XVII

NEW YEAR’S EVE

When Hugo left Mr Middleton that morning, instead of going straight home, he went to the block of Council flats where Bert lived. It wasn’t that he expected to find Bert in—for he would have been embarrassed if he had; it was Bert’s wife whom he was calling on.

The cold weather of Christmas had given way to a mild spell; indeed, barring the incidence of dawn and dusk, it was the type of day with which English people are familiar through­out the year,—a mingling of sunshine and grey skies and a luke-warm breeze with a threat of rain from the west. Hugo, who was wearing his thick overcoat, was flushed and hot when he reached the top of the stairs, and a little nervous, though not nearly so nervous as he had been when he arrived for Bert’s party on Christmas Day.

Bert’s wife, who was in the middle of doing her washing, was as hot and flushed as Hugo, and rather more flustered. When she answered the bell, she stood and gazed at him in per­plexity and he thought she wasn’t going to recognise him. But she said, ‘Why,—it’s Mr Muller—Bert’s friend from Pollitt Place! I’m sorry you find me like this,—but do come in.’

She threw the door open, but Hugo hesitated and said, ‘You must excuse me. I ought to have known the morning would be a bad time to call.’ Bert’s wife recovered some of her composure and said, ‘But why should you know? I expect your mother does her washing on a Monday or a Tuesday, but I have to fit mine in when I can. But if you don’t mind——’ She paused and Hugo said, ‘Of course not. My sister does our washing as a rule, and she hasn’t a regular day either. I really won’t keep you. I came round to thank you for the lovely party and to bring you a little present for the New Year. It’s nothing at all.’

He took out of his pocket a small package wrapped in tissue-paper and handed it to her. She said, ‘Oh, isn’t that nice of you! You shouldn’t have troubled. You really shouldn’t, you know. Now you must come in and see me open it. Just put your coat anywhere.’

He followed her into the sitting-room, which looked much smaller now that the furniture had been put back into place, though the Christmas decorations were still there to remind him of the party. Bert’s wife undid the parcel, which contained a very small plastic work-box, and while Hugo was thinking how amazing it was that he should have secured this foothold in Bert’s home and was wondering how often he would go there, she began to thank him. ‘Oh, how sweet! What a clever boy—I beg pardon, I mean young man—you were to find it! So useful too! Do sit down. Won’t you let me make you a cup of tea? I could do with one.’

Hugo answered, ‘No thank you. We shall be having our dinner quite soon. I suppose your husband never gets home at midday except on Sundays.’

‘Well, he does sometimes get Saturdays off, like to-day. But he didn’t ask me to get anything ready, so I expect he’ll get a bite at a pub and go on to the Dogs. Bert’s fond of pubs. He likes playing darts and talking to the people,—which I don’t. Besides, the doctor says I mustn’t drink. But if you marry a man who’s younger than you are, you mustn’t complain if he likes a bit of fun and goes out with the boys. He’s a good husband to me.’

Hugo said gravely, ‘I’m sure he is.’ Then he added, as if by an afterthought, ‘Do you remember, I told you at your party that I’d tried to do a drawing of him, but it wasn’t any good, and you said perhaps you could find me a snapshot of him which might help me? Do you think you could give it me now, or am I being a nuisance?’

‘Oh no, Mr Muller. It’s no trouble at all. I think they’re all in here.’ She went to a chest of drawers, took out a box full of photographs and laid them out on a table.

‘Here you are. Don’t look at that awful one—it was taken when we were just married. My word, I was a fright! That’s Bert before I knew him. He’s filled out a good bit since then, hasn’t he? That’s my sister Mary. That’s Mr Rintoul you met at the party, though you mightn’t think so. That’s . . . Ah, here we are. This is the lot that was taken at Westgate. That’s Bert and me. That’s me—tear it up. I look so dreadfully ill. The doctor said the air was too strong for me. It affected my liver. That’s Bert and some girls,—three sisters we got to know. That’s Bert and their brother,—the one who took the snaps as a rule, though one of his sisters must have taken this one. That’s Bert coming back from his bathe. That’s him again, but on Sunday. That’s where we stayed. That’s the steamer at Margate starting for Southend. Take which one you fancy. I don’t often look at them.’

