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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
In "War In Heaven," Charles Williams presents a complex narrative that intertwines the metaphysical with the mundane, depicting a supernatural battle for a sacred Grail that symbolizes divine truth and spiritual enlightenment. The novel features Williams' characteristic blend of rich, poetic prose and intricate theological motifs, reflecting his deep engagement with Christian mysticism and esotericism. Set in the elegant backdrop of post-war London, the story navigates the tensions between good and evil, exploring how individual choices resonate within a larger cosmic struggle. Through a multilayered plot, Williams engages with themes of redemption, faith, and the nature of reality, thereby positioning the work within the broader context of early 20th-century British literature's fascination with the occult and spiritual warfare. Charles Williams (1886-1945) was a prominent member of the Inklings, a literary group that included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, both of whom deeply admired his work. His background as a poet, novelist, and playwright, along with his involvement in theological circles, infused his writings with a unique blend of literary artistry and spiritual inquiry. "War In Heaven" culminates this synthesis, reflecting Williams' personal struggle with faith and existential dilemmas, making it a resonant exploration of human experience. This compelling novel is highly recommended for readers interested in the intersections of fantasy and theology. Williams' ability to weave intricate philosophical questions into a thrilling narrative invites readers to ponder the nature of belief and the reality of the unseen forces that shape our lives. For both fans of speculative fiction and those curious about the spiritual dimensions of literature, "War In Heaven" offers a rich and thought-provoking journey. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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War In Heaven
Table of Contents
Introduction
When the sacred erupts into the ordinary—arriving not with fanfare but with the hush of a long-hidden vessel—parish rooms, city offices, and unassuming hearts become contested ground where curiosity, fear, and reverence struggle to possess what cannot rightly be possessed, the calm surfaces of English life conceal profound currents, and the smallest kindness or slightest compromise can tilt the balance between desecration and defense, for in such warfare the measure of power is purity of intention and the cost of error is the steady erosion of the self, as even ordinary conversations harden into choices with enduring consequence.
War in Heaven is a 1930 novel by Charles Williams, a British poet, critic, and novelist associated with the informal Oxford circle known as the Inklings. Blending elements of mystery fiction and the supernatural thriller with Christian metaphysics, it unfolds in contemporary England of the interwar years, moving between a quiet country parish and the social and professional milieus of the city. As Williams’s first published novel, it introduces concerns and methods that recur throughout his later work: the irruption of the numinous into ordinary life, the moral testing of characters, and the disciplined use of mythic symbolism.
The premise is disarmingly simple and audacious: a sacred relic, identified as the Holy Grail, comes to light in a modest English church, and a small circle of guardians find themselves contending with those who would seize or corrupt it. Williams shapes this into a narrative at once brisk in incident and meditative in temperament. The voice is courteous, ironical, and attentive to liturgical and domestic textures; the mood shifts from village calm to an atmosphere of awed peril. Rather than sensational spectacle, the novel offers a steady pressure of mystery, in which fear and wonder are closely intertwined.
At its heart lies a meditation on sanctity: what it asks of those who encounter it, and how easily it can be mistaken for power to be wielded rather than presence to be honored. The book probes the ethics of means and ends, the formation of conscience, and the subtle ways vanity disguises itself as zeal. Williams is concerned with stewardship—of persons, rituals, and things—under the gaze of the eternal. The Grail functions less as a treasure than as a touchstone, revealing motives and reshaping possibilities, so that even routine choices acquire an eschatological edge without losing their everyday setting.
Stylistically, War in Heaven braids the cadence of ecclesial life with the apparatus of a pursuit story, letting homely detail and metaphysical urgency illuminate each other. Williams deploys symbols with restraint, allowing images to accrue meaning through repetition rather than exposition, and he stages conflicts less as exchanges of blows than as collisions of love, pride, and fear. Moments of quiet hospitality become decisive; a prayerful pause can carry as much suspense as a chase. The effect is a thriller of inwardness, in which intellectual clarity and spiritual attention are made to feel as daring as physical courage.
For contemporary readers, the novel’s questions remain bracing: What does reverence look like amid systems that turn everything into leverage? How do we discern the line between necessary action and the violence of control? Williams’s narrative suggests that community, memory, and attentiveness to the given world are not nostalgic refuges but disciplines that resist cynicism. In an age fascinated by spectacle, War in Heaven advocates for the stubborn significance of hidden fidelity. Its intellectual appeal lies in the rigor of its moral imagination; its emotional pull comes from the vulnerability of people who must choose under pressure.
