Stop Press

by Michael Innes

  From somewhere behind the scenes came a series of loud blurred thwacks, as if a child without feeling for tools had taken a hammer to thump an inadequately supported board. Voices were pitched higher by way of reply and Appleby wondered whether in any ear but his own there continued to sound above this din the remembered stroke of clocks untimely tolling twelve. Seeping through Rust the night before had been an anticipation of the untoward, a widely diffused apprehension of malice yet to come. With Mr Eliot’s rally the campaign had stumbled; the affair of the clocks had not quite come off with the majority; there was conceivably something like humorous admission of defeat in the final and almost light-hearted episode of the middle blacks. Either all this, thought Appleby – the plot taking the license of dream to dissolve and vanish – either this or the plotter was taking a bold dip into a species of dramatic relief. Or again – and with still more of the inconsequence of sleep – the malice which had hitherto been concentrated in a single unknown had been diffused and watered down amid the company; it was plain that the party was dividing into camps for the purpose of contriving mutual annoyance. It was plain, too, that this made everybody very gay. Miss Cavey had recovered from her misadventures and was preparing to give a little sketch called A Haworth Saturday Night. Even Gib Overall was morosely animated. He had discovered some time before that Wedge in his unwary youth had published a volume of poems: he was getting up some of the nicest of these for sudden and devastating recitation. The party, in fact, was drawing pleasantly to its climax and there seemed only Appleby to wonder what that climax would be.

  ‘Kids,’ said a powerful voice in Appleby’s ear; ‘just kids – the secret’s in that. Will you have a doughnut? I pocketed some at tea.’ Appleby turned round and discovered that this friendly offer came from Kermode; he was holding out a hand in which three doughnuts nestled like marbles. ‘I find them settling after brandy. Have you been drinking, Tommy, old boy? I have.’ Kermode nodded a solemn and candid head.

  ‘John,’ said Appleby.

  ‘John?’ Kermode scowled threateningly round.

  ‘Not Tommy: John.’

  Kermode looked puzzled; then his face cleared. ‘I get you,’ he said. ‘How do you do?’

  The smell of brandy was unescapable. Appleby fleetingly wondered if it had simply been dabbed on Kermode’s lapels; it was impossible to be his sort of policeman and remain simple-minded. He thought Kermode possibly the ablest man at Rust, and abundantly capable of presenting himself as a stage drunk. ‘The secret?’ he asked. ‘It’s the secret that they’re just kids?’

  Kermode nodded. ‘If you grow up’, he said, ‘you find that the simplest solution’s the booze. But if you stick at the age of ginger-pop – well, there’s nothing much for it but scribble away.’ He surveyed the room, momentarily deflected the passage of a doughnut to his mouth to gesture in the direction of Gerald Winter. ‘And that goes for his sort, too; only with him it’s chat… Kids. The trouble with me, Jack, old man, is that I’m too old. Too old at ten; that’s the truth about authors. Do you know Wedge’s Gateways of Literature? The only real gateway is the nursery door. Now mine’ – Kermode’s gnomic seemed to Appleby full of a covert logic which made it all part of the dream – ‘mine’s been the tradesman’s entrance. You see most from there: valets, the backstairs view. And I tell you they’re not an adult profession; nobody employs or consults them – do they? They just shove forward. Juvenile entertainers – they’re successful if they’re that.’

  ‘Heaven preserve me’, said Appleby, ‘from that sort of success.’

  For a moment Kermode’s eyes sought after a memory. ‘Kids,’ he said, ‘but fancying themselves as babes and sucklings. Liking to throw in a spot of prophecy as they perform. Mature societies didn’t allow it. They guarded art as mere entertainment by the kids – no little voices piping of the infinite. Aren’t I right?’ He took a doughnut at a gulp.

  ‘Right’, said Appleby, ‘as a rivet.’

