To the question "Why am I living in Port Huntlady?" Slick would have answered, "It gives me practical ideas." In other places one's ideas always seemed unpractical because there were so many things that stood in the way of one's carrying them out. In Port Huntlady there were no obstacles, and so the ideas one had seemed practical; it seemed to give one ideas, unlike other places, which only gave opposition. What is an idea? It is an enlargement of oneself. In Port Huntlady one seemed larger. Was this because, as a place, it was not very substantial: because it used people to fill it out, puffed them up? Slick didn't notice. He noticed only how he felt, and in Port Huntlady he felt successful. Slick's feeling of success little by little began getting on Diana's nerves. It made her life with him seem humiliatingly public and permanent. So she began treating him like a dress that fitted her too well and of which everyone thought, "How well she looks in it!" She began, so to speak, trying to pull Slick out of place here and there, as she would with such a dress, to try to make people mind their own business when she wore it. For example, while she did not disagree about the improvements he went on adding to their house, she would somehow make him feel, after each new one, that it had not, really, been worth all the fuss; so that he would start another which might, perhaps, when it was done, seem worth all the fuss. He was only trying to make a really nice home for them; certainly this was what she had wanted in the beginning. If their home no longer satisfied her, he could only say to himself that he had failed to make it nice enough. He did not understand that the nicer he made it, the more irritated she got; he could only understand that he had failed. He could only understand his ideas—whether they were successful or not. When certain ideas did not turn out successful he looked round for others.
Diana—that is, the particular ideas associated with her—was not going to be a success, after all. He could not go back to his previous life with Baby and Dan; that had been merely the youthful trying-out ground of his potentialities. He was now, in his own view, a man. To be a man was a wonderful achievement for a child of the poor, and he felt that he owed it to his class to make the most out of his achievement: not many children of the poor became men. And being a man did not only mean to him being a gentleman—someone whose social value other people took for granted, from the intrinsic personal value he attached to himself. It meant constant application. As someone who had once been a child of the poor, he had to keep up his belief in himself by concrete evidence of his social reality.
Other people might take his value for granted, but he could not. And so he was always preoccupied with the practical success of whatever activity he might at the moment be engaged in, rather than with any, shall we say, spiritual, critical, dramatic or merely economic significance it might have. And since he had failed with Diana, it was natural that he chose, after Diana, Laura Manilla as the titular theme of his activities. She was, as Diana had been, a woman whose history seemed to lie in something that had not yet happened to her. How true this was of most women—all their history lay ahead of them. Slick had hoped—with all his heart—to make history for Diana. He had, in fact; but she had not really enjoyed it. There were some women who actually hated living. A man ought to be able to make a woman enjoy living: this was real success—having one's ideas appreciated. Interest in some man's ideas was what gave a woman an interest in life, though of course a man's ideas had to be in sympathy with the tastes of the woman he wanted to please. There could be no doubt that Laura Manilla was looking for an interest in life in sympathy with her tastes.
It all went back to a conversation that Baby had had with Cards at that first five-o'clock at Lady Port-Huntlady's. Slick always listened to other people's conversation. From listening he got ideas. He could not use all of the ideas that he got in this way, but he never quite forgot them; and sometimes an idea that seemed fanciful when it first occurred to him came in handy later. Baby's conversation with Cards had been about clothes. Baby was saying to Cards that he liked wearing women's clothes—women's jerseys, women's jackets, women's blouses. The reason was, women's clothes did not make one feel big and important, as men's clothes did; women's clothes made one—as they made women—feel little and irresponsible. The way men dressed, they had no choice but to be either very good or very bad. But with women, the way they dressed, it was all more or less fun. Baby grinned slyly through his hair at Lady Port-Huntlady, as if to say that he did not mean the way she dressed but the way he dressed; Lady Port-Huntlady's clothes were delicate but solemn fabrications, and it certainly was not all more or less fun with her. Cards, too, dressed somewhat like a woman, his shirt bloused out at the waist, a red sash holding up his trousers, and a tartan shawl fastened at the neck (with a safety-pin) or clinging unfastened to his shoulders in an absurdly graceful, miraculous way—as women's things do somehow stay on. The strongest argument in favour of womanish clothes was that women did not dress by the weather. Stopping to think about the weather made clothes a bore.
