Chapter XIV: Part III: I (1)

THE BATHS OF APOLLO

On a foggy November morning of the year whose events have been chronicled a man came out of a house in Westminster and stood for a moment on the worn steps, supporting himself against one of the pillars of the porch, to blink sorely at the raw day. The house he was leaving was one of a few old buildings that still exist on the long, crooked street whose northern frontage follows the ancient precincts of royal abbey and palace. From its size, the graceful detail of its doorway, the white and black squares unevenly paving its hall and the depth of brickwork which the long recessed windows revealed, one judged at once that this had been, in days gone by, the town mansion of a great legal or political family, forced by its very functions to dwell at the gates of the legislature. But whatever it had been in olden times, to-day the great house was inexpressibly sordid and degraded. The cupids and garlands of its doorway, blunted by two centuries of whistling house-painters, had well-nigh disappeared once for all beneath a last coat of coarse red-brown paint. With the same dismal tint--the old penitential hue of the galleys--were daubed window-sashes and sills, the panelling of the wide hall, the carved brackets that supported the crumbling edges of its tiled roof. Within, one conjectured rightly bare lime-washed walls--disinfection, not decoration--sodden boards worn away round the knots. Even in the foggy half-light, so merciful to all that has beauty of outline still to show, its crude defacement did not escape. One felt that the pickaxe and sledge-hammer of the house-breaker, busy in a neighboring hoarded space, spared it too long.

A thick, dun mist had been creeping up-river since dawn from the Kent and Essex levels, gathering up on its way the filthy smoke of glue factories and chemical works, and holding it suspended over the spires and domes of the Imperial city. The close alleys and wynds that, like a fungus growth upon polluted soil, cover the area once sacred to the brothels and dog-kennels of the Plantagenet Court, seemed not so much to be endued with smoke and grime as actually to be built up out of compacted slabs of the sooty atmosphere. The sun was still in the east--a red wafer stuck on a sealed sky.

For a few minutes the man stood still, as if either too tired to make up his mind which way he should take, or as if, really paralyzed for the moment by the equilibrium of the forces that acted on his will, he was at the point where, vertigo having seized upon the mind and, as it were, disorientated it, direction loses its meaning. It is almost certain that had any passer-by--a policeman, a man bearing a burden, even a child--jostled the man, he would have gone on in the direction to which the collision turned him.

He wore a jacket and trousers of what had once been blue serge, faded by exposure, by dust, by rain that soaked in the dust, and sun that dried the rain in turn, to that color which is obtained by mixing all the primaries upon a palette. A streak of the coat's original color showed still under the upturned collar, and had the effect of a facing upon a soldier's tunic. Coat and trousers were miserably frayed at the edges, but neatly mended in more than one place. Probably from being worn night and day upon an almost naked body, the stiff straight lines natural to modern clothing had disappeared, and they had acquired, in their place, an actual mould of the limbs. His shoes, spattered with mud and grease, seemed once to have been brown. They were broken, and the heels had been trodden down so far that the soles curled up in front like an eastern slipper. The man was quite clean, his hair and beard even trimly kept. His face was refined. Whatever physical suffering he was undergoing or had undergone, it was evident he had not yet reached the depth at which the soul contracts and shrivels once for all, and, dropping into some inmost recess where only death shall find it again, leaves the animal epidermis to bear the outrage of life. Under one eye the discoloration of an old bruise showed faintly.

As he looked about him--first above his head, then mechanically to left and right--what was almost a look of relief and peace came over the tortured face. In this narrow drab margin twixt night and night--a day only by the calendar and by the duties it imposed--it is possible he felt something akin. Something of the mechanical precision of life that was such a reproach to his own confusion would have to be relaxed. It would be a day of late trains, of crawling, interlocked traffic, of sudden warnings from the darkness, with the ever-present possibility of some levelling disaster to lend a zest to the empty hours. Excluded from human communion on the side of its pleasures, the outcast yearns toward it all the more upon the side of its pain and mischance. What is the savagery of revolution but a very exaltation of perverted sympathy? "Weep with me, my brother," says the red of hand, "weep with me at least, since I might not rejoice with you."

He had been the last to leave the common lodging-house which had given him a night's shelter, and, as he lingered, the deputy, a big, fleshy man in shirt-sleeves, came down the passage behind him, whistling and sweeping before him the caked mud which forty pairs of broken shoes had brought in during the night. At the sound of his broom against the wainscot, the man turned sharply, with a sudden energy that was like the release of a coiled spring, and, thrusting his hands into his pockets, strode off to the left quickly and aimlessly as a caged wolf. Where Great Smith Street runs into Victoria Street he turned to his left again, and followed the main thoroughfare southward. Through the happy accident of its deflection midway, at the point where the colossal doorway of the Windsor Hotel confronts the Army and Navy Stores, Victoria Street possesses, as all visitors to London with the architectural sense must have noticed, a dignity and effectiveness unique in the city of costly ineptitude. Approached from the river at sunset or sunrise, or in any light low enough and dim enough to hide the sorry detail of its lofty houses, the effect approaches the monumental. The wanderer's eyes had been fixed on the ground; but, possibly arriving at some spot where in former days he had been used to watch for it, he raised his head and stood, unsteadily, for a few seconds, intent upon the beauty with which the world is as prodigal as it is niggardly of its substance. The sky was an orange dun, deepening and lightening almost momentarily, as though some pigment with which the day was to be dyed later were being prepared overhead. The long Italianesque façade of the stores was all one blue shadow, but over its roof, through some atmospheric freak, the campanile of the new cathedral emerged, pale pink and cream, and in the upper windows of the great hotel, whose pillars and helmed mask closed the prospect on the right, a few wavering squares as of strawberry tinsel foil reflected the foggy sun. As he watched, leaning against the railing, one might have noticed his lips move. He took his clenched fists from his pockets, and opened them slowly with a strange gesture of surrender. It was as though some inward resolution, evidenced by the hasty walk, the lowered eye, the clenched hands, yielded at its first contact with the influence he was attempting to forswear.

