After breakfast the Colonel saw all his officers in the smoking-room. “We’ve got to get everything out of the ship,” he said. “It’s got to be loaded tactically. We shan’t be sailing until tonight anyway. I’ve just seen the Captain and he says he isn’t fuelled yet. Also we’re overloaded and he insists on our putting two hundred men ashore. Also, there’s a field hospital coming on board this morning, that we’ve got to find room for. There is also Field Security Police, Field Force Institute, N.A.A.F.I., two Pay Corps officers, four chaplains, a veterinary surgeon, a Press photographer, a naval beach party, some Marine anti-aircraft gunners, an air support liaison unit—whatever that is—and a detachment of Sappers to be accommodated. All ranks are confined to the ship. There will be no communication of any kind with the shore. Duty company will find sentries for the post and telephone boxes on the quay. That’s all, gentlemen.”
Everyone said, “Lyne made a nonsense of the embarkation.”
V
When Mr. Bentley, in the first flush of patriotic zeal, left publishing and took service with the Ministry of Information, it was agreed between him and the senior partner that his room should be kept for his use and that he should come in whenever he could to keep an eye on his interests. Mr. Rampole, the senior partner, would see to the routine of the office.
Rampole and Bentley was not a large or a very prosperous firm; it owed its continued existence largely to the fact that both partners had a reasonable income derived from other sources. Mr. Bentley was a publisher because ever since he was a boy, he had had a liking for books; he thought them a Good Thing; the more of them the merrier. Wider acquaintance had not increased his liking for authors whom he found as a class avaricious, egotistical, jealous and ungrateful, but he had always the hope that one day one of these disagreeable people would turn out to be a messiah of genius. And he liked the books themselves; he liked to see in the window of the office the dozen bright covers which were that season’s new titles; he liked the sense of vicarious authorship which this spectacle gave him. Not so old Rampole. Mr. Bentley often wondered why his senior partner had ever taken to publishing and why, once disillusioned, he persisted in it. Old Rampole deplored the propagation of books. “It won’t do,” he always said whenever Mr. Bentley produced a new author, “no one ever reads first novels.”
Once or twice a year old Rampole himself introduced an author, always with well-justified forecasts of his failure. “Terrible thing,” he would say. “Met old So-and-so at the club. Got button-holed. Fellow’s just retired from Malay States. Written his reminiscences. We shall have to do them for him. No getting out of it now. One comfort, he won’t ever write another book.”
That was one superiority he had over Mr. Bentley which he was fond of airing. His authors never came back for more, like Mr. Bentley’s young friends.
The idea of the Ivory Tower was naturally repugnant to old Rampole. “I’ve never known a literary review succeed yet,” he said.
He had a certain grudging regard for Ambrose because he was one of the few writers on their list who were incontestably profitable. Other writers always involved an argument, Mr. Bentley having an ingenious way of explaining over advances and overhead charges and stock in hand in such a way that he seemed to prove that obvious failures had indeed succeeded. But Ambrose’s books sold fifteen thousand copies. He didn’t like the fellow, but he had to concede him a certain knack of writing. It shocked him that Ambrose should be so blind to his own interests as to propose such a scheme.
“Has the fellow got money?” he asked Mr. Bentley privately.
“Very little, I think.”
“Then what is he thinking of? What’s he after?”
To Ambrose he said, “But a literary review, now of all times!”
“Now is the time of all times,” said Ambrose. “Don’t you see?”
“No, I don’t. Costs are up and going higher. Can’t get paper. Who’ll want to read this magazine anyway? It isn’t a woman’s paper. It isn’t, as I see it, a man’s. It isn’t even topical. Who’s going to advertise in it?”
“I wasn’t thinking of having advertisements. I thought of making it something like the old Yellow Book.”
“Well, that was a failure,” said old Rampole triumphantly, “in the end.”
