Mr. Coombes was sick of life. He walked away from his unhappy home, and,
sick not only of his own existence, but of everybody else’s, turned
aside down Gaswork Lane to avoid the town, and, crossing the wooden
bridge that goes over the canal to Starling’s Cottages, was presently
alone in the damp pinewoods and out of sight and sound of human
habitation. He would stand it no longer. He repeated aloud with
blasphemies unusual to him that he would stand it no longer.
He was a pale-faced little man, with dark eyes and a fine and very black
moustache. He had a very stiff, upright collar slightly frayed, that
gave him an illusory double chin, and his overcoat (albeit shabby) was
trimmed with astrachan. His gloves were a bright brown with black
stripes over the knuckles, and split at the finger-ends. His appearance,
his wife had said once in the dear, dead days beyond recall,—before he
married her, that is,—was military. But now she called him— It seems a
dreadful thing to tell of between husband and wife, but she called him
“a little grub.” It wasn’t the only thing she had called him, either.
The row had arisen about that beastly Jennie again. Jennie was his
wife’s friend, and, by no invitation of Mr. Coombes, she came in every
blessed Sunday to dinner, and made a shindy all the afternoon. She was a
big, noisy girl, with a taste for loud colours and a strident laugh; and
this Sunday she had outdone all her previous intrusions by bringing in a
fellow with her, a chap as showy as herself. And Mr. Coombes, in a
starchy, clean collar and his Sunday frock-coat, had sat dumb and
wrathful at his own table, while his wife and her guests talked
foolishly and undesirably, and laughed aloud. Well, he stood that, and
after dinner (which, “as usual,” was late), what must Miss Jennie do but
go to the piano and play banjo tunes, for all the world as if it were a
week-day! Flesh and blood could not endure such goings-on. They would
hear next door; they would hear in the road; it was a public
announcement of their disrepute. He had to speak.
He had felt himself go pale, and a kind of rigour had affected his
respiration as he delivered himself. He had been sitting on one of the
chairs by the window—the new guest had taken possession of the
arm-chair. He turned his head. “Sun Day!” he said over the collar, in
the voice of one who warns. “Sun Day!” What people call a “nasty” tone
it was.
Jennie had kept on playing; but his wife, who was looking through some
music that was piled on the top of the piano, had stared at him. “What’s
wrong now?” she said; “can’t people enjoy themselves?”
“I don’t mind rational ’njoyment, at all,” said little Coombes; “but I
ain’t a-going to have week-day tunes playing on a Sunday in this house.”
“What’s wrong with my playing now?” said Jennie, stopping and twirling
round on the music-stool with a monstrous rustle of flounces.
Coombes saw it was going to be a row, and opened too vigorously, as is
common with your timid, nervous men all the world over. “Steady on with
that music-stool!” said he; “it ain’t made for ’eavy weights.”
“Never you mind about weights,” said Jennie, incensed. “What was you
saying behind my back about my playing?”
“Surely you don’t ’old with not having a bit of music on a Sunday, Mr.
Coombes?” said the new guest, leaning back in the arm-chair, blowing a
cloud of cigarette smoke and smiling in a kind of pitying way. And
simultaneously his wife said something to Jennie about “Never mind ’im.
You go on, Jinny.”
“I do,” said Mr. Coombes, addressing the new guest.
“May I arst why?” said the new guest, evidently enjoying both his
cigarette and the prospect of an argument. He was, by-the-by, a lank
young man, very stylishly dressed in bright drab, with a white cravat
and a pearl and silver pin. It had been better taste to come in a black
coat, Mr. Coombes thought.
“Because,” began Mr. Coombes, “it don’t suit me. I’m a business man. I
’ave to study my connection. Rational ’njoyment—”
“His connection!” said Mrs. Coombes, scornfully. “That’s what he’s
always a-saying. We got to do this, and we got to do that—”
“If you don’t mean to study my connection,” said Mr. Coombes, “what did
you marry me for?”