Hugo affected to delay his choice, but said, in the end, ‘I think this one is the best likeness. It seems to have caught him off his guard, if you know what I mean. Please, may I borrow it?’

‘Of course, Mr Muller. Keep it, if you like.’

It was Bert wearing bathing-trunks, with his arms akimbo, like a bear.

Hugo looked at his watch. ‘My word, what a long time I’ve kept you. I shall get such a scolding at home for being late. Do you really mean I can keep that photograph? I’ll give you my drawing in exchange, if it’s good enough, though I’m afraid it won’t be. Now I really must go.’

He got up and looked out of the window. Somewhere over there, if he were tall enough, or had someone to lift him up, he could see the upper windows at the back of Ten Pollitt Place. His heart fluttered. How easy everything was, if one had the will and the courage to exercise it,—the will and the courage. The courage would be put to the test that very afternoon.

[2]

Justin was walking with a slow, philosophical stride through the Park. He had been lunching with a friend, who was both a literary critic and an author, and whose opinion he greatly valued.

In the kindest possible way, this friend had urged him to give up writing novels. The advice was sweetened with sufficient praise to turn any author’s head, but in spite of this, it was quite definite.

‘Your trouble—our trouble—is that we’re hopelessly out of touch with the present age. However painstakingly we try to adapt ourselves to it—however carefully we vulgarise our style and purge it of its youthful classicism,—doing our best to for­get we’ve ever read Caesar, Cicero, Dr Johnson or Gibbon—whatever slick phrases we borrow from the other side of the Atlantic, we can’t really keep up. . . .

‘Our whole attitude to life is retrospective. We can’t dis­guise the fact that we think it a pity the world isn’t what it was in nineteen-ten, and when we remember that most of our readers don’t think so at all, we become cross with them, and tend to point out what very poor creatures they are, in their hey-day, compared with what we used to be in ours. Not unnaturally, they don’t like it.

‘Nor do they like any subtle analysis of character. The luxury of a complex personality—like the luxury of having a dozen servants—is unknown to the “little man”. He’s far too busy making a living or lapping up mass-produced entertain­ment to enlarge his own ego. . . .

‘You brought all this out very well in Seven Silent Sinners, and it may have been perhaps for that very reason that the book had only a limited appeal. I suppose it’s a question of overtones. I mean—take that scene—which I found most moving and beautiful—when you described the old man longing wistfully to be at Cambridge again, sauntering through the Backs on a summer day and communing with the ghosts of Horace Walpole and Gray, just before he gets the telephone-message telling him that the Amphisbaenic Review is ceasing publication through lack of funds and can’t take his next article. The con­trast between his day-dreaming, with its reminiscences of Frances Cornford and Rupert Brooke, and the brutal reality into which he wakes, is—for most people—simply meaningless. They’re not tuned in to that wavelength. They can no more receive it than you could be thrilled by an account of a boxing-match or a cup final. . . .

‘Besides, it holds up the action too much for their taste. The test of a book nowadays isn’t “How does it read?”, but, “How does it look?” It’s almost impossible for us to realise how enormously the popularity of the cinema and television have changed the process by which most people now absorb the written word. They translate it instinctively—provided of course they can understand it at all—into something visual. They want to see rather than understand, because understanding demands a mental effort they don’t care to make. . . .

‘If you want to keep yourself occupied, why not take up some form of biography? I know that research is a nightmare to the imaginative writer, but I think you could get by with very little. A revival of Lytton Stracheyism might be an excellent thing. Or how about some more “Dialogues of the Dead”? Or a reshaping of some classical myth, giving it one of those wry, slightly immoral, twists, that you’re so good at? Try anything—but if I were you, I shouldn’t try to write another novel!’

It was impossible to be offended or even annoyed, but it was only too easy to be sad,—and Justin was very sad.

