Charles Snow - George Passant

Morcom sat with his eyes never leaving George’s, his arms limp at his sides.

‘Good God above, do I wonder you hate me?’ George shouted on. ‘You’ve got everything that I needed to make me any use. You could have done everything — if only you could bear to see someone else’s happiness. As it is, you can only use your gifts against those who show you what you’ve missed. You try to get your satisfaction by injuring people who make you feel ashamed. Well, I hope you’re satisfied now. Until you find another victim.’

THE winter passed. George spent less time with me than formerly; partly because I was working intensively for my final examination in the summer — but also it was now Jack who had become his most confidential friend.

As soon as Eden’s decision was made, George had thrown himself into the interests of the group. Several young men and women from the School had been added to it; George talked of them all more glowingly than ever. On the few occasions I went out to the farm that winter, I felt the change from the group which George first devoted himself to. George and Jack, I know, formed parties there each weekend.

George never visited Eden’s house again, after the Sunday night when we walked back in the rain. I scarcely heard him mention Eden or the firm; and at Eden’s the entire episode of Martineau and George was merely the subject of comfortable reflections.

It was Eden, however, who told me in the early spring that Martineau was making another move, was giving up the agency. He had found some eccentric brotherhood, not attached to any sect, whose members walked over the country preaching and begging their keep. This he was off to join.

‘Ah well,’ said Eden, ‘religion is a terrible thing.’

We heard that Martineau was due to leave early one Saturday morning. I went along to his house that day and outside met George, who said, with a shamefaced smile: ‘I couldn’t very well let him go without saying goodbye.’

We had to ring the bell. Since the house had been transformed, we did not know where Martineau would be sleeping. The bell sounded, emptily, far away; it brought a desolation. At last his housekeeper came, her face was hostile, for she blamed us for the catastrophe.

‘You’ll find him in his old drawing-room,’ she said. ‘And if things had been right you’d never have had cause to look for him at all.’

He had been sleeping in the drawing-room, in one corner. A rough screen where the sofa used to be; in the bend of the room, between the fireplace and the window, where we used to sit on the more intimate Friday nights, a bed protruded, and there was an alarm clock on the chair beside it. The Ingres had been taken down, the walls were bare, there was a close and musty smell.

Martineau was standing by the bed, packing a rucksack.

‘Hallo,’ he cried, ‘so glad you’ve come to see the last appearance. It’s specially nice that you managed to find time, George.’

His laugh was wholehearted and full of enjoyment, utterly free from any sort of sad remembrance of the past. He was wearing an old brown shirt and the grey coat and trousers in which I had last seen him; he had no tie, and he had not shaved for days.

‘Could I possibly help you to pack that?’ said George.

‘I’ve always been better with my hands than with my head,’ said Martineau. ‘But still, George, you have a shot.’

George studied the articles on the bed. There were a few books, an old flannel suit, a sponge bag and a mackintosh.

‘I think the suit obviously goes in first,’ said George, and bent over the bed.

‘This is a change from the old days in the firm,’ said Martineau. ‘You used to do the brainwork, and I tried on the quiet to clean up the scripts you’d been selecting as ashtrays.’

George laughed. He could forget everything except their liking: and so (it surprised me more) could Martineau.

‘How is the firm, by the way?’ asked Martineau.

‘As tolerable as one can reasonably expect,’ said George.

‘Glad to hear it,’ said Martineau indifferently, and went off to talk gaily of his own plans. He was going to walk fifteen miles today, he said, down the road towards London, to meet the others coming from the east.

‘Will there be any chance of seeing you here? On your travels?’ said George.

‘Some time,’ Martineau smiled. ‘You’ll see me when you don’t expect me. I shall pass through some time.’

He went to the door, called ‘Eliz-a-beth,’ as he used to when he wanted more coffee on a Friday night. He ran down the stairs and his voice came to us lilting and cheerful: we heard her sobbing. He returned with a buttonhole in his shirt. When we had left the garden and turned the corner, out of sight of the house, he smiled at us and tossed the buttonhole away.

Just before we said goodbye, George hesitated. ‘There’s one thing I should like to say, Mr Martineau. I don’t know what arrangements you are making with your connections here. As you realise, they’re not people I should personally choose to rely on in case of difficulties. And you’re taking a line that may conceivably get you into difficulties. So I thought I ought to say that if ever you need money or anything of the sort — I might be a more suitable person to turn to. Anyway, I should like you to keep that in mind.’

‘I appreciate that, George.’ Martineau smiled. ‘I really appreciate that.’

He shook our hands. We watched him cross over the road, his knapsack lurching at each stride. Up the road, where the houses rested in the misty sunshine, he went on, dark between the trees, until the long curve took him out of sight.

‘Well,’ said George.

We walked the other way, towards the town. I asked if I should meet him out of the office at midday, as I often did on Saturdays.

‘I’m afraid not,’ said George. ‘As a matter of fact, I thought of going straight over to the farm. I don’t suppose you can allow yourself the time off, can you? But Jack is taking over a crowd by the one o’clock bus. I want to work in a full weekend.’

I took my final examination in May 1927, two months after Martineau’s departure; and went into chambers in London in the following September. For several years it was only at odd times that I saw George and my other friends in the town.

Some of that separation was inevitable, of course. I was making my way; it was then that I entered the chambers of Herbert Getliffe, who turned out to be as lively, complex and tricky as Jack himself; there was the long struggle with him (amusing to look back upon) before I emerged to make a decent living at the Bar. And in the process I formed new friendships, and got to know new worlds. That occupied me for a great part of those years; but still I need not have seen so little of George. It was natural for people as shrewd as Rachel to think that I was forsaking my benefactor and close friend of the past.

It was natural; but it was the opposite of the truth. Not by virtue, but by temperament, I was at that age, when I was still childless, bound by chains to anyone who had ever really touched my life; once they had taken hold of me, they had taken hold for good. While to George, though he enjoyed paying me a visit, I became incidental as soon as I vanished from the group. And before long he was keeping from me any news that mattered deeply to him. Yet I could feel that he was going through the most important time of his life.

From various people I heard gossip, rumours, genuine news of his behaviour. Olive sometimes wrote to me; and she was intimate with George again, when, after her father’s death in 1930, she came into some money and returned to live in the town. Her letters were full of her own affairs: how she finally decided not to marry Morcom, though for a few months they lived together; how his old jealousy at last justified itself, for she had fallen in love with Jack and hoped to marry him. In the middle of these pages on herself, frequently muddled and self-deceiving, there occurred every now and then one of her keen, dispassionate observations upon George.