Chapter One

‘Mr Stanley, here’s a cable for Gordon Carruthers.’

It was in a Western Union envelope. Stanley tore it open. ‘New York,’ it ran, ‘is desolate without you.’ It was signed Faith.

Stanley considered it pensively. Then looked up at his secretary.

‘What was Mr Carruthers’ last address?’ he asked.

‘The Chatham Hotel, New York. He said he was going down to the West Indies.’

‘He doesn’t seem to have.’

‘Shall I ring up his parents and ask if they know anything?’

Stanley hesitated, re-read the cable, then shook his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It will probably explain itself.’

At a first, and indeed at a second glance, Stanley gave the impression of being a person who made a practice of leaving things to explain themselves. In the latish thirties; tall, light-haired, grey-eyed, fresh-coloured, with a graceful indolence of manner, he never hurried, he was never flurried. On the cricket field, on the rare occasions when he dropped a catch, the bowler would invariably grumble ‘My luck, Stanley asleep again.’ When he brought off a gallery catch at second slip, there would be a knowing twinkle in the wicket-keeper’s eyes. ‘You wouldn’t have held that if you’d been awake.’

An American coming into the large Adams-ceilinged room in Adelphi Terrace, with its large log fire blazing in an Adams grate, with one of its walls filled with a Queen Anne bookcase, with high windows opening on the river, and with Stanley seated at a Chippendale writing-desk, would have felt that he was visiting in a private house rather than making a business call. ‘So this is what they call working over here,’ he’ld think. ‘If I had my office in a place like this, it would take me a week to get a morning’s work done.’ Cricketers, however, came after a season or two to realize that Stanley, in spite of his abstracted manner, for every difficult catch he dropped, would hold a dozen hard ones; and the American would realize after the second or third visit that though he had been greeted as though he had come to stay for a week-end, he was in point of fact in the passage within five minutes, with everything that had needed saying, said.

In some professions this manner of apparent indolence would have been a liability. To a literary agent it was a marked asset. Editors and publishers could never be certain how anxious Stanley was to put through a deal. His ‘take it or leave it’ gestures were never threats. He gave the impression that neither he nor his client cared in particular either way. There were other markets. And should the editor decide to leave it, Stanley did not look disappointed, argue or cut his price. He would say, ‘I’m sorry. I had thought it was rather your cup of tea,’ then change the subject. As a matter of fact, editors did not very often decide to leave it. Stanley did not take to an editor what he did not believe that editor would want. Nor did he attempt to force on an editor purchases that would be subsequently regretted. Such tactics would have prejudiced with that editor the output of his other clients. He maintained that no business was satisfactory that did not leave both parties satisfied.

For several years he had handled Gordon Carruthers’ work. It was an association whose success was a source of particular satisfaction to him because, of all his friends, Gordon alone had been discouraging when he had announced his project of opening a literary agency. Gordon had been in fact one of the first people with whom he had discussed it. Their friendship was of long standing. It had begun in the summer of 1914 when Gordon was still at school and Stanley, a graduate at John’s, had come to play for the M.C.C. against the school. The Club had arrived one short. Gordon, on the brink of the eleven, had been lent to them. Desperately anxious to convince the Fernhurst captain that his omission from the school side was a mistake, he compiled a longish innings, during the greater part of which he was Stanley’s partner. A long partnership on the cricket field creates a more personal and lasting bond than is provided by any other game. They had felt friends when they had met again, five years later, on the Hampstead cricket field.

Their friendship had begun with cricket and for three years as a cricket friendship it had continued. The Londoner arranges his life in pigeon-holes. He has his home, his office, his club, his games. There are the people he does business with, the people he goes dancing with, the people he plays games with. He does not invite to his home the people he plays bridge with at his club; nor does he meet at his club those with whom he does business in the city. When stumps are drawn after a cricket match, he may say, ‘Can I drop anyone? I’m going back by Baker Street and Knightsbridge.’ But he does drop whomsoever he gives a lift to, and when he drops him, he drops at the same time all the side of life that that particular friend represented. It is not that one side of his life is more important to him than another; it is simply that he keeps his interests separate.

For three years Gordon and Stanley met each other during the summer three or four times a week on the Hampstead cricket ground. They arranged their practice at the same nets and at the same hour. They travelled together to the various matches; they sat next one another at lunch, strolled round the ground arm in arm between the innings, knew each other as well as any two men can. Then the cricket season would end and between the fifteenth of September and the fourth Saturday in April they would be unlikely to see each other once. Quite often they would think, ‘It’ll be nice when cricket begins and we can see each other,’ but neither thought of ringing the other up.

