Musical notes
Now, what do you make of it? “Ex nihilo nihil fit,” I think you will say with me. It was literally thus, carefully penned in the middle of a single sheet of music-paper—a phrase, ormotif, I suppose it would be called—an undeveloped memorandum, in fact—nothing else whatever. I let the thing drop from my hand.
No doubt there was some capping jest here, some sneer, some vindictive sarcasm. I was not musician enough to tell, even had I had spirit for the endeavour. It was unworthy, at least, of the old man—much more, or less, than I deserved. I had been his favourite once. Strange how theidée fixecould corrode an otherwise tractable reason. In justice to myself I must insist that quite half my disappointment was in the realization that such dislike, due to such a trifle, could have come to usurp the old affection.
By and by I rose dismally, and carried the jest to the piano. (Half a crown a day my landlady exacted from me, if I so much as thumped on the old wreck with one finger, which was the extent of my talent.) Well, I was reckless, and the theme appeared ridiculously simple. But I could make nothing of it—not though Mrs. Dexter came up in the midst, and congratulated me on my performance.
When she was gone I took the thing to my chair again, and resumed its study despondently. And presently Chaunt came in.
“Hullo!” he said: “how’s the blooming legatee?”
“Pretty blooming, thanks,” I said. “Would you like to speculate in my reversion? Half a crown down to Mrs. Dexter, and the use of the tin kettle for the day.”
“Done,” he said, “so far as the piano’s concerned. Let’s see what you’ve got there.”
He had known of my prospective visit to the lawyers, and had dropped in to congratulate me onthatperformance. I acquainted him with the result; showed him the books, and the tea-caddy, and the penny, and the remnants of foolscap—finally, handed him the crowning jest for inspection.
“Pretty thin joke, isn’t it?” I growled dolefully. “Curse the money, anyhow! But I didn’t think it of the old man. I suppose you can make no more of that than I can?”
He was squinting at the paper as he held it up, and rubbing his jaw, stuck out at an angle, grittily.
“H’m!” he said, quite suddenly, “I’d go out for a walk and revive myself, if I were you. I intend to hold you to that piano, for my part; and you wouldn’t be edified.”
“No,” I said: “I’ve had enough of music for a lifetime or so! I fancy I’ll go, if you won’t think me rude.”
“On the contrary,” he murmured, in an absorbed way; and I left him.
I took a longish spin, and returned, on the whole refreshed, in a couple of hours. He was still there; but he had finished, it appeared, with the piano.
“Well,” he said, rising and yawning, “you’ve been a deuce of a time gone; but here you are”—and he held out to me indifferently a little crackling bundle.
Without a word I took it from his hand—parted, stretched, and explored it.
“Good God!” I gasped: “five notes of a thousand apiece!”
He was rolling a cigarette.
“Yes,” he drawled, “that’s the figure, I believe.”
“For me?”
“For you—from your uncle.”
“But—how?”
He lighted, took a serene puff or two, drew thejestfrom his pocket, and, throwing it on a chair, “You’ll have to allow some value to cryptograms at last,” he said, and sat down to enjoy himself.
“Chaunt!”
“O,” he said, “it was a bagatelle. An ass might have brayed it out at sight.”
“Please, I am something less than an ass. Please will you interpret for me?” I said humbly.
He neighed out—I beghispardon—a great laugh at last.
“O,” he cried: “your uncle was true blue; he stuck to his guns; but I never really supposed he meant to disinherit you, Johnny. You always had the first place in his heart, for all your obstinacy. He took his own way to convince you, that was all. Pretty poor stuff it is, I’m bound to confess; but enough to runyourcapacities to extinction. Here, hand it over.”
“Don’t be hard on me,” I protested, giving him the paper. “If I’m all that you say, it was as good as cutting me off with a penny.”
“No,” he answered: “because he knew very well that you’d apply to me to help you out of the difficulty.”
“Well, help me,” I said, “and, in the matter of Bacon, I’ll promise to be a fool convinced against my will.”
“No doubt,” he answered drily, and came and sat beside me. “Look here,” he said; and I looked:—
Musical notes
“You know your notes, anyhow,” said he. “Well, you’ve only got to read off these into their alphabetical equivalents, and cut the result into perfectly obvious lengths. It’s child’s play so far; and, indeed, in everything, unless this rum-looking metronome beat, or whatever it may be, bothers you for a moment.”
He put his finger on the crazy device perched up independently in the left-hand corner; and then came down to the lines again.
“Let that be for the moment,” said he. “It don’t much signify, after all. How do these notes go? that’s the main question. Read ’em off.”
I spelt them out, following his finger: “b a c e f d e c a d e c.”
“That’s a good boy,” he said. “And now, what are these things beyond, that have run off the lines, so to speak?”
“What are they? Why, I don’t see what they can be but notes.”
“Exactly. Five notes.”
I stared at the bundle in my hand, and then up at Chaunt.
“O-o-o-o!” I exclaimed.
He uttered a loud ironic laugh. “Well,” he said: “what does ‘b a c e f d e c a d e c’ spell?”
I scratched my nose. “You tell me, please.”
“O Jerusalem!” he cried, and took his pencil to the line, thus: b a c | e f | d e | c a d e | c—
“Well?” he said again.
I shook my head.
He positively stamped. “Listen here,” he cried: “ ‘bac ef de cad-e c’—don’tyou see?”
“No.”
“O, you ineffable ass! ‘Back of the caddy’ (that’s to say the tea-caddy; there it is), ‘see’—see what? What follows? Why, five notes, don’t they? ‘Back of the caddy see five notes’—and theretheyare.”
I sank in a heap in my chair. Light had dawned on me. “And you found ’em there, I suppose?” I murmured—“behind a false back or something?”
He nodded. “You’re getting on.”
“And, please, what’s the thing at the top?” I continued faintly. “Let me get it all over at once.”
“Ah!” he said: “there’s a trifle more ingenuity in that, perhaps. What is it, to begin with? A demisemiquaver balanced on the top of an M Y, eh?”
“So it appears to me.”
“To any one. Don’t be frightened. Try it every way round, and conclude with this: ‘On the top of M Y’—that is to say, ‘onM Y,’ which ismy, ‘a demisemiquaver’: or, shorn of all superfluities (he pencilled it down), thus: ‘on my demisemiquaver.’ Now apply the same process.”
I looked; pondered; felt myself instantly and brilliantly inspired; seized the pencil from him, and ticked off the measurements:—
“On my demise | mi | q | u | av | er.”
“Exactly,” said Chaunt, rising with the air of an at-length-released martyr, and proceeding to roll another cigarette: “ ‘On my demise, my cue you have here.’ ’Pon my word, without irreverence, it’s worthier of the composer of ‘Say, den, Julius, whar yo’ walkin’ roun’?’ than of the author of ‘Some Unnoticed Sides of Bacon.’ But all one can say is that he adapted himself to the intellectual measure of his legatee. Have you got a match?”
I must end, I am really ashamed to say, with this. Anyhow, in one way my uncle was triumphant: I was convinced, at last and at least, ofavalue in cryptograms.
