Stop Press (37 page)

Appleby had become a policeman long before the honourable calling of Dogberry and Verges had entered in England on its gentlemanlike phase. He liked to feel – specialist in a key place though he had become – that the simplicities of his craft remained within his command. He liked to feel that if stood up in a lavender tie to guard a table of wedding-presents those presents would be as safe as in a vault; that if he were employed as bodyguard to a sinful public person that public person might forget his sins. And he liked to think now that Mr Eliot was safer than he knew. Only the job took more vigilance than a man with an abstract problem could readily spare.

He could never decide whether it was indeed surprising that, with this double task upon him, he remembered so much of what Winter had to say on art.

‘Miss Cavey and I’, said Winter, ‘are endeavouring to define the nature of bad art. And we have thought it necessary to begin with some definition of art itself. It was said by Proust that the pleasure the artist gives is that of enabling us to know another universe. Art is the construction of another universe. I know you will all think it very interesting that Miss Cavey agrees with Proust.’

Winter presumably found the prospect of the approaching revels more tiresome than any number of manisfestations by the Spider. He had collected a little audience and was conversing with that air of personal shyness and intellectual audacity which his kind affect. Miss Cavey, who had recovered from her distrust of the morning and who was keyed up to the limelight presently to fall on her in the theatre, nodded with unnerving intensity. ‘Yes,’ she said with finality, ‘Proust is right.’

‘Miss Cavey’, continued Winter innocently, ‘is an authority on our topic, and the debate is all hers. But I would remark that it is easy, following our first definition, to remark what is
not
art. The artist does not enable us to know
this
universe. Documentation is not art; reporting is not art, however accurate and devoted. Were Miss Cavey herself to return from her studies of the rural temperament and simply transfer her experiences to paper the result would be very far from art. To achieve art, other forces have to come into play.’

‘There is’, said Miss Cavey, clasping her hands happily over her stomach, ‘the
spiritual
side.’

‘Exactly,’ said Winter – and folded his hands with unobtrusive wickedness in the same way. ‘There is the shaping power; the esenoplastic power; the esemplastic power, as the shaky scholarship of Coleridge called it.’ At this abysmal professional wallow the audience perceptibly thinned; Appleby, for whom Winter’s disquisitions had a curious fascination, was one of those who lingered. ‘Our mere experience is not art. And yet, again in the aphorism of Proust, the Muses are the daughters of Memory, and there is no art without recollection. But – and here is the point –
inaccurate
recollection. Miss Cavey recollects her experiences with the rustics, but recollects them – and how thankful we must be! – with the divine inaccuracy of the artist. It is this that makes her books so
rum
, so distinctly unlike anything this universe can offer. And that is the hallmark of art – which we may define, approximately in the words of Wordsworth, as commotion misrecollected in tranquillity. Now,
bad
art–’

Appleby sacrificed the opportunity of learning about bad art to a dash after Dr Chown, whom he had noticed in isolation at the other end of the room. From Winter’s lecture he departed not uninstructed. Miss Cavey had been baited sufficiently for one day and this added mockery was a little less than decent; it was the product of frayed nerves and prosecuted by someone whose sense of decorum faltered with his sense of security. One other person at least in the party – and an intelligent one at that – was looking forward with some uneasiness to the onset of night. Appleby guessed that Winter would be talking more persistently at nine than at eight and more wildly at eleven than at ten.

Casually he approached Chown. ‘Does the academic mind’, he asked – and because Winter had been dominating the room the allusion was clear – ‘work most fluently when scared and apprehensive?’

‘The intelligence, my dear Mr Appleby, is commonly more fertile when under emotional stir. But different emotional states stimulate specific intellectual responses. Take an acute sense of danger.’ Chown, already mellowed by his first glass of Amontillado, was prepared to be affable, instructive, and scarcely less voluble than Winter. ‘Our good friend over there is talking nonsense about the divinely inaccurate memory of art. He might more sensibly speak of the miraculously extended memory of funk.’

‘The drowning man?’

