Elinor had had time to telegraph from Euston. On her arrival, she found the car waiting for her at the station. ‘How is he?’ she asked the chauffeur. But Paxton was vague, didn’t rightly know. Privately, he thought it was one of these ridiculous fusses about nothing, such as the rich are always making, particularly where their children are concerned. They drove up to Gattenden and the landscape of the Chilterns in the ripe evening light was so serenely beautiful, that Elinor began to feel less anxious and even half wished that she had stayed till the last train. She would have been able in that case to see Webley. But hadn’t she decided that she was really almost glad not to be seeing him? One can be glad and sorry at the same time. Passing the north entrance to the Park, she had a glimpse through the bars of Lord Gattenden’s bath-chair standing just inside the gate. The ass had stopped and was eating grass at the side of the road, the reins hung loose and the marquess was too deeply absorbed in a thick red morocco quarto to be able to think of driving. The car hurried on; but that second’s glimpse of the old man sitting with his book behind the grey donkey, as she had so often seen him sitting and reading; that brief revelation of life living itself regularly, unvaryingly in the same old familiar way, was as reassuring as the calm loveliness of beech-trees and bracken, of greengolden foreground and violet distances.

And there at last was the Hall! The old house seemed to doze in the westering sun like a basking animal; you could almost fancy that it purred. And the lawn was like the most expensive green velvet; and in the windless air the huge Wellingtonia had all the dignified gravity of an old gentleman who sits down to meditate after an enormous meal. There could be nothing much wrong here. She jumped out of the car and ran straight upstairs to the nursery. Phil was lying in bed, quite still and with closed eyes. Miss Fulkes, who was sitting beside him, turned as she entered, rose and came to meet her. One glance at her face was enough to convince Elinor that the blue and golden tranquillity of the landscape, the dozing house, the marquess and his ass had been lying comforters. ‘All’s well,’ they had seemed to say. ‘Everything’s going on as usual.’ But Miss Fulkes looked pale and frightened, as though she had seen a ghost.

‘What’s the matter?’ Elinor whispered with a sudden return of all her anxiety, and before Miss Fulkes had time to answer, ‘Is he asleep?’ she added. If he were asleep, she was thinking, it was a good sign; he looked as though he were asleep.

But Miss Fulkes shook her head. The gesture was superfluous. For the question was hardly out of Elinor’s mouth, when the child made a sudden spasmodic movement under the sheets. His face contracted with pain. He uttered a little whimpering moan.

‘His head hurts him so much,’ said Miss Fulkes. There was a look of terror and misery in her eyes.

‘Go and have a rest,’ said Elinor.

Miss Fulkes hesitated, shook her head. ‘I’d like to be useful…’

Elinor insisted. ‘You’ll be more useful when you’ve rested….’ She saw Miss Fulkes’s lips trembling, her eyes growing suddenly bright with tears.

‘Go along,’ she said and pressed her arm consolingly.

Miss Fulkes obeyed with a sudden alacrity. She was afraid that she might start crying before she got to her room.

Elinor sat down by the bed. She took the little hand that lay on the turned-back sheet, she passed her fingers through the child’s pale hair caressingly, soothingly. ‘Sleep,’ she whispered, as her fingers caressed him, ‘sleep, sleep.’ But the child still stirred uneasily; and every now and then his face was distorted with sudden pain; he shook his head, as though trying to shake off the thing that was hurting him, he uttered his little whimpering moan. And bending over him, Elinor felt as though her heart were being crushed within her breast, as though a hand were at her throat, choking her.

‘My darling,’ she said beseechingly, imploring him not to suffer, ‘my darling.’

And she pressed the small hand more tightly, she let her palm rest more heavily on his hot forehead, as if to stifle the pain or at least to steady the shuddering little body against its attacks. And all her will commanded the pain to cease under her fingers, to come out of him—out of him, through her fingers, into her own body. But still he fidgeted restlessly in his bed, turning his head from one side to the other, now drawing up his legs, now straightening them out with a sharp spasmodic kick under the sheets. And still the pain returned, stabbing; and the face made its grimace of agony, the parted lips gave utterance to the little whimpering cry, again and again. She stroked his lorehead, she whispered tender words. And that was all she could do. The sense of her helplessness suffocated her. At her throat and heart the invisible hands tightened their grip.

‘How do you find him?’ asked Mrs. Bidlake, when her daughter came down.

