War in Heaven, Charles Williams [novels for teenagers .txt] 📗
- Author: Charles Williams
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Stephen was looking out of the window, and a minute went by before he spoke. Then he said absently, “What did you want? Anything important?”
“I wanted to talk about the balance sheet,” his father answered. “There are a few points I don’t quite understand. And I still incline to think the proportion of novels is too high. It fritters money away, merely using it to produce more novels of the same kind. I want a definite proportion established between that and the other kind of book. You could quite well have produced my Intensive Mastery instead of that appalling balderdash about Flossie. Stephen, are you listening?”
“Yes,” Stephen said half-angrily.
“I don’t believe you mean to produce my book,” his father went on equably. “Did you read it?”
“Yes,” Stephen said again, and came back into the room. “I don’t know about it. I told you I didn’t quite like it—I don’t think other people would. Of course, I know there’s a great demand for that sort of psycho-analytic book, but I didn’t feel at all sure—” He stopped doubtfully.
“If you ever felt quite sure, Stephen,” the older man said, “I should lose a great deal of pleasure. What was it you didn’t feel quite sure about this time?”
“Well, all the examples—and the stories,” Stephen answered vaguely. “They’re all right, I suppose, but they seemed so—funny.”
“‘Funny Stories I Have Read’, by Stephen Persimmons,” his father gibed. “They weren’t stories, Stephen. They were scientific examples.”
“But they were all about torture,” the other answered. “There was a dreadful one about—oh, horrible! I don’t believe it would sell.”
“It will sell right enough,” his father said. “You’re not a scientist, Stephen.”
“And the diagrams and all that,” his son went on. “It’d cost a great deal to produce.”
“Well, you shall do as you like,” Persimmons answered. “But, if you don’t produce it by Christmas, I’ll print it privately. That will cost a lot more money, Stephen. And anything else I write. If there are many more it’ll make a nasty hole in my accounts. And there won’t be any sale then, because I shall give them away. And burn what are over. Make up your mind over the week-end. I’ll come down next week to hear what you decide. All a gamble, Stephen, and you don’t like to bet except on a certainty, do you? You know, if I could afford it, I should enjoy ruining you, Stephen. But that, Stephen—”
“For God’s sake, don’t keep on calling me Stephen like that,” the wretched publisher said. “I believe you like worrying me.”
“But that,” his father went on placidly, “wasn’t the only reason I came to see you to-day. I wanted to kill a man, and your place seemed to me as good as any and better than most. So it was, it seems.”
Stephen Persimmons stared at the large, heavy body opposite lying back in its chair, and said, “You’re worrying me… aren’t you?”
“I may be,” the other said, “but facts, I’ve noticed, do worry you, Stephen. They worried your mother into that lunatic asylum. A dreadful tragedy, Stephen—to be cut off from one’s wife like that. I hope nothing of the sort will ever happen to you. Here am I comparatively young—and I should like another child, Stephen. Yes, Stephen, I should like another child. There’d be someone else to leave the money to; someone else with an interest in the business. And I should know better what to do. Now, when you were born, Stephen—”
“Oh, God Almighty,” his son cried, “don’t talk to me like that. What do you mean—you wanted to kill a man?”
“Mean?” the father asked. “Why, that. I hadn’t thought of it till the day before, really—yesterday, so it was; when Sir Giles Tumulty told me Rackstraw was coming to see him—and then it only just crossed my mind. But when we got there, it was all so clear and empty. A risk, of course, but not much. Ask him to wait there while I get the money, and shut the door without going out. Done in a minute, Stephen, I assure you. He was an undersized creature, too.”
Stephen found himself unable to ask any more questions. Did his father mean it or not? It would be like the old man to torment him? but if he had? Would it be a way of release?
“Well, first, Stephen,” the voice struck in, “you can’t and won’t be sure. And it wouldn’t look well to denounce your father on chance. Your mother is in a lunatic asylum, you know. And, secondly, my last will—I made it a week or two ago—leaves all my money to found a settlement in East London. Very awkward for you, Stephen, if it all had to be withdrawn. But you won’t, you won’t. If anyone asks you, say you weren’t told, but you know I wanted to talk to you about the balance sheet. I’ll come in next week to do it.”
Stephen got to his feet. “I think you want to drive me mad too,” he said. “O God, if I only knew!”
“You know me,” his father said. “Do you think I should worry about strangling you, Stephen, if I wanted to? As, of course, I might. But it’s getting late. You know, Stephen, you brood too much; I’ve always said so. You keep your troubles to yourself and brood over them. Why not have a good frank talk with one of your clerks—that fellow Rackstraw, say? But you always were a secretive fellow. Perhaps it’s as well, perhaps it’s as well. And you haven’t got a wife. Now, can you hang me or can’t you?” The door shut behind his son, but he went on still aloud. “The wizards were burned, they went to be burned, they hurried. Is there a need still? Must the wizard be an outcast like the saint? Or am I only tired? I want another child. And I want the Graal.”
