unsteady hand on the thick oak panels of the cabinet. He put his head
against one and groaned. The perfume--was it of lavender?--stole out
and nauseated him.
He would sell it. He must sell it. He went back to bed. He considered.
Which dealer would give the best price? He would sell it. He would take
his annual holiday early; he evidently wanted a thorough change.
In the morning he wondered how he could have thought of selling it. The
acquisitiveness, the unreasoning, improvident, ardent affection of the
collector was strong in him again. Before he went to the City he
examined the cabinet as usual, gloating and thrilling over its beauty.
But at night he was again seized with foreboding so dreadful that he
dashed into the flowing streets. He went to a music hall. He grinned, a
fixed, wide grin, that seemed to crack his cheeks. His face felt stiff.
The faces of the dead were stiff.
He thought that he would ask Harrowsmith to break the compact, to take
back his legacy. But the doctor had a professional ardor. He might
bluntly refuse. Also--he could not part with the cabinet.
The next day was Saturday. All the afternoon he walked miserably about
the London streets. He thought he’d enlist, get sent to the front, and
be killed on a battlefield. So would he save his dead flesh from ribald
attention. But perhaps Harrowsmith would not let him go.
He was afraid to go back to his chambers, afraid that he might meet
Harrowsmith on the stairs, afraid of the cabinet. He turned into a tea
shop and found with difficulty a vacant chair at one of the tables. The
life and gayety and warmth of that tea shop reassured him. He despised
himself for his morbid fears. He would be a fool if he threw up his
berth and went to the front. Besides, if he went he must leave the
cabinet. The touch and sight of the wonderful brown wood carved by
hands that had so long been dust had become a daily necessity to him.
Next morning, when he awoke, he was feeling very ill. It was doubtless
influenza. There was no danger in that if one took care. He would
take care. He must. He dared not die. Death now had a bitterness double
distilled. All that Sunday he lay miserably in bed. As the hours wore
on he grew too ill to fear death--and after. He was too ill, even, to
be haunted by his usual terror when dusk fell.
Next day his laundress came to light the fire. He sent her off with a
telegram to the office, saying he could not come. She happened to meet
Harrowsmith on the landing and sent him in on her own initiative.
The doctor was assiduous. He was good to us all, and only grew angry if
we spoke of a fee. He muttered something about nervous breakdown. He
provided a trained nurse; he paid professional visits twice a day.
With care and nursing Kinsman began to be himself again. Harrowsmith
told him that he must get away for a rest. He added that he would go
with him; a holiday together would be splendid. No doubt he wondered at
the wild, leaping terror in the other’s eyes when he said that; said it
in such a cheery, commonplace way, without any subtlety. But Kinsman
was subtle and suspicious and mad. He thought the doctor wished to come
too, so as to be sure of him. He read the most diabolical eagerness
in his calm face. How afraid he was of Harrowsmith! And how afraid
Harrowsmith was that he would be the loser on their strange compact.
Afraid to let him go away alone in case he should die and be buried.
His dread and hate grew and grew; it became distorted into a monster.
He now hesitated before he swallowed each dose of medicine. His light
head became the dwelling-place of a hundred wild thoughts. He lay with
his face to the wall and saw it all as clearly as possible--with
preternatural clearness. Harrowsmith wanted to kill him. He was
impatient; that was only natural. But he _would_ not die. Sometimes,
when the nurse came near, he desperately clutched at her hand to save
him, to pull him back. He must live. He must spare his flesh--his poor
flesh, at which he looked yearningly as it lay against the bed linen,
wan and veined.
Once he thought desperately that rather than die he would kill
Harrowsmith first--with the last spurt of energy left him. Yes. In any
case, when he grew strong, he would certainly kill him as a safeguard;
a man could not live in such perpetual terror.
His face to the wall, he reproached himself bitterly with his headlong
passion for the cabinet. What was there in old oak to lure a man to
such madness? It added nothing to life. What was life but decent
provision and the certainty of a long, undisturbed death? Things seemed
simple and clear as he lay dozing through the days.
If he had sold himself for bread that would have been more
understandable, less reprehensible. Starvation was a very terrible
thing. But he had sold himself--for what? He thought with weird dread
and passion of that solemn, shining brown thing through the wall--the
mysterious piece of ancient furniture that was responsible for his
misery.
And so, by desperate will, as he thought, he lived. He grew strong. The
trained nurse went away. The last bottle of medicine was empty.
