caught in a shower. It was a wet summer, one of those years when you
hear the continual soft rushing of rain and when the plants in the
garden go to luxuriant leaf. She sat under the tree. She had taken off
her hat and was holding it carefully in her lap. She had pulled the
skirt of her gown over her bodice and held it, lining outward, round
her head and shoulders. Her knees were drawn to her chin, and her chin
rested in the scooped hollows of her hands.
“These queer colors that you like run dreadfully,” she complained.
“Why did you wear a new dress on a threatening afternoon?”
“Because it is Bank Holiday. I have an ineradicable Bank Holiday
instinct for new clothes and an outing. This dress will be spoiled. I’d
like a navy-blue serge coat and skirt--you’d never permit it. Blue
serge--especially when it is touched up with cardinal--sounds so safe,
so sane; it seems to shout of all the good, thrifty, respectable
women who do their duty. Blue serge and a sailor hat!”
James Pray looked down at her tenderly and yet with a masculine
intolerance of her nonsense.
How is it that I know so much--the very details of their looks and
words? In after days--when Adeline and Murphy were dead--Pray used to
talk of her by the hour, and bore me to death.
He looked down at her. His first painful impression was that she had
grown very thin; he had not noticed it before. However, this impression
passed, and he watched her with the ardent eye of an artist. Her gray
eyes stared out troublously, vaguely, from the shelter of the great
elm, at the heavy rain falling in the open. He loved her intensely. I
expect he loved her more, in his steady, level-headed way, than she
loved him. He never talked about it; these women with so many words of
love are very often only words.
She must have been very tiresome, judging from what he told me. She was
always fondling him; a man gets sick of that. He said that she seemed
to have a sort of agonized remorse in her tenderness. I could have
explained.
Suddenly the rain stopped, and a bar of yellow broke the slaty sky.
“Come on,” he said; “never mind the rushes.”
“But I do mind.” She picked up the bundle, with its wide, delicate
flowers and sword-like leaves, and carried it against her breast,
making the front of her bodice dark with moisture.
As they went along in the watery sun she shivered.
“You’ve caught cold. I----”
“Told me so. I haven’t caught cold. But I have saved from utter ruin
the gown which took you some pains to design.”
Then she added, catching his loose hand in hers:
“I only _say_ stupid things. I get a little tired of being different,
that is all; no doubt other people get just as tired of being the
same.”
They were in sight of their cottage gate. Three-year-old Betty, their
only child, was hanging over it, hauling a kitten round the middle.
Adeline pulled up in the shadow of the irregular hazel hedge.
“You promise?”
Her eyes were half mirthful, half tragic.
“Promise what?”
“How men forget! To--put it in the paper.”
He turned on her angrily.
“This is unlike you--even you. This is too ridiculously, wickedly
morbid.”
“Isn’t it? But--but you promise just the same.”
“Yes, anything--if you’ll go up at once and change your shoes,” he
returned a little moodily, and kissing her with habitual carelessness
on the hot lips she held up.
She ran through the gate. He heard her humming lightly as she went
upstairs. He picked up baby Betty with a sigh, and swung her on his
back, feeling grateful that she at least had no complex emotions. A
sugar-stick would bare her little simple soul.
* * * * *
A week later Adeline died. The cold she caught under the elms developed
into pneumonia. She was a creature all nerves and no muscle. _I_
know that her conscience killed her. She was dead. Dead in the June
days, which had suddenly turned hot and yellow. Dead! lying rigid under
the brooding thatch eaves where the birds built. Lying cold and
unresponsive to birds, flowers, sun, love--all the things which had
moved her to hot, mournful passion. Almost her last words were, “Life
has been lovely, lovely.” Then with a little haunting flicker of
anxiety, memory, and fear on that face which already seemed to belong
to some other world, she added faintly, “You’ll put it in the paper?”
James Pray, broken-hearted, sent off the notice. It had been only a
freak, of course; one of the whimsical, morbid ideas which she had in
such plenty. But it was sacred. It was such a hideously little while
since the afternoon under the elms. She had looked so haggardly
beautiful. He remembered everything--down to a green caterpillar which
crawled on her hair.
Next day he walked into the village and bought a copy of the newspaper,
and brought it home and spread it out on the oak table in front of him.
“I wonder why?” he said, in a voice choked by tenderness, and then he
went up to her.
