About a fortnight after this Philip, going home one evening after his
day’s work at the hospital, knocked at the door of Cronshaw’s room. He
got no answer and walked in. Cronshaw was lying huddled up on one side,
and Philip went up to the bed. He did not know whether Cronshaw was
asleep or merely lay there in one of his uncontrollable fits of
irritability. He was surprised to see that his mouth was open. He
touched his shoulder. Philip gave a cry of dismay. He slipped his hand
under Cronshaw’s shirt and felt his heart; he did not know what to do;
helplessly, because he had heard of this being done, he held a
looking-glass in front of his mouth. It startled him to be alone with
Cronshaw. He had his hat and coat still on, and he ran down the stairs
into the street; he hailed a cab and drove to Harley Street. Dr. Tyrell
was in.
“I say, would you mind coming at once? I think Cronshaw’s dead.”
“If he is it’s not much good my coming, is it?”
“I should be awfully grateful if you would. I’ve got a cab at the door.
It’ll only take half an hour.”
Tyrell put on his hat. In the cab he asked him one or two questions.
“He seemed no worse than usual when I left this morning,” said Philip.
“It gave me an awful shock when I went in just now. And the thought of
his dying all alone…. D’you think he knew he was going to die?”
Philip remembered what Cronshaw had said. He wondered whether at that
last moment he had been seized with the terror of death. Philip
imagined himself in such a plight, knowing it was inevitable and with
no one, not a soul, to give an encouraging word when the fear seized
him.
“You’re rather upset,” said Dr. Tyrell.
He looked at him with his bright blue eyes. They were not
unsympathetic. When he saw Cronshaw, he said:
“He must have been dead for some hours. I should think he died in his
sleep. They do sometimes.”
The body looked shrunk and ignoble. It was not like anything human. Dr.
Tyrell looked at it dispassionately. With a mechanical gesture he took
out his watch.
“Well, I must be getting along. I’ll send the certificate round. I
suppose you’ll communicate with the relatives.”
“I don’t think there are any,” said Philip.
“How about the funeral?”
“Oh, I’ll see to that.”
Dr. Tyrell gave Philip a glance. He wondered whether he ought to offer
a couple of sovereigns towards it. He knew nothing of Philip’s
circumstances; perhaps he could well afford the expense; Philip might
think it impertinent if he made any suggestion.
“Well, let me know if there’s anything I can do,” he said.
Philip and he went out together, parting on the doorstep, and Philip
went to a telegraph office in order to send a message to Leonard
Upjohn. Then he went to an undertaker whose shop he passed every day on
his way to the hospital. His attention had been drawn to it often by
the three words in silver lettering on a black cloth, which, with two
model coffins, adorned the window: Economy, Celerity, Propriety. They
had always diverted him. The undertaker was a little fat Jew with curly
black hair, long and greasy, in black, with a large diamond ring on a
podgy finger. He received Philip with a peculiar manner formed by the
mingling of his natural blatancy with the subdued air proper to his
calling. He quickly saw that Philip was very helpless and promised to
send round a woman at once to perform the needful offices. His
suggestions for the funeral were very magnificent; and Philip felt
ashamed of himself when the undertaker seemed to think his objections
mean. It was horrible to haggle on such a matter, and finally Philip
consented to an expensiveness which he could ill afford.
“I quite understand, sir,” said the undertaker, “you don’t want any
show and that—I’m not a believer in ostentation myself, mind you—but
you want it done gentlemanly-like. You leave it to me, I’ll do it as
cheap as it can be done, ’aving regard to what’s right and proper. I
can’t say more than that, can I?”
Philip went home to eat his supper, and while he ate the woman came
along to lay out the corpse. Presently a telegram arrived from Leonard
Upjohn.
Shocked and grieved beyond measure. Regret cannot come tonight. Dining
out. With you early tomorrow. Deepest sympathy. Upjohn.
In a little while the woman knocked at the door of the sitting-room.
“I’ve done now, sir. Will you come and look at ’im and see it’s all
right?”
Philip followed her. Cronshaw was lying on his back, with his eyes
closed and his hands folded piously across his chest.
“You ought by rights to ’ave a few flowers, sir.”
“I’ll get some tomorrow.”
She gave the body a glance of satisfaction. She had performed her job,
and now she rolled down her sleeves, took off her apron, and put on her
bonnet. Philip asked her how much he owed her.
“Well, sir, some give me two and sixpence and some give me five
shillings.”
Philip was ashamed to give her less than the larger sum. She thanked
him with just so much effusiveness as was seemly in presence of the
grief he might be supposed to feel, and left him. Philip went back into
his sitting-room, cleared away the remains of his supper, and sat down
to read Walsham’s Surgery. He found it difficult. He felt singularly
nervous. When there was a sound on the stairs he jumped, and his heart
beat violently. That thing in the adjoining room, which had been a man
and now was nothing, frightened him. The silence seemed alive, as if
some mysterious movement were taking place within it; the presence of
death weighed upon these rooms, unearthly and terrifying: Philip felt a
sudden horror for what had once been his friend. He tried to force
himself to read, but presently pushed away his book in despair. What
troubled him was the absolute futility of the life which had just
ended. It did not matter if Cronshaw was alive or dead. It would have
been just as well if he had never lived. Philip thought of Cronshaw
young; and it needed an effort of imagination to picture him slender,
with a springing step, and with hair on his head, buoyant and hopeful.