But presently he gave his consent. He always gave his consent in the end to all Mr. Bentley’s suggestions. That was the secret of their long partnership. He had registered his protest. No one could blame him. It was all Bentley’s doing. Often he had opposed Mr. Bentley’s projects out of habit, on the widest grounds that publication of any kind was undesirable. In the case of the Ivory Tower he stood on firm ground and knew it. It gave him positive satisfaction to detect his partner in such indefensible folly. So Mr. Bentley’s room, which was the most ornamental in the fine old building which they used as their offices, became the editorial room of Ambrose’s paper.
There was not, at this stage, much editorial work to be done.
“There’s one criticism I foresee,” said Mr. Bentley, studying the proof sheets, “the entire issue seems to be composed by yourself.”
“No one’s to guess that,” said Ambrose. “If you like we’ll put some pseudonyms in.” Ambrose had always rather specialized in manifestos. He had written one at school; he had written a dozen at the University; once, in the late twenties, he and his friends Hat and Malpractice had even issued the invitation to a party in the form of a manifesto. It was one of his many reasons for shunning communism that its manifesto had been written for it, once and for all, by somebody else. Surrounded, as he believed himself to be, by enemies of all kinds, Ambrose found it exhilarating from time to time to trumpet his defiance. The first number of the Ivory Tower somewhat belied the serenity and seclusion which it claimed, for Ambrose had a blow for every possible windmill.
“The Minstrel Boys or Ivory Tower v. Manhattan Skyscraper” defined once and for all Ambrose’s attitude in the great Parsnip–Pimpernell controversy. “Hermit or Choirmaster” was an expansion of Ambrose’s theme at the Café Royal. “Culture must be cenobitic not conventual.” He struck ferocious unprovoked blows at those who held that literature was of value to the community. Mr. J. B. Priestley came in for much personal abuse in these pages. There followed “The Bakelite Tower,” an onslaught on David Lennox and the decorative school of fashionable artists. “Majors and Mandarins” followed, where was defined the proper degrees of contempt and abhorrence due to the military, and among the military Ambrose included by name all statesmen of an energetic and war-like disposition.
“It’s all very controversial,” said Mr. Bentley sadly. “When you first told me about it, I thought you meant it to be a purely artistic paper.”
“We must show people where we stand,” said Ambrose. “Art will follow—anyway there’s ‘Monument to a Spartan.’ ”
“Yes,” said Mr. Bentley. “There’s that.”
“It covers fifty pages, my dear. All pure Art.”
He said this with a facetious, shop assistant’s intonation as though he was saying, “All Pure Silk”; he said it as though it were a joke, but in his heart he believed—and he knew Mr. Bentley understood him in this sense—he was speaking the simple truth. It was all pure art.
He had written it two years ago on his return from Munich after his parting with Hans. It was the story of Hans. Now, after the passage of two years, he could not read it without tears. To publish it was a symbolic action of the laying down of an emotional burden he had carried too long.
“Monument to a Spartan” described Hans, as Ambrose had loved him, in every mood; Hans immature, the provincial petit-bourgeois youth floundering and groping in the gloom of Teutonic adolescence, unsuccessful in his examinations world-weary, brooding about suicide among the conifers uncritical of direct authority, unreconciled to the order of the universe; Hans affectionate, sentimental, roughly sensual, guilty; above all, Hans guilty, haunted by the taboos of the forest; Hans credulous, giving his simple and gener
ous acceptance to all the nonsense of Nazi leaders; Hans reverent to those absurd instructors who harangued the youth camps, resentful at the injustices of man to man, at the plots of the Jews and the encirclement of his country, at the blockade and disarmament; Hans loving his comrades, finding in a deep tribal emotion an escape from the guilt of personal love; Hans singing with his Hitler Youth comrades, cutting trees with them, making roads, still loving his old friend, puzzled that he could not fit the old love into the scheme of the new; Hans growing a little older, joining the Brown Shirts, lapped in a kind of benighted chivalry, bemused in a twilight where the demagogues and party hacks loomed and glittered like Wagnerian heroes; Hans faithful to his old friend, like a woodcutter’s boy in a fairy-tale who sees the whole forest peopled with the great ones of another world and, rubbing his eyes, returns at evening to his hut and his fireside. The Wagnerians shone in Ambrose’s story as they did in Hans’s eyes. He austerely denied himself any hint of satire. The blustering, cranky, bone-headed party men were all heroes and philosophers. All this Ambrose had recorded with great delicacy and precision at a time when his heart was consumed by the final tragedy. Hans’s Storm Troop comrades discover that his friend is a Jew; they have resented this friend before because in their gross minds they knew him to represent something personal and private in a world where only the mob and the hunting-pack had the right to live. So the mob and the hunting-pack fall on Hans’s friendship. With a mercy they are far from feeling they save Hans from facing the implications of his discovery. For him, alone, it would have been the great climacteric of his retarded adolescence; the discovery that his own, personal conviction conflicted with the factitious convictions drummed into him by the crooks and humbugs he took for his guides. But the hunting-pack and the mob left Hans no time to devise his own, intense punishment; that at least was spared him in the swift and savage onslaught; that was left to Ambrose returning by train to England.
