I stepped back into the doorway of Parsons’, but kept my ears open. Og was haggling with an old man — presumably, C. Cave himself — over the crystal lump, for which the proprietor was asking a sum beyond his purse. An opportunity.
Casually, I wandered into the shop.
Cave, a bent little fellow with egg in his stringy beard and a tea cosy on his head, had the odd mannerism of wobbling his head from side to side like certain snakes. I thought for a moment that I knew him from somewhere, but must have been mistaken. He smelled worse than many of his antiquities. I say, that’s rather good — must save the line for my next refutation.
Og was going through his pockets, scraping together coins to up his offer.
Upon seeing me, Og said ‘Stent, how fortunate that it’s you,’ with undue familiarity as if we were the closest of friends. ‘Could you extend me a small loan?’
‘Five pounds,’ insisted Cave. ‘Not a penny less.’
Og sweated like an opium addict without funds for his next pipe. Most extraordinary thing. I hadn’t thought he had the imagination to be so desperate.
‘Of course, my dear fellow,’ I said. His face lifted, and his palm came out. ‘But first I must conclude my own business.
My good man, I should like to purchase that curious crystal in your window.’
Og looked as if he had been punched in the gut.
‘Five pounds,’ Cave said.
‘Stent, I say, you can’t… well, that is… I mean, dash it…’
‘Yes, Ogilvy, was there something?’
I drew out my wallet and handed over five pounds. Cave entered the sale in an ancient register, then fussed about extracting the object from the window.
I looked at Og. He tried unsuccessfully to cover fury and disappointment.
‘Now about that loan,’ I said, wallet still open.
‘Doesn’t matter now,’ he said — and left the shop, setting the bell above the door a-jangle.
Another name off the List!
Cave came back with the object, cradled in black velvet. It struck me that I need only say I’d changed my mind to reclaim my outlay. But Og might creep back and get the blessed thing after all. Couldn’t have that.
Cave held up the crystal and said something about ‘the inner light’. Strange phrase. He meant the refraction, of course, but a lecture on optics would have been out of place in this circumstance. No fee would be forthcoming, and it doesn’t do to cheapen the currency of scholarship by dishing out lectures gratis.
I took the thing away with me. Perhaps I can use it as a paperweight after all.
Roast boar with apricots at the Lord Mayor’s. Congress with Lady Caroline in the carriage on the way home. Top-hole!
September 7: An odd day.
Luncheon at Simpson’s in the Strand with Jedwood, my publisher. Cream of turbot, hock of ham, peppered pear. An acceptable Muscadet, porter, sherry. The Refutation pamphlet is shifting briskly, and J. is eager for more. Pity Moriarty hasn’t fired other literary clay pigeons I could blast. J. proposes a collection of Refutations and suggests I consider expanding the arena of combat, to launch my intellectual ballista against other so-called great minds of the age. J. is a dolt — he doesn’t understand the List, or that it is as important to choose the proper enemies as the proper friends. Nevertheless, I’m tempted. Tom Huxley, Darwin’s old bulldog, could do with having his ears boxed for a change. And I didn’t care for the way George Stokes hovered over Lady Caroline at the last Royal Society formal. Those Navier — Stokes equations have their tiny little cracks.
Most extraordinary thing. As J. and I were leaving the restaurant, a wild-haired, sunburned fellow accosted us in the street, gabbling ‘the Martians are coming, the Martians are coming!’ Ever since Schiaparelli put about that nonsense about canals, there has been debate about how one should address the notional inhabitants of the planet Mars. I am firmly of the belief that ‘Marsian’ is the only acceptable term. I took the trouble to correct the moonatic on this point, but he was in no condition to listen. He grabbed my lapels with greasy fingers and breathed gin in my face. He called me by name, which was discomforting. ‘Sir Nevil,’ he said, ‘keep watching the skies! Look to the Red Planet! Look into the crystal egg!’
J. summoned a hefty constable, who laid a hand on the madman’s shoulder. The fellow writhed in the grasp of the law, and a look of heightened terror passed over his face. It is no wonder men of his stripe should fear the police, but the extent of his pantomime of fright struck me as excessive even for his situation. Curiously, the constable seemed humpbacked, tailored uniform emphasising rather than concealing a pronounced lump on one shoulder. I assumed the Metropolitan Police imposed strict physical requirements on their recruits. Perhaps this fellow’s condition has worsened in recent years? Something was not quite right about his hump, which I could swear wobbled like a jelly on a plate. His eyes were glassy and his face pale — indeed, our lawful officer was evidently in as poor a shape as our degenerate semi-assailant.
‘Don’t let them take me,’ begged the madman, ‘they wraps round you… and they bites… and they sucks your brains… and you ain’t you no more. I’ve seen it!’
‘Let’s… be… ’avin… you… my… lad,’ said the policeman, voice like a prolonged death rattle, monotonous and expressionless. ‘You… don’t… want… to… be… a-… botherin’… these… gentlemen…’
The madman’s face contorted in a silent scream.
There was something peculiarly hideous about the constable’s voice, as if he were a music hall dummy manipulated by a wicked ventriloquist.
‘Mind… ’ow… you… go… sirs!’
The policeman lifted the madman — not a small individual, by the way — one-handed. He marched off stiff-legged, bearing his whimpering prisoner down the Strand. As he walked, his hump seemed to shift under blue serge as if it were a separate entity. I had a sense of evil eyes cast at me.
J. asked me if I had any idea who the maniac was.
He had something of a military mien, I thought — though come down in the world, perhaps having frazzled his brains out in some sunstruck corner of the Empire. It came to me that I had seen him before — perhaps in the audience at one of my many popular lectures, perhaps skulking on the street waiting for the chance to accost me. J. pointed out that he had known who I was, but — of course — everyone in England knows the Astronomer Royal.
‘It should definitely be “Marsian”,’ I insisted. ‘The precedents are many and I can recall them in order…’
J. remembered he had forgotten another appointment and left before I could fully convince him. Must send him my monograph on planetary possessives. Some still rail against ‘Mercurial’ and ‘Jupiteric’, though a consensus is nearly reached on ‘Moonian’ and ‘Venutian’. By the end of this century, we shall have definitively colonised the sunnar system for proper naming!
September 7: later.
I had thought to dispel completely the unpleasant memory of this afternoon’s strange encounter… but the words of the madman resounded.
By some happenstance, this was literally true.
The long-necked cabbie who conveyed me back to Greenwich bade me a jovial farewell with ‘keep watching the skies, sir.’ An unusual turn of phrase to hear twice in one day, perhaps — but a sentiment naturally addressed to a famous astronomer in the vicinity of the biggest telescope in the land.
Galvani, the Italian foreman of the gang who have completed — at last! — the electrification of Flamsteed House, handed me a sheaf of wiring diagrams marked ‘for the attention of the householder’ and clearly said ‘look to the Red Plan, et… es essential for to understan’ the current en the house’. There was, indeed, a red plan in the sheaf, but it seemed to me he had stressed the first part of his sentence, which echoed the words of the madman, and thrown away the second, which conveyed his particular meaning.