CHAPTER IXTHE ART OF HIEROGLYPHICSThe bell of the ticket-puncher rang, the tiny slips of paper were torn off the roll and exchanged hands. For that day, at least--so long as they chose to sit there--the little penny chairs belonged to them; indisputably to them.You feel you have bought something when you pay for it with your last penny. John leant back with a breath of relief as the chair man walked away. It had been a terrible moment. In this life, you never lose that sense that it is only the one friend in the world who does not judge you by the contents of your pocket; and when an acquaintance is but of a few moment's standing--even if it be a Lady of St. Joseph--it is hazarding everything to have to admit to the possession of only one penny.Do you wonder his breath was of relief? Would you wonder if, wrapped up in that breath, there had been a prayer of thanks to St. Joseph? Only a little prayer, not even spoken in the breath, hardly expressed in the thought that accompanied it--but still a prayer--as much a prayer in his heart, as you might say there was a butterfly in the heart of a cocoon. We know that there is only a chrysalis--sluggish, inert, incapable of the light and dainty flight of a butterfly's wings--but still it will be a butterfly one day. That was just about the relation of John's breath to a prayer.Under his eyes, he stole a look at her. She was not thinking of pennies! Not she! Once you make a woman curious--pennies won't buy back her peace of mind. She was beginning her tricks again with the ferrule of her umbrella. Why is it that a woman can so much better express herself with the toe of an elegant shoe or the point of a fifteen and six-penny umbrella? Nothing less dainty than this will serve her. Give her speech and she ties herself into a knot with it like a ball of worsted and then complains that she is not understood. But with the toe of an elegant shoe--mind you, if it is not elegant, you must give her something else--she will explain a whole world of emotion.She had begun scratching up the mould again. John watched the unconscious expression of her mind with the point of that umbrella. One figure after another she scratched and then crossed out. First it was a ship, rigged as no ship has ever been rigged before or since. TheAlbatross, of course. Then a dome, the dome of a building. He could not follow that. He would have had to know that she had once had a picture book in which was a picture of Santa Maria della Salute--otherwise the meaning of that dome was impossible to follow. He thought it was a beehive. Really, of course, you understood this from the first yourself, it meant Venice. Then she began carving letters. The first was G. The second was R. She thought she felt him looking, glanced up quickly, but he was gazing far away across the round pond. It is always as well not to look. Women are very shy when they are expressing their emotions. It is always as well not to look; but you will be thought a dullard if you do not see. John was gazing across the pond. But nevertheless, she scratched those first two letters out. When he saw that, he took pity."Shall I tell you what the secret papers are?" said he, with a smile.Ah, the gratitude in her eyes."Do!" she replied."It's a short story.""A short story! You write? Why didn't you tell me that before?""But it's only a short story," said John, "that no one'll ever read.""Won't it be published?""No--never.""Why?""Because people won't like it.""How do you know?""I'm sure of it. I know what they like.""Read it to me and I'll tell you if I like it."Read it to her! Sit in Kensington Gardens and have his work listened to by the Lady of St. Joseph! He took it out of his pocket without another word and read it then and there.This is it.AN IDYLL OF SCIENCEThe world has grown some few of its grey hairs in search of the secret of perpetual motion. How many, with their ingeniously contrived keys, have not worn old and feeble in their efforts to open this Bluebeard's chamber: until their curiosity sank exhausted within them? You count them, from the dilettante Marquis of Worcester, playing with his mechanical toy before a king and his court, Jackson, Orffyreus, Bishop Wilkins, Addeley, with the rest of them, and, beyond arriving at the decision of the French Academy--"that the only perpetual motion possible ... would be useless for the purpose of the devisers," you are drawn to the conclusion that mankind shares curiosity with the beasts below him and calls it science lest the world should laugh.You have now in this idyll here offered you, the story of one who found the secret, and showed it to me alone. Have patience to let your imagination wander through Irish country lanes, strolling hither and thither, drawn to no definite end, led by no ultimate hope, and the history of the blind beggar, who discovered the secret of perpetual motion, shall be disclosed for you; all the curiosity that ever thrilled you shall be appeased, feasted, satiated.There was not one in the country-side who knew his name. Name a man in Ireland and you locate him; Murphy, and he comes from Cork--Power, and he comes from Waterford. Why enumerate them all? But this blind beggar had no name. There was no place that claimed him. With that tall silk hat of his which some parish priest had yielded him, with his long black coat which exposure to the sorrowful rains of a sad country had stained a faded green; with his long, crooked stick that tapped its wearisome, monotonous dirge and his colourless, red 'kerchief knotted round his neck, he was a figure well-known in three or four counties.No village owned him. At Clonmel, they denied him, at Dungarvan, they disowned him; yet the whole country-side, at certain seasons of the year, had heard that well-known tapping of the crooked stick, had seen those sightless eyes blinking under the twisted rim of the old silk hat. For a day or so in the place, he was a well-known figure; for a day or so they slipped odd pennies into his sensitively opened palm, but the next morning would find him missing. Where had he gone? Who had seen him go? Not a soul! The rounded cobbles and the uneven pavements that had resounded to the old crooked stick would be silent of that tapping noise for another year, at least.But had chance taken you out into the surrounding country, and had it taken you in the right direction, you would have found him toiling along by the hedges--oh, but so infinitely slowly!--his shoulders bent, and his hand nodding like some mechanical toy that had escaped the clutches of its inventor and was wandering aimlessly wherever its mechanism directed.How it came to be known that he sought the secret of perpetual motion, is beyond me. It was one of those facts about him which seem as inseparable from a man as the clothes that belie his trade. You saw him coming up the road towards you and the words "perpetual motion" rushed, whispering, to your mind. About the matter himself, he was sensitively reticent; yet he must have told someone--someone must have told me. Who was it? Some inhabitant of the village of Rathmore must have spread the story. Whom could it have been? Foley, the carpenter? Burke, the fisherman? Fitzgerald, the publican--Troy, the farmer? I can trace it to none of these. I cannot remember who told me: and yet, when each year he came round for the ceremonies of the Pattern day, when they honoured the patron saint, I said as I saw him: "Here is the blind beggar who tried to invent perpetual motion." The idea became inseparable from the man.With each succeeding year his movements became more feeble, his head hung lower as he walked. You could see Death stalking behind him in his footsteps, gaining on him, inch by inch, until the shadow of it fell before him as he walked.There were times when I had struggled to draw him into conversation; moments when I had thought that I had won his confidence; but at the critical juncture, those sightless eyes would search me through and through and he would pass me by. There must have been a time when the world had treated him ill. I fancy, in fact, that I have heard such account of him; for he trusted no one. Year after year he came to Rathmore for the festival of the Pattern and, year after year, I remained in ignorance of his secret.At last, when I saw the hand of Death stretched out almost to touch his shoulder, I spoke--straight to the pith of the matter, lest another year should bring him there no more.He was walking down from the Holy Well where for the last hour, upon his tremulous knees, he had been making his devotions to a saint whose shrine his unseeing eyes had never beheld. This was the opportunity I seized. For a length of many moments, when first I had seen his bent and ill-fed figure, rocking to and fro with the steps he took, I had made up my mind to it.As he reached my side, I slipped a shilling into his half-concealed palm. So do we assess our fellow-kind! The instinct is bestial, but ingrained. Honour, virtue and the like--we only call them priceless to ourselves; yet it takes a great deal to convince us that they are not priceless to others. I priced my blind beggar at a shilling! I watched his withered fingers close over it, rubbing against the minted edge that he might know its worth!"That has won him," I thought.Ah! What a brutal conception of God's handicraft! A shilling to buy the secret of perpetual motion! Surely I could not have thought that Nature would have sold her mysteries for that! I did. There is the naked truth of it."Who gives me this?" he asked, still fingering it as though it yet might burn his hand."A friend," said I."God's blessing on ye," he answered and his fingers finally held it tight. There he kept it, clutched within his hand. No pocket was safe in the clothes he wore to store such fortune as that. "You're leaving Rathmore after the Pattern, I suppose?" I began.His head nodded as he tapped his stick."There's something I want to ask you before you go," I continued.He stopped, I with him, watching the suspicions pass across his face."Someone has told me----" I sought desperately, clumsily, for my satisfaction now. "Someone has told me that you have found the secret of perpetual motion. Is that true?"The milk-white, sightless eyes rushed querulously to mine. All the expression of yearning to see seemed to lie hidden behind them. A flame that was not a flame--the ghost of a flame burnt there, intense with questioning. He could not see; I knew he could not see; yet those vacant globes of matter were charged with unerring perception. In that moment, his soul was looking into mine, searching it for integrity, scouring the very corners of it for the true reason of my question.I met his gaze. It seemed then to me, that if I failed and my eyes fell before his, he would have weighed and found me wanting. It is one of the few things in this world which I count to my credit, that those empty sockets found me