Wishful thinking, perhaps, born on the exhilaration of sun and sea and wind and his own newfound health?
Time alone would show.
Four
The Hooligans
That evening Mr. Pinfold felt the renewal of health and cheerfulness and clarity of mind greater, it seemed to him, than he had known for weeks. He looked at his hands, which for days now had been blotched with crimson; now they were clear and his face in the glass had lost its congested, mottled hue. He dressed more deftly and as he dressed the wireless in his cabin came into action.
This is the B.B.C. Third Program. Here is Mr. Clutton-Cornforth to speak on Aspects of Orthodoxy in Contemporary Letters.”
Mr. Pinfold had known Clutton-Cornforth for thirty years. He was now the editor of a literary weekly, an ambitious, obsequious fellow. Mr. Pinfold had no curiosity about his opinions on any subject. He wished there were a way of switching off the fluting, fruity voice. He tried instead to disregard it until, just as he was leaving, he was recalled by the sound of his own name.
“Gilbert Pinfold,” he heard, “poses a precisely antithetical problem, or should we say? the same problem in antithetical form. The basic qualities of a Pinfold novel seldom vary and may be enumerated thus: conventionality of plot, falseness of characterization, morbid sentimentality, gross and hackneyed farce alternating with grosser and more hackneyed melodrama; cloying religiosity, which will be found tedious or blasphemous according as the reader shares or repudiates his doctrinal preconceptions; an adventitious and offensive sensuality that is clearly introduced for commercial motives. All this is presented in a style which, when it varies from the trite, lapses into positive illiteracy.”
Really, thought Mr. Pinfold, this was not like the Third Program; it was not at all like Algernon Clutton-Cornforth. “My word,” he thought, “I’ll give that booby such a kick on the sit-upon next time I see him waddling up the steps of the London Library.”
“Indeed,” continued Clutton-Cornforth, “if one is asked—and one is often asked—to give one name which typifies all that is decadent in contemporary literature, one can answer without hesitation—Gilbert Pinfold. I now turn from him to the equally deplorable but more interesting case of a writer often associated with him—Roger Stillingfleet.”
Here, by a quirk of the apparatus, Clutton-Cornforth was cut off and succeeded by a female singer:
“I’m Gilbert, the filbert,
The knut with the K,
The pride of Piccadilly,
The blasé roué.”
Mr. Pinfold left his cabin. He met the steward on his rounds with the dinner gong and ascended to the main deck. He stepped out into the wind, leaned briefly on the rail, looked down into the surge of lighted water. The music rejoined him there, emanating from somewhere quite near where he stood.
“For Gilbert, the filbert,
The Colonel of the Knuts.”
Other people in the ship were listening to the wireless. Other people, probably, had heard Clutton-Cornforth’s diatribe. Well, he was accustomed to criticism (though not from Clutton-Cornforth). He could take it. He only hoped no one bored him by talking about it; particularly not that Norwegian woman at the Captain’s table.
Mr. Pinfold’s feelings towards the Captain had moderated in the course of the afternoon. As to whether the man were guilty of murder or no, his judgment was suspended, but the fact of his having fallen under a cloud, of Mr. Pinfold’s possession of secret knowledge which might or might not bring him to ruin, severed the bond of loyalty which had previously bound them. Mr. Pinfold felt disposed to tease the Captain a little.
Accordingly at dinner, when they were all seated, and he had ordered himself a pint of champagne, he turned the conversation rather abruptly to the subject of murder.
“Have you ever actually met a murderer?” he asked Glover.
Glover had. In his tea garden a trusted foreman had hacked his wife to pieces.
“I expect he smiled a good deal, didn’t he?” asked Mr. Pinfold.
“Yes, as a matter of fact he did. Always a most cheerful chap. He went off to be hanged laughing away with his brothers as though it was no end of a joke.”
“Exactly.”
Mr. Pinfold stared full in the eyes of the smiling Captain. Was there any sign of alarm in that broad, plain face?
