LANCELOT JONES LAID DOWN HIS PEN, and knew both satisfaction and discontent. He was confident that his article, provisionally entitled ‘A Vision by Lamplight’, would be accepted by The Jermyn Street Gazette. He knew also that the fee of two guineas which he would receive for it was barely adequate to keep his wife and small child from immediate starvation, let alone to pay the rent. The bassinet upon the landing, he reflected ruefully, is the enemy of enterprise.
In those days, and I am referring to the year 1891, Jones, his wife Mary, and two-year-old daughter Sophie lived on the top floor of a dank lodging house in Handel Street in the gloomy wildernesses of Soho. Jones’s writing table was at the window of their front room, from which he looked down into a dingy courtyard where by day dogs barked and dirty children played, and by night even dirtier men and women raged loudly against the darkness.
It should not have been thus, Jones told himself. He had left his native Wales and come to London with such high hopes of literary success, but seven years of drudgery and hard work had received little reward. A few of his stories had been noticed favourably; a collection had been published, but the sales had been disappointing. And in the course of all this he had fallen in love, weighing himself down with the additional burden of a wife and child.
Not that he regretted marrying Mary, who was the sweetest of creatures, but when he thought sometimes of what he had brought her to, his heart burned with shame and anger. Anger raged within him also when he thought of Jocelyn Slade.
He and Slade had been at school together at St Tudno’s, and it seemed to him that they had always been rivals. Both had been equally clever. If Slade was the quicker of the two, Jones was the more thoughtful and original, but between them they won all the school’s academic prizes. At that time they had not been hostile towards each other, merely suspicious and distant. Equal achievements had kept both reasonably content, but when they left St Tudno’s their paths had diverged. Slade’s way had been smoothed because his father could afford to send him to Oxford, whereas Jones’s father, a poor clergyman, could not. Jones had gone to seek his fortune in London where Slade, upon graduating, arrived three years later. Jones was still struggling on the lower slopes of the literary world when Slade landed with winged feet from Oxford, somewhat higher up Parnassus, and nearer to Pall Mall than Grub Street. Almost at once Slade was being asked to write three-guinea reviews of fiction for The Piccadilly Magazine and The Fitzroy Quarterly. He had even condescended to review Jones’s first work, Pale Hills, with a lofty amiability and a faint praise which smelt fouler than outright condemnation. Then Slade had himself published his first book, The Chronicles of Clarissa, a novel of high society which had become an instant success. It was clever, Jones had to concede, but it was also cynical, malicious, and utterly trivial. Slade, from being a successful young man of letters, which was just about tolerable to Jones, had been transformed overnight into a literary celebrity, which was not. When Slade’s second novel, The Duchess’s Diamonds, was published, Jones had hoped that the fact that the Diamonds were so very obviously paste would condemn their author to oblivion. But Slade’s luck held, the Diamonds were declared to be of the first water, and their manufacturer’s place in the sun was assured.
Jones continued to struggle, as near as it was possible to be to destitution without falling into the pit. One or two editors were kind and kept him afloat with commissions for articles and stories, but the second book remained unpublished. That morning, as he finished his article and prepared to take it round to the offices of The Jermyn Street Gazette, Jones was feeling particularly bitter. His wife Mary had taken their daughter Sophie for a visit to her mother in Peckham. She had said it was because they needed a change of air, but he knew it was because he was too poor to feed them. If only the world rewarded merit rather than the meretricious!
Jones began to wonder what he would do if he met his rival Slade in the street on his way to The Gazette. Would he pretend to ignore him, or deliberately cut him dead? The one thing he would not do would be to allow him to condescend to him. If he managed to see him without being seen perhaps he might secretly follow him, and then, if the opportunity arose — what would he do?
There was a knock at his door. Believing it to be Mrs Crace, his landlady, who had perhaps come to favour him with some cutting remarks about the rent, Jones did not immediately respond.
