planted him, parcels, papers, and all, by my side in a taxi. We whizzed
back along Queen Victoria Street, and on the way I sorted him out,
buttoned his overcoat so that it no longer tickled his ear, rolled up
his umbrella so that the points no longer got caught, and made him put
on both gloves, so that he could not drop them any more. And I kept
tight hold of him until we reached Essex Street. He talked leases the
whole way.
“Thanks awfully,” he said at the end, smiling; “you’re always kind--if a
little rough. But I’ll keep on the taxi, I think, now. The fact is, I
find I’ve left the right lease at home after all--you know, the one
about the house without the----”
I heard the rest, alternately mumbled and shouted at me, as the taxi
whirred off into the Strand, bound for some unknown destination in
Chelsea. It was impossible to help him more. But I should like to have
heard what he said to (_a_) the chauffeur at the end of his journey,
(_b_) to the solicitor. I should also like to swear that when he got
back to his rooms he found the right lease had been in his pocket all
the time.
I met him again the following day, but I had not the courage to ask him
anything.
VII
UP AND DOWN
His vagueness, apparently, is only on the surface of his mind; down at
the centre the pulses of life throb with unusual vigour and decision.
And I think the explanation of his puzzled expression and dazed
manner--to say nothing of his idiotic replies--when addressed upon
ordinary topics is due to the fact that he prefers to live in that hot
and very active centre. He dislikes being called out of it.
Down there his creative imagination is for ever at work: he sees
clearly, thinks hard, acts even splendidly. But the moment you speak to
him about trivial things the mists gather about his eyes, his voice
hesitates, his hands make futile gestures, and he screws up his face
into an expression of puzzled alarm. Up he comes to the best of his
ability, but it is clear he is vexed at being disturbed.
“Oh yes, I think so--very,” he replied the other day as we met on our
way to the Club and I asked if he had enjoyed his holiday.
“Awful amount of rain, though, wasn’t there?”
“Was there, now? Yes, there must have been, of course. It _was_ a wet
summer.”
He looked at me as though I were a comparative stranger, although our
intimacy is of years’ standing, and our talks on life, literature, and
all the rest are a chief pleasure to each of us. We had not met for some
months. I wanted to pierce through to that hot centre where the real man
lived, and to find out what the real man had been doing during the
interval. He came up but slowly, however.
“You went to the mountains as usual, I suppose?” he asked, with his mind
obviously elsewhere. He hopped along the pavement with his quick,
bird-like motion.
“Mountains, yes. And you?”
He made no reply. From his face I could tell he had come about half-way
up, but was already on the way down again. Once he got back to that
centre of his I should get nothing out of him at all.
“And you?” I repeated louder. “Abroad, I suppose, somewhere?”
“Well--er--not exactly,” he mumbled. “That is to say--I--er--went to
Switzerland somewhere--Austria, I mean--down there on the way towards
Italy _beyond Bozen, you know_.” He ended the sentence very loud indeed,
with quite absurd emphasis, as his way is when he knows he hasn’t been
listening. “I found a quiet inn out of the tourist track and did a rare
lot of work there too.” His face cleared and the brown eyes began to
glow a little. It was like seeing the sun through opening mists. “Come
in, and I’ll tell you about it,” he added, in an eager whisper, as we
reached the Club doors.
At the same moment, however, the porter came down the steps and touched
his hat, and my vague friend, recognising a face he felt he ought to
know, stopped to ask him how he was, and whether So-and-so was back yet;
and while the porter replied briefly and respectfully I saw to my dismay
the mists settle down again upon the other’s face. A moment later the
porter touched his hat again and moved off down the street. My friend
looked round at me as though I had but just arrived upon the scene.
“Here we are,” he observed gently, “at the Club. I think I shall go in.
What are you going to do?”
“I’m coming in too,” I said.
“Good,” he murmured; “let’s go in together, then,” his thoughts working
away busily at something deep within him.
On our way to the hat-racks, and all up the winding stairs, he mumbled
away about the wet summer, and tourists, and his little mountain inn,
but never a word of the work I was so anxious to hear about, and he so
anxious really to tell. In the reading-room I manœuvred to get two
arm-chairs side by side before he could seize the heap of papers he
smothered his lap with, but never read.
