The Documents in the Case (3 page)

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They’ve got an appalling sitting-room, all arty stuff from Tottenham Court Road, with blue and mauve cushions, and everything ghastly about it — like Ye Olde Oake Tea-Roomes. Harrison is fearfully proud of his wife’s taste, and played showman rather pathetically. They keep a ‘lady-help’ — they would! — a dreadful middle-aged female with a come-hither eye. She cornered me at the front door the other morning, just as I was popping out for my daily dozen round the houses. She was prowling round the hall in rose-pink pyjamas and a pale-blue négligé, pretending to take in the milk. I dawdled on the stairs as long as I could, to give her a chance to run to cover, but as she appeared to be determined, and the situation was becoming rather absurd, I marched out, and was, of course, involved in a conversation. I made myself as repellent as I could, but the good lady’s curiosity would take no denial. Last night was like a friendly evening with the Grand Inquisitor. I told her all she wanted to know about my income and prospects and family, and Lathom’s ditto so far as I knew them, and by that time she was chatting so archly (lovely word!) about the young ladies of the neighbourhood that I thought it best just to mention that I was engaged. That worked her up into still greater excitement, but I didn’t tell her much, Bungie, old dear. I’ve got a sort of weakness about you, though you mightn’t think it, my child, so I said nothing. Hadn’t I got a photograph? No, I didn’t approve of photographs. Well, of course, they were only mechanical, weren’t they? Hadn’t Mr Lathom painted a portrait of my fiancée? I said that, though I had few illusions about any of my belongings, I couldn’t expose you to the ordeal of being painted by Lathom. So she said how like a man to talk of his belongings, and she supposed Mr Lathom was very Modern (capital M). I said yes, terrifically so, and that he always painted his sitters with green mouths and their noses all askew. So she said she supposed I wrote poems to you instead. I replied that poems to one’s fiancée were a little old-fashioned, didn’t she think so, and she agreed, and said, ‘What was the title of my next volume?’ So I said at random ‘Spawn,’ which I thought was rather good for the spur of the moment, and it rather shut her up, because she wasn’t quite sure of the right answer, and just said that that sounded very modern too, and she hoped I would present her with a copy when it was printed. Then I got reckless, and said I feared it never would be printed, because Jix had his eye on me and opened all my letters to my publishers. You’d adore these people, my dear — they are like something out of one of your own books. How is the new work getting on?

I must stop now, old thing; I’ve been quill-driving all day on the Life, and I’m just about dead. But I had to write you some sort of yarn, just to show I hadn’t been and gone and deserted you.

Yours, Bungie, if indeed anything of one’s self can ever be anybody else’s which, as an up-to-date young woman, you will conscientiously doubt, but, at any rate, with the usual damned feeling of incompleteness in your absence, yours, blast you! yours,Jack

1. The Same to the Same
   

15a, Whittington Terrace, Bayswater 4th October, 1928

Dear Bungie,

Yours to hand, and your remarks about middle-aged spinsters noted. I will try not to be (a) catty; (b) mid-Victorian; (c) always imagining myself to be truly run after. I did not know I was all those things, but, being a modern woman and a successful novelist, no doubt you are quite right. Also, of course, you are quite right to speak your mind. As you say, married life should be based on mutual frankness.

In return, may I just hint that there are some sides of life which I, as a man, may possibly know more about than you do, merely through having lived longer and knocked about more. I assure you I can size up some types of people pretty well. However, it may give you pleasure to learn that Mrs Harrison, at any rate, is not out for my scalp. She has read Deadlock and is disgusted with its coarseness and cynicism. How do I know? Because I was in Mudie’s when she went in to change it. The girl said, no, it wasn’t a very nice book and she was afraid at the time Mrs Harrison wouldn’t care for it, and would she like the latest Michael Arlen? Which she did.

Our place really looks very jolly now; I wish you could come and see it. The Picasso is over the studio fireplace and the famille rose jar is in my sitting-room, and so are the etchings. They give my surroundings quite a distinguished-man-of-letters appearance. I wish I could get rid of this damned Life and get back to my own stuff, but I’m being too well paid for it, that’s the devil of it. Never mind — I’ll pretend I am the Industrious Apprentice, working hard so as to be able to marry his master’s daughter.