A man who had been walking hastily from the opposite direction, with a long roll of blue prints under his arm, stopped short, pulled off his glove, and, diving into his trouser pocket, pulled out a copper and pressed it against one of the open palms. The dreamer started, closed his hand upon the penny convulsively, and, without a word of thanks, gazed after the bustling figure. He opened his fingers slowly and looked at the coin, with the same fear and repugnance that a sick man might show who, having put his hand to his mouth, finds blood upon it. Then, still holding it in his hand, he quickened his walk, until it was almost a run.

In a baker's shop near the terminus he spent half the money on a stale roll, and ate it, standing in the doorway of the Underground Station, and using his free hand to cover his mouth, as though he felt his voracity was indecent. A wretched little waif--a girl child, bareheaded, in a long dress like a woman's, and with her hair done up in a wisp--seeing him eating, approached, held out a hand scaled with dirt like a fish's skin, and begged of those rags with the same blind confidence with which the child in heart asks relief of a beggared providence. He gave her the halfpenny, and as much of the bread as he had not eaten; then, crossing the road, he shouldered his way into the station yard.

The Continental Night Mail, more than half an hour late on account of the fog, was just in. A long line of motor-cabs, with an occasional four-wheeler, stood along the curb. Porters in charge of portmanteaux and trunks were shouting and gesticulating; the air was full of grunts, whistles, and the sudden clatter of horses' feet catching hold on the pavement. The man paid no attention to the motor-cabs, but, slipping behind a four-wheeler loaded with luggage and a bicycle, followed it from the yard and into the street.

The cab rolled along through Pimlico and in the direction of the river. Almost immediately the station was left the fog shut down and hid the houses on either side. The driver, an old street pilot of thirty years, kept on at a steady amble; the man behind, quite ignorant of his destination, settled down to a steady loping run, which apparently he was prepared to keep to between the wheels as long as the horse kept to it between the shafts.

At a cross-traffic break he looked up, and saw he was not alone. A short, thick-set stranger, with a bullet head and strangling, wheezy breath, had joined him _en route_. That competition which is said to be the soul of trade was not to be lacking.

"Ullo!" said the stertorous one, as soon as he felt himself observed. "W'ere did _you_ come from?"

Finding he was not rebuked, he thought it safe to essay a little further.

"You be awf and find a ---- keb for yourself. D'jeer? Follered this from the stishun, I did."

His bearded brother in misfortune gave him such a look that he judged it wise to defer settling the difference. The cab started again, turned, and twisted in the maze of stucco streets, always followed by the two men; stopped finally in a crescent that even in daylight was secluded, but in a fog might be said to be mislaid. Bullet head, being outside the wheel, used his tactical advantage to lay one authoritative hand on the leather trunk and the other on the bicycle.

"It's aw ri', guv'nor," he called, reassuringly through the window to their proprietor. Even as he spoke, he was himself deposited upon the pavement in an efficient manner of which the tall comrade's face had given no hint. Followed, not so much a volley of oaths, as a kind of set-piece, a transparency of language, which hung suspended in the shocked air of Pimlico long enough for a window or two to open, presumably in protest. Appealed to by his fare, a literary gentleman of peaceful habit, upon the score of age and experience, the driver refused to be drawn into the conflict.

"Settle it between yerselves," he said complacently, sucking on a voice lozenge and pocketing his legal fare. "Door to door, my trade is, and don't ferget it." A woman meantime had opened the hall door, and was scolding every one, impartially, in the dialect of Fifeshire.

Nothing goads to madness like foiled knavery. The tall man, having already shouldered the trunk, the short one laid a violent and ill-advised hand upon it from behind. Next moment it was set upon the ground and with a vigorous movement of the shoulders that gave his words authority, the dreamer spoke for the first time, in a voice whose accent and whose idiom alike were familiar.

"See here, now! You have one minute to hit the grit. If you're not gone then, I'll lay that mouth of yours against the sidewalk and give it the dry cleaning it needs. Now that goes--all the way!"

"My God!" I cried, "it's Ingram!"

* * * * *

He turned to run, but I clung to him. He was a powerful man, much stronger, even exhausted as he was, than I have been at any time, but I am proud to think my grip upon him never once gave way. At last he desisted, perhaps because he heard tears in my voice, and disengaged my fingers gently.

"Ingram! Oh! in God's name what does it mean? I thought you'd gone back--thought you were thousands of miles away."

He laughed. "Can't you see what it is, Prentice? It's the last note in journalism. A delegate to the depths. Talks with the underworld. I'm doing it pretty thoroughly, don't you think?"

