CHAPTER III
Wehave heard much of a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. We know that he was perfect and upright, feared God, and eschewed evil; and we are told how, on a disastrous afternoon, messenger after messenger came to him to announce one calamity after the other, culminating in the annihilation of his entire family, and how the final scorbutic affliction came shortly afterwards, the anti-climax, it must be confessed, of his woes, which drove the patient man to open his mouth and curse his day. Between Job and Dr. Quixtus I doubt whether the like avalanche of disasters, Pelion on Ossa and Kinchinjunga on Pelion of misfortunes, ever came thundering down on the head of an upright and evil-eschewing human creature.
The tale of these successive misfortunes can only be briefly narrated; for to examine in detail the train of circumstances which led up to them, and the intricate nexus of human motive in which they were complicated would be foreign to the purpose of this chronicle. Except passively or negatively, perhaps, Quixtus had no hand in their happening. As in the case of Job the thunderbolts fell from a cloudless sky. His moral character was blameless, his position as assured, his life as happy as the patriarch’s. He had done no man harm all his days, and he had no cause to fear evil from any quarter. A tithe or more of his goods he gave in generous charity; and not only did he not proclaim the fact aloud like the Pharisee, but never mentioned the matter to himself—for the simple reason that keeping no accounts of his expenditure he had not the remotest notion of the amount of his eleemosynary expenses. You would have far to go to meet a man more free from petty-mindedness or vanity than Ephraim Quixtus. He was mild, urbane, and for all his scholarly reading, palæolithic knowledge, and wide travel, singularly modest. If you contradicted him, instead of asserting himself, as most men do, with increased vigour, he forthwith put back to find, if possible, the flaw in his own argument. When complimented on his undoubted attainments, he always sought to depreciate them. The achievement of others, even in his own special department of learning, moved his generous admiration. Yet he had one extraordinary vanity—which made him fall short of the perfection of his prototype in the land of Uz—the doctorial title which he possessed by virtue of his Ph.D. degree from the University of Heidelberg. Through signing his articles in learned publications “Ephraim Quixtus, Ph.D.,” his brethren among the learned who rent him respectfully to pieces in other learned publications, invariably alluded to him as Dr. Quixtus. Through being thus styled by his brethren both in print and conversation, he began to give his name as Dr. Quixtus to the stentorian functionary at the doors of banquets and receptions of the learned, and derived infinite gratification from hearing it loudly proclaimed to all assembled. From that to announcing himself as “Dr. Quixtus” to the parlour-maid or butler in the homes of the worldly was but a step.
Now it may be questioned whether on the rolls kept by the Incorporated Law Society there is a solicitor who would style himself Doctor. It would be as foreign to the ordinary solicitor’s notions of professional propriety as to interview his clients in a surplice. The title does not suggest a solicitor—any more than Quixtus himself did in person. He was a stranger, an anomaly, a changeling in the Corporation. He ought never to have been a solicitor. He was a very bad solicitor—and that was what the judge said, among other things of a devastating nature, when he was giving evidence at a certain memorable trial, which took place not long after he had re-entered the stormy horizon of Clementina Wing, and his portrait had been hung above the presidential chair of the Anthropological Society.
It is but justice to say that Quixtus was a solicitor not by choice but by inheritance and filial affection. His father had an old-fashioned lucrative family practice, into which, as it was his father’s earnest desire, his kindly nature allowed him to drift. When his father died suddenly, almost as soon as his articles were completed and he was admitted into partnership, he stared in dismay at the prospect before him. He could no more draw up a conveyance of land, or administer a bankrupt estate, or prepare a brief for a barrister, than he could have steered an Atlantic liner into New York Harbour. And he had not the faintest desire to know how to draw up a conveyance or administer an estate. Beyond acquiring from text-books the bare information requisite for the passing of his examinations, he had never attempted to probe deeper into the machinery of the law. His mind attributed far greater importance to the sharp flint instruments wherewith primitive men settled their quarrels by whanging each other over the head than to the miserable instruments on parchment which adjusted the sordid wrangles of the present generation. By entering the profession he had merely gratified a paternal whim. There had been a “Quixtus and Son” in Lincoln’s Inn for a hundred years, and it was the dearest wish of the old man’s heart that “Quixtus and Son” should remain therein sæcula sæculorum. While his father was alive Ephraim had scarcely thought of this desirable continuity. But his father dead, it behoved him to see piously to its establishment.
The irksome part of the matter was that he had no financial reason for proceeding with an abominated profession. As hunger drives the wolves abroad, according to François Villon, so might hunger have driven him from his palæolithic forest. But there was no chance of his being hungry. Not only did his father and his mother each leave him a comfortable fortune, but he was the declared heir of an uncle, his father’s elder brother, who possessed large estates in Devonshire, and had impressed Ephraim from his boyhood up as one in advanced and palsied old age.
Yet “Quixtus and Son” had to be carried on. How? He consulted the confidential clerk, Marrable, who had been in the office since boyhood. Marrable at once suggested a solution of the difficulty which almost caused Ephraim to throw himself into his arms for joy. It was wonderful! It was immense! Quixtus welcomed it as Henry VIII. welcomed Cromwell’s suggestion for getting rid of Queen Katherine. The solution was nothing less than that Ephraim should take him into partnership on generous terms. The deed of partnership was drawn up and signed, and Quixtus entered upon a series of happy and prosperous years. He attended the office occasionally, signed letters and interviewed old family clients, whom he entertained with instructive though irrelevant gossip until they went away comforted. When they insisted on business advice instead of comfort, he rang the bell, and Marrable appeared like a djinn out of a bottle. Nothing could be simpler, nothing could work more satisfactorily. Not only did clients find their affairs thoroughly looked after, but they were flattered at having bestowed upon them the concentrated legal acumen and experience of the firm. You may say that, as a solicitor, Quixtus was a humbug; that he ought never to have accepted the position. But show me a man who has never done that which he ought not to have done, and you will show me either an irresponsible idiot or an angel masquerading in mortal vesture. I have my doubts whether Job himself before his trials was quite as perfect as he is made out to be. Quixtus was neither idiot nor angel. At the most he was a scholarly ineffectual gentleman of comfortable means, forced by filial tenderness into a distasteful and bewildering pursuit. He had neither the hard-heartedness to kill the one, nor the strength of will to devote himself to the mastery of the other. He compromised, you may say, with the devil. Well, the devil is notoriously insidious, and Quixtus was entirely unconscious of subscribing to a bargain. At any rate, the devil had a hand in his undoing and appointed a zealous agent of iniquity in the person of Mr. Samuel Marrable.
