The Kindly Ones

by Anthony Powell

  The fact is I must be careful of this shell I call my body, though why I should be, I hardly know. Perhaps from mere courtesy to my medical advisers. There have been warnings – cerebral congestion.’

  He laughed rather disagreeably. We supported him along the passage, led by Albert. In his room, not without effort, we established him in the bed. The exertions of Duport and myself brought this about, not much aided by Albert, who, breathing hard, showed little taste for the job. Duport, on the other hand, had been enjoying himself thoroughly since the beginning of this to-do. Action, excitement were what he needed. They showed another side to him. Dr Trelawney, too, was enjoying himself by now. So far from being exhausted by this heaving about of the shell he called his body, he was plainly stimulated by all that had happened. He had mastered his fit of asthma, brought on, no doubt, as Albert had suggested, by boredom and depression. The Bellevue must in any case have represented a low ebb in Dr Trelawney’s fortunes. Plenty of attention made him almost well again. He lay back on his pillows, indicating by a movement of the hands that he wished us to stay and talk with him until the arrival of Mrs Erdleigh.

  ‘Bring some glasses, my friend,’ he said to Albert. ‘We shall need four – a number portending obstacles and opposition in the symbolism of cards – yet necessary for our present purpose, if Myra Erdleigh is soon to be of our party.’

  Albert, thankful to have Dr Trelawney out of the bathroom and safely in bed at so small a cost, went off to fetch the glasses without any of the peevishness to be expected of him when odd jobs were in question. Dr Trelawney’s request seemed to have reference to a half-bottle of brandy, already opened, that stood on the wash-stand. I had been prepared to find myself in an alchemist’s cell, where occult processes matured in retorts and cauldrons, reptiles hung from the ceiling while their venom distilled, homunculi in bottles lined the walls. However, there were no dog-eared volumes of the Cabbala to be seen, no pentagrams or tarot cards. Instead, Dr Trelawney’s room was very like that formerly occupied by Uncle Giles, no bigger, just as dingy. A pile of luggage lay in one corner, some suits – certainly ancient enough – hung on coat-hangers suspended from the side of the wardrobe. The only suggestion of the Black Arts was wafted by a faint, sickly smell, not immediately identifiable: incense? hair-tonic? opium? It was hard to say whether the implications were chemical, medicinal, ritualistic; a scent vaguely disturbing, like Dr Trelawney’s own personality. Albert returned with the glasses, then said good night, adding a word about latching the front door when Mrs Erdleigh left. He must have been used to her visits at a late hour. Duport and I were left alone with the Doctor. He told us to distribute the brandy – the flask was about a quarter full – allowing a share for Mrs Erdleigh herself when she arrived. Duport took charge, pouring out drink for the three of us.

  ‘Which of you answered me through the door?’ asked Dr Trelawney, when he had drunk some brandy.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You know my teachings then?’

  I told him I remembered the formula from Stonehurst. That was not strictly speaking true, because I should never have carried the words in my head all those years, if I had not heard Moreland and others talk of the Doctor in later life. My explanation did not altogether please Dr Trelawney, either because he wished to forget that period of his career, or because it too painfully recalled happier, younger days, when his cult was more flourishing. Possibly he felt disappointment that I should turn out to be no new, hitherto unknown, disciple, full of untapped enthusiasm, admiring from afar, who now at last found dramatic opportunity to disclose himself. He made no comment at all. There was something decidedly unpleasant about him, sinister, at the same time absurd, that combination of the ludicrous and alarming soon to be widely experienced by contact with those set in authority in wartime.

  ‘I may be said to have come from Humiliation into Triumph,’ he said, ‘the traditional theme of Greek Tragedy. The climate of this salubrious resort does not really suit me. In fact, I cannot think why I stay. Perhaps because I cannot afford to pay my bill and leave. Nor is there much company in the Bellevue calculated to revive failing health and spirits. And you, sir? Why are you enjoying the ozone here, if one may ask? Perhaps for the same reason as Mr Duport, who has confided to me some of the secrets of his own private prison-house.’

