Charles Snow - George Passant

‘It can’t be much of a consolation for you,’ George said.

He was hoping more from Martineau’s evidence than he could let his father see. During their argument, I felt it was one of the few occasions on I had seen George deliberately dissimulate. Perhaps he had to destroy his own hopes. I wondered if he also consciously wanted to keep up the pretence that there was nothing in the case; and so told Mr Passant that his persecutors would disregard favourable evidence, just as they had invented the whole story of the fraud.

Yet, listening to him, we had all been brought to a pitch of inordinate strain. He had started out to dissimulate, but his own passion filled the words, and he did not know himself how much was acted. Before he stopped, he could not conceal an emotion as violent as that of the night before.

We all looked at him. No one spoke for a time. Then George said: ‘Where are you preaching on Sunday?’

‘I don’t know for certain.’

‘The trial will be over,’ said George. ‘Whatever happens, I want you to preach. Where’s the circuit this week?’

Mr Passant mentioned the name of a village.

George said: ‘It’s grotesque that they always give you the furthest places. You’ve got to insist on fair treatment.’

‘It doesn’t matter, going a few miles more,’ said Mr Passant.

‘It matters to them and it ought to matter to you. But anyway, this place is presumably fixed for Sunday. I want you to go.’

Mrs Passant suddenly tried to stop their pain.

‘That’s the place old Mr Martineau started his acting tricks, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I should like to know what culch he’s getting up to now.’

‘I don’t know,’ said George.

Mrs Passant said: ‘He ought to have looked after you. He used to think you would do big things. When you went to Mr Eden’s, he used to think you wouldn’t stay there very long.’

‘If I had wanted, I could have moved.’

‘I never thought you would, somehow,’ she said.

‘Because I found something valuable to do,’ George said.

‘You found something you liked doing more. I always knew you would. Even when I told people how well you were getting on.’ She spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, with acceptance and without reproach. George looked at her with something like gratitude. At that moment, one felt how close she had been all his life. She understood him in the way Jack did; she, too, did not believe in the purpose and aspirations, she had always seen the weaknesses and self-deceit. Like Jack, she had discounted the other sides of his nature, and possessed a similar power, the greater because of the love between them.

FOR a time the next morning, the feeling of the court was less hostile. Martineau’s evidence had raised doubts in some onlookers; and they responded to Getliffe’s new zest. Jack’s examination went smoothly and he soon made a good impression. The touch of genuine diffidence in his manner seemed to warm people, even in court, to his frank, spontaneous, fluent words. As he answered Getliffe, I thought again how there was a resemblance between them.

He gave an account of his positions in the years before they bought the agency — he was twenty-nine, a year older than he used to tell us in the past, a fact which I should have known if I had studied the register of our old school. He said of the transaction over the agency: ‘I wanted money very badly, I’m not going to pretend anything else.’

‘About the information you gave to people when you were borrowing money,’ said Getliffe, ‘that was never false?’

‘No. I’d got a good thing to sell, and I was selling it for all I was worth.’

‘You told them what you believed to be the truth?’

‘Yes. Naturally I was as enthusiastic as I could honestly be.’

‘You were certain it was a good thing, weren’t you?’

‘I put every penny I had got into it, and I spent every working hour of my time improving it for months.’

‘You felt like that yourself after you had received Mr Martineau’s information?’

‘Yes,’ said Jack. ‘If I’d heard — for instance, that the circulation of the Arrow was much smaller — I shouldn’t have become as keen. But even so, I should have known there were possibilities.’

‘It was a perfectly ordinary business venture, wasn’t it? That is how you would look at it?’

‘It was a good deal sounder than most. It did quite well, of course. There’s a tendency to forget that.’

Once or twice he drew sympathetic laughter. He kept to the same tone, responsible and yet not overburdened, through most of Porson’s cross-examination. He denied that he had known the real state of the agency.

‘I was a bit puzzled later, but all sorts of factors had to be taken into account. I set to work to put it right.’ About the farm he would not admit anything of the stories of Miss Geary and the others. It was noticed on all sides that Porson did not press him. But after several replies from Jack, Porson said: ‘The jury will observe there are two accounts of those interviews. One was given by several witnesses. The other was given by you, Mr Cotery.’ He added: ‘Incidentally, will you tell us why you gave different people so many different accounts of yourself?’

Getliffe objected. Porson said: ‘I consider it essential to cross-examine this witness as to credit.’

The judge said: ‘In the circumstances, I must allow the question.’

Porson asked whether Jack had not invented several fictitious stories of his life — one, that he had been to a good school and university, another that he had been an officer in the army? Jack, shaken for the first time, denied both.

‘It will be easy to prove,’ said Porson. He looked at the jury. He had given no warning of this surprise. ‘Do you deny that—’

‘Oh, I don’t deny that I’ve sometimes got tired of my ordinary self. But that had nothing to do with raising money.’ Jack had recovered himself. He replied easily to Porson’s questions about his stories: some he just admitted.

At last Porson said: ‘Well, I put it to you, Mr Cotery, that you’ve been living by your wits for a good many years?’

‘I think that’s true.’

‘You’ve never settled down to a serious occupation? If you like, I can take you through a list of things you’ve done—’

‘You needn’t trouble. It’s perfectly clear.’

‘You’ve spent your entire time trying to get rich quick?’

‘I’ve spent my time trying to make a living. If I’d been luckier, it wouldn’t have been necessary.’

Porson asked a number of questions about the ways in which he had made a living. To many, there was something seedy and repellent in those indications of a life continuously wary, looking for a weakness or a generosity — they were identical when one was selling an idea. But most people actually in court still felt some sympathy with Jack; he was self-possessed, after the moment of anger about his romances, and he answered without either assertiveness or apology. Once he said, with his old half-comic ruefulness: ‘It’s harder work living by your wits than you seem to think.’

Porson said, after a time: ‘You don’t in the least regret anything you’ve done? You don’t regret persuading people to lose their money?’

‘I’m sorry they’ve lost it — just as I’m sorry I lost my own. But that’s business. I expect to get mine back some day, and I hope they will.’

Porson finished by a reference to Olive’s part in the transactions; she had been trying to raise money for the purchase, he suggested, at a time when Jack was taking other women to the farm.

‘She was already your mistress as well, wasn’t she?’