Hewas nicknamed, ironically, Carabas—a sort of French equivalent for Fortunatus—the only title by which I ever knew him. Perhaps the underlying sympathy which impelled the jest reconciled him to its mockery; for there is, after all, an acute distinction in being the unluckiest man in the world. Somebody says somewhere that it is better to “lead” in hell than be a super in heaven. There came a time, I think, when Carabas would have resented good fortune as an outrage. It would have broken his record, and made him commonplace at a blow. As with Hawthorne’s young woman who was bred and throve on poisons, a normal dietary would have been fatal to him. Carabas was nurtured on ill-luck.
I made his acquaintance at Verey’s in Montreux. It was for ever Carabas here and Carabas there, and, sometimes, in badinage, M. le Marquis; for the fellow was always in huge request for his capability and good-humour. There was a great deal of commiseration being shown for him when I first arrived. Latterly he had drawn a prize ticket—for thirty thousand francs, I think it was—in some State lottery. But, alas! a few days before the declaration of the winning numbers, he had parted with his voucher for a trifle over cost price. We got up a consolation subscription for him in the hotel—relatively, quite a respectable little sum—which, with effusive thanks, he deposited in the Bureau de Secours Mutuels. The bank stopped payment almost at once, and Carabas lost his nest-egg, with a prospect of future “calls” from the parent cuckoo.
After that, we abandoned him to his Nemesis. We had recognized finally, I suppose, that vails to him meant nothing but tips to his evil destiny, to whom, as to a rapacious head-waiter, they all accrued. And so he himself was convinced with us. He showed himself neither surprised nor aggrieved; but remained the sunniest fatalist, with just a touch of wistfulness, which Nature had ever produced out of a union between Candour and Philosophy.
I don’t know what his official position was. I don’t think he knew himself. He wore a plain peaked cap, and a sleeved waistcoat with brass buttons, and was, loosely, jackal to the tremendous concierge whose bullion took the costly glass tabernacle in the hall with splendour. Carabas himself was not at all a figure of splendour. He was small, and placable in expression, with smiling cheeks, mobile lips, pencilled over by a tiny black moustache, and strength visible in nothing but his eyes. They were his vouchers of distinction above the common brand.
One thing certain about him was that he was an accomplished linguist; a second, that, for all his unspoiledness, he had a large experience of man, and (notably) womankind; a third, that his courage was equal to his good temper; a fourth, that, with every natural claim to consideration, his pride halted at no service, whether of skill or complaisance, which an unscrupulous management could exact of him; a fifth and last, that he permitted his employers so to presume upon his reputation for successlessness, as to accept from them, in reward for his many accomplishments, wages which would have been cheap to inefficiency. His own material welfare, indeed, seemed always the thing remotest from his interests. To be helpful to others was the sum of his morality.
I never could satisfy myself as to his nationality. Once—as one might ask him anything without offence—I put the question to him. To my secret surprise, he seemed to hesitate a perceptible moment before he answered, with a smiling shrug of his shoulders—
“Cosmopolitan, monsieur; a foundling of Fortune.”
“We should do very well, then,” I answered, “to claim you for England.”
Was it fancy on my part that his pleasant face paled a little? “As to that,” he said, “I know nothing.”
“You have never been in England?”
He made no reply, but began bustling over some incoming luggage, calling to the porters at the lift; and in a moment he left me.
The next day he was taken ill. The reversion of a service of raw oysters, supplied to the guests at table d’hôte, had found its way to the supper-table of the staff. Carabas detested oysters, but his gallantry to the fair sex was proverbial, and Ninette, the prettiest offilles de cuisine, sat next to him. She extracted a single “bivalve” from her half-dozen, and put it on his plate, moueing at him ravishingly.
“Love conquers everything, M. Carabas,” she said; “even the antipathies of the stomach. I will not believe in your protestations unless you eat this for my sake.”
He swallowed it at a gulp, and—it was a bad oyster, the only doubtful one in the whole consignment. Later, he was very sick; and afterwards ill for four days. Ninette cried, and then laughed, and congratulated herself on her escape. But as for the hotel, it was disconsolate in the temporary loss of its Carabas.
For my part, I was even particularly conscious of a vague discomfort in his absence. Somehow a certain personal responsibility which I had undertaken seemed to weigh upon me the more heavily for it. It was not that Carabas could have lightened, by any conceivable means, my burden. It was just a sense of moral support withdrawn at a critical moment. It was as if the knees of my conscience were weak, owing to something having gone wrong with my backbone. But I will explain.
Mr. G——, a very famous lawyer in our own country, had brought his family, a son and daughter, to holiday in Lucerne. The boy was a conceited and susceptible youth; to the lady I was—engaged.
There seems no reason why impressionability should spell obstinacy; yet very often it does. Young Miller (so I will call him) having invited himself, at the Schweitzerhof, into the toils of a siren—a patently showy and dubious one—resisted all the efforts of his family to help him out. Baffled, but resolute, the father thereupon shifted the scene to Montreux, where they were no sooner arrived than he was summoned home on business at a moment’s notice. In the meanwhile, to me (hastily called from Paris, where it had been arranged I was to join the party on its homeward journey), was assigned the unenviable and impossible task of safeguarding the family interests. Miller had positively refused to accompany his father home, then or thereafter, until his absurd “honour,” as he called his fatuity, was vindicated. It would never do to abandon the wretched infant in the wilderness. He had his independence, and was a desirableparti. Hence my promotion to an utterly fictitious authority.
I knew, naturally, how it would be; and so it turned out. The head was no sooner withdrawn, than Mademoiselle Celestine—privately advised, of course, of the fact—arrived at Verey’s. Here, then, was defiance unequivocal—naked and unashamed, I might have said, and been nearer the truth of the case. For mademoiselle’s charms were opulent, and she made no secret of them. One would have thought a schoolboy might have seen through that rouge and enamel, through the crude pencilling on those eyelashes, through all that self-advertising display. I will not dwell upon its details, because their possessor made, after all, only a summer nightmare for us, and was early discomfited. She served, at best, for foil to a brighter soul; and such is her present use in the context.
From the outset there was no finesse, no pretence of propitiation in her tactics. She understood that it was a matter of now or never with her quarry, and aimed to bring him down sitting. A woman, even the best of her sex, never gives “law” in these matters. She goes out to kill.
The two together formed an opposition camp—quite flagrantly, out in the sunlight. I thought sometimes the boy looked unhappy; but the witch would never let me havehimto myself, and I could not manœuvreherfrom under his guns. I would never have scrupled to roll her in the mud, could I once have got her alone. But she was too cunning for that; and, as for her companion, his warfare was, after all, an honourable warfare. And all the time I had my own particular Campaspe to safeguard, to console, to squire through the odious notoriety which her brother’s infatuation had conferred upon us all.
It was Carabas, of course, who in the end procured us a way, his own, out of the difficulty. The scandal being common property, there was no need for him to affect an ignorance of it. Yet we never knew, until the moment of his decision, how it had been occupying his mind from the beginning, or how, quietly and unobtrusively, he had been studying to qualify himself as our advocate. “Ouradvocate,” I say; but I knew his brief was for the bright eyes of Campaspe.Hestruck for the credit of the hotel, he declared; and mam’selle was associated with the best of that. Anyhow he struck, and daringly.
He had risen from his bed on the fourth day, as smiling, as complaisant as ever. His presence, like a genial thaw, ameliorated the little winter of our discontent. We greeted his reappearance with effusion, and dated, from the moment of it, our restoration to the social sanities.
