MORTGAGED.IHAVEtold you about Kinsman—his china and oak, his flirtations—never from the heart—his downfall and sorry end.Poor Kinsman! Like most born bad lots he was a charming companion. If it had not been for the apocryphal aristocratic connections to whom he persistently alluded, he would have been perfect. He was so charmingly enthusiastic over his curios; such a solemn enthusiasm—the only earnest thing about him.Yet over the affair of that one supreme curio he kept rigid silence. He told me; but it was a couple of years later—when the Inn had ceased to talk about Harrowsmith. A couple of years later! By then Kinsman had lived down the first strength of his angry regret. He told me fully, lovingly, sadly, opening out his passionate collector’s soul. He made me understand the full virility of those odd emotions which had once fired and wasted him.Yes. He was silent enough while the affair was in progress. That odd, weird, inanimate affair! How little any of us suspected the nature of the struggle that was going on behind his constantly sported oak.It was in this way. Let me begin, as he began, with his introduction to the brown, burly god which gained possession of him.Harrowsmith asked him to lunch one Saturday. After lunch he brought out cigars; he had money and could afford them daily. To him cigar-smoking was a habit, not an occasional indulgence.The last course of the luncheon still stood on the table, which the two men had pushed well back so that they might rest their feet upon the fender. It was a hard March day; a day of penetrating wind. The draughts licked under the door and danced between the carpet and the shrunken boards. Outside in the square the only sound was the savage “boo” of the young spring gale.Harrowsmith’s fripperies—of photographs and gimcrack furniture in the lightest and latest style—appeared meager in the ancient room of his chambers—thelittle room with the heavily corniced ceiling and paneled walls. These fripperies, which he considered showed taste, were in the light of a personal affront to the solid oak cabinet against the wall immediately opposite the fireplace. Kinsman, of course, found this piece of furniture the only thing that he could look at with tolerance. He had been invited to meet it—to give his expert opinion on it.He kept turning his head and looking pityingly, covetously at it. He felt sorry for it, set as it was among modern cabinet-making and garish ornament. It was passing through a period of degradation, this stout cabinet of oak which had lived most likely for a couple of centuries in some manor house. He thought that it must surely feel its shame of contact. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. Once he found himself fancifully wishing that he wore blinkers like a horse so that he might shut out Harrowsmith’s other effects.“It’s beautiful, beautiful,” he sighed, shading his eyes with his hands and staring straight at the wall. “It’s original, every bit, even the cornice. I shouldlike to know its history. If these old things could only talk!”“It’s all he left me. I expected a thousand at least,” grumbled Harrowsmith.Kinsman was still ardently drinking in the solid beauty of the cabinet—with its linen-patterned panels. One never saw carving of that pattern save on Tudor work. The thing was late Tudor. It was unique—and yet this materialistic doctor was not satisfied. He gazed at the glowing brown wood, at the slim posts supporting the upper cupboard, at the cunning hinges of iron. Never had he thrown at a woman so heart-whole a glance.“I wish a rich uncle would leave me such a thing,” he sighed. “Why, man, money won’t buy it. You may wait, you may search a lifetime, and not find such a well-preserved specimen of the period.”“Oh, yes, I know you have the old-oak craze. But I like smart, modern stuff. I like pretty things about me. You understand? What would that fetch at auction?”Harrowsmith took the cigar out of his mouthand pointed it, with its long, trembling tip of ash, toward the cabinet.“Impossible to say. So much depends. But you surely wouldn’t sell it?”“If I could get a good price. Why not?”Kinsman had never before felt so deeply the disadvantages of poverty. Fate, which had given him an unsuccessful father, which had chained him to a clerk’s stool in a City office, had further cursed him with a fine taste in art. He knew a good thing by instinct. He trifled withbric-à-brac, with Chippendale; he had an eye for the voluptuous coloring of the Empire period; but his best affections he reserved for oak. All the rest was thin, unsatisfying. In oak, despite the poverty which allowed him to criticise, but rarely to buy, he was a connoisseur. He could tell—blindfold—by a caressing turn of his hands about the different members, if a piece of oak furniture were original or if it were some bastard thing built together from old wood for the hoodwinking of people with money and a fashionable desire for the antique. How savagely I’ve heard him disclaim against people of that sort!He got up. The slim pillars seemed to draw him—to wink and beckon and plead.“Why don’t you buy it off me?” Harrowsmith asked, idly watching him and looking contemptuously amused.He spoke with the carelessness of a man to whom money is not of immediate moment. He wheeled round in his chair and took a long, sulky look at the oak. It irritated him. It took up room. More than that, it was reminiscent of disappointment. His Uncle Bob had always promised to remember him in his will. He didn’t consider that a Tudor cabinet was remembrance—enough.