BY MRS. HENRY DUDENEY
FOLLY CORNER
3d Impression 12mo $1.25
A STORY OF SUSSEX TO-DAY
“A work of art which is not only permeated with an extraordinarily
sympathetic understanding of the human heart, but displays also from
beginning to end the sort of vigor and sanity that can employ the most
delicate instruments and the subtlest methods without becoming
intellectually nearsighted and without losing even for a moment a sense
of true proportion.... Mrs. Dudeney is the equal of Thomas Hardy, as
she is his literary congener.”--_Professor Harry Thurston Peck in the
Bookman._
“It shows the same deep insight into the complications of the human
soul [as did the author’s earlier novel].... This story from the
opening page is tense with sustained power and is surely destined
to be one of the most important contributions to this season’s
fiction.”--_N. Y. Commercial Advertiser._
MEN OF MARLOWE’S
12mo $1.25
CONTENTS.--Introductory--The One in Red--Arnold’s
Laundress--Why?--Jimmy--Game Feathers--An Interlude--Mortgaged--A
Political Woman--Beyond the Gray Gate--The Set at Seven--Hopkins.
These stories of residents in one of the English “Inns,” like those of
“The Temple,” are so interrelated as almost to constitute a continuous
novel. They show more humor than anything the author has done, and a
variety of powers hardly foreshadowed even in “Folly Corner.”
HENRY HOLT & CO. NEW YORK
MEN OF MARLOWE’S
BY
MRS. HENRY DUDENEY
AUTHOR OF “FOLLY CORNER,” ETC.
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1900
COPYRIGHT, 1900,
BY
HENRY HOLT & CO.
THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS
RAHWAY, N. J.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY 1
THE ONE IN RED 9
ARNOLD’S LAUNDRESS 39
WHY? 71
JIMMY 93
GAME FEATHERS 117
AN INTERLUDE 135
MORTGAGED 161
A POLITICAL WOMAN 185
BEYOND THE GRAY GATE 201
THE SET AT SEVEN 233
HOPKINS 263
MEN OF MARLOWE’S.
INTRODUCTORY.
“AS a woman in search of sensation, you should not have come to me. I
can tell you tales, but they are not exactly sensational--hardly a
detective in them.”
“The detective is a slur on any story. He is merely the author’s fool.”
“But they are not even love stories of the kind you’re accustomed to.”
“Of course not. Here in an Inn of Court you have no opportunities--no
conservatory, no ballroom, no garden parties. Gerald proposed to me on
the Underground Railway--and deserved to be refused. But he had the
grace to apologize.”
“Well, I’ll tell you all I know--or nearly. Some very droll things
that I _could_ tell would not interest you.”
“I don’t mind being startled. You promised not to irritate me by
being chivalrous. Chivalry! That subtle grip of the Middle Ages on my
sex.”
“But a woman--don’t interrupt; I use the word in a superior sense--can
never appreciate the fine humor of a tipsy man. She expects him to be
obvious: to fall in the gutter, to be towed home by the policeman, or
fined for being disorderly. Tales of buoyancy, funny from the man’s
point of view, would bore you.”
“Humph!”
“There are other tales--quite of the feudal period--which Gerald would
rather I did not tell. Merry tales, with an undercurrent of sadness:
the most perfect form of humor.”
“I hope you don’t tax me with immodest prudery.”
“I tax your husband. Some of the tales may be rather mad.”
“Lunatics are the salt of the earth. Come and dine with us once a week.
Tell me a story after dinner--Gerald goes to sleep.”
“I must tell them in the Inn or they’d lose their flavor.”
“Here! Once a week--that is settled. I’ll come. Marlowe’s Inn is
charming. These quiet squares, just off Holborn; these sedate houses,
with their old staircases and sets of chambers, each with its stout
black door, appeal to me. I like the archway, the porter at the gate. I
never saw such a green garden. I love rooks. Everything is gay, cool,
monastic; a most fascinating place. And such queer people! I met a man
with the face of a mystic----”
“Probably Guy Blockley, the comedian.”
“There was another man with a striped waistcoat, closely cropped hair,
and a bulldog jaw. He looked like a prizefighter.”
“That’s Paradale, the poet.”
“Good Heavens! Then I met a woman, very fat. She carried a pail of
dirty water. No doubt she was a political hostess, famous for her
parties, or a popular lady novelist.”
“She was only a charwoman--laundresses we call them in the Inn. She has
probably ‘seen better days.’”
“Well--about the tales?”
“Sad tales, remember--partly sad. But you’ll get a laugh out of them.”
“I prefer sad tales; there is more strength in a sob than in a giggle.
Anything, so long as they are not commonplace. So long as the people
don’t marry in the last chapter. I’m so sick of sane, respectable
people who do exactly what they ought to do. Gerald has a regular
income--that blight on originality. I was doomed to middle-class ease
from my very cradle.”
“I wonder if you really _are_ broad-minded. I wonder! You are not very
young----”
“Nowadays a woman only comes of age at thirty.”
“After thirty she is often a prude.”
“But I am not so very much after. Why waste time in parrying? Tell me a
story at once. Let this be the first sitting.”
* * * * *
“It was very stupid of me to clutch your arm like that--to scream. A
scream is the admission of small intellect, of nerves, of everything
that went out with smelling-bottles. But that noise startled me--it
was the prologue to your tale--too realistic. What was it? I think it
came from that house across the way, from that open window on the third
floor, with the blue window box.”
“From No. 7. Yes; of course.”
“How somber you look!”
