cured Mrs. Yethill of a tendency toward jealousy, of the vague and
indiscriminating kind? The prescription consisted in posting to himself
letters highly scented and addressed in a variety of feminine scrawls.
Yethill was good at imitating handwriting!--and he absented himself
from the domestic hearth for several days together whenever there was
a recurrence of the symptoms. The method wrought a wonderful cure; but
Mrs. Yethill began to grow elderly from about this period. You could
hardly have called her a young woman, when the baby came, and brought
his mother’s lost youth back to her, clenched in one pudgy hand. The
vanished roses fluttered back and perched upon her thin cheekbones
again. She was heard to laugh. Her husband, who secretly adored her,
and who had continued to stick to the system more from a desire for
_her_ glorification than his own, feared a retrogression. So he thought
out a new torture or two, and put them into active application. He
sneered at the puerilities of nursery talk. He downcried the beauty
and attainments of the baby when she praised them. He pooh-poohed her
motherly fears, when the ailments inseparable from the joyous period
of infancy overtook his heir. This was the last straw laid upon Mrs.
Yethill’s aching shoulders. The downfall of the great system followed.
In this way. His wife came into his workshop one morning. The workshop
was forbidden ground, and Yethill dropped the negative he was
developing, and turned to stare. He saw that she was very pale, and
that her lips were bitten in. He heard her say that there was something
the matter with baby, and she wanted the doctor.
Solely in the interests of his wife whom he esteemed above all living
women, Yethill refused to allow the doctor to be sent for. The child
was as right as a trivet. Women were always worrying. She was to get
away with her nonsense, and leave him in peace. With more to the same
effect. She drooped her head, and went away obediently, only to return
in half an hour, with another version of the same prayer upon her lips.
Would he--would he come and look for himself? Yethill was thoroughly
annoyed. Yethill refused. Yethill went on, stubbornly, dabbling with
his negatives, until right from overhead--baby’s nursery was above the
workshop--Yethill had never heard a woman scream like that before....
Something like an ice-bolt shot down his spine. He dashed up to the
nursery, and looked in. The sight he saw there sent him tearing across
the Common, a hatless, coatless man, to the Doctor’s house.
When the Doctor came he said he could be of no use; he ought to have
been called in an hour ago. And Yethill, hearing this fiat, and meeting
his wife’s eyes across the table, felt the system totter to its
foundations.
He found himself wondering at her for taking baby’s end so quietly; but
he had schooled her to endure silently. There were no tears--he had
always jeered at tears. The Doctor took him aside before he left.
“You must treat your wife with kindness--and consideration, Yethill,”
said the Doctor, “or I won’t answer for the consequences!”
As if Yethill needed to be told to be kind or considerate! As if
Yethill had never loved--did not love--the late Miss Sallis! He planned
a revelation for her without delay. He would take her in his arms; kiss
her, and tell her that her time of trial was overpast; give her her
meed of praise for her heroism, her meed of sympathy for her grief--and
his. And he would own that he had made a mistake in the matter of baby
deceased. And she would forgive--as she always had forgiven.
As he decided this, she came into the room. She was quite composed. She
carried something behind her. She spoke to him very quietly in a dull,
strange, level voice--so strange a voice that, just as he was about to
open his arms and say, “Annie!” in the voice he had been saving up for
the Day of Revelation, the gesture and the word wouldn’t come.
“Tom,” said Mrs. Yethill, “what should you say if I told you that I had
made up my mind to kill myself?”
She brought her hand from behind her; it held one of Yethill’s
revolvers. She had been very much afraid of these lethal instruments
in the early days of her marriage, but under the system had learned to
clean them, and even drew the cartridges. But the thing she held wasn’t
loaded, Yethill was quite sure of that. It sealed up the fountain of
his admiring tenderness to have her treat him to commonplace, vulgar
heroics. It put her out of drawing, and Yethill out of temper.
She asked again:
“What would you say if I told you I mean to kill myself?”
Yethill ran his armor-plated head against the last wall. He answered
brutally:
“I should tell you, if you were such a fool as to threaten such a
thing, to do it, and have done with it!”
She said, “Very well!”--and did it.
