ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

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BUCHANAN’S HEAD

by

Avram Davidson

(From The Other Nineteenth Century by Avram Davidson (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2001)

 

BUCHANAN’S HEAD

Grant lived in sin with a buxom shrew; Tumbleton was in effect director of a privately endowed museum. After Eustace Williams had somewhat slightly recovered from his second nervous attack, Doctor Douglas McFall told him straightforwardly that he must give up the cottage-studio. He told him this in the presence of Williams’s friend Tumbleton and Grant, who had come down with McFall from town on the 9:15; and of his friend Harrison, who had already been staying with Williams in the country since having learned of the attack. The sick man’s condition was of such a nature that he required and would (for a while, as yet to be determined) require constant medical attention; and McFall, regardless of the fees, could not constantly be coming down to attend him; other medical men in the neighborhood of Troy Barns there was none. The cottage-studio stood nearer to two miles from the station than not. Sometimes there was a dogcart waiting, or a trap; more often there was not. The weather was unpredictable: McFall could neither be expected to burden himself with mackintosh or oilskins nor risk exposure to pneumonia as an alternative. Troy Barns was an out-of-the-way and brutish place, no neighbors for a full mile in any direction, and the sullen groom who acted as manservant could not be expected to prepare decent food if such were always available, which was not the case; upon neither the butcher’s cart nor the baker’s could one rely. McFall wound up this speech from, as it were, the throne, by saying he wondered Williams had not died of scurvy by now.
     “Which he damned well would have,” said Grant, in his usual growl, “if Harrison had not come down ahead of us.”
     Harrison said nothing, but touched his light gold beard, a gesture which often did him in place of speech. Williams gave evidence of desiring to say something, but he was still too feeble, and McFall racked on. “No chemist in case you run out of medicine, which you might, or you or that oaf Crutchett spill it, same thing it would come to: no, I want you where I can look at you and look you over as often as I think proper. You can’t go on living on bacon and bad potatoes and stale bread and stewed tea, you’ll be able to have fresh meat—chops, a joint, a nice fowl—and sprouts and greens, some decent wine, whatever I think best for your diet as we go along. If you have another of these moods in which you feel you cannot stay in the house, why, step to the curb and call a hansom or a four-wheeler—instead of rushing out into this barbarous wilderness and risk falling into an old quarry.”
     Williams moved forward in his chair, his lips began to move, he licked them, moved his right hand. But McFall gave him no chance. McFall said he didn’t care how “romantic” the cottage-studio was for a painter or poet, he wanted Williams within short distance of a hospital, if need be (he emphasised those words), and in particular St. Olave’s, where McFall stood high, though he did not say so; what he said was that Professor Schneiderhaus of Lepzig, a man knowing more about nervous diseases than any other man in Europe, including Charcot, was spending a year at St. Olave’s. Even McFall had to pause for breath, at which Williams said something at last, but so weakly that he could scarcely be heard to speak at all.
     Tumbleton it was who spoke and was heard, preening his left side-whisker, then his right: '”After all, Williams,” he said, “you can paint and write in London as well as anywhere. Lots of chaps do.”
     No: McFall, ignoring Tumbleton, pointed a thick finger at the sick man and said, in rolling tones, “I absolutely forbid you to touch brush to paint or pen to paper for at least six months. You are to undergo no exertion at all. For at least six months. For at least six months you are to do nothing requiring the expenditure of nervous energy more than to dress, climb into a smoking jacket, put your feet on the fender of the fireplace, and pick up a newspaper or a magazine. You are to take naps in the afternoon. One evening a week, if one of your friends—and you may thank your good stars that you have such good friends—if one or two or all three of these gentlemen here for that matter, wish to take you out for dinner at a quiet place, or to a music hall or a concert, why, very well, I allow that. But mind you: no drama.”
     He stopped, indicated by a rise of his tufty brows that Williams would at last be allowed to speak. After a moment, Williams did so.
     “What is the alternative?” he whispered.
     “Death or the straight-waistcoat,” said McFall, with quite terrible promptness.
     Williams collapsed back into his chair.
     “Well, there’s no more to be said,” said Grant. “We’ll pack you up”—he thrust the poker into the smoky fire as though it had been a mortal enemy; but still it smoked—“and take you back to town. You’ll live a quiet life, we’ll all see to that, we’ll all look after you, and I understand from Dr. McFall as we were coming down, that at the end of six months, when you will be much better, that there would be no objection raised if you’d wish to try the sea air; damn these coals, they aren’t proper coals at all, they’re half slate; in London you’ll have decent coals, you’ll be warm!
