The Conscience of the Rich (22 page)

We both noticed that Katherine suddenly looked very tired. Charles told her so; she was too much excited to deny it, and went obediently, first to the telephone and then to bed.

Charles’ smile, as we heard the final tinkle of the call, and then her step upstairs, was tender towards her. His whole expression was open and happy: yet, despite the tender smile, it was not gentle. It was open and fiercely happy. He jumped up and went to the window. His movements were full of energy.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I think it has cleared up now. I’d very much like a stroll. Do you think you could bear it?’

It was just such a night as that on which we walked home after the coming-out dance. The rain had stopped: there was a smell of wet leaves from the garden in the square. The smell recalled to Charles the excitement, the misgivings, the promise of that night, as well as the essence of other nights, forgotten now. In an instant he was overcome by past emotion, and did not want to speak.

It was some time before I broke the silence.

‘So you think Katherine is safe?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Charles. ‘It’s quite true what I told her. I think the wedding would have come off without any more trouble – any more trouble in the open, anyway. But I’m glad I talked to them. Uncle Philip did seem to be placated. He was completely surprised about Ann. He said that I’d never been seen with her in public. He couldn’t remember hearing anyone in the family couple our names together.’

Charles smiled. He broke off: ‘By the way, he is very angry about this Getliffe business. I suppose he’s sufficiently patriarchal to feel that all attachments to the family ought to come up to his standard of propriety. That must be the reason, don’t you agree? It pleased him more than you’d think, when I said that Porson had probably got tired of his own indignation.’

Charles went on: ‘And Uncle Philip was genuinely delighted about Ann. He decided that she would be a credit to us. He also said’ – Charles laughed – ‘that he did hear she was a bit of a crank, but he didn’t take that seriously.’

‘And Mr L?’

Charles hesitated.

‘He was not so pleased. Did you expect him to be?’

‘What did he say?’

‘Something rather strange. Something like – “I always knew it was inevitable. I have no objections to raise”.’

In a moment, he said: ‘Of course he was extremely glad that Uncle Philip is coming round. That is going to be the most important thing for him.’

Then Charles broke into his good-natured, malicious grin: ‘It struck me as pleasing that I should be soothing the family. It struck me as even more pleasing that I should be doing it by announcing that I intended to marry in as orthodox a manner as my father did.’ The malicious smile still flickered. ‘There is also a certain beauty,’ he reflected, ‘in the fact that, after all the fuss I’ve made from time to time, I should be eager to tell my father so.’

‘Ah well,’ he said, ‘it’s settled. It is superb to have it settled.’

Just as when he saw Ann at Haslingfield he smiled because he had first met her at the Jewish dance – so tonight he was amused that he of all men, who had once winced at the word ‘Jew’, should now be parading his engagement to a Jewess, should be insisting to his father that he was conforming as a Jewish son. It was a sarcastic touch of fate completely in his style; but it was more than that.

All of a sudden I realized why he had been so fiercely happy that day, why he had gained a release of energy, why as he walked with me he felt that his life was in his own hands. To him the day had been a special one – though all the rest of us had had our attention fixed on Katherine and her father, and had forgotten Charles except as a tactful influence in the background.

In Charles’ own mind, the day marked the end of the obsession which had preyed on him since he was a child. It marked the death of a shame. He felt absolutely free. Everything seemed open to him. He felt his whole nature to be fresh, simple, and at one.

We walked across Bayswater Road and into the Park. His stride was long and full of spring. He was talking eagerly, of his future with Ann, of what he hoped to do. He was more spontaneous, frank, and trustful than I had ever known him. He had forgotten, or put aside for the night, any thought of his conflict with his father over Ann.

In the darkness I listened to his voice, lively, resonant, happy. I thought of this shame which had occupied so much of his conscious life. It had gone, so it seemed to him, because he had fallen in love with Ann, and thus that evening could tell his father, with unqualified happiness, that he was going to marry her – and, more than that, could use the fact that he was marrying a Jewess in order to ease the way for Katherine.