He was alone and would be until the morning. This was the first evening
he had been alone since his illness. At dusk the old familiar terror
gripped him. He was beginning to be afraid, and this time he could
not dart like a hunted creature into the streets and join his
fellow-men--men whose bodies belonged to them; men who had not
mortgaged their last sad majesty. He was alone, alone. On the shawl
which wrapped his knees his folded hands looked oddly pale.
He walked across the room and touched the cabinet. Long stay in bed had
numbed his feet. He touched the cabinet. In his throat was a desperate
sob.
He would sell it. Sell! That was just what he could never do. But if
only he could; if only he might buy himself back.
Sell! He imagined the joy of the buyer--a collector, of course. What
pure, undiluted ecstasy he would get out of it--that man who paid with
gold and not with his own helpless flesh! No; he could never sell it.
Beautiful, devilish, compelling thing! It must stay with him until the
end.
He opened the door and smelt the smell--the clinging aroma which had
always tantalized and piqued him. He traced with his finger the rude
hinges of hammered iron. His face quivered in every muscle with varied
emotions. How he loved this thing! How he hated and feared it! What
moments of joy it had afforded him! What a fearful league it had lured
him into making!
A terrible struggle was passing over him. His freakish brain had
suggested a new extravagance. He was possessed with a desire to do this
strange, this futile and dastardly act. He lifted his head and looked
at the cabinet as he would have looked into human eyes--a long, wistful
look; a look embodying a whole gamut of emotions. Then he crossed the
room, stooped down to a box in one corner, and came back with a hammer.
“It will hurt you,” he said foolishly, the hammer already uplifted, his
eyes drinking in the delicacy of that wonderful thing which had
traveled down the past ages and drifted to him and been his tempter,
“but not as it hurts me.”
He struck. All night he worked with the hammer, with every tool he had
that could help him. He began to break it up, to hack it asunder--his
cabinet. He threw it on the fire bit by bit. It blazed and crackled,
this old dry wood. The splutter and crackle went to his heart. He
thought they were agonized protests. He believed that it suffered as it
died. In his long morbid communion with it he had grown to believe it
human and something more.
It took him days and nights to kill the cabinet. It was so stoutly
built. When he was exhausted he crept to bed, not forgetting to lock
the door on that scene of strange disorder. But at last it was done.
The wall behind was bare and dirty, festooned with cobwebs. On the
floor was dust and chips and splinters. The fire burned with the
glowing heat of a sacrificial fire.
Already he was calmer. Although he still belonged to Harrowsmith,
although he had madly destroyed the one thing that might have redeemed
him, although his days would now hold bitter moments, he was at peace.
He watched it burn. He saw the wondrous handicraft of cunning dead men
disappear line by line, and turn to ash.
He was sitting so when his laundress came in at the widely flung door.
It was the first time for days that she had been permitted to enter the
sitting room. He nervously expected her to exclaim, to inquire. The
blank wall was so obvious. The little room was hot like an oven, but
she only flung her hands and cried out:
“Oh, lor’! what an awful thing this is about Mr. ’Arrersmith. To be
knocked down by one o’ them cycles. The streets of London aint safe.
And ’im a doctor, too, the cleverest doctor at the ’orspital.”
“What--_what_ about him?”
“Knocked down by a cycle and killed in Grays Inn Road, jest by the
’orspital,” she returned with flavor.
Kinsman staggered to his feet. The fire licked out from the grate and
seemed to sear him, to dry the words in his throat and dam up the glad
accursed tears in his eyes.
He was no longer a bondman. He was free. He could bear to look at his
flesh, his own until death, and after. He looked at his hands, torn and
soiled, hands that had destroyed the cabinet.
His eyes fell on the last panel, which the fire was greedily eating; on
the heap of ash that had meant so much beauty.
He dropped back in the chair. He laughed--laughter that gurgled with
water as it fought its way through his throat. He could not see the
blank wall for tears, whether for the cabinet, the dead man, or himself
he did not know.
A POLITICAL WOMAN.
GULLY and his wife had one of the new sets just inside the gates. These
sets are more expensive, more convenient, more respectable than the old
ones. Lucinda--she was Gully’s wife--would never have consented to an
old set. She set her face sternly against Bohemianism when it took a
certain form. She didn’t object to it in the form of Liberty tea-gowns
and discreet flirtations in the name of art and literature. Gully was a
journalist. He found the Inn convenient, but Lucinda was always hoping
plaintively that some day they would be able to afford a house in
Bloomsbury, or, better still, a modest place in the country.
