THE SET AT SEVEN.SHALLI tell you about the set at 7? It is quite a proper story. You might call it dramatic. If poor Nat Chaytor were alive he would turn it into one of his thrilling tales for the penny papers—and get it rejected because it wasn’t probable. In popular tales you must be probable, and you must be proper. You may cut as many throats and embezzle as much money as you please—always remembering to do it in a thoroughly respectable manner.Orchard lived at 7—the left-hand set on the third floor. His was the most extraordinary affair. Poor Jimmy died there. Orion had the set—has it still, so they say. He comes back. We have a real, if rather foolish, ghost in the Inn.The man who took that set after the Great Ormond Street murder—his name slips me, but he went down in theDrummond Castle—had neverseen Orion. I forget his name, but we’ll call him Drummond.Pearson went to see him one night. He happened to be just going out; he said he wouldn’t be more than half an hour, and he made Pearson comfortable with some whisky and the currentFortnightly.When he came back Pearson said, with annoyance, looking a little disgusted and jerking his head toward the bedroom door:“Didn’t know you were so intimate with Orion.”“Orion! Never heard the name. Yet—let me see. He had these rooms. I took them over with the furniture.”“Never heard the name! Why, he’s in your bedroom at this moment. Walked about very much as if he were at home. Came strolling in with his old confounded jaunty air. I haven’t seen him for nearly three years, but he hasn’t altered a bit. You must have left the outer door ajar, or else he’s kept a key. That would be just one of Orion’s mean dodges. He walked about with his hands in his trousers’ pockets, just as usual. I didn’t speak; we had a row once. There was a bill; he wouldn’t payhis share. And one night when I was a bit on I broke the glass of the sideboard—threw a tumbler at it. He couldn’t stand that.“Yet, why didn’t I speak? What made me keep so quiet? Why didn’t I ask him what the devil he meant by prying about another man’s rooms?“He went and tinkered with the ornaments, scowled at the dust, picked up a match from the carpet—I could have sworn he picked it up, but it’s there still, just near your foot—and then went into the bedroom. He’s in there still. Confound it!” starting to his feet; “what was I doing to let him go in like that?”Drummond was looking very queer.“Orion,” he said quietly, “has been dead six months. He murdered his aunt and then jumped out of the window to evade the hangman. If you hadn’t been abroad you would have heard of it. We’ll have a look round the bedroom, if you like.”Of course he wasn’t there. That is our ghost story. Several fellows have seen him since—so they say.Dick Simpson came after Drummond. He saidhe saw Orion lots of times, and didn’t take the least notice. Rather resented sharing his rooms with another man who didn’t pay a penny rent, and who hadn’t the tact to make himself scarce when anybody dropped in—but that was all. Poor Dick wasn’t nervous or imaginative. Orion used to come in, shake his head at the dust, at torn leather paper on the walls and mangy ball fringe at the mantelshelf, then go quietly through into the bedroom. Dick told me the other day that he had just smashed the last of the rose-colored gas globes. He had the bits in a bag and was going to match it in the City. If he didn’t, Orion would be bound to look in to-night; he was beginning to be a bit of a bore.Simpson was an insurance clerk, most commonplace, most steady. He was always having his top hat ironed, and recommending one to buy a pair of trouser stretchers. He went to the theater every Saturday night, and stopped in bed late on Sunday. He was quite content and prosperous on his sixty-five shillings a week, yet, because he had the set at 7 on the third floor, we all waited without saying anything, to him or to each other, for somethingextraordinary to happen. In his case we thought it might be just vulgar embezzlement—but you can never be sure, it is always the most unlikely thing that happens to the tenant of that third-floor set. When once it gets hold of a man it never lets him go. It never gives him up. More often than not it hands him over to the undertaker. And you know what happened to Dick.There was a story of Bob and Barbara Piety. You’ll like that. If I were writing the story, instead of just gossiping it to you in the dusk, I should call it “The Play’s the Thing.” It is Hamlet—in an Inn of Court.*****Bob Piety lived in the Inn as a bachelor. He married a nice girl—Miss Martin—and took a villa at Norwood. A few months before he married he lent Murphy twenty pounds. We all warned him; Murphy never paid, and made a boast of never paying, but these Irishmen are wheedling, and Bob was pretty flush just then. On this unlucky twenty pounds the whole story hangs.Barbara had babies very quickly; servants’ wagesrose each time she changed—and she was always changing. The beer barrel constantly gave out, and it was generally quarter day. Bob had a good post, as the City goes. But four hundred a year, though ample in the Inn, is only a pittance at Norwood, with an extravagant, prolific wife, a seventy-pound villa, and two maids, with a boy to clean the knives.One morning, as Barbara was flicking at Bob’s coat with the clothes brush before he went to the City, she asked him timidly for a new gown.“It won’t cost five pounds,” she said, pulling his coat down at the back. “You don’t like me to look shabby, dear, do you? And, Bob, while I think of it, just leave me Maria’s wages. I’ve had to give her a rise. You can’t get a really decent cook general for less than twenty pounds a year. And we want some new linoleum for the nursery—I’d better order it to——”“I can’t really run to it all, Barbara”—he never called her Barbara except in a crisis, and when they were first married it usually made her cry. “There are the taxes, and I ought to have a new overcoat.And there is Pillew’s bill for the whooping cough. The kids must do without linoleum. Wear anything at the party—or we’ll stop at home. I’m hanged if I know where all the things are coming from. Twenty pounds for one girl—it’s preposterous.”“Twenty pounds! Why, you lent some horrid bachelor that. It would pay Maria for a year. Go and get it out of him.”“It is a bad debt.”“You must make him pay. Now do, Bob, dear. It breaks my heart to see you worried.”