the big lime by the gate; at dusk the ringing, rattling croak of frogs
in the pond, the weird voice of the night-jar. Jimmy grew more fretful.
He complained that he could not sleep for the cursed nightingale. He
wanted to go home; back to the Inn, to the boys, to the halls, the
bars, the evening papers. He had run out of tobacco--they only sold
shag at the village shop. He took my last packet of cigarette papers.
But I wanted to stay--for the end, which we all knew must come before
another Sunday. That window, high in the eaves, rigorously shut and
curtained, fascinated me.
On the fifth day things were just as they had been on the first, each
day of that week was a replica. Jib, Zak, and I were in the parlor, the
local paper was more crumpled, the flowers on the window ledge drooped.
Jimmy had crawled up in the sun and dust to the public house, where
they had a crazy piano in the bar parlor. The layer-out, the Vulture,
as I had grown to call her to myself, came slipping down the stairs
again in easy list slippers of drab and green.
“Some dies hard,” she said sententiously to the two sons, twisting the
corner of her apron, shaking her wavy white head, and eying me.
“It’s they game feathers she’s a-layin’ on,” she continued. “You can’t
die easy on game feathers, and there’s a plenty in the bed. Game
feathers! They skeer off Death--but her time’s come, poor love. Help
lift her. Lay her on the floor; she’ll go soon and easy then.”
Jib and Zak looked at each other furtively, then each shook his head.
They couldn’t lend a hand to help her die. The Vulture knew their
thought--these women are full of intuition.
“We’ll call Mas’r Puttick,” she said with inspiration. “And p’r’aps the
gentleman would not mind lendin’ a hand.”
She put her own hand to her side and took a short breath, muttering
something about not being strong enough to lift.
I said I’d go and fetch Puttick. He was cutting mangels in the field
beyond the garden, a couple of cows following him with keen interest on
the other side of the hedge. There was a wide border of white pinks to
the strawberry bed; the scent was heavy. White pinks, and, on the other
side of the path, broad beans in blossom.
Puttick was a very old man, older than Mrs. Covey, and his devotion to
her had been the mild jest of the neighbors. He did her chivalrous
service: carried down the refuse of his allotment garden for her pigs;
pea haulm, cabbage stumps, turnip tops too tough for the pot, spinach
that had bolted. He was always begging refuse “for t’ old gell’s pig.”
“T’ old gell” he invariably called her--behind her back--with an
indulgent mixture of tenderness and contempt for her as a lone widow
woman, with natural, womanly ways of scraping and nagging. He left his
work solemnly when I spoke to him. We went to the house. Three of the
five cats were looking askance at a saucer of sour milk set in the
middle of the strawberry bed--that was “t’ old gell’s” way of scaring
birds from her fruit. We went up the rat-eaten oak stairs, Puttick, the
Vulture, and I.
There was a characteristic smell about the place: a smell of ancient
garments, ropes of onions, apples on the floor of the attic, a smell
garnered by closely shut casements.
She was lying gaunt and straight in the bed, with its carved posts,
patchwork quilt, and dirty chintz hangings. Her face was yellow, so was
her unbleached nightgown, so were her hands with their curved black
nails. As we went in she looked round sharply at the door--a curious
look; lurid, angry, beseeching.
Puttick muttered, with a thick throat and his old eyes dazed, “T’ old
gell, t’ old gell.” It was grim to see her lying there with an idle
tongue, with idle hands. No doubt he was feeling drearily that his time
must be near too. He had been a virile young man when she had been a
child. The world could not go on without old Mis’ Covey of
Farthings Farm. She _was_ the world. No one else would keep him on
with odd jobs all through the winter. She must be made to live. He
said, after a long pause, during which I could see that his aged brain
had been working turgidly in an agony of desire to rouse her:
“They blackbirds, dang ’em, was at the white-heart cherries as early as
five this mornin’.”
But she did not stir. She only stared from the wall and back again,
with the odd, savage stare of entreaty, which none of us could
understand.
“I’ve seen many go, but none so hard as her. And yet she wasn’t what
you’d call a worldly-minded woman. Take her under the shoulders, sir,
if you kindly will, and, Mas’r Puttick, be ready to ketch her legs.”
