Things near & far Chapter 22: Part 22

the mark, so absolutely futile. Finally, from that day to this, I have never seen Mr. Charles O’Malley, of Castle O’Malley, Co. Galway, nor have I heard of him. I have forgotten to say that he did not so much as ask me my name. I only wish that I had kept some kind of note of the very strange period which I had entered. It came about gradually, the merging of Syon into Bagdad; and I have a much dimmer recollection of the latter city. For its essence, as will be seen in the anecdote of the O’Malley, was lack of purpose, a certain fantastic confusion, a sense that something without any ratio might happen at any moment. Nothing began, nothing ended: strange people were apt to separate themselves from the crowd, to engage in queer discourse without intelligible motive or meaning, and then to sink back again, leaving no trace behind. And when events lack logical sequence or connection, it is difficult to retain them in the memory. But I believe that I do remember that on this very day of the O’Malley incident ten total strangers addressed me, without any very manifest reason and to no discernible end. We encountered in all sorts of places, in the street, in the restaurant, in the vanished Café de l’Europe in Leicester Square; the strangers uttered their mysterious messages, which to me were as incomprehensible as if they had been in cipher, and so vanished away. Indeed, looking back, I begin to wonder whether I were constantly being mistaken for someone else, who must have been exactly like me; this Someone Else being evidently a prominent member of a secret society, who would be aware of the signs and passwords of the order. For all I know, when Mr. O’Malley praised poor old Jug--he has long years ago gone to be a gargoyle on the parapet of some great Gothic church of the skies--I should have answered: “Yes, he is a fine dog, but green bulldogs with blue spots are finer.” Then, it may be, the interview would have become coherent, and tending to some end, and the lady in the flat would have pressed the secret panel and have disclosed ... I really don’t know what. That very day, I mean the day of the incident of the Bulldog, Mr. O’Malley and the Lady in the Flat, I was sitting in the Café de l’Europe with a friend, discussing various matters, when, as we rose to go a young man of a somewhat colourless and unpretending appearance, who had been sitting at the other side of the table, suddenly observed: “I have been very much interested, sir, in your conversation, and I should very much like to hear more of it.” Again, I was in the scene. I gave him my address in Gray’s Inn, and he called to see me several times, always coming at night and staying pretty late, asking me many questions about interior things. I think it was only on his last visit that I found out his odd manner of leaving the Inn, when he went away at one or half-past one in the morning. He was ignorant of the fact that the Raymond Buildings Gate and the Holborn Gate have watchers by them who will open the portals all the long night; and so when he left me he would climb the spiked wall which separates Verulam Buildings from Gray’s Inn Road and make off into the gaslight. He, too, vanished, and I saw him no more. It was some time earlier in this year that I became conscious of a very odd circumstance. It will perhaps have been noticed that I have become insensibly Stevensonian in my diction, as I have spoken of the Incident of the Bulldog, or of this or of that. That is so because the atmosphere in which I lived was becoming remarkably like the atmosphere of “The Three Impostors,” which, as I have remarked, is derived from the “New Arabian” manner of R. L. Stevenson. Not only did strange and unknown and unexplained people start up from every corner, from every café table, and engage me in obscure mazes of talk, quite in the Arabian manner, but I presently became aware that something very odd indeed was happening: certain characters in “The Three Impostors” showed signs of coming to life, a feat which, perhaps, they had failed to perform before. I was once talking to a dark young man, of quiet and retiring aspect, who wore glasses--he and I had met at a place where we had to be blindfolded before we could see the light--and he told me a queer tale of the manner in which his life was in daily jeopardy. He described the doings of a fiend in human form, a man who was well known to be an expert in Black Magic, a man who hung up naked women in cupboards by hooks which pierced the flesh of their arms. This monster--I may say that there is such a person, though I can by no means go bail for the actuality of any of the misdeeds charged against him--had, for some reason which I do not recollect, taken a dislike to my dark young friend. In consequence, so I was assured, he had hired a