The Other Nineteenth Century (11 page)

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Authors: Avram Davidson

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Though from time to time he would exclaim, almost with a note of despair in his voice, “Oh, God! Another exhibition of
that
fellow’s wretched daubs!” or, “Dear Lord! Another edition of this man’s wretched doggerel?” To which Tumbleton might reply, with a good-natured shrug, that this man or that fellow seemed to have the knack of pleasing the public taste. “The public
taste.
Oh, God. Dear Lord.” Williams might actually strike his own head with his fist.
His friends were divided as to how to reply to such scenes. Harrison did once suggest that perhaps some of the reviews should be withheld, Tumbleton (unhappy) had pointed out that Williams
would be sure to notice their absence. Harrison (unhappy) had perforce agreed. Tumbleton suggested that an edition of Williams’s unpublished poems was just the thing to raise his wasted spirits. Harrison said that he was merely the junior partner in the firm and that his father, who was the senior, had more than once pointed out how meagerly the single publication of Williams’s other poems (“ … although, mind you, certainly the best …”) had sold. Harrison suggested that an exhibition of Williams’s paintings was what was really needed. And Tumbleton sighed, stirred, said that, even
should
the Duke agree (and one feared he wouldn’t), why—the excitement! No, no. Williams must on no account be allowed to become excited. And Grant had made a very coarse suggestion as to what
he
felt that Williams needed.
“To buck him up,” said Grant, growling.
“Eustace is still fearfully ill, you know.”
“Eustace can
try,
can’t he? What I have admired about him is that he always did try, never mind what the critics said, damn the critics, he would
try!
Again. Reason why he went to that bloody place in the country: to try. No, I tell you that what he needs is—”
“But it is
exciting,
and the doctor—”
A shaft of light lit up Harrison’s pale beard and hair, but Grant grimaced, said, “About as exciting as any other natural function, I’m sure the doctor would agree.”
The doctor did not say if he would agree or not agree, when, not very long after, Grant ran him down in the private bar of a place near the Hospital. He grunted (perhaps a habit picked up from Schneiderhaus), asked, “Is he sleeping well these days?”
Grant rubbed his smooth cheeks and chin, fingered his sleek moustache, and said, No, he believed not. Fellow was complaining about that just the other day, said Grant. “Well,” McFall declared, heavily, “he damned well should be sleeping well. Why hasn’t he been sleeping well? Should be sleeping well. Lack of sleep must inevitably lead to death or the straight-waistcoat. Why hasn’t he been taking a sleeping-draught?” Grant stared a moment. Then, with a
degree of uncustomary tact, suggested that perhaps “the Professor” had neglected to prescribe him one. McFall grunted again.
“Shouldn’t wonder. Foreign fellows don’t know everything, look at Charcot and his hysterical cow-maids turning somersaults,
I
shall damned well, prescribe him one. By Zeus and by Apollo.” He called for pen and he called for ink, wrote so firmly that the nib at one point dug into the paper. Called for brandy.
“More brandy, Doctor?”
“Yes, damn it, waiter, more brandy. Do you think that I drank the ink? I shall pay for it
instanter,
too, more than I can say for some of my patients, I have a Harley Street office to pay for, and the lease on a house in the Borough to pay for where I have an incompetent partner to pay for and I have a house and a wife and two unmarried daughters in Belgrave Square and an unmarried son to pay for and carriages and horses to pay for, and if you were obliged to walk the wards with me and observe the immense amount of human misery which can never be paid for—” McFall stopped abruptly, stared at Grant. Who stared back. McFall tried to hand Grant the pen, then handed him the prescription. “The chemist will put the directions on the bottle,” he said. “I used to dispense when I first began practice but I don’t now. Do not even think of sending your friend to try the sea air as yet. It would be death or the straight-waistcoat. Wait
-ter.”
Williams felt much better. “Sleep, sleep, is nature’s sweet restorer,” he informed Harrison. “It is sleep which knits up the raveled sleeve of care.”
“Eustace, you have no idea how happy I am to hear you say so.”
Williams was happy to be saying so. “It makes all the difference. The difference between strolling in a rose garden and tossing on a bed of thorns.”
“I say, you ought to write that down, you know.”
“Ought I? Well, perhaps you are—No.” He settled into his easy chair again, a faint smile on his face. “You forget that I am forbidden to touch pen to paper for a good while yet.” He pronounced himself restless on this point before, but now seemed content, quite content.
Harrison remembered, apologized. “Though I thought you had been. Doing so, I mean.”
“No, no. Devil a bit of it.”
Harrison moved about on the heavy oaken settle. “Well, in that case, perhaps I—It is really too good a line to—Paper? Ink?”
“All the newpaper you want. Ink? Don’t know if there’s such a thing in the house.” Harrison seemed faintly discomfited. Williams said that the lines would keep. “I shan’t forget them. I have a good many more, you know, all up here,” he tapped his brow. “They come to me in dreams, visions. Strolling through the rose garden, gently pushing away the crystal ball.” And, in reply to his friend’s inquiring look, he explained that, as he would lie abed, relishing the soon-to-be-expected slumber, sleep would (as it were) slowly approach in the form of a crystal ball, floating, floating slowly toward him. “And I, knowing that it will keep on coming no matter what may be, I take a sort of curious pleasure in pushing it away for a while. Once. Twice. Perhaps a third time. Then, finally, I allow it to snuggle close.” He smiled. “Delicious.”
“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?”

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