"There was a young fellow of MagdalenWhose tutor accused him of dagdalen,And of stretching his credit;He wouldn't have said itHad the youth been a peer or a lagdalen."
"There was a young fellow of MagdalenWhose tutor accused him of dagdalen,And of stretching his credit;He wouldn't have said itHad the youth been a peer or a lagdalen."
"I hope our lagdalen will be profitable; if we do well we might go down to the Riviera for a week or two."
"That wouldn't be bad at all, the sunny South! I think I'll go west now to the War Office and get Bobby Burness to come out for some lunch. Do you remember him? little Pemmy man. He got a clerkship by interest. Spends his time round the west now looking out for a moneyed female. Jolly berth he's got, just puts his name in the south-east corner of a few papers, and trots off to the park for the rest of the mornin'."
As he went down the Strand he thought over Sturtevant's plan. It was a good deal nearer the wind than he had dared to go before; however, the thing was certain, something had to be done to raise money. He was not a man who could live on thirty shillings a week, for, even though they failed to amuse him, he could not go without the "extras" of life. He did not, for instance, particularly care for Kümmell with his coffee, but it was as much a necessity to him as a clean shirt.
The morality of Sturtevant's scheme did not trouble him in the least; the danger was the thing he thought of. His head bubbled with details and scenic arrangements, rapidly falling into order as he thought. His mind was masterly in its grasp of salient points, in its suggestions of detail. Naturally, as he plotted and studied his part, this orderly marshalling of ideas induced a sense of freedom from danger. With a clearer view of incident came a confusion of outline.
He had just got to Trafalgar Square when he started to feel a hand placed on his shoulder,and looking round saw Father Gray and his victim. In the first shock of surprise he reeled as if struck, and a flash of deadly fear passed over his face, but so instantaneously that it would have been almost impossible for a stranger to have seen it. Though he had recovered this first feeling of terror in a moment, hard as he was, he could never have prevented it. It was the inevitable cowardice of evil, the most horrid kind of fear. Then almost immediately came a great flood of exaltation dominating all other sensation.
"Thisisjolly," said Father Gray, "we were just coming to see you. This is my friend, Lord Frederick Calvert. How are you getting on? Well! Oh, I'm so glad. You did excellent service for us in theChurch Chimes; that Protestant paper was dreadfully venomous. Now, what do you say to the hotel and lunch?"
"I should like it of all things. Where are you staying?"
"At the Charing Cross, just over the road."
"Right you are. If you will go on I will joinyou in a moment; I just want to go to the post."
He went to the office at the corner, and sent off a wire to Sturtevant, not being able to resist elevenpence-halfpennyworth of epigram.
"Everything comes to him who can't wait. Keep away from my rooms, have met our worthy friends.—G."
"Everything comes to him who can't wait. Keep away from my rooms, have met our worthy friends.—G."
The lunch party was bright and enjoyable. Lord Frederick did not talk much, but Gobion did, and the clergyman treated him most affectionately, paying the greatest attention to his remarks. The young fellow, who was aching to see a little life, and taste some of the joys hitherto forbidden, looked on Gobion as a being from another world, charmed and fascinated by his manner and conversation. He hoped that perhaps he might be able to make him the excuse for a little more freedom.
At the end of the meal a waiter came up with a telegram in his hand, "Rrreverrend Grray, sir?" he said. The clergyman read the flimsy pink paper, his face growing very serious as he did so.
"My dear Lord Frederick," he said, "I am so very sorry. My great friend Stanley, of the C.B.S., is dying up in Scotland and asking for me. I must leave you for a day or two, I fear. Do you mind? Gobion, perhaps, would not mind keeping you company a little."
Both men showed the deepest sympathy, saying that they could manage very well, while both were inwardly rejoicing. There were the elements of farce in the situation.
They got him off late in the afternoon. "God proposes, and man is disposed of," said Gobion as the train left the station. Lord Frederick laughed. "And now, my dear sir," he said, "I place myself entirely in your hands. To speak quite frankly, I've never had such a chance of a rag before, and I want to make the most of it."
"I too should like a rag," said Gobion. "Wewillrag, and take no thought for the morrow beyond staying up to welcome its arrival. We'd better go and dress first; I'll call at the hotel when I'm ready."
When he had put the other down at CharingCross he went on in the hansom to the "Temple," bursting in on Sturtevant, whom he found with the female conspirator sitting on his knee. "Arrange the coup for to-morrow evening at nine," he said; "I'm off now to take him round the halls."
He rushed out again and dressed as quickly as he could, putting two or three sovereigns in his pocket for emergencies, though he intended his friend should pay all expenses.
They went at first to The Princes, and had, as Gobion told Sturtevant next morning, "a dinner regardless, my dear boy, simply regardless. Never done so well before." Lord Frederick insisted on paying, explaining that as he had asked Gobion to accompany him, all the expenses would be his.
They got on very well together. The nobleman was ingenuous and gentlemanly, and Gobion, who appreciated these things to the full, almost felt compunction at what he proposed to do. They afterwards went to the Alhambra, taking a box, and Gobion pointed out various people as celebrities in literature and art, making himselfa charming companion by his clever commentaries on the crowd.
