The Other Nineteenth Century Page 9

  “Which he damned well would have,” said Grant, in his usual growl, “if Harrison had not come down ahead of us.”

  Harrison said nothing, but touched his light gold beard, a gesture which often did him in place of speech. Williams gave evidence of desiring to say something, but he was still too feeble, and McFall racked on. “No chemist in case you run out of medicine, which you might, or you or that oaf Crutchett spill it, same thing it would come to: no. I want you where I can look at you and look you over as often as I think proper. You can’t go on living on bacon and bad potatoes and stale bread and stewed tea, you’ll be able to have fresh meat—chops, a joint, a nice fowl—and sprouts and greens, some decent wine, whatever I think best for your diet as we go along. If you have another of these moods in which you feel you cannot stay in the house, why, step to the curb and call a hansom or a four-wheeler—instead of rushing out into this barbarous wilderness and risk falling into an old quarry.”

  Williams moved forward in his chair, his lips began to move, he licked them, moved his right hand. But McFall gave him no chance. McFall said he didn’t care how “romantic” the cottage-studio was for a painter or poet, he wanted Williams within short distance of a hospital, if need be (he emphasized those words), and in particular St. Olave’s, where McFall stood high, though he did not say so; what he said was that Professor Schneiderhaus of Lepzig, a man knowing more about nervous diseases than any other man in Europe, including Charcot, was spending a year at St. Olave’s. Even McFall had to pause for breath, at which Williams said something at last, but so weakly that he could scarcely be heard to speak at all.

  Tumbleton it was who spoke and was heard, preening his left side-whisker, then his right: “After all, Williams,” he said, “you can paint and write in London as well as anywhere. Lots of chaps do.”

  No: McFall, ignoring Tumbleton, pointed a thick finger at the sick man and said, in rolling tones, “I absolutely forbid you to touch brush to paint or pen to paper for at least six months. You are to undergo no exertion at all. For at least six months. For at least six months you are to do nothing requiring the expenditure of nervous energy more than to dress, climb into a smoking jacket, put your feet on the fender of the fireplace, and pick up a newspaper or a magazine. You are to take naps in the afternoon. One evening a week, if one of your friends—and you may thank your good stars that you have such good friends—if one or two or all three of these gentlemen here for that matter, wish to take you out for dinner at a quiet place, or to a music hall or a concert, why, very well, I allow that. But mind you: no drama.”

  He stopped, indicated by a rise of his tufty brows that Williams would at last be allowed to speak. After a moment, Williams did so.

  “What is the alternative?” he whispered.

  “Death or the straight-waistcoat,” said McFall, with quite terrible promptness.

  Williams collapsed back into his chair.

  “Well, there’s no more to be said,” said Grant. “We’ll pack you up”—he thrust the poker into the smoky fire as though it had been a mortal enemy; but still it smoked—“and take you back to town. You’ll live a quiet life, we’ll all see to that, we’ll all look after you, and I understand from Dr. McFall as we were coming down, that at the end of six months, when you will be much better, that there would be no objection raised if you’d wish to try the sea air; damn these coals, they aren’t proper coals at all, they’re half slate; in London you’ll have decent coals, you’ll be warm!”

  “Warmth,” said McFall, “is of the utmost importance in illness of your sort. You must have a good fire.” The lamp smoked, too, in its sooty globe, but Grant, having failed to do anything with it a moment earlier, did not try now. The wavering small light of the lamp, the dim sun through the grimy windows and dusty skylight, did little to show what might be on the unfinished canvas in the corner where an armor breastplate hung askew on a tailor’s dummy and a mass of cobweb had settled on a plumed hat; or what might be written on any of the dusty sheets of paper on the desk in another corner, loosely confined by what looked like a dictionary—something clattered in the kitchen, something smashed, somebody swore. Briefly.

  “There is a problem,” Harrison said. His voice was rather high, but it was not effeminate. “I live with my father and my brother, my brother is somewhat simpleminded, a gentle soul and no trouble to us, we know his ways, but he is not a fit companion for an invalid. Tumbleton is a married man with a small child, and, I understand, another soon to be expected.” Tumbleton did not precisely preen, but he did straighten himself a bit. And nod. “Eustace could hardly stay there.” Tumbleton suddenly looked grave and slightly shook his head. “Grant has his own arrangements.” Grant lived in sin with a buxom shrew whom only Grant could manage, and then only within certain limits, and within those limits there could be no place for Williams. Grant said nothing; his face, smooth-shaven save for a moustache, did not move. Grant exported cheap bottled spirits to the Colonies under a variety of bright labels, all of which he himself had designed; now and then when the sale of one label flagged, Grant designed another: this had become the extent of Grant’s work as an active artist.

  The wind wuthered down the chimney, driving more smoke into the room; Dr. McFall reproved it by coughing and waving his hands. “Very well, very well; what is the problem? Shall I tell you what is the problem? The problem is that your friend Williams is a very ill man. I have done my best for him before. Has it helped, no it has not helped. This is his second breakdown. The tonic which I prescribed after the first, I see it untouched. The elixir, on the contrary, is all over the floor, and the bottle is still where it fell. The diet pudding? In the larder, untouched, save for what the rats have mucked about. The claret, on the other hand, which should have lasted another month, is gone, it is clean gone, there are not even any empty bottles, but there is a barrel of beer which I did not order, and a case of gin, which I absolutely forbade; that is the problem, that, and the minor matter that your friend Williams had the good fortune to be found lying by the road, well-nigh insensible, by perhaps the only police-constable to have passed this way since the Chartists marched on London; what is the time, I must not miss my train, I have a Harley Street office with patients waiting for me, I have a practice in the Borough with a rather young partner who wants being looked in on rather often, I have wards to walk to St. Olave’s—problems? problems? Do not speak to me of problems, Mr. Harrison.”

