Hamlet, Revenge!

Part I

Prologue

The actors are come hither my Lord …

We’ll hear a play tomorrow.

Chapter One

WHEN you spend a summer holiday in the Horton country you must not fail to make the ascent of Horton Hill. It is an easy climb and there is a wonderful view. The hill is at once a citadel and an outpost, dominating to the North the subtle rhythms of English downland into which it merges, and to the South a lowland country bounded in the distance by a silver ribbon of sea. The little market-town of King’s Horton, five miles away, is concealed in a fold of the downs; concealed too, save for a wisp of blue-grey smoke, is the near-by hamlet of Scamnum Ducis. And almost directly below, beyond a mellow pomp of lawn and garden and deer-park, stands all the arrogantly declared yet finally discreet magnificence of Scamnum Court. Perhaps it is not the very stateliest of the stately homes of England. But it is a big place: two counties away it has a sort of little brother in Blenheim Palace.

And yet from the vantage-point of Horton Hill Scamnum looks strangely like a toy. The austere regularity of its façades, the improbable green of its surrounding turf, the perfection of its formal gardens bounded by the famous cliff-like hedges imitated from Schönbrunn—these things give some touch at once of fantasy and of restraint to what might easily have been a heavy and extravagant gesture after all. Here, Scamnum seems to say, is indeed the pride of great riches, but here, too, is the chastening severity of a classically-minded age. Mr Addison, had he lived a few years longer, would have approved the rising pile; Mr Pope, though he went away to scoff in twenty annihilating couplets, came secretly to admire; and Dr Johnson, when he took tea with the third duke, put on his finest waistcoat. For what is this ordered immensity, this dry regularity of pilaster and parterre, but an assertion in material terms of a prime moral truth of the eighteenth century: that the grandeur of life consists in wealth subdued by decorum?

Here, shortly, is the story of Scamnum and its owners.

Thirty years before the birth of Shakespeare, Roger Crippen, living hard by the sign of the Falcon in Cheapside, had been one of Thomas Cromwell’s crew. A sharp man, uncommonly gifted in detecting a dubious ledger—or in concocting one when need drove—he had risen as the religious houses fell. His sons inherited his abilities; his grandsons grew up hard and sober in the tradition of finance. When Elizabeth ascended the throne Crippens already controlled houses in Paris and Amsterdam; when James travelled south Crippens stood as a power in the kingdom he had inherited.

The Civil Wars came and the family declared for the King. At Horton Manor thousands of pounds’ worth of plate was melted down; and Humphrey Crippen, the third Baron Horton, was with Rupert when he broke the Roundhead horse at Naseby. But bankers must not be enthusiastic: Crippens too controlled tens of thousands of pounds that were flowing from Holland across the narrow seas to the city and the Parliament men—and during all the monetary embarrassments of the Protectorate they lost no penny. Meanwhile—themselves in ostentatious exile—they patiently financed the exiled court and at the Restoration the family of Crispin came home to a dukedom. Since the first grant of a gentleman’s arms to Roger Crippen there had passed just a hundred and thirty years.

Crispin remained a banker’s name. And on banking, in the fullness of time, Scamnum Court was raised. Far more fed the Horton magnificence than the broad acres of pasture land to the North, the estate added to estate of rich arable to the South. ‘You can’t’, the present Duke would ambiguously remark, ‘keep a yacht on land’—and the yacht, the great town house in Piccadilly, the Kincrae estate in Morayshire, the villa at Rapallo, Scamnum itself with its monstrous establishment (‘Run Scamnum with a gaggle of housemaids? Come, come!’ the Duke had exclaimed when he shut it down during the war)—these were but slight charges on the resources controlled by the descendants of Roger. For Crispin is behind the volcanic productivity of the Ruhr; Crispin drives railways through South America; in Australia one can ride across the Crispin sheep-station for days. If a picture is sold in Paris or a pelt in Siberia Crispin takes his toll; if you buy a bus or a theatre ticket in London, Crispin—somehow, somewhere—gets his share.

