A YARN OF THE GOOD OLD DAYS OF BROAD TROUSERS AND HIGH NECKED JUMPERS
“Do you know, I don’t think I can read mine. It’s rather unkind.”
“Oh, Basil, you must.”
“Please, Basil.”
This always happened when Basil played paper games.
“No, I can’t, look it’s all scrumbled up.”
“Oh, Basil, dearest, do.”
“Oh, Basil, please.”
“Darling Basil, you must.”
“No, I won’t. Imogen will be in a rage with me.”
“No, she won’t, will you, Imogen?”
“Imogen, tell him you won’t be in a rage with him.”
“Basil, do read it please.”
“Well, then, if you promise you won’t hate me”—and he smoothed out the piece of paper.
“Flower—Cactus.
“Drink—Rum.
“Stuff—Baize.
“Furniture—Rocking-Horse.
“Food—Venison.
“Address—Dublin.
“And Animal—Boa constrictor.”
“Oh, Basil, how marvellous.”
“Poor Adam, I never thought of him as Dublin, of course it’s perfect.”
“Why Cactus?”
“So phallic, my dear, and prickly.”
“And such vulgar flowers.”
“Boa constrictor is brilliant.”
“Yes, his digestion you know.”
“And can’t sting, only crush.”
“And fascinates rabbits.”
“I must draw a picture of Adam fascinating a rabbit,” and then, “Imogen, you’re not going?”
“I must. I’m terribly sleepy. Don’t get drunk and wake me up, will you?”
“Imogen, you are in a rage with me.”
“My dear, I’m far too tired to be in a rage with anybody. Good night.”
The door shut.
“My dear, she’s furious.”
“I knew she would be, you shouldn’t have made me read it.”
“She’s been very odd all the evening, I consider.”
“She told me she lunched with Adam before she came down.”
“I expect she ate too much. One does with Adam, don’t you find?”
“Just libido.”
“But you know, I’m rather proud of that character all the same. I wonder why none of us ever thought of Dublin before.”
“Basil, do you think Imogen can have been having an affaire with Adam, really?”
NOTE.—No attempt, beyond the omission of some of the aspirates, has been made at a phonetic rendering of the speech of Gladys and Ada; they are the cook and house-parlourmaid from a small house in Earls Court, and it is to be supposed that they speak as such.
The conversations in the film are deduced by the experienced picture-goer from the gestures of the actors; only those parts which appear in capitals are actual “captions.”
THE COCKATRICE CLUB 2.30 A.M.
A CENTRE OF LONDON NIGHT LIFE.
The “Art title” shows a still life of a champagne bottle, glasses, and a comic mask—or is it yawning?
“Oh, Gladys, it’s begun; I knew we’d be late.”
“Never mind, dear, I can see the way. Oh, I say—I am sorry. Thought the seat was empty—really I did.”
Erotic giggling and a slight struggle.
“Give over, can’t you, and let me get by—saucy kid.”
“’Ere you are, Gladys, there’s two seats ’ere.”
“Well I never—tried to make me sit on ’is knee.”
“Go on. I say, Gladys, what sort of picture is this—is it comic?”
The screen is almost completely dark as though the film has been greatly over-exposed. Fitful but brilliant illumination reveals a large crowd dancing, talking and eating.
“No, Ada—that’s lightning. I dare say it’s a desert storm. I see a picture like that the other day with Fred.”
Close up: the head of a girl.
“That’s ’is baby. See if she ain’t.”
It is rather a lovely head, shingled and superbly poised on its neck. One is just beginning to appreciate its exquisite modelling—the film is too poor to give any clear impression of texture—when it is flashed away and its place taken by a stout and elderly man playing a saxophone. The film becomes obscure—after the manner of the more modern Continental studios: the saxophonist has become the vortex of movement; faces flash out and disappear again; fragmentary captions will not wait until they are read.
“Well, I do call this soft.”
A voice with a Cambridge accent from the more expensive seats says, “Expressionismus.”
Gladys nudges Ada and says, “Foreigner.”
After several shiftings of perspective, the focus becomes suddenly and stereoscopically clear. The girl is seated at a table leaning towards a young man who is lighting her cigarette for her. Three or four others join them at the table and sit down. They are all in evening dress.
“No, it isn’t comic, Ada—it’s Society.”
“Society’s sometimes comic. You see.”
The girl is protesting that she must go.
“Adam, I must. Mother thinks I went out to a theatre with you and your mother. I don’t know what will happen if she finds I’m not in.”
There is a general leave-taking and paying of bills.
“I say, Gladys, ’e’s ’ad a drop too much, ain’t ’e?”
The hero and heroine drive away in a taxi.
Halfway down Pont Street, the heroine stops the taxi.
“Don’t let him come any farther, Adam. Lady R. will hear.”
“Good night, Imogen dear.”
“Good night, Adam.”
She hesitates for a moment and then kisses him.
Adam and the taxi drive away.
Close up of Adam. He is a young man of about twenty-two, clean-shaven, with thick, very dark hair. He looks so infinitely sad that even Ada is shaken.
Can it be funny?
“Buster Keaton looks sad like that sometimes—don’t ’e?”
Ada is reassured.
Buster Keaton looks sad; Buster Keaton is funny. Adam looks sad; Adam is funny. What could be clearer?
The cab stops and Adam gives it all his money. It wishes him “Good-night” and disappears into the darkness. Adam unlocks the front door.
On his way upstairs he takes his letters from the hall table; they are two bills and an invitation to a dance.
He reaches his room, undresses and sits for some time wretchedly staring at himself in the glass. Then he gets into bed. He dare not turn out the light because he knows that if he does the room will start spinning round him; he must be there thinking of Imogen until he becomes sober.
The film becomes darker. The room begins to swim and then steadies itself. It is getting quite dark. The orchestra plays very softly the first bars of “Everybody loves my baby.” It is quite dark.
Close up: the heroine.
Close up: the hero asleep.
Fade out.
The hero still asleep. The electric light is still burning.
A disagreeable-looking maid enters, turns out the light and raises the blind.
Adam wakes up.
“Good morning, Parsons.”
“Good morning, sir.”
“Is the bathroom empty?”
“I think Miss Jane’s just this minute gone along there.”
She picks up Adam’s evening clothes from the floor.
Adam lies back and ponders the question of whether he shall miss his bath or miss getting a place at the studio.
Miss Jane in her bath.
Adam deciding to get up.
Tired out but with no inclination to sleep, Adam dresses. He goes down to breakfast.
“It can’t be Society, Gladys, they aren’t eating grape fruit.”
“It’s such a small ’ouse too.”
“And no butler.”
“Look, there’s ’is little old mother. She’ll lead ’im straight in the end. See if she don’t.”
“Well, that dress isn’t at all what I call fashionable, if you ask me.”
“Well, if it isn’t funny and it isn’t murder and it isn’t Society, what is it?”
“P’r’aps there’ll be a murder yet.”
“Well, I calls it soft, that’s what I calls it.”
“Look now, ’e’s got a invitation to a dance from a Countess.”
“I don’t understand this picture.”
The Countess’s invitation.
“Why, there isn’t even a coronet on it, Ada.”
The little old mother pours out tea for him and tells him about the death of a friend in the Times that morning; when he has drunk some tea and eaten some fish, she bustles him out of the house.
Adam walks to the corner of the road, where he gets on to a bus. The neighbourhood is revealed as being Regent’s Park.
THE CENTRE OF LONDON’S QUARTIER LATIN
THE MALTBY SCHOOL OF ART.
No trouble has been spared by the producers to obtain the right atmosphere. The top studio at Maltby’s is already half full of young students when Adam enters. Work has not yet started, but the room is alive with busy preparation. A young woman in an overall—looking rather more like a chorus girl than a painter—is making herself very dirty cleaning her palette; another near by is setting up an easel; a third is sharpening a pencil; a fourth is smoking a cigarette in a long holder. A young man, also in an overall, is holding a drawing and appraising it at arm’s length, his head slightly on one side; a young man with untidy hair is disagreeing with him. Old Mr. Maltby, an inspiring figure in a shabby silk dressing gown, is telling a tearful student that if she misses another composition class, she will be asked to leave the school. Miss Philbrick, the secretary, interrupts the argument between the two young men to remind them that neither of them has paid his fee for the month. The girl who was setting up the easel is trying to borrow some “fixative”; the girl with the cigarette holder lends her some. Mr. Maltby is complaining of the grittiness of the charcoal they make nowadays. Surely this is the Quartier Latin itself?
The “set,” too, has been conscientiously planned. The walls are hung with pots, pans and paintings—these last mainly a series of rather fleshly nudes which young Mr. Maltby has been unable to sell. A very brown skeleton hangs over the dais at the far end.
“I say, Gladys, do you think we shall see ’is models?”
“Coo, Ada, you are a one.”
Adam comes in and goes towards the board on which hangs a plan of the easel places; the girl who was lending the “fixative” comes over to him, still smoking.
“THERE’S A PLACE EMPTY NEXT TO ME, DOURE, DO COME THERE.”
Close up of the girl.
“She’s in love with ’im.”
Close up of Adam.
“’E’s not in love with ’er, though, is ’e, Ada?”
The place the girl points out is an excellent one in the second row; the only other one besides the very front and the very back is round at the side, next to the stove. Adam signs his initials opposite this place.
“I’M SORRY—I’M AFRAID THAT I FIND THE LIGHT WORRIES ME FROM WHERE YOU ARE—ONE GETS SO FEW SHADOWS—DON’T YOU FIND?”
The girl is not to be discouraged; she lights another cigarette.
“I SAW YOU LAST NIGHT AT THE COCKATRICE—YOU DIDN’T SEE ME THOUGH.”
“THE COCKATRICE—LAST NIGHT—OH YES—WHAT A PITY!”
“WHO WERE ALL THOSE PEOPLE YOU WERE WITH?”
“OH, I DON’T KNOW, JUST SOME PEOPLE, YOU KNOW.”
He makes a movement as if to go away.
“WHO WAS THAT GIRL YOU WERE DANCING WITH SO MUCH—THE PRETTY ONE WITH FAIR HAIR—IN BLACK?”
“OH, DON’T YOU KNOW HER? YOU MUST MEET HER ONE DAY—I SAY, I’M AWFULLY SORRY, BUT I MUST GO DOWN AND GET SOME PAPER FROM MISS PHILBRICK.”
“I CAN LEND YOU SOME.”
But he is gone.
Ada says, “Too much talk in this picture, eh, Gladys?” and the voice with the Cambridge accent is heard saying something about the “elimination of the caption.”
ONE OF LIFE’S UNFORTUNATES.
Enter a young woman huddled in a dressing-gown, preceded by young Mr. Maltby.
“The model—coo—I say.”
She has a slight cold and sniffles into a tiny ball of handkerchief; she mounts the dais and sits down ungracefully. Young Mr. Maltby nods good morning to those of the pupils who catch his eye; the girl who was talking to Adam catches his eye; he smiles.
“’E’s in love with ’er.”
She returns his smile with warmth.
Young Mr. Maltby rattles the stove, opens the skylight a little and then turns to the model, who slips off her dressing gown and puts it over the back of the chair.
“Coo—I say. Ada—my!”
“Well I never.”
The young man from Cambridge goes on talking about Matisse unfalteringly as though he were well accustomed to this sort of thing. Actually he is much intrigued.
She has disclosed a dull pink body with rather short legs and red elbows; like most professional models her toes are covered with bunions and malformed. Young Mr. Maltby sets her on the chair in an established Art School pose. The class settles to work.
Adam returns with some sheets of paper and proceeds to arrange them on his board. Then he stands for some time glaring at the model without drawing a line.
“’E’s in love with ’er.” But for once Ada’s explanation is wrong—and then begins sketching in the main lines of the pose.
He works on for five or six minutes, during which time the heat of the stove becomes increasingly uncomfortable. Old Mr. Maltby, breathing smoke, comes up behind him.
“Now have you placed it? What is your centre? Where is the foot going to come? Where is the top of the head coming?”
Adam has not placed it; he rubs it out angrily and starts again.
Meanwhile a vivid flirtation is in progress between young Mr. Maltby and the girl who was in love with Adam. He is leaning over and pointing out mistakes to her; his hand rests on her shoulder; she is wearing a low-necked jumper; his thumb strays over the skin of her neck; she wriggles appreciatively. He takes the charcoal from her and begins drawing in the corner of her paper; her hair touches his cheek; neither of them heed the least what he is drawing.
“These Bo’emians don’t ’alf carry on, eh, Gladys?”
In half an hour Adam has rubbed out his drawing three times. Whenever he is beginning to interest himself in some particular combination of shapes, the model raises her ball of handkerchief to her nose, and after each sniff relapses into a slightly different position. The anthracite stove glows with heat; he works on for another half hour.
Most of the girls light cigarettes; the men, who have increased in number with many late arrivals, begin to congregate away from them in the corner. One of them is reading The Studio. Adam lights a pipe, and standing back, surveys his drawing with detestation.
Close up; Adam’s drawing. It is not really at all bad. In fact it is by far the best in the room; there is one which will be better at the end of the week, but at present there is nothing of it except some measurements and geometrical figures. Its author is unaware that the model is resting; he is engaged in calculating the medial section of her height in the corner of the paper.
Adam goes out on to the stairs, which are lined with women from the lower studio eating buns out of bags. He returns to the studio.
The girl who has been instructed by young Mr. Maltby comes up to him and looks at his drawing.
“Rather Monday morningish.”
That was exactly what young Mr. Maltby had said about hers.
The model resumes her pose with slight differences; the paper bags are put away, pipes are knocked out; the promising pupil is calculating the area of a rectangle.
The scene changes to
158 PONT STREET. THE LONDON HOUSE
OF MR. CHARLES AND LADY ROSEMARY QUEST.
An interior is revealed in which the producers have at last made some attempt to satisfy the social expectations of Gladys and Ada. It is true that there is very little marble and no footmen in powder and breeches, but there is nevertheless an undoubted air of grandeur about the high rooms and Louis Seize furniture, and there is a footman. The young man from Cambridge estimates the household at six thousand a year, and though somewhat overgenerous, it is a reasonable guess. Lady Rosemary’s collection of Limoges can be seen in the background.
Upstairs in her bedroom Imogen Quest is telephoning.
“What a lovely Kimony, Ada.”
Miss Philbrick comes into the upper studio at Maltby’s, where Adam is at last beginning to take some interest in his drawing.
“MISS QUEST WANTS TO SPEAK TO YOU ON THE TELEPHONE, MR. DOURE. I told her that it was against the rules for students to use the telephone except in the luncheon hour” (there is always a pathetic game of make-believe at Maltby’s played endlessly by Miss Philbrick and old Mr. Maltby, in which they pretend that somewhere there is a code of rules which all must observe), “but she says that it is most important. I do wish you would ask your friends not to ring you up in the mornings.”
Adam puts down his charcoal and follows her to the office.
There over the telephone is poor Miss Philbrick’s notice written in the script writing she learned at night classes in Southampton Row.
“Students are forbidden to use the telephone during working hours.”
“Good morning, Imogen.”
“Yes, quite safely—very tired though.”
“I can’t, Imogen—for one thing I haven’t the money.”
“No, you can’t afford it either. Anyway, I’m dining with Lady R. tonight. You can tell me then, surely?”
“Why not?”
“Who lives there?”
“Not that awful Basil Hay?”
“Well, perhaps he is.”
“I used to meet him at Oxford sometimes.”
“WELL, IF YOU’RE SURE YOU CAN PAY I’LL COME TO LUNCHEON WITH YOU.”
“WHY THERE? IT’S FRIGHTFULLY EXPENSIVE.”
“STEAK TARTARE—WHAT’S THAT?”
The Cambridge voice explains, “Quite raw, you know, with olives and capers and vinegar and things.”
“My dear, you’ll turn into a werewolf.”
“I should love it if you did.”
“Yes, I’m afraid I am getting a little morbid.”
“One-ish. Please don’t be too late—I’ve only three-quarters of an hour.”
“Good-bye, Imogen.”
So much of the forbidden conversation is audible to Miss Philbrick.
Adam returns to the studio and draws a few heavy and insensitive lines.
He rubs at them but they still show up grubbily in the pores of the paper. He tears up his drawing; old Mr. Maltby remonstrates; young Mr. Maltby is explaining the construction of the foot and does not look up.
Adam attempts another drawing.
Close up of Adam’s drawing.
“’E’s thinking of ’er.” Unerring Ada!
“These films would be so much more convincing if they would only employ decent draughtsmen to do the hero’s drawings for him—don’t you think?” Bravo, the cultured bourgeoisie!
There is a repetition of all the excursions of eleven o’clock.
The promising pupil is working out the ratio of two cubes. The girl who has been learning the construction of the foot comes over to him and looks over his shoulder; he starts violently and loses count.
Adam takes his hat and stick and goes out.
Adam on a bus.
Adam studying Poussin at the National Gallery.
Close up of Adam studying Poussin.
“’E’s thinking of ’er.”
The clock of St. Martin-in-the-Fields strikes one. Adam leaves the National Gallery.
TEN MINUTES PAST ONE. THE DINING ROOM OF THE RESTAURANT DE LA TOUR DE FORCE.
Enter Adam; he looks round but as he had expected, Imogen has not yet arrived. He sits down at a table laid for two and waits.
Though not actually in Soho, the Tour de Force gives unmistakably an impression half cosmopolitan, half theatrical, which Ada would sum up in the word “Bo’emian.” The tables are well spaced and the wines are excellent though extremely costly.
Adam orders some sherry and waits, dividing his attention between the door through which Imogen will enter and the contemplation of a middle-aged political lawyer of repute who at the next table is trying to keep amused a bored and exquisitely beautiful youth of eighteen.
Enter Imogen.
The people at the other tables say, “Look, there’s Imogen Quest. I can’t see what people find in her, can you?” or else, “I wonder who that is. Isn’t she attractive?”
“My dear, I’m terribly late. I am sorry. I’ve had the most awful morning shopping with Lady R.”
She sits down at the table.
“You haven’t got to rush back to your school, have you? Because I’m never going to see you again. The most awful thing has happened—you order lunch, Adam. I’m very hungry. I want to eat a steak tartare and I don’t want to drink anything.”
Adam orders lunch.
“LADY R. SAYS I’M SEEING TOO MUCH OF YOU. ISN’T IT TOO AWFUL?”
Gladys at last is quite at home. The film has been classified. Young love is being thwarted by purse-proud parents.
Imogen waves aside a wagon of hors d’oeuvre.
“We had quite a scene. She came into my room before I was up and wanted to know all about last night. Apparently she heard me come in. And, oh Adam, I can’t tell you what dreadful things she’s been saying about you. My dear, what an odd luncheon—you’ve ordered everything I most detest.”
Adam drinks soup.
“THAT’S WHY I’M BEING SENT OFF TO THATCH THIS AFTERNOON. And Lady R. is going to talk to you seriously tonight. She’s put Mary and Andrew off so that she can get you alone. Adam, how can you expect me to eat all this? and you haven’t ordered yourself anything to drink.”
