The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories

by J. I. M. Stewart

  I don’t really venture to go on! But I will just express the hope that, on some future occasion, a meeting with you may give me the opportunity of telling you (if you don’t already know) the chief reason why The Glory from the Grey has moved me so much. Thank you again.

  Yours sincerely,

  Ruth Dumbill

  PS. I have traced the title (through the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations) and read the poem! R. D.

  Ballaster looked at the clock. It was ten to five, and he guessed that the unknown Ruth Dumbill wouldn’t be late. It was a tribute to his position, he supposed – it was a fair if odd index of the decent literary eminence to which he had attained – that he could in fact ask a strange woman to tea in this way with no more effect of impropriety than if both he and she belonged (as they certainly didn’t) to a Bohemia in which the concept of impropriety didn’t exist. And five o’clock was an excellent time. His guest was gone shortly after six and there remained a couple of clear working hours before Mrs Kember tinkled the small silver bell that sent him to prepare for dinner. This evening he might even start the short story that was his next serious job. As this thought occurred to him, Ballaster glanced across his drawing-room to the big desk which stood, with a pleasing mild incongruity, in the deep bay window. A virgin sheet of paper lay on the writing-pad. He frowned. There was a snag about getting started on his story. But it would be overcome. It had often been overcome before.

  He picked up the lady’s letter again in order to drop it into a drawer. It oughtn’t to be waiting for her, as if she had written to a house-agent or her solicitor. One wouldn’t take it for the work of a high critical intelligence. But it was a sensible letter, he thought, as such things go. He liked the admission that there were some of his books that she hadn’t read. This excluded the more imbecile sort of fan. And of course he liked the implied judgment that his latest novel was his best. She was literate but not, he guessed, literary; she got her tag from Matthew Arnold right but appeared not to have had any previous acquaintance with “Rabbi ben Ezra”. There was at least nothing ominous in her letter, unless it was the curious suggestion that he might already know what had particularly moved her in The Glory from the Grey. She might be a little mad, but certainly she wasn’t pronouncedly so. And that was just right. A novelist, Ballaster believed, ought not to concern himself with mental states too pathological for representative fiction. (“Representative fiction” was a favourite phrase of his when he wrote his little critical essays; it had an academic flavour appropriate in the writing of one who would soon be seeing the Honorary Degrees begin to come in.) But mere vagary or eccentricity was another matter. A novelist could often pick up some pleasing inspiration from that.

  Ballaster became so absorbed in these professional reflections that he wasn’t aware of the door-bell when it rang. It was therefore with some effect of surprise that he turned round on hearing Mrs Kember’s voice across the length of the drawing-room.

  “Lady Dumbill,” Mrs Kember said.

  Ballaster was undeniably a shade at a loss as Lady Dumbill entered the room. It was partly her title. He realised that, in the face of that address, it had been a solicism to write “Miss Dumbill” at a venture; he ought to have undertaken a little elementary research in the telephone directory or Who’s Who. But what was more disconcerting than this was the fact that he had certainly met her – or at least seen her – somewhere before. It even sprang into his mind that her reference to a brother in Persia represented the offer of a thread of actual acquaintance which he had failed to pick up. He tried to remember whether his reply to her letter had been worded specifically as to a total stranger. With any luck, it would have been ambiguous on the point. And he must stick to ambiguity for the moment. Perhaps recollection would come to him and he would be able to dissimulate his first failure to command it.

  So Charles Ballaster advanced with his small elderly delighted smile – it usually got him off to a flying start – and took his visitor’s hand. “Thank you again, dear Lady Dumbill,” he said, “for your very kind letter. And now thank you for coming to tea. I hope it won’t disappoint you – and that I shan’t too hopelessly do so, either.”

  “Oh, no!” Lady Dumbill’s reply was on a note of faint alarm which might have been occasioned either by her host’s empressement or by the general novelty of her situation. “I’m sure you could never do that. It’s something I was sure about the first time we met.” She said this more comfortably. She seemed a comfortable woman: that rather than a distinguished one.

