Chapter I: SAID I would tell you the story of Adeline. You remember that she saw (1)

Orion fling himself out of the window.

Her story is in two parts. You will wonder how it is that I know both sides. It is because I met James Pray and got to know him very well soon after his wife died. He put Betty to boarding-school, let the cottage furnished, came back to London, and lived in the Inn until he married again.

His second wife is an artist too--a very sensible, capable woman--with mediocre pictures on the line and accounts of her artistic At Homes in the leading fashion papers. She keeps Pray well in hand. He is a successful portrait painter--of the third-rate sort. They live in Kensington. I go to see them sometimes.

When first he came to the Inn he used to talk to me incessantly of Adeline. Oddly enough, it was Murphy’s old set he took. He talked to me about Adeline. I used to listen--with my tongue in my cheek. Sometimes it really seemed a little uncanny, and I had half a mind to tell him everything, and so quiet him. But Adeline, poor dead girl, was always begging me not to. He was forever asking--why, why? I could have told him. The very room could have told him. We sat and smoked and drank and talked--at least he talked--in that paneled room which some former fool had grained to imitate maple. The ghosts of Murphy and of Adeline--a guilty pair--seemed to glide between us and stand shadowy in the clouds of tobacco as poor Pray asked--why?

The very wood on the walls could have told him, the very oak, that black, discreet door which holds so much, was pregnant with an answer to that mournful query of his--why, why?

He talked of Adeline. He painted a nervous, evanescent creature, full of moods and always plaintively tender. It was not the Adeline I remembered. She had been fine, full, and strong, with steady gray eyes and skin of ivory, all health and life and fun and witchery and wicked daring. Though I never saw so very much of her. She was a lady, you understand; Murphy usually sported his oak when she came. He only asked me once to dinner, and I thought her most charming.

* * * * *

“PRAY.--Adeline, wife of James Pray.”

“If anything should happen, if I should die first,” she said--“and you needn’t frown, because one of us must be first--you’ll put that in the paper.”

She spoke dreamily, staring in front of her at the driving rain and the dripping trees.

“Rubbish!” Pray said briefly.

“Of course. To announce one’s death, or birth, or marriage in the paper is to avow one’s self commonplace--to brand one’s self commonplace through all eternity, the eternity of the penny press.”

She laughed and added wistfully:

“I’d love to be commonplace, just for once. It wouldn’t go against your convictions to let me be commonplace when I was dead. If one does die! I shall come back every spring. When everything is bursting with life, how could I be expected to lie still? Ah! I wish you were not so uncomfortably original. I’d like to be like other people.”

“Other people being--the majority, that is----”

“Fools! Yes, I know. I agree. I’m a good wife. I take my color from my husband. But I do not think you sufficiently appreciate the tremendous importance of fools. They rule the world, with a very few exceptions. There is one born every minute. Think of that! And yet you ignore this vast army. It is created for the comfort, the convenience of the occasional wise man. But you are not wise. You do nothing for the fool. You won’t even paint pictures for him to hang on his wall; that is why we are so hard up. The fool does not want your mystic, impressionist pictures; they worry and irritate him. Never mind. Be sure you put it in the paper--Adeline, wife of James Pray.”

“Jump up from the grass,” he cried sharply--the sharpness with which husbands of some years’ standing veil concern--“and don’t talk nonsense. You’ll take cold.”

“Pooh! What is health to a new spring gown? That sounds like a patent-medicine query--inverted,” she said idly.

They had been to the river to gather flowering rushes, and had been caught in a shower. It was a wet summer, one of those years when you hear the continual soft rushing of rain and when the plants in the garden go to luxuriant leaf. She sat under the tree. She had taken off her hat and was holding it carefully in her lap. She had pulled the skirt of her gown over her bodice and held it, lining outward, round her head and shoulders. Her knees were drawn to her chin, and her chin rested in the scooped hollows of her hands.

“These queer colors that you like run dreadfully,” she complained.

“Why did you wear a new dress on a threatening afternoon?”

“Because it is Bank Holiday. I have an ineradicable Bank Holiday instinct for new clothes and an outing. This dress will be spoiled. I’d like a navy-blue serge coat and skirt--you’d never permit it. Blue serge--especially when it is touched up with cardinal--sounds so safe, so sane; it seems to shout of all the good, thrifty, respectable women who do their duty. Blue serge and a sailor hat!”

James Pray looked down at her tenderly and yet with a masculine intolerance of her nonsense.

How is it that I know so much--the very details of their looks and words? In after days--when Adeline and Murphy were dead--Pray used to talk of her by the hour, and bore me to death.

He looked down at her. His first painful impression was that she had grown very thin; he had not noticed it before. However, this impression passed, and he watched her with the ardent eye of an artist. Her gray eyes stared out troublously, vaguely, from the shelter of the great elm, at the heavy rain falling in the open. He loved her intensely. I expect he loved her more, in his steady, level-headed way, than she loved him. He never talked about it; these women with so many words of love are very often only words.

She must have been very tiresome, judging from what he told me. She was always fondling him; a man gets sick of that. He said that she seemed to have a sort of agonized remorse in her tenderness. I could have explained.

Suddenly the rain stopped, and a bar of yellow broke the slaty sky.

“Come on,” he said; “never mind the rushes.”

“But I do mind.” She picked up the bundle, with its wide, delicate flowers and sword-like leaves, and carried it against her breast, making the front of her bodice dark with moisture.

