I

At the time of my father’s death I was in Morocco, at a small French hotel outside the fortifications of Fez. I had been there for six weeks, doing little else but write, and my book, Murder at Mountrichard Castle, was within twenty thousand words of its end. In three weeks I should pack it up for the typist; perhaps sooner, for I had nearly passed that heavy middle period where less conscientious writers introduce their second corpse. I was thirty-three years of age at the time, and a serious writer. I had always been a one-corpse man and, as far as possible, a clean corpse man, eschewing the blood-transfusions to which most of my rivals resorted to revitalize their flagging stories; moreover, I eschewed anything that was even remotely sordid or salacious. My corpses, invariably, were male, solitary, of high position in the world and, as near as possible, bloodless. I abhorred blunt instruments and “features battered beyond recognition.” Lord George Vanburgh, in Death in the Dukeries, was decapitated but only, it will be remembered, after he had been dead for some time through other causes. My poisons were painless; no character of mine ever writhed or vomited. Cardinal Vascari, in Vengeance at the Vatican, my first and in other ways my least successful story, met death in a model fashion, lapsing into coma while he sat at his window, one tranquil autumn evening, overlooking the Tiber; the fingers relaxed in the scarlet lap and the rosary with the missing decade—that ingenious clue—slipped unnoticed to the carpet. That was how John Plant’s characters died.
On the other hand, while avoiding blood, I was tolerably free with the thunder. I despised a purely functional novel as I despised contemporary architecture; the girders and struts of the plot require adornment and concealment; I relish the masked buttresses, false domes, superfluous columns, all the subterfuges of literary architecture and the plaster and gilt of its decoration. A tenth of my writing or more—and some of the best of it—went on stage effects; sudden eddies of cold air would stir my curtains, candles guttered, horses lathered themselves to frenzy in their stalls; idiots gibbered; my policemen hunted their man in a landscape of crag, torrent, ruin, and fallen oak. And now and then, when the sequence of emotions I planned for my readers required a moment of revulsion and terror, I would kill an animal in atrocious circumstances—Lady Belinda’s Blenheim spaniel, for example, in The Frightened Footman.
Murder at Mountrichard Castle bristled with Gothic enrichments and I was tolerably confident of its good reception. Success, even at its first approach, failed to surprise me. I took pains with my work and I thought it excellent. Each of my seven books sold better than its predecessor. Moreover, the sale was in their first three months, at seven and sixpence. I did not have to relabel the library edition for the book-stalls. People bought my books and kept them—not in the spare bedrooms but in the library, all seven of them together on a shelf. My contract provided me with an advance on each book corresponding with the total earnings of the one before it. In six weeks’ time, when my manuscript had been typed, revised and delivered I should receive a cheque for something over nine hundred pounds. This would pay off my overdraft and Income Tax and leave me with five hundred or so, on which, with another overdraft, I should live until my next book was ready. That was how I ordered my affairs. Had I wished it, I could have earned considerably more. I never tried to sell my stories as serials; the delicate fibres of a story suffer when it is chopped up into weekly or monthly parts and never completely heal. Often, when I have been reading the work of a competitor, I have said, “She was writing with an eye on the magazines. She had to close this episode prematurely; she had to introduce that extraneous bit of melodrama, so as to make each installment a readable unit. Well,” I would reflect, “she has a husband to support and two sons at school. She must not expect to do two jobs well, to be a good mother and a good novelist.” I chose to live modestly on the royalties of my books.
I never found economy the least irksome; on the contrary I took pleasure in it. My friends, I know, considered me parsimonious; it was a joke among them, which I found quite inoffensive, for there are two distinct kinds of meanness—those which come of loving money and of disliking it. Mine was the latter sort. My ambition was to eradicate money as much as I could from my life and to do so required planning. I acquired as few possessions as possible. I preferred to pay interest to my bank rather than be bothered by tradesmen’s bills. I decided what I wanted to do and then devised ways of doing it cheaply and tidily; money wasted meant more money to be earned. I disliked profusion; it recalled stories in the Daily Express about prizefighters and comedians dying in penury ... they had spent £200 a week, entertaining and lending; they had worn a new pair of black silk socks every evening; no old pal ever left them empty-handed ... ten-shilling tips to commissionaires ... Bohemians.
I chose my career deliberately at the age of twenty-one. I had a naturally ingenious and constructive mind and the taste for writing. I was youthfully zealous of good fame. There seemed few ways, of which a writer need not be ashamed, by which he could make a decent living. To produce something, saleable in large quantities to the public, which had absolutely nothing of myself in it; to sell something for which the kind of people I liked and respected, would have a use; that was what I sought, and detective stories fulfilled the purpose. They were an art which admitted of classical canons of technique and taste. Their writing was painful—though much less painful than any other form would have been—because I have the unhappy combination of being both lazy and fastidious. It was immune, anyway, from the obnoxious comment to which lighter work is exposed. “How you must revel in writing your delicious books, Mr. So-and-So.” My friend Roger Simmonds, who was with me at the University and set up as a professional humorist at the same time as I wrote Vengeance at the Vatican, is constantly plagued by that kind of remark. Instead, women say to me, “How difficult it must be to think of all those complicated clues, Mr. Plant.” I agree. “It is, intolerably difficult.” “And do you do your writing here in London?” “No, I find I have to go away to work.” “Away from telephones and parties and things?” “Exactly.”
I had tried a dozen or more retreats in England and abroad—country inns, furnished cottages, seaside hotels out of the season—Fez was by far the best of them. It is a splendid, compact city and in early March, with flowers springing everywhere in the surrounding hills and in the untidy patios of the Arab houses, one of the most beautiful in the world. I liked the little hotel. It was cheap and rather chilly—an indispensable austerity. The food was digestible with, again, that element of sparseness which I find agreeable. It had an intermediate place between the semi-Egyptian splendours of the tourists’ palace on the hill, and the bustling commercial hotels of the new town, half an hour’s walk away. The clientele was exclusively French; the wives of civil servants and elderly couples of small means wintering in the sun. In the evening Spahi officers came to the bar to play bagatelle. I used to work on the verandah of my room, overlooking a ravine where Senegalese infantrymen were constantly washing their linen. My recreations were few and simple. Once a week after dinner I took the bus to the Moulay Abdullah; once a week I dined at the Consulate. The consul allowed me to come to him for a bath. I used to walk up, under the walls, swinging my sponge-bag, through the dusk. He, his wife and their governess were the only English people I met; the only people, indeed, with whom I did more than exchange bare civilities. Sometimes I visited the native cinema where old, silent films were shown in a babel of catcalls. On other evenings I took a dose of Dial and was asleep by half past nine. In these circumstances the book progressed well. I have since, on occasions, looked back at them with envy.
As an odd survival of the age of capitulations there was at that time a British Post Office at the Consulate, used mainly, the French believed, for treasonable purposes by disaffected Arabs. When there was anything for me the postman used to come down the hill on his bicycle to my hotel. He had a badge in his cap and on his arm a brassard with the royal escutcheon; he invariably honoured me with a stiff, military salute which increased my importance in the hotel at the expense of my reputation as an innocent and unofficial man of letters. It was this postman who brought the news of my father’s death in a letter from my Uncle Andrew, his brother.
My father, it appeared, had been knocked down by a motor-car more than a week ago and had died without regaining consciousness. I was his only child and, with the exception of my uncle, his only near relative. “All arrangements” had been made. The funeral was taking place that day. “In spite of your father’s opinions, in the absence of any formal instructions to the contrary,” my Uncle Andrew wrote, “your Aunt and I thought it best to have a religious ceremony of an unostentatious kind.”
“He might have telegraphed,” I thought; and then, later, “Why should he have?” There was no question of my having been able to see my father before he died; participation in a “religious ceremony of an unostentatious kind” was neither in my line nor my father’s; nor—to do him justice—in my Uncle Andrew’s. It would satisfy the Jellabys.