Adam eats an omelette alone. Imogen crumbles bread and talks to him.
“But, my dear, you mustn’t say anything against Basil because I simply adore him, and he’s got the loveliest, vulgarest mother—you’d simply love her.”
The steak tartare is wheeled up and made before them.
Close up; a dish of pulverized and bleeding meat: hands pouring in immoderate condiments.
“Do you know, Adam, I don’t think I do want this after all. It reminds me so of Henry.”
Adam has finished luncheon.
“SO YOU SEE, DEAR, WE SHALL NEVER, NEVER MEET AGAIN—PROPERLY I MEAN. Isn’t it just too like Lady R. for words.”
Imogen stretches out her hand across the table and touches Adam’s.
Close up; Adam’s hand, a signet ring on the little finger and a smudge of paint on the inside of the thumb. Imogen’s hand—very white and manicured—moves across the screen and touches it.
Gladys gives a slight sob.
“YOU DON’T MIND TOO DREADFULLY—DO YOU, ADAM?”
Adam does mind—very much indeed. He has eaten enough to be thoroughly sentimental.
The Restaurant de la Tour de Force is nearly empty. The political barrister has gone his unregenerate way; the waiters stand about restlessly.
Imogen pays the bill and they rise to go.
“Adam, you must come to Euston and see me off. We can’t part just like this—for always, can we? Hodges is meeting me there with the luggage.”
They get into a taxi.
Imogen puts her hand in his and they sit like this for a few minutes without speaking.
Then Adam leans towards her and they kiss.
Close up: Adam and Imogen kissing. There is a tear (which finds a ready response in Ada and Gladys, who sob uncontrollably) in Adam’s eye; Imogen’s lips luxuriously disposed by the pressure.
“Like the Bronzino Venus.”
“IMOGEN, YOU NEVER REALLY CARED, DID YOU? IF YOU HAD YOU WOULDN’T GO AWAY LIKE THIS. IMOGEN, DID YOU EVER CARE—REALLY?”
“HAVEN’T I GIVEN PROOF THAT I DID. Adam dear, why will you always ask such tiresome questions. Don’t you see how impossible it all is? We’ve only about five minutes before we reach Euston.”
They kiss again.
Adam says, “Damn Lady R.”
They reach Euston.
Hodges is waiting for them. She has seen about the luggage; she has seen about tickets; she has even bought magazines; there is nothing to be done.
Adam stands beside Imogen waiting for the train to start; she looks at a weekly paper.
“Do look at this picture of Sybil. Isn’t it odd? I wonder when she had it taken.”
The train is about to start. She gets into the carriage and holds out her hand.
“Good-bye, darling. You will come to mother’s dance in June, won’t you? I shall be miserable if you don’t. Perhaps we shall meet before then. Good-bye.”
The train moves out of the station.
Close up. Imogen in the carriage studying the odd photograph of Sybil.
Adam on the platform watching the train disappear.
Fade out.
“Well, Ada, what d’you think of it?”
“Fine.”
“It is curious the way that they can never make their heroes and heroines talk like ladies and gentlemen—particularly in moments of emotion.”
A QUARTER OF AN HOUR LATER.
Adam is still at Euston, gazing aimlessly at a bookstall. The various prospects before him appear on the screen.
Maltby’s. The anthracite stove, the model, the amorous student—(“the Vamp”), the mathematical student, his own drawing.
Dinner at home. His father, his mother, Parsons, his sister with her stupid, pimply face and her dull jealousy of all Imogen said and did and wore.
Dinner at Pont Street, head to head with Lady Rosemary.
Dinner by himself at some very cheap restaurant in Soho. And always at the end of it, Solitude and the thought of Imogen.
Close up: Adam registering despair gradually turning to resolution.
Adam on a bus going to Hanover Gate.
He walks to his home.
Parsons. Parsons opens the door. Mrs. Doure is out; Miss Jane is out; no, Adam does not want any tea.
Adam’s room. It is a rather charming one, high at the top of the house, looking over the trees. At full moon the animals in the Zoological Gardens can be heard from there. Adam comes in and locks the door.
Gladys is there already.
“Suicide, Ada.”
“Yes, but she’ll come in time to stop ’im. See if she don’t.”
“Don’t you be too sure. This is a queer picture, this is.”
He goes to his desk and takes a small blue bottle from one of the pigeon holes.
“What did I tell yer? Poison.”
“The ease with which persons in films contrive to provide themselves with the instruments of death . . .”
He puts it down, and taking out a sheet of paper writes.
“Last message to ’er. Gives ’er time to come and save ’im. You see.”
“AVE IMPERATRIX IMMORTALIS,
MORITURUS TE SALUTANT.”
Exquisitely written.
He folds it, puts it in an envelope and addresses it.
Then he pauses, uncertain.
A vision appears:
The door of Adam’s room. Mrs. Doure, changed for dinner, comes up to it and knocks; she knocks repeatedly, and in dismay calls for her husband. Professor Doure tries the door and shakes it. Parsons arrives and Jane. After some time the door is forced open; all the time Professor Doure is struggling with it, Mrs. Doure’s agitation increases. Jane makes futile attempts to calm her. At last they all burst into the room. Adam is revealed lying dead on the floor. Scene of unspeakable vulgarity involving tears, hysteria, the telephone, the police. Fade out.
Close up. Adam registering disgust.
Another vision:
A native village in Africa on the edge of the jungle; from one of the low thatch huts creeps a man naked and sick to death, his wives lamenting behind him. He drags himself into the jungle to die alone.
“Lor, Gladys. Instruction.”
Another vision:
Rome in the time of Petronius. A young patrician reclines in the centre of his guests. The producers have spared no effort in creating an atmosphere of superb luxury. The hall, as if in some fevered imagining of Alma Tadema, is built of marble, richly illumined by burning Christians. From right and left barbarian slave boys bring in a course of roasted peacocks. In the centre of the room a slave girl dances to a puma. Exit several of the guests to the vomitorium. Unborn pigs stewed in honey and stuffed with truffles and nightingales’ tongues succeed the peacocks. The puma, inflamed to sudden passion, springs at the girl and bears her to the ground; he stands over her, one paw planted upon her breast from which ooze tiny drops of blood. She lies there on the Alma Tadema marble, her eyes fixed upon the host in terrified appeal. But he is toying with one of the serving boys and does not notice her. More guests depart to the vomitorium. The puma devours the girl. At length, when the feast is at its height, a basin of green marble is borne in. Water, steaming and scented, is poured into it. The host immerses his hand, and a Negro woman who, throughout the banquet has crouched like some angel of death beside his couch, draws a knife from her loin cloth and buries it deep in his wrist. The water becomes red in the green marble. The guests rise to go, and with grave courtesy, though without lifting himself from the couch, he bids them each farewell. Soon he is left alone. The slave boys huddle together in the corners, their bare shoulders pressed against each other. Moved by savage desire, the Negress begins suddenly to kiss and gnaw the deadening arm. He motions her listlessly aside. The martyrs burn lower until there is only a faint glimmer of light in the great hall. The smell of cooking drifts out into the terrace and is lost on the night air. The puma can just be discerned licking its paws in the gloom.
Adam lights a pipe and taps restlessly with the corner of the envelope on the writing table. Then he puts the bottle in his pocket and unlocks the door.
He turns and walks over to his bookshelves and looks through them. Adam’s bookshelves; it is rather a remarkable library for a man of his age and means. Most of the books have a certain rarity and many are elaborately bound; there are also old books of considerable value given him from time to time by his father.
He makes a heap on the floor of the best of them.
There is about Mr. Macassor’s bookshop the appearance of the private library of an ancient and unmethodical scholar. Books are everywhere, on walls, floor and furniture, as though laid down at some interruption and straightway forgotten. First editions and early illustrated books lie hidden among Sermons and Blue Books for the earnest adventurer to find. Mr. Macassor hides his treasures with care.
An elderly man is at the moment engaged in investigating a heap of dusty volumes while Mr. Macassor bends longingly over the table engrossed in a treatise on Alchemy. Suddenly the adventurer’s back straightens; his search has been rewarded and he emerges into the light, bearing a tattered but unquestionably genuine copy of the first edition of “Hydrotaphia.” He asks Mr. Macassor the price. Mr. Macassor adjusts his spectacles and brushes some snuff from his waistcoat and, bearing the book to the door, examines it as if for the first time.
“Ah, yes, a delightful work. Yes, yes, marvellous style,” and he turns the pages fondly, “‘The large stations of the dead,’ what a noble phrase.” He looks at the cover and wipes it with his sleeve. “Why, I had forgotten I had this copy. It used to belong to Horace Walpole, only someone has stolen the bookplate—the rascal. Still, it was only the Oxford one—the armorial one, you know. Well, well, sir, since you have found it I suppose you have the right to claim it. Five guineas, shall I say. But I hate to part with it.”
The purchaser is a discerning man. Had he seen this same book baldly described in a catalogue he would not have paid half this price for it in its present condition, but the excitement of pursuit and the pride of discovery more even than the legends of Strawberry Hill have distorted his sense of values. One cannot haggle with Mr. Macassor as with some mere tradesman in Charing Cross Road. The purchaser pays and goes away triumphant. It is thus that Mr. Macassor’s son at Magdalen is able to keep his rooms full of flowers and, during the season, to hunt two days a week.
Enter Adam from a taxi laden with books. Mr. Macassor offers him snuff from an old tortoiseshell box.
“IT’S A SAD THING TO HAVE TO SELL BOOKS, MR. DOURE. Very sad. I remember as if it was yesterday, Mr. Stevenson coming in to me to sell his books, and will you believe it, Mr. Doure, when it came to the point, after we had arranged everything, his heart failed him and he took them all away again. A great book-lover, Mr. Stevenson.”
Mr. Macassor adjusts his spectacles and examines, caressingly, but like some morbid lover fastening ghoulishly upon every imperfection.
“Well, and how much were you expecting for these?”
Adam hazards, “Seventeen pounds,” but Mr. Macassor shakes his head sadly.
Five minutes later he leaves the shop with ten pounds and gets into his taxi.
Adam in the train to Oxford; smoking, his hands deep in his overcoat pockets.
“’E’s thinking of ’er.”
KNOW YOU HER SECRET NONE CAN UTTER; HERS OF THE BOOK, THE TRIPLE CROWN? Art title showing Book and Triple Crown; also Ox in ford.
General prospect of Oxford from the train showing reservoir, gas works and part of the prison. It is raining.
The station; two Indian students have lost their luggage. Resisting the romantic appeal of several hansom cabdrivers—even of one in a grey billycock hat, Adam gets into a Ford taxi. Queen Street, Carfax, the High Street, Radcliffe Camera in the distance.
“Look, Ada, St. Paul’s Cathedral.”
King Edward Street. The cab stops and Adam gets out.
LORD BASINGSTOKE’S ROOMS.
KING EDWARD STREET.
Interior of Lord Basingstoke’s rooms. On the chimneypiece are photographs of Lord Basingstoke’s mother and two of Lord Basingstoke’s friends, wearing that peculiarly inane and serene smile only found during the last year at Eton and then only in photographs. Some massive glass paper weights and cards of invitation.
On the walls are large coloured caricatures of Basil Hay drawn by himself at Eton, an early nineteenth-century engraving of Lord Basingstoke’s home; two unfinished drawings by Ernest Vaughan of the Rape of the Sabines and a wool picture of two dogs and a cat.
Lord Basingstoke, contrary to all expectation, is neither drinking, gaming, nor struggling with his riding boots; he is engaged on writing a Collections Paper for his tutor.
Lord Basingstoke’s paper in a pleasant, childish handwriting.
“BRADLAUGH v. GOSSETT. THIS FAMOUS TEST CASE FINALLY ESTABLISHED THE DECISION THAT MARSHAL LAW IS UNKNOWN IN ENGLAND.”
He crosses out “marshal” and puts “martial”; then sits biting his pen sadly.
“Adam, how lovely; I had no idea you were in Oxford.”
They talk for a little while.
“RICHARD, CAN YOU DINE WITH ME TONIGHT. YOU MUST. I’M HAVING A FAREWELL BLIND.” Richard looks sadly at his Collections Paper and shakes his head.
“My dear, I simply can’t. I’ve got to get this finished by tonight. I’m probably going to be sent down as it is.”
Adam returns to his taxi.
MR. SAYLE’S ROOMS IN MERTON.
Flowers, Medici prints and Nonesuch Press editions. Mr. Sayle is playing “L’Après midi d’un Faun” on the gramophone to an American aunt. He cannot dine with Adam.
MR. HENRY QUEST’S ROOMS IN
THE UGLIER PART OF MAGDALEN.
The furniture provided by the College has been little changed except for the addition of some rather repulsive cushions. There are photographs of Imogen, Lady Rosemary and Mr. Macassor’s son winning the Magdalen Grind. Mr. Henry Quest has just given tea to two freshmen; he is secretary of the J.C.R. His face, through the disability of the camera, looks nearly black, actually it forms a patriotic combination with his Bullingdon tie; he has a fair moustache.
Adam enters and invites him to dinner. Henry Quest does not approve of his sister’s friends; Adam cannot stand Imogen’s brother; they are always scrupulously polite to each other.
“I’M SORRY, ADAM, THERE’S A MEETING OF THE CHATHAM HERE TONIGHT. I SHOULD HAVE LOVED TO, OTHERWISE. Stay and have a cigarette, won’t you? Do you know Mr. Trehearne and Mr. Bickerton-Gibbs?”
Adam cannot stop, he has a taxi waiting.
Henry Quest excuses his intrusion to Messrs. Trehearne and Bickerton-Gibbs.
MR. EGERTON-VERSCHOYLE’S ROOMS
IN PECKWATER.
Mr. Egerton-Verschoyle has been entertaining to luncheon. Adam stirs him with his foot; he turns over and says:
“There’s another in the cupboard—corkscrew’s behind the thing, you know . . .” and trails off into incoherence.
MR. FURNESS’S ROOMS
IN THE NEXT STAIRCASE.
They are empty and dark. Mr. Furness has been sent down.
MR. SWITHIN LANG’S ROOMS
IN BEAUMONT STREET.
Furnished in white and green. Water colours by Mr. Lang of Wembley, Mentone and Thatch. Some valuable china and a large number of magazines. A coloured and ornamented decanter of Cointreau on the chimneypiece and some gold-beaded glasses. The remains of a tea party are scattered about the room, and the air is heavy with cigarette smoke.
Swithin, all in grey, is reading the Tatler.
Enter Adam; effusive greetings.
“Adam, do look at this photograph of Sybil Anderson. Isn’t it too funny?”
Adam has seen it.
They sit and talk for some time.
“Swithin, you must come and dine with me tonight—please.”
“Adam, I can’t. Gabriel’s giving a party in Balliol. Won’t you be there? Oh no, of course, you don’t know him, do you? He came up last term—such a dear, and so rich. I’m giving some people dinner first at the Crown. I’d ask you to join us, only I don’t honestly think you’d like them. It is a pity. What about tomorrow? Come over to dinner at Thame tomorrow.”
Adam shakes his head. “I’m afraid I shan’t be here,” and goes out.
Still alone, Adam is walking down the High Street. It has stopped raining and the lights shine on the wet road. His hand in his pocket fingers the bottle of poison.
There appears again the vision of the African village and the lamenting wives.
St. Mary’s clock strikes seven.
Suddenly Adam’s step quickens as he is struck by an idea.
MR. ERNEST VAUGHAN’S ROOMS.
They stand in the front quadrangle of one of the uglier and less renowned colleges midway between the lavatories and the chapel. The window blind has become stuck halfway up the window so that by day they are shrouded in a twilight as though of the Nether world, and by night Ernest’s light blazes across the quad, revealing interiors of unsurpassed debauchery. Swithin once said that, like Ernest, Ernest’s rooms were a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. The walls are devoid of pictures except for a half-finished drawing of Sir Beelzebub calling for his rum, which, pinned there a term ago, has begun to droop at the corners, and, spattered with drink and leant against by innumerable shoulders, has begun to take on much the same patina as the walls. Inscriptions and drawings, ranging from almost inspired caricature to meaningless or obscene scrawlings, attest Ernest’s various stages of drunkenness.
“Who is this Bach? I have not so much as heard of the man. E. V.” runs across the bedroom door in an unsteady band of red chalk, “UT EXULTAT IN COITU ELEPHAS, SIC RICARDUS,” surmounting an able drawing of the benign Basingstoke.
A large composition of the Birth of Queen Victoria can be traced over the fireplace. There are broken bottles and dirty glasses and uncorrected galley proofs on the table; on the corner of the chimneypiece a beautiful decanter, the broken stopper of which has been replaced by a cork. Ernest is sitting in the broken wicker chair mending the feathers of some darts with unexpected dexterity. He is a short, sturdy young man, with fierce little eyes and a well-formed forehead. His tweeds, stained with drink and paint, have once been well-made, and still preserve a certain distinction. Women undergraduates, on the rare occasions of his appearance at lectures, not infrequently fall in love with him.
“Bolshevist.” It is a reasonable mistake, but a mistake. Until his expulsion for overdue subscriptions, Ernest was a prominent member of the Canning.
Adam goes through the gateway into Ernest’s College where two or three youths are standing about staring vacantly at the notice-boards. As Adam goes by, they turn round and scowl at him.
“Another of Vaughan’s friends.”
Their eyes follow him across the quad, to Ernest’s rooms.
Ernest is somewhat surprised at Adam’s visit, who, indeed, has never shown any very warm affection for him. However, he pours out whisky.
It has begun to rain again. Dinner is about to be served in Ernest’s College and the porch is crowded by a shabby array of gowned young men vacantly staring at the notice-boards. Here and there a glaring suit of “plus fours” proclaims the generosity of the Rhodes Trust. Adam and Ernest make their way through the cluster of men who mutter their disapproval like peasants at the passage of some black magician.
“IT’S NO GOOD TAKING ME TO ANY CLUB, DOURE, I’VE BEEN BLACK-BALLED FOR THE LOT.”
“I should imagine that would have happened—even in Oxford.”
AN HOUR LATER. AT THE CROWN.
Adam and Ernest are just finishing dinner; both show marked signs of intoxication.
The dining room at the Crown bears little resemblance to Adam’s epicurean dream. The walls, pathetically frescoed with views of Oxford, resound with the clattering of dirty plates. Swithin’s dinner party has just left, leaving the room immeasurably more quiet. The three women who up till now have been playing selections from Gilbert and Sullivan in the corner have finished work and begun eating their dinner. An undergraduate who has very grandly signed the bill is engaged in an argument with the manager. At a table near Adam’s three young men with gowns wound round their throats have settled themselves and ordered coffee and cream cakes; while they are waiting they discuss the Union elections.
Adam orders more double whiskies.
