Forrest Leo - The Gentleman

‘Excuse me, sir,’ he says.

‘Hello, Simmons. What was the matter out there?’

‘No one can find your wife, sir.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just what I said.’

‘She’s probably gone up to her room,’ I say.

‘ My room,’ puts in Lizzie.

‘No, sir, I’ve checked all the rooms. The guests say one minute she was dancing and laughing and generally hostessing, and the next moment she was gone.’

I stare at him. ‘What do you mean, “gone”?’

‘I mean gone, sir. They say it’s as though she just — disappeared.’

I have just had an interview with the Devil. Is not that strange?

What is stranger still is that I leave the interview not fearful, not awestruck, not cast down — but, rather, feeling a little sad for the fellow, and wondering how I might contrive to sometime have him round for tea. He seems to me on the whole a decent chap, and I am struck that perhaps we (by which I mean humanity) have misunderstood him. Of course I could be wrong — perhaps this is all a ruse and will end in my eternal damnation. But if so, at least I have had a pleasant conversation with a stimulating partner.

I am not a religious man by inclination — I have time to worship only one deity, and Thou, Poetry, art my goddess — but I am born in England, and I have been brought up in a God-fearing English society. To suppose that things Up Above — or more to the point, Down Below — might be different than we have in the past supposed is, I admit, a bit of a reorientation; but not an unpleasant one.

Nearly as soon as the thought enters my head it is replaced by another, which is that perhaps my visitor wasn’t the Devil at all. He could have been mad, or he could have been playing a practical joke on me. That seems on the whole unlikely, however. If he was mad, he was unlike any madman I have ever met — and I have, to be candid, spent some little time with madmen. (I find them especially poetical, and have made it my business on occasion to visit Bedlam in an observatory capacity.)* No, I do not think him mad. An imposter, then? Sent, perhaps, by Pendergast? It is doubtful. I would not put such a thing past my rival; but if the fellow I just spoke to was counterfeiting, he did so better than any actor I have ever seen upon the stage.

If he was neither lunatic nor confidence man, logic if not reason tells me that he was then the Devil. Besides, he knew of the incident with the priest and the cobblestone. As no one besides he and I (he the priest, I mean) were present for the exchange, and as I have told no one of it but Simmons and Lizzie, how could he have discovered it other than by supernatural means? I have an acquaintance — friendship being not my forte or his — who says that when one eliminates the impossible, then what is left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Well then, the Gentleman was the Devil.

And if the Devil (which fact I have just resolved upon) then he was either counterfeiting docility or not. But what reason had he to feign friendship? The man left without my soul — without anything, in fact, save the finest volume of poetry published since the First Folio.* His diminutive demeanour gained him nothing — except my sympathy, which I do not know why he would have needed if he were secretly the terror we think him.

So, then, I again am led to the conclusion that the encounter I have just had was genuine. The Devil is not, in fact, a wicked stealer of souls and ravisher of virgins — he is, rather, a melancholy man of between five and six feet tall (I have no eye for those things), who stammers slightly and enjoys books and wishes himself better liked.

This of course alters the last two thousand years of literature. Most notably, it casts the exploits of one Johann Faustus in an especially dubious light. If the Devil is the Gentleman I have just met, then what precisely happened to the Wittenbergovian necromancer? It seems poor Mr Marlowe and Herr Goethe were misinformed. And what then? Ought I to publish something saying so? It could be the making of me. On the other hand, it might not be viewed in a strictly serious light. It could, in fact, lead to a deal of ridicule. I do not like to be seen as ridiculous. I suppose I will not publish an article. A poem, though, could be acceptable. The public rarely views poems as wholly factual affairs. A poem, then! It will be an epic in the Miltonian vein, though with perhaps a touch more Byron or Ariosto. A comical epic, but with serious and indeed existential undertones.

Here, though, I encounter an unfortunate stumbling block. I believe I have mentioned that my literary fame is of the passing, rather than lasting, sort. I am (I am perfectly aware) a strictly momentary sensation. Already, in fact, I have noted my waning reputation. I have published nothing in eight months, and the world is forgetting the tame wit of Lionel Savage. For me to compose an epic, even a comic one, would not do — it would confuse my readers. I might perhaps work my way to a place where I could publish it; but I am not there now. I have not written in a long while. If I attempted something on the scale I am considering, I would doubtless fall short of the mark. It would not be quite good enough to be good and not quite bad enough to be bad and would rather be simply mediocre, which is to me the single worst fate that can befall a work of art. I have no intention of being mediocre.

If, though, I were to regain my talent— to begin with trifles, at length advance to little amusements, from there to small gems, onward to ambitious flights of fancy, thereafter to— Yes, I believe that is the way it must be done.

I will write my way from impending obscurity to national hero.

And so I write all night. I do not spare a thought for my wife. She will return soon, no doubt, which is a pity; but until she does I will consider myself a condemned man handed a reprieve. I turn off the gas-jet (O metaphor!) and light candles and arrange my writing things with a care I have not taken since my marriage. To call it bliss would be to call Heaven pleasant. (I pause at that — the Gentleman had said Hell was more pleasant than one might suppose; and if there is a Hell I suppose there truly must be a Heaven: and what, then, is it like?)

I begin with trepidation. What if after all my jealously nourished hopes, I find myself still unable to write? But my hand seems to move pen across paper of its own accord. My brain has no conscious control over its speed. I am like a man who has wandered through the desert for an eternity and is suddenly confronted with a limitless expanse of cool, fresh, clean, blessed water. It is strange to me how easily the words flow. My wife will surely return home soon, wherever she may have gone; so why this sense of freedom? I do not know. But I take full advantage of it.

The sun rises and the candles are puddles on my desk, and I have finished a sheaf of poems. They are not masterpieces, but they amuse me and are sure to amuse a public long deprived of my words. I am composing aloud, as I do. ‘i WALKED a-LONG the STRAND as EVE-ning FELL / And SAW to MY sur-PRISE a GIRL who DID-n’t… look… well?’ I crumple the page and begin again. It is not quite right, but that is no matter. This is the sort of thing that happens when one writes: one expects it. Iambic pentameter is an unforgiving mistress. Ten syllables and five stresses a line — there is not room for fools or amateurs.

I am about to begin again when I hear the front door open and shut. My wife, I suppose. I sigh. It couldn’t last forever. I resolve not to let her reappearance dampen my mood or inhibit my verse. I plough ahead.