The Other Nineteenth Century

by Avram Davidson

  “Excellent. Excellent.”

  But this excellence did not endure. By and by Harrison, coming into the sitting room one day, observed his friend to be walking back and forth, back and forth, restless, and, in fact, groaning. He started on seeing the visitor: “Eustace, what is wrong, my poor fellow?” “I cannot sleep. I cannot sleep, I lie awake, and then I have such sick and troubled fancies, and I get up and walk about, walk about, hoping to tire myself so that—”

  Then it was Harrison who gave a start. Williams was indeed wearing the smoking jacket. But he was wearing it over his nightgarment. “Surely, Eustace, you have not, I hope that you have not been pacing the floor since last night? Do not say, ‘No, no.’ Look: you are not yet dressed. Eustace.”

  Williams glanced at his attire, gaped, pressed his hands to his temples, groaned. “What can this mean?” asked Harrison. “And you gave me such a good account of the effects of the sleeping-draught—” Williams burst out laughing.

  “The sleeping-draught! Of course! Edward! God bless you! Will you believe that I had forgotten to have it refilled! And that I had forgotten that I had forgotten!” The two friends laughed heartily at this. Then Williams said that he would dress at once and take care of the matter; but his friend raised a hand which protested this decision.

  “Dress? By all means, dress. However, you are not to exert yourself: I shall go and have it refilled, this is it, here on the chimneypiece, is it not? Yes? Shan’t be long.” Then he clapped his hand to his own head. “Good Heavens, your forgetfulness is contagious! Where am I to refill it? Where is the chemist’s?”

  “Just round the corner to your left, second door down: Jessup. Chemist. At least I believe Grant said so.”

  Grant was quite correct. The chemist came out from his dispensing room, on his ruddy face a smile of inquiry which ebbed a bit as he looked at the bottle Harrison set on the counter, requesting that it be refilled. “Directly … .”

  “Well, sir. Yes, sir. But do you think it altogether wise, sir?”

  Harrison was surprised, and, in fact, rather put out, thinking of his afflicted friend waiting at home. “What do you mean, sir. ‘Do I think it wise?’ I have nothing to think about it, Doctor Douglass McFall has thought about it, the Doctor Douglass McFall; you are Mr. Jessup? Be so kind, Mr. Jessup, to let me have the mixture as before. Directly.” Mr. Jessup was so kind, he came back directly, and he said no more except to say that that would be one and eightpence, sir.

  Williams was already dressed, smiled cheerfully, took the bottle and replaced it on the chimneypiece, thanked Harrison very much; and then, some new thought occurring to him, said, “Edward, would you mind. This being the footman’s day off”—the (mythical) footman was a favorite joke between them—“and Simmons being such a heavy, slow old thing, and I being so forgetful, and the steps so steep and dark, would you go down and ask her for the measuring glass? Then I needn’t worry about its being here when I need it tonight.”

  The steps were indeed steep and dark, and Simmons, seated and staring into her own fire in her kitchen, was indeed a heavy, slow old thing. Eventually, however, she was able to focus her mind and to say that the measuring glass was on the night table next to Mr. Williams’s bed; and from this declaration she would not budge; so Harrison went upstairs and repeated to his friend that Simmons had said … what she had said. “No, it isn’t,” Williams said promptly. “While you were gone I found it there, over there. Silly old slattern; never mind.” Suddenly his face changed, he repeated the words, “Never mind?” in such an entirely different tone of voice that Harrison was astonished, and, thinking that it was the woman’s mistake which was bothering, said that Williams was not to be peevish—

  He could, the next moment, have bitten his tongue; instead, said, “Forgive me, Eustace, of course you are not being peevish,” but it was too late. The man was being peevish, suddenly took up several of the publications from the low table where they lay, waved them furiously in Harrison’s face. “Don’t be peevish? Never mind?” His voice rose, his teeth actually grated; almost, he ripped the magazines apart to open them before his friend’s greatly troubled eyes. “Poetry? Do you call this poetry?” His breath trembled, his voice as well. “And as for this—” He held up an open page from an illustrated: “Is this worthy to be called painting?—And as for the characters of these men, which are too vile to—”

  “Eustace … Eustace … .”

