It is nothing but pulling down houses and putting up taller ones all
over Bloomsbury. I tell you frankly, old fellow, I can’t breathe. My
throat burns--as if they were stuffing their lime down it. Every
scaffold pole knocks at my heart. It’s killing me. You haven’t any
coppers about you, I suppose? The tram fare isn’t much. I could get
down to Stamford Hill and back again before dusk.”
One night I saw Minnie run bareheaded across the square toward my door.
I had the second floor at No. 7 in those days. She looked a little wild
and frightened, but she was self-possessed enough to throw a look of
stone at Sophia Dominy, who was going toward Kinsman’s set.
Presently I heard her on my stairs and went out.
“Come over to Nat,” she panted. “I think he is dying. The doctor told
me that bit of lung he had would last for years, but it isn’t going
to.”
He was lying in the bed. It stood under the window then. Near to his
hand was a pile of those hateful long envelopes. The editorial regrets
that had helped to break his heart peeped out from the open ends.
“I’ve been looking over some of these things,” he panted, touching the
articles and smiling at me in the old droll, half-scornful way. “Some
of them were bad and vulgar enough--Heaven knows. Yet they did not get
accepted. ‘Does Cold Mutton Cause Gumboil?’--I thought that would be
sure to go. ‘The Woman with the White Shoe Strings’--it is a most
sensational detective story--and yet, one after the other, they threw
my stuff back at me. I’ve written the title pages afresh ever so many
times, so that the MS. should not look as if it had been hawked about.”
It was a very hot July night, the windows were open top and bottom.
Jimmy, across the way, was singing the latest song from the “halls” in
his feeble voice.
Poor Nat was quiet for a little. Then he turned his head suddenly and
looked at Minnie. I’ve seen him look like that at her when they were
courting. No doubt she remembered, for she bent down and softly shook
up his pillows.
“It’s no good your going for the doctor,” she whispered huskily back in
answer to my question. “He was here this morning. He told me he could
do nothing. I can’t afford to throw away money for nothing, can I?”
There were tears in her eyes, like shining splinters of glass. We heard
footsteps on the pavement below, and men’s voices came up to the open
window. The fellows had come home from the City. Nat did not seem to
hear; he was devouring Minnie’s face line by line, looking at her in a
dazed, silly way.
“It is good of you to come,” he said at last, very simply and
gratefully. “How did you find it? So few people--country people, you
know--have heard of the Inn. It must seem a noisy, dirty place to
you--there are blacks all down your nice white apron. But we won’t
stay. You will show me the way back. It was very curious about that
gate.”
* * * * *
Minnie looked very well in widows’ weeds--those fair, neat little women
generally do. I always tried very hard to like Minnie. I admired her
practical spirit. Practicality means money, and money means ease.
She came knocking at my door three days after the funeral, and said
beseechingly:
“Come down with me on the tram to Stamford Hill.”
We went. The trams were crowded, it was Saturday afternoon. We walked
slowly along the row of villas in the blazing sun--the row where Nat
had sworn he found the gray gate.
“Poor old chap,” I said. “He wasn’t fit for this world. But what a gold
mine there would have been in it!”
“It was at this house he seemed to stop most,” she said. “I remember
the India-rubber plant in the front window.”
We stopped. There was an old, palsied sort of fellow tidying up the
rockery. I spoke to him--don’t know why.
“I suppose you remember this neighborhood before it was built on?”
“When it was a one-eyed country place,” elaborated Minnie.
He straightened his body on his spade, and looked at us, cunningly,
like old people often do. An eager light came into his bleared eyes. It
seemed to me the light of youth breaking uncannily through the crust of
seventy years. He remembered--sure he did. He became suddenly
voluble--talking more to himself than to us.
“It’s a good many year since this ’ere part was open country. Ah! there
was a gate on the common--hereabouts, as near as I can mind. A bit on
was a bridge, stone one side and iron t’other. A man had to keep a
sharp lookout if he come home full o’ liquor nights. The rail runs
there now--they built a new ’un. There was a copse--Shannonses copse, I
think they called it, but my memory aint what it was. You went over a
stile. That was a rare place for coortin’”--he grinned, showing a
toothless cavern, and he spluttered with merry memories as he rocked on
the spade.
