Charles Snow - Time of Hope

He was miserable for several reasons. He refused to dance, and he hated others enjoying fun which he was not going to share. His wife and Sheila were active, strong women, who loved using their muscles (Sheila, once set on a dance floor, forgot she had not wanted to come, and danced for hours); Mr Knight was an excessively lazy man, who preferred sitting down. He also hated to be at any kind of disadvantage. In his own house, backed by everything Mrs Knight could buy for him, he was playing on his home ground. He did not like going out, where people might not recognize him or offer the flattery which sustained him.

I picked up an example right at the beginning of supper. Mrs Knight announced that the bishop had brought a party to the hall. Shouldn’t they call on him during the evening? I could feel that she had not abandoned hope of getting her husband some preferment.

‘Not unless he asks us, darling,’ said Mr Knight faintly.

‘You can’t expect him to remember everyone,’ said Mrs. Knight, with brisk common sense.

‘He ought to have remembered me ,’ said Mr Knight. ‘He ought to have.’

I guessed that conversation had been repeated often. She had always planned for him to go far in the Church; he was far more gifted than many who had climbed to the top. When she married him, she was prepared to find ways of getting all the bishops on the bench to meet him. But he would not do his share. As he grew older, he could not humble himself at all. He had too much arrogance, too much diffidence, to play the world’s game. Later on, I ran across a good many men who had real gifts but who, in the worldly sense, were failures; and in most of them there was a trace of Mr Knight; like him, they were so arrogant and so diffident that they dared not try.

Mr Knight was miserable; Mrs Knight indignant; Sheila strained. We did not talk much for the first half of supper, and then, in desperation, I brought out the story of Martineau.

‘He must be a crank,’ said Mrs Knight as soon as I finished. ‘Well, Mrs Knight,’ I said, ‘no one could call him an ordinary man.’

‘Harry Eden’, she decided, ‘must be glad to see the back of him.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Mr Eden is devoted to him.’

‘Harry Eden was always a loyal person,’ said Mrs Knight.

Sheila broke in, clearly, as though she were thinking aloud: ‘He’ll enjoy himself!’

‘Who will?’ her mother asked obtusely.

‘Your Martineau.’ Sheila was looking at me. ‘He’ll enjoy every minute of it! It’s not a sacrifice.’

‘Of course’, said Mr Knight, in his most beautifully modulated voice, ‘many religions have sprung up from sources such as this. We must remember that there are hundreds of men like Martineau in every century, Those are the people who start false religions, but I admit that many of them have felt something true.’ Mr Knight was theologically fair-minded; but his nose was out of joint. If anyone was to act as raconteur to that party, he should do so. He proceeded to tell a long story about the Oneida community. He told it with art, far better than I had told mine, and as we chuckled, he became less sulky. I thought (for I was irritated at not being allowed to shine in front of Sheila) that his story had every advantage, but that mine was at any rate first-hand.

After supper I danced with Sheila and Mrs Knight alternately. They had many acquaintances there, who kept coming up to claim Sheila. As I watched her round the hall, my jealous inquisitiveness flew back, like a detective summoned to an unpleasant duty: was this one with whom she had threatened me last year? But, when I danced with her, she did not mention any of her partners. Her father was behaving atrociously, she said with her usual ruthlessness. And she had to talk to all these other people; she wanted to be quiet with me. So, much of the night, we danced in a silence that to me was languorous.

It was far otherwise in my alternate dances. Mrs Knight disapproved of me, but she demanded her exercise, and dancing with her became vigorous and conversational. She took it heartily, for she had a real capacity for pleasure. I was an unsatisfactory young man, but I was better than no one to whirl her round. She got hot and merry, and as we passed her friends on the floor she greeted them in her loud horsy voice. And she surprised me by issuing instructions that I was to take care of myself.

‘You’re not looking so well as you did,’ she said, in a brusque maternal stand-no-nonsense manner.

I explained that I had been working hard.

‘You’re not keeping fit. You’re pale,’ she said. ‘How long is it to your exam?’

I knew that exactly. ‘Ten weeks.’

‘You mustn’t crock up, you know.’

I knew that too. Yet, though I wished she was not Sheila’s mother, I was coming to like her. And, dancing with her at that ball early in 1927, I had a curious thought. George and I and thoughtful persons round us used to predict that our lives were going to see violent changes in the world. At the ball, inside the Knights’ house, those predictions seemed infinitely remote, a bubble no more real than others that George blew. Yet if they came true, if Mrs Knight lost all, lost servants and house and had to work with her hands and cook for her husband, I could imagine her doing it as heartily as she was dancing now. I should not like to be within the range of her indignation, but she would survive.

For one dance, both she and Sheila were taken off by others and I was left at our table with Mr Knight. Out of the corner of his eye, he must have noticed that my own glance was drawn time and again to follow Sheila. He was still bad-tempered at being ignored so much that night, and he did not intend to let me sit and dream. He required me as an audience and I had to listen to the main points of a letter that he thought of writing to The Times . Then, half-maliciously, he made me look at a dark-haired girl in a red dress, just dancing by our corner of the hall.

‘I’m not certain of your standards, Eliot,’ he said, ‘but should you say that she was pretty?’

‘Very,’ I said.

‘They live in my parish, but they don’t attend. I’m afraid that she’s broken a good many hearts.’

He was being deliberately oblique, I knew. He did not appear to be watching me, but he was making sure that I concentrated on the girl in the red dress.

‘She ought to get married,’ he said. ‘She ought to get married. It’s bad for anyone to break too many hearts. It shows there’s something’ — he paused — ‘shall I say torn? inside their own.’

He was, of course, talking in code. That was the nearest he would come to mentioning Sheila. But he was so subtle and oblique that I could not be certain what he was telling me. Was he giving me a warning? Was he trying to share a worry, knowing that I loved her, feeling that I too was lost and concerned for what might happen to her? Was he, incredibly, encouraging me? Or was he just being malicious at my expense? I had no idea. In his serious moments, when he gave up acting, I never knew where I was with Mr Knight.

Soon after, Sheila said that she wanted some air. Instead of dancing, we walked outside the hall. There was nowhere to sit out, except in the colonnades which looked over the park. She took my arm, and we stood there. Couples were strolling behind us, though the March night was sharp. Right round the other side of the park, the tram-standards made a necklace of lights (we were looking in the direction that I walked, feet light with hope, the last Christmas Eve but one).

‘Rather pretty,’ said Sheila. Then she asked, unexpectedly: ‘What does Martineau believe?’

I had to collect myself before I replied.

I said: ‘I’m not sure that he knows himself. I think he’d say that the only way to live a Christian life was to live like Christ. But—’