ABOVE THE DARK TUMULT by Hugh Walpole BOOK 1

[Hawkins]

ABOVE THE DARK TUMULT


An Adventure

by Hugh Walpole 1931
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BOOK I


CHAPTER I


The Barber

I am aware, I fancy, of most of the dangers of narrative in the first person, but it appears to me that there is no other possible method for this particular story.
Swiftly following though the incidents of it were, and involving a number of persons besides myself in very definite dangers, it is not the incidents that seem to me now, after nearly five years' interval, to be of importance, but rather the implications that lay behind them, and especially the implications in Osmund's purpose.
The chief peril, I suppose, that lurks behind narrative in the first person is that of incredulity. How can anyone remember so clearly and repeat so accurately these conversations? Yes, but one doesn't either remember clearly or repeat accurately. One gives the gist of the thing, the spirit of it rather than the letter. Then, further, as to the scenes that one did not oneself witness. Well, in this present adventure, there is, as will afterwards be clear, only one scene at which I was not myself present, and here my informant is so close to myself that it makes no matter.
For the rest I, and I alone, can give you, as I think, the point of it all, for I, and I alone, should see it from every angle--yes, from that dizzy catastrophe (for it was a catastrophe) under the guttering candles, from that bizarre procession with the loathsome Pengelly, his hat over his eyes, held up under each arm, to that last scene up among the chimney-pots.
This is a pretty portentous beginning. I hadn't intended to start seriously at all, but quite simply with my name and address, so to speak.
My name is Richard Gunn. I was born in the town of Totnes, April 4, 1884. When this adventure began I was standing, naked to the world, save for one half-crown, about five o'clock on a December afternoon, in Piccadilly Circus, wondering what would happen next.
And here I hope you will excuse me for vagueness in the matter of the year. Indeed, I will ask your permission to change the names, not only of persons, but of buildings and addresses in general. Not that it matters very much. There is no one left who can object very strongly, but I like to allow myself that amount of licence. You can trace the places for yourself, if you like. They are all, as you will see, within a stone's throw from one another. The Circus dominated us first and last and all the time, played perhaps a bigger part in the adventure than did any of us individually. I don't know. That's for you afterwards to decide.
As to the year, it was after the war and after Eros was removed from its pedestal. Where Eros had been, I remember, was the point at which I was especially staring as I stood on the edge of the kerb, wondering what would happen next.
I had several alternatives in my mind--one was suicide, another robbery, another something not very far from murder. And yet I was not in myself in any way a desperate character--not, probably, desperate enough. I never have been. I was only very cold, very hungry and very hopeless.
My position was in no ways a peculiar one at that time. Many another soldier shared it. Before the war I had held for many years a job as land agent in my own county of Devon. Joining up in 1914 I had trusted to a six months' conflict and the resumption of my job again, but Harry Carden, my employer and close personal friend, was dead, and his estate sold, long before the fighting was over. I had saved during the war a sufficiency, and in 1918 had invested it, with a brother-officer, in a pair of charabancs. The charabancs failed--we had not perhaps precisely the right talent for charabancs. I was, after that, secretary to an impatient peeress, secretary to a night club, companion to a deaf and dumb gentleman, assistant in Mr. Swell-in-the-head's Stores and seller-in-ordinary for Fletcher's Patent Fountain Pens. Whatever I touched failed; whatever touched me crumbled to ruin--so here I was on this December afternoon in the year such-and-such, with exactly one half-crown in my pocket, no food in my belly and the bitterest cold in my entrails.
I had, I fancy, no grudge against anybody or anything, not even myself. I did not find that any of this was my own fault or anyone else's. I blamed neither God nor my fellow-men.
I only wondered what I would do with my last half-crown. Anyone who has been acutely hungry knows how odd a state of fantasy that condition provides. I was not quite sane, nor did I see the rest of the world quite sanely as I stood at that particular moment, staring at the scaffolding that, guarding the fine new Tube-To-Be, pierced upwards into the London pea-soup sky and the shadowy casual flakes of falling snow.
I was a little cracked, to be honest. I had had nothing to eat since yesterday midday. I had left my lodging very early that morning, without waiting for my breakfast, and that because I knew that I should be unable to pay Mrs. Greene for it. On the preceding evening I had settled my weekly bill, smiled into Mrs. Greene's kindly, bulging countenance (she had a face just like a large bath-bun), and then, in the sinister silence of my room, examining my resources, found that I had exactly half a crown.
I had been, I must tell you, for the last month, searching every nook and cranny of London for a job. I am aware that it is a commonplace of comfortable and easily circumstanced people to say that any man who really wants a job can find one. I assure them that this is not so. It was not so nearly five years ago, and still less is it so to-day. I had submitted during that month to every sort of indignity. I had approached (hating myself and them) certain old friends, and I do not know which was the more horrible, their consciousness of their unhappy discomfort at being asked or my consciousness of their consciousness.
I was determined that I would neither borrow nor receive the gift of money without some sort of work offered in return. But the trouble was that nobody wanted my work--I was ready to do anything, yes, anything at all, clean the steps, clean the floors, black the shoes, but there was already a multitude of eager persons performing these offices. I was not alone in asking the question at this time--how was it that a war which slaughtered millions of human beings left the world a great deal fuller than it had found it?