When Quixtus went to Lincoln’s Inn Fields one morning and found, instead of his partner, a letter from him stating that he had gone abroad and would remain there without an address for an indefinite time, Quixtus was surprised. When he had summoned the managing clerk and together they had opened Marrable’s safe, both he and the clerk were bewildered; and after he had spent an hour or two with a chartered accountant, for whom he had hurriedly telephoned, he grew sick from horror and amazement. Later in the day he heard through the police that a warrant was out for Samuel Marrable’s arrest. In the course of time he learned that Samuel Marrable had done everything that a solicitor should not do. He had misappropriated trust-funds; he had made away with bearer-bonds; he had falsified accounts; he had forged transfers; he had speculated in wild-cat concerns; he had become the dupe of a gang of company promoters known throughout the City as “Gehenna Unlimited.” He had robbed the widow; he had robbed the orphan; he had robbed the firm; he had robbed with impunity for many years; but when, in desperation, he had tried to rob “Gehenna Unlimited,” they were too much for him. So Samuel Marrable had fled the country.
Thus fell the first thunderbolt. Quixtus saw the fair repute of “Quixtus and Son” shattered in an instant, his own name tarnished, himself—and this was the most cruel part of the matter—betrayed and fooled by the man in whom he had placed his boundless trust. Marrable, whom he had known since he was a child of five; with whom he had gone to pantomimes, exhibitions, and such like junketings when he was a boy; who had first guided his reluctant feet through the mazes of the law; who had stood with him by his father’s death-bed; who was bound to him by all the intimacies of a lifetime; on whose devotion he had counted as unquestioningly as a child on his mother’s love—Marrable to be a rogue and a rascal, not a man at his wits’ end yielding to a sudden temptation, but a deliberate, systematic villain—it was all but unthinkable. Yet here were irrefragable proofs, as the law took its course. And all through the nightmare time that followed until the trial—for the poor fugitive was soon hunted down and haled back to London—when his days were spent in helpless examination of confusing figures and bewildering transactions, the insoluble human problem was uppermost in his mind. How could the man have done these things? Marrable had sobbed over his father’s grave and had put his arm affectionately round his shoulders and led him away to the mourning coach. Marrable had stood with him by another open grave, that of his dead wife, and had comforted him with affectionate sympathy. To the very end not a sinister look had appeared in his honest, capable eyes. On the very day of his flight he had lunched with Quixtus in the Savoy grill-room. He had laughed and jested and told Quixtus a funny story or two. When they parted:
“Shall I see you at the office this afternoon? No? Well good-bye, Ephraim. God bless you.”
He had smiled and waved a cheery hand. How could a man shower upon another his tears, his sympathy, his laughter, his implied loyalty, his blessings, and all the time be a treacherous scoundrel working his ruin? All his knowledge of Prehistoric Man would not answer the question.
“I wonder whether there are many people in the world like Marrable?” he questioned.
And from that moment he began to look at all clear-eyed honest folk and speculate, in a dreary way, whether they were like Marrable.
The family honour being imperilled, duty summoned him to an interview with Matthew Quixtus, his father’s elder brother, the head of the family, and owner of a large estate at Croxton, in Devonshire, and other vast possessions. He paid him a week-end visit. The old man, nearly ninety, received him with every mark of courtesy. He went out of his way to pay deference to him as a man of high position in the learned world. Instead of the “Mr. Ephraim,” which had been his designation in the house ever since the “Master Ephraim” had been dropped in the dim past, it was pointedly as “Dr. Quixtus” that butler and coachman and the rest of the household heard him referred to. Quixtus, who had always regarded his uncle as a fiery ancient, hot with family pride and quick to quarrel on the point of honour, was greatly relieved by his unexpected suavity of demeanour. He listened to his nephew’s account of the great betrayal with a kindly smile, and wasted upon him bottles of the precious ‘54 port which the butler, with appropriate ritual, only brought up for the Inner Brotherhood of Dionysus. On all previous occasions, Ephraim, at whose deplorably uncultivated palate the old man had shrugged pitying shoulders, had been treated to an unconsidered vintage put upon the table after dinner rather as a convention than (in the host’s opinion) as a liquid fit for human throttle. He was sympathetic over the disaster and alluded to Marrable in picturesquely old-world terms of depreciation.
“It’ll cost you a pretty penny, one way or the other,” said he.
“I shall have to make good the losses. I dare say I can make arrangements extending over a period of years.”
“Fly kites, eh? Well, I shan’t live for ever. But I’m not dead yet. By George, sir, no!” and his poor old hand shook pitifully as he raised his glass to his lips. “My grandfather—your great grandfather lived to be a hundred and four.”
“It will be a matter of pride and delight to all who know you,” said Quixtus smiling and bowing, glass in hand, across the table, “if you champion the modern world and surpass him in longevity.”
“The property will come in very handy though, won’t it?” asked the old man.
“I confess,” said Quixtus, “that, if I pay the liabilities out of my own resources, I may be somewhat embarrassed.”
“And what will you do with yourself when you’ve shut up the shop?”
“I shall devote myself more closely to my favourite pursuits.”
The old man nodded and finished his glass of port.
“A damned gentlemanly occupation,” said he, “without any confounded modern commercialism about it.”
Quixtus was pleased. Hitherto his uncle had not regarded his anthropological studies with too sympathetic an eye. He had lived, all his life, a country gentleman, looking shrewdly after his estates, building cottages, draining fields, riding to hounds and shooting all things that were to be shot in their season. In science and scholarship he took no interest. It was therefore all the more gratifying to Quixtus to hear his studious scheme of life so heartily commended. The end of the visit was marked by the same amenity as the beginning, and Quixtus returned to town somewhat strengthened for the ordeal that lay before him.
Up to the time of the trial he had met with nothing but the kindly sympathy of friends and the courteous addressing of those with whom he came into business relations. His first battering against the sharp and merciless edges of the world took place in open court. He stood in the witness-box a lone, piteous spectacle, a Saint Sebastian among witnesses, unsaved by miraculous interposition, like the lucky Sebastian, from personal discomfort. That he was an upright sensitive gentleman mattered nothing to judge and counsel; just as the fact of Sebastian’s being a goodly and gallant youth did not affect his would-be executioners. At every barb shot at him by judge and counsel he quivered visibly. They were within their rights. In their opinion, he deserved to quiver. At the back of their legal minds they were all kindly gentlemen, and out of court had human minds like yours and mine—but in their legal minds, Judge, Counsel for the Prosecution, Counsel for the Defence, all considered Quixtus a fortunate man in being in the witness-box at all; he ought to have been in the dock. There had never been such fantastically culpable negligence. He did not know this; he had not inquired into that; such a transaction he had just been aware of but never understood; he had not examined the documents in question. Everything brought him by Marrable for signature, he signed as a matter of course, without looking at it.
“If Mr. Marrable had brought you a cheque for £20,000 drawn in his favour on your own private bankers, would you have signed it?” asked Counsel.
“Certainly,” said Quixtus.
“Why?”
“I should not have looked at it.”
“But supposing the writing on the cheque had, as it were, leaped to your eyes?”
