by E. F. Benson
The brandy had given the condemned man a momentary courage.
‘A pack of lies, Mr Elton,’ he said. ‘That boy has got a corrupt mind. He told me things that no boy of his age should know: he giggled and laughed at them. Perhaps I ought to have told his mother.’
‘It’s too late to think of that now,’ said Francis. ‘The diary I spoke of will be in the hands of the police at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. They will also inspect the room upstairs where you have been in the habit of celebrating the Black Mass.’
Barton leant forward towards him.
‘No, no,’ he cried. ‘Don’t do that! I beg and implore you! I will confess the truth to you. I will conceal nothing. My life has been a blasphemy. But I’m sorry: I repent. I abjure all those abominations from henceforth: I renounce them all in the name of Almighty God.’
‘Too late,’ said Francis.
And then the horror that haunts me still began to manifest itself. The wretched man threw himself back in his chair, and there dropped from his forehead on to his white shirt-front a long grey worm that lay and wriggled there. At that moment there came from overhead the sound of a bell, and he sprang to his feet.
‘No!’ he cried again. ‘I retract all I said. I abjure nothing. And my Lord is waiting for me in the sanctuary. I must be quick and make my humble confession to him.’
With the movement of a slinking animal he slid from the room, and we heard his steps going swiftly upstairs.
‘Did you see?’ I whispered. ‘And what’s to be done? Is the man sane?’
‘It’s beyond us now,’ said Francis.
There was a thump on the ceiling overhead as if someone had fallen, and without a word we ran upstairs into Francis’s bedroom. The door of the wardrobe where the vestments were kept was open, some lay on the floor. The panel was open, too, but within it was dark. In terror at what might meet our eyes, I felt for the switch and turned the light on.
The bell which had sounded a few minutes ago was still swinging gently, though speaking no more. Barton, clad in the gold-embroidered cope, lay in front of the overturned altar, with his face twitching. Then that ceased, the rattle of death creaked in his throat, and his mouth fell open. Great flies, swarms of them, coming from nowhere, settled on it.
Thursday Evenings
With the death of Mrs Georgiana Wallace, in 1920, a very notable link with certain artistic activities in the mid-Victorian era was severed. She had long passed her eightieth year, but her mental faculties were quite unclouded – the link, in fact, was unrusted and untarnished – and only a couple of days before she died she gave the last of her famous Thursday evenings. I was taken there by a friend, and that was the solitary occasion on which I saw Mrs Wallace alive. She was tremendously vivacious that night in praise of past time and (with many little shakes of her pretty porcelain head and holdings-up of her hands loaded with mourning rings) in condemnation of the grotesque gods which the present age has enshrined in the Temple of Art. Her fairness of mind was shown in the fact that she considered that much in the Golden Age of Victorian Art was ‘sad rubbish’. That ‘horrid old cynic’, Mr Thackeray, for instance, was one of her hottest aversions; Dickens, with his odious vulgar descriptions of low life, was another; the pre-Raphaelite movement was just ‘a piece of impertinence’; and when Mr Swinburne was incautiously mentioned, she flushed a little and changed the subject.
Mrs Wallace, then, did not regard any of these distinguished people as precious metal, and I found myself beginning to wonder where the lode lay. So far from these persons being pure gold, she did not consider them as being possessed of the smallest touch of gilding. But then her face lit up as she talked to us of that memorable evening when she heard the first performance of that famous song ‘The Lost Chord’.
‘That’s what I mean by music,’ she said, ‘and where are you to find such music now? I went to a concert the other day at the Queen’s Hall, but after sitting through an hour of it I had to come away. Such a caterwauling I never heard! There was an Overture by that dreadful Mr Wagner, and there was a Symphony by Brahms – shocking stuff, and there was a piece by Debussy, which finished me: Un après-midi d’un Faune, they called it. I’m sure I wondered what he had had for lunch to give him such a nightmare afterwards. I stopped my ears, my dear, until it was over; and then I came home, and sang “The Lost Chord” through twice, to put all those dreadful noises out of my head. Ah, I shall never forget the evening when it was sung for the first time at St James’s Hall. There wasn’t a dry eye in the place. The words, too, by Miss Adelaide Anne Procter! A bit of lovely poetry!’
