‘I’m inclined to think,’ Rose added, his face blank, ‘that the answer this time isn’t immediately obvious.’
At once, I knew what I was in for. Indeed, I had known it while Rose sat, politely listening to the other’s views, non-committal in his quietness. For, in the long run, the decision was his: the rest of us could advise, argue, persuade: he would listen to the sense of opinion, but his was the clinching voice. Though it did not sound like it, though the manners were egalitarian and not court manners, this was as much a hierarchy as Lufkin’s firm, and Rose’s power that morning, concealed as it was, was as free as Lufkin’s.
The only chance was for me to match will against will. He had opposed George’s entry right at the beginning; Rose was not the man to forget his own judgements. In that one impartial comment of his, I could hear him believing inflexibly that he had been right.
Yet within the human limits he was a just man: and, screwing myself up for the argument, there were some fears which I could wipe away. I could rely on it that he would not mention George’s prosecution fourteen years before: he had been acquitted, that was good enough. I could also rely on it that neither he nor the others would be much put off by rumours of George’s womanizing. Compared with those three round the table that morning, not many men, it struck me afterwards, would have been so correct, uninquisitive, unbiased.
‘It might help us,’ said Rose, ‘if Lewis, who has seen more of Passant’s work than any of us, would give us his views. I’m very anxious,’ he said to me, ‘that you should feel we’ve been seized of all the information we ought to have.’
Addressing myself to Rose, I made my case. Probably I should have made it more fluently for anyone but George. I was not relaxed, I had to force myself into the professional idiom.
I described his work, trying to apportion his responsibility, remembering that to Rose it would not seem right if I did not also demarcate my own. I said that he was a man of immense capacity. It was true — I was straining not to overstate my case — that his immediate judgement was not always first-class, he hadn’t the intuitive feel for what could or could not be done. But he had two qualities not often combined — zest for detail and executive precision, together with a kind of long-term imagination, a forecaster’s insight into policy. In the area between detail and the long term, he was not so good as our run-of-the-mill administrators: but nevertheless his two qualities were so rare that he was more valuable than any of them.
I had been talking on the plane of reason, but I heard my own voice harsh, emphatic without helping the sense.
‘We’re most grateful to you for that piece of exposition, my dear Lewis. We really are very, very much obliged to you.’
Jones sucked at his pipe: one could feel him sniffing dissension in the air. He said: ‘I imagine that, if old Passant didn’t get established, he’d just go straight back to those solicitors and it wouldn’t be any terrific hardship for him.’
‘He’d be about £200 a year better off with us,’ said Osbaldiston, ‘but you can knock some of that off for living in London.’
‘I wonder whether it would be really a kindness to establish him?’ Jones was meditating. ‘Because he’s obviously an unusual man, as Hector says, but with the best will in the world we can’t do much for him. He’d have to begin as a principal and he’s nearly fifty now, and at his age he couldn’t possibly go more than one step up. That’s not much for someone who really is a bit of a fellow in his own way.’
‘It may not be much, but he wants it,’ I burst out.
‘All that is off the point,’ said Rose, with untypical irritation. ‘We’re not required to say what is good for him or what isn’t, and we’re not concerned with his motives. He’s applied to be established, and he’s got a right to apply, and our business starts there and ends there. The only conceivable point we have got to decide is whether on his merits we ought to recommend him. I suggest,’ he said, recapturing his politeness but with a flick in his tone, ‘that we shall find the problem quite sufficiently intricate without introducing any psychological complications.’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Osbaldiston, ‘that I can see a strong enough reason for not having him.’
‘Do you see one, Hector?’ asked Jones.
‘Aren’t you making very heavy weather of it?’ I said, thinking the time for caution had gone. ‘Here’s a man everyone agrees to have some gifts. We’re thinking of him for a not desperately exalted job. As a rule we can pass people, like Cooke for example, without half this trouble. Does anyone really consider that Cooke is a quarter as competent as Passant?’
‘I didn’t want to give my opinion,’ said Rose smoothly and slowly to Jones, ‘before I had some indication of what you others thought. I still don’t want to rush things, but perhaps this is a reasonable time to sketch out the way my mind’s been tending. As for your question, Lewis, I don’t consider that we’ve been making unduly heavy weather of this business. We want to see that this man gets fair treatment: and we also don’t want to take an unjustified risk for the Department. It isn’t entirely easy to reconcile those two objectives. I’m inclined to think that you slightly, not very greatly, but perceptibly, exaggerate Passant’s mental qualities, but I won’t quarrel with the view that he is a distinctly better mind than Cooke, for example, or, as far as that goes, than most of the ordinary principals in the Department. I think I remember saying much the same thing when I first saw him. On the other hand, that doesn’t entirely persuade me that keeping him wouldn’t be a mildly regrettable risk where the Department stands to lose slightly more than it stands to gain. After all, if we keep Passant, we gain a principal in some ways rather better than the average, in some ways, as you very properly pointed out, Lewis, rather worse. And at the same time we take on a definite hazard, not of course a serious one or one likely to materialize in fact, but the kind of hazard that you can’t escape if you commit yourself to a man of, I don’t want to do him an injustice but perhaps I can reasonably say, powerful, peculiar, and perhaps faintly unstable personality. There’s bound to be a finite chance that such a man wouldn’t fit in for his remaining thirteen years or whatever it is. There’s a finite chance that we should be making trouble for ourselves. There might just possibly be some row or commotion that wouldn’t do us any good. I don’t think that it is responsible to take those risks for the sake of an appointment at this level. I think I should conceivably have come down in Passant’s favour if we were able to consider him for something more senior. He’s the sort of man, in fact, who might have been far less trouble as a cabinet minister than he’d be in the slightly more pedestrian ranks of the administrative service.’
‘Well,’ said Jones, ‘I don’t think anyone could add much to a summing up like that.’
While there had seemed a doubt, Osbaldiston had been as painstaking as Rose himself. Now he tilted back his chair, and sounded more than ever offhand.
‘Agreed,’ he said, as if anxious not to waste any more time. ‘Though perhaps it’s a pity that we didn’t catch the chap young.’
‘In that case, with your approval,’ Rose remarked, ‘I propose to report on him to the Commission in terms something like this. I’ll send you a draft. But I propose to say that he has filled a principal’s place here quite up to standard form, and in one or two respects better than standard form. That we consider him intellectually well up to the level of the administrative class. But that at his age, bearing in mind certain features of his personality, we shouldn’t feel entirely easy about fitting him into the Department as an established man.’
‘It might be a friendly thought,’ said Jones, and he was speaking with good nature, ‘to tell him to withdraw and not fag to go up to the Commission. Because there will be nothing they can do but say no.’