‘Oh yes, I have,’ Fred said. ‘But I’m sorry you don’t like them. They did things so picturesquely. “Enter executioners with coffin, cords and a bell.” The killers of to-day are . . . well . . . more prosaic’
‘I’ll say they are,’ said his guest, with a sudden lapse into Americanese. ‘I’ll say they are. Now, Wendy, we must go and make up our faces, and then we’ll take Mr. Cross on to our place. It’s not too early for you, is it, Mr. Cross? We’ve got the car outside.’
‘No, indeed,’ said Fred. He felt the meal was being terminated rather abruptly; but he was as anxious as his guests seemed to be to get down to business.
Left alone, he sat for a moment at the table, thinking. No doubt the pair, besides powdering their noses, wanted to say a word to each other in private about terms. While they were doing that he would go upstairs and fetch the book. Even his rather shabby bedroom wore a cheerful air, such was his elation, and when he took the typescript out of his suitcase, instead of greeting him with the leaden look of a child that has never managed to make good—the look that only an oft-rejected typescript can give—it seemed to say: ‘Your faith in me has been justified after all.’ I’ll wrap it up, he thought, handling it affectionately; it won’t matter if I keep them waiting, it’ll make them the more eager. How often had he done up this selfsame parcel; even the brown paper had been used before. But this would be its last outward journey until it returned to him with his proofs.
The book under his arm, he walked downstairs, scorning the lift. As he was crossing the middle lounge—always some Rubicon for a Cross to cross—he heard his name called. Not a good sign had the voice been imaginary, but this time it was real, as real at any rate as the loudspeaker’s voice, which penetrated to the very nerve-centres. ‘Mr. Whiston, please. A telephone call for Mr. Whiston, please. Mr. Fred Cross would like to speak to Mr. Whiston, Mr. Fred Cross calling Mr. Whiston, please.’
The hotel seemed to echo with it. Of all the coincidences on this evening of coincidences, this was the one that surprised Fred Cross the least. Experience had taught him that there were other Fred Crosses in the world besides himself. It was a lesson in humility which he had thoroughly learnt. Sometimes it vaguely depressed him that he had to share his name with so many other men but to-night he was proof against depression; he was morally certain that his ‘Jacobean Dramatists’ was in the bag (what bag? whose bag? A bag unknown to Brewer’s Phrase and Fable).
As the message was being repeated, the porter said to him:
‘Your guests are waiting for you in the car, sir.’
He sat on the back seat with the publisher’s wife, and didn’t notice much where they were going, so occupied was he in trying to keep up a conversation with her invisible but (he felt sure) existent smile. True to his resolution, he gave away as little as he could, and she was just as unforthcoming. Their conversation, like an iceberg, trailed unmeasured depths beneath it. Childishly, Fred found this mystification rather fun.
London spreads out a long way in all directions; when at last Fred felt he could take a rest from social effort and look about him he didn’t know where he was, but the street lamps were fewer than they had been, and the houses farther apart. A minute or two later the man said: ‘This is us,’ and drew up at the kerb.
The ‘place’ he had been taken to was much less grand than the size of the car suggested that it would be: it was in fact a bed-sitting-room in a semi-detached house. Many people lived like that nowadays, but they generally made the bed, or got it made, before the evening. As though aware of this thought the woman said:
‘Sorry the room’s in such a mess, but we had to make an early start this morning. What about some whisky, Bill?’
‘In there,’ the man said briefly, indicating a small cupboard which, when opened, was seen to house a surprising number of objects meant for a variety of uses: but drinking was one of them.
When the gas-fire had been lit the room seemed more habitable, as well as warmer. Fred and his hostess occupied the armchairs on each side of it; the man cleared a space among the bedclothes and sat down on the bed.
‘Joe’s not here,’ he said.
‘He may be on some job,’ said Wendy.
‘Well, good luck to him and good luck to the book,’ he said.
‘To the book!’ he said, and raised his glass. They all drank to it and Fred was suddenly aware of the parcel under his arm. Self-consciously but proudly he began to fumble with the string. This was his moment.