She had six rooms, every convenience, and a most superior maidservant,
the long streamers of whose cap, when she ran out to post a letter,
lent a certain _cachet_ to the Inn.
Lucinda was nice enough. Her struggles for a conventional manner of
life were amusing. She never gave Gully any peace. She dragged him
about to social functions. She made him use his influence to get her
portrait in the ladies’ papers, as assistant at a charity concert or
exhibitor at a cat show--she kept a couple of wild-looking Persians.
She always had her photograph taken in evening dress. She was one of
those coarse women--commonly called fine--who are disfigured by a big
neck and big arms.
She had her “At-Home” day, of course. She displayed a card bowl on a
prominent table in the pleasant room overlooking the gardens which she
called her drawing room. She peppered the conversation with references
to dinners and receptions that she had been invited to.
We were never allowed to smoke in the drawing room, nor to bring in our
whisky. It was a modern drawing room, all white paint, cheap china, and
cushion frills. She had a standard lamp with an amazing amber shade.
She spent sixpence twice a week on cut flowers, and sold Gully’s old
clothes for palms. It was a very fair attempt at Maida Vale--Lucinda
and her drawing room.
Therefore it was a surprise to me when Gully came round one night and
said despondently:
“I wish you could help me with Lucinda. She’s going all to pieces.”
“Going to pieces!”
I thought of dressmakers’ bills, of the minor journalists who sometimes
dropped in to tea. Yet Lucinda was a safe woman. She was far too
respectable to run into debt or to compromise herself. Gully proceeded
to explain.
“You know she makes me walk in the Park every Sunday afternoon. She
wants to go in the morning when the fashionable frocks are about. But I
draw the line at that. We compromise with the afternoon--when there is
only the band and pretty shop girls I don’t so much mind. We were there
six weeks ago, and we stopped to listen to a Socialist spouter--one of
those rabid enthusiasts in a red tie. We had listened to them all--the
religious ones, the atheists, the philosophers. Sometimes you get good
copy out of fellows like that.
“I wouldn’t let her stand about long. Her chest is weak, and the
Wigans’ fancy-dress ball is coming on. It is to be a grand affair;
they’ve talked of it for months. Lucinda was to go as a--blest if I can
remember as what--but her bodice was to be the merest apology. You
can’t blame a fine woman for showing off her neck and arms. Old Wigan
is the proprietor of my paper, a very wealthy man, a very influential
one too. It is to my interest to keep in with him. It would never do
for us to snub him by keeping away. You’re never safe in journalism.
Get a post as editor, and begin to bound on your so many hundreds a
year. Phew! the paper changes hands or politics--where are you? Get
regular weekly features, make yourself an authority on some subject or
other. The public doesn’t want your subject--or you. Journalism is
rotten, I tell you, rotten. Only the absolutely unscrupulous, or the
totally ignorant, have the least chance. I know men in journalism who
are making five pounds a week and more by writing gutter stuff. And I
know clever men who barely scrape a hundred and fifty a year.
“Where was I? Oh! Lucinda. I know that her bronchial attacks last half
through the winter, so I pulled her away out of the crowd. It was a
bitterly cold day.
“We walked off. She drew up the collar of her coat. I said that it had
been foolish of us to stand about in the cold and risk bronchitis, with
the Wigans’ fancy-dress ball coming on.
“‘I don’t care a bit about the ball,’ she said. ‘I’m not going.’
“‘Not care! not going! But your dress? You’ve bought the silk. It cost
a pretty penny.’
“‘Brocade. Twelve and six a yard,’ she groaned.
“‘It seemed to me a little stiff. But so long as you are happy----’
“‘Happy! Did you hear what he said? It is dreadful.’
“‘Awful. The police ought to put a stop to----’
“It was Lucinda who stopped--on the edge of the Serpentine.
“‘Do you know what you are saying?’ she demanded.
“I didn’t like the contemptuous curl of her lip, and returned with some
pique:
“‘I know what _he_ was saying. Extravagant balderdash! I ought to know
something about politics. I take an interest in them--an intelligent
interest. I write about them. There’s my weekly letter to the Midland
daily, isn’t there? I vote Radical, I’m a Progressive. I’m for the
amelioration of--all sorts of things.’
