Delamort threw back his head like one affronted.
“Since you put it that way,” he cried angrily, “I will consent even to a wager. I am a poor man, monsieur, but I will stake every penny that I have about me that you shall not be disappointed.”
He took out his purse, and emptied a cascade of gold on to the table.
“Here, monsieur, are fifty napoleons. When you have covered that sum I shall be ready to begin the seance.”
At that the sailor was taken aback. He looked about him pathetically. Then he drew from his breast-pocket a coloured kerchief, and carefully untied it. From this he took six gold pieces, which he placed very quietly and humbly upon the table.
“I am only a sailor, monsieur, and I am very poor. This is all that at the moment I am possessed of. It seems, sir, that for want of money I am only to earn six of your napoleons?” He paused, and his eyes wandered timidly over the company. Then he sighed. “It is a sin that where fifty napoleons are to be picked up, only six should be taken.”
At that, up leapt Pascal, and slapped two louis upon the table, announcing that he would wager that amount against M. Delamort. He was followed by the haberdasher with four louis; then came another with three, and another with five, and so on, until forty napoleons stood against the spiritualist’s pile of fifty. And then, lest he should retain the ten napoleons that had not been covered, the landlord ran upstairs and fetched that amount himself. I was the only man who had taken no part in the wager. I was not altogether so sure that the seafaring man was right. I had heard strange things concerning spiritualism, and whilst I had not heard enough to induce me to attach any appreciable degree of credit to it, still I knew too little to dare to disbelieve utterly.
Delamort, who had been looking on with an anxiety which heightened the saturnine expression of his countenance, observed this fact, and now that the money was all there, he gathered up the hundred napoleons, slipped them into his purse, and handed this to me.
“Monsieur is a gentleman,” he said by way of explaining why he selected me as the man to be intrusted with the stakes. “Also he has no interest in the money. Will you keep this, monsieur, and afterwards either deliver it to me or divide it amongst these good people should I fail?”
“If it is the wish of all—” I began, when they at once proclaimed their unanimous consent.
“And now, M. Delamort,” said the sailor with a leer and a swagger, “I have announced to the company whose is the ghost I wish to commune with, and I am ready. Come with me.”
“But whither?” inquired poor Delamort, who appeared by now to have lost the last shred of his magnificent assurance.
“To the room I have chosen.”
Delamort bit his lip, and a look of vexation crossed his face; whereat those good fellows nudged each other, grinned and whispered. But the spiritualist made no objection, and so we went upstairs to the room in which the sailor was to sleep. At the door he paused and turned to us.
“Remain here with M. Delamort. I will enter alone.”
“I only ask, monsieur,” said Delamort — and his tone seemed firmer again, as though he were regaining confidence— “that you sit without light of any description, whilst here, too, we must remain in the dark, if you please, gentlemen. M. l’Hote, will you have the goodness to extinguish the lamp? I have no directions to give you touching the arrangements of your room, monsieur,” he continued, turning to the sailor again “but I must ask you to leave a sheet of paper on the table. I will command the spirit to inscribe his name on it, so that all here may be satisfied that your visitor is the one you have desired to see.”
At that a thrill of doubt ran through the audience. Much might be done by ventriloquism and magic lanterns — as the sailor had assured them — but of the magic lantern they saw no sign, and, in any event, neither magic lantern nor ventriloquism could write a name on paper. The sailor himself seemed staggered for a moment.
“I will do so, monsieur,” he faltered.
With that he went within and closed the door, turning the key on the inside. A moment later the landlord had extinguished the light, and we were left in utter darkness. The last glimpse I had of Delamort, he was crouching by the door of the sailor’s room.
A silence followed, which seemed to last an eternity. The only sound was the occasional whispering of the spiritualist and the breathing of some twenty men in whose hearts doubt was swelling to fear with every second of that uncanny expectancy. Ten minutes had perhaps gone by when we heard a rap on the door, and from within came the sailor’s voice.
“How much longer am I to wait, M. Delamort? I must ask you to fix a limit. I have no desire to sit here in the dark all—”
The voice ceased abruptly. There was a dull thud, as of a body hurtling against the door, and with it there came a groan of fear. The groan almost found an echo in the gasps of the waiting company. Myself, I plead guilty to an uncanny thrill, and I might entertain you with my creepy sensations at some length were not my story more concerned with other matters.
There followed a silence of some few seconds, then we heard the sailor’s voice raised in a blood-curdling scream.
“Don’t come near me, don’t come near me!” he shrieked. “Let me out, Delamort! Let me out, for God’s sake, monsieur!” There was a rustle as of someone moving. Then a long-drawn wail of “Jesu!” That was followed by the sound of a heavy fall, and then silence.
The landlord was the first to recover the use of his wits; the fear of a tragedy in his house rousing him to action. He pushed roughly through to the door.
“Here, someone,” he begged. “Help me to break in.”
There was a groaning and cracking of woodwork and the report of the bursting door. Simultaneously a maid appeared with a lamp. I took it from her and hastened into the room in the wake of Delamort and the landlord.
Stretched on the floor, his eyes closed, his face ghastly pale, and distorted by a fearful grin, lay the sailor. That and a smell of something that had burned was all that we noticed at first.
