Charles Snow - George Passant

The sheet was headed ‘Players of the Market Place ’ and then, in smaller letters, ‘will be with you on Thursday night to give their LITTLE PLAYS . Titles for this evening, The Shirt, Circe . Written by us all. Played by us all. There is no collection,’ and in very large letters ‘WE WOULD RATHER HAVE YOUR CRITICISM THAN YOUR ABSENCE.’

It was a printed poster, and the proofs had been read with typical Martineau carelessness: so that, for instance, ‘evening’ appeared as ‘evenini’, like an odd word from one of the lesser-known Latin tongues, Romanian or Provençal.

The match burnt down to George’s fingers. He threw it away with a curse.

Jack explained that the ‘little plays’ purported to carry a religious moral: that they were presumably written by Martineau himself. Jack had watched part of one — ‘painfully bad’, he said.

George was embarrassed and distressed.

‘We can’t let him make a fool of himself in public. We must calm him down,’ he said. ‘He can’t have lost all sense of responsibility.’

‘He’s just kept enough to hide these antics from us,’ said Jack. ‘Still, I found him out.’ Then he laughed, and to my astonishment added: ‘Though in the process, of course, I managed to let you find me out.’

‘What do you mean now?’ said George, uninterested by the side of his concern for Martineau.

‘I made that slip about the train.’

‘Oh,’ said George.

‘And, of course, I remembered as soon as I spoke to you last night. I’ve always told you that my father’s brother lived in Chiswick. Last night I said it was my mother’s. After you’d noticed that, I may as well say that I’ve got no prosperous uncles living in Chiswick at all. I’m afraid that one night — it just seemed necessary to invent them.’

Jack spoke fast, smiling freshly in the dusk. Neither George nor I had noticed the slip: but that did not matter; he wanted to confess. He went on to confess some more romances; how he had wrapped his family in mystery, when really they were poor people living obscurely in the town. I was not much surprised. He was so fluid, I had watched him living one or two lies; and I had guessed about his family since he took pains to keep any of us from going near their house. I still was not sure where he lived.

He went on to tell us that one of his stories of an admiring woman had been imaginary. That seemed strange; for, more than most young men, he had enough conquests that were indisputably real. Perhaps he felt himself that this was an inexplicable invention — for he looked at George. The moon was just rising, and George’s face was lit up, but lit up to show a frown of anger and incomprehension.

‘I suppose it must seem slightly peculiar to you, George,’ said Jack. ‘But you don’t know what it is to be obliged to make the world a trifle more picturesque. I’m not defending myself, mind. I often wish I were a solid person like you. Still, don’t we all lie in our own fashion? You hear Martineau say, “George, I’m sure the firm’s always going to need you”. You’d never think of departing from the literal truth when you told us the words he’d said. But you’re quite capable, aren’t you, of interpreting the words in your own mind, and convincing yourself that he’s really promised you a partnership? While I’m afraid that I might be obliged to invent an offer, with chapter and verse. Lewis knows what I mean better than you do. But I know it makes life too difficult if one goes on after my fashion.’

He was repentant, but he was high-spirited, exalted. ‘Did you know,’ he went on, ‘that old Calvert told the truth at that committee of yours? He had warned me a month or two before that there wasn’t an opening for me in the firm.’

‘I didn’t know,’ said George. ‘Otherwise, I shouldn’t have acted.’

‘I can say this for myself,’ said Jack, ‘that the Roy affair brought him to the point.’

‘But you let me carry through the whole business under false pretences,’ George cried. ‘You represented it simply to get an advantage for yourself — and make sure that I should win it for you under false pretences?’

‘Yes,’ said Jack.

‘No,’ I said. ‘That was one motive, of course. But you’d have done it if there’d been nothing George could bring off for you. You’d have done it — because you couldn’t help wanting to heighten life.’

‘Perhaps so,’ said Jack.

‘I should never have acted,’ said George. He was shocked. He was shocked so much that he spoke quietly and with no outburst of anger. I thought that he sounded, more than anything, desperately lonely.

He stared at Jack in the moonlight. At that moment, their relation could have ended. Jack had been carried away by the need to reveal himself; he knew that many men — I myself, for example — would accept it easily; he had not realised the effect it would have on George. Yet, his intuition must have told him that, whatever happened, they would not part now.

George was seeing someone as different from himself as he would ever see. Here was Jack, who took on the colour of any world he lived in, who, if he remembered his home and felt the prick of a social shame, just invented a new home and believed in it, for the moment with his whole existence.

While George, remembering his home, would have thrust it in the world’s face: ‘I’m afraid I’m no good in any respectable society. You can’t expect me to be, starting where I did.’

That was his excuse for his diffidence’s and some of his violence, for his constant expectation of patronising treatment and hostility. In that strange instant, as he looked at Jack, I felt that for once he saw that it was only an excuse. Here was someone who ‘started’ where George did, and who threw it off, with a lie, as lightly as a girl he had picked up for an hour: who never expected to find enemies and felt men easy to get on with and easier to outwit.

George knew then that his ‘You can’t expect me to, starting where I did’ was an excuse. It was an excuse for something which any man finds difficult to recognise in himself: that is, he was by nature uneasy and on the defensive with most of his fellow men. He was only fully assured and comfortable with one or two intimate friends on whose admiration he could count; with his protégés, when he was himself in power: with women when he was making love. His shame at social barriers was an excuse for the hostility he felt in other people; an excuse for remaining where he could be certain that he was liked, and admired, and secure. If there had not been that excuse, there would have been another; the innate uneasiness would have come out in some other kind of shame.

That aspect of George, he shared with many men of characters as powerful as his own. The underlying uneasiness and the cloak of some shame, class shame, race shame, even the shame of deformity, whatever you like — they are a combination which consoles anyone like George to himself. For it is curiously difficult for any human being to recognise that he possesses natural limitations. We all tend to think there is some fundamental ‘I’ which could do anything, which could get on with all people, which would never meet an obstacle — ‘ if only I had had the chance’ . It was next to impossible — except in this rare moment of insight — for George to admit that his fundamental ‘I’ was innately diffident and ill-at-ease with other men. The excuse was more natural, and more comforting — ‘ if only I had been born in gentler circumstances .’

George stood up, plucked his knife out of the tree and handed the poster to Jack.

‘Thank you for taking that trouble about Martineau,’ he said. ‘I know you did it on my account. You’ll let me know the minute you discover anything fresh, of course. We’ve got to help one another to keep him from some absolutely irretrievable piece of foolishness.’