Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (164 page)

‘You know perfectly well that I depend on you entirely,’ returned Pitman. ‘But O, what a night is before me with that — horror in my studio! How am I to think of it on my pillow?’

‘Well, you know, my piano will be there too,’ said Michael. ‘That’ll raise the average.’

An hour later a cart came up the lane, and the lawyer’s piano — a momentous Broadwood grand — was deposited in Mr Pitman’s studio.

CHAPTER VIII. In Which Michael Finsbury Enjoys a Holiday

Punctually at eight o’clock next morning the lawyer rattled (according to previous appointment) on the studio door. He found the artist sadly altered for the worse — bleached, bloodshot, and chalky — a man upon wires, the tail of his haggard eye still wandering to the closet. Nor was the professor of drawing less inclined to wonder at his friend. Michael was usually attired in the height of fashion, with a certain mercantile brilliancy best described perhaps as stylish; nor could anything be said against him, as a rule, but that he looked a trifle too like a wedding guest to be quite a gentleman. Today he had fallen altogether from these heights. He wore a flannel shirt of washed-out shepherd’s tartan, and a suit of reddish tweeds, of the colour known to tailors as ‘heather mixture’; his neckcloth was black, and tied loosely in a sailor’s knot; a rusty ulster partly concealed these advantages; and his feet were shod with rough walking boots. His hat was an old soft felt, which he removed with a flourish as he entered.

‘Here I am, William Dent!’ he cried, and drawing from his pocket two little wisps of reddish hair, he held them to his cheeks like sidewhiskers and danced about the studio with the filmy graces of a ballet-girl.

Pitman laughed sadly. ‘I should never have known you,’ said he.

‘Nor were you intended to,’ returned Michael, replacing his false whiskers in his pocket. ‘Now we must overhaul you and your wardrobe, and disguise you up to the nines.’

‘Disguise!’ cried the artist. ‘Must I indeed disguise myself. Has it come to that?’

‘My dear creature,’ returned his companion, ‘disguise is the spice of life. What is life, passionately exclaimed a French philosopher, without the pleasures of disguise? I don’t say it’s always good taste, and I know it’s unprofessional; but what’s the odds, downhearted drawing-master? It has to be. We have to leave a false impression on the minds of many persons, and in particular on the mind of Mr Gideon Forsyth — the young gentleman I know by sight — if he should have the bad taste to be at home.’

‘If he be at home?’ faltered the artist. ‘That would be the end of all.’

‘Won’t matter a d — ,’ returned Michael airily. ‘Let me see your clothes, and I’ll make a new man of you in a jiffy.’

In the bedroom, to which he was at once conducted, Michael examined Pitman’s poor and scanty wardrobe with a humorous eye, picked out a short jacket of black alpaca, and presently added to that a pair of summer trousers which somehow took his fancy as incongruous. Then, with the garments in his hand, he scrutinized the artist closely.

‘I don’t like that clerical collar,’ he remarked. ‘Have you nothing else?’

The professor of drawing pondered for a moment, and then brightened; ‘I have a pair of low-necked shirts,’ he said, ‘that I used to wear in Paris as a student. They are rather loud.’

‘The very thing!’ ejaculated Michael. ‘You’ll look perfectly beastly. Here are spats, too,’ he continued, drawing forth a pair of those offensive little gaiters. ‘Must have spats! And now you jump into these, and whistle a tune at the window for (say) three-quarters of an hour. After that you can rejoin me on the field of glory.’

So saying, Michael returned to the studio. It was the morning of the easterly gale; the wind blew shrilly among the statues in the garden, and drove the rain upon the skylight in the studio ceiling; and at about the same moment of the time when Morris attacked the hundredth version of his uncle’s signature in Bloomsbury, Michael, in Chelsea, began to rip the wires out of the Broadwood grand.

Three-quarters of an hour later Pitman was admitted, to find the closet-door standing open, the closet untenanted, and the piano discreetly shut.

‘It’s a remarkably heavy instrument,’ observed Michael, and turned to consider his friend’s disguise. ‘You must shave off that beard of yours,’ he said.

‘My beard!’ cried Pitman. ‘I cannot shave my beard. I cannot tamper with my appearance — my principals would object. They hold very strong views as to the appearance of the professors — young ladies are considered so romantic. My beard was regarded as quite a feature when I went about the place. It was regarded,’ said the artist, with rising colour, ‘it was regarded as unbecoming.’

‘You can let it grow again,’ returned Michael, ‘and then you’ll be so precious ugly that they’ll raise your salary.’