And here, from the windy brow of Horton Hill, the wayfarer can look down on the crown of it all, his reflections dictated by his own philosophical or political or imaginative bias. There lies Scamnum, a treasure-house unguarded save by the marble gods and goddesses that stand patiently along its broad terraces, or crouch, narcissus-like, beside its ornamental waters—Scamnum unguarded and unspoiled, a symbol of order, security, and the rule of law over this sleeping country-side. The great wing to the East is the picture-gallery: there hang the famous Horton Titian; Vermeer’s Aquarium, for which the last Duke paid a fortune in New York; the thundery little Rembrandt landscape which the present Duchess’ father, during his Dublin days, had got for ten shillings in a shabby bookshop by the Liffey—and for which, ten years later, he sent a flabbergasted bookseller a thousand pounds. And that answering wing to the West is the Orangery. Sometimes, of a summer night, they will hold a dance or a ball there—the long line of lofty windows flung open upon the dark. And a curious labourer and his lass, seeing the procession of cars sweep into the park, will climb the hill and stretch themselves in the clover to gaze down upon a world as remote as that other world of Vermeer’s picture—tiny figures, jewelled and magical, floating about the terraces in a medium of their own. Now and then, as the wind veers, wisps of music will float up the hill. It is strange music sometimes, and then the spell is unbroken, the magic unflawed. But sometimes it is a lilt familiar from gramophone or wireless—and man and girl are suddenly self-conscious and uneasy. And Scamnum in general has long understood the necessity of keeping its own hypnotic other-world inviolate. Many a Duke of Horton has unbent at a farmers’ dinner, many a Duchess has gone laughing and chattering round Scamnum Ducis. But all have known that, essentially, they must contrive to be seen as from a long way off, that they have their tenure in remaining—remote, jewelled, and magical—a focus for the fantasy-life of thousands. We are all Duke or Duchess of Horton—this is the paradox—as long as the music remains sufficiently strange.

From Horton summit it is possible to see something of Scamnum’s great main court and of its one architectural eccentricity. For here some nineteenth-century duke, a belated follower of the romantic revival, has grotesquely pitched a sizeable monument of academic Gothic in the form of a raftered hall. As it stands it is something of a disreputable secret: the hill-top apart, you are aware of it only from certain inner windows of the house, and aware of it probably but to regret the famous fountain which it has obliterated. In the family it is known sometimes as Peter’s Folly, and more regularly—with that subdued irony which Crispins have assimilated with the aristocratic tradition—as the Banqueting Hall. It is a trifle damp, a trifle musty, and there is painful stained-glass. No use has ever been found for it. Or rather none had been found until the Duchess had her idea, the idea which was unexpectedly to draw the attention of all England upon Scamnum and to bring streams of chars-à-bancs with eager sightseers to the foot of Horton Hill.

Even now, strange events are preparing. But this flawless afternoon in June knows nothing of them yet: from the dovecot beyond the home orchard floats the drowsiest of all English sounds: the jackdaws wheel to the same lazy tempo above the elm walk; a bell in the distant stables chimes four; Scamnum slumbers. On the hill no tourist, field-glass in hand, disturbs the gently nibbling sheep or speculates on such activity as Scamnum reveals. There is no one to identify as the Duke the little knickerbockered figure who has paused to speak to a gardener by the lily pond; no one to recognise in the immaculately breeched and booted youth sauntering up from the stables Noel Yvon Meryon Gylby, a scion of the house; no one to guess that the tall figure strolling down the drive is his old tutor Giles Gott, the eminent Elizabethan scholar, or that the beautiful girl, looking thoughtfully after him from the terrace, is the Lady Elizabeth Crispin. Nobody knows that the restless man with the black box is not a photographer from the Queen but an American philologist. And nobody knows that the Rolls Royce approaching the south lodge contains the Lord High Chancellor of England, come down to play a prank with his old friend Anne Dillon, the present Duchess of Horton.

Scamnum, doubtless, is in the minds of many people at this moment. In Liverpool, serious young men are studying its ground-plan; in Berlin, a famous Kunsthistoriker is lecturing on its pictures; its ‘life’, brightly written up for an evening paper, is selling in the streets of Bradford and Morley and Leeds. Scamnum is always ‘Interest’: presently it is to be ‘News’.