Ernest insists on sending a bottle of gin over to the party at the next table. It is rejected with some resentment, and soon they rise and go away.
Adam orders more double whiskies.
Ernest begins drawing a portrait of Adam on the tablecloth.
He entitles it “Le vin triste,” and, indeed, throughout dinner, Adam has been growing sadder and sadder as his guest has grown more happy. He drinks and orders more with a mechanical weariness.
At length, very unsteadily, they rise to go.
From now onwards the film becomes a series of fragmentary scenes interspersed among hundreds of feet of confusion.
“It’s going queer again, Ada. D’you think it’s meant to be like this?”
A public-house in the slums. Adam leans against the settee and pays for innumerable pints of beer for armies of ragged men. Ernest is engrossed in a heated altercation about birth control with a beggar whom he has just defeated at “darts.”
Another public house: Ernest, beset by two panders, is loudly maintaining the abnormality of his tastes. Adam finds a bottle of gin in his pocket and attempts to give it to a man; his wife interposes; eventually the bottle falls to the floor and is broken.
Adam and Ernest in a taxi; they drive from college to college, being refused admission. Fade out.
GABRIEL’S PARTY in Balliol is being an enormous success. It is a decorous assembly mostly sober. There are bottles of champagne and decanters of whisky and brandy, but most of Gabriel’s guests prefer dancing. Others sit about and talk. They are large, well-furnished rooms, and the effect is picturesque and agreeable. There are a few people in fancy dress—a Queen Victoria, a Sapphist and two Generals Gordon. A musical comedy actor, who is staying the weekend with Gabriel, stands by the gramophone looking through the records; as becomes a guest of honour he is terribly bored.
Henry Quest has escaped from the Chatham and is talking about diplomatic appointments, drinking whisky and regarding everyone with disapproval. Lord Basingstoke stands talking to him, with his mind still worrying about the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia. Swithin is making himself quite delightful to the guest of honour. Mr. Egerton-Verschoyle sits very white, complaining of the cold.
Enter Mr. Sayle of Merton.
“GABRIEL, DO LOOK WHO I’VE FOUND IN THE QUAD. MAY I BRING HIM IN?” He pulls in Adam, who stands with a broken gin bottle in one hand staring stupidly about the room.
Someone pours him out a glass of champagne.
The party goes on.
A voice is heard roaring “ADAM” outside the window, and suddenly there bursts in Ernest, looking incredibly drunk. His hair is disordered, his eyes glazed, his neck and face crimson and greasy. He sits down in a chair immobile; someone gives him a drink; he takes it mechanically and then pours it into the carpet and continues to stare before him.
“ADAM, IS THIS IMPOSSIBLE PERSON A FRIEND OF YOURS? DO FOR GOODNESS’ SAKE TAKE HIM AWAY. GABRIEL WILL BE FURIOUS.”
“HE’S THE MOST MARVELLOUS MAN, HENRY. YOU JUST DON’T KNOW HIM. COME AND TALK TO HIM.”
And to his intense disgust Henry is led across the room and introduced to Ernest. Ernest at first does not seem to hear, and then slowly raises his eyes until they are gazing at Henry; by a further effort he continues to focus them.
“QUEST? ANY RELATION TO ADAM’S WOMAN?”
There is about to be a scene. The musical comedy actor feels that only this was needed to complete the melancholy of the evening. Henry is all indignation and contempt. “IMOGEN QUEST IS MY SISTER IF THAT’S WHAT YOU MEAN. WHO THE DEVIL ARE YOU AND WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY SPEAKING ABOUT HER LIKE THAT?”
Gabriel flutters ineffectually in the background. Richard Basingstoke interposes with a genial, “Come on, Henry, can’t you see the frightful man’s blind drunk?” Swithin begs Adam to take Ernest away. Everybody is thrown into the utmost agitation.
But Ernest, in his own way, saves everyone from further anxiety.
“DO YOU KNOW, I THINK I’M GOING TO BE SICK?”
And makes his way unmolested and with perfect dignity to the quad. The gramophone starts playing “Everybody loves my baby.” Fade out.
THE OXFORD CITY LIBERAL ASSOCIATION
DANCE AT THE TOWN HALL.
Tickets are being sold at the door for 1s. 6d.
Upstairs there is a table with jugs of lemonade and plates of plum cake. In the main hall a band is playing and the younger liberals are dancing. One of the waitresses from the Crown sits by the door fanning her face with a handkerchief.
Ernest, with a radiant smile, is slowly walking round the room offering plum cake to the couples sitting about. Some giggle and take it; some giggle and refuse; some refuse and look exceedingly haughty.
Adam leans against the side of the door watching him.
Close up; Adam bears on his face the same expression of blind misery that he wore in the taxi the night before.
Ernest has asked the waitress from the Crown to dance with him. It is an ungainly performance; still sublimely contented he collides with several couples, misses his footing and, but for his partner, would have fallen. An M.C. in evening dress asks Adam to take him away.
Broad stone steps.
Several motors are drawn up outside the Town Hall. Ernest climbs into the first of them—a decrepit Ford—and starts the engine. Adam attempts to stop him. A policeman hurries up. There is a wrenching of gears and the car starts.
The policeman blows his whistle.
Halfway down St. Aldates the car runs into the kerb, mounts the pavement and runs into a shop window. The inhabitants of St. Aldates converge from all sides; heads appear at every window; policemen assemble. There is a movement in the crowd to make way for something being carried out.
Adam turns and wanders aimlessly towards Carfax.
St. Mary’s clock strikes twelve.
It is raining again.
Adam is alone.
HALF AN HOUR LATER.
AN HOTEL BEDROOM.
Adam is lying on his face across the bed, fully clothed. He turns over and sits up. Again the vision of the native village; the savage has dragged himself very near to the edge of the jungle. His back glistens in the evening sun with his last exertion. He raises himself to his feet, and with quick unsteady steps reaches the first bushes; soon he is lost to view.
Adam steadies himself at the foot of the bed and walks to the dressing table; he leans for a long time looking at himself in the glass.
He walks to the window and looks out into the rain.
Finally he takes the blue bottle from his pocket, uncorks it, smells it, and then without more ado drinks its contents. He makes a wry face at its bitterness and stands for a minute uncertain. Then moved by some odd instinct he turns out the light and curls himself up under the coverlet.
At the foot of a low banyan tree the savage lies very still. A large fly settles on his shoulder; two birds of prey perch on the branch above him, waiting. The tropical sun begins to set, and in the brief twilight animals begin to prowl upon their obscene questings. Soon it is quite dark.
A photograph of H.M. the King in naval uniform flashes out into the night.
The cinema quickly empties.
The young man from Cambridge goes his way to drink a glass of Pilsen at Odenino’s.
Ada and Gladys pass out through ranks of liveried attendants. For perhaps the fiftieth time in the course of the evening Gladys says, “Well, I do call it a soft film.”
“Fancy ’er not coming in again.”
There is quite a crowd outside, all waiting to go to Earls Court. Ada and Gladys fight manfully and secure places on the top of the bus.
“Ere, ’oo are yer pushing? Mind out, can’t yer?”
When they arrive home they will no doubt have some cocoa before going to bed, and perhaps some bread and bloater paste. It has been rather a disappointing evening on the whole. Still, as Ada says, with the pictures you has to take the bad with the good.
Next week there may be something really funny.
Larry Semon or Buster Keaton—who knows?
The tea grew cold upon the chamber cupboard and Adam Doure stared out into the void.
The rain of yesterday had cleared away and the sun streamed into the small bedroom, lighting it up with amiable and unwelcome radiance. The distressing sound of a self-starter grappling in vain with a cold engine rang up from the yard below the window. Otherwise everything was quiet.
He cogitated: therefore he was.
From the dismal array of ills that confronted him and the confused memories that lay behind, this one proposition obtruded itself with devastating insistence. Each of his clearing perceptions advanced fresh evidence of his existence; he stretched out his limbs fully clothed under the counterpane and gazed at the ceiling with uncomprehending despair, while memories of the preceding evening, of Ernest Vaughan with swollen neck and staring eye, of the slum bar and the eager faces of the two pimps, of Henry, crimson and self-righteous, of shop girls in silk blouses eating plum cake, of the Ford wrecked in the broken window, fought for precedence in his awakening consciousness until they were established in some fairly coherent chronological order; but always at the end there remained the blue bottle and the sense of finality rudely frustrated. It stood upon the dressing table now, emptied of all its power of reprieve, while the tea grew cold upon the chamber cupboard.
After all the chaotic impressions which he had thus painfully and imperfectly set in order, the last minutes before he had turned out the light stood out perfectly clearly. He could see the white, inconsolable face that had stared out at him from the looking glass; he could feel at the back of his tongue the salt and bitter taste of the poison. And then as the image of the taste began to bulk larger in his field of consciousness, as though with the sudden breaking down of some intervening barrier another memory swept in on him blotting out all else with its intensity. He remembered as in a nightmare, remote, yet infinitely clear, his awakening in the darkness with the coldness of death about his heart; he had raised himself from the bed and stumbled to the window and leant there, he did not know how long, with the cold air in his face and the steady monotone of the rain fighting with the drumming of blood in his head. Gradually, as he stood there motionless, nausea had come upon him; he had fought it back, his whole will struggling in the effort; it had come again; his drunken senses relaxed their resistance, and with complete abandonment of purpose and restraint, he vomited into the yard below.
Slowly and imperceptibly the tea grew cold on the chamber cupboard.
Centuries ago, in his dateless childhood, Ozymandias had sprung to the top of the toy cupboard tired of Adam’s game. It was a game peculiar to himself and Ozymandias which Adam had evolved, and which was only played on the rare occasions of his being left alone. First, Ozymandias had to be sought from room to room, and when at last he was found, borne up to the nursery and shut in. He would watch him for some minutes as he paced the floor and surveyed the room with just the extreme tip of his tail expressing his unfathomable contempt for European civilization. Then armed with a sword, gun, battledore, or an armful of bricks to throw, and uttering sadistic cries, Adam would pursue him round and round the room, driving him from refuge to refuge, until almost beside himself with rage and terror, he crouched junglelike with ears flattened back and porpentine hair. Here Adam would rest, and after some slight pause the real business of the game began. Ozymandias had to be won back to complacency and affection. Adam would sit down on the floor some little way from him and begin calling to him softly and endearingly. He would lie on his stomach with his face as near Ozymandias as he would allow and whisper extravagant eulogies of his beauty and grace; mother-like he would comfort him, evoking some fictitious tormentor to be reproached, assuring him that he was powerless to hurt him any more; Adam would protect him; Adam would see that the horrible little boy did not come near him again. Slowly Ozymandias’ ears would begin to come forward and his eyes begin to close, and the delectable exercise invariably ended with caresses of passionate reconciliation.
On this particular afternoon, however, Ozymandias had refused to play, and the moment Adam brought him into the nursery, had established himself in unassailable sanctuary at the top of the toy cupboard. He sat there among the dust and broken toys, and Adam, foiled in his purpose, sat gloomily beneath calling to him. But Adam—at the age of seven—was not easily discouraged, and soon he began pushing up the nursery table towards the cupboard. This done he lifted the soldier box into it, and above this planted a chair. There was not room, turn it how he might, for all four legs to rest on the box, but content with an unstable equilibrium, Adam poised it upon three and mounted. When his hands were within a few inches of Ozymandias’ soft fur an unwary step on to the unsupported part of the chair precipitated him and it, first on to the table and then with a clatter and cry on to the floor.
Adam had been too well brought up to remember very much of his life in the days before he went to his private school, but this incident survived in his memory with a clearness, which increased as he became farther removed from it, as the first occasion on which he became conscious of ill as a subjective entity. His life up till this time had been so much bounded with warnings of danger that it seemed for a moment inconceivable that he could so easily have broken through into the realm of positive bodily harm. Indeed, so incompatible did it seem with all previous experience that it was some appreciable time before he could convince himself of the continuity of his existence; but for the wealth of Hebraic and mediaeval imagery with which the idea of life outside the body had become symbolized, he could in that moment easily have believed in his own bodily extinction and the unreality of all the sensible objects about him. Later he learned to regard these periods between his fall and the dismayed advent of help from below, as the first promptings towards that struggle for detachment in which he had, not without almost frantic endeavour, finally acknowledged defeat in the bedroom of the Oxford hotel.
The first phase of detachment had passed and had been succeeded by one of methodical investigation. Almost simultaneously with his acceptance of his continued existence had come the conception of pain—vaguely at first as of a melody played by another to which his senses were only fitfully attentive, but gradually taking shape as the tangible objects about him gained in reality, until at length it appeared as a concrete thing, external but intimately attached to himself. Like the pursuit of quicksilver with a spoon, Adam was able to chase it about the walls of his consciousness until at length he drove it into a corner in which he could examine it at his leisure. Still lying perfectly still, just as he had fallen, with his limbs half embracing the wooden legs of the chair, Adam was able, by conscentrating his attention upon each part of his body in turn, to exclude the disordered sensations to which his fall had given rise and trace the several constituents of the bulk of pain down their vibrating channels to their sources in his various physical injuries. The process was nearly complete when the arrival of his nurse dissolved him into tears and scattered his bewildered ratiocinations.
It was in some such mood as this that, an hour or so after his awakening, Adam strode along the towing path away from Oxford. He still wore the clothes in which he had slept, but in his intellectual dishevelment he had little concern for his appearance. All about him the shadows were beginning to dissipate and give place to clearer images. He had breakfasted in a world of phantoms, in a great room full of uncomprehending eyes, protruding grotesquely from monstrous heads that lolled over steaming porridge; marionette waiters had pirouetted about him with uncouth gestures. All round him a macabre dance of shadows had reeled and flickered, and in and out of it Adam had picked his way, conscious only of one insistent need, percolating through to him from the world outside, of immediate escape from the scene upon which the bodiless harlequinade was played, into a third dimension beyond it.
And at length, as he walked by the river, the shapes of the design began to advance and recede, and the pattern about him and the shadows of the night before became planes and masses and arranged themselves into a perspective, and like the child in the nursery Adam began feeling his bruises.
Somewhere among the red roofs across the water bells were ringing discordantly.
Two men were fishing on the bank. They looked curiously at him and returned their attention to their barren sport.
A small child passed him sucking her thumb in Freudian ecstasy. And after a time Adam left the footpath and lay down under a bank and by the Grace of God fell asleep.
It was not a long or an unbroken sleep, but Adam rose from it refreshed and after a little while resumed his journey.
On a white footbridge he paused, and lighting his pipe, gazed down into his ruffled image. A great swan swept beneath him with Spenserian grace, and as the scattered particles of his reflection began to reassemble, looking more than ever grotesque in contrast with the impeccable excellence of the bird, he began half-consciously to speak aloud:
“So, you see, you are after all come to the beginning of another day.” And as he spoke, he took from his pocket the envelope addressed to Imogen and tore it into small pieces. Like wounded birds they tumbled and fluttered, until reaching the water they became caught up in its movement and were swept out of sight round the bend of the river towards the city, which Adam had just left.
The reflection answered: “Yes, I think that that was well done. After all, ‘imperatrix’ is not a particularly happy epithet to apply to Imogen, is it?—and, by the way, are you certain that she can understand Latin? Suppose that she had had to ask Henry to translate it to her!
“But, tell me, does this rather picturesque gesture mean that you have decided to go on living? You seemed so immovably resolved on instant death yesterday, that I find it hard to believe you can have changed your mind.”
Adam: I find it hard to believe that it was I who yesterday was so immovably resolved. I cannot explain but it seems to me as though the being who survives, I must admit, with very great clearness in my memory, was born of a dream, drank and died in a dream.
The Reflection: And loved in a dream, too?
Adam: There you confound me, for it seems to me that that love of his alone does partake of reality. But perhaps I am merely yielding to the intensity of the memory. Indeed I think that I am. For the rest that being had no more substance than you yourself, whom the passage of a bird can dissolve.
Reflection: That is a sorry conclusion, for I am afraid that you are trying to dismiss as a shadow a being in every way as real as yourself. But in your present mood it would be useless to persuade you. Tell me instead, what was the secret which you learned, asleep there in the grass?
Adam: I found no secret—only a little bodily strength.
Reflection: Is the balance of life and death so easily swayed?
Adam: It is the balance of appetite and reason. The reason remains constant—the appetite varies.
Reflection: And is there no appetite for death?
Adam: None which cannot be appeased by sleep or change or the mere passing of time.
Reflection: And in the other scale no reason?
Adam: None. None.
Reflection: No honour to be observed to friends? No interpenetration, so that you cannot depart without bearing away with you something that is part of another?
Adam: None.
Reflection: Your art?
Adam: Again the appetite to live—to preserve in the shapes of things the personality whose dissolution you foresee inevitably.
Reflection: That is the balance then—and in the end circumstance decides.
Adam: Yes, in the end circumstance.
They have all come over to Thatch for the day; nine of them, three in Henry Quest’s Morris and the others in a huge and shabby car belonging to Richard Basingstoke. Mrs. Hay had only expected Henry Quest and Swithin, but she waves a plump hand benignly and the servants busy themselves in finding more food. It is so nice living near Oxford, and Basil’s friends always look so charming about the place even if they are rather odd in their manners sometimes. They all talk so quickly that she can never hear what they are saying and they never finish their sentences either—but it doesn’t matter, because they always talk about people she doesn’t know. Dear boys, of course they don’t mean to be rude really—they are so well bred, and it is nice to see them making themselves really at home. Who are they talking about now?
“No, Imogen, really, he’s getting rather impossible.”
“I can’t tell you what he was like the other night.”
“The night you came down here.”
“Gabriel was giving a party.”
“And he didn’t know Gabriel and he hadn’t been asked.”
“And Gabriel didn’t want him—did you, Gabriel?”
“Because you never know what he is going to do next.”
“And he brought in the most dreadful person.”
“Quite, quite drunk.”
“Called Ernest Vaughan, you wouldn’t have met him. Just the most awful person in the world. Gabriel was perfectly sweet to him.”
Dear boys, so young, so intolerant.
Still, if they must smoke between courses, they might be a little more careful with the ash. The dark boy at the end—Basil always forgot to introduce his friends to her—was quite ruining the table.
“Edwards, give the gentleman next to Lord Basingstoke another ash-tray.”
What were they saying?
“D’you know, Henry, I think that that was rather silly of you? Why should I mind what some poor drunk says about me?”
What a sweet girl Imogen Quest was. So much easier than her father. Mrs. Hay was always rather afraid of Imogen’s father. She was afraid Henry was going to be like him. How charming she looks now. She cannot understand why all the boys aren’t in love with her. When Mrs. Hay was young, they would have been. None of Basil’s friends seemed quite the “marrying sort” somehow. Now if only Basil would marry someone like Imogen Quest. . . .
“But do you know, I think I’ve met Ernest Vaughan? Or at least someone pointed him out to me once. Didn’t you, Swithin?”
“Yes. You said you thought he was rather attractive.”
“Imogen!”
“My dear.”
