Swing Low, Swing Death

by R. T. Campbell

  Tactically, he told himself, it would be wiser to go down the stairs than to risk the lift. He would be less likely to encounter Miss Wallenstein that way. He slid his hand along the polished scarlet plastic balustrade and started to descend. As bad luck would have it he ran into his employer in the hall.

  “Hullo, Douglas,” she said cheerfully, “how are things going in your department? Are all the books all right?”

  “Yes, everything’s going beautifully,” his voice was gloomy, “I just wanted to run out for a minute, if that’s all right?”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” Emily Wallenstein’s voice was vague; she was trying to think what she had meant to do next, “Do run out if you want to, Douglas. Once things get going we’ll see about getting you an assistant and that’ll give you a freer hand.”

  Douglas did not want an assistant. He had worked in a gallery with an assistant before and the assistant had plainly shewn that she could smell the whisky on his breath. Her dilated nostrils had been a sort of Jiminy Cricket to him. He had even had to take to eating peppermints. He wandered out into the street, sustained only by the thought of the drink at the end of it. He nudged the Henry Moore carving with his elbow and apologised to it mechanically. He wondered gloomily how long it would be before he got used to the thing and stopped saying he was sorry every time he bumped it.

  Iron Street is not a very long street. Fifty yards sufficed to bring Douglas to the garish doors of the Ely. He hesitated, weighing up the advantages of the saloon bar and the lounge. He decided upon the latter. After all, he was being well paid and it would not ruin him to have to give a tip to the attendant who brought his drink, and he might as well sit in comfort.

  He sat down at one of the basket-work tables. He looked in a depressed way at the salted nuts in a plated bowl which was reflected in the glass top. While he waited for his drink he ate the nuts slowly, reflecting that it was a bad thing to do as they would only increase his thirst.

  He was roused from his contemplation of the effect of salted peanuts upon his salivary glands by the noise of bickering from the table next to him.

  Jeremy Flint was being bullied by his wife, Alison. This was not in the last unusual. Jeremy seemed to be one of nature’s bullees.

  “But, my dear Jeremy,” she was saying in a voice that held more of irritation than of affection, “You really can’t expect me to go on wearing that dress any longer. You must give me enough money to buy a new one. A good one. Why, everyone in town must know that old one of mine by now.”

  Jeremy Flint protested weakly that he was not a rich man and that she had only had that dress for three months. His protest was voiced in a tone that held no hope that it would receive any attention whatsoever. It received none.

  Douglas shuddered. There, but for the grace of God, he told himself. He was glad that he had never married if this was what marriage did to a man. He liked Jeremy but he could not stand the sight of Alison. He realised, even more gloomily, that he would need to learn to put up with her. Emily had engaged the couple as sort of secretaries and organisers to the exhibitions. That was their profession. They would organise anything from a bottle-party to a fishing expedition. Fashion was Alison’s forte. One felt that her soul was stuffed with old numbers of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Jeremy, who looked distinguished in a wizened sort of way, went along with her, or was taken by her in the way that she might have carried a marmoset around with her.

  Even the whisky failed to cheer Douglas. He looked gloomily through the contents of his pockets and selected an envelope. He did not open the envelope. He knew that it contained a bill from his dentist. He could have recognised the typewriter a mile off. He made a few notes on the back, despite the spluttering and flooding of his fountain pen:

  Perhaps, said Madame Fashion to her mate,

  You think your sulkiness becoming?

  Perhaps you like to hobnob with the great

  Since I have rescued you, while slumming?

  Her husband stutters, mumbles to his chin,

  Presents a bland, agreeable outside;

  His wife has slobbered out the fires within

  While gobbling up the remnants of his pride.

  He read this through carefully and felt slightly better. He folded the envelope up and replaced it in his pocket. He looked across at the Flints speculatively. He wondered whether he should speak to them, and if he did so whether he would have to buy them a drink. He did not want to buy them a drink. If he did it would mean that he could not buy the Nonesuch Writings of William Blake, and he had decided that he wanted the three volumes in marbled boards with a smooth vellum back.

  Alison Flint saw him and waved him over. He went reluctantly, holding his glass in his hand to hide the fact that it was almost empty. Jeremy’s face lightened. He welcomed the presence of anyone, as a third person meant that his wife gave him some rest.