Philip’s rule of life, to follow one’s instincts with due regard to the
policeman round the corner, had not acted very well there: it was
because Cronshaw had done this that he had made such a lamentable
failure of existence. It seemed that the instincts could not be
trusted. Philip was puzzled, and he asked himself what rule of life was
there, if that one was useless, and why people acted in one way rather
than in another. They acted according to their emotions, but their
emotions might be good or bad; it seemed just a chance whether they led
to triumph or disaster. Life seemed an inextricable confusion. Men
hurried hither and thither, urged by forces they knew not; and the
purpose of it all escaped them; they seemed to hurry just for
hurrying’s sake.
Next morning Leonard Upjohn appeared with a small wreath of laurel. He
was pleased with his idea of crowning the dead poet with this; and
attempted, notwithstanding Philip’s disapproving silence, to fix it on
the bald head; but the wreath fitted grotesquely. It looked like the
brim of a hat worn by a low comedian in a music-hall.
“I’ll put it over his heart instead,” said Upjohn.
“You’ve put it on his stomach,” remarked Philip.
Upjohn gave a thin smile.
“Only a poet knows where lies a poet’s heart,” he answered.
They went back into the sitting-room, and Philip told him what
arrangements he had made for the funeral.
“I hoped you’ve spared no expense. I should like the hearse to be
followed by a long string of empty coaches, and I should like the
horses to wear tall nodding plumes, and there should be a vast number
of mutes with long streamers on their hats. I like the thought of all
those empty coaches.”
“As the cost of the funeral will apparently fall on me and I’m not over
flush just now, I’ve tried to make it as moderate as possible.”
“But, my dear fellow, in that case, why didn’t you get him a pauper’s
funeral? There would have been something poetic in that. You have an
unerring instinct for mediocrity.”
Philip flushed a little, but did not answer; and next day he and Upjohn
followed the hearse in the one carriage which Philip had ordered.
Lawson, unable to come, had sent a wreath; and Philip, so that the
coffin should not seem too neglected, had bought a couple. On the way
back the coachman whipped up his horses. Philip was dog-tired and
presently went to sleep. He was awakened by Upjohn’s voice.
“It’s rather lucky the poems haven’t come out yet. I think we’d better
hold them back a bit and I’ll write a preface. I began thinking of it
during the drive to the cemetery. I believe I can do something rather
good. Anyhow I’ll start with an article in The Saturday.”
Philip did not reply, and there was silence between them. At last
Upjohn said:
“I daresay I’d be wiser not to whittle away my copy. I think I’ll do an
article for one of the reviews, and then I can just print it afterwards
as a preface.”
Philip kept his eye on the monthlies, and a few weeks later it
appeared. The article made something of a stir, and extracts from it
were printed in many of the papers. It was a very good article, vaguely
biographical, for no one knew much of Cronshaw’s early life, but
delicate, tender, and picturesque. Leonard Upjohn in his intricate
style drew graceful little pictures of Cronshaw in the Latin Quarter,
talking, writing poetry: Cronshaw became a picturesque figure, an
English Verlaine; and Leonard Upjohn’s coloured phrases took on a
tremulous dignity, a more pathetic grandiloquence, as he described the
sordid end, the shabby little room in Soho; and, with a reticence which
was wholly charming and suggested a much greater generosity than
modesty allowed him to state, the efforts he made to transport the Poet
to some cottage embowered with honeysuckle amid a flowering orchard.
And the lack of sympathy, well-meaning but so tactless, which had taken
the poet instead to the vulgar respectability of Kennington! Leonard
Upjohn described Kennington with that restrained humour which a strict
adherence to the vocabulary of Sir Thomas Browne necessitated. With
delicate sarcasm he narrated the last weeks, the patience with which
Cronshaw bore the well-meaning clumsiness of the young student who had
appointed himself his nurse, and the pitifulness of that divine
vagabond in those hopelessly middle-class surroundings. Beauty from
ashes, he quoted from Isaiah. It was a triumph of irony for that
outcast poet to die amid the trappings of vulgar respectability; it
reminded Leonard Upjohn of Christ among the Pharisees, and the analogy
gave him opportunity for an exquisite passage. And then he told how a
friend—his good taste did not suffer him more than to hint subtly who
the friend was with such gracious fancies—had laid a laurel wreath on
the dead poet’s heart; and the beautiful dead hands had seemed to rest
with a voluptuous passion upon Apollo’s leaves, fragrant with the
fragrance of art, and more green than jade brought by swart mariners
from the manifold, inexplicable China. And, an admirable contrast, the
article ended with a description of the middle-class, ordinary, prosaic
funeral of him who should have been buried like a prince or like a
pauper. It was the crowning buffet, the final victory of Philistia over
art, beauty, and immaterial things.
Leonard Upjohn had never written anything better. It was a miracle of
charm, grace, and pity. He printed all Cronshaw’s best poems in the
course of the article, so that when the volume appeared much of its
point was gone; but he advanced his own position a good deal. He was
thenceforth a critic to be reckoned with. He had seemed before a little
aloof; but there was a warm humanity about this article which was
infinitely attractive.