“You shall have it for thirty pounds,” he said.Kinsman did not answer. He grew pale. The hand that was running about the rich wood twitched nervously.Harrowsmith misunderstood his silence, and said, with slight asperity:“Is that too much for you? To get rid of the thing I’ll say twenty-five.”“Twenty-five!” You may be sure there was acatch in Kinsman’s voice. “It would be cheap at thirty. But you know that I could as easily raise three hundred. How can a poor beggar save out of five pounds a week?”Harrowsmith shrugged and said, “I shall get a dealer in. Can you recommend one? You’re hand in glove with all those fellows. I hate the thing. It’s too heavy. It dwarfs the room.”Kinsman with his finger was tracing the panels. He threw a look of desperation, of pleading even, at the oak, as if he thought that a thing which had been so long in the world and had witnessed the perplexities of so many generations was really sentient and could suggest. As he looked, his cheeks flushed, his lips smiled, and his whole attitude became suddenlydébonnaire.He returned to the fire, walking ludicrously sideways, as if he were afraid to take his eyes off the cabinet—the wise, resourceful cabinet. Ithadsuggested. He suddenly remembered. He became confused, dizzy, elated with remembrance. He could buy it—if not with coin of the realm, with something equally marketable. Harrowsmith hadsaid it was marketable. He would buy it. Why not? Within his own body he carried the means to buy—his own imperfect, freakish body!“Do you remember,” he asked, in the hurried, jerky tones of a clock that is out of gear, “the offer you once made me?”Harrowsmith looked perplexed, and then his face lighted.“To buy your body—yes.”“Does it still hold good?”The doctor stared. Then he laughed and poked the fire until the hot light ran round the room, and, darting down the panels of the cabinet, made it wink and beckon more than before.“You didn’t like the idea,” he said at last.“Your Uncle Bob hadn’t left you the cabinet then,” Kinsman reminded him pointedly.“That’s ingenious. I see, I see. You propose to sell yourself—for a bit of wood.”“I should be a fool if I didn’t. You want my body after I am dead because it differs in some slight detail from other bodies, because, dead, I shall be to you medical fellows a curio. That’s grim.”“A curio, exactly—to use your own fanciful term,” said Harrowsmith, professional enthusiasm lighting its cold taper in his eye. “And I, as you know, have made a special study of the thorax. Are you really serious?”“Absolutely. I’ll give you my body when I’ve done with it if you’ll give me the cabinet at once.”Harrowsmith looked at his watch and jumped up.“It’s not quite four,” he said. “Kent, the commissioner for oaths, on the ground floor, has probably not gone. He stays late. You must sign a document of some sort. He’ll draw it up. I like to have things in form. In the event of your predeceasing me——”“I’m yours. Yes; that’s all right. If I die first,” assented Kinsman carelessly. He was amused and scornful in his turn at an interest which was to him inexplicable.He thought the doctor a fool. He was also positively grateful to his singular thorax. Men with normal organs could not always afford Tudor furniture. Over his enthusiastic face slid the expressionof a personal greeting as he gave a full look at the cabinet and saluted it.“You’ve got a bargain,” Harrowsmith said. “You’ll be able to sell the thing, when you are tired of it, at a profit.”Kinsman winced. The first hint of shadow drew his brows together.“Sell it! Why, I’d sell myself first. No joke intended. By Jove! Ihavesold myself.”They both laughed—laughter that tripped and tumbled down the old, wide stairs; laughter that was caught up by the rough wind outside and carried—whither?*****For some weeks Kinsman had his silent chuckle against Harrowsmith. He told himself that this was mean and narrow. He struggled against his jubilation and his contemptuous reflection that the doctor was a fool. He tried to regard him as a fellow-enthusiast—with a different objective. He wished to avoid the narrow outlook of the average collector. He imagined that his flirtations with china, with Empire lounges and candelabra, with thetapering legs of Chippendale chairs had made him tolerant and broadly sympathetic. Evidently it was not so. He looked at his cabinet; he thought of his eccentric thorax—which, after all, Harrowsmith might never possess—and again, silently, in the seclusion of his own rooms, he chuckled.After dinner each night, as he sat and smoked, he stole frequent moments for the cabinet. He jumped up now and then imagining that he had discovered some new minute detail in the work. Or he opened the doors and stuck his head far into the cavernous cupboards. They exhaled an aromatic perfume. Perhaps some woman had once kept Eastern embroideries there; this was a superficial speculation which he afterward discarded as being unworthy and improbable. He finally decided that it had been used as a linen press—linen folded away with lavender; or a thrifty housewife had stored within choice apples. It was the perfume of old orchards that teased his nostrils.He tried to supply the cabinet with a history. Harrowsmith could tell him nothing except that his Uncle Bob had bought it at a sale. Sometimes helooked at it so long, so ardently, that he almost thought he was on the point of drawing from the massive brown thing the secrets of dead generations.He could never tell me the exact momentous occasion when the first faint chill of repugnance struck him. He did remember the night when, as he came home tired from the City, and cast his eyes on the cabinet as usual, it seemed insufficient for the first time. What was it, after all, to make so much fuss about? Had he paid too great a