* * * * *
When people came running in, they found something--perhaps it was the
system--scattered on the walls, on the floor, everywhere. And Yethill
was howling, and beating his seven-inch skull against heavy pieces of
furniture, and calling on Annie to come back. But she had escaped, and
was in no hurry; and he hadn’t the pluck to follow her out of the world
and apologize.
“Was she mad?” somebody asked the Doctor; and the Doctor said:
“No; but she might have become so if she had lived much longer with a
lunatic!”
“You mean----?”
“I mean,” said the Doctor, “that Yethill has been suffering from
dementia for years. I mean that he will see the inside of a Lunatic
Asylum in six months from date.”
But the Doctor was wrong. He did--in three!
OBSESSED
Andrew Fenn is known to the world as an art critic and essayist of
unerring instinct and exquisite refinement, a writer of charming _vers
de société_, and teller of tales supposedly designed for children, but
in reality more appreciated by children of a larger growth. He is much
sought after, but little to be found, unless one has the _entrée_ to
his pleasant, roomy old house in Church Street, Chelsea, where he lives
in the midst of his library--the whole house is a library--his etchings
and Japanese curios. He is less of a traveler than he used to be;
getting old, he says, and lazy, content with old friends, soothed by
old pipes, fortified by old wine--he has a supreme _goût_ in wines--and
nourished by excellent cookery.
His household staff consists but of an elderly valet and butler, and a
housekeeper-cook. She has been in her master’s service twenty years,
and is beginning to grow handsome, Andrew is wont to say. Certainly,
if her master speaks the truth, she must have been, when comparatively
young, extraordinarily unlovely, this most excellent of women. Even now
she infallibly reminds the casual beholder of an antique ecclesiastical
gargoyle much worn by weather. Her name is Ladds. She has never been
married, but respect for the position of authority she occupies in
Andrew’s household universally accords her brevet rank. She might have
occupied another, and more important position, if----
“Yes,” Andrew says, when he is disposed to tell the story--and he
often does tell it to intimate friends, leaning back on the library
divan, after a cosy dinner, holding his gray beard in one big fist,
still brown with tropical sunshine--“Ladds is an excellent creature.
She might have married me, might Ladds!”
We invariably chorus astonishment. Then some of Ladds’ famous coffee
comes in, and Andrew gets up to hunt for precious liquors, and, having
found them, continues:
“I came _very_ near marrying her--once.”
Somebody growls: “Good job you pulled up in time!”
Andrew rounds on the somebody. “_I_ didn’t pull up. _She_ did. Refused
me!”
There is a general howl.
“I am telling you men the truth,” Andrew says, pulling the gray beard.
“Fifteen years ago I was infatuated with that woman. She possessed my
every thought; she dominated me, like----”
“Like a nightmare!”
“Apposite illustration,” says Andrew, nodding. “_Like_ a nightmare.
It was just about the time I published my book, _Studies of the Human
Grotesque in Art, Ancient and Modern_. You remember, some of you, I
was keen on the subject--had been for years. And I was a traveler
and collector in those days: I’d got together a wonderful show of
illustrative subjects. You won’t see many of ’em now. I gave them to
the Smoketown Mechanical Institute afterward.”
He pulls at his long cherrystick, and blows a cloud of Latakia, and
goes on:
“I’d the whole house full. Peruvian idols, Aztec picture writings,
Polynesian and Maori war masks; Chinese and Japanese, Burmese and
Abyssinian, Hindu and Persian monstrosities of every kind; Egyptian,
Carthaginian, Babylonian, Druidical, Gothic---- Well, well! I’m
thoroughgoing, and when I do a thing I do it thoroughly. It’s enough to
say that every variety of libel upon the human face and form that human
ingenuity or depravity has ever perpetrated, I’d carefully collected
and brought together here.”
He waves his hand, with a curious cabalistical ring upon it that once
belonged, it is said, to Eliphas Lévi, who had it from Albertus Magnus.
But this may be mere report.
“I worked hard, and drank a great deal of coffee,” says Andrew, “so
much that my old housekeeper began to be afraid something mysterious
was the matter with me. She expostulated at last, and I explained.