Approached in this light, Charles Williams’s first novel offers a distinctive reading experience: not a barrage of shocks, but a sustained, lucid unease that opens into awe. Readers attuned to myth, theology, and the textures of English parish life will find unusual rewards, though the book’s core drama—what human beings do when confronted by the reality of the holy—transcends its moment. To read War in Heaven is to enter a thriller that asks for contemplation as well as attention, and to emerge with sharpened questions about desire, responsibility, and the fragile, luminous things entrusted to our care.
Synopsis
War in Heaven opens in contemporary England when a routine morning at a small London publishing house is broken by the discovery of a corpse in a back office. Police arrive, questions proliferate, and the firm’s quietly capable staff find themselves entangled in a case that seems at first merely criminal. The mood is restrained, the details ordinary, yet hints of something stranger surface around missing papers and unexplained behavior. The incident establishes a double register: on one level, a procedural inquiry into murder; on another, a suggestive atmosphere in which the natural and the supernatural may intersect in unforeseen ways.
In the countryside, an Anglican archdeacon responsible for a modest parish becomes aware that a long-ignored chalice in a village church is no ordinary vessel. Through a combination of scholarship, intuition, and profound religious experience, he identifies it as the Holy Grail, a relic bound up with centuries of legend and devotion. His recognition brings both awe and anxiety, for the chalice’s very presence implies responsibility and danger. Determined to guard it without sensational display, he confides in a few trustworthy friends. The novel begins to alternate between metropolitan investigation and rural guardianship, knitting the two strands into one unfolding mystery.
Meanwhile, powerful adversaries move into view. A wealthy patron of esoteric practices, impatient with ordinary limits and convinced that sacred objects can be instruments of domination, sets his sights on obtaining the chalice. He is aided by an incisive, amoral associate whose scientific curiosity complements his occult ambition. Their methods range from social manipulation to clandestine rituals, and they are willing to exploit fear, vanity, and greed to achieve results. The early chapters establish their motives, their resources, and their willingness to risk perilous forces. A contest forms between those who would revere the object and those who would use it.
Clues from the London death begin to point beyond printing ledgers and office keys, drawing investigators toward circles where scholarship, rumor, and whispered tradition overlap. Correspondence, marginal notes, and faint traces of a hunt for a particular artifact connect the publisher’s troubles to the countryside. Ordinary men and women—clerics, civil servants, editors, and neighbors—are drawn together by circumstance, each holding a small piece of the pattern. The novel maintains an even tone, letting conversations, errands, and casual visits gradually reveal a network of intention. The effect is cumulative: a quiet recognition that something rare is at stake, and watched.
The archdeacon and his allies adopt a strategy of humility and vigilance. Rather than display or debate, they choose discretion, prayer, and practical caution: moving the chalice as needed, maintaining routine to avoid notice, and seeking guidance from liturgy and tradition. Their opponents answer with pressure—subtle threats, offers of patronage, and experiments meant to unsettle resolve. Moments of danger arise not as sensational set pieces but as disturbances within familiar rooms and lanes. The story underscores how ordinary discipline—watching, keeping silence, telling the truth—can meet extraordinary peril. Even so, the balance seems uncertain as the search narrows.
Across alternating scenes in city and village, the pursuit intensifies. Social calls mask reconnaissance; theological discussion masks probing; a casual drive becomes a cautious transfer under the eyes of unknown followers. The antagonists engage in a formal rite designed to draw power toward themselves and away from rightful custodianship. Against this, the protagonists hold fast to sacramental order and personal integrity, trusting that reverence, not technique, accords with the relic’s nature. Costs mount: fatigue, strain on friendships, and moral tests that expose self-interest or courage. The narrative retains clarity, mapping events step by step while keeping decisive outcomes just ahead.
As the conflict reaches a critical phase, converging threads bring police attention, private schemes, and sacred custody to a single perilous point. The night is filled with contested meanings: words spoken in prayer and in formula, roads traveled in hope and in pursuit. Physical danger coincides with psychic assault—nightmares, temptations, and sudden insights that reveal what each character truly seeks. The chalice’s presence proves decisive in ways the schemers do not anticipate, pressing those around it to choose reverence or violation. The central confrontation unfolds with measured pace, intensifying tension without prematurely disclosing the novel’s final turns.
After the decisive encounter, the narrative allows consequences to settle without spectacle. The secular investigation finds answers sufficient for its remit; those who treated the sacred as an instrument face the results of that choice; those who sought only to protect are released from immediate peril. The status of the chalice remains consistent with its nature: never a trophy, never quite possessed, always a trust. Relationships reorder quietly. Losses are acknowledged, small kindnesses recover importance, and daily life resumes with a new sobriety. The book concludes in consonance with its opening restraint, returning the extraordinary to the edges of the ordinary.