  Dr Trelawney smiled, showing teeth as yellow and irregular as the stains on his beard. He was, I thought, a tremendously Edwardian figure: an Edwardian figure of fun, one might say. All the same, I remembered that a girl had thrown herself from a Welsh mountain-top on his account. Such things were to be considered in estimating his capacity. His smile was one of the worst things about him. I saw that Duport must be on closer terms with the Doctor than he had pretended. I had certainly not grasped the fact that they already knew each other well enough to have exchanged reasons for residing at the Bellevue. Indeed, Duport, while he had been drinking at the Royal, seemed almost deliberately to have obscured their comparative intimacy. There was nothing very surprising about their confiding in one another. Total strangers in bars and railway carriages will unfold the story of their lives at the least opportunity. It was probably true to say that the hotel contained no more suitable couple to make friends. The details about his married life which Duport had imparted to me showed that he was a more complicated, more introspective character than I had ever guessed. His connexion with Jean was now less mysterious to me. No doubt Jimmy Stripling’s esoteric goings-on had familiarised Duport, more or less, with people of Dr Trelawney’s sort. In any case, Dr Trelawney was probably pretty good at worming information out of other residents. Even during the time we had been sitting in the room I had become increasingly aware of his pervasive, quasi-hypnotic powers, possessed to a greater or lesser degree by all persons – not necessarily connected with occultism – who form little cults devoted primarily to veneration of themselves. This awareness was not because I felt myself in danger of falling under Dr Trelawney’s dominion, though it conveyed an instinctive warning to be on one’s guard. Perhaps the feeling was no more than a grown-up version of childish fantasies about him, perhaps a tribute to his will. I was not certain. Duport, on the other hand, appeared perfectly at ease. He sat in a broken-down armchair facing the bed, his hands in his pockets. I explained about my early associations with Albert, about Uncle Giles’s funeral.

  ‘I used to talk with your uncle,’ said Dr Trelawney.

  ‘What did you think of him?’

  ‘A thwarted spirit, a restless soul wandering the vast surfaces of the earth.’

  ‘He never found a job he liked.’

  ‘Men do not gather grapes from off a thorn.’

  ‘He told you about himself?’

  ‘It was not necessary. Every man bears on his forehead the story of his days, an open volume to the initiate.’

  ‘From that volume, you knew him well?’

  ‘Who can be said to know well? All men are mysteries.’

  ‘There was no mystery about your uncle’s grousing,’ said Duport. ‘The only thing he was cheerful about was saying there would not be a war. What do you think, Dr Trelawney?’

  ‘What will be, must be.’

  ‘Which means war, in my opinion,’ said Duport.

  ‘The sword of Mithras, who each year immolates the sacred bull, will ere long now flash from its scabbard.’

  ‘You’ve said it.’

  ‘The slayer of Osiris once again demands his grievous tribute of blood. The Angel of Death will ride the storm.’

  ‘Could this situation have been avoided?’ I asked.

  ‘The god, Mars, approaches the earth to lay waste. Moreover, the future is ever the consequence of the past.’

  ‘And we ought to have knocked Hider out when he first started making trouble?’

  I remembered Ted Jeavons had held that view.

  ‘The Four Horsemen are at the gate. The Kaiser went to war for shame of his withered arm. Hitler will go to war because at official receptions the tails
of his evening coat sweep the floor like a clown’s.’

  ‘Seems an inadequate reason,’ said Duport.

  ‘Such things are a paradox to the uninstructed – to the adept they are clear as morning light.’

  ‘I must be one of the uninstructed,’ said Duport.

  ‘You are not alone in that.’

  ‘Just one of the crowd?’

  ‘Reason is given to all men, but all men do not know how to use it. Liberty is offered to each one of us, but few learn to be free. Such gifts are, in any case, a right to be earned, not a privilege for the shiftless.’

  ‘How do you recommend earning it?’ asked Duport, stretching out his long legs in front of him, slumping down into the depths of the armchair. ‘I’ve got to rebuild my business connexions. I could do with a few hints.’

  ‘The education of the will is the end of human life.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But can you always apply the will?’ said Duport. ‘Could I have renewed my severed credits by the will?’

  ‘I am concerned with the absolute.’

  ‘So am I. An absolute balance at the bank.’

  ‘You speak of material trifles. The great Eliphas Levi, whose precepts I quote to you, said that one who is afraid of fire will never command salamanders.’