Elinor did not answer, but turned away her face. The question had brought the tears rushing into her eyes. Mrs. Bidlake put her arms round her and kissed her. Elinor hid her face against her mother’s shoulder. ‘You must be strong,’ she kept saying to herself. ‘You mustn’t cry, mustn’t break down. Be strong. To help him.’ Her mother held her more closely. The physical contact comforted her, gave her the strength for which she was praying. She made an effort of will and with a deep intaken breath swallowed down the sobs in her throat. She looked up at her mother and gratefully smiled. Her lips still trembled a little; but the will had conquered.

‘I’m stupid,’ she said apologetically. ‘I couldn’t help it. It’s so horrible to see him suffer. Helplessly. It’s dreadful. Even if one knows that it’ll be all right in the end.’

Mrs. Bidlake sighed. ‘Dreadful,’ she echoed,’dreadful,’ and closed her eyes in a meditative perplexity. There was a silence. ‘By the way,’ she went on, opening them again to look at her daughter, ‘I think you ought to keep an eye on Miss Fulkes. I don’t know whether her influence is always entirely good.’

‘Miss Fulkes’s influence?’ said Elinor, opening her eyes in astonishment. ‘But she’s the nicest, the most conscientious…’

‘Oh, not that, not that!’ said Mrs. Bidlake hastily. ‘Her artistic influence, I mean. When I went up to see Phil the day before yesterday I found her showing him such dreadfully vulgar pictures of a dog.’

‘Bonzo?’ suggested Elinor.

Her mother nodded. ‘Yes, Bonzo.’ She pronounced the word with a certain distaste. ‘If he wants pictures of animals, there are such excellent reproductions of Persian miniatures at the British Museum. It’s so easy to spoil a child’s taste…. But Elinor! My dear!’

Suddenly and uncontrollably, Elinor had begun to laugh. To laugh and to cry, uncontrollably. Grief alone she had been able to master. But grief allied with Bonzo was irresistible. Something broke inside her and she found herself sobbing with a violent, painful and hysterical laughter.

Mrs. Bidlake helplessly patted her shoulder. ‘My dear,’ she kept repeating. ‘Elinor!’

Roused from uneasy and nightmarish dozing, John Bidlake shouted furiously from the library. ‘Stop that cackling,’ commanded the angry-plaintive voice. ‘For God’s sake.’

But Elinor could not stop.

‘Screaming like parrots,’ John Bidlake went on muttering to himself.

‘Some idiotic joke. When one isn’t well…’



‘Now, for God’s sake,’ said Spandrell roughly, ‘pull yourself together.’

Illidge pressed his handkerchief to his mouth; he was afraid of being sick. ‘I think I’ll lie down for a moment,’ he whispered. But when he tried to walk, it was as though his legs were dead under him. It might have been a paralytic who dragged himself to the sofa.

‘What you need is a mouthful of spirits,’ said Spandrell. He crossed the room. A bottle of brandy stood on the sideboard, and from the kitchen he returned with glasses. He poured out two fingers of the spirit. ‘Here. Drink this.’ Illidge took and sipped. ‘One would think we were crossing the Channel,’ Spandrell went on with ferocious mockery, as he helped himself to brandy. ‘Study in green and ginger—that’s how Whistler would have described you now. Apple-green. Moss-green.’

Illidge looked at him for a moment, then turned away, unable to face the steady glance of those contemptuous grey eyes. He had never felt such hatred as he now felt for Spandrell.

‘Not to say frog-green, slime-green, scum-green,’ the other went on.

‘Oh shut up!’ cried Illidge in a voice that had recovered some of its resonance and hardly wavered. Spandrell’s mockery had steadied his nerves. Hate, like brandy, is a stimulant. He took another burning gulp. There was a silence.

‘When you feel like it,’ said Spandrell, putting down his emptied glass, ‘you can come and help me clear up.’ He rose and walked round the screen, out of sight.

Everard Webley’s body was lying where it had fallen, on its side, with the arms reaching out across the floor. The chloroform-soaked handkerchief still covered the face. Spandrell bent down and twitched it away. The temple which had been struck was against the floor; seen from above the face seemed unwounded.

His hands in his pockets, Spandrell stood looking down at the body.

