Henceforward, Starn barricades the house every evening like a fortress and goes to sleep with a six-shooter under his pillow. For a week, nothing unusual happens; then he begins to notice the peculiar appearance of a baby in a perambulator which a nursemaid has taken to wheeling, several times a day, up and down the street. One morning, when he and Gunball are out walking, they meet the perambulator and the nursemaid face to face. Starn engages the woman in conversation. Her behaviour is guilty and highly suspicious. Gunball becomes impatient:
‘Why did you stop and yarn with those two? I can’t say I thought there was anything so very wonderful about the kid, either.’
‘No,’ I retorted, ‘I can well believe that, to you, there is nothing out of the common in a baby whose jacket is stuffed with straw and who wears a cardboard mask.’
‘Well—what if he does?’ said Gunball mildly. ‘I dare say the poor little beggar’s feeling the cold.’
The ‘baby’ is, of course, Moxon’s black serpent in disguise. Moxon is training it for the proposed burglary. In due course, his plan is put successfully into execution; the serpent enters Gunball’s house through the bathroom pipe, swallows the sapphires one by one, and escapes, taking with it Gunball’s old green felt hat. But Moxon is foiled, nevertheless. Try as it will, the obedient reptile cannot vomit up the stolen jewels, and when at last Moxon in desperation tries to recover them with an umbrella and a fishing-line, it becomes angry, sends him flying with a stroke of its tail and disappears. Some time afterwards, it is captured while asleep in the pulpit of a village church and presented to the London Zoo. Starn and Gunball, hoping against hope, travel up to town and visit the Reptile House:
A small crowd was usually gathered there, gazing in wonder at the newly acquired monster, as it moved languidly amidst a miniature forest of artificial greenery—its skin oiled and sleek from the keeper’s toiler, its jaws rouged, the markings on its forehead made yet more striking with touches of paint. Foppishly, the pampered reptile swayed and lolled beneath violet and orange lights. It snarled, showing scrubbed and carefully sharpened fangs. The crowd drew back, murmuring with fear and admiration.
But Gunball and I regarded the brute’s elegant slimness sadly:
‘No good,’ said Gunball, in a broken voice: ‘It has digested them.’
‘Drover’s Hollow’ is a long straight stretch of Roman road, somewhere in the depths of the country, crossing an expanse of almost uninhabited plain. Starn and Dr Mears are motoring along it when they meet with a rather curious accident: the wheel of their car is punctured by a number of small spiked metal objects which lie scattered over the otherwise smooth surface. They are therefore particularly surprised and pleased to discover, only a few hundred yards farther on, a large and well-equipped garage—an astonishingly large establishment for so lonely a place. Naturally, they expect that the puncture will be repaired in an hour, but the foreman assures them that the damage is far more serious than they imagine—the back axle is broken, the cylinder cracked, the accumulator leaking, the piston rings bent—in short, the car will be ready, thanks to a special quick-repair service, in three days. Dr Mears is furious, where on earth are they to stay? But here they get another surprise. The hotel at the tiny neighbouring hamlet of Martock St Bavin turns out to be most luxurious; the manageress tells them she has plenty of custom; all gentlemen whose cars have broken down.
Next morning they find the garage staff in a state of great excitement. The manager, Mr Castor, is expected—a very particular gentleman, he likes to see everything in perfect order. His temper is reported to be frightful, all the mechanics are afraid of him. Scarcely have they finished scrubbing, when the scream of an approaching car is heard. It is an enormous limousine, painted all over a gleaming black:
Already, the black car was within a quarter of a mile of where we stood. The menace of its tremendous speed made us instinctively draw back a little into the shelter of the doorway. It was within a hundred, within fifty yards of the garage. Then, suddenly, and with a prolonged hiss, its driver applied the brakes. The huge machine spun round like a top through two complete revolutions in the middle of the road; then, before I could have cried out, it shot through the archway and came to rest within an inch of the garage wall.
A mechanic ran to hold open the door and Mr Castor descended. He was short and very thin, with a pale angular face and bearing of almost fiendlike nonchalance. He wore a black double-breasted suit of the best cloth and a black tie. His voice was languid but peremptory: ‘Tea in the office at once.’
The foreman approached him: ‘These gentlemen are staying at Martock during some repairs to their car, sir.’
