From London Far (2 page)

It thus came about – a circumstance on the inwardness of which not even Dr Higbed could comment – that on this day of all days, when there was bearing down upon him perhaps the first thoroughly untoward incident of his life, Meredith was the custodian of some ten sheets of ancient parchment which were not only of the highest scholarly interest, but of very considerable monetary value as well. It was carrying this small fortune under his arm that he left the august seclusion of the inner library, passed through the great circular reading-room beyond, and presently found himself in the comparative brightness of a London October afternoon. A shower had fallen and heavy clouds were gathering; nevertheless, gleams of sunshine still caught the tops of the buses and reached down to the wet pavements at intersections; the smell of mouldering leaves, just perceptible through dust and petrol vapour, was like a faint echo of rural peace. Meredith remembered that on the morrow he would be travelling north, and reflected that if the weather cleared again the journey would be pleasant enough.

Resolved at length, from vice and
London
far,

To breathe in distant fields a purer air…

Juvenal once more – and as paraphrased by Dr Johnson he put the matter very nicely. Meredith crossed the street, dodging sundry lethal vehicles without being at all aware of them, and went in quest of some small shop that should provide a quiet cup of tea. After that he would walk by way of Shaftesbury Avenue and Piccadilly to the Athenaeum, and a couple of hours’ light reading – perhaps in recent numbers of the
Journal of Classical Archaelogy
– would take him on to dinner-time.

For who would leave, unbrib’d, Hibernia’s land,

Or change the rocks of Scotland for the Strand?

Well, Boswell would – and Johnson himself, for that matter, although he was here obliged to follow the Latin poet’s swinging denunciation of urban life:

Here malice, rapine, accident, conspire,

And now a rabble rages, now a fire…

There had been plenty of fire – void spaces round him as he walked witnessed to it – but not much in the way of rabble.

Here falling houses thunder on your head…

Yes, that decidedly. Meredith halted, peered into the first likely tea-shop, and descried with dismay two learned ladies of his acquaintance earnestly discoursing.

Here falling houses thunder on your head,

And here a female Atheist talks you dead.

Much pleased with this little joke, Meredith crossed the street again with another tea-shop in his eye. It was as he did so that he remembered being out of tobacco.

In all this Destiny was doubtless working – the object of Destiny being to bring Meredith into a certain unobtrusive Bloomsbury tobacco shop with Samuel Johnson’s verses still running in his head. Not really a good poem, Meredith reflected as he gained the farther pavement; you could never have guessed on the strength of it that he would write so great a thing as
The Vanity of Human Wishes
. For a moment his mind went off down the resounding corridors of the later composition. But as he turned in to make his purchase and saw that the shop was empty he was thinking again of
London
.

Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay…

Meredith became aware that the shopman was close beside him, stooped over a glass case in which he was arranging rows of petrol-lighters and cigarette-holders. A sullen fellow with a shifting glance, and a nervous tremor over one eyelid, Meredith remarked as he gave his order – and the man somewhat rudely delaying to finish his job, he fell into an abstraction once more. The full title was
London, A Poem
. And similarly with Johnson’s play; it was called
Irene, A Tragedy
. The age – in this how unlike the twentieth century! – had been fond of precise statement. Meredith looked round the commonplace little shop and noticed that it suggested nothing very brisk in the way of trade. Over sun-drenched houris in wispy bathing suits, entranced couples proposing tennis, firm but kindly-faced business men, dignified but mildly humorous clergy; over the larger-than-life pasteboard of all these devotees of nicotine, the London grime had settled and the London spiders had spun. But still the vicar clutched his glowing pipe, his other hand lovingly toying with the tobacco jar with the College arms.
For ever warm and still to be enjoyed
, thought Meredith, momentarily abandoning Dr Johnson for Keats. Matinée idols thrust forwards disproportionately large cigarette cases in frozen gestures:
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss
. Meredith smiled benignly at the sullen shopkeeper.
What men or gods are these
? he wanted to say to him.
What maidens loath? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes
?… Meredith faintly chuckled at this, startling the man who had now leant over the counter to fish him out his two ounces of tobacco. An unknown brand – but, of course, one was lucky to get it. Nevertheless, Meredith looked at it suspiciously. Would it satisfy the massively discriminative business man, the approachable but public-school and Oxfordy vicar? Or was it of the kind –

That leaves a heart high sorrowful and cloy’d,

A burning forehead, and a parching tongue?

