Chapter IX

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* EILEEN DOREEN GRANT	A WORKMAN *
* GLADYS GRANT	A WORKMAN *
* HUGH ROLANDSON	THE VICAR *
* A. MANNHEIM	H. J. GRAYLING X
* CPL. GEORGE RANSOM	C.J. F. EVETTS *

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“Hugh,” she said, sleepily, “you’d better go.” She must have forgotten she had already told him once to go, and he was standing outside the bed looking down at her. She flung one arm out of the bed and it fell along the counterpane, drawing down the bedclothes and exposing one white breast, small and unspoilt; if it was not quite such a firm round as it once had been, Hugh Rolandson was not the man to know it. She turned her head towards him, but did not open her eyes. She let herself sink into the pillow, profile outlined against the white, and in a few seconds was deep in the sleep of satisfied exhaustion.

Hugh wrapped the thin silk dressing-gown round his chilling body and watched his lover. I shall never know another moment like this in all my life, he thought. I cannot ever have a sharper happiness or a greater pleasure. I am going to fix every detail in my mind so that for years afterwards the memory shall be as clean and clear as this minute is.

The common consensus of opinion is often right and convention may be a good guide even in unconventionality. Could any place, but Paris have provided so perfect a romance?

There are no good words to explain, to those who do not know it, the keenness of the emotion he was feeling. It is a special thing. He was young; he was romantic; eight hours earlier he had been a virgin. It was six o’clock in the morning, in Paris in the year 1939, in spring, in an hotel on the banks of the Seine. His mistress was a few years older than he, experienced, and undeniably lovely. There was such a concentration of delight that he could scarcely contain it. He had the serenity of full satisfaction and at the same time a consciousness that he was only at the start of the most exciting and pleasurable period of his life. He had had all—much more than all— he had ever hoped for, and yet knew it was only the beginning.

Long bars of pale reddish light from the rising sun flooded into the bedroom from the tall french window. He saw every detail of the room, in the thin light, with the sharp-edged clarity of early morning. He imprinted on his mind the disorder of the narrow room. There were some lilies of the valley, which he had bought the evening before, drooping a little in a glass placed in front of the mirror. There was a pile of feminine clothes, half on and half off a chair, with small silk garments at the top. Even an unfinished quarter tumbler of brandy on a small table was important to him; he fixed its position in his mind. Underneath the heavy scent of the flowers was a sharp smell of alcohol. He walked to the long window and looked out. The street was empty in the weak sun; he stood for several minutes and watched the river run smooth and silent beyond the parapet, looking through the range of tall, slender, closely set trees, already bursting into leaf. This was Paris; here Renata had been his lover.

He turned round to look at her again. Brown, short hair on the pillow, finely traced features, eyes closed but with shadows beneath them; arm, shoulder, breast. Still, but breathing gently and quietly. He felt a sudden rush of feeling that he could not analyse, a constriction as if he was going to cry.

He waited for the crisis to pass, and when it had, deliberately remembered the night, passing from the clear light to the warm darkness. With no passion left, he recalled carefully every detail; and the blood rushed to his face again. Earlier in the evening, touched by his devotion and remembering her own past, she had said to him: “You make me feel second-hand.” He had not understood her; he was not capable, at the moment, of comprehending anything that seemed to suggest a criticism of her. It had only underlined his own feeling of yokellish clumsiness and inexpertness, and the greatness of her condescension. He stood at the door a minute before he slipped away to his room, and again recorded to himself that he did not deserve what he had received.

Neither later that day, nor afterwards, did Renata show if her emotions were equally stirred. She was as graceful as a cat, and she was as secretive. She gave him plenty of evidences of affection, but no signs that she had been shaken off her balance. Yet she had taken a very great risk. Her husband, the Councillor, was jealous and morose; and to go to Paris for a long week-end of adultery was at the least rash. The alibi she had constructed for herself might easily collapse. Once before she had taken a much less risk; and before her marriage she had made one experiment. This was more serious.

But if she was worried she did not show it.

It was a Saturday morning on which Hugh had watched the sun rise. They spent the day at Versailles; because it was the cheapest way they went by the State railway. The carriage was packed and Renata—he was beginning to learn to call her Renée—sat on a folding seat at the end of the carriage, near to the unclosed and uncloseable door. The railway runs through narrow, bush or tree-covered cuttings. Hugh silently watched her sitting there, motionless and calm, the green leaves racing past her head. When they came near the station, she rose, smoothed her dress, and called him by lifting her eyebrows. He came as swiftly and adoringly as a dog.

As there has not been, for two hundred years, any town to equal Paris for what the journalists call a week-end of love, so there has never been a park for lovers to equal Versailles. There are no fountains to equal that astonishing battery when it plays; no trees like the monster quincunxes that Louis planted; no ornamental gardens like Marie Antoinette’s playground. The long vista of squared waters seen from the Palace has been imitated from Leningrad to Washington; but this is the original.

They walked away from the Palace, down the great steps and past the first of the great rectangles of water. They turned off among the huge trees, among the partly overgrown and wholly overshadowed gravel walks and perennial green hedges, dark and a little damp after the brilliant warmth of the sunlight. Soon they came to a dusty, white side-road, with a waiting line of horsecabs in the sun and shabby cabmen, a kiosk, and large notice boards containing Regulations for Hippomobile Vehicles. They stood in the sun; and laughed at the notice; and refused solicitations to ride in a hippomobile vehicle.

After a minute or two they turned and went to the Petit Trianon. Renata stopped on one of the bridges in the Queen’s play-village and looked at the thickly struggling mass of fish in the stream. “Those are carp,” said Hugh, remembering the guide book. “They’re very old. They saw the Revolution. Marie Antoinette stocked the stream. Or perhaps they’re only the descendants,” he corrected uneasily.

“I know,” said Renata, and held on to the stone parapet silently for a second or two. “I never walk about here— I’ve been here before—without feeling unreal,” she went on. “I don’t mean feeling that it’s unreal, but that I’m somehow out of place; or rather out of time, I suppose I mean. Did you ever hear about the two English spinsters?”

Hugh indicated ignorance.

“I forget exactly what the story was intended to prove. Something about reincarnation, or perhaps it was Dunne’s time theory. Anyway, I read about it once. There were two middle-aged English spinsters before the war—about 1906, I think it was—walking in the Trianon, just about where we are, I suppose, when they noticed that it all seemed very empty. I think the first thing definitely queer that they saw was a man in what they thought was fancy dress, outside one of those wooden imitation peasant huts, walking up and down waiting for something or somebody. He was in a very bad temper and dressed like the eighteenth century. I forget whether he saw them or not; but the next person did see them; he was a woodman or park attendant in uniform and he seems to have been very surprised. And one of the old ladies described exactly what his uniform was, and it was something like the uniform of the attendants about 1788, but not quite right. So, because it wasn’t quite right, it was taken as proof that the old girls’ story was made up; but apparently later investigation into the records kept here showed that the Court was always fiddling round with the uniform and for quite a short period of one year just exactly those changes had been made. Well, when they got out of here into the main gardens the two Englishwomen began to hear some thin and pretty music and one of them was able to reproduce it afterwards more or less. Also they saw a great crowd of people in the distance, all in eighteenth-century dress. I forget how it ended or what exactly the proofs were; but I believe the evidence seemed to suggest that they had actually found themselves somehow in the middle of a fête champêtre given by Marie Antoinette on some particular day for which that music had been composed, and while those changes in the uniform had been enforced.”

“Do you believe that?” said Hugh.

“Of course not,” she answered. “There is some explanation—some sane explanation, I mean. But while you were reading it it was very convincing. I only mentioned it because I feel like those two old women. All this doesn’t belong to us, or to the rest of the tourists wandering round here. I wouldn’t in the least be surprised to find the trees suddenly smaller and younger, the peasant houses inhabited by courtiers, and the fish only a few, small, new, carp. It’s we who aren’t real; this belongs to other people; and it isn’t dead yet, like a museum is.”

“I don’t mind being a ghost, in a place like this,” said Hugh, smiling and looking up, to where the branches of the elms interlocked and formed a green ceiling through which bright blue shone in squares and diamonds and broken shapes.

“Your ghost will walk, you lover of trees,” she answered, a half-embarrassed quotation, to cover her lapse from reason.

“I love other things than trees,” he said, looking down at her with an affection that was almost fatuous.

They walked back to the main gardens, found a warm place on the edge of the trees, not too far from the artificial lakes, and lay down. They watched the sun make patterns on the grass, through the leaves of the trees, and flash irregularly in the water as it was troubled by the fountains. Both were tired; dark rings were under Renata’s eyes.

“Don’t let’s be ashamed,” quoted Hugh suddenly, “if the knowing know, We rose from rapture but an hour ago,” and then blushed scarlet and nearly apologized. She held his hand firmly for a moment; her fingers were thin, long and strong. “You ought,” she said contritely, “to get to know more about the facts of life. I’m really rather a bitch, but I suppose it’s no use telling you that.”

It was no use. He did not even trouble to say so. She chose, for her own reasons no doubt, to say such things about herself; but they had no meaning, and he did not regard them. All that mattered for him was how to keep the unexampled privileges he had secured, how to retain the graciousness of this marvellous, self-contained and experienced lover, how to hide his incompetence and rusticity. To this he devoted himself steadily until they caught the early morning Boulogne-Folkestone train on Tuesday. He recollected anxiously all that he had ever known, or been told, about Paris restaurants and cafés. That night he took her down to Montparnasse, and they had aperitifs on the terrace of a café called the Closerie des Lilas, looking at an iron statue of Marshal Ney on a horse, half-hidden among young yellow-green leaves. They drank a mixture called mandarin-citron, a bitter highly alcoholic brown liquid, with a dash of syrup, soda, and ice. It was exhilarating and (though they did not find this out till later) slightly purgative. They went on to a small restaurant called for unknown reasons the Negro of Toulouse, and ate what was no more than an ordinarily good Parisian dinner; that is, it was greatly superior to anything that could be got without prevision and thought in London or New York. A dignified man in black, with a flowing cerise tie and large belly, stopped in front of the restaurant, took a violin out of a shabby case, tucked it underneath his partly-shaved chin and began to play and sing I kiss your little hand, Madame. The French was Ce n’est que votre main, madame. He noticed the English couple, bowed, and began to sing and play a more ambitious number, unknown to Hugh and obscure in tune, which seemed to be called Ce ne fut qu’un moment de folie. Hugh was enraptured and sent him twenty francs: Renata said nothing, but watched her lover. Her expression might have been anguish, guilt, maternal anxiety, plain love, or even for a moment humility; it passed almost at once.