‘Gentleman to see you, Mr Jones,’ said the voice of Mrs Crace from the other side of the door. Her surprisingly respectful tones indicated that the gentleman in question had impressed her as a person of substance. Good God, what if it were Slade? The unlikely possibility filled him with terror, but he controlled himself and asked her to show him in. Mrs Crace opened the door and announced his visitor.
‘Mr Honeyburn,’ she said. The name was mercifully unfamiliar.
The man who had been announced as Mr Honeyburn wore a black Inverness cape and a Homburg hat which he immediately doffed upon entering. Jones was not surprised that Mrs Crace, who was even now withdrawing from the scene, had been impressed. Everything about Mr Honeyburn was large, rich, and powerful.
He was in his fifties, dark and, though heavily built, still handsome. He wore his curling, grizzled hair slightly long and his swarthy, aquiline features suggested Middle Eastern, perhaps Levantine origins. His superbly tailored clothes were dark and sober; but the heavy gold watch chain, the diamond stock pin and an emerald ring hinted at foreign flamboyance.
‘My dear Mr Jones, I must apologise for intruding upon you like this,’ he said. The voice was deep, resonant, and without a trace of an accent. ‘My name is Jonas Honeyburn.’ With a flourish he produced a card from his waistcoat and presented it to Jones.
As Jones took it he asked Mr Honeyburn to pray be seated, then, as an afterthought, offered to take his cape. Mr Honeyburn shook his head, as it was a cool March morning and there was no fire in the grate. Mr Honeyburn methodically placed his hat on Jones’s writing table and in it the pair of yellow kid gloves which he had been carrying; then he laid his ebony cane upon the table beside his hat. Jones noticed that the ivory handle was carved to look like the head of some primitive birdlike creature. Having performed these careful actions, Mr Honeyburn settled himself in the seat indicated.
Jones thought of inviting Mr Honeyburn to take some refreshment, but did not know if there was any to offer. Jones was in some ways an unworldly man, but he knew enough of the world to realise that he should not show Mr Honeyburn how desperate he was.
‘Just finishing a piece for The Jermyn Street Gazette,’ he said, casually waving his hand in the direction of his papers. ‘Can I help you, Mr Honeyburn?’
‘I am a great admirer of your work, Mr Jones,’ said Mr Honeyburn.
‘How kind of you to say so. Which work in particular?’ As Jones asked this question he thought he detected a small hint of hesitation pass over Mr Honeyburn’s confident, carven features.
‘Your story, “The Shining Road”, and—ah—Pale Hills. Remarkable . . . But, Mr Jones, let me waste no more of your valuable time. I am a publisher——’
‘You wish to publish my work?’ said Jones, inadvertently displaying his eagerness.
‘After a fashion, Mr Jones. In a sense. I understand you have in the past undertaken translation work?’
Jones was downcast. He had done translations in the past. His Memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini had sold extremely well, though he himself had seen few of the profits. But this was hack work and he thought he had done with it.
‘I did some work at one time, from the Italian and the French. I now concentrate on my own writing.’
‘Quite so. Quite so,’ said Mr Honeyburn with a smile in which Jones thought he could detect mockery. ‘However,’ he continued, taking out a large lawn handkerchief with which to wipe his lips, and perhaps, in addition, to conceal their cynical curve from Jones. ‘If the work were specialised and the rewards were commensurate, you might consider such an undertaking?’
Jones, who had
recovered his composure, asked Mr Honeyburn precisely what he meant.
‘My little firm,’ said Mr Honeyburn, ‘is called the Savoy Press. We specialise in limited editions of unusual — you might say curious — works for a very select clientele. Handsomely bound, printed on the very finest paper, illustrated by the most distinguished black-and-white artists. These are editions designed to grace the library of the connoisseur, you understand.’ Jones nodded, for he did understand. ‘If I were to ask you in the first place to take a look at a work, merely to give me your opinion upon it. There would be a fee of — shall we say? — ten guineas. Then, if you were to decide to undertake the work, a further advance of twenty? Would that suit, Mr Jones?’
