The Complete Stories (25 page)

  At that moment three men in uniforms charged out of the station doorway. There was a brief scuffle; then, adroitly, they had their man strapped up.

  "We thought he'd make for the railway," said their chief. "You must have had quite an exciting drive, sir."

  Mr. James could scarcely speak. "Wireless," he muttered weakly.

  "Ho, he's been talking to you about that, has he? Then you're very lucky to be here to tell us. It's his foible, as you might say. I hope you didn't disagree with him."

  "No," said Mr. James. "At least, not at first."

  "Well, you're luckier than some. He can't be crossed, not about wireless. Gets very wild. Why, he killed two people and half killed a third last time he got away. Well, many thanks for bringing him in so nicely, sir. We must be getting him home."

  Home. Mr. James drove back along the familiar road.

  "Why," said his wife when he entered the house. "How quick you've been. Where's the parcel?"

  "I think I must have forgotten it."

  "How very unlike you. Why, you're looking quite ill. I'll run in and tell Agnes to switch off the radio. She can't have heard you come in."

  "No," said Mr. James, sitting down heavily. "Not switch off radio. Like it. Homely."

  MY FATHER'S HOUSE

  Chapter One of the unfinished novel Work Suspended

  I

  At the time of my father's death I was in Morocco, at a small French hotel outside the fortifications of Fez. I had been there for six weeks, doing little else but write, and my book, Murder at Mountrichard Castle, was within twenty thousand words of its end. In three weeks I should pack it up for the typist; perhaps sooner, for I had nearly passed that heavy middle period where less conscientious writers introduce their second corpse. I was thirty-three years of age at the time, and a serious writer. I had always been a one-corpse man and, as far as possible, a clean corpse man, eschewing the blood-transfusions to which most of my rivals resorted to revitalize their flagging stories; moreover, I eschewed anything that was even remotely sordid or salacious. My corpses, invariably, were male, solitary, of high position in the world and, as near as possible, bloodless. I abhorred blunt instruments and "features battered beyond recognition." Lord George Vanburgh, in Death in the Dukeries, was decapitated but only, it will be remembered, after he had been dead for some time through other causes. My poisons were painless; no character of mine ever writhed or vomited. Cardinal Vascari, in Vengeance at the Vatican, my first and in other ways my least successful story, met death in a model fashion, lapsing into coma while he sat at his window, one tranquil autumn evening, overlooking the Tiber; the fingers relaxed in the scarlet lap and the rosary with the missing decade—that ingenious clue—slipped unnoticed to the carpet. That was how John Plant's characters died.

  On the other hand, while avoiding blood, I was tolerably free with the thunder. I despised a purely functional novel as I despised contemporary architecture; the girders and struts of the plot require adornment and concealment; I relish the masked buttresses, false domes, superfluous columns, all the subterfuges of literary architecture and the plaster and gilt of its decoration. A tenth of my writing or more—and some of the best of it—went on stage effects; sudden eddies of cold air would stir my curtains, candles guttered, horses lathered themselves to frenzy in their stalls; idiots gibbered; my policemen hunted their man in a landscape of crag, torrent, ruin, and fallen oak. And now and then, when the sequence of emotions I planned for my readers required a moment of revulsion and terror, I would kill an animal in atrocious circumstances—Lady Belinda's Blenheim spaniel, for example, in The Frightened Footman.

  Murder at Mountrichard Castle bristled with Gothic enrichments and I was tolerably confident of its good reception. Success, even at its first approach, failed to surprise me. I took pains with my work and I thought it excellent. Each of my seven books sold better than its predecessor. Moreover, the sale was in their first three months, at seven and sixpence. I did not have to relabel the library edition for the book-stalls. People bought my books and kept them—not in the spare bedrooms but in the library, all seven of them together on a shelf. My contract provided me with an advance on each book corresponding with the total earnings of the one before it. In six weeks' time, when my manuscript had been typed, revised and delivered I should receive a cheque for something over nine hundred pounds. This would pay off my overdraft and Income Tax and leave me with five hundred or so, on which, with another overdraft, I should live until my next book was ready. That was how I ordered my affairs. Had I wished it, I could have earned considerably more. I never tried to sell my stories as serials; the delicate fibres of a story suffer when it is chopped up into weekly or monthly parts and never completely heal. Often, when I have been reading the work of a competitor, I have said, "She was writing with an eye on the magazines. She had to close this episode prematurely; she had to introduce that extraneous bit of melodrama, so as to make each installment a readable unit. Well," I would reflect, "she has a husband to support and two sons at school. She must not expect to do two jobs well, to be a good mother and a good novelist." I chose to live modestly on the royalties of my books.

