Lord Byron's Novel (22 page)

‘Ach, nein,’
said the great man, ‘or
ja,
but in a different kind.’ In the deep orbits of his eyes, the hooded pupils glittered cunningly. ‘The faculties of our brains may be in conflict with one another—we may be
divided
. But there are other brains wherein the faculties are not opposed but so contradictory that we are in effect
doubled
. Most men are one, and despite their alterations from day to day, they know themselves to be one. But there are some few who may be one person in the main, but
another
at intervals—and the one may not know of the other’s existence—when the one sleeps, the other wakes.’

‘I do not believe that to be possible,’ said Ali quickly.

‘Tell me this, my Lord,’ said the German. ‘Has it ever happened to you, that in a dream you have walked abroad, thinking you were in one place—doing one task, or office—and awakened to find yourself in a different place, and doing what you did not intend?’

‘No,’ said Ali shortly. ‘Never have I been subject to such illusions—I cannot conceive of them, in respect of myself.’

‘The condition is rare indeed, yet not unknown. You are perhaps familiar with the history of Colonel Culpeper, an English officer.’

‘Indeed I am not,’ said Ali, and made to rise.

‘Colonel Cheyney Culpeper one day shot a Guardsman, and killed him. He shot the man’s horse, as well. Yet all that time he was asleep, and being apprehended, could not remember the deed, nor account for it—he was deeply mortified—he had no ill-will toward the man he had murdered, indeed hardly knew him—and certainly none toward the beast.’

The Honourable now anxiously took Ali’s arm—his friend had gone quite white, and a tremble appeared upon his lip. ‘That is dreadful,’ Ali whispered. ‘Dreadful! I would you had not told me of it.’

‘It was a hundred years and more ago,’ said the Doctor calmly, and yet regarding Ali’s countenance and posture closely. ‘The man received a Royal pardon. He was unconscious of the crime, and therefore blameless.’

‘And yet
the crime was done
,’ said Ali. ‘The crime was done! Excuse me, Sir, I am in need of air. Your science is remarkable indeed, and I hope to have further conversation upon these topics—good day—good day!’

T
HERE
WAS
THEN
a doom upon him—a judgement, that no
human
Court could make—a guilt that not even
he
could prove upon himself! Ever and again Ali found himself staring in surmise upon his own hands—as though they were two enemies, inveigled somehow in among his friends, and were even then contemplating mischief he would know nothing of. His couch he forbore, till Sleep could no longer be resisted—or he measured out a dose of Oblivion, in Kendals drops, to assure his body would not
stray
when his soul slept—and indeed when he woke his limbs felt to him as though forged by a Smith, of heaviest Iron!

Now—in fear of
himself
—he sought those realms where he was sure he would
not
find Susanna, circles infernal where the Honourable drew him. One such was ‘the Fancy’, wherein huge fellows with heads large and hard as cannonballs battered one another to insensibility, while others admired their
style
and laid bets against the outcome. There Ali at first saw nothing but that abominable and operose
cruelty
it was ever his study to avoid—but in time he came to see it as an Art, and a source of beauty and interest, tho’ carried on as it was in quarters reeking of blood, sweat, and fear, clouded with tobacco-smoke and loud with the cries of the spectators and bettors, winners and losers alike. ‘I have studied the Art myself,’ the Honourable informed him as they stood one day by Ring-side, ‘and taken lessons with Jackson, though to be sure I always insisted he wear the muffers, so that my beauty might not be marred.’

The match that day had gone for twenty rounds without either
pugilist
failing to come ‘up to scratch’ again after falling, roused it may be by the profane urgings of the
phans,
who crowded so close as to be spattered occasionally with the Claret exuded by the combatants.

‘Art!’ cried one among the company. ‘I will take Force over Art any day.’

‘I,’ said another, ‘have seen Daniel Mendoza, the wonderful Jew, a fighter of great art and delicacy, defeat Martin the Bath Butcher in twenty rounds—or it might have been
fewer
—and by his Science throw down any number of your Bulldogs.’

‘Well,’ said the first devotee, ‘
I
saw the great Gentleman Jackson, who for
delicacy
is unexampled, pummeled almost to death, and certainly to defeat, by the beast Cribb—so
delicacy
don’t always answer—nor Science neither—so say I.’

‘Cribb,’ whispered the Honourable to Ali, ‘once reply’d to a certain Youth who asked him—myself being by—what was the best
Posture of Defence,
by saying, “Why, to keep a civil tongue in your head!”’

‘I admit to you,’ said the opponent of Science to his friend, ‘I would not quickly challenge, nor taunt a Jew again, for he might have taken lessons from Mendoza, and make me answer for it.’

