Charles Snow - The Conscience of the Rich

‘I’m extremely sorry,’ said Katherine.

‘That’s the least you should be,’ said Mr March. He turned on her: ‘You go on expressing your sorrow uselessly while you persist in making it intolerable for me to show myself in the streets.’

Charles had to intervene.

‘This comes,’ he said, ‘of letting your children bring their disreputable friends to the house.’

‘I’ve tried to consider where I’m to blame,’ said Mr March. ‘But no precautions that I might have been expected to take would have been certain to spare me from the present position.’

That afternoon Charles said that Mr March would tolerate the marriage ‘so long as no one else interferes’.

They argued about Mr March’s state of mind. How deeply had he been wounded? None of us could be certain. They were surprised that he was not more crushed. True, he had a lively affection for Francis, and respect for his accomplishments. Possessive though he was, he was instinctively too healthy a man not to want to see his daughters married. But neither Charles nor Katherine could feel sure to what extent he had been afflicted, afflicted in himself apart from finding about other people’s opinion, because Francis was not a Jew.

I did not have much doubt. I had so little doubt that to Katherine certainly, to Charles almost as much, I seemed right out of sympathy. Katherine told me flat that I could not understand. For I believed that Mr March was hurt a good deal less than by the first quarrel with Charles, at the time when he abandoned the law: and incomparably less than by the struggle over Ann and Charles’ future. The suffering he felt now was on a different level, was on the level of self-respect and his external face to the world. It was not the deep organic suffering that he knew over his son, when he felt that a part of his own being was torn away.

Both on the first day and in the week after, he seemed far more preoccupied with the family’s criticism than with any distress of his own. He became irascible and hunted, and kept exploding about the esteem he would lose as soon as the news got out. In fact, Mr March tried to delay the news getting outside the house. He did not object to seeing Francis and arranging the settlement; he greeted him with the cry: ‘I’ve nothing against you personally. But I entirely disapprove.’ Afterwards he said to Charles: ‘The astonishing thing is, he knows something about business. He doesn’t like imprudent methods any more than I do myself.’

But he invented excuses for delaying the announcement from day to day. He could not write to his relations for a few days, he said, since he had just written all round for the New Year. It might be better to wait for one of Herbert’s daughters, whose engagement was just coming out, ‘if the man doesn’t fight shy, as I strongly suspect,’ said Mr March. ‘Hannah thought she’d hooked a man once. I never believed it was possible.’ He would not put an announcement in The Times until he had let the family know: and he dreaded the thought of publication even more than anything Philip and Hannah and Caroline might say. For he knew himself how after the first glance at the news, he read in order the deaths, the births, and the forthcoming marriages. He could imagine too clearly how people throughout the Marches’ world would do the same one morning and suddenly ask: ‘Who’s this Francis Getliffe that’s going to marry Leonard March’s daughter? Does it mean that she can be marrying “out”?’

A fortnight passed after Katherine broke the news, and then one day Mr March ordered the car in the afternoon. It was a break in his daily timetable such as neither Charles nor Katherine could remember. His temper muttered volcanically at lunch, and he refused to say where he was going. At night they realized that he had at last confessed to his sister Caroline.

‘She had furnished herself with an absurd ear-trumpet,’ said Mr March. ‘It was bad enough being obliged to divulge my family’s disgrace without having to bawl it into this contraption of hers. Your mother made the same mistake when she bought a fur in Paris on the ridiculous assumption that it was cheaper than in London—’

‘Sorry, Mr L,’ said Charles. ‘What mistake?’

‘Of not being able to resist articles in foreign shops, of course. My sister Caroline succumbed to the temptation when she was in Vienna recently. She caught sight of this apparatus in one of the latest shops. Women are unstable in these matters.’

‘You are being a bit hard,’ said Katherine. ‘She probably gets on better—’

‘Nonsense,’ said Mr March. ‘She found it exactly as difficult to comprehend what I was trying to say. Then she was polite enough to remark that I ought not to hold myself entirely to blame, and that these disappointments were bound to occur in the family, and that they’d all come round to it in time.’

Actually Caroline, just by being as tactless as usual, cheered him up; in his heart, he had expected a far more violent outcry. He was so much relieved that he indulged in louder complaints.

‘I can’t dissociate myself from the responsibility according to her advice. I remember that she regarded it as my responsibility when she suggested that fishing trip for you at her house. Not that I ever had the slightest faith in her averting the disaster. I suppose I must have brought it on myself. Though I can’t decide where I went wrong with my family. If I’d made you’ — he said to Katherine — ‘take your proper place at dances and other entertainments, I doubt whether it would have served any useful purpose.’

‘I’m sure it wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘Mr L, you mustn’t blame yourself because your family is unsatisfactory. It’s just original sin.’

‘Everyone else’s children have managed to avoid being a reproach. Except Justin’s daughter who did what you’re doing in even more disastrous circumstances. The less said of her the better. I suppose I’m bound to accept responsibility for what you call original sin. Even though my wishes have never had the slightest effect on your lamentable progress.’

The next day, he told the news to Philip, who received it both robustly and sadly; that night, with great commotion and expressions of anger, Mr March drew up the announcement for The Times . He sat in his study with the door open, shouting, ‘Go away, don’t you see I’m busy!’ when Charles approached. ‘I’m busy with an extremely distasteful operation.’ Then, a moment afterwards, Mr March rushed into the drawing-room. ‘Well, how does the fellow want to appear? I suppose he possesses some first names…’ Several times Mr March dashed into the drawing-room again: at last, standing by the open door, he read out his composition — ‘“A marriage has been arranged…”’

‘That’s done,’ said Mr March, and, instead of leaving the letter for the butler to collect, he took it to the post himself.

Katherine was thinking of getting up the next morning, when Mr March flung open the door.

‘It’s not my fault this has happened,’ he said. ‘It’s your mother’s fault. I never wanted another child. She made me.’

From the morning of the announcement, Mr March was immersed in letters, notes, conversations, and telephone calls. Since he had feared more than the worst, he became cheerful as he answered ‘what they are civil enough to term “congratulations”’. Most of the March family wrote in a friendly way, though there were rumours that one cousin had threatened not to attend the wedding. Hannah was reported to have said: ‘I never thought she’d find anyone at all. Even someone ineligible. Mind you, she’s not married him yet.’

For several days Mr March did not receive any setback; Katherine thought she had been lucky.