worthy of the trust."Who told ye that?" he asked.I answered him truthfully that I did not know."But is it the case?" I added.He shifted his position. I could see that he was listening."There is no one on the road," I said--"We are quite alone."He coughed nervously."'Tis a matter of fifteen years since I first thought the thing out at all. Shure, I dunno what made it come into me head; but 'twas the way I used to be working in a forge before I lost the sight of my eyes. I thought of it there, I suppose."He stopped and I prompted him."What principle did you go on?" I asked--"Was it magnetism? How did you set to work to avoid friction?"This time, as he looked at me, his eyes were expressionless. I felt that he was blind. He had not understood a word I had said."Are ye trying to get the secret out av me?" he asked at length. "Shure, there's many have done that. They all try and get it out av me. The blacksmith--him that was working at the forge where I was myself before I lost the sight in me eyes--he wanted to make the machine for me. But I'd known him before I was blind and I hadn't lost the knowledge with me eyesight.""Are you making it yourself, then?"He nodded his head."As well as I can," he continued--"but, shure, what can these fingers do with feeling alone--I must see what I'm doing. Faith, I've all the pieces here now in me pocket, only for the putting of 'em together, and glory be to God, I've tried and tried, but they won't go. Ye can't do it with feelin' alone."Some lump threatened to rise in my throat."Good God!" I thought--"this is tragedy----" And I looked in vain for sight in his eyes."Would ye like to see the pieces?" he asked.I assured him that the secret would be safe in my keeping were he so generous."No one about?" he asked."Not a soul!"Then, from his pocket--one by one--he took them out and laid them down on a grass bank by our side. I watched each piece as he produced it and, with the placing of them on the bank of grass, I watched his face. These were the parts in the construction of his intricate mechanism that he showed to me--a foot of rod iron, a small tin pot that once perhaps had held its pound of coffee, a strip of hoop iron and an injured lock."There," he said proudly--"but if I were to give these to that blacksmith, he'd steal the secret before my face. I wouldn't trust him with 'em and I working these fifteen years."I thanked God he could not see my face then. The foot of rod iron! The small tin pot! The injured lock! They stared at me in derision. Only they and I knew the secret--only they and I could tell it, as they themselves had told it me. His wits were gone. Perpetual motion! The wretched man was mad.Perpetual motion out of these rusty old things--rusting for fifteen years in the corners of his pockets! Perpetual motion!But here the reality of it all broke upon me--burst out with its thundering sense of truth. Mad the blind beggar might be; yet there, before my very eyes, in those motionless objects, was the secret of perpetual motion. Rust, decay, change--the obstinate metal of the iron rod, the flimsy substance of the tin pot, always under the condition of change; rusting in his pocket where they had lain for fifteen years--never quiescent, never still, always moving--moving--moving--in obedience to the inviolable law of change, as we all, in servile obedience to that law as well, are moving continually, from childhood into youth, youth to middle-age--middle-age to senility--then death, the last change of all. All this giant structure of manhood, the very essence of complicated intricacy compared to that piece of rod iron, passing into the dust from which the thousands of years had contrived to make it. What more could one want of perpetual motion than that?I looked up into his face again."You've taught me a wonderful lesson," I said quietly."Ah," he replied--"it's all there--all there--the whole secret of it; if only I had the eyes to put it together."If he only had the eyes? Haveanyof us the eyes? Have any of us the eyes?When he had finished, he folded it slowly and put it back in his pocket."Well----?" he said.His heart was beating with anticipation, with apprehension, with exaltation. With one beat he knew she must think it was good. It was his best. He had just done it and, when you have just done it, you are apt to think that. But with another beat, he felt she was going to say the conventional thing--to call it charming--to say--"But how nice." It would be far better if she said it was all wrong, that it struck a wrong note, that its composition was ill. One can believe that about one's work--but that it is charming, that it is nice--never!For that moment Destiny swung in a balance, poised upon the agate of chance. What was she going to say? It all depended upon that. But she was so silent. She sat so still. Mice are still when you startle them; then, when they collect their wits, they scamper away.Suddenly she rose to her feet."Will you be here in the Gardens to-morrow morning at this time," she said--"Then I'll tell you how very much I liked it."CHAPTER XTHE NEED FOR INTUITIONIn such a world as this, anything which is wholly sane is entirely uninteresting. But--thank heaven for it!--madness is everywhere, in every corner, at every turning. You will not even find complete sanity in a Unitarian; in fact, some of the maddest people I have ever met have been Unitarians. Yet theirs is an aggravating madness. You can have no sympathy with a man who believes himself sane.But anything more utterly irresponsible than this sudden, impulsive departure of the Lady of St. Joseph can scarcely be imagined. John did not even know her name and, what is more, did not even realise the fact until she and Ronald had crossed the stretch of grass and reached the Broad Walk. Then he ran after them.Ronald turned first as he heard the hurrying footsteps. Anything running will arrest the attention of a boy, while a woman hears, just as quickly, but keeps her head rigid. Evidently, Ronald had told her. She turned as well. John suddenly found himself face to face with her. Then the impossible delicacy of the situation and his question came home to him.How, before Ronald, to whom he had just been introduced as a friend, could he ask her name? Simplicity of mind is proverbial in those who traffic in deep waters; but could the master of the good shipAlbatrossever be so simple as not to find the suggestion of something peculiar in such a question as this?And so when he reached her side, he stood there despairingly dumb."You wanted to say something?" said she.He looked helplessly at Ronald. Ronald looked helplessly at him. Then, when he looked at her, he saw the helplessness in her eyes as well."What is it you want?" said her eyes--"I can't get rid of him. He's as cunning as he can be."And his eyes replied--"I want to know your name--I want to know who you are." Which is a foolish thing to say with one's eyes, because no one could possibly understand it. It might mean anything.Then he launched a question at a venture. If she had any intuition, she could guide it safe to port."I just wanted to ask," said John--"if you were any relation to the--the----" At that moment the only name that entered his head was Wrigglesworth, who kept a little eating-house in Fetter Lane--"the--oh--what is their name!--the Merediths of Wrotham?"He had just been reading "The Amazing Marriage." But where on earth was Wrotham? Well, it must do.She looked at him in amazement. She had not understood. Who could blame her?"The Merediths?" she repeated--"But why should you think----""Oh, yes--I know,"--he interposed quickly--"It's not the same name--but--they--they have relations of your name--they told me so--cousins or something like that, and I just wondered if--well, it doesn't matter--you're not. Good-bye."He lifted his hat and departed. For a moment there was a quite unreasonable sense of disappointment in his mind. She was wanting in intuition. She ought to have understood. Of course, in her bewilderment at his question she had looked charming and that made up for a great deal. How intensely charming she had looked! Her forehead when she frowned--the eyes alight with questions. Anyhow, she had understood that what he had really wanted to say could not be said before Ronald and, into her confidence she had taken him--closing the door quite softly behind them. Without question, without understanding, she had done that. Perhaps it made up for everything.Presently, he heard the hurrying of feet, and turned at once. How wonderfully she ran--like a boy of twelve, with a clean stride and a sure foot."I'm so sorry," she said in little breaths. "I didn't understand. The Merediths and the Wrotham put me all out. It's Dealtry--Julie Dealtry--they call me Jill. We live in Prince of Wales' Terrace." She said the number. "Do they call you Jack? Good-bye--to-morrow." And she was off.CHAPTER XIA SIDE-LIGHT UPON APPEARANCESHe watched the last sway of her skirt, the last toss of her head, as she ran down the hill of the Broad Walk, then, repeating mechanically to himself:Jack and Jill went up the hillTo fetch a pail of water,Jack fell down and broke his crownAnd Jill came tumbling after,and, wondering what it all meant, wondering if, after all, those nursery rhymes were really charged with subtle meaning, he made his way to Victoria Gate in the Park Railings.In the high road, he saw a man he knew, a member of his club, top-hatted and befrocked. The silk hat gleamed in the sunlight. It looked just like a silk hat you would draw, catching the light in two brilliant lines from crown to brim. The frock coat was caught with one button at the waist. Immaculate is the word. John hesitated. They were friends, casual friends, but he hesitated. There might be two opinions about the soft felt hat he was wearing. He found it comfortable; but one gets biased in one's opinions about one's hats. Even the fact that the evening before he had driven with this friend in a hansom for which he had paid as the friend had no money on him at the time--even this did not give him courage. He decided to keep to his, the Park side of the Bayswater Road.But presently the friend saw him, lifted his stick, and shook it amicably in greeting. He even crossed the road. Well, after all, he could scarcely do anything else. John had paid for his hansom only the evening before. He remembered vividly how, on the suggestion that they should drive, his friend had dived his hand into his pocket, shaken his bunch of keys and said, with obvious embarrassment, that he had run rather short of change. It always is change that one runs short of. Capital is never wanting. There is always a balance at the poor man's bank, and the greater his pride the bigger the balance. But at that moment, John had been rich in change--that is to say, he had half a crown."Oh--I've got heaps," he had said. It is permissible to talk of heaps when you have enough. And