I was about to make some remark when he put a finger to his lips again and pointed at the mirror. I turned back and once more, this time with strong inner misgivings, gazed at myself multiplied in the mirror.
The sight I beheld was different from my last encounter with it, though at first I could not discern where the difference lay. By slightly shifting my position in relation to the mirror, I could see more clearly the second image of myself behind the first, and it was then that I received a shock. The second image was the difference. Not only was it dimmer, but it seemed older. At first I tried to dismiss it as a passing illusion, but there were lines on the face which were not present in my most immediate reflection. The hair, moreover was more disordered and had the taint of grey in it. I looked at the third image which seemed older still. Deep grooves of disappointed hopes curved around my lips and darkened my eyes. My hair was not only greyer but had begun to thin. I blinked, passed my hand over my face but the illusion—if it was an illusion—remained. Down the endless corridor I stared as each succeeding reflection of myself diminished and decayed until, far in the unreal distance, I could see, faint and small, but still discernible, a grinning skull and skeleton to which a few rags of decayed flesh still adhered. I cried out in horror and the echo shrieked back at me a thousand times. When I turned from the mirror I saw that the monk was gone. I was alone.
I ran and found that I was running towards my infinite self in the opposite direction. This filled me with such terror that it confounded my senses for a while, and some time elapsed before I recovered my wits sufficiently to find the exit from the endless corridor. The monastery had become a labyrinth to my wounded mind and for a long while I blundered through decaying passages and chambers, and through vast ruined halls until at last I found my way out into the open air where, to my astonishment the sun was already beginning to decline into a cloudy and ensanguined west.
I untethered and mounted Salamanca who seemed to welcome my arrival and we set off at once on the long ride to Guadalajara. I truly believe that it was my faithful horse rather than I who found the way back to our Franciscan sanctuary. We arrived before its gates in starlight and under a moon without whose guiding illumination Salamanca and I would have been utterly lost.
There is more in this journal, but it is mostly fragmentary. Some of it shows evidence of a deeply troubled mind, but I don’t need to quote further. I had taken scans of these and other pages. It was evening and I had not eaten all day. Needless to say my hosts offered no refreshment. When I took my leave of Lord Glimham and the skeletal blonde whom I took to be Serena, Lady Glimham, they looked at me searchingly, almost in a concerned way. Glimham asked if the Sotheran papers were ‘worth selling’ and I replied, again ambiguously, that they were of great value.
As I drove my car down towards the entrance gates the evening sun was low and shone almost directly in my face, masked only by a belt of spidery trees. The protesters were still at the gates, sitting on camp stools and regaling themselves with sandwiches and Thermos tea. I felt a pang of hunger and, in a momentary loss of concentration, swerved towards them almost hitting an elderly lady who fell off her stool. The rest shook their fists and yelled at me. To them it had been a deliberate attack on their righteous cause. I felt dazed and confused. It was as if someone or something had taken momentary possession of the steering wheel.
Nothing, except a faint but persistent sense of unease, could restrain the sense of exhilaration I felt over the next few weeks. I wrote some chapters and a synopsis, then approached a publisher who showed enthusiasm for the project. All was going well, or seemed to be. It was Julia who alerted me to the fact that I was working too hard, lecturing and giving tutorials during the day, writing in the evenings, sparing no thought for myself or others. My work on Sotheran was almost finished before I paid her any attention.
One evening, on returning from a seminar on Byron, I took a bath. I had begun to pay conscious attention to my exhaustion but still denied it to the world. A bath, I thought would dissolve anxieties. I am still young enough to believe in simple remedies.
The area of the bath is surrounded on three sides by mirrors, an idea of Julia’s. I have never cared much for the sight of myself naked and I have always had an aversion to the endless reflection that Sotheran writes about in his memoir. Indeed the image had preyed upon me rather and this may explain what appeared to happen next.
The bath had done me good. Cares from the day, had dissolved. I rose out of the water and, without giving it much thought, cleared the steam from the mirrors that surrounded me. Before taking my towel I studied myself in the glass. I had lost weight recently and was preparing to be pleasantly surprised by what had become of my figure.
