I, Libertine

by Theodore Sturgeon

  The choked whisper had a suggestion about a piece of furniture, but he ignored it, concentrating on the outside temperature of the teapot. At last it seemed to satisfy him, and he emptied its hot water carefully into the bottle, threw in the tea, filled it from the kettle, replaced cover and cosy, and set it aside to steep. The skillet was all a-crackle now. He broke two eggs into it and contemplated them. “Lady Blanton asked me, just as I was leaving, if I thought it quite proper for her to have a rather notorious guest in her house. I answered her as you would have, sir, speaking a great deal and committing myself not at all. I must say I was proud of myself; but prouder still of you. It was like having you invisible, there at my elbow, whispering to me from the weight of your years and experience.” This spate of words carried him to the door, where he leaned gracefully, smiling.

  Barrowbridge had, for the moment, given up trying to speak. Only because he was watching for it did Lance see the slight motion at the edge of the bed as the barrister’s hand tightened on the concealed stick, the bulge of the monstrous shoulder. Barrowbridge’s legs were useless with scrofula and gout, but those shoulders and heavy arms were to be treated with respect.

  Lance smiled his respectful smile and turned away, just out of range. He crossed to the teapot, took down a clean cup, poured a few drops of tea, looked at its color, nodded, poured it full. He sprinkled in a few granules of sugar, lifted the cup and carried it carefully to the back room. He stepped inside so swiftly and smoothly, swung the cup and saucer with his own momentum so carefully, that not a drop spilled as he presented the cup an inch before the old man’s startled face. Years of intimate association had taught him how very much Barrowbridge appreciated the first draught of that first cup of tea in the mornings.

  As the pocked nostrils dilated over the steaming cup, Lance bent slightly and twitched the stick away; it clattered to the floor far behind him, in the outer office, like a spent arrow. Barrowbridge’s jaw dropped as he followed it longingly with his eyes. “My goodness,” said Lance, half to himself, gazing into the depths of the cup, “not strong enough after all …” and, cup and all, retreated to the office.

  The sound Barrowbridge made, had he had his own old great bugle of a voice, would have been a wordless scream. It issued, ludicrously, as a sort of yawn. Lance busied himself with the eggs, dipping them out of the skillet on to an earthen plate. He cut bread and arranged it around the eggs and stood a moment to admire the effect. When he reached the door with the plate, Barrowbridge seemed about to weep. Lance stopped, startled. He had never seen this before. “My dear sir!” he exclaimed.

  “What in the name of God’s got into you, Lanky? What are you doing to me?”

  “I? Why—sir … you are my benefactor, my—Mr. Barrowbridge, I would never …” He laughed deprecatingly and made a slight gesture with the plate of food. “Doing to you, sir? Preparing a small something to break your fast. Perhaps you don’t care for plover’s eggs?” he added worriedly.

  “Get me the night-mug,” said the old man brokenly, pointing at the sideboard, “give me a bite to eat, and then for the love of heaven sit down and tell me what’s got into you.”

  “Oh, I’ve been thoughtless, I’ve …” and Lance hurried to the sideboard. He opened the cabinet briskly, took out the chamber, averted his head, lifted the lid, and let the contents of the plate—bread, eggs, and all—slip into it.

  He met the barrister’s horror-struck eyes. “Thoughtless,” murmured Lance contritely, “and now careless. How can you forgive me?” He then replaced the cover, lifted the object back into the sideboard—“Lanky!” wailed the old man as it disappeared—and firmly closed its door.

  “I beg you, an instant’s patience, and I’ll have more eggs for you,” said Lance earnestly, and fairly ran to prepare them. While the eggs were cooking, he went back to lean in the doorway. Barrowbridge was lying back again, with his eyes closed now.

  “Interesting matter at law came to my attention last night,” Lance said, apparently looking at his fingernails, but actually watching the closed eyes on the bed. They opened, red and agonized. “And it came to me that if anyone might be able to solve it, you could.”

  “D’ye think I can talk law at a time like this?”

  “I think you could talk law at anytime, anywhere,” said Lance in tones of pure idolatry.

