Charles Snow - George Passant

For a moment I tried to put him off. I suggested that Morcom was not well enough to want visitors, but George was stubborn.

We walked towards Morcom’s; a fog had thickened during the day, and the streets were cold and dark.

Morcom’s eyes were bright with illness, as he caught sight of George.

‘How are things going?’ George said, in a tone strangely and uncomfortably gentle.

‘It’s nothing.’

I walked round to the other side of the bed. Morcom lay back on the pillow after the effort to shake hands. Beyond the two faces, the fog was shining through the window; it seemed to illuminate the room with a white glare.

George made Morcom tell him of the illness. Unwillingly, Morcom said that when he had last seen me at tea with Olive, he had not been well: a chill had been followed by a day of acute neuritic pain; then the pain lessened, and during the trial he had been lying with a slight temperature.

George sympathised, with his awkward kindness. Their quarrels of the past had been patched up long since; they had met as casual acquaintances in the last few years. Yet, with an inexplicable strain, I remembered the days when Morcom played a special part in George’s imagination — the part of the disapproving, persecuting world outside. Now George sat by his bed.

It was strange to see: and to remember how George had once invented Morcom’s enmity. Still, more or less by chance, Morcom had done him some bad turns. George did not know that if Morcom had conquered his pride and intervened, the trial might never have happened. Perhaps — I suddenly thought — George, whose understanding sometimes flashed out at random, felt that Morcom also was preyed on, was broken down by remorse.

‘This illness is a nasty business,’ George was saying. ‘You’ll have to be careful of yourself. It’s a shame having you laid up.’

‘You’re worrying too much. Your trouble isn’t over yet?’

George’s face was, for a moment, swept clear of concern and kindness; he was young-looking, as many are at a spasm of fear.

‘The last words have been spoken from my side,’ he said. ‘They’ve said all they could in my favour. It’s a pity they couldn’t have found something more.’

‘Will he save it—?’

‘He told them,’ George said, ‘that I probably didn’t do the frauds they were charging me with. He told them that. He said they weren’t to be prejudiced because I was one of the hypocrites who make opportunities for their pleasures, while persuading themselves and other people that they had the highest of motives. I’ve been used to that attack since you began it years ago. It’s suitable it should come in now—’

‘I meant nothing like that.’

‘He said I believed in freedom because it would ultimately lead me to self-indulgence. You never quite went to the lengths of saying that was the only object in my life. You didn’t need to tell me I wanted my sexual pleasures. I’ve known that since I was a boy. I kept them out of my other happiness for longer than most men would have done. With all the temptations for sexuality for years, I know they have — encroached. You don’t think there haven’t been times when I regretted that?’ He paused, then went on: ‘Not that I feel I have hurt anyone or damaged the aims I started out with. But this man who was defending me, you understand, who was saying all that could be said in my favour against everyone there trying to get rid of me — he suggested that I have never wanted anything but sexuality, from the time I began till now. He said I thought I wanted a better world: but a better world for me meant a place to indulge my weaknesses. I was just someone shiftless and rootless, chasing his own pleasures. He used the pleasant phrase — a man who has wasted himself.’

‘He was wrong,’ said Morcom. He was staring at the ceiling; I felt that the interjection was quite spontaneous.

‘He suggested I was “a child of my time”.’ George went on, ‘and not really guilty of my actions because of that. As though he wanted to go to the limit of insulting nonsense. There are a lot of accusations they can make against me, but being a helpless unit in the contemporary stream — that is the last they can make. He said it. He meant it. He meant — running after my own amusement, living in a haze of sexual selfishness, because there’s nothing else I wanted to do, because I have lost my beliefs, because there’s no purpose in my life. I tell you, Arthur, that’s what he said of me. It would be a joke if it had happened anywhere else. With that offensive insult, he dared to put up the last conceivable defence I should ever make for myself. That I had been guilty of a good many sins, that I had been a hypocritical sensualist, but that I wasn’t responsible for it because I was “a child of my time”. He dared to say that I wasn’t responsible for it. Whatever I have done in my life, I claim to be responsible for it all. No one else and nothing else was responsible for what I have done. I won’t have it taken away. I am utterly prepared to answer for my own soul.’

The echo died away in the room. Then George said to Morcom: ‘Don’t you agree? Don’t you accept responsibility for anything you may have done?’

There was a silence. Morcom said: ‘Not in your way.’

He turned towards George. I listened to the rustle of the bedclothes. He said: ‘But after a fashion I do.’

‘There are times when it’s not easy,’ George said. ‘When you’ve got to accept a responsibility that you never intended. This afternoon I heard of the last thing they’ve done to me. They’ve dismissed Rachel from her job. Just for being a supporter of mine. You remember her, don’t you? Whatever they say against me, they can’t say anything against her. But she’s going to be disgraced and ruined. I can’t lift a finger to help. And I’m responsible. I tell you, I’m responsible. If they want to attack me any more they can say that’s the worst thing I’ve done. I ought not to have exposed anyone to persecution. It’s my own doing. There’s no way out.’

Morcom lay still without replying. George got up suddenly from his chair.

‘I’m sorry I’ve been tiring you,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think—’ He was speaking with embarrassment, but there was also a flicker of affection. ‘Is there anything I can do before we go?’

Morcom shook his head, and his fingers rattled with the switch by the bedside. The light flashed back from the windows.

‘Are you sure there’s nothing I can do?’ George asked. ‘There’s nothing I can fetch? Shall I send you some books? Or is there anything else you’d like sent in?’

‘Nothing,’ Morcom replied, and added a whisper of thanks.

That night I woke after being an hour or two asleep. The road outside was quiet. I listened for the chimes of a clock. The quarters rang out; I could not get to sleep again.

The central fear kept filling itself with new thoughts. Beyond reach, beyond the mechanical working of the mind, there was not a thought but the shapeless fear. I was afraid of the verdict on Monday.

Sometimes, in a wave of hope, memory would bring back a word, a scrap of evidence, a juror’s expression, a remark overheard in court. The fear ebbed and returned. One part of the trial returned with a distress that I could not keep from my mind for long; it was that morning, Getliffe’s final speech for the defence.

I could look back on it lucidly and hopelessly, now. There might have been no better way to save them. He had done well for them in the trial; he had done better than I should ever have done; I was thankful now that he had defended them.

And yet — he believed in his description of George, and his excuse. He believed that George had wanted to build a ‘better world’: a better world designed for George’s ‘private weaknesses’. As I heard those words again, I knew he was not altogether wrong. His insight was not the shallowest kind, which is that of the intellect alone; he saw with the emotions alone. Yet what he saw was half-true.