found himself constantly watching her, speculating on her. Once, when
he went into the kitchen on a Saturday afternoon to wash out an ink
pot, he noticed how white her fat neck was. She was cleaning the lid of
a tin saucepan with a bit of emery paper. Her head was bent and her
fist circled energetically. Her face was streaming with perspiration
and her flat toper’s nose glowed like a poppy. Her bodice was open at
the throat, and he saw that her neck, beneath the line of exposure,
was delicately fine. It reminded him of Clarissa’s milky skin. He
stood swilling out the ink pot, taking more pains than was necessary
and staring at fat, frowsy Mrs. Neaves and wondering how she would
look with a finely-chiseled nose in place of the comical, red, flat
one, which seemed to have been roughly trodden into her face by a
careless foot. She looked up at him rather curiously, rather
resentfully--evidently suspecting that he was spying on her. He noticed
that her blue eyes were pensive, not twinkling. It was absurd to think
of Clarissa in connection with that dirty, gin-drinking woman--her
face all coarse rolls of flesh, her dress gaping, and her greasy
bonnet-strings streaming back from her triple chin. Yet, when he went
to Clapham that night, he amused himself by trying to fit Clarissa with
a flat, blossom-like nose. And he was prepared to swear that her blue
eyes were twin eyes to those pensive ones which were set in the
laundress’ head.
He couldn’t for the life of him help watching Mrs. Neaves--in every
attitude. He watched her as she rubbed the brush across his boots,
swinging her big arm easily from the shoulder; as she knelt on the rug
to coax the fire, her great, spread body bunched out and her pouch-like
cheeks inflated. And in the evening when he sat in the widow’s house
he used to compare her with that porcelain slip of a girl Clarissa. At
fifty--Mrs. Neaves couldn’t be more--would Clarissa have such haunches,
such pendulous cheeks!
He idealized the laundress--quite unconsciously; he was the most
matter-of-fact little chap in the world. Yet, in spite of himself, he
became imaginative, degenerate. He took to engaging Mrs. Neaves in long
conversations--about the lady at the cats’-meat shop in Red Lion
Passage, who had just given birth to twins, and whose husband was doing
three months for stamping on her (“a nice beast,” as Mrs. Neaves
said righteously); about the other lady who got mad drunk regularly
every Saturday night and threw all the household china out of the
window--about anything, or anyone, for the mere sake of seeing her
talk, of watching the changes on her coarse face, and the quick
movement of her mouth, which could only boast three front teeth.
Every wrinkle, every deeply-scored line on that woman’s face, every
watery light in her blue eyes, meant to Arnold the track of some
youthful charm. Was Mrs. Neaves like Clarissa at eighteen? Would
Clarissa be like Mrs. Neaves at fifty? I really think that he would
have ended by marrying Mrs. Neaves, out of pure, involuntary
fascination, if Clarissa had not been a woman and inquisitive.
She kept bothering him to take her to see his rooms. He was to leave
them very soon, had sublet them to another man. He had taken a house at
Clapham, a stone’s throw from the Common, and with a back garden a
little bigger than usual--but only for Sol’s sake, Clarissa said. It
was the first time she had shown a tinge of rebellion.
“A great dog like that will make an awful mess in a nice house with his
dirty feet. Can’t you keep him chained up?”
“Chain a deerhound!” cried Arnold, in holy horror. Sol was a religion
to him. “You’d spoil his legs.”
He arranged to bring Clarissa up to the Inn some Saturday afternoon.
She was to have tea with him in his rooms, and go out to dine somewhere
afterward. He gave Mrs. Neaves an extra shilling to stay late and get
the tea. At least, he said it was to get tea; he tried to persuade
himself that it was to get tea; but I’m certain that his real reason
for keeping her was his odd desire to see those two together, to
compare notes. He said to her with deprecating apology--she was the
sort of voluble, violent woman to compel respect from a man of his
character:
“I’ve a young lady coming here this afternoon to tea; the young
lady--hum, hum--that I am going to marry. Can you stay a couple of
hours later? I’ll make it worth your while.”
