George Passant (36 page)

‘I should have thought that events have left little doubt of that.’

‘No. You had good and sufficient reasons for fear at the time you wanted to buy the farm. What could you have had before?’

‘I was doing something which most people would disapprove of. I didn’t deceive myself that I should escape the consequences if ever I gave an excuse. And I wasn’t fool enough to think that there were no excuses during a number of years. I was vulnerable through other people long before Mr Martineau himself acquired the agency.’

‘You say you were doing something most people would disapprove of. That’ – Porson said – ‘is apparent at the time I am bringing you to. The time the scandals among your friends were finding their way out. But what were you doing before, what are you referring to?’

‘I mean that I was helping a number of people to freedom in their lives.’

‘You’d better explain what you mean by helping people to “freedom in their lives”.’

‘I don’t hope for it to be understood. But I believe that while people are young they have a chance to become themselves only if they’re preserved from all the conspiracy that crushes them down.’

Porson interrupted, but George did not stop.

‘They’re crushed into thinking and feeling just as the world outside wants them to think and feel. I was trying to make a society where they would have the chance of being free.’

‘But you’re asking us to regard that – as the work which would bring you into disrepute? That was the work you seemed to consider important?’

‘I consider it more important than any work I could possibly have done.’

‘We’re not concerned with your own estimate, you know. We want to see how you could possibly think your work a danger – until it had developed into something which people outside your somewhat unimportant group would notice?’

‘Work of that kind can’t be completely ignored.’

‘I suggest to you that it would have remained completely unknown – if it hadn’t just one external result. That is, this series of scandals.’

‘I do not admit those as results. But there are others which people would have been compelled to notice.’

‘Now, Mr Passant, what could you imagine those to be?’

‘The lives and successes of some of my friends.’

‘Do you pretend you ever thought that those would be very easy to show?’

‘Perhaps,’ George cried loudly again, ‘I never credited completely enough how blind people can be. Except when they have a chance to destroy something.’

‘That’s more like it. You’re beginning to admit that you couldn’t possibly have attracted any attention, either favourable or unfavourable? Until something was really wrong–’

‘I’ve admitted nothing of the kind.’

‘I’ll leave it to the jury. In any case, there was no serious scandal threatened until somewhere about the time you considered buying the farm? For several years you had been giving them the chance of what you choose to call “freedom in their lives” – but nothing had resulted until about the time you all got alarmed?’

‘There were plenty of admirable results.’

‘The more obvious ones, however, were that a good many of your friends began to have immoral relations?’

‘You’ve heard the evidence.’

‘Most of them had immoral relations?’

George stood silent.

‘You don’t deny it?’

George shook his head.

‘Your group became, in fact, a haunt of promiscuity?’

George was silent again.

Porson said: ‘You admit, I suppose, that this was the main result of your effort to give them “freedom in their lives”?’

‘I knew from the beginning that it was a possibility I had to face. The important thing was to secure the real gains.’

‘You don’t regret that you brought it about? You don’t feel any responsibility for what you have done to your – protégés?’

‘I accept complete responsibility.’

‘Despite all this scandal?’

‘I believe it’s the final example of the stupid hostility I’d taught them to expect and to dismiss.’

‘You have no regrets for these scandals?’

‘They are an inconvenience. They should not have happened.’

‘But – the happenings themselves?’

‘I’m not ashamed of them,’ George shouted. ‘If there’s to be any freedom in men’s lives, they have got to work out their behaviour for themselves.’

‘So your only objection to this promiscuity was when it became a danger? The danger that suddenly became acute at the time you said, in Mrs Ward’s hearing: “If we don’t get secrecy soon, we shall lose everything”.’

‘I should feel justified if much more had happened.’

‘You also felt justified in practising what you preach?’

George did not answer. Porson referred to Iris Ward’s evidence, the hints of Daphne and other girls. There was a soft, jeering laugh from the court.

George said: ‘There’s no point in denying those stories.’