‘Some book!’ the man said, watching him.
Fred agreed. ‘It took me——’ he broke off, remembering he had told them before how long the book had taken him to write—remembering, too, that publishers are not necessarily impressed by the extent of an author’s industry. ‘Well, you know how long it took me,’ he substituted. ‘Time wasn’t an object: accuracy was what I aimed at.’
They both nodded, and out the typescript came. It had at once, for his eyes, the too bulky, too ponderous look of a literary work, however slender, that has always missed its market. Printed in the middle was the title, its worn, faded ink almost indecipherable against the pale blue of the folder, and in the bottom right-hand corner Fred’s name, and his address, which seemed at the moment very far away.
The man took the book from him. ‘I wasn’t expecting a big book like this,’ he said, ‘I must put on my glasses.’ The horn-rimmed spectacles transformed his face and for the first time he looked like a man who might be interested in books. He turned the pages. ‘Middleton, Marston, haven’t heard of them. Oh, here’s Ben Jonson. Where’s the list you spoke of?’
‘You’ll find it at the end,’ said Fred.
The man began to read the names out, and then stopped. ‘Strikes me there’s some mistake here,’ he said. ‘Somebody’s been having a game, he repeated giving the innocent phrase an unpleasant sound. ‘A game with us, it looks like. Somebody has. What do you make of it, Wendy?
He handed his wife, if wife she was, the book: the pages turned rapidly under her reddened nails.
‘I can’t make head or tail of it,’ she said. ‘It might be somebody’s idea of a joke. . . . Perhaps this gentleman will explain.’
Fred cleared his throat.
‘It’s my book,’ he said, with such dignity as he could muster, but with a fluttering at his midriff. ‘My book on the Jacobean Dramatists. I thought you were interested in it. . . . I was told you were.’
‘Who told you?’ the man asked.
It was only when he couldn’t remember his informant’s name—a name he knew as well as his own—that Fred realized he was frightened.
‘But you are publishers, aren’t you?’ he asked.
For a moment it seemed just rude that neither of them answered; then it seemed strange, with the strangeness of their faces, the strangeness of the room, and the strangeness of his being there at all.
‘I thought——’ he began.
‘You thought a good deal, didn’t you?’ said die man. ‘It’s our turn to think now. Someone, as the poet said, has blundered. Someone will be for it, I suppose.’
The repetition of the word ‘someone’ began to get on Fred Cross’s nerves.
‘If you’re not interested,’ he said, half-rising, ‘I’ll take the book away.’
‘Sit down, sit down,’ the man said, patting the air above Fred’s head. ‘We are interested, and we don’t want you to go away, not yet. We haven’t quite done with you, as the saying is. Now as for this book——’
‘It’s quite simple,’ said Fred, trembling. ‘I see you’re not interested in it. I’ll take it away.’
‘It isn’t so simple as that,’ the man said. ‘Someone has found out something that someone has got to forget—or there may be trouble, and we don’t want any trouble, do we?’
‘No,’ said Fred mechanically.
‘I’m not mentioning names,’ the man went on, ‘it’s better not to mention names, we haven’t mentioned names, have we?’
‘You
know my name,’ Fred said.
‘Yes, but we’re not interested in your name. It’s our names that matter. She’s Wendy and I’m Bill—those are our names. You can call us by them, if you like.’
Fred Cross had never felt less inclined to be on Christian-name terms with anyone.
‘And you might want to write to us,’ Bill went on. ‘You might want to send us a Christmas card, for instance.’
‘I don’t think I shall,’ Fred said.
‘You never know,’ Bill said. ‘Now here’s an envelope.’ He fetched one, slightly soiled, from a heap of litter on the table. ‘Have you a pen?’
Using the typescript as a desk, Fred set himself to write; his hand was shaking.
‘Mr. and Mrs.——’ he wrote, and stopped. Then he remembered: Whiston, of course. ‘Mr. Whiston, please. A telephone call for Mr. Whiston, please.’ But his hand was shaking too much. To gain time he raised it from the envelope and said:
‘But you haven’t told me your name.’