As they went along in the watery sun she shivered.

“You’ve caught cold. I----”

“Told me so. I haven’t caught cold. But I have saved from utter ruin the gown which took you some pains to design.”

Then she added, catching his loose hand in hers:

“I only _say_ stupid things. I get a little tired of being different, that is all; no doubt other people get just as tired of being the same.”

They were in sight of their cottage gate. Three-year-old Betty, their only child, was hanging over it, hauling a kitten round the middle. Adeline pulled up in the shadow of the irregular hazel hedge.

“You promise?”

Her eyes were half mirthful, half tragic.

“Promise what?”

“How men forget! To--put it in the paper.”

He turned on her angrily.

“This is unlike you--even you. This is too ridiculously, wickedly morbid.”

“Isn’t it? But--but you promise just the same.”

“Yes, anything--if you’ll go up at once and change your shoes,” he returned a little moodily, and kissing her with habitual carelessness on the hot lips she held up.

She ran through the gate. He heard her humming lightly as she went upstairs. He picked up baby Betty with a sigh, and swung her on his back, feeling grateful that she at least had no complex emotions. A sugar-stick would bare her little simple soul.

* * * * *

A week later Adeline died. The cold she caught under the elms developed into pneumonia. She was a creature all nerves and no muscle. _I_ know that her conscience killed her. She was dead. Dead in the June days, which had suddenly turned hot and yellow. Dead! lying rigid under the brooding thatch eaves where the birds built. Lying cold and unresponsive to birds, flowers, sun, love--all the things which had moved her to hot, mournful passion. Almost her last words were, “Life has been lovely, lovely.” Then with a little haunting flicker of anxiety, memory, and fear on that face which already seemed to belong to some other world, she added faintly, “You’ll put it in the paper?”

James Pray, broken-hearted, sent off the notice. It had been only a freak, of course; one of the whimsical, morbid ideas which she had in such plenty. But it was sacred. It was such a hideously little while since the afternoon under the elms. She had looked so haggardly beautiful. He remembered everything--down to a green caterpillar which crawled on her hair.

Next day he walked into the village and bought a copy of the newspaper, and brought it home and spread it out on the oak table in front of him.

“I wonder why?” he said, in a voice choked by tenderness, and then he went up to her.

Their bedroom, like the rest of the cottage, spoke of the persistent struggle for individuality. The bed was a tent, with curtains and canopy of brown and white; old chintz the color of coffee which is three parts milk. There was a patchwork quilt. She had made it from sentiment, not industry. There was the shine of oak and the twinkle of metal about the furniture. The chairs had rush seats, and had been collected, one by one, from other cottages.

He sat down and looked at the figure which was stretched so quietly under the canopy of sad brown. I try to picture him as he sat in that room with his unconventional clothes--you know the sort of thing, velvet coat, baggy knickerbockers, and streaming ends of a vivid necktie--and rugged, simple face; he might have been a man of a hundred years back. He could have had no place in this whirling, struggling nineteenth century, this common age.

The cuckoo was calling, with a voice much the worse for wear, “Cuckoo. Cuckoo. Cuck-cuck-cuckoo, cuckoo, cuck. Cuck.” He groaned, remembering that she would never hear a word against the cuckoo--that genus of birds who scorned dull routine and domesticity. She used to add a bit mournfully, with one of those fierce sudden kisses which had bothered him so at the time, and which he would have given all his art for now, that a cuckoo sort of woman would have suited him. She filled the world--this dead, perplexing Adeline of his. Would he ever be able to touch or hear, or speak, or see without that tender, pensive ghost at his side!

He looked about him as the cuckoo called. The room was dear, so dear, from the days when Betty, a funny, bald baby, had kicked and gurgled in that queer oak cradle beside the bed. They had made the child participate in their eccentricities from the very start. She never had a perambulator, her dolly was a grotesque, home-made one, her clothes were made from mediæval designs.

Dear! with so many common, precious details. How many mornings had _she_ sat before that shield-shaped glass, and wound the silk of her long, pale hair about her head! That little drawer on the left was sacred to her ribbons--an end of rose was hanging out.

And then he looked at her, going close to the bed and stooping as if to caress her. But the dead face tantalized him. The eternal, remorseful tenderness was strong on her lips of steel. There had always been a sprig of rue in her love. Why? that maddening why--never to be answered. There had been a locked chamber in her heart.

He turned away, not even kissing her brow. This still, white woman on the bed was not his. He and this soulless face were strangers. He felt her more in the never-ceasing call of the bird, in tall heads of lilies in the garden, and ephemeral patches of Shirley poppies which she had sown in March, in Betty’s ringing shout as she darted like a hummingbird across the grass.

The room became suddenly hateful; every corner, every picture on the wall was a pang. Her gown--the delicate gown she had given her life for--hung fresh on the nail. It seemed mutely to hold her shape: in the sleeves, the folds across the bosom, the short, round waist.

The sight of it was more than he could bear. She had been so clever, so daring, so different. Clever, not in a positive, productive way,--stupid women could produce,--but she had thrown her capacity about with royal lavishness; putting it into everything she did, if it were only a pudding, or a new border in the garden.

He had sweepingly deemed nearly every other woman a fool. Yet she had simply died for her finery. You couldn’t have a meaner, a more frivolous end. She was only Eve, like all the rest, treasuring her apron of fig leaves. He blamed the inanimate thing of lace and soft wool for everything. He dragged it off the nail and trampled on it.