What I was not in the least prepared for was the vile and greasy, patronizing, indifferent complacency of Mr. Bilgewater, the founder-and-head of the great Bilgewater Stores in Mannequin Street. He had announced that he was anxious to assist officers who were out of a job, and I secured an interview with him. I can see him still, sitting, a bloated, gray-haired, swollen-with-self-satisfaction spider, inside his fine money-coining web, looking across his shiny desk at me and asking me how a man of my age dared to come and waste his precious time by expecting a job from him. I gently hinted . . . but I won't go on. Even after this passage of time my hand trembles when I think of him. I can only hope that one day Saint Peter, who must be on the whole a just soul and quite free of snobbery, gives him, before he admits him through the Golden Gates, a piece of his mind.
This little incident cured me of supplicating. I swore that I would beg no more. Suicide, robbery or murder, they seemed to my starving belly and hot, fiery head, that was bursting with fantastic visions, no impossible alternatives. I had been walking about all day, and yet I was not weary. I was sustained by a sort of glow, a fire fanned and decorated by hunger, a sense of injustice, a sort of exultation, because now, at this desperate moment, I really felt myself to be touching the very heart of life,--and a lot of indignant self-pride.
I had no possessions in the world save some clothes in a drawer at Mrs. Greene's, the garments I was wearing, and Lockhart's edition of Motteux's Don Quixote, four volumes of which were at Mrs. Greene's and one, the first, in my hand. That book I possessed owing to an act of mad extravagance four days earlier. I had seen the volumes in a second-hand bookshop, moderately priced, and had incontinently gone in and purchased them, thereby ridding myself of twenty-one shillings out of twenty-five, the most unreasonable act possibly of all my life.
It was no excuse that Don Quixote was my favourite book in the world and Lockhart's my favourite edition. It was a piece of fantastic extravagance, and how could I tell at the time that it was to play so important a part in the wildest sequence of events so shortly afterwards?
In any case, I was holding this, the first volume of the five, in my hand, as I stood there staring at the scaffolding, and I remember quite clearly putting the volume, with its handsome old rose-red cover and crimson leather label, under my overcoat that it might not have damage from the falling snow.
For the rest my clothes were decent; and as I was myself broadly made, ruddy in colour, short and sturdy of build, none of the many who jostled by and around me had, I am sure, the slightest notion of the especial straits that I was in.
The point that I was at this moment debating was the destination of my final half-crown.
When you have only one half-crown left in the world it is astonishing the number of things you can do with it, but on this particular occasion it was quite definitely a choice between two--should it be spent on a meal or a hair-cut? For nearly a month I had not had my hair cut, and this, I imagine, from some sense of its extravagance. It would, in fact, have been cheap at almost any price, for if there is a thing in this world that makes me feel myself a dirty degenerate swine, it is the creeping of long hair about my neck.
The great question was--would half a crown do it, for a shampoo must be included? Was a shampoo enough? You may say that such a hesitation between a meal and a hair-cut was, for a starving man, an impossibility. I can only tell you that I did so hesitate, and that this same hesitation altered not my own life only, but the lives of many others.
I considered the meal. Could I have enough for half a crown? Or would I not, once I had started, be driven by my appetite into a whale of a meal and then be arrested for nonpayment?
On the other hand, would not the cool and cleanliness about my neck, the freshness of the shampoo . . . ? My whole body trembled as I felt the firm hands of the barber pressing into my scalp, the soft foamy luxury of the soap, the touch of the cold water after the hot. . . . Two rival sensuousnesses--my last, perhaps. Or my first--which way was I to go?
I have said that hunger had made me a little fantastic. It was not the real world that I saw when I looked up and around me. Or was it? Who knows?
I looked up and across the Circus, and the first things that I saw were the green and red lights dancing on walls of the buildings opposite me. These stars of green and red flashed and twinkled, vanished, returned, flashed and twinkled again. There was still in the air a dim gray shadow of departing day, so that these recurrent stars had a particular unreality about them that gave them, in a queer way, an especial urgency for myself. They seemed to be inviting me to something.
High on the wall on the farther side of the avenue was a goblet of gold that rose slowly, tilted itself awkwardly, and then ejected some liquid with an air of quite ridiculous self-satisfaction.
The reflection of its gold and crimson shone dully in the dead windows behind me--the reflection was sulky and vengeful, as though the windows were angry and sullen at the use to which they were being put. Not only did these lights seem to have some especial personal meaning for me, but also for the people who were passing on every side of me. The Circus was only moderately crowded, but I noticed that everyone was clinging to the pavement as though a step forward meant ruin.
In my own excited state this did not seem at all unnatural. Because the day had not quite departed the centre of the Circus was sinking into a dusk that resembled to my heated gaze the gray waters of a pool, and I had the fancy that the omnibuses charging up the hill from the Mall, circling round from Piccadilly, were uncouth and barbarous monsters plunging to the pool for a savage drink.
'Well for us all,' something said, 'that we cling to this pavement. There's danger at every step.'
So the monsters panted to the pool and, under the twinkling and derisive lights that flashed so meaninglessly now against empty space as the evening darkened, drank their fill.
Then, looking about me, I noticed people. I noticed first the fat shapeless beggar of the especially blind eyes who, with his shiny tin cup and the board across his chest, had just this moment arrived and stationed himself quite close to me against the wall. He, too, seemed to have a peculiar meaning for me. (What an empty stomach can do to your imagination if you only give it rope enough!)
I had seen him arrive, led by a little shabby woman in a black hat and with black cotton gloves on her hands. The moment she had stationed him against the wall she gave his board a twitch and without a word left him, shuffling off into the crowd. There he stood, gazing with piercing blind intentness at the twinkling stars of red and green.
A thin clergyman, with an eager countenance, hesitated beside me, looked as though he would speak, and moved away. Two women, very gay and hustling, ranged at my side. 'Well,' said one over my head to the other, 'cheerio.'
'Cheerio,' said the other. The first one waited a moment, then said again:
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[Hawkins]

