“Then after lunch we will have coffee in the garden, and I will tell
you.”
When we had sat down under the shade of a wall, with the tall avenue of
pines opposite us making a dark tangled frieze against the delicate sky,
he began.
“What I am going to tell you now has been gathered partly from
conversations with my friend: and partly from letters he has written to
me. Years ago I jotted down the order of events, with names and dates,
but that, of course, I fear I cannot show even to you. However, I know
the story well, and you may rely on the main facts.
“I must tell you first that many years ago now, my friend, who was about
forty years old, had lately become a partner in his father’s firm: and
of course was greatly occupied with all the details of business. It was
a broker’s firm, well established and did a good steady business. My
friend at that time had no idea of doing any work outside his
occupation. I heard him say in fact, about this time, that his work
seemed to absorb all his energies and capacity. Then the first event of
the series took place.
“He was coming home one frosty afternoon in December, between three and
four o’clock, on the top of an omnibus. He was sitting in front and
looking about him. He noticed a poorly-dressed man standing on the
pavement on the right-hand side, as if he wished to cross. Then he began
to cross, and came at last right up to the omnibus on which my friend
was sitting, and paused a moment to let it pass. As he stood there, my
friend watching him with that listless interest with which a tired man
will observe details, a hansom cab moving quickly came in the opposite
direction. It seemed as if the horse would run the man down. It was too
sudden to warn him, but the man saw it, and to avoid the horse sprang
quickly forward, his head half turned away, and his feet came between
the front and back wheels of the omnibus. There was a jolt and a
terrible scream, and my friend horrified leant far over the side to see.
When the omnibus had passed the man stood for a moment on his crushed
feet, and then swayed forward and fell on his face. My friend started up
and made a movement to go to him, but several others had seen the
accident and ran to the man, and a policeman was crossing quickly from
the other side, so he sat down again and the omnibus carried him on.
“Now this horrible thing remained in my friend’s mind, haunted him,
shocked him profoundly. He could not forget the terrible face of pain
that he had seen upturned for an instant, and his imagination carried
him on in spite of himself to dwell on the details of those crushed
feet. He wrote me a long letter a week or two afterwards, minutely
describing all that I have told you.
“The following summer he was going down to the Kennington Oval one
Saturday afternoon to see the close of some famous cricket match. He
travelled by the Underground Railway as far as Westminster, and from
there determined to walk at least across the Bridge. He walked on the
right-hand side, and had reached the steps of St. Thomas’ Hospital. He
waited here a moment undecided whether to walk on or drive.
“As he waited, he half turned and saw a beggar sitting in the angle
between the steps and the wall. There was a white dog beside him. The
beggar’s face was partly bandaged; but what caught my friend’s attention
most were his two hands. They were lying palms downwards on the beggar’s
knees, bandaged like his face, but in the centre of each was a dark
spot, showing through the wrapping, as if there were a festering wound
that soaked through from underneath. My friend looked at him in disgust
for a moment: but terribly fascinated by those quiet suffering hands;
and then he passed on. But during all that afternoon he could not forget
those hands. I daresay he was overwrought and nervous. But his memory
too went back to the accident by the Marble Arch. That night too, as he
told me in a conversation afterwards, as he tossed about, his windows
wide open to catch the night air, half waking visions kept moving before
him of a man with crushed feet and bandaged hands, who moaned and lifted
a drawn face to the sky.
“Early that autumn he was alone, except for the servants, in his
father’s house in London. A maid was taken ill. I forget the nature of
the illness, but perhaps you will be able to identify it when I have
finished. At any rate the girl grew quickly worse. One morning just
before he started to the City the doctor, who had called early that
morning, asked to have a word with him, and told him he thought he ought
to operate immediately, and asked for his sanction.
“‘Well,’ said my friend, ‘of course I must speak to the girl about it.
Have you told her yet?’
“‘No,’ said the doctor, ‘I thought I should mention it to you first. I
understand that the girl has no relations in the world.’
“‘Can you tell me the nature of the operation?’ asked my friend.
“‘It is not really serious. It is an incision in the right side,’ and he
added a few details explaining the case.
“‘Well,’ said my friend, ‘we had better go upstairs together.’
“They went up and found the girl perfectly conscious and reasonable. She
consented to the operation, which was fixed for that evening.
“But all that day the picture floated before his eyes of the quiet room
at the top of the house, and the girl lying there waiting. And then the
scene would shift a little. And he would see the girl after it was over,
with a bandage against her side, and the knowledge of the little wound
beneath. When he reached home, late in the evening, the doctor was
waiting for him.
“‘It has been perfectly successful,’ he said, ‘and I think she will
recover.’
“Now, that evening, as my friend sat at the dinner-table alone, smoking
and thinking, his old experiences came to his mind again. In less than a
year he had seen three things, none of which seemed to have any very
close relation to him, but each of which had deeply affected him. He
told me afterwards that he began to suspect a design underlying them;
but he had not a glimmer of light, strange as it may seem to you and me,
as to the nature of that design. Within a month, however, I received a
letter from him, from some place in the country where he was staying,
describing the following incident.
“He had gone down from a Saturday to Monday to a friend’s house in
Surrey. On the Sunday afternoon he and his friend went for a walk
through some woods. Autumn was in full glory, and the trees were blazing
in red and gold: and the bramble branches were weighed down with purple
fruit. As they walked together along a grass ride they heard shouts and
laughter of children in the woods on one side. They could hear footsteps
pattering through dry leaves, and the tearing and trampling of
brushwood; and in a moment more a boy burst out of the thin hedge,
tripped in a bramble, and rolled into the grass walk. He was up again in
a moment laughing and flushed, but my friend saw across his forehead a
little thin red dotted line where a thorn had scratched him. As the boy
laughed up into their faces, he lifted his hand to his forehead.
“‘Why it’s wet,’ he said, and then, looking at his fingers: ‘Why, it’s
blood! I’ve scratched myself.’
“Other footsteps came running through the undergrowth, and the boy
himself ran off down the road, and the footsteps in the wood stopped,
retraced themselves and died away in faint rustlings up the hill. But as
my friend had looked he had seen in his memory those other experiences
of the last year. And all seemed to concentrate themselves on one
Figure––with wounded feet and hands and side––and a torn forehead.
‘My friend stood quiet so long that his companion spoke to him and
touched his arm.
“‘Yes, I am ready,’ he said; ‘let us go home.’
“The end of the letter I cannot quote to you. It is too intimate and
personal. But it ended with a request to myself to give him an
introduction to some friend who would give him work to do in some poor
district. And work of that kind he has carried on ever since.”
The old priest’s voice ceased.
“There is one thing my friend did not know,” he said after a moment.
“When that particular operation on the side is performed, of which I
have spoken, there comes out blood and water. A doctor will tell you
so.”
And then:
“That is my friend’s story,” he said, “Do you not think it remarkable?”
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