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The Floating Press - Oliver Onions

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124 pages

English

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Oliver Onions' In Accordance With the Evidence is often referred to as a detective story, but though technically accurate, that description vastly understates the penetrating psychological insights and lyrical nuance of the novel. Pitting two complex characters against one another in a battle of wits, this multi-layered masterpiece will linger with readers long after the last page.

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Publié par	The Floating Press
Date de parution	01 juillet 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781776580996
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0134€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE EVIDENCE
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OLIVER ONIONS

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In Accordance With the Evidence From a 1913 edition Epub ISBN 978-1-77658-099-6 Also available: PDF ISBN 978-1-77658-100-9 © 2013 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike. Visit www.thefloatingpress.com
Contents
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Part I - Holborn I II III IV V VI VII VIII Part II - Woburn Place I II III IV V VI Part III - The Garret I II III IV V
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TO WILLIAM ARTHUR LEWIS BETTANY
Part I - Holborn
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I
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It seems strangely like old times to me to be making these jottings inPitman's shorthand. I was surprised to find I remembered as much of itas I do, for I dropped it suddenly when Archie Merridew died, andArchie's clear, high-pitched voice was the last that ever dictated to mefor speed, while I myself have not dictated since Archie took down hislast message from my reading. That will be—say a dozen years or moreago next August. It may be a little more, or a little less. Nor, since Ido not keep it as an anniversary, does the day of the month matter.
Either in my rooms or his, we had a good deal of this sort of practisetogether about that time, young Archie and I—reading aloud, taking downand transcribing. I am wrong in speaking of my "rooms" though; I hadonly one, a third-floor bedroom near the very noisiest corner of King'sCross. It was just opposite one of these running electric advertisementsthat changed from green to red and from red to green three times everyminute; you know them; there are plenty of them now, but they were newthen. The street was narrow; this horrible thing was at a rounded cornernot more than five and twenty yards away; and even when my lamp waslighted it still tinged my ceiling and the upper part of the wall abovemy bed, red and green, red and green—for I had only a little muslinhalf-curtain and no blind, and if I wanted to read in bed I had eitherto turn my lamp out until I had undressed or else to undress in a cornerby the window side of the room, because of being overlooked from acrossthe way. I don't think there were any other lodgers in the house. It wasa "pub," the "Coburg," but I could get on to the staircase without goingthrough the bars on the ground floor, and always did so. The rather soursmell of these lower parts of my abode reached me up my three flights ofstairs, but I had got used to that. It was the noise that was the worst(except, of course, that red and green fiend of an advertisement)—thenoise that greeted me when I woke of a morning, awaited me when I cameback from Rixon Tebb & Masters' at night, and often became maddeningwhen, at half-past twelve, they clashed to the iron gates of thepublic-house and turned the topers out into the street, to fraternise orquarrel for half-an-hour or more beneath my window.
But we worked more in Archie Merridew's rooms than in mine. "Rooms" iscorrect here. He had the whole top floor of a house near the FoundlingHospital, a pretty house with a fan-lighted ivy-green door, earlyGeorgian, a brightly twinkling brass knocker and bellpulls, and awhite-washed area inside the railings to make the basement lighter. Hisfolks lived at Guildford; his father paid his rent for him, thirty-eightpounds a year; and his pleasant quarters under the roof had everythingthat mine hadn't—he could sit outside on the coped leads when theweather was hot, draw up cosily to a fireplace shaped something like aQueen Anne teapot when it was cold, and the ceiling, truncated along oneside, didn't begin to turn red and green the moment the twilight came.
It gives me a shiver to think how atrociously poor I was in those days.More and more of that too comes back with the half-forgotten shorthand.I don't mean that I've ever forgotten that I used to be poor; it's thedepth and degradation I mean and that—this will seem odd to youpresently, as it seems suddenly odd to me as I write it—that memory isstill more horrible to me than anything else I have ever known. Myhaving got rich since doesn't wipe it out. If I were to become as richas Rockefeller I should never forget the rages of envy, black and deepand bitter, that used sometimes to take me when I thought of ArchieMerridew's circumstances and my own.
