The Conscience of the Rich Read Online Free Page A

about a minute to eight, and Mr March came in. He came in very quickly, his arms swinging and his head lowered. As we shook hands, he smiled at me shyly and with warmth. He was bald, but the hair over his ears was much darker than his children’s; his features were not so clear cut as theirs. His nose was larger, spread-out, snub, with a thick black moustache under it. When he spoke, he produced gestures that were lively, active, and peculiarly clumsy. They helped make his whole manner simple and direct – to my surprise, for I had expected him to seem formidable at once. But I had only to watch his eyes, even though the skin round them was reddened and wrinkled, to see they had once looked like Charles’ and Katherine’s and were still as sharp.
    He was wearing a dinner jacket, though none of the rest of us had dressed. Charles had several times told me not to. Mr March noticed my glance.
    ‘You mustn’t mind my appearance,’ he said. ‘I’m too old to change my ways. You’re all too bohemian for me. But when my children refuse to bring any of their friends to see their aged parent if they have to make themselves uncomfortable, I’m compelled to stretch a point. I’d rather have you not looking like a penguin than not at all.’
    The butler opened the door; we followed Katherine in to dinner. After blinking under the mass of candelabras in the drawing-room, I blinked again, for the opposite reason: for we might have been going into the shadows of a billiard-hall. The entire room, bigger even than the one we had just left, was lit only at the table and by a few wall-lights. On the walls I dimly saw paintings of generations of the family; later I discovered that the earliest, a picture of a dark full-bearded man, was finished in the 1730s, just after the family settled in England.
    I sat on Mr March’s left opposite Katherine, with Charles at my side; we took up only a segment of the table. A menu card lay by Mr March’s place; he read it out to us with gusto and satisfaction: ‘clear soup, fillets of sole, lamb cutlets, caramel mousse, mushrooms on toast.’
    The food was very good. Mr March began talking to me about Herbert Getliffe and the Bar; he already knew something of my career.
    ‘My nephew Robert used to be extremely miserable when he was in your position,’ said Mr March. ‘My brother-in-law warned him he’d got to wait for his briefs, but Robert always was impatient, and I used to see him being disgorged from theatres every time I took my wife out for a spree. One night I met him on the steps of the St James’s–’
    ‘What’s going to theatres got to do with his being impatient, Mr L?’ Katherine was beginning to laugh.
    Mr March, getting into his stride, charged into a kind of anecdote that I was not ready for. I had read descriptions of total recall: Mr March got nearer to it than anyone I had heard. Each incident that he remembered seemed as important as any other incident (this meeting with his nephew Robert was completely casual and happened over twenty years before): and he remembered them all with extravagant vividness. Time did not matter; something which happened fifty years ago suggested something which happened yesterday.
    I was not ready for that kind of anecdote, but his children were. They set him after false hares, they interrupted, sometimes all three were talking at once. I found myself infected with Mr March’s excitement, even anxious in case he should not get back to his starting-point.
    Listening to the three of them for the first time, I felt dazed. Mr March’s anecdotes were packed with references to his relatives and members of their large inter-married families. Occasionally these were explained, but usually taken for granted. He and his children had naturally loud voices, and in each other’s presence they became louder still. Between Mr March and Charles I could feel a current of strain; perhaps between Mr March and Katherine also, I did not know; but the