The Nature of a Crime

day. When an old friend, last year, on a Parisian Boulevard said: “Isn’t there a story by yourself and Collaborator buried in the So & So?” I repudiated the idea with a great deal of heat. Eventually I had to admit the, as it were, dead fact. And, having admitted that to myself, and my Collaborator having corroborated it, I was at once possessed by a sort of morbid craving to get the story republished in a definitive and acknowledged form. One may care infinitely little for the fate of one’s work and yet be almost hypochondriacally anxious as to the form its publication shall take⁠—if the publication is likely to occur posthumously. I became at once dreadfully afraid that some philologist of that Posterity for which one writes, might, in the course of his hyena occupations, disinter these poor bones and, attributing sentence one to writer A and sentence two to B, maul at least one of our memories. With the nature of those crimes one is only too well acquainted. Besides, though one may never read comments one desires to get them over. It is indeed agreeable to hear a storm rage in the distance and rumble eventually away.

Let me, however, since my Collaborator wishes it and in the name of Fun that is today hardly an echo, differ from him for a shade as to the nature of those passages of time. I protest against the word: quarrels. There were not any. And I should like to make the note that our collaboration was almost purely oral. We wrote and read aloud the one to the other. Possibly in the end we even wrote to read aloud the one to the other: for it strikes me very forcibly that The Nature of a Crime is for the most part prose meant for recitation, or of that type.

Anyhow, as the memory comes back to me overwhelmingly, I would read on and read on. One begins with a fine propulsion. Sometimes that would last to the end. But, as often as not, by a real telepathy, with my eyes on the page and my voice going on I would grow aware of an exaggerated stillness on the part of my Collaborator in the shadows. It was an extraordinary kind of stillness: not of death: not of an ice age. Yes, it was the stillness of a prisoner on the rack determined to conceal an agony. I would read on, my voice gradually sticking to my jaws. When it became unbearable I would glance up. On the other side of the hearth I would have a glimpse of a terribly sick man, of a convulsed face, of fingers contorted. Guido Fawkes beneath the peine forte et dure looked like that. You are to remember that we were very serious about writing. I would read on. After a long time it would come: “Oh!⁠ ⁠… Oh, oh!⁠ ⁠… Oh my God.⁠ ⁠… My dear Ford.⁠ ⁠… My dear faller.⁠ ⁠…” (That in those days was the fashionable pronunciation of “fellow.”)

For myself, I would listen always with admiration. Always with an admiration that I have never since recaptured. And if there were admirablenesses that did not seem to me to fit in with the given scene I could at least, at the end of the reading, say with perfect sincerity: “Wonderful! How you do things!⁠ ⁠…” before beginning on: “But don’t you perhaps think.⁠ ⁠…”

And I really do not believe that either my Collaborator or myself ever made an objection which was not jointly sustained. That is not quarrels. When I last looked through the bound proofs of Romance I was struck with the fact that whereas my Collaborator eliminated almost every word of action and eighty percent of the conversations by myself, I supplied almost all the descriptive passages of the really collaborated parts⁠—and such softer sentiment as was called for. And my Collaborator let them get through.

All this took place long ago; most of it in another century during another reign; whilst an earlier but not less haughty and proud generation were passing away.

F. M. F.

The Nature of a Crime

I

You are, I suppose, by now in Rome. It is very curious how present to me are both Rome and yourself. There is a certain hill⁠—you, and that is the curious part of it, will never go there⁠—yet, yesterday, late in the evening, I stood upon its summit and you came walking from a place below. It is always midday there: the seven pillars of the Forum stand on high, their capitals linked together, and form one angle of a square. At their bases there lie some detritus, a broken marble lion, and I think but I am not certain, the bronze she-wolf suckling the two bronze children. Your dress brushed the herbs: it was grey and tenuous: I suppose you do not know how you look when you are unconscious of being looked at? But I looked at you for a long time⁠—at my You.

I saw your husband yesterday at the club and he said that you would not be returning till the end of April. When I got back to my chambers I found a certain letter. I will tell you about it afterwards⁠—but I forbid you to look at the end of what I am writing now. There is a piece of news coming: I would break it to you if I could⁠—but there is no way of breaking the utterly unexpected. Only, if you read this through you will gather from the tenor, from the tone of my thoughts, a little inkling, a small preparation for my disclosure. Yes: it is a “disclosure.”

… Briefly, then, it was this letter⁠—a business letter⁠—that set me thinking: that made that hill rise before me. Yes, I stood upon it and there before me lay Rome⁠—beneath a haze, in the immense sea of plains. I have often thought of going to Rome⁠—of