“Have you ever known a murderer, Captain Steerforth?”
Yes, when he first went to sea, Captain Steerforth had been in a ship with a stoker who killed another with a shovel. But they brought it in that the man was insane, affected by the heat of the stokehold.
“In my country in the forests in the long winter often the men become drunken and fight and sometimes they kill one another. Is not hanging in my country for such things. Is a case for the doctor we think.”
“If you ask me all murderers are mad,” said Scarfield.
“And always smiling,” said Mr. Pinfold. “That’s the only way you can tell them—by their inevitable good-humor.”
“This stoker wasn’t very cheerful. Surly fellow as I remember him.”
“Ah, but he was mad.”
“Goodness,” said Mrs. Scarfield, “what a morbid subject. However did we get on to it?”
“Not so morbid by half as Clutton-Cornforth,” said Mr. Pinfold rather truculently.
“Who?” asked Mrs. Scarfield.
“As what?” asked the Norwegian woman.
Mr. Pinfold looked from face to face round the table. Clearly no one had heard the broadcast.
“Oh,” he said, “if you don’t know about him, the less said the better.”
“Do tell,” said Mrs. Scarfield.
“No, really, it’s nothing.”
She gave a little shrug of disappointment and turned her pretty face towards the Captain.
Later Mr. Pinfold tried to raise the topic of burial at sea, but this was not taken up with any enthusiasm. Mr. Pinfold had devoted some thought to the matter during the late afternoon. Glover had said that the stewards came from Travancore, in which case there was a good chance of their being Christians of one or other of the ancient rites that prevailed in that complex culture. They would insist on some religious observance for one of their number. If he wished to avert suspicion, the Captain could not bundle the body overboard secretly. Once in a troopship Mr. Pinfold had assisted at the committal to the sea of one of his troop who shot himself. The business he remembered took some time. Last Post had been sounded. Mr. Pinfold rather thought the ship had hove-to. In the Caliban the sports-deck seemed the most likely place for the ceremony. Mr. Pinfold would keep watch. If the night passed without incident, Captain Steerforth would stand acquitted.
That evening, as on the evening before, Captain Steerforth played bridge. He smiled continuously rubber after rubber. Early hours were kept in the Caliban. The bar shut at half past ten, lights began to be turned off and ash trays emptied; the passengers went to their cabins. Mr. Pinfold saw the last of them go below, then went aft to a seat overlooking the sports-deck. It was very cold. He went down to his cabin for an overcoat. It was warm there and welcoming. It occurred to him he could keep his vigil perfectly well below deck. When the engines stopped, he would know that the game was on. The last faint cobwebs of his sleeping-draught had now been swept up. He was wide awake. Without undressing he lay on his bunk with a novel.
Time passed. No sound came through the intercommunication; the engines beat regularly, the plates and paneling creaked; the low hum of the ventilator filled the cabin.
There were no funeral obsequies, no panegyric; no dirge on board the Caliban that night. Instead there was enacted on the deck immediately outside Mr. Pinfold’s window a dramatic cycle lasting five hours—six? Mr. Pinfold did not notice the time at which the disturbance began—of which he was the solitary audience. Had it appeared behind footlights on a real stage, Mr. Pinfold would have condemned it as grossly overplayed.
There were two chief actors, juvenile leads, one of whom was called Fosker;
the other, the leader, was nameless. They were drunk when they first arrived and presumably carried a bottle from which they often swigged for the long hours of darkness were of no avail in sobering them. They raged more and more furiously until their final lapse into incoherence. By their voices they seemed to be gentlemen of a sort. Fosker, Mr. Pinfold was pretty sure, had been in the jazz band; he thought he had noticed him in the lounge after dinner, amusing the girls, tall, very young, shabby, shady, vivacious, bohemian, with long hair, a moustache, and the beginning of side-whiskers. There was something in him of the dissolute law students and government clerks of mid-Victorian fiction. Something too of the young men who had now and then crossed his path during the war—the sort of subaltern who was disliked in his regiment and got himself posted to S.O.E. When Mr. Pinfold came to consider the matter at leisure he could not explain to himself how he had formed so full an impression during a brief, incurious glance, or why Fosker, if he were what he seemed, should be travelling to the East in such incongruous company. The image of him, however, remained sharp cut as a cameo. The second, dominant young man was a voice only; rather a pleasant well-bred voice for all its vile utterances.
