A VISIT TO BRYANSTON SQUARE
Unwillingly enough, I set out with our guest to consult my Uncle Theodore. Assuredly it was a scheme in which common sense, in the general acceptation of that elusive quality, had no part. Yet, however preposterous the proceeding, it was an act of common humanity to take even an extravagant measure for the relief of such an acute suffering. It was impossible not to pity the unhappy creature. Her eyes were wild and her appearance had been transformed into that of a hunted animal.
On the way up to town we were fortunate enough to secure a carriage to ourselves. Throughout the journey my companion hardly addressed a word to me, but she continued to betray many tokens of mental anguish. The train was punctual, and by a few minutes after four o'clock we were in Bryanston Square.
It is only once in a lustrum that I visit my Uncle Theodore. He is rich, a bachelor, and in the family is regarded as an incorrigible crank. The champion of lost causes, a poet, a radical, a practitioner of the occult, a scorner of convention, and a robust hater of many things, including all that relates to the merely expedient, the utilitarian and the material, he is looked upon as a dangerous heretic who might be more esteemed if he belonged to a less eminently responsible clan.
Howbeit, I confess that I never visit my Uncle Theodore without feeling constrained to pay a kind of involuntary homage to his personality. He has a way with him; there is a something about him which is the absolute negation of the commonplace. He is tall and extraordinarily frail, with a picturesque mop of orange-coloured hair, and a pair of large round eyes of remarkable luminosity, which seem like twin moons of liquid light.
It was our good fortune to find this bravo at home and in receipt of my telegram. I left my companion in another room while I went forth and bearded the lion in his den. Dressed in a velvet jacket, a red tie and a pair of beaded Oriental slippers he was in the act of composition, and was writing very slowly with a feathered quill upon a sheet of unruled foolscap.
"I am writing a letter to the time-serving rag that disgraces us," he said with a kind of languid vehemence, "and the time-serving rag won't print it, but I shall keep a copy and publish it in a pamphlet at the price of three-pence."
"Then put me down for four copies," said I. "You know I always regard you as one of the few living masters of the King's English."
"The King's English! The King, my boy, has no English. He has less English than the average self-respecting costermonger."
"The well of English undefiled, then."
"That is better. You are perfectly right. It is my firm conviction that my prose is quite equal to my poetry, and yet these dunces persist in saying that we poets can't write prose. Swinburne couldn't, it's true, and with tears in my eyes I used to beseech him to give up trying. But he was an obstinate little fellow. Milton couldn't, either. But Goethe now, Goethe could write prose as well as I can myself, and so could Wordsworth if he had liked, and so could Shelley. As for that yokel from Stratford-on-Avon, if there is anybody who dares to say he couldn't write prose, I should like to have the pleasure of contradicting him."
"I think," said I, "you will be among the prose-writers after your death. If I survive you, I shall hope to prepare a collected edition of the letters you have had rejected by the newspapers."
"That's a bargain, my boy. I will select them for you. It will be a nice little legacy to leave to posterity. A hundred years hence they will speak of me as the British Lucian who opened the stinking casements of a putrid age and let in God's honest sunlight. What a time we live in, and what a poisonous crew inhabits it! Why, do you know, my boy, we have less real freedom in this country than they have in Illyria."
The totally unexpected mention of the blessed word Illyria startled me considerably. That sinister kingdom was evidently in the air.
"You are right, Theodore," said I. "'The stinking casements of a putrid age'—that is a phrase I shall remember when next I am at the point of asphyxiation upon the green benches of the Mother of Parliaments."
"What a football-kicking, boat-tugging, gymnasium-bred crew they must be to stand such an atmosphere day after day, night after night! I shouldn't have thought that a really polite man could have existed in it for three days. I wonder what Edmund Burke thinks of the place when he enters it now."
A rough working knowledge of the subject with which I had to cope rendered it imperative that I should make a determined effort to lay hold of his head before he took charge of me altogether.
"Theodore," said I, "I am not here to yield to the delight of your conversation, much as I yearn to do so. I have brought a lady with me who desires to consult you about the stars."
He seemed to laugh a deep, hollow laugh out of the depths of himself, much as an ogre might be expected to do.
"Vain superstition!" he guffawed, as he stretched out his long tenuous hands. "O ye upper-middle-class British Pharisees, that ye should condescend! Who is this weak vessel that would consult the stars? Not, I trow and trust, a daughter of the late Sir John Stubberfield, Bart.?"
"The late Sir John Stubberfield, Bart." was a symbol erected permanently in his mind, with which he toyed when he was moved to exercise his fancy at the expense of his countrymen.
"Not a daughter of Sir John," I assured him. "An even more potent personage."
