Stop Press

by Michael Innes

  ‘Ideas you are certain you never wrote down – not even in a rough note? Ideas you are certain you never mentioned in casual conversation; never mentioned to anybody?’ Appleby, feeling that at any moment Mr Eliot might slip from his grasp, was remorselessly urgent.

  ‘Exactly that. I never discuss my plans for the books with anybody; so many things are better worth talking about.’ Mr Eliot smiled in what might so easily – it struck Appleby – be considered his superior amateur way. ‘I never even discussed them with my secretary. And I never make notes; no note that I could make would do other than fill me with dismay a week later. Except of course’ – Mr Eliot was suddenly wistful – ‘my notes on Pope. I really think they are beginning to come together.’ Mr Eliot’s sigh belied this confidence.

  ‘Ideas’, said Appleby carefully, ‘sufficiently distinctive not to be mere shots in the dark?’

  ‘Definitely so. Tolerably original ideas come to me, for some reason, readily enough. I assure you it would all be too great a bore if they did not. The ideas the joker showed command of simply come into my head and stay in storage there. When I need them I use them… We must really try to make this theatre a little more attractive for next year. It seems only fair when all these people are good enough to come down.’

  ‘You are familiar’ – Appleby fired off Winter’s idea – ‘with the phenomenon which psychologists call paramnesia?’

  ‘Oh, that, I thought of that very early on. It won’t at all do.’

  Appleby’s impulse to shake him became very pronounced indeed. ‘And having abandoned metaphysics and rejected morbid psychology’, he said, ‘have you any explanation of this extraordinary state of affairs?’

  Mr Eliot opened his eyes in exaggerated surprise; just such a prep-school trick in Timmy, Appleby reflected, must have infuriated Winter often enough. ‘Dear me, yes. I can’t think how it escaped me before. It is perfectly simply explained by a scientifically attested fact. Wedges published a book about it only the other day by a Fellow of the Royal Society. What the joker has command of is plainly telepathy. Mind-reading. The thing has been proved… I must really go round and say a civil word to some of these excellent souls.’

  And as casually but irresistibly as a piece of pack-ice Mr Eliot broke away. He paused, however, at a couple of paces. ‘I think the Royal Society,’ he said. ‘And virtually proved.’

  6

  Mr Eliot, in fact, did not believe in telepathy and he could be quite as irritating as his son. Yet by this odd interview in the theatre Appleby was finally less irritated than impressed. It was as if Mr Eliot, hitherto amiably shuttlecocked hither and thither, had subtly taken to himself an impetus and an objective of his own. Perhaps it was only his natural resilience once more; perhaps he was simply deriving momentum from the party, now briskly moving towards its crowning fun. But Appleby felt that Mr Eliot’s confidence, so unexpectedly begotten by Joseph out of the Renoir, was something other than this. The creator of the Spider, for reasons unknown, had come to feel that he was on his game; that the problematical situation at Rust had fallen under his control. Appleby tried to think of anything besides the history of Belinda’s picture which might have contributed to this result. The clocks, the visitors from the Abbey, the pigs; these had been the principal incidents of the day and there was obvious illumination in none of them. Mr Eliot, again, had repudiated with urbanity and lucidity the disturbing convictions of Dr Chown: was he simply the lighter for having disburdened himself of this perilous stuff? Or did he feel that he had thereby turned the flank of what might be substantially the truth?

  For more than one reason now, Appleby wanted to tackle Chown. Chown’s reading of the situation – even in the sketch of it offered by Mr Eliot – was at least the most economical and convincing in the field. It was conceivable that Mr Eliot was being pursued by the persistent malice of nobody; it was conceivable that he was persecuting himself. It seemed at first glance an unlikely form of madness, but Appleby knew that in the experience of one like Chown such antics of the bewildered spirit must be common enough. In every asylum there are people whose right hand knows not what their left hand does. Indeed the sanest of us, if his habit be introspective, may sometimes detect strange games of hide-and-seek conducting themselves within the confines of his own personality. Was a Mr Eliot who was doomed to the bin persecuting himself? Or – conceivably – was a perfectly sane Mr Eliot laying obscure foundations for the persecuting of somebody else?