“I think he is. Isn’t he short and dirty with masses of hair?”
“Always drunk.”
“Yes, I remember. I think he looked very charming. I want to meet him properly.”
“Imogen, you can’t, really. He is too awful.”
“Didn’t he do those pictures in Richard’s room? Richard, will you invite me to meet him one day?”
“No, Imogen, really I couldn’t.”
“Then someone must—Gabriel, you will, please. I insist on meeting him.”
Dear children, so young, so chic.
“Well, I think it’s perfectly beastly of you all. But I will meet him all the same. I’ll get Adam to arrange it.”
The table was ruined.
“Edwards, I think it’s almost fine enough to have coffee outside.”
I arrived at Vanburgh at five to one. It was raining hard by now and the dreary little station yard was empty except for a deserted and draughty-looking taxi. They might have sent a car for me.
How far was it to Stayle? About three miles, the ticket collector told me. Which part of Stayle might I be wanting? The Duke’s? That was a good mile the other side of the village.
They really might have sent a car.
With a little difficulty I found the driver of the taxi, a sulky and scorbutic young man who may well have been the bully of some long-forgotten school story. It was some consolation to feel that he must be getting wetter than I. It was a beastly drive.
After the crossroads at Stayle we reached what were obviously the walls of the park, interminable and dilapidated walls that stretched on past corners and curves with leafless trees dripping on to their dingy masonry. At last they were broken by lodges and gates, four gates and three lodges, and through the ironwork I could see a great sweep of ill-kept drive.
But the gates were shut and padlocked and most of the windows in the lodges were broken.
“There are some more gates further on,” said the school bully, “and beyond them, and beyond them again. I suppose they must get in and out somehow, sometimes.”
At last we found a white wooden gate and a track which led through some farm buildings into the main drive. The park land on either side was railed off and no doubt let out to pasture. One very dirty sheep had strayed on to the drive and stumbled off in alarm at our approach, continually looking over its shoulder and then starting away again until we overtook it. Last of all the house came in sight, spreading out prodigiously in all directions.
The man demanded eight shillings for the fare. I gave it to him and rang the bell.
After some delay an old man opened the door to me.
“Mr. Vaughan,” I said. “I think his Grace is expecting me to luncheon.”
“Yes; will you come in, please?” and I was just handing him my hat when he added: “I am the Duke of Vanburgh. I hope you will forgive my opening the door myself. The butler is in bed today—he suffers terribly in his back during the winter, and both my footmen have been killed in the war.” Have been killed—the words haunted me incessantly throughout the next few hours and for days to come. That desolating perfect tense, after ten years at least, probably more . . . Miss Stein and the continuous present; the Duke of Vanburgh and the continuous perfect passive. . . .
I was unprepared for the room to which he led me. Only once before, at the age of twelve, had I been to a ducal house, and besides the fruit garden, my chief memory of that visit was one of intense cold and of running upstairs through endless passages to get my mother a fur to wear round her shoulders after dinner. It is true that that was in Scotland, but still I was quite unprepared for the overpowering heat that met us as the Duke opened the door. The double windows were tight shut and a large coal fire burned brightly in the round Victorian grate. The air was heavy with the smell of chrysanthemums, there was a gilt clock under a glass case on the chimneypiece and everywhere in the room stiff little assemblages of china and bric-a-brac. One might expect to find such a room in Lancaster Gate or Elm Park Gardens where the widow of some provincial knight knits away her days among trusted servants. In front of the fire sat an old lady, eating an apple.
“My dear, this is Mr. Vaughan, who is going to take Stayle abroad—my sister, Lady Emily. Mr. Vaughan has just driven down from London in his motor.”
“No,” I said, “I came by train—the twelve fifty-five.”
“Wasn’t that very expensive?” said Lady Emily.
Perhaps I ought here to explain the reason for my visit. As I have said, I am not at all in the habit of moving in these exalted circles, but I have a rather grand godmother who shows a sporadic interest in my affairs. I had just come down from Oxford, and was very much at a loose end when she learned unexpectedly that the Duke of Vanburgh was in need of a tutor to take his grandson and heir abroad—a youth called the Marquess of Stayle, eighteen years old. It had seemed a tolerable way in which to spend the next six months, and accordingly the thing had been arranged. I was here to fetch away my charge and start for the Continent with him next day.
“Did you say you came by train?” said the Duke.
“By the twelve fifty-five.”
“But you said you were coming by motor.”
“No, really, I can’t have said that. For one thing I haven’t got a motor.”
“But if you hadn’t said that, I should have sent Byng to meet you. Byng didn’t meet you, did he?”
“No,” I said, “he did not.”
“Well, there you see.”
Lady Emily put down the core of her apple and said very suddenly:
“Your father used to live over at Oakshott. I knew him quite well. Shocking bad on a horse.”
“No, that was my uncle Hugh. My father was in India almost all his life. He died there.”
“Oh, I don’t think he can have done that,” said Lady Emily; “I don’t believe he even went there—did he, Charles?”
“Who? what?”
“Hugh Vaughan never went to India, did he?”
“No, no, of course not. He sold Oakshott and went to live in Hampshire somewhere. He never went to India in his life.”
At this moment another old lady, almost indistinguishable from Lady Emily, came into the room.
“This is Mr. Vaughan, my dear. You remember his father at Oakshott, don’t you? He’s going to take Stayle abroad—my sister, Lady Gertrude.”
Lady Gertrude smiled brightly and took my hand.
“Now I knew there was someone coming to luncheon, and then I saw Byng carrying in the vegetables a quarter of an hour ago. I thought, now he ought to be at Vanburgh meeting the train.”
“No, no, dear,” said Lady Emily. “Mr. Vaughan came down by motor.”
“Oh, that’s a good thing. I thought he said he was coming by train.”
The Marquess of Stayle did not come in to luncheon.
“I am afraid you may find him rather shy at first,” explained the Duke. “We did not tell him about your coming until this morning. We were afraid it might unsettle him. As it is he is a little upset about it. Have you seen him since breakfast, my dear?”
“Don’t you think,” said Lady Gertrude, “that Mr. Vaughan had better know the truth about Stayle? He is bound to discover it soon.”
The Duke sighed: “The truth is, Mr. Vaughan, that my grandson is not quite right in his head. Not mad, you understand, but noticeably underdeveloped.”
I nodded. “I gathered from my godmother that he was a little backward.”
“That is largely why he never went to school. He went to a private school once for two terms, but he was very unhappy and the fees were very high; so I took him away. Since then he has had no regular education.”
“No education of any sort, dear,” said Lady Gertrude gently.
“Well, it practically amounts to that. And it is a sad state of affairs, as you will readily understand. You see, the boy will succeed me and—well, it is very unfortunate. Now there is quite a large sum of money which his mother left for the boy’s education. Nothing has been done with it—to tell you the truth, I had forgotten all about it until my lawyer reminded me of it the other day. It is about thirteen hundred pounds by now, I think. I have talked the matter over with Lady Emily and Lady Gertrude, and we came to the conclusion that the best thing to do would be to send him abroad for a year with a tutor. It might make a difference. Anyway, we shall feel that we have done our duty by the boy.” (It seemed to me odd that they should feel that about it, but I said nothing.) “You will probably have to get him some clothes too. You see he has never been about much, and we have let him run wild a little, I am afraid.”
When luncheon was over they brought out a large box of peppermint creams. Lady Emily ate five.
Well, I had been sent down from Oxford with every circumstance of discredit, and it did not become me to be over nice; still, to spend a year conducting a lunatic nobleman about Europe was rather more than I had bargained for. I had practically made up my mind to risk my godmother’s displeasure and throw up the post while there was still time, when the young man made his appearance.
He stood at the door of the dining room surveying the four of us, acutely ill at ease but with a certain insolence.
“Hullo, have you finished lunch? May I have some peppermints, Aunt Emily?”
He was not a bad-looking youth at all, slightly over middle height, and he spoke with that rather agreeable intonation that gentlepeople acquire who live among servants and farm hands. His clothes, with which he had obviously been at some pains, were unbelievable—a shiny blue suit with four buttons, much too small for him, showing several inches of wrinkled woollen sock and white flannel shirt. Above this he had put on a stiff evening collar and a very narrow tie, tied in a sailor-knot. His hair was far too long, and he had been putting water on it. But for all this he did not look mad.
“Come and say ‘How do you do?’ to your new tutor,” said Lady Gertrude, as though to a child of six. “Give him your right hand—that’s it.”
He came awkwardly towards me, holding out his hand, then put it behind him and then shot it out again suddenly, leaning his body forward as he did so. I felt a sudden shame for this poor ungraceful creature.
“How-d’you-do?” he said. “I expect they forgot to send the car for you, didn’t they? The last tutor walked out and didn’t get here until half past two. Then they said I was mad, so he went away again. Have they told you I’m mad yet?”
“No,” I said decidedly, “of course not.”
“Well, they will then. But perhaps they have already, and you didn’t like to tell me. You’re a gentleman, aren’t you? That’s what grandfather said: ‘He’s a bad hat, but at least he’s a gentleman.’ But you needn’t worry about me. They all say I’m mad.”
Anywhere else this might have caused some uneasiness, but the placid voice of Lady Gertrude broke in:
“Now, you mustn’t talk like that to Mr. Vaughan. Come and have a peppermint, dear.” And she looked at me as though to say, “What did I tell you?”
Quite suddenly I decided to take on the job after all.
An hour later we were in the train. I had the Duke’s cheque for £150 preliminary expenses in my pocket; the boy’s preposterous little wicker box was in the rack over his head.
“I say,” he said, “what am I to call you?”
“Well, most of my friends call me Ernest.”
“May I really do that?”
“Yes, of course. What shall I call you?”
He looked doubtful. “Grandfather and the aunts call me Stayle; everyone else calls me ‘my Lord’ when they are about and ‘Bats’ when we are alone. It’s short for ‘Bats in the Belfry’, you know.”
“But haven’t you got a Christian name?”
He had to think before he answered. “Yes—George Theodore Verney.”
“Well, I’m going to call you George.”
“Will you really? I say, have you been to London a lot?”
“Yes, I live there usually.”
“I say. D’you know I’ve never been to London? I’ve never been away from home at all—except to that school.”
“Was that beastly?”
“It was —” He used a ploughboy’s oath. “I say, oughtn’t I to say that? Aunt Emily says I shouldn’t.”
“She’s quite right.”
“Well, she’s got some mighty queer ideas, I can tell you,” and for the rest of the journey he chatted freely. That evening he evinced a desire to go to a theatre, but remembering his clothes, I sent him to bed early and went out in search of friends. I felt that with £150 in my pocket I could afford champagne. Besides, I had a good story to tell.
We spent the next day ordering clothes. It was clear the moment I saw his luggage that we should have to stay on in London for four or five days; he had nothing that he could possibly wear. As soon as he was up I put him into one of my overcoats and took him to all the shops where I owed money. He ordered lavishly and with evident relish. By the evening the first parcels had begun to arrive and his room was a heap of cardboard and tissue paper. Mr. Phillrick, who always gives me the impression that I am the first commoner who has dared to order a suit from him, so far relaxed from his customary austerity as to call upon us at the hotel, followed by an assistant with a large suitcase full of patterns. George showed a well-bred leaning towards checks. Mr. Phillrick could get two suits finished by Thursday, the other would follow us to the Crillon. Did he know anywhere where we could get a tolerable suit of evening clothes ready made? He gave us the name of the shop where his firm sold their misfits. He remembered his Lordship’s father well. He would call upon his Lordship for a fitting tomorrow evening. Was I sure that I had all the clothes I needed at the moment? He had some patterns just in. As for that little matter of my bill—of course, any time that was convenient to me. (His last letter had made it unmistakably clear that he must have a cheque on account before undertaking any further orders.) I ordered two suits. All of this George enjoyed enormously.
After the first morning I gave up all attempt at a tutorial attitude. We had four days to spend in London before we could start and, as George had told me, it was his first visit. He had an unbounded zeal to see everything, and, above all, to meet people; but he had also a fresh and acute critical faculty and a natural fastidiousness which shone through the country bumpkin. The first time he went to a revue he was all agog with excitement; the theatre, the orchestra, the audience all enthralled him. He insisted on being there ten minutes before the time; he insisted on leaving ten minutes before the end of the first act. He thought it vulgar and dull and ugly, and there was so much else that he was eager to see. The dreary “might-as-well-stay-here-now-we’ve-paid” attitude was unintelligible to him.
In the same way with his food, he wished to try all the dishes. If he found he did not like anything, he ordered something else. On the first evening we dined out he decided that champagne was tasteless and disagreeable and refused to drink it again. He had no patience for acquiring tastes, but most good things pleased him immediately. At the National Gallery he would look at nothing after Bellini’s “Death of Peter Martyr.”
He was an immediate success with everyone I introduced him to. He had no “manner” of any kind. He said all he thought with very little reticence and listened with the utmost interest to all he heard said. At first he would sometimes break in with rather disturbing sincerity upon the ready-made conversations with which we are mostly content, but almost at once he learned to discern what was purely mechanical and to disregard it. He would pick up tags and phrases and use them with the oddest twists, revitalizing them by his interest in their picturesqueness.
And all this happened in four days; if it had been in four months the change would have been remarkable. I could see him developing from one hour to the next.
On our last evening in London I brought out an atlas and tried to explain where we were going. The world for him was divided roughly into three hemispheres—Europe, where there had been a war; it was full of towns like Paris and Buda-Pest, all equally remote and peopled with prostitutes; the East, a place full of camels and elephants, deserts and dervishes and nodding mandarins; and America, which besides its own two continents included Australia, New Zealand, and most of the British Empire not obviously “Eastern”; somewhere, too, there were some “savages.”
“We shall have to stop the night at Brindisi,” I was saying. “Then we can get the Lloyd Trestino in the morning. What a lot you’re smoking!”
We had just returned from a tea and cocktail party. George was standing at the looking glass gazing at himself in his new clothes.
“You know, he has made this suit rather well, Ernest. It’s about the only thing I learned at home—smoking, I mean. I used to go up to the saddle room with Byng.”
“You haven’t told me what you thought of the party.”
“Ernest, why are all your friends being so sweet to me? Is it just because I’m going to be a duke?”
“I expect that makes a difference with some of them—Julia for instance. She said you looked so fugitive.”
“I’m afraid I didn’t like Julia much. No, I mean Peter and that funny Mr. Oliphant.”
“I think they like you.”
“How odd!” He looked at himself in the glass again. “D’you know, I’ll tell you something I’ve been thinking all these last few days. I don’t believe I really am mad at all. It’s only at home I feel so different from everyone else. Of course I don’t know much . . . I’ve been thinking, d’you think it can be grandfather and the aunts who are mad, all the time?”
“They’re certainly getting old.”
“No, mad. I can remember some awfully dotty things they’ve done at one time or another. Last summer Aunt Gertrude swore there was a swarm of bees under her bed and had all the gardeners up with smoke and things. She refused to get out of bed until the bees were gone—and there weren’t any there. And then there was the time grandfather made a wreath of strawberry leaves and danced round the garden singing ‘Cook’s son, Dook’s son, son of a belted earl.’ It didn’t strike me at the time, but that was an odd thing to do, wasn’t it? Anyway, I shan’t see them again for months and months. Oh, Ernest, it’s too wonderful. You don’t think the sleeves are too tight, do you? Are people black in Athens?”
“Not coal black—mostly Jews and undergraduates.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, Peter’s an undergraduate. I was one until a few weeks ago.”
“I say, do you think people will take me for an undergraduate?”
It seems to me sometimes that Nature, like a lazy author, will round off abruptly into a short story what she obviously intended to be the opening of a novel.
Two letters arrived for me by the post next morning. One was from my bank returning the Duke’s cheque for £150 marked “Payment Stopped”; the other from a firm of solicitors enjoining me that they, or rather one of them, would call upon me that morning in connection with the Duke of Vanburgh’s business. I took them in to George.
All he said was: “I had a sort of feeling that this was all too good to last.”
The lawyer duly arrived. He seemed displeased that neither of us was dressed. He intimated that he wished to speak to me alone.
His Grace, he said, had altered his plans for his grandson. He no longer wished him to go abroad. Of course, between ourselves we had to admit that the boy was not quite sane . . . very sad . . . these old families . . . putting me in such a difficult position in case anything happened. . . . His Grace had talked it over with Lady Emily and Lady Gertrude. . . . It really was too dangerous an experiment . . . besides, they had especially kept the boy shut away because they did not want the world to know . . . discredit on a great name . . . and, of course, if he went about, people were bound to talk. It was not strictly his business to discuss the wisdom of his client’s decision, but, again between ourselves, he had been very much surprised that his Grace had ever considered letting the boy leave home. . . . Later perhaps, but not yet . . . he would always need watching. And of course there was a good deal of money coming to him. Strictly between ourselves, his Grace was a great deal better off than people supposed . . . town property . . . death duties . . . keeping up Stayle . . . and so on.
He was instructed to pay the expenses incurred up to date and to give me three months’ salary . . . most generous of his Grace, no legal obligation. . . . As to the clothes . . . we really seemed rather to have exceeded his Grace’s instructions. Still, no doubt all the things that had not been specially made could be returned to the shops. He would give instructions about that . . . he was himself to take Lord Stayle back to his grandfather.
And an hour later they left.
“It’s been a marvellous four days,” said George; and then: “Anyway, I shall be twenty-one in three years and I shall have my mother’s money then. I think it’s rather a shame sending back those ties though. Don’t you think I could keep one or two?”
Five minutes later Julia rang up to ask us to luncheon.
THE MANAGER OF
“THE KREMLIN”This story was told me in Paris very early in the morning by the manager of a famous night club, and I am fairly certain that it is true.
I shall not tell you the real name of the manager or of his club, because it is not the sort of advertisement he would like, but I will call them, instead, Boris and “The Kremlin.”
“The Kremlin” occupies a position of its own.
Your hat and coat are taken at the door by a perfectly genuine Cossack of ferocious appearance; he wears riding boots and spurs, and the parts of his face that are not hidden by beard are cut and scarred like that of a pre-war German student.
The interior is hung with rugs and red, woven stuff to represent a tent. There is a very good tsigain band playing gipsy music, and a very good jazz-band which plays when people want to dance.
The waiters are chosen for their height. They wear magnificent Russian liveries, and carry round flaming skewers on which are spitted onions between rounds of meat. Most of them are ex-officers of the Imperial Guard.
Boris, the manager, is quite a young man; he is 6 ft. 5 1/2 in. in height. He wears a Russian silk blouse, loose trousers and top boots, and goes from table to table seeing that everything is all right.
From two in the morning until dawn “The Kremlin” is invariably full, and the American visitors, looking wistfully at their bills, often remark that Boris must be “making a good thing out of it.” So he is.
Fashions change very quickly in Montmartre, but if his present popularity lasts for another season, he talks of retiring to a villa on the Riviera.
