions of the scene between Mr March and Philip; the versions differed a good deal, but contained a similar core. They all agreed that Mr March had put up a resistance so strong that it surprised the family. He had made no attempt to challenge the facts about Herbert Getliffe, but protested, with extreme irritability, that ‘though I refuse to defend my daughter’s unfortunate choice, I have no intention of penalizing the man because of the sharp practice of his half-brother’. According to one account, he had expressed his own liking and trust for Francis; and certainly, with his accustomed practicality, he had said that it was far too late to intervene now. ‘If you had wanted me to refuse to recognize the marriage, you should have communicated your opinion in decent time.’

  It sounded final. Charles, piecing together the stories, was relieved, but he was not quite reassured: even less so was Katherine. Mr March had brazened matters out, as though he were ready to defy the family. But his mood since had been sombre, not defiant; and they knew he was hurt, more than by the family’s disapproval which Philip represented, by his feeling for Philip himself.

  They knew the depth of his feeling. Warm-hearted as he was, yet with no intimate friends outside the family, this was the strongest of his human bonds, after his love for his children. When he had spoken the night before of ‘the only relative whom I have ever respected’, he was trying to mask, and at the same time relieve, his sadness. He made it sound like an outburst of ill-temper, an exaggerated phrase; but it was really a cry of pain.

  So Charles and Katherine kept coming back to Philip’s effect on Mr March. It was not till after tea that Charles said: ‘It’s possible that I may be able to help with Uncle Philip.’ He asked me to take Katherine out for the evening: he would see Mr March, and persuade him to invite Philip for dinner.

  Katherine looked puzzled as he made these plans. Charles said: ‘It may help you. You see, Ann has promised to marry me. I think I ought to tell them at once.’

  ‘Did you expect to be able to tell them this?’ Katherine burst out. ‘You said something – you remember – the night Lewis brought the news?’

  Charles did not reply, but said: ‘It may smooth things over with Uncle Philip.’

  ‘Of course it will,’ said Katherine, suddenly full of hope. ‘It will put Mr L right with the family. Your making a perfectly respectable marriage. And he ought to be glad about it himself.’

  Charles looked across at me.

  ‘Of course, he ought to be glad about it,’ Katherine went on. ‘I know he thinks she’s got too much influence over you. But she’s everything he could possibly wish, isn’t she? He likes her, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Charles. ‘Yes. In any case, he ought to be told at once.’

  Then he got up from his chair, and added in a tone now vigorous and eager: ‘I want to tell him tonight.’

  Charles had become impatient. He scarcely had time to listen to our congratulations. He asked me again to take Katherine away for the evening, and before we were out of the house he had entered Mr March’s study.

  It was pouring with rain, and we went by taxi to our restaurant, and even then got wet as we crossed the pavement. But Katherine, without taking off her coat, went straight to the telephone to ring up Francis at Cambridge. In a few minutes she returned, her eyes shining, her hair still damp.

  She was anxious, but her capacity for enjoyment was so great that it carried both of us along. In her bizarrely sheltered life, she had never dined out with a man alone, except Francis. She was interested in everything, the decoration of the restaurant, the relations between the pairs of people dining, my choice of food. It was her own sort of first-hand interest, as though no one had ever been out to dinner before.

  With the same zest, she kept returning to the news Charles was at that moment telling Mr March. ‘Lewis, when did he propose? It must have been what he hinted at that night, don’t you agree? That was a week ago – don’t you admit he’s had it up his sleeve ever since?’

  She chuckled fondly. Then she asked me: ‘Lewis, do you think she’ll make him happy?’

  I told her what I thought: they would be happier together than either with anyone else. She was not satisfied. Did that mean I had my doubts? I said that Charles had been luckier than he ever expected. Katherine asked if Ann was not too complicated. I said that I guessed that in love she was quite simple.

  Katherine broke out: ‘If she makes him happy then everything is perfect. Lewis, you’ve just said that he never expected to be so lucky. What I am positive about is that he never expected a wife who would please the family. Don’t you agree that’s the astonishing part of it? That’s why I’m fantastically hopeful tonight. I don’t pretend that Mr L and Uncle Philip will think she’s a tremendous catch. She doesn’t come from our group of families, and she’s only moderately rich. But they’ll have to admit that she passes. After all, most of Mr L’s nephews have done worse for themselves. And I don’t think it will be counted against her that she’s very pretty. She’s been admired in the family already.’

  I took her to a theatre, so that we should get back to Bryanston Square late enough for Charles to be waiting for us. On the way back her anxiety recurred, but Charles met us in the hall and his smile dispelled it.

