The Moving Toyshop (22 page)

“Damn!” said Sally. “It’s beginning to rain.”

Unfortunately, it was. Dark rain-clouds made the night sky darker, and there were no longer any stars visible. The drops hissed and spattered in the leaves.

There used to be a summer-house at the end of the garden,” Cadogan answered. “Come on. Let’s run for it.”

It was still there, and in another moment they were stumbling breathlessly up the steps to shelter. Cadogan struck a match, and the light showed a dusty, comfortless interior, with deck-chairs stacked against the walls, a few garden tools, and a large square box which contained a set of bowling woods. An oak seat faced the doorway, and they sat down on it. Cadogan peered about in the gloom.

“This gives me the creeps,” he observed; adding without much relevance: “When I was an undergraduate I made love to a girl in here.”

“Pretty?”

“No, not particularly. She had rather fat legs and her name was—was—Damn, I’ve quite forgotten.
Tout lasse, tout casse, tout passe.
I remember I wasn’t feeling well and didn’t put much zest into the business. I don’t suppose she enjoyed it especially, poor thing.”

It was an hour since Havering had made his confession on the river, and he was now, apathetic and as though drugged, temporarily immured in a room adjoining Fen’s. Fen himself had driven them out because, as he said, he wanted to think. From where they had been strolling on the lawn they could see the lights of his room, and all the lights of the garden front of St. Christopher’s. Mr. Hoskins had gone off with Wilkes to the latter’s rooms for a drink, since Fen’s whisky proved to be exhausted. So for the moment all—apart from the strains of jazz which issued from an undergraduate chamber—was peace.

“One does extraordinary things,” said Cadogan reflectively. “But on the whole, not as extraordinary as the things other people do. Look at Miss Snaith. Look at Rosseter. Look at”—he became rather gloomy—“Fen.”

“D’you spend all your time chasing about after murderers with him?”

“I?” Cadogan chuckled suddenly. “No—God be praised. But it really is comic.”

“What’s comic?”

“Last night—only last night I was craving for adventure, for excitement: anything to stave off middle age. Goethe said that you ought to be very careful what you wish for, because you’ll probably get it. How right he was. I wanted to be delivered from dullness, and the gods have taken me at my word.”

“I shouldn’t have thought you’d have led a dull life.”

“I do, though. Seeing the same people, doing the same things. Trying to make what I like doing and what people will pay me for overlap a bit more.”

“But you’re famous,” Sally objected. “Professor Fen said you were, and I’ve just remembered where I’ve seen your face before. It was in the
Radio Times.”

“Ah,” said Cadogan without much enthusiasm. “I wish they wouldn’t publish these things without asking one first. It looked like a mystic trying to communicate with the Infinite and tackle a severe bout of indigestion at the same time.”

“What did you do?”

“Do? Oh, I see what you mean. I read poetry.”

“What poetry?”

“Some of my own.”

Sally grinned in the half-darkness. “I still can’t imagine you writing poetry. For one thing, you’re too easy to get on with.”

Cadogan sat up. “You know, that cheers me. I was afraid I was degenerating into a mere word-spinner, one Wormius hight.”

“Of course, your saying things like that rather ruins it.”

“Sorry. It was a quotation from Pope.”

“I don’t care who it was a quotation from. It’s really rather rude to quote when you know I shan’t understand. Like talking about someone in a language they don’t know.”

“Oh dear.” Cadogan was penitent. “Honestly, it’s just habit. And anyway, it’d be far ruder if I were to talk down to you, as if you were a child.”

Sally was still considering the improbability of Cadogan’s pretensions to poetry. She felt put out by his saturnine but unremarkable appearance. “You ought to look different, too.”

“Why?” said Cadogan. He lit a cigarette and gave her one too. “There’s no reason why poets should look like anything in particular. Wordsworth resembled a horse with powerful convictions; Chesterton was wholly Falstaffian; Whitman was as strong and hairy as a goldrush prospector. The fact is, there’s no such thing as a poetic type. Chaucer was a Government official, Sidney a soldier, Villon a thief, Marvell an M.P., Burns a ploughboy, Housman a don. You can be any sort of man and still be a poet. You can be as conceited as Wordsworth or as modest as Hardy; as rich as Byron or as poor as Francis Thompson; as religious as Cowper or as pagan as Carew. It doesn’t matter what you believe; Shelley believed every lunatic idea under the sun. Keats was certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections. And I’m willing to bet, my dear Sally, that you could pass Shakespeare on the way to work every morning for twenty years without noticing him once… Good Lord, this is developing into a lecture.”

