by Russell Kirk
“Quite, quite, my dear.” Madame pursed her thin lips. “But it’s rather late for theological discussion just now, don’t you think? Do keep close to the Archvicar, when possible. Let me see... do we have a key to your room? Apparently not, and the bolt’s wanting, too. You can put a chair back under the knob, can’t you?”
Phlebas was lighting a fire in the grate, taking more coals from a handsome copper scuttle. How many years might it have been since anyone slept here? But the chimney seemed to draw well enough, and there was a pretty pink counterpane on the ancient bed. Tomorrow Mr. Apollinax would talk with her again, bringing fresh significance into her life.
Madame Sesostris was rattling on. “You needn’t be uneasy: this may be one of the quiet nights, and the other people are in a different part of the house. Look, your tiny Michael is smiling at us! Does he resemble his father? But what am I saying? Perhaps you’d not wish him to. Call me Mrs. Mala-prop, do. It’s no great matter nowadays, I suppose, my dear: many a fine man has been conceived on the wrong side of a blanket, the Archvicar among them. Sleep late, if you like, for Mr. Apollinax never sees anyone before noon. The others will breakfast together, but you can be excused for tomorrow morning, at least. Phlebas will have your tea and sandwiches ready in a twinkling, and someone will bring you breakfast on a tray. It might be well for you to have your meals in your room whenever possible; but we shall have to see about that. What have you been brought here for, I wonder? Do sleep well.”
When the old woman had tottered out, followed by Phlebas, Marina busied herself in unpacking. There was an antique wardrobe with infinite room for her dresses and the baby’s things. Then she fed the baby; and when Phlebas came back with the tea, she found it good. The little black man bowed his way backward out the door with a grin presumably intended to be polite and deferential, but looking lupine.
Had that Madame Sesostris meant to unsettle her? Surely, despite the atmosphere of decay and melancholy about this house, the vitality of Mr. Apollinax would be transmitted to the others invited to this gathering, whoever they might be-and especially to her.
Weary though she felt, Marina made some inspection of her room. Two small windows were behind heavy draperies; she raised the sash of one. It was far too dark to make out much, but her room seemed to face upon a large wild garden, almost a park; the silhouette of a tall monkey-puzzle tree was not far distant, beyond outbuildings. She thought she caught a glimmer from a pond, beyond which the ground seemed to rise sharply. It looked a long, long way from her windows to the ground.
She turned back into the room. Beyond Michael in the old crib that Phlebas had brought, a small door was set into the wall, presumably opening into a closet. Or could it be that, after all, she had been assigned her own bathroom? The little door was a sticky one, and when she had wrenched it open, she was startled.
This was no closet, but the entrance to a stair. It curved both upward and downward. Was her room situated in a portion of the medieval buildings on this site? The little stair, with a monkish look about it, seemed a kind of incrustation upon a mass of ancient masonry: Marina perceived that the stair must twist around the chimney stack into which her room’s fireplace was let. Did the stair go up to the top of the house, and down to the cellars? Niche and stair were marvelously cobwebby, as if no one had come this way for a great while. Perhaps the stair was blocked somewhere above and somewhere below. She didn’t wish to rummage about other people’s houses, and she was quite worn out. She closed the little door again, noticing, in the act, that curiously enough the door had a heavy bolt and socket on its inner side, but no fastening by which she could lock it from within her room.
Sinking into her bed, Marina discovered that Phlebas had put an earthenware “pig,” filled with hot water, down between the sheets, thoughtfully meant to comfort her feet. What slaves we are to creature comforts! Indeed this was a damp, chill house; she’d not wish to sleep here always. Yet however odd the choice of site for this gathering of disciples, at Balgrummo Lodging there might occur that Timeless Moment, and all of them might be transfigured.
2
The Mystical Master
Sweeney had lost himself somewhere between his bedroom and the east drawing room, where he was supposed to meet with Apollinax. Such damned bad lighting, so many closed doors, so many aimless flights of stairs, such corridors that led nowhere, here at Balgrummo Lodging! And there was no whiskey served in this house; it was against Mr. Apollinax’s rules, he had been told. Of course there were the three bottles prudently carried in his luggage, but they might have to last him a week; he would open the first after the conference with Apollinax. Now should he go through this green baize door on his right, or take the short flight of steps just ahead of him?