price? Until that moment he had never given one thought to the price.In the evenings, smoking his cigarette, one hand loose on his knee, he asked himself how that hand would look—dead. Involuntarily he stiffened it. Perhaps it was the slowly rising horror in him which made it appear whiter than it ever had been before. His hand! He was sorry for it. His body! What an injustice he had done it. Had any man the right to rob his body of the sanctity and superb solitude which come after death? The meanest wretch living retained the right to that majestic aloofness. He had mortgaged his. The first seeds of hate and fear sprouted in his heart.He dashed out of his chambers and went down Chancery Lane into Fleet Street. He walked west to a theater. The play was a tragedy. As he sat in the pit he laughed when the other people thrilled. He then looked in amazement at the scandalized faces surrounding him.He had left his chambers without casting a farewell look at the cabinet, without murmuring some word of admiration. This had never happened before. He became grave. He reproached himself. He was tender with foolish little penitences—as one would be with a loved woman.That night in his bed the grewsome fancy seized him to lie straight and still, hands folded and chin well up. That’s how he would lie when he was dead—the majesty of death. But in his case it would be a mere tinsel majesty—like the amusingly solemn antics of a gypsy monarch. He was not his own.He got up and lit the light and smoked. He was ashamed of himself. He was afraid of himself, and of Harrowsmith and of the cabinet. They were a dread trio, banded in a terrible way.The fire was quite dead. He felt his way acrossthe room and put his unsteady hand on the thick oak panels of the cabinet. He put his head against one and groaned. The perfume—was it of lavender?—stole out and nauseated him.He would sell it. He must sell it. He went back to bed. He considered. Which dealer would give the best price? He would sell it. He would take his annual holiday early; he evidently wanted a thorough change.In the morning he wondered how he could have thought of selling it. The acquisitiveness, the unreasoning, improvident, ardent affection of the collector was strong in him again. Before he went to the City he examined the cabinet as usual, gloating and thrilling over its beauty.But at night he was again seized with foreboding so dreadful that he dashed into the flowing streets. He went to a music hall. He grinned, a fixed, wide grin, that seemed to crack his cheeks. His face felt stiff. The faces of the dead were stiff.He thought that he would ask Harrowsmith to break the compact, to take back his legacy. But the doctor had a professional ardor. He mightbluntly refuse. Also—he could not part with the cabinet.The next day was Saturday. All the afternoon he walked miserably about the London streets. He thought he’d enlist, get sent to the front, and be killed on a battlefield. So would he save his dead flesh from ribald attention. But perhaps Harrowsmith would not let him go.He was afraid to go back to his chambers, afraid that he might meet Harrowsmith on the stairs, afraid of the cabinet. He turned into a tea shop and found with difficulty a vacant chair at one of the tables. The life and gayety and warmth of that tea shop reassured him. He despised himself for his morbid fears. He would be a fool if he threw up his berth and went to the front. Besides, if he went he must leave the cabinet. The touch and sight of the wonderful brown wood carved by hands that had so long been dust had become a daily necessity to him.Next morning, when he awoke, he was feeling very ill. It was doubtless influenza. There was no danger in that if one took care. He would takecare. He must. He dared not die. Death now had a bitterness double distilled. All that Sunday he lay miserably in bed. As the hours wore on he grew too ill to fear death—and after. He was too ill, even, to be haunted by his usual terror when dusk fell.Next day his laundress came to light the fire. He sent her off with a telegram to the office, saying he could not come. She happened to meet Harrowsmith on the landing and sent him in on her own initiative.The doctor was assiduous. He was good to us all, and only grew angry if we spoke of a fee. He muttered something about nervous breakdown. He provided a trained nurse; he paid professional visits twice a day.With care and nursing Kinsman began to be himself again. Harrowsmith told him that he must get away for a rest. He added that he would go with him; a holiday together would be splendid. No doubt he wondered at the wild, leaping terror in the other’s eyes when he said that; said it in such a cheery, commonplace way, without any subtlety.But Kinsman was subtle and suspicious and mad. He thought the doctor wished to come too, so as to be sure of him. He read the most diabolical eagerness in his calm face. How afraid he was of Harrowsmith! And how afraid Harrowsmith was that he would be the loser on their strange compact. Afraid to let him go away alone in case he should die and be buried.His dread and hate grew and grew; it became distorted into a monster. He now hesitated before he swallowed each dose of medicine. His light head became the dwelling-place of a hundred wild thoughts. He lay with his face to the wall and saw it all as clearly as possible—with preternatural clearness. Harrowsmith wanted to kill him. He was impatient; that was only natural. But hewouldnot die. Sometimes, when the nurse came near, he desperately clutched at her hand to save him, to pull him back. He must live. He must spare his flesh—his poor flesh, at which he looked yearningly