It was a dusk, warm evening. The peaks of the Dent du Midi, thrust into a dewy sky, had been slowly cooling from pink to pearl-ash, like ingots of white-hot steel. Everything seemed one harmony of colour, except our thoughts, Campaspe’s and mine, as we strolled in the deserted garden. The Celestine and her victim had been out boating on the lake. We met them, unexpectedly returning. Mademoiselle was eating cherries out of a bag, and daintily spitting the stones right and left as she advanced. I don’t know how we should have faced the contretemps; I had no time, indeed, at the moment, to form a decision, before Carabas came softly and swiftly from a leafy ambush, and took command of the occasion.
We all, I believe, instinctively recognized it for a critical one. Mademoiselle’s bosom, though she laughed musically (she had managed to preserve, it must be owned, the unspoiled voice of aséductrice) began to rise and fall in spasms. The portier addressed her without a moment’s hesitation.
“I take the liberty to inform madame that she is in danger.”
She gave a little gasp.
“But is this comedy or melodrama?” she cried vehemently.
“That is,” said Carabas, “as madame shall decide. I have the plot up my sleeve.”
“The plot!” she echoed, and fell staring at him; and then furiously from him to us.
“Go on,” she said. “I know very well who has instigated you to this.”
She checked herself, and, smiling, put out a hand towards her companion, as if to ask, or give, reassurance. But I noticed, already to my satisfaction, that the boy did not respond. As for us, we were in complete darkness.
“I obey, madame,” said Carabas. “This plot is told in a word. There was once in Paris a certain notoriouscourtisane et joueuse. Will madame desire her name?—à bon entendeur demi-mot. One night this lady’s husband, a Corsican, from whom she was separated on an honourable allowance, visited, purely by accident, her establishment. There was a fine scene, and he wounded her severely. She was forced by the police to prosecute him, and the jury, amidst the plaudits of the public, gave their verdict—against madame. But, triumphant there, the husband’s vengeance was whetted rather than assuaged. He would throw himself upon the suffrages of his countrymen in a more drastic vindication of his honour. She had disguised herself—her name—had fled. He devoted himself to the business of pursuit. At length he believed he had traced her to an hotel in Territet.”
Carabas shrugged his shoulders and his lips, stuck out his arms at right angles with his body, stiff from the elbow, and came to a significant stop. I declare I pitied the adventuress. Every expression but that of panic seemed eliminated from her face at a touch. She looked old and haggard; and then, as if conscious of her self-betrayal, collapsed in a moment, dropping her bag of cherries.
“I am not very well,” she stammered; “the night air tries me.” She turned lividly upon the portier: “Par pitié, monsieur! C’est pour me prevenir que vous etes venu, non pour me trahir?”
Without waiting for his answer, she gathered herself together, literally, folding her train about her arm; made a desperate effort at self-command; wrenched out a smile, and went off, quavering a little airy chansonnette. But, after a few steps, despite her royal amplitude she was running. Carabas, very pale but self-possessed, picked up the bag, found one cherry in it, put it in his mouth abstractedly, and—
“My God!” cried Miller hoarsely.
Carabas jumped, and gulped.
“A thousand devils!” he cried. “You made me swallow the stone, monsieur.”
The boy was in a fever of agitation.
“Is she really that—that sort?” he said.
My Campaspe fell upon his neck.
“O, my dear, O, my dear, I am so sorry!” she sobbed.
He put her roughly, but not unkindly, away.
“I’m—I’m going back to England—to the governor,” he said.
“Carabas,” I demanded privately, as we returned to the hotel, “is it a fact that——?”
“The husband is here? No, monsieur; it is not a fact.”
“But——”
“It was acause célèbre. I was confident I recognized madame from the published prints. For the rest, it was just a chance shot; but it hit the mark.”
“Carabas, you are wonderful; and we shall not forget.”
Miller was as good as his word. With characteristic disregard for any but his own interests, he was gone the next morning, without sign or message, leaving us to wobble in his backwash of scandal, and to get out of it as best we could. His flight, of course, threw open all the doors of gossip. My business in Paris being unfinished, I had to go; but first I did my best to provide against unpleasantnesses by confiding Campaspe to the care of the least slanderousdame de compagnieI could find. I am afraid, nevertheless, she had but a poor time of it.
A week later I received a letter from Mr. G——, who in the interval had returned to Montreux.
“All is happily over with all,” he wrote: “with the exception, that is to say, of poor Carabas, who is to undergo an operation for appendicitis. It appears that a cherry-stone, which he swallowed unwittingly, did the business. The management (OWLS!) demur to the expense. I have insisted (FOOLS!) upon undertaking it upon my own account. We owe much to him; and so do they (IDIOTS!). But they don’t understand how to pay your debts is very often the best foresight.”
It was a case of pitch and toss. For days, it appeared, Carabas’s life hung in the balance. In the meanwhile, I was enabled to rejoin Mr. G—— and his daughter at Montreux, and to take my share in the nursing. Between gratitude and indignation, we rather claimed Carabas among us. Campaspe the poor fellow simply adored. Once, when he fancied himself losing hold, he confided to her, while we stood by, some main incidents in his life. I retail them here, in an abbreviated form.
“There is no doubt,” he said “that as truly as some men are born without a palate, so some men are born without luck. It is no use trying to remedy the deficiency; it is well, rather, to study to reconcile oneself to it.
“I was born in an English village, of naturalized Huguenot parents. When I was nineteen, I fell passionately in love. I had for a rival a youth very strong and unscrupulous. One day he persuaded me to bathe with him in the river, then swollen with floods. In mid-stream he pounced upon me, and strove to bear me under. I struggled desperately—it was of no avail. Death thundered in my ears; the water enwrapped and proceeded to swallow me. The last thing I saw was a figure gesticulating and shouting on the bridge a little way above; then consciousness fled, and I sank. I came to myself, stranded somewhere in a dark channel. A mad face was bending over me. I knew it—it was that of the miller. I had been carried into his race, and, just short of the wheel, he had caught and dragged me to shore. He was a drunkard, of that I was aware; and he was now quite demented.
“ ‘Mordieu!’ he said, ‘I see what you’ve come for, and the devil shan’t call twice for his own.’
“I understood instantly. He meant himself to go with me into the water—to join issues with the devil who had called for him, and have a fine frolic into eternity with his visitor. Terror lent me strength. I caught at a post, and, as he leaned down, shot my whole body at him like a spring. He went over with a splash, and I heard the wheel hitch, then begin to turn again, chewing its prey. O, my friends, what a situation! I lay like one damned, a thousand dreadful reflections mastering me. I should be accused, if caught, of murdering this man. That terror quite devoured the other, and increased with every moment that I lay. Darkness came upon me, and then I rose and fled. I thought of nothing but to escape; and so, stealing always by night, I reached London.
“Now, I will tell you the irony of this destiny. Many weeks later I read, by chance, in a newspaper, how my rival had been granted your Royal Humane Society’s testimonial, on the evidence of a casual spectator, for a brave but unsuccessful attempt tosave mefrom drowning; and how the little pretty romance had terminated with his marriage to the admiring object of our two regards. So I was dead; and, as long as I lay in my nameless grave—for my body, it appeared, had never been recovered—the ghost of my fear was laid. I do not complain, therefore. Yet—ah, mademoiselle, most condescending of sympathizers!—shehad been very dear to me.”
