Read Online Sea of Glass (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) by Dennis Parry - Free Book Online Page A

violence of the change and its blatant artifice made the comparison inevitable. I remember thinking that this trick should be played in the drawing-room to complete the atmosphere of pantomime.
    ‘My dear chap,’ he said, ‘I’m Cedric Ellison. I’ve heard so much about you. I know we shall see much more of each other.’
    Here he made one of the absurd little miscalculations which were typical of him and which, in my later judgment, sprang from some very deep-seated lack of co-ordination. He was always pulling so many strings that he could never remember which of them might have crossed.
    On this occasion he held out his right hand, forgetting that it still contained the object which he had removed from the case. Suddenly he realized that he was holding a foreign body. He withdrew his fingers and carelessly transferred a small yellow coin to his pocket. Immediately I remembered and identified it from my previous inspection, which was not hard, seeing that a gold Macedonian stater stood out from the general junk in the coin-tray like a diamond among ashes.
    Cedric Ellison said: ‘Excuse me, David. When I drop round here I often pick up some little curio to amuse my girl. It’s such an awful magpie’s nest, but one can still find a few things that will stimulate a child’s imagination.’
    ‘I expect so.’
    He looked at me closely. He had eyes of a peculiar light-grey which should have suggested vacillation, yet, in some mysterious fashion, indicated an extraordinary hardness.
    ‘I feel,’ he said, taking off his gold pince-nez, ‘that you’re a person who has ideas about education. So I don’t mind saying that I believe one of the finest things you can do for a young person is to give him or her a sense of the romance of past ages.’
    I felt the gratuitous falsity of his sentiments like a physical slap. And yet, even as an older man, I have been taken in by characters far less intrinsically skilled in deceit than Cedric Ellison. But he had a kind of self-defeating mechanism inside him. Later I began to see how it operated: he was so utterly absorbed in himself and the part he was playing that he forgot he was being observed by an independent human intelligence. All the springs and weights and counterweights in his mind lay bare like the works of a gramophone. You could practically hear him saying (as it might be): ‘Now I am being subtle,’ or ‘Now I will put him off his guard,’ or ‘It’s about time I applied the whip-hand.’
    Such signals reduced the amount of damage which he could do; but it would be wrong to suppose that they rendered him harmless. He was not a clever man, but he had cunning and endless pertinacity. Failing to get in by the door or the window, he would turn up weeks later through the chimney, when you thought he had forgotten his objective. I do not think that he could ever have acquired great wealth or power for himself; on the other hand he knew how to keep and use them.
    ‘Of course,’ he said with a sincerity so highly charged that it would not have deceived an infant, ‘of course, anything that I borrow for Deirdre is returned after a few days. It would never do to let the child get the notion that even odds-and-ends are there to be walked off with.’
    I knew then that Cedric was stealing the stater . And I was quite right. Later I learnt from Turpin that for years, whenever the acquisitive fit was on him, he would pop round to Aynho Terrace and pinch something out of the museum. It was a kind of intermittent outlet, such as is necessary in many types of mania. Over the years it had, so Turpin told me, visibly diminished the contents of the collection. He also said that Mrs. Ellison was aware of it. Certainly the servants knew. Some time before there had been a head-housemaid who particularly loathed Cedric. She invested several shillings of her wages at Woolworth’s in sixpenny rings out of which she prised the stones. These she placed in an inconspicuous corner of the