  The doughnut took a plunge down Kermode’s gullet. His eyes – the eyes of a perfectly sober or sobered man – narrowed on Appleby; opened again luminously amused. ‘The keyhole’s the great place for secrets,’ he said. ‘So long, Jack.’

  Appleby watched him across the theatre. The keyhole for secrets; it was the simple and obvious rebuke… But obscurely he felt that in all the chatter at Rust the first thing of consequence had been said.

  Hard upon this Appleby had his conversation with Mr Eliot. It was a disturbed conversation, without privacy and punctuated by bumps and bangs. And because they had repeated to dodge people coming and going about the theatre it took on something of the quality of primitive dance – a vis-à-vis dodging and ducking as of savages miming combat. The setting was Mr Eliot’s choice; it was an example of his sense of style – that faintly ironic sense which must get him into trouble, as often as not, in his writing. Mr Eliot was not a big man, like the looming Shoon; nor a powerful man, like the glimpsed Bussenschutt; one could feel him at times as a small man – this perhaps because only a fragment of him was present at once. Certainly he was vital, with as many lives as a cat. He was even – Appleby thought of the thirty-seven books, of Pope, and of the leisured and piggy life of Rust – a shade uncanny if one contemplated him for long. But of this there was no danger at the moment; it was a fugitive, if significant, encounter.

  ‘So we are all’, said Mr Eliot, passing and pausing as if only for a moment, ‘bound for the Abbey tomorrow. Do you know it? Except for the Collection, which one knows to be really remarkable, I have a lurking feeling that it would all be better blown sky-high.’

  Appleby nodded. ‘My feelings don’t lurk. It would certainly be better in ruins – real ruins.’

  ‘How quickly’, said Mr Eliot inconsequently, ‘everything is going forward. Wedge, my dear fellow’ – the publisher was prowling past – ‘they are hatching some plot against you: don’t take it ill. And what’ – he had turned again to Appleby – ‘is going to happen at midnight? Really and truly murder, do you think?’

  Appleby looked hard at his host; he appeared to be in genuinely high spirits. ‘Heaven forbid,’ he said quietly. ‘Another irksome trick, perhaps.’

  ‘I agree with you.’ Mr Eliot stepped back to avoid a group of perspiring people who were bringing in a piano. ‘It is a most annoying series of jokes.’

  ‘You’ve given up the idea that it’s a sort of raid from another world of your own creating?’ Mr Eliot, Appleby rather desperately felt, must somehow be pinned down.

  His host nodded with simplicity and conviction. ‘I sometimes get such fancies.’ He spoke as if in light but genuine apology. ‘I’m afraid it worried the children. For a time I was scared and the notion was a sort of refuge.’

  This, thought Appleby, might be accurate enough. He waited until somebody had ceased striking chords on the piano and said firmly, ‘Scared?’

  ‘My dear John’ – though light-hearted, Mr Eliot was not in the least flippant – ‘I was really scared by certain ideas which were put into my head some time ago by Chown. I have not cared to speak about it to the children, but I know I may talk about it confidentially to Patricia’s brother. I was a patient of Chown’s for some time. I had become obsessed with the books and couldn’t put them out of my head – a matter of overwork. He is a capital fellow really and most competent; he put the matter entirely right. Only’ – Mr Eliot looked for a moment as if the scare of which he had spoken was not entirely a matter of the past – ‘he rides a hobby, as so many of them do. He has his own favourite explanation of things… Miss Cavey, how much we are all looking forward to Haworth tonight.’

  Appleby treated Miss Cavey to what was probably a ferocious glare. He gave a moment to calculation. What he wanted to put to Mr Eliot might be dangerous.

  ‘Chown’, he said boldly, ‘being interested in split personalities?’

  Mr Eliot was unperturbed.

  ‘Exactly. It’s very nice, if I may say so, to discuss the matter with an acute mind. It ap
pears – and it came to me with something of a shock – that my books are studied with a good deal of interest by people like Chown. They are interested’ – Mr Eliot, standing in the middle of his eddying theatre, was taking on something of the air of subdued showmanship with which he had discoursed on the Birthday Party the night before – ‘in me… Mind your head.’

