George Passant Page 5

  ‘Classes in law,’ said the Principal, rising to a cautious, deliberate anger, ‘which amount to two a week, this committee may remember. Like those given by twenty other visiting helpers to our regular staff.’

  ‘The committee may also remember,’ said George, ‘that they can terminate the connection at a month’s notice. That, however, does not affect the fact that I know Cotery well: I know him, just as I know a good many other students, better than anyone else in this institution.’

  ‘Why do you go to this exceptional trouble?’ asked the Canon.

  ‘Because I am attached to an educational institution: I conceive that it is my job to help people to think.’

  ‘Some of your protégés are inclined to think on unorthodox lines?’ the Principal said.

  ‘No doubt. I shouldn’t consider any other sort of thinking was worth the time of a serious-minded man.’

  ‘Even if it leads them into actions which might do harm to our reputations?’ said the Principal.

  ‘I prefer more precise questions. But I might take the opportunity of saying that I know what constitutes a position of trust: and I do not abuse it.’

  There was a hush. Calvert’s pencil scribbled over the paper.

  ‘Well,’ said Beddow, ‘perhaps if–’

  ‘I have not quite finished,’ said George. ‘I am not prepared to let the committee think that I am simply intruding into this affair. I am completely unapologetic. I repeat, I know Cotery well: you have heard my questions: I regard my case as proved. But I don’t want to leave the committee under a misapprehension. Cotery is one out of many. You will be judged by what you make of them. They are better human material than we are. They are people who’ve missed the war. They are people who are young at the most promising time in the world’s history. If they don’t share in it, then it’s because this committee and I and all we represent are simply playing the irresponsible fool with our youngers and betters. You may take the view that it’s dangerous to make them think: that it’s wiser to leave them in the state of life into which it has pleased God to call them. I refuse to take that view: and I shall not, while I have a foot in this building.’

  He stood up to go.

  Beddow said: ‘If no one has anything more to ask Mr Passant…’

  Until the door closed Beddow did not speak again, but his eyes moved from Calvert to the Canon.

  ‘Well, Principal,’ said Beddow, but his tone had lost (I was excited to notice) some of its buoyancy, ‘I take it that you have made your recommendation.’

  ‘I have, sir,’ said Cameron emphatically.

  ‘In that case, if no one has a motion, I suppose we accept the recommendation and pass on.’

  Miss Geary leaned forward in her chair. ‘Certainly not,’ she said. ‘We’ve been listening to a man who believes what he says. And I want to hear some of it answered.’

  There was a stir round the table. They were relieved that she had spoken out, given them someone to argue against.

  ‘Haven’t we been listening,’ said Canon Martineau, with his subtle smile, ‘to a man who has a somewhat exaggerated idea of the importance of his mission?’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Miss Geary. ‘Most people who believe in anything have a somewhat exaggerated idea of its importance. And I don’t pretend that he made the best of his case. Nevertheless–’

  She was speaking from a double motive, of course; her dislike for the Principal shone out of her: so did her desire to help George.

  It was still one against four, if it came to a vote; but there was a curious, hypercharged atmosphere that even the absolute recalcitrants, Calvert and the Principal, felt as they became more angry. Over Beddow and Martineau certainly, the two most receptive people there, had come a jag of apprehension. And when, after Miss Geary had competently put the position of Cotery again, and Calvert merely replied stubbornly: ‘He’s known for months that I didn’t intend to keep him here. Nothing else came into account. Nothing else–’ the Canon became restless.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘there are times when it’s not only important that justice should be done. Sometimes it’s important that justice should appear to be done. And in this case, unless we’re careful, it does seem to me possible that our Mr Passant may make a considerable nuisance of himself.’

  ‘I regret the suggestion,’ said the Principal, ‘that we should consider giving way to threats.’

  ‘That isn’t Canon Martineau’s suggestion, if I understand it right,’ said Beddow. ‘He’s saying that we mustn’t stand on our dignity, even when we’re being taught our business by a man like Passant. Because nothing would take the wind out of his sails like giving way a bit. And, on the other hand, it might do this young fellow Cotery some good if we stretched a point.’

