I
On a memorable morning of early December, London opened its eyes on a
frigid grey mist. There are mornings when King Fog masses his molecules
of carbon in serried squadrons in the city, while he scatters them
tenuously in the suburbs; so that your morning train may bear you from
twilight to darkness. But to-day the enemy's manoeuvring was more
monotonous. From Bow even unto Hammersmith there draggled a dull,
wretched vapour, like the wraith of an impecunious suicide come into a
fortune immediately after the fatal deed. The barometers and thermometers
had sympathetically shared its depression, and their spirits (when they
had any) were low. The cold cut like a many-bladed knife.
Mrs. Drabdump, of 11 Glover Street, Bow, was one of the few persons in
London whom fog did not depress. She went about her work quite as
cheerlessly as usual. She had been among the earliest to be aware of the
enemy's advent, picking out the strands of fog from the coils of darkness
the moment she rolled up her bedroom blind and unveiled the sombre
picture of the winter morning. She knew that the fog had come to stay for
the day at least, and that the gas-bill for the quarter was going to beat
the record in high-jumping. She also knew that this was because she had
allowed her new gentleman lodger, Mr. Arthur Constant, to pay a fixed sum
of a shilling a week for gas, instead of charging him a proportion of the
actual account for the whole house. The meteorologists might have saved
the credit of their science if they had reckoned with Mrs. Drabdump's
next gas-bill when they predicted the weather and made "Snow" the
favourite, and said that "Fog" would be nowhere. Fog was everywhere, yet
Mrs. Drabdump took no credit to herself for her prescience. Mrs. Drabdump
indeed took no credit for anything, paying her way along doggedly, and
struggling through life like a wearied swimmer trying to touch the
horizon. That things always went as badly as she had foreseen did not
exhilarate her in the least.
Mrs. Drabdump was a widow. Widows are not born but made, else you might
have fancied Mrs. Drabdump had always been a widow. Nature had given her
that tall, spare form, and that pale, thin-lipped, elongated, hard-eyed
visage, and that painfully precise hair, which are always associated with
widowhood in low life. It is only in higher circles that women can lose
their husbands and yet remain bewitching. The late Mr. Drabdump had
scratched the base of his thumb with a rusty nail, and Mrs. Drabdump's
foreboding that he would die of lockjaw had not prevented her wrestling
day and night with the shadow of Death, as she had wrestled with it
vainly twice before, when Katie died of diphtheria and little Johnny of
scarlet fever. Perhaps it is from overwork among the poor that Death has
been reduced to a shadow.
Mrs. Drabdump was lighting the kitchen fire. She did it very
scientifically, as knowing the contrariety of coal and the anxiety of
flaming sticks to end in smoke unless rigidly kept up to the mark.
Science was a success as usual; and Mrs. Drabdump rose from her knees
content, like a Parsee priestess who had duly paid her morning devotions
to her deity. Then she started violently, and nearly lost her balance.
Her eye had caught the hands of the clock on the mantel. They pointed to
fifteen minutes to seven. Mrs. Drabdump's devotion to the kitchen fire
invariably terminated at fifteen minutes past six. What was the matter
with the clock?
Mrs. Drabdump had an immediate vision of Snoppet, the neighbouring
horologist, keeping the clock in hand for weeks and then returning it
only superficially repaired and secretly injured more vitally "for the
good of the trade." The evil vision vanished as quickly as it came,
exorcised by the deep boom of St. Dunstan's bells chiming the
three-quarters. In its place a great horror surged. Instinct had failed;
Mrs. Drabdump had risen at half-past six instead of six. Now she
understood why she had been feeling so dazed and strange and sleepy.
She had overslept herself.