Mrs. Neaves said condescendingly that she’d come back in time to get
the tray ready, after she’d “done for the gent at 6.” As for Arnold’s
remark about marrying the young lady visitor, no doubt she put her own
valuation on it--being seasoned to remarks of that sort from giddy
tenants. The laundress is a true skeptic. She does not believe in
married couples in the Inn--this land of ephemeral affections--doesn’t
approve of them. I knew a sensitive fellow who had his marriage
certificate framed and hung up in the sitting room.
At four o’clock Arnold and Clarissa came in. Mrs. Neaves had just
arrived. She was in a state of much disorder, as a protest against
Clarissa. There was a warm, sour smell of dishwater; a dustpan half
full of flue tripped Arnold up on the threshold.
“This is my bedroom,” he said to Clarissa. “And that is my sitting
room. And here’s a little den for Sol--he’s allowed to have bones
there--and there’s the kitchen.”
“Oh! that’s the kitchen.”
Clarissa looked in and Mrs. Neaves looked up.
“I’ll go and take my hat off,” the girl said suddenly, slipping in at
the open bedroom door--it was exactly opposite the kitchen.
Arnold went into the sitting room at the end of the passage. There was
a cupboard. He used it as a hanging closet. At the back of this
cupboard there was a tiny window which looked into the kitchen. The
sets are full of oddities, surprises like that; windows, ledges, steps,
in the most unlikely places.
Some sets have a dunscope. It is a little grating, opening out of
a cupboard in the passage. You steal into the cupboard, shut the
door, and peep onto the staircase. The same idea is carried out in
places where polite people live. In that case it is a looking-glass
which reflects into the dining room the figure of the caller on
the door-step. When people have a good balance at the bank, and no
particular skeleton, the idea is snobbish; when a man in the Inn hasn’t
a penny it is pathetic. He looks out, sees his washerwoman, the tax
collector, the man who lent him a fiver--and keeps the oak rigorously
sported.
The dunscope was often used by industrious students, who looked out to
see if the visitor would be helpful to their studies or the reverse.
No doubt the man who put in that little window at the back of Arnold’s
cupboard chuckled as he did it--recognizing that it also had dramatic
possibilities.
Where was I? Oh! Arnold was changing his coat. As he felt for the loop
at the neck, he heard someone say softly--it was a whisper of terrified
recognition:
“Mother!”
Then he heard another voice, which seemed to come thickly through
layers of flesh.
“Law! Then it reely _is_ you, Clara.”
That was all. But you’ll admit that the square, dusty window at the
back of the cupboard had justified its existence--doubtless not for the
first time, if the paneled walls had been capable of crying out.
Arnold put his eye cautiously to that dim pane of glass. He saw
Clarissa in her spring finery; dainty, fresh, from the jaunty little
lace hat, with the trembling cornflowers, which was perched on her
elaborately dressed hair, to the pointed, shiny shoe sticking out from
the frill of her skirt. He saw her beautiful, classic face; her blue
eyes, a trifle frightened and guilty and disgusted, but not in the
least affectionate. He saw her frown and make a warning movement with
her gloved fingers and jerk her head toward the sitting room.
Mrs. Neaves had her dirty hands on her spread hips; her dreadful
working dress of brownish-gray wool was slopped with dish water and
patched with grease. It had parted from its lining under the arms, at
the waist, at the back--everywhere, as her exuberant rolls of flesh
broke through. She wasn’t a woman; she was an unsavory bundle of rags
which you would take gingerly by one corner and pitch onto a dust heap.
And she was Clarissa’s mother. The likeness was unmistakable, even if
he had not heard the girl’s quick, frightened word, which gave away the
situation. He understood now the uncanny attraction which had lately
impelled him to observe Mrs. Neaves. The two pairs of blue eyes, one
looking out from a delicate frame of chalk, the other from a shiny band
of perspiration, were the same. One pair a little bleared by gin, by
labor and years--but that was the only difference.