Well, I stood there and pleaded with him. His competitor carried in the baggage meekly, under Mrs. Mac's petrifying eye, was paid, and went his way--the mystified Jehu cracked his whip and rumbled off into the fog before I had exhausted half the arguments and expedients with which my brain swarmed. I wanted him to take money, to come in and be fed and clothed, to go back to America (assisted passage). He shook his head at everything, and at the last suggestion set his bearded jaw hard. I thought his objection very fanciful.

"I won't go back," he said, "to see a democracy that has had its chance and missed it, done to death with a golden bandage over its eyes. It's less hard to stop here among the poor devils that have never known what economic independence meant."

He found reasons equally good or equally bad for resisting my offers toward rehabilitation in England.

"It's no use, Prentice," he said, again and again. "Believe me, between the very last rung of the social ladder and the depths in which I'm swimming round and round, and waiting for the final suffocation, there's a sheer fall that no power on earth can ever bridge again. From where I am I can speak still, hear still, even feel. I look up and see living men on the slope above me. Some are slipping down, some, who have stood once on the verge and looked over, are crawling up again, weak and half dead from terror. But I and those with me are past help. You don't know the gulf that separates having a little money, even your last pound, from having none at all. That's an experience as final and irremediable as death. None can imagine it unless they have known it, and none that have known it ever come back to tell."

Before such remorseless logic I weakened, little by little. I told him he was ungenerous--that friendship involved debts of honor he had never been willing to pay; finally I went into the house to make him up a parcel of warm underclothing. I remember blubbering like a whipped lower-form urchin as I ransacked drawers and trunks, and how the string kept snapping as I tried to tie up the great untidy brown-paper parcel. When I came downstairs the street was empty.

II

LIGHTNING IN THE FOG

He ran, he has told me since, like a man with a hue-and-cry in his ears, turning left or right at random. At last his breath failed; he remembered his rags, and noticed people looking suspiciously after him. He came out onto the river somewhere near the Tate Gallery, by a yard full of spray-battered old ship figureheads, and crossed the big new bridge to the Albert Embankment. At a river sluice below an iron yard men were unloading bundles of Belgian tees and angles from a barge. The river was falling fast, and he got an hour's job helping them to unload the cargo. It was on such casual labor, I suppose, that for months he had supported life. He was paid sixpence for his hour's work, and, seeing his strength and famished willingness, the lighter-men overloaded him and raised a weal on his shoulder. He was still nearly starving, but did not dare spend the money till later. By two o'clock in the afternoon the fog was general and very thick. He was standing in the centre of the little foot-bridge that runs under the viaduct from Charing Cross Station. Above his head trains rumbled softly and circumspectly. There were Pullman cars filled with sun-worshippers on their way from the winter-smitten city to France and Italy--to ivory villa and amethyst bay, maybe to the white sun-steeped cities upon whose ramparts he had once stood sentry. The fog-signals went off in his ears like cannon. On the Middlesex shore of the river was a dim bustle, muffled tang of gongs, constant flitting of blurred lights; but under the Surrey shore, lonely as a quicksand on the Breton coast, a strip of mud left by the falling tide shone, a coppery red, beneath the bulk of the big Lambeth brewery. Below his feet a squadron of empty lorries lay moored together, four--four--and three, like a hand of cards dealt face downward by a fortune-teller. All around him was mewing, as from a dozen litters of kittens; the fog became thick with the fluttering winged forms of sea birds. No one had passed him for a long time. He stretched out his arms and spoke aloud--

"Soul! what things are these that hem us in--that compass us about this November noontide, as we roam, stifled and uncertain, through Babylon's foggy streets? These towers, soaring into the infinite; these palaces, whose limits we conjecture from the dimmed overflow of light within; these chariots, rolling one instant soundless from obscurity, next instant engulfed by it? What things are they? Even such as to-day thou beholdest them: shadows, phantoms, vapor, and cloud. To-morrow the wind shall smite them, and their places know them no more; daylight seek them, and find them gone. Oh! paradox immeasurable, that where the sun had lied to thy senses fog should truly bespeak them!"

Solitary as he seemed, he had been observed for some time. A bulky figure, in heavy overcoat and helmet, stepped from behind a girder and touched him on the shoulder.

"Don't you think you'd best get to one side or the other? It's bad loitering weather."

Ingram started at the touch, then looked over his shoulder and laughed.

"I see," he said. "But there's no fear of that," and he looked at the river again. "You'd have come in after me, I suppose--boots, overcoat, and all."

"I'm not saying what I'd have done," the constable answered stolidly. "My dooty, I hope. But it's not the day I should choose to win the Albert Medal on."

He looked at the suspect closer, and seeing a man probably as strong as himself, his voice and manner changed. There was a new freemasonry in it when he spoke again, and a strange curiosity, shame-faced but eager.

"Man to man, mate; is it very bad?"

Ingram turned on his heels like the soldier he had been.

"Man to man--no. I've earned sixpence this morning; that's supper and bed. My nakedness is only an offence to the providence I've ceased to believe in, and I've the æsthetic sense which makes a thing like that," and he pointed to the patch of rosy mud, "a living joy. What man who works for bread will have more to say in two hundred years? Do you know there are great artists who'd go a day without food to paint truly what we've got under our feet. Not many English ones, though. I'll do them that justice."

"I think I know wot you mean," said S. 11. "I'm fond of pitchers myself. I suppose you know there's one of our force gets 'is pitcher into the 'cademy reg'lar every year. But hunger's one thing and starvation's another."

