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That Mr Eliot, thus circumstanced and thus inclined, should have invented the Spider in order to provide schooling for his son is something on which he himself probably came to look back with a good deal of perplexity. Partly it was due to that realistic turn of mind which made him a tolerably competent gentleman farmer. A sum of money was required; literature might provide it; so Mr Eliot sat down and read Anthony Trollope’s
Autobiography
, that textbook of the economics of authorship. He then reflected on the numbers of people who read old-established magazines in quiet clubs and compared them with the numbers of people who have to read what is readily readable in noisy tubes and buses. From these reflections emerged the Spider.

But there was more to it than this. Had the Spider been merely an economic expedient Mr Eliot, who was not venal, would never have called him forth from the night of his forebeing. The truth is that to his realism Mr Eliot united a restless fancy, and to his mature if rather ineffective literary culture a juvenile taste for vicarious romantic adventure. In devising the highly improbable adventures of the Spider he was weaving his own magic carpet. At the outset nobody enjoyed these adventures more keenly than their inventor. His imagination was of the refrigerating sort from which the fantasies of boyhood can step with convincing freshness; and it was this quality, no doubt, that made the stories the instant and almost embarrassing success that they were. Nor at first was Mr Eliot’s bookishness a handicap. Rather it helped him to a useful critical control of the magic carpet, so that his contraptions of the sort flow straighter and cleaner than most. And it gave him from the start a good deal of craft.He had pondered
Gulliver’s Travels
and knew that the best way to pass off an improbability is to set another improbability hard up against it. He knew that literature is naturally divided into ‘kinds’, which the writer mixes at his peril. The early Spiders kept carefully within their own ‘kind’.

And they were a success. A fatal moment came when Mr Eliot ought to have stopped – and didn’t. After that there was no stopping. An adjoining estate came into the market and he bought it. It ate money. So did various indigent relations, including a couple of disreputable cousins whom the good news brought hurrying home from the colonies. And soon on the continued activities of the Spider a score of remoter livelihoods came to hang. There was the old lady who dramatized and the young man who did the films; there was the American agent who had contrived to marry Mr Eliot’s niece; there was the little staff at Mr Eliot’s publishers which ran the absurd and irritatingly successful Spider Club; there was an amusing Jew who called himself Helmuth somebody and did translations into German, and there was the same Jew calling himself André something else and doing translations into French. For a time there were even three young women in Chelsea who proposed to paint the Spider, together with Sherlock Holmes and kindred notabilities, on crockery designed for the modern home – but at this Mr Eliot rebelled, and by buying back these particular ‘rights’ for an exorbitant sum nipped the nascent industry in the bud.

For years, then, the Spider contributed to the gaiety of nations. But Mr Eliot, who had been brought up to believe that life should be earnest as well as gay and sober as well as fantastic, became more and more uneasy at the increasing demands which the Spider made upon his energies. For months on end he was obliged to submerge himself wholly amid such absurdities and improbabilities as are agreeable to a well-balanced man only on an occasional lazy evening by the fire. It was rather like living out one’s span of days in a cinema or through an unintermitted succession of dramas. And whenever he proposed to emerge or wake up he knew that the old lady who dramatized and all the other servants whom the Spider had gathered about himself trembled for their bread – or at least for their cake. Mr Eliot, who was kind-hearted, liked to think that there was cake all round; in a way it made up for his disappointment over Timothy. For Timothy had not gone to Eton after all. A precocious interest in educational theory, coupled with an equally precocious strength of will, had taken him to a modest co-educational school such as his father might very well have afforded without once setting pen to paper. So Mr Eliot had to comfort himself with the thought that his activities brought unexpected prosperity to a number of indifferently deserving people. But he came, it was believed, to feel positively uncomfortable about his creation.