“Still, poets must be alike in
some
way.”

“Certainly they are. They all write poetry.”

“Well, then, that would make them all alike, at least partly.”

“Would it?” Cadogan exhaled a cloud of smoke and watched it drift, spectral and gauzy, across the pale oblong of the door. “If all the poets are collected together in some ante-room of paradise, there”ll be a good deal of social discomfort by this time. Marlowe will not be speaking to Dowson, and Emily Brontë will flee at the approach of Chaucer…” He grinned, but went on more seriously: “I think the only thing poets have in common is a kind of imaginative generosity of heart towards their fellows—and even then one can’t be too sure, with people like Baudelaire and Pope and unpleasant little neurotics like Swinburne. No, there isn’t such a thing as a poet type. And for a very good reason.”

“Why?”

Cadogan groaned mildly. “It’s very nice of you to be so polite, but I do know when I’m being a bore.”

Sally pinched him. “Ass,” she said.
“I
’m interested. Tell me why a poet doesn’t have to be a man who needs a haircut.”

“Because,” said Cadogan, uneasily attempting to gauge the the length of his own hair with his left hand, “poetry isn’t the outcome of personality. I mean by that that it exists independently of your mind, your habits, your feelings, and everything that goes to make up your personality. The poetic emotion’s impersonal: the Greeks were quite right when they called it inspiration. Therefore, what you’re like personally doesn’t matter a twopenny damn: all that matters is whether you’ve a good receiving-set for the poetic waves. Poetry’s a visitation, coming and going at its own sweet will.”

“Well, then, what’s it like?”

“As a matter of fact, I can’t explain it properly because I don’t understand it properly, and I hope I never shall. But it certainly isn’t a question of oh-look-at-the-pretty-roses or oh-how-miserable-I-feel-today. If it were, there’d be forty million poets in England at present. It’s a curious passive sensation. Some people say it’s as if you’ve noticed something for the first time, but I think it’s more as if the thing in question had noticed
you
for the first time. You feel as if the rose or whatever it is were shining at you. Invariably after the first moment the phrase occurs to you to describe it; and when that’s happened, you snap out of it: all your personality comes rushing back, and you write the
Canterbury Tales
or
Paradise Lost
or
King Lear
according to the kind of person you happen to be. That’s up to you.”

“And does it happen often?”

In the darkness, Cadogan shrugged. “Every day. Every year. There’s no telling if each time, whenever it is, mayn’t be the last… In the meantime, of course, one gets dull and middle-aged.”

The rain drummed steadily on the roof of the summer-house.

“I think you ought to be married,” said Sally after a pause. “You aren’t, are you?”

“No. But what an odd diagnosis. Why should I get married?”

“You need someone to look after you, and cheer you up when you get miserable.”

“You may be right,” said Cadogan, “though I doubt it. I’ve only been in love seriously once in my life, and that was ages ago.”

“Who was she? No,” said Sally quickly. “I shouldn’t be so inquisitive. I don’t expect you want to talk about it.”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t in the least mind talking about it,” said Cadogan more cheerfully. “It’s all over and done with now. Her name was Phyllis Hume, and she was an actress—dark, with large eyes, and a superb figure. But we should have had the hell of a time if we’d got married; we were both furious egoists, and we could only endure each other in the smallest quantities. If we were together for even a week we fought like Jacob and the Angel.”

The trouble is,” said Sally, “you don’t know much about women.”

“No, I don’t,” Cadogan agreed. “But then as I don’t intend to marry it doesn’t much worry me. You, on the other hand—”

“Oh—”

“A lot of people are going to want to many you.”

“Thanks for the compliment, but why—”

“Because, Sally Carstairs, you’re immensely rich.”

