of noise, the wind, the leaves, the birds of night or day and the
rain, that I had become keenly sensitive or suspicious of the advent
of a new sound. This was a wail such as I had never heard before. I
listened again and caught the same curious shrieking. It was not, as
I thought at first, a dog’s howling. It contained too wild a note. I
could not guess what animal could have uttered it, but I sat assuring
myself that wolves had been extinct for two hundred years in Ireland.
I crept to the door, when the sound came again, and started down the
long passage of the ground floor. I had not gone half-way when I heard
a sound that thrilled the blood in my brain. It was not one howl but
many, a horrible chorus that rose and rang, which neither the wind
nor the rain could drown. As the sound sank my courage sank with it. I
began to shake like a reed and a gust of wind might have overthrown me.
But I felt that I had to look out into the night to locate the source
of the sound or I should never have slept. I entered the kitchen. The
old cook had retired to bed and I was alone with only a wooden door
between me and the outer court. I had the strength to struggle to the
window and look into the night. It was not too dark for me to see that
the place was alive with wild animals, a dozen, twenty, thirty lithe,
slender creatures running round in a quivering, coiling crowd. When
one halted all halted. When one raised his thin snout into the air and
howled, every living animal howled in echo. All the Diplomas attesting
my character for common sense could not prevent me dropping into a dead
faint.
It must have been an hour later that I was brought to my senses by a
deluge of cold water. A sound of low voices hummed round me, and I
heard an Irish voice say: “She must have taken it to heart, but there’s
no harm done.” I was led slowly into the passage and to my own room,
where I found to my surprise that the children were in an agony of
grief. I strove to comfort them as well as I could. I pleaded, and told
them stories, but it was all in vain. I had a vague feeling that they
wept for me and because I had swooned in the kitchen. I had forgotten
for the moment all that preceded the swoon. When I assured them that
all was all right, they cried; “But no, Dad is dead, dead; fell from
his horse and was found in the wood.” Then my memory began to start
from its subconscious lair and I gradually remembered everything....
After putting them to bed I crawled into mine and remained there for
that awful night. I could close my eyes but not my ears, and from time
to time I heard the howling recommence outside. And within the house
I heard the agitated steps of the servants and the men of the hunt,
who had returned, bringing the Master’s body. They heard the howling
as well as I did, for they stopped dead each time the wild sound
recommenced. I knew then that I was not mad alone but that it was a
house of the mad. Gradually the howling died down to a wail and passed
away into the thin dark of the night. But I could hear men moving all
night in the house, and when I came downstairs in the morning, lights
were still burning in every room. Hunting men, men of the house and
neighbours lay huddled in the arm-chairs just as they had ridden in
from the previous day. With blazing fires and copious liquor they had
kept grief or fear at bay during the night. I dared only then to look
into the courtyard. It was empty!
My nerves had suffered such a strain that I wished to return to England
immediately, in spite of my affection for the children. But their grief
for their father was pathetic and I decided to remain for a few days
trying to soothe them one moment and to fit them into black cotton
clothes the next. The remaining days I spent at Gortinealy brought me
however a climax of unexplained mystery and horror. The body was being
waked and I continually overheard the conversation of the servants and
neighbours, who were camped in the house and making the fullest use of
the cellars. I gathered that I was far from being the only one to have
seen the uncanny visitors of the day. But the amazing thing was that
they seemed to have expected those wild howling animals as naturally
as they expected the undertaker at the approach of death. All had seen
or heard what I had heard or seen and yet nobody was going mad except
myself. I heard one voice saying casually enough: “Aren’t they saying
there’s no foxes in the other end of the county this fortnight? Every
cover drawn blank and the old women saying all the foxes are gone to
Gortinealy to see the old man dead!”
Every night for nearly a week they waked the Master’s corpse, sitting
and smoking in relays and telling tales of his great charity to his
hounds and kindred spirits and of his prowess in the field from evening
till dawn. I avoided what seemed to me a painful form of heathen orgies
except one night when I was asked to look upon the poor Master’s face
once more before it was lowered into the grave for ever. I could not
refuse, and old Timotheus offered to take me into the big room where it
was laid out in the sickly candlelight.