“I should have taken it for granted that it had to do with the legitimate business of the firm.”
“If that is the case,” remarked the judge, “I don’t think that men like you ought to be allowed to go about loose.”
Whereat there arose laughter in court, and sudden, hellish hatred of judges in the heart of Quixtus.
“Can you give the court any reason why you drifted into such criminal carelessness?” asked Counsel.
“It never entered my head to doubt my partner’s integrity.”
“Do you carry this childlike faith in human nature into all departments of life?”
“Up to now I have had no reason to distrust my fellow creatures.”
“I congratulate you as a solicitor on having had a unique experience,” said the judge acidly.
Counsel continued. “I put it to you—suppose two or three plausible strangers told you a glittering tale, and one asked you to entrust him with a hundred pounds to show your confidence in him—would you do it?”
“I am not in the habit of consorting with vulgar strangers,” retorted Quixtus, with twitching lip.
“Which means that you are too learned and lofty a person to deal with the common clay of this low world?”
“I cannot deal with you,” said Quixtus.
Counsel grew red and angry, as there was laughter in which the judge joined.
“The witness,” said the latter, “is not quite such a fool as he would give us to imagine, Mr. Smithers.”
Thus the only blow that Quixtus could give was turned against him. Also, Counsel, smarting under the hit, mishandled him severely, so that at the end of his examination he stepped down from the witness-box, less a man than a sentient bruise. He remained in court till the very end, deathly pale, pain in his eyes, and his mouth drawn into the lines of that of a child about to cry. The trial proceeded. There was no doubt of the guilt of the miserable wretch in the dock. The judge summed up, and it was then that he said the devastating things about Quixtus that inflamed his newly born hatred of judges to such an extent that it thenceforth blackened his candid and benevolent soul. The jury gave their verdict without retiring, and Marrable, at the age of sixty, was condemned to seven years’ penal servitude.
Quixtus left the court dazed and broken. He was met in the corridor by Tommy, who gripped him by the arm, led him down into the street and put him into a cab. He had not been in court, being a boy of delicate feelings.
“You must buck up, you know,” he said to the silent, grey-faced man beside him. “It will all come right. What you want now is a jolly stiff brandy-and-soda.”
Quixtus smiled faintly. “I think I do,” said he.
A few minutes later Tommy superintended the taking of his prescription in the dining-room in Russell Square, and eyed Quixtus triumphantly as he set down the empty glass.
“There! That’ll set you straight. There’s nothing like it.”
Quixtus held out his hand. “You’re a good boy, Tommy. Thanks for taking care of me. I’ll be all right now.”
“Don’t you think I might be of some use if I stayed? It’s a bit lonesome here.”
“I have a big box of stuff from the valley of the Dordogne, which I haven’t opened yet,” said Quixtus. “I was saving it up for this evening, so I shan’t be lonesome.”
“Well be sure to have a good dinner and a bottle of fizz,” said Tommy. After which sage counsel he went reluctantly away.
Just as Clementina was sitting down to dinner Tommy rushed in with a crumpled evening newspaper in his hand, incoherent with rage. Had she seen the full report? What did she think of it? How dared they say such things of a high-minded honourable gentleman? Counsel on both sides were a disgrace to the bar, the judge a blot on the bench. They ought not to be allowed to cumber the earth. They ought to be shot on sight. Out West they would never have left the court alive. Had he lived in a simpler age, or in a more primitive society, the young Paladin would have gone forth and slaughtered them in the bosom of their families. Fortunately, all he could do by way of wreaking his vengeance was to tear the newspaper in half, throw it on the floor, and stamp on it.
“Feel better?” asked Clementina, who had listened to his heroics rather sourly. “If so, sit down and have some food.”
But Tommy declined nourishment. He was too sore to eat. His young spirit revolted against the injustice of the world. It clamoured for sympathy.
“Say you think it damnable.”
“Anything to do with the law is always damnable,” said Clementina. “You shouldn’t put yourself within its clutches. Please pass me the potatoes.”
Tommy handed her the dish. “I believe you’re as hard as nails, Clementina.”
“All right, believe it,” she replied grimly. And she would not say more, for in what she thought was her heart she agreed with the judge.
CHAPTER IV
Quixtuswas still bowing his head over the dishonoured grave of “Quixtus and Son” when the second thunderbolt fell. The public disgrace drove a temperamentally hermit-like nature into more rigid seclusion. He resigned his presidency of the Anthropological Society. The Council met and unanimously refused to accept his resignation. They wrote in such terms that he could not do otherwise than yield. But he gave up his attendance at their meetings. To a man, his friends among the learned professed their sympathy. It hurt rather than healed. Those who wrote received courteous and formal replies. Those who knocked at his door were refused admittance. Even Clementina, repenting of her harshness and pitying the lonely and helpless man, pinned on a shameless thing that had once resembled a hat, and went up by omnibus to Russell Square, only to find the door closed against her. The woman thus scorned became the fury which, according to the poet, is unknown in Hades. She expressed her opinion of Quixtus pretty freely. But Quixtus shrank from her as he shrank from every one, as he even shrank from his own servants. These he dismissed, with the exception of Mrs. Pennycook, his housekeeper, who, since the death of his wife had held a high position of trust in his household, and a vague female of humble and heterogeneous appearance who lived out, and had the air of apologising for inability to squeeze through the wall when he passed by. In view of he knew not what changes in his immediate financial circumstances, economy, he said, was desirable. He also shut up the greater part of the big house, finding a dim sort of pleasure in such retrenchment. He lived in his museum at the back, ate his meals in the little dark room at the head of the kitchen stairs, and changed his luxurious bedroom for a murky, cheerless little chamber adjoining the museum. When a man takes misery for a bride he may be forgiven for exaggeration in his early transports.
Only on Tuesday nights did he throw open dining-room and drawing-room, where he received Huckaby, Vandermeer, and Billiter as in the past. To them his smile and his old self were given. Indeed he found a newer sympathy with them. He, even as they, had been the victim of outrageous fortune. He, too, had suffered from the treachery of man and the insolence of office. The three found an extra guerdon in their great-coat pockets.
There were times, however, when the museum grew wearisome through familiarity, when he found no novelty in the Quaternary skull from Silesia, or the engraved reindeers on the neolithic axe-heads, or the necklet of the lady of the bronze age; when he craved things nearer to his own time which could give him some message of modernity. On such occasions he would either walk abroad, or if the weather were foul, take a childish pleasure in exploring the sealed chambers of the house. For, shut up a room, exclude from it the light of day, cover the furniture with dust-sheets till you get the semblance of a morgue of strange beasts, forget it for a while, and, on re-entering it, you will have all the elements of mystery which gradually and agreeably give place to little pleasant shocks of discovery of the familiar. The neglected pictures that have hung on the walls, the huddled knick-knacks on a table, the heap of books on the floor, all have messages of gentle reproach. A newspaper of years ago, wrapped round a cushion, once opened by eager hands and containing in its headlines world-shaking news (now so stale and forgotten) is a pathetic object. In drawers are garments out of date, preserved heaven knows why, keepsakes worked by fair hands, unused but negligently treasured, faded curtains which will never be rehung—a thousand old stimulating things, down to ends of sealing-wax and carefully rolled bits of twine. And some drawers are empty, and from them rises the odour of lavender poignant with memories of the things that are no more.
