Charles Snow: George Passant

THE lamplighter passed up the road; under the lamp by Martineau’s gate, the hedge top suddenly shone out of the dusk. Looking down over the gardens, Morcom was content to be quiet.

Just then, thinking how much I liked him, I felt too how he could never have blown so many of us into more richly coloured lives, as George had done. Where should we have been, if George had not come to Eden & Martineau’s?

Where should we have been? We were poor and young. By birth we fell into the ragtag and bobtail of the lower middle classes. Then we fell into our jobs in offices and shops. We lived in our bed-sitting rooms, as I did since my mother’s death, or with our families, lost among the fifty thousand houses in the town. The world seemed on the march, we wanted to join in, but we felt caught.

Myself, but for George, I might still have been earning my two pounds a week as a clerk in the education department, and wondering what to do with a legacy of £300 from an aunt. I should have acted in the end, perhaps, but nineteen is a misty age: while George gave me no rest, bullied and denounced me until I started studying law and reading for the Bar examinations. A month before Jack’s crisis I had at last stopped procrastinating, and arranged to leave the office at the end of this September.

And so with the others in George’s group — except Jack, who had been the unlucky one. George had set us moving, lent us money: he never seemed to think twice about lending us money, out of his income of £250 from the firm, together with an extra £30 from the School. It was the first time we had been so near to a generous-hearted man.

We became excited over the books he told us to read and the views he stood by, violent, argumentative, four square. We were carried away by his belief in human beings and ourselves. And we speculated, we could not help but speculate, about George himself. Olive certainly soon knew, and Jack and I not long afterwards, that he was not a simple character, unmixed, all of a piece. We felt, though, and nothing could shake us, that he was a man warm with broad, living nature; not good nature or bad nature, but simple nature; he was a man of flesh and bone.

I thought this, as I saw him at last walking in the lamplight, whistling, swinging his stick, his bowler hat (which he punctiliously wore when on professional business) pushed on to the back of his head.

I shouted down. George met us on the stairs: it did not take long to explain the news. He swore.

We went back to Morcom’s flat to let him think it out. For minutes he sat, silent and preoccupied. Then he declared, with his extraordinary, combative optimism: ‘I expect Martineau will get me to stay behind after we’ve finished the social flummeries. It will give me a perfect opportunity to provide him with the whole truth. They’ve probably presented us with the best possible way of getting it home to the Canon.’

But George was nervous as we entered Martineau’s drawing room — though perhaps no more nervous than he always felt when forced to go through the ‘social flummeries’, even the mild parties of Martineau’s Friday nights. He only faced this one tonight because of Olive’s nagging; while the rest of us went regularly, enjoyed them, and prized Martineau’s traditional form of invitation to ‘drop in for coffee, or whatever’s going ’ — though after a few visits, we learned that coffee was going by itself.

‘Glad to see you all,’ cried Martineau. ‘It’s not a full night tonight.’ There were, in fact, only a handful of people in the room; he never knew what numbers to expect, and on the table by the fireplace stood files of shining empty cups and saucers; while in front of the fire two canisters with long handles were keeping warm, still nearly full of coffee and milk, more than we should ever want tonight.

Morcom and I sat down. George walked awkwardly towards the cups and saucers; he felt there was something he should do; he felt there was some mysterious etiquette he had never been taught. He stood by the table and changed his weight from foot to foot: his cheeks were pink.

Then Martineau said: ‘It’s a long time since you dropped in, George, isn’t it? Don’t you think it’s a bit hard if I only catch sight of my friends in the office? You know it’s good to have you here.’

George smiled. In Martineau’s company he could not remain uncomfortable for long. Even when Martineau went on: ‘Talking of my friends in the office, I think Harry Eden is going to give us a look in tonight.’

George’s expression became clouded, stayed clouded until Martineau baited him in his friendly manner. The remark about Eden had revived our warning: more, it made George think of a man with whom he was ill-at-ease; but no one responded to affection more quickly, and, as Martineau talked, George could put away unpleasant thoughts, and be happy with someone he liked.

We all enjoyed listening to Martineau. His conversation was gay, unpredictable and eccentric; he had a passion, an almost mischievous passion, for religious controversies, and he loved to tell us on Friday nights that he had been accused of yet another heresy. It did not matter to him in the slightest that none of us was religious, even in any of his senses; he was a spontaneous person, and his ‘scrapes’, as he called them, had to be told to someone. So he described his latest letter in an obscure theological journal, and the irritated replies. ‘They say I’m getting dangerously near Manichaeism now,’ he announced cheerfully tonight.

George chuckled. He had accepted all Martineau’s oddities: and it seemed in order that Martineau should stand in front of his fire, in his morning coat with the carnation in the buttonhole, and tell us of some plan for puzzling the orthodox. It did not occur to any of us that he was fifty and going through the climacteric which makes some men restless at that age. His wife had died two years before; we did not notice that, in the last twelve months, the eccentricities had been brimming over.

Like George, we expected that he would stay as he was this Friday night, standing on his hearthrug, pulling his black tie into place over his wing collar. I persuaded him to read a letter from a choleric country parson; Martineau smiled over the abusive references to himself, and read them in a lilting voice with his head on one side and his long nose tip-tilted into the air.

Then George teased him affectionately about his religious observances; which seemed, indeed, as eccentric as his beliefs. He had long ago left the Church of England, and still carried on a running controversy with his brother, the Canon; he now acted as steward in the town’s most respectable Methodist congregation. There he went with regularity, with enjoyment, twice each Sunday; but he confessed, with laughter and almost with pride, that he reckoned to ‘get off’ to sleep before any sermon was under weigh.

‘Did you manage to get off last Sunday, Mr Martineau?’ said George.

‘I did in the morning, George. But at night we had a stranger preaching — and there was something disturbing about his tone of voice.’

George beamed with laughter; he sank back into his armchair, and surveyed the room; it was a pleasant room, lofty, painted cream, with a print of Ingres’ Source on the wall opposite the fireplace. For once, he did not want his evening in respectable society to end.

And Jack, who came in for half an hour, guessed that all was well. He had been warned by Olive that pressure might be used upon George; but George was so surprisingly at home that Jack’s own spirits became high. He left early: soon afterwards the room thinned out, and only George, Morcom and I stayed with Martineau.

Then Eden came in. He walked across the room to the fireplace.