  “Hullo, Douglas,” he said, perking up like a sparrow who has just found a wheat-grain in a pile of manure, “What are you drinking? Have another?”

  “Whisky, thank you,” Douglas was moody. This meant that he would have to buy a round, and would postpone the purchase of the books for a week.

  “Have you been working this morning?” Alison was affable. She reserved her venom for her husband. “Is Emily very a-flutter?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’ve being trying to get the books into some order. The trouble is that I know practically no German and so many of the books seem to be written in it. I only saw Emily for a moment when I decided that I’d pop out and have a drink. She seemed full of energy. What are you doing to-day?”

  “Oh,” it was Jeremy who answered, “we’re having lunch with Cornelius Bellamy and Julian Ambleside. Emily wants to buy Julian’s large Max Ernst and he seems willing enough to sell, but she thought we should have it vetted by Cornelius. Why on earth she feels that Cornelius needs to see everything she buys is beyond me. Everyone knows Julian’s picture and there’s no doubt that it’s genuine and there’s also no doubt that Emily will pay him whatever he wants for it. But still, as dear Cornelius is her adviser, he has to say the word, so we get landed with the job of taking him out to lunch.”

  Alison Flint frowned. Douglas, percipient, knew exactly why she frowned. Her husband’s remarks about Cornelius Bellamy were aimed at destroying the very foundations of her world. Dr. Cornelius Bellamy was the fashionable arbiter of taste. His word on anything from a brassiere to a teacup was sancrosant. A word of praise from him could make the reputation of an interior decorator, or disparagement dictate the destruction of a line of goods meant for the fashionably wealthy. He sat on Committees for the Improvement of Industrial Design, on Committees for the Encouragement of Natural and National Taste, on committees to do this and committees to do that. What he said went.

  Douglas thought irritably of the Doctor’s various obiter dicta on the subject of poetry. “If we,” he had said, referring to his friends who had been the avante garde of the nineteen-teens, “were the revolution, you,” he had included everyone since T. S. Eliot, “are the counterrevolution.”

  “Oh, but didn’t you hear?” Alison turned excitedly to Douglas, “the Doctor has discovered the most marvellous new man? I’m going to have one of the walls of our dining-room done by him. His name is Ben Carr. He’s the most amazing find. Positively a moron, but he has invented a perfectly new technique for the decoration of rooms. He just covers one wall with plaster or cement or something and, while it is still wet, he throws things at it and they stick. The effect is stupendous. He throws anything he can find at the walls. I’ve been out to his own studio. It is an old chapel in the east end and the walls are positively festooned with things that he rescued from bombed buildings. He can give a real significance to a frying-pan without a bottom. There is one on his own walls and he has used it as a frame for a coloured postcard of The Light of the World. He can give wit to his significance in a way that no one else can. His work is so penetrating.”

  Not so penetrat
ing as your voice, Douglas said to himself. He thought that he remembered seeing the same thing done by a Dadaist called Kurt Schwitters, who had made grottoes hung with rubbish, round about 1920. He knew that Schwitters was living at Barnes and that nobody seemed to give him much employment. He wondered gloomily why someone like Dr. Cornelius Bellamy was almost foreordained to be taken in by the belated imitator and did not bother to seek out the original man. He decided that he would see that Kurt Schwitters got an invitation to the opening of the Museum. After all, Emily had had to include two of his Merzbild in the historical section. Perhaps something might come of it.

  He drained his whisky glass. He was just about to order another round when he saw approaching them, crab-like in his sideways gait, the figure of Julian Ambleside. Curious, he thought, I wonder whether his name had any influence upon him—he does amble sideways.

  Julian Ambleside was short and squat. He gave those who met him for the first time the impression that he had been squeezed flat like an opera-hat and was in the process of recovering from the treatment. He always seemed to be on the point of shooting up like the legendary beanstalk, but he never achieved it. His face resembled that of a toad, even down to the warty knobs besprinkled at intervals across the surface. His arms hung down almost to his knees, giving the impression that he might, if he wished, hop across the room. But he moved slowly on enormous flat feet, and a slight inequality in the length of his legs made him appear to walk sideways. When he hurried he scuttled.