  Confronted by this latter question, Appleby found that he had a curious confidence in Mr Eliot’s veracity. Or in the veracity, at least, of the familiar Mr Eliot – and there was no real evidence that another existed. His host’s belief in telepathy had been distinguishably enough a sport of fancy; nevertheless an instinct for veracity had made him underline the point in an ironical addendum. Appleby believed in the substantial truthfulness of any but a morbid, subliminal, and merely hypothetical Mr Eliot; he also believed, he found, in the essential rationality of the same conscious man. He believed in short – and here was the inescapable point – that Mr Eliot had bewilderingly encountered, both in the adulterated manuscript of Murder at Midnight and in last night’s incident of the Birthday Party, matter which he had thought of as never having passed the boundaries of his own unspoken and unwritten thought.

  Amid all the huddle of incidents at Rust, and amid the advancing shadows of complications which Appleby suspected as yet to come, this single problem stood out clear. If Mr Eliot was speaking not merely what he believed to be the truth but the truth itself – then how could the trick be worked? It was a speculative question. And Appleby found the contemplation of it interfering with a practical duty.

  Confident and quizzical, Mr Eliot had revealed himself as in a state of mild exhilaration. And in this Appleby had felt the stir of something known to himself: the sense of danger and the quickened consciousness which follows. Mr Eliot was backing himself to get the whip hand in a tight place.

  Murder at Midnight. It was still likely that Patricia had been right; that the situation at Rust was perilous as well as mysterious; and that Mr Eliot was chiefly endangered. Appleby’s confidence in this issue was far from absolute; the thing might continue at a level of rather futile malice. But he was at least more confident of the reality of the danger than of Mr Eliot’s ability to counter it. The author of thirty-seven mysterious thrills might so easily bank too heavily on what were only a literary resourceful and a theoretical guile. In short, Mr Eliot had to be guarded.

  Appleby had become a policeman long before the honourable calling of Dogberry and Verges had entered in England on its gentlemanlike phase. He liked to feel – specialist in a key place though he had become – that the simplicities of his craft remained within his command. He liked to feel that if stood up in a lavender tie to guard a table of wedding-presents those presents would be as safe as in a vault; that if he were employed as bodyguard to a sinful public person that public person might forget his sins. And he liked to think now that Mr Eliot was safer than he knew. Only the job took more vigilance than a man with an abstract problem could readily spare.

  He could never decide whether it was indeed surprising that, with this double task upon him, he remembered so much of what Winter had to say on art.

  ‘Miss Cavey and I’, said Winter, ‘are endeavouring to define the nature of bad art. And we have thought it necessary to begin with some definition of art itself. It was said by Proust that the pleasure the artist gives is that of enabling us to know another universe. Art is the construction of another universe. I know you will all think it very interesting that Miss Cavey agrees with Proust.’

  Winter presumably found the prospect of the approaching revels more tiresome than any number of manisfestations by the Spider. He had collected a little audience and was conversing with that air of personal shyness and intellectual audacity which his kind affect. Miss Cavey, who had recovered from her distrust of the morning and who was keyed up to the limelight presently to fall
on her in the theatre, nodded with unnerving intensity. ‘Yes,’ she said with finality, ‘Proust is right.’

  ‘Miss Cavey’, continued Winter innocently, ‘is an authority on our topic, and the debate is all hers. But I would remark that it is easy, following our first definition, to remark what is not art. The artist does not enable us to know this universe. Documentation is not art; reporting is not art, however accurate and devoted. Were Miss Cavey herself to return from her studies of the rural temperament and simply transfer her experiences to paper the result would be very far from art. To achieve art, other forces have to come into play.’

