Read The Fiend in Human Online
Authors: John MacLachlan Gray
The Fiend in Human (37 page)
Sewell holds Reggie’s gaze with a peculiar intensity. ‘Shut up, Reggie. Shut your mouth, for you are indeed a perfect goat — and perfectly correct in your estimation that we, you and I both, are in extremely serious trouble. I wonder: is your stupidity general, or are there specific areas in your brain which are numb? Might you be a subject for phrenology study?’
‘I beg you, old chap, a joke is a joke but there is no need to cut a fellow like that.’
‘Do you have an opinion as to how a “friend of Dorcas” might have come by an item stolen by another of your filthy women?’
‘Not the faintest, old chap. Complete mystery to me.’
‘I see. Well, if indeed this person has your flask, her description of ‘Mr Roo’ is certain to resemble you and not me. Though I am sorely inconvenienced by your actions, yours is by far the greater peril.’
‘Please stop, old fellow. You are being positively beastly.’
‘Which puts me in mind of her beastly little friend.’
‘Do you mean the impudent little slut? Oh, bad show.’
‘There is your blackmailer, I should think.’
‘What do you suggest we do?’
‘We? If we are to sever this dreadful association, one of us will be required to contact this … this person, retrieve the flask and bring an end to the matter. And by “one of us” I mean that it will have to be the one of us who don’t answer to the description of your Mr Roo.’
‘Very sensible. Well said, my dear fellow.’
Eager to restore their association to a less prickly footing, Harewood moves to the opposite couch and places an arm about his friend’s shoulder in a gesture intended to commemorate the new seriousness they have found this evening, the newfound depth of their friendship.
‘Of course, it is no more than one might expect from such a capital fellow – best bloody friend a chap could have, by Heaven!’ So saying, Harewood places a kiss upon his friend’s cheek in the manner of one Frenchman bestowing a medal upon another. ‘You shall be rewarded, old chap, goes without saying. Manage this business for me, dear Roo, and I swear you shall have whatever you like.’
Replies Walter Sewell: ‘Reggie, do not ever again refer to me by that name.’ So saying, he turns to Reginald Harewood and kisses him straight on the mouth.
Beak Street
For being of the honest few,
Who give the Fiend himself his due …
Who give the Fiend himself his due …
The fog on Beak Street is a yellow colour this afternoon. It will grow progressively darker down Regent Street, until by the time he reaches Trafalgar Square it will have the colour and texture of chocolate. Not strolling weather certainly; anyone out walking is scurrying home, or hurrying to office, committee or shop. Precisely for this reason he has decided to make the circuitous journey on foot.
Regent Street is enveloped in a fog of smoke irradiated by light, and he is struck by a mystical aspect to it all – the wide street of black macadam and sooty brick appears as a tunnel into the next world, fading into invisibility. As he quickens his pace, the intensified sun turns the fog golden while the rain becomes fine, close, pitiless. There seems no reason why it should not last until the end of time. He stops at Vigo Street to unfurl his umbrella – as do, simultaneously, a dozen or so fellow pedestrians within view. Thus sheltered, all resume walking, he among them, quickening the pace, bent beneath their umbrellas like mourners …
Nothing in London is natural, he thinks. Everything has been disfigured, transformed from its original state – the earth, the people who walk upon it, the very air they breathe; yet the present light transforms this necessary deformity, confers a strange grace upon the monstrous city men hath made, like a smile on the face of a Cyclops.
Even when there is sunlight, it is cold and damp. As a precaution, he wears two scarves – one for the walk home.
Though unpleasant in itself, the weather is of inestimable value in the accomplishment of his task, a drawn curtain to muffle the rough edges of what he is about to do, so that the act will blend with the muffled hum of the city.
It will be done in quiet and in privacy, in a hollow space where he will speak with her briefly beforehand, then take ample time during, then remain with her for a period afterward. His little rituals such as they are, his table manners as it were, small gestures to provide majesty
and a sense of occasion to a melancholy event, in which a woman’s attractiveness to a gentleman becomes her downfall, in which it would have been better for everyone had she been ugly.
and a sense of occasion to a melancholy event, in which a woman’s attractiveness to a gentleman becomes her downfall, in which it would have been better for everyone had she been ugly.