‘Five minutes ago,’ he said to himself, formulating his thoughts in words, that his realization of their significance might be the more complete, ‘five minutes ago, it was alive, it had a soul. Alive,’ he repeated and balancing himself unsteadily on one leg, with the other foot he touched the dead cheek, he pushed forward the ear and let it flick back again. ‘A soul.’ And for a moment he allowed some of his weight to rest on what had been Everard Webley’s face. ‘He withdrew his foot; the print of it remained, dust-grey, on the white skin. ‘Trampling on a dead face,’ he said to himself. Why had he done it? ‘Trampling.’ He raised his foot again and pressed his heel into the socket of the eye, gently, tentatively, as though experimenting with outrage. ‘Like grapes,’ he thought. ‘Trampling wine out of the grapes.’ It was in his power to trample this thing into a pulp., But he had done enough. Symbolically, he had trodden out the essential horror from his murder; it flowed from under his trampling feet. The essential horror? But it was more stupid and disgusting, than horrible. Pushing the toe of his boot under the chin, he rolled the head over until the face was looking up, open-mouthed and with half-shut eyes, at the ceiling. Above and behind the left eye was a huge red contusion. There were trickles of blood on the left cheek, already dry, and where the forehead had rested on the floor, a little pool—hardly even a pool—a smear.

‘Incredibly little blood,’ said Spandrell aloud.

At the sound of his calm voice Illidge violently started.

Spandrell withdrew his supporting foot. The dead face fell back with a little thump on to its side.

‘It’s a complete justification for Bishop Odo’s mace,’ he went on dispassionately. That he should find himself recalling, at this of all moments, the comical prancings of that conscientious churchman in the Bayeux tapestry—that too was part of the essential horror. The frivolousness of the human mind! The wandering irrelevance! Evil might have a certain dignity. But silliness…

Illidge heard him walk into the kitchen. There was the gradually sharpening note of water running into a pail. The tap was turned off; there were foot-falls; the bucket was set down with a metallic clink.

‘Luckily,’ Spandrell went on, in comment on his last remark. ‘Or else I don’t know what we should have done about the mess.’

Illidge listened with a strained and horrified attention to the sounds that came to him from the other side of the screen. A limp and meaty thud; was that an arm lifted and dropped? The sibilant sliding of a soft and heavy object across the floor. Then the splash of water, the homely noise of scrubbing. And at these sounds, so incomparably more horrible, more profoundly significant than any words, however brutal, however calmly cynical, that Spandrell could say, he felt a recrudesence of that sinking, that heart-fluttering faintness of the first minutes, when the dead man was lying there, still twitching, at his feet. He remembered, he lived over again those moments of breathless and sick anticipation before the horrible event. The noise of the car backing down the street; the gritty scrape of feet on the doorstep, and then the knock, and then a long, long silence of heart-beats and visceral creepings and imaginative forebodings, of justifying thoughts of revolution and the future, justifying hatred of oppression and the vileness of wealth. And at the same time ridiculous, incongruous recollections, as he crouched behind the screen, of those childish games of hide-and-seek on school-treat days, among the gorse and juniper bushes of the common. ‘One, two, three…’; the seekers covered their faces and began to count their hundred, aloud; the hiders scattered. You thrust yourself into a prickly bush, you lay in the bracken. Then came the shout of ‘ninety-nine, a hundred, Cooee!’; and the seekers were off, were after you. And the excitement was so painfully intense, as you crouched or squatted in your lair, peeping, listening for a chance to make a bolt for Home, that you felt an almost irrepressible desire to’do something,’ though something had been done, behind the junipers, only five minutes before. Absurd memories! And because absurd, dreadful! For the hundredth time he felt in his pocket to make sure that the bottle of chloroform was still there and safely corked. The second knock startlingly resounded and, with it, the whistle and that humorous call (you could hear, from the tone of his voice, that he was smiling) of ‘Friend!’ Behind his screen Midge had shuddered. ‘Friend!’ And remembering now, he shuddered again, more violently, with all the shame and horror and humiliation which he had had no time then to feel. No time; for before his mind could realize all the implications upon implications of that laughing call, the door had creaked on its hinges, there was the noise of feet on the boards, and Webley was shouting Elinor’s name. (Illidge suddenly found himself wondering if he had been in love with her.) ‘Elinor!’ There followed a silence; Webley had seen the note. Illidge had heard his breathing, only a foot or two away, on the other side of the screen. And then there was the rustle of a quick movement, the beginning of an exclamation and that sudden dry concussion, like the noise of a slap, but duller, deader and at the same time much louder. There followed a fraction of a second’s silence, then the noise of falling—not a single sound, but a series of noises spread over an appreciable period of time; the bony collapse of the knees, the scrape of shoes sliding away across the polished floor, the muffled thud of the body and arms, and the sharp hard rap of the head against the boards. ‘Quick!’ had come the sound of Spandrell’s voice, and he had darted out of his hidingplace. ‘Chloroform.’ Obediently, he had soaked the handkerchief, he had spread it over the twitching face….He shuddered again, he took another sip of brandy.

