The Arthur Machen Megapack: 25 Classic Works (106 page)

There were few English people in the Château de Chinon—indeed, it is doubtful whether there was more than one—the ménage Lupton excepted. This one compatriot happened to be a rather remarkable man—it was Carrol. He was not in the vanguard of anything; he knew no journalists and belonged to no clubs; he was not even acquainted in the most distant manner with a single person who could be called really influential or successful. He was an obscure literary worker, who published an odd volume every five or six years: now and then he got notices, when there was no press of important stuff in the offices, and sometimes a kindly reviewer predicted that he would come out all right in time, though he had still much to learn. About a year before he died, an intelligent reading public was told that one or two things of his were rather good; then, on his death, it was definitely discovered that the five volumes of verse occupied absolutely unique ground, that a supreme poet had been taken from us, a poet who had raised the English language into a fourth dimension of melody and magic. The intelligent reading public read him no more than they ever did, but they buy him in edition after edition, from large quarto to post octavo; they buy him put up into little decorated boxes; they buy him on Japanese vellum; they buy him illustrated by six different artists; they discuss no end of articles about him; they write their names in the Carrol Birthday Book; they set up the Carrol Calendar in their boudoirs; they have quotations from him in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s Cathedral; they sing him in the famous Carrol Cycle of Song; and, last and best of all, a brilliant American playwright is talking even now of dramatising him. The Carrol Club, of course, is ancient history. Its membership is confined to the ranks of intellect and art; it invites to its dinners foreign princes, bankers, major-generals and other persons of distinction—all of whom, of course, are intensely interested in the master’s book; and the record and praise of the Club are in all the papers. It is a pity that Carrol is dead. He would not have sworn: he would have grinned.

Even then, though he was not glorious, he was observant, and he left a brief note, a sort of thumb-nail sketch, of his impressions that night at the Château de Chinon.

“I was sitting in my old corner,” he says, “wondering why the devil I wrote so badly on the whole, and what the devil I was going to do with the subject that I had tackled. The dinner was not so bad at the old Château in those days, though now they say the plate-glass is the best dish in the establishment. I liked the old place; it was dingy and low down and rather disreputable, I fancy, and the company was miscellaneous French with a dash of Italian. Nearly all of us knew each other, and there were regulars who sat in the same seat night after night. I liked it all. I liked the coarse tablecloths and the black-handled knives and the lead spoons and the damp, adhesive salt, and the coarse, strong, black pepper that one helped with a fork handle. Then there was Madame sitting on high, and I never saw an uglier woman nor a more good-natured. I was getting through my roast fowl and salad that evening, when two wonderful people came in, obviously from fairyland! I saw they had never been in such a place in all their lives before—I don’t believe either of them had set foot in London until that day, and their wonder and delight and enjoyment of it all were so enormous that I had another helping of food and an extra half-bottle of wine. I enjoyed them, too, in their way, but I could see that
their
fowl and
their
wine were not a bit the same as mine.
I
once knew the restaurant they were really dining at—Grand Café de Paradis—some such name as that. He was an extraordinary looking chap, quite young, I should fancy, black hair, dark skin, and such burning eyes! I don’t know why, but I felt he was a bit out of his setting, and I kept thinking how I should like to see him in a monk’s robe. Madame was different. She was a lovely girl with amazing copper hair; dressed rather badly—of the people, I should imagine. But what a gaiety she had! I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but one had to smile with sheer joy at the sight of her face—it positively danced with mirth, and a good musician could have set it to music, I am sure. There was something a little queer—too pronounced, perhaps—about the lower part of her face. Perhaps it would have been an odd tune, but I know I should have liked to hear it!”

Ambrose lit a black Caporal cigarette—he had bought a packet on his way. He saw an enticing bottle, of rotund form, paying its visits to some neighbouring tables, and the happy fools made the acquaintance of Benedictine.

