‘Oh no, Mr Muller. It’s no trouble at all. I think they’re all in here.’ She went to a chest of drawers, took out a box full of photographs and laid them out on a table.
‘Here you are. Don’t look at that awful one—it was taken when we were just married. My word, I was a fright! That’s Bert before I knew him. He’s filled out a good bit since then, hasn’t he? That’s my sister Mary. That’s Mr Rintoul you met at the party, though you mightn’t think so. That’s . . . Ah, here we are. This is the lot that was taken at Westgate. That’s Bert and me. That’s me—tear it up. I look so dreadfully ill. The doctor said the air was too strong for me. It affected my liver. That’s Bert and some girls,—three sisters we got to know. That’s Bert and their brother,—the one who took the snaps as a rule, though one of his sisters must have taken this one. That’s Bert coming back from his bathe. That’s him again, but on Sunday. That’s where we stayed. That’s the steamer at Margate starting for Southend. Take which one you fancy. I don’t often look at them.’
Hugo affected to delay his choice, but said, in the end, ‘I think this one is the best likeness. It seems to have caught him off his guard, if you know what I mean. Please, may I borrow it?’
‘Of course, Mr Muller. Keep it, if you like.’
It was Bert wearing bathing-trunks, with his arms akimbo, like a bear.
Hugo looked at his watch. ‘My word, what a long time I’ve kept you. I shall get such a scolding at home for being late. Do you really mean I can keep that photograph? I’ll give you my drawing in exchange, if it’s good enough, though I’m afraid it won’t be. Now I really must go.’
He got up and looked out of the window. Somewhere over there, if he were tall enough, or had someone to lift him up, he could see the upper windows at the back of Ten Pollitt Place. His heart fluttered. How easy everything was, if one had the will and the courage to exercise it,—the will and the courage. The courage would be put to the test that very afternoon.
[2]
Justin was walking with a slow, philosophical stride through the Park. He had been lunching with a friend, who was both a literary critic and an author, and whose opinion he greatly valued.
In the kindest possible way, this friend had urged him to give up writing novels. The advice was sweetened with sufficient praise to turn any author’s head, but in spite of this, it was quite definite.
‘Your trouble—our trouble—is that we’re hopelessly out of touch with the present age. However painstakingly we try to adapt ourselves to it—however carefully we vulgarise our style and purge it of its youthful classicism,—doing our best to forget we’ve ever read Caesar, Cicero, Dr Johnson or Gibbon—whatever slick phrases we borrow from the other side of the Atlantic, we can’t really keep up. . . .
‘Our whole attitude to life is retrospective. We can’t disguise the fact that we think it a pity the world isn’t what it was in nineteen-ten, and when we remember that most of our readers don’t think so at all, we become cross with them, and tend to point out what very poor creatures they are, in their hey-day, compared with what we used to be in ours. Not unnaturally, they don’t like it.
‘Nor do they like any subtle analysis of character. The luxury of a complex personality—like the luxury of having a dozen servants—is unknown to the “little man”. He’s far too busy making a living or lapping up mass-produced entertainment to enlarge his own ego. . . .
‘You brought all this out very well in Seven Silent Sinners, and it may have been perhaps for that very reason that the book had only a limited appeal. I suppose it’s a question of overtones. I mean—take that scene—which I found most moving and beautiful—when you described the old man longing wistfully to be at Cambridge again, sauntering through the Backs on a summer day and communing with the ghosts of Horace Walpole and Gray, just before he gets the telephone-message telling him that the Amphisbaenic Review is ceasing publication through lack of funds and can’t take his next article. The contrast between his day-dreaming, with its reminiscences of Frances Cornford and Rupert Brooke, and the brutal reality into which he wakes, is—for most people—simply meaningless. They’re not tuned in to that wavelength. They can no more receive it than you could be thrilled by an account of a boxing-match or a cup final. . . .
