“But I don’t prefer,” the man said, briskly. “I know nothing about it. I’d come up from the Observatory – damned silly notion putting an observatory in Wales, skies obscured three hundred nights a year with soppy Celtic mists, all the pubs closed on Sundays – and, happening to drop in on the Royal Society, I allowed myself to act as subject for your experiment. One moment I was there, the next moment I was there—” He gestured toward the diving bell. Then something evidently struck his mind. “‘Thirty years,’ you say? Good heavens!” An expression of the utmost glee came across his face. “Then Flora must be dead by now, skinny old bitch, and, if she isn’t, so much the worse for her, who is this lovely lady here?”
The lady herself, displacing her parasol and coming toward him in full-blown majesty, said, in heavily accented but still melodious English, “Is here the Madame Puprikosch, but you may to calling me Yózhinka. My affinity! My own true love! Produced for me by the genius of the wizard anglais! Yoi!” And she embraced him with both arms, a process which seemed by no means distasteful to the gentleman himself.
“If you don’t mind, Pigafetti Jones,” the wizard said, somewhat stiffly, “I will thank you for the return of my cloak. We will next discuss the utmost inconveniency which your disappearance from the chambers of the Royal Society has caused me throughout three decades.”
“All in good time, Pemberton Smith,” said the former Astronomer-Royal of Wales, running his hands up and down the ample back of Frow Puprikosch—or, as she preferred to be called by him, Yózhinka. “All in good time . . . I say, Yózhinka, don’t you find that corset most constrictive? I should. In fact, I do. Do let us go somewhere where we can take it off, and afterward I shall explain to you the supernal glories of the evening skies – beginning, of course, with Venus.”
To which the lady, as they made their way toward the door together, replied merely (but expressively), “Yoi . . .!”
Standing in the doorway was a very tall, very thin, very, very dignified elderly gentleman in cutaway, striped trousers, silk hat – a silk hat which he raised, although somewhat stiffly, as the semi-former Frow Puprikosch went past him. He then turned, and regarding the wizard anglais with a marked measure of reproof, said, “Well, George.”
“Good Heavens. Augustus. Is it really you?”
“It is really me, George. Well, George. I suppose that you have received my letter.”
“I have received no letter.”
“I sent it you, care of Cook’s, Poona.”
“Haven’t been in Poona for years. Good gad. That must be why my damned remittances kept arriving so late. I must have forgotten to give them a change of address.”
Sir Augustus Smith frowned slightly and regarded his brother with some perplexity. “You haven’t been in Poona for years? Then what was all this nonsense of your calling yourself Vizier Sri Smith and trying to rouse the hill tribes with the rallying cry of ‘No votny’? Votnies were abolished, along with the tax on grout, the year after the Mutiny, surely you must know that.”
“I haven’t been in Injia for eleven years, I tell you. Not since the Presidency cut up so sticky that time over the affair of the rope trick (all done by the odyllic forces, I tell you). As for all the rest of it, haven’t the faintest idea. Call myself Vizier Sri Smith indeed, what do you take me for?”
Sir Augustus bowed his head and gently bit his lips. Then he looked up. “Well, well,” he said, at last. “This is probably another hugger-mugger on the part of the Junior Clarks, not the first time, you know, won’t be the last,” he sighed. “I tell you what it is, you know, George. They let anyone into Eton these days.”
“Good heavens!”
“Fact. Well. Hm. Mph.” He looked around the room with an abstracted air. “Ah, here it is, you see, now that I have seen with my own eyes that Pigafetti Jones is alive and playing all sorts of fun and games as I daresay he has been doing all these years, ahum, see no reason why you shouldn’t come home, you know, if you like.”
“Augustus! Do you mean it?”
“Certainly.”
The younger Smith reached into the clothes press and removed therefrom a tightly packed traveling bag of ancient vintage. “I am quite ready, then, Augustus,” he said.
There was a clatter of feet on the stairs in the corridors beyond, the feeble voice of the hall-porter raised in vain, and into the room there burst Kummelman Swartbloi, who proceeded first to fall at the younger Smith’s feet and next to kiss them. “My wife!” he cried. “My wife has just had twin boys! Bella is guaranteed another generation of Brothers Swartbloi (Snuff-Tobacco)! Thank you, thank you, thank you!” And he turned and galloped away, murmuring that he would have stayed longer but that it was essential for him to be at the mill in a quarter of an hour in order to grind the Rappee.
“Do twins come up often in the chap’s family?” asked Sir Augustus.
“I’m afraid that nothing much comes up often in his family at all, any more. I merely advised him to change his butcher and I may have happened to suggest the well-known firm of Schlockhocker, in the Ox Market. Old Schlockhocker has six sons, all twins, of whom the youngest, Pishto and Knishto, act as delivery boys on alternate days. Wonderful thing, change of diet . . . that, and, of course, the odyllic forces.”
Sir Augustus paused in the act of raising his hat to his head. “I should hope, George,” he said, “that you may not have been the means of introducing any spurious offspring into this other tradesman’s family.”
His brother said that he didn’t know about that. Fellow and his wife were first cousins, after all. Sir Augustus nodded, again lifted his hat, and this time gestured to the multitudinous items upon the heavy old sideboard. “Do you not desire to remove your philosophical equipment?” he asked.
Smith the younger considered. He looked at his own hat, the velvet cap of curious cut with the curious silvern medallion on it. He took it in both hands and approached Doctor Eszterhazy. Doctor Eszterhazy bowed. George William Marmaduke Pemberton Smith placed the cap upon the head of Engelbert Eszterhazy (Doctor of Medicine, Doctor of Jurisprudence, Doctor of Science, Doctor of Literature, etc., etc.). “You are now and henceforth,” the Englishman said, “the Wizard of the Triune Monarchy, and may regard yourself as seized of the entire equipage of the odyllic force, or, rather, forces. Sorry I can’t stay, but there you are.”
The brothers left the room arm in arm, Sir Augustus inquiring, “Who was that odd-looking chap, George?” and his junior replying, “Phrenologist fellow. Can’t recollect his name. Does one still get good mutton at Simpson’s?”
“One gets very good mutton, still, at Simpson’s.”
“Haven’t had good mutton since . . .” Voices and footsteps alike died away.
Doctor Eszterhazy looked at the equipage of the odyllic forces, and he slowly rubbed his hands together and smiled.