  Not very alertly, Appleby minded his head. A rope and pulley-block had come clattering down from where Archie Eliot was tapping and screwing above the stage, ‘You gathered that psychiatrists are interested in you as – as a case?’

  ‘Just that. They are interested in myself and the Spider. It is odd to think of Harley Street and Wimpole Street intriguing themselves with that hoary old automaton.’ Mr Eliot gave a smile which might have been either the irony again or ingenuous pride. ‘What is likely to happen to a person who spends half a lifetime in the company for a single imaginative creation? That is the question which attracts them. And it appears that there are several schools. Some of Chown’s colleagues believe that I and my creature the Spider may finally become integrated in a single stable personality, animating equally myself and the books. Others declare that I shall become progressively unable to distinguish between my own ego and the more powerful ego I have called into being, and that as a result I must inevitably be destroyed. Nothing, I suppose, but Spider left.’

  ‘Dear me. That looks like another metaphysical problem.’

  ‘No doubt, my dear John. But you must not poke fun at me. I assure you it is really upsetting to discover that one is the subject of speculations of that sort. I am bound to say that Chown himself appears to have met these attempts at prognosis in a soundly sceptical spirit; he seems to have maintained that there is not sufficient evidence for a valid scientific opinion. He would only say – in a very happy phrase, for he is quite a literary fellow – that I was indeed in some measure entangled in my own web. To what issue, time would show.’ Mr Eliot’s smile was suddenly brilliant. ‘And time, he seems to think, has now delivered the goods.’

  The piano was strumming persistently and on the stage somebody was tap dancing. Lights had been turned on and the theatre, hitherto faintly mysterious, was one rather shoddy glare. Appleby, although he had so far heard little on which he had not at least briefly meditated, was disturbed. It was partly the effect of the setting again. He supposed that in Mr Eliot’s mind the matters under debate were associated with the uneasy privacy of Dr Chown’s consulting-room, and that he was deriving satisfaction from airing them in a different environment… The lights snapped off; they were trying out spotlights; a greenish beam swept down on them and threw Mr Eliot into momentary brilliant isolation; Appleby’s discomfort grew.

  ‘As I was saying, the split personality is Chown’s special field. He once lent me a very fascinating book about it. You must not think that he has ever openly associated me with the subject; nevertheless I have been able at times to read his thoughts. So you will see how very disturbed I was when these odd things began to happen. Such odd things, it seems, can happen. One may develop a subsidiary personality and never be aware either of it or of one’s connexion with its operations. There was a girl – a very orderly girl – who woke up every morning to find her room in frantic confusion and her yesterday’s knitting unravelled. It was herself all the time. A personality of whose existence she had no inkling used to get control and say the most awful things to people on trams.’

  Appleby chuckled as cheerfully as he could. ‘Morton Prince’s Miss A? If I remember aright one personality used to baffle another by keeping a diary in a language which only the diarist-personality knew. Something you would never dare to put in a novel. What Aristotle called an improbable possibility.’

  Mr Eliot gave fleeting recognition to this literary critical excursus. ‘All that sort of thing. So you see how possible it was for me to be alarmed when I connected it with these speculations of the learned on the Spider and myself – with that and these fantastic things which had actually begun to happen. My metaphysical explanation was plainly a way of sidetracking this disturbing possibility. It was only when the picture turned up as it did that I saw both ideas to be ruled out equally. No personality of mine could behave in that way… Holme, my dear chap, don’t let them burden you with too much tonight.’

  It was distressingly evident that Mr Eliot’s new confidence was as tenuous as it was unsound. The Miss A who awoke in her disordered room was likely to have had just the same supra-rational conviction that no personality of hers could do that. But this was scarcely a point to put to Mr Eliot: Appleby was about to pass rapidly to something else when his host again took the initiative. ‘I don’t know if you will understand me when I say that Chown’s line of thought was chiefly distressing because it attracted me. It caught my fancy; and my fancy, you know, is like a wrestler’s muscles – dangerously over-developed. I found myself supposing the thing to be true and then working out various resulting predicaments, just as I might work out a book. Fascinating – but depressing in the end – particularly when Chown came down again with the evident conviction that I was obscurely play-acting.’