Being extremely young and innocent, Lord Frederick was of course a confirmed cynic, and he enjoyed the malice of Gobion's remarks, especially as he was always unmercifully snubbed at home when he tried to be caustic.
On this particular evening it happened that no one of any note was in the place except Moro de Minter, the comic journalist, but, nothing daunted, Gobion pointed out various obvious bank clerks and actors "resting" as the leading lights of London journalism. The poor boy believed it all; he was very ingenuous; indeed, he laughed twice, once almost loudly, at one of Little Hich's songs!
They parted late, Lord Frederick a little tipsy, swearing eternal friendship, and Gobion promised to take him to a well-known night club in Soho the following evening.
Progress was reported to Sturtevant next morning over breakfast, and he gave Gobion some valuable hints as to detail. As the evening drew on both of them got rather nervous and excited—the coup was so big, andthe chances of failure so many.
They discussed the final arrangements with an affected disregard for danger, sprinkling cheap cynicism as a sort of intellectual pepper to disguise the too strong taste of the undertaking.
"Pan is dead," said Sturtevant, filling up the inevitable tumbler. "Long live Pannikin! And now to play your part; the curtain is going up and the critics are in the stalls. Go out and prosper."
They dined this time at the Trocadero, Gobion thinking that the music would help in producing the necessary high spirits in Calvert, and at the close of the meal he proposed an adjournment to his rooms, as it was yet too early for the night club. When they mounted the stairs a light showed from under the door. "Hallo," said Gobion, "there's someone here"; and meeting Mrs. Daily on the landing, she said Mrs. Holmes was waiting to see him.
"You're in luck," he said to his friend; "she's a charming little woman—acts in burlesques, you know."
Mrs. Holmes rose to meet them. With a keen sense of the comic side of the situation, Gobion noticed that Sturtevant had been there, his gloves were left on the table. The room was evidently arranged by a master mind. An inviting lounge shaded by a screen was placed by the red glow of the fire, the lights were carefully shaded so as not to shine too fully on the artificial beauties of the lady's face. The cushions and chairs exhaled an odour of patchouli (Sturtevant had been round with a spray-diffuser half an hour before), andNanalay open on the table at the page where Georges is drying by the kitchen fire.
Indeed, so far had the thing been carried out, Gobion could not help thinking that something was wrong. No. 999, Queer Street was a little too visible, but the champagne had exhilarated Calvert, and he noticed nothing, and became on confidential terms with "Mrs. Holmes" in no time.
Absinthe was produced, the sickly smell irritating Gobion, who was longing to get out of the hot rooms and thepoudre d'amouratmosphere.
At last the telegram came. He said, "Awf'ly sorry, old man, but I must go out for half an hour; they want me to do a leaderette for to-morrow'sHappy Despatchon the 'spinning-house' row. I'll be back very shortly."
He went out in a hurry to the Temple, where he found Sturtevant in evening dress, white and haggard, walking up and down the room.
They got the cheque, and Sturtevant cashed it before lunch next morning, and at one o'clock they met in Gobion's rooms to divide the spoil. Over the meal—a dainty repast, ordered to celebrate their achievement—they were in the highest spirits. To-morrow they resolved that they would go to Cannes, or perhaps further still.
"We might do Madeira," said Sturtevant. "Think of the heat, the quivering air, the hum of the insects, ah-h!" He took a deep anticipatory breath, and as he did so the door opened and an elderly gentleman came in.
"I don't think I have the pleasure," said Gobion, rising from his chair.
"My name is Ringwood," said the stranger quietly. Gobion flinched as if he had been struck in the face. There was a strained, tense silence, only broken by the gurgling of the champagne in Sturtevant's glass as he raised it to his lips. Then he sneered, "Ah!" his lips curling away from his teeth.
Lord Ringwood struggled desperately to control himself. "Good God! what a damned couple of rascals you are!" he cried.
Gobion laughed a little sickly, pitiable laugh. "Fine day," he said.
The peer got up. "I see now what to do," he said. "I was a fool to come here. I'll have you both in gaol this afternoon."
When he had gone, and they had heard the front door bang, Gobion jumped up and packed a portmanteau.
"Go back to the Temple," he said; "no one knows your address. I'm going to get rooms somewhere in Pimlico—till we can get further away. I'll come to the Temple to-night."
He got into a cab and drove away. As he turned into the Embankment a piano-organ burst out with "The Dandy Coloured Coon," and the tune throbbed in his brain, keeping time to the monotonous beat of the horse's feet on the macadam.
In the Vauxhall Bridge Road Gobion found a room in a lodging-house kept by a Mrs. Ebbage. In the evening of the same day he went to the Temple, but found Sturtevant's door shut, and he received no answer to his knocks. As he was turning away he saw that something was written on a piece of paper pinned to the door.
"To Y. G.,—Note for you at the 'Grecian' bar."M. S."
"To Y. G.,—Note for you at the 'Grecian' bar.
"M. S."