It was a large, old-fashioned house which had been his father’s before him, in which he had been born; and it was full of memories. In the recess of a dark cupboard in one of the attics he found a glass jar, which had escaped the vigilance or commanded the respect of generations of housemaids, covered with a parchment on which was written in his mother’s hand, “Damson Jam.” His mother had died a quarter of a century ago.
An old hair-trunk in the corner of the box-room, such a hair trunk as the boldest man during Quixtus’s lifetime would have shrunk from having attached to him on his travels, contained correspondence of his grandfather’s and old daguerreotypes and photographs of stiff, staring, faded people long since gone to a (let us hope) more becomingly attired world. There was a miniature on ivory, villainously painted, of a chubby red-cheeked child, and on the back was written “My Son Mathew, aged two years and six months.” Could the shrivelled, myriad-wrinkled, palsied old man whom Ephraim had visited but a short while since ever have remotely resembled this? The hair-trunk also contained a pistol with a label “Carried by my father at Waterloo.” That was the old gentleman who had lived to a hundred and four. Why had this relic of family honour remained hidden all his life?
The more he searched into odd corners the more did his discoveries stimulate his interest. Of his own life he found records in unexpected places. A bundle of school-reports. He opened it at random, and his eye fell upon the Headmaster’s Report at the foot of a sheet; “Studious but unpractical. It seems impossible to arouse in him a sense of ambition, or even of the responsibilities of life.” He smiled somewhat wistfully and put the bundle in his pocket with a view to the further acquisition of self-knowledge. A set of Cambridge college bills tied with red tape, a broken microscope, a case of geometrical drawing instruments, a manuscript book of early poems, mimetic echoes of Keats, Tennyson, Shelley, Swinburne, who were all clamouring together in his brain, his college blazer, much moth-eaten, his Heidelberg student’s cap, ditto. . . .Ah! qu’ils sont loin ces jours si regrettés!. . .
Of his wife, too, there were almost forgotten relics. An oak chest opened unexpectedly disclosed a pair of little pink satin slippers standing wistfully on the top of the tissue paper that protected the dresses beneath. The key was in the lock. He closed the lid reverently, locked the chest, and put the key in his pocket. They had had together five years of placid happiness. She was a sweet, white-winged soul— Angela. Her little boudoir on the second floor had not been used since her death, and was much as she had left it. Only the dust-sheets and the gloom invested it in a more ghostly atmosphere than other less sacred chambers. Her work-basket stood by the window. He opened it and found it still contained a reel of thread and a needle-case stuck full of rusty needles. On the wall hung an enlarged portrait of himself at the age of thirty—he was not quite so lantern-jawed then, and his hair was thicker on the top. A water-colour sketch of Angela hung over the oak bureau, at which she used to write her dinner-notes and puzzle her pretty head over household accounts. He drew up the blind so as to see the picture more clearly. Yes. It was like her. Dark-haired, fragile, with liquid brown eyes. There was just that dimple in her chin. . . . He remembered it so well; but, strangely, it had played no part in his customary mental picture of her. In the rediscovery of the dimple he found a vague melancholy pleasure. . . . Idly he drew down the slanting lids of the bureau, and pulled out the long narrow drawers that supported it underneath. The interior was empty. He recollected now that he had cleared it of its contents when settling Angela’s affairs after her death. He thrust up the slanting lid, pushed back the long right-hand drawer, pushed the left hand one. It stuck. He tried to ease it in, but it was jammed. He pulled it out with a jerk, and found that the cause of the jam was a letter flat against the end of the drawer with a corner turned over the edge. He took out the letter, closed the drawers, and smiled sadly, glad to have discovered a new relic of Angela in the bureau—probably a gossiping note from a friend, perhaps one from himself. He went to the light of the window.
“My adored heart’s dearest and most beloved angel”—so the letter began. He scanned the words bewildered. Certainly in his wildest dreams he had never imagined such a form of address. Besides, the handwriting was not his. He turned the sheet rapidly and glanced at the end; “God! How I love you.Will.”
Will? Will Hammersley. It was Will Hammersley’s handwriting. What did it mean? He paused for a few moments, breathing hard, looking with blind eyes through the window over the square. At last he read the letter. Then he thrust it, a crumpled ball, into his pocket and reeled out of the room like a drunken man, down the stairs of the lonely house, and flung himself into a chair in his museum, where he sat for hours staring before him, paralysed with an awful dismay.
At five o’clock his housekeeper entered with the tea-things. He did not want tea. At seven she came again into the large dark room lit only by the red glow of the fire.
“The gentlemen are here, sir.”
It was a Tuesday evening. He had forgotten.
He stumbled to his feet.
“All right,” he said.
Then he shivered, feeling a deadly sickness of soul. No, he could not meet his fellow creatures to-night.
“Give them my compliments and apologies, and say I am unwell and unable to dine with them this evening. See that they have all they want, as usual.”
“Very good, sir—but yourself? I’m sorry you are ill, sir. What can I bring you?”
“Nothing,” said Quixtus harshly. “Nothing. And please don’t trouble me any more.”
Mrs. Pennycook regarded him in some astonishment, not having heard him speak in such a tone before. Probably no one else had, since he had learned to speak.
“If you’re not better in the morning, sir, I might fetch the doctor.”
He turned in his chair. “Go. I tell you. Go. Leave me alone.”
Later he rose and switched on the light and, mechanically descending to the hall, like a sleep-walker, deposited his usual largesse in the pockets of the three seedy, familiar overcoats. Then he went up to his museum again. The effort, however, had cleared his mind. He reflected. He had not been very well of late. There were such things as hallucinations, to which men broken down by mental strain were subject. Let him read the letter through once more. He took the crumpled paper from his pocket, smoothed it out and read. No. There was no delusion. The whole story was there—the treachery, the faithlessness, the guilty passion that gloried in its repeated consummation. His wife Angela, his friend Will Hammersley—the only woman and the only man he had ever loved. A sudden memory smote him. He had entrusted her to Hammersley’s keeping times out of number.
“My God!” said he, beating his forehead with a clenched fist. “My God!”
And so fell the second thunderbolt.
Towards midnight there came a heavy knocking at his door. Startled by the unusual sound he cried:
“What’s that? Who’s there?”
The door opened and Eustace Huckaby lurched solemnly into the room. His ruffled hair stood up on end like a cockatoo’s crest, and his watery eyes glistened. He pulled his straggling beard.
