The Fiend in Human Read online

  ‘A restorative, you mean. To steady the system.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘An excellent suggestion. Woke up rather liverish myself.’

  In fact, the previous evening was a disaster. Having come up empty-handed at the hanging, lacking a suitable assignation, they took too much claret at Plant’s, where some unpleasantness with the correspondent for The Falcon marred what might have turned into a jolly evening.

  ‘Bother that fellow Whitty,’ says Harewood. ‘A melancholy, misanthropic, moralistic, rum sort of fellow. Never liked him at all. Stretches the old school tie a bit thin if you ask me.’

  ‘Surprising success, though, all things considered.’

  ‘Not a gentlemanly sort of success.’

  ‘Of course not. Still, I shouldn’t get on the wrong side of him. Pen and the sword and all that.’

  ‘Sound advice, Roo. Remind me next time.’

  ‘I shall do so.’ Sewell knows only too well his friend’s ability to arouse the jealousy of lesser men; thus does fascination become both a blessing and a curse, depending upon one’s audience.

  The two young men discovered one another as boys while freshmen at Eton, after witnessing a fellow New Boy undergo Ordeal By Birch for one of the many offences collectively known as ‘shirking’. (Hallo! There’s going to be a swishing!) This, at the capable hands of tiny Dr. Keate – who, famously, would dress up for the occasion, sometimes in the manner of Napoleon, sometimes in the manner of a widowed woman; at such a moment an Eton freshman discovers exactly just how alone it is possible to be, how alien the world can seem.

  Not long after, in their dormitory following Evensong, Harewood rose to the unathletic orphan’s defence by disrupting a form of arbitrary victimization known as ‘blackballing’ – a self-explanatory practice incorporating shoe polish. Together they fought off four assailants, during which encounter both boys had the skin taken off their noses with the rough end of a bolster.

  Sewell, the less advantaged physically, had acquired a protector; Harewood, neither aristocrat nor scholar, nor provided with a gentleman’s income (despite the Governor having grudgingly paid the double fees of a ‘gentleman commoner’), had acquired a benefactor. Thus do even the most devoted male friendships rest on a foundation of self-interest:

  Thou preparest a table before me

  In the presence of mine enemies:

  Thou anointest my head with oil;

  My cup runneth over.

  Harewood drains his glass, which his friend refills without prompting. ‘Speaking of the female gender, there is a favour I wish to ask, old fellow.’

  Sewell affects the expression of a man of the world. ‘Certainly. Ask and it shall be given.’

  ‘It concerns my cousin Clara.’

  ‘Clara. Of course.’

  ‘We’re two men of the world, Roo. Never forget that.’

  ‘Quite.’ How he wishes it were true.

  ‘And I count on your discretion.’

  ‘Goes without saying.’

  Harewood leans forward and lowers his voice, while searching for le mot juste. ‘There have taken place, upon occasion, between myself and my cousin Clara, certain conversations of an intimate nature …’

  ‘Oh. She’s not in the … in the family way, I hope?’

  Harewood lights a fresh cigaret off the preceding and drains his second glass: ‘Sprained her ankle? Good heavens no! As I’ve told you many times, only a cad goes out without a skin in his purse.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘The devil of it is this: the Governor has found out, and has come down rather hard.’

  ‘Of course, you’re first cousins. Although that has never been a problem with the Royals.’

  ‘It is worse than that. Upon my soul, I’m blessed if he don’t want me to marry the girl!’

  ‘Oh, I say!’

  ‘It’s no bloody joke, I tell you. The Governor holds the purse-strings – insufficient as they are – and I’m damned if he’ll give me a penny until I’m in chains.’

  ‘The impudence of it!’

  ‘The Governor has never been what you’d call the horn of plenty, but a trickle has become positively arid.’

  ‘What can he be thinking of?’

  ‘It’s the old man’s fancy, in his dotage, to bring the Greenwells back into the fold at my expense. Harbouring one’s poor relations is one thing – but marry her? Marriage ain’t a game of cards, old chap. When a man plays and loses he can deal another hand and perhaps win; but when a man gets a wife without money, he’s knackered for life.’

