‘I’m not sorry you heard that,’ he said. ‘You can see why one has to turn away so many pupils? They follow the work, you know. It’s no credit to me, of course, but you’re lucky to come here, Eliot. I should like you to tell yourself that.’
What I should have liked to tell myself was whether or not that scene with Percy was rehearsed.
Then Getliffe began to exhort me: his voice became brisk and strident, he took the pipe out of his mouth and waved the stem at me.
‘Well, Eliot,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a year here as a pupil. After that we can see whether you’re ever going to earn your bread and butter. Not to speak of a little piece of cake. Mind you, we may have to tell you that it’s not your vocation. One mustn’t shirk one’s responsibilities. Not even the painful ones. One may have to tell you to move a bit farther up the street.’
‘Of course,’ I said, in anger and pride.
‘Still,’ said Getliffe, ‘you’re not going to sink if you can help it. You needn’t tell me that. You’ve got a year as a pupil. And a year’s a long time. Your job is to be as useful as you can to both of us. Start whenever you like. The sooner the better. Start tomorrow.’
Breathlessly, with immense zest, Getliffe produced a list of cases and references, happy with all the paraphernalia of the law, reeling out the names of cases very quickly, waving his pipe as I copied them out.
‘As for the root of all evil,’ said Getliffe, ‘I shall have to charge you the ordinary pupil’s fees. You see, Eliot, one’s obliged to think of the others. Hundred guineas for the year. October to October. If you start early, you don’t have to pay extra,’ said Getliffe with a chuckle. ‘That’s thrown in with the service. Like plain vans. A hundred guineas is your contribution to the collection plate. You can pay in quarters. The advantage of the instalment system’, he added, ‘is that we can reconsider the arrangement for the third and fourth quarters. You may have saved me a little bit of work before then. You may have earned a bit of bread and butter. The labourer is worthy of his hire.’ He smiled, affably, brazenly, and said: ‘Yes! The labourer is worthy of his hire.’
I think I had some idea, even then, of the part Herbert Getliffe was going to play in my career. He warmed me, as he did everyone else. He took me in often, as he did everyone else. He made me feel restrained, by the side of the extravagant and shameless way in which he exhibited his heart. On the way from his room to the clerk’s, I was half aware that this was a tricky character to meet, when one was struggling for a living. I should not have been astonished to be told in advance the part he was going to play. But Percy Hall’s I should not have guessed.
Percy’s room was a box of an office, which had no space for any furniture but a table and a chair; Percy gave me the chair and braced his haunches against the edge of the table. He was, I noticed now, a squat powerful man, with the back of his head rising vertically from his stiff collar. No one ever bore a more incongruous Christian name; and it was perverse that he had a job where, according to custom, everyone called him by it.
‘I want to explain one or two points to you, sir. If you enter these Chambers, there are things I can do for you. I could persuade someone to give you a case before you’ve been here very long. But’ — Percy gave a friendly, brutal, good-natured smile — ‘I’m not going to until I know what you’re like. I’ve got a reputation to lose myself. The sooner we understand each other, the better.’
With a craftsman’s satisfaction, Percy described how he kept the trust of the solicitors; how he never overpraised a young man, but how he reminded them of a minor success; how he watched over a man who looked like training into a winner, and how gradually he fed him with work; how it was no use being sentimental and finding cases for someone who was not fitted to survive.
Percy was able, I was thinking. He liked power and he liked his job — and he liked himself. It was a pleasure to him to be hard and shrewd, not to succumb to facile pity, to be esteemed as a clear-headed man. And he cherished a certain resentment at his luck. He had not had the chances of the men for whose work he foraged; yet he was certain that most of them were weaklings beside himself.
‘I want to know what strings you can pull, sir,’ said Percy. ‘Some of our young gentlemen have uncles or connexions who are solicitors. It turns out very useful sometimes. It’s wonderful how the jobs come in.’
‘I can’t pull any strings,’ I said. He was not a man to fence with. He was rough under the smooth words, and it was wiser to be rough in return.
‘That’s a pity,’ said Percy.
‘I was born poor,’ I said. ‘I’ve got no useful friends. Apart from my studentship — you knew I’d got one?’
‘I see Mr Getliffe’s correspondence, sir,’ said Percy complacently.
‘Apart from that, I’m living on borrowed money. If I can’t earn my keep within three years, I’m finished — so far as this game goes.’
‘That’s a pity,’ said Percy. Our eyes met. His face was expressionless.
He said nothing for some moments. He seemed to be assessing the odds. He did not indulge in encouragement. He had, however, read Eden’s letters and, with his usual competence, remembered them in detail. He reminded me that here was one solicitor with whom I had some credit. I said that Eden’s was a conservative old firm in a provincial town.
‘Never mind. They’ve paid Mr Getliffe some nice little fees.’
‘Eden’s got a very high opinion of him.’
‘I suppose so, sir,’ said Percy.
I was fishing for his own opinion, but did not get a flicker of response.
He had asked enough questions for that afternoon, and looked content. He banished my future from the conversation, and told me that he bred goldfish and won prizes for them. Then he decided to show me the place where I should sit for the next year. It was in a room close to Getliffe’s, and the same size. There were already four people in it — Allen, a man well into middle age, who was writing at a roll-top desk, and two young men, one reading at a small table and two others playing chess. Percy introduced me, and I was offered a small table of my own, under one of the windows. The view was different from that in Getliffe’s room: one looked across the gardens to another court, where an occasional light was shining, though it was teatime on a summer afternoon. The river was not visible from this window, but, as I turned away and talked to Allen and the others, I heard a boat hoot twice.
I came to know the view from that window in Chambers very well. I spent weeks in the long vacation there, though it was not realistic to do so. I learned little, and the others had gone away. Getliffe had asked me to produce some notes for him, but I could have taken my books anywhere. Yet I was restless, away from my place: it was as though I had to catch a train.
I was restless through that autumn and winter, through days when, with nothing to do, I gazed down over the gardens and watched the lights come on in the far court. There was nothing to do. Though Getliffe was good at filling in one’s time, though I marked down every case in London that was not sheer routine, still there were days, stretches of days, when all I could do was read as though I were still a student and, instead of gazing from my garret over the roofs, look out instead over the Temple gardens. Some days, in that first year, when I was eating my heart out, that seemed the only change: I had substituted a different view, that was all.
I was too restless to enjoy knowing the others in Getliffe’s chambers. At any other time I should have got more out of them. I struck up an acquaintance, it was true, with Salisbury, who worked in the other room; he had three years’ start on me and was beginning to get a practice together. He boasted that he was earning seven hundred pounds a year, but I guessed that five hundred pounds was nearer the truth. Our acquaintance was a sparring and mistrustful one; he was a protégé of Getliffe’s, which made me envy him, and in turn he saw me as a rival. I half knew that he was a kind, insecure, ambitious man who craved affection and did not expect to be liked; but I was distracted by the sight of his vulpine pitted face bent over his table, as I speculated how he described me to Getliffe behind my back.