GRANICE told his story simply, connectedly.
He began by a quick survey of his early years--the years of drudgery and
privation. His father, a charming man who could never say “no,” had so
signally failed to say it on certain essential occasions that when he
died he left an illegitimate family and a mortgaged estate. His lawful
kin found themselves hanging over a gulf of debt, and young Granice, to
support his mother and sister, had to leave Harvard and bury himself at
eighteen in a broker’s office. He loathed his work, and he was always
poor, always worried and in ill-health. A few years later his mother
died, but his sister, an ineffectual neurasthenic, remained on his
hands. His own health gave out, and he had to go away for six months,
and work harder than ever when he came back. He had no knack for
business, no head for figures, no dimmest insight into the mysteries of
commerce. He wanted to travel and write--those were his inmost longings.
And as the years dragged on, and he neared middle-age without making
any more money, or acquiring any firmer health, a sick despair possessed
him. He tried writing, but he always came home from the office so tired
that his brain could not work. For half the year he did not reach his
dim up-town flat till after dark, and could only “brush up” for dinner,
and afterward lie on the lounge with his pipe, while his sister droned
through the evening paper. Sometimes he spent an evening at the theatre;
or he dined out, or, more rarely, strayed off with an acquaintance or
two in quest of what is known as “pleasure.” And in summer, when he
and Kate went to the sea-side for a month, he dozed through the days in
utter weariness. Once he fell in love with a charming girl--but what had
he to offer her, in God’s name? She seemed to like him, and in common
decency he had to drop out of the running. Apparently no one
replaced him, for she never married, but grew stoutish, grayish,
philanthropic--yet how sweet she had been when he had first kissed her!
One more wasted life, he reflected...
But the stage had always been his master-passion. He would have sold his
soul for the time and freedom to write plays! It was _in him_--he could
not remember when it had not been his deepest-seated instinct. As the
years passed it became a morbid, a relentless obsession--yet with every
year the material conditions were more and more against it. He felt
himself growing middle-aged, and he watched the reflection of the
process in his sister’s wasted face. At eighteen she had been
pretty, and as full of enthusiasm as he. Now she was sour, trivial,
insignificant--she had missed her chance of life. And she had no
resources, poor creature, was fashioned simply for the primitive
functions she had been denied the chance to fulfil! It exasperated him
to think of it--and to reflect that even now a little travel, a
little health, a little money, might transform her, make her young and
desirable... The chief fruit of his experience was that there is no such
fixed state as age or youth--there is only health as against sickness,
wealth as against poverty; and age or youth as the outcome of the lot
one draws.
At this point in his narrative Granice stood up, and went to lean
against the mantel-piece, looking down at Ascham, who had not moved from
his seat, or changed his attitude of rigid fascinated attention.
“Then came the summer when we went to Wrenfield to be near old
Lenman--my mother’s cousin, as you know. Some of the family always
mounted guard over him--generally a niece or so. But that year they were
all scattered, and one of the nieces offered to lend us her cottage if
we’d relieve her of duty for two months. It was a nuisance for me, of
course, for Wrenfield is two hours from town; but my mother, who was a
slave to family observances, had always been good to the old man, so it
was natural we should be called on--and there was the saving of rent and
the good air for Kate. So we went.
“You never knew Joseph Lenman? Well, picture to yourself an amoeba or
some primitive organism of that sort, under a Titan’s microscope. He was
large, undifferentiated, inert--since I could remember him he had done
nothing but take his temperature and read the _Churchman_. Oh,
and cultivate melons--that was his hobby. Not vulgar, out-of-door
melons--his were grown under glass. He had miles of it at Wrenfield--his
big kitchen-garden was surrounded by blinking battalions of
green-houses. And in nearly all of them melons were grown--early melons
and late, French, English, domestic--dwarf melons and monsters: every
shape, colour and variety. They were petted and nursed like children--a
staff of trained attendants waited on them. I’m not sure they didn’t
have a doctor to take their temperature--at any rate the place was full
of thermometers. And they didn’t sprawl on the ground like ordinary
melons; they were trained against the glass like nectarines, and each
melon hung in a net which sustained its weight and left it free on all
sides to the sun and air...
“It used to strike me sometimes that old Lenman was just like one of
his own melons--the pale-fleshed English kind. His life, apathetic
and motionless, hung in a net of gold, in an equable warm ventilated
atmosphere, high above sordid earthly worries. The cardinal rule of
his existence was not to let himself be ‘worried.’ . . I remember his
advising me to try it myself, one day when I spoke to him about Kate’s
bad health, and her need of a change. ‘I never let myself worry,’ he
said complacently. ‘It’s the worst thing for the liver--and you look to
me as if you had a liver. Take my advice and be cheerful. You’ll make
yourself happier and others too.’ And all he had to do was to write a
cheque, and send the poor girl off for a holiday!