Lovers’ nights are all the same, and yet never the same. He felt, in the quieter delights of Saturday, as if he had been shown, in order that he might know everything, what love would be like with Renée (the name was coming easier now, though he still sometimes pronounced it Renie) after years of married life. An absence of hysteria, a quiet confidence of affection. He did not hope for married life with her; he knew it was impossible, and why, anyhow, should he expect it? (If he could have expected it, would he have felt the same way about her? He would have had to have been much older to ask, let alone answer, such a question.) Only, he wished for a fleeting minute that he could have stayed all night with her. Surely, in a small Paris hotel, there was no one to ask questions. But she had said what she wanted, and he had to do as he was told. Perhaps she just preferred to have her bed to herself. He looked for a longer time, that dawn, out of the window. He craned his neck and could see the statue of Ste. Genevieve, patron saint of Paris. It is (or was; it may not still stand) a white torso rising from one of the pillars of a bridge across the Seine. It looks eternally, watchfully, and ultimately in vain, to the East. He wondered about it for an idle minute. It was probably, he thought, symbolic. Watching for the German invader. He disliked the thought; and forgot it.

That Sunday, wiser than he was, she demanded exercise and made him take her to Fontainebleau. They walked the whole day in the forest, among the great trees, and had lunch in a small inn on the western edge of it. The road outside was white and sunny; inside it was dark and almost too cool. The room was furnished with wooden tables on a few of which were blue and white check cloths. On the walls were an advertisement of Rossi vermouth (an orange), the faded text of the LOI SUR L’IVRESSE, the words DUBO DUBON DUBONNET and an elaborate announcement of a society called La Chablisienne, which had been formed to combat the pernicious habit of le cocktèle, so destructive to population, and had therefore arranged that a glass of genuine Chablis could be purchased for 3 fr. 50, which was an œuvre de remoralisation; and in this work of remoralizing they joined.

The meal was simple and very cheap. The hors d’œuvre contained most of the things that they expected, and in addition a dish of what looked like sliced rubber and gristle in oil and vinegar but which turned out to be very tasty, masticable (though only just), but ultimately enigmatic. There was next a great deal of veal in a dark orange-coloured sauce, fruit which was no more than reasonably good, and the cheese which is called Pont l’evêque, in excellent condition. The wine was a light red burgundy named Juliénas, which does not travel well but is very rarely bad (as it is also very rarely extremely good; it was in this case neither). Hugh, who was still young, took with his coffee a liqueur called Parfait Amour, and wished he had not. Renata asked for brandy—fine maison—and to her distress realized she had humiliated him once more by showing a greater knowledge of the world. She did all that she could by holding his hand under the table and smiling at him.

That was their Sunday. At night, their lovemaking was little more than the equivalent of the brief kiss of two tired but affectionate people; he did not stay with her and was, to his surprise, glad to lie in his bed and sleep uninterruptedly, peacefully and very late into the morning.

They spent what was left of the morning wandering about Paris like tourists. There was a flower market by the riverside, not far from the Prefecture of Police; she prevented him with difficulty from loading her with new bouquets of lilies of the valley. They walked around the tiny lle St. Louis, and were surprised to see how much it still resembled a small French village set down in the middle of the city. They went north of the river and spent a lot of time and some appreciable amount of money in a shop called “Le Bon Rire Gaulois,” on small practical jokes, including a toilet roll which released a black snake, a sort of whistle which could be placed beneath a cushion and would make an indecorous noise when anyone sat down on it, and a cruet which was composed of tiny models of necessary domestic china articles. In the afternoon they went to the pictures, to see a French film that Hugh did not understand.

That night, Monday night, was their last night. They said good-bye ardently; at one point Renata told Hugh to look away (which he obediently did) for she found she was quietly weeping for no reason that she knew. They separated next midday at Victoria, hurriedly and without a word. Fear and calculation had returned to them as soon as they passed the Customs at Folkestone.

§

It is almost certain that Renata Grayling’s chief anxiety, as she sat in the train for Croxburn on that morning of 1939, was not for her husband’s possible clairvoyance, but for her own balance. Ever since she had begun to think about herself connectedly at all, her chief object had been to secure her own poise. She must be in control of herself and, so, in control of what happened around her. She could not order the world, that she knew; but she could make sure that the world did not overcome her. Her chief characteristic—she had decided it as early as fourteen years old—should be a calm superiority to outward circumstances, an elegant nonchalance, a self-adequacy which would not be upset by anything outside herself. Dignity was not the word: it was rather the sure self-possession of a woman of the world which was (she decided) the only reliable protection except money.

Age is more important in women’s lives than in men. Here, then, are the dates. Renata Grayling, née Torrens, was born in 1904. She was fifteen in 1919, the first year of peace. She was twenty when she married Grayling. She was thirty-five when she went to Paris with Hugh Rolandson, probably as beautiful as she ever would be (which was, at the least, exceedingly good-looking), full of vigour and ambition, but not with the future before her. She was thirty-eight when her husband died. Nearly forty.

All through her life, she had concentrated her attention, successfully, on controlling herself, on being (as she phrased it to herself) in the driving seat of herself. Only in Paris had it seemed, for a minute, as if the car would run away with the driver; and that would be terrifying. For all her life had enforced on her the moral that “They”—the outside world—would oppress her if they could, if she let anyone but herself for one minute gain any control.

Her father, Clarence Kirkpatrick Torrens, had been Senior Classical Master at a reputable boys’ school on the South Coast which was already in 1904 at the beginning of slow decline. Parents even then were wondering whether they were really wise to send their boys to be flogged by Mr. Torrens and taught Latin and Greek and very little else; in the years in which Renata grew up more and more of them decided they were not. Mr. Torrens had never been a jovial man: the slow decay of his prospects and the death of his wife in 1909 made him finally into a morose one. His six children were named Alexander, Desiderius, and Augustine (the boys) and Alethea, Sophronia and Renata (the girls). It might have been conjectured from their names that he was a classical scholar, and a second deduction could have been that he was High Church. In fact, he had not taken his religion seriously until shortly before the birth of Renata: he then became consciously an Anglican (he had been nominally one all his life) and proceeded slowly but steadily towards Roman Catholicism. Shortly after his wife’s death he became convinced that he ought to have been a priest, and celibate. He found in this belief a consolation for his worldly ill-success; but at the same time the sight of his children became an offence to him. They were present reminders that he was not a priest, that even if his convictions did, as they intermittently threatened to, carry him into the Roman Church, it would have to be at the cost of repudiating his whole past life, or of remaining a layman.

He treated his family, as he believed, with exact justice. He did not reflect on any need they might have for the affection their mother would have shown them, or on his possible duty to replace her. He showed them the way to the love of God, which was greater than any mortal love, by means of morning and evening prayers; he disciplined them for untruthfulness, uncleanliness, or noise; for the rest, he treated them exactly as he did his pupils, without favouritism of any kind. That, incidentally included punishing them not infrequently in the somewhat indecent manner common in boys’ schools of the last generation. He made, in pursuance of his principle of fairness, no difference between the sexes. There is nothing like intermittent beating on the bare posteriors in adolescence to encourage in after life an almost morbid determination to keep one’s life wholly private, and to forbid others even the most indirect control or the most innocent and emotional rights.

Renata was not worse treated than her brothers and sisters, but she was ill-served by her age. She was thirteen and fourteen in the last two years of the first world war: that is to say, like most English children, she suffered from a slight lack of sugar and meat and a grave lack of fats in 1917, intensified in 1918. This left a marked effect on her physique—she was pallid, leggy, spotty, and underweight. She wanted to be called “Diane,” because of a picture entitled Diane de Poitiers in her father’s encyclopaedia, but the family did not encourage romantic dreaming. Her brothers called her Skinny and told her the only place she had any fat was on her bottom. They could be excused: she was not pretty, her brown hair was sparse and done in two plaits, she was gauche and ill-mannered.

Her emancipation was by no act of her own. The very day after her decision already mentioned to cultivate poise and self-adequacy, her father spanked her quite smartly with the study door wide open. The younger children laughed, with the treachery of their kind, and tears and humiliation were all her lot. It was an event which was repeated more than once, even after her fifteenth birthday: twenty years later she had not quite forgotten the sensation. One July evening in 1919, her father, finding some fault with her and Desiderius, her seventeen-year-old brother, strapped her moderately severely—enough to reduce her to tears—and then turned to her brother.

Desiderius, watching his sister’s ignoble struggles, had made up his mind. He seized his father’s right hand and twisted it sharply, so that the strap fell out.

“How dare you?” thundered the schoolmaster.

Desiderius’ answer was to twist his father’s arm in the way he had learnt at school. He discovered his muscles were better than the older man’s: he nearly twisted his father to his knees.

“If you ever try to touch me again, I’ll break your arm,” he said.

The two glared at each other. After a minute the father walked away.

“And leave the kid alone too,” called Desiderius after him, with lordly generosity.

§

There can have been fewer young women of eighteen more unfit to take care of themselves than Renata Torrens in 1920. Her father never attempted to reassert himself after his defeat by Desiderius, even though his son left the house three months later. He withdrew himself, allowing her the minimum of pocket money, offering neither enmity nor affection, nor, for days on end, even conversation. He would not, if he could avoid it, speak to her or to any of his children. He expected of her, as his financial circumstances declined, more domestic duties, which she fulfilled fairly adequately. She was not well clothed, but gained considerable skill in making a good show from poor materials. She still regarded herself humbly as an ugly girl, the automatic derision of her family preventing her knowing that she was developing a brown-haired, pale, slightly elfin beauty. She read all the modern books that she could get from the local library, indiscriminately but eagerly. She was not qualified for any work—not even as a shopgirl or a typist—and her acquaintances in the High School she had just left were silly. It was an especial misfortune that not one of her friends’ mothers took an interest in the lonely girl.

She was in consequence, as Brandon Lee told his friends, a pushover. He seduced her, with an ease that astonished himself, on a July afternoon. She had been flattered and surprised at the short but enthusiastic court paid to her by one who was incontestably the beau of the town. He had been a pupil at her father’s school, and even there had been adored by his juniors of both sexes (including herself), and by at least one indiscreet senior, wife of one of the staff. That he should have picked her out from among the girls of their acquaintance, even for a week, astonished her. She walked proudly with him along the esplanade, dressed in a blue coat and skirt, which she had herself made over into a well-fitting garment, hands thrust clenched into its pockets, swinging along with a free long stride, a wild surmise forming in her mind. Perhaps she was not the ugly duckling she had been; perhaps others than the great Brandon could see beauty in her. When, after scarcely a week, he claimed, and with smooth efficiency took, complete intimacy, she made no resistance. She was not, yet, sufficiently proud to do so; and in any case she wanted to lose her ignorance. He reassured her against possible consequences and called her “my sweet Ipsithilla.” Not till she consulted her father’s Catullus at home did she discover that Ipsithilla was a cheap harlot, and that all she had immediately received from Brandon was an insult in Latin and some physical discomfort.

