Manly Wade Wellman - Judge Pursuivant 02 Read online

  The Black Drama

  Manly Wade Wellman

  Powers, passions, all I see in other beings,

  Have been to me as rain unto the sands

  Since that all-nameless hour.

  -Lord Byron: Manfred

  Contents

  Foreword

  1. Drafted

  2. Byron's Lost Play

  3. Enter Judge Pursuivant

  4. Into the Country

  5. Jake's Story

  6. The Theater in the Forest

  7. Rehearsal

  8. Pursuivant Again

  9. Davidson Gives a Warning

  10. That Evening

  11. Battle and Retreat

  12. Return Engagement

  13. The Black Book

  14. Zero Hour

  15. "Whither? I Dread to Think-"

  Foreword

  UNLIKE MOST ACTORS, I do not consider my memoirs worth the attention of the public. Even ifl did so consider them, I have no desire to carry my innermost dear secrets to market. Often and often I have flung aside the autobiography of some famous man or woman, crying aloud: "Surely this is the very nonpareil of bad taste!"

  Yet my descendants-and, after certain despairful years, again I have hope of descendants- will want to know something about me. I write this record of utterly strange happenings while it is yet new and clear in my mind, and I shall seal it and leave it among my important possessions, to be found and dealt with at such time as I may die. It is not my wish that the paper be published or otherwise brought to the notice of any outside my immediate family and circle of close friends. Indeed, if I thought that such a thing would happen I might write less frankly.

  Please believe me, you who will read; I know that part of the narrative will strain any credulity, yet I am ready with the now-threadbare retort of Lord Byron, of whose works more below: "Truth is stranger than fiction." I have, too, three witnesses who have agreed to vouch for the truth of what I have set down. Their only criticism is that I have spoken too kindly of them. If anything, I have not spoken kindly enough.

  Like Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night's Dream, I have rid my prolog like a rough colt. Perhaps, like Duke Theseus, you my readers will be assured thereby of my sincerity.

  Signed,

  Gilbert Connatt, New York City August 1, 1938

  We, the undersigned, having read the appended statement of Gilbert Connatt, do hereby declare it to be true in substance.

  Signed,

  Sigrid Holgar

  Keith Hilary Pursuivant

  Jacob A. Switz

  1. Drafted

  The counterman in the little hamburger stand below Times Square gazed at me searchingly.

  "Haven't I seen you somewhere?" he asked, and when I shook my head he made a gesture as of inspiration. "I got it, buddy. There was a guy in a movie like you-tall, thin-black mustache and eyes-"

  "I'm not in pictures," I told him, quite truthfully as concerned the moment. "Make me a double hamburger."

  "And coffee?"

  "Yes." Then I remembered that I had but fifteen cents, and that double hamburgers cost a dime. I might want a second sandwich. "Make it a single instead."

  "No, a double," piped somebody at my elbow, and a short, plump figure climbed upon the next stool. "Two doubles, for me and my friend here, and I'm paying. Gilbert Connatt, at half-past the eleventh hour I run onto you by the luck of the Switzes. I am glad to see you like an old father to see his wandering boy."

  I had known that voice of old in Hollywood. Turning, I surveyed the fat, blob-nosed face, the crossed eyes behind shell-rimmed glasses, the thick, curly hair, the ingratiating smile. "Hello, Jake," I greeted him without enthusiasm.

  Jake Switz waved at the counterman. "Two coffees with those hamburgers." His strange oblique gaze shifted back to me. "Gib, to me you are more welcome than wine at a wedding. In an uptown hotel who do you think is wondering about you with tears in her eyes as big as electric light bulbs?" He shrugged and extended his palms, as if pleased at being able to answer his own question. "Sigrid Holgar!"

  I made no reply, but drew a frayed shirt-cuffback into the worn sleeve of my jacket. Jake Switz continued: "I've been wondering where to get hold of you, Gib. How would you like again to play leading man for Sigrid, huh?"

  It is hard to look full into cross-eyes, but I managed it. "Go back to her," I bade him, "and tell her I'm not taking charity from somebody who threw me down."