“The hardest part of it was that the money half-belonged to us already.
The old skin-flint only had it for life, in trust for us and the others.
But his life was a good deal sounder than mine or Kate’s--and one could
picture him taking extra care of it for the joke of keeping us waiting.
I always felt that the sight of our hungry eyes was a tonic to him.
“Well, I tried to see if I couldn’t reach him through his vanity. I
flattered him, feigned a passionate interest in his melons. And he was
taken in, and used to discourse on them by the hour. On fine days he was
driven to the green-houses in his pony-chair, and waddled through them,
prodding and leering at the fruit, like a fat Turk in his seraglio.
When he bragged to me of the expense of growing them I was reminded of
a hideous old Lothario bragging of what his pleasures cost. And the
resemblance was completed by the fact that he couldn’t eat as much as
a mouthful of his melons--had lived for years on buttermilk and toast.
‘But, after all, it’s my only hobby--why shouldn’t I indulge it?’ he
said sentimentally. As if I’d ever been able to indulge any of mine! On
the keep of those melons Kate and I could have lived like gods...
“One day toward the end of the summer, when Kate was too unwell to drag
herself up to the big house, she asked me to go and spend the afternoon
with cousin Joseph. It was a lovely soft September afternoon--a day to
lie under a Roman stone-pine, with one’s eyes on the sky, and let the
cosmic harmonies rush through one. Perhaps the vision was suggested
by the fact that, as I entered cousin Joseph’s hideous black walnut
library, I passed one of the under-gardeners, a handsome full-throated
Italian, who dashed out in such a hurry that he nearly knocked me down.
I remember thinking it queer that the fellow, whom I had often seen
about the melon-houses, did not bow to me, or even seem to see me.
“Cousin Joseph sat in his usual seat, behind the darkened windows, his
fat hands folded on his protuberant waistcoat, the last number of the
_Churchman_ at his elbow, and near it, on a huge dish, a fat melon--the
fattest melon I’d ever seen. As I looked at it I pictured the ecstasy
of contemplation from which I must have roused him, and congratulated
myself on finding him in such a mood, since I had made up my mind to ask
him a favour. Then I noticed that his face, instead of looking as calm
as an egg-shell, was distorted and whimpering--and without stopping to
greet me he pointed passionately to the melon.
“‘Look at it, look at it--did you ever see such a beauty? Such
firmness--roundness--such delicious smoothness to the touch?’ It was
as if he had said ‘she’ instead of ‘it,’ and when he put out his senile
hand and touched the melon I positively had to look the other way.
“Then he told me what had happened. The Italian under-gardener, who had
been specially recommended for the melon-houses--though it was against
my cousin’s principles to employ a Papist--had been assigned to the care
of the monster: for it had revealed itself, early in its existence, as
destined to become a monster, to surpass its plumpest, pulpiest
sisters, carry off prizes at agricultural shows, and be photographed and
celebrated in every gardening paper in the land. The Italian had done
well--seemed to have a sense of responsibility. And that very morning
he had been ordered to pick the melon, which was to be shown next day at
the county fair, and to bring it in for Mr. Lenman to gaze on its blonde
virginity. But in picking it, what had the damned scoundrelly Jesuit
done but drop it--drop it crash on the sharp spout of a watering-pot,
so that it received a deep gash in its firm pale rotundity, and was
henceforth but a bruised, ruined, fallen melon?
“The old man’s rage was fearful in its impotence--he shook, spluttered
and strangled with it. He had just had the Italian up and had sacked
him on the spot, without wages or character--had threatened to have him
arrested if he was ever caught prowling about Wrenfield. ‘By God, and
I’ll do it--I’ll write to Washington--I’ll have the pauper scoundrel
deported! I’ll show him what money can do!’ As likely as not there was
some murderous Black-hand business under it--it would be found that the
fellow was a member of a ‘gang.’ Those Italians would murder you for a
quarter. He meant to have the police look into it... And then he grew
frightened at his own excitement. ‘But I must calm myself,’ he said. He
took his temperature, rang for his drops, and turned to the _Churchman_.
He had been reading an article on Nestorianism when the melon was
brought in. He asked me to go on with it, and I read to him for an
hour, in the dim close room, with a fat fly buzzing stealthily about the
fallen melon.