With regard to the Jellabys my father always avowed a ruthlessness which he was far from practising; he would in fact put himself to considerable inconvenience to accommodate them, but in principle he abhorred any suggestion of discretion or solicitude. It was his belief that no one but himself dealt properly with servants. Two attitudes drove him to equal fury: what he called the “pas-devant tomfoolery” of his childhood—the precept that scandal and the mention of exact sums of money should be hushed in their presence—or the more recent idea that their quarters should be prettily decorated and themselves given opportunity for cultural development. “Jellaby has been with me twenty years,” he would say, “and is fully cognisant of the facts of life. He and Mrs. Jellaby know my income to the nearest shilling and they know the full history of everyone who comes to this house. I pay them abominably and they supplement their wages by cooking the books. Servants prefer it that way. It preserves their independence and self-respect. The Jellabys eat continually, sleep with the windows shut, go to church every Sunday morning and to chapel in the evening, and entertain surreptitiously at my expense whenever I am out of the house. Jellaby’s a teetotaller; Mrs. Jellaby takes the port.” He rang the bell whenever he wanted anything fetched from upstairs and sat as long as he wanted over his wine. “Poor old Armstrong,” he used to say of a fellow Academician, “lives like a Hottentot. He keeps a lot of twittering women like waitresses in a railway station buffet. After the first glass of port they open the dining-room door and stick their heads in. After the second glass they do it again. Then instead of throwing something at them, Armstrong says, ‘I think they want to clear’ and we have to move out.” But he had a warm affection for the Jellabys, and I believe it was largely on Mrs. Jellaby’s account that he allowed himself to be put down for the Academy. They, in their turn, served him faithfully. It would have been a cruel betrayal to deny them a funeral service and I am sure my father had them in mind when he omitted any provision against it in his will. He was an exact man who would not have forgotten a point of that kind. On the other hand, he was a dogmatic atheist of the old-fashioned cast and would not have set anything down which might be construed as apostasy. He had left it to my Uncle Andrew’s tact. No doubt, too, it was part of my uncle’s tact to save me the embarrassment of being present.

II

I sat on my verandah for some time, smoking and considering the situation in its various aspects. There seemed no good reason for a change of plan. My Uncle Andrew would see to everything. The Jellabys would be provided for. Apart from them my father had no obligations. His affairs were always simple and in good order. The counterfoils of his cheques and his own excellent memory were his only account books; he had never owned any investments except the freehold of the house in St. John’s Wood which he had bought with the small capital sum left him by my mother. He lived up to his income and saved nothing. In him the parsimony which I had inherited, took the form of a Gallic repugnance to paying direct taxes or, as he preferred it, to subscribing to “the support of the politicians.” He had, moreover, the conviction that anything he put by would be filched by the radicals. Lloyd George’s ascent to power was the last contemporary event to impress him. Since then he believed, or professed to believe, that public life had become an open conspiracy for the destruction of himself and his class. This class, of which he considered himself the sole survivor, and its ways were for him the object of romantic loyalty; he spoke of it as a Jacobite clan proscribed and dispersed after Culloden, in a way which sometimes embarrassed those who did not know him well. “We have been uprooted and harried,” he would say. “There are only three classes in England now, politicians, tradesmen and slaves.” Then he would particularize. “Seventy years ago the politicians and the tradesmen were in alliance; they destroyed the gentry by destroying the value of land; some of the gentry became politicians themselves, others tradesmen; out of what was left they created the new class into which I was born, the moneyless, landless, educated gentry who managed the country for them. My grandfather was a Canon of Christ Church, my father was in the Bengal Civil Service. The capital they left their sons was their education and their moral principles. Now the politicians are in alliance with the slaves to destroy the tradesmen. They don’t need to bother about us. We are extinct already. I am a Dodo,” he used to say, defiantly staring at his audience. “You, my poor son, are a petrified egg.” There is a caricature of him by Max Beerbohm, in this posture, saying these words.
My choice of profession confirmed his view. “Marjorie Steyle’s boy works below the streets, in a basement, selling haberdashery at four pounds a week. Dick Anderson has married his daughter to a grocer. My son John took a second in Mods and a first in Greats. He writes penny dreadfuls for a living,” he would say.
I always sent him my books and I think he read them. “At least your grammar is all right,” he once said. “Your books will translate and that’s more than can be said for most of these fellows who set up to write Literature.” He had a naturally hierarchic mind and in his scheme of things, detective stories stood slightly above the librettos of musical comedy and well below political journalism. I once showed him a reference to Death in the Dukeries by the Professor of Poetry, in which it was described as “a work of art.” “Anyone can buy a don,” was his only comment. But he was gratified by my prosperity. “Family love and financial dependence don’t go together,” he said. “My father made me an allowance of thirty shillings a week for the first three years I was in London and he never forgave it me, never. He hadn’t cost his father a penny after he took his degree. Nor had his father before him. You ran into debt at the University. That was a thing I never did. It was two years before you were keeping yourself and you went about as a dandy those two years, which I never did while I was learning to draw. But you’ve done very well. No nonsense about Literature. You’ve cut out quite a line for yourself. I saw old Etheridge at the club the other evening. He reads all your books, he told me, and likes ’em.
Poor old Etheridge; he brought his boy up to be a barrister and he’s still keeping him at the age of thirty-seven.”
My father seldom referred to his contemporaries without the epithet “old”—usually as “poor old so-and-so,” unless they had prospered conspicuously when they were “that old humbug.” On the other hand, he spoke of men a few years his junior as “whippersnappers” and “young puppies.” The truth was that he could not bear to think of anyone as being the same age as himself. It was all part of the aloofness that was his dominant concern in life. It was enough for him to learn that an opinion of his had popular support for him to question and abandon it. His atheism was his response to the simple piety and confused agnosticism of his family circle. He never came to hear much about Marxism; had he done so he would, I am sure, have discovered a number of proofs of the existence of God. In his later years I observed two reversions of opinion in reaction to contemporary fashion. In my boyhood, in the time of their Edwardian popularity, he denounced the Jews roundly on all occasions, and later attributed to them the vogue for post-impressionist painting—“There was a poor booby called Cezanne, a kind of village idiot who was given a box of paints to keep him quiet. He very properly left his horrible canvases behind him in the hedges. The Jews discovered him and crept round behind him picking them up—just to get something for nothing. Then when he was safely dead and couldn’t share in the profits they hired a lot of mercenary lunatics to write him up. They’ve made thousands out of it.” To the last he maintained that Dreyfus had been guilty, but when, in the early thirties, anti-Semitism showed signs of becoming a popular force, he justly pointed out in an unpublished letter to The Times, that the prime guilt in that matter lay with Gentile Prussians.
Similarly he was used to profess an esteem for Roman Catholics. “Their religious opinions are preposterous,” he said. “But so were those of the ancient Greeks. Think of Socrates spending half his last evening babbling about the topography of the nether world. Grant them their first absurdities and you will find Roman Catholics a reasonable people—and they have civilized habits.” Later, however, when he saw signs of this view gaining acceptance, he became convinced of the existence of a Jesuit conspiracy to embroil the world in war, and wrote several letters to The Times on the subject; they, too, were unpublished. But in neither of these periods did his opinions greatly affect his personal relations; Jews and Catholics were among his closest friends all his life.
My father dressed as he thought a painter should, in a distinct and recognizable garb which made him a familiar and, in his later years, a venerable figure as he took his exercise in the streets round his house. There was no element of ostentation in his poncho capes, check suits, sombrero hats and stock ties. It was rather that he thought it fitting for a man to proclaim unequivocally his station in life, and despised those of his colleagues who seemed to be passing themselves off as guardsmen and stockbrokers. In general he liked his fellow academicians, though I never heard him express anything but contempt for their work. He regarded the Academy as a club; he enjoyed the dinners and frequently attended the schools, where he was able to state his views on art in Johnsonian terms. He never doubted that the function of painting was representational. He criticized his colleagues for such faults as incorrect anatomy, “triviality” and “insincerity.” For this he was loosely spoken of as a conservative, but that he never was where his art was concerned. He abominated the standards of his youth. He must have been an intransigently old-fashioned young man, for he was brought up in the heyday of Whistlerian decorative painting and his first exhibited work was of a balloon ascent in Manchester—a large canvas crowded with human drama, in the manner of Frith. His practice was chiefly in portraits—many of them posthumous—for presentation to colleges and guildhalls. He seldom succeeded with women whom he endowed with a statuesque absurdity which was half deliberate, but given the robes of a Doctor of Music or a Knight of Malta and he would do something fit to hang with the best panelling in the country; given some whiskers and he was a master. “As a young man I specialized in hair,” he would say, rather as a doctor might say he specialized in noses and throats. “I paint it incomparably. Nowadays nobody has any to paint,” and it was this aptitude of his which led him to the long, increasingly unsaleable series of historical and scriptural groups, and the scenes of domestic melodrama by which he is known—subjects which had already become slightly ludicrous when he was in his cradle, but which he continued to produce year after year while experimental painters came and went until, right at the end of his life, he suddenly, without realizing it, found himself in the fashion. The first sign of this was in 1929 when his “Agag before Samuel” was bought at a provincial exhibition for 750 guineas. It was a large canvas at which he had been at work intermittently since 1908. Even he spoke of it, with conscious understatement, as “something of a white elephant.” White elephants indeed were almost the sole species of four-footed animal that was not, somewhere, worked into this elaborate composition. When asked why he had introduced such a variety of fauna, he replied, “I’m sick of Samuel. I’ve lived with him for twenty years. Every time it comes back from an exhibition I paint out a Jew and put in an animal. If I live long enough I’ll have a Noah’s ark in its background.”