But she had ultimately been given something else. Brandon wanted to continue to hang round her: she gave him his congé with serene assurance. His attentions, and her mirror, had assured her of one thing. She was no longer an ugly gawk, a skinny Lizzie, a duck’s-bottom or any of the things that the nursery had called her. She knew now she was a pretty young woman—perhaps more than pretty—she could cut others out, she could charm men, and (she considered) she had experienced all life had to give and found it worthless. Immune from temptation, new in poise and assurance; she would marry for money and remove herself from her father’s home as soon as she could.

Her fulfilment of that programme had not been as successful as she wished. Two years after Brandon Lee’s exploit she became engaged to, and shortly after married, Councillor Henry Grayling of Croxburn, who was staying for a fortnight’s holiday at the Grand. He was over forty and already established in his habits, which consisted of regular attendance at the office and the Council, with the sole relaxation of bridge with fellow councillors. He wanted a wife who would increase his position in the community, entertain his friends as he wished, and give him children. He picked on Renata because she was very attractive, because she encouraged him openly, and because she had no money and would be in his power. He did not get what he wanted: she would not have children, and was bored with his friends. He was not even able to control her financially to anything like the extent he had expected.

She on her side wanted a rich husband who would make few demands and would provide her with a comfortable home and the base for a full life. She found she had married a man who was moderately well off only—his salary was not high and his peculations limited—and very parsimonious. His friends were dreary, middle-aged and dull; he disapproved of the books she read, and of the conversations she tried to carry on. He was as narrow and tyrannous as her father; though he did not try to beat her he had other physical rights over her which he exercised according to a punctually kept time-table. She was convinced (being twenty years old, healthy, and a woman) that she had cast from herself all illusions of the flesh and of romance: she was greatly surprised at the annoyance caused her by the continued proximity of this grey, sour husband, smelling perpetually of stale tobacco.

Her second escapade, which she remembered in humiliation in Paris, was undertaken wholly in revenge on her husband. She found in Cellini’s memoirs a phrase about one of his models whom he rather disliked: “I lay with her to vex her and her family.” Appreciating it, she lay with Richard Grannison (a cheerful, rather greedy reddish-faced man who had entertained her expensively) in order to vex her husband. She never told him of her evening’s occupation; her revenge was private. To her mild surprise, she rather enjoyed the experience, though not sufficiently keenly to wish to repeat it. She found Grannison a very kind and quite unsentimental man: she learnt in one afternoon that a cynical attitude to affairs of the heart was quite compatible with gentleness and (as she thought) a fundamentally civilized behaviour. He talked to her afterwards with the ease of a practised man about town, assuming at the first an equal degree of sophistication in her. “Why, you’re blushing,” he said after a minute. “Let me see. Do you blush all over, or only your face?” She burned even redder and-held down the clothes. “You …” she began to say and stopped. What she really meant was the equivalent of “You are a one!” or “You do say such things!” observations she had abandoned about the age of fifteen; and she felt humiliated that she had advanced no further. She said something, inevitably incoherent, about “broad daylight.”

He sat upright, and bent over her, his eyes bright with the zeal of the propagandist. “Darling,” he said, “you mustn’t be Victorian. You have got to consider these things practically. Afternoons are the time for seduction. Anatole France proved it long ago.”

He stood up to deliver his discourse. He picked up his dressing-gown, which was silk, purple with large yellow sunflowers on it, put it on and strode up and down in it. He looked Neronic, and the subject of his oration would have suited the early Roman empire.

“Consider the whole question in the light of reason,” he adjured her. “The conventional night out. What does it mean? Why, creeping home about five in the morning, very tired and uncomfortable, with none of the buses or trains running, and probably no taxi available. One is unshaven and probably has an unpleasant mouth. If you are a man who runs the usual ménage, you are terrified of making a noise as you come in and facing questions afterwards. You are exhausted and irritable the rest of the day; and what, I ask you, are your last recollections of the girl friend? You saw her in the light of early morning: she was probably half asleep, with her mouth open, and she might be snoring.”

He stroked her hair with his hand and reflected that there was no point in adding that her make-up might be disturbed. Two small dashes of lipstick were all that Renata needed in those days.

“And then think of the afternoon” (he resumed). “You get up—you have a cocktail (I am going to order one in a minute). Your last intimate recollection of your friend is of her in complete command of herself, in what the eighteenth-century poets called a sweet disorder. As lovely as you look this moment, my dear. You part about four or five o’clock—bland, cheerful, unchallengeable. Nobody knows that you have been occupied otherwise than innocently. You remember each other as we, I hope, will remember each other. I hope you will think of me as clean and well-shaved, and as cheerful after a large dry Martini. That is what I am going to order, and I have remembered that you like a Clover Club. And I shall certainly remember you as beautiful as you are now, and as chic as you were when you came—and as you will be when you take my arm downstairs. I shall say ‘Good afternoon, Mrs. Grayling! It has been a pleasure meeting you,’ and that understatement will end a perfect afternoon.”

He sent her flowers for two years running on the anniversary and thereafter forgot.

It was much more her continued association with her husband than her one escapade with Grannison which had made her feel grubby and secondhand in face of Hugh’s adoration. It made her, too, a little frightened—not that Hugh would “find out” in any vulgar sense, for she had told him her history and been listened to without comprehension, but that some time the excitement would pass and he would see in her a not-so-young, cheapened suburban councillor’s wife. Was she deceiving him? No. Was it her duty to prevent him deceiving himself? No. Could she prevent him, if it had been her duty? No. The sequence of question and answer should have been satisfactory; and was not.

§

The partner in her bad bargain did not know quite how bad his bargain was, but he too was discontented enough. He was the more consciously, and the more quickly, discontented, because he had from the beginning regarded the marriage as a transaction—as an important step in a career which had consisted in a steady, if slow, acquisition. He had acquired money, a limited amount, but satisfactory according to his standards; power, limited in area but satisfactory in its area; possessions and position of the kind to which he aspired. He had made no serious error before, and if anyone had been worsted in his life it had not been he. This was his first failure.

He had been an only child, late-born, of hardworking and poor parents. He had been sickly in his youth, a spotty, timid boy in knee-breeches attending a private school which taught him indifferently and had pretensions to snobbery. His education had consumed nearly all his parents’ money; what remained had been just enough to send him to a London commercial college where he was taught “business method,” of which the only valuable part was accountancy. He had taken a junior clerkship at Barrow and Furness’s before 1914. His career was interrupted only a short while by the war. He “attested” early in 1916 to avoid conscription, was passed B1 by an indolent doctor, and broke down in two months. He was invalided out, was taken on again at the bottom of the ladder by his firm, and had never left them since. His progress had been maddeningly slow, not because he was inefficient (he was noticeably neither efficient nor inefficient), but because in 1919 the management reinstated such of their old employees as returned from the war. They demoted him to make room for them; he bitterly resented this as an injustice, but dared not protest. He restarted climbing the ladder. One year was like another year; promotion was very slow, salary increases small but regular. He lived with his parents till they died; then he moved to one of the innumerable houses built in the London suburbs which he purchased, as did a thousand neighbours, on a mortgage through a building society. He employed a middle-aged cousin as a housekeeper; it was partly to get rid of her that he married.

It is not in his emotional but in his financial history that the mainspring of his life could be found. Henry Grayling was honest in private and in business, but publicly dishonest—a system of morals more common than is often realized. He would have regarded it as crazy to attempt to swindle his employers, and as bad policy to cheat his friends; but he had no hesitation in robbing the public. He recognised, indeed, that he had better be careful, just as a man who rides in a train farther than his ticket entitles him to go realizes he had better be careful; but he had no more sense of guilt than the thousands of London tram, tube and bus passengers who override their stage each year. He regarded himself quite honestly as a man with a high standard of morals.

He did not enter local politics originally with any corrupt intention, but merely as part of his plan for social advancement. He had joined the Conservative Club (from which the local “Ratepayers’ Association” was run), while his parents were still living. When Croxburn was first constituted as Urban District and allowed a Council, he was a candidate at that first almost uncontested election; by the time it achieved the rank of Borough he was so well established that it was unthinkable that he should lose his seat. At most elections he was unopposed; all he had to do was to issue a brief election address, printed locally on shiny paper with a smudgy half-tone of himself (in an oval frame, and taken by a local photographer), assuring the citizens of Croxburn of his continued devotion to their interests.

Quite possibly he would have been contented with the increase in importance that his new status gave him, if he had not been elected to the Finance and General Purposes Committee, on the grounds that as the cashier of a big firm he would be highly qualified. He watched the proceedings of his colleagues silently for some time: he suspected irregularities and even partially exposed one. Nothing came to the ears of the public on that occasion, nor to those of the District Auditor, but it was understood by fellow councillors that Mr. Grayling’s broad hint was the cause of the resignation of the Deputy Mayor on grounds of ill-health. Taxed with it one evening by an Alderman—P. H. Robbins, a stationer, not very influential—Grayling declined to reply except in general terms. “I don’t,” he said, “claim that for a man to make a reasonable profit out of his knowledge is a serious crime. I have moved about the world; I am a practical man. But what I say is this: municipal finance nowadays is very closely overlooked. If a councillor or official is found out doing what he shouldn’t, it shakes public confidence as well as ruining him. And he is very likely to be found out. As to whether I’ve had any reason to suspect anything recently, and whether I’ve acted on these suspicions—that I ought not to say. All I will say is that, if anything like that occurred, it would be to everyone’s advantage if the person who had been so ill-advised decided of his own will to retire from the scene.”

Alderman Robbins looked at the Councillor admiringly over the edge of his cup of cocoa and repeated these profound aphorisms during the next week to all who would listen. Grayling’s reputation went up among all municipal politicians of sense: a week later he accepted membership of the small committee which controlled the Croxburn Municipal Gasworks.

He had had his eye on this committee for some time. It consisted of five: the Town Clerk, the General Manager, who was the Town Clerk’s brother-in-law, Councillor J. G. King (whom Grayling replaced), Alderman Robbins who was insignificant, and Councillor Peter Fairley who was interested in a local tileworks and was believed to have a finger in several other enterprises.