Without his writing,—without that faint hope that some day he would produce a masterpiece universally acclaimed as such—the whole of his future seemed an aimless blank. Why go on, why face the gradual gathering of infirmities, if one’s existence was to have no other aim than length of years and the avoidance of pain? But his friend was right, there must be no more novels.

As soon as he got back to Ten Pollitt Place, he opened a drawer in his desk and took out some sixty sheets of manu­script. The first one bore nothing but attempts at a title,—The Righteous Heart, Old People have Voices, Old Faust was no Fool, Three Elderly Oracles and many others. Their varying ineptitudes made him blush, and he turned to Chapter One and began to read:

It was an afternoon in early May of 1922,—a drowsy damp hour of cuckoo-calls and the scent of lilac-blossom exhaled in a rainy sunshine. The stone Tritons, waist-deep in the ornamental water, hydraulically stimulated in their hinderparts, blew gay jets against a background of green, and filled the air with a thousand little rainbows.

He thought, ‘It’s not so bad. It isn’t bad at all. I should rather like to pick up a book with that kind of beginning.’ Yes, but pay fifteen shillings for it? Would he do that? And if not, who would? Besides, any fool can write an opening chapter. Could he sustain that note of airy moisture, which was meant to pervade the whole work as an ironical symbol of wasted effort, frustrated ideals and fate’s indifference? No,—he had to confess it—he couldn’t keep it up. The story would intervene. He would analyse, hint at crises then play them down, and the motif—or theme-song, if that was the name the present generation preferred—would vanish as the plot took its humdrum shape. And even if, by some miracle, he succeeded in doing what he had set himself to do, who, nowadays, would set store by such an achievement?

He tore the page into small pieces, and then with a quick glance at each successive page, did the same. By the time he had finished, the waste-paper basket was half full and his fingers ached. He sighed very deeply and looked out of the window. A youngish woman, not unlike the unfortunate creature who used to live on the top floor of Number Seven, minced down the street with a dachshund on a lead. As they neared Number Ten, the dog made a dart for the doorstep, and cocked its leg, while its owner stood by with a complete lack of concern. Justin’s fury flared up, but when he was about to rush into the hall, he remembered what had happened to him the last time he had had a row with a woman whose dog had offended in a similar way. The old pain came back into his heart at the thought of it, and he sat down in an arm-chair by the window and watched the thick, stinking, yellowish liquid trickle slowly to the edge of the step, where it first made a pool, then splashed, drop by drop, down into the area.

He yawned with disgust and weariness. Once more, he had walked too far. Half a mile was quite as much as he could manage without over-tiring himself. By the end of next year, a few hundred yards might be more than enough for him—while the year after that, he might hardly be able to get to the bus-stop in Parkwell Road. What a New Year’s Eve medita­tion! With an effort, he rose from his chair, and went into his bedroom, where he took off his shoes, coat, tie and collar, and lay down on the bed.

He woke at a quarter to four and his first thought was, ‘I’m no longer a novelist!’ Then he remembered that he had promised Miss Tredennick to have tea with her and help her to entertain two elderly spinsters who had been her neighbours in Cornwall. It was not a thrilling prospect, and he dreaded climbing up the two flights of stairs, but it was better than having tea alone, regretting the past and brooding over the future. Meanwhile more than half an hour lay between him and tea-time, and he decided to fill it by writing a letter which he ought to have written and posted before luncheon.

[3]

At half-past five, Hugo crept furtively to the top of the house. Pausing a moment on Miss Tredennick’s landing, he could hear voices from her sitting-room,—her own, keen-edged and incisive—‘Cornish weather is distressingly like English cooking’,—Justin Bray’s, a dull, hesitant boom, and two twittering flutes, which completed the quartet at the tea-party. They were hard at it. Let them keep at it and hear no sounds but those they made themselves!

