THE ORDER OF ST MARTIN OF TOURS
Sir John Hampden paused for a moment with arrested pen. He had been in
the act of crossing off another day on the calendar that hung inside his
desk, the last detail before he pulled the roll-top down for the night,
when the date had caught his eye with a sudden meaning.
"A week to-day, Salt," he remarked, looking up.
"A week to-day," repeated Salt. "That gives us seven more days for
details."
Hampden laughed quietly as he bent forward and continued the red line
through the "14."
"That is one way of looking at it," he said. "Personally, I was rather
wishing that it had been to-day. I confess that I cannot watch the
climax of these two years approaching without feeling keyed up to
concert pitch. I suppose that you never had any nerves?"
"I suppose not. If I had, the Atlantic water soon washed them out."
"But you are superstitious?" he asked curiously. It suddenly occurred to
him how little he really knew of the man with whom he was linked in such
a momentous hazard.
"Oh yes. Blue water inoculates us all with that. Fortunately, mine does
not go beyond trifles, such as touching posts and stepping over paving
stones--a hobby and not a passion, or I should have to curb it."
"Do you really do things like that? Well, I remember Northland, the
great nerve specialist, telling me that most people have something of
the sort--a persistent feeling of impending calamity unless they conform
to some trivial impulse. I am exempt."
"Yes," commented Salt; "or you would hardly be likely to cross off the
date before the day is over."
"Good Heavens!" exclaimed Hampden. "What an age we live in! Is it tannin
or the dregs of paganism? And you think it would be tempting Providence
to do it while there are five more hours to run?"
"I never do it, as a matter of fact," admitted Salt with perfect
seriousness. "Of course, I _know_ that nothing would happen in the five
hours if I did, but, all the same, I rather think that something would."
"I hope that something will," said Hampden cheerfully. "Dinner, for
example. Did I ever strike you as a gourmet, Salt? Well, nevertheless, I
am a terrific believer in regular meals, although I don't care a straw
how simple they are. You may read of some marvellous Trojan working
under heavy pressure for twenty-four hours, and then snatching a hurried
glass of Chateau d'Yquem and a couple of Abernethy biscuits, and going
on again for another twenty-four. Don't believe it, Salt. If he is not
used to it, his knees go; if he is used to it, they have gone already.
If I were a general I solemnly declare that I would risk more to feed my
men before an engagement, than I would risk to hold the best position
all along the front. Your hungry man may fight well enough for a time,
but the moment he is beaten he knows it. And, strangely enough, we
English have won a good many important battles after we had been
beaten."
He had been locking up the safe and desk as he ran on, and now they
walked together down the corridor. At the door of his own office Salt
excused himself for a moment and went in. When he rejoined the baronet
at the outer door, he held in his hand a little square of thin paper on
which was printed in bold type
JULY 14.
"You will regret it," said Hampden, not wholly jestingly. He saw at once
that it was the tag for the day, torn from his calendar, that Salt held.
"No," he replied, crumpling up the scrap of paper and throwing it away,
"I may remember, but I shall not regret. When you have to think twice
about doing a thing like that, it is time to do it.... You have no
particular message for Deland?"
"None at all, personally, I think. You will tell him as much as we
decided upon. Let him know that his post will certainly be one of the
most important outside the central office. What time do you go?"
"The 10 train from Marylebone. Deland will be waiting up for me. There
is an early restaurant train in the morning--the 7.20, getting in at
10.40. I shall breakfast _en route_, and come straight on here."
"That's right. Look out for young Hampshire in the train; he will
probably wait on you, but you won't recognise him unless you remember
the Manners-Clinton nose in profile. He regards it as a vast joke, but
he is very keen. And sleep all the time you aren't feeding. Can't do
better. Good night."
Salt laughed as he turned into Pall Mall, speculating for a moment, by
the light of his own knowledge, how little time this strenuous,
simple-living man devoted to the things he advocated. If he had been
able to follow Sir John's electric brougham for the remainder of that
night he would have had still more reason to be sceptical.