He didn’t catch the rest of their conversation; he did not want to. He
watched them; their gestures (Clarissa’s tragic, the mother’s amazed)
were enough. He sneaked away from the cupboard at last and sat down by
the window. Sol, understanding, put his damp nose into his master’s
loosely doubled palm. His brown eyes said wistfully, “I could have told
you so. Why want a woman? Isn’t my devotion enough?”
Arnold wasn’t angry with Clarissa, wasn’t contemptuous of her. He
didn’t see the humor of the situation, nor the degradation of it. He
didn’t want to put on his hat and get out of the place, leaving the
women to squabble over him as they liked. He had none of the sensations
that I should have had, that you would have had if you were a man. I
know your womanly sensations; boiling wrath and contempt for Clarissa,
mingled with intense sympathy and a little irritation with her for
being fool enough to give away everything by that one nervous word.
He felt, as every sensible man would, that it was not her fault; the
poor girl could not help having a dirty trull of a mother. He rather
admired her for her independence. He saw the whole thing; the natural
transition from Clara Neaves to Clarissa Eve, the genteel tastes
instilled by the board school and kept up by the dainty dressing
insisted on by the bar. Two rooms in North Street off Theobalds Road,
gin and onions for supper, fist fights with other lady lodgers on the
smallest pretext, frequent black eyes, noisy troops of dirty
children--all the things which were part of her mother’s daily
life--would speedily become intolerable to the daughter. He thought
it very creditable in Clarissa to have thrown the old woman overboard.
And he sat and waited patiently for Clarissa to come in, stroking the
deerhound’s long head and giving affectionate looks back to those sad,
brown eyes. Clarissa entered. Almost immediately behind her came Mrs.
Neaves with the tray. Arnold pulled the deerhound’s ears rather
nervously and looked at the two women. Clarissa was as cool as an ice
pail; she seemed to sit a little more upright than usual, seemed to
display her left hand with the engagement ring blazing on it--nothing
more. The way in which she said:
“Thank you. I shall want a little more milk,” to her mother, was
superb.
Mrs. Neaves had made no attempt to dress for the occasion; she hadn’t
even taken off the sacking apron which was strained tightly across her
big waist; her down-at-heel shoes went flip-flap as she crossed the
room. Both Arnold and Clarissa could see, as the hem of the skirt
kicked up, a circle of discolored skin where the stocking was torn.
But Clarissa’s face remained cold and unmoved, like the cameo, as
usual. Her expression rarely altered. She was the most apathetic, the
most impenetrable-looking girl in the world. Her cheeks had never
flushed and her eye had never faltered when men in the bar made
doubtful remarks; she never flushed nor faltered now, with her poor,
degraded old mother’s bare heel under her eyes.
“You needn’t wait, Mrs. Neaves,” said Arnold, as Clarissa, with a
charming young-matron air, began to pour out tea.
Then he remembered that he hadn’t paid her, and feeling very
uncomfortable he put his hand in his pocket, brought out a loose heap
of gold and silver, and dropped eight shillings in the moist palm. He
hated to pay her before her daughter. But he hesitated at going outside
the door with her and doing it there, for fear Clarissa should take
fright and think he had found out. But Clarissa never lifted her white
lids. She only said, with an airy laugh and the milk jug poised
affectedly from her dainty wrist with the jangling bangle, “Milk?”
“Thank you, sir.”
Mrs. Neaves bent her head to count the shillings and he saw again the
line of pure, fair flesh below the collar of her bodice.
“Good-afternoon, sir. Good-afternoon, miss.”
She scuttled away. Clarissa mumbled a very haughty and patronizing
“_Good_-afternoon.”