He went into the garden, at the piteous request of Betty, and played ball. She had on a pink frock, the color of the ragged robins that bloomed in the wood. He would on no account tolerate mourning, but the pitying country woman who was their servant had tied a black ribbon on the child’s flaxen head.

Adeline had made that frock. Adeline had ferreted out the stuff at the village shop and carried it home in triumph, knowing he would be pleased. Adeline! Adeline! He seemed to see her fleet white fingers moving along the seams.

They played ball until bedtime. He sat beside the cot in the dusk, a lonely, bereft man, until the little one, who was mystified and tearful, fell asleep. When he went downstairs the paper was still spread out stiffly on the oak table. He picked it up and read again--the one paragraph on the whole sheet.

“Adeline, wife of James Pray.”

* * * * *

That very night Murphy and I and Carrie Dark were dining in his rooms--that set which had known Adeline, which later on was to know James Pray.

Carrie was sixteen, a little girl in a sweet shop--one of those shops where they put nothing but billows of silk and fondants in the window.

Murphy was middle-aged--with a wide margin. I should have said fifty-five, but he only owned up to forty. That was one of his contemptible tricks; he was just like a woman. The things we love and look for in a woman are contemptible in a man. He was what I should call a pretty chap--all regular features, pink cheeks, and pouting lip. Men disliked him, but he was a tremendous favorite with women. His influence over them was quite uncanny.

Carrie was nervous; she had never been in an Inn before. She evidently considered Murphy, with his stale stories of the aristocracy and his brag about his elder brother’s place in Kerry, very magnificent. She wasn’t a country girl, you see, and consequently lacked the rustic stolidity which sometimes passes for dignity. She caught up the newspaper while she waited for her fish, and when she saw the notice of Adeline’s death she gave a youthful giggle.

“I shouldn’t like to go through life with a name like that,” she said derisively, with a not over-clean forefinger on that short word PRAY.

Murphy was pouring sherry into her glass. The waiter--we had ordered the dinner from across the way--came in.

“Like what?” asked Murphy, smiling at her paternally.

“Pray!” She tossed her head and giggled again, and then she read the notice aloud.

You should have seen Murphy’s face! A strange silence like a pall settled over the table; to me the news seemed to creep round those silent walls which had reflected Adeline’s shadow so often. It was the effect of Murphy’s frozen expression.

But a man cannot live with a dead woman, especially when she belonged to someone else. I touched Carrie’s foot under the table. She was too young and pretty for a fossil like Murphy. He had snatched the paper from her and was reading the notice for himself.

“Who was she?” demanded the girl, with the freedom of her class toward a chance admirer.

“A lady I knew,” Murphy told her curtly.

Carrie flushed. She resented the word--in these days of universal ladyhood. She was affronted. She was wishing that she had gone straight home from the shop to Battersea as usual, instead of being taken in Murphy’s toils at the corner of the Circus. Her round, childish face grew sulky. The evening was quite spoiled by this stupid dead woman.

Murphy began to eat savagely, talking to me in a jerky way as he did so.

“Dead!” he said in a dazed way, with his jaws working nervously as he swallowed some bread. “Why, she was quite a young woman; she couldn’t have been thirty----”

“Thirty!” echoed Carrie, in a scornful undertone.

“We dined here, five years ago--you were of the party. We cooked the dinner ourselves; she thought it such fun. The soup was salt--you must remember.”

His voice was so anxious that I said soothingly, “Of course I do.”

“What a handsome girl she was!” he continued with sad enthusiasm. “It was the night of the Duke of York’s wedding.”

“The Duke of York’s wedding?” cried irrepressible Carrie. “That is ever so long ago. We had a holiday from school. My mother went to see the illuminations and got her pocket picked.”

She looked at Murphy with a new expression. He had been doing exactly the same thing five years before--only the girl was different. He must be quite old. She had not thought of that before. She had only considered that he was a gentleman. She felt depressed by the antique flavor of her company. I could see that she was thinking fervently that in future she would go straight back to Battersea.

“We were a jolly party,” Murphy went on. “What a row Elizabeth made next day!”

“Elizabeth?”

“Married sister. Lived in Colville Gardens. Husband a parson--but a decent fellow. I used to visit them--of course they did not suspect--Adeline was clever, but she got found out like all the clever ones. There was a deuce of a row. Soon after she married Pray. Neither of them had a penny. Went and starved in the country. I could not have married her. It was out of the question altogether. She did not expect it. How fond she was of me!” He smiled, more with vanity than regret.

“You couldn’t marry her, of course,” I echoed, just for the sake of saying something. “She wouldn’t expect it.”

“She said that when she died she’d let me know,” Murphy went on, looking a little scared. He was superstitious, like all Irishmen. “It was in Colville Square, the night before her wedding. She crept out after dinner. I can see her now in her light gown with her big arms bare to the elbow and a thin chain round her neck. I remember that we stayed out a long time, walking round and round the railings. It was so late that I couldn’t get a cab back to the Inn and had to walk all the way. She looked so queer. She said she’d----”

“Haunt you,” I finished, sick of his maunderings. “Well, she made sure of poor Pray. I’m sorry for that fellow. He put in the notice, of course--for you to see. She did the most that was possible in these practical days.”