     “Warmth,” said McFall, “is of the utmost importance in illness of your sort. You must have a good fire.” The lamp smoked, too, in its sooty globe, but Grant, having failed to do anything with it a moment earlier, did not try now. The wavering small light of the lamp, the dim sun through the grimy windows and dusty skylight, did little lo show what might be on the unfinished canvas in the corner where an armor breastplate hung askew on a tailor’s dummy and a mass of cobweb had settled on a plumed hat; or what might be written on any of the dusty sheets of paper on the desk in another corner, loosely confined by what looked like a dictionary—something clattered in the kitchen, something smashed, somebody swore. Briefly.
     “There is a problem,” Harrison said. His voice was rather high, but it was not effeminate. “I live with my father and my brother, my brother is somewhat simpleminded, a gentle soul and no trouble to us, we know his ways, but he is not a fit companion for an invalid. Tumbleton is a married man with a small child, and, I understand, another soon to be expected.” Tumbleton did not precisely preen, but he did straighten himself a bit. And nod. “Eustace could hardly stay there.” Tumbleton suddenly looked grave and slightly shook his head. “Grant has his own arrangements.” Grant lived in sin with a buxom shrew whom only Grant could manage, and then only within certain limits, and within those limits there could be no place for Williams. Grant said nothing; his face, smooth-shaven save for a moustache, did not move Grant exported cheap bottled spirits to the Colonies under a variety of bright labels, all of which he himself had designed; now and then when the sale of one label flagged, Grant designed another: this had become the extent of Grant’s work as an active artist.
     The wind wuthered down the chimney, driving more smoke into the room; Dr. McFall reproved it by coughing and waving his hands. “Very well, very well; what is the problem? Shall I tell you what is the problem? The problem is that your friend Williams is a very ill man. I have done my best for him before. Has it helped, no it has not helped. This is his second breakdown. The tonic which I prescribed after the first, I see it untouched. The elixir, on the contrary, is all over the floor, and the bottle is still where it fell. The diet pudding? In the larder, untouched, save for what the rats have mucked about. The claret, on the other hand, which should have lasted another month, is gone, it is clean gone, there are not even any empty bottles, but there is a barrel of beer which I did not order, and a case of gin, which I absolutely forbade; that is the problem, that, and the minor matter that your friend Williams had the good fortune to be found lying by the road, well-nigh insensible, by perhaps the only police-constable to have passed this way since the Chartists marched on London; what is the time, 1 must not miss my train, I have a Harley Street office with patients waiting for me, I have a practice in the Borough with a rather young partner who wants being looked in on rather often, I have wards to walk to Si. Olave’s—problems? problems? Do not speak to me of problems, Mr. Harrison.”
     He glanced at his watch, raised his eyebrows, began next to put things back into his black case. Harrison touched his beard, hut. nonetheless, said, “There is a problem of money. And where Eustace is to live. Not here, certainly, but—”
     McFall would be butted no buts; his red face grew redder. Williams had money of his own, had he not? What? It had been somehow anticipated? There was a shortage in the last quarter’s income and there were no accounts, no hopes of recovering any of the shortage? (Things were suddenly very quiet in the kitchen.) Well, he, McFall, had not said that Williams must take rooms in the Albany, neither did he advise him to live in a doss house in Stepney. There were other places, quite livable, places respectable and yet inexpensive. “Mr. Grant and Mr. Tumbleton and I have already discussed this.” He snapped the crocodile-bag shut.
     Tumbleton blinked, taken slightly by surprise, fluffed his whiskers. “Ah, yes, Williams, Harrison, we did. We did. Old Solomon, you know old Solomon, the painter’s cousin? Picturesque old fellow, ‘the artists’ friend,’ they call him, buys and sells used canvases, picture frames, easels, and such things, buys . . . rents out . . . sells . . . ah, theatrical costumery and painter’s props and ah—”
     Grant was suddenly as impatient as the physician. “Oh, damn it, man, don’t give us an inventory of old Solomon’s business affairs. He is in the cheap business, and he had a cheap house on lease in Upper Welchman Street and is willing to rent the first floor cheap, rent not on an annual but on a quarterly basis so you needn’t be hung up for a year’s money when you’ll likely not be needing the place for more than six months. Eustace Williams may store all his things in one of the rooms on the second floor, or in two of them, for that matter: so long as Solomon continues to have access to his own rubble and rubbish also stored up there on the same floor. It is just the thing for you, Williams, and there is no other thing for you, Williams, and thank God for you that you needn’t depend for pennies, to say nothing of pounds, on the sale of a painting or a poem, Williams.” Williams blinked very rapidly and for a very long moment after Grant said this last.

