Chapter I: HAVE told you about Kinsman--his china and oak, his flirtations--never (1)

from the heart--his downfall and sorry end.

Poor Kinsman! Like most born bad lots he was a charming companion. If it had not been for the apocryphal aristocratic connections to whom he persistently alluded, he would have been perfect. He was so charmingly enthusiastic over his curios; such a solemn enthusiasm--the only earnest thing about him.

Yet over the affair of that one supreme curio he kept rigid silence. He told me; but it was a couple of years later--when the Inn had ceased to talk about Harrowsmith. A couple of years later! By then Kinsman had lived down the first strength of his angry regret. He told me fully, lovingly, sadly, opening out his passionate collector’s soul. He made me understand the full virility of those odd emotions which had once fired and wasted him.

Yes. He was silent enough while the affair was in progress. That odd, weird, inanimate affair! How little any of us suspected the nature of the struggle that was going on behind his constantly sported oak.

It was in this way. Let me begin, as he began, with his introduction to the brown, burly god which gained possession of him.

Harrowsmith asked him to lunch one Saturday. After lunch he brought out cigars; he had money and could afford them daily. To him cigar-smoking was a habit, not an occasional indulgence.

The last course of the luncheon still stood on the table, which the two men had pushed well back so that they might rest their feet upon the fender. It was a hard March day; a day of penetrating wind. The draughts licked under the door and danced between the carpet and the shrunken boards. Outside in the square the only sound was the savage “boo” of the young spring gale.

Harrowsmith’s fripperies--of photographs and gimcrack furniture in the lightest and latest style--appeared meager in the ancient room of his chambers--the little room with the heavily corniced ceiling and paneled walls. These fripperies, which he considered showed taste, were in the light of a personal affront to the solid oak cabinet against the wall immediately opposite the fireplace. Kinsman, of course, found this piece of furniture the only thing that he could look at with tolerance. He had been invited to meet it--to give his expert opinion on it.

He kept turning his head and looking pityingly, covetously at it. He felt sorry for it, set as it was among modern cabinet-making and garish ornament. It was passing through a period of degradation, this stout cabinet of oak which had lived most likely for a couple of centuries in some manor house. He thought that it must surely feel its shame of contact. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. Once he found himself fancifully wishing that he wore blinkers like a horse so that he might shut out Harrowsmith’s other effects.

“It’s beautiful, beautiful,” he sighed, shading his eyes with his hands and staring straight at the wall. “It’s original, every bit, even the cornice. I should like to know its history. If these old things could only talk!”

“It’s all he left me. I expected a thousand at least,” grumbled Harrowsmith.

Kinsman was still ardently drinking in the solid beauty of the cabinet--with its linen-patterned panels. One never saw carving of that pattern save on Tudor work. The thing was late Tudor. It was unique--and yet this materialistic doctor was not satisfied. He gazed at the glowing brown wood, at the slim posts supporting the upper cupboard, at the cunning hinges of iron. Never had he thrown at a woman so heart-whole a glance.

“I wish a rich uncle would leave me such a thing,” he sighed. “Why, man, money won’t buy it. You may wait, you may search a lifetime, and not find such a well-preserved specimen of the period.”

“Oh, yes, I know you have the old-oak craze. But I like smart, modern stuff. I like pretty things about me. You understand? What would that fetch at auction?”

Harrowsmith took the cigar out of his mouth and pointed it, with its long, trembling tip of ash, toward the cabinet.

“Impossible to say. So much depends. But you surely wouldn’t sell it?”

“If I could get a good price. Why not?”

Kinsman had never before felt so deeply the disadvantages of poverty. Fate, which had given him an unsuccessful father, which had chained him to a clerk’s stool in a City office, had further cursed him with a fine taste in art. He knew a good thing by instinct. He trifled with _bric-à-brac_, with Chippendale; he had an eye for the voluptuous coloring of the Empire period; but his best affections he reserved for oak. All the rest was thin, unsatisfying. In oak, despite the poverty which allowed him to criticise, but rarely to buy, he was a connoisseur. He could tell--blindfold--by a caressing turn of his hands about the different members, if a piece of oak furniture were original or if it were some bastard thing built together from old wood for the hoodwinking of people with money and a fashionable desire for the antique. How savagely I’ve heard him disclaim against people of that sort!

He got up. The slim pillars seemed to draw him--to wink and beckon and plead.

“Why don’t you buy it off me?” Harrowsmith asked, idly watching him and looking contemptuously amused.

He spoke with the carelessness of a man to whom money is not of immediate moment. He wheeled round in his chair and took a long, sulky look at the oak. It irritated him. It took up room. More than that, it was reminiscent of disappointment. His Uncle Bob had always promised to remember him in his will. He didn’t consider that a Tudor cabinet was remembrance--enough.

“You shall have it for thirty pounds,” he said.

Kinsman did not answer. He grew pale. The hand that was running about the rich wood twitched nervously.

Harrowsmith misunderstood his silence, and said, with slight asperity:

“Is that too much for you? To get rid of the thing I’ll say twenty-five.”

“Twenty-five!” You may be sure there was a catch in Kinsman’s voice. “It would be cheap at thirty. But you know that I could as easily raise three hundred. How can a poor beggar save out of five pounds a week?”

