Complete Stories of Eveyln

by Evelyn Waugh

  Uncle Andrew gave me the keys of my father’s house. I went straight there from lunching with him. The shutters were up and the curtains drawn; the water and electric light were already cut off; all this my uncle had accomplished in a few days. I stumbled among sheeted furniture to the windows and let in the daylight. I went from room to room in this way. The place still retained its own smell—an agreeable, rather stuffy atmosphere of cigar smoke and cantaloupe; a masculine smell—women had always seemed a little out of place there, as in a London club on Coronation Day.

  The house was sombre but never positively shabby so that, I suppose, various imperceptible renovations and replacements must have occurred from time to time. It looked what it was, the house of an unfashionable artist of the 1880s. The curtains and chair-covers were of indestructible Morris tapestry; there were Dutch tiles round the fireplaces; Levantine rugs on the floors; on the walls, Arundel prints, photographs from the old Masters, and majolica dishes. The furniture, now shrouded, had the inimitable air of having been in the same place for a generation; it was a harmonious, unobtrusive jumble of inherited rosewood and mahogany, and of inexpensive collected pieces of carved German oak, Spanish walnut, English chests and dressers, copper ewers and brass candlesticks. Every object was familiar and yet so much a part of its surroundings that later, when they came to be moved, I found a number of things which I barely recognized. Books, of an antiquated sort, were all over the house in a variety of hanging, standing and revolving shelves.

  I opened the french windows in my father’s study and stepped down into the garden. There was little of spring to be seen here. The two plane trees were bare; under the sooty laurels last year’s leaves lay rotting. It was never a garden of any character. Once, before the flats came, we used to dine there sometimes, in extreme discomfort under the catalpa tree; for years now it had been a no-man’s-land isolating the studio at the further end; on one side, behind a trellis, were some neglected frames and beds where my father had once tried to raise French vegetables. The mottled concrete of the flats, with its soil pipes and fire escapes and its rash of iron-framed casement windows, shut out half the sky. The tenants of these flats were forbidden, in their leases, to do their laundry, but the owners had long since despaired of a genteel appearance, and you could tell which of the rooms were occupied by the stockings hanging to dry along the windowsills.

  In his death my father’s privacy was still respected and no one had laid dust-sheets in the studio. “Too Big?” stood as he had left it on the easel. More than half was finished. My father made copious and elaborate studies for his pictures and worked quickly when he came to their final stage, painting over a monochrome sketch, methodically, in fine detail, left to right across the canvas as though he were lifting the backing of a child’s “transfer.” “Do your thinking first,” he used to tell the Academy students. “Don’t muddle it out on the canvas. Have the whole composition clear in your head before you start,” and if anyone objected that this was seldom the method of the greatest masters, he would say, “You’re here to become Royal Academicians, not great masters. This was the way Ford Madox Brown worked, and it will be a great day for English art when one of you is half as good as he was. If you want to write books on Art, trot round Europe studying the Rubenses. If you want to learn to paint, watch me.” The four or five square feet of finished painting were a monument of my father’s art. There had been a time when I had scant respect for it. Lately I had come to see that it was more than a mere matter of dexterity and resolution. He had a historic position for he completed a period of English painting that through other circumstances had never, until him, come to maturity. Phrases, as though for an obituary article, came to my mind—“. . . fulfilling the broken promise of the young Millais . . . Winterhalter suffused with the spirit of Dickens . . . English painting as it might have been, had there not been any Aesthetic Movement . . . the age of the Prince Consort in contrast to the age of Victoria . . .” and with the phrases my esteem for my father took form and my sense of loss became tangible and permanent.