The purchaser of this work was Sir Lionel Sterne.
“Honest Sir Lionel,” said my father, as he saw the great canvas packed off to Kensington Palace Gardens. “I should dearly have liked to shake his hairy paw. I can see him well—a fine, meaty fellow with a great gold watch-chain across his belly, who’s been decently employed boiling soap or smelting copper all his life, with no time to read Clive Bell. In every age it has been men like him who kept painting alive.”
I tried to explain that Lionel Sterne was the youthful and elegant millionaire who for ten years had been a leader of aesthetic fashion. “Nonsense!” said my father. “Fellows like that collect disjointed Negresses by Gauguin. Only Philistines like my work and, by God, I only like Philistines.”
There was also another, rather less reputable side to my father’s business. He received a regular yearly retaining fee from Goodchild and Godley, the Duke Street dealers, for what was called “restoration.” This sum was a very important part of his income; without it the comfortable little dinners, the trips abroad, the cabs to and fro between St. John’s Wood and the Athenaeum, the faithful, predatory Jellabys, the orchid in his buttonhole—all the substantial comforts and refinements which endeared the world and provided him with his air of gentlemanly ease—would have been impossible to him. The truth was that, while excelling at Lely, my father could paint, very passably, in the manner of almost any of the masters of English portraiture and the private and public collections of the New World were richly representative of his versatility. Very few of his friends knew this traffic; to those who did, he defended it with complete candour. “Goodchild and Godley buy these pictures for what they are—my own work. They pay me no more than my dexterity merits. What they do with them afterwards is their own business. It would ill become me to go officiously about the markets identifying my own handicraft and upsetting a number of perfectly contented people. It is a great deal better for them to look at beautiful pictures and enjoy them under a misconception about the date, than to make themselves dizzy by goggling at genuine Picassos.”
It was largely on account of his work for Goodchild and Godley that his studio was strictly reserved as a workshop. It was a separate building approached through the garden and it was excluded from general use. Once a year, when he went abroad it was “done out”; once a year, on the Sunday before sending-in day at the Royal Academy it was open to his friends. He took a peculiar pleasure from the gloom of these annual tea parties and was at the same pains to make them dismal as he was on all other occasions to enliven his entertainments. There was a species of dry, bright yellow, caraway cake which was known to my childhood as “Academy cake,” which appeared then and only then, from a grocer in Praed Street; there was an enormous Worcester tea service—a wedding present—which was known as “Academy cups”; there were “Academy sandwiches”—tiny, triangular and quite tasteless. All these things were part of my earliest memories. I do not know at what date these parties changed from being a rather tedious convention to what they certainly were to my father at the end of his life, a huge, grim and solitary jest. If I was in England I was required to attend and to bring a friend or two. It was difficult, until the last two years when, as I have said, my father became the object of fashionable interest, to collect guests. “When I was a young man,” my father said, sardonically surveying the company, “there were twenty or more of these parties in St. John’s Wood alone. People of culture drove round from three in the afternoon to six, from Campden Hill to Hampstead. Today I believe our little gathering is the sole survivor of that deleterious tradition.”
On these occasions his year’s work—Goodchild and Godley’s items excepted—would be ranged round the studio on mahogany easels; the most important work had a wall to itself against a background of scarlet rep. I had been present at the last of the parties the year before. The recollection was remarkable. Lionel Sterne was there, Lady Metroland and a dozen fashionable connoisseurs. My father was at first rather suspicious of his new clients and suspected an impertinent intrusion into his own private joke, a calling of his bluff of seed-cake and cress sandwiches; but their commissions reassured him. People did not carry a joke to such extravagant lengths. Mrs. Algernon Stitch paid 500 guineas for his picture of the year—a tableau of contemporary life conceived and painted with elaborate mastery. My father attached great importance to suitable titles for his work, and after toying with “The People’s Idol,” “Feet of Clay,” “Not on the First Night,” “Their Night of Triumph,” “Success and Failure,” “Not Invited,” “Also Present,” he finally called this picture rather enigmatically “The Neglected Cue.” It represented the dressing room of a leading actress at the close of a triumphant first night. She sat at the dressing table, her back turned on the company and her face visible in the mirror, momentarily relaxed in fatigue. Her protector with proprietary swagger was filling the glasses for a circle of admirers. In the background the dresser was in colloquy at the half-open door with an elderly couple of provincial appearance; it is evident from their costume that they have seen the piece from the cheaper seats, and a commissionaire stands behind them uncertain whether he did right in admitting them. He did not do right; they are her old parents arriving most nopportunely. There was no questioning Mrs. Stitch’s rapturous enjoyment of her acquisition.
I was never to know how my father would react to his vogue. He could paint in any way he chose; perhaps he would have embarked on those vague assemblages of picnic litter which used to cover the walls of the Mansard Gallery in the early twenties; he might have retreated to the standards of the Grosvenor Gallery in the nineties. He might, perhaps, have found popularity less inacceptable than he supposed and allowed himself a luxurious and cosetted old age. He died with his 1932 picture still unfinished. I saw its early stage on my last visit to him; it represented an old shipwright pondering on the idle dockyard where lay the great skeleton of the Cunarder that was later to be known as the Queen Mary. It was to have been called “Too Big?” My father had given the man a grizzled beard and was revelling in it. That was the last time I saw him.
I had given up living in St. John’s Wood for four or five years. There was never a definite moment when I “left home.” For all official purposes the house remained my domicile. There was a bedroom that was known as mine; I kept several trunks full of clothes there and a shelf or two of books. I never set up for myself anywhere else, but during the last five years of my father’s life I do not suppose I slept ten nights under his roof. This was not due to any estrangement. I enjoyed his company, and he seemed to enjoy mine; had I settled there permanently, with a servant of my own and a separate telephone number, we might have lived together comfortably enough, but I was never in London for more than a week or two at a time, and I found that as an occasional visitor I strained and upset my father’s household. He and they tried to do too much, and he liked to have his plans clear for some way ahead. “My dear boy,” he would say on my first evening. “Please do not misunderstand me. I hope you will stay as long as you possibly can, but I do wish to know whether you will still be here on Thursday the fourteenth and if so, whether you will be in to dinner.” So I took to staying at my club or with more casual hosts, and to visiting St. John’s Wood as often as I could, but with formal prearrangements.
Nevertheless, I realized, the house had been an important part of my life. It had remained unaltered for as long as I could remember. It was a decent house, built in 1840 or thereabouts, in the contemporary Swiss mode of stucco and ornamental weather boards, one of a street of similar, detached houses when I first saw it. By the time of my father’s death the transformation of the district, though not complete, was painfully evident. The skyline of the garden was broken on three sides by blocks of flats. The first of them drove my father into a frenzy of indignation. He wrote to The Times about it, addressed a meeting of ratepayers and for six weeks sported a board advertising the house for sale. At the end of that time he received a liberal offer from the syndicate, who wished to extend their block over the site, and he immediately withdrew it from the market. “I could tell they were Jews,” he said, “by the smell of their notepaper.”
This was in his anti-Semitic period; it was also the period of his lowest professional fortunes, when his subject pictures remained unsold, the market for dubious old masters was dropping, and public bodies were beginning to look for something “modern” in their memorial portraits; the period, moreover, when I had finished with the University and was still dependent on my father for pocket money. It was a very unsatisfactory time in his life. I had not then learned to appreciate the massive defences of what people call the “border line of sanity,” and I was at moments genuinely afraid that my father was going out of his mind; there had always seemed an element of persecution mania about his foibles which might, at a time of great strain, go beyond his control. He used to stand on the opposite pavement watching the new building rise, a conspicuous figure muttering objurgations. I used to imagine scenes in which a policeman would ask him to move on and be met with a wild outburst. I imagined these scenes vividly—my father in swirling cape being hustled off, waving his umbrella. Nothing of the kind occurred. My father, for all his oddity, was a man of indestructible sanity and in his later years he found a keen pleasure in contemplating the rapid deterioration of the hated buildings. “Very good news of Hill Crest Court,” he announced one day. “Typhoid and rats.” And on another occasion, “Jellaby reports the presence of tarts at St. Eustace’s. They’ll have a suicide there soon, you’ll see.” There was a suicide, and for two rapturous days my father watched the coming and going of police and journalists. After that fewer chintz curtains were visible in the windows, rents began to fall and the lift-man smoked on duty. My father observed and gleefully noted all these signs. Hill Crest Court changed hands; decorator’s, plumber’s and electrician’s boards appeared all round it; a commissionaire with a new uniform stood at the doors. On the last evening I dined with my father he told me about a visit he had made there, posing as a potential tenant. “The place is a deserted slum,” he said. “A miserable, down-at-heel kind of secretary took me round flat after flat—all empty. There were great cracks in the concrete stuffed up with putty. The hot pipes were cold. The doors jammed. He started asking three hundred pounds a year for the best of them and dropped to one hundred and seventy-five pounds before I saw the kitchen. Then he made it one hundred and fifty pounds. In the end he proposed what he called a ‘special form of tenancy for people of good social position’—offered to let me live there for a pound a week on condition I turned out if he found someone who was willing to pay the real rent. ‘Strictly between ourselves,’ he said, ‘I can promise you will not be disturbed.’ Poor beast, I nearly took his flat, he was so paintable.”