The rustics remained on the threshold, their faces pale and scared, asking whether the sailor were dead. Delamort, who had been on his knees beside him, reassured us. It was only a swoon. And presently, when he loosened his neckwear and sponged his head and pulses, the man opened his eyes and groaned, but was clearly no worse for whatever he had undergone. The villagers now crowded fearlessly into the room, and some were already plying the sailor with questions as he sat on the floor with Delamort supporting him. Suddenly a diversion was created by Pascal, who uttered a cry that was almost a shriek. Turning quickly to seek the cause of this, I beheld him pointing to something on the table at which he was staring in an awe-struck manner. I approached and beheld a sheet of paper on which had been burnt, as if with a red- hot iron, the name “Gravine.”
Such in brief was my first introduction to spiritualism. M. Delamort left Aubepine an hour later, and pursued his journey to St. Hilaire. But the sailor was not himself until the following morning, and even when he had recovered from the shock occasioned him by his unearthly visitant, he sustained a fresh one when he realised that he lost his wager and his six louis.
I was at Angeville a fortnight later, staying with a cousin of mine who resides there. On the evening of my arrival my cousin took me round the old-world town, and in the course of things led me into the Peacock Inn. As we entered the general room, a familiar voice assailed my ears with familiar words.
“Fools,” it cried. “Crass, ignorant fools! You live out your lives in this wretched corner of the world much as a rat lives in its burrow, and as your minds are closed to intelligence, so, too, do you close your ears to knowledge. Derision is the ever-ready weapon of the ignorant, and because the things that I tell you are things of which you never dreamt in your unenlightened lives you laugh and call me charlatan.”
It was, of course, M. Delamort. As I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of his lean, cadaverous face, I heard a sudden and contemptuous laugh, with which
I also seemed familiar. I turned in the direction of the sound, and there, surely enough, I beheld my friend the sailor, baiting the spiritualist as he had done at Aubepine.
I was on the point of denouncing them as a couple of impostors and swindlers, when for some reason or other I held my peace. I had a sort of feeling that would be like taking vengeance upon them for having fooled me in common with those others at Aubepine. I am rather ashamed to confess it, but I turned and quitted the Peacock Inn, leaving those ingenious tricksters to continue to exploit their spiritualistic mummery.
MR. DEWBURY’S CONSENT
The Graphic, December 1, 1906.
I am the humblest-minded man in the world, but if you should wound my feelings my humility is at once transformed into pride and self-assertiveness, my habitual meekness converted into retaliatory arrogance.
Thus, when Mr. Dewbury pointed out to me — with that brutality for which he is notorious — that I was a young man of idle ways, that my means were too restricted to permit of idleness, and that consequently he would oppose my wedding his niece and ward, I did not adopt a humble or conciliatory tone, I didn’t swear to achieve great things so as to become worthy of the union to which I aspired; I ate no humble-pie. I made no promises; I rose up in all the panoply of outraged pride, and turned to rend Mr. Dewbury.
I pointed out to him that to describe me as idle was to distort facts, and that if my means were restricted, they were at least sufficient to keep a loving couple from absolute want. Incidentally I threw it out that I belonged to the great aristocracy of genius — at which Mr. Dewbury audibly sniffed — and that my name was a name likely to be heard of presently.
But the rending of Mr. Dewbury was more easy to project than to achieve. Alas! The very stupidity of the man was an impenetrable bulwark, a demoralising array of chevaux-de-frise against which I hurled the onslaught of my logic and my eloquence, only to fall back baffled.
I could lure him into no fresh statement; like the dull-witted creature he was he took refuge in repeating the one odious sentence that he had coined to describe my condition — a sentence that gained in neither point nor effectiveness from being repeated. Mr. Dewbury’s money was made for him in a factory, and from the rudeness he displayed on the painful occasion of which I write, I might reasonably adduce that his manners were of like origin.
I may have been foolish to have adopted the attitude of retaliation — in short, to have lost my temper — for when you hope to become a man’s nephew-in-law it is perhaps as well to conciliate him; when you have become his nephew-in-law you please yourself.
“The profession of letters, sir,” said I, with the loftiness of the broad-minded man when drawn to dissent from one whose views are narrow, “is a profession that has been followed by men of an eminence which neither you nor I may hope to attain.”
I was by no means sure that I should not attain it, but for politic reasons I thought it as well to couple myself with him.
“And as for my being idle,” I repeated, “the statement is quite inaccurate. I am a student of men.”
“You may study men as long and as closely as you please,” said he. “That does not concern me. But I certainly intend to prevent your pursuing the study of woman in the person of my niece.” He delivered himself of this with irritating smugness; to his benighted soul it may have commended itself as a witticism. “You are an idle young man,” he said again with odious insistence, “and idle young men incline to vice.”
“If a man incline to vice, Mr. Dewbury, he will be vicious whether idle or not.”
“I do not wish to be drawn into an argument.”
“That,” said I, “is the last defence of one who has no argument.”
