“To my nephew Ephraim for his soul’s good I bequeath my cellar of wine
which I adjure him to drink with care, thought, diligence, and
appreciation, being convinced that a sound judge of wine is, or is on
the way to becoming what my nephew is not, a judge of men and affairs.”
Quixtus stared at the ironical words written in Mathew Quixtus’s sharp
precise handwriting, and turned with a grey face to the lawyer who had
pointed them out.
“Is that the only reference to me in the will, Mr. Henslow?” he asked.
“Unfortunately, yes, Dr. Quixtus. You can see for yourself.” He handed
Quixtus the document.
Mathew Quixtus had bequeathed large sums of money to charities, smaller
sums to old servants, the wine to Ephraim, and the residue of his estate
to a Quixtus unknown to Ephraim, save by hearsay, who had settled thirty
years before in New York. Even Tommy Burgrave, with whom he had been on
good terms, was not mentioned. But he had quarrelled years before with
his niece, Tommy’s mother, for making an impecunious marriage, and, to
do him justice, had never promised the boy anything. The will was dated
a few weeks back, and had been witnessed by the butler and the coachman.
“I should like you to understand, Dr. Quixtus,” said Henslow, “that
until we found that envelope I had no idea that your uncle had made a
fresh will. I came here with the old one in my hand, which I drew up and
which has been in my office-safe for fifteen years. Under that, I need
not tell you, you were, with the exception of a few trifling legacies,
the sole legatee. I am deeply grieved.”
“Let me see that date again,” said Quixtus.
He pressed his hands to his eyes and thought. It was the day before his
arrival on his last visit.
The telegram announcing Mathew Quixtus’s sudden death had brought a
gleam of light into a soul which for a week had been black with misery.
It awakened him to a sense of outer things. A sincere affection for the
old man had been a lifelong habit. It was a shock to realise that he was
no longer alive. Besides having always unconsciously taken a child’s
view of death, he felt genuinely sorry, for his uncle’s sake, that he
should have died. Impulses of pity, tenderness, regret, stirred in his
deadened heart. He forthwith set out for Devonshire, and when he arrived
at Croxton, stood over the pinched waxen face till the tears came into
his eyes.
He had summoned Tommy Burgrave, the only other member of the family in
England, but Tommy had not been able to attend. He had caught cold while
painting in the open air, and was in bed with a slight attack of
congestion of the lungs. Quixtus was alone in the great house. With the
aid of Henslow he made the funeral arrangements. The old man was laid to
rest in the quiet churchyard of Croxton. Half the county came to pay
their tribute to his memory, and shook Quixtus by the hand. Then he came
back to the house, and in the presence of one or two of the old
servants, the will was read.
It had been dated the day before his arrival on his last visit. The
thing had been written and signed and witnessed and sealed, and was
lying in that locked drawer in the library all the time that the old man
was welcoming him, flattering him, showing him deference. All the
suavity and deference had been mockery. The old man had made him a
notorious geck and gull.
His pale blue eyes hardened, and he turned an expressionless face to the
lawyer.
“I’m afraid it would not be possible,” said Henslow, “to have the will
set aside on the ground of, say—senility—on the part of the testator.”
“My uncle had every faculty at its keenest when he wrote it,” said
Quixtus, “including that of merciless cruelty.”
“It was a heartless jest,” the lawyer agreed.
“If you will do me a service, Mr. Henslow, you might be kind enough to
instruct one of the servants to pack up my bag and forward it to my
London address. I am going now to the railway station.”
The lawyer looked at his watch and put out a detaining hand.
“There’s not a decent train for two or three hours.”
“I would rather,” said Quixtus, “ride a tortoise home than stay in this
house another moment.”
He walked out of the room and out of the house, and after waiting at the
station whence he despatched a telegram to his housekeeper, who was not
expecting him back for two or three days, took the first train—a slow
one—to London.
In his corner of the railway carriage the much-afflicted man sat
motionless, brooding. Everything had happened that could shake to its
foundations a man’s faith in humanity, and swallow it up in abysmal
darkness. Suddenly, as though by a prearranged design—as we know was
the case with his forerunner in the land of Uz—cataclysm after
cataclysm had revealed to him the essential baseness, treachery, cruelty
of mankind. For in his eyes these were proved to be essential qualities.