At this point Laura Manilla had clinched the discussion primly. "Why not," she said, "just such a shop at Port Huntlady, with no distinction between the sexes?" This, of course, made everyone think of the distinctions between the sexes and talk at random again. Tomatoes asked Mabick about poets: were they not difficult to deal with in a business way—too sensitive? Mabick answered that he only dealt with poets through their wives, whom poets seemed to make the scapegoats of their beautiful delusions. The wives of poets always understood the difficulties. They were not ashamed to take favours. But Slick kept the conversation about clothes in mind.
By this time Diana had had a baby. "Why did I have a baby?" she now asked herself. Lady Port-Huntlady seemed responsible for everything. She provoked people to be untrue to themselves. She seemed to look into people and see things —one did not know quite what. This made one excited. One imagined things in oneself. One did things that one did not mean to. Diana had never meant to have a baby. So one day, finding herself looking with horror at the baby, she suddenly ran away—perhaps to prevent herself from killing it. Miss Bookworth would take care of it. If she had killed it, perhaps someone would have killed her—perhaps Slick. She ran away from her baby, Slick, Lady Port-Huntlady. Or perhaps she would have killed Slick—or Lady Port-Huntlady. Or perhaps Slick would have killed her because of Laura Manilla. Or perhaps Lady Port-Huntlady would have killed her—in some clever, secret way. Diana ran away from the sudden catastrophe that had once been the gloomy darling of her thoughts, and no one in Port Huntlady ever heard of her again.
Slick and Laura Manilla set up a shop called 'The Smiling Mirror'. The theory was that in looking at themselves in a mirror people should smile. The clothes were rather like fancy- dress costumes, and, as far as possible, for men and women indifferently. The customer was dressed out in a mirrorless compartment, then taken into the mirror salon and asked to look at himself and smile. If he smiled it was assumed that the clothes suited him and that the sale was accomplished. Slick and Laura Manilla lived very neatly together in two rooms behind the shop. Slick had taught himself to draw a little, to help Laura with new designs for clothes. He invented a motto: "Every garment must be a joke". 'Joke' was synonymous with 'work of art', as people with modern views about painting say that a picture is 'amusing' when they mean it is a good picture. Indeed, he now thought of himself as an artist. Every time he had a new idea Laura would say, "Slick, you're an artist." And an artist was automatically a gentleman. It wasn't so certain if one was a writer. Anyway, he couldn't write. But he did have ideas, and Laura was delighted with him. She too was an artist, but she needed a man to keep up her interest. It was he who managed the sewing-women and ordered the stuffs. But, of course, Laura was the inspiration. She had a wonderful tired smile that made people feel that they owed it to her to be gay. She was very good at selling things. People found it so difficult to make a point of their own tastes while she was smiling at them. One night a week they gave a party in their shop for the people who had bought clothes from them: the guests were su
pposed to wear the clothes they had bought and prove to one another how much gayer they felt in them. Slick was always the gayest, although, strangely enough, he didn't wear the kind of clothes they sold. He was a producer, not an actor. Besides, he looked better in conventional clothes, he knew; conventional clothes were the safest if one wasn't born a gentleman. Laura Manilla, too, dressed in a rather negative style. She was very tall and embarrassingly thin; she had the sort of body one thinks of as a tree—something, merely, that stands up and looks on. It would have been very bad for business if she had, by wearing experimental clothes, called attention to the pathetic defencelessness of bodies against the inappropriate things people do with them.