  ‘Mind, you stand to inherit a substantial estate …’

  ‘But if I were to marry Clara, I should be submitting to blackmail. A fellow must have principles, Roo. Without principles we’re nothing.’

  ‘So I take it you feel on the horns, as it were.’

  ‘Rather, I should say.’

  ‘And what does your pretty cousin think of this?’

  ‘Oh, Clara’s all right. Marvellous girl, with no capacity to understand such matters.’

  ‘Reggie, you’re a cad – even with a skin in your purse.’

  ‘No worse than other men, I don’t think.’

  ‘I meant it as a compliment.’

  ‘Ah. Well, yes, I do seem to have a way with the ladies. Dashed if I know what it is.’

  ‘You haven’t given her a promise of any sort, I hope? In return for her … favours?’

  ‘Blessed if I have. None beyond the usual “love you madly” sort of thing. Still, with matters about to come to a crisis, no telling what ideas will creep into that pretty little head. To give you some sense of the spot I’m in, listen to this.’ So saying, he produces a piece of embossed stationery and reads aloud, while doing a superb imitation of his unlettered paterfamilias:

  You may be well aware that you have disgracefully disappointed me in every plan that I have formed with regard to you. Of your career since Oxford, suffice it that your shameful reputation has eclipsed my honourable one, though the latter was achieved by far greater effort …

  ‘Oh dear. I see what you mean.’

  ‘The old fellow goes on to suggest that I shall marry Clara or die “penniless in a brothel, of some loathsome disease”.’

  ‘That is very hard, but rather droll as well.’

  ‘Droll it may seem to you, but not to me.’

  ‘Anything I can do? Ask and ye shall receive.’

  ‘I’ll be frank. Being temporarily short of funds (damn the Governor), I’ve had to take a bunk at the club. Insufferable bother, but there it is. So I’m strapped for a rendezvous, and I’m blessed if I shall take the girl to some flea-pit on Leicester Square. Not the thing for a lady, don’t you see.’ So saying, Harewood admires the room, especially the wainscoting, which has been waxed to a shine a fellow could shave in.

  ‘That would be unthinkable. Of course you can make use of my rooms.’

  ‘It would be a few hours a week, nothing more.’

  ‘I shall have a duplicate key made. You can come and go as you please with absolute confidence.’

  ‘Capital thought. Provide some breathing-room. A chance to think things through.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Good old Roo! Who can a fellow rely upon, if not his best damned friend in the world?’

  4

  The Falcon

  In the narrow, dark hall (tunnel, really) to the inner office, the correspondent sidles gingerly past the previous visitor, a uniformed electric telegraph messenger whose perfunctory nod suggests an unbecoming smugness in such a young man. Pausing to mould his features into an expression of confidence, Whitty pushes open the green baize-covered door and steps into a large, cheerless, heavy room, redolent of cigar smoke and ink, with a pattern of circular smudges in the ceiling thanks to a century of evil-smelling tallow candles jammed in tin sconces, which the Editor prefers to the disconcerting brightness of gas.

  Removing his gloves while waiting to be acknowledged, he surveys the aged Tur
key carpet, splashed with dried ink and littered with piles of newspapers both home and country, crumpled by fists and eviscerated by scissors. It occurs to him that a visitor is but a momentary variable in a room as unchanging as the cemetery next-door – excepting that in this case the bone-yard is one of ideas, perished in their infancy.

  Three creaking bookshelves crammed with tattered brown volumes of reference fill one wall, with the flaming cover of the Post-Office Directory like a star in a patch of mud; the wall opposite is papered with area maps, shiny with finger-grease; on the third wall an old clock hammers away, above the begrimed plaster bust of a previous eminence, hair powdered with dust, glaring with chilly disapprobation straight into Whitty’s wasted life.

  In the geographic centre of the Turkey carpet squats a battered desk covered with letters (open and unopened), publishers’ copies of books (to be demolished by reviewers), and several baskets containing cards of invitation for a wide variety of desperately important events. To the right of the desk is a leaden inkstand like a bird bath and a sheaf of pens; to the left, a huge waste-paper basket, filled to overflowing with envelopes. The entire room vibrates from the machinery below – like a distant earthquake, punctuated by that awful clock.

