The Friendship of Mortals

by Audrey Driscoll

  Chapter 11

  Wednesday morning was misty, the scarlet blaze of the maples muted to a dull red. I thought I was early, but West was already at the station, talking to a porter who took away his two large suitcases and a trunk. He wore a tweed travelling coat and already looked remote and foreign. Conversation was difficult. What I wanted to say was, “Do you know what you have done to me? You have broken my illusions, and now you are going away, leaving only the fragments behind.” But instead I chatted with false heartiness about the weather and the prospects for a pleasant trip through interesting country.

  When the train was in the station and passengers were going aboard, he cut me short. “One thing, Charles. It’s just as well I’m going away, don’t you think? Since I’m my father’s son, after all – murder in the blood, you could say. Thank you for your help all these years, and your friendship too. It wasn’t unappreciated.”

  I felt once more his cool, firm handclasp, then he was gone. All around me echoed endingness, endingness.

  I walked slowly to the Library. All day I was distracted and irritable. I sent several colleagues away dissatisfied, even hurt, by my manner. At the afternoon break Alma asked outright what was bothering me. Breaking our rule, which now seemed silly, of never discussing personal matters at work, I said,

  “West has gone to Flanders, to the war. He’s going to be a medical officer in the Canadian Army.” Already I could feel an obscure relief stealing over me, just by voicing the fact to Alma.

  But her reaction was unexpected. “Really? How did he manage that? I wish I’d thought of asking him about it. You see, I’ve been thinking it’s irresponsible of me to stay here, following my daily round of silly activities while people are killing each other over there. I’ve heard there are things non-combatants can do, apart from nursing, I mean. I’ll have to find out more.”

  I was shocked, and showed it. “Alma! Not you too! No, I can’t let you go!”

  “I hardly think it’s for you to say, Charles. But don’t be silly, it’s not as though I’m going tomorrow, or even at all. It’s just something that might be worth pursuing. You already know I’ve been thinking about leaving Arkham. What could be better than this? It’s a worthy cause, and a way of postponing a final decision about what to do with my life. I shouldn’t have sprung it on you so suddenly, that’s all, especially when your friend just left.”

  She listened to my edited description of West’s decision to go, and after a while I felt a little better, but only for a while, because I knew there was another ending in sight. When Alma signed up with the Red Cross as an ambulance driver, it was set at mid-March.

  On a morning as clear and frosty as that one in October had been mild and misty, I saw her off at Arkham Station.

  “Cheer up, Charles,” she said. “I’ll write you, of course – more often than West, I’ll bet. How many letters have you had from him?”

  “A couple of short notes,” I admitted. “But I imagine he’s fairly busy.” My words conjured up a sudden mental image of West in a bloodstained white coat, bending over something unspeakable. “I’ve been reading that things are heating up again on the Western Front.”

  We made no promises to one another, Alma and I. It would not have been in keeping with what we had been to one another. I was left with hopes, but not expectations. We walked up and down the platform, talking of trivia. I wanted this pointless interlude to continue forever, and I couldn’t wait for it to end. When it did end and the train was pulling away, Alma waving to me through her window, I wished that I could reverse time, just a little. Was it something like this agonized desire that drove West in his efforts to reverse death? If so, I could almost begin to understand his ruthless single-mindedness.

  It is always more difficult to be left than to leave. The one leaving has new situations to occupy him or her, new people and places to take in and cope with. The one left behind, on the other hand, has only that which occupied his attention before, but without the presence of those who are no longer there. And in my case there was besides an envy of the new adventures that West and Alma had embarked upon, and which I was unable to.

  Shortly after Alma’s departure I was seized by such an intense longing for the past, for her and West, that I resolved somehow to follow them. But this was not so easily done. America did not enter the War until 1917 of course, and I knew anyway that I would never make the grade in the Army because of my poor eyesight and bad leg. I had neither the connections nor the resolve to enlist in a foreign army, as West had done. And anyway, I expected the Canadians would have physical standards which I probably did not meet. Besides, West had a valuable skill to offer; I did not think there was much demand for cataloguers. That left services such as the Red Cross and other support organizations. But I knew my motives for joining any of them were suspect. It was not altruism, humanitarianism or patriotism that drove me, but nostalgia, which would not serve me well in any kind of challenging situation.