'Cheerio, dear.'
'Cheerio,' said the other. The first one vanished, the second one looked right through me as though I were not there. I felt suddenly dead, dead and buried. No, I was not dead. I was conscious of my beastly hair, hot and uncomfortable against my neck.
'It shall be a hair-cut,' I decided. Then my belly called out, 'Steak and kidney.' The golden bottle cocked itself up against the dark, scorned me, and ejected its liquid. Something inside me said: 'See what the book says!' So I took Quixote out from under my coat and opened it.
I read:
'The knight was yet asleep, when the curate came attended by the barber, and desired his niece to let him have the key of the room where her uncle kept his books, the author of his woes. . . .'
The barber! There was an omen for you! The fates had decided. I moved forward to my destiny.
These details must seem to you of excessive unimportance, and I can well understand your disbelief in my memory of them, but it is precisely these things that one does remember forever and ever amen, even to the rather worn, semi-shiny buttons on the eager clergyman's coat.
After a moment's hesitation I pushed forward across the waters of the Circus, escaped narrowly two charging monsters that seemed to snort fire and smoke at me as they passed, and arrived on dry land on the spot where Eros once was. Here I drew breath. My legs were trembling under me. I felt faint with a gripping pain like a harsh-taloned hand laid at my entrails. Once more (and, as it happened, for the last time) I hesitated. Did I yield to the temptation of the hair-cut I must, afterwards, either finish things once and for all or commit crime for a meal. I faced, I think, in that bitter instant the ultimate degradation. I was ready to do anything for a meal, sell my soul, my body (one often enough involving the other) to anybody for anything. A moral world? It had ceased to exist for me, and in its room there was this strangely beautiful evil place, shot with coloured lights that broke and flashed and trembled across the sky above my head, while at my feet there were these strange sluggish waters, iridescent, cleft by monsters, bordered by walls of grim gray stone. Out of them there stepped to my side a slim horrible creature in a shining top-hat, a black overcoat, with a white camellia in its buttonhole.
'Good-evening,' it said.
'Good-evening,' I replied.
'There's more snow coming,' it continued.
'Probably,' I answered.
'Going my way?' it asked. I nearly answered that I was if it would provide me with a meal. Its face was very white under its shiny hat. It had long hands in white gloves. I hesitated and was saved, for, looking up, I saw the golden goblet raise itself and illuminate with its light the neighbouring windows. On these were inscribed in big black letters, 'Gentlemen's and Ladies' Hairdressers--Manicure--Massage.'
'Coming my way?' it said again. It had dead eyes and wide hungry nostrils to its nose.
'I think not,' I answered, and pushed out into the stream again.
And even now the guiding finger had not finished with me. I had landed, panting a little, as though I had run a long way, at the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue. There was now but a short step across to the other side of the street; facing me was the corner of the Trafalgar Theatre, and above it on the second floor the high windows of the big hairdresser's establishment. I was about to take that step when someone jogged my elbow. I heard a thick, rather drunken voice say: 'A fat lot of use God would be in this place,' and, turning, saw above me, swinging over the heads of the crowd, a long pole and on the end of it a placard with the words: 'Thou God seest Me.'
This pole was carried by an old gaunt man with a long straggling gray beard and a shabby coat that fell to his heels. He was shuffling along bearing his banner on high, and as he jostled me I noticed that he was feeling with his spare hand in his pocket for food.
There were some crumbs on his beard. So above the crowd the message floated. Very few gazed up to it, but it passed on serenely, confidently secure in its terrible truth. Its effect upon me was that, looking up to it, I saw above my head and over the sweetshop behind me a small window with 'Hairdresser--Shaving--Massage' upon it. The window was surrounded with fantasy. Not far away from it were three timepieces which, with bland naked faces, warned the crowd beneath them of its swift passage towards remorseless eternity, and all around the timepieces and the barber's window were the dancing stars of red and green that I had seen from the farther bank of the pool.
Why should I cross the road when there was a barber's shop here at my elbow? Moreover, there was something in the window of the sweetshop that tore at my guts with a frightful agony.
It was not sugar that my hunger really needed, but nevertheless the sight of those piled-up heaps, the marzipan, the crystallized fruit, the huge cake with a pagoda in pink and red icing, the chocolates, the slabs of cocoanut cream. . . . One clutch of the hand, one sweep of the arm, down those heaps would come, I would tear the pagoda. . . . I had sense enough left me to pass swiftly by the shop and climb the few dark twisting stairs to the glass door with 'W. Jacoby, Hairdresser' inscribed upon it. A little more temptation, a very little more. . . . I pushed that door back as though I were fleeing from the devil.
So dark and grubby a little room was it that, after a glance at it, I almost retired. After all, if this hair-cut were to be the last grand and independent action of my life I might as well have a good one. But the sense that if I passed by that sweet-shop again I might yield, at this second time, to my craving temptations held me. No, I dared not risk it. So I walked forward.
It was a bizarre enough room. The blinds were not down, and I was still pursued by the golden goblet, which was now, from the opposite side of the street, almost on a level with me, and as the flash of its shining liquid came and went the lights struck the room where I was, vanished, and struck again as though they were fingers of some illuminated hand hunting on this dusty floor for some treasure. For dusty it was. I have seldom seen a more neglected place, and the scrubby little barber was as neglected as his den. There were three basins with their mirrors stuck against the wall. On the other side of the room were some chairs, and here two men were waiting.