Glad the book seems to be working itself out amiably. For God’s sake, though, don’t overdo the psycho-analytical part, It’s not your natural style. Don’t listen to that Challenger woman, but write your own stuff. The other kind of thing wants writing (forgive me) fearfully well if it’s to be any good, and even then it is rather dreary and old-fashioned. Glands, my child, glands are the thing, as Barrie would say. Pre-natal influences and childhood fears have gone out with compulsory Greek.

A Don who encountered a MaenadWas left with less wits than the Dean’ad;Till the Dean, being vexed by a Gonad,Was left with less wits than the Don ’ad: This shows what implicit relianceWe may place on the progress of Science.

Talking of Science, I have brought up all standing by Nicholson’s book on The Development of English Biography. According to him, ‘pure’ biography is doomed, and we are to have the ‘scientific biography’, which will in the end prove destructive of the literary interest. There are to be nothing but studies of heredity and indoctrine secretions, economics and aesthetics, and so on — all specialised and all damned. This is where I get off; I only hope this infernal work will get itself published before the rot sets in. So back to the shop, Mr Keats!Yours, while this machine is to him, Jack

On looking this through, I seem to be rather in a scolding mood. But it’s only because I think so highly of your stuff that I don’t want you to get sloppy and psycho. That kind of thing is all sentimentality, really. Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner; tout pardonner, c’est tout embęter.

1. The Same to the Same
   

15a, Whittington Terrace, Bayswater 8th October, 1928

Darling old Bungie, old thing—

All right, damn it, no! I don’t want to hector and lay down the law. You carry on in your own way, my child, and don’t pay any attention to me. I quite see what you say about taking things for granted — so we’ll lay it down quite clearly for future guidance that, although I am always right, I must never be so ex officio and because I am a man and a husband. No doubt it is irritating. I hadn’t quite looked at it from that point of view, but possibly there is something in it. Signed Jacko, the almost-human Ape.

Making a strenuous effort to adopt this feminine viewpoint, I am beginning to wonder whether my neighbour goes quite the right way to assert his position as head of the household. I fancy he must have read somewhere that women like to be treated rough and feel the tight hand on the rein and that sort of thing. Unfortunately, nature did not design him for a sheik part, having made him small, dry, and a little bald on top.

We were just starting off to dine with Lambert the other night, and were waiting in the hall for a taxi, when Mrs H. came in, rather flurried and very wet. She was hanging up her waterproof, when Harrison came charging out on the landing and called down:

‘Is that you, Margaret? Do you know what time it is?’

‘I’m sorry — I won’t be a moment.’

‘Where on earth have you been?’

‘That’s a secret’ (in the tone of voice of someone who wants to have the secret teased out of her. She was laughing to herself, and had a fattish parcel tucked under her arm).

‘Oh! I suppose it’s all the same to you if the dinner’s uneatable.’

Evidently no interest was to be taken in the ‘secret’. The next effort was along the lines of cheerful common sense.

‘Why didn’t you begin without me?’

‘I don’t choose to. This is my home — or supposed to be — not a hotel’ (in a tone of peevish protest).

She had gone past us up to the first-floor landing, and, like the Wedding-Guest, we could not choose but hear.

‘I’m sorry, dear. I was getting something for tomorrow.’

‘That’s no excuse, You’ve been chattering to some of your office friends in some tea-shop or other and forgetting all about what you were supposed to be doing. No, I don’t want any dinner now.’

‘Oh, very well.’

He came running downstairs then and saw us. I think it gave him a shock, because he pulled himself up and smiled and said something vague. Then he turned and called up the stairs again:

‘All right, my dear, I’ll be up in a minute.’ His eyes were unhappy. There’s something wrong in this house — something more than a little misunderstanding about dinner time. I shouldn’t wonder if she gives this man a devil of a time — probably without meaning it, that’s the rub. Lathom, who is at the chivalrous age, was all for youth and beauty, of course, and wanted to hop out and sling the old boy into his own umbrella stand, but I told him not to be an infernal ass. Why shouldn’t the woman come home in time for meals? It’s not much to do, and I don’t believe she has any other job in life except to sit reading novels in the front window all day. I know, I’ve seen her at it. All the same, I do wish we had a separate staircase. It’s a bore to have people fighting out their matrimonial quarrels on one’s front doorstep. I’m a man of peace, I am.