as it lay against the bed linen, wan and veined.Once he thought desperately that rather than diehe would kill Harrowsmith first—with the last spurt of energy left him. Yes. In any case, when he grew strong, he would certainly kill him as a safeguard; a man could not live in such perpetual terror.His face to the wall, he reproached himself bitterly with his headlong passion for the cabinet. What was there in old oak to lure a man to such madness? It added nothing to life. What was life but decent provision and the certainty of a long, undisturbed death? Things seemed simple and clear as he lay dozing through the days.If he had sold himself for bread that would have been more understandable, less reprehensible. Starvation was a very terrible thing. But he had sold himself—for what? He thought with weird dread and passion of that solemn, shining brown thing through the wall—the mysterious piece of ancient furniture that was responsible for his misery.And so, by desperate will, as he thought, he lived. He grew strong. The trained nurse went away. The last bottle of medicine was empty.He was alone and would be until the morning. This was the first evening he had been alone sincehis illness. At dusk the old familiar terror gripped him. He was beginning to be afraid, and this time he could not dart like a hunted creature into the streets and join his fellow-men—men whose bodies belonged to them; men who had not mortgaged their last sad majesty. He was alone, alone. On the shawl which wrapped his knees his folded hands looked oddly pale.He walked across the room and touched the cabinet. Long stay in bed had numbed his feet. He touched the cabinet. In his throat was a desperate sob.He would sell it. Sell! That was just what he could never do. But if only he could; if only he might buy himself back.Sell! He imagined the joy of the buyer—a collector, of course. What pure, undiluted ecstasy he would get out of it—that man who paid with gold and not with his own helpless flesh! No; he could never sell it. Beautiful, devilish, compelling thing! It must stay with him until the end.He opened the door and smelt the smell—the clinging aroma which had always tantalized andpiqued him. He traced with his finger the rude hinges of hammered iron. His face quivered in every muscle with varied emotions. How he loved this thing! How he hated and feared it! What moments of joy it had afforded him! What a fearful league it had lured him into making!A terrible struggle was passing over him. His freakish brain had suggested a new extravagance. He was possessed with a desire to do this strange, this futile and dastardly act. He lifted his head and looked at the cabinet as he would have looked into human eyes—a long, wistful look; a look embodying a whole gamut of emotions. Then he crossed the room, stooped down to a box in one corner, and came back with a hammer.“It will hurt you,” he said foolishly, the hammer already uplifted, his eyes drinking in the delicacy of that wonderful thing which had traveled down the past ages and drifted to him and been his tempter, “but not as it hurts me.”He struck. All night he worked with the hammer, with every tool he had that could help him. He began to break it up, to hack it asunder—hiscabinet. He threw it on the fire bit by bit. It blazed and crackled, this old dry wood. The splutter and crackle went to his heart. He thought they were agonized protests. He believed that it suffered as it died. In his long morbid communion with it he had grown to believe it human and something more.It took him days and nights to kill the cabinet. It was so stoutly built. When he was exhausted he crept to bed, not forgetting to lock the door on that scene of strange disorder. But at last it was done. The wall behind was bare and dirty, festooned with cobwebs. On the floor was dust and chips and splinters. The fire burned with the glowing heat of a sacrificial fire.Already he was calmer. Although he still belonged to Harrowsmith, although he had madly destroyed the one thing that might have redeemed him, although his days would now hold bitter moments, he was at peace.He watched it burn. He saw the wondrous handicraft of cunning dead men disappear line by line, and turn to ash.He was sitting so when his laundress came in at the widely flung door. It was the first time for days that she had been permitted to enter the sitting room. He nervously expected her to exclaim, to inquire. The blank wall was so obvious. The little room was hot like an oven, but she only flung her hands and cried out:“Oh, lor’! what an awful thing this is about Mr. ’Arrersmith. To be knocked down by one o’ them cycles. The streets of London aint safe. And ’im a doctor, too, the cleverest doctor at the ’orspital.”“What—whatabout him?”“Knocked down by a cycle and killed in Grays Inn Road, jest by the ’orspital,” she returned with flavor.Kinsman staggered to his feet. The fire licked out from the grate and seemed to sear him, to dry the words in his throat and dam up the glad accursed tears in his eyes.He was no longer a bondman. He was free. He could bear to look at his flesh, his own until death, and after. He looked at his hands, torn and soiled, hands that had destroyed the cabinet.His eyes fell on the last panel, which the fire was greedily eating; on the heap of ash that had meant so much beauty.He dropped back in the chair. He laughed—laughter that gurgled with water as it fought its way through his throat. He could not see the blank wall for tears, whether for the cabinet, the dead man, or himself he did not know.
IHAVEtold you about Kinsman—his china and oak, his flirtations—never from the heart—his downfall and sorry end.