The Rolls Royce swings under the odd little bridge joining the twin lodges and purrs up the drive.

‘And her Grace’, said Macdonald magnanimously, ‘can hae as muckle o’ roses for the Banqueting Ha’ as she cares to demaun’.’

‘Good,’ said the Duke, concealing the consciousness of a victory unexpectedly won. ‘And now, let me see’—he consulted a scribbled envelope—‘ah yes, sweet-peas. Enough sweet-peas to fill all the Ming bowls in the big drawing-room.’

‘The big drawing-room!’ Macdonald was aghast.

‘The big drawing-room, Macdonald. Big party this, you know. Quite an event.’

‘I’ll see tae’t,’ said Macdonald dourly.

‘And, um, just one other thing. Dinner is in the long gallery —’

‘The lang gallery!’

‘Come, come, Macdonald—a big dinner you know. Quite out of the ordinary. About a hundred and twenty people.’

Macdonald reflected. ‘I’m thinking, wi’ great respect, it’ll be mair like the saloon o’ a liner than a nobleman’s daenner in ony guid contemporary taste I’ve heard tell o’.’

Macdonald was one of the curiosities of Scamnum. ‘Have you met our pragmatical Scot?’ the Duchess would ask gaily—and the favoured visitor would be taken out and cautiously insinuated into the head-gardener’s presence and conversation. Nevertheless, the Duke felt, Macdonald could be very trying.

‘Be that as it may,’ said the Duke, unconsciously supporting himself on what had been the pivotal phrase of his celebrated speech in the House of Lords in 1908—‘be that as it may, Macdonald, the fact is—carnations.’

‘May it please your Grace,’ said Macdonald ominously, ‘I had a thocht it might be the carnations.’

‘Carnations. The long gallery is to have a single long table, and they’ve raked up thirty silver vases from the strong-room —’

‘Thirty,’ said Macdonald, as if scoring heavily.

‘To be filled with the red carnations —’

‘Horton,’ said Macdonald firmly, ‘it canna be!’

When Macdonald resorted to this feudal and awful address—eminently proper, no doubt, in his own country—affairs were known to be critical. And the Duke had been expecting this crisis all afternoon.

‘It canna be,’ continued Macdonald with a heavy reasonableness. ‘Ye maun consider that if ye hae a hunnert and twenty folk tae daenner in your lang gallery, I’m like tae hae a hunnert and twenty folk walking my green-hooses thereaufter. And ye maun consider that the demaun’s already excessive: a’ but a’ the public apartments and forty bedrooms—let alone what the upper servants get frae my laddies when my back’s turned! And it’s my opeenion,’ continued Macdonald, suddenly advancing from reasonableness to an extreme position, ‘that flu’ers hae no place in the hoose at a’. Unner the sky and unner glause, wi’ their ain guid roots below them, is the richt place for flu’ers.’

‘Come, come, my dear Macdonald —’

‘I’m no’ saying there’s no a way oot o’ the difficulty. Maybe your Grace is no acquaintet wi’ Mistress Hunter’s Wild Flu’ers o’ Shakespeare?’

‘I don’t know —’

‘No more ye need. It’s no’ a work o’ ony scholarly pretension. But it’s in the library and it might persuade her Grace —’

‘Come, come, Macdonald!’

‘— that Shakespeare’s wild flu’ers doon that lang table would be mair appropriate than my guid carnations. Do you see to that, your Grace, and I’ll set the lassies at the sooth lodge to get a’ that’s wanted fraw the woods … In thirty sil’er bowls too’—added Macdonald enthusiastically—‘it’ll be a real pretty sight!’

The evasiveness of the Duke’s response revealed him as judiciously giving ground. ‘’Pon my soul, Macdonald, I didn’t know you were a student of Shakespeare.’

‘Shakespeare, your Grace, was well instructed in the theory o’ gardening, and it becomes a guid gardener to be well instructed in Shakespeare. In this play that’s forrard the noo, there’s eleven images from gardening alone.’

‘Eleven—dear me!’