The woman put her deft hands under the bedclothes and rolled the heavy
legs in a plaid shawl. Then, between us, we lifted her from the
malignant bed--full of the feathers of birds that she had plucked
remorselessly and who would not let her go in peace now that her time
had come. We stretched her decently on the floor near the clock and
pulled the blanket close under her peaked chin.
“We’ve all been young,” the Vulture said confidentially to me as we
jostled together down the twisting stairs. “There’s something on her
mind--a slip maybe. Them things comes up at the last and won’t let us
women go. The men are harder.”
Jib and Zak were still slouching in the Windsor chairs. They were
helpless without their mother, great fellows of thirty-eight and forty.
But she had been the mainspring. She had kept the purse-strings, kept
all control. They were mechanical figures run down without her. I sat
on the couch with the blue-checked cover and speculated on her secret,
on some rustic story made sweet by time, some sin--a slip, as the
country woman mercifully said--something which was quivering on her
tied tongue and which she couldn’t give word to.
Jib and Zak went slowly back to the hayfield, Puttick to his mangels. I
saw him go round the house, past the sitting-room window. He kept
casting guilty glances at the window overhead with the calico blind. He
had lent a hand in killing her.
But she obstinately wouldn’t die. Death was expected of her. The doctor
had prophesied it; the Vulture knew it would come, by many ancient,
foolish signs. The impress of her long bony body dented the swollen bed
of feathers, but on the sixth day she was lying alive still on the
floor on a rough couch of blankets, at the foot of the clock, whose
brass face seemed to leer and twinkle at her victoriously when the
western sun came in.
She would not go. The patience of the layer-out was quite exhausted.
“I must bide about the place,” she said plaintively. “It’s money out o’
pocket to me. I could be makin’ a lot in the hayfields. But I dursn’t
leave. She’ll be stiff a’most as soon as the breath is out o’ her, and
you can’t do nothin’ with a corpse then.”
“Sure, sure,” gurgled all the other women softly.
The room was full of women. I kept in the garden, but I could see and
hear them through the open door. I could see and hear all: the sunny
sitting room, with its broad window ledges, on which were pots of
calceolarias, with spotted, pouch-like blossoms; the women, with
children at their skirts or buried in their cotton bodices. All waiting
and twittering in that house of death.
I knew every line of the local paper. The long clay pipe which Jib in
pity had bestowed on me was cool, but it hurt my throat to draw such a
long way. I smoked it from sentiment. I like those long clays, but
properly speaking they should go with village politics. Jimmy was on
his back in the orchard, deep in grass which had not been cut yet,
rolling his last cigarette with long, transparent fingers. But he was
waiting like the rest of us. He started up on his elbow when the sound
came. We all heard it through the closed doors of bedroom and
staircase. That sound! The wheezing creak of a chain. A minute later
came the clear, deliberate chime of three. Then all the women and the
two sons remembered that for six days no one had thought to draw up the
clock. There was then no secret, no sin; no eating, biting prick of
conscience.
* * * * *
She was dead by the open case, on her knees, with one crooked-out hand
caught round the open door. Her eyes, wide open still, were on the
softly swaying pendulum, and the heavy weight was drawn high.
Jib, who had inherited his share of her practicality, and more, went up
softly as soon as he was allowed to and turned the hand round to the
proper place, each hour chiming in the quiet room.
Four. Five. Six. Seven.
It was evening. The haymakers had gone and a stifling mist was creeping
across the cropped meadows. The promise of another blazing day.
“Ah! to think it was only _that_ she wanted.” The layer-out extended
her hand and drew down her sweetly curved mouth. “I knew there was
something on her mind; there offen is with us poor women. We’ve all
been young----” She broke off discreetly, in the presence of the sons.
“But who’d ha’ thought of that plaguey clock? Why, any of us might ha’
drawed it up if we’d ha’ thought. I might ha’ earned good money at the
hayin’ this week.”
She went down the flagged path through the orchard to the gate. Jimmy,
half buried again in grass, long white daisies, and the delicate
summer orchis, stared at her, and his face changed.
“She reminds me of someone I used to know,” he said, and then stopped
abruptly. It was the only peep he ever gave me into his inner life. But
I remembered afterward.
We sat out until dusk, smoking--what dust of tobacco we had--and
looking up trains. Jib and Zak had gone upstairs. Their voices came
down to us, through the window with the greenish glass, which was now
swung back. They were discussing the coming sale.