Better love hath no man, than that he lay down a life for a friend …
As he walks south on Regent Street he feels his heartbeat quicken – not out of fear but of a kind of readiness, like the entrance of a gladiator; which illusion is enhanced by the curve of the street, like the approach to a Roman amphitheatre, its shadowed apertures filled with invisible, hushed spectators, shrouded in fog as though by a giant cloak.
He passes a tradesman, barely visible, to his right, who cautions: ‘Watch out for your pockets, Sir.’
‘I shall indeed, my good man. Much obliged to you.’ So saying, he slips a penny into a coal-coloured palm, and continues.
The rain having let up somewhat, he re-furls his umbrella, which he now swings like a cane while increasing his pace, an exercise to stimulate the blood. The fog is now a thick buttery yellow, syrup impregnated with the smell of soot, so heavy that it sinks to the street and crawls along the gutters …
As he continues south, the cityscape around him becomes ever more massive and ponderous, with long ranks of black, blind windows above him like a charcoal drawing over which someone has rubbed his sleeve. Slowing his speed he passes through, but not among, the thickening crowd of pedestrians. Faces move in and out of his field of vision, in a pageant which is interesting for him to watch, but whose participants have neither time nor inclination to watch him in return.
At Piccadilly, the crowd has grown more dense. He passes a man with the set, impenetrable face of a businessman, massive as an ox in successive layers of wool, a top hat accentuating his height by at least a foot. He passes a group of women on a shopping excursion, dressed like stalks of asparagus or skirted lamp-posts, on their faces the customary sour grimace of the quality. He passes a pampered child of about ten, with the sulky, intent look of a young bulldog, incessantly yapping at his gaunt, miserable governess, a washed-out girl of sixteen. He passes two swells like hairdressers’ dummies on their way to their club, their upper bodies executing a strangely motionless glide while their legs scissor beneath their coats. He passes three elderly ladies, Sphinx-like beneath their bonnets, with the complexions of nuns.
He pauses on Trafalgar Square – Nelson in the clouds above, planted high upon his column like a rat impaled on a stick – then resumes his
pace, past more ladies: a girl with soft, angelic cheeks and deep periwinkle-blue eyes, conducted down the street by her mother, whose face is a red mask of inert flesh the colour of beefsteak. Close behind them follows a wealthy crone who might well be the grandmother, with heron’s feet for hands, a stork’s neck, and a great frontage of white teeth set in the prominent jaw of a carnivore.
pace, past more ladies: a girl with soft, angelic cheeks and deep periwinkle-blue eyes, conducted down the street by her mother, whose face is a red mask of inert flesh the colour of beefsteak. Close behind them follows a wealthy crone who might well be the grandmother, with heron’s feet for hands, a stork’s neck, and a great frontage of white teeth set in the prominent jaw of a carnivore.
Such would have been the fate of his own mother had she not expired while still a great beauty; it was not his intention that she should lure his grief-stricken father to the next world as well, leaving the family estate to their only child.
At the kerb, a ragged boy is performing cartwheels in hopes of a penny. A shilling falls at his feet. The boy fetches it eagerly, scanning the crowd for the invisible benefactor …
On the Strand the dispersing fog hangs like shreds of cotton from the lamp-posts, while the sun (which did not seem to proceed from any specific direction) skulks away forever behind the roofs of surrounding buildings, allowing darkness to spread so that, when at last he turns up Cranbourne Alley, he can hardly see his hand in front of him. Almost immediately, however, all is light and brilliancy as he approaches the Crown’s fancifully ornamented parapet and the profusion of gaslights in richly built burners. A crowd of gentlemen speed past him to the light, like a school of eager fish, clerks for the most part, with mended coats and scuffed top hats and swinging worn walking-sticks.