“Sorry ole’ man to hear you’re seedy. Came to know—how—getting on.”
Quixtus rose, a new sternness on his face, and confronted the intruder.
“Huckaby, you’re drunk.”
Huckaby laughed and waved a protesting hand, thereby nearly losing his balance.
“No,” said he. “Rid’klous. I’m not drunk. Other fellows are—drunk ash owls—tha’s why—couldn’t come see you. They’re not qui’ sort of men been acushtomed to assochate with—I’m—University man—like you, Quishtus—sometime Fellow Corpus Christi College, Cambridge—I first gave motto for club—didn’t I?Procul, O procul este profani—tha’s Latin. Other two lobsters don’t know word of Latin—ignorant as lobsters—lobsters—tha’s wha’ I call ’em.” He lurched heavily into a chair. “Awful thirsty. Got a drink, old f’la?”
“No,” said Quixtus. “I haven’t. And if I had, I wouldn’t give it to you.”
The reprobate pondered darkly over the announcement. Then he hiccoughed, and his face brightened.
“Look here, dear old frien’——”
Quixtus interrupted him.
“Do you mean to tell me those other men are drunk too?”
“As owls—you go down—see ’em.”
He threw back his head and broke out into sudden shrill laughter. Then, checking himself, he said with an awful gravity;
“I beg your pardon, Quishtus. Their conduc’s disgrace—humanity.”
“You three have dined in this house once a week for years, and no one has left it the worse for liquor. And now, the first time I leave you to yourselves—I was really not able to join you to-night—you take advantage of my absence, and——”
Huckaby staggered to his feet and tried to lay his hand on Quixtus’s shoulder. Having recovered himself, he put it on top of a case of prehistoric implements.
“Tha’s just what I want—explain to you. They’re lobsters, dear ole’ friend—just lobsters—all claw and belly and no heart. I’m a University man like you. Corpush Christi College, Cambridge—They’re not friends of yours. They’re lobsters. Ruddy lobsters. I’m not drunk you know. I’m all right. I’m telling you——”
Quixtus took him by the arm. “I think you had better go away, Huckaby.”
“No. Send other fellows away. I’m your frien’,” said he, pointing a shaky forefinger. “I want to tell you. I’m a University man and so are you, and I don’t care how much you made out of it. You’re all right, Quishtus. I’m your frien’. Other lobsters said at dinner that if justice were done you’d be in quod.”
Quixtus took the gaunt sot by the shoulders and shook him.
“What the devil do you mean?”
“Don’t, don’t—don’t upset good dinner,” said Huckaby wriggling away. “You won’t believe I’m your friend. Van and Billiter say you were in with Parable—Paramour—wha’s his name? all the time, and it’s just your rosy luck that you weren’t doing time too. Now I don’t care if you did stand in with Parachute—‘tisn’t my business. But I’ll stan’ by you. I, Eustace Huckaby, Master of Arts, sometime Fellow of Corpush Christi College, Cambridge. There’sh my hand.”
He extended it, but Quixtus regarded it not.
“The three of you have not contented yourselves with getting drunk, but you’ve been slandering me behind my back—foully slandering me.”
He went to the door and flung it open.
“I think it’s time, Huckaby, that we joined the others.”
Huckaby shambled down the stairs, murmuring of lobsters and parables, and turning every now and then to assure his host that adverse circumstances made no difference to his imperishable affection; and so they reached the dining-room. Huckaby had spoken truly. Billiter was sprawling back in his chair, his coat and waistcoat covered with cigar-ash; his bald head was crowned by the truncated cone of a candle-shade (a jest of Huckaby’s) which gave him an appearance that would have been comic to a casual observer, but to Quixtus was peculiarly obscene. His dazed eyes were fixed stupidly on Vandermeer who, the picture of woe, was weeping bitterly because he had no one to love him. At the sight of Quixtus, Billiter made an effort to rise, but fell back heavily on to his seat, the candle-shade falling likewise. He muttered hoarsely and incoherently that it was the confounded gout again in his ankles. Then he expressed a desire to slumber. Vandermeer raised a maudlin face.
“No one to love me,” he whined, and tried to pour from an empty decanter; it slipped from his hand and broke a glass. “Not even a drop of consolation left,” he said.
“Disgrashful, isn’t it?” said Huckaby with a hiccough.
Quixtus eyed them with disgust. Humanity was revolting. He turned to Huckaby and said with a shudder; “For God’s sake, take them away.”
Huckaby summed them up with an unsteady but practised eye. “Can’t walk. Ruddy lobsters. Must have cabs.”
Quixtus went to the street-door and whistled up a couple of four-wheelers from the rank; and eventually, by the aid of Huckaby and the cabmen whom he had to bribe heavily to drive the wretches home, they were deposited in some sort of sitting posture each in a separate vehicle. As soon as the sound of the departing wheels died away, Quixtus held out Huckaby’s overcoat.
“You’re sober enough to walk,” said he, helping him on with it. “Good-night.”
Huckaby turned on the doorstep.
“Want you to remember—don’t care damn what a frien’ has done—ever want help, come to me, sometime Fellow of Corp——”
Quixtus closed the street door in his face and heard no more. These were his friends; these the men who had lived on his bounty, who, for years, for what they could get, had controlled their knavery, their hypocrisy. These were the men for whom he had striven, these sots, these dogs, these vulgar-hearted, slandering knaves! His very soul was sick. He paused at the dining-room door and for a moment looked at the scene of the debauch. Wine and coffee were spilled; glasses broken; a lighted stump of cigar had burned a great brown hole in the tablecloth. He grimly imagined the tipsy scene. If he had been with them, there would have been smug faces, deprecating hands upheld at the second round of the port, talk on art, literature, religion, and what-not, and, at parting, whispered blessings and fervent hand-shakes; and all the time there would have been slanderous venom in their hearts, and the raging beast of drink within them cursing him for his repressing presence.
“The canting rogues,” he murmured as he went back to his museum. “The canting rogues!”
He thrust his hands, in a gesture of anger and disgust, deep into his jacket-pockets. His knuckles came against the crumpled letter. He turned faint and clung to the newel-post on the landing for support. The smaller treachery coming close before his eyes had for the time eclipsed the greater.
“My God,” he said, “is all the world against me?”
Unfortunately there was a thunderbolt or two yet to fall.
CHAPTER V
Tomy nephew Ephraim for his soul’s good I bequeath my cellar of wine which I adjure him to drink with care, thought, diligence, and appreciation, being convinced that a sound judge of wine is, or is on the way to becoming what my nephew is not, a judge of men and affairs.”
Quixtus stared at the ironical words written in Mathew Quixtus’s sharp precise handwriting, and turned with a grey face to the lawyer who had pointed them out.
“Is that the only reference to me in the will, Mr. Henslow?” he asked.