  Jake caught my arm and shook it earnestly. "But that ain't true, Gib. It's only that she's been so successful she makes you look like a loser. Gib, you know as well as you know your own name that it was you that threw her down-so hard she rang like a silver dollar."

  "I won't argue," I said, "and I won't have charity."

  I meant that. It hurt to think of Sigrid and myself as we had been five years ago-she an inspired but unsure newcomer from Europe, I the biggest star on the biggest lot in the motion picture industry. We made a film together, another, became filmdom's favorite lovers on and offscreen. Then the quarrel; Jake was wrong, it was Sigrid's fault. Or was it? Anyway, she was at the head of the class now, and I had been kicked away from the foot.

  The counterman set our sandwiches before us. I took a hungry bite and listened to Jake's pleadings.

  "It would be you doing her and me a favor, Gib. Listen this one time-please, to give Jake Switz a break." His voice quavered earnestly. "You know that Sigrid is going to do a stage play."

  "I've read about it in Variety," I nodded. "Horror stuff, isn't it? Like Dracula, I suppose, with women fainting and nurses dragging them out of the theater."

  "Nurses!" repeated Jake Switz scornfully. "Huh, doctors we'll need. At our show Jack Dempsey himself would faint dead away on the floor, it's so horrible!" He subsided and began to beg once more. "But you know how Sigrid is. Quiet and restrained-a genius. She wouldn't warm up, no matter what leading man we suggested. Varduk, the producer, mentioned you. "Get Gilbert Connatt," he said to me. "She made a success with him once, maybe she will again." And right away Sigrid said yes."

  I went on eating, then swallowed a mouthful of scalding coffee. Jake did the same but without relish. Finally he exploded into a last desperate argument.

  "Gib, for my life I can't see how you can afford to pass it up. Here you are, living on hamburgers-"

  I whirled upon him so fiercely that the rest of the speech died on his open lips. Rising, I tossed my fifteen cents on the counter and started for the door. But Jake yelled in protest, caught my shoulder and fairly wrestled me back.

  "No, no," he was wailing. "Varduk would cut my heart out and feed it to the sparrows if I found you and lost you again. Gib, I didn't mean bad manners. I don't know nothing about manners, Gib, but have I ever treated you wrong?"

  I had to smile. "No, Jake. You're a creature of instincts, and the instincts are rather better than the reasonings of most people. I think you're intrinsically loyal." I thought of the years he had slaved for Sigrid, as press agent, business representative, confidential adviser, contract maker and breaker, and faithful hound generally. "I'm sorry myself, Jake, to lose my temper. Let's forget it."

  He insisted on buying me another double hamburger, and while I ate it with unblunted appetite he talked more about the play Sigrid was to present.

  "Horror stuff is due for a comeback, Gib, and this will be the start. A lovely, Gib. High class. Only Sigrid could do it. Old-fashioned, I grant you, but not a grain of corny stuff in it. It was written by that English guy, Lord Barnum-no, Byron. That's it, Lord Byron."

  "I thought," said I, "that there was some question about the real authorship."

  "So the
papers say, but they holler 'phony' at their own grandmothers. Varduk is pretty sure. He knows a thing or two, that Varduk. You know what he is going to do? He is getting a big expert to read the play and make a report." Jake, who was more press agent than any other one thing, licked his good-humored lips. "What a bust in the papers that will be!"

  Varduk… I had heard that name, that single name whereby a new, brilliant and mysteriously picturesque giant of the theatrical world was known. Nobody knew where he had come from. Yet, hadn't Belasco been a riddle? And Ziegfeld? Of course, they had never courted the shadows like Varduk, had never refused to see interviewers or admirers. I meditated that I probably would not like Varduk.

  "Send me a pass when your show opens," I requested.

  "But you'll be in it, Gib. Passes of your own you'll be putting out. Ha! Listen this once while I try to do you good in spite of yourself, my friend. You can't walk out after eating up the hamburgers I bought."

  He had me there. I could not muster the price of that second sandwich, and somehow the shrewd little fellow had surmised as much. He chuckled in triumph as I shrugged in token of surrender.