Now, I supposed, the house would be sold; another speculator would pull it to pieces; another great, uninhabitable barrack would appear, like a refugee ship in harbour; it would be filled sold, emptied, resold, refilled, re-emptied, while the concrete got discoloured and the green wood shrank, and the rats crept up in their thousands out of the metropolitan railway tunnel; and the trees and gardens all round it disappeared one by one until the place became a working-class district and at last took on a gaiety and life of some sort; until it was condemned by government inspectors and its inhabitants driven further into the country and the process began all over again. I thought of all this, sadly, as I looked out at the fine masonry of Fez, cut four hundred years back by Portuguese prisoners ... I must go back to England soon to arrange for the destruction of my father’s house. Meanwhile there seemed no reason for an immediate change of plan.

III

It was the evening when I usually visited the Moulay Abdullah—the walled quartier toleré between the old city and the ghetto. I had gone there first with a sense of adventure; now it had become part of my routine, a regular resort, like the cinema and the Consulate, one of the recreations which gave incident to my week and helped clear my mind of the elaborate villainies of Lady Mountrichard.
I dined at seven and soon afterwards caught my bus at the new gate. Before starting I removed my watch and emptied my pockets of all except the few francs which I proposed to spend—a superstitious precaution which still survived from the first evening, when memories of Marseilles and Naples had even moved me to carry a life preserver. The Moulay Abdullah was an orderly place, particularly in the early evening when I frequented it. I had formed an attachment for it; it was the only place of its kind I have ever found, which endowed its trade with something approaching glamour. There really was a memory of “the East,” as adolescents imagine it, in that silent courtyard with its single light, the Negro sentries on either side of the lofty Moorish arch, the black lane beyond, between the walls and the waterwheel, full of the thump and stumble of French military boots and the soft pad and rustle of the natives, the second arch into the lighted bazaar, the bright open doors and the tiled patios, the little one-roomed huts where the women stood against the lamplight—shadows without race or age—the larger houses with their bars and gramophones. I always visited the same house and the same girl—a chubby little Berber with the scarred cheeks of her people and tattooed ornaments—blue on brown—at her forehead and throat. She spoke the peculiar French which she had picked up from the soldiers and she went by the unassuming, professional name of Fatima. Other girls of the place called themselves “Lola” and “Fifi”; there was even an arrogant, coal-black Sudanese named “Whiskey-soda.” But Fatima had none of these airs; she was a cheerful, affectionate girl working hard to collect her marriage dot; she professed to like everyone in the house, even the proprietress, a forbidding Jewess from Tetuan, and the proprietress’s Algerian husband, who wore a European suit, carried round the mint tea, put records on the gramophone and collected the money. (The Moors are a strict people and take no share in the profits of the Moulay Abdullah.)
To regular and serious customers it was an inexpensive place—fifteen francs to the house, ten to Fatima, five for the mint tea, a few sous to the old fellow who tidied Fatima’s alcove and blew up the brazier of sweet gum. Soldiers paid less, but they had to make way for more important customers; often they were penniless men from the Foreign Legion who dropped in merely to hear the gramophone and left nothing behind them but cigarette ends. Now and then tourists appeared with a guide from the big hotel, and the girls were made to line up and give a modest performance of shuffling and hand clapping which was called a native dance. Women tourists particularly seemed to like these expeditions and paid heavily for them—a hundred francs or more. But they were unpopular with everyone, particularly with the girls, who regarded it as an unseemly proceeding. Once I came in when Fatima was taking part in one of these dances and saw her genuinely and deeply abashed.
On my first visit I told Fatima that I had a wife and six children in England; this greatly enhanced my importance in her eyes and she always asked after them.
“You have had a letter from England? The little ones are well?”
“They are very well.”
“And your father and mother?”
“They, too.”
We sat in a tiled hall, two steps below street level, drinking our mint tea—or, rather, Fatima drank hers while I let mine cool in the glass. It was a noisome beverage.
“Whiskey-soda lent me some cigarettes yesterday. Will you give her them?”
I ordered a packet from the bar.
“Yesterday I had a stomach-ache and stayed in my room. That is why Whiskey-soda gave me her cigarettes.”
She asked about my business.
I had told her I exported dates.
The date market was steady, I assured her.
When I was in the Moulay Abdullah I almost believed in this aspect of myself as a philo-progenitive fruiterer; St. John’s Wood and Mountrichard Castle seemed equally remote. That was the charm of the quarter for me—not its simple pleasures but its privacy and anonymity, the hide-and-seek with one’s own personality which redeems vice of its tedium.
That night there was a rude interruption. The gramophone suddenly stopped playing; there was a scuttling among the alcoves; two seedy figures in raincoats strode across the room and began questioning the proprietress; a guard of military police stood at the street door. Raids of this kind, to round up bad characters, are common enough in French Protectorates. It was the first time I had been caught in one. The girls were made to stand along one wall while the detectives checked their medical certificates. Then two or three soldiers stood to attention and gave a satisfactory account of themselves. Then I was asked for my carte d’identité. By the capitulations the French police had little authority over British subjects, and since the criminal class of Morocco mostly possessed Maltese papers, this immunity was good ground for vexation. The detectives were surly fellows, African born. Even the sacred word “tourist” failed to soften them. Where was my guide? Tourists did not visit the Moulay Abdullah alone. Where was my passport? At my hotel. The Jamai Palace? No? Tourists did not stay at the hotel I mentioned. Was I registered at the police headquarters? Yes. Very well, I must come with them. In the morning I should have the opportunity to identify myself. A hundred francs, no doubt, would have established my respectability, but my money lay with my passport in the hotel. I did not relish a night in gaol in company with the paperless characters of the Moulay Abdullah. I told them I was a friend of the British Consul. He would vouch for me. They grumbled that they had no time for special enquiries of that kind. The Chief would see about it next morning. Then when I had despaired, they despaired too. There was clearly no money coming for them. They had been in the profession long enough to know that no lasting satisfaction results from vexing British subjects. There was a police post in the quarter and they consented to telephone from it. A few minutes later I was set at liberty with a curt reminder that it was advisable to keep my passport accessible if I wanted to wander about the town at night.
I did not return to Fatima. Instead I set off for the bus stop, but the annoyances of the night were not yet over. I was halted again at the gates and the interrogation was repeated. I explained that I had already satisfied their colleagues and been discharged. We re-enacted the scene, with the fading hope of a tip as the recurring motive. Finally they, too, telephoned to the Consulate and I was free to take my bus home.
They were still serving dinner at the hotel; the same game of billiards was in progress in the bar; it was less than an hour since I went out. But that hour had been decisive; I was finished with Fez; its privacy had been violated. My weekly visit to the Consulate could never be repeated on the same terms. Twice in twenty minutes the Consul had been called to the telephone to learn that I was in the hands of the police in the Moulay Abdullah; he would not, I thought, be censorious or resentful; the vexation had been mild and the situation slightly absurd—nothing more; but when we next met our relations would be changed. Till then they had been serenely remote; we had talked of the news from England and the Moorish antiquities. We had exposed the bare minimum of ourselves; now a sudden, mutually unwelcome confidence had been forced. The bitterness lay, not in the Consul knowing the fact of my private recreations, but in his knowing that I knew he knew. It was a salient in the defensive line between us that could only be made safe by a wide rectification of frontier or by a complete evacuation. I had no friendly territory into which to withdraw. I was deployed on the dunes between the sea and the foothills. The transports riding at anchor were my sole lines of support.
In the matter of Good Conscience, I was a man of few possessions and held them at a corresponding value. As a spinster in mean lodgings fusses over her fragments of gentility—a rosewood workbox, a Spode plate, a crested teakettle—which in a house of abundance would be risked in the rough and tumble of general use, I set a price on Modesty which those of ampler virtues might justly regard as fanciful.