“Oh, yes, it is all very well,” Ambrose has been heard to say on being offered this agreeable and aromatic liqueur, “it’s nice enough, I daresay. But you should have tasted the
real
stuff. I got it at a little cafe in Soho some years ago—the Château de Chinon. No, it’s no good going there now, it’s quite different. All the walls are plate-glass and gold; the head waiter is called Maître d’hôtel, and I am told it’s quite the thing, both in southern and northern suburbs, to make up dinner parties at the Château—everything most correct, evening dress, fans, opera cloaks, ‘Hide-seek’ champagne, and stalls afterwards. One gets a glimpse of Bohemian life that way, and everybody says it’s been such a queer evening, but quite amusing, too. But you can’t get the real Benedictine there now.

“Where can you get it? Ah! I wish I knew.
I
never come across it. The bottle looks just the same, but it’s quite a different flavour. The phylloxera may be responsible, of course, but I don’t think it is. Perhaps the bottle that went round the table that night was like the powder in
Jekyll and Hyde
—its properties were the result of some strange accident. At all events, they were quite magical.”

The two adventurers went forth into the maze of streets and lost themselves again. Heaven knows where they went, by what ways they wandered, as with wide-gleaming eyes, arm locked in arm, they gazed on an enchanted scene which they knew must be London and nothing else—what else could it be? Indeed, now and again, Ambrose thought he recognized certain features and monuments and public places of which he had read; but still! That wine of the Château was, by all mundane reckonings, of the smallest, and one little glass of Benedictine with coffee could not disturb the weakest head: yet was it London, after all?

What they saw was, doubtless, the common world of the streets and squares, the gay ways and the dull, the broad, ringing, lighted roads and the dark, echoing passages; yet they saw it all as one sees a mystery play, through a veil. But the veil before their eyes was a transmuting vision, and its substance was shot as if it were samite, with wonderful and admirable golden ornaments. In the Eastern Tales, people find themselves thus suddenly transported into an unknown magical territory, with cities that are altogether things of marvel and enchantment, whose walls are pure gold, lighted by the shining of incomparable jewels; and Ambrose declared later that never till that evening had he realized the extraordinary and absolute truth to nature of the
Arabian Nights
. Those who were present on a certain occasion will not soon forget his rejoinder to “a gentleman in the company” who said that for truth to nature he went to George Eliot.

“I was speaking of men and women, Sir,” was the answer, “not of lice.”

The gentleman in question, who was quite an influential man—some whisper that he was an editor—was naturally very much annoyed.

Still, Ambrose maintained his position. He would even affirm that for crude realism the Eastern Tales were absolutely unique.

“Of course,” he said, “I take realism to mean absolute and essential truthfulness of description, as opposed to merely conventional treatment. Zola is a realist, not—as the imbeciles suppose—because he described—well, rather minutely—many unpleasant sights and sounds and smells and emotions, but because he was a poet, a seer; because, in spite of his pseudo-philosophies, his cheap materialisms, he saw the true heart, the reality of things. Take
La Terre
; do you think it is ‘realistic’ because it describes minutely, and probably faithfully, the event of a cow calving? Not in the least; the local vet. who was called in could probably do all that as well, or better. It is ‘realist’ because it goes behind all the brutalities, all the piggeries and inhumanities, of those frightful people, and shows us the strange, mad, transcendent passion that lay behind all those things—the wild desire for the land—a longing that burned, that devoured, that inflamed, that drove men to hell and death as would a passion for a goddess who might never be attained. Remember how ‘La Beauce’ is personified, how the earth swells and quickens before one, how every clod and morsel of the soil cries for its service and its sacrifice and its victims—I call
that
realism.

“The
Arabian Nights
is also profoundly realistic, though both the subject-matter and the method of treatment—the technique—are very different from the subject-matter and the technique of Zola. Of course, there may be people who think that if you describe a pigsty well you are a ‘realist,’ and if you describe an altar well you are ‘romantic.’…I do not know that the mental processes of Crétins form a very interesting subject for discussion.”

