A yellow fog brooded over the city like a curse.
It was about six o’clock of a Sunday evening in October, 1933. For over an hour Ivor Trent had stood by the undrawn curtains in his sitting-room, looking down on desolation. No one was visible: every sound was muffled. The church bells seemed to be summoning the ghosts of a forsaken city to worship.
Some minutes passed, but Ivor Trent remained motionless. Anyone entering the room would have been startled by this immobility, which was that of a waxwork. But moments of deep interior intensity have a physical reflection, and such a moment now possessed him—elevating him to an eminence from which the pattern of his life was clearly discernible.
And Ivor Trent saw that he had reached a final frontier: that he stood, not on a high-road, but at the end of a cul-de-sac. The future would hold only repetitions, not unique experiences. He would become the plagiarist of his own past.
But his will rebelled against this discovery. His plans had been made, and he decided to execute them. His friends believed he was leaving England, to write another book, and that in all probability he would not return to London for a year. Every detail had been arranged—he had let the flat for nine months; letters were to be forwarded to his bank; the luggage was now piled in the hall. He was leaving almost immediately.
The flat was at the top of a comparatively modern block near Cork Street, and Trent lived in it only when he was not working. He had never written a line in it. Each of his books had been created in very different surroundings, for, although his friends had been told he was leaving England, and although they believed he always went abroad to work, it was nevertheless a fact that every one of his books had been written in a house quite near the flat—a queer, dilapidated house, which became more strange each time he visited it. It was in Chelsea, and stood at the end of a street which ran down to the Embankment. The river could be seen from the upper windows.
Ten years ago this house had been the home of an experiment. A number of writers and artists had decided to live a communal life in it. Each had taken a room, or a couple of rooms, decorated and furnished them, rents being assessed according to the size and desirability of the accommodation selected. The communal element had been provided by the dining-room on the ground floor and a library, next to it, to which anyone could go at any time in search of companionship.
This experiment had demanded a capitalist to finance it, and eventually someone had discovered a Captain Frazer. He was an odd, proud, nervous man—then about thirty—who had been badly wounded in the war and had recently recovered from a serious nervous collapse. He had just married a strong, vigorous woman, five years his junior, who had nursed him through his illness.
For some curious reason the experiment had appealed to Captain Frazer, and he invested every penny he possessed in it. Possibly he felt he must do something in the world, and realised that he was incapable of doing much. Perhaps he believed he was serving the higher aspirations of humanity. One thing is certain, however—the idea of owning an ordinary lodging-house would have dismayed him. His ideal was to be military and extremely correct. But this hive of geniuses was entirely different. It flattered him with the promise of a reflected immortality.
Of course the experiment failed. In less than a year the house was a miniature Bedlam. Quarrels and disputes were perpetual. Wives ran away with lovers: one husband committed suicide: rents were months in arrear. Eventually, the inmates decided to sub-let their rooms, selling their furniture to the new tenants, with the result that a number of persons—in no way related to the higher aspirations of humanity—began to invade the house. Finally, only two of the original pioneers remained: Ivor Trent, and a man in a small room on the first floor, who believed he was a reincarnation of Nietzsche.
So Captain Frazer discovered that he was the owner of an ordinary lodging-house. One effect of this degradation was to make him even more military in his bearing; another was that he disassociated himself entirely from the establishment, explaining to those who did not know the facts that the venture was an eccentric whim of his wife’s. The latter, however, welcomed the failure of the experiment and directed her great energy and practical ability to the task confronting her. The house was their only asset—it must be made to yield them a living. She transformed the dining-room and the library into bed-sitting rooms, letting the former to a commercial traveller and the latter to the manager of a local picture palace. She then revealed to Nietzsche her opinion of him, which had been maturing for many months. He disappeared a few hours later, owing sixteen weeks’ rent.