go away clean as
it was possible for you
to go and still go

I stood up and leaned against the sink. “Now let’s add it up and don’t interrupt me. You came to me this morning in a highly emotional condition and wanted to be driven to Tijuana to catch an early plane. You had a gun in your pocket, but I needn’t have seen it. You told me you had stood things as long as you could but last night you blew up. You found your wife dead drunk and a man had been with her. You got out and went to a Turkish bath to pass the time until morning and you phoned your wife’s two closest relatives and told them what you were doing. Where you went was none of my business. You had the necessary documents to enter Mexico. How you went was none of my business either. We are friends and I did what you asked me without much thought. Why wouldn’t I? You’re not paying me anything. You had your car but you felt too upset to drive yourself. That’s your business too. You’re an emotional guy and you got yourself a bad wound in the war. I think I ought to pick up your car and shove it in a garage somewhere for storage.”

He reached into his clothes and pushed a leather keyholder across the table.

“How does it sound?” he asked.

“Depends who’s listening. I haven’t finished. You took nothing but the clothes you stood up in and some money you had from your father-in-law. You left everything she had given you including that beautiful piece of machinery you parked at La Brea and Fountain. You wanted to go away as clean as it was possible for you to go and still go. All right. I’ll buy it …

From The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler (Ballantine Books, New York, First Ballantine Books Edition: October, 1971).

I want to go away as clean as possible and still go.

Anybody buy it?

Sounds so simple even after Mr. Chandler spells it all out.

you might think we had
won a major victory
instead … betraying

While the returning Prime Minister’s car was surging through hysterical crowds, a French window opened beside me and the Deputy Under Secretary, Sir Orme Sargent, stepped on to the balcony. He surveyed the scene below with dislike and disdain. “You might think’, he said to me, ‘that we had won a major victory instead of betraying a minor country’. Then, after a pause, as the window opposite opened and it was clear that Chamberlain was expected to say a few words, Sargent added: ‘I can bear almost anything provided he doesn’t say it is Peace with Honour’.

Meanwhile, as I subsequently learned, Chamberlain was greeted by his loyal and elated staff at the end of the long red-carpeted passage which runs from the front door of No. 10 to the Cabinet Room, and he said that in response to the clamour outside he must go up to the first floor window — Dizzy’s bedroom — and say a few words. It was then that Mrs. Chamberlain put the words into his mouth : ‘Tell them’, she said, ‘that you have brought back peace, but not just peace — peace with honour’. Tell them he did, and as the crowd roared in applause Sir Orme Sargent turned on his heel, closed the French window behind him and left me alone on the balcony.

Two years passed and I was myself a Private Secretary at No. 10. Disliking the unfresh air of the Central War Room, where a bedroom deep under ground was available to me, I contrived to have a bed provided in the large and now empty room from which first Disraeli and then Neville Chamberlain had sent their words echoing round the country and the world. Honour we still had, in abundance ; but Peace was only a memory and night after night the bombs in their hundreds devastated London. Early in 1941 the blast from one of them shattered the famous window as I pushed my head under the bed clothes to avoid the shower of glass.