“I must go and see what is up. Promise me to keep quite still. Don’t
even look out of the window.”
“I promise. I’ll look at the album instead. That is a most harmless, a
most creditable thing to do. My heart thumps still. Do you think it’s a
suicide? I’d like a smelling-bottle, if you had one. But a drop of
whisky is the modern substitute. Thank you. And in this little cup. How
pretty!”
“It belonged to Kinsman. You will hear about him later. Here is the
album. There are portraits of Adeline Pray and Minnie Chaytor--women
whose acquaintance you’ll make. I won’t be long.”
* * * * *
“What was it? Here, take the rest of the whisky; you look as if you
wanted it.”
“It was Dick Simpson. He’s shot himself. Let me take you out and put
you in a hansom. This is our first installment; a melodramatic one.”
“Why did he shoot himself? How shocking! Love? There’s a girl going in
at the door now.”
“Why? You will understand when I tell you about that set of chambers in
which he lived. Poor Dick! He’s left a note, just saying that all his
accounts are in order. He was in the City; some of the men of Marlowe’s
are. The odd thing is--there is always a quip in our tragedies--that he
had dressed for the occasion. Frock coat, flower in his buttonhole, new
tie--he only bought it last night; showed it to me; asked if I admired
the pattern. They’ll never let that set again; it is the most
extraordinary thing--that’s the fifth man that _I_ know of, counting
Drummond and Jimmy.
“He was such a thrifty, cautious little chap, too! No debts, no
difficult position. He wasn’t hard up--as most of us are. He lived
within his income.”
“He seems to have been a commonplace person.”
“Poor Dick! Here you are. Where shall I tell the man to drive to?”
“To the Circus. Good-by. I’ll come again, about this time this day
week. Poor man! How shocking!”
THE ONE IN RED.
ORION was mean. He gave a party once. The whisky was watered. He came
to me confidentially in the course of the evening and whispered
angrily:
“You see that fellow Pearson? My word! how he’s helping himself to
whisky. He’s drinking it neat. I’ve watched him. Don’t you call that
confounded impudence?”
He was also one of those men whose brains never seem to develop; a
weak-minded chap who, when he had his hair cut, allowed the barber to
wheedle him into buying a bottle of hair wash--half a crown the small
size, but only four-and-sixpence for one containing more than double.
Brains! Men like that have only just enough to grub along with--just
enough to see that they get their proper change across the counter, and
are given the right brand of tobacco.
I knew a barmaid--a nice girl, without the least harm in her. I gave
her flowers--a bangle once. For some years she has been the mistress of
a flourishing public-house off New Oxford Street; married a barman who
had dropped in for a legacy. Doubtless by now she is the mother of an
appallingly large family. Yet, whenever I met Orion, he used to
snigger, bob his silly face forward, and chuckle:
“Well, old man, seen anything of Rosey lately? Fine girl, Rosey!”
I should have forgotten the girl’s very name, but Orion would not let
me. He always said the same thing.
One Christmas Eve I took her to his rooms--it was the only time he ever
met her. He was sitting by a tremendous fire cooking a fine turkey. The
table was set out most elaborately, with flowers, crackers, serviettes
folded into shape.
We sat and chatted; he basting the bird, Rosey dimpling about with
appetite. He told us how much he had paid for that turkey in Smithfield
market, he showed us the sausages that were to be eaten with it. He
went to the cupboard and brought out a very dainty tin of fancy
biscuits. Rosey half put out her plump hand and then drew it back
awkwardly. He lifted the rice paper so that we might admire the sugar
on the top row. He pointed out bottles of ginger wine, boxes of
preserved fruit--all sorts of things. They made poor Rosey’s blue eyes
glisten. But he never offered her so much as a fig. What is more, I
ascertained afterward, as a positive fact, that he never had a soul to
dine with him that Christmas. That’s the sort of fellow Orion was.
He had the third floor set at No. 7. We all wondered why he lived in
the Inn at all. It held no advantages for him. His oak was never
sported, except when he was out.
Perhaps you see nothing so very important, nothing, certainly, that is
romantic, about that heavy black door on which my name stands white.
But a man’s oak guards faithfully the secrets of his life. Generations
of secrets, of sins, of sorrows are held by those stout doors--black
and inscrutable, two by two on every landing. The oak shuts out duns;
shuts in a pretty woman. The stories those black doors could tell!
I wonder they never crack--with laughter or great, splitting sobs.
The oak knows everything. It is like a fashionable woman’s toilet. I
love to hear them clang to somberly at night; when a man goes out, when
he creeps in late. The oak is the bachelor’s discreet parlor-maid. It
says “not at home.” When we sport it--which is simply shutting it--we
defy the world.
Yet Orion only used this potential thing, this sacred and confidential
black door, to protect his electro plate. He had no debts, no
compromising visitors, no delicate difficulties. What a man! What a
mean, drab life!
We all chaffed him about his electro plate; the box in which he kept
macaroons, the fish slice, the sugar tongs--all the useless things. He
really ought to have lived in a neat villa. No doubt he would have done
if his aunt had not happened to live in Great Ormond Street, close by.
He took me to dine with her once. It was a wet Sunday. The aunt, Mrs.
Grigg, was a terrible woman of seventy or so. She was dressed in the
height of fashion--as it had been in the fifties. No doubt you have
seen mold-spotted fashion plates of the period. She had a muslin
chemisette, muslin under-sleeves, a wide skirt of some blinding, bright
red stuff. Great rings stretched the lobes of her ears. On her neck she
wore string after string of jet and on her bony wrist a hair bracelet.
Her brooch was set with braids of sandy hair. I suppose it was Grigg’s.
How that ancient woman leered and bridled at me all through dinner! We
had cold mutton and mint sauce, gooseberry tart and tapioca--cold water
to drink. That leering, mincing meal! Those vapid gulps of plain water!
There is nothing in this world more ghastly than the labored archness
of an old coquette. For days afterward I never looked at a woman,
except at my laundress--and they are hardly women.
Orion apologized for the water as we walked home.
“The old girl’s stingy,” he said with satisfaction. “But it suits me,
my boy. When she kicks the bucket, I’m in for a good thing. And it
can’t be long, can it? What did you make of her? I don’t like the way
she wags her head about--paralysis. She’ll go off like a champagne
cork some day.”
“I suppose she will,” I said wearily.
“Of course she will. She can’t last long. She’s over seventy, and she
was a beauty once; you wouldn’t think it.”
I groaned, remembering those old eyes with red, lashless lids; that
mouth with the infantile, pearly false teeth.
We crossed Lamb’s Conduit Street. In Chapel Street, Wood, who was a
decentish fellow and always in low water, had two back rooms on the
second floor at No. 8.
“I’m going in here to get a whisky,” I said, none too graciously, to
Orion.
He put out his hand. His face, with the weak mouth and watery eyes,
looked quite haggard in the moonlight which speared down into the
narrow street. He bore a horrible family likeness to Mrs. Grigg.
Did I mention that he was a thin fellow? He had a straggling,
straw-colored mustache and his skin matched it. Everything about him
was ill-hung and undecided. With his yellow face, yellow hair,
fawn-colored overcoat and soft hat, he looked as if he had been just
flipped into a weak solution of saffron and drawn out again. Why will
fair men persist in wearing fawn?
“When she dies,” he went on, “that house in Great Ormond Street will be
mine; that and a snug bit--the old girl banks at Barclay’s. She hasn’t
got a relation in the world but me. Some sort of second cousin of
Grigg’s used to live with her, but they rowed; she’d row with an
archangel. I don’t know where Clara Citron--that was the cousin’s
name--is now.”
“Well, good-night, old fellow,” I said.
“Wait a bit. You see property’s going up at such a devil of a rate in
Bloomsbury. The house alone will bring in a tidy income, let out in
flats. I shall do it up and charge good rents and keep it select.
Everything on the square, you know.”
He gave his suggestive grin and dropped my hand. I wiped it
mechanically as I pulled Wood’s bell, and drummed on his knocker. The
landlady kept me waiting; it was a trick she had. When at last she
opened the door she asked me acrimoniously:
“Aint the bell enough, but you must go playin’ on the knocker and
bringing a person’s ’art into their mouths?”
A week later Orion came to my rooms. It was about nine in the
evening--Saturday evening. I was just off to the “Oxford,” and told him
so. But he caught me by the sleeve and said feverishly:
“Haven’t you heard?”
“What?”
“My aunt--Mrs. Grigg, you know. She--she’s murdered.”
He sat down in the saddlebag chair by the fire. Yes, the same
saddlebag. That shabby old thing you are sitting in, with the fallen
springs and the shiny mark of many fingers on the arms. Don’t get up. I
brought out the bottle and gave him a nip of whisky. He was shaking all
over like a little clay-tinted marionette.
“Murdered!” I said, the vivid image of the old woman coming back.
“Murdered!”
“Yes; just now.” He made a gesture for more whisky.
The glass he held was dancing a jig in his hand. I noticed--it seemed
an odd thing to notice at such a time--how clean his hands were. One
does notice unimportant things.
“The old woman--her servant--has just come round to tell me,” he
continued. “Haven’t you heard?”
“Heard! How could I?”
“I forgot. Of course you couldn’t. It’s enough to confuse a fellow,
isn’t it? Murdered!”
“Yes. But how?”
“I’m going to tell you. Is there any more whisky? Thanks. It is
Saturday night and the servant had gone out to shop. She always shops
late on Saturday--when she doesn’t do it on Sunday morning. On Sunday
morning in the Lane you can get a very decent fowl cheap. My aunt was
left alone in Great Ormond Street. Am I making myself quite clear? She
must have been cooking some mess over the dining-room fire; a pot had
boiled over on the hob. She was stabbed--just above the heart. Isn’t
it awful? Thanks, old man. It--it pulls me together. Come up to my
place. The old woman’s waiting. I don’t know what to do first. She
came straight to me. She--the other one, my aunt--is lying on the
dining-room hearthrug. Well--thanks.”
I followed him upstairs. Late as it was, one of the Inn
laundresses--those travesties of women, all flesh, sacking apron, and
dusty hair--was scrubbing the third floor flight. Saturday is the great
day for stair scrubbing. She moved her pail for us to pass and looked
at Orion’s face curiously. As we went up we were followed by the
rasping swish of her brush.
Mrs. Grigg’s servant was waiting in the sitting room. She had seated
herself. Orion did not seem to like this.
It was such a swell room--all varnish, gewgaws, and rose-colored
lights. He had stuck squares of leather paper on the panels of the
walls and put white porcelain finger plates painted with roses on the
doors. He burned gas in the grate instead of coal--it was cleaner. It
looked like an old maid’s room. I believe that he helped his laundress
to clean it. She was a rather clean woman herself, who always wore a
stiff bow of white muslin tied under her chin.
There was a shiny sideboard, on top of which was set out the electro
plate. The looking-glass above the sideboard was cracked. Pearson, his
nerves strung by the respectability and smugness of that room, had
flung his glass at it on the night of the party--as a graceful return
for watered whisky. Emily Higgins, a girl that Orion knew--she served
in a fancy shop in Hampstead Road--had skillfully painted a cobweb and
a trail of flowers across the crack. Orion never spoke to Pearson
afterward.
“A fellow who will come into one’s rooms and do a thing like that is a
dirty cad,” he would say in his thin, piping voice.
He was always saying it. He never said more than three things at the
same period. He had attacks of sentences and worked them off. He said
it every time you went to his set. He said it to all new acquaintances.
He took them in to look at the sideboard, and while they looked he
enlarged on the rank villainy of Pearson. I actually waited for him to
say it on that Saturday night. But he didn’t. He only lifted the old
woman’s leg of mutton from the center table where she had set it. It
was foreign meat and the blood had run out freely, pulping the
newspaper and making a patch on the tablecloth. He carried it, with an
air of reproof, to the cupboard and set it carefully on a dish.
The woman looked at him and then she looked at me. There was defiance
and self-vindication and a lurking terror on her face. It was a long,
horselike face, I remember. People of her class always look like that
when anything suspicious occurs. She seemed to be saying in a
terrified, insolent way:
“Don’t you think I did it, because I didn’t.”
It is pathetic; this perpetual assertion of innocence--before they are
accused--of such people.
“It give me such a orful turn!” she burst out at last, addressing
herself to me, as Orion remained half in the cupboard, carefully
putting a wire cover over the joint. “I’ve never been mixed up in
no sich thing before. I’ve never been to prison. Not me! Nor any
of my relations. It’s made my ’eart that bad--I suffers with the
palpitations.”
Orion remained in the cupboard, deaf to the hint.
“I come straight off to Mr. Rine,” she went on. “I didn’t even think to
take the joint from under my arm. I’d only bin gone ’arf an hour down
Tibbalds Row marketin’ with another lady--’er as is ’ousekeeper in
Chapel Street, where Mr. Wood lives. She could tell you the same. I’ll
take my Bible oath I wasn’t more’n ’arf an hour. The larst place I was
in was the fish shop at the corner of Devonshire Street.”
“We’d better go to Great Ormond Street,” I said to Orion.
The servant stood up, pulling her gray and black shawl closer round her
throat. She gave a critical glance round the room before she left, and
paid it her feminine tribute.
“You’ll excuse me,” she said, “but what a pretty room this is. Quite a
doll’s ’ouse, to be sure. I never see but one like it, and that was
Mrs. Abraham’s in North Street--’er whose ’usband was in the ready-made
line.”
It wouldn’t interest you to hear the rest, but I have all the
newspapers put aside if you would like to read the reports some day.
The murder of Mrs. Grigg was one of London’s many mysteries. There was
no clew. The servant was able to clear herself conclusively of all
suspicion. Scotland Yard was baffled. Ambitious journalists, with a
taste for intrigue and interviewing, started wild theories, and there
ended. Great Ormond Street was blocked with the crowd that gaped
stolidly all day at the shabby house with the drawn blinds opposite the
hospital.
Orion didn’t go to the City. He was junior partner--so he said--in a
shipping-house near London Bridge. He stayed at home in the jaunty room
with the pink-tinted gas globes and drank all day. Orion was in a bad
way. You might guess that when he drank whisky at three and something a
bottle as if it had been water.
We’ll skip the inquest and so on, and pass to the funeral.
Orion begged me to go, and I went. One couldn’t refuse a poor,
invertebrate, pleading fool like that. His aunt’s death had absolutely
doubled him up.
There was the uncomfortable atmosphere of death about the place when we
got there. I’ll show you the particular house next time we are in Great
Ormond Street. There is a narrow passage paneled to the ceiling with
wood that is painted stone color. There is a sitting room to your left
as you go in, and a flight of stairs ready to your feet at the end of
the passage.
We went into the sitting room. There was a smeary decanter half full of
thick port on the table. There were wine glasses and an uncut cake.
Orion sat down. By and by we heard deprecating, creaking shoes coming
downstairs, heard unctuous words of sympathy in the passage. Then we
heard a woman’s shrill voice--a sharp, short voice, like the keen snap
of ice. Orion started.
“That’s Clara Citron,” he said in a frightened way.
She came in, a little middle-aged, shrewish-looking woman. She gave
Orion her hand--it was thin and red and knuckly.
“I saw it in the papers,” she said, without any circumlocution. “I came
up from Southsea at once.”
“I didn’t know your address,” he stammered feebly.
Mrs. Citron looked at him in a meaning way. She solemnly poured out
three glasses of muddy port and cut three slices of cake.
“We must leave enough for the undertaker and his men,” she said,
measuring the bottle with her little alert eye. “Yes, I came at once.
It was my duty. She was my relation, too, by marriage. And all the
money was my cousin Grigg’s.”
The hearse and the one coach drew in at the curb. They threw an added
shadow across the room where those two sat solemnly munching and
sipping--the small, prim room with the putty-colored walls and the bits
of fancywork, a sampler, mats, a beaded footstool--worked, no doubt, by
Mrs. Grigg herself half a century before.
Clara Citron bustled up.
“The undertaker is such a very sympathetic man,” she said, wiping the
loose crumbs of cake from her pale lips. “His wife’s great-uncle,
or his sister-in-law’s great-uncle--I really forget which--was murdered
in a similar way. He said he quite understood my feelings.”