‘Aye, eleven. Weeds twa, violet, rose, canker twa, thorns, inoculate old stock, shake fruit frae tree, palm-tree, and cut off in bloom — the thing ya shouldna dae. It’s a’ in Professor Spurgeon’s new book.’

‘Ah yes,’ said the Duke incautiously, ‘Spurgeon—clever fellow.’

‘She’s a very talented leddy,’ said Macdonald.

Powerful, precise, world-wide, the Crispin machine ground on. And did Macdonald, bringing this interview to a triumphant close, ponder in his metaphysical Scottish brain some deeper irony—conscious, amid all this familiar ducal ineffectiveness, of the lurking dominance of that steel-hard Crispin eye?

Macdonald trudged down the drive to the south lodge.

The Rolls stopped in its tracks. Lord Auldearn stood up behind his impassive chauffeur and made a dramatic gesture as Giles Gott advanced.

‘Barkloughly Castle call they this at hand?’

Gott shook hands—with the bow one gives to a slight acquaintance who keeps the King’s conscience in his pocket. Then he laughed.

‘There stands the castle, by yon tuft of trees.’

‘Mann’d with three hundred men, as I have heard?’

‘Presently to be manned with about three hundred guests, as far as I can gather. In the Duchess’ hands the thing grows.’

‘Get in,’ said the Lord Chancellor with unconscious authority. And as the Rolls glided forward he sighed. ‘I was afraid it would turn into that sort of thing. Anne must always pick the out-size canvas. A mistake her father never made.’

‘Didn’t she run old Dillon?’

‘I think she did—as a clever woman can run a genius. She kept him to the portraits, picked the right moment for capitulating to the Academy, and so on.’ Lord Auldearn paused. ‘I know my part, I think. What’s yours?’

‘I’m producing. And I’ve built a sort of Elizabethan stage.’

‘Good Lord! Where?’

‘In the Banqueting Hall.’

‘Mouldy, gouty hole. So it’s all very serious—striking experiment in the staging of Shakespeare—crowds of your professional brethren watching, eh?’

‘There is a bevy of them coming down on the night. And an American about the place already, I believe. The Duchess is never wholly serious—but she’s working tremendously hard.’

‘Anne always did. Worked underground for weeks to contrive a minute’s perfect effect—a minute’s perfect absurdity, it might be. That’s how she got here. What’s she doing—the dresses?’

‘Not a bit of it. She’s been reading up the texts. Got out the Horton Second Quarto and borrowed somebody’s First Folio. I’m terrified she’ll start scribbling enthusiastically in the margins. And she’s been studying the acting tradition as well. She’s impressed by the accounts of Garrick, particularly his business when he first sees the Ghost. She’s almost ready to coach Melville Clay in it.’

‘Coach Clay!’ Lord Auldearn chuckled. ‘Do him good. Make a noisy success of a part in London and New York—and then be coached in it by a woman for private theatricals. What’s he doing it for?’

The question, abruptly pitched, seemed to make Gott reflect. ‘Glamour of Scamnum,’ he suggested at length.

‘Humph!’ said the Lord Chancellor—and a moment later added: ‘And Elizabeth—how does she like it? Rather a thrill playing opposite Clay?’

‘No doubt,’ said Gott.

For a moment there was silence as the car sped up the drive. Macdonald, stumping past, touched his hat respectfully.

‘And Teddy?’ Lord Auldearn continued his inquisition. ‘What does Teddy think of the size the thing’s apparently grown to?’

Gott looked dubious. ‘I can’t quite make out what the Duke thinks—on that or anything. I’m a distant Dillon, you know, and the Duchess strikes me as essentially readable. But the Duke puzzles me. I shouldn’t like to have to put him in a novel—or not in the foreground. He’s a nice conventional effect while in the middle-distance, but disturbing on scrutiny.’

Lord Auldearn paid these remarks the tribute of some moments’ silence. Then he pitched another question: ‘Do you write novels?’

Confound you, thought Gott, for the smartest lawyer in England—and replied with polite finality: ‘Psuedonymously.’

But the Lord Chancellor, vaguely curious, was not to be put off. ‘Under what name?’ he said.

Gott told him.

