II

Over against the back windows of a nice new street of tall red houses,

beyond the high red wall enclosing their common strip of shrubs and

gravel, runs a humbler row of windows in connection with a mews. In one

you may still catch a coachman shaving for the box, but more likely a

chauffeur's lady engrossed in her novelette; and on the next sill are

pots of geraniums, while the next but one keeps the evening's kippers

nice and fresh. Most of the windows have muslin curtains, and in some

the lights are on all night. Last October there was only one without any

kind of covering, except a newspaper stuck across a broken pane.

It was the scandal of the row; a battered billycock lay rotting on the

roof above; strange fragments of song were always liable to burst from

within, as of a gentleman roistering in his sleep, and at times a

bristly countenance would roll red eyes over the backs of the red

houses, beginning and ending with the flats at the bottom of the street.

If a dark handsome face appeared simultaneously at a top flat window,

the chances were that both would vanish, but it would have been

difficult to detect the exchange of actual signals.

On the return of Alfred Croucher, shaven and collared, from the audience

in Welbeck Street, he went so far as to wink and wave from the window

that disgraced the mews to the one that crowned the flats. His rolling

eyes still had their whites about them; his wrists were still in

unaccustomed cuffs; and Mostyn Scarth was at his elbow before it could

be lifted with the bottle brought in to celebrate the occasion.

"Just one!" said Croucher, pitching his mongrel whine in the key of

comic extravaganza. "I deserve all ten fingers for what I got to tell

yer!"

"Not a drop, my Lazarus!" said Scarth. "When do you move in?"

"To-day--now."

"You shall have the whole bottle when you come out. You may want it.

What about that stamped note-paper?"

"Couldn't lay 'ands on a scrap."

"Hadn't you the waiting-room to yourself?"

"My witin'-room was the street, gov'nor."

"Well, I must have a sheet or two as soon as you can stick them in the

post; three or four would be safer, and at least a couple of his

envelopes, in case of accidents. Now tell me everything that happened;

and perhaps you _shall_ have a drink before you go."

There was no light that night in the window with the broken pane pasted

over with newspaper; next day it was mended properly, and the sodden

billycock removed from the roof before Alfred Croucher awoke from his

innocent and protracted slumbers in the crime doctor's patent chamber of

perpetual peace.

His first impression was that some mysterious miracle had been performed

expressly for his behoof. He must have been drunk to have slept so

sound, and yet he had none of the disagreeable sensations which a long

experience associated with the ordinary orgy. He felt profoundly rested

and refreshed; never had he lain in so luxurious a bed; and the air was

faintly scented, subtly soothing, and there was plenty of it, yet not a

sound except the gentle stirring of his own breathing body between the

sheets. His palate was clean and cool beyond belief. He opened his eyes,

and saw a plain room sharp as crystal to the sight: not the bronze

bedchamber that he suddenly remembered, but the same place steeped in

purest sunshine, and ten thousand times fairer for the change.

Then he knew where he was, and precisely why he was there; and it was

the mental equivalent of what Mr. Croucher called "'ot coppers," only

this made him hot all over. He might have been in a fever; he hoped

violently that he was. He remembered his cough, and began to practise

it. A determined paroxysm revived his spirits; he was not fit to get up,

and other people would just have to wait until he was, and serve 'em

jolly well right!

Other people couldn't get at him there; yet one other person could, and

did, to Mr. Croucher's mingled discomfort and relief. The doctor duly

kept him in bed; but there was too much of the doctor; and yet the time

hung heaviest when he was not there, and there were heavier burdens even

than the time. The patient had lost his liking for a book. Conversation

was more to his taste this time. His mind would wander when he read. It

would follow the doctor down-stairs to his consulting-room, or across

the landing to the room in which he slept. The man haunted him; it was

better to have him there in the flesh, than to see him as Croucher

continually saw him when he was not there at all.

Better, again, to talk of some things than to dwell on them night and

day, especially when those subjects seemed to possess an equally awful

fascination for the crime doctor. Of course, they were in his line; that

accounted for the doctor's morbid taste, and the patient's most terrible

experience was quite enough to account for his. There was nothing

unnatural in their talks. They had the thing in common, only from

opposite poles of experience, which enormously enhanced the mutual

interest. If there was one subject they were bound to have discussed,

with no false delicacy on either side, each being what he was, it was

the subject of the sixth commandment.

"Of course you think about it," said Dollar, dismissing an incoherent

excuse on the second day. "It must haunt you; it's only natural that it

should. All I should like you to do, since you never committed one, and

are the last man in the world to commit one now, is to take a rather

lighter view of that particular misdeed."

"A lighter view!" repeated Croucher, goggling; and he added with a

shuddering inconsequence: "The lor o' the land don't make light of it!"

"Literature has been known to," rejoined the doctor, with as little

apparent point. "But you are not the reader you were last year;

otherwise there's a little thing, _On Murder Considered as One of the

Fine Arts_, that I should like to lend you."

"One o' the 'ow much?" said Mr. Croucher, uncertain whether to grin, or

frown, and meanwhile glaring more than he supposed.

Dollar went for the book, and read a few extracts aloud. They appeared

to afford him extraordinary enjoyment; they were altogether over the

bullet head on the pillow. Croucher could only gather that some people

seemed to imagine it was good sport to commit a murder. Funny fools! Let

them try a fortnight in the condemned cell, for one they never did

commit, and see how they took to that!