Without waiting for a reply Mr Honeyburn took a bundle of papers from the capacious inside pocket of his Inverness cape and presented it to Jones. It was a manuscript written in a modern hand and it was French. Jones glanced at the title:
L’école des filles, ou Le châtiment de Vénus
‘Copied by hand from a rare book,’ said Mr Honeyburn. ‘The owner was unwilling to allow the original out of his possession.’
Jones looked at the papers while Mr Honeyburn counted out ten guineas and placed them on the table in a shaft of sunlight where they dazzled the eye.
‘No obligation, you understand,’ said Mr Honeyburn as he rose to take his leave. ‘I wish you a very good day, Mr Jones.’
When Mary came home from her mother’s with Sophie, they were able to send out for food from a nearby Italian restaurant; and Mrs Crace’s rent was paid in full.
* * * * *
The following afternoon a messenger boy called with the twenty guineas and a note from Mr Honeyburn which read: ‘Herewith the advance, as promised, for your translation of L’école des filles. A further ten awaits if you can complete the work inside a week.’ Jones accepted the twenty guineas but with misgivings, because Mr Honeyburn had so arrogantly assumed that he would accept the assignment.
Jones worked rapidly, not only for the ten guineas, but because he wanted to have done with it. L’école des filles was, thankfully, a short piece and no worse than countless other works that Jones had encountered on the private shelves of so-called ‘connoisseurs’. All the same, Jones took great care to ensure that Mary should not see what he was writing.
At the end of the week the same messenger boy called again to take his manuscript away. He had come with a purse containing thirty guineas and a note from Mr Honeyburn which read: ‘The additional twenty is the advance for an Englishing of the work my boy will now give you.’
As Jones looked up from reading the note he saw that the messenger boy was holding out a parcel to him. For the first time Jones scrutinised him closely. The ‘boy’ was a little over five feet tall, and it was difficult to tell his age, he might have been anything between twelve and twenty: the features were young, but the expression was old, somewhat weary and wasted. His body seemed stunted and twisted out of true, like a tree that has been forced to grow between rocks on poor soil. Jones took the parcel from him and thanked him, at which the boy turned to go — but Jones stopped him.
‘Wait! I haven’t decided to take this yet,’ said Jones with what he knew to be a meaningless gesture of resistance.
The manuscript in the parcel was another transcription in the same modern hand as L’école des filles. On the title page had been written:
Amélie, ou Les cent caresses du Charnier
par L’Abbé Boullan
‘Amélie, or The One Hundred Caresses of the Charnel House.’ What horror was this? Nevertheless Jones dismissed the boy and kept the manuscript. In a short while he had become used to being able to buy his wife and child pretty things, and was looking forward to entertaining some old friends at Romano’s or the Caf… Royal; so he put the guineas into his pocket and stuffed the manuscript into the drawer of his writing table. He would work on it when he could be sure of being undisturbed, at night, with only the maundering cries of drunken wasters in the court below for company.
The translation took longer than he expected because of the irregular hours at which he undertook the task, and because the manuscript itself was a vile thing. He read in it what he had never read before and hoped would never read again, but he persisted. He was keeping his wife and child from poverty, and he hoped thereafter that Mr Honeyburn would reward him with some more congenial occupation for his talents.
A fortnight passed before, one afternoon, Mr Honeyburn’s boy came to collect the manuscript. Jones, who had been spending rather freely over the last few days was looking forward to further remuneration, but the boy had no message from his master and no more money for him. Jones was enraged: the demeaning drudgery of the last few days had made him feel entitled to at least a further ten guineas. With a great show of indignation he refused to let the minion have the manuscript. The boy was at first utterly bewildered: his mean hollow-eyed face looked aghast. Jones was beginning to feel pleased with himself when he saw the boy’s face change into a mask of malignant hatred. The imp hissed and spat, then fled.
Jones was horrified by what had happened, and for the rest of the day lapsed into gloom and torpor, afraid now that Mr Honeyburn might pay him another visit. He railed against the fate which compelled him to do such miserable work, simply to feed his wife and child, and he thought again of Jocelyn Slade. Somehow Slade was responsible for his situation, Slade and a world which valued dross before beauty.
