While England Sleeps Read Online Free PDF Page A

that of your hero Mr. Hitler, then I am afraid, being half Polish myself, my continued presence at the table will upset your appetite, something I would never dream of doing.” Oh, but one never thought up such clever retorts until one had already left the table. L’esprit de l’escalier , the French call it. And how I wished I had walked away indignantly rather than fearfully!
    I had gathered together my clothes and books and was about to leave the room when I remembered the umbrella. Putting my things down for a moment, I wrote Rupert a check for a hundred pounds (Aunt Constance’s gift had been forty), left it on the edge of the bed where he had perched, then fled downstairs and out the servants’ door.
    It was drizzling out. I caught a taxi to the underground, then the District Line to Richmond. I had twenty-two pounds to my name.
    In the morning I told Nanny the story of the umbrella. “What I don’t understand,” I concluded, “is why someone would loan out a hundred-pound umbrella in the first place.”
    “It seems obvious to me,” Nanny said. “He was trying to impress you.”
    “Impress me? I don’t care about umbrellas! For me, umbrellas only exist when it rains!”
    “Apparently they mean more than that to him,” Nanny said.
    “Apparently so,” I said, and thought of Forster, Howards End , literature’s cache of fatal umbrellas.
    “Well, it doesn’t matter,” I concluded. “It’s lost. The umbrella’s lost. Just another object in a history of lost objects. I shall never speak of it again.”
    But I was wrong.
     
    That afternoon I went out to look for cheap rooms, and by the next morning had installed myself in a bed-sitter in Earl’s Court that had for the past twenty-seven years been the domain of one Muriel White, a stenographer. It had a coin-operated gas fire and a lavatory the flushes of which sounded like the coughing fits of a dying emphysemic. And here I settled—jobless, rent paid to the end of the month—and tried to decide what to do next.
    Every day I listened to the wireless. The situation in Germany grew worse every day; every day, it seemed, Hitler made more advances, the noose tightened around the necks of the Jews. Meanwhile the European nations had signed a nonintervention treaty in regard to Spain, which the Germans and Russians appeared to be blatantly defying. Curse Eden! Curse England for her cowardice!
    I made halfhearted attempts to work on my novel, but in light of present events—in light of hideous Lady Abernathy’s opinions—it seemed a useless endeavor. Once, it had been enough to explore the delicate shadings of a conversation, the etiquette according to which an old woman poured out tea, the thoughts of a young boy as he descended in a lift toward the underground platforms. Now, however, history was pressing down from all sides, and sensibility seemed more than insufficient: it seemed criminal. Soldiers, not writers, determined the fate of the world.
    An envelope arrived one afternoon in the post, forwarded from Richmond. It contained the check I’d written to Rupert, uncashed. No note. Rupert, I was beginning to suspect, wasn’t nearly so fragile as his teacups. So now I had one hundred and seventeen pounds to my name. Enough for a few months, at most.
    Nigel’s essay on left-handed pianism was published in The Gramophone and hailed as a masterpiece.
     
    Around that time rumors started circulating among my friends in London and Cambridge about a fellow called Desmond Leacock, the heir apparent to the publishing firm of Leacock and Strauss. He had taken a double first at Oxford and wore on his face a look of tortured regret, which only added to his attractiveness. Leacock had always had an air about him of heroic predestination, so it was no surprise to any of us when one day he decamped to Spain and joined up with the Republican forces. Conflicting reports about his progress through Catalonia and Aragon came through the mail and the telephone: