27.   John Munting to Elizabeth Drake

15a, Whittington Terrace, Bayswater    

[The opening sheets of this letter are lost, but the date is evidently some time in January.]

. . . proofs coming along at express speed, I am enjoying a magnificent illusion of importance and busy-ness. The novel will be out before the Life, which is being held up considerably by copyright bothers over the plates. All the better, as it is a mistake to bung two books out right on top of one another.

    I am feeling a great deal more sympathetic with Lathom just now. The earnest Harrison has transferred his attentions, for the moment, to me, because, as a literary man, I can, of course, tell him exactly how best to prepare his fungus-book for the press. He comes teetering in at my busiest moments to discuss points of grammar. I tell him my opinion and he contradicts it at great length, pointing out subtleties in his phrasing which I have not grasped. At length I either tell him that his own original idea expresses his personality best, or fall back on The King’s English if the error is really too monstrous to let pass. This works all right for a time, and he carries the book off with much gratitude – returning later, however, with the demurrer to Mr Fowler carefully written down on paper. I once made the foolish suggestion that he should write to Fowler and thrash it out with him direct; this was fatal, as I had to listen to (a) the letter; (b) the reply; (c) the rejoinder – so I now fall back as a rule on the phrase about expressing personality. There was also a dreadful day when a water-colour picture of fungi came out too green by three-colour process. Lathom and I suffered dreadfully over this abominable toadstool, and were at length forced to go out and drown the recollection in Guinness.

    All the same, I try my best to be helpful, because I am the only person who can enter into Harrison’s interests, and he has really written a very entertaining little piece of work, full of odd bits of out-of-the-way knowledge, scraps of country lore and queer old-fashioned recipes and things. He must have made extraordinary good use of his holidays, and there’s not a plant or animal in the country fit for food that he doesn’t know the last word about. He has made a wonderful collection of botanical diaries, which ought to be of considerable scientific value, and he brings a really scholarly mind to his rather unscholarly subject. His water-colours, though too prim considered as pictures, make really rather attractive book-illustrations, and his drawings of plants and fungi are beautifully accurate in line and colour – far better than the stuff you find in the usual textbooks. And, indeed, the vagaries of the three-colour process are enough to make Job irritable. I told him that he should take as his motto for the book the famous misprint in the Bible, ‘Printers bave persecuted me with a cause’ – which pleased him.

    Profiting by my position as literary guide and mentor, I have (with colossal tact) persuaded him to let the famous portrait be shown. We got around to it by way of cookery, oddly enough. I said that cookery was really a very important creative art, which was not properly understood in this country, being chiefly left in the hands of women, who were not (pardon me, Bungie) as a rule very creative.

    That led on to a general discussion of Art, and the yearning that every creative artist feels to obtain a public response to his art. And so, by devious ways, to Lathom and his picture. I said that, while I entirely understood Mrs Harrison’s quite natural feeling that to exhibit her portrait would be, to a great extent, exhibiting herself, to Lathom it was, of course, quite a different matter. It was his work, his handling of line and colour, for which he wanted public recognition. But I admitted that a woman could not be expected to appreciate this point of view.

    As I had foreseen, Harrison took this as an indirect criticism of his wife, and promptly reacted against it. She was not, he said, like the ordinary woman. She had a remarkable gift for artistic appreciation. He felt sure that if he put it to her in the right light, she would see that it was not a personal question at all. Indeed, she had made no objection herself – it was he who had been afraid of exposing her to unwelcome notoriety. But it should be made quite clear that the painting was the important matter, and that the subject had no personal bearings of any kind.

    It was very odd, Bungie, to see him reassuring himself in this vicarious way. And it was still odder that I had a feeling all the time as if I was doing something unfair. His attitude about the thing was preposterous, of course, but I have a queer feeling about Mrs Harrison. She isn’t so stupid that she can’t see Lathom’s point of view. It would matter less if she were. It is that she is clever enough to see it and adopt it when it is pointed out, and to make it into a weapon of some kind for something or other. Not knowing that it is a weapon, either; practising a sort of ju-jitsu, that overcomes by giving way – good God! what a filthy bit of obvious journalese metaphor!

    Anyhow, Mr Harrison worked off my little lecture on the creative artist with great effect under my very nose the same evening, as though it was all his own work. Mrs H. started off with her usual lack of tact by saying: ‘I thought you said,’ and ‘I don’t want to discuss it,’ but, catching my eye, resigned herself to listen graciously and give consent. So the Hanging Committee is, after all, to have the happiness of gazing upon the portraits of Mrs Harrison and Miss Milsom – blest pair of sirens – and I hope they will be duly appreciative. Lathom is pleased – and so damn well ought to be! I hope it will calm him down, for what with the portraits and the fungus-book and one thing and another, he and I are both getting into a state of nerves.

    I want peace and quiet. Damn all these people! Thank Heaven I’ve got the proofs to see to, because I’m in no fit state to write anything. My ideas are all upside down. I can’t focus anything. I suppose it’s just the usual ‘between-books’ feeling. I am going to take a few weeks’ lucid interval and read astronomy or physics or something. Personally, I’m dead sick of the blasted creative instinct!

Yours all-of-a-dither, but still devotedly,        

Jack

28.   The Same to the Same

15a, Whittington Terrace, Bayswater    

1st February, 1929

Bungie, my darling,

    What, in God’s name, are you going to do with me if I get jealous and suspicious? Or I with you, if it happens that way? I ask this in damn sober earnest, old girl. I’ve got the thing right under my eyes here, and I know perfectly well that no agreement and no promise made before marriage will stand up for a single moment if either of us gets that ugly bug into the blood.

    You remember – months ago – I passed on a cheerful little matrimonial dialogue that took place by the umbrella-stand. Tonight we had the pleasure of hearing the thing carried on to the next stage.

    Harrison had the brilliant idea of inviting Lathom and me to dinner to taste his special way of frying chicken. Well, there we all were – Miss Milsom frightfully kittenish in a garment she had embroidered herself with Persian arabesques. (‘I don’t know what they mean, you know, Mr Munting. Probably something frightfully improper! I copied them off a rug.’) Harrison who allows nobody to penetrate into ‘his’ kitchen when he’s working out a masterpiece, was frying away amid a powerful odour of garlic. No Mrs Harrison! We furiously make conversation – enter H. – gives a black look round, and disappears again. I count the things on the mantelpiece – two brass candlesticks, brass door-knocker representing the Lincoln imp – two imitation brass mulling-cones – ill-balanced pottery nude – quaint clock and pair of Liberty nondescripts. Front door goes. Kitchen door in the distance heard to burst open. ‘Well, where have you been?’ Awful realisation creeps over us all that the sitting-room door has been left open. I say hurriedly: ‘Have you read the new Michael Arlen, Miss Milsom?’ We are all aware that a prolonged cross-examination is proceeding. Lathom fidgets. Voice rises to appalling distinctness: ‘Don’t talk nonsense! How long were you at the hairdresser’s? – Well, what were you doing? – Yes, but what kept you? – Yes, of course, you met somebody. You seem to be meeting a lot of people lately! – I don’t care who it “only” was – one of the men from the office, I suppose – Carrie Mortimer? nonsense! – I shall not be quiet – I shall talk as loudly as I like – Did you or did you not remember – ?’ Here I grow desperate and turn on the gramophone. In comes Harrison, putting a good face on it. ‘Here’s the wife, late as usual!’ We sit down to dinner in embarrassed silence. I murmur eulogies on the chicken. ‘Over-cooked,’ says Harrison, shovelling it all aside and savagely picking at the vegetables. After this, everybody is afraid to eat it, for fear of not seeming to know good food from bad. ‘It seems delicious to me, Mr Harrison,’ says Miss Milsom, profiting nothing from long experience. ‘Oh,’ says Harrison, sourly, ‘you women don’t care what you eat. It’s overdone, isn’t it, Lathom?’ Lathom, quite helpless with rage, says in a strangulated voice, that he thinks it’s just right. ‘Well, you’re not eating it,’ says Harrison, gloomily triumphant. By this time everybody’s appetite is taken thoroughly away. There is nothing on earth the matter with the chicken, but we all sit staring at it as though it was a Harpagus-feast of boiled baby.

    Well, I’ll spare you the rest of the nightmare. The point is that this time, Mrs Harrison didn’t come in bubblingly eager to say where she had been and what she had been doing – and that next time the alibi will hold water – and then Harrison will start saying that you can’t trust women, and will very likely be perfectly justified.

    Bungie – I see how these things happen, but how does one insure against them? What security have we that we – you and I, with all our talk of freedom and frankness – shall not come to this?

    Love makes no difference. Harrison would cheerfully die for his wife – but I can’t imagine anything more offensive than dying for a person after you’ve been rude to them. It’s taking a mean advantage. And what’s the good of it all to him, if he loves her so much that everything she says gets on his nerves? I like Harrison – I think he’s worth a hundred of her – and yet, every time there’s a row, she ingeniously manages somehow to make him appear to be in the wrong. She is completely selfish, but she takes the centre of the stage so convincingly that the whole scene is engineered to give her the limelight for her attitudes.

    This house is becoming a nightmare; I shall have to chuck it, but I must stay on till Easter, because the rent is paid up to the quarter and I can’t afford to lead a double life and Lathom can’t manage more than his own share. Hell!

    I to Hercules comes out next month. I hope old Merritt won’t be let down over it. He continues to be enthusiastic. Senile decay, I should think. Well, we’ll hope for the best. If my Press is as good as yours I shan’t complain, my child.

Your envious        

Jack

29.   Note by Paul Harrison

It is unfortunate that throughout this important and critical period, from the end of November to the end of February, we should have no help from the Milsom correspondence. It seems that Miss Milsom and Mrs Farebrother had a renewed quarrel during the Christmas period, on the subject of the youth Ronnie Farebrother, mentioned in former letters, and that as a result they remained for some time not on speaking or writing terms. Mr Munting’s letters also contain no references to my father’s domestic affairs during the month of February – no doubt because he was preoccupied with his own private concerns.

    During the last week of January, the wretched young Farebrother shot himself. This gratifying fulfilment of her prophecies of disaster seems to have driven Miss Milsom into a highly hysterical state of mind, which probably precipitated the mental collapse that followed. Her correspondence with her sister (which was then resumed) is therefore quite useless for evidential purposes. We can, therefore, only guess at the development of the situation between my stepmother and Lathom during February – the month in which my father’s duties took him away from home for fourteen days, in connection with the electrical installation in Middleshire. In view of the extraordinary incident which finally broke up the two households, it is, however, not difficult to form a correct opinion.

30.   John Munting to Elizabeth Drake

15a, Whittington Terrace, Bayswater    

17.2.29

Darling Bungie,

    You have seen the reviews, of course! Bless my heart and soul, what has happened to the people? Of course, it was all started by that tom-fool at the Guildhall (I don’t know why Cabinet Ministers should be the only people who can sell one’s books for one nowadays) – but oh, my lights and liver! Oh, goroo! goroo! The silly mutton-headed G.P. is walking into the blooming shops by thousands and buying the thing! Paying for the thing. Shoving down their hard-earned seven-and-sixpences for it! Lord help us – what have I done that I should be a bestseller? Is thy servant a tripe-hound that he should do this thing? First edition sold out. Presses rolling out new printings day and night – Merritt nearly off his head and saying, ‘I told you so.’ Blushing author besieged in his charming Bayswater flat (! ! ! !) – Remarkable portrait of blushing author by that brilliant young artist Mr Harwood Lathom (done in a fit of boredom one afternoon when the model hadn’t turned up) being scrambled for by four Press agencies, two literary hostesses and an American lion-tamer! Everything gas and gaiters! Worm-like appeals, from publishers who turned Hercules down, for the next contract but seven, and the Wail and the Blues and the Depress and all the Sunday Bloods yapping over the phone for my all-important, inspired and inspiring views on ‘What does the Unconscious mean to me?’ – ‘Is Monogamy Doomed?’ – ‘Can Women tell the truth?’ – ‘Should Wives Produce Books or Babies?’ – ‘What is wrong with the Modern Aunt?’ – and ‘Glands or God – Which?’

    Bungie, old thing, it all seems absolutely ghastly and preposterous, but the blasted book is BOOMING – and – shall we get married, Bungie? Will you take the risk on the strength of one fluky Boomer (which may perfectly well be a Boomerang and prevent me from ever writing anything worth doing for the rest of my life), and a set of contracts which I may go mad with inability to fulfil? Because, if you will – say so, my courageous infant, and we will tell your Uncle Edward to put up the banns, and prance off hand in hand our own primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.

    Pull yourself together, Jack Munting!

    Bungie, I’ve never told you how jealous I was because your books sold and mine didn’t. If I tell you so now, don’t remember it against me. Parson Perry says confession is a good thing. Perhaps he’s right. I confess it now – and now forget it, there’s a good girl. Perhaps even now it only means that my wretched book is howlingly bad. I always comforted myself with thinking that I must write better than you to be so unsaleable – but I’m filthily pleased and cock-a-hoop all the same.

    Pull yourself together, Jack Munting! You are becoming hysterical. Your glands are functioning madly in the wrong places, and your Unconscious has come unstuck!

    Anyhow, I’m going to have quite enough to depress me tomorrow. That crashing nuisance, Leader, has suddenly discovered that he knows the fellow who’s written the book of the season, and is coming along to ‘Look me up, old boy, and celebrate!’

There was a young student of Caius

Who passed his exams with a squaius,

Ere dissecting at St Bartholomews

Inward St Partholomews, such as St Heartholomews,

To discover the cure of disaius.

    Oh, well, I suppose one of the penalties of success is the way it brings you in touch with your friends. I had an invitation to dine from the Sheridans last week. ‘Such a long time since we met, isn’t it?’ I will see to it that it shall be longer still.

    Well, let me know about the matrimonial outlook, won’t you? I have a great many important engagements, of course, but I daresay I might be able to fit this little matter in somewhere!

Yours pomposo e majestuoso,        

Jack

P.S. You need not trouble to make it a quiet one. I can easily afford a top-hat – in fact, several.