At that moment he heard the tapping of a stick in that damask-hung corridor, and started sharply.
“Rather like the doors in Bluebeard’s castle, aren’t they?” said the Archvicar.
That bland old crepuscular person was not precisely the companion Sweeney would have chosen for a dark corner; it would have been more entertaining to have encountered here that pretty prude Marina. But the Archvicar did know his way about, purblind though he was, for he opened the green door and led Sweeney down a short passage, into the east drawing room. Below the Jacobean chimneypiece a fire was dying on the hearth.
“Do take a chair,” the Archvicar invited him. “Grishkin, giving ‘promise of pneumatic bliss,’ told me a few minutes ago that Mr. Apollinax won’t receive us for at least another quarter of an hour.”
“Where’s everybody else?” Sweeney stirred the half-consumed billets of wood with a baroque brass poker nearly as tall as himself.
“Most of them, except my people, are in the great hall, I believe-which, by the way, was the monks’ refectory before the Dissolution. An odd lot, aren’t they, these disciples of Apollinax?”
“Odder than you?” Sweeney grunted.
“Oh, surely, and odder even than you, my friend. You and I are moved by natural vices: you by the concupiscence of the flesh, I by avarice. These grotesques in Apollinax’s collection have run through the disappointing litany of the Seven Deadly Sins, have found those limited diversions wanting, and now seek sensation beyond the ordinary senses.” Archvicar Gerontion seemed to be trying to find a tolerable position in the corner of the sofa for his twisted back.
“How do you mean?” This old man, Sweeney had reason to know, ought to be the last person to set up as censor.
“I refer, my friend, to the twelve older men and women that our Master has gathered together. The twelve neophytes, the eight boys and four girls who hew our wood and draw our water for this conference, aren’t old enough to be totally blasé, I suppose, but they’re well on their way. You are here because you’re useful in one fashion; Grishkin, useful in another; I in a third, with Madame and Phlebas and Madame’s maid, my necessary props in my decrepitude. But the twelve worn-out disciples—faugh! I take it that you’ve not seen them yet. However do Miss Marina and her infant fit into this puzzle?”
The Archvicar’s chin rested on the carved head of his ebony stick, he looking altogether like a swarthy gargoyle. It was impossible to make out his eyes behind those peculiar goggles of his. His stare had kept Sweeney nervous in Haggat; it perturbed Sweeney here. And this might be a perilous conversation, what with Apollinax’s imperious habits and his short way with dissenters. Was the Archvicar trying to draw him out and entrap him, for some malign reason?
“You’re sure this room isn’t bugged?” asked Sweeney, sotto voce. He could not resist trying to find out what the Archvicar might know that he did not know.
“Perfectly sure. I hired this house myself, through my old Scottish connections, and arrived here days before Apollinax did. There’s no one in his crew capable of installing such devices, although time was when I could have done such work with these my own hands.”
Had it not been for the hint of chi-chi, the curious archaic turns of English, the goggles, and the insinuating mann
er of this old gargoyle, Sweeney scarcely would have recognized in this gaunt, bent figure the drug dealer of Haggat, in Africa. Had there been any gods to thank, Sweeney would have sent up the smoke of burnt offerings to them for sparing him from the Hamnegri prison into which the Archvicar had been flung a year ago; it had been a close call, that.
In his mind’s eye, Sweeney saw the two of them sitting, face to face like this, in the fusty back parlor of the Archvicar’s chemist’s shop down a dirty lane in the Armenian quarter of Haggat, the Archvicar prudently counting the big notes that Sweeney had delivered to him in exchange for those precious little parcels of a substance which no one else could procure for Apollinax. But it had been beastly hot in Haggat that evening, and it was ghastly chill in Balgrummo Lodging this evening.
It had been hotter still next day, when the Hamnegri security forces had caught Sweeney in his hotel and the Archvicar in his shop. They had detained Sweeney only a week, putting him to no especial pain, and then had expelled him from the country. They had kept the Archvicar for nearly a year, and had cracked his spine for him.
“How’d you manage to get out?” Sweeney inquired, glancing aside from the Archvicar’s impenetrable goggles.
