his in the same regiment, named Prosser, a young man who had previously
been in a drapery store. It was not till later in the evening that the
dull rumble of some imminent tragedy caused the vast bulk of the
linoleum manager’s body to tremble. He had been conscious of it all the
afternoon. He was frightened. He did not like the way Percy had asked
for Ticknett. He did not like Ticknett’s disappearance, and above all he
did not like the way Daphne had cowered against the wall. There was
something at the back of all this, something uncomfortable. He dreaded
things of this nature. Why couldn’t people go on quietly, eating and
drinking and being comfortable? He avoided “The Duchess of Teck,” and
actually stayed late at his work and caught up some arrears. He decided
to go quickly home. When he got outside he commenced to walk, when
suddenly Percy came out of a doorway and took hold of his arm. Bultishaw
started.
“What is it? What do you want?” he said.
There was something very curious about Percy. He had never seen him like
that before. He had been drinking, but he was not drunk. In fact,
Bultishaw had never seen him in some ways so sober, so grimly serious.
His lips were trembling, and his eyes were unnaturally bright. He
gripped Bultishaw’s coat and said:
“Where is your friend Ticknett?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since this morning,” Bultishaw
answered.
“Will you swear he isn’t in the building? and that you don’t know where
he is?”
“Yes,” gasped the cork-lino manager.
Percy looked into his eyes for some moments, and then he said queerly:
“Ticknett knows that I’ve got to report first thing in the morning. I’ve
just seen Daphne home. There’ll be a packet for Ticknett, do you see? I
say there’ll be a packet for him. D’ you understand, Bulky-chops?”
Bultishaw was very frightened. He did not know a bit what the young man
meant. He only knew that he wanted to get away. He didn’t want to be
mixed up in this. He mumbled:
“I see--er--a packet?... I’ll tell him.”
“No, you needn’t tell him,” answered the soldier. “I’m sayin’ this for
your benefit. I say there’ll be a packet for him. D’ you understand?
There’ll be a packet for him.”
And he melted into the night....
III
From the day when Percy disappeared with these mysterious words on his
lips to the day when the news came that he had been killed there was an
interval of time that varied according to the occupation and the
preoccupation of his particular acquaintances. To Bultishaw it appeared
a very long time, but this may have been partly due to the fact that in
the interval he had spent most of the time in bed with a very serious
illness. He had been lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, and he
had not been allowed to drink. The time had consequently hung very
heavily on his hands, and his thoughts had been feeding on each other.
The exact time was in effect eleven weeks.
During the latter part of this period his friend Ticknett paid him many
visits, and had been very kind and attentive. And it was he indeed who
brought the news that Percy had been killed.
It was one evening when it was nearly dark, and Bultishaw was sitting up
in his dressing-gown in front of the fire, and his daughter Elsie was
sitting on the other side of the fireplace, sewing. Ticknett paid one of
his customary visits. Elsie showed him to an easy chair between the two,
and after Ticknett’s solicitous enquiries regarding Bultishaw’s health,
the two men reverted to their usual discussion of the staff of
Cotterway’s and their friends. Suddenly Ticknett remarked quite
casually:
“Oh, by the way, young Percy has been killed at the front.”
And then the room seemed to become violently darker. Bultishaw struggled
to frame some suitable comment upon this but the words failed to come.
He sat there with his fat, puffy hands pressing the sides of his easy
chair. At last he said:
“Elsie, you might go and get my beef-tea ready.”
When his daughter had gone out of the room, he still had nothing to say.
He had not dismissed her for the purpose of speaking about the matter to
Ticknett, but simply because a strange mood had come to him that he
could not trust himself. In the gathering darkness he could see the
sallow mask of his friend’s face looking at the fire, and his cold eyes
peering beneath his heavy brows. Bultishaw at length managed to say:
“Any particulars?”
And Ticknett replied:
“No. It was in the papers yesterday.”
And then Ticknett smiled and added:
“So you won’t have to bother about your job any longer, Mr. Bultishaw.”
And Bultishaw thought:
“There’ll be a packet for you, Ticknett. A packet. Do you understand?
And by God! you’ll deserve it!”
He was still uncertain of what “the packet” would contain, but he had
thought a lot about it during his illness, and he was sure the packet
would contain something unpleasant, if not terrible. And yet Ticknett
was his friend, in fact his only friend; the man who had saved him in a
crisis, and who waited on him in his sickness. He tried to pull himself
together, and he managed to say in his normally wheezy voice:
“I hope to be back next week.”