“A feather bed allus fetches money.”
“There’s folk--gentry--as likes this oak.”
“It’s a good goer, an’ I’ve allus liked a chain better’n a cord.”
“Let’s take the 2.45, old man,” said Jimmy. “I’d like to look in at the
Royal in the evening. They’ve got that big girl there--Lilian--what’s
her name? The girl who sings Irish song’s so well.”
The fierce summer sun had gone to bed. All the night sounds were
beginning--beetles, frogs, birds. The nightingale that Jimmy so hated
was tuning up on a hedge near.
“Shan’t get a wink of sleep to-night,” he said dolefully, with his
hard, painful cough. “Give me the cabs for a lullaby.”
Jib and Zak were coming slowly downstairs. I heard them shut her door.
I could imagine her: the sheet over her hard face, the clock, to whose
regularity she had given her last breath, keeping her sedate company.
AN INTERLUDE.
IT was only Mrs. Conifer. Thought the woman would never go! Poor soul!
What a curse a conscience is. She was a fool to come back! Said she
couldn’t help it! She loathes the very memory of Kinsman--she adores
her husband--and yet she comes back to-night. That is so deliciously
like a woman--to come back. To come creeping through the gate, dodging
the porter, like she used to do, just to get the flavor of those old,
distasteful days on her tongue again.
Kinsman had the ground floor at No. 7. A middle-aged couple rent it
now; the wife watches everyone in and out of the Inn through a pair of
opera glasses. In Kinsman’s time there were high-art curtains--very
dingy--at the windows and tumbled red-and-white dhurries on the floor
and blue plates hung by wire along the walls.
He was a languid, artistic chap--played the violin, hung about old
bookstalls and _bric-à-brac_ shops in the lanes off Holborn.
He very rarely went to a music hall, avoided rowdy parties, dined out a
great deal in the season, and spoke now and then, in an off-hand,
half-ashamed way, of his people near Park Lane. There were photographs
of society beauties on his mantelshelf, propped up against Oriental
bowls--“pudden basins,” his laundress dubbed them scornfully--he gave
you to understand that he knew all the beauties personally.
He visited the Conifers, who had a big dingy house in Russell Square.
Conifer was a stockbroker, very much absorbed in his business, and Mrs.
Conifer was an extremely pretty blonde in the china-doll style. She was
the kind of little woman who is called “dressy” by her friends.
You don’t know the oppressively respectable side of Bloomsbury.
Bloomsbury is altering fast. The change pains me. I wish some fellow
who could write would immortalize the old place before it disappears.
Every time I go outside the gates of the Inn some change hits me in the
face. I see hoardings with up-to-date posters and the addresses of
house-breakers in places where once there was a familiar, flat-faced
house, with wide-framed windows. The old shops are going, little fusty
shops--eating houses, furniture stores, undertakers. I saw the last
typical eating house this morning. There was nothing in the window but
a big blue dish--Kinsman would have admired it--and a row of pressed
beef tins, with a haddock hanging flabbily over each tin.
Bloomsbury is forever in the violent stage--always going up or down.
Directly they took away our exclusive gates and let the cabs run
straight through to Kings Cross and Euston, there was an epidemic of
boarding houses. I believe that every house in Woburn Place takes
lodgers--more or less genteelly. An old fellow who had the first floor
set at 3 when I came to the Inn remembered the days when only carriage
folk lived in Great James Street. The first professional brass plate on
a door ruffled the inhabitants considerably.
Great James Street, Doughty Street, and a few more belong to the
Tichborne family. I remember a charwoman who used to say viciously--at
times when she considered herself imposed upon by those she worked for:
“Ah! Wait till Sir Roger comes out o’ quod, and then they’ll see.”
Just now we are aggressively on the up grade. It is much worse than
going down. The Duke has determined to make Bloomsbury a superior
residential quarter once more. He has pulled down some houses, added a
story to others, made gardens of the mews--and ruined the place for all
sentimental people. These red-and-white blocks of flats spoil the
neighborhood. We are becoming vulgarly opulent. Once you might have
drawn a line, roughly, say down Southampton Row, and so divided the
oppressively respectable from the aggressively Bohemian. That was so in
Mrs. Conifer’s time.
