by Dennis Parry
‘My dear chap,’ he said, ‘I’m Cedric Ellison. I’ve heard so much about you. I know we shall see much more of each other.’
Here he made one of the absurd little miscalculations which were typical of him and which, in my later judgment, sprang from some very deep-seated lack of co-ordination. He was always pulling so many strings that he could never remember which of them might have crossed.
On this occasion he held out his right hand, forgetting that it still contained the object which he had removed from the case. Suddenly he realized that he was holding a foreign body. He withdrew his fingers and carelessly transferred a small yellow coin to his pocket. Immediately I remembered and identified it from my previous inspection, which was not hard, seeing that a gold Macedonian stater stood out from the general junk in the coin-tray like a diamond among ashes.
Cedric Ellison said: ‘Excuse me, David. When I drop round here I often pick up some little curio to amuse my girl. It’s such an awful magpie’s nest, but one can still find a few things that will stimulate a child’s imagination.’
‘I expect so.’
He looked at me closely. He had eyes of a peculiar light-grey which should have suggested vacillation, yet, in some mysterious fashion, indicated an extraordinary hardness.
‘I feel,’ he said, taking off his gold pince-nez, ‘that you’re a person who has ideas about education. So I don’t mind saying that I believe one of the finest things you can do for a young person is to give him or her a sense of the romance of past ages.’
I felt the gratuitous falsity of his sentiments like a physical slap. And yet, even as an older man, I have been taken in by characters far less intrinsically skilled in deceit than Cedric Ellison. But he had a kind of self-defeating mechanism inside him. Later I began to see how it operated: he was so utterly absorbed in himself and the part he was playing that he forgot he was being observed by an independent human intelligence. All the springs and weights and counterweights in his mind lay bare like the works of a gramophone. You could practically hear him saying (as it might be): ‘Now I am being subtle,’ or ‘Now I will put him off his guard,’ or ‘It’s about time I applied the whip-hand.’
Such signals reduced the amount of damage which he could do; but it would be wrong to suppose that they rendered him harmless. He was not a clever man, but he had cunning and endless pertinacity. Failing to get in by the door or the window, he would turn up weeks later through the chimney, when you thought he had forgotten his objective. I do not think that he could ever have acquired great wealth or power for himself; on the other hand he knew how to keep and use them.
‘Of course,’ he said with a sincerity so highly charged that it would not have deceived an infant, ‘of course, anything that I borrow for Deirdre is returned after a few days. It would never do to let the child get the notion that even odds-and-ends are there to be walked off with.’
I knew then that Cedric was stealing the stater. And I was quite right. Later I learnt from Turpin that for years, whenever the acquisitive fit was on him, he would pop round to Aynho Terrace and pinch something out of the museum. It was a kind of intermittent outlet, such as is necessary in many types of mania. Over the years it had, so Turpin told me, visibly diminished the contents of the collection. He also said that Mrs. Ellison was aware of it. Certainly the servants knew. Some time before there had been a head-housemaid who particularly loathed Cedric. She invested several shillings of her wages at Woolworth’s in sixpenny rings out of which she prised the stones. These she placed in an inconspicuous corner of the museum—and had the amusement of observing their steady disappearance during the following months.
His vice was not so much that of the plain thief as the magpie or the miser, for by all accounts his personal income was in the region of £20,000 a year.
‘I hear,’ he said—and the machinery of flattery started up with an audible purr, ‘that you’re a young man of quite remarkable talents. A future Haldane or Stephen.’
I muttered something about ‘having a long way to go’.
Then he said: ‘You’re modest. I expect if the truth were known a good many people have already benefited by your advice.’ Feeling that the second show of interest in my embryonic profession could not be pure coincidence, I gave him much the same rejoinder as I had given to Varvara.
‘Nobody in his senses would consult an inexperienced undergraduate.’