We went down the creaking stairs and I peeped into half-darkness.
The room gave me the feeling of being full of people or things. The
candles had mostly guttered out but, when my eyes caught their focus, I
thought at first that I saw mourners kneeling round the coffin, tiny,
sharp-faced hob-goblins but no! they sprang up like noiseless and
beautiful cats and leaped over the furniture and out of the open window
into the courtyard. But they were not cats! I could make no mistake
what they were, for too often I had seen their mangled pieces brought
home after a day’s hunting. They were slender live foxes! wriggling
through the furniture like maggots! God have mercy!
Timotheus had dropped to his knees and was reciting prayers at fever
heat. Not until the last vestige of fur had slipped from the room did I
dare take even a first step forward. Timotheus rose and went before me,
but I was not ready for the next shock. I saw him lean over the visage
of the dead and stay riveted. I did not look myself, thank God! but I
heard the words he gasped. It was only one sentence, the last words I
heard in that terrible house, but they will be the last words I shall
have the happiness and relief to forget if ever I lose my memory. For
all that Timotheus let past his lips was: “Holy of Holy! but they have
the face ate off him!”
INSPIRATION
It was a long time before it dawned on Marmaduke McSmith that he must
be an artist and a great one possibly. Unfortunately his profession
was that of an undertaker’s clerk, which did not allow him all the
leisure or any of the atmosphere necessary to greater kinds of writing.
This was specially so during the bronchitis season. A writer: since
his artistry almost necessarily took the form of pen and ink, for
scrivener he was bred. Doubtless had he been educated to ply the brush
on front doors or upon bath tubs his instinct would have turned toward
portraiture. But the pen had been his technical medium and year after
year he had written mortuary letters and filed the missives of mourners
and the orders of the orphan. There was a faint suggestion of widows’
houses about his ledger, and the tears of the fatherless had diluted
his ink.
All day he sat behind a curtain in the office of the old-established
firm of Gammon and Hardwash. In the front window were two cremation
urns, and like a relic of the past hung a large hatchment scrolled with
an extinct coat of arms. Good taste combined with good business to
keep all sight of coffins to the inner parlour. Not a hint was heard,
not a funeral note. As befitted a member of the British Undertakers’
Association, Marmaduke McSmith was deeply absorbed by the detail and
technical knowledge of the burial craft. The _Undertakers’ Journal_ at
his side seldom added a new detail or afforded a new suggestion to his
mind. He read little else except the obituary notices in every morning
paper. In this form he sipped his daily portion of the world’s news.
His life was that of a booking clerk to Hades. But his proficiency
delighted the customers, and his mastery of minutiæ edified Gammon and
Hardwash. Envious clerks whispered that it was only a matter of half
a century before he actually became a partner; coequal with Gammon,
consubstantial with Hardwash!
He had the true undertaker’s outlook. He often amused himself by
measuring people with his eye in the street for their coffins or
guessing straight off the style and class of funeral they could afford.
He perceived the living world in the terms and catalogue of death. Oak
and elm meant to him no stately foliaged trees but polished caskets
underground. He had a marvellous mind for “ruffles and sheets,” for
breastplates and handles, for cars and cortège. Happy it might be
said was the corpse which received the funeral classified as “Class V
Adults,” a form of mortuary pomp he had devised to the last detail. In
the firm’s catalogue it was simply described as “Gammon and Hardwash’s
Jubilee model,” for some of the leading ideas in the disposition of the
cortège had been taken from an attentive study of the second Jubilee
procession of Queen Victoria. It was a masterpiece of taste and economy
and was referred to feelingly in the trade as “Mourner’s Pride.”
It was a marvel that so young and inexperienced a man as Marmaduke
McSmith should have devised the nonpareil of the undertaking world. He
was assuredly intended for high place. He might be President of the
Undertakers’ Association yet. But all this was only the sepulchral
gossip of the parlours, rumours caught on the chilly little winds that
blow down the alleys of one Necropolis or another.