“I wonder,” said Jennie, and turned back to the piano.
“I never saw such a man as you,” said Mrs. Coombes. “You’ve altered all
round since we were married. Before—”
Then Jennie began at the tum, tum, tum again.
“Look here!” said Mr. Coombes, driven at last to revolt, standing up and
raising his voice. “I tell you I won’t have that.” The frock-coat heaved
with his indignation.
“No vi’lence, now,” said the long young man in drab, sitting up.
“Who the juice are you?” said Mr. Coombes, fiercely.
Whereupon they all began talking at once. The new guest said he was
Jennie’s “intended,” and meant to protect her, and Mr. Coombes said he
was welcome to do so anywhere but in his (Mr. Coombes’) house; and Mrs.
Coombes said he ought to be ashamed of insulting his guests, and (as I
have already mentioned) that he was getting a regular little grub; and
the end was, that Mr. Coombes ordered his visitors out of the house, and
they wouldn’t go, and so he said he would go himself. With his face
burning and tears of excitement in his eyes, he went into the passage,
and as he struggled with his overcoat—his frock-coat sleeves got
concertinaed up his arm—and gave a brush at his silk hat, Jennie began
again at the piano, and strummed him insultingly out of the house. Tum,
tum, tum. He slammed the shop-door so that the house quivered. That,
briefly, was the immediate making of his mood. You will perhaps begin to
understand his disgust with existence.
As he walked along the muddy path under the firs,—it was late October,
and the ditches and heaps of fir-needles were gorgeous with clumps of
fungi,—he recapitulated the melancholy history of his marriage. It was
brief and commonplace enough. He now perceived with sufficient clearness
that his wife had married him out of a natural curiosity and in order to
escape from her worrying, laborious, and uncertain life in the workroom;
and, like the majority of her class, she was far too stupid to realise
that it was her duty to co-operate with him in his business. She was
greedy of enjoyment, loquacious, and socially-minded, and evidently
disappointed to find the restraints of poverty still hanging about her.
His worries exasperated her, and the slightest attempt to control her
proceedings resulted in a charge of “grumbling.” Why couldn’t he be
nice—as he used to be? And Coombes was such a harmless little man, too,
nourished mentally on “Self-Help,” and with a meagre ambition of
self-denial and competition, that was to end in a “sufficiency.” Then
Jennie came in as a female Mephistopheles, a gabbling chronicle of
“fellers,” and was always wanting his wife to go to theatres, and “all
that.” And in addition were aunts of his wife, and cousins (male and
female), to eat up capital, insult him personally, upset business
arrangements, annoy good customers, and generally blight his life. It
was not the first occasion by many that Mr. Coombes had fled his home in
wrath and indignation, and something like fear, vowing furiously and
even aloud that he wouldn’t stand it, and so frothing away his energy
along the line of least resistance. But never before had he been quite
so sick of life as on this particular Sunday afternoon. The Sunday
dinner may have had its share in his despair—and the greyness of the
sky. Perhaps, too, he was beginning to realise his unendurable
frustration as a business man as the consequence of his marriage.
Presently bankruptcy, and after that— Perhaps she might have reason to
repent when it was too late. And destiny, as I have already intimated,
had planted the path through the wood with evil-smelling fungi, thickly
and variously planted it, not only on the right side, but on the left.
