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By Root 671 0

off on my own to the creek below the cemetery and there was Israel Wold, the half-baked tenant of the shack beyond the pines, on all fours, digging out the earth like he was a wild cat. He called out, ‘Help me, pesky boy,’ and obediently I crouched opposite and scrabbled at the ground. When the hole was deep enough he poured gunpowder into it from a sack slung from his belt and he said, ‘Here I go and may the Lord go with me’ and then he lay down with his head over the hole. I ran off because I knew he was cracked, and the next instant there was a noise like thunder and when I looked back I saw his old straw hat tossed into the misty sky as though someone had brought good news. Which is why I took the dead man in Manchester Square in my stride, though not quite.

That night I booked into a boarding house in Bloomsbury, and suffered accordingly. I suppose I could have gone down to Melchett’s folk in Dorset, except the company they kept was real dull and their sofas awash with dogs.

Tuesday I’d gone with Laura Rothschild to a matinée of some play or other, let Melchett stand me dinner at the Carlton, staggered on with him to his club and then mislaid him at three o’clock in the morning outside the revolving doors of the Café Royal. In between I’d telegraphed my aunt, assuring her of my eagerness to see the family again, particularly Sissy who in my absence had produced a son and heir for her husband. It cost a few cents more but I also said I was in tip-top spirits. I wasn’t, although I was truly bucked about Sissy and her boy. I recollect buying her a bunch of violets with the notion they might last the voyage home, only I shed them somewhere.

Melchett and I had planned to motor down to the ship together – his chauffeur had earlier taken charge of my luggage – but when I lost him at the Café Royal I was forced to catch the milk train from Waterloo, after which rattling journey through Woking, Winchester and Eastleigh I arrived at Southampton to spend a miserable hour perched on a coil of rope outside the Ocean Terminal, my only companion in the near darkness a boy endlessly sorting through the contents of a cardboard suitcase. I had plenty to think about; every time I hunched forward a corner of the picture frame inside my coat jabbed against my breastbone. Once, the boy called out to me, ‘What’s the time, mister?’ but I didn’t reply. He wore a white muffler about his throat and I thought of the dead man in the barber’s chair.

Shortly after sunrise a straggling procession of men in uniform approached Gate 4 and crossed the railway tracks on to Ocean Road. It was then the doors of the South Western Hotel opened and I was able to order a breakfast of overdone kippers. At that hour there were only three other guests in the dining room, two of whom had their backs to me. Of these, one was a woman soberly dressed and the other a stoutly built fellow sitting alone in an alcove, one hand constantly hovering about the string of an oblong box lying beside his chair. The third occupant, middle-aged and wearing spectacles, sat opposite the woman. His face, otherwise fleshy and undistinguished, was remarkable for a mouth whose lower lip was scored through as though by a slash from a knife; split thus, it gave him a roguish appearance. Leaning backwards in his chair, he talked in so distinctive a voice and with such authority that several times I caught the drift of what he said. I took him to be a lawyer, for he seemed to be conducting an interrogation rather than a conversation.

‘Are you sure that you have the will? . . . What makes you think you possess the strength? . . . What will you do with success when it comes?’ To which last question the woman replied barely above a whisper. I have the knack of concentration and although a waiter was poking the coals into flame and plates were clattering in the kitchens beyond the green baize door, I heard her plain. ‘Why, I shall be happy,’ is what she said.

It was then her companion looked across and met my eye. He was smiling in such a jovial fashion, that, taken off guard, I pretended