  One point was settled; there had been a definite meeting. Ballaster patted Lady Dumbill’s gloved fingers – she couldn’t be forty, so that the fatherly was a distinctly possible note – before bringing her a chair. Of course she was agitated on finding herself in his presence, and he must make it clear that he was the kindest, the least assuming of men. The perfect simplicity that sometimes goes with – well, call it a certain degree of talent, would be what it would be charitable to make this new admirer aware of. “You see,” he said, “writers can scarcely hope to improve on acquaintance. Their vanity, alas, makes them concentrate that sort of ambition entirely on their books.”

  Lady Dumbill, from amid what he now noticed as expensive furs, gave a small sigh. It was of satisfaction in a precious expectancy fulfilled. In proceeding thus at once to gnomic utterance her host was making some dream come true. “I can hardly believe it,” she said. “That I’m here, I mean, and talking to you.”

  “But that’s only a start.” He looked at her roguishly, as if between them were the absurd joke that he might conceivably venture upon the risqué. “Presently you’re going to be eating my muffins and drinking my china tea. Or Mrs Kember’s, I should say. Ah! Here she is.”

  Mrs Kember performed her first sequence of reassuring offices and withdrew. Ballaster made a little talk about the circumstance that he ventured himself to pour the tea. “And what,” he presently asked easily, “is the news out of Persia?”

  “Just Uljaitu,” Lady Dumbill said placidly. “And then more Uljaitu.”

  “Uljaitu?” Ballaster, rashly, confessed himself baffled.

  Lady Dumbill stared. “But don’t you remember? Nearly all Bobby’s talk that day was about Uljaitu – and the craze has stuck with him. You laughed when I said I didn’t know whether Uljaitu was an emperor or a stone-mason.”

  “So I did.” Ballaster laughed now.

  But Lady Dumbill was looking at him with large candid eyes. “You don’t remember a great deal about Bobby,” she said. “You don’t even remember everything about me.”

  Ballaster passed the muffins. He made the mere gesture a qualified confession. It was charmingly done.

  “How marvellous!” Lady Dumbill said. “How much more marvellous that makes it all!”

  A moment’s silence succeeded upon this perplexing utterance – although it was a silence indeed into which Ballaster managed to throw an adequate stopgap smile. He wasn’t so certain now about Lady Dumbill’s not being a menace. Not that there was anything flirtatious or predatory about her. It was clear that nothing of the sort was her line. And that, Ballaster told himself, might be just as well. For that particular stream – the stream of amatory response – she would surely flog in vain. Lady Dumbill seemed pleasant enough. But she was totally without sexual attractiveness. The thing was indefinable but yet almost absolute. She was rather pretty in a faded unremarkable way. Her figure was well cared for and good. And she certainly didn’t carry about with her the faintest aura of Lesbianism. No, it was simply that, in the particular matter to which Ballaster found his thought momentarily directed, she carried around just no aura at all.

  But now she was smiling at him. “And your china tea,” she said, “is marvellous too.”

  This might have been either social competence or failure of nerve; at least it deferred for the moment whatever communication made the prime motive of Lady Dumbill’s visit. Perhaps she was going to have second thoughts and offer no confidence aft
er all. Which would leave unsolved, he felt, what must surely be the only puzzle she had ever contrived to create. Nobody could for long be curious about Lady Dumbill; she was all amiably patent; and perhaps the reason for her total failure of erotic vibration lay in the fact that, in the absence of at least some shadowy prompting to a curiosity beyond the carnal, sex won’t work. Yes, Lady Dumbill, bating the small enigma of her presence in this room, was as transparent as the very flattest of small flat aquarium fish.

  Ballaster dropped this image into an appropriate mental pigeon-hole. “I’m afraid I do forget a great deal,” he said. “But not, believe me, about your brother.” He paused to emphasis this easy fib. “I’ve got him to hold on to for a start.” It would be civil to elicit some facts about his unexciting visitor, and he might begin with her relations. She couldn’t be plain Lady Dumbill unless she was somebody’s wife or widow. He wondered what sort of chap had made do with her. “But I don’t think,” he went on, “that I met anybody else?”