Harrowsmith shrugged and said, “I shall get a dealer in. Can you recommend one? You’re hand in glove with all those fellows. I hate the thing. It’s too heavy. It dwarfs the room.”

Kinsman with his finger was tracing the panels. He threw a look of desperation, of pleading even, at the oak, as if he thought that a thing which had been so long in the world and had witnessed the perplexities of so many generations was really sentient and could suggest. As he looked, his cheeks flushed, his lips smiled, and his whole attitude became suddenly _débonnaire._

He returned to the fire, walking ludicrously sideways, as if he were afraid to take his eyes off the cabinet--the wise, resourceful cabinet. It _had_ suggested. He suddenly remembered. He became confused, dizzy, elated with remembrance. He could buy it--if not with coin of the realm, with something equally marketable. Harrowsmith had said it was marketable. He would buy it. Why not? Within his own body he carried the means to buy--his own imperfect, freakish body!

“Do you remember,” he asked, in the hurried, jerky tones of a clock that is out of gear, “the offer you once made me?”

Harrowsmith looked perplexed, and then his face lighted.

“To buy your body--yes.”

“Does it still hold good?”

The doctor stared. Then he laughed and poked the fire until the hot light ran round the room, and, darting down the panels of the cabinet, made it wink and beckon more than before.

“You didn’t like the idea,” he said at last.

“Your Uncle Bob hadn’t left you the cabinet then,” Kinsman reminded him pointedly.

“That’s ingenious. I see, I see. You propose to sell yourself--for a bit of wood.”

“I should be a fool if I didn’t. You want my body after I am dead because it differs in some slight detail from other bodies, because, dead, I shall be to you medical fellows a curio. That’s grim.”

“A curio, exactly--to use your own fanciful term,” said Harrowsmith, professional enthusiasm lighting its cold taper in his eye. “And I, as you know, have made a special study of the thorax. Are you really serious?”

“Absolutely. I’ll give you my body when I’ve done with it if you’ll give me the cabinet at once.”

Harrowsmith looked at his watch and jumped up.

“It’s not quite four,” he said. “Kent, the commissioner for oaths, on the ground floor, has probably not gone. He stays late. You must sign a document of some sort. He’ll draw it up. I like to have things in form. In the event of your predeceasing me----”

“I’m yours. Yes; that’s all right. If I die first,” assented Kinsman carelessly. He was amused and scornful in his turn at an interest which was to him inexplicable.

He thought the doctor a fool. He was also positively grateful to his singular thorax. Men with normal organs could not always afford Tudor furniture. Over his enthusiastic face slid the expression of a personal greeting as he gave a full look at the cabinet and saluted it.

“You’ve got a bargain,” Harrowsmith said. “You’ll be able to sell the thing, when you are tired of it, at a profit.”

Kinsman winced. The first hint of shadow drew his brows together.

“Sell it! Why, I’d sell myself first. No joke intended. By Jove! I _have_ sold myself.”

They both laughed--laughter that tripped and tumbled down the old, wide stairs; laughter that was caught up by the rough wind outside and carried--whither?

* * * * *

For some weeks Kinsman had his silent chuckle against Harrowsmith. He told himself that this was mean and narrow. He struggled against his jubilation and his contemptuous reflection that the doctor was a fool. He tried to regard him as a fellow-enthusiast--with a different objective. He wished to avoid the narrow outlook of the average collector. He imagined that his flirtations with china, with Empire lounges and candelabra, with the tapering legs of Chippendale chairs had made him tolerant and broadly sympathetic. Evidently it was not so. He looked at his cabinet; he thought of his eccentric thorax--which, after all, Harrowsmith might never possess--and again, silently, in the seclusion of his own rooms, he chuckled.

After dinner each night, as he sat and smoked, he stole frequent moments for the cabinet. He jumped up now and then imagining that he had discovered some new minute detail in the work. Or he opened the doors and stuck his head far into the cavernous cupboards. They exhaled an aromatic perfume. Perhaps some woman had once kept Eastern embroideries there; this was a superficial speculation which he afterward discarded as being unworthy and improbable. He finally decided that it had been used as a linen press--linen folded away with lavender; or a thrifty housewife had stored within choice apples. It was the perfume of old orchards that teased his nostrils.

He tried to supply the cabinet with a history. Harrowsmith could tell him nothing except that his Uncle Bob had bought it at a sale. Sometimes he looked at it so long, so ardently, that he almost thought he was on the point of drawing from the massive brown thing the secrets of dead generations.

He could never tell me the exact momentous occasion when the first faint chill of repugnance struck him. He did remember the night when, as he came home tired from the City, and cast his eyes on the cabinet as usual, it seemed insufficient for the first time. What was it, after all, to make so much fuss about? Had he paid too great a price? Until that moment he had never given one thought to the price.

In the evenings, smoking his cigarette, one hand loose on his knee, he asked himself how that hand would look--dead. Involuntarily he stiffened it. Perhaps it was the slowly rising horror in him which made it appear whiter than it ever had been before. His hand! He was sorry for it. His body! What an injustice he had done it. Had any man the right to rob his body of the sanctity and superb solitude which come after death? The meanest wretch living retained the right to that majestic aloofness. He had mortgaged his. The first seeds of hate and fear sprouted in his heart.

