The Conscience of the Rich (19 page)

As we talked – we were not so much arguing as agreeing – I felt a curious excitement in the air. Her voice at the same time quickened and sank to something like a whisper; her blue eyes had gone wide open, were staring at me, or past me, with the kind of stare that one sees in someone who is obsessed by the thought of making love. In fact, it might have been the beginning of a love-affair.

Yet she was totally in love with Charles: I was just as single-minded in my love for Sheila: that was why Ann and I could keep up a friendship without trouble to either of us.

The excitement tightened, and I was completely at a loss. She whispered: ‘Look, Lewis. Isn’t it time you came in with us?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Isn’t it time you came into the party?’

When at last I heard the question, I thought I had been a fool. Nevertheless, up to that evening she had been discreet, even with me; she had talked like someone on the left, but so did many of our friends, none of whom were communists in theory, let alone members of what she called ‘the party’.

I looked at her. The strain had ended. She was brave, headstrong, and full of faith.

I owed her an honest answer. Trying to give it to her, I felt at a disadvantage just because she was brave and full of faith. I felt at a disadvantage, too, because I happened not to be well that night. Giving her reasons why I could not come in I did not make either a good or an honest job of it. Yet I did manage to make the one point that mattered most to me. She wasn’t as interested as I was, I told her, in the nature of power and those who held the power. The more I thought of it, the less I liked it. Any régime of her kind just had to give its bosses great power without any check. Granted that they were aiming at good things, it was still too dangerous. People with power began to get detached from anything but power itself. No one could be trusted with power for long.

For a time she argued back with the standard replies, which we both knew by heart, then she gave up.

‘You’re too cynical,’ she said.

‘I’m not in the least cynical.’

‘You’re too pessimistic.’

‘I don’t think so, in the long run.’ But I wished that my hopes were as certain as hers.

She was disappointed with me, and put out, but she wasted no more time. This was what she had come for, and she had failed. She had a business-like gift of cutting her losses. She decided that in my own fashion, I was as obstinate as she was.

She asked me to order more brandy: even after a disappointment, she liked giving me a good time. In a voice still lowered, but not excited by now, only brisk, she said: ‘You’ll keep this absolutely quiet, of course, won’t you?’

She meant about herself and the party. She spoke with trust. In the same tone I said: ‘Of course.’ I went on: ‘It’s the sort of secret I’m not bad at keeping.’

She looked at me, her face open and gentle, and said: ‘Nor am I.’

We both laughed. After the argument, we were glad to feel comradely again. She asked me (I thought it was a relief to her to be straightforward) whether I had suspected she was a member.

‘No,’ I said, and then suddenly a thought crossed my mind.

‘You’re pretty good at keeping your mouth shut, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘But that first night at Haslingfield – why did you give everyone such a hint?’

Her reply did not come at once. At last she said: ‘I think I knew already that Charles was going to be important to me.’

‘And so–’

‘And so I couldn’t let them take me in on entirely false pretences, could I?’

I was pleased to think that, at the time, I had been somewhere near the truth. There was a streak of the gambler in her. She did not like being careful; even though she had to be, it seemed to her, more than to most of us, cowardly, impure, dishonourable. It was really part of her to tell the truth. That night at Haslingfield, a cardinal night for her, she had believed she could tell the truth and get away with it.

But there was no one outside the party, apart from Charles and me, who knew that she was in it – so she told me as we finished our last drinks at the Ritz. She had made clear to Charles exactly what she did, before their affair began. That I should have expected from her: what interested me was that she had made no attempt to invite him in. She had not tried to persuade him, even to the extent she had tried with me. It seemed that she did not want to influence him. She had taken care that he knew the exact truth about her. That done, she longed just to make him happy.

Katherine put off breaking the news to her father. It was the second week in October before she told him. The family were together at Bryanston Square, and Mr March, having written his usual hundred letters for the Jewish New Year, had been grumbling because others’ greetings were so late. Katherine waited until the festival had passed by.

I had tea at Bryanston Square the day she finally brought herself to the pitch. We were alone. Francis had not long left for Cambridge, after staying the weekend in the house. She told me that she meant to face Mr March that night.