Throughout, War in Heaven presents a fusion of detective story and theological romance, asserting that the gravest struggles may occur amid teacups, timetables, and parish duties. Its central message is that power over the sacred is an illusion, while service to it reshapes the servant. Williams emphasizes that grace operates through ordinary forms—friendship, worship, honesty—even when opposed by technical mastery and will. The novel thus conveys a quiet assurance: that humility, patience, and right order outlast frenzy and coercion. In the end, the story affirms a world where sanctity can dwell unannounced, and where reverence proves the surest defense.
Historical Context
War in Heaven is set in contemporary England of the late 1920s, moving between a quiet country parish and the professional precincts of London. Its rural scenes evoke an Anglican village church with deep historical layers, while its urban passages traverse offices, clubs, and the emerging corporate culture around printing and publishing. The interwar period provides the social temperature: a nation still marked by the losses of 1914–1918, negotiating austerity, moral uncertainty, and new technologies of communication. This setting allows an ancient sacramental object to collide with modern bureaucracy, policing, and commerce, staging the conflict between spiritual authority and secular power in familiar English places.
The novel’s strongest historical matrix is interwar Britain, 1918–1930. The Armistice of 11 November 1918 ended the First World War, followed by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and the demobilization of over 3 million British servicemen by 1920. Britain experienced a sharp postwar slump in 1921, mass unemployment above 2 million, and recurring industrial strife culminating in the General Strike of 3–12 May 1926, when Trades Union Congress leaders halted transport and heavy industry in solidarity with miners. Public life was further unsettled by the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic, which killed an estimated 228,000 in the United Kingdom, and by fiscal retrenchment under the “Geddes Axe” (1921–1922). The late decade brought the 1929 Wall Street Crash, precipitating contraction that set the stage for the 1931 National Government. Alongside economic shocks, there was a surge in spiritual seeking: veterans’ grief and social dislocation fed interest in psychical research and séances, while clergy confronted empty pews and contested authority. War in Heaven mirrors this atmosphere: its Anglican archdeacon’s calm sacramentalism and the parish’s liturgical rhythm resist a society habituated to crisis management and instrumental reason; its London antagonist, an ambitious publisher dabbling in occult power, embodies a modern will-to-control indifferent to the sacred. By placing a relic at the center of a policeable, commodifiable world, the book dramatizes the interwar collision of market logics and spiritual inheritance, showing how a nation of memorials and debt tallies can still be tempted by nihilism masked as efficiency.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Church of England controversies supply a crucial backdrop. The Oxford Movement (from 1833), led by John Henry Newman and Edward B. Pusey, pressed for a Catholic understanding of the Church, prompting ritualist practices that Parliament tried to curb with the Public Worship Regulation Act (1874). Priests such as Arthur Tooth were even imprisoned (1877) for liturgical disobedience. The Anglo-Catholic Congresses in London (notably 1920 and 1923) displayed renewed confidence, while the 1927–1928 proposed revision of the Book of Common Prayer was rejected by the House of Commons. War in Heaven reflects this world: its priestly protagonist treats the Grail as sacramental reality, confronting secular and commercial powers that presume jurisdiction over holy things.
The late Victorian and Edwardian occult revival, spilling into the 1920s, supplies the novel’s sinister countercurrent. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1887 by William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, and William Robert Woodman, propagated ceremonial magic before fragmenting around 1900 amid disputes involving W. B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley. Crowley’s Thelema (from 1904) and his Abbey of Thelema at Cefalù (1920–1923), terminated by Mussolini’s expulsion in 1923, became tabloid shorthand for black magic. Meanwhile, the Society for Psychical Research (founded 1882) lent a sheen of inquiry to supernatural claims. War in Heaven transposes these currents into the plot’s occult conspiracies, opposing manipulative magic with orthodox sanctity.
The Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII (1536–1541), engineered by Thomas Cromwell after the Act of Supremacy (1534) and the Valor Ecclesiasticus (1535), shattered England’s medieval network of shrines and relics. Subsequent iconoclasm under Edward VI (1547–1553) and renewed Puritan destructions in the 1640s dispersed liturgical vessels and reliquaries; many sacred objects were hidden, sold, or repurposed in parish life. This long history makes plausible the novel’s premise: a venerable chalice of immense sanctity lying unnoticed in a country church. War in Heaven thus leverages England’s Reformation-era fragmentations to explain how a relic could survive in ordinary custody, guarded by habit and piety rather than by princely treasuries.