And indeed on the following Tuesday he did once more report himself to
the heads of the firm. He was still very weak and ill, and the doctor
had warned him to avoid alcohol in any form. But by half-past twelve he
felt so exhausted he decided that a little whisky and milk might help to
get him through the day. He crawled round to “The Duchess of Teck” and
was soon amongst his congenial acquaintances. It was very warm, very
pleasant and ingratiating, the atmosphere of the bar. He ordered his
whisky and milk, and then became aware of a striking vacancy. Daphne was
not there. Mrs. Clarke and Gladys were busy serving drinks, and a tall
thin girl was helping them. A peculiar sense of misgiving came to
Bultishaw. He did not like to say anything about it to Mrs. Clarke, but
he turned to an old habitué, named Benjamin Strigge, and he whispered:
“Where’s Daphne to-day, Mr. Strigge?”
And Mr. Strigge answered:
“Daphne? She ain’t been here for nearly three months. There was some
story about her and young Percy. I’ve really forgotten what it was all
about. Of course, you’ve been away, Mr. Bultishaw. You’ve missed all the
spicy news, eh? They never interest me. Ha, ha, ha! Can I order you
another whisky and milk?”
Bultishaw declined with thanks, and stood there sucking his pipe. In a
few minutes Ticknett entered the bar. He appeared to be quite cheerful,
and for him garrulous. He was very solicitous about Bultishaw’s health,
and insistent that he should not stand near a draught. He talked
optimistically about the war, and Bultishaw replied in monosyllables.
And all the time the ridiculous thought kept racing through his mind:
“You’re going to get a packet, my friend.”
It was a week later that Prosser turned up. He was one of eleven men,
the sole survivors of a regiment--Percy’s regiment. Prosser was slightly
wounded in the foot, and strangely altered. He stammered and was no
longer a gay companion. He had a wild, abstracted look, as though he had
lost the power of listening, and was entirely occupied with inner
visions. They could get little information out of him about Percy. He
described certain scenes and experiences very vividly, but the
description did not convey much to most of the men, for the reason that
they were entirely devoid of imagination. The regiment had, as a matter
of fact, been ambushed, and practically annihilated. A mine had done
some deadly work. He had seen Percy and another man come into the lines
in the morning. It was just daybreak. They had been on listening patrol.
He had seen them both making their way along a trench to a dug-out, to
the very spot where five minutes later the mine blew up.
“Didn’t you never see Percy again?” some one asked.
“No,” answered the warrior. “But I ’eard ’im laugh.”
“Laugh!”
“Yes. You know the way he used to laugh. Loud and clear-like. He must
have been two hundred yards away. Suddenly he laughed, and I says to
Peters, who was on my right, ‘’Ark at that blighter, Percy! Seems to
think even this is amusin’.’ I ’adn’t got the words out of my mouth when
... just as though the whole bally earth had burst into a gas ... not a
quarter of a mile away--thought I was gone myself ... right over in the
quarter where Percy had gone ... thousands of tons of mud flung up into
the sky ... you could ’ear the earth being ripped to pieces, and there
were men in it.... Oh, Gawd!”
Bultishaw shuddered and felt faint, and the rest of the company seemed
to think they were hearing a rather highly colored account of some quite
inconceivable phenomenon. Prosser was further detailing his narrative,
when he happened to drop a phrase that was very illuminating to
Bultishaw. He was speaking of another man some of them knew, named
Bates. The phrase he used was:
“Charley Bates got a packet too!”
A packet! Bultishaw paid for his drink and went out into the street. He
felt rather hot and cold round the temples. He took a cab home, and went
straight to bed, explaining to his daughters that he had had “a very
heavy day.” When he rolled between the sheets the true meaning of that
sinister phrase “getting a packet” kept revolving through his mind. It
was evidently the military expression, and very terse and grim and
sardonic it was. These men who met a violent end “got a packet.” Percy
had got a packet, Bates had got a packet, but why should Ticknett,
dividing his days between a furnishing house and a saloon bar, get a
packet? It was incredible, preposterous. Men who went out to fight for
their country, well--they might expect it. But not men who lead simple,
honest, commercial lives. If Ticknett got a packet, why should he not
himself get a packet? He passed a sleepless night, but there was one
problem he determined to try and solve on the morrow.
IV
Somehow Bultishaw could not bring himself to ask Mrs. Clarke about
Daphne, and Gladys, whom he always suspected of laughing at him, he
would certainly not question. He eventually got her address from a
potman, who had carried some of her things home for her.
