My murder, I thought, was rather cleverly carried out. The villain
sent a letter to his victim, enclosing a stamped addressed envelope
for an answer. The gum of the envelope was poisoned. I did not know,
nor did I bother to find out, whether it was possible, but this, as I
said just now, is the beauty of writing a detective story. If there is
no such quick-working poison, then you invent one. If up to the moment
when the doubt occurs to you, your villain had been living in Brixton,
you immediately send him to Central Africa, where he extracts a poison
from a "deadly root" according to the prescription of the chief
medicine-man. ("It is the poison into which the Swabiji dip their
arrows," you tell the reader casually, as if he really ought to have
known it for himself.) Well, then, I invented my poison, and my
villain put it on the gum of a self-addressed envelope, and enclosed
it with a letter asking for his victim's autograph. He then posted the
letter, whereupon a very tragic thing happened.
What happened was that, having left the letter in the post for some
years while I formed fours and saluted, I picked up a magazine in the
Mess one day and began to read a detective story. It was a very
baffling one, and I really didn't see how the murderer could possibly
have committed his foul deed. But the detective was on to it at once.
He searched the wastepaper basket, and, picking an envelope therefrom,
said "Ha!" It was just about then that I said "Ha!" too, and also
other things, for my half-finished story was now useless. Somebody
else had thought of the same idea. But though I was very sorry for
this, I could not help feeling proud that my idea made such a good
story. Indeed, since then I have fancied myself rather as a
detective-story-writer, and if only I could think of something which
nobody else would think of while I was thinking of it, I would try
again.
Some Old Companions
In the days of the last-war-but-thirty-seven, when (as you will
remember) the Peers were fighting the People, Lord Curzon defended the
hereditary system by telling us that it worked very well in India,
where a tailor's son invariably became a tailor. The obvious answer,
if anyone bothered to give it, was that the tailor's son, having had
his career mapped out for him at birth, presumably prepared to be a
tailor, whereas a peer's eldest son, as far as one observed, did not
prepare to be a statesman. Indeed, the only profession in this country
to which one is apprenticed in one's childhood is that of royalty. The
future King can begin to learn the "tactful smile," the "memory for
faces," the knowledge of foreign languages and orders, almost as soon
as he begins to learn anything. He alone need not regret his youth and
say, "If only I had been taught this, that, and the other instead!"
These gloomy reflections have been forced on me by the re-discovery of
all those educational books which I absorbed, or was supposed to have
absorbed, at school and college. They made an imposing collection when
I had got them all together; fifty mathematical works by eminent Den,
from a well-thumbed, dog's-eared _Euclid_ to a clean uncut copy of
_Functions of a Quaternion_. It is doubtful if you even know what a
quaternion is, still less how it functions; probably you think of it
as a small four-legged animal with a hard shell. You may be right--it
is so long since I bought the book. But once I knew all about
quaternions; kept them, possibly, at the bottom of the garden; and now
I ask myself in Latin (for I learnt Latin too), _"Cui bono?"_ How
much better if I had learnt this, that, and the other instead!
History for instance. How useful a knowledge of history would be to me
now. To lighten an article like this with a reference to what
Garibaldi said to Cavour in '53; to round off a sentence with the
casual remark, "As was the custom in Alexander's day"; to trace back
a religious tendency, or a fair complexion, or the price of boots to
some barbarian invasion of a thousand years ago--how delightfully easy
it would be, I tell myself, to write with such knowledge at one's
disposal. One would never be at a loss for a subject, and plots for
stories, plays, and historical novels would be piled up in one's brain
for the choosing. But what can one do with mathematics--save count the
words of an article (when written) with rather more quickness and
accuracy than one's fellow writer? Did I spend ten years at
mathematics for this? The waste of it!
But perhaps those years were not so wasted as they seem to have been.
