George Passant by C. P. Snow Page B

complete. You’d better read it.’
    His anxiety, however, was growing. He did not explain it; I knew that it must be caused by some trouble within the firm. Once, when Martineau was mentioned, he said abruptly: ‘I don’t know what’s come over him. He used to have a sense of proportion.’ It was a contrast to his old extravagant eulogies of Martineau, but he soon protested: ‘Whatever you say, the man’s the only spiritual influence in the whole soulless place.’
    Then tired over the case, vexed by this secret worry, he was repeatedly badgered by the crisis in Jack’s business. For a time Jack had taken Morcom’s advice, and managed to put off an urgent creditor. He did not confide the extent of the danger to George until a promise fell through and he was being threatened. George was hot with anger at being told so late.
    ‘Why am I the last person who hears? I should have assumed I ought to be the first.’
    ‘I didn’t want to worry you.’
    ‘I suppose you don’t think it’s worrying me to tell me now in the middle of as many difficulties as anyone ever had?’
    ‘I couldn’t keep it back any longer,’ said Jack.
    ‘If you’d come before, I should have stopped you getting into this absurd position.’
    ‘I’m there now, said Jack. ‘It’s not much comfort holding inquests.’
    Several nights in the middle of the case, George switched off to study the figures of the business. They were not over-complicated, but it was a distraction he wanted to be spared: particularly as it soon became clear that Jack was expecting money to ‘set it straight’. George discovered that Morcom had heard of this misfortune a week before; he exploded into an outburst that lasted a whole night. ‘Do you think I’m the sort of man you can ignore till you can’t find anyone else? Why don’t you let other people finish up the business? There’s no need to come to me at all.’ He was half-mollified, however, to be told that Morcom’s advice had only delayed the crisis, and that he had volunteered no further help.
    Affronted as he was, George did not attempt to throw off the responsibility. To me in private, he said with a trace of irritated triumph: ‘If I’d asserted myself in the first place, he’d have been settling down to the law by now.’ But he took it for granted that he was bound to set Jack going again. He went through the figures.
    ‘You guaranteed this man–?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘What backing did you have?’
    ‘It hasn’t come off.’
    In the end George worked out that a minimum of fifty pounds had to be provided within a month. ‘That will avoid the worst. We want three times as much to consolidate the thing. I don’t know how we shall even manage the fifty,’ George said. As we knew, he was short of money himself; Mrs Passant was making more demands, his sister was going to a different school; he still lived frugally, and then frittered pounds away on a night’s jaunt.
    It surprised me how during this transaction Jack’s manner towards George became casual and brusque. Towards anyone else Jack would have shown more of his finesse, as well as his mobile good nature. But I felt in him a streak of ruthlessness whenever he was intent on his own way: as he talked to George, it came almost to the surface.
    I mentioned this strange relation of theirs to Morcom, the evening before I went to London for my examination: but he drove it out of my head by telling me he was himself worried over Martineau.
    There was no time for him to say more. But in the train, returning to the town after the examination, I was seized by the loneliness, the enormous feeling of calamity, which seems lurking for us – or at any rate, all through my life it often did so for me – when we arrive home at the end of a journey. I went straight round to George’s. He was not in, although it was already evening. His landlady told me that he was working late in the office; there I found him, in his room on the same floor as