When Hampden reached his house and strode up to the door with the
elastic step of a young man, despite his iron-grey hair and burden of
responsibility, instead of the bronze Medusa knocker that had dropped
from the hands of Pietro Sarpi and Donato in its time, his eyes
encountered the smiling face of his daughter as she swung open the door
before him. She had been sitting at an open window of the dull-fronted
house until she saw the Hampden livery in the distance.
"There is some one waiting in the library to see you," she said, as he
kissed her cheek. "He said that he would wait ten minutes; you had
already been seven."
"Who is it?" he asked in quiet expectation. It was not unusual for
Muriel to watch for him from the upper room, and to come down into the
hall to welcome him, but to-night he saw at once that there was a mild
excitement in her manner. "Who is it?" he asked.
She told him in half a dozen whispered words, and then returned to the
drawing-room and the society of a depressing companion, who chanced to
be a poor and distant cousin, while Sir John turned toward the library.
"Tell Styles to remain with the brougham if he is still in front," he
said to a passing footman. The visit might presage anything.
A young man, an inconspicuous young man in a blue serge suit, rose from
the chair of Jacobean oak and Spanish leather where he had been sitting
with a bowler hat between his hands and a cheap umbrella across his
knees, and made a cursory bow as he began to search an inner pocket.
"Sir John Hampden?" he enquired.
"Yes," replied the master of the house, favouring his visitor with a
more curious attention than he received in return. "You are from
Plantagenet House, I believe?"
The young man detached his left hand from the search and turned down the
lapel of his coat in a perfunctory display of his credentials. Pinned
beneath so that it should not obtrude was an insignificant little medal,
so small and trivial that it would require the closest scrutiny to
distinguish its design and lettering.
But Sir John Hampden did not require any assurance upon the point. He
knew by the evidence of just such another medallion which lay in his own
possession that upon one side, around the engraved name of the holder,
ran the inscription, "Every man according as he purposeth in his heart;"
upon the other side a representation of St Martin dividing his cloak
with the beggar. It was the badge of the Order of St Martin of Tours.
The Order of St Martin embodied the last phase of organised benevolence.
In the history of the world there had never been a time when men so
passionately desired to help their fellow men; there had never been a
time when they found it more difficult to do so to their satisfaction.
From the lips of every social reformer, from the reports of the
charitable organisations, from the testimony of the poor themselves the
broad indictment had gone forth that every casual beggar was a rogue and
a vagabond. Promiscuous alms-giving was tabulated among the Seven Curses
of London.
Organised charity was the readiest alternative. Again obliging
counsellors raised their conscientious voices. Organised charity was
wasteful, inelastic, unsympathetic, often superfluous. The preacher
added a warning note: Let none think that the easy donation of a cheque
here and there was charity. It was frequently vanity, it was often a
cowardly compromise with conscience, it was never an absolution from the
individual responsibility.
So brotherly love continued, but often did not fructify, and the man who
felt that he had the true Samaritan instinct, as he passed by on the one
side of the suburban road, looked at his ragged neighbour lying under
the hedge on the other side in a fit which might be epilepsy but might
equally well be soap-suds in the mouth, and assured himself that if only
he could believe the case to be genuine there was nothing on earth he
would not do for the man.
It was a very difficult age, every one admitted: "Society was so
complex."
There was evidence of the generous feeling--ill-balanced and spasmodic,
it is true--on every hand. The poor were bravely, almost blindly, good
to their neighbours in misfortune. The better-off were lavish--or had
been until a few years previously--when they had certified proof that
the cases were deserving. If a magistrate or a police court missionary
gave publicity to a Pathetic Case, the Pathetic Case might be sure of
being able to retire on a comfortable annuity. If only every Pathetic
Case could have been induced to come pathetically into the clutches of a
sympathetic police court cadi, instead of dying quite as pathetically in
a rat-hole, one of the most pressing problems of benevolence might have
been satisfactorily solved.