‘Didn’t we tell you?’ the man asked. ‘It was very careless of us. Are you sure we didn’t?’
‘Quite sure,’ said Fred.
‘What an extraordinary thing. We didn’t tell you our name, or our address, or anything?’
‘Nothing at all,’ said Fred.
‘Could you find your way here, if you wanted to pay us another visit?’
Suddenly Fred wondered if he could frighten them, and rashly said:
‘I think I could.’
‘Oh, you think you could? Well, just to make it easier for you, here’s our name and the address,’ Bill said, standing behind him. ‘Take it down.’
Fred bent his head and set himself to write.
‘Allbright,’ said the dictating voice.
‘Mr. and Mrs. Allbright, Flat C, 19 Lavender Avenue, S.W.17. Got that?’
Fred did get it, but he couldn’t say so, for his head was lying on the typescript, and he was unconscious. When he came to he was in hospital. A policeman had found him stretched on the pavement in a deserted street. Almost his first inquiry was for his precious typescript, and almost the first action when he left the hospital was to get in touch with the man whom he had turned so inhospitably from the door. All the newspapers had reported his misadventure, and none of them failed to observe that the typescript had bloodstains on it. At last it was in the news, and this may have turned the scale in Fred’s favour; at any rate the publisher accepted it.
Yet more publicity followed. The name of Allbright conveyed nothing to the police, but the name Whiston did.
‘You were lucky you didn’t let on you knew it,’ the police told Fred, ‘or you would have got a bigger bashing than the one you did get.’ They had more serious charges against William Whiston than the assault upon Fred Cross, but that was one charge. Another Fred Cross soon figured in the proceedings, a much more sensational one; but he did not altogether steal the limelight from our hero, for the newspapers dared not mention him and his black doings without making it quite clear that he must not be confused with another Fred Cross, the well-known author, whose long-awaited work on the Jacobean Dramatists was soon to be given to the world. But one important piece of evidence in the case, a small black notebook containing a list of the names of a gang against whom William Whiston had a grudge, was never submitted to a publisher.
THE PYLON
The trees sloping inwards, and the hedge bounding the field beyond, made a triangle of green in which the pylon stood. Beyond it, fields again and then the railway embankment. Beyond the embankment more hedges making transverse lines, and then the roofs of houses bowered in trees, sloping up to the wooded hill-crest, outlined against the sky. But that was a mile, perhaps, two miles away; whereas the pylon——
There was general rejoicing when the pylon disappeared: Mummy was glad, Daddy was glad, Victor was glad and Susan was glad. The morning when it happened they all crowded to the window as if they had never seen the view before. Nor had they—the view without the pylon. Ever since they came to the house ten years ago it had been there—an eyesore, a grievance. ‘It would be such a lovely view,’ they used to say to visitors, ‘if it wasn’t for the pylon!’
The pylon used to stand between two trees, a fir-tree and a copper beech, directly in front of the window, just beyond the garden. Instead of concealing it, they framed it. Every so often Victor, the optimist, now sixteen, would say, ‘Daddy, I’m sure those branches are coming closer together! Next year, you’ll see, they’ll hide it!’ And his father would reply, as like as not, ‘They’re not growing any nearer—they’re growing farther apart! Fir-trees and beech-trees don’t agree, you know!’
There it stood, between the trees, rearing its slender tapering height against the wooded hillside, the line of which it maddeningly broke, topping with its incongruous yard-arm the ancient earth-work that crowned the hill.
Now it was gone, and in its place they saw the trees that it had hidden and, more especially, two Lombardy poplars growing so close together that if you walked a little distance, either way, they looked like one.
And Laurie, the youngest of the family, too, was glad at first, or thought he was. When he heard his parents saying to visitors, ‘Isn’t it wonderful, the pylon’s gone!’ he would echo, in a grown-up manner ill-suited to his eleven years, ‘Yes, isn’t it wonderful?’ Not that he disliked the pylon on aesthetic grounds, but he thought it was the proper thing to say.