  Finally, I knew that if West had wanted me to accompany him, he would have made sure I did. It was as simple as that. No, Herbert West and Alma Halsey had left the circle of the world I inhabited, as surely as if they had gone to Mars. To put myself in mere physical proximity with either of them now would achieve nothing. The idyll was over and I had my own road to follow.

  After a few weeks during which the motions of daily life felt like slogging through ankle-deep mud, I found myself coming to terms with my new situation. In their own way, my war years were as odd and disjointed as the previous three had been. The differences were that the oddness was public, not private, and I was not as happy.

  Because of the involvement of my two friends, I had more interest in the War than most Americans. I read every newspaper article I could get my hands on and attended lectures by persons who professed an expert knowledge of the situation, an expertise which often existed only in their own minds. After the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, anti-German sentiment and patriotism began to develop. A number of strange little societies sprang up in and around Arkham, such as the Arkham Patriots’ League, the Miskatonic Musketeers (a group of self-styled ‘practical militarists’ who went out and practiced marching and shooting rifles in preparation for the ultimate struggle with the Hun), the Arkhamites Against War and the Bolton Catholics for Peace. I attended meetings and demonstrations of several of these groups, not from any conviction, but merely because to hear about the War and related issues made me feel, in some tenuous way, closer to my friends overseas.

  It was at one of these events that I met Sarah Enright. She was from Bolton, working as a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital. I found myself next to her at a lecture and soon realized that she was rolling her eyes heavenward at exactly the same times as I was inwardly doing so myself. Chatting together at the refreshment session which followed, we found we had a good deal more in common. For one thing, Sarah was professionally acquainted with West; she had, in fact, worked with him.

  “Yes, I know Dr. West quite well,” she said. “He’s a good doctor, though not everyone thinks so. At least when it comes to surgery, anyway. I’ve never seen anyone so fast and neat at the job. Very few of his patients develop post-surgical infections. Those Canadians are lucky to have him sewing up their soldiers, but it’s Arkham’s loss.”

  “But you say some people don’t think much of him.”

  “Well, of course. When someone’s really good at what they do, there are always a few who are happy to find fault. Now I admit, he isn’t much for reassuring the patients and cheering them up. But I figure some of the other doctors are just jealous, and as for the nurses, some resented his insistence that everything be sterilized within an inch of its life. And then, of course, he was totally resistant to their charms, which really got their collective goat!”

  “Yes, that’s Herbert all right,” I said with a smile. “He’s the most unromantic person I’ve ever met.”

  “Unromantic! That’s an understatement. ‘Dr. Iceberg West,’ that’
s what they call him. But I liked working with him. You always knew where you were, as long as you were on your toes, that is. And he might have been cold, but he was certainly ornamental.”

  Sarah could not be called ornamental, exactly, but she was attractive enough, with her neat dark hair and trim figure. We became friends. I was glad to have someone I could talk with almost as freely as I had with Alma. But friends was all we were. At this point anyway, it seemed that my desire for anything more had gone away too.

  One evening we had arranged to meet outside the Freemasons’ Hall, where we were to attend a lecture with the provocative title ‘Are There German Spies Among Us?’ I waited until the last possible minute, but Sarah did not appear. I went inside and found a pair of seats near the back of the hall. Minutes later she arrived, a little out of breath.

  “I couldn’t get away in time,” she explained later. “You see, my lady was having one of her spells, and I thought I had better stay with her until she settled down.”

  “Your lady?”

  “A lady I look after. It’s sort of an extra job I have, three afternoons a week. She’s… disturbed, I guess you could say. Some days are better than others, but it’s not bad, usually. And it means a little extra money for my mother in Bolton. She still has three children at home, you see. My Dad died a few years ago, so it’s not easy for her.”

