Stop Press (7 page)

Winter was thinking of Benton. He wondered if Bussenschutt in his compartment was aware that the Lady whose chattels had created the recent uproar was the same whose name had so disturbed his senior tutor. In explanation of that subsidiary mystery it could now at least be said that the Birdwire milieu was likely to be uncongenial to the academic mind. And Winter turned to Timmy. ‘I hope’, he said, ‘not to meet either of them. I take it they’re not likely to be asked to the party?’

‘Not at all likely. But they might turn up. The Birdwire likes enemies as well as friends. An aggressive old person. Daddy isn’t at all aggressive.’

Timmy,’ said Toplady, seizing upon this opportunity with a readiness which Winter had to admire, ‘I would like you to tell us something about your father. Or rather, just because you have told us something, I think we may fairly ask you to tell us something more. For if as we have been given to suppose you believe that it isn’t without a certain effect on his spirits and indeed on his way of feeling about things generally that this thing has happened, then it will be better surely, if we are to be of any help – and indeed for the mere business of getting on in an unembarrassed way – that we should know just how and to what extent that certain effect is evident.’

This tactful composition, Winter said to himself, was to the point. The fantasy of the vitalized Spider was in itself pleasing enough, but by resulting mental derangement in his prospective host he was unprepared to be amused. Timmy’s account of his father’s condition had been vague – and probably slightly alarmist; here was Toplady decently pressing for exacter information. Waiting with some keenness for Timmy’s reply. Winter felt slightly uncomfortable; and it was this perhaps that prompted him to stick his head once more into the corridor and look round. He was just in time for something odd.

He saw an eye. Quite far away – beyond the end compartment which he knew housed Bussenschutt – and appearing cautiously from a little recess which led to a lavatory, he saw an eye and exactly as much of a man’s face as an eye must carry with it if it is to peer successfully round a corner. The effect was curiously unreal – suggestive, it occurred to Winter, less of cautious observation than of a pictorial convention of cautious observation on the cover of a magazine – and it was fleeting; in a moment the eye was seconded by an uncertain nose, half of a close-cropped grey moustache and the corresponding half of a rather less uncertain mouth. Then the whole man came into view – a middle-aged man clad with casual and well-worn elegance – and stepped hurriedly down the corridor. Reaching the neighbourhood of Mrs Birdwire’s and Lady Pike’s compartment, and as if suddenly infected by the brute creation still intermittently vociferous within, he dropped on his hands and knees and scampered briskly past. Then he rose to his feet with deftness and dignify, glanced rapidly into several compartments, murmuring aloud the while. He came nearer, paused to allow Winter to withdraw his head, turned in through the open door, and – still murmuring – sat down. He looked absently round – first at Timmy, then at Toplady, and then at Winter. Finally his glance returned to Timmy and broke into friendly recognition. ‘Hullo’, he said, ‘how are you?’

‘Gerald Winter and Hugo Toplady,’ said Timmy formally, ‘– my father.’

Mr Eliot – the student of Pope, creator of the Spider, and parent doomed to the bin – preserved in middle-age the athletic slimness of his son. But though spare rather than rotund he gave something of the impression of a child’s balloon – of a delicate equilibrium, vibrating with the promise of rising gently into the air at a touch, and this buoyancy carrying with it in its turn the suggestion of deflatability. Mr Eliot, it might be hazarded, possessed the sort of good spirits that are the more engaging for being of a sort peculiarly vulnerable to the arrows of fate. And he was indeed probably shy; he had the rapid social instinct which the shy and cultivated must develop. ‘I hope’, he said, ‘that Timmy is bringing you down to stop with us?’

Winter and Toplady made the grateful murmurings of those who feel that their position is being regularized. Timmy said something about his telegram. Mr Eliot nodded with a vagueness which was still perhaps tact. ‘I had to run up to town,’ he said; ‘a thing that doesn’t often happen nowadays. But Belinda will have got the wire and be sending someone to the station. I’m afraid’ – and he addressed Winter – ‘that this is a very tedious train. Sometimes I’ve thought of writing to the company.’ He paused on the polite implication that this was an issue on which Winter might say the wisely definitive word. ‘But I’ve no doubt’, he added practically, ‘that its vagaries are directed at dividends, and I’m a shareholder myself. Still, it’s very tedious, particularly if one isn’t used to it,’ and Mr Eliot smiled, clearly finding the tediousness of his train among this world’s soothing and satisfactory things.

With considerable relief Winter determined that Mr Eliot was demonstrably sane. But he felt an impulse of irritation against the romancing of Timmy. And it was perhaps as a reflex to this that he said, not wholly kindly: ‘I find this train not at all unentertaining.’ He let his eye stray to the corridor.

