QUIDNUNC
I was so fired by that extraordinary adventure, that I think I could have overcome my constitutional timidity and made myself acquainted with the only actor in it who was accessible if I had not become involved in another matter of the sort. But I don't know that I should have helped myself thereby. To the night the things of the night pertain. If I could have had speech with Mrs. Ventris in that season of her radiancy there would have been no harm; but by day she was another creature. Thereby contact was impossible because it would have been horrible. It is true that a certain candour of conduct distinguished her from the frowsy drabs with whom she must have jostled in public-house bars or rubbed elbows at lodging-house doors, a sort of unconsciousness of evil, which I take to have been due to an entire absence of a moral sense. It is probable that she was not a miserable sinner because she did not know what was miserable sin. Heat and cold she knew, hunger and thirst, rage and kindness. She could not be unwomanly because she was not woman, nor good because she could not be bad. But I could have been very bad; and to me she was, luckily, horrible. I could not divorce her two apparent natures, still less my own. We are bound—all of us—by our natures, bound by them and bounded. I could not have touched the pitch she lived with, the pitch of which she was, without defilement. Let me hope that I realised that much. I shall not say how my feet burned to enter that slum of squalor where hovered this bird of the night, unless I add, as I can do with truth, that I did not slake them there. I saw her on and off afterward for a year, perhaps; but tenancies are short in London. There was a flitting during one autumn when I was away on vacation, and I came back to see new faces in the half-doorway and other elbows on the familiar ledge.
But as I have said above, a new affair engrossed me shortly after my night pageant on Parliament Hill. This was concerned with a famous personage whom all knowing London (though I for one had not known it) called Quidnunc.
But before I present to the curious reader the facts of a case which caused so much commotion in distinguished bosoms of the late "eighties," I think I should say that, while I have a strong conviction as to the identity of the person himself, I shall not express it. I accept the doctrine that there are some names not to be uttered. Similarly I shall neither defend nor extenuate; if I throw it out at all it will be as a hint to the judicious, or a clew, if you like, to those who are groping a way in or out of the labyrinth of Being. To me two things are especially absurd: one is that the trousered, or skirted, forms we eat with, walk with, or pass unheeded, are all the population of our world; the other, that these creatures, ostensibly men or women with fancies, hopes, fears, appetites like our own, are necessarily of the same nature as ourselves. If beings from another sphere should, by intention or chance, meet and mingle with us, I don't see how we could apprehend them at all except in our own mode, or unless they were, so to speak, translated into our idiom. But enough of that. The year in which I first met Quidnunc, so far as my memory serves me, was 1886.
I was in those days a student of the law, with chambers in Gray's Inn which I daily attended; but being more interested in palæography than in modern practice, and intending to make that my particular branch of effort, I spent much of my time at the Public Record Office; indeed, a portion of every working day. The track between R—— Buildings and Rolls Yard must have been sensibly thinned by my foot-soles; there can have been few of the frequenters of Chancery Lane, Bedford Row and the squares of Gray's Inn who were not known to me by sight or concerning whom I had not imagined (or discerned) circumstances invisible to their friends or themselves to account for their acts or appearances. Among these innumerable personages—portly solicitors, dashing clerks, scriveners, racing tipsters, match-sellers, postmen, young ladies of business, young ladies of pleasure, clients descending out of broughams, clients keeping rendezvous in public-houses, and what not—Quidnunc's may well have been one; but I believe that it was in Warwick Court (that passage from Holborn into the Inn) that, quite suddenly, I first saw him, or became aware that I saw him; for being, as he was, to all appearance an ordinary telegraphic messenger, I may have passed him daily for a year without any kind of notice. But on a day in the early spring of 1886—mid-April at a guess—I came upon him in such a way as to remark him incurably. I saw before me on that morning of tender leafage, of pale sunlight and blue mist contending for the day, a strangely assorted pair proceeding slowly toward the Inn. A telegraph boy was one; by his side walked, vehemently explaining, a tall, elderly solicitor—white-whiskered, drab-spatted, frock-coated, eye-glassed, silk-hatted—in every detail the trusted family lawyer. I knew the man by sight, and I knew him by name and repute. He was, let me say—for I withhold his real name—George Lumley Fowkes, of Fowkes, Vizard and Fowkes, respectable head of a more than respectable firm; and here he was, with his hat pushed back from his dewy forehead, tip-toeing, protesting, extenuating to a slip of a lad in uniform. The positions of the odd pair were unaccountably reversed; Jack was better than his master, the deference was from the elder to the brat. The stoop of Fowkes's shoulder, the anxious angle of his head, his care to listen to the little he got—and how little that was I could not but observe—his frequent ejaculations of "God bless my soul!" his deep concern—and the boy's unconcern, curtly expressed, if expressed at all—all this was singular. So much more than singular was it to myself that it enthralled me.
They stopped at the gateway which admits you to Bedford Row to finish their colloquy. The halt was made by Fowkes, barely acquiesced in by his companion. Poor old Fowkes, what with his asthma, the mopping of his head, the flacking of his long fingers, exhibited signals of the highest distress. "I need hardly assure you, sir ..." I heard; and then, "Believe me, sir, when I say...." He was marking time, unhappy gentleman, for with such phrases does the orator eke out his waning substance. The lad listened in a critical, staring mood, and once or twice nodded. While I was wondering how long he was going to put up with it, presently he jerked his head back and showed Fowkes, by the look he gave him, that he had had enough of him. The old lawyer knew it for final, for he straightened his back, then his hat, touched the brim and made a formal bow. "I leave it so, sir," he said; "I am content to leave it so;" and then, with every mark of respect, he went his way into Bedford Row. I noticed that he walked on tiptoe for some yards, and then more quickly, flapping his arms to his sides.
The boy stood thoughtful where he was, communing by the looks of him quite otherwhere, and I had the opportunity to consider him. He appeared to be a handsome, well-built lad of fifteen or so, big for his age, and precocious. By that I mean that his scrutiny of life was mature; that he looked capable, far beyond the warrant of his years. He was ruddy of complexion, freckled, and had a square chin. His eyes were light grey, with dark lashes to them; they were startlingly light and bright for such a sunburnt face, and seemed to glow in it like steady fires. It was in them that resided, that sat, as it were, enthroned, that mature, masterful expression which I never saw before or since in one so young. I have seen the eyes of children look as if they were searching through our world into another; that is almost habitual in children. But here was one, apparently a boy, who seemed to read into our circumstances (as you or I into a well-studied book) as though they held nothing inexplicable, nothing unaccounted for. Beyond these singular two eyes of his, his smiling mouth, with its reminder of archaic statuary, was perhaps his only noticeable feature. He wore the ordinary uniform of a telegraphic messenger, which in those days was grey, with a red line down the trousers and a belt for the tunic. His boots were of the service pattern, so were his ankle-jacks. His hands were not cleaner than they ought to have been, his nails well bitten back. Such was he.