‘But I don’t want to be ugly,’ cried the artist.

‘Don’t be an ass,’ said Michael, who hated beards and was delighted to destroy one. ‘Off with it like a man!’

‘Of course, if you insist,’ said Pitman; and then he sighed, fetched some hot water from the kitchen, and setting a glass upon his easel, first clipped his beard with scissors and then shaved his chin. He could not conceal from himself, as he regarded the result, that his last claims to manhood had been sacrificed, but Michael seemed delighted.

‘A new man, I declare!’ he cried. ‘When I give you the windowglass spectacles I have in my pocket, you’ll be the beau-ideal of a French commercial traveller.’

Pitman did not reply, but continued to gaze disconsolately on his image in the glass.

‘Do you know,’ asked Michael, ‘what the Governor of South Carolina said to the Governor of North Carolina? “It’s a long time between drinks,” observed that powerful thinker; and if you will put your hand into the top left-hand pocket of my ulster, I have an impression you will find a flask of brandy. Thank you, Pitman,’ he added, as he filled out a glass for each. ‘Now you will give me news of this.’

The artist reached out his hand for the water-jug, but Michael arrested the movement.

‘Not if you went upon your knees!’ he cried. ‘This is the finest liqueur brandy in Great Britain.’

Pitman put his lips to it, set it down again, and sighed.

‘Well, I must say you’re the poorest companion for a holiday!’ cried Michael. ‘If that’s all you know of brandy, you shall have no more of it; and while I finish the flask, you may as well begin business. Come to think of it,’ he broke off, ‘I have made an abominable error: you should have ordered the cart before you were disguised. Why, Pitman, what the devil’s the use of you? why couldn’t you have reminded me of that?’

‘I never even knew there was a cart to be ordered,’ said the artist. ‘But I can take off the disguise again,’ he suggested eagerly.

‘You would find it rather a bother to put on your beard,’ observed the lawyer. ‘No, it’s a false step; the sort of thing that hangs people,’ he continued, with eminent cheerfulness, as he sipped his brandy; ‘and it can’t be retraced now. Off to the mews with you, make all the arrangements; they’re to take the piano from here, cart it to Victoria, and dispatch it thence by rail to Cannon Street, to lie till called for in the name of Fortune du Boisgobey.’

‘Isn’t that rather an awkward name?’ pleaded Pitman.

‘Awkward?’ cried Michael scornfully. ‘It would hang us both! Brown is both safer and easier to pronounce. Call it Brown.’

‘I wish,’ said Pitman, ‘for my sake, I wish you wouldn’t talk so much of hanging.’

‘Talking about it’s nothing, my boy!’ returned Michael. ‘But take your hat and be off, and mind and pay everything beforehand.’

Left to himself, the lawyer turned his attention for some time exclusively to the liqueur brandy, and his spirits, which had been pretty fair all morning, now prodigiously rose. He proceeded to adjust his whiskers finally before the glass. ‘Devilish rich,’ he remarked, as he contemplated his reflection. ‘I look like a purser’s mate.’ And at that moment the window-glass spectacles (which he had hitherto destined for Pitman) flashed into his mind; he put them on, and fell in love with the effect. ‘Just what I required,’ he said. ‘I wonder what I look like now? A humorous novelist, I should think,’ and he began to practise divers characters of walk, naming them to himself as — he proceeded. ‘Walk of a humorous novelist — but that would require an umbrella. Walk of a purser’s mate. Walk of an Australian colonist revisiting the scenes of childhood. Walk of Sepoy colonel, ditto, ditto. And in the midst of the Sepoy colonel (which was an excellent assumption, although inconsistent with the style of his make-up), his eye lighted on the piano. This instrument was made to lock both at the top and at the keyboard, but the key of the latter had been mislaid. Michael opened it and ran his fingers over the dumb keys. ‘Fine instrument — full, rich tone,’ he observed, and he drew in a seat.

When Mr Pitman returned to the studio, he was appalled to observe his guide, philosopher, and friend performing miracles of execution on the silent grand.

‘Heaven help me!’ thought the little man, ‘I fear he has been drinking! Mr Finsbury,’ he said aloud; and Michael, without rising, turned upon him a countenance somewhat flushed, encircled with the bush of the red whiskers, and bestridden by the spectacles. ‘Capriccio in B-flat on the departure of a friend,’ said he, continuing his noiseless evolutions.