Things did not, really, go at all badly.
     Crutchett vanished without trace, and with him the possibility of a detailed explanation of the perhaps not precisely alchemical mystery of how an amount of Williams’s money had been transmuted into dross—or even how several dozens of claret had become, somehow, changed into at least one barrel of beer and a quantity of gin. But it was felt that this was a fair price to pay for a total absence of Crutchett. Old Solomon, it turned out, slightly to Grant’s annoyed surprise, was surprised to think that the gentleman had thought the furniture of the apartments in Upper Welchman Street was not included in the rent: it was; it was old furniture, but it was good enough: so there was a saving, there. And, perhaps equally surprising, perhaps even more, only Grant could have said, and Grant did not say; Kitty—whom Grant referred to, when he referred to her at all, as “my slut”—Kitty undertook to see that the apartments were cleaned, and Kitty did see to it that the apartments were cleaned. It was Kitty who hired the cook-housekeeper, and Kitty who swooped down at irregular and unannounced intervals to see that the cooking was done and that the house was kept, and kept as well as anyone could expect. She came usually, and departed, usually, while Williams was being taken somewhere which made very little demand on his nervous energy; Harrison once asked, curiously, “Have you ever actually seen her?”
     “No,” said Williams, incuriously, “but I have heard her. Once.” Perhaps Dr. McFall might not have approved. But no one told him. Dr. McFall, it is true, did not come to see Williams as often as Williams’s friends had expected. Not quite as often. However, his directions were scrupulously carried out: Williams drank the claret, and he drank it as prescribed. And Williams was taken regularly to St. Olave’s, where Professor Schneiderhaus asked him many questions and grunted a great deal and peered at the insides of his lower eyelids, and other things like that. Eustace had little to do, otherwise, except to thrust his feet into his slippers and place his slippered feet on the fender of the fireplace in which burned real coal, and to read the papers. The daily papers arrived twice a day; the reviews were lent by Tumbleton, who brought them himself, but did not pay for them himself, they being paid for by the Duke’s Museum, of which Tumbleton was Vice-Director. The Hon. Director was the present Duke himself, who never set foot in the Museum except for the Annual Meeting, or when there was an exhibition of Landseer. Or Bonheur. The Duke was very fond of Bonheur. “There, Tumbleton, you see? A woman, a mere slip of a woman, and a French woman, at that: and just see what she does with horseflesh. Eh? Now, why cannot our English artists all paint that sort of thing? Eh? Tumbleton?”
     The Duke, of course, never dreamed of looking at the list of periodicals to which the Museum subscribed, and, to the one single member of the Board who ever had, and who had asked why the Museum subscribed to literary publications “as well,” Tumbleton solemnly replied, “Because, Sir Bascomb, it is part of the whole duty of man.” Sir Bascomb never asked again. Williams, of course, never asked at all.
     Though from time to time he would exclaim, almost with a note of despair in his voice, “Oh, God! Another exhibition of that fellow’s wretched daubs!” or, “Dear Lord! Another edition of this man’s wretched doggerel?” To which Tumbleton might reply, with a good-natured shrug, that this man or that fellow seemed to have the knack of pleasing the public taste. “The public taste. Oh, God. Dear Lord.” Williams might actually strike his own head with his fist.
     His friends were divided as to how to reply to such scenes. Harrison did once suggest that perhaps some of the reviews should be withheld, Tumbleton (unhappy)  had pointed out that Williams would be sure to notice their absence. Harrison (unhappy) had perforce agreed. Tumbleton suggested that an edition of Williams’s unpublished poems was just the thing to raise his wasted spirits. Harrison said that he was merely the junior partner in the firm and that his father, who was the senior, had more than once pointed out how meagerly the single publication of Williams’s other poems (“. . . although, mind you, certainly the best. . .”) had sold. Harrison suggested that an exhibition of Williams’s paintings was what was really needed. And Tumbleton sighed, stirred, said that, even should the Duke agree (and one feared he wouldn’t), why—the excitement! No, no. Williams must on no account be allowed to become excited. And Grant had made a very coarse suggestion as to what he felt that Williams needed.
     “To buck him up,” said Grant, growling.
     “Eustace is still fearfully ill, you know.”
     “Eustace can try, can’t he? What I have admired about him is that he always did try, never mind what the critics said, damn the critics, he would try! Again. Reason why he went to that bloody place in the country: to try. No, I tell you that what he needs is—”
     “But it is exciting, and the doctor—”
     A shaft of light lit up Harrison’s pale beard and hair, but Grant grimaced, said, “About as exciting as any other natural function, I’m sure the doctor would agree.”