He did not seem to hear me.

“Dead!” he went on, in a monologue sort of way, while Carrie, her fork halfway to her mouth and her elbows on the table, stared at him scornfully. “Her eyes! Gray, Irish eyes. She was an Irish girl--the Mahoneys of Roscommon. You remember the dinner? She sat where you are now--facing the cupboard.”

A long, clear note came from the set over the way, with the gay rattle of piano keys beneath quick fingers.

“How well that girl of Martin’s sings!” I said irrelevantly.

“I saw her once afterward. She was with her husband; it _must_ have been Pray, a long-faced, badly dressed chap. I was with Bob Piety, at the Aquarium. I suppose they had come up from the country, determined on amusement; married people have their moments of _ennui._ They looked out of place. Adeline was so changed that I was not sure of her. Her good looks were gone and her mouth was harsh. She looked at me; I looked at her. I turned to Bob and said in a loud voice:

“‘Auntie!’

“That used to be my pet name for her. She turned to her husband and returned very clearly:

“‘Yes.’

“That was all. We both made our explanations--I to Bob, she to her husband. I didn’t see her again that evening; I’ve never seen her since. Dead!”

He got up hurriedly and looked round for his hat.

“See after her,” he said huskily, jerking his head toward pretty Carrie, “I can’t--to-night. Take her to a music hall--anything.”

He went away abruptly, leaving me a fair field. He was bent as he walked. He looked too old for the Inn; we don’t want graybeards.

“What’s up with him?” demanded Carrie.

“Liver. Have some more champagne?”

I caught up the bottle.

“No, thanks.” She snatched her glass away and the wine slobbered out on the cloth.

“Who was she?” she persisted. “I don’t care a brass farthing. She’d be as old as the hills, if she was alive. But--who was she?”

“A lady that he knew years ago.”

“Lady!” sneered Carrie, spitefully, with a nasty, upward curl of her ripe lip. “Why, she was the same as me--he said so.”

“She was a woman, my dear; that’s all. Have you really finished? Then where shall we go?”

She put on her hat in a hurry and cast decisively for a popular contortionist at one of the halls--I think it was the Royal.

“They say he twists himself about something awful,” she added, with a little grimace and a gleeful shudder.

We clattered down the stairs. The oak thudded heavily behind our quick feet, as if it had regrets for Adeline.

JIMMY.

HIS full name was James Adolphus Carol, but everyone called him just Jimmy. He was Jimmy to all of us in the Inn; Jimmy to the music-hall managers and music-hall artistes.

He was a little spindle-shanked fellow, like a jockey, but a bit too gentlemanly. He had bulging, gray-blue eyes and a sunken, heavily freckled face. His top hat was always very sleek and a little on one side, but the rest of his dress fell short of perfect finish. I’ve seen him with his shoe tied up with string and his collar pinned together in front because he’d lost his last stud.

He was dreadfully hard up, but that is nothing. We resent a prosperous fellow. I don’t fancy he ever had any regular meals. Men stood him drinks, and he had a trick of turning up at your rooms about midnight, talking brilliantly and wildly for about half an hour, and then saying carelessly, “Have you got any bread and butter knocking about, old man?” Fellows who didn’t know him very well would suggest a square meal--a chop, or a sausage and mashed at Mimm’s, just outside the gates--then Jimmy would be affronted.

He was always being dunned and pretended that he liked it. Perhaps he really did. He was full of schemes for evading duns. He was an authority on judgment-summonses, pawnshops, shooting the moon, and obtaining credit. He would hold forth eloquently on the delights of being dunned. I forget the particular points he made, but they were very forcible--coming from him.

He used to borrow unblushingly, but his gift in that way was restricted--very few of us had any money to lend.

He had the finest private collection of pawn-tickets that I ever saw. His pockets were full of them. I remembered that he once went to a swell party--some musical affair. He was very polite, very strict on questions of etiquette. The day after the party he made the usual formal call at the house--it was some big place near Sloane Street. His hat was very sleek, he had a frock coat, a flower in his button-hole--everything complete. He handed his card to the footman, and as he did so a couple of pawn-tickets fluttered gently to the door-mat. The flunkey stooped, picked them up, and handed them gracefully back to Jimmy--who took them with equal grace. He told me the whole performance was superb--in perfect style. It was done without a word, without a smile. They did not dare look at each other.

Jimmy’s rooms were untidy and his style of housekeeping not to be commended. He never kept a laundress for very long--because he never paid her. Yet the women loved him and worked for nothing so long as they could. He used to chaff them lightly, explain the state of his exchequer. He took a personal interest in their family life. They told him their troubles; drunken husbands, big families, pugnacious lodgers on the next landing, the hard heart of the landlords when they came upstairs with their black books for the weekly rent.

When Mrs. Morey was ill Jimmy went down Green Street to see her, with a couple of French novels--translations--under his arm. She had a gathering on her ankle which she showed him with pride, in spite of his courteous protest, but she declined the offer of the novels.

“You’re very kind, sir,” she said. “But I don’t suppose as your books ’ud suit me. I was brought up very particular. I like something good--the Bible or the Common Prayer or the Sunday newspaper. I makes my ’usband read ‘When the wicked man turneth,’ in the ’opes it ’ll be a lesson to ’im. No, there’s nothin’ as the doctor’s ordered, thank you, sir--except to keep my strength up.”