Next day I set off for London with my book unfinished.

IV

I travelled from spring into winter; sunlit spray in the Straits of Gibraltar changed to dark, heavy seas in the Bay of Biscay; fog off Finisterre, fog in the Channel, clear, grey weather in the Thames estuary and a horizon of factories and naked trees. We berthed in London and I drove through cold and dirty streets to meet my Uncle Andrew.
He told me the full circumstances of my father’s death; the commercial traveller, against whom a case was being brought for reckless driving, had outraged my uncle by sending a wreath of flowers to the funeral; apart from this everything had been satisfactory. My uncle passed over to me the undertaker’s receipted account; he had questioned one or two of the items and obtained an inconsiderable reduction. “I am convinced,” my uncle said, “that there is a great deal of sharp practice among these people. They trade upon the popular conception of delicacy. In fact they are the only profession who literally rob the widow and the orphan.” I thanked my uncle for having saved me £3 18s. It was a matter of principle, he said.
As I expected, I was my father’s sole heir. Besides the house and its contents I inherited £2,000 in an insurance policy which my father had taken out at the time of his marriage and, without my knowledge, kept up ever since. An injunction, in the brief will, to “provide suitably” for the servants in my father’s employment, had already been obeyed. The Jellabys had been given £250. It was clear from my father’s words that he had no conception of what a suitable provision should be. Neither had I, and I was grateful to my uncle for taking responsibility in the matter. For their part the Jellabys had expected nothing. My father, as long ago as I could remember him, was accustomed to talk with relish of his approaching death. I had heard him often admonish Jellaby, “You have joined fortune with a poor man. Make what you can while I still have my faculties. My death will be an occasion for unrelieved lamentation,” and the Jellabys, in the manner of their kind, took his words literally, kept a keen watch on all sources of perquisite, and expected nothing. Jellaby took his cheque, my uncle said, without any demonstration of gratitude or disappointment, murmuring ungraciously that it would come in quite useful. No doubt he thought no thanks were due to my uncle, for it was not his money, nor to my father, for it was no intention of his to give it. It was a last, substantial perquisite.
The Jellabys had been much in my mind, off and on, during the journey from Fez. I had fretted, in a way I have, imagining our meeting and a scene of embarrassing condolence and reminiscence, questioning the propriety of removing them immediately, if ever, from the place where they had spent so much of their lives; I even saw myself, on the Jellabys’ account, assuming my father’s way of life, settling in St. John’s Wood, entertaining small dinner parties, lunching regularly at my club and taking three weeks’ holiday abroad in the early summer. As things turned out, however, I never saw the Jellabys again. They had done their packing before the funeral, and went straight to the railway station in their black clothes. Their plans had been laid years in advance. They had put away a fair sum and invested it in Portsmouth, not, as would have been conventional, in a lodging house, but in a small shop in a poor quarter of the town which enjoyed a brisk trade in second-hand wireless apparatus. Mrs. Jellaby’s step-brother had been keeping the business warm for them and there they retired with an alacrity which was slightly shocking but highly convenient. I wrote to them some time later when I was going through my father’s possessions, to ask if they would like to have some small personal memento of him; they might value one of his sketches, I suggested, for the walls of their new home. The answer took some time in coming. When it came it was on a sheet of trade paper with a printed heading “T. JELLABY. Every Radio want promptly supplied for cash.” Mrs. Jellaby wrote the letter. They had not much room for pictures, she said, but would greatly appreciate some blankets, as it was chilly at nights in Portsmouth; she specified a particular pair which my father had bought shortly before his death; they were lying, folded in the hot cupboard.....
Uncle Andrew gave me the keys of my father’s house. I went straight there from lunching with him. The shutters were up and the curtains drawn; the water and electric light were already cut off; all this my uncle had accomplished in a few days. I stumbled among sheeted furniture to the windows and let in the daylight. I went from room to room in this way. The place still retained its own smell—an agreeable, rather stuffy atmosphere of cigar smoke and cantaloupe; a masculine smell—women had always seemed a little out of place there, as in a London club on Coronation Day.
The house was sombre but never positively shabby so that, I suppose, various imperceptible renovations and replacements must have occurred from time to time. It looked what it was, the house of an unfashionable artist of the 1880s. The curtains and chair-covers were of indestructible Morris tapestry; there were Dutch tiles round the fireplaces; Levantine rugs on the floors; on the walls, Arundel prints, photographs from the old Masters, and majolica dishes. The furniture, now shrouded, had the inimitable air of having been in the same place for a generation; it was a harmonious, unobtrusive jumble of inherited rosewood and mahogany, and of inexpensive collected pieces of carved German oak, Spanish walnut, English chests and dressers, copper ewers and brass candlesticks. Every object was familiar and yet so much a part of its surroundings that later, when they came to be moved, I found a number of things which I barely recognized. Books, of an antiquated sort, were all over the house in a variety of hanging, standing and revolving shelves.
I opened the french windows in my father’s study and stepped down into the garden. There was little of spring to be seen here. The two plane trees were bare; under the sooty laurels last year’s leaves lay rotting. It was never a garden of any character. Once, before the flats came, we used to dine there sometimes, in extreme discomfort under the catalpa tree; for years now it had been a no-man’s-land isolating the studio at the further end; on one side, behind a trellis, were some neglected frames and beds where my father had once tried to raise French vegetables. The mottled concrete of the flats, with its soil pipes and fire escapes and its rash of iron-framed casement windows, shut out half the sky. The tenants of these flats were forbidden, in their leases, to do their laundry, but the owners had long since despaired of a genteel appearance, and you could tell which of the rooms were occupied by the stockings hanging to dry along the windowsills.
In his death my father’s privacy was still respected and no one had laid dust-sheets in the studio. “Too Big?” stood as he had left it on the easel. More than half was finished. My father made copious and elaborate studies for his pictures and worked quickly when he came to their final stage, painting over a monochrome sketch, methodically, in fine detail, left to right across the canvas as though he were lifting the backing of a child’s “transfer.” “Do your thinking first,” he used to tell the Academy students. “Don’t muddle it out on the canvas. Have the whole composition clear in your head before you start,” and if anyone objected that this was seldom the method of the greatest masters, he would say, “You’re here to become Royal Academicians, not great masters. This was the way Ford Madox Brown worked, and it will be a great day for English art when one of you is half as good as he was. If you want to write books on Art, trot round Europe studying the Rubenses. If you want to learn to paint, watch me.” The four or five square feet of finished painting were a monument of my father’s art. There had been a time when I had scant respect for it. Lately I had come to see that it was more than a mere matter of dexterity and resolution. He had a historic position for he completed a period of English painting that through other circumstances had never, until him, come to maturity. Phrases, as though for an obituary article, came to my mind—“... fulfilling the broken promise of the young Millais ... Winterhalter suffused with the spirit of Dickens ... English painting as it might have been, had there not been any Aesthetic Movement ... the age of the Prince Consort in contrast to the age of Victoria ...” and with the phrases my esteem for my father took form and my sense of loss became tangible and permanent.
No good comes of this dependence on verbal forms. It saves nothing in the end. Suffering is none the less acute and much more lasting when it is put into words. In the house my memories had been all of myself—of the countless homecomings and departures of thirty-three years, of adolescence like a stained tablecloth—but in the studio my thoughts were of my father and grief, nearly a week delayed, overtook and overwhelmed me. It had been delayed somewhat by the strangeness of my surroundings and the business of travel, but most by this literary habit; it had lacked words. Now the words came; I began, in my mind, to lament my father with prose cadences and classical allusions, addressing, as it were, a funeral oration to my own literary memories, and sorrow, dammed and canalized, flowed fast.
For the civilized man there are none of those swift transitions of joy and pain which possess the savage; words form slowly like pus about his hurts; there are no clean wounds for him; first a numbness, then a long festering, then a scar ever ready to reopen. Not until they have assumed the livery of the defence can his emotions pass through the lines; sometimes they come massed in a wooden horse, sometimes as single spies, but there is always a Fifth Column among the garrison ready to receive them.
Sabotage behind the lines, a blind raised and lowered at a lighted window, a wire cut, a bolt loosened, a file disordered—that is how the civilized man is undone.
I returned to the house and darkened the rooms once more, relaid the dust-sheets I had lifted and left everything as it had been.