A small shopman is in such a melancholy position, if his wife turns out
a disloyal partner. His capital is all tied up in his business, and to
leave her, means to join the unemployed in some strange part of the
earth. The luxuries of divorce are beyond him altogether. So that the
good old tradition of marriage for better or worse holds inexorably for
him, and things work up to tragic culminations. Bricklayers kick their
wives to death, and dukes betray theirs; but it is among the small
clerks and shopkeepers nowadays that it comes most often to a cutting of
throats. Under the circumstances it is not so very remarkable—and you
must take it as charitably as you can—that the mind of Mr. Coombes ran
for awhile on some such glorious close to his disappointed hopes, and
that he thought of razors, pistols, bread-knives, and touching letters
to the coroner denouncing his enemies by name, and praying piously for
forgiveness. After a time his fierceness gave way to melancholia. He had
been married in this very overcoat, in his first and only frock-coat
that was buttoned up beneath it. He began to recall their courting along
this very walk, his years of penurious saving to get capital, and the
bright hopefulness of his marrying days. For it all to work out like
this! Was there no sympathetic ruler anywhere in the world? He reverted
to death as a topic.
He thought of the canal he had just crossed, and doubted whether he
shouldn’t stand with his head out, even in the middle, and it was while
drowning was in his mind that the purple pileus caught his eye. He
looked at it mechanically for a moment, and stopped and stooped towards
it to pick it up, under the impression that it was some such small
leather object as a purse. Then he saw that it was the purple top of a
fungus, a peculiarly poisonous-looking purple: slimy, shiny, and
emitting a sour odour. He hesitated with his hand an inch or so from it,
and the thought of poison crossed his mind. With that he picked the
thing, and stood up again with it in his hand.
The odour was certainly strong—acrid, but by no means disgusting. He
broke off a piece, and the fresh surface was a creamy white, that
changed like magic in the space of ten seconds to a yellowish-green
colour. It was even an inviting-looking change. He broke off two other
pieces to see it repeated. They were wonderful things, these fungi,
thought Mr. Coombes, and all of them the deadliest poisons, as his
father had often told him. Deadly poisons!
There is no time like the present for a rash resolve. Why not here and
now? thought Mr. Coombes. He tasted a little piece, a very little piece
indeed—a mere crumb. It was so pungent that he almost spat it out again,
then merely hot and full-flavoured,—a kind of German mustard with a
touch of horse-radish and—well, mushroom. He swallowed it in the
excitement of the moment. Did he like it or did he not? His mind was
curiously careless. He would try another bit. It really wasn’t bad—it
was good. He forgot his troubles in the interest of the immediate
moment. Playing with death it was. He took another bite, and then
deliberately finished a mouthful. A curious tingling sensation began in
his finger-tips and toes. His pulse began to move faster. The blood in
his ears sounded like a mill-race. “Try bi’ more,” said Mr. Coombes. He
turned and looked about him, and found his feet unsteady. He saw and
struggled towards a little patch of purple a dozen yards away. “Jol’
goo’ stuff,” said Mr. Coombes. “E—lomore ye’.” He pitched forward and
fell on his face, his hands outstretched towards the cluster of pilei.
But he did not eat any more of them. He forgot forthwith.
He rolled over and sat up with a look of astonishment on his face. His
carefully brushed silk hat had rolled away towards the ditch. He pressed
his hand to his brow. Something had happened, but he could not rightly
determine what it was. Anyhow, he was no longer dull—he felt bright,
cheerful. And his throat was afire. He laughed in the sudden gaiety of
his heart. Had he been dull? He did not know; but at any rate he would
be dull no longer. He got up and stood unsteadily, regarding the
universe with an agreeable smile. He began to remember. He could not
remember very well, because of a steam roundabout that was beginning in
his head. And he knew he had been disagreeable at home, just because
they wanted to be happy. They were quite right; life should be as gay as
possible. He would go home and make it up, and reassure them. And why
not take some of this delightful toadstool with him, for them to eat? A
hatful, no less. Some of those red ones with white spots as well, and a
few yellow. He had been a dull dog, an enemy to merriment; he would make
up for it. It would be gay to turn his coat sleeves inside out, and
stick some yellow gorse into his waistcoat pockets. Then
home—singing—for a jolly evening.
After the departure of Mr. Coombes, Jennie discontinued playing, and
turned round on the music-stool again. “What a fuss about nothing,” said
Jennie.