31.   The Same to the Same

15a, Whittington Terrace    

20.2.29

Darling Bungie,

    Glory, alleluia! Then we will be married at Easter. Curse Uncle Edward’s scruples! I could make you just as good a husband in Lent – but, as you say, it’s a shame to upset the old boy. Now that the remote prospect has really come so (comparatively) near, I feel all wobbly and inadequate. It’s like bracing your muscles to pick up a heavy bag and finding there’s nothing in it. One thought it was years off – and here it is – and there it is, and that’s that.

    Well!

    Well, we are going to be married at Easter.

    Well – it will be a good excuse for refusing silly invitations. No time. Frightfully sorry. Going to be married at Easter, you know. A lot to do. Ring. Best man. Bridesmaids’ presents and all that. Excuse me, old man, I’ve got to see my tailor. Cheer-frightfully-ho, don’t you know.

    I couldn’t get rid of Leader that way, though. He was horribly hearty and stayed a very long time, and insisted on Lathom’s and my going down to the College to see over the labs and ‘meet a few of the men’, who all hated me at sight, by the way, when they did see me. I thought the sooner we got it over the better, so we went this afternoon. Lathom is in one of his vagrom moods – doing no work, and catching at any excuse to waste time. I tried to get out of it, but no! I ‘absolutely must come, old man’. I take it the idea was to impress Leader’s friends with the idea that men of intellect are proud to know him. It had not occurred to me that best-selling had such idiotic accompaniments.

    Leader was in his element, of course, showing off his half-baked knowledge, and exhibiting fragments of anatomy in bottles. I can see Leader one of these days as the principal witness at an inquest, frightfully slapdash and cocksure, professing that he can tell the time of the murder to within five minutes by taking half a glance at the corpse, and swearing somebody’s life away with cheerful confidence in his own infallibility. He was highly impressive in the dissecting-room, but at his best, I think, displaying his knowledge of poisons (which, by the way, they seem to keep handy on the open shelves for any passing visitor to help himself to). He was very great on synthetic drugs – all made on the premises out of God knows what, and imitating nature so abominably – abominably well, that is – that chemical analysis can’t tell them apart. Indeed, indeed, sirs (and apart from the wearisomeness of Leader), but this troubles me. Synthetic perfumes from coal-tar are bad enough, and synthetic dyes, and I can put up with synthetic camphor and synthetic poisons, but when it comes to synthetic gland-extracts like adrenalin and thyroxin, I begin to get worried. Synthetic vitamins next, I suppose, and synthetic beef and cabbages – and after that, synthetic babies. So far, however, they don’t seem to have been able to make synthetic life – the nearest they have got is stimulating frog-spawn into life with needles. But what of the years to come? If, as the bio-chemists say, life is only a very complicated chemical process, will the difference between life and death be first expressible in a formula and then prisonable in a bottle?’

    This is a jolly kind of letter to write to you, old girl, on this auspicious occasion, but this everlasting question of life and the making of life seems to haunt me – and it is, after all, not so remote from the problem of marriage. We can pass it on and re-continue it, but what is it? They say now that the universe is finite, and that there is only so much matter in it and no more. But does life obey the same rule, or can it emerge indefinitely from the lifeless? Where was it, when the world was only a dusty chaos of whirling gas and cinders? What started it? What gave it the thrust, the bias, to roll so ceaselessly and eccentrically? To look forward is easy – the final inertia, when the last atom of energy has been shaken out of the disintegrating atom – when the clocks stand still and time’s arrow has neither point nor shaft – but the beginning!

    One thing is certain. If I begin to think like this, I shall never write another best-seller. Heaven preserve us from random speculation! Our own immediate affairs are as important as the loves of the electrons in this universe of infinitestimal immensities, and as far as we are concerned  . . .

[The remainder of this letter, being of a very intimate nature, is not available.]

32.   The Same to the Same

Smith’s Hotel, Bloomsbury    

25.2.29

Dearest,

    Just a hasty line to say that I have had to leave Whittington Terrace on account of a very unfortunate incident, which I will tell you about later on. I am here for a few days till I can get my belongings moved out and warehoused somewhere pro tem.

    It is all extremely tiresome. However, it only means that we shall have to do our house-hunting a little earlier than we expected. I think I had better run up to Kirkcudbright and have a yap with you about it, if I can get away from publishers and agents.

All my love,        

Jack

33.   Agatha Milsom to Elizabeth Drake

15, Whittington Terrace, Bayswater    

25.2.29

Dear Madam,

    You will probably be very angry at what I am going to say, but I feel it is my duty to warn you against Mr John Munting. Girls do not always know how men go on behind their backs, and it is only right they should be told by those who have had unfortunate experience of these men’s real character.

    You may think that Mr Munting is honourable, but he has been turned out of this house on account of indecent behaviour, and your eyes ought to be opened to his goings-on. You may believe me because I have the best right to speak of what I know. I have no doubt he will tell you that this is all false and try to pull the wool over your eyes, but I have proof of what I say, and if you should want further evidence you can write to Mr Harrison at this address, and he will tell you that every word is true.

    I am sending you this warning for your good, because you ought not to marry a man like that; he is not fit to marry a decent woman. You are young, and you do not know what the consequences may be of marrying a man of depraved habits. This is one incident I can tell you about of my own knowledge, but there are others, or why does he so often come in late at night?

    Do not tell him I have written to you, as it is not a pleasant thing to have to do, and naturally I do not care to write or talk about it in detail. But ask him why he was ordered out of the house, and do not believe the excuses he makes, because everybody here knows the truth and could tell it if necessary.

    Now for your own sake pay attention to what I say and have no more to do with that disgusting man. I know I shall get no thanks for doing my duty, but in this world one must not expect gratitude. I have already been deprived of my livelihood and made to suffer mental and financial persecution on this man’s account. However, I bear no malice, and remain

Your sincere well-wisher,        

Agatha Milsom

34.   Elizabeth Drake to John Munting

[Endorsed on the above.]

Dear Jack,

    What on earth is all this about? Is the woman mad?

Yours, in all confidence and love,

E

35.   Telegram from John Munting to Elizabeth Drake, dated 26.2.29

A little mad and quite mistaken. Do not worry. Am starting North tonight.

Jack

36.   George Harrison to Paul Harrison

27.2.29

My dear Paul,

    I have to inform you of a most disagreeable incident which has caused a disturbance in our family life, and in consequence of which I have had to turn that man Munting out of the house. It occurred while I was unfortunately obliged to be absent over the Middleshire Electrical Installation, and, but for the accidental intervention of Miss Milsom, Margaret might have been exposed to an annoyance and risk that I shudder to think of.

    I was summoned home by an urgent and rather incoherent letter from Miss Milsom, accusing Munting of an indecent assault upon herself. You will naturally understand that I found this rather difficult to believe, since the man (to do him justice) had shown no signs of being actually demented. By the same post I received a letter from Margaret written in great mental distress, and begging me to take no notice of Miss Milsom, on the ground that she was suffering from delusions. Obviously, whatever was the truth of the matter, it was necessary that I should intervene, and I hastened home at once (at a most inconvenient moment of my work, but, fortunately, the greater part of the contract was settled, and Freeman is quite competent to carry on).

    On arriving, I immediately interrogated Miss Milsom closely. Her story was that, on the night of the 22nd, at about 12.30, she had felt a sudden craving for sardines (the woman is certainly unbalanced), and had gone downstairs to ransack the larder. She came up again in the dark – knowing the house well she did not trouble to turn on the light – and was just entering her bedroom, which, if you remember, is next to ours, when to her alarm she heard somebody breathing quite close to her. She gave some sort of exclamation and tried to get her hand on the landing switch but encountered the hand of a man. Thinking it was a burglar, she started to scream, but the man gripped at her arm and said in a whisper, ‘It’s all right, Miss Milsom.’ She clutched at his arm, and felt she at once recognised as the sleeve of Munting’s quilted dressing-gown, which he frequently wears when doing his writing. She at once asked him what he was doing on her landing, and he mumbled something about fetching some article or other from his overcoat on the hall-stand and missing his way in the dark. She expostulated, and he pulled her away from the lighting-switch, saying, ‘Don’t make a disturbance – you’ll alarm Mrs Harrison. It’s quite all right.’ She told him she did not believe him, and according to her account, he then made advances to her, which she repelled with indignation. He replied, ‘Oh, very well!’ and started off upstairs. She went back and turned the light on in time to see the tail of the dressing-gown disappearing upstairs. Thoroughly frightened, she rushed into my wife’s bedroom and had an attack of hysterics. Margaret endeavoured to soothe her, and they spent the rest of the night together. The next night, Miss Milsom summoned up courage to remain in her own room, bolting the door. Margaret did the same, and they suffered no further disturbance.

    I then questioned Margaret. She was, naturally, very much upset, but thought that Miss Milsom was completely mistaken, and making a mountain out of a mole-hill. She is too innocent to see – what I, of course, saw very plainly – that this shameless attack was directed against herself and not against Miss Milsom. I did not suggest this to her (not wishing to alarm her), and promised to hear Munting’s version of the affair before taking any further steps.

    I then interviewed Munting. He took the thing in the worst possible way – with a cool effrontery which roused me to the highest pitch of indignation – treated the whole matter as a triviality, and positively laughed in my face. ‘The woman is demented,’ he said. ‘I assure you my tastes do not lie in that direction.’ ‘I never supposed they did,’ I answered, and made quite clear to him what my suspicions were. He laughed again, and said I was mistaken. I said I knew very well that I was not mistaken, and asked him what other explanation he could offer of being found outside my wife’s door in the middle of the night. ‘You have heard the explanation,’ said he, airily. ‘And a very convincing one it is,’ said I; ‘at least you don’t deny that you were there, I suppose?’ He said, ‘Would you believe me if I did deny it?’ I said that his manner had convinced me that the story was true, and that nothing he said would persuade me to the contrary. ‘Then it’s not an atom of use my denying it, is it?’ said he coolly. ‘Not an atom,’ I said. ‘Will you leave the house straight away or wait to he kicked out?’ ‘If you put it that way,’ said he, ‘I think it would cause less excitement in the neighbourhood if I went of my own accord.’ I gave him half an hour to be out of the house, and he said that would suit him very well, and had the impudence to request the use of our telephone to order a taxi. I told him I would not have him in our part of the house on any pretence whatever. ‘Oh,’ said he, ‘then perhaps you would be good enough to order the taxi yourself.’ I did so, in order to give him no excuse for hanging about the place, and he took himself off. On the way downstairs he said, in a more subdued tone, ‘Look here, Harrison. Won’t you believe that this is all a mistake?’ I told him to get out of the house before I sent for the police, and he went without another word.

    All this has upset us very much. I am only thankful that no further harm has come of it. Margaret says he had never previously offered her any rudeness, and I believe her; but, looking back on the matter, I can remember occasions when I have not altogether cared for the tone of his conversation. He is too experienced a man in this kind of thing, however, to have shown his hand while I was there. I am only sorry that our friendship with young Lathom, whom we all like so much, should have led to this unpleasantness.

    Lathom is extremely distressed, as you may imagine. I thought it well to warn him to show more discretion in future with regard to his choice of friends. He was too genuinely horrified and unhappy to wish to talk about the matter; still, I think he was grateful for the advice. Unhappily, this means we shall lose him as well, since his means do not permit of his keeping on the upper maisonette by himself. I suggested that he might stay till the end of the quarter, but he said he was engaged to visit some friends next month, and would be leaving anyway at the end of the week.

    This incident has made it very clear to me that Miss Milsom must be got rid of. She is in a state of violent hysteria, and is obviously subject to delusions about herself, and in no way a fit companion for Margaret. I have given her a month’s salary in lieu of notice, and sent her home. Out of all this hateful episode this one good thing has come: that I have now a valid reason for insisting on this woman’s departure.

    Other news has been rather over-shadowed by these anxieties, and must wait till my next letter. I hope all is well with you.

Your affectionate        

Dad

37.   Statement of John Munting

It was a mistake from the very beginning for Lathom and myself to set up housekeeping together. It happened purely by chance – one of those silly, unnecessary chances that set one spinning out cheap platitudes about fatality and the great issues that hang upon an accidental meeting. It used to be considered highly unphilosophical to indulge in speculations about coincidence, still more to base any work of art upon it – but that was in the days when we believed in causality. Now, thanks to the Quantum theory and the second law of thermo-dynamics, we know better. We know that the element of randomness is what makes the Universe go round, and that the writers of sensation novels are wiser in their generation than the children of sweetness and light.

    All the same, there still remains an appearance of causation here and there, and I persist in attributing some of the blame to the imbecilities of the public-school system. If Lathom had not worn an old Wincastrian tie, I should never have spoken to him in the little restaurant Au Bon Bourgeois in Greek Street. Or, at the most, I should have asked him to pass the French mustard. As it was, my natural aversion to my fellow-creatures being broken down by burgundy, I was fool enough to say: ‘Hullo! you come from the old school, I see. Did I know you?’ – and was instantly swamped and carried away in the flood of Lathom’s expansiveness.

    Lathom is an incorrigible extrovert. His thyroids and liver function with riotous vigour. He beams out enthusiastically upon the world and is refracted out from everything and everybody he meets in a rainbow of colour. That is his fatal charm. In the ordinary way, I am ill-adapted for prismatic function. That evening was an unfortunate exception. I couldn’t keep it up afterwards; that was the trouble.

    When Lathom mentioned his name I recognised it at once. He is six years younger than I am, and was an obnoxious brat in the Upper Third when I was preparing for Oxford in the Sixth, but he had penetrated to my Olympian seclusion in virtue of his reputation.

    Lathom, of course – Burrage’s celebrated fag, who scrounged toasting-forks. He was always in trouble with the other prefects for his apparent inability to distinguish other people’s property from Burrage’s. If anything was wanted, he took it; if anything had to be done, he did it, regardless of other people’s convenience, or, indeed, of his own. He was attached to Burrage, who naturally stood up for him. In fact, I think we were all jealous of Burrage for having a fag so ruthlessly competent. Burrage patronised the kid in his large, appreciative way, and Lathom basked in the rays of Burrage’s approval. I don’t blame Burrage altogether, but he certainly spoilt Lathom. He protected him from the consequences of his actions. Perhaps Burrage had advanced ideas about the non-existence of causation and imparted them to Lathom. But Burrage was rather an ass, and his reactions were probably more human and immediate.

