The Gentleman

by Forrest Leo

  Lizzie says, ‘Good morning, you look like death, I brought you a pastry, and we need to talk.’

  I can see that she’s in a lecturing mood, so I tell her that I’m a bit preoccupied this morning, which I am. I cannot focus my thoughts. They are swirling and purling through the whirling world without pause or consideration for my delicate sensibility just like my sister.

  ‘You lied to me,’ she says.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I demand. I do not lie. I do, however, sometimes omit the truth. I wonder to which particular truth she may be referring.

  ‘You said you couldn’t write.’

  ‘I can’t!’ I cry. I do not want to think about what I wrote last night; it already seems lacking. The light of day is a most awful thing.

  She waves the papers she’s holding at me. ‘Then what are these? I found them in my room, locked in my desk!’ Her voice is abruptly tender. ‘You could have told me, Nellie. I’m so proud of you. I read them while I walked this morning—I believe they’re the best you’ve ever done.’

  I do not recognise the papers. What is she talking about? I need her to leave. I need to think. Strange things are happening. Have happened. I need a moment alone. ‘They’re not mine,’ I tell her.

  ‘Don’t be silly, whose else would they be?’

  Whose what? I have no idea what she is talking about. I have not been attending. I am not myself. I am distracted. I ask to look at them. She hands me the papers. More unpleasant things happens in my abdomen. They are poems. They’re in Vivien’s handwriting. I tell her so.

  ‘Surely she transcribed for you?’ enquires my ever-loyal sister. I feel an overwhelming sense of goodwill toward her, which is in turn immediately overwhelmed by my sense of wretchedness. I have not time to peruse them at length, but the words I see are quite good. Perhaps better than good. Oddly arranged, but good.*

  ‘I haven’t written anything since we got married.’

  ‘Then whose are they?’ asks Lizzie. ‘Is she copying out Tennyson?’ I am appalled that Lizzie could even ask the question. What have they been teaching her at that school? If it is the sort of place which takes perfectly sensible girls and renders them unable to tell whether or not a scrap of verse is written by Tennyson, then perhaps it is better she was expelled.

  ‘This isn’t Tennyson,’ I tell her icily.

  ‘Browning?’

  For God’s sake. ‘No.’

  ‘Either of the Rossettis?’

  It is self-evidently neither of the Rossettis. Lizzie is growing stupider. ‘SIMMONS!’ I yell.

  ‘Sir?’ he says, entering promptly. I believe he does listen at my door. It does not bother me, but I note it. He is still the best butler in Britain, and a damned good judge of poetry besides.* He will provide answers.

  Without a word I hand him the poems. He peruses them briefly, then makes his pronouncement.

  ‘They’re charming, sir, if not what you might call structurally sound.’ I knew that already. He is not giving me the answers I need.

  ‘Yes, yes, but do you recognise them?’ I demand.

  ‘Ought I to?’

  ‘I had rather hoped so. Could they be Morris?’ I am grasping at straws. They are clearly not Morris.

  ‘You know they couldn’t be.’ There is disappointment in his voice—he sounds as I did a moment ago answering Lizzie’s absurd questions.

  ‘Arnold?’ I ask him. It is even more ridiculous. What am I saying?

  ‘I rather think not,’ he says, offended by the very thought.

  ‘Swinburne?’ I wish I could stop myself, but I cannot. If I accept the reality of the situation it may break me.

  ‘Really, sir!’ he says, now terribly disappointed and a little hurt by the depths of my stupidity. I am desperate.

  ‘Then WHO, damn it?’ I cry.

  ‘Someone new, sir,’ he replies.

  Lizzie, who has been observing the exchange with the breathless excitement of a gambling man watching a tennis match, begins to ask a question I would rather not consider. ‘Could it—’

  ‘No,’ I say in a tone that brooks no argument.

  ‘But—’ protests my tone-deaf sister.

  ‘NO.’

  ‘This is Mrs Savage’s handwriting,’ says Simmons. Damn him. I should sack him on the spot for even suggesting such a thing.

