Forrest Leo - The Gentleman

‘Absolutely not,’ she says, still flushed from her little speech.

The doorbell rings again. I am quite certain that there is something not right and probably supernatural about the doorbell at Pocklington Place. It rattles the nerves as ordinary doorbells do not. I have inspected it personally many times, and can see nothing amiss — it is a simple contraption which when pulled from without causes a small bell to jingle within. But somehow, I know beyond doubt, there is malice in the little thing. It jars me such that I cannot recall what I was thinking on before it rang.

I listen. There are footsteps, the front door opens, there are voices, it shuts. More footsteps, by which I mean both that there are again footsteps and that there are more of them: I can hear that the number of the steppers is multiplied. Where only one set went toward the door — that of Simmons or a footman — several have returned.

Guests.

‘Good heavens, they’re coming.’ I hear the desperation in my own voice. ‘This is awful.’

‘What’s so terrible about a party?’ Lizzie asks. I stare at her, aghast. She blinks at me bovinely. How can this person, so much more worldly than myself in certain deplorable ways, not know why society parties are terrible?

The doorbell rings again, and my train of thought is derailed and several passengers are killed. I hope none of them were poetical. The door opens and shuts again. More guests. Many of them. At least a hundred. Perhaps a thousand.

‘Lizzie,’ I say, ‘have you ever been to a society party?’

‘Obviously not, because I was raised by you, the most boring man on the planet.’ I resent the allegation, but before I can reply, the infernal doorbell rings for a third time. This time the door is open for longer and is hardly shut before the bell rings yet again. I am becoming very agitated. I wish to crawl under my desk and put a pillow over my head. Lizzie, though, isn’t finished with me.

‘I have yet to meet your wife and I have nothing to wear and have been travelling all day and look a fright. This is a calamity.’ She fixes me with a glare that plainly implicates me in her troubles. When she has satisfied herself that I am feeling suitably remorseful (I’m not), she says, ‘I’m going to my room to put myself together.’

With some trepidation, I say, ‘Your room—’

She cuts me off. ‘Oh yes, my room is no longer my room. How could I have forgotten? Very well, I am going to your room. Have I mentioned that I hate you?’

Then she sweeps out of the study without a backward glance. I know that she wants me to feel chastened, and it irks me that somehow I do. Lizzie has an unattractive habit of making you feel precisely the way she intends.* I wonder if it is possible (I have wondered it often before) that she was not switched at birth with a fairy child.* It would make sense of many things I have never understood if she were a changeling.*

My study, if I have not already mentioned it, has two doors on its lower level, one leading upstairs to the bedchambers by a back stairway and another opening into a corridor which leads to the foyer, from which one can choose either to go upstairs by the main staircase or into the rest of the house. If one were cruel and perverse, one could also go up the spiral staircase and pick one’s way through the armchairs on the balcony and out one of three doors upon the upper level; but I do not like the noise on the iron of feet that are not mine, and so I discourage that path. Members of my family, by which I mean Lizzie, for she is the only member of my family — I do not count my wife for obvious reasons, though I suppose the law would — often use this when they mean to annoy me. My wife often uses it as well, but I do not believe she knows it annoys me; she is neither intelligent nor observant enough.*

Lizzie, though angry with me, has spared me the clamour of the iron spiral and gone up the back stairs. Through the other door drift the voices of a handful of party guests. The clock above the mantel tells me they are early. I do loathe people who are early to parties.*

I have not yet decided what to do. Killing myself seems ill-considered with Lizzie newly arrived, and quite out of the question during a party. It wouldn’t do to gas an entire household of society folks. There is a certain wicked part of me which thinks it could be just the thing—‘Society Murdered by Poet,’ Pendergast could write, damn him — but I do not in earnest wish them dead.

So I cannot kill myself yet, but neither can I face the guests. I am not mentally equipped at this time. Until further notice, I am resolved to hide in my study. I have a moment to consider what Lizzie said to me. It is true that I am not as carefree as I once was, but I do not believe I am quite as hopeless as she thinks.

I resolve to write a poem. I have found it impossible for six months, but I am not yet so broken that I shall go down without a fight. I search for a subject and recall my exchange with the priest. If ever there were matter suited to a poem, it is that. I have a queer fondness for tales of morality, and the public always embraces narratives with theological undertones. I begin.

‘Without the Devil, we’d both be out of a job,’ I say to myself. (I frequently compose aloud.) I attempt to render it into blank verse, alternating unstressed and stressed syllables into a pleasing configuration.

I could here bore you with a lengthy digression on iambic pentameter, but I will not. I trust you are familiar with it, and if not you need only consider the name. It is a poetic metre which consists of five iambs. An iamb is a pair of syllables, the first of which is unstressed and the second of which is stressed. It is the poetic metre which most closely replicates the rhythms of English speech, and has been the mode of poetic expression favoured by English poets for half a millennium. It is a beautiful thing, and one upon which I could discourse at great length, but I will not. I will only mention that it stirs within me great feeling. It provides structure and form for the greatest thoughts ever expressed in our language, and without it ours should be a meagre sort of poetry. There are of course some persons who choose not to utilise it — even I have at times succumbed to the enticements of other metres — but by and large if you say to yourself, ‘I am going to write a poem which will endure for a thousand years,’ you do not then sit down and attempt to write it in anything other than iambic pentameter.* Even Pendergast is not such a fool as to forsake it. It is a very beautiful thing.

And so I begin to compose. I speak in a singsong manner, hitting the stresses of the lines with exaggerated emphasis. ‘With-OUT the DEV-il WE’D both— Damn it.’ You observe that I am off the metre. Blank verse (which is of course unrhymed iambic pentameter) at its finest fits its words like a glove. Take, for instance, ‘To FOL-low KNOWL-edge LIKE a SINK-ing STAR / Be-YOND the UT-most BOUND of HU-man THOUGHT.’ It seems effortless. It becomes effortless — when I am consistently poetical for a stretch, I find that I begin to think in iambic pentameter. (i FIND that I be-GIN to THINK…) Alas, I have not been poetical / For such a long long while that I begin / To wonder if I ever shall again. I take a breath and reconfigure some words. ‘We’d BOTH be OUT of A… job.’ It’s awful. Drivel. Worse than drivel. I call for Simmons, who enters with impossible promptitude — was he listening at the door? I sometimes think he must be for the speed of his entrances, but I know that eavesdropping is not in his nature.

He is wearing a turban and a mask. He is doubtless required by my wife to wear them at her absurd party. I am gratified to note that his butler’s weeds are otherwise unaltered.