"It's not starvation, man; it's the fear of it that's putting out the sun and stars for three quarters of the world. 'Do _my_ work or starve! do _my_ work or starve!' that's what every factory hooter and works bell and alarm clock is ding-donging from morning till night. We're all too frightened to do ourselves justice. We sit down to our desk, or stand to our bench or easel with a full belly and an icy cold heart. So the great book never gets written, and the great picture never gets painted, and the great wrong never gets righted, and the soul we have no use for is passing into piston-rods and flywheels that eat up human flesh and blood as the beasts of the field chew grass. No thank you, constable. Didn't I tell you I'd got sixpence. Keep it for the next woman you have to move on. _That's_ the shame--_that's_ the unpardonable sin."

There had been no present thought of self-destruction in his mind, but, in spite of himself, the policeman's suspicion stirred a dormant idea that was now a comfort to him, now a terror, just so far as it lay vague or assumed definite shape. He climbed the ascent into the Strand, glad to be in the crowd again, and to feel himself jostled and elbowed by its hurrying life. Amid all the human tide that, after having turned the wheels of commerce all day, was now setting homeward, there was probably no one who walked straighter or brisker than he.

His long steps soon carried him into a distant quarter of the city; but as night fell he turned them toward Westminster again--back to the house where he had slept last night and perhaps many a night before. It was no better than others that lay to his hand, but at least its horrors were familiar. He shrank from new initiations. Besides, it was not seven o'clock, and eight was the earliest hour at which such places opened. How to kill an hour?--absorbing occupation for a mind like this.

He decided to follow the Embankment again. There, if his feverish walk outpaced the clock, he might loiter--lean upon the parapet, sit down upon one of the seats. He would buy some liver in Lambeth and cook it before the lodging-house fire. He was faint when he reached Blackfriars, and not from hunger alone. Dimly he divined a crisis. The last of a little store of illusions with which he concealed from himself how personal and irremediable was his misery had been expended during that wild talk with the man in blue upon the bridge. Something, if life was to continue, must supply its place.

The work upon the widening of the bridge was still in progress. Opposite De Keyser's Hotel a big wooden hoarding covered the pavement, making a little niche with the low granite wall of the Embankment. It was too early in the evening for the recess to be occupied or to be explored by the bull's-eye lantern of law and order. He crept within it under cover of the fog, and, resting his arms upon the wet granite wall, relit a half-smoked cigarette. All day long, throughout his defiant speech, his indignant bearing, his wretched assumption of energy, he had felt himself under an observation as unfriendly as it was thorough. Some other self, cold, critical, sneering, was watching his struggles with amused contempt. He had felt its presence before, but never so utterly detached, so hostile or so impatient. That _alter se_ which education creates and easy living nourishes, and which, deplore him as we may, is a personality to be reckoned with at every crisis and in every action of our lives, is never long content to outlive such an experience as his. It is only a question of time before the rational in man wearies of prison and poor entertainment.

"_Let us go hence!_"

Ingram smoked his cigarette until it burnt his lips, leaned over the parapet, and, as he dropped the glowing end into the river, measured the distance to the water that was "_clop-clopping_" soupily against the foot of the Embankment. His isolation in the heart of London was strangely complete, for such foot-passengers as passed, passed wide of him by a railed plank walk built outside of the great wooden hoarding that concealed him from view. The wide roadway, moreover, full of vague sound and motion--blast of motor-horns, rumble of trams, quick come and go of blurred lamps, accentuated his solitude. He waited until a heavy tread that was going westward had died away into the fog. Then he drew up his legs, first one, then the other, upon the parapet beside his hands.

"_Oh Gawd! oh Gawd!_" a voice groaned behind him. He checked his sinister movement and listened intently. Some one--some fellow-creature in torment--was cursing and sobbing on the pavement he had just left. He got down and groped for it. A man, huddled together, and with one leg jerking convulsively, was lying with his head against the boards.

Ingram put his arms round him and lifted him gently.

III

VALEDICTORY

Mrs. McNaughten has assured me that I stood for nearly five minutes, the brown paper parcel under my arm, staring blankly, first in one direction, then in another, and licking my lips. I am glad of her evidence that a mood so abject and personal lasted no longer. Because--alas!--what held me in a trance that temporarily lost count of time was not that this intolerable thing had befallen Paul Ingram, dear Paul, with whom I had sat, so many a night and on into the small hours, holding converse, high and austere, on man's destiny through life and beyond--no, it was that, having befallen him, it might befall any one, and, befalling any one--let me give the full measure of my craven heart--it might befall me. For one paralyzing instant that veil which mercifully cloaks the extreme chances of fate had been plucked aside. I had looked full into its malignant eyes, and, like the man in the Greek fable, what I had seen had been enough to turn flesh to stone. In that moment the shadowy safeguards which men erect between themselves and the grim possibilities of destiny--knowledge of the world, self-consciousness, confidence in untested friendships--stood revealed, the shams they are. The security born of years--anxious, toilsome years it is true, but during none of which, for a single day or night, bread, clothing, or sheltered sleep had failed me--shook and fluttered darkly like the eternal hills in an earthquake. I literally lost hold on life.

