A Train of Powder by Rebecca West

Author:Rebecca West
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Essays, Literary Collections
ISBN: 9781453207222
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
Published: 2000-08-20T18:30:00+00:00

Mr. Setty and Mr. Hume

1

The murder of Mr. Setty was important, because he was so unlike the man who found his headless and legless body. It was news, after the pattern which was established when the Wise Men came out of the East and questioned their way to the stable where the King of the Jews had been born; for they were of course neither kings nor philosophers, as has often been pretended, but newspapermen, and they had seen no star, but had received the call not heard by the ear but felt by the nerves, which announces that somewhere there is news. For news is always an incarnation. Interest comes when people start to act out an idea, to show what a thought is worth when it is worked out in flesh and blood; and both Mr. Stanley Setty and his discoverer, Mr. Tiffen, were engaged in such dramatization.

Mr. Setty had no apparent connection with ideas. He was one of those cases of abnormally unlucky precocity followed by abnormally lucky maturity, which, though the good luck adds up to nothing impressive, nevertheless present modern England with a disquieting problem. He was born Sulman Seti in Baghdad in 1903. He was brought to England by his parents when he was four, and at fourteen was working in a Manchester cotton mill, as the law then permitted. Two years later he and his brother set up in business as shipping merchants with a registered capital of something like three thousand pounds. After two years a receiving order was granted against the little lads, who owed about twenty-five thousand pounds and had only five pounds’ assets. As Mr. Setty was still only eighteen he could not be made a bankrupt, a status reserved for adults. Four years later, in 1926, he had saved five hundred pounds and started up in business again, calling himself a shipping merchant, but dealing in every kind of merchandise on which he could lay his hands. A year later he had run up twelve hundred pounds’ debts, and he ran away with two hundred pounds he had abstracted from the till to Italy, where his father lived, in hope of getting help from him. But blood ran thinner than water, and he was back in Manchester in the following spring without a penny. He rapidly tried to mend his fortunes by gambling on horses and dogs, but soon acquired another three thousand pounds of debts.

Meanwhile a receiving order had been made against him, and in August 1928, at the age of twenty-four, he was sentenced by a Manchester court to eighteen months’ imprisonment, having pleaded guilty to twenty-three offences against the Debtors’ and Bankruptcy Acts, such as having kept no proper accounts, left his place of business with the intention of defeating or delaying his creditors, and having used the two hundred pounds with which he went to Italy for his own purposes instead of handing them over to his creditors. His counsel made a moving plea for Mr.

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