II
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 handmade 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 makeup 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 newfound piece of Lord Byron’s work is bound to be a literary sensation. We hope also to make a theatrical sensation, for our newfound 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 Planché 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,
Even one so godly gallant, face so many?
He followed not. I knew that he was slain—”
At that point, I say, the first surprise comes with the servant’s announcement that Ruthven himself has followed his traveling companion from Greece and waits, whole and sound, for permission to present himself.
No stage directions or other visualization; but immediate dialog defines the title role as courtly and sinister, fascinating and forbidding. Left alone with the maidservant, Bridget, he makes unashamed and highly successful advances. When he lifts the cap from her head and lets her hair fall down, it reminds one that Byron himself had thus ordered it among the maids on his own estate. Byron had made love to them, too; perhaps some of Ruthven’s speeches in this passage, at least, came wholemeal from those youthful conquests.
Yet the seduction is not a gay one, and smacks of bird and snake. When Ruthven says to Bridget,
“You move and live but at my will; dost hear?”
and she answers dully:
“I hear and do submit,”
awareness rises of a darkling and menacing power. Again, as Aubrey mentions the fight with the bandits, Ruthven dismisses the subject with the careless,
“I faced them, and who seeks my face seeks death,”
one feels that he fears and spares an enemy no more than a fly. And, suddenly, he turned his attentions to Malvina:
“Yes, I am evil, and my wickedness
Draws to your glister and your purity.
Now shall you light no darkness but mine own,
An orient pearl swathed in a midnight pall—”
Oscar, husband of the betrayed Bridget, rushes in at this point to denounce Ruthven and draw away his bemused mistress. At a touch from the visitor’s finger, Oscar falls dead. Aubrey, arming himself with a club of whitethorn—a sovereign weapon against demons—strikes Ruthven down. Dying, the enchanter persuades Aubrey and Malvina to drag him into the open and so leave him. As the moon rises upon his body, he moves and stands up:
“Luna, my mother, fountain of my life,
Once more thy rays restore me with their kiss.
Grave, I reject thy shelter! Death, stand back! …
“Curtain,” said Varduk suddenly, and smiled around at us.
“So ends our first act,” he continued in his natural voice. “No date—nor yet are we obliged to date it. For purposes of our dramatic production, however, I intend to lay it early in the past century, in the time of Lord Byron himself. Act Two,” and he picked up another section of the manuscript, “begins a century later. We shall set it in modern times. No blank verse now—Byron cleverly identifies his two epochs by offering his later dialog in natural prose. That was the newest of new tricks in his day.”
Again he read to us. The setting was the same garden, with Mary Aubrey and her cousin Swithin, descendants of the Aubrey and Malvina of the first act, alternating between light words of love and attentions to the aged crone Bridget. This survivor of a century and more croaks out the fearsome tale of Ruthven’s visit and what followed. Her grandson Oscar, Mary’s brother, announces a caller.
The newcomer explains that he has inherited the estate of Ruthven, ancient foe of the Aubreys, and that he wishes to make peace. But Bridget, left alone with him, recognizes in him her old tempter, surviving ageless and pitiless. Oscar, too, hears the secret, and is told that this is his grandfather. Bit by bit, the significance of a dead man restless after a century grows in the play and upon the servants. They swear slavishly to help him. He seeks a double and sinister goal. Swithin, image of his great-grandfather Aubrey, must die for that ancestor’s former triumph over Ruthven. Mary, the later incarnation of Malvina, excites Ruthven’s passion as did her ancestress.
Then the climax. Malvina, trapped by Ruthven, defies him, then offers herself as payment for Swithin’s life. Swithin, refusing the sacrifice, thrusts Ruthven through with a sword, but to no avail. Oscar overpowers him, and the demoniac lord pronounces the beginning of a terrible curse; but Mary steps forward as if to accept her lover’s punishment. Ruthven revokes his words, blesses her. As the Almighty’s name issues from his lips, he falls dead and decaying.
“End of the play,” said Varduk. “I daresay you have surmised what roles I plan for you. Miss Holgar and Mr. Connatt are my choices for Malvina and Aubrey in the first act, and Mary and Swithin in the second. Miss Vining will create the role of Bridget, and Davidson will undertake the two Oscars.”
“And Ruthven?” I prompted, feeling unaccountably presumptuous in speaking uninvited.
Varduk smiled and lowered his fringed lids. “The part is not too difficult,” he murmured. “Ruthven is off stage more than on, an influence rather than a flesh-and-blood character. I shall honor myself with this title role.”
Switz, sitting near me, produced a watch. We had been listening to the play for full two hours and a half.
Again a knock sounded at the door. Davidson started to rise, but Varduk’s slender hand waved him down.
“That will be Judge Pursuivant. I shall admit him myself. Keep your seats all.”
He got up and crossed the floor, walking stiffly as though he wore tight boots. I observed with interest that in profile his nose seemed finer and sharper, and that his ears had no lobes.
“Come in, Judge Pursuivant,” he said cordially at the door. “Come in, sir.”