Their bedroom, like the rest of the cottage, spoke of the persistent
struggle for individuality. The bed was a tent, with curtains and
canopy of brown and white; old chintz the color of coffee which is
three parts milk. There was a patchwork quilt. She had made it from
sentiment, not industry. There was the shine of oak and the twinkle of
metal about the furniture. The chairs had rush seats, and had been
collected, one by one, from other cottages.
He sat down and looked at the figure which was stretched so quietly
under the canopy of sad brown. I try to picture him as he sat in that
room with his unconventional clothes--you know the sort of thing,
velvet coat, baggy knickerbockers, and streaming ends of a vivid
necktie--and rugged, simple face; he might have been a man of a hundred
years back. He could have had no place in this whirling, struggling
nineteenth century, this common age.
The cuckoo was calling, with a voice much the worse for wear, “Cuckoo.
Cuckoo. Cuck-cuck-cuckoo, cuckoo, cuck. Cuck.” He groaned, remembering
that she would never hear a word against the cuckoo--that genus of
birds who scorned dull routine and domesticity. She used to add a bit
mournfully, with one of those fierce sudden kisses which had bothered
him so at the time, and which he would have given all his art for now,
that a cuckoo sort of woman would have suited him. She filled the
world--this dead, perplexing Adeline of his. Would he ever be able to
touch or hear, or speak, or see without that tender, pensive ghost at
his side!
He looked about him as the cuckoo called. The room was dear, so dear,
from the days when Betty, a funny, bald baby, had kicked and gurgled in
that queer oak cradle beside the bed. They had made the child
participate in their eccentricities from the very start. She never had
a perambulator, her dolly was a grotesque, home-made one, her clothes
were made from mediæval designs.
Dear! with so many common, precious details. How many mornings had
_she_ sat before that shield-shaped glass, and wound the silk of her
long, pale hair about her head! That little drawer on the left was
sacred to her ribbons--an end of rose was hanging out.
And then he looked at her, going close to the bed and stooping as if to
caress her. But the dead face tantalized him. The eternal, remorseful
tenderness was strong on her lips of steel. There had always been a
sprig of rue in her love. Why? that maddening why--never to be
answered. There had been a locked chamber in her heart.
He turned away, not even kissing her brow. This still, white woman on
the bed was not his. He and this soulless face were strangers. He felt
her more in the never-ceasing call of the bird, in tall heads of lilies
in the garden, and ephemeral patches of Shirley poppies which she had
sown in March, in Betty’s ringing shout as she darted like a
hummingbird across the grass.
The room became suddenly hateful; every corner, every picture on the
wall was a pang. Her gown--the delicate gown she had given her life
for--hung fresh on the nail. It seemed mutely to hold her shape: in the
sleeves, the folds across the bosom, the short, round waist.
The sight of it was more than he could bear. She had been so clever,
so daring, so different. Clever, not in a positive, productive
way,--stupid women could produce,--but she had thrown her capacity
about with royal lavishness; putting it into everything she did, if it
were only a pudding, or a new border in the garden.
He had sweepingly deemed nearly every other woman a fool. Yet she had
simply died for her finery. You couldn’t have a meaner, a more
frivolous end. She was only Eve, like all the rest, treasuring her
apron of fig leaves. He blamed the inanimate thing of lace and soft
wool for everything. He dragged it off the nail and trampled on it.
He went into the garden, at the piteous request of Betty, and played
ball. She had on a pink frock, the color of the ragged robins that
bloomed in the wood. He would on no account tolerate mourning, but the
pitying country woman who was their servant had tied a black ribbon on
the child’s flaxen head.
Adeline had made that frock. Adeline had ferreted out the stuff at
the village shop and carried it home in triumph, knowing he would be
pleased. Adeline! Adeline! He seemed to see her fleet white fingers
moving along the seams.
They played ball until bedtime. He sat beside the cot in the dusk, a
lonely, bereft man, until the little one, who was mystified and
tearful, fell asleep. When he went downstairs the paper was still
spread out stiffly on the oak table. He picked it up and read
again--the one paragraph on the whole sheet.
“Adeline, wife of James Pray.”
* * * * *
That very night Murphy and I and Carrie Dark were dining in his
rooms--that set which had known Adeline, which later on was to know
James Pray.
Carrie was sixteen, a little girl in a sweet shop--one of those shops
where they put nothing but billows of silk and fondants in the window.