The Order of St Martin of Tours was one of the attempts to reconcile the
generous yearnings of mankind with modern conditions. Its field of
action had no definable limit, and whatever a man wished to give it was
prepared to utilise. It was not primarily concerned with money, although
judged by the guaranteed resources upon which it could call if
necessary, it would rank as a rich society. It imposed no subscription
and made no outside appeal. Upon its books, against the name of every
member, there was entered what he bound himself to do when it was
required of him. It was a vast and comprehensive list, so varied that
few ever genuinely applied for the services of the Order without their
needs being satisfied. The city man willing to give a foolish and
repentant youth another chance of honest work; the Sussex farmer anxious
to prove what a month of South Down fare and Channel breezes would do
for a small city convalescent; the prim little suburban lady, much too
timid to attempt any personal contact with the unknown depths of sin and
suffering, but eager to send her choicest flowers and most perfect fruit
to any slum sick-room; the good-hearted laundry girl who had been
through the fires herself, offering to "pal up to any other girl what's
having a bit of rough and wants to keep straight without a lot of
jaw,"--all found a deeper use in life beneath the sign of St Martin's
divided cloak. Children, even little children, were not shut out; they
could play with other, lonely, little children, and renounce some toys.
The inconspicuous young man standing in Sir John Hampden's library--he
was in a cheap boot shop, but he gave his early closing day to serve the
Order as a messenger, and there were millionaires who gave less--found
the thing he searched for, and handed to Sir John an unsealed envelope.
"I accept," said the baronet, after glancing at the slip it contained.
This was what he accepted:
ORDER OF ST. MARTIN OF TOURS.
_Case_. . . John Flak, 45 Paradise Buildings,
Paradise Street, Drury Lane, W.C.
_Cause_ . . Street Accident.
_Requirement_ Service through the night.
_Recommender_ L. K. Stone, M.D., 172 Great Queen
Street, W.C.
WALTHAM, MASTER.
He could have declined; and his membership would have been at an end.
But in a mission of personal service he could not accept and appoint a
substitute. The Order was modern, business-like, reasonable,
unemotional, and quite prepared to take humanity as it was. It did not
seek to impose the ideal Christian standard, logically recognising that
if a man gave _all_ he possessed, a system of Christian laws (a Caesar
whom he was likewise bidden to obey) would at once incarcerate him in a
prison for having no visible means of subsistence, and, if he persisted
in his unnatural Christian conduct, in a lunatic asylum, where in its
appointed season he would have the story of the Rich Ruler read for his
edification.
The Order was practical and "very nice to do with;" but it had a
standard, and as a protest against that widespread reliance in the
omnipotence of gold that marred the age it allowed no delegation of an
office of mercy. On all points it was open; its thin medallion
symbolised no mysteries or secret vows; nor, and on this one point it
was unbending, as far as lay in the power of the Order should any
second-hand virtue find place beneath its saintly ensign.
A few years before, Paradise Street, with that marked inappropriateness
that may be traced in the nomenclature of many London thoroughfares, had
been the foulest, poorest, noisomest, most garbage-strewn and
fly-infested region even in the purlieus of Drury Lane. It was not
markedly criminal, it was merely filthy; and when smell-diseases broke
out in central London it was generally found that they radiated from
Paradise Street like ripples from a dead dog thrown into a pond.
Presently a type foundry in the next street, growing backwards because
it was impossible to expand further in any other direction, pushed down
the flimsy tenements that stood between and reared a high wall, pierced
with windows of prismatic glass, in their place. Soon public
authorities, seeing that the heavens did not fall when a quarter of
Paradise Street did, suddenly and unexpectedly tore down another quarter
as though they had received a maddened impulse and Paradise Street had
been a cardboard model. The phoenix that appeared on this site was a
seven-storied block of workmen's dwellings. It could not be said to have
given universal satisfaction. The municipal authorities who devised it
bickered entertainingly over most of the details that lay between the
foundations and the chimney-pots; the primitive dwellers in Paradise
Street looked askance at it, as they did at most things not in liquid
form; social reformers complained that it drove away the very poor and
brought in a class of only medium poor; and ordinary people noticed that
in place of the nearest approach to artistic dirt to be found in the
metropolis, some one had substituted uninteresting squalor.
Hampden dismissed his carriage in Lincoln's Inn Fields and walked the
remainder of the way. He had changed into a dark lounge suit before he
left, but, in spite of the principle he had so positively laid down, he
had not stayed to dine. The inevitable, morbid little group marked the
entrance to Paradise Buildings, but the incident was already three hours
old, and the larger public interest was being reserved for the
anticipated funeral.