He dashed out of his chambers and went down Chancery Lane into Fleet Street. He walked west to a theater. The play was a tragedy. As he sat in the pit he laughed when the other people thrilled. He then looked in amazement at the scandalized faces surrounding him.

He had left his chambers without casting a farewell look at the cabinet, without murmuring some word of admiration. This had never happened before. He became grave. He reproached himself. He was tender with foolish little penitences--as one would be with a loved woman.

That night in his bed the grewsome fancy seized him to lie straight and still, hands folded and chin well up. That’s how he would lie when he was dead--the majesty of death. But in his case it would be a mere tinsel majesty--like the amusingly solemn antics of a gypsy monarch. He was not his own.

He got up and lit the light and smoked. He was ashamed of himself. He was afraid of himself, and of Harrowsmith and of the cabinet. They were a dread trio, banded in a terrible way.

The fire was quite dead. He felt his way across the room and put his unsteady hand on the thick oak panels of the cabinet. He put his head against one and groaned. The perfume--was it of lavender?--stole out and nauseated him.

He would sell it. He must sell it. He went back to bed. He considered. Which dealer would give the best price? He would sell it. He would take his annual holiday early; he evidently wanted a thorough change.

In the morning he wondered how he could have thought of selling it. The acquisitiveness, the unreasoning, improvident, ardent affection of the collector was strong in him again. Before he went to the City he examined the cabinet as usual, gloating and thrilling over its beauty.

But at night he was again seized with foreboding so dreadful that he dashed into the flowing streets. He went to a music hall. He grinned, a fixed, wide grin, that seemed to crack his cheeks. His face felt stiff. The faces of the dead were stiff.

He thought that he would ask Harrowsmith to break the compact, to take back his legacy. But the doctor had a professional ardor. He might bluntly refuse. Also--he could not part with the cabinet.

The next day was Saturday. All the afternoon he walked miserably about the London streets. He thought he’d enlist, get sent to the front, and be killed on a battlefield. So would he save his dead flesh from ribald attention. But perhaps Harrowsmith would not let him go.

He was afraid to go back to his chambers, afraid that he might meet Harrowsmith on the stairs, afraid of the cabinet. He turned into a tea shop and found with difficulty a vacant chair at one of the tables. The life and gayety and warmth of that tea shop reassured him. He despised himself for his morbid fears. He would be a fool if he threw up his berth and went to the front. Besides, if he went he must leave the cabinet. The touch and sight of the wonderful brown wood carved by hands that had so long been dust had become a daily necessity to him.

Next morning, when he awoke, he was feeling very ill. It was doubtless influenza. There was no danger in that if one took care. He would take care. He must. He dared not die. Death now had a bitterness double distilled. All that Sunday he lay miserably in bed. As the hours wore on he grew too ill to fear death--and after. He was too ill, even, to be haunted by his usual terror when dusk fell.

Next day his laundress came to light the fire. He sent her off with a telegram to the office, saying he could not come. She happened to meet Harrowsmith on the landing and sent him in on her own initiative.

The doctor was assiduous. He was good to us all, and only grew angry if we spoke of a fee. He muttered something about nervous breakdown. He provided a trained nurse; he paid professional visits twice a day.

With care and nursing Kinsman began to be himself again. Harrowsmith told him that he must get away for a rest. He added that he would go with him; a holiday together would be splendid. No doubt he wondered at the wild, leaping terror in the other’s eyes when he said that; said it in such a cheery, commonplace way, without any subtlety. But Kinsman was subtle and suspicious and mad. He thought the doctor wished to come too, so as to be sure of him. He read the most diabolical eagerness in his calm face. How afraid he was of Harrowsmith! And how afraid Harrowsmith was that he would be the loser on their strange compact. Afraid to let him go away alone in case he should die and be buried.

His dread and hate grew and grew; it became distorted into a monster. He now hesitated before he swallowed each dose of medicine. His light head became the dwelling-place of a hundred wild thoughts. He lay with his face to the wall and saw it all as clearly as possible--with preternatural clearness. Harrowsmith wanted to kill him. He was impatient; that was only natural. But he _would_ not die. Sometimes, when the nurse came near, he desperately clutched at her hand to save him, to pull him back. He must live. He must spare his flesh--his poor flesh, at which he looked yearningly as it lay against the bed linen, wan and veined.

Once he thought desperately that rather than die he would kill Harrowsmith first--with the last spurt of energy left him. Yes. In any case, when he grew strong, he would certainly kill him as a safeguard; a man could not live in such perpetual terror.

His face to the wall, he reproached himself bitterly with his headlong passion for the cabinet. What was there in old oak to lure a man to such madness? It added nothing to life. What was life but decent provision and the certainty of a long, undisturbed death? Things seemed simple and clear as he lay dozing through the days.

If he had sold himself for bread that would have been more understandable, less reprehensible. Starvation was a very terrible thing. But he had sold himself--for what? He thought with weird dread and passion of that solemn, shining brown thing through the wall--the mysterious piece of ancient furniture that was responsible for his misery.

And so, by desperate will, as he thought, he lived. He grew strong. The trained nurse went away. The last bottle of medicine was empty.

He was alone and would be until the morning. This was the first evening he had been alone since his illness. At dusk the old familiar terror gripped him. He was beginning to be afraid, and this time he could not dart like a hunted creature into the streets and join his fellow-men--men whose bodies belonged to them; men who had not mortgaged their last sad majesty. He was alone, alone. On the shawl which wrapped his knees his folded hands looked oddly pale.

