Charles Snow: Time of Hope

It had actually made an impression on Getliffe himself. Like many others, he could not decide whether Martineau had committed perjury in order to save George.

Before the end of the trial, I was able to settle that doubt. I listened to a confession, not from George or Jack but from their chief associate.

George had started the agency venture in complete innocence; but he realized the truth before they had raised the whole sum. He realized that the statement he had quoted, on Martineau’s authority, was false. He tried to stop the business then, but Jack’s influence was too strong. From that time forward, Jack was George’s master. He was the dominant figure in the farm transactions — Jack’s stories, on which they borrowed the money, were conscious lies, and George knew of them.

In his final speech, Getliffe kept his promise and ‘pulled something out of the bag’. Yet he believed what he said; in his facile emotional fashion, he had been moved by the stories both of Martineau and of George, and he just spoke as he felt. It was his gift, naïve, subtle, and instinctive, that what he felt happened to be convenient for the case. He let himself go; and as I listened, I felt a kind of envious gratitude. As the verdict came near, I was thankful that he was defending them. He had done far better than I should ever have done.

He dismissed the charge over the agency, and the one over the farm, already vague and complicated enough, he made to sound unutterably mysterious. Then we expected him to sit down; but instead he set out to fight the prejudice that George’s life had roused. He did so by admitting the prejudice himself. ‘I want to say something about Mr Passant, because I think we all realize he has been the leader. He is the one who set off with this idea of freedom. It’s his influence that I’m going to try to explain. You’ve all seen him… He could have done work for the good of the country and his generation — no one has kept him from it but himself. No one but himself and the ideas he has persuaded himself to believe in: because I’m going a bit further. It may surprise you to hear that I do genuinely credit him with setting out to create a better world.

‘I don’t pretend he has, mind you. You’re entitled to think of him as a man who has wasted every gift he possesses. I’m with you.’ Getliffe went on to throw the blame on to George’s time. As he said it, he believed it, just as he believed in anything he said. He was so sincere that he affected others. It was one of the most surprising and spontaneous of all his speeches.

The jury were out two hours. Some of the time, Getliffe and I walked about together. He was nervous but confident. At last we were called into court.

The door clicked open, the feet of the jury clattered and drummed across the floor. Nearly all of them looked into the dock.

The clerk read the first charge, conspiracy over the agency. The foreman said, very hurriedly: ‘Not guilty.’

After the second charge (there were nine items in the indictment), the ‘Not guilty’ kept tapping out, mechanically and without any pause.

It was not long before George and I got out of the congratulating crowd, and walked together towards the middle of the town. The sky was low and yellowish-dark. Lights gleamed into the sombre evening. We passed near enough to see the window of the office where I had worked. For a long time we walked in silence.

Then George said, defiantly, that he must go on. ‘I’ve not lost everything,’ he said. ‘Whatever they did, I couldn’t have lost everything.’

Then I heard him rebuild his hopes. He could not forget the scandal; curiously, it was Getliffe’s speech, that perhaps saved him from prison, which brought him the deepest rancour and the deepest shame. From now on, he would often have to struggle to see himself unchanged. Yet he was cheerful, brimming with ideas and modest plans, as first of all he thought of how he would earn a living. He wanted to leave the town, find a firm similar to Eden’s, and then work his way through to a partnership.

He developed his plans with zest. I was half-saddened, half-exalted, as I listened. It brought back the nights when he and I had first walked in those streets. Just as he used to be, he was eager for the future, and yet not anxious. He was asking only a minor reward for himself. That had always been so; I remembered evenings similar to this, with the shop windows blazing and the sky hanging low, when George was brimful of grandiose schemes for the group, of grandiose designs for my future. For himself, he had never asked more than the most improbable of minor rewards, a partnership with Eden. I remembered nights so late that all the windows were dark; there were no lights except on the tram standards; we had walked together, George’s great voice rang out in that modest expectation — and the dark streets were lit with my own ravenous hopes.

Walking by his side that evening, I felt the past strengthen me now. Just as I used to be, I was touched and impatient at his diffidence, heartened by his appetite for all that might come. Yet, even for him, it would be arduous beyond any imagining to rebuild a life. With the strength and hope he had given me as a young man and which, even in his downfall, he gave me still, I thought of his future — and of mine.

We went into a café, sat by an upstairs window, and looked over the roofs out to the wintry evening sky. George was facing what it would cost to rebuild his life. As he came to think of his private world, the group that had started as Utopia and ended in scandal, his face was less defiant and sanguine than his words. He could not blind himself to what he must go through, and yet he said: ‘I’m going to work for the things I believe in. I still believe that most people are good, if they’re given the chance. No one can stop me helping them, if I think another scheme out carefully and then put my energies into it again. I haven’t finished. You’ve got to remember I’m not middle-aged yet. I believe in goodness. I believe in my own intelligence and will. You don’t mean to tell me that I’m bound to acquiesce in crippling myself?’

He was so much braver than I was. He was facing self-distrust, which as a young man he had scarcely known at all. He realized that there were to be moments when he would ask what was to become of him. Yet he would cling to some irreducible fragment of his hope. It was born with him, and would die only when he died. And it strengthened me, sitting by him in the café that evening, as I heard it struggle through, as I heard that defiant voice coming out of his scandal, downfall, and escape.

It strengthened me in my different fashion. I should never be so brave, nor have so many private refuges. My life up to now had been more direct than his. I had to come to terms with a simpler conflict. Listening to George that evening, I was able to think of my ambition and my marriage more steadily than I had ever done.

My ambition was as imperative now as in the days when George first helped me. I did not need proof of that — but if I had, Eden’s decision would have made it clear. It was not going to dwindle. If I died with it unfulfilled, I should die unreconciled: I should feel that I had wasted my time. I should never be able to comfort myself that I had grown up, that I had gone beyond the vulgarities of success. No, my ambition was part of my flesh and bone. In ten years, the only difference was that now I could judge what my limits were. I could not drive beyond them. They seemed to be laid down in black and white, that evening after George’s trial.

Much of what I had once imagined for myself was make-believe. I never should be, and never could have been, a spectacular success at the Bar. That I had to accept. At the very best, I could aim at going about as far as Getliffe. It was an irony, but such was my limit. With good luck I might achieve much the same status — a large junior practice, silk round forty, possibly a judgeship at the end.