By opening his eyes and shutting his mouth he noticed reasons to believe that peculation could, and probably did, occur, though direct monkeying with the funds was impossible: the District Auditor made it far too dangerous.

He spent an enormous amount of time trying to find out what was going on and how he could get in on it. It was for a while the problem of his life, on which he spent more thought and energy than on anything that had come his way—certainly more than on his marriage. He lived with the question—slept with it, ate with it, worked with it. Ultimately he decided there were probably four methods of corruption, and began to make notes on them in a private shorthand. But he was a careful man; it was just possible that some day someone might find his notes and decipher them. He recast them, therefore, heading them “Matters for investigation,” and writing out at length preliminary reflections upon the duty of every councillor to prevent corruption and to check on every possible loophole through which it might creep.

The first method which occurred to him as probable was the undercharging of favoured customers. He suspected that somehow the Town Clerk and his friends got their gas for something like a third of the fixed price. But how it was done he could not imagine. It irritated him to the extreme. It would be too risky to tamper with the Accounts Department. There would be someone who would notice. The statement would not agree with the meter record; and that could not be explained away. He wrote: “How? How?” in the margin; he was indignant at not being able to see what must be under his nose.

Still, this was small stuff and risky. A second method seemed, at first sight anyway, to be more hopeful. He noticed, as everyone who has had anything to do with public contracts has been noticing for a good many years, that the competitive character of tenders was pretty bogus. All the large tenders for equipment, coal, and so forth, corresponded almost exactly when they were received in the Council offices. A few shillings difference, indeed, only separated them. In one case the firms in the ring had not even troubled to make that gesture, and the tenders were identical to the last 8s. 6d. Yet one firm had to be preferred to another in the end. How was that firm chosen? The answer did not seem doubtful to Grayling. Bribes. Not a large bribe; perhaps only £20 passed across in a public house. All that the obliging official had to do was to remark to the Committee that all the prices were much the same and so what really mattered was that So-and-So’s service was much better, by past experience. Or perhaps the same amount would be more wisely spent scattered among the councillors. Grayling noted this as a possible source of funds; but he also noted (as obscurely as he could) that it couldn’t be good for long. For, in his opinion, it would soon occur to the contractors that their agents were undoing by these bribes the chief benefit which they had anticipated from forming a ring. They were reintroducing a kind of competition even as if it was only a competition in corruption. Before long, Grayling considered, the firms would go into a fresh huddle and allot the market scientifically. Then, the firm to which Croxburn business was allotted would always enter a tender appreciably below that of other firms. The Committee would have nothing to debate. The Council would find its choice in effect made for it. And there would be no more handouts.

Grayling did not note down that he was witnessing a fundamental change in economics and the structure of society. He was not inclined for reflexions upon the structure and implications of the late stage of finance-capitalism. All he saw was a system of graft beginning to wither away before he had had a real opportunity to exploit it.

He noted with more respect a third way of preying on the public funds (the phrase comes from his own notes). This was unnecessary expenditure of a kind which was sure to be for the benefit of one of the gang. He noticed that the amount of re-tiling that the Gasworks had required in the past three years had amounted to almost complete re-equipment. Mr. Fairley had, of course, withdrawn from the Committee when the contracts were discussed. He had indeed only just resumed his seat on it. But his presence had not been necessary. Once it had been decided to re-tile, the thing was in the bag. There was no other firm near which had the equipment and material or employed local labour. Mr. Fairley could show the most complete indifference to the debates; as indeed he did. There were several other, smaller contracts, mainly with builders, which Grayling suspected. But, alas, he owned no firm which could work a similar racket. He had to console himself by marking this practice “Dangerous.”

Finally, he viewed with cold contempt the stuffing of the payrolls which went on. The clerical staff of the Gasworks was much too large, and very incompetent. The reason was, fairly clearly, the considerable number of otherwise unemployable female relatives of local politicians who were on the staff. Grayling had no relatives to park on the Gasworks, and he was annoyed. The telephone was answered by halfwits; and he disliked having an institution with which he was connected publicly shamed. He felt what might, with gross flattery, be called an embryonic stirring of civic consciousness.

He had by now a brief Rogue’s Manual of local government, but found only one opening for himself. He decided that the only thing he could do was to push in to the contracts racket while it was still profitable. It needn’t be dangerous. He could just wait until there seemed to be something going through and then obstruct in Committee. Then the others would have to move. They would have to offer him something. They should take the risks; not he.

He waited some considerable time; the whole project was of a risky kind that made him uneasy. Indeed, when he did move, it had to be after all on a guess. The biggest single contract which came to the Committee was, naturally, for coal. Five years earlier this contract had been changed over, on the pretext of a very small saving, from a firm which had supplied the Council from the beginning to a relatively new coal merchant. Grayling knew of no evidence that there was anything wrong. He merely assumed from the character of his colleagues that there had been some dirty work. He therefore decided to say as little as possible, consistent with playing his hand at all. When the contract came up for a renewal, which all the rest of the Committee assumed to be automatic, he muttered over it, and then suddenly said aloud that he thought the question ought to be gone into thoroughly. He felt that the needs of the ratepayers required the figure to be examined by an independent authority, and perhaps some other tenders ought to be solicited. He suggested that the engineers be asked to report in detail on the quality of the fuel delivered; at that point the General Manager’s expression showed him he had found the weak point. He then looked at his watch, exclaimed at the time, begged his colleagues not to make any rash decision and left the committee-room at high speed.

Two days before the next committee meeting an envelope arrived through the post, addressed to H. J. Grayling, Esq., and containing thirty-five one pound notes and nothing else. At the committee meeting when the subject came up, Grayling said nothing at all, and the contract was unanimously passed for acceptance by the full Council. At the Council meeting he said nothing also.

A few nights later the Town Clerk took coffee and an evening’s bridge at his house. As he helped him on with his coat, Grayling said to him smoothly and in a low voice: “About that coal business. I hope your brother-in-law, the General Manager, is careful.” The Town Clerk blustered a little, said he didn’t know what Grayling meant, and then, as the Councillor remained coolly silent, was rash enough to say: “Well, you’re in it now as much as the rest of us.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Grayling.

“Why, you got thirty-five pounds, didn’t you?” asked the Clerk.

“I don’t understand you,” repeated the Councillor and stared him down.

When the Committee sponsored a great “forward move” by which subscribers got gas cookers provided by the Corporation at a nominal rental in return for signing a special “all-in” contract, Grayling got the biggest “cut” of his career. He also allowed himself to go as near as he ever did to indicating a request. “Well,” he said, as the meeting rose, “I hope my gas will cost me less now.” The General Manager was wreathed in smiles. “I expect it will,” he said.

Two days later two of the Corporation engineers called at his house. “I understand the Councillor’s complaining about his meter,” said the elder one to Renata.

She showed no surprise; indeed, she felt none, for her husband rarely told her anything. She took them down to the cellar, where they disconnected the old meter and attached another which they had brought with them. It recorded consistently 40 per cent, of the amount that the old one had. Thereafter Grayling knew how the second habitual swindle was worked.

Grayling reckoned that he saved £14 a year on that, and an average of £60 or £70 was delivered in pound notes. He never took anything else but pound notes, once he received a cheque, signed personally by one of the directors of the firm which supplied the gas cookers. He rang them up, and said to him: “This is Grayling speaking. That was a very foolish thing that you have done. You know what I mean,” and rang off. He received the sum in notes next day. But he did not return the cheque, nor did he destroy it. It was evidence.

He knew his position was far from absolutely secure. But he frequently reviewed it to himself and decided that there was no evidence against him, while he himself had evidence against his colleagues.

The gas meter? He had never asked for it to be changed, nor had it ever occurred to him to question his bills.

The coal contract? He had suspected it, and the minutes would show that he had queried it. He had inspected the accounts (yes; he had made a point of going down to the office and looking at them, but had found nothing, as he knew he would), and they were in order, so he had not pursued the matter.

The cheque? Precisely; an evidence of his incorruptibility. He would tell a fine story of his having rung up the director of the company, upbraided him and reduced him to humbleness. “I told him that I believed he meant no harm; that I knew such things did occur in circles in which I did not care to move; but that he must understand that Croxburn Councillors had nothing to do with such behaviour. I warned him I would keep the cheque by me, unused; and if ever I heard the least thing against his company—if the least breath of suspicion occurred— I would throw it down on the table in the Council Chamber and he could explain it if he could.”

All that was necessary for him to do was to be sure to move first. If it ever looked as if the game was up, he must leap in with revelations. The episode of the Deputy Mayor would be in his favour and he would be almost sure to gain rather than lose in reputation.

He was, indeed, in a position to put the squeeze on the General Manager, and through him on the Town Clerk. He did not, in fact, do so; he merely allowed himself the pleasure of occasional equivocal remarks at the end of the evenings of bridge which so bored his wife. His sole disquiet came from the Vicar; the man had made two disagreeable speeches on the Council and he wondered whether perhaps the Council staff had not been chattering.

§

Marital disharmony began in the first week of the Graylings’ life together. The Councillor had had good reasons to expect that everything would be as he wished it. He had the strong position. Renata was a stranger; he would supervise all her friendships. One by one she would be introduced to his friends and their wives—all considerably older than her and unquestionably good influences. She would learn which acquaintances deserved dinner invitations, and which (such as the Vicar, for example) should be kept at a short distance and invited only to tea. When the first of the two children on whom he had decided was on the way, she could have some daily assistance in the house; till then domestic duties would keep her busy during the day. If she had time to spare and needed entertainment she could join the Ladies’ Bridge Circle: she did not, it was true, play bridge, but she could learn. For the first month he would inspect all the household bills and check over each item. By that time sufficient data would be accumulated to fix a figure of a proper weekly expenditure: this he would thenceforward pay over to his wife without further question. Should she need any extra money, she would explain why, and he would either give or withhold it.

This was his idea: it was broken in seven days. The first of his “bridge evenings” was attended by the Town Clerk, and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Alderman Robbins, and the next-door neighbour and his wife. Renata refused to play bridge. She even declined to be instructed, saying flatly she was not interested; so there was only one four. She talked about literature, of all things, to the enforced sitters-out; she chose for the subject of her discourse James Joyce’s Ulysses. She had not read it, though she managed to sound as if she had: neither had her chief antagonist, Mrs. Robbins. Mrs. Robbins had acquired the general idea that the book was an obscene work, the equivalent of Suzy, Petite Dactylo (if she had known of that work); and in any case she disliked being instructed by a wife so noticeably younger and prettier than herself. The ensuing argument was sufficiently loud and ill-tempered to disturb Grayling at the card table and make him lose half a crown. Later in the evening he had his first quarrel with Renata. He told her it was important that he should not quarrel with the Robbinses, and that she was never to mention “that filthy book” again. She told him he was an ignoramus, that his friends were fools, and that she would do as she pleased. If they had been brought up differently he would have beaten her, or she would have thrown the ornaments at him: as it was, they merely nursed their anger.

