IV
Into the Country
The judge would not enlarge upon his perplexing statement, but he would and did play the most genial host I had ever known since the extravagant days of Hollywood. We had a number of drinks, and he complimented me on my steadiness of hand and head. When we parted I slept well in my little room that already seemed more cheerful.
Before noon the following day I returned to Varduk’s hotel. Only Davidson was there, and he was far more crisp and to the point than he had been when his chief was present. I accepted the salary figure already set down on my contract form, signed my name, received a copy of the play and left.
After my frugal lunch—I was still living on the money Jake Switz had lent me—I walked to the library and searched out a copy of Contemporary Americans. Varduk’s name I did not find, and wondered at that until the thought occurred that he, a descendant of Byron, was undoubtedly a British subject. Before giving up the volume I turned to the P’s. This time my search bore fruit:
Pursuivant, Keith Hilary; b. 1891, Richmond, Va., only son of Hilary Pursuivant (b. 1840, Pursuivant Landing, Ky.; Col. and Maj.-Gen., Va. Volunteer Infantry, 1861–65; attorney and journalist; d. 1898) and Anne Elizabeth (Keith) Pursuivant (b. 1864, Edinburgh; d. 1891).
Educ. Richmond pub. sch., Lawrenceville and Yale. A.B., male, 1908. Phi Beta Kappa, Skulls and Bones, football, forensics. LL.B., Columbia, 1911. Ph. D., Oxford, 1922. Admitted to Virginia bar, 1912. Elected 1914, Judge district court, Richmond. Resigned, 1917, to enter army. Major, Intelligence Div., U.S.A., 1917–19, D.S.C., Cong. Medal of Honor, Legion d’Honneur (Fr.). Ret. legal practice, 1919.
Author: The Unknown That Terrifies, Cannibalism in America, Vampyricon, An Indictment of Logic, etc.
Clubs: Lambs, Inkhorn, Gastronomics, Saber.
Hobbies: Food, antiquaries, demonology, fencing.
Protestant. Independent, Unmarried.
Address: Low Haven, R.F.D. No. 1, Bucklin, W. Va.
Thus the clean-picked skeleton of a life history; yet it was no hard task to restore some of its tissues, even coax it to life. Son of a Southern aristocrat who was a soldier while young and a lawyer and writer when mature, orphaned of his Scotch mother in the first year of his existence—had she died in giving him life?—Keith Pursuivant was born, it seemed, to distinction. To graduate from Yale in 1908 he must have been one of the youngest men in his class, if not the youngest; yet, at seventeen, he was an honor student, an athlete, member of an exclusive senior society and an orator. After that, law school, practise and election to the bench of his native community at the unheard-of age of twenty-three.
Then the World War, that sunderer of career-chains and remolder of men. The elder Pursuivant had been a colonel at twenty-one, a major-general before twenty-five; Keith, his son, deserting his brilliant legal career, was a major at twenty-six, but in the corps of brain-soldiers that matched wits with an empire. That he came off well in the contest was witnessed by his decorations, earnest of valor and resource.
“Ret. legal practise, 1919.” So he did not remain in his early profession, even though it promised so well. What then? Turn back for the answer. “Ph. D., Oxford, 1922.” His new love was scholarship. He became an author and philosopher. His interests included the trencher—I had seen him eat and drink with hearty pleasure—the study hall, the steel blade.
What else? “Protestant”—religion was his, but not narrowly so, or he would have been specific about a single sect. “Independent”—his political adventures had not bound him to any party. “Unmarried”—he had lived too busily for love? Or had he known it, and lost? I, too, was unmarried, and I was well past thirty. “Address: Low Haven”—a country home, apparently pretentious enough to bear a name like a manor house. Probably comfortable, withdrawn, full of sturdy furniture and good books, with a well-stocked pantry and cellar.
I felt that I had learned something about the man, and I was desirous of learning more.
On the evening mail I received an envelope addressed in Jake Switz’s jagged handwriting. Inside were half a dozen five-dollar bills and a railway ticket, on the back of which was scribbled in pencil: “Take the 9 a.m. train at Grand Central. I’ll meet you at the Dillard Falls Junction with a car. J. Switz.”
I blessed the friendly heart of Sigrid’s little serf, and went home to pack. The room clerk seemed surprised and relieved when I checked out in the morning, paying him in full. I reached the station early and got on the train, securing a good seat in the smoking-car. Many were boarding the car, but none looked at me, not even the big fellow who seated himself into position at my side. Six years before I had been mobbed as I stepped off the Twentieth Century Limited in this very station—a hundred women had rent away my coat and shirt in rags for souvenirs—
“Would you let me have a match, Mr. Connatt?” asked a voice I had heard before. My companion’s pale blue eyes were turned upon me, and he was tucking a trusty-looking pipe beneath his blond mustache.
“Judge Pursuivant!” I cried, with a pleasure I did not try to disguise. “You here—it’s like one of those Grand Hotel plays.”
“Not so much coincidence as that,” he smiled, taking the match I had found. “You see, I am still intrigued by the paradox we discussed the other night; I mean, the riddle of how and when Ruthven was set down. It so happens that an old friend of mine has a cabin near the Lake Jozgid Theater, and I need a vacation.” He drew a cloud of comforting smoke. “Judiciously I accepted his invitation to stay there. You and I shall be neighbors.”