‘Bless my soul—mystery stories! Well, I suppose it goes along with your ferreting sort of work—just as it might with mine. And what are you writing now? Going to make a story out of the Scamnum theatricals?’

‘Hardly a mystery story, I should think,’ replied Gott. Lord Auldearn, he reflected, was not impertinent—merely old and easy. But Gott was shy of any mention of this hobby of his. And it was perhaps with some obscure motive of diversion that his hand at this moment went out to a crumpled ball of paper which he had discerned in a corner of the car.

‘What’s that?’ asked Lord Auldearn.

Gott smoothed out the paper—to stare unbelievingly at three lines of typescript on an otherwise blank quarto page. ‘More Shakespeare,’ he said, ‘like our greetings a few minutes ago. But this isn’t Richard II; it’s Macbeth.’

Lord Auldearn was again vaguely curious. ‘Read it out,’ he said. And Gott read:

‘The raven himself is hoarser

That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan

Under my battlements.’

The Rolls had stopped—Scamnum towering above it. ‘Curious,’ said Lord Auldearn.

It was half-past seven. Noel Gylby sat on the west terrace, dividing his attention between a cocktail, Handley Cross, and his former tutor, who had sat down with a brief ‘Hullo, Noel,’ to stare absently and a shade disapprovingly at the beginnings of a garish sunset.

‘There’s going to be a decent party at Kincrae for the Twelfth,’ said Mr Gylby presently. ‘Last August Aunt Anne took the bit between her teeth and the moors were like an OTC field-day. But Uncle Teddy’s put his foot down this time.’

‘Has he,’ said Gott.

‘He’s asking you,’ said Noel, turning Handley Cross sideways to look at an illustration. ‘Going?’

Gott shook his head. ‘I think I may be in Heidelberg,’ he said austerely.

‘Humph.’ Noel had been an impressed observer of the Lord Chancellor’s mannerisms during tea. And after a silence he added ‘I’m getting a new 12-bore.’

In the technical language of his generation Noel was an ‘aesthete’. His normal conversation was much of his contemporaries the youngest poets. He ran a magazine for them and wrote editorials sagely discussing André Breton and Marianne Moore; it was rumoured that he had been to a tea-party with Mr Ezra Pound. But in the atmosphere of Scamnum some atavistic process asserted itself; he took on the colour of the place—or what a lively imagination prompted him to feel the colour should be. He read Surtees and Beckford; he made notes on Colonel Farquharson on the Horse. He discoursed on stable-management with the head groom; he spent hours confabulating with the one-eyed man in the gun-room.

‘A half-choke, I think,’ said Noel—and the subject failing to excite he added after a moment: ‘Why didn’t you take a cocktail?’

‘Habit,’ replied Gott. ‘The old gentlemen at St Anthony’s don’t drink cocktails before dinner, and I’ve got the habit.’ He smiled ironically at his former pupil. ‘I’m at the age when habit gets its hold, Noel.’

Noel looked at him seriously. ‘I suppose you are getting on,’ he said. ‘What are you?’

‘Thirty-four.’

‘I say!’ exclaimed Noel. ‘You’ll soon be forty.’

‘Quite soon,’ responded Gott coldly.

‘You know,’ said Noel, ‘I think you should —’

He was interrupted by the appearance of a dinner-jacketed figure at the end of the terrace. ‘Here’s your pal Bunney. I’ll leave the savants together. Little chat about Shakespeare’s semicolons may do you good.’

‘My pal who?’

‘Bunney. Dr Bunney of Oswego, USA Dying to meet a real live Fellow of the British Academy. I suppose’—Noel added innocently—‘it’s something to make that even at thirty-four? Well, cheery-bye, papa Gott.’ And Mr Gylby strolled off.

Gott eyed the advancing figure of Dr Bunney with suspicion. The man was carrying a largish black box which he set down on a table as he advanced to shake hands.

‘Dr Gott? Pleased to meet you. My name’s Bunney—Bunney of Oswego. We are fellow-workers in a great field. Floreat scientia.’

‘How do you do. Quite so,’ said Gott—and assumed that charming, charmed, and tentatively understanding expression which is the Englishman’s defence on such occasions. ‘You have come down for the play?’

