The Conscience of the Rich (14 page)

One afternoon in January, I went to tea at Bryanston Square and discovered that Charles had just confided in Katherine. I discovered it through their habit of repeating themselves. When I arrived, they were talking of a rumour that Aunt Caroline had been making enquiries about Francis Getliffe: how often did he go to Bryanston Square? How often did he go when Charles was otherwise engaged? Katherine was agitated and excited. There was another rumour that Caroline was considering whether she ought to speak to Mr March. Was it true? Then Katherine said, harking back to what they had been saying:

‘I suppose he won’t mind this idea of yours. Don’t you agree that he won’t mind it?’

‘Can you give me a good reason why he should?’

‘It will be a shock to him, you realize that?’ she said. She looked at me, and went on: ‘Does Lewis know anything about this, by the way?’

‘He’s had a bit of warning.’ Charles then said to me: ‘I’ve told Katherine this afternoon that I’m going to try to become a doctor.’

Since that hint in my room he had not asked my advice nor anyone else’s. Only Ann had been inside his secret. He was presenting us, just as he had done when he gave up the law, with a resolution already made. By the time he told us, it was made once for all, and the rest of us could take it or leave it.

Katherine was frowning. ‘I can’t understand why you should do this.’

‘It isn’t as difficult as all that, is it?’

‘You could do so many things.’

‘I’ve evaded them so far with singular success,’ said Charles.

‘Is it the best scheme?’ Katherine said. ‘Don’t you think he’ll be wasted, Lewis?’

‘It’s exactly to prevent myself being wasted that I’ve thought of this.’ Charles looked at her with a sarcastic, affectionate grin. ‘I agree, I wouldn’t like to feel that I had wasted my time altogether. The chief advantage of becoming a doctor is precisely that it might prevent me doing that. I shall still be some use in a dim way even if I turn out to be completely obscure. It’s the only occupation I can find where you can be absolutely undistinguished and still flatter yourself a bit.’

‘That’s all very well for one of nature’s saints,’ said Katherine. ‘But are you sure it’s your line?’

Charles did not answer. He hesitated. He was embarrassed. Sharply, he went on to a new line:

‘I’ve told you, there’s a perfectly good practical reason. You both know, I’m hoping that Ann will marry me. We’ve got to look a reasonable way ahead. I suppose Mr L will make me independent when I’m twenty-five, that is in April. He’s always promised to do that, or when I marry, “whichever shall be the earlier”, as he insists on saying. And I suppose I shall come into his money in time. But don’t you see? I daren’t count on any of this lasting many years. If I come into Mr L’s money, I daren’t count on that lasting many years. Too much may happen in the world. It’s not exactly likely we shall be able to live on investments all our lives. Well, I think there’s more security as a doctor than as anything else I could take up. Whatever happens to the world, it’s rather unlikely that a doctor will starve.’

Those words sounded strange, in the drawing-room at Bryanston Square, from the heir to one of the March fortunes. But we had already begun to speak in those terms. On this winter evening when Charles was talking, such an anxiety seemed, of course, remote, not quite real, not comparable for an instant with that which Katherine felt when she saw a letter from Aunt Caroline waiting for Mr March.

When Charles told Mr March a few days later, he gave the same justification – the desire to be some use, the need to be secure, though he did not mention Ann’s name.

For some time, Charles’ insight failed him; he did not understand how his father had responded. Mr March began by opposing: but that was nothing unusual, and Charles was not disturbed. Mr March’s first remarks were on the plane of reason. He put forward entirely sensible arguments why Charles could not hope to become a doctor. He was nearly twenty-five. At best he would be well into the thirties before he was qualified. He had had no serious scientific education, and was, like all the Marches, clumsy with his hands. It would be an intolerable self-discipline to go through years of uncongenial study. ‘You might begin it,’ said Mr March, ‘but you’d give it up after a few months. You’ve never shown the slightest disposition to persevere with anything when you’re not interested. You’ve never shown the slightest disposition to persevere with anything at all. I refuse to believe that you’re remotely capable of it.’