  No good comes of this dependence on verbal forms. It saves nothing in the end. Suffering is none the less acute and much more lasting when it is put into words. In the house my memories had been all of myself—of the countless homecomings and departures of thirty-three years, of adolescence like a stained tablecloth—but in the studio my thoughts were of my father and grief, nearly a week delayed, overtook and overwhelmed me. It had been delayed somewhat by the strangeness of my surroundings and the business of travel, but most by this literary habit; it had lacked words. Now the words came; I began, in my mind, to lament my father with prose cadences and classical allusions, addressing, as it were, a funeral oration to my own literary memories, and sorrow, dammed and canalized, flowed fast.

  For the civilized man there are none of those swift transitions of joy and pain which possess the savage; words form slowly like pus about his hurts; there are no clean wounds for him; first a numbness, then a long festering, then a scar ever ready to reopen. Not until they have assumed the livery of the defence can his emotions pass through the lines; sometimes they come massed in a wooden horse, sometimes as single spies, but there is always a Fifth Column among the garrison ready to receive them. Sabotage behind the lines, a blind raised and lowered at a lighted window, a wire cut, a bolt loosened, a file disordered—that is how the civilized man is undone.

  I returned to the house and darkened the rooms once more, relaid the dust-sheets I had lifted and left everything as it had been.

  V

  The manuscript of Murder at Mountrichard Castle lay on the chest of drawers in my club bedroom, reproaching me morning, evening and night. It was promised for publication in June, and I had never before disappointed my publishers. This year, however, I should have to ask grace for a postponement. I made two attempts on it, bearing the pile of foolscap to an upper room of the club which was known as the library and used by the elder members for sleeping between luncheon and tea. But I found it impossible to take up the story with any interest; I grew peevish about the time sequence, and half inclined to scrap all I had written and start anew; the murderess had had too much luck on the morning of the crime and the police were being unnaturally obtuse; they had reached a stage in the investigation when they must either tumble to the truth within six pages or miss it forever; I could not go on piling up clue and counterplot; why should not the wrong man get hanged for a change or the murderess walk in her sleep and proclaim the whole story? I had gone stale on it. So I went to my publisher and tried to explain.

  “I have been writing for over eight years,” I said, “and am nearing a climacteric.”

  “I don’t quite follow,” said Mr. Benwell anxiously.

  “I mean a turning point in my career.”

  “Oh, dear, I hope you’re not thinking of making a contract elsewhere?”

  “No, no, I mean that I feel in danger of turning into a stock bestseller.”

  “If I may say so in very imminent danger,” said Benwell, and he made me a kind of little bow from the seat of his swivel chair and smirked in the wry fashion people sometimes assume when they feel they have said something elaborately polite; a smile normally kept for his women writers; the word “climacteric” had clearly upset him.

  “I mean, I am in danger of becoming purely a technical expert. Take my father —” Mr. Benwell gave a deferential grunt and quickly changed his expression to one of gravity suitable to the mention of someone recently dead. “He spent his whole life perfecting his technique. It seems to me I am in danger of becoming mechanical, turning out year after year the kind of book I know I can write well. I feel I have got as good as I ever can be at this particular sort of writing. I need new worlds to conquer.” I added this last remark in compassion for Mr. Benwell, whose gravity had deepened to genuine concern. I believed he would feel the easier for a little facetiousness—erroneously, for Mr. Benwell had suffered similar, too serious conversations with other writers than
me.

  “You’ve not been writing poetry in Morocco?”

  “No, no.”

  “Sooner or later almost all my novelists come to me and say they have written poetry. I can’t think why. It does them infinite harm. Only last week Roger Simmonds was here with a kind of a play. You never saw such a thing. All the characters were parts of a motor-car—not in the least funny.”

  “Oh, it won’t be anything like that,” I said. “Just some new technical experiments. I don’t suppose the average reader will notice them at all.”

  “I hope not,” said Mr. Benwell. “I mean, now you’ve found your public . . . well, look at Simmonds—magneto and sparking plugs and camshaft all talking in verse about communism. I don’t know what to do about it at all. . . . But I can count on your new novel for the autumn?”

  “Yes.”

  “And we can list it as ‘crime’?”

  “Certainly.”