“I will make him,” Bob said after a minute’s pause, and added savagely, his nerves racked by wife, babies, and bills, “I’ll get it out of him by fair means or foul.”Barbara cried out, before she kissed him and gave the final pull to his coat at the back:“How can you talk in that dreadful way? One would think you meant to murder the man.”At that moment Maria came out of the dining room with the breakfast tray.Well, in the evening Bob went to the Inn andfound Murphy at home. He asked him bluntly to pay back the twenty pounds, and Murphy said airily that it was ridiculous—a joke on Bob’s part—he hadn’t twenty pence in the world. This led to words. In the thick of the row there was a knock at Murphy’s door and he left the room to open it. Piety heard the murmur of voices—Murphy’s and another which he did not recognize. Then he heard a movement like a sharp scuffle of feet on the boards, heard a piercing cry and a heavy fall, and the quick, frightened patter of feet on the stairs. That was all. When he rushed into the little passage both of the outer doors were open, and Murphy was lying stone-dead just inside the “set.” There was the handle of a queer-looking knife sticking up from his waistcoat, and his blood had poured out in a great dark pool in which the Syrian curtains that draped the archway of the passage were dabbled.Bob tried to raise the body. But the Irishman had been a burly fellow, and he only succeeded in spattering himself with blood. We all heard that fearful scream of poor Murphy’s; it even pierced the oak, for Kinsman, who had been shut away in hisrooms with Sophia Dominy, came rushing upstairs, followed by the girl. I had the set opposite Murphy’s on the second floor, so I was first on the spot.Sophia gave a yell when she saw the dead man. Kinsman bade her pull herself together, and in a minute or so she flew away down the stairs, saying she would find a policeman. By this time the whole square was roused. There were lights at most of the windows, sashes were flung up, men ran out in their slippers and with their pipes still stuck in the corner of their mouths, asking what was up. Kinsman and I ran down too. Piety didn’t move. He might have got away easily, but he stood dazed, staring at the heavy body of the dead Irishman; stood and stared sluggishly, with the splashed blood drying on his face and hands, just where it had spurted, and dropping heavily from his limp red cuff, the corner of which was soaked. Of course, everybody said that he had murdered Murphy in a fit of temper, because he couldn’t get his twenty pounds back. I knew they had been rowing, heard their angry voices across the passage when I went to my door toadmit a visitor. It looked bad for Bob. Yet I didn’t believe that he had done it. All the other fellows pooh-poohed his lame explanation, and some said that Murphy, who was a thorough bad lot, was well out of the way, and others, who had known Mrs. Bob as Miss Martin, were full of sympathy for the poor little woman.It was a wet night. Warm rain fell straight from the sky to the square. The light of each lamp above the hooded doors was reflected on the pavements. The stair leading to the second floor at 7 was crowded—with men in slippers and girls without any hats. One of the girls went into hysterics. Another one propped her up against the wall and undid her collar and called out shrilly for cold water and smelling salts. And then, after what seemed an interminable time, Sophia brought a policeman—he had been off the beat, of course—and Bob was arrested.I went with him to the station, and after that I went down to Norwood and broke the news to Barbara.I never believe in those women who, when troublecomes, sit at home and weep and wait and pray. They are fools, or callous. Your true woman must be doing something. Barbara never shed a single tear. She didn’t wring her hands or scream or faint. She only kept saying, with pitiful monotony, that it was her wicked vanity and extravagance which had got Bob in a mess, and that she meant to get him out of it.She seemed to rise all at once out of villadom—that smug, narrow life which ruins so many people. Villadom! It promulgates the hateful, stultifying creed of “paying your way.” Barbara told me once that a lady at Norwood refused to visit another lady because she hadn’t paid her butcher’s bill. She threw off her shackles—the shackles of that spick-and-span house, with the stiff white curtains at the windows, the demure maidservants, and the noisy overflow of babies. She sent for Mrs. Martin to keep house, then packed a little black box, kissed her children with the air of a Spartan, and came away to the Inn with me.With me! Why not? She had my set. I went and turned in with Hawkins. He had a little denleading out of his bedroom, which he used as a carpenter’s shop, and his laundress as a kitchen! It was very good of me to do that for a comparative stranger! But she wasn’t. You see—hadn’t I mentioned it?—Barbara was an old flame of mine. It was a close running between me and Bob at one time. But I backed out. He had four hundred pounds a year and I hadn’t a penny—that could be called certain. Sometimes I make a haul and sometimes I starve. That would have killed Barbara. She had always been educated to the necessity of a certain income.She came and settled in my rooms, so as to be near Bob. At Norwood she might as well have been in Alaska—these suburbs are so beautifully isolated. And then, as she confessed to me, she hoped to pick up evidence. Of course she believed in her husband’s innocence. She went farther than that; she was convinced that the murder was committed by someone in the Inn—in the house—at 7.I gave her a list of all the tenants. I tried to show her how impossible it was. On the ground floor was Kinsman, who had been shut up withSophia. The set opposite was empty. The sets on the first floor were rented as offices, and both principals and clerks had been gone for hours at the time Murphy was stabbed. On the second floor, Murphy had one set and I the other. On the third floor, one set was empty and the other—the fatal set, although she knew nothing about that—belonged to Stapley.Stapley was a quiet young fellow. He was engaged to his cousin, spent his Sundays with his widowed mother at Dulwich, and was reading hard for a Civil Service appointment. As I pointed out to Barbara, Murphy was murdered on Saturday night, and Stapley always left for Dulwich on Saturday afternoon. I saw him come back myself at the usual time on Monday morning. But she wouldn’t be convinced. She was certain that the murderer was in the Inn, in the very house.The Inn bore with her. Laundresses stared after her sympathetically as she went up and down the old stairs, and called her to each other, “Pore young thing.” The fellows, many of whom had met her as Miss Martin, didn’t know how to show theirsympathy. They brought her flowers and new-laid eggs—anything. One brought a stray white kitten that he’d found in a doorway. Arnold offered a pure-bred bull pup, and was hurt when she refused it. Arnold was a great fancier. His book of devotion was a bulky volume, “Druid on Dogs.”The girls who spend a social evening or a Sunday at the Inn occasionally talked of her with honest tears. They are good, kind, hard-working souls, these gay little shop girls, as a rule. And I think they felt it all the more because they could not do anything for her; dare not even say how sorry they were. Between them and her was the unbreakable barrier which stands breast-high between the women who are—well, particular—and the women who are not.She brought a faint air of repression and tragedy into the Inn, but no one dreamed of resenting it. The careless, rather wild life we all lead seemed suddenly hollow, feeble—wicked almost. Many a host said to a noisy friend:“Don’t make so much row, old man. You’ll frighten Mrs. Piety.”She used to creep about at all hours; used to listen on the stairs, peep into sets if a door happened to be open, watch men and girls in and out with the air of a hungry cat. But everybody understood and everybody sympathized. The little light-haired woman in black, with the sad, inquisitive glances, became our Deity.I went with her to every curio shop and marine store in Bloomsbury. There are many. Some of the people who keep them are regular characters in their way. We were trying to find out the history of the dagger—that queer-handled weapon which had stuck out from dead Murphy’s waistcoat. The police had it. They were making every