by Forrest Leo
At the time it seemed the most romantic thing that had ever happened. But looking back, I see it to have been the beginning of the end. I was composing poetry, and Vivien interrupted me in a way which brooked no further converse. So there you have it.
I courted a goddess, but married only a woman. I hear that this is how it often goes, and I must pause here to note that marriage seems to me a most awful institution. If only we could carry out eternal courtships! I believe then I should be content, for the weeks courting Vivien were the happiest of my life. When every glance makes one’s heart beat quicker and one’s breath come short, and when a shy smile or spirited toss of the head makes one’s eyes lose focus, the world becomes more vivid. Even London becomes a welcoming place, a lovely place, a town of beauty instead of filth and parties.*
I am not looking forward to Simmons’s return.
The door creaks open. I do not lift my head. ‘Did you find me a mask so I can attend my own party, Simmons?’ I ask with some bitterness.
‘Oh,’ comes a querulous, stammering voice I have never heard before, ‘I’m not Simmons.’
I look up. The stranger has entered my study and closed the door behind him. He is absurdly thin, well dressed, and wears no costume but a bird-beaked Venetian carnival mask which he holds on a stick in front of his face. His shoulders are sloped as though with inexpressible weariness, but he does not appear to be elderly. As I study him, I find that I cannot in fact age him within a decade.
‘Indeed,’ I say. ‘You’re lost.’
‘Not lost, either,’ he says. The stammer wears upon my nerves.
‘No, see, in fact you are. This is my private study. The party is out there.’
‘I’m not here for the party, Mr Savage, though it does seem to be an excellent one.’
‘Then what are you here for?’ I demand. I do not like strangers, interlopers, stammerers, uninvited guests, or gentlemen travelling incognito.
‘Only to thank you,’ he says with great politeness, lowering the mask absently. There is nothing in his face of note. It is a perfectly ordinary face, one with a nose, two grey eyes with lids to them, a mouth, a chin, and everything else one would expect to find upon a face. I still cannot determine his age.
‘To thank me?’
‘For the kind word. I had been in a dark place, you understand, but hearing a friendly word can work miracles, and I’m feeling jolly much better.’
I stare at him, quite at a loss. At last, I say, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Earlier tonight you defended me from a particularly short-sighted priest, for which I came to thank you.’
I am utterly confused. He keeps looking at me with significance, but I do not understand the look. ‘You must be mistaken,’ I say. ‘All that happened is that a priest tripped over a cobblestone and was cursing the—’ Then I understand all at once. It is an unpleasant sensation, the sort of thing I imagine a man must feel who has had legs his whole life and then finds them abruptly amputated. ‘Oh,’ I say dumbly. ‘Then you are— Really?’
He says only, ‘Indeed.’*
I have never spoken to a supernatural entity before, and do not know precisely how to proceed. The Prince of Darkness—for I am reasonably certain it is he—simply looks at me. I study his face again. It remains ordinary. I wonder if this is his body, or if he has appropriated it. I try not to shudder at the thought. My mind conjures up images of a perfectly ordinary fellow walking home when suddenly the Devil floats up out of the dusty roadway and through his leather soles and along his shins and past his knees and around his hips and into his heart, rather like smoke into a smoker’s lungs. I glance at him again. I am waiting for something, but I am not sure what. Flames to spurt up, I suppose, or horns to sprout from his forehead, or a dead angel to plummet through the roof. None of these things happen, and the longer I look at him the more uncomfortable he seems to become and (strangely) the less uncomfortable I become.
‘Well I say,’ I venture at last. ‘This is unexpected.’
‘But not unwelcome, I hope?’ he asks eagerly.
‘No,’ I say, thrown off by his diminutive demeanour. He seems really quite tame, and what’s more, even a trifle melancholy. ‘No, of course not.’
‘Oh good!’ he exclaims with feeling. ‘I do so hate to be unwelcome!’
