George Passant by C. P. Snow Page A

was tinged with heat as he crumpled the paper in the grate.
    ‘That I’m relying on you to keep this strictly confidential,’ he said, putting on a kettle. ‘I’m laying you under that definite obligation. It’s a friendly contract and it’s got to be kept. Because I’m being irregular in telling you this at all.’
    I nodded. This was not the first of the firm’s cases I had heard discussed, for George was not always rigid on professional etiquette; and indeed his demand for secrecy tonight served as much to show me the magnitude of the case as to make sure that I should not speak. It was their biggest job for some time, apart from the routine of conveyancy and so on in a provincial town. A trade union, through one of its members, was prosecuting an employer under the Truck Act.
    Eden had apparently realised that the case would call out all George’s fervour. It was its meaning as well as its intricacy that gave George this rush of enthusiasm. It set his eyes alight and sent him rocking with laughter at the slightest joke.
    As he developed the case itself, he was more at home even than among his friends at the Farm. There, an unexplained jarring note could suddenly stab through his amiability; or else he would be hurt and defensive, often by a remark which was not intended to bear the meaning he wove into it. But here for hours, he was completely master of his surroundings, uncriticised and at ease; his exposition was a model, clear and taut, embracing all the facts and shirking none of the problems.
    George himself, of course, was led by inclination to mix with human beings and find his chief interest there. There is a superstition that men like most the things they do supremely well; in George’s case and many others, it is quite untrue. George never set much value on these problems of law, which he handled so easily. But, whatever he chose for himself, there was no doubt that, of all the people I knew in my youth, he was the best at this kind of intellectual game; he had the memory, the ingenuity, the stamina and the orderliness which made watching him arrange a case something near an aesthetic pleasure.
    As he finished, he smacked his lips and chuckled. He said: ‘Well, that reduces it to three heads. Now let’s have some tea and get to work.’
    We sat down at the table as George wrote down the problems to which he had to find an answer; his saucer described the first sodden circle on a sheet of foolscap. I fetched down some books from his shelves and looked up references; but I could not help much – he had really insisted on my coming in order to share the excitement, and perhaps to applaud. On the other side of the table George wrote with scarcely a pause.
    ‘God love us,’ George burst out. ‘If only’ – he broke into an argument about technical evidence – ‘we should get a perfect case.’
    ‘It’ll take weeks,’ I said. ‘Still–’ I smiled. I was beginning to feel tired, and George’s eyes were rimmed with red.
    ‘If it’s going to take weeks,’ said George, ‘the more we do tonight the better. We’ve got to get it perfect. We can’t give Eden a chance to make a mess of it. I refuse to think,’ he cried, ‘that we shan’t win.’
    In the excitement of the night, I forgot the beginning of the evening and the signs of a quarrel with Martineau. But, as George gathered up his papers after the night’s work, he said: ‘I can’t afford to lose this. I can’t afford to lose it personally – in the circumstances,’ and then hurried to make the words seem innocuous.

 
     
10:   Roofs Seen from an Office Window
     
    MOST nights in the next week I walked round to George’s after my own work was done. Often it was so late (for my examination was very near, and I was reading for long hours) that George’s was the only lighted window in the street. His voice sounded very loud when he stood in the little hall and greeted me.
    ‘Isn’t it splendid? I’ve got another argument