The Gentleman

by Forrest Leo

  ‘El Dorado doesn’t exist,’ I say. Though I suppose maybe it does after all. My wife was just abducted by the Devil. Surely El Dorado isn’t as fantastical as that.

  ‘That’s what they said, the faithless beggars!’ cries Lancaster. ‘I told them I’d found it and they laughed in my face and told me to prove it.’

  ‘That sounds reasonable,’ I point out.

  ‘Well maybe so, old boy,’ he says, frowning, ‘but it’s not strictly speaking polite. Anyway, I went back with a bevy of ’em, but couldn’t find the damn place again, and that was the beginning of the end. The trouble with the Geographical Society is, they’ve no imagination. Well, I’d had quite enough of the whole thing, and it wasn’t as though I needed their money, so I left the Society and ever since I have independently been finding remarkable things which the scientific community blithely assures me don’t exist.’*

  I do not voice my scepticism, and he goes on.

  ‘Now, I tell you all this not to toot my own horn, as the saying goes, but because I want you to understand that I’m with you, by Christ, and we’ll see this thing through to the bitter end. I’ve been to El Dorado and I’ve stumbled across Shangri-La and I’m damn near to finding Atlantis, so if you’re looking for a chap with whom to storm the gates of Hell then don’t worry, old boy, you’ve found your man!’

  He is breathing rather heavily—if his words have not roused me, I believe they have at least stirred his own blood a little. I am glad, for it was a pretty speech—and if not for the fact that I do not like going out of doors if it can be avoided, I would doubtless have been inspired to seek the sunset. ‘Well that’s very kind of you,’ I say, ‘but I’m afraid it’s more complicated than that.’ I still do not know how to tell him exactly what I mean.

  ‘I don’t see why it should be,’ he replies. ‘She loves you, and you love her, and she’s my little sister, and she’s been stolen. God knows we’d go after them if it were the Frenchies who’d taken her,* so why not the Devil?’

  I do not know why he keeps talking of love. There is no love in this household. I do not love my wife, and she does not love me. It is a loveless marriage, which is why I cannot write and why she confines herself to her room except when she’s throwing parties. The man is delusional. Where has he gotten these notions? ‘Well of course,’ I say, ‘but—’

  ‘But what? She dotes on you. You know damn well she’d never leave you to rot if it were the other way round.’

  I know no such thing. I believe were it the other way round she would dance a jig. It’s finally too much for me. ‘Yes, so you keep saying. You’ll excuse me for pointing it out, but you haven’t even seen her for two years. For all you know we hate each other.’

  ‘Now there’s a thought!’ laughs Lancaster, dismissing it out of hand. ‘I told you, Savage, I read her letters, and it’s not every couple that’s got what you’ve got.’ There’s something about him which tells me that, I am almost certain of it, he is not lying. He truly believes that she loves me. How can this be? What is in those letters? I must read them. Immediately. My life may depend upon it.

  There are very strange happenings inside me.

  ‘I’d show them to you, if I could—the letters, I mean, they’d warm you right from the inside—but they were all lost when the ship went down off Spitsbergen.* Damn shame, that. Never met anyone who can use words like my little sister. What was it she said? “The fact is, I’m his, all of me, and he is mine—and whatever the difference in our temperaments, we are souls entwined.” Makes a man glad to read those words, glad to know such a thing’s possible, eh?’

  Something is wrong with my chest. I cannot breathe. I do not know what is happening. My blood is not pumping properly, my eyes are not focusing, my ears are ringing, I can feel a feverish flush rising to my cheeks.

  ‘You alright, Savage?’ asks Lancaster, eyeing me with concern. ‘You’re looking poorly.’

  ‘Indeed,’ I say. ‘I’m feeling . . . peculiar. Peculiar feelings. I’m going to lie down. Make yourself at home. Lizzie will come find you.’ I raise my voice and call, ‘LIZZIE!’ Then, without a backward glance, I flee.

  Six

  In Which I Visit the Grandest Shop in the World, Where I Meet a Very Poetical Person, After Which I Have an Earth-Shattering Epiphany.