Had they not been revealed to him, not by fitful gleams, but in one
steady lurid glare, in the nature of those who had been nearest to him
in the world—Angela, Will Hammersley, Marrable, Huckaby, Vandermeer,
Billiter, Mathew Quixtus? If the same hell-streak ran through the souls
of these, surely it must run through the souls of all the sons and
daughters of Adam. Now here came the great puzzle. Why should he,
Ephraim Quixtus, (as far as he could tell) vary from the unkindly race
of man? Why hitherto had baseness, treachery, and cruelty been as
foreign to his nature as an overpowering inclination towards arson or
homicide? Why had he been unequipped with these qualities which appeared
to serve mortals as weapons wherewith to fight the common battle of
life? The why, he could not tell. That he had them not, was obvious.
That he had gone to the wall through lack of them was obvious, too.
Instead of the dagger of baseness, the sword of cruelty, the shield of
treachery, all finely tempered implements of war, he had been fighting
with the wooden lath of virtue and the brawn-buckler of trust. Armed as
he should have been, he would have out-manœuvred Marrable at his own
game, kept his wife in chaste and wholesome terror of his jealousy, sent
Huckaby and Company long since to the limbo where they belonged, deluded
his uncle into the belief that he was a devil of a fellow, and now be
standing with flapping wings and crowing voice triumphant on this
dunghill of a world. But he had been hopelessly outmatched. Whoever had
taken upon himself the responsibility of equipping him for the battle of
life had been guilty of incredible negligence. But on whom could he call
to remedy this defect? Men called on the Unknown God to make them good;
but it would be idiotic as well as blasphemous to call on Him to make
one bad. How, then, were the essential qualities of baseness, treachery,
and cruelty to be captured and brought into his armoury? Perhaps the
Devil might help. But we are so matter-of-fact and scientific in these
days that even the simple soul of Quixtus could not quite believe in his
existence. If he had lived in the Middle Ages (so in scholarly gloom ran
his fancy) he could have drawn circles and pentagrams and things on the
floor, and uttered the incantations, and all the hierarchy of hell would
have been at his command, Satanas, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Asmodeus,
Samael, Asael, Beelzebub, Azazel, Macathiel. . . . Quixtus rather leaned
towards Macathiel—the name suggested a merciless, bowelless,
high-cheek-boned devil in a kilt——
Impatiently he shook his thoughts free from the fantastic channel into
which they had wandered and brought them back into the ever-thickening
slough of his soul. The train lumbered on, stopping at pretty wayside
stations where fresh-faced folk with awkward gait and soft deep voices
clattered cheerily past Quixtus’s windows on their way to or from the
third-class carriages, or at the noisier, bustling stations of large
towns. Now and then a well-dressed traveller invaded his solitude for a
short distance. But Quixtus sat in his remote corner seeing, hearing
nothing, brooding on the baseness, treachery, and cruelty of mankind. He
had come to the end of love, the end of trust, the end of friendship.
When the shapes of those who were still loyal to him flitted across his
darkened fancy he cursed them in his heart. They were as corrupt as the
rest. That they had not been found out in their villainy only proved a
thicker mask of hypocrisy. He had finished with them all. If he had been
a more choleric man gifted with the power of picturesque vehemence of
language he might have outrivalled Timon of Athens in the denunciations
of his fellows. It must be a relief to any one in such a frame of mind
to stand up and, with violent gestures, express his views in terms of
sciatica, itches, blains, leprosy, venomed worms and ulcerous sores, and
to call upon the blessed breeding sun to draw from the earth rotten
humidity, and below his sister’s orb to infect the air. He knows exactly
what he feels, gives it full artistic expression, and finds himself all
the better for it. But Quixtus, inarticulate, had no such comfort.
Indeed, he could hardly have expressed the welter of horror, hate, and
misery that was his moral being, in any form of speech whatever. As the
train rumbled on, the phrase “Evil be thou my good” wove itself into the
rhythm of the machinery. He let it sing dully and stupidly in his ears,
and his mind worked subconsciously back to Macathiel.
As yet he had imagined no future attitude towards life. His soul was in
a state of negation. The insistent invocation of Evil was but a
catchword, irritating his brain and having no real significance. At the
most he envisaged the future as a period of inactive misanthropy and
suspicion. He had as yet no stirrings to action. On the other hand, he
did not, like Job, after the first series of afflictions, rend his
clothes, shave his head, and bear his reverses with pious resignation.