Chagrined and puzzled, she hastily set the kettle over the crackling
coal, discovering a second later that she had overslept herself because
Mr. Constant wished to be woke three-quarters of an hour earlier than
usual, and to have his breakfast at seven, having to speak at an early
meeting of discontented tram-men. She ran at once, candle in hand, to his
bedroom. It was upstairs. All "upstairs" was Arthur Constant's domain,
for it consisted of but two mutually independent rooms. Mrs. Drabdump
knocked viciously at the door of the one he used for a bedroom, crying,
"Seven o'clock, sir. You'll be late, sir. You must get up at once." The
usual slumbrous "All right" was not forthcoming; but, as she herself had
varied her morning salute, her ear was less expectant of the echo. She
went downstairs, with no foreboding save that the kettle would come off
second best in the race between its boiling and her lodger's dressing.
For she knew there was no fear of Arthur Constant's lying deaf to
the call of Duty--temporarily represented by Mrs. Drabdump. He was
a light sleeper, and the tram-conductors' bells were probably ringing
in his ears, summoning him to the meeting. Why Arthur Constant,
B.A.--white-handed and white-shirted, and gentleman to the very purse of
him--should concern himself with tram-men, when fortune had confined his
necessary relations with drivers to cabmen at the least, Mrs. Drabdump
could not quite make out. He probably aspired to represent Bow in
Parliament; but then it would surely have been wiser to lodge with a
landlady who possessed a vote by having a husband alive. Nor was there
much practical wisdom in his wish to black his own boots (an occupation
in which he shone but little), and to live in every way like a Bow
working man. Bow working men were not so lavish in their patronage of
water, whether existing in drinking-glasses, morning tubs, or laundress's
establishments. Nor did they eat the delicacies with which Mrs. Drabdump
supplied him, with the assurance that they were the artisan's appanage.
She could not bear to see him eat things unbefitting his station. Arthur
Constant opened his mouth and ate what his landlady gave him, not first
deliberately shutting his eyes according to the formula, the rather
pluming himself on keeping them very wide open. But it is difficult for
saints to see through their own halos; and in practice an aureola about
the head is often indistinguishable from a mist.
The tea to be scalded in Mr. Constant's pot, when that cantankerous
kettle should boil, was not the coarse mixture of black and green sacred
to herself and Mr. Mortlake, of whom the thoughts of breakfast now
reminded her. Poor Mr. Mortlake, gone off without any to Devonport,
somewhere about four in the fog-thickened darkness of a winter night!
Well, she hoped his journey would be duly rewarded, that his perks would
be heavy, and that he would make as good a thing out of the "travelling
expenses" as rival labour leaders roundly accused him of to other
people's faces. She did not grudge him his gains, nor was it her business
if, as they alleged, in introducing Mr. Constant to her vacant rooms, his
idea was not merely to benefit his landlady. He had done her an uncommon
good turn, queer as was the lodger thus introduced. His own apostleship
to the sons of toil gave Mrs. Drabdump no twinges of perplexity. Tom
Mortlake had been a compositor; and apostleship was obviously a
profession better paid and of a higher social status. Tom Mortlake--the
hero of a hundred strikes--set up in print on a poster, was unmistakably
superior to Tom Mortlake setting up other men's names at a case. Still,
the work was not all beer and skittles, and Mrs. Drabdump felt that Tom's
latest job was not enviable.
She shook his door as she passed it on her way back to the kitchen, but
there was no response. The street door was only a few feet off down the
passage, and a glance at it dispelled the last hope that Tom had
abandoned the journey. The door was unbolted and unchained, and the only
security was the latch-key lock. Mrs. Drabdump felt a whit uneasy,
though, to give her her due, she never suffered as much as most good
housewives do from criminals who never come. Not quite opposite, but
still only a few doors off, on the other side of the street, lived the
celebrated ex-detective Grodman, and, illogically enough, his presence in
the street gave Mrs. Drabdump a curious sense of security, as of a
believer living under the shadow of the fane. That any human being of ill
odour should consciously come within a mile of the scent of so famous a
sleuth-hound seemed to her highly improbable. Grodman had retired (with a
competence) and was only a sleeping dog now; still, even criminals would
have sense enough to let him lie.
