The Collected Connoisseur

by Valentine, Mark

  ‘Deprived of my sight, I listened intently but could only hear the slow, deliberate tread of footfalls, as if the strange cadre were processing carefully to a preordained march, and then a renewed grandiose rumbling from Branescu, this time uttering short, abrupt sentences which, to my intent hearing, seemed in a different tongue than before. The tone of the invocation seemed to have strengthened.

  ‘Again, he stopped abruptly: and it was as if some vast, oppressive mass occupied the silence. I seemed to find another sense, vitally alert to movement and presence, and I felt keenly all around me the presence of dense, shadowy forms, shuddering into shape from the very darkness. I heard too the unnatural breathing of those I supposed had summoned these forms, harsh and edged.

  ‘There was a whirring from the middle of the room and even through my blind I distinguished a quick, flickering intrusion of light. Branescu’s voice rose again, coarse and angry, in short sharp bursts as of one uttering vehement curses: and that quickened new sense conveyed to me a surging of the shapes, a lunging as of some beast of prey after its quarry. Another voice haltingly rasped out “Mihal!” before a renewed outburst from Branescu ensured that his voice had no competition.

  ‘I seemed to feel a veritable pulsing within the room, as if waves of black, bitter anger were flooding out in mono-rhythm, like a chant of hate from a hundred throats. Then above this there seemed to strike upon my senses spasms of sharper, harder force, shards of sheer, spear-like hatred. I felt as if I was being drawn into a dark vortex, as if something within me would soon be utterly suppressed and seared away by the malevolent energy from this incantatory assault.

  ‘I thought wildly of how I had stumbled into this predicament, and my mind seized desperately at the recollection of the faces I had seen in the photographic collection in the white wood solander, calling them into my inner vision one by one. As I did so, there seemed to seep into the pulsing darkness a single, silent sliver of half-light, and I held on hard to this leap of pale illumination. Gradually Branescu’s voice seemed to falter, changing from the tone of one performing an invocation to that of a man struggling to overcome sudden, stuttering doubt and fright, as if at a sudden shocking revelation. The name “Mihal!” was shouted again in anguish and closely followed by a series of sharp negations.

  ‘Despite my blinded sight, it seemed to me that the grave and faded faces on the glass slides were somewhere holding steadfast in silent defiance of the forces unleashed around us. I tried to focus all my inward vision on their grey, flickering forms, and began to feel the slow diffusion of their influence sustaining a vulnerable citadel against that ravening, raging darkness. The citadel seemed surrounded by implacable forces, yet it held.

  ‘Then the doors burst inwards, and I felt the cool rush of charging bodies sweep in. I was thrust off my chair, and my blindfold wrenched off. Blinking, I stared into the sharply-drawn face of the assailant who had seized the Balmont from me a few days before, who handed me my old leopard stick, and helped me to my feet. I scarcely had time to register the pale, fine features I recognised from my nocturnal encounter, nor the cap rammed down upon the shorn hair, before I was distracted by a stranger sight still: a tall, lean form wielding his own formidable rapier, drawn from a silver-headed cane: Gaspard.

  ‘He held a staring, unbelieving Branescu at its point, while my rescuer and a young, saturnine man who had been part of the ritual, and who now swiftly seized a ceremonial poignard, threatened the rest of the company. We were four against six, but we had the advantage of surprise and we had their leader at the sword’s end.

  ‘Yet I had the sense that it was not so much the tempestuous arrival of his adversaries, nor the discovery of a counter-agent in his midst that had stunned and crushed the old hierophant, as rather some shuddering transformation in the enactment he was leading, some sudden silent descent of a different force entirely from those he had invoked.

  We gathered up the box and its contents, and made two of them carry the projector out to Gaspard’s car, while he talked menacingly and low to Branescu’s sagged and spiritless carcass. Then we sped from the scene with all dispatch.