The barber himself was misshapen, his dusty head sunk between his shoulders, and on his countenance as surly an expression as I had ever seen on any human face. He had a large walrus moustache, and the ends of this he was frequently snapping at.
He said nothing to me when I came in, and I sat down on one of two empty chairs.
I was now quite light-headed with hunger, weariness and a sense of rebellion against all human beings. What had I ever done that I should have been brought to this pass? I was no worse than my fellows, better indeed than a great many of them. I turned round on the little amiable apple-faced man who was sitting next to me and chuckling over the innocuous pages of Punch. For twopence I could have caught him by the neck and swung him to and fro, demanding of him why he and his fellows had treated me so unjustly.
But he took my gaze for amiability.
'That's a good one,' he said, grinning and handing me the Punch. It was at this point, I think, that my past began to mingle inextricably with my present--as though, if you like, my past knew that in another quarter of an hour it was going to concern me very actively and that it might as well prepare me for that. Never mind the scenes that I saw--a door half opened, a mirror framing a face of rage and vengeance, a mean, spindle-shanked little man stealing down a garden path, eyes, the most beautiful in the world to me, telling me of a trust and affection for which I had never dared to hope . . . sad, wasted, ironical pictures, crowding into the room on the recurring, reflected impulses of that golden flashing light.
The door opened, and a sailor came in. He was a big, red-faced fellow in sailor's kit, a somewhat rare sight in the West End, and he carried a sailor's bundle. It was at once evident that he was pleasantly drunk. He rolled a little in his walk and greeted us all with the most cheerful of smiles. He lumbered to the chair next to mine and sat down heavily upon it.
The barber glanced at him with exceeding disfavour. He looked about him with beaming interest, whistled loudly, snapped his fingers, smacked his bulging thighs.
At last, looking at the three of us who were waiting, he said huskily:
'Wonder if you gents would mind. I know you're first . . . don't want to presume, but it's only a shave I want and I'm going to Newcastle. First time 'ome for three years, 'aven't seen the kids for three years, gentlemen, and if I miss the six-thirty . . . 'E can give me a quick shave and if 'e don't I'll wring 'is bleeding neck.'
The barber turned and gave him a look of saturnine murder but said no word. We all at once meekly agreed that the sailor should have the next turn. This elated him greatly. He walked about the room whistling and lumbering from article to article, examining everything, the almanac, with a pink-cheeked girl holding a bunch of roses, the advertisements of hair restorer and shaving soap. He stopped before the pink-cheeked girl and said, lurching:
'She's my fancy!'
The young man upon whom the barber had been operating, his job concluded, rose and went for his hat and coat. The sailor immediately plopped into his place and stared very gravely into the mirror, feeling his cheek for pimples. Then, suddenly remembering, rose heavily, crossed the floor, and with the greatest care and reverence placed his bundle on the chair where he had been waiting, then returned to the seat of ceremony.
The barber approached him with looks of surly disgust. I thought he would refuse to shave him, but he said nothing, only stropped his razor furiously. Then he lathered half the sailor's face, paused, and, shaving-brush in one hand, with the other took the sailor's bundle from the chair and dropped it on the floor. The sailor said nothing to this but, when his face was completely lathered, gave the barber a wave of the hand as though to say 'Just wait a moment,' got up, crossed the floor and lifted his bundle on to the seat again. No one uttered a word, but we three spectators sat in our seats watching this drama with absorbed attention.
The barber shaved with great care half the sailor's face, then gently moved back and placed the bundle on the floor, the sailor watching his action with grave intensity in the mirror. When the razor had passed once completely over his countenance he again motioned politely to the barber with his hand, rose and replaced his bundle on the chair. The barber lathered his face again, then once more crossed to the bundle, but on this occasion threw it violently onto the floor. Still no word was spoken. Yet again the sailor replaced it. Yet again the barber threw it down.
The air was now breathless with suspense. The sailor rose, seeming now to be twice his former bulk.
''Ow much?' he asked gravely, feeling in his deep, wide pocket.
'Threepence,' said the barber. The sailor, after some fumbling, found his pennies and delivered them, then, with a husky, 'Take that for your bloody cheek,' drove his fist full into the barber's face. The barber crumpled and fell.
Instantly there was pandemonium. The little apple-faced man who had been reading his Punch so amiably was changed into a demon of fury and rage. He flung himself onto the sailor. The other observer, a long thin fellow, rushed shouting to the door. The barber, surprisingly alive, raised himself onto his knees and bit the sailor's thigh. The sailor himself rolled about, shouting and waving his arms; chairs tumbled over, bottles fell with a crash, two men came in and joined the fray.
The door was open; my eyes were upon it. Someone peered in, looked about him, and cautiously stepped into the room.
One glance was enough for me. My heart thundered in my ears, the room swam before me. The sight of that mean-faced, spindle-shanked, narrow-eyed little man was the ghost of all my past, the link with everything that should have been my future, the link that, for more than fourteen years, I had been seeking.
Mr. Leroy Pattison Pengelly.

