Progress of Stories

by Laura (Riding) Jackson

  At this point the conversation broke up. Mr. Schiller said that he was a mere business man and couldn't afford to play the Count. The others said that they weren't of noble birth either, and laboriously got into their overcoats. Mr. Gainsbury suggested that they should all dine together the next evening. The four strangers accepted eagerly. It made things seem very cosy. Athens felt that he had done his duty.

  But meanwhile the strangers were still on his hands. He went downstairs to Beatrice and asked her if she would operate for four visitors of his. He knew her in a neighbourly way, but had never had anything to do with her spiritualistically before. She was a sincere medium. She would not take money, but each member of her audience must give her a personal token, not to be returned. She could not operate without these tokens. Nebuchadnezzar gave her one of his necklaces. Each bead was a semi-precious stone. "Lucrezia Borgia was a good woman," he said on offering the necklace to her, "but her father being a pope went to her head. Women shouldn't use their heads. It makes devils of them." Beatrice did not smile at this. She was beginning to get in touch with the other side. Mr. Root gave her a blue silk handkerchief, unused. Bob gave her a diamond ring, a present from his foster-father. Mr. Sweet gave her his watch-charm, a gold nugget that had always been a little heavy to carry. Athens gave her a silver-plated pocket-pencil.

  At Beatrice's request all the lights were turned off. They could still faintly see one another, for a little light came up to them from the street. Then she explained that to-night she would only reveal matters of world interest, but that whatever she revealed they must treat as confidential. Otherwise they might suffer personal injury or misfortune. The people on the other side were exacting and pitiless. They did not like being bothered and imposed capricious conditions. For example, another condition was that those to whom she confided the message must meet once a year in secret in commemoration of it: 'they' did not like the things they revealed to be forgotten. The conditions being acquiesced in, Beatrice began etherealizing. No one must speak to her while she was etherealizing. She walked blindly round and round the room, seeming to grow lighter and lighter. Her feet left the floor. She dissolved into a mist at the ceiling and slowly drifted down to the floor again, like a mass of inert silk.

  "They are very cruel to-night," she whispered, as if in pain. "They seem very angry. They are not my usual friends. The sun is moving farther and farther away, but there is still light. The light cuts like little knives." She shivered all over, her teeth chattering. "It has never been like this before. The people who are telling me things are living minds. You are there," she screamed, pointing at Nebuchadnezzar, "and you!" pointing at Bob. Nebuchadnezzar was not affected by this information but Bob gave a whoop of triumph.

  "What did I tell you!" he cried, slapping Mr. Sweet hard on the back. Mr. Sweet looked as if he were going to faint. Archibald got up and sat down again.

  "They tell me," said Beatrice in a stronger voice, "that the world will end to-morrow morning at twenty-four minutes past eleven." Having said this, Beatrice stretched herself out flat on the floor and lay as if asleep. Archibald rushed at her and shook her. "But suppose we go on living?" he asked feverishly. Beatrice answered without waking, "Then you'll only be ghosts."

  Athens switched on the lights and carried Beatrice downstairs, where he laid her on her bed; he had heard that it was dangerous to disturb people when they were like this and he felt, besides, that everyone had had enough of her. When he came up Mr. Sweet was sitting as he had left him and Archibald was staring into a mirror, but Bob and Nebuchadnezzar had turned on the gramophone and were whirling round the room. Bob knew a way to make records shriek, though it meant breaking the spring.

  "I'm glad to see you take this little incident in the right spirit," said Athens pleasantly.

  The next evening the four strangers dined with the six partners of Athens. Athens's absence was politely accounted for. Bob and Nebuchadnezzar played with each other like bear and puppy, but Mr. Sweet and Mr. Root were badly shaken. Mr. Sweet confided to the partners that they had all had an awful experience since they had met—something they had to keep secret. They must excuse their erratic behaviour. By the end of the evening the partners felt cross and malicious. They hadn't been able to get hold. Mr. Sweet, drunk and hysterical, was still a possibility, however. Mr. Slade and Mr. Atkinson got him into a taxi and took him to the house of Mr. Wheeler, another partner. There they undressed him and put him to bed and tried to work on his mind all night by making gruesome noises just outside his room. But in the morning, instead of gibbering out his secret to them, as they had hoped he would, he appeared to have suffered from a stroke during the night and died. Nothing like this had ever happened before, and they were disgusted. They were somehow disgusted with Athens.