  I looked at her with admiration. Here was someone who was dealing successfully with the difficulties of her life, a life not nearly as privileged as Alma’s or mine. “Isn’t it difficult, this extra job? I would have thought working at the hospital would be enough.”

  “No, it’s not hard, most of the time. You see, she trusts me, and I’ve come to know what kinds of things upset her, so I can usually tell when she’s going to have a bad spell. It doesn’t happen that often, maybe a couple of times a month. Usually I’m just company for her. I guess her family prefer to pay someone to be with her, so they don’t have to do it themselves. She can be quite interesting to talk to, even though I’m never sure what’s the truth and what isn’t. She must have been a real lady once. I think she was married, though I’ve never seen or heard anything of her husband. But sometimes she speaks of a little son she lost.”

  About this time I had a strange dream. I was in the back of an ambulance, although there was nothing wrong with me, as far as I could tell. Alma was driving. The ground we were riding over was very bumpy, but it was dark and I could see nothing outside except occasional flashes of bright light. “Flares,” said Alma. “They set them off to show me the way.”

  Finally we arrived at a barn, rather like the one where the prizefight had been held. Alma drove inside. I tried to get out but she wouldn’t let me. “You can’t walk, Charles. Someone will come and get you.” Someone did, but I couldn’t see who it was. Strangely, they didn’t need to lift me because I was floating in mid air, lying on my back. Whoever it was had only to steer me. We went along miles of corridors, some dimly lit and brick-walled, others bright and lined with white tiles that reflected the light blindingly.

  Then West was there, dressed in white. I could not see him very well because I was unable to rise from my horizontal position or turn myself. “I’m making you a new leg, Charles,” he said. “Then you won’t have an excuse not to come out here.” I tried to protest that having an excuse wasn’t the issue and I didn’t need a new leg, but suddenly he was holding a leg out to me and smiling. There must have been many other people in the room, because applause and cheering broke out. West held up the leg as if to show it to this audience. I felt intensely embarrassed and woke up.

  All this time, of course, I continued to work as a cataloguer at Miskatonic University Library. Cataloguing was far more difficult and interesting in those days, before widespread acceptance of the Library of Congress’s printed cards imposed standardization of methods.

  From 1915 onward I was engaged in cataloguing a large collection of books, manuscripts and other materials donated to the Library by Augustus Quarrington. Nominally, he had been a member of the Philosophy Department, but over the years his interests had branched out (some would say slopped over) into areas as diverse as mathematics, Egyptology, quantum physics, phrenology and especially numerology. He was a twentieth century manifestation of the long tradition of interdisciplinary studies begun by such Renaissance scholars as Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Tritthemius and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Quarrington believed, among other things, that there was a secret system of numbers that united all things in the universe. Once discovered, it would yield the key to eternal life and answers to the ultimate questions. Unfortunately he died before he attained this goal, at the age of one hundred and one.

  I was first made aware of his demise by a notice in the Arkham Advertiser over my breakfast coffee – “Venerable Prof Dead at 101.” He had written to me only a few weeks earlier, a rather puzzling letter. My attention fully engaged, I read the article, learning more about the professor’s wide-ranging interests and his long career as a teacher, researcher and daring theorist.

  Several weeks later, I was summoned to a meeting with Dr. Armitage, the University Librarian and Peter Runcible, my Department Head. Dr. Quarrington had left his entire collection of books, manuscripts and objects to the Miskatonic University Library, with the stipulation that they be kept together and housed separately as the Augustus Quarrington Collection.

  Dr. Armitage looked grim rather than delighted at the news.

  “We’re up against it this time,” he said. “I’ve managed to talk most of our prospective donors out of these notions before it was too late, but Quarrington sprang this one on us. Good God, can you imagine if we had to set up a special collection for every professor’s cast-off books and papers – the Joseph Brown Collection on Tropical Liverworts, the Nathaniel Dixon Collection on Medieval Siege Engines, the Professor Bertha Marshall Collection on Transylvanian Doily-Knitting! You know what I mean – they all want a room with their name on it and a separate catalogue too, as though their books are too good to mingle with the common herd.”