Then, with very little encouragement, after a sniff at her lavender salts, the old lady suffered herself to be led to ‘the instrument’, as she called the piano, and sang the masterpiece again in a faint far-away voice which sounded as if it came from the next house but one.
She spoke of the tremendous excitement at the Private View of the Academy when the ‘Derby Day’ appeared on its walls; and passing on to literature, she recounted how, soon after she was married, Mr Wallace had read aloud to her Mr Robert Montgomery’s magnificent poem called ‘Satan’, which he considered the finest thing which had appeared since Milton’s Paradise Lost. He held the most advanced views on literary subjects, and she described how when Adam Bede burst like a bombshell into the placid circles of the novel-reading public, scaring and shocking so many, Mr Wallace had always maintained that, though too daring in parts, and not fit to be read aloud, it was a fine book, and she shared his view. No doubt it was an extraordinary thing for a woman to touch such a theme, but if Miss Evans had accepted her invitation to any of the Thursday evenings, both she and Mr Wallace would have given her a warm welcome in the name of Art.
She spoke, too, of the early years of these famous Thursdays, of which this was to prove the last. All the noblest in the realms of Art and Culture assembled in this very studio where we now sat, ‘and I assure you,’ said Mrs Wallace, audaciously, ‘there were a great many gentlemen always present!’ There was a dinner-party first in the dining-room next door, to which some twenty of the brightest and best were bidden, and the brilliance of the conversation was perfectly paralysing. After the crinolines had retired, the gentlemen would not sit long over their wine, for they were eager in those days to join the ladies. (This was said with great archness, and I wondered how many hearts Mrs Wallace had seriously damaged in her time.) Moreover, the odious indulgence in tobacco was then quite unknown, even as it had remained in Mrs Wallace’s house to this day, and the gentlemen were quick on the ladies’ heels. Soon the party began to arrive: artists, musicians, writers, actors (she gave us a catalogue of names which I cannot remember) poured in, and the wit and the recitations, the music and the singing, were the talk of the town next day. Mr Wallace was Scotch, and the tartan-paper which streaked the walls tonight was then newly put up. We sat in the same stiff mahogany chairs; the same worsted-work curtains shut out the noises of London; the same antimacassars were spread on the backs of sofas; even the same ‘instrument’, which had just now tinkled under Mrs Wallace’s fingers, stood in its old place; the same colza-oil lamps were reflected in the heavy mirrors and in the polished tables. Nothing in that shrine sanctified by the conversaziones of the Golden Age, had ever been altered.
Even as she spoke I seemed to get a glimpse of the toughness of the psychical bond which, while Mrs Wallace lived, bound the Golden Age to ours. Week by week for all those mid-Victorian years the spirit of ‘The Lost Chord’, and the ‘Derby Day’, and Mr Montgomery’s poems had been pouring into the room, impregnating and haunting it, and it expressed itself not only in the mahogany and the colza-oil lamps, in the worsted curtains and the flowered carpet, but even more potently in the whole psychic environment. Drop by drop, from crinoline and conversation, sweet as lavender and remote as the stars, that essence, unrecapturable except through the mediumship, so to speak, of our venerable hostess,
had soaked the spiritual atmosphere. She alone held it there; when she was no longer able to do that, the ancient volatile fragrance must surely fade, and be perceptible no longer to our modern bustling senses. So when, two days later, I saw in the paper the announcement of Mrs Wallace’s death, I felt that the Golden Age of Victoria, as loved and understood by her, had passed away for ever from the earth. It seemed to have fallen with a remote hissing sound (as when you drop a match into the river), down, down into the dark well of years, and to have been promptly quenched . . . Never in my life have I been so hopelessly and outrageously wrong.