Then she got interested in the book; she was an intelligent woman,
poor dear old soul, and she got specially interested in that section
of the work which deals with the Grotesque in Nature. Everything in
humanity that is purely grotesque--not deformed, unnatural, outrageous,
but purely quaint and bizarre--I piled into those chapters. The work
is illustrative, you know, as well as descriptive, and the queer
photographs and engravings that scientific friends had contributed to
this particular portion of it absolutely fascinated the dear old lady.
“‘To be sure, Master Andrew’ (she had known me from my knickerbocker
and peg-top days), ‘but them are queer folk. And, my heart alive!’--she
uttered a sharp scream--‘if that picture isn’t the exact moral of Jane
Ladds!’
“I glanced over her shoulder. It _was_ a portrait of Jane, certainly--a
rude little wood cut of the sixteenth century, purporting to be a
portrait of a female jester, attached, in her diverting capacity, to
the Court of Mary Tudor, during the latter part of her reign, and
mentioned by name in some of the accounts of the Royal household as
‘Jeanne la Folle.’ Unless the long-dead delineator of her vanished
charms has shamefully belied them, Jeanne must have been one of the
most grotesquely hideous specimens of womanhood that ever existed.
Judge, then, whether the exclamation of my housekeeper awakened my
interest, excited my curiosity, or left me apathetic and unmoved!”
We are silent. Our interest, our curiosity, are urging us to hurry on
the conclusion of Andrew’s story.
“You may suppose that I bombarded my housekeeper with questions. What?
Did a living counterpart of the sixteenth-century joculatrix exist
in the nineteenth? What was her station in life? Where was she to be
found? In reply, I elicited the fact that Jane Ladds was a countrywoman
of my own, the daughter of a wheelwright living in the village of
Wickham, in Dorsetshire, where I myself had first seen the light. Jane
was some half dozen years my junior, it appeared. My mother had once
taken her into her service as under-scullerymaid, but in a casual
encounter with the last new baby (my brother Robert, now commanding
his battery of the Royal Horse Artillery at Jelalabad), Jane’s
facial eccentricities had produced such a marked effect (resulting
in convulsions) that the unfortunate _protégée_ had been hastily
dismissed. Since when she had kept house for her father, and was
probably keeping it still; there not being, said my housekeeper, the
slightest human probability that any potential husband would endeavor
to interfere with the wheelwright’s domestic arrangements.” There comes
a twinkle into Andrew’s brown eyes.
“‘No man would be mad enough!’ the old lady said. Judge of her surprise
when I turned upon her and ordered her to write--write at once to
Dorsetshire, ascertain whether Jane was still alive, still available,
willing to take service, under an old acquaintance, in a bachelor’s
London establishment? Stunned as she was, my housekeeper obeyed. The
wages I instructed her to offer were good. An answering letter arrived
within the space of a week, announcing Jane Ladds’ willingness to
accept the offered situation. The letter was nicely written. I read and
reread it with morbid excitement. I looked forward to the day of the
writer’s arrival with an excitement more morbid still. At last the day
came, and the woman....”
We inspire deep breaths, and unanimously cry, “Go on!”
“My writing table was piled high with books--I couldn’t see her until
she came round the corner,” says Andrew, “and stood by my chair. She
wore her Sunday clothes--Wickham taste inclines to garments of many
colors. In silence I contemplated one of the finest examples of the
Animated Grotesque it had ever been my fortune to look upon. Her hair
was then red--the brightest red. Her nose was not so much a nose as a
pimple. Her mouth was the oddest of buttons. Her forehead a ponderous
coffer of bone, overhanging and overshadowing the other features.
She was lengthy of arm, short of leg, dumpy of figure. She did not
walk--she waddled; she did not sit--she squatted. Her smile was a
gash, her curtsy the bob of an elder-pith puppet. She was, as she is
now, unique. You are all familiar with her appearance. Search your
memories for the moment when that appearance dawned upon you first,
intensify your surprise, quadruple your sensations of delight--add
to these, imagine yourself dominated by a fascination, weird,
strange--inexplicable. In a word----”
Andrew’s pipe is out; he is gesticulating excitedly, and his eyes have
an odd gleam under his shaggy brows.
