retired to the sea-side, and Lord Bastable…well, we are all aware of his amazing disappearance after the so-called “cataleptic transferrence” which followed his post-war sojourn in Lourdes. What became of Jack Owlesby’s pursuit of Olivia I can’t say, nor can I determine whether Keeble hazarded the making of yet another amazing device for his plucky niece, who was the very Gibraltar of her family in the months that followed the tumult.
So this history, I hope, will cause no one embarrassment, and may satisfy the curiosities of those who recall “The Horror in St. James Park.” I apologize if, by the revelation of causes and effects, what was once marvelous and inexplicable slides down a rung or two into the realm of the commonplace; but such explication is the charge of the historian — a charge I hope to have executed with candor.
The Hole in Space
By now you’ve heard of the doings at Chingford-by-the-Tower and of the great orange cataract of flame that the Watford-Enfield scouts saw over Chingford Common on the evening of October 24. You also know that the whole affair blew over in a fortnight, was laughed down as a prank played on the scouts by a gang of local toughs, those same toughs who, during the Baden Powell Jamboree in St. James Park, pitched the four scoutmasters into the duck pond. The burnt tents and rampaging scouts of the Chingford Common incident, however, had a run-in with something other than local bullies: vastly other, I believe I can say with complete truth. Virtually no one knows what actually occurred on that wild night — no one but me, Jack Owlesby, and, I pray, Professor Langdon St. Ives and his man Hasbro. Had I not returned miraculously Sunday last, worn but serviceable, the Watford-Enfield boys would remain known as the Chingford Cuckoos and the Scout’s Rest on Jermyn Street would fold its tent shamefacedly and slink away.
But I haven’t crossed and recrossed a million miles of deep space simply to explain away the Chingford fracas, nor to stand witness for the Enfield toughs, nor to help eradicate the blot that this pall of suspected lunacy has dropped over the Scout’s Rest, although this last task I would undertake cheerfully, for the old Rest has been my succor and my hearth rug, as I believe they say, since the good years of my youth.
My rooms, in fact, are above the Rest there on Jermyn Street, about halfway between Charing Cross Road and the Dunhill shop — the corner of Regent and Jermyn to be precise. It was but eight short weeks ago, if I remember aright, that an oddly uniformed boy nipped round with a telegram of what appeared to be the urgent sort. I had returned to the digs about thirty minutes past from lunch at the Old Shades on Whitehall; you know, off Trafalgar Square: Cornish pasty and mash and a pint of the best a shilling. Can’t be beat, I say. Anyway, here came a fearful pounding on the door and I opened it to find a small stout chap got up in joke clothes, in a Fauntleroy suit and with a sort of greenish wiggy thing atop his head. There was something of the jolly porcine about him, like a pig on holiday. He handed me a note, uttering something made senseless by a foreign accent, and I tipped him twopence for the effort. He tripped off down the stairs looking altogether pleased. The telegram ran as follows:
Jack OwlesbyJermyn House#24 Jermyn St.London
Jack: Project finished. Make haste. 24th of O. absolute necessity. Full moon. Bring woolies and secure copy of Birdlip’s Last Word on Rare Succulents and Tropical Begonias from Dr. Lester, special collections, Brit. Mus.
Professor Langdon St. IvesThe High RoadChingford-by-the-TowerChingford
Another person might have been stupefied by such a telegram, but I wasn’t. I was out and hoofing it up Charing Cross in a nonce to secure, as St. Ives had requested, the Birdlip volume from Dr. Lester. I’ll admit that this part of the instructions was a puzzler. The rest was clear as a lark among peahens, but this plant book threw me. One doesn’t diddle about, however, when Langdon St. Ives calls; one hops to in the manner of the famous rickshaw boy in the fable, and sets about his mission. So, as I say, I set out at a brisk pace and returned with the book in hand — something more of a manuscript than a book — in a matter of an hour. By five o’clock I was packed and rattling away out of King’s Cross Station toward Chingford, the book propped open on my knee and the compartment cheerful with the reek of a merry pipe and the steam from a thermos of coffee and a pair of hotcross buns bought smoking from a car at the station. The illustrated volume was otherworldly, the Latin incomprehensible, and I could only marvel at the foreign climes that produced the strange fauna that peopled the pages of the book.
It was storming outside and the dusk was lit with flashes of lightning that illuminated raindrops the size of goose eggs. The wind was blowing in fits and gusts out of the east, a chill wind off the North Sea, and I was ruminating on the jolly atmosphere of the warm compartment and was congratulating myself for having the upper hand over what have been referred to as the inclemencies of climate, and that in spades, when into the compartment burst a red faced sweating chap with a heavy, fat face and, oddly, with what might be called a family relationship to the man who had delivered the Professor’s telegram — the same swinish features, the small eyes, the stout build.
I was on the brink of suggesting that he had stumbled by accident into the first class car, when what he wanted was either the third class down back, or, more likely, the coal car, when he lunged across and whisked the window down with a twirl of his coarse wrist.
“Quite a night, what?” I said, leading into the whole thing delicately. The wind, however, came howling through at about that time carrying this goose-egg rain upon it like a flood tide, and my words were lost in the deluge. I felt like old Lear, the king in the play who made the crazy speech out on the blasted heath to his knave, poor Tom Foolery, who was wrapped in a winding sheet.
“Quite a filthy night!” I repeated, cupping my hands over my mouth.
He turned and gave me a look, as if I had shouted a madness. Then he squinted along over his nose and said something like, “aaargh,” and pointed out the window toward the east and the lights of Stoke Newington. Anxious not to offend, and supposing that some visual treat was looming out there somewhere, I bent down and thrust my head out into the storm.
In a trice shrivel-face had me by the seat of the trousers and the collar of my mack and I found myself hurtling like the Hesperus toward a blur of rock and gravel along the tracks. The fates, however, have always kept a judicious eye on Jack Owlesby, and apparently they cast a quick vote and decided to play out a bit of slack. I landed tumbling and whooping in a stand of gorse.
I lay still for a moment, taking stock, as they say, and letting the rain, which by now was falling in sheets instead of drops, wash the wildness from my eyes and clear away the muddle. Leave it to being pitched out the window of a moving train to create a muddle. Two things appeared certain as I lay there plucking at gorse spines. The first was that bugs of one sort or another inhabited the bush. The second was that foul play had stuck its beak into the affair and had begun to prod about and stir things up filthily.
This was just the sort of thing, however, that spurs we Owlesbies into action.
It was the sort of night that prompts one to muse on the infinite and to consider what might be out there, beyond the scattering of stars that we egotistically consider our own. I used to think, when I was a lad, that there was likely a big stone wall that one would encounter should one run one’s space galleon far enough out into the void. I chose a wall, I believe, simply to provide a boundary. The idea of the endlessness of anything was something I was unprepared to grapple with. I even dreamed about it — of just such a night — blasting away beyond the