The box-room, or haunted room, as Hugo called it, from which he had been allowed to watch the fireworks, was not directly over the sitting-room, though too loud a footfall might be heard down there. His hope was that the skylight wouldn’t squeak when he opened it; for he planned to get out on to the roof and wave from there to Bert’s window. He had brought a strong torch, an old white tablecloth of his mother’s, and a white scarf, so as to make himself so con­spicuous that Bert couldn’t miss him.

It was his first experience of any sort of mountaineering, and when he had climbed the eight rungs of the emergency-ladder, pushed up the skylight (which was counterweighted, and moved easily and silently enough), put his head through the gap and peered sideways into the dark, his courage was strained to its uttermost, and had he not had a superstitious fear that if he failed in his purpose he would lose Bert’s friendship for ever, he would have come down ignominiously and made his signals from the box-room window. But his mind was made up, and murmuring a prayer to whatever god may look with favour on romantic exploits, he sat on the sill, dragged his right leg through the skylight and then the left, so that they rested against the slates sloping down to the lead-covered gulley. His toes soon touched an iron rung let into the slates, which helped him in his descent. The gulley, which lay between a pair of gables,—additions since the days of William Pollitt—was two feet broad and ran the whole length of the house from Pollitt Place to the back. In the front, there was a parapet so high that it almost hid the gables from the street, and Hugo couldn’t have looked over it. But at the back—and it was only from this direction that he could hope to have a view of Bert’s window—there were two iron bars, fixed so low down that they seemed designed to trip you up rather than save you from falling. Hugo went cautiously to within a yard of the precipice, then paused and scanned the horizon of houses that towered round him. Lights from a thousand windows, some near, some distant, stabbed the blackness and made it impossible for him to see the gap through which Bert’s torch should answer his. But Bert was high up,—enthroned like a god on Mount Olympus—at an altitude from which the lower world could hide no secrets. Though the human eye might not see him, the eye of faith was assured of his watchfulness.

Slowly and solemnly, Hugo draped himself in the white table-cloth and walked up and down in the shadow of the gables, for fear he should display himself too soon. He felt as if he were robed as an acolyte, and wondered if it would be a thrill to serve at Mass in Brompton Oratory, the dome of which rose dimly in the distance,—or was that, perhaps, the Victoria and Albert Museum? All outlines were strange, and the city seemed transfigured as if expectant of some revelation, after which nothing would be as it had been before.

He flashed the torch on his watch. Three minutes to go. Like Ganymede awaiting the eagle’s swoop, he advanced towards the extreme edge of the gulley. Another six inches and his knees would have touched the bars at the end, and the shock might have made him lose balance and plunge down, head foremost, into the maze of little backyards and gardens that filled the shapeless area below him. But he stood erect and motionless as a statue, while the breeze from the west blew damply against his cheek and fluttered his draperies.

Then the clock on St Ethelred’s church, behind the Square, slowly struck six. Hugo flicked on the torch, and holding it in his left hand waved it round in a circle which had as its dia­meter almost twice the length of his arm, while with his right hand he twirled the long scarf in high, fantastic curves, and his eager eyes, directed to a point slightly north of due west, sought an answering flash of light, or at least the dim waving of a handkerchief,—perhaps one of the handkerchiefs which he had given Bert on Christmas Day—somewhere on a level with the lower stars.

But nothing happened. Innumerable pinpoints of light twinkled round him, but showed no change in their position. Perhaps Bert couldn’t hear St Ethelred’s clock? His watch might be wrong, or he might be preparing their evening meal just at that moment. A few minutes passed, while Hugo sought excuses for his friend’s remissness, and when he had found half a dozen, he repeated his performance, though with rather less gusto than before. But what was that? Something whitish appeared in a window, then two thin arms that shook it, then a woman’s dark head that for an instant caught the light from within. No, it was much too near. Bert’s window must be three or four hundred yards further away, and very much higher.