     The doctor did not say if he would agree or not agree, when, not very long after, Grant ran him down in the private bar of a place near the Hospital. He grunted (perhaps a habit picked up from Schneiderhaus), asked, “Is he sleeping well these days?”
     Grant rubbed his smooth cheeks and chin, fingered his sleek moustache, and said, No, he believed not. Fellow was complaining about that just the other day, said Grant. “Well,” McFall declared, heavily, “he damned well should be sleeping well. Why hasn’t he been sleeping well? Should be sleeping well. Lack of sleep must inevitably lead to death or the straight-waistcoat. Why hasn’t he been taking a sleeping-draught?” Grant stared a moment. Then, with a degree of uncustomary tact, suggested that perhaps “the Professor” had neglected to prescribe him one. McFall grunted again.
     “Shouldn’t wonder. Foreign fellows don’t know everything, look at Charcot and his hysterical cow-maids turning somersaults, I shall damned well, prescribe him one. By Zeus and by Apollo.” He called for pen and he called for ink, wrote so firmly that the nib at one point dug into the paper. Called for brandy.
     “More brandy, Doctor?”
     “Yes, damn it, waiter, more brandy. Do you think that I drank the ink? I shall pay for it instanter, too, more than I can say for some of my patients, I have a Harley Street office to pay for, and the lease on a house in the Borough to pay for where I have an incompetent partner to pay for and I have a house and a wife and two unmarried daughters in Belgrave Square and an unmarried son to pay for and carriages and horses to pay for, and if you were obliged to walk the wards with me and observe the immense amount of human misery which can never be paid for—” McFall stopped abruptly, stared at Grant. Who stared back. McFall tried to hand Grant the pen, then handed him the prescription. “The chemist will put the directions on the bottle,” he said. “I used to dispense when I first began practice but I don’t now. Do not even think of sending your friend to try the sea air as yet. It would be death or the straight-waistcoat. Wait-ter.”
     Williams felt much better. “Sleep, sleep, is nature’s sweet restorer,” he informed Harrison. “It is sleep which knits up the raveled sleeve of care.”
     “Eustace, you have no idea how happy I am to hear you say so.”
     Williams was happy to be saying so. “It makes all the difference. The difference between strolling in a rose garden and tossing on a bed of thorns.”
     “I say, you ought to write that down, you know.”
     “Ought I? Well, perhaps you are—No.” He settled into his easy chair again, a faint smile on his face. “You forget that I am forbidden to touch pen to paper for a good while yet.” He pronounced himself restless on this point before, but now seemed content, quite content.
     Harrison remembered, apologized. “Though I thought you had been. Doing so, I mean.”
     “No, no. Devil a bit of it.”
     Harrison moved about on the heavy oaken settle. “Well, in that case, perhaps I—It is really too good a line to—Paper? Ink?”
     “All the newpaper you want. Ink? Don’t know if there’s such a thing in the house.” Harrison seemed faintly discomfited. Williams said that the lines would keep. “I shan’t forget them. I have a good many more, you know, all up here,” he tapped his brow. “They come to me in dreams, visions. Strolling through the rose garden, gently pushing away the crystal ball.” And, in reply to his friend’s inquiring look, he explained that, as he would lie abed, relishing the soon-to-be-expected slumber, sleep would (as it were) slowly approach in the form of a crystal ball, floating, floating slowly toward him. “And I, knowing that it will keep on coming no matter what may be, I take a sort of curious pleasure in pushing it away for a while. Once. Twice. Perhaps a third time. Then, finally, I allow it to snuggle close.” He smiled. “Delicious.”
     “Excellent. Excellent.”
     But this excellence did not endure. By and by Harrison, coming into the sitting room one day, observed his friend to be walking back and forth, back and forth, restless, and, in fact, groaning. He started on seeing the visitor: “Eustace, what is wrong, my poor fellow?” “I cannot sleep. I cannot sleep, I lie awake, and then I have such sick and troubled fancies, and I get up and walk about, walk about, hoping to tire myself so that—”
     Then it was Harrison who gave a start. Williams was indeed wearing the smoking jacket. But he was wearing it over his night-garment. “Surely, Eustace, you have not, I hope that you have not been pacing the floor since last night? Do not say, ‘No, no.’ Look: you are not yet dressed. Eustace.”
     Williams glanced at his attire, gaped, pressed his hands to his temples, groaned. “What can this mean?” asked Harrison. “And you gave me such a good account of the effects of the sleeping-draught—” Williams burst out laughing.
     “The sleeping-draught! Of course! Edward! God bless you! Will you believe that I had forgotten to have it refilled! And that I had forgotten that I had forgotten!” The two friends laughed heartily at this. Then Williams said that he would dress at once and take care of the matter; but his friend raised a hand which protested this decision.