inquiry of course, but Barbara thought she could do better than they. As I said, a true woman must do something—even if it is something foolish. The little stuffy, foul courts of Holborn grew to know her and to pity her. All the other women pointed after her furtively and said, as the laundresses said, “Pore young thing.”You don’t want me to go into the detective side of the affair. You can well imagine the array of evidenceagainst Bob; you can see the damning importance of his row with Murphy, of the soaked red corner of his cuffs, and the red-ocher splashes on his face and hands.Barbara heard him committed for trial. She didn’t cry out or even shudder. But her eyes grew more wide and somber than before.That night I took her to the theater. Several fellows came to me quite seriously and said:“Do something to distract her. The poor woman’s going out of her mind.”Hemming—he had been a friend of Jimmy’s, and was on a dramatic paper—added:“Take her to a music hall, make her dead-drunk—anything for a distraction. The theater for a compromise. I can pass you into the Adelphi. There is a splendid melodrama on there. Something exciting.”I had expected opposition, but, queerly enough, she jumped at the idea. She dressed herself very smartly; I think her face was rouged. She kept laughing as we jolted to the Strand in a cab.In the second act there was a row between twomen, and one stabbed the other to the heart. It was most unlucky. Barbara was staring up at the dress circle. She turned to me suddenly, her cheeks and eyes blazing. She got up and slipped on her cloak, pulling the hood well over her head before she was out of doors. When I rose too she made a quick, excited gesture, and whispered:“Don’t follow. Whatever you do, don’t follow.”I let her go out quietly alone. When I happened to look up at the dress circle I saw a vacant seat.When one man on the stage stabbed the other, Barbara naturally turned her head away. She happened to look up at the dress circle, and her eyes fixed on a family party in the front row. It was Stapley, the girl he was engaged to, and her mother.Barbara was struck by the look on his face. He seemed as much moved by that murder on the stage as she was. He looked a guilty man, a terrified man. His face was the face of a corpse; his eyes were the eyes of a corpse—some corpse whose last impression had been one of fearful horror.Presently he rose, whispered a word or two tohis companions, and went away. At the same moment Barbara slipped up from her seat in the stalls.She followed him out of the theater, along the brilliant whirl of the Strand, through dirty little streets to Holborn, across the road, under the gateway, and into the Inn. The square was quiet. The trees waved troublously. There were peep-holes of bright light at men’s windows, and once she heard a loud peal of laughter.Stapley turned in at No. 7.The policeman happened to be taking shelter in the doorway of No. 5. It was a wet night. She stepped back and whispered to him before she crept with a stealthy, springy step up the stairs. Stapley went on, past my rooms, past Murphy’s, to the top floor. He put in his key and opened the door of his set—the fatal set, which had been responsible for so much; the set which had egged on Orion to murder, which had saddled poor Orchard with such a horrid companion—I’ll tell you that some other day—which had seen Jimmy die. He opened the door. There was a bracket lamp on the wall immediatelyopposite. It was burning feebly, and there was a dark circle on the wall paper behind it, where the oil had sweated. Below the lamp was a little glass which Orion had gilded with a sixpenny bottle of dye. Barbara was close behind Stapley—so close that she could see her own face in the little glass slightly behind his.He stepped in. She leaned over the banisters and swiftly beckoned. She heard the roar of the streets through the open window on the staircase, and she heard the heavy tread of the policeman’s boots on the wood. Then she glided after Stapley. Before he turned to shut the door she was in the passage alone with him at the top of the big, quiet house, with the policeman coming steadily up the stairs. Her eyes, when later on she told me the scene, were the glowing, deadly eyes of a wild beast. I suppose she must have looked at Stapley in the same way—accusingly, fiercely, without a shimmer of mercy. No doubt she thought of Bob waiting for his trial, of the quiet, narrow life at Norwood which had satisfied her, and which she was in danger of losing. She said crisply:“A policeman is coming up to arrest you for the murder of Denis Murphy.”When she saw Stapley’s face she no longer had the least doubt of his guilt.The policeman came up, puffing a little, to the third flight, and Stapley, taken utterly by surprise, not knowing how much had been found out, never said a single word in defense, never resisted when he was arrested. There wasn’t a tittle of evidence against him. It was a woman’s instinct, only a woman’s instinct, that—hanged him? No; the set spares its victims that. It gave Orion a hint to fling himself out of the window. Only a woman’s instinct. If I had not taken her to that melodrama, Bob Piety would have swung.“The Play’s the Thing.” Now, wouldn’t that be a splendid title? If only poor Nat had been alive!Stapley was tried. He made a full confession. The jury, finding his story much too fantastic, brought him in mad, and, so far as I know, he is alive, at Broadmoor at this moment.It came out in evidence, and on his own showing,that he had been going queer for some time before he stabbed Murphy. He had been reading very hard, and then, of course, those rooms got on his nerves. He exaggerated trifles. For instance, he fixed a certain hour for his laundress to turn up in the morning. He used to get up and wait for her with his watch in his hand, dreading that she would be a minute late. That morning arrival of hers became the one moment of his day. He could think of very little else. Would she come in time to-morrow? Was it worth his while to pay her if she wouldn’t be punctual, if she wasted daily five minutes? Five minutes! Ten sometimes. How much did that mount up to in a month? The woman was deliberately robbing him. He would not stand it. One must draw the line somewhere. He used to beseech her, bully her, raise her money, threaten to sack her. He bribed her with old hats and trousers for her husband. If she would only turn up to time, so that the one hour of the day—that hour of nine—could take its place with the others, sink into comparative insignificance like the rest!He used to ask other fellows very earnestly—we all remembered it afterward:“What would you do if your laundress was always five minutes late in the morning? I want practical advice. I don’t want to be hard on the woman; but, then, no one likes to be imposed upon.”Sometimes he would oversleep and she would slip in quietly with her key and wake him by planking his boots down outside his bedroom door. On those days he was more wretched than ever, because he had no means of judging how late she had been.He used to decide beforehand what dress the pretty cousin would wear next time they met. He dared not influence her. But if she wore blue, that meant damnation for him—this world and the next. But red was bliss forever. He used to say to himself, “This is the very last time I’ll play these mental pranks. To-day shall decide everything.”And she would be on the platform