Not only Functions of a Quaternion, but other of these books, chatty
books about hydro-mechanics and dynamics of a particle (no, not an
article--that might have been helpful--a particle), gossipy books
about optics and differential equations, many of these have a
comforting air of cleanness; as if, having bought them at the
instigation of my instructor, I had felt that this was enough, and
that their mere presence in my bookcase was a sufficient talisman; a
talisman the more effective because my instructor had marked some of
the chapters "R"--meaning, no doubt, _"Read carefully"_--and other
chapters "RR" or _"Read twice as carefully."_ For these seem to be
the only marks in some of the books, and there are no traces of
midnight oil nor of that earnest thumb which one might expect from the
perspiring seeker after knowledge.
So I feel--indeed, I seem to remember--that the years were not so
wasted after all. When I should have been looking after my
quaternions, I was doing something else, something not so useful to
one who would be a mathematician, but perhaps more useful to a writer
who had already learnt enough to count the words in an article and to
estimate the number of guineas due to him. But whether this be so or
not, at least I have another reason for gratitude that I treated some
of these volumes so reverently. For I have now sold them all to a
secondhand bookseller, and he at least was influenced by the clean
look of those which I had placed upon the top.
So they stand now, my books, in a shelf outside the shop waiting for a
new master. Fifteen shillings I paid for some of them, and you or
anybody else can get them for three and sixpence, with my autograph
inside and the "R" and "RR" of some of our most learned
mathematicians. I should like to hear from the purchaser, and to know
that he is giving my books as kind a home as I gave them, treating
them as reverently, exercising them as gently. He can never be a
mathematician, or anything else, unless he has them on his shelves,
but let him not force his attentions upon them. Left to themselves
they will exert their own influence.
I shall wonder sometimes what he is going to be, this young fellow who
is now reading the books on which I was brought up. Spurred on by the
differential equations, will he decide to be a lawyer, or will the
dynamics of a particle help him to realize his ambition of painting?
Well, whatever he becomes, I wish him luck. And when he sells the
books again, may he get a better price than I did.
A Haunted House
We have been trying to hide it from each other, but the truth must now
come out. Our house is haunted.
Well, of course, anybody's house might be haunted. Anybody might have
a headless ghost walking about the battlements or the bath-room at
midnight, and if it were no more than that, I should not trouble you
with the details. But our house is haunted in a peculiar way. No house
that I have heard of has ever been affected in quite this way before.
I must begin by explaining that it is a new house, built just before
the war. (Before the war, not after; this is a true story.) Its first
and only tenant was a Mrs. Watson-Watson, who lived here with her
daughter. Add her three servants, and you have filled the house. No
doubt she could have stowed people away in the cellar, but I have
never heard that she did; she preferred to keep it for such coal and
wood as came her way. When Mrs. Watson-Watson decided six months ago
to retire to the country, we took the house, and have lived here
since. And very comfortably, except for this haunting business.
As was to be expected, we were busy for the first few weeks in sending
on Mrs. Watson-Watson's letters. Gradually, as the news of her removal
got round to her less intimate friends, the flow of them grew less,
and at last--to our great relief, for we were always mislaying her
address--it ceased altogether. It was not until then that we felt
ourselves to be really in possession of our house.
We were not in possession for long. A month later a letter arrived for
Lady Elizabeth Mullins. Supposing this to be a _nom-de-guerre_ of Mrs.
Watson-Watson's, we searched for, and with great difficulty found, the
missing address, and sent the letter on. Next day there were two more
letters for Lady Elizabeth; by the end of the week there were half a
dozen; and for the rest of that month they came trickling in at the
rate of one a day. Mrs. Watson-Watson's address was now definitely
lost, so we tied Lady-Elizabeth's letters up in a packet and sent them
to the ground-landlord's solicitors. Solicitors like letters.
It was annoying at this time, when one was expecting, perhaps, a very
important cheque or communication from the Prime Minister, to go
downstairs eagerly at the postman's knock and find a couple of letters
for Lady Elizabeth and a belated copy of the _Church Times_ for Mrs.
Watson-Watson. It was still more annoying, that, just when we were
getting rid of Lady Elizabeth, Mr. J. Garcia should have arrived to
take her place.