So Charles was talking with boyish spontaneity, completely off his guard, his secrecies thrown away. I felt a great affection for him. Perhaps the affection was greater because I did not see his state that night quite as he did himself. For me there was something unprotected about his openness and confidence.

I remembered his confession when he gave up the law. I had felt two things then, and I felt them more acutely now: that this shame had tormented him, and that at the same time he had used it as an excuse. Charles would always, I thought, have been prouder and more self-distrustful, harsher and more vulnerable to shame, than most of us. In his youth, he would in any case have gone through his torments. But even he, for all his insight, wanted to mollify and excuse them. Even he found it difficult to recognize his sadic harshness, his self-distrust, above all his vulnerability, as part of his essential ‘I’.

Some years before, I had had a friend, George Passant, who put the blame for the diffidence and violence of his character on to his humble origin. His vision of himself was more self-indulgent than Charles’. Yet Charles’ insight did not prevent him from seizing at a similar excuse. He had felt passionately, as we have all felt, that everything would have been possible for him, life would have been utterly harmonious, he would have been successful and good ‘if only it had not been for this accident’. Charles had felt often enough ‘I should have been free, I should have had my fate in my hands – if only I had not been born a Jew.’

It was not true. It was an excuse. Even to himself it was an excuse which could not endure. For his vulnerability (unlike George Passant’s) was of the kind that is mended by time; for years the winces of shame had become less sharp. It seemed to him that by telling his father and Philip he was marrying a Jewess he had conquered his obsession. I should have said that it was conquered by the passing of time itself and the flow of life. In any case, he could no longer believe in the excuse. That night for him signalized the moment of release, which really had been creeping on imperceptibly for years.

He was light with his sense of release. He felt that night that now he was truly free.

That was why I was stirred by a rush of affection for him. For he would be more unprotected in the future than he had been when the excuse still dominated him. In cold blood, when the light and warmth of release had died down, he would be left face to face with his own nature. Tonight he could feel fresh, simple, and at one; tomorrow he would begin to see again the contradictions within.

Up till the day of the wedding, rumours still ran through the family, but I heard from Charles that Philip had sent an expensive present. I also heard on the wedding morning that Mr March was in low spirits but ‘curiously relieved’ to be getting ready to go to the register office.

When I arrived at Bryanston Square after the wedding, to which not even his brothers were invited, I thought Mr March was beginning to enjoy himself. Nearly all the family had come to the reception and, soon after being ‘disgorged from obscurity’ (his way of referring to the marriage in a register office) he seemed able to forget that this was different from any ordinary wedding.

In the drawing-room Mr March stood surrounded by his relatives. There were at least a hundred people there: the furniture had been removed and trestle-tables installed round two of the walls and under the windows, in order to carry the presents. The presents were packed tightly and arranged according to an order of precedence that had cost Katherine, in the middle of her suspense, considerable anxiety; for, having breathed in that atmosphere all her life, she could not help but know the heart-burnings that Aunt Caroline would feel if her Venetian glasses (‘she hasn’t done you very handsomely,’ said Mr March, who made no pretence about what he considered an unsatisfactory present) were not placed near the magnificent Flemish tapestry from the Herbert Marches, or Philip’s gift of a Ming vase.

The tables glittered with silver and glass; it was an assembly of goods as elaborate, costly, ingenious, and beautiful as London could show. At any rate, Mr March considered that the presents ‘came up to expectations’. Hannah, so someone reported, had decided that they ‘weren’t up to much’; but, as that had been her verdict in all the March weddings that Mr March could remember, it merely reassured him that his daughter’s was not continuously regarded as unique.

There were few of those absences of presents which had embarrassed the cousin whose daughter married a Gentile twenty years before. ‘That appears to be ancient history,’ said Mr March to Katherine, when presents had arrived from all his close relations and some of his fears proved groundless. The two or three lacunae among his cousins he received robustly: ‘George is using his religious scruples to save his pocket. Not that he’s saving much – judging from the knick-knack that he sent to Philip’s daughter.’ At the reception itself, he repeated the retort to Philip himself, and they both chuckled.