‘Jackson when he beat Mendoza did it by taking hold of his
hair,
as it were Samson’s, and buffeting him unmercifully. When Mendoza complained to the Umpires, he was told there was no rule against it,
“And that’s a d
—
n shame, is it not?”’

‘Cribb too is a taker-hold of hair, and indeed there
ain’t
no rule against.’

‘No rule against! A fine argument! Tom Molyneaux, a Negro of America, nearly beat Cribb—Cribb won only because the Ref would not call
Time!
on him, when he was fallen, and could not come to scratch—for a half an hour by the clock!’

‘I’ll pummel you my self, if you say England’s champion could not fairly beat America’s blackamoor!’ cried his friend—having no regard, seemingly, for Cribb’s own advice—and it was all that friends around them could do to keep the two belligerents from demanding satisfaction then and there.

The match having been concluded, and the Honourable having collected his winnings from the Bankers, as the crowd unravelled into the darkness of eve, Ali saw at a distance one who turned to
look upon
him, from amid others who obscured his person—but then, observing more closely, Ali saw that it was not (as he had supposed) a dark
man
in a furred coat—but a
bear
—who looked, and held his regard. The Bear-ward too—a bent man smaller than his Beast—sought Ali’s eye as well, and then both were gone, as though they had not been! Ali fought his way through the uncaring crowd, which was made
pugnacious
by absorption of the exhibitions they had witnessed—but he caught no further glimpse of the Beast, nor of his Ward. Closely he questioned Mr Piper, who just then took his arm—had he not seen this show, for a show it had surely been—a catchpenny show—a mangy animal, and a beggar to make him dance? But the Honourable and his companions had seen nothing. Nothing! Once again he seemed to himself to be seated in the examining room of the German Doctor, denying thrice, like Peter, that he had ever or
could
ever see that which was not there, or
do
that which he
knew not
.

‘Come, my Lord!’ said his Companions, ‘all pleasure here is fled—do not stare so upon the Scene—we return to Town, do come!’ So he departed with them for the Clubs, laughing as they laughed, tho’ a cold wonder had entered his breast, that neither Brandy nor Punch could wholly wash away.
Think when thou see’st me again
—had not the dream of his Father’s bear promised him so?—
that thy time is come, and a different journey is to go on
. Foolish! Mad! Was there but
one bear
in the Universe? And had it not been but in a meaningless
dream
that he had been thus spoken to? He called for further drink—and sought a place at the Table, and cards to play. A different journey to go on! Well, so he would—he had embark’d already! Seeing, by the fever’d light in Ali’s eye, his eagerness to burn away the night, his friends, as surprized as they were amused, willingly indulged him—the cost being borne by
him
.

NOTES FOR THE 9TH CHAPTER

1. ennui:
   Lucky is the human spirit immune to the excitements of Chance. There is no exaltation that is like the certainty that a perfect system of betting exists, at the race-course or the card-table, and that it is in hand, and needs only the refinement that comes with actual play. The exaltation is itself as fixating as the result, and the
   proof positive
   that one’s system is in fact sound would, in my own opinion, be a gratification beyond any sum of money won at Newcastle or the St-Leger. The costs to be paid for failure being, concomitantly, twice as bitter as mere money lost.
   
2. Weeks’s museum:
   Decades later the silver lady here described came into the possession of Charles Babbage, who would make it dance and nod, beckon and gesture, for guests who came to his house, that house so full of wonders, mechanical and intellectual. He had fallen in love with the lady when he was a little boy and she was shewn at Merlin’s museum, of which Weeks’s was the successor. Yet I remember that she was disassembled when he bought her, a box of parts long stored in Weeks’s attic, and it was left to him (like Pygmalion) to bring her back to life—she had never danced in public since 1803, when Merlin’s closed. How then did Ld. B. see her? Or did he invent her, tho’ she existed before his invention? It is quite mysterious.
   
3. craniologist:
   The phrenology of the last generation, which so took the imaginations of many—among them Lady Byron—seems now inadequate to the unequalled complexity of that organ, and moreover its principles are based on no particular experimental result, but only on supposition. I have my hopes, & very distinct ones too, of one day recording cerebral phenomena such that I can put them into mathematical equations; in short a law or laws for the mutual action of the molecules of the brain, equivalent to the law of gravitation for the planetary and sidereal world—a Calculus of the Nervous System. The great difficulty, which was not present to the Phrenologists, and vitiated their system, is in the design of practical experiments. I must become a most skilful practical manipulator in experimental tests & that, on materials difficult to deal with, viz., the brain, blood and nerves of animals. In time I will do all I dare say I hope & so may bequeath to future generations by application industry attention a
   system
   w
   ^ch
   