  I hurry up the stairs and into my room. I lie down on my bed. It is a great four-postered monstrosity that used to belong to my parents. I hate it. I have never spent a night in it with Vivien. I have never spent a night anywhere with Vivien. The week of our wedding I was in a fit of composition, and I dared not waste any time consummating our marriage. I wonder if things would have been different if I had.

  It is a silly thought. Vivien is now in Hell, and I am lying on this wretched bed thinking of her. I do not understand Lancaster’s words. His talk of letters. Could there truly have been letters?* I do not know. I was not aware that my wife writes—wrote—letters, but I was also not aware that she wrote poetry. One learns the most alarming things.

  I hate my room. I hate my house. I hate being indoors. I need to get out of doors. I still cannot breathe. I need to be outside. I tiptoe to the door, open it a crack, peer through. No one is on the landing. I can hear faint voices from the study and a shout of laughter. Lizzie must be entertaining Lancaster. I wish them well, and if he touches her I will kill him. I do not know where Simmons may be.

  I creep down the stairs. I do not like creeping within my own home, but I cannot bear to see anyone. I do not want to speak. I do not believe I would know what to say. I do not know what to think. Something inside me is broken. I slip into my overcoat, for it is a chilly November day and my smoking jacket will not be warm enough and I hate being cold, and I slip out the front door.

  The yellow fog is wrapped round the house waiting for me, and I plunge into it. I love the fog. The sounds of the city are muffled by it, made mysterious and poetical. It is a poetical city. Why have I never noticed that before? Perhaps I have. I do not remember. I do not know. I do not know a great many things, I find. Everything seems somehow different. Perhaps I am dreaming. I wonder if that is the case. It would make explicable many things currently inexplicable. I pinch myself. I do not wake. I am not asleep. I am not dreaming. Unless I am in a waking dream. I may be mad. I may have stumbled into a fairy tale, but I see no dashing princes about, unless Lancaster be one. I imagine him holding a sword leading an army. It is easy to do. If I were a great painter I should paint him as St George. I have never had a care about my body, but watching the way Lancaster moves I was struck for the first time in my life that I am small and weak. If I were otherwise, would Vivien have loved me? I do not know.

  Seeing her brother makes me think of Vivien differently. They look so similar that I could not help thinking of her as I watched him. They have the same unconscious grace. Why did I never notice it in Vivien before? It occurs to me that I did notice it, but that I preferred not to think of it after our courtship.

  Briefly, I wonder what it would have been like to see Vivien without her clothes on our wedding night. Would she have moved with the same ease and grace then?

  I banish the thought with something like panic. I will not think of it. I cannot. It will drive me mad. I focus on my feet. They move of their own accord, without conscious thought or effort or command from me. That is a marvellous thing. Why have I never before noticed what a marvellous thing that is?

  I have not known where I am walking, but I know now. I need to see Tompkins. (Tompkins is my second sage. If Simmons is my Ector, Tompkins is my Merlin.* He owns a bookshop.) I cannot see my course through the fog, but my feet know the way. They skitter across the damp cobblestones, my heels clicking like hooves. I wonder if the Gentleman had hooves. I did not think to look.

  I pass illuminated house-fronts which grin at me maniacally through the fog, gaslight blazing from their windows. It is a dark afternoon (the sun for sorrow will not
show its face), and the lamp-posts are being lit. I tip my hat to the lamplighters. I hurry past the smell of clustered humanity. I still find perverse poetry in it all, even in the sewage in the gutters and garbage in the street. I do not know what is wrong with me.

  Mine is a city in transition. Signs of Progress are all around me—the steel girders spanning the Thames, the omnibuses clattering by, the modern policemen standing on every corner of this modern metropolis—but still there is history beneath my feet, sneaking out from cracks between cobblestones and darkened alleys forgotten by the tide of time. I know of no other era when life was so exciting, unless it be the glory days of the Roman Republic.* We have the world before us, but have not yet outrun our past. It is a good time to be alive.