"Impossible, my boy! A veritable daughter of Sir John stands at the apex of human endeavour. She is the crown of social, political and philosophical beatitude. Do you forget that it was a daughter of Sir John Stubberfield, Bart., who married a Prosser? Do you forget it was a daughter of Sir John Stubberfield, Bart., who had issue an heir male, a little Prosser?"
"Peace, peace, my good Theodore. You have a bare half-hour in which to read the stars in their courses for a fair unknown. And I beg that you will treat her tenderly, for she is a brave woman and an unhappy."
"Aha!" The Ogre—the name he was known by in the family—sighed a romantic sympathy. It may seem out of harmony with the terms in which I have endeavoured to render the personality of this Berserk, but he had an almost Quixotic development of the sense of chivalry. Nothing so greatly delighted this champion of lost causes as to succour those who were in distress.
"Produce the languishing vestal, so that the arts of the necromancer may sustain her. But stay, my boy; before we go further, may I suggest that you conform to the conventional practice of confiding the name she goes by among men?"
"Certainly. Her name is Mrs. Nevil Fitzwaren."
"Aha!" The Ogre swung half round in his writing-chair to confront me. He seemed like a satyr, and the twin moons that were his eyes began to magnetise me with their uncanny effulgence. "A woman about thirty, of foreign extraction?"
"Ye—es."
"Married an English squire about five years ago?"
"How the deuce do you know that?" said I, in amazement.
Again the look of the satyr seemed to transfigure him.
"What, pray, is the use of being a soothsayer without one is permitted to dabble a little in the black arts?"
"Theodore, my friend," said I, with a somewhat disconcerted laugh, "I am inclined to think you must be the Devil."
"Perchance, my dear boy, perchance." The Ogre placed the tips of his fingers together in a way he had. "May it interest you to know that the Devil is a more potent figure in the public life of our little day than our German friends allow for. Never despise the Devil, and never mention him lightly in any company, for he is always looking at you."
The twin moons were enfolding me with a refulgence that in the dim January twilight was so uncanny that, had I been other than of a fairly robust materialistic texture, I might have felt a kind of horror.
"It is very interesting that your friend Mrs. Fitzwaren—black hair, olive complexion, remarkable appearance, a type you can't place—should come to me like this. The fact is, my dear boy, things are not always what they seem. Judging by the recent behaviour of one or two rather important planetary bodies, and of the new body of which our observant French friends have lately learned to take cognisance, the visit of your friend Mrs. Nevil Fitzwaren to your cracked Uncle Theodore at his local habitation in Bryanston Square may have some kind of a bearing on the destiny of nations. How say you?"
"My dear Theodore," I expostulated, from motives of policy, "my dear Theodore, you really are, 'pon my word you really are——!"
All the same, it was with a singular complexity of emotion that I went forth to lead this prophet and soothsayer into the presence of the Crown Princess of Illyria.
It struck me as I preceded my carpet-slippered relation into the great bare room that the unhappy lady was looking more distinguished and more distraught than-ever. Had I had a merely superficial acquaintance with our family Berserk I must have had qualms as to the mode of his reception of his visitor. In uncongenial company he could be a positive Boeotian savage, but, again, if it pleased him, he could display an ease and a sympathetic charm of bearing which was wholly delightful to those who had the good fortune to call it forth.
As he came shambling in with his flaming tie, his mop of orange-coloured hair, his hands in his pockets and his heels half out of his slippers, would it please him to be the polished and gracious courtier, or the wild Boeotian savage?
His visitor rose to receive him and a grave bow was exchanged. And for the first time in my knowledge of her Mrs. Fitz seemed at a loss for speech. Small wonder was it, for this gaunt, lean presence with the faun-like smile and the still, full, luminous gaze, seemed to hold the key to realms of infinite mystery and power.
"If you will come to my room, we can talk," he said, quite gently.
As he was about to lead the way, he half turned and leered at me ogre-like over his shoulder with his peculiarly significant malice.
"Tell Peacock to give you the Sporting Times and a cigar and a whisky-and-soda, my dear boy," he said.
"Thanks," said I, "but I am afraid you cannot be allowed more than twenty minutes for your interview. It is imperative that Mrs. Fitzwaren should catch the 5.28 from the Grand Central."
"The 5.28 from the Grand Central." He repeated the words as though an importance was attached to them that they had no reason to claim. Then he added musingly, "I am not so clear as I should like to be that you will be wise to catch it. It would be better, I think, if Mrs. Fitzwaren could arrange to travel to-morrow."
"Impossible, my dear Theodore. Mrs. Fitzwaren is staying with us, and we must certainly be back to dinner."
The Princess nodded her concurrence.
"Well, well, if you really must. And perhaps I exceed my prerogative."