In his way Marmaduke was developing into an artist. Whatever department
he touched he adorned. He was given the delicate supervision of the
Embalming. He promptly made himself adept in the theory and practice of
human conserves. He was generally chosen to nick the wrists and groins
of the dead before inserting the blood-pumping tube. His gestures were
those of the cunning surgeon rather than the job butcher. He never
lost dignity. He never allowed the embalming fluids to be spoken of as
pickles! Then he was given the firm’s correspondence. All day he sat
perusing the letters and orders that flowed as regularly as death into
the letter-box of the firm, corpse measurements, sentimentalities,
absurd requests for shells of sandalwood and silk and plush linings,
dogs’ coffins, catafalques for favourite cats; all of which he read
methodically and answered discreetly, practically and soothingly, and
great was the business of Gammon and Hardwash. He wished that clients
would write more sensibly and often imagined the brief and businesslike
letters he would have written in their place. He possessed a neat pen,
but it was a long time before it dawned upon him that it might be the
pen of a great artist and that he must write about the living and not
the dead.
Had he lived in ancient Egypt when that country was possessed and ruled
by one gigantic undertakers’ trust, when embalmment was the national
art, and literature found its outlet on the lids of coffins, he might
have stayed in the business and realised himself as an artist among
the dead. But as he scribbled his first creative phrases on the backs
of requiem and obituary cards and sketched his poetical drama in
empty corners of his ledger he felt the overwhelming call to follow
his Inspiration and cut adrift from this sepulchral business in which
he felt he was being slowly buried. But it required pluck as well as
decision to swim from his secreted moorings into the literary tide. He
knew that he would be without cable or anchor and his eyes had often
peered through the curtains on that haggard crowd of clerks and hacks
and journalists making their way by day and by night towards Fleet
Street and the great printing and publishing houses. He knew how much
genius and inspiration had been gulfed in that stagnant Niagara. He
knew those waters were oily with the midnight oil and that their eddies
were lingering signs of the struggling writers who had sunk beneath
the surface. Still the artist in him bade him go out and seek his
Inspiration there. He felt confident of his ability to wear the Palm,
but a little diffident of his enjoyment of the pains and penalties
which crown the palmward path.
Anyhow he had saved enough to afford a three months’ lifebelt, while
he took the risk. All Art is a risk. Perhaps the Artist represents the
form that gambling takes among the immortal gods, who set the pieces
of human life on the earth’s green baize. Perhaps it amuses them to
lay odds on the Oddities of Life? Perhaps the gods have Favourites as
much as the betting public? It is a gamble whether the divine fire
can find itself. It was a risk whether in those three months he could
catch anchorage, security or even success and literary position. But he
shuddered when he looked at the scurrying whirlpool of souls perhaps
once as divinely inspired as he, caught now a hundred times more
miserably in the shabby nets of underpaid slavery. There was a side to
his nature which appreciated the dignity and seclusion of Gammon and
Hardwash. On rainy days and in the bronchial season this was specially
the case. The more unpleasant the weather, the snugger he kept himself
in the little curtained parlour where he wrote and worked. Better be a
dormouse hibernating warmly and well fed in his nest than a starving
and unnoticed lion.
He never took the plunge until he was inspired by Queenie Elkington to
resign without asking pension or character from Gammon and Hardwash.
They used to meet after work was over outside the Tube and sit together
in eating-house corners and he used to read her his poetical drama. She
listened wonderingly. She was full of admiration for his punctuation
even. There was music in his commas and he could convey ecstasy with a
semicolon. She was the kind of audience a writer loves, fair in every
way.
It was Queenie who persuaded him that he must suffer for his Art.