Poor Kinsman! Like most born bad lots he was a charming companion. If it had not been for the apocryphal aristocratic connections to whom he persistently alluded, he would have been perfect. He was so charmingly enthusiastic over his curios; such a solemn enthusiasm—the only earnest thing about him.
Yet over the affair of that one supreme curio he kept rigid silence. He told me; but it was a couple of years later—when the Inn had ceased to talk about Harrowsmith. A couple of years later! By then Kinsman had lived down the first strength of his angry regret. He told me fully, lovingly, sadly, opening out his passionate collector’s soul. He made me understand the full virility of those odd emotions which had once fired and wasted him.
Yes. He was silent enough while the affair was in progress. That odd, weird, inanimate affair! How little any of us suspected the nature of the struggle that was going on behind his constantly sported oak.
It was in this way. Let me begin, as he began, with his introduction to the brown, burly god which gained possession of him.
Harrowsmith asked him to lunch one Saturday. After lunch he brought out cigars; he had money and could afford them daily. To him cigar-smoking was a habit, not an occasional indulgence.
The last course of the luncheon still stood on the table, which the two men had pushed well back so that they might rest their feet upon the fender. It was a hard March day; a day of penetrating wind. The draughts licked under the door and danced between the carpet and the shrunken boards. Outside in the square the only sound was the savage “boo” of the young spring gale.
Harrowsmith’s fripperies—of photographs and gimcrack furniture in the lightest and latest style—appeared meager in the ancient room of his chambers—thelittle room with the heavily corniced ceiling and paneled walls. These fripperies, which he considered showed taste, were in the light of a personal affront to the solid oak cabinet against the wall immediately opposite the fireplace. Kinsman, of course, found this piece of furniture the only thing that he could look at with tolerance. He had been invited to meet it—to give his expert opinion on it.
He kept turning his head and looking pityingly, covetously at it. He felt sorry for it, set as it was among modern cabinet-making and garish ornament. It was passing through a period of degradation, this stout cabinet of oak which had lived most likely for a couple of centuries in some manor house. He thought that it must surely feel its shame of contact. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. Once he found himself fancifully wishing that he wore blinkers like a horse so that he might shut out Harrowsmith’s other effects.
“It’s beautiful, beautiful,” he sighed, shading his eyes with his hands and staring straight at the wall. “It’s original, every bit, even the cornice. I shouldlike to know its history. If these old things could only talk!”
“It’s all he left me. I expected a thousand at least,” grumbled Harrowsmith.
Kinsman was still ardently drinking in the solid beauty of the cabinet—with its linen-patterned panels. One never saw carving of that pattern save on Tudor work. The thing was late Tudor. It was unique—and yet this materialistic doctor was not satisfied. He gazed at the glowing brown wood, at the slim posts supporting the upper cupboard, at the cunning hinges of iron. Never had he thrown at a woman so heart-whole a glance.
“I wish a rich uncle would leave me such a thing,” he sighed. “Why, man, money won’t buy it. You may wait, you may search a lifetime, and not find such a well-preserved specimen of the period.”
“Oh, yes, I know you have the old-oak craze. But I like smart, modern stuff. I like pretty things about me. You understand? What would that fetch at auction?”
Harrowsmith took the cigar out of his mouthand pointed it, with its long, trembling tip of ash, toward the cabinet.
“Impossible to say. So much depends. But you surely wouldn’t sell it?”
“If I could get a good price. Why not?”
Kinsman had never before felt so deeply the disadvantages of poverty. Fate, which had given him an unsuccessful father, which had chained him to a clerk’s stool in a City office, had further cursed him with a fine taste in art. He knew a good thing by instinct. He trifled withbric-à-brac, with Chippendale; he had an eye for the voluptuous coloring of the Empire period; but his best affections he reserved for oak. All the rest was thin, unsatisfying. In oak, despite the poverty which allowed him to criticise, but rarely to buy, he was a connoisseur. He could tell—blindfold—by a caressing turn of his hands about the different members, if a piece of oak furniture were original or if it were some bastard thing built together from old wood for the hoodwinking of people with money and a fashionable desire for the antique. How savagely I’ve heard him disclaim against people of that sort!
He got up. The slim pillars seemed to draw him—to wink and beckon and plead.
“Why don’t you buy it off me?” Harrowsmith asked, idly watching him and looking contemptuously amused.
He spoke with the carelessness of a man to whom money is not of immediate moment. He wheeled round in his chair and took a long, sulky look at the oak. It irritated him. It took up room. More than that, it was reminiscent of disappointment. His Uncle Bob had always promised to remember him in his will. He didn’t consider that a Tudor cabinet was remembrance—enough.
“You shall have it for thirty pounds,” he said.
Kinsman did not answer. He grew pale. The hand that was running about the rich wood twitched nervously.