When he did get her address, it took him over a week to make up his mind
to visit her. He thumbed the envelope and breathed heavily on it, put it
back in his pocket and took it out again, and tried to dismiss it from
his mind, but the very touch of it seemed to burn his body. At length,
on the following Saturday night, he tucked it finally into his waistcoat
pocket, and set out in the direction of Kilburn.
It was very dark when he found the obscure street. And the number of the
address was a gaunt house of four stories above a low-class restaurant
where sausages and slabs of fish were frying in the window, to tempt
hungry passers-by. He stumbled up the dark stairs, and was told by two
children whom he could not see that “Miss Allen” lived on the third
floor. He rang the wrong bell on the third floor (there were two lots of
inhabitants) and was told by a lady that “she liked his bleeding cheek
waking her in her first sleep, ringing the wrong bell,” and the door was
slammed in his face.
He tried the other bell, and the door was opened immediately by a gaunt
woman who said:
“Who’s that? Oh, I thought it was the doctor!”
Bultishaw asked if Miss Daphne Allen lived there, and gave his own name.
The woman stared at him and then said:
“Wait a minute.”
She shut the door and left him outside. After a time she came back and
said:
“What do you want?”
Bultishaw said, “I just want to speak to her for a few minutes.”
The woman again retired, and left him for nearly five minutes. He stood
there shivering with cold on the stone stairs, and listening to the
strange mixture of noises: children quarreling in the street below, and
in the room opposite some one playing a mouth organ. At last the woman
came back. She said:
“Come in.”
He followed her into a poky room, dimly lighted by a tin paraffin lamp
with a pink glass. In the corner of the room was a bed on which a woman
was lying, feeding a baby. Her face looked white and thin and her hair
was bound up in a shawl. It was Daphne. She looked at him listlessly,
and said:
“Well, have you brought any money from him?”
Bultishaw stood blinking at her, unable to comprehend. Whom did she mean
by “him”? He coughed, and tried to formulate some sympathetic enquiry,
when suddenly the gaunt woman who had shown him in turned on him and
cried:
“Well, what the hell are you standing there like that for? You’ve come
from him, I suppose? You’re ’is greatest pal, ain’t yer? We’ve never
seen a farthing of ’is money yet since the dirty blackguard did ’er in.
What ’ave you come slobbering up ’ere for, if it ain’t to bring some
money? The b--y ’ound! If it ’adn’t been for ’im, she might be the wife
of a respectable sowljer, and gettin’ ’er maintenance and pension, and
all that.”
There was a mild sob from the bed, and a pleading voice that cried:
“Aunty! Aunty!”
And the baby started to cry. While these little things were happening,
the slow-moving mind of Bultishaw for once worked rapidly, came to a
conclusion, and formed a resolution. He moved ponderously to the lamp,
and took out his purse. He looked across the lamp at Daphne and said:
“He sends you this. He’s sorry not to have sent before. He....”
The elder woman dashed toward the table, and looked at the money.
“How much is it?” she said, and then turning to Daphne, she rasped:
“It’s two quid. That’s better than nothing. Is there any more to come?”
Bultishaw again looked at Daphne. She was bending over the child. She
seemed indifferent. A strand of her hair had broken loose beneath the
shawl. Bultishaw stammered:
“Yes--er--of course. There’ll be--er--the same again.”
“’Ow often?” whined the elder woman.
“Er--two pounds--every fortnight. Er--I’ll bring it myself.”
The big man blew his nose, and shuffled from one foot to another.
“Are you getting better? Is there anything else?” he mumbled.
“Oh, no,” whined the elder woman. “We’re living in the lap of luxury.
Everything we could want. Ain’t we, Cissy?”
The woman on the bed did not answer, and Bultishaw fumbled his way out
of the room.
That night Bultishaw had a mild return of his illness. He was very
feverish. His mind became occupied with visions of Percy. Percy, the
gay, the debonair. There was a long line of poplars by a canal, and some
low buildings of a factory on the left. The earth was seamed with jagged
cuts and holes. Men were burrowing their way underground like moles. The
thing was like a torn fringe of humanity, wildly insane. It was very
dark, but one was conscious that vast numbers of men were scratching
their way toward each other, zigzagging in a drunken, frenzied manner.