‘And so all this,’ Porson said, ‘is the work of which you were so proud? Which you told us you considered the most important activity you could perform?’

There was another laugh. With a flushed face, the judge ordered silence. ‘You needn’t answer that if you don’t want,’ he said to George, a kindly curious look in his eyes.

‘I prefer to answer it,’ said George. ‘I’ve already described what I’ve tried to do. I can’t be expected to give much significance to these incidents you are bringing up – when you compare them with the real meaning they mattered very little one way or the other.’

Porson drank some water. When he spoke again, his voice was a little husky, but still full of energy and assertion.

‘You’ve told us, Mr Passant, that
work
with your group of friends was a very important thing in your life?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you always realised it might involve you in a certain danger? Shall we say in social disapproval?’

‘Yes.’

‘You still repeat, however, that the danger at the time of these alarms – just before you considered buying the farm – seemed to you little greater than in previous years?’

‘It was an excuse presented to anyone wishing to be hostile. Before, they would have been compelled to invent one. That was all the difference.’

‘I’m asking you again. You still deny that the danger really was desperate enough to affect your actions? To force you to make an attempt to buy the farm at all costs?’

‘I deny it, naturally.’

Porson paused.

‘How then do you explain that you were willing – just about that time – to give up your group of friends altogether? To have nothing more to do with work that you’ve told us was the most important thing in your life?’

‘It’s not true.’

‘I can recall a witness to prove you said
these words also
at the farm.’

There was a silence. George began speaking fast.

‘In a sense I grant it. It was the only course left for me to take. I’d finished as much as I could do. I’d tried to help a fair number of my friends from the School. I’d given them as much chance of freedom as I could. Doing it again with other people would merely mean repeating the same process. I was willing to do that – but if it was going to involve me in continual hostility with everyone round me, I wasn’t prepared to feel it a duty to go on. I’d done the pioneer work. I was satisfied to let it go at that.’

As he spoke, George had a helpless and suffering look. This last answer scarcely anyone understood, even those of us who knew something of his language, and the barrier between his appetite for living and his picture of his own soul. He was alone, more than at any time in the trial – more than he had ever been.

For a moment, I found myself angry with him. Despite the situation, I was swept with anger; I was without understanding, as though I were suddenly much younger, as though I were taken back to the night of his triumph years before. For all his eagerness for life – I felt in a moment so powerful that no shame could obscure it – for all the warmth of his heart and his ‘vision of God’, he was less honest than his attackers, than the Beddows, Camerons, and Canon Martineau’s, the Porsons, Edens and Iris Wards. He was less honest than those who saw in his aspirations only the devices of a carnally obsessed and self-indulgent man. He was corrupt within himself. So at the time when the scandal first hung over him, he was afraid, and already dissatisfied, tired of the ‘little world’. But this answer which he made to Porson was the manner in which he explained it to himself.

At that moment, he suddenly seemed as alien to me, who had been intimate with him for so many years, as to those who laughed in court the instant before. I was blinded to the fire and devotion which accompanied this struggle with himself; through that struggle, he had deceived himself; yet it had also at moments given him intimations such as the rest of us might never know.

Even our indignations and ideals tend to be made in our own image. For me, to whom a kind of frankness with myself came more naturally than to George, it was a temptation to make that insight and ‘honesty’ a test by which to judge everyone else – just as an examiner, setting his papers and marking his questions, is always searching to give marks to minds built on the same pattern as his own.

I was blinded also to something as true and more simple. His words sounded less certain to him than to any of his listeners; they were more than anything an attempt to reason away his own misgivings. I ought to have known that he, too, had lain awake at night, seeing his aspirations fallen, bitterly aware of his own fear and guilt, full of the reproach of failure, remorse and the loss of hope. He too had ‘wept at night’, in a suffering harsher than Getliffe would ever feel, with all excuse seeming useless and remote; he had felt only degrading fear and the downfall of everything he had tried to do.

Yes, there had been self-reproach. I did not know, I couldn’t foresee the future, whether it would last, or for how long.