  "I knew you would, Gib. Now, here." He wrote on a card. "This is Varduk's hotel and room number. Be there at eight o'clock tonight, to read the play and talk terms. And here."

  His second proffer was a wad of money.

  "Get some clothes, Gib. With a new suit and tie you'll look like a million dollars come home to roost. No, no. Take the dough and don't worry. Ain't we friends? If you never pay me back, it will be plenty soon enough."

  He beamed my thanks away. Leaving the hamburger stand, we went in opposite directions.

  2. Byron's Lost Play

  I DID NOT FOLLOW Jake's suggestion exactly. Instead of buying new garments throughout, I went to the pawnshop where I had of late raised money on the remnants of a once splendid wardrobe. Here I redeemed a blue suit that would become me best, and a pair of hand-made Oxfords. Across the street I bought a fresh shirt and necktie. These I donned in my coffin-sized room on the top floor of a cheap hotel. After washing, shaving and powdering, I did not look so bad; I might even have been recognized as the Gilbert Connatt who made history in the lavish film version of Lavengro, that classic of gipsydom in which a newcomer named Sigrid Holgar had also risen to fame…

  I like to be prompt, and it was eight o'clock on the stroke when I tapped at the door of Varduk's suite. There was a movement inside, and then a cheerful voice: "Who's there?"

  "Gilbert Connatt," I replied.

  The lock scraped and the door opened. I looked into the handsome, ruddy face of a heavy, towering man who was perhaps a year younger than I and in much better physical condition. His was the wide, good-humored mouth, the short, straight nose of the Norman Scot. His blond hair was beginning to grow thin and his blue eyes seemed anxious.

  "Come in, Mr Connatt," he invited me, holding out his broad hand. "My name's Davidson-Elmo Davidson." And, as I entered, "This is Mr Varduk." He might have been calling my attention to a prince royal.

  I had come into a parlor, somberly decorated and softly lighted. Opposite me, in a shadowed portion, gazed a pallid face. It seemed to hang, like a mask, upon the dark tapestry that draped the wall. I was aware first of a certain light-giving quality within or upon that face, as though it were bathed in phosphorescent oil. It would have been visible, plain even, in a room utterly dark. For the rest there were huge, deep eyes of a color hard to make sure of, a nose somewhat thick but finely shaped, a mouth that might have been soft once but now drew tight as if against pain, and a strong chin with a dimple.

  "How do you do, Mr Connatt," said a soft, low voice, and the mask inclined politely. A moment later elbows came forward upon a desk, and I saw the rest of the man Varduk start out of his protective shadows. His dark, double-breasted jacket and the black scarf at his throat had blended into the gloom of the tapestry. So had his chestnut-brown curls. As I came toward him, Varduk rose-he was of middle height, but looked taller by reason of his slimness-and offered me a slender white hand that gripped like a smith's tongs.

  "I am glad that you are joining us," he announced cordially, in the tone of a host welcoming a guest to dinner. "Miss Holgar needs old friends about her, for her new stage adventure is an important item in her splendid career. And this," he dropped his hand to a sheaf of papers on the desk, "is a most important play."

  Another knock sounded at the door, and Elmo Davidson admitted a young woman, short and steady-eyed. She was Martha Vining, the character actress, who was also being considered for a role in the play.

  "Only Miss Holgar to come," Davidson said to me, with a smile that seemed to ask for friendship. "We've only a small cast, you know; five."

  "I am expecting one more after Miss Holgar," amended Varduk, and Davidson made haste to add: "That's right, an expert antiquary-Judge Keith Pursuivant. He's going to look at our manuscript and say definitely if it is genuine."

  Not until then did Varduk invite me to sit down, waving me to a comfortable chair at one end of his desk. I groped in my pockets for a cigarette, but he pressed upon me a very long and very good cigar.

  "I admire tobacco in its naked beauty," he observed with the wraith of a smile, and himself struck a match for me. Again I admired the whiteness of his hand, its pointed fingers and strong sensitivity of outline. Such hands generally betoken nervousness, but Varduk was serene. Even the fall of his fringed lids over those plumbless eyes seemed a deliberate motion, not an unthought wink.