    Lathom was saved from disaster, partly by Burrage and partly by Halliday. Halliday was a great man and captain of the First Eleven. He took things easily and when he said that the kid was just potty we all accepted the explanation. That was on the day of the picnic, when Lathom turned up at feeding-time without his overcoat, and said he had thrown it away because it got in his way. The weather turned to soaking rain and Lathom got pneumonia and nearly died. We were all rather frightened and distressed, and when Lathom turned up next term we made allowances for him. I reminded Lathom that we had called him ‘Potty’, and he laughed and said we were perfectly right.

    I remembered, too, that in those days Lathom had earned a reputation for himself by making caricatures of the masters. This fascinating gift had earned him still more toleration. I was not surprised to hear that he had become an artist. He said he was looking for a studio, and had seen just the thing in Bayswater, only he couldn’t afford to take it.

    I asked, why Bayswater, of all places? Why not Chelsea or Bloomsbury? But Lathom said no, the rents were too high, and besides, Chelsea and Bloomsbury were hopelessly arty and insincere. They lived at second-hand and had no beliefs. To see life lived in the raw, one ought really to go to Harringay or Tooting, but they were really not central enough. Bayswater was near enough to be convenient and far enough out to be a healthy suburb.

    ‘The suburbs are the only places left,’ said Lathom, ‘where men and women will die and persecute for their beliefs. Artists believe in nothing – not even in art. They live in little cliques and draw the fashionable outlines in the fashionable colours. They can’t love – they can only fornicate and talk. I’ve had some. And the aristocracy has lost the one belief that made it tolerable – its belief in itself. It’s fool enough to pretend to believe in the people, and what is the good of an aristocracy playing at being democratic? And the people . . .’ He made a violent gesture. ‘Cheap scientific textbooks – cheap atheism – cheap sociology – cheap clothes – your blasted educationists have left them no beliefs at all. They marry, and then the woman comes howling to the magistrate for a separation order on any pretext, so as to get money for nothing and go to cheap dance-halls. And the man goes yelping away for a dole to shuffle all his responsibilities on to the State. But the blessed people of the suburbs – they do believe in something. They believe in Respectability. They’ll lie, die, commit murder to keep up appearances. Look at Crippen. Look at Bywaters. Look at the man who hid his dead wife in a bath and ate his meals on the lid for fear somebody should suspect a scandal. My God! Those people are living, living with all their blood and their bones. That’s reality – in the suburbs – life, guts – something to chew at, there!’

    At the time I was rather struck by this.

    It ended, of course, in my consenting to share the maisonette with Lathom. An hour earlier, the very word would have put me off, but under the spell of Lathom’s enthusiasm, and stupefied with food and public-school spirit, I began to think there was really something raw, red and life-like about living in a maisonette with an Old Wincastrian. And perhaps Lathom was right after all. The trouble is that raw, red life is possibly better seen at second-hand. A good still-life of a piece of rump-steak has none of the oozing clamminess of the real thing.

    I wish, all the same, that I had tried to play up to Lathom better. It was irritating, of course, to find that he was still regardless of other people’s convenience. I did not object to his bagging the best room for his studio – that was in the bond – but it was tiresome to have him overflowing into my room all day when I was at work. Lathom is one of those spasmodic workers who need constant applause and excitement. He would work like fury for several hours, snarling at me if I came in to retrieve a garment or lighter that he had borrowed; but, the fit over, he would wander in to where I was grimly struggling with a knotty piece of biography and talk. He talks well, but his interests are lopsided. He is a real creator – narrow, eager, headlong, and loathing introspection and compromise. He questions nothing; I question everything. I am only semi-creative, and that is why I cannot settle and dismiss questions, as he does, in one burst of inspired insight or equally inspired contempt. Lathom is all light and dark – a Rembrandt. I am flat, cold, tentative, uneasily questioning, a labourer in detail. I caught no fire from Lathom, and I quenched his. It is my disease to doubt and to modify – to be unable to cry at a tragedy or shout in a chorus. It was my fault that I did not help Lathom more, for, just because of my uneasy sensitiveness, I understood him far better than he ever understood me. It would have suited him better if I had violently disagreed with him. But I had the fatal knack of seeing his point and cautiously advancing counter-arguments, and that satisfied neither of us. I see this now, and, indeed, I saw it then; it is characteristic of people like me to see a thing and do nothing about it.

    This, of course, was where the Harrisons came in. I liked Harrison. If I had not liked him, I should not be making this statement, which is, I am afraid, entirely contrary to the public-school tradition. Harrison was a man of very great sincerity, no imagination and curiously cursed with nerves. It is all wrong for a man of his type to have nerves – nobody believes or understands it. In theory, he was extremely broad-minded, generous and admiringly devoted to his wife; in practice, he was narrow, jealous and nagging. To hear him speak of her, one would have thought him the ideal of chivalrous consideration; to hear him speak to her, one would have thought him a suspicious brute. Her enormous vitality, her inconsequence, her melodrama (that is the real point, I think), got on his nerves, and produced an uncontrollable reaction of irritability. He would have liked her to shine for him and for him only; yet a kind of interior shyness prompted him to repress her demonstrations and choke off her confidences. ‘That will do, my dear’; ‘Pull yourself together, my girl,’ checked a caress or an enthusiasm; a grunt, a ‘Can’t you see I’m busy,’ a ‘Why have you suddenly got these ideas about’ music or astronomy or whatever the latest interest might be. Into the muffling of his outer manner, her radiance sank and was quenched. Yet to others he spoke with earnest pride of his wife’s brilliance and many-sided intelligence.

    Harrison’s instinct was to dominate, but by nature and training he was unfitted to dominate that particular woman. It could have been done in two ways – by capturing the limelight, or by sheer physical exuberance. But neither of these things was in his power; he was inexpressive and sexually unimaginative, as so many decent men are.

    He had his means of self-expression: his water-colours and his cookery. It was his misfortune that in the former he should have been weak, conventional and sentimental, and bold and free only in the latter. I believe, indeed, that all the imagination he possessed ran to the composition of sauces and flavourings. It is surely a matter for investigation whether cookery is not one of the subtlest and most severely intellectual of the arts; else, why do its more refined manifestations appeal to women hardly at all and to men only in their later and more balanced age? Unlike music or poetry or painting, food rouses no response in passionate and emotional youth. Only when the surge of the blood is quieted does gastronomy come into its own with philosophy and theology and the sterner delights of the mind. If Harrison could have made a big public splash with anything, she could have understood that and preened herself happily as the wife of a notoriety. But she had no eyes for the half-lights.

    At first it was amazing to me that Lathom showed so much patience with Harrison. Lathom is a barbarian about food and magnificently intolerant of bad painting. Twaddle about Art and Atmosphere got short shrift with him. Yet he let Harrison bore him to any extent with his prattle and his picturesque bits. Harrison did, indeed, treat him with a deference flattering in a man of his age, but under ordinary circumstances that would merely have infuriated Lathom, who, to do him justice, is no drawing-room lion. It was not that Harrison provided the response which I gave so awkwardly. In time I realised that, though I had my selfish reasons for refusing to see it. Mrs Harrison was the radiant prism for Lathom’s brilliance, and Lathom used Harrison in that service as carelessly as in the old days he had used the prefects’ toasting-forks. He saw the tool ready to his hand and took it, without shame and without remorse.

    I have put all this down, as I saw it, without consideration for the feelings of anybody. It is useless to blame people for their peculiarities of temperament. At the time I did not interfere, because, to tell the truth, I was working hard and involved in my own concerns, and did not want to be bothered with Lathom’s affairs. Besides, I rather prided myself on a cynical detachment in such matters. As it turns out, I should have done far better to preserve this cheerful selfishness throughout. That I did not was again due to sentimentality and public-school spirit, and I am heartily ashamed of it.

    I suppose I must say something about Mrs Harrison. It is difficult, because I both understood and disliked her. Just because she had no use for me, I was detached enough to see through her. I have not the superb and centralised self-confidence that could strike the colours from her prism. I come back to that image, because it expresses her with more accuracy than any description. My diffusion left her dead glass. But in Lathom’s concentration she shone. He gave her the colour and splendour her dramatic soul craved for. She saw herself robed with all the glowing radiance that dazzled her half-educated eyes in the passionate pages of Hichens and de Vere Stacpoole. I hardly think she was wicked – I do not think she had any moral standards of her own. She would adopt any attitude that was offered to her, provided it was exciting and colourful enough. I think she had enjoyed herself at her office; she had radiated there in the little warmth of popularity which always surrounds people of abundant physical and emotional vigour, but at home she had only the devotion of Miss Milsom, with her warped mind and perilous preoccupations. She visualised herself into the character of a wronged and slighted woman, because that was the easiest way to evoke clamorous response from Miss Milsom – and, of course, from Lathom when he came along.

    It is rather surprising, I feel, that Harrison was never jealous of Lathom, as he was of every other man, including myself. I fancy it was because he looked on Lathom as his own friend, primarily. Now I come to think of it, it was of his wife’s personal life that he was jealous – her office, her interests, the friends she had made for herself – everything that had not come to her through him. My position was different. He distrusted me because of my work and opinions. I had written an unpleasant book and I had no definite moral judgements. From such a man, nothing but impropriety could be expected. He was wary and uneasy in my presence. He could talk food with me, and did, but only, I think, in despair for want of other appreciation. He was fearfully lonely, poor soul, and I failed him miserably. And he was jockeyed by me into letting his wife’s picture be shown at the Academy – but only because he thought I was belittling his wife’s character. His change of mind was a chivalrous rush to her defence. I was pleased with myself at the time, I remember; I suppose my light-hearted diplomacy was about as disastrous as diplomacy usually is. What devilish things we do when we try to be clever. After all, Harrison probably understood his wife only too well, but he could not bear that anyone should suspect the clay of his idol. He destroyed himself rather than let her down. I rather think that Harrison had something heroic behind his primness and his gold spectacles.

    There was one thing which I ought most certainly to have left severely alone, and that was the final disaster, in which Miss Milsom was concerned. For once I was seized with the idiotic whim to play the martyr and the noble-spirited friend. At the very moment when my reasonable and deliberate policy of detachment should have come to my aid, I must choose to take the centre of the stage and indulge in high-mindedness.

    Lathom woke me up. He came and sat on my bed, and I noticed with irritation that he had been borrowing my dressing-gown again. He always took things.

    ‘I’m in a mess,’ he said.

    ‘Oh?’ said I.

    He told me what had happened. I have seen Miss Milsom’s account. It is accurate in all points but one. Far from repulsing Lathom, she had encouraged him. He had broken from her at the foot of the staircase with considerable difficulty. He was filled with a righteous disgust, which struck me as funny under the circumstances.

    ‘Disgusting old woman,’ said he.

    ‘True,’ said I. ‘None should have passions but the young and the beautiful. What are you going to do? Serve with Leah seven years in the hope of getting Rachael in the end?’

    ‘Don’t be filthy,’ said he. ‘There will be a row about this, I’m afraid.’

    ‘Very likely,’ said I. ‘But that is your affair.’

    ‘Not altogether,’ said Lathom. ‘You see, she thinks it was you.’

    ‘Me?’ I was considerably taken aback.

    ‘Yes. You see, I had your dressing-gown—’

    ‘So I observe.’

    ‘She recognised the feel – the quilting, you know – damn it all, she rubbed her ugly face in it—’

    ‘Really,’ I said. ‘The kittenish old creature.’

    All the same, I was not pleased. Gestures which delight in the right person are so indecent when performed by the wrong. In fact, it is only when we contemplate the loves of unpleasant people that we see the indecency of passion. It is disgusting to think of the amorous transports of, let us say, Mr Pecksniff. Grotesque characters only exist for us from the waist upwards.

    ‘I suppose,’ I went on, ‘it didn’t occur to you to mention that you were not me?’

    ‘I didn’t say anything. I got away. I didn’t want to make a noise. In fact  . . .’

    In fact, he had made use of me cheerfully enough, and was now wondering whether I should put up with it.

    ‘Look here,’ I said, ‘what do you intend to do? If you want to carry on an intrigue with Mrs Harrison, I tell you, frankly, I’m going to get out and leave you to it. It bores me and I don’t care about these alarms and excursions. Anyhow, why didn’t you leave the woman alone? You’re doing her no good.’

    Then he exploded and started to tramp about. She was the greatest miracle God had ever made. They were meant for one another. They had got into each other’s blood and all the rest of it. That, of course. Equally, of course, if Harrison had been a decent sort of man he would have sacrificed his own feelings. (As if Lathom had ever thought of sacrificing anything.) But Harrison was a brute, who did not appreciate the wonderful woman who had been entrusted to him. Lathom could suffer himself, but he could not bear to see her suffer. It was all so damned unjust. The man was not fit to live. He deserved to be murdered for his rotten paintings, let alone for his cruelty to his wife. And to think that his revolting hands should have the right  . . .

    And so on.

    It is so very odd that in moments of excitement we should all talk like characters in a penny novelette. However long one lives, I suppose it always strikes one with the same shock of surprise.

    ‘That’ll do,’ I said at last. ‘We can take that as read. If Mrs Harrison feels as you do about it—’

    He interrupted me to assure me at unnecessary length that she did.

    ‘Very well,’ I said, ‘why not do the decent and sensible thing and take her away? You won’t find this kind of back-stairs intrigue permanently inspiring, you know. Besides, it seems to be the kind of thing you do very badly.’