“All the while one phrase of the old man’s buzzed in my brain like the
fly about the melon. ‘_I’ll show him what money can do!_’ Good heaven!
If _I_ could but show the old man! If I could make him see his power of
giving happiness as a new outlet for his monstrous egotism! I tried
to tell him something about my situation and Kate’s--spoke of my
ill-health, my unsuccessful drudgery, my longing to write, to make
myself a name--I stammered out an entreaty for a loan. ‘I can guarantee
to repay you, sir--I’ve a half-written play as security...’
“I shall never forget his glassy stare. His face had grown as smooth as
an egg-shell again--his eyes peered over his fat cheeks like sentinels
over a slippery rampart.
“‘A half-written play--a play of _yours_ as security?’ He looked at me
almost fearfully, as if detecting the first symptoms of insanity. ‘Do
you understand anything of business?’ he enquired mildly. I laughed and
answered: ‘No, not much.’
“He leaned back with closed lids. ‘All this excitement has been too much
for me,’ he said. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I’ll prepare for my nap.’ And I
stumbled out of the room, blindly, like the Italian.”
Granice moved away from the mantel-piece, and walked across to the tray
set out with decanters and soda-water. He poured himself a tall glass of
soda-water, emptied it, and glanced at Ascham’s dead cigar.
“Better light another,” he suggested.
The lawyer shook his head, and Granice went on with his tale. He told
of his mounting obsession--how the murderous impulse had waked in him on
the instant of his cousin’s refusal, and he had muttered to himself:
“By God, if you won’t, I’ll make you.” He spoke more tranquilly as the
narrative proceeded, as though his rage had died down once the resolve
to act on it was taken. He applied his whole mind to the question of how
the old man was to be “disposed of.” Suddenly he remembered the outcry:
“Those Italians will murder you for a quarter!” But no definite project
presented itself: he simply waited for an inspiration.
Granice and his sister moved to town a day or two after the incident of
the melon. But the cousins, who had returned, kept them informed of
the old man’s condition. One day, about three weeks later, Granice,
on getting home, found Kate excited over a report from Wrenfield. The
Italian had been there again--had somehow slipped into the house,
made his way up to the library, and “used threatening language.” The
house-keeper found cousin Joseph gasping, the whites of his eyes showing
“something awful.” The doctor was sent for, and the attack warded off;
and the police had ordered the Italian from the neighbourhood.
But cousin Joseph, thereafter, languished, had “nerves,” and lost his
taste for toast and butter-milk. The doctor called in a colleague, and
the consultation amused and excited the old man--he became once more
an important figure. The medical men reassured the family--too
completely!--and to the patient they recommended a more varied diet:
advised him to take whatever “tempted him.” And so one day, tremulously,
prayerfully, he decided on a tiny bit of melon. It was brought up
with ceremony, and consumed in the presence of the house-keeper and a
hovering cousin; and twenty minutes later he was dead...
“But you remember the circumstances,” Granice went on; “how suspicion
turned at once on the Italian? In spite of the hint the police had given
him he had been seen hanging about the house since ‘the scene.’ It was
said that he had tender relations with the kitchen-maid, and the rest
seemed easy to explain. But when they looked round to ask him for the
explanation he was gone--gone clean out of sight. He had been ‘warned’
to leave Wrenfield, and he had taken the warning so to heart that no one
ever laid eyes on him again.”
Granice paused. He had dropped into a chair opposite the lawyer’s, and
he sat for a moment, his head thrown back, looking about the familiar
room. Everything in it had grown grimacing and alien, and each strange
insistent object seemed craning forward from its place to hear him.
“It was I who put the stuff in the melon,” he said. “And I don’t want
you to think I’m sorry for it. This isn’t ‘remorse,’ understand. I’m
glad the old skin-flint is dead--I’m glad the others have their money.
But mine’s no use to me any more. My sister married miserably, and died.
And I’ve never had what I wanted.”
Ascham continued to stare; then he said: “What on earth was your object,
then?”
“Why, to _get_ what I wanted--what I fancied was in reach! I wanted
change, rest, _life_, for both of us--wanted, above all, for myself, the
chance to write! I travelled, got back my health, and came home to
tie myself up to my work. And I’ve slaved at it steadily for ten years
without reward--without the most distant hope of success! Nobody will
look at my stuff. And now I’m fifty, and I’m beaten, and I know it.”
His chin dropped forward on his breast. “I want to chuck the whole
business,” he ended.