Here Carabas found it necessary to console my Campaspe before he could go on.
“I obtained work—under an assumed name, of course—and for many years found at least a living in that immense capital. I had an aptitude for languages, which was my great good fortune; yet prosperity never more than looked at me through the window. What then? I could keep body and soul together. Ill-luck is too mean a spirit for Death to patronize. Many a time has the great Angel turned his back disdainfully on the other’s spiteful hints. He will not claim me, I believe, until he sees him asleep, or tired of persecuting me.
“One day I was travelling on your underground railway. I had for companion in my compartment a single individual. He jumped out at the Blackfriars station, leaving a handbag on the seat. At the moment the train moved off I noticed this, seized it, and leaned with it out of the window, with a purpose to shout to its owner. I saw him in the distance, hurriedly returning. The train gathered speed; I saw he could never reach me in time, and I flung the bag upon the platform. Instantly I perceived him leap, and jerk his arm across his eyes; and on the same moment a terrible explosion occurred.
“Stunned, but unhurt, I had fallen back, when, in a flash, the full horror of my situation burst upon me. It was the time of the dynamite scares, and—ah, mon Dieu, mam’selle! your quick wit has already perceived my misfortune.
“The train had stopped; the place was full of smoke; the hubbub of a great tumult sounded in my ears. The owner of the infernal machine was certainly destroyed in his own trap; I, at the same time, had as certainly thrown the bag. No evidence to exonerate me was now possible. Without an instant’s consideration, I opened the door upon the line, slipped out, closed it, and raced for my life through the smoke to the next station. I was successful in gaining its platform without exciting observation. News of the catastrophe had already been passed on, so that I was able, mingling with a frenzied crowd, to make my way to the streets. But panic was in my feet, and all reason had fled from my brain. I felt only that to remain in London would be to find myself, sooner or later, the most execrated of human monstrosities, on the scaffold. There and then I effaced myself for the second time, hurried to the docks, and procured a post as steward on an out-going steamer. I have never been in England since. I now give monsieur the explanation he once asked for, secure in the thought that, as ill-luck has at last conceded to me the ministrations of this dear angel of a mademoiselle, his persecution must be nearing its end before the approach of the only foe he dreads. I leave it to monsieur, if he likes, to vindicate my name.”
As he finished, Mr. G——, whose face had been wonderfully kindling towards the end, bent over the bed.
“This must not be, Carabas,” he said. “The man, the dynamiter, confessed the whole truth before he died.”
Carabas sprang up.
“Monsieur!” he cried.
“I am a lawyer,” said Mr. G——; “I was connected with the case. The man confessed, I say. If I had only known that—Carabas! Carabas! you were the one witness we wanted, and could not find!”
Campaspe knelt down, and put a pitiful young arm round the shoulders of the unluckiest man in the world.
“Not only we now,” she said softly, “but others also, it seems, owe you a great debt, dear Carabas. We shall all be unable to pay it if you die. If—if I give you a kiss, will you live to return it to me on my wedding day?”
“Mademoiselle!” cried Carabas, radiant. “You shame ill-luck; you shame even Death. See how they turn and go out by the door! Vouchsafe me that dear mascot, and I swear I will live for ever.”
He is now, and has been for long, our most loved and trusted servant, with an iron constitution, and, what is best, an unshakable conviction that the circumstances which led him on to his present position were, after all, the kindest of luck in disguise.
“Willyou favour me by looking at it, young gentleman?” said the petitioner.
Itwas a most curious little model, which the petitioner had taken reverently out of a handbag. He was a hungry, eager-looking man, in a battered bowler, shabby frockcoat, and a primordial “comforter” which might have been made for Job.
Mr. Edward Cantle, busy at his desk, paid no attention.
“It turns, sir, literally, on a question of fresh butter,” said the petitioner. “Who gets it nowadays, or realizes how, between churn and table, every pat becomes a dumping-ground for bacilli? Here, you will observe, the whole difficulty is resolved. We lead the cow into the cart itself, milk her into a separator, turn her out, drive off, and the revolution of the wheels completes the process. See? No chance for any freebooting germ! The result is simplicity itself—the customer’s butter made actually on the way to his door.”
Mr. Cantle put his pen in his mouth, blotted what he had been at work on, examined it cursorily but surely, rose, walked to the counter, and presented a form to the petitioner, all something with the air of a passionless police-inspector. He was a tall young man, loose-limbed, and with all his hardness, like a melancholy Punch’s show character, in his head. Much converse with cranks had engendered in him an air of perpetual unspoken protest, of exasperated resignation. For he was a trusted clerk in the office of the Commissioners of Patents for Inventions.
“Exactly,” he mumbled over the goose-quill. “Thats a matter for your provisional specification. Good morning.”
“It’s the most wonderful——”
“Of course—they all are. Good morning.”
“It will revolutionize——”
“Naturally. You will make your petition and declaration in the proper forms. Good morning.”
The inventor essayed another effort or two, met with no response, quavered out a sigh, packed up his treasure and vanished. The sound of his exit neither relaxed nor deepened a wrinkle on the brow of the neatly groomed Government official. He simply went on with his work.
At half-past one o’clock, it being Saturday, he—we were going to say “knocked off,” but the expression would be a libel on his methodical refinement. He took a hansom—selecting a personably horsed one—to his chambers in Adelphi Terrace; lunched off fourpâté de foie grassandwiches, already awaiting him under a silver cover, and a glass of chablis; changed his dress for a river suit of sober-tinted flannel and a Panama hat; charged himself with a morocco handbag, also ready prepared; drove to Waterloo, and took a first-class ticket, and the train—he favoured the South-Western because it was the quieter line of two in this connexion—to Windsor. Arrived there, he was hailed and joined by a friend on the platform.
“Glad you’re come, Ned. I’m off colour a bit. You never are.”
It was hardly an attractive reception. Mr. Cantle glanced interrogatively at his companion, the Honourable Ivo Monk, son of Lord Prior.
“No?” he said. “What’s disturbing you, Monk?”
“O, the devil, I think!” said the young man peevishly. “Come along, do, out of this.”
Together they walked down to the river in almost absolute silence. Mr. Cantle had agreed to join his friend for an agreeable week-end on the water. It looked promising. He thought a little, and came to a characteristically uncompromising decision.
“Is it anything to do with Miss Varley?”
“Yes, it is.”
“She—they have a houseboat here, haven’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Close by?”
“More or less. Just above Datchet.”
“Then, I think, perhaps I’d better——”
“Then, I think, perhaps, you’d not. You don’t know anything about it. It’s not what you suppose.”
“O!”
A punt, in luxurious keeping with the tastes of its owner, awaited them at the steps. It was equipped with a number of little lockers for wine and food, a wealth of the downiest cushions, and an adjustable tilt with brass hoops for “roughing it” at nights on the water. For the Honourable Ivo was at the moment an aquatic gipsy, wandering at large and at whim, and scorning the effeminate pillow.
They loitered through Romney lock, talking commonplaces, and below relinquished their poles and sat and drifted until the reeds held them up. It was a fair, sweet afternoon, full of life and merriment, and, in view of the crowding craft, the remotest from ghostliness.
“Would you like to see her?” said Mr. Monk suddenly and unexpectedly.
