George Passant (8 page)

It was impossible to resist Mr Passant’s enormous zest, to prevent him doing a service. He fetched out a pack of cards from the sideboard, and we played three-handed solo. Mr Passant, who had been brought up in the strictest Puritan discipline, was middle-aged before he touched a card; now he played with tremendous enjoyment, with a gusto that was laughable and warmed us all.

When we finished the game, Mr Passant suddenly got up and brought a book to the table.

‘Just a minute, Mr – er – Lewis, there’s something I thought of when I was playing. It won’t take long, but I mustn’t forget.’

The book was a Bible. He moistened a pencil in his lips, drew a circle round a word, and connected it by a long line to another encircled word.

I moved to give him more room at the table, but he protested.

‘No, please, no. I just do a little preparation each night to be ready for Sunday, you know. I’m allowed to tell the good news, I go round the villages, I don’t suppose George has told you.’ (Of course, I knew long since that he devoted his spare hours to local preaching.) ‘And it’s easier if I do a little work every night. I’m only doing it before supper so that afterwards–’

George and I spread out the evening paper and whispered comments to each other. In a few moments Mr Passant sighed and put a marker into the Bible.

‘Ready for Sunday?’ said George.

‘A little more tomorrow.’ Mr Passant smiled.

‘I suppose you won’t have a big congregation,’ George said. His tone was both intimate and constrained. ‘As it’s a slack time of the year.’

Mr Passant said: ‘No, we can’t hope for many, but that’s not the worst thing. What grieves me is that we don’t get as many as we used to. We’re losing, we’ve been losing ever since the war.’

‘So has the Church of England,’ I observed.

‘Yes, you’re losing too,’ Mr Passant smiled at me. ‘It isn’t only one of us. Which way are you going to win them back?’

I gained some amusement from being taken as a spokesman of the Church of England. I did not obtrude my real beliefs: we proceeded to discuss on what basis the Christian Churches could unite. There I soon made a mistake; for I suggested that Mr Passant might not find confirmation an insurmountable obstacle.

Mr Passant pushed his face forward. He looked more like George than I had seen him. ‘That is the mistake you would have to understand before we could come together,’ he said. ‘Can’t I make you see how dangerous a mistake it is, Mr – Lewis? A man is responsible for his own soul. Religion is the choice of a man’s soul before his God. At some time in his life, sooner or later, a man must choose to stay in sin or be converted. That is the most certain fact I know, you see, and I could not bring myself to associate in worship with anyone who doesn’t want to know it as I do.’

‘I understand what you mean by a man being responsible for his soul.’ George rammed tobacco into his pipe. ‘That’s the basis of Protestantism, naturally. And, though you might choose to put it in other words’ – he looked at me – ‘it’s the basis of any human belief that isn’t completely trivial or absurdly fatalistic. But I never have been able to see why you should make conversion so definite an act. It doesn’t happen like that – irrevocably and once for all.’

‘It does,’ said Mr Passant.

‘I challenge it,’ said George.

‘My dear,’ said Mr Passant, ‘you know all sorts of matters that I don’t know, and on every one of these I will defer to your judgment or knowledge, and be glad to. But you see, I have been living amongst people for fifty years, for fifty-three years and a half, within a few days, and as a result of that experience I know that their lives change all of a sudden – like this–’ he took a piece of paper out of his pocket and moistened his pencil against a lip; then he drew a long straight line– ‘a man lives in sin and enjoyment and indulgence for years, until he is brought up against himself; and then, if he chooses right, life changes altogether –
so
.’ And he drew a line making a sharp re-entrant angle with the first, and coming back to the edge of the paper. ‘That’s what I mean by conversion, and I couldn’t tell you all the lives I’ve seen it in.’