  Athens and the three strangers went to the funeral. So far none of them had mentioned the secret. They all suspected that the old man had given it away the night of his death, but they did not like to talk about it. They went to a tea-shop near the cemetery after the funeral, trying to behave naturally with one another. Mr. Root spoke of his return to America. He thought of going to Canada; he had a friend who had a ranch there. He needed something to calm him down before he started teaching again. Europe had upset him. Bob kept laughing to himself and was very imperious with Nebuchadnezzar. It almost seemed as if Nebuchadnezzar was beginning to be afraid of him. Nebuchadnezzar ate a great many buns and made gruff jokes with the waitress, a stupid girl who answered "That's the truth!" to whatever he said to her that sounded like philosophy. When he choked on his words she bent over him in a motherly way, attributing his spasms to the buns.

  Athens realized that their embarrassment could only be bridged over by some reference to the strange events that had brought them together. "Well," he said with quiet recklessness, "since death seems to be still with us, the world has apparently not come to an end!" Bob pretended to pay no attention to this sally. Archibald went red and said, "I can't stand this any longer. This is my address in America. If you decide to meet in a year's time, let me know where it is to be." He got up and went out without shaking hands, leaving three cards on the table. Athens picked up one of them and put it away carefully in his note-case. He then looked at his companions with an expression of forced amusement. Nebuchadnezzar paid no attention to the remaining cards, but Bob picked up both of them and put them angrily in his pocket. Then he stood up and waved his knife at Athens. "Think you can play around with us, do you?" he sang. "I'll show you!" He plunged his blunt knife against Athens's coat. Athens scowled and said, "Don't be silly!" Nebuchadnezzar ran into the kitchen crying, "Buddha is trying to kill the Devil! Be yourself, Bob! Buddha, be yourself!" He crouched under a table in the kitchen, still crying out to Bob. The waitress ran out of the kitchen, screaming.

  Meanwhile Bob had found a sharp knife at the cake-counter. "Don't be silly, eh?" he shrieked, plunging it into Athens, this time effectively. The waitress ran into the street, screaming. Some of the cemetery attendants came back with her and held Bob until the police came. Athens was dead. Nebuchadnezzar remained under the table until he was pulled out. He was arrested along with Bob.

  Athens retained in death his expression of forced amusement. His partners gave him a decent burial. Beatrice was the only woman present. "It didn't hurt him to go," she said. "He'll be a great man on the other side. He had a fine manner, and they like that there." Beatrice, of course, remembered nothing of the message she had given to Athens and the four strangers. Her spiritualistic consciousness did not mix with her worldly consciousness. Of the circumstance of Athens's death she only said, "He chose these two people as his instruments because they were childlike and selfless." The partners agreed that Athens was the kind of man who did things deliberately. "He must have seen that there was something odd about them and yet he made friends with them," she said. "Athens was no fool." The partners agreed that he was no fool. His death, following on Mr. Sweet's, had given them a fright. They had no heart to go on with the
ir crime-work. Athens seemed to have taken it with him. They thought of themselves as having also been his instruments.

  Bob, who had inherited all Mr. Sweet's money, was brilliantly defended at his trial. It was pointed out that at his mystery house in Bermuda Nebuchadnezzar had already inspired one murder and one suicide. Bob had come under this madman's influence. He had been pampered by his late foster- father and was accustomed to follow his fancy. Nebuchadnezzar had told him that he was Buddha and he, more from boredom than from any innate insanity, had allowed himself to play with the idea. Nebuchadnezzar would say nothing, but the waitress, an obviously unimaginative girl, had sworn that Nebuchadnezzar had referred to Bob as Buddha and to the murdered man as the Devil. Bob had become unbalanced for a few moments and during these moments had committed the crime. He had just come from the burial of his foster-father, to whom he had been tenderly devoted. His grief, his aloneness in the world and this madman's persistent pursuit of him had been too much for his undisciplined mind. He was now in complete possession of himself and had had sufficient punishment in the remorse and sorrow he was suffering. His counsel asked for a full acquittal and got it. The case filled the papers under the headline 'Bob and Nebuchadnezzar'. His counsel spoke of him always as 'Bob' to keep the jury in mind of his youth.

