by Forrest Leo
‘Thank you.’ He takes it and dabs at his face. I avert my eyes. This is definitely not the evening I had expected it to be.
‘What is that book on your desk?’ the Gentleman asks. I am grateful for the change in subject, and look to where he points.
I smile to see the title indicated. ‘The Idylls of the King,’* I say.
‘What is it about?’
‘You’ve never read it?’ I ask with surprise.
‘No. Is it very good?’
‘It is,’ I say, struggling to imagine how dreary life must be without my lord Alfred.
‘Who wrote it?’
‘A great bear of a poet named Tennyson. But unlike any poet you’ve met. He’s taller than any man I’ve ever seen. At school they say he used to sneak into the stables and steal a pony which he’d put on his back and parade around the grounds. When queried about this remarkable habit, he replied that we should never recover the nobility lost us since the age of Arthur until we learn to bear our mounts as willingly as they bear us.’*
‘I would like to meet that man someday,’ he says with enthusiasm, and I try not to think mordant thoughts. ‘I do so love books,’ he goes on. ‘I have a great many. I flatter myself that my library is one of the finest anywhere. But I haven’t that one.’ He looks mournfully at the small volume.
‘Would you like to borrow it?’ I ask.
‘May I?’ he says with trepidation. ‘I would be in your debt.’
‘Please. The only thing more pleasurable than reading perfect poetry is sharing it.’ He still looks nervous, so I pick up the book and hand it to him.
‘I begin to understand the premium placed on friendship,’ he says with feeling. Then he shakes himself and says, ‘I regret that I must go.’
‘Are you sure?’ I ask. I find myself disappointed that the interview is at an end—somehow I have become quite attached to this slender Gentleman, and will be sorry to see him go. His company has been like a bit of wreckage from a sunken ship which a drowning man might cling to. His departure will plunge me back into the trackless ocean of despair which I have swum for so many months already.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I’ve tarried too long already. Your kindness tonight will not be forgotten, Mr Savage. I wish you a very pleasant night.’
‘You forget that I am married,’ I reply, gloomy once more.
The Gentleman looks at me queerly, with a sort of half-smile playing across his face. ‘Chin up, old boy,’ he says. ‘These things have a way of working themselves out.’ He raises the book to me in salute, opens the study door, and vanishes back into the party.
I scarcely have time to blink and none at all to think before Lizzie flounces in, a swirl of black velvet and pearls. I haven’t the slightest idea where she found the dress, but it suits her better than I am comfortable with. No sister should look so well.
‘Who was that?’ she demands, removing a silver domino mask. She must have passed the Gentleman in the hall.
‘It’s really rather difficult to explain,’ I say. I have no desire to speak to her about my encounter until I have had time to properly think about it, and I do not know when that might be. Then I recall our earlier harsh words and I tell her, ‘You look beautiful, little sister.’
‘Thank you,’ she says with womanly graciousness, twirling to show off her gown. It is alarming to me how lovely she is grown, and how very old. It isn’t a thing little sisters should do, grow up.
‘I wanted to apologise,’ I say. ‘About earlier.’
‘Oh no, no!’ she exclaims. ‘I was going to do the same!’
‘I love you, you know,’ I say.
‘And I love you, of course. I brought you a mask. Simmons said you needed one.’
She holds out to me a small, plain black mask, just such as I would have chosen for myself. ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Where is he?’
‘Simmons?’
I nod.
‘I’m not sure. There was some sort of upset among the guests which he was seeing to.’
I imagine the possible causes of said upset and shudder. Several scenarios chase one another through my mind. General Hallam might have had a heart attack and fallen dead on the table and caused a mess which would take a week to properly clean. A servant might have made eyes at a lady and been shot by a jealous husband. Or perhaps Babington became truly drunk and pinched a maid who squealed and jumped and upset a soup tureen which emptied its contents onto the lap of the Duke of Cumbria who fell backward and into the way of Mr Moncrieff who tripped over him and whose mask upon falling was pitched across the room and stabbed Lady Lazenby in the bosom causing her to drop her champagne flute which shattered on the carpet and a shard of which bounced and impaled Lord Earlsmere who dropped to his knees in pain and over whom Mrs Frazer, who was all this while preoccupied with jealousy for the pinched maid and was looking behind her at Babington instead of in front of her at the body of Earlsmere, pitched headlong, landing in a fireplace which immediately set her costume ablaze which in turn set the curtains alight and which will by and by burn down the whole house.* I loathe parties.
