Line 286:  A jet’s pink trail above the sunset fire

I, too, was wont to draw my poet’s attention to the idyllic beauty of airplanes in the evening sky.  Who could have guessed that on the very day (July 7) Shade penned this lambent line (the last one on his twenty-third card) Gradus, alias Degré, had flown from Copenhagen to Paris, thus completing the second lap of his sinister journey!  Even in Arcady am I, says Death in the tombal scripture.

The activities of Gradus in Paris had been rather neatly planned in the Shadows.  They were perfectly right in assuming that not only Odon but our former consul in Paris, the late Oswin Bretwit, would know where to find the King.  The decide to have Gradus try Bretwit first.  That gentleman had a flat in Meudon where he dwelt alone, seldom going anywhere except the National Library (where he read theosophic works and solved chess problems in old newspapers), and did not receive visitors.  The Shadows’ neat plan sprung from a piece of luck.  Suspecting that Gradus lacked the mental equipment and mimic gifts necessary for the impersonation of an enthusiastic Royalist, they suggested he had better pose as a completely apolitical commissioner, a neutral little man interested only in getting a good price for various papers that private parties had asked him to take out of Zembla and deliver to their rightful owners.  Chance, in one of its anti-Karlist moods, helped.  One of the lesser Shadows whom we shall call Baron A. had a father-in-law called Baron B., a harmless old codger long retired from the civil service and quite incapable of understanding certain Renaissance aspects of the new regime.  He had been, or thought he had been (retrospective distance magnifies things), a close friend of the late Minister of Foreign Affairs, Oswin Bretwit’s father, and therefore was looking forward to the day when he would be able to transmit to “young” Oswin (who, he understood was not exactly persona grata with the new regime) a bundle of precious family papers that the dusty baron had come across by chance in the files of a governmental office.  All at once he was informed that now the day had come:  the documents would be immediately forwarded to Paris.  He was also allowed to prefix a brief note to them which read:

Here are some precious papers belonging to your family.  I cannot do better than place them in the hands of the son of the great man who was my fellow student in Heidelberg and my teacher in the diplomatic service.  Verba volant, scripta manent.

The scripta in question were two hundred and thirteen long letters which had passed some seventy years ago between Zule Bretwit, Oswin’s grand-uncle, Mayor of Odevalla, and a cousin of his, Ferz Bretwit, Mayor of Aros.  This correspondence, a dismal exchange of bureaucratic platitudes and fustian jokes, was devoid of even such parochial interest as letter of this sort may possess in the eyes of a local historian—but of course there is no way of telling what will repel or attract a sentimental ancestralist—and this was what Oswin Bretwit had always been known to be by his former staff.  I would like to take time out here to interrupt this dry commentary and pay a brief tribute to Oswin Bretwit.

Physically, he was a sickly bald-headed man resembling a pallid gland.  His face was singularly featureless.  He had café-au-lait eyes.  One remembers him always as wearing a mourning band.  But this insipid exterior belied the quality of the man.  From beyond the shining corrugations of the ocean I salute here brave Bretwit!  Let there appear for a moment his hand and mine firmly clasping each other across the water of the golden wake of an emblematic sun.  Let no insurance firm or airline use this insigne on the glossy page of a magazine as an ad badge under the picture of a retire businessman stupefied and honored by the sight of the technicolored snack that the air hostess offers him with everything else she can give; rather, let this lofty handshake be regarded in our cynical age of frenzied heterosexualism as a last, but lasting, symbol of valor and self-abnegation.  How fervently one had dreamed that a similar symbol but in verbal form might have imbued the poem of another dead friend; but this was not to be . . . Vainly does one look in Pale Fire (oh, pale, indeed!) for the warmth of my hand gripping yours, poor Shade!

But to return to the roofs of Paris.  Courage was allied in Oswin Bretwit with integrity, kindness, dignity, and what can be euphemistically called endearing naïveté.  When Gradus telephoned from the airport, and to whet his appetite read to him Baron B.’s message (minus the Latin tag), Bretwit’s only thought was for the treat in store for him.  Gradus had declined to say over the telephone what exactly the “precious papers” were, but it so happened that the ex-consul had been hoping lately to retrieve a valuable stamp collection that his father had bequeathed years ago to a now defunct cousin.  The cousin had dwelt in the same house as Baron B., and with all these complicated and entrancing matters uppermost in his mind, the ex-consul, while awaiting his visitor, kept wondering not if the person from Zembla was a dangerous fraud, but whether he would bring all the albums at once or would do it gradually so as to see what he might get for his pains.  Bretwit hoped the business would be completed that very night since on the following morning he was to be hospitalized and possible operated upon (he was, and died under the knife).

If two secret agents belonging to rival factions meet in a battle of wits, and if one has none, the effect may be droll; it is dull if both are dolts.  I defy anybody to find in the annals of plot and counter plot anything more inept and boring than the scene that occupies the rest of the conscientious note.