He walked across the room and touched the cabinet. Long stay in bed had numbed his feet. He touched the cabinet. In his throat was a desperate sob.

He would sell it. Sell! That was just what he could never do. But if only he could; if only he might buy himself back.

Sell! He imagined the joy of the buyer--a collector, of course. What pure, undiluted ecstasy he would get out of it--that man who paid with gold and not with his own helpless flesh! No; he could never sell it. Beautiful, devilish, compelling thing! It must stay with him until the end.

He opened the door and smelt the smell--the clinging aroma which had always tantalized and piqued him. He traced with his finger the rude hinges of hammered iron. His face quivered in every muscle with varied emotions. How he loved this thing! How he hated and feared it! What moments of joy it had afforded him! What a fearful league it had lured him into making!

A terrible struggle was passing over him. His freakish brain had suggested a new extravagance. He was possessed with a desire to do this strange, this futile and dastardly act. He lifted his head and looked at the cabinet as he would have looked into human eyes--a long, wistful look; a look embodying a whole gamut of emotions. Then he crossed the room, stooped down to a box in one corner, and came back with a hammer.

“It will hurt you,” he said foolishly, the hammer already uplifted, his eyes drinking in the delicacy of that wonderful thing which had traveled down the past ages and drifted to him and been his tempter, “but not as it hurts me.”

He struck. All night he worked with the hammer, with every tool he had that could help him. He began to break it up, to hack it asunder--his cabinet. He threw it on the fire bit by bit. It blazed and crackled, this old dry wood. The splutter and crackle went to his heart. He thought they were agonized protests. He believed that it suffered as it died. In his long morbid communion with it he had grown to believe it human and something more.

It took him days and nights to kill the cabinet. It was so stoutly built. When he was exhausted he crept to bed, not forgetting to lock the door on that scene of strange disorder. But at last it was done. The wall behind was bare and dirty, festooned with cobwebs. On the floor was dust and chips and splinters. The fire burned with the glowing heat of a sacrificial fire.

Already he was calmer. Although he still belonged to Harrowsmith, although he had madly destroyed the one thing that might have redeemed him, although his days would now hold bitter moments, he was at peace.

He watched it burn. He saw the wondrous handicraft of cunning dead men disappear line by line, and turn to ash.

He was sitting so when his laundress came in at the widely flung door. It was the first time for days that she had been permitted to enter the sitting room. He nervously expected her to exclaim, to inquire. The blank wall was so obvious. The little room was hot like an oven, but she only flung her hands and cried out:

“Oh, lor’! what an awful thing this is about Mr. ’Arrersmith. To be knocked down by one o’ them cycles. The streets of London aint safe. And ’im a doctor, too, the cleverest doctor at the ’orspital.”

“What--_what_ about him?”

“Knocked down by a cycle and killed in Grays Inn Road, jest by the ’orspital,” she returned with flavor.

Kinsman staggered to his feet. The fire licked out from the grate and seemed to sear him, to dry the words in his throat and dam up the glad accursed tears in his eyes.

He was no longer a bondman. He was free. He could bear to look at his flesh, his own until death, and after. He looked at his hands, torn and soiled, hands that had destroyed the cabinet.

His eyes fell on the last panel, which the fire was greedily eating; on the heap of ash that had meant so much beauty.

He dropped back in the chair. He laughed--laughter that gurgled with water as it fought its way through his throat. He could not see the blank wall for tears, whether for the cabinet, the dead man, or himself he did not know.

A POLITICAL WOMAN.

GULLY and his wife had one of the new sets just inside the gates. These sets are more expensive, more convenient, more respectable than the old ones. Lucinda--she was Gully’s wife--would never have consented to an old set. She set her face sternly against Bohemianism when it took a certain form. She didn’t object to it in the form of Liberty tea-gowns and discreet flirtations in the name of art and literature. Gully was a journalist. He found the Inn convenient, but Lucinda was always hoping plaintively that some day they would be able to afford a house in Bloomsbury, or, better still, a modest place in the country.

She had six rooms, every convenience, and a most superior maidservant, the long streamers of whose cap, when she ran out to post a letter, lent a certain _cachet_ to the Inn.

Lucinda was nice enough. Her struggles for a conventional manner of life were amusing. She never gave Gully any peace. She dragged him about to social functions. She made him use his influence to get her portrait in the ladies’ papers, as assistant at a charity concert or exhibitor at a cat show--she kept a couple of wild-looking Persians. She always had her photograph taken in evening dress. She was one of those coarse women--commonly called fine--who are disfigured by a big neck and big arms.

She had her “At-Home” day, of course. She displayed a card bowl on a prominent table in the pleasant room overlooking the gardens which she called her drawing room. She peppered the conversation with references to dinners and receptions that she had been invited to.

We were never allowed to smoke in the drawing room, nor to bring in our whisky. It was a modern drawing room, all white paint, cheap china, and cushion frills. She had a standard lamp with an amazing amber shade. She spent sixpence twice a week on cut flowers, and sold Gully’s old clothes for palms. It was a very fair attempt at Maida Vale--Lucinda and her drawing room.