he had paid for the whole journey. It was not to be wondered at then, that his friend came amicably across the road.John greeted him lightly."Going up to town?""Yes--are you?"John nodded. "Are you lunching at the Club?""No--I've got to meet some people at the Carlton--How's the time--my watch is being mended.""I don't know," said John--"my watch is all smashed up. It's just on one I should think.""As much as that? I must be moving on. Shall we get on a 'bus?"The very thing. John acquiesced readily. He had nothing; a careful calculation of what he had spent that morning will account for that. But his friend could pay. It was his turn.They mounted the stairs and took a front seat behind the driver."You'll have to pay for me to-day," said John. "My pockets are empty till I get a cheque changed."The blood mounted to the face of his friend. For a moment he looked as though his beautiful hat were too tight for his head. He felt in his pocket. Then he produced a little stamp case, with gold mounted corners and one penny stamp inside."I'm awfully sorry," said he--"I--I've only got a penny stamp." He rose quickly to his feet.John laughed--laughed loudly."What are you going to do?" said he."Well--get off," said his friend."Sit down," said John--"there's no hurry.""Have you got twopence, then?""No--not a farthing. But we're getting into Town, aren't we? We've got nothing to grumble at."When the 'bus had travelled another hundred yards or so, John stood up."Now, you come downstairs," said he. The friend followed obediently. The conductor was inside punching tickets. John looked in."Does this 'bus go to Paddington Station?" he asked inquiringly."No--Piccadilly Circus, Haymarket, and Strand.""What a nuisance," said John--"Come on--we'd better get off."They descended on to the road, and the friend, immaculate, top-hatted and befrocked, took his arm."I see," he said, and he looked back to measure the distance with his eye.There are more people in London with only a penny in their pockets than you would imagine.CHAPTER XIITHE CHAPEL OF UNREDEMPTIONThe next morning was one of promise. For half an hour before the time appointed for his meeting, John was waiting, seated upon a penny chair, thinking innumerable thoughts, smoking innumerable cigarettes. Sometimes he felt the money that was in his pocket, running his finger nail over the minted edge of the half crowns and florins to distinguish them from the pennies. No woman, whatever franchise she may win, will ever understand the delight of this. You must have a pocket in your trousers and keep your money there--even gold when you possess it--to appreciate the innocent joy of such an occupation as this. Men have really a deal to be grateful for.That morning, John had money. He even had gold. He had pawned his gold watch-chain, intending, if the opportunity arose, to ask Jill to lunch.The watch, as you know, was smashed up. That is a technical term in use amongst all gentlemen and sensitive people, having this great advantage that it may be taken literally or not, at will. No one who uses the term has ever been so much in want of shame as to define it.You may wonder why it is that the watch and not the chain should get smashed up first. It is the watch that tells the time. But then, it is the chain that tells you have got the watch that tells the time, and in this life one has always to be considering that there would be no maiden all forlorn if it were not for the house that Jack built. The chain will always be the last to go, so long as those three brass balls continue to hang over that suspicious-looking shop in the dingy side street.John's watch had been smashed up for some weeks; but little boys and little girls in the street still flattered him by asking to be told the time.With one eye searching for a distant clock while your hand pulls out the latch key which depends upon the chain, giving it the weight of a reason to stay in the pocket, you can easily deceive the eyes of these unsuspecting little people in the street. If you discover the distant clock, all well and good. If not, then a hundred devices are left open to you. You can guess--you can tell it by the sun, but, and if you are conscientious, you can apologise and say your watch has stopped. And last of all, if it is a nice little person with eyes in which a laugh is always a-tip-toe, you may dangle the key in front of their face, and with their merriment experience the clean pleasure of honesty.A quality about John that was interesting, was his ability to anticipate possibilities. Perhaps a man's mind runs instinctively to the future, and it is the woman who lives in the past.When Mrs. Rowse awakened him in the morning, he sat up in bed with the glowing consciousness that something was to happen that day. Something had been arranged; some appointment was to be kept; some new interest had entered his life which was to take definite shape that very day.He asked Mrs. Rowse the time--not as one who really wishes to know it, but as it were a duty, which must sooner or later be accomplished. Directly she said a quarter to nine, he remembered. Jill! The Lady of St. Joseph! That morning she was going to tell him how much she liked his story.He sat up at once in bed."Mrs. Rowse! I shall want my coffee in half an hour. Less! Twenty minutes!"In twenty minutes, he was dressed. Allowance must be made if he chose a sock that matched a tie or spent a moment of thought upon the selection of a shirt to go with them. Vanity, it is, only to do these things for your own approval; but when all consciously, you stand upon the very threshold of romance, it may be excused you if you consider yourself in the reflexion of the door. It is the man who, wandering aimlessly through the streets in life, looks in at every mirror that he passes, who is abominable. That is the vanity of which the prophet spoke. The prophet, himself, would have been the first to set straight the tie, or rearrange the 'kerchief of the lover who goes to meet his mistress.Even John smiled at himself. The socks matched the tie so absolutely; it was ludicrous how well they matched. There was no rough, blue serge suit that day. Out of the depths of the wardrobe came a coat well brushed and kept. Then he went in to breakfast.During the meal, Mrs. Rowse lingered about in the sitting-room, dusting things that might easily have escaped notice. John, reading his paper, at last became aware of it with a rush of blood to his cheeks. She had paid the day before for the washing--three and elevenpence.If you go to a laundry in the environment of Fetter Lane, it is like putting your clothes in pawn. You can't get them back again until the bill is paid, and there are times when that is inconvenient.That was why Mrs. Rowse was lingering. She had paid for the washing. Whenever money was due to her, she lingered. It is a subtle method of reproach, a gentle process of reminder which at first scarcely explains itself.On the first occasion when she had adopted it, John had thought she was losing her memory, that her wits were gathering. Out of the corner of his eye, he had nervously watched her going aimlessly about the room, dusting the same object perhaps six separate times. When a woman is paid seven shillings a week for keeping one's rooms tidy, such industry as this might well be a sign of madness.At length, unable to bear it any longer, John had said that he thought she had done enough. Despairingly then, she had folded up the duster, put it away, taken an unconscionable time in the pinning on of that black, shabby hat, and finally, but only when at the door itself, she had said:"Do you think you could spare my wages to-day, sir?"Now she was lingering again. But he had come to know the signs and meanings of the process. This time, John knew it was the washing. He watched her covertly from behind his paper, hoping against hope that she might tire; for he had not got three and elevenpence, nor three halfpence in the world. But a master in the art of lingering does not know what it means to tire. Just when he thought she must have finished, when she had done all the glass on the mantel-piece for the second time, she went out of the room to the cupboard on the landing where John kept his two-hundredweight of coal and returned with all the rags and pots of paste necessary for the cleaning of the brass.Here he gave in; the siege was over. Under cover of the newspaper, he detached the latch key from his watch-chain, slipped it into his pocket and rose, concealing the chain within his hand."I'm just going out," he said--"for a few moments. Can you wait till I get back?"She looked as though she could not, as if it were rather encroaching upon the limit of her time to ask her to stay longer, but----"I expect I can find one or two little things to do for a few moments," she said.John left her doing them. They mainly consisted of putting the brass polish and the rags back again in the cupboard from which she had taken them.It is here that you will see this quality interesting in John, this ability to anticipate possibilities. It was not really the victory of Mrs. Rowse that had impelled him to the sacrifice of his watch-chain. It is not consistent with human nature for any man to pawn an article of value--far less one which implies the possession of another--in order to pay his washing bill. Washing, like the income tax, is one of those indemnities in life which appear to have no justice in their existence. It would always seem that your integrity were still preserved, that you were still a man of honour if you could avoid paying them.I know a man, who has eluded the income tax authorities for seven years, and he is held in the highest esteem as a man of acumen, ability, and the soul of honour. I admit that this opinion is only held of him by those who are endeavouring to do the same as he. A man, for instance, who belongs to the same club and pays his income tax to the last shilling, thinks him to be a hopelessly immoral citizen and would believe him capable of anything. But this is not fair. It would be far more just to say that the man who pays his income tax to the uttermost farthing is capable of nothing--invertebrate.It was not, then, alone to pay his washing bill that John decided to part with the gold watch-chain. He had, in a moment of inspiration, conjured before him the possibility of asking Jill to lunch, and these two motives, uniting from opposite quarters of the compass of suggestion to one and the same end, he sacrificed the last pretentions he might have claimed to the opulence conveyed by a gold watch-chain and repaired to Payne and Welcome's.With a bold and unconscious step, he strode into the little side entrance, which is a feature of all these jeweller's shops displaying the mystical sign of the three brass balls. Without the slightest sense of shame, he pushed open one of the small doors that give admittance to the little boxes--those