    ‘I wish to God,’ replied Lathom, ‘that I could take her away. Heaven and earth, man, do you think I wouldn’t do it like a shot if I had half a chance? But she won’t hear of it. She’s got some poisonous idea about not making a scandal. It’s this damned awful suburban respectability that’s crushing the beautiful life out of her. When you see what she was meant to be – free and splendid and ready to proclaim her splendid passion to the world – and then see what this foul blighter has made of her—’

    ‘Well, there you are,’ said I. ‘That’s the raw, red life of the suburbs, as per specification. That’s what you came here for, isn’t it? Look here, Lathom, buzz off and let me get to sleep, there’s a good chap. You can blow your feelings off in the morning.’

    ‘Oh, all right.’ He got up from the bed and hesitated at the door. ‘I only thought I’d warn you,’ he added, a little awkwardly, ‘in case the old woman says anything to you.’

    ‘Dashed good of you,’ I said dryly. ‘What am I to do? Make love to the confidante while you make love to the mistress, and go stark mad in white linen?’

    ‘Oh, you needn’t bother to do that,’ said he. ‘I should just treat the whole thing as a joke. Or, if she makes a fuss, apologise and say you were a bit screwed. I’ll back you up.’

    I was so infuriated with him for shoving the responsibility on to me in this light-hearted way that I told him to clear out, which he did.

    As a matter of fact, I rather under-estimated the seriousness of the thing. I mean, I did not realise the lengths to which Miss Milsom’s resentment might go. I determined merely to avoid the woman in future, and, in fact, treat the whole episode as if it hadn’t occurred. I thought Lathom had received a salutary shock and useful lesson on the difficulties attending suburban love affairs, and that he might bethink himself and stop the whole thing before it had gone too far. A good thing, too. I was clearing out and getting married at Easter, and there, so far as I was concerned, was an end of it. Lathom could fish it out for himself after that. My book had made a sudden success, and I was feeling rather cock-a-hoop with myself.

    Consequently, I was quite unprepared for the arrival of Harrison with his accusation. He was dead-white with fury and intensely quiet. He did not offer me a single opening by scattering his usual fiery particles of rage. He put the accusation before me. Such and such things had been stated – what had I to reply? I tried to dismiss the thing with airy persiflage. He was not abashed by my assumption of ridicule. He simply asked whether I denied being on the landing at that time, and, if not, what I was doing there. When I refused to answer so absurd an accusation, he told me, without further argument, to leave the house. His wife must not be subjected to any kind of disagreeable contact. The mere fact that I could take such an attitude to the matter (and, indeed, my attitude had nothing dignified about it) showed that I was an entirely unsuitable person to come into any sort of contact with Mrs Harrison. He was there to protect her from persons of my sort. Would I go quietly or wait to be removed by force?

    The deceived husband is usually considered to be a ridiculous figure, but Harrison was not ridiculous. Sometimes I wonder whether he was deceived. I thought at the time that he was, but perhaps the light of faith in his eyes was really the torch of martyrdom. It is fine to die for a faith, but perhaps it is still finer to die for a thing you do not believe in. I do not know. He baffled me. If the garrison was disarmed and beaten behind that impenetrable façade, I was never to know. Nobody would ever know it.

    It is ironical that Lathom, coming to Suburbia to find raw, red life, should have failed to recognise it when he saw it. It was there, all right, in this dry little man, with no imagination beyond beef-steak and mushrooms, but it did not wear bright colours, and Lathom liked colours. The thing was farcical. And I believe I was the most farcical fool in the whole outfit. Even then, the mocking censor which views one’s personality from the outside sat sniggering in a corner of my brain. Here was I, a successful novelist, presented with this monstrous situation – one which was quite in my own line of work, too – and I hadn’t even had the wits to see it coming. The thing was a gift.

    I could see myself tackling it, too, in quite the right modern, cynical way. No nonsense. No foolish shibboleths about honour and self-sacrifice. A lucid exposure of the situation – an epigram or so – a confrontation of Harrison (as representing the old morality) with the unsentimental frankness of the new.

    And the damnable thing was that I didn’t do it. When it came to saying, ‘My good man, you are mistaken. My friend Lathom is the man you ought to be after. He and your wife are carrying on a love affair, for which you are largely to blame, if, indeed, any blame attaches to these unsophisticated manifestations of natural selection’ – when it came to the point, I didn’t say it. Looking at Harrison, I couldn’t say it. I behaved like a perfect little gentleman, and said nothing whatever.

    After that, I can only suppose that I became quite intoxicated by this new and heroic view of myself. I went straight off to Lathom and told him about it. I oozed priggishness. I said:

    ‘I have stood by you. I have kept silence. I have agreed to leave the house at once. But I will only do it if you will promise me to chuck the whole business – clear out at the same time that I do. Leave these people alone. You have no right to ruin the life of this decent man and his wife, who were getting along quite well in their way till you came along.’

    I grew solemn and portentous about it. I enlarged on Harrison’s sufferings. I painted a vivid picture of the miseries the woman must needs undergo in the course of a secret love-affair. I called it vulgar. I called it wicked and selfish. I used expressions which I thought had perished from the vocabulary since the eighties. And I ended by saying:

    ‘If you do not promise me to do the decent thing, you cannot expect me to stand by you.’ Which was mere blackmail.

    There must be more of the old inhibitions alive in even the most modern of us than one would readily credit. Lathom was actually abashed by my eloquence. He protested at first; then he grew sulky; finally, he was touched.

    ‘You’re quite right, old man,’ he said, ‘damn it. I’ve been behaving like a cad. I couldn’t make her happy. I ought to go away. I will go away. You’ve been damned decent to me.’ He wrung my hand. I clapped him sentimentally on the shoulder. We wallowed in our own high-mindedness. It must have been a touching sight.

    The first disagreeable consequence of this foolish interference with the course of events arrived in the shape of a letter from my fiancée. Miss Milsom had felt it her duty to send one of those warnings. I dashed up to Scotland to put matters right. The greatest compliment I can pay to the open mind and generous common sense of Elizabeth is to say plainly that I had no difficulty about doing this. But I was reminded with a slight shock that Victorian quixotry has a way of landing one in complications. However, no harm appeared to be done, and later I received a letter from Lathom, dated from Paris, in which he informed me that he was playing the game (the words were proof in themselves of the conditions to which I must have reduced him), and that, after a highly emotional scene, Mrs Harrison and he had agreed to part.

I got married soon after that, and forgot all about Lathom and the Harrisons – the more so as Elizabeth did not encourage me to dwell on the subject. A natural jealousy, I thought, particularly as she had not seemed altogether impressed by my quixotic gesture. But women are unconquerable realists, and nowadays they are not taught to flatter male delusions as they once were. It is uncomfortable to think that perhaps our repressed Victorian ancestresses were as clear-sighted as their franker granddaughters. If so, how they must have laughed, as they made their meek responses. In this century we do know, more or less, what they are thinking, and meet them on equal terms – at least, I hope we do.

    I was reminded of Lathom by receiving my ticket for the Private View at the Academy on May 3rd. We had had our honeymoon, and were ready to return to our place in the world. Almost the first thing I saw, as we surged through the crowd, was the painted face of Mrs Harrison, blazing out from a wall full of civic worthies and fagged society beauties, with the loud insistence of a begonia in a bed of cherrypie. There was a little knot of people in front of it, and I recognised Marlowe, the man who paints those knotty nudes, and created a sensation two years ago with ‘The Wrestlers’. He was enjoying his usual pastime of being rude to Garvice, the portrait-painter. His voice bellowed out over the din, and his black cloak flapped gustily from a flung-out arm. ‘Of course you don’t like it,’ he boomed lustily, ‘it kills everything in the place dead. That’s none of your damned art – that’s painting – a painting, I tell you.’ Several pained people, who had been discussing values in low tones, shrank at the unseemly noise, and dodged waveringly from the sweep of his hairy fist. ‘None of you poor pimples,’ went on Marlowe, threateningly ‘can see colour – or thickness – you’re only fit to colour Christmas cards at twopence a hundred. There isn’t a painter in the whole beastly boarding-house crowd of you except this chap.’ I will do Marlowe the justice to say that, except where nudes are concerned, he is singularly generous to the younger men. He glowered round through his bush of beard and spectacles, and caught sight of me. ‘Hullo, Munting!’ he bawled. ‘Come here. Somebody said you knew this fellow Lathom. Who is he? Why haven’t you brought him round to see me?’

    I explained that I had only just returned from my honeymoon, and introduced Marlowe to my wife. Marlowe roared approval in his characteristic way, and added:

    ‘Come along on Friday – same old crowd, you know, and bring this man Lathom. I want to know him. He can paint.’

    He spun round to face the picture again, and the crowd retired precipitately to avoid him.

    ‘Well,’ said a man’s voice, almost in my ear, ‘and how do you think it looks, now it’s hung?’

    I spun round and saw Lathom, and with him, before I could adopt any suitable attitude to the situation, Mr and Mrs Harrison, flung up from the waves of sightseers like the ball from a Rugby scrum.

    Retreat was hopeless, because Marlowe now had me tightly by the shoulder, while with his other hand he sketched large, thumby gestures towards the portrait to indicate the modelling and brushwork.

    ‘Hullo, Munting!’ said Lathom.

    ‘Hullo, Lathom!’ I said, and added nervously, ‘Hullo-ullo-ullo!’ like something by P. G. Wodehouse.

    ‘Good God!’ exploded Marlowe, ‘is this the man? The man and the model, by all that’s lucky,’ he bellowed on, without waiting for my embarrassed answer. ‘I’m Marlowe; and I say you’ve done a good piece of work.’

    Lathom came to my rescue by making a suitable acknowledgement of the great man’s condescension, and I was sliding away with a vague bow and a muttered remark about an engagement, when I felt a tap on the shoulder. It was Harrison.

    ‘Excuse me one moment, Mr Munting,’ said he.

    A row in the Academy would have its points from the point of view of my Press agent, but I was not anxious for it. However, I asked Elizabeth to wait a moment for me, and stepped aside with Harrison.

    ‘I think,’ said he, ‘I am afraid – that is, I feel I owe you an apology, Mr Munting.’

    ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘That’s all right. I mean, it doesn’t matter at all.’ Then I pulled myself together. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘it’s my fault, really. I ought not to have come. I might have known you would be here.’

    ‘It’s not that,’ he said, determined to face it. ‘The fact is – I fear I did you an injustice that – er – that last time we met. Er – the unfortunate woman who made all the trouble—’

    ‘Miss Milsom?’ I asked; not because I didn’t know, but to help him on with his sentence.

    ‘Yes. She has had to take a rest – in fact, to undergo a course of treatment – in fact, she is in a kind of nursing-home.’

    ‘Indeed?’

    ‘Yes. There can really be no doubt that the poor creature is – well, demented is perhaps an unkind way of putting it. Perhaps we had better say, unbalanced.’

    I expressed sympathy.

    ‘Yes. From what my wife tells me – and Mr Lathom – and from what I hear from the poor creature’s relatives, I now feel no doubt at all that the – the accusation, you know – was entirely unfounded. A nervous delusion, of course.’

    ‘Yes, yes,’ said I.

    ‘I quite understand, of course, your very chivalrous motives for not putting the blame on her at the time. The position was most awkward for you. You might perhaps have given me a hint – but I perfectly understand. And my wife, you will realise, was so very much upset—’

    ‘Please,’ I broke in, ‘do not blame her or yourself for a single moment.’

    ‘Thank you. It is very kind of you to take it in this reasonable spirit: I cannot say how much I regret the misunderstanding. I hope you are very well and prosperous. You are quite a famous man now, of course. And married. Will you do me the honour to present me to your wife? I hope you will come and see us some day.’

    I was not keen to make the introduction, but it could scarcely be avoided. The preposterous situation was there, and had to be imagined away. Mrs Harrison glowed. For the first time I saw her in full prismatic loveliness, soaked and vibrating with colour and light. I asked her what she thought of the show.

    ‘We haven’t seen much of it yet,’ she said, laughing, ‘we came straight to see the picture. Is it going to be the picture of the year as they call it, do you think, Mr Munting?’

    ‘It looks rather like it,’ said I.

    ‘Fancy that! It does make me feel important – though, of course, I don’t count for anything, really. The painting is the thing, isn’t it!’

    ‘The subject of the portrait counts for something, too,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I don’t see how anybody can make a picture of one of those cow-faced people. Except a satirical one, of course. It’s the painter’s job to get the personality on the canvas, but what is he to do if there is no personality? Mr Lathom  . . .’

    She looked at the portrait, and then at Mrs Harrison, and something seemed to strike her. It was the thing that had struck me, months before, when I first saw what Lathom had made of it. She grew a little confused, and Lathom struck in.

    ‘Mrs Harrison and you would agree about the importance of subject-matter,’ he said. ‘I can’t persuade her to admire Laura Knight.’

    Mrs Harrison blushed a little.

    ‘I think they are very clever pictures,’ she said, a trifle defiantly, and with a side-glance at her husband, ‘but they are rather peculiar for a woman to have painted, aren’t they? Not very refined. And I mean, they are so unnatural. I’m sure people don’t walk about, even in their bedrooms, like that, with nothing on. And I think pictures ought to make one feel – uplifted, somehow.’

    ‘Come, come, Margaret,’ said Harrison, ‘you don’t know what you are talking about.’

    ‘But you said the same thing yourself,’ she came back at him.

    ‘Yes, but I don’t care about your discussing them here.’

    ‘Oh!’ said Marlowe, loudly, ‘you are afraid of the flesh. That is our trouble – we are all afraid of it, and that is why we insist and exaggerate. “Hoc est corpus,” said God – but we turn it into hocus-pocus. There’s no hope for this generation till we can see clean flesh and “sweet blood” – Meredith’s phrase – without being shocked at its fine troublesomeness. If one were to strip all these people now’ – he waved a hand at a fat man in a top-hat and an emaciated girl, who caught his eye and stood paralysed – ‘you would think it indecent. But it’s not as indecent as the portrait-painter who strips their souls for you. Some men’s work would be publicly censored, if the powers knew how to distinguish between flesh and spirit – which, thank God, they don’t.’ He clapped Lathom on the shoulder. ‘How about that other thing of yours, my boy?’

    Lathom laughed a little awkwardly.

