In fact, however, I should have gained almost as much exhilaration if I had been walking with Charles through the streets of my own town. There, in the past years as a student, I had made other intimate friends. But the closest of them was a very different person from myself; he saw the world, the people round him, his own passions, in a way which seemed strange to my temperament and which I had to learn step by step. While with Charles, right from our first meeting, I felt that he saw himself and other people much as I did; and he never exhausted his fund of interest.
That was the real excitement, during the first months of our friendship. The picture of those early nights which remained in my memory bore no reference to the dinners and shows, much as I gloated in them; instead, I remembered walking together down Regent Street late one night.
We had just left a coffee stall. Charles carried a mackintosh over his arms, he was stooping a little. He had begun to talk about the characters of Alyosha and Father Zossima. Didn’t I think that no other writer but Dostoyevsky could have conveyed goodness in people as one feels it in them? That this was almost the only writer who had an immediate perception of goodness? Why could we accept it from him and doubt it from anybody else?
I could feel the fascination goodness held for him. I recognized what he meant; but at that age I should not have thought of it for myself. We began to argue, with a mixture of exasperation and understanding that often flared up between us. On the one side: isn’t it just sentimentality carried out with such touch and such psychological imagination that we swallow it whole? On the other: aren’t people like that, even if we choose to see their motives differently, even if we are sceptical about what goodness really means? Then Charles turned to me: his eyes were brighter than ever. They were dark grey, very sharp and intelligent.
‘We’re each feeling the other’s right,’ he said. ‘The next time I talk about this, I shall appropriate most of what you’re saying now — if you’re safely out of the way. And you’ll do the same, don’t you admit it?’
As each day passed in chambers, I looked forward to the evening; but slowly I was managing to occupy myself, and I discovered several odd jobs to do for Getliffe, who soon began to keep me busy. It became clear that Charles was still idle. He seemed to be reading scarcely any law, and I knew quite early that he was unhappy about his career. He spoke of Hart with a kind of lukewarm respect, but was far more eager to hear my stories of Getliffe.
During those months, I still did not know when to expect Charles’ concealments. His family, childhood — yes, as we spoke the blank came between us. About women and love and sex, he was franker than I was and knew more. He was not in love, I was: but we talked without any guards at all. When I spoke about my future, my hopes, he listened; if I asked him his, the secretiveness came back as though I had switched off a light. As an evasion he threw himself with intense vicarious interest into my relations with Herbert Getliffe.
As it happened, Getliffe was a tempting person to gossip about. It was hard not to be captivated by him occasionally: it was even harder not to speculate about his intentions, particularly if they had any effect on one’s livelihood. I knew that, the first time he interviewed me in chambers, after I had already arranged to become his pupil. He was late for the appointment, and I waited in his room; it was a rainy summer afternoon, and looking down from the window I saw the empty gardens and the river. Getliffe hurried in, dragging his feet, his lip pushed out in an apologetic grin. Suddenly his expression changed into a fixed gaze from brown and lively eyes.
‘Don’t tell me your name,’ he said. His voice was a little strident, he was short of breath. ‘You’re Ellis—’ I corrected him. As though he had not heard my correction at all, he was saying ‘You’re Eliot.’ Soon he was telling me: ‘I make it a principle to take people like you. Who’ve started with nothing but their brains.’
He chuckled, suddenly, as though we were jointly doing someone down: ‘It keeps the others up to it.’
‘And’ — his moods were quick, he was serious and full of responsibility again — ‘we’ve got a duty towards you. One’s got to look at it like that.’
Inside a quarter of an hour he had exhorted, advised, warned, and encouraged me. He finished up: ‘As for the root of all evil — I shall have to charge you the ordinary pupil’s fees. Hundred pounds for this year. This year only. You can pay in quarters. The advantage of the instalment system is that we can reconsider it for the fourth. If you’ve earned a bit of bread and butter before then.’ He smiled, protruding his lip and saying: ‘Yes! The labourer is worthy of his hire.’
I told Charles of this conversation in my first week in London. He said: ‘His brother was a friend of mine at Cambridge. By the way, he’s singularly unlike him. I was taken to dinner with your Herbert once, last year. Of course, he was the life and soul of the party. The point is, when he was talking to you I’m sure he believed every word he said. That’s his strength. Don’t you feel that’s his strength?’
He added a few minutes later: ‘I wish I’d known you were going to him, though.’
Then he knew he had made me more anxious: for the unreliability of Getliffe’s temperament was one of those disagreeable truths which I could admit equably enough to myself, but was hurt to hear from anyone else. He said quickly: ‘I really meant you might have done better at the Chancery Bar. But it’ll make no difference. He’ll be better in some ways than a solid cautious man could possibly be. It’ll even itself out. It won’t affect you too much, you agree, don’t you?’
If I had mentioned it to Charles in the summer, he would have sent me to some other chambers, and I should have been spared a good deal. For this year, however, there were certain advantages in being with Getliffe. Quite early in the autumn, he began fetching me into his room two or three times each week. ‘How’s it going?’ he would say, and when I mentioned a case, he would expound with a cheerful, invigorating enthusiasm, more often than not getting the details a trifle wrong (that first slip with my name was typical of his compendious but fuzzy memory). Then he would produce some papers for me: ‘I’d like a note on that by the end of the week. Just to keep you from rusting.’
Often there were several days’ work in one of those notes, and it was only by not meeting Charles and sitting up late that I could deliver it in time. Getliffe would glance through the pages, take them in with his quick, sparkling eyes, and say affably: ‘You’re getting on! You’re getting on!’
The first time it happened, I was surprised to find the substance of one of those drafts of mine appearing in the course of an opinion of his own. In most places he had not even altered the words.
The weeks went by, the new year arrived: and still Charles had told me little about himself. He had said no more about his family; he had never suggested that I should visit them. He offered no explanation, not even an excuse to save my face. It seemed strange, after he had taken such subtle pains over the most trivial things. It could not be reconciled with all the kind, warm-hearted, patient friendliness I had received at his hands.
At last he asked me. We were having tea in my room on a January afternoon. He spoke in a tone different from any I had heard him use: not diffident or anxious, but cold, as though angry that I was there to receive the invitation.
‘I wonder if you would care to dine at my father’s house next week?’
I looked at him. Neither of us spoke for a moment. Then he said: ‘It might interest you to see the inside of a Jewish family.’