She took Jimmy’s last sixpence gratefully, and asked him to stop and share the half-quartern of gin which her youngest little girl but three ran to the public house to fetch. Very likely he stayed; it would have been just like him. He was a crank. Fancy a man offering Paul de Kock and Flaubert to an Inn of Court laundress! He paid for the gin, but he lightly ignored the two months’ money he owed her, and she never reminded him.

His sitting room was full of books, on open shelves and thick with dust. They were the admiration of Mrs. Morey.

“I thought Mr. Slobkins ’ad a lot,” she said, “’im as I worked for in Furnival’s. ’E’s a magistrate or a clerk or somethin’ o’ that sort, yer see. But, lor, this lot bangs ’is.”

Stanch Mrs. Morey! She was a little roly-poly kind of woman, with eyes like ripe sloes, and she worked for Jimmy for six months without ever receiving a penny.

“My ’usband ’ud kill me if ’e knowed,” she said, smiling plaintively as she scrubbed the boards. “’E’s bin out o’ work for nearly a year. It’s hard work for me to fill the kids’ mouths and keep ’im in grub and pocket money. But ’e’s a good ’usband when ’e aint drunk. I wish ’e ’ad more luck, that’s all.”

“What is his trade?” asked Jimmy languidly--he was always languid until the gas lamps were lighted.

The little woman tossed her head.

“My ’usband aint _that_ sort, jest able to do one kind o’ work. ’E can turn ’is ’and to anythin’. But I wish ’e wasn’t quite so partikler.”

She came to me privately when Jimmy’s health began to break. She said that he didn’t eat enough to keep a sparrow alive, that it worried her awful, that she feared he was going off in a galloping decline.

“It’s jest the way my niece’s ’usband was took,” she concluded. “’E used to drive a vegetable cart, and ’e’s layin’ in the Brompton Simmetery. As nice a young man as ever you see, and played the flute bootiful. ’E was took bad in May and dead in December. He was indeed, and ’er with six little children--all babies, as you might say, and another on the road--if you’ll excuse my free way of speakin’. My niece she’s got the flute under a glass case in the parlor window, for the mountings is silver.”

But Jimmy was too far gone for my care, or anyone else’s. No doubt he had been consumptive for years, and a constitution kept up principally on “nipping” never thrives. There was a doctor living in the Inn at the time--a very good fellow. He visited him and gave him medicine--don’t believe Jimmy ever took it. His cough got gradually worse and his face fell in more than ever. But he was always full of jokes, rather grim jokes sometimes. I’ve seen girls shiver and scream with laughter at the same time. He went to a music hall every night, spending most of his time at the bar. He called the artistes by their Christian names--Queenie this, or Dan the other. The Queenies gave him their full confidence. Big, flashy girls, these music-hall girls, with free, not over-clean tongues and very good hearts. They would frighten you, but they don’t mean any harm. Jimmy used to write songs for them--which they very seldom bought. He did both words and music. His airs were most melodious and “catchy,” but his words were never quite vulgar enough. None of his songs “caught on.”

I never knew a man with such a marvelous ear. If he went to a comic opera he would come straight home and play all the lyrics without a false note. He played Chopin by ear; he used to sit for hours extemporizing the most weird, fascinating, tantalizing music. He ought to have made his fortune. Instead of that, he went into consumption and died--for want of proper food.

Now and again someone sent him a postal order. He never said who. He was a bit of a mystery. They were only small orders--under a pound, as if they had been scraped by some woman out of the housekeeping money, or her dress allowance. But I never knew. The last one he had was for fifteen shillings. He was on his last legs. The steward of the Inn, who was most forbearing--because it was Jimmy--had sent a deprecating note in to say that he must distrain if something, ever so little, was not paid on account of the year’s rent. Mrs. Morey had left him at last. Even his top hat was rough. Yet what do you think he did? Went out and bought a bath sponge for fifteen and six, promising to leave the sixpence next time he was passing.

I met him on the stairs and he displayed the sponge proudly.

“Only fifteen and six! Dirt cheap, isn’t it? It would be unpardonable extravagance to let a chance like that slip, wouldn’t it? And I wanted a bath sponge; the one I’ve got isn’t nearly big enough. Come up to my place. We’ll put it in water. Just you watch how it swells!”

You may say bluntly that he was a fool. Of course he was. But it is the fools and the failures who win our hearts.

We went up to his rooms. He put the sponge to swell and sat down to the piano and forgot all about it. I should like to hear Jimmy play music-hall songs again; nothing was ever so charming. He knew them all. He used to sing the refrains in a thin, shrill voice, accompanying in his own wonderful way. Everything he touched became classic.

A week after he bought the sponge Harrowsmith--he was the young doctor--ordered him out of London. Fortunately I made a haul about that time, so we went together to Farthings Farm, as I’ll tell you later on.

Farthings Farm was the last nail in Jimmy’s coffin. He never spent a more miserable month. He would be morose, half asleep all day. But at dusk, just when the theaters would be opening and the racket in the Strand at its flow, he’d be restless. All the sweet smells and sounds of the farm were a poor enough substitute. The country finished him. He was a pure Cockney. There is no half way with the Cockney; either he loves the country passionately, or he hates it and chafes at it until it kills him. Saints and criminals are made by the country; it depends on how you take it. We hadn’t been back ten days before he broke a blood vessel and kept his bed. What was to be done with him? _He_ never bothered. He believed in taking things easy. He had a favorite axiom about never putting up your umbrella until it rained--and ended by not having an umbrella at all! He just drifted. He was dying. He hadn’t a penny in the world; he was up to his eyes in small debts.

