Outside the dining-room life at 18 Park Circus was splendidly commonplace. After the evening meal we tended the sick animals in the operating-theatre, then retired to the study where we read or played chess (which Baxter always won) or draughts (which I nearly always won) or cribbage (where the victor was unpredictable). We resumed our long weekend tramps and all the time talked about Bella. She did not let us forget her. Every three or four days a telegram saying “M HR” arrived from Amsterdam, Frankfort-on-Maine, Marienbad, Geneva, Milan, Trieste, Athens, Constantinople, Odessa, Alexandria, Malta, Morocco, Gibraltar and Marseilles.
One foggy November afternoon came a telegram from Paris saying DNT WRRY. Baxter grew frantic. He cried, “There must be something dreadful to worry about if she tells me not to do it. I will go to Paris. I will hire detectives. I will find her.”
I said, “Wait till she summons you, Baxter. Trust her honesty. That message means she is not disturbed by an event which would upset you or me. Rather than thwart her you trusted her to Duncan Wedderburn. Better trust her to herself, now.”
This convinced but did not calm him. When the same message came from Paris exactly a week later his resolution collapsed. I went to work one morning feeling sure he would have left for France when I got back, but as I entered the front door he hailed me vigorously from the study landing shouting, “News of Bella, McCandless! Two letters! One from a maniac in Glasgow and one from her residence in Paris!”
“What news?” I cried, casting off my coat and running upstairs. “Good? Bad? How is she? Who wrote these letters?”
“The news is certainly not altogether bad,” he said cautiously. “In fact, I think she is doing remarkably well, though conventional moralists would disagree. Come into the study and I will read the letters to you, leaving the best till last. The other one has a south Glasgow postmark, and a maniac wrote it.”
We composed ourselves on the sofa
He read aloud what follows.
41 Aytoun Street,
Pollokshields.
November 14th.
Mr. Baxter,
Until a week ago I would have been ashamed to write to you, sir. I then thought my signature on a letter would convulse you with such loathing that you would burn it unread. You invited me to your home on a matter of business. I saw your “niece”, loved her, plotted with her, eloped with her. Though unmarried we toured Europe and circled the Mediterranean in the character of husband and wife. A week ago I left her in Paris and returned alone to my mother’s home in Glasgow. Were these facts made public The Public would regard me as a villain of the blackest dye, and that, until a week ago, is how I viewed myself: as a guilty reckless libertine who had ravished a beautiful young woman from her respectable home and loving guardian. I now think much better of Duncan Wedderburn and far, far worse of you, sir. Did you see the great Henry Irving’s production of Goethe’s Faust at the Glasgow Theatre Royal? I did. I was deeply moved. I recognized myself in that tormented hero, that respectable member of the professional middle class who enlists the King of Hell to help him seduce a woman of the servant class. Yes, Goethe and Irving knew that Modern Man — that Duncan Wedderburn — is essentially double: a noble soul fully instructed in what is wise and lawful, yet also a fiend who loves beauty only to drag it down and degrade it. That is how I saw myself until a week ago. I was a fool, Mr. Baxter! A blind misguided fool! My affair with Bella was Faustian from the start, the intoxicating incense of Evil was in my nostrils from the moment you foisted me onto your “niece”. Little did I know that in THIS melodrama I would play the part of the innocent, trusting Gretchen, that your overwhelming niece was cast as Faust, and that YOU! YES, YOU, Godwin Bysshe Baxter, are Satan Himself!
“Notice, McCandless,” said Baxter at this point, “that the fellow writes as you talk when you are drunk.”
I must try to write calmly. Exactly a week ago I crouched in the corner of a stationary carriage with Bella on the platform outside, chattering to me through the window. She was bright and beautiful as ever, with a fresh expectant youthfulness which seemed wholly new, yet hauntingly familiar. WHY was it familiar? Then I remembered Bella had looked exactly like that when we first became lovers. And now, with every appearance of kindness (for it was I who had said we must part) she was discarding me like a worn shoe or broken toy, having been RENEWED by someone I had never seen, someone she must have glimpsed that very morning, for we had arrived in Paris from Marseilles only six hours before. In those six hours she had met nobody, spoken to nobody but me and the manageress of our hotel — I had been beside her the whole time, apart from my visit to the nearby Cathedral which took thirty minutes or less — yet in that time she had fallen in love anew! All things are possible for a witch. Suddenly she said, “Promise when you get to Glasgow that you tell God I will soon want the candle.” I promised, although I thought the message gibberish — or more witchcraft. This letter discharges that promise.
Why, having discharged it, am I gripped by an urge to tell you more, tell you all? Whence this hunger to disclose to YOU, Mephisto Baxter, the innermost secrets of my guilty and tortured heart? Is it because I believe you already know them?
“Catholicism just might restore his sanity,” muttered Baxter. “Lacking the rites of the confessional he will seize any excuse to blether out his second-hand, second-rate sentiments to anyone.”
Did you see at the Theatre Royal two years ago Beerbohm-Tree’s production of She Stoops to Conquer by that greatest of Irishmen, Oliver Goldsmith? The hero is a bright clever handsome gentleman, liked by his companions, favoured by the elderly, attractive to women. He has but one defect. He is only at ease with women of the servant class. Respectable women of his own income group make him feel frigid and formal, and the more beautiful and pleasant they are the more awkward and incapable of loving them he feels. My case entirely! As a child I took it for granted that only women who worked with their hands would not find the natural Duncan Wedderburn a disgusting creature, and the result of this was that working women became the only class of female who attract me. As an adolescent I thought this proved me a kind of monster. Will you believe me when I say, that on entering University I discovered that TWO-THIRDS of the students felt exactly as I did? Most of them conquered this instinct to the extent of marrying respectable women and getting children by them, but I doubt if they are truly happy. My instincts were too strong for that, or perhaps I was too honest to live a lie. Goldsmith’s hero is eventually saved by a beautiful heiress of his own class who wins him by dressing up and talking like her maid. Alas, no such happy ending is possible for a Glasgow solicitor in the nineteenth century. My love life was below the stairs and behind the scenes of my professional life, and in these cramped surroundings I enjoyed the ecstasies and obeyed the moral code enjoyed, preached and practised by Scotland’s National Bard, Rabbie Burns. As I told each panting fair one I would love her for ever I was perfectly sincere, and indeed, I would have married every one of them had the social gulf between us not forbade this. My few poor bastard bairns (excuse the Scotticism, but to my ear the word bairns has a truer human warmth than babies or children) my few poor bastard bairns (fewer than the number of your fingers, Mr. Baxter, for my precautions prevented a great many) my few poor bastard bairns were never uncared for. Every one went into the charitable institution of my friend Quarrier. You know (if you read The Glasgow Herald) how that great philanthropist fosters such tender unfortunates, then ships them to Canada where they are put to good domestic agricultural use on the expanding frontier of our Empire in the North. Nor did their mothers suffer. No delicious scullions, tempting laundry manglers, luscious latrine scrubbers ever lost a day’s work by dallying with Duncan Wedderburn, though the shortness and irregularity of their free time meant I had to court several at once. Basically innocent despite my wicked ways — fundamentally honest underneath my superficial hypocrisies — such was the man you introduced to your so-called niece, Mr. Baxter.