The Finishing Stroke (18 page)

14 Twelfth Night:
Sunday, January 5, 1930

In Which Olivette Brown Converses with a Ghost, Mr. Queen is Struck by Lightning, and on John Sebastian Is Bestowed the Last Gift

Sunday was one of those dreadful days that seem to drag their feet from birth. People wandered from room to room, threw themselves from chair to chair. The Sunday newspapers were read and reread, even the fat automotive section inspired by the New York Automobile Show. Mayor Jimmy Walker's announcement that he would donate the amount of his pay rise for the next four years to charity was sniffed at, mouthed, and torn to bits. Val Warren read aloud, with emotion, the obituary of Kenneth Hawks, Mary Astor's husband, who with ten others had been killed while filming an airplane scene off Santa Monica on Friday. The literary-minded conducted a round-table on some publishing landmarks of the season – J. B. Priestley's
The Good Companions
, John Steinbeck's
Cup of Gold
, Henry Handel Richardson's
Ultima Thule
, Donn Byrne's last novel,
Field of Honour.
Dan Freeman ruefully recounted the curious pre-publishing history of Remarque's
All Quiet on the Western Front.
But when Ellery brought up William Bolitho's
Twelve Against the Gods
, the round-table abruptly splintered into kindling. In that house, on that day, ‘twelve' was a bad word.

In spite of the sunshine, no one ventured outdoors except old Mr. Gardiner, who left the house before anyone was up and did not return until late afternoon. When he was asked where he had been all day, the clergyman replied, ‘With Christ manifesting Himself to the Gentiles,' and went quietly up to his room.

The dark promise of the evening lay over the house, holding everyone fast. It was too much for the Irish girl, Mabel, who had a weeping spell in midafternoon on the astonished chest of Sergeant Devoe.

Ellen Craig came up with a suggestion.

‘As long as this is Twelfth Night and tomorrow probably everyone will leave,' Ellen said, ‘why don't we celebrate it the way people did in the Middle Ages? They had lots of fun on Twelfth Night, feasting, playing games, making merry. What do you think?'

‘
Brava
,' Ellery said, forbearing to point out that the Feasts of the Epiphany of medieval times were probably survivals of the Roman Saturnalia. ‘Who'll do what?'

In the end a programme of sorts was drawn up.

At the festive board, Mr. Gardiner's grace referred to the Marriage at Cana and wound up in a supplication to turn ‘the bitter water of this house' into the sweet wine of goodness and joy. This pointed prayer did not serve to elevate anyone's spirits, and Mrs. Janssen's feast was begun in silence. John did not improve matters when he observed, loudly enough for Mrs. Janssen to overhear across the butler's pantry, that the roast of lamb was underdone; and the remainder of the dinner was eaten to a symphony of stifled sobs and nose blowings from the culinary sector, interspersed by frantic shushes from Mabel and Felton. Then, while clearing the table preparatory to serving the dessert, Mabel tipped her lofted tray and slid a nearly full glass of burgundy neatly on to the head of Roland Payn, baptizing his white hair a beautiful purplish red and sending runnels of the same lush hue down his handsome cheeks and shirt front into his lap. Whereupon Mabel dropped the tray and fled to the kitchen, adding the wails of her anguish to Mrs. Janssen's, and the feast broke up in confusion, Ellen and Rusty hastening to soothe the distressed females in the kitchen while Arthur Craig assisted his spluttering attorney upstairs.

Ellery took this opportunity to scout the living room. There was no Christmas package. He was still wondering when and where the twelfth package would be found, and by whom, when the company assembled for the Twelfth Night programme.

Marius had ducked into the music room, and through the archway came a surprisingly naive music that sounded like Purcell. To this melodic accompaniment everyone was seated.

Ellery raised his hand and the music stopped.

‘As your Master of Revels, ladies and gentlemen,' Ellery said solemnly, ‘I choose that most popular of all lines, the line of least resistance. There will be no speech from me.' Ellen cheered – rather too heartily, he thought. ‘Instead, we shall proceed at once to the business of the evening.

‘Our opening entertainment, in defiance of the time-honoured vaudeville tradition, will be neither acrobats nor Japanese jugglers. In fact, I don't know what the devil it is. My friends, I give you Mr. Arthur Benjamin Craig.'