  “Of course, you didn’t meet Jim. That’s my husband, you know. At least he was my husband. We’re divorced now.” Lady Dumbill’s awe – still in part unexplained – at being in Charles Ballaster’s presence was now abated, and she chatted as she might across any other tea-cups. “It wasn’t a nice divorce.”

  “I suppose they can’t often be that.”

  “For some reason it all had to go into court, and a barrister on the other side drew quite a horrible picture of me. I was terribly hurt.” Lady Dumbill paused on this, and Ballaster realised that it wasn’t a conventional remark. Although so commonplace, she could be hurt badly. “And Jim and I had got on so well. It seemed just what our parents had hoped for. But for some reason Jim took to going with other women. One was a Jewess and one was Spanish. I could never understand it. You see, it wasn’t as if I didn’t like sleeping with my husband. It was quite nice, mostly.”

  “These things are very unaccountable.” Ballaster was conscious that this response didn’t do much credit to his gnomic wisdom. But he was wondering whether Lady Dumbill had simply chosen him for quite general confessional purposes. If so, she wasn’t wasting much time. Perhaps she had previously employed psychiatrists, with whom the guineas so smartly tick up.

  “And there was so much inconvenience.” Lady Dumbill didn’t say this complainingly; she was a woman of equable mind, who could review past distresses without animus. “Dividing the furniture, for instance. And remembering to order only half quantities when seeing the cook.”

  “Won’t you have one of my cream-cakes?” Ballaster was prompted by this turn on the conversation to feel that he might have been remiss. And he was quite taking to his visitor; such a clear shallow brook made a pleasing minor study. “One of Mrs Kember’s cream-cakes, I ought to say. Admirable woman.”

  For a moment Lady Dumbill looked startled, as if she had mistakenly supposed these last words an ejaculation called forth by herself. Then she pursued her previous reflections. “But I sold the heavier stuff that Daddy and Mummy had given me; and that made it feasible to get into a very nice flat. I have a Kerry Blue, and he’s really very companionable. Do you like dogs?”

  This was an inquiry with which Ballaster was familiar – although indeed it was much more often cats. He had a small whimsical speech which served for one or other indifferently, and of this he now delivered himself. He felt unassured that his visitor made much of its finer points, but since she listened respectfully she continued to advance in his esteem. By the third cup of tea things were entirely cosy. Lady Dumbill’s discipleship, if still a shade mysterious, hinted no element of danger. She certainly wasn’t going to undress. It seemed unlikely that – with the effect of a stage villain suddenly dropping a cunning disguise – she would snap open her bag and produce the subscription list of a favourite charity. One couldn’t conceive of her as having written a novel which now needed only running over by an experienced professional eye. On the other hand, it became plain that she – and presumably her Kerry Blue – moved in good society. She might well give little luncheon parties to people whom Ballaster would be glad to meet. It even turned out that she wasn’t Lady Dumbill after all. Mrs Kember – although so admirable a woman – had made a mistake about that. She was Lady Ruth Dumbill, so it ought to have been “dear Lady Ruth” that Ballaster thanked for coming to tea. Jim had been plain Mr Dumbill, and chiefly distinguished by considerable wealth. Brother Bobby, devoted to Uljaitu, was soon going to be an ambassador.

  All this information was the easier to come by because Lady Ruth didn’t in fact appear to have deeper matters to discuss. She talked agreeably in a superficial social way, and with an artlessness, indeed, which made the apposite word – her host thought – not “talk” but “prattle”. At the same time she continued to suggest one who is immensely admiring, and Ballaster soon saw that, in this particular, he had no need, so to speak, to continue singing for his supper. Lady Ruth’s flattering estimate of him was formed and irrefrangible. He could relax.