London’s interwar publishing world, centered around Paternoster Row, Fleet Street, Bloomsbury, and Holborn, frames the novel’s portrait of cultural power. The Publishers Association (1896) and the Net Book Agreement (from 1899–1900) structured pricing and distribution, while the 1911 Copyright Act consolidated intellectual property rules. Houses such as Heinemann, Cassell, and the newly formed Faber & Faber (1929) expanded lists; Oxford University Press operated from Amen House near St Paul’s, where Charles Williams worked from 1908. The book’s unscrupulous publisher antagonist reflects anxieties about cultural gatekeepers who treat texts and even sacred artifacts as commodities, mirroring real interwar debates over profit, prestige, and responsibility in the expanding book trade.
Antiquarian collecting and heritage law in Britain, 1880–1930, shape the plot’s traffic in sacred objects. The Ancient Monuments Protection Acts (1882, 1900, 1910) and the Ancient Monuments Consolidation and Amendment Act (1913) began protecting sites, while the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England) was established in 1908. Yet portable artifacts were lightly regulated under common-law treasure trove rules, allowing private sales and export through auction rooms in London. The National Art Collections Fund (1903) arose to keep treasures in public hands. War in Heaven exploits this legal gray zone: its relic attracts collectors and conspirators who treat the Grail as a museum piece or asset, setting civil law and market custom against ecclesial guardianship.
As social and political critique, War in Heaven exposes the interwar tendency to subordinate transcendence to technique, profit, and bureaucratic convenience. By staging collisions among police procedure, corporate ambition, and sacramental reverence, it indicts elites who commodify heritage and manipulate belief while neglecting justice and community. The novel also addresses class and center–periphery divides: a London coterie presumes authority over a rural parish’s patrimony, echoing metropolitan extraction and cultural snobbery. Against occult will-to-power and secular instrumentalism, the book affirms shared moral order and the common good, suggesting that a society that forgets the sacred risks enthroning domination—whether in boardrooms, laboratories, or ministries.
War In Heaven
Chapter One
THE PRELUDE
The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.
A few moments later there was. Lionel Rackstraw, strolling back from lunch, heard in the corridor the sound of the bell in his room, and, entering at a run, took up the receiver. He remarked, as he did so, the boots and trousered legs sticking out from the large knee-hole table at which he worked, but the telephone had established the first claim on his attention.
"Yes," he said, "yes…. No, not before the 17th…. No, who cares what he wants?… No, who wants to know?… Oh, Mr. Persimmons. Oh, tell him the 17th…. Yes…. Yes, I'll send a set down."
He put the receiver down and looked back at the boots. It occurred to him that someone was probably doing something to the telephone; people did, he knew, at various times drift in on him for such purposes. But they usually looked round or said something; and this fellow must have heard him talking. He bent down towards the boots.
"Shall you be long?" he said into the space between the legs and the central top drawer; and then, as there was no answer, he walked away, dropped hat and gloves and book on to their shelf, strolled back to his desk, picked up some papers and read them, put them back, and, peering again into the dark hole, said more impatiently, "Shall you be long?"
No voice replied; not even when, touching the extended foot with his own, he repeated the question. Rather reluctantly he went round to the other side of the table, which was still darker, and, trying to make out the head of the intruder, said almost loudly: "Hallo! hallo! What's the idea?" Then, as nothing happened, he stood up and went on to himself: "Damn it all, is he dead?" and thought at once that he might be.
That dead bodies did not usually lie round in one of the rooms of a publisher's offices in London about half-past two in the afternoon was a certainty that formed now an enormous and cynical background to the fantastic possibility. He half looked at the door which he had closed behind him, and then attempted the same sort of interior recovery with which he had often thrown off the knowledge that at any moment during his absence his wife might be involved in some street accident, some skidding bus or swerving lorry. These things happened—a small and unpleasant, if invisible, deity who lived in a corner of his top shelves had reminded him—these things happened, and even now perhaps…. People had been crushed against their own front doors; there had been a doctor in Gower Street. Of course, it was all untrue. But this time, as he moved to touch the protruding feet, he wondered if it were.
The foot he touched apparently conveyed no information to the stranger's mind, and Lionel gave up the attempt. He went out and crossed the corridor to another office, whose occupant, spread over a table, was marking sentences in newspaper cuttings.