    ‘Is that the portrait of Miss Milsom?’ I Interrupted, hastily – for I saw trouble coming up like a thunder-cloud over Harrison’s horizon. ‘We must go and have a look at it. You’re doing pretty well to have two pictures in such a crowded year. We mustn’t keep you too long. Which room is it in, Lathom?’

    He told us, and when we had said our farewells, pursued us into the next room.

    ‘I say, old man,’ he whispered breathlessly, ‘I couldn’t really help this. Couldn’t in decency get out of it, could I?’

    ‘No,’ said I, ‘I suppose you couldn’t. It’s not my funeral, anyhow.’

    ‘It’s the first time we’ve met,’ he went on, ‘and it will end here.’

    ‘But for my damned interference it wouldn’t have begun here,’ I answered. ‘I’m not blaming you, Lathom. And I’ve really no right to make conditions. I don’t think it’s wise – but I can’t set up to be a dictator.’

    ‘Oh, you admit that, do you?’ said Lathom. ‘I’m rather glad to know it.’ He hesitated, and added abruptly, ‘Well, so long.’

    I was thankful to see the end of the episode. From every point of view it seemed advisable to drop all connection with Lathom and the Harrisons, and I saw none of them again until the 19th of October.

38.   Margaret Harrison to Harwood Lathom

May 4th, 1929

Petra darling,

    Oh, how wonderful it was, darling, to see you again, even under the Gorgon’s eye – such a cold stony eye, darling, and with all those people around. I had been dead all through those dreadful months. When you went away, I felt as if the big frost had got right into my heart. Do you know, it made me laugh when the pipes froze up in the bathroom and we couldn’t get any water and He was so angry. I thought if he only knew I was just like that inside, and when the terrible numb feeling had passed off, something would snap in me, too. Was that a foolish thing to think, Petra? Not a very poetical idea, I am afraid, but I wished I could have told it to you and heard your big, lovely laugh at your Darling Donkey!

    Oh, Petra, we can’t go on like this, can we? I couldn’t go through those long, long weeks again without seeing or hearing you, not so much as your dear untidy writing on an envelope. And, darling, it was so dreadful to hear you say you couldn’t work without your Inspiration, because your work is so wonderful and so important. Why should He stand between you and what God meant you to do? The life we live here is so cramped and useless; the only way I can fulfil any great purpose is in being a little help in your divine work of creation. It is so wonderful to know that one can really be of use – part of the beauty you make and spread all about you. It isn’t even as if I counted for anything in His work. A woman can’t be an inspiration for an electrical profit and loss account, or a set of estimates, can she? He doesn’t think so, anyway. He just wants to have me in a cage to look at, darling – not even to love. He doesn’t care or know about love – thank God! I say now, because I can keep myself all for my own marvellous Man. Oh, I have so much to give, so much, all myself, such as I am – not clever, darling, you know I am not that, though I love to hear about clever, interesting things – but loving and real, and alive for you, only you, darling, darling Petra. I never knew how much beauty there was in the world till you showed it to me, and that’s why I feel so sure that our love must be a right thing, because one could not feel so much beauty in anything that was wrong, could one? Fancy going on living for years and years, starved of beauty and love, when there is all that great treasure of happiness waiting to be taken. Oh, darling, he was going on at dinner last night about how his grandfather lived to be a hundred, and his father about ninety-four, and what a strong family they were, and I could see them, going on year after year, grinding all the happiness out of their wives and families and making a desert all round them, just as He does. I looked up Gorgons in a book, darling, and it said they were immortal, all except the one Perseus killed, and I’m sure they are, darling, the stony horrors. Sometimes I wish I could die. Do you think they would let me come and be near you after I was dead? But I know you think we don’t live after we are dead, but just turn into flowers and earth again. It does seem much more likely, doesn’t it, whatever the clergymen say – so I suppose it would be no good me dying, would it? Just think – only one life, and to be able to do nothing with it – nothing at all, and then just die and be finished. It makes me shudder. It’s all so cold and dreary. What right have people to make life such a wasted, frozen thing? Why are they allowed to live at all if they don’t live in the true sense of the word? And life can be such a great thing if it is really lived. Oh, Pet darling, thank you for having taught me to live, even if it was only for a few short, wonderful weeks! When I’m all alone (and I’m always alone, nowadays, not even poor Aggie Milsom to talk to now), I sit and try to read some of the books you told me about. But I stop reading, and my mind wanders away, and I’m just living over again the hours we had together, and the feel of your dear arms round me. Sometimes he comes in and finds me like that, and scolds me for letting the fire out and not putting the light on. ‘You’re always mooning about,’ he says, ‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing.’ Oh, darling, if he only did know, how angry he would be and how wicked he would think me in his ugly little mind!

    Dear one, you won’t leave me all alone again, will you? We said we would try to forget one another, but I think you knew as well as I did how impossible it was. Well, we have tried, haven’t we, and we’ve found it is no good. You thought it would be better for me, but it isn’t. I feel far, far more miserable than I did, even in the days when we were seeing each other and trying to keep down all the things we were thinking and feeling together. I would rather suffer the awful pain of seeing and wanting you, than feel so dead and empty, as if my heart had been all drained out of me, beloved. And I know now that it is just as bad for you, because you can’t do your work without me, and your work ought to come first, darling, even if you have to mix your paints with my heart’s blood.

    Darling, if you think it’s better we shouldn’t be real lovers don’t leave me altogether. Let us see each other sometimes. It doesn’t matter even if the Gorgon is there and we have to talk the silly meaningless tea-party talk. Our real selves will be saying the real things to one another all the time, and we can look at one another and be a little bit happy. I can feel with my eyes, can’t you, darling? When you met us yesterday and stood there with that absurd top-hat in your hand – it was so funny to see you in that stiff, formal morning dress, but you looked very splendid and it made me so proud to think you were really all mine and no one knew it – well, when I saw you, I could feel in all my fingers, darling, the queer lovely feel of your hair that first day – do you remember – when you put your head on my knees and broke down and said you loved me. Such a dear head, darling, all rough and crisp, and strong, splendid bones under it, full of wonderful thoughts. If I shut my eyes I can feel it – I’m doing it now darling. Shut yours – now, this minute – and see if you can’t feel my hands. Did you, Petra darling – did you feel all the love and life in them? Tell me when you write if you can feel me as I feel you!

    You will write, darling, won’t you? You will spare me that little ray at least from the great fire of your life and love. Don’t leave me all in the dark, Petra, and I’ll be content with whatever you give me. Everything has been so ghastly that I haven’t got it in me to be exacting, dear.

Always your own, only, for ever,        

Lolo

39.   The Same to the Same

June 6th, 1929

Petra, my darling, my dear, dear man darling,

    Oh, my dearest, isn’t it terrible to see the summer coming, and to feel so wintry and lonely. Your letters have been a help, but what wouldn’t I give for you yourself, the real you!

    You will tell me again that I’m not telling the truth. That I don’t really love you because I won’t give up being conventional and respectable and go away with you, but it isn’t that, Petra darling. You think in your dear, impetuous way that it would all be so easy, but it wouldn’t really, darling. You think that because you are a man, and you don’t consider how awful it would be, day after day, all the sordidness and trouble. It wouldn’t really be fair to make you go through all that. Even if He would let me go – which, of course, he wouldn’t, because he is so selfish – it would be a long, drawn-out misery. I know how horrid it is because I know a woman who got her divorce. Of course, her husband took all the blame, but it was a miserable time for everybody, and she and her man friend had to go right away, and he gave up his post, a very good post, and they are living in quite a slummy little place in rooms, and don’t even get enough to eat sometimes.

    Anyway, the Gorgon would never consent to me divorcing him, because he prides himself on being very virtuous and proper, and he would probably have to leave his firm or something. He would never do that. He thinks more of his firm than of anything in the world – far more than he does of me or my happiness, which he has never considered at all from the day he married me.

    Doesn’t it seem too awful that one has to pay so heavily for making a mistake? I keep on thinking, if only I hadn’t married him. If only I were free to come to you, Petra darling – what a wonderful time we could have together! But then I think again that if I hadn’t married him, I should never have lived here, never met you, and oh, darling, what could make up for that? So I suppose, as they say in the nature-books, that He has ‘fulfilled his function’ in bringing us together. I looked at him last night as he sat glooming over the mutton, which wasn’t quite done as he likes it (you would never let a stupid thing like mutton poison the whole beautiful day for you, but he does), and I thought of Mr Munting saying once, ‘All God’s creatures have their uses,’ when Miss Milsom had made me one of her lovely scarves – and I said to myself, ‘If only you could know, my dear Gorgon, what is the one thing in our lives I thank you for!’ That would really have given him something to gloom about, wouldn’t it?

    It is so funny – he is always asking when you are coming to see us again. His Cookery Book is going to be published in a few weeks’ time, and he is ridiculously excited about it. He thinks it is a great work of art, and is going to send you a copy as from one artist to another. Wouldn’t that make a good reason for you to call on us, if you could get over to England? It is clever of you to be able to find so many things to say about his silly little water-colours – you who are a really great painter (I have learnt not to say artist now. Do you remember how impatient you were with me when I called you ‘artistic’? We nearly had a quarrel that day. Fancy us quarrelling about anything – now!).

    It makes me sad, Petra darling, to think of my poor lonely Man so far away, wanting his Lolo. And I’m a little frightened, too, when I think of all the beautiful ladies in Paris. I expect they think a lot of you, don’t they? Do you go to a great many fashionable parties? Or do you live the student-life I used to read about and think how gay and jolly it must be? You don’t tell me very much about the people you see and the places you go to. I wish you weren’t a portrait-painter – you must have so many opportunities to find someone more beautiful than your poor Lolo and so much cleverer. Don’t say they aren’t more beautiful than I am, because I shall know you aren’t telling the truth. I’m not really beautiful at all – only when I had been with you I sometimes used to look in the glass and think that happiness made me almost beautiful, sometimes. I have been reading in a book about the real Laura and Petrarch – did you know, she was really only a little girl and that he hardly saw her at all? Perhaps she was only beautiful in his imagination, too. But that didn’t prevent her from being his inspiration, did it? I wonder if you are the same. Perhaps I inspire you better from a distance. I don’t think a woman could feel like that. She wants her Man always, close to her. Darling, do say you want me to like that, too.

    I must stop now. The Gorgon will be wanting its tea. I am living just like a hermit now. I never go anywhere and I try to do all I can to keep him in good temper, for fear he should get the idea that there is Somebody Else in my life. How dreadful it would be if he suspected anything. He is fairly reasonable now, except when his food isn’t quite right. But oh! I am so lonely.

    Darling, I love you so much I don’t know what to do with myself. I have kissed the paper twenty times where your dear, darling name is. You must kiss it, too, and think you are kissing your own, your absolutely owned own.

Lolo

40.   The Same to the Same

14th June, 1929

Darling,

    Your letter hurt me so dreadfully, I cried and cried. Oh, Petra, you can’t love me at all, or you wouldn’t say such awful things. You can’t really think that if I love you I ought to let him divorce me. Darling, do think how horrible it would be! How could I go through all that terrible shame in public, and all my friends looking on and thinking hateful things about our beautiful love! At least, I suppose I could go through with it – one can go through all kinds of agonies and still live – but that you should want me to do it – that you could think of your Lolo in such a sordid way – that’s what hurts me, darling. You used to say you wanted to stand between me and trouble, and couldn’t bear to think of anything ugly touching our pure and lovely passion. And yet now you want to smirch me with the stain of the divorce courts and see my name in the papers for people to snigger at. Oh Petra, it’s absolutely clear you don’t really love me one bit.

    You couldn’t feel the same to me, Petra, I know that, if I came to you all dirtied and draggled from an ordeal like that. Just think of having to stand up in the witness-box and tell the judge all about our love. It would all sound so different to their worldly, coarse, horrible minds, and our love would seem just a vulgar, nasty – I don’t like to write the word they would call it, even to you – instead of the pure, clean, divine thing it really is.

    Darling, I’m not thinking of myself – I’m thinking of you and our love. I don’t want a single spot to touch it. It would be better to suffer all our lives as we are suffering now – as I am suffering, for sometimes, Petra, I don’t think you suffer at all – rather than to look at each other with the shadow of an ugly scandal between us. You don’t understand. You don’t realise what a difference these things make to a woman. It does not make any difference to a man, but even you would see the stain on me for ever afterwards, and would turn against me.

    Tell me you don’t really mean it, darling. There must be some other way out. Let us think very hard and find out. Or if you really think so little of me, tell me so, and we will say good-bye again – for always, this time. I expect I was wrong to stick to our agreement before. You wanted to be released then, and you wouldn’t have asked it if you hadn’t been tired of me already in your heart. Let’s end it all, Petra. Perhaps I shall die, and then you will be free. I feel unhappy enough to die – and if I’m too strong for wretchedness to kill me, there are always easy ways out of it all.

Your heart-broken        

Lolo

41.   The Same to the Same

15, Whittington Terrace    

30th June, 1929

Darling, dear Petra, my dearest,

    Of course I do forgive you. It’s you really that must forgive me for saying such awful things. I didn’t mean them. I knew really, deep down in my heart, that you loved me all the time. Of course I couldn’t say good-bye – it would kill me – Yes, I meant that part of it.

    But you do see now, don’t you, that we can’t take that way out. For my sake, you say, darling, but, indeed, I could bear anything for myself – only I don’t want to spoil the lovely thing we have made. We will do just as you say, wait for a year and see if anything happens. It may, if we only want it enough. God might make a miracle to help us. Such things have happened before now. He might even die – ‘in him Nature’s copy’s not eterne’ – doesn’t somebody say that in a play somewhere? We used to go and see Shakespeare sometimes when I was at school, and do the plays in class, though I didn’t pay much attention to them then. I didn’t understand what a difference art and poetry make to one’s life. I was waiting for you to come and teach me, my dear.