‘Quite so. The notion that a drowning man passes his whole life in review is substantially correct; many instances have been collected of men in acute danger reliving the past with extraordinary intensity and sense of detail. That is an instance of the mind working more fluently – if in a passive mode – when scared. The power of more active thought, however, is stimulated less by apprehension than by anger. In difficult and intricate situations one is commonly urged to keep one’s temper. But that is the talk of ignorant schoolmasters; nothing actually could be more fallacious.’ Chown eyed Appleby with the benign severity of the man who knows. ‘One will always solve an intellectual problem more readily if one can get really angry over it. This is something we have put through the laboratory. It has been proved.’

Like telepathy, Appleby thought – and let his eye and ear stray to Mr Eliot near by. Mr Eliot was explaining to the unsuccessful Gib Overall that good baconers should have length, depth, and strong backs inclined to be roached. Overall, in his melancholy way, looked distinctly as if he were preparing to adopt Chown’s receipt for successful intellectual endeavour. Farther away, Miss Cavey was passing once more from complacency through suspicion to distrust. Consciously and unconsciously, the party was developing its power of annoyance. Feeling that he might take licence from this to deliver a frontal attack, Appleby said abruptly, ‘The various hypnotic states – what is their effect on memory?’

Chown indicated by a slight frown his sense that the other’s conversation verged on badgering. ‘Under hypnotic control we can recover a great deal. Birthdays, for example. Do you remember anything of your tenth birthday?’

‘I don’t think I remember the circumstances of any birthday before my twenty-first.’

‘Quite so – but only because you are in a normal waking state. Under hypnotic influence you could be persuaded to remember something for your twentieth. And then – though the process is uncertain and laborious – we could work back year by year. Memories of a second birthday have been recovered in that way frequently enough, and sometimes memories of a first. Some practitioners of medical hypnotism claim even to have got back to intra-uterine memories. But that’ – Chown shook a responsible and conservative head – ‘is disputable.’

‘Does the subject continue to remember about the birthdays when he has emerged from the hypnosis? Does he remember anything at all of what has occurred while he has been hypnotized?’

Dr Chown put down his glass. ‘My dear sir,’ he said with suave finality, ‘this is an intricate subject. One day perhaps – if you are really interested – you will let me have the pleasure of recommending a few books.’

‘Books, Dr Chown?’

The question, obscurely pregnant, hung for a moment in air – where Chown seemed to contemplate it challengingly. ‘There are several,’ he said – and with a civil murmur moved away.

Appleby stared for a moment in his own empty glass. It was interesting. Everything – even Gerald Winter on
The Moonstone
or on art – was interesting if one hearkened in the right way. He turned round. Miss Cavey had retired to a corner and was holding a small indignation meeting of supporters. Winter had transferred his attentions to Peter Holme. Kermode, planted in the middle of the room, appeared to be anatomizing his host to Mrs Moule in terms that turned her pale with rage. Timmy Eliot was behaving badly to Toplady: there had been an awful quarrel, it was said, in a cupboard during the fateful game the evening before. On this – and much else – were superimposed the mounting anticipation and the rather uneasy corporate feeling of the party. Only Mr Eliot was a centre of calm. This was simply another of the Spider’s parties; many of the guests were the Spider’s children; he himself sustained a benevolent grandfatherly role. Appleby watched and had to fight an unprofitable sense that the Spider – the Spider who had crept from the manuscripts – was in control; that although the clarinet and the stick were silent and no more incidents had occurred the party yet moved to a plan. He glanced at his watch. Exactly twenty-four hours before he had pushed open a window and presented himself in the darkness to these same people eddying about him now. In the interval had he learnt enough? And what had Winter learnt?

Winter – he discovered by recrossing the room – had learnt of Holme’s physical exercises; he was making the control of the abdomen the occasion for a sort of anthropological fantasy. The exercises sprang from a widespread philosophical fallacy – the romantic fallacy. Holme tinkered with his tummy because of an irrational belief in the superiority of primitive man; he was attempting to replace a civilized inside by a savage one. At the best it was an illogical half-measure; there was no evidence whatever that primitive man had been healthier than his civilized descendant. It was a different matter, now, with the apes. There was considerable scientific backing for the view that when man first stood upright he gave his physical frame a jar from which it never recovered. In this business of posture and the tummy the motto should be not back to primitive man but back to the lemurs, apes, and opossums. It would look well on the stage; if a modern-dress
Hamlet
why not a simian one? Why not a baboon-like Othello, a spider-monkey of a Spider?

