The Conscience of the Rich Read online

  We had just left a coffee stall. Charles carried a mackintosh over his arms, he was stooping a little. He had begun to talk about the characters of Alyosha and Father Zossima. Didn’t I think that no other writer but Dostoyevsky could have conveyed goodness in people as one feels it in them? That this was almost the only writer who had an immediate perception of goodness? Why could we accept it from him and doubt it from anybody else?

  I could feel the fascination goodness held for him. I recognized what he meant; but at that age I should not have thought of it for myself. We began to argue, with a mixture of exasperation and understanding that often flared up between us. On the one side: isn’t it just sentimentality carried out with such touch and such psychological imagination that we swallow it whole? On the other: aren’t people like that, even if we choose to see their motives differently, even if we are sceptical about what goodness really means? Then Charles turned to me: his eyes were brighter than ever. They were dark grey, very sharp and intelligent.

  ‘We’re each feeling the other’s right,’ he said. ‘The next time I talk about this, I shall appropriate most of what you’re saying now – if you’re safely out of the way. And you’ll do the same, don’t you admit it?’

  As each day passed in chambers, I looked forward to the evening; but slowly I was managing to occupy myself, and I discovered several odd jobs to do for Getliffe, who soon began to keep me busy. It became clear that Charles was still idle. He seemed to be reading scarcely any law, and I knew quite early that he was unhappy about his career. He spoke of Hart with a kind of lukewarm respect, but was far more eager to hear my stories of Getliffe.

  During those months, I still did not know when to expect Charles’ concealments. His family, childhood – yes, as we spoke the blank came between us. About women and love and sex, he was franker than I was and knew more. He was not in love, I was: but we talked without any guards at all. When I spoke about my future, my hopes, he listened; if I asked him his, the secretiveness came back as though I had switched off a light. As an evasion he threw himself with intense vicarious interest into my relations with Herbert Getliffe.

  As it happened, Getliffe was a tempting person to gossip about. It was hard not to be captivated by him occasionally: it was even harder not to speculate about his intentions, particularly if they had any effect on one’s livelihood. I knew that, the first time he interviewed me in chambers, after I had already arranged to become his pupil. He was late for the appointment, and I waited in his room; it was a rainy summer afternoon, and looking down from the window I saw the empty gardens and the river. Getliffe hurried in, dragging his feet, his lip pushed out in an apologetic grin. Suddenly his expression changed into a fixed gaze from brown and lively eyes.

  ‘Don’t tell me your name,’ he said. His voice was a little strident, he was short of breath. ‘You’re Ellis–’ I corrected him. As though he had not heard my correction at all, he was saying ‘You’re Eliot.’ Soon he was telling me: ‘I make it a principle to take people like you. Who’ve started with nothing but their brains.’

  He chuckled, suddenly, as though we were jointly doing someone down: ‘It keeps the others up to it.’

  ‘And’ – his moods were quick, he was serious and full of responsibility again – ‘we’ve got a duty towards you. One’s got to look at it like that.’

  Inside a quarter of an hour he had exhorted, advised, warned, and encouraged me. He finished up: ‘As for the root of all evil – I shall have to charge you the ordinary pupil’s fees. Hundred pounds for this year. This year only. You can pay in quarters. The advantage of the instalment system is that we can reconsider it for the fourth. If you’ve earned a bit of bread and butter before then.’ He smiled, protruding his lip and saying: ‘Yes! The labourer is worthy of his hire.’

  I told Charles of this conversation in my first week in London. He said: ‘His brother was a friend of mine at Cambridge. By the way, he’s singularly unlike him. I was taken to dinner with your Herbert once, last year. Of course, he was the life and soul of the party. The point is, when he was talking to you I’m sure he believed every word he said. That’s his strength. Don’t you feel that’s his strength?’

  He added a few minutes later: ‘I wish I’d known you were going to him, though.’