‘Indeed?’ Mr Castor looked at us for a moment with half-closed eyes:
‘Very deeply privileged,’ he said, and turned to enter the office …
Castor, needless to say, is Moxon. In this out-of-the-way part of the country, he is doing profitable business as a car-wrecker. Nor does he always confine himself to causing punctures. If any word or action of his clients happens to annoy him, he orders the unlucky victims of his displeasure to be supplied with the ‘Superfine Mixture’—a special kind of high explosive petrol which will blow their car to atoms. I forget now how I had planned the story to end; like so many of the Hynd and Starn series, it remained unfinished.
Dr Mears was the Mortmere physician. His most remarkable achievement was his cure of Gunball, who was suffering from a Rats’ Hostel disease known as Suffolk Ulcers, by the application of a species of inland seaweed only to be found in the crypt of Mortmere church. He was the author of a book called Awards and Miseries of Astronomy. And he was at work upon a new method of classifying the human race. He had divided man into two main groups—‘Dragoons’ and ‘Dorys’: Dragoons were subdivided into ‘Puss-dragoons,’ ‘Cogs-dragoons’ and ‘Imperials’; Dorys into ‘Itchers,’ ‘Repellers’ and ‘Consumers’—and each of these three subdivisions could be further classed as ‘Pouters,’ ‘Poupees,’ ‘Buttocks’ or ‘Throstles.’ (I leave the recognition of all these types to the reader’s imagination and personal taste.)
Then there was Sergeant Claptree, who kept the Skull and Trumpet Inn. And Mr Wherry, the architect and engineer, who, years before, had built a railway tunnel under the downs. This tunnel collapsed—owing to an infinitesimal error in Wherry’s trigonometry—just as the first Mortmere express was passing through it, burying the passengers so deep that they could never be dug out; all that now remained was the solitary railway signal in the grounds of Henry Belmare’s estate. Henry Belmare, the Mortmere landowner, had a sister, Miss Belmare, the artist. She was a formidable, mannish figure with a loud commanding voice who wore starched blouses and a small steel padlock inside her stiff collar. She spent most of her time bullying Welken and setting her fierce tomcat on Gunball’s dog Griever. She had painted the frescoes of the Mortmere village hall.
Such were the leading Mortmere worthies. Minor characters included Gustave Shreeve, the Headmaster of Frisbald College for boys (the Frisbald Cellar Game was quite unlike any known football code); Harold Wrygrave, Welken’s curate, who also taught at the college; Boy Radnor, the choirboy who assisted at Welken’s ritual of angel manufacture; Anthony, Henry Belmare’s son whose extraordinary beauty was a source of perpetual jealousy between Shreeve and Mr Wherry; Alison Kemp, the village whore; Ensign Battersea, who helped Sergeant Claptree at the Skull and Trumpet; and Gaspard Farfox, the private detective, who was called down to Mortmere in connection with the Mystery of the Dead Wasp. All these people were assembled gradually, casually, without plan. It was only later that we thought of writing Mortmere as a connected dramatic story.
If Mortmere was to have a plot, what was to be our central theme? Obviously, the eternal conflict between the Rats’ Hostel and the University system. Laily must be brought to Mortmere, as a destroyer. So we created Mr Chardes, a more dynamic and dangerous reincarnation of the Worm: he is a young archaeologist, engaged in excavating some Roman remains on Belstreet Dow
n. From the first, he hates and fears the anarchic, eccentric freedom of Mortmere life; and soon his hatred becomes concentrated and directed against Gunball. We thought that Mr Chardes might actually murder Gunball—or perhaps that wouldn’t be necessary. It might be sufficient if Chardes, in some semi-mystical manner, could discredit and thereby shatter Gunball’s marvellous delirium world: if he did this, it followed that Gunball would die a natural death—and, possibly, with Gunball’s death, Mortmere itself would dissolve and fade away.
Mortmere would certainly have to be a tragedy; but we couldn’t bear the thought of Chardes’ triumph. He, too, must be destroyed. The Rats’ Hostel must be avenged. This was where Reynard Moxon would come in useful. In the last chapter, Moxon, by some peculiarly horrible method, kills Chardes.
We discussed all this at great length, but I don’t think we had ever any serious intention of literally sitting down to write the book. Quite apart from mere laziness, it hardly seemed necessary: indeed, it would have spoilt all our pleasure. As long as Mortmere remained unwritten, its alternative possibilities were infinite; we could continue, every evening, to improvise fresh situations, different climaxes. We preferred to stick to the Hynd and Starn stories, and to make utterly fantastic plans for the edition-de-luxe: it was to be illustrated, we said, with real oil paintings, brasses, carvings in ivory or wood; fireworks would explode to emphasize important points in the narrative; a tiny gramophone sewn into the cover would accompany the descriptive passages with emotional airs; all the dialogue would be actually spoken; the different pages would smell appropriately, according to their subject-matter, of grave-clothes, manure, delicious food, burning hair, chloroform or expensive scent. All copies would be distributed free. Our friends would find attached to the last page, a pocket containing banknotes and jewels; our enemies, on reaching the end of the book, would be shot dead by a revolver concealed in the binding.