Gradus sat down, uncomfortably, on the edge of a sofa (upon which a tire king had reclined less than a year ago), dipped into his briefcase, handed to his host a bulky brown paper parcel and transferred his haunches to a chair near Bretwit’s seat in order to watch in comfort his tussle with the string.  In stunned silence Bretwit stared at what he finally unwrapped, and then said:

“Well, that’s then end of a dream.  This correspondence has been published in 1906 or 1907—no, 1906, after all—by Ferz Bretwit’s widow—I even have a copy of it somewhere among my books.  Moreover, this is not a holograph but an apograph, made by a scribe for the printers—you will note that both mayors write the same hand.”

“How interesting,” said Gradus noting it.

“Naturally I appreciate the kind thought behind it,” said Bretwit.

“We were sure you would,” said pleased Gradus.

“Baron B. must be a little gaga,” continued Bretwit, “but I repeat, his kind intention is touching.  I suppose you want some money for bringing this treasure?”

“The pleasure it gives you should be our reward,” answered Gradus.  “But let me tell you frankly:  we took a lot of pains in trying to do this properly, and I have come a long way.  However, I want to offer you a little arrangement.  You be nice to us and we’ll be nice to you.  I know your funds are somewhat—” (Small fish gesture and wink).

“True enough,” sighed Bretwit.

“If you go along with us it won’t cost you a centime.”

“Oh, I could pay something” (Pout and shrug).

“We don’t need your money” (Traffic-stopper’s palm).  “But here’s our plan.  I have messages from other barons for other fugitives.  In fact, I have letters for the most mysterious fugitive of all.”

“What!”  cried Bretwit in candid surprise.  “They know at home that His Majesty has left Zembla?”  (I could have spanked the dear man.)

“Indeed, yes,” said Gradus kneading his hands, and fairly panting with animal pleasure—a matter of instinct no doubt since the man certainly could not realize intelligently that the ex-consul’s faux pas was nothing less than the first confirmation of the King’s presence abroad:  “Indeed,” he repeated with a meaningful leer, “and I would be deeply obliged to you if you would recommend me to Mr. X.”

At these words a false truth dawned upon Oswin Bretwit and he moaned to himself:  Of course!  How obtuse of me!  He is one of us!  The fingers of his left hand involuntarily started to twitch as if he were pulling a kikapoo puppet over it, while his eyes followed intently his interlocutor’s low-class gesture of satisfaction.  A Karlist agent, revealing himself to a superior, was expected to make a sign corresponding to the X (for Xavier) in the one-hand alphabet of deaf mutes:  the hand held in horizontal position with the index curved rather flaccidly and the rest of the fingers bunched (many have criticized it for looking too droopy; it has now been replaced by a more virile combination).  ON the several occasions Bretwit had been given it, the manifestation had been preceded for him, during a moment of suspense—rather a gap in the texture of time than an actual delay—by something similar to what physicians call the aura, a strange sensation both tense and vaporous, a hot-cold ineffable exasperation pervading the entire nervous system before a seizure.  And on this occasion too Bretwit felt the magic wine rise to his head.

“All right, I am ready.  Give me the sign,” he avidly said.

Gradus, deciding to risk it, glanced at the hand in Bretwit’s lap:  unperceived by its owner, it seemed to be prompting Gradus in a manual whisper.  He tried to copy what it was doing its best to convey—mere rudiments of the required sign.

“No, no,” said Bretwit with an indulgent smile for the awkward novice.  “The other hand, my friend.  His majesty is left-handed, you know.”

Gradus tried again—but, like an expelled puppet, the wild little prompter had disappeared.  Sheepishly contemplating his five stubby strangers, Gradus when through the motions of an incompetent and half-paralyzed shadow-grapher and finally made an uncertain V-for-Victory sign.  Bretwit’s smile began to fade.

His smile gone, Bretwit (the name means Chess Intelligence) got up from his chair.  In a larger room he would have paced up and down—not in this cluttered study.  Gradus the Bungler buttoned all three buttons of his tight brown coat and shook his head several times.

“I think,” he said crossly, “one must be fair.  If I bring you these valuable papers, you must in return arrange an interview, or at least give me his address.”

“I know who you are,” cried Bretwit pointing.  “You’re a reporter!  You are from that cheap Danish paper sticking out of your pocket” (Gradus mechanically fumbled at it and frowned).  “I had hoped they had given up pestering me!  The vulgar nuisance of it!  Nothing is sacred to you, neither cancer, nor exile, nor the pride of a king” (alas, this is true not only of Gradus—he has colleagues in Arcady too).

Gradus sat staring at his new shoes—mahogany red with sieve-pitted caps.  An ambulance screamed its impatient way through dark streets three stories below.  Bretwit vented his irritation on the ancestral letters lying on the table.  He snatched up the neat pile with its detached wrapping and flung it all in the wastepaper basket.  The string dropped outside, at the feet of Gradus who picked it up and added it to the scripta.

“Please, go,” said poor Bretwit.  “I have a pain in my groin that is driving me mad.  I have not slept for three nights.  You journalists are an obstinate bunch but I am obstinate too.  You will never learn from me anything about my king.  Good-bye.”

He waited on the landing for his visitor’s steps to go down and reach the front door.  It was opened and closed, and presently an automatic light on the stairs went out with the sound of a kick.