  Then he knew he had made me more anxious: for the unreliability of Getliffe’s temperament was one of those disagreeable truths which I could admit equably enough to myself, but was hurt to hear from anyone else. He said quickly: ‘I really meant you might have done better at the Chancery Bar. But it’ll make no difference. He’ll be better in some ways than a solid cautious man could possibly be. It’ll even itself out. It won’t affect you too much, you agree, don’t you?’

  If I had mentioned it to Charles in the summer, he would have sent me to some other chambers, and I should have been spared a good deal. For this year, however, there were certain advantages in being with Getliffe. Quite early in the autumn, he began fetching me into his room two or three times each week. ‘How’s it going?’ he would say, and when I mentioned a case, he would expound with a cheerful, invigorating enthusiasm, more often than not getting the details a trifle wrong (that first slip with my name was typical of his compendious but fuzzy memory). Then he would produce some papers for me: ‘I’d like a note on that by the end of the week. Just to keep you from rusting.’

  Often there were several days’ work in one of those notes, and it was only by not meeting Charles and sitting up late that I could deliver it in time. Getliffe would glance through the pages, take them in with his quick, sparkling eyes, and say affably: ‘You’re getting on! You’re getting on!’

  The first time it happened, I was surprised to find the substance of one of those drafts of mine appearing in the course of an opinion of his own. In most places he had not even altered the words.

  The weeks went by, the new year arrived: and still Charles had told me little about himself. He had said no more about his family; he had never suggested that I should visit them. He offered no explanation, not even an excuse to save my face. It seemed strange, after he had taken such subtle pains over the most trivial things. It could not be reconciled with all the kind, warm-hearted, patient friendliness I had received at his hands.

  At last he asked me. We were having tea in my room on a January afternoon. He spoke in a tone different from any I had heard him use: not diffident or anxious, but cold, as though angry that I was there to receive the invitation.

  ‘I wonder if you would care to dine at my father’s house next week?’

  I looked at him. Neither of us spoke for a moment. Then he said: ‘It might interest you to see the inside of a Jewish family.’

  3: Mr March with His Children

  At the time, Charles was so distressed that I hurried to accept and then turn the conversation away. It was later before I could think over my surprise. For I had been surprised: although as soon as I heard him speak, I thought myself a fool for not having guessed months before.

  I remembered hearing Getliffe chat about ‘the real Jewish upper deck. They’re too aristocratic for the likes of us, Eliot’ – and now I realized that he was referring to Charles. As it happened, however, I had known scarcely a single Jew up to the time I came to London. In the midland town where I was born, there had been a few shops with Jewish names over them; but I could not remember my parents and their friends even so much as mention a Jewish person. There were none living in the suburban backstreets: nor, when I got my first invitations from professional families, were there any there.

  I could think of just one exception. It was a boy in my form at the grammar school. He stayed at the school only a year or two: he was not clever, and left early: but for the first term, before we were arranged in order of examination results, we shared the same desk because our names came next to each other in the list.

  He was a knowing, cheerful little boy who brought large packets of curious boiled sweets to school every Monday morning and gave me a shar
e in the midday break. In Scripture lessons he retired to the back of the class, and studied a primer on Hebrew. He assumed sometimes an air of mystery about the secrets written in the Hebrew tongue; it was only as a great treat, and under solemn promises never to divulge it, that I gained permission to borrow the primer in order to learn the alphabet.

  I remembered him with affection. He was small, dark, hook-nosed, his face already set in more adult lines than most of ours in the form. It was an ugly, amiable, precocious face; and on that one acquaintance, so it seemed, I had built up in my mind a standard of Jewish looks.

  When I met Charles, it never occurred to me to compare him. He was tall and fair; his face was thin, with strong cheekbones; many people thought him handsome. After one knew that he was a Jew, it became not too difficult to pick out features that might conceivably be ‘typical’. For a face so fine-drawn his nostrils spread a little more than one would expect, and his under-lip stood out more fully. But that was like water-divining, I thought, the difficulties of which were substantially reduced if one knew where the water was. After mixing with the Marches and their friends and knowing them for years, I still sometimes wondered whether I should recognize Charles as a Jew if I now saw him for the first time.