One Saturday night, or rather a Sunday morning, Boris did me the honour of coming to sit at my table and take a glass of wine with me. It was then that Boris told his story.
His father was a general, and when the war broke out Boris was a cadet at the military academy.
He was too young to fight, and was forced to watch, from behind the lines, the collapse of the Imperial Government.
Then came the confused period when the Great War was over, and various scattered remnants of the royalist army, with half-hearted support from their former allies, were engaged in a losing fight against the Bolshevists.
Boris was eighteen years old. His father had been killed and his mother had already escaped to America.
The military academy was being closed down, and with several of his fellow cadets Boris decided to join the last royalist army which, under Kolchak, was holding the Bolshevists at bay in Siberia.
It was a very odd kind of army. There were dismounted cavalry and sailors who had left their ships, officers whose regiments had mutinied, frontier garrisons and aides-de-camp, veterans of the Russo-Japanese war, and boys like Boris who were seeing action for the first time.
Besides these, there were units from the Allied Powers, who seemed to have been sent there by their capricious Governments and forgotten; there was a corps of British engineers and some French artillery; there were also liaison officers and military attachés to the General Headquarters Staff.
Among the latter was a French cavalry officer a few years older than Boris. To most educated Russians before the war French was as familiar as their own language.
Boris and the French attaché became close friends. They used to smoke together and talk of Moscow and Paris before the war.
As the weeks passed it became clear that Kolchak’s campaign could end in nothing but disaster.
Eventually a council of officers decided that the only course open was to break through to the east coast and attempt to escape to Europe.
A force had to be left behind to cover the retreat, and Boris and his French friend found themselves detailed to remain with this rearguard. In the action which followed, the small covering force was completely routed.
Alone among the officers Boris and his friend escaped with their lives, but their condition was almost desperate.
Their baggage was lost and they found themselves isolated in a waste land, patrolled by enemy troops and inhabited by savage Asiatic tribesmen.
Left to himself, the Frenchman’s chances of escape were negligible, but a certain prestige still attached to the uniform of a Russian officer in the outlying villages.
Boris lent him his military overcoat to cover his uniform, and together they struggled through the snow, begging their way to the frontier.
Eventually they arrived in Japanese territory. Here all Russians were suspect, and it devolved on the Frenchman to get them safe conduct to the nearest French Consulate.
Boris’s chief aim now was to join his mother in America. His friend had to return to report himself in Paris, so here they parted.
They took an affectionate farewell, promising to see each other again when their various affairs were settled. But each in his heart doubted whether chance would ever bring them together again.
Two years elapsed, and then one day in spring a poorly-dressed young Russian found himself in Paris, with three hundred francs in his pocket and all his worldly possessions in a kitbag.
He was very different from the debonair Boris who had left the military academy for Kolchak’s army. America had proved to be something very different from the Land of Opportunity he had imagined.
His mother sold the jewels and a few personal possessions she had been able to bring away with her, and had started a small dressmaking business.
There seemed no chance of permanent employment for Boris, so after two or three months of casual jobs he worked his passage to England.
During the months that followed, Boris obtained temporary employment as a waiter, a chauffeur, a professional dancing-partner, a dock-labourer, and he came very near to starvation.
Finally, he came across an old friend of his father’s, a former first secretary in the diplomatic corps, who was now working as a hairdresser.
This friend advised him to try Paris, where a large Russian colony had already formed, and gave him his fare.
It was thus that one morning, as the buds were just beginning to break in the Champs Elysées and the couturiers were exhibiting their Spring fashions, Boris found himself, ill-dressed and friendless, in another strange city.
His total capital was the equivalent of about thirty shillings; and so, being uncertain of what was to become of him, he decided to have luncheon.
An Englishman finding himself in this predicament would no doubt have made careful calculations.
He would have decided what was the longest time that his money would last him, and would have methodically kept within his budget while he started again “looking for a job.”
But as Boris stood working out this depressing sum, something seemed suddenly to snap in his head.
With the utmost privation he could hardly hope to subsist for more than two or three weeks.
At the end of that time he would be in exactly the same position, a fortnight older, with all his money spent and no nearer a job.
Why not now as well as in a fortnight’s time? He was in Paris, about which he had read and heard so much. He made up his mind to have one good meal and leave the rest to chance.
He had often heard his father speak of a restaurant called Larne. He had no idea where it was, so he took a taxi.
He entered the restaurant and sat down in one of the red-plush seats, while the waiters eyed his clothes with suspicion.
He looked about him in an unembarrassed way. It was quieter and less showy in appearance than the big restaurants he had passed in New York and London, but a glance at the menu told him that it was not a place where poor people often went.
Then he began ordering his luncheon, and the waiter’s manner quickly changed as he realized that this eccentrically dressed customer did not need any advice about choosing his food and wine.
He ate fresh caviare and ortolansan porto and crepes suzettes; he drank a bottle of vintage claret and a glass of very old fine champagne, and he examined several boxes of cigars before he found one in perfect condition.
When he had finished, he asked for his bill. It was 260 francs. He gave the waiter a tip of 26 francs and 4 francs to the man at the door who had taken his hat and kitbag. His taxi had cost 7 francs.
Half a minute later he stood on the kerb with exactly 3 francs in the world. But it had been a magnificent lunch, and he did not regret it.
As he stood there, meditating what he could do, his arm was suddenly taken from behind, and turning he saw a smartly dressed Frenchman, who had evidently just left the restaurant. It was his friend the military attaché.
“I was sitting at the table behind you,” he said. “You never noticed me, you were so intent on your food.”
“It is probably my last meal for some time,” Boris explained, and his friend laughed at what he took to be a joke.
They walked up the street together, talking rapidly. The Frenchman described how he had left the army when his time of service was up, and was now a director of a prosperous motor business.
“And you, too,” he said. “I am delighted to see that you also have been doing well.”
“Doing well? At the moment I have exactly three francs in the world.”
“My dear fellow, people with three francs in the world do not eat caviare at Larne.”
Then for the first time he noticed Boris’s frayed clothes. He had only known him in a war-worn uniform and it had seemed natural at first to find him dressed as he was.
Now he realized that these were not the clothes which prosperous young men usually wear.
“My dear friend,” he said, “forgive me for laughing. I didn’t realize. . . . Come and dine with me this evening at my flat, and we will talk about what is to be done.”
“And so,” concluded Boris, “I became the manager of ‘The Kremlin.’ If I had not gone to Larne that day it is about certain we should never have met!
“My friend said that I might have a part in his motor business, but that he thought anyone who could spend his last 300 francs on one meal was ordained by God to keep a restaurant.
“So it has been. He financed me. I collected some of my old friends to work with us. Now, you see, I am comparatively a rich man.”
The last visitors had paid their bill and risen, rather unsteadily, to go. Boris rose, too, to bow them out. The daylight shone into the room as they lifted the curtain to go out.
Suddenly, in the new light, all the decorations looked bogus and tawdry; the waiters hurried away to change their sham liveries. Boris understood what I was feeling.
“I know,” he said. “It is not Russian. It is not anything even to own a popular night club when one has lost one’s country.”
The marriage of Tom Watch and Angela Trench-Troubridge was, perhaps, as unimportant an event as has occurred within living memory. No feature was lacking in the previous histories of the two young people, in their engagement, or their wedding, that could make them completely typical of all that was most unremarkable in modern social conditions. The evening paper recorded:
“This has been a busy week at St. Margaret’s. The third fashionable wedding of the week took place there this afternoon, between Mr. Tom Watch and Miss Angela Trench-Troubridge. Mr. Watch, who, like so many young men nowadays, works in the city, is the second son of the late Hon. Wilfrid Watch of Holyborne House, Shaftesbury; the bride’s father, Colonel Trench-Troubridge, is well known as a sportsman, and has stood several times for Parliament in the Conservative interest. Mr. Watch’s brother, Captain Peter Watch of the Coldstream Guards, acted as best man. The bride wore a veil of old Brussels lace lent by her grandmother. In accordance with the new fashion for taking holidays in Britain, the bride and bridegroom are spending a patriotic honeymoon in the West of England.”
And when that has been said there is really very little that need be added.
Angela was twenty-five, pretty, good-natured, lively, intelligent and popular—just the sort of girl, in fact, who, for some mysterious cause deep-rooted in Anglo-Saxon psychology, finds it most difficult to get satisfactorily married. During the last seven years she had done everything which it is customary for girls of her sort to do. In London she had danced on an average four evenings a week, for the first three years at private houses, for the last four at restaurants and night clubs; in the country she had been slightly patronizing to the neighbours and had taken parties to the hunt ball which she hoped would shock them; she had worked in a slum and a hat shop, had published a novel, been bridesmaid eleven times and godmother once; been in love, unsuitably, twice; had sold her photograph for fifty guineas to the advertising department of a firm of beauty specialists; had got into trouble when her name was mentioned in gossip columns; had acted in five or six charity matinées and two pageants, had canvassed for the Conservative candidate at two General Elections, and, like every girl in the British Isles, was unhappy at home.
In the Crisis years things became unendurable. For some time her father had shown an increasing reluctance to open the London house; now he began to talk in a sinister way about “economies,” by which he meant retiring permanently to the country, reducing the number of indoor servants, stopping bedroom fires, cutting down Angela’s allowance and purchasing a mile and a half of fishing in the neighbourhood, on which he had had his eye for several years.
Faced with the grim prospect of an indefinitely prolonged residence in the home of her ancestors, Angela, like many a sensible English girl before her, decided that after her two unhappy affairs she was unlikely to fall in love again. There was for her no romantic parting of the ways between love and fortune. Elder sons were scarcer than ever that year and there was hot competition from America and the Dominions. The choice was between discomfort with her parents in a Stately Home or discomfort with a husband in a London mews.
Poor Tom Watch had been mildly attentive to Angela since her first season. He was her male counterpart in about every particular. Normally educated, he had, after taking a Third in History at the University, gone into the office of a reliable firm of chartered accountants, with whom he had worked ever since. And throughout those sunless city afternoons he looked back wistfully to his undergraduate days, when he had happily followed the normal routine of University success by riding second on a borrowed hunter in the Christ Church “grind,” breaking furniture with the Bullingdon, returning at dawn through the window after dances in London, and sharing dingy but expensive lodgings in the High with young men richer than himself.
Angela, as one of the popular girls of her year, used to be a frequent visitor to Oxford and to the houses where Tom stayed during the vacation, and as the bleak succession of years in his accountant’s office sobered and depressed him, Tom began to look upon her as one of the few bright fragments remaining from his glamorous past. He still went out a little, for an unattached young man is never quite valueless in London, but the late dinner parties to which he went sulkily, tired by his day’s work and out of touch with the topics in which the débutantes attempted to interest him, served only to show him the gulf that was widening between himself and his former friends.
Angela, because (as cannot be made too clear) she was a thoroughly nice girl, was always charming to him, and he returned her interest gratefully. She was, however, a part of his past, not of his future. His regard was sentimental but quite unaspiring. She was a piece of his irrecapturable youth; nothing could have been more remote from his attitude than to think of her as a possible companion for old age. Accordingly her proposal of marriage came to him as a surprise that was by no means welcome.
They had left a particularly crowded and dull dance, and were eating kippers at a night club. They were in the intimate and slightly tender mood which always developed between them when Angela had said in a gentle voice:
“You’re always so much nicer to me than anyone else, Tom; I wonder why?” and before he could deflect her—he had had an unusually exacting day’s business and the dance had been stupefying—she had popped the question.
“Well, of course,” he had stammered, “I mean to say there’s nothing I’d like more, old girl. I mean, you know, of course I’ve always been crazy about you . . . But the difficulty is I simply can’t afford to marry. Absolutely out of the question for years, you know.”
“But I don’t think I should mind being poor with you, Tom; we know each other so well. Everything would be easy.”
And before Tom knew whether he was pleased or not, the engagement had been announced.
He was making eight hundred a year; Angela had two hundred. There was “more coming” to both of them eventually. Things were not too bad if they were sensible about not having children. He would have to give up his occasional days of hunting; she was to give up her maid. On this basis of mutual sacrifice they arranged for their future.
It rained heavily on the day of the wedding, and only the last-ditchers among the St. Margaret’s crowd turned out to watch the melancholy succession of guests popping out of their dripping cars and plunging up the covered way into the church. There was a party afterwards at Angela’s home in Egerton Gardens. At half past four, the young couple caught a train at Paddington for the West of England. The blue carpet and the striped awning were rolled away and locked among candle-ends and hassocks in the church store-room. The lights in the aisles were turned out and the doors locked and bolted. The flowers and shrubs were stacked up to await distribution in the wards of a hospital for incurables in which Mrs. Watch had an interest. Mrs. Trench-Troubridge’s secretary set to work dispatching silver-and-white cardboard packets of wedding cake to servants and tenants in the country. One of the ushers hurried to Covent Garden to return his morning coat to the firm of gentlemen’s outfitters from whom it was hired. A doctor was summoned to attend the bridegroom’s small nephew, who, after attracting considerable attention as page at the ceremony by his outspoken comments, developed a high temperature and numerous disquieting symptoms of food poisoning. Sarah Trumpery’s maid discreetly returned the travelling clock which the old lady had inadvertently pouched from among the wedding presents. (This foible of hers was well known and the detectives had standing orders to avoid a scene at the reception. It was not often that she was asked to weddings nowadays. When she was, the stolen presents were invariably returned that evening or on the following day.) The bridesmaids got together over dinner and fell into eager conjecture about the intimacies of the honeymoon, the odds in this case being three to two that the ceremony had not been anticipated. The Great Western express rattled through the sodden English counties. Tom and Angela sat glumly in a first-class smoking carriage, discussing the day.
“It was so wonderful neither of us being late.”
“Mother fussed so . . .”
“I didn’t see John, did you?”
“He was there. He said good-bye to us in the hall.”
“Oh, yes . . . I hope they’ve packed everything.”
“What books did you bring?”
A thoroughly normal, uneventful wedding.
Presently Tom said: “I suppose in a way it’s rather unenterprising of us, just going off to Aunt Martha’s house in Devon. Remember how the Lockwoods went to Morocco and got captured by brigands?”
“And the Randalls got snowed up for ten days in Norway.”
“We shan’t get much adventure in Devon, I’m afraid.”
“Well, Tom, we haven’t really married for adventure, have we?”
And, as things happened, it was from that moment onwards that the honeymoon took an odd turn.
“D’you know if we change?”
“I rather think we do. I forgot to ask. Peter got the tickets. I’ll get out at Exeter and find out.”
The train drew into the station.
“Shan’t be a minute,” said Tom, shutting the door behind him to keep out the cold. He walked up the platform, purchased a West country evening paper, learned that they need not change and was returning to his carriage when his arm was seized and a voice said:
“Hello, Watch, old man! Remember me?” And with a little difficulty he recognized the smiling face of an old school acquaintance. “See you’ve just got married. Congratulations. Meant to write. Great luck running into you like this. Come and have a drink.”
“Wish I could. Got to get back to the train.”
“Heaps of time, old man. Waits twelve minutes here. Must have a drink.”
Still searching his memory for the name of his old friend, Tom went with him to the station buffet.
“I live fifteen miles out, you know. Just come in to meet the train. Expecting some cow-cake down from London. No sign of it . . . Well, all the best.”
They drank two glasses of whisky—very comforting after the cold train journey. Then Tom said:
“Well, it’s been jolly seeing you. I must get back to the train now. Come with me and meet my wife.”
But when they reached the platform, the train was gone.
“I say, old man, that’s darned funny, you know. What are you going to do? There’s not another train tonight. Tell you what, you’d better come and spend the night with me and go on in the morning. We can wire and tell your wife where you are.”
“I suppose Angela will be all right?”
“Heavens, yes! Nothing can happen in England. Besides, there’s nothing you can do. Give me her address and I’ll send a wire now, telling her where you are. Jump into the car and wait.”
Next morning Tom woke up with a feeling of slight apprehension. He turned over in bed, examining with sleepy eyes the unaccustomed furniture of the room. Then he remembered. Of course he was married. And Angela had gone off in the train, and he had driven for miles in the dark to the house of an old friend whose name he could not remember. It had been dinnertime when they arrived. They had drunk Burgundy and port and brandy. Frankly, they had drunk rather a lot. They had recalled numerous house scandals, all kinds of jolly insults to chemistry masters, escapades after dark when they had gone up to London to the “43.” What was the fellow’s name? It was clearly too late to ask him now. And anyway he would have to get on to Angela. He supposed that she had reached Aunt Martha’s house safely and had got his telegram. Awkward beginning to the honeymoon—but then he and Angela knew each other so well . . . It was not as though this were some sudden romance.
Presently he was called. “Hounds are meeting near here this morning, sir. The Captain wondered if you’d care to go hunting.”
“No, no! I have to leave immediately after breakfast.”
“The Captain said he could mount you, sir, and lend you clothes.”
“No, no! Quite impossible.”
But when he came down to breakfast and found his host filling a saddle flask with cherry-brandy, secret threads began to pull at Tom’s heart.
“Of course we’re a comic sort of pack. Everyone turns out, parson, farmers, all kinds of animals. But we generally get a decent run along the edge of the moor. Pity you can’t come out. I’d like you to try my new mare, she’s a lovely ride . . . a bit fine for this type of country, perhaps . . .”
Well, why not? . . . after all, he and Angela knew each other so well . . . it was not as though . . .
And two hours later Tom found himself in a high wind galloping madly across the worst hunting country in the British Isles—alternations of heather and bog, broken by pot-holes, boulders, mountain streams and disused gravel pits—hounds streaming up the valley opposite, the mare going perfectly, farmers’ boys on shaggy little ponies, solicitors’ wives on cobs, retired old sea-captains bouncing about eighteen hands high, vets and vicars plunging on all sides of him, and not a care in his heart.
Two hours later still he was in less happy circumstances, seated alone in the heather, surrounded on all sides by an unbroken horizon of empty moor. He had dismounted to tighten a girth, and galloping across a hillside to catch up with the field, his mount had put her foot in a rabbit hole, tumbled over, rolled perilously near him, and then regaining her feet, had made off at a brisk canter towards her stable, leaving him on his back, panting for breath. Now he was quite alone in a totally strange country. He did not know the name of his host or of his host’s house. He pictured himself tramping from village to village saying: “Can you tell me the address of a young man who was hunting this morning? He was in Butcher’s house at Eton!” Moreover, Tom suddenly remembered he was married. Of course he and Angela knew each other so well . . . but there were limits.
At eight o’clock that evening a weary figure trudged into the gas-lit parlour of the Royal George Hotel, Chagford. He wore sodden riding boots and torn and muddy clothes. He had wandered for five hours over the moor, and was hungry. They provided him with Canadian cheese, margarine, tinned salmon, and bottled stout, and sent him to sleep in a large brass bedstead which creaked as he moved. But he slept until half past ten next morning.