  Douglas remembered The Waste Land, and wondered vaguely whether Julian Ambleside’s ample shoes disguised a “pair of ragged claws.”

  Julian Ambleside was the owner of a gallery. A small gallery, certainly, but one that was haunted by those whose lives were spent being, not only in the swim, but slightly ahead of it. He had a genius for picking up cheaply the disregarded trifles of to-day which were destined to become the treasured ornaments of to-morrow. He had bought Victorian glass paper-weights in the days when such objects could be found in every junk-shop and had had several thousands of them when the craze suddenly burst upon him. At the moment he was collecting paintings by unknown English amateur painters, convinced that the American books on their primitive and popular painters would bring him a rich dividend when the English started to wonder about their own country. As he always stressed, Ambleside was a dealer, and given a big enough offer he would have parted from his pants in Bond Street. Nothing that he had was permanent. Everything was stock-in-trade.

  The Flints watched him approach without enthusiasm. Alison was accustomed to pick his brains, to try and see what he thought would be popular the season after next, but she could not manage to include him among the number of people who she considered it smart to know. Jeremy Flint just quite plainly did not like him.

  He came up to the table and reached out a tentacle to grab a chair from a table about four feet away. He placed himself carefully upon the basket-work, as if afraid that he was risking something by sitting down. He looked at the Flints and then at Douglas before he spoke.

  “Good morning,” he said affably in a high-pitched squeak, “or is it afternoon? What are you drinking?”

  Hell, said Douglas to himself, this means a bigger round. I’ll never get that book.

  “I was just buying a round,” he said, “it’s my turn. What’ll you have?”

  Julian Ambleside turned his heavy squat face round and looked at Douglas, with the corners of his mouth announcing that he was smiling.

  “When I think you’re rich enough, young man,” he said, “to buy me a drink, I’ll ask for it.” He turned to the waiter, “Three whiskies and a glass of tonic water.”

  For some reason, Douglas felt annoyed by this kindness to his pocket. He knew it was unreasonable, but all the same he felt that he could have slapped Julian Ambleside quite cheerfully. He looked unhappily into the amber fluid in his glass. He gestured with it halfheartedly towards Ambleside and poured it down his throat.

  “I suppose I should get back to work,” he remarked rising, “there are all these blasted German books to catalogue and arrange. I’ll be seeing you.”

  He wandered out into Iron Street. The daylight looked unsympathetic and harsh, but it was not as cruel as the bar “day-light” electricity in the library. He saw no one as he entered the shining monel-metal lift and pressed the plastic button. The lift rose like a fountain and made him feel that he had left part of his digestion behind.

  He sat down at his desk and started writing out cards: Klee, Paul, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, Weimar, 1925, and so on. It was an ideal job as he did not need to devote more than a third of his mind to it. He made up his mind, however, that he would ask Emily if she would let him have a desk-lamp with an ordinary bulb in it. This daylight electricity in an air-conditioned sound-proof room made him feel that he had almost receded into the womb. Ahead of him, so far as he could see, there stretched an endless ribbon of filing cards. He found the thought of them faintly revolting. He wrote on the back of a pale lemon yellow card:

  I wonder if my card is filed

  In God’s enormous office scheme,

  And if the notes on me displayed

  Shew me exactly as I seem.

  He would have gone on but the door of the library opened and a man came in. He was of medium height, dressed in a black suit and greying sidewhiskers came halfway down his cheeks. He wore a white bow tie with scarlet polka dots.

  “Oh Douglas, dear boy,” he said, “I thought I would find you here. Can you tell me if you have a copy of Aragon’s Le Peinture au Defi? If you have, can you lend it to me for a few minutes? I am just checking up on various points in the catalogue.”

  Douglas slid the card under the blotter on his black bakelite desk. He got up and went to the shelves and pulled out the required volume.

  “Here you are, Francis,” he said, holding it out. “What do you mean to do with the catalogue? I thought it was finished and printed.”

