Undoubtedly it compensated, this latest sensation, since reimbursement of a more remunerative nature was apparently to be unforthcoming. And along with reparation, another emotion gradually established itself within Landsdowne’s breast: of unqualified approbation from, dare he consider it? beyond. Thus he labored on with incremented agreeableness, augmenting his tiny store of confidence that his selection had not been mere propinquity, nor the surety and ease of editorial manipulation, should such be required, but instead an authorization derived from the single, the only possibly authentic, origin.
4.
Indistinguishable was that evening, unextraordinary the circumstances, during which our young savant was to discern that all unawares he’d suddenly, lamentably discovered himself in a position most acutely felt and acutely deplorable. The literary-chronological mechanism upon which he’d long relied, which he’d for such a successful period plied, required that any uncollated paper, be it note, bill of sale, or missive, be paired to the naturally correspondent passage in the curiously irregular journal or record book Van Pryor had kept. Cognate thereby bred infallible. All the more inevitable therefore the communication Landsdowne now perused, unable to fully embrace its significance, except as it fit patchwork into the grander enigma of the diurnal events of this workroom’s predecessor. Yet, once puzzled into place, once the fit was declared not inappropriate, the greater meaning became—all too inescapable. That the authoress of the epistle to his master was instantly recognizable to our acolyte, whose own matrimonial partner he’d tirelessly if only mentally accompanied as each new volume floated into the lending libraries, produced perhaps the most peerless of concussions. That Van Pryor had then actually notated another fellow helpmeet’s initials into his ordinarily haphazard datebook with astonishing heedlessness, and later on compounded the egregiousness by commenting upon the encounter in his journal in a satisfied manner insouciantly approaching, well, it had to be admitted, approaching the vulgar, would thereafter be undeniable.
Ensuing passages, annotations, commentaries, in fact the entire ceaseless panoply amounted to several months’ duration, resulting in the irrefutable: unfamiliar to any but themselves, and now alas to his abashed gaze, the aberrant twosome had continued to sully their matrimonial sacraments and earlier commitments, with, at various times, an almost unrestricted liberty of action, month after month after month.
Crestfallen, Landsdowne could do nothing but abscond from if not the setting, then at least the substantiation of the activity. But while he’d decamped from the stage, the performance all the more perpetuated itself in his imagination, so that even an unaccustomed double measure of fortified wine failed to generate that lethean surcease he required to fall asleep. Before the obliquitous dawn he resolved to relinquish a task no longer to be held as honorable. Resolution led to somnolence; with his artlessness restored, he at last slept.
The unexpected interview caught her not completely unawares. She bestowed, entered, allowed his anxiety its stammering moments, his resolution its exclamation, but nonetheless she continued to remain unswervingly in place, plumped among her ebony crinolines, fixing upon him a liquid gaze admixed as much with compassion as with more professional objectivity. Allowing his timorous vehemence its fullest extent, she then acceded immediately to his resignation, wholeheartedly so, if, if, if—if only—she begged she might be allowed to partake of and thus comprehend the source of this remarkable, this so precipitous turnabout.
Seldom had Landsdowne encountered such difficulty. At last, he intimated his discoveries, his trepidation, the understandable apprehension—for her reputation alone. Before he was done, she contrived to interrupt, her fan an instrument of regard and interaction upon his sleeve, as, almost inaudibly she reminded him of their earlier intercourse upon the subject of “determination,” and how she’d understood them to have already abundantly agreed upon a course where any such selection would be utterly unnecessary. “You must present it all,” she once more repeated. “All as it is written. Every bountiful phrase. His readers demand all,” she once more gently insisted. “Poor we are merely his providential caretakers,” she reiterated.
Leaving her interlocutor at a temporary loss for further words. Was the personage then before him so extraordinarily charitable, so magnificent in her acceptance of the inadmissible? Without question he must now assume that his own recent detection must be a disclosure his hostess had somehow herself long before managed to arrive at herself, and further she had also managed to arrange it all to herself, processing the doubtless unwelcome information in a manner if not wholly acceptable than at the least bearable. It now came to Landsdowne, that without doubt his workroom’s predecessor had himself selected his life’s companion precisely for the possession of such a temperament, exactly such an ability at management, indeed for qualities beyond those at first glance apparent.
Grateful confusion led Landsdowne to bend his knee to her, but she soon elevated him to his feet, reminding him of their covenant and of the enormity of the task still left undone. He ascended to his exertions with a renewed stamina and sense of purpose, and once settled was again put in mind of that other, far less substantial Communicant, whose unquestioned presence consisted of a recapitulated riffling of his hair, as though overlooking in him the understandable, if surely not to be repeated, lapse of certitude.
5.
“But surely you can see how I’ve come around yet again?” Landsdowne moaned to his editorial contemporary, “From one bare credibility to another one, this time far more abominable.”
DeHaven had been accosted at his office at the moment of leave-taking for his midday meal, and his customary high spirits decided for him the necessity of his young champion accompanying him to a dining establishment of the most arcane tenor, focusing as it did, upon a cuisine altogether unfamiliar, mid-Asiatic, and sapid in the extreme.