He went to the bar and got the letter, which ran:—
"Middle Temple."Dear Gobion,—I have gone to the southern heat as we proposed, and shall soon be sailing over thesiren-haunted Mediterranean. I enclose a ten-pound note in the hope that a period of enforced sobriety may tend to a worthier life for you."Even a wise man is sometimes happy, and I should recommend philosophy to you at this present juncture. As a matter of fact, you may be quite sure that Ringwood won't make any move; but still, as I intend, as you know, to practise at the bar, it may be as well to go away for a time."If I were you I should stick to journalism; it will pay for bread and butter. You might even write on subjects that you know something about!"With your appreciation of 'master-strokes' you cannot but admire this my last move. To you, I am sure, the illustrious will now become the august."Mordaunt Sturtevant."
"Middle Temple.
"Dear Gobion,—I have gone to the southern heat as we proposed, and shall soon be sailing over thesiren-haunted Mediterranean. I enclose a ten-pound note in the hope that a period of enforced sobriety may tend to a worthier life for you.
"Even a wise man is sometimes happy, and I should recommend philosophy to you at this present juncture. As a matter of fact, you may be quite sure that Ringwood won't make any move; but still, as I intend, as you know, to practise at the bar, it may be as well to go away for a time.
"If I were you I should stick to journalism; it will pay for bread and butter. You might even write on subjects that you know something about!
"With your appreciation of 'master-strokes' you cannot but admire this my last move. To you, I am sure, the illustrious will now become the august.
"Mordaunt Sturtevant."
"Yes," muttered Gobion, "he is cleverer than I am—ten pounds, out of a thousand! Damn the scoundrel!" He swore under his breath for a minute or two, but his quick wit soon grasped the humour of the situation. Though it told against him, the joke was too good to be lost, and he could not help a somewhat bitter laugh.
He went to bed when he got back, and,having nothing particular to do, lay far into the morning, listening lazily to the sounds of the house. He heard Mrs. Ebbage shouting angrily at her children, while in the distance a tinkling piano spun out "Belle Mahone," and every half-hour or so someone on the other side of the wall knocked his pipe out against the mantelpiece.
A smell of steak and onions floated into the room.
He looked round. It was what is known as a "bed-sitter" on the ground-floor at the end of the main passage. He got up and looked out of the window, making the discovery that the landlady and her family lived below him. Opposite the window, some four yards away, was the straight wall of the next house, while below he looked down into a deep yard into which the back door opened. It was entirely enclosed by the two houses, forming a sort of pit or well. Some children were playing in the dirt, while just below his window a rope was fastened, with some socks and a flannel shirt drying on it.
His room was furnished with the bed, a jug andbasin standing on an old sugar-box painted green, an old armchair, a table, a wooden chair, and a mirror over the fire, in which a crack down the middle was repaired by a strip of paper gilded to match the frame. The walls were decorated with a black japanned pipe-rack studded with pink and green stars, a medallion of the Queen stamped in bronze cardboard, and a photograph of the new Scotland Yard framed in shiny yellow wood.
For this he was to pay five-and-sixpence a week. Strangely enough the utter sordidness of the place did not strike a jarring note. He felt that he had dropped out of everything, that from henceforth he belonged to this world of Mrs. Ebbage, this Vauxhall-Bridge-Road world. After another lazy half-hour he got up and dressed, calling for the landlady when he was ready. The woman came in, carrying a tray with his breakfast. She was dirty and unkempt. Her face, where it was not black, was yellow, and stray wisps of grizzled hair blew round it—a face lined and shrewd.
"Thort you'd like an 'errin'," she said. "Ebbage 'ad one before 'e wentout. 'E's a pliceman, is Ebbage; 'as 'is beat down Kennington way."
"Oh, thanks very much; very nice," said Gobion, amused to see her making the bed and lighting the fire while he ate.
"Better 'ave the window open," she said. "Gets a bit smelly in the mornin', don't it?" She opened the window, breaking off her conversation to shout at one of the children in the yard. "Leave off playin' with Mr. Belper's socks, little nosey wretch yer; always nosin' about, little devil."
"Ah, you don't know what kids are, you don't. Ebbage gets cussing at them sometimes. I sez to 'im, 'Touch the 'arp lightly, my deah! You want yer ugly 'edd tappin',' I sez. It makes 'im fairly med. 'Cummere,' I sez, 'callyourself a man? Cummere if you want to knock anyone about. I could make a better yuman man than you, art of a lump o' coal.' Ah, 'e isn't what 'Olmes was, my first man. 'Ewasa man—big, fat, fleshy devil, makin' 'is three quid a week regular. 'E was always good to me; 'e was fond of women.I've 'eard 'im say as a man ort to ave as many women as 'e could keep."
Gobion soon got used to the woman, and even began to like her. She was kind to him in her way, saying she'd "had many a toff down on his luck with her," and she "noo the brand." He made friends with the husband—a big, black-haired man, stolid and obscene in his conversation, and they used to go to the public-house at the corner for a "drop of Scotch." Mr. Ebbage always called it "a drop," though it would have been better for him if he had never exceeded the twopennorth that did duty for the aforesaid generic name.
After a fortnight Gobion settled down to a dull cheerless time, sordid and dreadful; and it was but rarely that a pain-flash disturbed his torpor. He used to play the old cracked piano in the evenings to the family. Mrs. Ebbage's nieces—giggling shop girls—would come in from College Street, and he would sit, with no tie and a dirty shirt, making vulgar love to "Trot" and "Fanny," while Ebbage read the footballStar, and his wife cooked the sausages for supper. Sometimes inthe long dull afternoons Lucy Ebbage, a girl of sixteen, used to come into his room and sit on his knee. He took a diseased pleasure in lowering himself to their level.