‘Besides, it holds up the action too much for their taste. The test of a book nowadays isn’t “How does it read?”, but, “How does it look?” It’s almost impossible for us to realise how enormously the popularity of the cinema and television have changed the process by which most people now absorb the written word. They translate it instinctively—provided of course they can understand it at all—into something visual. They want to see rather than understand, because understanding demands a mental effort they don’t care to make. . . .
‘If you want to keep yourself occupied, why not take up some form of biography? I know that research is a nightmare to the imaginative writer, but I think you could get by with very little. A revival of Lytton Stracheyism might be an excellent thing. Or how about some more “Dialogues of the Dead”? Or a reshaping of some classical myth, giving it one of those wry, slightly immoral, twists, that you’re so good at? Try anything—but if I were you, I shouldn’t try to write another novel!’
It was impossible to be offended or even annoyed, but it was only too easy to be sad,—and Justin was very sad.
Without his writing,—without that faint hope that some day he would produce a masterpiece universally acclaimed as such—the whole of his future seemed an aimless blank. Why go on, why face the gradual gathering of infirmities, if one’s existence was to have no other aim than length of years and the avoidance of pain? But his friend was right, there must be no more novels.
As soon as he got back to Ten Pollitt Place, he opened a drawer in his desk and took out some sixty sheets of manuscript. The first one bore nothing but attempts at a title,—The Righteous Heart, Old People have Voices, Old Faust was no Fool, Three Elderly Oracles and many others. Their varying ineptitudes made him blush, and he turned to Chapter One and began to read:
It was an afternoon in early May of 1922,—a drowsy damp hour of cuckoo-calls and the scent of lilac-blossom exhaled in a rainy sunshine. The stone Tritons, waist-deep in the ornamental water, hydraulically stimulated in their hinderparts, blew gay jets against a background of green, and filled the air with a thousand little rainbows.
He thought, ‘It’s not so bad. It isn’t bad at all. I should rather like to pick up a book with that kind of beginning.’ Yes, but pay fifteen shillings for it? Would he do that? And if not, who would? Besides, any fool can write an opening chapter. Could he sustain that note of airy moisture, which was meant to pervade the whole work as an ironical symbol of wasted effort, frustrated ideals and fate’s indifference? No,—he had to confess it—he couldn’t keep it up. The story would intervene. He would analyse, hint at crises then play them down, and the motif—or theme-song, if that was the name the present generation preferred—would vanish as the plot took its humdrum shape. And even if, by some miracle, he succeeded in doing what he had set himself to do, who, nowadays, would set store by such an achievement?
He tore the page into small pieces, and then with a quick glance at each successive page, did the same. By the time he had finished, the waste-paper basket was half full and his fingers ached. He sighed very deeply and looked out of the window. A youngish woman, not unlike the unfortunate creature who used to live on the top floor of Number Seven, minced down the street with a dachshund on a lead. As they neared Number Ten, the dog made a dart for the doorstep, and cocked its leg, while its owner stood by with a complete lack of concern. Justin’s fury flared up, but when he was about to rush into the hall, he remembered what had happened to him the last time he had had a row with a woman whose dog had offended in a similar way. The old pain came back into his heart at the thought of it, and he sat down in an arm-chair by the window and watched the thick, stinking, yellowish liquid trickle slowly to the edge of the step, where it
first made a pool, then splashed, drop by drop, down into the area.
He yawned with disgust and weariness. Once more, he had walked too far. Half a mile was quite as much as he could manage without over-tiring himself. By the end of next year, a few hundred yards might be more than enough for him—while the year after that, he might hardly be able to get to the bus-stop in Parkwell Road. What a New Year’s Eve meditation! With an effort, he rose from his chair, and went into his bedroom, where he took off his shoes, coat, tie and collar, and lay down on the bed.
He woke at a quarter to four and his first thought was, ‘I’m no longer a novelist!’ Then he remembered that he had promised Miss Tredennick to have tea with her and help her to entertain two elderly spinsters who had been her neighbours in Cornwall. It was not a thrilling prospect, and he dreaded climbing up the two flights of stairs, but it was better than having tea alone, regretting the past and brooding over the future. Meanwhile more than half an hour lay between him and tea-time, and he decided to fill it by writing a letter which he ought to have written and posted before luncheon.
