III
Enter Judge Pursuivant
Keith Hilary Pursuivant, the occultist and antiquary, was as arresting as Varduk himself, though never were two men more different in appearance and manner. Our first impression was of a huge tweed-clad body, a pink face with a heavy tawny mustache, twinkling pale eyes and a shock of golden-brown hair. Under one arm he half crushed a wide black hat, while the other hand trailed a heavy stick of mottled Malacca, banded with silver. There was about him the same atmosphere of mature sturdiness as invests Edward Arnold and Victor McLaglen, and withal a friendly gayety. Without being elegant or dashing, he caught and held the regard. Men like someone like that, and so, I believe, do women who respect something beyond sleek hair and brash repartee.
Varduk introduced him all around. The judge bowed to Sigrid, smiled at Miss Vining, and shook hands with the rest of us. Then he took a seat at the desk beside Varduk.
“Pardon my trembling over a chance to see something that may have been written by Lord Byron to lie perdu for generations,” he said pleasantly. “He and his works have long been enthusiasms of mine. I have just published a modest note on certain aspects of his—”
“Yes, I know,” nodded Varduk, who was the only man I ever knew who could interrupt without seeming rude. “A Defense of the Wickedest Poet—understanding and sympathetic, and well worth the praise and popularity it is earning. May I also congratulate you on your two volumes of demonology, Vampyricon and The Unknown That Terrifies?”
“Thank you,” responded Pursuivant, with a bow of his shaggy head. “And now, the manuscript of the play—”
“Is here.” Varduk pushed it across the desk toward the expert.
Pursuivant bent for a close study. After a moment he drew a floor lamp close to cast a bright light, and donned a pair of pince-nez.
“The words ‘by Lord Byron,’ set down here under the title, are either genuine or a very good forgery,” he said at once. “I call your attention, Mr. Varduk, to the open capital B, the unlooped downstroke of the Y, and the careless scrambling of the O and N.” He fumbled in an inside pocket and produced a handful of folded slips. “These are enlarged photostats of several notes by Lord Byron. With your permission, Mr. Varduk, I shall use them for comparison.”
He did so, holding the cards to the manuscript, moving them here and there as if to match words. Then he held a sheet of the play close to the light. “Again I must say,” he announced at last, “that this is either the true handwriting of Byron or else a very remarkable forgery. Yet—”
Varduk had opened a drawer of the desk and once more he interrupted. “Here is a magnifying glass, Judge Pursuivant. Small, but quite powerful.” He handed it over. “Perhaps, with its help, you can decide with more accuracy.”
“Thank you.” Pursuivant bent for a closer and more painstaking scrutiny. For minutes he turned over page after page, squinting through the glass Varduk had lent him. Finally he looked up again.
“No forgery here. Every stroke of the pen is a clean one. A forger draws pictures, so to speak, of the handwriting he copies, and with a lens like this one can plainly see the jagged, deliberate sketchwork.” He handed back the magnifying glass and doffed his spectacles, then let his thoughtful eyes travel from one of us to the others. “I’ll stake my legal and scholastic reputation that Byron himself wrote these pages.”
“Your stakes are entirely safe, sir,” Varduk assured him with a smile. “Now that you have agreed—and I trust that you will allow us to inform the newspapers of your opinion—that Ruthven is Byron’s work, I am prepared to tell how the play came into my possession. I was bequeathed it—by the author himself.”
We all looked up at that, highly interested. Varduk smiled upon us as if pleased with the sensation he had created.
“The germ of Ruthven came into being one night at the home of the poet Shelley, on the shores of Lake Geneva. The company was being kept indoors by rain and wind, and had occupied itself with reading German ghost stories, and then tried their own skill at Gothic tales. One of those impromptu stories we know—Mary Godwin’s masterpiece, Frankenstein. Lord Byron told the strange adventures of Ruthven, and Polidori appropriated them—that we also know; but later that night, alone in his room, Byron wrote the play we have here.”
“In one sitting?” asked Martha Vining.
“In one sitting,” replied Varduk. “He was a swift and brilliant worker. In his sixteen years of active creative writing, he produced nearly eighty thousand lines of published verse—John Drinkwater reckons an average of fourteen lines, or the equivalent of a complete sonnet, for every day. This prodigious volume of poetry he completed between times of making love, fighting scandal, traveling, quarreling, philosophizing, organizing the Greek revolution. An impressive record of work, both in size and in its proportion of excellence.”
Sigrid leaned forward. “But you said that Lord Byron himself bequeathed the play to you.”