  ‘There is’, said Miss Cavey, clasping her hands happily over her stomach, ‘the spiritual side.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Winter – and folded his hands with unobtrusive wickedness in the same way. ‘There is the shaping power; the esenoplastic power; the esemplastic power, as the shaky scholarship of Coleridge called it.’ At this abysmal professional wallow the audience perceptibly thinned; Appleby, for whom Winter’s disquisitions had a curious fascination, was one of those who lingered. ‘Our mere experience is not art. And yet, again in the aphorism of Proust, the Muses are the daughters of Memory, and there is no art without recollection. But – and here is the point – inaccurate recollection. Miss Cavey recollects her experiences with the rustics, but recollects them – and how thankful we must be! – with the divine inaccuracy of the artist. It is this that makes her books so rum, so distinctly unlike anything this universe can offer. And that is the hallmark of art – which we may define, approximately in the words of Wordsworth, as commotion misrecollected in tranquillity. Now, bad art–’

  Appleby sacrificed the opportunity of learning about bad art to a dash after Dr Chown, whom he had noticed in isolation at the other end of the room. From Winter’s lecture he departed not uninstructed. Miss Cavey had been baited sufficiently for one day and this added mockery was a little less than decent; it was the product of frayed nerves and prosecuted by someone whose sense of decorum faltered with his sense of security. One other person at least in the party – and an intelligent one at that – was looking forward with some uneasiness to the onset of night. Appleby guessed that Winter would be talking more persistently at nine than at eight and more wildly at eleven than at ten.

  Casually he approached Chown. ‘Does the academic mind’, he asked – and because Winter had been dominating the room the allusion was clear – ‘work most fluently when scared and apprehensive?’

  ‘The intelligence, my dear Mr Appleby, is commonly more fertile when under emotional stir. But different emotional states stimulate specific intellectual responses. Take an acute sense of danger.’ Chown, already mellowed by his first glass of Amontillado, was prepared to be affable, instructive, and scarcely less voluble than Winter. ‘Our good friend over there is talking nonsense about the divinely inaccurate memory of art. He might more sensibly speak of the miraculously extended memory of funk.’

  ‘The drowning man?’

  ‘Quite so. The notion that a drowning man passes his whole life in review is substantially correct; many instances have been collected of men in acute danger reliving the past with extraordinary intensity and sense of detail. That is an instance of the mind working more fluently – if in a passive mode – when scared. The power of more active thought, however, is stimulated less by apprehension than by anger. In difficult and intricate situations one is commonly urged to keep one’s temper. But that is the talk of ignorant schoolmasters; nothing actually could be more fallacious.’ Chown eyed Appleby with the benign severity of the man who knows. ‘One will always solve an intellectual problem more readily if one can get really angry over it. This is something we have put through the laboratory. It has been proved.’

  Like telepathy, Appleby thought – and let his eye and ear stray to Mr Eliot near by. Mr Eliot was explaining to the unsuccessful Gib Overall that good baconers should have length, depth, and strong backs inclined to be roached. Overall, in his melancholy way, looked distinctly as if he were preparing to adopt Chown’s receipt for successful intellectual endeavour. Farther away, Miss Cavey was passing once more from complacency through suspicion to distrust. Consciously and unconsciously, the party was developing its power of annoyance. Feeling that he might take licence from this to deliver a frontal attack, Appleby said abruptly, ‘The various hypnotic states – what is their effect on memory?’

  Chown indicated by a slight frown his sense that the other’s conversation verged on badgering. ‘Under hypnotic control we can recover a great deal. Birthdays, for example. Do you remember anything of your tenth birthday?’

  ‘I don’t think I remember the circumstances of any birthday before my twenty-first.’

  ‘Quite so – but only because you are in a normal waking state. Under hypnotic influence you could be persuaded to remember something for your twentieth. And then – though the process is uncertain and laborious – we could work back year by year. Memories of a second birthday have been recovered in that way frequently enough, and sometimes memories of a first. Some practitioners of medical hypnotism claim even to have got back to intra-uterine memories. But that’ – Chown shook a responsible and conservative head – ‘is disputable.’

  ‘Does the subject continue to remember about the birthdays when he has emerged from the hypnosis? Does he remember anything at all of what has occurred while he has been hypnotized?’

