Charles Snow - The Conscience of the Rich

Mr March stood up, shook my hand, and said: ‘I hope you will forgive me, Lewis, for not inviting you to stay to luncheon. I shall have certain matters to attend to for the remainder of the day.’

He added: ‘If you wish to stay in order to see my son, I hope you will not be deterred from doing so. I think you are familiar enough with my house to make yourself at home. I should be sorry if you ceased to be familiar with my house. I shall be obliged if you find it possible to visit me occasionally.’

I went into the drawing-room, affected by the other times I had waited there. I sat by the fire, picked up a biography, and tried to read. The soft rain fell in the square outside. The light of the wet autumn day was diffuse and gentle, and the fire burned high in the chimney. I heard Charles’ car drive up, and the sound of the butler’s voice greeting him in the hall.

Again I tried to read. But, within a few minutes, far sooner than I expected, Charles joined me. He said: ‘Mr L told me that I should find you here.’

He sat down, and looked at me with a tired, composed smile.

He said: ‘He did it with great dignity.’

He said no more of their last meeting.

He began to talk, practically, about his financial condition. Ann’s income would go down now that her father had retired. Charles himself was earning about £900 a year from his practice. ‘It ought to mount up in the next two or three years,’ he said. ‘But I shall be lucky if I work it up to £1,000. Altogether, it will be slightly different from the scale of life I was brought up to expect.’

He smiled. ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter much,’ he said. ‘It may be a nuisance sometimes not to have a private income — you used to say what a difference it made, didn’t you? I don’t mean for luxuries. I mean there are times when it’s valuable for a doctor to be independent of his job. He can do things and say things that otherwise he wouldn’t dare. Some of us ought to be able to say things without being frightened for our livelihood, don’t you agree? Well, I shan’t be able to. I don’t know how much difference it will make.’

He was showing the kind of realistic worry that I had seen in him so often. It was genuine; for most of his life he had expected that when Mr March died he would become a rich man; he had always lived in comfort, even since his marriage.

He did not restrain his worry. He was not in a hurry to leave his father’s house. He spoke about Mr March with a concern so strong and steady that one could not miss it.

‘He mustn’t be left alone more than anyone can help,’ said Charles. ‘I’ve done this, so I can’t do anything for him now. But everyone must see that he’s got plenty to catch his interest. He finds it hard to be desperately unhappy when there are people round him, you know that, don’t you? Even though—’ Charles paused. ‘Even though he’s lost something. He can’t be swallowed up by unhappiness while there are people round him. He has to expend himself on them.’

His face was tired, kind. He went on: ‘I know it’s a different story when he is alone at night.’

He reiterated his concern: ‘They mustn’t be frightened to intrude on him. When he’s unhappy, I mean. It’s easy to be too delicate. Sometimes it’s right. I assure you it isn’t right with Mr L I think Katherine will know that by instinct. If she doesn’t, you must tell her, Lewis. Will you promise to tell her?’

‘I’m cut off from them,’ he added. ‘I can’t tell them what to do. But I think I know him better than they do.’

Behind his worry, behind his concern, he was thinking of what he had done.

‘I’ve done this,’ he said, repeating the phrase he had used as he gave me messages about his father. ‘I’ve done this. Sometimes I can’t believe it. It sounds ridiculous, but I feel I’ve done nothing.’ He gave a smile, completely open, unguarded, and candid. I had never seen his face so brilliant and innocent.

‘At other times,’ he said, ‘I feel remorse.’

The words weighed down. I said: ‘I know what you mean. I’ve told you, once I did something more unforgivable than you’ve done. I know what you mean.’

Charles said eagerly: Sometimes it seems the most natural thing in the world to do what one did, isn’t that true? Didn’t you feel that? And sometimes you felt you wouldn’t forget it, you wouldn’t be free of the memory, for the rest of your life?’

‘I’m not free yet,’ I said.

We smiled. There was great intimacy between us.

‘Did yours seem like mine? Did it seem you were bound to make a choice? Did it seem you had to hurt one or two people, whatever you did?’

‘I hadn’t any justification at all,’ I said.

‘With me,’ said Charles, ‘it seemed to be wrapped up with everything in my life.’

He waited for some time before he spoke again. His expression was heavy, but not harassed. ‘Until it happened, I didn’t know what I should have to live with. Live with in myself, I mean: you must have faced that too, haven’t you?’ He looked at me with simplicity, with a kind of brotherly directness. He said: ‘I suppose I don’t know yet.’

Did it make nonsense to him of what he had tried to do with his life? More than any of us, I was thinking, he had searched into his own nature, and had distrusted it more. Did this make nonsense of what he had tried to do? To him the answer would sometimes, and perhaps often, be yes.

Sitting with him in the drawing-room, I could not feel it so. Not that I was trying to judge him: all I had was a sense of expectancy, curiously irrelevant, but reassuring as though the heart were beating strongly, about what the future held.

Some weeks later I went to dinner at Bryanston Square. As I heard from Katherine, Mr March was inventing excuses to keep his house full; that night he had chosen to celebrate what he regarded as a success of mine. The ‘success’ was nothing but a formality: I had just been confirmed in my college job and now, if I wanted, could stay there for life. For Mr March it was a pretext for a party; as he greeted me it seemed to be something more.

When the butler showed me into the drawing-room, cosy after the cold night outside, Mr March had already come down, and was standing among Francis and Katherine and a dozen or more of our contemporaries. It was the biggest party I had seen there since his seventieth birthday. He came across to me, swinging his arm, and the instant he shook hands, said without any introduction: ‘I always viewed your intention to support yourself by legal practice as misguided.’

It sounded brusque. It sounded unemollient. Taken aback, Katherine said: ‘He was doing well in it, after all, Mr L.’

‘No! No!’ He brushed her aside, and spoke straight to me: ‘I didn’t regard legal practice as a suitable career for someone with other burdens.’

He spoke with understanding. Although he had not once referred to it, he knew what my marriage meant: this was his way of telling me so. How much time — he broke off shyly — did I intend to devote to my London job? Three days a week, I told him: and I could feel him thinking that that was the amount of time I spent with my wife in the Chelsea house. ‘Oh well,’ he remarked, ‘so long as that brings in sufficient for your requirements.’

As with Francis, so with me, Mr March ignored any earnings from academic life. His tone had not altered; apart from the burst of sympathy, which no one else in the room recognized, he was talking as he used to do. At dinner he went on addressing us round the table, just as he had done on my earliest visits there. The only difference that I should have noticed, if I had not known what had happened, was a curious one: the food, which had always been good, was now luxurious. Mr March, living alone in Bryanston Square, was doing himself better than ever in the past.