V

The manuscript of Murder at Mountrichard Castle lay on the chest of drawers in my club bedroom, reproaching me morning, evening and night. It was promised for publication in June, and I had never before disappointed my publishers. This year, however, I should have to ask grace for a postponement. I made two attempts on it, bearing the pile of foolscap to an upper room of the club which was known as the library and used by the elder members for sleeping between luncheon and tea. But I found it impossible to take up the story with any interest; I grew peevish about the time sequence, and half inclined to scrap all I had written and start anew; the murderess had had too much luck on the morning of the crime and the police were being unnaturally obtuse; they had reached a stage in the investigation when they must either tumble to the truth within six pages or miss it forever; I could not go on piling up clue and counterplot; why should not the wrong man get hanged for a change or the murderess walk in her sleep and proclaim the whole story? I had gone stale on it. So I went to my publisher and tried to explain.
“I have been writing for over eight years,” I said, “and am nearing a climacteric.”
“I don’t quite follow,” said Mr. Benwell anxiously.
“I mean a turning point in my career.”
“Oh, dear, I hope you’re not thinking of making a contract elsewhere?”
“No, no, I mean that I feel in danger of turning into a stock bestseller.”
“If I may say so in very imminent danger,” said Benwell, and he made me a kind of little bow from the seat of his swivel chair and smirked in the wry fashion people sometimes assume when they feel they have said something elaborately polite; a smile normally kept for his women writers; the word “climacteric” had clearly upset him.
“I mean, I am in danger of becoming purely a technical expert. Take my father —” Mr. Benwell gave a deferential grunt and quickly changed his expression to one of gravity suitable to the mention of someone recently dead. “He spent his whole life perfecting his technique. It seems to me I am in danger of becoming mechanical, turning out year after year the kind of book I know I can write well. I feel I have got as good as I ever can be at this particular sort of writing. I need new worlds to conquer.” I added this last remark in compassion for Mr. Benwell, whose gravity had deepened to genuine concern. I believed he would feel the easier for a little facetiousness—erroneously, for Mr. Benwell had suffered similar, too serious conversations with other writers than me.
“You’ve not been writing poetry in Morocco?”
“No, no.”
“Sooner or later almost all my novelists come to me and say they have written poetry. I can’t think why. It does them infinite harm. Only last week Roger Simmonds was here with a kind of a play. You never saw such a thing. All the characters were parts of a motor-car—not in the least funny.”
“Oh, it won’t be anything like that,” I said. “Just some new technical experiments. I don’t suppose the average reader will notice them at all.”
“I hope not,” said Mr. Benwell. “I mean, now you’ve found your public ... well, look at Simmonds—magneto and sparking plugs and camshaft all talking in verse about communism. I don’t know what to do about it at all..... But I can count on your new novel for the autumn?”
“Yes.”
“And we can list it as ‘crime’?”
“Certainly.”
Mr. Benwell saw me to the top of the stairs. “Interesting place, Morocco,” he said. “The French are doing it very well.”
I knew what he was thinking: “The trouble about Plant is, he’s come in for money.”
In a way he was right. The money my father had left me and the proceeds which I expected from the sale of the house, relieved me of the need to work for two or three years; once the necessity was removed there was little motive for writing. It was a matter of pure athletics to go on doing something merely because one did it well. This tedium was the price I must pay for my privacy, for the choice, which until lately had been a matter of special pride with me, of a trade which had nothing of myself in it. The heap of foolscap began to disgust me. Twice I hid it under my shirts, twice the club valet unearthed it and laid it in the open. I had nowhere to keep things, except in this little hired room above the traffic.
As I returned from seeing Mr. Benwell, the club secretary waylaid me. Under Rule XLV, he reminded me, members might not occupy bedrooms for more than five consecutive nights. He did not mind stretching a point, he said, but if a member from out of town applied for a room and found them all engaged and wrote to the committee about it, where would he, the secretary, be? I promised to move out as soon as I could; I had a lot to attend to at the moment; perhaps he had seen that my father had just died.
We both knew that it was unfair to bring this up, but it won me my point. For the time being I had lodging—a bed, a washbasin, a window in St. James’s, a telephone, space enough for a fortnight’s wardrobe. But I must start looking about for something more secure.
This sense of homelessness was new to me. Before I had moved constantly from one place to another; every few weeks I would descend upon St. John’s Wood with a trunk, leave some books, collect others, put away summer clothes for the winter; seldom as I slept there, the house in St. John’s Wood had been my headquarters and my home; that earth had now been stopped and I thought, not far away, I could hear the hounds.
My worries at this period became symbolized in a single problem; what to do with my hats. I owned what now seemed a multitude of them, of one sort and another; two of them of silk—the tall hat I took to weddings and a second I had bought some years earlier when I thought for a time that I was going to take to fox-hunting; there were a bowler, a panama, a black, a brown and a grey soft hat, a green hat from Salzburg, a sombrero, some tweed caps for use on board ship and in trains—all these had accumulated from time to time and all, with the possible exception of the sombrero, were more or less indispensable. Was I doomed for the rest of my life to travel everywhere with this preposterous collection? At the moment they were, most of them, in St. John’s Wood, but, any day now, the negotiations for the sale might be finished and the furniture removed, sold or sent to store.
Somewhere to hang up my hat, that was what I needed.
I consulted Roger Simmonds who was lunching with me. I felt as though I had known Roger all my life; actually I had first met him in our second year at Oxford; we edited an undergraduate weekly together and had been close associates ever since. He was one of the very few people I corresponded with when I was away; we met constantly when I was in London. Sometimes I even stayed with him, for he and half a dozen others constituted a kind of set. We had all known each other intimately over a number of years, had from time to time passed on girls from one to the other, borrowed and lent freely. When we were together we drank more and talked more boastfully than we normally did. We had grown rather to dislike one another; certainly when any two or three of us were alone, we blackguarded the rest, and if asked about them on neutral ground I denied their friendship. “Blades?” I would say. “Yes, I used to see a lot of him, but we never seem to meet now he’s in Parliament” or “Jimmie Rendall? Yes, I knew him well. Then he got taken up by Lord Monomark and that is the end of all friendship.” About Roger I used to say, “I don’t think he’s interested in anything except politics now.”
This was more or less true. In the late twenties he set up as a writer and published some genuinely funny novels on the strength of which he filled a succession of rather dazzling jobs with newspapers and film companies, but lately he had married an unknown heiress, joined the Communist Party and become generally respectable.
“I never wear a hat now I am married,” said Roger virtuously. “Lucy says they’re kulak. Besides I was beginning to lose my hair.”
“My dear Roger, you’ve been bald as a coot for ten years. But it isn’t only a question of hats. There are overcoats.”
“Only in front. It’s as thick as anything at the back. How many overcoats have you got?”
“Four, I think.”
“Too many.”
We discussed it at length and decided it was possible to manage with three.
“Workers pawn their overcoats in June and take them out again in October,” Roger said. He wanted to talk about his play, Internal Combustion. “The usual trouble with ideological drama,” he said, “is that they’re too mechanical. I mean the characters are economic types, not individuals, and as long as they look and speak like individuals it’s bad art. D’you see what I mean?”
“I do, indeed.”
“Human beings without human interest.”
“Very true. I ...”
“Well, I’ve cut human beings out altogether.”
“Sounds rather like an old-fashioned ballet.”
“Exactly,” Roger said with great pleasure. “It is an old-fashioned ballet. I knew you’d understand. Poor old Benwell couldn’t. The Finsbury International Theatre are sitting on it now, and if it’s orthodox—and I think it is—they may put it on this summer if Lucy finds the money.”
“Is she keen too?”
“Well, not very, as a matter of fact. You see, she’s having a baby and that seems to keep her interested at the moment.”
“But to return to the question of my hats ...”
“I tell you what. Why don’t you buy a nice quiet house in the country. I shall want somewhere to stay while this baby is born.”
There was the rub. It was precisely this fear that had been working in my mind for days, the fear of making myself a sitting shot to the world. It lay at the root of the problem of privacy; the choice which torments to the verge of mania, between perpetual flight and perpetual siege; and the unresolved universal paradox of losing things in order to find them.
“Surely that is odd advice from a communist?”
Roger became suddenly wary; he had been caught and challenged in loose talk. “Ideally, of course, it would be,” he said. “But I daresay that in practice, for the first generation, we shall allow a certain amount of private property where its value is purely sentimental. Anyway, any investment you make now is bound to be temporary. That’s why I feel no repugnance about living on Lucy’s money ...” Marxist ethics kept him talking until we had finished luncheon. Over the coffee he referred to Ingres as a “bourgeois” painter. When he left me I sat for some time in the leather armchair finishing my cigar. The club was emptying as the younger members went back to their work and their elders padded off to the library for the afternoon nap. I belonged to neither world. I had nothing whatever to do. At three in the afternoon my friends would all be busy and, in any case, I did not want to see them. I was ready for a new deal. I climbed to my room, began re-reading the early chapters of Murder at Mountrichard Castle, put it from me and faced the boredom of an afternoon in London. Then the telephone rang and the porter said, “Mr. Thurston is downstairs to see you.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Thurston. He says he has an appointment.”