“Good ones, I hope,” was my warm rejoinder, as I lighted a cigarette from the match he still held.
By the time our train clanked out of the subterranean caverns of Grand Central Station, we were deep in pleasant talk. At my earnest plea, the judge discussed Lord Byron.
“A point in favor of the genuineness of the document,” he began, “is that Byron was exactly the sort of man who would conceive and write a play like Ruthven.”
“With the semi-vampire plot?” I asked. “I always thought that England of his time had just about forgotten about vampires.”
“Yes, but Byron fetched them back into the national mind. Remember, he traveled in Greece as a young man, and the belief was strong in that part of the world. In a footnote to The Giaour—you’ll find his footnotes in any standard edition of his works—he discusses vampires.”
“Varduk spoke of those who fancied Byron to be the devil,” I remembered.
“They may have had more than fancy to father the thought. Not that I do not admire Byron, for his talents and his achievements; but something of a diabolic curse hangs over him. Why,” and Pursuivant warmed instantly to the discussion, “his very family history reads like a Gothic novel. His father was ‘Mad Jack’ Byron, the most sinful man of his generation; his grandfather was Admiral ‘Foul-weather Jack’ Byron, about whose ill luck at sea is more than a suggestion of divine displeasure. The title descended to Byron from his great-uncle, the ‘Wicked Lord,’ who was a murderer, a libertine, a believer in evil spirits, and perhaps a practising diabolist. The family seat, Newstead Abbey, had been the retreat of medieval monks, and when those monks were driven from it they may have cursed their dispossessors. In any case, it had ghosts and a ‘Devil’s Wood.’ ”
“Byron was just the man for that heritage,” I observed.
“He certainly was. As a child he carried pistols in his pockets and longed to kill someone. As a youth he chained a bear and a wolf at his door, drank wine from a human skull, and mocked religion by wearing a monk’s habit to orgies. His unearthly beauty, his mocking tongue, fitted in with his wickedness and his limp to make him seem an incarnation of the hoofed Satan. As for his sins—” The judge broke off in contemplation of them.
“Nobody knows them all,” I reminded.
“Perhaps he repented,” mused my companion. “At least he seems to have forgotten his light loves and dark pleasures, turned to good works and the effort to liberate the Greeks from their Turkish oppressors. If he began life like an imp, he finished like a hero. I hope that he was sincere in that change, and not too late.”
I expressed the desire to study Byron’s life and writings, and Pursuivant opened his suitcase on the spot to lend me Drinkwater’s and Maurois’ biographies, a copy of the collected poems, and his own work, A Defense of the Wickedest Poet.
We ate lunch together in the dining-car, Pursuivant pondering his choice from the menu as once he must have pondered his decision in a case at court. When he made his selection, he devoured it with the same gusto I had observed before. “Food may be a necessity,” quoth he between bites, “but the enjoyment of it is a blessing.”
“You have other enjoyments,” I reminded him. “Study, fencing—”
That brought on a discussion of the sword as weapon and symbol. My own swordsmanship is no better or worse than that of most actors, and Pursuivant was frank in condemning most stage fencers.
“I dislike to see a clumsy lout posturing through the duel scenes of Cyrano de Bergerac or Hamlet,” he growled. “No offense, Mr. Connatt. I confess that you, in your motion-picture interpretation of the role of Don Caesar de Bazan, achieved some very convincing cut-and-thrust. From what I saw, you have an understanding of the sport. Perhaps you and I can have a bout or so between your rehearsals.”
I said that I would be honored, and then we had to collect our luggage and change trains. An hour or more passed on the new road before we reached our junction.
Jake Switz was there as he had promised to be, at the wheel of a sturdy repainted car. He greeted us with a triumphant story of his astuteness in helping Elmo Davidson to bargain for the vehicle, broke off to invite Pursuivant to ride with us to his cabin, and then launched into a hymn of praise for Sigrid’s early rehearsals of her role.
“Nobody in America seems to think she ever made anything but movies,” he pointed out. “At home in Sweden, though, she did deep stuff—Ibsen and them guys—and her only a kid then. You wait, Gib, she’ll knock from the theater public their eyes out with her class.”
The road from the junction was deep-set between hills, and darkly hedged with high trees. “This makes the theater hard to get at,” Jake pointed out as he drove. “People will have to make a regular pilgrimage to see Holgar play in Ruthven, and they’ll like it twice as well because of all the trouble they took.”
Pursuivant left us at the head of a little path, with a small structure of logs showing through the trees beyond. We waved goodbye to him, and Jake trod on his starter once more. As we rolled away, he glanced sidewise at me. His crossed eyes behind their thick lenses had grown suddenly serious.
“Only one night Sigrid and I been here, Gib,” he said, somewhat darkly, “and I don’t like it.”
“Don’t tell me you’re haunted,” I rallied him, laughing. “That’s good press-agentry for a horror play, but I’m one of the actors. I won’t be buying tickets.”
He did not laugh in return.
“I won’t say haunted, Gib. That means ordinary ghosts, and whatever is here at the theater is worse than ghosts. Listen what happened.”