As for Baby—after having innocently started this idea about clothes, he applied himself to an innocent conversation with Barney Flagg about knocking people on the head. When Barney had fallen—in an acrobatic stunt—he had injured his spine, with the result that his legs, from the knees down, became limp and useless. He now walked by means of two sticks with which he swung himself from step to step. Baby had once broken a leg and knew about sticks. "They make you think about knocking people on the head. You get quite free with them." The idea of Barney's knocking someone on the head with one of his sticks amused Cards, and Lady Port-Huntlady smiled at Cards. Barney looked at his sticks and smiled. And let us here get over an incident that must in any case occur later on in the story by telling how Barney did eventually knock someone on the head with one of his sticks; he did, in fact, kill Tomatoes at dinner one evening during a discussion on the spiritual value of misfortune.
"Do you not," Tomatoes asked Barney, "feel a stronger man since Fate made a cripple of you?" "You bet I do," Barney answered hilariously, "I feel fine." And then Barney, to show how fine he felt, shook one of his sticks in the air. Everyone except Tomatoes laughed uncomfortably—it is not pleasant to laugh with a cripple about his deformity. Tomatoes, however, really believed that Barney's good humour was genuine. As Barney swung his stick towards him he ducked his head playfully. It crashed hard into his plate as Barney struck it. For a moment everyone was afraid to admit to himself that something serious had happened. To Tomatoes fun was something sacred. "Joyous secret of saints and sinners," he would say. Perhaps this was fun. But Tomatoes was dead.
The police in Port Huntlady were temporarily permanent residents like all the rest. No one knew who appointed them, or exactly what their powers were. They seemed to be merely residents who had the courage to despise Port Huntlady and everyone who came to it, yet not quite the courage to go away. One does not think of policemen, indeed, as loving the places whose peace they so devoutly maintain. Port Huntlady policemen translated the Port Huntlady point of view about events into a law. The view was that nothing could happen in Port Huntlady on any given day, however strongly one might feel that some day something important was bound to happen. The law was that in any given day nothing must happen. And so the Port Huntlady police refused to regard Tomatoes's death as a public event; it was his own affair. No one in Port Huntlady was interested in how the others got the money on which they lived there, and equally death was not a subject for curiosity. Barney was held to be no more involved in Tomatoes's death than he would have been in his financial troubles if he had by chance handed Tomatoes a letter threatening him with legal prosecution for dishonest debt.
As a matter of fact, just such a letter arrived the next day for Tomatoes, and it might easily have happened, if he had still been alive, that Barney would have handed it to him at lunch. For the postman always called a little before lunch, and it was usually Barney, sitting on the veranda (having come very early to avoid being excused, as a cripple, for coming late), who took the letters; he liked keeping them in his pocket and bringing them out at lunch and watching the faces people made as they read them. Perhaps Barney was somewhat curious about what was in the letters. At any rate, it pleased him to see people screw up their faces over their letters: people always screw up their faces as if in pain over letters—in pain, or as if in pain. Barney suffered a good deal of pain from his spine, although he never talked about it. He might have talked about it if other people had not been so secretive about their private discomforts. But most people pretended that they had nothing the matter with them. Women pretended less than men; but women had so much the matter with them—they were always suffering. Even if they had practically nothing the matter with them, they had, at least, a slight headache. Women were all sympathy—either with themselves or with men. Barney was not a womanish man, but he was womanish compared with other men. It was not altogether from cruelty that he took pleasure in seeing people screw up their faces in pain over their letters— or as if in pain. He was ready to be sincerely attentive to the emotions of other people, if they showed them; it irritated him that they made themselves so private. Tomatoes, particularly, had irritated him, because, although he tried to know all about other people, he never told anything about himself. He had made it seem that he was only interested in their souls. Barney had a prejudice against clergymen, especially ex-clergymen. People like that, he said, were inquisitive, not sympathetic, and they were inquisitive because they were jealous. They were jealous of people's souls because they had none themselves: they liked to prove to themselves that other people were as soulless as they were.