Murphy was middle-aged--with a wide margin. I should have said
fifty-five, but he only owned up to forty. That was one of his
contemptible tricks; he was just like a woman. The things we love
and look for in a woman are contemptible in a man. He was what I should
call a pretty chap--all regular features, pink cheeks, and pouting lip.
Men disliked him, but he was a tremendous favorite with women. His
influence over them was quite uncanny.
Carrie was nervous; she had never been in an Inn before. She evidently
considered Murphy, with his stale stories of the aristocracy and his
brag about his elder brother’s place in Kerry, very magnificent. She
wasn’t a country girl, you see, and consequently lacked the rustic
stolidity which sometimes passes for dignity. She caught up the
newspaper while she waited for her fish, and when she saw the notice of
Adeline’s death she gave a youthful giggle.
“I shouldn’t like to go through life with a name like that,” she said
derisively, with a not over-clean forefinger on that short word PRAY.
Murphy was pouring sherry into her glass. The waiter--we had ordered
the dinner from across the way--came in.
“Like what?” asked Murphy, smiling at her paternally.
“Pray!” She tossed her head and giggled again, and then she read the
notice aloud.
You should have seen Murphy’s face! A strange silence like a pall
settled over the table; to me the news seemed to creep round those
silent walls which had reflected Adeline’s shadow so often. It was the
effect of Murphy’s frozen expression.
But a man cannot live with a dead woman, especially when she belonged
to someone else. I touched Carrie’s foot under the table. She was too
young and pretty for a fossil like Murphy. He had snatched the paper
from her and was reading the notice for himself.
“Who was she?” demanded the girl, with the freedom of her class toward
a chance admirer.
“A lady I knew,” Murphy told her curtly.
Carrie flushed. She resented the word--in these days of universal
ladyhood. She was affronted. She was wishing that she had gone straight
home from the shop to Battersea as usual, instead of being taken in
Murphy’s toils at the corner of the Circus. Her round, childish face
grew sulky. The evening was quite spoiled by this stupid dead woman.
Murphy began to eat savagely, talking to me in a jerky way as he did
so.
“Dead!” he said in a dazed way, with his jaws working nervously as he
swallowed some bread. “Why, she was quite a young woman; she couldn’t
have been thirty----”
“Thirty!” echoed Carrie, in a scornful undertone.
“We dined here, five years ago--you were of the party. We cooked the
dinner ourselves; she thought it such fun. The soup was salt--you must
remember.”
His voice was so anxious that I said soothingly, “Of course I do.”
“What a handsome girl she was!” he continued with sad enthusiasm. “It
was the night of the Duke of York’s wedding.”
“The Duke of York’s wedding?” cried irrepressible Carrie. “That is ever
so long ago. We had a holiday from school. My mother went to see the
illuminations and got her pocket picked.”
She looked at Murphy with a new expression. He had been doing exactly
the same thing five years before--only the girl was different. He must
be quite old. She had not thought of that before. She had only
considered that he was a gentleman. She felt depressed by the antique
flavor of her company. I could see that she was thinking fervently that
in future she would go straight back to Battersea.
“We were a jolly party,” Murphy went on. “What a row Elizabeth made
next day!”
“Elizabeth?”
“Married sister. Lived in Colville Gardens. Husband a parson--but a
decent fellow. I used to visit them--of course they did not
suspect--Adeline was clever, but she got found out like all the clever
ones. There was a deuce of a row. Soon after she married Pray. Neither
of them had a penny. Went and starved in the country. I could not have
married her. It was out of the question altogether. She did not expect
it. How fond she was of me!” He smiled, more with vanity than regret.
“You couldn’t marry her, of course,” I echoed, just for the sake of
saying something. “She wouldn’t expect it.”
“She said that when she died she’d let me know,” Murphy went on,
looking a little scared. He was superstitious, like all Irishmen. “It
was in Colville Square, the night before her wedding. She crept out
after dinner. I can see her now in her light gown with her big arms
bare to the elbow and a thin chain round her neck. I remember that we
stayed out a long time, walking round and round the railings. It was so
late that I couldn’t get a cab back to the Inn and had to walk all the
way. She looked so queer. She said she’d----”
“Haunt you,” I finished, sick of his maunderings. “Well, she made sure
of poor Pray. I’m sorry for that fellow. He put in the notice, of
course--for you to see. She did the most that was possible in these
practical days.”
He did not seem to hear me.