That was the end of the first discussion. Mr March’s tone had become not quite so reasonable. As never before in all their quarrels over his career, Charles heard a gibe behind it. Mr March used to speak about his son’s idleness with sympathy and regret. For the first time a gibe sprang out, harsh, almost triumphant.

Even so, Charles was slow to see what Mr March was feeling. The arguments went on, and became angrier. Mr March ceased to speak with caution; he was behaving not like a man troubled, or even sad and wounded, but one in a storm of savage distress. It seemed fantastic, but at last Charles had to admit that he had not seen his father in a state as dark as this before.

When Charles told me about it, he was enough upset to stay late in my room, retracing the arguments, trying to find a motive for Mr March’s behaviour. Charles was having to guard his own temper. He was resentful because he had provoked a response like this – a response deeper, angrier, and more ravaged than anyone in his senses could have expected.

It was no use my telling Charles that this was a torment of passion; he knew that as well and better than I did. He knew too that, as with so many of the torments of passion, Mr March’s distress was bitter out of all proportion to what appeared to have provoked it. It seemed just like love, I thought to myself, when a trivial neglect, such as not receiving a letter for a day or two, may suddenly make one seethe with anguish and hatred: the event, of course, being a trigger and not a cause. So Mr March heard Charles say that he was going to abandon a life of idleness and become a doctor, and was immediately shaken by passion such as no other action of his son had ever roused.

For day after day he got less controlled, not more. One night Charles was so worn down that I walked back with him, some time after one in the morning, to Bryanston Square. As we stood outside, he asked if I would mind coming in, he would like to go on talking. Before we had sat five minutes in the drawing-room, there was a heavy shuffle outside and Mr March pushed open the door.

Just by itself his appearance would have been bizarre. He was wearing red square-toed slippers and a bright-blue dressing-gown on which glittered rising-sun decorations, as though he was covered with the insignia of an unknown order. But the extraordinary thing about him was his face. For some reason difficult to understand, he had covered his eyelids, the skin under the eyes, in fact all the skin within the orbital area, with white ointment. He looked something like the end-man in an old-fashioned minstrel show.

He was scowling: his courtesy had been swept away, and he entered the room without any sign that I existed. He said to Charles: ‘I’ve been considering the observations you insist on making–’

‘Can’t we leave it for tonight, Mr L?’ Charles’ tone was tired, but even-tempered and respectful.

‘We can only leave it if you abandon your ridiculous intentions. I should like to be assured that that is what you are now proposing.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘In that case I want to inform you again that your intentions are nothing but a ridiculous fit of crankiness. I’ve listened to your maunderings about wanting your life to be useful. Herbert never maundered as crankily as that, to do him justice, which shows what you’ve come down to. I should like to know why you consider it’s specially incumbent on you to decide in what particular fashion your life ought to be useful.’

‘I’ve told you, I shouldn’t be on terms with myself–’

‘Stuff and nonsense. Why are you specially competent to decide that one man’s life is useful and another’s isn’t? Was my father’s life useful? Is my brother Philip’s? Is John’s [the butler’s]? I suppose that I’m expected to believe that my brother Philip’s life isn’t as useful as any twopenny ha’penny practitioner’s.’

Charles stayed silent. Mr March flapped the arms of his dressing-gown and his eyes were furious in their white surround.

‘Is that what I am expected to believe?’ he cried.

‘I don’t expect you to believe it for yourself, Mr L,’ said Charles with restraint. ‘I don’t expect you to believe it for Uncle Philip. All I want you to accept is that it does happen to be true for me.’

‘All I want you to accept,’ shouted Mr March, ‘is that it is a piece of pernicious cranky nonsense.’

The furore in the room made it hard to stay still. Yet it was true that Mr March could not credit that a balanced man should want to go to extravagant lengths to feel that his life was useful. He could not begin to understand the sense of social guilt, the sick conscience, which were real in Charles. To Mr March, who by temperament accepted life as it was, who was solid in the rich man’s life of a former day, such a reason seemed just perverse. He could not believe that his son’s temperament was at this point radically different from his own.

Without warning he began a new attack – from Charles’ expression new to him, not only new but beyond comparison more offensive.