  ‘The Chairman has put my attitude,’ said Martineau, ‘much more neatly than I could myself.’

  ‘I’m afraid that I still consider it dangerous,’ said the Principal.

  ‘Well,’ said Beddow, ‘if we could meet one condition, I myself would go so far as to stretch a point. But the condition is, of course, that we must satisfy Mr Calvert. We shouldn’t think of acting against your wishes,’ said Beddow to Calvert, in his most cordial and sincere manner.

  Calvert nodded his head.

  ‘I can’t alter my own position,’ he said. ‘There’s no future – I can’t find a place for Cotery. I decided that in the summer. I don’t bear him any ill-will–’

  ‘I wonder,’ Canon Martineau looked at Beddow with a sarcastic smile, ‘whether this idea would meet the case? Cotery would normally have two more years: we pay half the cost, and Mr Calvert half. Mr Calvert, for reasons we all accept, can’t go on with his share. But is there anything to prevent us keeping to our commitment, and remitting – may I suggest – not the half, but all Cotery’s fees for just one year?’

  ‘Except that it would be no practical use to the man himself,’ said Miss Geary.

  ‘No,’ said Calvert. ‘He needs the whole three years.’

  ‘I’m not so desperately concerned about that,’ said the Canon.

  ‘He’d have to get the money from some other source. If he wanted to finish,’ said Beddow briskly. ‘I agree with the Canon. I think it’s a decent compromise.’

  Miss Geary saw that it was her best chance.

  ‘If you’ll propose it, Canon,’ she said, ‘I’m ready to second.’

  ‘I deeply regret this idea,’ said the Principal. ‘And I am sure that Mr Calvert does.’

  Canon Martineau and Beddow had judged Calvert more shrewdly, however, and he shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I can’t support the motion. But I shan’t vote against it.’ It was carried by three votes to one, with Calvert abstaining.

  6: Results of a Celebration

  I went straight from the committee to the Victoria, our public house, where George and Jack were waiting.

  ‘Well?’ cried George, as soon as I entered. I saw that Morcom was with them, sitting by the fire.

  ‘It’s neither one thing nor the other,’ I said. I told them the decision.

  ‘It’s a pretty remarkable result for any sane collection of men to achieve. I never believed that you’d drive them into it. But it doesn’t help Jack, of course.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ George shouted. ‘You’re as cheerful as Balfour giving the news of the Battle of Jutland. Your sane collection of men have been made to realise that they can’t treat Jack as though he was someone who just had to be content with their blasted charity. Good God alive, don’t you see that that’s a triumph? We’re going to drink a considerable amount of beer and we’re going to Nottingham by the next train to have a proper celebration. In the meantime, I’m going to hear every word that they found themselves obliged to say.’

  Jack smiled, raised his glass towards George,
and said: ‘You’re a wonderful man, George.’ Jack was shrewd enough to know already that, for himself, the practical value of the triumph was nothing: but it was his nature to rejoice with him who rejoices. (I was soon to see the same quality again in Herbert Getliffe.) He could not bear to spoil George’s pleasure.

  George lived through my description of the meeting before he confronted them and after he left. He was furiously indignant with Beddow’s attempt to propitiate Calvert, more than with the Principal’s: ‘I suppose Cameron, to do him justice, is out to get benefactions for the institution. It’s true that he’s quite incapable of administering them, but we can’t reasonably expect him to realise that. But what Beddow, who calls himself a socialist, thinks he’s doing, when he tries to lick the feet of a confounded businessman–’ so George went on, drinking his beer, chuckling with delight at Miss Geary’s interventions, reinterpreting the Canon’s equivocal manoeuvres as directly due to the influence of Howard Martineau. ‘The Canon must have worked out his technique. To come in on our side without letting it seem obvious,’ said George. But he had no explanation of Calvert’s naïve defence that he formed his decision about Jack long before the incident with his son.

