Stop Press (8 page)

There was a slightly awkward pause. It was terminated by the voice of Toplady. ‘Old Findon?’ he asked.

‘Cold Findon,’ said Timmy.

‘A tedious train,’ said Mr Eliot. But this time he spoke as if he meant it. He peered despondently through the window – a different being from the gentleman who had so childishly and delightedly eluded his guests. ‘How melancholy the winter landscape can be.’

Winter peered too. A cottage, a haystack chopped like a half- consumed loaf, an unstartled Jersey cow – these had as background bare fields cross-hatched with hedgerows and beyond them a gentle grassy swell – the fringes of downland country – crowned with a grove of oaks. And on the other side the face of nature stretched away in similar severe neutrality – waiting, Winter thought, for such as Mr Eliot to pump in something of their own changing chemistry. Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud.

‘I am interested’, said Mr Eliot, ‘in what you have been saying about writing. It reminds me of a passage in the third part of
Gulliver’s Travels
– the one filled with the pedants and people of barrenly ingenious mind.’ He paused to smile at Winter – evidently he was not guileless and continued in careful
résumé
. ‘You will remember the professor who had perfected a machine for improving speculative knowledge by practical and mechanical operations? It was an enormous mosaic of words; what you have called a whole human vocabulary. The professor’s pupil manipulated levers, the whole mosaic fell into a new order, and the result was noted down. In time the device was going to give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences. The satire, at its most obvious, is directed at the professor and his nonsensical invention. But it is meant, perhaps, to hit at the arts and sciences too – to hit, just as you have been so amusingly doing, at the whole business of writing. Writing is a matter of shoving the words about and might very well be done by a machine.’

Mr Eliot paused and for a moment looked doubtfully at Winter. Then his eye grew abstracted, searching some problematical territory in front of him. ‘Swift’, he said, ‘distrusted what he called vain babbling and mere sound of words. He distrusted the
Word
; perhaps he feared it.’

Toplady put down
The Times
– cautiously. Timmy, who had been fidgeting, was sitting very still.

‘Swift,’ said Mr Eliot, ‘the most rational of men, feared the Word because it is magical. He tried never to use it magically; only flatly, barely, rationally. But – because he understood as well as feared – the magic crowded in upon his writing. He shoved the words about and somewhere’ – Mr Eliot gestured diffidently – ‘another world acknowledged a fresh act of creation. Mr Winter: Lilliput and Brobdingnag – would you deny that they exist?’

The little train rattled sleepily but pertinaciously onwards; the engine whistled; from down the corridor came the subdued whine of a Birdwire dog. But within the compartment silence was absolute.

‘It is’, said Mr Eliot, ‘a metaphysical problem.’ He looked up quickly as if there was something encouraging in this reflection. ‘An interesting metaphysical problem. I remember a colleague of yours’ – he glanced at Winter – ‘a New College man and a most distinguished philosopher’ – he turned to the gravely attentive Toplady – ‘putting a very pretty question. Just what is the metaphysical status of a wild animal encountered in a dream? If the dream is vivid or terrifying then there is an obvious sense in which the creature in it is more
real
than any similar creature observed in the security of the zoo. And the same problem attaches to the creatures of the world of words as to the creatures of the world of dreams. What is their status?’

From the corridor came some casual sound. Winter found himself starting and glancing half-fearfully out. Fanciful talk in return for fanciful talk – only behind this talk of his host’s was the pressure of urgent thought. The Spider was indeed stirring, if only in his creator’s mind; was asserting himself as something mysteriously more and other than the sum of the words from which he had been built up. His footstep – less solid perhaps than a mortal’s, yet not heard by an inner ear alone – might even now be echoing down some farther corridor of the train; his eye might be bent curiously on Bussenschutt, be frowning at Mrs Birdwire’s dogs. Winter, who had no fancy for notions of this sort, found that he had to brace his mind to get rid of them.

‘Yesterday’, continued Mr Eliot, ‘I happened to see the porter at my club for the first time in nearly a year. What has he been doing in the interval? Nobody will doubt for a moment that he has been there at the club and going steadily about his job. But consider Iago or Mr Micawber, creatures incomparably more vital than our porter. What happens when I cease to think of
them
? I sometimes wonder–’ Mr Eliot broke off, appeared to take a long breath. ‘The problem is a teasing one and perhaps it is just as well that it is a metaphysical problem merely.’ He brought out his pipe again and stuffed it with what was to Winter a deliberately steady hand. ‘I mean that there is no practical problem; these different modes of being never collide. The real world into which we are given and the imaginative world to which our words can give: both perhaps are dreams and they flow, unmingling, side by side.’ He struck a match and the little spurt of flame lit up a face which was questioning and absorbed. ‘But what’, said Mr Eliot, ‘if, after all, there may come a point at which the two dreams cross?’