A slipshod, smug-faced woman opened the door of No. 45 in response to
his discreet knock. He stepped into a small hall where coal was stored
in a packing-case, and, on her invitation, through into the front room.
Five more untidy women, who had been drinking from three cups, got up as
he entered, and passed out, eyeing him with respectful curiosity as they
went, and each dropping a word of friendly leavetaking to the slatternly
hostess.
"Don't be down'arted, my dear."
"See you later, Emm."
"Let's know how things are going, won't you?"
"You'll remember about that black alpaker body?"
"Well, so long, Mrs Flak. Gord bless yer."
Sir John waited until the hall door closed behind the last frowsy woman.
"I am here to be of any use I can," he said. "Did Dr Stone mention that
some one would come?"
"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir," she replied. She stood in the middle of the
room, a picture of domestic incapacity, with a foolish look upon her
rather comely features. The room was not bare of furniture, was not
devoid of working-class comforts, but the dirty dishes, the dirty
clothing, the dirty floor, told the plain tale.
"I do not know any particulars of the case yet." He saw at once that he
would have to take the lead in every detail. "Did the doctor speak of
coming again, or leave any message?"
"Yes, sir," she replied readily. She lifted an ornament on the
mantelpiece and gave him a folded sheet of paper, torn from a note-book,
that had been placed there for safety. He had the clearest impression
that it would never have occurred to the woman to give it to him
unasked.
"To rep of O. St M.," ran the pencilled scrawl. "Shall endeavour to look
in 8-8.30.--L.K.S."
Even as he took out his watch there came a business-like knock at the
door, an active step in the hall, and beneath the conventional greeting,
the two men were weighing one another.
Dr Stone had asked the Order to send a man of common-sense who could
exercise authority if need be, and one who would not be squeamish in his
surroundings. For reasons of his own he had added that if with these
qualifications he combined that of being a Justice of the Peace, so much
the better. Dr Stone judged that he had the man before him. Hampden saw
a brisk, not too well shaven, man in a light suit, with a straw hat and
a serviceable stick in his hands, until he threw them on the table.
There was kindness and decision behind his alert eyes, and his manner
was that of a benevolent despot marshalling his poor patients--and he
had few others--as a regiment before him, marching them right and left
in companies, bringing them sharply to the front, and bidding them to
stand there and do nothing until they were told.
"You haven't been into the other room yet?" he asked. "No, well----"
He stopped with his hand on the door knob, turned back like a pointer on
the suspicion of a trail, and looked keenly at the woman, then around
the bestrewn room. If her eyes had slid the least betraying glance,
Hampden did not observe it, but the doctor, without a word, strode to
the littered couch, put his hand behind a threadbare cushion, and drew
out a half-filled bottle. There was a gluggling ripple for a few
seconds, and the contents had disappeared down the sink, while the
terebinthine odour of cheap gin hung across the room.
"Not here, Mrs Flak," he said sharply; and without changing her
expression of vacuous good-nature, the woman meekly replied, "No, sir."
Dr Stone led the way into the inner room and closed the door behind
them. A man, asleep, insensible, or dead, lay on the bed, his face half
hidden in bandages.
"This is the position," explained the doctor, speaking very rapidly, for
his time was mapped out with as little waste as there is to be found
between the squares on a chess board. "This man went out of here a few
hours ago and walked straight into an empty motor 'bus that was going
round this way. That's how they all put it: he walked right into the
thing. Why? He was a sober enough man, an attendant of some kind at one
of the west end clubs. Because, as I have good reason to suppose, he was
thinking absorbingly of something else.
"Well, they carried him in here; it ought to have been the hospital, of
course, but it was at his own doorstep it took place, you see, and it
doesn't really matter, because to-morrow morning----!"
"He will die then?" asked Hampden in a whisper, interpreting the quick
gesture.