  ‘That’s just incredible,’ said George. ‘If I’d wanted to invent something improbable, I couldn’t have invented anything as improbable as that.’

  Morcom said little; but he was amused by the change of sides, the choice of partners, before the vote. As I told the story, Jack illustrated it by moving glasses about the table; two glasses of beer representing the Canon and Beddow, a glass of water the Principal, a small square jug Miss Geary, and for Calvert Jack turned a glass upside down. When he moved them into their final places, George gave a loud satisfied sigh.

  ‘They couldn’t do anything else,’ he said. ‘They couldn’t do anything else.’

  Morcom looked at him with a curious smile.

  ‘I doubt whether anyone else could have made them do it, George,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said George.

  ‘But, to come back for a minute to what Lewis said, they’ve still left Jack in the air, haven’t they?’

  ‘They’ve recognised his position. He’s got time to turn round.’

  ‘He’s really in very much the same position,’ said Morcom. ‘It’s important you should keep that in mind, for Jack’s sake–’

  ‘Arthur,’ George cried, angrily and triumphantly, ‘you tried to dissuade me from breathing a word to the bellwethers. You don’t deny that, I suppose?’

  ‘No,’ said Morcom.

  ‘And now I’ve done it, you’re trying to deprive me of the luxury of having brought it off. I’m not prepared to submit to it. I’ve listened to you on most things, Arthur, but I’m not prepared to submit to it tonight.’

  Half-drunk myself, I laughed. This was his night: I was ready, like Jack, to forget tomorrow. Yet, somewhere beneath my surrender to his victory, there crept a chill of disappointment. An hour ago, I had seen George in his full power and totally admired him; but now, knowing that Morcom was right, I was young enough to resent the contradiction between George in his full power and the same man sitting in this chair by the fire, shutting his eyes to the truth. He ought not to be sitting there, flushed, optimistic, triumphant, seeing only what he wanted to see.

  ‘In fact,’ shouted George, defiantly, ‘you’re not going to argue me out of my celebration. I dare say you don’t want to come. But the others will.’

  Jack and I were eager for it. We left Morcom sitting by the fire, and ran across to the station. The eight-forty was a train to Nottingham that we all knew; for half an hour the lights of farms, the villages, the dark fields, rushed by. The carriage was full, but George talked cheerfully of the pleasures to come and how he first met Connie at the ‘club’; he was oblivious, as in all happiness or quarrels, to the presence of strangers; that night none of us cared.

  We had a drink in a public house at the top of Parliament Street, and crossed over to another on the other side; it was a windy night, and the wind seemed very loud and the lights spectacularly bright. Jack, though he drank less than George and I, began demanding bowls of burning gold and going behind bars to help the maids: George kept greeting acquaintances, various men, whores, and girls from the factories out for a good time. He had met them on other night visits to Nottingham: for he went often, though he concealed it from Jack and me until we discovered by accident.

  He knew the back streets better than those of our own town. He led us to the club by short cuts between high, ramshackle houses, and through ‘entries’, partly covered over, where George’s voice echoed crashingly. One such entry led to a narrow street, lit only by a single street lamp at the mouth. At the door of a tall house at the end remote from the light, George rapped three times with the brass knocker.

  A woman climbed up from the area and recognised George. She told him to take us upstairs, the top door was unlocked. We went up the four flights of creaking wooden stairs, and met a new, bright blue door which cut off the attic storey from the landing.

  A gramophone was wailing inside. George marched in before us: the room was half-full, mainly of women; as soon as he entered, a group of them gathered round him. He was popular there; they laughed at him, they were after the money which he threw away carelessly at all times, fantastically so when drunk; but they genuinely liked him. They did him good turns, and took their troubles to him for advice. With them, he showed none of the diffidence of a visit to Martineau’s respectable drawing-room; he was cheerfully, heartily enjoying himself, he liked being with them, he felt at home.

  Tonight he burst into extravagance from the start. He saw Connie sitting with Thelma, her regular older friend; George put an arm round each of them, and shouted, ‘Thelma’s here! Of course, I insist that everyone must have a drink – because Thelma’s here!’

