‘I pray thee, friend Bellephoron, sit still, and according to thy accustomed courtesy, declare to us the loss of thy nose and ears.’
The Golden Ass of LUCIUS APULEIUS, in the translation of William Adlington, edited by F. J. Harvey Darton.
HANNIBAL JONES HAD earned a dishonest livelihood for seventeen years by writing sentimental novels. It was the less excusable in Jones to get his living this way in that he knew—none better, since he had lectured in Abnormal Psychology for a year or two in an American University before taking up his rather more nefarious career as author—that such novels as he wrote tended to encourage morbid day-dreaming on the part of their readers, and that cooks and dressmakers, mothers of families, spinsters in all walks of life—even his own female relatives—were developing, because of him and his works, a Cinderella-complex of the most devitalising time-consuming type.
It was the size of his income which prevented in Jones the acute shame proper to his situation, but, fortunately for the chances of his soul’s salvation, the habit of sentimental writing proved to have grave physical risks as well as pecuniary advantages.
One day in the early Spring, his publisher invited him to lunch, and put forward a new proposal. Jones listened carefully. The same notion had been in his own mind time and again, but he had put it from him because of the trouble it would be to put in some serious work after all his years of laziness and easy money-making. Said his publisher:
‘Why don’t you do some melodramatic stuff? The big scene in your last book was sheer melodrama, and went well. Slums in a riverside district, or in a big port. Plenty of meat, and plenty of sob-stuff, like a film, but solid and fairly long. You know what I mean.’
Jones took the idea very seriously and began to work very hard. But the harder he worked, the more difficult it seemed to write the book. The result of his labours was disastrous. He became nervous and began to suffer from insomnia, but still he persevered. He collected reference books, newspaper cuttings, statistics and even facts, and at the end of six strenuous weeks he tore up the novel which he had hoped and anticipated, was to be startlingly, arrestingly, nudely modern, and, at the same time, an example of English prose at its best.
He worked tremendously hard and sent his wife considerable sums of money on condition that she was willing to extend her holiday on the Riviera until the novel was finished. But it was years since he had settled down to serious work. He grew irritable, morose, and quite unlike himself. In addition, he lost weight, he lost appetite; he began to lose interest in the book. His publisher bullied him, at first over the telephone, and then, when Jones refused to answer it, by telegram. With the business acumen which is often, although not invariably, one of the first-fruits of writing solely for money, Jones had insisted upon a substantial advance before he began work on the book, and the publisher was desirous of being assured that Jones really did intend to write the novel. This, under the circumstances, was natural enough, but it goaded almost to insanity the nerve-ridden and harassed author.
Having at last reassured him by word of mouth in a pithy sentence which, had it appeared in the novel in question, certainly would have been deleted at sight by the Censor, Jones toiled on, despairing but undefeated. Two secretaries gave notice, and the third, a suggestible young man whom Jones’ rapidly collapsing nervous system could not fail to affect, hastened the approaching nervous breakdown by appearing five nights in succession at his employer’s bedside, sleep-walking, and babbling disconnected lines from the poems of William Blake.
Jones gave him an excellent testimonial and dismissed him. Then, after spending eight weeks in a nursing home, he consulted a famous psycho-analyst—her reputation was sufficiently established for her to be able to continue the use of an out-of-date term with which to describe her profession—and was given an appointment. She was a small but terrifying woman with the grin of a hungry crocodile and sharp black eyes, and her whole appearance and personality were in direct contrast to those of the nerve-ridden, extraordinarily lanky and cadaverous Jones. She put him through the usual tests, physical and mental, cackled at him, prodded him in the ribs with a yellow forefinger and advised him to take up gardening.
‘And mind you return your publisher the advance on account of royalties which he paid you,’ she adjured him. Jones, who had not mentioned the advance, was astonished and impressed by her perspicacity, but declined to consider for one moment her advice that he should take up gardening.
‘When I was a boy,’ he said, ‘my father had an allotment. Do you know what that is?’
The little old woman said that she did.
‘And on Good Friday mornings,’ continued Jones, ‘It used to be my detestable duty to walk beside him dropping seed potatoes into the holes he made. Since my fifteenth birthday, when the job passed automatically, according to my father’s promise, to my younger brother, I have avoided gardening and never wish to look upon a potato dibber nor a garden fork any more.’
‘Well, then,’ said she, ‘get out your third-best car and travel until you find a sufficiently interesting and secluded village. Make yourself part of it. Study the people, but resolve never to write about them in a novel. Love them. Quarrel with them. Begin a lawsuit. Play village cricket.’
‘But look here—this book I’m on!’ wailed Jones. ‘I’m contracted to finish it at the end of the next two months. I can’t let my publisher down. It’s essential I should finish the book by September. You don’t understand!’
‘Very well,’ said the psycho-analyst. She gave him back his cheque. ‘Go and write. But don’t ask me to appeal to the Commissioners to release you from a lunatic asylum later on.’
Jones wrote to his publisher, returning the advance, returned her fee to the formidable, reptilian psycho-analyst, closed his flat, got his third-best car from the garage, and started out in quest of his village. It took him nineteen days to discover and annexe the village of Saxon Wall. It was long, straggling and unkempt. It was away from main roads and apparently unacquainted with the progress of what people who put cleanliness before godliness call civilisation. The farmyards of its immediate vicinity smelt sourer, its inhabitants looked more dour and unfriendly, its cottages were uglier in conception, arrangement and colouring and its public house more surprisingly named than any of the others he had passed by or encountered during his tour, so he adopted it at sight, and decided to stay in it a good long time.