‘Oh,’ said Cedric with great smoothness, ‘not about the kind of detail which one only picks up with practice. But advice on matters of principle . . . I often think that comes as well from a young, as an old, head.’
I suddenly made up my mind to string along with him, if only to see where he was going.
‘What sort of matters had you in mind?’
‘Well . . . for instance . . . respect for the Law . . . making people understand they can’t play fast and loose with it or with documents made under its authority.’
‘Such as?’
‘I don’t know. Deeds, perhaps, or wills. There are a lot of simple unbusinesslike people who imagine that if you don’t like what’s written in them you can ignore it.’
‘It should be easy to squash that notion,’ I said.
‘It just needs a word or two of disinterested advice.’
I continued to wear a bright, astute expression, but he suddenly shut up. I suppose I had played my part too vigorously and he felt that I was trying to push him into some concrete proposition before he was ready.
We left the museum and went downstairs together. In doing so we had to pass the door of Varvara’s room. It was open and I could see her inside seated in front of a mirror, like the Lady of Shalott.
‘Good evening, my dear,’ called her uncle.
She must have been able to see our reflections, but she did not reply nor did her face flicker. Perhaps, I thought, it is one of those conventions which play such a part in Chinese life that people observing others through a mirror are themselves notionally invisible.
Cedric sighed. ‘A poor, wild, uncouth creature!’ he said in a lowered voice. ‘I suppose it’s a miracle she survived at all in that terrible wilderness. What my brother can have been thinking of, all those years . . .’
‘I’ve wondered why he went to a place like that,’ I said.
Cedric nodded gravely.
‘Yes,’ he said, removing his spectacles and fixing me in a light-grey stare. ‘Yes, you must have wondered. Well . . . there’s no sense in being squeamish about old scandals.’ He paused so that his words should gain emphasis. ‘My wretched brother betrayed our father’s trust.’ For a moment I was not quite sure whether the victim’s name should be spelt with a capital F or not: then he went on. ‘Fulk obtained money as an agent and failed to account for it.’ (This seemed to rule out the Deity.) ‘In those days society had no place for swindlers.’
It is a significant fact that the possibility of believing him never for an instant crossed my mind.
‘It must have been very disturbing,’ I said cautiously.
‘It was,’ Cedric agreed, ‘to persons with standards of honour.’
His awful naïve cunning sometimes achieved results by a kind of double bluff. It filled persons of sensibility with so much vicarious shame that they could not bear the insult to humanity involved in showing him up; consequently they sometimes pretended to have noticed nothing and allowed him to achieve his object. This, of course, led to a vicious circle, since each triumph was put down by its author to a Borgian subtlety.
By this time we had reached the hall and Cedric was collecting his hat and his gold-topped malacca cane. I looked round, hearing a noise from the staircase, and saw Nurse Fillis coming down the treads two at a time.
‘Oh, Mr. Ellison,’ she said, ‘I’m so glad to have caught you! You left your spectacle-case upstairs.’
‘Thank you, Sister,’ said Cedric. ‘Most kind! It’s so seldom you youngsters realize how much we old fogeys depend on our props and crutches.’
He squared up his body, which for a man in his fifties was a pretty good one. I caught an enlightening glimpse of sickly adoration on Nurse Fillis’s face.
‘What nonsense!’ she said in slightly breathless accents. ‘Everybody says how young you look.’
Cedric coughed sharply, a displeased bark, and you could see her shrinking back to the station to which St. Thomas’s or Bart’s had called her. Then—feeling, I suppose, that the scene must otherwise end a little bleakly—he inquired:
‘Is my mother resting now?’
‘I’ve just given her a sedative,’ said Nurse Fillis, ‘to stop her—’
But though it passed me by she obviously received another warning of displeasure, for she broke off abruptly.
‘You stimulate her so much, Mr. Ellison,’ she finished sycophantically.
I next saw Varvara whilst we both waited in the morning-room for dinner to be announced.
‘Now,’ she said with biting scorn, ‘you have found a new friend and master. You shall be his lice!’