  ‘I don’t need to command salamanders. I want to shake the metal market.’

  ‘To know, to dare, to will, to keep silence, those are the things required.’

  ‘And what’s the bonus for these surplus profits?’

  ‘You have spoken your modest needs.’

  ‘But what else can the magicians offer?’

  ‘To be for ever rich, for ever young, never to die.’

  ‘Do they, indeed?’

  ‘Such was in every age the dream of the alchemist.’

  ‘Not a bad programme – let’s have the blue-prints.’

  ‘To attain these things, as I have said, you must emancipate the will from servitude, instruct it in the art of domination.’

  ‘You should meet a mutual friend of ours called Widmerpool,’ said Duport. ‘He would agree with you. He’s very keen on domination. Don’t you think so, Jenkins? Anyway, Dr Trelawney, what action do you recommend to make a start?’

  ‘Power does not surrender itself. Like a woman, it must be seized.’

  Duport jerked his head in my direction.

  ‘I offered him a woman in the bar of the Royal this evening,’ he said, ‘but he declined. He wouldn’t seize one. I must admit Fred never has much on hand.’

  ‘Cohabitation with antipathetic beings is torment,’ said Dr Trelawney. ‘Has that never struck you, my dear friend?’

  ‘Time and again,’ said Duport, laughing loudly. ‘Perfect hell. I’ve done quite a bit of it in my day. Would you like to hear some of my experiences?’

  ‘Why should we wish to ruminate on your most secret orgies?’ said Dr Trelawney. ‘What profit for us to muse on your nights in the lupanar, your diabolical couplings with the brides of debauch, more culpable than those phantasms of the incubi that rack the dreams of young girls, or the libidinous gymnastics of the goat-god whose ice-cold sperm fathers monsters on writhing witches in coven?’

  Duport shook with laughter. I saw that one of Dr Trelawney’s weapons was flattery, though flattery of no trite kind, in fact the best of all flattery, the sort disguised as disagreement or rebuke.

  ‘So you don’t want a sketch of my love life in its less successful moments?’ said Duport.

  Dr Trelawney shook his head.

  ‘There have been some good moments too,’ said Duport. ‘Don’t get me wrong.’

  ‘He alone can truly possess the pleasures of love,’ said Dr Trelawney, ‘who has gloriously vanquished the love of pleasure.’

  ‘Is that your technique?’

  ‘If you would possess, do not give.’

  ‘I’ve known plenty of girls who thought that, my wife among them.’

  ‘Continual caressing begets satiety.’

  ‘She thought that too. You should meet. However, if what you said about a war coming is true – and it’s what I think myself – why bother? We shall soon be as dead as Jenkins’s uncle.’

  Duport had a way of switching from banter to savage melancholy.

  ‘There is no death in Nature,’ said Dr Trelawney, ‘only transition, blending, synthesis, mutation.’

  ‘All the same,’ said Duport, ‘to take this uncle of Jenkins’s again, you must admit, from his point of view, it was different sitting in the Bellevue lounge, from lying in a coffin at the crematorium, his present whereabouts, as I understand from his nephew.’

  ‘Those who no longer walk beside us on the void expanses of this fleeting empire of created light have no more reached the absolute end of their journey than birth was for them the absolute beginning. They have merely performed their fugitive pilgrimage from embryo to ashes. They are in the world no longer. That is all we can say.’

  ‘But what more can anyone say?’ said Duport. ‘You’re put in a box and stowed away underground, or cremated in the Jenkins manner. In other words, you’re dead.’

  ‘Death is a mere phantom of ignorance,’ said Dr Trelawney. ‘It does not exist. The flesh is the raiment of the soul. When that raiment has grown threadbare or is torn asunder by violent hands, it must be abandoned. There is witness without end. When men know how to live, they will no longer die, no more cry with Faustus:

  O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!’

  Dr Trelawney and Duport were an odd couple arguing together about the nature of existence, the immortality of the soul, survival after death. The antithetical point of view each represented was emphasised by their personal appearance. This rather bizarre discussion was brought to an end by a knock on the door.

  ‘Enter,’ said Dr Trelawney.