  I walk through respectable neighbourhoods which turn abruptly into disrespectable ones. The respectable are quiet, on this foggy and inhospitable day. The disrespectable are noisy, for despite the weather it is a day like any other and there is work to be done. There is much a poet might learn from this. I pass into commercial neighbourhoods, which are even noisier than were the disrespectable ones. People are everywhere, and horses, and carts, and cabs, and policemen, and advertisements. I have no desire to purchase a new top hat, nor a miraculous spring-loaded shoehorn (my boring one serves just fine), nor a corset made with the bones of an elephant. I am bumped and jostled and sworn at. I bump and jostle and swear back, which is the only way to survive in a city such as this.

  I am sweating by the time I reach the small shop. It is sandwiched between a haberdasher and an apothecary. Above the door a peeling sign says, ‘Phoenix Used Books And What Have You, Prop. Wm. Tmkns.’ The windows are crusted with a thick layer of soot, but I can just make out a flickering light inside. Tompkins reading by his hearth.

  Abruptly I find myself face-to-face with Whitley Pendergast, who is leaving the establishment. ‘Hullo, old boy,’ I say, ‘the Hell are you doing here?’

  ‘Purchasing a racehorse,’ he replies automatically. ‘What else would I do in a bookstore?’

  ‘Thought you might’ve come to pick up Platitudes.* There’s a stack of unsold first editions that have been gathering dust in the corner for a month.’

  ‘Savage,’ says he, ‘words cannot express the acute pleasure I will feel when at last I drive my rapier into your belly.’

  ‘When that day comes, Pendergast, I’ve instructed my lawyer to hang a black banner from St Paul’s to mark the death of poetry.’

  ‘Speaking of poems, Savage,’ he says, ‘I’ve written you one just now. “The savage fool does vainly rage and cry / But foolish Savage imagines how he’ll die.”‘

  ‘Better a witty fool,’ I tell him, ‘than a foolish wit. Cheerio, old boy.’

  He storms off into the night and I push open the door with my shoulder. Rusty hinges groan loudly in protest. Why the treasures of this magical cave are not more widely known I have never been able to conceive. It is the most marvellous place in the world. It should be the most popular spot in town; but I am glad that it is not.*

  ‘It’s Savage,’ I say, entering the shop. It is at first glance a tiny place, a narrow storefront barely wide enough for a door and a window looking out upon the street. But once your eyes grow accustomed to the gloom, you are able to see the teetering towers of books which vanish into the dusty darkness of the rafters, and that the room, though not wide, is very deep. Looking down the stacks it seems as though the shop has no end. It simply goes back, back, back, into some sort of musty, misty, magical hinterland of crumbling pages and lost knowledge. There’s a cat, too. Its name is Boadicea, and I do not like it. I do not like cats. They return affection with indifference. But even its presence cannot diminish my love of the shop.

  Before the fire, engulfed by one of his colossal wing-backed armchairs, the ancient bibliophile himself sits squinting at dusty pages. He doesn’t look up. (The shop seems otherwise deserted, which is not uncommon. I do not know how it turns a profit, if it turns a profit. Perhaps Tompkins is fabulously wealthy and has never told anyone and runs the shop purely for the pleasure of it.)

  ‘Tompkins,’ I say, ‘I have a problem.’ I always call Tompkins ‘Tompkins.’ Once I tried to call him ‘Mr Tompkins’ and he threw a book at my head.

  He continues to read. He is maybe two hundred years old, though to see the agility with which he climbs a ladder to reach a distant book would astonish you. His eyes are sunk deep within wrinkles, and are very dark and tend to glitter. His hair is perfectly white.

  ‘Tompkins!’

  ‘Eh?’ He turns a page. His voice is not as feeble as you would suppose, looking at its owner—he is a trifle deaf, and talks loudly.

  ‘Damn it, Tompkins, I need your help!’

  ‘I’m in the middle of a chapter,’ he complains.

  ‘I don’t care if you’re in the middle of a sentence!’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Tompkins, something awful has happened.’

  Grumbling, Tompkins lowers the book. ‘What do you want?’ he says, fixing me with a keen-eyed glare.

  ‘I need advice.’

  ‘I hope it’s worth the interruption.’

  ‘I am having peculiar feelings about my wife.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ he says without enthusiasm. ‘You hate her.’ (I often confide in Tompkins.)

  ‘Tompkins, I’m serious! I don’t know whether I hate her or not, that’s the trouble!’