He was a man with a keen eye for beauty, a deep appreciation of the poetry of things, and yet for a week or two, with a strange morbid insensibility, he revelled in the manners of the vulgarest class in London. "Human nature is much of a muchness," he said to himself. "Why give myself airs? I should make Lucy a capital husband; we could keep a fried-fish shop and be happy."
This went on for three weeks; then one evening—somewhat of the suddenest—came the reaction.
He was sitting alone on the one comfortable chair drawn up close to the fire. The dancing flames lit up the unmade bed, the remains of a chop, a heap of clothes scattered over a chair, and a pair of muddy boots drying in the fender.
It was again the after-dinner hour—an hour with the monopoly of some effects. He sat lazilysmoking a pipe, half dozing, when he became conscious of a banjo playing a comic song: "And her golden hair was hanging down her back." Gradually the air took greater hold of him. The distant twanging seemed fraught with an undercurrent of sadness, a sub-tone of regret.
Gradually the sordid message dispelled lassitude, and his vivid mind began to preen itself, waking from its long sleep. First passed away with the swing of the first line the dull December London. His mind put on wings, flying through confused memories to the first night of term, the little Oxford theatre crammed with men—all the old set, Fleming, Taylor, Robertson, Raymond, Young, "Weggie" Dibb, Scott, even Condamine. How they had applauded and joined in the choruses! how they had cheered the fat principal boy, how bright andyoungit was!... Then a moment's hush, and the sharp-strung chords, when the orchestra dashed madly into the song, "Oh, Flo, 'twasverywrong, you know!" How all the men had roared at the girl's conscious wink. From the first he had posed, but in those early terms he had been innocent of great wrong ... and now?...The twang stopped with a little penultimate flourish before the final chord. The trams in the road rattled past. Mrs. Ebbage shouted in the kitchen, opining that her spouse must be "off 'is blooming onion"; and outside in the passage Trot and Lucy giggled, high in the palate, hoping he would hear and ask them to come in.... He shook violently in his chair. To his excited imagination it seemed as if strange lights passed before him; he heard strange sounds. He shook, and it seemed as if the scales fell from his eyes, letting all the horror of his life flash into his ken. There was a sense of the finality of things; he saw dimly a far-off purpose.
It was thestaleness, the torture of sin, not a sorrowful sense of evil, that settled round him like a cloud. He had fed his appetites too heavily, and a total apoplexy of mind and soul had ensued.
Then came a knock at the door, and a grotesque figure entered—a large, gross old man, with heavy pouches under the eyes, with unsteady dribbling lips, dressed in a long parti-coloured dressing-gown.
He said he lived on the other side of the passage, "and perhaps his young friend would come in and smoke a pipe with him." They went into a room much the same as Gobion's. A jug of steaming water stood on the table by a bottle of gin.
"My name is Belper," said the old gentleman, "the Reverend Peter Belper, though I no longer have a cure of souls. Will you have some Old Tom? I never work, but it makes me very thirsty."
Gobion drank; he was not in a state of mind to be surprised at anything. This leering old satyr seemed quite natural and in proper sequence.
"I won't ask you what you've done," he said to Gobion. "A gentleman doesn't live here for no reason." He spoke with a wagging of his heavy jaw, with a hoarse bleat, but an accent in which still lingered a trace of culture.
"No," said Gobion; "I suppose we're a shady lot in this hole."
"We are, we are; I myself am not what I was. Good heavens! I was once a vicar! I am nowa moral object-lesson. I used to live by sermonizing, now I sermonize by living. A university man, may I ask?"
"Yes—Oxford."
"Really, there are then two of us. Mrs. Ebbage ought to congratulate herself."
"Have you been with her long?"
"Six years now. I have a moderate incompetence left; enough to be constantly drunk on."
"You find it really does deaden thought?"
"My dear sir, if it wasn't for gin I should long since have been in another hell!"
A shrill laugh floated up from the kitchen.
"I call her 'laughing water,'" said Mr. Belper.
"You are poetic."
"Yes, my father was Belper the minor poet. I am the least poetic of his works."
He leered at the fire, shaking with drink—a shameless, dirty old man. "I was a pretty fellow in my time," he said, licking the chops of remotest memory. "I had a conscience, and wrote harvest festival hymns with it."
Gobion filled his glass. "What do you do with yourself all day?"
"Drink and sleep, sleep and drink."
"Cheerful!"
"Yes, very; what else can I do? My mind is gone; if I think it's only blurred pain. I used to try and philosophise, but I can't think now. I don't believe in the nonsense people talk about the comforting powers of philosophy."
"Nor I. Philosophy seems to me to be an attempt to eat one's own soul, and indigestion generally results."
The old man filled his pipe anew, his face half in light half in shadow, the gross imprint of vice showing more sharply for the contrast, and suggesting still worse possibilities. Bad as it was, it had the prepotency of lower depths.
They often sat together thus, spending the long-drawn evenings over the gin-bottle, japing at society. Mr. Belper was ribald and cynical. Nothing could shock either of them; their only prejudice was to persuade themselves that they had none.