  I paid my first visit to Bryanston Square on a clear cold February night. I walked the mile and a half from my lodgings: along Wigmore Street the shops were locked, their windows shining: in the side-streets, the great houses stood dark, unlived-in now. Then streets and squares, cars by the kerb, lighted windows: at last I was walking round the square, staring up at numbers, working out how many houses before the Marches’.

  I arrived at the corner house; over the portico there was engraved the inscription, in large plain letters, 17 BRYANSTON SQUARE.

  A footman opened the door, and the butler took my overcoat. With a twinge of self-consciousness, I thought it was probably the cheapest he had received for years. He led the way to the drawing-room, and Charles was at once introducing me to his sister Katherine, who was about four years younger than himself. As she looked at me, her eyes were as bright as his; in both of them, they were the feature one noticed first. Her expression was eager, her skin fresh. At a first sight, it looked as though Charles’ good looks had been transferred to a fuller, more placid face.

  ‘I’ve been trying to bully Charles into taking me out to meet you,’ she said after a few moments. ‘You were becoming rather a legend, you know.’

  ‘You’re underestimating your own powers,’ Charles said to her.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ve cross-questioned me about Lewis. You’ve done everything but track me. I never realized you had so much character.’

  ‘It was the same with his Cambridge friends,’ said Katherine. ‘He was just as secretive. It’s absolutely monstrous having him for a brother – if one happens to be an inquisitive person.’

  She had picked up some of his tricks of speech. One could not miss the play of sympathy and affection between them. Charles was laughing, although he stood about restlessly waiting for their father to come in.

  Katherine answered questions before I had asked them, as she saw my eyes looking curiously round the room. It was large and dazzlingly bright, very full of furniture, the side-tables and the far wall cluttered with photographs; opposite the window stood a full-length painting of Charles as a small boy. He was dressed for riding, and was standing against a background of the Row. The colouring was the reverse of timid – the hair bright gold, cheeks pink and white, eyes grey.

  ‘He was rather a beautiful little boy, wasn’t he?’ she said. ‘No one ever thought of painting me at that age. Or at any other, as far as that goes. I was a useful sensible shape from the start.’

  Charles said: ‘The reason they didn’t paint you was that ‘Mr L’ – (their father’s first name was Leonard and I had already heard them call him by his nickname) – ‘decided that there wasn’t much chance of your surviving childhood anyway. And if he tempted fortune by having you painted, he was certain that you’d be absolutely condemned to death.’

  I inspected the photographs on the far wall. They were mostly nineteenth-century, some going back to daguerreotype days.

  ‘I can’t help about those,’ said Katherine. ‘I don’t know anything about them. I’m no good at ancestor worship.’ She said it sharply, decisively.

  Then she returned, with the repetitiveness that I was used to in Charles, to the reasons why she had not been painted – anxious to leave nothing to doubt, anxious not to be misunderstood.

  It was now about a minute to eight, and Mr March came in. He came in very quickly, his arms swinging and his head lowered. As we shook hands, he smiled at me shyly and with warmth. He was bald, but the hair over his ears was much darker than his children’s; his features were not so clear cut as theirs. His nose was larger, spread-out, snub, with a thick black moustache under it. When he spoke, he produced gestures that were lively, active, and peculiarly clumsy. They helped make his whole manner simple and direct – to my surprise, for I had expected him to seem formidable at once. But I had only to watch his eyes, even though the skin round them was reddened and wrinkled, to see they had once looked like Charles’ and Katherine’s and were still as sharp.

  He was wearing a dinner jacket, though none of the rest of us had dressed. Charles had several times told me not to. Mr March noticed my glance.