“Dead!” he went on, in a monologue sort of way, while Carrie, her fork
halfway to her mouth and her elbows on the table, stared at him
scornfully. “Her eyes! Gray, Irish eyes. She was an Irish girl--the
Mahoneys of Roscommon. You remember the dinner? She sat where you are
now--facing the cupboard.”
A long, clear note came from the set over the way, with the gay rattle
of piano keys beneath quick fingers.
“How well that girl of Martin’s sings!” I said irrelevantly.
“I saw her once afterward. She was with her husband; it _must_ have
been Pray, a long-faced, badly dressed chap. I was with Bob Piety, at
the Aquarium. I suppose they had come up from the country, determined
on amusement; married people have their moments of _ennui._ They looked
out of place. Adeline was so changed that I was not sure of her. Her
good looks were gone and her mouth was harsh. She looked at me; I
looked at her. I turned to Bob and said in a loud voice:
“‘Auntie!’
“That used to be my pet name for her. She turned to her husband and
returned very clearly:
“‘Yes.’
“That was all. We both made our explanations--I to Bob, she to her
husband. I didn’t see her again that evening; I’ve never seen her
since. Dead!”
He got up hurriedly and looked round for his hat.
“See after her,” he said huskily, jerking his head toward pretty
Carrie, “I can’t--to-night. Take her to a music hall--anything.”
He went away abruptly, leaving me a fair field. He was bent as he
walked. He looked too old for the Inn; we don’t want graybeards.
“What’s up with him?” demanded Carrie.
“Liver. Have some more champagne?”
I caught up the bottle.
“No, thanks.” She snatched her glass away and the wine slobbered out on
the cloth.
“Who was she?” she persisted. “I don’t care a brass farthing. She’d be
as old as the hills, if she was alive. But--who was she?”
“A lady that he knew years ago.”
“Lady!” sneered Carrie, spitefully, with a nasty, upward curl of her
ripe lip. “Why, she was the same as me--he said so.”
“She was a woman, my dear; that’s all. Have you really finished?
Then where shall we go?”
She put on her hat in a hurry and cast decisively for a popular
contortionist at one of the halls--I think it was the Royal.
“They say he twists himself about something awful,” she added, with a
little grimace and a gleeful shudder.
We clattered down the stairs. The oak thudded heavily behind our quick
feet, as if it had regrets for Adeline.
JIMMY.
HIS full name was James Adolphus Carol, but everyone called him just
Jimmy. He was Jimmy to all of us in the Inn; Jimmy to the music-hall
managers and music-hall artistes.
He was a little spindle-shanked fellow, like a jockey, but a bit too
gentlemanly. He had bulging, gray-blue eyes and a sunken, heavily
freckled face. His top hat was always very sleek and a little on one
side, but the rest of his dress fell short of perfect finish. I’ve seen
him with his shoe tied up with string and his collar pinned together in
front because he’d lost his last stud.
He was dreadfully hard up, but that is nothing. We resent a prosperous
fellow. I don’t fancy he ever had any regular meals. Men stood him
drinks, and he had a trick of turning up at your rooms about midnight,
talking brilliantly and wildly for about half an hour, and then saying
carelessly, “Have you got any bread and butter knocking about, old
man?” Fellows who didn’t know him very well would suggest a square
meal--a chop, or a sausage and mashed at Mimm’s, just outside the
gates--then Jimmy would be affronted.
He was always being dunned and pretended that he liked it. Perhaps he
really did. He was full of schemes for evading duns. He was an
authority on judgment-summonses, pawnshops, shooting the moon, and
obtaining credit. He would hold forth eloquently on the delights of
being dunned. I forget the particular points he made, but they were
very forcible--coming from him.
He used to borrow unblushingly, but his gift in that way was
restricted--very few of us had any money to lend.
He had the finest private collection of pawn-tickets that I ever saw.
His pockets were full of them. I remembered that he once went to a
swell party--some musical affair. He was very polite, very strict on
questions of etiquette. The day after the party he made the usual
formal call at the house--it was some big place near Sloane Street.
His hat was very sleek, he had a frock coat, a flower in his
button-hole--everything complete. He handed his card to the footman,
and as he did so a couple of pawn-tickets fluttered gently to the
door-mat. The flunkey stooped, picked them up, and handed them
gracefully back to Jimmy--who took them with equal grace. He told me
the whole performance was superb--in perfect style. It was done without
a word, without a smile. They did not dare look at each other.