The decidedly protean character of the Spider was no doubt due to this uncomfortableness. There would come a point at which Mr Eliot could no longer contemplate the Spider as he was – whereupon there had to be a change. These changes, each of which had thrown Mr Eliot’s publishers into a sub-acute agony, were by a strange fatality always overwhelmingly successful. Kindly reviewers spoke of the progressively revealed complexity, the subtle maturing of the Spider’s character, and when he finally came over wholeheartedly to the side of law and order his conversion was the subject of approving comment from more than one distinguished pulpit. Mr Eliot himself, as the Spider pursued malefactors dramatically about the globe, had for a time the illusory sense of being the henchman of a sort of cosmic police.

Novelists have often recorded the almost uncanny way in which their everyday life has come to be influenced by their own creations. The beings of a writer’s imagination are said to throng and press about him and even to impose for a time their own fictitious personalities upon the real personality of their creator. And it may be supposed that when a writer makes of a single character a companion for life and experiences in his company a series of adventures terminable only by death he may come to he haunted by this single dominating creation in an extraordinary way. Perhaps this happened to Mr Eliot. It is certain that in the Spider’s final phase the Spider and Mr Eliot became a little mixed up. There was a disconcerting novel in which a good deal turned upon the Spider’s habit – hitherto unknown to his admirers – of writing stories about tigers and fakirs. And there was an increasing element not only of literary allusiveness in the badinage between the Spider and his friend the engineer but of realistic and unromantic matter on the problems of English land-owners and the condition of English rural society. Against these hazardous trends more than one interested party held complicated and costly insurance policies.

More and more, in fact, Mr Eliot and his interests seemed to be creeping into the world of the Spider. Was the Spider, the curious speculated, creeping correspondingly into the world of Mr Eliot? Mr Eliot’s own opinions were unknown. Probably he was undisturbed; it is noteworthy that none of his acquaintances had thought of him as a nervously unbalanced man. Nevertheless his acquaintances, observing that he no longer came up for the Royal Academy or even the Eton and Harrow match, suspected that all was not well with him; a few believed that he had conceived for the wearisome Spider something not unlike a mild obsessive hatred.

This was the situation when the thing happened.

Rust Hall

It was a November evening in Oxford and the air was stagnant, raw, and insidiously chill. Vapours – half-hearted ghosts on the verge of visibility – played desultory acoustic tricks about the city, like bored technicians flicking to and fro the sound screens in a radio studio. A wafer of eaten stone, loosened by a last infinitesimal charge of condensing acid, would slither to the ground with disconcerting resonance. The masons’ mallets, making good in random patches centuries of such mellow decay, tapped like so many tiny typewriters in an engulfing silence. The sky, a sheet of lead rapidly oxidizing, was fading through glaucous tones to cinereous; lights were furred about their edges; in the gathering twilight Gothic and Tudor, Palladian and Venetian melted into an architecture of dreams. And the hovering vapours, as if taking heart of darkness, glided in increasing concentration by walls and buttresses – like the first inheritors of the place, robed and cowled, returning to take possession with the night.

‘
Webster!
’

The young man who had turned so abruptly out of the porter’s lodge ignored the call. He had an athletic figure of the slimmer sort, disproportionately attired. Round his neck were accumulated a sweater, a towel, a blazer, and a large muffler; below this level he wore nothing but a pair of shoes, and diminutive shorts cut in the faith that the squatting position is the only one known to man. This peg-top appearance is common in those who have just come off the river, and there was nothing out of the way about the young man except the haste which had suddenly possessed him. As if the ghosts had verily appeared to him, he ran. Ignoring another friend’s call, he charged across the college lawn – a route which would have cost him five shillings had a traditionally minded don observed him – tripped over the college tortoise, recovered, skilfully swerved round an advancing tray of crumpets and anchovy-toast, dodged through a narrow archway and pounded up a dark and ancient staircase. A dim person, whom the youth hailed as Webster had long believed to be a kitchen-man but who was in point of fact the Regius Professor of Eschatology, stood politely aside to let him pass; he took the last treads at a bound, thumped at a door, pitched himself precipitately through it, and collapsed into a wickerwork chair – a chair, like his shorts, moulded to a theory: this time that man sits not, but either curls or sprawls.