“There was a cottage near by--my father had it. I jest call to mind
_his_ father plantin’ the orchard--a very old man as couldn’t expect to
see the fruit. A fine orchard it wur--Blenum orringe trees and Tom
Spuds and all sorts. Dickson’s tannery stands there now. If you went
on, through the fields and across the road, you come to Hillyar’s
farm--that’s Stern & Carson’s brewery. Hillyar’s pears was wonderful
for keepin’. I mind Loo Hillyar--sich arms;” he leered at Minnie, whose
face was chalky under her black bonnet. “You don’t see young women like
that these times. Sich a hand at butter-making. It must be fifty--forty
year ago or more since me an’ her drove geese over the common. It
couldn’t ha’ been so fur from where we stands, neither. Here, as you
may say, or thereabouts--but the face of the earth do change so.”
He spat on his hands and bent his back to the weary task of tidying the
melancholy mound of clinkers and starved ferns. I gave him sixpence and
I gave Minnie my arm. She clutched it wildly. There was a shadow on her
pretty, common face--the shadow of the unexplainable.
What did it mean? I don’t pretend to say. Odd, wasn’t it? But then the
world is odd. We just skim it and fancy we have proved all.
Minnie? She went back to a City office as typist, and she married the
principal in less than a year. She was always the sort of girl to do
well for herself--her marriage with Chaytor was an aberration. She
lives in a very swagger house at East Croydon, wears rather loud
dresses, and talks persistently of “my cook.”
THE SET AT SEVEN.
SHALL I tell you about the set at 7? It is quite a proper story. You
might call it dramatic. If poor Nat Chaytor were alive he would turn it
into one of his thrilling tales for the penny papers--and get it
rejected because it wasn’t probable. In popular tales you must be
probable, and you must be proper. You may cut as many throats and
embezzle as much money as you please--always remembering to do it in a
thoroughly respectable manner.
Orchard lived at 7--the left-hand set on the third floor. His was the
most extraordinary affair. Poor Jimmy died there. Orion had the
set--has it still, so they say. He comes back. We have a real, if
rather foolish, ghost in the Inn.
The man who took that set after the Great Ormond Street murder--his
name slips me, but he went down in the _Drummond Castle_--had
never seen Orion. I forget his name, but we’ll call him Drummond.
Pearson went to see him one night. He happened to be just going out; he
said he wouldn’t be more than half an hour, and he made Pearson
comfortable with some whisky and the current _Fortnightly._ When he
came back Pearson said, with annoyance, looking a little disgusted and
jerking his head toward the bedroom door:
“Didn’t know you were so intimate with Orion.”
“Orion! Never heard the name. Yet--let me see. He had these rooms. I
took them over with the furniture.”
“Never heard the name! Why, he’s in your bedroom at this moment. Walked
about very much as if he were at home. Came strolling in with his old
confounded jaunty air. I haven’t seen him for nearly three years, but
he hasn’t altered a bit. You must have left the outer door ajar, or
else he’s kept a key. That would be just one of Orion’s mean dodges. He
walked about with his hands in his trousers’ pockets, just as usual. I
didn’t speak; we had a row once. There was a bill; he wouldn’t pay
his share. And one night when I was a bit on I broke the glass of the
sideboard--threw a tumbler at it. He couldn’t stand that.
“Yet, why didn’t I speak? What made me keep so quiet? Why didn’t I ask
him what the devil he meant by prying about another man’s rooms?
“He went and tinkered with the ornaments, scowled at the dust, picked
up a match from the carpet--I could have sworn he picked it up, but
it’s there still, just near your foot--and then went into the bedroom.
He’s in there still. Confound it!” starting to his feet; “what was I
doing to let him go in like that?”
Drummond was looking very queer.
“Orion,” he said quietly, “has been dead six months. He murdered his
aunt and then jumped out of the window to evade the hangman. If you
hadn’t been abroad you would have heard of it. We’ll have a look round
the bedroom, if you like.”
Of course he wasn’t there. That is our ghost story. Several fellows
have seen him since--so they say.
Dick Simpson came after Drummond. He said he saw Orion lots of times,
and didn’t take the least notice. Rather resented sharing his rooms
with another man who didn’t pay a penny rent, and who hadn’t the tact
to make himself scarce when anybody dropped in--but that was all. Poor
Dick wasn’t nervous or imaginative. Orion used to come in, shake his
head at the dust, at torn leather paper on the walls and mangy ball
fringe at the mantelshelf, then go quietly through into the bedroom.