The sound of scrubbing was succeeded by the squelch of a wetted cloth.

‘There,’ said Spandrell, appearing round the screen. He was drying his hands on a duster. ‘And how’s the invalid?’ he added in the parody of a bedside manner, smiling ironically.

Illidge averted his face. The hatred flared up in him, expelling for the moment every other emotion. ‘I’m all right,’ he said curtly.

‘Just taking it easy while I do the dirty work. Is that it?’ Spandrell threw the duster on to a chair and began to turn down his shirt cuffs.

In two hours the muscles of the heart contract and relax, contract again and relax only eight thousand times. The earth travels less than an eighth of a million miles along its orbit. And the prickly pear has had time to invade only another hundred acres of Australian territory. Two hours are as nothing. The time to listen to the Ninth Symphony and a couple of the posthumous quartets, to fly from London to Paris, to transfer a luncheon from the stomach to the small intestine, to read Macbeth, to die of snake bite or earn one-and-eightpence as a charwoman. No more. But to Illidge, as he sat waiting, with the dead body lying there behind the screen, waiting for the darkness, they seemed unending.

‘Are you an idiot? asked Spandrell, when he had suggested that they should go away at once and leave the thing lying there. ‘Or are you particularly anxious to die of hanging?’ The sneer, the cool ironic amusement were maddening to Illidge. ‘It would be found to-night when Philip came home.’

‘But Quarles hasn’t got a key,’ said Illidge.

‘Then to-morrow, as soon as he’d got hold of a locksmith. And three hours later, when Elinor had explained what she had done with the key, the police would be knocking at my door. And I promise you, they’d knock at yours very soon afterwards.’ He smiled at Illidge, who averted his eyes. ‘No,’ Spandrell went on, ‘Webley’s got to be taken away. And with his car standing outside, it’s child’s play, if we wait till after dark.’

‘But it won’t be dark for another two hours.’ Illidge’s voice was shrill with anger and complaint.

‘Well, what of it?’

‘Why…’ Illidge began and checked himself; he realized that if he was going to answer truthfully, he would have to say that he didn’t want to stay those two hours because he was frightened. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s stay.’ Spandrell picked up the silver cigarette box, opened and sniffed. ‘They smell very nice,’ he said. ‘Have one.’ He pushed the box across the table. ‘And there are lots of books. And the Times And the New Statesman. And the latest number of Vogue. It’s positively a dentist’s waiting-room. And we might even make ourselves a cup of tea.’ The time of waiting began. Heart-beat followed heart-beat. Each second the earth travelled twenty miles and the prickly pears covered another five rods of Australian ground. Behind the screen lay the body. Thousands upon thousands of millions of minute and diverse individuals had come together and the product of their mutual dependence, their mutual hostility had been a human life. Their total colony, their living hive had been a man. The hive was dead. But in the lingering warmth many of the component individuals still faintly lived; soon they also would have perished. And meanwhile, from the air, the invisible hosts of saprophytics had already begun their unresisted invasion. They would live among the dead cells, they would grow, and prodigiously multiply and in their growing and procreation all the chemical building of the body would be undone, all the intricacies and complications of its matter would be resolved, till by the time their work was finished a few pounds of carbon, a few quarts of water, some lime, a little phosphorus and sulphur, a pinch of iron and silicon, a handful of mixed salts—all scattered and recombined with the surrounding world—would be all that remained of Everard Webley’s ambition to rule and his love for Elinor, of his thoughts about politics and his recollections of childhood, of his fencing and good horsemanship, of that soft strong voice and that suddenly illuminating smile, of his admiration for Mantegna, his dislike of whiskey, his deliberately terrifying rages, his habit of stroking his chin, his belief in God, his incapacity to whistle a tune correctly, his unshakeable determinations and his knowledge of Russian.

Illidge turned over the advertisement pages of Vogue. A young lady in a fur coat priced at two hundred guineas was stepping into a motor car; on the opposite page another young lady in nothing but a towel was stepping out of a bath impregnated with Dr. Verbruggen’s Reducing Salts. There followed a still-life of scent bottles containing Songe Negre and the maker’s latest creation, Relent d’Amour. The names of Worth, Lanvin, Patou sprawled across three more pages. Then there was a picture of a young lady in a rubber reducing belt, looking at herself in the glass. A group of young ladies admired one another’s slumber wear from Crabb and Lushington’s lingerie department. Opposite them another young lady reclined on a couch at Madame Adrena’s Beauty Laboratory, while the hands of a masseuse stroked the menace of a double chin. Then followed a still-life of rolling pins and rubber strigils for rolling and rubbing away young ladies’ superfluous fat, and another still-life of jars and gallipots containing skin foods to protect their faces from the ravages of time and the weather.