Winter, as Appleby had predicted to himself, was talking more wildly. He was also talking better; this performance had speed, and the acute, deceptively vacuous Holme was brisker game. Nevertheless, Appleby took Winter by the arm and led him aside. ‘My dear man,’ he said candidly, ‘you won’t do. As a vocal turn, yes; as a detective, distinctly not. Come outside.’

They pushed open a window and stepped into the chill darkness of the terrace. For a second they could see nothing; then they simultaneously exclaimed. Nature, so profoundly uninteresting during the past thirty-six hours, had played a spectacular trick. With a speed which was matter for meteorological curiosity the rain had given place to snow, and the snow was beginning to lie on the ground. The terrace under a few scattered lights was like a half-finished Christmas card. ‘It seems to me’, said Winter, ‘all part of the plan. Was Folly Hall surrounded by snow in
Murder at Midnight
? You may bet it was.’

‘The plan?’ It was as if the word had started an echo.

Winter moved impatiently in the shadows. ‘Isn’t something going forward? Do you think those clocks stuck and struck for nothing? I wish I’d never come near this corner of England. I’m scared, and being scared is wanton waste of nervous energy.’ There was the spurt of a match as he lit a cigarette. ‘You and I keep on having conferences. Is it necessary to that progress you’re making that we should hold another in a snowstorm?’

‘I thought we might exchange ideas. But you certainly are scared; does it always take you in chat? And why just you? The party is all right; it’s losing its temper a bit, but not its nerve. I can’t see much of last night’s jumpiness. Why just you?’

‘Perhaps because I’ve taken it into my head that all this is Eliot himself; something bowled him over and now he’s as mad as a hatter. I find it a horrid and haunting thought. Has the possibility struck you?’ Winter had gone back to the window and stood framed in faint light.

‘Indeed it has – and Eliot too. He’s offered me an up-to-date theory of his own imbecility, vetted by Chown. Incidentally I’ve talked to Chown and been snubbed for my pains. I have to report that I don’t see him as holding Eliot in semi-permanent hypnotic thrall. Chown isn’t any sort of villian; he’s just an out and out man of science.’

Winter laughed apologetically. ‘It was a silly theory and I shall think twice before offering another. But I will offer you a fact, or more strictly, Mrs Moule will. It looks’ – there was a shade of triumph in his voice – ‘like the crucial fact. Would you agree that the man who drugged Archie Eliot last night is the man we’re looking for?’

Appleby chuckled. ‘At this stage in a puzzle I never agree with anything. Still, it sounds all right.’

‘Well then’ – Winter was a shade impatient – ‘Archie drugged himself. Mrs Moule saw him.’

‘It’s nice that something’s been seen. The cloak of darkness that this joker can take on is beginning to worry me. Oh, excellent Moule.’

‘You don’t sound very impressed.’

‘I’m not.’

Snowflakes were falling between them; a moment’s silence was broken querulously by Winter. ‘But surely–’

‘It doesn’t much help.’ Appleby’s tone was both absent and decisive; it may even have been faintly mocking as well. ‘Mrs Moule must look again. So far, I repeat, we’ve all seen too little.’

‘If we stay here we shan’t see any dinner.’ Winter pitched his cigarette into darkness. ‘I wish I could think you are just a mystery-monger. I bring you decisive information; you make enigmatic noises of depreciation; and, sad to say, I am no end impressed.’

‘My dear man, don’t be impressed by me. Be impressed by the mind behind this foolery.’

‘Ought one to be impressed by foolery?’ Winter’s hunger seemed less keen than his instinct for debate.

‘I merely mean that, whatever it’s after, it’s a good mind. Any mind that can get clean away with a number of manoeuvres, however trivial or perverted, is a mind good in itself. And you yourself suspect a plan.’ Once more there was discreet amusement in Appleby’s voice. ‘I suspect that that’s the best bit of suspecting you’ve done so far.’

‘I’ve merely followed you in that.’