“He’s gone to bed,” said Fosker.
“We’ll soon get him out,” said the pleasant well-bred voice.
“Music.”
“Music.”
“I’m Gilbert, the filbert,
The knut with the K,
The pride of Piccadilly,
The blasé roué.
Oh Hades, the ladies
Who leave their wooden huts
For Gilbert, the filbert,
The Colonel of the Knuts.”
“Come on, Gilbert, Time to leave your wooden hut.”
Damned impudence, thought Mr. Pinfold. Oafs, bores.
“D’you think he’s enjoying this?”
“He’s got a most peculiar sense of humor. He’s a most peculiar man. Queer, aren’t you, Gilbert? Come out of your wooden hut, you old queer.”
Mr. Pinfold drew the wooden shutter across his window but the noise outside was undiminished.
“He thinks that’ll keep us out. It won’t, Gilbert. We aren’t going to climb through the window, you know. We shall come in at the door and then, by God, you’re going to cop it. Now he’s locked the door.” Mr. Pinfold had done no such thing. “Not very brave, is he? Locking himself in. Gilbert doesn’t want to be whipped.”
“But he’s going to be whipped.”
“Oh yes, he’s going to be whipped all right.”
Mr. Pinfold decided on action. He put on his dressing-gown, took his blackthorn, and left his cabin. The door which led out to the deck was some way down the corridor. The voices of the two hooligans followed him as he went to it. He thought he knew the Fosker type, the aggressive underdog, vainglorious in drink, very easily put in his place. He pushed open the heavy door and stepped resolutely into the wind. The deck was quite empty. For the length of the ship the damp planks shone in the lamp-light. From above came shrieks of laughter.
“No, no, Gilbert, you can’t catch us that way. Go back to your little hut, Gilbert. We’ll come for you when we want you. Better lock the door.”
Mr. Pinfold returned to his cabin. He did not lock the door. He sat, stick in hand, listening.
The two young men conferred.
“We’d better wait till he goes to sleep.”
“Then we’ll pounce.”
“He doesn’t seem very sleepy.”
“Let’s get the girls to sing him to sleep. Come on, Margaret, give Gilbert a song.”
“Aren’t you being rather beastly?” The girl’s voice was clear and sober.
“No, of course not. It’s all a joke. Gilbert’s a sport. Gilbert’s enjoying it as much as we are. He often did this sort of thing when he was our age—singing ridiculous songs outside men’s rooms at Oxford. He made a row outside the Dean’s rooms. That’s why he got sent down. He accused the Dean of the most disgusting practices. It was all a great joke.”
“Well, if you’re sure he doesn’t mind…”
Two girls began singing very prettily:
“When first I saw Mable,
In her fair Russian sable
I knew she was able
To satisfy me.
Her manners were careless…”
The later lines of the song—one well known to Mr. Pinfold—are verbally bawdy, but as they rose now on the passionless, true voices of the girls, they were purged and sweetened; they floated over the sea in perfect innocence. The girls sang this and other airs. They sang for a long time. They sang intermittently throughout the night’s disturbances, but they were powerless to soothe Mr. Pinfold. He sat wide awake with his stick to deal with intruders.
Presently the father of the nameless young man came to join them. He was, it appeared, one of the generals.
“Go to bed, you two,” he said. “You’re making an infernal nuisance of yourselves.”
“We’re only mocking Pinfold. He’s a beastly man.”
“That’s no reason to wake up the whole ship.”
“He’s a Jew.”
“Is he? Are you sure? I never heard that.”