And Meredith was so startled at the appositeness of this final snatch from Keats’ Ode that he spoke aloud and at random. Moreover – and here was Fate’s final inconsequence, a riddle such as scarcely Dr Higbed himself might unravel – it was to Dr Johnson that he turned again as the obscure necessity for speech moved him. ‘London, a Poem,’ he articulated absently at the half-turned back of the tobacconist.

And the man stiffened, swung round, glanced apprehensively round the empty shop. ‘Rotterdam’s gone,’ he said in a low voice. And, stooping swiftly, he tugged at a ring in the floor. A trapdoor opened and revealed a flight of wooden steps dropping into darkness.

‘Quick!’ said the man.

Meredith paused a second – but it was to take hold of his tobacco. Then he stepped down. A light flicked on at his feet as he did so. And the trapdoor closed above his head.

The practical and everyday advantages of the exacting science known as Textual Criticism are admittedly few. To ponder the minute inaccuracies of long-dead scribes and thus penetrate through a corrupted text to the pristine meaning of a yet longer-dead orator or grammarian is a way of life not likely to be appealing to the actively inclined. And yet, in what was to be decidedly an active affair, Textual Criticism gave Meredith a good send-off, for it enabled him, between one rung and the next, to discover why the words
London, a Poem
should receive the inconsequent answer
Rotterdam’s gone
. He had been understood to say
London’s going
; and what he had exchanged with the sullen tobacconist was, in fact, a password and countersign.
London’s going: Rotterdam’s gone
. The second statement was as unchallengeable as it was melancholy. The first statement was an old guess and a bad one, since London, battered and beautiful, still very substantially existed all around him. An
old
guess; it was therefore to be inferred that the organization or racket or conspiracy – for certainly it was on something of the sort that he had stumbled – had been in existence for some time…

Thus far did Meredith’s science take him. It could not at all tell him why he had himself done this extraordinary thing; why he should have thus unhesitatingly stepped into the melodrama so unexpectedly sprung upon him. But
was
it melodrama? Meredith, who was now more than halfway down the ladder, stopped, appalled. Had he come upon something merely sordid; perhaps upon a haunt of vice? Poised on the tobacconist’s ladder, he remembered a fable current in the Cambridge of his day. One went into a tobacconist’s shop (a
tobacconist’s
shop!), put a pound note on the counter, asked for some unlikely purchase, and was immediately ushered –

Incontinently, a cold sweat broke out on Meredith’s brow. In horrid trepidation he peered down what was now revealed as a narrow, whitewashed corridor, dimly lit by small electric bulbs. Some twenty feet ahead it made a blank turn and disappeared – to open upon what? Had he not, in his innocence on the low life of the Metropolis, made a wholly embarrassing blunder? Meredith took a couple of paces forward, his mind unwontedly besieged by vivid, detailed and swiftly moving visual fantasies. His ignorance of the seamy side of modern London might be vast, but yet vaster was his knowledge of the seamy side of classical Rome. And this specialized information, for long sterilized and stored up for strictly learned purposes, now rioted before him in images of some vast Neronian lupanar, replete with everything that should satiate the farthest reach and curiosity of lust…

How would one respond if one were by some black magic actually precipitated upon such surroundings – infinite artistries of the flesh amid a wilderness of marble and gold? The vision and the question hung before Meredith only for a moment and gave way to the drab conviction that he must indeed have broken across the threshold of a subterraneous brothel. And again images stirred in his mind. Memories, thirty years deep, showed him a student hurrying through these streets, and men in shabby Edwardian clothes beckoning meaningfully from doorways, and one man – his features perfectly recalled as they hung etched against gaslight – inviting to a house ‘where the girls danced on the table’. Meredith shivered. At twenty he had perhaps been a little tempted by these girls, but he had no wish to meet their granddaughters. Should he turn round and make for the ladder by which he had come?