‘For the phonology of the play,’ corrected Dr Bunney. He turned and flicked a switch on the black box. ‘Say bunchy cushiony bush,’ said Dr Bunney placidly.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘No. Bunchy cushiony bush.’

‘Oh! Bunchy cushiony bush.’

‘And now. The unimaginable touch of time.’

‘The unimaginable touch of time,’ said Gott, with the suppressed indignation of a good Wordsworthian forced to blaspheme.

‘Thank you.’ Bunney turned and flicked another switch. Instantly the black box broke into speech. "Say bunchy cushiony bush I beg your pardon no bunchy cushiony bush oh bunchy cushiony bush and now the unimaginable touch of time the unimaginable touch of time thank you,’ said the black box grotesquely.

Bunney beamed. ‘The Bunney high-fidelity Dictaphone. Later, of course’—he added explanatorily—‘it is all graphed.’

‘Graphed—of course.’

‘Graphed and analysed. Dr Gott, my thanks for one more instance of that friendly cooperation without which learning cannot increase. Hee paideia kai tees sophias kai tees aretees meeteer. There are drinks?’

‘Sherry and cocktails are in the library.’ And as Dr Bunney disappeared Gott chanted a little Greek of his own.

‘Brek-ek-ek-ex! Ko-ax! Ko-ax!’ said Gott. ‘Brek-ek-ek-ex! Ko-ax!’

‘Giles, have you laid an egg—or what?’ The Lady Elizabeth Crispin had emerged on the terrace, bearing a luridly-tinged cherry speared on a cocktail-stick.

‘I was only telling a rabbit what the frogs thought of him,’ said Gott obscurely—and began laboriously an unhappy academic explanation. ‘Aristophanes —’

‘Aristophanes! Isn’t Shakespeare quite enough at present?’

‘I think he is. Shakespeare and Bunney between them.’

‘It was Bunney, was it? Has he black-boxed you?’

‘Yes. Bunchy cushiony Bunney. How did he get here?’

‘Mother picked him up at a party. He black-boxed her and she was thrilled. He’s going to black-box the whole play and lecture on the vowels and consonants and phonemes and things when he gets home. Only mother hopes he’s really something sinister.’

‘Sinister?’

‘The Spy in Black or something. Black-boxing secrets of state. Have my cherry, Giles.’

Gott munched the cherry. The Lady Elizabeth perched on the broad stone balustrade. ‘Another hideous sunset,’ she said.

‘Isn’t it!’ exclaimed Gott, electrified at this agreement. But Elizabeth had returned to the subject of the American.

‘I suppose Bunney’s quoted Greek and Latin and the Advancement of Learning at you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’ve been eyeing him with the polite wonder of the St Anthony’s man?’

‘Yes—I mean, certainly not.’

‘Dear Giles, this must be an awful bore for you—beaning Shakespeare to make a barbarian holiday. You’re very nice about it all.’

‘It’s not beaning. Everybody’s being remarkably serious. And I want to see Melville Clay on something like an Elizabethan stage. And I particularly want to see you.’

Elizabeth wriggled gracefully into a position in which she could inspect her golden slippers. ‘I wish about three hundred other people weren’t going to. How morbidly Edwardian-Clever Mother is! Don’t you think?’

‘Age cannot wither her,’ said Gott.

‘Yes, I know. She’s marvellous. But who but an Edwardian-Clever would think of celebrating a daughter’s twenty-first by dressing her in white satin to be talked bawdy to by a matinée idol and drowned and buried to make a big county and brainy Do?’

This breathless speech had evidently been simmering. Gott looked surprised. ‘You don’t really object, do you, Elizabeth?’

Elizabeth swung off the balustrade. ‘Not a bit. I think I love it. Clay’s beautiful.’

‘And extraordinarily nice.’

‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth. ‘And—Giles—I do hope I’ll speak it all so that you approve!’

‘Ironical wench.’ Gott was out of his chair. ‘Round the lily pond before dinner, Elizabeth!’ And they ran down the broad steps together.

Returning, they met Noel waving a letter.

‘I say—Giles, Elizabeth! The Black Hand!’

