II

It might have been a falling coal that woke him up. Such was the

innocent Croucher's first impression. But in that case it was nothing

less than a shower of coals, a gentle but continuous downpour, and they

fell with a curiously crisp and metallic tinkle. Moreover, the sound

was not from the fire after all, but apparently from the window on the

opposite side of the room.

Croucher lay listening until his quickened senses could no longer be

deceived. Somebody was at his window, the dormer window that anybody

could get at over the leads, that ought to have been securely barred but

wasn't, as he suddenly remembered with aggrieved dismay. He had himself

considered that unprotected window and those conducive leads, in one of

his last waking moments, as a not impossible solution of the whisky

problem.

But this was different; this was awful; this was a case for alarming the

house without scruple or delay. It should have been a great moment for a

bit of an expert, who had once served the humane equivalent of seven

years for an ambitious burglary of his own; but the defect of character

which had spelled failure on that occasion, when an elderly householder

had held him up with an unloaded revolver, rendered Mr. Croucher

incapable of appreciating the present situation as it deserved. He was

far too shaken to think of the former affair, or to feel for a moment

like a 'busman on his proverbial holiday or an actor at the front of the

house. He did feel bitterly indignant that a patient in a nursing home

should be exposed to such terrors by night; and he had got as far as his

elbow toward a display of spirit (and incipient virtue) when the catch

flew back with as much noise as he might have made himself. Before more

could happen, Mr. Croucher had relapsed upon his pillow with a

stentorian snore.

Then a sash went up too slowly, limbs crossed the sill and felt the

floor with excessive caution, and for a little lifetime Alfred Croucher

suffered more exquisitely than toward the end in the condemned cell. The

monster was leaning over him, breathing hotly in his face, all but

touching his frozen skin.

"Alfie!" said a blessed voice, as a tiny light struck through the

compressed eyelids. "Alfie, it's me!"

And once more Alfred Croucher was a man and a liar. "Shoddy!" he croaked

with a sepulchral sob. "An' me asleep an' dreamin' like a bloomin'

babby! Why, wot the 'ell you doin' 'ere, Shod?"

"Come to see you, old son," said Shoddy. "But it's more like me arskin'

what _you're_ up to in a 'ouse like this?"

"'Avin the time o' me life!" whispered the excited patient. "Livin' like

a fightin' cock, on the fat o' the teemin' land, at some ruddy old

josser's expense!"

And he poured into the still adjacent ear the true fairy tale of his

first day's freedom, from his introduction to Doctor Dollar in the

precincts of that very jail which was to have been his place of

execution and obscene sepulcher.

"I know. I seen you come out with him," said Shoddy, "an' drive off in

yer car like a hairy lord. I was there with a taxi meself----"

"There to meet me, Shod?"

"That's it. That's 'ow I tracked you to this 'ere 'ouse. The room took

more findin'; but there's an old pal o' mine a shover in the mews. 'E

showed me the back o' the 'ouse, an' blowed if I didn't spot yer at yer

winder first go off!"

"That must've been early on, old man? I bin in bed all day. Oh, such a

bed, Shoddy! I'm goin' to sleep me 'ead into a pulp afore I leave it."

"You ain't," said Shoddy firmly. "You're comin' along o' me, Alfie.

That's why I'm 'ere."

"Not me," replied Alfie, with equal firmness. "I know w'en I'm well

off--and it's time I was."

"I'm wiv yer there!" Shoddy nodded in adroit sympathy; he had kept his

electric lamp burning all the time; and an extra prominence of eye and

cheek-bone, a looseness of lip and a flickering glance, were not

inarticulate in the chastened countenance of his friend. "It must've

been 'ell, Alfie, real, old red-'ot 'ell!"

"And all for wot I never done," he was reminded with some stiffness.

"That's it," the other agreed, with perfunctory promptitude. "But that's

exactly why I'm 'ere, Alfie. You didn't think I done a job like this for

the sake o' tikin' 'old o' yer 'and, didger? It's just because it seems

you didn't commit yerself, Alfie, that I'd got to see yer by 'ook or

crook before the day was out."

"Where's the fire?" inquired Alfie, idiomatically; but his professional

friend, like other artists in narration, and all givers of real news,

was not going to surrender the bone of the situation until his audience

sat up and begged for it.

Mr. Croucher literally did sit up, while the exasperating Shoddy

interrupted himself to make a stealthy tour of the room, in the course

of which his electric torch illumined the comfortably bolted door, and

the delectable box of Upmanns. To one of these he helped himself without

permission, but a brace were in blast before he resumed his position on

the bed.

"The fire?" said he, as though seconds and not minutes had elapsed since

the cryptic question. "There's no fire anywhere as I know of--not

to-night--but there soon may be, that's why I want you out o' this. If

you didn't commit yourself, Alfie, don't you see as somebody else must

'ave done?"

"Oh, bring it up!" cried Croucher under his breath.

"Well, if you didn't stiffen that copper on the night o' the sufferygite

disturbance--an' we know you didn't--then somebody else did!"

"You don't mean to tell me you know who did?"

There had been a tense though tiny pause; there was another while Shoddy

changed the torch to his right hand, and blew a cloud over the head of

his now recumbent companion.

"I know what everybody says, Alfie."

"More than their prayers, I'll bet, like they did before. Wot do they

say?"