“Of course he is. He came to Lychpole in 1937 with the German refugees. He was called Peinfeld then.”
“We’re out for Peinfeld’s blood,” said the pleasant voice. “We want to beat hell out of him.”
“You don’t really mind, do you, sir,” said Fosker, “if we beat hell out of him.”
“What’s wrong with the fellow particularly?”
“He’s got a dozen pair of shoes in his little hut, all beautifully polished on wooden trees.”
“He sits at the Captain’s table.”
“He’s taken the only bathroom near our cabin. I tried to use it tonight and the steward said it was private, for Mr. Pinfold.”
“Mr. Peinfeld.”
“I hate him. I hate him. I hate him. I hate him. I hate him,” said Fosker. “I’ve got my own score to settle with him for what he did to Hill.”
“That farmer who shot himself?”
“Hill was a decent, old-fashioned yeoman. The salt of the country. Then this filthy Jew came and bought up the property. The Hills had farmed it for generations. They were thrown out. That’s why Hill hanged himself.”
“Well,” said the general. “You won’t do any good by shouting outside his window.”
“We’re going to do more than that. We’re going to give him the hiding of his life.”
“Yes, you could do that, of course.”
“You leave him to us.”
“I’m certainly not going to stay up here and be a witness. He’s just the sort of fellow to take legal action.”
“He’d be far too ashamed. Can’t you see the headlines, “Novelist whipped in liner”?”
“I don’t suppose he’d care a damn. Fellows like that live on publicity.” Then the general changed his tone. “All the same,” he added wistfully, “I wish I was young enough to help, good luck to you. Give it to him good and strong. Only remember: if there’s trouble, I know nothing about it.”
The girls sang. The youths drank. Presently the mother came to plead. She spoke in yearning tones that reminded Mr. Pinfold of his deceased Anglican aunts.
“I can’t sleep,” she said. “You know I can never sleep when you’re in this state. My son, I beg you to go to bed. Mr. Fosker, how can you lead him into this escapade? Margaret, darling, what are you doing here at this time of night? Please go to your cabin, child.”
“It’s only a joke, mama.”
“I very much doubt whether Mr. Pinfold thinks it a joke.”
“I hate him,” said her son.
“Hate?” said the mother. “Hate? Why do all you young people hate so much. What has come over the world? You were not brought up to hate. Why do you hate Mr. Pinfold?”
“I have to share a cabin with Fosker. That swine has a cabin to himself.”
“I expect he paid for it.”
“Yes, with the money he cheated Hill out of.”
“He behaved badly to Hill certainly. But he isn’t used to country ways. I’ve not met him, though we have lived so near all these years. I think perhaps he rather looks down on all of us. We aren’t so clever as he, nor as rich. But that’s no reason to hate him.”
At this the son broke into a diatribe in the course of which he and Fosker were left alone. There had been an element of jollity in the pair at the beginning of their demonstration. Now they were possessed by hatred, repeating and elaborating a ferocious, rambling denunciation full of obscenities. The eviction of Hill and responsibility for his suicide were the chief recurring charges but interspersed with them were other accusations. Mr. Pinfold, they said, had let his mother die in destitution. He was ashamed of her because she was an illiterate immigrant, had refused to help her or go near her, had let her die alone, uncared for, had not attended her pauper’s funeral. Mr. Pinfold had shirked in the war. He had used it as an opportunity to change his name and pass himself off as an Englishman, to make friends with people who did not know his origin, to get into Bellamy’s Club. Mr. Pinfold had in some way been implicated in the theft of a moonstone. He had paid a large sum of money to sit at the Captain’s table. Mr. Pinfold typified the decline of England, of rural England in particular. He was a reincarnation (Mr. Pinfold, not they, drew the analogy) of the “new men” of the Tudor period who had despoiled the Church and the peasantry. His religious profession was humbug, assumed in order to ingratiate himself with the aristocracy. Mr. Pinfold was a sodomite. Mr. Pinfold must be chastened and chastised.