Bewildered and miserable, Hugo lowered his eyes and looked almost perpendicularly downwards, till he could see a shaft of light falling from Magda’s window into the yard. And there was Magda herself, removing some washing from the clothes-line. There was something grotesque and terrifying about her movements, as seen in this odd, vertical perspective. She looked like a puppet, jerkily put through its paces by a showman who wished to raise a laugh from the spectators. As Hugo watched her head bobbing up and down, he had an impulse to fling his torch at it. Then it occurred to him that if she moved to the far side of the yard and looked up at the roof, she would think she was seeing a ghost and might really believe that the box-room was haunted, as he had declared it was. She had always scoffed at his gift of second-sight and said his parade of it was a cheap way of drawing attention to himself. What a chance this was of really frightening her! For a moment he almost forgot his disappointment, and what his real purpose had been that evening.

But she went indoors, and then the full bitterness of Bert’s betrayal came home to him. He straightened himself up, and with tears in his eyes waved the scarf and the torch a third time with frantic vigour, till his arms grew tired and his head reeled, and suddenly he seemed to hear his own voice pro­phesying that before the year was out, someone at Number Ten was doomed to die. Never once, since he had made that prophecy, had he dreamt that he might be foretelling his own death. But now, in that spasm of despair and giddiness, when a false step would send him crashing down on to the flag­stones fifty feet below, he felt as if he were caught in his own trap.

As he tried to turn round and seek safety in the middle of the roof, a strange and intimate pain shot up his left leg from the ankle to the hip, and he was forced to put the whole of his weight on his right foot, which quivered under the strain. If only he had something to hold on to,—but the slope of the slates either side of him was so gradual that he couldn’t touch them with his finger-tips. Even the uppermost bar at the end of the gulley was six inches too low unless he stooped down towards it. The cramp in his left leg was by now so acute, that he couldn’t bend it at all, but he bent the right one slowly, inclining his body perilously forward till the fingers of his right hand found the bar. The feel of it gave him a moment’s hope, but as he grasped it more firmly and began to shift his body sideways, so that he could fall backwards against the slates and somehow shuffle along towards the skylight, there was a sound of rusted metal being torn from its socket, the bar came away free in his hand, and he screamed and fell.

[4]

The two old ladies from Cornwall were sipping their cherry-brandy and chattering with a shrill vivacity. Miss Tredennick and Justin, both of whom preferred a dry sherry, encouraged them with appropriate nods and smiles and the stimulus of an occasional word. But the sitting-room window, which was almost directly below the gulley on the roof, was open several inches at the top, and Hugo’s cry was loud and clear enough to shock the little party into silence.

Miss Tredennick’s quick wits were the first to approach the truth. She said, ‘That must be someone on the roof, and he’s had an accident.’ The old ladies were thrilled. ‘What, a burglar—a cat-burglar, do you think?’ But while Justin was suggesting they should ring up the police, Miss Tredennick said, ‘No,—I’m pretty sure it’s Hugo. He’s fond of the box-room, for some reason or other, and I think I’ve heard him creeping up there before. He must have climbed out on to the roof by the fire-escape. Oh, Mr Bray, do please go and have a look. There’s no danger to you. The little staircase on the left of the landing leads straight to the box-room door. There are some easy steps inside the box-room that run up to the skylight. If you’d just put your head out and see what’s happened? The poor boy may have broken his leg.’

For a moment Justin was inclined to protest that it was a job for a policeman or a fireman, but reminding himself that he was no longer a novelist and that his life was henceforward valueless to posterity, he put his glass down, got up heavily from his comfortable chair and without saying a word, went out on to the landing.

He thought even the little staircase bad enough. There were only six steps, but they were both narrow and steep and there was no kind of threshold by the door at the top, which opened awkwardly outwards and nearly knocked him down. Inside the room, he was still more disconcerted by the eight-runged ladder set against the wall at an angle that was formidably acute. Besides, the ladder was extremely dusty, except where Hugo’s hands and feet had touched it, and Justin was wearing his newest suit that afternoon.

The skylight was open, as far as it would go. Very gingerly he climbed the three lowest rungs, put his head out and called, ‘Is anyone there?’ Somewhere in the darkness a voice answered, ‘Help! Come quickly.’ Justin gritted his teeth, com­pleted the ascent and somehow wriggled himself on to the sill, where he found that to turn himself round and get his legs through was a tricky and most exhausting manœuvre. When this feat, too, was accomplished, he had to rest for two minutes till his breathing became more normal.

