I had written nearly three thousand words that day, and in the after-glow of self-satisfaction I decided that there was certainly something in his life of rural seclusion after all.
In Bloomsbury far too many people were acquainted with me and my address. They were "just dropping in" on me at all hours of the night and day with complete disregard for my work. In their assumption a writer was a person who never worked anyway; his stories were things he just dashed off in odd moments now and again, with no particular thought, as one dashes off letters.
After a string of nights on short rations of sleep, trying to recover some of the time thus stolen from me during the day, I dashed off myself, away from London and these vampires of my attention—my friends. I took care that none of them—none but Spencer, that is—should know my address until I was good and ready for them. And that meant when I had finished my novel.
It was safe to tell Spencer. He never saw any of my other friends. They avoided him because he was—odd. Eccentric. In his musty bed-sitting-room in Mecklenburgh Square he lived in a world of his own. You sensed the strangeness as soon as you stepped into the room, and it was certainly enhanced by his presence.
He was fattish—why, I don't know, for I never saw him eat anything—and, I believe, older than he looked. He looked in his early sixties. Trying to maintain a conversation with him was indeed trying. You felt that quite two-thirds of his attention was somewhere else all the time, and he only intermittently remembered that you were there.
And most of what he said to you he deliberately made cryptic. He had a tortuous mind that loved to puzzle and mystify. Many times I had remonstrated with him: "For God's sake, Spencer, speak straightforwardly and sensibly, will you! I can make more sense out of my income tax correspondence than I can out of you."
When you did make sense out of him, it was invariably worth the trouble. He had more odd knowledge tucked away inside his head than Ripley ever dreamed upon, and he was full of surprising little tit-bits that made me exclaim, "That gives me an idea for a story! . . ."
I made quite a lot of money out of Spencer in this way. Maybe that was why I looked upon him as my best friend.
In fact, the main reason that I elected to keep in touch with him from my lonely cottage among the gorse and pines of Surrey was because my novel dealt with medieval witchcraft and I anticipated difficulty over one or two chapters. I might need to dig in Spencer's fund of knowledge about such things. Also, he had the best library of books on the occult that I had ever come across. It was through a previous search for out-of-the-way information that I originally encountered him.
But about that evening when I was wandering alone across the Surrey heath so comfortably satisfied with the day's work
It was an evening in midsummer when the atmosphere was close and still, and the going of the sun had seemed to leave it more warm and oppressive than noonday.
The air was a thick, almost liquid substance, from which your lungs were hard pressed to draw oxygen, almost as thick as the blood which pumped at your temples and made your head throb heavily. Headachey weather, and you longed for a storm to come and break it up.
Somewhere this night there was a storm, for along the horizon the sheet lightning flickered and jumped and revealed silently weird-lit glimpses of an unsuspected cloudland that lay out there in the darkness.
Heading by Fred Humiston
51