Thank God, the mood was over soon. I had time to be pitiful, to be even angry, with an illogical but humanizing wrath that fate, taking hourly toll of the world, had not spared one dear to me. I blamed myself bitterly for leaving him alone those few minutes. I had wearied of well-doing too soon. He must have yielded at last. Seated by the familiar fireside, fed and comforted, with the pipe in his mouth that still bore the scar of his long wolfish teeth upon its stem, a better mood must have awakened. I say a better mood, because, at certain depths, misfortune calls almost for the same treatment as crime, and the kindness that seeks to save must be disciplining as well as compassionate.

I dined at the _À-peu-près_ after my work was done, hoping against hope there would be news of him there--some indication that might put me on his track again. Smeaton was in the chair to-night--old Smeaton, best and bravest knight that ever set quill in rest--with his little restless pink face, snapping black eyes, tumbled white hair, and bulging and disordered waistcoat. I was greeted uproariously. For nearly a month I had been away in the south of France, press correspondent at a murder trial which had stirred all thinking Europe by the depths it revealed of cynical depravity on the one side, and of morbid, reiterated condonation on the other. It was by far the biggest thing I had been given to do yet, and I hoped I had done it well; but it was too much to hope that, in a subject coming home so nearly to the average sensual male, the psychological conclusions I had drawn should pass unchallenged. I sat for over an hour, besieged by questions, pelted with authorities, shouted down, derided unexpectedly and as unexpectedly championed. Even madame's indulgence was not proof against such pandemonium. She pushed open the lace-curtained door, put her hands to her pretty brown ears, and shook a reproving finger at her unruly family.

"_Quel tapage! Mon Dieu, quel br-r-ruit!_"

"_Oui!_" cries Smeaton, pointing at her excitedly with the nut-crackers. "_Et vous en êtes la cause!_"

"Do you remember your Yankee friend's dictum on the little point of manners we've been discussing?" Mackworth asked me when order was restored. He was a dark, depressed man, perhaps the richest who dined at the _À-peu-près_ regularly, and had written the most talked-about novel of the year before last.

"By the way," interrupted Smeaton, whose manners are bad, "who's seen Ingram lately?"

"I saw him--to-day," I answered, balancing the spoon on my coffee-cup.

"What's he doing? I thought he'd gone back to the States."

"He followed a growler I took from Victoria and wanted to carry in my trunk. Would have had to fight another man, too, for the sixpence."

Madame could not have desired a more complete cessation of turmoil than followed these words of mine. In more than one pair of eyes I saw the panic that would be my own lasting shame rise suddenly, and as suddenly be checked. I wonder how they got it under.

"Was he very bad?" asks Smeaton, in a low voice. "Down--right down?"

I nodded.

"_Poor--devil!_ Did he know you, Prentice?"

"Not at first. It was too foggy to recognize the house."

"What did you do?"

"Grabbed him as he turned to run, and held him. He wouldn't come in, but let me go to fetch him some clothes. When I came out, he'd bolted."

"Bravo!" said Smeaton, and clapped his pudgy little hands.

"Why do you say that?" I asked, voicing a surprise I think we all shared.

"Because it confirms a judgment of my own upon Ingram. He was the logical animal _par excellence_, and to take money or substance one hasn't been allowed to earn, if it's only a penny to buy a loaf or a rag to cover nakedness, is to sell logic as Esau sold his birthright. If there were more like Ingram, the tangle of this filthy old kaleidoscope we call life might straighten out. He'll die, of course, but at least he'll die with a man's soul in him."

"Listen to Satan rebuking sin!" said Waldron of the _Hemisphere_.

Smeaton brought his fist down on the table. "Yes," he thundered. "I know what you mean. Yes, I've given charity. I've cast bread on the waters--to drowning men that were begging for a rope. I've helped lame dogs--over stiles that led to nowhere. And every time I've done it, Waldron, I've been ashamed of myself. For I know I'm helping to protract an agony and perpetuating a state of things that ought to have been done with twenty years ago. Literature isn't paying its way to-day: that's the cold fact we must face. And a thing that isn't paying its way is a sham, no matter if it's as brilliant as the last ten years of the old French monarchy. It's falling more and more into the hands of men and women who either eke out a little private means by scribbling, or else eke out their hire by borrowing. Journalism's not so rotten; but, by the Lord Harry, after a morning in Fleet Street I sometimes think half of us are living by taking in one another's washing."

"You're taking rather a black view," said Waldron.

"Am I? Well, compare the present day with long ago--with Grub Street--with what Macaulay calls the darkest period of English letters. Read Johnson's early life--Savage--all the historical instances. Look at the sums those beggars got! Twenty-five pounds benefit from a play that ran fourteen nights: fifty pounds for an ode to Royalty once a year: ten pounds for translating a volume of Portuguese travels. Why, to many a man whose name is a household word to-day these things read like a fairy tale. They used to call on publishers with 'projects' and have luncheon served them while he read 'em over."

"What about the novel?" says Waldron, with a half-look at Mackworth.

"In its death throes. Fifty years hence the English novel--considered as literature, mind you--will be as dead as the epic poem. I stick to what I've said. When a thing ceases to pay its way, it's a sign the stage of national development that called for it is over."

"What's going to take its place?"

"Look around you. Something's begun to take its place already: articles, books--by people who've _done_ things, not dreamed them--written in the English any one can write who tries. 'Three months' lion slaughter in Central Africa'; 'One degree nearer that pole'; 'How I made my millions.' Especially the last. People never weary of that. They don't see that the game must be up, or the secrets wouldn't be being given away."