In front of him rose reassuringly the western gable, but to the right, at the end of the gulley, there was a sickening void. He remembered how, when many years before he had read in Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes the scene that took place on the ‘Cliff without a name’, he had almost fainted, and the thought of the distress into which that literary peril had plunged him, made his position seem doubly vertiginous.

‘Help! Hurry, or I shall fall!’ Justin’s eyes were now accustomed to the darkness. He looked in the direction of the sound, which came from the open end of the gulley, and saw a white heap in the space between the gables. Forcing himself forward from the sill, he stretched out his long legs till they found a footing on the lead of the gulley, stood upright and walked towards the gap. When he was about two yards away, he trod on Hugo’s torch, lost his balance and fell heavily on to Hugo’s legs. Hugo gave another cry, but the physical contact seemed in some way to revive him; for he stirred, raised him­self on his elbow and sat up, bumping Justin’s nose with his head. ‘Oh, it’s Mr Bray! I had cramp in my leg and got dizzy and fell down and daren’t move in case I fell over the edge. Are you all right, Mr Bray?’ Justin said vaguely, ‘I suppose I am,’ then disentangling himself from the folds of Mrs Muller’s table-cloth, he struggled to his feet and put a hand on the slates to steady himself. Then he added, ‘I don’t think I can get you in by myself. I must go for help. Perhaps Mr Fawley is in. He’d find it quite easy. Can you move at all? I don’t like leaving you so near the edge.’

By way of answer, Hugo flexed his leg and got up without any apparent difficulty. ‘The pain’s quite gone. Shall I see what it’s like getting in?’ Without waiting for an answer, he brushed past Justin and hurried to the skylight. He was so short that he couldn’t get his foot on the rung below the sill, till Justin gave him a shove from behind, but from there he climbed quite easily through the skylight and down the ladder inside. A moment later, he saw Justin’s head and shoulders silhouetted against the sky.

Justin found getting in even more laborious than it had been to get out. His muscles trembled and didn’t respond to the instructions given them by the brain. However, as if by a happy accident, he did at last put himself in such a position that he could use the ladder, while Hugo looked on, half anxious and half impatient. As soon as Justin touched the floor with his feet, he made straight for an old-fashioned trunk in a corner of the room, sat down on it and rested the top of his back against the match-boarded wall. Hugo said suddenly, ‘Oh, my torch! I’ve left it behind. I’ll go and get it. I shall be quite all right.’ But Justin said wearily, ‘Don’t be a silly boy. You can go and look for it in daylight to-morrow, if you must, but don’t expect me to come and rescue you, if you get cramp. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a roof before, and I’m certainly never going on one again.’

The effort of speaking seemed to cost him something. Hugo looked with alarm at his greyish face and asked, ‘Shall I get you some water?’, but Justin replied ungraciously, ‘No, go away. Don’t look at me like that. I shall be all right after I’ve had a short rest. Tell Miss Tredennick everything’s all right, and that I’ll be down in a moment.’

Hugo nodded gravely, murmured, ‘Yes, Sir,—and thank you very much for your kindness to me,’ and went down the short stairway. When he reached the landing, he met Magda who was coming up from below. She gave him her automatic glance of fear and dislike, and then, noticing the dust and dirt on his hands, face and clothes, she said, ‘What on earth have you been doing? In any case what are you doing up here?’ He said sullenly, ‘I’ve a message for you to give to Miss Tredennick. Tell her Mr Bray will be down in a moment and that every­thing’s all right.’ Before she could make further inquiries or protest, he hurried past her down the next flight of stairs. By the time he had reached the basement, all he thought of was Bert’s broken promise.

Justin sat on the trunk in the corner of the box-room, sway­ing slightly, with his left hand on his chest. He said to himself, ‘I shall be all right very soon. It isn’t as bad as when I chased that woman with the dog. It’s nerves,—only nerves. Dr Jamieson said it was nerves. Too much adrenalin getting into the blood,—or something like that.’

