Charles Snow - The Conscience of the Rich

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me next that we can’t understand anything unless we take account of what those people call the class struggle.’

Mr March’s voice had become loud; his face was heavy with anger.

Ann’s tone was more subdued, but she continued without hesitation: ‘I’m afraid I should have to say just that.’

‘Economic poppycock,’ Mr March burst out.

‘It’s a tenable theory, Mr L,’ Charles interrupted. ‘You can’t dispose of it by clamour.’

‘My guest can’t dispose of it by claptrap,’ said Mr March. Then he suppressed his temper, and spoke to Ann in his most friendly and simple way: ‘Obviously we take different views of the world. I presume that you think it will improve?’

‘Yes,’ said Ann.

‘You are optimistic, as you should be at your age. I am inclined to consider that it will continue to get worse. I console myself that it will last my time.’

‘Yes,’ Mr March added, as he glanced round the bright room, ‘it will last my time.’

He had spoken in a tone matter-of-fact and yet elegiac. He did not want to argue with Ann any more. But then I saw that Ann was not ready to let it go. Her eyes were bright. For all her shyness, she was not prepared to be discreet, as I was. Perhaps she was contemptuous of that kind of discretion. I had an impression that she was gambling.

‘I’m sure it won’t last mine,’ she said.

Mr March was taken aback, and she added: ‘I’m also sure that it oughtn’t to.’

‘You anticipate that there will be a violent change within your lifetime?’ said Mr March.

‘Of course,’ said Ann, with absolute conviction.

She had spoken with such force that we were all silent for an instant. Then Mr March said: ‘You’ve no right to anticipate it.’

‘Of course she has,’ Charles broke in. ‘She wants a good world. This is the only way in which she can see it happening.’ He smiled at her. ‘The only doubt is whether the world afterwards would be worth it.’

‘I’m sure of that,’ she said.

‘You’ve no right to be sure,’ said Mr March.

‘Why don’t you think I have?’ she asked quietly.

‘Because women would be better advised not to concern themselves with these matters.’

Mr March had spoken with acute irritability, but Ann broke suddenly into laughter. It was laughter so spontaneous, so unresentfully accepting the joke against herself, that Mr March was first taken at a loss and then reassured. He watched her eyes screw up, her self-control dissolve, as she abandoned herself to laughter. She looked very young.

Charles took the chance to smooth the party down. He acted as impresario for Mr March and led him on to his best stories. At first Mr March was still disturbed: but he was melted by his son’s care, and by the warmth and well being we could all feel that night in Charles.

Katherine joined in. Between them they poured all their attention on to Mr March, as though making up for the exhilaration of the last few hours.

They succeeded in getting Mr March on to the subject of Ann’s family. He told her: ‘Of course, you’re not one of the real Simons,’ and she proved that she was a distant cousin of the Florence Simon whom I had met at the family dinner at Bryanston Square and who even Mr March had to admit was ‘real’. From then till 10.40 Mr March explored in what remote degree he and Ann were related; stories of fourth and fifth cousins ‘making frightful asses of themselves’ forty years ago became immersed in the timeless continuum in which Mr March, more extravagantly than on a normal night, let himself go.

When Mr March had rattled each door in the hall and gone upstairs, Katherine said to Ann:

‘Well, I hope you’re not too bothered after all that.’ Ann shook her head.

‘Did you want me to keep out?’ she said to Charles. Charles was smiling.

Francis asked: ‘What would your own father have said if a strange young woman had started talking about the revolution?’

‘Didn’t you agree with me?’ she said, quite sharply. She knew that Francis was on her side: he was as radical as his fellow scientists. Deferential as she often sounded, she was not to be browbeaten. Then she smiled too.

‘I won’t do it again,’ she said. ‘But tonight was a special occasion.’

Again I had the impression that she had been gambling. Whatever the gamble had been, it was over now, and she was relaxed.

Making it up with Francis, she said to him: ‘As for my father, he wouldn’t have had the spirit to argue. Even when I was growing up, he’d managed to tire himself out.’

Although she seemed to be speaking to Francis, she was really speaking to Charles. One could guess from her tone that she loved him. One could guess too that she was not often relaxed enough to talk like this. She smiled again, almost as though her upper lip was twitching, and said:

‘Can you remember the agony you went through when your father was first proved wrong?’

It was Katherine who answered her:

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘We were used to the whole family proving each wrong, weren’t we?’

‘But I think I know what you mean,’ Charles was saying to Ann.

‘I’ve never forgotten,’ said Ann. ‘It was the day after my birthday — I was nine. Someone came in to dinner, a friend of mother’s. He said to my father: “You call yourself a doctor. You remember how you swore last week that the sea was blue because of the salts that it dissolved? Well, I asked one of the men at school. He laughed and said it was a ridiculous idea.” Then he gave the proper explanation. I never have been able to remember it to this day.’ Ann went on: ‘I’ve re-learned it several times, but it’s no good. I told myself in bed that night that of course father was right. But I knew he wasn’t. I knew people were laughing because he didn’t know why the sea was blue. Every time I remembered that night for years, I wanted to shut my eyes.’

Charles said to Katherine: ‘We know what that’s like, don’t we?’ He turned back to Ann. ‘But when I’ve felt like that, it wasn’t over quite the same things.’

‘Not over your father?’

Charles hesitated, and said: ‘Not in the same way.’

‘What was it about then?’

‘Mostly about being a Jew,’ said Charles.

‘Curiously enough,’ said Ann, ‘I never felt that.’

‘Which is no doubt why I met you,’ said Charles, ‘on my one and only appearance at the Jewish dance.’

He looked at me; this was the trick of fortune I had not recognized that afternoon. He was smiling at his own expense, and his expression, sarcastic and gay, brought back the first night I dined at Bryanston Square, when he talked ‘with a furrowed brow’ of Katherine being sent to the dance. Tonight he seemed free of that past.

‘You were lucky to escape,’ said Charles. ‘There’ve been times when I’ve disliked other Jews — simply because I suffered through being one.’

‘Yes,’ said Katherine.

‘I couldn’t help it, but it was degrading to feel oneself doing it,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Katherine again.

‘I think you would have behaved better,’ Charles said to Ann.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve hated my father sometimes because of the misery I’ve been through on his account.’

We all confided about our childhoods, but it was Charles and Ann, and sometimes Katherine, who spoke most about the moments of shame — not grief or sorrow, but shame. The kind of shame we all know, but which had been more vivid to them than to most of us: the kind of shame which, when one remembers it, makes one stop dead in one’s tracks, and jam one’s eyelids tight to shut it out.

They went on with those confidences until Ann went to bed. It was late, and Francis followed not long after. Katherine made an excuse and ran out, and from the drawing-room Charles and I heard her speak to Francis at the bottom of the stairs. For several minutes we heard their voices. Then Katherine rejoined us, and gave Charles a radiant smile. We opened the long windows, and walked on to the terrace. It was an August night of extreme beauty, the moon just about to rise over the hills. A meteor flashed among the many stars to the south.