He worked hard, but he was tense all the time, getting out of bed at night to make sure he had written a point down. If and when my first case came, I thought, I should do the same. But I should still be in high spirits — while one had only to listen to Charles’ voice to hear something inexplicably harsh, not only anxious but abnormally strained.
As the hearing drew nearer (it was fixed for the middle of January) he seemed to find a little relief in violent, trivial worries about the case: ‘I shall put up the dimmest opening,’ he said, ‘that’s ever been heard in a court of law. Can’t you imagine the heights of dimness that I shall manage to reach?’
Several times, as I heard him reiterate these anxieties, I thought how they would have deceived me only a short time before. Charles was the most restrained of his family; but, like Mr March and Katherine, he did not try to be stoical in little things. Many acquaintances felt that their worries (over, for instance, this opening speech, or catching a train, or whether someone had overheard an indiscreet remark) could only be indulged in by weak and unavailing people. It was tempting to regard them as part of the sapping process of luxury. It was tempting: it seemed sociologically just: but in fact, when affliction came, not petty worry, each of the three Marches was stoical in the end.
Katherine knew this, although on those nights at Bryanston Square, while Charles was waiting for his case to come on, she watched him with pain. I wondered if she understood better than I why he was so tense. Whether she understood or not, her own nerves were strung up. But she could still tease him about the symptoms of fuss; as she did so one evening, she repeated in my presence the latest story of Mr March’s fussing, which was only a few months old.
As I knew, Mr March always expressed gloomy concern if one of his children had a sore throat: he would enquire after it repeatedly, with the most lugubrious expression:
‘Wouldn’t it be better if I sent for a practitioner? Not that I pretend to have much faith in any of them. Wouldn’t it be better if I sent for one tonight?’ In the same way, he profoundly doubted anyone’s ability to get to the correct station in time to catch an appropriate train: travelling could only be achieved by a kind of battle against the railways, in which he sat like a general surrounded by maps and time-tables, drawing up days before any journey an elaborate chart of possible contingencies.
In the past summer, he had spent himself prodigiously over a journey of Katherine’s. She had never been away alone up to this time; even now, it was scarcely alone in any but Mr March’s sense of the word, as she was going on a cruise down the Adriatic, in a party organized by her young women’s club. Mr March opposed on principle; and, when she got her way, occupied a good part of a night in making certain what would happen if she missed the party at Victoria on the first morning.
Three days after the party started, Mr March received a telegram. It reached him half an hour after breakfast and read: Regret Katherine ill in — hospital Venice food poisoning suspected urgent you should join her. It was signed by the secretary of the club. Mr March said in a business-like tone to Charles: ‘Your sister’s ill. I may be away some time’, and caught the eleven o’clock boat train.
He arrived at the hospital the following midday; he interviewed the doctors, decided it was nothing grave, and then began to grumble at the heat. He was wearing his black coat and striped trousers, and he had arrived in a Venetian July.
He saw Katherine, said: ‘I refuse to believe there’s anything wrong’, and walked off to find an English doctor. He had all his life expressed distrust of ‘those foreign practitioners’. When he talked to an English one, however, he decided that he was probably incompetent and that the Italians ‘seemed level-headed fellows’. So Mr March accepted the position; he could do nothing more; he retired to his hotel and sat in his shirt sleeves looking at the Grand Canal.
In a couple of days Mr March and the Italian doctors agreed that Katherine could be safely moved to the hotel. Mr March arranged everything with competence; as soon as Katherine began to walk about, he said, with an air of conviction and scorn:
‘I knew there was never anything wrong.’
They stayed in Venice for a fortnight. From the moment of his arrival, he had behaved with equanimity. When she recovered, however, the air of sensible friendliness suddenly broke: and it broke in a characteristic way. Katherine slept in the room next to Mr March’s: like his, its windows gave on to the Canaclass="underline" to Mr March’s horror, she wanted to leave them open all night. Mr March angrily protested. Katherine pointed out that no gondolier could get in without climbing from the balcony beneath: and that, in any case, her jewellery had been deposited in the manager’s safe and there was nothing valuable to steal.
Mr March stamped up and down the room. ‘My dear girl,’ he shouted, ‘it’s not your valuables I’m thinking of, it’s your virtue.’ Katherine stuck to her point. An hour later, when they were both in bed, she heard his voice come loudly through the walclass="underline"
‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth…’ The last words sounded, at first hearing, as though they were an invention of her own. But like most of the March stories, this was discussed in Mr March’s presence: he protested, chuckled, added to it, and it must have been substantially true. In fact, if Mr March felt like King Lear, he acted upon it, even if the occasion seemed to others inadequate.
The story must have been true, except for what they each left out. They left out what none of us would find it necessary to tell in a family story: the fact that there was deep feeling in the quarrel, though the occasion was so absurd: that Katherine, arguing with her father, felt more overawed and frightened than she could admit: that Mr March felt a moment of anxiety, such as we all know as we see someone beginning to slip from the power of our possessive love.
5: Confession
Charles’ case lasted for a day and a half. From the beginning, lawyers thought it impossible that anyone could win it: at times, particularly on the second morning, I found my judgement wavering — was he going to prove us wrong after all? His manner was restless, sometimes diffident, sometimes sharp and ruthless: I knew — it was not an unqualified pleasure for me to know — that I did not often hear a case argued with such drive and clarity.
Mr March sat through every word. As he watched his son, his face lost its expression of lively, fluid interest, and became tightened into one that was nervous, preoccupied, and rigid. He took me out to lunch on the first day; his mood was quieter than usual, and he was glad to have someone to talk to.
‘My daughter Katherine has mysteriously refused to put in an appearance,’ he said. ‘She did not account for her actions, but the reason is, of course, that she couldn’t bear to watch my son making a frightful ass of himself in public. I must say that I can sympathize with her attitude. When he contrived to get himself into the team at school, I used to feel that propriety demanded that I should be represented in person: but invariably I wished that I could take a long walk behind the pavilion when he came out to bat.’
Mr March went on: ‘I also considered today that propriety demanded that I should be present in person. Even though it might entail seeing my son make a frightful ass of himself upon an important occasion. So far as I can gather with my ignorance of your profession, however, he appears to have avoided disaster so far. Hannah might not think so, but I fail to see why she is specially competent to judge.’
I told him how well Charles had done; Mr March gave a delighted and curiously humble smile.
‘I’m extremely glad to have your opinion,’ he said. ‘This is the first time that I’ve been able to consider the prospect of any of my family emerging into the public eye.’ He added, in a matter-of-fact tone: ‘I could never have cut anything of a dash myself. My son may conceivably find it easier.’