I was feeling distinctly ill again, and my patience was short.
‘Please don’t talk drivel,’ I said. ‘If you want to know, I think your uncle is one of the most god-awful skunks I’ve ever seen.’ I squinted at her maliciously, for migraine was setting in. ‘And that,’ I added, ‘is in face of a good deal of local competition.’
At this stage in her career Varvara never used the emotional staircase: she dived straight down (or up) the lift-shaft. The disgust in my tone must have carried instant conviction.
‘My dear ally,’ she said, coming forward with her gesture of the outstretched hands, ‘I knew you must hate him. . . . You do hate him?’
‘I don’t know him well enough. But he makes a very nasty impression on me.’
This apparently satisfied her.
‘We shall plot together,’ she announced.
‘Not me.’
Varvara and Cedric Ellison cannot have met very often before my arrival on the scene. She had not been in England long enough. And yet her hatred of him was already full-fledged and she seemed to have a singularly complete appreciation of his character. This, I think, can only have been due to a course of preparation beginning in childhood. Fulk had had good reason to distrust his brother and he was not one to minimize his wrongs.
Presently the gong sounded and we went downstairs. For the next forty minutes I had to make a show of eating rich food and simultaneously carrying on polite conversation without being sick. It was Turpin who keyed up my resistance. He must have noticed my greenish appearance, for when he bent over me with a dish he said in a commiserating mutter:
‘These bloody little afternoon boozers—clubs in mewses—they’re no good for a young chap!’
With that interpretation hanging over me, there was no longer any possibility of quitting the table. But by the time I was left alone with the port (which did not appeal to me even as an emetic) my head was spinning.
I was sitting with my back to the door, and when I heard it open I assumed that Turpin had come in.
‘I don’t think I’ll join you downstairs tonight,’ I said without looking round.
To my surprise I was answered by Varvara.
‘You must go to your bed. I have watched you and you have a fever.’
She put her hand on my forehead. It was slightly rough, but cool, and her touch seemed in itself to have a special quality. I am not producing the usual mystic gibber about healing hands and electric ’fluences. Varvara had ‘touch’ in much the same way as we use the phrase of a professional billiards player; and, I suspect, for much the same reason, namely abounding self-confidence. A fraction of this was transferred by the contact and from it I derived a definite, though momentary, alleviation of my symptoms.
‘You must be cured,’ she said.
‘I don’t want to trouble them to send for a doctor.’
‘I shall cure you myself,’ she said with a certain condescension.
‘Do you know how?’
‘My nurse taught me. She was a witch. She could poison and she could heal.’
It was not really a very auspicious testimonial. I must have been feeling damned ill; otherwise I should never have surrendered myself to second-hand Asiatic sorceries. But had I not, I should certainly have missed something.
We went upstairs, my skull opening and shutting at every step. Varvara stopped at the door of her own room. I hesitated, but, seeing that I was obviously meant to enter, I did so.
‘Lie down on the bed,’ she ordered. ‘Take off your shoes first.’
‘I should have done that in any case,’ I said coldly.
Through a haze of fever I watched her preparations. In a corner of the room, looking wildly out of place against the rich smug Victorian furniture and hangings, was a large and hideous tin trunk stamped with the initials F.J.E. She opened it and took out a box with the same black japanned surface, which contained a number of little jars and bottles made of coarse china. From one of the former she measured out on to her thumbnail some small slivers like fragments of dried haricot, and tipped them into the famous rhinoceros-horn goblet, a dingy vessel which a quiet word from Mrs. Ellison had lately caused to be banished from the dining-room. Then she added a few drops of reddish liquid and began to pound the strips with the handle of a hairbrush. There was nothing antiseptic about Varvara’s medicine.