  I never found economy the least irksome; on the contrary I took pleasure in it. My friends, I know, considered me parsimonious; it was a joke among them, which I found quite inoffensive, for there are two distinct kinds of meanness—those which come of loving money and of disliking it. Mine was the latter sort. My ambition was to eradicate money as much as I could from my life and to do so required planning. I acquired as few possessions as possible. I preferred to pay interest to my bank rather than be bothered by tradesmen's bills. I decided what I wanted to do and then devised ways of doing it cheaply and tidily; money wasted meant more money to be earned. I disliked profusion; it recalled stories in the Daily Express about prizefighters and comedians dying in penury ... they had spent £200 a week, entertaining and lending; they had worn a new pair of black silk socks every evening; no old pal ever left them empty-handed ... ten-shilling tips to commissionaires ... Bohemians.

  I chose my career deliberately at the age of twenty-one. I had a naturally ingenious and constructive mind and the taste for writing. I was youthfully zealous of good fame. There seemed few ways, of which a writer need not be ashamed, by which he could make a decent living. To produce something, saleable in large quantities to the public, which had absolutely nothing of myself in it; to sell something for which the kind of people I liked and respected, would have a use; that was what I sought, and detective stories fulfilled the purpose. They were an art which admitted of classical canons of technique and taste. Their writing was painful—though much less painful than any other form would have been—because I have the unhappy combination of being both lazy and fastidious. It was immune, anyway, from the obnoxious comment to which lighter work is exposed. "How you must revel in writing your delicious books, Mr. So-and-So." My friend Roger Simmonds, who was with me at the University and set up as a professional humorist at the same time as I wrote Vengeance at the Vatican, is constantly plagued by that kind of remark. Instead, women say to me, "How difficult it must be to think of all those complicated clues, Mr. Plant." I agree. "It is, intolerably difficult." "And do you do your writing here in London?" "No, I find I have to go away to work." "Away from telephones and parties and things?" "Exactly."

  I had tried a dozen or more retreats in England and abroad—country inns, furnished cottages, seaside hotels out of the season—Fez was by far the best of them. It is a splendid, compact city and in early March, with flowers springing everywhere in the surrounding hills and in the untidy patios of the Arab houses, one of the most beautiful in the world. I liked the little hotel. It was cheap and rather chilly—an indispensable austerity. The food was digestible with, again, that element of sparseness which I find agreeable. It had an intermediate place between the semi-Egyptian splendours of the tourists' palace on the hill, and the bustling commercial hotels of the new town, half an hour's walk away. The clientele was exclusively French; the wives of civil servants and elderly couples of small means wintering in the sun. In the evening Spahi officers came to the bar to play bagatelle. I used to work on the verandah of my room, overlooking a ravine where Senegalese infantrymen were constantly washing their linen. My recreations were few and simple. Once a week after dinner I took the bus to the Moulay Abdullah; once a week I dined at the Consulate. The consul allowed me to come to him for a bath. I used to walk up, under the walls, swinging my sponge-bag, through the dusk. He, his wife and their governess were the only English people I met; the only people, indeed, with whom I did more than exchange bare civilities. Sometimes I visited the native cinema where old, silent films were shown in a babel of catcalls. On other evenings I took a dose of Dial and was asleep by half past nine. In these circumstances the book progressed well. I have since, on occasions, looked back at them with envy.

  As an odd survival of the age of capitulations there was at that time a British Post Office at the Consulate, used mainly, the French believed, for treasonable purposes by disaffected Arabs. When there was anything for me the postman used to come down the hill on his bicycle to my hotel. He had a badge in his cap and on his arm a brassard with the royal escutcheon; he invariably honoured me with a stiff, military salute which increased my importance in the hotel at the expense of my reputation as an innocent and unofficial man of letters. It was this postman who brought the news of my father's death in a letter from my Uncle Andrew, his brother.

  My father, it appeared, had been knocked down by a motor-car more than a week ago and had died without regaining consciousness. I was his only child and, with the exception of my uncle, his only near relative. "All arrangements" had been made. The funeral was taking place that day. "In spite of your father's opinions, in the absence of any formal instructions to the contrary," my Uncle Andrew wrote, "your Aunt and I thought it best to have a religious ceremony of an unostentatious kind."