‘I can’t claim the length of your experience,’ George’s tone had suddenly become hard, near anger, ‘but I have been studying people intensively for several years. And all I’ve seen makes me think their lives are more like this–’ he took his father’s paper under the gaslight, his hand casting a blue shadow; he drew a rapid zigzag. ‘A part of the time they don’t trouble to control their baser selves. Then for a while they do and get on with the most valuable task in sight. Then they relax again. And so on another spurt. For some people the down-strokes are longer than the up, and some the reverse. That’s all I’m prepared to admit. That’s all you need to hope, it seems to me. And whatever your hopes are, they’ve got to be founded in something like the truth–’

Mr Passant was breathless and excited: ‘Mine is the truth for every life I’ve seen. It’s the truth for my own life, and no one else can speak for that. When I was a young man I did nothing but run after enjoyments and pleasures.’ He was staring at the paper on the table. It was quiet; a spurt of rain dashed against the window. ‘Sensual pleasures,’ said Mr Passant, ‘that neither of you will ever hear about, perhaps, much less be tempted with. But they were pleasures to me. Until I was a young man about your age, not quite your age exactly.’ He looked at George. ‘Then one night I had a sight of the way to go. I can never forget it, and I can never forget the difference between my state before and since. I can answer for the same change in others also. But chiefly I have to speak for myself.’

‘I have to do the same,’ said George.

They stared at each other, their faces shadowed. George’s lips were pressed tightly together.

Then Margaret, George’s youngest sister, a girl of fourteen, came in to lay the supper. And Mrs Passant, still unappeased, followed with a great metal tray.

Supper was a meal both heavy and perfunctory. There was a leg of cold overdone beef, from which Mr Passant and George ate large slices: after the potatoes were finished, we continued with the meat alone. Mrs Passant herself was eating little – to draw George’s concern, I thought. When her husband tried to persuade her, she merely smiled abruptly. His voice was entreating and anxious; for a moment, the room was pierced by unhappiness, in which, as Mr Passant leaned forward, George and the child suddenly took their share.

Nothing open was said until Margaret had gone to bed. From halfway up the stairs, she called out my Christian name. I went up, leaving the three of them alone; Margaret was explaining in her nervous, high-pitched voice that her candle had gone out and she had no matches. She kept me talking for a few moments, proud of her first timid attempt to flirt. As she cried ‘Goodnight’ down the stairs, I heard the clash of voices from below. The staircase led, through a doorway, directly into the kitchen; past the littered table, George’s face stood out in a frown of anger and pain. Mr Passant was speaking. I went back to my place; no one gave me a glance.

‘You’re putting the wrong meaning on to us,’ the words panted from Mr Passant. ‘Surely you see that isn’t our meaning, or not what we tried to mean.’

‘I can only understand it one way,’ George said. ‘You suspect the use I intend to make of my money. And in any case you claim a right to supervise it, whether you suspect me or not.’

‘We’re trying to help you, that’s all. We must try to help you. You can’t expect us to forget who you are and see you lose or waste everything.’

‘That amounts to claiming a right to interfere in my affairs. I’ve had this out too many times before. I don’t admit it for a single moment. If I make my own judgment and decide to spend every penny I receive on my own pleasures, I’m entitled to do so.’

‘We’ve seen some of your judgment,’ said Mrs Passant. George turned to her. His anger grew stronger, but with a new note of pleading: ‘Don’t you understand I can’t give way in this? I can’t give way in the life I lead or the money I spend. In the last resort, I insist of being the judge of my own actions. If that’s accepted, I’m prepared to justify the present case. I warn you that I’ve made up my mind, but I’m prepared to justify it.’

‘You’re prepared to keep other people with your money. That’s what you want to do,’ said Mrs Passant.

‘You must believe what I’ve told you till I’m tired,’ George shouted. ‘We’re only talking about this particular sum of money I propose to use in a particular way. What I’ve done in the past and what I may do in the future are utterly beside the point. This particular sum I’m not going to spend on a woman, if that’s what you’re thinking. If you won’t believe me–’

‘We believe that, we believe that,’ Mr Passant burst out. George stared at his mother.

‘Very well. Then the point is this, and nothing but this; that I’m going to spend the money on someone I’m responsible for. That responsibility is the most decent task I’m ever likely to have. So the only question is whether I can afford it or not. Nothing I’ve ever learned in this house has given me any respect for your opinions on that matter. Your only grumble could be that I shan’t be discharging my duty and making my contribution here. I admit that is a duty. I’m not trying to evade it. Have I ever got out of it except for a day or two? Have I ever got out of it since I was qualified?’