"One o' the sufferygites----"

"Corpsed the copper?"

"That's it, old man."

"And I never thought of it!"

"It bears some thinkin' about, don't it?" said Shoddy. "Why, you're

trem'lin' like a blessed leaf!"

"I should think I was trem'lin'! So would you if you'd been through wot

I been ... Shod!"

"Yuss, Alfie?"

"I see the 'ole blessed thing!"

"I thought you would."

"It was 'er wot broke the jooler's winder for me!"

"That's wot they say."

"They? Who?"

"Lots o' people. I 'eard it down some mews: some o' the pipers 'ave

'inted at it. Topham's in fair 'ot water all round; they say 'e's 'ushed

it up because she's in serciety."

"Wot's 'er nime, Shod?"

"Lidy Moyle--Lidy Vera Moyle, I think it is. And 'ere's another thing, a

thing that I was forgettin'."

"Out with it."

"I see 'er come 'ere this afternoon, whilst I was watchin' the 'ouse in

case you come out."

"My Gawd, Shoddy! Let me sit up. I can't breathe lyin' down."

"She 'ad some flowers wiv 'er," said Shoddy, pursuing his reminiscences.

"Looks as though she's got a friend in the 'ome."

"I'm the friend," said Mr. Croucher grimly. "Take and run yer light over

that wash-stand; the guv'nor brought 'em up 'isself wiv these 'ere

smokes."

"Roses, in the month o' March!" murmured Shoddy, as a bowl of beauties

filled the disk of light; "'ot'ouse flowers for little Alfie! Why, the

girl's fair struck on you, cully!"

"I'll strike 'er!" said Alfie, through teeth that chattered with

emotion. "I very near 'anged for the little biter, and don't you forget

it!"

"Not me," said Shoddy, steering for the bed with his headlights of

white-hot filament and red-hot cigar. "That's wot brought me 'ere

through thick and thin."

"So she's the great unknown!" said Croucher more than once, but not

twice in the same tone. "So it was 'er, was it?" he inquired as often,

until Shoddy insisted on a hearing.

"Don't I keep tellin' yer?" said Shoddy. "That's wot brings me, at the

gaudiest risks you ever see--only to 'ear you gas! Can't you listen for

a change? There's a big thing on if you've guts enough for the job."

It was a simple thing, however, like most big things; the projector had

it at his finger-ends; and in a very few minutes Mr. Croucher was

considering a complete, crude, and yet eminently practical proposition.

"There's money in it," he was forced to admit, "if there ain't the big

money you flatter yerself. But I believe she thinks o' givin' me a start

in life any'ow."

"This'd be a start an' a finish, Alfie! Besides, it'd be your revenge;

don't you forget wot you've been through," urged the other.

"Catch me!" said Croucher, eagerly. "But--don'cher see? I been through

so much that I was lookin' forward to dossin' down 'ere a bit. I ain't

the man I was. It's wot I need. Where's the fire, as I said afore? The

gal won't run away."

"That's just wot she will, Alfie; goin' abroad any day--an' might get

married any day, a piece like 'er. Then you might find it more of a job.

There's another 'old we've got, an' might lose any old day."

The other hold appealed with peculiar power to the character and

temperament of Alfred Croucher, and not less strongly to a certain

sagacity which added more to his equipment. But he had never been quite

so comfortable in his life; comfort had never been so decidedly his due;

and the substance of present luxury (with a fresh start in the near

future) was not lightly to be exchanged for a gold-mine, with all a

gold-mine's gambling chances, including the proverbial optimism of

prospectors.

The discussion ended in a compromise and the withdrawal of Shoddy by the

catlike ways and means of his arrival. But he did not depart without

pointing, through the open window and a forest of chimney-stacks, to a

lighted but uncurtained square on a lower level. And thither, at certain

appointed hours, the patient might have been caught peeping, or even in

the act of rude and furtive signals, for several days to come.

Handled as it deserves, the tale of those days would make a

psychological chapter of dual interest, and for reasons that may yet

appear. But for the moment Alfred Croucher holds the stage, and

soliloquies are out of vogue. Yet even his objective life had points of

interest. He slept less than he had planned to sleep, but read more than

he had ever read in all his life; and his reading, if not a sign of

grace, was at least a straw that showed the way the wind might have

blown but for the intrusive Shoddy.

Out of the doctor's little typewritten list, the patient in the

top-floor-back began by choosing _For the Term of His Natural Life_. It

held him--with a tortured brow that sometimes glistened. When the book

was finished, he was advised that _It Is Never Too Late to Mend_ was a

better thing of the same kind; "In spite of its name," added Dollar, in

studied disparagement. Croucher took the hint, and was soon breathing as

hard as he had done before he knew that Shoddy was Shoddy; was heard

blaspheming over Hawes in his solitude, and left wondering what Tom

Robinson's creator would have made of Alfred Croucher. Something of that

speculation found its way into words, with the return of the book, and

was the cause of lengthier visitations from the doctor, whose eye began

to brighten when it fell on Croucher, as that of a man put on his mettle

after all.

And then one morning he came in with a blue review and a new long poem,

which might have hurt but might have helped; only it had no chance of

doing either, because the top back room was empty of Alfred Croucher,

who had walked out of the house in the loudest of his brand-new clothes.