“Pack him off to the hospital,” advised Arnold rather brutally. “Poor devil! A fellow who earns a fiver and lives on it until it’s gone. I’ve no sympathy with that sort of thing. The hospital’s the place for him. I’ll pay the cab fare.”

However, the rest of us decided to club together and keep him going, first telling Arnold that he did the invalid an injustice; Jimmy had never earned a five-pound note, in a lump sum, in his life. Harrowsmith had told us privately that his case was quite hopeless. We could pull along somehow. Nutting, the steward, would wait a little longer for his rent; when Jimmy was gone the piano alone would pay that. One or other of us could look in; Mrs. Morey must be got back. The only difficulty was with Jimmy himself--he was so deuced proud.

A woman came to the rescue. Queenie La Belle was a regular brick. She bought up all his songs. Who but a woman would have thought of that? She’d come in, all sham diamonds and jolly voice, and sit down by his bed and tell him how well his songs were going at the halls. She said she was singing them at three nightly. She assured him that she was always encored. She begged him to take an extra ten pounds--the original price had been in shillings.

“You see, I’ve made that girl,” Jimmy would say when she had gone. “I knew those songs would just fit her. She wants more. Give me a bit of paper and pencil, old chap. I’ll dot down another. Why does Harrowsmith keep me tied by the leg like this? I mean to get up next week and toddle down to the halls and hear my songs encored. They give Queenie a middle turn now. They used to put her on at the end, to sing the audience out. I’m a made man. It’s just as well, with all the expenses of this illness. Are you going up Tottenham Court Road to-day? If so, look in and pay the fellow that sixpence owing on the sponge. I’ve never used it. Harrowsmith knocked me off my cold tub. You can’t mistake the shop. It’s nearly opposite Maple’s. I forget the name.”

He put on tremendous airs. He was, as he proudly said, a made man. When he got better he was going to write songs at fabulous prices for all the leading music-hall singers. But Queenie La Belle should have them at a reasonable figure. She wasn’t a bad sort. She ought to be grateful to him. He had made her. He kept his money under his pillow with his tobacco pouch and cigarette papers. He said seriously to me:

“If you’re a little short, old chap, there’s plenty of money in the bag. I’ve gone through the mill myself. I know what it is to come down to my last half-crown.”

He might truthfully have said his last copper. To please him I took five shillings.

Queenie came to see him regularly. He put the poor girl through a rigid cross-examination. Did the audience take up her two last lines, as he had intended? Were his songs on the barrel organs? The great ambition of his life had been to hear his songs on the barrel organs. But it was early days. It was just as well that they were not on yet. He wanted to hear them. Wanted to tip every grinder a bob. Queenie had to sing the songs to him; had to do the little kick at the end of each verse, pretend to throw the rose into the auditorium--that was Jimmy’s original trick.

“I’d like to come down and hear you to-night at the Royal,” he sighed--and Queenie looked horribly frightened, until I reassured her by a dismal shake of the head. “But Harrowsmith is so particular. He keeps me in bed. Of course that makes a man weak. There’s nothing in the world the matter with me but weakness, through want of exercise.”

Queenie put on her tremendous hat, all flyaway lace and wings. She stooped down and kissed him solemnly on his clammy forehead. I thought the big, jolly girl, with her coarse voice and frank tongue, an angel at that moment. Jimmy looked scared and annoyed--suspicious of this unusual gentleness.

She blubbered outside the bedroom door, growing purple in her efforts to choke her sobs lest he should hear.

“It’s all a lie,” she said passionately. “I’m only on at one hall--last turn on the programme. His song don’t fetch even a grin. I’m expecting the manager to bully me on pay day. People don’t understand ’em--I don’t myself. It’s a lie. I was hissed--hissed! And there’s him, poor dear, talking of writing for Guy Blockley and Ada Fitz Clare. Oh! it’s all right about the ten pounds, I can run to that. Don’t you fret.”

She colored, through her make-up--her daylight make-up, all careless smears of blue-white powder and burning smudges of red.

Nearly every night, after the halls and the public houses were shut, one or two fellows would drop into Jimmy’s room and give him the evening’s news. They sang snatches of new songs to him, mimicked bits of “business.” They retailed the popular comedian’s latest gag, the story that was going the round of the clubs, the smart conundrum on public affairs or people.

Jimmy used to join in weakly, drumming his claw-like fingers on the quilt. He talked of music-hall people of to-day; of five years ago; of men who had been lions and were content to take obscure turns in the provinces now, or who had gone in for the dramatic-agent business.

They all ran off his glib tongue; the Sisters That, the Brothers So and So, the Something Troupe. He laughed at old wheezes, which had never lost their flavor for him. He spoke of this man’s pet mannerisms and that girl’s particular smile.

He used to say:

“Do you remember Joe Slashby’s trick with the pair of spectacles? That was killing,” or, “What’s become of the Manasteriotti girl? Never saw a woman juggle so well.”