waiting for his train, smiling and radiant in a blue gown, and he would have to go over it all again.The fang of some dread or other was always fastening in him. He was full of all kinds ofwhimsical fancies—those whims which seem so unimportant, so imbecile and contemptible to the level-minded, and which are so tragic to the morbid. You understand the sort of thing; avoiding the seams of paving stones, taking your fate from the chance expression of the first strange face you meet when you go out of doors, from the color of a horse, the chime of a clock, street cries—anything.He was very candid when he stood on his trial for his life; he poured out all his troubles, piteously magnifying trifles, blaming the laundress, the blue dress, the clock in the square, the cab outside, for his misfortune. The prison doctor and another examined him. Of course they said he was mad. He may have been. Yet, if he had taken some other set, he would have been as sane as you are to-day.On the Saturday that he killed Murphy he had delayed going to Dulwich by the usual early afternoon train. He was afraid for one thing—afraid of the poor little cousin’s frock. He kept putting it off—the time-table spread out in front of him—from one half-hour to the other. And then, as the afternoon went on, a new terror presented itself.The Inn began to fill up and grow gay with fellows home early from their offices, and smart shop girls, light-hearted with the weekly half-holiday. He could see them all at the open windows—men in lounging coats and women in cambric bodices.Pretty faces peeped over flower boxes and round idly flapping curtains. He was afraid to cross the square. Directly the girls saw him they would lean over the window ledges, make funny grimaces, and cough. There would be a perfect chorus of short, dry, mocking coughs. He had a little nervous trick of clearing his throat, and the girls, who were full of chaff, and not over-fond of him because he was so grave and proper, always mimicked him and called him Splutters. They have a nickname for most of the men, but no one but Stapley ever took any notice.He was afraid to run along that line of little coughs and bantering cries of “Splutters! Splutters!” He looked at one girl immediately opposite, a girl with very fluffy hair and a flashing steel buckle at her waist, and said tragically:“If that girl coughs and calls out ‘Splutters,’ Imay as well go and hang myself. I shan’t have any luck. It will be all up with me.”So for fear that she would, he waited until dusk, when he thought he would be able to glide out of the Inn unobserved.While he waited he noticed that there was something unusual about the paneling of the wall—something that he had never observed before. It was near the window, at a part where Orion’s leather paper had peeled off. There was a slight but unmistakable difference in the molding. The possibility of a secret cupboard in the wall at once occurred to him. At the same moment he seized it feverishly as an omen, a thing that might make a free man of him once more. The nervous, prompting fiend at his side made him say to himself, as his quivering fingers fiddled at the wood:“If there should be a secret place behind, then there will be an end to your foolery. It won’t matter whether Augusta wears red or blue. Mrs. Worsell may stay away until ten, if she chooses.”He tapped and pushed and pressed and coaxed for a little, and at last the panel moved slightly upward.He put his hand in, felt a bolt, drew it down, and sliding up the panel saw a shallow cupboard. It was full of dust, and empty except for a knife. Ah!Theknife. The knife which later on was to investigate the very recesses of Murphy’s heart. A knife with a chased silver handle and a fine blade.He held it in his hand, and stood pondering on it and on the shallow hidden place behind the panel. He became conscious of something heavy and still in the air, something waiting, watchful, as his hand gripped that handle. Every little sound in other sets became full of portent. That knife! Who had hidden it there? How had it been used? How long ago was it since a human hand, warm with life, made a blur on that polished, delicately chased handle?Then he suddenly thought that he would take it down and show it to Kinsman, who was very interested in curios and had some knowledge of them. He gave a last rapid look at the time-table, and decided that he would not go down to Dulwich in time for dinner; he’d have a steak at Gatti’s. Kinsman would be interested in the knife. He went downstairsas he was, in his old slippers, leaving his door ajar and his rooms in darkness. He had not lighted the lamp because he had been telling himself every half-hour that he would get off to Dulwich.On the way downstairs he heard a woman’s clear strong voice singing “Tatters.” It was Sophia’s voice, and Sophia was the worst tease of them all. He began to clear his throat directly he thought of her. He would not go downstairs to Kinsman. He would wait until he could find him alone. He would go upstairs and get his hat and bag, and put on his boots and be off to Dulwich. It was evening. Augusta—dear, tender little Augusta—would have on her evening gown—red nun’s veiling.As ill-luck would have it, there was a light under Murphy’s door. And Murphy’s oak was hospitably black, and the inner door with its gleaming brass knocker seemed to wink an invitation. The very knife in his hand seemed to point to Murphy’s door. Well, why not show it to Murphy? He was a bit of a fool, but he would be interested.So he pulled up, knocked at the door—and you know the rest.He swore to the very last that he did not do it, that he was merely the agent of the knife—that diabolical knife with the secret history.Murphy came to the door. His pretty, dissolute face was rather flushed with annoyance. His lips, those pouting, cherry-red lips like a girl’s, showed his white, even teeth under his mustache, which was turning white. His sodden brown eyes, half veiled in a web of crow’s feet, his smirking, unfailing air of conceit and satisfaction, struck clean-living, over-wrought Stapley as disgusting. The man was an evil clod upon an honest earth. There was the trail of twenty years’ intrigue, shuffling, and sham on his features. His eyes were dull with the ruin of many women. He was accursed, heavy, hateful with old secrets, old sins—like the knife. The knife! It claimed kinship. It flew forward to his heart.That is all. As Murphy shouted out and fell, Stapley went, quick and silent like a panther, up the stairs—quick and silent, with the cunning of a wild animal, just as Barbara, a few weeks later, stole up after him. He softly shut his oak—the oak is alwaysdiscreet—and sat shivering, almost breathless, in the dark, listening to the tramp of feet and the anxious buzz of tongues underneath.When everything was still he stole out and went to Dulwich.Augusta had a blue gown—it was the Boat Race day—and Stapley was a Cambridge man.She wore blue constantly afterward. This was one of his plaintive injuries when he babbled out everything at the trial. Blue at the theater that night when his face betrayed him to the vigilant eye of Barbara. Blue when she came to the court to give evidence against him. I wonder if she wears blue when she goes to see him at Broadmoor. Some women would do that in the hope of a cure; though, as you say, they probably don’t allow visits at Broadmoor, and a cure wouldn’t be of any real help in Stapley’s case.
