The Gorse Trilogy

by Patrick Hamilton, Matthew Beaumont

Genres: Classics; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

'I recommend Hamilton at every opportunity, because he was such a wonderful writer and yet is rather under-read today. All his novels are terrific' Sarah Waters

'If you were looking to fly from Dickens to Martin Amis with just one overnight stop, then Hamilton is your man' Nick Hornby


Patrick Hamilton's novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne's new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.

Ernest Ralph Gorse's heartlessness and lack of scruple are matched only by the inventiveness and panache with which he swindles his victims. With great deftness and precision Hamilton exposes how his dupes' own naivete, snobbery or greed make them perfect targets. These three novels are shot through with the brooding menace and sense of bleak inevitability so characteristic of the author. There is also vivid satire and caustic humour.

Gorse is thought to be based on the real-life murderer Neville Heath, hanged in 1946.

Release date: July 6, 2017

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

‘What is a criminal – or a pervert – or a criminal pervert or whatever you like to call him – really getting at?’ the policeman asks in Caller Anonymous, Patrick Hamilton’s disturbing radio play about an obscene phone caller. ‘All I know is that they just exist,’ he continues; ‘Some little boys at school like tearing off the wings of flies or butterflies. And most of them get over it when they grow up. But some of them don’t – unfortunately some people love cruelty for its own sake, to the end of their days…’

Caller Anonymous, broadcast in 1952, was a product of the same period during which – in a last, slightly desperate burst of this terminally alcoholic author’s rapidly declining creativity – Hamilton published The West Pier (1951), Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1953) and Unknown Assailant (1955), the novels that comprise the Gorse Trilogy. The character of Gorse himself, a malicious, manipulative con man motivated not by avaricious or socially ambitious impulses but by pure viciousness, is a half-playful, half-serious case study in criminal perversion. He is someone who relishes cruelty, someone who evidently never ceased, as he matured, to derive a detached and at the same time faintly amused satisfaction from torturing animals and insects; someone, in fact, who sees human beings themselves as insects and animals. As a small child, Hamilton informs us with comic malice, his anti-hero used to immerse his pet mice in the bath and force them to compete with one another in what, with characteristic cruelty, he fondly regarded as ‘races’. In the language of King Lear, this spiteful pre-pubescent is one of those wanton boys who, like some puerile pagan god, kills simply for the sport of it.

As a young man, as the simple but gripping plots of the three novels testify, Gorse experiments on other people, exploiting with merciless subtlety the fears and the all too pathetic hopes of socially aspirant, emotionally susceptible women in particular. As Emily Brontë says of her cruel anti-hero Heathcliff, he likes to treat people to a ‘slow vivisection’ for the sake of nothing more than amusement. In The West Pier, his victim is Esther Downes, an independent but unsophisticated young woman living with her family in abject poverty in Brighton, who works in a sweet shop and innocently hopes to improve her social prospects. This is a gruesome modern fairy tale, set some three years after the First World War, in which Cinderella comes from the slums and Prince Charming secretly resembles ‘a dangerous lunatic, a sex-maniac, some kind of News of the World slaughterer’. Esther is snared both by the gentlemanly accoutrements that Gorse displays as part of his deception, the elegant clothes, the sporty cars, the exotic cocktails in pretentious hotel bars; and by the poison-pen letters he sends her. These anonymous notes, artfully designed to eradicate her feelings for a friend of Gorse’s, create ‘an over-hanging pall of filth and evil’ that, inspissated by her suitor’s intoxicating charms, eventually overwhelms her.

In Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, Gorse’s victim is Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce, a portly, socially pretentious widow whom Hamilton satirizes with almost as much malicious enthusiasm as his protagonist channels into psychologically abusing her and embezzling her savings. This novel, set in Reading, is a bitter and extremely funny attack on what is today characterized as the culture of Middle England. Mr Stimpson, the pitiable estate agent with whom Gorse competes for Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce’s attentions, is both middle-aged and ‘intensely and overbearingly middle-class’: ‘He was vehemently, formidably, almost dangerously “middle” in every way.’ Finally, in Unknown Assailant, a novel that is as nasty and brutish as it is short, Gorse’s victim is a vivacious barmaid, the daughter of a greedy and unscrupulous former gamekeeper living in London. She is not only defrauded by Gorse but physically abused by him. ‘He liked to tie women up in order to get the impression that they were at his mercy, and he also liked to be tied up by women and to feel that he was at theirs.’ There is a certain amount of biographical evidence to suggest that Hamilton’s own sexual predilections converged with those of his unpleasant anti-hero.

‘We’ll never know their real motives,’ the policeman in Caller Anonymous concludes his thumbnail character sketch of criminal perverts; ‘They probably don’t know themselves.’ Gorse, whose apprenticeship in criminal perversity takes place in Brighton, as I have implied, is comparable to Pinkie in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (1938), another novel about apparently motiveless evil; except that he is rather more socially slippery, rather more spiritually elusive, than his predecessor. It is no accident that Greene, albeit with a slightly condescending pretence of modesty, called The West Pier ‘the best novel written about Brighton’. It brilliantly captures the social opportunities that this seaside resort, built on an archaic class structure that is quite as rigid and rickety as the pier itself, presents someone who is completely unscrupulous, if not sociopathic. Indeed, the pier might stand in for English society itself between the Wars, with its artificial jollities glittering like fairground lights above the shadows of poverty and deprivation that flicker dangerously beneath its fragile edifice.

Hamilton based Gorse in part on his father Bernard, a pathological narcissist whose belief in his own self-aggrandising fantasies had a seriously damaging impact on his poor son’s psyche. But, as the botanical associations of Gorse’s name intimate, combined no doubt with its buried reference to gore, he also based him partly on the notorious figure of Neville Heath. Heath was a con man and murderer who, disguised as a distinguished soldier, committed a series of sadistic and misogynistic crimes in the febrile, socially labile social conditions of England in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. This was a strange time, often described by Hamilton as ‘somnambulistic’, when hundreds of thousands of soldiers, who had been taught by the state to kill in cold blood, returned in a condition of terminal restlessness, both psychological and social, to families and communities that had themselves been dramatically destabilized by events far beyond their control.

Heath, who inhabited the drab domain of anonymous hotel bedrooms, rapidly graduated from ‘ear-biting’, a brutal form of fraud that entailed becoming engaged to affluent young women and then running up substantial debts on their behalf before absconding, to horrifically violent, ultimately homicidal sex crimes, in the course of which, among other atrocities, he bit off his victims’ nipples. During his sensational trial, which the tabloids reported in lurid detail, Heath’s prison doctors identified him as a psychopath, though not as insane, and he was hanged in 1946. But he remained uncomfortably lodged in the nation’s psyche: the novelist Elizabeth Taylor based A Wreath of Roses on his story in 1949; and Alfred Hitchcock, who had adapted Hamilton’s play Rope (1929) for the cinema, developed a script based on his sordid career throughout the 1960s, several traces of which can be detected in his penultimate film, Frenzy (1972). A waxwork of Heath, installed in Madame Tussaud’s a mere twenty minutes after his execution, was a staple feature of the Chamber of Horrors for decades.