gang in Lambeth, who were grievously to maim or preferably to slaughter the dark young man; each member of the gang receiving a retaining fee of eight shillings and sixpence a day--a sum, by the way, that sounds as if it were the face value of some mediæval coin long obsolete. I listened in wonder, for there are some absurdities so enormous that they seem to have a stunning effect on the common sense, paralysing it for the moment and inhibiting its action. It was only when I got home that it dawned upon me that I had been listening to the Young Man in Spectacles, and that he came out of “The Three Impostors.” And soon Miss Lally, another character from the book, appeared, and like her prototype discoursed most amazing tales, was the heroine of incredible adventures, would appear and disappear in a quite inexplicable manner, relating always histories before unheard of, a personage wholly diverting, enigmatic and enchanting. And the odd thing is that it was as if these two had parts to play for a season, and played them--till the prompter’s bell sounded, and the curtain fell and the lights went out. Both Miss Lally and the Young Man in Spectacles still live; but they have become useful members of society and eminently successful, as I believe, in their several employments. Thus do the King and Queen in the play go home to their flats or their lodgings after the show and enjoy cold beef, pickles and a comfortable bottle of beer. And now I am going at last to say a good word for literature. I have said, again and again, even to tedium, that the only good that I can see in it is that it is one of the many ways of escaping from life, to be classified with Alpine Climbing, Chess, Methylated Spirit and Prussic Acid. The way I have always seen it is like this: I go out on a Sunday afternoon in March with the black north-easter blowing to take a walk up Gower Street. I say to myself: “O come! I can’t stand this,” and go home and write--or try to write--a chapter in “The Hill of Dreams.” Many people will say that the chapter is much worse than the street, and I daresay that they are right; but, anyhow, it was different: it was, for me, the nearest way out of Gower Street and the black north-easter. But I believe that there may be a little more in literature than this. It is certainly the escape from life; but perhaps it is also the only means of realising and shewing life, or, at least, certain aspects of life. Here is an example to my hand. Here am I, not trying to write literature, but doing my best to tell a true tale, and I find that I can make nothing of it. I can set down the facts, or rather such of them as I remember, but I am quite conscious that I am not, in the real sense of the word, telling the truth; that is, I am not giving any sense of the very extraordinary atmosphere in which I lived in the year 1900, of the curious and indescribable impression which the events of those days made upon me; the sense that everything had altered, that everything was very strange, that I lived in daily intercourse with people who would have been impossible, unimaginable, a year before; that the figure of the world was changed utterly for me--of all this I can give no true picture, dealing as I am with what are called facts. I maintained long ago in “Hieroglyphics” that facts as facts do not signify anything or communicate anything; and I am sure that I was right, when I confess that, as a purveyor of exact information, I can make nothing of the year 1900. But, avoiding the facts, I have got a good deal nearer to the truth in the last chapter of “The Secret Glory,” which describes the doings and feelings of two young people who are paying their first visit to London. _I_ never bolted up to town with the house-master’s parlour-maid; but truth must be told in figures. There is one episode of this period of which I may say a little more, that is the affair of the Secret Society. Putting two and two together, a good many years after the event, I am inclined to think that it was a mere item in the programme of strange and Arabian entertainment that was being produced for my benefit: the Secret Society was of the same order as the Incident of Mr. O’Malley and the Adventure of the Young Man who always left by the Spiked Wall, only of a more gorgeous and elaborate kind. And I must confess that it did me a great deal of good--for the time. To stand waiting at a closed door in a breathless expectation, to see it open suddenly and disclose two figures clothed in a habit that I never thought to see worn by the living, to catch for a moment the vision of a cloud of incense smoke and certain dim lights glimmering in it before the bandage was put over the eyes and the arm felt a firm grasp upon it that led the hesitating footsteps into the unknown darkness: all this was strange and admirable indeed;