  “Think again,” said Barrowbridge, and closed his eyes.

  “It is the matter,” said Lance precisely, “of Elizabeth Chudleigh, and her desired marriage to the second Duke of Kingston.”

  All that was puffy, fluid, soft, malleable and subject to change in that massive old face seemed in that instant to disappear, and in its place was a rock carving. The head even sank a little deeper into the pillow, as if it had acquired a new dead weight. For a long breathless moment nothing happened, nothing moved. It was a stasis following which anything—literally anything—might happen, provided only that it was explosive. And the explosion came, in the simple and unbelievable fact that there was none. Barrowbridge opened his eyes and looked at his young protégé, and sighed—softly, gently, barely a breath. Then he whispered, “So … that’s it.”

  Weakly, he tried and failed to wet his lips with the tip of a greyish tongue. “I might have known … I could have seen … this is the kind of thing she does so well. What did she do, Lanky, draw you out until she had all my weaknesses before her, and then rehearse you?”

  “You do me little credit, sir.”

  “Ah, do I, though! … Well, friend bastard—and I speak precisely—you may be sure I shall not help her, now or at any time. You may faithfully believe this yourself, and you may convey the conviction to your … new … owner.”

  “But look,” said Lance disgustedly, “I’ve let the yolks cook hard. Ah, Mr. Barrowbridge, there’s a haunting on your breakfast! Ah well, never mind, sir. I’ve still two more eggs. But I’d best eat these myself; you taught me yourself to waste nothing. I’ll be quick, sir; bear with me.” He put the eggs on the plate where the new bread awaited it, drew up the clerk’s high stool to the corner of the big desk that could be seen from the bedroom, fetched the cooling cup of tea he had poured earlier, and composed himself to eat.

  There was no sound from the other room. He sipped the tea thoughtfully. He was considerate and did not smack his lips. With the staccato entry of voice-upon-swallow he said, “I saw your notice on the landing, sir. Why did you want no consultations today? Why, anyone who comes will turn away without even reaching the door.”

  No answer. Lance cut away egg with his knife and carefully laid the ivory and gold sliver upon a piece of bread. He brought it carefully to his lips and filled his mouth. He ruminated for long enough, swallowed, sipped tea, and said informatively, “Nice little beggar, that Scuttle. Since we’re seeing no clients today I sent him off to see the gypsies, with a silver threepenny. He’ll not be in until tomorrow.”

  Still nothing. Lance wagged his head admiringly. The old chap was tough. Or unconscious. He glanced quickly at that red glare, and nodded. Tough was the word. “Mr. Barrowbridge,” he said gently, “I am here in your service, and prepared to discuss the law with you. If you would prefer to be alone, I will as always oblige you.” He hurriedly ate up the rest of the egg and bread, and drank the tea down. Then he turned to the open doorway and made an inquisitive sound, raising his eyebrows a great deal and his shoulders a little in the manner attributed to Lord Chesterfield.

  Barrowbridge, deep in his pillow, nodded. “Get out, then.”

  Lance sighed and rose. Crossing and recrossing the office, he got his hat and his coat and his stick. He tidily lifted the kettle from the fireplace and set it on the hearth, poked up the fire and added a stick or two. He covered the bread against the flies, sighed again and went to the door. The door could not be seen from the bedroom. He unlocked it and swung it wide.

  “Good-by, sir.”

  No answer.

  Lance stepped over the sill and down on the creaking board which for eleven year
s had loudly marked every passage in and out of this room. He then stepped back inside again, soft as a cat, and slammed the door. Noisily, he locked it. He then employed two artifices he had been taught by a thief whom Barrowbridge had once defended; one was to bend swiftly and pound the floor with the hardest part of the heels of his hands, in imitation of departing footsteps. (Th’ smallest sound from a foot sounds like a foot; but ’ands, now, they can sound like anything—even a rat, even yerself, out-o-doors and runnin’ off. An’ ye’ll know ye done it right when off they run after ye.)