She was on the respectable side, of course: where people subscribe to
Mudie’s and make the changing of books the great business of the day,
where the men come home punctually to dinner at seven and the women
stroll down Oxford Street regularly on fine afternoons. You may still
see them swarming out of Hanway Street, very well dressed as a rule,
and very often Jewesses.
Mrs. Conifer was sometimes dull, so dull that she used to go to a cake
shop and have her afternoon tea and listen to the other women’s
chatter. Here was an opportunity that Kinsman could not miss. Before
long she went to his rooms instead of going to the cake shop. It was
really much more amusing. The Inn is quiet in the afternoons. A great
many of the fellows are in the City, and the laundresses have gone away
for the day. Mrs. Conifer used to thread her way through quiet
by-ways--down Guilford Street, along monastic Great James Street,
across Theobalds Road, and onwards. The gardens were quiet in those
days; we did not allow children in until evening. It was so beautifully
fresh and still after the roar and dust of outside London, the summer
smells of provision shops, and the rattle of omnibuses. Kinsman had
shaded windows--it was summer time at first--and a dainty tea. He liked
her to come in the afternoons because Sophia Dominy, of whom he was a
little afraid, was safely shut away in the big mantle shop where she
was dummy. But by and by Mrs. Conifer came in the evenings also--after
dinner, when Conifer had shut himself up for the evening in his study.
She used to drive up to the gates on wet nights. I saw her more than
once myself--always beautifully dressed and closely veiled, and having
that intangible air of shrinking which is natural to the woman who
never goes out alone after dark.
And then one night she met Sophia Dominy in the doorway. It was bound
to happen. Sophia was a handsome girl with a fine figure--I told you
she was dummy at a mantle shop. She came out of the shadow of the
doorway as Mrs. Conifer drew into it. It so happened that Kinsman was
late home that night; his windows were dark. Mrs. Conifer looked. With
her quick woman’s eye she took in every detail of this other woman,
whose clothes were a pitiful struggle for costly effect--seal plush
instead of sealskin, weedy ostrich plumes in her hat, and in her small
ears the glitter of red glass. There must have been insolent contempt
in her china-blue eyes, for Sophia’s great black ones began to
blaze, and she put her hand on the other’s slim, nervous shoulder. She
said, with an offensive touch of comradeship:
“Good-evening, Mrs. Conifer.”
How did she find out? How do women learn these things? _You_ can say
perhaps--_I_ give it up. I only know that Kinsman had been very
careful--as careful as a man knows how.
Little blond Mrs. Conifer started, and then stared coldly at the gaudy,
tawdry, dark creature in the doorway.
“I--I don’t understand,” she faltered; “I--excuse me--I do not know
you.”
She made a weak attempt at dignity, but she looked horribly ashamed and
alarmed. She was afraid that the girl knew everything and was going to
blackmail her.
“But I know you,” returned the other, with a little fierce chuckle of
triumph. “I know why you have come here to-night. You ladies give
yourself such airs--you are not a bit better than girls like me. If
everybody had their rights, I ought to be Mrs. Kinsman. See!”
Mrs. Conifer did see. The whole hideous position was perfectly clear to
her, without another word. You won’t believe me, of course, but she
wasn’t a wicked woman. She had simply drifted, like any other idle
young woman might. There had been a fascination about Kinsman, with his
queerly furnished rooms, his romantic airs of art-worship, sympathy,
and so on. She had regarded herself as misunderstood and was inclined
to be plaintively melancholy about Conifer’s obtuseness. Kinsman had
been an affinity. She got the insidious flavor of the Inn. There had
been nothing vulgar or wicked about the affair. It had only been
delicious, piquant, dangerous--like a leaf torn out of the “Decameron.”
Sophia Dominy brought everything up to date, brought terrifying visions
of the Divorce Court. Mrs. Conifer was a faithful wife again, in every
thought, directly she looked into those blazing black eyes and
understood.
She whisked round and rustled swiftly in her skirts of silk across the
square, getting out at the Holborn end and plunging into the stream
of people on the pavement flowing westward. So soon as the first
tightness was out of her throat and the first desperate trembling had
left her limbs she hailed a hansom, telling the man to stop at the
corner of Russell Square. She fell back quivering on the seat and shut
her eyes, but opened them again directly because the face of Sophia
rose before her--triumphant, grinning, pale with chalk, and hidden to
the thick brows with a coarse fuzz of hair.
