Charles Snow - The Conscience of the Rich

‘There are other compensations too. People show such confidence in one. It’s nice to be able to justify that sometimes. Once or twice in the last few weeks I’ve felt some use.’

We had crossed in front of Victoria Station and came out into Wilton Road. I asked: ‘Charles, if you had your time again, would you make the same choice?’

‘Without any doubt,’ he said.

I looked at him under the light of a street lamp. He had become older than any of us. He was carrying a mackintosh; he was stooping more than he used to. At that moment — while he was saying, his eyes glinting maliciously at his own expense: ‘If I had my time again, I might not even take quite so long to make up my mind’ — I was moved back to the evening in Regent Street long ago, when we argued about goodness. I felt the shock that assails one as one suddenly sees an intimate in a transfiguring light, the shock of utter familiarity and utter surprise. Here was Charles, whom I knew so well, whom I took for granted with the ease of a long friendship — and at the same time, I was thinking with incredulity, as though I had never met him before, what a curious choice he had made.

In Antrobus Street the light was glowing over the night-bell. We said good-night in front of his house, and I began to walk west along the Embankment. The night was so caressingly warm that I wanted to linger, looking at the river. There was an oily swell on the dark water, and on the swell the bands of reflected light slowly swayed. I could see the red and green eyes of lamps on the bridges up the river. I stayed there, watching the bands of light sway on the water, and, as I watched, among the day-dreams drifting through my mind were memories and thoughts about Charles.

The river smell was carried on a breath of air. Down towards Chelsea the water glistened and a red light flashed. Leaning on the Embankment, I thought that, in a different time, when the conscience of the rich was not so sick, Charles might not have sacrificed himself, at least not so completely. Some of his abnegation one could attribute to his time, just as some of his surface quirks, his outbursts of arrogance and diffidence, one could attribute to his being born a Jew.

But none of that seemed to me to matter very much, compared with what I thought I had seen in him, walking in the Wilton Road half an hour before.

I thought I had seen a nature which, at the deepest, was never sure of love. Never sure of receiving it: perhaps never sure of giving it: vulnerable and at the same time resenting any approach.

It was the kind of nature which could have broken his life — for men with that flaw at the root often spend their lives in pursuing unrequited love, or indulging their cruelty on others, or tormenting themselves with jealousy, or retiring into loneliness and spiritual pride. But in Charles this deepest self was housed in a temperament in all other respects strong, active, healthy, full of vigour. It was that blazing contrast which I had seen, or imagined that I had seen.

Perhaps it was that contrast which made him want to search for the good.

He had always been fascinated by the idea of goodness. Was it because he was living constantly with a part of himself which he hated? To know what goodness means, perhaps one needs to have lain awake at night, hating one’s own nature. The sweet, the harmonious, the untempted, have no reason to hate their natures; it is the others, the guilty or the sadic — it seemed to me most of all the sadic — who are driven to find what goodness is.

But men like Charles did not find it in themselves. It was not as easy as all that. He wanted to be good; so his active nature led him to want to do good. He was living a useful life now — but that was all. No one felt that as a result he had reached a state of goodness: he never felt it for a moment himself. He knew that, with his insight and sarcastic honesty. He would have liked to feel goodness in himself — he would have liked to believe that others felt it. But he knew that in fact others often felt a sense of strain, because he was acting against part of his nature. They did not feel he was apt for a life of abnegation. They distrusted his conscience, and looked back with regret to the days before it dominated him — to the days, indeed, in which they remembered him as gay, malicious, idle, brilliant.

I looked down at the water, not wanting to drag myself away. I had never felt more fond of him, and into my thoughts there flickered and passed scenes in which he had taken part, the night of our examination years before, quarrels in Bryanston Square, a glimpse of him walking with his arm round Ann. I thought I had seen in him that night some of the goodness he admired. But not in the way he had searched for it. Instead, there was a sparkle of good in the irony with which he viewed his own efforts; in the disillusioned certainty with which he knew that he at least was right to be useful, that he could have chosen no other way, even if it now seemed prosaic, lacking in the radiance which others attained by chance.

Most of all there was a sparkle of good in the state to which his struggle with his own nature had brought him. He could still hate himself. Through that hatred, and not through his conscience, through the nights when he had lain awake darkened by remorse, he had taken into his blood the sarcastic astringent experience of life which shone out of him as he comforted another’s self-reproach and lack of self-forgiveness.

I did not see Mr March again before the day I had arranged to meet Herbert Getliffe, but I received an anxious note, saying that he hoped I would persevere with my enquiries and relieve his mind as soon as I had information. The lull of reassurance was over and his worry was nagging at him again. There were few states more infectious than anxiety, I thought, as I walked through the courts to Getliffe’s chambers, with an edge to my own nerves.

Getliffe had taken silk a year before. There he was, sitting at his great desk, where I had sat beside him often enough. Four briefs were untied in front of him; on a side table stood perhaps thirty more, these neatly stacked and the pink ribbons tied. I caught sight of a lavish fee on the top one — it might not have been accidental that it was that fee a visitor could see.

For two or three minutes after I was shown in, Getliffe stared intently at the brief he was studying. His brow was furrowed, his neck stiff with concentration; he was the model of a man absorbed. This was a new mannerism altogether. At last he looked up.

‘Heavens, you’re here, are you, L S?’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I was so completely up to the eyes that I just didn’t realize. Well, it’s good to see you, L S.’

I asked him how his practice was going since he took silk.

‘I mustn’t grumble,’ said Getliffe, sweeping an arm towards the briefs on the side table. ‘No, I mustn’t grumble. It was a grave decision to take; I should like you to remember what a grave decision it was. I could have rubbed on for ever as a junior, and it would have kept me in shoe-leather’ — his dignity cracked for a second — ‘and the occasional nice new hat.’ Then he settled himself even more impressively. ‘But two considerations influenced me, L S. I thought of the increased chances it would give one to give promising young men their first jump on the ladder. One could be more useful to a lot more young men. Young men in the position you were, when you first came looking for a friendly eye. Believe me, I thought of you personally, L S, when I was making the decision. You know how much I like helping brilliant young men. Perhaps that was the most important consideration. The other was that one owes a duty to one’s profession and if one can keep oneself alive as a counsel of His Majesty, one ought not to refuse the responsibility.’