One may surmise, if one will, that the sudden violence of the change was a sufficient cause of exaltation. That detestable Lupton left behind; no town, but a collection of stink and poison factories and slave quarters; that more detestable school, more ridiculous than the Academy of Lagado; that most detestable routine, games, lessons and the Doctor’s sermons—the transition was tremendous to the freedom of fabled London, of the unknown streets and unending multitudes.

Ambrose said he hesitated to talk of that walk, lest he should be thought an aimless liar. They strolled for hours seeing the most wonderful things, the most wonderful people; but he declared that the case was similar to that of the Benedictine—he could never discover again the regions that he had perambulated. Somewhere, he said, close to the Château de Chinon there must be a passage which had since been blocked up. By it was the entrance to Fairyland.

When at last they found Little Russell Row, the black cat was awaiting them with an expression which was pleased and pious, too; he had devoured the greater portion of that quarter-pound of dubious butter. Ambrose smoked black cigarettes in bed till the packet was finished.

III

It was an amazing week they spent in London. For a couple of days Nelly was busied in getting “things” and “odds and ends,” and, to her credit, she dressed the part most admirably. She abjured all the imperial purples, the Mediterranean blues, the shrieking lilacs that her class usually affects, and appeared at last a model of neat gaiety.

In the meantime, while these shopping expeditions were in progress, while Nelly consulted with those tall, dark-robed, golden-haired and awful Elegances which preside over the last mysteries of the draper and milliner, Ambrose sat at home in Little Russell Row and worked out the outlines of some fantasies that had risen in his mind. It was, in fact, during these days that he made the notes which were afterwards expanded into the curious
Defence of Taverns
, a book which is now rare and sought after by collectors. It is supposed that it was this work that was in poor Palmer’s mind when the earnest man referred with a sort of gloomy reticence to Meyrick’s later career. He had, in all probability, not read a line of it; but the title was certainly not a very pleasing one, judged by ordinary scholastic standards. And it must be said that the critical reception of the book was not exactly encouraging. One paper wondered candidly why such a book was ever written or printed; another denounced the author in good, set terms as an enemy of the great temperance movement; while a third, a Monthly Reviewer, declared that the work made his blood boil. Yet even the severest moralists should have seen by the epigraph that the Apes and Owls and Antiques hid mysteries of some sort, since a writer whose purposes were really evil and intemperate would never have chosen such a motto as:
Jalalúd-Din praised the behaviour of the Inebriated and drank water from the well
. But the reviewers thought that this was unintelligible nonsense, and merely a small part of the writer’s general purpose to annoy.

The rough sketch is contained in the first of the
Note Books
, which are still unpublished, and perhaps are likely to remain so. Meyrick jotted down his hints and ideas in the dingy “first floor front” of the Bloomsbury lodging-house, sitting at the rosewood “Davenport” which, to the landlady, seemed the last word in beautiful furniture.

The ménage rose late. What a relief it was to be free of the horrible bells that poisoned one’s rest at Lupton, to lie in peace as long as one liked, smoking a matutinal cigarette or two to the accompaniment of a cup of tea! Nelly was acquiring the art of the cigarette-smoker by degrees. She did not like the taste at all at first, but the wild and daring deviltry of the practice sustained her, and she persevered. And while they thus wasted the best hours of the day, Ambrose would make to pass before the bottom of the bed a long procession of the masters, each uttering his characteristic word of horror and astonishment as he went by, each whirled away by some invisible power in the middle of a sentence. Thus would enter Chesson, fully attired in cassock, cap and gown:

“Meyrick! It is impossible? Are you not aware that such conduct as this is entirely inconsistent with the tone of a great Public School? Have the Games…” But he was gone; his legs were seen vanishing in a whirlwind which bore him up the chimney.