DAPHNE ALONE
9 SEPTEMBER
This makes a pale shadow of all the others. Words are too soft for some delights…coloured seas and ten million gramophones.
23 SEPTEMBER
There is sometimes too much indiscretion. In a hostile world, a scandal would be dangerous. We cannot ignore it. The raking danger I can sometimes forget, but it returned with an unpleasant scare last week. A fool of a girl thought she might be pregnant. Fortunately it has passed over, but we cannot be too careful.
On the practical issue, Jack insisted that we think of buying the farm. There would be great advantages from every point of view. Jack is certain it could be made to pay. It would make discretion easier. And I insist we have a right to our own world, unspied on and in peace of mind.
Also we must have money. Perhaps I have neglected it too long.
1 OCTOBER
Last night I crawled the pubs in the town. I don’t remember ever doing this before. I have always kept these steam-blowing episodes for Nottingham. But what obligations do I owe Eden, after all? After my nine years’ servitude.
Anyway, Roy Calvert and I and — (a young man in the group) got drunk and started home. By the post office we saw K. She hurried cringing down a side street. I stopped her. ‘Yes — I know, you’re drunk,’ she said. The vision passed; and I was walking wildly, yelling with Roy, cheering — as we ran round the lamp-posts and crossed the streets.
Through 1931 the diary showed him more and more engrossed with Daphne, although it was not till the middle of the year that he broke off finally from Freda. The references to the purchase of the farm were continued: ‘We have to go ahead. I have no alternative.’… ‘I propose to leave the whole business in Jack’s charge, far more than I did the agency. There is no reason to occupy myself unnecessarily with it, now it is started, I have better things to do.’ These entries both occurred in the autumn of 1931; after that time, during the nine months down to the last entry in my hands, he did not mention the farm business again.
I was forced to compare this silence with the long arguments to himself about the agency; I turned back to those pages which had given Daphne a reason for coming:
16 DECEMBER 1928
Tonight I went over the figures of the first month’s business under the new regime (i.e. of the agency). They are satisfactory, and we shall be able to pay our way — but I still find the difficulty which has puzzled me before.[2]
16 JANUARY 1929
The agency is going well. Our profits are up by 10 per cent in the first month. At last Jack is justifying my faith in him (how it would have changed things if he had followed my advice four years ago and entered a profession. Even now I still feel I was right. I should not be fretted by this uneasiness which I cannot quite put aside).
17 JANUARY 1929
I cannot bear this difficulty any longer. There is no doubt that Martineau’s statement of the circulation was fantastically exaggerated. On seeing our own figures there is no doubt at all. We are doing better business than they ever did; and we have not disposed of 1,100 copies of the wretched rag. This puts me in a false position. It devolves upon me to consider what is right for the three of us to do.
If I were to be censorious with myself, I should regret not acting on my earlier suspicions. I was amazed by the figure when Martineau first told me. But after all, I had his authority. What reasons could possess him, of all men, to deceive me? There was no justification for inquiring further. I was within every conceivable right in using his statement to help raise our money. There was one period when I came near to investigating the entire matter — that night, a fortnight before we actually completed the purchase, when I mentioned the circulation to Jack and Olive. Jack laughed, and would not explain himself. Olive said nothing. I began to take steps that night; but then it seemed unnecessary, and I decided to go ahead. I can still feel justified that I was right.
After all, what is the present position? We have borrowed money for a business. We have placed information about the business in front of those we persuaded to lend. All that information was given us on the best of authority; we transmitted it, having every rational ground to consider it true. Most of it was true; on one rather inconsiderable fact, it turns out that we were misled ourselves.
It would be an untenable position, of course, if this accidental misrepresentation had been a cause of loss to our creditors. That providentially is the converse of the actual state of affairs. Our creditors are safely receiving their money, more safely than through any similar investment I can imagine. They have done pretty well for themselves.
So what is to be done? There seems only one answer. No one is losing; for everyone’s sake we must go on as we are. I do not consider it necessary to raise the subject with Jack. I have disposed of the moments of uneasiness. My mind is at rest.
18 JANUARY 1929
I am now able to feel that the difficulty is resolved. But there is one problem which I cannot settle. Why ever should Martineau have made a false statement in the first place? Can it have been deliberate? It seems unthinkable. I remember his curious manoeuvres about Morcom’s flat just before he left the firm. But I could not believe that was done from selfish motives; still more I cannot believe anything so ridiculous of him now. After all, he did not touch a penny of the price we paid. He went straight off to his incredible settlement. Since then he has scarcely had a shilling in his pocket.
I suppose he was simply losing his grip on the world, and it is useless to speculate as though he were a rational being.
As soon as I read George’s words, I did not doubt that his account of Martineau’s statement was true. I wondered what Martineau had really meant; whatever underlay it all, his evidence might be essential now. On the whole, though, I was more distressed than before I knew as much.
Two things struck me most. George had certainly suspected the statement while they were still borrowing money; he had managed to shelve his misgivings for a time. Then at last he put his ‘mind at rest’. I was not altogether surprised by his self-explanation; but it became full of meaning when we compared it to his silence over the farm.
He believed himself caught accidentally in a fog of misrepresentation over the agency — what about the other business? I could not help but imagine — was it something he could not reconcile himself to? Something he tried to dismiss from his thoughts?
And I knew what George’s feeling for Jack had now become. The mention of the circulation, and Jack’s laughter; George afraid, when struggling with his doubt, to speak to Jack again — those hints endowed some of George’s words with an ironic, an almost intolerable pathos: ‘It devolves on me to consider what is right for the three of us to do.’
31: Confidential Talk in Eden’s Drawing-Room
I read the diary all evening. At dinner Eden and I were alone, and he was kindly and cordial. We went into the drawing-room afterwards; he built up the fire as high as it had been the night of Morcom’s slip; he pressed me to a glass of brandy.
Here I have to enter into a conversation which I reported, more subjectively, in a part of my own story.