Of course Arnold knew that he must do something. He couldn’t have his
wife’s mother working in the Inn. She must be provided for. He thought
of many things; a cottage in the country, a little business--something
genteel in the sweetstuff and tobacco way, an almshouse, a home for
incurables.
“For she is incurable,” he remarked next day. “She was as drunk as
Chloe for three days running last week. I wouldn’t have Clarissa know I
knew for a fortune. I wouldn’t hurt a fly if I could help it, Groome.
But if someone would take Mrs. Neaves out in a pleasure boat on Sunday,
or for an excursion down to Southend, or--you know accidents do happen.
Don’t you think you might take her down to Epping Forest and lose her?
Or Regent’s Canal with a brick round her----”
“Don’t be a fool. There’s only one way out, and that is to give up
Clarissa. A girl who would treat her mother like that----”
“If I had a mother like that I’d choke her,” he said violently.
Then, cooling down, he added, digging the ash out of his pipe with a
scrooping scrape of the pocket knife:
“The thing would be a country cottage. When people get old, nature is
soothing to them. She could keep a pig and a few hens.”
“She wouldn’t stay there a week. You are making a tremendous trouble
out of a trifle. Ask her. Find out what she wants and give it her.”
“That’s not a bad idea. I never thought of it.”
He went back to his set. Mrs. Neaves was making his bed. She was
looking very heavy after her three-days’ indulgence. Her black eye had
reached the green-and-purple stage. It was a lovely color study.
Arnold, who was a kind-hearted little chap, felt sorry for her. Perhaps
it was grief that had made her get drunk. He sat down on the window
ledge and stared at her thoughtfully as she doubled down to tuck in the
blanket.
“What do you think of doing when you get old?” he asked carelessly.
“Charring is hard work, I should say.”
She stopped bed-making, put her hands on her hips,--it was her favorite
conversational attitude,--and looked at him plaintively.
“The workus, I s’pose,” she said tersely. “Now, if I could get that
five ’underd pound the perlice is offerin’, it’s visitin’ yer I’d be,
an’ not doin’ yer dirty work.”
“Five hundred pounds?”
“Five ’underd pound. Arf that ’ud make a lady of me. I was a lady born
and bred; my father ’ad a jeweler’s business in the Strand. But we none
of us knows what we may come to. Five ’underd pound for information as
’ull lead to the conviction of----”
“Oh, yes, I know. The Hackney Wick murderer. But you’ll never get him.
He committed suicide, there’s very little doubt about that.”
“Aint there, now? The mean ’ound! And five ’underd pound ’angin’ on
it--which would ’a’ bin a godsend to many a poor person. To think of
’im a-skulkin’ off in that ’ole-and-corner way, with five ’underd pound
on ’im.”
“What would you like to set you up in life, supposing you had the
chance of choosing?” Arnold persisted.
She thought a little. Then she said longingly:
“There’s a nice shirt-and-collar business goin’ cheap in the
Lane--Leather Lane. The laidy’s got a young family and can’t see to the
laundry. Fifty pound ’ud buy it. An’ I’m used to clear starchin’.”
Arnold was delighted at being let off so lightly. He said, trying hard
to smooth the complacent grin from his face, and lying glibly, as we
all can in emergency:
“I’ve always had a great regard for you, Mrs. Neaves. You’ve done my
work well, and you’ve been very good to Sol. I’m going to be married
shortly, as I told you----”
“Yes, sir. And how’s the young lady, sir? if I make so bold.”
“The young lady is very well, thank you,” he returned with hurried
stiffness. “I should like to see you settled in a comfortable little
business of your own before I leave the Inn. And if fifty pounds will
buy the shirt-and-collar business, I shall be very pleased to make you
a present of it.”
When she had a little recovered from her astonishment, she gasped out:
“Thank you, sir, thank you kindly, I’m sure. I’ll do the same for you
some day; one good turn deserves another, don’t it? An’ I’ll be proud
to do your collars and cuffs for sixpence a dozen; the usual price
bein’ a shillin’.”