"Come!"--noticing a silence of dissent round the table. "Take a concrete instance. Mackworth, there's only one opinion about 'When the Sky Fell.'"

"You're very good."

"Simple justice, my boy. Now, take us behind the scenes a little. How long did it take you to write it?"

"Nine or ten months."

"Say nine. Working hard?"

"All day and every day."

"How long before you found a publisher?"

"Finished in June, and it came out in the autumn season."

"That's a year. Were you paid on publication?"

"No: six months afterward."

"Eighteen months. I don't like to ask you any more."

"Oh, I don't mind telling. I've cleared a hundred and twenty pounds."

"For eighteen months' work and worry."

"It's great fun. I've nearly done another."

"Yes, but assuming, for the sake of argument----"

"----that I had to live on it, eh? Well, I'm afraid there'd have been a third after Prentice's cab this morning."

"I think that settles it," said Smeaton, looking round. "No. The novel's had its day. And what a day it's been! Let us think of that. Fielding to Henry James! It's like the creation of another world. Come! I'll give you a toast we can all drink in silence--'Speedy deliverance to Paul Ingram!' And now let's talk of something more cheerful. Who's been to see Fenella Barbour's Cuckoo dance at the Stadium?"

"I suppose that's really the stage of national development we've reached," hazarded Mackworth.

"If it is, there's something to be said for it," said Smeaton, stoutly.

"She's paying _her_ way, anyhow," said some one. "Two hundred and fifty a week ought to keep the wolf from the door."

"Oh, the wolf at the stage door is a domesticated animal. No one wants to frighten him away."

I wasn't interested in what followed, and dropped out. Now and then a word or two struck me: "A clog-dancer with sophistications." "Anyway, you'll see a jolly pretty girl!" "No, not Jewish, Mackworth--Phœnician. Mother was Cornish, and she's a throw-back more than two thousand years straight to Carthage." "As much again for the posters. Briggses paid her four hundred for the 'Crême de Pêche.'"

And I smoked on, thinking of Ingram's rags. As our party broke up, I thought Smeaton made me a sign to stop on. When we were alone, he smoked silently for a while, and then--

"This is a more than usually filthy tragedy, Prentice."

"About Ingram? Yes, it's pretty bad."

"Wasn't there some book he was going to set the Thames alight with? Has it been published?"

"No. It had some funny adventures; but not that one."

"You read it. Was it really good? Between ourselves, you know."

"Oh, I answer for it."

"Don't be in a hurry. It's not late. You knew Ingram better than most of us. Now, wasn't there something between him and the little girl we've been talking of? Perhaps you guessed I didn't mention her by accident. Didn't they come here together more than a year ago?"

I told him what I knew, including the boat-train incident.

"Isn't that Ingram all over?" he exclaimed. "If his eye or his friend or his ladylove offended him, one felt the axe would be out in a minute. You know what they're saying about her now?"

"About dancing the night her mother died? Why shouldn't she? If she'd been a shop-girl or a typist, no one would have thrown stones at her for going on with her work. They'd have thought the more of her for it."

"No, no, my dear boy. I mean the Darcher case--woman at Hampstead who poisoned herself and the little boy, you know. There was a mysterious lady came down in the car with Lumsden. Her name was kept out, but they say----"

"That it was she. Oh! impossible, Smeaton! How could it be?"

"Because she left the theatre with him, and happened to be in his house when the message came through. Two o'clock in the morning! I had it from a quarter that isn't usually wrong."

"And you believe it?"

Smeaton shrugged his shoulders. "My dear boy, I've given up guessing. Anybody that wants it can have the benefit of the doubt, now." _Puff! puff!_ "I often think of poor Newstead, last time I saw him, at Guy's. They thought he was going to get well, and he was sitting up on the pillows reading one of those blasted Sunday papers that you write for. 'Well Newstead,' said I, as I was going, 'what am I to tell the boys?' 'Tell them,' he says, laying his poor claw of a hand on the paper, 'tell them I'm driven to my grave at last by the beauty and the horror of life!'" _Puff! puff!_ "Why don't you go and see her? You can get there easy enough. She's interviewed once a week on an average."

"What good would it do?"

Smeaton rapped for his _addition_. "I dunno. I think if I were a friend of Ingram's I'd take a certain amount of malicious pleasure in letting her know what you saw to-day."

IV

SOMETHING LIKE CLOVES

As a matter of fact, I found no difficulty at all. Little Winstanley was pleased with my murder specials, and fixed up an interview over the 'phone in no time.

"You're getting rather heavy metal for this, Prentice," he said, puffing out his cheeks and regarding me with the benevolence a man keeps for the work of his own hands; "but toddle along and see what you make of her." One of Winstanley's illusions is that he has "formed" me.

Fenella had a very pretty little doll's house in the tiny square that is tucked away near Knightsbridge Barracks, whose gardens back upon the Park. The brickwork was very neatly pointed, and the window boxes were full of chrysanthemums, and a red door with brass appointments flew open to my rather timid ring with a disconcerting suddenness. But I was not prepossessed with the stunted little maid who opened it. Neither in manner nor appearance was she "up to" the house. There was a latent hostility, too, in the way she scanned me.

"Noospapers?" she queried over her shoulder, as she closed the door.

I admitted it.

"Come in 'ere and wait."