“The undertaker has always got somebody who died in a similar way,” I
said, with involuntary flippancy. “It is one of the business trappings;
he brings it with the pall.”
Clara Citron gave me a stony glance, and Orion stared at me
entreatingly. He seemed afraid of offending her; he was afraid of
everything and everyone.
“I don’t know how we are going to get her downstairs,” the
business-like little woman said. “It is such an awkward turn on the
landing. We could lower her out of the window, but there is such a
crowd.”
She peeped through the brown wire blind before she hurried away. Orion
poured himself out a second glass of that deplorable port directly the
door was shut on her and he dared. Every time there was a scrooping
sound overhead he shook from head to foot. It seemed a long time before
we heard the cautious, thumping tread of men bearing a heavy load.
At the ominous resting of those feet we both knew, although we said
nothing, although we did not even look at each other, that they were
maneuvering the turn at the landing. We both drew a breath of relief
when the steady stumping went on again, came nearer, passed the door,
went down the steps. A faint murmur floated up from the crowd. Orion
had his third glass of port.
Clara Citron came in, a little flushed and triumphant. She poured out
more wine in clean glasses, cut more cake, and beckoned the men in.
When they were ready she coaxed on new black kid gloves.
“Come on,” she said to us. “We are late as it is. Such a squeeze with
that coffin at the head of the stairs! She was a fine woman. I want, if
I can, to catch a late train back to Southsea. There are my lodgers to
look after. I’ve only left the girl in charge.”
“Do you keep a lodging house?” Orion asked mechanically, snatching up
his hat with the deep black band.
“Yes,” she said shortly; “I must do something.”
We all three wedged into the passage. Orion was last. Clara Citron
marched out, a compact, trim figure in cheap black, between the thin
line of sickly London faces. She wore a solemn, festival sort of air. I
followed, feeling very awkward and uncomfortable in the frock-coat I
had borrowed from Wood: he got it out of pawn for the occasion. I never
owned a frock coat in my life, and hope I never shall. It is one of
those respectable, stultifying possessions that I refrain from on
principle.
I looked back for Orion. He was wavering on the step, as if he felt
afraid to walk between those lines of white faces which stretched from
the door to the coach. Then I saw him give a hasty look into the house,
at the passage, the stairs, muddy with so many feet. Then he seemed to
come headlong to the coach. I thought he had slipped on something. He
jumped in and banged the door furiously. The crowd gave a soft,
sympathetic “boo” at the sight of his ghastly face. Clara Citron, who
held a new handkerchief with a very wide border to her dry eyes, looked
over the hem.
That terrible long drive to Finchley! That shimmering line of faces
all the way! I went to Jimmy’s funeral, I went to Chaytor’s, and I went
to Mrs. Grigg’s--under protest. I will never go to another, unless it
is my own--that will be unavoidable.
The Great Ormond Street murder made a tremendous sensation. I think
Clara Citron thoroughly enjoyed herself. She seemed to regard the crowd
in the light of a personal ovation.
Did I tell you that it was May?--a wet, warm May morning. At Finchley,
away from the houses, the rain seemed to fall more softly. In the
cemetery all sorts of pink and white and purple bushes were in bloom.
They reminded me of my childhood; I was born in the country. The great,
intensely green stretches of grass were hideously humped with graves.
The soft, rushing rain seemed to make them greener every moment.
I forgot to mention that Clara Citron coolly took the whole of the seat
facing the horses. It was the best position for seeing the people, and
it allowed the people to have a good view of her. She spread her skirt
out carefully and kept the handkerchief to her eyes, peering furtively
all the time. Orion and I sat as far back as we could on the
cushions--those dusty, pluffy cushions which reeked of a thousand stale
griefs. We tried to get beyond the range of those gimlet-like eyes
which pointed in their hundreds, from the pavements. Once Orion said,
in a queer, strained voice:
“For God’s sake let me get out and walk.”
A moment later, before Clara Citron could make any scandalized protest,
he bent forward, pounced forward, in a quick, cunning way, as you would
on an animal you wished to catch, and brought his hand down heavily on
the cushions of the opposite seat. A cloud of dust rose up and choked
our companion. When she had done spluttering, she asked him angrily why
on earth he did it. He didn’t answer. He only sat and stared, with
dazed eyes, at the seat where she sat. Once he moaned and shivered. He
was not looking at Clara Citron. He was looking past her, through her.
He was like an imbecile. But what could one expect of a man who had
drunk whisky as if it had been water for a week, and had wound up with
funeral port from the grocer’s?
The service was a trial to everyone but Clara Citron. She reveled in
the crowd. I was never in such a rage in my life. Every slatternly
woman was pointing and whispering. Orion’s face was clammy and yellow,
like the clay into which they lowered Mrs. Grigg. I watched them drop
earth onto her coffin; watched them put away for ever that leer of
hers, those old coquetries.
When everything was over we went quickly across the sodden, exquisitely
green turf to the gravel. The crowd seemed to melt away; softly, with a
gentle rustle, like the gurgling May rain. We were almost alone.
A warm, wet day in spring is perfect. The rain came finer and thicker
every moment. It made a mysterious veil of gauze which dropped over the
graveyard.
Halfway down the path Orion clutched my arm. It was the despairing mad
clutch of a doomed man. He clutched my arm and looked hurriedly behind
him.
We had reached the coach. The undertaker’s men climbed to their box
with an air of business. Some sat on the roof of the hearse, their
legs dangling jovially.