In the opening paragraphs of The West Pier, outlining the social type to which Gorse belongs, and no doubt thinking of Heath too, Hamilton observes that, ‘during wars, or in periods of social upheaval,’ its representatives ‘appear, as if vengefully, to come into their own, to gain ephemeral power and standing’. Hamilton, who consistently identified himself as a Marxist novelist, was committed to exploring situations in which an individual’s most barbaric instincts, under the conditions of social and political reaction, are catalysed and converted into a collective problem of potentially enormous gravity and severity. The Gorse Trilogy, from this angle, is an anatomy, finally, of the kind of person who, in certain historical circumstances, becomes a fascist. It is a portrait of what, in The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a book published a year before The West Pier, the philosopher Theodor Adorno and his co-authors classified as ‘the potentially fascistic individual’.

Tragically, perhaps, it is this that imparts to the Gorse Trilogy a persistent, even pressing relevance in the politically confusing, if not desperate, times in which we live in the early twenty-first century; times in which, as W.B. Yeats so indelibly phrased it, ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.’

Matthew Beaumont, 2017

 

There is a sort of man – usually a lance-corporal or corporal and coming from the submerged classes – who, returning to England from military service in distant parts of the earth, does not announce his arrival to his relations. Instead of this he will tramp, or hitchhike, his way to his home, and in the early hours of the morning will be heard gently throwing pebbles up at his wife’s bedroom window.

It is impossible to say whether he does this because he hopes to surprise his wife in some sinful attachment, or whether it has never occurred to him to use the telephone, the telegraph service, or the post. If the latter were the case one might suppose him to be merely unimaginative: but this type of person is actually far from being unimaginative.

What concerns us here is that such a person certainly belongs to a type, rare but identifiable. There may exist only one in a hundred thousand, or more, people: but, by a shrewd observer, they can be discerned and classified without mistake.

The main feature which characterizes these people is, of course, their silence – their almost complete dumbness and numbness amidst a busy and loquacious humanity. They are not, in fact, inarticulate: at certain times they will talk at great length. They are able, also, to laugh, though this is usually at a joke of a commonplace, cruel, or dirty nature. But although they are able to talk and laugh, they seem to do this only spasmodically and on the surface: beneath this surface they are dreaming, dully brooding, seeming incessantly and as it were somnambulistically to contemplate themselves and the prospects of their own advantage.

They are almost exclusively a male species. Seventy-five per cent of them belong to the submerged classes: the remaining (and perhaps most interesting) twenty-five per cent are scattered amongst all kinds of higher strata. They all tend to drift into the Army. During wars, or in periods of social upheaval, they appear, as if vengefully, to come into their own, to gain ephemeral power and standing.

As boys at school they are generally bullies, but quiet ones – twisters of wrists in distant corners. As adults, naturally, they can no longer behave in such a way, and some of them wear on their faces what may be a slow, pensive resentment at being thwarted in this matter.

They use few gestures, and, like most great inner thinkers, they are great walkers, plodders of the streets in raincoats.

They are conspicuously silent and odd in their behaviour with their wives or their women. In public houses, or in tea-shops, they are to be seen sitting with women without uttering a word to them, sometimes for as much as an hour on end.

It is extremely difficult to guess what goes on beneath the surface of their minds. It is only from their surface behaviour, and surface utterances, that the depths can be dimly understood or estimated.

It would be wrong to suppose that they are all of the same character, that there are not innumerable variations within this species. They are not all bullies at school, and they are by no means all bad and harmful. Indeed, it is likely that many of them serve a purpose as calm, honest, useful, though extremely dull citizens. On the other hand it is beyond dispute that it is from this type that the most atrocious criminals emerge.

We feel that the poisoner Neil Creame, the bath-murderer George Smith, and many others of a similar way of thinking belonged to this type.

Of this type Ernest Ralph Gorse, who was born in 1903, was clearly one or the other sort of member. He showed as much as a boy.

 

During a Thursday afternoon of the winter before the First World War, at Rodney House Road, Hove, there occurred, in a changing-room, an episode which was originated by Ernest Ralph Gorse.

Rodney House was a preparatory school for about forty boys, accepting pupils from many different classes of parents in the town. What may be roughly called an aristocracy of five or six boys came from the squares and avenues – Brunswick Square, Grand Avenue, First Avenue, and the like: what may be roughly called a bourgeoisie (the sons of merchants, dentists, estate agents, doctors, clergymen, retired officers, and well-to-do local tradesmen) came from the roads – Wilbury Road, Holland Road, Tisbury Road, Norton Road: while the rest came from the villas – Hova Villas, Ventnor Villas, Denmark Villas – or from obscure crescents and streets at the back of Hove or of Brighton, or from humble western regions verging upon Portslade. A few of this third class approximated to the sansculottes: at any rate, their clothes were laughed at, and they were known to be ‘common’.

Of these three classes the quietest, for the most part, were the aristocrats and the sansculottes – the former, perhaps, because of their smooth home atmosphere; the latter because of their rudely published inferiority and consequent timidity. It was the middle class which made all the noise, the middle class which, in the pursuit of its many varied and violent pleasures, caused the establishment, out of working hours, to resound to the skies.

These pleasures, like all pleasures, were subject to fashion, and fashion of an even more fickle kind than that which operates in the adult world. For a short period, for instance, the eager, clamorous delight of almost all the pupils would centre around the persecution of a single boy, who would be accused of being a thief, or a cheat, or a ‘sneak’, or unclean in his personal habits, or all these things together. Such a boy, however, would all at once be rescued from the utmost spiritual and physical torment, would be permitted to sink into a blissful state of nonentity, by the chance appearance at the school of a mere water pistol of a new design. Not the human boy, but water pistols of this design would now be the rage, though not for long. Water pistols would be soon submerged in a suddenly recurring wave of, say, model battleships, and so it went on throughout the year, a single one of which would embrace vogues moving from boy-persecution to water pistols, from water pistols to model battleships, and from model battleships to electric torches; to catapults; to regimental buttons; to pocket knives; to miniature trains; to fretsaws; to pistols exploding pink caps; to miniature soldiers, guns, and forts; to whistles; to balloons; to instruments into which one could hum tunes with a greatly enlarged volume of sound; to small mirrors which sent mischievous reflections of the sun into the eye of a distant enemy or friend; to highly coloured tin beetles which raced along the floor; to tops; to cameras; to ‘transfers’; to white mice; to chewing gum; to miniature aeroplanes; to solid imitations of spilt ink, and so on and so forth. All these popular passions, ephemeral but returning in cycles, were accompanied by the perennial and perpetual creation and throwing of paper darts and gliders, and the collection and exchange of cigarette cards.

On that remote Thursday afternoon of that remote winter, an interest in small electric torches was approaching its peak; and Ernest Ralph Gorse originated the episode in question by removing one of these from the pocket of one boy and putting it into the pocket of another. He was able to do this unseen, because he was the first to return to the changing-room after military operations on the County Ground, which was within six minutes’ walk of Rodney House.