Harrowsmith misunderstood his silence, and said, with slight asperity:
“Is that too much for you? To get rid of the thing I’ll say twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five!” You may be sure there was acatch in Kinsman’s voice. “It would be cheap at thirty. But you know that I could as easily raise three hundred. How can a poor beggar save out of five pounds a week?”
Harrowsmith shrugged and said, “I shall get a dealer in. Can you recommend one? You’re hand in glove with all those fellows. I hate the thing. It’s too heavy. It dwarfs the room.”
Kinsman with his finger was tracing the panels. He threw a look of desperation, of pleading even, at the oak, as if he thought that a thing which had been so long in the world and had witnessed the perplexities of so many generations was really sentient and could suggest. As he looked, his cheeks flushed, his lips smiled, and his whole attitude became suddenlydébonnaire.
He returned to the fire, walking ludicrously sideways, as if he were afraid to take his eyes off the cabinet—the wise, resourceful cabinet. Ithadsuggested. He suddenly remembered. He became confused, dizzy, elated with remembrance. He could buy it—if not with coin of the realm, with something equally marketable. Harrowsmith hadsaid it was marketable. He would buy it. Why not? Within his own body he carried the means to buy—his own imperfect, freakish body!
“Do you remember,” he asked, in the hurried, jerky tones of a clock that is out of gear, “the offer you once made me?”
Harrowsmith looked perplexed, and then his face lighted.
“To buy your body—yes.”
“Does it still hold good?”
The doctor stared. Then he laughed and poked the fire until the hot light ran round the room, and, darting down the panels of the cabinet, made it wink and beckon more than before.
“You didn’t like the idea,” he said at last.
“Your Uncle Bob hadn’t left you the cabinet then,” Kinsman reminded him pointedly.
“That’s ingenious. I see, I see. You propose to sell yourself—for a bit of wood.”
“I should be a fool if I didn’t. You want my body after I am dead because it differs in some slight detail from other bodies, because, dead, I shall be to you medical fellows a curio. That’s grim.”
“A curio, exactly—to use your own fanciful term,” said Harrowsmith, professional enthusiasm lighting its cold taper in his eye. “And I, as you know, have made a special study of the thorax. Are you really serious?”
“Absolutely. I’ll give you my body when I’ve done with it if you’ll give me the cabinet at once.”
Harrowsmith looked at his watch and jumped up.
“It’s not quite four,” he said. “Kent, the commissioner for oaths, on the ground floor, has probably not gone. He stays late. You must sign a document of some sort. He’ll draw it up. I like to have things in form. In the event of your predeceasing me——”
“I’m yours. Yes; that’s all right. If I die first,” assented Kinsman carelessly. He was amused and scornful in his turn at an interest which was to him inexplicable.
He thought the doctor a fool. He was also positively grateful to his singular thorax. Men with normal organs could not always afford Tudor furniture. Over his enthusiastic face slid the expressionof a personal greeting as he gave a full look at the cabinet and saluted it.
“You’ve got a bargain,” Harrowsmith said. “You’ll be able to sell the thing, when you are tired of it, at a profit.”
Kinsman winced. The first hint of shadow drew his brows together.
“Sell it! Why, I’d sell myself first. No joke intended. By Jove! Ihavesold myself.”
They both laughed—laughter that tripped and tumbled down the old, wide stairs; laughter that was caught up by the rough wind outside and carried—whither?
*****
For some weeks Kinsman had his silent chuckle against Harrowsmith. He told himself that this was mean and narrow. He struggled against his jubilation and his contemptuous reflection that the doctor was a fool. He tried to regard him as a fellow-enthusiast—with a different objective. He wished to avoid the narrow outlook of the average collector. He imagined that his flirtations with china, with Empire lounges and candelabra, with thetapering legs of Chippendale chairs had made him tolerant and broadly sympathetic. Evidently it was not so. He looked at his cabinet; he thought of his eccentric thorax—which, after all, Harrowsmith might never possess—and again, silently, in the seclusion of his own rooms, he chuckled.
After dinner each night, as he sat and smoked, he stole frequent moments for the cabinet. He jumped up now and then imagining that he had discovered some new minute detail in the work. Or he opened the doors and stuck his head far into the cavernous cupboards. They exhaled an aromatic perfume. Perhaps some woman had once kept Eastern embroideries there; this was a superficial speculation which he afterward discarded as being unworthy and improbable. He finally decided that it had been used as a linen press—linen folded away with lavender; or a thrifty housewife had stored within choice apples. It was the perfume of old orchards that teased his nostrils.
He tried to supply the cabinet with a history. Harrowsmith could tell him nothing except that his Uncle Bob had bought it at a sale. Sometimes helooked at it so long, so ardently, that he almost thought he was on the point of drawing from the massive brown thing the secrets of dead generations.