But the pain increased, and he began to realise that he was passing through an experience unlike any other he had had in his whole life. It was terrifying; yet such a rift had developed in his consciousness, that while one half of it struggled with pain and fear, the other half dreamt irrelevantly of being at Cambridge again, as a young man, communing with Frances Cornford, Rupert Brooke, Gray and Horace Walpole in one of the college gardens leading down to the river. The air was warm and moist, and all the birds of early summer were singing in the trees. Why not? Why shouldn’t he go there again as an undergraduate, and read some leisurely subject for a pass degree? How much happier he would be—and how much less lonely—than in Ten Pollitt Place! If only the new novel he was going to write turned out a success,—if only he could make one supreme effort——

His cry, like Hugo’s reached the room below, and this time there was no chatter to drown it. Miss Tredennick and her two friends were talking in apprehensive whispers, while Magda was uneasily clearing away the tea. Miss Tredennick called her as she was carrying a tray into the kitchen, and said softly, ‘Magda, I can’t help fearing Mr Bray has been taken unwell. Will you go to the box-room and see?’

[5]

They found this half-finished letter on Justin’s desk:

New Year’s Eve 10, Pollitt Place, S.W.

I am so grieved and distressed, my dear Lady Victoria, to learn of your abominable accident. I know how brave and uncomplaining you will be, but the pain must be dreadful, and the prospect of three months’ captivity in a room with two unchosen companions is more than I can bear to think of for you. This at least it is in my power to remedy, if only you will let me. I do beg you—if not for your own sake and not for mine—for the sake of my mother, whose memory I know is still precious to you after all these years, to accept the cheque which I enclose. She would never forgive me if I didn’t send it nor should I forgive myself,—despite the rebuffs with which, as you must confess, any little attempts of mine to make life easier for you have met hitherto.

My wants are now very few and will soon be fewer. I have more than enough to see me out, unless some government, resolved on the utter destruction of the rentier, introduces a punitive form of capital levy. And in that case, it will give me great satisfaction to think that before I was ruined, I did at least try to do something for someone else.

I have done so very little for other people in the course of my pampered and self-indulgent life. I used to think that ‘my art’—this sounds as if I were a diseuse or a film-star—justified all my selfishness. I had to enjoy every comfort and be sur­rounded by beautiful things, if I was to give of my best. In a lazy way, so far as I could, I kept my side of the bargain. I gave of my best,—but it wasn’t good enough.

I had luncheon to-day with George de Lacey. As you know, he has long been both one of my dearest friends and one of my kindest and most encouraging critics. I talked to him of a new book I have been writing for the last few weeks, and asked him for his advice on one or two points. Alas, his advice,—when it came—(I had to drag it out of him, to begin with)—was that I should give up any idea of ever writing another novel. He tried to soften the blow as much as he could. He instanced George Moore (both in his opinion and mine a greater writer than any now living), who is in almost total eclipse, perhaps because he regards his characters not as units in the social organism, but as ends in themselves. I admit, de Lacey suggested other aspects of literature with which I might occupy my declining years. But novels, no! He said, ‘Nowadays, a readable novel has to be an intellectualised strip-cartoon, and that’s a technique which, however hard you try, you will never master.’

I had to agree with everything he said. So, instead of being Justin Bray the novelist, I am now Justin Bray, the elderly man-about-town,—a period-piece, a quaint, pathetic survival.

But how very much too seriously we take ourselves, we would-be ‘serious writers’. Our egotism may not be as gross, uncritical and full-blooded as that of the successful tennis-player or boxer, but in its insidious, introspective way, it is no less poisonous. I read a passage in Hawthorne the other night,—it comes from the introductory chapter to The Scarlet Letter—which impressed me very deeply.

‘It is a good lesson—though it may often be a hard one—for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world’s dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognised, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.’

The letter broke off at this point, and the cheque, which was to accompany it, was still unwritten.