Mr. Garcia seems to be a Spaniard. At any rate, most of his letters
came from Spain. This makes it difficult to know what to do with them.
There was something clever in Spanish on the back of the last one,
which may be the address to which we ought to return it, but on the
other hand, may be just the Spanish for "Always faithful" or
"Perseverance" or "Down with the bourgeoisie." He seems to be a
busier person than Lady Elizabeth. Ten people wrote to him the other
week, whereas there were never more than seven letters in a week for
her ladyship.
Until lately, I have always been annoyed by the fact that there is no
Sunday post in London. To come down to breakfast knowing that on this
morning anyhow there is no chance of an O.B.E. takes the edge off
one's appetite. But lately, I have been glad of the weekly respite.
For one day in seven I can do without the excitement of wondering
whether there will be three letters for Mr. Garcia this morning, or
two for Lady Elizabeth, or three for Lady Elizabeth, or one for Mrs.
Watson-Watson. I will gladly let my own correspondence go in order to
be saved from theirs. But on Sunday last, about tea-time, there came a
knock at the front-door and the unmistakable scuttle of a letter being
pushed through the slit and dropping into the hall, My senses are now
so acute in this matter, that I can almost distinguish the scuffle of
a genuine Garcia from that of a Mullins or even a Watson-Watson. There
was a novelty about this arrival which was interesting. I went into
the hall, and saw a letter on the floor, unstamped and evidently
delivered by hand. It was inscribed to Sir John Poling.
Will somebody offer an explanation? I have given you our
story--leaving out as accidental, and not of sufficient historic
interest, the postcard to the Countess of Westbury and the obvious
income-tax form to Colonel Todgers, C.B.--and I feel that it is up to
you or the Psychical Research Society or somebody to tell us what it
all means. My own explanation is this. I think that our house is
haunted by ghosts, but by the ghosts of living persons only, and that
these ghosts are visible to outsiders, but invisible to the inmates
Thus Mr. Lopez, while passing down our street, suddenly sees J. Garcia
looking at him from our drawing-room window. "Caramba!" he says, "I
thought he was in Barcelona." He makes a note of the address, and
when he gets back to Spain writes long letters to Garcia begging him
to come back to his Barcelonian wife and family. At another time
somebody else sees Sir John Poling letting himself in at the front
door with a latch-key. "So that's where he lives now," she says to
herself, and spreads the news among their mutual friends. Of course,
this is very annoying for us, and one cannot help wishing that these
ghosts would confine themselves to one of the back bedrooms. Failing
this, they might leave some kind of address in indelible letters on
the bath-mat.
Another explanation is that our address has become in some way a sort
of typical address, just as "Thomas Atkins" became the typical
soldier for the purpose of filling up forms, and "John Doe" the
typical litigant. When a busy woman puts our address on an envelope
beneath the name of Lady Elizabeth Mullins, all she means is that Lady
Elizabeth lives somewhere, and that the secretary had better look up
the proper address and write it in before posting the letter. Every
now and then the secretary forgets to do this, and the letter comes
here. This may be a compliment to the desirability of our house, but
it is a compliment of which we are getting tired. I must ask that it
should now cease.
Round the World and Back
A friend of mine is just going off for his holiday. He is having a
longer holiday than usual this time. Instead of his customary three
weeks, he is having a year, and he is going to see the world. He
begins with India. Probably some of our Territorials will wonder why
he wants to see India particularly. They would gladly give him all of
it. However, he is determined to go, and I cannot do less than wish
him luck and a safe return.
There are several places to which I should be glad to accompany him,
but India is not one of them. Kipling ruined India for me, as I
suspect he did for many other of his readers. I picture India as full
of intriguing, snobbish Anglo-Indians, who are always damning the Home
Government for ruining the country. It is an odd thing that, although
I have lived between thirty and forty years in England, nobody
believes that I know how to govern England, and yet the stupidest
Anglo-Indian, who claims to know all about the proper government of
India because he has lived there ten or twenty years, is believed by
quite a number of people to be speaking with authority. No doubt my
friend will have the decisive word in future in all his arguments on
Indian questions with less travelled acquaintances. But he shall not
get round me.