Dick told me the other day that he had just smashed the last of the
rose-colored gas globes. He had the bits in a bag and was going to
match it in the City. If he didn’t, Orion would be bound to look in
to-night; he was beginning to be a bit of a bore.
Simpson was an insurance clerk, most commonplace, most steady. He was
always having his top hat ironed, and recommending one to buy a pair of
trouser stretchers. He went to the theater every Saturday night, and
stopped in bed late on Sunday. He was quite content and prosperous on
his sixty-five shillings a week, yet, because he had the set at 7 on
the third floor, we all waited without saying anything, to him or to
each other, for something extraordinary to happen. In his case we
thought it might be just vulgar embezzlement--but you can never be
sure, it is always the most unlikely thing that happens to the tenant
of that third-floor set. When once it gets hold of a man it never lets
him go. It never gives him up. More often than not it hands him over to
the undertaker. And you know what happened to Dick.
There was a story of Bob and Barbara Piety. You’ll like that. If I were
writing the story, instead of just gossiping it to you in the dusk, I
should call it “The Play’s the Thing.” It is Hamlet--in an Inn of
Court.
* * * * *
Bob Piety lived in the Inn as a bachelor. He married a nice girl--Miss
Martin--and took a villa at Norwood. A few months before he married he
lent Murphy twenty pounds. We all warned him; Murphy never paid, and
made a boast of never paying, but these Irishmen are wheedling, and Bob
was pretty flush just then. On this unlucky twenty pounds the whole
story hangs.
Barbara had babies very quickly; servants’ wages rose each time
she changed--and she was always changing. The beer barrel constantly
gave out, and it was generally quarter day. Bob had a good post, as
the City goes. But four hundred a year, though ample in the Inn, is
only a pittance at Norwood, with an extravagant, prolific wife, a
seventy-pound villa, and two maids, with a boy to clean the knives.
One morning, as Barbara was flicking at Bob’s coat with the clothes
brush before he went to the City, she asked him timidly for a new gown.
“It won’t cost five pounds,” she said, pulling his coat down at the
back. “You don’t like me to look shabby, dear, do you? And, Bob, while
I think of it, just leave me Maria’s wages. I’ve had to give her a
rise. You can’t get a really decent cook general for less than twenty
pounds a year. And we want some new linoleum for the nursery--I’d
better order it to----”
“I can’t really run to it all, Barbara”--he never called her Barbara
except in a crisis, and when they were first married it usually made
her cry. “There are the taxes, and I ought to have a new overcoat.
And there is Pillew’s bill for the whooping cough. The kids must do
without linoleum. Wear anything at the party--or we’ll stop at home.
I’m hanged if I know where all the things are coming from. Twenty
pounds for one girl--it’s preposterous.”
“Twenty pounds! Why, you lent some horrid bachelor that. It would pay
Maria for a year. Go and get it out of him.”
“It is a bad debt.”
“You must make him pay. Now do, Bob, dear. It breaks my heart to see
you worried.”
“I will make him,” Bob said after a minute’s pause, and added savagely,
his nerves racked by wife, babies, and bills, “I’ll get it out of him
by fair means or foul.”
Barbara cried out, before she kissed him and gave the final pull to his
coat at the back:
“How can you talk in that dreadful way? One would think you meant to
murder the man.”
At that moment Maria came out of the dining room with the breakfast
tray.
Well, in the evening Bob went to the Inn and found Murphy at home. He
asked him bluntly to pay back the twenty pounds, and Murphy said airily
that it was ridiculous--a joke on Bob’s part--he hadn’t twenty pence in
the world. This led to words. In the thick of the row there was a knock
at Murphy’s door and he left the room to open it. Piety heard the
murmur of voices--Murphy’s and another which he did not recognize. Then
he heard a movement like a sharp scuffle of feet on the boards, heard a
piercing cry and a heavy fall, and the quick, frightened patter of feet
on the stairs. That was all. When he rushed into the little passage
both of the outer doors were open, and Murphy was lying stone-dead just
inside the “set.” There was the handle of a queer-looking knife
sticking up from his waistcoat, and his blood had poured out in a great
dark pool in which the Syrian curtains that draped the archway of the
passage were dabbled.
Bob tried to raise the body. But the Irishman had been a burly fellow,
and he only succeeded in spattering himself with blood. We all heard
that fearful scream of poor Murphy’s; it even pierced the oak, for
Kinsman, who had been shut away in his rooms with Sophia Dominy, came
rushing upstairs, followed by the girl. I had the set opposite Murphy’s
on the second floor, so I was first on the spot.
