The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [70]
An exalted guest arrived today. He came in a seaplane, put its pontoons down in Freshwater Bay, flying in despite the dismal weather. It’s a tribute to his skill as a pilot. He is German, like Fischer. And, like Fischer, he disguises a tendency to obesity in energetic gusto and fine tailoring. He wore splendid riding boots under a greatcoat stitched with campaign ribbons and medals won in the air over the fields of France in the war. I thought Dennis might baulk at this display, at its implications. But he plainly knew and even liked the fellow, greeting him with an embrace to follow their handshake. The German was greatly taken with the forest and I heard him ask our host over cocktails last night about game. There is no game here to distinguish those woods, Fischer told him, laughing. But he added that it always falls to the predator to find prey.
A brook bisects the wood. And the brook was as far as I was able to progress on my brief exploration after we were delivered by the Mercedes and I unpacked in my room here yesterday. It runs deep and rapidly, which is probably the effect of the rains that have persisted in their intensity since we arrived. Or it might not be a brook at all, it might instead be a smallish river with a current made swift by the narrowness of its banks. Either way, it runs dark and deep and was far too formidable an obstacle for me to think of crossing. There’s no escape, it made me think. And the thought was not entirely idle. Nor was it altogether comfortable.
7 October, 1927, later
Much later! There is to be a duel in the morning. It will be a real duel involving injury and possibly even death, fought supposedly to satisfy honour. It seems so anachronistic. In a few hours the two protagonists will walk between the parked Lagondas and Bentleys and Rolls-Royces crowding Fischer’s drive as the very latest and most ostentatious symbols of our technological age. They will find a secluded spot. And they will hack at one another with swords. But even writing that, I become aware of the contradiction implicit in my own logic. We are here to practise magic, after all. We are modern people, have embraced modernity with conviction and enthusiasm and, in some instances, with substantial profit. Yet nothing could be more ancient, or more strictly bound by lore and ritual, than the black art that has brought us all together here.
Nevertheless, the duel is ridiculous, the outcome less likely the ‘satisfaction’ the protagonists seek than some grotesque and dangerous injury to one or both of them. One of them is actually a seasoned duellist. It is our German, of course, the fat aviator who arrived here yesterday festooned in decorations earned during his glorious martial past.
The evening began promisingly enough. Of course, it was the evening of the blood banquet, the first of the ceremonial meals we must endure before the sacrifice. There is an American here, a film producer. He had brought with him the new filmic sensation, a moving picture called The Jazz Singer, which comes complete with its own sound thanks to a new process called dubbing. Speech is synchronised so that the characters speak naturally on film with their own voices. In this instance, since The Jazz Singer is a musical drama, the actors also sing. Fischer has a projection room and the whole entertainment had been planned in advance for the afternoon prior to the banquet. Given the inclement weather, it seemed a blessing as well as a welcome novelty.
But the star of The Jazz Singer is Al Jolson. And Al Jolson is an Americanised Jew. Those of us unaware of this when the film began were made aware of it very quickly by Fischer’s aviator guest, who loudly announced that he would not sit through a two-hour performance by a Jew from Lithuania, expected to consider the ordeal entertaining. He began to jeer and barrack and one or two of the others there, perhaps encouraged by too much wine drunk with their lunch, began to boo and handclap ponderous ironic applause. After a couple of minutes