From India he goes to China, and thither I would follow him with
greater willingness, albeit more tremulously. I can never get it out
of my head that the Chinese habitually torture the inquiring visitor.
Probably I read the wrong sort of books when I was young. One of them,
I remember, had illustrations. No doubt they were illustrations of
mediaeval implements; no doubt I am as foolish as the Chinaman would
be who had read about the Tower of London and feared to disembark at
Folkstone; but it is hard to dispel these early impressions. "Yes,
yes," I should say rather hastily, as they pointed out the Great Wall
to me, and I should lead the way unostentatiously but quite definitely
towards Japan.
Before deciding how long to stay in Japan, one would have to ask
oneself what one wants from a strange country. I think that the answer
in my case is "Scenery." The customs of Japan, or Thibet, or Utah
are interesting, no doubt, but one can be equally interested in a
description of them. The people of these countries are interesting,
but then I have by no means exhausted my interest in the people of
England, and five minutes or five months among an entirely new set of
people is not going to help me very much. But a five-second view of
(say) the Victoria Falls is worth acres of canvas or film on the
subject, and as many gallons of ink as you please. So I shall go to
Japan for what I can see, and (since it is so well worth seeing)
remain there as long as I can.
I am not sure where we go next. New Zealand, if the holiday were mine;
for I have always believed New Zealand to be the most beautiful
country in the world. Also it is from all accounts a nice clean
country. If I were to arrange a world-tour for myself, instead of
following some other traveller about in imagination, my course would
be settled, not, in the first place, by questions of climate or
scenery or the larger inhabitants, but by consideration of those
smaller natives--the Tarantula, the Scorpion, and the Centipede. If I
were told that in such-and-such a country one often found a lion in
one's bath, I might be prepared to risk it. I should feel that there
was always a chance that the lion might not object to me. But if I
heard that one might find a tarantula in one's hotel, then that
country would be barred to me for ever. For I should be dead long
before the beast had got to close quarters; dead of disgust.
This is why South America, which always looks so delightful on the
map, will never see me. I have had to give up most of Africa, India
(though, as I have said, this is a country which I can spare), the
West Indies, and many other places whose names I have forgotten. In a
world limited to inhabitants with not more than four legs I could
travel with much greater freedom. At present the two great
difficulties in my way are this insect trouble, and (much less
serious, but still more important) the language trouble. You can
understand, then, how it is that, since also it is a beautiful
country, I look so kindly on New Zealand.
But I doubt if I could be happy even in a dozen New Zealands, each one
more beautiful than the last, seeing that it would mean being away
from London for a year. The number of things which might happen in the
year while one was away! The new plays produced, the literary and
political reputations made and lost, a complete cricket championship
fought out; in one's over-anxious mind there would never be such a
year as the year which one was missing. My friend may retain his calm
as he hears of our distant doings in Kiplingized India, but it would
never do for me. Even to-day, after a fortnight in the country, I am
beginning to get restless. Really, I think I ought to get back
to-morrow.
The State of the Theatre
We are told that the theatre is in a bad way, that the English Drama
is dead, but I suspect that every generation in its turn has been told
the same thing. I have been reading some old numbers of the Theatrical
Magazine of a hundred years ago. These were the palmy days of the
stage, when blank verse flourished, and every serious play had to
begin like this:
_Scene. A place without._ Rinaldo _discovered dying. Enter_ Marco_._
_Mar._ What ho, Rinaldo! Lo, the hornéd moon
Dims the cold radiance of the westering stars,
Pale sentinels of the approaching dawn. How now, Rinaldo?
_Rin._ Marco, I am dying, Struck down by Tomasino's treacherous hand.
_Mar._ What, Tomasino?
_Rin._ Tomasino. Ere
The flaming chariot of Phoebus mounts
The vaults of Heaven, Rinaldo will be dead.
_Mar._ Oh, horror piled on horror!
Lo, the moon----
And so on. The result was called--and I think rightly--"a tragedy."