The heat of the water had made my skin pinker than usual, and I looked with interest at the infinite recessions of my body in the glass. I found it hard to focus my eyes on the grey-green distance. It was my partner Julia who had put the mirrors up. She liked the paradox of the mirror world which was at once entirely real and completely false. It was, she said, the simplest and most profound of art installations.
I seemed to be looking at a stranger. It was me, of course, the features were recognisable, but I could claim no ownership over my reflection. The eyes were cold and lustreless: their weariness was ancient. And each succeeding image in the infinitely long line was increasingly strange until, at the apex of the endless vista, I saw something shadowy and utterly alien with two points of darkness for eyes. Then that thing began to advance and all sense of perspective collapsed. It was not me at all but a dark man in a rusty black suit with a white stock around his throat. He was running down the endless corridor towards me, lank hair waving in a mythical breeze, while my own image shuddered in the vaporous heat. His lugubrious eyes were hungry to possess me while I was beginning to lose all that I was. I could barely see myself; in a moment I might not exist at all.
A hand on my shoulder; arms around me as I collapsed: it was Julia. She was by me as I recovered, slowly, as far as I am able. I still am, but do not know if I will be. I cannot be what I was: that is certain.
Now I have achieved my ‘impact’. My book The Endless Corridor: William Sotheran, Doomed Romantic has been published by Bloomsbury, and John Carey has reviewed it favourably in the Sunday Times. I have presented a Radio 3 documentary about Sotheran and my lectureship at Wessex University has been renewed. But Julia walked out on me two days ago, giving no reason, though maybe I can guess. I am chained to a madman. I owe Sotheran, and he is not about to forget my obligation to him. He beckons to me from the Endless Corridor where Fame and Oblivion are one.
THE VAMPYRE TRAP
When you are obliged to hang someone, it ties a knot of indissoluble familiarity between you and your victim. That is how I have had the privilege of becoming the lifelong friend of Mr Jasper Davenant, though naturally the fact that I did not kill him was of help. Mr Davenant once observed to me that though he is fond of death scenes, he has a very definite prejudice against Death itself. ‘She has been the ruin of many a promising career,’ he remarked. Mr Davenant always makes reference to Death as a person of the female persuasion, a peculiarity of his.
We first met in the June of 1851 when I was working as a stage carpenter and general factotum for Mr Frederick Medley’s stock company. We were a portable theatre establishment, that is to say we moved from town to town setting up a wooden and canvas ‘booth’ on waste ground leased to us by the Corporation. At Bradford we were granted a licence to set up our theatre for four months in the summer.
Old Medley wanted to make a stir and so he invited Mr Davenant to join our company, and Davenant, to our amazement, consented. Mr Davenant was already an established actor on the London stage, a ‘star’ as they say, having played Iago to Mr Macready’s Othello at Drury Lane, but he felt obliged to Medley who had given him a helping hand early in his career. He came with a good grace and seemed well pleased with his lot. Medley had invited him to play Captain Crosstree in Black-E
yed Susan, or All in the Downs and William Corder in Maria Martin, or the Murder in the Red Barn, the latter role being how I came to hang him.
You will no doubt have noticed that the above roles are of a villainous nature, and, truly, if ever a man was born to play villains, it was my good friend Jasper Davenant. Even his name suggested something of that favourite figure of our melodrama, the wicked squire, and off stage he always dressed like a fashionable swell. He stood over six foot in his stockinged feet, and was dark, thin, and saturnine in aspect; his hair and whiskers, in those days, abundant, glossy and black as night. His voice too was as rich and dark as a pint of milk stout laced with port wine. I remember him telling me once that Mr Macready (that old humbug) had called him ‘a first rate actor of second rate parts’, not intending his description to be wholly complimentary. ‘But, my dear Dobbs,’ he told me, ‘your villain is always the better role because more true to life than your milk-and-water hero. For what is a villain after all but a hero with the mask removed?’ He told me that he had made himself a student of villainy to play his parts better, and that study had proved valuable to him more than once in what is sometimes, and perhaps mistakenly, called ‘real life’. I myself can testify to this.