  ‘I’m pretty certain that all is well,’ he said in a low voice. She kissed him. He stopped her talking there, and we went into the drawing-room.

  ‘I’m pretty certain all is well,’ he repeated. ‘You mustn’t think it’s due to me. It would have come all right anyhow – don’t you really believe that yourself?’

  When she questioned him, he admitted that Philip had been pleased with the news. There had been considerable talk about the Getliffes and Porson. Mr March and Philip had parted on good terms.

  We both noticed that Katherine suddenly looked very tired. Charles told her so; she was too much excited to deny it, and went obediently, first to the telephone and then to bed.

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bsp; Charles’ smile, as we heard the final tinkle of the call, and then her step upstairs, was tender towards her. His whole expression was open and happy: yet, despite the tender smile, it was not gentle. It was open and fiercely happy. He jumped up and went to the window. His movements were full of energy.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I think it has cleared up now. I’d very much like a stroll. Do you think you could bear it?’

  It was just such a night as that on which we walked home after the coming-out dance. The rain had stopped: there was a smell of wet leaves from the garden in the square. The smell recalled to Charles the excitement, the misgivings, the promise of that night, as well as the essence of other nights, forgotten now. In an instant he was overcome by past emotion, and did not want to speak.

  It was some time before I broke the silence.

  ‘So you think Katherine is safe?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Charles. ‘It’s quite true what I told her. I think the wedding would have come off without any more trouble – any more trouble in the open, anyway. But I’m glad I talked to them. Uncle Philip did seem to be placated. He was completely surprised about Ann. He said that I’d never been seen with her in public. He couldn’t remember hearing anyone in the family couple our names together.’

  Charles smiled. He broke off: ‘By the way, he is very angry about this Getliffe business. I suppose he’s sufficiently patriarchal to feel that all attachments to the family ought to come up to his standard of propriety. That must be the reason, don’t you agree? It pleased him more than you’d think, when I said that Porson had probably got tired of his own indignation.’

  Charles went on: ‘And Uncle Philip was genuinely delighted about Ann. He decided that she would be a credit to us. He also said’ – Charles laughed – ‘that he did hear she was a bit of a crank, but he didn’t take that seriously.’

  ‘And Mr L?’

  Charles hesitated.

  ‘He was not so pleased. Did you expect him to be?’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Something rather strange. Something like – “I always knew it was inevitable. I have no objections to raise”.’

  In a moment, he said: ‘Of course he was extremely glad that Uncle Philip is coming round. That is going to be the most important thing for him.’

  Then Charles broke into his good-natured, malicious grin: ‘It struck me as pleasing that I should be soothing the family. It struck me as even more pleasing that I should be doing it by announcing that I intended to marry in as orthodox a manner as my father did.’ The malicious smile still flickered. ‘There is also a certain beauty,’ he reflected, ‘in the fact that, after all the fuss I’ve made from time to time, I should be eager to tell my father so.’

  ‘Ah well,’ he said, ‘it’s settled. It is superb to have it settled.’

  Just as when he saw Ann at Haslingfield he smiled because he had first met her at the Jewish dance – so tonight he was amused that he of all men, who had once winced at the word ‘Jew’, should now be parading his engagement to a Jewess, should be insisting to his father that he was conforming as a Jewish son. It was a sarcastic touch of fate completely in his style; but it was more than that.

  All of a sudden I realized why he had been so fiercely happy that day, why he had gained a release of energy, why as he walked with me he felt that his life was in his own hands. To him the day had been a special one – though all the rest of us had had our attention fixed on Katherine and her father, and had forgotten Charles except as a tactful influence in the background.

  In Charles’ own mind, the day marked the end of the obsession which had preyed on him since he was a child. It marked the death of a shame. He felt absolutely free. Everything seemed open to him. He felt his whole nature to be fresh, simple, and at one.

  We walked across Bayswater Road and into the Park. His stride was long and full of spring. He was talking eagerly, of his future with Ann, of what he hoped to do. He was more spontaneous, frank, and trustful than I had ever known him. He had forgotten, or put aside for the night, any thought of his conflict with his father over Ann.

  In the darkness I listened to his voice, lively, resonant, happy. I thought of this shame which had occupied so much of his conscious life. It had gone, so it seemed to him, because he had fallen in love with Ann, and thus that evening could tell his father, with unqualified happiness, that he was going to marry her – and, more than that, could use the fact that he was marrying a Jewess in order to ease the way for Katherine.

