The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, Volume 1

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The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, Volume 1 Page 61

by Philip Hensher


  Flambeau pulled up the spade and impetuously drove it into the place. He turned up, under a load of soil, something that did not look like a potato, but rather like a monstrous, over-domed mushroom. But it struck the spade with a cold click; it rolled over like a ball, and grinned up at them.

  ‘The Earl of Glengyle,’ said Brown sadly, and looked down heavily at the skull.

  Then, after a momentary meditation, he plucked the spade from Flambeau, and, saying: ‘We must hide it again,’ clamped the skull down in the earth. Then he learned his little body and huge head on the great handle of the spade, that stood up stiffly in the earth, and his eyes were empty and his forehead full of wrinkles. ‘If one could only conceive,’ he muttered, ‘the meaning of this last monstrosity.’ And leaning on the large spade handle, he buried his brows in his hands, as men do in church.

  All the corners of the sky were brightening into blue and silver; the birds were chattering in the tiny garden trees; so loud it seemed as if the trees themselves were talking. But the three men were silent enough.

  ‘Well, I give it all up,’ said Flambeau at last boisterously. ‘My brain and this world don’t fit each other; and there’s an end of it. Snuff, spoilt Prayer Books, and the insides of musical boxes – what—’

  Brown threw up his bothered brow and rapped on the spade handle with an intolerance quite unusual with him. ‘Oh, tut, tut, tut, tut!’ he cried. ‘All that is as plain as a pikestaff. I understood the snuff and clockwork, and so on, when I first opened my eyes this morning. And since then I’ve had it out with old Gow, the gardener, who is neither so deaf nor so stupid as he pretends. There’s something amiss about the loose items. I was wrong about the torn mass-book, too; there’s no harm in that. But it’s this last business. Desecrating graves and stealing dead men’s heads – surely there’s harm in that? Surely there’s black magic still in that? That doesn’t fit in to the quite simple story of the snuff and the candles.’ And, striding about again, he smoked moodily.

  ‘My friend,’ said Flambeau, with a grim humour, ‘you must be careful with me and remember I was once a criminal. The great advantage of that estate was that I always made up the story myself, and acted it as quick as I chose. This detective business of waiting about is too much for my French impatience. All my life, for good or evil, I have done things at the instant; I always fought duels the next morning; I always paid bills on the nail; I never even put off a visit to the dentist—’

  Father Brown’s pipe fell out of his mouth and broke into three pieces on the gravel path. He stood rolling his eyes, the exact picture of an idiot. ‘Lord, what a turnip I am!’ he kept saying. ‘Lord, what a turnip!’ Then, in a somewhat groggy kind of way, he began to laugh.

  ‘The dentist!’ he repeated. ‘Six hours in the spiritual abyss, and all because I never thought of the dentist! Such a simple, such a beautiful and peaceful thought! Friends, we have passed a night in hell; but now the sun is risen, the birds are singing, and the radiant form of the dentist consoles the world.’

  ‘I will get some sense out of this,’ cried Flambeau, striding forward, ‘if I use the tortures of the Inquisition.’

  Father Brown repressed what appeared to be a momentary disposition to dance on the now sunlit lawn and cried quite piteously, like a child: ‘Oh, let me be silly a little. You don’t know how unhappy I have been. And now I know that there has been no deep sin in this business at all. Only a little lunacy, perhaps – and who minds that?’

  He spun round once, then faced them with gravity.

  ‘This is not a story of crime,’ he said; ‘rather it is the story of a strange and crooked honesty. We are dealing with the one man on earth, perhaps, who has taken no more than his due. It is a study in the savage living logic that has been the religion of this race.

  ‘That old local rhyme about the house of Glengyle –

  As green sap to the simmer trees

  Is red gold to the Ogilvies –

  was literal as well as metaphorical. It did not merely mean that the Glengyles sought for wealth; it was also true that they literally gathered gold; they had a huge collection of ornaments and utensils in that metal. They were, in fact, misers whose mania took that turn. In the light of that fact, run through all the things we found in the castle. Diamonds without their gold rings; candles without their gold candlesticks; snuff without the gold snuff-boxes; pencil-leads without the gold pencil-cases; a walking-stick without its gold top; clockwork without the gold clocks – or rather watches. And, mad as it sounds, because the halos and the name of God in the old missals were of real gold, these also were taken away.’