“We shall get back faster than we came,” Clara Citron said, getting in
and looking round, half in disappointment, because there was no longer
such a crowd. “I’m dying for a cup of tea.”
Orion leaped in and rattled to the door. I was beginning to be really
anxious about him. We started off at a brisk trot, but the iron gates
of the cemetery were hardly out of sight before he stumbled up with a
fearful cry. The cemetery, I say, was hardly out of sight; we might
still have seen the grave which held Mrs. Grigg and the mystery of her
death. He gave that cry and put out his trembling hands to the door.
He saw what we could not see. He saw the door of the coach open easily,
and saw the fourth mourner come in. She brushed by him silently--the
one in red--to the vacant seat.
“I can’t stay. I tell you I won’t stay,” he shrieked, and the sharp
rattle of wheels and hoofs dulled the agony in his voice. “Don’t you
see her on the seat?”--he was speaking to Clara Citron. “She has
hardly left you room to sit. Those confounded crinolines take up so
much room.”
The lodging-house keeper gripped him firmly by the wrists, and forced
him back to his seat. Her hands were strong with years of housework.
“I’m used to this sort of thing,” she said aside to me; “my first-floor
lodger has had D. T. twice. My lady in the parlors takes her drop. Her
husband pays me well to look after her--but they get it at the grocer’s
as soap or candles, at the confectioner’s and call it tea, at the
draper’s when they go shopping, and have it put on the bill as extras.”
Orion rambled on.
“She is sitting next you. She followed us out of the house. I saw her
come down the stairs. She rode with us all the way. She stood by her
own grave--followed her own funeral. She looked across and grinned at
me, the old witch, when they threw earth on the coffin. She has
followed us back. She jostled me just now on the cemetery path, d----n
her! She’d have had me down if I hadn’t caught hold of Groome. She
wanted to seal me up in that dirty yellow grave, as we tried to seal
her. But I could bear it. I wasn’t going to let her frighten me. I
bore everything until she came away from her own grave--then I knew it
was all up with me. She is filling the coach. Can’t you see her red
dress puffing out? I never saw a woman swell so. The red dress, Groome;
the dress she wore at dinner on Sunday week! The one she always wore in
the evening, the one she died in. Oh! can’t you two see her? Can’t you
turn her out? The coach is all growing red.”
“Do you mean Mrs. Grigg?” Clara Citron asked crisply. “I can’t see
anything.” She bounced to the other side as if to convince him. “But
then,” she added significantly, “I didn’t murder her.”
“You see, I did,” Orion returned with a foolish smile and the
tremendous simple relief of a child who gets something off his mind.
He did not seem to realize what the admission involved. He was
evidently indifferent to everything but the one in red; the dead old
woman in the blood-colored gown, who was slowly, slowly, but very
surely, filling up the coach.
“I got so tired of waiting,” he continued in a confidential way, and we
both bent close to catch every word, closing him in, as it seemed.
“She wouldn’t part with a penny and she wouldn’t die,” he went on
piteously. “What are you to do with a woman like that? I was on my beam
ends. It is all the accursed City. I was afraid of getting out of a
berth. When you get out of a berth you’re done. I’ve been with the same
firm fifteen years, and yet they were going to turn me off like a
dog--the bookkeeper told me so.”
He was laying himself quite bare. He dropped the flimsy lie of his
daily life. He did not hold to the junior-partner fiction any longer.
“It was very easy,” he added, with a certain workman-like pride in the
affair. “I knew when the servant went out marketing; knew how long
she’d be, and where she hid the street-door key--on a ledge near the
coal cellar by the area steps. It was the easiest matter in the world.
The old woman--keep her back, can’t you? She doesn’t want to hear--she
knows. She was stooping over the fire--weren’t you? She had been
cutting up meat; the stew was on the hob and the carving knife was
on the table. I gave her one certain blow. She gave me one look--I
might have known what that look meant.
“But I did it beautifully. I went back to my rooms and washed my hands
and changed my cuffs, so as to be sure,” he sniggered. “I had only just
finished when the servant came round. It was a close shave. And then I
went and told Groome. No one need ever have known. But you can’t fight
with a woman who comes out of her grave!
“She takes up so much room that I can’t breathe. Let her out, shove her
into the road. She’ll never be able to catch us up. Let the wheels go
over her.”
Clara Citron, who had held his wrists firmly all the time, dropped them
and cautiously opened the door of the coach a very little way. I
twitched her skirt.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to tell them to drive to the Old Bailey--that’s Newgate,
isn’t it?” she returned viciously. Evidently she owed Orion some deep
grudge.
“Pooh! We don’t do it that way. Sit down. Take up all the seat--try
to convince him, to keep him quiet. I’ll look after him to-night.”
She sat down looking slightly sulky.
“I trust you to look after my interests,” she said plaintively, after a
pause. “I’m a hard-working woman and all the money was on my side of
the family. Here’s my card.” She pulled out a thickly-lettered squab of
cardboard. “‘Citron, The Parade, Southsea.’ If you ever want a blow of
sea air, I can always let you have bed and breakfast on reasonable
terms.”
The coach swung merrily on. I rather fancy that the men on the box were
singing. Orion kept on saying piteously that Mrs. Grigg, in the red
dress, was taking up all the room--more and more room--that she was
slowly strangling him. In this fashion we rattled back to Bloomsbury,
where it was getting dusk and where rain fell more heavily than it had
done in the morning.
I watched him all that night. In the morning the sun came fiercely in.
The hot, golden air seemed all Sunday frocks, church bells, and the
weighty caw of rooks.