"Oh, he will die as sure as his head is a cracked egg-shell. Between
midnight and dawn, I should say. But before the end I look confidently
for an interval of consciousness, or rather sub-consciousness. If I am
wrong I shall have kept you up all night for nothing; if I am right you
will probably hear something that he wants to say very much."
"Whatever was in his mind when he met with the accident?"
"That is my conviction. There has already been an indication of partial
expression. Curiously enough, I have had two exactly similar cases, and
this is going just the same way. In one it was a sum of money a man had
banked under another name to keep it from his wife and for his children;
in the second it was a blow struck in a scuffle, and an innocent man was
doing penal servitude for it."
"That is what you wished to have some one here for chiefly, then?" asked
Hampden.
"Everything, practically. You see the kind of people around? The wife is
a fool; the neighbours are the class of maddening dolts who leave a
suicide hanging until a policeman comes to cut him down. They would hold
an orgie in the next room. In excitement the women fly to gin as
instinctively as a nun flies to prayer. Order them out if they come, but
I don't think that they will trouble you after I have spoken to the
woman as I go. If there is anything to be caught it will have to be on
the hop, so to speak. It may be a confession, a deposition of legal
value, or only a request; one cannot guess. Questioning, when the
sub-conscious stage is reached, might lead to something. It's largely a
matter of luck, but intelligence may have an innings."
"Is there nothing to be done--in the way of making it easier for him?"
Dr Stone made a face expressive of their helplessness and shrugged his
shoulders; then mentioned a few simple details.
"He will never know," he explained. "Even when he seems conscious he
will feel no pain and remember nothing of the accident. The clock will
be mercifully set back." He smiled whimsically. "Forgive me if it never
strikes." He turned to go. "The nearest call office is the kiosk in
Aldwych," he remarked. "I am 7406 Covent Garden." No paper being visible
he wrote the number on the wall. "After 10.30 as a general thing," he
added.
So the baronet was left alone with the still figure that counterfeited
death so well, the man who would be dead before the dawn. He stepped
quietly to the bed and looked down on him. The lower half of the face
was free from swathing, and the lean throat and grizzled beard struck
Sir John with a momentary surprise. It was the face of an elderly man;
he had expected to find one not more than middle-aged as the companion
of the young woman in the other room.
There was a single chair against the wall, and he sat down. There was
nothing else to do but to sit and wait, to listen to the sounds of
voluminous life that rose from the street beneath, the careful creaking
movements in the room beyond. From the shallow wainscotting near the bed
came at intervals the steady ticking of a death-watch. It was nothing,
as every one knew, but the note of an insect calling for its mate, but
it thrilled and grew large in the stillness of the chamber ominously.
A low tap on the door came as a relief. He found the woman standing
there.
"Is there anything different?" she asked, hanging on to the door. "I
kept on thinking I heard noises."
"No, there is no change," he replied. "Will you come in?"
She shrank back at the suggestion. "Gord 'elp us, no!" she cried. "It's
bad enough out there."
"What are you afraid of?" he asked kindly.
She had no words for it. Self-analysis did not enter into her daily
life. But, sitting there alone among the noises, real and imagined, she
had reached a state of terror.
"There is nothing at all dreadful, nothing that would shock you," he
said, referring to the appearance of the dying man. "You are his wife,
are you not?"
The foolish look, half stubborn, half vacuous, flickered about her face.
"As good as," she replied. "It's like this----"
"I see." He had no desire to hear the recital of the sordid details.
"His wife's in a mad-house. Won't never be anywhere else, and I've been
with him these five years, an honest woman to him all the time," she
said, bridling somewhat at the suggestion of reproach. "No one's got no
better right to the things, I'm sure." Her eloquence was stirred not so
much to defend her reputation as by the fear that some one might step in
to claim "the things."
"There will be plenty of time to talk about that when--when it is
necessary," he said. "Has he no relations about here who ought to be
told?"
"Nah," she said decisively; "no one but me. Why, he didn't even have no
friends--no pals of his own class, as you may say. Very close about
himself he was. All he thought of was them political corkses, as they
call um." She came nearer to the door again, the gossiping passion of
her class stronger than her fear, now that the earlier restraint of his
presence was wearing off. "It's the only thing we ever had a 'arsh word
about. It's all right and well for them that make a living at it, but
many and many a time my 'usband's lost 'alf a day two and three times a
week to sit in the Distingwidged Strangers' Gallery. You mightn't 'ardly
think it, sir, but he was hand and foot with some of the biggest men
there are; he was indeed."