The Archvicar rubbed thumb and forefinger together-a frequent gesture of his that Sweeney recalled from the Haggat evening. “From Vice-Premier M’Rundu, anything in Hamnegri can be bought for a price. He took every franc I had, except for passage money. As you may have suspected, friend Sweeney, I had done well enough during my Haggat years, despite my lifelong relish for gaming. Lost, all my hoard lost to M’Rundu! So now I am Apollinax’s hireling attendant lord, swelling his progress: an easy tool, deferential, glad to be of use, politic, cautious, and meticulous. Forget my quondam name, remembering always to call me Geron-tion: ‘I am an old man, a dull head among windy spaces.’”
“I shouldn’t have expected that they’d have been so rough on you in a country where half the people eat hashish.”
“Ah, but the charge was murder: the unfortunate death of some of those beggars on whom I tested dosages of kalanzi at Mr. Apollinax’s insistence. Not once before had I been found guilty of homicide.”
“Not the first time you’d been charged, though?”
“I stand silent. Yet why call this kettle black, friend pot? I have not been imprisoned for rape: I make no war upon women, nor need to.”
Scowling, Sweeney half rose from his chair. “What in hell do you know about that?”
“One conviction of you on that charge, old chap, with a three-year term of imprisonment imposed. If you don’t mind my saying so, it’s a coward’s crime. You do mind? You were paroled at the end of a year, and arrested and charged four other times for offenses against women.”
Sweeney drew in his breath. “Apollinax keeps dossiers?”
“He does indeed.” The Archvicar chuckled softly. “I have seen most of them: cards on all the twelve disciples, on the twelve acolytes, on you, presumably on Grishkin and me. Our mystical Master might have obtained his information out of Interpol, so detailed it is; he moves in labyrinthine ways his wonders to perform.” The Archvicar writhed, perhaps settling his painful spine again, and then resumed.
“But why, dear Sweeney, do we talk of such sordid concerns in so splendid an old house as this? I believe you studied architecture, and a little archaeology, before you were expelled from the university. Is this not a lovely dark house? A trifle shabby, I confess, like you and me, but one scarcely notices the ravages of moth and deathwatch beetle when the draperies are drawn.” He swept a supple hand before him, in homage to the grace of this vaulted room.
“It’s damned damp.”
“I suppose it always was, the Fettinch Moss lying so near to the house. But what the old lairds sought was grandeur, not comfort. The last Lord Balgrummo had nothing done in the way of repairs, and there was dry rot in many a room by the time he died. Yet the Balgrummo Trust seems to have patched things up tolerably-out of pious sentiment, I suppose, for we’re the first tenants they’ve found since old Balgrummo came to his end.”
“Is it true that a burglar did him in?”
“Au contraire, dear friend: it looked rather as if he had done the burglar in. Very nearly three years ago, the two of them were found cold stone dead in the morning, in different rooms, with no mark of violence on either corpse. The burglar had been a strong man in the prime of life, while of course Lord Balgrummo was past ninety years, some fifty of them spent continuously and compulsorily in this house.”
“I know his dirty story.” Sweeney lit a cigarette. “He tried to raise the devil, literally, and went crazy as a coot, and chopped up a man and a woman about 1913, here in this house. Because he was a peer, they didn’t hang him. What kind of justice was that?”
Sweeney was conscious inwardly of having done certain acts for which he still might have been hanged in certain states, had they caught and convicted him. Yet damn all peers and privileges! Damn all in authority, Apollinax included! Still, who but Apollinax would have hired Sweeney, with his dubious credentials and more than doubtful record? Who but Apollinax would have engaged such a grisly old toad as this “Gerontion”? So he supposed that the pair of them ought to be grateful to Apollinax, demanding though that master was.
“What kind of justice?” the Archvicar echoed him. “Lex talionis, retributive justice, my dear Sweeney. Balgrummo gave his word never to leave Balgrummo Lodging, which meant that he consented to spend the rest of his life in his own peculiar hell, Balgrummo’s Hell. There existed also peculiar, if not extenuating, circumstances here when Balgrummo did what he did in 1913: like Gilles de Rais, he was as much victim as monster. Balgrummo took a great while dying. Do you fancy, Sweeney, that Balgrummo’s with us still, in spirit? Alone out in that corridor some minutes ago, you seemed ill at ease.”