Sophia gave a yell when she saw the dead man. Kinsman bade her pull
herself together, and in a minute or so she flew away down the stairs,
saying she would find a policeman. By this time the whole square was
roused. There were lights at most of the windows, sashes were flung up,
men ran out in their slippers and with their pipes still stuck in the
corner of their mouths, asking what was up. Kinsman and I ran down too.
Piety didn’t move. He might have got away easily, but he stood dazed,
staring at the heavy body of the dead Irishman; stood and stared
sluggishly, with the splashed blood drying on his face and hands, just
where it had spurted, and dropping heavily from his limp red cuff, the
corner of which was soaked. Of course, everybody said that he had
murdered Murphy in a fit of temper, because he couldn’t get his twenty
pounds back. I knew they had been rowing, heard their angry voices
across the passage when I went to my door to admit a visitor. It looked
bad for Bob. Yet I didn’t believe that he had done it. All the other
fellows pooh-poohed his lame explanation, and some said that Murphy,
who was a thorough bad lot, was well out of the way, and others, who
had known Mrs. Bob as Miss Martin, were full of sympathy for the poor
little woman.
It was a wet night. Warm rain fell straight from the sky to the square.
The light of each lamp above the hooded doors was reflected on the
pavements. The stair leading to the second floor at 7 was crowded--with
men in slippers and girls without any hats. One of the girls went into
hysterics. Another one propped her up against the wall and undid her
collar and called out shrilly for cold water and smelling salts. And
then, after what seemed an interminable time, Sophia brought a
policeman--he had been off the beat, of course--and Bob was arrested.
I went with him to the station, and after that I went down to Norwood
and broke the news to Barbara.
I never believe in those women who, when trouble comes, sit at home
and weep and wait and pray. They are fools, or callous. Your true woman
must be doing something. Barbara never shed a single tear. She didn’t
wring her hands or scream or faint. She only kept saying, with pitiful
monotony, that it was her wicked vanity and extravagance which had got
Bob in a mess, and that she meant to get him out of it.
She seemed to rise all at once out of villadom--that smug, narrow life
which ruins so many people. Villadom! It promulgates the hateful,
stultifying creed of “paying your way.” Barbara told me once that a
lady at Norwood refused to visit another lady because she hadn’t paid
her butcher’s bill. She threw off her shackles--the shackles of that
spick-and-span house, with the stiff white curtains at the windows, the
demure maidservants, and the noisy overflow of babies. She sent for
Mrs. Martin to keep house, then packed a little black box, kissed her
children with the air of a Spartan, and came away to the Inn with me.
With me! Why not? She had my set. I went and turned in with Hawkins.
He had a little den leading out of his bedroom, which he used as a
carpenter’s shop, and his laundress as a kitchen! It was very good of
me to do that for a comparative stranger! But she wasn’t. You
see--hadn’t I mentioned it?--Barbara was an old flame of mine. It was a
close running between me and Bob at one time. But I backed out. He had
four hundred pounds a year and I hadn’t a penny--that could be called
certain. Sometimes I make a haul and sometimes I starve. That would
have killed Barbara. She had always been educated to the necessity of a
certain income.
She came and settled in my rooms, so as to be near Bob. At Norwood she
might as well have been in Alaska--these suburbs are so beautifully
isolated. And then, as she confessed to me, she hoped to pick up
evidence. Of course she believed in her husband’s innocence. She went
farther than that; she was convinced that the murder was committed by
someone in the Inn--in the house--at 7.
I gave her a list of all the tenants. I tried to show her how
impossible it was. On the ground floor was Kinsman, who had been shut
up with Sophia. The set opposite was empty. The sets on the first
floor were rented as offices, and both principals and clerks had been
gone for hours at the time Murphy was stabbed. On the second floor,
Murphy had one set and I the other. On the third floor, one set was
empty and the other--the fatal set, although she knew nothing about
that--belonged to Stapley.
Stapley was a quiet young fellow. He was engaged to his cousin, spent
his Sundays with his widowed mother at Dulwich, and was reading hard
for a Civil Service appointment. As I pointed out to Barbara, Murphy
was murdered on Saturday night, and Stapley always left for Dulwich on
Saturday afternoon. I saw him come back myself at the usual time on
Monday morning. But she wouldn’t be convinced. She was certain that the
murderer was in the Inn, in the very house.