‘You’re making a song about it. By the side of what we’ve done,’ she said.

‘I want an answer. Have I ever got out of it?’

She shook her head.

‘Do you suggest I shall get out of it now?’

She said, with a sudden bitter and defenceless smile: ‘Oh, I expect you’ll go on throwing me a few shillings. Just to ease your mind before you go off with the others.’

‘Do you want every penny I earn?’

‘If you gave me every penny,’ she said, ‘you’d still only be trying to ease your mind.’

George said in a quietened, contrite tone: ‘Of course, it’s not the money. You wouldn’t worry for a single instant if my salary were cut and I couldn’t afford to find any. I ought to know’ – his face lightened into an affectionate smile – ‘that you’re just as bad with money as I am myself.’

‘I know that you can afford to find money for these other people. Just as you can afford to give them all your time. You’re putting them in the first place–’

‘It’s easy to give your money without thinking,’ said Mr Passant. ‘But that’s worse than meanness if you neglect your real duties or obligations–’

‘To hear you talk of duties,’ Mrs Passant turned on him. ‘I might have listened to that culch if I hadn’t lived with you for thirty years.’

‘I’ve left things I ought not to have left,’ said Mr Passant. ‘You’ve got a right to say that.’

‘I’m going to say, and for the last time,’ George cried, ‘that I intend to spend this money on the realest duty that I’m ever likely to find.’

Mrs Passant said to her husband: ‘You’ve never done a mortal act you didn’t want. Neither will he. I pity anyone who has to think twice about either of you.’

IT was all settled by the beginning of October. Just three weeks had passed since George first heard the news of Jack’s trouble. Now George was speaking as if those three weeks were comfortably remote; just as, in these same first days of October, he disregarded my years in the office from the moment I quit it. Even the celebratory weekend at the farm was not his idea.

The farm was already familiar ground to George’s group. Without it, in fact, we could not have become so intimate; nowhere in the town could we have made a meeting place for young men and women, some still watched by anxious families. Rachel had set to work to find a place, and found the farm. It was a great shapeless red-brick house fifteen miles from the town, standing out in remarkable ugliness among the wide rolling fields of High Leicestershire; but we did not think twice of its ugliness, since there was room to be together in our own fashion, at the price of a few shillings for a weekend. The tenants did not make much of a living from the thin soil, and were glad to put up a party of us and let us provision for ourselves.

Rachel managed everything. This Saturday afternoon, welcoming us, she was like a young wife with a new house.

She had tidied up the big, low, cold sitting-room which the family at the farm never used; she had a fire blazing for us as we arrived, in batches of two and three, after the walk from the village through the drizzling rain. She installed George in the best armchair by the fire, and the rest of us gathered round; Jack, Olive and I, Mona, a perky girl for whom George had a fancy, several more of both sexes from the School. The entire party numbered twelve, but did not include Arthur Morcom, for George was happiest when it was kept to his own group.

This afternoon he was filled with a happiness so complete, so unashamedly present in his face, that it seemed a provocation to less contented men. He lay back in his chair, smoking a pipe, being attended to; these were his friends and protégés, in each of us he had complete trust; all the bristles and guards of his defences had dropped away.

Cheerfully he did one of his parlour tricks for me. I had been invited for tea in a neighbouring village; I had lived in the county twenty years to George’s two, but it was to him I applied for the shortest cut. He had a singular memory for anything that could be put on paper, so singular that he took it for granted; he proceeded to draw a sketch map of the countryside. We assumed that each detail was exact, for no one was less capable of bluffing. He finished, with immense roars of laughter, by drawing a neat survey sign, a circle surmounted by a cross, to represent my destination; for I was visiting Sheila’s home for the first time, and George could not recover from the joke that she was the daughter of a country clergyman.

Then, just as I was going out, a thought struck him. Among this group, he was always prepared to think aloud. ‘I’m only just beginning to realise,’ said George, ‘what a wonderful invention a map is. Geography would be incomprehensible without maps. They’ve reduced a tremendous muddle of facts into something you can read at a glance. Now I suspect economics is fundamentally no more difficult than geography. Except that it’s about things in motion. If only somebody could invent a dynamic map–’