  The garden seemed to brighten, the grass to grow gayer in the strengthening sun, as the crazy truth was told. Flambeau lit a cigarette as his friend went on.

  ‘Were taken away,’ continued Father Brown; ‘were taken away – but not stolen. Thieves would never have left this mystery. Thieves would have taken the gold snuff-boxes, snuff and all; the gold pencil-cases, lead and all. We have to deal with a man with a peculiar conscience, but certainly a conscience. I found that mad moralist this morning in the kitchen garden yonder, and I heard the whole story.

  ‘The late Archbishop Ogilvie was the nearest approach to a good man ever born at Glengyle. But his bitter virtue took the turn of the misanthrope; he moped over the dishonesty of his ancestors, from which, somehow, he generalized a dishonesty of all men. More especially he distrusted philanthropy or free-giving; and he swore if he could find one man who took his exact rights he should have all the gold of Glengyle. Having delivered this defiance to humanity he shut himself up, without the smallest expectation of its being answered. One day, however, a deaf and seemingly senseless lad from a distant village brought him a belated telegram; and Glengyle, in his acrid pleasantry, gave him a new farthing. At least he thought he had done so, but when he turned over his change he found the new farthing still there and a sovereign gone. The accident offered him vistas of sneering speculation. Either way, the boy would show the greasy greed of the species. Either he would vanish, a thief stealing a coin; or he would sneak back with it virtuously, a snob seeking a reward. In the middle of the night Lord Glengyle was knocked up out of his bed – for he lived alone – and forced to open the door to the deaf idiot. The idiot brought with him, not the sovereign, but exactly nineteen shillings and eleven-pence three-farthings in change.

  ‘Then the wild exactitude of this action took hold on the mad lord’s brain like fire. He swore he was Diogenes, that had long sought an honest man, and at last had found one. He made a new will, which I have seen. He took the literal youth into his huge, neglected house, and trained him up as his solitary servant and – after an odd manner – his heir. And whatever that queer creature understands, he understood absolutely his lord’s two fixed ideas: first, that the letter of right is everything; and second, that he himself was to have the gold of Glengyle. So far, that is all; and that is simple. He has stripped the house of gold, and taken not a grain that was not gold; not so much as a grain of snuff. He lifted the gold leaf off an old illumination, fully satisfied that he left the rest unspoilt. All that I understood; but I could not understand this skull business. I was really uneasy about that human head buried among the potatoes. It distressed me – till Flambeau said the word.

  ‘It will be all right. He will put the skull back in the grave, when he has taken the gold out of the tooth.’

  And, indeed, when Flambeau crossed the hill that morning, he saw that strange being, the just miser, digging at the desecrated grave, the plaid round his throat thrashing out in the mountain wind; the sober top hat on his head.

  Max Beerbohm

  Enoch Soames

  When a book about the literature of the eighteen-nineties was given by Mr Holbrook Jackson to the world, I looked eagerly in the index for SOAMES, ENOCH. I had feared he would not be there. He was not there. But everybody else was. Many writers whom I had quite forgotten, or remembered but faintly, lived again for me, they and their work,
in Mr Holbrook Jackson’s pages. The book was as thorough as it was brilliantly written. And thus the omission found by me was an all the deadlier record of poor Soames’ failure to impress himself on his decade.

  I daresay I am the only person who noticed the omission. Soames had failed so piteously as all that! Nor is there a counterpoise in the thought that if he had had some measure of success he might have passed, like those others, out of my mind, to return only at the historian’s beck. It is true that had his gifts, such as they were, been acknowledged in his lifetime, he would never have made the bargain I saw him make – that strange bargain whose results have kept him always in the foreground of my memory. But it is from those very results that the full piteousness of him glares out.

  Not my compassion, however, impels me to write of him. For his sake, poor fellow, I should be inclined to keep my pen out of the ink. It is ill to deride the dead. And how can I write about Enoch Soames without making him ridiculous? Or rather, how am I to hush up the horrid fact that he was ridiculous? I shall not be able to do that. Yet, sooner or later, write about him I must. You will see, in due course, that I have no option. And I may as well get the thing done now.