little boxes where the confession of one's poverty is made. And to no sympathetic ear of a gentle priest are those terrible confessions to be whispered--the most terrible confession you can make in this world. The man to whom you tell your story of shame is greedy and willing to listen, eager and inexorable to make your penance as heavy as he may. A bailiff is, perhaps, more stony of heart than a pawnbroker; yet both are brothers in trade. The dearest things in the life of anyone are their possessions, and both these tradesmen deal in their heartless confiscation. The woman out at elbow, hollow-eyed, who comes to pawn her wedding ring, the man--shabby--genteel--wearing, until the nap is gone and the sleeves are frayed, the garment of his self-respect, who comes to put away his best and Sunday coat; they are all one to the pawnbroker. He beats them down to the last farthing, well knowing that, having once determined to part with their possessions, they will not willingly go away again without that for which they came. He has them utterly at his mercy. They are all one to him. The story in their faces is nothing to his eyes. He signs a hundred death warrants in the tickets that he writes every day--death warrants to possessions well-nigh as dear as life; but it means nothing to him.The awful thought about it all, is to consider the ease with which one loses the sense of shame which, upon a first transaction of the kind, is a hot wind blowing on the face, burning the cheeks to scarlet.On the first occasion that John was driven to such dealing, he passed that guilty side entrance many times before he finally summoned courage to enter. Every time that he essayed the fatal step, the street became full of people whom he knew. There was that editor who was considering his last short story! He turned swiftly, his heel a sudden pivot, and scrutinised the objects in the jeweller's window, then harried away up the street, as though he were ashamed of wasting his time. A glance over the shoulder, satisfied him that the editor was out of sight and back he slowly came. This time he had got within a foot of the door--a foot of it. One step more and he would have been in the sheltering seclusion of that narrow little passage! There was the girl who sold him stamps in the post-office--the girl who smiled at him and said she had read a beautiful story of his in one of the magazines! He had looked up quickly as though he had mistaken the number on the door, then marched into the next shop on the left, as if that were the one he had been looking for. When he had got in, he realised that it was a butcher's.The butcher, in a blithe voice, had said:"And what this morning, sir?""I want--can you tell me the time?" said John.In about half an hour there came a moment when the street was empty. John had seized it and vanished up the little passage. But the ordeal was not over then. He had had to face the high priest of poverty--to tell to him the unforgivable, the mortal crime of penury. And there had been someone in the next confessional--someone hardened in sin--who could hear every single word that he said, and even so far over-stepped the bounds of decency as to look round the corner of their partition."How much will you give me for this?" said John, laying his watch upon the counter. It was the watch his mother had given him, the watch for which she had lovingly stinted herself of ten pounds in order to mark, with degree, his twenty-first birthday.The high priest had picked it up superciliously."D'you want to sell it?""No--oh, no! Only--pawn it.""Well, how much d'you want?""I'd rather you said," replied John meekly.The high priest shrugged his shoulders. It was a wasting of his time, he said, to go on with nonsense like that."How much do you want?" he repeated."Five pounds," said John, and suddenly, without knowing how, found the watch back again in his possession. The high priest had turned to the hardened sinner in the next confessional, and he was left there looking at it blankly in the palm of his open hand. He scarcely knew how he had come by it again. In the midst of the other transaction, the pawnbroker presently addressed him over his shoulder--loudly, so that all in the shop could hear:"I'll give you two pounds," he had said--"And that's about as much as I could sell it for myself."Two pounds! It was an insult to that dear, little, old, white-haired lady who had scraped and saved to buy him the best she knew."It cost ten pounds!" John said boldly."Ten pounds!" The laugh he gave was like the breaking of glass. "The person who gave ten pounds for that must have wanted to get rid of money in a hurry."Wanted to get rid of money in a hurry! If he could have seen the number of dainty shawls the thin white fingers had knitted and the trembling hands had sold in order to amass the fortune of that ten pounds, he would not have talked of hurry."I'll give you two pounds five," he had added. "Not a farthing more and if you take it away somewhere else and then bring it back here again, I'll only give you two pounds, what I said at first."When the blood is mounting to your forehead, when it seems you are crushed about by those watching your discomfort till the warmth of their pressing, phantom bodies brings the perspiration out in beads upon your face, you will take anything to get away.The pawnbroker had made out the ticket as John mumbled his name and address."Got a penny--a penny for the ticket?" said the man.To be compelled to make this confession--the most unabsolvable of all--that he had nothing in his pocket, was the crisis to his suffering. The high priest sniffed, smiled and counted out two pounds four and elevenpence. Then John had turned and fled.Out in the street again, he had breathed once more. The air was purer there. The passers-by, hearing the money jingle in his pocket, held him in higher esteem than did those devotees in the chapel of unredemption. He could even stop and look in the windows of the jeweller's shop--that open, smiling face of a shop window which, beneath its smug and shiny respectability, concealed all the secret, sordid crimes of poverty--the polished pledges unredeemed, that lay deceptively upon the glass shelves as though they had come just new from the maker's hands.It was then, gazing in the window, on that memorable day when he had made his first confession, that John had seen the little brass man. He stood there on a glass shelf along with dozens of other unredeemed trinkets, his low-crowned top-hat, his long-tailed, slim-waisted, Georgian coat and many-buttoned vest, giving him an air of distinction which none of the other objects around him possessed. His attitude, his pose, was that of aChevalier d'honneur--a chivalrous, courteous, proud old gentleman. The one hand resting on the hip, was full of dignity. The other stretched out as though to reach something, John came later, on acquaintance, to learn the fuller significance of that. But though all the features of his face were worn away by hands that had held him, gripping him as they pressed him down, a seal upon the molten wax, it had no power to lessen his undeniable dignity. For all his shapelessness of eyes and nose and mouth, there was not an inch thereby detracted from his stature. From the first moment that he had seen him, the little brass man had taken his stand in John's mind as the figure of all nobility, all honour, and all cleanliness and generosity of heart.To see that little figure in brass was to covet him. John walked back without hesitation into the shop; but this time it was through the jeweller's entrance--this time it was with the confidence of one who comes to buy, not to sell, with the self-righteousness of the virtue of two pounds four and eleven-pence, not with the shame of the sin of poverty.Ah, they treat you differently on this side of the counter. If you were ordering a High Mass to be sung, the priest of poverty could treat you with no greater deference. They may have thought he was mad--most probably they did. It is not characteristic of the man who comes without a penny to pay for the ticket as he pawns his watch, to immediately purchase, haphazard, a little trinket that is of no use to anyone. The high priest of poverty, himself, will tell you that the sin must weigh heavy with need upon the mind before the tongue can bring itself to confess.They had looked at him in no little surprise as he re-entered; but when he had asked to be shown the little brass man, they cast glances from one to another, as people do when they think they are in the presence of a wandering mind."How much do you want for it?" John had asked."Seven and six. It's very good--an old seal, you know, quite an antique."John considered the one pound fifteen which he owed out of that two pounds four and elevenpence."I'm afraid that's too much," said he."Ah--it's worth it. Why, that's over a hundred years old--quite unique.""I'm afraid it's too much," John repeated."Well--look here--I'll tell you what we'll do. You can have it for seven shillings, and we'll give you six on it any day you like to bring it back."They could have offered no greater proof than that of the value in which they held it. If a pawnbroker will buy back an article at almost the same price that he sells it, he must indeed be letting you have it cheap. This offering to take back the little brass man at only a shilling less than he was asking for it, was the highest expression of honesty with which he could defend his demands.John accepted the conditions--paid out his seven shillings and bore the littleChevalier d'honneurin brass away.It was three months later, he had only had breakfast for two days--breakfast, which consisted of toast made from a loaf that was ten days old, bloater paste which keeps for ever, and coffee which can--if you know where to get it--be obtained on credit. It was winter-time and the cold had made him hungry. Coals had run out. The last few scrapings of dust had been gathered out of that cupboard on the landing. Then depression set in. Depression is a heartless jade. She always pays you a visit when both stomach and pocket are empty. Putting his face in his hands, John had leant on the mantel-piece. There was nothing to pawn just then. Everything had gone! Suddenly, he became aware that he was gazing at the little brass man, and that the little brass man had got one hand aristocratically upon his hip, whilst the other was holding out something as though secretly to bestow it as a gift. John looked, and looked again. Then he saw what it was. The little brass man was offering him six shillings and a spasm of hunger creaking through him--he had taken it.
CHAPTER IX
THE ART OF HIEROGLYPHICS
The bell of the ticket-puncher rang, the tiny slips of paper were torn off the roll and exchanged hands. For that day, at least--so long as they chose to sit there--the little penny chairs belonged to them; indisputably to them.