“I don’t know anything about him. Will you ask what he wants?”
A pause: “Mr. Thurston says will you see him very particular.”
“Very well, I’ll come down.”
A tall young man in a raincoat was standing in the hall. He had reddish hair and an unusually low, concave forehead. He looked as though he had come to sell some hopelessly unsuitable commodity and had already despaired of success.
“Mr. Thurston?” He took my hand in a savage grip. “You say you have an appointment with me. I am afraid I don’t remember it.”
“No, well, you see I thought we ought to have a yarn, and you know how suspicious these porter-fellows are at clubs. I knew you wouldn’t mind my stretching a point.” He spoke with a kind of fierce jauntiness. “I had to give up my club. Couldn’t run to it.”
“Perhaps you will tell me what I can do for you.”
“I used to belong to the Wimpole. I expect you know it?”
“I’m not sure that I do.”
“No? You would have liked it. I could have taken you there and introduced you to some of the chaps.”
“That, I gather, is now impossible.”
“Yes. It’s a pity. There are some good scouts there. I daresay you know the Batchelors?”
“Yes. Were you a member there, too?”
“Yes, at least not exactly, but a great pal of mine was—Jimmie Grainger. I expect you’ve often run across Jimmie?”
“No, I don’t think I have.”
“Funny. Jimmie knows almost everyone. You’d like him. I must bring you together.” Having failed to establish contact, Thurston seemed now to think that responsibility for the conversation devolved on me.
“Mr. Thurston,” I said, “is there anything particular you wished to say to me? Because otherwise ...”
“I was coming to that,” said Thurston. “Isn’t there somewhere more private where we could go and talk?”
It was a reasonable suggestion. Two page boys sat on a bench beside us, the hall porter watched us curiously from behind his glass screen, two or three members passing through paused by the tape machine to take a closer look at my peculiar visitor. I was tolerably certain that he was not one of the enthusiasts for my work who occasionally beset me, but was either a beggar or a madman or both; at another time I should have sent him away, but that afternoon, with no prospect of other interest, I hesitated. “Be a good scout,” he urged.
There is at my club a nondescript little room of depressing aspect where members give interviews to the press, go through figures with their accountants, and in general transact business which they think would be conspicuous in the more public rooms. I took Thurston there.
“Snug little place,” he said, surveying this dismal place. “O.K. if I smoke?”
“Perfectly.”
“Have one?”
“No thank you.”
He lit a cigarette, drew a deep breath of smoke, gazed at the ceiling and, as though coming to the point, said, “Quite like the old Wimpole.”
My heart sank. “Mr. Thurston,” I said, “you have surely not troubled to come here simply in order to talk to me about your club.”
“No. But you see it’s rather awkward. Don’t exactly know how to begin. I thought I might lead up to it naturally. But I realize that your time’s valuable, Mr. Plant, so I may as well admit right out that I owe you an apology.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. I’m here under false pretences. My name isn’t Thurston.”
“No?”
“No. I’d better tell you who I am, hadn’t I?”
“If you wish to.”
“Well, here goes. I’m Arthur Atwater.” The name was spoken with such an air of bravado, with such confidence of it making a stir, that I felt bewildered. It meant absolutely nothing to me. Where and how should I have heard it? Was this a fellow-writer, a distant cousin, a popular athlete? Atwater? Atwater? I repeated it to myself. No association was suggested. My visitor meanwhile seemed unconscious of how flat his revelation had fallen, and was talking away vehemently:
“Now you see why I couldn’t give my name. It’s awfully decent of you to take it like this. I might have known you were a good scout. I’ve been through Hell I can tell you ever since it happened. I haven’t slept a wink. It’s been terrible. You know how it is when one’s nerve’s gone. I shouldn’t be fit for work now even if they’d kept me on in the job. Not that I care about that. Let them keep their lousy job. I told the manager that to his face. I wasn’t brought up and educated to sell stockings. I ought to have gone abroad long ago. There’s no opportunity in England now, unless you’ve got influence or are willing to suck up to a lot of snobs. You get a fair chance out there in the colonies where one man’s as good as another and no questions asked.”
I can seldom bear to let a misstatement pass uncorrected. “Believe me, Mr. Atwater,” I said. “You have a totally mistaken view of colonial life. You will find people just as discriminating and inquisitive there as they are here.”
“Not where I’m going,” he said. “I’m clearing right out. I’m fed up. This case hanging over me and nothing to do all day except think about the accident. It was an accident too. No one can try and hang the blame on me and get away with it. I was on my proper side of the road and I hooted twice. It wasn’t a Belisha crossing. It was my road. The old man just wouldn’t budge. He saw me coming, looked straight at me, as if he was daring me to drive into him. Well, I thought I’d give him a fright. You know how it is when you’re driving all day. You get fed to the teeth with people making one get out of their way all the time. I like to wake them up now and then when there’s no copper near, and make them jump for it. It seems like an hour now, but it all happened in two seconds. I kept on, waiting for him to skip, and he kept on, strolling across the road as if he’d bought it. It wasn’t till I was right on top of him I realized he didn’t intend to move. Then it was too late to stop. I put on my brakes and tried to swerve. Even then I might have missed him if he’d stopped, but he just kept on walking right into me and the mudguard got him. That’s how it was. No one can blame it on me.”
It was just as my Uncle Andrew had described it.
“Mr. Atwater,” I said, “do I understand that you are the man who killed my father?”
“Don’t put it that way, Mr. Plant. I feel sore enough about it. He was a great artist. I read about him in the papers. It makes it worse, his having been a great artist. There’s too little beauty in the world as it is. I should have liked to be an artist myself, only the family went broke. Father took me away from school young, just when I might have got into the eleven. Since then I’ve had nothing but odd jobs. I’ve never had a real chance. I want to start again, somewhere else.”
I interrupted him, frigidly I thought. “And why, precisely, have you come to me?”
But nothing could disabuse him of the idea that I was well-disposed. “I knew I could rely on you,” he said. “And I’ll never forget it, not as long as I live. I’ve thought everything out. I’ve got a pal who went out to Rhodesia; I think it was Rhodesia. Somewhere in Africa, anyway. He’ll give me a shakedown till I get on my feet. He’s a great fellow. Won’t he be surprised when I walk in on him! All I need is my passage money—third class, I don’t care. I’m used to roughing it these days—and something to make a start with. I could do it on fifty pounds.”
“Mr. Atwater,” I said, “have I misunderstood you, or are you asking me to break the law by helping you to evade your trial and also give you a large sum of money?”
“You’ll get it back, every penny of it.”
“And our sole connection is the fact that, through pure insolence, you killed my father.”
“Oh, well, if you feel like that about it ...”
“I am afraid you greatly overrate my good nature.”
“Tell you what. I’ll make you a sporting offer. You give me fifty pounds now and I’ll pay it back in a year plus another fifty pounds to any charity you care to name. How’s that?”
“I’m afraid there is no point in our discussing the matter. Will you please go?”
“Certainly I’ll go. If that’s how you take it, I’m sorry I ever came. It’s typical of the world,” he said, rising huffily. “Everyone’s all over you till you get into a spot of trouble. It’s ‘good old Arthur’ while you’re in funds. Then, when you need a pal it’s ‘you overrate my good nature, Mr. Atwater.’”
I followed him across the room, but before we reached the door his mood had changed. “You don’t understand,” he said. “They may send me to prison for this. That’s  that happens in this country to a man earning his living. If I’d been driving my own Rolls-Royce they’d all be touching their caps. ‘Very regrettable accident,’ they’d be saying. ‘Hope your nerves have not been shocked, Mr. Atwater’—but to a poor man driving a two seater ... Mr. Plant, your father wouldn’t have wanted me sent to prison.”
“He often expressed his belief that all motorists of all classes should be treated as criminals.”
Atwater received this with disconcerting enthusiasm. “And he was quite right,” he cried in louder tones than can ever have been used in that room except perhaps during spring-cleaning. “I’m fed to the teeth with motor-cars. I’m fed to the teeth with civilization. I want to farm. That’s a man’s life.”
“Mr. Atwater, will nothing I say persuade you that your aspirations are no concern of mine?”
“There’s no call to be sarcastic. If I’m not wanted, you’ve only to say so straight.”
“You are not wanted.”
“Thank you,” he said. “That’s all I wanted to know.”