Thursday was the day on which Rodney House School, forsaking games, applied itself diligently to military exercises. In the morning there appeared a ‘sergeant’, who, establishing himself in a shed in the back garden, taught a number of privileged boys (those whose parents desired to pay for it) to shoot at a target pinned on a wooden box. Such boys, in an expectant and excited condition, were called in twos by rota from their classrooms. They left the room with silent, valiant, and dramatic air (which gave the impression rather that they were going to be shot than going to shoot) and returned about ten minutes later with their targets, riddled and showing their scores, in their hands. These targets, despite the vigilance of the masters, usually succeeded in being passed from desk to desk around the room and coming back to their owners.

All this, in the morning, was pleasant and intelligible to the boys: the afternoon was unpleasant and almost completely unintelligible. In the afternoon they were dressed in the boots, puttees, tunics, and caps of private soldiers, and, carrying wooden imitations of rifles, were marched down to the County Ground and drilled – made, with their coarse puttees tickling their immature legs, to shoulder arms, present arms, port arms, form fours, right dress, stand at ease, etc., never, never satisfactorily, and again and again and again until they were stupefied.

It was, oddly enough, not difficult to stupefy the boys of Rodney House. They were, in fact, during the greater part of their day at school, either making a noise which rang to heaven, or in a state of stupefaction at their tasks. In the latter condition they wore a bewildered, staring, idiotic, Bedlam, Bridewell look – many of them, during class, biting their nails, blinking their eyes, or showing other nervous twitching gestures.

This habit of staring, brought on by bewilderment and boredom, was almost certainly the original cause of the myopia which would make so many of them in later life wear spectacles.

Ernest Ralph Gorse was, however, not in any way bored by Thursday afternoons: the unintelligible was to him in some way intelligible. His boots were always clean; his puttees were rolled neatly and expertly; his buttons were the brightest of all; his execution of the requisite movements was so good that he was often called from the ranks to make a model demonstration and shame his fellows. Thursday afternoons stimulated rather than stupefied Ernest Ralph Gorse.

Even his expression and demeanour changed. A slim boy, with ginger silken hair which came in a large bang over his forehead, and an aquiline nose which seemed to be smelling something nasty – a boy with thin lips, a slouching gait, a nasal voice, and a certain amount of freckles, Ernest Ralph Gorse’s normal expression was the dull, thoughtful one of a person proposing to remember an evil done to him. But on Thursday afternoons there was something different: his look was less obtuse and hoarding: he became, even, in his own way, lively.

It was, perhaps, an excess of this lively spirit which put into his mind, and inspired him to perpetrate, the mischief with the torch.

 

The changing-room was a dark, bare-boarded room in the basement – in the day overrun by boys, in the night by beetles. It was lined with lockers which did not lock, with hooks, and with benches. About twelve boys changed in here – those who occupied, roughly, an upper middle station in the school. A select band of seniors and a mob of juniors changed in their respective rooms elsewhere.

After Ernest Ralph Gorse (who, having removed the torch from the one pocket to the other, was by this time unrolling his puttees) there entered two boys.

One of these was named Ryan and the other Bell. Ryan was a carefree, impulsive, good-looking boy who did not pretend to be clever and did not specialize at anything; while Bell was a spectacled, old-looking boy who was extremely clever at his lessons and who specialized in the use of long words. He was using long words as he entered with Ryan.

‘The relation of your proboscis appertaining to your external physiognomy,’ he was saying to Ryan as he entered, ‘occurs to me to be somewhat superfluous.’

This remark of Bell’s came completely out of the blue: nearly all such remarks of his did. Bell would go into a sort of trance, would remain absolutely quiet for a moment or so while preparing such sentences, which, though painfully obscure, were nearly always to be recognized as being of a bald, rude, gratuitous, and challenging nature.

Ryan now had to do some quick thinking. He had not understood what had been said: but he was certain that whatever had been said was unfavourable to himself. ‘Proboscis’, he at any rate knew, was long-language for nose: so presumably something nasty had been said about his nose. But what? Had it been called red, long, dirty, ugly? He floundered about in doubt (as Bell had indeed intended he should) for a matter of ten seconds, and then, unable to make a retort in kind, rather shamefacedly took the easiest way out.

‘So’s yours,’ he said, and a moment later added, ‘only worse…’

‘That happens to be a tu quoque,’ said Bell without hesitation, and Ryan, having been recently taught in class what a tu quoque was, this time did not hesitate.

‘You’re a tu silly ass,’ he said. ‘And I should say you’ve got a bit tu above yourself.’

This was definitely witty and clever, and it was Bell’s turn to be momentarily dumbfounded. He paused for as long as he had previously made Ryan pause, and at last was only able to manage:

‘Really… Your brain…’

‘Really,’ said Ryan, ‘yours…’

Honours might now well have been considered even, and so the argument might well have been allowed to drop. But the Ryans and Bells of life never on any account allow such arguments to drop. Only when a school bell rings, a master enters, or their attention is fortuitously distracted elsewhere, do such arguments end. There was now a pause during which the adversaries, while rapidly changing their clothes, and while other boys entered to change, were clearly mobilizing their forces behind the lines. Then Ryan went into the attack.

‘Bell…’ he said in an innocent voice, as if he intended to ask the other a detached or even amiable question.

‘Yes?’ said Bell.

‘Nothing,’ said Ryan, with the firm and gleeful air of having most cunningly enticed and then snapped a trap upon Bell.

This device, commonplace and, in fact, beneath contempt, yet had the power to hurt: for to the Ryans and Bells of life, in argument, there is hardly any ruse considered too conventional or too low.

‘Very clever,’ said Bell. ‘Very clever indeed. You ought to have your bumps examined – by a phrenologist – just to see how clever you are.’

‘I’ve got quite enough bumps, thank you,’ said Ryan, ‘playing football. And barges, too.’

Now Bell saw an opportunity of employing a counter-device. This device was, perhaps, not quite so base as the one just used by his opponent – but was, all the same, cheap and facile beyond measure. It consisted of repeating, word for word, and merely for the sake of annoyance, what the other person had last uttered.

‘“I’ve got quite enough bumps, thank you”’ Bell quoted, ‘“playing football, And barges, too.”’

Ryan thought for a moment.

‘Are you trying to imitate me?’ he then said.

‘“Are you trying to imitate me?”’ said Bell.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Ryan. ‘Anybody can do that.’

‘“Don’t be a fool,”’ said Bell. ‘“Anybody can do that.”’

‘It’s not funny, you know,’ said Ryan.

‘“It’s not funny, you know,”’ said Bell.

There was a pause.

‘Well – I just won’t say anything, that’s all,’ said Ryan.

‘“Well – I just won’t say anything, that’s all,”’ said Bell.

There was now a silence of nearly a minute’s duration, in which it seemed that Ryan intended to adhere to his resolution. This silence was embarrassing and hateful to both, for to the Ryans and Bells of life there is nothing more unnatural and detestable than not talking. Much as he desired it, it was impossible for Bell to break the spell, for, had he done so, Ryan, he knew, would have at once started repeating his own words, and the whole position would have been fatally reversed. It was Ryan who at last relieved the situation. This he did by adopting a new tactic – or rather a familiar variation in this barren and frustrating form of conflict.