  But now Eustace actually did rip them apart, or rather, he began to do so, but Harrison, pleading Tumbleton’s embarrassment at having to excuse this to the librarian at the Museum, gently dissuaded him from any further destruction.

  He also insisted on staying for dinner; then on taking Williams to a music hall, the nearest, the Vicereine. The Vicereine was the nearest, but it was nowhere near the best. Williams showed no pleasure in seeing and hearing the tunes, muttered, slumped in his seat, nodded off for a bit from time to time, groaned, awoke. “I perhaps should not have brought you here, Eustace, this is wretched stuff, not even third rate. Would you like to go?”

  No: Williams, in a dreary voice, said that it was better watching a superannuated artiste than watching Buchanan’s head. But after the curtain dropped on Madame Adelaida, or whatever she was called, he rose abruptly and made his way through the mostly empty row, with Harrison, taken by surprise, half-scuttling after him. He found him waiting, found him glaring, heard him saying, between clenched teeth, “And as for Rossetti—!”

  It was easy to humor him, here. “Well, true, Eustace, true; Rossetti is not the thing nowadays, no one looks at his pictures, no one reads his poetry, the man is quite démodé. I quite agree.” Williams became placid as he heard these words, the slightest touch of his arms persuaded him to move. At the door, with the voice of some aged buffoon comedian echoing dimly from within, he stopped. Turned to face his companion.

  “Rossetti also tossed upon the bed of thorns and yet he too found the key to the rose garden, you know.” He said this very quietly.

  “But still,” Tumbleton observed, some while later (it proved not then possible for the three to meet at once). “But still. Whilst in some ways certainly he is better than, say, after his first and even his second, ah, nervous crisis, in other ways, ah—”

  “—he is worse,” Grant finished. Grant was never patient with word-fumblings. “Furthermore, it is my opinion that he may be taking too much of that sleeping-draught. Don’t know how many times I’ve refilled it for—”

  “You! You have refilled it for him many times!” Tumbleton’s face was half astonished, half aghast. “Why, I have done so, I don’t recall how often, but, ah, ah, often,” he concluded hastily, in the face of Grant’s awful glare.

  Then it was Harrison’s turn to speak about that.

  It was agreed that McFall must be spoken to, and at once; they divided their forces: Tumbleton went to Harley Street, Harrison to the Borough, Grant to St. Olave’s. Grant stopped first at Williams’s, found him alternately snoring and muttering, shaving kit laid out but not used; removed the medicine bottle, stopped at the establishment of Jessup. Chemist, looked in at the private bar of the place near the hospital; finally ran down McFall, who was washing his hands in a basin on a cart, in one of the wards. He thrust the bottle at the physician, asked, sans preface, “What is in this sleeping-draught you prescribed for Williams?”

  McFall looked at him from red-rimmed eyes, then looked at the bottle, dried his hands, took the bottle, then sniffed it, then held the besmeared label close. “Ah, yes. ‘In it’? Basically, chloral and water.”

  “Chloral? Chloral. Good God. Isn’t that the stuff that Coleridge and De Quincey both went stark mad from using?”

  “No. No, no. That was laudanum. Tincture of opium. I did not say laudanum. Neither did I prescribe it for your friend. This is chloral, chloral hydrate, a synthetic; different sort of thing entirely … though sometimes the effects of overuse: fantasy, hallucination, addiction … what is this you are thrusting into my face
now?”

  This, on a billhead elaborately engraved Jessup, et cetera, was a list of dates and of the quantities of chloral dispensed to Williams on those dates. Jessup was probably not required to have provided this list to a layman, but Jessup had perhaps his reasons for doing so; besides, Grant was a great bully. McFall scanned the list, slowly. It was then his turn to say, “Good God!” After a moment more he said, more quietly, “He should not have been allowed to have had that much. How is he?”

  Grant told him how Williams was. “And in addition to all that, he has developed a hatred, which I can only describe as maniacal, of every artist being exhibited and every poet being published, and has been writing letters on the sneak to the reviews and magazines and newspapers accusing them, these people, I mean, of every imaginable vice. Harrison suspected something when he saw ink stain on Williams’s fingers, oh, a good while ago. Admitted, that jealousy is a very natural human emotion, still—”

  McFall gave a very deep sigh. “Yes. ‘Still.’ Go on.”