Jimmy’s rooms were untidy and his style of housekeeping not to be
commended. He never kept a laundress for very long--because he never
paid her. Yet the women loved him and worked for nothing so long as
they could. He used to chaff them lightly, explain the state of his
exchequer. He took a personal interest in their family life. They told
him their troubles; drunken husbands, big families, pugnacious lodgers
on the next landing, the hard heart of the landlords when they came
upstairs with their black books for the weekly rent.
When Mrs. Morey was ill Jimmy went down Green Street to see her, with a
couple of French novels--translations--under his arm. She had a
gathering on her ankle which she showed him with pride, in spite of his
courteous protest, but she declined the offer of the novels.
“You’re very kind, sir,” she said. “But I don’t suppose as your books
’ud suit me. I was brought up very particular. I like something
good--the Bible or the Common Prayer or the Sunday newspaper. I makes
my ’usband read ‘When the wicked man turneth,’ in the ’opes it ’ll be a
lesson to ’im. No, there’s nothin’ as the doctor’s ordered, thank you,
sir--except to keep my strength up.”
She took Jimmy’s last sixpence gratefully, and asked him to stop and
share the half-quartern of gin which her youngest little girl but three
ran to the public house to fetch. Very likely he stayed; it would have
been just like him. He was a crank. Fancy a man offering Paul de Kock
and Flaubert to an Inn of Court laundress! He paid for the gin, but he
lightly ignored the two months’ money he owed her, and she never
reminded him.
His sitting room was full of books, on open shelves and thick with
dust. They were the admiration of Mrs. Morey.
“I thought Mr. Slobkins ’ad a lot,” she said, “’im as I worked for in
Furnival’s. ’E’s a magistrate or a clerk or somethin’ o’ that sort, yer
see. But, lor, this lot bangs ’is.”
Stanch Mrs. Morey! She was a little roly-poly kind of woman, with eyes
like ripe sloes, and she worked for Jimmy for six months without ever
receiving a penny.
“My ’usband ’ud kill me if ’e knowed,” she said, smiling plaintively as
she scrubbed the boards. “’E’s bin out o’ work for nearly a year. It’s
hard work for me to fill the kids’ mouths and keep ’im in grub and
pocket money. But ’e’s a good ’usband when ’e aint drunk. I wish ’e ’ad
more luck, that’s all.”
“What is his trade?” asked Jimmy languidly--he was always languid until
the gas lamps were lighted.
The little woman tossed her head.
“My ’usband aint _that_ sort, jest able to do one kind o’ work. ’E can
turn ’is ’and to anythin’. But I wish ’e wasn’t quite so partikler.”
She came to me privately when Jimmy’s health began to break. She
said that he didn’t eat enough to keep a sparrow alive, that it worried
her awful, that she feared he was going off in a galloping decline.
“It’s jest the way my niece’s ’usband was took,” she concluded. “’E
used to drive a vegetable cart, and ’e’s layin’ in the Brompton
Simmetery. As nice a young man as ever you see, and played the flute
bootiful. ’E was took bad in May and dead in December. He was indeed,
and ’er with six little children--all babies, as you might say, and
another on the road--if you’ll excuse my free way of speakin’. My niece
she’s got the flute under a glass case in the parlor window, for the
mountings is silver.”
But Jimmy was too far gone for my care, or anyone else’s. No doubt he
had been consumptive for years, and a constitution kept up principally
on “nipping” never thrives. There was a doctor living in the Inn at the
time--a very good fellow. He visited him and gave him medicine--don’t
believe Jimmy ever took it. His cough got gradually worse and his face
fell in more than ever. But he was always full of jokes, rather grim
jokes sometimes. I’ve seen girls shiver and scream with laughter
at the same time. He went to a music hall every night, spending most
of his time at the bar. He called the artistes by their Christian
names--Queenie this, or Dan the other. The Queenies gave him their full
confidence. Big, flashy girls, these music-hall girls, with free, not
over-clean tongues and very good hearts. They would frighten you, but
they don’t mean any harm. Jimmy used to write songs for them--which
they very seldom bought. He did both words and music. His airs were
most melodious and “catchy,” but his words were never quite vulgar
enough. None of his songs “caught on.”
I never knew a man with such a marvelous ear. If he went to a comic
opera he would come straight home and play all the lyrics without a
false note. He played Chopin by ear; he used to sit for hours
extemporizing the most weird, fascinating, tantalizing music. He ought
to have made his fortune. Instead of that, he went into consumption and
died--for want of proper food.