Therefore it was a surprise to me when Gully came round one night and said despondently:

“I wish you could help me with Lucinda. She’s going all to pieces.”

“Going to pieces!”

I thought of dressmakers’ bills, of the minor journalists who sometimes dropped in to tea. Yet Lucinda was a safe woman. She was far too respectable to run into debt or to compromise herself. Gully proceeded to explain.

“You know she makes me walk in the Park every Sunday afternoon. She wants to go in the morning when the fashionable frocks are about. But I draw the line at that. We compromise with the afternoon--when there is only the band and pretty shop girls I don’t so much mind. We were there six weeks ago, and we stopped to listen to a Socialist spouter--one of those rabid enthusiasts in a red tie. We had listened to them all--the religious ones, the atheists, the philosophers. Sometimes you get good copy out of fellows like that.

“I wouldn’t let her stand about long. Her chest is weak, and the Wigans’ fancy-dress ball is coming on. It is to be a grand affair; they’ve talked of it for months. Lucinda was to go as a--blest if I can remember as what--but her bodice was to be the merest apology. You can’t blame a fine woman for showing off her neck and arms. Old Wigan is the proprietor of my paper, a very wealthy man, a very influential one too. It is to my interest to keep in with him. It would never do for us to snub him by keeping away. You’re never safe in journalism. Get a post as editor, and begin to bound on your so many hundreds a year. Phew! the paper changes hands or politics--where are you? Get regular weekly features, make yourself an authority on some subject or other. The public doesn’t want your subject--or you. Journalism is rotten, I tell you, rotten. Only the absolutely unscrupulous, or the totally ignorant, have the least chance. I know men in journalism who are making five pounds a week and more by writing gutter stuff. And I know clever men who barely scrape a hundred and fifty a year.

“Where was I? Oh! Lucinda. I know that her bronchial attacks last half through the winter, so I pulled her away out of the crowd. It was a bitterly cold day.

“We walked off. She drew up the collar of her coat. I said that it had been foolish of us to stand about in the cold and risk bronchitis, with the Wigans’ fancy-dress ball coming on.

“‘I don’t care a bit about the ball,’ she said. ‘I’m not going.’

“‘Not care! not going! But your dress? You’ve bought the silk. It cost a pretty penny.’

“‘Brocade. Twelve and six a yard,’ she groaned.

“‘It seemed to me a little stiff. But so long as you are happy----’

“‘Happy! Did you hear what he said? It is dreadful.’

“‘Awful. The police ought to put a stop to----’

“It was Lucinda who stopped--on the edge of the Serpentine.

“‘Do you know what you are saying?’ she demanded.

“I didn’t like the contemptuous curl of her lip, and returned with some pique:

“‘I know what _he_ was saying. Extravagant balderdash! I ought to know something about politics. I take an interest in them--an intelligent interest. I write about them. There’s my weekly letter to the Midland daily, isn’t there? I vote Radical, I’m a Progressive. I’m for the amelioration of--all sorts of things.’

“I wound up vaguely. You can’t talk sane, serious politics to your wife; the true political woman has yet to be born.

“‘When we retire to the country in our ripe middle age,’ I went on, ‘I shall take an active interest in local affairs. I shall become a member of the parish council; shall look after rights of way and be down on barbed wire. I’ve my own ideas on the game laws--we shall never have enough money to preserve--and lots of things. I won’t dilate on them. You wouldn’t understand.’

“It was getting dusk. In the distance the crowd--all the little crowds--were melting away. A soldier sat with a girl on a seat. His red coat was warm against the shadows.

“‘There!’ broke out Lucinda passionately, before we were out of hearing. ‘Did you see those two on the seat?’

“‘I did. I thought, so far as I could judge, you know, that they looked uncommonly happy.’

“‘Happy! a soldier! a servant girl! What have they done? Surely you, as a practical politician, can tell me. Why should they be born to such a life? I ask you. No gleam of brightness to lighten the impenetrable gloo----’

“‘Come now. You are quoting the maniac in the red tie.’

“We got out of the Park and went along Oxford Street in silence until we were near the Circus. Then Lucinda burst out suddenly:

“‘Two thousand acres of land----’

“‘If you are going to tackle the agricultural problem----’

“‘One third of the available capital----’

“‘Don’t start on statistics; nothing more treacherous.’

“‘How many families did he say lived in one room?’

“‘Wasn’t listening.’

“‘That is just it. People like you never do listen. People like you content themselves with reading stupid, woolly, political speeches. For my part, I always skip such things, and am thankful when Parliament adjourns and they put something really interesting in the papers.’”

Gully stopped and knocked the ashes out of his pipe.

“From that day,” he said solemnly, when he had refilled and lighted up, “she has given me no peace. She’ll compromise herself seriously--that’s what I’m afraid of. She’s been making election rosettes. She actually met a fellow by appointment in Broad Street. One of these Social Democrats; she wants me to review his book, ‘The Fall of the Capitalist.’ I put my foot down when it came to appointments--the scoundrel!

“She’s always hurling Socialistic bricks at me. I’ve tried to convince her of her errors with a pencil and a bit of paper. I worked out a sum in proportion, with a landowner and a man with a patent who had a certain amount of capital to start with. She said she didn’t care a fig for my stupid landowner.