Cantle was never to be taken off his guard.
“If it will please you, it will please me,” he said.
They resumed the poles and made forward. To their left a little sludgy creek went up among the osiers; and, anchored at its mouth, rocked the vulgarest little apology for a houseboat. It seemed just one cuddy, mounted on a craft like a bomb-ketch, which it filled from stem to stern; and what with its implied restrictedness, and dingy appearance, and stump of a chimney, one could not have imagined a less inviting prison in which to make out a holiday. Yet there was a lord to this squalid baby galliot, and to all appearance a very contented one, as he sat smoking a pipe, with his legs dangling over the side. Monk nodded to him, and the man nodded back with a grin.
“Who’s that?” asked Mr. Cantle, when out of earshot.
“O, a crank! You should recognize the breed better than I do.”
Mr. Cantle, thoughtfully nursing his jaw, with a frown on his face, had left off punting.
“Don’t you know him?” he said suddenly.
“We exchange civilities,” answered the other; “the freemasonry of the river, you understand.There’sthe Varleys’ boat.”
Forging under the Victoria Bridge, they had come in view of a long line of houseboats moored under the left bank against a withy bed, opposite the Home Park. At one of these, hight the “Mermaid,” very large and handsome, they came to, and fastening on, stepped aboard. A sound of murmuring ceased with their arrival, and Cantle had hardly become aware of two figures seated in the saloon, before he was being introduced to one of them.
Miss Varley was certainly “interesting”—tall and “English,” but with an exhausted air, and her eyes superhumanly large. She greeted the stranger sweetly, and her fiancé with a rather full, pathetic look.
“Mamma’s resting a little,” she said, in a bodiless voice, “and Nanna’s been reading to me. Papa comes down by the seven o’clock train.”
“And what’s Nanna been reading?” asked the young man.
The old nurse held up the volume. It was the Holy Book. Monk ground his teeth.
“Hush, Master Ivo!” whispered the woman. “You only distress her.”
“I’d rather see her reading a yellow-back on a July day on the river.”
The girl put a hand on his arm. “When the call has come? When my days are numbered, Ivo?” she said.
He almost burst out in an oath.
“I’d rather, if I were you, be recognized and called by my own name and nature,” he said bitterly. “But it’s all nonsense, Netta. Do, for God’s sake, believe it!”
He was so obviously overwrought, the situation was so painful, that his friend persuaded him, on personal grounds, to leave. They punted across, dropped down a distance, and brought up under the bank in a quiet spot.
“Very well,” said Cantle. “You’ll tell me, perhaps, what’s the matter?”
“Can’t you see? She’s dying.”
He dropped his face into his hands, with a groan of impotent suffering.
“There’s some mystery here,” said his friend quietly.
Monk looked up, and burst out in a sudden lost fury—
“There is, by God! Jack the Skipper!”
Cantle was rolling a cigarette imperturbably.
“Who’s—Jack the Skipper?” he drawled.
“I wish you could tell me,” cried the other. “I wish you could show these the way to his throat!” He held out his hands. “They’d fasten!” he whispered.
He came all of a sudden, quite quietly, and sat by his friend. “Its been going on for three weeks now,” he said rapidly. “They call him that about here—a sort of skit on the other—the other beast, you know. He appears at night—a sort of ghoulish, indescribable monster, black and huge and dripping, and utters one beastly sound and disappears. Nobody’s been able to trace him, or see where he comes from or goes to. He just appears in the night, in all sorts of unexpected places—houseboats, and bungalows, and shanties by the water—and terrifies some lonely child or woman, and is gone. The devil!—O, the devil! We’ve made parties and hunted him, to no good. It’s a regular reign of terror hereabouts. People don’t dare being left alone after dark. He frightened the little Cunningham child into a fit, and it’s not expected to recover. Mrs. Bancock died of an apoplexy after seeing it. And the worst of it is, a deadly superstition’s seized the place. Its visit’s got to be supposed to presage death, and——” He seized Cantle’s hand convulsively.
“Damn it! It’s unnatural, Ned! The river’s haunted—here, in Cockney Datchet—in the twentieth century! You don’t believe in such things—tell me you don’t! But Netta——”
His head sank on his breast. Cantle blew out a placid whiff of smoke.
“But—Miss Varley?” he said.
“You know—you’ve heard, at least,” said the other, “what she was. Thethingsuddenly stood before her, when she was alone, one night. Well—you see what she is now.”
“I don’t see, nevertheless, why she don’t——”
“Pack and run? No more do I. Put it to her if you like. I’ve saidmysay. But she’s in the grip—thinks she’s had her call—and there’s no moving her. Cantle, she’s just dying where she stands.”
Cantle’s cigarette made a tiny arc of light, and hissed in the river. He had heard of epidemic hysteria. The world was full of cranks.
“Now,” he said, “drop the subject, please. Shall I tell you of some fools I’ve come across in my time?”
He related some of his experiences in the Patent Office. The most impudent invention ever proposed, he said, was a burglar’s tool for snipping out and holding by suction in one movement a disk of window glass. His dry self-confidence had a curiously reassuring effect on the other. While they ate and drank and smoked and talked, the life of the river had become gradually attenuated and delivered to silence; a mist rose and hung above the water; sounds died down and ceased, concentrating themselves into the persistent dismal yelp of a dog somewhere on the bank above; the lights in the houseboats thinned to isolated sparks—twelve o’clock clanged from a distant tower.
Then, all at once, he was alert and quietly active.
“Monk, listen to me: I’m going to cure Miss Varley.”
“Ned!”
“Take the paddle and work up—up the river, do you hear? I’ll sit forward.”
The ghost of a red moon was rising in the east. They slipped on with scarce a sound. A sort of lurid glaze enamelled the water. All of a sudden a sleek bulk rose ahead right in their path, wallowed a moment like a porpoise, and disappeared.
“Good God!” cried Monk, in a choking voice, half rising from his seat.
“Keep down!” whispered his friend.
“Cantle! Did you see it? Cantle! It was he!”
“Keep down!”
They paddled on, past the last of the boats, through the bridge, on as far as the squat little bomb-ketch bulking black and menacing at the mouth of the creek.
“Hold on!” whispered Cantle. “Run her out of sight into the reeds. We must wade on board there.”
“There? That fellow Spindler’s boat?”
“Of course, now. That was his name.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll soon know.”
They accomplished the feat, though near mud-foundered by the way, and scrambled, dripping, on board. The door of the cuddy yielded to their touch. Monk was beginning to gather dim light.
“Don’t let me,” he whispered, almost sobbing. “Keep my hands off him.”
“Leave him to me,” said Cantle gravely.
Not a sound of life greeted them. They stole into the cabin and closed the door, almost, upon themselves.
“We must yield him to-night for the sake of to-morrow,” murmured Cantle.
“Ned! If he goes again——”
“Hush! It’s not probable he’d risk a second visit, knowing her watched.”
The crack brightened as the moon rose: glowed into a ribbon of light. Suddenly Cantle gripped the other’s wrist.
A stealthy puddling, sucking sound close by reached their ears. Over the side came swarming a great shapeless fishy creature, which settled with a sludgy wallop on the little triangle of foredeck almost at their feet. Monk gave a soft, awful gasp, and, with the sound, Cantle had dashed open the door and flung himself upon the monster.