But whereas their grievance against the pylon had been vocal for many years, their gratitude for its departure was comparatively shortlived. They would still say, ‘How marvellous without the pylon!’ but they didn’t really feel it, and after a month or two they didn’t even say it, taking their deliverance for granted, just as when an aching tooth is pulled out, one soon ceases to bless the painless cavity.
With Laurie, however, it was otherwise. Being outwardly a conformer—indeed a rather zealous conformer—he had joined in the delight his elders showed over the pylon’s downfall. He tried to gloat over the square patch of concrete, marking its site, which the demolition squad hadn’t bothered to clear away. But when he stood in front of the window, whichever window it might be—for having a southern aspect, most of the windows of the house had once looked on the pylon—and set himself to gloat, sometimes he would find his eyes straying, even shying away from, the remnant of its ruin. To the others the pylon had been an eyesore and a grievance; to him it was a landmark and a friend. How tall and proud it used to be—one hundred and seventeen feet high—the tallest object in the neighbourhood—taller than the hill itself, he liked to think, though his mind told him that its superior height was only a trick of the perspective.
From surveying the pylon-less gap with a lack-lustre eye it was a short step to trying to imagine it with the pylon there. And then Laurie realized that something had gone out of his life—some standard, was it, by which he had measured himself? No, not exactly that, nor only that. The pylon had symbolized his coming stature, his ambitions for himself as an adult. One day his short, plump body would shoot upwards, tall and straight as the pylon was; one day his mind, that was so dense in some ways, and so full of darkness, would fine down to an aery structure that let the light in everywhere and hardly cast a shadow. He would be the bearer of an electric current, thousands of volts strong, bringing light and power to countless homes.
The pylon, then, had served him as a symbol of angelic strength. But in other moods it stood for something different, this grey-white skeleton. In meaner moods, rebellious moods, destructive moods, he had but to look at it to realize how remote it was from everything that grew, that took its nourishment from the earth and was conditioned by this common limitation. It was self-sufficient, it owed nothing to anyone. The pylon stood four-square upon the ground, but did not draw its sustenance from the ground. It was apart from Nature; the wind might blow on it, the rain might beat on it, the snow might fall on it, frost might bite it, drought might try to parch it, but it was immune, proof against th
e elements: even lightning could not touch it, for was it not itself in league with lightning?
And so he, Laurie, in those moods when nothing favoured him, when everyone’s hand was against him and his hand against theirs, insulated by the flawless circle of himself, he, too, enjoyed the pylon’s immunity, its power to be itself. Whatever stresses might be brought to bear on it, it didn’t care, nor, looking at it, did he, Laurie, care.
All that was over now; his companion was gone; and Laurie-the-pylon was no more.
Deprived of his second self he shrank, his imaginative life dwindled, and with it his other budding interests. An east-wind blight descended on his mind, dulling his vision, delaying his reactions. If he was spoken to, he didn’t always hear, and if he heard he didn’t always answer. ‘But you don’t listen!’ Susan would chide him, in exasperation, and his brother, who went to the same day-school, would defend him: ‘You see, he’s so tiny, his ears haven’t grown yet! They’re really little baby’s ears!’ Then Laurie would lunge out at him, and in the scuffle regain the sense of immediate contact with reality that he had lost.
His mother and father, oddly enough, took longer to notice the change in him, for he had always been more talked against than talking. In fact they might never have noticed it but for his end-of-term reports. These made them think, and one, from Laurie’s form-master, made them quite indignant.
‘I wonder what’s come over the boy,’ his father said, knitting his heavy brows and tapping his finger-tips against his teeth. ‘He used to be the clever one. Not quick and sharp like Victor, but thoughtful and original.’
‘I expect he’s going through a phase,’ his wife said, placidly.
‘Phase, indeed! He isn’t old enough for phases.’
‘You’d better speak to him, but if you do, be careful, darling. You know how sensitive he is.’
‘Sensitive my foot! I’m much more sensitive than he is. You ought to warn him to be careful.’