“Explicate, dear fellow.” He attempted to calm his friend with a squeeze of the fleshier sector of one of his lower limbs. “For I’m afraid I’m somewhat at sea. Ah, and here is the tandoor dish I spoke of before with such tenderness!” he enthused as a be-turbanned attendant set down the savory vessel and uncovered it, releasing an amplitude of orientalia to ring their heads with its wreath of fragrances and to stimulate their gourmanderie.
“For days after, I’d persuaded myself she’d after all known all the while, the Widow Van Pryor that is, known perhaps with growing comprehension for months during the perpetration of the marital enormity and that she’d only ultimately forgiven, as who wouldn’t. But that she was now willing to release all despite, if not given, the otherwise faultless origin of her understandable agony. Naturally, she could but rise in my estimation, as I labored on to corral the aberrant missives and nearly licentious journal passages… But then, and only yesterday it occurred to me, as I was frequenting a railroad tea-shop attached to Euston Station, a dreary yet at times fascinating situation from which to encompass the London universe, only then, as I said, late last night, awaiting an Underground to return me to Roland Gardens, did another, far more sinister interpretation all unassisted arrive. What if, by publication of it all, she seeks nothing less than a practically public vengeance upon the great man, a vengeance all the more distressing in that she alone is able to give voice, while her potential disputant is utterly unable to defend himself? Thus my torment and thus the newly understood falseness of my present position.”
The carmine roast had been dissected, and unable not to resist, DeHaven had availed himself of the pleasures of the table. He ceased, however, now, elevating a fowl-filled fork aloft to declaim, “But my dear young marvel, it couldn’t be any clearer! Should she become, as you say you fear, so publicly intemperate herself, then you are yourself to take up the cudgels in defense of your master! Who better to be his champion than one already so privileged?”
Landsdowne could do little but utter phrases of astonishment to his companion, who managed to “tuck” back into his luncheon with the sharpest of ap
petites. “But surely you give me too much credit. You presume to begin with, that I would challenge her and defend him, when in fact, I’ve not arrived at any such certainty. Surely she was wronged. Surely the world ought to know her blessed silent endurance of it all, equally along with his seemingly Olympian utter disregard.”
“Then, my young starveling, for if you do not soon avail yourself, there will be none left and starveling surely you must become today, you must do nothing. And by all means follow the path your irksome conscience describes for you. This dish now is called a Korma. Experience, my love, to what a culinary pinnacle a mere kitchen garden marrow may aspire!”
Landsdowne did at last sample the feastling set before the two, and if he never quite rose to the occasion as did his editor, at least he contrived to taste sufficient of each platter before them to summarize for himself the varied buccal sensations that had been conjured. DeHaven was undoubtedly a boon friend and his advice worth heeding. Even so, he observed himself still unserene by luncheon’s conclusion, and he stalked off to his labors with still-crimped brow and apprehensive mien.
Only to be greeted not a half hour after he’d settled into the long-honored chair and desk by a new series of horrors which, if by no means as equal in number or manner to the great man’s, were all the more intolerable for detailing as they so unswervingly did detail from the husband’s perspective, the utter disregard of marital vows of the wife! The passages Van Pryor had penned in natural response partook of equal portions of jaded amusement and connubial irritation. His single remaining desire in the face of it all was merely that she and her unnamed companion become never quite so fatuous as to entitle the hoi polloi to deduce their clandestine alliance. In that at least, Landsdowne had to admit, they’d all succeeded very well, as he’d never heard the breath of a whisper against the woman.
Landsdowne’s own stupefaction was quietly accompanied by a correspondent reanimation of the presence he’d so recently sensed, upon this occasion renewed by the long familiar hair riffling but newly accompanied by a soft respiration into the cup of his hearing organ, so subtle that at first he couldn’t be utterly certain, until it was repeated, until the surety was undeniable. If earlier he’d been blessed, now surely he was doubly so.
Quitting the establishment somewhat earlier that night than others to attend upon DeHaven at the opera, he stumbled upon his hostess herself, in the house’s foyer, preparing for the outdoors. He begged her pardon, asservating that he’d come upon yet more information of a particularly uncivil nature, and wondered did her command still stand, no matter the party involved in the potential damage? Or would perhaps she wish to know its details?
She was about to herself step out, apparently a second time for the night in company, all aflutter in jet and feathers, gemstones and furs, and at first she barely registered his presence, then did evince it with a graciousness he could only admire: “Every bountiful phrase,” she reiterated. Then as she swept out to an awaiting carriage, she adumbrated: “His demanding readers must have it all.”
“But… No matter the cost to him…or to yourself?”
“What is mere cost to such as he…or to I?” she in turn asked. And was gone.
6.