It was a dark, dull time, too sordid for the actors to accrue any excitement at its lurid aspects. Night after night they sat till they were too befuddled to talk, each in turn providing the necessary amount of gin for the night's debauch. Belper punctuated the weary days by long sleeps, and Gobion by caressing Lucy Ebbage.
His health began to go slowly, and the torture of insomnia was added to his life.
One evening Mrs. Ebbage came into his room incoherently reminiscent, and sitting on the bed, rambled of the past, giving Gobion a strange glimpse of the habits of her class.
She told of her youth in a Westminster slum, of her mother who had been kicked to death in a low public-house on the evening of the Derby. "'Er face was like a bit of liver after they'd done with 'er, and when the p'lice came in she was as dead as meat. I often think ovver."
She went on to talk of her daughter by her first marriage, who had died at seventeen, her coarse voice trembling as she told how clever she had been at crochet work, and what a small foot she had. She showed Gobion a tiny white shoe thegirl had worn. It was piteous to hear her—this scraggy, hard woman—with tears in her eyes, talking of her dead darling.
Then she said, "My 'ands are all mucky, and I've gone and soiled the shoe. Pore 'Arriet, it don't matter to 'er now."
She wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron, and with a change of manner—a somewhat futile arrogation of gaiety—"We're goin' to 'ave a bit of supper. Ebbage said as 'e could swallow a Welsh rarebit and a drop of something 'ot; come down and 'ave a bit."
"Yes," said Gobion slowly, "let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow——"
Mr. Belper came in and made coarse jokes, to Mr. Ebbage's huge delight. Gobion in his loneliness sat and became one of them, eating with his knife to avoid the appearance of eccentricity.
About eleven o'clock he went out with a jug to get some beer. The streets were heavy with fog, but he had not far to go, as the public-house he frequented was just round the corner. He chatted with the barmaid while she was drawing the beer,noticing with a smile the notice painted on the wall:
"Where else can you get
As he was going back a man in evening dress knocked against him.
"I beg pardon," he said. "I don't see—good God! Gobion!"
It was Scott.
Gobion took him into his room, and lit the little alabaster lamp, rich in gaudy flower work. The door opened, and the Reverend Peter Belper came in. The light shone on him, and he looked more Silenus-like than ever. "Beg pardon," he said, "thought you were alone." Gobion seized the momentary diversion of his coming to put on a tie and push his dirty cuffs under the sleeves of his coat.
"Oh! my dear old man," said Scott, looking round the room, "have you come to this? Why didn't you tell me?"
He put his arm on his shoulder, and Gobion drew nearer, shaking with emotion.
"I've been always thinking of you," said Scott. "It's been so lonely without you—so dull and lonely—we all miss you so. They said at Oxford that you'd been mixed up in some beastly newspaper scandal, but I knew of course that you'd rather die than do anything like that. I've been horribly afraid for you. You see, I couldn't find out where you'd got to or anything. You look terribly ill, old man; you must come out of this hole. Come away with me to-morrow, and when you're better you can make a new start."
"It's no use," said Gobion, "I'm finished—mind and body."
"Rot, old man! you're only rather pippy. Don't you know you'vealwaysgot me? Don't you remember how once for a joke in those Ship Street rooms you made me put my hands between yours and swear to be your man? Well, it wasn't a joke—to me. Don't you know how we all love you? Fancy your being here, you who used to lead us all. Damn it all, what gaudy nonsense I'm talking!"
His rather commonplace face shone strangely. He seemed to change the mean aspect of the room, to annihilate its sordidness.
Late at night Scott went back to his hotel, promising to be round first thing in the morning to take Gobion away. They parted at the door with a long hand-grip, and never met again in this world.
When he had gone Gobion went back to his room and fell like a log on to the floor, lying there motionless till the grey light crept into the court.
Then he got up and swiftly packed a small bag, his face white and drawn.
He went into the next room. The lamp was still burning, and old Mr. Belper lay in a drunken sleep on the bed. His mouth was open, and he breathed heavily.
Gobion woke him. "I've come to say good-bye," he said.
"What! has it come to that?"
"Yes."
The old man stared heavily. "Well, good-bye," he said. "I shan't be very long either. I'm gladwe've met. I, ahem, I—er"—he coughed—"I congratulate you." He passed his dirty hand over his eyes. "Yes, I—er—congratulate you. I wish—I'll see you out."
He came to the front door. They shook hands. "Good-bye," he said, "good-bye, dear boy."
He stood on the steps, a fat, grotesque figure, and watched Gobion's slim form disappear in the fog—a dirty, shameless old man.
He felt that the time had come at last. What in his misery he had thought vaguely possible now loomed close before.
With the resolve to make an end of it all, to have done with pain, to cheat the inevitable, came a flood of relief. The torture of his brain was swept away as if it had not been, and its receding tide left only a shallow residuum of false sentiment.
The poor fool busied himself with details and accessories. Since he had come to the point, he resolved that he would pose to the last. He began to play his old trick of exciting a diseased duality of consciousness.
As he walked eastwards he was composing his farewell letters, he was picturing to himself thesorrow of his friends. They would talk of him wonderingly, as a brilliant life promising great things, gone with its work undone. They would recall his sweetness, the glow of his bright youth ... the tears came into his eyes at the idea, it was so pathetic a picture.