There was a stench of decaying matter, and of some chemical even more
penetrating. There were millions and millions of men, but they were all
invisible, silently scratching and listening. Suddenly amidst the dead
silence there was the loud burst of Percy’s laughter--just as he had
laughed in the bar of “The Duchess of Teck”--and his voice rang through
the night:
“Hullo! hullo! HULLO! So here we all are!”
And this challenge seemed to awaken the lurking passions of the night.
Bultishaw groaned, and started up in bed, and cried out:
“O God! a thousand tons of mud! a thousand tons of mud!”
On the following day Bultishaw made a grievous mistake in his accounts.
He was severely hauled over the coals by the directors. As the weeks
proceeded he made other mistakes. He became morose and abstracted. He
drank his whisky with less and less soda, till he was drinking it almost
neat.
“Old Bulky-chops’s brain’s going,” said some of the other salesmen.
He would lean up against the bar, and stare at Ticknett. Their old
conversational relationship became reversed. It was Bultishaw who
listened, and Ticknett who did the talking. The soft goods manager
appeared to be in excellent trim at the time. He seemed more
light-hearted than he had been for years. He spoke in his quiet voice
about the tactics of Russian generals, and the need for general
compulsion in this country for everybody up to the age of forty-five
(Ticknett was forty-seven). At Christmas-time he sent Bultishaw a case
of old port wine. His position in the firm became more assured. It was
said that Ticknett had bought a large block of shares in Cotterway’s,
Limited, and that he stood a good chance of being put on the board of
directorship.
And Bultishaw watched his upward progress with a curious intentness. He
himself was blundering down the hill. He had made a large inroad into
his capital, and the day could not be far distant when he would be
dismissed. Every fortnight he went out to Kilburn and took two
sovereigns, and he never spoke of this to Ticknett.
V
Elsie Bultishaw was very mysterious. In her black crêpe dress she
bustled about the small room, holding the teapot in her hand.
“They say you should never speak ill of the dead,” she whispered to her
visitor. She emptied a packet of tea into a caddy, and tipped three
teaspoonsful into the pot.
“Of course,” she continued, “it’s very hard on me and Dorothy. It’s
lucky Dorothy’s got that job at the War Office, or I don’t know what
we’d do.”
“Your pore father was not a careful man, I know, my dear,” said the
visitor.
Elsie poured the boiling water on to the tea-leaves, and sighed.
“It wasn’t only that, my dear,” she answered. She coughed and then added
in a low voice:
“There was some woman in the case. A barmaid, in fact. Of course, pore
father’s illness cost a lot of money, what with doctors, and
specialists, and loss of time and that. But it seems he’d been keeping
this woman too, taking her money every fortnight. When everything’s
settled up, there won’t be more’n twenty pounds a year for me and
Dorothy.”
“Dear, dear!” said the visitor. “It’s all very tragic, my dear.”
“You can’t think,” Elsie continued, warming to the excitement of her
narrative, “what we’ve been through. We could never have _lived_ through
it, if it hadn’t been for Mr. Ticknett. He’s been kindness itself. And
such an extraordinary hallucination pore father had about him. I didn’t
tell you, did I, dear?”
“No, dear.”
“I’ll never forget that night father came home. He’d been drinking, of
course. But it wasn’t only that. I’ve never seen him like it. He just
raved. It was very late, and me and Dorothy were going to bed. He came
stumbling into this room, his eyes lookin’ all bright and glassy-like.
He started by saying that the dead could speak. He said he’d only obeyed
the voice of the dead. And then he said something about a packet, and
about Mr. Ticknett. I was terrified. He described something he said he’d
just done. He walked about the room. He pointed to that corner. ‘Look,’
he says, ‘Ticknett was standin’ there.’ There’d been a dinner to
celebrate Mr. Ticknett’s election on to the board of directors of
Cotterway’s. ‘I never take my eyes off him all the evening,’ father
says. ‘It was after the dinner, and we went into the saloon. Ticknett
was surrounded by his friends. I watched his lying, treacherous, yellow
face smirkin’ all around. And suddenly a voice spoke to me, a voice from
some dim field in France. It says, “Ticknett’s going to have a packet.”
And then I drew my revolver and shot him through the face!’ Dorothy
shrieked, and I tried to get father to bed. Of course it was all
rubbish. He’d never shot no one. It was just raving. Everybody knows
that Mr. Ticknett’s been father’s best friend. He’s helped him crowds of
times. A nicer man you couldn’t meet. He’s coming to tea on Sunday. We
managed to get poor father to bed, and to get a doctor. But it was no
good. He babbled like a child all night. It was so funny like. He really
was like a child. He kept on repeating, ‘A thousand tons of mud!’ and
then suddenly, about mornin’, he got quite quiet, and his face looked
like some great baby’s lying there.... He died quite peaceful.”