He wriggles sideways through the dense, eagerly shifting crowd, by whose demeanour and by the excitement in their voices it is clear that an exceptional spectacle is taking place. By peering beneath the armpit of the man standing before him, he catches a fleeting, astonishing glimpse of two women, both stripped to the waist, hair tied behind with cords, standing up like men and facing off as though in a prize ring, their fists clenched like small clubs in front of their breasts, which seem, under the present circumstance, strangely irrelevant, like pouches under the eyes.
He notes that the gentleman acting as referee is none other than the proprietor of the Crown, presiding over a spectacle which in any other location would appear outrageous and bizarre, but which seems in this quarter to be a piece of acceptable entertainment.
The audience sets up a cheer as the two women fly at one another with that natural feminine inclination to tear and claw.
Capital
. His timing has been perfect. Fifteen minutes after the hour, on the Saturday when the clerks about Fleet Street and Temple Bar
receive their meagre stipends. Thus unchained from their scriveners’ desks, their quill pens pried from ink-blackened fingers, they venture outside their prisons and proceed directly to the drinking-houses, divans and gaming-parlours, there to expunge a week of skull-sucking tedium with gin and ale, their consequent hangovers to see them through the interminable emptiness of the Lord’s Day. All of this has been carefully planned on his part, which excellent timing is now augmented by circumstance – for who could predict or expect to have the additional distraction of a prize-fighting match between two Amazons?
. His timing has been perfect. Fifteen minutes after the hour, on the Saturday when the clerks about Fleet Street and Temple Bar
receive their meagre stipends. Thus unchained from their scriveners’ desks, their quill pens pried from ink-blackened fingers, they venture outside their prisons and proceed directly to the drinking-houses, divans and gaming-parlours, there to expunge a week of skull-sucking tedium with gin and ale, their consequent hangovers to see them through the interminable emptiness of the Lord’s Day. All of this has been carefully planned on his part, which excellent timing is now augmented by circumstance – for who could predict or expect to have the additional distraction of a prize-fighting match between two Amazons?
Surely it is a sign that God smiles upon his errand.
He enters the Crown only to discover that, such is the lure of the outside entertainment, the place has emptied save for a scattering of nearly insensible customers at the bar and at tables. Without effort he instantly recognizes the young lady with the insolent tongue (
Why don’t you go and pork your little fat friend?
– his cheeks still burn at the thought of it), seated at the table facing the dance floor, her back to a pillar, its elaborate Corinthian finial dripping over her head like a tropical tree. Thinks he: Some men might find her to be a pretty little thing with her hair parted in the centre, in a dress which has been made from many dresses. He, however, can recognize such vanity as an indication of a woman’s overweening pride, her contempt for her station.
Why don’t you go and pork your little fat friend?
– his cheeks still burn at the thought of it), seated at the table facing the dance floor, her back to a pillar, its elaborate Corinthian finial dripping over her head like a tropical tree. Thinks he: Some men might find her to be a pretty little thing with her hair parted in the centre, in a dress which has been made from many dresses. He, however, can recognize such vanity as an indication of a woman’s overweening pride, her contempt for her station.
He thanks God to have been blessed with the quality of indeterminateness, a generality of countenance enhanced by a head of prematurely thinning hair – the forehead of a forty-year-old atop the face of a toddler. His fleshy countenance, lacking the definition afforded by prominent bones, can alter its aspect according to circumstance, so that it is unlikely to be identified from one casual interaction; which cultivation of changeable vacuity he augments with a wardrobe selected for its invisibility, its colours approximating the soot, rust and mud of the city; he tops his average coat with an average top hat, so that even his height is a matter for uncertainty.
And there is the advantage of knowing that the Mr Roo she anticipates is an entirely different gentleman.
Thus attired and with an expression of general affability, he steps across the empty dance floor and seats himself at a table whose only other occupant is asleep. He is now mere steps away from his prey, having attracted only the most cursory notice.
Notwithstanding his successful entrance, however, he senses danger.