“Discretion means all in Service,” a maternal-line relation had once intoned to him, then a barely comprehending child, “and discretion in Service is nothing more or less than a finely discriminating blindness in the matter of one’s betters.” The ancient and now munificently endowed old thing had unquestionably managed the artful practice of discretion, if one were to conclude only by external compensations. Her pension was unstinting, the very cottage in which she’d resided since the passing of her longtime mistress was charmingly situated; remarkably capacious; it even harbored its own service in the form of a slavy from the “big house,” no longer required there, if gratifyingly essential to his aged relation’s newly won gentility. Fresher generations of the great house unfailingly called upon the older person whenever they happened anywhere near the neighborhood, behaving when they did so with the openhanded, openhearted unconstraint, not of mere former employer’s offspring, but indeed almost as though they themselves were but honored, respectful, younger relations.
As he advanced onward in his labors, Landsdowne couldn’t help but recollect all that and himself attempt to apply some of these well-experienced lessons to his own more particularized circumstances. Nor had it escaped his apprehension that in the last few months of his nocturnal efforts among the Van Pryor papers, his own poor little pittance of repute had all unawares by himself become considerably elevated beyond what his slim volume of contes could genuinely warrant; among his own poor and scattered set of artists-in-training as would have been understandable; but also, dare one say it, among others less en famille, not excluding certain bellwethers gathered at the more established Athenaeums of erudition.
His late master’s star continued its irrepressible ascent, undeterred by the vulgar fact of mortality, and as its rays more widely glimmered, casting further light over the house, the oeuvre, the uncollected papers, invariably the widow herself began to assume the unequivocal status of a personage among certain districts of society. It became at first intimated, then generally accepted, that perhaps one had been unjust toward the poor woman in the past, if only in one’s conscious efforts to so set her husband so apart from the common run. Thankfully, reparation could only be more valuable in how utterly it must now be performed. These later months it was wholly in vain that our youth awaited her tentative footfalls upon the uncarpeted risers outside the chamber lintel. It seemed she now luncheoned, dined, even breakfasted abroad quite so systematically that were it not for themselves and his own meager little repasts, the kitchen staff would have found itself delightfully superfluous.
Even DeHaven’s publishing establishment, by now so inextricably coupled with the great author’s name, continued to batten and gorge upon the generalized radiance, as did DeHaven himself, spoken of as a noted “Clever Young Turk of the Arts.” And, as did our simple scribe himself, granted the growing sincerity of regard evidently provoked, he was certain, at least partially by the aura of mystery that naturally surrounded his endeavors. One would have to be sightless, heedless, deaf, indiscreet, as well as indiscriminate in varied senses of those terms to not truly apprehend how very universal a sunset glow had come to suffuse all that lay within the ill-defined, ever-amplifying, Van Pryor penumbra.
In such a benevolently crepuscular ambiance, an accommodation with the less palatable specifics of his superiors did arrive, quite slowly at first given the galaxy of compunctions it must overcome—or illuminate—only to at long last fully scatter all contentions asunder, resulting one afternoon in our young man’s completely uncharacteristic species of Gallically shoulder-shrugging insouciance.
Thus ensued the penultimate phase of Landsdowne’s mission: the most recent year’s journals, slipshod as they were, along with the accompanying, heretofore barely glanced at, aggregate of letters, notes, relevant and irrelevant paper effluvia. It went without needed having to be said that the previously eerie and by now more or less customary caresses from an unnamed source that had at first so alarmed our young savant whenever he sat in the master’s chair at his labors were now redoubled in some hitherto unaccustomed manner, causing equal amounts of pleasure and consternation, and yet still he plunged onward.
The newest disclosure when ultimately it reached its destination—an undulating course dictated by unfolded note by scribbled note, twice-left visiting cards, multiple hansom cab receipts, not fully distinct journal entries, even once an invoice from a shared chamber at a less-than-estimable seaside resort—would sensibly enough be less effectively thunder-striking than had it come earlier and sans antecedent heralds, despite what its even more sensational content otherwise indicated.
Evidently, our collator was coerced to conclude that his very own editorial champion had felt the need only a few short months previously to ensure fertilization of the
ground of his new ascension into the paternal position, by initiating what he, in a strikingly precipitate billet-doux, reminded the Master was a long-desired, long spoken of, and long postponed, joint intimacy. That it had been as corporeal as preceding amours concerning members of the house was wholly inevitable, Landsdowne supposed in retrospect, and thus equally unremarkable. After all, those above, as these three Demigods apparently so considered themselves, bestrode the world as Olympians; hence equally Olympian would be their inclinations and as well their transgressions. At times our poor scribe even pondered whether in the very heated moment of conception of the project, his soi-disant friend, the perversely public DeHaven, hadn’t even fallen upon, nay relied upon, this very denouement being arrived at. He could today without a jot of difficulty envision the young publisher carefully deciding to do so, and simultaneously deciding exactly what tack to veer onto, once it were all broadcast. Indubitably only once he comprehended the prevailing westerlies of opinion, only then would DeHaven opt to deride it all as a simple, if all-too-graciously flattering, phantasy of his elder; or conversely to entertain it further, explaining it away as a conclusive, Hellenically developmental, stage in the life and art of a great author.
Contemporary Gay Romances Page 13
