boucher book oct28.pdf - Index of

302 Anthony Boucher
quality; indeed my own experiences here a few years later in the singular affair of the
cable cabal were not unrewarding. But a man of your generation knows nothing of
those pleasures now ten lustra faded. The humours of the Music Halls, the delights
of a hot bird and a cold bottle shared with a dancer from Daly’s, the simpler and
less expensive delights of punting on the Thames (shared, I may add, with a simpler
and less expensive companion)—these claimed what portion of my time I could
salvage from my practice.
But above all I was devoted to music; and to be devoted to music meant, in the
London of 1901, to be devoted to—but I have always carefully refrained from the
employment of veritable and verifiable names in these narratives. Let me once more
be discreet, and call her simply by that affectionate agnomen by which my cousin,
to his sorrow, knew her: Carina.
I need not describe Carina as a musician; you have just heard her sing Pergolesi,
you know how she combined nobility and grandeur with a technical agility which
these degenerate days associate only with a certain type of light soprano. But I must
seek to describe her as a woman, if woman she may be called.
When first I heard the tittle-tattle of London, I paid it small heed. To the man in
the street (or even in the stalls) actress is still a euphemism for a harsher and shorter
term, though my experience of actresses, extending as it has over three continents
and more than my allotted three score and ten years, tends to lead me, if anywhere,
to an opposite conclusion.
The individual who stands out from the herd is the natural target of calumny.
I shall never forget the disgraceful episode of the purloined litter, in which the veterinarian
Dr. Stookes accused me of—but let us reserve that anomaly for another
occasion. To return to Carina: I heard the gossip; I attributed it to as simple a source
as I have indicated. But then the evidence began to attain proportions which the
most latitudinarian could hardly disregard.
First young Ronny Furbish-Darnley blew out his brains. He had gambling debts,
to be sure, and his family chose to lay the stress upon them; but his relations with
Carina had been common knowledge. Then Major MacIvers hanged himself with
his own cravat (the MacIvers tartan, of course). I need hardly add that a MacIvers
had no gambling debts. Even that episode might have been hushed up had not a
peer of so exalted a name that I dare not even paraphrase it perished in the flames
of his ancestral castle. Even in the charred state in which they were recovered, the
bodies of his wife and seven children evinced the clumsy haste with which he had
slit their throats.
It was as though … how shall I put it? … as though Carina were in some way
a “carrier” of what we had then not yet learned to call The Death Wish. Men who
knew her too well hungered no longer for life.
The press began to concern itself, as best it might with due regard for the laws of
libel, with this situation. Leading articles hinted at possible governmental intervention
to preserve the flower of England from this insidious foreigner. Little else was
discussed in Hyde Park save the elimination of Carina.
Even the memorable mass suicides at Oxford had provided no sensation comparable
to this. Carina’s very existence seemed as much in danger as though Jack the
Ripper had been found and turned over to the English people. We are firm believers