  So Charles was talking with boyish spontaneity, completely off his guard, his secrecies thrown away. I felt a great affection for him. Perhaps the affection was greater because I did not see his state that night quite as he did himself. For me there was something unprotected about his openness and confidence.

  I remembered his confession when he gave up the law. I had felt two things then, and I felt them more acutely now: that this shame had tormented him, and that at the same time he had used it as an excuse. Charles would always, I thought, have been prouder and more self-distrustful, harsher and more vulnerable to shame, than most of us. In his youth, he would in any case have gone through his torments. But even he, for all his insight, wanted to mollify and excuse them. Even he found it difficult to recognize his sadic harshness, his self-distrust, above all his vulnerability, as part of his essential ‘I’.

  Some years before, I had had a friend, George Passant, who put the blame for the diffidence and violence of his character on to his humble origin. His vision of himself was more self-indulgent than Charles’. Yet Charles’ insight did not prevent him from seizing at a similar excuse. He had felt passionately, as we have all felt, that everything would have been possible for him, life would have been utterly harmonious, he would have been successful and good ‘if only it had not been for this accident’. Charles had felt often enough ‘I should have been free, I should have had my fate in my hands – if only I had not been born a Jew.’

  It was not true. It was an excuse. Even to himself it was an excuse which could not endure. For his vulnerability (unlike George Passant’s) was of the kind that is mended by time; for years the winces of shame had become less sharp. It seemed to him that by telling his father and Philip he was marrying a Jewess he had conquered his obsession. I should have said that it was conquered by the passing of time itself and the flow of life. In any case, he could no longer believe in the excuse. That night for him signalized the moment of release, which really had been creeping on imperceptibly for years.

  He was light with his sense of release. He felt that night that now he was truly free.

  That was why I was stirred by a rush of affection for him. For he would be more unprotected in the future than he had been when the excuse still dominated him. In cold blood, when the light and warmth of release had died down, he would be left face to face with his own nature. Tonight he could feel fresh, simple, and at one; tomorrow he would begin to see again the contradictions within.

  26: Mr March Crosses the Room

  Up till the day of the wedding, rumours still ran through the family, but I heard from Charles that Philip had sent an expensive present. I also heard on the wedding morning that Mr March was in low spirits but ‘curiously relieved’ to be getting ready to go to the register office.

  When I arrived at Bryanston Square after the wedding, to which not even his brothers were invited, I thought Mr March was beginning to enjoy himself. Nearly all the family had come to the reception and, soon after being ‘disgorged from obscurity’ (his way of referring to the marriage in a register office) he seemed able to forget that this was different from any ordinary wedding.

  In the drawing-room Mr March stood surrounded by his relatives. There were at least a hundred people there: the furniture had been removed and trestle-tables installed round two of the walls and under the windows, in order to carry the presents. The presents were packed tightly and arranged according to an order of precedence that had cost Katherine, in the middle of he
r suspense, considerable anxiety; for, having breathed in that atmosphere all her life, she could not help but know the heart-burnings that Aunt Caroline would feel if her Venetian glasses (‘she hasn’t done you very handsomely,’ said Mr March, who made no pretence about what he considered an unsatisfactory present) were not placed near the magnificent Flemish tapestry from the Herbert Marches, or Philip’s gift of a Ming vase.

  The tables glittered with silver and glass; it was an assembly of goods as elaborate, costly, ingenious, and beautiful as London could show. At any rate, Mr March considered that the presents ‘came up to expectations’. Hannah, so someone reported, had decided that they ‘weren’t up to much’; but, as that had been her verdict in all the March weddings that Mr March could remember, it merely reassured him that his daughter’s was not continuously regarded as unique.

  There were few of those absences of presents which had embarrassed the cousin whose daughter married a Gentile twenty years before. ‘That appears to be ancient history,’ said Mr March to Katherine, when presents had arrived from all his close relations and some of his fears proved groundless. The two or three lacunae among his cousins he received robustly: ‘George is using his religious scruples to save his pocket. Not that he’s saving much – judging from the knick-knack that he sent to Philip’s daughter.’ At the reception itself, he repeated the retort to Philip himself, and they both chuckled.

  Philip had already gone out of his way to be affable. He had greeted Ann with special friendliness, and had even given a stiff smile towards Herbert Getliffe. He seemed set, in the midst of the family, on suppressing the rumours of the last fortnight.

  Mr March responded at once to the signs of friendship. He began to refer with cheerfulness and affection to ‘my son-in-law at Cambridge’, meaning Francis, who was standing with Katherine a few feet away. A large knot of Mr March’s brothers and sisters and their children had gathered round him, and he was drawn into higher spirits as the audience grew.