Appleby Talks Again (9 page)

Our hostess was enchanted – as it was her business to be. “Judith – what a wonderful idea! But is it a
good
competition? I hate the stodgy ones – composing sonnets and
villanelles
. Is it last words? I do adore making up last words for people. Bishop, have you ever tried?”

“Not, dear lady, precisely in the sense we are considering.” The Bishop rose and moved implacably forward with his cup. “But I make no objection to the pastime – provided it is not massively exploited for purposes of edification, that is to say… Thank you – two lumps.”

“There was such a good one only a few weeks ago. Attributed to King Charles the Second – or was it King Charles the First? That he must apologise for being such a long time in dying.”

“Most felicitous.” The Bishop offered this comment with gravity, and then turned to Lady Appleby. “But
is
it last words?”

“Not last words – just words. Three enigmatical remarks, accidentally overheard. Elucidations are not required.”

There was a pause on this, and I was myself the first person who was prompted to speak. “I think I can supply one straight away. I was once called up on the telephone, rather late at night, by a man’s voice announcing, in considerable agitation, that Queen Anne was dead. But he had got the wrong number, and rang off. I never knew what it was about.”

I cannot claim that my little anecdote was a great success. Somebody at once pointed out that the truly enigmatical was lacking to it, since what I had accidentally received was plainly urgent intelligence from a kennel or a stable. Oddly enough, this had never occurred to me, and I have to confess that I was a little discomfited. The Bishop I think observed this, and charitably took up the ball.

“There are undoubtedly some snatches of talk which will recur to one teasingly for years. Some of you perhaps knew Charles Whitwell, who was reckoned a barrister of rare promise before his tragic death? We belonged to the same club, an on the occasion which I am recalling I happened to pass close to him in the dining-room when he was entertaining a guest – someone quite unknown to me. And I heard Whitwell utter just four words. I believe they might qualify very well for Lady Appleby’s competition. They were these: ‘Grey’s ghost was black’.”

There was a moment’s silence while we absorbed this – and then our hostess reacted with characteristic dash. “But, my dear Bishop, how marvellously odd! Grey’s ghost was black! Did you ever find out what it meant?”

“Never. I had it in mind, indeed, to ask Whitwell one day. I knew him quite well enough to do so. But then, of course, he was killed in the Alps. His guest I never saw again – nor could I very well have tackled him if I had. So there it is: Grey’s ghost was black.”

“I think it had something to do with heredity.” Lady Appleby offered this odd opinion with every appearance of confidence. “Mendelian theory, and so on. Grey’s parents had come from either side of the colour bar. And Grey himself was white. But Grey’s
ghost
inclined to the other side of the family, and so was black.”

“It
might
be heredity. But I think it was trade unions.” As our hostess made this strange announcement she looked brightly and largely round. “Strikes, you know. That sort of thing.”

“Strikes?” I said. “Trade unions? I don’t follow that at all.”

“If you are a worker and go against the other workers, aren’t you declared black? I’m sure there’s some such phrase. Well, as a ghost, Grey had done the wrong thing – worked too long hours, or something of that sort. And so he was black.”

There was some laughter at this – I am bound to confess that I myself thought it uncommonly silly – and then the Bishop made a suggestion. “These are rather complicated notions. My own guess is much simpler. Poor Grey had either been strangled or burnt to a cinder. Or perhaps he had been involved in amateur theatricals – say as Othello – at the time of his sudden death. And so his ghost–”

This received general acclamation, in which the speaker’s concluding words were drowned. A bishop, as I have said, is a person of consequence in a modest establishment such as I was visiting. And now there was an unexpected contribution to the whole absurd discussion. It came from the Scotland Yard man – Sir John Appleby.

“These are all good speculations. But none of them, as it happens, is correct. I knew Whitwell, and I happen to know, too, the circumstances he was talking about. As a matter of fact, the Bishop was misled by only
hearing
the remark.”