  Nebuchadnezzar was certified insane and was allowed to enter a private mental home approved by the court. The head of this home was a certain Professor Grail who had made himself famous by transforming several wealthy criminals into respectable authors. He treated the insane people under his care as lonely intellects that had gone astray for want of sympathetic collaborators. He took great interest in Nebuchadnezzar's case and began a book with him on the recurrence of historic personality-types in modern individuals. He was authorized to buy Nebuchadnezzar's Bermuda establishment, and ran it on scientific lines with great success, putting in charge a former patient of his, Lady Charmaine Horner, of the distinguished Horner family. She had once suffered from a mania for stealing babies from wealthy and well-known families and conveying them, under what she claimed at her trial to be providential inspiration, to distant cities, where she placed them with comparatively poor, socially inconspicuous families, pretending that they were charity orphans. She had believed herself a chosen agent of social diffusion and Professor Grail had cured her by writing a book with her on family continuity as a cause of insanity. In Bermuda Lady Charmaine relied largely on a system (elaborated with Professor Grail) for breaking the chain of inherited thought-habits. It did not work so well, naturally, with people who did not have much family continuity behind them; but the theory was that everybody who had a persistent madness had some family stricture, even if it was only symbolic, like being a Jew.

  Bob, soon after his acquittal, went to America, where he looked up Archibald Root. Archibald persuaded him to enroll himself as a student in his university. Bob became a sensible theological seminarist, but instead of taking orders he retained the independence to which his wealth entitled him, travelling from state to state as a lecturer on religion. He was known as 'Bob, the Happy Christian'. Archibald always boasted that Bob had learned the elements of public speaking from him. Bob loved platform life. He had learnt that the only way to make people leave one alone was to expose oneself to their curiosity in a good-tempered way and talk to them frankly about themselves; this gave them the illusion that one was being frank with them about oneself.

  When Bob finally tired of platform life he married Archibald's sister, a placid, pleasantly cynical woman a good deal older than himself, who was anxious, in her own interests, that he should not find the marriage an inconvenience. Bob renewed his former studies in astronomy. He built an observatory on the roof of his house. On clear Sunday evenings he gave star-talks there to people who, like himself, were cold- hearted and apathetic and yet selfish enough to be amiably tolerant of the world they lived in, especially of its less exacting elements. Every year he dined alone with his brother-in- law in commemoration of the message they had had from the other side. They explained this custom to other people as a sentimental anniversary of the formation of their friendship. The secret itself was never referred to between them. Nebuchadnezzar was always sent a perfunctory invitation a month before. Throughout this meal each year Archibald and Bob always nursed an irritable half-hope that he would not turn up, and a superstitious half-hope that he would. But, of course, he never did.

  THE INCURABLE VIRTUE

  EMILE SAINT-BLAGUE had been a lively, versatile painter in his youth, but he had abused his energy by painting too many pictures; so that in what might have been the ripe period of his art he had nothing left but ideas. A man who has nothing left but ideas may be of great service to his friends, but he is of no use at all to himself. Emile was certainly an inspiration to his friends.

  He had inherited a little money at just about the time when he had found himself physically exhausted by painting. And so he was an object of respect, not of pity—as he might have been if he had been poor as well as idle. Nor was he really idle: he was continually thinking about things. Every evening after ten he gave supper in his studio and talked about life in an interesting, informed way. His friends ate and listened and gathered in phrases and argumentative points and were thus able, in their turn, to talk to people sophisticatedly, gliding intelligently from one prejudice to another.

