Stop Press (18 page)

‘Really,’ said Mr Eliot, whom some inner impulsion urged still to unnecessary speech, ‘you seem, my dear Mr Appleby, to have the whole complicated installation at your finger-tips. May I ask you are an electrical engineer?’

‘I’m afraid not. As a matter of fact’ – even amid this little squad of domestic assistants it would be better to tell the truth at once – ‘I’m a policeman. I work in the CID at Scotland Yard.’

Mr Eliot’s candle side-slipped, steadied itself. ‘The CID?’ He pronounced the letters as blankly as if he had never peopled that institution with a score of imaginary officers; a moment later he seemed to recollect himself. ‘This is interesting indeed; I had no idea that Patricia had a brother so picturesquely employed. We shall be able to break a lance together, you and I. And truth will no doubt prove stranger than fiction once more.’

Appleby smiled cheerfully down. ‘Truth’, he said idly, ‘is truth, and fiction is fiction – and here are the two meeting in the dark.’

There was a little silence. ‘Do you think’ – the voice from below was suddenly strained – ‘that you can locate the trouble?’ It paused and added – as if afraid that it had too abruptly changed tone – ‘my dear fellow?’

Appleby, who seldom touched a nerve without intending it, frowned into the darkness. ‘I’ve located it. As I thought, it’s a big fuse that’s blown. And there’ another, complete in its frame, that can be slipped in. There.’ A faint click came from above; Rust was flooded once more from a hundred points of light.

The parlourmaids scuttled, the lad made off with the steps, the butler switched off the electric torch and stood contemplating his employer’s efficient guest with an expression of deference which was substantially genuine; the gentleman’s vocation might be out of the way, but he had drawn order from chaos and in the kitchens the situation was as good as saved. ‘Dinner’, said Mr Eliot’s butler to Mr Eliot – with the air of calling attention to a less spectacular but still meritorious conjuring trick of his own – ‘will be served in five minutes.’ And upon this the gentleman from the CID stripped off his overcoat and revealed himself as being as decently dinner-jacketed as anybody. Mr Eliot’s butler, a last shade of anxiety dismissed from his mind, bowed and withdrew.

The nerve-centre of Rust’s electric supply stood in a small room off the hall, from which it was separated by a glass door identical with that of the telephone-room opposite. Mr Eliot, left alone with his new guest, appeared in two minds whether to linger in this retreat with the solitary unknown or to hasten back to the multitudinous and familiar elsewhere. He glanced through the glass door to the hall, where was only the retreating figure of the manservant; he glanced up at the array on the wall, and Appleby noticed that his gaze went competently enough to the fuse that had been concerned. And then his eye turned to his companion; an eye presaging a critical question. ‘Mr Appleby – I suppose you are peculiarly qualified to say – does it appear to have been accidental?’

Appleby knew enough of the situation to understand that Mr Eliot had reason to apprehend malice; he knew nothing of the tapping which had followed the blackout. It was pleasant to open relations with a reassuring word. ‘Why, yes,’ he said. ‘The fuse was genuinely blown; one can tell. It appears to have been a mere accident.’

Mr Eliot made an odd movement; he was spinning oddly on his heel; he was a crumple of black and white clothes on the black and white tessellated floor… And from far away, fainter than the faintest sounding of Siegfried’s distant horn, falling in its exhausted little cadences like a slow curtain on some accomplished scene, came the ebbing melody of the clarinet.

Dinner was served at eight twenty-five, with Mr Eliot at the head of his table. Only Appleby had witnessed his collapse; consequently there was only Appleby to meditate on it. He had seen such tricks of the over-taxed mind before: on the physical side quickly over, but on the psychical holding tenaciously to the oblivion at which they are directed. Mr Eliot had forgotten; for the time being had comprehensively forgotten the blackness which had fallen upon his guests and the redness which had been scrawled above them; had forgotten the sounds which were beginning to drift out of his books and about the corridors of Rust; had forgotten Mrs Birdwire and the vicar and the schoolmistress and all that had followed in their train. For a blessed space the Spider slumbered again within his ink and paper walls; this party was as the party last year and the year before: something which pleased Wedge, and a number of other people no doubt capital in their way besides; the necessary annual complement of the curious but really frequently amusing way in which he had come to make an abundant living for Timmy and Belinda and Rupert and Archie and himself. It would soon be over, and meantime not even the large stuffed spider which somebody had suspended above the dinner-table could be regarded as seriously disturbing. The Spider was in his cupboard and all right with the world.

