_THE FINAL POSE._
He felt that the time had come at last. What in his misery he had
thought vaguely possible now loomed close before.
With the resolve to make an end of it all, to have done with pain, to
cheat the inevitable, came a flood of relief. The torture of his brain
was swept away as if it had not been, and its receding tide left only a
shallow residuum of false sentiment.
The poor fool busied himself with details and accessories. Since he had
come to the point, he resolved that he would pose to the last. He began
to play his old trick of exciting a diseased duality of consciousness.
As he walked eastwards he was composing his farewell letters, he was
picturing to himself the sorrow of his friends. They would talk of him
wonderingly, as a brilliant life promising great things, gone with its
work undone. They would recall his sweetness, the glow of his bright
youth ... the tears came into his eyes at the idea, it was so pathetic a
picture.
His thoughts had run so long in the same groove, that though he felt
dimly that there ought to be other and deeper feelings within him, he
was unable to evoke them. He was conscious that this dainty picturing
was utterly false; yet, try as he would, he could not stop it. Whether
it was the last flicker of intense vanity, or merely that his mind was
weakened by debauchery, it is impossible to say; but when a man plays
unhealthy tricks with his mind, and is for ever feeling his spiritual
muscles, the habit holds him fast as in a vice. His last hours possess a
strange psychological interest.
He walked eastwards mechanically, but stopped when he had turned into
Houndsditch, and the roar of the early traffic in Bishopsgate sounded
less loudly.
From a card hanging in a pawnbroker's window he saw a bedroom was to
let, and after paying the rent in advance, he was allowed to take
possession. He lit the oil-stove that did duty for a fire, and lay down,
falling into a heavy, dreamless sleep.
When he woke it was quite dark, and after washing his hands he went to a
low eating-house for a last meal. The _menu_ was pasted on the window in
strips, while a cabbage-laden steam floated out of the half-open door.
The room was long and low of ceiling, each table standing in a separate
partition. A large woman, dressed in a scarlet silk blouse, walked up
and down the centre gangway, taking the orders, which she shouted out in
a hoarse voice to the open kitchen at the far end. "Pudding and peas!"
"Roast, Yorkshire, and baked!"
The table at which Gobion sat was covered with oil-cloth, and as he
moved a saucer full of salt out of the way of his elbow, a many-legged
insect ran over it to a crack in the wall.
The woman brought him the food, not giving him a knife and fork till he
had paid for what he had ordered. He noticed her hands were red and
misshapen, with long, black nails.
He ate ravenously. Over the low partition he could see a Jew jerking
some rich, steaming mess into his mouth with a curious twist of the
wrist, and every now and again wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his
coat. These details fascinated him.
When he had done, he asked for some paper, and with the roar of
Whitechapel surging outside he began to write to Scott.
"MY DEAR, DEAR OLD MAN,
Forgive me for what I am going to do. Life seems to me----"
After writing a sentence or two he tore it up, as he found that he could
not produce what he wanted. Time after time he tried, and only succeeded
in being commonplace to the last degree. All his ideas of a tender
farewell, a beautiful poetic letter, seemed impossible of realization;
instead, he produced effusions which looked as if they might have been
copied from the _Family Herald_.
At last he wrote simply "Good-bye," adding his new address. He tried to
think of someone else to write to, but could not. His father he hated
and feared; there was no thrill in a letter to him. It all seemed very
flat and commonplace. These last few hours were not at all as he had
pictured to himself.
Then he went out into the Whitechapel High Street. The costermongers'
stalls, lit with flaring naphtha lamps, made the street nearly as bright
as in the day-time. The pavement was greasy to walk on, and it was
thronged by a vast crowd walking slowly up and down. The fog was
settling over the houses, and the place smelt like a stale sponge.
He wandered slowly down towards the church, picking his way among the
mob.
Coarse Jewish women with false hair shouted to one another. Girls with
high cheek-bones, smeared with red and white, caught hold of his arm,
whispering evil suggestions to him, and cursing him for a fool when he
turned away. There was a lurid glow in the air.
He stopped outside a stationer's window, gazing idly at the specimens
of invitation cards in the window.