  ‘My new companions briefly introduced themselves. The capped figure that had stopped me on the old causeway stared at me now in full light with an ironical twist to the faint lips. “Magda,” she said, in the same theatrical whisper she had used that night, and I gazed back at her for a while, at the shorn hair, and the paleness, and the oblique shape of the face, and the bleak smile. Then, “Stefan,” said the saturnine young man, and we shook hands.

  ‘As Gaspard headed us away to an obscure aerodrome, he gave us a few succinct explanations. He said he had searched for the box with the radiant marquetry all along the Black Sea littoral and its penumbral countries as soon as he had heard something of its story; and when he secured it, he knew it was a precious charge. Rumours soon reached him that the dark core of the old Iron Guard which had once dominated much of that region with terror, was not defunct, and that it still had adherents intent on seizing the solander, to suppress the spirit that it symbolised, and the secret it contained of the final vestiges of a courageous cause. There were several attempts upon the box as he brought it to England. Yet he heard too that there were those who honoured the memory of that cause, and they put him in touch with Stefan, their conspirator inside the enemy camp.

  ‘Turning to me with a look of insouciance, Gaspard then offered his brief apologies. He had hoped that leaving the solander with me would prompt those who sought out the charged contents to try their hand, if they thought he was out of the way. After that, Stefan, his contact inside Branescu’s Legionary Order, had told him that a faked letter, as if from Gaspard, had been sent to me, in an attempt to lure me to the “Institute”. Gaspard had let himself into my rooms during the day, identified this letter after it was delivered, examined the forgery, decided it was too crude and blatant to fool me—“I’m paying you a compliment here, you understand. Of course I could have been wrong,” as he so pleasantly put it—and substituted one of his own, which—as you have seen—almost trusted a little too far to my ingenuity.’

  The Connoisseur broke off his narrative at this point, and enquired, ‘You will have discerned no doubt, that the first letter of Stenbock, the second of Corvo, the third of Polidori, and so on, hintingly spells out “solander”.’

  I emitted a noncommittal observation, and he resumed.

  ‘Gaspard needed to induce Branescu to bring out of hiding the projector whose place of concealment not even the others of the Order knew. And he wanted to force a final reckoning with that last dark relic of the inner Order of the Iron Guard. I was a catspaw, certainly. But he kept back one of the photographic frames to ensure that some at least of Branescu’s dark work would be frustrated at the last if things did not go according to plan.

  ‘And indeed he nearly didn’t arrive in time. He had reckoned without Magda, who was independently in pursuit of the box and the plates, and who stopped him on his journey. I gather they had quite an exchange before it dawned upon them that their aim was the same. She had been tailing him ever since she got word of what he had found, and had stopped me for the Balmont on the assumption that it was the box. For she must be some descendant of one of those who gave their life for the cause that the box commemorates: and she is now its possessor.’

  My friend again gazed briefly at the grey print by his side. ‘The Thirteen, as they were known,’ he continued, after a few moments’ reflection, ‘were a group of young idealists in Bucharest in the 1920s and 30s. They pitched themselves against their country’s authoritarian militia, the Legion of the Archangel Michael, or Iron Guard. The Thirteen had kept alive the liberal ideals and universalist views from better days, and learned from friends in Paris; some half-Dadaist notions had found their way through too, from Zurich and Prague. At first they were hardly in earnest, possibly just enjoying the thrill of rebellion. But as their mockery and parody of the regime and the failure of the promise of “Greater Roma
nia” became more biting, and better-known, they were plunged into danger.

  ‘The “Studio de Beaux-Arts”, as the little Panoramica was somewhat pretentiously called, became their headquarters. The old inventor who owned it was a sympathiser, a freethinker and a Theosophist by repute, and so the closed-down building was made free for their use. At first they employed it for risible montages of Codreanu (“The Captain”), and his “gauleiters”, and the politicians and landowners that ruled the country without enriching it, whose strutting and vain portraits they would cast upon the walls in improbable circumstances—amongst the odalisques of a harem backdrop, perhaps, or the clowns of a circus.