As a consequence, she refused to submit the second week’s bills to him. She merely said what the total was and declined to discuss the details. He paid; but the next week would not pay. She said nothing, but opened accounts at the chief tradesmen’s shops: they were glad enough to do so, as it made them sure of her custom. At the end of a month she handed the tradesmen’s books to him; the weekly entries were merely, “To Goods.” He asked for the individual bills; she refused to show them.

“Then I won’t pay,” he said.

“As you please,” she answered. “I can’t pay them. I shall give the shops your city address and tell them to present the bills to you there.”

He jumped up in anger and alarm. “You’re not to do that—I forbid it!” he shouted.

She made no answer; and that evening he gave her the money to pay the books. She didn’t show him the books again: she merely told him each week of the total (which varied very little), and he supplied the money. She asked him for a pound a week for herself, in addition. He refused, and she replied: “You ought to have sense enough to realize I shall only take it.”

There was another long wrangle, at the end of which he allowed her 12s. 6d.

As for having children, she saw to it that that did not happen; but she complained of continual minor illnesses which fed him with false hopes. The illnesses were almost wholly, but not quite wholly, imaginary; her diseases were really only slight anemia and great discontent. She completely charmed, however, old Dr. Hopkins: he assured the Councillor with absolute sincerity that it was imperative that she should have help in the house. Grayling himself, however, chose the maid: he picked on Mrs. Buttlin, whom he had met in connection with his church work. She regarded him as “the master” and her employer; she distrusted her mistress, and suspected her morals long before there was any justification. When, in 1941, she stood in front of the Vicar and said: “A whore. That’s what I said,” she satisfied a longing of some years’ growth. The full round word gave her as much pleasure as a ripe orange.

The second week of her marriage, Renata, flushed and perverse because of the time of the month, chose to pick a quarrel with her neighbour’s wife. She told her that religion was nonsense and that she, Renata, would never go near the Church. “My husband,” she added, “is a churchwarden, but that is a matter of business.”

She cried, for once, a little when Grayling reproached her afterwards, but she would not withdraw. It was for only a minute, too, that his reproaches were effective. He almost immediately changed over to the terms in which he really thought. He told her to cease trying her superior airs on him and his friends, as she was cheap, and ought to be grateful to him for picking her out of an intolerable existence. She froze at once; but he did not perceive it, for he saw nothing offensive in what he said. It was a mere statement of fact. All his life at the office the firm had, openly or by implication, made a similar statement of fact to him. He had never resented it.

He had little hesitation in forbidding her friends the house. He came home one afternoon to find Mrs. Callaghan, wife of a man who had once run as a Labour candidate for the Council. He behaved so icily that she soon rose to go, and he saw her to the door. As he opened it, he said, in an equable voice:

“Please do not come here again.”

“What did you say?” Mrs. Callaghan asked incredulously.

“Please do not come here again,” he repeated. “I think your opinions are likely to have a bad influence on my wife. You would not be welcome.”

She flushed and answered: “I shall do whatever Mrs. Grayling wishes.”

He did not seem affected. “If necessary,” he remarked, “I shall write to your husband.”

He went back into the house. “I have told that woman not to come back,” he informed Renata. “She is a bad influence, and you are not to drink in this house.”

There was a pathetic and deplorable half-bottle of Australian wine which Mrs. Callaghan had brought and out of which they had each had a glass. He poured the contents down the sink and put the bottle aside for the dustman.

§

A border warfare of this kind must in the end close in a compromise (or a slaughter). Before 1939, Mr. and Mrs. Grayling had achieved the compromise: a method of living satisfactory to neither; agreed, if not agreeable. He paid her weekly a fixed amount for household expenses. Since prices, on the whole, fell from 1931 onwards, this was convenient to her; she could, and did, annex the margin for herself. He did not question her accounts, nor expect from her affection or anything but a civil friendliness. She on her side ran his house, provided food for him, and at not too frequent intervals entertained his friends. She was aloof in her conversation and attitude, but avoided shocking the guests; he, in return, made no effort to discover whether she invited Mrs. Callaghan or other undesirables while he was at the office. They disliked each other decorously: the ménage might have gone on for years on the same basis, as many others have done.

Externally, both of them seemed to have learned calm: whether it was feigned, in order not to give the other an advantage, or real, they both seemed satisfied with a life of limited courtesy and limited hostility. Underneath there was a strain: it perhaps was as well that this strain was relaxed shortly before the outbreak of war.

The Munich Agreement in 1938 was supposed to bring “peace in our time”; but even the Chamberlain Government doubted that. What it immediately brought was the institution of a national Air Raid Precautions Service, and this was not an unmixed evil for the Grayling family. It enabled Mrs. Grayling to enrol for A.R.P. work; it ended an idleness which was eating out her heart without her knowledge. Her husband’s authority had, despite her resistance, limited her acquaintance. When she enrolled she was suddenly thrown into the company of men and women whom he would never have wished her to meet. Croxburn was a snobbish suburb, and the enrolment of the A.R.P. staff was a compulsory churning up of social strata which would have preferred to remain separate. Theoretically, Renata Grayling approved this, though for no better reason than that it annoyed her husband. She had, in fact, some difficulty in adjusting herself to the sardonic and robust conversation of the ex-charladies and workmen’s wives whom she met, but she made the effort, and was rewarded by the verdict that she was “superior” but “not uppish.”

Perhaps equally important in making life easier for her was the uniform that she received. Dark blue trousers and dark blue tunic, not unlike an army officer’s tunic, were hard on some of her plumper colleagues, but for the slim and not too young were a gift from heaven, so long as they remembered not to wear shoes with high heels. Renata knew, as she walked about confidently and with a strictly limited make-up, that she looked at once delightful and efficient. Trim, slender, charming: those were the adjectives which she cynically decided a Woman’s Page Editor could honestly apply to her. They were the adjectives which a colleague had already used. Hugh Rolandson, twenty-nine years old and unmarried, had joined the A.R.P. because the club-foot with which he had been born prevented him taking more active work. He had not been in the service a fortnight before he knew he was in love with Mrs. Grayling.

He was a young man—born in 1910—innocent and ardent, not rich, with a handsome fair face, and singularly bright blue eyes. She was older than he was, unhappy, and sorely in need of affection. She made some effort at resistance. She reminded herself that he was the sole support of his mother, that he was wholly dependent upon a not-well-paid job in the gift of a narrow-minded employer, that baby-snatching was ignoble. But she had been used to taking responsibility on herself. She did so once again, and in the spring of 1939 went with him to Paris for a long week-end, Friday to Tuesday, by the Folkestone-Boulogne route, on specially cheap tickets provided by the Southern Railway.

§

It was not very surprising to anyone but himself that Hugh Rolandson fell so helplessly in love. He was twenty-nine when he first saw Renata, but he was young for his age. And he was in addition unusually inexperienced. His only relative was his mother, to whom he was devoted. He lived with her in a small house in Croxburn in which he had been born, and which, with a very small income, was all his father had left her. She was not precisely an invalid, but she was in indifferent health, and he had very rarely left her for as much as a night. As soon as he had left college he had gone to work for the old-established publishing house of Brown and Summers, and he still was working with them. He was underpaid, but loyal; and until he met Renata his thoughts were almost wholly concentrated on deserving his employers’ approbation.

Brown & Summers Ltd. was a publishing firm of a kind that was very common fifty years ago, but is rarer now. It was a family business, run paternally and economically. After eight years’ service Hugh was still only getting a basic wage of £4 a week, but he received frequently extra payments according to a carefully calculated system laid down by Sir Herbert Brown-Cotton (in those days only Mr. Herbert) in 1910, when he became senior partner. It was not an unjust scheme; its only considerable fault was that Sir Herbert failed to realize how much the value of money had decreased since 1910. Hugh was paid his original salary of £4, and to this was added a low rate of extra remuneration for anything that he wrote which was used in any of the various magazines which the house published. Editorial work, cutting, proof-reading, and corresponding with authors he was supposed to do as part of the job for which he was paid his original fee. Should anything that he wrote be regarded as worthy of book publication, for that he would be given a contract identical with the contracts offered to outside authors, which might mean quite an appreciable extra sum. He had never yet achieved that honour. Ideas that he produced for other authors to use were the firm’s property.

Each man or woman who joined the staff, Hugh included, had been given a brief history of the firm to read, written by an elderly compositor now living off a pension (granted by the firm to all old employees, as part of its fixed policy). It gave a full account of Josiah Brown, founder of the firm, whose marble bust stood at the head of the main staircase of the huge offices in Holborn. It gave only a few words to Edwin Summers, who had stayed with the firm but a short while, and none of whose descendants were to be found in its employment to-day. It recorded how Mr. Gladstone had so strongly approved of Josiah’s policy that he had overborne the objections of his regular publishers in order to allow the new firm the honour of publishing his Essay upon the advantages of religious education in schools. It told a totally apocryphal anecdote to the effect that Charles Bradlaugh, the great atheist, had been struck silent in the midst of a passionate oration by the voice of Josiah crying out “Blasphemer!” It noted how he had been disappointed of male offspring, though the Lord had blessed him with seven daughters, of whom but one married. Her husband was Mr. Aloysius Cotton, who had been educated in the Roman heresy, but shortly after meeting Miss Rebecca Brown became an Anglican, a very low Church Evangelical. (Josiah was a Methodist.) After fifteen years’ work in the firm, Mr. Cotton took the name of Brown-Cotton and became a junior partner. He succeeded to sole control of the firm on his father-in-law’s death, which occurred at the age of eighty-three. On his death at seventy-two, the firm passed to his sons, Mr. Herbert, Mr. Albert and Mr. Gilbert. He left some shares, but no right to interfere, to his daughter Leonora, married to a tea-broker named Hopkins; and instructed his sons to find employment for any of her sons who desired to enter the business in due course. One, Reginald, did so; he was Hugh’s immediate superior.