SHALLI tell you about the set at 7? It is quite a proper story. You might call it dramatic. If poor Nat Chaytor were alive he would turn it into one of his thrilling tales for the penny papers—and get it rejected because it wasn’t probable. In popular tales you must be probable, and you must be proper. You may cut as many throats and embezzle as much money as you please—always remembering to do it in a thoroughly respectable manner.
Orchard lived at 7—the left-hand set on the third floor. His was the most extraordinary affair. Poor Jimmy died there. Orion had the set—has it still, so they say. He comes back. We have a real, if rather foolish, ghost in the Inn.
The man who took that set after the Great Ormond Street murder—his name slips me, but he went down in theDrummond Castle—had neverseen Orion. I forget his name, but we’ll call him Drummond.
Pearson went to see him one night. He happened to be just going out; he said he wouldn’t be more than half an hour, and he made Pearson comfortable with some whisky and the currentFortnightly.When he came back Pearson said, with annoyance, looking a little disgusted and jerking his head toward the bedroom door:
“Didn’t know you were so intimate with Orion.”
“Orion! Never heard the name. Yet—let me see. He had these rooms. I took them over with the furniture.”
“Never heard the name! Why, he’s in your bedroom at this moment. Walked about very much as if he were at home. Came strolling in with his old confounded jaunty air. I haven’t seen him for nearly three years, but he hasn’t altered a bit. You must have left the outer door ajar, or else he’s kept a key. That would be just one of Orion’s mean dodges. He walked about with his hands in his trousers’ pockets, just as usual. I didn’t speak; we had a row once. There was a bill; he wouldn’t payhis share. And one night when I was a bit on I broke the glass of the sideboard—threw a tumbler at it. He couldn’t stand that.
“Yet, why didn’t I speak? What made me keep so quiet? Why didn’t I ask him what the devil he meant by prying about another man’s rooms?
“He went and tinkered with the ornaments, scowled at the dust, picked up a match from the carpet—I could have sworn he picked it up, but it’s there still, just near your foot—and then went into the bedroom. He’s in there still. Confound it!” starting to his feet; “what was I doing to let him go in like that?”
Drummond was looking very queer.
“Orion,” he said quietly, “has been dead six months. He murdered his aunt and then jumped out of the window to evade the hangman. If you hadn’t been abroad you would have heard of it. We’ll have a look round the bedroom, if you like.”
Of course he wasn’t there. That is our ghost story. Several fellows have seen him since—so they say.
Dick Simpson came after Drummond. He saidhe saw Orion lots of times, and didn’t take the least notice. Rather resented sharing his rooms with another man who didn’t pay a penny rent, and who hadn’t the tact to make himself scarce when anybody dropped in—but that was all. Poor Dick wasn’t nervous or imaginative. Orion used to come in, shake his head at the dust, at torn leather paper on the walls and mangy ball fringe at the mantelshelf, then go quietly through into the bedroom. Dick told me the other day that he had just smashed the last of the rose-colored gas globes. He had the bits in a bag and was going to match it in the City. If he didn’t, Orion would be bound to look in to-night; he was beginning to be a bit of a bore.
Simpson was an insurance clerk, most commonplace, most steady. He was always having his top hat ironed, and recommending one to buy a pair of trouser stretchers. He went to the theater every Saturday night, and stopped in bed late on Sunday. He was quite content and prosperous on his sixty-five shillings a week, yet, because he had the set at 7 on the third floor, we all waited without saying anything, to him or to each other, for somethingextraordinary to happen. In his case we thought it might be just vulgar embezzlement—but you can never be sure, it is always the most unlikely thing that happens to the tenant of that third-floor set. When once it gets hold of a man it never lets him go. It never gives him up. More often than not it hands him over to the undertaker. And you know what happened to Dick.
There was a story of Bob and Barbara Piety. You’ll like that. If I were writing the story, instead of just gossiping it to you in the dusk, I should call it “The Play’s the Thing.” It is Hamlet—in an Inn of Court.
*****
Bob Piety lived in the Inn as a bachelor. He married a nice girl—Miss Martin—and took a villa at Norwood. A few months before he married he lent Murphy twenty pounds. We all warned him; Murphy never paid, and made a boast of never paying, but these Irishmen are wheedling, and Bob was pretty flush just then. On this unlucky twenty pounds the whole story hangs.
Barbara had babies very quickly; servants’ wagesrose each time she changed—and she was always changing. The beer barrel constantly gave out, and it was generally quarter day. Bob had a good post, as the City goes. But four hundred a year, though ample in the Inn, is only a pittance at Norwood, with an extravagant, prolific wife, a seventy-pound villa, and two maids, with a boy to clean the knives.
One morning, as Barbara was flicking at Bob’s coat with the clothes brush before he went to the City, she asked him timidly for a new gown.
“It won’t cost five pounds,” she said, pulling his coat down at the back. “You don’t like me to look shabby, dear, do you? And, Bob, while I think of it, just leave me Maria’s wages. I’ve had to give her a rise. You can’t get a really decent cook general for less than twenty pounds a year. And we want some new linoleum for the nursery—I’d better order it to——”
“I can’t really run to it all, Barbara”—he never called her Barbara except in a crisis, and when they were first married it usually made her cry. “There are the taxes, and I ought to have a new overcoat.And there is Pillew’s bill for the whooping cough. The kids must do without linoleum. Wear anything at the party—or we’ll stop at home. I’m hanged if I know where all the things are coming from. Twenty pounds for one girl—it’s preposterous.”
“Twenty pounds! Why, you lent some horrid bachelor that. It would pay Maria for a year. Go and get it out of him.”
“It is a bad debt.”
“You must make him pay. Now do, Bob, dear. It breaks my heart to see you worried.”
“I will make him,” Bob said after a minute’s pause, and added savagely, his nerves racked by wife, babies, and bills, “I’ll get it out of him by fair means or foul.”
Barbara cried out, before she kissed him and gave the final pull to his coat at the back:
“How can you talk in that dreadful way? One would think you meant to murder the man.”
At that moment Maria came out of the dining room with the breakfast tray.
Well, in the evening Bob went to the Inn andfound Murphy at home. He asked him bluntly to pay back the twenty pounds, and Murphy said airily that it was ridiculous—a joke on Bob’s part—he hadn’t twenty pence in the world. This led to words. In the thick of the row there was a knock at Murphy’s door and he left the room to open it. Piety heard the murmur of voices—Murphy’s and another which he did not recognize. Then he heard a movement like a sharp scuffle of feet on the boards, heard a piercing cry and a heavy fall, and the quick, frightened patter of feet on the stairs. That was all. When he rushed into the little passage both of the outer doors were open, and Murphy was lying stone-dead just inside the “set.” There was the handle of a queer-looking knife sticking up from his waistcoat, and his blood had poured out in a great dark pool in which the Syrian curtains that draped the archway of the passage were dabbled.