  The other device was a method of breathing silently in concealment. (Tip back yer ’ead to give yer neck room, open yer throat like you’ve just run a league, and go all soft inside. Yer ’eart ’ll pump yer bellows for ye. The scareder ye are the better ye’ll pump. It’s a trick keeps many o’ us poltroons alive.)

  So there he crouched, head back, mouth open like an idiot watching the moon, his fingertips on the floor for balance, his very soul in his ears.

  He waited until his left foot was an agony of pins and needles and his right foot was cold. Nothing, and nothing, and …

  A faint sequence of sounds, hushed bleats.

  A sudden mighty thrashing, and a series of labored syllables, uh! uh! uh!

  A muffled crash that set the floorboards jumping, and over and over, the sound of a mulling iron plunged into cool ale.

  With a single motion Lance shucked out of hat and coat and bounded to the inner doorway, to be leaning against it, his sleek head on one side, watching with cool curiosity the great broken mound of man on the bedroom floor, one useless leg still across the bed, the other on the floor, the stub-clawed hands spraddling and crab-creeping across toward the sideboard, cheeks aquiver inflating, ashiver collapsing, while lips and nostrils in unison gave forth that great reiterated hiss. Caught up in his own misery, Barrowbridge had obviously let it fill his cosmos, and crept and groveled and slobbered for many seconds before he was aware of the spectator, and then only as a boot in the doorway. He stopped breathing abruptly, for a heartbeat, and then actually reached out and touched Lance’s foot with wondering wet fingers. Then, unable to raise himself high enough to look upward, he made a single great convulsion and turned over, presenting his big head to Lance’s fascinated gaze upside down, contorted. The brute log of a leg slipped off the bed then, and Lance knew somehow that its bolt of pain broke what had been brought to the breaking point.

  “Ah, then, ah-h,” he soothed, like a nurse with a babe, “did he fall then, did he. Ah, na, ye’re all right now, just let me make ye better, poor thing.” His words ceased to be words, just a gentling, as he settled the head to the floor and straightened the legs, got a purchase on the sideboard and heaved the shuddering trunk erect so that Barrowbridge sat on the floor, as uncertain and all-in-parts as a ten-week infant. Barrowbridge complied like one, helpless in the young man’s hands, passive beyond distrust. It was a long while and a mighty job of work before the barrister was comforted and restored to his couch, combed and cleaned, the bed remade, and at last the cup of tea steaming at hand; by then it was Lance who looked the part of the beaten one, that is, until one saw his face.

  Barrowbridge had ceased his gasping, or sobbing if that’s what it was, for some time now, and lay dully watching Lance work. The first thing he said was all but inaudible, and he had to repeat it twice before Lance understood: “I must sleep now.”

  “Surely, surely,” said Lance, “but you’ll answer my question first?”

  Barrowbridge moved his head from side to side. It was not a negation, but an expression of weakness, of incapability.

  “Come now,” Lance urged in his most penetrating sotto, accompanied by his most thrumming bass. “I want you to rest, and rest you shall, and I’ll watch over you and take care of you. I want no explanations; those I can find for myself. Ah, dear friend, how many times I’ve seen you sum up a thumb-thick brief with a word of advice: remember Richards, with the ship-lading action? ‘Plead guilty,’ you said. And Uxham, a shout away from the gallows, two wives, and an unfilled indenture; ‘Emigrate,’ you said. Give me such a word for Miss Chudleigh, sir, and then sleep.”

  Barrowbridge flapped his lips weakly, and said a word. It needed saying a number of times; even a familiar one becomes meaningless if repeated often enough, but this one would have been meaningless to him if it had been clearly tattooed on his kneecap.

  “Jactitation?” he said at last.

  The barrister nodded, and astonishingly, smiled. There was an odd anticipation in the smile, and when Lance began to rise, to plunge into the book-racks in the office, the old man caught his sleeve. With what seemed to be his last atom of energy he nodded to the right of the door, smiled again, and before Lance’s eyes, he slept.