The train arrived an hour late, as slow trains are apt to do, and it was
nearly half-past eleven when he reached his house in Russell Square. He
opened the door with his latchkey. The hall was dark, contrary to
custom. He switched on the light, and, turning, saw that the letter-box
had not been cleared. Mechanically he took out the letters, and beneath
the hall lamp glanced at the outside of the envelopes. Among them was
the telegram he had sent from Devonshire.
Even a man wallowing in the deepest abysses of spiritual misery needs
food; and when he finds that a telegram ordering supper (for his return
was unexpected) has not been opened, he may be pardoned purely material
disappointment and irritation. Mrs. Pennycook, the housekeeper, must
have profited by his absence to take a holiday. But what business had
she to take a holiday and leave the house uncared for at that time of
night? For, if she had returned, she would have lit the hall-light, and
cleared the letter-box. He resigned himself peevishly to the prospect of
a biscuit and a whisky-and-soda in the little back room where he ate his
meals.
He strode down the passage to the head of the kitchen stairs and opened
the study door. A glare of light met his eyes, and a moment afterwards
something else. This was Mrs. Pennycook in an armchair, sleeping a
bedraggled sleep with two empty quart bottles of champagne and an empty
bottle of whisky by her side. He shook her hard by the shoulders; but
beyond stertorous and jerky breaths the blissful lady showed no signs of
animation.
It was then that a constricting thread snapped in Quixtus’s brain. It
was then, as if by a trick of magic, that all the vaguely billowing
horrors, disillusions, disgusts, resentments and hatreds co-ordinated
themselves into a scheme of fierce vividness.
Just as the boils made Job, who had borne the annihilation of his family
with equanimity, open his mouth and curse his day, so did a drunken
servant, who neglected to give him his supper, awaken Ephraim Quixtus to
the glorious thrill of a remorseless, relentless malignity.
He threw up his hands and laughed aloud, peals of unearthly laughter
that woke the echoes of the empty house, that woke the canary in its
cage by the window, causing it to utter a few protesting “cheeps,” that
arrested the policeman on his beat outside, that did everything human
laughter in the way of noise can do, even stimulating the blissful lady
to open half a glazed eye for the fraction of a second. After his
paroxysm had subsided, he looked at the woman for a moment, and then
with an air of peculiar malevolence took a sheet of note-paper from a
small writing-table beneath the canary’s cage and wrote on it:
“_Let me never see your face again.—E. Q._”
This, by the aid of a hairpin that had fallen into her lap, he pinned to
her apron. Then, with another laugh, he left her beneath the glare of
the light, and went out into the street. He was thrilled, like a drunken
man, with a new sense of life. Years had fallen from his shoulders. He
had solved the riddle of the world. Baseness, treachery, cruelty, he
felt them pulsating in his heart with a maddening joy of existence. Evil
was his good. He was no longer even a base, treacherous, cruel man. He
was a devil incarnate. The long exultant years in front of him would be
spent in deeds of shame and crime and unprecedented wickedness. If there
was a throne to be waded to through slaughter, through slaughter would
he wade to it. He would shut the gates of Mercy on mankind. He held out
both hands in front of him with stiffened outspread fingers. If only
there was a human throat between them, how they would close around it,
how he would gloat over the dying agony! Caligula was the man for him.
He regretted his untimely death. What a colleague could have been made
of the fiend who wished that the whole human race had one neck so that
it could be severed at one blow!
He had reached this stage in his exultant reflections when he found
himself outside a restaurant which he had never entered, at the Oxford
Street end of the Tottenham Court Road. He remembered that he was
hungry; that a new-born spirit of wickedness must be fed. He went in,
unconscious of the company or the surroundings, and ordered supper. The
waiter said that it was nearly closing time. Quixtus called for a plate
of cold beef and a whisky-and-soda. He devoured the meat ravenously,
forgetful of the bread by his side, and drank the drink at a gulp.
Having lit a cigar, he threw half a sovereign on the table and walked
out. He walked along the streets heedless of direction, down Shaftesbury
Avenue, across Piccadilly Circus blazing with light, through Leicester
Square, along the still hurrying Strand to Fleet Street noiseless and
empty, his brain on fire, weaving exquisite fabrics of devilry. Suddenly
he halted on a glorious thought. Why should he not begin there and then?