  Mr. Benwell saw me to the top of the stairs. “Interesting place, Morocco,” he said. “The French are doing it very well.”

  I knew what he was thinking: “The trouble about Plant is, he’s come in for money.”

  In a way he was right. The money my father had left me and the proceeds which I expected from the sale of the house, relieved me of the need to work for two or three years; once the necessity was removed there was little motive for writing. It was a matter of pure athletics to go on doing something merely because one did it well. This tedium was the price I must pay for my privacy, for the choice, which until lately had been a matter of special pride with me, of a trade which had nothing of myself in it. The heap of foolscap began to disgust me. Twice I hid it under my shirts, twice the club valet unearthed it and laid it in the open. I had nowhere to keep things, except in this little hired room above the traffic.

  As I returned from seeing Mr. Benwell, the club secretary waylaid me. Under Rule XLV, he reminded me, members might not occupy bedrooms for more than five consecutive nights. He did not mind stretching a point, he said, but if a member from out of town applied for a room and found them all engaged and wrote to the committee about it, where would he, the secretary, be? I promised to move out as soon as I could; I had a lot to attend to at the moment; perhaps he had seen that my father had just died. We both knew that it was unfair to bring this up, but it won me my point. For the time being I had lodging—a bed, a washbasin, a window in St. James’s, a telephone, space enough for a fortnight’s wardrobe. But I must start looking about for something more secure.

  This sense of homelessness was new to me. Before I had moved constantly from one place to another; every few weeks I would descend upon St. John’s Wood with a trunk, leave some books, collect others, put away summer clothes for the winter; seldom as I slept there, the house in St. John’s Wood had been my headquarters and my home; that earth had now been stopped and I thought, not far away, I could hear the hounds.

  My worries at this period became symbolized in a single problem; what to do with my hats. I owned what now seemed a multitude of them, of one sort and another; two of them of silk—the tall hat I took to weddings and a second I had bought some years earlier when I thought for a time that I was going to take to fox-hunting; there were a bowler, a panama, a black, a brown and a grey soft hat, a green hat from Salzburg, a sombrero, some tweed caps for use on board ship and in trains—all these had accumulated from time to time and all, with the possible exception of the sombrero, were more or less indispensable. Was I doomed for the rest of my life to travel everywhere with this preposterous collection? At the moment they were, most of them, in St. John’s Wood, but, any day now, the negotiations for the sale might be finished and the furniture removed, sold or sent to store.

  Somewhere to hang up my hat, that was what I needed.

  I consulted Roger Simmonds who was lunching with me. I felt as though I had known Roger all my life; actually I had first met him in our second year at Oxford; we edited an undergraduate weekly together and had been close associates ever since. He was one of the very few people I corresponded with when I was away; we met constantly when I was in London. Sometimes I even stayed with him, for he and half a dozen others constituted a kind of set. We had all known each other intimately over a number of years, had from time to time passed on girls from one to the other, borrowed and lent freely. When we were together we drank more and talked more boastfully than we normally did. We had grown rather to dislike one another; certainly when any two or three of us were alone, we blackguarded the rest, and if asked about them on neutral ground I denied their friendship. “Blades?” I would say. “Yes, I used to see a lot of him, but we never seem to meet now he’s in Parliament” or “Jimmie Rendall? Yes, I knew him well. Then he got taken up by Lord Monomark and that is the end of all friendship.” About Roger I used to say, “I don’t think he’s interested in anything except politics now.”

  This was more or less true. In the late twenties he set up as a writer and published some genuinely funny novels on the strength of which he filled a succession of rather dazzling jobs with newspapers and film companies, but lately he had married an unknown heiress, joined the Communist Party and become generally respectable.

  “I never wear a hat now I am married,” said Roger virtuously. “Lucy says they’re kulak. Besides I was beginning to lose my hair.”

  “My dear Roger, you’ve been bald as a coot for ten years. But it isn’t only a question of hats. There are overcoats.”