‘Revolting!’ Illidge said to himself as he turned the pages. ‘Criminal!’ And he cherished his indignation, he cultivated it. To be angry was a distraction, and at the same time a justification. Raging at plutocratic callousness and frivolity, he could half forget and half excuse to himself the horrible thing that had happened. Webley’s body was lying on the other side of the screen. But there were women who paid two hundred guineas for a fur coat. Two hundred guineas! His Uncle Joseph would have thought himself happy if he could have made as much in eighteen months of cobbling. And they bought scent at twentyfive shillings the quarter-pint. He remembered the time when his little brother Tom had had pneumonia after influenza. Ghastly! And when he was convalescent, the doctor had said he ought to go away to the sea for a few weeks. They hadn’t been able to afford it. Tom’s lungs had never been too strong after that. He worked in a motor factory now (making machines for those bitches in twohundred-guinea coats to sit in); Illidge had paid for him to go to a technical school—paid, he reflected, beating up his anger, that the boy might have the privilege of standing eight hours a day in front of a milling machine. The air of Manchester wasn’t doing Tom any good. There was no superfluous fat to be rolled off him, poor devil. Swinish guzzling! Why couldn’t they do a little useful work instead of squeegeeing their hams and bellies? That would take the fat off all right. If they worked as his mother had done…. She had no fat to rub off with rolling-pins, or sweat off under a rubber belt, or stew off in hot baths and brine. He thought indignantly of that endless dreary labour of housework. Day after day, year after year. Making beds, that they might be unmade. Cooking to fill bellies eternally empty. Washing up what the next meal was to make dirty again. Scrubbing the floor for muddy boots to defile. Darning and patching that yet more holes might be made. It was like the labouring of Sisyphus and the Danaids, hopeless and interminable—or would have been interminable (except by his mother’s death), if he hadn’t been able to send her those two pounds a week out of his salary. She could get a girl in now to help with the hardest work. But she still did more than enough to make rubber belts unnecessary. What a life! And in the world of fur coats and Songe Negre they complained of boredom and fatigue, they had to retire into nursing homes for rest cures. If they could lead her life for a bit! And perhaps they’d be made to, one of these days (he hoped so), even in England. Illidge thought with satisfaction of those ex-officers of the Tsar driving taxis and working in factories, those ex-countesses with their restaurants and cabarets and hat-shops; of all the ex-rich of Russia, all over the world, from Harbin and Shanghai to Rome and London and Berlin, bankrupt, humiliated, reduced to the slavish estate of the common people on whom they had once parasitically lived. That was good, that served them right. And perhaps it might happen here too. But they were strong here, the fat-reducers and the fur-coated; they were numerous, they were an organized army. But the army had lost its chief. He had got his packet. Embodied beastliness and plutocracy, he lay there behind the screen. But his mouth had been open and the muscles of his face, before the reeking handkerchief had covered it, had twitched grotesquely. Illidge shuddered. He looked again for indignant distraction and justification at the picture of the young lady in the twohundred-guinea fur, of the young lady stepping, naked but coyly towelled, out of her reducing bath. Strumpets and gluttons! They belonged to the class that Webley had fought to perpetuate. The champion of all that was vile and low. He had got what he deserved, he had…

‘Good Lord!’ exclaimed Spandrell suddenly, looking up from his book. The sound of his voice in the silence made Illidge start with an uncontrollable terror. ‘I’d absolutely forgotten. They get stiff, don’t they?’ He looked at Illidge. ‘Corpses, I mean.’

Illidge nodded: He drew a deep breath and steadied himself with an effort of will.

‘What about getting him into the car, then?’ He sprang up and walked quickly round the screen, out of sight. Illidge heard the latch of the house door rattling. He was seized with a sudden horrible terror: Spandrell was going to make off, leaving him locked in with the body.

‘Where are you going?’ he shouted and darted off in panic pursuit. ‘Where are you going?’ The door was open, Spandrell was not to be seen, and the thing lay on the floor, its face uncovered, open-mouthed and staring secretly, significantly, as though through spyholes, between half-closed eyelids. ‘Where are you going?’ Illidge’s voice had risen almost to a scream.