  “Little do our prospective donors know how many of their books prove to be redundant,” remarked Runcible. “You remember, Milburn, last year when that fellow from the Classics Department left us five thousand books? How many of them did we keep?”

  “Fewer than a quarter,” I said. “I spent the better part of a month going through them and deciding which ones to keep. And another week at Gifts and Exchanges to dispose of the rejects.”

  “Ah, that would have been Professor Hollingsworth,” said Dr. Armitage. “It was lucky that I managed to convince him to trust us when it came to dealing with his collection. He’d been hinting that he expected a special room, because he was being so generous – five thousand books, after all! I persuaded him that they would be more useful if they were kept with others on the same subjects. But then, Hollingsworth was a generalist. I find it’s the ones who specialize in some esoteric and rarified subject that are the hardest to deal with.”

  “But sir,” I ventured, “that doesn’t really describe Prof. Quarrington, does it? I gather that he was interested in a large number of fields. He believed in the interdisciplinary approach, didn’t he?”

  Runcible let out a barking laugh. “You could call it that, I suppose. Some would say he got lost on the road between philosophy and magic. There is one thing, though.” He turned to Armitage. “It’s pretty unlikely that many of his books will be duplicates of ones we already have. The question is, are they worth keeping? I mean, really – numerology? It’s hardly a science.”

  “Perhaps not, but it’s a subject of interest to some scholars,” said Dr. Armitage, “if only as an example of a dubious field of inquiry. But you have a point, Runcible. Prof. Quarrington’s materials include a great deal that will be difficult to deal with. No fewer than a dozen languages are represented. Latin and Greek, but also Icelandic and Old Lithuanian.”

  “That’s where you come in, Milburn,” said Runcible. “Yo
u seem to have a knack for figuring out what to do with the unfamiliar. Foreign languages and so on. And then there are the items that by rights belong in an archive or a museum. Quarrington’s manuscripts and.. objects he studied for various reasons – rocks and bits of string, and even shoes, I understand. We’re relying on your experience as a cataloguer to deal with them.”

  I thought, ‘unfamiliar’ to Runcible means ‘stuff I’d rather not be bothered with,’ but I was flattered that my superior had such good things to say about me in the presence of Dr. Armitage. Aloud, I said,

  “Shoes! Surely we aren’t going to catalogue them.”

  “Oh yes, we are,” said Runcible, grinning. “Or rather, you are. Why do you suppose we asked you to be here today?”

  “Yes,” said Armitage. “The bequest states quite clearly that everything must be kept in the Miskatonic University Library, and everything must be catalogued.”

  “But sir,” I objected, “why shouldn’t we exercise our right to select appropriate materials for the Library’s collections? No one has ever given us things like shoes before. They aren’t appropriate.”

  “True, but in this case there’s a complication,” said Armitage, looking at me sternly. “I suppose I should have mentioned it earlier. You see, Prof. Quarrington has left the Library a.. considerable sum of money along with his books and other materials. A very generous endowment for the Augustus Quarrington Collection. Exceedingly generous. But the will stipulates quite clearly that the materials must be kept together, must be catalogued and must be made available to researchers. Do you understand now, Milburn?”

  “Oh yes, sir, I quite understand.” I kept quiet after that, wondering just how I was going to catalogue books in languages I had never heard of before, never mind rocks and shoes.

  As I began to work with the materials, in a small room formerly used to store castoffs such as broken furniture, old catalogue cards and superseded reference works, I felt like a lone missionary sent to a small savage country, the customs of whose inhabitants were utterly mystifying and a little frightening.

  I unpacked the cartons, starting with the books and progressing to the manuscripts, maps, drawings, photographs, natural objects, knotted strings and other bizarre and unlikely items. One box did indeed contain a dozen or so pairs of well-worn shoes, accompanied by a file of notes helpfully entitled ‘Shoe Study.’