I was precipitated rather than ushered into a fireless dining-room, a little cold and uncheery for all its graceful furnishings of dark scrolled wood and striped mulberry velvet cushions. There was a hanging lamp over the oval table, of liver-colored bronze; mistletoe leaves stuck over with little electric berries, which budded into light as the girl left the room. The sideboard was covered with silver toys. I remember a jointed crab and lobster, and a ship on wheels with all its sails set, and a coach and six, whose driver, his calves in the air, waved a long whiplash over six curled, trampling stallions. I know there are more striking contrasts in the world if one goes seeking them, but for me the injustice of life always stands pictured now by a shelf full of useless beaten silver toys on the one hand, and on the other by a coat buttoned across a naked throat.

I wonder would I have known my pale little girl with the frightened eyes, whose heart I had been so strangely commissioned to break, eighteen months ago? Then I had only been able to guess at the probable grace of the body which a rough travelling coat so thoroughly covered, and though, even in the strained, anxious face and disordered hair, beauty had been apparent, it had been beauty seen through a mist of tears, its harmonies disordered by the tortured questioning soul.

Since that time I suppose her figure had attained its full graciousness of line and had reached the limit of development which modern standards of bodily beauty, forced to take a fashion into consideration, would consider compatible with elegance for a woman of her height. She was still in half-mourning, and wore a trained dress of some soft gray material embroidered in black on the breast and sleeves. I am a child in such matters, but imagine her dressmaker, or the builder of garments more intimate still, must have been something of an artist, for, seen thus, there was absolutely nothing to recall the boyish _sans gêne_ of figure and manner which was her great asset--her trump card upon the stage, and which, from the moment she kissed her hands across the footlights, never failed to bring rapturous applause about her ears. Her dark hair, "fine as the finest silk" (after all, there is no bettering the robust descriptiveness of fairy-tale), was dressed rather fashionably than prettily--wide across her forehead in front, and rather far beyond her head at the back. I thought she wore too many rings, and diamonds glittered in the soft shadow of her throat.

She did not recognize me, but gave me her hand to shake without condescension, which was all in her favor. I will make a further confession: At the first frank, interested glance of her eyes I consigned old Smeaton and his hateful friend who didn't often make mistakes to the eternal fellowship of Ananias. The impossibility simply began and ended with those eyes. It was not the glamour of a lovely face and a gracious welcome, for, as I took her hand, I remember feeling indignant that so little shadow of the wrong my friend had done her crossed the bright well-being of her life. It was too evident that she forgave and forgot with equal completeness. Poor, logical-minded Paul, carrying about with him night and day the image of this lost mistress. Did I blame him that food and raiment were hateful to him?

"Why," she said, "poor man! you're shivering. This room is a bit cold, isn't it? I'm afraid Frances doesn't like the press. I've noticed she always shows them into whichever room hasn't a fire in it. She's rather a tyrant, Frances is. But it's nice isn't it, to have some one left who cares enough for you to bully you. Druce, the housekeeper, was my nurse once. Come across to the drawing-room. It's much prettier, and there's a fire in it. Twenty minutes now"--lifting a warning finger--"not an instant longer."

I followed her across the ridiculous little hall into a drawing-room whose size surprised me. It was low but very long, and the bottom was filled in by a curved window of leaded glass looking out over the sodden Park, where a belated rider or two still walked a steaming horse and probably dreamed of a hot bath and dinner. The room, with its lacquered "dancing dado," and walls hung with Chinese silk, has been often paragraphed. It smelt of sandalwood and roses, and had a fire of old whale-ship logs burning in a steel casket upon the hearth, with little spurts of flame, all manner of unexpected tints--violet and bottle-green and strawberry red. How fond she was of color and glitter! A frightful old bull-terrier--reared, I should say, from his appearance, in the bosom of some knacker's family, and whose head something, prosperity perhaps, had turned violently on one side--got up from the hearth-rug and came limping and sniffing across the room. Fenella got down on her knees and put her soft cheek to the repulsive pink nose.

"Did _he_ want to be interviewed then? And so he shall. Do you know"--looking up at me--"you're the first one that's seen _him_? I generally show two small ones like pen-wipers; but they're away at a show." She turned to the dog again. "Is he vezzy old then, and vezzy blind, and vezzy much chewed and bitten, poor old man! and is the world just one big, dark smell to him? Well if 'oo _will_ chew my whiskers, dear, of _tourse_ 'oo'll sneeze!" She jumped up as though some thought suddenly checked her playful mood. "Put _him_ down, please!" she said, pointing in a business-like manner to my open note-book. "Name? Roquelaure--Rock for short. Eighteen years old--two years less than me. Fancy _that_--younger than me! No tricks--only habits. We were puppies together--at least, I mean--Yes, yes. Put it down that way. It sounds rather _dear_, I think. Sit down, please. Now, what else do you want to hear about? My dancing? Oh! I've always danced. Used to do it instead of flying into a rage."

"Wait one minute, please," I said. "'The usefulness of dancing as an outlet for the emotion is probably a discovery as old as the world itself.' Um--um----When did you begin to take regular lessons, and how far----?"

I looked up. She had recognized me. Forgetfulness? Oh! I was as bad as the others.

"Wait a moment!" She rose, and left the room as quickly as her tight silk underskirt would let her. She was back again in a minute, holding my card in her hand.

"Are you _his_ Mr. Prentice?"

I bowed my head, and laid note-book and pencil aside. What a fool I had been to come!