Sweeney snorted. “I take Apollinax’s cash, but I don’t buy his game.” He glanced about the long room: all the doors were shut. “You can have the spirit, and I’ll take the flesh.”
“So you acknowledge no ghosts, Mr. Apeneck Sweeney? None of those ‘Timeless Moments’ for you, eh? No duality? We’re worms’ meat merely, you maintain?” The Archvicar lifted his head and leaned forward pontifically. “Why, think so still, Apeneck, till experience teach otherwise.”
“If there were a Hell, you’d rot in it,” Sweeney told him, resentfully.
“That’s not our gospel according to Apollinax, my friend, not the wisdom of Apollinax, with ‘his laughter submarine and profound.’ Don’t you trust in our benefactor Mr. Apollinax, with his dry and passionate talk?”
The old man’s tone was equable. Was he mocking altogether? It continued, that insinuating voice of Archvicar Gerontion, faintly unctuous.
“I grant you, Sweeney, that our Master seems to be polishing rough diamonds, this lot we have with us on the present occasion. Excepting yourself and myself-if you’il concede me an exception, provisionally, for the sake of argument-and my own entourage, and presumably Miss Marina and her baby, why, everyone in this house tonight is corrupt, thoroughly depraved, as if in demonstration of pure Augustinian doctrine. Of course I don’t mean to include Apollinax him-self-salaam, salaam-in my indictment.
“Why has he chosen such unlikely candidates for redemption? Why give them the Timeless Moment? I pride myself upon my memory, and I recall their dossiers.”
“For instance?”
“Why, my friend, take the faded demi-rep upon whom Apollinax has bestowed the name of Madame de Tornquist: she has played about with black spells, poisoning her husband in the course of one of them. Take that elderly Oriental gentleman, fancier of small lovely things, who passes under the name of Hakagawa: he has been a Napoleon of abortion mills. But I grow garrulous. Strong though my stomach is, it would sicken me to run through the roster of tonight’s lodgers in this Lodging. Corrupt, all corrupt; unblemished turpitude, delightful phrase.” He sank back into the sofa, laying his stick across his knees.
“Do I include
voluptuous Grishkin, whose former name I happen to know—although, unlike many others, I have not known her carnally? I do include her, Apollinax’s own darling Coppelia doll. ‘She’s a dead thing, or never was alive.’ Like the French queen, she could keep her lovers’ hearts in bottles. All this being so, then why our ingenue Miss Marina, more sinned against than sinning? Why, in heaven’s name, her baby boy?”
Archvicar Gerontion’s soft voice had turned sibilant. He raised his thick white eyebrows in animated inquiry, slid a hand inside his waistcoat to draw forth a cigar, lit it ceremoniously. “Burma cheroot, my Apeneck friend, the only true cigar. One for you? No? Your vile cigarettes will drag you to a coughing horror of a death.”
“Apollinax pays you and pays me,” Sweeney told him. “Why all this fuss about his clients? The old ladies love his hocus-pocus, and it doesn’t hurt them to pay for it. So long as he rakes in the cash, what’s it to you and me?”
“Disciple of dirty Diogenes, your cynicism doesn’t probe deep enough.” The Archvicar puffed upon his cheroot. “Behold in me an old man, a profound skeptic, who transcended mere cynicism epochs ago. I have dwelt amidst dangers for many decades, and have got my bread by most hazardous occupations, and yet have kept a whole skin. I know humanity. I know Apollinax for something other than a money-grubbing charlatan.”
A little ash fell upon his waistcoat. Producing a delicate silk handkerchief, the Archvicar brushed it carefully away, not ceasing to talk.
“Penny-dreadful things were done in this house when I was young. I know, for I am the last person left who was concerned in them. That is one reason why Apollinax values me, and he asks me many a searching question about what precisely was done here, and how. Oh, I had no direct hand in those doings; I was a silly spectator of the lesser things, a dilettante in the occult, no adept. Well, then, Apollinax asks too many such questions. I do not propose, if it can be helped, to repeat the follies of a misspent youth.”