     “Dress? By all means, dress. However, you are not to exert yourself: I shall go and have it refilled, this is it, here on the chimneypiece, is it not? Yes? Shan’t be long.” Then he clapped his hand to his own head. “Good Heavens, your forgetfulness is contagious! Where am I to refill it? Where is the chemist’s?”
     “Just round the corner to your left, second door down: Jessup. Chemist. At least I believe Grant said so.”
     Grant was quite correct. The chemist came out from his dispensing room, on his ruddy face a smile of inquiry which ebbed a bit as he looked at the bottle Harrison set on the counter, requesting that it be refilled. “Directly. . . .”
     “Well, sir. Yes, sir. But do you think it altogether wise, sir?”
     Harrison was surprised, and, in fact, rather put out, thinking of his afflicted friend waiting at home. “What do you mean, sir. ‘Do I think it wise?’ I have nothing to think about it, Doctor Douglass McFall has thought about it, the Doctor Douglass McFall; you are Mr. Jessup? Be so kind, Mr. Jessup, to let me have the mixture as before. Directly.” Mr. Jessup was so kind, he came back directly, and he said no more except to say that that would be one and eightpence, sir.
     Williams was already dressed, smiled cheerfully, took the bottle and replaced it on the chimneypiece, thanked Harrison very much; and then, some new thought occurring to him, said, “Edward, would you mind. This being the footman’s day off”—the (mythical) footman was a favorite joke between them—“and Simmons being such a heavy, slow old thing, and I being so forgetful, and the steps so steep and dark, would you go down and ask her for the measuring glass? Then I needn’t worry about its being here when I need it tonight.”
     The steps were indeed steep and dark, and Simmons, seated and staring into her own fire in her kitchen, was indeed a heavy, slow old thing. Eventually, however, she was able to focus her mind and to say that the measuring glass was on the night table next to Mr. Williams’s bed; and from this declaration she would not budge; so Harrison went upstairs and repeated to his friend that Simmons had said . . . what she had said. “No, it isn’t,” Williams said promptly. “While you were gone I found it there, over there. Silly old slattern; never mind.” Suddenly his face changed, he repeated the words, “Never mind?” in such an entirely different tone of voice that Harrison was astonished, and, thinking that it was the woman’s mistake which was bothering, said that Williams was not to be peevish—
     He could, the next moment, have bitten his tongue; instead, said, “Forgive me, Eustace, of course you are not being peevish,” but it was too late. The man was being peevish, suddenly took up several of the publications from the low table where they lay, waved them furiously in Harrison’s face. “Don’t be peevish? Never mind?” His voice rose, his teeth actually grated; almost, he ripped the magazines apart to open them before his friend’s greatly troubled eyes. “Poetry? Do you call this poetry?” His breath trembled, his voice as well. “And as for this—” He held up an open page from an illustrated: “Is this worthy to be called painting?—And as for the characters of these men, which are too vile to—”
     “Eustace . . . Eustace. . . .”
     But now Eustace actually did rip them apart, or rather, he began to do so, but Harrison, pleading Tumbleton’s embarrassment at having to excuse this to the librarian at the Museum, gently dissuaded him from any further destruction.
     He also insisted on staying for dinner; then on taking Williams to a music hall, the nearest, the Vicereine. The Vicereine was the nearest, but it was nowhere near the best. Williams showed no pleasure in seeing and hearing the tunes, muttered, slumped in his seat, nodded off for a bit from time to time, groaned, awoke. “I perhaps should not have brought you here, Eustace, this is wretched stuff, not even third rate. Would you like to go?”
     No: Williams, in a dreary voice, said that it was better watching a superannuated artiste than watching Buchanan’s head. But after the curtain dropped on Madame Adelaida, or whatever she was called, he rose abruptly and made his way through the mostly empty row, with Harrison, taken by surprise, half-scuttling after him. He found him waiting, found him glaring, heard him saying, between clenched teeth, “And as for Rossetti—!
     It was easy to humor him, here. “Well, true, Eustace, true; Rossetti is not the thing nowadays, no one looks at his pictures, no one reads his poetry, the man is quite démodé, I quite agree.” Williams became placid as he heard these words, the slightest touch of his arms persuaded him to move. At the door, with the voice of some aged buffoon comedian echoing dimly from within, he stopped. Turned to face his companion.
     “Rossetti also tossed upon the bed of thorns and yet he too found the key to the rose garden, you know.” He said this very quietly.
     “But still,” Tumbleton observed, some while later (it proved not then possible for the three to meet at once). “But still. Whilst in some ways certainly he is better than, say, after his first and even his second, ah, nervous crisis, in other ways, ah—”
     “—he is worse,” Grant finished. Grant was never patient with word-fumblings. “Furthermore, it is my opinion that he may be taking too much of that sleeping-draught. Don’t know how many times I’ve refilled it for—”