And he always condemned everyone else’s songs. He said it pained him to see the rot, the arrant, foolish drivel that went down with a music-hall audience. But he was going to alter all that. The public only wanted educating. The public knew a good thing when it heard it. That was proved by the success of his songs. How had his songs gone this evening? Queenie was a good sort, but he was a little nervous of her, afraid she didn’t quite do him justice. He added that she had treated him rather meanly; ten pounds was a poor price with which to buy success. She must be getting twenty pounds a week at the lowest. Three halls at twenty each. That would be sixty. He must speak to her.

Success had not improved Jimmy. He was going the way of all successes. He actually spoke of starting a banking account when he got better, of giving a big order to his tailor. He probably would have decided on a house at Brixton and a brougham, if he had lived long enough. But--before he had time to tax Queenie over money matters--the end came.

It was Saturday. Harrowsmith looked in about noon. He told me that Jimmy wouldn’t last another twenty-four hours. I went back to the bedroom and broke it. He was lying on his side, turning off another song. He took it very calmly, only hoping that he’d be able to get that third line in the second verse right before he went. It was very weak.

Schultz, the great German composer, died the day before; it had been in the morning papers. Jimmy said composedly, when I mentioned it:

“There’s another of us gone. Lucky devil!”

He added a little rebelliously:

“It’s rather rough to have to hand in your checks just when you’ve ‘arrived.’ I hope I shan’t be so long about it as the woman at Farthings Farm was. Queer old girl! You’ll make Harrowsmith send in his bill and pay up any little thing I owe. Get the money out of Queenie. That girl’s been a bit shabby. And just roll me a cigarette--there’s enough baccy in the pouch--and leave me alone to worry out this third line.”

He was lying at the back; Orion, if you remember, had his bedroom in the front, but Jimmy had turned that into a bathroom.

All the Saturday night bubble of the streets came up into the little paneled room where he was dying. He liked it; asked me to open the window, so that he could hear the hoarse voices of the costers and the banter of the women. He liked the rattle of ’buses, the cries, the calls--all the feverish, struggling life.

One by one the fellows dropped in as usual. He begged them not to put on such deathbed faces. How had his songs gone? He was afraid that he wouldn’t see Queenie any more. The fellows stayed; he begged them to. I’d asked him if he had any friends that he would like me to send for, and he returned airily that he hadn’t a relative in the world. His face never flinched when he said it.

The night went on, and the room, although the month was August, got chilly. The sounds of the market died down, the omnibuses left off running, so did the trams; there was only a dying trundle of hansoms over the stones. Then all at once came a ringing howl from some slum at the back. They have pulled them nearly all down now. All the narrow courts I used to know, the tiny general shops, the row of almshouses, the big boiled-beef shop at the corner--gone. Residential flats are in their place and big shops with sky signs.

It was some Saturday-night row. It came in plainly through the open window. Jimmy opened his eyes and listened with zest.

You won’t understand the grim sentiment of those slum rows. They are simply part of the Saturday night’s programme--when the man gets his week’s money and the woman goes out shopping and they both are blind drunk by midnight. Simply part of Saturday night--that is all. It does not affect their relations for the rest of the week. The language they use to each other is awful--but what are words? We place too great a stress on mere words.

Jimmy roused up a little, and grinned feebly.

“Shouldn’t wonder if it’s Mrs. Morey,” he said.

We sat and listened to the woman’s shrill, passionate invective--to adjectives which were foreign even to us. We heard the husband’s low, deprecating growl, and, after a little, the protesting bass of the policeman. The woman was infuriated at the interruption.

“Has anybody complained?” she yelled, going up half an octave at each word. “Well! Well! Everybody ’as their rows, don’t they? Move on yourself. Oh! you _brute!_”

Then we heard a scuffle, more words, a torrent of tears and abuse.

But it was all quiet at last; the short spell of silence between the last cab and the venders of Sunday papers.

_“Referee!” “Lloyd’s!” “Weekly Dispatch!”_

The men went bawling along the pavements beneath. Jimmy, who had collapsed after the row, opened his eyes again.

“Give me a whisky,” he said. “Fill up. I’ll say when.”

As I was pouring the water, and waiting for him to stop me, he murmured enthusiastically:

“How good Dot and Lottie Mack were in that laughing duet. Lottie married an earl. I wonder what became of Dot.”

When I took the tumbler and whisky and water to the side of the bed, he was dead.

We fetched Mrs. Morey to lay him out. She was ghoulishly curious about the funeral, and kept me half an hour while she told me about her father’s.

“’E belonged to a club, don’t yer see, and when ’e died there was twenty pound. My Bill wanted to blow it. But I ses no. It was ’is and ’e should ’av it. We ’ad mourning coaches to fetch all the people from their own doors. There was mutes--yer don’t often see them now--and weepers, and feathers in the ’orses’ ’eads. An’ yer should ’a’ seen the tea we set down to when we come ’ome from the funeral! We ’ad thin bread and butter, and winkles and three sorts of cake. I felt so mad with Bill. ’E goes and clouts my little Jim’s ’ead, jest because the innercent child said as ’e wished grandfathers ’ud die every day, so as we might ’ave sich a bustin’ tea. It was only natural in the child. Rose Adkins--she’s my brother’s wife--took Bill’s part. I didn’t forgit it neither. A nice one to talk, _she_ wur! We was ’avin’ a few words, months after, and I ses to ’er:

“‘You ’ussy! ’Ow dare you talk to me?’ I ses. ‘’Ow many slices of thin bread and butter did you eat at my poor father’s funeral tea? I saw you take ten with my own eyes.’ _That_ fetched ’er. ‘Be off,’ I ses, ‘and don’t ever show yer brazen face in my door agen.’”