  ‘Well, boy, we live in troublous times.’

  ‘Tompkins, I sold her to the Dev’l!’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The Dev’l.’

  ‘Speak up, Savage, I didn’t quite catch that.’

  ‘THE DEV-ILL!’

  ‘Ah,’ he says, closing the book entirely. ‘And why did you do that?’

  He doesn’t display any surprise at my pronouncement; only interest. That is something I especially like about Tompkins—he is never astounded by anything. I believe that is a by-product of living one’s entire life within books. He has read about every conceivable happening upon this earth, and so the notion that one might sell one’s wife to the Devil is not inconceivable. Indeed, it is even rather commonplace.

  ‘I didn’t mean to!’ I say. ‘It just happened. He dropped by to thank me—’

  ‘He did what?’ Tompkins says, intrigued. I believe he thinks more of me than he has hitherto.

  ‘I don’t have time to explain! Lizzie is holding Ashley Lancaster at bay in my study, and they think I’m in my room, but I’m not, I’m here, and—’

  ‘Ashley Lancaster is back in England? I didn’t know that.’ There is self-reproach in his tone. Tompkins doesn’t like not knowing things. (It is from him that Lizzie got the trait. We spent a considerable portion of our childhood in Tompkins’s bookshop. He and Simmons are very old friends.)*

  ‘Yes! He’s hiding from his parents in my study! He wants to know where his sister is, but I couldn’t tell him, but I finally said she was abducted, but he wasn’t angry he was excited because the supernatural’s rather his area, and he—’

  ‘Breathe, boy,’ advises Tompkins.

  ‘I don’t have time to breathe! I don’t know what to do! There are letters, and he says she loves me!’

  ‘Who says who loves you?’

  ‘Lancaster says Vivien loves me! She told him so in a letter! And now I don’t know what to do!’

  ‘What are your options?’

  ‘I don’t have any options.’

  ‘Lionel Savage, one always has options. Let us begin at the beginning. First, sit down and please stop yelling. You are upsetting the books.’

  I apologise and sit down. Boadicea promptly jumps into my lap and begins to purr. Tompkins hands me tea. I shove the animal onto the floor, then master myself and take a sip. ‘That’s better,’ he says. ‘Now. What precisely is your quandary?’

  I s
tare at him, trying to put it into words. I realise I cannot. I mumble something about hating my wife.

  ‘Who you never have to think about again, for you have sold her to the Devil.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I say, ‘I suppose so. But— But those letters to Lancaster!’

  ‘What about the letters?’

  ‘Is it possible she actually loved me?’ I loathe the wheedling, pathetic tone of my voice.

  ‘I know of nothing impossible when speaking of love.’

  ‘Don’t joke, Tompkins, it isn’t funny.’

  ‘I wasn’t being humorous.’

  If I wondered in childhood whether Lizzie wasn’t somewhat magical, I knew it for certain of Tompkins. He has a way about him which is not of this world. To be in his company is to be put preternaturally at ease. I begin to feel my stomach unclench. My chest, though, is still doing odd things.

  ‘What would it mean if Vivien loved me?’ I ask.

  ‘It would mean you have been very selfish and very blind.’

  ‘But if she loved me, why didn’t she ever say anything?’

  ‘Perhaps she hadn’t the words.’

  ‘She did! She wrote poetry! Did you know that? Poetry that is lovely.’

  ‘Well,’ says Tompkins, ‘let’s ask Mr Kensington. He sometimes has an excellent grasp of these things. What do you think, lad?’

  ‘Maybe she hadn’t the heart,’ says a voice from the stacks. I look around in surprise—I hadn’t realised there was anyone else in the shop.

  A person I do not know emerges from the gloom. He is very young, perhaps eighteen, but tall (not Lancaster tall, but a little taller than me) and pretty well built. He has bright green eyes which look older than the rest of him, and dark hair, and ears that stick out just a little bit too far. He looks too well bred for me to accuse him of eavesdropping, but he seems to have misplaced his eyebrows.

  ‘Hello,’ he says, extending a hand which I take and shake. ‘I’m Will.’

  ‘Savage,’ I say. ‘Lionel Savage.’