 

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CHAPTER II

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Spindle-Shanks in a Dark Garden


It will be remembered that when Sancho Panza told his master the story of the beautiful shepherdess Toralva, Don Quixote could not count the number of goats carried by the fisherman across the stream in his boat.
Quoth Sancho: 'How many goats are got over already?'
'Nay, how the devil can I tell?' replied Don Quixote.
'There it is!' quoth Sancho, 'did not I bid you keep count? On my word, the tale is at an end, and now you may go whistle for the rest.'
'Ridiculous,' cried Don Quixote. 'Pray thee, is there no going on with the story unless I know exactly how many goats are wafted over?'
'No, marry is there not,' quoth Sancho, 'for as soon as you answered that you could not tell, the rest of the story quite and clean slipped out of my head; and in troth it is a thousand pities, for it was a special one.'
'So then,' cried Don Quixote, 'the story's ended?'
'Ay, marry is it,' quoth Sancho. 'It is no more to be fetched to life than my dead mother.'
The time has come for me too, before my story can move a step forward, to number my goats. The trouble is not so much in my numbering them as in selecting the best ones for my purpose. There are so many, and they all seem to be conveyed over in the fisherman's boat together.
The period that I must recover is a short one--only six weeks--and the place is definite enough. I will call it Howlett Hall--a name sufficiently near to the reality--and closing my eyes can see again those dark, squat buildings, the beautiful Park running to the sea's very edge, the Devon sea with the red cliffs, the mild lisp of the waves on the shingle in that summer weather, the cooing of the doves in the trees that were scattered on the edge of the shaven lawn, old red-faced Harry Carden calling to his dogs, all the easy, lazy social life of that wealthy carefree world before the war.
And into that easy, normal world stepped, one summer afternoon, the three figures of my drama. Looking back, it seems queer enough, although at the time it was nothing, that these three should have all come into my life on the same day, almost at the same moment--John Osmund, Leroy Pengelly--and Helen Cameron. . . .
Pengelly was the first. I was Harry Carden's land agent, and we were, had been for several years, the greatest friends. Had he lived it would have been another story for me. Of course he was years older than I; our relationship was almost that of father and son--dear Harry with his oaths and tempers and stubbornness and charity and secret shy kindnesses and love of women, dogs and every earthly kind of sport!
Simple! It seems impossible that there should be anyone alive in this complicated world of to-day so guileless.
Well, at about three o'clock of that hot, shimmering afternoon we walked down to the beach to see about some nets that Carden had ordered from a fisherman, saw two nets, watched for a little the sea swell lazily in over the hot dry pebbles, breaking, like the outstretching paw of a sleepy cat, across the rising ridge; then turned back through the little village.
Outside the one and only pub there was standing a man. I noticed him because I knew every soul in the village, and this was a new face to me. When we had struck up through the Park gates Harry said:
'So Pengelly's back again.' He said it, I remember, in a tone that roused my interest, for he disliked so few of his fellow-beings that the grating displeasure in his voice was sufficiently remarkable.
I asked who Pengelly might be. Now here I perceive the danger of melodrama. Pengelly is, I suppose, the villain of this piece, if any villain there be, although it is possibly one of the small values of this story that it contains neither villain nor hero. I should like to be fair to Pengelly, especially in consideration of later events, but, however fair one may try to be, one cannot escape his nastiness. It exuded from him always and everywhere. Harry was the most generous-minded of men, but at once, when he spoke of Pengelly, a sort of disgusting atmosphere crept about us, the air seemed to darken, the warmth of the sun to grow less kindly.
There are one or two people in the world who darken the air, not so much by anything they do as by what simply, of themselves, and possibly quite without their own fault, they are. Not that Pengelly stopped at mere existence, he was quite an active personality until--but what happened to him comes later.
Carden did not say much about Pengelly just then--only that he was the nastiest, meanest, most abject little scoundrel born of woman, that he had come to the village some five years ago, agent, he declared, for some kind of photographic firm, that he had a wife whom he bullied, that he was never seen by anyone to do any work, but simply slouched around the place. Many things were suspected of him, very little proved. Then a girl in the village had a baby of which he was supposed to be the father, his wife died suddenly, and he vanished--to the great relief of everyone. And yet the unexpected thing was, Carden added, that he had a kind of fascination for some people. Even Carden himself had felt it. He was very glib in his talk, had plenty of stories to tell, had travelled, apparently, and his conceit and self-confidence were boundless.
'I hope he's not come back to stay,' said Carden, and a kind of depression fell between us. I am even fanciful enough to imagine that life was never quite the same careless, happy thing for either of us after the moment when we saw Pengelly leaning his scarecrow of a body up against the wall of the Farmer's Boy, his hands in his pockets, and his bony, ugly head thrust forward in that snake-like, piercing way that was so characteristic of him.
That was to be, however, an eventful afternoon for me, and the second new encounter that it brought me quickly knocked the first out of my head.
When we reached the house and stretched ourselves out in chairs on the lawn with a good cool drink at our elbow, Harry told me that people were coming to tea. Borlass and his stout lady and imbecile daughter, for three--and two others.
'John Osmund,' said Harry, 'and the lady who is to marry him.'
'And who may John Osmund be?' I asked him.
Carden told me. John Osmund was a remarkable fellow. One of those men who could do anything if he liked. But he didn't like. And yet you couldn't call him a slacker. He was always doing something and doing it well, but they were odd, unnecessary jobs, jobs that no one else thought of doing.
Where did he come from? Nobody knew. He said that he belonged to some Glebeshire family. Oh, yes, he was a gentleman all right. Extraordinarily handsome fellow and a giant. Must be six foot six at least, and carried himself firmly, as though he had been commanding people all his life.
Funny-tempered chap, though. You never knew what was likely to upset him--went off the rocker at the slightest thing, and when he did lose his temper it was something to see. For the rest he was as sweet as a nut, and his laugh was worth going a mile to hear. But he had odd bees in his bonnet. Couldn't bear this democratic twaddle and yet was always palling up with the fellows out of his own class, not just talking to them, but made real friends of them and didn't mind who saw him with them. It was crowds that he said he hated and the way that everyone cheapened everything. He called it a half-baked age, and hated it for being that, said he would like to drop bombs on half humanity and leave room for the rest to grow properly. And yet he was the kindest-hearted of men, no crank, you understand, only talked of these things when he was roused.
I asked some more questions and discovered that he had been staying for a long time at the Trout Inn at Amberthwaite, a village some five miles in the Exmouth direction. He kept a horse and looked mighty fine riding it.
And the lady? Helen Cameron? She used to come down here often with the Fosters when they rented Onsett. She was an Edinburgh girl. I must have seen her. Three years ago she was down here, but was only a bit over sixteen, had her hair down. She was nearly twenty now. An orphan, very independent, a delightful girl and fascinated by Osmund.
She had arrived on her own about a month ago, met Osmund and became at once engaged to him. The odd thing, Carden said, was that he didn't think that she was really in love with him. There was no doubt of Osmund's feeling for her, he was simply mad about her, but his will seemed to have overpowered hers, which was saying something, because she was one of the strongest-willed and most independent women in the world. But they were a striking pair, both so good-looking, so unlike other people, so individual and alone. I'd be interested in both of them when I saw them. I felt that I would.
I had no questions to ask about Sir Nevil Borlass and his wife. I knew him well enough--common-place, greedy, self-satisfied, vulgar. He had inherited a fortune from his father and owned a huge place, Pecking, some ten miles distant from Howlett. He wasn't a bad fellow, I suppose, but arrogant, greedy and stupid.
'As a matter of fact,' said Carden, 'I'm sorry I've asked them at the same time as Osmund. Osmund hates them both like poison, and he's no swell at hiding his feelings. You may have the luck to see him in one of his tempers. It's worth seeing.'
I did, as it happened, have that luck, and I'm never likely to forget it.