There was a sale of the contents of the house, and, in spite of the extravagant prices then paid for furniture, those faded flowered carpets, those heavy mahogany chairs, those colza-oil lamps, failed to arouse the cupidity of purchasers, and it was melancholy to reflect how, but a few weeks ago, these objects had been the splendour and embellishment of a venerated sanctuary. Now that shrine was empty, and they were tumbled out undesired and unhallowed to freeze on the pavements outside second-hand furniture shops till their final dispersion into callous homes. There were engravings, too, ‘The Monarch of the Glen’, ‘Derby Day’, ‘Queen Victoria Opening the Great Exhibition’, which scarcely fetched the price of the gilding on their frames. Lot after lot was rapidly and contemptuously disposed of, and at the end of the day I found myself the possessor of a glass case of wax flowers and two pink vases, the hideousness of which was absolutely irresistible. With them in my hand I took one more look round the scene of the Thursday evenings, and for the moment I was alone there, as the auctioneer was finishing the disposal of the ‘boudoir’ fittings. Just as I turned to leave I distinctly heard a voice at my elbow. It spoke very clearly, in a voice that I recognised at once.
‘They may get rid of my things,’ it said, ‘but they don’t get rid of me.’
I was so startled that I dropped one of the pink vases, and, clutching my other possessions more tightly, I stole away on tiptoe.
Soon after came the sale of the house itself: the purchaser was Mr Humphrey Lodge, the musical composer, whom the enlightened admire so greatly. His wife, as all the world knows, is the Cubist portrait-painter who sees the faces of her sitters as a series of planes separated from each other by coloured lines. In a few weeks the house was redecorated according to the most modern ideas, and resembled the setting of a Russian ballet gone mad, or, perhaps, a house so camouflaged that it ceased to be like a house at all. Electric light, of course, was introduced, and the lamp-shades were in the shape of large paper cauliflowers, bunches of carrots, and bundles of asparagus, painted by Mrs Lodge. The walls of the studio were purple, with large green clouds sailing across them, out of which sprang flashes of magenta lightning, and dotted about among the clouds were some houses and steeples and a few faces. The room was extremely large, and there was plenty of space for Mrs Lodge’s easels in one half, and a big table for her husband in the other. Just now he was composing his twenty-third symphony for a small band: his siren-whistles, pieces of emery-paper rubbed together, watchmen’s rattles, and penny whistles found places in the newer orchestra. Neither of them ever stopped smoking cigarettes, and neither was the least mad, but only modern.
One morning, as they worked together, she at a portrait of her husband, he at the slow movement of his Symphony, he scribbled the date across the page, and got up.
‘That’s finished,’ he said.
‘Ah, you shall play it me in a moment, dear,’ said she. ‘Just sit still one minute more. I want to catch – yes, that’s right.’
She painted for a little while in silence, while he, reconsidering his last bars, put in a fortissimo semi-breve for the B flat rattle.
‘And I’ve finished, too,’ she said, drawing a line of crimson across the plane of his nose. Then, putting back her head, she sniffed curiously at the thick air.
‘It’s odd,’ she said. ‘All the morning, while working, I thought I smelt that spiky thing that grows in gardens and among clothes.’
‘Lavender?’ he asked.
‘Yes, that’s it. It must be my imagination if you can’t smell it. Come and play me your slow movement.’
He went across to the piano. This alone remained of Mrs Wallace’s furniture, for Humphrey Lodge had attended the sale, and, running his fingers over the antique keys, had discovered in them exactly that tinkly remote tone which he wanted for certain surprising orchestral effects, and had bought it on the spot. He spread the score on the music-rest, and picked up from the table half a dozen weird instruments.
‘I can only give you the sketchiest idea of it,’ he said. ‘Yes, you take the two rattles and whirl them when I nod to you.’
The crazy performance began. Humphrey was extremely agile with arpeggios for one hand, a few raps at the xylophone with the other, with hurried rubbings of the emery-paper and chromatic blasts on the siren which he held in his mouth. But, though Julia supplemented these activities with the rattles in E flat and B flat, he could but render a sketch, an adumbration of the score. With the musician’s gift of internal audition, he could, as he followed his text, imagine the parts which want of fingers compelled him to omit, and the complete effect was as fully realised by him as if the omitted noises were all in full blast. Suddenly he stopped.