Being only sixteen at the time when I first met him, and the lowliest person in the company, I did not expect Davenant to pay me any heed, and for the first few days after his arrival, he was too deeply occupied in rehearsing to pay much attention to anyone. He had previously played both roles for which he had been engaged, but Corder in Maria Marten needed some adjustment because our version differed from the one he was used to. Medley had printed on the bills that one of the principal and unique attractions of the piece was that ‘the hanging of the reprobate William Corder will take place in full view of the audience!’ To which he added, with his usual instinct for showmanship: ‘Ladies of a nervous disposition may care to take their leave before this final distressing scene.’ Needless to say, among the ladies of Bradford that summer, those of ‘a nervous disposition’ were very few in number.
‘Dobbs,’ Medley said to me one morning, ‘I want you to make me a practical gallows!’ Well, I was trained from my earliest youth in woodwork and no bad hand at it, but I had never made a gallows in my life, let alone one which enabled its victim to survive the ministrations of the rope, but fortunately Medley had a set of plans, for he had more than once had a hanging on stage and could testify to its popularity. I had to work fast because besides the construction of a scaffold, I had to make the harness which would prevent Mr Davenant from suffering the fate of the character he was to portray.
It was hardly surprising that Davenant took some interest in my work. I remember one evening I was working away at my gallows in the scene dock, oblivious to all but the task in hand when I became conscious of an odour of cigar smoke. Now old Medley was very strict—and rightly so in my view—about smoking in the theatre. If any member was caught smoking in the theatre he fined them a shilling. I turned round in some annoyance preparing to deliver a rebuke.
Davenant was lounging on a property throne—last seen in Macbeth—one long leg dangling over an arm, with a fine Indian cheroot in his mouth. I had the feeling that having stolen in he had been watching me at work for some time and this angered me. I was sixteen and the most junior member of Medley’s company but I summoned up the courage to speak to Mr Davenant in forthright terms. I reminded him of the perils of fire in a theatre composed entirely of wood and canvas and of Mr Medley’s strict rules with regard to smoking.
There was a pause while I waited for the fury, the scorn, even possibly the physical violence that might well have been Davenant’s reaction to such a piece of damned impudence. But without a word, Davenant removed his leg from the arm of the property throne, dropped the cheroot on the floor and ground it into extinction with the heel of his boot.
‘Well spoken, young ’un,’ he said. ‘That was deuced careless of me. I beg your pardon, sir, for a damned foolish offence.’ Off the boards Davenant spoke in the drawling tones of the idle landed gentry which at first I thought to be mere affectation. It was only later in our acquaintance that I discovered that my friend had been born into that class, in a manner of speaking. For Davenant was the natural son of a well-known sporting baronet and had been to Rugby School. It was only when his father had lost all his money at the gaming tables and could no longer pay the fees that Davenant had been thrown onto his own resources. He left Rugby and became a vagrant on the roads of England. A passing company of players—Medley’s as it happened—had taken pity on the young Jasper Davenant and invited him to join them.
With a courtesy which would have graced a Duke or Marquess, he begged that he might be allowed to stay and converse with me as he was not needed at rehearsals. At that moment they were running through the farce (that old favourite, A Fig for a Farthing, or the Mouse Catcher and the Milkmaid) which was to raise the curtain on Maria Marten and in which he was not, therefore, involved.
‘And I would not go back to my lodgings,’ said he, ‘and have to sit in the parlour and listen to a recital of my landlady’s cursed ailments which run from the gout to the vapours with many a staging post in between, chiefly of a flatulent nature.’
It was my laughter at this, Davenant told me later, that sealed our friendship. He saw in me, a humble stage carpenter, a kindred spirit, a sharer of what he called his ‘credo’. When I asked him what it was, he told me.