Porson passed on to the money transactions over the farm. Nothing unexpected happened in the rest of the cross-examination, which ended in the early evening.

I went from the court to some friends who had invited me to drink sherry; a crowd of people were already gathered in the drawing-room. Many of them asked questions about the trial. No one there, as it happened, knew that I was so intimate with George. They were all eager to talk of the evidence of the day, discussing Olive’s infatuation for Jack, the kind of life they had both led. Several of them agreed that ‘she had done it because he was involved already’. It was strange to hear the guesses, some as superficial as that, some penetrating and shrewd. The majority believed them guilty. There was a good-humoured and malicious delight in their exposure, and the gossip was warm with the contact of human life.

From the point of view of the case, they were exaggerating the day’s significance. People there felt that George’s cross-examination ‘had settled the business. He can’t get away with that’; just as, in the street, I had overheard two men reading the evening paper and giving the same opinion in almost the same words. Yet, for all the talk of his ‘hypocrisy’, ‘the good time he had managed for himself’, there were some ready to defend him in this room. ‘I can believe it of the other two easier than I can of him,’ one of them said. ‘I shouldn’t have thought swindling was in his line.’ But no one believed that he had ever devoted himself to help his friends.

I returned to dinner at Eden’s. Getliffe told Eden that he thought it was ‘all right’. He added: ‘I’d be certain if it weren’t for this prejudice they’ve raised. I must try to smooth that down.’ Yet he was not so cheerfully professional as he sounded; something still weighed on him. As soon as he had finished eating, he said: ‘I had better retire now. I must get down to it. I’ve got to pull something out of the bag tomorrow.’

‘I’ve heard people wondering what you will say,’ said Eden.

‘One must take a line,’ said Getliffe. Soon afterwards, without drinking any wine, he left us. Eden looked at me and said: ‘It’s no use worrying yourself now. You can’t do any more, you know.’

I went to my room, and lay down on the sofa in front of the fire. After a time, footsteps sounded on the stairs, then a knock at the door. The maid came in, and after her Olive. At once I felt sure of what she was going to say. She stood between me and the fire.

‘You’ve worn yourself out,’ she said. Then she burst out: ‘But you’ve finished now, it doesn’t matter if I talk to you?’

She threw cushions from the chair on to the hearthrug, and sat there.

‘There’s something – I shall feel better if I tell you. No one else must know. But I’ve got to tell you, I don’t know why. It can’t affect things now.’

‘It couldn’t at any time,’ I replied.

She laughed, not loudly but with the utter abandonment that overtook her at times; the impassiveness of her face was broken, her eyes shone, her arms rested on the sofa head.

‘Well, I may as well say it,’ she went on in a quiet voice. ‘This business isn’t all a mistake. We’re not as – spotless as we made out.’

‘Will you tell me what happened?’

Without answering, she asked abruptly: ‘What are our chances?’

‘Getliffe still thinks they’re pretty good.’

‘It oughtn’t to make much difference,’ she said. ‘I keep telling myself it doesn’t matter.’ She gave a sudden sarcastic laugh, and said: ‘It does. More than you’d think. When I heard you say there was still a chance I was more shaken – than if I suddenly knew I’d never done it at all.’

She was silent for a moment. Then she said: ‘I’m going to tell you some more. I can’t help it.’ She broke into a confession of what had happened between the three of them. She was forced on, degraded and yet relieved, just as Jack had been that night in the park years ago. Often she evaded my questions, and more than once she concealed a fact that she clearly knew. There were still places where I was left baffled, but, from what she said and what I already knew, their story seemed to have gone on these lines:

They actually did begin to raise money for the agency in complete innocence. George believed Martineau’s account, and Olive took George’s opinion; so probably did Jack, for a time. Jack had suggested the idea of taking over the agency – for him it was a commonplace ‘flutter’, and it was easy to understand George catching at the new interest. He was genuinely in need of money, compelled to see that he had no future in the firm, and, though he would not yet admit it to himself, tired of the group in its original form.