His thoughts had run so long in the same groove, that though he felt dimly that there ought to be other and deeper feelings within him, he was unable to evoke them. He was conscious that this dainty picturing was utterly false; yet, try as he would, he could not stop it. Whether it was the last flicker of intense vanity, or merely that his mind was weakened by debauchery, it is impossible to say; but when a man plays unhealthy tricks with his mind, and is for ever feeling his spiritual muscles, the habit holds him fast as in a vice. His last hours possess a strange psychological interest.
He walked eastwards mechanically, but stopped when he had turned into Houndsditch, and the roar of the early traffic in Bishopsgate sounded less loudly.
From a card hanging in a pawnbroker's window he saw a bedroom was tolet, and after paying the rent in advance, he was allowed to take possession. He lit the oil-stove that did duty for a fire, and lay down, falling into a heavy, dreamless sleep.
When he woke it was quite dark, and after washing his hands he went to a low eating-house for a last meal. Themenuwas pasted on the window in strips, while a cabbage-laden steam floated out of the half-open door. The room was long and low of ceiling, each table standing in a separate partition. A large woman, dressed in a scarlet silk blouse, walked up and down the centre gangway, taking the orders, which she shouted out in a hoarse voice to the open kitchen at the far end. "Pudding and peas!" "Roast, Yorkshire, and baked!"
The table at which Gobion sat was covered with oil-cloth, and as he moved a saucer full of salt out of the way of his elbow, a many-legged insect ran over it to a crack in the wall.
The woman brought him the food, not giving him a knife and fork till he had paid for whathe had ordered. He noticed her hands were red and misshapen, with long, black nails.
He ate ravenously. Over the low partition he could see a Jew jerking some rich, steaming mess into his mouth with a curious twist of the wrist, and every now and again wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his coat. These details fascinated him.
When he had done, he asked for some paper, and with the roar of Whitechapel surging outside he began to write to Scott.
"My dear, dear old Man,Forgive me for what I am going to do. Life seems to me——"
"My dear, dear old Man,
Forgive me for what I am going to do. Life seems to me——"
After writing a sentence or two he tore it up, as he found that he could not produce what he wanted. Time after time he tried, and only succeeded in being commonplace to the last degree. All his ideas of a tender farewell, a beautiful poetic letter, seemed impossible of realization; instead, he produced effusions which looked as if they might have been copied from theFamily Herald.
At last he wrote simply "Good-bye," adding his new address. He tried to think of someone else to write to, but could not. His father he hated and feared; there was no thrill in a letter to him. It all seemed very flat and commonplace. These last few hours were not at all as he had pictured to himself.
Then he went out into the Whitechapel High Street. The costermongers' stalls, lit with flaring naphtha lamps, made the street nearly as bright as in the day-time. The pavement was greasy to walk on, and it was thronged by a vast crowd walking slowly up and down. The fog was settling over the houses, and the place smelt like a stale sponge.
He wandered slowly down towards the church, picking his way among the mob.
Coarse Jewish women with false hair shouted to one another. Girls with high cheek-bones, smeared with red and white, caught hold of his arm, whispering evil suggestions to him, and cursing him for a fool when he turned away. There was a lurid glow in the air.
He stopped outside a stationer's window, gazingidly at the specimens of invitation cards in the window.
"Mr. and Mrs. Levenstein
"Request the pleasure of your company
"At the occasion of their son's circumcision."
In the brilliant light he saw the gutters littered with decayed vegetables, bones, and rags. Two old women stood at a corner of the Commercial Road. He heard one of them say, "Yes, it was still-born, so shesaid; but I 'eard it squeak before Annie come out of the room." He passed on. A piano-organ, with a cage of bedraggled birds on the top, struck up, the handle being turned by a boy, while his father went among the crowd showing a smooth white stump where his hand should have been.
The door of the Free Library stood open. He went in. The room was crowded with men standing about reading the evening papers. He walked up and down through the rows of stands, as if looking for someone, after a while coming out again into the street. A sailor knocked against him, and swore at him for a "bleeding fool."
He was passing a pillar-box, when he remembered his letter to Scott, and he posted it, hearing the hollow echo of its fall with the sense of a curious subjective disturbance in the air around. He felt something was by him in the noisy street, something waiting by him for the end. He looked hastily over his shoulder, and then laughed grimly.
After a time, when he had been among the crowd for nearly two hours, some impulse seemed to draw him away, and he went back towards Houndsditch. Before turning down the long narrow street, he went into the "Three Nuns," the big hotel at the corner, and spent his last shilling in three glasses of brandy.
As he closed the door of his lodgings, the noise of the streets sank suddenly into a distant hum, through which he could distinguish the far-off tinklings of the barrel-organ, which had moved higher up the street. When he got to his room he busied himself in making it clean and tidy, clearing up the hearth, putting his clothes neatly away into his bag.
Then he took a little bottle out of his pocketmarked "Chloroform." Over the head of the bed he fixed up a sort of rack with two hatpins and some string, so that the bottle could swing exactly over his pillow. Then he pricked a hole in the cork in such a manner that if the phial was turned upside-down, every few minutes a drop of liquid would ooze through.