Mr. Herbert, made Sir Herbert in 1911 by Mr. Asquith, was the head of the firm, in title and in fact. His brothers’ photographs, greatly enlarged and framed in silver, hung in the reception room. His portrait, painted in oils by an A.R.A., was in the boardroom. It was not hung; in the rebuilding of the offices in 1920, it was actually built into the fabric of the wall and could not be removed without tearing down the structure. He controlled the policy of the firm and supervised every department. Mr. Albert concerned himself almost wholly with the accounting side; he was a placid, bald man with pale blue eyes. Mr. Gilbert did not come to the office regularly. He was unmarried, with longish dark hair, and lived alone in a large house at Purley, where he gave musical evenings at which he himself played the piano. It was understood that he was artistic; he was asked his opinion upon the typography and the jackets of the new books; and no catalogue went out without his approval. He attended board meetings and supported the opinions of Sir Herbert.

Sir Herbert, tall, white-moustached, a little bent with age but still impressive, carried on the profitable policies of Josiah Brown and Aloysius Brown-Cotton. Hugh had only once had a lengthy interview with him, but that was enough. The old man was as clear in exposition as he was immovable in judgment. Nor had this judgment been wrong; throughout three long lives the same general policy had made money; and at this day it was supported consciously by three men whom their colleagues admitted to be among the most successful publishers in London. “My Uncles,” as Reginald Hopkins always referred to them, were a triumvirate who passed assured verdicts on every form of printed matter except daily papers, who had been until recently always right, and who still had no conception that they would not always be right. Whole areas of literature fell under their condemnation: “my uncles” warned Reginald when Hugh once rashly spoke of D. H. Lawrence, “consider that a great deal of modern fiction would have been better left unwritten.”

Sir Herbert had explained to Hugh that he was never to forget that the great British reading public was deeply moral. It was not, perhaps, as consciously religious as it had been, but all the same the annual balance (“which my brother Albert will show you if you care to see it”) showed that the most substantially profitable section of the firm’s list was the large theological section. Some of these books, which were still on the list, had cost the firm originally no more than a couple of hundred pounds’ payment to a struggling clergyman who had been deeply grateful for it; and had then sold for as many as thirty years and were still asked for. Next to them, and possibly soon to become more valuable, were the educational books, headed by the famous series of Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced Dictionaries. More aleatory (Hugh blinked at the word) in Sir Herbert’s opinion, but still profitable were the series of magazines with which Sir Herbert hoped that Mr. Rolandson would henceforward specially concern himself. They ranged from Wireless for Boys to True Stories of the Empire, and from In the Steps of Our Lord to Science for You. These three main lines, Sir Herbert explained, were what brought in the bread and butter. Year after year, orders for them could be predicted; they had stood the test of time, and though the firm was far from unenterprising or unreceptive of new ideas, it could not fail to remember that the opinion of the British public was that in this sphere at least the old ideas were best.

“I was almost forgetting,” he continued with a benevolent smile, “what is after all the department which certainly gives the most honest and simple pleasure, and, though it is far from being the largest, has in several years given the highest percentage return per book. I mean our juvenile department. My grandfather, Josiah Brown, really started it with some moral tales for children, which I’m afraid would make the modern child chuckle: and annuals which were unique until Mr. Blackie copied them.” As he made this outrageous charge against a highly respectable rival firm, Sir Herbert did not seem angry; he spoke indulgently, as headmaster might of a promising but pretentious schoolboy. “I remember well how pleased I was when father said my suggestion to call them the Bumper Annuals was a good one though for some reason he did not adopt it. I felt I was on the way to becoming a real publisher. Ah-ah.” He sighed and resumed. “Then and then only, my dear Rolandson, we come to the biography and fiction, which alone the reviewers seem to notice and which, despite their considerable number, really play a relatively small part in assuring the prosperity of the firm. I think you know this part of our list fairly well. Now tell me, what strikes you about it particularly?”

This was an appalling question to be fired at a junior employee by the head of the firm. Hugh sought round desperately for something not too inane to say. What was the list like? Well, the biographies were mostly of builders of empire, established literary figures, well-known political characters (all reputable), written by honest craftsmen and rather on the dull side. None of them was a debunking or a “fictionalized” biography. The fiction list contained several good stodgy names of older novelists, safe for a first printing of five thousand each time, a big number of simple romantic woman writers, a few Wild Westerns, and some detective novels of the puzzle type. How could you sum that up politely? He played for safety: “Well, I had always regarded it as a very solid list, sir.”

“Yes, that is a fair comment,” Sir Herbert smiled; it seemed that the answer was all right. But to prevent any mishaps Sir Herbert took charge of the course of the conversation henceforward himself. “I wonder if you have observed what gives our list its solidity. What is the common feature which runs through all sections, and is to be found as much in the religious section, where you would expect it, as in the fiction where perhaps you might not? It is, that all our books have a moral basis—a Christian philosophy and aim, using the word Christian in the very widest sense. I do believe, and I trust you will not ridicule this” (Hugh would never have dreamed of doing such a thing) “that what is good religion is also good business. The public, despite certain flurries of fashion, does not want pornography and mocking. We don’t publish risqué novels. We don’t issue a series of biographies of King Charles’s mistresses, written by hack journalists to order, like our colleagues who live a little further east. We decline politely the offers we get of American gangster stories. Sometimes my brother Gilbert tells me we go absurdly far. He was pulling my leg outrageously only yesterday because in Miss Nina Opal’s new novel an oath by an Indian captain is given as Ddash-N. He asked me if I felt it safe to spell out the words ‘Oh bother.’ I told him—only in fun, of course— that he would be asking me to print out in full the word Mr. Bernard Shaw tried to popularize some years ago in a play called Pygmalion. It was a very witty play.

“Don’t let me give you the idea that we are narrow-minded. I am not in the least afraid of the Captain’s oath, though I don’t use it myself. My education taught me to give the word its original meaning, and if I said a man was damned I would mean I thought he was on the way to eternal fire; and that seems an extremely violent term to throw about in daily conversation. We aren’t narrow in politics; in fact, we only yesterday decided to approach Mr. J. R. Clynes with a proposal to write a book on Socialism; and we shall be delighted to publish it if it can be arranged. We aren’t narrow in religion; if a scientific book, written in decent terms and the product of honest thought, led its author, for example, to deny the truth of revealed religion, neither my brothers nor I would consider that alone a reason for declining it. I admit I might have a certain private prejudice against it; but I would not allow that to influence me. I hope not, anyway. We are not narrow even in matters of sex; we long ago dropped the ban on the mention of divorce except for reprobation, on which my father insisted.

“But we believe this. Every publisher has an individual responsibility to see that his books are fit for all to read. No firm can limit the circulation of its books. You may label a book ‘for adults only,’ or ‘for doctors only.’ That is quite meaningless. Even if all booksellers were scrupulous, there are innumerable libraries which cannot supervise withdrawals and many of which don’t try to. So we try to keep off our lists anything that encourages a love of blood and slaughter. These sickening stories of gangster massacres—just consider what effect they are likely to have on a boy of fifteen, for example, sent out to earn his living—say, in London as a van boy. Or on an older man of twenty-five or so, unemployed and with a grievance against society which is by no means wholly unfounded. Tacking on a happy ending is no good; he reads the story and learns to admire the Big Shot. And he ends up in Thames Police Court, convicted of some sordid little crime and wrecked for life. And as for these sex novels—well, there is nothing, nothing in the world, more likely to destroy the happiness and future prospects of a young man or woman than to have learnt a frivolous attitude to unchastity. Believe me, I am not quite an old fogy; I have been young; and I do know what I am talking about.”

Sir Herbert spoke with great emphasis and a trace of embarrassment. Perhaps he was conscious, as he stood against the mantelpiece underneath a large framed portrait of Mr. Asquith, that he was an imposing figure of a silver-haired old man, but he was not acting. There was real earnestness in his voice; he seemed as he continued almost to be imploring Hugh to assure him that these views still seemed sound to the younger generation.

“My nephew Reginald,” he said, “will be giving you great latitude in the work he will hand over to you. I do want to feel sure in my mind that you will care for these magazines as the firm would wish you to. I hope you will share these ideals and help us to carry them out. May I have that assurance from you?”

Hugh gave him the promise he wanted, and was not insincere as he did so.

§

Hugh’s club foot prevented him going to the war, “Mr. Reginald” (Hugh sometimes expected the staff to refer to him as “Master Reginald” to distinguish him from the Olympian uncles) joined the Army in 1940. More responsibility, and more frequent interviews with Sir Herbert, resulted; Hugh was now in general charge of half of the variegated periodicals which Reginald had controlled. The other half was under the control of his most immediate rival, a woman of fifty, Cornelia Shotter. He knew little about her, except that she was pious and did not dissemble her dislike for him. Each of them was of opinion that Mr. Reginald’s work could have been devolved on the one alone, without the other’s assistance; but Hugh was less obviously irritated by that belief than Miss Shotter.

As the size of the magazines was progressively reduced by paper rationing, Sir Herbert correspondingly reduced the amount of material provided by outside authors. Soon no more than 5 per cent., all over, was provided by writers not on the payroll of the firm. Hugh was not asked to write any more than he had been, nor were the Wireless consultant, the Home Problems consultant, the Religious adviser and the rest of the industrious gentlemen and ladies who had desks in the office and provided a named amount of satisfactory copy each month; but, because they wrote the same amount, their contributions were proportionately larger. The only material which Sir Herbert felt could not be satisfactorily written in the office to order was the fiction. And this was no inconsiderable expense: several magazines had either a serial or short stories; one was nothing but fiction. He considered but rejected a scheme put up by Mr. Albert for changing the contracts of those who like Hugh had shown an aptitude for fiction, and requiring them to turn in a proportion of fiction in the material that might be demanded of them. He told his brother it was an immoral proposition, and the two had as near to a quarrel as they ever did. The most that he would agree to do was to send a memorandum to each member of the staff who had shown any ability to write the sort of stories that were needed, in which he said that the firm would welcome even more eagerly than before anything that they could offer, but that as before this work would be paid for separately. Hugh, who had written two or three adequate short stories, received this note and set ardently to work to provide all the fiction he could. He needed money badly. Not only was his mother in poorer health than ever—the track of some of the raiders in the London blitzes had gone straight over Croxburn, and the A.A. racket as well as jettisoned bombs had wrecked her nerve—but he now had a mistress. Renata was not expensive—indeed, she vetoed whenever she could his least expenditure—but she could not invariably refuse what he brought. Flowers, chocolates and cigarettes when there were such things, cinema tickets, fares, new clothes for himself to feed his new found vanity, half shares in a very rare week-end or night away. Adultery may or may not be sinful, but is never cheap.

In November, 1941, he had a long session with Sir Herbert which for the first time offered him the hope of a considerable increase of income. It opened inauspiciously. He submitted to him an idea for a romantic serial by one of their most reliable authors, Mrs. Blodwen Griffiths.