“Quick!” he cried; “you’ve got matches! Light a candle—lamp—anything! Lie still, Mr. Spindler. It’s all up. I know you and your Marine Secret Service suit! A knife now, Monk! Out he comes.”
He was merciless with the blade when he got it, slashing and cutting at the oilskin suit, splitting it from top to toe. Mr. Spindler’s red beard and extravagant face came out of it like a death’s-head out of its chrysalis.
“There goes the proud monument of a lifetime,” said the madman. He had made no effort to resist. The first blow at this darling of his invention had seemed to hamstring him, morally and materially.
For he was just one of Mr. Cantle’s cranks—had once invented a submarine travelling suit, with which he had hoped to inaugurate a new system of Secret Service for the Admiralty. It was an ingenious enough device, with some scheme of floating valves through which to breathe; but the authorities, after holding him on and off, would have none of it. Then the fate of many inventors had befallen him. Between practical ruin and a moral sense of wrong, he had gone crazy, and vowed warfare on the mankind which had discarded him. It should comprehend, too late, the uses of instant appearance and disappearance to which his invention could be put. He went mad, and ended his days in an asylum.
On the Monday morning Mr. Cantle posted back to the Patent Office; on the Tuesday Miss Varley was reading De Maupassant’s “Mademoiselle Fifi” under the awning of the “Mermaid’s” roof; and on the Wednesday Mr. Ivo Monk got her to name the day.
One crowded hour of glorious lifeIs worth an age without a name.
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name.
I hadnever suspected Sweeting of a desire to be “somebody.” Indeed, thejeunesse dorée, in whose ranks Nature had seemed unquestioningly to bestow him, is not subject to diffidence, or prone to the wisdom which justifies itself in a knowledge of its own limitations. I was familiar with his placid, cherubic face at a minor club or two, in the Park, in Strand restaurants and Gaiety stalls; and it had never once occurred to me to classify him as apart from his fellows of the exquisite guild. If, like Keats, he could appreciate the hell of conscious failure, its most poignant anguish, I could have sworn, would borrow from some too-late realization of the correctest “form” in a hat-brim or shirt-collar. I could have sworn it, I say, and I should have been, of course, mistaken. Keats may have claimed it as his poetical prerogative to go ill-dressed, and to object, though John, to be dubbed “Johnny.” It remained to Sweeting to prove that a man might be a very typical “Johnny” and a poet to boot. But I will explain.
One day I entered the reading-room of the Junior Winston and nodded to Sweeting, who was seated solitary at the newspaper-table. While I was hunting for the “Saturday Review”—which was conducting, I had been told, the vivisection of a friend of mine—my attention was attracted by something actually ostentatious in Sweeting’s perusal ofhissheet, and I glanced across. Judge my astonishment when I saw in his hands, not “Baily’s” or the “Pink ’Un,” but the very periodical I sought. I gasped; then grinned.
“Hullo!” I said. “Since when have you taken to that?”
He attempted to reply with a face of wondering hauteur, but gave up at the first twitch.
“O,” he said rather defiantly, “you lit’ary professionals think no one’s in it but yourselves.”
“In what?”
“Why, this sort of thing,” he said, tapping the “Saturday”; “the real stuff, you know.”
“Indeed,” I said, “we don’t. You’re always welcome to the reversion of my place in it for one.”
“O, me!” he said airily. “It don’t positively apply there, you see, being a sort of a kind of a professional myself.”
“My Sweet!” I exclaimed. “A professional—you?”
“O, yes,” he said. “Didn’t you know? Write for the ‘Argonaut.’ Little thing of mine in it last number.”
I felt faint.
“May I see it?” I murmured. “If I don’t mistake, it’s under your elbow at this moment.”
“Is it?” he answered, blushing flagrantly, “Lor’ bless me, so it is!”
I took it from his hand, opened it, and read, over his undoubted signature—Marmaduke Sweeting—the title, “The Fool of the Family.”
“Ah!” I thought, “of course. Like title like author.”
But I was wrong. The tale, a veritableconte drolatique, was as keen and strong as a Maupassant. I had no choice but to take it at a draught, smacking my lips after. Then I put the paper softly down and looked across at him. His harmless features were set in a sort of hypnotic smile, his hat was tilted over his eyes, and he was making constant mouthfuls of the large silver knob of his stick. My eyes travelled to and fro between this figure and the figures of printthat were he. What possible connexion could there be between the two? I thought of Buffon writing in lace ruffles, and all at once recognized a virtue in immaculate shirt-cuffs, and decided to consult some fashionable hosier about raising my price per thousand words. In the meantime my respect for Sweeting was born.
“So,” I said, “you are somebody after all?”
“Am I?” he answered, grinning bucolic. “Glad you’ve found it out.”
“Why,” I said, “honestly there’s genius in this story; but nothing to what you’ve shown in concealing that you had any. There must be much more to come out of the same bin.”
He flushed and laughed and wriggled, as I walked over and sat beside him.
“O, I dare say!” he said. “Hope so, anyhow.”
“Not a doubt. What made you think of it, now?”
“O! I thought of it,” he said; and, after all, there was no better reply to an idiotic question. I was beginning humbly to appraise intellectual self-sufficiency at its value, and to appreciate the hundred disguises of reason.
I saw a good deal of Sweeting, on his own initiative, after this. He would visit me in my rooms, and discuss—none too sapiently, I may have thought in other circumstances, and with the most ingenuous admiration for his own abilities—the values of certain characters as portrayed by him in a brilliant series, “The Love-Letters of a Nonconformist,” which had immediately followed in the “Argonaut” “The Fool of the Family,” and was taking the town by storm. Thus, “What d’ee think of that old Lupin, last number,” he would chuckle, “with his calling virtue an ‘emu,’ don’tcherknow?”
“Ha, yes!” I would correct him, with a nervous laugh. “ ‘Anæmia’ was the word. You meant it, of course.”
“Why, didn’t I say it?” he would answer. “It’s got a big swallow anyhow”; and then he would check himself suddenly, and, without further explanation, eye me, and begin to whistle.
Now I might recall the passage to which he referred (to wit, that every red blood corpuscle, being a seed peccancy, so to speak, made virtue an anæmia) and try to puzzle out a quite new significance in it. Suspecting that its author’s apparent naïveté was only assumed, I was respectfully guarded in my answers, and, when he was gone, would curiously ponder the perspicacious uses to which he would put them. He did not consult me, I felt, as an oracle; but rather drew upon me for the vulgar currency of thought, to which his exclusiveness was a stranger. He was very secret about his own affairs; though I understood that he was becoming quite an important “name” in the literary world. Ostensibly he was not, after that first essay, to be identified with the “Argonaut,” though any one, having an ounce of the proper appreciation, could scarcely fail to mark in the “Love-Letters” the right succession of qualities which had made the earlier story notable. Indeed, he suffered more than any man I knew from the penalties attaching to the popular author. The number of communications, both signed and anonymous, which he received from admirers was astonishing. Scarce a day passed but he brought me specimens of them to discuss and laugh over. I did not, I must admit, think his comments always in good taste; but then I was not personally subject to the flattering pursuit, and so may have been no more constituted to judge than a monk is of a worldling.