Bob tried to raise the body. But the Irishman had been a burly fellow, and he only succeeded in spattering himself with blood. We all heard that fearful scream of poor Murphy’s; it even pierced the oak, for Kinsman, who had been shut away in hisrooms with Sophia Dominy, came rushing upstairs, followed by the girl. I had the set opposite Murphy’s on the second floor, so I was first on the spot.
Sophia gave a yell when she saw the dead man. Kinsman bade her pull herself together, and in a minute or so she flew away down the stairs, saying she would find a policeman. By this time the whole square was roused. There were lights at most of the windows, sashes were flung up, men ran out in their slippers and with their pipes still stuck in the corner of their mouths, asking what was up. Kinsman and I ran down too. Piety didn’t move. He might have got away easily, but he stood dazed, staring at the heavy body of the dead Irishman; stood and stared sluggishly, with the splashed blood drying on his face and hands, just where it had spurted, and dropping heavily from his limp red cuff, the corner of which was soaked. Of course, everybody said that he had murdered Murphy in a fit of temper, because he couldn’t get his twenty pounds back. I knew they had been rowing, heard their angry voices across the passage when I went to my door toadmit a visitor. It looked bad for Bob. Yet I didn’t believe that he had done it. All the other fellows pooh-poohed his lame explanation, and some said that Murphy, who was a thorough bad lot, was well out of the way, and others, who had known Mrs. Bob as Miss Martin, were full of sympathy for the poor little woman.
It was a wet night. Warm rain fell straight from the sky to the square. The light of each lamp above the hooded doors was reflected on the pavements. The stair leading to the second floor at 7 was crowded—with men in slippers and girls without any hats. One of the girls went into hysterics. Another one propped her up against the wall and undid her collar and called out shrilly for cold water and smelling salts. And then, after what seemed an interminable time, Sophia brought a policeman—he had been off the beat, of course—and Bob was arrested.
I went with him to the station, and after that I went down to Norwood and broke the news to Barbara.
I never believe in those women who, when troublecomes, sit at home and weep and wait and pray. They are fools, or callous. Your true woman must be doing something. Barbara never shed a single tear. She didn’t wring her hands or scream or faint. She only kept saying, with pitiful monotony, that it was her wicked vanity and extravagance which had got Bob in a mess, and that she meant to get him out of it.
She seemed to rise all at once out of villadom—that smug, narrow life which ruins so many people. Villadom! It promulgates the hateful, stultifying creed of “paying your way.” Barbara told me once that a lady at Norwood refused to visit another lady because she hadn’t paid her butcher’s bill. She threw off her shackles—the shackles of that spick-and-span house, with the stiff white curtains at the windows, the demure maidservants, and the noisy overflow of babies. She sent for Mrs. Martin to keep house, then packed a little black box, kissed her children with the air of a Spartan, and came away to the Inn with me.
With me! Why not? She had my set. I went and turned in with Hawkins. He had a little denleading out of his bedroom, which he used as a carpenter’s shop, and his laundress as a kitchen! It was very good of me to do that for a comparative stranger! But she wasn’t. You see—hadn’t I mentioned it?—Barbara was an old flame of mine. It was a close running between me and Bob at one time. But I backed out. He had four hundred pounds a year and I hadn’t a penny—that could be called certain. Sometimes I make a haul and sometimes I starve. That would have killed Barbara. She had always been educated to the necessity of a certain income.
She came and settled in my rooms, so as to be near Bob. At Norwood she might as well have been in Alaska—these suburbs are so beautifully isolated. And then, as she confessed to me, she hoped to pick up evidence. Of course she believed in her husband’s innocence. She went farther than that; she was convinced that the murder was committed by someone in the Inn—in the house—at 7.
I gave her a list of all the tenants. I tried to show her how impossible it was. On the ground floor was Kinsman, who had been shut up withSophia. The set opposite was empty. The sets on the first floor were rented as offices, and both principals and clerks had been gone for hours at the time Murphy was stabbed. On the second floor, Murphy had one set and I the other. On the third floor, one set was empty and the other—the fatal set, although she knew nothing about that—belonged to Stapley.
Stapley was a quiet young fellow. He was engaged to his cousin, spent his Sundays with his widowed mother at Dulwich, and was reading hard for a Civil Service appointment. As I pointed out to Barbara, Murphy was murdered on Saturday night, and Stapley always left for Dulwich on Saturday afternoon. I saw him come back myself at the usual time on Monday morning. But she wouldn’t be convinced. She was certain that the murderer was in the Inn, in the very house.
The Inn bore with her. Laundresses stared after her sympathetically as she went up and down the old stairs, and called her to each other, “Pore young thing.” The fellows, many of whom had met her as Miss Martin, didn’t know how to show theirsympathy. They brought her flowers and new-laid eggs—anything. One brought a stray white kitten that he’d found in a doorway. Arnold offered a pure-bred bull pup, and was hurt when she refused it. Arnold was a great fancier. His book of devotion was a bulky volume, “Druid on Dogs.”
The girls who spend a social evening or a Sunday at the Inn occasionally talked of her with honest tears. They are good, kind, hard-working souls, these gay little shop girls, as a rule. And I think they felt it all the more because they could not do anything for her; dare not even say how sorry they were. Between them and her was the unbreakable barrier which stands breast-high between the women who are—well, particular—and the women who are not.
She brought a faint air of repression and tragedy into the Inn, but no one dreamed of resenting it. The careless, rather wild life we all lead seemed suddenly hollow, feeble—wicked almost. Many a host said to a noisy friend:
“Don’t make so much row, old man. You’ll frighten Mrs. Piety.”
She used to creep about at all hours; used to listen on the stairs, peep into sets if a door happened to be open, watch men and girls in and out with the air of a hungry cat. But everybody understood and everybody sympathized. The little light-haired woman in black, with the sad, inquisitive glances, became our Deity.