Toplady, though ignorant of Mr Eliot’s peculiar proceedings of a few minutes before, divined the need for intervention. ‘The house on the hill’, he said didactically and with unusual directness, ‘belongs to some cousins of mine.’

They all looked out of the window. Perched with urbane aggressiveness on top of a hill – and violating thereby the nicest canons of its period – was a spreading eighteenth-century mansion, its empty and impeccable proportions emphasized against a wintry sky-line. ‘A big house,’ said Winter with malicious respect. He glimpsed Timmy grinning understandingly – as with the intimation of his knowing from experience that his tutor was feeling relieved, annoyed, and ready to plunge into sustained verbal extravagance.

Toplady, conscious that his claim had been without motive of arrogance, proceeded to set the now retreating mansion in a sympathetic light. ‘Steynfield Hall,’ he said. ‘Even more than it would be so unhappily natural to suppose, they have been hit by death duties during the past thirty years. Recently my cousin had to disperse the library. And now he thinks – or so it is thought – that he may even have to give up his mastership of hounds. How bad – are they not? – things are.’

The landowner in Mr Eliot nodded sincere by absent agreement. The novelist – Winter suspected – made a mental note of Toplady’s peculiar rhetoric. But it was a third Mr Eliot who spoke. ‘The Steynfield library? I remember the sale very well. There were several Caxtons. Belinda went.’ He turned to Winter. ‘My daughter is interested in early printers’ devices.’ He spoke casually, as a well-bred man plays his trump card. ‘She has already had one or two papers in the
Library
.’ Mr Eliot’s eye glanced with a hint of reproach towards Timmy and returned, with the same hint faintly lingering, to Winter. It would be nice, the remote implication ran, if Belinda’s brother had caught similar scholarly tastes from his tutor.

From Timmy’s corner came a succession of faint snaps. He had produced another cake of chocolate and was breaking it into irregular chunks. ‘Books,’ he said, ‘’tis a dull and endless strife. Chocolate?’

Mr Eliot took a piece of chocolate and father and son sat munching side by side. ‘Come, hear the woodland linnet? Yes – yes, indeed. But I don’t think Wordsworth meant to condemn books outright – or even bookishness. He speaks very appreciatively of books in the
Prelude
. We couldn’t really get on without books; not even without that sort of books to the making of which there is no end. Don’t you think?’ And Mr Eliot, plainly proposing the pleasures of a little literary conversation, turned again to Winter.

At this moment the train bumped to a stop. ‘The junction,’ said Timmy. In his voice was the peculiar tone by which the outsider recognizes a family joke.

Mr Eliot, hitherto a monument of placid content, was at this transformed into a vessel of quintessential and incomprehensible gaiety – a gaiety that stirred neither in word not in gesture but was all in a momentary translucency of the physical man, as if someone had contrived an exquisite electrical effect. At the same time he contrived to appear acutely apprehensive. ‘
You
look,’ he said urgently to his son.

Timmy looked. So did Winter. At the tail-end of the train Bussenschutt was descending, in his bearing the annoyance of a man who steps out of a first-class carriages and fails to find a porter within hail. The porters were all farther up the platform where a largish group of people, the majority apparently known to each other, was already standing amid little piles of luggage. In a yard beyond stood a row of cars; a chauffeur with an old and roomy saloon of the sort that discreetly wealthy people keep to meet trains at country stations, a disguised gardener with another of the same and a stable lad with a yet older and roomier tourer. Decently calculated noticeableness was given to the assemblage by the fact that the whole of it, with the exception of the stable lad, was in that delicate shade of cream known to conservative coach-builders as Queen Anne’s white. And towards it, with the enhanced cheerfulness of travellers who realize that now somebody else is going to pay, moved the group of people who had got off in front.

‘You see,’ said Timmy, ‘we print the junction on our notepaper and have people met.’

‘But this’, said Mr Eliot, ‘is the through carriage. That’s why I moved along.’

‘In about five minutes they’ll back us into the siding.’

‘The only trouble is that the heating goes off. But nowadays the wait is only half-an-hour till they hitch us on to a local train.’ Mr Eliot produced a pipe which was almost the twin of Timmy’s. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

Winter, who suddenly felt he had been travelling all day, drew his overcoat about him and made an affable noise. Toplady said: ‘Not at all. Are there many stops?’

‘Warter,’ said Timmy, ‘King’s Cleeve, and Wing.’

‘Low Swaffham,’ said Mr Eliot, ‘Pigg, Little Limber, Snug, Cold Findon, and Rust. It means that by the time we arrive Belinda will have settled them all nicely in.’ He filled his pipe and turned to Winter. ‘I wonder if you happen to have a match? I meant to pick some up in my club.’