It was a story which a popular writer would have spun out to 150,000 words; Ambrose missed nothing; it was all there, delicately and precisely, in fifty pages of the Ivory Tower.
“Quite frankly, Geoffrey, I regard this as a major work of Art.”
“Yes, Ambrose, I know you do. So do I. I only wish we were publishing it without all the controversial stuff.”
“Not controversial, Geoffrey. We invite acceptance, not argument. We are showing our credentials and laissez-passer. That’s all.”
“Old Rampole won’t like it,” said Mr. Bentley.
“We won’t let old Rampole see it,” said Ambrose.
“I’m on to a very good thing, Colonel.”
“Will you kindly address me as ‘sir’ in this office?”
“You wouldn’t prefer to be called ‘chief’?”
“You’ll call me ‘sir’ or get out of that uniform.”
“It’s funny,” said Basil. “I should much sooner be called ‘chief.’ In fact that’s what Susie does call me. However, sir, may I tell you about my discovery?”
When Basil had told him, Colonel Plum said, “That’s all right as far as it goes. We can’t take any action, of course. This fellow Silk is a well-known writer, working in the Ministry of Information.”
“He’s a most dangerous type. I know him well. He was living in Munich before the war—never out of the Brown House.”
“That’s as may be, but this isn’t Spain. We can’t go arresting people for what they say in a private conversation in a café. I’ve no doubt we shall come to that eventually, but at the present stage of our struggle for freedom, it just can’t be done.”
“But this paper he’s starting.”
“Yes, that’s another matter. But Rampole and Bentley are a perfectly respectable little firm. I can’t apply for a search warrant until I’ve got something to go on. We’ve got pretty wide powers, but we have to be careful how we use them. We’ll keep an eye on this paper and if it seems dangerous we’ll stop it. Meanwhile, get to work. Here’s an anonymous denunciation of a retired admiral in South Kensington. There won’t be anything in it. See what the police know about him.”
“Don’t we ever investigate night clubs? I’m sure they’re bursting with enemy agents.”
Susie said, “I do. You don’t.”
A quiet day at the Ministry of Information. The more energetic neutral correspondents had mostly left the country by now, finding Axis sources a happier hunting-ground for front page news. The Ministry could get on with its work undisturbed. That afternoon a film was showing in the Ministry theatre; it dealt with otter-hunting and was designed to impress neutral countries with the pastoral beauty of English life. The religious department were all keen film-goers. Basil found the room empty. On Ambrose’s table lay two sets of galley-proofs of the new magazine. Basil pocketed one of them. There was also a passport; Basil took it up with interest. He had never seen an Irish one before. It was made out for a Father Flanagan, S.J., Professor of Dublin University. The photograph showed a cadaverous face of indeterminate age. Father Flanagan was in his leisure from higher education the correspondent of an Irish newspaper. He wanted to visit the Maginot Line during his vacation and after numerous disappointments had found his way to the religious department of the Ministry of Information, where the Roman Catholic director had promised to try and get him a visa. Basil took this too; an additional passport often came in useful. Then he sauntered away.