“I’m afflicted with a wife who has ideas of her own and means to live up to them. It’s hard. I never counted on taking brains--of the bran-new sort--when I took Lucinda. I object to a clever woman. I work hard. I’ve got brains enough for both, and over. I ask for a pretty face, a fresh frock, good cooking--that’s all. I can get the rest from the papers, or I can drop in at the club.”

“Look here, old man,” I said soothingly, “get her on facts. Never use pencil and paper to a woman--logic only irritates them. Make her live up to her doctrines--she’ll be sick of them in a week.”

Women soon tire; all froth and no ballast. (I’m forgetting that you’re a woman, but you like the complete story.)

He went away after I had given him a few tips. At the end of the week he came back.

“Well?” I said optimistically, as he sat down and took out his pipe.

“I think she is a trifle better,” he admitted, in a half-hearted way. “She won’t part with the servant; says she really hasn’t time and strength enough for housework. But she admits that a servant is inconsistent with her theories, and she looked quite happy when she added that she really believed I was beginning to see things in the right light. I’ve told her plainly that I’ll have no hypocrites in my home. Silver--her aunt left her some--flowers, Worcester tea-things, I wouldn’t stand. She murmured something about it being a duty with every citizen to keep up the graces of life, but she yielded in the end. She was crying a bit as she wrapped the silver--beautiful Georgian stuff--away in chamois-leather bags.

“I said that a drawing room gave the very lie to her theories. She’s turned the key of that room.

“The servant has given notice; of course she thinks the spoons are pawned. Lucinda is upset. But I said cheerily that it was so nice to be indifferent, to be supported by the consciousness of a worthy mission. I said that simplicity was the great thing. I suggested that we should sell the furniture--giving the proceeds to the Socialistic cause--and go to a boarding house. They board you in Gower Street for twenty-five shillings a week--with a reduction, no doubt, on married couples. I said that she would then be quite free from housekeeping and would be able to throw more soul into her political work. You should have seen her face! I think she’s beginning to be sorry that she converted me. Converts always go too far.

“But she’s not cured,” he concluded solemnly. “She went off this morning to Brentford, where some member of her party has his committee room.”

“Perhaps we had better play our trump card,” I said. “What time will she be back?”

“About nine.”

“Very well. I’ll look round with Smithers and Arnold. It’s a job that Jimmy would enjoy, but he’s so lantern-jawed she’d know him at once.”

At nine Gully, Smithers, Arnold, and I were in Lucinda’s drawing room, smoking very strong tobacco and drinking hot gin and water; it gave me heartburn for nearly a week. But it made a good steam and fume; effect was what we wanted. We all four looked--well, rough. A bristly chin and no collar alters a man immensely. As luck would have it, neither Smithers nor I had shaved that morning; nor the morning before, in my case. Arnold wore a false beard.

Why do absconding criminals take the trouble to disguise themselves--decent, middle-class criminals who are accustomed to razors and clean linen? A bristly chin and a neck without a collar would do the whole business, without trouble or expense. If, added to that, the criminal gets his “portrait” in the paper, he’s safe.

My feet were on the sofa. The gin bottle and a jug of beer stood on Lucinda’s pet polished table. Arnold was gently scraping his boots on the copper scuttle, and Smithers had his head well into the white curtains. The rugs were kicked up; there were spent matches all over the floor. It was an education to see how by a few well-thought-out touches we had wrecked the room.

Lucinda was pretty punctual. She stood on the threshold for one second before she fled. I looked round. There was blank tragedy on her face. Gully got up, appearing a little guilty. He went out to her. Judging by the direction of their voices he found her in the lobby, with her face buried in his overcoat. She was crying. We three in the untidy room, thick with smoke and stale with spirit, heard her say in a muffled way:

“This is too much. You’ve taken away the--s--silver--all the decencies of life. You talk to me of a cheap boarding house. I’ll never consent to it; I’d rather die or go back to papa. And you’ve brought those wretches into my drawing room.”

“But we agreed, darling, that it wasn’t to be a drawing room any longer. We said that we’d devote it to the people. Your own idea was a laundresses’ weekly tea, and----”

“You look disreputable. You look like--a--brigand. No collar--that tie. I never was so miserable. I never would have married you if----”

“My dearest, you wouldn’t have me wound the susceptibilities of those worthy fellows----”

“And one with his hateful great feet on the embroidered cushion my cousin Ethel sent from India, and another----”

“Lucinda, you surprise me. I thought you’d be so pleased. I arranged it as a delicate attention--a pleasant surprise party. Sons of toil, dear, all of them, and----”

“Dirty brutes! I hate the whole thing. I’m tired to death.” We heard her stamp her feet viciously on the oil-cloth. “The election is all going to pieces. Let it! _I_ don’t care. Just look at my new skirt--all mud and torn to ribbons. You never saw such a filthy place, such a set of roughs! I couldn’t even get a decent cup of tea. And--and--I went into the wrong committee room, and the man--the other man--laughed, the idiot! I wish I’d---- Oh, Tom! I never thought you could be so cruel, so unmanly. Do be yourself again. I can’t think what has come over you. It has worried me dreadfully. Let us be comfortable again. Send those monsters away.”

Gully said impressively:

“Will you go to the Wigans’ ball? I’ve got my way to make in the world. Wigan’s wife is--well, you know her. Decent old charwoman; got sense enough to hold her tongue. Wigan is sensitive on that point. If we snub his wife it may be bad for me.”

