Charles Snow - George Passant

George did not like it. He would have preferred to try to article Jack to Eden & Martineau. He asked Morcom and me for our opinions. We gave practically the same answer. Making Jack a solicitor would mean a crippling expense for George; and we could not see Jack settling down to a profession if he started unwillingly. His choice was far more likely to come off.

At last George gave way. Then, though Jack, as I say, never doubted that the money would be found, George faced a last obstacle; he had to tell his father and mother that he was lessening his immediate help to them.

For many men, it would have been easy. He could have equivocated; after all, the insurance provided for their future, and he had been making an extravagantly large contribution. But he never thought of evading the truth. He dreaded telling it, for he knew how it would be taken; their family relations were passionately close. But tell it he did, without any cover, three days after our visit to Nottingham.

A week later, when he took me to supper with them, they were still not reconciled to it. It was only Mr Passant’s natural courtesy, his anxiety to make me feel at home, that kept them from an argument the moment we arrived.

Actually, I was not a stranger in their house. Until two years before, Mr Passant had been assistant postmaster at Wickham; then, when George got his job at Eden & Martineau’s, Mr Passant transferred to the general post office in the town. For fear of their family ties George insisted on going into lodgings, while they lived in this little house, one of a row of identical little houses, each with a tiny front garden and iron railings, on the other side of the town. But George visited them two or three times every week; he took his friends to spend whole evenings with them; tonight we arrived early and George and his mother kissed each other with an affection open and yet suddenly released. She was a stocky, big-breasted woman, wearing an apron over a greyish dress.

‘It’s half the week since I saw you, old George,’ she said: it was the overtones of her racy Suffolk accent that we noticed in George’s speech.

She wanted to talk at once about the question of money. Mr Passant managed to stop her, however, his face lined with concern. In a huff, as hot-tempered as George, she went into the back kitchen, though supper would not be ready for an hour.

Mr Passant sat with us round the table in the kitchen. It was hot from a heaped-up fire, and gave out the rich smell of small living-rooms. Under the gaslight, Mr Passant burst into a breathless, friendly, excited account of how, that morning at the post office, a money order had nearly gone astray. He spoke in a kindly hurry, his voice husky and high-pitched. He said: ‘Do you play cards, Mr — er — Lewis? Of course you must play cards. George, we ought to play something with him now.’

It was impossible to resist Mr Passant’s enormous zest, to prevent him doing a service. He fetched out a pack of cards from the sideboard, and we played three-handed solo. Mr Passant, who had been brought up in the strictest Puritan discipline, was middle-aged before he touched a card; now he played with tremendous enjoyment, with a gusto that was laughable and warmed us all.

When we finished the game, Mr Passant suddenly got up and brought a book to the table.

‘Just a minute, Mr — er — Lewis, there’s something I thought of when I was playing. It won’t take long, but I mustn’t forget.’

The book was a Bible. He moistened a pencil in his lips, drew a circle round a word, and connected it by a long line to another encircled word.

I moved to give him more room at the table, but he protested.

‘No, please, no. I just do a little preparation each night to be ready for Sunday, you know. I’m allowed to tell the good news, I go round the villages, I don’t suppose George has told you.’ (Of course, I knew long since that he devoted his spare hours to local preaching.) ‘And it’s easier if I do a little work every night. I’m only doing it before supper so that afterwards—’

George and I spread out the evening paper and whispered comments to each other. In a few moments Mr Passant sighed and put a marker into the Bible.

‘Ready for Sunday?’ said George.

‘A little more tomorrow.’ Mr Passant smiled.

‘I suppose you won’t have a big congregation,’ George said. His tone was both intimate and constrained. ‘As it’s a slack time of the year.’

Mr Passant said: ‘No, we can’t hope for many, but that’s not the worst thing. What grieves me is that we don’t get as many as we used to. We’re losing, we’ve been losing ever since the war.’

‘So has the Church of England,’ I observed.

‘Yes, you’re losing too,’ Mr Passant smiled at me. ‘It isn’t only one of us. Which way are you going to win them back?’

I gained some amusement from being taken as a spokesman of the Church of England. I did not obtrude my real beliefs: we proceeded to discuss on what basis the Christian Churches could unite. There I soon made a mistake; for I suggested that Mr Passant might not find confirmation an insurmountable obstacle.

Mr Passant pushed his face forward. He looked more like George than I had seen him. ‘That is the mistake you would have to understand before we could come together,’ he said. ‘Can’t I make you see how dangerous a mistake it is, Mr — Lewis? A man is responsible for his own soul. Religion is the choice of a man’s soul before his God. At some time in his life, sooner or later, a man must choose to stay in sin or be converted. That is the most certain fact I know, you see, and I could not bring myself to associate in worship with anyone who doesn’t want to know it as I do.’

‘I understand what you mean by a man being responsible for his soul.’ George rammed tobacco into his pipe. ‘That’s the basis of Protestantism, naturally. And, though you might choose to put it in other words’ — he looked at me — ‘it’s the basis of any human belief that isn’t completely trivial or absurdly fatalistic. But I never have been able to see why you should make conversion so definite an act. It doesn’t happen like that — irrevocably and once for all.’

‘It does,’ said Mr Passant.

‘I challenge it,’ said George.

‘My dear,’ said Mr Passant, ‘you know all sorts of matters that I don’t know, and on every one of these I will defer to your judgment or knowledge, and be glad to. But you see, I have been living amongst people for fifty years, for fifty-three years and a half, within a few days, and as a result of that experience I know that their lives change all of a sudden — like this—’ he took a piece of paper out of his pocket and moistened his pencil against a lip; then he drew a long straight line— ‘a man lives in sin and enjoyment and indulgence for years, until he is brought up against himself; and then, if he chooses right, life changes altogether — so .’ And he drew a line making a sharp re-entrant angle with the first, and coming back to the edge of the paper. ‘That’s what I mean by conversion, and I couldn’t tell you all the lives I’ve seen it in.’

‘I can’t claim the length of your experience,’ George’s tone had suddenly become hard, near anger, ‘but I have been studying people intensively for several years. And all I’ve seen makes me think their lives are more like this—’ he took his father’s paper under the gaslight, his hand casting a blue shadow; he drew a rapid zigzag. ‘A part of the time they don’t trouble to control their baser selves. Then for a while they do and get on with the most valuable task in sight. Then they relax again. And so on another spurt. For some people the down-strokes are longer than the up, and some the reverse. That’s all I’m prepared to admit. That’s all you need to hope, it seems to me. And whatever your hopes are, they’ve got to be founded in something like the truth—’