Elsie performed a little mild weep, and the visitor indulged in various
exclamations of sympathy and interest.
“Oh, dear,” she concluded, “it’s dreadful the things people imagine
when--they’re like that.”
Elsie went over all the details again, and the visitor recounted a
tragic episode she had heard of in connection with a corporal’s widow,
who was a relation of her own landlady. They discussed the dreadful war,
and its effect on the price of bacon and margarine.
After her departure, Elsie washed out and ironed some handkerchiefs, and
then prepared her sister’s supper. Dorothy arrived home about seven, and
the two sisters discussed the events of the day. They sat in front of
the fire and listened to a pot stewing. At a sudden pause, Dorothy
looked into the fire, and said:
“Do you think Ticknett’s really keen on me, Elsie?”
Elsie giggled, and kissed her sister.
“You’d have to be blind not to see that,” she said; and then she
whispered:
“Are you really keen on him?”
The younger sister continued staring into the fire.
“I don’t know. I think I am. I--Isn’t this stew nearly done?”
Elsie again giggled, and proceeded to dish up the stew. Before this
operation was completed, there was a knock at the door.
Elsie said, “Oh, curse!” and went, and opened it.
In the doorway stood a woman with a small parcel. Her face was deadly
white and her lips colorless. She looked like a woman to whom everything
that could happen had happened long ago, and the result had left her
lifeless and indifferent. She said listlessly:
“Are you Miss Bultishaw?”
And Elsie said, “Yes.”
The woman entered, and looked round the room.
“May I speak to you a moment? Is this your sister?” she said.
Elsie answered: “Yes; what do you want?”
“I want to make an explanation, and to give you some money.”
She untied the packet, and placed some notes on to the table-cloth.
“What the hell’s this?” exclaimed Elsie.
“This is all I could find,” muttered the listless woman. “I found them
in his breast-pocket. They belonged to your father. It wasn’t your
father at all who--ought to have paid. _He_ ought to have paid. So I’ve
taken them from him. I hope there’s enough. I’m afraid there may not
be. It’s all I have. It’s only right you should have it.”
The two sisters stared at her, and involuntarily drew closer together.
It was Dorothy who eventually managed to speak:
“What are you talking about?” she said. “Who do you mean by ‘him’?”
“Ticknett!”
The sisters gasped, and Dorothy gave a little cry.
“Here! what do you mean?” she said breathlessly. “Have you pinched this
money from Ticknett? You’d better be careful. He’s coming here. We’ll
have you arrested.”
The listless woman shook her head.
“No, no,” she said in her toneless voice. “Don’t you believe that. He
won’t come here.”
“Why won’t he come here?” rasped Dorothy, with a note of challenge.
The strange visitor stood staring vacantly at the fire. She seemed not
to have heard. Her lips were trembling. Suddenly she answered in the
same dull, lifeless manner:
“Because he’s lying on my bed with a bullet through his heart.”
“IN THE WAY OF BUSINESS”
“IN THE WAY OF BUSINESS”
As the large, thick-set man with the red face, the bushy mustache, and
the very square chin swung round on his swivel chair, at the great
roll-top desk with its elaborate arrangements of telephones, receivers,
and electric buttons, he conveyed to the little mild-eyed man waiting on
a chair by the door the sense of infinite power.
And surely it must be a position requiring singular gifts and remarkable
capacity. For was this not Dollbones, the house famous throughout the
civilized world for supplying trimmings, gimp, embroidery, buttons, and
other accessories to nearly every retail furnisher in England and the
colonies? and was not this Mr. Godfrey Hylam, the London manager? To
hold such a position a man must have not only brains, and an infinite
capacity for work and driving power, but he must have character, a
genius for judging people and making quick decisions.
“Almost like a general,” thought the mild-eyed man by the door. He had
waited fifty minutes in the outer office for his interview, and on being
at length shown in, had been told to “sit down a minute.” This minute
had been protracted into thirty-five minutes, but it was very
interesting to watch the great man grappling with the myriad affairs
that came whispering through the wires, and giving sharp instructions to
the two flurried clerks who sat in the same office, or dictating to the
young lady stenographer who sat furtively on a small chair by his side
scribbling into a book with a fountain-pen.