The Documents in the Case Read online

  We may place on the progress of Science.

  Talking of Science, I have brought up all standing by Nicholson’s book on The Development of English Biography. According to him, ‘pure’ biography is doomed, and we are to have the ‘scientific biography’, which will in the end prove destructive of the literary interest. There are to be nothing but studies of heredity and indoctrine secretions, economics and aesthetics, and so on – all specialised and all damned. This is where I get off; I only hope this infernal work will get itself published before the rot sets in. So back to the shop, Mr Keats!

  Yours, while this machine is to him,

  Jack

  On looking this through, I seem to be rather in a scolding mood. But it’s only because I think so highly of your stuff that I don’t want you to get sloppy and psycho. That kind of thing is all sentimentality, really. Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner; tout pardonner, c’est tout embêter.

  7. The Same to the Same

  15a, Whittington Terrace, Bayswater

  8th October, 1928

  Darling old Bungie, old thing—

  All right, damn it, no! I don’t want to hector and lay down the law. You carry on in your own way, my child, and don’t pay any attention to me. I quite see what you say about taking things for granted – so we’ll lay it down quite clearly for future guidance that, although I am always right, I must never be so ex officio and because I am a man and a husband. No doubt it is irritating. I hadn’t quite looked at it from that point of view, but possibly there is something in it. Signed Jacko, the almost-human Ape.

  Making a strenuous effort to adopt this feminine viewpoint, I am beginning to wonder whether my neighbour goes quite the right way to assert his position as head of the household. I fancy he must have read somewhere that women like to be treated rough and feel the tight hand on the rein and that sort of thing. Unfortunately, nature did not design him for a sheik part, having made him small, dry, and a little bald on top.

  We were just starting off to dine with Lambert the other night, and were waiting in the hall for a taxi, when Mrs H. came in, rather flurried and very wet. She was hanging up her waterproof, when Harrison came charging out on the landing and called down:

  ‘Is that you, Margaret? Do you know what time it is?’

  ‘I’m sorry – I won’t be a moment.’

  ‘Where on earth have you been?’

  ‘That’s a secret’ (in the tone of voice of someone who wants to have the secret teased out of her. She was laughing to herself, and had a fattish parcel tucked under her arm).

  ‘Oh! I suppose it’s all the same to you if the dinner’s uneatable.’

  Evidently no interest was to be taken in the ‘secret’. The next effort was along the lines of cheerful common sense.

  ‘Why didn’t you begin without me?’

  ‘I don’t choose to. This is my home – or supposed to be – not a hotel’ (in a tone of peevish protest).

  She had gone past us up to the first-floor landing, and, like the Wedding-Guest, we could not choose but hear.

  ‘I’m sorry, dear. I was getting something for tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s no excuse, You’ve been chattering to some of your office friends in some tea-shop or other and forgetting all about what you were supposed to be doing. No, I don’t want any dinner now.’

  ‘Oh, very well.’

  He came running downstairs then and saw us. I think it gave him a shock, because he pulled himself up and smiled and said something vague. Then he turned and called up the stairs again:

  ‘All right, my dear, I’ll be up in a minute.’ His eyes were unhappy. There’s something wrong in this house – something more than a little misunderstanding about dinner time. I shouldn’t wonder if she gives this man a devil of a time – probably without meaning it, that’s the rub. Lathom, who is at the chivalrous age, was all for youth and beauty, of course, and wanted to hop out and sling the old boy into his own umbrella stand, but I told him not to be an infernal ass. Why shouldn’t the woman come home in time for meals? It’s not much to do, and I don’t believe she has any other job in life except to sit reading novels in the front window all day. I know, I’ve seen her at it. All the same, I do wish we had a separate staircase. It’s a bore to have people fighting out their matrimonial quarrels on one’s front doorstep. I’m a man of peace, I am.

  I heard afterwards (per Lathom, via Miss Milsom) that the mysterious parcel was a present for Harrison, the next day being their wedding-anniversary. The row in the hall rather spoilt the sentiment of the occasion, I gather. Lathom says the man is a brute. But I don’t altogether see that. He couldn’t be supposed to know, and anyhow, what is the good of giving a person a lavish display of affection with one hand and rubbing pepper into his eyes with the other?

