The Department of Dead Ends

by Roy Vickers

  In this phase he is seen only as a successful young man obviously destined for a brilliant career. He was bumptious, but no more so than any other rising barrister, and certainly no tougher. The toughness was, as it were, flashed into being, a few days before the Easter vacation, by a wretched woman called May Dinton, the associate of a burglar whom Swilbey was prosecuting.

  It required no great ingenuity on Swilbey’s part to destroy the alibi the girl was trying to create for her man. But he carried on for another hour and, with some subtlety, extracted from her additional facts which aggravated the prisoner’s guilt.

  At dusk, when Swilbey was returning to his lodgings, May Dinton appeared from behind a pillar box.

  ‘You got my boy seven years when the cops said the judge’ud only give ’im three,’ she accused.

  ‘My dear girl, what the cops say is nothing to do with me. I am sorry if you have been made unhappy, but you know that sort of thing is my job, and I can’t discuss it.’

  ‘You did more than you had to do for your pay. Twistin’ my words round like that! You’ve made Ted think I ratted on him. But he won’t think it any more – now!’

  He had seen her draw a broad-stoppered bottle from under her coat: he supposed indifferently that she was about to swallow poison. He put up no guard – with the result that some three fluid ounces of vitriol splashed into his face.

  On regaining consciousness after the operation, he asked when he would be likely to recover the use of his eyes. The doctor stalled, but broke down under Swilbey’s expert questioning.

  ‘Very well! Perhaps you’d better take the full shock while you are under our care. I am very sorry, Mr Silbey – there is no hope at all. Moreover – well, bluntly, old man, for appearance’s sake, you’ll have to wear two glass eyes.’

  ‘Thank you!’ said Silbey. In the time it took to utter those two words he re-planned his career. ‘I can now work out my programme.’

  Inspector Karslake himself had come to the hospital. They were personally acquainted, and respected each other’s work.

  ‘D’you feel strong enough now, Mr Swilbey, to tell us what happened?’

  ‘I haven’t the least idea.’

  It was not the smallest of Swilbey’s achievements that he was able to think clearly while his body was racked with pain.

  ‘We know it was May Dinton,’ prompted Karslake.

  ‘But you can’t prove it – or we shouldn’t be talking about it – you’d charge her. Sorry, Karslake! I can’t afford vengeance. Got to be very economical. Got to avoid law courts. Got to forget I was once a lawyer.’

  Chapter Two

  The bumptious young barrister had been drowned in three ounces of vitriol, and Swilbey’s unquenchable vitality was already creating a new personality, which had to be coddled during its infancy. He must forget May Dinton as well as the Law. The new personality must have no grievance against life, or it would not make the grade.

  Through a nurse, he wrote to Mildred: ‘Please don’t come to see me until the pain has passed. Pain in your presence would confuse me.’

  These words show he was aware that, no matter how much his personality might change, he would still have a normal nervous system, would still be sensitive to the charm of women, with all its disturbances. Mildred, of course, would be in charge of that side of his life. So there need be no disturbances.

  Mildred’s father visited him every day. Swilbey found the visits tedious, except when they were talking about Mildred.

  ‘You’ll very soon feel well enough to let her come, won’t you?’

  ‘Practically ready now. Say the day after to-morrow.’

  ‘I’ll tell her!’ Dr Kelston cleared his throat. ‘There’s one thing I want to mention before then. I can safely say that Mildred will keep her promise to marry you, if she sees that you wish to – er – hold her to it.’

  ‘There’s no means by which a man can “hold” a woman to such a promise.’

  ‘Oh yes there is, my friend!’ The father was fighting for his daughter’s happiness and dared not soften his words. ‘When Mildred accepted you, you were on the threshold of a brilliant career. She must have looked forward – quite properly – to sharing fame and prosperity with you. By a tragic accident, you can now offer her only poverty and a treadmill of small services to yourself. Show that you expect her to stick to you, and she will. As would any woman of character.’

  Dr Kelston had done his painful duty. The answer brought him but cold comfort.