The singular creature proceeded to lead the way to his study. I was left to meditate alone for twenty minutes upon this latest expression of his personality. Never before had I realised so fully that he was the possessor of gifts the nature of which was as a sealed book to the common mortal. There had been occasions when we "in the family" had been tempted to believe that there was a strong infusion of the charlatan in his pretension to occult knowledge. A prophet is not without honour save in his own country.
But as I sat this January evening in his house in Bryanston Square, I realised more fully than I had ever done before that the last word has yet to be uttered in regard to the things around us. It was as though all at once my cranky relation in his carpet slippers, his velvet coat and his red tie had brought me into a more intimate contact with the Unseen.
Somehow, and for no specific reason that I was able to discover, my unruly nerves began to tick like a clock. The temperature of the room was not high, but a perspiration broke out all over me. A full five minutes I sat in the silence of the gathering darkness not quite knowing what to do and not caring particularly. It was as though the enervating atmosphere of my uncle's nearness had taken from me the power of volition.
It never occurred to me to ring the bell, and yet I had merely to press the button at my elbow. Nevertheless, when a servant entered with a lamp it was a real relief.
"Hullo, Peacock!" said I, issuing with a little shiver from my reverie.
Somehow it seemed that that retainer, trusted, elderly, responsible, looked singularly pale and meagre in the lamp-light.
"Are you very well, Peacock?"
"Thank you, sir, not very." The old servant sighed heavily.
"Why, what's the matter?"
The old fellow proceeded to draw the curtains and then turned to face me with a kind of nervous defiance.
"Fact is, Mr. Odo," he said, "this place is getting too much for me. I am afraid I shan't be able to go on much longer. Fact is, Mr. Odo"—the old man lowered his voice to a whisper of painful solemnity—"it is contrary to the will of God."
"What is contrary to the will of God?"
"The goings on, sir, of Mr. Theodore. My private opinion is—and I say to you, Mr. Odo, what I wouldn't say to another"—the voice of the old fellow grew lower and lower—"that Mr. Theodore is getting to know a bit more than any man ought to: in fact, sir, more than the Almighty intended any man should."
"What do you mean, Peacock? You are not growing superstitious in your old age, are you?"
I strove to speak in a light tone. But in my own ears my voice sounded curiously high and thin.
"I mean this, sir. The line ought to be drawn somewhere. And Mr. Theodore doesn't know where to draw it. The people he has here, sir—it's—well, it's appalling! Clairvoyants, mediums, mahatmas, Indian fakirs, table-turners, spirit-rappers, and I can't say what. Communion with spirits is all very well, sir, but it is contrary to the will of God. The Almighty never intended, sir, that we should pry into all the secrets of existence."
"How do you know that, Peacock?"
"I know by this, sir." The old fellow tapped the centre of his forehead solemnly. "The thing that lies behind this."
To my surprise the old servant wrung his hands and burst into tears.
"It can't go on, sir—at least, as far as I am concerned. Either Mr. Theodore will have to mend his ways or I shall have to leave him. I have been a long time with Mr. Theodore, and of course I was with his father before him, and I daresay I am getting old, but do you know what we have got in the attic, sir?"
"What have you got in the attic, Peacock?"
"An Egyptian mummy, sir. It is several thousand years old, and I am convinced that a curse is on it. I wouldn't enter that attic, sir, not me, not for all the wealth of the Rothschilds."
"I was not aware that you were superstitious, Peacock," said I, with a very ineffectual assumption of the formal tone of the married man, the father of the family, and the county member.
"It is not superstition, sir, but I know what I know. That mummy has got to leave this house, or I shall leave it."
"Is that the fiat of the True Believer?"
"I don't fear God the less, sir, because I fear an Egyptian mummy, if that is what you mean."
"But you are inclined to think there are more things in earth and heaven than it is well for the average man to be concerned with?"
"I am convinced of that, sir; and if Mr. Theodore doesn't get rid of that mummy and amend his goings on, I shall be compelled to give notice."
Stated baldly, the old fellow's words may seem ridiculous. But as he uttered them his distress was so sincere that it was impossible to deny him a meed of sympathy.
"Quite right, if you do, Peacock," I agreed. "And you can lay it to that honest conscience of which you are rightly proud that you have served the family long and faithfully, and that no one will question your right to an annuity."
"Oh, that will be all right, sir," said the old retainer; "even if Mr. Theodore does act contrary to the will of God, nobody can deny that he is a perfect gentleman."
"Is not that rather a confirmation of the ancient, theory that the Devil was the first perfect gentleman?"
"I have not thought of that before, sir, but now you mention it, it is certainly worth thinking about."
Having lent sanction to this profound truth, the old fellow went out of the room. But I recalled him from the threshold.
"By the way, Peacock, Mr. Theodore told me to ask for the Sporting Times, a cigar and a whisky-and-soda."
"Very good, sir." The old fellow withdrew.
"And thank God for them!" I muttered devoutly to the bare walls.