  In the Summer Term of ’93 a bolt from the blue flashed down on Oxford. It drove deep, it hurtlingly embedded itself in the soil. Dons and undergraduates stood around, rather pale, discussing nothing but it. Whence came it, this meteorite? From Paris. Its name? Will Rothenstein. Its aim? To do a series of twenty-four portraits in lithograph. These were to be published from the Bodley Head, London. The matter was urgent. Already the Warden of A, and the Master of B, and the Regius Professor of C, had meekly ‘sat’. Dignified and doddering old men, who had never consented to sit to any one, could not withstand this dynamic little stranger. He did not sue: he invited; he did not invite: he commanded. He was twenty-one years old. He wore spectacles that flashed more than any other pair ever seen. He was a wit. He was brimful of ideas. He knew Whistler. He knew Edmond de Goncourt. He knew every one in Paris. He knew them all by heart. He was Paris in Oxford. It was whispered that, so soon as he had polished off his selection of dons, he was going to include a few undergraduates. It was a proud day for me when I – I – was included. I liked Rothenstein not less than I feared him; and there arose between us a friendship that has grown ever warmer, and been more and more valued by me, with every passing year.

  At the end of Term he settled in – or rather, meteoritically into – London. It was to him I owed my first knowledge of that forever enchanting little world-in-itself, Chelsea, and my first acquaintance with Walter Sickert and other august elders who dwelt there. It was Rothenstein that took me to see, in Cambridge Street, Pimlico, a young man whose drawings were already famous among the few – Aubrey Beardsley, by name. With Rothenstein I paid my first visit to the Bodley Head. By him I was inducted into another haunt of intellect and daring, the domino room of the Café Royal.

  There, on that October evening – there, in that exuberant vista of gilding and crimson velvet set amidst all those opposing mirrors and upholding caryatids, with fumes of tobacco ever rising to the painted and pagan ceiling, and with the hum of presumably cynical conversation broken into so sharply now and again by the clatter of dominoes shuffled on marble tables, I drew a deep breath, and ‘This indeed,’ said I to myself, ‘is life!’

  It was the hour before dinner. We drank vermouth. Those who knew Rothenstein were pointing him out to those who knew him only by name. Men were constantly coming in through the swing-doors and wandering slowly up and down in search of vacant tables, or of tables occupied by friends. One of these rovers interested me because I was sure he wanted to catch Rothenstein’s eye. He had twice passed our table, with a hesitating look; but Rothenstein, in the thick of a disquisition on Puvis de Chavannes, had not seen him. He was a stooping, shambling person, rather tall, very pale, with longish and brownish hair. He had a thin vague beard – or rather, he had a chin on which a large number of hairs weakly curled and clustered to cover its retreat. He was an odd-looking person; but in the ’nineties odd apparitions were more frequent, I think, than they are now. The young writers of that era – and I was sure this man was a writer – strove earnestly to be distinct in aspect. This man had striven unsuccessfully. He wore a soft black hat of clerical kind but of Bohemian intention, and a grey waterproof cape which, perhaps because it was waterproof, failed to be romantic. I decided that ‘dim’ was the mot juste for him. I had already essayed to write, and was immensely keen on the mot juste, that Holy Grail of the period.

  The dim man was now again approaching our table, and this time he made up his mind to pause in front of it. ‘You don’t remember me,’ he said in a toneless voice.

  Rothenstein brightly focussed him. ‘Yes, I do,’ he replied after a moment, with pride rather than effusion – pride in a retentive memory. ‘Edwin Soames.’

  ‘Enoch Soames,’ said Enoch.

  ‘Enoch Soames,’ repeated Rothenstein in a tone implying that it was enough to have hit on the surname. ‘We met in Paris two or three times when you were living there. We met at the Café Groche.’

  ‘And I came to your studio once.’

  ‘Oh yes; I was sorry I was out.’

  ‘But you were in. You showed me some of your paintings, you know … I hear you’re in Chelsea now.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I almost wondered that Mr Soames did not, after this monosyllable, pass along. He stood patiently there, rather like a dumb animal, rather like a donkey looking over a gate. A sad figure, his. It occurred to me that ‘hungry’ was perhaps the mot juste for him; but – hungry for what? He looked as if he had little appetite for anything. I was sorry for him; and Rothenstein, though he had not invited him to Chelsea, did ask him to sit down and have something to drink.