These testimonies to his fame were from every sort of individual—the soldier, the divine, the poet, the painter, the actor (and more especially the actress), the young person with views, the social butterfly, the gushling late of the schoolroom, the woman of sensibility late of the latest lifelong passion for art or religion, and finding, as usual, the taste of life sour on her lips after a recent debauch of sentiment. They all found something in the “Love-Letters” to meet their particular cases—some note of subtle sympathy, some first intimation to their misunderstood spirits of a kindred emotion which hadfelt, and could lay its finger with divine solace on the spot. No longer would they suffer a barren grievance—that hair-shirt which not a soul suspected but to giggle over. To take, for example, from the series a typical sentence which served so many for a text—
“To whom does the materialist cry his defiance—to whom but to God? He cannot rest from baiting a Deity whose existence he denies. He forgets that irony can wring no response from a vacuum.” A propos of which wrote the following:—
A Half-pay General.—Don’t tell me, Sir, but you’ve served, like me, a confounded ungrateful country, and learned your lesson! Memorialize the devil rather than the War Office. You’ve hit it off in your last sentence to a T.A Chorus Girl.—Dear Sir,—You mean me to understand, I know, and you’re quite right. The British public has no more ears than a ass, or they’d reconise who ought to be playing Lotta in “The Belle of Battersea.” It’s such a comfort you can’t tell. Please forgive this presumptious letter from a stranger.—Yours very affectionately,Dolly.An Apostolic Fisherman.—I like your metaphor. I would suggest only “ground-baiting a Deity” as more subtly applicable to the tactics of a worldling. Note: “And Simon Peter said, ‘I go a-fishing.’ ”
A Half-pay General.—Don’t tell me, Sir, but you’ve served, like me, a confounded ungrateful country, and learned your lesson! Memorialize the devil rather than the War Office. You’ve hit it off in your last sentence to a T.
A Chorus Girl.—Dear Sir,—You mean me to understand, I know, and you’re quite right. The British public has no more ears than a ass, or they’d reconise who ought to be playing Lotta in “The Belle of Battersea.” It’s such a comfort you can’t tell. Please forgive this presumptious letter from a stranger.—Yours very affectionately,
Dolly.
An Apostolic Fisherman.—I like your metaphor. I would suggest only “ground-baiting a Deity” as more subtly applicable to the tactics of a worldling. Note: “And Simon Peter said, ‘I go a-fishing.’ ”
Take, again, this excerpt: “Doctors’ advice to certain patients to occupy their minds recalls the Irishman’s receipt for making a cannon, ‘Take a hole and pour brass round it.’ ” Of which a “True Hibernian” wrote—
Sir,—I’ve always maintained that the genuine “bull,” fathered on my suffering country, came from the loins of the English lion. Murder, now! How could a patient occupy his doctor’s mind as well as his own, unless he was beside himself? And then he’d have no mind at all.
Sir,—I’ve always maintained that the genuine “bull,” fathered on my suffering country, came from the loins of the English lion. Murder, now! How could a patient occupy his doctor’s mind as well as his own, unless he was beside himself? And then he’d have no mind at all.
Or take, once more and to end, the sentence: “The Past is that paradoxical possession, a Shadow which we would not drop for the Substance”; which evoked the following from “One who has felt the Weariness, the Fever, and the Fret”—
How strangely and exquisitely phrased! It brings, I know not how, the memory of the Channel before me. I have only crossed it once; but, O! the recollection! the solemn moving waters to which my soul went out!
How strangely and exquisitely phrased! It brings, I know not how, the memory of the Channel before me. I have only crossed it once; but, O! the recollection! the solemn moving waters to which my soul went out!
These are specimens, but a few, of the responses wrung by Sweeting from the human chords he touched. There were, in addition, prayers innumerable for autographs, requests for the reading of manuscripts, petitions for gratis copies of his works, to be sold for any and every charity but the betterment of impecunious authors. He fairly basked in the sunshine of a great reputation. There was only one flaw in his enormous self-satisfaction. By a singular perversity and most inexplicable coincidence, every one of these signed documents was without an address. But, after all, coincidence, which is only another name for the favouritism of Fate, must occasionally glut itself on an approved subject. Sweeting was in favour with the gods, and enjoyed “a high old time of it,” principally, perhaps, because he did not appear to be ambitious of impressing any “set” but that with which he was wont to forgather, and above which he made no affectation now of rising superior.
I had an example one evening of this intellectual modesty, when casually visiting the Earl’s Court grounds. There I encountered my friend, the centre and protagonist of a select company in the enclosure. All exquisitely wore exquisite evening dress (for myself I always scornfully eschewed the livery), and all gravitated about Sweeting with the unconscious homage which imbecility pays to brains—“the desire of the moth for the star.” I could see at once that he was become their Sirius, their bright particular glory, reflecting credit upon their order. And he, who might have commanded the suffrages of the erudite, seemed content with his little conquest—to have reached, indeed, the apogee of his ambition—a one-eyed king among the blind. These suffered my introduction with some condescension, as a mere larva of Grub Street. They knew themselves now as the stock from which was generated this real genius. As for me, I was Gil Blas’s playwright at the supper of comedians. And then, at somebody’s initiative, we were all swaggering off together along the walks.
Now, I had always had a sort of envy of theesprit de tonwhich unites the guild of amiable gadflies; and, finding myself here, for all my self-conscious intellectual superiority, of the smallest account, I grew quickly sardonic. If I knew who wrote the “Heptameron,” I didn’t know, even by sight, the Toddy Tomes who was setting all the town roaring and droning with his song, “Papa’s Perpendicular Pants.” It is a peevish experience to be “out of it,” even if theitis no more intelligible than a Toddy Tomes’s topical; and gradually I waxed quite savage. Reputation is only relative after all. There is no popular road to fame. As an abstract acquisition, it may be said to pertain at its highest to the man who combines quick perceptions with adaptive sympathies. I was not that man. In all, save exclusively my own company, I felt “out of it,” awkward because resentful, and resentful because awkward. I despised these asses, however franked by Sweeting, yet coveted, vainly, the temporary grace of seeming at home with them. I got very cross. And then we alighted on Slater.
I knew it for his name by Sweeting’s greeting him in response to his hail. He was seated at a little table all by himself, drinking champagne, and alternately turning up and biting the ends of a red tag of beard, and luridly pulling at a ponderous cigar. He was a small, dingy person, so obviously inebriated, that the little human clearing in which he sat solitary was nothing more than the formal recognition of his state. He also, it was evident, to my disgust, despised the conventions of dress, but without any of those qualms of self-consciousness with which I was troubled. He lolled back, his hat crushed over his eyes, a hump of dicky and knotted tie escaping from his waistcoat-front, his disengaged thumb hooked into an arm-hole—as filthy a little vagabond, confident and maudlin and truculent in one, as you could wish. And he hailed Sweeting as a familiar.
My friend stopped, with a rather sheepish grin.
“Hullo, Slater!” said he. “A wet night, ain’t it?”
Our little group came chuckling all about the baboon. Even then, I noticed, I was the one looked upon with most obvious disfavour by the surrounding company.
“Look here,” said Sweeting, suddenly gripping me to the front. “Here’s one of your cloth, Slate’. Let me introjuce you,” and he whispered in my ear, “Awfully clever chap. You’ll like him when you know.”
