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about his creation.
    The decidedly protean character of the Spider was no doubt due to this uncomfortableness. There would come a point at which Mr Eliot could no longer contemplate the Spider as he was – whereupon there had to be a change. These changes, each of which had thrown Mr Eliot’s publishers into a sub-acute agony, were by a strange fatality always overwhelmingly successful. Kindly reviewers spoke of the progressively revealed complexity, the subtle maturing of the Spider’s character, and when he finally came over wholeheartedly to the side of law and order his conversion was the subject of approving comment from more than one distinguished pulpit. Mr Eliot himself, as the Spider pursued malefactors dramatically about the globe, had for a time the illusory sense of being the henchman of a sort of cosmic police.
    Novelists have often recorded the almost uncanny way in which their everyday life has come to be influenced by their own creations. The beings of a writer’s imagination are said to throng and press about him and even to impose for a time their own fictitious personalities upon the real personality of their creator. And it may be supposed that when a writer makes of a single character a companion for life and experiences in his company a series of adventures terminable only by death he may come to he haunted by this single dominating creation in an extraordinary way. Perhaps this happened to Mr Eliot. It is certain that in the Spider’s final phase the Spider and Mr Eliot became a little mixed up. There was a disconcerting novel in which a good deal turned upon the Spider’s habit – hitherto unknown to his admirers – of writing stories about tigers and fakirs. And there was an increasing element not only of literary allusiveness in the badinage between the Spider and his friend the engineer but of realistic and unromantic matter on the problems of English land-owners and the condition of English rural society. Against these hazardous trends more than one interested party held complicated and costly insurance policies.
    More and more, in fact, Mr Eliot and his interests seemed to be creeping into the world of the Spider. Was the Spider, the curious speculated, creeping correspondingly into the world of Mr Eliot? Mr Eliot’s own opinions were unknown. Probably he was undisturbed; it is noteworthy that none of his acquaintances had thought of him as a nervously unbalanced man. Nevertheless his acquaintances, observing that he no longer came up for the Royal Academy or even the Eton and Harrow match, suspected that all was not well with him; a few believed that he had conceived for the wearisome Spider something not unlike a mild obsessive hatred.
    This was the situation when the thing happened.

 
     
PART ONE
    Rust Hall

 
     
1
     
    It was a November evening in Oxford and the air was stagnant, raw, and insidiously chill. Vapours – half-hearted ghosts on the verge of visibility – played desultory acoustic tricks about the city, like bored technicians flicking to and fro the sound screens in a radio studio. A wafer of eaten stone, loosened by a last infinitesimal charge of condensing acid, would slither to the ground with disconcerting resonance. The masons’ mallets, making good in random patches centuries of such mellow decay, tapped like so many tiny typewriters in an engulfing silence. The sky, a sheet of lead rapidly oxidizing, was fading through glaucous tones to cinereous; lights were furred about their edges; in the gathering twilight Gothic and Tudor, Palladian and Venetian melted into an architecture of dreams. And the hovering vapours, as if taking heart of darkness, glided in increasing concentration by walls and buttresses – like the first inheritors of the place, robed and cowled, returning to take possession with the night.
    ‘ Webster! ’
    The young man who had turned so abruptly out of the porter’s lodge ignored the call. He had an athletic figure of the slimmer sort,