“I wound up vaguely. You can’t talk sane, serious politics to your
wife; the true political woman has yet to be born.
“‘When we retire to the country in our ripe middle age,’ I went on, ‘I
shall take an active interest in local affairs. I shall become a member
of the parish council; shall look after rights of way and be down on
barbed wire. I’ve my own ideas on the game laws--we shall never have
enough money to preserve--and lots of things. I won’t dilate on them.
You wouldn’t understand.’
“It was getting dusk. In the distance the crowd--all the little
crowds--were melting away. A soldier sat with a girl on a seat. His red
coat was warm against the shadows.
“‘There!’ broke out Lucinda passionately, before we were out of
hearing. ‘Did you see those two on the seat?’
“‘I did. I thought, so far as I could judge, you know, that they looked
uncommonly happy.’
“‘Happy! a soldier! a servant girl! What have they done? Surely you, as
a practical politician, can tell me. Why should they be born to such a
life? I ask you. No gleam of brightness to lighten the impenetrable
gloo----’
“‘Come now. You are quoting the maniac in the red tie.’
“We got out of the Park and went along Oxford Street in silence until
we were near the Circus. Then Lucinda burst out suddenly:
“‘Two thousand acres of land----’
“‘If you are going to tackle the agricultural problem----’
“‘One third of the available capital----’
“‘Don’t start on statistics; nothing more treacherous.’
“‘How many families did he say lived in one room?’
“‘Wasn’t listening.’
“‘That is just it. People like you never do listen. People like you
content themselves with reading stupid, woolly, political speeches. For
my part, I always skip such things, and am thankful when Parliament
adjourns and they put something really interesting in the papers.’”
Gully stopped and knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
“From that day,” he said solemnly, when he had refilled and lighted up,
“she has given me no peace. She’ll compromise herself seriously--that’s
what I’m afraid of. She’s been making election rosettes. She actually
met a fellow by appointment in Broad Street. One of these Social
Democrats; she wants me to review his book, ‘The Fall of the
Capitalist.’ I put my foot down when it came to appointments--the
scoundrel!
“She’s always hurling Socialistic bricks at me. I’ve tried to convince
her of her errors with a pencil and a bit of paper. I worked out a sum
in proportion, with a landowner and a man with a patent who had a
certain amount of capital to start with. She said she didn’t care a fig
for my stupid landowner.
“I’m afflicted with a wife who has ideas of her own and means to live
up to them. It’s hard. I never counted on taking brains--of the
bran-new sort--when I took Lucinda. I object to a clever woman. I work
hard. I’ve got brains enough for both, and over. I ask for a pretty
face, a fresh frock, good cooking--that’s all. I can get the rest from
the papers, or I can drop in at the club.”
“Look here, old man,” I said soothingly, “get her on facts. Never use
pencil and paper to a woman--logic only irritates them. Make her live
up to her doctrines--she’ll be sick of them in a week.”
Women soon tire; all froth and no ballast. (I’m forgetting that you’re
a woman, but you like the complete story.)
He went away after I had given him a few tips. At the end of the week
he came back.
“Well?” I said optimistically, as he sat down and took out his pipe.
“I think she is a trifle better,” he admitted, in a half-hearted
way. “She won’t part with the servant; says she really hasn’t time
and strength enough for housework. But she admits that a servant is
inconsistent with her theories, and she looked quite happy when she
added that she really believed I was beginning to see things in the
right light. I’ve told her plainly that I’ll have no hypocrites in my
home. Silver--her aunt left her some--flowers, Worcester tea-things, I
wouldn’t stand. She murmured something about it being a duty with every
citizen to keep up the graces of life, but she yielded in the end. She
was crying a bit as she wrapped the silver--beautiful Georgian
stuff--away in chamois-leather bags.
“I said that a drawing room gave the very lie to her theories. She’s
turned the key of that room.
“The servant has given notice; of course she thinks the spoons are
pawned. Lucinda is upset. But I said cheerily that it was so nice to be
indifferent, to be supported by the consciousness of a worthy mission.
I said that simplicity was the great thing. I suggested that we should
sell the furniture--giving the proceeds to the Socialistic cause--and
go to a boarding house. They board you in Gower Street for twenty-five
shillings a week--with a reduction, no doubt, on married couples. I
said that she would then be quite free from housekeeping and would be
able to throw more soul into her political work. You should have seen
her face! I think she’s beginning to be sorry that she converted me.
