The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh Read Free Book Online Page A

of invitations. There was a cleavage on this subject. A faction were in favor of keeping the party small and British, the majority headed by Sir Ambrose wished to include all the leaders of the film industry. It was no use “showing the flag,” he explained, if there was no one except poor old Frank to show it to. It wasnever in doubt who would win. Sir Ambrose had all the heavy weapons. Cards were accordingly printed in large numbers.
    Dennis meanwhile searched for any trace of Sir Francis’s “Works.” There were few books in the bungalow and those few mostly Dennis’s own. Sir Francis had given up writing before Dennis could read. He did not remember those charming books which had appeared while he lay in the cradle, books with patterned paper boards and paper labels, with often a little scribble by Lovat Fraser on the title page, fruits of a frivolous but active mind, biography, travel, criticism, poetry, drama—
belles lettres
in short. The most ambitious was
A Free Man greets the Dawn,
half autobiographical, a quarter political, a quarter mystical, a work which went straight to the heart of every Boots subscriber in the early twenties, and earned Sir Francis his knighthood.
A Free Man greets the Dawn
had been out of print for years now, all its pleasant phrases unhonored and unremembered.
    When Dennis met Sir Francis in Megalopolitan studios the name, Hinsley, was just not unknown. There was a sonnet by him in
Poems of Today
. If asked, Dennis would have guessed that he had been killed in the Dardanelles. It was not surprising that Dennis possessed none of the works. Nor, to any who knew Sir Francis, was it surprising that
he
did not. To the end he was the least vain of literary men and in consequence the least remembered.
    Dennis searched long fruitlessly and was contemplating adesperate sortie to the public library when he found a stained old copy of the
Apollo
preserved, Heaven knew why, in Sir Francis’s handkerchief drawer. The blue cover had faded to gray, the date was February 1920. It comprised chiefly poems by women, many of them, probably, grandmothers by now. Perhaps one of these warm lyrics explained the magazine’s preservation after so many years in so remote an outpost. There was, however, at the end a book review signed F.H. It dealt, Dennis noticed, with a poetess whose sonnets appeared on an earlier page. The name was now forgotten, but perhaps here, Dennis reflected, was something “near the heart of the man,” something which explained his long exile; something anyway which obviated a trip to the public library… “This slim volume redolent of a passionate and reflective talent above the ordinary…” Dennis cut out the review and sent it to Sir Ambrose. Then he turned to his task of composition.
    *
    The pickled oak, the chintz, the spongy carpet and the Georgian staircase all ended sharply on the second floor. Above that lay a quarter where no layman penetrated. It was approached by elevator, an open functional cage eight feet square. On this top floor everything was tile and porcelain, linoleum and chromium. Here there were the embalming-rooms with their rows of inclined china slabs, their taps and tubes and pressure pumps, their deep gutters and the heavysmell of formaldehyde. Beyond lay the cosmetic rooms with their smell of shampoo and hot hair and acetone and lavender.
    An orderly wheeled the stretcher into Aimée’s cubicle. It bore a figure under a sheet. Mr. Joyboy walked beside it.
    “Good morning, Miss Thanatogenos.”
    “Good morning, Mr. Joyboy.”
    “Here is the strangulated Loved One for the Orchid Room.”
    Mr. Joyboy was the perfection of high professional manners. Before he came there had been some decline of gentility in the ascent from show-room to workshop. There had been talk of “bodies” and “cadavers”; one jaunty young embalmer from Texas had even spoken of “the meat.” That young man had gone within a week of Mr. Joyboy’s appointment as Senior