“You see, Mr. Clarence, what I’ve got to put up with,” said Mrs.
Coombes.
“He is a bit hasty,” said Mr. Clarence, judicially.
“He ain’t got the slightest sense of our position,” said Mrs. Coombes;
“that’s what I complain of. He cares for nothing but his old shop; and
if I have a bit of company, or buy anything to keep myself decent, or
get any little thing I want out of the housekeeping money, there’s
disagreeables. ‘Economy,’ he says; ‘struggle for life,’ and all that. He
lies awake of nights about it, worrying how he can screw me out of a
shilling. He wanted us to eat Dorset butter once. If once I was to give
in to him—there!”
“Of course,” said Jennie.
“If a man values a woman,” said Mr. Clarence, lounging back in the
arm-chair, “he must be prepared to make sacrifices for her. For my own
part,” said Mr. Clarence, with his eye on Jennie, “I shouldn’t think of
marrying till I was in a position to do the thing in style. It’s
downright selfishness. A man ought to go through the rough-and-tumble by
himself, and not drag her—”
“I don’t agree altogether with that,” said Jennie. “I don’t see why a
man shouldn’t have a woman’s help, provided he doesn’t treat her meanly,
you know. It’s meanness—”
“You wouldn’t believe,” said Mrs. Coombes. “But I was a fool to ’ave
’im. I might ’ave known. If it ’adn’t been for my father, we shouldn’t
have had not a carriage to our wedding.”
“Lord! he didn’t stick out at that?” said Mr. Clarence, quite shocked.
“Said he wanted the money for his stock, or some such rubbish. Why, he
wouldn’t have a woman in to help me once a week if it wasn’t for my
standing out plucky. And the fusses he makes about money—comes to me,
well, pretty near crying, with sheets of paper and figgers. ‘If only we
can tide over this year,’ he says, ‘the business is bound to go.’ ‘If
only we can tide over this year,’ I says; ‘then it’ll be, if only we can
tide over next year. I know you,’ I says. ‘And you don’t catch me
screwing myself lean and ugly. Why didn’t you marry a slavey,’ I says,
‘if you wanted one—instead of a respectable girl?’ I says.”
So Mrs. Coombes. But we will not follow this unedifying conversation
further. Suffice it that Mr. Coombes was very satisfactorily disposed
of, and they had a snug little time round the fire. Then Mrs. Coombes
went to get the tea, and Jennie sat coquettishly on the arm of Mr.
Clarence’s chair until the tea-things clattered outside. “What was that
I heard?” asked Mrs. Coombes, playfully, as she entered, and there was
badinage about kissing. They were just sitting down to the little
circular table when the first intimation of Mr. Coombes’ return was
heard.
This was a fumbling at the latch of the front door.
“’Ere’s my lord,” said Mrs. Coombes. “Went out like a lion and comes
back like a lamb, I’ll lay.”
Something fell over in the shop: a chair, it sounded like. Then there
was a sound as of some complicated step exercise in the passage. Then
the door opened and Coombes appeared. But it was Coombes transfigured.
The immaculate collar had been torn carelessly from his throat. His
carefully-brushed silk hat, half-full of a crush of fungi, was under one
arm; his coat was inside out, and his waistcoat adorned with bunches of
yellow-blossomed furze. These little eccentricities of Sunday costume,
however, were quite overshadowed by the change in his face; it was livid
white, his eyes were unnaturally large and bright, and his pale blue
lips were drawn back in a cheerless grin. “Merry!” he said. He had
stopped dancing to open the door. “Rational ’njoyment. Dance.” He made
three fantastic steps into the room, and stood bowing.
“Jim!” shrieked Mrs. Coombes, and Mr. Clarence sat petrified, with a
dropping lower jaw.
“Tea,” said Mr. Coombes. “Jol’ thing, tea. Tose-stools, too. Brosher.”