I scratch my head. I have reason to believe I am standing in my study hiding from the guests of a fancy dress party conducting an interview with the Devil, but for some reason there does not seem to be anything particularly odd about it. He is very polite, and I am very polite, and what more I expect I cannot say.
After a very long and awkward moment in which I find speech impossible, the Gentleman says, ‘Well, I’d best be going. But again, I thank you, and I wish you a happy life free from care.’
‘Alas, sir, I am already married!’ I say without thinking.
‘Oh sir,’ he cries in horror, quite taken aback. ‘What, and a fine poet like you?’
I grin ruefully at his boyish chagrin. ‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Oh dear,’ he says, with what sounds like genuine concern. ‘Why?’
I find myself beginning to like the old chap, and so I tell him the truth: ‘It was a financial thing.’
‘You married for money?’
‘I blush to admit that I did. Otherwise I never would have done it. I never planned to marry—in fact, I planned never to marry. I am not made of marriageable stuff. My mind is not a marriageable mind and I do not come from marriageable stock. My parents died upon their anniversary, you see.’
‘Indeed, indeed,’ he says, nodding sagely.
‘You see, sir,’ I carry on, the floodgates now open, ‘as you say, I’m a poet, and poets aren’t meant to marry! Poets are meant to dream and dance in the moonlight and love hopelessly! And in short, sir, I found that as soon as I had married I quite lost my ability to write and have been losing my already tenuous grasp on my reason ever since—for I find that no matter what I try—and believe me, I have tried everything: I stopped speaking to conserve my apparently limited supply of verbiage, I stopped sleeping so as to not waste creativity in dreaming, I even considered burning my library, thinking that without reading material I should be forced to generate my own. But no matter what I try I cannot, come—excuse me—Hell or high water, write, and it seems that the well of my genius has run dry and I am left bereft at twenty-two with neither words nor ideals to sustain me. And in short, sir, since my marriage I cannot write, and but for my little sister—no, in fact, regardless of my little sister—I wish I were dead.’
There is a pause after my speech, and I wonder if it had been ill-advised. I meant every word, but it occurs to me that revealing one’s inmost heart to Satan may not always be the wisest course of action. At length he says with quiet feeling, ‘I’m so sorry! That sounds dreadful.’
‘It is,’ I say, deciding that Satan or no, this gentleman is especially reasonable and quick to apprehend.
‘All the same,’ he adds after pensing a moment, ‘one can’t help but point out that it’s your own fault.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Hang it, man, you’re a poet! And you married for money instead of love!’
He is perfectly correct, of course, and I know it—indeed, I have said as much myself. But something in his manner irks me. I do not like it when I am preached at, and I am feeling contrary—too contrary even to appreciate the irony of being preached at by the Devil. I say, ‘That has nothing to do with it. It’s my wife’s fault.’
‘I don’t mean to offend you, Mr Savage, but that’s not the case.’
I am becoming upset. ‘It is!’
‘Please don’t be angry,’ says the Gentleman. ‘I don’t want to quarrel with you.’
‘Then don’t give advice regarding matters of which you are plainly ignorant! I take it you a
re not married?’
‘I am not, but I—’
‘Of course you’re not, or you wouldn’t be so damned impatient to pass judgment!’ I wonder fleetingly at my choice of words. Can one say ‘damned’ to the Devil? Is it proper?* I do not know. Nor do I know why I am arguing with notions I have myself set forth already. I feel as though I am a sleeve unravelling.
‘I am not married, sir,’ says the Gentleman with more resolve than I had expected of him, ‘but I have some small understanding, I think, of human nature.’
I do not know why I am yelling at the Devil. Perhaps it is a residual effect of my recent self-endangering impulses. ‘I don’t care about human nature!’ I cry, my voice breaking. ‘I am married to a harpy and you tell me it’s my fault I’m losing my mind!’
‘I didn’t say that,’ he says soothingly. ‘I said—’
But the madness is upon me, and I have lost my head. ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’ I demand.