Much pain this week Dependent upon my drops more than in former days All this needs to be corrected & will be if I am able But no more this night

I think it is a point of the greatest importance—though it seem insignificant—that Lord Byron was one who could see himself as at times comical, and laugh at himself—at his adventures, his ambitions, his character even—whereas Lady Byron was forever on guard as to how she would be seen, and understood, by others. Her watchfulness seemed to her then, I am sure, to be natural, and universal—she was likely indeed to have been wholly unconscious of it—and so she thought that Lord Byron’s self-ridicule and exaggerated expression of his own shortcomings, which were but a
line
meant to amuse, were admissions of the gravest weaknesses and even sins. There would be no reconciling such opposing natures.

T
RUE IT WAS THAT
Mrs Enoch Whitehead came not often to town. Corydon Hall was hers, her duty and her delight, and it was a world to her—and within it, a still littler world, yet the
largest
too—a Nursery, wherein there reigned the heir of both families, and a Despot he was—though with all his Mother’s beauty. There was, besides, her own Mother, still smiling but now partly absent from the world, as though she had already joined the Angels whom she had always resembled, and was closing her earthly books—and there were her Brothers, growing straight and tall and grave, so unlike yet so
like
their departed elder that Susanna sometimes knew not if she would laugh or weep to see them at the Butts, or at leap-frog.

Mr Whitehead, on the contrary, was not often at home—which, it must be said, did not much diminish his wife’s liking to remain there. For a time after he became Master and Proprietor of Corydon’s manors, he tried country pleasures one after another—got himself pinks, and fox-hounds; shot pheasants; planned a Park—but soon enough he forgot why he should have adopted these pursuits, and increasingly returned to the less
ambiguous
pleasures he had formerly enjoy’d—though (odd as it may seem) his conversation when in Town turned frequently upon his Estates, and the Crops grown upon them, and the Improvements he intended.

In one season, though, his wife too was eager for Town, and that was the time when new plays were opened at the Theatres. How could it be that such a plain and honest heart as Susanna’s could so love artifice, and the sight and sound of bewigged and rouged ladies and gentlemen speaking verse, and the undoing of tangled plots by the sword-stroke of authorial contrivance, merely to bring his ‘two hours’ traffic’ to an end? It cannot be explained, except perhaps by a
bump
on her shapely head. Her husband, still contrariwise, got little pleasure there—he could not hear much that was said, understood but half of that, and approved less. Having brought his wife to his box, and sat through the curtain-raiser, he often slipt away, to other parts of Town, and other
scenes
. Thus Susanna sat often alone—or with a Companion half-asleep after a good dinner—and looked and listened, and criticised too, comparing this year’s Greeks and Romans, Barons and Friars, Harlequins and Clowns, with last year’s. And now and again she was lost—and wept—or laughed—was touched, and absent.

When thus caught up in the imaginary doings below, she would now and again lean out from her box, her white hand upon the velvet lip—and thus it was that Ali saw her, from his own seat. For so long had his eye roamed without hope over every Crowd, so often had it been tricked by the sight of those who were
not her,
that at first it (that Organ, I mean, our proudest sense, and most easily deceived) passed over her—then returned—and as it were grew
telescopic,
filled with nothing but her, as with a new Planet. As soon as he might, he left his own box and sought hers—entered one that was
not,
and withdrew with apologies—and then hit upon the right place. Parting the curtain in the greatest trepidation he had yet felt, he saw her form lit by the stage below—saw that she was
alone
save for that sleeping Argus—and he slipt in. Still for a long moment he made not his presence known—she turned not, absorbed in the sights and sounds, the waves of Laughter, the clash of Instruments, all which made his approach unnoticed. Looking upon her—she all unaware of him, her soft lips parted, her eyes sparkling in the hundred lights—he wished to stay forever, so she changed not—or contrariwise, that having drunk his fill, he might slip away, without awaking her notice at all—but he found his thirst was not to be allayed—and at last the Animal Magnetism (if such thing there be) exuded from him caused her to turn, and find him there.

