It was to be the keynote of my visit, I reflected, as I lay in bed—invitation. The bell had invited me to dinner; Oswald’s man had invited me to take wine. Oswald himself in his first remarks, delivered ever so courteously across the oval table, had the air of inviting reply. He began:

‘Perhaps you’ve never been in this part of the world before?’

I was encouraged to say ‘No.’

After a moment’s reflection in which, I supposed, he was passing the countryside in review, he said:

‘There’s Clum Abbey near by; would you care to see it?’ I hesitated, not wholly from lukewarmness but because I was at a loss how to frame my answer, how to appear politely eager. He misinterpreted my silence. ‘Don’t feel obliged,’ he said; ‘only I generally take people there.’

Was this a threat? I longed to say, ‘Take me anywhere else.’ To my lively apprehensions the innocent ruin took on the hues and horrors of a Blue Chamber. But I complied; I succumbed to Clum.

Other invitations had followed: to smoke, to inspect the house, to play picquet, to take the younger hand first, to name the stakes.

‘Give me some indication,’ I said, wishing that he hadn’t, after the insinuating fashion of the odd-job man, ‘left it to me’.

‘Do you think a shilling?’

‘A point?’

‘Just as you like,’ he said.

I saw myself a financial cripple, perhaps a bankrupt; but it seemed impossible without vulgarizing the lofty accent of our intercourse, to suggest a humbler sum.

‘The game generally ends all square, doesn’t it?’ I said, flying in the face of experience.

‘I have known it not,’ he admitted.

‘You think, perhaps——?’ Longingly I eyed the ignoble straw, not daring to clutch it. But he had seen it too.

‘Well, I really meant a shilling a hundred.’

We were saved. But with what expense of spirit, with what reckless doles of hostages to misunderstanding! The appearance of whisky, with all its mitigating accessories, turned on a cascade of major and minor invitations. Fortunately for this contingency I was armed with ready desires; I directed, encouraged and restrained with a will; and, as a small return on my former prodigious outlay of reluctant adaptability, I did find the water hotter the whisky smoother, the sugar sweeter, the whole brew more grateful and harmonious, for the fact that it had been extracted, fought for, out of the inmost pattern and texture of polite behaviour. It was a stolen water, and if I had received it with some natural colloquialism such as ‘Whisky, not half!’ it would have tasted brackish and bitter. Instead, all the pleased propitiated forces of convention and propriety came to its aid, and poured their cautious sweetness into the cup. When, like a climacteric, the last invitation came, the invitation to bed, final and inevitable as I felt it to be, I detected stirrings of revolt, I almost jibbed. A defiant impulse came to me, as it might come to one on the summons of the Last Trump, to turn a deaf ear, to tender a qualified compliance, to suggest an alternative; almost to refuse.

But here I was in bed, and I had gone quietly enough. Refusal! that was the obverse of the golden coin that we had tossed each other, with rigid dexterity, throughout the evening. But only at the last had I managed to catch a glimpse of it; invitation’s suave, deferential head was ever uppermost. I pondered over classical invitations: Weber’s to the Valse; Shelley’s less specifically to Jane. They didn’t help because, from their buoyant confident tone one could see they didn’t contemplate a refusal. But to all Oswald’s invitations an engraved, an almost embossed R.S.V.P., was palpably subscribed. If he had just said ‘Come away!’ without troubling to call me ‘best and brightest’ or comparing the weather unfavourably with me, I would have gone with a light heart, ready for any enterprise, even excavations at Clum. Or if he had piped to me in Weber’s florid strain I would have cried shame on my poor spirit, and plunged into the dance. And that was what he would have done before my visit, or the mysterious cause that determined my visit, had cast its blighting spell. I should have been given no time to decide; my hesitations and doubts would have been overridden or tossed aside, my self-consciousness anaesthetized. Instead of losing myself in this delirious experience I was condemned to sit eating unpalatable blackberries at a respectful distance from the still smouldering embers of the Burning Bush—for its blaze and crackle illuminated memory, unquenched by the berries’ bitter juice. And for music I had the refrain of ‘Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, join,’ well what? The figured, frigid capering of conventional ghosts. I didn’t want to, and I didn’t want not to. Oswald flattered himself when he took such elaborate precautions against a possible refusal. It was a strain, too, negotiating his insipid proposals, threading my way through the tiresome labyrinth that promised no Minotaur.

‘Will you, won’t you?’ Well, I wouldn’t. I would refuse.

Daylight saw the ebb of my Dutch courage. It had receded infinitely far, leaving a barren strand. All day I waited for the tide to turn. On the horizon of my mind (never very distant, now stuffily close) I wrote the charmed word in letters of scarlet: refuse.

There seemed to be an opening at Clum. Among its treasures was a large squat perpendicular window, ribbed and tight-laced with massive angular tracery. Its forbidding aspect, presented successively to shrinking centuries, had kept injurious Time in awe. Oswald led me to a green knoll, which had a local reputation as a vantage-point from which this monster could be all too clearly seen. There it stood, or rather it didn’t stand, it came ‘at’ you, secure in its harsh virginity, unmarried and unmarred, one of survival’s most palpable mistakes. But Oswald invited my admiration; and I nearly withheld it. I hated to hear him speak with the voice if not with the accent (and that made it so much worse) of every tasteless tripper. And it wasn’t his voice; it was the voice that for the sake of safety, for the sake of maintaining the straddled flat-footed poise of the vulgar, he felt compelled to use to me. He wouldn’t be thrown off his balance; he would bring home to me, by the persistence with which he applauded the second-rate and took refuge, for opinion, in the second-hand, the fact that I ceased to count. How could I, with any feeling for my own dignity, challenge his impersonality? I should only succeed in being rude. It was the triumph of his policy to have brought our friendship to a pass where rudeness and disagreement were synonymous.

But I didn’t give up hope. I remembered my resolve; and though to my inspection the altar of friendship appeared as cold, as foreign to sacramental rites as Clum itself, I would still cling to it, though no one should take enough interest to pull me off it. All swabbed and scraped and slippery as it was, I couldn’t help thinking that an acolyte had lately been at work upon it, removing vestiges of former feasts. For though swept it wasn’t garnished, even with a vegetable marrow. It had an air of dereliction, I noted maliciously, not of preparation. The manger might be empty, but I was the only dog in the manger; it wasn’t coldly furnished forth with viands ear-marked for the next mongrel, denied to me. Oswald didn’t readily discuss our common friends, though after dinner I tried to draw him, by dangling names, into this, often the most rewarding of all forms of conversation. Perhaps it was snobbery; he wouldn’t rise to the minnows with which my poor line was forlornly baited. I had resolved not to change the direction of my attack, but to intensify it—to meet his most frigid propositions with passionate agreement, to glut his devouring sense of responsibility with continual titbits. Zealous as I was, he easily outstripped me in the competition for conferring favours. He looked all his own gift-horses in the mouth, before he presented them, whereas I was too apt to make mine show their paces, too raw not to recommend them. I felt as the evening drew on that something was sure to happen, some outburst, probably physical. He would scream, or I should. We were playing picquet and I had won the second partie.