There was a pane of glass above Orion’s bedroom door. He said, quite
quietly,--it was the first time he had spoken:
“She keeps on looking through that glass. There’s a confounded red
bonnet on her head now--never knew such a woman for red. Can’t you do
something? Can’t you rig up a curtain, old chap?”
There was a crafty look on his silly face. I remembered that afterward.
I turned aside to find something, and the next thing I knew was a
“ploomp” on the stones underneath and a loud, ringing shriek.
Orion had flung himself out. It was really the best finish he could
have made. Adeline saw him do it and shrieked. She was standing at
Murphy’s window; Orion, in his fluttering shirt, dropped past her
startled eyes. I must tell you Adeline’s story some day.
The money? That was the one funny touch in the whole affair. Mrs. Grigg
actually left the house and every penny she had in the world to the man
who brought her round two hundredweight of coal once a week, from the
greengrocer’s shop in Red Lion Street. He was a handsome sort of
chap--that seemed the only reason. He sold the house. I heard the other
day that he was drinking himself to death.
Clara Citron? She went back to the lodging-house at Southsea; is there
now, I suppose. But she was one of those women without attributes; not
the sort of person you would have the least interest in investigating.
Hard on Orion, wasn’t it? Quite superfluous, you see. I never liked
him. Yet, looking back, I’m sorry for the mean little humbug. That
cursed City grinds men down to any pettiness. I’d rather starve in
Piccadilly than eat turtle in an Alderman’s robe at Guildhall.
ARNOLD’S LAUNDRESS.
THE laundress, as an institution, is dying out. Men are getting
particular about their rooms; one across the way, that set where the
cork window-boxes are, bought a feather broom last week. There is a
very reprehensible feeling of respectability and decorum about. Most of
the fellows have smart young women to clean their rooms. I see them
tripping gingerly across the square in the mornings, with loose cotton
blouses, curly hair, and artificial flowers in their big hats.
But the good old laundress, all fat and dirt and impudence, contents
me. She has a draggled skirt with a deep hem of dried mud, a flat
pancake of a bonnet, all melancholy jet and brown ribbon that once was
black. She wobbles when she moves; she is a half-set jelly in a greasy
bag. I like her; to me she recalls my youth, the old wild days when I
and the others were young. With a few exceptions she is only employed
to clean offices now.
She is a professional woman. For many years the care of certain sets
descended quite naturally from mother to daughter. They were pocket
boroughs--hereditary pickings. The tenant was a mere incident, to be
borne with up to a certain point.
I remember that Arnold was always squabbling with his laundress. He was
an assertive little chap, and understood nothing in the world but dogs.
He had no sense of humor; resented Mrs. Neaves and asked me to mediate.
I suggested an apology.
Mrs. Neaves was blue-eyed. She had a singularly flat, red nose.
“Me apologize to the likes of ’im!” she cried out in a pained voice.
“Me! As ’ave cleaned that set for years. Why, I treats ’im worse than
the dirt under my feet. Do you know what he did? ’E threatened to punch
my nose.”
“Come, come! Did he do it?”
“Did ’e do it! It ’ud a bin Gawd ’elp ’im if ’e ’ad. I’d a summonsed
’im,” she cried as she flounced off.
After this Arnold went through many vicissitudes; a new laundress
every week. He was like a woman; took these things to heart. I shall
never forget how pleased he was when he came to tell me that he’d got a
treasure at last.
She was very smart; a rather supercilious young married woman, with
long earrings and a pert, white face. She came to the Inn wearing black
kid gloves and a silver locket and chain; she carried a little reticule
with her apron rolled up tightly inside. Things went very well for a
week. She kept the place spotless. But when Arnold paid her on Saturday
afternoon, she asked him civilly to “suit himself.”
“The work’s far too heavy,” she said mincingly, “and the rooms is
invested with beadles to an awful extent. It’s not as if I was obliged
to work, you see, sir. I only do it to occupy my time--not having any
children--and to help pay back the money my husband’s mother lent him.
There’s no hurry for that. She’s in a good position. Got her own
laundry, paid seven hundred down for it. My husband was in the army,
and she bought him out before we were married. I couldn’t think of
marrying a soldier--all the refuge goes into the army. If only you
could get a girl to come in and do the rough work for a hour every
morning, my husband wouldn’t object to me obliging you.”
“What’s a man to do?” Arnold asked dejectedly of me in the evening.
“I’m half inclined to chuck the Inn and go back to diggings; the Common
was good for the dog to run on. But then there’s the landlady--she
always objects to dogs. And some of them have principles--I call all
principle prejudice--about the latch key.”
“You’d better take back Mrs. Neaves. Give her a shilling a week more;
that’s all she was trying for. You’d save in the end. How many have you
had altogether?”
He began to count on his fingers.
“There was Stubbs. She was right enough, but it makes me sick to look
at a scarecrow. And old mother Morey who always turned up with bruises
on Monday morning. And Mrs.--What’s-her-name--the woman who brought a
perambulator full of babies. By the way, have you heard about Wood?
He’s frightfully down on his luck. The last thing he did was to steal
the landlady’s perambulator. When he got to the pawnbroker’s the
blessed thing wouldn’t go through the door, so he had to wheel it back.