  Emile kept in touch with contemporary politics, science, literature and philosophy and threw over his friends a cloak of protective verbiage. He was not only their guiding intellect, he was an angel. He had risen beyond the egotistic creative plane which they inhabited, and lived, so to speak, posthumously, looking down on their innocent activities from a benevolent vantage of ideas. Ideas are the old-age of art. Artists have to keep young; they must not think too much—thought is death, while art is life. Such was Emile's viewpoint.

  Emile's friends learnt from him the meaning of intelligence, without having to be actively intelligent themselves. They learnt to be grateful to the rest of the world, the non-artists, for having worries, for being elders. If nobody worried, life would certainly come to a standstill; there would be no artistic stimulus to irresponsibility and youthfulness. Emile was an elder, but he had once been young. Other people, the non- artists, were born elders. The wisest course was for the young to be grateful to the old and to show their gratitude by seeming to understand how important it was to have worries—instead of behaving as if worries were a disease. It was this kind of delicacy that sold art; people liked to think of pictures as tributes to their intellectual superiority. It was not the way artists painted but the way they behaved that determined the commercial status of art.

  Emile was good. He did not lend his friends money or, beyond providing inexpensive light suppers, help them in any tangible way, but he mothered their minds. He lived for them and was proud of them—not of what they did, but of their wordly discretion. He liked to feel that they did not make boors of themselves in the society of the mature. His acquaintances—besides his real friends—were all very knowing people, old rather than young characters. With these he sometimes lunched or dined, but only to exercise his ideas; he did not form or maintain friendships outside the immediate field of his mothering interests. His real friends knew that he lived only for them. No one must ever say anything against Emile. They called him 'poor Emile', as a reminder to themselves that no one must ever say anything against him. Emile was good. He lived for them. He spoiled them. He carried them along from one revolution round the sun to the next, taking upon himself all the nausea and strangeness of the movement. Women have performed something like this service for men, making homes for them in which they could escape from the sickening memories of their daily contortions in the giddy gymnasium of life. Emile was even tenderer than a woman. He softened for his friends the reckless variations of nature and the harsh progress of time. They were aware of nothing except faint, pleasant impacts against themselves of these otherwise terrible forces. Emile wanted his friends
to feel mentally pampered, and himself to be their pamperer. It was his incurable virtue. It is also a curious fact that none of his friends ever married; which is a thing that happens only when men are really successful. Emile's friends all wore a pampered manly air. They worked hard and prospered gracefully. They were absorbed in their art, but they knew their way about the ordinary streets of human experience. And the clue to it all was Emile.

  Then, one day, Emile was put in prison. He had run down and killed a young unemployed shop-girl in the Bois de Boulogne. He had been reading and driving at the same time. The young girl did not seem to have a family or friends, but, all the same, Emile was put in prison. He was not put in prison for long, because he was undoubtedly a respectable person and by birth a Breton, and Bretons were known to be eccentric. The papers had first referred to him as 'The Reading Motorist', and later, during the trial, as 'The Artists' Socrates'. His friends testified warmly to his wisdom, his generosity, his importance to them. Emile gave interviews to newspaper men, expressing himself freely on current topics. The jury found him guilty of 'abstracted' driving, and the judge sentenced him in very flattering language. "Here is a distinguished gentleman of leisure," the judge said, "whose enthusiasm for culture has made him the unfortunate instrument of the death of a young girl who could not, in any case, have loved life too well." Not wishing to weaken the admirable influence of this distinguished gentleman on his friends, he was sending him to prison for two months only, as a friendly warning to eccentric drivers; he hoped that this forced retirement would not be disagreeable to a person of philosophic temperament.

  But Emile did not like being in prison. He could not get at books and papers. He missed his evenings with his friends, who came to see him faithfully on visiting days, but who could not be expected to think of him in quite the same way as before. They spoke of him as if, on entering prison, he had ended another period of his life. "What will poor Emile do when he comes out of prison?" they asked themselves. They thought of a voyage to England, for Emile held the English in great admiration as a nation whose rôle it was to influence other nations; England, like Emile, had an incurable virtue. But a wisewoman had prophesied of him when he was a child that he would meet his death in a large body of water, or else by suicide, and so Emile never went on ships.