So Mrs. Drabdump did not really feel that there had been any danger,
especially as a second glance at the street door showed that Mortlake had
been thoughtful enough to slip the loop that held back the bolt of the
big lock. She allowed herself another throb of sympathy for the labour
leader whirling on his dreary way towards Devonport Dockyard. Not that he
had told her anything of his journey, beyond the town; but she knew
Devonport had a Dockyard because Jessie Dymond--Tom's sweetheart--once
mentioned that her aunt lived near there, and it lay on the surface that
Tom had gone to help the dockers, who were imitating their London
brethren. Mrs. Drabdump did not need to be told things to be aware of
them. She went back to prepare Mr. Constant's superfine tea, vaguely
wondering why people were so discontented nowadays. But when she brought
up the tea and the toast and the eggs to Mr. Constant's sitting-room
(which adjoined his bedroom, though without communicating with it), Mr.
Constant was not sitting in it. She lit the gas, and laid the cloth; then
she returned to the landing and beat at the bedroom door with an
imperative palm. Silence alone answered her. She called him by name and
told him the hour, but hers was the only voice she heard, and it sounded
strangely to her in the shadows of the staircase. Then, muttering, "Poor
gentleman, he had the toothache last night; and p'r'aps he's only just
got a wink o' sleep. Pity to disturb him for the sake of them grizzling
conductors. I'll let him sleep his usual time," she bore the tea-pot
downstairs with a mournful, almost poetic, consciousness that soft-boiled
eggs (like love) must grow cold.
Half-past seven came--and she knocked again. But Constant slept on.
His letters, always a strange assortment, arrived at eight, and a
telegram came soon after. Mrs. Drabdump rattled his door, shouted, and at
last put the wire under it. Her heart was beating fast enough now, though
there seemed to be a cold, clammy snake curling round it. She went
downstairs again and turned the handle of Mortlake's room, and went in
without knowing why. The coverlet of the bed showed that the occupant had
only lain down in his clothes, as if fearing to miss the early train. She
had not for a moment expected to find him in the room; yet somehow the
consciousness that she was alone in the house with the sleeping Constant
seemed to flash for the first time upon her, and the clammy snake
tightened its folds round her heart.
She opened the street door, and her eye wandered nervously up and down.
It was half-past eight. The little street stretched cold and still in the
grey mist, blinking bleary eyes at either end, where the street lamps
smouldered on. No one was visible for the moment, though smoke was rising
from many of the chimneys to greet its sister mist. At the house of the
detective across the way the blinds were still down and the shutters up.
Yet the familiar, prosaic aspect of the street calmed her. The bleak air
set her coughing; she slammed the door to, and returned to the kitchen to
make fresh tea for Constant, who could only be in a deep sleep. But the
canister trembled in her grasp. She did not know whether she dropped it
or threw it down, but there was nothing in the hand that battered again
a moment later at the bedroom door. No sound within answered the clamour
without. She rained blow upon blow in a sort of spasm of frenzy, scarce
remembering that her object was merely to wake her lodger, and almost
staving in the lower panels with her kicks. Then she turned the handle
and tried to open the door, but it was locked. The resistance recalled
her to herself--she had a moment of shocked decency at the thought that
she had been about to enter Constant's bedroom. Then the terror came over
her afresh. She felt that she was alone in the house with a corpse. She
sank to the floor, cowering; with difficulty stifling a desire to scream.
Then she rose with a jerk and raced down the stairs without looking
behind her, and threw open the door and ran out into the street, only
pulling up with her hand violently agitating Grodman's door-knocker. In a
moment the first-floor window was raised--the little house was of the
same pattern as her own--and Grodman's full fleshy face loomed through
the fog in sleepy irritation from under a nightcap. Despite its scowl the
ex-detective's face dawned upon her like the sun upon an occupant of the
haunted chamber.