* * * * *

Well, we buried Jimmy. I rode with him, in a dreadful conveyance they call a Shillibeer, to Finchley. When I went back to the Inn and began to square up his affairs, the water bed was missing. We had clubbed together and hired that water bed for him before Queenie’s deception. I heard long afterward that Mrs. Morey had pawned it at the pawnbroker’s at the corner of Green Street. No doubt Bill, for once, was too strong for her.

About two months afterward there was a faint tap at my door one night. When I opened it I saw a woman standing outside. How shall I describe her?

She wasn’t young--your age, if you’ll forgive me, thirty or so--but there was a youthfulness and freshness about her which you seldom see in a girl out of her teens. She wasn’t pretty, not a bit. She didn’t even look clever. Yet I’ve never seen a more fascinating, a more delightful woman. She was a little like Adeline, only not half so handsome, and there was not the mark of knowledge on her face. She said firmly, “Does Mr. James Carol live here?”

Her voice was calm, but it was only the calmness of perfect breeding. There was none of a sister’s cold, lily-like air about her--no tepid, anxious touch of family concern. Jimmy had been her world.

She was a lady, using the word in its old dignified, graceful sense, without modern abuse, without that vulgar, exasperating “i” which degrades it into “laidy.”

“I’m sorry to say that Jimmy--Mr. Carol--is dead.”

She didn’t wait for me to say any more. She dropped at my feet on the dirty boards of the landing; dropped without a cry, without a contortion of her charming, pure face.

I got her round as well as I could. While I was fanning her with a doubled-up newspaper and trying to force brandy down her throat, I noticed the subtle refinements of her dress. And there was a haunting memory in that face. I thought that I must have seen it before, until I remembered Farthings Farm and the old woman who tended Mrs. Covey. I remembered, too, Jimmy’s flicker of animation when he had seen that woman--and I understood. There was the same peculiar, fascinating sweetness of expression; an expression which would lure you to any madness at the start and cloy you to death long before the finish.

I got her round. She went away, with beautifully expressed thanks--and not a flutter of her eyelids.

That is all. The key to Jimmy’s love affair--if he had one--lies with him at Finchley.

GAME FEATHERS.

JIMMY and I once spent a month in the country together. The doctor had ordered him fresh air and good diet. We went to Farthings Farm in Sussex and boarded with old Mrs. Covey. She was an extraordinary character--narrowly religious, as these half-educated rustics so often are. You could see hell fire in the hard lines of her mouth and the cunning screw of her little gray eyes. Yet she wasn’t a bad sort. Her pious cant was amusing and quite harmless. She talked seriously to Jimmy, knowing, as she must have done, that he had not long to live. She used to say, with a half-groaning, half-chuckling sort of breath:

“Ah! sir, I believe in the sacrifice in _this_ world.”

Jimmy returned, very politely--he was always polite:

“I’m afraid I don’t quite gather your meaning.”

Mrs. Covey would look at him despairingly, raise her eyes to the ceiling, shake her head, and ejaculate a long, solemn “Ah--ah!” which was very convincing.

She was up at daybreak every morning; we used to hear her scolding and swilling or throwing a pet word to her cats--she had five. But on Sundays she used to lie very late--until half-past seven. She took a bath--as a pious duty. When breakfast was over, she sat in the living room, with the big Bible in front of her and her spectacles on the open page, until it was time to go to chapel. She drove there regularly every Sunday. It was a rich sight to see her with her two sons, in the shabby wagonette, sitting bolt upright in widow’s weeds, with black kid gloves, purple in the palms and much too long in the fingers. Sunday was a day of days. We fed on cold meat and salad; it was the one day on which she refused to sell milk or to spud about in her garden. In the afternoon she would walk solemnly through her meadows, never speculating on the crops or allowing her sons to do so, but holding up her black silk skirt carefully, and drawing her sour Sabbath lip.

She was very kind to Jimmy--taking good care of his body, although she despaired of his soul. In her young days she had been a cook, and she tempted his flagging appetite with many dainties. There was one particular dish of candied red currants.

If anyone called on her--say, between three and half-past--for milk, for advice about a sick baby, for herbal treatment of a wound, or for the simple loan of a black crock, Jib or Zak would be lurching at the house door. They were grotesquely alike, those sons of hers, with the Biblical names of Jabez and Zachary. She always called them Jib and Zak on week days; Jabez and Zachary on Sundays. They had an odd way of greeting you. They gave a nod--half sheepish, half jovial--or they raised a broad, dingy thumb to a sun-baked straw hat, according to their mood or the social status of the visitor.

Their answer to all inquiries was:

“Mother ’ull be down directly. Would you care to step inside out o’ the sun and set down, till you hear her draw up the clock?”

That was her rule. For forty years, except when stopped by trivialities--such as a confinement--she had drawn up the thirty-hour clock the moment before she came down from her afternoon’s cleaning.

That afternoon black dress, with jet buttons! I remember the tiny, shiny silk apron, with the bead edging and the prim pockets. She never put in her false teeth until the afternoon, nor pinned on her false hair, which was three shades too light. In the mornings she slipped about the kitchen and dairy in an old skirt, a nondescript bodice, and a shawl--thick or thin, according to the direction of the wind.