There was nothing apart from cricket to bring them directly into touch. They belonged at that time to different clubs. Stanley was editing a boys’ magazine. His contributors received small emolument. His columns were un-adapted to Gordon’s pen. Gordon was busy during the winter. He did all his solid writing between October and March. Two days a week he was employed as reader, advertisement drafter and paragraphist, by a firm of publishers. The middle days of the week he would spend in the country writing. On the Saturday he played football. His spare time was strictly mortgaged. For three years it had gone on like that. Then Stanley gave up hockey. Between the end of the cricket season and Michaelmas he put on four pounds. He rang Gordon up about it. ‘I’m going to start playing squash,’ he said. ‘Will you learn with me?’ And so through the winter as well as the summer they met three or four times a week.

It was while they were changing at the end of an afternoon’s game that Stanley announced his intention of abandoning editorship and becoming a literary agent.

‘An editor’s limited by his paper’s policy,’ he said. ‘He never earns much. There’s always the danger of his getting fired. A literary agent touches life at more amusing angles.’

‘Aren’t there a good many literary agents as it is?’

‘There’s room for another one. As far as I can see most of the unestablished young writers feel that they’re overlooked in a big organization.’

‘It’s going to take a long time before unestablished young writers are earning your office expenses for you.’

‘Perhaps. If I’m wrong I can always go back to journalism.’

He spoke with his customary unconcern.

Himself, Gordon had no agent. He was producing very little in point of fact that an agent could profitably handle. The publisher to whom he had sent his first novel—a story of Army life—had presented him with one of the long term agreements by which the beginner’s future is invariably mortgaged. It was a fair enough agreement, which Gordon had signed after a careless scrutiny. He wanted his book published. In war time no one could afford to look far ahead. The side of life that was concerned with livelihood had yet to touch him. It was not till the war was over, with the necessity for earning a living urgently presented, that he realized that his next three books along with their subsidiary rights were already sold on terms by which the writing of them would only by the caprice of chance prove profitable. Later he was to consider this disability as a piece of fortune. His first book had been not only in England, but in the States as well, a moderate success. Had he been free to make an agreement with large advances paid to him on the delivery of each book, he would almost inevitably have overwritten, so that by the time he had begun to find out where he was and what he wanted to do, his reputation and market alike would have been severely damaged.

Even as it was, the two novels that he published during the first four years after the war were successful neither from a literary nor a commercial standpoint. His first book had been a story of Army life. It was photographic. It had been in the main autobiographical. He was writing of what he knew. It was a direct straightforward narrative. Since its subject matter was dramatic, it was exciting. It also was controversial, in the way that Siegfried Sassoon’s early poetry was controversial. It was one of the first novels to expose the death and glory, the Agincourt attitude to war. It had news value. It sold eight thousand copies in England and five thousand in America.

His first book had been a comparatively easy one to write. He had described a self-contained and self-sufficient world. He had not needed to know more than he actually had seen. He had been able to see his characters four-square. He had known what they were doing at every hour of the twenty-four. He had known how they would react to every situation which the action of his plot demanded. But later, writing of adult life in London, he had to describe men and women whom he saw periodically, for a few moments, under an arranged light. He had to guess at what they were doing at other times. He had not the breadth of experience which would enable him to guess correctly. A writer in the early twenties cannot portray accurately and detachedly the adult life of a big city. He can only describe the effects that that adult life makes on him. He must write subjectively. And that was not Carruthers’ way of writing. He aimed at the study on a broad canvas of sections of society. And for such studies he was unequipped. His experience was too fragmentary, too adolescent. Now and again in his second and third novels there would be a passage of vivid writing when he was describing an actual event. But such passages would be separated by chapters built on guesswork, veneered by an attempt to conceal their guesswork. They were unreal.

His second novel sold three thousand copies in England and twelve hundred in America. His third sold eighteen hundred in England and did not find a publisher in the States. Out of his first novel he had made four hundred pounds, out of his second he made a hundred and thirty, out of his third, ninety-six. ‘It’s lucky,’ he thought, ‘that Miser-man & Grove pay me six pounds a week to sort their manuscripts and write their “blurbs.”’

It was while Gordon was at work on his fourth novel that Stanley decided to abandon editorship.

Stanley made no direct reference to his friend’s discouraging criticism. But a few months later, as they were changing for a game of squash, he asked Gordon casually if he would like to earn a couple of hundred pounds.

‘That’s a silly kind of question to put to a man like me. Why?’

‘I could probably put you in the way of earning it.’

‘How?’

‘I’ll tell you afterwards.’