The third day of the honeymoon started more propitiously. A bleak sun was shining a little. Stiff and sore in every muscle, Tom dressed in the still damp riding clothes of his unknown host and made inquiries about reaching the remote village where his Aunt Martha’s house stood, and where Angela must be anxiously awaiting him. He wired to her: “Arriving this evening. Will explain. All love,” and then inquired about trains. There was one train in the day which left early in the afternoon and, after three changes, brought him to a neighbouring station late that evening. Here he suffered another check. There was no car to be hired in the village. His aunt’s house was eight miles away. The telephone did not function after seven o’clock. The day’s journey in damp clothes had set him shivering and sneezing. He was clearly in for a bad cold. The prospect of eight miles’ walk in the dark was unthinkable. He spent the night at the inn.
The fourth day dawned to find Tom speechless and nearly deaf. In this condition the car came to conduct him to the house so kindly lent for his week’s honeymoon. Here he was greeted with the news that Angela had left early that morning.
“Mrs. Watch received a telegram, sir, saying that you had met with an accident hunting. She was very put out as she had asked several friends to luncheon.”
“But where has she gone?”
“The address was on the telegram, sir. It was the same address as your first telegram . . . No, sir, the telegram has not been preserved.”
So Angela had gone to his host near Exeter; well, she could jolly well look after herself. Tom felt far too ill to worry. He went straight to bed.
The fifth day passed in a stupor of misery. Tom lay in bed listlessly turning the pages of such books as his aunt had collected in her fifty years of vigorous out-of-door life. On the sixth day conscience began to disturb him. Perhaps he ought to do something about Angela. It was then the butler suggested that the name in the inside pocket of the hunting coat would probably be that of Tom’s late, Angela’s present host. Some work with a local directory settled the matter. He sent a telegram.
“Are you all right? Awaiting you here. Tom,” and received the answer:
“Quite all right. Your friend divine. Why not join us here. Angela.”
“In bed severe cold. Tom.”
“So sorry darling. Will see you in London or shall I join you. Hardly worth it is it. Angela.”
“Will see you London. Tom.”
Of course Angela and he knew each other very well . . .
Two days later they met in the little flat which Mrs. Watch had been decorating for them.
“I hope you’ve brought all the luggage.”
“Yes, darling. What fun to be home!”
“Office tomorrow.”
“Yes, and I’ve got hundreds of people to ring up. I haven’t thanked them for the last batch of presents yet.”
“Have a good time?”
“Not bad. How’s your cold?”
“Better. What are we doing tonight?”
“I promised to go and see mama. Then I said I would dine with your Devon friend. He came up with me to see about some cow-cake. It seemed only decent to take him out after staying with him.”
“Quite right. But I think I won’t come.”
“No, I shouldn’t. I shall have heaps to tell her that would bore you.”
That evening Mrs. Trench-Troubridge said: “I thought Angela was looking sweet tonight. The honeymoon’s done her good. So sensible of Tom not to take her on some exhausting trip on the Continent. You can see she’s come back quite rested. And the honeymoon is so often such a difficult time particularly after all the rush of the wedding.”
“What’s this about their taking a cottage in Devon?” asked her husband.
“Not taking dear, it’s being given them. Near the house of a bachelor friend of Tom’s apparently. Angela said it would be such a good place for her to go sometimes when she wanted a change. They can never get a proper holiday because of Tom’s work.”
“Very sensible, very sensible indeed,” said Mr. Trench-Troubridge, lapsing into a light doze, as was usual with him at nine in the evening.
A round, amiable face, reddened rather than browned by the tropical sun; round, rather puzzled grey eyes; close-cut sandy hair; a large, smiling mouth; a small sandy moustache; clean white duck suit and sun helmet—a typical English commercial agent stopping between ships at a stifling little port on the Red Sea.
We were the only Europeans in the hotel. The boat for which we were both waiting was two days late. We spent all our time together.
We went round the native bazaar and played interminable games of poker dice at the café tables. In these circumstances a casual acquaintance easily assumes a confidential tone.
At first naturally enough we talked of general subjects—local conditions and race problems.
“Can’t understand what all the trouble’s about. They’re all jolly chaps when you get to know them.” British officials, traders, Arabs, natives, Indian settlers—they were all to my new friend jolly good chaps.
Such an odd thing they couldn’t get on better. Of course, different races had different ideas—some didn’t wash, some had queer ideas about honesty, some got out of hand at times when they’d had too much to drink.
“Still,” he said, “that’s nobody’s business but their own. If only they’d all let each other alone to go their own ways there wouldn’t be any problems. As for religions, well, there was a lot of good in them all—Hindu, Mahommedan, Pagan: the missionaries did a lot of good, too—Wesleyan, Catholic, Church of England, all jolly good fellows.”
People in remote parts of the world tend to have unshakable views on every topic. After a few months spent among them it was a relief to come across so tolerant and broad a mind.
On the first evening I left my companion with a feeling of warm respect. Here at last, in a continent peopled almost exclusively by fanatics of one kind or another, I thought I had found a nice man.
Next day we got on to more intimate subjects and I began to learn something of his life. He was now nearer fifty than forty years of age, though I should have thought him younger.
He had been an only son, brought up in an English provincial town in a household where rigid principles of Victorian decorum dominated its members.
He had been born late in his parents’ life, and all his memories dated from after his father’s retirement from a responsible Government post in India.
It was alien to his nature to admit the existence of discomfort or disagreement, but it was clear from his every reference to it that his home had not been a congenial one.
Exact rules of morals and etiquette, ruthless criticism of neighbours, an insurmountable class barrier raised against all who were considered socially inferior, hostile disapproval of superiors—these were clearly the code of my friend’s parents, and he had grown up with a deep-rooted resolution to model his own life on opposite principles.
I had been surprised on the evening of our first meeting to discover the nature of his work. He was engaged in selling sewing machines on commission to Indian storekeepers up and down the East African coast.
It was clearly not the job for which his age and education should have fitted him. Later I learned the explanation.
He had gone into business on leaving his public school, had done quite well, and eventually, just before the war, had set up on his own with the capital left him at his father’s death.
“I had bad luck there,” he said. “I never feel quite to blame over what happened. You see, I’d taken a chap into partnership with me. He’d been a clerk with me in the office, and I’d always liked him, though he didn’t get on very well with the other fellows.
“He got sacked just about the time I came in for some money. I never quite made out what the trouble was about, and anyway it was none of my business. The arrangement seemed rather lucky at first, because my partner wasn’t fit for military service, so all the time I was in the army he was able to look after things at home.
“The business seemed to be going very well, too. We moved to new offices and took on a larger staff, and all through the war we were drawing very decent dividends. But apparently it was only temporary prosperity.
“When I got back after the Armistice I didn’t pay a great deal of attention to my affairs, I’m afraid. I was glad to be home and wanted to make the most of peace. I left my partner to manage everything, and I suppose I more or less let things slide for two years.
“Anyway, I didn’t know how bad things were until he suddenly told me that we should have to go into liquidation.
“Since then I’ve been lucky in getting jobs, but it isn’t quite the same as being one’s own master.”
He gazed out across the quay, turning his glass idly in his hand. Then, as an afterthought, he made an illuminating addition to his story.
“One thing I’m very glad of,” he said, “my partner didn’t come down with me. Almost immediately after we closed down he opened on his own in the same way of business on quite a large scale. He’s a rich man now.”
Later in the day he surprised me by casually mentioning his son.
“Son?”
“Yes. I’ve a boy of twenty-seven at home. Awfully nice fellow. I wish I could get back more often to see him. But he’s got his own friends now and I dare say he’s happy by himself. He’s interested in the theatre.
“It’s not a thing I know much about myself. All his friends are theatrical, you know, jolly interesting.
“I’m glad the boy has struck out for himself. I always made a point of never trying to force his interest in anything that didn’t attract him.
“The only pity is that there’s very little money in it. He’s always hoping to get a job either on the stage or the cinema, but it’s difficult if you don’t know the right people, he says, and that’s expensive.
“I send him as much as I can, but he has to be well dressed, you know, and go about a good deal and entertain, and all that takes money. Still, I expect it’ll lead to something in the end. He’s a jolly good fellow.”
But it was not until some days later, on board ship, when we were already berthed at the port where he was due to disembark next day, that he mentioned his wife.
We had had many drinks to wish each other good luck on our respective journeys. The prospect of immediate separation made mutual confidence easier than it would be between constant companions.
“My wife left me,” he said simply. “It was a great surprise. I can’t to this day think why. I always encouraged her to do just what she wanted.
“You see, I’d seen a lot of the Victorian idea of marriage, where a wife was supposed to have no interests outside her housekeeping, and the father of the family dined at home every evening. I don’t approve of that.
“I always liked my wife to have her own friends and have them in the house when she wanted and to go out when she wanted and I did the same. I thought we were ideally happy.
“She liked dancing and I didn’t, so when a chap turned up who she seemed to like going about with, I was delighted. I’d met him once or twice and heard that he ran after women a good bit, but that wasn’t my business.
“My father used to keep a strict division among his friends, between those he saw at home and those he met in the club. He wouldn’t bring anyone to his house whose moral character he didn’t wholly approve of. I think that’s all old-fashioned rot.
“Anyway, to cut a long story short, after she’d been going out with this fellow for some time she suddenly fell in love and went off with him. I’d always liked him, too. Jolly good sort of fellow. I suppose she had a perfect right to do what she preferred. All the same, I was surprised. And I’ve been lonely since.”
At this moment two fellow passengers whose acquaintance I had been scrupulously avoiding came past our table. He called them to our table, so I wished him “Good-night” and went below.
I did not see him to speak to next day, but I caught a brief glimpse of him on the pier, supervising the loading of his crate of sample sewing machines.
As I watched, he finished his business and strode off towards the town—a jaunty, tragic little figure, cheated out of his patrimony by his partner, battened on by an obviously worthless son, deserted by his wife, an irrepressible, bewildered figure striding off under his bobbing topee, cheerfully butting his way into a whole continent of rapacious and ruthless jolly good fellows.
The commissionaire at Espinoza’s restaurant seems to maintain under his particular authority all the most decrepit taxicabs in London. He is a commanding man; across his great chest the student of military medals may construe a tale of heroism and experience; Boer farms sink to ashes, fanatical Fuzzi-wuzzies hurl themselves to paradise, supercilious mandarins survey the smashing of their porcelain and rending of fine silk, in that triple row of decorations. He has only to run from the steps of Espinoza’s to call to your service a vehicle as crazy as all the enemies of the King-Emperor.
Half-a-crown into the white cotton glove, because Simon Lent was too tired to ask for change. He and Sylvia huddled into the darkness on broken springs, between draughty windows. It had been an unsatisfactory evening. They had sat over their table until two because it was an extension night. Sylvia would not drink anything because Simon had said he was broke. So they sat for five or six hours, sometimes silent, sometimes bickering, sometimes exchanging listless greetings with the passing couples. Simon dropped Sylvia at her door; a kiss, clumsily offered, coldly accepted; then back to the attic flat, over a sleepless garage, for which Simon paid six guineas a week.
Outside his door they were sluicing a limousine. He squeezed round it and climbed the narrow stairs, that had once echoed to the whistling of ostlers, stamping down to stables before dawn. (Woe to young men in Mewses! Oh woe, to bachelors half in love, living on £800 a year!) There was a small heap of letters on his dressing table, which had arrived that evening while he was dressing. He lit his gas fire and began to open them. Tailor’s bill £56, hosier £43; a reminder that his club subscription for that year had not yet been paid; his account from Espinoza’s with a note informing him that the terms were strict, net cash monthly, and that no further credit would be extended to him; it “appeared from the books” of his bank that his last cheque overdrew his account £10 16s. beyond the limit of his guaranteed overdraft; a demand from the income-tax collector for particulars of his employees and their wages (Mrs. Shaw, who came in to make his bed and orange juice for 4s. 6d. a day); small bills for books, spectacles, cigars, hair lotion and Sylvia’s last four birthday presents. (Woe to shops that serve young men in Mewses!)
The other part of his mail was in marked contrast to this. There was a box of preserved figs from an admirer in Fresno, California; two letters from young ladies who said they were composing papers about his work for their college literary societies, and would he send a photograph; press cuttings describing him as a “popular,” “brilliant,” “meteorically successful,” and “enviable” young novelist; a request for the loan of two hundred pounds from a paralysed journalist; an invitation to luncheon from Lady Metroland; six pages of closely reasoned abuse from a lunatic asylum in the North of England. For the truth, which no one who saw into Simon Lent’s heart could possibly have suspected, was that he was in his way and within his limits quite a famous young man.
There was a last letter with a typewritten address which Simon opened with little expectation of pleasure. The paper was headed with the name of a Film Studio in one of the suburbs of London. The letter was brief and business-like.
Dear Simon Lent (a form of address, he had noted before, largely favoured by the theatrical profession),
I wonder whether you have ever considered writing for the Films. We should value your angle on a picture we are now making. Perhaps you would meet me for luncheon tomorrow at the Garrick Club and let me know your reactions to this. Will you leave a message with my night-secretary some time before 8 a.m. tomorrow morning or with my day-secretary after that hour.
Cordially yours,
Below this were two words written in pen and ink which seemed to be Jewee Mecceee with below them the explanatory typescript (Sir James Macrae).
Simon read this through twice. Then he rang up Sir James Macrae and informed his night-secretary that he would keep the luncheon appointment next day. He had barely put down the telephone before the bell rang.
“This is Sir James Macrae’s night-secretary speaking. Sir James would be very pleased if Mr. Lent would come round and see him this evening at his house in Hampstead.”
Simon looked at his watch. It was nearly three. “Well . . . it’s rather late to go so far tonight . . .”
“Sir James is sending a car for you.”
Simon was no longer tired. As he waited for the car the telephone rang again. “Simon,” said Sylvia’s voice; “are you asleep?”
“No, in fact I’m just going out.”
“Simon . . . I say, was I beastly tonight?”
“Lousy.”
“Well, I thought you were lousy too.”
“Never mind. See you sometime.”
“Aren’t you going to go on talking?”
“Can’t, I’m afraid. I’ve got to do some work.”
“Simon, what can you mean?”
“Can’t explain now. There’s a car waiting.”
“When am I seeing you—tomorrow?”
“Well, I don’t really know. Ring me up in the morning. Good night.”
A quarter of a mile away, Sylvia put down the telephone, rose from the hearthrug, where she had settled herself in the expectation of twenty minutes’ intimate explanation and crept disconsolately into bed.
Simon bowled off to Hampstead through deserted streets. He sat back in the car in a state of pleasant excitement. Presently they began to climb the steep little hill and emerged into an open space with a pond and the tops of trees, black and deep as a jungle in the darkness. The night-butler admitted him to the low Georgian house and led him to the library, where Sir James Macrae was standing before the fire, dressed in ginger-coloured plus fours. A table was laid with supper.
“Evening, Lent. Nice of you to come. Have to fit in business when I can. Cocoa or whisky? Have some rabbit pie, it’s rather good. First chance of a meal I’ve had since breakfast. Ring for some more cocoa, there’s a good chap. Now what was it you wanted to see me about?”
“Well, I thought you wanted to see me.”
“Did I? Very likely. Miss Bentham’ll know. She arranged the appointment. You might ring the bell on the desk, will you?”
Simon rang and there instantly appeared the neat night-secretary.
“Miss Bentham, what did I want to see Mr. Lent about?”
“I’m afraid I couldn’t say, Sir James. Miss Harper is responsible for Mr. Lent. When I came on duty this evening I merely found a note from her asking me to fix an appointment as soon as possible.”
“Pity,” said Sir James. “We’ll have to wait until Miss Harper comes on tomorrow.”
“I think it was something about writing for films.”
“Very likely,” said Sir James. “Sure to be something of the kind. I’ll let you know without delay. Thanks for dropping in.” He put down his cup of cocoa and held out his hand with unaffected cordiality. “Good night, my dear boy.” He rang the bell for the night-butler. “Sanders, I want Benson to run Mr. Lent back.”
“I’m sorry, sir. Benson has just gone down to the studio to fetch Miss Grits.”
“Pity,” said Sir James. “Still, I expect you’ll be able to pick up a taxi or something.”
Simon got to bed at half past four. At ten minutes past eight the telephone by his bed was ringing.
“Mr. Lent? This is Sir James Macrae’s secretary speaking. Sir James’s car will call for you at half past eight to take you to the studio.”
“I shan’t be ready as soon as that, I’m afraid.”
There was a shocked pause; then, the day-secretary said: “Very well, Mr. Lent. I will see if some alternative arrangement is possible and ring you in a few minutes.”
In the intervening time Simon fell asleep again. Then the bell woke him once more and the same impersonal voice addressed him.
“Mr. Lent? I have spoken to Sir James. His car will call for you at eight forty-five.”
Simon dressed hastily. Mrs. Shaw had not yet arrived, so there was no breakfast for him. He found some stale cake in the kitchen cupboard and was eating it when Sir James’s car arrived. He took a slice down with him, still munching.
“You needn’t have brought that,” said a severe voice from inside the car. “Sir James has sent you some breakfast. Get in quickly; we’re late.”
In the corner, huddled in rugs, sat a young woman in a jaunty red hat; she had bright eyes and a very firm mouth.
“I expect that you are Miss Harper.”
“No. I’m Elfreda Grits. We’re working together on this film, I believe. I’ve been up all night with Sir James. If you don’t mind I’ll go to sleep for twenty minutes. You’ll find a thermos of cocoa and some rabbit pie in the basket on the floor.”
“Does Sir James live on cocoa and rabbit pie?”
“No; those are the remains of his supper. Please don’t talk. I want to sleep.”
Simon disregarded the pie, but poured some steaming cocoa into the metal cap of the thermos flask. In the corner, Miss Grits composed herself for sleep. She took off the jaunty red hat and laid it between them on the seat, veiled her eyes with two blue-pigmented lids and allowed the firm lips to relax and gape a little. Her platinum-blonde wind-swept head bobbed and swayed with the motion of the car as they swept out of London through converging and diverging tram lines. Stucco gave place to brick and the façades of the tube stations changed from tile to concrete; unoccupied building plots appeared and newly planted trees along unnamed avenues. Five minutes exactly before their arrival at the studio, Miss Grits opened her eyes, powdered her nose, touched her lips with red, and pulling her hat on to the side of her scalp, sat bolt upright, ready for another day.
Sir James was at work on the lot when they arrived. In a white-hot incandescent hell two young people were carrying on an infinitely tedious conversation at what was presumably the table of a restaurant. A dozen emaciated couples in evening dress danced listlessly behind them. At the other end of the huge shed some carpenters were at work building the façade of a Tudor manor house. Men in eye-shades scuttled in and out. Notices stood everywhere. Do not Smoke. Do not Speak. Keep away from the high-power cable.
Miss Grits, in defiance of these regulations, lit a cigarette, kicked some electric apparatus out of her path, said, “He’s busy. I expect he’ll see us when he’s through with this scene,” and disappeared through a door marked No admittance.