You feel you have bought something when you pay for it with your last penny. John leant back with a breath of relief as the chair man walked away. It had been a terrible moment. In this life, you never lose that sense that it is only the one friend in the world who does not judge you by the contents of your pocket; and when an acquaintance is but of a few moment's standing--even if it be a Lady of St. Joseph--it is hazarding everything to have to admit to the possession of only one penny.
Do you wonder his breath was of relief? Would you wonder if, wrapped up in that breath, there had been a prayer of thanks to St. Joseph? Only a little prayer, not even spoken in the breath, hardly expressed in the thought that accompanied it--but still a prayer--as much a prayer in his heart, as you might say there was a butterfly in the heart of a cocoon. We know that there is only a chrysalis--sluggish, inert, incapable of the light and dainty flight of a butterfly's wings--but still it will be a butterfly one day. That was just about the relation of John's breath to a prayer.
Under his eyes, he stole a look at her. She was not thinking of pennies! Not she! Once you make a woman curious--pennies won't buy back her peace of mind. She was beginning her tricks again with the ferrule of her umbrella. Why is it that a woman can so much better express herself with the toe of an elegant shoe or the point of a fifteen and six-penny umbrella? Nothing less dainty than this will serve her. Give her speech and she ties herself into a knot with it like a ball of worsted and then complains that she is not understood. But with the toe of an elegant shoe--mind you, if it is not elegant, you must give her something else--she will explain a whole world of emotion.
She had begun scratching up the mould again. John watched the unconscious expression of her mind with the point of that umbrella. One figure after another she scratched and then crossed out. First it was a ship, rigged as no ship has ever been rigged before or since. TheAlbatross, of course. Then a dome, the dome of a building. He could not follow that. He would have had to know that she had once had a picture book in which was a picture of Santa Maria della Salute--otherwise the meaning of that dome was impossible to follow. He thought it was a beehive. Really, of course, you understood this from the first yourself, it meant Venice. Then she began carving letters. The first was G. The second was R. She thought she felt him looking, glanced up quickly, but he was gazing far away across the round pond. It is always as well not to look. Women are very shy when they are expressing their emotions. It is always as well not to look; but you will be thought a dullard if you do not see. John was gazing across the pond. But nevertheless, she scratched those first two letters out. When he saw that, he took pity.
"Shall I tell you what the secret papers are?" said he, with a smile.
Ah, the gratitude in her eyes.
"Do!" she replied.
"It's a short story."
"A short story! You write? Why didn't you tell me that before?"
"But it's only a short story," said John, "that no one'll ever read."
"Won't it be published?"
"No--never."
"Why?"
"Because people won't like it."
"How do you know?"
"I'm sure of it. I know what they like."
"Read it to me and I'll tell you if I like it."
Read it to her! Sit in Kensington Gardens and have his work listened to by the Lady of St. Joseph! He took it out of his pocket without another word and read it then and there.
This is it.
AN IDYLL OF SCIENCE
The world has grown some few of its grey hairs in search of the secret of perpetual motion. How many, with their ingeniously contrived keys, have not worn old and feeble in their efforts to open this Bluebeard's chamber: until their curiosity sank exhausted within them? You count them, from the dilettante Marquis of Worcester, playing with his mechanical toy before a king and his court, Jackson, Orffyreus, Bishop Wilkins, Addeley, with the rest of them, and, beyond arriving at the decision of the French Academy--"that the only perpetual motion possible ... would be useless for the purpose of the devisers," you are drawn to the conclusion that mankind shares curiosity with the beasts below him and calls it science lest the world should laugh.
You have now in this idyll here offered you, the story of one who found the secret, and showed it to me alone. Have patience to let your imagination wander through Irish country lanes, strolling hither and thither, drawn to no definite end, led by no ultimate hope, and the history of the blind beggar, who discovered the secret of perpetual motion, shall be disclosed for you; all the curiosity that ever thrilled you shall be appeased, feasted, satiated.
There was not one in the country-side who knew his name. Name a man in Ireland and you locate him; Murphy, and he comes from Cork--Power, and he comes from Waterford. Why enumerate them all? But this blind beggar had no name. There was no place that claimed him. With that tall silk hat of his which some parish priest had yielded him, with his long black coat which exposure to the sorrowful rains of a sad country had stained a faded green; with his long, crooked stick that tapped its wearisome, monotonous dirge and his colourless, red 'kerchief knotted round his neck, he was a figure well-known in three or four counties.
No village owned him. At Clonmel, they denied him, at Dungarvan, they disowned him; yet the whole country-side, at certain seasons of the year, had heard that well-known tapping of the crooked stick, had seen those sightless eyes blinking under the twisted rim of the old silk hat. For a day or so in the place, he was a well-known figure; for a day or so they slipped odd pennies into his sensitively opened palm, but the next morning would find him missing. Where had he gone? Who had seen him go? Not a soul! The rounded cobbles and the uneven pavements that had resounded to the old crooked stick would be silent of that tapping noise for another year, at least.
But had chance taken you out into the surrounding country, and had it taken you in the right direction, you would have found him toiling along by the hedges--oh, but so infinitely slowly!--his shoulders bent, and his hand nodding like some mechanical toy that had escaped the clutches of its inventor and was wandering aimlessly wherever its mechanism directed.
How it came to be known that he sought the secret of perpetual motion, is beyond me. It was one of those facts about him which seem as inseparable from a man as the clothes that belie his trade. You saw him coming up the road towards you and the words "perpetual motion" rushed, whispering, to your mind. About the matter himself, he was sensitively reticent; yet he must have told someone--someone must have told me. Who was it? Some inhabitant of the village of Rathmore must have spread the story. Whom could it have been? Foley, the carpenter? Burke, the fisherman? Fitzgerald, the publican--Troy, the farmer? I can trace it to none of these. I cannot remember who told me: and yet, when each year he came round for the ceremonies of the Pattern day, when they honoured the patron saint, I said as I saw him: "Here is the blind beggar who tried to invent perpetual motion." The idea became inseparable from the man.
With each succeeding year his movements became more feeble, his head hung lower as he walked. You could see Death stalking behind him in his footsteps, gaining on him, inch by inch, until the shadow of it fell before him as he walked.
There were times when I had struggled to draw him into conversation; moments when I had thought that I had won his confidence; but at the critical juncture, those sightless eyes would search me through and through and he would pass me by. There must have been a time when the world had treated him ill. I fancy, in fact, that I have heard such account of him; for he trusted no one. Year after year he came to Rathmore for the festival of the Pattern and, year after year, I remained in ignorance of his secret.
At last, when I saw the hand of Death stretched out almost to touch his shoulder, I spoke--straight to the pith of the matter, lest another year should bring him there no more.
He was walking down from the Holy Well where for the last hour, upon his tremulous knees, he had been making his devotions to a saint whose shrine his unseeing eyes had never beheld. This was the opportunity I seized. For a length of many moments, when first I had seen his bent and ill-fed figure, rocking to and fro with the steps he took, I had made up my mind to it.
As he reached my side, I slipped a shilling into his half-concealed palm. So do we assess our fellow-kind! The instinct is bestial, but ingrained. Honour, virtue and the like--we only call them priceless to ourselves; yet it takes a great deal to convince us that they are not priceless to others. I priced my blind beggar at a shilling! I watched his withered fingers close over it, rubbing against the minted edge that he might know its worth!
"That has won him," I thought.
Ah! What a brutal conception of God's handicraft! A shilling to buy the secret of perpetual motion! Surely I could not have thought that Nature would have sold her mysteries for that! I did. There is the naked truth of it.
"Who gives me this?" he asked, still fingering it as though it yet might burn his hand.
"A friend," said I.
"God's blessing on ye," he answered and his fingers finally held it tight. There he kept it, clutched within his hand. No pocket was safe in the clothes he wore to store such fortune as that. "You're leaving Rathmore after the Pattern, I suppose?" I began.
His head nodded as he tapped his stick.
"There's something I want to ask you before you go," I continued.
He stopped, I with him, watching the suspicions pass across his face.
"Someone has told me----" I sought desperately, clumsily, for my satisfaction now. "Someone has told me that you have found the secret of perpetual motion. Is that true?"
The milk-white, sightless eyes rushed querulously to mine. All the expression of yearning to see seemed to lie hidden behind them. A flame that was not a flame--the ghost of a flame burnt there, intense with questioning. He could not see; I knew he could not see; yet those vacant globes of matter were charged with unerring perception. In that moment, his soul was looking into mine, searching it for integrity, scouring the very corners of it for the true reason of my question.
I met his gaze. It seemed then to me, that if I failed and my eyes fell before his, he would have weighed and found me wanting. It is one of the few things in this world which I count to my credit, that those empty sockets found me worthy of the trust.
"Who told ye that?" he asked.
I answered him truthfully that I did not know.
"But is it the case?" I added.
He shifted his position. I could see that he was listening.
"There is no one on the road," I said--"We are quite alone."
He coughed nervously.