     “You! You have refilled it for him many times!” Tumbleton’s face was half astonished, half aghast. “Why, I have done so, I don’t recall how often, but, ah, ah, often,” he concluded hastily, in the face of Grant’s awful glare.
     Then it was Harrison’s turn to speak about that.
     It was agreed that McFall must be spoken to, and at once; they divided their forces: Tumbleton went to Harley Street, Harrison the Borough, Grant to St. Olave’s. Grant stopped first at Williams’s, found him alternately snoring and muttering, shaving kit laid out but not used; removed the medicine bottle, stopped at the establishment of Jessup. Chemist, looked in at the private bar of the place near the hospital; finally ran down McFall, who was washing his hands in a basin on a cart, in one of the wards. He thrust the bottle at the physician, asked, sans preface, “What is in this sleeping-draught you prescribed for Williams?”
     McFall looked at him from red-rimmed eyes, then looked at the bottle, dried his hands, took the bottle, then sniffed it, then held the besmeared label close. “Ah, yes. ‘In it’? Basically, chloral and water.”
     “Chloral? Chloral. Good God. Isn’t that the stuff that Coleridge and De Quincey both went stark mad from using?”
     “No. No, no. That was laudanum. Tincture of opium. I did not say laudanum. Neither did I prescribe it for your friend. This is chloral, chloral hydrate, a synthetic; different sort of thing entirely . . . though sometimes the effects of overuse: fantasy, hallucination, addiction . . . what is this you are thrusting into my face now?”
     This, on a billhead elaborately engraved Jessup, et cetera, was a list of dates and of the quantities of chloral dispensed to Williams on those dates. Jessup was probably not required to have provided this list to a layman, but Jessup had perhaps his reasons for doing so; besides, Grant was a great bully. McFall scanned the list, slowly. It was then his turn to say, “Good God!” After a moment more he said, more quietly, “He should not have been allowed to have had that much. How is he?”
     Grant told him how Williams was. “And in addition to all that, he has developed a hatred, which I can only describe as maniacal, of every artist being exhibited and every poet being published, and has been writing letters on the sneak to the reviews and magazines and newspapers accusing them, these people, I mean, of every imaginable vice. Harrison suspected something when he saw ink stain on Williams’s fingers, oh, a good while ago. Admitted, that jealousy is a very natural human emotion, still—”
     McFall gave a very deep sigh. “Yes. ‘Still.’ Go on.”
     Grant did go on. He went on to say that Williams had first denied it all, then insisted that it was all true and that he acted out of public duty, then he had shrieked and babbled and wept and said that all of it and much more had been revealed to him by what he called Buchanan’s head.
     “He called it—what?
     “Called it Buchanan’s head. Said that first there was a sort of crystal ball in a rose garden, then gradually this had changed into a human head, says it spoke to him . . . speaks to him . . . tells him all these things, tells him that x is a fornicator and y is an adulterer and z is a pornographer, and so on and so on. Says he doesn’t know how he knows it’s Buchanan’s head, just that he knows, nor does he know who ‘Buchanan’ is, and he must have the drug or he cannot sleep, which is horrible, and when he takes the drug, and he has taken more and more of it—What? ‘Miracle that he is still alive?’—We must, 1 suppose, have you to thank for this miracle, Doctor Douglass McFall; yes, I am also ‘sorry.’”
     As for the appearance of the head, aside from there being no body attached to it, it was most remarkable for its expression of jealousy, malignancy, and hatred; also that it appeared to have been badly marred on one side; how, Williams could neither explain nor adequately describe. “What is to be done?” demanded Grant.
     McFall began to walk away from the cart, Grant walking with him. “‘What is to be done,’ indeed. If you had just now for the first time come and given me a description of such symptoms I should have prescribed complete rest and a total absence of nervous excitement. I should also have fell obliged to prescribe a sleeping-draught, chloral being the most effective one I know. What is to be done now . . . either a private asylum, which is, if good, far from cheap, and, if cheap, far from good. . . . For, you see”—McFall stopped, faced Grant—“certainly he should have no more chloral. Certainly if it is cut off the results will be terrible. As for the public asylums . . . Perhaps he should have a keeper, one who is with him all the time. Several, in fact: round the clock. No money for that? No money, no money. Death or the straight-waistcoat; pleasant alternatives. Sometimes, you know, Mr. Grant, there are questions to which the only answer seems to be that there is no answer. A personality constitutionally strong . . . but when a personality is constitutionally weak—Ah well. If you believe that I have been remiss in my duties, you are at liberty to complain of me. Meanwhile, you may accompany me as I continue to attend to my patients. If you wish.” He walked off again.
     Grant, after looking round the ward and at its many patients, and now for the first time listening to them as well, did not wish.