Approximately these, thought Appleby, were his host’s mental processes. The result for the moment was a restored nervous equilibrium round the table, but the processes could hardly be regarded as promising in themselves. The mind does not devise such emergency measures save when hard-pressed; nor are they ever workable for long. If he were to be helpful he must move tolerably fast, and so far he possessed only inadequate sketches of the facts: Patricia’s letter, with Belinda’s invitation to come down; the beguiling if extravagant hypothesis with which Patricia had provided him on the telephone… He looked discreetly about the table.

He saw – because his vision was arduously trained – that Belinda Eliot was acknowledging to herself that twenty-five minutes’ marking time had been none too good for the soup; that his sister was trying to make up her mind about a young man who must be Timmy Eliot; that Timmy Eliot was guiltily considering the possibility of playing truant on another and serious young man sitting near by; that a plump little man slightly resembling Mr Eliot had drunk a little too much on an empty stomach; that a large and ferocious man near the foot of the table had drunk much too much in the same condition; that most of the company knew of himself merely as the late arrival who had somewhat dramatically prevented minor panic; that the old lady sitting beside him knew a little more. All of which was scarcely useful. He was attempting further observation when the old lady spoke.

‘I’m afraid’, said the old lady, in what was evidently a formula, ‘that introductions are never thought necessary at this party. May I be very unconventional and say that I am Mrs Moule? You will sometimes see my name in
teeny
letters on–’

‘On the playbills,’ said Appleby. ‘It’s very nice to meet you. I am John Appleby, Patricia’s brother.’

Mrs Moule blushed – not faintly but vividly, like Mr Disney’s dwarf. Appleby wrote her down in a businesslike way as a friend for the duration of the adventure. It was wonderful how useful a habit of retaining useless information sometimes proved. Mrs Moule laid a light hand on his sleeve. ‘Belinda’, she said in a low voice, ‘has confided in me.’

One down, thought Appleby, to Belinda. But perhaps there was extenuating circumstance.

Mrs Moule seemed to catch at his thought. ‘But Belinda is very discreet. I wouldn’t like to say that I have tried to be a mother to her, because it is a thing so
many
people tend to say of motherless children. But we have always been very friendly. She is a delightful girl. Perhaps a
teeny
bit modern, but of course that is to be expected.’

Appleby agreed that it was to be expected that the young should be on the modern side. Mrs Moule said that the modern mind, though in many ways an improvement on the sorts of mind that had gone before, was inclined to be narrow. In five minutes Appleby was possessed of all Mrs Moule’s convictions on the unaccountable element in human affairs. ‘And now’, said Mrs Moule, ‘I am going to introduce you to Gerald Winter; I have been keeping him to myself for ever such a long time.’

Winter was on Mrs Moule’s other side; the introduction was effected across her bosom and to the animated twinkling of her tiara. ‘Mr Winter’, said Mrs Moule, ‘is from Oxford. My brother, who is now Bishop of Udonga, though not at the same college, proves to have been at one almost next door.’

Appleby, whose mind had been wandering during the latter part of Mrs Moule’s discourse, was momentarily at a loss for a suitable opening observation: the propinquity of Mr Winter’s college to that of the Bishop of Udonga was singularly barren of suggestion. Winter, however, immediately took charge of the conversation. ‘To be introduced’, he said, ‘as coming from Oxford: how exceedingly uninformative that is nowadays! A hundred odd years ago it meant that one was either a clergyman, a quasi-clergyman, or a dangerous democrat. Now the other fellow cannot be sure that one is not a micro-chemist, a trades-union secretary, a lover of Tamil and Telugu, or an international authority on the bacon industry. If the introduction is indistinct and takes place in the dark one’s sex is a matter of pure conjecture, and one’s complexion as likely to be black, yellow, or coffee as the traditional pinko-grey.’

‘I think’, said Mrs Moule, ‘that the universities are wonderfully unchanging places.’