"'Tis a matter of fifteen years since I first thought the thing out at all. Shure, I dunno what made it come into me head; but 'twas the way I used to be working in a forge before I lost the sight of my eyes. I thought of it there, I suppose."
He stopped and I prompted him.
"What principle did you go on?" I asked--"Was it magnetism? How did you set to work to avoid friction?"
This time, as he looked at me, his eyes were expressionless. I felt that he was blind. He had not understood a word I had said.
"Are ye trying to get the secret out av me?" he asked at length. "Shure, there's many have done that. They all try and get it out av me. The blacksmith--him that was working at the forge where I was myself before I lost the sight in me eyes--he wanted to make the machine for me. But I'd known him before I was blind and I hadn't lost the knowledge with me eyesight."
"Are you making it yourself, then?"
He nodded his head.
"As well as I can," he continued--"but, shure, what can these fingers do with feeling alone--I must see what I'm doing. Faith, I've all the pieces here now in me pocket, only for the putting of 'em together, and glory be to God, I've tried and tried, but they won't go. Ye can't do it with feelin' alone."
Some lump threatened to rise in my throat.
"Good God!" I thought--"this is tragedy----" And I looked in vain for sight in his eyes.
"Would ye like to see the pieces?" he asked.
I assured him that the secret would be safe in my keeping were he so generous.
"No one about?" he asked.
"Not a soul!"
Then, from his pocket--one by one--he took them out and laid them down on a grass bank by our side. I watched each piece as he produced it and, with the placing of them on the bank of grass, I watched his face. These were the parts in the construction of his intricate mechanism that he showed to me--a foot of rod iron, a small tin pot that once perhaps had held its pound of coffee, a strip of hoop iron and an injured lock.
"There," he said proudly--"but if I were to give these to that blacksmith, he'd steal the secret before my face. I wouldn't trust him with 'em and I working these fifteen years."
I thanked God he could not see my face then. The foot of rod iron! The small tin pot! The injured lock! They stared at me in derision. Only they and I knew the secret--only they and I could tell it, as they themselves had told it me. His wits were gone. Perpetual motion! The wretched man was mad.
Perpetual motion out of these rusty old things--rusting for fifteen years in the corners of his pockets! Perpetual motion!
But here the reality of it all broke upon me--burst out with its thundering sense of truth. Mad the blind beggar might be; yet there, before my very eyes, in those motionless objects, was the secret of perpetual motion. Rust, decay, change--the obstinate metal of the iron rod, the flimsy substance of the tin pot, always under the condition of change; rusting in his pocket where they had lain for fifteen years--never quiescent, never still, always moving--moving--moving--in obedience to the inviolable law of change, as we all, in servile obedience to that law as well, are moving continually, from childhood into youth, youth to middle-age--middle-age to senility--then death, the last change of all. All this giant structure of manhood, the very essence of complicated intricacy compared to that piece of rod iron, passing into the dust from which the thousands of years had contrived to make it. What more could one want of perpetual motion than that?
I looked up into his face again.
"You've taught me a wonderful lesson," I said quietly.
"Ah," he replied--"it's all there--all there--the whole secret of it; if only I had the eyes to put it together."
If he only had the eyes? Haveanyof us the eyes? Have any of us the eyes?
When he had finished, he folded it slowly and put it back in his pocket.
"Well----?" he said.
His heart was beating with anticipation, with apprehension, with exaltation. With one beat he knew she must think it was good. It was his best. He had just done it and, when you have just done it, you are apt to think that. But with another beat, he felt she was going to say the conventional thing--to call it charming--to say--"But how nice." It would be far better if she said it was all wrong, that it struck a wrong note, that its composition was ill. One can believe that about one's work--but that it is charming, that it is nice--never!
For that moment Destiny swung in a balance, poised upon the agate of chance. What was she going to say? It all depended upon that. But she was so silent. She sat so still. Mice are still when you startle them; then, when they collect their wits, they scamper away.
Suddenly she rose to her feet.
"Will you be here in the Gardens to-morrow morning at this time," she said--"Then I'll tell you how very much I liked it."
CHAPTER X
THE NEED FOR INTUITION
In such a world as this, anything which is wholly sane is entirely uninteresting. But--thank heaven for it!--madness is everywhere, in every corner, at every turning. You will not even find complete sanity in a Unitarian; in fact, some of the maddest people I have ever met have been Unitarians. Yet theirs is an aggravating madness. You can have no sympathy with a man who believes himself sane.
But anything more utterly irresponsible than this sudden, impulsive departure of the Lady of St. Joseph can scarcely be imagined. John did not even know her name and, what is more, did not even realise the fact until she and Ronald had crossed the stretch of grass and reached the Broad Walk. Then he ran after them.
Ronald turned first as he heard the hurrying footsteps. Anything running will arrest the attention of a boy, while a woman hears, just as quickly, but keeps her head rigid. Evidently, Ronald had told her. She turned as well. John suddenly found himself face to face with her. Then the impossible delicacy of the situation and his question came home to him.
How, before Ronald, to whom he had just been introduced as a friend, could he ask her name? Simplicity of mind is proverbial in those who traffic in deep waters; but could the master of the good shipAlbatrossever be so simple as not to find the suggestion of something peculiar in such a question as this?
And so when he reached her side, he stood there despairingly dumb.
"You wanted to say something?" said she.
He looked helplessly at Ronald. Ronald looked helplessly at him. Then, when he looked at her, he saw the helplessness in her eyes as well.
"What is it you want?" said her eyes--"I can't get rid of him. He's as cunning as he can be."
And his eyes replied--"I want to know your name--I want to know who you are." Which is a foolish thing to say with one's eyes, because no one could possibly understand it. It might mean anything.
Then he launched a question at a venture. If she had any intuition, she could guide it safe to port.
"I just wanted to ask," said John--"if you were any relation to the--the----" At that moment the only name that entered his head was Wrigglesworth, who kept a little eating-house in Fetter Lane--"the--oh--what is their name!--the Merediths of Wrotham?"
He had just been reading "The Amazing Marriage." But where on earth was Wrotham? Well, it must do.
She looked at him in amazement. She had not understood. Who could blame her?
"The Merediths?" she repeated--"But why should you think----"
"Oh, yes--I know,"--he interposed quickly--"It's not the same name--but--they--they have relations of your name--they told me so--cousins or something like that, and I just wondered if--well, it doesn't matter--you're not. Good-bye."
He lifted his hat and departed. For a moment there was a quite unreasonable sense of disappointment in his mind. She was wanting in intuition. She ought to have understood. Of course, in her bewilderment at his question she had looked charming and that made up for a great deal. How intensely charming she had looked! Her forehead when she frowned--the eyes alight with questions. Anyhow, she had understood that what he had really wanted to say could not be said before Ronald and, into her confidence she had taken him--closing the door quite softly behind them. Without question, without understanding, she had done that. Perhaps it made up for everything.
Presently, he heard the hurrying of feet, and turned at once. How wonderfully she ran--like a boy of twelve, with a clean stride and a sure foot.
"I'm so sorry," she said in little breaths. "I didn't understand. The Merediths and the Wrotham put me all out. It's Dealtry--Julie Dealtry--they call me Jill. We live in Prince of Wales' Terrace." She said the number. "Do they call you Jack? Good-bye--to-morrow." And she was off.
CHAPTER XI
A SIDE-LIGHT UPON APPEARANCES
He watched the last sway of her skirt, the last toss of her head, as she ran down the hill of the Broad Walk, then, repeating mechanically to himself:
Jack and Jill went up the hillTo fetch a pail of water,Jack fell down and broke his crownAnd Jill came tumbling after,
Jack and Jill went up the hillTo fetch a pail of water,Jack fell down and broke his crownAnd Jill came tumbling after,
Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water,
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after,
and, wondering what it all meant, wondering if, after all, those nursery rhymes were really charged with subtle meaning, he made his way to Victoria Gate in the Park Railings.
In the high road, he saw a man he knew, a member of his club, top-hatted and befrocked. The silk hat gleamed in the sunlight. It looked just like a silk hat you would draw, catching the light in two brilliant lines from crown to brim. The frock coat was caught with one button at the waist. Immaculate is the word. John hesitated. They were friends, casual friends, but he hesitated. There might be two opinions about the soft felt hat he was wearing. He found it comfortable; but one gets biased in one's opinions about one's hats. Even the fact that the evening before he had driven with this friend in a hansom for which he had paid as the friend had no money on him at the time--even this did not give him courage. He decided to keep to his, the Park side of the Bayswater Road.
But presently the friend saw him, lifted his stick, and shook it amicably in greeting. He even crossed the road. Well, after all, he could scarcely do anything else. John had paid for his hansom only the evening before. He remembered vividly how, on the suggestion that they should drive, his friend had dived his hand into his pocket, shaken his bunch of keys and said, with obvious embarrassment, that he had run rather short of change. It always is change that one runs short of. Capital is never wanting. There is always a balance at the poor man's bank, and the greater his pride the bigger the balance. But at that moment, John had been rich in change--that is to say, he had half a crown.
