And then Robert went on, ‘I don’t believe in that Prince. He’d never have got through the thorns. It’d take the Beast to do that. Some rough beast.’ And the Beast did turn up. Oswald Seaton. And Robert jumped at the opportunity: it gave him the chance (with a perfectly good conscience, for Oswald was after all its rightful owner) to leave Plash Meadow, to break the cataleptic trance it had thrown upon his Muse, to return to the conditions under which—however grim they had been—he had in the past produced poetry. To kill Oswald would be to destroy his last chance of freeing the creator in himself.
Yet how could I convince Blount of this? He’s an exceptionally able and broad-minded man, but no Scotland Yard officer, no layman at all perhaps, can be expected to understand the motive force of the creative artist—how he is compelled by this unpredictable force to subject himself and any one connected with him to hardship, to indignity, to apparent caprice or an inhuman routine, so that a few precious drops of immortality may be squeezed out.
I was deceived myself, for some time, by Robert’s insouciance about the crime. I took it for innocence: and of course he was innocent of the actual killing. Possibly, being human, he got a certain kick from the altruism of his own conduct in helping Janet conceal her crime. But the great change I noticed from the Robert Seaton of June—the new briskness, vitality, clarity which I felt in him—was the result of his having begun to write poetry again. As he says, this was the ironical effect of Oswald’s death; for him, its prime effect. And the fact that, at last, he was re-engaged upon the work for which nature had designed him, and knew it was good, gave him an extraordinary detachment: in his interviews with Blount and myself, he seemed to maintain the attitude of an intelligent but dispassionate observer. Compared with the poem he was writing, the criminal investigation was secondary—a game which he now had enough spare energy to take part in, to play with a certain impudent ease, to relish almost. This culminated in his audacious, yet literally accurate statement, ‘I am willing to swear, on my oath, that I never saw Oswald alive after that day, ten years ago, when he disappeared.’
It would not do to exaggerate this. Robert was not behaving irresponsibly. It was just that, for a while, his social responsibility yielded place to a more urgent one: he had to get his poem written. If he seemed to treat Oswald’s death, and its inevitable consequences, with a sort of impish disrespect, it was only as a man upon whom sentence of death has been passed finds the ordinary world unreal: he may be excused a certain levity. I am sure Robert knew that the case could, for him, have only one ending. His was a heart of gold. He tried to arrange it so that no one else should permanently suffer for the crime. I can’t forget how the editor of the local paper said of Robert’s first wife, ‘It was his poetry, when you get down to the bottom of it, which killed her.’ Robert must have felt the same about Oswald and Janet: if he hadn’t invited Oswald down, with the intention of getting the paralysing weight of Plash Meadow lifted from his shoulders, Janet would never have gone in danger of the gallows. History had repeated itself: the destructive potentiality in genius was vindicated once again . . .
Lord, how he would chuckle at all this solemn stuff! ‘I’ve written my confession, so for God’s sake get on with it and spare us your pretentious analyses and moralisings!’—I can hear him say it. But the ‘confession’ does pose me a difficult moral problem. On the one hand, it’s basically untrue, it might quite possibly fail to convince the police, and to make it public would be to tarnish unjustly the fame of a great, good man. On the other hand, if the police did accept the confession, it would mean Lionel’s being let off comparatively lightly, Janet’s being saved from hanging or life imprisonment (though the case of her conspiracy in Oswald’s ‘suicide’ would be pursued, no doubt), and therefore Robert’s last wishes would have been respected.
How could I bring myself to disregard them? But then, how could I bear to dishonour his name? Who am I to conceal truth or to falsify justice? But which would serve truth and justice the better—to destroy his confession or to hand it over to the authorities?
I wish someone could tell me . . .
1 This was later to be substantially confirmed. N.S.
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