Mr. Mervyn Gwilt was thoroughly enjoying himself. This, he thought, was what the practice of the law should be—fine surroundings, a captive audience of distinguished people, and he, Mervyn Gwilt, advising them, for their own good, from his rich understanding of the law and human nature.

Mr. Mervyn Gwilt was every inch a lawyer. Indeed, the expression is inadequate, for there were not many inches to Mr. Gwilt, and there was an awful lot of lawyer in him. He could not have been anything else. He habitually wore a wing collar, suggesting that only a few minutes before he had whipped off his gown and bands and was attempting to reduce his courtroom demeanour and vocabulary to the needs of common life. He always wore a dark three-piece suit, lest he be summoned to court in a hurry. He particularly liked Latin; the priests of Rome might have abandoned that language as a cloak for their mystery, but not Mervyn Gwilt. It was, he explained, so pithy, so exact, so wholly legal in its underlying philosophy and its sound, that it could not be beaten as an instrument for subduing an opponent, or a client. The law had not, up to the present, shown much favour to Mr. Gwilt, but he was ready, should such favour suddenly declare itself.

“At the outset,” he said, smiling around the table, “I want to make it amply clear that my client’s wish in pursuing this matter carries no taint ad crumenam (that’s to say he isn’t looking for money) but is actuated solely by an inborn respect for the ius natural (meaning what’s right and proper).”

He smiled at Maria; at Hollier; at Darcourt. He even smiled at the large man with the big black moustache who had been introduced simply as Mr. Carver. Finally he smiled, with special radiance, at his client Wally Crottel, who was sitting at his side.

“That’s right,” said Wally. “Don’t think I’m just in this for what I can get.”

“Let me handle it, Wally,” said Mr. Gwilt. “Let’s put it all on the table and look at it ante litem motam (by which I mean before we think of any court action). Now look: Mr. Crottel’s father, the late John Parlabane, left at his death the manuscript of a novel, the title of which was Be Not Another. Am I right?”

Maria, Hollier, and Darcourt nodded.

“He left it to Miss Maria Magdalena Theotoky, now Mrs. Arthur Cornish, and to Professor Clement Hollier, as his literary executors. Right?”

“Not precisely,” said Hollier. “He left it with an appeal that we should get it published. The term literary executors was not used.”

“That remains to be seen,” said Mr. Gwilt. “It might well have been implied. So far my client and I have not had a chance to examine that letter. I think this is the time for us to have it on the table. Right?”

“Out of the question,” said Hollier. “It was a letter of the most intimate character, and the bit about the novel was only a small part of it. Whatever Parlabane wanted made public he sent in other letters to the newspapers.”

Mr. Gwilt made stagy business of hunting in his briefcase for some newspaper clippings. “Those were the portions that spoke of his unhappy determination to take his life because of the neglect his great novel had met with.”

“They were also the portions that described his elaborate and disgusting murder of Professor Urquhart McVarish,” said Hollier.

“That is not relevant to the matter in hand,” said Mr. Gwilt, rebuking this crude reference.

“Of course it is,” said Hollier. “He knew the murder would get a lot of publicity, and draw attention to his book. He said so. ‘The book a man murdered to have published’ was the way he suggested it should be advertised. Or words of that sort.”

“Let us not be diverted by irrelevancies,” said Mr. Gwilt, primly.

“Maybe he was off his nut and didn’t know what he was saying,” said Wally Crottel.

“Wally! Leave this to me,” said Mr. Gwilt, and kicked Wally sharply under the table. “Until we have indisputable evidence to the contrary, we assume that the late Mr. Parlabane knew precisely what he was saying, and doing.”

“He was Brother John Parlabane, I believe, even though he had gone over the wall and parted from the Order of the Sacred Mission. Let’s not forget he was a monk,” said Maria.

“In these times many men find that they are not fully attuned to the religious life,” said Mr. Gwilt. “The exact status of Mr. Parlabane at the time of his unhappy death—felo de se, and which of us dares point the finger—is not our business here. What concerns us is that he was my client’s father. And my client’s status as his heir is what we are talking about now.”

“But how do we know Wally was his son?” said Maria. As a woman she wanted to get to the point, and was restless under Mr. Gwilt’s ceremonious approach.

“Because that’s what my late mum always told me,” said Wally. “ ‘Parlabane was your dad, sure as guns; he was the only guy ever gave me a real organism.’ That’s what my mum always said.”

“Please! Please! May I be allowed to conduct this investigation?” said Mr. Gwilt. “My client was brought up as the child of the late Ogden Whistlecraft, whose name is a word of magic in the annals of Canadian poetry, and his wife, the late Elsie Whistlecraft, my client’s undisputed mother. That there had been a liaison of a passionate character—let’s just call it an ad hoc thing, maybe two or three occasions—between Mrs. Whistlecraft and the late John Parlabane, we do not propose to deny. Why should we? Who dares to point the finger? What kind of woman marries a poet? A woman of deep passions and rich feminine sympathies, obviously. Her pity extended to this family friend, likewise a man of profound literary temperament. Pity! Pity, my friends! And compassion for a lonely, great, questing genius. That was what explained it.”

“No. It was the organism,” said Wally, stoutly.

“Orgasm, Wally! For God’s sake how many times do I have to tell you? Orgasm!” Mr. Gwilt’s speech was a hiss.

“She always said organism,” said Wally, mulishly. “I know what my mum said. And don’t think I blame her. She was my mum and I stand by her, and I’m not ashamed. You said something about that, Merv; you said it was, like, Latin, De mortos or something. ‘Don’t crap on your folks’ you said it meant.”

“All right! All right, Wally! Just leave it to me.”

“Yeah, Merv, but I want to explain about my mum. And Whistlecraft—he didn’t like me to call him Dad, but he was nice about the whole thing. He never really talked to me about it, but I know he didn’t hold it against my mum. Not much. There was something he said once, in poetry—

–as the fellow says.”

“What fellow was that?” said Darcourt, speaking for the first time.

“The fellow in Shakespeare.”

“Oh—that fellow! I thought it might have been something Whistlecraft wrote himself.”

“No. Shakespeare. Whistlecraft was prepared to overlook the whole thing. He understood life, even if he wasn’t much of a hand at the organism.”

“Wally—I call your attention to the fact that there is a lady present.”

“Don’t mind me,” said Maria; “I suppose I am what used to be called a woman of the world.”

“And a fine Rabelaisian scholar,” said Hollier, smiling at her.

“Aha! Rabelaisian scholar? Old-time Frenchman? Dead?” said Mr. Gwilt.

“The truly great are never dead,” said Maria, and suddenly remembered that she was quoting her mother.

“Very well, then. Let us continue on a rather freer line,” said Mr. Gwilt. “I don’t have to remind you university people of the great changes that have taken place in public opinion, and one might almost say in public morals, in recent years. The distinction has virtually vanished, in the newspapers and also in modern fiction—though I haven’t much time for fiction—between what we may define as the O.K. and the Raw. Discretion of language—where is it? Obscenity—where is it? On stage and screen we live in the Age of the Full Frontal. Since the Ulysses case and the Lady Chatterley case the law has had to take unwilling cognizance of all this. If you are a student of Rabelais, Mrs. Cornish—not that I’ve read his stuff, but he has a certain reputation, you know, even among those who haven’t read him—we must assume that you are thoroughly broken to the Raw. But I digress. So let us get back to our real interest. We admit that the late Mrs. Whistlecraft’s life was in some degree flawed—”