[3]
At half-past five, Hugo crept furtively to the top of the house. Pausing a moment on Miss Tredennick’s landing, he could hear voices from her sitting-room,—her own, keen-edged and incisive—‘Cornish weather is distressingly like English cooking’,—Justin Bray’s, a dull, hesitant boom, and two twittering flutes, which completed the quartet at the tea-party. They were hard at it. Let them keep at it and hear no sounds but those they made themselves!
The box-room, or haunted room, as Hugo called it, from which he had been allowed to watch the fireworks, was not directly over the sitting-room, though too loud a footfall might be heard down there. His hope was that the skylight wouldn’t squeak when he opened it; for he planned to get out on to the roof and wave from there to Bert’s window. He had brought a strong torch, an old white tablecloth of his mother’s, and a white scarf, so as to make himself so conspicuous that Bert couldn’t miss him.
It was his first experience of any sort of mountaineering, and when he had climbed the eight rungs of the emergency-ladder, pushed up the skylight (which was counterweighted, and moved easily and silently enough), put his head through the gap and peered sideways into the dark, his courage was strained to its uttermost, and had he not had a superstitious fear that if he failed in his purpose he would lose Bert’s friendship for ever, he would have come down ignominiously and made his signals from the box-room window. But his mind was made up, and murmuring a prayer to whatever god may look with favour on romantic exploits, he sat on the sill, dragged his right leg through the skylight and then the left, so that they rested against the slates sloping down to the lead-covered gulley. His toes soon touched an iron rung let into the slates, which helped him in his descent. The gulley, which lay between a pair of gables,—additions since the days of William Pollitt—was two feet broad and ran the whole length of the house from Pollitt Place to the back. In the front, there was a parapet so high that it almost hid the gables from the street, and Hugo couldn’t have looked over it. But at the back—and it was only from this direction that he could hope to have a view of Bert’s window—there were two iron bars, fixed so low down that they seemed designed to trip you up rather than save you from falling. Hugo went cautiously to within a yard of the precipice, then paused and scanned the horizon of houses that towered round him. Lights from a thousand windows, some near, some distant, stabbed the blackness and made it impossible for him to see the gap through which Bert’s torch should answer his. But Bert was high up,—enthroned like a god on Mount Olympus—at an altitude from which the lower world could hide no secrets. Though the human eye might not see him, the eye of faith was assured of his watchfulness.
Slowly and solemnly, Hugo draped himself in the white table-cloth and walked up and down in the shadow of the gables, for fear he should display himself too soon. He felt as if he were robed as an acolyte, and wondered if it would be a thrill to serve at Mass in Brompton Oratory, the dome of which rose dimly in the distance,—or was that, perhaps, the Victoria and Albert Museum? All outlines were strange, and the city seemed transfigured as if expectant of some revelation, after which nothing would be as it had been before.
He flashed the torch on his watch. Three minutes to go. Like Ganymede awaiting the eagle’s swoop, he advanced towards the extreme edge of the gulley. Another six inches and his knees would have touched the bars at the end, and the shock might have made him lose balance and plunge down, head foremost, into the maze of little backyards and gardens that filled the shapeless area below him. But he stood erect and motionless as a statue, while the breeze from the west blew damply against his cheek and fluttered his draperies.
Then the clock on St Ethelred’s church, behind the Square, slowly struck six. Hugo flicked on the torch, and holding it in his left hand waved it round in a circle which had as its diameter almost twice the length of his arm, while with his right hand he twirled the long scarf in high, fantastic curves, and his eager eyes, directed to a point slightly north of due west, sought an answering flash of light, or at least the dim waving of a handkerchief,—perhaps one of the handkerchiefs which he had given Bert on Christmas Day—somewhere on a level with the lower stars.