  Connie told him that he was silly, then whispered in his ear; his eyes brightened, and he took out a couple of notes for Thelma to buy drinks round. George shouted to some women across the room, and in the same breath talked in soft chuckles to Connie. She was fair and quite young, with a pretty, impassive face and a nice body. She pretended to escape from his arm: at once he clutched her, and she came towards him: the contact went through George like an electric current, and he shouted jubilantly: ‘Make them have another drink, Thelma. Why shouldn’t everyone have two drinks at once?’

  Soon George and Connie had gone away. The rest of us drank and danced. The floor was rough; there was nothing polished about the ‘club’ except the bright blue door on the landing. The furniture was mixed, but all old; the red velvet sofas seemed like the relics of a gay house of the nineties; so did the long mirror with the battered gilding. But there were also some marble-topped tables, picked up in a café, several wicker chairs and even two or three soap boxes. One of the bulbs was draped in frilly pink, and one was naked. Women giggled and shrilled; and among it all, the ‘manager’ (whose precise function none of us knew) sat in the corner of the room, reading a racing paper with a cloth cap on the back of his head.

  Now and then a pair went out. The gramophone wailed on, like all the homesick, lust-sweet longing in the world. The thudding beat got hold of one, it got mixed with the smell of scent. After one dance, Jack spoke to me for a moment.

  ‘Jesus love me, I can’t help it, Lewis,’ he said with his fresh open smile. ‘I’m going all randy sad.’

  It was after one o’clock when the three of us gathered round one of the marble-topped tables. The room was nearly empty by then, though the gramophone still played. We should have liked to go, but there was over an hour before the last train home. So we sat there, sobered and quiet, ordering a last glass of gin to mollify the manager: and, of course, we talked of women.

  ‘The first I ever had,’ said George, ‘happened on the night before my eighteenth birthday. She told me that she did
it for a hobby. Afterwards, when I was walking home, it seemed necessary to shout, “Why don’t they all take up a hobby? Why don’t they all take up a hobby?”’ The words would have resounded boisterously three hours ago, when we entered that room; but now they were subdued. He was not randy sad, as Jack and I had been; this was a different, a deeper sadness. He knew the pleasure he had gained; and turning from it, he – whose pictures of the future usually glowed like a sunrise – felt all that he might miss.

  ‘I should have wanted something better before now,’ said Jack, ‘if I’d been you.’

  ‘It serves my purpose,’ said George. ‘I don’t know about yours.’

  Jack smiled. ‘Why don’t you try nearer home?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that some of the young women in our group would be open to persuasion. You’d get more happiness from one of them, George. Clearly you would.’

  ‘That would destroy everything I want to do,’ George said. ‘You realise that’s what you’re suggesting? You’d put me into a position where people like Morcom could say that I was building up an impressive façade of looking after our group at the School. That I was building up an impressive façade – and that my real motive was to cuddle the girls on the quiet.’

  Jack looked at George in consternation. For once in a quarrel, he had not raised his voice; yet his face bore all the signs of pain. Affectionately, Jack said: ‘I want you to be happy, that’s all.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be happy that way,’ said George. ‘I can look after my own happiness.’

  ‘Anyway, for my happiness, I’m afraid I shall need love,’ said Jack. ‘Love with all the romantic accompaniments, George. The sort of love that makes the air seem a remarkable medium to be moving through. I’m afraid I need it.’

  ‘I don’t know whether I need it,’ I said. ‘But I’m afraid that I’ve got it.’

  ‘Don’t you ever want it, George?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Of course I want it,’ said George. ‘Though I shouldn’t be prepared to sacrifice everything for it. But of course I want it: what do you think I am? As a matter of fact, I’ve been thinking tonight that I’m not very likely to find it.’ He looked at me with a sympathetic smile. ‘I don’t know that I’ve ever been in love – at least not what you’d call love. I’ve made myself ridiculous once or twice, but it didn’t amount to much. I dare say that it never will.’