That night Arnold went down to Clapham in the best of spirits. As he
put it to himself triumphantly, he had saved a couple of hundred pounds
and more, for he had quite reckoned on ten shillings a week at least,
and these drunken old women live forever. Clarissa was on the platform.
She ran up to him, through the hustle of weary-looking City men with
tall hats and evening newspapers.
“Sol’s gone!” she burst out hysterically. “I took him for a run on the
Common. I let him off the lead when we got to the water--you always
told me to. And I--I missed him. They run so fast, those deerhounds,
don’t they? There were a couple of roughs a little way back. I heard
them say what a beauty he was.”
You may imagine what a blow this was to Arnold; Sol was a great deal
more to him than Clarissa was. Clarissa had never been a woman; she was
a barmaid at first and a pretty face afterward. But Sol had been his
companion for ten years. Sol had saved his life. All the salt was off
his palate; his daily life was dull, without savor.
He left off going to Clapham; Clarissa must have had a dull time.
Whenever she hinted at marriage, he put her off peevishly.
“She never cared for Sol,” he said sadly. “She wanted to chain him up.
Women haven’t got brains enough to appreciate a good dog.”
He was very miserable. He hadn’t even got Mrs. Neaves to bully and to
study. She was settled in the Lane and deep in the shirt-and-collar
business. His new laundress helped herself to the whisky and took away
his loaves of bread and his rolls of fresh butter.
Of course he kept in touch with Clarissa, wrote her polite letters, and
went down to Clapham occasionally. One Sunday afternoon he was walking
across the Common. He went to Clapham partly by omnibus and partly on
his legs; he no longer flustered to catch a particular train.
Do you know these suburban commons? They are most melancholy. One feels
really grateful to the jerry builder for creeping up so closely to
them, as closely as he dares. No doubt they are lungs for the
people--but that is not a particularly interesting point. The people!
They play cricket on the Common, leaving it bare in patches, like a
giant head beset by a parasite. They throw paper on it; screws of
paper, fluttering ends of paper, strips of orange peel, empty bottles.
The Common! It is sacred to the people. No builder will ever be allowed
to devirginate it. Arnold was fond of talking like that. He used to
swell out proudly when he said it, as if that stretch of sad brown
grass and cracking earth belonged to him. The sanctity of the people!
Preserve me from it! Give me the stately gardens of the Inn, with
elms, rooks, the terrace, and memories.
Well, he was walking on the Common, sorrowfully and slowly, not caring
a rush whether Clarissa was waiting for him or not. Suddenly he saw a
long, grayish-blue something shoot straight toward him like an arrow.
Have you seen these deerhounds run? Head down, paws out--it is a
charming sight. Arnold very nearly infected me with his enthusiasm for
Sol. Yes, it was Sol. He kept bounding shoulder high on his master,
breaking over him like a wave. Sol! Arnold--soft-hearted little
chap--never denied that a lump came into his throat and left him
standing dizzy on the Common. But he was collected enough to grab Sol’s
collar--not at all a necessary precaution, as he ought to have known.
The beast would have gone straight for the throat of anyone who tried
to take him from the master that he had just found.
A rough-looking customer with a hoarse voice and a voluminous yellow
neckerchief came up and began to be abusive, in the most picturesque
language.
Have you guessed? Clarissa sold Sol. Sold him for five pounds, with
which to bribe her mother. Mrs. Neaves, who was most accommodating,
took it with the shirt-and-collar business. Clarissa’s beauty brought
the old woman luck.
“A good-looking gal she wur,” said the thick-voiced man. “Brought him
down to my place in the Borough and I give ’er five quid.”
Arnold was fifty-five pounds and a wife to the bad. But he got his dog
back.
Clarissa! She hadn’t wasted her time. When Arnold threw her over she
promptly married another fellow--a City man; in the wholesale fruit
way, I fancy. He had lodged next door to the widow lady, and those back
gardens offer opportunities.