Was starvation necessary? he asked her. She told him that any soul
worth its mettle would welcome the pain of its enclosing body. Her
words gave him vision and a direct metaphor from life. He felt that
to cling to his present stability and petty comfort was stagnation
and worse--embalmment! Just as grooms develop horse sense and equine
features, so he was in danger of becoming a walking corpse. Undertaking
is a mummifying profession. Sometimes he felt as though he were bound
by invisible shrouds. And all the while Queenie was hinting liberty,
offering to share her dressmaking wage with him and incidentally her
starvation. He knew that her hours were twice his and her wage a half
of his salary. Between his salary and her slavery a gulf indeed seemed
to stretch. Slavery that was primitive, terrible, logical, and perhaps
the only setting civilisation still had to offer the bulk of women.
She was tempting him to abandon his steady stagnation and clutch the
flying success to which she felt inspired to inspire him. And if he
missed, she would slave for him. He hardly knew sometimes whether she
was tempting or testing him. In the end he felt merely tired. Better be
a starving poet, he felt, than a tired undertaker.
The Artist’s head was lowered over his empty teacup and he murmured:
“Will the London sparrows bring me bread or the ravens boil me tea?”
A quick sheen danced through her eyes and into his, telling him how
wonderfully he spoke words and prophesying the lightning that would be
evoked by his writing in the future. The Artist could see his genius
flashing under her eyelids and his epigrams unborn curling to her
lips. Talking to her seemed to cause poetry to swim into his brain and
he took the plunge. The old-established firm of Gammon and Hardwash
regretted the departure of the most sepulchral and unlively of their
assistants.
As she had swayed him, so she buoyed him. Once he had made an Artist’s
despairing gesture towards life and suffered himself to be carried
along upon the tide, she attended to the rest. She toiled to make
life in the single room of a tenement practicable. He wrote all day
and rested wearily at night while she finished her over-work, not on
the delicious teas of fifty years ago but on the black-stewed juice
reboiled from the night before. He generally had enough to eat, and
the first poems and stories, that she placed for him with editors,
served to stave off starvation. But starvation is not easily sated, and
besides the Artist owed it to Humanity to devote his time to a great
poetical drama. Like many of those whose lives are inspired with the
enrichment of Humanity as a whole, humanity is forgotten at home. His
Drama grew upon him and he no longer looked with pity into Queenie’s
white face. Love even dwindled aside if not away. He looked to her
greedily for food and inspiration. He used the light in her eyes like
an invisible fire to ferment the images in his brain. As she grew
whiter and thinner, his verbalisation increased and his pen glowed with
the current of poetic drama he was laying upon sheet after sheet. Had
he worked faster, perhaps she would not have had to live so long on
half-rations. But the Artist took a slow, luxurious pleasure in his
work, and she would not have had him hurried for worlds.
By the time his Poetic Drama was complete their affairs were rather
desperate. She took it out to market. It was one thing to find editors
who did not mind throwing guineas like solitary bones to poets, but to
find a manager willing to produce the most stupendous Drama of modern
times was the quest of a lifetime, and her repeated suggestion that it
was a lineal and lyrical successor to the works of Shakespeare fell on
what might be called Baconian ears. One manager she was able to draw
into discussion at least as to its merits, though he was amused at the
idea of placing Drama before the public that was not only serious and
poetic but beautifully written. He had produced the wildly successful
Revue, “Moneytime is Honeytime,” to say nothing of the winsome farce
called “Blue-eye’s Eighth Husband.” He was a nice, oil-scrubbed
gentleman with permanently waved black wire round his head. He was
always kind to ladies on the ground that kindness should be reciprocal.
On hearing her mention of Shakespeare he made a personal allusion to
Romeo and Juliet which was lost on her. But he promised to read the
Drama and make a decision on the morrow.