  ‘I know that,’ I reply acidly.

  ‘Though I hesitate to suggest the obvious explanation, sir,’ carries on my soon-to-be-former butler, ‘I cannot in the name of reason and logic let it lie. When one eliminates the impossible, what is left, no matter how improbable—’

  I cut him off. I know. I do not want to hear it. ‘Give them back,’ I say petulantly. He hands me a few pages, but keeps a few for himself. We both read Vivien’s poetry for a moment. I will not comment on its quality any further than I have already done. I cannot. It is painful.

  ‘These are quite good, sir,’ he says. I glower. They are. Though something is the matter with their structure. They are written in no metre I have ever encountered; in fact, they look rather like vers libre, and it is an affront to me that anyone living beneath my roof would dare compose in vers libre.

  ‘If you think about it, Nellie,’ says Lizzie, ‘the situation is really very funny.’

  ‘NO IT’S NOT,’ I say hotly. I am feeling the level ground upon which I once thought I stood sliding out from under me. Too many things are happening at once. I do not like it. I am not an adventurous soul, I am an Englishman. I desire things to remain quite the way they have always been; but suddenly everything is changing. It is awful.

  I have dabbled in madness,* but what is wonderful about madness is that there is no ground to shake beneath your feet. When there is nothing that is level, then there can be nothing that is not level. (If that is complicated to you, I suggest you walk into a very dark room and shut the door. Look around. There is nothing. Close your eyes. There is no difference. Stand on your head—the world is not upside down; it remains only black. Spin in circles until you fall over. Still the world is black. Do everything you can manage to disorient yourself—try as you might, you will not be able to for the world is still black.)* I am not at present in Bedlam, however.* I am in my study, and am standing on what I had presumed to be level ground, but it is abruptly shifting beneath my feet. It is intolerable. I cannot live like this.

  Lizzie notices my night’s work on the desk. ‘What’s this?’ she asks.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say. I am not eager for her to read it, in light of the things just revealed.

  ‘Let me see it,’ she says.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘No!’

  While I have been guarding it from Lizzie, Simmons has come behind me and plucked it off the desk. By the time I notice, he is reading it and looking unwell.

  ‘Damn it, Simmons,’ I cry, ‘give it back!’ After a long moment he does. He doesn’t say anything. If there’s anything worse than Simmons passing judgment on my work, it’s Simmons remaining silent. He simply stands there, looking aggrieved and a little affronted. Finally I say, ‘Well?’

  ‘It’s not your best, sir,’ he says.

  ‘I know that, damn it!’ I wish he had not read it. I wish I had not asked his opinion. I wish this day had not happened. I suddenly feel that yesterday afternoon I was not so miserable as I am now. If I could go back in time and simply be unhappily married I would leap at the chance. It is funny how every time one thinks things can get no worse, they do. I think it is a metaphor for life. Or perhaps it’s not a metaphor at all and simply is life. I marvel that I used to be considered a happy person. You would not think it reading this, but it is true. I was once untroubled and light of heart.*

  Lizzie asks what is, at the moment, the single least useful question she could ask: ‘Where’s your wife?’

  ‘
I DON’T KNOW!’

  Lizzie and Simmons are silent, taken aback by my volume. They look at me in what seems a most accusatory manner, though that is perhaps only a projection of my own guilty and unstable mind. I did not mean to yell at them. I never used to yell.

  ‘I might know,’ I amend.

  Expectant silence.

  ‘This is going to sound much worse than it really is.’ I consider the best way to put it. ‘Yesterday evening before you arrived,’ I try, ‘I was walking home and I met a priest—’

  ‘Who had tripped over a cobblestone and was cursing the Devil and you said without the Devil we’d both be out of a job, yes, you told us.’ Lizzie may be growing stupider, but even if she cannot tell what is and is not written by a Rossetti her mind is still quicker than most.

  ‘Yes. Well. You remember the gentleman last night you met coming out of my study?’

  ‘What’s he have to do with anything?’