  "He might have telegraphed," I thought; and then, later, "Why should he have?" There was no question of my having been able to see my father before he died; participation in a "religious ceremony of an unostentatious kind" was neither in my line nor my father's; nor—to do him justice—in my Uncle Andrew's. It would satisfy the Jellabys.

  With regard to the Jellabys my father always avowed a ruthlessness which he was far from practising; he would in fact put himself to considerable inconvenience to accommodate them, but in principle he abhorred any suggestion of discretion or solicitude. It was his belief that no one but himself dealt properly with servants. Two attitudes drove him to equal fury: what he called the "pas-devant tomfoolery" of his childhood—the precept that scandal and the mention of exact sums of money should be hushed in their presence—or the more recent idea that their quarters should be prettily decorated and themselves given opportunity for cultural development. "Jellaby has been with me twenty years," he would say, "and is fully cognisant of the facts of life. He and Mrs. Jellaby know my income to the nearest shilling and they know the full history of everyone who comes to this house. I pay them abominably and they supplement their wages by cooking the books. Servants prefer it that way. It preserves their independence and self-respect. The Jellabys eat continually, sleep with the windows shut, go to church every Sunday morning and to chapel in the evening, and entertain surreptitiously at my expense whenever I am out of the house. Jellaby's a teetotaller; Mrs. Jellaby takes the port." He rang the bell whenever he wanted anything fetched from upstairs and sat as long as he wanted over his wine. "Poor old Armstrong," he used to say of a fellow Academician, "lives like a Hottentot. He keeps a lot of twittering women like waitresses in a railway station buffet. After the first glass of port they open the dining-room door and stick their heads in. After the second glass they do it again. Then instead of throwing something at them, Armstrong says, ‘I think they want to clear' and we have to move out." But he had a warm affection for the Jellabys, and I believe it was largely on Mrs. Jellaby's account that he allowed himself to be put down for the Academy. They, in their turn, served him faithfully. It would have been a cruel betrayal to deny them a funeral service and I am sure my father had them in mind when he omitted any provision against it in his will. He was an exact man who would not have forgotten a point of that kind. On the other hand, he was a dogmatic atheist of the old-fashioned cast and would not have set anything down which might be construed as apostasy. He had left it to my Uncle Andrew's tact. No doubt, too, it was part of my uncle's tact to save me the embarrassment of being present.

  II

  I sat on my verandah for some time, smoking and considering the situation in its various aspects. There seemed no good reason for a change of plan. My Uncle Andrew would see to everything. The Jellabys would be provided for. Apart from them my father had no obligations. His affairs were always simple and in good order. The counterfoils of his cheques and his own excellent memory were his only account books; he had never owned any investments except the freehold of the house in St. John's Wood which he had bought with the small capital sum left him by my mother. He lived up to his income and saved nothing. In him the parsimony which I had inherited, took the form of a Gallic repugnance to paying direct taxes or, as he preferred it, to subscribing to "the support of the politicians." He had, moreover, the conviction that anything he put by would be filched by the radicals. Lloyd George's ascent to power was the last contemporary event to impress him. Since then he believed, or professed to believe, that public life had become an open conspiracy for the destruction of himself and his class. This class, of which he considered himself the sole survivor, and its ways were for him the object of romantic loyalty; he spoke of it as a Jacobite clan proscribed and dispersed after Culloden, in a way which sometimes embarrassed those who did not know him well. "We have been uprooted and harried," he would say. "There are only three classes in England now, politicians, tradesmen and slaves." Then he would particularize. "Seventy years ago the politicians and the tradesmen were in alliance; they destroyed the gentry by destroying the value of land; some of the gentry became politicians themselves, others tradesmen; out of what was left they created the new class into which I was born, the moneyless, landless, educated gentry who managed the country for them. My grandfather was a Canon of Christ Church, my father was in the Bengal Civil Service. The capital they left their sons was their education and their moral principles. Now the politicians are in alliance with the slaves to destroy the tradesmen. They don't need to bother about us. We are extinct already. I am a Dodo," he used to say, defiantly staring at his audience. "You, my poor son, are a petrified egg." There is a caricature of him by Max Beerbohm, in this posture, saying these words.