‘I’ve been considering the origin of this pernicious nonsense,’ said Mr March. His tone had suddenly dropped, not to a conversational level, but to something lower, like a hard whisper. It was a tone completely unexpected, coming from him, and the effect was jarring, almost sinister.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Charles.

‘I refuse to be persuaded that you came to these ridiculous conclusions by yourself.’

‘What do you mean to suggest?’

For the first time, Charles had raised his voice. Mr March kept his low.

‘I have been considering how many of these conclusions can be attributed to another person.’

‘Who would that be?’ Charles burst out.

‘My guest of last summer. Ann Simon.’

Mr March had not seen her since Haslingfield. Charles had told him nothing of their meetings: her name had been mentioned very seldom. Yet all of a sudden Mr March showed that he had been thinking of her with suspicion, with an elaborate, harsh, and jealous suspicion.

‘Is she or is she not,’ Mr March said, in a grating, obsessed tone, ‘the daughter of a practitioner herself?’

‘Of course she is.’

‘Is she or is she not the kind of young woman who would encourage a man to go in for highfalutin nonsense?’

‘Don’t you think this had better stop straight away?’ Charles said.

‘Has she or has she not attempted to seduce you into adopting her own pestilential opinions?’

White with anger, Charles stood up, and went towards the door. For the first time that night, Mr March addressed a remark to me:

‘Isn’t this young woman set on making my son what she’d have the insolence to call a useful member of society?’

I did not reply, and in an instant Mr March was asking another obsessed question at Charles’ back.

‘How many times have you seen her since she visited my house?’

Charles turned round. Trying to command himself, he said, with dignity, with something like affection: ‘It will be worse if we don’t leave it, don’t you see?’

‘How many times,’ cried Mr March, ‘have you seen her this last week?’

Charles looked at him, and to my astonishment Mr March said nothing more, did not wait for an answer, but rushed out of the room, his slippers scuffling.

The next day, however, Mr March repeated the questions again. Charles became enraged. At last his control broke down. He said curtly that there was no point in talking further. Without an explanation or excuse, he went out of the house.

When Charles had left, Mr March was subdued for a few hours. He did not know where his son had gone. His fury returned and he vented it on Katherine. ‘Why hasn’t Ann Simon been invited to my house?’ he burst into the drawing-room shouting. ‘I hold you responsible for not inviting her. If she had visited my house, I could have stopped this foolery before it showed signs of danger. I tell you, I insist on Ann Simon being invited here at once. I insist on seeing her before the weekend.’

Katherine invited her, but had to report to Mr March that Ann replied she was busy every day that week and could not come. Mr March did not say another angry word to Katherine. His silence was sombre and brooding.

For forty-eight hours after he left Bryanston Square, no one knew where Charles was. Katherine was distracted with anxiety; on the second afternoon, Ann rang me up and asked if I could tell her anything. There had not been a silence between them before.

He came to my rooms that night. I had taken a brief home from chambers and was still working on it at ten o’clock. I had not heard him on the stairs, and the first I knew was that he stood inside the room, the shoulders of his coat glistening from the rain.

‘May I sleep on your sofa tonight?’ he asked. He was tired, he wanted the question to be accepted as casually as he tried to ask it. In order to prevent any talk of himself, he asked what I was doing, picked up the brief and read it with his intense and penetrating attention. He had begun to read before he threw off his overcoat; he stood on the carpet where, only a month before, I had seen him sit at Ann’s feet by the fire.

‘What line are you taking?’ he asked. ‘Have you got anything written down?’

I gave him my sketch of the case. He read it, still with abnormal concentration. He looked at me, his eyes bright with a smile both contemptuous and resentful.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You ought to win it that way. Unless you show more than usual incompetence when you get on your feet. But you oughtn’t to be satisfied with the case you’ve made, don’t you realize that? I should say you’re doing it slightly better than the average young counsel at your stage. Do you think that’s fair? I know you’re cleverer than this attempt suggests. But I sometimes wonder whether you’ll ever convey to the people in authority how clever you really are. You’re missing the chance to make this case slightly more impressive than your previous ones, don’t you admit it? If you just look here, you’ll see–’