  Grant did go on. He went on to say that Williams had first denied it all, then insisted that it was all true and that he acted out of public duty, then he had shrieked and babbled and wept and said that all of it and much more had been revealed to him by what he called Buchanan’s head.

  “He called it—what?”

  “Called it Buchanan’s head. Said that first there was a sort of crystal ball in a rose garden, then gradually this had changed into a human head, says it spoke to him … speaks to him … tells him all these things, tells him that x is a fornicator and y is an adulterer and z is a pornographer, and so on and so on. Says he doesn’t know how he knows it’s Buchanan’s head, just that he knows, nor does he know who ‘Buchanan’ is, and he must have the drug or he cannot sleep, which is horrible, and when he takes the drug, and he has taken more and more of it—What? ‘Miracle that he is still alive?’—We must, I suppose, have you to thank for this miracle, Doctor Douglass McFall; yes, I am also ‘sorry.’”

  As for the appearance of the head, aside from there being no body attached to it, it was most remarkable for its expression of jealousy, malignancy, and hatred; also that it appeared to have been badly marred on one side; how, Williams could neither explain nor adequately describe. “What is to be done?” demanded Grant.

  McFall began to walk away from the cart, Grant walking with him. “‘What is to be done,’ indeed. If you had just now for the first time come and given me a description of such symptoms I should have prescribed complete rest and a total absence of nervous excitement. I should also have felt obliged to prescribe a sleeping-draught, chloral being the most effective one I know. What is to be done now … either a private asylum, which is, if good, far from cheap, and, if cheap, far from good … . For, you see”—McFall stopped, faced Grant—“certainly he should have no more chloral. Certainly if it is cut off the results will be terrible. As for the public asylums … Perhaps he should have a keeper, one who is with him all the time. Several, in fact: round the clock. No money for that? No money, no money. Death or the straight-waistcoat; pleasant alternatives. Sometimes, you know, Mr. Grant, there are questions to which the only answer seems to be that there is no answer. A personality constitutionally strong … but when a personality is constitutionally weak—Ah well. If you believe that I have been remiss in my duties, you are at liberty to complain of me. Meanwhile, you may accompany me as I continue to attend to my patients. If you wish.” He walked off again.

  Grant, after looking round the ward and at its many patients, and now for the first time listening to them as well, did not wish.

  Along Upper Welchman Street there shambled—and finally stopped at the steps of the house and fumbled a ring of keys from his pocket, now and then mumbling a word or two to himself—a stooped old man with a white beard; his silk hat was older, taller, than those worn by the three men at the top of the steps, and he wore a long silk coat: each clean enough, hat and coat, though showing, each, the signs of long, hard wear. Suddenly he looked up and noticed the group in the doorway, and, clearly, noticed something more about them than their presences alone.

  “What! What!” he exclaimed, a look of more immediate distress replacing the one of general sadness on his face, hollowed cheeks and pouchy eyes. “Gentlemen … . Gentlemen … . What is wrong? What is wrong?”

  Tumbleton took this as a signal for a heavy sigh. “I am afraid that you have lost your tenant, Mr. Solomon,” he said; “and we, our friend.”

  Mr. Solomon lifted a thin hand as one who wards off a blow. “Blessed be the True Judge,” he murmured. “Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh—”

  “Do you quite understand what Mr. Tumbleton has just told you, Solomon? Mr. Williams has died. Sometime last night.”

  The much-brushed, much-worn old hat bobbed. “I understand, I understand. I understood at once. Poor young man, eh? Poor Mr. Williams. And I thought he was getting better. Better, I thought he was getting. His illness returned after all, then?” This question was asked in a tone not confident. There was a silence.

  “Well, you are entitled to know the truth. And would find out in any event. I feat that while the balance of his mind was disturbed, poor Williams took his own life. There is no doubt about it at all.”

  Harrison burst out, “Poor Eustace! It is ghastly!” His voice broke.

  This time the old man lifted both hands. His face was horrified. “God help us! God have mercy on him. Imbeshreer!” He tottered a moment, took hold of the railing, steadied himself, moved hesitantly. “What should I do? Should I go inform the—Can I—” They beckoned him, and he went slowly up the steps. “Eh?”