  Dr Chown put down his glass. ‘My dear sir,’ he said with suave finality, ‘this is an intricate subject. One day perhaps – if you are really interested – you will let me have the pleasure of recommending a few books.’

  ‘Books, Dr Chown?’

  The question, obscurely pregnant, hung for a moment in air – where Chown seemed to contemplate it challengingly. ‘There are several,’ he said – and with a civil murmur moved away.

  Appleby stared for a moment in his own empty glass. It was interesting. Everything – even Gerald Winter on The Moonstone or on art – was interesting if one hearkened in the right way. He turned round. Miss Cavey had retired to a corner and was holding a small indignation meeting of supporters. Winter had transferred his attentions to Peter Holme. Kermode, planted in the middle of the room, appeared to be anatomizing his host to Mrs Moule in terms that turned her pale with rage. Timmy Eliot was behaving badly to Toplady: there had been an awful quarrel, it was said, in a cupboard during the fateful game the evening before. On this – and much else – were superimposed the mounting anticipation and the rather uneasy corporate feeling of the party. Only Mr Eliot was a centre of calm. This was simply another of the Spider’s parties; many of the guests were the Spider’s children; he himself sustained a benevolent grandfatherly role. Appleby watched and had to fight an unprofitable sense that the Spider – the Spider who had crept from the manuscripts – was in control; that although the clarinet and the stick were silent and no more incidents had occurred the party yet moved to a plan. He glanced at his watch. Exactly twenty-four hours before he had pushed open a window and presented himself in the darkness to these same people eddying about him now. In the interval had he learnt enough? And what had Winter learnt?

  Winter – he discovered by recrossing the room – had learnt of Holme’s physical exercises; he was making the control of the abdomen the occasion for a sort of anthropological fantasy. The exercises sprang from a widespread philosophical fallacy – the romantic fallacy. Holme tinkered with his tummy because of an irrational belief in the superiority of primitive man; he was attempting to replace a civilized inside by a savage one. At the best it was an illogical half-measure; there was no evidence whatever that primitive man had been healthier than his civilized descendant. It was a different matter, now, with the apes. There was considerable scientific backing for the view that when man first stood upright he gave his physical frame a jar from which it never recovered. In this business of posture and the tummy the motto should be not back to primitive man but back to the lemurs, apes, and opossums. It would loo
k well on the stage; if a modern-dress Hamlet why not a simian one? Why not a baboon-like Othello, a spider-monkey of a Spider?

  Winter, as Appleby had predicted to himself, was talking more wildly. He was also talking better; this performance had speed, and the acute, deceptively vacuous Holme was brisker game. Nevertheless, Appleby took Winter by the arm and led him aside. ‘My dear man,’ he said candidly, ‘you won’t do. As a vocal turn, yes; as a detective, distinctly not. Come outside.’

  They pushed open a window and stepped into the chill darkness of the terrace. For a second they could see nothing; then they simultaneously exclaimed. Nature, so profoundly uninteresting during the past thirty-six hours, had played a spectacular trick. With a speed which was matter for meteorological curiosity the rain had given place to snow, and the snow was beginning to lie on the ground. The terrace under a few scattered lights was like a half-finished Christmas card. ‘It seems to me’, said Winter, ‘all part of the plan. Was Folly Hall surrounded by snow in Murder at Midnight? You may bet it was.’

  ‘The plan?’ It was as if the word had started an echo.

  Winter moved impatiently in the shadows. ‘Isn’t something going forward? Do you think those clocks stuck and struck for nothing? I wish I’d never come near this corner of England. I’m scared, and being scared is wanton waste of nervous energy.’ There was the spurt of a match as he lit a cigarette. ‘You and I keep on having conferences. Is it necessary to that progress you’re making that we should hold another in a snowstorm?’

  ‘I thought we might exchange ideas. But you certainly are scared; does it always take you in chat? And why just you? The party is all right; it’s losing its temper a bit, but not its nerve. I can’t see much of last night’s jumpiness. Why just you?’