He could never tell me the exact momentous occasion when the first faint chill of repugnance struck him. He did remember the night when, as he came home tired from the City, and cast his eyes on the cabinet as usual, it seemed insufficient for the first time. What was it, after all, to make so much fuss about? Had he paid too great a price? Until that moment he had never given one thought to the price.
In the evenings, smoking his cigarette, one hand loose on his knee, he asked himself how that hand would look—dead. Involuntarily he stiffened it. Perhaps it was the slowly rising horror in him which made it appear whiter than it ever had been before. His hand! He was sorry for it. His body! What an injustice he had done it. Had any man the right to rob his body of the sanctity and superb solitude which come after death? The meanest wretch living retained the right to that majestic aloofness. He had mortgaged his. The first seeds of hate and fear sprouted in his heart.
He dashed out of his chambers and went down Chancery Lane into Fleet Street. He walked west to a theater. The play was a tragedy. As he sat in the pit he laughed when the other people thrilled. He then looked in amazement at the scandalized faces surrounding him.
He had left his chambers without casting a farewell look at the cabinet, without murmuring some word of admiration. This had never happened before. He became grave. He reproached himself. He was tender with foolish little penitences—as one would be with a loved woman.
That night in his bed the grewsome fancy seized him to lie straight and still, hands folded and chin well up. That’s how he would lie when he was dead—the majesty of death. But in his case it would be a mere tinsel majesty—like the amusingly solemn antics of a gypsy monarch. He was not his own.
He got up and lit the light and smoked. He was ashamed of himself. He was afraid of himself, and of Harrowsmith and of the cabinet. They were a dread trio, banded in a terrible way.
The fire was quite dead. He felt his way acrossthe room and put his unsteady hand on the thick oak panels of the cabinet. He put his head against one and groaned. The perfume—was it of lavender?—stole out and nauseated him.
He would sell it. He must sell it. He went back to bed. He considered. Which dealer would give the best price? He would sell it. He would take his annual holiday early; he evidently wanted a thorough change.
In the morning he wondered how he could have thought of selling it. The acquisitiveness, the unreasoning, improvident, ardent affection of the collector was strong in him again. Before he went to the City he examined the cabinet as usual, gloating and thrilling over its beauty.
But at night he was again seized with foreboding so dreadful that he dashed into the flowing streets. He went to a music hall. He grinned, a fixed, wide grin, that seemed to crack his cheeks. His face felt stiff. The faces of the dead were stiff.
He thought that he would ask Harrowsmith to break the compact, to take back his legacy. But the doctor had a professional ardor. He mightbluntly refuse. Also—he could not part with the cabinet.
The next day was Saturday. All the afternoon he walked miserably about the London streets. He thought he’d enlist, get sent to the front, and be killed on a battlefield. So would he save his dead flesh from ribald attention. But perhaps Harrowsmith would not let him go.
He was afraid to go back to his chambers, afraid that he might meet Harrowsmith on the stairs, afraid of the cabinet. He turned into a tea shop and found with difficulty a vacant chair at one of the tables. The life and gayety and warmth of that tea shop reassured him. He despised himself for his morbid fears. He would be a fool if he threw up his berth and went to the front. Besides, if he went he must leave the cabinet. The touch and sight of the wonderful brown wood carved by hands that had so long been dust had become a daily necessity to him.
Next morning, when he awoke, he was feeling very ill. It was doubtless influenza. There was no danger in that if one took care. He would takecare. He must. He dared not die. Death now had a bitterness double distilled. All that Sunday he lay miserably in bed. As the hours wore on he grew too ill to fear death—and after. He was too ill, even, to be haunted by his usual terror when dusk fell.
Next day his laundress came to light the fire. He sent her off with a telegram to the office, saying he could not come. She happened to meet Harrowsmith on the landing and sent him in on her own initiative.
The doctor was assiduous. He was good to us all, and only grew angry if we spoke of a fee. He muttered something about nervous breakdown. He provided a trained nurse; he paid professional visits twice a day.
With care and nursing Kinsman began to be himself again. Harrowsmith told him that he must get away for a rest. He added that he would go with him; a holiday together would be splendid. No doubt he wondered at the wild, leaping terror in the other’s eyes when he said that; said it in such a cheery, commonplace way, without any subtlety.But Kinsman was subtle and suspicious and mad. He thought the doctor wished to come too, so as to be sure of him. He read the most diabolical eagerness in his calm face. How afraid he was of Harrowsmith! And how afraid Harrowsmith was that he would be the loser on their strange compact. Afraid to let him go away alone in case he should die and be buried.
His dread and hate grew and grew; it became distorted into a monster. He now hesitated before he swallowed each dose of medicine. His light head became the dwelling-place of a hundred wild thoughts. He lay with his face to the wall and saw it all as clearly as possible—with preternatural clearness. Harrowsmith wanted to kill him. He was impatient; that was only natural. But hewouldnot die. Sometimes, when the nurse came near, he desperately clutched at her hand to save him, to pull him back. He must live. He must spare his flesh—his poor flesh, at which he looked yearningly as it lay against the bed linen, wan and veined.