The piano produced a chord, and from the library marched their host. He was carrying a corrugated carton. This he deposited on the refectory table, bowed gravely to Ellery, Ellery bowed back and sat down, and Craig cleared his throat.

Sergeant Devoe looked on from the hall archway, and Mrs. Janssen, Mabel and Felton – the women still sniffling – peered in from beyond the half-open swinging door to the dining room.

‘Fellow-members of the John Sebastian Admiration Society,' Craig began, one hand impressively on the carton, ‘tomorrow being January the sixth, The House of Freeman will publish
The Food of Love
in a trade edition as modest though sterling as its author.'

Cries of ‘Hear, hear!' interrupted him. John was grinning, and everyone else was smiling except Freeman and Payn, who sat listening without expression. Craig held up his hand quickly.

‘In my dual connexion with our young hero – both as his unofficial father and the printer of said trade edition – I could not allow this historic occasion to slip by without a token of my personal dedication to the event.

‘In consequence,' Craig went on oratorically, ‘I have summoned the considerable resources of my press and of the various fine craftsmen with whom I have been associated these many years to the task of producing' – Craig flipped open the carton and lifted out a book – ‘this special edition of
The Food of Love
, limited to twelve copies, numbered in sequence, one for each member of this company.'

A murmur went up at the beauty of the volume.

‘The volume is a duodecimo, to maintain a pleasing proportion with its slimness. A special rag paper has been used, manufactured for me in England. The text has been composed in the delicate, uneccentric type which I had Chartrain design for The House of Freeman's exclusive use in the printing of poetry classics. Each sheet is printed in two colours, the text in black and the rules and decorations in mallow red, a colour of medium saturation and brilliance. The endpaper design and the title page are a labour of friendship by the well-known artist Boris Akst. The sheets have been folded, gathered and sewn by hand, and then bound in full crushed levant. It is a book I'm proud to have produced, John, and I present these copies to your friends and mine in the hope that you will all find as much pleasure in the owning as I did in the making.'

And, beaming, Craig handed one of the beautiful books to John and distributed ten others to the company. The one that was left over the bearded printer clutched firmly to his chest.

‘Naturally, I didn't overlook myself!'

John was enormously touched. He sat there with the book in his lap, blinking at it.

Among the general exclamations of admiration came a clamour for John's autograph. Over his protests that he could write only with great difficulty because of his sprained wrist, John was seized by Rusty and Ellen, marched over to the table, and seated with a thump. Mr. Gardiner produced his fountain pen, Valentina ran to the library for blotters, and the table became the scene of an impromptu autographing party. Everyone was demanding a personal inscription as well as a signature, and John frowned and cogitated and wrote each inscription in a painful and distorted scrawl on the insert-page containing the limited-edition legend.

Ellery drifted over to the chair on which John had left his own copy of the book, picked the book up and casually glanced at its insert-page. The copy was numbered 12. A line from some un-remembered Victorian author sprang into his head: ‘Fate laughs at probabilities.'

He noticed as he brought his own copy over to the table that both Freeman and Payn were hanging back. But they were trapped by the necessities of the occasion, and before it was too late each man presented his copy for the young poet's attentions, smiling with difficulty.

‘I didn't realize, when the programme for tonight's entertainment was drawn up,' the Master of Revels announced, ‘what beautiful balance exists between the then unknown opening number by Mr. Craig and the second number, which I now introduce: Readings from
The Food of Love
, by the Poet Himself.'

And Ellery sat down while the Poet clasped his hands above his head prize-ring fashion, and was applauded and cheered. Then, handling his leather-bound copy of the verses as if it were something out of the workshop of Benvenuto Cellini, John began to read.

He read well, with rhythm, texture and colour, and what he was reading, Ellery thought, was very fine indeed. Being of the poet's own Fitzgeraldian generation, Ellery did not share Mr. Gardiner's view that the verses were brittle and merely clever; to him they sounded crisp and witty, with a delightful cynicism and a disregard of traditional form that might have been spawned among the young American expatriates of the French Riviera and the cafés of the Left Bank. He joined the applause at the conclusion of the reading with honest appreciation.