Lying still on my back made me feel better, and consequently rather more observant. I noticed Varvara’s clothes, to which I had become hardened of late. In those days there was no question in a house like Mrs. Ellison’s but that one dressed for dinner. Her evening frock was about the right length for current fashion, but its fabric reminded me of nothing so much as those curtains of string and beads which are still found in old-fashioned pubs.
She must have seen the direction of my gaze in the mirror.
‘Why are you staring at me, David?’
I was not up to social evasion.
‘I was looking at your dress,’ I said, ‘and wondering where you got it.’
‘Passing through Shanghai on my way to England. At a shop for the modes.’
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘the modes.’
She gave me the look of sorrowful nobility, which, on occasions when she had been insulted or injured, alternated quite unpredictably with tigerish rage.
‘I know I am dressed laughably,’ she said. ‘At home I wore my trousers and coat, like the other women of the country, and I am not used to your clothes.’
‘I didn’t mean to be rude,’ I pleaded unhappily.
Varvara continued: ‘My father had an English proverb: First things first. Thus, first I shall defeat my enemies. Second I shall become fashionable so that I fill everyone with desire.’
‘Oh, I don’t think you do badly as it is,’ I mumbled.
Varvara blushed and went back to triturating the contents of the horn. Though she said nothing, I knew that I had made amends for my remark about the dress.
Soon she came over with the medicine. I sat up and drank it. It was curiously bland and rather sickening, and it made me shake my head involuntarily as though trying to expel the after-taste. I put my feet on the floor, meaning to thank her and return to my own room, but she pushed me back on to the bed. (Her push would have been more use in a rugger scrum than mine ever was.)
‘No,’ she said. ‘You must remain quiet. Otherwise it will do you harm.’
I began to feel alarmed. ‘What in God’s name have you given me?’
Varvara pronounced some long word which was probably Turki. She could not translate it at the time, but later when her English vocabulary improved, I learnt that it meant ‘mushroom’ or ‘fungus’. These are not very reassuring words in the mouth of an amateur doctor, and my ignorance was perhaps fortunate.
But after two or three minutes I should not have cared. All fears or speculations about the future were extinguished by a new intensity of present vision. Despite a tendency to lose the sharpness of their outlines, in
animate objects assumed a vastly increased significance: and also a kind of suppressed activity. Perhaps I can best describe this by saying that now, for the first time, I seemed to perceive that being a chair or a wash-basin or bed was a continual struggle by matter to retain its orderly and useful form, and one in which my sympathies ought to be actively engaged. If it had not been too much effort I should have applauded the furniture.
I do not know what she gave me, except that it must have been some kind of hypnotic. Toadstools with this property are known to be used in parts of Central Asia for inducing trances. But none of the doctors of whom I have made inquiries can explain why a drug of this type should have allayed fever. Apparently its result ought to have been the opposite. Yet the fact remains that as soon as I swallowed the stuff my body began to feel deliciously cool and my headache ceased.
Presently I felt a drowsiness which did not seem to threaten my heightened interior vision. The latter, I felt, would be continued and perhaps enhanced in sleep. But Varvara had other ideas.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You must not sleep yet.’
‘Why?’
‘It is bad.’
‘I doubt if I can keep awake.’
‘To help you,’ she said, ‘I shall talk.’
‘What about?’
‘This will be a long talk and there is only one subject of which I know enough.’
She meant her own life, which could be practically equated with the city of Hai-po-li or Doljuk. She spoke with unerring fluency, never hesitating for a word, as she sometimes did in ordinary conversation, and her gruff voice took on the cadences of a rhapsode. Early in her discourse I felt an extension of the drug’s power. Whereas before it had merely given life to inanimate objects, it now began to convert words into pictures as active and vivid as any on a stereoscopic screen. I could see what she described to me. It is a curious thing that my mind supplied many details which were necessarily left out of verbal description, and supplied them correctly, though I had no means of knowing this till much later. Unfortunately it is not possible to make printed words convey a third-dimensional effect: so that the reader will have to be content with a hotch-potch of topography, ethnology, and anecdote.
