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dramatically, in a sense appropriately, fatal.
    Were the hypothesis
of the female guardian a correct one (situation reminiscent of Miss Weedon
curing Stringham of drink), she would in the normal course of things certainly
intercept any money Trapnel might earn, or, more credibly, derive from ‘public
assistance’. Even in his less calamitous days, there had been interludes in the
past of signing on at ‘the Labour’ – the Labour Exchange – though what trade or
vocation Trapnel claimed at such emergencies was never revealed. When, so
transcendentally, the hundred pounds in cash materialized into his hands in the
manner of a highly proficient conjuror, Trapnel (like Stringham) must have
evaded his keeper, reverted to type in the traditional manner, decided, now the
money had come his way in this utterly unforeseen manner, to squander it
gloriously in The Hero of Acre.
    Malcolm Crowding’s
account of Trapnel’s apotheosis in The Hero was likely to be the most reliable.
He had been there in person. Besides, his own works proclaimed him a writer of
little or no imagination. He could never have invented such a story. By that
time he had ceased to publish verse, and was lecturing on English literature at
a newly-founded provincial university, in fact spending the night in London in
connexion with the editing of a textbook. He approached the subject of Trapnel,
like his own academic work, in a spirit of the severest literary puritanism. On
impulse, a wish to call up old times, he had dropped in that night to The Hero.
    ‘I expect he hoped to
pick up a boy-friend,’ said Evadne Clapham. ‘The Hero was full of queers when I
was taken there last. It was much against my will in any case. They were all
standing round wide-eyed watching that old wretch Heather Hopkins giving an
imitation of John Foster Dulles in his galoshes.’
    Whatever Malcolm
Crowding’s original intention, Trapnel’s arrival in The Hero offered something
worth while; in fact supplied a story to become, ever after, Crowding’s most
notable set-piece.
    ‘It was Lazarus
coming back from the Dead. Better than that, because Lazarus didn’t buy
everyone a drink – at least there’s no mention of that in Holy Writ.’
    Somebody present – probably
Evadne Clapham again, bent on disorganizing the side-effects of Crowding’s
story – suggested that free drinks were to be inferred on the earlier
resurrectionary occasion from Tennyson:
    ‘When Lazarus left
his charnel-cave …
The streets were filled with joyful sound.’
    Crowding refused to allow
his narrative to be obstructed by inconclusive pedantry of that sort. He merely
increased the vibrant note of his rather shrill voice. Evadne Clapham, or
whoever else it was interrupting, ceased to argue. Crowding, feeling the
Tennysonian phrase appropriate enough for Trapnel’s sojourn in outer darkness,
developed new metaphor in the direction of Shelley.
    ‘The charnel cave was
put behind him. It was Trapnel Unbound.’
    There were present in
The Hero old stagers who had endured in that spot since Trapnel’s own great
days, when, tall, bearded, loquacious, didactic, draped in his dyed greatcoat,
toying with the death’s head swordstick, he had laid down the law on
literature, commanded the price of a drink (though never as now), dominated the
length of the saloon bar. His arrival was a thunderbolt. Even the most
complacent of The Hero’s soaks were jolted by it from their evening’s drinking.
Crowding never tired of telling the story.
    ‘X started in at once
– Wodehouse and Wittgenstein, Malraux and the Marx Brothers – it was just like
the old days, though never before had The Hero known a night like that for free
drinks.’
    Unlike the mourners
of Lazarus – to accept Crowding’s apprehension of the incident, rather than
Evadne Clapham’s – the mourners of Trapnel, as, on the strength of his
resurrection, they were soon to become, were stood