‘Bell,’ he said, ‘is the silliest fool at Rodney House.’

Now what? Without proclaiming himself the silliest fool at Rodney House, Bell was unable to maintain the ascendancy by continuing in the same course as before. Should he, then, remain silent? No – for that would be an admission of defeat. Also, being a Bell of life, Bell, as has been said, was temperamentally incapable of remaining silent. He saw that he had to compromise, and did so.

‘Bell,’ he said, ‘is not the silliest fool at Rodney House.’

‘There you are. Got you!’ said Ryan. ‘You couldn’t repeat me.’

‘“There you are. Got you!”’ said Bell. ‘“You couldn’t repeat me.”’

‘You didn’t repeat me, and it’s no use pretending you did,’ said Ryan.

‘“You didn’t repeat me, and it’s no use pretending you did”’ said Bell.

Now it seemed to Ryan that, owing to his own folly, he was back exactly where he was before. Ryan, however, was an indomitable boy, and he used indomitability.

‘Bell,’ he said again, firmly, ‘is the silliest fool at Rodney House.’

‘Bell,’ Bell replied with equal firmness, ‘is not the silliest fool at Rodney House.’

‘Bell,’ said Ryan, ‘is the silliest fool at Rodney House and is not able to repeat Ryan’s words.’

‘Bell,’ said Bell, ‘is not the silliest fool at Rodney House and is able to repeat Ryan’s words.’

‘Bell,’ said Ryan, ‘is so Abso-Blooming-Lutely silly that Ryan doesn’t intend to speak to him any more.’

‘Bell,’ said Bell, ‘is not so Abso-Blooming-Lutely silly that Ryan doesn’t intend to speak to him any more.’

Who, now, was the winner? Who could ever be the winner? Ryan, undoubtedly, was morally and logically in the right, but appearances, which are all-important to the Ryans and Bells of life, were against him. He could not, by any means, establish his moral and logical superiority, and he could never get the last word.

How long this would have gone on, and what the outcome would have been, cannot be said. In a sense fortunately, the insoluble was at this moment solved by misfortune.

Misfortune, striking Ryan like a thunderbolt, caused him to go white in the face, and to dismiss from his mind all other things.

‘Hullo,’ he said frantically and whitely, going through the pockets of his coat. ‘Where’s my torch?’

 

At first Bell, who was fundamentally of a humane nature, did not at all take in the seriousness of what had been said.

‘“Hullo”’ he repeated automatically. ‘“Where’s my torch?”’

‘No, shut up, man,’ said Ryan. ‘I’ve lost it.’

And still Bell did not understand, and repeated Ryan’s words again.

‘No. Do shut up, really,’ said Ryan. ‘It’s gone from my pocket!’

At this a hoarseness, even a hint of tears, in Ryan’s voice caused Bell to look at Ryan and see that his face was pale and his manner agitated beyond measure. Seeing this, Bell abandoned frivolity, though reluctantly.

‘What do you mean – it’s gone from your pocket?’ he said. ‘Don’t be an ass.’

‘It’s gone,’ said Ryan, still searching feebly, ‘that’s all.’

And now something of the real and peculiar horror of the situation was communicated to Bell. The horror was of a peculiar nature because of the character and reputation of Ryan’s torch. Ryan’s torch, in fact, dwelt in a heavenly realm above and beyond all other torches – was famous, one might say fabulous, in the school just at this time. To be permitted to look at it was a privilege, to hold it was an honour; to use it, even with its owner’s sanction, was almost a blasphemy, frightening. This was to a certain extent because it was so wonderfully thin and small and covered with imitation crocodile leather; but principally because it had, at the top, a sliding apparatus which enabled its user to change the white light to red, and then to white again, and then again to green! What specific purpose, if any, this was intended to serve, nobody had as yet asked: everyone simply and instinctively knew that no one could ask for more. During the whole week it had been the making of Ryan: Ryan’s being was the torch and the torch was Ryan’s being. Ryan was a torch. If, then, the torch was lost, was not Ryan utterly lost, suddenly a nothing? Bell, looking at him, was genuinely appalled, and attempted kindness.

‘Go on, man,’ he said. ‘Have another look. It must be there somewhere.’

‘But it isn’t.’

‘But it must be.’

Bell was not entirely disinterested, and his voice also betrayed terror. For when he was not quarrelling with Ryan he had more than once been allowed to use the torch and had looked forward to much pleasure of this kind in the future.

Here Ernest Ralph Gorse, who, while methodically changing, had been listening to every word which had passed between these two, spoke.

‘Are you sure it was in your pocket?’ he asked Ryan.

‘Yes. I know it was.’

‘Absolutely sure?’ asked Ernest Ralph Gorse.

‘Yes,’ said Bell. ‘You might have left it somewhere else.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ said Ryan. ‘It was in my pocket.’

‘Then someone must have pinched it,’ said Ernest Ralph Gorse.

Ryan considered this for a moment. ‘But who could have pinched it?’ he said, and then, returning to life, he burst forth angrily and addressed the entire room. ‘Look here,’ he said. ‘Is someone trying to be funny? Has someone pinched my torch?’

‘Look here,’ said a boy named Kerr. ‘Are you accusing me?’

‘No. I’m not accusing anyone. I’m just asking who’s jolly well pinched my torch.’

‘You’d better not accuse me, you know,’ said Kerr, now anxious to be accused, and endeavouring to create the illusion that this had already happened. ‘Because I’ll jolly well punch your nose.’

‘And you’d better not accuse me either,’ said another boy named Roberts, perceiving and rushing and with all his belongings towards the glorious Yukon of quarrelling which Kerr had discovered. ‘Or I’ll jolly well punch your nose, too.’

‘I’ll jolly well punch anyone’s nose who’s pinched my torch,’ said Ryan. ‘Come on. Who is it? Come on!’

Ryan himself was now, it can be seen, affected by the wild spirit of the gold rush, and assumed without further question that his torch had been stolen.

‘Why not institute a search?’ said Ernest Ralph Gorse.

This brought in Bell’s support because he liked the long word ‘institute’ (of which he took a mental note).

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Let’s institute a summary investigation.’ (He was glad to have beaten ‘search’ with ‘investigation’ and was very pleased indeed with ‘summary’.)

‘Nobody’s jolly well going to summary investigate me,’ said Kerr. ‘I’ll jolly well summer and investigate their noses, if they do. And winter, too, if it comes to that.’

At this delightful play upon words, many of the boys could not resist openly giggling, while others reluctantly half smiled, and it looked for a moment as though a painful and strenuous situation might break up in humour and lightheartedness. But now another boy named Wills, changing in a far corner, poisonously reintroduced seriousness.

‘I’ll bet it’s Rosen…’ he said.

Rosen was a dark, Jewish, short, quiet, passionate, long-haired boy, destined in later life to become a successful municipal and BBC musical conductor. His quietness and aloofness, his gift for the violin (which enabled him most enviably to escape, during the week, quite a few hours in the ordinary classroom), together with his hopeless inability to keep a shred of his temper when falsely accused of the foulest crimes, all served to make him unpopular, a victim. He, above all, was one of those characters whom only vogues for water pistols, torches, model battleships, etc., could save from persecution. Now it seemed that the prevailing torch-mania, instead of mercifully hiding him, was by a wicked paradox fated to bring him into the limelight yet again.