 

[Hawkins]

Osmund and his lady walked over from Amberthwaite.
When I saw them standing together on the sun-drenched lawn it was all I could do to restrain an exclamation. There are some people in the world--a few--like that, made, it seems, of different clay from the rest of us.
Osmund would have excited attention anywhere. His height did not seem excessive because he carried himself so magnificently. When I knew him better it was always a trick he had of throwing his head back, a gesture of freedom, of strength, of independence, quite impossible to give any real sense of, that seemed especially his. He was dark and with just that amount of foreignness in his colour that our Celts often have. You would have known him for an Englishman anywhere, though. His smile was delightful, boyish and discerning. His anger--well, I shall have an opportunity of describing that in a moment.
And Helen? If this story has neither hero nor villain, at least it has a heroine. How shall I describe her as she was on that first day? I can remember very little of that first impression. She was slim, tall, dark-haired like Osmund, and I fancy that on that first afternoon I thought her sullen, conceited, fond of her own opinion, a little arrogant.
To tell the truth, I was, I think, on that day so deeply struck by Osmund that I paid little attention to Helen. She certainly paid none at all to me. She had, as I was to learn afterwards, other things just then to think about.
We all sat down together and were very happy. How charming Osmund could be when he liked! He was the most perfectly natural being I have ever known. When he was at his ease and trusted his company he was like a cheery happy-go-lucky boy who hadn't a bother in the world.
At any rate that was what he was on this first meeting--before all his trouble came.
I don't think that any of us heard Fate mutter in our ears as the Borlass family appeared on the horizon, 'Here's the end of your happiness.' No, we didn't hear, but if we had we should have heard the truth.
A more commonplace trio you couldn't have found in all England: Borlass with his thick neck and swelling stomach, and stout calves ridiculous in their rough pinky-brown stockings; Lady Borlass, a stout little woman who walked like a chicken looking for seed. She was always overdressed and, for so small a woman, wore an astonishing amount of jewels. She was famous for her jewels. Her daughter was a large lumpy girl with spectacles and a deep bass voice. She laughed like a man too, and seemed to take the deepest interest in everything that you said. Only her eyes betrayed her, for they stared through their glasses with a blank vacancy which showed that she never listened to a word that anyone uttered. It was her obsession (and also the obsession of her parents) that every male and every mother of every male pursued her for her money.
As a matter of fact, it's my opinion that no one pursued her at all and that she was cross and lonely, poor thing.
In any case, here they were, Lady Borlass picking her way between her two large companions, who marched one on either side of her as though they were protecting her from rape and battery. She carried in her hand a lorgnette, and every once and again she would stop for a moment and examine the ground exactly like a hen looking for seed.
I have taken some while in describing this family because of its importance in what happened afterwards. The important event on this particular afternoon will take no time at all to describe.
I remember, as though it were yesterday, the immediate change in Osmund as the Borlasses appeared.
To say that it was childish inadequately describes it. His face that had a second before been open, jolly and most handsomely engaging was suddenly rebellious, ill-tempered and petulant. We all know people who are simply unable to behave decently in company that is uncongenial to them, and, however charming they may be, we do on the whole avoid them because of the awkward situations that crop up in their society--so it was now with Osmund. Harry, Helen Cameron and myself were at once uncomfortable. It was as though we had taken out into grown-up company a child who might at any moment behave indecently. Only the Borlasses noticed nothing. They patronized us all, ate their cucumber sandwiches with complete satisfaction, behaved as though they had bought all the world for a song.
The crash came, as unexpectedly for them as though a naked Pan had broken suddenly through the thicket. The affair had upon Lady Borlass just that effect. She had been speaking of her maid-servants; she had a high-pitched, immensely superior voice, cold, like a lump of ice falling into a drink, cultivated, I've no doubt, in the early days when her own family was not quite so 'county' as it might have been. She talked of her servants as though they were a party of savages that had been brought over to England for her from Central Africa. 'After all,' she said, 'one expects stupidity, but such idiocy . . .'
Osmund jumped to his feet. The whole of his six foot six hung over us.
'Idiocy! Idiocy!' he cried. 'If that isn't just characteristic of all of you! Because you've got money to spend you think that you're better than the men and women worth a thousand of you. I bet you're as useless a woman as exists. You and your husband just cumber the ground, and it would be better for everyone if you were under it. I haven't been here for months without knowing something about you--with your conceit and laziness and ignorance. . . . Oh, damn! I beg your pardon, Carden. I've behaved like a swine. Sorry. I'll be going. . . .'
It was that or something like that. I only know that after all these years the anger and impatience and lack of control of that outbreak have for me still the effect as though the sky had cracked asunder and a bolt, black and thunderous, crashed to our feet!
Anyway, Osmund went there and then, without another word to any of us, strode furiously across the lawn and was gone. The tea-party, needless to say, was ended. I can see yet the look of staggered surprise in the Borlass countenances, as though a damp rag had been pressed there and wiped all the modelling away. Helen Cameron said not a word.
Next day I met Osmund by the seashore. Shamefaced, he confessed his sins. He had behaved, he supposed, like a perfect cad? I said that he had. Was Carden furious? Yes, Carden was furious. He'd better go up, he supposed, and take his licking. He liked Carden. He'd take any beating he wanted to give him. I suggested that he should write a note of apology to Lady Borlass. But that he wouldn't hear of. He had, he considered, committed no crime at all so far as the Borlasses were concerned. He'd been wanting to say something to them ages back; it was only saying it in Harry Carden's garden that was wrong, under old Harry's roof, so to speak, and in front of myself and Miss Cameron.
But there it was. He had the devil of a temper; he had always had one and never learnt to control it as a kid. People like the Borlasses made him feel sick. But he apologized to me, and would perfectly understand if I never wanted to speak to him again.
I liked him. I couldn't help but like him. You'd have liked him had you known him at that time.
He took then a surprising fancy to myself, and in a short while we were seeing one another very often. Three things I noticed about him. One was that, charming, kindly, humorous as he mostly was, these sudden winds of passion were at any time liable to ruffle his spirit. Secondly, that he was a poet with a real worship of beauty in every possible form--nature, art, music, letters, character, everything--and that, just now, this love of beauty was all directed into the channel of his worship for Helen Cameron. Thirdly, that, as Carden said, he made the oddest intimacies with men quite outside his own class and education.
Not many days passed before I met such a friend, Charlie Buller by name. Buller was short, sturdy, with a certain air of hostler about him. He was a jolly little man, with pleasant wrinkles about his eyes and an apple-brown complexion. He had no especial purpose in life that I could see except to joke about everything. I wouldn't have been at all surprised at his having done time. He was as reticent about his past as his present--altogether not at all the sort of friend for Osmund. But then Osmund, gentleman as he was, was most certainly adventurous also. No one knew anything at all about his past. Helen Cameron herself had no idea whether he had relations, whether he had been in the Army, whether he had any means.
She was hypnotized by him as, to a certain degree, I was myself.
Then an awful thing happened. I fell in love with Helen Cameron. How often in the years that followed I looked back and asked myself whether I could have done anything, anything at all, to have prevented this. Now I know that I could not. It was one of the strands--and not the least important one either--in the strange plot in which we were all at last to figure.
At the time it was madness and worse. I was Osmund's friend, for one thing; for another, I didn't want just then to fall in love with anyone; for a third, I had no reason to think that she had any interest in me: if she thought of me at all, she seemed to dislike me. But it happened--as inevitably and, it seemed, as hopelessly as all the rest of this incredible business.
And, what is more, I knew the exact moment when it happened.
I had walked with Osmund and Helen to the Park gate. As we reached it the rain began. All the trees above our heads trembled; there were the secret urgent whispers of a coming storm. He drew her under the cover of his waterproof, but just before they turned down the windy road, meeting the rain, she looked back and smiled.
I stood there looking after her, looking beyond her into an angry tear of yellow sky that slashed the thick gray. I knew in that moment that I loved her. I hoped at first that it was a passing fever, caught from the quietness and remoteness of our life in this little place. I left next morning for London. I returned a week later, knowing that this was something far different from any love affair of my life. Yes, and by God, so it has been!
I returned to find one or two odd things. One was that Osmund's friend, Charlie Buller, had someone lodging with him, a big flabby balloon-like man with a remarkably small head. His name was Hench. He had a funny squeaky voice like a woman's, but he seemed not a bad fellow, from Osmund's account of him, kindly, ready to do anything for anyone. All the same, they were, both of them, strange friends for Osmund to have. And then I discovered a queerer thing yet. They were both of them, Buller and Hench, hand in glove with the horrible Pengelly. I saw the three of them constantly together, and, stranger yet, Osmund, it seemed, on passable terms with Pengelly. I spoke to Carden about this. He only shrugged his shoulders. Since that scandalous outburst he had seen very little of Osmund. A fellow who behaved like that to your guests--well, it made a chap uncomfortable. . . .
Then things moved quickly. Looking back now, I feel that I was in a kind of dream during those weeks, and not a very pleasant dream either. Now that I had fallen in love with Helen, I perceived in her every kind of sweetness, nobility and charm. But I had to behave decently. I avoided her persistently. Everyone thought that I disliked her--Carden, Osmund, and Helen herself. I think that it was this sense of my dislike of her that first stirred her interest in me. And she wasn't--although at the time I had no idea of this--at all happy: frightened, uneasy, desperately apprehensive. The more she knew of Osmund the more apprehensive she became.
Even I could see, during those weeks, what a queer fellow he was. Madness does not cover it, neither then nor later. I shall not attempt any analysis of him. At the moment I am concerned only with events; but at least from the very first I realized that Osmund was, so to speak, 'out-size'--not only in physical things, but especially in spiritual. He had--he must always have had--a sort of wild impatience with life. Things that he read in the paper--little casual wayside things--made him mad with irritation. He wanted to 'get at' people and punish or praise or comfort or expose. He hated injustice and cruelty and meanness with a ferocity that I've never seen equalled in any other human being, but he was himself, in that very hatred, unjust and cruel--mean never.
He really believed, I think, that, were he given a free, omnipotent hand, he would by wholesale executions and wholesale rewards set all the world right. And yet he was not conceited, did not believe in his own powers. I think that it was partly his sense of his own weakness and ignorance that exasperated him.