He lit a cigarette and sat down to think. He was not quite sober, but he felt a dull conviction that things were never more unsatisfactory. He felt no sadness, no pathos, stealing over him.
With a great effort he struggled to realize things, getting up and walking round the room, talking thickly to himself. "Here I am, young, clever, of a good family, a man who might have been good or even great; am I going to die like a rat in a hole? Oh, God!" He said it with all the force and yearning he could put into his voice, trying to force a note of pain, but the result was most ordinary. He looked at his face in a little strip of looking-glass abovethe fireplace. He saw nothing but the imprint of impurity and sin.
Then he lay back on the bed, and thought that he roared with laughter. The situation seemed irresistibly comic. He only chuckled feebly, but to him it seemed as if he were shrieking in an ecstasy of mirth.
Suddenly he got up and fell on his knees, praying aloud, "Oh, God, help me! God forgive me!" All the time that he knelt and tried to pour out an impassioned prayer for forgiveness he knew that it was only an attempt to bring some poetry, some pathos, into his last moments. Again he got up and laughed wildly. His face grew ashen grey and horribly drawn in his attempts to deceive himself, to pose once more.
"Is there nothing,NOTHING? Good God!... why can't I feel? Why? why? Ah! ahh!" He tore at the bed-quilt wildly, snarling like a beast.
In the middle of his paroxysm he stopped suddenly and stiffened. Once more the weird horror of another presence in the room cameover him. He whimpered like a dog, shrinking into a corner, with staring eyes, not knowing what he did, muttering "Mother—mother!" Then with a complete change of tone and manner, he said, "A nonentity with most seductive hair."
He took the little bottle from the table, and hung it mouth downwards in the sling.
He took off his coat and waistcoat, mechanically winding up his watch and placing it on the mantel.
"This is not at all what I had hoped. It ismostunsatisfactory, quite commonplace, in fact," he said as he lay down on the bed.
He felt a little splash on his cheek, and moved his face out of the direct course of the liquid, which now began to fall more rapidly.
THE FIRST PICTURE.
The Art of Religion.
The church was very full. It was the vigil of All Saints, and Father Scott was to preach.
Far away, the culminating point of the long vista of shadowy arches, stood the High Altar, blazing with lights. The choir had just taken their stalls, and every head was bent low.
An orchestra was reinforcing the organ, and the long silver trumpets, loved of old Purcell, shouted jubilantly, echoing away down the dim clerestory.
Father Scott felt a strange thrill, an uplifting of the heart, at the melody. He stood up in his stall with the rest, a man whose face still showed a trend to the commonplace, but sweetened, almost refined away by something else.
The little sisters of St. Cecily, sweet souls with whom he worked, said among themselves that he had had a dear friend once whom he had loved, and for whom he still mourned and prayed, and that it was this that made him such an eminently lovable man.
Indeed, Sister Eliza had even read a novel he had written in his early days, a mystic romance of a glorious youth who had never come to prime.
The music of the stately anthem swelled up in a burst of praise, the trumpets singing high over all with keen vibratory notes that told of an inner mystery to ears initiate. Then, when Father Gray, an old priest whose days were nearly done, read the lesson, Scott leant back with crossed hands, thinking of old times, of his youth. It seemed to him on this great night of the Church that other and less earthly forms andvoices thronged the building. In the Creed, the words "communion of saints" touched him strangely, as they always did; but to-night they came home to him with a deeper meaning.
"God is so good," he thought simply. "Surely He has pardoned him for that one sin. He was so pure and beautiful—very pleasant hast thou been to me." His thoughts wandered disconnectedly, recalling sentences that had struck him, old scenes and scraps of verse. The smell of the incense brought back Cowley or the Sunday evening services at St. Barnabas. He rejoiced in his heart at the stateliness and circumstance of worship around him, and he recalled some old articles in theChurch Chimes, defending eloquently the "true ritual of holy Church." He had thought them so good, he remembered, such a dignified answer to the other side.
The prayers began, each with its deep harmonized "Amen," which seemed to him in his excited mind long-drawn gasps of thankfulness and worship. He bent his head low in his hands, and prayed humbly for the Church's welfare, and then, with an uplifting of his heart and agreat passionate yearning, for his dead friend. He felt very near to him on this feast of the departed.
The time came for him to speak to the long rows of faces. He mounted to the high pulpit in the sweep of the chancel arch, and looked down on the congregation.
He began quietly enough, but gathered power and sonance as his feelings swayed him, drawing for them a picture, an ideal, to which they might all attain, telling them of the sweetness that comes with goodness. He thought of the friend of his youth, and drew an exalted picture of him, while the people sat breathless at the beauty of his words.
Then he said in a hushed voice how he had thought, and liked to think, that round them to-night were the dear ones who had died, that they were watching over them and praying with them that holy night.
Everyone felt the spell of the hour and the voice of the priest, it was most unearthly, dramatic, and effective. Sister Eliza wiped her eyes and thought of the novel, and only poorold Father Gray, worthy man, was fast asleep in the chancel, tired by the long ceremonial day.
Then came the great procession round the church, with its acolytes and crosses, Father Scott walking last in flowered cope. They sang, "For all the saints who from their labours rest," waking a responsive echo in every heart.