‘What is the excitement about?’ asked Spandrell as the other appeared, pale and with desperation in his looks, on the doorstep. Standing by Webley’s car, he was engaged in undoing the tightly stretched waterproof which decked in all that part of the open body lying aft of the front seats. ‘These thingumbobs are horribly hard to unfasten.’

Illidge put his hands in his pockets and pretended that it was merely an idle curiosity that had brought him out with such precipitation.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked offhandedly.

Spandrell gave a final tug; the cover came loose along the whole length of one side of the car. He turned it back and looked in. ‘Empty, thank goodness,’ he said and, stretching his hand, he played imaginary octaves, span after span, over the coach-work. ‘Say four feet wide,’ he concluded, ‘by about the same in length. Of which half is taken up by the seat. With two foot six of space under the cover. Plenty of room to curl up in and be very comfortable. But if one were stiff?’ He looked enquiringly at Illidge. ‘A man could be got in, but not a statue.’

Illidge nodded. Spandrell’s last words had made him suddenly remember Lady Edward’s mocking commentary on Webley. ‘He wants to be treated like his own colossal statue—posthumously, if you see what I mean.’

‘We must do something quickly,’ Spandrell went on. ‘Before the stiffness sets in.’ He pulled back the cover and laying a hand on Illidge’s shoulder, propelled him gently into the house. The door slammed behind them. They stood looking down at the body.

‘We shall have to pull the knees up and the arms down,’ said Spandrell.

He bent down and moved one of the arms towards the side. It returned, when he let go, half-way to its former position. Like a puppet, Spandrell reflected, with elastic joints. Grotesque rather than terrible; not tragical, but only rather tiresome and even absurd. That was the essential horror—that it was all (even this) a kind of bad and tedious jape. ‘We shall have to find some string,’ he said. ‘Something to tie the limbs into place.’ It was like amateur plumbing, or mending the summerhouse oneself; just rather unpleasant and ludicrous.

‘They ransacked the house. There was no string to be found. They had to be content with three bandages, which Spandrell found among the aspirin and iodine, the boracic powder and vegetable laxatives of the little medicine cupboard in the bathroom.

‘Hold the arms in place while I tie,’ commanded Spandrell.

Illidge did as he was told. But the coldness of those dead wrists against his fingers was horrible; he felt sick again, he began to tremble.

‘There!’ said Spandrell, straightening himself up. ‘Now the legs. Thank goodness we didn’t leave it much longer.’

‘Treated like his own statue.’ The words reverberated in Illidge’s memory. ‘Posthumously, if you see what I mean.’ Posthumously… Spandrell bent one of the legs till the knee almost touched the chin.

‘Hold it.’

Illidge grasped the ankle; the socks were grey and clocked with white. Spandrell let go, and Illidge felt a sudden and startlingly powerful thrust against his retaining hand. The dead man was trying to kick. Black voids began to expand in front of his eyes, eating out holes in the solid world before him. And the solid world itself swayed and swam round the edges of those interstellar vacancies. His gorge turned, he felt horribly giddy.

‘Look here,’ he began, turning to Spandrell, who had squatted down on his heels and was tearing the wrapping off another bandage. Then shutting his eyes, he relinquished his grasp.

The leg straightened itself out like a bent spring, and the foot, as it shot forward, caught Spandrell on the shoulder and sent him, unsteadily balanced as he was, sprawling backwards on to the floor.

He picked himself up. ‘You bloody fool!’ But the anger aroused by that first shock of surprise died down. He uttered a little laugh. ‘We might be at the circus,’ he said. It was not only not tragic; it was a clownery.

By the time the body was finally trussed, Illidge knew that Tom’s weak lungs and twohundred-guinea coats, that superfluous fat and his mother’s lifelong slaving, that rich and poor, oppression and revolution, justice, punishment, indignation—all, as far as he was concerned, were utterly irrelevant to the fact of these stiffening limbs, this mouth that gaped, these half-shut, glazed and secretly staring eyes. Irrelevant, and beside the point.