She went tottering up her own doorsteps. As she slipped along the hall,
and past the study door, Conifer called out:
“Is that you, Freda?”
“Yes, it is I.”
“Come in.”
She stepped over the threshold and stood in the warm room, her pale
head hanging and her half-shut eyes filled with dread. She forced
herself to look up at last and to stammer out:
“We drove down to Terry’s Theater, Mrs. Hart and I. But the house was
full--so--so we drove back. That is all--really.”
Conifer was sitting over the big table as usual, and as usual it was
strewn with papers. But the double knot of anxiety was untied from
above his eyes and the packets of paper were pushed back. There was a
new tenderness on his face, or, rather, the revival of on old one.
“I’m glad you came back,” he said. “I’ve got time to talk to you
to-night, darling. I shall have time to take you about again myself.
I’ve been awfully worried lately about business--you wouldn’t
understand, it would only bother you. But I was afraid once that it
meant ruin. I’ve been in a very tight place. But it’s all right now.”
He set back his shoulders and sighed, as if he threw off at that moment
the burden of months.
“I shall,” he repeated, laughing foolishly, “have time for _you_ now.”
Mrs. Conifer’s pretty, weak face stiffened into horror. She was
thinking of the quiet Inn, with its perpetual, sanctified taste of
cloisters and the Middle Ages; thinking of Kinsman’s rooms, with the
high-art furbelows, the violin under the table, the untidy dhurries on
the floor, the impressionist daubs which he had painted himself and
hung on the wall to keep the blue plates company. She thought of
the black, dingy doorway, of the girl with the savage face and the
twinkling earrings.
“Talk to me.” Conifer, who had shut the door carefully, half lifted her
into the great chair by the fire and stretched himself at her feet on
the rug, like a faithful dog.
Their eyes met; his full of worship, hers of lava-like tears.
“You love me?” she asked incredulously, the frozen look creeping more
stiffly over her face. “I --I began to think----”
She looked such a small, shrunken thing--as he told her afterward--that
he felt quite anxious and remorseful.
“Love!” he cried out boyishly; “I should think I did. Only business
worries, you know, darling, enchain a man. He can’t be always saying
it.”
He took her in his arms. She shivered as he kissed her, taking her full
punishment from his ardent lips. She had loved him all along--only him.
She thought of Kinsman, in his stuffy, wooden room, with a fierce,
ashamed loathing. She kept quiet a little, her head on her husband’s
breast and his lips just flicking her face now and then. At last she
broke out beseechingly:
“Let us go away for a holiday.”
“Very good idea. When?”
“To-night--to-morrow, I mean. And, Dick--”
“Yes.”
“Let’s give up this house and go into the country. You can have a pony
trap and a season ticket.”
“That isn’t half a bad idea,” he responded lazily--he was too happy to
be positive or vehement about anything. “The rent here is very high and
I don’t see what we get for it.”
* * * * *
They went abroad for two months, and when they returned they took a
house somewhere in Surrey. They lived there for four years--with a pony
trap, a man for the garden, and all the other accessories of rural
gentility. Mrs. Conifer was very happy. She had two charming children.
She was in the third best set--the set which draws the line at tenant
farmers, but thinks it rather a privilege to be invited to the
Vicarage.
She never thought of Kinsman, of that dazed, magic time when she had
been a traitor to Dick. She only heard of him twice--once when they
saw his name in the newspaper--co-respondent in a divorce suit or
something of that sort--and wondered if it were the same man--_their_
Kinsman--casually over dinner.
That was all. Except for that, she never gave Kinsman a thought, not
even a shudder. She was too happy, too prosperous, too busy. She had
her children. She had also her dogs, her bees, her poultry--all the
live things that women gather about them in the country, to take the
place of shopping. She had her little social excitements--summer garden
parties and winter hockey. She had her little heart-burnings and
triumphs--being snubbed by this woman or dropping that one.
But one day when she was out alone on her bicycle she came upon Kinsman
in a lane near the house. He was very shabby, obviously very down on
his luck. She remembered all at once that he had never given her back
her letters--those foolish, imprudent letters in which she had bared
her soul. She gripped the handle bars of her machine desperately.
He was standing in her path. For a moment she had a wild plan of
running him down. But the next moment her foot was on the ground. She
had dismounted and faced him.