  I hesitate. ‘Well. He said that he came to thank me for the kind word.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ says Lizzie. She is thick. I can hear the gears turning in Simmons’s head. Perhaps he is made of clockwork. This would explain his inhuman correctness in things.

  I take a breath and it all comes tumbling out. ‘And then I complained about my wife and told him I couldn’t write and gave him a book and he said everything would be alright.’

  Lizzie’s face is still blank, but Simmons has apprehended. ‘Oh sir,’ he says.

  ‘What?’ demands Lizzie.

  Simmons almost looks like he is going to laugh, but I suppose that must be nervous tension. ‘Sir, really?’

  ‘Shut up, Simmons,’ I snap.

  ‘What’s going on?’ says soft-witted Lizzie.

  ‘He believes he gave Mistress Vivien to the Devil,’ says Simmons. Lizzie’s eyes widen, and I can see that she is about to say awful things to me. I rush to cut her off.

  ‘I may have given— Actually, no, no, wait, there was no giving involved. The Devil may have taken her. Possibly.’ I am running backward desperately. I do feel I have given Vivien away, though as I think of it that seems unfair to myself. I certainly never asked the Gentleman to take her. At least not directly.

  ‘Oh, Nellie,’ says Lizzie in a tone of voice that makes me want to find a hole and crawl into it and die. ‘You really are an awful person.’

  ‘I would have thought, given the situation, that the two of you might show a trifle more understanding,’ I say bitterly.

  They just stare at me. I cannot bear it. I try to find the silver lining, try to make them see it, try to regain some of my former stature in their eyes. (Had I any stature? Perhaps not, not in recent days or weeks or months. I had once, I am certain. For Simmons maybe not in a long while.)

  ‘Don’t you see?’ I exclaim. ‘This is a good thing! I’m free! I can write again! I wrote all night.’

  Simmons, damn him, has taken another poem from my desk and dashed my hopes. He reads it aloud: ‘“I said to her now please disrobe yourself / And she complied and said here’s to your—”’ He pauses painfully, then finishes, ‘“—health.”’

  ‘IT’S WORDS ON THE PAGE!’ I yell like a cornered animal. ‘That’s the first step! When there are words on the page then one can revise them until they are good words! But until they’re there, there is nothing!’

  They stare at me some more. Lizzie eventually says, ‘I cannot believe you sold your wife to the Devil.’

  I consider pointing out that I didn’t actually sell her, but the difference is so slight I do not even bother. I am in a very peculiar, rather misty area in which I could become quite lost if I am not careful. And so I try to rationalise. ‘Lizzie,’ I say, ‘I had no choice. I have been unable to write since I married her—this was the only alternative to a life of misery and perhaps madness.’

  ‘But you still can’t write!’ says she. Which is true.

  ‘I’m working on it!’ say I. Which is also true, but rather pathetic.

  She takes a matronly tone I do not like. ‘You’ve been wifeless almost a full day, Lionel. If you haven’t written anything in that time, you’re not going to.’

  I protest automatically, but I grasp her point. Is it possible that my wife is not in fact the reason for my declining talents? I must think on it someday.

  ‘You have to tell them,’ says Lizzie.

  ‘Tell who what?’ How her mind hops about. Perhaps she is mad.

  ‘Tell her parents you sold their daughter to the Devil!’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ I say. It is clearly out of the question. I hate her parents as I hate her. Her father perhaps a trifle less; he is a kindly soul, just trapped. Lady Lancaster, though, is the awfullest human who ever lived. I am actually a little scared of her.*

  ‘You must,’ she says.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t talk about my wife’s family.’ I do not know why Lizzie insists on bringing them up. There is nothing to be gained from talking about them. The Lancasters are society folks, emblematic of everything that I do not like about this age. That they are now my relations is an awkward truth I do not like to consider.

  ‘You have to tell them sooner or later.’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ I say. ‘The whole thing was a mistake. I certainly probably wouldn’t have done it if I’d been aware of what I was doing.’