Shortly after eleven o’clock Sir James caught sight of Simon. “Nice of you to come. Shan’t be long now,” he called out to him. “Mr. Briggs, get a chair for Mr. Lent.”
At two o’clock he noticed him again. “Had any lunch?”
“No,” said Simon.
“No more have I. Just coming.”
At half past three Miss Grits joined him and said: “Well, it’s been an easy day so far. You mustn’t think we’re always as slack as this. There’s a canteen across the yard. Come and have something to eat.”
An enormous buffet was full of people in a variety of costume and make-up. Disappointed actresses in languorous attitudes served cups of tea and hard-boiled eggs. Simon and Miss Grits ordered sandwiches and were about to eat them when a loud-speaker above their heads suddenly announced with alarming distinctness, “Sir James Macrae calling Mr. Lent and Miss Grits in the Conference Room.”
“Come on, quick,” said Miss Grits. She bustled him through the swing doors, across the yard, into the office buildings and up a flight of stairs to a solid oak door marked Conference. Keep out.
Too late.
“Sir James has been called away,” said the secretary. “Will you meet him at the West End office at five-thirty.”
Back to London, this time by tube. At five-thirty they were at the Piccadilly office ready for the next clue in their treasure hunt. This took them to Hampstead. Finally at eight they were back at the studio. Miss Grits showed no sign of exhaustion.
“Decent of the old boy to give us a day off,” she remarked. “He’s easy to work with in that way—after Hollywood. Let’s get some supper.”
But as they opened the canteen doors and felt the warm breath of light refreshments, the loud-speaker again announced: “Sir James Macrae calling Mr. Lent and Miss Grits in the Conference Room.”
This time they were not too late. Sir James was there at the head of an oval table; round him were grouped the chiefs of his staff. He sat in a greatcoat with his head hung forward, elbows on the table and his hands clasped behind his neck. The staff sat in respectful sympathy. Presently he looked up, shook himself and smiled pleasantly.
“Nice of you to come,” he said. “Sorry I couldn’t see you before. Lots of small things to see to on a job like this. Had dinner?”
“Not yet.”
“Pity. Have to eat, you know. Can’t work at full pressure unless you eat plenty.”
Then Simon and Miss Grits sat down and Sir James explained his plan. “I want, ladies and gentlemen, to introduce Mr. Lent to you. I’m sure you all know his name already and I daresay some of you know his work. Well, I’ve called him in to help us and I hope that when he’s heard the plan he’ll consent to join us. I want to produce a film of Hamlet. I daresay you don’t think that’s a very original idea—but it’s Angle that counts in the film world. I’m going to do it from an entirely new angle. That’s why I’ve called in Mr. Lent. I want him to write dialogue for us.”
“But, surely,” said Simon, “there’s quite a lot of dialogue there already?”
“Ah, you don’t see my angle. There have been plenty of productions of Shakespeare in modern dress. We are going to produce him in modern speech. How can you expect the public to enjoy Shakespeare when they can’t make head or tail of the dialogue. D’you know I began reading a copy the other day and blessed if I could understand it. At once I said, ‘What the public wants is Shakespeare with all his beauty of thought and character translated into the language of everyday life.’ Now Mr. Lent here was the man whose name naturally suggested itself. Many of the most high-class critics have commended Mr. Lent’s dialogue. Now my idea is that Miss Grits here shall act in an advisory capacity, helping with the continuity and the technical side, and that Mr. Lent shall be given a free hand with the scenario . . .”
The discourse lasted for a quarter of an hour; then the chiefs of staff nodded sagely; Simon was taken into another room and given a contract to sign by which he received £50 a week retaining fee and £250 advance.
“You had better fix up with Miss Grits the times of work most suitable to you. I shall expect your first treatment by the end of the week. I should go and get some dinner if I were you. Must eat.”
Slightly dizzy, Simon hurried to the canteen where two languorous blondes were packing up for the night.
“We’ve been on since four o’clock this morning,” they said, “and the supers have eaten everything except the nougat. Sorry.”
Sucking a bar of nougat Simon emerged into the now deserted studio. On three sides of him, to the height of twelve feet, rose in appalling completeness the marble walls of the scene-restaurant; at his elbow a bottle of imitation champagne still stood in its pail of melted ice; above and beyond extended the vast gloom of rafters and ceiling.
“Fact,” said Simon to himself, “the world of action . . . the pulse of life . . . Money, hunger . . . Reality.”
Next morning he was called with the words, “Two young ladies waiting to see you.”
“Two?”
Simon put on his dressing gown and, orange juice in hand, entered his sitting room. Miss Grits nodded pleasantly.
“We arranged to start at ten,” she said. “But it doesn’t really matter. I shall not require you very much in the early stages. This is Miss Dawkins. She is one of the staff stenographers. Sir James thought you would need one. Miss Dawkins will be attached to you until further notice. He also sent two copies of Hamlet. When you’ve had your bath, I’ll read you my notes for our first treatment.”
But this was not to be; before Simon was dressed Miss Grits had been recalled to the studio on urgent business.
“I’ll ring up and tell you when I am free,” she said.
Simon spent the morning dictating letters to everyone he could think of; they began—“Please forgive me for dictating this, but I am so busy just now that I have little time for personal correspondence . . .” Miss Dawkins sat deferentially over her pad. He gave her Sylvia’s number.
“Will you get on to this number and present my compliments to Miss Lennox and ask her to luncheon at Espinoza’s . . . And book a table for two there at one forty-five.”
“Darling,” said Sylvia, when they met, “why were you out all yesterday and who was that voice this morning?”
“Oh, that was Miss Dawkins, my stenographer.”
“Simon, what can you mean?”
“You see, I’ve joined the film industry.”
“Darling. Do give me a job.”
“Well, I’m not paying much attention to casting at the moment—but I’ll bear you in mind.”
“Goodness. How you’ve changed in two days!”
“Yes!” said Simon, with great complacency. “Yes, I think I have. You see, for the first time in my life I have come into contact with Real Life. I’m going to give up writing novels. It was a mug’s game anyway. The written word is dead—first the papyrus, then the printed book, now the film. The artist must no longer work alone. He is part of the age in which he lives; he must share (only of course, my dear Sylvia, in very different proportions) the weekly wage envelope of the proletarian. Vital art implies a corresponding set of social relationships. Co-operation . . . co-ordination . . . the hive endeavour of the community directed to a single end . . .”
Simon continued in this strain at some length, eating meantime a luncheon of Dickensian dimensions, until, in a small, miserable voice, Sylvia said: “It seems to me that you’ve fallen for some ghastly film star.”
“O God,” said Simon, “only a virgin could be as vulgar as that.”
They were about to start one of their old, interminable quarrels when the telephone boy brought a message that Miss Grits wished to resume work instantly.
“So that’s her name,” said Sylvia.
“If you only knew how funny that was,” said Simon, scribbling his initials on the bill and leaving the table while Sylvia was still groping with gloves and bag.
As things turned out, however, he became Miss Grits’s lover before the week was out. The idea was hers. She suggested it to him one evening at his flat as they corrected the typescript of the final version of their first treatment.
“No, really,” Simon said aghast. “No, really. It would be quite impossible. I’m sorry, but . . .”
“Why? Don’t you like women?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“Oh, come along,” Miss Grits said briskly. “We don’t get much time for amusement . . .” And later, as she packed their manuscripts into her attaché case she said, “We must do it again if we have time. Besides I find it’s so much easier to work with a man if you’re having an affaire with him.”
For three weeks Simon and Miss Grits (he always thought of her by this name in spite of all subsequent intimacies) worked together in complete harmony. His life was re-directed and transfigured. No longer did he lie in bed, glumly preparing himself for the coming day; no longer did he say every morning ‘I must get down to the country and finish that book’ and every evening find himself slinking back to the same urban flat; no longer did he sit over supper tables with Sylvia, idly bickering; no more listless explanations over the telephone. Instead he pursued a routine of incalculable variety, summoned by telephone at all hours to conferences which rarely assembled; sometimes to Hampstead, sometimes to the studios, once to Brighton. He spent long periods of work pacing up and down his sitting room, with Miss Grits pacing backwards and forwards along the other wall and Miss Dawkins obediently perched between them, as the two dictated, corrected and redrafted their scenario. There were meals at improbable times and vivid, unsentimental passages of love with Miss Grits. He ate irregular and improbable meals, bowling through the suburbs in Sir James’s car, pacing the carpet dictating to Miss Dawkins, perched in deserted lots upon scenery which seemed made to survive the collapse of civilization. He lapsed, like Miss Grits, into brief spells of death-like unconsciousness, often awakening, startled, to find that a street or desert or factory had come into being about him while he slept.
The film meanwhile grew rapidly, daily putting out new shoots and changing under their eyes in a hundred unexpected ways. Each conference produced some radical change in the story. Miss Grits in her precise, unvariable voice would read out the fruits of their work. Sir James would sit with his head in his hand, rocking slightly from side to side and giving vent to occasional low moans and whimpers; round him sat the experts—production, direction, casting, continuity, cutting and costing managers, bright eyes, eager to attract the great man’s attention with some apt intrusion.
“Well,” Sir James would say, “I think we can O.K. that. Any suggestions, gentlemen?”
There would be a pause, until one by one the experts began to deliver their contributions . . . “I’ve been thinking, sir, that it won’t do to have the scene laid in Denmark. The public won’t stand for travel stuff. How about setting it in Scotland—then we could have some kilts and clan gathering scenes?”
“Yes, that’s a very sensible suggestion. Make a note of that, Lent . . .”
“I was thinking we’d better drop this character of the Queen. She’d much better be dead before the action starts. She hangs up the action. The public won’t stand for him abusing his mother.”
“Yes, make a note of that, Lent.”
“How would it be, sir, to make the ghost the Queen instead of the King . . .”
“Yes, make a note of that, Lent . . .”
“Don’t you think, sir, it would be better if Ophelia were Horatio’s sister. More poignant, if you see what I mean.”
“Yes, make a note of that . . .”
“I think we are losing sight of the essence of the story in the last sequence. After all, it is first and foremost a Ghost Story, isn’t it? . . .”
And so from simple beginnings the story spread majestically. It was in the second week that Sir James, after, it must be admitted, considerable debate, adopted the idea of incorporating with it the story of Macbeth. Simon was opposed to the proposition at first, but the appeal of the three witches proved too strong. The title was then changed to The White Lady of Dunsinane, and he and Miss Grits settled down to a prodigious week’s work in rewriting their entire scenarios.
The end came as suddenly as everything else in this remarkable episode. The third conference was being held at an hotel in the New Forest where Sir James happened to be staying; the experts had assembled by train, car and motor-bicycle at a moment’s notice and were tired and unresponsive. Miss Grits read the latest scenario; it took some time, for it had now reached the stage when it could be taken as “white script” ready for shooting. Sir James sat sunk in reflection longer than usual. When he raised his head, it was to utter the single word:
“No.”
“No?”
“No, it won’t do. We must scrap the whole thing. We’ve got much too far from the original story. I can’t think why you need introduce Julius Caesar and King Arthur at all.”
“But, sir, they were your own suggestions at the last conference.”
“Were they? Well, I can’t help it. I must have been tired and not paying full attention . . . Besides, I don’t like the dialogue. It misses all the poetry of the original. What the public wants is Shakespeare, the whole of Shakespeare and nothing but Shakespeare. Now this scenario you’ve written is all very well in its way—but it’s not Shakespeare. I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll use the play exactly as he wrote it and record from that. Make a note of it, Miss Grits.”
“Then you’ll hardly require my services any more?” said Simon.
“No, I don’t think I shall. Still, nice of you to have come.”
Next morning Simon woke bright and cheerful as usual and was about to leap from his bed when he suddenly remembered the events of last night. There was nothing for him to do. An empty day lay before him. No Miss Grits, no Miss Dawkins, no scampering off to conferences or dictating of dialogue. He rang up Miss Grits and asked her to lunch with him.
“No, quite impossible, I’m afraid. I have to do the continuity for a scenario of St. John’s Gospel before the end of the week. Pretty tough job. We’re setting it in Algeria so as to get the atmosphere. Off to Hollywood next month. Don’t suppose I shall see you again. Good-bye.”
Simon lay in bed with all his energy slowly slipping away. Nothing to do. Well, he supposed, now was the time to go away to the country and get on with his novel. Or should he go abroad? Some quiet café-restaurant in the sun where he could work out those intractable last chapters. That was what he would do . . . sometime . . . the end of the week perhaps.
Meanwhile he leaned over on his elbow, lifted the telephone and, asking for Sylvia’s number, prepared himself for twenty-five minutes’ acrimonious reconciliation.
The union club at Matodi was in marked contrast to the hillside, bungalow dwellings of the majority of its members. It stood in the centre of the town, on the waterfront; a seventeenth-century Arab mansion built of massive whitewashed walls round a small court; latticed windows overhung the street from which, in former times, the womenfolk of a great merchant had watched the passing traffic; a heavy door, studded with brass bosses gave entrance to the dark shade of the court, where a little fountain sprayed from the roots of an enormous mango; and an open staircase of inlaid cedar-wood led to the cool interior.
An Arab porter, clothed in a white gown scoured and starched like a Bishop’s surplice, crimson sash and tarboosh, sat drowsily at the gate. He rose in reverence as Mr. Reppington, the magistrate, and Mr. Bretherton, the sanitary-inspector, proceeded splendidly to the bar.
In token of the cordiality of the Condominium, French officials were honorary members of the Club, and a photograph of a former French President (“We can’t keep changing it,” said Major Lepperidge, “every time the frogs care to have a shim-ozzle”) hung in the smoking room opposite the portrait of the Prince of Wales; except on Gala nights, however, they rarely availed themselves of their privilege. The single French journal to which the Club subscribed was La Vie Parisienne, which, on this particular evening, was in the hands of a small man of plebeian appearance, sitting alone in a basket chair.
Reppington and Bretherton nodded their way forward. “Evening, Granger.” “Evening, Barker.” “Evening, Jagger,” and then in an audible undertone Bretherton inquired, “Who’s the chap in the corner with La Vie?”
“Name of Brooks. Petrol or something.”
“Ah.”
“Pink gin?”
“Ah.”
“What sort of day?”
“Bad show, rather. Trouble about draining the cricket field. No subsoil.”
“Ah. Bad show.”
The Goan barman put their drinks before them. Bretherton signed the chit.
“Well, cheerio.”
“Cheerio.”
Mr. Brooks remained riveted upon La Vie Parisienne.
Presently Major Lepperidge came in, and the atmosphere stiffened a little. (He was O.C. of the native levy, seconded from India.)
“Evening, Major,” from civilians. “Good evening, sir,” from the military.
“Evening. Evening. Evening. Phew. Just had a very fast set of lawner with young Kentish. Hot service. Gin and lime. By the way, Bretherton, the cricket field is looking pretty seedy.”
“I know. No subsoil.”
“I say, that’s a bad show. No subsoil. Well, do what you can, there’s a good fellow. It looks terrible. Quite bare and a great lake in the middle.”
The Major took his gin and lime and moved towards a chair; suddenly he saw Mr. Brooks, and his authoritative air softened to unaccustomed amiability. “Why, hallo, Brooks,” he said. “How are you? Fine to see you back. Just had the pleasure of seeing your daughter at the tennis club. My missus wondered if you and she would care to come up and dine one evening. How about Thursday? Grand. She’ll be delighted. Good-night you fellows. Got to get a shower.”
The occurrence was sensational. Bretherton and Reppington looked at one another in shocked surprise.
Major Lepperidge, both in rank and personality, was the leading man in Matodi—in the whole of Azania indeed, with the single exception of the Chief Commissioner at Debra Dowa. It was inconceivable that Brooks should dine with Lepperidge. Bretherton himself had only dined there once and he was Government.
“Hullo, Brooks,” said Reppington “Didn’t see you there behind your paper. Come and have one.”
“Yes, Brooks,” said Bretherton. “Didn’t know you were back. Have a jolly leave? See any shows?”
“It’s very kind of you, but I must be going. We arrived on Tuesday in the Ngoma. No, I didn’t see any shows. You see, I was down at Bournemouth most of the time.”
“One before you go.”
“No really, thanks, I must get back. My daughter will be waiting. Thanks all the same. See you both later.”
Daughter . . . ?
There were eight Englishwomen in Matodi, counting Mrs. Bretherton’s two-year-old daughter; nine if you included Mrs. Macdonald (but no one did include Mrs. Macdonald who came from Bombay and betrayed symptoms of Asiatic blood. Besides, no one knew who Mr. Macdonald had been. Mrs. Macdonald kept an ill-frequented pension on the outskirts of the town named “The Bougainvillea”). All who were of marriageable age were married; they led lives under a mutual scrutiny too close and unremitting for romance. There were, however, seven unmarried Englishmen, three in Government service, three in commerce and one unemployed, who had fled to Matodi from his creditors in Kenya. (He sometimes spoke vaguely of “planting” or “prospecting,” but in the meantime drew a small remittance each month and hung amiably about the Club and the tennis courts.)
Most of these bachelors were understood to have some girl at home; they kept photographs in their rooms, wrote long letters regularly, and took their leave with hints that when they returned they might not be alone. But they invariably were. Perhaps in precipitous eagerness for sympathy they painted too dark a picture of Azanian life; perhaps the Tropics made them a little addle-pated. . . .
Anyway, the arrival of Prunella Brooks sent a wave of excitement through English society. Normally, as the daughter of Mr. Brooks, oil company agent, her choice would have been properly confined to the three commercial men—Mr. James, of the Eastern Exchange Telegraph Company, and Messrs. Watson and Jagger, of the Bank—but Prunella was a girl of such evident personal superiority, that in her first afternoon at the tennis courts, as has been shown above, she transgressed the shadow line effortlessly and indeed unconsciously, and stepped straight into the inmost sanctuary, the Lepperidge bungalow.
She was small and unaffected, an iridescent blonde, with a fresh skin, doubly intoxicating in contrast with the tanned and desiccated tropical complexions around her; with rubbery, puppyish limbs and a face which lit up with amusement at the most barren pleasantries; an air of earnest interest in the opinions and experiences of all she met; a natural confidante, with no disposition to make herself the centre of a group, but rather to tackle her friends one by one, in their own time, when they needed her; deferential and charming to the married women; tender, friendly, and mildly flirtatious with the men; keen on games but not so good as to shake masculine superiority; a devoted daughter denying herself any pleasure that might impair the smooth working of Mr. Brooks’s home—“No, I must go now. I couldn’t let father come home from the Club and not find me there to greet him”—in fact, just such a girl as would be a light and blessing in any outpost of the Empire. It was very few days before all at Matodi were eloquent of their good fortune.