Philip had already gone out of his way to be affable. He had greeted Ann with special friendliness, and had even given a stiff smile towards Herbert Getliffe. He seemed set, in the midst of the family, on suppressing the rumours of the last fortnight.

Mr March responded at once to the signs of friendship. He began to refer with cheerfulness and affection to ‘my son-in-law at Cambridge’, meaning Francis, who was standing with Katherine a few feet away. A large knot of Mr March’s brothers and sisters and their children had gathered round him, and he was drawn into higher spirits as the audience grew.

‘I refuse to disclose my contribution,’ he said, after Philip had been chaffing him about the absence of any present of his own. Everyone knew that Mr March had given them a house, but he had decided not to admit it. Philip was taking advantage of the old family legend that Leonard was particularly close with money.

‘You might have produced half a dozen fish forks,’ said Philip.

‘I refuse to accept responsibility for their diet,’ said Mr March. ‘I gave Hetty some decanters for her wedding and she always blamed me for the regrettable events afterwards.’

‘You could have bought them something for their house,’ said Herbert.

‘You could have passed on a piece of your surplus furniture,’ said Philip. ‘So long as Katherine’s forgotten that you ever owned it.’

‘There must have been something you could have bought for the house,’ said Herbert’s wife.

Mr March chuckled, and went off at a tangent. ‘They insist on living in some residence in the provinces, owing to the nature of my son-in-law’s occupation–’

Katherine interrupted ‘I wish you wouldn’t make it sound like coal-mining, Mr L.’ But he was sailing on:

‘A month ago I went to inspect some of their possible places of abode. My son Charles told me the eleven-fifty went from King’s Cross, and it goes from Liverpool Street, of course. However, I never had the slightest faith in his competence; naturally I had consulted the time-table before I asked him, and so arrived at the station in comfortable time. Incidentally, in twenty-five minutes my daughter and son-in-law will be compelled to leave to catch the boat train. On my honeymoon I had already left for the train at the corresponding time, allowing for the additional slowness of the cab as a means of conveyance. People always say Mentone is a particularly quiet resort, but I’ve never found it so. The first time I visited it was on my honeymoon with its general air of unrest. The second time my wife had some jewellery stolen and I was compelled to undergo some interviews with a detective. I never had any confidence in him, but the jewellery was returned several months later. The third time passed without incident. Having arrived despite Charles’ attempt to make my journey impossible–’

‘Where? When?’ shouted several of his audience.

‘At my daughter’s future domicile in the provinces. On the occasion under discussion,’ replied Mr March without losing way, ‘I proceeded to inspect the three residences which were considered possibilities by the couple principally concerned–’ Philip and the others threw in remarks, they gave Mr March the centre of the stage, and he was letting himself go.

Then, just after he had triumphantly ended that story and begun another, he looked across the room. Outside the large noisy crowd over which his own voice was prevailing, there were two or three knots of people, not so full of gusto – and Ann by the window, talking to Margaret March.

Mr March broke off his story, hesitated, and watched them. As Mr March stared at Ann, the room happened to become quiet. Mr March said loudly: ‘I’ve scarcely spoken to my future daughter-in-law. I must go and have a word with her.’

Slightly flushed, he crossed the room, swinging his arms in his quick, awkward gait.

‘Why haven’t you talked to me, young woman? Why am I being deserted on this public occasion?’

He took her to the centre of the carpet, and there they stood.

Mr March showed no sign at all of the gallant, elaborately courteous manner which he had first used to her in company. He was speaking to her, here in public view, intimately, simply, brusquely.

‘I shall have to see about your own wedding before long,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Ann.

‘The sooner the better,’ said Mr March. ‘Since we are to be related in this manner.’

Ann looked at him. His expression had become sad and resigned. His head was bent down in a posture unlike his normal one, a posture dejected, subdued.