Along Upper Welchman Street there shambled—and finally stopped at the steps of the house and fumbled a ring of keys from his pocket, now and then mumbling a word or two to himself—a stooped old man with a white beard; his silk hat was older, taller, than those worn by the three men at the top of the steps, and he wore a long silk coat: each clean enough, hat and coat, though showing, each, the signs of long, hard wear. Suddenly he looked up and noticed the group in the doorway, and, clearly, noticed something more about them than their presences alone.
     “What! What!” he exclaimed, a look of more immediate distress replacing the one of general sadness on his face, hollowed cheeks and pouchy eyes, “Gentlemen. . . . Gentlemen. . . . What is wrong? What is wrong?”
     Tumbleton took this as a signal for a heavy sigh. “I am afraid that you have lost your tenant, Mr. Solomon,” he said; “and we, our friend.”
     Mr. Solomon lifted a thin hand as one who wards off a blow, “Blessed be the True Judge,” he murmured. “Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh—”
     “Do you quite understand what Mr. Tumbleton has just told you, Solomon? Mr. Williams has died. Sometime last night.”
     The much-brushed, much-worn old hat bobbed. “I understand, I understand. I understood at once. Poor young man, eh? Poor Mr. Williams. And I thought he was getting better. Better, I thought he was getting. His illness returned after all, then?” This question was asked in a tone not confident. There was a silence.
     “Well, you are entitled to know the truth. And would find out in any event. I fear that while the balance of his mind was disturbed, poor Williams took his own life. There is no doubt about it at all.”
     Harrison burst out, “Poor Eustace! It is ghastly!” His voice broke.
     This time the old man lifted both hands. His face was horrified. “God help us! God have mercy on him. Imbeshreer!” He tottered a moment, took hold of the railing, steadied himself, moved hesitantly. “What should I do? Should I go inform the—Can I—” They beckoned him, and he went slowly up the steps. “Eh?”
     Tumbleton: The fact is . . . The fact is. . . .
     Solomon: Have you notified? He has family? What a shock for them. A, a priest? A minister? An undertaker, at least?
     Grant (waves all this away): Harrison’s “fact” is that Williams did it in his own bed and everything is drenched with blood. He should never have been allowed to shave himself.
     The old man bared his teeth, drew in a hissing breath.
     “There’s not a clean sheet to be found,” said Grant; “all the linens must have gone to the wash and not come back. The housekeeper has already gotten herself sodden with gin and is of no use at all. So we’ve covered him with a sort of tarpaulin we found out back, the coroner cannot come just yet, there’s a policeman in there now—and the rest must wail. Family? An aunt in Wales, somewhere.”
     The old man said that a tarpaulin was not enough. “That’s not a proper covering for anyone, a tarpaulin. Something better I must have upstairs in the storeroom. Must be. Let me think. Let me look.”
     Tumbleton said he was just about to suggest that. Grant growled, “You’ll never be able to use it again, whatever it is; what? ‘never mind that?’ Then by all means go up and look.” They turned and went into the hallway and toward the stairs to the upper floor. Harrison suddenly sat on the bench beneath the mirror, said he would wait.
     Lighting the gas on each landing in the dark house, the old man laboriously climbed, talked on, talked on. “Poor Mr. Williams, these are terrible times we live in, gentlemen; murders, massacres, famines, plagues; poor man, I thought he was getting better: why? ‘This new medicine helps me sleep,’ he said, but that was last quarter day, more or less; terrible, terrible; the Shechinah is in exile and the Daughter of the Voice rings out, rings out, but we do not hear it, ‘Repent! Repent!’ but we hear it not, we don’t want to hear it, we don’t want to repent; where is the key, the key, this one? no not this one. Mr. Williams! Aye!” At length the storeroom door was opened, it opened onto darkness and, another gas jet being lit (one without a mantle: high and red it flared, then was turned lower), onto clutter beyond cataloguing; the old man stood in a narrow way between items covered and uncovered, and he talked on. “—a terrible thing to be an artist today, gentlemen, and yet a fascination it has which cannot be denied; six or seven of the best, the leading artists of today—” He fumbled here and there, seemed sure of nothing. “—live in mansions and they lunch with lords, Sir Laurence, Sir John, the incomparable Landseer, Mr. Holman-Hunt who did The Scapegoat, he visited the Holy Land, what a blessed privilege, and how many others? a few others only”—he peered here and there around the crowded room—“and the rest? Poverty, decay, and worse. Making likenesses, perhaps it’s not allowed, God says, what does God say? ‘Thou shalt not make—’ My cousin Simeon you may have heard of my cousin Simeon, let me remove a dust sheet here, sir—”