Indignation awoke in the mind of Pitman. ‘Those spectacles were to be mine,’ he cried. ‘They are an essential part of my disguise.’

‘I am going to wear them myself,’ replied Michael; and he added, with some show of truth, ‘There would be a devil of a lot of suspicion aroused if we both wore spectacles.’

‘O, well,’ said the assenting Pitman, ‘I rather counted on them; but of course, if you insist. And at any rate, here is the cart at the door.’

While the men were at work, Michael concealed himself in the closet among the debris of the barrel and the wires of the piano; and as soon as the coast was clear the pair sallied forth by the lane, jumped into a hansom in the King’s Road, and were driven rapidly toward town. It was still cold and raw and boisterous; the rain beat strongly in their faces, but Michael refused to have the glass let down; he had now suddenly donned the character of cicerone, and pointed out and lucidly commented on the sights of London, as they drove. ‘My dear fellow,’ he said, ‘you don’t seem to know anything of your native city. Suppose we visited the Tower? No? Well, perhaps it’s a trifle out of our way. But, anyway — Here, cabby, drive round by Trafalgar Square!’ And on that historic battlefield he insisted on drawing up, while he criticized the statues and gave the artist many curious details (quite new to history) of the lives of the celebrated men they represented.

It would be difficult to express what Pitman suffered in the cab: cold, wet, terror in the capital degree, a grounded distrust of the commander under whom he served, a sense of imprudency in the matter of the low-necked shirt, a bitter sense of the decline and fall involved in the deprivation of his beard, all these were among the ingredients of the bowl. To reach the restaurant, for which they were deviously steering, was the first relief. To hear Michael bespeak a private room was a second and a still greater. Nor, as they mounted the stair under the guidance of an unintelligible alien, did he fail to note with gratitude the fewness of the persons present, or the still more cheering fact that the greater part of these were exiles from the land of France. It was thus a blessed thought that none of them would be connected with the Seminary; for even the French professor, though admittedly a Papist, he could scarce imagine frequenting so rakish an establishment.

The alien introduced them into a small bare room with a single table, a sofa, and a dwarfish fire; and Michael called promptly for more coals and a couple of brandies and sodas.

‘O, no,’ said Pitman, ‘surely not — no more to drink.’

‘I don’t know what you would be at,’ said Michael plaintively. ‘It’s positively necessary to do something; and one shouldn’t smoke before meals I thought that was understood. You seem to have no idea of hygiene.’ And he compared his watch with the clock upon the chimney-piece.

Pitman fell into bitter musing; here he was, ridiculously shorn, absurdly disguised, in the company of a drunken man in spectacles, and waiting for a champagne luncheon in a restaurant painfully foreign. What would his principals think, if they could see him? What if they knew his tragic and deceitful errand?

From these reflections he was aroused by the entrance of the alien with the brandies and sodas. Michael took one and bade the waiter pass the other to his friend.

Pitman waved it from him with his hand. ‘Don’t let me lose all self-respect,’ he said.

‘Anything to oblige a friend,’ returned Michael. ‘But I’m not going to drink alone. Here,’ he added to the waiter, ‘you take it.’ And, then, touching glasses, ‘The health of Mr Gideon Forsyth,’ said he.

‘Meestare Gidden Borsye,’ replied the waiter, and he tossed off the liquor in four gulps.

‘Have another?’ said Michael, with undisguised interest. ‘I never saw a man drink faster. It restores one’s confidence in the human race.

But the waiter excused himself politely, and, assisted by some one from without, began to bring in lunch.

Michael made an excellent meal, which he washed down with a bottle of Heidsieck’s dry monopole. As for the artist, he was far too uneasy to eat, and his companion flatly refused to let him share in the champagne unless he did.

‘One of us must stay sober,’ remarked the lawyer, ‘and I won’t give you champagne on the strength of a leg of grouse. I have to be cautious,’ he added confidentially. ‘One drunken man, excellent business — two drunken men, all my eye.’

On the production of coffee and departure of the waiter, Michael might have been observed to make portentous efforts after gravity of mien. He looked his friend in the face (one eye perhaps a trifle off), and addressed him thickly but severely.

‘Enough of this fooling,’ was his not inappropriate exordium. ‘To business. Mark me closely. I am an Australian. My name is John Dickson, though you mightn’t think it from my unassuming appearance. You will be relieved to hear that I am rich, sir, very rich. You can’t go into this sort of thing too thoroughly, Pitman; the whole secret is preparation, and I can get up my biography from the beginning, and I could tell it you now, only I have forgotten it.’