The opportunity had come by chance. The editor of the Daily Argus had wanted a series of London sketches, each of them to take the shape of a short story describing the life of the Londoner from various aspects. There was to be a sketch of the suburban Londoner, of the East-end Londoner, of the Mayfair Londoner. There were to be pictures of London’s various playgrounds: Hampstead Heath, the Oval, Southend, Ranelagh, a night club. The editor had wanted Manning Lewes to do the series. Stanley was at the time representing Lewes. Lewes was, however, extremely busy on a novel from which he did not want his attention taken. The price offered was not appreciably attractive, a couple of discussions proved abortive.

‘I’ll have to get someone else, I suppose,’ said the editor ruefully.

‘Then why not have a shot at some beginner?’ Stanley said. ‘You’ld get him cheaper. He’ld take a lot of trouble over them. There’s more news value for you in launching a new man.’

‘Whom do you suggest?’

‘What’s wrong with Gordon Carruthers?’

‘He’s not done much lately.’

‘That’s why he’ld suit your purpose. He’s about due for another break. At any rate, he’ld probably do you a specimen article on the chance.’

‘So if you care to run the risk,’ Stanley had suggested to Gordon, ‘there the chance is waiting.’

Gordon took the risk. He also took a great deal of trouble over the article. It was approved. The series was commissioned. One morning as he began his walk through the Park to Covent Garden he was astounded by the sight of a fleet of buses sweeping up Piccadilly, bearing each of them on both sides of the top deck the flaming poster of his series. For a week his name was placarded over London. The experience was so exciting that on three separate occasions he was nearly run over as he stood gazing mesmerized at the embellished buses as they swung towards him.

‘Those articles of yours went rather well,’ Stanley remarked a few days later. ‘The editor was wondering whether there mightn’t be a serial in your next novel.’

‘I should doubt it.’

‘You might anyhow let me see as much of it as you’ve done.’

It was a story of Social Bohemia; of the Quadrant; Tour d’Eifel Londoner. Stanley’s verdict on it was prompt.

‘There’s a serial there,’ he said. ‘But it’ll need altering. You had best go straight ahead with it as a novel. When it’s finished we can discuss it as a serial.’

The advice he gave was simple.

‘All that matters in a newspaper serial is the first instalment. That has to be self-contained, it has to finish on a strong curtain, it needs to be five thousand words. Imagine you were writing a five-thousand-word story setting out the main issue of your story ending on a note of What’s going to happen next? After that it should be all plain sailing.’

It proved to be. Gordon made more money out of his fourth novel than out of his other three combined. It was also the last novel under his first agreement.

In the same way that they had drifted into friendship, Stanley and Gordon drifted into business. The English code has no such formal avowal of friendship as the continental ‘tu.’ There came no moment when Gordon said, ‘I appoint you as my agent.’ The existence of the association was gradually assumed. When Gordon’s new novel was finished he remarked in the interval between two innings that he had no agreement for it. ‘Hadn’t you better fix something up about it?’ he had said.

Their business was carried on at odd, unlikely moments. They never formally discussed anything. Members now of the same club, they met on an average three or four times a week. When Gordon wrote a story or had an idea for an article he would deliver it without comment, making no subsequent reference to it till he had heard from Stanley. Such references would be made with extreme indifference. If Stanley had any good news he would always announce it last. He would fix a date for squash, arrange a meeting-place for a cricket match, then when the conversation was apparently over, he would say, ‘Oh, by the way, Harrison thinks that new story of yours worth fifty pounds.’ Whenever he had bad news he held it back till there was some good news to counterbalance it.

The announcement of the news that was to reorientate the course of Gordon’s life was typical.

‘I’m afraid,’ he remarked, ‘that you’re going to have rather a lot of trouble over your income-tax next year.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Hollywood has offered ten thousand dollars for the film rights in your new book.’

Gordon’s father when he heard the news had said: ‘If you invest that in War Loan you’ll have a hundred pounds coming into you every year.’

His son had smiled. ‘I’ld rather invest it in myself.’

‘How are you proposing to do that?’

‘By giving up my job as a publisher and going round the world.’

Two months later he had started. By the time he was back he had got the travel habit.

For five years now he had travelled more or less incessantly. In no place had he stayed for longer than three months. During those years the complete control of his affairs had remained in Stanley’s hands. All his letters, all his bills were sent to Adelphi Terrace. He rarely wrote to Stanley. There was little to write about. An author can usually judge what his income will be for the next six months. Before he started anywhere, he and Stanley would find out how much was likely to be coming in, Stanley would then give a guarantee for that amount of overdraft at Gordon’s bank. Letters were not forwarded. When any bills got particularly pressing, Stanley settled them.