"Mornington," Lionel said, "there's a man in my room under the table, and I can't get him to take any notice. Will you come across? He looks," he added in a rush of realism, "for all the world as if he was dead."
"How fortunate!" Mornington said, gathering himself off the table. "If he were alive and had got under your table and wouldn't take any notice I should be afraid you'd annoyed him somehow. I think that's rather a pleasant notion," he went on as they crossed the corridor, "a sort of modern King's Threshold—get under the table of the man who's insulted you and simply sulk there. Not, I think, starve—that's for more romantic ages than ours—but take a case filled with sandwiches and a thermos…. What's the plural of thermos?…" He stared at the feet, and then, going up to the desk, went down on one knee and put a hand over the disappearing leg. Then he looked up at Lionel.
"Something wrong," he said sharply. "Go and ask Dalling to come here." He dropped to both knees and peered under the table.
Lionel ran down the corridor in the other direction, and returned in a few minutes with a short man of about forty-five, whose face showed more curiosity than anxiety. Mornington was already making efforts to get the body from under the table.
"He must be dead," he said abruptly to the others as they came in. "What an incredible business! Go round the other side, Dalling; the buttons have caught in the table or something; see if you can get them loose."
"Hadn't we better leave it for the police?" Dalling asked. "I thought you weren't supposed to move bodies."
"How the devil do I know whether it is a body?" Mornington asked. "Not but what you may be right." He made investigations between the trouser-leg and the boot, and then stood up rather suddenly. "It's a body right enough," he said. "Is Persimmons in?"
"No," said Dalling; "he won't be back till four."
"Well, we shall have to get busy ourselves, then. Will you get on to the police-station? And, Rackstraw, you'd better drift about in the corridor and stop people coming in, or Plumpton will be earning half a guinea by telling the Evening News."
Plumpton, however, had no opportunity of learning what was concealed behind the door against which Lionel for the next quarter of an hour or so leant, his eyes fixed on a long letter which he had caught up from his desk as a pretext for silence if anyone passed him. Dalling went downstairs and out to the front door, a complicated glass arrangement which reflected every part of itself so many times that many arrivals were necessary before visitors could discover which panels swung back to the retail sales-room, which to a waiting-room for authors and others desiring interviews with the remoter staff, and which to a corridor leading direct to the stairs. It was here that he welcomed the police and the doctor, who arrived simultaneously, and going up the stairs to the first floor he explained the situation.
At the top of these stairs was a broad and deep landing, from which another flight ran backwards on the left-hand to the second floor. Opposite the stairs, across the landing, was the private room of Mr. Stephen Persimmons, the head of the business since his father's retirement some seven years before. On either side the landing narrowed to a corridor which ran for some distance left and right and gave access to various rooms occupied by Rackstraw, Mornington, Dalling, and others. On the right this corridor ended in a door which gave entrance to Plumpton's room. On the left the other section, in which Lionel's room was the last on the right hand, led to a staircase to the basement. On its way, however, this staircase passed and issued on a side door through which the visitor came out into a short, covered court, having a blank wall opposite, which connected the streets at the front and the back of the building. It would therefore have been easy for anyone to obtain access to Lionel's room in order, as the inspector in charge remarked pleasantly to Mornington, "to be strangled."
For the dead man had, as was evident when the police got the body clear, been murdered so. Lionel, in obedience to the official request to see if he could recognize the corpse, took one glance at the purple face and starting eyes, and with a choked negative retreated. Mornington, with a more contemplative, and Dalling with a more curious, interest, both in turn considered and denied any knowledge of the stranger. He was a little man, in the usual not very fresh clothes of the lower middle class; his bowler hat had been crushed in under the desk; his pockets contained nothing but a cheap watch, a few coppers, and some silver—papers he appeared to have none. Around his neck was a piece of stout cord, deeply embedded in the flesh.
So much the clerks heard before the police with their proceedings retired into cloud and drove the civilians into other rooms. Almost as soon, either by the telephone or some other means, news of the discovery reached Fleet Street, and reporters came pushing through the crowd that began to gather immediately the police were seen to enter the building. The news of the discovered corpse was communicated to them officially, and for the rest they were left to choose as they would among the rumours flying through the crowd, which varied from vivid accounts of the actual murder and several different descriptions of the murderer to a report that the whole of the staff were under arrest and the police had had to wade ankle-deep through the blood in the basement.