He lay back in his chair, contemplating remote possibilities and the passage of the days immediately before him.
The inquest was held on the Monday, with the formal result of a verdict of “Murder by a person or persons unknown,” and the psychological result of emphasizing the states of mind of the three chief sufferers within themselves. The world certified itself as being, to Lionel more fantastic, to Mornington more despicable, to Stephen Persimmons more harassing. To the young girl who lived in the waiting-room and was interrogated by the coroner, it became, on the contrary, more exciting and delightful than ever; although she had no information to give— having, on her own account, been engaged all the while so closely indexing letter-books that she had not observed anyone enter or depart by the passage at the side of her office.
On the Tuesday, however, being, perhaps naturally, more watchful, she remarked towards the end of the day, three, or rather four, visitors. The offices shut at six, and about half-past four the elder Mr. Persimmons, giving her an amiable smile, passed heavily along the corridor and up to his son’s room. At about a quarter past five Barbara Rackstraw, with Adrian, shone in the entrance—as she did normally some three or four times a year—and also disappeared up the stairs. And somewhere between the two a polite, chubby, and gaitered clergyman hovered at the door of the waiting-room and asked her tentatively if Mr. Mornington were in. Him she committed to the care of a passing office-boy, and returned to her indexing.
Gregory Persimmons, a little to his son’s surprise and greatly to his relief, appeared to have shaken off the mood of tantalizing amusement which had possessed him on the previous Friday. He discussed various financial points in the balance sheet as if he were concerned only with ordinary business concerns. He congratulated his son on the result of the inquest as likely to close the whole matter except in what he thought the unlikely result of the police discovering the murderer; and when he brought up the subject of Intensive Mastery he did it with no suggestion that anything but the most normal hesitation had ever held Stephen back from enthusiastic acceptance. In the sudden relief from mental neuralgia thus granted him, Stephen found himself promising to have the book out before Christmas—it was then early summer—and even going so far as to promise estimates during the next week and discuss the price at which it might reasonably appear. Towards the end of an hour’s conversation Gregory said, “By the way, I saw Tumulty yesterday, and he asked me to make sure that he was in time to cut a paragraph out of his book. He sent Rackstraw a postcard, but perhaps I might just make sure it got here all right. May I go along, Stephen?”
“Do,” Stephen said. “I’ll sign these letters and be ready by the time you’re back.” And, as his father went out with a nod, he thought to himself: “He couldn’t possibly want to go into that office again if he’d really killed a man there. It’s just his way of pulling my leg. Rather hellish, but I suppose it doesn’t seem so to him.”
Lionel, tormented with a more profound and widely spread neuralgia than his employer’s, had by pressure of work been prevented from dwelling on it that day. Soon after his arrival Mornington had broken into the office to ask if he could have a set of proofs of Sir Giles Tumulty’s book on Vessels of Folklore.
“I’ve got an Archdeacon coming to see me,” he said—“don’t bow—and an Archdeacon ought to be interested in folklore, don’t you think? I always used to feel that Archdeacons were a kind of surviving folklore themselves-they seem pre-Christian and almost prehistoric: a lingering and bi-sexual tradition. Besides, publicity, you know. Don’t Archdeacons charge? ‘Charge, Archdeacons, charge! On, Castra Parvulorum, on! were the last words of Mornington.”
“I wish they were!” Lionel said. “There are the proofs, on that shelf: take them and go! take them all.”
“I don’t want them all. Business, business. We can’t have murders and Bank Holidays every day.”
He routed out the proofs and departed; and when by the afternoon post an almost indecipherable postcard from Sir Giles asked for the removal of a short paragraph on page 218, Lionel did not think of making the alteration on the borrowed set. He marked the paragraph for deletion on the proofs he was about to return for Press, cursing Sir Giles a little for the correction—which, however, as it came at the end of a whole division of the book, would cause no serious inconvenience—and much more for his handwriting. A sentence beginning—he at last made out— “It has been suggested to me” immediately became totally illegible, and only recovered meaning towards the end, where the figures 218 rode like a monumental Pharaoh over the diminutive abbreviations which surrounded it. But the instruction was comprehensible, if the reason for it was not, and Lionel dispatched the proofs to the printer.
When, later on, the Archdeacon arrived, Mornington greeted him with real and false warmth mingled. He liked the clergyman, but he disliked manuscripts, and a manuscript on the League of Nations promised him some hours’ boredom. For, in spite of his disclaimer, he knew he would have to skim the book at least, before he obtained further opinions, and the League of Nations lay almost in the nadir of all the despicable things in the world. It seemed to him so entire and immense a contradiction of aristocracy that it drove him into a positive hunger for mental authority imposed by force. He desired to
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