  “My dear boy,” Francis Varley was shocked, “surely you know our Emily by now. As you say, the catalogue was practically printed. I’d corrected all my proofs and had passed the blocks. However, this morning it suddenly occurred to dear Emily that the catalogue would become out of date very quickly. That is true, considering the rate at which she is buying stuff for the Museum, but I pointed out that we could easily enough prepare a second and a third and so on in the way of editions. But do you think that would satisfy the dear girl? Of course not. Her latest idea is that the catalogue will be a loose-leaf affair and that she will have an extra leaf printed whenever she buys a new picture. And, having thought up this idea, she then decides that the catalogue does not give enough information about the pictures. So, alas, your humble servant has to sit down and try and prepare a bibliography for each picture in the Museum, saying where it is mentioned and where it has been reproduced.”

  He sighed affectedly, and wiped his face with a white, silk handkerchief.

  “I may say, confidentially, of course,” he went on, “that our Emily is just a little bit peeved with me. I had the nerve to suggest that, perhaps, one of the Chiricos was not as genuine as it might seem, and that, as a matter of fact, it was one of the forgeries of his early work which he did during the twenties. She could not have been more insulted if I had told her that one of her cheques had bounced. She pointed out stiffly that the picture had been passed by the Great Bellamy himself, and asked me who I thought I was to presume to know better than the Doctor. I made a feeble effort to justify my opinion, but I sadly fear that I was not impressive. Ah well,” he sighed theatrically, “I suppose I will have to go and apologise, pretending I had a brainstorm. These reconciliations with Emily are so touching. Last time she gave me a watch. I wonder what it will be this time? I think I would like that large etching by Miró. You know, Douglas my dear boy, you should try bickering with dear Emily occasionally. You’d find it very profitable.” Francis Varley tucked the green wrapped book under his arm and went out. Douglas returned to h
is cards. Francis really was a scrounger, he told himself, but he did it so charmingly that no one minded it. By the time he had filled half-a-dozen cards Douglas knew that Francis Varley would own the etching he had coveted. He wondered vaguely if the Chirico really was a wrong one, or whether it was just part of Francis’s game. Anyhow, it was none of his business. He was only the librarian.

  * * *

  * Note.—The first part of this story contains Douglas Newsome’s story as he related it to me. —Max Boyle.

  Chapter 2

  Small Metaphysical Interior

  BEN CARR was engaged in decorating the ladies’ lavatory. He took a miscellaneous collection from his pockets and squeezed it against the walls. A tired stub of Woodbine peered coyly round a bus ticket and a farthing rubbed up against a coloured glass marble. Mr. Carr retired to the other end of the room and looked at his handiwork with distaste.

  “Haven’t you got anything in your pockets?” he demanded of the melancholy Douglas who leaned against a hand-basin watching him. Douglas looked through all his pockets but could find nothing that he wanted to discard. At last, in desperation, he looked at the wall and saw the farthing, and assumed that a coin of the realm might be acceptable. He disengaged half-a-crown from the coppers in his trouser-pockets. He handed it to Ben Carr who looked at it suspiciously and bit it. It did not disintegrate beneath this treatment. Mr. Carr looked at the wall and then at the half-crown. He shook his head sadly and slid the coin into his pocket.

  “Thanks, chum,” he said. “As I was saying this modern business of trying to see that everyone leads a hygienic life is really getting me down. My trouble is that I’ve got five children and two wives. The mother of the children has left me, but I was managing beautifully with the other and with the children. I couldn’t get a house so I just hired a marquee from Harridges and put it up in a field in the country. I had almost all the family under one roof and it was certainly healthy. Well, there I was, feeling as pleased as can be. But do you think they’d leave me alone? Not likely. Along comes an old josser from the Council and he looks round the place. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘You can’t bring up five children in a marquee.’ ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘what do you think I’m doing? I seem to be bringing them up all right.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ he says, ‘I mean you’ve got to have a house.’ ‘All right,’ I say, ‘give me the house.’ So I’m damned if they don’t give me a council house. It’s certainly less draughty than the marquee was but all the same it’s no great shakes. Now they come along and have the blinking cheek to ask why I’ve never paid any rent. ‘Who put me here?’ I ask and that stumps them, so I go on and I point out that I haven’t paid the rent of much better houses than their little hen-roost. I’d clear out to-morrow, but the trouble is that Harley, that’s my second son, made a bonfire out of the marquee and Harridges are threatening to sue me for it. So far as I’m concerned they can sue away. They won’t get much out of me.”