He looks hurt to be so interrogated. ‘I have told you already. I am here to thank you.’
‘And steal my soul while you’re at it, no doubt,’ I mutter. As the words pass my lips, I think perhaps that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. No matter what method of suicide I resolve upon, it will leave something of a mess for those I leave behind me—but if I were to descend bodily to Hell it seems that all complications would be allayed. (Could I go bodily? Or would he rip out my soul and just take that?)
‘What on earth would I want with your soul?’ he asks with genuine surprise.
‘Isn’t that what you do? Collect souls?’
‘I have quite a surfeit of souls, sir,’ he replies. ‘I’d be happy never to see another soul as long as I live.’ So much for that.
‘Indeed?’
‘Assuredly.’
‘I find that fascinating.’
‘You do?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Why?’
‘Well,’ I say, wondering how best to put it. ‘It goes rather against common wisdom, you know.’
‘Does it?’
‘It does.’
The Gentleman looks so downcast that for a moment I fear he will weep. He says with a sigh, ‘There are times when I feel as though humanity misunderstands me.’
‘Sir,’ I tell him wryly, ‘you suffer the plight of a poet.’
‘You’re too kind,’ he says.
‘No, but truly.’
‘Do you know,’ he muses, ‘Alighieri once told me the same thing.’
I must have misheard. It is too extraordinary. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Oh,’ he says offhandedly, ‘the fellow who takes care of my flowers. Something Alighieri. Don, Donald, something. He once told me I understand poets better than most poets understand themselves.’
‘Dante?’ I say in shock. I was only just thinking of the man. ‘Dante Alighieri?’
‘Yes, that’s it,’ says he.
‘Dante the poet?’
‘Yes. Wonderful with the roses. Less so with the rhododendron.’
I can only repeat the name like an idiot. ‘Dante Alighieri—is your gardener?’
‘I believe I just said that.’
‘Well good Lord.’
‘What?’
‘Well—’ He seems not to understand how extraordinary this is. I search for words. ‘He’s quite famous, you know.’
‘Is he?’ asks the Gentleman, with evident surprise.
‘Indisputably.’
‘Fascinating. Indeed?’ He seems doubtful. ‘Don’t misunderstand me, he does a perfectly adequate job; but I keep him on more because I enjoy talking to him than for his gardening skills—which are, between you and me, spectacularly mediocre.’
I cannot tell whether I should laugh or cry. ‘He isn’t famous for his gardening,’ I manage to say with offended poetic dignity. I do not in fact much care for his work (allegory does not agree with me). But the Commedia is after all something of a standard around which all poets rally—and if I do not care for it, I can at least appreciate it.
‘Well I should think not,’ laughs the Gentleman, relieved. ‘That would have been quite inexplicable. His poetry, then?’
‘Quite.’
‘Fascinating,’ he says again. ‘That drivel about Hell and such?’
‘Yes.’
‘He got it all wrong, you know.’
If I pause to consider that I am discussing the poetic merits of Dante Alighieri with the Devil, I believe I shall lose what is left of my mind—so I simply carry on with the conversation as if it is one I have every evening in my study. ‘Did he?’ I say.
‘Well of course!’ says the Gentleman. He seems eager to talk about it. ‘Don’t think it’s really that awful, do you? Couldn’t live there if it was, could you?’
‘What’s it like, then?’ I ask.
‘Well, first off, I rather prefer to call it Essex Grove.’
‘Call what Essex Grove?’ I ask, just to be certain.
‘Where I’m from.’
‘You mean—Hell?’
The Gentleman shudders and says, ‘Oh, I do hate that word! It sounds so vulgar. And uninviting.’
‘So you call it Essex Grove.’
‘I do.’
‘To make it more inviting.’
‘Indeed.’
He is so blithe about the whole thing that all I can say is, ‘How extraordinary.’
‘Thank you,’ he says.
‘If you’ll pardon my asking, why Essex Grove?’