“Unfortunately, yes, Dr. Quixtus. You can see for yourself.” He handed Quixtus the document.
Mathew Quixtus had bequeathed large sums of money to charities, smaller sums to old servants, the wine to Ephraim, and the residue of his estate to a Quixtus unknown to Ephraim, save by hearsay, who had settled thirty years before in New York. Even Tommy Burgrave, with whom he had been on good terms, was not mentioned. But he had quarrelled years before with his niece, Tommy’s mother, for making an impecunious marriage, and, to do him justice, had never promised the boy anything. The will was dated a few weeks back, and had been witnessed by the butler and the coachman.
“I should like you to understand, Dr. Quixtus,” said Henslow, “that until we found that envelope I had no idea that your uncle had made a fresh will. I came here with the old one in my hand, which I drew up and which has been in my office-safe for fifteen years. Under that, I need not tell you, you were, with the exception of a few trifling legacies, the sole legatee. I am deeply grieved.”
“Let me see that date again,” said Quixtus.
He pressed his hands to his eyes and thought. It was the day before his arrival on his last visit.
The telegram announcing Mathew Quixtus’s sudden death had brought a gleam of light into a soul which for a week had been black with misery. It awakened him to a sense of outer things. A sincere affection for the old man had been a lifelong habit. It was a shock to realise that he was no longer alive. Besides having always unconsciously taken a child’s view of death, he felt genuinely sorry, for his uncle’s sake, that he should have died. Impulses of pity, tenderness, regret, stirred in his deadened heart. He forthwith set out for Devonshire, and when he arrived at Croxton, stood over the pinched waxen face till the tears came into his eyes.
He had summoned Tommy Burgrave, the only other member of the family in England, but Tommy had not been able to attend. He had caught cold while painting in the open air, and was in bed with a slight attack of congestion of the lungs. Quixtus was alone in the great house. With the aid of Henslow he made the funeral arrangements. The old man was laid to rest in the quiet churchyard of Croxton. Half the county came to pay their tribute to his memory, and shook Quixtus by the hand. Then he came back to the house, and in the presence of one or two of the old servants, the will was read.
It had been dated the day before his arrival on his last visit. The thing had been written and signed and witnessed and sealed, and was lying in that locked drawer in the library all the time that the old man was welcoming him, flattering him, showing him deference. All the suavity and deference had been mockery. The old man had made him a notorious geck and gull.
His pale blue eyes hardened, and he turned an expressionless face to the lawyer.
“I’m afraid it would not be possible,” said Henslow, “to have the will set aside on the ground of, say—senility—on the part of the testator.”
“My uncle had every faculty at its keenest when he wrote it,” said Quixtus, “including that of merciless cruelty.”
“It was a heartless jest,” the lawyer agreed.
“If you will do me a service, Mr. Henslow, you might be kind enough to instruct one of the servants to pack up my bag and forward it to my London address. I am going now to the railway station.”
The lawyer looked at his watch and put out a detaining hand.
“There’s not a decent train for two or three hours.”
“I would rather,” said Quixtus, “ride a tortoise home than stay in this house another moment.”
He walked out of the room and out of the house, and after waiting at the station whence he despatched a telegram to his housekeeper, who was not expecting him back for two or three days, took the first train—a slow one—to London.
In his corner of the railway carriage the much-afflicted man sat motionless, brooding. Everything had happened that could shake to its foundations a man’s faith in humanity, and swallow it up in abysmal darkness. Suddenly, as though by a prearranged design—as we know was the case with his forerunner in the land of Uz—cataclysm after cataclysm had revealed to him the essential baseness, treachery, cruelty of mankind. For in his eyes these were proved to be essential qualities. Had they not been revealed to him, not by fitful gleams, but in one steady lurid glare, in the nature of those who had been nearest to him in the world—Angela, Will Hammersley, Marrable, Huckaby, Vandermeer, Billiter, Mathew Quixtus? If the same hell-streak ran through the souls of these, surely it must run through the souls of all the sons and daughters of Adam. Now here came the great puzzle. Why should he, Ephraim Quixtus, (as far as he could tell) vary from the unkindly race of man? Why hitherto had baseness, treachery, and cruelty been as foreign to his nature as an overpowering inclination towards arson or homicide? Why had he been unequipped with these qualities which appeared to serve mortals as weapons wherewith to fight the common battle of life? The why, he could not tell. That he had them not, was obvious. That he had gone to the wall through lack of them was obvious, too. Instead of the dagger of baseness, the sword of cruelty, the shield of treachery, all finely tempered implements of war, he had been fighting with the wooden lath of virtue and the brawn-buckler of trust. Armed as he should have been, he would have out-manœuvred Marrable at his own game, kept his wife in chaste and wholesome terror of his jealousy, sent Huckaby and Company long since to the limbo where they belonged, deluded his uncle into the belief that he was a devil of a fellow, and now be standing with flapping wings and crowing voice triumphant on this dunghill of a world. But he had been hopelessly outmatched. Whoever had taken upon himself the responsibility of equipping him for the battle of life had been guilty of incredible negligence. But on whom could he call to remedy this defect? Men called on the Unknown God to make them good; but it would be idiotic as well as blasphemous to call on Him to make one bad. How, then, were the essential qualities of baseness, treachery, and cruelty to be captured and brought into his armoury? Perhaps the Devil might help. But we are so matter-of-fact and scientific in these days that even the simple soul of Quixtus could not quite believe in his existence. If he had lived in the Middle Ages (so in scholarly gloom ran his fancy) he could have drawn circles and pentagrams and things on the floor, and uttered the incantations, and all the hierarchy of hell would have been at his command, Satanas, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Asmodeus, Samael, Asael, Beelzebub, Azazel, Macathiel. . . . Quixtus rather leaned towards Macathiel—the name suggested a merciless, bowelless, high-cheek-boned devil in a kilt——
Impatiently he shook his thoughts free from the fantastic channel into which they had wandered and brought them back into the ever-thickening slough of his soul. The train lumbered on, stopping at pretty wayside stations where fresh-faced folk with awkward gait and soft deep voices clattered cheerily past Quixtus’s windows on their way to or from the third-class carriages, or at the noisier, bustling stations of large towns. Now and then a well-dressed traveller invaded his solitude for a short distance. But Quixtus sat in his remote corner seeing, hearing nothing, brooding on the baseness, treachery, and cruelty of mankind. He had come to the end of love, the end of trust, the end of friendship. When the shapes of those who were still loyal to him flitted across his darkened fancy he cursed them in his heart. They were as corrupt as the rest. That they had not been found out in their villainy only proved a thicker mask of hypocrisy. He had finished with them all. If he had been a more choleric man gifted with the power of picturesque vehemence of language he might have outrivalled Timon of Athens in the denunciations of his fellows. It must be a relief to any one in such a frame of mind to stand up and, with violent gestures, express his views in terms of sciatica, itches, blains, leprosy, venomed worms and ulcerous sores, and to call upon the blessed breeding sun to draw from the earth rotten humidity, and below his sister’s orb to infect the air. He knows exactly what he feels, gives it full artistic expression, and finds himself all the better for it. But Quixtus, inarticulate, had no such comfort. Indeed, he could hardly have expressed the welter of horror, hate, and misery that was his moral being, in any form of speech whatever. As the train rumbled on, the phrase “Evil be thou my good” wove itself into the rhythm of the machinery. He let it sing dully and stupidly in his ears, and his mind worked subconsciously back to Macathiel.