 

[Hawkins]

And beside Osmund and Helen stood Pengelly. Even at that time, before anything had happened, I realized by a kind of spiritual sniffing of the air that Pengelly was mixed up with all of this. I cannot possibly describe the way in which he was forever turning up. He wore a thin, gray Aquascutum that flapped about his bony legs and, cocked sideways, a bowler too large for him that badly needed brushing. He had a thin cane, with which he used to tap his teeth.
He had nothing to do with any of us, and yet he was always appearing round the corner. He would grin, touch his shabby bowler, look at us as though he had something very important to say and slouch away.
I remember saying to Osmund that I wondered that Charlie Buller made a friend of him. Buller seemed a decent little chap.
'Oh, it isn't Charlie that's Pengelly's friend,' said Osmund, 'it's Hench.'
And Hench? What was he doing here? Like Buller and Pengelly, nothing at all apparently, slouching about like a bladder that needed pricking, a really comic figure, with that little mild face staring above the big wobbly body. And his voice, whenever I heard it, made me want to giggle like a schoolgirl.
What were they doing? We very soon knew. The climax crashed in upon us as though a gray muddy sky had swamped down and choked us.
I heard it from Carden.
One remembers the most ridiculous details of sudden catastrophic scenes that, with a swing and a push, hammer one's life into a new direction. So, on that sunny morning in Carden's library, I was hammered.
I was, I remember, at that moment trying to write. I have all my life been trying to write in the odd moments between what is, I believe, of vastly more importance, trying to live. Just then I was fancying that I could produce a pretty combination of nature and fiction: you know the sort of thing--beavers and otters, cranky heroes who think they should redeem the world, and beautiful trusting young girls. The happy combination has never been brought off yet, and I am most certainly not clever enough to manage it.
I had just written a most moving little description of the Otter's life as, pursued by cruel hunters, he was nosing for his three wives everywhere, when Carden came in, his round childish eyes simply popping in his face.
He gasped. He sat down, stuttered as though he would have a fit, then told me. Last night, half an hour after midnight, Osmund, with Buller and Hench in attendance, was arrested in the hall of the Borlass mansion on the charge of attempted burglary.
'Oh, rot!' I shouted, jumping up. 'Osmund . . . Burglary . . . Absurd, impossible!'--and so on.
But it was true, deadly true. Buller and Hench had had masks and lanterns, all the regular paraphernalia.
Osmund had not uttered one word when arrested, simply shrugged his shoulders.
In due time more of the mystery was declared. They had been given away, the three of them. Everything was known to the police long before the attempt. The police, gathered in from Exmouth, were simply waiting for them.
Further than that, it appeared that their betrayer was Pengelly.
Charlie Buller had been, it appeared, the originator of the plan. He had heard of Lady Borlass's jewels, had persuaded an old friend of his, Hench, to come in with him, and there they were. How Pengelly wormed himself into their confidence nobody knew. Why he played the part he did nobody knew either.
He betrayed them from the very first.
But, mystery of mysteries, what had Osmund to do in this galère? Osmund, the aristocrat, to be mixed in this degraded crowd, and involved in a burglary as common and vulgar as any in the cheapest novelette!
Not at his arrest, nor at his trial nor afterwards, did he utter a single word. He went to jail as quietly as he went fishing.
As you may suppose, my first and my last thought was of Helen. What she must be suffering in her love, her pride, her affronted privacy, her sudden loneliness! But was it not human nature that behind this sorrow for her I should, in spite of myself, wonder whether there was not now a chance for me? I might have known her better.
I saw her indeed only once. On a wild stormy afternoon I was battling my way home across the beach, and I almost ran into her. We stepped back into some shelter of a rock.
I asked her: 'Is there a thing I can do?'
'Nothing,' she answered me.
Then, holding out her hand to me and smiling, she said: 'He won't tell me why he did it. He'll tell me nothing. I think it was a prank of his at the last minute, to play a game on the Borlasses. I don't know. We shall marry as soon as he comes out.'
Then, looking at me as I'd never seen her look at me, she said: 'I want you to promise one thing.'
'I'll promise anything,' I answered.
'Don't try to see me again. Forget us both. I like life to be difficult, but I don't want it to be too difficult. If you really wish to help me, promise me that.' And she was gone.
She left me in a state of exaltation, defiance, exasperation. Did she care for me after all? And if she did, wouldn't I fight heaven and earth to have her?
I argued basely with myself that Osmund was my friend no longer, that in any case he could now only make her miserable, that for her sake I must prevent her from what could only be a wretched marriage. I wrote her, again and again, mad, passionate, pleading letters. I received no answer. I could get no news of her. With 1914 came the war and the end of every story.
I had one more glimpse, however, of the villain of this little piece.
In 1915 I was home on leave and, the loneliest soul in the world, sought out the only friend I had. I sent a wire to Carden and followed it down to find the house shut up and Carden in France. I wandered, on a wet, dreary evening, about the gardens already growing wild with neglect, hating the blind, hostile, shuttered windows and the sough of the wind in the trees.
A stormy shivering moon broke out from the clouds and palely lit the lawn, that very lawn upon which, under a blazing sun, Osmund and Helen and I had first met.
As I stood there someone stepped crunchingly on the gravel path before the shuttered windows. I turned, and there was Pengelly. Oh, but unmistakable, his dusty bowler cocked sideways, his Aquascutum flapping at his heels.
He stood there, staring, as though he, too, had seen a ghost. I called his name, 'Pengelly, you dirty swine!' He turned and ran, I followed, but the moon was veiled, the rain came beating down, hammering on the shuttered boards, there was no other sound in the world.
He became, after that, an obsession with me. I was always looking for him. When I saw him I would discover where the Osmunds were and then wring his dirty neck.
But the world is a large place. As I have already told you, I went from one miserable job to another, always the image of Helen haunting me, loving only her, not knowing whether she were alive or dead--wanting her . . . wanting her. . . .
And now you know why the sight of Pengelly's hatchet face in that barber's shop was the most momentous vision in the world!