"Where is he? Do you see him? Oh, _how_ I've tried and tried to remember your name!"

"I don't know where he is."

"But you've seen him? I know you have. Answer, please. Why do you look so queer?"

"I saw him last week."

"Was he well? Was he happy?"

"He was--starving, I think."

"_O-oh!_" I had seen tragedy in the girl's face, now I saw it in the woman's. I told her as much as I dared. I hope I was merciful.

"Why didn't you hold him?" she cried, at one point of the story. "Oh, my God! Why did you let him go? Don't you know the sort of man he is?"

"I thought I was doing my best. I had only gone to get him some warm clothes. It was such a raw, foggy morning. That seemed the first thing."

"Some warm clothes!" she repeated, under her breath, looking round at the silk and silver and roses. Then she broke down, and cried and cried. Poor soul! I had to stop her at last. I was afraid she'd be ill.

She was very docile, dried her eyes, and begged my pardon for what she'd just said.

"You're his friend, aren't you?" she pleaded, "his real, true friend? You won't give him up?"

"What can I do? I'd even bear it for him if I could."

"No you couldn't," she said, tightening her lips and shaking her head decisively. "Nobody can bear anything for him. Do you think I didn't try?"

She rolled her handkerchief up into a ball, and tucked it away, with a resolute little gesture.

"I'm not going to despair," she said bravely, with a kind of gulp and a tremor of her throat that set the diamonds streaming blue fire. "I think things will come all right. I've had a kind of a--kind of sign. Shall I tell you?"--timidly.

I'm foolishly impulsive, and I kissed her hand. After all, the dog does it.

"Listen, then! Thursday week"--I started, but she didn't notice it--"Thursday week I was feeling simply _awful_ all day. I can't explain it. Imagine some one you love is being tried for something that means death--or more awful still, if it goes against him. It got worse and worse. I've never missed a night I was billed for, but I shouldn't have been able to go on as I was. Still, I went down to the theatre--just on chance, you know. It was half-past seven or quarter to eight. I had an hour, but I dressed early to be safe. Suddenly something seemed to say inside of me, 'Now! now! down on your knees, quick. This is the dangerous time.' My dresser had gone out. I locked the door, and fell on my knees in a kind of faint. I prayed, and prayed as well as I could. I don't remember much what. I think I asked God, if Paul was never, never to be happy again, to take him the best way to some place where nothing could hurt him any more, and where he would see me and know what I was feeling for him. And then, Mr. Prentice--and then----Oh! it was wonderful. Something all warm and comfortable, like--oh! like _cloves_--why do you laugh? I'm trying to tell you the best way I can--seemed to come round my heart. I got up from my knees. It was eight-fifteen, and my dresser was banging on the door and asking if I was ill. I opened it and hugged her. She must have thought me crazy. All the sadness was gone--every bit. I knew they'd done trying him, and he--and he----" She struggled with her emotion, and, then, covering her face with her hands, rocked backward and forward, moaning and sobbing--"he's Not Guilty. No! my love's Not Guilty."

There was a knock at the door. She turned her head quickly into the shadow.

"Come in!"

"It's Sir Bryan, madam."

"Tell him to wait in the dining-room.... Now, Mr. Prentice, we must try again. What are the best papers to advertise in? Papers that--that quite poor people read most?"

I gave two or three an unsolicited testimonial.

"Write your address--your private address--on this card. I'll put an advert."--she said it this way--"in three for a year. Just your initial. The moment you hear, telegraph--no, telephone me! I'll say you're to be always given my address. I don't go to New York for nearly a year. Good-bye. I'll send you something for your paper to-night."

I did not see the sporting baronet, but I smelt his cigar in the hall, and I saw his damned motor-car outside the door. And as I walked out of the little square, I wondered whether perhaps it wouldn't be to every one's advantage, and his own, if Paul Ingram should never be heard of on this earth again.

V

A VERY VULGAR CHAPTER

"Ingram, Paul. Will Paul Ingram communicate at once with 'P.,' 15,
Darlaston Crescent? The matter is urgent, and concerns the future
happiness of another."

Some day, when Paul Ingram is already a legend, the dipper into musty records who stumbles upon this heartrending appeal in issue after issue will imagine he has made a rare find. Always supposing another eventuality, which I sometimes seem to foresee, has not supervened, and that a reformed society, for security's sake, and as an earnest of its reformation, does not make a bonfire once for all of the records of its past depravity and madness.

Nothing, to me, affords fruit for such sad thought as to see unworldly folk taking advantage of the machinery of a world that is organized to crush them and their like out of existence. That Oxford graduate who seeks "congenial employment as amanuensis or secretary," the gentlewoman "thrown suddenly upon her own resources through financial loss" who is anxious for a post as nursery governess, as companion, as anything that will allay the fright and loneliness at her heart--("fond of children," she adds. Poor soul, one sees her casting a wistful glance into passing perambulators.) Do not the very compositors, I wonder, laugh as they set up such type? I was sorry indeed for that "other" whose happiness depended upon Ingram's resurrection.

Meantime I had given my word, and I was not idle. Every good journalist is a bit of a detective at heart, and I discovered a mournful zest in following Paul's calvary, step by step, from one lodging to another. Everywhere I found help and sympathy, and conceived a new regard for the maligned race of landladies. (Mrs. McNaughten, of course, is _hors concours_.)