  Appleby smiled. ‘I don’t know if I should mention it, but I believe he consulted Holme.’

  ‘Consulted Holme?’ Mr Eliot was startled.

  ‘Chown seems to think’ – Appleby had abruptly decided to test Mr Eliot’s new confidence out – ‘that you are not wholly unconscious of your secondary personality. An awareness of your extraordinary conduct is lurking somewhere on the threshold of your mind. You have a sort of groping understanding of what’s happening. As a result, when you profess complete bewilderment about the tricks you are in some degree acting. I believe Chown sought the professional opinion of Holme on the subject.’

  ‘I am sure’, said Mr Eliot cheerfully, ‘that it is very kind of him to take so much trouble. Have you gathered what Holme’s opinion was?’

  ‘At a guess – that you weren’t in the least acting.’

  ‘And that made Chown feel–?’

  ‘That – well, that you were more of a case.’

  Frankly and boisterously Mr Eliot laughed. ‘Rupert, my dear fellow’ – his cousin was going past with a pile of chairs on his trolley – ‘you look like a Punch picture of the propertied classes buckling to in a general strike.’ He turned back to Appleby, his face suddenly rueful. ‘There, I’ve said the wrong thing. About the propertied classes. Rupert hasn’t any property. And I fear that – perfectly reasonably – he is resentful. A good fellow, Rupert. But you have to understand him, of course… What a beautiful mask!’ The young woman from Chelsea had come up with a grotesque shell from within which Gib Overall was to give his rendering of Wedge’s poems. ‘But just a little cruel. I do hope that nobody’s feelings are going to be hurt. These foolish jokes may have made people touchy.’

  Appleby had an impulse to take Mr Eliot by the shoulders and give him a gentle shake. He was contriving to be irritatingly remote – as remote as an author behind a solidly constructed book. There was about him too the suggestion of some tour de force achieved, as if – again – he were contriving the final chapter of one of his own puzzles. Appleby decided to bring up what artillery he had. ‘Folly Hall,’ he said. ‘A good many people think – and my sister was the first to guess – that Folly Hall was the name you gave to the house in Murder at Midnight.’

  ‘Patricia was quite right.’

  ‘How many people knew?’

  ‘Well, anybody might know. My manuscripts are always there in the cupboard for anybody to look at. I have always preferred that nobody should; and as a matter of fact’ – Mr Eliot looked uncomfortable – ‘only Archie is in the habit of taking a quiet glance over them, as far as I know. He takes a friendly interest, I suppose, in how things are getting on.’ Mr Eliot, determinedly charitable, brightened again as he made this suggestion.

  ‘A murder was to take place in Folly Hall at midnight? Just how?’

  Mr Eliot shook an amiable head. ‘My dear John, I h
ave no idea. I tore up the manuscript shortly after it began to misbehave, and before I had in the least thought the murder out. I find, you know, that I put off the murders more and more; they haven’t quite the old kick – at least not for me.’

  ‘I see. Now, do you mind if we take up the crux of the whole matter – the joker’s clairvoyance, or whatever we are to call it? He might have got the name, Folly Hall, from your manuscript. Has he, in fact, shown any awareness of anything which you had projected for Murder at Midnight but not actually put down on paper? Anything, I mean, like the knowledge he seems to have had of the unwritten story, The Birthday Party?’

  ‘Oh, dear me, yes.’ Mr Eliot’s placid cheerfulness – slightly reminiscent of Sir Archie – was taking on a mildly infuriating quality. ‘Several of the changes which I discovered in the manuscript implied knowledge of ideas I had entertained but abandoned in the Spider’s earlier period.’