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He was quiet when we left the palace, and said nothing to me as we rode back to Baker Street.
It was dark already. I wondered how long we had spent in the Palace.
Fingers of sooty fog twined across the road and the sky.
Upon our return to Baker Street, in the looking glass of my room, I observed that the frog-white skin across my shoulder had taken on a pinkish tinge. I hoped that I was not imagining it, that it was not merely the moonlight through the window.
4. The Performance
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That my friend was a master of disguise should have come as no surprise to me, yet surprise me it did. Over the next ten days a strange assortment of characters came in through our door in Baker Street – an elderly Chinese man, a young rouй, a fat, red-haired woman of whose former profession there could be little doubt, and a venerable old buffer, his foot swollen and bandaged from gout. Each of them would walk into my friend’s room, and, with a speed that would have done justice to a music-hall “quick change artist”, my friend would walk out.
He would not talk about what he had been doing on these occasions, preferring to relax, staring off into space, occasionally making notations on any scrap of paper to hand, notations I found, frankly, incomprehensible. He seemed entirely preoccupied, so much so that I found myself worrying about his well-being. And then, late one afternoon, he came home dressed in his own clothes, with an easy grin upon his face, and he asked if I was interested in the theatre.
“As much as the next man,” I told him.
“Then fetch your opera glasses,” he told me. “We are off to Drury Lane.”
I had expected a light opera, or something of the kind, but instead I found myself in what must have been the worst theatre in Drury Lane, for all that it had named itself after the royal court – and to be honest, it was barely in Drury Lane at all, being situated at the Shaftesbury Avenue end of the road, where the avenue approaches the Rookery of St. Giles. On my friend’s advice I concealed my wallet, and, following his example, I carried a stout stick.
Once we were seated in the stalls (I had bought a threepe
The orchestra struck up, and the curtain was raised. My friend was silent.
It was a fine enough show in its way: three one-act plays were performed. Comic songs were sung between the acts. The leading man was tall, languid, and had a fine singing voice; the leading lady was elegant, and her voice carried through all the theatre; the comedian had a fine touch for patter songs.
The first play was a broad comedy of mistaken identities: the leading man played a pair of identical twins who had never met, but had managed, by a set of comical misadventures, each to find himself engaged to be married to the same young lady – who, amusingly, thought herself engaged to only one man. Doors swung open and closed as the actor changed from identity to identity.
The second play was a heartbreaking tale of an orphan girl who starved in the snow selling hothouse violets – her grandmother recognised her at the last, and swore that she was the babe stolen ten years back by bandits, but it was too late, and the frozen little angel breathed her last. I must confess I found myself wiping my eyes with my linen handkerchief more than once.
The performance finished with a rousing historical narrative: the entire company played the men and women of a village on the shore of the ocean, seven hundred years before our modern times. They saw shapes rising from the sea, in the distance. The hero joyously proclaimed to the villagers that these were the Old Ones whose coming was foretold, returning to us from R’lyeh, and from dim Carcosa, and from the plains of Leng, where they had slept, or waited, or passed out the time of their death. The comedian opined that the other villagers had all been eating too many pies and drinking too much ale, and they were imagining the shapes. A portly gentleman playing a priest of the Roman God tells the villagers that the shapes in the sea were monsters and demons, and must be destroyed.
At the climax, the hero beat the priest to death with his own crucifer, and prepared to welcome Them as They came. The heroine sang a haunting aria, whilst, in an astonishing display of magic-lantern trickery, it seemed as if we saw Their shadows cross the sky at the back of the stage: the Queen of Albion herself, and the Black One of Egypt (in shape almost like a man), followed by the Ancient Goat, Parent to a Thousand, Emperor of all China, and the Czar Unanswerable, and He Who Presides over the New World, and the White Lady of the Antarctic Fastness, and the others. And as each shadow crossed the stage, or appeared to, from out of every throat in the gallery came, unbidden, a mighty “Huzzah!” until the air itself seemed to vibrate. The moon rose in the painted sky, and then, at its height, in one final moment of theatrical magic, it turned from a pallid yellow, as it was in the old tales, to the comforting crimson of the moon that shines down upon us all today.
The members of the cast took their bows and their curtain calls to cheers and laughter, and the curtain fell for the last time, and the show was done.
"There,” said my friend. “What did you think?”
“Jolly, jolly good,” I told him, my hands sore from applauding.
“Stout fellow,” he said, with a smile. “Let us go backstage.”
We walked outside and into an alley beside the theatre, to the stage door, where a thin woman with a wen on her cheek knitted busily. My friend showed her a visiting card, and she directed us into the building and up some steps to a small communal dressing room.
Oil lamps and candles guttered in front of smeared looking-glasses, and men and women were taking off their make-up and costumes with no regard to the proprieties of gender. I averted my eyes. My friend seemed unperturbed. “Might I talk to Mr Vernet?” he asked, loudly.
A young woman who had played the heroine’s best friend in the first play, and the saucy i
The young man who stood up in response was lean; less conventionally handsome than he had seemed from the other side of the footlights. He peered at us quizzically. “I do not believe I have had the pleasure...?”
“My name is Henry Camberley,” said my friend, drawling his speech somewhat. “You may have heard of me.”
“I must confess that I have not had that privilege,” said Vernet.
My friend presented the actor with an engraved card.
The man looked at the card with unfeigned interest. “A theatrical promoter? From the New World? My, my. And this is...?” He looked at me.
“This is a friend of mine, Mister Sebastian. He is not of the profession.”
I muttered something about having enjoyed the performance enormously, and shook hands with the actor.