As yet he had imagined no future attitude towards life. His soul was in a state of negation. The insistent invocation of Evil was but a catchword, irritating his brain and having no real significance. At the most he envisaged the future as a period of inactive misanthropy and suspicion. He had as yet no stirrings to action. On the other hand, he did not, like Job, after the first series of afflictions, rend his clothes, shave his head, and bear his reverses with pious resignation.
The train arrived an hour late, as slow trains are apt to do, and it was nearly half-past eleven when he reached his house in Russell Square. He opened the door with his latchkey. The hall was dark, contrary to custom. He switched on the light, and, turning, saw that the letter-box had not been cleared. Mechanically he took out the letters, and beneath the hall lamp glanced at the outside of the envelopes. Among them was the telegram he had sent from Devonshire.
Even a man wallowing in the deepest abysses of spiritual misery needs food; and when he finds that a telegram ordering supper (for his return was unexpected) has not been opened, he may be pardoned purely material disappointment and irritation. Mrs. Pennycook, the housekeeper, must have profited by his absence to take a holiday. But what business had she to take a holiday and leave the house uncared for at that time of night? For, if she had returned, she would have lit the hall-light, and cleared the letter-box. He resigned himself peevishly to the prospect of a biscuit and a whisky-and-soda in the little back room where he ate his meals.
He strode down the passage to the head of the kitchen stairs and opened the study door. A glare of light met his eyes, and a moment afterwards something else. This was Mrs. Pennycook in an armchair, sleeping a bedraggled sleep with two empty quart bottles of champagne and an empty bottle of whisky by her side. He shook her hard by the shoulders; but beyond stertorous and jerky breaths the blissful lady showed no signs of animation.
It was then that a constricting thread snapped in Quixtus’s brain. It was then, as if by a trick of magic, that all the vaguely billowing horrors, disillusions, disgusts, resentments and hatreds co-ordinated themselves into a scheme of fierce vividness.
Just as the boils made Job, who had borne the annihilation of his family with equanimity, open his mouth and curse his day, so did a drunken servant, who neglected to give him his supper, awaken Ephraim Quixtus to the glorious thrill of a remorseless, relentless malignity.
He threw up his hands and laughed aloud, peals of unearthly laughter that woke the echoes of the empty house, that woke the canary in its cage by the window, causing it to utter a few protesting “cheeps,” that arrested the policeman on his beat outside, that did everything human laughter in the way of noise can do, even stimulating the blissful lady to open half a glazed eye for the fraction of a second. After his paroxysm had subsided, he looked at the woman for a moment, and then with an air of peculiar malevolence took a sheet of note-paper from a small writing-table beneath the canary’s cage and wrote on it:
“Let me never see your face again.—E. Q.”
This, by the aid of a hairpin that had fallen into her lap, he pinned to her apron. Then, with another laugh, he left her beneath the glare of the light, and went out into the street. He was thrilled, like a drunken man, with a new sense of life. Years had fallen from his shoulders. He had solved the riddle of the world. Baseness, treachery, cruelty, he felt them pulsating in his heart with a maddening joy of existence. Evil was his good. He was no longer even a base, treacherous, cruel man. He was a devil incarnate. The long exultant years in front of him would be spent in deeds of shame and crime and unprecedented wickedness. If there was a throne to be waded to through slaughter, through slaughter would he wade to it. He would shut the gates of Mercy on mankind. He held out both hands in front of him with stiffened outspread fingers. If only there was a human throat between them, how they would close around it, how he would gloat over the dying agony! Caligula was the man for him. He regretted his untimely death. What a colleague could have been made of the fiend who wished that the whole human race had one neck so that it could be severed at one blow!
He had reached this stage in his exultant reflections when he found himself outside a restaurant which he had never entered, at the Oxford Street end of the Tottenham Court Road. He remembered that he was hungry; that a new-born spirit of wickedness must be fed. He went in, unconscious of the company or the surroundings, and ordered supper. The waiter said that it was nearly closing time. Quixtus called for a plate of cold beef and a whisky-and-soda. He devoured the meat ravenously, forgetful of the bread by his side, and drank the drink at a gulp. Having lit a cigar, he threw half a sovereign on the table and walked out. He walked along the streets heedless of direction, down Shaftesbury Avenue, across Piccadilly Circus blazing with light, through Leicester Square, along the still hurrying Strand to Fleet Street noiseless and empty, his brain on fire, weaving exquisite fabrics of devilry. Suddenly he halted on a glorious thought. Why should he not begin there and then? The whole of London, with its crime and sin and rottenness, lay before him. He retraced his steps back to the Babylon of the West. What could he do? Where could he find adequate wickedness? When he reached Charing Cross again it was dark and deserted. A square mile of London has every night about an hour of tearing, surging, hectic life. Then all of a sudden the thousands of folk are swept away to the four comers of the mighty city, and all is still. A woman, as Quixtus passed, quickened her pace and murmured words. Here was a partner in wickedness to his hand. But the flesh of the delicately fibred man revolted simultaneously with the thought. No. That did not come within his scheme of wickedness. He slipped a coin into the woman’s palm, because she looked so forlorn, and went his way. She was useless for his purpose. What he sought was some occasion for pitilessness, for doing evil to his fellow creatures. A fine rain began to fall; but he heeded it not, burning with the sense of adventure. A reminiscence of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde crossed his mind. Hyde, like Caligula, was also the man for him. Didn’t he once throw a child down in a lonely street and stamp on it?