The following morning he remembered that Mr Honeyburn had given him his business card. 7A, Lupton Court, Gray’s Inn Square was the address printed upon it, and Jones resolved to make his way there to confront his paymaster. What he would say to him he did not know, but he felt that an encounter would relieve a pressure on his mind which had been mounting for some days.
It was hard to find, for Lupton Court, now long vanished, was in a tiny alleyway off Gray’s Inn Square. It had been built in the early 1700s of dark red brick and its ancient pedimented doorway of worn limestone was slightly crooked, as if it had been pushed out of alignment by a careless giant in the distant past and never put right. Mr Honeyburn’s chambers were on the first floor, to which an ancient porter who had answered the front door showed him. As soon as he had directed Jones to the landing and the door marked 7A in black paint, the old man shuffled off down the stairs with surprising speed.
Jones hesitated at Mr Honeyburn’s door. He listened for the reassuring sound of activity within, but heard nothing, so he knocked.
The voice of Mr Honeyburn bade him come in, and he entered a large room, panelled in ancient wood, with an elaborate plaster ceiling now yellow with age. Mr Honeyburn sat at a desk facing the door, but otherwise the room was sparely furnished, the only bright colours emanating from the Turkish rug on the dark wooden floor.
There were books everywhere: crammed on to sagging shelves, piled into little columns on the floor like the exposed brick supports of a Roman hypocaust, leaning drunkenly against each other in the window seats, sprawling over the papers on Mr Honeyburn’s desk.
Apart from the books there were no signs of the normal activities of a publishing house. The proprietor of the Savoy Press seemed to be there alone, operating his business without assistance. He sat quite still behind his desk staring at Jones who stared back.
‘Sit down, Mr Jones,’ said Mr Honeyburn at length. ‘What have you come for?’
Jones produced the manuscript of his translation of Amélie, ou Les cent caresses du charnier and muttered something about having come for his money.
‘Do you consider your fee to have been inadequate, Mr Jones?’
Jones made no reply. Mr Honeyburn waved him to the one chair which was not occupied by books; Jones sat down and, for want of anything better to do, looked about him.
‘It is an interesting place, don’t you think, Mr Jones?’ said Mr Honeyburn with sudden geniality. ‘These stones, you know, are steeped in history. Some years back the remains of a Mithraic temple were found when they w
ere digging out the cellars of this very building. Remarkable, don’t you think? Now tell me how I can be of assistance to you. What is it that you want?’ Mr Honeyburn leaned his elbows on the table, put his finger tips together and looked at Jones steadily over the top of them. It was a gesture which reminded Jones of his father when he was trying to extract a confession from him. An atavistic urge compelled him to respond by laying bare the most secret desires of his heart.
‘I want to work,’ said Jones, ‘and to profit from my work.’
‘Then what is preventing you?’ said Mr Honeyburn.
So Jones told him how hard he had worked, how gifted he was and how little he was appreciated. He told him about the bad luck he had endured, and about the folly of reviewers and publishers in ignoring his claims on their attention. He told Mr Honeyburn also, though he had not intended to, about Jocelyn Slade, their rivalry, and Slade’s infernal, unmerited good luck. Mr Honeyburn nodded several times and leaned back in his chair as if preparing to deliver a homily. Once more Jones was reminded of his late father.
‘My dear Mr Jones,’ said Mr. Honeyburn, ‘you must know that there are people in this world to whom we are secretly bound, as if by a silver cord. If those two people so bound are in harmony, then that silver cord may be a source of strength to them both, but if not, then one will draw strength from the other — it may be unconsciously — so that the other fails and withers. This Jocelyn Slade is clearly your own particular nemesis. When such a creature is found out there is only one thing to do.’
‘What is that?’
‘The cord must be severed.’
‘But how?’
Mr Honeyburn smiled, took out his gold watch, glanced at it, and returned it to his waistcoat, then he rose and went to a small, brass-bound mahogany cabinet that was resting on a side table. He unlocked it with a key on his watch chain, and from it removed a bundle of papers tied with ribbon.
MASQUES OF SATAN Page 10