‘You are mistaken; the pace is quite dizzying at both of them. At Oxford we have seen everything turned topsy-turvy within a generation. When our minds mellow and become disinclined for the sort of operations which distinguish a brisk civil-servant we are retired to little villas on the fringes of the town. The streets are thronged with learned ladies who have their more natural place in the poems of Lord Tennyson. Strange subjects are professed in the Schools: the bacon industry again, and even English literature – a lore hitherto properly confined to academics and to the native colleges of India.’ Winter paused briefly to sip hock. Appleby had time to reflect that the universities do indeed change, and this youngish aged don must be one of that diminishing remnant which continues to consult the art of dining out. Mr Eliot’s dinner-table was still far from easy, but one corner at least would produce a smooth flow of talk.

‘The dead languages’, continued Winter with the practised modulations which preserve a monologue from being a harangue, ‘which have been the most truly living languages for a matter of millennia, are now dying indeed. Boys come up from great public schools scarcely able to latinize their neck-verse. They have to be taught that Virgil and Sophocles were writers admired by Spenser and Milton: that a tragedy is a song of the goat; that “phonograph” is made up of two Greek words and that with the spread of the machine that name has passed into popular usage.’ He turned to Mrs Moule. ‘Do the people’, he asked with deft inconsequence, ‘really say “phonograph”? They do not. But it is the innocence of these cloistral beliefs, after all, that is their charm.’ He switched his eye to Appleby, the little climax at which he was aiming within sight. ‘Adorable dreamer,’ he quoted, ‘home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs and unpopular names’ his voice dropped gracefully ‘where a gramophone is a phonograph still!’

Fancy stuff, thought Appleby dispassionately, nicely done. But again, surely, only faintly instructive. He was meditating a little steering of the conversation on his own behalf when a voice broke in from the other side of the table. The tones, Appleby happened to know, were those of a publisher called Spandrell; it was with mild astonishment that he marked them as proceeding from somebody quite unfamiliar to him. ‘Don’t, said the voice querulously and unnecessarily, ‘speak of the universities to me. I see them as being at the bottom of the whole mischief.’

‘The mischief?’ said Winter, whose conversational equipment appeared to include a knowledge of when interpolation was expected. ‘Surely we are not mischievous? Commonly we are thought sedate.’

‘The universities have come to exercise a markedly depressant effect on the whole field of literary activity. Nobody is allowed to come down from Oxford nowadays lightly proposing to fill long-felt literary wants. Their noses have been rammed into the accumulated stuff in the libraries and that discourages them. Contrast the situation with Wordsworth and his crowd.’

‘A Cambridge man, I have heard,’ said Winter with sudden appalling academic facetiousness.

‘It seems that at the university nobody bothered to ram these people’s noses into anything. As a result they came down with the proper feelings: that the whole writing job was substantially yet to do. And the results were first-rate. The Wordsworth alone wrote and published some seventy thousand lines of verse during his lifetime; and even then there were some tens of thousands left over for posthumous handling. Contrast that, I say, with the corresponding situation today.’ The pseudo-Spandrell tapped the table with an irritable finger.

‘But surely, Mr Wedge,’ expostulated Mrs Moule, ‘quantity isn’t
everything
.’

Less and less, Appleby reflected, to any possible point. But one never knew. He listened on. The
salmi
, he noted, had come through the twenty-five minutes unscathed.

‘It was different’, continued the man called Wedge, dropping Spandrell’s manner but conceivably preserving Spandrell’s argument, ‘when one was a publisher and nothing else, contracting with an independent printer job by job. It wasn’t all vital then that one’s writers should keep on writing all the time. But now when one is a printer as well, with hundreds of tons of that frightfully expensive machinery depreciating year by year–’ Growing suddenly bored with his own remarks, Mr Wedge broke off and applied himself to his dinner.

‘One sees’, said Winter smoothly – and Appleby realized that there was to be neither chink nor crevice in the flow of talk – ‘your point of view. And I don’t doubt that the universities have something of the effect you ascribe to them. The university man is trained’ – his eyes strayed to Mr Eliot in the distance, his mind made an answering dive at Mr Eliot’s favourite author – ‘not to rhyme ere he wakes and print before Term ends. If one is speaking grandly one calls the thing critical sense. But, as I say, I admit your point of view. The machines, no doubt, must be kept moving; it is the character of their kind. Stop press: only a murder or the result of a horse-race may be allowed to do that. That the machine should even be slowed down by the critical sense of writers would be highly inconvenient.’ He sipped hock again; there was the faint suggestion of a piece of stage business about the act. ‘There is, for example, our host’s son, Timmy Eliot.’