“She took possession of me. I had her constantly about me. She brought
me everything I wanted. I was never tired of gloating over my new-found
treasure. Every accent of her voice, every odd contortion of her
features, every awkward movement of her body was a fresh revelation to
me. All this while I was working at my book. It was said afterward, in
the newspapers, that the entire work, especially the closing chapters
on the Human Grotesque, had been written in a fever of enthusiasm. The
reviewer never knew how rightly he had guessed. Some of the theories
I propounded and proved were curious. That Ugliness is in reality the
highest form of Beauty--beauty in the abstract--was one of the mildest.
I believed it when I wrote it; for I was madly, passionately infatuated
with the ugliest woman I had ever seen--my parlor maid, Jane Ladds!”
We hang upon his words so that our pipes go out, and our whisky and
sodas stand untasted at our elbows.
“Yes,” says Andrew, drawing a long, hard breath, “she possessed my
thoughts--dominated me--waking and sleeping. I had the queerest of
dreams, in which, with a joy that was anguish, a rapture that was
horror, I saw myself attending crowded assemblies with my wife,
Jane Fenn, _née_ Ladds, upon my arm. She wore my mother’s diamonds,
a _décolletée_ gown from Worth’s; and as we moved along together,
sibilant whispers sounded in my ears, and astonished eyes said as
plainly, ‘_What_ an ugly woman!’
“Then would come other visions ... Jane at the head of my table ...
Jane rocking the cradle of our eldest born--an infant who strongly
resembled his mother ... Jane here, Jane there--Jane everywhere!... My
nerves, you will guess, must have been in a very queer state.
“All the time Jane Ladds would be deftly moving about me, dusting
my books and curios, or going on with her sewing, or, to the utter
stupefaction of my housekeeper, I had issued orders that she should sit
in the window, where my glance might dwell upon her whenever I lifted
my head from my work. Late, late into the small hours, when the sky
began to gray toward the dawning, and the ink in my stand got low, she
used to keep me company. Not the faintest shadow of impropriety could
attach to the association in any sane mind. My housekeeper thought it
queer, but nothing more.
“She had--she has--very large, very rough, very red hands. I used to
imagine myself kissing one of those hands when I should ask her to
be my wife, and conjure up the grotesque smile of shy delight with
which she would accept the unheard-of honor. The temptation to snatch
and kiss that awful hand became so powerful that it cost me more
effort than I can explain to resist its ceaseless promptings. And I
would chuckle as I looked at it, and at the bizarre countenance that
bent over the stocking that was in process of being darned--Jane’s
peculiar, shuffling gait seemed to have a peculiarly wearing effect
on stockings--and wonder, _if she knew_, how she would look, what she
would say? Then she would thread her needle, or bite the end of her
worsted.... That hand! that hand! The struggle between the masterful
impulse to seize and kiss it, and the shuddering desire not to do
anything of the kind, would, upon these occasions, be perfectly
indescribable. And--one day--the very day that saw the completion of my
book--I yielded!”
“Yes?” we cry, interrogatively. All our eyes are rounded, all our
mouths wide open.
“She saw some of my papers flutter to the carpet as I pushed back my
chair,” Andrew continues, “and obligingly crossed the room, stooped
and gathered them up. A kind of mist came over my eyes, and when it
cleared away, she was there--by my side--holding the written sheets out
to me. That hand! I must--I must! Before the poor creature could hazard
a guess at my intentions, I seized it--I kissed it--with a resounding
smack. I cried deliriously, ‘Jane, will you be my wife? I adore you,
Jane!’”
“And what did she do? What did she say?...”
“I’m coming to that! She drew away from me, and turned very white,
and her poor red hands trembled, and her little button features
twitched absurdly with the effort she made to keep from crying. But,
as I seized her hands, and went on with my wild asseverations and
protestations--Heaven only knows what I said!--the absurdity of the
whole thing came on her, and she burst out laughing wildly. Then I
caught the infection, and followed suit. Once I began, I couldn’t
stop. I was shaken like a rag in the wind--torn, possessed by seven
devils of risibility. But I went on raging, all through it, that she
must marry me! At last she tore herself away, and ran out of the
room, breathlessly to burst upon my housekeeper with the information
that ‘Master was mad, and wanted the doctor.’ And she was not far
wrong, for by the time he came I was fit for nothing but to be carried
to bed. Twenty-four hours later I was raving in brain fever. Seven
weeks that red-hot torture lasted, and then I came to myself, and
found that through all the delirium and fever I had been patiently,
uncomplainingly, tenderly nursed by poor Jane....”