‘Wing,’ said Timmy – and braced himself against the opposite seat. ‘It’s a curious thing about trains, but the slower they go the quicker they stop.’ He pause. ‘Listen – I can still hear the dogs. Those awful women must have had the same idea as ourselves.’

‘I’m afraid’, said Mr Eliot, ‘that this is a very tedious train. I wonder if we ought to close the window?’

Curling and uncurling his toes within his shoes, and finding a satisfactory ambiguity in the ejaculation, Winter said ‘Pigg!’ Mr Eliot rubbed with a glove at the window, saying ‘Pigg?’ as if surprised that they had got so far. And Timmy, chanting ‘Pigg, Pigg, Pigg – oh, Hugo, I must take you to Pigg!’, wriggled on his seat in the obscure enjoyment of some sentiment of childhood.

Winter felt pervasively numb. He had ceased, against his better knowledge, to believe in any mystery of the Spider, or in the existence of Mrs Birdwire and Lady Pike along the corridor, or even in the enviable crowd and guests who had been conveyed to the Eliot home so much more expeditiously that himself. It was only a little past midday, but interminably the train seemed to have been travelling through an England enfolded in cold, in half-light, and in gloom. ‘No,’ he said, resuming his literary conversation with Mr Eliot and speaking so emphatically that Toplady started. ‘I think that books are a mistake, and that more books are more mistaken still. One’s sole legitimate satisfaction in contemplating the production of literature is in the knowledge that the process has a mathematical limit; that there will come a point, just as there will with music, at which it will be possible to produce only what somebody else has produced before.’

Mr Eliot knocked out his pipe. ‘That’, he said amiably, ‘is pretty much the position already.’

‘But I am speaking exactly. The human vocabulary is limited and can be arranged only in a finite number of ways. The combinations must eventually exhaust themselves. Consider’ – said Winter – ‘an observer from a planet with somewhat different habits from ours prowling about and watching writers at work.’

Toplady, who plainly thought this an unprofitable thing to consider, reached for
The Times
.

‘Consider this detached observer viewing the ceaseless labour of writers in shuffling and rearranging words. Might be not rationally suppose that this matter of the possible combinations was the end on view?’

Mr Eliot considered carefully, a light cloud of perplexity on his face. ‘Yes, I see what you mean. I can conceive an attitude from which all the writing that ever was might appear as a fragment of some pointless mathematical labour. Only your observer would soon see that the combination were being pursued in a very haphazard manner.’ And Mr Eliot looked enquiringly at Winter, seeming to wonder if he were making the right responses in this eccentric conversation.

‘Exactly!’ Winter, turning up the collar of his coat, nodded with an exaggerated air of logical keenness. ‘So why not organize and concentrate? Students of language have demonstrated the possibility of putting a linguistic instrument adequate to every operation of the human intellect upon a single sheet of notepaper. A steady drive for say a couple of centuries with that – a steady working out, regardless of the distractions of seeming sense and nonsense, of the possible combinations of such a rational language–’

‘Little Limber,’ said Timmy.

‘Snug,’ said Timmy.

‘…And the intellectual frailty’, said Winter – who had persuaded himself that he must talk or freeze – ‘of believing that by feeding the flux of experience once more through the typewriter, twisting it here and there with exhausting and boring prestidigitation into the casually pleasing effects which are called art–’

He stopped. Mr Eliot was listening with the politest attention, but rather – Winter suddenly saw – as a matter of duty than of pleasure. It was not that Mr Eliot was incapable of following a fantastic argument; it was simply that this sort of thing was not his pigeon. Emancipated from his own popular literary labours Mr Eliot was serious. Sustained by the sense of a serious environment – of reasonably conducted dons and of daughters who studied early printers’ devices – he could be spontaneously gay. But faced with levity where he expected the solemnities of literary discussion he became perplexed and his gaiety faded; his whole personality faded visibly, as figures on a stage fade into insubstantiality at a touch on a dimmer. Winter, made aware of this oddly physical effect and divining something of the mechanism at work, was conscious too that he had rashly proceeded farther in his absurd theme than was tactful or even decent. This amiable and volatile gentleman, in whose house he was going to stay in obscure and somewhat uncomfortable circumstances, was the manufacturer of thirty-seven romances. And Winter, to beguile this chilly and trundling tail-end of a journey, had been presenting him with an extravagant vision of the profession of letters as an ant-like activity, one of the ultimate futilities of the human spirit. Mr Eliot, it was true, had begun the debate, but on the most unpretentious level. There had been no call for aggressive pyrotechnics in reply. Appalled by a sudden sense of his sins – a sense pointed by the positively cliff-like symbol of dissociation into which the so correct Toplady had erected
The Times
– he tumbled into apology. He had been talking, he was sure, most tedious nonsense. He even stopped curling and uncurling his toes, as if that too were an offence against the bread and salt he was presently to consume.