  ‘You mustn’t mind my appearance,’ he said. ‘I’m too old to change my ways. You’re all too bohemian for me. But when my children refuse to bring any of their friends to see their aged parent if they have to make themselves uncomfortable, I’m compelled to stretch a point. I’d rather have you not looking like a penguin than not at all.’

  The butler opened the door; we followed Katherine in to dinner. After blinking under the mass of candelabras in the drawing-room, I blinked again, for the opposite reason: for we might have been going into the shadows of a billiard-hall. The entire room, bigger even than the one we had just left, was lit only at the table and by a few wall-lights. On the walls I dimly saw paintings of generations of the family; later I discovered that the earliest, a picture of a dark full-bearded man, was finished in the 1730s, just after the family settled in England.

  I sat on Mr March’s left opposite Katherine, with Charles at my side; we took up only a segment of the table. A menu card lay by Mr March’s place; he read it out to us with gusto and satisfaction: ‘clear soup, fillets of sole, lamb cutlets, caramel mousse, mushrooms on toast.’

  The food was very good. Mr March began talking to me about Herbert Getliffe and the Bar; he already knew something of my career.

  ‘My nephew Robert used to be extremely miserable when he was in your position,’ said Mr March. ‘My brother-in-law warned him he’d got to wait for his briefs, but Robert always was impatient, and I used to see him being disgorged from theatres every time I took my wife out for a spree. One night I met him on the steps of the St James’s–’

  ‘What’s going to theatres got to do with his being impatient, Mr L?’ Katherine was beginning to laugh.

  Mr March, getting into his stride, charged into a kind of anecdote that I was not ready for. I had read descriptions of total recall: Mr March got nearer to it than anyone I had heard. Each incident that he remembered seemed as important as any other incident (this meeting with his nephew Robert was completely casual and happened over twenty years before): and he remembered them all with extravagant vividness. Time did not matter; something which happened fifty years ago suggested something which happened yesterday.

  I was not ready for that kind of anecdote, but his children were. They set him after false hares, they interrupted, sometimes all three were talking at once. I found myself infected with Mr March’s excitement, even anxious in case he should not get back to his starting-point.

  Listening to the three of them for the first time, I felt dazed. Mr March’s anecdotes were packed with references to his relatives and members of their large i
nter-married families. Occasionally these were explained, but usually taken for granted. He and his children had naturally loud voices, and in each other’s presence they became louder still. Between Mr March and Charles I could feel a current of strain; perhaps between Mr March and Katherine also, I did not know; but the relations of all three were very close.

  I kept looking from one to another of the clever, energetic, mobile faces. I knew that Charles had regretted inviting me; that, as we waited for his father to come in, he wished the evening were already over; yet now he was more alive than I had ever seen him.

  ‘Yes, what was going to theatres to do with Robert being impatient?’ asked Charles.

  ‘If he hadn’t been impatient, he wouldn’t have gone to theatres,’ said Mr March. ‘You know he doesn’t go now. And if his uncle Philip hadn’t been so impatient, he wouldn’t have made such a frightful ass of himself last Tuesday. That’s my eldest brother, Philip’ – he suddenly turned to me – ‘I’ve never known him make such a frightful ass of himself since that night in 1899. The key was lost–’

  ‘When, Mr L? In 1899?’ asked Katherine.

  ‘What key?’

  ‘Last Tuesday, of course. The key of my confounded case. I didn’t possess a case in 1899. I used the bag that Hannah gave me. She never liked me passing it on to my then butler. So I told Philip the key was lost when I saw him in my club. They’d just made us trustees of this so-called charity, though why they want to add to my labours and give me enormous worry and shorten my life, I’ve never been able to understand.’ (At that time Mr March was nearly sixty-three. He had retired thirty years before, when the family bank was sold.) ‘Philip ought to expect it. They used to call him the longest-headed man on the Stock Exchange. Though since he levelled up on those Brazilian Railways, I have always doubted it.’