‘Yes, I’ll bet it is, too,’ said another poisonous boy.

For a few moments nothing was said, and in the silence it was generally felt that it was Ryan’s business to make a formal accusation against Rosen. This Ryan did not at once do. Being, like his friend Bell, a humane boy, and not believing for a second that Rosen had stolen his torch, he was loath to begin. The continued silence, however, at last began to fill him with a sense of having to shoulder a public obligation, and, in a gingerly manner, he plunged in, or rather began to paddle.

‘Have you taken it, Rosen?’ he said, with an imitation of some hostility, but actually almost apologetically.

Rosen, who was already getting dangerously angry; made the pretence of considering it beneath his dignity to reply, and went on changing his clothes rapidly.

‘Well. Go on,’ said Kerr. ‘Answer – can’t you?’

But still Rosen, in his anger changing his clothes even more rapidly, affected mute and sublime dignity.

‘Oh – so you can’t answer,’ said Kerr. ‘Well – that’s a proof of guilt, anyway. That’s jolly well a proof of guilt.’

‘Yes – that’s a proof of guilt,’ said Roberts, who was Kerr’s shadow. ‘Come on, hand it over, you dirty little thief.’

This caused the pent-up Rosen to explode. He stood as if at bay, his body quivered, and his eyes dilated.

‘How dare you say that!’ he said. ‘How dare you! You pig!’

Alas, Rosen had succumbed yet again to his inveterate weakness – his inability to keep a shred of his temper when falsely accused. His mother had constantly spoken to him about this – so had his father: he himself completely accepted and eagerly agreed with what both his mother and father said; but it was all of no avail. He was totally unable to control himself when unjustly treated at school. A success in later life, certainly, he was going to be, with a fame to which his present tormentors (themselves having drifted into money-seeking, undistinguished, or even sordid obscurity) would allude with pride and pleasure, basely preening themselves with a morsel of his glamour: but here and now he created nothing but ignominy and suffering for himself. This was aggravated by the fact that when he lost his temper he always did so with the utmost gaucherie, bringing forth, in his lonely, alien, Jewish way, absurd, alien, outmoded expressions. At Rodney House, or at any preparatory school of its kind at that time, you simply did not say ‘How dare you!’ Nor, though in certain contexts you might abusively use the word ‘pig’, did you ever permit yourself the ridiculous, declamatory ‘You pig!’

‘Did you call me a pig?’ said Roberts, fixing Rosen with a steady, detached, questioning look. ‘Did I hear anyone calling me a pig?’

Rosen’s answer was simple enough.

‘You’re a pig, a cad, a swine, a hog, and a liar!’ he said.

‘Oh – so I’m –’ began Roberts, when Ryan cut in.

‘Never mind about that,’ said Ryan. ‘All I want is my torch, and all I want to know is if you’ve got it, Rosen.’

‘How dare you say I’ve got it!’ said Rosen. ‘How dare you suggest I’ve got it! Do you want to search me? Go on. Search my clothes! Search my locker! Search my desk upstairs! Search everything!’

‘All right. We will,’ said Roberts, and moved over towards Rosen’s locker.

‘If you dare to so much as touch my clothes I’ll kill you!’ said Rosen, contradicting himself.

‘Oh – so you’re afraid, are you?’ said Roberts.

‘No. I’m not afraid. Ryan may search. It’s his torch. Go on, Ryan. Search!’

‘No, I don’t want to…’ said Ryan, but Rosen would have none of this.

‘Go on. Search!’ he said. ‘I insist that you search! I demand a search!’

Ryan still hesitated, but the other boys egged him on, only one of them recommending him to refrain from searching, and this not for Rosen’s sake, but because of the inconvenience which Ryan might have to endure from ‘the smell’.

Ryan began to search, and the others crowded round to watch him.

All at once a gasp of incredulity and ineffable exultation arose from the boys. Ryan had found the torch in Rosen’s pocket.

‘My Aunt – my Sainted Aunt!’ said one boy, and ‘Phe-e-e-e-w!’ said another, and others said, ‘My Giddy Forefathers!’ and ‘By George’ and ‘Great Scott’ and ‘Great Jehoshaphat’ and ‘My Hat – my Giddy Hat!’ and Bell said solemnly, ‘By Nebuchadnezzar’s Toe-Nails…’ (Nebuchadnezzar’s name was very frequently upon Bell’s lips, because Nebuchadnezzar’s name was so long.)

Then they turned upon Rosen. ‘Well – what about it now, my young friend?’ said Kerr. ‘What about it now?’

‘It’s a trick! It’s a trick! It was never there! It’s a conjuring trick!’ said Rosen in his old-fashioned way. ‘Someone must have put it there! Someone put it there by sleight of hand!’

‘Oh,’ said Kerr. ‘So you’re accusing other people now. You’re not content with stealing – you start accusing people of playing tricks.’

‘Legerdemain…’ said Bell.

‘I tell you it’s a trick!’ said Rosen. ‘And you all know it! If I’d taken it I wouldn’t let you search. I demanded the search. Didn’t I?’

‘Yes,’ said Bell fairly. ‘He certainly requested an examination of his external apparel.’ And the other boys were struck by the curiousness of this. They might, indeed, have remained in some sort of benevolent doubt had not Ernest Ralph Gorse, still standing apart and quietly changing, now cut in again.

‘That was just a try-on,’ he said. ‘He knew he was caught, so he tried it on. He thought we wouldn’t look. It was his last fling.’

‘Yes,’ said Kerr, highly grateful to Gorse for having so astutely readjusted the case against Rosen. ‘It was your last fling, you filthy little thief, and now you’re trying to use it as an excuse.’

‘Filthy low thief yourself!’ shouted Rosen, and ‘What did you say!’ shouted Kerr, advancing upon Rosen to make a physical attack, when there was an interruption from outside. Mr Oakes, a junior master, put his head round the door.

‘There’s a lot of noise going on in here,’ he said, and then suavely suggested: ‘Shall we have complete silence until you’re all changed and upstairs?’

 

Mr Oakes’s suggestion was not really a suggestion at all: it was a command: and Mr Oakes was capable, even with this violent, hardened, and for the most part brutish mob, of inspiring the greatest fear.

This was strange, because Mr Oakes was not in fact formidable, either in himself or to himself. Only twenty-two years of age, with a chubby face, curly fair hair, and spectacles, Mr Oakes was in his private life lonely, miserable, and afraid. He had a tendency to spots on his face; he suffered a good deal from earache; he caught colds easily; and he was treated, it seemed to him, contemptuously and basely by the headmaster. He had a mother who lived in Clapham, and to his mother he wrote letters which were on the surface hopeful and courageous, but in reality filled with great pathos. Over and above his unhappiness at the school he was ‘in love’, and the one he loved, also living in Clapham, he could not ‘understand’. Also, it was clear that she did not ‘understand’ him. She had originally ‘understood’ him, had, he believed, ‘loved’ him, and that was what made it all so much worse. In addition there was a nagging mystery as to whether or not there was somebody else. He wrote to her almost daily (receiving much less frequent replies) and harped upon this mystery. She stated that there was nobody else: but this she did in an indifferent, and therefore cruel, way, and even if he had believed it he would only have been unhappier still: because in that case there would be no explanation for her erratic and extraordinary attitudes. Then, again, she might simply have changed. He only wanted, he told himself, to know. And so on and so on and so on, and so forth and so forth and so forth.