  ‘But on one occasion they decided to perform a quickfire imitation of the most sacred of the Legion’s militaristic rituals: the torchlit calling and answering of the names of their dead warriors. They flicked up pictures of themselves in bizarre costumes and poses, and answered for each other in extravagant dadaspeak. Word got out. Their first loss followed within days. After that, curiously enough, they began to enact the ritual in earnest, partly in defiance and partly because it seemed to have a strange potency. At their meetings, the flickering grey forms of their own who had gone before were cast upon the white walls by the parascope, the spoked projector used in the old Studio, and there was an act of silent remembrance by the survivors.

  ‘And it began to seem to them, so Stefan solemnly recounted the legend, as if the real spiritual presences of their companions were with them there in the angular studio whenever their images were played from the rays of the unique projector that the old inventor had made. And perhaps not only their companions, but something—or someone—Other. After a time, they could scarcely distinguish between the projections and the insubstantial figures they thought were with them.

  ‘When they finally succumbed, the old theosophist that owned the studio played the cracked-headed ancient and avoided capture. He saved the glass plates and placed them reverently in the box engraved with the colours of The Thirteen, but the projector was confiscated.

  ‘The terrible and unequal duel of those days did not die away with the passing years. The last of the Iron Guard, and their successors, knew that there was some relic, some secret of their opponents that had evaded them. When Gaspard prevented it from falling into their hands from that Turkish dealer, they alerted their exiled adherents in Britain. Branescu’s ritual was designed to summon down the secret inner forces of his order to destroy any last, lingering vestige of The Thirteen’s spirit. Yet there were two of us—Stefan and I—who were summoning that spirit of youthful revolt for all we were worth, and it seems that some spectre of it had indeed survived.’

  The Connoisseur rose wearily and handed me the faded grey print he had been contemplating, and I saw again, more clearly, the face of the young woman depicted—the cropped hair, dark arrowed eyebrows, lean cheeks and curt mouth. ‘A few weeks after all this,’ he continued, ‘I received a brief card inscribed from Magda, with a copy of one of the prints in the solander, I suppose of one of the original group. It is a strong, a remarkable likeness.’

  I handed it back to him carefully. He leaned over and slipped the photograph back in between the pages of a book that still lay open on the table. Then, more briskly, as if shaking away some dim shadow at the back of his mind, The Connoisseur rose, took up the old black leopard swordstick, polished it with a flourish using a black kerchief, and replaced it in its niche—until the next time.

  The Last Archipelago,

  being The Secret History of

  the First Crossing of Spitsbergen

  As well as recounting to me his own experiences of the curious and unaccountable, my friend The Connoisseur also shared with me narratives from a modest collection of manuscript records left by those who seemed to have entered into similar regions. These he and colleagues such as the explorer Gaspard and the dilettante mystic, Ivo Tradescant, sought out in the libraries, muniment rooms, auction houses and annals of learned societies within their reach.

  On one evening of hard, searing frost, with the fire stirred to a golden vigour, he fetched down a quarto notebook bound in black, and turned the pages slowly; they made a crisp rippling sound as he did so.

  ‘This is just right for such a night as this,’ he began, ‘but first a word or so of introduction. This narrative, which I acquired when an ancient club in this city, fallen into desuetude, was forced to relinquish some of its library, concerns the islands of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean. The Northernmost outpost of Europe, this territory now has a number of huddled communities, encourages visitors, and even has a music festival. Yet barely a century ago it had no permanent inhabitants and much of it was unknown land.

  ‘At different times in recent centuries both England and Denmark had considered annexation of the entire archipelago; but nothing ever came of it. Its official literature finds no place to name the British expedition of 1896, under the command of Sir Martin Conway. Nor, indeed, is Conway known much in his own country now, despite the eminence he once had as an explorer and mountaineer. The Conway expedition, the first to cross the island from coast to coast and to go into the heart of what was then a highly remote, inhospitable and lonely place, is now hardly even a footnote in the history of the polar lands. Yet it was a distinguished assembly. Conway himself was a man of great energy and vision and the party contained three other experienced explorers.