She sat up. “Do you mean I shall still get the money?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“But I didn’t think—anyway, Miss Tardy claimed it. It’ll be hers.”

“I don’t know.” Cadogan reflected. “In the absence of any contesting relatives—and Mrs. Wheatley said there
weren’t
any—I should think it would be yours. But what I know about the law could be typed on a penny stamp.”

“Oh,” said Sally, quite overwhelmed, “I
shall
have to be careful.”

“Don’t be too careful.”

“How do you mean?”

Cadogan dropped his cigarette on to the floor and trod it out. “There’s a German story about a very rich and very beautiful young woman who was surrounded by suitors. But whenever she made up her mind to marry one of them, she was suddenly afraid that he. only wanted her for her money, and the fear was so strong that it drove her to break the engagement. Then one day when she was in Italy she met a young merchant, and the two fell in love with one another. Yet even real love wasn’t strong enough to drive out the old obsession, and she decided to test him. She said that she had a fiancé in Germany, that all her own money had gone, and that her fiancé needed ten thousand guilders to set him up in business (ten thousand guilders, she knew, was all the fortune the young merchant possessed). Well, he gave her the money for love of her, and she made him promise to come to Germany on a certain day to see her married. Then she went happily home, because, without knowing it, he’d emerged triumphantly from her test and she gave orders for the house to be splendidly decorated for his coming. He never came, because she’d tried him too far. He went instead to the wars, and was killed.”

“And her?”

“She died an old maid.”

“She was stupid,” said Sally, “but I see her point of view. Of course I shall never really be able to believe I own all that money. What would you do with it if it was yours?”

“Go to Italy to escape the English winter,” Cadogan answered promptly, “and lay down a wine-cellar. What will you do?”

“Get a cottage and a servant for Mummy. Buy a lot of clothes. Buy a car. And go to London and Paris and all over the place…” She ran out of ideas, adding with a laugh: “But I shall carry on at Lennox’s until it comes true.”

Cadogan sighed. “Well, today’s undignified scamper has brought you a fortune. What’s it brought me?”

“Adventure,” Sally pointed out with a touch of malice. “Excitement. Wasn’t that what you wanted?”

Cadogan, who was feeling rather stiff, got up and began to wander about. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it was what I wanted. But I don’t want any more of it. For excitement give me a country walk any day, and I’m inclined to think there’s a good deal more adventure to be had by just opening the curtains in the morning. I dare say that sounds gutless and middle-aged, but after all I
am
middle-aged, and there’s no escaping the fact; as a matter of fact after today I welcome it. Being middle-aged means that you know what matters to you. All this business has been strictly meaningless to me, and from now on I shall conserve my energies, such as they are, for significant things. If ever I’m tempted by posters advertising cruises, I shall whisper ‘Sharman’; whenever I see headlines about international crooks, I shall murmur ‘Rosseter’. I eschew Poictesme and Logres now and for ever. In fact, in a couple of days I shall go back to London and start work again—though I’ve a nightmare feeling that this business isn’t over yet.”

“Oh, golly, I’d almost forgotten about all that.” As she inhaled, the tip of Sally’s cigarette grew fiery in the darkness. “And you haven’t told me what you got out of that doctor.”

“He said you were the only person who could have killed Miss Tardy.”

There was a sudden paralysing silence, and Cadogan cursed himself savagely. But it was too late to recall the words now.

“What did he mean?” Sally said in a small voice. “He must’ve had some reason for saying that.”

Cadogan explained about the problem of the time of death. “But he may have been lying,” he concluded

“Do you think he was?”

He hesitated; then: “Frankly, no,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean you’ve got anything to worry about. There must be some way round it, if one only knew. Or he may just have been mistaken.” (But he didn’t believe it.)

There was another pause. “You see, it checks with what Rosseter and the Winkworth woman said,” he resumed at last. “About it having been an impossible murder, and Havering having said at the time that no one there could have done it.”

“Still, he might have been lying to
them.
”

“Why?”

“Because… Well, perhaps because he did it himself, and knew the real time of death would give him away.”

“But in that case, why make it impossible for
anyone
to have done it? After all, he didn’t know at the time that you were downstairs.”

“He might have been protecting someone.”