George Passant Read Online Free PDF Page A

you thinking that it has ruined Jack’s chances for good?’
    ‘This can’t affect them,’ I said quickly, and Morcom agreed.
    ‘You mustn’t worry about that, Roy,’ Olive said.
    Roy half-believed her; her tone was kind, she cared for him more than she had admitted on Wednesday night. He was still doubtful, however, until she added: ‘If you want to know, we were thinking whether they can do any harm to George Passant.’
    The boy’s fears lifted; for a few moments his precocity seemed to leave him, and he teased Olive as though the other three of us were not still harassed.
    ‘Are you fond of Mr Passant, Olive?’ he asked, with his lively smile.
    ‘In a way,’ she said.
    ‘Are you sweet on him?’
    ‘Not in the least,’ she replied. She paused, then said vehemently: ‘But I can tell you this: he’s worth twenty Jack Coterys.’
    A little later, they went away. Before they left, Roy shook hands with us both; and, as Morcom and Olive were talking together, Roy said quietly to me: ‘I’m being whisked off tomorrow. I don’t suppose I shall see you again for a long time, Mr Eliot. But could you spare a minute to send me word how things turn out?’
    From the window, Morcom and I watched them walk across the gardens.
    ‘I wonder what sort of life he’ll have,’ said Morcom. But he was thinking, hopefully that night, of himself and Olive.
    We stayed by the window, eating bread and cheese from his pantry, and keeping a watch on the road below; for we had to warn George before he arrived next door, on his visit to Martineau’s at home.

 
     
4:   A Cup of Coffee Spilt in a Drawing-Room
     
    THE lamplighter passed up the road; under the lamp by Martineau’s gate, the hedge top suddenly shone out of the dusk. Looking down over the gardens, Morcom was content to be quiet.
    Just then, thinking how much I liked him, I felt too how he could never have blown so many of us into more richly coloured lives, as George had done. Where should we have been, if George had not come to Eden & Martineau’s?
    Where should we have been? We were poor and young. By birth we fell into the ragtag and bobtail of the lower middle classes. Then we fell into our jobs in offices and shops. We lived in our bed-sitting rooms, as I did since my mother’s death, or with our families, lost among the fifty thousand houses in the town. The world seemed on the march, we wanted to join in, but we felt caught.
    Myself, but for George, I might still have been earning my two pounds a week as a clerk in the education department, and wondering what to do with a legacy of £300 from an aunt. I should have acted in the end, perhaps, but nineteen is a misty age: while George gave me no rest, bullied and denounced me until I started studying law and reading for the Bar examinations. A month before Jack’s crisis I had at last stopped procrastinating, and arranged to leave the office at the end of this September.
    And so with the others in George’s group – except Jack, who had been the unlucky one. George had set us moving, lent us money: he never seemed to think twice about lending us money, out of his income of £250 from the firm, together with an extra £30 from the School. It was the first time we had been so near to a generous-hearted man.
    We became excited over the books he told us to read and the views he stood by, violent, argumentative, four square. We were carried away by his belief in human beings and ourselves. And we speculated, we could not help but speculate, about George himself. Olive certainly soon knew, and Jack and I not long afterwards, that he was not a simple character, unmixed, all of a piece. We felt, though, and nothing could shake us, that he was a man warm with broad, living nature; not good nature or bad nature, but simple nature; he was a man of flesh and bone.
    I thought this, as I saw him at last walking in the lamplight, whistling, swinging his stick, his bowler hat (which he punctiliously wore when on