Fancies and Goodnights

POSSESSION OF ANGELA BRADSHAW

There was a young woman, the daughter of a retired colonel, resident in one of London's most select suburbs, and engaged to be married to Mr. Angus Fairfax, a solicitor who made more money every year. The name of this young woman was Angela Bradshaw; she wore a green sweater and had an Aberdeen terrier, and when open-toed shoes were in fashion, she wore open-toed shoes. Angus Fairfax was as ordinary as herself, and pleasant and ordinary were all the circumstances of their days.

Nevertheless, one day in September this young woman developed symptoms of a most distressing malady. She put a match to the curtains of the drawing-room, and kicked, bit, and swore like a trooper when restrained.

Everyone thought she had lost her reason, and no one was more distressed than her fiancé. A celebrated alienist was called in; he found her in a collected frame of mind. He made a number of little tests, such as are usual in these examinations, and could find none of the usual symptoms of dementia.

When he had done, however, she burst into a peal of coarse laughter, and, calling him a damned old fool, she reminded him of one or two points he had overlooked. Now these points were extremely abstruse ones, and most unlikely to be known to a young girl who had never studied psychoanalysis, or life, or anything of that sort.

The alienist was greatly shocked and surprised, but he was forced to admit that while such knowledge was most abnormal, and while the term she had applied to him was indicative of ignorance and bad taste, he did not feel that she could be certified on these grounds alone.

«But cannot she be certified for setting fire to my curtains?» asked her mother.

«Not unless I find symptoms of insanity,» said the specialist. «You can, of course, charge her with arson.»

«What? And have her go to prison?» cried her mother. «Think of the disgrace!»

«I could undertake her defence, free of charge, and doubtless get her off with a caution,» said Mr. Fairfax.

«There would still be the newspapers,» said the Colonel, shaking his head. «At the same time, it seems extraordinary that nothing can be done about it.» Saying this, he gave the eminent alienist his cheque and a look. The alienist shrugged his shoulders and departed.

Angela immediately put her feet on the table (her legs were extremely well turned) and recited a string of doggerel verses, celebrating the occasion in great detail, and casting scorn on her parents and her fiancé. These verses were very scurrilous, or I would reproduce them here.

During the next few days, she played some other tricks, all of them troublesome and undignified; above all, she rhymed away like the principal boy in a pantomime. A whole string of doctors was called in. They all said her misbehaviour was not due to insanity.

Her parents then tried a few quacks, who, powerless to certify, were also impotent to cure. In the end they went to a seedy Madame who claimed to see into the soul. «The whole thing is perfectly clear,» said this unprepossessing old woman. «Your daughter is possessed of a devil. Two guineas.»

They asked her to exorcise the intrusive fiend, but that was ten, so they said they would think the matter over, and took Angela home in a taxi.

On the way, she said to them with a smile, «If you had had the decency to ask me, I could have told you that was the trouble, all along.»

When they had finished rating her for allowing them to go to so much expense unnecessarily, they asked her how she knew.

«In the simplest way,» she said. «I see him very frequently.»

«When?» cried the Colonel.

«Where?» cried her mother.

«What is he like?» cried her fiancé.

«He is young and not at all bad-looking,» replied Angela, «and he talks most amusingly. He generally appears to me when I am alone. I am seldom alone but in my bedroom, and it is there that I see him, between eleven at night and seven in the morning.»

«What does he say?» cried her father, grasping his malacca.

«Is he black?» cried her mother.

«What does he—? How do you know it is not a she-devil?» cried her fiancé.

«But how does he appear?» asked her mother.

«Frequently I find him beside me, when I have got into bed,» said Angela, with the greatest composure in the world.

«I have always asked you to let me order a wider bed for that loom,» observed her mother to the Colonel.

«This fiend must be exorcised at once,» said Angus Fairfax, «for there is no bed wide enough to sleep three, once we are married.»

«I'm not sure that he wants to be exorcised,» said Angela. «In any case, I must ask him first.»

«Colonel Bradshaw,» said Angus Fairfax, «I hope you realize my position. In face of these revelations, and of all that lies behind them, I cannot but withdraw from the engagement.»

«A good riddance, I say,» observed the fiend, now speaking for the first time.

«Be quiet, dear,» said Angela.

Mr. Fairfax rapped on the glass, stopped the taxi, and got out

«In face of what we have just heard,» said he, «no action for breach of promise can possibly lie.»

«It is not the custom of the Bradshaws to bring actions for breach of promise,» said the Colonel. «No more shall we sue you for your share of the taxi-fare.»

