When I was still a child my grandfather – the noble Lord who was, in fact, only a Styrian farmer – used to take me on his knee to play ride-a-cock-horse, and at the same time he would tell me all sorts of stories in a hushed voice.
All my childhood memories of fairy-tales are set on my Grandfather’s knee – he was almost a fairy-tale figure himself. And Grandfather told me of a dream. “Dreams”, he said, “are a stronger legal title than any parchment or fee simple. Always remember that. If you are to be a real heir, then, one day perhaps, I will bequeath our dream to you: the dream of the son of Hywel Dda.” And then, in a low, mysterious voice, as if he were afraid the very air in the room might be listening, close to my ear and yet still jogging me up and down on his knee, he told me of a jewel in a land where no living man could go, unless he were accompanied by one who had overcome death; and of a crown of gold and crystal on the double head of, of – – –? I think I remember him talking of this double-headed dream creature as of an ancestor or a family spirit, but then my memory fails entirely. Everything is blurred in a misty light.
I never had a dream of that kind until – until last night! – Was that the dream of the sons of Hywel Dda?
There was no point in going on brooding about it. Anyway, I was interrupted by a visit from my friend Sergei Lipotin, the old art dealer from the Werrengasse.
Lipotin – in the city he is known by his nickname of “Nitchevo” – was formerly Antiquary to the Czar, and is still an impressive old gentleman, in spite of the dismal fate that has befallen him. Once a millionaire, a connoisseur, an expert in Asiatic art with a world-wide reputation – now a back-street dealer in junk chinoiserie, marked by death and hardly able to make ends meet, he is still a czarist to the core. I owe a number of rare pieces in my possession to his infallible judgement. And, strange to say, whenever I am gripped by the desire for some special objet which seems inaccessible, Lipotin appears and brings me something in that line.
Today, as I had nothing more remarkable to hand, I showed him my cousin’s consignment from London. He was full of praise for some of the old prints; “Rarissima” he called them, using a favourite phrase of his. There were also a few objects in the manner of medallions which aroused his interest: “Solid German Renaissance work, above average quality.” Finally he examined John Roger’s coat of arms, gave a gasp of surprise and gazed at it abstractedly. I asked him what it was that had excited him. He shrugged his shoulders, lit a cigarette and said nothing.
We chatted about unimportant matters. Just before he left he casually remarked, “Did you know that our old friend, Michael Arangelovitch Stroganoff, is unlikely to survive the last packet of cigarettes he bought. It is for the best. What has he left to pawn? No matter. It is an end we shall all come to. We Russians are like the sun – we rise in the East and go down in the West. Farewell!”
Lipotin went. I mused on what he had told me. Michael Stroganoff, the old Baron I had first met in the coffee house, was about to cross over into the green realm of the dead, into the green land of Persephone. Since I have known him he has lived on tea and cigarettes. He arrived here after his flight from Russia with nothing but what he could carry on his person, half a dozen diamond rings and about the same number of gold pocket watches – all that he had been able to stuff into his pockets when he broke through the Bolshevik picket line. From the proceeds of these jewels he lived a carefree life in the grand manner. He smoked only the most expensive cigarettes, specially imported from the East; who knows what hands they passed through before reaching him. “To let the things of this earth go up in smoke,” he used to say, “is perhaps the only favour we can do God.” At the same time he was slowly starving to death; and whenever he was not sitting in Lipotin’s little shop he was freezing in his tiny attic somewhere in the suburbs.
So Baron Stroganoff, former Imperial ambassador to Teheran, is on his deathbed. “No matter. It is all for the best,” Lipotin had said. With a mindless sigh to the empty air, I turn to the books and manuscripts of John Roger.
I pick out this and that at random and start to read. – – –
I have spent the whole day rummaging through the documents John Roger has left me and the outcome is that it seems pointless to try to arrange these scraps of ancient records and antiquarian studies into any kind of ordered whole – it is rubble and no effort can reconstruct the building it came from! I seem to hear a voice whispering, “Read and burn. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust!”
Why should I care about this story of a certain John Dee, Lord of the Manor of Gladhill? Just because he was an old Englishman with an idée fixe who may have been one of my mother’s ancestors?
But I cannot bring myself to throw the rubbish away. There are times when things have greater power over us than we over them; perhaps they are more alive than we and are just shamming lifelessness? I cannot even bring myself to stop reading. I do not know why, but the musty pages tighten their grip on me with every hour. The jumble of fragments begins to sort itself into a picture which emerges, sad yet splendid,
