[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
The rumour was not widespread, and
Vesquit need not have suffered; but he
took alarm, and had the unlucky thought of
employing Arthwait to write a book
clearing him from all suspicion, by which it
naturally was fixed on him for ever.
The second trouble was his little quarrel
with Douglas. Vesquit was Senior in the
Black Lodge, and Douglas overthrew him by
"carelessly" leaving, in a hansom cab, some
documents belonging to the Lodge, with
Vesquit's name and address attached to
them, which made some exceedingly grim
revelations of the necromantic practices
carried on in Hampden Road.
The honest cabby had turned over the
papers to Scotland Yard, as his duty was;
and the police had sent them on to those in
authority over coroners; and Vesquit
received, with his documents, an
intimation that he must drop that sort of
thing at once.
To be chief in the Lodge seemed less
than to be always in a Paradise of corpses;
so he resigned office, and Douglas pushed
his advantage by making him an abject
tool, under the perpetual threat of
exposure.
No sooner did Douglas learn of the
death of Gates than he telegraphed to
Arthwait to get the inquest adjourned "so
that the relatives of the deceased in
England might attend, and take possession
of the body," and to Vesquit to attend the
same. On this occasion the coroner needed
no threat -- the job was after his own
heart.
Douglas met him in Paris in high glee,
for he was not sorry to be rid of Gates;
and, on the other hand, the man had died
in full tide of battle, and should be the
very corpse that Vesquit most needed; as
Douglas himself said, with a certain grim
humour in which he excelled, he was,
morally speaking, an executed criminal;
while, being in actual magical contact with
Grey and his friends, so much so that he
had evidently been killed by them, he was
an ideal magical link.
Vesquit's task was, if possible, to learn
from Gates exactly what had happened,
and so expert a necromancer had no fear of
the result. He was also to create a semi-
material ghost of Gates from the remains,
and send it to the person who had dealt out
death to that unlucky wizard.
On his arrival at Naples, there was no
difficulty in the way of the Black Lodge;
the authorities were only too glad to return
a formal verdict of death by misadventure,
and to hand over the corpse to the
rejoicing Vesquit.
Gates had fortunately left memoranda,
a rough diary of the various procedures
hitherto adopted; so that Vesquit was not
committed to the task of acquiring
information from Arthwait, which might
easily have occupied a season; and from
these notes the old necromancer came to
the conclusion that the enemy was to be
respected. Gates had done pretty well in
the matter of the pigeons, at first; his
procedure was not to be compared with his
colleague's pedantic idiocies; but the first
touch of riposte had been indeed deadly.
Gates had been the clairvoyant of the
party; he had gauged clearly enough the
result of his operation; but naturally he had
left no note of the last act, and neither
Arthwait nor Abdul Bey had been able to do
anything. Arthwait had been scared badly
until his pompous vanity came to the
rescue, and showed him that accidents of
that kind must be expected when one is
handicapped with an assistant of inferior
ability.
Vesquit decided that the battle should
be properly [175] prepared, and no trouble
spared to make it a success. His fondness
for corpses had not gone to the length of
desiring to become one.
In him there had been the makings of a
fairly strong man; and, with Douglas to
push him on, he was still capable of acting
with spirit and determination. Also, he had
the habit of authority. He set Arthwait to
worrk on the Grimoire; for, in a operation
of this importance, one must make all one's
instruments.
Beginning with a magic knife, which one
is allowed to buy, one cuts the magic wand
from a hazel, the magic quill from a goose,
and so on. The idea is to confirm the will to
perform the operation by a long series of
acts ad hoc. It is even desirable to procure
parchment by killing a consecrated animal
with the magic knife, and making ready the
skin with similarly prepared utensils; one
might for instance, cut and consecrate
even the pegs which stretched the skin.
However, in this case Arthwait had plenty
of "Virgin parchment" in stock, with quills
of a black vulture, and ink made by burning
human bones, and mixing the carbonized
products with the soot of the magic dark-
lantern, whose candles were prepared with
human fat.
But the Grimoire of any great operation
must be thought out and composed;
according to elaborate rules, indeed, but
with the purpose of the work constantly in
mind. Even when all this is done, the
Grimoire is hardly begun; for it must be
copied out in the way above indicated; and
it should be illuminated with every kind of
appropriate design. This was an ideal task
for Arthwait; he was able to wallow in dog-
latin and corrupt Greek-Coptic; he made
sentences so complicated that the
complete works of George Meredith,
Thomas Carlyle, and Henry James, tangled
together, would have seemed in
comparison like a word of three letters.
[176]
His Grimoire was in reality excellent for
its purpose; for the infernal hierarchy
delights in unintelligible images, in every
kind of confusion and obscurity. This
particular lucubration was calculated to
drag the Archdemon of Bad Syntax himself
from the most remote corner of his lair.
For Arthwait could not speak with
becoming unintelligibility; to knot a
sentence up properly it has to be thought
out carefully, and revised. New phrases
have to be put in; sudden changes of
subject must be introduced; verbs must be
shifted to unsuspected localities; short
words must be excised with ruthless hand;
archaisms must be sprinkled like sugar-
plums upon the concoction; the fatal
human tendency to say things
straightforwardly must be detected and
defeated by adroit reversals; and, if a
glimmer of meaning yet remain under close
scrutiny, it must be removed by replacing
all the principal verbs by paraphrases in
some dead language.
This is not to be achieved in a moment;
it is not enough to write disconnected
nonsense; it must be possible for anyone
acquainted with the tortuosities of the
author's mind to resolve the sentence into
its elements, and reproduce -- not the
meaning, for there is none, but the same
mental fog from which he was originally
suffering. An illustration is appended.
Pneumaticals
Omnient
(spirits) (all)
Tabernacular
Subinfractically
(dwelling)
(Below)
Homotopic
hermeneutical
(this)
(magic)
Ru-
volvolimperipunct,
suprorientalize,
(circle)
(arise)
factote
kinematodrastically,
(move) (soon)
overplus
phenomenize!
(and)
(appear) [177]
Upon this skeleton, a fair example of his
earlier manner, for no man attains the
summit of an art in a day, he would build a
superstructure by the deft introduction of
parentheses, amplifying each word until
the original coherence of the paragraph
was diluted to such an extent that the true
trail was undiscoverable. The effect upon
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]