And the Cox woman--oh! I forget their confounded names. They are all
alike. Stay as long as it suits them. Rob you right and left. They take
their money some Saturday and you never see them again. If they can
swindle you out of sixpence or a shilling by pretending to have no
change, but promising to bring it on Monday, they will. The last
one--before this woman--had me that way. I was fool enough to give her
half a sovereign. That was four bob to the bad, for her money was only
six. Said she lived in Hand Court, over the old clothes shop. I’ve been
down there and no one has ever heard of her. I went with Wood. He was
going to sell some old trousers, but they only offered eighteenpence
for two pairs, so he’s pawned them and sold the ticket--it’s a much
better plan.
“There was the woman Sol flew at. He is the gentlest dog in the whole
world. But you mustn’t shake your fist at a deerhound; it puts their
blood up sooner than anything. I warned her, but she would do it. The
husband came round half drunk and bullied. I gave him five shillings to
get rid of him. They all object to the dog. It was because of the dog
that I left my lodgings in Wilkinson Street, Tooting. And I’d rather
throw stones at my grandmother than part with Sol. He saved my life.
Did I ever tell you? It was when I was on a walking tour. I was alone
on Dartmoor, except for Sol----”
“You’ve told me lots of times. Now, take my advice and have Mrs. Neaves
back. She wasn’t a bad sort.”
“She was very kind to Sol; used to bring him an apron full of bones,”
he said reflectively.
When he said that, I knew the thing was settled and that Mrs. Neaves
would be reinstated. He was devoted to Sol, who was a beautiful,
pure-bred deerhound, with the long, melancholy face and almost human
eyes which these dogs have.
Poor Arnold! I don’t know what has become of him. But I can make
a good guess. He’s living somewhere in the suburbs, very near the
Common--for Sol’s sake. He was a dapper little fellow. One of those
men with a rather big head, neat calves, and a chain with a big seal.
He wore loud check suits--four checks to the suit--when he went away on
a holiday, and when he was at home he had an incorrigible habit of
wasting his time at bars and chaffing the barmaid. That is nothing;
every man is bachelor to the barmaid. But it led Arnold into
complications.
Clarissa was an extraordinarily pretty girl. She had blue eyes set very
far apart, and a striking profile. With her loose knot of hair, her
delicate nose, and her short upper lip, she looked like a cameo--one of
those pure, classic faces which middle-aged ladies used to wear in a
brooch. Of course she was powdered, and she laced tightly and puffed
her lovely hair out into one of those exaggerated erections which is
the professional headgear of the barmaid. You never see such an
arrangement anywhere else; perhaps the management provides it. But she
was very lovely and demure. Also, she had the sense to be silent: an
unusually pretty woman should never talk.
Arnold, who dropped into the “Worcester Arms” nightly, began to regard
her as a woman--not merely a barmaid. Men sometimes talk dubiously to
the barmaid, and she--figuratively speaking--ducks her head and lets
the stream of insinuation flow over her. She is never affronted; takes
it as a matter of course; customers pay for this privilege with their
drinks.
Clarissa was lonely. She lived in a barracks somewhere off Greek
Street, clubbing together with a lot of other young women. She never
spoke of her relations. Arnold assumed that she was like so many other
girls, alone in London--to sink or swim, according to her luck. He took
her out and gave her harmless little treats whenever she could get away
from the bar. But he never asked her to his rooms. He had a sort of
reverence for her. He didn’t wish to compromise her, and he took to
glaring fiercely at any harmless simpleton who strolled into the
“Worcester Arms” and chaffed Clarissa in the usual way.
He introduced her to Sol, telling her how the dog had saved his life on
Dartmoor and adding that nothing on this earth would induce him to part
with the animal.
“He’s a pure-bred blue deerhound,” he wound up enthusiastically. “I’ve
got his pedigree for seven generations.”
Clarissa said “really” in her demure way, and she stroked the thing’s
wiry coat and said what beautiful eyes he had, and that she supposed he
must be worth a lot of money.
“Twenty pounds--I’ve been offered that,” Arnold told her concisely. “It
was a fellow who shows these dogs. He’s got a whole kennel of them at
his place in the country. I went down there; you never saw a more
beautiful sight.”
“Twenty pounds!” said Clarissa, drawing in her breath softly.
Things went on for a month or two. Then Arnold became more infatuated
than ever. He asked Clarissa to marry him. Of course she jumped at it.
The great ambition of these girls is to marry a gentleman. And Arnold
would pass--with a barmaid. He was fairly well off, too, making, so he
said, about six hundred a year on the Stock Exchange; it is always
these stupid men who make money. It was a catch for Clarissa.
He took her away from the “Worcester Arms” and boarded her out with a
decayed widowed lady at Clapham. He made an arrangement for Sol to
board there too, and Clarissa promised to take the dog for long rambles
on the Common while his master was in the City.
After this the Inn did not see very much of Arnold. He used to go
straight from the City to the suburbs--rushing to catch a particular
train and joining the general exodus at Clapham Junction. Thousands of
fellows do that; it would kill me. But he really liked it. He was
always hankering after the suburbs; said the air was pure; told you
vaingloriously that no one could ever build on the Common--it was
sacred to the people. You know the way these people talk; the people
who live in smart houses all red and white--the ideas of the suburban
builder never go beyond a colored peppermint stick--fellows who work
and sweat in back gardens the size of a tablecloth and go to the local
theater.
Arnold used to have supper with Clarissa and the widowed lady--his
ideas with regard to the girl were ludicrously proper ones. After
supper he and she would be alone more or less for an hour or two, with
Sol spread at their feet. Arnold would talk dogs, and Clarissa would
look lovely and throw in a simper now and then. At ten he left: the
widow lady liked to be in bed by half-past.