It was an adaptation of an idea he had read somewhere—he no longer remembered where. It was to be about a thyroid deficient, a young man who was cast aside on a desert island with his girl friend; and realized that without his thyroid extract he would shortly become an imbecile. It had seemed an excellent idea. But Sir Herbert dismissed it as “morbid,” and as inclining to immorality; then perceiving how cast down Rolandson was, sought for a way to comfort him. “I am very sorry to put aside so promising an idea—a brilliant suggestion which does you every credit, my boy,” he said, “but I cannot see how we could make it acceptable. No, I really cannot.” He paused. “You offered a suggestion the other day which I would far rather take up. I am trying to recall exactly what it was.”

“Arsenical egg,” said Hugh Rolandson, distinctly.

“I beg your pardon?” said Sir Herbert, frowning.

“It was an idea suggested to me by a young woman I know,” Hugh explained. “It was to be a murder story in which the villain injected eggs with arsenic, using a hypodermic syringe through the shell. So he was able to have an alibi for when the victim ate an egg and was poisoned. But I asked a chemist and he tells me that the arsenic would make the white of the egg set at once, and you couldn’t get away with it. I’m afraid it’s no good, sir.” He spoke depressedly.

Sir Herbert’s kind heart was troubled. “I wish we could get something that you could write yourself,” he said. “Something which would use the magnificent possibilities of modern science. You do that so well. Something on the lines of the early H. G. Wells stories. Or Jules Verne, if that name means anything to you.”

It did not, but Hugh had an idea. “I have got a plot,” he said, “but it seemed to me too fantastic. However, if you think we could do with something on these lines …”

“Let me hear it, please,” said Sir Herbert.

“I haven’t got it worked out yet,” said Hugh. “But so far as I’ve gone, it’s this. The man who writes the book writes it about a friend of his, an eccentric but brilliant scientist. The scientist is primarily an astronomer, and for that reason has become a great expert on telescopes, lenses, photography, light, and all that. He has built himself the finest telescope ever made, far better than the Mount Wilson one, and it is mounted on a peak in the South American Andes, among the wild Indian tribes of Ecuador.”

“Good,” said Sir Herbert.

“One day the hero gets a wire from the scientist. Come at once, it says. Well, we pass over his various travels and adventures, until at last he comes to the scientist, alone with his vast telescope, strange instruments and valuable stores, in the middle of tribes who use poison arrows and juju, or voodoo, or whatever it is in Ecuador. And then the scientist tells him a wonderful story.

“You know, sir, that light travels infinitely fast, but that the distances in space are so enormous that what we see in the stars is what happened hundreds of years ago. I believe that it has been worked out that the nearest star is one called Alpha Centauri, and that what we see there is what happened in the days of Julius Cœsar. I’ll look that up to make sure, but that is the general idea. Of course, all we can see is the chemical composition of the star, which is found out by breaking up the light into a spectrum. But that’s because it’s so far away and our instruments are so weak. The light travels on, undimmed and unchanged in space; and everything is there, if only we could see it.

“This scientist has been experimenting in taking enormously enlarged photographs through his giant telescope on to a special film, and then enlarging and enlarging the film and throwing the result on a screen. For a long time he has got nothing more than fuller information about what we know already. Especially he has got an enormous map of Mars, with even small details of the canals, which turn out to be belts of quick-growing jungle, with four-legged things moving about in them. He has been able to raise the power of his instruments so much that he can make out their general shape, but that is all.”

“Excellent. Go on,” said Sir Herbert.

“He never lets his telescope rest, of course. All the time it is trained somewhere on the heavens, and the photographic attachments are clicking away. He looks at everything that comes through to the film, and projects it on the screen. Most times it is nothing of importance. But once or twice he finds the whole of the screen occupied by a pale grey picture which looks like an actual view of countryside, seen from above. It positively seems as if he was up in an aeroplane, looking down, sometimes clearly and sometimes between clouds, on fields and houses and people moving in them. Everything is in black and white, or rather grey and grey, like an old, bad film.

“Gradually he discovers what has happened, as he finds out how to make sure of this peculiar phenomenon being repeated. He is put on to it first by getting a continuous ‘run’ of these strange pallid pictures, which seem to show him the beginning of a story. Something is happening, though he loses the connection one night, and a month later when he gets the thing adjusted again he is looking at a wholly different scene. But the explanation in both cases is the same. It is this:

“Brilliant light is pouring off the earth every second. If we were in the moon, for example, we should see the earth as ten times as large and ten times as bright as the moon. Even with our naked eye we could pick out the outlines of sea and land and so forth. If we had powerful telescopes we could see much more. Well, the earth’s light, pouring out like this, has simply struck against one of the dead, dark bodies which we know are circling in space, and has been reflected back to the earth. Here the scientist’s instruments have infinitely enlarged it. And now he is looking straight on to what happened a hundred years ago. He sees men and women long dead moving and acting, though he cannot hear them and cannot move his position. It is not a picture he sees, but them themselves. After a vast journey through space their images have returned home.

“That’s the basic idea, sir. I haven’t yet worked out what it is he sees—it may be something of great historic importance, or it may be something which has direct bearing on the hero’s life—a will, for example—or just a plain story of passion. Perhaps there could be more than one story. But the end, of course, will be that superstition destroys the scientist. The Indians are set on to him by their sorcerers, who declare he is bringing evil magic down to the earth; and they storm the house and kill him. They wreck the delicate instruments and the hero only just escapes with his life. Months later he makes his way down to a coast town, starving, racked with fever, continually mouthing and repeating a story no one will believe.”

Sir Herbert fixed him with earnest blue eyes. “Amazing, my dear boy. Amazing. Absolutely first rate. It has everything we could wish—adventure, terror, marvels, and a good moral. No morbidity, no sex business. Nothing against it at all. It is wholly admirable.” He rose and paced up and down the room. “You think you can work out this idea, Rolandson? Can you get down to it right away?”

“If you think you can use, it, sir, certainly,” said Hugh.

“Use it? Certainly we can use it. You may consider that settled.” Sir Herbert thought a moment, and went on. “If you can make a full length feature of this story of seventy thousand words or more, we will take it on the usual terms for Home and Beauty’s serial. We will also, if it proves satisfactory, and I am sure it will, take it for book publication, either in the spring or the autumn of next year. We shall pay you two hundred pounds advance for this, and fifty pounds above that if our American colleagues use it, as I expect they will. There will be a commencing royalty of 10 per cent., rising to 15 per cent, after the sale of three thousand copies. You know our usual contract form.”

Two hundred pounds, and more. Hugh was so delighted he was hardly able to convey his assent.

§

One end of a telephone conversation, late December, 1941:

“May I speak to Mr. Rolandson?”

‥…

“Mrs. Grayling speaking.”

‥…

“Mr. Rolandson?”

‥…

“Hugh. Can you meet me at lunch? I’m coming up to town. It’s something rather important.”

“Oh. I see. If it’s Sir Herbert you can’t, of course. But I must talk to you: and you can’t come here this evening. Are you alone in the room?”

‥…

“I won’t risk your telephone girl listening in. Can you go outside your office, now, and ring me up here? I’ve got to talk while Alice is out, and she may be back any moment.”

‥…

“I’ll be waiting.”

An interval of under three minutes, and then a telephone ringing:

‥…

“My dear, Henry has found out.”

‥…

“I wish it had been. I wish it could be that before I’m too old. But it isn’t. He just found out. It is going to be very disagreeable, as disagreeable as Henry can make it, and he is an expert at that. Apparently Mrs. Buttlin had been watching us for a long time, and we must have been careless. You’ve only been here twice, after all. From what Henry says she took her evidence to the Vicar, and either she got no change from him or she was told to go to Henry. And Henry had a magnificent scene prepared for me yesterday. I tried denying it, but it was obviously useless.”

‥…

“Oh, News of the World stuff. Rumpled beds, and envelopes taken out of the wastepaper basket, and torn up letters. That was my fault. I began a letter Darling Hugh and tore it up, but not small enough. And apparently on the day you were here when I gave her the afternoon off she was suspicious and waited to see who came. We didn’t draw the blinds, did we?”

‥…

“That’s the sort of thing she said, anyway. You must just imagine the rest. The thing which made it worst was the cruet. I had no explanation of it.”

‥…

“Yes, yes; the cruet we bought in Paris, in the joke shop. Made up of poes. I put it in a drawer, hidden away, and he found it. You can imagine his moralizings about it. He and Mrs. Buttlin must have fairly enjoyed themselves. Anyway that, he said, warned him of my depravity and started him making inquiries. I don’t know if there’s any truth in it, but that is going to be his story, for public consumption, anyway. It serves me right for being sentimental, and about such a thing too.”

‥…

“Hugh dear, you must be serious and pay attention.”

‥…

“But that is just it. He’s not going to divorce me.”

‥…

“Well, he’s not going to. He has a better idea. He told me all about it last night. I asked him, as coolly as I could, if he thought he had evidence enough for a divorce, and he said he didn’t approve of divorce on religious grounds. He only puts on that sort of pretence with me—religion, I mean—if he’s very angry. He said he was going to sue you for seduction and alienation of affections. I think those were his phrases. Anyhow, there is a case which he kept quoting, which he called the Helen of Troy case. I didn’t remember it, but it was in the papers. Somewhere in the provinces a man got quite a lot of money off his wife’s lover. Cambridge, I think it was. And because it wasn’t a divorce the papers could report it. They let themselves go, and the two people were driven out of the country by the scandal. They couldn’t marry, either; because there was no divorce. That didn’t matter so much as the fact that they were ruined. Henry gave me all the details. He enjoyed himself thoroughly.

“What he proposes to do is to sue you and ruin you. He said just that. He is going to have the papers served on you at the office, on the pretence of not knowing your address, but really in order to make sure you are sacked.”

‥…

“That is just what he will do, my dear. Of course, he offered a way out.

‥…

“For me to give you up and be a good wife to him. And my dear, I think it’s got to be done. He’s got the whip hand. There’s nothing we can do.”

‥…

“Of course I do. More than anything in the world. But you’ll be dismissed at once, won’t you, and that two hundred pounds will be gone, and all …”

‥…

“It’s not probably, you know it’s certainly. And you’ve got to think of your mother.”

‥…

“Hugh, you’re being unjust. I don’t want to. I shall find life almost impossible to live. But I don’t see any way out. Henry’s vanity and his sense of property have been attacked and he’s quite merciless then. And he is quite sure he has you trapped. I won’t have you ruin your life for me.”

‥…

“I will: indeed I will. But I must stop now. You know why. Good-bye, my love.”

§

“Well,” said the Superintendent to Inspector Holly, “did you get an earful from Mrs. Adelaide Buttlin?”