  Oh, Bungie, it’s the silly little things of life that I’m afraid of. Don’t they frighten you, too, competent as you are?

  Yours always,

  Jack

  8. The Same to the Same

  15a, Whittington Terrace, Bayswater

  12th October, 1928

  Dearest Bungie,

  Things are looking up. This Life will be finished by Christmas, I hope. I am rather stuck at present over the chapter on ‘Religious Convictions’. It is difficult to bring one’s mind into sympathy with that curious Victorian blend of materialism and trust in a personally interfering Providence. It’s odd how they seem to have blinded themselves to the hopeless contradiction between their science and their conventional ethics. On the one hand, an acceptance of the Darwinian survival of the fittest, which ought to have made them completely ruthless in theory and practice; on the other, a sort of sentimental humanitarianism, which directly led to our own special problem of the multitudinous survival of the unfittest. They seem to have had a pathetic belief that it could all be set right by machinery. I don’t know, come to think of it, that we are in a much better position today, except that we have lost the saving belief in machinery. Which doesn’t stop our becoming more and more mechanical, any more than their having lost their belief in anthropomorphism stopped them from becoming more and more humanitarian. Compromise – blessed word! – Chesterton speaks somewhere of the great Victorian compromise – but why Victorian, more than anything else? At any rate, they had the consolation of feeling that this earth and its affairs were extremely large and important – though why they should have thought so, when they were convinced they were only the mechanical outcome of a cast-iron law of evolution on a very three-by-four planet, whirling round a fifth-rate star in illimitable space, passes human comprehension. It would be more reasonable to think so today, if Eddington and those people are right in supposing that we are rather a freak sort of planet, with quite unusual facilities for being inhabited, and that space is a sort of cosy little thing which God could fold up and put in his pocket without our ever noticing the difference. Anyhow, if time and space and straightness and curliness and bigness and smallness are all relative, then we may just as well think ourselves important as not. ‘Important, unimportant – unimportant, important,’ as the King of Hearts said, trying to see which sounded best. So, like the Victorians, we shall no doubt compromise – say it is important when we have a magnum opus to present to an admiring creation, and unimportant when it suits our convenience to have our peccadilloes passed over.

  Forgive me wandering away like this. It’s just a sort of talking the thing out with you before I talk it out in the book. Because, for some reason, it does seem to me important to do this job as well as I can – not merely because it will do me good with publishers, and make it possible to embark on the important triviality of marriage, but for some obscure and irrational motive connected with the development of my soul, if I may so allude to it. I am increasingly not clear whether I am a mess of oddly assorted chemicals (chiefly salt and water), or a kind of hypertrophied fish-egg, or an enormous, all-inclusive cosmos of solar-systematically revolving atoms, each one supporting planetfuls of solemn imbecil
es like myself.

  But, whatever I am, I must finish the Life and then get on to our life, Bungie, because that somehow does count for something too.

  Jack

  9. The Same to the Same

  15a, Whittington Terrace, Bayswater

  15th October, 1928

  I knew it, Bungie – I knew it, I knew it! I knew we should be asked downstairs to tea. And we’ve been! Down among the Liberty curtains and the brass Benares ware! Three young women, two bright youths, the local parson and the family. Crockery from Heal’s and everything too conscientiously bright. Mrs Harrison all radiance and very much the centre of attraction.

  No sooner had I got there than I was swept into a discussion about ‘this wonderful man Einstein’. Extraordinarily interesting, wasn’t it, and what did I make of it? Displaying all my social charm, I said I thought it was a delightful idea. I liked thinking that all the straight lines were really curly, and only wished I’d known all about it at school, because it would have annoyed the geometry master so much.

  ‘But you do think there’s something in it, don’t you? My husband says it is all nonsense, but what do you say?’

  There was a little stir of triumph about this, and I somehow gathered that the Einstein topic had been deliberately chosen for a purpose. I said guardedly that I believed the theory was now generally accepted by mathematicians, though with very many reserves.

