Charles Snow - The Conscience of the Rich

Katherine invited her, but had to report to Mr March that Ann replied she was busy every day that week and could not come. Mr March did not say another angry word to Katherine. His silence was sombre and brooding.

For forty-eight hours after he left Bryanston Square, no one knew where Charles was. Katherine was distracted with anxiety; on the second afternoon, Ann rang me up and asked if I could tell her anything. There had not been a silence between them before.

He came to my rooms that night. I had taken a brief home from chambers and was still working on it at ten o’clock. I had not heard him on the stairs, and the first I knew was that he stood inside the room, the shoulders of his coat glistening from the rain.

‘May I sleep on your sofa tonight?’ he asked. He was tired, he wanted the question to be accepted as casually as he tried to ask it. In order to prevent any talk of himself, he asked what I was doing, picked up the brief and read it with his intense and penetrating attention. He had begun to read before he threw off his overcoat; he stood on the carpet where, only a month before, I had seen him sit at Ann’s feet by the fire.

‘What line are you taking?’ he asked. ‘Have you got anything written down?’

I gave him my sketch of the case. He read it, still with abnormal concentration. He looked at me, his eyes bright with a smile both contemptuous and resentful.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You ought to win it that way. Unless you show more than usual incompetence when you get on your feet. But you oughtn’t to be satisfied with the case you’ve made, don’t you realize that? I should say you’re doing it slightly better than the average young counsel at your stage. Do you think that’s fair? I know you’re cleverer than this attempt suggests. But I sometimes wonder whether you’ll ever convey to the people in authority how clever you really are. You’re missing the chance to make this case slightly more impressive than your previous ones, don’t you admit it? If you just look here, you’ll see—’

He set to work upon my draft. Impatiently, but with extreme thoroughness and accuracy, he reshaped it; he altered the form, pared down the argument in the middle, brought in the details so that the line of the case stood out from beginning to end. It was criticism that was more than criticism, it was a re-creation of the case. He did it so brutally that it was not easy to endure.

I tried to shut out pique and vanity. I thought how strange it was that, at this crisis of his conflict with his father, in which they were quarrelling over his new profession, he could immerse himself in the problems of the one he had deliberately thrown away. He would never go back; he was determined to find his own salvation; yet was there perhaps the residue of a wish that he could return to the time before the break was made?

‘Well,’ said Charles, ‘that’s slightly less meaningless. It’s not specially elegant — but it will do you a bit less harm than your first draft would have done, don’t you admit that?’

It was nearly midnight, and neither of us had eaten for a long time. I took him to a dingy café close by. Charles looked at the window, steamy in the cold, wet night, smelt the frying onions, heard the rattle of dominoes in the inside room. ‘Do you often come here?’ he asked, but he saw, from the way the proprietor spoke to me, and the nods I exchanged, what the answer was. This was a side of my life he scarcely knew — the back streets, the cheap cafés, the ramshackle poverty, which I still took for granted.

We sat in an alcove, eating our plates of sausage and mash. Charles said: ‘You haven’t many ties, have you?’

‘I’ve got those I make myself,’ I said.

‘They’re not so intolerable,’ said Charles. ‘You’re lucky. You’ve been so much more alone than I ever have. You’ve had such incomparably greater privacy. Most of the things you’ve done have affected no one but yourself. I tell you, Lewis, you’re lucky.’

His eyes were gleaming.

‘They think I’m irresponsible to have gone off like this. They’re right. And they think I’m naturally not an irresponsible person. It might be better if I were. Can’t they imagine how anyone comes to a point where he wants to throw off every scrap of responsibility — and just go where no one knows him? Can’t they imagine how one’s aching to hide somewhere where no one notices anything one does?’

‘That’s why,’ he said, ‘you’re lucky to have no ties.’

He could not break, he was telling me, from his: for a night or two he had escaped, behaved completely out of character, shown no consideration or feeling or even manners: but he was drawn back to the conflict of his home. For a night or two he had escaped from the attempts to confine him, not only his father’s but also Ann’s. He was drawn back. But, sitting in the alcove of the smoky café, his face pale against the tarnished purple plush, his eyes brilliant with lack of sleep, Charles talked little of his father or Ann. He was unassuageably angry with himself. Why had he behaved in this fashion? — without dignity, without courage, without warmth. He could not explain it. He felt, not only self-despising, but mystified.

He talked of himself, but he said nothing I had not heard before. He went over the arguments for the way he had chosen. He was exhausted, unhappy, nothing he said could satisfy him. We walked the streets in the cold rain, it was late before we went to bed, but he had not reached any kind of release.

In the morning, grey and dark, we sat over our breakfast. He had been dreaming, he said, and he looked absent, as though still preoccupied and weighed down by his dream. Suddenly he rose, went to my desk and took hold of the brief on which we had worked the night before. He turned to me, his lips pulled sideways in a smile, and said: ‘I was unpleasant about this yesterday.’ It was not an apology. ‘You know what it is not to be able to stop being cruel. One hates it but goes on.’

At that moment we both knew, without another word, why he had escaped. He had not really escaped from the conflict: he had escaped from what he might do within it.

He knew — it was a link between us, for I also knew — what it was like to be cruel. To be impelled to be cruel, and to enjoy it. Other young men could let it ride, could take themselves for granted, but not he. He could not accept it as part of himself. It had to be watched and guarded against. With the force, freshness, and hope of which he was capable, he longed to put it aside, to be kind and selfless as he believed he could be kind and selfless. When he spoke of wanting to lead a ‘useful’ life, he really meant something stronger; but he was still young enough, and so were the rest of us, to be inhibited and prudish about the words we used. He said ‘useful’; but what he really meant was ‘good’. When Ann fought shy of my questions about what he hoped for, we both had an idea: he wanted to lead a good life, that was all.

I sometimes thought it was those who were tempted to be cruel who most wanted to be good.

Charles wanted to dull his sadic edge. He knew the glitter which radiated from him in a fit of malice. He was willing to become dull, humdrum, pedestrian, in order not to feel that special exhilaration of the nerves. For long periods he succeeded. By the time of that quarrel, he was gentler than when I first knew him. But he could not trust himself. To others the edge, the cruel glitter, might seem dead, but he had to live with his own nature.

So he was frightened of his conflict with his father. He must be free, he must find his own way, he must fulfil his love for Ann; but he needed desperately that he should prevail without trouble, without the harsh excitement that he could feel latent in his own heart. Neither Ann nor his father must suffer through him.