He took the proofs home and read until dinner, marking a passage here and there as material to his brief. The style throughout was homogeneous but the authors’ names were multiform. Ambrose rather let himself go on names: “Hucklebury Squib,” “Bartholomew Grass,” “Tom Barebones-Abraham.” Only “Monument to a Spartan” bore Ambrose’s own name. Later that evening Basil sought Ambrose where he was sure to find him, at the Café Royal.
“I’ve been reading your magazine,” he said.
“So it was you. I thought one of those nasty Jesuits had stolen it. They’re always flapping in and out the department like jackdaws. Geoffrey Bentley was in a great stew about it. He doesn’t want old Rampole to see a copy until the thing’s out.”
“Why should the Jesuits want to show your magazine to old Rampole?”
“They’re up to any mischief. What d’you think of it?”
“Well,” said Basil, “I think you might have made it a bit stronger. You know what you want to do is to shock people a bit. That’s the way to put a new magazine across. You can’t shock people nowadays with sex, of course; I don’t mean that. But suppose you had a little poem in praise of Himmler—something like that?”
“I don’t believe that would be a good idea; besides, as far as I know no one has written a poem like that.”
“I daresay I could rake one up for you.”
“No,” said Ambrose. “What did you think of ‘Monument to a Spartan’?”
“All the first part is first rate. I suppose they made you put 0n that ending?”
“Who?”
“The Ministry of Information.”
“They’ve had nothing to do with it.”
“Haven’t they? Well, of course, you know best. I can only say how it reads to an outsider. What I felt was—here is a first-class work of art; something no one but you could have written. And then, suddenly, it degenerates into mere propaganda. Jolly good propaganda, of course; I wish half the stuff your Ministry turns out was as good—but propaganda. An atrocity story—the sort of stuff American journalists turn out by the ream. It glares a bit, you know, Ambrose. Still, of course, we all have to make sacrifices in war time. Don’t think I don’t respect you for it. But artistically, Ambrose, it’s shocking.”
“Is it?” said Ambrose, dismayed. “Is that how it reads?”
“Leaps to the eye, old boy. Still it ought to give you a leg up in the department.”
“Basil,” said Ambrose solemnly, “if I thought that was how people would take it, I’d scrap the whole thing.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t do that. The first forty-five page
s are grand. Why don’t you leave it like that, with Hans still full of his illusions, marching into Poland?”
“I might.”
“And you could bring Himmler in, just at the end, in a kind of apotheosis of Nazism.”
“No.”
“Well, Himmler isn’t necessary. Just leave Hans in the first exhilaration of victory.”
“I’ll think about it… D’you really mean that intelligent readers would think I was writing propaganda?”
“They couldn’t think anything else, old boy, could they?”
A week later by the simple process of going to Rampole and Bentley’s office and asking for one, Basil obtained an advance copy of the new magazine. He turned eagerly to the last page and found that “Monument to a Spartan” now ended as he had suggested; he read it again with relish; to anyone ignorant of Ambrose’s private history it bore one plain character—the triumphant paean of Hitler Youth; Doctor Ley himself might have been the author. Basil took the magazine with him to the War Office; before approaching Colonel Plum he marked with a red chalk the “Monument to a Spartan” and passages in the preceding articles which cast particular ridicule upon the army and the War Cabinet and which urged on the artist the duty of non-resistance to violence. Then he laid it on Colonel Plum’s desk.
“I think, sir, you promised to make me a Captain of Marines if I caught a fascist.”
“It was a figurative expression.”
“Meaning what?”
“That you might have done something to excuse your presence in my office. What have you got there?”
“Documentary evidence. A fifth column nest.”
“Well, put it down. I’ll have a look at it when I’ve time.”
It was not Colonel Plum’s habit to show enthusiasm before subordinates, but as soon as Basil was gone he began reading the marked passages with close attention. Presently he called for Basil.