I got him through the door, but halfway across the front hall he paused again. “I spent my last ten bob on a wreath.”
“I’m sorry you did that. I’ll refund it.”
He turned on me with a look of scorn. “Plant,” he said, “I didn’t think it was in you to say a thing like that. Those flowers were a sacred thing. You wouldn’t understand that, would you? I’d have starved to send them. I may have sunk pretty low, but I have some decency left, and that’s more than some people can say even if they belong to posh clubs and look down on fellows who earn a decent living. Good-bye, Plant. We shall not meet again. D’you mind if I don’t shake hands.”
That was how he left me, but it was not the last of him. That evening I was called to the telephone to speak to a Mr. Long. Familiar tones, jaunty once more, greeted me. “That you, Plant? Atwater here. Excuse the alias, won’t you. I say, I hope you didn’t take offence at the way I went off today. I’ve been thinking, and I see you were perfectly right. May I come round for another yarn?”
“No.”
“Tomorrow, then?”
“No.”
“Well, when shall I come?”
“I’m afraid I can’t see you.”
“No, I quite understand, old man. I’d feel the same myself. It’s only this. In the circumstances I’d like to accept your very sporting offer to pay for those flowers. I’ll call round for the money if you like or will you send it?”
“I’ll send it.”
“Care of the Holborn Post Office finds me. Fifteen bob, they cost.”
“You said ten this afternoon.”
“Did I? I meant fifteen.”
“I will send you ten shillings. Good-bye.”
“Good scout,” said Atwater.
So I put a note in an envelope and sent it to the man who killed my father.

VI

Time dragged; April, May, the beginning of June. I left my club and visited my Uncle Andrew for an uneasy week; then back to the club. I took the manuscript of Murder at Mountrichard Castle to the seaside, to an hotel where I once spent three months in great contentment writing The Frightened Footman: they gave me the best suite, at this time of year, for five guineas a week. The forlorn, out-of-season atmosphere was just as I knew it—the shuttered ballroom, the gusts of rain on the roof of the “sun lounge,” the black esplanade, the crocodiles of private-school boys on their way to football, the fanatical bathers hissing like ostlers as they limped over the shingle into the breakers; the visitors’ high church, the visitors’ low church, and the church of the residents—all empty. Everything was as it had been three years before, but in a week I was back in London with nothing written. It was no good until I got things settled, I told myself; but “getting things settled” merely meant waiting until the house was sold and the lawyers had finished with the will. I took furnished rooms in Ebury Street and waited there, my thoughts more and more turning towards the country and the need of a house there, a permanent home of my own possession. I began to study the house-agents’ advertisements on the back page of The Times. Finally I notified two or three firms of my needs, and was soon amply supplied with specifications and orders-to-view.
During this time I received a call from young Mr. Godley of Goodchild and Godley. There was nothing at all artistic about young Mr. Godley. He looked and spoke like a motor salesman; his galleries were his “shop” and their contents “stuff” and “things.” He would have seemed at ease, if we had met casually, but the long preamble of small talk—references to mutual acquaintances, holiday resorts abroad, sport, politics, a “first-class man for job lots of wine”—suggested uncertainty; he was trying to decide how to take me. Finally he came to the point.
“Your father used to do a certain amount of work for us, you know.”
“I know.”
“Restorations mostly. Occasionally he used to make a facsimile for a client who was selling a picture to America and wanted one to take its place. That kind of work.”
“Often they were his own compositions.”
“Well, yes, I believe a few of them were. What we call in the trade ‘pastiche,’ you know.”
“I saw some of them,” I said.
“He was wonderfully gifted.”
“Wonderfully.”
A pause. Mr. Godley twiddled his Old Harrovian tie. “His work with us was highly confidential.”
“Of course.”
“I was wondering—our firm was, whether you had been through his papers yet. I mean, did he keep any records of his work or anything of the kind?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t been through his things yet. I should think it quite likely. He was very methodical in some ways.”
“The papers are all in your own hands?”
“So far as I know.”
“If anything of the kind was to turn up, we could rely on your discretion. I mean it would do no one any good ... I mean you would want your father to be remembered by his exhibited work.”
“You need not worry,” I said.
“Splendid. I was sure you would understand. We had a spot of unpleasantness with his man.”
“Jellaby?”
“Yes. They both came to see us, husband and wife, immediately after the accident. You might almost say they tried to blackmail us.”
“Did you give them anything?”
“No. Goodchild saw them and I imagine he gave them a good flea in the ear. They had nothing to go on.”
“Odd pair the Jellabys.”
“I don’t think we shall be worried by them again.”
“Nor by me. Blackmail is not quite in my line.”
“No, no, my dear fellow, of course, I didn’t for a moment mean to suggest ... Ha, ha, ha.”
“Ha, ha, ha.”
“But if anything should turn up ...”
“I shall be discreet about it.”
“Or any studies for the paintings he did for us.”
“Anything incriminating,” I said.
“Trade secrets,” said Mr. Godley.
“Trade secrets,” I repeated.
That was almost the only amusing incident in my London season.
The sale of the house in St. John’s Wood proved more irksome than I had expected. Ten years before the St. John’s Wood Residential Amenities Company who built the neighbouring flats had offered my father £6,000 for his freehold; he had preserved the letter, which was signed, “Alfred Hardcastle, Chairman.” Their successors, the Hill Crest Court Exploitation Co., now offered me £2,500; their letter was also signed Mr. Hardcastle. I refused, and put the house into an agent’s hands; after two months they reported one offer—of £2,500 from a Mr. Hardcastle, the managing director of St. John’s Wood Residential Estates Ltd. “In the circumstances,” they wrote, “we consider this a satisfactory price.” The circumstances were that no one who liked that kind of house would tolerate its surroundings; having dominated the district, the flats could make their own price. I accepted it and went to sign the final papers at Mr. Hardcastle’s office, expecting an atmosphere of opulence and bluster; instead, I found a modest pair of rooms, one of the unlet flats at the top of the building; on the door were painted the names of half a dozen real estate companies and the woodwork bore traces of other names which had stood there and been obliterated; the chairman opened the door himself and let me in. He was, as my father had supposed, a Jew; a large, neat, middle-aged, melancholy, likeable fellow, who before coming to business, praised my father’s painting with what I believe was complete sincerity.
There was no other visible staff; just Mr. Hardcastle sitting among his folders and filing cabinets, telling me how he had felt when he lost his own father. Throughout all the vicissitudes of the flats this man had controlled them and lived for them; little companies had gone into liquidation; little, allied companies had been floated; the names of nephews and brothers-in-law had come and gone at the head of the notepaper; stocks had been written down and up, new shares had been issued, bonuses and dividends declared, mortgages transferred and foreclosed, little blocks of figures moved from one balance sheet to another, all in this single room. For the last ten years a few thousand pounds capital had been borrowed and lent backwards and forwards from one account to another and, somehow, working sixteen hours a day, doing his own typing and accountancy, Mr. Hardcastle had sustained life, kept his shoes polished and his trousers creased, had his hair cut regularly and often, bought occasional concert tickets on family anniversaries and educated, he told me, a son in the United States and a daughter in Belgium. The company to which I finally conveyed my freehold was a brand-new one, registered for the occasion and soon, no doubt, doomed to lose its identity in the kaleidoscopic changes of small finance. The cheque, signed by Mr. Hardcastle, was duly honoured, and when the sum, largely depleted by my solicitor, was paid into my account, I found that with the insurance money added and my overdraft taken away, I had a credit balance for the first time in my life, of rather more than £3,500. With this I set about planning a new life.
Mr. Hardcastle had been willing to wait a long time to make his purchase; once it was done, however, his plans developed with surprising speed. Workmen were cutting the trees and erecting a screen of hoarding while the vans were removing the furniture to store; a week later I came to visit the house; it was a ruin; it might have been mined. Presumably there is some method in the business of demolition; none was apparent to a layman, the roof was off, the front was down, and on one side the basement lay open; on the other the walls still stood their full height, and the rooms, three-sided like stage settings, exposed their Morris papers, flapping loose in the wind where the fireplaces and window frames had been torn out. The studio had disappeared, leaving a square of rubble to mark its site; new shoots appeared here and there in the trampled mess of the garden. A dozen or more workmen were there, two or three of them delving away in a leisurely fashion, the rest leaning on their tools and talking; it seemed inconceivable that in this fashion they could have done so much in such little time. The air was full of flying grit. It was no place to linger. When next I passed that way, a great concrete wing covered the site; it was cleaner than the rest of the block and by a miscalculation of the architects, the windows were each a foot or two below the general line; but, like them, were devoid of curtains.