He walked and walked through the now silent places, and the more he walked the less opening for wickedness did he see. The potentialities of Babylon appeared to him overrated. After a wide and aimless détour he found himself again at Charing Cross. He struck down Whitehall. But in Whitehall and Parliament Street, the stately palaces on either side, vast museums of an Empire’s decorum, forbade the suggestion of wickedness. The belated omnibuses and cabs that passed along were invested with a momentary hush of respectability. He turned up the Thames Embankment and saw the mass of the great buildings with here and there patches of lighted windows showing above the tree-tops of the gardens, the benches below filled with huddled sodden shapes of human misery, the broad silent thoroughfares, the parapet, the dimly flowing river below—a black mirror marked by streaks of light, reflections from lamps on parapet and bridges, the low-lying wharves on the opposite side swallowed up in blackness—and no attractive wickedness was apparent; nor was there any on the great bridge, disturbed only by the slow waggons mountains high bringing food for the insatiable multitude of London, and lumbering on in endless trail with an impressive fatefulness; nor even at the coffee-stall at the corner of the Waterloo Bridge Road, its damp little swarm of frequenters clustering to it like bees, their faces illuminated by the segment of light cast by the reflector at the back of the stall, all harmlessly drinking cocoa or wistfully watching others drink it. For a moment he thought of joining the swarm, as some of the faces looked alluringly vile; but the inbred instinct of fastidiousness made him pass it by. He plunged into the unsavoury streets beyond. They were still and ghostly. All things diabolical could no doubt be found behind those silent windows; but at two o’clock in the morning sin is generally asleep, and sleeping sin and sleeping virtue are as alike as two pins. Meanwhile the fine rain fell unceasingly, and the Earnest Seeker after Wickedness began to feel wet and chilly.
This is a degenerate age. A couple of centuries ago Quixtus could have manned a ship with cut-throats, hoisted the skull and cross-bones, and become the Terror of the Seas. Or, at a more recent date, if he had been a Corsican he could have taken his gun and gone into the maquis and declared war on the island. If he had lived in the fourteenth century he could have become a condottiere after the fashion of the gentle Duke Guarnieri, who, wearing on his breast a silver badge with the inscription “The Enemy of God, of Pity, and of Mercy,” gained for himself enviable unpopularity in Northern Italy. As a Malay, he could have taken a queerly curving, businesslike knife and run amuck, to his great personal satisfaction. In prehistoric times, he could have sat for a couple of delicious months in a cave, polishing and sharpening a beautiful axe-head, and, having fitted it to its haft, have gone forth and (probably skulking behind trees so as to get his victims in the rear) have had as gorgeous a time as was given to prehistoric man to imagine. But nowadays, who can do these delightful, vindictive, and misanthropical things with any feeling of security? If Quixtus, obeying a logically developed impulse; had slaughtered a young man in evening dress in Piccadilly, he most indubitably would have been hung, to say nothing of being subjected to all the sordid procedure of a trial for murder.
Nor is this all. Owing to some flaw in our system of education, Quixtus had not been trained to deeds of violence; no one had even set before him the theoretical philosophy of the subject. You may argue, I am aware, that we use other weapons now than the cutlass of the pirate or the stone-axe of the quaternary age; we have the subtler vengeance of voice and pen, which can give a more exquisite finish to the devastation of human lives. But I would remind you that Quixtus, through the neglect of his legal studies and practice, was ignorant of the ordinary laws of chicane, and of the elementary principles of financial dishonesty that guided the nefariousness of folk like “Gehenna, Unlimited.”
It must be admitted, therefore, that Quixtus entered on his career of depravity greatly handicapped.
The grey light of a hopeless May dawn was just beginning to outline the towers and spires of Westminster against the sky when Quixtus found himself by the Westminster Hospital. He was damp and chill, somewhat depressed. The thrill of adventure had passed away, leaving disappointment and a little disillusion in its place. He was also physically fatigued, and his shoulders and feet ached. One ghostly hansom-cab stood on the rank, the horse drooping its dejected head into a lean nosebag, the driver asleep inside. Quixtus resolved to arouse the man from his slumbers, and, abandoning the pursuit of evil for the night, drive home to Russell Square. But as he was crossing the road towards the vehicle, a miserable object, starting up from the earth, ran by his side and addressed him in a voice so hoarse that it scarcely rose above a whisper.
“For Gord’s sake, guv’nor, spare a poor man a copper or two. I’ve not tasted food for twenty-four hours.”
Quixtus stopped, his instinctive fingers diving into his pence-pocket. Suddenly an idea struck him.
“You must have led a very evil life,” said he, “to have come to this stage of destitution.”
“Whatcher gettin’ at?” growled the applicant, one eye fixed suspiciously on Quixtus’s face, the other on the fumbling hand.
“I’m not going to preach to you—far from it,” said Quixtus; “but I should like to know. You must have seen a great deal of wickedness in your time.”
“If you arsk me,” opined the man, “there’s nothing but wickedness in this blankety blank world.”
He did not say “blankety blank,” but used other and more lurid epithets which, though they were not exactly the ones that Quixtus himself would have chosen, at least showed him that his companion and himself were agreed on their fundamental conception of the universe.
“If you will tell me where I can find some,” he said, “I will give you half a crown.”
A glimmer of astonished interest lit up the man’s dull eyes. “Whatcher want to know for?”
“That’s my business,” said Quixtus.
The cabman, suddenly awakened, saw the possibility of a fare. He clambered out of the vehicle.
“Cab, sir?” he called across the road.
“Yes,” said Quixtus.
“ ‘Arf a crown?” said the battered man.
“Certainly,” said Quixtus.
“Then I’ll tell yer, guv’nor. I’ve been a bookie’s tout, see? Not a slap-up bookie in the ring—but an outside one—one what did a bit of welshing when he could, see?—and what I say is, that I seed more wickedness there than anywhere else. If you want to see blankety blank wickedness you go on the turf.” He cleared his throat, but his whisper had grown almost inaudible. “I’ve gone and lost my voice,” he said.
Quixtus looked at the drenched, starved, voiceless, unshorn horror of a man standing outcast and dying of want and wickedness in the grey dawn, under the shadow of the central symbols of the pomp and majesty of England.
“You look very ill,” said he.
“Consumpshon,” breathed the man.
Quixtus shivered. The cabman, who had hastily dispossessed the dejected horse of the nosebag, had climbed into his dicky and was swinging the cab round.
“I thank you very much for your information,” said Quixtus. “Here’s half a sovereign.”
Voicelessness and wonder provoked an inarticulate wheeze like the spitting of a cat. The man was still gaping at the unaccustomed coin in his hand when the cab drove off. But Quixtus had not been many minutes on his way when a thought smote him like a sledge-hammer. He brought his fist down furiously on the leathern seat.
“What a fool! What a monumental fool I’ve been!” he cried.
He had just realised that the devil had offered him as pretty a little chance of sheer wickedness as could be met with on a May morning, which he had not taken. Instead of giving the man ten shillings, he ought to have laughed in his face, taunted him with his emaciation and driven off without paying the half-crown he had promised. To have let the very first opportunity slip through his fingers! He would have to wear a badge like that of the gentle Duke Guarnieri to keep his wits from wandering.
When he reached home he looked for a moment into the little room at the head of the kitchen stairs. The Blissful One still slept, a happy smile on her face, and the paper pinned to her apron.
There was surely some chance of wickedness here. Quixtusfurensscratched an inventive head. Suppose he carried her outside and set her on the doorstep. He regarded her critically. She was buxom—about twelve stone. He was a spare and unathletic man. A great yawn interrupted his speculations, and turning off the light he stumbled off sleepily and wearily to bed.