‘I’m extremely embarrassed,’ she said. ‘No, I’m more than embarrassed, I’m definitely frightened. It’s absurd to feel oneself being as frightened as this.’

She added: ‘I can’t shake off an absurd fear that when I do try to tell him, I shall find myself go absolutely dumb. I’ve been rehearsing some kind of an opening all day. To tell you the honest truth, I’ve been rehearsing it ever since Francis proposed. I never thought I should put it off as long.’

The next evening she and Charles came round to my rooms. She said at once: ‘I’ve got it over. I think it’s all right. But–’

‘It’s all right so far,’ said Charles.

Mr March had been at moments extravagantly himself, and Katherine could laugh at some of his remarks: yet she was still shaken.

Immediately after dinner she had said to Mr March, falling back on the sentence she had rehearsed:

‘I’m sorry, Mr L, but I’ve something to tell you that I’m afraid will make you rather unhappy.’

Mr March replied:

‘I hope it isn’t what I suppose it must be.’

They went into his study, and Katherine heard her own information sound blunt and cut-and-dried. It took only a minute or two, and then she said: ‘Naturally, I’m tremendously happy about it myself. I’m not going to try and hide that from you, Mr L. I’m only sorry that it’s going to make you slightly miserable.’

Mr March said: ‘Of course, I wish you’d never been born.’

Katherine felt that he was saying simply and sincerely what he meant. She felt it again, when he said:

‘My children have brought me nothing but disgrace.’

‘I know I’ve given you a lot of trouble,’ said Katherine.

‘Nothing you’ve done matters by the side of what you are informing me of now.’

‘I was afraid of that.’

‘Afraid? Afraid? You knew that you were proposing something that I should never get over. You never gave a moment’s thought to the fact that you’d make me a reproach for the rest of my life.’

‘I’ve thought of nothing else for weeks, Mr L,’ she said.

‘And you are determined to persevere?’ he shouted.

‘I can’t do anything else.’

Mr March spoke in a calmer tone: ‘I suppose I can’t stop it. He can presumably maintain you in some sort of squalor. Not that I have any objection to his profession. It’s all very well for men who are prepared to sacrifice all their material requirements. Though I can’t understand how they venture to support their wives. How much does this fellow earn?’

‘About eight hundred a year.’

‘Twopence a week,’ said Mr March. ‘It’s enough for you to contemplate existing on, unfortunately. I suppose I can’t stop it. It was exactly the same when your Aunt Hetty insisted on marrying the painter. He took to drink before they’d been married three years.’

He broke off: ‘I’m obliged to say, though I couldn’t disapprove more strongly, that I’ve no particular objection to this fellow on personal grounds. He seems quiet, and he’s surprisingly level-headed, apart from whatever proficiency he may have at his academic pursuits. I realize that he exercises himself on mountains, but he doesn’t look particularly strong.’

‘He’s as tough as I am,’ said Katherine.

‘The doctors said you were delicate when you were young,’ said Mr March. ‘They said the same about me in ’79. If they had been right in either case, I might have been spared this intolerable state of affairs you’re bringing on me. I say, I haven’t any strong personal objection to the fellow. I could put up with his poverty, since he’s pursuing a career which isn’t discreditable. I should be willing to give you my approval apart from the fact that makes it impossible, as you must have known all along. It would be different if he were a member of our religion.’

‘I realize that,’ she said.

‘What’s the use of realizing it?’ said Mr March. ‘When you come and tell me that you are determined to marry him. What’s the use of realizing it? When you’re determined to do the thing that I shall never get over.’

Then he said: ‘I know it’s not so easy for a woman to refuse. If he’d satisfied the essential condition, I shouldn’t have blamed you for accepting him on the spot. After all, you mightn’t get a second chance.’

It was strange, Katherine felt as though she were noticing it for the first time, to see his distress suddenly streaked with domestic realism. Rather excessively so in this case, she grumbled to Charles and me, since she was not quite twenty-one, ‘and not so completely repulsive as Mr L seems to assume’. In the same realistic way, he appeared to be convinced that there was nothing for him to do. He cut the interview short, and neither Charles nor Katherine saw him again that night; Katherine took Charles off to the billiard-room, and they played for hours.