Once he thought desperately that rather than diehe would kill Harrowsmith first—with the last spurt of energy left him. Yes. In any case, when he grew strong, he would certainly kill him as a safeguard; a man could not live in such perpetual terror.
His face to the wall, he reproached himself bitterly with his headlong passion for the cabinet. What was there in old oak to lure a man to such madness? It added nothing to life. What was life but decent provision and the certainty of a long, undisturbed death? Things seemed simple and clear as he lay dozing through the days.
If he had sold himself for bread that would have been more understandable, less reprehensible. Starvation was a very terrible thing. But he had sold himself—for what? He thought with weird dread and passion of that solemn, shining brown thing through the wall—the mysterious piece of ancient furniture that was responsible for his misery.
And so, by desperate will, as he thought, he lived. He grew strong. The trained nurse went away. The last bottle of medicine was empty.
He was alone and would be until the morning. This was the first evening he had been alone sincehis illness. At dusk the old familiar terror gripped him. He was beginning to be afraid, and this time he could not dart like a hunted creature into the streets and join his fellow-men—men whose bodies belonged to them; men who had not mortgaged their last sad majesty. He was alone, alone. On the shawl which wrapped his knees his folded hands looked oddly pale.
He walked across the room and touched the cabinet. Long stay in bed had numbed his feet. He touched the cabinet. In his throat was a desperate sob.
He would sell it. Sell! That was just what he could never do. But if only he could; if only he might buy himself back.
Sell! He imagined the joy of the buyer—a collector, of course. What pure, undiluted ecstasy he would get out of it—that man who paid with gold and not with his own helpless flesh! No; he could never sell it. Beautiful, devilish, compelling thing! It must stay with him until the end.
He opened the door and smelt the smell—the clinging aroma which had always tantalized andpiqued him. He traced with his finger the rude hinges of hammered iron. His face quivered in every muscle with varied emotions. How he loved this thing! How he hated and feared it! What moments of joy it had afforded him! What a fearful league it had lured him into making!
A terrible struggle was passing over him. His freakish brain had suggested a new extravagance. He was possessed with a desire to do this strange, this futile and dastardly act. He lifted his head and looked at the cabinet as he would have looked into human eyes—a long, wistful look; a look embodying a whole gamut of emotions. Then he crossed the room, stooped down to a box in one corner, and came back with a hammer.
“It will hurt you,” he said foolishly, the hammer already uplifted, his eyes drinking in the delicacy of that wonderful thing which had traveled down the past ages and drifted to him and been his tempter, “but not as it hurts me.”
He struck. All night he worked with the hammer, with every tool he had that could help him. He began to break it up, to hack it asunder—hiscabinet. He threw it on the fire bit by bit. It blazed and crackled, this old dry wood. The splutter and crackle went to his heart. He thought they were agonized protests. He believed that it suffered as it died. In his long morbid communion with it he had grown to believe it human and something more.
It took him days and nights to kill the cabinet. It was so stoutly built. When he was exhausted he crept to bed, not forgetting to lock the door on that scene of strange disorder. But at last it was done. The wall behind was bare and dirty, festooned with cobwebs. On the floor was dust and chips and splinters. The fire burned with the glowing heat of a sacrificial fire.
Already he was calmer. Although he still belonged to Harrowsmith, although he had madly destroyed the one thing that might have redeemed him, although his days would now hold bitter moments, he was at peace.
He watched it burn. He saw the wondrous handicraft of cunning dead men disappear line by line, and turn to ash.
He was sitting so when his laundress came in at the widely flung door. It was the first time for days that she had been permitted to enter the sitting room. He nervously expected her to exclaim, to inquire. The blank wall was so obvious. The little room was hot like an oven, but she only flung her hands and cried out:
“Oh, lor’! what an awful thing this is about Mr. ’Arrersmith. To be knocked down by one o’ them cycles. The streets of London aint safe. And ’im a doctor, too, the cleverest doctor at the ’orspital.”
“What—whatabout him?”
“Knocked down by a cycle and killed in Grays Inn Road, jest by the ’orspital,” she returned with flavor.
Kinsman staggered to his feet. The fire licked out from the grate and seemed to sear him, to dry the words in his throat and dam up the glad accursed tears in his eyes.
He was no longer a bondman. He was free. He could bear to look at his flesh, his own until death, and after. He looked at his hands, torn and soiled, hands that had destroyed the cabinet.
His eyes fell on the last panel, which the fire was greedily eating; on the heap of ash that had meant so much beauty.
He dropped back in the chair. He laughed—laughter that gurgled with water as it fought its way through his throat. He could not see the blank wall for tears, whether for the cabinet, the dead man, or himself he did not know.