“An earful indeed,” said the Inspector. “And a few extra notes from her successor, Alice Williams. It’s remarkable what minds respectable women have. She sounded just like the old News of the World, before they stopped printing the divorce reports. She even mentioned ‘a suspicious condition of the sheets.’”

“What did it all amount to?”

“Briefly, that Rolandson and Mrs. Grayling had been having a hot affair for some time, and there is no doubt they’d been going the limit. Mrs. Buttlin is as malicious as any witness I’ve ever heard, but if a divorce case had come on I think her evidence would have settled it. As far as I can judge it, she suspected what was up long ago, but did nothing about it till after Mrs. Grayling sacked her. Then she turned nasty; but she first went to the Vicar. I don’t know what he said, but I gather she got no satisfaction. After that she went to Grayling, and then there was a real uproar. There have been scenes in that house, first-class scenes, for the last fortnight or so. Alice Williams heard enough to give the whole story away. Mrs. Grayling didn’t raise her voice much, but Grayling did. He shouted. He wasn’t going to divorce her, apparently. He was going to sue young Rolandson for damages and ruin him. Rolandson works for an old-fashioned publisher in Holborn, and it probably would ruin him. Also, as it was not to be a divorce case, all the evidence could be printed in full in the papers. Grayling said he would brand them so that they would be run out of town. He was certainly all out to make himself unpleasant.”

“What do the guilty pair say?”

“They won’t talk. I am fairly sure that they’ve got together on this. Their answers are so damn similar. Mrs. Grayling repeats over and over again the story of the evening when the Councillor died; and apart from that regrets she cannot agree to discuss her relations with her husband with me. When I remind her she can be asked on oath at the inquest or perhaps even at a trial, she says that she will answer what questions she must answer when she must and not before. I tried to suggest to her how much easier it would be if she would only speak freely—how the police could be discreet, and so often things need not come out in court. My most fatherly manner. I might as well have talked to a lamppost.”

“Rolandson?”

“I think he’ll make a fool of himself in court. She will freeze the coroner, I’ve no doubt. But he’s all nerves. However, at the moment, he, too, has ‘nothing to say,’ but just repeats the story of his train journey with Grayling. It’s just the same as all the other stories of that journey.”

“There’s motive there, all right,” said the Superintendent. “Have you anything more against them?”

“Knowledge,” said Holly. “They’re both in the A.R.P. service. They’ve done the complete course of gas—decontamination and all. There’s a supply kept as you know there, for the gas chamber and other purposes. The A.R.P. people say it couldn’t be tapped, but their precautions are childish. They go on the principle— reasonable enough, normally—that people are too frightened of the beastly stuff to want to touch it. A label saying: GAS, KEEP OFF, and a Woolworth padlock. That’s all.”

“Your trouble,” said the Super., “isn’t that you don’t know who did the job. It’s that you’ve proved too many did it. Almost everyone had both opportunity and motive. Just count them up.”

“In a sense anybody is suspect,” protested the Inspector. “There’s too much opportunity. The only firm facts we have are that death was caused by mustard gas and that the gas can’t have been administered much before the time when Grayling’s train started home. It could have been administered, theoretically anyway, before he got on to the platform at all. There was a lot of jostling, you remember. Supposing that the mustard gas was administered by someone slipping a soaked handkerchief into his pocket—and that’s a big supposition—then that could have happened any time after his leaving the office. Even before, I suppose, though that’s not very likely. It might have been planted on him by any of the people who crowded into the carriage with him. I am supposing he sniffed it up in the train. But it might have been administered by someone setting on him on the way home and clapping it on his face like a chloroform pad. Nobody was seen lying in wait for him, but that doesn’t mean much. I’d think, though that Grayling would have raised the devil’s own racket if anyone tried that on him; and there aren’t any reports of any disturbance that night.”

“Did you ever find anything more about those alleged workingmen who leant over his shoulder to read the notices during the journey?” asked the Super.

“No. No luck at all.” The Inspector sighed. “I’ll count them up, as you said, sir. There’s the beginning of a case against everyone who saw or might have seen him, right up to the time he fell in his own front door dying. Apart from the workmen, there’s the Vicar; he’s the least likely. But the condition of his face suggested that he might have had something to do with poison gas recently. Still, it might have been nothing but a cold and the revival of a barbers’ rash that he had before. He disliked Grayling, we know. On the other hand, all the evidence that we have is to the effect that he had something on Grayling and had reason to look forward to putting him out of public life. I wouldn’t dismiss him; but I don’t think he’s a good suspect. But as for the rest—!

“First Corporal Ransom. He’s a gas expert, with access to the stuff. He’s quarrelled with Grayling, who had his knife into him and is his superior officer. He was close to Grayling on that journey, he may possibly have a criminal record, and he quite certainly needs £120. Ordinarily, you’d say all the signposts pointed to him. But wait a moment. Think of Mr. Rolandson. He is Mrs. Grayling’s lover, bitterly jealous; and Grayling has threatened him not only with losing the girl-friend but with getting him sacked and branded all over the country. He knows all about gas too; and it’s pretty sure he could get hold of some. He sits in the same carriage with Grayling that night; and plumb opposite to him. A very curious choice. His neck may get a crick in it yet. Then there’s a third. This German, whom Grayling was trying to get taken up by the Home Office people and dealt with as they do deal with Nazi spies. He was close up against him. And whoever he is, fake or genuine, he knows all about chemistry. He doesn’t need to have access to that stuff; he can make it. If it comes to that, so could Evetts, the young man who was sitting next to Grayling and whose bag fell on his head so that he could have planted a handkerchief as easy as kiss-me. He is a qualified chemist; and his appearance, more than the Vicar’s, was like that of somebody who’d been mucking with the gas recently. Though that, too, may just have been a cold. Also, his behaviour to me was more suspicious than that of anyone else’s at all. Not that I go much by manner, of course.”

“Well, you’ve got six people, or six and a half, against whom there’s part of a case,” said the Superintendent. “There it is. What am I to do with it?”

Holly looked at him gloomily. One does not reply to superior officers with the suggestion that he wished to give. After a minute he said: “I’ll have to ask everyone more questions, I suppose. I’d give anything to be able to bring them all in and beat them with rubber hoses. Never before seen what a good idea that is.”

They both remained silent some minutes. After a while the Superintendent spoke again.

“About your theory of the administration of the poison gas,” he said, not very hopefully. “Does it hold water? Have you gone into that with Dr. Campbell, for example?”

“Dr. Campbell is not very helpful,” complained the Inspector, resignedly. “But I have consulted him, and tried to think out the mechanism of the murder for myself. It does seem to be possible, this way:

“The murderer has either to make the stuff himself, or he has to abstract it from somewhere. Supposing he makes it, he apparently needs only the sort of apparatus which is to be found in most chemical labs. By this the liquid is distilled, or whatever be the word, into a sealed container. There is no danger to him at all. The only difficult point comes when he has to soak the handkerchief with the liquid. The temperature can be low, so that the liquid will not be volatile: still, in the nature of things it will have to be exposed. What he does, therefore, is to put on rubber gloves and his civilian gas mask, and use a pair of tongs to hold the handkerchief. He lays it in the stuff and leaves it, under’ cover, long enough to get saturated. He has to have a flat tin immediately to hand to plunge the soaked handkerchief into. When he’s done that, he closes it up at once. He puts the stopper or whatever it is in the bottle, and runs adhesive tape round the edges of the tin box; and that’s that. I suppose he would need to open the window for a short while to let any fumes clear away.

“If he stole the stuff ready made, he could transfer it to the handkerchief and tin the same way, in any room that was convenient. I talked to Dr. Hewitt, at the Civil Defence Divisional Headquarters, in charge of Gas Protection, putting it up as a hypothetical case. He said it was perfectly possible.

“Then about planting the handkerchief on Grayling. I’ve checked this up myself. I walked with the crowd going to the station, with a flat cigarette tin bound with tape in my overcoat pocket, and a damp handkerchief inside. I had rubber gloves on and kid gloves over them. It took me 25 seconds, 20 seconds, and 35 seconds, in three experiments, to do the whole business. I mean by that, to strip off the tape with my right hand, inside my overcoat pocket, open the tin, take the handkerchief out of it, and hold it in my hand inside the pocket ready to slip it into someone else’s pocket. I didn’t go the further step and actually do so. It might have been difficult to explain to anyone that I tried it on, and anyhow I’m not good at pickpockets’ tricks. But far more difficult things than that have been done, as you know. So the whole thing is possible anyway.

“A direct attack on him looks like the only alternative. It’s not very likely. He would have fought and yelled—he was certainly not a meek or accommodating person at the best of times—and would probably have had to be knocked out or chloroformed. There was no trace of a bruise, and no one has mentioned traces of chloroform. And anyway, when he came to he would have made the devil’s own uproar. Suppose he had been attacked between Croxburn Station and his home—that’s the only place it could have happened—well, I know it was a dark and lonely night; but the streets are less empty then than at most times. People are coming home from work and we have our men on their beats. I don’t believe it could have passed unnoticed.”

“Are those the only alternatives?” asked the Superintendent.

“Practically the only ones, sir,” said the Inspector. “The doctor talked about the possibility of a gas bomb dropping practically on to him. I inquired into that, and both the Air Ministry and the wardens’ service said it was impossible. I think that is a dead end. I’m forced back to assuming my first theory is right. And then, as you said, I have six and a half good suspects.”

“Any hope of tracing the means used?” asked the Superintendent.

“Very little. The handkerchief should have been in Grayling’s overcoat pocket, unless he dropped it. But Mrs. Grayling sent the overcoat a couple of days later to the cleaners. He had vomited over it. I asked the cleaners if they had noticed anything about the coat— that is, if it had produced any symptoms of mustard gas poisoning. They said half their girls had running noses and wretched colds, anyway. As for a handkerchief, they had no record of one. But they volunteered the remark that since the war they had lost most of their competent staff and that records of such things were no longer properly kept. I got the impression that things found in pockets were more likely to be pinched than not.

“The murderer could quite easily dispose of his own traces. The tin would go into a salvage dump, the tape be dropped in a gutter. If he had worn an overcoat, the gas would vanish from it after wearing it once out in the rain; if he had a mackintosh it would never have soaked into it at all. If there was anything left in the bottle— supposing he stole it in a bottle—he need only pour it into a gutter or on a bit of waste land on a rainy night and it would be washed away. In a few hours, I’m told, there’d be no traces. And we’ve had plenty of rainy nights.”

He rose heavily. “I’ll just go on asking questions,” he said, depressedly.