Once more the train jerked to a stop. With a shade of uncharacteristic fuss Timmy began handing his companions their possessions. ‘Rust,’ he said. ‘Let’s nip out before the Birdwire pack.’

Winter, who was grateful for the diversion, jammed on his hat and prepared for undignified haste. He was halted by the finger of Mr Eliot – an aerial and floating finger, raising itself with the suddenly renewed buoyancy of a submarine. ‘In these matters’, said Mr Eliot, ‘there is a technique to be observed.’ He smiled and – as if years had been ripped from him – the smile was Timmy’s. ‘In taxis one jumps in at one door and out at the other. From trains one gets off at the wrong side. And so one eludes – or, if one believes in English, dodges – pursuit. Such manoeuvres are perennially pleasing.’ He looked about the compartment. ‘Timmy, I can’t believe that you really needed to bring such a big suitcase. Winter and Toplady are going to have much less trouble.’ And Mr Eliot – the particular Mr Eliot, Winter felt, who was in charge at the moment – threw open the door beside him and dropped with confidence to the line. Toplady, not without one longing lingering look at the orthodoxy of corridor and platform behind, followed; Winter went next; Timmy stayed to hand down the luggage. In a minute they were all standing in a siding between some sacks of bone ash and a truck-load of pigs. Mr Eliot, on whom the scramble and the cold air – it may have been – had produced once more a delicate glow, inspected the pigs. ‘Gloucester Old Spots,’ he told Toplady; ‘probably my neighbour Gregory’s.’ He glanced round the siding. ‘I think we’ll make for Laslett’s barn.’ They trudged down the siding; from behind them a rising river of sound indicated that Mrs Birdwire and Lady Pike had begun to disembogue. ‘I’m sorry’, said Mr Eliot, ‘that it’s raining so hard.’

For quite suddenly it was raining very hard indeed. Winter hoped that Laslett’s barn was near at hand. His trousers were flapping wetly against his calves. He read commiseration as well as cautious amusement in the look of a young porter who was respectfully touching his cap to Mr Eliot’s curious procession. Toplady, he conjectured, was carrying on a parenthetical debate with himself as to whether he might usefully stop to put up his umbrella. Timmy had gripped his hat between his teeth and was experimenting with carrying his streaming suitcase on his head.

‘I myself’, said Mr Eliot, ‘prefer Lincolnshire Curly Coated.’ He took Toplady’s arm in a friendly way. ‘You will say at once that they are coarse in the bone, but I reply that they are exceptionally hardy and prolific. And in pigs at least’ – from under dripping eyebrows Mr Eliot glanced innocently at Winter – ‘to be prolific is to possess the ultimate virtue.’

They trudged on. The rain, driven by a veering wind, drifted about them in washes of grey, pattered on their hats, exploded on the rusty metals between which they were walking. Winter, changing his bag from one hand to the other, unwarily stubbed his chilled toes on a sleeper. ‘I usually advise the tenants’, said Mr Eliot, ‘to cross them with Large White. I think we had better climb under here. Be careful of the barbed wire. It is a dreadfully expensive kind and claims to have an extra spike. But most of them prefer Large Black. This is the barn. When the coast is clear we can send Timmy to reconnoitre and probably he will find that someone has come down with a car. How careless Laslett is with grain.’ Laslett’s carelessness, Winter guessed, was to be inferred from an immense flock of sparrows garrisoning the barn. The birds rose up in a cloud of dust and chaff and agitated droppings as they entered; a moment later they had vanished into the rain. ‘It seems rather hard to turn them out,’ said Mr Eliot. ‘But no doubt they will come back.’