‘As opposed to . . . ?’
‘I don’t know,’ say I. ‘Milford Haven or Pocklington Place or Pemberley. What I mean to say is, does the name Essex Grove have any especial significance to you?’
‘Oh,’ says the Gentleman, ‘certainly! I like it.’
Which, really, is as good an explanation as I could wish.
I am aware that I am not alone in my curiosity regarding certain matters metaphysical in nature—so for the sake of posterity I ask him, ‘And you live in a palace? A mansion? A Grecian temple?’
‘But you do have a flair for theatrics, don’t you!’ he says with a little laugh. ‘Of course I don’t live in a palace. Just a simple cottage on the edge of the Elysian Fields, a stone’s throw from the River Styx.’
‘And Dante is your gardener,’ I repeat.
‘Yes.’
I have run out of things to say. The enormity of the situation threatens to overwhelm me, and I simply gape at him. He stares back, quiet and awkward. This goes on for several minutes.
At length, desperate to break what has become an uncomfortable silence, I blurt, ‘Look, please forgive me for being blunt, but I have no idea what you’re doing here.’
‘Well I say,’ says the Gentleman, mildly offended. ‘I’ve told you—I wished to thank you.’
‘Which you have done.’
‘Which I have done.’
We stare at one another again. I feel compelled to add, ‘It’s not that I object to your company. But you must admit this is a damned peculiar sort of encounter. If you’ll pardon me.’
‘I suppose it is, yes.’
‘So what is it that you want?’
‘Actually,’ he says, enormously uncomfortable, ‘I was rather wondering—’ He breaks off, and shifts from foot to foot. I try to look encouraging. Finally he takes a breath and says all at once, ‘Could we be friends?’
I stare at him.
‘I’ve always wanted a friend,’ he blunders on. ‘I’ve heard all about them, and I think they sound splendid. But I’ve never had one. And I don’t know how to go about obtaining one. One reads stories and they are made out to be very easy to come by—in fact people seem to take them for granted—but I’ve never had one. And I’d like one. And so at the risk of sounding provincial, I would like to ask yo
u to be my friend.’ He reddens and quickly adds, ‘I mean, if you’d be agreeable to the notion. I don’t mean to impose terms on our relationship. I’m afraid I must seem the soul of tactlessness. I’m sorry.’
‘No, no,’ I say hurriedly, for he looks more mortified by the moment. ‘No, I’d—’ I hesitate, then say, ‘I’d like that.’
The Gentleman looks up sharply, searching my face for traces of mockery. He finds none. ‘You would?’ he asks.
‘I would. I am at the moment suffering from a dearth of friends.’ It is no lie. I have never been what one might call a social chap; but I was not always as isolated from my fellow man as I have been of late. It was not so long ago that I had numerous acquaintances—admirers, colleagues (though the bond of fellowship between writers has always been a fraught thing),* even here and there a few of what you might call friends. Never perhaps of the intimate sort; but all the same men and women whose company gave me pleasure. Over the last six months, however, these have one by one fallen by the wayside—and this conversation, irrespective of the hellish nature of my interlocutor, is the first pleasurable exchange of words I have had with a like-minded person in a very long while. And so I tell him genuinely and without a thought to personal danger, ‘I would.’
‘That’s— That’s marvellous! And very kind of you, sir.’
‘Not at all,’ I say. There is more emotion in the air than I care for.
‘No, no, it is! You have treated me handsomely this evening, Mr Savage. I have been as I think I mentioned in a dark place these last— Well, for a rather long time. And your kindness moves me, sir. It moves me very much indeed.’
I see that he is very near to being overcome, which I fear will lead to me being overcome. ‘Steady on, old boy,’ I say with alarm, ‘I’ve had a run of it lately, too, and I don’t know if I can handle any more emotion tonight.’
‘Forgive me,’ he says, turning from me. ‘A moment, please. There. Apologies.’
‘Not at all. Handkerchief?’ I offer him mine.