“He’s drunk,” said Jennie, in a weak voice. Never before had she seen
this intense pallor in a drunken man, or such shining, dilated eyes.
Mr. Coombes held out a handful of scarlet agaric to Mr. Clarence. “Jo’
stuff,” said he; “ta’ some.”
At that moment he was genial. Then at the sight of their startled faces
he changed, with the swift transition of insanity, into overbearing
fury. And it seemed as if he had suddenly recalled the quarrel of his
departure. In such a huge voice as Mrs. Coombes had never heard before,
he shouted, “My house. I’m master ’ere. Eat what I give yer!” He bawled
this, as it seemed, without an effort, without a violent gesture,
standing there as motionless as one who whispers, holding out a handful
of fungus.
Clarence approved himself a coward. He could not meet the mad fury in
Coombes’ eyes; he rose to his feet, pushing back his chair, and turned,
stooping. At that Coombes rushed at him. Jennie saw her opportunity,
and, with the ghost of a shriek, made for the door. Mrs. Coombes
followed her. Clarence tried to dodge. Over went the tea-table with a
smash as Coombes clutched him by the collar and tried to thrust the
fungus into his mouth. Clarence was content to leave his collar behind
him, and shot out into the passage with red patches of fly agaric still
adherent to his face. “Shut ’im in!” cried Mrs. Coombes, and would have
closed the door, but her supports deserted her; Jennie saw the shop-door
open, and vanished thereby, locking it behind her, while Clarence went
on hastily into the kitchen. Mr. Coombes came heavily against the door,
and Mrs. Coombes, finding the key was inside, fled upstairs and locked
herself in the spare bedroom.
So the new convert to _joie de vivre_ emerged upon the passage, his
decorations a little scattered, but that respectable hatful of fungi
still under his arm. He hesitated at the three ways, and decided on the
kitchen. Whereupon Clarence, who was fumbling with the key, gave up the
attempt to imprison his host, and fled into the scullery, only to be
captured before he could open the door into the yard. Mr. Clarence is
singularly reticent of the details of what occurred. It seems that Mr.
Coombes’ transitory irritation had vanished again, and he was once more
a genial playfellow. And as there were knives and meat-choppers about,
Clarence very generously resolved to humour him and so avoid anything
tragic. It is beyond dispute that Mr. Coombes played with Mr. Clarence
to his heart’s content; they could not have been more playful and
familiar if they had known each other for years. He insisted gaily on
Clarence trying the fungi, and after a friendly tussle, was smitten with
remorse at the mess he was making of his guest’s face. It also appears
that Clarence was dragged under the sink and his face scrubbed with the
blacking-brush,—he being still resolved to humour the lunatic at any
cost,—and that finally, in a somewhat dishevelled, chipped, and
discoloured condition, he was assisted to his coat and shown out by the
back door, the shopway being barred by Jennie. Mr. Coombes’ wandering
thoughts then turned to Jennie. Jennie had been unable to unfasten the
shop-door, but she shot the bolts against Mr. Coombes’ latch-key, and
remained in possession of the shop for the rest of the evening.
It would appear that Mr. Coombes then returned to the kitchen, still in
pursuit of gaiety, and, albeit a strict Good Templar, drank (or spilt
down the front of the first and only frock-coat) no less than five
bottles of the stout Mrs. Coombes insisted upon having for her health’s
sake. He made cheerful noises by breaking off the necks of the bottles
with several of his wife’s wedding-present dinner-plates, and during the
earlier part of this great drunk he sang divers merry ballads. He cut
his finger rather badly with one of the bottles,—the only bloodshed in
this story,—and what with that, and the systematic convulsion of his
inexperienced physiology by the liquorish brand of Mrs. Coombes’ stout,
it may be the evil of the fungus poison was somehow allayed. But we
prefer to draw a veil over the concluding incidents of this Sunday
afternoon. They ended in the coal cellar, in a deep and healing sleep.