  ‘It really is, is it? Really true that nothing actually exists as we see it? I do hope so, because I have always felt so strongly that materialism is all wrong. There is something so deadening about materialism, isn’t there? I do so wish I knew what life means and what we really are. But I can’t understand these things, and you know, I should so like to, if only I had someone to explain them to me.’

  ‘As far as I can make out,’ I replied, you are really only made up of large lumps of space, loosely tied together with electricity. It doesn’t sound flattering, but there it is.’

  She frowned attractively.

  ‘But I can’t believe that.’

  ‘Why do you want to believe it?’ said Harrison. ‘It’s all words. When it comes to doing anything practical you have to come back to common sense. My friend Professor Alcock—’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know.’ She waved the interruption aside impatiently. ‘But the idea is the real thing, isn’t it? Haven’t they come round to thinking that poetry and imagination and the beautiful things of the mind are the only true realities after all?’

  ‘Of course beauty is the only true reality,’ said Lathom eagerly. ‘But it isn’t always what ordinary people think of as beauty. I mean, it’s not pretty-pretty. When you think a thing, then you create it and it exists. What’s the use of arguing what you make it of? That doesn’t matter to the thing itself, any more than the stuff paints are made of matter to the picture.’

  ‘It matters a good deal in practice,’ said Harrison. ‘Now the Pre-Raphaelites understood that – though, mind you, I don’t think much of the Pre-Raphaelite school myself. Some of their pictures are so remarkably ugly, and so exaggerated in colour. Take that thing of Holman Hunt’s, now—’

  ‘Darling,’ said Mrs Harrison, with emphasis, ‘you’re side-tracking.’

  ‘No, I’m not. I’m coming back to that. What I mean is that the Pre-Raphaelites, especially William Morris, knew a great deal about the material of their paints. They used to get the right stuff and grind it themselves, so as to be sure it wasn’t adulterated. Now I’m all of their opinion. I say they were quite right. I get my colours from a man up in town, a wholesale dealer—’

  ‘My husband is always so literal,’ said Mrs Harrison, taking the whole company into a confederacy to condemn the unfortunate man. ‘But I didn’t mean that at all. Mr Lathom understands what I mean – don’t you, Mr Lathom?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lathom, ‘and, of course, it’s true in a way. But you mustn’t think that the form of the thing doesn’t matter, too. Whatever the world is made of, there it is, and it’s ours to make something of.’

  ‘It must be marvellous to paint great pictures!’ said one of the young women.

  Lathom scowled frightfully, and, ostentatiously ignoring her, continued his remarks to Mrs Harrison in an undertone.

  What a conversation, my God! Harrison faded out and I don’t blame him, and I took the opportunity to tackle the parson, a fellow by the name of Perry. He turned out to be an earnest and cultivated middle-aged spike from Keble, and I took the opportunity to mention the Life and the difficulties about Victorian materialism.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we’ve rather got past that stage now, haven’t we? I’ve got one or two books that I think might be useful to you, as giving the point of view and all that. Shall I send them over?’

  I said it was very good of him (not expecting much from it), and, by way off a leg-pull, asked him what he thought of relativity.

  ‘Why, I’m rather grateful to it,’ said he, ‘it makes my job much easier. We’ll have a chat some day and go into it. I must be going now.’

  He oozed competently away, and the party rambled on till I could stand it no longer and rambled out into the passage, where I met Harrison.

  ‘Hullo!’ said he, ‘come and have a pipe in the studio. And a whisky-and-soda or something. Better than tea.’

  I went in, expecting him to talk Art, but he didn’t. He just sat smoking in silence and I did likewise. I had an idea I ought to say something to him, but nothing presented itself. If I had said what I felt like saying, he would have been angry with me.

  So much for social life in Suburbia. I had a letter from Jim on Wednesday. He is thoroughly enjoying himself in Germany, and begs to be remembered to you. He is reading hard – or so he says – and he’d jolly well better, the young cub, since if he fails in his tripos there’s no money to give him another year there and he’ll have to go as an apothecary’s apprentice or something. I haven’t looked up Cynthia or the Brierleys yet, but I will pull myself together and do it before long.