I went with her to every curio shop and marine store in Bloomsbury. There are many. Some of the people who keep them are regular characters in their way. We were trying to find out the history of the dagger—that queer-handled weapon which had stuck out from dead Murphy’s waistcoat. The police had it. They were making every inquiry of course, but Barbara thought she could do better than they. As I said, a true woman must do something—even if it is something foolish. The little stuffy, foul courts of Holborn grew to know her and to pity her. All the other women pointed after her furtively and said, as the laundresses said, “Pore young thing.”
You don’t want me to go into the detective side of the affair. You can well imagine the array of evidenceagainst Bob; you can see the damning importance of his row with Murphy, of the soaked red corner of his cuffs, and the red-ocher splashes on his face and hands.
Barbara heard him committed for trial. She didn’t cry out or even shudder. But her eyes grew more wide and somber than before.
That night I took her to the theater. Several fellows came to me quite seriously and said:
“Do something to distract her. The poor woman’s going out of her mind.”
Hemming—he had been a friend of Jimmy’s, and was on a dramatic paper—added:
“Take her to a music hall, make her dead-drunk—anything for a distraction. The theater for a compromise. I can pass you into the Adelphi. There is a splendid melodrama on there. Something exciting.”
I had expected opposition, but, queerly enough, she jumped at the idea. She dressed herself very smartly; I think her face was rouged. She kept laughing as we jolted to the Strand in a cab.
In the second act there was a row between twomen, and one stabbed the other to the heart. It was most unlucky. Barbara was staring up at the dress circle. She turned to me suddenly, her cheeks and eyes blazing. She got up and slipped on her cloak, pulling the hood well over her head before she was out of doors. When I rose too she made a quick, excited gesture, and whispered:
“Don’t follow. Whatever you do, don’t follow.”
I let her go out quietly alone. When I happened to look up at the dress circle I saw a vacant seat.
When one man on the stage stabbed the other, Barbara naturally turned her head away. She happened to look up at the dress circle, and her eyes fixed on a family party in the front row. It was Stapley, the girl he was engaged to, and her mother.
Barbara was struck by the look on his face. He seemed as much moved by that murder on the stage as she was. He looked a guilty man, a terrified man. His face was the face of a corpse; his eyes were the eyes of a corpse—some corpse whose last impression had been one of fearful horror.
Presently he rose, whispered a word or two tohis companions, and went away. At the same moment Barbara slipped up from her seat in the stalls.
She followed him out of the theater, along the brilliant whirl of the Strand, through dirty little streets to Holborn, across the road, under the gateway, and into the Inn. The square was quiet. The trees waved troublously. There were peep-holes of bright light at men’s windows, and once she heard a loud peal of laughter.
Stapley turned in at No. 7.
The policeman happened to be taking shelter in the doorway of No. 5. It was a wet night. She stepped back and whispered to him before she crept with a stealthy, springy step up the stairs. Stapley went on, past my rooms, past Murphy’s, to the top floor. He put in his key and opened the door of his set—the fatal set, which had been responsible for so much; the set which had egged on Orion to murder, which had saddled poor Orchard with such a horrid companion—I’ll tell you that some other day—which had seen Jimmy die. He opened the door. There was a bracket lamp on the wall immediatelyopposite. It was burning feebly, and there was a dark circle on the wall paper behind it, where the oil had sweated. Below the lamp was a little glass which Orion had gilded with a sixpenny bottle of dye. Barbara was close behind Stapley—so close that she could see her own face in the little glass slightly behind his.
He stepped in. She leaned over the banisters and swiftly beckoned. She heard the roar of the streets through the open window on the staircase, and she heard the heavy tread of the policeman’s boots on the wood. Then she glided after Stapley. Before he turned to shut the door she was in the passage alone with him at the top of the big, quiet house, with the policeman coming steadily up the stairs. Her eyes, when later on she told me the scene, were the glowing, deadly eyes of a wild beast. I suppose she must have looked at Stapley in the same way—accusingly, fiercely, without a shimmer of mercy. No doubt she thought of Bob waiting for his trial, of the quiet, narrow life at Norwood which had satisfied her, and which she was in danger of losing. She said crisply:
“A policeman is coming up to arrest you for the murder of Denis Murphy.”
When she saw Stapley’s face she no longer had the least doubt of his guilt.
The policeman came up, puffing a little, to the third flight, and Stapley, taken utterly by surprise, not knowing how much had been found out, never said a single word in defense, never resisted when he was arrested. There wasn’t a tittle of evidence against him. It was a woman’s instinct, only a woman’s instinct, that—hanged him? No; the set spares its victims that. It gave Orion a hint to fling himself out of the window. Only a woman’s instinct. If I had not taken her to that melodrama, Bob Piety would have swung.
“The Play’s the Thing.” Now, wouldn’t that be a splendid title? If only poor Nat had been alive!
Stapley was tried. He made a full confession. The jury, finding his story much too fantastic, brought him in mad, and, so far as I know, he is alive, at Broadmoor at this moment.
It came out in evidence, and on his own showing,that he had been going queer for some time before he stabbed Murphy. He had been reading very hard, and then, of course, those rooms got on his nerves. He exaggerated trifles. For instance, he fixed a certain hour for his laundress to turn up in the morning. He used to get up and wait for her with his watch in his hand, dreading that she would be a minute late. That morning arrival of hers became the one moment of his day. He could think of very little else. Would she come in time to-morrow? Was it worth his while to pay her if she wouldn’t be punctual, if she wasted daily five minutes? Five minutes! Ten sometimes. How much did that mount up to in a month? The woman was deliberately robbing him. He would not stand it. One must draw the line somewhere. He used to beseech her, bully her, raise her money, threaten to sack her. He bribed her with old hats and trousers for her husband. If she would only turn up to time, so that the one hour of the day—that hour of nine—could take its place with the others, sink into comparative insignificance like the rest!
He used to ask other fellows very earnestly—we all remembered it afterward:
“What would you do if your laundress was always five minutes late in the morning? I want practical advice. I don’t want to be hard on the woman; but, then, no one likes to be imposed upon.”
Sometimes he would oversleep and she would slip in quietly with her key and wake him by planking his boots down outside his bedroom door. On those days he was more wretched than ever, because he had no means of judging how late she had been.
He used to decide beforehand what dress the pretty cousin would wear next time they met. He dared not influence her. But if she wore blue, that meant damnation for him—this world and the next. But red was bliss forever. He used to say to himself, “This is the very last time I’ll play these mental pranks. To-day shall decide everything.”