Winter dumped his suitcase end up near the door, sat on it, and from this position contemplated his host anew. About twenty minutes before he had been entertaining for Mr Eliot sentiments of remorse and commiseration; now he noted that his attitude held something of the mild suspicion with which he was sometimes impelled to regard Mr Eliot’s son. The rural Mr Eliot – the Mr Eliot who bought barbed wire and held convictions on the nuptials of Gloucester Old Spots – had appeared with disconcerting promptness the moment the party touched earth – with something of the slick synchronization, indeed, of a refined manufacturing process. Behind this Mr Eliot there had been, momentarily, the Mr Eliot whose professional concern was with the devices of melodrama, and who was willing to indulge himself with a prank from his own stock-in-trade. And behind this again was the Mr Eliot on whom Timmy proposed to let loose Dr Herbert Chown: a Mr Eliot who was being led by untoward happenings to entertain disturbing notions on the relations of the imaginary and the actual. This, Winter reflected, was the interesting Mr Eliot, the embarrassing Mr Eliot, and conceivably the dangerous Mr Eliot as well. There had of course been a further Mr Eliot: the amiable antiquarian who was the proud father of Belinda. Perhaps there had been others who flitted by unnoticed; certainly there were too many Mr Eliots for comfort.

At this point Winter’s reflections were interrupted by an icy and spear-like sensation in the back; a moment later this resolved itself into a moist trickling down his spine. He glanced up at the roof and a further aggregation of raindrops caught him on the nose.

‘I am afraid’, said Mr Eliot, ‘that the roof leaks. When I come to think of it, Laslett has complained more than once. And I believe that I replied most dogmatically that the roof
couldn’t
leak. How liable one is to take up rash a-prioristic positions.’

Winter wondered if Laslett would get his roof repaired, or if Mr Eliot regarded the impact of experience as adequately met with a philosophic aphorism. He stood up and joined Toplady, who was peering through the door.

‘I think’, said Toplady, ‘that we must expect an unsettled weekend.’ He gave Winter a meaningful look which unflatteringly underlined the subtlety of this remark. Then he lowered his voice. ‘Ought we to have come? You know what I myself chiefly feel, and really at this particular moment as I have never done, is the sheer stretch of time between Friday’s luncheon and Monday’s breakfast.’

Winter looked at his watch. ‘Is there to be a Friday’s luncheon?’

‘If only we could arrive I should imagine a good one. Our friends don’t seem anywhere very much
à l’étroit
. I suppose all those books must have made something like a fortune. And that must so definitely add to the disconcertingness of the present situation, don’t you think? Imagine’ – said Toplady with real feeling – ‘uncanny things happening to one’s bonds and dividend warrants.’

‘I find it difficult enough to imagine uncanny things happening to Eliot’s manuscripts. It wouldn’t surprise me if that part of the story were Timmy’s imagination.’

Toplady glanced cautiously behind him. ‘Timmy is certainly rather eccentric. I suppose that in his family it is more of less the thing. Last term, for instance, he did something very odd. He sent me a long series of sonnets.’

‘Sonnets?’

‘I can’t think why. I’m not really interested in poetry and didn’t feel at all competent to criticize.’ Toplady looked with mild doubt at Winter. ‘And I discovered that last year he sent just the same poems to a man at Balliol – a black man.’

‘Dear me.’

‘So he really is rather unaccountable. But I don’t think he would romance about his father’s embarrassments. And I don’t think you will disagree with me when I say that whatever the facts that we should so much like to know about more exactly may be they do constitute a situation of a delicacy to be tactfully approached if at all.’

‘Yes,’ said Winter.

‘I thought,’ continued Toplady conscientiously, ‘that what you discussed in the train, though you won’t suspect that I question its interest to people who are interested in that sort of thing – among whom no doubt Mr Eliot himself might be guessed to be – led rather unfortunately perhaps–’

‘I agree’, said Winter, ‘with what you are in process of saying.’ Cautiously he stuck his head out of the barn. Near at hand he imagined that he had heard the purr of a motor-car.

‘Timmy said’, said Toplady, ‘that you were confident you could solve–’

Winter interrupted brusquely. ‘That at least was Timmy’s nonsense. I’m quite sure I shall solve nothing. Nor you either.’

Toplady did not dispute this perhaps unnecessary thrust. ‘Then I wish’, he said stolidly, ‘we might find a person who could.’

Somebody was whistling. A little falling melody, at once limp and luxurious like the recital of a neurotic symptom, ebbed about the barn. There was an interval of silence and the phrases were repeated – so carefully that it became evident that the interval had been given to their dispassionate appraisal. This time the melody was taken a little farther, slowing down as it moved. There was another considering pause and the theme was dismissed – decisively sped on its way with a couple of bars from the overture to
Figaro
. ‘Excuse me,’ said a voice. ‘Are you with Mr Eliot?’