That same evening I began to make notes for Andriaovsky's "Life." On the
following day, the last of the fourth series of the _Martin Renards_
occupied me until I was thankful to get to bed. But thereafter I could
call rather more of my time my own, and I began in good earnest to devote
myself to the "Life."
Maschka had spoken no more than the truth when she had said that of all
men living none but I could write that "Life." His remaining behind in my
Chelsea garret that evening after the others had left had been the
beginning of a friendship that, barring that lapse of five years at the
end, had been for twenty years one of completest intimacy. Whatever money
there might or might not be in the book, I had seen _my_ opportunity in
it--the opportunity to make it the vehicle for all the aspirations,
faiths, enthusiasms, and exaltations we had shared; and I myself did not
realise until I began to note them down one tithe of the subtle links and
associations that had welded our souls together.
Even the outward and visible signs of these had been wonderful. Setting
out from one or other of the score of garrets and cheap lodgings we had
in our time inhabited, we had wandered together, day after day, night
after night, far down East, where, as we had threaded our way among the
barrels of soused herrings and the stalls and barrows of unleavened
bread, he had taught me scraps of Hebrew and Polish and Yiddish; up into
the bright West, where he could never walk a quarter of a mile without
meeting one of his extraordinary acquaintances--furred music-hall
managers, hawkers of bootlaces, commercial magnates of his own Faith,
touts, crossing-sweepers, painted women; into Soho, where he had names
for the very horses on the cab-ranks and the dogs who slumbered under the
counters of the sellers of French literature; out to the naphtha-lights
and cries of the Saturday night street markets of Islington and the North
End Road; into City churches on wintry afternoons, into the studios of
famous artists full of handsomely dressed women, into the studios of
artists not famous, at the ends of dark and break-neck corridors; to tea
at the suburban homes of barmaids and chorus girls, to dinner in the
stables of a cavalry-barracks, to supper in cabmen's shelters. He was
possessed in some mysterious way of the passwords to doors in hoardings
behind which excavations were in progress; he knew by name the butchers
of the Deptford yards, the men in the blood-caked clothes, so inured to
blood that they may not with safety to their lives swear at one another;
he took me into an opium-cellar within a stone's-throw of Oxford Street,
and into a roof-chamber to call upon certain friends of his ... well,
they _said_ they were fire extinguishers, so I'd better not say they
were bombs. Up, down; here, there; good report, but more frequently
evil ... we had known this side of our London as well as two men may. And
our other adventures and peregrinations, not of the body, but of the
spirit ... but these must be spoken of in their proper place.
I had arranged with Maschka that Schofield should bring me the whole of
the work Andriaovsky had left behind him; and he arrived late one
afternoon in a fourwheeler, with four great packages done up in brown
paper. I found him to be a big, shaggy-browed, red-haired, raw-boned
Lancashire man of five-and-thirty, given to confidential demonstrations
at the length of a button-shank, quite unconscious of the gulf between
his words and his right to employ them, and bent on asserting an equality
that I did not dispute by a rather aggressive use of my surname.
Andriaovsky had appointed him his executor, and he had ever the air of
suspecting that the appointment was going to be challenged.
"A'm glad to be associated with ye in this melancholy duty, Harrison," he
said. "Now we won't waste words. Miss Andriaovsky has told me precisely
how matters stand. I had, as ye know, the honour to be poor Michael's
close friend for a period of five years, and my knowledge of him is
entirely at your disposal."