‘Did you meet my wife?’ I say.
‘Not yet. There are lots and lots of people, and everyone’s wearing a mask.’
‘Isn’t it horrid?’
‘Oh no!’ she cries. ‘I’ve never had such a lovely evening. I feel as though I could dance until my feet bled. Everyone’s so beautiful and mysterious and romantic in their costumes. I’m upset with you, Nellie. I feel as though you’ve been holding out on me. Society parties are wonderful.’
It is a dreadful speech, one which I never feared one of my own blood would ever make to me. I must look pained, because Lizzie says to me sternly, ‘Lionel, you are an old humbug, and I cannot believe—’
I do not learn what she cannot believe, for she is interrupted by the entrance of Simmons, who looks (though it is hard to tell beneath the turban) grave.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ he says.
‘Hello, Simmons. What was the matter out there?’
‘No one can find your wife, sir.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just what I said.’
‘She’s probably gone up to her room,’ I say.
‘My room,’ puts in Lizzie.
‘No, sir, I’ve checked all the rooms. The guests say one minute she was dancing and laughing and generally hostessing, and the next moment she was gone.’
I stare at him. ‘What do you mean, “gone”?’
‘I mean gone, sir. They say it’s as though she just—disappeared.’
Four
In Which I Write Dreadful Poetry & Discover Two Other Dreadful Things.
I have just had an interview with the Devil. Is not that strange?
What is stranger still is that I leave the interview not fearful, not awestruck, not cast down—but, rather, feeling a little sad for the fellow, and wondering how I might contrive to sometime have him round for tea. He seems to me on the whole a decent chap, and I am struck that perhaps we (by which I mean humanity) have misunderstood him. Of course I could be wrong—perhaps this is all a ruse and will end in my eternal damnation. But if so, at least I have had a pleasant conversation with a stimulating partner.
I am not a religious man by inclination—I have time to worship only one deity, and Thou, Poetry, art my goddess—but I am born in England, and I have been brought up in a God-fearing English society. To suppose that things Up Above—or more to the point, Down Below—might be different than we have in the past supposed is, I admit, a bit of a reorientation; but not an unpleasant one.
Nearly as soon as the thought enters my head it is replaced by another, which is that perhaps my visitor wasn’t the Devil at all. He could have been mad, or he could have been playing a practical joke on me. That seems on the whole unlikely, however. If he was mad, he was unlike any madman
I have ever met—and I have, to be candid, spent some little time with madmen. (I find them especially poetical, and have made it my business on occasion to visit Bedlam in an observatory capacity.)* No, I do not think him mad. An imposter, then? Sent, perhaps, by Pendergast? It is doubtful. I would not put such a thing past my rival; but if the fellow I just spoke to was counterfeiting, he did so better than any actor I have ever seen upon the stage.
If he was neither lunatic nor confidence man, logic if not reason tells me that he was then the Devil. Besides, he knew of the incident with the priest and the cobblestone. As no one besides he and I (he the priest, I mean) were present for the exchange, and as I have told no one of it but Simmons and Lizzie, how could he have discovered it other than by supernatural means? I have an acquaintance—friendship being not my forte or his—who says that when one eliminates the impossible, then what is left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Well then, the Gentleman was the Devil.
And if the Devil (which fact I have just resolved upon) then he was either counterfeiting docility or not. But what reason had he to feign friendship? The man left without my soul—without anything, in fact, save the finest volume of poetry published since the First Folio.* His diminutive demeanour gained him nothing—except my sympathy, which I do not know why he would have needed if he were secretly the terror we think him.