Philip was dining alone. In front of his plate half a bottle of claret and the water-jug propped up an open volume. He read between the mouthfuls, as he masticated. The book was Bastian’s On the Brain. Not very up to date, perhaps, but the best he could find in his father’s library to keep him amused in the train. Halfway through the fish, he came upon the case of the Irish gentleman who had suffered from paraphasia, and was so much struck by it that he pushed aside his plate and, taking out his pocket-book, made a note of it at once. The physician had asked the patient to read aloud a paragraph from the statutes of Trinity College, Dublin. ‘It shall be in the power of the College to examine or not examine every Licentiate previous to his admission to a fellowship, as they shall think fit.’ What the patient actually read was: ‘An the bee-what in the teemother of the trothodoodoo, to majoram or that emidrate, eni eni krastrei, mestreit to ketra totombreidei, to ra from treido as that kekritest.’ Marvellous! Philip said to himself as he copied down the last word. What style! what majestic beauty! The richness and sonority of the opening phrase! ‘An the bee-what in the teemother of the trothodoodoo.’ He repeated it to himself. ‘I shall print it on the title-page of my next novel,’ he wrote in his notebook. ‘The epigraph the text of the whole sermon.’ Shakespeare only talked about tales told by an idiot. But here was the idiot actually speaking Shakespeareanly, what was more. ‘The final word about life,’ he added in pencil.

At the Queen’s Hall Tolley began with Erik Satie’s Borborygmes Symphoniques. Philip found the joke only moderately good. A section of the audience improved it, however, by hissing and booing. Ironically polite, Tolley bowed with more than his usual grace. When the hubbub subsided, he addressed himself to the second item on the programme. It was the Coriolan overture. Tolley prided himself on a catholic taste and omnicompetence. But, oh dear! thought Philip as he listened, how abominably he conducted real music! As though he were rather ashamed of Beethoven’s emotions and were trying to apologize for them. But fortunately Coriolanus was practically Tolley-proof. The music was heroically beautiful, it was tragic and immense in spite of him. The last of the expiring throbs of sound died away, a demonstration of man’s indomitable greatness and the necessity, the significance of suffering.

In the interval Philip limped out for a smoke in the bar. A hand plucked at his sleeve.

‘The melomaniac discovered!’ said a familiar voice. He turned and saw Willie Weaver twinkling all over with good-humour, kindliness and absurdity. ‘What did you think of our modemrn Orpheus?’

‘If you’re referring to Tolley, I don’t think he can conduct Beethoven.’

‘A shade too light and fantastic for old man Ludwig’s portentosities?’ suggested Willie.

‘That’s about it,’ said Philip smiling. ‘Not up to him.’

‘Or too far up. Portentosity belongs to the prepositivistic epoch. It’s bourgeois as Comrade Lenin would say. Tolley’s nothing if not contemporaneous. Didn’t you like him in the Satie? Or did you,’ he went on, in response to Philip’s contemptuous shrug, ‘did you wish he’d committed it?’ He coughed his own appreciation of the pun.

‘He’s almost as modern as the Irish genius whose works I discovered this evening.’ Philip took out his pocket-book and, after a word of explanation, read aloud. ‘An the bee-what in the teemother of the trothodoodoo…’ At the foot of the page were his own comments of an hour before. ‘The text of the whole sermon. The final word about life.’ He did not read them out. He happened to be thinking quite differently now. ‘The difference between portentosity and Satiecum-Tolleyism,’ he said, ‘ is the same as the difference between the statutes of Trinity College, Dublin, and this bee-what in the teemother of the trothodoodoo.’

He was blankly contradicting himself. But, after all, why not?



Illidge wanted to go home and to bed; but Spandrell had insisted that he should spend at least an hour or two at Tantamount House.

‘You must get yourself seen,’ he said. ‘For the sake of the alibi. I’m going on to Sbisa’s. There’ll be a dozen people to vouch for me.’

Illidge agreed only under the threat of violence. He dreaded the ordeal of talking with anyone—even with someone so incurious, preoccupied and absent as Lord Edward. ‘I shan’t be able to stand it,’ he kept repeating, almost in tears. They had had to carry the body, trussed into the posture of a child in the womb—carry it amorously pressed in a close and staggering embrace—out of the door, down the steps into the roadway. A single greenish gas-lamp under the archway threw but a feeble light up the mews; enough, however, to have betrayed them, if anyone had happened to be passing the entrance as they carried their burden out and lifted it into the car. They had begun by dumping the thing on its back on the floor; but the up-drawn knees projected above the level of the carriage-work. Spandrell had to climb into the car and push and lug the heavy body on to its side, so that the knees rested on the edge of the back seat. They’ shut the doors, pulled the cover over and fastened it tautly into place. ‘Perfect,’ said Spandrell. He took his companion by the elbow. ‘You need a little more brandy,’ he added. But in spite of the brandy Illidge was still faint and tremulous when they drove away. Nor was Spandrell’s bungling with the mechanism of the unfamiliar car at all calculated to soothe his nerves. They had begun by backing violently into the wall at the end of the mews; and before he discovered the secret of the gears, Spandrell twice inadvertently stopped the engine. He relieved his irritation by a few curses and laughed. But to Illidge these little mishaps, entailing as they did a minute’s delay in escaping from that horrible and accursed place, were catastrophes. His terror, his anxious impatience became almost hysterical.