I suppose my instant and instinctive repulsion was patent even to the sot. He lurched to his feet, and swept off his crumpled hat with an extravagant bow. Sweeting’s pack went into a howl of laughter. It was evident they were not unacquainted with the creature, and looked to him for some fun.
“My cloth, sir?” vociferated the beast. “Honoured, sir, ’m sure, sir. Will you allow me to cut my coat according to it, sir? Has any gentleman a pair of scissors? Just the tails, sir, no more—quite large enough for me; and you’d look very elegant in an Eton jacket.”
I tried to laugh at this idiotic badinage, and couldn’t.
“O, crikey, wouldn’t he!” said a vulgar onlooker. “Like a sugar-barrel in a weskit.”
Then, as everybody roared, I lost my temper.
“Don’t be a fool,” whispered Sweeting. “It’s the way he’ll get his change out of you.”
“Change!” I snapped furious. “No change could be for the worse with him, I should think. Let me pass, please!”
The odious wretch was pursuing me all the time I spoke, while the others hemmed me in, edging me towards him and roaring with laughter. Sweeting himself made no effort to assist me, but stood to one side, irresistibly giggling, though with a certain anxiety in his note.
“Call off your puppies!” I cried ragingly, and with the word was sent flying into the very arms of Slater. I felt something rip, and at a blow my hat sink over my eyes; and then a chill friendly voice entered into the mêlée.
“O, look here, Slater, that’ll do, you know!”
I wrenched my eyes free. My champion was not Sweeting, but Voules, Sir Francis Voules, of whom more hereafter. He was cool and vicious, and as faultlessly dressed as the others, but in a manner somehow superior to the foppery of their extreme youth. He carried a light overcoat on his arm.
“O!willit?” said Slater.
“Yes, I said so,” said Voules, pausing a moment from addressing me to scan him. Slater slouched back to his table. Nobody laughed again.
In the meantime, Sir Francis was helping me to restore my hat to shape, and to donhisovercoat.
“Yours is split to the neck,” he said. “Now, let’s go.”
He took my arm, and we strolled off together. The crowd, quite respectful, parted, and we were engulfed in it.
I was grateful to Voules, of course, but inexplicably resentful of his cool masterfulness. Truth to tell, we were souls quite antipathetic; and now he had put me right—with everybody but myself. In a helpless attempt to restore that balance, I snarled fiercely, smacking fist into palm—
“I’ll have the law of that beast! You know him, it seems? I can’t congratulate you on your friends.”
“Sweeting was most to blame,” said Voules quietly.
I grunted, and strode on fuming.
“But, after all,” said Voules, “the poor ass had to back up his confederate.”
I glanced at him as we walked.
“His confederate?”
“Of course. Didn’t you know? Slater really writes the things for which Sweeting gets the credit.”
“O, come, Voules! Here’s one of your foolhardy calumnies. You really should be careful. Some day you’ll get into trouble.”
“O, very well!”
“You talk as if it were an open secret.”
“You know Sweeting as well as I. Do you recognize his style in the Nonconformist lucubrations? Possibly you’ve had letters from him?”
“I’ve some specimens of letterstohim now—letters from admirers. If anything were needed to refute your absurd statement, there they are in evidence.”
He gave a little dry laugh; then touched my sleeve eagerly.
“You wouldn’t think it abusing a confidence to show me those letters?”
“I don’t know why. Sweeting’s laid no embargo on me.”
“Very well. If you’ll let me, I’ll come home with you now.”
I stumbled on in a sort of haze.
I did not believe this to be any more than a mad shot in the dark. Sir Francis was one of those men who made mischief as Pygmalion made Galatea. He fell in love with his own conceptions—would go any lengths to gratify his passion for detraction. Do not suppose, from his prefix, that he was a bold, bad baronet. He was just an actor of the new creation—belonged to what was known by doyens of the old Crummles school as the be-knighted profession. The stage was an important incident in his social life, and he seldom missed a rehearsal of any piece to which he was engaged.
“You know this Slater?” I said, as I drove in my latchkey. “As what?”
“As a clever, disreputable, and perfectly unscrupulous journalist.”
“It's preposterous! What could induce him to part with such a notoriety?”
“The highest bidder, of course.”
“What! Sweeting? If he’s still the simple Johnny you’d have him be?”
“I’m yet to learn that the simple Johnny lacks vanity.”
“But, for him, such an unheard-of way to gratify it!”
“Opportunism, sir. There are more things in the Johnny’s philosophy than we dream of.”
“Well, I simply don’t believe it.”
Voules read, with an immobile face, the letters which Sweeting had left with me. At the end he looked up.
“Are you open to a bet?”
“Can’t afford it.”
“Never mind, then.” He rose. “Truth for its own sake will do. Anyhow, I presume you don’t object to countering on Slater?”
“O, do what you like!”
“Thanks. Would you wish to be in at the death?”
“Just as you please.”
“You see,” said he, with a pleasant affectation of righteousness, “if my surmise is correct—and you’re the first one I’ve ventured to confide in—it’s my plain duty to prick a very preposterous bubble. Thank you for lending yourself to the cause of decency. Don’t say anything until you hear from me. Good-bye!”—and he was gone, followed by my inclination, only my inclination, to hurl a book after him.
I sat tight—always the more as I swelled over the delay—till, on the third day following, Sweeting called on me. He came in very shamefaced, but with a sort of suppressed triumph to support his abjectness.
“I couldn’t help it, you know,” he said; “and I gave him a bit of my mind after you’d gone.”
“Indeed,” I answered good-humouredly; “that was what you couldn’t well afford, and it was generous of you.”
He was blankly impervious to the sarcasm. Had it been otherwise, my new-fledged doubts had perhaps fluttered to the ground. After a moment I saw him pull a paper from his pocket.
“Look here,” he said, vainly trying to suppress some emotion, which was compound, in suggestion, of elation and terror. “You’ve made your little joke, haven’t you, over all those other people forgettin’ to put their addresses? Well, what do you think ofthatfor the Prime Minister?”
I took from his hand a sheet of large official-looking paper, and read—
Dear Sir,—You may have heard of my book, “The Foundations of Assent.” If so, you will perhaps be interested to learn that I am contemplating a complete revision of its text in the light of your “Love-Letters.” They are plainly illuminating. From being a man of no assured opinions, I have become converted, through their medium, to a firm belief in the importance of the Nonconformist suffrage. Permit me the honour, waiving the Premier, to shake by the hand as fellow-scribe the author of that incomparable series. I shall do myself the pleasure to call upon you at your rooms at nine o’clock this evening, when I have a little communication to make which I hope will not be unpleasing to you. Permit me to subscribe myself, with the profoundest admiration, your obedient servant,J. A. Burleigh.
Dear Sir,—You may have heard of my book, “The Foundations of Assent.” If so, you will perhaps be interested to learn that I am contemplating a complete revision of its text in the light of your “Love-Letters.” They are plainly illuminating. From being a man of no assured opinions, I have become converted, through their medium, to a firm belief in the importance of the Nonconformist suffrage. Permit me the honour, waiving the Premier, to shake by the hand as fellow-scribe the author of that incomparable series. I shall do myself the pleasure to call upon you at your rooms at nine o’clock this evening, when I have a little communication to make which I hope will not be unpleasing to you. Permit me to subscribe myself, with the profoundest admiration, your obedient servant,
J. A. Burleigh.