Charles Snow - The Conscience of the Rich

She coughed and paused again.

‘There’s one thing I haven’t talked out with Charles. I can’t rely on thinking it out properly now, can I?’ she said. ‘I mean the showdown over the paper.’

She went on: ‘Some people wouldn’t be sorry if I were finished with.’

Her voice was faint and husky. Suddenly her will shone out, undefeated.

‘I’m not going to back out now,’ she whispered. ‘If I get over this, then I’ll have plenty of time to talk to Charles again. If I don’t, will you give him a message? He’ll understand that I wasn’t ready to back out — the last thing I did—’ She was not quite coherent, but I knew that by ‘backing out’ she meant ruining the Note , reneging on the cause. ‘But tell him, now he must settle it. He can do whatever he likes. The letters are in my steel filing cabinet under H. He’ll find the key in my bag. If Charles decides to stop the paper, he’s only got to send them to Ronald or the chap in the Home Office. The letters are mixed up with some others, they’ll need a bit of organizing. I couldn’t do that now.’

The effort tired her out. She fell asleep, although her body moved without resting. Sometimes she spoke. Once she said, quite clearly, as though continuing the conversation: ‘Charles would have to marry again. Someone who wouldn’t make trouble. And could give him children, of course.’ At other times she called on her father, cried out Charles’ name. Most of the time in her sleep she seemed — although when conscious she had spoken so coolly — tormented by anxiety or sheer fear. Her cries sounded as though she were in a nightmare.

Sitting there — through the window the trees of the square shone green and gold in the sunlight — I could imagine what Charles’ night by the bedside must have been like. As I watched her, fears seemed to be piling upon her like faces in a nightmare. She woke for a few minutes, lucid and controlled again: she said without fuss that she was afraid of dying. But, when she lost consciousness, quite different fears broke out of her. She cried about the hate that others felt for her. She was terrified of them, terrified that they were persecuting her, terrified that she was at their mercy. She tossed about the bed, calling out names, some of which I had never heard, but among them several times that of Mr March; she called out his name in fright, she was trying to get away from an enemy. Then she seemed to be making a speech.

I went down to the drawing-room, where the afternoon sun was streaming in. Mr March and Charles sat there, but neither spoke.

‘How did you leave her, Lewis?’ said Mr March at last.

‘She was asleep,’ I said.

‘How did you think she seemed?’ he went on.

I did not know how to reply.

‘I’ve not seen enough illness to tell,’ I said.

Mr March was fretted with anxiety. His eyes were sombre; he was more restless than Charles.

‘I should like to be reassured that everything within human power is being done. I should like to insist that my practitioner is instructed to obtain further advice apart from the fellow he brought in yesterday.’

Charles did not reply to his father. He said to me: ‘Did she tell you what she wanted to?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I’m glad of that,’ said Charles.

‘I shall not be easy,’ said Mr March again, ‘until I am convinced that everything within human power is being done.’

Charles looked at him and said: ‘Leave it to me, that’s all I ask of you.’

Through each of those days when no one knew whether Ann would live, the sun shone into the great bedroom at Bryanston Square.

It was a warm and glowing autumn, and she lay in the mellow sunshine, not conscious for many minutes together. But I suspected that, while she was conscious, she had made a request to Charles. All of a sudden he gave orders that no one but the nurses was to visit her room, unless he specially asked them. He told his father so, giving no reason. Mr March knew that it was he himself who had to be kept from her sight.

Charles spent most of each night by her bed. After the fourth night, he rang me up and said she had had a long lucid interval, in which she was worried that she had not made herself clear to me. ‘She’s worrying about everything that occurs to her. If I can satisfy her about one thing, there’s another on her mind before she’s stopped thanking me. This Note affair is the worst.’ As he mentioned it, his voice became harsher. ‘I should be grateful if you’d tell her that you understood exactly what she meant.’

When I went into her room that afternoon, however, she scarcely recognized me. Her breathing seemed faster and her skin very hot. The rash on her lip was now full out, and her face was angrily flushed. She coughed and muttered. I waited for some time in the hope she would know me, but, though once she said something, her eyes stared at me unseeing and opaque.

I joined Mr March in the drawing-room, as I had done each day of her illness. He could not bring himself to go to the club; he was deserted, with no one to speak to. He spoke little to me, but we had tea together. He was listening for any movement of the nurses on the stairs so that he could rush outside and ask for the latest news. Occasionally he talked to me, and appeared glad of my presence.

He wanted her to die. He wanted her to die for a practical reason. He believed — he had not discovered the precise situation — that, if she were out of the way, it would not take long to stop the Note . He believed, quite correctly, that the means of stopping it would pass to Charles. His family would be left in peace. He took it for granted that there would be a temporary breach with his son. But nothing would come out. In the end they would be reconciled, and he would be left in peace for the rest of his life.

He knew that he wanted it. He was not an introspective man, but he was a completely candid one. Only a man much more dishonest with himself than Mr March could have resisted realizing what his feelings meant. As soon as he knew she was ill, he imagined what the benefit would be if she were dead. He could no more pretend the desire had not risen within him than he could deny a dream from which he had just woken. It was there.

He was too realistic to cover it with self-deceptions. He could not console himself that he was not the first man to watch a sickbed and find his longings uncomfortable to face. He did not think — how many of us have wished, not even for good or tragic reasons, but simply to make our own lives easier, that someone else, someone whom we may be fond of, should just be blotted out? Mr March would not console himself. He wanted Ann to die, whom his son passionately loved, whom he had himself once come near to loving.

It was on this account that he fretted so continuously. He could not suppress his thoughts: but anything he could do to help her he did with as much intensity as if her life had been precious to him. He had, on the second day, made his ‘practitioners’ bring in the consultant of whom Charles thought most highly; he had sent for the most expensive nurses; he could not have exerted himself more, if this had been Charles ill as a child.

He followed the illness minute by minute. Each time he could get a word with a nurse, he pressed her for the news. They were all astonished, as were the whole March family, by how violently he felt.

Meanwhile, Mr March thought often about death. He thought of her death and his own. He hated the thought of his death with all his robust, turbulent, healthy vigour.

Realistic as he was, he could not face it starkly in his own heart. On the outside, he could appear stoical, he could refer, to the fact, as he did to me several times on those afternoons, that in the nature of things his death must come before long. But, left alone, he did not think of it so.