Rogue Male

by Geoffrey Household

The story opens as its narrator recounts in an offhand way how he decided on a sportsman’s whim to walk south across the border from Poland and stalk “the biggest game on earth,” an unnamed dictator who is clearly Hitler.

They never doubted for a moment that the culprit was Willy. I hope they didn’t believe his denials till he was thoroughly punished. The sort of man whom one instantly accuses of any practical joke that has been played deserves whatever is coming to him.

The only class-conscious people are those who would like to belong to Class X and don’t: the suburban old-school-tie brigade and their wives, especially their wives.

One’s instinct is against looking too far forward when the present demands all available resource.

I began to speculate on what would happen if I reappeared quite openly in England. I was perfectly certain that they would not appeal to the Foreign Office or to Scotland Yard. Whatever I might have done or intended, their treatment of me wouldn’t stand publicity. They couldn’t be sure how the English would react; nobody ever is. After all, we once went to war for the ear of a Captain Jenkins—though Jenkins was an obscurer person than myself and had, considering the number of laws he broke, been treated with no great barbarity.

On the credit side of this voyage was the fact that I hadn’t got to be polite to anyone; on the debit, that I hadn’t got a book.

‘You shouldn’t think of the police as tactless,’ he reminded me gently. ‘A man in your position is protected without question. You’ve been abroad so much that I don’t think you have ever realized the power of your name. You’re automatically trusted, you see.’

After lunch, I signed a number of documents to tidy up loose ends, and we blocked out a plan I had often discussed with him of forming a sort of Tenants’ Co-operative Society. Since I never make a penny out of the land, I thought they might as well pay rent to themselves, do their own repairs, and advance their own loans, with the right to purchase their own land by instalments at a price fixed by the committee. I hope it works. At any rate Saul and my land agent will keep them from quarrelling among themselves.

In these days of visas and identification cards it is impossible to travel without leaving a trail that can, with patience, bribery, and access to public records, be picked up. In the happy years between 1925 and 1930 you could talk yourself over any western European frontier, so long as you looked respectable and explained your movements and business with a few details that could be checked;

It must have been a horrible shock to be knocked up by a reporter around midnight and told that her lodger had been killed under suspicious circumstances. Or perhaps not. I have been assured by newspapermen that even close relatives forget their grief in the excitement of getting into the news; so a landlady, provided she had her rent, might not worry overmuch.

The police were anxious to interview a well-dressed clean-shaven man in the early forties, with a bruised and blackened eye, who was observed to leave the Aldwych station shortly before the body was discovered, and surrendered a shilling ticket to the collector. I am not yet forty and I was not well dressed, but the description was accurate enough to be unpleasant reading.

I like to see a billy-goat accompanying the dairy herd to pasture, supposedly to bring them luck or to eat the herbs that cause abortion. I think his true function has been forgotten, but there is no object in going against ancient tradition, nor reason to suppose he has no function.

My own county is gayer and more pagan. When it rains we do our love-making in the tithe barn or the church porch or under the steps at the back of the Women’s Institute, and we don’t care who sees us. Trespassers are expected to guffaw and look away.

I have no chance even of illusion. Luck has reached a state of equilibrium and stopped. I had one stroke of evil when that trailer innocently attracted the notice of the police, one stroke of magnificent luck when Quive-Smith’s bullet hit the flask. In most other cases I have been able to account for the march of events by conscious planning or by my own instinctive and animal reactions under stress.

One does not, I think, kill oneself without a definite desire to do so. It is hardly ever an act to which a man must key himself up; it is a temptation which he must struggle against.

As a matter of fact no Englishman that I know would have signed his bloody paper—refusing partly from honour but chiefly from sheer obstinacy.

I should have been a very useful tool, completely in their power. When you find an agitator who hasn’t suffered poverty, it’s sound to ask whether he has ever been in my position and what he has done that our police don’t know and a foreign police do.

The wretched fellow feared death as he would a ghost. I admit that death is a horrid visitor, but surely distinguished? Even a man going to the gallows feels that he should receive the guest with some attempt at dignity.

I distrust patriotism; the reasonable man can find little in these days that is worth dying for. But dying against—there’s enough iniquity in Europe to carry the most urbane or decadent into battle.