And she would be on the platform waiting for his train, smiling and radiant in a blue gown, and he would have to go over it all again.
The fang of some dread or other was always fastening in him. He was full of all kinds ofwhimsical fancies—those whims which seem so unimportant, so imbecile and contemptible to the level-minded, and which are so tragic to the morbid. You understand the sort of thing; avoiding the seams of paving stones, taking your fate from the chance expression of the first strange face you meet when you go out of doors, from the color of a horse, the chime of a clock, street cries—anything.
He was very candid when he stood on his trial for his life; he poured out all his troubles, piteously magnifying trifles, blaming the laundress, the blue dress, the clock in the square, the cab outside, for his misfortune. The prison doctor and another examined him. Of course they said he was mad. He may have been. Yet, if he had taken some other set, he would have been as sane as you are to-day.
On the Saturday that he killed Murphy he had delayed going to Dulwich by the usual early afternoon train. He was afraid for one thing—afraid of the poor little cousin’s frock. He kept putting it off—the time-table spread out in front of him—from one half-hour to the other. And then, as the afternoon went on, a new terror presented itself.The Inn began to fill up and grow gay with fellows home early from their offices, and smart shop girls, light-hearted with the weekly half-holiday. He could see them all at the open windows—men in lounging coats and women in cambric bodices.
Pretty faces peeped over flower boxes and round idly flapping curtains. He was afraid to cross the square. Directly the girls saw him they would lean over the window ledges, make funny grimaces, and cough. There would be a perfect chorus of short, dry, mocking coughs. He had a little nervous trick of clearing his throat, and the girls, who were full of chaff, and not over-fond of him because he was so grave and proper, always mimicked him and called him Splutters. They have a nickname for most of the men, but no one but Stapley ever took any notice.
He was afraid to run along that line of little coughs and bantering cries of “Splutters! Splutters!” He looked at one girl immediately opposite, a girl with very fluffy hair and a flashing steel buckle at her waist, and said tragically:
“If that girl coughs and calls out ‘Splutters,’ Imay as well go and hang myself. I shan’t have any luck. It will be all up with me.”
So for fear that she would, he waited until dusk, when he thought he would be able to glide out of the Inn unobserved.
While he waited he noticed that there was something unusual about the paneling of the wall—something that he had never observed before. It was near the window, at a part where Orion’s leather paper had peeled off. There was a slight but unmistakable difference in the molding. The possibility of a secret cupboard in the wall at once occurred to him. At the same moment he seized it feverishly as an omen, a thing that might make a free man of him once more. The nervous, prompting fiend at his side made him say to himself, as his quivering fingers fiddled at the wood:
“If there should be a secret place behind, then there will be an end to your foolery. It won’t matter whether Augusta wears red or blue. Mrs. Worsell may stay away until ten, if she chooses.”
He tapped and pushed and pressed and coaxed for a little, and at last the panel moved slightly upward.He put his hand in, felt a bolt, drew it down, and sliding up the panel saw a shallow cupboard. It was full of dust, and empty except for a knife. Ah!Theknife. The knife which later on was to investigate the very recesses of Murphy’s heart. A knife with a chased silver handle and a fine blade.
He held it in his hand, and stood pondering on it and on the shallow hidden place behind the panel. He became conscious of something heavy and still in the air, something waiting, watchful, as his hand gripped that handle. Every little sound in other sets became full of portent. That knife! Who had hidden it there? How had it been used? How long ago was it since a human hand, warm with life, made a blur on that polished, delicately chased handle?
Then he suddenly thought that he would take it down and show it to Kinsman, who was very interested in curios and had some knowledge of them. He gave a last rapid look at the time-table, and decided that he would not go down to Dulwich in time for dinner; he’d have a steak at Gatti’s. Kinsman would be interested in the knife. He went downstairsas he was, in his old slippers, leaving his door ajar and his rooms in darkness. He had not lighted the lamp because he had been telling himself every half-hour that he would get off to Dulwich.
On the way downstairs he heard a woman’s clear strong voice singing “Tatters.” It was Sophia’s voice, and Sophia was the worst tease of them all. He began to clear his throat directly he thought of her. He would not go downstairs to Kinsman. He would wait until he could find him alone. He would go upstairs and get his hat and bag, and put on his boots and be off to Dulwich. It was evening. Augusta—dear, tender little Augusta—would have on her evening gown—red nun’s veiling.
As ill-luck would have it, there was a light under Murphy’s door. And Murphy’s oak was hospitably black, and the inner door with its gleaming brass knocker seemed to wink an invitation. The very knife in his hand seemed to point to Murphy’s door. Well, why not show it to Murphy? He was a bit of a fool, but he would be interested.
So he pulled up, knocked at the door—and you know the rest.
He swore to the very last that he did not do it, that he was merely the agent of the knife—that diabolical knife with the secret history.
Murphy came to the door. His pretty, dissolute face was rather flushed with annoyance. His lips, those pouting, cherry-red lips like a girl’s, showed his white, even teeth under his mustache, which was turning white. His sodden brown eyes, half veiled in a web of crow’s feet, his smirking, unfailing air of conceit and satisfaction, struck clean-living, over-wrought Stapley as disgusting. The man was an evil clod upon an honest earth. There was the trail of twenty years’ intrigue, shuffling, and sham on his features. His eyes were dull with the ruin of many women. He was accursed, heavy, hateful with old secrets, old sins—like the knife. The knife! It claimed kinship. It flew forward to his heart.
That is all. As Murphy shouted out and fell, Stapley went, quick and silent like a panther, up the stairs—quick and silent, with the cunning of a wild animal, just as Barbara, a few weeks later, stole up after him. He softly shut his oak—the oak is alwaysdiscreet—and sat shivering, almost breathless, in the dark, listening to the tramp of feet and the anxious buzz of tongues underneath.
When everything was still he stole out and went to Dulwich.
Augusta had a blue gown—it was the Boat Race day—and Stapley was a Cambridge man.
She wore blue constantly afterward. This was one of his plaintive injuries when he babbled out everything at the trial. Blue at the theater that night when his face betrayed him to the vigilant eye of Barbara. Blue when she came to the court to give evidence against him. I wonder if she wears blue when she goes to see him at Broadmoor. Some women would do that in the hope of a cure; though, as you say, they probably don’t allow visits at Broadmoor, and a cure wouldn’t be of any real help in Stapley’s case.