Bevin O’Downett nodded vehement agreement. “Quite so, sir! I say, have you heard that fellow speak down at the Egyptian Hall? That Lithuanian-looking chap, although he’s as British as a gold sovereign, what’s he calling himself? I heard some reporter say he used to go by some Egyptian sounding moniker, back in his younger days over in SoHo, before he studied medicine and the occult and became a respectable mesmeric physician.”
Malcolm hadn’t the faintest idea who O’Downett might mean, although he did notice Guy Pendergast lean forward, sudden interest sharp in his eyes. Once a reporter, always a reporter, although Malcolm couldn’t imagine why Guy Pendergast would be so acutely interested in a SoHo occultist.
Yeats, however, nodded at once, clearly familiar with the fellow Bevin O’Downett had mentioned. “Yes, I have seen him speak. Intriguing fellow, although he hasn’t actually gone by the name of Johnny Anubis in several years. Oh, I know it’s an absurd name,” Yeats said, noticing the amused tilt of Bevin O’Downett’s brows, “but a man must have some way to attract the attention of the public when he’s come up from that sort of background. And despite the theatrics of his early career, his scholarship really is sound, astonishing for a self-made man from Middlesex Street, Whitechapel.”
Malcolm paused, caught as much by the edge of bitterness in the young poet’s voice as by the niggling suspicion that he was missing something important, here. He glanced into Yeats’ brilliant, fire-eaten eyes—and was struck motionless by the pain, the anger and pride that burned in this young Irishman’s soul. Forthright fury blazed in those eyes for every slight ever made by an Englishman against the Irish race, fury and pain that the achievements of the Celtic peoples were only now, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, being hailed as genius by overbearing English scholars—and then, only by some scholars, in a decade when Welshmen, descendants of the original Celtic settlers of Britain, were still belittled as savage subhumans and advised to give up their barbarous tongue if they would ever redeem themselves into the human race, while the Irishman was kicked and maltreated as the mangiest dog of Europe. Yet despite the kicks and slurs, there blazed in Yeats’ brilliant, volcanic eyes a fierce, soul-igniting pride, lightning through stormclouds, a shining pride for the history of a nation which for centuries had carried the torch of civilization in Europe.