Yet the youthful Mr Oakes, weak and tottering as a private individual, had witch-doctor-like power in the school and was able to cause dread amongst savages. He had a mystical alliance and direct means of communication with the study-god, the headmaster Mr Codrington, whose hideous vengeance, with a ‘report’, he could at any moment summon into action. The boys were quite silent for fully a minute.

Then, one of the boys having crept to the door and ascertained that Mr Oakes was not within hearing distance, they began to whisper, and then, softly, to talk.

‘Well – what are we going to do with him, Ryan?’ said Kerr. ‘It’s up to you.’

‘He jolly well ought to have his nose punched,’ said Ryan.

‘He jolly well ought to be stewed in boiling oil,’ said Roberts.

‘Except for the smell,’ said the boy who had already pointed out the danger of any sort of physical approach to Rosen, and who did not desire this contribution of his own to the matter in hand to be overlooked.

‘Yes. There is that,’ another boy agreed, and then said ‘Pooh!’ as though he could already smell something.

‘Stewed in boiling oil, turned upside down, have his guts taken out, and sent to Coventry for a week,’ suggested Wills, Rosen’s original accuser.

‘Cave!’ said the boy nearest the door, thinking he had heard Mr Oakes returning.

There was now a long, cautious silence, which gave Bell the time and peace necessary for creative thought.

‘The advisability of dismissing the delinquent to the City of Cycles,’ said the gifted Bell, ‘is not to be dismissed. But to submerge his physiology in the oleaginous substance does not appertain to civilized behaviour.’ There was a pause. ‘I therefore suggest,’ Bell went on, ‘that the venerable and much-respected Order of the Boot be applied by means of pedal extremities to his nether proportions, and that the culprit be summarily dismissed.’

Bell had surpassed himself.

‘Cave!’ said the boy nearest the door, and this time it was not a false alarm. Mr Oakes again put his head round the door.

‘Did I hear someone talking?’ he asked, and most of the boys cried ‘No, sir!’ indignantly; and Bell, who had, in addition to a command of length in language, nerve, said sweetly, ‘By no manner of means, sir’ – and there was thenceforth actually no word uttered in the changing-room until the school bell rang.

 

Rosen was sensible enough to prolong his changing until the exact moment at which the school bell was rung, and was the last to enter the third-form classroom.

This was a dreary and uncomfortable room, now rendered, owing to the time of year and day, even more dispiriting by the electric light which shone down upon it from two bright bulbs, with white porcelain shades, suspended from the ceiling.

Three rows of three age-worn desks (each of which seated, and harboured the school belongings of, two boys) confronted the smaller and higher master’s desk, which contained, for the most part, objects which had been confiscated owing to their illicit circulation in class.

The boys, when brooding, looked either at this desk and the master seated behind it, or at a blackboard on a stand to the left, or at an enormous coloured map of England, showing each county in a particular colour, which hung in the middle of the wall facing them. They usually stared at the map, gloomily realizing, for the thousandth time, that Rutland (in pink) was indeed, as they had been told, the smallest county in England, and very small.

This afternoon, under the supervision of Mr Oakes, history was being examined, and history had recently arrived at the French Revolution. But this brought about no response, caused nothing but electric-lit, map-staring torpor in the spirits of the pupils. Nor was Mr Oakes responsive, his complications at Clapham and a threat of recurring earache almost wholly occupying his mind. While the boys read given pages, he himself pretended to read.

The boys’ reading, too, was little more than a pretence. They relied on their wits somehow to see them through when Mr Oakes questioned them, and engaged themselves in many fervent underground communications.

Ryan, seeking in his mind for any sort of means of relieving his tedium, suddenly realized that Rosen had, certainly, to all appearances, behaved atrociously towards him in stealing his torch, and used this as an excuse for sending a note to a plump, spectacled boy named Appleby, who shared a desk with Rosen.

This note, which merely said, ‘Kick Rosen for me and tell him just wait,’ was made remarkable by the elaborate manner in which it was addressed:

 

Appleby,

Desk nearest door,

Front Room,

Rodney House,

Hove.

 

– and was passed along to Appleby, who in three minutes’ time had sent back a reply.

‘Can’t kick him properly because he’s too near, but told him to wait,’ wrote Appleby, using the address:

 

Ryan,

Desk nearest window,

Front Room,

Rodney House,

Hove,

Sussex,

England.

 

Ryan, who had in the meanwhile been reading a little, and had come across in his book the curious name St Just, now inadvertently let Rosen escape from his mind, and sent another note asking, ‘Do you think St Just was Just?’ with the address:

 

Appleby,

Desk nearest door,

Front Room,

Rodney House,

Hove,

Sussex,

England,

Europe,

The World.

 

To which Appleby replied, ‘No, because he Robed himself with Spears,’ which was a subtle allusion to St Just’s colleague, Maximilien Robespierre, and was addressed to Ryan as follows:

 

Ryan,

Desk nearest window,

Front Room,

Rodney House,

Hove,

Sussex,

England,

Europe,

The World,

The Universe.

 

This set Ryan a by no means easy problem, which he at last solved, he believed satisfactorily, by writing, ‘Tell Rosen I’ll guillotine him,’ and using the address:

 

Appleby,

Desk nearest door,

Front Room,

Rodney House,

Hove,

Sussex,

England,

Europe,

The World,

The Universe,

Not Mars. 

 

This, in its turn, was tasking Appleby to the utmost. How, now, could the point occupied by Ryan in eternal space conceivably be presented with more agonized clarity or accuracy?

However, after much thought, Appleby, like Ryan, solved the practically insoluble. He wrote:

 

Ryan,

RIGHT HAND SIDE of desk nearest window,

Front Room,

Rodney House,

Hove,

Sussex,

England,

Europe,

The World,

The Universe,

Not Mars.

 

and was just about to add, as a coup de grâce, ‘AND NOT VENUS EITHER’ (which, in fact, opened illimitable possibilities) when Mr Oakes, who had had his eye on both of these boys for some time, asked Appleby what he was doing.

‘Nothing, sir,’ replied Appleby in an injured tone. Yet, though injured, he blushed.

Mr Oakes then replied that Appleby certainly ought to be doing something – he ought to be reading – and Appleby began to stare hard at his book.

And so the afternoon, and the Rosen episode (originated by Ernest Ralph Gorse), bleakly wore on.

