Charles Snow - The Conscience of the Rich

Death to him meant the silence and the dark. It meant that he, who had been so much alive, would have been annihilated. Other lives would go on, busy, violent and content, ecstatic and anguished, comfortable and full of anxiety, and utterly indifferent to what he had been. Other people would eat in this house, talk in this room, love and get married and have their children, walk through the square, quarrel and come together; and he would be gone from it for ever. Any life, he cried to himself, any life, however stricken with pain, racked by conflict, beaten in all its hopes, is better than the nothingness. It would be better to be a shadow in the darkness, to be able to watch without taking part, than to be struck into that state for which all images are more consoling than the truth — just this world of human beings living out their lives, and oneself not there.

Those thoughts visited him as he waited day by day for news of Ann, never seeing her, forbidden by his son to see her. One afternoon I found him reading the current issue of the Note . He read it word by word. ‘Pernicious nonsense,’ he said. ‘But there is naturally nothing further about my brother Philip.’

Reports of Ann’s illness went round the March family, and the telephone in Bryanston Square rang many times a day. Sir Philip enquired daily: I wondered whether he too faced his thoughts. There were whispers, rumours, hopes, and alarms. So far as I knew, Katherine put through only one call. But Porson rang me up often, sometimes at Bryanston Square and often at night in my own house. ‘How is she?’ his voice came, booming, assertive, drunken, distressed. ‘I insist that she’s always wanted someone to look after her. How is she? You’re not keeping anything from me?’ Each day he sent flowers, more lavish even than Mr March’s. One evening, going home, I thought I saw him watching in the square: but, if it were he, he did not want to be seen, and hurried away out of sight.

Charles paid no attention to any of these incidents. He spoke very little to anyone in the house, and scarcely at all to his father. He was grey with fatigue, so tired that once in the drawing-room he went to sleep in his chair. He was entirely concentrated in Ann. Her sickroom was the only place where he seemed alive.

On the seventh day of her illness, the crisis came. Charles was in the house all that day; his partner had taken charge of his cases for the last forty-eight hours. After tea, Charles came down and said to me, in a hard, uninflected voice: ‘She would like to see you again. I must warn you, she is looking much better. You’ll probably think the danger has gone. That isn’t true.’

Despite his warning, I could not help thinking she was better. She was weak, she could not talk much; but her breathing was quiet now, the fever had gone, and she spoke almost in her ordinary voice.

‘You’ve got it clear, have you? I don’t want to force Charles’ hand. I’ve been worrying whether I made that clear. If anything happens to me, he must make a free choice.’

‘I’ve got it clear,’ I replied.

‘Thank you,’ she said. She gave a friendly matter-of-fact smile and said faintly: ‘I hope it won’t be necessary.’

Charles returned to take me away. He stood by the bedside, looking down at Ann; he made an attempt to smile at her.

With the clumsiness of fatigue, she interleaved her fingers into those of the hand he had rested on her pillow.

‘I’ve been giving Lewis instructions about the Note ,’ she whispered. ‘That isn’t finished, you know. Had you forgotten it?’

‘Not quite,’ said Charles. ‘Not quite.’

For two days after, Charles was ravaged by a suspense and apprehension greater than he had yet known. The consultant had been called in again. They thought she had no resilience left. Mr March’s doctor told Charles that no one now could be certain of the end. Then she seemed to be infused by a faint glow of vitality, when they thought it had all gone.

In the afternoon of the ninth day, a warm and cloudless autumn afternoon, we knew that she had been a long time asleep. Mr March and Charles were sitting opposite to each other in the drawing-room, and I was on the sofa. The clock ticked on the mantelpiece, and each quarter of an hour there came its chime, sweet, monotonous, and maddening. It was beyond any one of us to go outside into the sunshine. It would have seemed like tempting fate.

Mr March’s face was an old man’s that afternoon. The skin beneath his eyes was dark sepia; his head was sunk down, the veins on his temples were blue. Charles was leaning forward, his hands locked together; his position did not change for half an hour at a time. Often when he was anxious he smoked in chains: that afternoon he did not smoke. There was no tinge of colour in his face. His eyes shone bright, bloodshot, and intent.

Mr March stared at him and once, with a grinding effort, broke the silence: ‘I believe that this sleep may be a good sign. They informed me before luncheon that they had considerably more hope.’

Charles made no sign that he had heard.

At last, it was well after four o’clock, we heard footsteps down the stairs, and a tap on the door. A nurse entered and beckoned Charles. He was out of the room at once. The nurse’s manner had not been specially grave, and I felt a touch of relief. Mr March and I exchanged a few words, and then fell silent again. The quarters chimed — half past, a quarter to. Suddenly Mr March sprang up and stopped the clock.

Then there was noise on the stairs, and the sound of a loud, unmuted, orotund voice: ‘I think she’ll do, March. If we look after her properly, I think she’ll do.’

Charles came into the room. He spoke directly to his father for the first time for many hours.

‘Did you hear that?’ he cried triumphantly. ‘Did you hear that?’

Ann’s convalescence was a slow one, and she could not be moved from Mr March’s house. I ceased calling when the danger was past, but heard of her each day from Charles. She had asked Mr March to visit her in her room; it seemed that she had apologized for the inconvenience she had caused him by falling ill; she promised to go as soon as the doctors would let her. From what she told Charles, it had been an interview formal and cool on the surface. After it, Mr March had not spoken to Charles about her.

One afternoon soon after, Charles rang me up.

‘You remember when Ann was ill? She gave you a message for me?’

I said yes.

‘She said this morning that I could ask you about it. She’d rather you told me than tell me herself.’

I was taken aback, so much so that I did not want to speak over the telephone. I arranged to call at his house. As I walked there along the reach from Chelsea, the river oily in the misty sunshine, the chimneys quivering in the languid Indian summer, I was seized by a sense of strangeness. This new wish of Ann’s — for she had, while in danger, said that if she recovered she would tell Charles herself — this wish to have her message given him at second hand seemed bizarre. But it was not really that wish which struck so strange. It was the comfort of the senses, the warmth of the air and the smell of the autumn trees, assuring one that life might be undisturbed.

Charles was in his surgery. He was not pleased to see me. He did not want to be reminded of what I had come to tell him. He was looking better than when I had last seen him: he had made up sleep, the colour had come back to his face. But he was not rested. In a tone brittle and harsh, he began: ‘I’d better hear what she said. I suppose it’s about this wretched paper, isn’t it? I’d better hear it.’

I was sure that, since she got better, he had not been able to put the choice out of his mind. I gave him her message, as I should have been obliged to if she had died.