  Yet again a knock at the door, a brief colloquy and an ushering in by Elmo Davidson. This time it was Sigrid.

  I got to my feet, as unsteady as a half-grown boy at his first school dance. Desperately I prayed not to look so moved as I felt. As for Sigrid, she paused and met my gaze frankly, with perhaps a shade's lightening of her gently tanned cheeks. She was a trifle thinner than when I had last seen her five years ago, and wore, as usual, a belted brown coat like an army officer's. Her hair, the blondest unbleached hair I have ever known, fell to her shoulders and curled at its ends like a full-bottomed wig in the portrait of some old cavalier. There was a green flash in it, as in a field of ripened grain. Framed in its two glistening cascades, her face was as I had known it, tapering from brow to chin over valiant cheekbones and set with eyes as large as Varduk's and bluer than Davidson's. She wore no make-up save a touch of rouge upon her short mouth-cleft above and full below, like a red heart. Even with low-heeled shoes, she was only two inches shorter than I.

  "Am I late?" she asked Varduk, in that deep, shy voice of hers.

  "Not a bit," he assured her. Then he saw my awkward expectation and added, with monumental tact for which I blessed him fervently, "I think you know Mr Gilbert Connatt."

  Again she turned to me. "Of course," she replied. "Of course I know him. How do you do, Gib?"

  I took the hand she extended and, greatly daring, bent to kiss it. Her fingers fluttered against mine, but did not draw away. I drew her forward and seated her in my chair, then found a backless settee beside her. She smiled at me once, sidewise, and took from my package the cigarette I had forsaken for Varduk's cigar.

  A hearty clap on my shoulder and a cry of greeting told me for the first time that little Jake Switz had entered with her.

  Varduk's brief but penetrating glance subdued the exuberant Jake. We turned toward the desk and waited.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," began Varduk, seriously but not heavily, "a new-found piece of Lord Byron's work is bound to be a literary sensation. We hope also to make a theatrical sensation, for our new-found piece is a play.

  "A study of Lord Byron evokes varied impressions and appeals. Carlyle thought him a mere dandy, lacking Mr Brummel's finesse and good humor, while Goethe insisted that he stood second only to Shakespeare among England's poets. His mistress, the Countess Guiccioli, held him literally to be an angel; on the other hand, both Lamartine and Southey called him Satan's incarnation. Even on minor matters-his skill at boxing and swimming, his depth
of scholarship, his sincerity in early amours and final espousal of the Greek rebels-the great authorities differ. The only point of agreement is that he had color and individuality."

  He paused and picked up some of the papers from his desk.

  "We have here his lost play, Ruthven. Students know that Doctor John Polidori wrote a lurid novel of horror called The Vampire, and that he got his idea, or inspiration, or both, from Byron. Polidori's tale in turn inspired the plays of Nodier and Dumas in French, and of Planche and Boucicault in English. Gilbert and Sullivan joked with the story in Ruddigore, and Bram Stoker read it carefully before attempting Dracula. This manuscript," again he lifted it, "is Byron's original. It is, as I have said, a drama."

  His expressive eyes, bending upon the page in the dimness, seemed to shed a light of their own. "I think that neither Mr Connatt nor Miss Vining has seen the play. Will you permit me to read?" He took our consent for granted, and began: "Scene, Malvina's garden. Time, late afternoon-Aubrey, sitting at Malvina's feet, tells his adventures."

  Since Ruthven is yet unpublished, I take the liberty of outlining it as I then heard it for the first time. Varduk's voice was expressive, and his sense of drama good. We listened, intrigued and then fascinated, to the opening dialog in which young Aubrey tells his sweetheart of his recent adventures in wildest Greece. The blank verse struck me, at least, as being impressive and not too stiff, though better judges than I have called Byron unsure in that medium… Varduk changed voice and character for each role, with a skill almost ventriloquial, to create for us the illusion of an actual drama. I found quite moving Aubrey's story of how bandits were beaten off single-handed by his chance acquaintance, Lord Ruthven. At the point where Aubrey expresses the belief that Ruthven could not have survived the battle:

  "I fled, but he remained; how could one man,