Andrew’s voice grows a little husky as he nears the finish.
“Well, when I was convalescent, and knew that I owed my life to her
devotion, it seemed to me that only one reparation was possible for the
wrong I had done Jane. It was a hard thing to do--the madness being
over--the morbid impulse that had swayed me being no longer in the
ascendant. But I did it! You may have noticed”--he clears his husky
throat--“that is, those among you who have spoken to Ladds--_that
she has a singularly sweet voice_--a voice curiously out of keeping
with her personality. Well, when she thanked me for my ‘kindness’
and--refused me, I might, supposing my eyes had been shut, have fancied
that I was listening to a beautiful woman. She had been ‘marked out
by the Lord’ to lead a lonely life, she said. When she was a young
girl it used to make her cry when the lads went by _her_, ‘wi’ their
vaices turned away,’ and the girls laughed when she put on a ribbon or
a flower. But she got used to it; and she quite understood that I was
trying to make up--like a gentleman as I was;--(a mighty poor kind of
gentleman, I felt)--‘for summat as I’d said when I didn’t know what I
was a-saying!’ Crazy people had queer ideas, and the village ‘softy’
had once taken it into his head that he was in love with Jane.... And
she thanked me for sticking to my word now that I was well, and she’d
be my faithful servant always and for ever, Amen! Years have passed
since then.... Well, she has kept her word. I hope, when the end of
everything comes for me, that honest, tender, devoted heart will be
beating by my pillow. I hope----”
Andrew breaks off abruptly, and gets up and wishes us all good night.
A VANISHED HAND
“_Why_,” Daymond wrote, “_do you imagine that I shall despise you for
this confession? None but a whole-souled, high-hearted woman could have
made it! You have said you love me, frankly; and I say in return that
had the fountains of my heart not been hopelessly dried up at their
sources, they must have sprung forth gladly at such words from you. But
the passion of love, dear friend, it is for me no more to know; and I
hold you in too warm regard to offer you, in exchange for shekels of
pure Ophir gold, a defaced and worthless coinage!”_
As Daymond penned the closing words of the sentence, the last rays of
the smoky-red London sunset were withdrawn. Only a little while ago
he had replenished the fire with fresh logs; but they were damp, and
charred slowly, giving forth no pleasant flame. He struck a match and
lighted a taper that stood upon his writing table. It created a feeble
oasis of yellow radiance upon the darkness of the great studio, and
the shadow of Daymond’s head and shoulders bending above it, was cast
upward in gigantesque caricature upon the skylight, reduced to frosty
white opacity by a burden of March snow.
Daymond poised the drying pen in white, well-kept fingers, and read
over what he had written. Underlying all the elegance of well-modeled
phrases was the sheer brutality of rejection, definitely expressed. His
finely strung mental organization revolted painfully at the imperative
necessity of being cruel.
“She asks for bread,” he cried aloud, “and I am giving her a stone!”
The lofty walls and domed roof of his workshop gave back the words to
him, and his sensitive ear noted the theatrical twang of the echo. Yet
the pang of remorse that had moved him to speech was quite genuine.
“_You have heard my story_,” he wrote on.
A great many people had heard it, and had been bored by it; but,
sensitive as Daymond’s perceptions were, he was not alive to this fact.
“_Seventeen years ago, while I was still a student dreaming of fame
in a draughty Paris studio, I met the woman who was destined--I felt
it then as I know it now--to be the one love of my life. She was an
American, a little older than myself. She was divinely beautiful to
me--I hardly know whether she was really so or not. We gave up all,
each for each. She left husband, home, friends, to devote her life to
me. I_----”
He paused, trying to sum up the list of his own sacrifices, and
ultimately left the break, as potent to express much, and went on:
“_Guilty as I suppose we were, we were happy together--how happy I dare
not even recall. Twenty-four months our life together lasted, and then
came the end. It was the cholera year in Paris; the year which brought
me my first foretaste of success in Art, robbed me of all joy in
life.... She died. Horribly! suddenly! And the best of me lies buried
in her grave!_”