Next day when she returned, he asked her to come to supper forthwith as
an instalment of payment. In a frenzied moment she concluded that he
intended to produce the Drama. As she ate his fresh food that evening,
her wits gathered themselves out of weary hope and arranged themselves
pleasantly on the hall steps of achievement. He made no remarks about
the Drama, on which she could have passed an examination, having
typed and overtyped and undertyped every line many times. He asked
her how often she ate such a supper and whether she took champagne at
breakfast, and finally if the dramatist was her husband. To all of
which questions the answer was necessarily in the negative. Though
he appeared satisfied, he proceeded to detail some of the possible
expenditure needed to produce Poetic Drama on the English stage. It
was a question of the expenditure to be lavished on a funeral. Great
Drama was dead and Mr. McSmith’s Drama was great, he reasoned. He only
wished he had the money to embalm such a Drama and keep it on the stage
regardless of the public. The omen in his words unnerved her for a
moment. A dead hand seemed to be stretched out of the undertaking past
to crush the flower of the poetic present. Tears welled in her eyes and
she looked hopelessly at the Manager, who promptly judged that the
appropriate moment had come to make acceptance of the Drama. He began
discussing rehearsals and alluding to royalties, to all the details,
the cabbages and kings of the Theatre, the chances of a king in a box
at an opening night or of cabbages being thrown at the actors on the
last. Nevertheless Mr. McSmith’s Drama was accepted. Thinking only of
the Dramatist, she made a practical reflection as to the price to be
paid him. “The price of what?” asked the Manager. “The price you would
be willing to pay for the acting the drama?” He observed her coolly and
observed: “What price would you pay us for producing it?” Then it was
all trickery and deception! Was that cold face one of mockery or----?
She rose to go.
But he still fingered the manuscript and motioned her to stay. It was
several minutes before she quite caught his drift. It struck her with a
dim sickness at the back of her brain. Then he did expect such payment
as she could make. The situation planted itself round her with ruthless
logicality. Art needed a triangle for its woof to be woven. There was
the Artist, there was his Inspiration and finally the medium by which
his Art reached the world, whether it was publisher or picture-dealer
or producer. Without each other they fell into nothingness. Queenie
realised that it was not enough to have been the Inspiration. She
must find the producer and unite all three as it were in her own
person. Dramatic art could not live until the breath of production had
been breathed into its verbal coils. Very simply and without tears
she decided she must pay the producer, and returned, leaving the
manuscript of the Drama at the theatre. She felt no resentment when she
surrendered herself.
Late that night she told the man whom she had loved, and, what was
greater, whom she had inspired, that his Drama had been accepted on its
merits. Then followed days when they both battened on expectancy and
drank the thin, vibrating wine of hope. Rehearsals drew near. Contracts
appeared in black and white. Rehearsals were successful; and the
first night blazed like a comet out of space, the night that affords
a greater consummation to the Artist than to the lover. For the first
night to the Dramatist is twofold. To him the acts of creation and
of birth are simultaneous. Solemnly outwardly, and sinkingly within,
Marmaduke McSmith sat through the hours listening to his own words
trembling and tossing on the lips of the hired interpreters, while
his songs were mercifully tempered by the slow thrill of the choric
accompaniment. By his side sat the woman whose whole being had served
to bring him to this accomplishment. Marmoreal was her countenance,
but her eyes shone with the steady light of sapphires, the unalterable
triumph of Art over chaos and night. His eyes glistened one moment like
diamonds as panic swept through them and twitched the optic nerve, but
the next moment they grew dulled and lulled with the auto-intoxication
of pride. Queenie and Marmaduke watched and watched till all was sung
or said and he suddenly caught a sweeter sound than even his own
words--the repeated cheering of success. All was over! The critics were
rushing to their inkpots, the first-nighters were moving towards supper
and the Artist was receiving friends in his box, blown and bloated
suddenly with the ovation of fame. The golden effluvia of compliments
and applause bathed his hot brow. He struggled down to the stage puffed
and bewildered; speechless save for the few words he was made to
mumble through the blinding calcium.
It was Fate that thrust him into the Manager’s room, where he had left
his overcoat, and suffered him to receive one flashlight of Queenie
Elkington. The Manager’s evil kiss was upon her marble cheek. Marmaduke
blustered between them and dragged her home. He looked at the wretched
woman trembling half in pride for him and half in shame for herself.
Then he asked: “When did he start doing that?” The inspiration faded
out of her eyes. “It wasn’t the first time, was it?” She answered him
simply, “No, not the first time. He kissed me the day I brought him
your manuscript.” The Artist searched furiously in her cloudless eyes
and found nothing in the way of regret.