Elizabeth stared. ‘Do you mean the black box, child?’

‘Not a bit of it. The Black Hand. Something in Uncle Gott’s own lurid line. Preparing to strike—and all that.’

Gott understood. ‘You’ve had a scrap of typescript?’

Noel withdrew a quarto sheet of paper from the envelope and handed it to Elizabeth. All three stared at it.

And in their ears tell them my dreadful name,

Revenge, which makes the foul offender quake.

‘From Titus Andronicus,’ said Gott.

‘Rubbishing sort of joke,’ said Noel.

Far away, St James’ Park was closing. The melancholy call, as of the archangel crying banishment from Eden, floated faintly through the open window. The Parliamentary Private Secretary, glancing obliquely out across the parade, could catch a glimpse of his old berth. He and Sir James were well past that stile together … but this was a nervous elevation. His fingers drummed on the window-sill.

‘Here in a few minutes now,’ said the Permanent Secretary unemotionally.

‘In a Bag?’

‘Hilfers is bringing it back … Croydon.’

‘Oh.’ The Parliamentary Secretary was frankly raw, frankly impressed. There was silence, broken at last by footsteps in the long corridor. An elderly resident clerk came in.

‘Captain Hilfers here, sir.’

‘We’ll go over to the deciphering,’ said the Permanent Secretary briskly to the Parliamentary Secretary. He picked up a telephone. ‘And have the great men over from their dinner.’

At this the Parliamentary Secretary grew suddenly cheerful. ‘Of course they must come over straight away,’ he agreed importantly.

The Prime Minister summed up the deliberations of an hour.

‘Get Auldearn,’ said the Prime Minister.

‘Auldearn’s at Scamnum,’ said the Parliamentary Secretary.

‘Get What’s-his-name,’ said the Prime Minister.

‘Get Captain Hilfers,’ elucidated the Permanent Secretary into a telephone.

The near-midsummer dusk is deepening on Horton Hill. The sheep are shadowy on its slopes; to the North the softly-rolling downland is sharpening into silhouette; and below, Scamnum is grown mysterious. Its hundred points of light are a great city from the air. Or its vague pale bulk is the sprawl of all Europe as viewed from an unearthly height at the opening of The Dynasts. And here, as there, are spirits. The spirits sinister and ironic look down on Scamnum Court these nights.

Chapter Two

THERE had been a time when Anne Dillon’s large canvases were notorious. Lionel Dillon, moving dubiously amid the gay, indistinguished, and overflowing companies which his daughter gathered in their rambling Hampstead house, had been inclined to charge her with a merely quantitative mind. Dillon himself was austerely qualitative in those days. He would stand grim and baffled before a single canvas for a year on end, and count every moment not so spent lost—fit only for drink and violence, to be followed by confession, Mass, and renewed concentration afterwards. He was of the time before the nineties. ‘One should do nothing to make oneself conspicuous,’ was the motto of his quiet spells; and he painted in a dress indistinguishable from that of his father, the Dublin solicitor.

Anne, taking charge of the widower in her later teens, had had to change all that. It was in itself, she knew, not a good picture to present to the declining century; and it was otherwise dangerous. Brandy once a month was the fatal Cleopatra of that generation; she ruled it out and established instead more intimate and respectable relations with claret. ‘Dillon,’ she would say—for she exploited all the minutiae of the cult of genius—‘Dillon was born a glass too low’; and the daily glass, working out in practice at three-quarters of a bottle, was provided. There was nothing merely quantitative about the claret; it was the best one could readily buy in London, and it came into the cellars regularly twice a year even if the rent or Anne’s dressmaker had to wait. And it worked. The awkward thought disappeared from the canvas to be replaced by the fluent handwriting that was acclaimed miraculous in London, in Glasgow, in Paris. And although Lionel Dillon knew the early studies as the things for which men would one day bid high he did not protest. It was not altogether Anne’s doing: he had felt the twitch of his tether, knew both the level at which he had shot his bolt and the level at which he had a future. And the orthodoxy that had come upon him like a revelation in Toledo was still heterodox enough in England—heterodox enough for the picture Anne was composing.

The period of the