  The most interesting photographs were dozens of close-up views of different people’s eyes. I laid the images out on the table, for no better reason than to experience the odd effect of many disembodied pairs of eyes looking up at me. As I regarded them, I became certain that one of them was West’s. There was something about the crystalline quality of the irises, the directness of the gaze and the trace of irony I thought I could see in the expression, that was very like him.

  Eventually I found it necessary to co-opt another librarian to work with me. Alma, with her scientific background, would have been the ideal choice, but her replacement, Linton Adams, was intelligent enough to be able to work beyond rigid disciplinary boundaries.

  It was fairly easy to classify the books – philosophy, mathematics, natural history, chemistry, physics and so on. There was another broad grouping of ‘esoteric knowledge,’ which included everything from alchemy to astrology, mesmerism, phrenology and divination. There were so many works on numerology that they constituted a category of their own.

  The manuscripts were more problematic. In the end I decided to arrange them in strict chronological order, as far as their dates could be determined. With time, it was surprising how readily I was able to date a document from its subject matter and tone. Quarrington’s early writings were fairly standard philosophical treatises. As the decades went by they became more varied as to subject and wilder as to substance. Those written in the last years of his life approached the limits of reasonable discourse.

  Quarrington believed that he had found a way to test his theories by subjecting individuals to analysis using principles he had worked out over the years, then making specific predictions about the life courses of the subjects. The predictions would be kept secret from them, of course, so as to avoid influencing their choices. Eventually the actual life events could be checked against Quarrington’s documented predictions. If these proved to be true, Quarrington believed, it would be possible to project from the lesser to the greater and unlock some of the world’s ultimate secrets.

  A thick portfolio titled ‘Profiles and Predictions’ contained dozens of these case histories, probably of students. They were not named but identified by codes, to which the key was either missing or not yet recognized for what it was by myself and my assistants. The data included information such as exact time and place of birth, family history, number of siblings, economic status, education, likes and dislikes. Some were rather peculiar, such as detailed measurements of body proportions and reactions to varying kinds of sounds, intensities of light, temperatures and pin-pricks on a number of sites on the body.

  The predictions ranged from fantastically detailed and specific to ominous hints. I found myself reading them compulsively.

  Will be thrown from a horse while passing Hooper’s Pond, June 12, 1910. Right leg broken, but will recover completely.

  Early marriage, five children, early death from tuberculosis. Bad business – should I intervene? But how? Keep her from marrying? – impossible!

  Will start out as lawyer, be persuaded to enter politics. Successful. Then possibility of corruption. May do great harm.

  This woman will become a nexus. Because of her, many great things will be done, but much pain endured as well. Details unclear.

  Many contradictions here – light and darkness in equal measure. Reconciliation necessary or self-destructive impulses may follow.

  I kept reminding myself that these predictions were based on rather dubious data. Without knowing the individuals to whom the prognostications referred, it was impossible to begin to investigate their validity. But even without the identifying key, I thought this was a potentially volatile file. I recommended that it be securely stored and consulted only by those who had a sincere and serious reason to do so.

  In 1917, with the United States finally in the War, a great change took place in Arkham. Suddenly, many of the younger men were gone, their jobs taken by women. My assistant Linton Adams left for France, along with a few other men from the Library. Fortunately, the cataloguing of the Quarrington Collection was by then nearly complete.

  I saw less of Sarah Enright, as she was kept very busy at the hospital with so many nurses overseas. But I found myself in demand socially, much to my surprise. With the general shortage of younger men, anything in trousers that was even semi-articulate was a desirable property. As the War progressed and American soldiers began to return with various disabilities, I was more than once taken for a returnee and my limp the result of a war injury. Admiring women asked me to tell them how it happened. I am sorry to admit that on one or two occasions I did just that, fabricating a lurid tale from bits of information gleaned from newspapers and letters from Alma and West. The latter, I thought, would have been much amused.