‘No, I can’t, I really can’t,’ he protested when Spandrell had told him that he must spend the evening at Tantamount House.

‘All the same,’ said the other, ‘you’re damned well going to,’ and he headed the car into the Mall. ‘I ‘1 drop you at the door.’

‘No, really!’

‘And if necessary kick you in.’

‘But I couldn’t stand being there, I couldn’t stand it.’

‘This is an extremely nice car,’ said Spandrell pointedly changing the subject.’delightful to drive.’

‘I couldn’t stand it,’ Illidge whimperingly repeated.

‘I believe the makers guarantee a hundred miles an hour on the track.’

They turned up past St. James’s Palace into Pall Mall.

‘Here you are,’ said Spandrell, drawing up at the kerb. Obediently, Illidge got out, crossed the pavement, climbed the steps and rang the bell. Spandrell waited till the door had closed behind him, then drove on into St. James’s Square. Twenty or thirty cars were parked round the central gardens. He backed in among them, stopped the engine, got out and walked up to Piccadilly Circus. A penny’bus-ride took him to the top of the Charing Cross Road. The trees of Soho Square shone green in the lamplight at the end of the narrow lane between the factory buildings. Two minutes later he was at Sbisa’s, apologizing to Burlap and Rampion for being so late.



‘Ah, here you are,’ said Lord Edward.’so glad you’ve come.’

Illidge mumbled vague apologies for not having come sooner. An appointment with a man. About business. But suppose, he wondered in terror while he spoke, suppose Lord Edward should ask what man, what business? He wouldn’t know what to answer; he would utterly break down. But the Old Man seemed not even to have heard his excuses.

‘Afraid I must ask you to do a little arithmetic for me,’ he said in his deep blurred voice. Lord Edward had made himself a tolerably good mathematician; but ‘sums’ had always been beyond his powers. He had never been able to multiply correctly. And as for long division—it was fifty years since he had even attempted it. ‘I’ve got the figures here.’ He tapped the notebook that lay open in front of him on the desk. ‘It’s for the chapter on phosphorus. Human interference with the cycle. How much P2 05 did we find out was dispersed into the sea in sewage?’ He turned a page. ‘Four hundred thousand tons. That was it. Practically irrecoverable. Just thrown away. Then there’s the stupid way we deal with cadavers. Three-quarters of a kilo of phosphorus pentoxide in every body. Restored to the earth, you may say.’ Lord Edward was ready to admit every excuse, to anticipate, that he might rebut, every shift of advocacy. ‘But how inadequately!’ he swept the excuses away, he blew the special pleaders to bits. ‘Huddling bodies together in cemeteries! How can you expect the phosphorus to get distributed? It finds its way back to the life cycle in time, no doubt. But for our purposes it’s lost. Taken out of currency. Now, given three-quarters of a kilo of P2 05. for every cadaver and a world population of eighteen hundred millions and an average deathrate of twenty per thousand, what’s the total quantity restored every year to the earth? You can do sums, my dear Illidge. I leave it to you.’ Illidge sat in silence, shielding his face with his hand. ‘But then one has to remember,’ the Old Man continued, ‘ that there are a lot of people who dispose of the dead more sensibly than we do. It’s really only among the white races that the phosphorus is taken out of circulation. Other people don’t have necropolises and watertight coffins and brick vaults. The only people more wasteful than we are the Indians. Burning bodies and throwing the ashes into rivers! But the Indians are stupid about everything. The way they burn all the cow-dung instead of putting it back on the land. And then they’re surprised that half the population hasn’t enough to eat. We shall have to make a separate calculation about the Indians. I haven’t got the figures, though. But meanwhile will you work out the grand total for the world? And another, if you don’t mind, for the white races. I’ve got a list of the populations here somewhere. And, of course, the deathrate will be lower than the average for the whole world, at any rate in Western Europe and America. Would you like to sit here? There’s room at this end of the table.’ He cleared a space. ‘And here’s paper. And this is quite a decent pen.’

‘Do you mind,’ said Illidge faintly, ‘if I lie down for a minute. I’m not feeling well.’