Arnold went on a six-weeks’ walking tour, for Sol’s sake.
“They haven’t been giving him half enough exercise,” he said
indignantly. “These pure-bred deerhounds get paralyzed in the hind legs
if they don’t get enough exercise.”
WHY?
I SAID I would tell you the story of Adeline. You remember that she saw
Orion fling himself out of the window.
Her story is in two parts. You will wonder how it is that I know both
sides. It is because I met James Pray and got to know him very well
soon after his wife died. He put Betty to boarding-school, let the
cottage furnished, came back to London, and lived in the Inn until he
married again.
His second wife is an artist too--a very sensible, capable woman--with
mediocre pictures on the line and accounts of her artistic At Homes in
the leading fashion papers. She keeps Pray well in hand. He is a
successful portrait painter--of the third-rate sort. They live in
Kensington. I go to see them sometimes.
When first he came to the Inn he used to talk to me incessantly of
Adeline. Oddly enough, it was Murphy’s old set he took. He talked
to me about Adeline. I used to listen--with my tongue in my cheek.
Sometimes it really seemed a little uncanny, and I had half a mind to
tell him everything, and so quiet him. But Adeline, poor dead girl, was
always begging me not to. He was forever asking--why, why? I could have
told him. The very room could have told him. We sat and smoked and
drank and talked--at least he talked--in that paneled room which some
former fool had grained to imitate maple. The ghosts of Murphy and of
Adeline--a guilty pair--seemed to glide between us and stand shadowy in
the clouds of tobacco as poor Pray asked--why?
The very wood on the walls could have told him, the very oak, that
black, discreet door which holds so much, was pregnant with an answer
to that mournful query of his--why, why?
He talked of Adeline. He painted a nervous, evanescent creature, full
of moods and always plaintively tender. It was not the Adeline I
remembered. She had been fine, full, and strong, with steady gray eyes
and skin of ivory, all health and life and fun and witchery and wicked
daring. Though I never saw so very much of her. She was a lady, you
understand; Murphy usually sported his oak when she came. He only asked
me once to dinner, and I thought her most charming.
* * * * *
“PRAY.--Adeline, wife of James Pray.”
“If anything should happen, if I should die first,” she said--“and you
needn’t frown, because one of us must be first--you’ll put that in the
paper.”
She spoke dreamily, staring in front of her at the driving rain and the
dripping trees.
“Rubbish!” Pray said briefly.
“Of course. To announce one’s death, or birth, or marriage in the paper
is to avow one’s self commonplace--to brand one’s self commonplace
through all eternity, the eternity of the penny press.”
She laughed and added wistfully:
“I’d love to be commonplace, just for once. It wouldn’t go against your
convictions to let me be commonplace when I was dead. If one does die!
I shall come back every spring. When everything is bursting with life,
how could I be expected to lie still? Ah! I wish you were not so
uncomfortably original. I’d like to be like other people.”
“Other people being--the majority, that is----”
“Fools! Yes, I know. I agree. I’m a good wife. I take my color from my
husband. But I do not think you sufficiently appreciate the tremendous
importance of fools. They rule the world, with a very few exceptions.
There is one born every minute. Think of that! And yet you ignore this
vast army. It is created for the comfort, the convenience of the
occasional wise man. But you are not wise. You do nothing for the fool.
You won’t even paint pictures for him to hang on his wall; that is why
we are so hard up. The fool does not want your mystic, impressionist
pictures; they worry and irritate him. Never mind. Be sure you put it
in the paper--Adeline, wife of James Pray.”
“Jump up from the grass,” he cried sharply--the sharpness with which
husbands of some years’ standing veil concern--“and don’t talk
nonsense. You’ll take cold.”
“Pooh! What is health to a new spring gown? That sounds like a
patent-medicine query--inverted,” she said idly.