I have got riches as I have got everything else— everything —I everwanted, by attention to detail. You'll probably agree with me by-and-bythat by "attention to detail" I mean rather more than most men do whenthey give this advice to young men about to start in life. I rememberthey used to give us, as it were, the empty form and shell of this maximat the Business College, the place in Holborn Archie and I attended; butyou've got to have been down into the pit and come back again before yourealise the terrible force there is in these truisms. And no less indoing things than undoing them afterwards (when that has been necessary)have I planned to the very last minutiæ . If I have never seemed aparticularly busy man, that has been because I have always dislikedbeing seen in the act of doing a thing. And where I have passed my trailis obliterated.
Archie Merridew and I were only half contemporaries. He was younger thanI by a good seven years—was, as a matter of fact, only twenty-threewhen he died. And in nearly everything else we were as sharplycontrasted as we were in our fortunes. Indeed, we were much more so, forwhile I miserably coveted that thirty-eight pound upper floor of hisnear the Foundling Hospital, my faith in myself and my ambition wouldhave helped me over that. Physically, we were as different as we couldbe. My almost gigantic size made me, in my cramped red and green lightedapartment, an enormously overgrown squirrel in the smallest of cages;but to Archie's rather dandified little dapperness his series of roofchambers was spacious as a palace. Mentally we diverged even more. I wastaciturn, he lively as one of the crickets that used to chirp behind hislittle Queen Anne teapot of a fireplace. And as for luck—well, if luckever so much as nodded to me in those days, it seemed to change its mindand to pass by on the other side, while he seemed to pull things off themore easily the more recklessly he blundered.
And he had his people at Guildford, while I had never a soul in theworld.
I don't know how we contrived to hit it off as well as, on the whole, wedid. Perhaps that too was part of his lucky disposition—he could getalong even with me. He always spread some sort of a weak charm abouthim, and this charm always disarmed me even, when to all intents andpurposes he was merely rubbing in my horrible poverty. He would tell me,as if I wasn't already eating my heart out about it, that it was abouttime I made an effort—that he wasn't going to remain in those stuffydiggings of his all his days—and that if he had only half my brainshe'd be up somewhere pretty high in a very short time (as he probablywould had he lived)—all this, you understand, for my good, thecigarette gummed to his prettily shaped upper lip wagging as he talked,and with the best intentions in the world. He was quite devoted to me;would tell me how he had told other people about those extraordinarybrains of mine; and he never dreamed (though it was not long before Ibegan to) that our respective ages were even then making of ourcompanionship a hopeless thing. A lad of seventeen may attach himselffor a time to a man whose years number twenty-four of bitterness andexclusion, but they will part company again before the one istwenty-three and the other thirty.
I was only an evening student at the Business College, while Archiespent his days there. Often enough he did not turn up in the evening atall; indeed, he only began to do so with unfailing regularity some timeafter Evie Soames had put her name down for the social evening course oflectures on Business Method. Evie Soames was a day student too, thoughonly on three days in the week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; andthe lectures on Method were given in the evening because they werespecially addressed to those who, like myself, were employed during theday, and deemed to be ripe for the more advanced instruction. I don'tthink Archie was very much wiser for Weston's (our lecturer) efforts,but he was genuinely grateful to me for my explanations of themafterwards, and would pat me on the shoulder affectionately, and tell mehe couldn't understand why everybody else didn't see what a rare goodsort I was. That was his backhanded idea of a compliment.
I think, in those early days of mine, I hated pretty well everything andeverybody; and I cannot better show you how little I found to love thanby giving you, before I go on with my tale, an account of my day at thatperiod of my life—any day taken at random will do.
I had to be at Rixon Tebb & Masters' by nine, why, I don't know, sincenobody else of any account whatever turned up much before half-past ten.But eight of us had to be there by nine o'clock, and I will tell you howour eight had been got together.
You know—or don't you know?—that there are firms that contract for thesupply of "office labour" of all grades, from the messenger boy to thebeginning of the confidential clerks; holusbolus, in the lump, as muchof it or as little as you please. You pay, if you are an employer, acertain number of hundreds a year, and the agency does the rest. Onedown, t'other up; sack one man, and telephone for another. The agency'ssupply, at the maximum of a pound a week, is practically unlimited, andthe firm escapes all personal responsibility in regard to its staff