  Lady Ruth finished with bread and butter – obviously a good nursery habit she had retained – and accepted a cigarette. Ballaster often put in the last twenty minutes of occasions like this at a little discreet pawing and probing – without leaving his seat, of course, and entirely on a mental plane. It was, after all, his job to strip things down a bit; and a lady who could be persuaded to small exposures of a strictly verbal order might be at once informative, titillating, and un-alarming. But really not much could be done with Lady Ruth. It wasn’t that she was reticent; the reverse, indeed, had already casually appeared. It was simply that the depth from which you dredged a confidence didn’t exceed two inches. And for that matter dredging wasn’t needed. In those two inches – Ballaster searched for a variant on an earlier image – his admirer freely gambolled like a tadpole-sized dolphin. She had very little to express and nothing to hide.

  So his interest in her – no, it wasn’t to be called that – his attitude to her was becoming, he thought, beautifully and almost affectingly disinterested. Whether or not she had any small design on him, he certainly had none on her; he saw no way, that is to say, in which she could be tipped into fiction. Others might do it, but she wasn’t his line. Satire wasn’t his line. He was the grave explorer—was he not?—of the sensitive and subtle consciousness. He didn’t at all see Lady Ruth as what one of his fellow novelists had liked to call en disponibilité. But this only gave, surely, a pleasing purity to his relations with her. He would certainly pat her fingers again as she took her leave. And a little pitch up the fatherly, the benign effect. He saw himself at a succession of those future luncheon parties – perhaps lingering on after the end of one in order to help arrange the next. It would be a pleasure a little to preside, affectionately and selflessly, over this small neutral life.

  “And now,” Lady Ruth suddenly said, “I must tell you. I must tell you just what you have done for me.”

  Charles Ballaster, with that careful considerateness to guard, hoped he didn’t look amused. It must be that she had sagely discovered in The Glory from the Grey some moral or maxim or guide to conduct which was proving useful in what she doubtless regarded as her complicated life. The idea was entertaining. Ballaster offered another cigarette. When he sat down it was quite close to Lady Ruth – in fact in the very next chair. This was prescriptively his maximum approach to contiguity. “How delightful,” he said. “Yes, do tell me, dear Lady Ruth.”

  “It’s what’s called intuition, isn’t it?” She looked at him seriously. “A wonderful power that writers – that some great writers – have.”

  Ballaster murmured an agreement intended to cover the general proposition that some great writers possess this wonderful power. All unexpectedly, Lady Ruth was for the moment really contriving to surprise him.

  “Because we did have only that short evening. You remember?”

  Ballaster was already committed to mendacity about this. “Yes, indeed,” he said emphatically.

  “And I didn’t r
eally tell you very much about myself. Not nearly as much as I’ve told you – not that you in the least need, telling it – this afternoon. And yet, there it is.”

  There was a short silence. Ballaster had no notion what “it” might be. “Ah,” he said.

  “It could be a dangerous power.” Lady Ruth was frowning. It was an effort to her to attain to this degree of philosophic generality. “To know so much. Instantaneously.”

  “About human nature?” Ballaster asked indulgently. He now had an approximate notion of the drift of his visitor’s thought.

  “About people.” Lady Ruth looked at him wonderingly. “How do novelists usually create characters?”

  Ballaster had a set piece on this. It included the bit about characters sometimes getting out of the author’s control and insisting on living their own life. He delivered himself of it now. Lady Ruth listened attentively. “That must be just the common way,” she said. “Intuition is much more wonderful. Taking a real person and penetrating down and down. Seeing to the depths. And at a glance. It’s like God.”

  “Well, I don’t know.” Ballaster, although not perhaps a man of unflawed modesty, was unprepared for this proposal to pay him quasi-divine honours. “Of course one does have moments of – well, exceptional insight.”

  “The strangest thing is that I wasn’t aware of it. I even felt you weren’t very interested in me. It’s rather like having your chest done, I suppose.”

  “Having your chest done?” Ballaster looked apprehensive.

  “By the X-ray people, I mean. You don’t so much as know when it’s happening. And yet of course it’s not really like that. Because when you make the X-ray people show you the plate afterwards it doesn’t mean a thing. You don’t have any feeling that you’re looking at your own inside. It would be rather horrid if you did. But when I read The Glory from the Grey—” Lady Ruth hesitated, as if adequate words were hard to find. “Well,” she said, “it wasn’t like that.”