and cope with Mr. Kensitt and Co. New profession.’
‘He ought not to be here. He can ride and shoot.’
‘He is the only son of his mother and she is a widow.’
‘He ought to go out. My only brother is out. I wish I were a man. I hate dawdlers.’ She looked at him: her eyes were large and grey under black lashes, they were dark and louring.
‘Have you, by any chance, a spark of the devil in you?’ asked Merton, taking a social header.
‘I have been told so, and sometimes thought so,’ said Miss Willoughby. ‘Perhaps this one will go out by fasting if not by prayer. Yes, I have a spark of the Accuser of the Brethren.’
‘Tant mieux,’ thought Merton.
All the people were talking and laughing now. Miss Maskelyne told a story to the table. She did a trick with a wine glass, forks, and a cork. Logan interviewed Miss Martin, who wrote tales for the penny fiction people, on her methods. Had she a moral aim, a purpose? Did she create her characters first, and let them evolve their fortunes, or did she invent a plot, and make her characters fit in?
Miss Martin said she began with a situation: ‘I wish I could get one somewhere as secretary to a man of letters.’
‘They can’t afford secretaries,’ said Logan. ‘Besides they are family men, married men, and so—’
‘And so what?’
‘Go look in any glass, and say,’ said Logan, laughing. ‘But how do you begin with a situation?’
‘Oh, anyhow. A lot of men in a darkened room. Pitch dark.’
‘A séance?’
‘No, a conspiracy. They are in the dark that when arrested they may swear they never saw each other.’
‘They could swear that anyhow.’
‘Conspirators have consciences. Then there comes a red light shining between the door and the floor. Then the door breaks down under a hammer, the light floods the room. There is a man in it whom the others never saw enter.’
‘How did he get in?’
‘He was there before they came. Then the fighting begins. At the end of it where is the man?’
‘Well, where is he? What was he up to?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ said Miss Martin, ‘it just comes as I go on. It has just got to come. It is a fourteen hours a day business. All writing. I crib things from the French. Not whole stories. I take the opening situation; say the two men in a boat on the river who hook up a sack. I don’t read the rest of the Frenchman, I work on from the sack, and guess what was in it.’
‘What was in the sack?’
‘In the Sack! A name for a story! Anything, from the corpse of a freak (good idea, corpse of a freak with no arms and legs, or with too many) to a model of a submarine ship, or political papers. But I am tired of corpses. They pervade my works. They give “a bouquet, a fragrance,” as Mr. Talbot Twysden said about his cheap claret.’
‘You read the old Masters?’
‘The obsolete Thackeray? Yes, I know him pretty well.’
‘What are you publishing just now?’
‘This to an author? Don’t you know?’
‘I blush,’ said Logan.
‘Unseen,’ said Miss Martin, scrutinising him closely.
‘Well, you do not read the serials to which I contribute,’ she went on. ‘I have two or three things running. There is The Judge’s Secret.’
‘What was that?’
‘He did it himself.’
‘Did what?’
‘Killed the bishop. He is not a very plausible judge in English: in French he would be all right, a juge d’instruction, the man who cross-examines the prisoners in private, you know.’
‘Judges don’t do that in England,’ said Logan.
‘No, but this case is an exception. The judge was such a very old friend, a college friend, of the murdered bishop. So he takes advantage of his official position, and steals into the cell of the accused. My public does not know any better, and, of course, I have no reviewers. I never come out in a book.’
‘And why did the judge assassinate the prelate?’
‘The prelate knew too much about the judge, who sat in the Court of Probate and Divorce.’
‘Satan reproving sin?’ asked Logan.
‘Yes, exactly; and the bishop being interested in the case—’
‘No scandal about Mrs. Proudie?’
‘No, not that exactly, still, you see the motive?’
‘I do,’ said Logan. ‘And the conclusion?’
‘The bishop was not really dead at all. It takes some time to explain. The corpus delicti—you see I know my subject—was somebody else. And the bishop was alive, and secretly watching the judge, disguised as Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Oh, I know it is too much in Dickens’s manner. But my public has not read Dickens.’
‘You interest me keenly’ said Logan.
‘I am glad to hear it. And the penny public take freely. Our circulation goes up. I asked for a rise of three pence on the thousand words.’
‘Now this is what I call literary conversation,’ said Logan. ‘It is like reading The British Weekly Bookman. Did you get the threepence? if the inquiry is not indelicate.’
‘I got twopence. But, you see, there are so many of us.’
‘Tell me more. Are you serialising anything else?’
‘Serialising is the right word. I see you know a great deal about literature. Yes, I am serialising a featured tale.’
‘A featured tale?’
‘You don’t know what that is? You do not know everything yet! It is called Myself.’
‘Why Myself?’
‘Oh, because the narrator did it—the murder. A stranger is found in a wood, hung to a tree. Nobody knows who he is. But he and the narrator had met in Paraguay. He, the murdered man, came home, visited the narrator, and fell in love with the beautiful being to whom the narrator was engaged. So the narrator lassoed him in a wood.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh,