  Whitty massages a tightening knot of pain in his temple with finger and thumb.

  The Editor’s capacious and well-tailored girth (though precisely Whitty’s age, the former is more prosperously built) occupies a cane-bottomed armchair surrounded by his good men and true, in the form of a sub-editor and a series of sub-sub-editors, all of whom hunch over smaller desks on either side, faces hidden by the pages of competing newspapers. From behind the sheets, disembodied voices exchange commentary as though calling from separate rooms.

  Having arrived in the midst of a discussion, Whitty gathers that the electric telegraph messenger brought in a report of the wreck of a steamer with all hands lost, off the north-east coast of Ireland; which urgent and dramatic narrative must compete for pride of place with an ugly knife murder in Haverfordwest, a salacious foreign rumour, an unpleasant coroner’s inquest following a fatal accident, the worrying (rising or falling) price of railway or mining shares, and the growing of the largest turnip in the history of Scotland.

  Algernon Sala and Edmund Whitty go back a good distance, having suffered through Rugby together and having rowed in the same eight at Oxford. Though separated by subsequent events, the two friends opted for parallel paths, with the result that both men, each in his own way, are established figures on Fleet Street, albeit occupying vastly dissimilar positions in the institutional hierarchy.

  At this moment, as Whitty finds himself wading through another trough in his career (despite flashes of renown, the correspondent is never overmuch in demand), the Editor, as his dearest and oldest friend, represents his best chance of a receptive ear.

  ‘Edmund. Come and take a seat.’ Sala does not look up, his mind not having disengaged from the previous topic. His voice, while by no means shrill, is of a higher pitch than one might expect from a man of his size. ‘Sorry, old boy, but the fecking electric telegraph takes precedence over everything these days.’

  ‘Certainly your messenger seems to think so.’

  ‘I’ve ordered a vacuum tube installed at ruinous expense, solely so that I shall not have to look at the little shite.’

  Sala adjusts his monocle while presenting the correspondent with a brooding, hirsute face full of black whiskers, and a brow so low it is as if his eyebrows have been grown long, then combed straight back. Beneath the hairline, contradicting its simian aspect, gleam a pair of small, intelligent grey eyes, the left eye magnified by a monocle designed for distance vision. Taken altogether, the effect is of a child within a bush, peering through a telescope at objects of interest.

  ‘That young rascal is our messenger of death, Edmund. Mark my bloody words, Sir. When there is an electric telegraph situated in every home receiving instant news by the hour, I ask you – who will need newspapers then?’

  ‘As usual, you paint a gloomy picture, old chap.’ Indeed, thinks Whitty, our man takes a perverse, childlike delight in the prospect of utter ruin. As far as Sala is concerned, if it was chilly this morning and warm by noon, London will be in flames by midnight.

  ‘Think of it, Edmund: since the beginning of history, the maximum distance any object or idea could travel was that which could be covered by a man on horseback. Now it is instant. Instant!’ (For Sala, the word itself is enough to produce a frisson.) ‘The electric telegraph will demolish geography. It is the end of the world as we know it.’

  ‘A grotesque exaggeration, but well put.’

  ‘Thank you. Part of a speech I am giving to the Royal Society. They want a prediction or two.’

  ‘Never had a gift for prognostication myself. Always seem to be wrong.’

  ‘Frankly, old chap, it requires no gift to prognosticate your own future, should you continue on your present course. For God’s sake sit down, you’re the walking dead.’

  Whitty clears the high scrivener’s stool, only to find the rung broken and one leg about to collapse. Rather than fall to the floor with his legs flying in the air, he braces himself awkwardly against Sala’s desk with one hand. His temple is pounding on the side facing the clock; he would not be surprised if it were swollen.

  A sudden grunt of approval from beneath the beard: ‘Speaking of the dead, tremendous crack on the hanging piece, old boy, trenchant and vivid. Plays to the morally superior, while fulfilling the demands of sadistic voyeurs who missed the show. Delights and instructs and all that. Condemns a thing while marketing it at the same time. Should be taught in school as a model of journalistic balance.’