Hampden was looking at her curiously. He read into her "'arsh word" the
ceaseless clatter of her nagging, shameless tongue when the old man
brought home a few shillings less than he was wont; the aftermath of
sullen silence, the unprepared meals and neglected home. He pictured him
a patient, long-suffering old man, and pitied him. And now she took
pride and boasted of the very things that she had upbraided him with.
"Vickers he knew," she continued complacently, "and Drugget. He's shaken
hands with Mr Strummery, the Prime Minister, more than onest. Then
Tubes--you've heard speak of him?--he found Mr Tubes a very pleasant
gentleman. Oh, and a lot more I can't remember."
Hampden disengaged himself from further conversation with a single
formal sentence, and returned to his vigil. There he was secure from her
callous chatter. He saw the renewed look of terror start into her eyes
when a board behind her creaked as the door was closing. He heard the
startled shriek, but her squalid avarice cut off his sympathies. He sat
down again and looked round at the already familiar objects in the room.
The form lying on the bed had not changed a fraction of its rigid
outline; but he missed something somewhere in the room, and for a minute
he could not identify it. Then he remembered the ticking of the
death-watch. It had ceased. He looked at his watch; it was not yet nine
o'clock.
He had not been back more than ten minutes when the subdued tapping--it
was rather a timid scrape, as though she feared that a louder summons
might call another forth--was repeated.
"I don't see that it's no good my staying here," she gasped. "I've been
sitting there till the furniture fair began to move towards me, and
every bloomin' rag about the place had a face in it. It's giving me the
fair horrors."
He could not ignore her half-frenzied state. "What do you want to do?"
he asked.
"I want to go out for a bit," she replied, licking her thin feline lips.
"You don't know what it's like. I want to hear real people talk and not
see things move. I'll come back soon; before Gord, I will."
"Yes, _how_ will you came back?"
"I won't. May it strike me dead if I touch a drop. I'll go straight into
Mrs Rugg's across the street, and she's almost what you might call a
teetotaler."
"The man you call your husband is dying in there, and he may need your
help at any minute," he said sternly. It needed no gift of divination to
prophesy that if the woman once left the place she would be hopelessly
drunk before an hour had passed. "Don't sit down doing nothing but
imagining things," he continued. "Make yourself some tea, and then when
one of your friends comes round to see you, you can let her stay. But
only one, mind."
He saw the more sullen of her looks settle darkly about her face as he
closed the door. He waited to hear the sound of the kettle being moved,
the tea-cup clinking, but they never came. An unnatural, uncreaking
silence reigned instead. He opened the door quietly and looked out. That
room was empty, and, as he stood there, a current of cooler air fell
across his cheek. Half a dozen steps brought him to the entrance to the
little hall--the only other room there was. It also was empty, and the
front door stood widely open. There was only one possible inference:
"Mrs Flak" had fled.
Sir John had confessed to possessing nerves, and to few men the
situation would have been an inviting one. Still, there was only one
possible thing to do, and he closed the door again, noticing, as he did
so, that the action locked it. As he stood there a moment before
returning to the bedroom and its tranquil occupant lying in his rigid,
unbreathing sleep, a slight but continuous sound caught his ear. It was
the most closely comparable (to attempt to define it) with the whirring
of a clock as the flying pinion is released before it strikes. Or it
might be that the doctor's simile prompted the comparison. It was not
loud, but the room beyond seemed very, very still.
It was not a time to temporise with the emotions. Hampden stepped into
the next room and stood listening. He judged--nay, he was sure--that the
sound came from the bedroom, but it was not repeated. Instead, something
very different happened, something that was either terrifying or
natural, according to the conditions that provoked it. Quite without
warning there came a voice from the next room, a full, level, healthy
voice, even strong, and speaking in the ordinary manner of conversation.
"Will you please tell Mr Tubes that I am waiting here to see him?"