 

Between the ringing of the bell which broke up the class and the ringing of the bell which summoned the pupils to tea, there was no time to resume the assault upon Rosen in a systematic way. At the long tea-table itself Rosen occupied a seat next to another junior master, and immediately after tea came ‘prep’. Most of the boys did this under supervision in the front room, but others were allowed to go home, where it was presumed that they did their homework, though they certainly did not unless there was something on paper to be shown next morning. Amongst the latter were Rosen, Ryan, Wills, Appleby, and Ernest Ralph Gorse.

Because these boys had recently slipped into the habit of making a great noise in the changing-room before departure, it had become the business of a junior master to see them quickly off the premises. Rosen was thus again temporarily protected.

Nevertheless, during tea, a plot had been hatched, between Appleby and Ryan, who sat next to each other, to attack Rosen as soon as he was outside the school and in the dark. Appleby, in fact, had been inspired by a plan which served the double purpose of vengeance upon Rosen and use of the torch which he was supposed to have stolen.

This plan was curiously complicated and carefully rehearsed in theory beforehand. Ryan and Appleby, it was agreed, would get into their outdoor clothes with the utmost speed and leave the school by the back door, from which Rosen would presently emerge. When they were outside they would prepare to ‘ambush’ Rosen, but not together. While Ryan was to take his station at the door, Appleby was to stand at twenty yards’ distance in the darkness. Then, as the other boys came out, Ryan was to ‘signal’ to Appleby with his torch. If the boy who came out was not Rosen, but another, a green light would be flashed to Appleby, whose nervous vigilance and strain would thus be momentarily relieved. If Ryan believed that Rosen was ‘just coming’ the white light would be flashed on three times (and this three times in succession) and Appleby would brace himself for the coming ordeal. When Rosen himself did come out, the red light, of course, would be used. Action, however, was not to follow instantly. It was now Appleby’s business to ‘track’ Rosen, while Ryan followed Appleby – Appleby himself having an ordinary torch with a plain white light with which, behind his back, he would himself ‘signal’ to Ryan – and this in ‘Morse’, which he professed to have mastered. What was to happen after this had not been discussed, and the main point, really, was that light had been most cleverly thrown upon an obscure matter – sense and a positive utility had at last been found in what might have been thought a totally senseless and useless sliding apparatus at the top of Ryan’s torch.

But all these plans came to nothing because the passionate but clever Rosen, on coming out of the back door, at once sensed that something was afoot, ran in an unexpected direction, and made his escape. It was impossible even to make an attempt at a chase. Ryan shouted and ‘signalled’ to Appleby, and they joined each other at the back door.

‘It’s no good. He’s gone,’ said Ryan, and at this moment Ernest Ralph Gorse, coming out into the night, heard what had been said.

‘Who’s gone?’ he asked.

‘Rosen,’ said Ryan. ‘He did a bunk and got away.’

‘Well, that doesn’t matter,’ said Ernest Ralph Gorse. ‘You can get him tomorrow.’

‘Yes,’ said Ryan. ‘I suppose we can…’

Ryan spoke without enthusiasm, for he did not in his heart believe in Rosen’s guilt, and, unlike most of his fellows, was not the sort of boy who was even more anxious to persecute the guiltless rather than the guilty. He was only anxious to make use of his torch. This he now did, turning on the white, the green, the red, the white, the green.

The other two boys stood observing these flashes, and a rather funny silence fell upon all three. This silence may have been due to their absorption in the unspeakably beautiful, the absolutely divine colours piercing the blackness: but it may, in addition, have been due to something else. It may, to a certain degree, have been caused by the fact that Ryan and Appleby, without knowing it, did not wholly like Ernest Ralph Gorse, and felt his presence to be an interruption of their pleasure.

‘You’ll wear out the battery,’ said Appleby at last.

‘Got three more in reserve,’ said Ryan, and there was another silence…

‘What are you going to do to him,’ said Ernest Ralph Gorse in his level, nasal voice, ‘when you catch him tomorrow?’

Such a return to the question of Rosen, in the midst of the divine flashes, was instinctively felt by Ryan and Appleby to be a little coarse, boring, unnecessary, and odd.

‘I don’t know,’ said Ryan half-heartedly. ‘What would you?’

‘I’d tie him up,’ said Ernest Ralph Gorse, ‘if I were you.’

And this extraordinary remark succeeded in surprising Ryan and Appleby on a conscious level.

‘What do you mean?’ said Ryan with a casual air which concealed his bewilderment.

‘Yes. That’s what I’d do, if I were you,’ said Ernest Ralph Gorse. ‘I’d tie him up.’

But he had not thrown any further light upon his meaning, and Ryan, flashing his torch off and on, made a brief mental endeavour fully to comprehend what had been said. Tie Rosen up? Why? And what when he was tied up? Or was ‘tying up’ some sort of new invention by Gorse, something to be regarded as a punishment in itself?

Ryan was unable to find a satisfactory answer, and was not the sort of boy to seek one for long. Asking a patient Appleby whether he now wanted to ‘have a go’ with the torch, he dismissed the matter from his mind, and here the Rosen episode came to an end, for no one brought the matter up again next day.

Something more than a quarter of a century later, however, those words of Gorse, uttered while the torch flashed in the darkness of that night, were to return to Ryan, and were to have meaning.

 

Those flashes of the little torch in the night – the red, the white, the green! Were these, to Ernest Ralph Gorse, in any sort of way what they were to Appleby and Ryan?

Did he, as they did, standing there in excitement and rapture, see little holes being pierced into the blackness, holes through which one might gaze into paradise – now a cool green paradise, now a blazing red paradise, now a blinding white paradise in which the visible and glorious filaments of the bulb might have been the crystalline flower of paradise itself?

Seemingly he did not. He did not even wait to ask Ryan to allow him to use the torch. Without saying goodnight, he left the other two in the darkness and entered the lamplight of Rodney Road.

If not inspired by paradise, in what, then, could this boy be interested? Was he interested in anything at all? Yes – for he took pleasure, as has been seen, in military exercises, and he was, apparently, sufficiently interested in human nature to desire to see the results of surreptitiously slipping a torch belonging to one boy into the pocket of another.

Again, were these pure, artistic interests? Did he enjoy military exercises and the observation of human nature for their own sakes? Or was there something more to it than this? Did he, perhaps, dimly perceive and relish the huge potentialities for the infliction of universal pain behind the seemingly innocent and childish military drill? And was his little experiment with human nature in fact conducted mostly for the sake of watching the misery of the victim?

No certain answer can be given. The type to which Ernest Ralph Gorse belonged cannot ever be fully understood at depth: only shrewd or inspired guesses can be made.

Now that the boy was out under the lamps on his half-mile walk back to the house in which he lived in Denmark Villas, he had further business of an uncommon sort to do.

This consisted of sticking a large pin, which he carried for the purpose in the lapel of his overcoat, into the tyres of as many bicycles as he might find, on his way home, propped up against the kerb in dark places.

Although, in those faraway nights, there were many such bicycles, Gorse’s task was by no means easy. To avoid detection, a good deal of preliminary observation and lurking was necessary, and the deed required histrionic ability – the simulation of an air of nonchalance as he approached the bicycle, of a detached interest in its make or style. Often, in the pursuit of this hobby of his, Gorse would arrive home twenty minutes or more later than he would have in the ordinary way.