    I am going to do some really solid reading now, to try and be more worthy of my darling when the happy time comes. (I must believe there will be a happy time, or I should go mad.) This year of waiting shall be a year of self- development. That will make the desolate days pass more quickly. Goodness knows I shall have time enough, for He never lets me go out anywhere or have any of my own friends to see me. The only people I ever have to talk to are his friends from the office. They talk about bridges and electrical plant interminably. I don’t know how people can live with such petty, dull things taking up all their minds. Sometimes one or two of them have the graciousness to ask me if I have seen the latest play or film, but I never have, and I just have to sit and smile while He says, ‘We’re quiet, domestic people, my wife and I; we don’t care about this night life.’ And if I ever suggest going out, he pretends that I want to be ‘gadding round’ in night-clubs at all hours. I am ashamed of being so ignorant of the things everybody is talking about. Other husbands take their wives out. But no – if I want to stir out of doors, I’m a bad woman – ‘one of these modern wives who don’t care for their homes’. What kind of place is my home, that I should care about it?

    I have got that book you were talking about, Women in Love. It is very queer and coarse in parts, don’t you think, and rather bewildering, but some of the descriptions are very beautiful. I don’t understand it at all, but it is thrilling, like music. That bit about the horse, for instance. I can’t quite make out what he means, but it is terribly exciting. What funny people Lawrence’s characters are! They don’t seem to have any ordinary lives, or have to make money or run households or anything. That woman who is a schoolmistress – she never seems to have to bother about her work, one would think it was all holidays at her school. I suppose the author means that the humdrum things don’t really count in one’s life at all, and I expect that is true, only in actual life they do seem to make a lot of difference.

    Oh, I do hate this cramping life – always telling lies and smothering up one’s feelings. But tyrants make liars. It is what somebody I read about in the papers calls ‘slave-psychology’. I feel myself turning into a cringing slave, lying and crawling to get one little scrap of precious freedom – a book, a letter, a thought even – and carrying it off into a corner to gloat over it in secret. That is the way in which I am learning to build up an inner life for myself, a lovely, secret freedom, so that the things He says and does can’t really hurt me any longer. The real Me is free and happy, worshipping in my hidden temple with my darling Idol, my own dear Petra darling.

    How I do love you! My starved life is full when I think of you – brimmed with joy and inward laughter. And one day, perhaps, we shall come out of the dark catacombs and build our temple of Love in the glorious sunlight, with the golden gates wide open for all the world to see and marvel at our happiness.

    Yours, beloved, yours utterly and completely,

Lolo

I love to write the name you call me by – the name that is only yours. Such a silly name it would sound to people who didn’t know what it meant. He uses the name other people use – just like an uncle or something. That’s all he is – a sort of Wicked Uncle in a fairy-tale. I can bear him better if I think of him just as that.

42.   The Same to the Same

15, Whittington Terrace    

18th July, 1929

Darling, darling,

    I hardly know how to breathe for joy! To know that I shall see you, hear your dear voice, hold your hand again! He heard me singing in the kitchen this morning and asked what I was yowling about. I should have liked to tell him. Think of his face if I had said: ‘My lover is coming home and I am singing for joy!’ I said meekly that I was sorry if it disturbed him, and he said in his courteous way that it didn’t matter to him if I liked to hear the sound of my own voice, but the girl would probably think I was mad. I said I didn’t care what the girl thought of me, and he answered: ‘That’s just the trouble with you. You don’t care. You’re right up in the air.’ So I am – so I am! Right above the clouds, Petra darling, up in the golden sunlight, where nothing can touch me. He’s quite right for once, if he did but know it.

    Darling, we must be very careful when you come. I don’t know how I shall manage to keep the happiness out of my eyes and voice. But he won’t notice – he never notices how I’m feeling. Besides, he will monopolise you with his precious book. It’s really out at last, and he’s clucking over it like a hen that’s laid an egg. People say to me: ‘So your husband has written a book, Mrs Harrison. So clever of him. Fancy a man knowing such a lot about cooking! What exciting meals you must have. Aren’t you afraid he’ll poison himself sometimes with those queer toadstools and things?’ And I smile and say, ‘Oh, but my husband would never make a stupid mistake. He knows so much about them, you see.’ That’s quite true, too. He doesn’t make mistakes about things – only about people. He never gets anything right about me – not one single thing. But then he really cares about mushrooms and takes trouble to study them.

    I wonder how his first wife put up with him. She was a homely sort of person, from all accounts – the sort that are good housekeepers and mothers and all that. I think, if I’d ever had a child I could have been happier, but he has never given me one, and doesn’t seem to want to. I’m glad of that now – since I met you. It would be terrible to have his child now – it would seem like a sort of treason to you, beloved. Don’t be afraid, dearest. He never touches me – you know what I mean – and I wouldn’t let him. I don’t let him even give me his usual morning peck if I can help it. I don’t refuse, of course – that would make him suspicious at once. I just happen to be busy and keep out of his way. He’s glad, I think, because he always used to grumble at any demonstration and say, ‘That’ll do, that’ll do’ – though he’ll let the cat swarm all over him and knead bread on his chest for hours together. I suppose he thinks a woman’s feelings don’t matter as much as a cat’s!

    But I don’t know why I bother about him at all, when you, you, you are the one thing filling my heart. Oh, my darling, my Petra, my heart’s heart! You are coming back. Nothing else is of importance in the whole world. The sun’s shining and everything is happy. I went out to do some shopping today – silly, trivial things for the house – and I could have kissed the bread and the potatoes as I put them into my basket, just for joy that you and I and they exist in the same world together! Petra, beloved, you and I, you and I – oh, darling, isn’t it wonderful!

Your happy        

Lolo

43.   The Same to the Same

15, Whittington Terrace    

August 2nd, 1929

Petra, oh, my dear!

    Oh, darling, never say now that the luck isn’t on our side sometimes. Something even bigger than luck, perhaps. That we should save that last, wonderful evening out of the wreck – so perfect, so unspeakably wonderful – our evening of marvellous love. Just think – that it should be your last night, and that he should be called out suddenly like that, and ask you, himself, not to go before he got back. And even then, if it hadn’t been the girl’s night out, we shouldn’t have been safe. But it was, by such incredible luck, Petra mine.

    Do you know, there was a moment when I was frightened. I thought, for a horrible minute, that he had suspected something after all, and had only pretended to go out, and would come slinking back on purpose to catch us. Did that occur to you? And were you afraid to say anything, lest I should be frightened? I was. And then, quite suddenly, I felt certain, absolutely certain that it was all right. We were being watched over, Petra. We had been given that great hour – a little bit of eternity, just for you and me. God must be sorry for us. I can’t believe it was sin – no one could commit a sin and be so happy. Sin doesn’t exist, the conventional kind of sin, I mean – only lovingness and unlovingness – people like you and me, and people like him. I wonder what Mr Perry would say to that. He is just crossing the road now to Benediction, as he calls it. He thinks he knows all about what is right and what is wrong, but lots of people think his candles and incense wicked, and call him a papist and idolater and things like that. And yet, out of his little, cold, parish experience, he would set himself up to make silly laws for you, darling, who are big and free and splendid. How absurd it all is! He preached such a funny sermon the other day, about the Law and the Gospel. He said, if we wouldn’t do as the Gospel said, and keep good for the love of God, then we should be punished by the Law.

    And he said that didn’t mean that God was vindictive, only that the Laws of Nature had their way, and worked out the punishment quite impartially, just as fire burns you if you touch it, not to punish you, but because that is the natural law of fire.

    I am wandering on, darling, am I not? I only wondered what kind of natural revenge Mr Perry thought God would take for what he would call our sin. It does seem so ridiculous, doesn’t it? As if God or Nature would trouble about us, with all those millions and millions of worlds to see to. Besides, our love is the natural thing – it’s the Gorgon who is unnatural and abnormal. Probably that’s his punishment. He denies me love, and our love is Nature’s revenge on him. But, of course, he wouldn’t see it that way.

    Oh, darling, what a wonderful time these last weeks have been. I enjoyed every minute. I have been so happy, I didn’t know how to keep from shouting my happiness out loud in the streets. I wanted to run and tell the people who passed by, and the birds and the flowers and the stray cats how happy I was. Even the Gorgon being there couldn’t spoil it altogether. Do you remember how angry he was about The Sacred Flame? And you were holding my hand, and your hand was telling mine how true and right it was that the useless husband should be got out of the way of the living, the splendid wife and her lover and child. Darling, I think that play is the most wonderful and courageous thing that’s ever been written. What right have the useless people to get in the way of love and youth? Of course, in the play, it wasn’t the husband’s fault, because he was injured and couldn’t help himself – but that’s Nature’s law again, isn’t it? Get rid of the ugly and sick and weak and worn-out things, and let youth and love and happiness have their chance. It was a brave thing to write that, because it’s what we all know in our hearts, and yet we are afraid to say it.

    Petra, darling, my lover, my dearest one, how can we wait and do nothing, while life slips by? The time of love is so short – what can we do? Think of a way, Petra. Even – yes, I’m almost coming to that – even if the way leads through shame and disgrace – I believe I could face it, if there is no other. I know so certainly that I was made for you and that you are all my life, as I am yours.

    Kiss me, kiss me, Petra. I kiss my own arms and hands and try to think it’s you. Ever, my darling, your own

Lolo

44.   The Same to the Same

15, Whittington Terrace    

5th Oct., 1929

‘Oh, Petra, I am so frightened. Darling, something dreadful has happened. I’m sure – I’m almost quite sure. Do you remember when I said Nature couldn’t revenge herself? Oh, but she can and has, Petra. What shall I do? I’ve tried things, but it’s no good. Petra, you’ve got to help me. I never thought of this – we were so careful – but something must have gone wrong. Petra, darling, I can’t face it. I shall kill myself. He’ll find out – he must find out, and he’ll be so cruel, and it will all be too terrible.

    Petra, I was so desperate I tried to make him – don’t be angry, Petra – I mean, I tried to be nice to him and make him love me, but it wasn’t any good. I don’t know what he will do to me when he discovers the truth. Darling, darling do something – anything! I can’t think of any way, but there must be one, somehow. Everybody will know, and there will be a frightful fuss and scandal. And even if we got a divorce, it wouldn’t be in time – they are so slow in those dreadful courts. But I don’t expect he would divorce me. He would just smother it all up and be cruel to me. I don’t know. I feel so ill, and I can’t sleep. He asked me what was the matter with me today. I’d been crying and I look simply awful. Petra, my dearest, what can we do? How cruel God is! He must be on the conventional people’s side after all. Do write quickly and tell me what to do. And don’t, don’t be angry with me, darling, for getting you into this trouble. I couldn’t help it. Write to me or come to me – I shall go mad with worry. If you love me at all, Petra, you must help me now.

Lolo

45.   Statement of John Munting [Continued.]

The next news I had about the Harrisons was about the middle of October, 1929, when I got a note from Lathom, written, rather unexpectedly, from ‘The Shack, Manaton, Devon’. He said that he was staying with Harrison, who was having his annual ‘camp’ among the water-colour ‘bits’ and the natural food-stuffs. Harrison, it appeared, had been so pressing that he really had not known how to refuse, especially as he was really feeling rather played-out after several months’ strenuous work in Paris. After the unbearable hot and prolonged summer, the prospect of pottering about a bit among the lush grass and deep lanes of Devon had seemed attractive, even when coupled with the boredom of Harrison’s company. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he added, ‘the old boy is not so bad when you get him in the country by himself. This is the kind of life that really suits him. As a family man he is a failure, but he quite comes out and blossoms doing the odd bits of work about the shack. And he certainly is a first-class cook, though up to the present I have successfully avoided his nettle-broth and stewed toadstools, not wishing to be cut off in my youth. This is a pretty place – miles away from everywhere, of course, stuck down on a circumbendible lane which runs down from Manaton (half a dozen houses and a pub) to the deep valley which separates the Manaton Ridge and Becky Falls from Lustleigh Cleave. The only neighbours are the sheep and cows – an old ram walked into the kitchen the other day. Harrison was grunting over the stove and didn’t see him at first, “Be-hey-hey,” says the ram; “Eh-heh-heh,” bleats Harrison, looking up; and damn it, he was so exactly like the old fellow that he wanted nothing but a pair of horns to complete the resemblance! We wash the crockery, and then Harrison takes his newest superfine painting-box, with the collapsible legs and all the rest of it, and trundles away into the valley, where he sits all day in a gorse-bush, trying to put the tumbling of the stream on paper. The drought has dried it up a good bit, but never was anything so desiccated as the arid little plan of it he produces with pride for me to see, painted with a brush with three hairs in it – peck, peck, scratch and dab – like a canary scrabbling for seed. Why don’t I take the opportunity to do some work in this glorious place? No, thanks; I’m a figure and portrait wallah – besides, I’ve come here for a rest. It is not mine to sing the stately grace – I smoke my pipe in the doorway, drive the cattle out of the back garden, and see that the stewpot doesn’t boil too fast.

    ‘So here I am, in comfortable exile with Menelaus, while Helen sits at home and sews shirts. And it’s a better way, too. One mustn’t take these things too seriously. Damned if Harrison hasn’t got the right idea after all. Look after the grub and leave women to their own fool devices. They give a man no peace. You, being married, have perhaps got your house in order. Do you find it as easy to do your work, now that you’re hooked up to a whirlwind? But, of course, your whirlwind works too, and helps to turn the mill-wheel, which no doubt makes all the difference.’

    Lathom went on in this strain for a page or so. Cynicism from him was something new, and I took it to spell restlessness of some sort or other. Either, I thought, he was getting fed up with the lady’s exactions, or the trio had arrived at a modus vivendi. It was no affair of mine.

    He ended up by saying that he would be running up to town in a day or two and would look me up. I was then living in Bloomsbury – in fact, in my present house – and my wife was away with her people. I had arranged to go with her, but at the last moment an urgent matter turned up – an Introduction to an anthology, which had to be rushed out in a great hurry before some other publisher got hold of the idea, and I had to stay behind to get the thing fairly going, as it meant a good deal of work at the British Museum.

    When Lathom turned up at about one o’clock on the 19th, I explained this to him and apologised for having no lunch to offer him. Like most men, and women, too, when left to themselves, I found solitary meals uninspiring. So, apparently, did ‘the girl’, whom, till my wife left me, I had imagined to be a good cook. Not that I had ever expected Elizabeth to leave her writing to see after my meals, I can only suppose that her moral influence was enough to make the difference between roast mutton and raw.