  Seated, he was more self-assertive. He flung back the wings of his cape with a gesture which – had not those wings been waterproof – might have seemed to hurl defiance at things in general. And he ordered an absinthe. ‘Je me tiens toujours fidèle,’ he told Rothenstein, ‘à la sorcière glauque.’

  ‘It is bad for you,’ said Rothenstein drily.

  ‘Nothing is bad for one,’ answered Soames. ‘Dans ce monde il n’y a ni de bien ni de mal.’

  ‘Nothing good and nothing bad? How do you mean?’

  ‘I explained it all in the preface to “Negations”. ’

  ‘ “Negations”?’

  ‘Yes; I gave you a copy of it.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. But did you explain – for instance – that there was no such thing as bad or good grammar?’

  ‘N-no,’ said Soames. ‘Of course in Art there is the good and the evil. But in Life – no.’ He was rolling a cigarette. He had weak white hands, not well washed, and with finger-tips much stained by nicotine. ‘In Life there are illusions of good and evil, but’ – his voice trailed away to a murmur in which the words ‘vieux jeu’ and ‘rococo’ were faintly audible. I think he felt he was not doing himself justice, and feared that Rothenstein was going to point out fallacies. Anyway, he cleared his throat and said ‘Parlons d’autre chose.’

  It occurs to you that he was a fool? It didn’t to me. I was young, and had not the clarity of judgment that Rothenstein already had. Soames was quite five or six years older than either of us. Also, he had written a book.

  It was wonderful to have written a book.

  If Rothenstein had not been there, I should have revered Soames. Even as it was, I respected him. And I was very near indeed to reverence when he said he had another book coming out soon. I asked if I might ask what kind of book it was to be.

  ‘My poems,’ he answered. Rothenstein asked if this was to be the title of the book. The poet meditated on this suggestion, but said he rather thought of giving the book no title at all. ‘If a book is good in itself—’ he murmured, waving his cigarette.

  Rothenstein objected that absence of title might be bad for the sale of a book. ‘If,’ he urged, ‘I went into a bookseller�
��s and said simply “Have you got?” or “Have you a copy of?” how would they know what I wanted?’

  ‘Oh, of course I should have my name on the cover,’ Soames answered earnestly. ‘And I rather want,’ he added, looking hard at Rothenstein, ‘to have a drawing of myself as frontispiece.’ Rothenstein admitted that this was a capital idea, and mentioned that he was going into the country and would be there for some time. He then looked at his watch, exclaimed at the hour, paid the waiter, and went away with me to dinner. Soames remained at his post of fidelity to the glaucous witch.

  ‘Why were you so determined not to draw him?’ I asked.

  ‘Draw him? Him? How can one draw a man who doesn’t exist?’

  ‘He is dim,’ I admitted. But my mot juste fell flat. Rothenstein repeated that Soames was non-existent.

  Still, Soames had written a book. I asked if Rothenstein had read ‘Negations.’ He said he had looked into it, ‘but,’ he added crisply, ‘I don’t profess to know anything about writing.’ A reservation very characteristic of the period! Painters would not then allow that any one outside their own order had a right to any opinion about painting. This law (graven on the tablets brought down by Whistler from the summit of Fujiyama) imposed certain limitations. If other arts than painting were not utterly unintelligible to all but the men who practised them, the law tottered – the Monroe Doctrine, as it were, did not hold good. Therefore no painter would offer an opinion of a book without warning you at any rate that his opinion was worthless. No one is a better judge of literature than Rothenstein; but it wouldn’t have done to tell him so in those days; and I knew that I must form an unaided judgment on ‘Negations’.

  Not to buy a book of which I had met the author face to face would have been for me in those days an impossible act of self-denial. When I returned to Oxford for the Christmas Term I had duly secured ‘Negations’. I used to keep it lying carelessly on the table in my room, and whenever a friend took it up and asked what it was about I would say ‘Oh, it’s rather a remarkable book. It’s by a man whom I know.’ Just ‘what it was about’ I never was able to say. Head or tail was just what I hadn’t made of that slim green volume. I found in the preface no clue to the exiguous labyrinth of contents, and in that labyrinth nothing to explain the preface.

 

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