The Inn bore with her. Laundresses stared after her sympathetically as
she went up and down the old stairs, and called her to each other,
“Pore young thing.” The fellows, many of whom had met her as Miss
Martin, didn’t know how to show their sympathy. They brought her
flowers and new-laid eggs--anything. One brought a stray white kitten
that he’d found in a doorway. Arnold offered a pure-bred bull pup, and
was hurt when she refused it. Arnold was a great fancier. His book of
devotion was a bulky volume, “Druid on Dogs.”
The girls who spend a social evening or a Sunday at the Inn
occasionally talked of her with honest tears. They are good, kind,
hard-working souls, these gay little shop girls, as a rule. And I think
they felt it all the more because they could not do anything for her;
dare not even say how sorry they were. Between them and her was the
unbreakable barrier which stands breast-high between the women who
are--well, particular--and the women who are not.
She brought a faint air of repression and tragedy into the Inn, but no
one dreamed of resenting it. The careless, rather wild life we all lead
seemed suddenly hollow, feeble--wicked almost. Many a host said to a
noisy friend:
“Don’t make so much row, old man. You’ll frighten Mrs. Piety.”
She used to creep about at all hours; used to listen on the stairs,
peep into sets if a door happened to be open, watch men and girls in
and out with the air of a hungry cat. But everybody understood and
everybody sympathized. The little light-haired woman in black, with the
sad, inquisitive glances, became our Deity.
I went with her to every curio shop and marine store in Bloomsbury.
There are many. Some of the people who keep them are regular characters
in their way. We were trying to find out the history of the
dagger--that queer-handled weapon which had stuck out from dead
Murphy’s waistcoat. The police had it. They were making every inquiry
of course, but Barbara thought she could do better than they. As I
said, a true woman must do something--even if it is something foolish.
The little stuffy, foul courts of Holborn grew to know her and to pity
her. All the other women pointed after her furtively and said, as the
laundresses said, “Pore young thing.”
You don’t want me to go into the detective side of the affair. You can
well imagine the array of evidence against Bob; you can see the damning
importance of his row with Murphy, of the soaked red corner of his
cuffs, and the red-ocher splashes on his face and hands.
Barbara heard him committed for trial. She didn’t cry out or even
shudder. But her eyes grew more wide and somber than before.
That night I took her to the theater. Several fellows came to me quite
seriously and said:
“Do something to distract her. The poor woman’s going out of her mind.”
Hemming--he had been a friend of Jimmy’s, and was on a dramatic
paper--added:
“Take her to a music hall, make her dead-drunk--anything for a
distraction. The theater for a compromise. I can pass you into the
Adelphi. There is a splendid melodrama on there. Something exciting.”
I had expected opposition, but, queerly enough, she jumped at the idea.
She dressed herself very smartly; I think her face was rouged. She kept
laughing as we jolted to the Strand in a cab.
In the second act there was a row between two men, and one stabbed the
other to the heart. It was most unlucky. Barbara was staring up at the
dress circle. She turned to me suddenly, her cheeks and eyes blazing.
She got up and slipped on her cloak, pulling the hood well over her
head before she was out of doors. When I rose too she made a quick,
excited gesture, and whispered:
“Don’t follow. Whatever you do, don’t follow.”
I let her go out quietly alone. When I happened to look up at the dress
circle I saw a vacant seat.
When one man on the stage stabbed the other, Barbara naturally turned
her head away. She happened to look up at the dress circle, and her
eyes fixed on a family party in the front row. It was Stapley, the girl
he was engaged to, and her mother.
Barbara was struck by the look on his face. He seemed as much moved by
that murder on the stage as she was. He looked a guilty man, a
terrified man. His face was the face of a corpse; his eyes were the
eyes of a corpse--some corpse whose last impression had been one of
fearful horror.
Presently he rose, whispered a word or two to his companions, and went
away. At the same moment Barbara slipped up from her seat in the stalls.
She followed him out of the theater, along the brilliant whirl of the
Strand, through dirty little streets to Holborn, across the road, under
the gateway, and into the Inn. The square was quiet. The trees waved
troublously. There were peep-holes of bright light at men’s windows,
and once she heard a loud peal of laughter.
Stapley turned in at No. 7.