From the Abyss (Handheld Weirds) by Broster D K

Author:Broster D K [K, Broster D]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Handheld Press
Published: 2022-08-09T04:00:00+00:00

7 Couching at the Door (1933)

1

The first inkling which Augustine Marchant had of the matter was on one fine summer morning about three weeks after his visit to Prague – that is to say, in June, 1898. He was reclining, as his custom was when writing his poetry, on the very comfortable sofa in his library at Abbot’s Medding, near the French windows, one of which was open to the garden. Pausing for inspiration – he was nearly at the end of his poem, Salutation to All Unbeliefs – he let his eyes wander round the beautifully appointed room, with its cloisonné and Satsuma, Buhl and first editions, and then allowed them to stray towards the sunlight outside. And so, between the edge of the costly Herat carpet and the sill of the open window, across the strip of polished oak flooring, he observed what he took to be a small piece of dark fluff blowing in the draught; and instantly made a note to speak to his housekeeper about it. There was slackness somewhere; and in Augustine Marchant’s house no one was allowed to be slack but himself.

There had been a time when the poet would not for a moment have been received, as he was now, in country and even county society – those days, even before the advent of The Yellow Book and The Savoy, when he had lived in London, writing the plays and poems which had so startled and shocked all but the ‘decadent’ and the ‘advanced’, Pomegranates of Sin, Queen Theodora and Queen Marozia, The Nights of the Tour de Nesle, Amor Cypriacus and the rest. But when, as the ’nineties began to wane, he inherited Abbot’s Medding from a distant cousin and came to live there, being then at the height of an almost international reputation, Wiltshire society at first tolerated him for his kinship with the late Lord Medding, and then, placated by the excellence of his dinners and further mollified by the patent staidness of his private life, decided that, in his personal conduct at any rate, he must have turned over a new leaf. Perhaps indeed he had never been as bad as he was painted, and if his writings continued to be no less scandalously free and free-thinking than before, and needed to be just as rigidly kept out of the hands of daughters, well, no country gentleman in the neighbourhood was obliged to read them!

And indeed Augustine Marchant in his fifty-first year was too keenly alive to the value of the good opinion of county society to risk shocking it by any overt doings of his. He kept his licence for his pen. When he went abroad, as he did at least twice a year – but that was another matter altogether. The nose of Mrs Grundy was not sharp enough to smell out his occupations in Warsaw or Berlin or Naples, her eyes long-sighted enough to discern what kind of society he frequented even so near home as Paris.

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