Converts always go too far.
“But she’s not cured,” he concluded solemnly. “She went off this
morning to Brentford, where some member of her party has his committee
room.”
“Perhaps we had better play our trump card,” I said. “What time will
she be back?”
“About nine.”
“Very well. I’ll look round with Smithers and Arnold. It’s a job that
Jimmy would enjoy, but he’s so lantern-jawed she’d know him at once.”
At nine Gully, Smithers, Arnold, and I were in Lucinda’s drawing room,
smoking very strong tobacco and drinking hot gin and water; it gave me
heartburn for nearly a week. But it made a good steam and fume; effect
was what we wanted. We all four looked--well, rough. A bristly chin and
no collar alters a man immensely. As luck would have it, neither
Smithers nor I had shaved that morning; nor the morning before, in my
case. Arnold wore a false beard.
Why do absconding criminals take the trouble to disguise
themselves--decent, middle-class criminals who are accustomed to razors
and clean linen? A bristly chin and a neck without a collar would do
the whole business, without trouble or expense. If, added to that, the
criminal gets his “portrait” in the paper, he’s safe.
My feet were on the sofa. The gin bottle and a jug of beer stood on
Lucinda’s pet polished table. Arnold was gently scraping his boots on
the copper scuttle, and Smithers had his head well into the white
curtains. The rugs were kicked up; there were spent matches all over
the floor. It was an education to see how by a few well-thought-out
touches we had wrecked the room.
Lucinda was pretty punctual. She stood on the threshold for one second
before she fled. I looked round. There was blank tragedy on her face.
Gully got up, appearing a little guilty. He went out to her. Judging by
the direction of their voices he found her in the lobby, with her face
buried in his overcoat. She was crying. We three in the untidy room,
thick with smoke and stale with spirit, heard her say in a muffled way:
“This is too much. You’ve taken away the--s--silver--all the decencies
of life. You talk to me of a cheap boarding house. I’ll never consent
to it; I’d rather die or go back to papa. And you’ve brought those
wretches into my drawing room.”
“But we agreed, darling, that it wasn’t to be a drawing room any
longer. We said that we’d devote it to the people. Your own idea was a
laundresses’ weekly tea, and----”
“You look disreputable. You look like--a--brigand. No collar--that tie.
I never was so miserable. I never would have married you if----”
“My dearest, you wouldn’t have me wound the susceptibilities of those
worthy fellows----”
“And one with his hateful great feet on the embroidered cushion my
cousin Ethel sent from India, and another----”
“Lucinda, you surprise me. I thought you’d be so pleased. I arranged it
as a delicate attention--a pleasant surprise party. Sons of toil, dear,
all of them, and----”
“Dirty brutes! I hate the whole thing. I’m tired to death.” We heard
her stamp her feet viciously on the oil-cloth. “The election is all
going to pieces. Let it! _I_ don’t care. Just look at my new skirt--all
mud and torn to ribbons. You never saw such a filthy place, such a set
of roughs! I couldn’t even get a decent cup of tea. And--and--I went
into the wrong committee room, and the man--the other man--laughed, the
idiot! I wish I’d---- Oh, Tom! I never thought you could be so cruel,
so unmanly. Do be yourself again. I can’t think what has come over you.
It has worried me dreadfully. Let us be comfortable again. Send those
monsters away.”
Gully said impressively:
“Will you go to the Wigans’ ball? I’ve got my way to make in the world.
Wigan’s wife is--well, you know her. Decent old charwoman; got sense
enough to hold her tongue. Wigan is sensitive on that point. If we snub
his wife it may be bad for me.”
“Will I go? What a question! Of course I will.”
“And committee rooms and mass-meetings and particularly that Socialist
cad----”
“Don’t mention him. I’m sick, I tell you--sick, sick. He hardly spoke a
civil word to me--after the way I’ve slaved. Go and send those men
away, if you love me.”
“You don’t think a little friendly supper----”
“I won’t hear of it.”
We heard--well, we heard him kiss her--and then we heard her whisk away
into the bedroom to bathe her eyes, and Gully came in with a wide grin
to dismiss us. As we went through the passage we heard the vigorous
splash of water in the basin.
Gully let us out. We went down the stone stairs, with stealthy
handshakes and smothered chuckles, leaving him alone with Lucinda, and
master once more.
BEYOND THE GRAY GATE.