  He spoke in a voice of command. Mrs Erdleigh came into the room. Dr Trelawney raised himself into a sitting position, leaning back on his elbows.

  ‘The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the True.’

  ‘The Vision of Visions heals the Blindness of Sight.’

  While she pronounced the incantation, Mrs Erdleigh smiled in a faintly deprecatory manner, like a grown-up who, out of pure good nature, humours the whim of a child. I remembered the same expression coming into her face when speaking to Uncle Giles. Dr Trelawney made a dramatic gesture of introduction, showing his fangs again in one of those awful grins as he lay back on the pillow.

  ‘Mr Duport, you’ve met, Myra,’ he said. ‘This gentleman here is the late Captain Jenkins’s nephew, bearing the same name.’

  He rolled his eyes in my direction, indicating Mrs Erdleigh.

  ‘Connaissez-vous la vieille souveraine du monde,’ he said, ‘qui marche toujours, et ne se fatigue jamais? In this incarnation, she passes under the name of Mrs Erdleigh.’

  ‘Mr Jenkins and I know each other already,’ she said, with a smile.

  ‘I might have guessed,’ said Dr Trelawney. ‘She knows all.’

  ‘And your introduction was not very polite,’ said Mrs Erdleigh. ‘I am not as old as she to whom the Abbé referred.’

  ‘Be not offended, priestess of Isis. You have escaped far beyond the puny fingers of Time.’

  She turned from him, holding out her hand to me.

  ‘I knew you were here,’ she said.

  ‘Did Albert say I was coming?’

  ‘It was not necessary. I know such things. Your poor uncle passed over peacefully. More peacefully than might have been expected.’

  She wore a black coat with a high fur collar, a tricorne hat, also black, riding on the summit of grey curls. These had taken the place of the steep bank of dark-reddish tresses of the time when I had met her at the Ufford with Uncle Giles seven or eight years before. Then, I had imagined her nearing fifty. Lunching with the Templers eighteen months later (when she had arrived with Jimmy Stripling), I decided she was younger. Now, she was not so much aged a
s an entirely different woman – what my brother-in-law, Hugo Tolland, used to call (apropos of his employer, Mrs Baldwyn Hodges) a ‘blue-rinse marquise’. This new method of doing her hair, the tone and texture of which suggested a wig, together with the three-cornered hat, recalled Longhi, the Venetian ridotto. You felt Mrs Erdleigh had just removed her mask before paying this visit to Cagliostro – or, as it turned out with no great difference, to Dr Trelawney.

  ‘Sad that your mother-in-law, Lady Warminster, passed over too,’ said Mrs Erdleigh. ‘She had not consulted me for some years, but I foretold both her marriages. I warned her that her second husband should beware of the Eagle – symbol of the East, you know – and of the Equinox of Spring. Lord Warminster died in Kashmir at just that season.’

  ‘She is greatly missed in the family.’

  ‘Lady Warminster was a woman among women,’ said Mrs Erdleigh. ‘I shall never forget her gratitude when I revealed to her that Tuesday was the best day for the operation of revenge.’

  Dr Trelawney was becoming restive, either because Mrs Erdleigh had made herself the centre of attention, or because his own ‘treatment’ had been delayed too long.

  ‘We think we should have our … er … pill, ha-ha,’ he said, trying to laugh, but beginning to twitch dreadfully. ‘We do not wish to cut short so pleasurable an evening. I am eternally grateful to you, gentlemen – though to name eternity is redundant, since we all perforce have our being within it – and I hope we shall meet again, if only in the place where the last are said to be first, though, for my own part, I shall not be surprised if the first are first there too.’

  ‘We shall have to turn in as well,’ said Duport, rising, ‘or I shall have no head for figures tomorrow.’

  I thought Duport did not much care for Mrs Erdleigh, certainly disliked the fact that she and I had met before.

  ‘The gods brook no more procrastination,’ said Dr Trelawney, his hoarse voice rising sharply in key. ‘I am like one of those about to adore the demon under the figure of a serpent, or such as make sorceries with vervain and periwinkle, sage, mint, ash and basil …’

  Mrs Erdleigh had taken off her coat and hat. She was fumbling in a large black bag she had brought with her. Dr Trelawney’s voice now reached an agonised screech.