To such a distraction Mr. Persimmons himself returned from a meeting of the Publishers' Association about four o'clock, and was immediately annexed by Inspector Colquhoun, who had taken the investigation in charge. Stephen Persimmons was rather a small man, with a mild face apt to take on a harassed and anxious appearance on slight cause. With much more reason he looked anxious now, as he sat opposite the inspector in his own room. He had recognized the body as little as any of his staff had, and it was about them rather than it that the inspector was anxious to gain particulars.
"This Rackstraw, now," Colquhoun was saying: "it was his room the body was found in. Has he been with you long?"
"Oh, years," Mr. Persimmons answered; "most of them have. All the people on this floor—and nearly all the rest. They've been here longer than me, most of them. You see, I came in just three years before my father retired—that's seven years ago, and three's ten."
"And Rackstraw was here before that?"
"Oh, yes, certainly."
"Do you know anything of him?" the inspector pressed. "His address, now?"
"Dalling has all that," the unhappy Persimmons said. "He has all the particulars about the staff. I remember Rackstraw being married a few years ago."
"And what does he do here?" Colquhoun went on.
"Oh, he does a good deal of putting books through, paper and type and binding, and so on. He rather looks after the fiction side. I've taken up fiction a good deal since my father went; that's why the business has expanded so. We've got two of the best selling people to-day—Mrs. Clyde and John Bastable."
"Mrs. Clyde," the inspector brooded. "Didn't she write The Comet and the Star[1]?"
"That's the woman. We sold ninety thousand," Persimmons answered.
"And what are your other lines?"
"Well, my father used to do, in fact he began with, what you might call occult stuff. Mesmerism and astrology and histories of great sorcerers, and that sort of thing. It didn't really pay very well."
"And does Mr. Rackstraw look after that too?" asked Colquhoun.
"Well, some of it," the publisher answered. "But of course, in a place like this things aren't exactly divided just—just exactly. Mornington, now, Mornington looks after some books. Under me, of course," he added hastily. "And then he does a good deal of the publicity, the advertisements, you know. And he does the reviews."
"What, writes them?" the inspector asked.
"Certainly not," said the publisher, shocked. "Reads them and chooses passages to quote. Writes them! Really, inspector!"
"And how long has Mr. Mornington been here?" Colquhoun went on.
"Oh, years and years. I tell you they all came before I did."
"I understand Mr. Rackstraw was out a long time at lunch to-day, with one of your authors. Would that be all right?"
"I daresay he was," Persimmons said, "if he said so."
"You don't know that he was?" asked Colquhoun. "He didn't tell you?"
"Really, inspector," the worried Persimmons said again, "do you think my staff ask me for an hour off when they want to see an author? I give them their work and they do it."
"Sir Giles Tumulty," the inspector said. "You know him?"
"We're publishing his last book, Historical Vestiges of Sacred Vessels in Folklore. The explorer and antiquarian, you know. Rackstraw's had a lot of trouble with his illustrations, but he told me yesterday he thought he'd got them through. Yes, I can quite believe he went up to see him. But you can find out from Sir Giles, can't you?"
"What I'm getting at," the inspector said, "is this. If any of your people are out, is there anything to prevent anyone getting into any of their rooms? There's a front way and a back way in and nobody on watch anywhere."
"There's a girl in the waiting-room," Persimmons objected.
"A girl!" the inspector answered. "Reading a novel when she's not talking to anyone. She'd be a lot of good. Besides, there's a corridor to the staircase alongside the waiting-room. And at the back there's no-one."
"Well, one doesn't expect strangers to drop in casually," the publisher said unhappily. "I believe they do lock their doors sometimes, if they have to go out and have to leave a lot of papers all spread out."
"And leave the key in, I suppose?" Colquhoun said sarcastically.
"Of course," Persimmons answered. "Suppose I wanted something. Besides, it's not to keep anyone out; it's only just to save trouble and warn anyone going in to be careful, so to speak; it hardly ever happens. Besides——"
Colquhoun cut him short. "What people mean by asking for a Government of business men, I don't know," he said. "I was a Conservative from boyhood, and I'm stauncher every year the more I see of business. There's nothing to prevent anyone coming in."
"But they don't," said Persimmons.
"But they have," said Colquhoun. "It's the unexpected that happens. Are you a religious man, Mr. Persimmons?"
"Well, not—not exactly religious," the publisher said hesitatingly. "Not what you'd call religious unpleasantly, I mean. But what——"
"Nor am I," the inspector said. "And I don't get the chance to go to church much. But I've been twice with my wife to a Sunday evening service at her Wesleyan Church in the last few months, and it's a remarkable thing, Mr. Persimmons, we had the same piece read from the Bible each time. It ended up—'And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.' It seemed to me fairly meant for the public. 'What I say unto you,' that's us in the police, 'I say unto all, Watch.' If there was more of that there'd be fewer undiscovered murders. Well, I'll go and see Mr. Dalling. Good day, Mr. Persimmons."
