Charles Snow - The Conscience of the Rich

When his father died, Mr March, who would have preferred to go to the university, was brought in to fill a vacancy in the firm. ‘It was a good opening,’ he said to us, nearly fifty years after. ‘I wasn’t attracted specially to business, but I hadn’t any particular inclinations. I hoped you would have,’ he said to Charles.

It was not during this conversation, but previously, that I had the curiosity to ask him about the routine of foreign banking, when he first joined the firm. There had still been an air about it, so it seemed. Each morning, the letters came in from the Marches’ correspondents: there had been two in Paris, and one in each of the other European capitals, including ‘the very capable fellow at St Petersburg. We never believed he was a Russian’. Since the bank started, they had depended on their correspondents, a group of men very similar in gifts and outlook to the foreign-based journalists of the twentieth century. In 1880 the Marches were still better informed, over a whole area of facts where politics and economics fused, than any newspaper. The March correspondents acquired a curious mixture of cynicism and world-view. Just because their finding the truth could be measured in terms of money, they learned what the truth was. All through 1870 one of the Paris correspondents was predicting war, and war in which the French army would be outclassed: Mr March’s father cleared some hundred thousand pounds. Right through the nineteenth century, up to the end of the bank in 1896, the foreign letters added sarcastic footnotes to history: they were unmoral, factual, hard-baked, much more hard-baked because they did not set out to be.

The secret correspondent declined in value as communications got faster. The Marches’ telephone number was London 2; but they did not time their moves as certainly as when Mr March’s father opened his despatches in the morning. Mr March gallantly telephoned in French to Paris and Brussels every day as the bourses opened; but as the nineties passed by, neither his uncles nor Philip, nor he above all, felt they were in touch, even as much in touch as ten years before.

Of course the scale of things was altering under their hands. Their loans of a million pounds or so to the Argentine or Brazil no longer went very far; they were coming near to a world of preposterous size — a world dangerous, mad, exciting beyond measure, and, as Mr March decided, no place for a financier of distinctly anxious temperament. It was about this time that the legend sprang up of his only being able to control his worry by balancing the firm’s accounts each night.

They might have stayed in longer, but for a characteristic weakness against which Mr March struggled in vain. They would never take anyone outside the family into the firm. As Mr March argued and quarrelled with his uncles, he kept protesting that one man of a different sort from the Marches might vitalize them. But they were loyal to the family: the Marches had started the bank a hundred years before, they had controlled it ever since, they could not give power to a stranger. In fact, as they were good pickers of men, Mr March’s policy would probably have made them richer; but, whatever happened, neither they nor any other ‘merchant banker in a fairly lucrative way of business’ would have stayed in usefully for long: the twentieth century needed, not single millions, but tens and hundreds of millions, and could only be financed by the joint stock banks.

So they ceased business in 1896. They had not made much money in the nineties, but each of the five partners retired with a comfortable fortune. Mr March was just thirty-two. As the three of us sat at lunch he was talking of that time.

‘I was still a bachelor,’ he said, ‘I thought I possessed enough for my requirements. But it was a pity, a firm like ours terminating after a hundred years. I sometimes think we should have continued. But we hadn’t improved our position noticeably since my father died. Of course if I had been like him, I should have carried on successfully. But I didn’t do much. My temperament was quite unsuitable for business. I was too shy and anxious.’

He was accepting himself as always, but his eyes did not leave Charles and he was speaking with regret. Success, in the world of his father and uncles, meant multiplying one’s fortune and adding to one’s influence among solid men. Mr March, not valuing it as much as they did, knew nevertheless that he would have pursued it if his temperament had not let him down; he would have kept the firm going, or joined others, as his brother Philip had done. While in fact he had come to terms with himself and retired. He had been happier, he had followed his nature; but he made no excuses, and it meant admitting to himself that, compared with those others, he was not so good a man.

‘I was too shy and anxious’ — he had taken himself for granted and lived unrestrainedly according to his own comfort. Like many people who are obsessed by every detail in the world outside, he was driven to simplify his life. Business was unbearable with a real anxiety every day, and instead he let himself loose on anxieties such as locking the door at night. Like many people sensitized to others’ feelings, he was driven to escape more and more from company — except of those he had known so long that they did not count. More than any other March, he came to live entirely inside the family. He retired from any competition (Charles had said the same of himself the night be announced he was abandoning the law), met few new faces, and enjoyed himself as he felt inclined.

His happiness grew as he lived at the centre of his family, and his own most extravagant stories began with his marriage. It was a good start, as he stood with his bride on Victoria Station, to arrange for a cab to meet their train on Monday afternoon exactly one month later. After they had been a week at Mentone, another thought occurred to him of a contingency left unprovided for. He walked alone to the post office and sent off a telegram, reserving for his wife a place next to himself in the Jewish Cemetery at Golders Green.

Thus he plunged among twenty-five years of marriage — not at all tranquil years, because he could not be tranquil anywhere, but full of the life he wanted and in which he breathed his native air. He was passionately fond of his wife, and he was occupied with plenty of excitements, major and minor; the major excitements about his children as they grew up, and the minor ones of his fortune, Bryanston Square, Haslingfield, the servants, the whole economico-personal system of which he was the core.

He had not been bored. He had enjoyed his life. He still enjoyed it. He would have taken it over again on the same terms, and gone through it with as much zest.

And yet, it was foreign to his nature not to be frank with himself, and he felt that he had paid a price. Underneath this life which suited him, which soaked up the violence underneath and let him become luxuriantly himself, he knew that he had lost some self-respect. He had been happier than most men, but it meant that he chose to run away from the contest.

Even Mr March, the most realistic of men, could not always forgive himself for his own nature. He could not quite forget the illusion, which we all have, most strongly when we are young, that every kind of action is possible to us if only we use our will. He felt as we all do, when we have slowly come to terms with our temperament and no longer try to be different from ourselves; we may be happier now, but we cannot help looking back to the days when we struggled against the sight of our limitations, when, miserable and conflict-ridden perhaps, we still in flashes of hope held the whole world in our hands. For the loss, as we come to know ourselves, is that now we know what we can never do.