There I never wanted to part from him. His fellow feeling had strengthened mine. There he was my master, and throughout my life I wished he would stay so until the end.
Quite soon after George took me into the group, our difference began to show. Yet I too was full of hope. I might attack George’s Utopian visions, but then at times George provoked all my destructive edge. There were other times I remembered afterwards, in which I was as unshielded as my mother used to be, in which I had learned nothing of disappointment.
I remembered the first time that Marion Gladwell asked me to call on her at school. She had been promising to lend me a book, but whenever we met in the group she had forgotten it; I could have it, she said, if I went round to her school in the lunch hour.
The school was in Albion Street, near to the middle of the town, a diminutive red-brick barracks drawing in the children from the rows of red-brick houses in the mean streets near. Marion had only taught there a year, since she came out of her training college. She was twenty-one, and engrossed in her work. She often talked to us about the children, laughed at herself for being ‘earnest’, and then told us some more.
When I arrived in her classroom that afternoon she was just opening a window. The room was dark and small, and there was a faint, vestigial, milky smell of small children. Marion said, in her energetic, overemphatic, nervous fashion, that she must let some oxygen in before the next lesson. She moved rapidly to the next window, opened it, returned to the blackboard, shook the duster so that a cloud of chalk hung in the air.
‘Sit down, Lewis,’ she said. ‘I want to talk to you.’
She stood by the blackboard, twisting the duster. At the group she was overemphatic, overdecisive, but no one minded it much from her, since she was so clearly nervous and anxious to be liked and praised. She was tallish and strong, very quick and active physically, but a little clumsy, and either her figure was shapeless or she dressed so sloppily that one could not see she had a waist. But she had an open, oval, comely face, and her eyes were striking. They were not large, but bright and continually interested. Despite her earnestness, they were humorous and gay.
That afternoon she wrung out the duster, unusually restless and nervous even for her.
‘I’m worried about you,’ she said.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘You mustn’t burn the candle at both ends.’
I asked what she meant, but I had a very good idea. Marion, like most of the girls in the group, came from a respectable lower-middle-class home, and their emancipation had still not gone far. So Marion and the others were shocked, some of them pleasantly shocked, at the gossip they heard of our drinking parties and visits to Nottingham. The gossip became far more lurid than the facts — Jack saw to that, who was himself a most temperate man — and George and the rest of us acquired an aura of sustained dissipation.
I was not displeased. It was flattering to hear oneself being snatched from the burning. I tried to pare off the more extravagant edges of the stories, but Marion wanted to believe them, and I should have had to be much more wholehearted to persuade her.
‘You mustn’t wear yourself out,’ said Marion obstinately.
‘I’m pretty good at looking after myself,’ I said.
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Marion. ‘Anyway, you mustn’t waste yourself. Think of all you’ve got to do.’
She was watching me with her clear, bright eyes. She must have seen a change in my expression. She knew that I was softened and receptive now. She gave up twisting the duster and put it in its box. In doing so she knocked down a piece of chalk, and cried, ‘Oh, why do I always upset everything?’ Her eyes were lit up with gaiety, and she leaned against the desk. Her voice was still decisive, but it was easy to confide.
‘Tell me what you want to do. Tell me what you want.’
My first reply was: ‘Of course, I want to see a better world.’
Marion nodded her head, as though she would have given the same answer. We were sufficiently under George Passant’s influence to make such an answer quite unselfconsciously. We were children of our class and time, and took that hope as unchallengeable. That afternoon in Marion’s schoolroom in 1923, both she and I expected it to be fulfilled.
‘What do you want for yourself?’ asked Marion.
‘I want success.’
She seemed startled by the force with which I had spoken. She said: ‘What do you call success?’
‘I don’t mean to spend my life unknown.’
‘Do you want to make money, Lewis?’
‘I want everything that people call success. Plus a few requirements of my own.’
‘You mustn’t expect too much,’ said Marion.
‘I expect everything there is,’ I said. I went on: ‘And if I fail, I shan’t make any excuses. I shall say that it is my own fault.’
‘Lewis!’ she cried. There was a strange expression on her face. After a silence, she asked: ‘Is there anything else you want?’
This time I hesitated. Then I said: ‘I think I want love.’
Marion said, her voice emphatic and decisive, but her face still soft with pain ‘Oh, I haven’t had time for that. There’s too much else to do. I wonder if you’ll have time.’
I was too rapt to attend to her. Just then, I was living in my imagination.
Marion contradicted herself; and said ‘Oh, I suppose you’re right. I suppose we all want — love. But, Lewis, I wonder if we mean the same thing by love?’
I was living in my imagination, and I could not tell her the essence of my own hope, let alone come near perceiving hers. I had confessed myself to her with ardour. I began to inquire about what she would teach that afternoon.
That winter I found the days in the office harder than ever to bear. At night I drank with George, stood at coffee stalls, sat in his room or my attic, tirelessly walked the streets until the small hours, while we stimulated each other’s answers to the infinite questions of young men — man’s destiny, the existence of God, the organization of the world, the nature of love. It was hard to wake up, with the echoes of the infinite questions still running through my head, to get to the office by nine and to stare with heavy eyes at the names of fee-paying children at one of the secondary schools.
Mr Vesey did not make it easier. He considered that I was living above my station, and he disapproved intensely. He had heard that I was seen in the London Road one night, excessively cheerful with drink. He had heard also of my political speeches. Mr Vesey was outraged that I should presume to do things he dared not do. He said ominously that the life of his clerks out of hours was part of his business, whatever we might think. He addressed the office in characteristically dark and cryptic hints: how some people deliberately drew attention to themselves, either by sucking up to authority or by painting the town red, with only one intention, which was to discredit their superior and obstruct his promotion.