Chapter Two
THE EVENING IN THREE HOMESI
Adrian Rackstraw opened the oven, put the chicken carefully inside, and shut the door. Then he went back to the table, and realized suddenly that he had forgotten to buy the potatoes which were to accompany it. With a disturbed exclamation, he picked up the basket that lay in a corner, put on his hat, and set out on the new errand. He considered for a moment as he reached the garden gate to which of the two shops at which Mrs. Rackstraw indifferently supplied her needs he should go, and, deciding on the nearest, ran hastily down the road. At the shop, "Three potatoes," he said in a low, rather worried voice.
"Yes, sir," the man answered. "Five shillings, please."
Adrian paid him, put the potatoes in the basket, and started back home. But as at the corner he waited for the trams to go by and leave a clear crossing, his eye was caught by the railway station on his left. He looked at it for a minute or two in considerable doubt; then, changing his mind on the importance of vegetables, went back to the shop, left his basket with orders that the potatoes should be sent at once, and hurried back to the station. Once in the train, he saw bridges and tunnels succeed one another in exciting succession as the engine, satisfactorily fastened to coal-truck and carriages, went rushing along the Brighton line. But, before it reached its destination, his mother, entering the room with her usual swiftness, caught the station with her foot and sent it flying across the kitchen floor. Her immediate flood of apologies placated Adrian, however, and he left the train stranded some miles outside Brighton in order to assist her in preparing the food for dinner. She sat down on a chair for a moment, and he broke in again hastily.
"Oh, Mummie, don't sit down there, that's my table," he said.
"Darling, I'm so sorry," Barbara Rackstraw answered. "Had you got anything on it?"
"Well, I was going to put the dinner things," Adrian explained. "I'll just see if the chicken's cooked. Oh, it's lovely!"
"How nice!" Barbara said abstractedly. "Is it a large chicken?"
"Not a very large one," Adrian admitted. "There's enough for me and you and my Bath auntie."
"Oh," said Barbara, startled, "is your Bath auntie here?"
"Well, she may be coming," said Adrian. "Mummie, why do I have a Bath auntie?"
"Because a baby grew up into your Bath auntie, darling," his mother said. "Unintentional but satisfactory, as far as it goes. Adrian, do you think your father will like cold sausages? Because there doesn't seem to be anything else much."
"I don't want any cold sausages," Adrian said hurriedly.
"No, my angel, but it's the twenty-seventh of the month[2], and there's never any money then," Barbara said. "And here he is, anyhow."
Lionel, in spite of the shock that he had received in the afternoon, found himself, rather to his own surprise, curiously free from the actual ghost of it. His memory had obligingly lost the face of the dead man, and it was not until he came through the streets of Tooting that he began to understand that its effect was at once more natural and more profound than he had expected. His usual sense of the fantastic and dangerous possibilities of life, a sense which dwelled persistently in a remote corner of his mind, never showing itself in full, but stirring in the absurd alarm which shook him if his wife were ever late for an appointment—this sense now escaped from his keeping, and, instead of being too hidden, became too universal to be seized. The faces he saw, the words he heard existed in an enormous void, in which he himself—reduced to a face and voice, without deeper existence—hung for a moment, grotesque and timid. There had been for an hour some attempt to re-establish the work of the office, and he had initialled, before he left, a few memoranda which were brought to him. The "L. R." of his signature seemed now to grow balloon-like and huge about him, volleying about his face at the same time that they turned within and around him in a slimy tangle. At similar, if less terrifying, moments, in other days, he had found that a concentration upon his wife had helped to steady and free him, but when this evening he made this attempt he found even in her only a flying figure with a face turned from him, whom he dreaded though he hastened to overtake. As he put his key in the lock he was aware that the thought of Adrian had joined the mad dance of possible deceptions, and it was with a desperate and machine-like courage that he entered to dare whatever horror awaited him.