  ‘You want me to humbug her with a wistful little speech about my not having the right to blight her life. Wistfulness is not in my programme. You needn’t worry. I shall not blight her life. I shall give her a square deal.’

  He meant what he said. Indeed, Swilbey never lied to himself nor anyone else – except, eventually, to the police. But he failed to see that, in the matter of Mildred, he had appointed himself judge in his own case – to his own ultimate ruin.

  When she came to the hospital, he was still bandaged – was in a chair on a terrace overlooking the river. A motor launch was passing and he did not hear her approach.

  ‘I’m here, Robert,’ she said and thrust her hand in his. The significance of having to announce herself to him upset her self-control. A tear dropped on his wrist.

  ‘Darling, you’ve got the wrong slant on this!’ he exclaimed eagerly. ‘To us, it won’t make any essential difference. I’ve adapted my thoughts to it and know I can manage it. Listen! Believe I’m telling the truth and not just trying to cheer you up. These last few seconds – while I’ve been holding your hand I’ve taken a great leap forward. You’ve touched some nerve or other. I can visualize!’

  ‘I’m glad, dear, but I don’t understand. Go on talking about it – it’ll make it easier.’

  ‘Darkness!’ he ejaculated. ‘At first, you’re always waiting, waiting for the light. Having breakfast in total darkness! It muddles your other senses – produces a sort of animal fear. I found difficulty in thinking of things by their shape and colour. But now – holding your hand – I can see the sun shining on your hair, making the wavy bit in front look like copper wire. I can get the angle of the sun, too. It doesn’t matter a damn if the sun isn’t actually shining at the moment. The important thing is that I can visualize the effect of light under the stimulus of an emotional urge – meaning you. That guarantees I shall be able to visualize stage lighting.’

  Fascinated by the mechanism of his own brain, he pursued his thoughts in silence, which she broke.

  ‘While you’re here, could I come every day to teach you Braille?’

  ‘I’m not going to learn Braille – or anything else the blind learn. I’m not going to be a blind man. I’m an ordinary man, who can’t see.’

  That which she believed to be his pathetic courage, his gallant faith in the wreck of himself, destroyed her judgement – though it is easy to see, even at this stage, that there was no pathos in his courage, and that he had not been wrecked by his blindness.

  ‘This is the programme. I’ve got one toe in the theatre with those sketches. I intend to plant both feet. Now, when I’ve paid up here I shall have about fourteen hundred pounds, all told. I shall want five hundred for my working expenses, which will include purchase of a dictaphone.’

  He proceeded to detail a practical plan of domestic finance. ‘Allow a hundred and fifty for our honeymoon and unforeseen expenses after we move in, and we shall have a reserve of fifteen months at the rate of five hundred a year. I shall be well in the swim within six months. Have you made notes of all this?’

  ‘Yes, Robert.’ Prudence was awakening. Suppose he were not ‘well in the swim’ – ever?

  ‘If you’ll see my bank manager we’ll fix a power of attorney so that you can deal with the cheques and the contracts. Remember, I can’t sign my name. By the way, you’ll have to do a lot of reading for me at first. Shall you mind?’

  She answered that she would not mind. Her tone made him ask:

  ‘I say
, darling! The programme as a whole? Including me? I’ve been rushing on, building a new life on your shoulders. Feel like it – or not?’

  She was, in the words of her father, a woman of character. To leave him in the lurch would be utterly impossible. She bent and kissed him.

  ‘It will be wonderful – building together,’ she said, which was exactly what he had expected her to say. He visualized the expression on her face as she said it. But the visualized expression was quite different from her actual expression of honest doubt of herself and him.

  ‘I shall have these bandages off in a fortnight,’ he told her – and altogether failed to visualize the shudder that followed his words.

  Chapter Three

  For the next few years we see Robert Swilbey as the embodiment of the virtues extolled in the literature of success. In him, character really did triumph against enormous odds. He did laugh at his set-backs. He did believe that failure was impossible. Also, of course, ‘luck came to him who earned it’. His stage plays happened to be adaptable to a certain comedian in whom Hollywood had sunk a good deal of capital, and Swilbey’s rates rose with each success.