“And where have _you_ been all the summer?” he asked, crossing his
little legs and speaking in a voice loud enough to have been heard in
the street. “Somewhere in the mountains, I suppose, as usual?”
“You were going to tell me about the work you got through up in your
lonely inn,” I insisted sharply. “Was it a play, or a novel, or
criticism, or what?” He looked so small and lost in the big arm-chair
that I felt quite ashamed of myself for speaking so violently. He turned
round on the slippery leather and offered me a cigarette. The glow came
back to his face.
“Well,” he said, “as a matter of fact it was both. That is, I was
preparing a stage version of my new novel.” All the mist had gone now;
he was alive at the centre, and thoroughly awake. He snapped his case to
and put it away before I had taken my cigarette. But, of course, he did
not notice that, and held out a lighted match to my lips as though there
was something there to light.
“No, thanks,” I said quickly, fearful that if I asked again for the
cigarette the mists would instantly gather once more and the real man
disappear.
“Won’t you _really_, though?” he said, blowing the match out and
forgetting to light his own cigarette at the same time. “I did the whole
scenario, and most of the first act. There was nothing else to do. It
rained all the time, and the place was quiet as the grave----”
A waiter brought him several letters on a tray. He took them
automatically. The face clouded a bit.
“What’ll you have?” he asked absent-mindedly, acting automatically upon
the presence of the waiter.
“Nothing, thanks.”
“Nor will I, then. Oh yes, I will, though--I’ll have some dry ginger
ale. Here, waiter! Bring me a small dry ginger ale.”
The waiter, with the force of habit, bent his head questioningly for my
order too.
“_You_ said----?” asked my exasperating friend. He was right down in the
mists now, and I knew I should never get him up again this side of
lunch.
“I said nothing, thanks.”
“Nothing, then, for this gentleman,” he continued, gazing up at the
waiter as though he were some monster seen for the first time, “and for
me--a dry ginger ale, please.”
“Yes, sir,” said the man, moving off.
“Small,” the other called after him.
“Yessir--small.”
“And a slice of lemon in it.”
The waiter inclined his head respectfully from the door. The other
turned to me, searching in his perturbed mind--I could tell it by the
way his eyes worked--for the trail of his vanished conversation. Before
he got it, however, he slithered round again on the leather seat towards
the door.
“A bit of ice too, don’t forget!”
The waiter’s head peeped round the corner, and from the movement of his
lips I gathered he repeated the remark about the bit of ice.
“I _did_ say ‘dry’?” my friend asked, looking anxiously at me; “didn’t
I?”
“You did.”
“And a bit of lemon?”
“And a slice of lemon.”
“And what are _you_ going to have, then? Upon my word, old man, I forgot
to ask you.” He looked so distressed that it was impossible to show
impatience.
“Nothing, thanks. You asked me, you know.”
A pause fell between us. I gave it up. He would talk when he wanted to,
but there was no forcing him. It struck me suddenly that he had a rather
fagged and weary look for a man who had been spending several weeks at a
mountain inn with work he loved. The pity and affection his presence
always wakes in me ran a neck-and-neck race. At that “centre” of his, I
knew full well, he was ever devising plans for the helping of others,
quite as much as creating those remarkable things that issued
periodically, illunderstood by a sensation-loving public, from the
press. A sharp telepathic suspicion flashed through my mind, but before
there was time to give it expression in words, up came the waiter with a
long glass of ginger ale fizzing on a tray.
He handed it to my vague friend, and my vague friend took it and handed
it to me.
“But it’s yours, my dear chap,” I suggested.
He looked puzzled for a second, and then his face cleared. “I forget
what _you_ ordered,” he observed softly, looking interrogatively at the
waiter and at me. We informed him simultaneously, “Nothing,” and the
waiter respectfully mentioned the price of the drink. My friend’s left
hand plunged into his trousers pocket, while his right carried the glass
to his lips. Perhaps his left hand did not know what his right was
about, or perhaps his mind was too far away to direct the motions of
either with safety. Anyhow, the result was deplorable. He swallowed an
uncomfortable gulp of air-bubbles and ginger--and choked--over me, over
the waiter and tray, over his beard and clothes. The floating lump of
ice bobbed up and hit his nose. I never saw a man look so surprised and
distressed in my life. I took the glass from him, and when his left hand
finally emerged with money he handed it first vaguely to me as though I
were the waiter--for which there was no real excuse, since we were not
in evening dress.
