Time of Hope by C. P. Snow

Author:C. P. Snow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Time of Hope
ISBN: 9780755120208
Publisher: House of Stratus
Published: 2012-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

26: Meeting by Accident

The examination did not trouble me overmuch. It was not a decisive one; my acquaintances who were taking law degrees, like Charles March, were exempt from it; unless I did disgracefully badly, nothing hung upon the result. Once I got started, I felt a cheerful, savage contempt for those who tried to keep me in my proper station. I had only taken one examination in my life, the Oxford, but I found again that, after the first half-hour, I enjoyed the game. In the first lunch interval, certain that I was not going to disgrace myself, I reflected realistically, as I had done before, that my performance this year would be a guide to my chances twelve months hence in the Bar Finals – on which, in my circumstances, all depended.

I stayed at Mrs Reed’s, for no better reason than habit, but this time I did not have to look in entreaty at the hall table each time I entered the house. Sheila’s letter arrived on my second morning, according to her promise. For I had seen her before I left town, not listening to Jack Cotery, despite the comfort he had given me. The letter was in her usual allusive style, but contained a passage which made me smile: ‘My father has lost his voice, which is exceedingly just. He croaks pathetically. I have offered to nurse him – would you expect me to be good at the healing word?’ And, a little farther on, she wrote: ‘Curiously enough, he inquired about you the other day. He is probably thinking you might be useful some time for free legal consultations. My family are remarkably avaricious. I don’t know whether I shall inherit it. Poor Tom used to have to prescribe for my father. But Tom was a moral coward. You are evasive and cagey, but you’re not that.’

Evasive and cagey, I thought, in the luxury of considering a beloved’s judgement, in the conceit of youth. Was it true? No one else had ever said so. So far as I knew, no one had thought so. She had seen me get on, in harmony, with all kinds of people – while she shrank into a corner. And she alone had seen me quite free.

She wrote in the same vein about her father, her mother, herself. She was unsparing; equally remote from moral vanity or visceral warmth; she saw no reason to give herself or anyone else the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes her judgements were lunatic, and sometimes they went painfully deep. Those judgements were her revenge. People got through life with their lies and pretences, with their spontaneity, with their gluey warmth denied to her. She was left out of the party. So she told them that the party was false and the good-fellowship just a sham, and in telling them so she was sometimes no truer than a hurt child; but sometimes she tore the façade off the human condition, and made us wince at the truth.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.