This seemed to me nonsense. “By only hearing it? I don’t see what difference–”

“He missed the presence – well, of another capital letter. Black ought to be given one, as well as Grey. Grey’s ghost was
Black
.”

It took me a moment to make any sense of this. “You mean,” I presently asked, “that Whitwell was really saying something like ‘Robinson’s ghost was Smith’?”

Appleby nodded. “Just that.”

“Then it appears to me to be quite meaningless.”

Appleby smiled. “It depends on what you mean by a ghost.”

It was plain that the man intended to tell us a story. From his wife’s expression, I guessed that it would probably be of rather a tall order. Whether I was right in this, my readers must judge. I shall simply set down Appleby’s words, as well as I can remember them.

“Ghosts – the sort with which, at least in the first instance, I am concerned – appear to be rather unfashionable. One can see why. The cinema and broadcasting and television have all tended to cut down people’s reading time, and we no longer call for a prodigious literary output even from very popular writers. Ghost-writers, therefore, don’t much flourish except in a few specialised fields. For instance, there is still a small class of persons who believe that their own social or public eminence makes it incumbent upon them to commemorate their activities and persuasions in a book, but who are a little vague about how actually to put the bally thing together. For these to hire some smart fellow with the trick of scribbling is an obvious and quite innocent resource; and there are certainly a few ghosts who are always available for that sort of thing.

“But Grey’s ghost was different. He was much closer to the old-fashioned article, employed to amplify the output of a professional author. And yet – at least at the start – he wasn’t quite simply that, either. He was called in, one might say, as a specialist. If Grey hadn’t begun life as a painter, I doubt whether the notion of his ghost would ever have come to him. For it is the history of painting, of course, that is full of little specialists – dab hands at this or that – being called in to do their stuff in one or another appropriate corner of the canvas.

“I see that some of you have now taken a guess about Grey. And you are quite right. It is Hugo Grey that I am talking about – the powerful and sombre rural novelist who died a good many years ago. By that time, it is true, he had pretty well ceased to be either rural, sombre, or even particularly powerful. But to this I shall presently come.

“Grey’s father, as you will no doubt recall, had been a Cumberland shepherd – as indeed all his ancestors had been since long before the poet Wordsworth took to celebrating the monolithic simplicity of that sort of person. Grey himself had monolithic simplicity, and his greatest characters and conceptions – to put it mildly – weren’t exactly noted for their complexity. But decidedly his people were above life-size; his secret, as his great admirer Sir Edmund Gosse said, was to give epic proportions to the figures of a pastoral world. That – and perhaps their dark strain of primitive superstition – gave his books their striking individuality. What the younger critics have to say about Grey now I don’t at all know. But in those days his rural folk were compared with Thomas Hardy’s and George Eliot’s. Learned persons earned grateful guineas by comparing his works with the
Dorfgeschichten
of Gottfried Keller. There was no doubt that Grey was going to be an immortal.

“It was doubtless the beautiful directness and simplicity of his mind that led him to hire Black. He read in the reviews, you see, that his peasants were superb, but that he couldn’t do the gentry. Perhaps in that case he ought to have done without them. But Grey’s plots were always thoroughly old fashioned contrivances – it was one of the impressive facts about them that the rust positively flaked off his contraptions as the wheels went creaking round – and he always needed at least one gentleman, preferably a baronet, for such matters as seducing shepherds’ daughters, foreclosing mortgages, destroying wills, and so on. And the reviewers would declare to a man that these patricians were intolerably wooden.

“Well now, when the patrons, say, of a seventeenth-century Dutch painter declared his cows to be so good that you could hardly restrain yourself from reaching for a milking-pail but his dogs to be such feeble inventions that nobody would think to heave a brick at them, the painter – as I’ve remarked – simply called in a good dog-man from round the corner. Grey called in Black.