     Grant said, impatiently, that a dust sheet would do. “But not a dusty dust sheet, Mr. Grant, sir; look: ah. . . .” Underneath the dusty one was a clean one, and underneath that something showed purple and gold. “My cousin Simeon was an artist, and a good one, too, and now look at him, or better yet don’t; ‘Here comes Moses,’ he says when I visit him, which is perhaps not as often as—‘Moses, with another half-crown and another half-drawsha, who needs your damned drawshas, Moses, a fig for your sermons and your Shema Beni, why don’t you bring us a half-sovereign instead, Moses?’—because he would immediately convert it into drink, gentlemen, if not worse, gentlemen, a terrible disgrace for a family to have a drunkard . . . and worse: look.” The dust sheets came off, one after the other; the old man carefully lifted up some heavy broad piece of stuff—“This would be nice for Mr. Williams, poor young man, poor young man. Aye!
     “Purple velvet!” exclaimed Tumbleton. “A gorgeous pall!”
     Grant said he expected it was only velveteen.
     “Beautiful gold bordering! Poor Williams would have admired—”
     “Tosh, it can’t be real gold, can’t have real value, but it will do, hand it over, Solomon.”
     The old man said that everything which had to do with art had value, though seldom, he feared, to the benefit of the artist. “Sundry odds and ends I sold to Mr. Dante Gabriel when—”
     “Rossetti?” exclaimed Tumbleton.
     “Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a great artist, and sundry items here I bought back, after he died, a great poet he was, too; shame on them who said he wrote shameful poems, who—”
     Grant swore, tugged the heavy purple cloth away. “Tumbleton, stay here listening to this babble if you like. I’m going down to lay this over Williams, damned pitiful poor fool; stopped trying.” They could hear his footsteps clump heavily and rapidly upon the stairs, slow down as he entered the bedroom below.
     The old man lingeringly pulled the dust sheets back. “I came for this picture frame,” he said, lifting it. “Only for this I came. And what did I find? May such a thing not happen to any of us, Mr. Williams, Mr. Williams! But let us not open Satan’s mouth, lest he accuse us.”
     Tumbleton seemed by his glances here and there not eager to remain, but he seemed not eager to go below, either; certainly he did not wish to be alone. “So you knew Rossetti, eh?”
     The old silk hat nodded, nodded. “Mr. William Rossetti, a kind gentleman. Miss Christina Rossetti, a very fine poet. Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, I knew him best, a great artist, beautiful paintings he made, from my religion and from your religion; and poems as well. They say, some people say, he died of a sudden disease, other people say he died of a medicine of which he gradually took too great a quantity, so what was it? Opium? Not opium, what then, who remembers? Coral, why do I say ‘coral,’ coral is not a medicine, he could not sleep well, years and years he could not sleep, some wretched fellow broke his heart, said he wrote a shameful poem, poems, about love; they were beautiful poems, like Shir Ha-Shirim, Solomon’s Song, is what they were like; look—”
     He bent, he arose, he held something in his hand. “A skull!” cried Tumbleton, recoiled; said, “Not a skull,” drew near again; the old man blew and blew, dust flew about, his thin beard fluttered, the gas flame trembled.
     “A bust. I say, Mr. Solomon: a bust of whom?
     The old man nodded, nodded. “A plaster mold he was making; maybe, Mr. Dante Gabriel, almost the last thing he made, it may be. ‘For this, Moses,’ he said, ‘I need no model, the man’s malignant features haunt me forever.’ His very words. See. What hate, eh? Jealous, jealous, hateful and malignant jealous, some penny journalist who made a great scandal out of envy of the great Mr. Dante Gabriel; with one hand who gave it such a blow, at last, the plaster was still wet: look—” He turned the object so the side misshapen might be seen.
     Tumbleton seemed sickened, looked at the door, looked back. Asked, “But who? Who?
     A moment’s thought. A long moment. “Who. His name. Let us not open Satan’s mouth, lest. , . . Ah, yes. His name? Buchanan, his name. This is Buchanan’s head. Look.”

__________

 

AFTERWORD TO “BUCHANAN’S HEAD”

In this tale of London sophisticates of the late nineteenth century, the hapless Williams falls victim to the malignant emanations of a certain hidden statue. English poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was the founding force of the influential Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. His sister was the poet Christina Rossetti. His first wife died of an overdose of laudanum in 1862, apparently a suicide; Rossetti thereafter had a long affair with Jane Morris, wife of his friend William Morris. When she finally decided to return to her husband, Rossetti grew reclusive, and his addiction to chloral hydrate worsened, eventually killing him. In 1872, the artist was devastated when critic Robert Buchanan published his controversial attack on Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, “The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day.” That Rossetti sculpted a portrait of his nemesis in his last years is not beyond conjecture.

                                                                                                                                     —Henry Wessells

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