Things near & far
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; and strange it was to think that
within a foot or two of those closely curtained windows the common
life of London moved on the common pavement, as supremely unaware of
what was being done within an arm’s length as if our works had been
the works of the other side of the moon. All this was very fine; an
addition and a valuable one, as I say, to the phantasmagoria that was
being presented to me. But as for anything vital in the secret order,
for anything that mattered two straws to any reasonable being, there
was nothing of it, and less than nothing. Among the members there
were, indeed, persons of very high attainments, who, in my opinion,
ought to have known better after a year’s membership or less; but the
society as a society was pure foolishness concerned with impotent
and imbecile Abracadabras. It knew nothing whatever about anything
and concealed the fact under an impressive ritual and a sonorous
phraseology. It had no wisdom, even of the inferior or lower kind, in
its leadership; it exercised no real scrutiny into the characters of
those whom it admitted, and so it is not surprising that some of its
phrases and passwords were to be read one fine morning in the papers,
their setting being one of the most loathsome criminal cases of the
twentieth century.
And yet it had and has an interest of a kind. It claimed, I may say,
to be of very considerable antiquity, and to have been introduced
into England from abroad in a singular manner. I am not quite certain
as to the details, but the _mythos_ imparted to members was something
after this fashion. A gentleman interested in occult studies was
looking round the shelves of a second-hand bookshop, where the works
which attracted him were sometimes to be found. He was examining a
particular volume--I forget whether its title was given--when he
found between the leaves a few pages of dim manuscript, written
in a character which was strange to him. The gentleman bought the
book, and when he got home eagerly examined the manuscript. It was
in cipher; he could make nothing of it. But on the manuscript--or,
perhaps, on a separate slip laid next to it--was the address of a
person in Germany. The curious investigator of secret things and
hidden counsels wrote to this address, obtained full particulars,
the true manner of reading the cipher and, as I conjecture, a sort
of commission and jurisdiction from the Unknown Heads in Germany to
administer the mysteries in England. And hence arose, or re-arose, in
this isle the Order of the Twilight Star. Its original foundation was
assigned to the fifteenth century.
I like the story; but there was not one atom of truth in it. The
Twilight Star was a stumer--or stumed--to use a very old English
word. Its true date of origin was 1880–1885 at earliest. The “Cipher
Manuscript” was written on paper that bore the watermark of 1809 in
ink that had a faded appearance. But it contained information that
could not possibly have been known to any living being in the year
1809, that was not known to any living being till twenty years later.
It was, no doubt, a forgery of the early ’eighties. Its originators
must have had some knowledge of Freemasonry; but, so ingeniously
was this occult fraud “put upon the market” that, to the best of my
belief, the flotation remains a mystery to this day. But what an
entertaining mystery; and, after all, it did nobody any harm.
It must be said that the evidence of the fraudulent character of the
Twilight Star does not rest merely upon the fact that the Cipher
Manuscript contained a certain piece of knowledge that was not in
existence in the year 1809. Any critical mind, with a tinge of occult
reading, should easily have concluded that here was no ancient order
from the whole nature and substance of its ritual and doctrine. For
ancient rituals, whether orthodox or heterodox, are founded on one