‘We are all of us damned lunatics, my dear Dobbs, living in the devil of a madhouse, but a few, the best of us, know that we are.’
My friend Davenant, as I may call him, took a considerable interest in my gallows and its workings, and not merely for reasons of his own safety. ‘I like your devices, sir,’ he said to me. ‘Damme, they please me, for there is a side of me which is all mathematics and deuced mechanical. It satisfies me to think that there is a machine under the madness. I hope there is, because if there is not, we are all bound for a cursed Gehenna of chaos.’ This is how my friend’s mind ran, and whether it was folly or good sense, you may judge for yourselves, for I will not.
It was thanks to his encouragement, I believe, that I made a very fair job of my gallows, though this, inadvertently, was part cause of a disaster and an adventure which I shall now relate.
On the day before the opening performance of Maria Marten old Medley had his usual procession through the streets of Bradford to excite interest. Besides Wellington, a bull mastiff, Medley’s favourite performing dog, dressed in the Union Jack as ‘the spirit of England’, we had Fatimah the camel, whom Medley had purchased on Liverpool docks for fifty guineas but a week before and was of a singularly recalcitrant nature. She drew—or was meant to draw—a wagon in which Old Finch, our clown, was capering on an upturned washtub to the great merriment of spectators. On a second wagon, drawn by two fine fat albino ponies, old Medley’s youngest daughter, Louise, ‘the Juvenile Wonder’ discoursed on the flageolet while Mr Davenant stood motionless and dignified before my gallows which had been mounted on the cart for the inspection of the multitude.
This procession excited much interest among the townspeople and it was returning to the theatre when Mr Medley was informed that two gentlemen had applied at the gallery door to see the manager. I was present when Medley appeared before them. One was tall and dressed like a gentleman, almost bald with a large nose and a small, pursed mouth. The other was grimy, unshaven and remarkably ill-favoured with bandy legs. His name was Vhokes and, though I little knew it, I was to have further dealings with both of them. They stood on the platform before the doors of the theatre and addressed themselves to my master.
‘You are the manager, I presume?’ said the tall gentleman, assuming the haughtiest of manners.
‘I usually act in that capacity,’ replied Medley with quiet irony.
‘You may not perhaps know me.’
‘I am afraid I have not that pleasure.’
‘My name is Edwin Falconer,’ replied the tall gentlem
an. ‘and I am the lessee of the Theatre Royal here at Bradford.’
‘And may I ask what is your business with me?’
‘To object to your performing here.’ The two eyed each other for the moment: Mr Falconer, tall and angular, Mr Medley short and somewhat stout, but a match for him in dignity and self-possession.
‘It may be that you are not fully aware who I am.’
‘The manager, as I understand.’
‘Yes, and also the lessee of this theatre,’ replies Medley, waving in the direction of his wood and canvas erection with as much pride as if it had been Drury Lane. ‘And do you happen to know that you are now standing upon my platform?’
‘I am aware of that.’
‘Then kindly allow me to suggest that you and your friend will find a way down from it by the steps there.’
The look of rage that passed across Mr Falconer’s face was a sight to behold. The whole of his large and all but hairless head became suffused with a purplish tinge and two veins at his temples began to throb. But he stood his ground and when he next spoke it was with icy calm.
‘I understand that you are intending to perform the drama of Maria Marten.’
‘Indeed I am, with my daughter Miss Louise Medley in the title role, and Mr Davenant, late of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane as William Corder.’
‘Are you not aware, sir, that I too am to present Maria Marten this very week at the Theatre Royal?’
‘Indeed, I was not, sir, but what if you are?’
‘May I recommend, sir, that you at the very least remove that piece from your repertoire until you leave this town?’
‘I will do nothing of the sort, Mr Falconer. Nor do I in my turn advise you to desist from your own presentation. Let us put our respective Maria Martens upon the stage, and, to adapt a sporting phrase, sir, may the best Maria Marten win. And now, if you will kindly leave my premises?’
The Ballet of Dr Caligari Page 17