  Whitty comprehends the Editor’s ironic subtext, yet Sala has the advantage of him, given that the author of the piece is able to recall it only in fragments. Notwithstanding, he must make an effort to grasp each scrap of praise, carry it to the bank and convert it to a sum of money.

  ‘Decent of you to notice, old chap. Took a fair amount of time with it – more, certainly, than my modest stipend would justify.’

  Sala’s eyebrows curl like twin caterpillars. ‘Of course, it goes without saying that the hanging of a common murderer is hardly another Fiend. No Chokee Bill on the loose, no buxom body bathed in blood, the thing has no legs on it at all.’

  Isn’t it lovely, thinks Whitty, how one’s accomplishments become mallets with which to pound one’s future prospects to pulp.

  ‘You make an appalling sight, Edmund. Consumptive and syphilitic at the same time.’

  ‘In actual fact I have been contemplating the water cure – nothing like it to tone the system.’

  ‘Water would be a novelty in your system, I should think.’

  ‘London water is notorious. Gives you typhus.’

  ‘You’ll use any excuse to deteriorate.’

  ‘Deterioration is relative. We all deteriorate.’

  ‘Not with your enthusiasm. The Falcon is concerned about you, Edmund. You possess – though I may be the only remaining editor in London with this opinion – the sharpest pen in the city, and you seem to be undertaking a tedious form of suicide.’

  ‘Nonsense. The effects of overwork and underpayment are well known.’

  ‘The Falcon pays a market wage, Edmund. Supply and demand, say the little shites above.’

  ‘Exactly. Which is why, given your gratifying enthusiasm for the hanging piece, The Falcon might see it as being to its advantage to venture an advance.’

  ‘Paid in full, Mr Whitty. Every penny.’ Dinsmore, the sub-editor, rubs his thumb and fingers together as though signing for the deaf.

  ‘No balance outstanding.’ So echoes Mr Cream, thereby executing his prime function in life, to further his own prospects by seconding any motion put forward by a superior.

  Sala shrugs his thick shoulders, as though the matter has been taken out of his hands by some implacable god. ‘There you have it, old chap.’

  ‘Quite.’

/>   ‘Even so, Edmund, The Falcon might be able to manage some sort of advance on a future piece. Got anything for us?’

  Of the many indignities commonly suffered by a freelance correspondent Whitty finds this one hardest to bear. He will now be required to present ideas, to toss them into the editorial pit one after the other like scraps of meat, to be sniffed at, nibbled, then spat on the floor, having contravened somebody’s pet theory as to what cut of meat the public currently craves.

  The devil of it is that forming the presentation entails most of the work of writing the deuced thing. Yet this is how things are done, and there is not a correspondent on Fleet Street with the prestige to escape it.

  ‘Shocking bit of business on Halliwell Street, Algernon. A reliable source has it that just around the corner from Exeter Hall, London’s evangelical Mecca, operates a bookseller who specializes in volumes from a section of Paris known as the Clitoris of Europe. In the space of a five-minute stroll, one can acquire both a sermon on temperance and a volume of De Sade bound in human skin.’

  Comes the sub-editorial chorus, crowlike, from behind their newspapers:

  ‘Naw.’

  ‘Heard it before.’

  Dinsmore snorts from behind newspaper: ‘You read that in Dodd’s, old chap. Fraser investigated the human skin angle. Turned out to be the skin of a goat.’

  ‘Fraser is a Scotch buffoon, Sir, who would not know human skin from crocodile.’

  Sala lights a long black cigar, leans back in his creaking swivel chair and puts up his feet, thereby signalling that he is looking forward to more entertainment. Nothing to lift an editor’s spirits like the song and dance of a desperate correspondent.

  ‘Not bad, on the whole, I like the human skin angle. Clitoris of Europe is charming, but obviously it will never pass.’

  ‘Impossible,’ adds Mr Dinsmore, unnecessarily.

  ‘And frankly, Edmund, our readers have seen one too many holiness-decadence cheek-by-jowl exposes in recent months. The line is starting to pall. Anything else, old chap?’