I heard afterwards (per Lathom, via Miss Milsom) that the mysterious parcel was a present for Harrison, the next day being their wedding-anniversary. The row in the hall rather spoilt the sentiment of the occasion, I gather. Lathom says the man is a brute. But I don’t altogether see that. He couldn’t be supposed to know, and anyhow, what is the good of giving a person a lavish display of affection with one hand and rubbing pepper into his eyes with the other?

Oh, Bungie, it’s the silly little things of life that I’m afraid of. Don’t they frighten you, too, competent as you are?Yours always, Jack

1. The Same to the Same
   

15a, Whittington Terrace, Bayswater 12th October, 1928

Dearest Bungie,

Things are looking up. This Life will be finished by Christmas, I hope. I am rather stuck at present over the chapter on ‘Religious Convictions’. It is difficult to bring one’s mind into sympathy with that curious Victorian blend of materialism and trust in a personally interfering Providence. It’s odd how they seem to have blinded themselves to the hopeless contradiction between their science and their conventional ethics. On the one hand, an acceptance of the Darwinian survival of the fittest, which ought to have made them completely ruthless in theory and practice; on the other, a sort of sentimental humanitarianism, which directly led to our own special problem of the multitudinous survival of the unfittest. They seem to have had a pathetic belief that it could all be set right by machinery. I don’t know, come to think of it, that we are in a much better position today, except that we have lost the saving belief in machinery. Which doesn’t stop our becoming more and more mechanical, any more than their having lost their belief in anthropomorphism stopped them from becoming more and more humanitarian. Compromise — blessed word! — Chesterton speaks somewhere of the great Victorian compromise — but why Victorian, more than anything else? At any rate, they had the consolation of feeling that this earth and its affairs were extremely large and important — though why they should have thought so, when they were convinced they were only the mechanical outcome of a cast-iron law of evolution on a very three-by-four planet, whirling round a fifth-rate star in illimitable space, passes human comprehension. It would be more reasonable to think so today, if Eddington and those people are right in supposing that we are rather a freak sort of planet, with quite unusual facilities for being inhabited, and that space is a sort of cosy little thing which God could fold up and put in his pocket without our ever noticing the difference. Anyhow, if time and space and straightness and curliness and bigness and smallness are all relative, then we may just as well think ourselves important as not. ‘Important, unimportant — unimportant, important,’ as the King of Hearts said, trying to see which sounded best. So, like the Victorians, we shall no doubt compromise — say it is important when we have a magnum opus to present to an admiring creation, and unimportant when it suits our convenience to have our peccadilloes passed over.

Forgive me wandering away like this. It’s just a sort of talking the thing out with you before I talk it out in the book. Because, for some reason, it does seem to me important to do this job as well as I can — not merely because it will do me good with publishers, and make it possible to embark on the important triviality of marriage, but for some obscure and irrational motive connected with the development of my soul, if I may so allude to it. I am increasingly not clear whether I am a mess of oddly assorted chemicals (chiefly salt and water), or a kind of hypertrophied fish-egg, or an enormous, all-inclusive cosmos of solar-systematically revolving atoms, each one supporting planetfuls of solemn imbeciles like myself.

But, whatever I am, I must finish the Life and then get on to our life, Bungie, because that somehow does count for something too.Jack

1. The Same to the Same
   

15a, Whittington Terrace, Bayswater 15th October, 1928

I knew it, Bungie — I knew it, I knew it! I knew we should be asked downstairs to tea. And we’ve been! Down among the Liberty curtains and the brass Benares ware! Three young women, two bright youths, the local parson and the family. Crockery from Heal’s and everything too conscientiously bright. Mrs Harrison all radiance and very much the centre of attraction.

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No sooner had I got there than I was swept into a discussion about ‘this wonderful man Einstein’. Extraordinarily interesting, wasn’t it, and what did I make of it? Displaying all my social charm, I said I thought it was a delightful idea. I liked thinking that all the straight lines were really curly, and only wished I’d known all about it at school, because it would have annoyed the geometry master so much.