  Tumbleton: The fact is … The fact is … .

  Solomon: Have you notified? He has family? What a shock for them. A, a priest? A minister? An undertaker, at least?

  Grant (waves all this away): Harrison’s “fact” is that Williams did it in his own bed and everything is drenched with blood. He should never have been allowed to shave himself.

  The old man bared his teeth, drew in a hissing breath.

  “There’s not a clean sheet to be found,” said Grant; “all the linens must have gone to the wash and not come back. The housekeeper has already gotten herself sodden with gin and is of no use at all. So we’ve covered him with a sort of tarpaulin we found out back, the coroner cannot come just yet, there’s a policeman in there now—and the rest must wait. Family? An aunt in Wales, somewhere.”

  The old man said that a tarpaulin was not enough. “That’s not a proper covering for anyone, a tarpaulin. Something better I must have upstairs in the storeroom. Must be. Let me think. Let me look.”

  Tumbleton said he was just about to suggest that. Grant growled, “You’ll never be able to use it again, whatever it is; what? ‘never mind that?’ Then by all means go up and look.” They turned and went into the hallway and toward the stairs to the upper floor. Harrison suddenly sat on the bench beneath the mirror, said he would wait.

  Lighting the gas on each landing in the dark house, the old man laboriously climbed, talked on, talked on. “Poor Mr. Williams, these are terrible times we live in, gentlemen; murders, massacres, famines, plagues; poor man, I thought he was getting better: why? ‘This new medicine helps me sleep,’ he said, but that was last quarter day, more or less; terrible, terrible; the Shechinah is in exile and the Daughter of the Voice rings out, rings out, but we do not hear it, ‘Repent! Repent!’ but we hear it not, we don’t want to hear it, we don’t want to repent; where is the key, the key, this one? no not this one. Mr. Williams! Aye!” At length the storeroom door was opened, it opened onto darkness and, another gas jet being lit (one without a mantle: high and red it flared, then was turned lower), onto clutter beyond cataloguing; the old man stood in a narrow way between items covered and uncovered, and he talked on. “—a terrible thing to be an artist today, gentlemen, and yet a fascination it has which cannot be denied; six or seven of the best, the leading artists of today—” He fumbled here and there, seemed sure of nothing. “�
��live in mansions and they lunch with lords, Sir Laurence, Sir John, the incomparable Landseer, Mr. Holman-Hunt who did The Scapegoat, he visited the Holy Land, what a blessed privilege, and how many others? a few others only”—he peered here and there around the crowded room—“and the rest? Poverty, decay, and worse. Making likenesses, perhaps it’s not allowed, God says, what does God say? ‘Thou shalt not make—’ My cousin Simeon you may have heard of my cousin Simeon, let me remove a dust sheet here, sir—”

  Grant said, impatiently, that a dust sheet would do. “But not a dusty dust sheet, Mr. Grant, sir; look: ah … .” Underneath the dusty one was a clean one, and underneath that something showed purple and gold. “My cousin Simeon was an artist, and a good one, too, and now look at him, or better yet don’t; ‘Here comes Moses,’ he says when I visit him, which is perhaps not as often as—‘Moses, with another half-crown and another half-drawsha, who needs your damned drawshas, Moses, a fig for your sermons and your Shema Beni, why don’t you bring us a half-sovereign instead, Moses?’—because he would immediately convert it into drink, gentlemen, if not worse, gentlemen, a terrible disgrace for a family to have a drunkard … and worse: look.” The dust sheets came off, one after the other; the old man carefully lifted up some heavy broad piece of stuff—“This would be nice for Mr. Williams, poor young man, poor young man. Aye!”

  “Purple velvet!” exclaimed Tumbleton. “A gorgeous pall!”

  Grant said he expected it was only velveteen.

  “Beautiful gold bordering! Poor Williams would have admired—”

  “Tosh, it can’t be real gold, can’t have real value, but it will do, hand it over, Solomon.”

  The old man said that everything which had to do with art had value, though seldom, he feared, to the benefit of the artist. “Sundry odds and ends I sold to Mr. Dante Gabriel when—”