At the end of that term, there was a college feast. Chalmers and I had looked forward to this ceremony for some time: it promised to be a suitable opportunity for an overt act of hostility to the ‘Other Side.’ Exactly what we were going to do, we didn’t know. Perhaps Chalmers would simply jump on to the table and shout: ‘J’en appelle!’—whereupon, we said, the earth would open, and the dons, the silver heirloom plate and the college buildings themselves would be immediately engulfed. The phrase ‘J’en appelle!’, which occurs in a poem by Villon, meant, in our private slang, a kind of metaphysical challenge. Just as when, in poker, one says: ‘I’ll see you!’ we challenged the ‘Other Side’ to show us their cards. They dreaded this challenge because, of course, they had been bluffing. Once the bluff had been called, we liked to imagine, the entire academic ‘blague’ became bankrupt and would automatically collapse.
Needless to say, what really happened was that we had an excellent dinner and that I got drunk. The drunker I became, the more amiable I felt. The Poshocracy were really too nice for words. I slapped their backs; they slapped mine. I talked a great deal: I wanted them to share every nuance of my exquisite sensations on drinking Scotch whisky for the first time in my life. I could have murdered the college tutor smilingly, in purest love: I could have lighted the cigar he offered me, unabashed, with a page from our twelfth-century illuminated missal. I tried to tell them about Mortmere as, arm in arm, we all bounded down the steps and out into the freezing intoxicating midnight air.
We were in Chalmers’ sitting-room: it was so full of people that you could hardly turn round. And there was Chalmers himself, whom I hadn’t seen all the evening, writing with a fountain-pen on Ashmeade’s shirt-front: ‘A la très-chère, à la très-belle …’ Ashmeade leant against the wall, smiling dreamily. When Chalmers had finished writing, he opened the cupboard, took out a hammer and tapped Ashmeade several times smartly on the head. Then a butter-fight began. Chalmers was in the middle of it: he and one of the largest members of the Poshocracy were smearing butter into each other’s hair. Soon there was butter everywhere—on the pictures, on the walls, on the ceiling, all over the lapels of the beautiful silk dinner-jackets. Several people wore great yellow pats of it stuck to their buttonholes like diplomatic decorations. The lights went out, went on again. Chalmers was shouting and waving a knife. Everyone laughed uproariously and someone said: ‘That’s enough.’ Half a dozen Poshocrats saw me to bed.
Next morning I woke early. I was feeling wonderful: not a trace of sickness. Dressing quickly, I hurried round to Chalmers’ room and entered friskily to find him dozing in an armchair. He had stayed up all night, packing: my reception was extremely cool. ‘Do you seriously mean to tell me you didn’t realize that it was all a plot?’ he indignantly demanded. ‘Obviously the whole thing was a put-up job: they were out to wreck the whole place.’ The butter-fight, it seemed, had been in deadly earnest: Chalmers had done his best to stab his adversary through the heart: ‘And, instead of helping me,’ he added bitterly, ‘you just sat in the corner and grinned.’ He then told me that, in the first flush of resentment, he had written me a drunken note, saying that I had betrayed him, we must part for ever. I was rather hurt; but soon we were laughing together over the whole affair. As for the alleged ‘conspiracy,’ I have never quite made up my mind whether to believe in it or not. That the Poshocracy should all have assembled, without invitation, in the rooms of such socially insignificant people as ourselves, was certainly rather queer. Ashmeade, no doubt, was at the bottom of it.
I spent that Christmas Vac. in London, roller-skating and writing Lions and Shadows. At this time, there was still a large skating rink in Holland Park: Philip and I were there nearly every day. Skating, like ballroom dancing, belonged to the list of accomplishments essential to the Mayfair literary Don Juan: both on wheels and on the ice, Philip was quite an expert. Natty, absurdly graceful, with poised arms which reminded you of a penguin’s wings, he circled, curved, described threes and eights, waltzed with the most attractive instructress, and finally, approaching the barrier at enormous speed, stopped himself within a couple of inches and murmured: ‘No good, boy … Can’t do a thing today … Shall we have some tea?’