So, then, I again am led to the conclusion that the encounter I have just had was genuine. The Devil is not, in fact, a wicked stealer of souls and ravisher of virgins—he is, rather, a melancholy man of between five and six feet tall (I have no eye for those things), who stammers slightly and enjoys books and wishes himself better liked.
This of course alters the last two thousand years of literature. Most notably, it casts the exploits of one Johann Faustus in an especially dubious light. If the Devil is the Gentleman I have just met, then what precisely happened to the Wittenbergovian necromancer? It seems poor Mr Marlowe and Herr Goethe were misinformed. And what then? Ought I to publish something saying so? It could be the making of me. On the other hand, it might not be viewed in a strictly serious light. It could, in fact, lead to a deal of ridicule. I do not like to be seen as ridiculous. I suppose I will not publish an article. A poem, though, could be acceptable. The public rarely views poems as wholly factual affairs. A poem, then! It will be an epic in the Miltonian vein, though with perhaps a touch more Byron or Ariosto. A comical epic, but with serious and indeed existential undertones.
Here, though, I encounter an unfortunate stumbling block. I believe I have mentioned that my literary fame is of the passing, rather than lasting, sort. I am (I am perfectly aware) a strictly momentary sensation. Already, in fact, I have noted my waning reputation. I have published nothing in eight months, and the world is forgetting the tame wit of Lionel Savage. For me to compose an epic, even a comic one, would not do—it would confuse my readers. I might perhaps work my way to a place where I could publish it; but I am not there now. I have not written in a long while. If I attempted something on the scale I am considering, I would doubtless fall short of the mark. It would not be quite good enough to be good and not quite bad enough to be bad and would rather be simply mediocre, which is to me the single worst fate that can befall a work of art. I have no intention of being mediocre.
If, though, I were to regain my talent— to begin with trifles, at length advance to little amusements, from there to small gems, onward to ambitious flights of fancy, thereafter to— Yes, I believe that is the way it must be done.
I will write my way from impending obscurity to national hero.
And so I write all night. I do not spare a thought for my wife. She will return soon, no doubt, which is a pity; but until she does I will consider myself a condemned man handed a reprieve. I turn off the gas-jet (O metaphor!) and light candles and arrange my writing things with a care I have not taken since my marriage. To call it bliss would be to call Heaven pleasant. (I pause at that—the Gentleman had said Hell was more pleasant than one might suppose; and if there is a Hell I suppose there truly must be a Heaven: and what, then, is it like?)
I begin with trepidation. What if after all my jealously nourished hopes, I find myself still unable to write? But my hand seems to move pen across paper of its own accord. My brain has no conscious control over its speed. I am like a man who has wandered through the desert for an eternity and is suddenly confronted with a limitless expanse of cool, fresh, clean, blessed water. It is strange to me how easily the words flow. My wife will surely return home soon, wherever she may have gone; so why this sense of freedom? I do not know. But I take full advantage of it.
The sun rises and the candles are puddles on my desk, and I have finished a sheaf of poems. They are not masterpieces, but they amuse me and are sure to amuse a public long deprived of my words. I am composing aloud, as I do. ‘i WALKED a-LONG the STRAND as EVE-ning FELL / And SAW to MY sur-PRISE a GIRL who DID-n’t . . . look . . . well?’ I crumple the page and begin again. It is not quite right, but that is no matter. This is the sort of thing that happens when one writes: one expects it. Iambic pentameter is an unforgiving mistress. Ten syllables and five stresses a line—there is not room for fools or amateurs.
I am about to begin again when I hear the front door open and shut. My wife, I suppose. I sigh. It couldn’t last forever. I resolve not to let her reappearance dampen my mood or inhibit my verse. I plough ahead.
‘Life WAS re-STORED—’ No, no, no. The advent of the sun has thrown me off my rhythm. I am a creature of the night. The day is not made for poets. I begin again. ‘The MASQU-er-ADE re-STORED to ME my LIFE: / Re-STORED my MUSE and TOOK a-WAY my WIFE.’
