It appeared that some colossus had lifted the lid off the house and buried the floor under a ton of streamers, balloons and unconscious bodies. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and the fumes of alcohol, the lounge curtains still drawn, so all was seen in an unearthly half-light. The clouds of noxious smoke and the notorious historical figures lying around in postures of pain and despair made it all a bit like Hades, but at the far end of the room a Lalique lamp cast a golden glow across armchairs drawn up around a coffee table laden with empty bottles. There sat Diane, transformed by white silk pajamas, bathing cap and greasepaint into a fetchingly malevolent Pierrot. She was deep in conversation with a 90s dandy in the Des Esseintes style.
I edged past two exhausted females shuffling together beside a gramophone. The rasping voice was exhorting them to “Charleston, Charleston!” but I could see they didn’t have it in them.
Diane accepted my carefully chosen gift with no interest whatsoever and after a kiss and a gushing greeting, proceeded to ignore me. The dandy was telling her of an encounter he had had on a plateau in the Himalayas with a two-hundred-year-old man who lived in an underground chamber, guarding an enormous book with clasps of horn. He claimed to have won the old man’s confidence by some yogic trick of sitting naked in the ice fields and melting the snow by generating bodily heat. (I commented that two-hundred-year-old men were notoriously easy to impress, but no one took any notice of me.) He learned that the book contained the whole history of the human race, and the old man had inherited the job of turning over a page each day until his successor should come. The dandy had had a devil of a job convincing the old sage that he was not the man, but he had got a sneaky glimpse of our future! The earth was soon to be destroyed by fire. It seemed that we were only here to prepare the way for another species!
It was while I was listening to this account that I first saw the strange couple seated in a corner of the room. One was a tousle-headed, handsome and athletic youth with the look of one of Aubrey Beardsley’s more sinister satyrs. It seemed the trousers and shoes he wore were only there to hide his shaggy legs and cloven hooves. The other was the most unhealthy-looking woman I have ever seen. The wrist of the hand that supported her chin looked so thin, so horribly fragile, that it seemed the grip of anger or an accidental blow would have broken it like a twig. She drew on a cigarette held lightly between the first and second fingers of the other hand, flapping the wrist back limply after each inhalation and pouting a lazy gray cloud toward the ceiling. I noticed a curious silver ring on her index finger. It showed a homed serpent coiling back and forth inside the oval collet.
Her features were angular and ordinary, her skin was positively yellow, like old ivory jaundiced by years. Her teeth, which would become visible as she pouted out the smoke, were finely shaped but faintly tinged with blue and jagged along the edges.
She had about her a strange, sickly charm such as Poe might have delighted in, or Rossetti taken for an image of deathly elegance; another Beatrice. As I looked at her wide, dead eyes shadowed beneath the lower lashes by restless nights, I could almost see a ghostly pillow hovering behind her head. That was the first of two very perceptive fancies.
The most disturbing thing about her was her absolute lack of human response. She was not listening to the young man who sat beside her, she was watching him talk to her, observing him like some peculiar and only vaguely interesting phenomenon. The only sign of emotion I could discern was a fleeting twist to the corners of her mouth which suggested sarcastic amusement. I couldn’t help feeling, though, that she was too withdrawn to find direct humor in her surroundings. The real source, I felt, must be more secret than that. The second fancy came to me then, of an unseen companion, a familiar as it were, crouching at her shoulder, its mouth to her ear. It was this creature, and not she, who thought human beings were all bloody fools, and who twisted her mouth, despite herself, with a stream of evil, whispered observations.
My attention was drawn back at that moment to the dandy, who had taken Diane to the window and drawn back the curtain. A wave of sunshine flooded the room, edging their forms in a shared aura of gold.
“Awake!” he cried melodiously. “For Morning in the Bowl of Night has flung the stone that put the stars to flight, and lo! the Hunter of the East has caught St Pancras Station in a noose of light!”
Diane turned her grotesquely made-up face to his and laughingly called him a fool, and something in the tone of her voice made me sorry that no woman had ever spoken to me in such a way.
I found myself rising to join them, so we stood close together peering out into the bright world. Close to, the dandy smelled strongly of some musky perfume. Diane introduced us and I learned that his name was Nicholas Hallam. When he learned that I was a clerk, he looked at me with sympathy.
“You’re always telling me that my life is too selfish, Diane”—the sarcastic twist that came to her mouth suggested that she had said no such thing—“I have decided to make Thomas my good cause. I will save this poor wretch from himself. If he’s still a clerk in one month, there is no hope for him. Be honest, young man. Do you really wish to spend this sequence of precious and unrepeatable sensations we call a day languishing in the dungeons of Messrs. Kneebone and Kneebone, or whatever they are called, pining for adventure while your life goes drifting away, along with the desks and the uncounted dirty ledgers, toward the grave?”
“Not particularly,” I conceded, “but I have rent to pay, and lately I’ve developed some expensive habits like eating. So I’m afraid,” I finished checking my pocket watch, “I must push off, or the desks and ledgers will be drifting toward the grave with my replacement at the helm.”
“Yes, and we must leave too, Diane,” said Hallam, glancing across her to the woman in the corner who had so aroused my interest. “Our young friend has reminded us of our duty. Rose and I have a hard day too. It is our plan to walk away the morning, giving common people a chance to look at us and dream. Then a good lunch with fine wine in a little restaurant I know, and a trip to my bookbinders, where my volumes of Swinburne await me clad in a new raiment of leather, scarlet as the tongue of Sin.” He sighed deeply. “And if we have the strength after such a day of toil, a whole decanter of cognac remains at home to be disposed of unaided. I hardly think we shall have the energy left to invoke Ashtoreth tonight!” Bending forward he kissed Diane’s hand and whispered, “Goodbye for now, my sweet Pierrot.”
Diane simpered and let go of his hand with reluctance.
“Call in on us some time, Lenihan,” he added to me, holding out an expensive-looking calling card. The address was 13 Tamar Gardens, Hampstead.
A couple of days later I took the umpteenth look at that black and gold card, pondered again the weird charm of Rose Seaford, for such apparently was her name, and decided to take Hallam up on his invitation. The evening wind was blowing fine rain down the streets, and my asthma had been playing up a little, but I had just bought a rather snappy trilby which, I thought, gave me a touch of style, so I said “what the hell” and took a taxi.