  “Only in front. It’s as thick as anything at the back. How many overcoats have you got?”

  “Four, I think.”

  “Too many.”

  We discussed it at length and decided it was possible to manage with three.

  “Workers pawn their overcoats in June and take them out again in October,” Roger said. He wanted to talk about his play, Internal Combustion. “The usual trouble with ideological drama,” he said, “is that they’re too mechanical. I mean the characters are economic types, not individuals, and as long as they look and speak like individuals it’s bad art. D’you see what I mean?”

  “I do, indeed.”

  “Human beings without human interest.”

  “Very true. I . . .”

  “Well, I’ve cut human beings out altogether.”

  “Sounds rather like an old-fashioned ballet.”

  “Exactly,” Roger said with great pleasure. “It is an old-fashioned ballet. I knew you’d understand. Poor old Benwell couldn’t. The Finsbury International Theatre are sitting on it now, and if it’s orthodox—and I think it is—they may put it on this summer if Lucy finds the money.”

  “Is she keen too?”

  “Well, not very, as a matter of fact. You see, she’s having a baby and that seems to keep her interested at the moment.”

  “But to return to the question of my hats . . .”

  “I tell you what. Why don’t you buy a nice quiet house in the country. I shall want somewhere to stay while this baby is born.”

  There was the rub. It was precisely this fear that had been working in my mind for days, the fear of making myself a sitting shot to the world. It lay at the root of the problem of privacy; the choice which torments to the verge of mania, between perpetual flight and perpetual siege; and the unresolved universal paradox of losing things in order to find them.

  “Surely that is odd advice from a communist?”

  Roger became suddenly wary; he had been caught and challenged in loose talk. “Ideally, of course, it would be,” he said. “But I daresay that in practice, for the first generation, we shall allow a certain amount of private property where its value is purely sentimental. Anyway, any investment you make now is bound to be temporary. That’s why I feel no repugnance about living on Lucy’s money . . .” Marxist ethics kept him talking until we had finished luncheon. Over the coffee he referred to Ingres as a “bourgeois” painter. When he left me I sat for some time in the leather armchair finishing my cigar. The club was emptying as the younger members went back to
their work and their elders padded off to the library for the afternoon nap. I belonged to neither world. I had nothing whatever to do. At three in the afternoon my friends would all be busy and, in any case, I did not want to see them. I was ready for a new deal. I climbed to my room, began re-reading the early chapters of Murder at Mountrichard Castle, put it from me and faced the boredom of an afternoon in London. Then the telephone rang and the porter said, “Mr. Thurston is downstairs to see you.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Thurston. He says he has an appointment.”

  “I don’t know anything about him. Will you ask what he wants?”

  A pause: “Mr. Thurston says will you see him very particular.”

  “Very well, I’ll come down.”

  A tall young man in a raincoat was standing in the hall. He had reddish hair and an unusually low, concave forehead. He looked as though he had come to sell some hopelessly unsuitable commodity and had already despaired of success.

  “Mr. Thurston?” He took my hand in a savage grip. “You say you have an appointment with me. I am afraid I don’t remember it.”

  “No, well, you see I thought we ought to have a yarn, and you know how suspicious these porter-fellows are at clubs. I knew you wouldn’t mind my stretching a point.” He spoke with a kind of fierce jauntiness. “I had to give up my club. Couldn’t run to it.”

  “Perhaps you will tell me what I can do for you.”

  “I used to belong to the Wimpole. I expect you know it?”

  “I’m not sure that I do.”

  “No? You would have liked it. I could have taken you there and introduced you to some of the chaps.”

  “That, I gather, is now impossible.”

  “Yes. It’s a pity. There are some good scouts there. I daresay you know the Batchelors?”

  “Yes. Were you a member there, too?”

  “Yes, at least not exactly, but a great pal of mine was—Jimmie Grainger. I expect you’ve often run across Jimmie?”