Nor did the ordinary interchange of greetings do much to disperse the cloud. It occurred to him even as he smiled at Barbara that perhaps another lover had not long left the house; it occurred to him even as he watched Adrian finding pictures of trains in the evening paper that a wild possibility—for a story perhaps; not, surely not, as truth—might be that of a child whose brain was that of the normal man of forty while all his appearance was that of four. An infant prodigy? No, but a prodigy who for some horrible reason of his own concealed his prodigiousness until the moment he expected should arrive. And when they left him to his evening meal, while Barbara engaged herself in putting Adrian to bed, a hundred memories of historical or fictitious crimes entered his mind in which the victim had been carefully poisoned under the shelter of a peaceful and happy domesticity. And not that alone or chiefly; it was not the possibility of administered poison that occupied him, but the question whether all food, and all other things also, were not in themselves poisonous. Fruit, he thought, might be; was there not in the nature of things some venom which nourished while it tormented, so that the very air he breathed did but enable him to endure for a longer time the spiritual malevolence of the world?
Possessed by such dreams, he sat listless and alone until Barbara returned and settled herself down to the evening paper. The event of the afternoon occupied, he knew, the front page. He found himself incapable of speaking of it; he awaited the moment when her indolent[3] eyes should find it. But that would not be, and indeed was not, till she had looked through the whole paper, delaying over remote paragraphs he had never noticed, and extracting interest from the mere superfluous folly of mankind. She turned the pages casually, glanced at the heading, glanced at the column, dropped the paper over the arm of her chair, and took up a cigarette.
"He's beginning to make quite recognizable letters," she said. "He made quite a good K this afternoon."
This, Lionel thought despairingly, was an example of the malevolence of the universe; he had given it, and her, every chance. Did she never read the paper? Must he talk of it himself, and himself renew the dreadful memories in open speech?
"Did you see," he said, "what happened at our place this afternoon?"
"No," said Barbara, surprised; and then, breaking off, "Darling, you look so ill. Do you feel ill?"
"I'm not quite the thing," Lionel admitted. "You'll see why, in there." He indicated the discarded Star.
Barbara picked it up. "Where?" she asked. "'Murder in City publishing house.' That wasn't yours, I suppose? Lionel, it was! Good heavens, where?"
"In my office," Lionel answered, wondering whether some other corpse wasn't hidden behind the chair in which she sat. Of course, they had found that one this afternoon, but mightn't there be a body that other people couldn't find, couldn't even see? Barbara herself now: mightn't she be really lying there dead? and this that seemed to sit there opposite him merely a projection of his own memories of a thousand evenings when she had sat so? What mightn't be true, in this terrifying and obscene universe?
Barbara's voice—or the voice of the apparent Barbara—broke in. "But, dearest," she said, "how dreadful for you! Why didn't you tell me? You must have had a horrible time." She dropped the paper again and hurled herself on to her knees beside him.
He caught her hand in his own, and felt as if his body at least was sane, whatever his mind might be. After all, the universe had produced Barbara. And Adrian, who, though a nuisance, was at least delimited and real in his own fashion. The fantastic child of his dream, evil and cruel and vigilant, couldn't at the same time have Adrian's temper and Adrian's indefatigable interest in things. Even devils couldn't be normal children at the same time. He brought his wife's wrist to his cheek, and the touch subdued the rising hysteria within him. "It was rather a loathsome business," he said, and put out his other hand for the cigarettes.
II
Mornington had on various occasions argued with Lionel whether pessimism was always the result of a too romantic, even a too sentimental, view of the world; and a slightly scornful mind pointed out to him, while he ate a solitary meal in his rooms that evening, that the shock which he undoubtedly had felt was the result of not expecting people to murder other people. "Whereas they naturally do," he said to himself. "The normal thing with an unpleasant intrusion is to try and exclude it—human or not. So silly not to be prepared for these things. Some people, as De Quincey said, have a natural aptitude for being murdered. To kill or to be killed is a perfectly reasonable thing. And I will not let it stop me taking those lists round to the Vicar's."
He got up, collected the papers which he had been analysing for reports on parochial finance, and went off to the Vicarage of St. Cyprian's, which was only a quarter of an hour from his home. He disliked himself for doing work that he disliked, but he had never been able to refuse help to any of his friends; and the Vicar might be numbered among them. Mornington suspected his Christianity of being the inevitable result of having moved for some time as a youth of eighteen in circles which were, in a rather detached and superior way, opposed to it; but it was a religion which enabled him to despise himself and everyone else without despising the universe, thus allowing him at once in argument or conversation the advantages of the pessimist and the optimist. It was because the Vicar, a hard-worked practical priest, had been driven by stress of experience to some similar standpoint that the two occasionally found one another congenial.
That evening, however, he found a visitor at the Vicarage, a round, dapper little cleric in gaiters, who was smoking a cigar and turning over the pages of a manuscript. The Vicar pulled Mornington into the study where they were sitting.