I am chuckling to myself as Simmons enters. This night has improved my disposition as no night has in I do not know how long. I am feeling vastly better. That I contemplated suicide barely twelve hours ago seems to me most strange and wondrous. I feel so well this morning that I could sing. I am exhausted but exhilarated.
‘Good morning, sir,’ says Simmons, setting down a tray of tea. He is accustomed to my erratic hours of old. ‘Did you sleep well?’
‘No, Simmons, I didn’t sleep. I thought it best to take advantage of any wifely reprieve to write. Where was she?’
‘Excuse me, sir?’
‘My wife. I heard her come in just now. The door slammed. Did you find out where she’d been?’
‘That wasn’t your wife, sir,’ says Simmons. ‘That was Miss Elizabeth going out for a morning walk round the park.’*
I am surprised by this news, but cautiously optimistic. ‘Then where is my wife?’ I ask with bated breath.
‘She’s still missing, sir.’
My heart leaps. ‘That’s marvellous! Thank you, Simmons, you’ve taken a load off my mind.’
‘You aren’t worried, sir?’ says he.
‘Worried? No, why on earth should I be? Maybe she has a lover. That would be brilliant! Get her out of the house once in a while, give me some peace. Do you know I wrote all night?’
Simmons looks queer, as if he wants to say something, but he does not. Instead he asks only, ‘Is it good?’
‘What an awful question, Simmons!’ I exclaim, laughing—my heart feels buoyed aloft on butterfly wings. ‘Of course it’s good!’
‘May I read it?’
‘Certainly not,’ I snap. I regret my brusqueness, but Simmons has an unpleasant habit of making my writing seem much worse than it really is. I do not like it when I am composing and feeling grand and then someone comes along and reads my work and finds it wanting. It takes one down so quickly. It is like when one has a dream of flying, and then just as the world below looks its most marvellous and one feels the freest, it suddenly occurs to one that one hasn’t any wings and that humans aren’t built for flight and that the laws of physics decree that one must fall—and then with a sickening sensation one begins to plummet to the earth so far below. That is what I always
think of when I feel pleased with my poetry and then Simmons reads it. He is an astute critic, of that there is no doubt—but he is not always a gentle one, and my constitution requires gentleness.
Simmons has that queer look again, and says at length, ‘Do you really think Mrs Savage has a paramour, sir?’ It is an indelicate question, and asking it is unlike him.
‘Well, how else do you explain it?’ I counter. ‘Lovely though it would be, wives don’t just disappear. It is strange, though—devilish strange. Or “dev’lish,” if you will. I’ve decided it is only one syllable, by the way. Dev’l.’
‘Very good, sir,’ he says, and leaves the room to continue his duties. He asks no questions and pushes the subject no further. Damned good man, Simmons.
I am struck by a poetic feeling, and extemporise: ‘’Tis DEV’lish STRANGE when WIVES just DIS-a-PPEAR.’ I like it. It has some panache. I wonder if there is something in it—a story in blank verse about disappearing wives, some devilry, a dash of the supernatural. It would not be the epic of which I have spoken—but in later years it could perhaps be viewed as a sketch of it, an early consideration of wives, the Devil, heartbreak, the follies of youth, perhaps abductions—
Very abruptly, something quite awful occurs to me.
‘SIMMONS!’ I cry.
He enters with his usual promptness. ‘Sir?’
I cannot say it. It is too terrible. Simmons will never forgive me. ‘Nothing. Nothing, Simmons. Never mind. Please let me know if my wife comes back. That will be all.’
‘Very good, sir,’ he says, looking perplexed. He leaves again.
My stomach is doing all sorts of peculiar things—whether from fear, excitement, guilt, or hunger, it is impossible to tell. I try to consider the situation, but I am too disturbed to think straight. Before I can order my thoughts the door slams again. I wonder if it is Vivien, and my stomach does even more strange things.
It is not Vivien; it is Lizzie. She skips into my study, holding a rather crushed baked good which she deposits on my desk and a sheaf of papers which she does not. Vivien is still missing. The unspeakable consideration still stands.