During those years, Stanley had become used to Gordon’s changes of plan. When Gordon said, ‘I’m coming straight back by the next boat,’ he no more expected to see him within a week, than he expected not to see him for a year when Gordon accompanied a batch of manuscript with the note: ‘Penang is heaven. I am thinking of taking a house and settling here.’ A letter on Chatham Hotel notepaper with a New York postmark announcing his intention of summering in Martinique did not make Stanley less prepared for a cable signed by an unknown name, addressed to a place that Gordon was not expected to reach for months, announcing that the place where he was supposed to be was desolate in his absence.

‘You’d better get out Gordon Carruthers’ ledger,’ he told his secretary, ‘and if there’s any money owing to him draw a cheque.’

Two hours later a telephone call came through.

‘It’s Gordon Carruthers speaking.’

‘Where’s he speaking from?’

‘Waterloo Station.’

‘When’s he coming round here?’

‘Right now.’

‘That’s good. I’ve got a cable for him.’

‘What does it say?’

‘That somebody called Faith is missing him.’

‘Oh.’ There was a pause. Then: ‘I’ll be right round.’

Gordon’s voice had quickened at the mention of the cable, and in his eyes there was an excited gleam as he took the yellow envelope. Stanley watched him with a smile. Gordon had changed considerably. He was looking extremely well; he had thinned and he was sunburnt. But it was not there that the difference lay. An inner glow had electrified and vitalized him, so that although in a photograph the short, sturdy figure, with no particularly arresting feature would have seemed unexceptional, you would at that moment, had you passed him in the streets, have turned round to look at him. At the times when one’s life is dramatic, one looks dramatic. There was something potential about Gordon then.

‘New York seems to suit you,’ Stanley said.

‘I’ve got my weight down to a hundred and forty seven.’

‘You’ve learnt to talk American, I see.’

‘I’ve learnt to drink rye straight.’

‘Then we’d better have a game of squash and see how your wind’s standing it.’

‘I played every morning over there.’

‘That’s an end of your handicap.’

‘I doubt it. Their game’s hard hitting and no angles.’

‘Then I’ll give you two. What about Friday? Five o’clock at Lord’s.’

‘Fine.’

‘I was afraid you were going to say O.K.’

‘I’m not that bad yet.’

‘Nearly. In the meantime I’ve got some money for you.’

‘Much? I hope it is. I’m broke.’

‘Let’s have a look.’

While he was away Gordon Carruthers always imagined that on his return he would find innumerable problems waiting to be discussed. But on his return he invariably found that five minutes concentrated talk could settle everything. A writer’s business, provided it is well organized by an agent, becomes simplified as he comes down the course. He produces less and is paid more for it.

A minute and a half’s glance at his ledger gave Gordon a pretty clear idea of his position.

There was about two hundred due to him at the moment. There would be another three hundred coming in during the next eight weeks. He would have, he reflected, to do a good deal of work in the next four months if he was not going to be uncomfortably short of money in the next autumn. For, since a novelist gets paid for his work on an average nine months after he does it, he is always in the dangerous position of being able to take a holiday without immediately imperilling his resources, and Gordon had taken such a holdiay.

‘Things look,’ said Stanley, ‘as though they’ld need careful management, unless you’ve sold things independently on the other side.’

‘I haven’t.’

‘I heard something about your lecturing.’

‘I’ve fixed up a tour of sorts there for the spring.’

‘With the Stock market crashing that’ll not do much more than cover your expenses.’

‘Not much. And as there’s my taxi ticking away three-pences downstairs. . . .’ He had risen and begun to assemble his scarf and gloves and hat.

‘On Friday,’ he said, ‘Lord’s at five.’

‘And in the meantime, you are planning what?’

‘To do a modern girl novel. Something we can serialize both sides.’

‘I was wondering from that cable whether there might not be more ahead than that.’

Gordon laughed.

‘Whatever there is, it’s quite a little way ahead.’

‘Be careful. The American woman isn’t, I’m told, like anything one’s used to.’

‘That’s just how I’ld describe her.’

‘I could take that in two ways,’ said Stanley.

Gordon smiled, ‘I didn’t mean you to.’

The moment he was alone in the taxi he drew the yellow sheet of paper from his pocket. ‘New York is desolate without you.—Faith.’ He tapped on the window of the cab.

‘Stop at the nearest post-office,’ he said.

On a pale buff sheet he wrote this message:

‘FAITH SWEDEN. 126 E 53 New York City. Arrived tonight in a London that might just as well be empty.— GORDON.’