    Lathom commiserated with me, and we went and had some grub at the ‘Bon Bourgeois’. He seemed to be in high spirits, when he thought about it, but had a way of going off into fits of abstraction which suggested nerves or preoccupation of some kind. He asked about the anthology and my work generally with apparent interest, and then, to my surprise, broke suddenly into my description of the plot of my new novel by saying:

    ‘Look here, if the wife’s away, why don’t you come down to the Shack with me for the weekend? It’ll do you good, freshen you up and all that.’

    ‘Good heavens,’ I said, ‘it’s Harrison’s place. He won’t want me.’

    ‘Oh yes, he’d love to have you. Oh, rather. In fact, he only said to me, when I was starting off, he wished I could bring you back with me. He’s quite forgotten all that misunderstanding. He’s rather distressed about it, really. Thinks he did you an injustice. Would like to make it up. He says you must be harbouring resentment, because you’ve been in town all this time and haven’t been to see them.’

    ‘That’s nonsense,’ I said. ‘You know why I’ve thought it best to keep out of it.’

    ‘Yes, but he doesn’t. Naturally he thinks you’re offended.’

    ‘Didn’t you tell him I was busy?’

    ‘Of course. Oh, yes. Played up the popular literary man for all it was worth. So he said, of course you were too important nowadays to remember your old friends.’

    ‘Damn it,’ I said, ‘what a tactless devil you are, Lathom. You needn’t have hurt his feelings.’

    ‘No, but look here. Why not come down? It’ll please the old boy no end, and as neither of the women will be there, there won’t be any awkwardness. It’s a damned good opportunity for being civil to him without involving your wife.’

    ‘Civil is a good word for it,’ I objected. ‘I don’t know that it’s particularly civil to plant myself on the man like that, and make him feed me and so on, without notice, when he probably doesn’t want me. Just at the weekend, too, when it’s difficult to get extra supplies.’

    ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter,’ said Lathom, ‘we’ll take some grub down with us. I was going to in any case. Everything has to be brought out there by a carrier twice a week. Frightful desolate hole. We’ll take a bit of beef and a couple of pounds of sausages. That’ll see us through all right.’

    I considered it.

    ‘I say,’ said Lathom, suddenly. ‘Do come, old man. I wish you would. It’s all right there, you know, but I do get a bit bored at times. I’d like to have a yap with somebody who talks my language.’

    ‘If you’re fed up,’ I said reasonably, ‘why do you stay?’

    ‘Oh, well – I promised I would, don’t you see. It’s not bad really, but it would do us both good to have a bit of a change.’

    ‘Now, look here, Lathom,’ said I, ‘I don’t like the idea particularly. I’m not particularly puritan’ (I don’t know why one uses that phrase – I suppose it is easier to disown one’s decencies when one represents them as something grotesque in a black suit and steeple-hat), ‘but considering the way you behaved to Harrison, I think it’s rather thick to go and push your friends on to him. What you do is your own business’ (looking back on it, I seem to have extracted a great deal of satisfaction from this original thought), ‘but it’s rather different for me.’

    ‘Punk!’ said Lathom. ‘That’s all absolutely over. Finished. Washed out. It’s you who keep on digging it up again. Can’t you forget it and come down and help me out with old Harrison?’

    ‘Why so keen?’

    ‘Oh, I’m not particularly keen. I thought you’d like it, that’s all. It doesn’t matter. What are you doing this afternoon? B.M. again?’

    I said, no; I avoided the Reading Room on Saturday afternoons, because it was so crowded, and asked him about his work.

    He talked about it a little, in the same vague way as before, saying how difficult it was to settle to anything, and displaying some irritability with his sitters of the moment. His triumph at the Academy had made him fashionable, and fashionable women were all alike, it seemed; small-minded and featureless. One might as well paint masks. All of which I had heard so often from other painters that I put Lathom down as already spoilt.

    I suggested that he should stay up in town and do a show with me, but he said he was fed up with shows. He had only come up to see his agent, and was catching the 4.30. Why didn’t I change my mind and come with him?

    It ended in my changing my mind, and going. I hardly know why, except that I was only six mouths married and my wife was away, which, to the well-balanced mind, is no good reason for idle behaviour.

    The express ran us down in smooth, stuffy comfort, and reached Newton Abbot dead on time at 9.15. I cannot say – though I have tried – that I remembered any particular incident on the way down. I hate talking on railway journeys, anyway, and Lathom did not seem very conversational. I read – it was Hughes’s High Wind in Jamaica – an overrated book, I think, considered as a whole, but memorable for that strange and convincing description of the earthquake. The thick heat and silence, and then the quick, noiseless shift of sea and shore, like the tilting of a saucer. Good, that. And the ghastly wind afterwards. And the child, not realising that anything out of the way had happened, because nobody gave the thing its proper terrifying name. That is very natural. I do not care for the part about the pirates. It is an anti-climax.

    I know we dined on the train, but railway meals are seldom memorable. Lathom grumbled and left his portion half-eaten, and I said something about his acquiring a taste for hedgehog-broth and stewed toadstools – some silly remark which he took as a deadly insult.

    At Newton Abbot we changed into the local, and dawdled through Teigngrace, Heathfield and Brimley Halt, taking over half an hour about it, till we were turned out, twenty minutes late, on the platform at Bovey Tracey. It was a quarter-past ten and dark, but the smell of the earth came up pleasantly, with a welcome suggestion of rain in the air. I stood on the platform, clutching an attaché case in one hand and the bag with the beef and sausages in the other, while Lathom transacted some occult business with a man outside. Then he came back, saying briefly, ‘I’ve got a man to take us,’ and we stumbled out to where an aged taxi thrummed mournfully in the gloom. Lathom bundled in, and I parked my bags at his feet.

    ‘What the devil’s that?’ he said crossly.

    ‘The grub, fathead,’ said I, following him in.

    ‘Oh, yes, of course, I’d forgotten,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s get going, for God’s sake!’

    Being used to Lathom, I ignored his irritability. We jolted off.

    The taxi had a churchyard smell about it, and I mentioned the fact. Lathom slammed the window down with an impatient grunt. I remarked, foolishly, that he didn’t seem very enthusiastic about the trip. He said:

    ‘Oh, don’t talk so much.’

    It seemed to me that the prospect of seeing Harrison again had rather got on his nerves, and I looked forward to an exasperating weekend.

    ‘Vous l’avez voulu, Georges Dandin,’ I reflected, and lit a cigarette resignedly. The narrow road heaved and sank between dark hedges, but climbed on the whole, wriggling determinedly up and round to the ridge. A dim light or so and a cluster of black roofs announced civilisation, and Lathom roused himself to say: ‘Manaton – there’s a good view from here by daylight.’

    ‘We shan’t be long now, then, I suppose,’ said I.

    He did not reply, and I suddenly became aware that I could hear him breathing. Once I had noticed it, I couldn’t seem to shut my eyes to the sound. It was like hearing your own heartbeats in the night – when they seem to grow louder and louder, till they fill the silence and keep you from going to sleep. The breaths seemed quite to rasp my ear, they were so heavy and so close.

    ‘Eh!’ said Lathom, unexpectedly. ‘What did you say?’

    What had I said? It must have been ages ago, for Manaton was well behind us now, and the car was nosing her broken-winded way steadily down and down, with deep cartruts wringing her aged bones. I recollected that I had said I supposed we shouldn’t be long now.

    ‘Oh, no,’ said Lathom. ‘We’re nearly there.’

    We bounced on in silence for ten minutes more; then creaked to a standstill. I put my head out. Dim fields, trees and the tinkling of a distant stream coming remotely up on a puff of south-west wind. No light. No building.

    ‘Is this it?’ I asked, ‘or has the engine conked?’

    ‘What?’ said Lathom, irritably. ‘Yes, of course this is it. What’s the matter? Push along – we don’t want to stay here all night.’

    I wrestled with the door and edged out. Lathom close at my heels. He paid the driver, and the car began to move off, lurching on down the slope to find a place to turn.

    ‘Here!’ said I; ‘have you got the beef?’

    ‘Oh, hell,’ said Lathom, ‘I thought you had it.’

    I plunged after the taxi, reclaiming the food, and came back to where Lathom was standing. His hurry seemed to bave left him. He was striking a match and having a little trouble with it. The car, a hundred yards off, choked, crashed its gears, burbled, choked again, burbled, choked, and came thudding up on bottom gear. It passed us, labouring and bumping, moved up into second, hesitated into top, and its red rear light vanished, showed, jerking, vanished and span slowly skywards.

    ‘Ready?’ said Lathom.

    I did not point out that I had been patiently waiting for him to make a move, but grasped the bags and followed.

    ‘We’ve got a field to cross,’ he explained, holding a gate open for me.

    We staggered along for a little. Then he stopped and I bumped up against him.

    ‘Over there,’ he said.

    I looked, and saw a patch of extra darkness, between the darkness of some tree-stems.

    ‘There’s no light,’ I said. ‘Is he expecting you? I hope he won’t be annoyed with me for coming.’

    ‘Oh, he won’t be annoyed,’ said Lathom, shortly. ‘He’s gone to bed, I expect. Early bird. Up with the lark and down with the sun and all that. It doesn’t matter. We can forage round for ourselves.’

    A few more minutes, and we stood at the door of the shack. You know what it’s like – indeed, all England knows by now – a low, two-roomed cottage, ugly, built of stone, with a slate roof. Only one story – what in Scotland they call a but and ben. The windows were unshuttered, but not a spark of light showed through them – no candle, not so much as the embers of a fire.

    Lathom gave an ejaculation.

    ‘He must have gone to sleep,’ he muttered. I was fumbling for the handle of the door, but he pushed me aside, and I heard the latch click open. He paused, staring into the dark interior.

    ‘I wonder if he’s gone wandering off and got lost somewhere,’ he said, hesitating on the threshold.

    ‘Why not go in and see?’ I countered.

    ‘I’m going to.’ He stepped in and the unmistakable rattle of matches in the box told me that he was getting a light. He was clumsy about it, and only after several futile scratches and curses did the small flame flare up; he held it high, and for a moment I saw the living-room – a kitchen-table cluttered with crockery, a sink, an empty hearth, and a jumble of painting gear, clumped in a corner. Then the match flickered and burnt his fingers, and he dropped it, but made no effort to strike another.

    ‘Juggins!’ said I, defiantly, for this cheerless welcome was getting on my nerves. ‘Here – isn’t there a candle or anything?’

    I hunted through my pockets for a petrol lighter. This gave a steadier light, by which I found and lit a bedroom candle on a bracket just behind the door. The untidy room leaped into existence again. I set the candle down on the table, beside the sordid remnants of a meal. A chair lay overturned on the floor. I righted it mechanically and looked round. Lathom was still standing just inside the door; with his head cocked sideways, as though he were listening.

    ‘Well, I’m damned,’ said I, ‘this is very cheerful. If Harrison—’

    ‘Listen a minute,’ he said, ‘I thought I heard him snoring.’

    I listened, but could hear nothing except a tap dripping into the sink.

    ‘Looks to me as if he’d gone out,’ I said. ‘How about starting the fire up? I’m chilly. Where’s the wood?’

    ‘In the basket,’ said Lathom, vaguely.

    I investigated the basket, but it was empty.

    ‘Oh, well,’ I said, ‘let’s have a drink and get to bed. If Harrison comes in later, you’ll have to do the explaining.’

    ‘Yes,’ said Lathom, eagerly, ‘good idea. Let’s have a drink.’ He wandered about. ‘Where the devil’s he put the whisky?’ He flung open a cupboard door, and groped about, muttering.

    At this point a thought occurred to me.

    ‘Would Harrison go out and leave the door unlocked?’ I said. ‘He’s a careful sort of fellow as a rule.’

    ‘What?’ Lathom’s head emerged for a moment from the cupboard. ‘No – no – I should think he would lock up.’

    ‘Then he must be about somewhere,’ I said. We had been talking almost in whispers – I suppose with the idea of not disturbing the sleeper, but now I lost patience.

    ‘Harrison!’ I shouted.

    ‘Shut up!’ said Lathom. ‘He must have left the whisky in the bedroom.’ He picked up the candle and plunged into the inner room.

    The shadows parted and flowed in after him as he went, leaving me in darkness again. His footsteps shuffled to a halt and there was a long pause. Then he spoke, in a curious, thick voice with a catch in it, like a gramophone needle going over a crack.

    ‘I say, Munting. Come here a minute. Something’s up.’

    The inner room was in a sordid confusion. My hurrying footsteps tripped over some bedclothes. There were two beds in the room, and Lathom was standing by the farther of the two. He stepped aside, and his hand shook so that the candle-flame danced. I thought at first that the man on the bed had moved, but it was only the dancing candle.

    The bed was broken and tilted grotesquely sideways. Harrison was sprawled over it in a huddle of soiled blankets. His face was twisted and white and his eyeballs rolled up so that only the whites showed. I stooped over him and felt for his wrist. It was cold and heavy, and when I released it it fell back on the bed like dead-weight. I did not like the look of the nostrils – black caverns, scooped in wax – not flesh, anyway – and the mouth, twisted unpleasantly upwards from the teeth, with the pale tongue sticking through.

    ‘My God!’ I cried, but softly – and turned to look at Lathom, ‘the man’s dead!’

    ‘Dead?’ He was looking at me, not at Harrison. ’Are you sure?’

    ‘Sure?’ I put a finger beneath the fallen jaw, which woodenly resisted me. ‘Why, he must have been dead for hours. He’s stiff, man, stiff!’

    ‘So he is, poor old b—’ said Lathom.

    He began to laugh.

    ‘Stop that,’ I said, snatching the candle away from him, and dumping him roughly down on to the other bed. ‘Pull yourself together. You want a drink.’