The whole of London, with its crime and sin and rottenness, lay before
him. He retraced his steps back to the Babylon of the West. What could
he do? Where could he find adequate wickedness? When he reached Charing
Cross again it was dark and deserted. A square mile of London has every
night about an hour of tearing, surging, hectic life. Then all of a
sudden the thousands of folk are swept away to the four comers of the
mighty city, and all is still. A woman, as Quixtus passed, quickened her
pace and murmured words. Here was a partner in wickedness to his hand.
But the flesh of the delicately fibred man revolted simultaneously with
the thought. No. That did not come within his scheme of wickedness. He
slipped a coin into the woman’s palm, because she looked so forlorn, and
went his way. She was useless for his purpose. What he sought was some
occasion for pitilessness, for doing evil to his fellow creatures. A
fine rain began to fall; but he heeded it not, burning with the sense of
adventure. A reminiscence of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde crossed his mind.
Hyde, like Caligula, was also the man for him. Didn’t he once throw a
child down in a lonely street and stamp on it?
He walked and walked through the now silent places, and the more he
walked the less opening for wickedness did he see. The potentialities of
Babylon appeared to him overrated. After a wide and aimless détour he
found himself again at Charing Cross. He struck down Whitehall. But in
Whitehall and Parliament Street, the stately palaces on either side,
vast museums of an Empire’s decorum, forbade the suggestion of
wickedness. The belated omnibuses and cabs that passed along were
invested with a momentary hush of respectability. He turned up the
Thames Embankment and saw the mass of the great buildings with here and
there patches of lighted windows showing above the tree-tops of the
gardens, the benches below filled with huddled sodden shapes of human
misery, the broad silent thoroughfares, the parapet, the dimly flowing
river below—a black mirror marked by streaks of light, reflections from
lamps on parapet and bridges, the low-lying wharves on the opposite side
swallowed up in blackness—and no attractive wickedness was apparent;
nor was there any on the great bridge, disturbed only by the slow
waggons mountains high bringing food for the insatiable multitude of
London, and lumbering on in endless trail with an impressive
fatefulness; nor even at the coffee-stall at the corner of the Waterloo
Bridge Road, its damp little swarm of frequenters clustering to it like
bees, their faces illuminated by the segment of light cast by the
reflector at the back of the stall, all harmlessly drinking cocoa or
wistfully watching others drink it. For a moment he thought of joining
the swarm, as some of the faces looked alluringly vile; but the inbred
instinct of fastidiousness made him pass it by. He plunged into the
unsavoury streets beyond. They were still and ghostly. All things
diabolical could no doubt be found behind those silent windows; but at
two o’clock in the morning sin is generally asleep, and sleeping sin and
sleeping virtue are as alike as two pins. Meanwhile the fine rain fell
unceasingly, and the Earnest Seeker after Wickedness began to feel wet
and chilly.
This is a degenerate age. A couple of centuries ago Quixtus could have
manned a ship with cut-throats, hoisted the skull and cross-bones, and
become the Terror of the Seas. Or, at a more recent date, if he had been
a Corsican he could have taken his gun and gone into the maquis and
declared war on the island. If he had lived in the fourteenth century he
could have become a condottiere after the fashion of the gentle Duke
Guarnieri, who, wearing on his breast a silver badge with the
inscription “The Enemy of God, of Pity, and of Mercy,” gained for
himself enviable unpopularity in Northern Italy. As a Malay, he could
have taken a queerly curving, businesslike knife and run amuck, to his
great personal satisfaction. In prehistoric times, he could have sat for
a couple of delicious months in a cave, polishing and sharpening a
beautiful axe-head, and, having fitted it to its haft, have gone forth
and (probably skulking behind trees so as to get his victims in the
rear) have had as gorgeous a time as was given to prehistoric man to
imagine. But nowadays, who can do these delightful, vindictive, and
misanthropical things with any feeling of security? If Quixtus, obeying
a logically developed impulse; had slaughtered a young man in evening
dress in Piccadilly, he most indubitably would have been hung, to say
nothing of being subjected to all the sordid procedure of a trial for
murder.
Nor is this all. Owing to some flaw in our system of education, Quixtus
had not been trained to deeds of violence; no one had even set before
him the theoretical philosophy of the subject. You may argue, I am
aware, that we use other weapons now than the cutlass of the pirate or
the stone-axe of the quaternary age; we have the subtler vengeance of
voice and pen, which can give a more exquisite finish to the devastation
of human lives. But I would remind you that Quixtus, through the neglect
of his legal studies and practice, was ignorant of the ordinary laws of
chicane, and of the elementary principles of financial dishonesty that
guided the nefariousness of folk like “Gehenna, Unlimited.”