‘Ali!’—‘Susanna!’—What more? For a moment, only confusion—then both together spoke, each with an Account to make, each eager to forgive what the other
must
consider unforgivable, and at the same time to
speak not
of it, to deny all that had occupied their thoughts so long. ‘All that befell—’Twas
I
—
I
,’ Ali insists, and before he can say
what
he was, Susanna cries low, ‘
No no,
the fault was
not thine
—never think so—but
I
’——All this conducted in a whisper, and yet—as a sudden
silence
may wake us, as well as a sudden sound—her Companion rouses, though she had slept like the dead through the orchestra’s tootling and the roars of the crowd. Now Ali must be introduced—he is
a close friend
of Susanna’s departed Brother’s, and wished but to pay his respects to that dear Memory—the Lady Companion is most interested, and desires further information, which the two supply, tumbling upon each other’s words. Fans are opened then, and manipulated. The show, which meantime continues upon the stage below—though they two, while looking down upon it steadily, perceive little of it—is the new Pantomime (as new as any Pantomime may be, where the same things always happen in the same way). Just now they see Dame Venus conclude the ‘Transformation Scene’, wherein the young lovers are turned into Harlequin and Columbine, the old jealous father into Pantaloon, and the sleepy
duenna
into Clown.

‘I have been for a time abroad,’ says Ali then stiffly, at which Susanna cannot help but laugh—for she knew his history, as did all the world.

‘Your mother and brothers?’ asks he of Susanna. He sits behind her, where he may not himself be seen by the spectators without.

‘Well,’ says she. ‘All well.’

So they remain—their talk, when they talk, is of the kind called ‘small’—yet somehow pregnant, nonetheless, with matters larger—He hopes he may call upon her—She avers that her
husband
does not often entertain—Yet she notes he has taken a House in Town—She would have him note the performances—the Clown’s no Grimaldi—and in all this Ali knew not if he advanced, or retreated—nor
to
what, nor
from
what!

Now the gloomy Chords strike up, and the curtains part upon the ‘Dark Scene’, as the players call it—the Grave-yard, Ruins, Tombs or Cavern, wherein poor Harlequin must suffer, and be tested, before Dame Venus in her kind wisdom restores all to what it was at first—the scene of Life—the same we act in every day. But before this, and while Bats and Ghosts on wires still pester poor Harlequin, and all’s still to be resolved, Susanna sighs—and says Mr Whitehead soon will arrive, as is his wont, for the final Scene—and Ali (though for a moment he does not catch her drift) takes his leave, with a mumbled Farewell, to her—and another to the sharp-eyed Friend—who (though he knows it not) will become
his
friend, as well, in the fullness of time. And then he’s gone.

Though Ali had noticed it not, Susanna Whitehead had learned from him, and had remembered, his present Residence—and there, not very long at all after that night, he finds a Letter addressed in her familiar hand—as though it had been summoned by the constancy of his thought upon her, all that time ’twixt that hour and this. Her words within are brief enough—glad, though, and eager to know more of him—and they include
instructions
as to how he may reply, through an intermediary—that same Friend!—by enclosing his letter to herself within one to that person—but few can need instruction in such methods.
‘Write quick and I will answer’
—and his heart lifts as lightly and foolishly as a paper kite—only to fall as quick, when the string tugs—for he knows what first he
must
write, and yet not
how:
how it was that he, tho’ all unknowing, had doomed her family to wander without rudder or compass, to a comfortless harbour.

‘It was I,’ he wrote, ‘who brought about your brother’s death—make no mistake—I also who contrived it, that you should have no option but to marry one you despised—all this was my doing—for I drew you both into the web of evil in which I was caught—the web I AM—for my own selfish purposes—that I be not
alone
—you must hate me, you have no other choice, and I shall welcome that hate, as one
should,
who receives his
due
.’

‘Never believe it to be so,’ came back Susanna’s reply as quick as thought, or at any rate as quick as posted Letter may. ‘What Fate or Chance ordains, is not only foolish but
presumptuous
to claim for our own doing—it was not yours. Is it not useless to be consumed with Remorse for what no
human
effort could have prevented, nor may now make right? I fear that what you say may keep you away from me—and that is, of all the regrets I may suffer, the one I most fear today. O my dear Ali—you ask why I never sought you out—never wrote, tho’ knowing you were returned—know you not how I followed the news of you—of your disappearance—your return, & fame—never say I
cared not
—yet I feared, not
you,
but
myself,
if we two met again—I must say no more—I feel like a fortress besieged, and traitors are within my walls—do not write more—O yet do
not cease
to write, and
think of me
always—as I shall think of thee—I know not how to sign—except S
USANNA
.’