‘There it is again,’ he said. ‘I’ve been hearing that at intervals all the morning.’
‘Hearing what?’ asked Julia, checking the rattle.
‘It’s some kind of reedy sound which doesn’t occur in my score at all.’ said he. ‘It’s like an old lady singing in the next house, and it keeps interrupting me. Sometimes I catch a bar or two of a tune, some sort of hymn tune in G. This kind of thing – ’
And with an exasperated finger he played a couple of lines of ‘The Lost Chord’.
Julia listened; a dim recognition awoke in her fine eyes. ‘But that’s a real tune,’ she said; ‘I’ve heard it before. Play it again, Humphrey; I shall remember what it is.’
He repeated the ecclesiastical melody.
‘I don’t call it a tune,’ he said. ‘And, anyhow, there’s nothing in my score that remotely resembles it. Why do I keep on hearing it?’
‘I know what it is now,’ said Julia. ‘My mother used to sing it. It’s called “The Lost Chord”, “Seated one day at the organ” – that’s how the words began – and there’s something about the crimson twilight and the sound of a great Amen.’
She put out her hand, and touched the keys, attempting, rather un-successfully, to pick out the sound of the great Amen with one finger.
‘I’m beginning to remember it,’ she said hopefully.
Humphrey jumped up with a start.
‘But there it is again, correcting you,’ he cried. ‘Can’t you hear it?’
For one second Julia Lodge certainly thought she heard a faint, flute-like voice crooning from somewhere behind her easel. Whether it was an illusion or not, the impression was only momentary; but once again, more vividly, she thought she smelt the odour of lavender.
‘Yes, I thought I heard something,’ she said.
‘What is it?’
A little shudder of goose-flesh passed over her.
‘It’s all imagination,’ she said. ‘Let’s get on with your lovely slow movement. Where are my rattles?’
From that morning a series of trivial but inexplicable incidents began to invade the domestic routine of the house; things trumpery in themselves, but inconvenient, like pebbles in shoes, and also arresting because no possible explanation could be found for them. Some of them suggested that a practical joker was exercising his despicable wit on the Lodges, for one morning there appeared on the hall table a package, addressed in a tall, slanting hand to Julia, which, when opened, proved to contain a wretched reproduction of ‘The Monarch of the Glen’; and on the same day, and in the same place, was found a similar package addressed to
Humphrey, which contained a well-thumbed copy of one of Mr Wetherby’s songs. These packets had not passed through the post; but, even granting collusion with their servants, they could think of no one who would have thought it worth while to cut such childish capers. More inexplicable was the insertion in Humphrey’s score of his new Overture of a passage for the tenor horn which proved to be the opening bars of an obsolete song called ‘Dresden China’, by Mr Molloy, whom he ascertained to have been an admired melodist of the nineteenth century. Of course, he indignantly erased it, and even while his knife was scratching at it, he thought he heard some noise, a mixture between a sob and a sniff, from the corner of the dusky studio. Again, one morning Julia found her cubist picture of her husband, which was still not yet dry, fallen face downwards on the floor, and much obliterated, because the wet paint had stuck to the carpet. This time there was no sob or sniff by way of comment, but a little noise, scarcely audible, which sounded to her much more like a cackle of laughter, followed up by an overwhelming whiff of lavender. Again, it was very odd that a copy of Adam Bede, a book of which neither of them had ever heard, well-worn, with passages heavily underlined, and pencilled in the margin with notes of approbation, should appear during lunch-time, on the lid of the piano. Curious noises were heard in the house – the tapping of shoes, the rustle of skirts, and once, when Julia and her husband were dining out, the servants in the kitchen, which lay below the studio, were amazed at the tinkle of the piano above their heads, and the parlour-maid came up with a tray of siphons and whisky, supposing that they had returned. She noticed a line of light under the studio door, clearly indicating that it was lit within. But on opening it she found herself staring into a darkness redolent with the smell of colza-oil. After a hysterical night she gave notice next morning, and Julia was obliged to sacrifice several days from her painting in order to find a new maid.