In the morning they arranged to come down to breakfast at the same time. As soon as they had sat down, Mr March came in, banging the door behind him.

‘You never show the slightest consideration,’ he said. ‘You announce your intentions at night just before I’m going to bed. You might have known that it would keep me awake.’

Charles was reassured when he heard that first outburst. He tried to speak casually:

‘What is the proper time to upset you, Mr L? We should like an accurate answer for future reference.’

Mr March gave a reluctant chuckle.

‘After dinner is the worst time of all,’ said Mr March. ‘If I must have an ungrateful family, the best thing they can do is not to interfere with my health. It was exactly the same when Evelyn contracted her lamentable marriage. She was thoughtless enough to tell me at half past ten at night. So that I actually got to bed late in addition to finding it impossible to sleep.’

‘I’m extremely sorry,’ said Katherine.

‘That’s the least you should be,’ said Mr March. He turned on her: ‘You go on expressing your sorrow uselessly while you persist in making it intolerable for me to show myself in the streets.’

Charles had to intervene.

‘This comes,’ he said, ‘of letting your children bring their disreputable friends to the house.’

‘I’ve tried to consider where I’m to blame,’ said Mr March. ‘But no precautions that I might have been expected to take would have been certain to spare me from the present position.’

That afternoon Charles said that Mr March would tolerate the marriage ‘so long as no one else interferes’.

They argued about Mr March’s state of mind. How deeply had he been wounded? None of us could be certain. They were surprised that he was not more crushed. True, he had a lively affection for Francis, and respect for his accomplishments. Possessive though he was, he was instinctively too healthy a man not to want to see his daughters married. But neither Charles nor Katherine could feel sure to what extent he had been afflicted, afflicted in himself apart from finding about other people’s opinion, because Francis was not a Jew.

I did not have much doubt. I had so little doubt that to Katherine certainly, to Charles almost as much, I seemed right out of sympathy. Katherine told me flat that I could not understand. For I believed that Mr March was hurt a good deal less than by the first quarrel with Charles, at the time when he abandoned the law: and incomparably less than by the struggle over Ann and Charles’ future. The suffering he felt now was on a different level, was on the level of self-respect and his external face to the world. It was not the deep organic suffering that he knew over his son, when he felt that a part of his own being was torn away.

Both on the first day and in the week after, he seemed far more preoccupied with the family’s criticism than with any distress of his own. He became irascible and hunted, and kept exploding about the esteem he would lose as soon as the news got out. In fact, Mr March tried to delay the news getting outside the house. He did not object to seeing Francis and arranging the settlement; he greeted him with the cry: ‘I’ve nothing against you personally. But I entirely disapprove.’ Afterwards he said to Charles: ‘The astonishing thing is, he knows something about business. He doesn’t like imprudent methods any more than I do myself.’

But he invented excuses for delaying the announcement from day to day. He could not write to his relations for a few days, he said, since he had just written all round for the New Year. It might be better to wait for one of Herbert’s daughters, whose engagement was just coming out, ‘if the man doesn’t fight shy, as I strongly suspect,’ said Mr March. ‘Hannah thought she’d hooked a man once. I never believed it was possible.’ He would not put an announcement in
The Times
until he had let the family know: and he dreaded the thought of publication even more than anything Philip and Hannah and Caroline might say. For he knew himself how after the first glance at the news, he read in order the deaths, the births, and the forthcoming marriages. He could imagine too clearly how people throughout the Marches’ world would do the same one morning and suddenly ask: ‘Who’s this Francis Getliffe that’s going to marry Leonard March’s daughter? Does it mean that she can be marrying “out”?’

A fortnight passed after Katherine broke the news, and then one day Mr March ordered the car in the afternoon. It was a break in his daily timetable such as neither Charles nor Katherine could remember. His temper muttered volcanically at lunch, and he refused to say where he was going. At night they realized that he had at last confessed to his sister Caroline.