“Will I go? What a question! Of course I will.”

“And committee rooms and mass-meetings and particularly that Socialist cad----”

“Don’t mention him. I’m sick, I tell you--sick, sick. He hardly spoke a civil word to me--after the way I’ve slaved. Go and send those men away, if you love me.”

“You don’t think a little friendly supper----”

“I won’t hear of it.”

We heard--well, we heard him kiss her--and then we heard her whisk away into the bedroom to bathe her eyes, and Gully came in with a wide grin to dismiss us. As we went through the passage we heard the vigorous splash of water in the basin.

Gully let us out. We went down the stone stairs, with stealthy handshakes and smothered chuckles, leaving him alone with Lucinda, and master once more.

BEYOND THE GRAY GATE.

POOR Nat Chaytor had this set once. It is very inconvenient--just two rooms and a nest of cupboards called a kitchen. You never saw such cupboards, such idiotic waste of space! Probably not. Every set is different. The old fellows who designed the place were freakish. It is small and inconvenient, but the best I can afford. I’m three quarters in arrears with the rent, as it is. Some day I shall have to shoot the moon and get the boys in the other sets to help me do it. We all hang together in adversity.

When Chaytor took it he was a clerk in the City at one hundred and eighty pounds a year. On one hundred and eighty pounds a year he married Minnie, who was the lady typewriting clerk in the same office. They lived here--just for a bit, as he always explained--until their ship came home. He was a most hopeful fellow. They pegged on pretty comfortably for a time. Minnie smartened up the rooms--that plush bracket on the wall above your head was hers. She turned up her nose pretty considerably at other ladies in the Inn. She routed Chaytor’s laundress. The poor old soul came and poured out her woes to me. She had everything her own way so long as Chaytor was a bachelor. I remember that he came home from the City one day in his lunch hour--which he usually stretched into two--and found her asleep on his bed. She had not even troubled to take off her battered black bonnet or the sacking apron whose narrow string kept her together at the waist. But Minnie, as she rather snappishly said, was not going to “put up with such ways. She would rather do the work herself.” So Mrs. Percival got a week’s notice.

“I’ve done for dozens of gentlemen in the Inn, as you knows, sir,” she said pathetically to me; “and then to be sacked by a hussy like her. An’ me the widow of a solicitor myself, and a lady by birth.”

Things went on well enough with the Chaytors for a few months. We did not see much of Nat; Minnie had a freezing, fine-lady manner with old bachelor friends, and liked her husband to go to bed when she did--punctually at eleven. Things went on well enough until he got discharged from his berth in the City. It was the usual story--business bad, reducing the staff, and so on. But I rather fancy that Nat’s easy hours had something to do with it. He always turned up half an hour late in the morning, took two hours for his lunch, another hour for afternoon tea, and went off at six every night, very often leaving the members of the firm at their desks. He had that fierce, sick hatred of City life which so many fellows have--nearly all the fellows who are good for anything. The dozens that I have seen chuck the accursed City! Some of these go up and some go under. But whichever way it is, they live--or die--free men.

He lost his berth. He was rather relieved than otherwise. He had been expecting it for a long time. A City clerk’s is a grim calling. He is never safe, and he knows that once out of a situation the chances are ten to one against his getting another. It is like losing your footing in a crowd--there is small chance of getting up again. Orion knew that; it egged him on to murder the old woman in Great Ormond Street.

No doubt Nat had a hot time with Minnie when he told her the news. She was one of those small, sharp-featured, rasping-voiced girls, with an ineffaceable sneer on her lips. Her creed was getting on in the world. She had been hoping that Nat would have a rise--two hundred a year, so that they might have a house all to themselves in the suburbs, and a little maidservant with a cap and apron. She said that the Inn wasn’t a fit place for a respectable young woman, and very likely she was right.

But Chaytor, as usual, put a good face on the affair. I think he was genuinely glad. The City fogs hurt his chest, he said; and was a man a slave or a schoolboy, that he should mount the same confounded office stool every morning, year in and year out!

“They only give us a fortnight’s holiday,” he added, “and then it is always wet. Find me the City clerk who has ever had a fine fortnight for his annual holiday!”

Minnie cried out savagely, “Stuff and nonsense!”

She asked him where he expected to find thirty-five pounds a year rent and a pound a week housekeeping, to say nothing of extras such as clothes.

“Easily enough,” Chaytor cried airily. “I’m going in for journalism.”

And then it began--the long, heart-breaking struggle--with a shrew at his elbow thrown in. He used to sit at the window and wait for the last post every evening. He watched the postman cross the square and fumble at his bag.

“That article is sure to be accepted,” he would call into the room to Minnie. “Here is the check coming upstairs. We’ll go down to your home for a little holiday.”

But the check never came. It was always a long envelope addressed in his own handwriting and containing his “copy” and the diabolically polite regrets of the editor. Poor old Chaytor!

Minnie carefully cleaned and oiled her typewriter and put an advertisement in a literary paper for copying work--quoting a penny a thousand less than the other advertisers.

The quick clinkety-clank of the typewriter tortured Chaytor; he hated machinery. He said mournfully that the world was rapidly becoming machine-made. Of course Minnie asked acidly, “where would he be if it were not for machines?”