"Oh--I've got heaps," he had said. It is permissible to talk of heaps when you have enough. And he had paid for the whole journey. It was not to be wondered at then, that his friend came amicably across the road.
John greeted him lightly.
"Going up to town?"
"Yes--are you?"
John nodded. "Are you lunching at the Club?"
"No--I've got to meet some people at the Carlton--How's the time--my watch is being mended."
"I don't know," said John--"my watch is all smashed up. It's just on one I should think."
"As much as that? I must be moving on. Shall we get on a 'bus?"
The very thing. John acquiesced readily. He had nothing; a careful calculation of what he had spent that morning will account for that. But his friend could pay. It was his turn.
They mounted the stairs and took a front seat behind the driver.
"You'll have to pay for me to-day," said John. "My pockets are empty till I get a cheque changed."
The blood mounted to the face of his friend. For a moment he looked as though his beautiful hat were too tight for his head. He felt in his pocket. Then he produced a little stamp case, with gold mounted corners and one penny stamp inside.
"I'm awfully sorry," said he--"I--I've only got a penny stamp." He rose quickly to his feet.
John laughed--laughed loudly.
"What are you going to do?" said he.
"Well--get off," said his friend.
"Sit down," said John--"there's no hurry."
"Have you got twopence, then?"
"No--not a farthing. But we're getting into Town, aren't we? We've got nothing to grumble at."
When the 'bus had travelled another hundred yards or so, John stood up.
"Now, you come downstairs," said he. The friend followed obediently. The conductor was inside punching tickets. John looked in.
"Does this 'bus go to Paddington Station?" he asked inquiringly.
"No--Piccadilly Circus, Haymarket, and Strand."
"What a nuisance," said John--"Come on--we'd better get off."
They descended on to the road, and the friend, immaculate, top-hatted and befrocked, took his arm.
"I see," he said, and he looked back to measure the distance with his eye.
There are more people in London with only a penny in their pockets than you would imagine.
CHAPTER XII
THE CHAPEL OF UNREDEMPTION
The next morning was one of promise. For half an hour before the time appointed for his meeting, John was waiting, seated upon a penny chair, thinking innumerable thoughts, smoking innumerable cigarettes. Sometimes he felt the money that was in his pocket, running his finger nail over the minted edge of the half crowns and florins to distinguish them from the pennies. No woman, whatever franchise she may win, will ever understand the delight of this. You must have a pocket in your trousers and keep your money there--even gold when you possess it--to appreciate the innocent joy of such an occupation as this. Men have really a deal to be grateful for.
That morning, John had money. He even had gold. He had pawned his gold watch-chain, intending, if the opportunity arose, to ask Jill to lunch.
The watch, as you know, was smashed up. That is a technical term in use amongst all gentlemen and sensitive people, having this great advantage that it may be taken literally or not, at will. No one who uses the term has ever been so much in want of shame as to define it.
You may wonder why it is that the watch and not the chain should get smashed up first. It is the watch that tells the time. But then, it is the chain that tells you have got the watch that tells the time, and in this life one has always to be considering that there would be no maiden all forlorn if it were not for the house that Jack built. The chain will always be the last to go, so long as those three brass balls continue to hang over that suspicious-looking shop in the dingy side street.
John's watch had been smashed up for some weeks; but little boys and little girls in the street still flattered him by asking to be told the time.
With one eye searching for a distant clock while your hand pulls out the latch key which depends upon the chain, giving it the weight of a reason to stay in the pocket, you can easily deceive the eyes of these unsuspecting little people in the street. If you discover the distant clock, all well and good. If not, then a hundred devices are left open to you. You can guess--you can tell it by the sun, but, and if you are conscientious, you can apologise and say your watch has stopped. And last of all, if it is a nice little person with eyes in which a laugh is always a-tip-toe, you may dangle the key in front of their face, and with their merriment experience the clean pleasure of honesty.
A quality about John that was interesting, was his ability to anticipate possibilities. Perhaps a man's mind runs instinctively to the future, and it is the woman who lives in the past.
When Mrs. Rowse awakened him in the morning, he sat up in bed with the glowing consciousness that something was to happen that day. Something had been arranged; some appointment was to be kept; some new interest had entered his life which was to take definite shape that very day.
He asked Mrs. Rowse the time--not as one who really wishes to know it, but as it were a duty, which must sooner or later be accomplished. Directly she said a quarter to nine, he remembered. Jill! The Lady of St. Joseph! That morning she was going to tell him how much she liked his story.
He sat up at once in bed.
"Mrs. Rowse! I shall want my coffee in half an hour. Less! Twenty minutes!"
In twenty minutes, he was dressed. Allowance must be made if he chose a sock that matched a tie or spent a moment of thought upon the selection of a shirt to go with them. Vanity, it is, only to do these things for your own approval; but when all consciously, you stand upon the very threshold of romance, it may be excused you if you consider yourself in the reflexion of the door. It is the man who, wandering aimlessly through the streets in life, looks in at every mirror that he passes, who is abominable. That is the vanity of which the prophet spoke. The prophet, himself, would have been the first to set straight the tie, or rearrange the 'kerchief of the lover who goes to meet his mistress.
Even John smiled at himself. The socks matched the tie so absolutely; it was ludicrous how well they matched. There was no rough, blue serge suit that day. Out of the depths of the wardrobe came a coat well brushed and kept. Then he went in to breakfast.
During the meal, Mrs. Rowse lingered about in the sitting-room, dusting things that might easily have escaped notice. John, reading his paper, at last became aware of it with a rush of blood to his cheeks. She had paid the day before for the washing--three and elevenpence.
If you go to a laundry in the environment of Fetter Lane, it is like putting your clothes in pawn. You can't get them back again until the bill is paid, and there are times when that is inconvenient.
That was why Mrs. Rowse was lingering. She had paid for the washing. Whenever money was due to her, she lingered. It is a subtle method of reproach, a gentle process of reminder which at first scarcely explains itself.
On the first occasion when she had adopted it, John had thought she was losing her memory, that her wits were gathering. Out of the corner of his eye, he had nervously watched her going aimlessly about the room, dusting the same object perhaps six separate times. When a woman is paid seven shillings a week for keeping one's rooms tidy, such industry as this might well be a sign of madness.
At length, unable to bear it any longer, John had said that he thought she had done enough. Despairingly then, she had folded up the duster, put it away, taken an unconscionable time in the pinning on of that black, shabby hat, and finally, but only when at the door itself, she had said:
"Do you think you could spare my wages to-day, sir?"
Now she was lingering again. But he had come to know the signs and meanings of the process. This time, John knew it was the washing. He watched her covertly from behind his paper, hoping against hope that she might tire; for he had not got three and elevenpence, nor three halfpence in the world. But a master in the art of lingering does not know what it means to tire. Just when he thought she must have finished, when she had done all the glass on the mantel-piece for the second time, she went out of the room to the cupboard on the landing where John kept his two-hundredweight of coal and returned with all the rags and pots of paste necessary for the cleaning of the brass.
Here he gave in; the siege was over. Under cover of the newspaper, he detached the latch key from his watch-chain, slipped it into his pocket and rose, concealing the chain within his hand.
"I'm just going out," he said--"for a few moments. Can you wait till I get back?"
She looked as though she could not, as if it were rather encroaching upon the limit of her time to ask her to stay longer, but----
"I expect I can find one or two little things to do for a few moments," she said.
John left her doing them. They mainly consisted of putting the brass polish and the rags back again in the cupboard from which she had taken them.
It is here that you will see this quality interesting in John, this ability to anticipate possibilities. It was not really the victory of Mrs. Rowse that had impelled him to the sacrifice of his watch-chain. It is not consistent with human nature for any man to pawn an article of value--far less one which implies the possession of another--in order to pay his washing bill. Washing, like the income tax, is one of those indemnities in life which appear to have no justice in their existence. It would always seem that your integrity were still preserved, that you were still a man of honour if you could avoid paying them.
I know a man, who has eluded the income tax authorities for seven years, and he is held in the highest esteem as a man of acumen, ability, and the soul of honour. I admit that this opinion is only held of him by those who are endeavouring to do the same as he. A man, for instance, who belongs to the same club and pays his income tax to the last shilling, thinks him to be a hopelessly immoral citizen and would believe him capable of anything. But this is not fair. It would be far more just to say that the man who pays his income tax to the uttermost farthing is capable of nothing--invertebrate.
It was not, then, alone to pay his washing bill that John decided to part with the gold watch-chain. He had, in a moment of inspiration, conjured before him the possibility of asking Jill to lunch, and these two motives, uniting from opposite quarters of the compass of suggestion to one and the same end, he sacrificed the last pretentions he might have claimed to the opulence conveyed by a gold watch-chain and repaired to Payne and Welcome's.