‘The next entertainment is a Musical Interlude offered by that ineffable impresario of the ivories, that peerless pianistic prodigy, our consummate composer and violent virtuoso – Maestro Marius Carlo!'

Sergeant Devoe and Felton were enlisted as stagehands and dragged the piano through the archway from the music room. Marius bowed, flipped imaginary tails out of his way, and seated himself on the piano stool.

‘In this era when every man is his own distiller,' Marius began, flexing his fingers above the keyboard, ‘harvesting the materials of his domiciliary brew from his immediate environment – the farmhand from the bottom of his silo, the coal miner from his underground still, the Californian from his rotted cactus – it struck me that as a composer I might well do likewise.

‘In short, in view of what Mr. Queen has referred to recently as the “twelveness” of this holiday, I have been working on a composition, utilizing the Schönberg twelve-tone system, which is inspired by a dramatic entertainment from the pen of Bill Shakespeare entitled
Twelfth Night
, so-called not because it had anything to do with the plot but because it was meant to be acted at the Twelfth Night festivities of Elizabeth's court. Do I hear huzzas?'

He heard huzzas.

‘The first movement is entitled
Shipwreck in Illyria
. Silence, please,' And Marius elevated his hands, paused and then brought them down in a crash of sound so dissonant that Mabel, in the dining room doorway, uttered a yip of dismay, blushed crimson, and fled.

For twenty minutes the young composer wrenched and tore at the piano keys, accompanying his playing with a cheerful libretto that left his audience as mystified as they were deafened. The applause at the end was violent with relief.

‘Our next artist,' Ellery announced when the piano had been rolled back to the music room, ‘is Miss Valentina Warren, who will favour us – I'm told – with two Thespian interpretations, but of what, deponent knoweth not. Miss Warren?'

Valentina was a surprise, at least at first. Ellery had expected something heavy – from Sophocles, say, a Jocastan speech to Oedipus, or an imitation of Blanche Yurka in
The Wild Duck.
Instead, Valentina asked them to transport themselves in imagination across the Hudson River to Hoboken and Christopher Morley's repertory theatre, and launched into a hilarious monologue from the nineteenth century ‘drayma',
After Dark, or Neither Maid, Wife nor Widow.
Everyone hissed and hollered, including Ellery; but then, for an encore, the young actress unfortunately chose to become Nina Leeds, heroine of Eugene O'Neill's
Strange Interlude
, doing very badly a long scene in the stream-of-consciousness vein. If there was a false note in the applause that followed Valentina's bow, no one seemed to detect it but Ellery. Certainly Valentina did not.

Ellen Craig produced an easel, some sheets of drawing paper and a box of charcoal sticks, and amused the company by a series of quick caricatures of unexpected wickedness. (The one she did of Ellery was especially devastating – a vulturine face on a long snoopy neck that nevertheless managed to convey a likeness.)

Mr. Gardiner read bravely from the Song of Solomon, not neglecting to interpret it as an allegory of the union between Christ and His Church; Rusty Brown came onstage with a roll of wire and a pair of pliers and proceeded to contrive some delightful bird and animal ‘free forms', as she called them; and even Dr. Samson Dark performed, bringing down the house with an uncanny nasal imitation of Rudy Vallee singing the Maine ‘Stein Song'.

‘And now,' Ellery said, as the doctor sat down swabbing his Falstaffian cheeks, we come to the
pièce de résistance
, the epiphany of our entertainment, a guaranteed genuine séance conducted by the celebrated spiritist, our own Madam Olivette Brown.'

Mr. Gardiner immediately rose, pleaded an indisposition, begged to be excused and left the room. But a moment later he came back, remarking grimly that on reconsideration one who had devoted his long lifetime to the world of the spirit might perhaps prove useful in dealing with Mrs. Brown's friends from the other side, if only to exorcise them. And the old clergyman reseated himself and folded his arms, ready for the Devil himself.

Olivette Brown paid no attention. She was too busy supervising the setting of her stage.

At last they were seated about the big round table Mrs. Brown had commandeered, in the all-but-darkness she had arranged for, hand gripping neighbour's hand, in silence; and the séance began.