Gerald Winter, the don who owned the room, surveyed his panting visitor, enunciated with simple irony the words, ‘Come in’, and helped himself to a muffin from a dish by the fire. Then, resigning himself to the exercise of hospitality, he said, ‘Muffin.’

The young man took half a muffin. Presently he scrambled up the back of the chair and reached himself a cup and saucer. ‘I’m frightfully sorry’, he murmured conventionally as he poured out tea, ‘to burst in.’ He jumped up and foraged three lumps of sugar. One he ate and the others he dropped with a splash in his cup. And then he sat down again, looked warily at his host and fidgeted. ‘Frightfully sorry,’ he repeated inanely and vaguely. He was a young man with a firm mouth and a resolute chin.

Winter made a movement after the kettle that concealed a scrutiny of his guest. ‘My good Timmy,’ he said – for it was only Timothy Eliot’s closest friends who were privileged to call him Webster; and Winter, who was merely his tutor, was not of this degree of intimacy – ‘My good Timmy, not at all.’ He began to fill his pipe, which was a ritual indicating a mood of sympathetic leisure. He was by no means attached to the role of confidential adviser to the young; nevertheless this job frequently fell to him. Troubles material and spiritual came regularly up his staircase, sometimes at a resistless bound, sometimes with the most dubious pauses landing by landing. The Professor of Eschatology had formed the conclusion that Winter was a sinisterly sociable person. Actually Winter was rather shy and when he heard these characteristic approaches he frequently took refuge on the roof. But Timothy Eliot had caught him and now he said briefly: ‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s the Spider.’

Winter looked gloomy. If there was anything tedious about Timmy it was a chronic sensitiveness about this harmless invention of his father’s. Since coming up to Oxford Timmy had been constrained to endure a good deal of fun about the Spider, for it is a characteristic of undergraduates to revive kinds of humour in abeyance since they left their private schools. There was, for instance, the amusement of addressing Timmy out of what was called Webster’s Dictionary: which meant weaving into conversation – if possible undetected – phrases from the earlier and more picturesque conversation of Mr Eliot’s hero. And there was the solemn assumption that Timmy himself was the author of the books, this being an ingenious way of avoiding the impropriety of making direct fun of a man’s parent. The jokes about Webster Eliot were judiciously intermittent – to harp on them would have been boorish – but Timmy, while playing up to them amiably enough, was reputed at times to brood over the curious family industry which was the occasion of them. So now Winter sighed and said dryly: ‘Oh, that.’ He felt that he was unlikely to be helpful about the Spider.

But Timmy shook his head. ‘It’s not’, he said, ‘just the old quiet fun. It’s something queer at home. Something – well – that seems to be happening to daddy.’

To Winter Mr Eliot the elder was not much more than a name and an odd reputation. He thought it sufficient therefore to indicate conventional concern. ‘Happening?’ he murmured.

‘Doomed to the bin.’

‘Doomed to the bin – the Spider? You mean he’s being scrapped?’

‘Not the Spider, daddy. And I mean he seems to be going gently off his rocker. Taking something to heart. I don’t know quite what to do about it. Awkward thing in a family.
I
thought you might think of something.’ And Timmy, with a fragment of muffin he had reserved for the purpose, began mopping up the surplus butter in the muffin dish. He did it in jabs that echoed the jerky sentences.

There was a little silence. A bus rumbled down the High and Winter’s windows rattled angrily; from the quad below floated up the voices of hearty men discussing a football practice. Winter straightened himself, feeling that somnolescence was no longer decent. ‘The facts,’ he said.

‘Very simple. He thinks the Spider has come alive.’

‘Come alive?’ Experience with undergraduate predicaments did not prevent Winter feeling uncomfortable.

‘Just that. Pygmalion and Galatea situation. The beloved marble stirs and lives. Only daddy doesn’t greatly love the Spider.’

Winter looked at his pupil suspiciously. ‘What – if anything – has actually happened?’

‘A joke – put across by some precious ass on daddy. And it’s been too dam’ successful.’ Timmy pushed the empty muffin dish away ungratefully. ‘Doomed to the bin,’ he repeated and seemed to find comfort in this succinct statement of the worst.