The alternative to these tragedies was a farce, in which everybody
went to an inn and was mistaken for somebody else (causing great fun
and amusement), the heat and burden of the evening resting upon a
humorous man-servant called _Trickett_ (or something good like that).
And whether the superior people of the day said that English Drama was
dead, I do not know; but they may be excused for having thought that,
if it wasn't dead, it ought to have been.
Fortunately we are doing better than that to-day. But we are not doing
as well as we should be, and the reason generally given is that we
have not enough theatres. No doubt we have many more theatres than we
had a hundred years ago, even if you only count those which confine
themselves to plays without music, but the mass-effect of all these
music-hall-theatres is to make many people think and say that English
Drama is (once more) dead.
It is customary to blame the manager for this--the new type of
manager, the Mr. Albert de Lauributt who has been evolved by the war.
He existed before the war, of course, but he limited his activities to
the music-hall. Now he spreads himself over half a dozen theatres, and
produces a revue or a musical comedy at each. He does not care for
Art, but only for Money. He would be just as proud of a successful
production of _Kiss Me, Katie_, as of _Hamlet_; and, to do him
justice, as proud of a successful production of _Hamlet_, as of _Kiss
Me, Katie_. But by "successful" he means "financially successful";
no more and no less. He is frankly out for the stuff, and he thinks
that it is musical comedy which brings in the stuff.
It seems absurd to single him out for blame, when there are so many
thousands of other people in the world who are out for the stuff. Why
should Mr. Albert de Lauributt lose two thousand pounds over your or
my serious play, when he can make ten thousand over _Hug me, Harriet_?
We do not blame other rich men for being as little quixotic with their
money. We do not expect a financier to back a young inventor because
he is a genius, in preference to backing some other inventor because
he has discovered a saleable, though quite inartistic, breakfast food.
So if Mr. de Lauributt produces six versions in his six different
theatres of _Cuddle Me, Constance_, it is only because this happens to
be his way of making money. He may even be spending his own evenings
secretly at the "Old Vic." For he runs his theatre, not as an
artist, but as a business man; and, as any business man will tell you,
"Business is business, my boy."
We cannot blame him then. But we can regret that he is allowed to own
six different theatres. In Paris it is "one man, one theatre," and
if it were so in London then there would be less the matter with the
English Drama. But, failing such an enactment, all that remains is to
persuade the public that what it really wants is something a little
better than _Kiss Me, Katie_. For Mr. de Lauributt is quite ready to
provide Shakespeare, Ibsen, Galsworthy, modern drama, modern comedy,
anything you like as long as it brings him in pots of money. And he
would probably do the thing well. He would have the sense to know that
the producer of _Hug Me, Harriet_, would not be the best possible
producer of _The Wild Duck_; he would try to get the best possible
producer and the best possible designer and the best possible cast,
knowing that all these would help to bring in the best possible
box-office receipts. Yes, he would do the thing well, if only the
public really asked for it.
How can the public ask for it? Obviously it can only do this by
staying away from _Cuddle Me, Constance_, and visiting instead those
plays whose authors take themselves seriously, whenever such plays are
available. It should be the business, therefore, of the critics (the
people who are really concerned to improve the public taste in plays)
to lead the public in the right direction; away, that is, from the
Bareback Theatre, and towards those theatres whose managers have other
than financial standards. But it is unfortunately the fact that they
don't do this. Without meaning it, they lead the public the wrong way.
They mislead them simply because they have two standards of
criticism--which the public does not understand. They go to the
Bareback Theatre for the first night of _Kiss Me, Katie_, and they
write something like this:--
"Immense enthusiasm.... A feast of colour to delight the eye. Mr.
Albert de Lauributt has surpassed himself.... Delightfully catchy
music.... The audience laughed continuously.... Mr. Ponk, the new
comedian from America, was a triumphant success.... Ravishing Miss
Rosie Romeo was more ravishing than ever... Immense enthusiasm."
On the next night they go to see Mr. A. W. Galsbarrie's new play,
_Three Men_. They write like this:--