"What in the devil's the matter?" he growled. Grodman was not an early
bird, now that he had no worms to catch. He could afford to despise
proverbs now, for the house in which he lived was his, and he lived in it
because several other houses in the street were also his, and it is well
for the landlord to be about his own estate in Bow, where poachers often
shoot the moon. Perhaps the desire to enjoy his greatness among his early
cronies counted for something, too, for he had been born and bred at Bow,
receiving when a youth his first engagement from the local police
quarters, whence he had drawn a few shillings a week as an amateur
detective in his leisure hours.
Grodman was still a bachelor. In the celestial matrimonial bureau a
partner might have been selected for him, but he had never been able
to discover her. It was his one failure as a detective. He was a
self-sufficing person, who preferred a gas stove to a domestic; but in
deference to Glover Street opinion he admitted a female factotum between
ten A.M. and ten P.M., and, equally in deference to Glover Street
opinion, excluded her between ten P.M. and ten A.M.
"I want you to come across at once," Mrs. Drabdump gasped. "Something has
happened to Mr. Constant."
"What! Not bludgeoned by the police at the meeting this morning, I hope?"
"No, no! He didn't go. He is dead."
"Dead?" Grodman's face grew very serious now.
"Yes. Murdered!"
"What?" almost shouted the ex-detective. "How? When? Where? Who?"
"I don't know. I can't get to him. I have beaten at his door. He does not
answer."
Grodman's face lit up with relief.
"You silly woman! Is that all? I shall have a cold in my head. Bitter
weather. He's dog-tired after yesterday--processions, three speeches,
kindergarten, lecture on 'the moon,' article on cooperation. That's his
style." It was also Grodman's style. He never wasted words.
"No," Mrs. Drabdump breathed up at him solemnly, "he's dead."
"All right; go back. Don't alarm the neighbourhood unnecessarily. Wait
for me. Down in five minutes." Grodman did not take this Cassandra of the
kitchen too seriously. Probably he knew his woman. His small, bead-like
eyes glittered with an almost amused smile as he withdrew them from
Mrs. Drabdump's ken, and shut down the sash with a bang. The poor woman
ran back across the road and through her door, which she would not
close behind her. It seemed to shut her in with the dead. She waited in
the passage. After an age--seven minutes by any honest clock--Grodman
made his appearance, looking as dressed as usual, but with unkempt
hair and with disconsolate side-whisker. He was not quite used to that
side-whisker yet, for it had only recently come within the margin of
cultivation. In active service Grodman had been clean-shaven, like all
members of _the_ profession--for surely your detective is the most
versatile of actors. Mrs. Drabdump closed the street door quietly, and
pointed to the stairs, fear operating like a polite desire to give him
precedence. Grodman ascended, amusement still glimmering in his eyes.
Arrived on the landing he knocked peremptorily at the door, crying, "Nine
o'clock, Mr. Constant; nine o'clock!" When he ceased there was no other
sound or movement. His face grew more serious. He waited, then knocked,
and cried louder. He turned the handle but the door was fast. He tried to
peer through the keyhole, but it was blocked. He shook the upper panels,
but the door seemed bolted as well as locked. He stood still, his face
set and rigid, for he liked and esteemed the man.
"Ay, knock your loudest," whispered the pale-faced woman. "You'll not
wake him now."
The grey mist had followed them through the street door, and hovered
about the staircase, charging the air with a moist sepulchral odour.
"Locked and bolted," muttered Grodman, shaking the door afresh.
"Burst it open," breathed the woman, trembling violently all over, and
holding her hands before her as if to ward off the dreadful vision.
Without another word, Grodman applied his shoulder to the door, and made
a violent muscular effort. He had been an athlete in his time, and the
sap was yet in him. The door creaked, little by little it began to
give, the woodwork enclosing the bolt of the lock splintered, the panels
bent inwards, the large upper bolt tore off its iron staple; the door
flew back with a crash. Grodman rushed in.
"My God!" he cried. The woman shrieked. The sight was too terrible.
* * * * *
Within a few hours the jubilant newsboys were shrieking "Horrible Suicide
in Bow," and _The Moon_ poster added, for the satisfaction of those too
poor to purchase, "A Philanthropist Cuts His Throat."