It must be admitted, therefore, that Quixtus entered on his career of
depravity greatly handicapped.
The grey light of a hopeless May dawn was just beginning to outline the
towers and spires of Westminster against the sky when Quixtus found
himself by the Westminster Hospital. He was damp and chill, somewhat
depressed. The thrill of adventure had passed away, leaving
disappointment and a little disillusion in its place. He was also
physically fatigued, and his shoulders and feet ached. One ghostly
hansom-cab stood on the rank, the horse drooping its dejected head into
a lean nosebag, the driver asleep inside. Quixtus resolved to arouse the
man from his slumbers, and, abandoning the pursuit of evil for the
night, drive home to Russell Square. But as he was crossing the road
towards the vehicle, a miserable object, starting up from the earth, ran
by his side and addressed him in a voice so hoarse that it scarcely rose
above a whisper.
“For Gord’s sake, guv’nor, spare a poor man a copper or two. I’ve not
tasted food for twenty-four hours.”
Quixtus stopped, his instinctive fingers diving into his pence-pocket.
Suddenly an idea struck him.
“You must have led a very evil life,” said he, “to have come to this
stage of destitution.”
“Whatcher gettin’ at?” growled the applicant, one eye fixed suspiciously
on Quixtus’s face, the other on the fumbling hand.
“I’m not going to preach to you—far from it,” said Quixtus; “but I
should like to know. You must have seen a great deal of wickedness in
your time.”
“If you arsk me,” opined the man, “there’s nothing but wickedness in
this blankety blank world.”
He did not say “blankety blank,” but used other and more lurid epithets
which, though they were not exactly the ones that Quixtus himself would
have chosen, at least showed him that his companion and himself were
agreed on their fundamental conception of the universe.
“If you will tell me where I can find some,” he said, “I will give you
half a crown.”
A glimmer of astonished interest lit up the man’s dull eyes. “Whatcher
want to know for?”
“That’s my business,” said Quixtus.
The cabman, suddenly awakened, saw the possibility of a fare. He
clambered out of the vehicle.
“Cab, sir?” he called across the road.
“Yes,” said Quixtus.
“‘Arf a crown?” said the battered man.
“Certainly,” said Quixtus.
“Then I’ll tell yer, guv’nor. I’ve been a bookie’s tout, see? Not a
slap-up bookie in the ring—but an outside one—one what did a bit of
welshing when he could, see?—and what I say is, that I seed more
wickedness there than anywhere else. If you want to see blankety blank
wickedness you go on the turf.” He cleared his throat, but his whisper
had grown almost inaudible. “I’ve gone and lost my voice,” he said.
Quixtus looked at the drenched, starved, voiceless, unshorn horror of a
man standing outcast and dying of want and wickedness in the grey dawn,
under the shadow of the central symbols of the pomp and majesty of
England.
“You look very ill,” said he.
“Consumpshon,” breathed the man.
Quixtus shivered. The cabman, who had hastily dispossessed the dejected
horse of the nosebag, had climbed into his dicky and was swinging the
cab round.
“I thank you very much for your information,” said Quixtus. “Here’s half
a sovereign.”
Voicelessness and wonder provoked an inarticulate wheeze like the
spitting of a cat. The man was still gaping at the unaccustomed coin in
his hand when the cab drove off. But Quixtus had not been many minutes
on his way when a thought smote him like a sledge-hammer. He brought his
fist down furiously on the leathern seat.
“What a fool! What a monumental fool I’ve been!” he cried.
He had just realised that the devil had offered him as pretty a little
chance of sheer wickedness as could be met with on a May morning, which
he had not taken. Instead of giving the man ten shillings, he ought to
have laughed in his face, taunted him with his emaciation and driven off
without paying the half-crown he had promised. To have let the very
first opportunity slip through his fingers! He would have to wear a
badge like that of the gentle Duke Guarnieri to keep his wits from
wandering.
When he reached home he looked for a moment into the little room at the
head of the kitchen stairs. The Blissful One still slept, a happy smile
on her face, and the paper pinned to her apron.
There was surely some chance of wickedness here. Quixtus _furens_
scratched an inventive head. Suppose he carried her outside and set her
on the doorstep. He regarded her critically. She was buxom—about twelve
stone. He was a spare and unathletic man. A great yawn interrupted his
speculations, and turning off the light he stumbled off sleepily and
wearily to bed.