The fiend, while Mr. Fairfax hastily fumbled for his money, recited a valedictory quatrain, rhyming most obscenely upon his name.

To resume our tale: they got home. The Colonel immediately telephoned for the old Madame to come, regardless of cost

«I'll have this fiend out before eleven tonight, anyway, Miss,» said he to his daughter, who laughed.

The old Madame turned up, bearing a great box of powders, herbs, bones, symbols, and heaven knows what else. She had the drawing-room darkened, and the wireless disconnected from its aerial, just in case, and, as an afterthought, had the Colonel go out with a sardine to tempt a cat in from the street. «They often like to go into a cat,» she said. «I don't know why.»

Then, Angela being seated in the middle of the room, and the ornamental paper being taken out of the fireplace, because fiends very frequently like to make an exit by way of the chimney, the old woman lit a joss-stick or two, and began to mumble away for dear life.

When she had said all that was required, she set fire to a saucerful of Bengal Light. «Come forth, Asmodeus!» she cried.

«Wrong,» said the fiend, with a chuckle.

«Bother!» cried the old woman in dismay, for the flare had shown the cat eating one of the bones she had brought «That was a bone of St. Eulalia, which was worse than Keating's Powder to devils, and cost me twenty guineas,» she said. «No devil win go into that cat now, and the bone must go into the bill, and the Colonel must go into the street to fetch a fresh cat»

When everything was resettled, she began again, and, lighting a new saucerful, «Come forth, Beelzebub!» she demanded.

«Wrong again,» said the fiend, with a louder chuckle than before.

«They'll never guess, darling,» said Angela.

The old bedlam went on, at a prodigious expense of the Bengal Light, which was of a special kind. She called on Belial, Belphegor, Mahound, Radamanth, Minos, all the fiends ever heard of, and all she brought forth was taunts and laughter.

«Then who the devil are you?» cried the Colonel at last

«William Wakefield Wall,» replied the fiend.

«You might have asked that at the beginning,» said Angela quietly.

«And who, if you please, is William Wakefield Wan?» inquired her mother, with dignity. «At least dear, he is not one of those foreign fiends,» she added to the Colonel

«He is some charlatan,» said the old woman. «I have never heard of him.»

«Very few Philistines have,» rejoined the fiend, with great equanimity. «However, if there is, by any odd chance, anyone in this suburb who is familiar with the latest developments of modem poetry, I advise you to make your inquiries there.»

«Do you mean to say you're a poet?» cried the Colonel

«I am not a Poona jingler,» replied the other, «if that is what you mean by the term. Nor do I describe in saccharine doggerel such scenes as are often reproduced on coloured calendars. If, however, by the word 'poetry' you imply a certain precision, intensity, and clarity of —»

«He is a poet, Father,» said Angela, «and a very good one. He had a poem in a magazine printed in Paris. Didn't you, Will?»

«If the rascal is a poet,» cried the Colonel, «bring in a bottle of whiskey. That'll get him out, if I know the breed.»

«A typical army idea!» replied the poet. «Perhaps the only one. No, Colonel, you need not bring whiskey here, unless you need some yourself, and you may send away that old woman, at whom I do nothing but laugh. I shall come out on my own terms, or not at all»

«And your terms are —?» said the Colonel

«Permission to marry your daughter,» said the poet. «And the settlement upon her of a sum commensurate with the honour which my profession will bestow upon the family.»

«And if I refuse?» cried the outraged father.

«I am very comfortable where I am,» replied William Watt. «Angela can eat enough for two, and we are both as happy as anything. Aren't we, Angela?»

«Yes, dear,» said Angela. «Oh, don't!»

«We shall continue to have our bit of fun, of course,» added the poet.

«My dear,» said the Colonel to his wife, «I think we had better sleep on this.»

«I think it must be settled before eleven, my dear,» said Mrs. Bradshaw.

They could see no way out of it, so they had to come to an agreement. The poet at once emerged, and proved to be quite a presentable young man, though a little free in his mode of speech, and he was able to satisfy them that he came of an estimable family.

He explained that he had first seen Angela in the foyer of a theatre, during the entr'acte, and, gazing into her eyes (for he was much attracted), he had been amazed and delighted to find himself enter into possession of her. He was forced to reply in the affirmative to a certain question of Mrs. Bradshaw's, but after all young people have their own standards in these days. They were married at once, and, as he soon took to writing novels, the financial side worked out very satisfactorily, and they spent all their winters on the Riviera.