  Love to everybody. Wish I was up north with you among the burrns and birrds. Give the Guv’nor my love. Has he had good sport? I suppose the hills are beginning to look a bit grim again now, bless their granite hearts. Remember me to all the artist fraternity.

  Ever and ever yours, funny-face, old dear. I’d like to see your cheery grin now and again. I must be damned fond of you – sometimes it positively puts me off my stroke. Damned inconvenient. I shall really have to see about this marriage business. I cannot have my work interrupted in this way.

  Yours deeply injured

  Jack

  10. Agatha Milsom to Olive Farebrother

  15, Whittington Terrace, Bayswater

  15.10.28

  Dearest Olive,

  I am so sorry I have not written for such a long time, but I have been feeling anything but fit. This household is most trying to live with, and I really feel that in my present nervous condition I am hardly fit to cope with my work here. I have been to Dr Trevor and put the whole situation very fully and carefully before him, and he agrees that I certainly ought not to be subjected to so much emotional strain. On the other hand, I know poor Mrs Harrison does cling to me so much for sympathy and support that it seems almost wicked not to hang on if I can possibly manage it. She has no one else to confide in at all, and I do at least feel that here I am being of real use to somebody. Dr Trevor says that if only I can lose sight of my own difficulties in helping her with hers, it will be good for me to make the effort, provided I do not let the atmosphere of the house get on my nerves. I have started a little exercise on Coù lines. Every morning I say to myself: ‘I am cool, strong, confident,’ twenty times, and at night I say: ‘I am satisfied and at peace,’ also twenty times. Dr Trevor thinks these are quite good phrases to say.

  I did hope, a few days ago, that the difficulty was going to solve itself. Mrs Harrison announced that she was going to take up office work again. The idea of it seemed to brighten her up tremendously, and I think it would
be the best thing she could do. But, of course, the Bear played his old trick again. When she first announced her decision, he pretended to agree, and said she could do as she liked, so was awfully pleased, and rang up one of the people at her old office to see if they had a vacancy there. As it happened, they had, and she practically arranged to start work next week. Then Mr Bear started off. ‘All right? Well, I suppose it is all right if you think so. But don’t you think it’s a trifle hard on me, my dear, having a wife out all day, fagging herself to death in an office and coming home fit for nothing? I give you a good home, and I rather expected, or hoped, you would like to make it a home for me to come back to. That is the usual idea, isn’t it? But I suppose the modern woman thinks differently about these things. If hotel life is your notion of happiness you ought to go and live in America.’

  It is too bad to work upon the poor girl’s feelings in that selfish way. She tried to reason with him, but, of course, the end was that she made herself perfectly sick with crying, and wrote and told the people that she couldn’t manage to take the job after all. And now he goes about saying it’s a pity she can’t find something better to do with herself than reading trashy novels all day. I spoke up. I said, ‘Mr Harrison, excuse me, but you ought not to speak to your wife like that. She gave up the work she wanted to do, entirely to please you, and I think you ought to consider her a little more and yourself a good deal less.’ I daresay he wasn’t best pleased, but I thought it my duty to say it. I felt most terribly exhausted after this trying scene. It is such a drain upon one’s personality, coping with outbreaks of this kind. One is giving, giving, all the time. I am asking Dr Trevor to prescribe me a tonic. A curious feature of my malady at the moment is a craving for shrimps. Our fishmonger keeps very good ones, but sometimes I have to go quite a long way to get them, because I am afraid he will think it funny if I buy shrimps every day.

  I am sure I don’t know what we should do if it were not for Mr Lathom. He often drops in of an evening now and cheers us up immensely. The Bear is always dragging the poor man off into his studio, as he calls it, to twaddle about art, but Mr Lathom has most delightful manners and puts up with it heroically. He thinks my scarf-patterns and stocking-tops show great talent, ‘a very good sense of design’. He is a real artist, so I am sure he wouldn’t say so if he didn’t think it.