A flash of heat strikes his right cheek, causing it to redden while his left cheek remains cold; he turns casually toward the barkeeper and signals for two cups of hot spiced gin; it is some few moments before he can attract the man’s attention, during which time he puts a face to the danger: the gentleman huddled over his ale, glancing too frequently in the direction of the girl by the pillar, as though having made a resolution not to let her out of his sight.
A flash of heat strikes his right cheek, causing it to redden while his left cheek remains cold; he turns casually toward the barkeeper and signals for two cups of hot spiced gin; it is some few moments before he can attract the man’s attention, during which time he puts a face to the danger: the gentleman huddled over his ale, glancing too frequently in the direction of the girl by the pillar, as though having made a resolution not to let her out of his sight.
Whitty. Wouldn’t you know. The dissipated scribbler who came to the hanging. Not a gentleman’s occupation – but of course Whitty is no gentleman. In all probability he means to serve as her accomplice in blackmail, for no Haymarket judy would muster the strength of purpose to launch such an enterprise on her own. A ticklish position to be sure, but it remains playable, for Whitty has not yet recognized him in return – indeed, has not glanced in his direction. Thus assured, with his back to the correspondent he collects his gin from the barkeeper, returns to an inconspicuous table, and waits.
There is a trick a man in spectacles can do. People assume such a man to be looking straight through his lenses, when it may not be the case. Thus, no matter how bad his sight, a man may observe the population of a room unnoticed through the corner of his eye, collect valuable impressions, and be thus at an advantage.
The young lady displays a winsome appearance: with her small, symmetrical features and the smooth arch to the brow, hers is an English, unobtrusive sort of beauty – which guise serves to conceal her low birth and animal cunning. Note that she pretends to be reading from a book: a clever touch, as is the gin before her which she seems not to sip.
Upon closer viewing, he can see her for what she really is.
There!
Note the turn of the mouth, the determined – not to say ruthless – set of the jaw. Discern the contempt in the line of the forehead; and upon close inspection, see in her small features, despite their seeming harmony, that nibbling, rodent-like aspect. Take note of her hands, now that she has made the mistake of removing her gloves: see how the little claw grasps the book, while the forefinger of the other taps a tattoo upon the table, apparently at her ease.
Note the turn of the mouth, the determined – not to say ruthless – set of the jaw. Discern the contempt in the line of the forehead; and upon close inspection, see in her small features, despite their seeming harmony, that nibbling, rodent-like aspect. Take note of her hands, now that she has made the mistake of removing her gloves: see how the little claw grasps the book, while the forefinger of the other taps a tattoo upon the table, apparently at her ease.
For now we see through a glass, darkly;
but then face to face …
but then face to face …
Were she to know,
even as also
she is known
, he is certain she would fly at him like a bat.
even as also
she is known
, he is certain she would fly at him like a bat.
The additional challenge – the presence of his college acquaintance across the floor – does not substantially alter the position, only the sequence and timing. And there will be no need to give her gin.
He waits without touching either cup. Outside he hears a chorus of hooting as a blow is struck, and a minute later a monstrous, extended cheer, which signals the end of the bout, for it is the sound of men delighted by a violent result. Warming his hands with a cup of gin, he listens to the babble outside and forms his plan – or rather, his instinctive course of action, for when one trusts in God one cannot rightfully be said to plan.
As expected, suddenly the doors explode inward and a thick swarm of clerks re-enter in an almost liquid rush of wool coats and hats; the room resonates with the click of walking-sticks, and the jocular palaver of satisfied gentlemen eager to savour their satisfaction, to relive it and comment upon it and commemorate it, then to sniff about for other entertainment.
‘I beg your pardon, Miss. I am aware that we have not been introduced. My name is Mr George Stanley. If I may I be so bold, I believe you have advertised an object which is of more than passing interest to a certain gentleman …’ So saying, he bows, placing his gloved fingers together before him in a way that makes him appear like a small, timid animal, positively the last creature on earth to give offence.
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