  In the first year he climbed on Mildred’s shoulders more than he realized. Indeed, Mildred herself did not know that it was she who put him so quickly into the West End. His first full-length farcical comedy was tried out in the provinces, seven months after their wedding. It was undercapitalized and badly mounted and was in some danger of collapse, when Turley Wain saw it in Liverpool.

  Wain was a company promoter, mainly in the cotton market, with no expert knowledge of the theatre, who had the amateur’s belief that he could spot a winner. He was impressed by Swilbey’s dynamic drive, but he was more impressed, in a different way, by Mildred’s courage and devoted care. He could see that he was in a position to dictate terms, but in Mildred’s presence he held his hand and let Swilbey drive him. True that he eventually made money out of the play. But Swilbey made so much that he was able to finance his next play himself. Before the run had ended, Wain came to live in London and thereafter saw much of Mildred, without suspecting danger.

  At the end of six years, living in affluence and with strong financial reserves, Swilbey believed that his marriage was as successful as his career. He was unaware that, after the first eighteen months of struggle, Mildred had been extremely unhappy. Even on their honeymoon, he had refused to perceive that her feeling for him had become exclusively maternal and protective. This feeling had been steadily thwarted by his progressive efficiency.

  While they were still comparatively poor she had the arduous task of keeping him abreast of events and ideas by reading to him for long stretches every day. Then she had to take him for walks and, in the intervals, run the home with inadequate assistance. But the comradeship of it sustained her, gave her a sense of fulfilment.

  Yet even in this first phase of their marriage, she had what one may call the first premonition of the ultimate disaster. She took her fear to her father.

  ‘He drives himself so hard, Daddy. And although in a way it’s all so splendid, I’m a little worried as to whether it’s quite – healthy. I know you’ll think I’m a fool – I think so myself, but – this happens. When we’re discussing plans for the week, he speaks as if he and I were making arrangements about someone else. He even says: “he must go to that rehearsal, and if we can get him back in good time we’ll let him try a re-write of that last scene before he goes goes to bed”. The frightening part is that it’s not meant to be funny. He only speaks like that when he is very concentrated.’

  ‘There’s nothing in that!’ said Dr Kelston. ‘I suspect you’ve been reading some stuff about split personality – without, my dear, quite understanding what you read. I’m no psychiatrist, but I can tell you that, though it does attack exceptionally clever people sometimes, there’s no fear at all with a balanced, mentally disciplined man like Robert. I’ve never met any man I admire more – for mental discipline, I mean.’

  Six years later she again approached her father on the same subject.

  ‘He’s begun to “split” me now,’ she told him. ‘Yesterday, I read a contract to him. He said: “Ah! There’s something for him to tell his wife!” And he did tell me, last night. He always does tell me how wonderful he is. This time, he spoke as if I knew nothing about the contract.’

  Dr Kelston was still unimpressed. He asked: ‘Anything else? Has he any morbid habits?’

  ‘Not that I know of. But I see so little of him except for business, or when others are there. He won’t go for walks any more. He “goes for a row” in that rowing contraption in the gym that makes a noise like a real boat on real water. And a bicycle-thing that can make him feel he’s going up and down hills. And he has a journalist to read to him. If anything gets in his way he invents an expensive gadget so that he need not ask me to help him. He has so built things round him – things and persons – that I don’t believe he any longer wishes he could see. Perhaps that’s morbid.’

  ‘You aren’t happy with him, Mildred, are you?’

  ‘No!’ She added: ‘What makes it uncanny is that he is happy with me. I suppose I’m beastly to him pretty often. It never hurts his feelings. He never retaliates – just cleverly makes me feel ashamed of myself. And then’ – she shuddered – ‘we make it up!’