It was not a wise thing to have said, perhaps. But then Dewbury was by no means an old man. He was under forty, and there was little grey in his hair. There was, however, a devilishly truculent tongue in his head, and the brutal discourtesy with which he brought our discussion to a close left me in no doubt as to the hopelessness of my condition.
Perhaps I was unnecessarily despondent, for, after all, so long as the girl be true, what signify others? But that afternoon it seemed to me that mine was a poor, blighted young life. I resolved to leave Stollbridge at once and return to town. If I had remained so long in that little provincial place it had been solely because Mildred dwelt there. Now that I was to see Mildred no more the attractions faded.
But next morning I received a note from her — a hurried, panic-stricken scrawl — to the effect that if the weather were fine she would be on the river that afternoon. It fortunately was fine, and hot, even for July. So after lunch I took the canoe, and a couple of miles up-stream I came upon her punt made fast under a tree of very usefully overhanging branches.
I went alongside, and passing from the canoe to the punt I assisted her to make tea. She says that I only looked on while she made it. She is probably right. Mildred is a distinctly pretty girl, and I know of few pursuits more engrossing than the contemplation of her.
At last, when she had handed me a cup, and settled herself in the rainbow of her cushions,
“Paddy,” said she very sorrowfully, “the uncle has forbidden me to speak to you again.”
“This disobedience,” said I, “is very sweet.”
“But what happened? What did he say to you?”
I told her, and she was a very angel in her indignation.
“But you are anything but idle, Paddy,” she cried, and I felt that I had never really loved Mildred until that moment. She was the one person in all the world who understood me.
“That is precisely what I told your uncle, and I confirmed it by arguments that no man in his senses could have failed to appreciate. He, however,” and I waved my hand widely, “refuses to look upon my occupation in the light of serious work.”
“Paddy, you must do something to prove him wrong.”
“Mount Parnassus is lofty,” I commented dolefully. “Its heights are steep and difficult to scale even for the stronger and better equipped than I. I may be years reaching the summit; I may never reach it; and, anyhow, I can’t wait.”
“What I mean,” she explained, “is that you should do something really useful; something that he would consider useful. Go into business.”
“I have no head for figures. I should only lose the little that I have.”
“A profession then,” she insisted.
“What professions are there? For the Church I have no vocation; law and medicine are already overcrowded; besides, they blunt a man’s individuality.”
“Is there nothing else?”
“There is hair-dressing and chiropody — both estimable professions in their way, only this is an age of prejudices, and perhaps you wouldn’t care to marry me then.”
“How can you laugh, Paddy?”
“Laughter,” said I oracularly, “is one of sorrow’s most terrible expressions. My poor Millie, I was never meant to be useful in that sense. I am just a dreamer, and to wake me would be to spoil me, or else set me to spoil other things, which might be worse.”
“You are the dearest madman in all the world.”
“Thanks, Mildred,” I sighed gratefully.
“I’ll be of age in a year,” she reflected.
“And you’ll wait, Millie?”
I find a difficulty in chronicling her reply, for she expressed herself without the use of words. But it convinced me, and it was very comforting and fortifying even if we did nearly upset the punt.
So much consolation did I gather from that interview that I went up to town in a moderately cheerful spirit on the morrow, and in a cheerful spirit did I write to her twice in the ensuing week. But the second of these letters was returned to me enclosed in one of the most discourteous epistles that I have ever read, from her uncle. Now for all that I had every reason to be pleased with the composition of my letters to Mildred, I hardly desired for them such publicity as this, so I wrote no more.
It was while I was a prey
to my fresh sorrows at this interruption of our correspondence, that Jessie Willoughby came to the rescue like a fairy godmother. I was wandering aimlessly down Piccadilly one sunny afternoon when she suddenly confronted me.
“Paddy!”
Now, although she was my sister’s dearest friend and my sometime playmate grown into a sufficiently beautiful woman to rejoice the sight of any discriminating man, so dejected was my condition that her appearance afforded me no pleasure. Still I was polite.
“I — I don’t see the peacock,” said I, looking round.
“Peacock?” she echoed, and her brows puckered, “What peacock?”
Then I laughed.
“Why bless me, it’s you, Jessie. Your pardon; I mistook you for Juno.”
“Oh?” And to get level she drew unflattering parallels between me and every god, demi-god and hero of the ancients, and wound up by asking me whither I was going.
“To the dogs,” said I, mournfully.
“I mean this afternoon,” she explained.
“Oh, anywhere. It doesn’t matter.”
“Come with me then.”
I shook my head.
“You look too gay for me; I feel too sad for you. No doubt you are as anxious to preserve your gaiety as I am to harbour my melancholy. By association we should probably both suffer.”
But she insisted, and when Jessie insists she is difficult to withstand. Five minutes later we were on our way to her studio in a hansom. She was expecting, she told me, some friends to tea. Jessie Willoughby was an artist — at least she believed herself one, as did also a few admiring friends; admirers, it must be confessed, of her delightful personality, her toilettes and her beauty, rather than of her art. Blessed with a sufficiency of this world’s goods, Jessie could afford to play at being a Bohemian, make nasty messes with colours and enjoy the emancipation from conventional trammels that is the prerogative of the class to which she claimed — by the slenderest of artistic rights — to belong.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 460