  ‘You have to tell them,’ Lizzie says again. She is stubborn that way. It is an unattractive quality.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You have to.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Absolutely not! Simmons understands—don’t you, Simmons?’

  ‘I am afraid, sir, that I have in this instance only a limited understanding.’

  ‘I cannot tell any woman’s parents, not even my wife’s, that I did what I did!’ I do not like saying what I did, even to my sister and Simmons, even in the privacy of my own study. It seems more terrible when spoken aloud. I wish we could just forget all about it and have tea.

  ‘Then tell her brother,’ Lizzie presses.

  ‘I can’t, he’s off conquering Borneo.* Besides,’ I say, ‘I’ve never met the man and now there’s no one to introduce us.’* I omit that I hate the very thought of him. I have heard far too much of his virtues to ever think him anything more than an utter fool.

  ‘Write him a letter.’

  ‘“Dear Mr Lancaster,”’ I say, ‘“I seem to have misplaced your sister. Satan may have been involved. Warmly, Lionel Savage.”’ (Actually, it would be an amusing letter to send. I said it only to annoy Lizzie, but I wonder if I oughtn’t to send it after all.)

  Lizzie glares at me. ‘Did you do it because she’s a better poet than you?’

  This is too much. ‘SHE IS NOT!’*

  ‘You know very well that’s a lie.’

  I am apoplectic. ‘She writes without form! Her line breaks are arbitrary! She may as well be a—novelist!’

  ‘Now you’re just lying to yourself,’ Lizzie says. She appraises me unnervingly. ‘You look like you’re about to cry. I think you miss her.’

  ‘I do not miss her!’

  She raises her eyebrows. ‘I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone so unhappy in my entire life. I love you, and I wish you’d let me help you. I’m bored and melancholy and sick at heart. I’m going to go lie down.’ And she leaves. I have never heard Lizzie to voice boredom or melancholia. I did not think her afflicted by them as other people are.

  I hit my head against my desk several times, hoping it will clear my mind. It doesn’t.

  ‘SIMMONS!’ I call.

  ‘I’m right here, sir,’ he says at my elbow.

  I start—I had forgotten he was in the room. Simmons is like that.

  ‘Simmons,’ I say, ‘do I seem unhappy to you?’

  ‘Of course, sir,’ he says.
/>
  It was a poorly phrased question. I am very obviously unhappy. I rephrase it. ‘But do I seem more unhappy since my wife left?’

  ‘Indeed, sir,’ he answers promptly.

  ‘Ah.’ That is queer—I had thought that as she was the primary source of my sorrows, her disappearance would immediately lift my spirits. That it has had the opposite effect is very odd. I had suspected it, and hearing Simmons’s confirmation I can but accept it as so.

  After a moment, he says, ‘Will that be all, sir?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you, Simmons.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  He starts to leave. My mind is spinning and my head hurts. I wish I hadn’t banged it against the desk. I call after him, ‘Simmons!’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Do you consider me morally reprehensible for inadvertently selling my wife to the Devil?’

  ‘I do, sir,’ he says. I had feared as much. I was feeling morally deficient, but wondered if that was only because of my weariness.

  ‘And do you consider me yet more reprehensible for refusing to notify her family?’

  ‘I do, sir.’

  I sigh and slump forward. I press my cheek against the desktop. ‘Simmons,’ I say at length, ‘I believe I am miserable.’

  ‘That is just the word I would have used, sir.’

  For the first time in a long time I do not think about anything. I simply lie there being miserable.

  We remain in silence. Then I think of another question I am not sure I have the courage to have answered, but I ask it anyway. ‘Simmons?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Is my wife a better poet than I am?’

  ‘I am compelled to tell you that she is, sir,’ says the man who raised me.

  I am silent. What is there to say? Outside my window, I watch the little park. Rain is falling, which ordinarily pleases me, mist is rising, which ordinarily cheers me, and the trees all look like mysterious sculptures stolen from other worlds. But instead of finding the sight lovely and poetical, today it seems to signify imminent doom of some sort.