  ‘Well, at least he is loyal to you. At the back of my mind –’

  ‘Loyal?’ It was as if she asked herself a question. ‘Women run after him. He’s so big and strong – and handsome, if you can ignore his poor, staring eyes. But I think he’s afraid they might put him out of his stride. He’s positively Victorian with them. When he’s going to rehearse a new actress he sends for me. He says to the girl: “It’s essential that I should be able to visualize you. May I touch you?” And then I have to chip in and say something pleasant.’

  ‘At the back of my mind –’

  ‘“May I touch you!”’ she repeated bitterly. ‘With me standing by to make it impersonal and uncompromising. That’s what I’m for. I’m not his wife. I’m just – women!’

  ‘At the back of my mind, my dear girl, there has been for some time the feeling that I ought to warn you that there are whispers about your friendship with Mr Wain. I know there can be nothing in it – but there it is!’

  About the same time, the whisper reached Swilbey.

  Chapter Four

  Every Tuesday night, Swilbey gave a party in his house in St John’s Wood, a couple of miles from theatreland. For the rest of the week he was strictly not-at-home to anybody to whom he had not given a definite appointment.

  In the lofty L-shaped drawing-room that was also his working room he would hold an inner court round his gadget-laden armchair.

  Now and again he would rise and walk among his guests, who were required merely to avoid impeding his progress. His system enabled him always to know where he was standing in his house or in the theatre. On first nights he could walk unaided to the proper spot from which to take his author’s call – for which purpose he wore spectacles and a careful make-up; for he did not wish his public to know that he ‘could not see’.

  It was by the bend of the ‘L’ that he overheard the whisper; and for the first time since he lost his sight he found himself shirking a reality.

  For some days, he vacillated. Mildred’s behaviour to himself was the same as it had been for years. He worked out ways of asking her for details – a frank approach. But in his heart he was afraid of receiving a frank answer that would break the smooth routine of his career. On the fourth day he wrote to Wain, under a thin pretence of being able to offer him another flutter in the theatre.

  He received him, as he received everybody, alone in the drawing-room.

  ‘I say, old man! Some infernal scandalmongers have been coupling your name and Mildred’s. I thought you and I had better get together about it. Cards on the table and all that!’

  He was alarmed by the length of the pause before Wain answered.

  ‘Be
fore I say anything else, Swilbey, I have nothing to confess to you. I’ve never so much as touched her hand. I can’t imagine what is being said. We have always taken care not to give the talkers a chance.’

  That killed the last hope that there might be nothing in it. Wain seemed to think that Mildred had already discussed it.

  ‘I’d better go on.’ Wain’s voice sounded unctuous and sentimental. ‘I’ve been in love with her for years, and shall be all my life. But I doubt whether she knows it’s any more than friendship. Anyhow, if circumstances were normal I would speak to her – then ask you for a divorce. I’ve told you all there is to tell, Swilbey.’

  ‘I appreciate that.’ The fellow, thought Swilbey, was a mere sentimentalist, who would run from a challenge. ‘But I don’t follow that bit about “normal circumstances”. Why not speak to her? I have never regarded women as property. I stake no prior claim. How do we know she wouldn’t be happier with you?’

  Sentimentalist or not, Wain shook the edifice of six years with his answer.

  ‘Swilbey, you asked for cards on the table. So you’ll let me say that we both know she would be happier with me – if I could retain my self-respect. But how could I? Knowing I had taken his wife from a blind man?’

  In the recesses of Swilbey’s brain, a voice was speaking about Swilbey: That’ll upset him – calling him a blind man! Mind he doesn’t do anything rash.’

  Through the darkness the other voice, that of Wain, penetrated.

  ‘To Mildred, your well-being is a sacred mission, Swilbey. Her power of attorney has more than legal significance. She stands between you and the outside world with which you could not cope, even with all your assistants and servants. You would be the first to acknowledge that you owe your career, not only to your own qualities, but also to hers.’

  Again came the illusion of an inner voice speaking: ‘Look out! That’ll make him worse. Wain is telling him that he’s a blind man living on the charity of his wife’s eyes.’