When, at length, order was restored and he was sipping quietly at the
remains of the fizzing liquid, he looked up at me over the brim of his
glass and remarked, with more concentration on the actual present than
he had yet shown:
“By the way, you know, I’m going away to-morrow--going abroad for my
holiday. Taking a lot of work with me, too----”
“But you’ve only just come back!” I expostulated, with a feeling very
like anger in my heart.
He shook his head with decision. Evidently that choking had choked him
into the living present. He was really “up” this time, and not likely to
go down again.
“No, no,” he replied; “I’ve been here all the summer in town looking
after old Podger----”
“Old Podger!” I remembered a dirty, down-at-heel old man I once met at
my friend’s rooms--a poet who had “smothered his splendid talent” in
drink, and who was always at starvation’s door. “What in the world was
the matter with Podger?”
“D.T. I’ve been nursing him through it. The poor devil nearly went under
this time. I’ve got him into a home down in the country at last, but all
August he was--well, we thought he was gone.”
_All August!_ So that was how my friend’s summer had been spent. With
never a word of thanks probably at that!
“But your mountain inn beyond Bozen! You said----”
“Did I? I must be wool-gathering,” he laughed, with that beautifully
tender smile that comes sometimes to his delicate, dreamy face. “That
was _last_ year. I spent my holidays last year up there. How stupid of
me to get so absurdly muddled!” He plunged his nose into the empty
glass, waiting for the last drop to trickle out, with his neck at an
angle that betrayed the collar to be undone and the tie sadly frayed at
the edges.
“But--all the work you said you did up there--the scenario and the first
act and--and----”
He turned upon me with such sudden energy that I fairly jumped. Then, in
a voice that mumbled the first half of his sentence, but shouted the end
like a German officer giving instructions involving life or death, I
heard:
“But, my dear good fellow, you don’t half listen to what I say! All that
work, as I told you just now, is what I expect and mean to do when I get
up there. _Now_--have you got it clear at last?”
He looked me up and down with great energy. By biting the inner side of
my lip I kept my face grave. Later we went down to lunch together, and I
heard details of the weeks of unselfish devotion he had lavished upon
“old Podger.” I would give a great deal to possess some of the driving
power for good that throbs and thrills at the real centre of my old
friend with the vague manner and the absent-minded surface. But he is a
singular contradiction, and almost always misunderstood. I should like
to know, too, what Podger thinks.
VIII
FAITH CURE ON THE CHANNEL
A letter from my vague friend was always a source of difficulty: it
allowed of so many interpretations--contradictory often. But this one
was comparatively plain sailing:--
“You said you were going abroad about this time. So am I. Let’s go
as far as Paris together. Send me a line to above address at once.
Thursday or Friday would suit me.--Yours,
X. Y. Z.
“P.S.--I enclose P.O. for that 10s. I owe you.”
I received this letter on a Wednesday morning.
It was written from the Club, but the Club address was carefully scored
out and no other given.
The “P.O.” was not enclosed.
In spite of these obstacles, however, we somehow met and arranged to
start on Saturday; and the night before we dined together in that
excellent little Soho restaurant--“there’s nothing,” my friend always
said, “between its cooking and the Ritz, except prices”--and discussed
our prospects, he going to finish a book at a Barbizon inn, I to inspect
certain machinery in various Continental dairies.
His heart, it was plain, however, was neither in the cooking nor the
book, nor in my wonderful machinery. Like a boy with a secret, he was
mysterious about something hitherto unshared. Happy, too, for he kept
smiling at nothing.
“The fact is,” he observed at last over coffee, “I’m really a vile,
simply a vile sailor.”
“I remember,” I said, for we had once been companions on the same yacht.
“And you,” he added, holding the black eyebrows steady, “you--are
another.” When dealing with simple truths he was often brutally frank.
“What’s the good of talking about it?”
“This,” he replied, paying the bill and giving me the amount of the
“P.O.,” “I’ll show you.”