Sometimes he got ten shillings, once a guinea, for an article, but it was the copying work that kept them. I remember the day when he got the guinea. He went out and spent two shillings on a plant in a pot for Minnie. You should have seen the look on her face when he presented it! I happened to be there. She went on clanking furiously, just spitting out through the din of her keys:

“The baker came while you were out. I had to shut the oak and keep as still as a mouse. We owe _him_ ten shillings. I don’t know where you think it is coming from.”

I suppose she was right, but one couldn’t help being sorry for Chaytor. He wasn’t really fit for this work-a-day world. I often had a queer feeling that he did not mean to stop in it long.

One morning in early April he burst out laughing. He was sitting at a table near the window polishing up one of his articles, and Minnie was typing at another table in the middle of the room.

“What is the matter?” she asked sharply.

He looked at her across the machine in a dazed way.

“Oh, nothing!” he muttered, confused by her clear, business-like glance. “I was only wondering why I am here--that’s all. It seemed odd.”

“I wish you were not here,” she returned practically. “Go and hunt round for a berth! There must be plenty. Why, if you began at £80 it would be better than nothing.”

Then she got up, saying it was time to get something for dinner. She came in with her hat and cape on to ask what he would like. The shabbiness of that hat and cape struck his heart, although he had not quite got rid of the dazed, unreal feeling which had come over him so suddenly. He noticed too, that Minnie’s cheeks, so pink once, had deepened to mottled purple, that her shallow eyes were hard and her cheek-bones sharp. He worried himself by wondering where her old self had gone. The girl he had courted under City gas lamps had left him and put a shrewish woman in her place. But she must have gone somewhere, that delicately tinted, coquettish girl. What became of cast-off selves?

“Well?” she said crisply, investigating the contents of her purse.

“Chops?”

“At thirteen pence a pound! No, thank you. A bit of beefsteak and a spring cabbage. I shan’t be long. I shall just run down Red Lion Street.”

She whisked off with her worn purse and her string bag. Chaytor began to dream of the country, which he knew very well, although he had never been more than ten miles from London since his childhood. But Minnie was a Somersetshire girl. She was always scattering careless word pictures. He knew just when you might find the first primroses, in sheltered spots, what cherry blossom was like, how they carted home hay. He knew the earliest date for the cuckoo, and how persistently the wryneck called through April and May; knew that the first notes of the nightingales were unsteady, that ladies’ smocks and king-cups only grew in damp spots.

He laughed. He felt that the country was his own rich inheritance. It really was ridiculous! A grim, rare, ripe joke that he--with such a kingdom of earth and sky--should be going through this farce. Why was he here? Why had he come? Why was he strangling himself slowly with thick London smoke? Why was he driving himself half mad to make both ends meet, to turn off articles suited to the popular taste--the debased popular taste which he scorned! It was queer. He laughed again.

Then he thought he would go out. Minnie would be annoyed when he came home and said that he had only been for a walk and not for a berth; but when you are playing at life, just masquerading, a woman’s anger does not matter very much. He went across the square. I saw him go. It was such a spring-like morning--in the Inn--that I almost called out of the window to say that I would come too. Instead of that, I watched him from behind the curtain and noticed, for the first time, how slowly he went, how hunched his shoulders were.

He went across to the Holborn Town Hall, where the trams start. He went by one to Stamford Hill and got down and went crawling along a row of new houses. They were villas of the sort that Minnie had been ambitious for when there was some chance of his screw being raised to two hundred pounds. They were semi-detached; between each pair was a narrow passage, convenient for the carting of coal and refuse. He stopped at one of these shoots; the passage was barred by a gate, an unpainted gate of gray oak.

He pushed it open, shut it softly, gave a last look back, and then went down the narrow entry. New walls of cheap brick rose on each side; the April wind hooted softly after him. At the end of the passage was another gate, which he went through. Beyond it was open common.

There had been rain. He saw stretches of dim brown and bleached yellow, broken here and there by the bright mustard tint of fully blown broom and patched with little pools on which the sun shone, turning them into irregular plates of turquoise. There was a tethered goat with a little kid by her side. Haughty geese, with their newly hatched families behind them, strutted proudly. There were ever so many young things; humpy, clumsy calves, ducklings trying to swim in the pools with all the dignity and address of their elders; a colt, set on long, stick-like, squarely placed legs--like a toy wooden horse--and with a funny tail like a hearth brush. Chaytor laughed heartily with recollection of this colt when he was telling us his experiences.

The heather sprang up after his feet had crushed it. Everything was whole and sweet. He sniffed at a delicious, intangible smell. He sat down, the ground yielded to his body like a pillow. He gave his aching lungs, clogged with so many years of smoke and fog, their fill. There was no house in sight, no, not one. No chimney speared the sky. The sky! He looked up, and the blue and yellow blinded him. He looked down and saw only wide clean common, patched by broom and gorse, spread with withered heather. A bird flew up singing, as if its throat would burst. Across the common came a jerky, regular call. Something tight came up in his neck and his eyes grew hot and dry. He had heard the lark. He had heard the cuckoo. He had ceased to masquerade, to play the fool. He had come to his own. He jumped up with a tremendous feeling of strength and exhilaration and went on. He swung his shoulders with a grand free swing. He looked about him, intently, critically, as a man looks at his inheritance.