"_Mr. and Mrs. Levenstein
Request the pleasure of your company
At the occasion of their son's circumcision._"
In the brilliant light he saw the gutters littered with decayed
vegetables, bones, and rags. Two old women stood at a corner of the
Commercial Road. He heard one of them say, "Yes, it was still-born, so
she _said_; but I 'eard it squeak before Annie come out of the room." He
passed on. A piano-organ, with a cage of bedraggled birds on the top,
struck up, the handle being turned by a boy, while his father went among
the crowd showing a smooth white stump where his hand should have been.
The door of the Free Library stood open. He went in. The room was
crowded with men standing about reading the evening papers. He walked up
and down through the rows of stands, as if looking for someone, after a
while coming out again into the street. A sailor knocked against him,
and swore at him for a "bleeding fool."
He was passing a pillar-box, when he remembered his letter to Scott, and
he posted it, hearing the hollow echo of its fall with the sense of a
curious subjective disturbance in the air around. He felt something was
by him in the noisy street, something waiting by him for the end. He
looked hastily over his shoulder, and then laughed grimly.
After a time, when he had been among the crowd for nearly two hours,
some impulse seemed to draw him away, and he went back towards
Houndsditch. Before turning down the long narrow street, he went into
the "Three Nuns," the big hotel at the corner, and spent his last
shilling in three glasses of brandy.
As he closed the door of his lodgings, the noise of the streets sank
suddenly into a distant hum, through which he could distinguish the
far-off tinklings of the barrel-organ, which had moved higher up the
street. When he got to his room he busied himself in making it clean and
tidy, clearing up the hearth, putting his clothes neatly away into his
bag.
Then he took a little bottle out of his pocket marked "Chloroform."
Over the head of the bed he fixed up a sort of rack with two hatpins and
some string, so that the bottle could swing exactly over his pillow.
Then he pricked a hole in the cork in such a manner that if the phial
was turned upside-down, every few minutes a drop of liquid would ooze
through.
* * * * *
He lit a cigarette and sat down to think. He was not quite sober, but he
felt a dull conviction that things were never more unsatisfactory. He
felt no sadness, no pathos, stealing over him.
With a great effort he struggled to realize things, getting up and
walking round the room, talking thickly to himself. "Here I am, young,
clever, of a good family, a man who might have been good or even great;
am I going to die like a rat in a hole? Oh, God!" He said it with all
the force and yearning he could put into his voice, trying to force a
note of pain, but the result was most ordinary. He looked at his face in
a little strip of looking-glass above the fireplace. He saw nothing but
the imprint of impurity and sin.
Then he lay back on the bed, and thought that he roared with laughter.
The situation seemed irresistibly comic. He only chuckled feebly, but to
him it seemed as if he were shrieking in an ecstasy of mirth.
Suddenly he got up and fell on his knees, praying aloud, "Oh, God, help
me! God forgive me!" All the time that he knelt and tried to pour out an
impassioned prayer for forgiveness he knew that it was only an attempt
to bring some poetry, some pathos, into his last moments. Again he got
up and laughed wildly. His face grew ashen grey and horribly drawn in
his attempts to deceive himself, to pose once more.
"Is there nothing, NOTHING? Good God!... why can't I feel? Why? why? Ah!
ahh!" He tore at the bed-quilt wildly, snarling like a beast.
* * * * *
In the middle of his paroxysm he stopped suddenly and stiffened. Once
more the weird horror of another presence in the room came over him. He
whimpered like a dog, shrinking into a corner, with staring eyes, not
knowing what he did, muttering "Mother--mother!" Then with a complete
change of tone and manner, he said, "A nonentity with most seductive
hair."
He took the little bottle from the table, and hung it mouth downwards in
the sling.
He took off his coat and waistcoat, mechanically winding up his watch
and placing it on the mantel.
"This is not at all what I had hoped. It is _most_ unsatisfactory, quite
commonplace, in fact," he said as he lay down on the bed.
He felt a little splash on his cheek, and moved his face out of the
direct course of the liquid, which now began to fall more rapidly.