    I found the whisky with some trouble. It was on the floor, under Harrison’s bed. He must have grasped at it his struggles and let it roll away from him. Fortunately, the cork was in place. There was a tumbler, too, but I did not touch that. I fetched another from the living-room (Lathom cried out not to be left in the dark, but I paid no attention), and poured him out a stiff peg, and made him swallow it neat. Then I stood over him as he sat and shuddered.

    ‘Sorry, old man,’ he said at last. ‘Silly of me to make an ass of myself. Bit of a startler, isn’t it? But your face – oh, Lord! – if you could have seen yourself! It was priceless.’

    He began to giggle again.

    ‘Don’t be a fool,’ said I. ‘We’ve got no time for hysterics. Something’s got to be done.’

    ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘Yes – something must be done. A doctor, or something. All right, old man. Give me another drink and I’ll be as right as rain.’

    I gave him another small one and took some myself. That seemed to clear my mind a little.

    ‘How far are we from Manaton?’

    ‘About three miles, I think – or a little over.’

    ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I suppose somebody there will have a telephone, or can send a messenger. One of us had better get along there as fast as possible and get on to the police?’

    ‘Police?’

    ‘Yes, of course, you ass. They’ve got to know.’

    ‘But you don’t suppose there’s anything wrong about it?’

    ‘Wrong? Well, there’s a dead man – that’s pretty wrong, I should think. He must have died of something. Did he have a heart, or fits, or anything?’

    ‘Not that I know of.’

    I surveyed the distasteful bed again.

    ‘It looks more as though – he’d eaten something—’

    I stopped, struck by an idea.

    ‘Let’s look at the things in the other room,’ I said. Lathom jumped to his feet.

    ‘When I left him he said something about fungi – he was going to get some special kind—’

    We went out. In a saucepan on the table was a black, pulpy mess. I sniffed it cautiously. It had a sourish, faintly fungoid odour, like a cellar.

    ‘Oh, Lord,’ whimpered Lathom, ‘I knew it would happen some day. I told him over and over again. He laughed at me. Said he couldn’t possibly make a mistake.’

    ‘Well, I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but it looks rather as if he had. Poor devil. Of course, it would happen the very day there was nobody here to help him. I suppose he was absolutely on his own. Didn’t any tradesmen call, or anything?’

    ‘The carrier comes over on Mondays and Thursdays with supplies,’ said Lathom, ‘and takes the orders for the next visit.’

    ‘No milkman? No baker?’

    ‘No. Condensed milk, and the carrier brings the bread. If there’s nobody in he just puts the things on the window-sill.’

    ‘I see.’ It seemed to me pretty ghastly. ‘Well,’ I went on, ‘will you go or shall I?’

    ‘We’d better both go, hadn’t we?’

    ‘Nonsense.’ I was positive about this. I don’t know why, except that it seemed damnable, somehow, to leave Harrison’s body alone, when leaving it could do no possible harm. ‘If you don’t feel fit to go, I will.’

    ‘Yes – no!’ He looked about him uneasily. ‘All right, you go. It’s straight up the hill, you can’t miss it.’

    I took up my hat, and was going, when he called me back.

    ‘I say – do you mind – I think I’d rather go after all. I feel rather rotten. I’ll be better in the fresh air.’

    ‘Now look here,’ I said firmly. ‘We can’t stay shilly-shallying all night. If you don’t like staying in the house, you’d better go yourself. But make up your mind, because the quicker we get on to somebody the better. Get the police and they’ll probably be able to find a doctor. And you’ll have to give them Mrs Harrison’s address.’

    ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Yes – I suppose – I suppose – they’d better break it to her.’

    ‘Somebody’s got to. It’s a beastly business, but you don’t know any relations you could get hold of, do you?’

    ‘No. Very well. I’ll see to it. Sure you won’t come with me? You don’t mind staying?’

    ‘The sooner you go, the shorter time I’ll have to stay,’ I reminded him.

    ‘Right-ho!’ He paused, appeared about to say something, then repeated ‘right-oh!’ and went out, shutting the door behind him.

    Three miles uphill in the dark – it would take him close on the hour, certainly. Then he had to knock somebody up, find a telephone, if there was one, get on to the police – say half an hour for that. Then, it all depended whether there was an available car in the village – whether he came straight back, or waited for the officials, who would come, presumably from Bovey Tracey. I need not, I thought, expect anything to happen under an hour and three-quarters or so. I suddenly remembered that I was cold, and started to hunt for kindling. I found some, after a little search, in an outhouse. The fire consented to light without much persuasion, and after that, and when I had found and lighted two extra candles, I began to feel in better condition to take stock of things.

    A bottle of Bovril on the mantelpiece presented itself to me with helpful suggestiveness. I took up the kettle to fill it at the tap. A glance at the sink nearly turned me from my intention, but I conquered the sudden nausea and drew my water with care. Impulse would have flooded the repulsive evidences of sickness away, but as the phrase flashed through my mind the word ‘evidence’ asserted itself. ‘I must preserve the evidence,’ I said to myself, and found myself subconsciously taking note that this trifling episode went to prove – as I had always believed – that Anatole France was right in supposing that we always, or at any rate usually, think in actual words.

    The Bovril and the psychology together restored my self-confidence. I began to reconstruct Harrison’s manner of death in my mind. He was quite stiff. I tried to remember what I had read about rigor mortis. One thinks one knows these things till it comes to the point. My impression was that rigidity usually set in about six or seven hours after death, and that it began in the neck and jaw and extended to the limbs and trunk, going away in the same order, after an interval which I could not remember. I braced myself up to go back to Harrison and feel him again. The jaw was rigid, the limbs still fairly flexible. It seemed to me, then, that he must have died some time that morning. I could not quite recollect by what train Lathom had said he had come to town, but, presumably, whenever it was, he had left Harrison fit and well. It was now getting on for midnight on Saturday. Say Harrison had been dead six hours – what then? I had no idea how long fungus-poisoning – if it was fungus-poisoning – took to act. Presumably, it would depend on the amount taken and the state of the victim’s heart.

    What meal was it whose remains lay on the table? I looked into the cupboard. In it there was a large cottage-loaf, uncut. On the table was another from which a couple of slices or so seemed to have been taken. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. If two loaves represented four days’ allowance before the carrier called again, the suggestion was that the last meal had been taken some time on the Thursday. Say Harrison had finished up the old loaf on Thursday morning, the remains probably represented Thursday’s midday or evening meal. The cupboard also contained about a pound of shin of beef, still in the paper in which the butcher had wrapped it, and smelling and looking rather on the stale side, a dried haddock, and a large quantity of tinned food. The meat was not ‘off’, but the blood had dried and darkened. It looked as though the carrier had left it on his Thursday’s visit. Evidently, therefore, Harrison had been alive then to take it in. But since he had not cooked it, I concluded that he must have been taken ill some time on the Thursday night or Friday morning.

    Pleased with these deductions, I reasoned a little further. How soon after the meal had the trouble started? He had not cleared the table. Was he the kind of tidy man who clears as he goes? Yes, I thought he was. Then the illness had come on fairly soon after the meal. The chair which had stood before the used plate was now lying on its side, as though he had sprung up in a hurry and knocked it over. Searching about on the floor, I came upon a pipe, filled, and scarcely smoked. There was a cup, half-filled with coffee. I began to see Harrison, his supper finished, his chair pushed back against the edge of the rug, his pipe lit up, lingering over his after-dinner coffee. Suddenly he is gripped with a spasm of pain or nausea. He jumps up, dropping his pipe. The chair catches the edge of the carpet and falls over as he makes a dash for the sink. He clings to the edge of it and is horribly sick. What next?

    I took up the candle and went out into the little yard at the back of the house, where there was the usual primitive country convenience. It occurred to me, as I pursued my sordid investigations, that the lot of coroners’ officers, policemen, doctors and detectives was much more disagreeable than sensational fiction would lead one to suppose. I soon had enough of the yard and came in again.

    After that – the bedroom, I supposed. And whisky, of course. Pain and exhaustion would call for spirits. Well, I knew where I had found the whisky and the tumbler. Then more sickness – by that time he had been too bad to move. Then – I did not like the look of the broken bedstead. How did one die of fungus-poisoning? Not peacefully, I supposed. There was no peace in that twisted body and face. How long had the agony of delirium and convulsion lasted. It must be a damnable thing to die in so much pain, absolutely alone.

    I did not like these ideas. I took a sheet from the other bed, and laid it gently over Harrison’s body, being careful to disturb nothing. Then I went back and sat by the fire.

    At about half-past two, I heard voices outside, and opened the door to Lathom, a police-sergeant, and a man who was introduced as Dr Hughes of Bovey Tracey. He was a brisk and confident middle-aged man, and brought an atmosphere of reassurance along with him.

    ‘Oh dear, yes,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid he’s quite dead. Been dead for seven or eight hours, if not more. How very unfortunate!’ He drew a pair of forceps from his pocket and rolled up the dead eyelids delicately. ‘Mmm! The pupils are slightly contracted – looks as if your diagnosis might be correct, Mr Lathom. Poisoning of some kind seems indicated. No tablets? Glasses? Anything of that sort?’

    I produced the tumbler from under the bedclothes, and explained about the whisky-bottle.

    ‘Oh, yes. Here, Sergeant – you’d better take charge of these.’

    ‘The whisky is all right,’ I volunteered. ‘At least, we both had some about three or four hours ago, without any ill effects.’

    ‘That was rash of you,’ said Dr Hughes, with a sort of grim smile. ‘We’ll have to impound it, all the same.’

    ‘The mushrooms are in here, doctor,’ said Lathom, anxiously.

    ‘Just a moment. I’ll finish here first.’ He felt and flexed the body, and looked it over carefully. ‘Was this bed like this when you left him? No. Broken in a convulsion, probably. Yes. All right, Sergeant, you can carry on here. I shall want the body and these bedclothes taken down to the mortuary, just as they are. And any other utensils—’

    Lathom pulled my arm. ‘Let’s clear out of this,’ he urged. I stood my ground. Something – either inquisitiveness or the novelist’s greed for copy – impelled me to hang about and get in the way.

    The doctor finished his investigations and covered the body up again.

    ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘that’s about all I can do for the moment. Where’s this saucepan you were telling me about? Oh, yes. Fungus of some sort, obviously, but I can’t say what by looking at it. That will all have to go to London, Sergeant. When the Superintendent comes he’ll see the things packed up. I’ll give you the address they’re to go to. Sir James Lubbock, the Home Office Analyst – here you are, and you’ll see they telephone him to expect them, won’t you?’

    ‘Yes, sir.’

    ‘What will you do, Sergeant? Hold the fort here till they send down to relieve you?’

    ‘Yes, sir. The Superintendent will be here very soon, sir, I expect. They’ve called him up.’

    ‘Very well. Now I’d better be off. I’m wanted for a baby case. You’ll find me at Forbes’s place if you want me. Lucky I hadn’t started. I don’t for a moment suppose anything will happen for hours, but it’s her first, and they’re naturally fidgety. If I don’t get there pronto, it’ll be B.B.A., out of pure cussedness, and I shall never hear the last of it. Well, good-night. Sorry I can’t give anybody a lift, but I’m going out in the opposite direction.’

    He hastened out, and we heard his car chug away down the lane. The sergeant observed that it was a bad business all round, and suggested that he should take down notes of what Lathom and I could tell him. I found some logs in an outhouse and piled them on the fire till it roared up the chimney. More and more I began to feel this was a scene from a book; it was like nothing in life at all. It was – hang it – it was almost cosy. I should have ended, I think, by almost enjoying it – the policeman’s voice cooing like the note of a fat wood-pigeon, the ruddy blaze on his round face, the thick thumb that turned the pages of his notebook, the pink tongue licking the stubby pencil, and Lathom, talking, answering, explaining so lucidly (he had got over his nervousness and was childishly eager to tell his story) – I could have enjoyed it, if it had not been for a fear in the back of my mind.

    The sun  . . .

    You do not want a description of that stiff, cold sunrise. I was facing the window, and saw it – first a whiteness, then a hardening of the skyline – then a bluish reflection on the ceiling – then an uncertain gleam under the blanket of cloud. The weather was going to change.

    I got up and wandered out across the fields. The stream, far off, was the only voice in the silence, and that was impersonal. It had no blood nor life behind its chatter.

    I wandered to the edge of the slope, where the valley plunged down, gorse and heath and bracken all jumbled among the grey boulders, and looked across to where the huge tors humped their granite shoulders over the heights of Lustleigh Cleave. They looked grim enough.

    What I was wondering was just this: Had Harrison ever guessed about his wife and Lathom? What had Lathom said to him in those long, solitary days? Had Harrison decided that his best way out was to clear out from the place where he was not wanted? I knew that, for all his irritating mannerisms, the man had a sterling unselfishness in him – and it would have been so easy for him – with his knowledge – to make a mistake on purpose when he was gathering fungi.

    Would anyone choose a death so painful? Well – a man only the other day had committed suicide by pouring petrol over his clothes and setting himself on fire. And nothing could be made to appear more natural than this poison-death of Harrison’s. Why had Lathom been so anxious for me to come down with him? Had he had doubts about his reception? Had he expected something? Had Harrison – possibly – agreed, promised, even hinted that Lathom might return to find the way clear? Or had Lathom spoken some shattering word – shown irrefutable evidence – and left the facts to do their bitter work?

    A cock crew in the valley. A sheep said ‘Baa!’ just behind me, so that I started and laughed. This kind of thing was morbid, and Harrison was the very last man to lay violent hands on himself. He clear meekly out to make way for a rival? Not likely!

    I hurried back to the shack. The sergeant was dozing, his belt off and his tunic unbuttoned. Lathom was staring into the fire with his chin on his hands.

    ‘Hullo, you two!’ I said with unnecessary heartiness. The policeman jerked awake. ‘Lor’ bless me,’ he muttered apologetically. ‘I must ’a’ dropped off.’

    ‘Why not?’ said I. ‘Best way to pass the time. Look here, there’s a pound of sausages in our kit that we brought down last night. How about a bit of grub?’

    We did not care about using any of the pots and pans in that place, so whittled a stick to a point, and toasted the sausages on that. They tasted none the worse.