Such fine analysis of Barney's attitude to Tomatoes, to other people, to life in general and to himself in particular, may not seem to have much importance for our story. But, indeed, is our story very important? Is any story very important? I assure you that no story is of much importance; and I think you will agree with me. Are we not all agreed that only a few things are really important? And are we not further agreed that it is almost impossible to agree what these few things are? Here we are telling ourselves a story about a place where people fancied themselves to be dealing with these few really important things, without knowing ourselves exactly what they are. And so is it not natural that, in self-punishment, we should give weight as well to insignificant factors in the story? Since we do not know, at least not with absolute certainty, what the significant factors are? Have we the right yet to choose between what is significant and what is not? Are we, indeed, giving weight? I trust not. Equally I trust that we are covering the ground efficiently. We have now made it clear that Tomatoes was killed by Barney, and that Barney was held to have no more to do with Tomatoes's death than he might with some other private affair of Tomatoes's about which some unpleasant letter had arrived, to be handed to him, quite accidentally, by Barney. We have also indicated that if such a letter had arrived it would probably have been handed to him by Barney, And also that this would probably have been the case, had Tomatoes lived, since the very next day after his death a letter arrived in which he was threatened with prosecution for dishonest debt.
Tomatoes, it seemed, had been given quite a lot of money by an elderly lady, a Miss Man, to invest in a pension in Port Huntlady which she was to take over from him when he had got it in running order, retaining him as manager. Tomatoes had written to her that conditions were unfavourable in Port Huntlady for a new pension, but had failed to return the money. Upon being notified of Tomatoes's death by Barney, Miss Man came to Port Huntlady and claimed the pension for hers. She took an immediate fancy to Barney as having been the instrument of Tomatoes's death. Though elderly, she had a salacious tongue, and talked freely with Barney about Tomatoes. Tomatoes's real name was Mr. Clingby. He had, as a clergyman, interested himself in houses of prostitution and been what he called, in his poetical way, a lover of low life. He had taken many girls away from such houses and, at the expense of the Salvation of the Flesh Society, of which Miss Man was Mother-Leader, had established them in little homes which he had practically made his own. Miss Man said that she had never trusted him; but she had admired his cleverness in getting the girls' confidence, which was the first step in all social work. She had given him money to invest in a pension in Port Huntlady because she had heard Port Huntlady well spoken of by m
any, as it were, serious people. Social work made one spiritually static, and she was anxious to devote her mind to the really important things in life; and she knew that she could rely on Tomatoes's want of idealism in business matters. It had not occurred to her that his want of idealism would make him so foolish as to try to cheat her. If he had not died when he did, he would certainly have found himself in prison before long, all the papers relating to the transaction being in order.
Miss Man, as has been said, had a salacious tongue, and she was, moreover, in a rough, domineering way, an unaffectedly cheerful person. She, too, like Tomatoes, preferred men on the whole to women, and so the pension remained a pension for men. Barney grew very fond of her; she reminded him of his mother, who had been a circus wardrobe-matron. They were both women who had seen a good deal of the world and yet remained provincial. Barney himself was a strictly local character. He did not believe in universality; he thought in terms of particular places and particular people. Miss Man was, like himself, a strictly local character. She had her little pecularities but was not the sort of person one could make into a story. Similarly, Barney looked on Port Huntlady as a provincial town. "Perhaps it's the one provincial town left in the world," he said. It had its little peculiarities but was not the sort of place one could make into a story. A place was provincial, he said, if you hated it and yet went on living in it because hating it made it feel like home. Thus many people got excited about large, worldly cities and pretended to be in love with them, but you had to hate something first in order to love it, he said, and it was difficult to hate anything about which there was a lot to be said. There wasn't much to be said about Port Huntlady. It would have been a good place to feel at home in in a very short time if it had not been for Lady Port-Huntlady. Barney did not identify Port Huntlady with Lady Port-Huntlady as the others did. What right had a universal character to queen it over a little town like Port Huntlady, as if it were the last place on earth and she the presiding spirit of doom? Why didn't she take a house in some large, worldly city and give magnificent parties to other universal characters, like some philosophical princess in a novel of Tolstoi's? Why didn't she give magnificent parties, anyway? What fun did one get out of her?
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