  Slowly Lance rose and went to the book racks—turning in amazement to his right instead of left, where the old man’s great library of law had most of its body. Surely in those thousands of pages lay his answer; but no, the glance to the right, and that old smile of triumph in his skill, indicated that it was to be found in the esoterica, the little-used collection of what Barrowbridge called, jocosely, ‘uncommon law.’

  He began to read.

  4.

  HE HAD LONG SINCE completed the last copy of the latest draught of his final excerpt of the laws and procedures of jactitation; it lay under his hand, reduced to two neat sheets. He touched it lightly as he sat watching the sleeper … or watching the world and all life, with his eyes ready to watch the sleeper when it was time.

  What a strange old man, ugly and gruff, gentle, repulsive, brilliant, mad. He wondered if he had ever stopped before to take the measure of Simon Barrowbridge; he thought not. He had set foot on that creaking board by the door for the first time when he was still in his eleventh year. He had reached for the coachman’s hand numbly and held to it as if he were dangling from a tree limb forty feet up. Mr. Barrowbridge had seemed wide as a summer cloud, distant as majesty. Old Piggott had doffed his hat and scuffed his boot and said, “ ’Ere ’e is, sir,” as if he had spoken of him to the barrister before—and indeed he must have done.

  “Arghh!” the monster had snorted, looking him up and down. “What’s he got to smile about, the little basilisk?” Lanky had not remembered smiling; only the terror, and a black future forever. He would see Piggott again in two hours, but the coachman’s parting was almost more than he could bear. He’d have run, but he was rooted; he could not even turn away once he was alone with Barrowbridge. All he could recall now was that endless paralysis while the man stared at him, the great pocked chin a-pucker with derision, the slight contraction about the eyes that might have grown to scornful merriment if he had been significant enough.

  And afterwards—

  “Sweep, sweat and swot,” he murmured now, wagging his head in amazement. What a wringing out, what a starching he had had, those years! If Barrowbridge had not torn off an arm and a leg and tacked them back in their wrong places, it was only because he had not thought of it; heaven knows he altered everything else. Every move, every thought, every syllable he produced were regarded as Barrowbridge property to be moulded by the Barrowbridge hand. The boy had lived in terror of his ubiquitous cudgel; even then it was becoming difficult for him to move about, and he was marvelously dexterous with the stick, flicking down a book from the shelves, hooking a dish of cold tea across the desk, deftly scratching this or that otherwise inaccessible part of his immense person. Time and again he heard it whistling down on him, only to tug at the hem of his smock as it passed close by. Now he knew what he could not then; Simon Barrowbridge struck no blows with his weapon, save for the single time Lanky had been set upon by street toughs just outside, four against one, and the old chap had come lumbering and wincing down to the street. That was the time to make up for all others! with his baited-bull roaring, thunder on thunder like a king’s cannonade, and for each bellow a thwack and a yell from the enemy, until the noise was fit to move the shops back and widen the road; and the e
rstwhile attackers milling about, smarting so in their backs and shoulders that they did not know which way to run and howled around bumping into one another until the giant tired of the sport and showed them the way with a last hearty flurry. He had said a strange thing just then, panting and watching the street-boys fly away bawling. “A heady thing, to know you’re right; it comes seldom.”

  He crammed his slave with Greek and Latin as he crammed himself with the suety pastys which had now brought him down; and his gospel was the Oraculo of Balthazar Gracian. Five thousand times he must have said “Live by Gracian but as you live, quote him not; for these four things will damn him in the modern world”—and the four fat fingers would count them down: “Gracian’s a Jesuit and papist … Gracian’s a Spaniard … Gracian’s barely a hundred years dead … and Gracian’s something you know and the other chap doesn’t, for which you’d never be forgiven.”

  So while his contemporaries were learning homiletics, lofty, inapplicable, unattainable, Lancaster Higger-Piggott was marinated in Gracian, who said: There is always time to add a word, never to withdraw one. Talk as if you were making your will: the fewer words the less litigation. And who said: Never, from sympathy with an unfortunate, involve yourself in his fate. And: The wise do at once what the fool does at last. To command is merely to force men to do what they might do of their own accord. And most often from the lips of Simon Barrowbridge: You must learn to put up with fools.