An interval of five years elapsed. Again it was a Sunday afternoon in
October, and again Mr. Coombes walked through the pinewood beyond the
canal. He was still the same dark-eyed, black-moustached little man that
he was at the outset of the story, but his double chin was now scarcely
so illusory as it had been. His overcoat was new, with a velvet lapel,
and a stylish collar with turndown corners, free of any coarse
starchiness, had replaced the original all-round article. His hat was
glossy, his gloves newish—though one finger had split and been carefully
mended. And a casual observer would have noticed about him a certain
rectitude of bearing, a certain erectness of head that marks the man who
thinks well of himself. He was a master now, with three assistants.
Beside him walked a larger sunburnt parody of himself, his brother Tom,
just back from Australia. They were recapitulating their early
struggles, and Mr. Coombes had just been making a financial statement.
“It’s a very nice little business, Jim,” said brother Tom. “In these
days of competition, you’re jolly lucky to have worked it up so. And
you’re jolly lucky, too, to have a wife who’s willing to help like yours
does.”
“Between ourselves,” said Mr. Coombes, “it wasn’t always so. It wasn’t
always like this. To begin with, the missus was a bit giddy. Girls are
funny creatures.”
“Dear me!”
“Yes. You’d hardly think it, but she was downright extravagant, and
always having slaps at me. I was a bit too easy and loving, and all
that, and she thought the whole blessed show was run for her. Turned the
’ouse into a regular caravansary, always having her relations and girls
from business in, and their chaps. Comic songs a’ Sunday, it was getting
to, and driving trade away. And she was making eyes at the chaps, too! I
tell you, Tom, the place wasn’t my own.”
“Shouldn’t ’a’ thought it.”
“It was so. Well—I reasoned with her. I said, ‘I ain’t a duke, to keep a
wife like a pet animal. I married you for ’elp and company.’ I said,
‘You got to ’elp and pull the business through.’ She would n’t ’ear of
it. ‘Very well,’ I says; ‘I’m a mild man till I’m roused,’ I says, ‘and
it’s getting to that.’ But she wouldn’t ’ear of no warnings.”
“Well?”
“It’s the way with women. She didn’t think I ’ad it in me to be roused.
Women of her sort (between ourselves, Tom) don’t respect a man until
they’re a bit afraid of him. So I just broke out to show her. In comes a
girl named Jennie, that used to work with her, and her chap. We ’ad a
bit of a row, and I came out ’ere—it was just such another day as
this—and I thought it all out. Then I went back and pitched into them.”
“You did?”
“I did. I was mad, I can tell you. I wasn’t going to ’it ’er, if I could
’elp it, so I went back and licked into this chap, just to show ’er what
I could do. ’E was a big chap, too. Well, I chucked him, and smashed
things about, and gave ’er a scaring, and she ran up and locked ’erself
into the spare room.”
“Well?”
“That’s all. I says to ’er the next morning, ‘Now you know,’ I says,
‘what I’m like when I’m roused.’ And I didn’t ’ave to say anything
more.”
“And you’ve been happy ever after, eh?”
“So to speak. There’s nothing like putting your foot down with them. If
it ’adn’t been for that afternoon I should ’a’ been tramping the roads
now, and she’d ’a’ been grumbling at me, and all her family grumbling
for bringing her to poverty—I know their little ways. But we’re all
right now. And it’s a very decent little business, as you say.”
They proceed on their way meditatively. “Women are funny creatures,”
said brother Tom.
“They want a firm hand,” says Coombes.
“What a lot of these funguses there are about here!” remarked brother
Tom, presently. “I can’t see what use they are in the world.”
Mr. Coombes looked. “I dessay they’re sent for some wise purpose,” said
Mr. Coombes.
And that was as much thanks as the purple pileus ever got for maddening
this absurd little man to the pitch of decisive action, and so altering
the whole course of his life.