To this Ali replied, in a kind of fever, his pen chasing after his thought as it spun across the page, his thought chasing in turn his heart, which was tumbled along between Hope and Despair—for the one he had loved, and thought lost, was not lost, and yet
was,
absolutely. My young Hero, too gallant in all the ways a hero ought to be, had had too little experience of the world to know that the common contradiction he then found himself in had a common resolution—yet he was on the way to learning it—he had already in place the Postal System whereby his suit might be made, and all that he received in return by the same System, only instructed him further. ‘I inclose as you ask a lock of my hair—I know not for what purpose you desire it—yet puzzling upon that makes me think that a lock of
yours
wd. give me great comfort. I wish that you wd. set the conditions for our intercourse, otherwise I may overstep and offend—the which I dread more than to be kept in my place—tho’ I dread
that
sufficiently, for my place may be too far from you! O relieve these anxieties, Susanna! Tell me what I may ask, and what not!’

Time was, when a billet of the heart was consecrated to privacy, meant for but two other eyes, carried by winged Mercury with finger to his lips. Now every letter of any interest is copied over, as often as not by the Authoress herself (for it is that sex that has, if not the
monopoly
of that business, at least the
majority interest
), to be circulated as wanted, or deserved. The foolish
duenna
to whom Ali was to send missives intended for Susanna thought it not beyond her duties that, having opened his cover to extract the letter inside and re-cover it with her own, she should first copy it, for her own meditation.

Odd you may find it—or perhaps not—that, while for many months, amounting to a year and more, Ali and Susanna had never met, it happened
now
that hardly a week went by—nay, sometimes not a day—that they did not encounter each other, and pass some time together. It is certainly not an
Author’s
contrivance that makes it so—tho’ his Tale depend upon it—but an
instinctual
wisdom of the Sex, that will ever astonish the Male, who generally thinks he happens upon the object of his affections by wondrous Chance. Thus it was they
found themselves
—the English says it plainly—at Billiards, in a splendid room, looked down upon by portraits of Lords and Ladies in armour or in silks. Their conversation was of the blandest—save that, whenever the three spheres their sticks impelled collided, as Newton conceived they must—the angles of their incidence equalling the angles of their reflection—the remarks he made to her, or she to him, of Triumph or Defeat, had each a double meaning, open to no-one else. Meanwhile about them the talk was general, and scraps of this and that remark penetrated even to their ears.

‘Have you not heard? Buonaparte has escaped from Elba, Paris is taken!’

‘What, again? I suppose it will be an annual event—every summer, Paris is taken—well, I am sorry for it, I say.’

Said Ali to Susanna, ‘’Tis this
third
fellow on the table’s the troublesome one! Could he but be removed, the game were soon won.’

‘Is it not the essence of the game, that there he be?’

‘I care not,’ said Ali—‘I’d gladly knock him in a corner—so these two could go their way together.’ He chanced at that moment to raise his eyes, and found with a cold horror that Mr Enoch Whitehead—the very one he had spoke of, tho’
allegorically
—had without his noticing come to stand not two yards’ length from them—whereupon Ali looked stricken upon Susanna.

‘He hears nothing,’ said Susanna softly to him, ‘or little enough. You need not fear.’ And with that she chalked her cue in unconcern. Ali, though, with profoundest shame, bethought him of his last Interview with his Father—which had taken place beside a billiards table!—and of that Lord’s words to him concerning Mr Whitehead—how he was
deaf,
and would not notice, so the Lady might do as she liked—
as all the world likes,
said he. Shame—and horror—but not
repentance
—for Mr Whitehead’s disability now entered Ali’s calculations, those calculations that the master Arithmetician, Venus’ child, is always about, as he must be if the world is to go round. They two play’d on, and spoke low, and the balls rolled—yet now they
counted not the hazards
.

More such
collisions
(and deflections the more painful) took place among those three social
molecules,
till Ali retreated altogether from Society to the solitude of his apartments, to read ancient Authors for wisdom—stern good sense he got there, too, till his eyelids droop’d upon the midnight—yet this is not a copy-book, and none of it shall be repeated here. On a certain gloomy morning the Post brought a letter, not from Susanna but from Miss Catherine Delaunay. It was, like the young lady herself, both precise and feeling—it adverted to their recent meetings, which seemed to have been more full of significance than Ali (whose thoughts were often elsewhere) had thought them to be. ‘I am not one who can
show
what I do not
feel
,’ quoth she. ‘Indeed I have learned to my cost that I do not always show what I
do
feel, and may leave those whom I would most wish to know my heart, in some puzzlement—which may cause them to turn away from me—when that would be to me a very great sorrow. I remember that in our conversation I dwelt upon that Ideal Man whose qualities I have long pondered—and so I have, and I believe my picture to be perfect in all respects—but I surely meant not to assert, that only he could win my favor who matched my Ideal in
every detail
—nor
could,
perhaps, any living man! Well—dear Friend—as I hope I may
always
call you—I shall say no more, lest I say that which I do not precisely mean—a Fault against which I struggle daily!’