But he could understand them that knew nothing about it writing a lot of

rot like this; what beat him was that the crime doctor, of all people,

and with all his uncanny knowledge of the subject, that even he was

able to view the worst of crimes in a light which would never have

dawned on the independent intellect of Alfred Croucher. It seemed to him

a more lurid light than any in which he himself, at his worst, had ever

seen such things; horrible, to his mind, that one who ran every risk of

being murdered should sit there gloating over "the shades of merit" in

one murder, and over others as "the sublimest and most entire in their

excellence that ever were committed." What was more horrible, however,

was the hollow note of Mr. Croucher's own laughter, and the furtive

gleaming of his restless eyes, while his body twitched between the

sheets.

He asked for the book when Dollar rose to go; and was discovered, in due

course, bathed in a perspiration which he made less effort to conceal.

"It ain't all like them funny bits," he assured the doctor, with an open

shudder. "There's a bit I struck about a servant gal, on one side of a

door, an' a bloke wot's done the 'ole bloomin' family in on the other.

My cripes! I 'ad to 'old me breff over that, and it's made me sweat like

a pig."

"On which side of the door were you?"

"Wot's that?"

"In your mind's eye, my good fellow!"

Mr. Croucher had seldom found it easier to tell the truth, and he made

the most of his opportunity.

"I felt as if I was the gal," said he. "Shouldn't wonder if I dreamt I

was 'er to-night!"

"Ah! I always find myself on the inside," said Dollar, with

extraordinary gusto. "I'd much rather have been the girl. She had the

open street behind her, and the street-lamps; he had only his own

handiwork in the dark, and hardly room enough to step out of the way of

it. She got away, too, whereas he had to make away with himself. But I

always would rather be the victim; he doesn't know what's coming; and

it's not a thousandth part as bad as--the other thing--when it does

come.... I'm sorry, Croucher! You shouldn't have asked me to leave you

the book; but there's nothing like looking at a thing from all sides,

and it may console you to know that you've perspired over the best

description of a murder ever written."

Yet that was not the last of their morbid conversations; they would

hardly be five minutes together before the noxious subject would crop

up, nearly always through some reluctant yet irresistible allusion on

the patient's part. The doctor might come in overflowing with deliberate

gaiety; there was something about him that set the bulbous eyes rolling

with uneasy cunning, the cockney tongue wagging in its solitary strain,

as it were under protest from the beaded brow.

On one occasion Dollar was the prime offender. It was the day after

Croucher's introduction to De Quincey and the first bad night spent by

anybody in the Chamber of Peace. He declared he had not slept a wink,

and was advised to get up and go for a walk.

"Alone?" said Croucher in a low voice.

"Why not? This isn't prison, and I never hear you cough. _You_ are not

going to die just yet, Croucher!"

"I 'ope nobody is, not 'ere," said Croucher, with a horrid twitch. "I

feel as it _might_ buck me up--a breff of air on a nice fine day like

this." His eyes rolled undecidedly, and the oil ran out of his voice.

"But it ain't no fun goin' out alone."

"Haven't you any friends you could go and see?"

"No!" cried Croucher, with an emphasis that pulled him up. "I--I might

write a letter, though--if you could spare me a bit o' paper wiv the

address."

It was a very short letter that Alfred Croucher wrote, but a remarkably

thick envelope that he himself took to the post, after looking many

times up and down the street. And at the pillar-box, which was not many

yards from the door, he again hesitated sadly before thrusting it in.

In the afternoon Dollar took him out in the car, and then it was that

for once the poisonous topic was not introduced by Mr. Croucher.

"See that house?" said Dollar, pointing out one of the most modest in

the purlieus of Park Lane. "There was no end of a murder _there_ once.

Swiss valet cut his master's throat, made what he flattered himself were

the hall-marks of burglars, and had the nerve to go into the room to

wake the dead man up next morning."

"Fair swine, eh?" said Mr. Croucher, with all the symptoms of disgust.

"A very fair artist, too," rejoined the disciple of De Quincey. "That

wasn't his only good touch. He cut the old gentleman's throat from ear

to ear, and yet there wasn't a spot of blood on his garments. How do

you suppose he managed that? It's a messy operation, Croucher; you or I

would have made a walking shambles of ourselves!"

"How did he manage it?" asked Croucher, in a shaky growl.

"By taking off every stitch before he did the trick. How about that for

a tip?"

Croucher made no reply. His teeth were clenched like those of a man

bearing physical pain. They were nearly out of town, and Dollar had

discoursed upon autumn tints and the nip in the air before being

abruptly interrogated as to the "fair swine's" fate.

"Need you ask?" said he. "The poor devil was too clever by half, and

made a big mistake for each of his strokes of genius. He was taken,

tried, condemned, and all the rest of it! And a greater writer than the

gentleman who kept you awake last night wrote the best description

of--all the rest of it--in existence. But don't you ask me to lend you

that!"

"They always seem to forget somefink," said Alfred Croucher, another

long mile out of town.

"The first thing being that the best murders oughtn't to look like

murders," the criminologist agreed. "They ought to look like accidents,

or suicides at the most. But it takes a Mostyn Scarth to cut as deep as

that."

"Wot the 'ell mikes yer fink of 'im?" cried Croucher, in a fury at the

very name.

"Well, among other things, the fact that he saw us off in the car just

now. Do you mean to say you didn't see through the false beard of the

gentleman who was picking up his umbrella as we turned into Wigmore

Street?"