“I doubt whether Walter Black’s name will suggest much to any of you. He had begun life in some quite obscure and humble way on the stage. His personality appeared insignificant and perhaps rather effeminate, and it was said to be in an effort to mask this that he wore his large black beard. But Black could write, and he had a flair for polite life. He became a novelist – not perhaps very widely known, but greatly admired by a few for his polished, witty, sophisticated creation. His range was undoubtedly narrow, and it was notorious that his imagination never moved outside Mayfair. Yet there was no question of the purity of his small, carefully husbanded talent. He was always very hard up, and Hugo Grey was probably actuated by genuine benevolence as well as by his own large simple astuteness when he made the arrangement he did. It was not suggested that there was to be anything in the nature of collaboration in a substantial sense. Black was simply to do whatever aristocratic or highly cultivated characters the conduct of Grey’s plots required from time to time.

“The arrangement worked very well. The baronets and so forth in Grey’s novels became full of life – you might say of really authentic baronial devil and
savoir vivre
– and people who felt they were in the know remarked how wonderfully Grey was assimilating the ways of that higher sort of society to which his literary eminence had gained his admittance.

“Then something rather odd began to happen. I expect several of you can recall it. The baronets took to spreading themselves over more and more of the picture, and carrying their own world – which was of course Walter Black’s elected world – with them. For a time Grey’s novels were panoramic representations of English society, the polite and rustic components being mingled about fifty-fifty. Readers were enthusiastic. Professors gave lectures explaining that the English novel had at last recovered the breadth and amplitude of its glorious past.

“In the next few years the balance swung further, and Grey’s rural scenes, although still wonderfully realised, became a progressively minor feature of the books. This was a gradual process. But at last something quite sudden and definitive occurred. Grey published
Storied Urns
. It was in many ways a brilliant novel, and some people maintained that the portrait of the old marquis was the most striking thing the author had done. But almost equally notable was something about the few rustic personages who lurked in corners of the story. They were universally described as completely wooden.”

Appleby paused on this, and somebody made the not very penetrating remark that it was a case of the wheel having come full circle. And the Bishop interrupted some stout work with his teaspoon to put a question. “It was simply that Grey had been growing increasingly lazy?”

Appleby nodded. “I think it was largely that. No doubt he had been paying Black at so much a line, and it was to Black’s advantage to contribute as much as he was let. Grey found that books maintained their popularity with more and more of Black in them, and that his own profits were not seriously diminished by setting Black to do a heavier share of the work.”

“Until Grey was really the dog-man himself?” Our hostess offered this with a great air of vivacious intelligence.

“Precisely. He just wrote in his rustics here and there. Eventually, of course, he grew reckless, and didn’t bother himself even to do that. The Hugo Grey novels had become, in the old-fashioned sense, one hundred per cent ghost-writing.”

“Surely,” I asked, “that was extraordinarily immoral – and even positively fraudulent?”

Appleby shook his head. “That, I think, is where the Bishop’s friend Whitwell came in. His opinion was sought – and sought by Black. Black had been a party to what, book by book, was without doubt increasingly a deception. But Black felt that he had been ill-used and that he ought to have some redress. The novels were now all his own, but he had to take for them pretty well what Grey chose to give.”

This time it was Lady Appleby who broke in. “But couldn’t Black simply have started again under his own name?”

“That course was open to him, no doubt. But his own name had dropped into oblivion by this time, and he may have felt that a fresh start was something too formidable to face. He appears not to have been a strong character. Whitwell gave it as his opinion, I imagine, that Black had with full awareness got himself into a mess, that the legal position was quite obscure, and that public reaction to any disclosure could decidedly not be to the advantage of either writer. Black was so disgusted that he shook the dust of England off his feet. That is to say, he collected what may have been his last few hundred pounds from the bank, and went off on one of those aimless cruises that were so fashionable at that time. And the next thing anybody heard about him was that he was dead.”

We were all rather startled by this. The Bishop even checked himself in reaching for another lump of sugar. “I hope,” he said, “that there was no question of–?”

“It was all quite obscure, and I don’t think there was anybody – except conceivably Grey – who was interested. But, of course, we are by no means finished with Walter Black yet.”