He conducted me into a little box of a place bearing the legend outside
“Foreign Chemist,” and proceeded first to buy the most curious
assortment of strange medicines I ever heard of. Weird indeed must have
been his ailments. I had no time for reflection, however, on the point,
for suddenly turning to me by way of introduction, and allowing the
eyebrow next the chemist to dance and bristle so as to attract his
attention, he mumbled, “This is my seasick friend. We’re off to-morrow.
If you’ve got the stuff ready we might take it now.” And, before I had
time to ask or argue, he had pocketed a little package and we were in
the street again.
Never had I known him so brisk and practical. “It’s a new seasick cure,”
he explained darkly as we went home; “something quite new--just
invented, in fact; and that chap’s asking a few of his special customers
to try it and give their honest opinions. So I told him we were pretty
bad--vile, in fact--and I’ve got this for nothing. He only wants vile
sailors, you see, otherwise there’s no test----”
“Know what’s in it?”
He shook his head so violently that I was afraid for the eyebrows.
“But I believe in it. It’s simply wonderful stuff; no bromide, he
assured me, and no harmful drugs. Just a seasick cure; that’s all!”
“I’ll take it if you will,” I laughed. “I could take poison with
impunity before going on the Channel!”
He gave me one bottle. “Take a dose to-night,” he explained, “another
after breakfast in the morning, another in the train, and another the
moment you go on board.”
I gave my promise and we separated on his doorstep. It was a lot to
promise, but as I have explained, I could drink tar or prussic acid
before going on a steamer, and neither would have the time to work
injury. I marvelled greatly, however, at my vague friend’s fit of
abnormal lucidity, and in the night I dreamed of him surrounded by all
the medicine bottles he had bought to take abroad with him, swallowing
their contents one by one, and smiling while he did so, with eyebrows
grown to the size of hedges.
I took my doses faithfully, with the immediate result that in the train
I became aware of symptoms that usually had the decency to wait for the
steamer. My friend took his too. He was in excellent spirits, eyes
bright, full of confidence. The bottles were wrapped in neat white
paper, only the necks visible; and we drank our allotted quantity from
the mouths, without glasses.
“Not much taste,” I remarked.
“Wonderful stuff,” he replied. “I believe in it absolutely. It’s good
for other things, too; it made me sleep like a top, and I had the
appetite of a horse for breakfast. That chemist’ll make his fortune when
he brings it out. People will pay a pound a bottle, lots of ’em.”
At Newhaven the sea was agitated--hideously so; even in the harbour the
steamers rose and fell absurdly. Not all the fresh, salt winds in the
world, nor all the jolly sunshine and sparkling waves, nor all that
strong beauty that comes with the first glimpse of the sea and long
horizons, could lessen the sinking dread that was in my--my heart. Truth
to tell, I had no more belief in the elixir than if it had been chopped
hay and treacle.
My friend, however, was confidence personified. “The fact is,” he said,
laughing at the wind and sea, “the real fact is _I believe in that
chemist_. He told me this stuff was infallible; and I believe it is. The
trouble with you is funk--sheer blue funk.”
We stuck to our guns and swallowed the last prescribed dose just before
the syren announced our departure--and fifteen minutes later....
It was a degrading three hours; and the sting of it was that my friend,
with a hideous cap tied down about his ears, a smile that was in the
worst possible taste, and a jaunty confidence that was even more
insulting than he intended it to be, walked up and down that loathsome,
sliding, switchback deck the entire way. Not the entire way, though, for
half-way across he disappeared into the dining-room, and returned in due
course with that brown beard of his charged with bread-crumbs, and
between his lips actually--a pipe. And, without so much as speaking to
me, he paced to and fro before my chair, when a little of that
imagination he put so delightfully into his books would have led him
discreetly to pace the other deck where I could not see him. I thought
out endless revenges, but the fact was I never had time to think out
any single revenge properly to its conclusion. Something--something
unspeakably vile--always came to interfere; and the sight of my friend,
balancing up and down the rolling deck chatting to sailors, admiring the
sea and sky, and puffing hard at his pipe all the time, was, I think,
the most abominable thing I have ever seen.
“Simply marvellous, I call it,” he told me in the _douane_ at Dieppe.
