Charles Snow - The Conscience of the Rich

‘That’s the sort of thing you know,’ I said.

‘Hawtin’s quite a different cup of tea,’ said Seymour. ‘Now he does cut some ice, and if we get his blood the rest of the gang will feel it, won’t they now?’

I asked again, what facts had he got about Hawtin? And when was the next instalment due to appear? To the second question, he gave a straight answer. Not for some weeks. They were not ready yet. If they had to delay for months rather than weeks, he might repeat what he had already printed — ‘just to remind some of our friends that we’re still thinking about them.’

It was the same answer as he had given to Ann: so there was time, I thought. Meanwhile, as we waited for Ann and Charles, Seymour went on talking, dismissing the ‘Hawtin racket’, elated and obsessed by ‘stories’ which, to him, mattered out of comparison more.

Below us, the haze of London was changing from blue to grey as night fell, and through the haze the lights were starting out. From second to second a new light quivered through, now in the Pimlico streets beneath us, now on the skyline. Soon there was a galaxy of lights. It made me think of the press of human lives, their struggles and their peace.

The bell of Seymour’s flat rang, and on his way to open the door he switched on his own lights. Outside in the passage were standing Ann and Charles. Seymour grinned up at Charles.

‘Late bill,’ he said. It was a recognition-symbol, a token of their days at school: I had heard Seymour use it before as a kind of upper-class password.

As we sat down, all of us except Seymour were unrelaxed: but he, just as confidently as he had done with me, started talking: his trip, the ‘low-down’ which he had collected, he went on just as with me. It took Ann an effort to say: ‘Look, Humphrey, do you mind if we get this over!’

Her voice was tight. I could feel how much she respected him. On his side, he was at once polite and considerate. ‘Of course, we’d better if you want to,’ he said with a kind, friendly, praising smile.

‘I think I’ve got to bring up this Philip March story,’ she said.

‘Right,’ said Seymour.

Though she looked strained, she began her appeal with extreme lucidity. It was agreed by everyone, wasn’t it, she said, that Philip March had had nothing whatever to do with any recent dealings? Seymour nodded his head. Philip March was absolutely in the clear, she said; last year’s rumours had nothing to do with him? Seymour nodded. If she herself hadn’t brought in the name of Herbert Getliffe, and an almost forgotten piece of gossip, no one would have remotely considered any smear against Philip March?

‘Absolutely true,’ said Seymour. ‘I was just telling Lewis, he never seriously counted, with all due respect to your family, Charles.’

He was sitting back with one leg crossed over the other. For all his cockiness and the tincture of the grotesque, he was a man in whom one could feel authority. It was an authority that did not come just from his commitment, from his position in the party: it was the authority of his nature. Even Charles, leaning forward on the sofa, watching him with hard eyes, paid attention to it. Certainly Ann, more given than Charles to admit authority in others, recognized it. She sat with her backbone straight as a guardsman’s by Charles’ side, and said: ‘Well then, I shouldn’t ask for anything impossible. I shouldn’t ask to call off anything that was important. But it isn’t important, is it? I didn’t even know that anyone would think it worth while to revive the Getliffe business. I should have thought it was too long ago to count. I should have thought whatever Philip March did or didn’t do at that time, it was too long ago to count. And anyway it’s more obscure than the Getliffe business, we couldn’t get it cut and dried. I think there would be pretty strong arguments for leaving him alone, in any case. But of course we want him left alone because it’s bound to affect my husband’s family. It’s not often that one can ask for special treatment, is it? I think I can, this time.’

Seymour smiled at her, and said: ‘There isn’t any such thing as private news, is there?’

She repeated ‘I think I can, this time’, because his tone was so light that it did not sink in. It took her seconds to realize that he had turned her down flat.

Charles had realized at once. In a harsh and angry voice he said: ‘You admit that you’ve got no foundation at all for any scandal last year — as far as my uncle is concerned. You admit the same about Herbert Getliffe, don’t you? Is there any foundation for the scandal at all, even about this man Hawtin? Or are you just wishing that it happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Seymour.

‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

‘Precisely what I say.’

Bitterly Charles went on with his questions. About 1935 there was nothing proved or provable at all: it seemed most likely that there was nothing in the rumour. But, as Seymour said jauntily, the 1929 dealings were on the record — the transactions of Getliffe’s brothers-in-law and, as he hoped to demonstrate, those of Philip March.

‘You’re proposing to use those, in fact,’ said Charles, ‘to give a bit of credibility to a sheer lie?’

‘That’s putting it rather more strongly than I should myself. If there was jiggery-pokery some years ago, there’s no reason why there shouldn’t have been some last year.’

‘But you’re really pretty certain that there wasn’t?’

Seymour shrugged his shoulders.

‘I must say,’ said Charles, ‘it’s more dishonest even than I thought.’

‘I shan’t have time for your moral sensitivity,’ said Seymour, his voice suddenly as passionate as Charles’, ‘until we’ve beaten the fascists and got a decent world.’

In the angry silence I put in: ‘If you’re seriously proposing to print rumours without even a scrap of evidence, the paper isn’t going to last very long, is it?’

‘Why in God’s name not?’

‘What’s going to stop a crop of libel actions?’

‘The trouble with you lawyers,’ said Seymour, jaunty once more, ‘is that you never know when a fact is a fact, and you never see an inch beyond your noses. I am prepared to bet any of you, or all three if you like, an even hundred pounds that no one, no one , brings an action against us over this business. Trust old Father Mouse and bob’s your uncle.’

He went on, enjoying himself: ‘While I’m about it, I’m prepared to bet you that the paper never runs into a libel action. You trust old Father Mouse. I’m nothing like as wild and woolly as I seem. No, the only thing that could ever finish the paper is that we might come up against the Official Secrets Act. That’s the menace, and if we had bad luck that would be the end. I don’t suppose I’m telling any of you anything you don’t know. Anyway, Ann’s seen how we collect some of our stuff and she must have enough documents in her own desk to finish the poor old paper off in a couple of hours.’

It sounded like an indiscretion, like a piece of his cocksureness. Listening, I believed it was the opposite. He had done it deliberately. He was not the man to underestimate just how competent and ruthless other people could be. He took it for granted that Ann and Charles knew that she had it in her power to kill the paper; he took it for granted too, that, after his refusal, having no other conceivable way to protect Charles’ family, they would consider it.

He knew her well. It would have been stupid to hide anything, it was good tactics to bring the temptation into the open, brandish it in front of her and defy her with it. He knew, of course, that she was as much committed to the party as he was himself. Outside her marriage, it was her one devotion. It was so much a devotion — only a religious person could know something similar in kind, perhaps — that she had not been shocked when Seymour admitted that he was fabricating a set of scandals. To Charles, it was a moral outrage. To her, so upright in her own dealings, it was not. Any more, oddly enough, than it was to Seymour himself. Both she and Seymour were believers by nature. At times it gave them a purity and innocence that men like Charles never knew: at times it gave Seymour, and perhaps even Ann, a capacity to do things from which Charles, answering to his own conscience, would have been repelled.