Again Varduk’s tight, brief smile. “It sounds fantastic, but it happened. Byron gave the manuscript to Claire Clairmont, his mistress and the mother of two of his children. He wanted it kept a secret—he had been called fiend incarnate too often. So he charged her that she and the children after her keep the play in trust, to be given the world a hundred years from the date of his death.”
Pursuivant cleared his throat. “I was under the impression that Byron had only one child by Claire Clairmont, Mr. Varduk. Allegra, who died so tragically at the age of six.”
“He had two,” was Varduk’s decisive reply. “A son survived, and had issue.”
“Wasn’t Claire’s son by Shelley?” asked Pursuivant.
Varduk shook his curly head. “No, by Lord Byron.” He paused and drew a gentle breath, as if to give emphasis to what he was going to add. Then: “I am descended from that son, ladies and gentlemen. I am the great-grandson of Lord Byron.”
He sank back into his shadows once more and let his luminous face seem again like a disembodied mask against the dark tapestry. He let us be dazzled by his announcement for some seconds. Then he spoke again.
“However, to return to our play. Summer is at hand, and the opening will take place at the Lake Jozgid Theater, in July, later to come to town with the autumn. All agreed? Ready to discuss contracts?” He looked around the circle, picking up our affirmative nods with his intensely understanding eyes. “Very good. Call again tomorrow. Mr. Davidson, my assistant, will have the documents and all further information.”
Jake Switz was first to leave, hurrying to telephone announcements to all the morning newspapers. Sigrid, rising, smiled at me with real warmth.
“So nice to see you again, Gib. Do not bother to leave with me—my suite is here in this hotel.”
She bade Varduk good night, nodded to the others and left quickly. I watched her departure with what must have been very apparent and foolish ruefulness on my face. It was the voice of Judge Pursuivant that recalled me to my surroundings.
“I’ve seen and admired your motion pictures, Mr. Connatt,” he said graciously. “Shall we go out together? Perhaps I can persuade you to join me in another of my enthusiasms—late food and drink.”
We made our adieux and departed. In the bar of the hotel we found a quiet table, where my companion scanned the liquor list narrowly and ordered samples of three Scotch whiskies. The waiter brought them. The judge sniffed each experimentally, and finally made his choice.
“Two of those, and soda—no ice,” he directed. “Something to eat, Mr. Connatt? No? Waiter, bring me some of the cold tongue with potato salad.” Smiling, he turned back to me. “Good living is my greatest pursuit.”
“Greater than scholarship?”
He nodded readily. “However, I don’t mean that tonight’s visit with Mr. Varduk was not something to rouse any man’s interest. It was full of good meat for any antiquary’s appetite. By the way, were you surprised when he said that he was descended from Lord Byron?”
“Now that you mention it, I wasn’t,” I replied. “He’s the most Byronic individual I have ever met.”
“Right. Of course, the physical resemblances might be accidental, the manner a pose. But in any case, he’s highly picturesque, and from what little I can learn about him, he’s eminently capable as well. You feel lucky in being with him in this venture?”
I felt like confiding in this friendly, tawny man. “Judge Pursuivant,” I said honestly, “any job is a godsend to me just now.”
“Then let me congratulate you, and warn you.”
“Warn me?”
“Here’s your whisky,” he said suddenly, and was silent while he himself mixed the spirit with the soda. Handing me a glass, he lifted the other in a silent toasting gesture. We drank, and then I repeated, “Warn me, you were saying, sir?”
“Yes.” He tightened his wide, intelligent mouth under the feline mustache. “It’s this play, Ruthven.”
“What about it?”
His plate of tongue and salad was set before him at this juncture. He lifted a morsel on his fork and tasted it.
“This is very good, Mr. Connatt. You should have tried some. Where were we? Oh, yes, about Ruthven. I was quite unreserved in my opinion, wasn’t I?”
“So it seemed when you offered to stake your reputation on the manuscript being genuine.”
“So I did,” he agreed, cutting a slice of tongue into mouthfuls. “And I meant just that. What I saw of the play was Byronic in content, albeit creepy enough to touch even an occultist with a shiver. The handwriting, too, was undoubtedly Byron’s. Yet I felt like staking my reputation on something else.”
He paused and we each had a sip of whisky. His recourse to the liquor seemed to give him words for what he wished to say.
“It’s a paradox, Mr. Connatt, and I am by no means so fond of paradoxes as was my friend, the late Gilbert Chesterton; but, while Byron most certainly wrote Ruthven, he wrote it on paper that was watermarked less than ten years ago.”