With a bold and unconscious step, he strode into the little side entrance, which is a feature of all these jeweller's shops displaying the mystical sign of the three brass balls. Without the slightest sense of shame, he pushed open one of the small doors that give admittance to the little boxes--those little boxes where the confession of one's poverty is made. And to no sympathetic ear of a gentle priest are those terrible confessions to be whispered--the most terrible confession you can make in this world. The man to whom you tell your story of shame is greedy and willing to listen, eager and inexorable to make your penance as heavy as he may. A bailiff is, perhaps, more stony of heart than a pawnbroker; yet both are brothers in trade. The dearest things in the life of anyone are their possessions, and both these tradesmen deal in their heartless confiscation. The woman out at elbow, hollow-eyed, who comes to pawn her wedding ring, the man--shabby--genteel--wearing, until the nap is gone and the sleeves are frayed, the garment of his self-respect, who comes to put away his best and Sunday coat; they are all one to the pawnbroker. He beats them down to the last farthing, well knowing that, having once determined to part with their possessions, they will not willingly go away again without that for which they came. He has them utterly at his mercy. They are all one to him. The story in their faces is nothing to his eyes. He signs a hundred death warrants in the tickets that he writes every day--death warrants to possessions well-nigh as dear as life; but it means nothing to him.
The awful thought about it all, is to consider the ease with which one loses the sense of shame which, upon a first transaction of the kind, is a hot wind blowing on the face, burning the cheeks to scarlet.
On the first occasion that John was driven to such dealing, he passed that guilty side entrance many times before he finally summoned courage to enter. Every time that he essayed the fatal step, the street became full of people whom he knew. There was that editor who was considering his last short story! He turned swiftly, his heel a sudden pivot, and scrutinised the objects in the jeweller's window, then harried away up the street, as though he were ashamed of wasting his time. A glance over the shoulder, satisfied him that the editor was out of sight and back he slowly came. This time he had got within a foot of the door--a foot of it. One step more and he would have been in the sheltering seclusion of that narrow little passage! There was the girl who sold him stamps in the post-office--the girl who smiled at him and said she had read a beautiful story of his in one of the magazines! He had looked up quickly as though he had mistaken the number on the door, then marched into the next shop on the left, as if that were the one he had been looking for. When he had got in, he realised that it was a butcher's.
The butcher, in a blithe voice, had said:
"And what this morning, sir?"
"I want--can you tell me the time?" said John.
In about half an hour there came a moment when the street was empty. John had seized it and vanished up the little passage. But the ordeal was not over then. He had had to face the high priest of poverty--to tell to him the unforgivable, the mortal crime of penury. And there had been someone in the next confessional--someone hardened in sin--who could hear every single word that he said, and even so far over-stepped the bounds of decency as to look round the corner of their partition.
"How much will you give me for this?" said John, laying his watch upon the counter. It was the watch his mother had given him, the watch for which she had lovingly stinted herself of ten pounds in order to mark, with degree, his twenty-first birthday.
The high priest had picked it up superciliously.
"D'you want to sell it?"
"No--oh, no! Only--pawn it."
"Well, how much d'you want?"
"I'd rather you said," replied John meekly.
The high priest shrugged his shoulders. It was a wasting of his time, he said, to go on with nonsense like that.
"How much do you want?" he repeated.
"Five pounds," said John, and suddenly, without knowing how, found the watch back again in his possession. The high priest had turned to the hardened sinner in the next confessional, and he was left there looking at it blankly in the palm of his open hand. He scarcely knew how he had come by it again. In the midst of the other transaction, the pawnbroker presently addressed him over his shoulder--loudly, so that all in the shop could hear:
"I'll give you two pounds," he had said--"And that's about as much as I could sell it for myself."
Two pounds! It was an insult to that dear, little, old, white-haired lady who had scraped and saved to buy him the best she knew.
"It cost ten pounds!" John said boldly.
"Ten pounds!" The laugh he gave was like the breaking of glass. "The person who gave ten pounds for that must have wanted to get rid of money in a hurry."
Wanted to get rid of money in a hurry! If he could have seen the number of dainty shawls the thin white fingers had knitted and the trembling hands had sold in order to amass the fortune of that ten pounds, he would not have talked of hurry.
"I'll give you two pounds five," he had added. "Not a farthing more and if you take it away somewhere else and then bring it back here again, I'll only give you two pounds, what I said at first."
When the blood is mounting to your forehead, when it seems you are crushed about by those watching your discomfort till the warmth of their pressing, phantom bodies brings the perspiration out in beads upon your face, you will take anything to get away.
The pawnbroker had made out the ticket as John mumbled his name and address.
"Got a penny--a penny for the ticket?" said the man.
To be compelled to make this confession--the most unabsolvable of all--that he had nothing in his pocket, was the crisis to his suffering. The high priest sniffed, smiled and counted out two pounds four and elevenpence. Then John had turned and fled.
Out in the street again, he had breathed once more. The air was purer there. The passers-by, hearing the money jingle in his pocket, held him in higher esteem than did those devotees in the chapel of unredemption. He could even stop and look in the windows of the jeweller's shop--that open, smiling face of a shop window which, beneath its smug and shiny respectability, concealed all the secret, sordid crimes of poverty--the polished pledges unredeemed, that lay deceptively upon the glass shelves as though they had come just new from the maker's hands.
It was then, gazing in the window, on that memorable day when he had made his first confession, that John had seen the little brass man. He stood there on a glass shelf along with dozens of other unredeemed trinkets, his low-crowned top-hat, his long-tailed, slim-waisted, Georgian coat and many-buttoned vest, giving him an air of distinction which none of the other objects around him possessed. His attitude, his pose, was that of aChevalier d'honneur--a chivalrous, courteous, proud old gentleman. The one hand resting on the hip, was full of dignity. The other stretched out as though to reach something, John came later, on acquaintance, to learn the fuller significance of that. But though all the features of his face were worn away by hands that had held him, gripping him as they pressed him down, a seal upon the molten wax, it had no power to lessen his undeniable dignity. For all his shapelessness of eyes and nose and mouth, there was not an inch thereby detracted from his stature. From the first moment that he had seen him, the little brass man had taken his stand in John's mind as the figure of all nobility, all honour, and all cleanliness and generosity of heart.
To see that little figure in brass was to covet him. John walked back without hesitation into the shop; but this time it was through the jeweller's entrance--this time it was with the confidence of one who comes to buy, not to sell, with the self-righteousness of the virtue of two pounds four and eleven-pence, not with the shame of the sin of poverty.
Ah, they treat you differently on this side of the counter. If you were ordering a High Mass to be sung, the priest of poverty could treat you with no greater deference. They may have thought he was mad--most probably they did. It is not characteristic of the man who comes without a penny to pay for the ticket as he pawns his watch, to immediately purchase, haphazard, a little trinket that is of no use to anyone. The high priest of poverty, himself, will tell you that the sin must weigh heavy with need upon the mind before the tongue can bring itself to confess.
They had looked at him in no little surprise as he re-entered; but when he had asked to be shown the little brass man, they cast glances from one to another, as people do when they think they are in the presence of a wandering mind.
"How much do you want for it?" John had asked.
"Seven and six. It's very good--an old seal, you know, quite an antique."
John considered the one pound fifteen which he owed out of that two pounds four and elevenpence.
"I'm afraid that's too much," said he.
"Ah--it's worth it. Why, that's over a hundred years old--quite unique."
"I'm afraid it's too much," John repeated.
"Well--look here--I'll tell you what we'll do. You can have it for seven shillings, and we'll give you six on it any day you like to bring it back."
They could have offered no greater proof than that of the value in which they held it. If a pawnbroker will buy back an article at almost the same price that he sells it, he must indeed be letting you have it cheap. This offering to take back the little brass man at only a shilling less than he was asking for it, was the highest expression of honesty with which he could defend his demands.
John accepted the conditions--paid out his seven shillings and bore the littleChevalier d'honneurin brass away.
It was three months later, he had only had breakfast for two days--breakfast, which consisted of toast made from a loaf that was ten days old, bloater paste which keeps for ever, and coffee which can--if you know where to get it--be obtained on credit. It was winter-time and the cold had made him hungry. Coals had run out. The last few scrapings of dust had been gathered out of that cupboard on the landing. Then depression set in. Depression is a heartless jade. She always pays you a visit when both stomach and pocket are empty. Putting his face in his hands, John had leant on the mantel-piece. There was nothing to pawn just then. Everything had gone! Suddenly, he became aware that he was gazing at the little brass man, and that the little brass man had got one hand aristocratically upon his hip, whilst the other was holding out something as though secretly to bestow it as a gift. John looked, and looked again. Then he saw what it was. The little brass man was offering him six shillings and a spasm of hunger creaking through him--he had taken it.