Of course, she had first of all to be examined and instructed by the matrons of the colony, but she submitted to her initiation with so pretty a grace that she might not have been aware of the dangers of the ordeal. Mrs. Lepperidge and Mrs. Reppington put her through it. Far away in the interior, in the sunless secret places, where a twisted stem across the jungle track, a rag fluttering to the bough of a tree, a fowl headless and full spread by an old stump marked the taboo where no man might cross, the Sakuya women chanted their primeval litany of initiation; here on the hillside the no less terrible ceremony was held over Mrs. Lepperidge’s tea table. First the questions; disguised and delicate over the tea cake but quickening their pace as the tribal rhythm waxed high and the table was cleared of tray and kettle, falling faster and faster like ecstatic hands on the taut cowhide, mounting and swelling with the first cigarette; a series of urgent, peremptory interrogations. To all this Prunella responded with docile simplicity. The whole of her life, upbringing and education were exposed, examined and found to be exemplary; her mother’s death, the care of an aunt, a convent school in the suburbs which had left her with charming manners, a readiness to find the right man and to settle down with him whenever the Service should require it; her belief in a limited family and European education, the value of sport, kindness to animals, affectionate patronage of men.
Then, when she had proved herself worthy of it, came the instruction. Intimate details of health and hygiene, things every young girl should know, the general dangers of sex and its particular dangers in the Tropics; the proper treatment of the other inhabitants of Matodi, etiquette towards ladies of higher rank, the leaving of cards. . . . “Never shake hands with natives, however well educated they think themselves. Arabs are quite different, many of them very like gentlemen . . . no worse than a great many Italians, really . . . Indians, luckily, you won’t have to meet . . . never allow native servants to see you in your dressing gown . . . and be very careful about curtains in the bathroom—natives peep . . . never walk in the side streets alone—in fact you have no business in them at all . . . never ride outside the compound alone. There have been several cases of bandits . . . an American missionary only last year, but he was some kind of non-Conformist . . . We owe it to our menfolk to take no unnecessary risks . . . a band of brigands commanded by a Sakuya called Joab . . . the Major will soon clean him up when he gets the levy into better shape . . . they find their boots very uncomfortable at present . . . meanwhile it is a very safe rule to take a man with you everywhere. . . .”
And Prunella was never short of male escort. As the weeks passed it became clear to the watching colony that her choice had narrowed down to two—Mr. Kentish, assistant native commissioner, and Mr. Benson, second lieutenant in the native levy; not that she was not consistently charming to everyone else—even to the shady remittance man and the repulsive Mr. Jagger—but by various little acts of preference she made it known that Kentish and Benson were her favourites. And the study of their innocent romances gave a sudden new interest to the social life of the town. Until now there had been plenty of entertaining certainly—gymkhanas and tennis tournaments, dances and dinner parties, calling and gossiping, amateur opera and church bazaars—but it had been a joyless and dutiful affair. They knew what was expected of Englishmen abroad; they had to keep up appearances before the natives and their co-protectionists; they had to have something to write home about; so they sturdily went through the recurring recreations due to their station. But with Prunella’s coming a new lightness was in the air; there were more parties and more dances and a point to everything. Mr. Brooks, who had never dined out before, found himself suddenly popular, and as his former exclusion had not worried him, he took his present vogue as a natural result of his daughter’s charm, was pleased by it and mildly embarrassed. He realized that she would soon want to get married and faced with equanimity the prospect of his inevitable return to solitude.
Meanwhile Benson and Kentish ran neck and neck through the crowded Azanian spring and no one could say with confidence which was leading—betting was slightly in favour of Benson, who had supper dances with her at the Caledonian and the Polo Club Balls—when there occurred the incident which shocked Azanian feeling to its core. Prunella Brooks was kidnapped.
The circumstances were obscure and a little shady. Prunella, who had never been known to infringe one jot or tittle of the local code, had been out riding alone in the hills. That was apparent from the first, and later, under cross-examination, her syce revealed that this had for some time been her practice, two or three times a week. The shock of her infidelity to rule was almost as great as the shock of her disappearance.
But worse was to follow. One evening at the Club, since Mr. Brooks was absent (his popularity had waned in the last few days and his presence made a painful restraint) the question of Prunella’s secret rides was being freely debated, when a slightly fuddled voice broke into the conversation.
“It’s bound to come out,” said the remittance man from Kenya, “so I may as well tell you right away. Prunella used to ride with me. She didn’t want us to get talked about, so we met on the Debra Dowa road by the Moslem Tombs. I shall miss those afternoons very much indeed,” said the remittance man, a slight, alcoholic quaver in his voice, “and I blame myself to a great extent for all that has happened. You see, I must have had a little more to drink than was good for me that morning and it was very hot, so with one thing and another, when I went to change into riding breeches I fell asleep and did not wake up until after dinnertime. And perhaps that is the last we shall ever see of her . . .” and two vast tears rolled down his cheeks.
This unmanly spectacle preserved the peace, for Benson and Kentish had already begun to advance upon the remittance man with a menacing air. But there is little satisfaction in castigating one who is already in the profound depths of self-pity and the stern tones of Major Lepperidge called them sharply to order. “Benson, Kentish, I don’t say I don’t sympathize with you boys and I know exactly what I’d do myself under the circumstances. The story we have just heard may or may not be the truth. In either case I think I know what we all feel about the teller. But that can wait. You’ll have plenty of time to settle up when we’ve got Miss Brooks safe. That is our first duty.”
Thus exhorted, public opinion again rallied to Prunella, and the urgency of her case was dramatically emphasized two days later by the arrival at the American Consulate of the Baptist missionary’s right ear loosely done up in newspaper and string. The men of the colony—excluding, of course, the remittance man—got together in the Lepperidge bungalow and formed a committee of defence, first to protect the women who were still left to them and then to rescue Miss Brooks at whatever personal inconvenience or risk.
The first demand for ransom came through the agency of Mr. Youkoumian. The little Armenian was already well known and, on the whole, well liked by the English community; it did them good to find a foreigner who so completely fulfilled their ideal of all that a foreigner should be. Two days after the foundation of the British Womanhood Protection Committee, he appeared at the Major’s orderly room asking for a private audience, a cheerful, rotund, self-abasing figure, in a shiny alpaca suit, skull cap and yellow, elastic-sided boots.
“Major Lepperidge,” he said, “you know me; all the gentlemen in Matodi know me. The English are my favourite gentlemen and the natural protectors of the under races all same as the League of Nations. Listen, Major Lepperidge, I ear things. Everyone trusts me. It is a no good thing for these black men to abduct English ladies. I fix it O.K.”
To the Major’s questions, with infinite evasions and circumlocutions, Youkoumian explained that by the agency of various cousins of his wife he had formed contact with an Arab, one of whose wives was the sister of a Sakuya in Joab’s band; that Miss Brooks was at present safe and that Joab was disposed to talk business. “Joab make very stiff price,” he said. “He want one undred thousand dollars, an armoured car, two machine guns, a undred rifles, five thousand rounds of ammunition, fifty orses, fifty gold wrist watches, a wireless set, fifty cases of whisky, free pardon and the rank of honorary colonel in the Azanian levy.”
“That, of course, is out of the question.”
The little Armenian shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, well, then he cut off Miss Brooks’s ears all same as the American clergyman. Listen, Major, this is one damn awful no good country. I live ere forty years, I know. I been little man and I been big man in this country, all same rule for big and little. If native want anything you give it im quick, then work ell out of im and get it back later. Natives all damn fool men but very savage all same as animals. Listen, Major, I make best whisky in Matodi—Scotch, Irish, all brands I make im; I got very fine watches in my shop all same as gold, I got wireless set—armoured car, orses, machine guns is for you to do. Then we clean up tidy bit fifty-fifty, no?”
Two days later Mr. Youkoumian appeared at Mr. Brooks’s bungalow. “A letter from Miss Brooks,” he said. “A Sakuya fellow brought it in. I give im a rupee.”
It was an untidy scrawl on the back of an envelope.
Dearest Dad,
I am safe at present and fairly well. On no account attempt to follow the messenger. Joab and the bandits would torture me to death. Please send gramophone and records. Do come to terms or I don’t know what will happen.
Prunella.
It was the first of a series of notes which, from now on, arrived every two or three days through the agency of Mr. Youkoumian. They mostly contained requests for small personal possessions . . .
Dearest Dad,
Not those records. The dance ones. . . . Please send face cream in pot in bathroom, also illustrated papers . . . the green silk pajamas . . . Lucky Strike cigarettes . . . two light drill skirts and the sleeveless silk shirts . . .
The letters were all brought to the Club and read aloud, and as the days passed the sense of tension became less acute, giving way to a general feeling that the drama had become prosaic.
“They are bound to reduce their price. Meanwhile the girl is safe enough,” pronounced Major Lepperidge, voicing authoritatively what had long been unspoken in the minds of the community.
The life of the town began to resume its normal aspect—administration, athletics, gossip; the American missionary’s second ear arrived and attracted little notice, except from Mr. Youkoumian, who produced an ear trumpet which he attempted to sell to the mission headquarters. The ladies of the colony abandoned the cloistered life which they had adopted during the first scare; the men became less protective and stayed out late at the Club as heretofore.
Then something happened to revive interest in the captive. Sam Stebbing discovered the cypher.
He was a delicate young man of high academic distinction, lately arrived from Cambridge to work with Grainger in the immigration office. From the first he had shown a keener interest than most of his colleagues in the situation. For a fortnight of oppressive heat he had sat up late studying the texts of Prunella’s messages; then he emerged with the startling assertion that there was a cypher. The system by which he had solved it was far from simple. He was ready enough to explain it, but his hearers invariably lost hold of the argument and contented themselves with the solution.
“. . . you see you translate it into Latin, you make an anagram of the first and last words of the first message, the second and last but one of the third when you start counting from the centre onwards. I bet that puzzled the bandits . . .”
“Yes, old boy. Besides, none of them can read anyway . . .”
“Then in the fourth message you go back to the original system, taking the fourth word and the last but three . . .”
“Yes, yes, I see. Don’t bother to explain any more. Just tell us what the message really says.”
“It says, ‘DAILY THREATENED WORSE THAN BREATH.’
“Her system’s at fault there, must mean ‘death’; then there’s a word I can’t understand—PLZGF, no doubt the poor child was in great agitation when she wrote it, and after that TRUST IN MY KING.”
This was generally voted a triumph. The husbands brought back the news to their wives.
“. . . Jolly ingenious the way old Stebbing worked it out. I won’t bother to explain it to you. You wouldn’t understand. Anyway, the result is clear enough. Miss Brooks is in terrible danger. We must all do something.”
“But who would have thought of little Prunella being so clever . . .”
“Ah, I always said that girl had brains.”
News of the discovery was circulated by the Press agencies throughout the civilized world. At first the affair had received wide attention. It had been front page, with portrait, for two days, then middle page with portrait, then middle page halfway down without portrait, and finally page three of the Excess as the story became daily less alarming. The cypher gave the story a new lease on life. Stebbing, with portrait, appeared on the front page. Ten thousand pounds was offered by the paper towards the ransom, and a star journalist appeared from the skies in an aeroplane to conduct and report the negotiations.
He was a tough young man of Australian origin and from the moment of his arrival everything went with a swing. The colony sunk its habitual hostility to the Press, elected him to the Club, and filled his leisure with cocktail parties and tennis tournaments. He even usurped Lepperidge’s position as authority on world topics.
But his stay was brief. On the first day he interviewed Mr. Brooks and everyone of importance in the town, and cabled back a moving “human” story of Prunella’s position in the heart of the colony. From now onwards to three millions or so of readers Miss Brooks became Prunella. (There was only one local celebrity whom he was unable to meet. Poor Mr. Stebbing had “gone under” with the heat and had been shipped back to England on sick leave in a highly deranged condition of nerves and mind.)
On the second day he interviewed Mr. Youkoumian. They sat down together with a bottle of mastika at a little round table behind Mr. Youkoumian’s counter at ten in the morning. It was three in the afternoon before the reporter stepped out into the white-dust heat, but he had won his way. Mr. Youkoumian had promised to conduct him to the bandits’ camp. Both of them were pledged to secrecy. By sundown the whole of Matodi was discussing the coming expedition, but the journalist was not embarrassed by any inquiries; he was alone that evening, typing out an account of what he expected would happen next day.
He described the start at dawn . . . “grey light breaking over the bereaved township of Matodi . . . the camels snorting and straining at their reins . . . the many sorrowing Englishmen to whom the sun meant only the termination of one more night of hopeless watching . . . silver dawn breaking in the little room where Prunella’s bed stood, the coverlet turned down as she had left it on the fatal afternoon . . .” He described the ascent into the hills—“. . . luxuriant tropical vegetation giving place to barren scrub and bare rock . . .” He described how the bandits’ messenger blindfolded him and how he rode, swaying on his camel through darkness, into the unknown. Then, after what seemed an eternity, the halt; the bandage removed from his eyes . . . the bandits’ camp. “. . . twenty pairs of remorseless eastern eyes glinting behind ugly-looking rifles . . .” here he took the paper from his machine and made a correction; the bandits’ lair was to be in a cave “. . . littered with bone and skins.” . . . Joab, the bandit chief, squatting in barbaric splendour, a jewelled sword across his knees. Then the climax of the story; Prunella bound. For some time he toyed with the idea of stripping her, and began to hammer out a vivid word-picture of her girlish frame shrinking in the shadows, Andromeda-like. But caution restrained him and he contented himself with “. . . her lovely, slim body marked by the hempen ropes that cut into her young limbs . . .” The concluding paragraphs related how despair suddenly melted to hope in her eyes as he stepped forward, handing over the ransom to the bandit chief and “in the name of the Daily Excess and the People of Great Britain restored her to her heritage of freedom.”
It was late before he had finished, but he retired to bed with a sense of high accomplishment, and next morning deposited his manuscript with the Eastern Exchange Telegraph Company before setting out with Mr. Youkoumian for the hills.
The journey was in all respects totally unlike his narrative. They started, after a comfortable breakfast, surrounded by the well wishes of most of the British and many of the French colony, and instead of riding on camels they drove in Mr. Kentish’s baby Austin. Nor did they even reach Joab’s lair. They had not gone more than ten miles before a girl appeared walking alone on the track towards them. She was not very tidy, particularly about the hair, but, apart from this, showed every sign of robust well-being.
“Miss Brooks, I presume,” said the journalist, unconsciously following a famous precedent. “But where are the bandits?”
Prunella looked inquiringly towards Mr. Youkoumian who, a few steps in the rear, was shaking his head with vigour. “This British newspaper writing gentleman,” he explained, “e know all same Matodi gentlemen. E got the thousand pounds for Joab.”
“Well, he’d better take care,” said Miss Brooks, “the bandits are all round you. Oh you wouldn’t see them, of course, but I don’t mind betting that there are fifty rifles covering us at this moment from behind the boulders and bush and so on.” She waved a bare, suntanned arm expansively towards the innocent-looking landscape. “I hope you’ve brought the money in gold.”
“It’s all here, in the back of the car, Miss Brooks.”
“Splendid. Well, I’m afraid Joab won’t allow you into his lair, so you and I will wait here, and Youkoumian shall drive into the hills and deliver it.”
“But listen, Miss Brooks, my paper has put a lot of money into this story. I got to see that lair.”
“I’ll tell you all about it,” said Prunella, and she did.
“There were three huts,” she began, her eyes downcast, her hands folded, her voice precise and gentle as though she were repeating a lesson, “the smallest and the darkest was used as my dungeon.”
The journalist shifted uncomfortably. “Huts,” he said. “I had formed the impression that they were caves.”
“So they were,” said Prunella. “Hut is a local word for cave. Two lions were chained beside me night and day. Their eyes glared and I felt their foetid breath. The chains were of a length so that if I lay perfectly still I was out of their reach. If I had moved hand or foot . . .” She broke off with a little shudder . . .
By the time that Youkoumian returned, the journalist had material for another magnificent front-page splash.
“Joab has given orders to withdraw the snipers,” Prunella announced, after a whispered consultation with the Armenian. “It is safe for us to go.”
So they climbed into the little car and drove unadventurously back to Matodi.
Little remains of the story to be told. There was keen enthusiasm in the town when Prunella returned, and an official welcome was organized for her on the subsequent Tuesday. The journalist took many photographs, wrote up a scene of homecoming that stirred the British public to the depths of its heart, and soon flew away in his aeroplane to receive congratulation and promotion at the Excess office.
It was expected that Prunella would now make her final choice between Kentish and Benson, but this excitement was denied to the colony. Instead, came the distressing intelligence that she was returning to England. A light seemed to have been extinguished in Azanian life, and in spite of avowed good wishes there was a certain restraint on the eve of her departure—almost of resentment, as though Prunella were guilty of disloyalty in leaving. The Excess inserted a paragraph announcing her arrival, headed ECHO OF KIDNAPPING CASE, but otherwise she seemed to have slipped unobtrusively from public attention. Stebbing, poor fellow, was obliged to retire from the service. His mind seemed permanently disordered and from now on he passed his time, harmlessly but unprofitably, in a private nursing home, working out hidden messages in Bradshaw’s Railway Guide. Even in Matodi the kidnapping was seldom discussed.
One day six months later Lepperidge and Bretherton were sitting in the Club drinking their evening glass of pink gin. Banditry was in the air at the moment for that morning the now memberless trunk of the American missionary had been found at the gates of the Baptist compound.
“It’s one of the problems we shall have to tackle,” said Lepperidge. “A case for action. I am going to make a report of the entire matter.”
Mr. Brooks passed them on his way out to his lonely dinner table; he was a rare visitor to the Club now; the petrol agency was uniformly prosperous and kept him late at his desk. He neither remembered nor regretted his brief popularity, but Lepperidge maintained a guilty cordiality towards him whenever they met.
“Evening, Brooks. Any news of Miss Prunella?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I heard from her today. She’s just been married.”
“Well I’m blessed . . . I hope you’re glad. Anyone we know?”
“Yes, I am glad in a way, though of course I shall miss her. It’s that fellow from Kenya who stayed here once; remember him?”
“Ah, yes, him? Well, well . . . Give her my salaams when you write.”
Mr. Brooks went downstairs into the still and odorous evening. Lepperidge and Bretherton were completely alone. The Major leant forward and spoke in husky, confidential tones.
“I say, Bretherton,” he said. “Look here, there’s something I’ve often wondered, strictly between ourselves, I mean. Did you ever think there was anything fishy about that kidnapping?”
“Fishy, sir?”
“Fishy.”
“I think I know what you mean, sir. Well some of us have been thinking, lately . . .”
“Exactly.”
“Not of course anything definite. Just what you said yourself, sir, fishy.”
“Exactly . . . Look here, Bretherton, I think you might pass the word round that it’s not a thing to be spoken about, see what I mean? The missus is putting it round to the women too . . .”
“Quite, sir. It’s not a thing one wants talked about . . . Arabs, I mean, and frogs.”
“Exactly.”
There was another long pause. At last Lepperidge rose to go. “I blame myself,” he said. “We made a great mistake over that girl. I ought to have known better. After all, first and last when all’s said and done, Brooks is a commercial wallah.”