  He glanced at his watch, raised his eyebrows, began next to put things back into his black case. Harrison touched his beard, but, nonetheless, said, “There is a problem of money. And where Eustace is to live. Not here, certainly, but—”

  McFall would be butted no buts; his red face grew redder. Williams had money of his own, had he not? What? It had been somehow anticipated? There was a shortage in the last quarter’s income and there were no accounts, no hopes of recovering any of the shortage? (Things were suddenly very quiet in the kitchen.) Well, he, McFall, had not said that Williams must take rooms in the Albany, neither did he advise him to live in a doss house in Stepney. There were other places, quite livable, places respectable and yet inexpensive. “Mr. Grant and Mr. Tumbleton and I have already discussed this.” He snapped the crocodile-bag shut.

  Tumbleton blinked, taken slightly by surprise, fluffed his whiskers. “Ah, yes, Williams, Harrison, we did. We did. Old Solomon, you know old Solomon, the painter’s cousin? Picturesque old fellow, ‘the artists’ friend,’ they call him, buys and sells used canvases, picture frames, easels, and such things, buys … rents out … sells … ah, theatrical costumery and painter’s props and ah—”

  Grant was suddenly as impatient as the physician. “Oh, damn it, man, don’t give us an inventory of old Solomon’s business affairs. He is in the cheap business, and he had a cheap house on lease in Upper Welchman Street and is willing to rent the first floor cheap, rent not on an annual but on a quarterly basis—so you needn’t be hung up for a year’s money when you’ll likely not be needi
ng the place for more than six months. Eustace Williams may store all his things in one of the rooms on the second floor, or in two of them, for that matter: so long as Solomon continues to have access to his own rubble and rubbish also stored up there on the same floor. It is just the thing for you, Williams, and there is no other thing for you, Williams, and thank God for you that you needn’t depend for pennies, to say nothing of pounds, on the sale of a painting or a poem, Williams.” Williams blinked very rapidly and for a very long moment after Grant said this last.

  Things did not, really, go at all badly.

  Crutchett vanished without trace, and with him the possibility of a detailed explanation of the perhaps not precisely alchemical mystery of how an amount of Williams’s money had been transmuted into dross—or even how several dozens of claret had become, somehow, changed into at least one barrel of beer and a quantity of gin. But it was felt that this was a fair price to pay for a total absence of Crutchett. Old Solomon, it turned out, slightly to Grant’s annoyed surprise, was surprised to think that the gentleman had thought the furniture of the apartments in Upper Welchman Street was not included in the rent: it was; it was old furniture, but it was good enough: so there was a saving, there. And, perhaps equally surprising, perhaps even more, only Grant could have said, and Grant did not say; Kitty—whom Grant referred to, when he referred to her at all, as “my slut”—Kitty undertook to see that the apartments were cleaned, and Kitty did see to it that the apartments were cleaned. It was Kitty who hired the cook-housekeeper, and Kitty who swooped down at irregular and unannounced intervals to see that the cooking was done and that the house was kept, and kept as well as anyone could expect. She came usually, and departed, usually, while Williams was being taken somewhere which made very little demand on his nervous energy; Harrison once asked, curiously, “Have you ever actually seen her?”

  “No,” said Williams, incuriously, “but I have heard her. Once.” Perhaps Dr. McFall might not have approved. But no one told him. Dr. McFall, it is true, did not come to see Williams as often as Williams’s friends had expected. Not quite as often. However, his directions were scrupulously carried out: Williams drank the claret, and he drank it as prescribed. And Williams was taken regularly to St. Olave’s, where Professor Schneiderhaus asked him many questions and grunted a great deal and peered at the insides of his lower eyelids, and other things like that. Eustace had little to do, otherwise, except to thrust his feet into his slippers and place his slippered feet on the fender of the fireplace in which burned real coal, and to read the papers. The daily papers arrived twice a day; the reviews were lent by Tumbleton, who brought them himself, but did not pay for them himself, they being paid for by the Duke’s Museum, of which Tumbleton was Vice-Director. The Hon. Director was the present Duke himself, who never set foot in the Museum except for the Annual Meeting, or when there was an exhibition of Landseer. Or Bonheur. The Duke was very fond of Bonheur. “There, Tumbleton, you see? A woman, a mere slip of a woman, and a French woman, at that: and just see what she does with horseflesh. Eh? Now, why cannot our English artists all paint that sort of thing? Eh? Tumbleton?”

  The Duke, of course, never dreamed of looking at the list of periodicals to which the Museum subscribed, and, to the one single member of the Board who ever had, and who had asked why the Museum subscribed to literary publications “as well,” Tumbleton solemnly replied, “Because, Sir Bascomb, it is part of the whole duty of man.” Sir Bascomb never asked again. Williams, of course, never asked at all.

  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 eas
y 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.”