“The stuff is a revolutionary discovery. It’s the first time I ever ate
a meal on a steamer in my life. Sorry you suffered so. Can’t understand
it,” he added, with a complacency that was insufferable. I was
positively delighted to see the Customs officer open _all_ his bags and
litter his things about in glorious confusion....
In Paris that night our little hotel was rather full, and we had to
share a big two-bedded room. My friend groaned a good deal between two
and three in the morning and kept me awake; and once, somewhere about
five a.m., I saw him with a lighted candle fumbling at the table among a
lot of little white paper packages which I recognised as his purchases
from that criminal London chemist who had concocted the seasick cure.
It was at nine o’clock, however, while he was down at his bath, that I
noticed something on the table by his bed that instantly arrested my
attention. Regardless of morals, I investigated. It was unmistakable. It
was his own bottle of the seasick cure. He had never taken it at all!
Then, just as his step sounded in the passage, it flashed across me. He
had made one of his usual muddles. He had mistaken the bottle. He had
swallowed the contents of some other phial instead.
Revenge is sweet; but I felt well again, and no longer harboured any
spite. There was just time to hide the bottle in my hand when he
entered.
“Awful headache I’ve got,” he said. “Can’t make out what’s wrong with
me. Such funny pains, too.”
“After-effects of the seasick cure, probably. They’ll pass in time,” I
suggested. But he remained in bed for a day and a night with all the
symptoms of _mal de mer_ on land.
It was many weeks later when I told him the truth, and showed the bottle
to prove it--just in time to prevent his telling the chemist, “I have
tried your seasick cure and found it absolutely efficacious,” etc.
“What cured you,” I said, “was far more wonderful than anything one can
buy in bottles. It was faith, sheer faith!”
“I believe you’re right,” he replied meekly. “I believed in that stuff
_absolutely_.” Then he added, “But, you know, I should like to find out
what it was I _did_ take.”
IX
THE GOBLIN’S COLLECTION
Dutton accepted the invitation for the feeble reason that he was not
quick enough at the moment to find a graceful excuse. He had none of
that facile brilliance which is so useful at week-end parties; he was a
big, shy, awkward man. Moreover, he disliked these great houses. They
swallowed him. The solemn, formidable butlers oppressed him. He left on
Sunday night when possible. This time, arriving with an hour to dress,
he went upstairs to an enormous room, so full of precious things that he
felt like an insignificant item in a museum corridor. He smiled
disconsolately as the underling who brought up his bag began to fumble
with the lock. But, instead of the sepulchral utterance he dreaded, a
delicious human voice with an unmistakable brogue proceeded from the
stooping figure. It was positively comforting. “It ’ull be locked, sorr,
but maybe ye have the key?” And they bent together over the disreputable
kit-bag, looking like a pair of ants knitting antennæ on the floor of
some great cave. The giant four-poster watched them contemptuously;
mahogany cupboards wore an air of grave surprise; the gaping, open
fireplace alone could have swallowed all his easels--almost, indeed, his
little studio. This human, Irish presence was distinctly consoling--some
extra hand or other, thought Dutton, probably.
He talked a little with the lad; then, lighting a cigarette, he watched
him put the clothes away in the capacious cupboards, noticing in
particular how neat and careful he was with the little things.
Nail-scissors, silver stud-box, metal shoe-horn, and safety razor, even
the bright cigar-cutter and pencil-sharpener collected loose from the
bottom of the bag--all these he placed in a row upon the dressing-table
with the glass top, and seemed never to have done with it. He kept
coming back to rearrange and put a final touch, lingering over them
absurdly. Dutton watched him with amusement, then surprise, finally with
exasperation. Would he never go? “Thank you,” he said at last; “that
will do. I’ll dress now. What time is dinner?” The lad told him, but
still lingered, evidently anxious to say more. “Everything’s out, I
think,” repeated Dutton impatiently; “all the loose things, I mean?” The
face at once turned eagerly. What mischievous Irish eyes he had, to be
sure! “I’ve put thim all together in a row, sorr, so that ye’ll not be
missing anny-thing at all,” was the quick reply, as he pointed to the
ridiculous collection of little articles, and even darted back to finger
them again. He counted them one by one. And then suddenly he added, with
a touch of personal interest that was _not_ familiarity, “It’s so easy,
ye see, sorr, to lose thim small bright things in this great room.” And
he was gone.