Tonight he met with nothing satisfactory to work upon until he was within fifty yards of his own home: but here his watchfulness was rewarded with a machine in a situation of the most delightful vulnerability. Here he had, also, the pleasure both of knowing that it belonged to a neighbour and of knowing who the neighbour was. He stuck his pin twice into the front tyre and twice into the back one, and half a minute later he was indoors.

Ernest Ralph Gorse never knew – because he felt that it was too dangerous to wait and see – whether these pricks with his pin brought about an almost immediate deflation of the tyre. He confidently believed, though, that a slow puncture was begun in nearly every case, and he was certain that eventual damage of some sort had at any rate been achieved.

 

Ernest Ralph Gorse’s mother and father were dead: he lived with his stepmother: and he had a home background which caused him intuitively not to ask friends back to tea.

He had taken, indeed, even at this early age, a dislike to his social beginnings, and this in spite of having been often told that he had much to be proud of in his father, George Gorse, who had been, in his day, a successful, and in certain circles even well-known, commercial artist – the creator of a famous cartoon advertising a toothpaste. But the precocious Ernest Ralph was not interested in art of any sort, and he did not fancy a connection with advertising and toothpaste.

Also, his father’s second wife had at one time served behind a West End bar, and although Ernest Ralph was not aware of this, all his instincts informed him that there was something out of order in this second marriage.

He could remember nothing of his mother, and little of his father. A solicitor uncle, Sydney Gorse, was his guardian, and frequently paid visits to the house in Denmark Villas.

His stepmother was one of those remarkable, fat, excessively genial women who are, for some reason, despite their somewhat advanced age and fleshiness, never without quite serious admirers. Known as good ‘sorts’, or great or grand ‘sports’, they seem to have the power of enslaving men physically purely by the warmth of their spiritual nature. (Service behind a bar undoubtedly has some occult connection with the creation of this type of woman.) Mrs Gorse was now fifty-seven, but little as her stepson could conceive such a thing, it was not totally impossible that she had notions of marrying again, and that she was actually in a position to put such notions into practice.

The relationship between Mrs Gorse, who made little active endeavour to conceal the fact that she had sprung from the people, and Ernest Ralph Gorse, who already knew that it was inadvisable to ask his friends round to tea, was of the weirdest kind, and marked by suspicion and caution on both sides.

The fault, needless to say, did not lie with the genial second Mrs Gorse. She had made every attempt to make the boy happy and reasonable, and, conscious without being ashamed of her social origins, had been scrupulously careful not to ‘stand in his way’, as she put it.

Although she believed that she might be capable of ‘passing’, she never attended, as most parents did, any of the cricket matches, sports, fireworks, parties, prize-givings, and plays given by the school: she never, in fact, made any appearance at the school, or had any interview or direct communication with the headmaster: all that was necessary in this way was left to the uncle.

All the same, she did not like the boy, and was unable to force herself to do so. And, although an extremely fine judge of character, as such a type of ex-barmaid always is, she was unable quite to name to herself what it was which she found so distasteful, if not almost detestable, in her stepson. She contented herself with telling herself (and her intimate friends) that he was a ‘funny’ one, an ‘odd’ one, a ‘rum’ one, and she predicted that his future would be curious. She said that she never knew ‘what he was thinking’.

To dislike and distrust anyone – let alone a child, and a child so closely connected to her – ran so much against the grain of Mrs Gorse’s character that it caused her whole personality and manner, when in contact or conversation with him, to change. Normally a carefree, laughing, nearly boisterously uninhibited woman – one who was the life and soul of parties in the private rooms of the public houses which she still discreetly visited – with Ernest Ralph Gorse she was actually timid, shy. When she spoke to him she spoke quietly, and looked at him. Often, when not speaking to him, she would look at him. And this for as much as a minute on end, as if she still sought to discover his secret.

Mrs Gorse’s manner to himself seemed to be, and almost certainly was, a matter of indifference to Ernest Ralph Gorse. With such a character any kind of behaviour – kindness, cheerfulness, sourness, spitefulness, or even physical brutality – would have produced the same outward response. These would have been, in any event, the same slouching, inimical demeanour: the same slightly nasty smell under the nose.

 

Tonight, when her stepson returned, Mrs Gorse was not at home.

She had, in fact, been out most of the day, and was at this moment drinking stout with familiars in a remote private residence at Preston Park. But Ernest Ralph knew nothing of her whereabouts.

Nearly every week she was twice or three times away from home when he returned from school, but he was not neglected. A maid-of-all-work, Mabel, who was nineteen years of age and who slept in, was there to look after his needs.

The sentiments of Mabel in regard to Ernest Ralph Gorse were, unlike those of Mrs Gorse, uncomplicated: they were those of sheer hatred. This was not because she was, like Mrs Gorse, a fine judge of character. An inexperienced, lumpy girl, she was anything but this. She simply hated boys of this age on pure, academic principles. She had had to live with young brothers and her mind was warped in this direction, perhaps for life. She was, therefore, being unfair to the young Gorse, particularly because in point of fact he gave her very much less trouble (or ‘sauce’) than nearly any other boy of his age might have given her. He was not the sort of boy to give trouble of the conventional kind to which she was habituated.

Ernest Ralph Gorse did not make a noise, and was orderly in his habits. Also, curiously enough, he had hobbies which kept him quiet. It was curious that a boy who was not interested in paradise could be interested in hobbies. This contradiction was, however, possibly explicable on the grounds that his interest in hobbies was not essentially disinterested. He pursued hobbies for the sake of vainglory and prestige at his school. He had the largest and finest collection of cigarette cards at the school, and the largest and most intricately made fleet of model battleships. But he was a hoarder rather than a genuine collector. He would slowly assemble his fleet of battleships in secret, and then one day appear at school with a huge cardboard box containing them under his arm. Having caused general curiosity, he would open this box at an appropriate and if possible dramatic moment, and become the centre of attraction. All rivals would be snubbed, and he would glow with quiet, ginger-haired, level-eyed power.

He was clever with his hands, and was at present engaged upon an elaborate piece of fretwork. Fretwork was in the air at the school just at this time, was due to succeed torches, and by the employment of foresight he proposed to outshine his fellows with a masterpiece.

He had a hobby room on the first floor at the back, and to this he retired at once on returning. Here he remained until his supper at seven-thirty.

Mabel would cook Ernest Ralph’s supper and lay it on the dining-room table, with an air of being meticulously just. However much she might abominate him, his supper was his due, and she was not going to let him gain any moral advantage by not getting his supper properly and punctually.

‘Your supper, Master Gorse!’ she would cry up from below, but the words, which in print would seem cordial enough, were shouted in a way which filled them with vindictiveness and the resentful intimation that she was keeping her side of the bargain.

‘All right!’ he would shout down, and these, on most evenings when they were alone together, would be all the words which passed between them.

Then Master Ralph would wash his hands (he was clean in his personal habits) and go into the dining-room to eat.

After eating, this evening, he returned to his fretwork for another hour, and then, taking his cage of white mice with him, went into the bathroom and had a bath.

Then he took his five white m. . .