Last, and most impressive of all, the long spell of silent prayer, broken at last by the crashing music, and the shuffling feet of the congregation as they left the building. Sister Eliza, as she went out into the cutting night wind, could not help thinking of the novel. It was not a bad novel, but this is the true account.
THE SECOND PICTURE.
A dinner in honour of the law.
"Well, my dear, and who have you got?" said the duchess.
"First of all there's Mr. Mordaunt Sturtevant, the new Q.C.,quitea nice person."
"He is," said the duchess, "I've met him. Such eyes! Eliza Facinorious said that he madeher 'feel quite funny when he looked at her.' You know the sort of person—makes you feel b-r-r-r-r-r! like that."
"I know," said the hostess. "Then Marjorie Burness is coming—such a dear! knows all the latest stories about everyone."
"I don't think I've met her," said the duchess, "is she quite?"
"Not exactly; she was a Miss Lovibond—Lovering—some name like that. Parson's daughter, Kensington people, dontcherknow; but so amusin'—fat, too, she is."
"Oh!" said the duchess.
"Then there's a Mr. Sanderson Tom asked. He keeps a school board, or wants the poor to live noble lives in Hackney—somethin' of that sort. Eliza Facinorious and the Baron, Lady Darwin Swift, Mr. Justice Coll, Bradley Bere, the new writin' boy, Lord Saul Horridge, and of course the girls. That's all, I think."
"Oh!" said the duchess again.
She was rather a damaged duchess, and very impertinent, but Mrs. Chitters was exceedingly glad to get her. She reallywasa duchess,which, if a woman has no brains, money, or comeliness, is the best thing she can be. She was staying for a week with Colonel Chitters and his wife.
The dinner was for the joy of Mr. Mordaunt Sturtevant, who had just taken silk. The most eminent member of the criminal bar, he would have been Queen's Counsel long ago if it had not been for some vague rumours of his early life.
A footman opened the door, the duchess her eye-glasses, and Mrs. Chitters the conversation. Mr. Bradley Bere was announced, a youth apparently of seventeen, but of a great name; the rich uncleanness of his life almost rivalling his stories, and both being given undue prominence by his friends on the weekly press. Then came Lord Saul Horridge, a tall melancholy man, whose life was crushed by an energetic mother, whose forte was teetotalism, and whose weakness was omniscience.
Mr. and Mrs. Robert Burness came in, were effusively greeted by the hostess, and passed on to amuse the duchess. Mrs. Burness,nèeMarjorieLovering, had grown too stout for flirtation, and feeling the want of amètier, had turned her thoughts to scandal, and achieved a great success. Her husband, a clerk in the War Office, used to say that his wife had a higher regard for truth than anyone he knew—she used it so economically.
Mordaunt Sturtevant and Mr. Justice Coll came in arm in arm, and soon after they went down to dinner.
Sturtevant had grown two small whiskers, and his keen eyes, shaded by bushy brows, made the duchess want to say "B-r-r-r-r-r!" several times during the evening.
The Baroness Facinorious, an ample and various lady, was taken down by Mr. Sanderson, the education person from Hackney, and they discussed the latest thing in Chelsea churches.
Bradley Bere told Miss Chitters that poetry was the pursuit of the unattainable by the unbearable, hoping she would repeat it as having come from him.
Mr. Justice Coll alone was silent, his wholemind, no large part of him, being given up to the business in hand.
When the gentlemen came up to the drawing-room Sturtevant sat down by Mrs. Burness, and they discussed their host and hostess, both of them telling Mrs. Chitters what the other had said later on in the evening.
When they got tired of scandal Mrs. Burness mentioned that her son had just gone up to Oxford. "To Exeter, you know. Robert says it's an excellent college. We went up for the 'Torgids,' I think they call them—boatin' races, you know—and we had lunch in Bernard's rooms.Suchnice rooms, all panelled in oak, and only next door to the Hall, which must besoconvenient in wet weather, don't you think?"
"Have they a high-barred window in the corner looking out into B. N. C. Lane?" said Sturtevant.
"Yes! do you know them?"
"I think so. I believe I used to know a man who had them years ago. He's dead now."
"Oh,howromantic! I must tell Bernard!Perhaps his ghost haunts them!Dotell me his name."
"A rather uncommon name—Yardly Gobion."
Mrs. Burness grew pale.
"I knew him when I was a girl," she said faintly.
The man gripped a little ornamental knob on the arm of the chair. The people who were coming after the dinner were being announced. He heard Sir Lionel and Lady Picton's names shouted from the door. It was a curious evening.
"Were you a Miss Lovering before you married?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Then you're Marjorie!"
"Yes," she said with a little smile, "I was Marjorie."
They were silent for a time, and their faces changed a little.
"Rather a fool, wasn't he?" Sturtevant forced himself to say at last.
"Oh, yes, we flirted a little, don't you know, but I always thought him rather poor fun."
"Yes, he wasn't much. I remember when I was reading for the Bar I did him a service, for which he was not in the least grateful."
"Yes, he was quite that sort of person."
"But still," said Sturtevant, "he was a man possessed of considerable personal charm."
FINIS.
PLYMOUTH
WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON
PRINTERS