Charles Snow - The Conscience of the Rich

No one spoke. Katherine threw her arm round Charles’ shoulders, smiled at him, and sighed.

Early in October, when the March household had returned to London, Katherine started gossip percolating through the family, just by having Francis Getliffe three or four times to dinner at Bryanston Square. We speculated often upon when the gossip would reach Mr March: we became more and more puzzled as to whether he was truly oblivious.

On an autumn night, warm and misty, with leaves sometimes spinning down in the windless air, Charles and I were walking through the square. He had not been talking much. Out of the blue he said:

‘I’ve got a favour to ask you.’

‘What is it?’

He was speaking with diffidence, with unusual stiffness.

‘I don’t want you to say yes out of good-nature. It may be too much of an intrusion—’

‘If you tell me what it is—’

‘I don’t want you to say yes on the spot.’

‘What in God’s name is it?’

At last he said: ‘Well, we wondered whether you could bear it, if Ann and I met in your rooms—’

He produced timetables, which he had been thinking out, so I suspected, for days beforehand, of how they could fit in with my movements, of how they need not inconvenience me.

Up to that night he had said nothing about Ann. Hearing him forced to break his secretiveness open, I was both touched and amused. I was amused also to find him facing a problem that vexed me and my impoverished friends when I was younger — of ‘somewhere to go’ with a young woman. In our innocence we thought the problem would have solved itself if we had money. While in fact Charles, with all the March houses at his disposal, could get no privacy at all — less than we used to get in the dingy streets of the provincial town.

Walking with Charles that night, and other nights that autumn, I felt as one does with a friend in love — protective, superior, a little irritated, envious. His tongue was softened by happiness. He was full of hopes. Those hopes! He would not have dared to confess them. He would have blushed because they were so impossibly golden, romantic — and above all vague. They had no edge or limit, they were just a vista of grand, continuing, and perfect rapture.

Charles was by nature both guarded and subtle. His imagination was a realistic one. If I had confessed any such hopes as uplifted him that autumn, he would have riddled them with sarcasm. They would have sounded jejune by contrast to his own style. Yet now he fed on them for hours, they were part of the greatest happiness he had ever known.

As the autumn passed, I saw a good deal of Charles and Ann together. Inquisitive as I was, I did not know for certain what was happening to them. Then one evening when I returned to my flat they were still there. They were sitting by the fire; they greeted me; they did not tell me anything. Yet looking at them I felt jealous because they were so happy.

Ann said, gazing round the room as though she was noticing it for the first time: ‘Why does Lewis make this place look like a station waiting-room?’ Charles smiled at her, and she went on: ‘We ought to take care of him for once, oughtn’t we? Let’s take care of him.’

She spoke with the absorbed kindness of the supremely happy: kindness which was not really directed towards me, but which was an overflow of her own joy.

I thought then that it had taken Ann longer than anyone else to recognize that she was in love: though from that afternoon at Haslingfield the barriers dropped away, and she gave him her trust. She had not known before that she could let the barriers fall like that; except with her father, she had not entrusted herself to another human being. To all of us round her, there seemed no doubt about it; each moment she was living through had become enhanced. Yet it was some time before she said to herself: ‘I am in love.’

Of course, that conscious recognition to oneself — particularly in a character like Ann’s — is a more important stage than we sometimes allow. Until it has happened, this present desire may still swim with others, there are plenty more we have never brought to light. But when once it is made conscious, there is no way of drawing back; the love must be lived out.

That moment, when Ann first thought ‘I am in love’ (to Charles it happened at once, during the weekend at Haslingfield), was more decisive for them than the dates which on the surface seemed to mark so much: of the first kiss, of when they first made love. Seeing them that night, when it was all settled, I guessed that it came later than the rest of us suspected: and that, as soon as it came, there was no retreat. They knew — they told each other with the painful and extreme pleasure of surrender — that fate had caught them.

A day or two after I had watched Charles and Ann in my own sitting-room, she took me out to dinner alone. She took me out to a sumptuous dinner; shy as she could be, she was used to making her money work for her, and she led me to a corner table in Claridge’s; more unashamed of riches than Charles, more lavish and generous, she persuaded me to eat an expensive meal and drink a bottle of wine to myself. Meanwhile she was getting me to talk about Charles.

For a time I was reticent. He was too secretive to tolerate being discussed, even with her, perhaps most of all with her.

Very gently she said: ‘All I should like to know is what you think he really wants.’ She did not mean about herself: that was taken for granted and not mentioned all night. There she was as delicate and proud as he was; she did not even suggest that they would get married. But about the rest of his life she was tender and not so delicate. She wanted anything she could learn about him which would help him. As she pressed me, her face open, her manner affectionate and submissive, I could realize the core of will within her.

What had he been like when I first knew him? What had he thought of doing with himself? What had he really felt when he gave up the Bar?

‘He would always have hated the Bar,’ I said. ‘He was dead right to get out of it.’

‘Of course he was,’ said Ann.

‘And yet,’ I said, ‘he’s not so unambitious as he seems.’

‘Aren’t you reading yourself into him?’ she said, suddenly sharp.

‘Do you think he likes being idle?’ I retorted.

‘Don’t you think’ — she was gazing straight at me — ‘there are other ways of not being idle?’

She took up the attack.

‘Would you really say,’ she went on, ‘that he wants success on the terms that you want it, or most other men do?’

I hesitated.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Perhaps not quite.’

‘Not quite?’ She was smiling. As she asked the question, I knew how tenacious and passionate she was.

‘Not at all. Not in the ordinary sense,’ I had to admit.

She smiled again, sitting relaxed in her corner. Once more she asked me in detail what he had done about giving up the Bar. She needed anything I could tell her about him; nothing was trivial; she was bringing her whole self to bear. When she had finished with me, she became silent. It was some time afterwards before she said:

‘Have you got an idea of what he really wants?’

‘Has he?’

She would not answer; but I was sure she thought he had. Alone with her, I knew for certain how single-minded her love was. She had no room for anyone but him. She liked me, she was friendly and comradely, she had good manners, she wanted to know how I was getting on: but really this was a business dinner. She was securing me as an ally, just because I was his intimate friend: she was picking my brains: that was all.