  ‘The exception was the cadet of the crew, Philip Hazleton. At twenty-three, the youngest of the team by some distance, he was Conway’s personal selection; and yet he is hardly mentioned in his leader’s comprehensive study. This notebook, left to that library by Hazleton himself, allows us to speculate as to why. It suggests that Conway’s Spitsbergen survey was the first—though perhaps not the only—British expeditionary team where one of the members was deliberately chosen because of his sensitivity to the unseen. This journal tells us something of what resulted from that experiment.’

  The Connoisseur settled the book in front of him and read carefully, lingering over many phrases, the following account, which I later copied down:

  ‘I am the last of the five members of the expedition to set down my experiences, and the last to survive. Conway’s monumental official account now stands stolidly in the library of many an institution, club and gentleman’s library, august in its royal blue and gilt livery, but, I venture to suggest, scarcely ever read. Trevor-Battye’s slim essay, collected with several other reminiscences of the field, may occasionally be glanced over by those seeking some idle diversion. Garwood’s mountaineering exploits make for gaunter reading, and I believe in moments he approaches closely to revealing some hint of the experiences I shall relate, but he is writing mainly for fellow-climbers. They, I think, will recognise something in his curt, precise evocation of the silence and the vastness: but few will care to put a name to it, or pursue it further. Dr Gregory provided that concise and carefully factual study that his Museum expected, and his monograph was accordingly well-received: like most such, it captures all and more that one could wish of the outward and visible world on that great Arctic island; and nothing of any importance whatsoever.

  ‘The first crossing of Spitsbergen, Conway called it, and the claim had a fine heroic ring to it. Strictly, it cannot be gainsaid. We were indeed the first to cross from one coast of the island to the other, setting foot as we did so on untrodden leagues of icy waste, bringing our human taint to the vast pure whiteness of its interior. Man has worried away at the edges of the place for some years. There are huddled shacks at intervals on the coastline, where walrus-hunters, scientists, surveyors, pioneers such as ourselves, have set up their transient base camps. And the better landfalls and sheltered bays are seldom utterly remote from human activity.

  ‘But inland from these coastal margins there is a completely different world, of great desolate peaks, long plains, troughs, steep ridges, all brilliantly white under the hard light, or concealed by cold, slow cloud drifts. And we were the first to see
this, and I alone, I believe, the first to fully experience what is to be found there. Officially, I was the expedition’s artist, and my adequate sketches, often done in charcoal with gloved hand, appear in Conway’s account. He selected, of course, mostly those that show the impedimenta of our mission; the tents, the doughty Norwegian ponies and sledges, the landing-boat, the climbing gear. As for my fumbling attempts to set down the land that we saw; well those, for the most part, he tactfully omitted. While in truth I account myself no more than a competent draughtsman, I would defy even a Turner to convey in fixed images the white majesty, the crystalline purity, the brilliant light that we saw, still less the very curious sense both of brittleness and yet of insubstantiality, the constant impression of being present upon a cusp in existence. Yet this I tried to do, exercising a spare economy of line and letting the paper tablet tell most of the tale. They are pale shadows only, and I do not hope that this narrative will do any better.

  ‘So: I was the official artist, yes; but Conway also took me along for another reason that only he and I knew. The military mind is far from narrow, as some people think, and our annals are full of soldiers who had deeper instincts and interests; one might name Fuller, Lawrence, Younghusband as three only of the most renowned who had a profounder cast of mind. So it was with Conway, and exploration for him was never solely of territory, though he was always careful to give adventure as his first motive, for that the public can always understand. But he knew Mead well, scholar of the arcane; and he knew Wallis Budge, the Egyptologist; and others. Mingling in such company, he was introduced to me at the Iamblichus Club, in a most modest and discreet Georgian house in a quiet square of a provincial cathedral city: and in a room illuminated by the fine light entering from a high window, we hesitantly established our commonality of interest. I had just been sent down for a rag that got out of hand; I was known as a strong athlete and a nimble fencer; these were all my known gifts.