But nothing happened. Innumerable pinpoints of light twinkled round him, but showed no change in their position. Perhaps Bert couldn’t hear St Ethelred’s clock? His watch might be wrong, or he might be preparing their evening meal just at that moment. A few minutes passed, while Hugo sought excuses for his friend’s remissness, and when he had found half a dozen, he repeated his performance, though with rather less gusto than before. But what was that? Something whitish appeared in a window, then two thin arms that shook it, then a woman’s dark head that for an instant caught the light from within. No, it was much too near. Bert’s window must be three or four hundred yards further away, and very much higher.
Bewildered and miserable, Hugo lowered his eyes and looked almost perpendicularly downwards, till he could see a shaft of light falling from Magda’s window into the yard. And there was Magda herself, removing some washing from the clothes-line. There was something grotesque and terrifying about her movements, as seen in this odd, vertical perspective. She looked like a puppet, jerkily put through its paces by a showman who wished to raise a laugh from the spectators. As Hugo watched her head bobbing up and down, he had an impulse to fling his torch at it. Then it occurred to him that if she moved to the far side of the yard and looked up at the roof, she would think she was seeing a ghost and might really believe that the box-room was haunted, as he had declared it was. She had always scoffed at his gift of second-sight and said his parade of it was a cheap way of drawing attention to himself. What a chance this was of really frightening her! For a moment he almost forgot his disappointment, and what his real purpose had been that evening.
But she went indoors, and then the full bitterness of Bert’s betrayal came home to him. He straightened himself up, and with tears in his eyes waved the scarf and the torch a third time with frantic vigour, till his arms grew tired and his head reeled, and suddenly he seemed to hear his own voice prophesying that before the year was out, someone at Number Ten was doomed to die. Never once, since he had made that prophecy, had he dreamt that he might be foretelling his own death. But now, in that spasm of despair and giddiness, when a false step would send him crashing down on to the flagstones fifty feet below, he felt as if he were caught in his own trap.
As he tried to turn round and seek safety in the middle of the roof, a strange and intimate pain shot up his left leg from the ankle to the hip, and he was forced to put the whole of his weight on his right foot, which quivered under the strain. If only he had something to hold on to,—but the slope of the slates either side of him was so gradual that he couldn’t touch them with his finger-tips. Even the uppermost bar at the end of the gulley was six inches too low unless he stooped down towards it. The cramp in his left leg was by now so acute, that
he couldn’t bend it at all, but he bent the right one slowly, inclining his body perilously forward till the fingers of his right hand found the bar. The feel of it gave him a moment’s hope, but as he grasped it more firmly and began to shift his body sideways, so that he could fall backwards against the slates and somehow shuffle along towards the skylight, there was a sound of rusted metal being torn from its socket, the bar came away free in his hand, and he screamed and fell.
[4]
The two old ladies from Cornwall were sipping their cherry-brandy and chattering with a shrill vivacity. Miss Tredennick and Justin, both of whom preferred a dry sherry, encouraged them with appropriate nods and smiles and the stimulus of an occasional word. But the sitting-room window, which was almost directly below the gulley on the roof, was open several inches at the top, and Hugo’s cry was loud and clear enough to shock the little party into silence.
Miss Tredennick’s quick wits were the first to approach the truth. She said, ‘That must be someone on the roof, and he’s had an accident.’ The old ladies were thrilled. ‘What, a burglar—a cat-burglar, do you think?’ But while Justin was suggesting they should ring up the police, Miss Tredennick said, ‘No,—I’m pretty sure it’s Hugo. He’s fond of the box-room, for some reason or other, and I think I’ve heard him creeping up there before. He must have climbed out on to the roof by the fire-escape. Oh, Mr Bray, do please go and have a look. There’s no danger to you. The little staircase on the left of the landing leads straight to the box-room door. There are some easy steps inside the box-room that run up to the skylight. If you’d just put your head out and see what’s happened? The poor boy may have broken his leg.’
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