At the rink Philip was in his element. Indeed, on a crowded Saturday afternoon, he came near to fulfilling his own wish-dream. Everybody admired him. Pretty schoolgirls, home for the holidays, giggled self-consciously whenever he shot by: schoolboys wondered how he did those backward turns. Even the lady in black velvet, with a bunch of violets at her bosom and a little veil, whom we supposed, for some insufficient reason, to be a Russian Princess, didn’t refuse when he asked her for a dance. At one period, Philip even seriously considered leaving the medical school altogether and becoming a skating instructor. He pictured a romantic bohemian existence, under the pseudonym of ‘Mr Philips,’ which would lead, in due course, to a liaison, perhaps even a marriage, with one of his pupils—alternatively an ‘Honourable’ or the daughter of an American millionaire. And what a novel he would later be able to write about it all!
On the seventh of January I finished Lions and Shadows—and about time, too. I had been writing at it, on and off, since the July of 1923. Even as I toiled my way through the last chapter to the last page, I knew, in my heart, that it was no good. But it was a satisfaction, at any rate, to have done the job; and of course, I still cherished desperate hopes. It seemed to me then that to have published a book—any kind of book—would be the greatest possible happiness I could ask from life. A lady novelist who was an old friend of our family had promised to read the completed manuscript, and, if she liked it, to put in a word for me with her own publisher. Seated in her chintz drawing-room with a tea-cup on my knee I heard her verdict—a death-sentence charmingly pronounced in the phraseology of Henry James: ‘In a book like this, one expects the material to be more—how shall I say?—its own justification, than yours, for the most part, is …’ I nodded brightly and tried to smile. Yes, she was perfectly right. I hated her, at that moment, for her perceptiveness: but I was grateful to her, at least, that she had told me the
truth. I know now how easily she might have got rid of me with a couple of dishonest compliments and a lazy suggestion that I should ‘rewrite certain passages.’ Instead, she advised me frankly to put my year and a half’s work away in a drawer and forget it. It was nice in places, of course, but it wouldn’t do—and that was that. As we were saying good-bye, she told me, ‘If you really have talent, you know, you’ll go on writing—whatever people say to you.’ This was exactly the kind of unsentimental encouragement I so badly needed. As I walked away from her house, I felt much more cheerful, almost exhilarated: my head was full of fresh plans.
That Lent Term was an unsatisfactory time, both for Chalmers and for myself. We were restless and unhappy, and we jarred on each other’s nerves. We seemed to have lost, temporarily, that telepathic thread of communication: it often happened, now, that one of us said something which the other found meaningless, or forced, or even antipathetic.
Chalmers, a year older than myself and in his eighth University term, was beginning to find Cambridge absolutely intolerable. He was disappointed, as Mr Holmes predicted, in the English school: its necessarily academic approach reduced all literature to the status of ‘texts.’ He was sexually unsatisfied and lonely: he wanted a woman with whom he could fall in love and go to bed—not any more of these shopgirl teasers and amateur punt-cuddling whores. And he was deeply depressed about his own writing. He felt, now, that he would never be a poet. Everything he had done or would do, he said bitterly, was ornamental: his thought was tied up in bizarre adjectives, deliberately obscure phrases, conceits. Rats’-Hostelism, so fatally attractive to his temperament, dangerously easy to his pen, had been his final undoing. ‘And now,’ he exclaimed in desperation, ‘I can’t write a single line which isn’t strange.’
I was unhappy, too; but less consciously so because, being in a much more complex psychological mess than Chalmers himself, I had evolved a fairly efficient system of censorships and compensations. Unnaturally lively, I acted in Poshocracy charades, helped to found a literary society, sat up late arguing with the members of the Film Club, threw cushions in people’s rooms after tea. Then came days of depression, when I huddled in my arm-chair, empty as a burst paper-bag—turning the leaves of The Constant Nymph or The Boy in the Bush, dreaming miserably of the Tirol, of Australia, hating my life, knowing I should never escape, and then comforting myself by ordering a double portion of buttered toast. I wrote nothing; didn’t work. It was easy enough to banish from my conscious mind the steadily approaching spectre of the Tripos. Lectures I now cut in increasing quantities. As for my new tutor, he was less exacting than Gorse; and he set the essay subjects of the previous year—but even copying out Chalmers’ old essays with suitable variations became at length such an exhausting duty to one in my pathological state of laziness that I found I could only get through it when the room was full of people and a gramophone was playing.
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