‘As good a place in which to get over a nervous breakdown as any in England,’ thought Jones, drawing up at the entrance to the Long Thin Man and getting out of the car.
Over a tankard of beer—the nuttiest he had drunk for years—he invited opinion upon his chances of finding a suitable cottage for the summer.
‘Easy,’ said the landlord. ‘I’ll tell Birdseye to turn out old Mother Fluke for you. She won’t have paid the rent three months or more.’
‘But what will she do?’ asked the humanitarian Jones.
‘Her? Oh, that’ll be all right. I’ll tell Birdseye she can have that little cottage that was built sometime back for the barman when he got married, before he went to the war. I haven’t had a barman—haven’t needed one, like—since I’ve been here. It’s a little old tumble-down place enough, because I haven’t looked to keep it in repair, but old Mother Fluke, most likely, won’t live long enough to know much different. I’ll tell Birdseye to put a couple of shillings, say, on to your rent, and I shan’t charge the old woman nothing for my little cottage, say. Then I can settle up with Birdseye, and nobody won’t be the loser as far as I can see.’
Digesting the ethics and the economics of this delicate manipulation of the facts of the case, Jones agreed, and finished his beer. He never came into contact with the accommodating Birdseye, but by the end of the day everything was settled, including which articles of furniture Mrs Fluke was going to leave behind in the cottage for Jones’ use, and which were going to accompany her to her new home, a little further down the road. Jones had the felicity of assisting to load her belongings on to two perambulators, the property of Mrs Passion and Mrs Pike, the daughter and next-door neighbour respectively, of the old woman he was dispossessing. Of Mrs Fluke herself he saw nothing, she having preceded the perambulators by a quarter of an hour, so that she could decide where everything was to go when it arrived at the cottage. Jones was considerably lightened in conscience to hear from Mrs Passion that ‘mother will be only too glad to be quit of Birdseye for a bit, with his everlasting coming of a Monday morning for the rent just when she’d got the clothes on the boil and the copper fire going nicely!’
The Passions, he learned, were to be his next-door neighbours on the other side. They had seen aeroplanes but not motor-coaches, and both thought that the inventions of wireless telegraphy and vacuum cleaners were in direct contravention of the will of God. Of the divine wishes and intentions, Jones soon discovered, the village had wide and infallible knowledge.
On the second day of his stay he telegraphed to London for a new bed and for various small amenities, and proceeded to make his new quarters habitable. He then began the book for the second time. It was useless. He had dried up completely. He was considerably alarmed. He put his writing materials out of sight; hid his typewriter underneath the bed; went walking every day; explored the countryside and refused to think of work, proposing to court ideas by pretending to ignore them.
The neighbourhood was pleasing without being in any way remarkable. His favourite walk was across the village green and over the rounded hill called Guthrum Down by way of a stretch of heath, bracken-covered, springy underfoot with heather, and pleasantly bracing.
There were slow-worms and adders on the common, and Jones found that these creatures were held in peculiar horror by all the village people except old Mrs Fluke, who had a name for being able to make them dance on their tails by moonlight, and spell the names of the angels of darkness by their contortions at witches’ sabbaths.
It was repeated, too, that the devil himself had visited Mrs Fluke at the cottage which Jones was occupying, and there had made his pact with her. Jones was amused and interested, but could find nothing sinister about the cottage itself, which was clean and in good repair, and overlooked arable fields. Mrs Fluke herself, when her daughter spoke of her to him, seemed to be a much-maligned old woman, poor, honest and respectable.
‘You wait till they quarrels,’ his other next-door neighbour, the simple-minded Mrs Pike, informed him. She was mild-mannered and clean, and possessed the most pronounced squint that Jones had ever seen, but apart from this, and the fact that she had a beautiful fair-haired, delicate-looking son, a boy of nine or ten, who appeared to have sufficient intelligence for the pair of them, Jones found her unremarkable. She expressed her goodwill by sending the boy along with presents of vegetables out of the garden. Jones, who liked garden peas, returned the compliment by sending in chocolate and bananas from the village shop. He had suggested paying for the peas, but Mrs Pike had burst into tears.
Her devotion to him soon became sycophantic, but not sufficiently obtrusive to be annoying. Her greatest joy was to encounter him in the village street so that he should raise his hat to her, and this usually occurred upon another walk that Jones took through the village, which was a very straggling one, out past a big house standing in a park. He tried to find out the history of the house, for it appeared that no one except a caretaker had lived there for some time, but the villagers were peculiarly, and, to Jones, who had the writer’s lust for a story, irritatingly reticent. They told him the name of the mansion, Neot House, and that was all.
Gradually the desire to write his book began to leave him. He no longer took it out twice a day, sighed, and put it away again. He began to go to bed earlier and to sleep better. He had never known such peace of mind and body in his life. He lived sparely, and spent very little money. He received no letters—for nobody, except his wife, who was beginning to tire of Nice, and the people at the shop to which he had sent for the new bed and other necessaries, knew where he was living, and his publisher re-commenced to telephone his London flat in vain. He ceased to be Hannibal Jones, accursed best-seller of novels the proofs of which he could not bear to read and correct, and became Mr Jones of the village of Saxon Wall, again at last a nonentity, but one in a state of grace.