London’s going: Rotterdam’s gone
. Who, after all, would think to choose such words as a passport to venery? Meredith’s confidence returned. He thrust his two ounces of tobacco into a pocket, clasped his dispatch-case firmly under an arm, and continued to advance down the corridor.

The floor was swept; the whitewash had been recently renewed; round the little electric bulbs overhead no cobwebs had been allowed to gather. This was in marked contrast with the dilapidated and rather dirty shop above. It suggested the environs of a hospital, or at least of some institution markedly functional and antiseptic – but whether in this there was matter that should further allay his apprehensions Meredith felt that he was without the data for knowing. He pressed on and in a low, shadowless light turned the corner. And there, very abruptly, he stopped.

Straight ahead, a lady reclined luxuriously on a divan. She wore a tiara and three strings of pearls; she had no clothes whatever; and she looked at Meredith with a steady and infinite enticement. This was embarrassing; but far more so was Meredith’s instant knowledge that the lady – and the lady thus frankly posed – was familiar to him. He had met her like this before. Meredith, his worst fears thus copiously confirmed, was about to suppose himself an unwitting Jekyll whose Hyde familiarly haunted such places as this when he realized that the low light and his own apprehensions had deceived him. The lady existed only on canvas. In fact, she was the Horton
Venus
. And she had been painted by Titian just on four hundred years ago.

Meredith, now on easy and natural terms with what was thus strangely displayed, advanced with simple pleasure for a closer inspection. The Duke of Horton, he recalled, possessed amid his great collection of pictures two which were pre-eminent: Vermeer’s
Aquarium
, a little miracle of virtuoso edges, of jewelled, mirrored, and refracted light; and this prodigal evocation and transmutation of some great courtesan of Venice, golden-haired, black-eyed, and of ample and resplendent flesh, over the mastering of whose subtle planes and infinite dyes the artist had toiled through oblivious, torrid days. She lay on scarlet; behind her a great emerald curtain was drawn back to reveal an angry sky and a strip of mysteriously sun-drenched sea; upon the goddess herself scattered tints from this tremendous setting were at play with the ivory and rose and gold of the curved torso, the studied relaxation of the limbs. Meredith, when he had looked at the picture for some time, remembered that it ought to be at Horton House.

He had seen it before, and the Vermeer too – but that had been at the Italian and Dutch Exhibitions back in the thirties. Normally the Vermeer lived at Scamnum Court, the Duke’s principal country seat. And the Titian lived in Town. But only –

And then Meredith remembered. Horton House was a burnt-out shell, and had been so these two years past. One of the last of the big raids had got it. And by what the Duke – grown old and obstinate – had chosen to leave there, exposed to the hazards of bomb and rocket, a good many people had been disturbed. That the Duke himself should stop on in the vast, almost deserted house (sleeping, it was said, very comfortably in an attic which he shared with his butler) was his own affair, but assuredly he ought to have sent away the Titian, and the Gobelin tapestries, and the famous Crispin Collection of cameos. Not but what (Meredith seemed to remember) the precious things were thought to have turned out safe and sound after all, the Duke having in fact tucked them away in cellars far below the level of the nearby Thames. But
this
cellar certainly had nothing to do with Horton House; it was hidden in the heart of Bloomsbury. Why, then, should the Titian be here – and stacked casually against a whitewashed wall?

Until he asked himself this question Meredith had been so absorbed by the great painting that he had not looked farther about him. Now he shifted his gaze – this with the intention of taking a comprehensive view of his surroundings – only to have it riveted once more on an immediately adjoining object. Almost blocking the corridor was an immense conglomerate of masonry and plaster, which would have looked like the disregarded product of some large-scale work of demolition but for the fact that it was held together by an elaborate system of steel rods and screws designed for the purpose. Meredith advanced several paces until he was in a position to examine the mass on its thither side. What he found was a fresco by Giotto. A very familiar fresco, which Meredith was accustomed to view as often as he visited Italy. The fact was astounding but undeniable. The Titian had travelled some five miles from Horton House. This formidable fragment of a thirteenth-century church had travelled some seven hundred from Florence!