 

[Hawkins]

​

CHAPTER III

​

Osmund

I had no more thought for barber or barber's shop. My final vision of the place was of the barber and the sailor grappling together in a muttering, gasping embrace among the tumbled chairs and china. I had picked up my hat and coat and was out of the door into the passage.
There was no Pengelly. Indeed, there was nothing in the dreary little box of a passage but a dim light and a musty smell of oranges. Then I heard voices. Two people came round the corner of the stairs, and I stood aside that they might go by. A stout woman and a little man. The stout woman was breathing heavily and complaining bitterly.
As they passed me I heard the little man say: 'But how was I to know? You always liked liver and bacon before this. I don't know what's come to you with all these new fancies. . . .'
I waited until they had gone. Everything was as silent as an ice-box. From inside the barber's shop there came no sound. Very cautiously I moved up the stairs, turned the corner, and there, on the next landing, looking up the farther staircase, his head cocked as though he were listening, stood Pengelly.
I drew back in the corner of the staircase, restraining every breath in my body, restraining, yet more, my eager desire to catch his dirty bony neck between my fingers and wring it until his eyes stared over the back of his body!
I didn't move, and Pengelly didn't move either. What it was to me to see him again after all these years! He hadn't changed an iota! His cheek bones were as prominent, his nostrils as wide and hungry, his eyes as gray and narrow, his mouth as cruel and mean, and his whole air as shabby and dusty as of old. He was an immemorial figure, standing for spite and meanness like a carved figure in a Cathedral choir stall. But, as I looked at him, it was not of himself that my heart was full, but of Osmund and Helen. At last I should have news of them, at last know whether they were alive, whether they were married, yes, even though I had to push his mean eyes into his dirty little face to discover it.
But what, after all, was he doing there? He was engaged, it was plain, on some game of his own, some game that was of great importance to himself. His whole body was strung together in its absorption of eagerness and curiosity. There was something or somebody on the floor above that concerned him very nearly, and I knew enough about him to be aware that it was something that boded ill.
A noise startled him. He turned and, looking back down the staircase, seemed to be staring right into me. You must remember that here there was only a half-light. A window threw a glow upon his evil countenance, but I was myself in obscurity. I looked into the white frosted door of some offices that had upon the glass names printed in deep black letters.
When he stared at me there was something uncanny about our encounter. For more than fourteen years I had again and again imagined our reunion. With any one of them, Osmund, Helen, Pengelly, Buller, Hench, the meeting would have been enough to provide a link for me with the others, but, for some reason, it had been Pengelly whom I had first envisaged. How often I had planned just what I would say and do, forcing him onto his knees wherever our meeting might be, and then, having had my will with him, throwing him aside like a dirty rag. But I had never imagined it like this.
He stared at me as though he must see and recognize me, but I realized that he was staring beyond me, down into the dark recesses of the staircase, listening with all his protruding ears for a voice, a footstep, an opening door.
Suddenly he nodded his head, as though he had come to a decision, turned and very cautiously climbed the staircase. For a moment I hesitated. Should I follow him or wait for his return? I didn't want to climb to the next floor and then confront him, when perhaps he had already rung a bell and so could escape into some flat. If I waited where I was he would in all probability return--or would he? He might be swallowed up by some apartment and not emerge again that night. The thought decided me. I mounted the stairs after him. I went cautiously, and the turn of the stairs was dark enough to make a slip very easy. I remember that I clutched the volume of Quixote to me as though it were a talisman. I emerged onto the next landing, and--there was no Pengelly! He had vanished as though he had never been.
I was caught by a beat of bitter disappointment. I had missed him, then! I looked around me. Above me the stairs, thinning now as they reached the heights of the building; in front of me the door of a flat with bell and letter box but no name, to my right a ledge with a small window.
I went to this last and looked out. The snow had ceased; roofs ran parallel with my vision, roofs and, above and beyond them, some crooked chimneys that, in this half-light, resembled human beings. One chimney near to me, peering over shelving tiles, seemed like a swollen and doubly malevolent Pengelly. The large ears were cocked; the face, thickened and roughened, was corrugated and lined with sneering laughter. But especially it wore exactly that look of evil listening attention that Pengelly had just now worn.
All this was in the air, but through a division between walls, I could look down, as one looks over a hilly ridge, into the lights of the Circus. The air was thickened and darkened, and so I peered over as it were into a river of light that twinkled and flashed and seemed sometimes to bubble as though, at any moment, it would burst into flame. I was not, in actual fact, so high here above the ground, but I seemed to be high, in a thick gray world with the light flowing like a lava stream between the clefts.
Suddenly, and from the floor below, someone switched on the light and, turning, I saw my little rabbit hutch of a passage all ablaze. If Pengelly came down now or emerged from that door, nothing could prevent our meeting.
Someone was coming up from the floor below. I waited. A head appeared, then a body. It seemed to me not to be odd at all that in another moment I was face to face with Charlie Buller. I had always told myself that if I ever were lucky enough to encounter one of them he would carry the others with him. I don't know why I had been sure of this. After all, nothing was more unlikely. And yet it turned out to be true in a much wider, deeper sense than I had ever suspected. Yes, it turned out to be very true indeed! But at the actual sight of Charlie Buller I must confess that my heart leapt with joy, for Buller meant Osmund and Helen more than Pengelly did. I was sure then, with a glorious triumphant certainty, that my contact with Helen had at last begun again!
Nevertheless, if Charlie was no surprise to me I was like a ghost or miracle to Charlie! He had come up the stairs, his head down, lost in his own thoughts (and, as I was to find out afterwards, he had plenty to think about just then). He almost ran straight into me. He pulled himself up and then stood there, staring as though, in spite of the light, he must be deceived.
'Well, Charlie,' I said, smiling and holding out my hand. At first glance he looked to me just as he used to look--a little rounder, a little tubbier, clothed in just the same sort of rather loud brown tweeds that he used to wear, his round face of the same ruddy brown colour, his eyes bordered by the same good-humoured wrinkles. I had changed, of course, and, I am afraid, not for the better.
At first he really did not know me.
'Dick Gunn,' I said.
'My God!' he answered, taking me in. He stood looking me over, shook me warmly by the hand, then dropped it as though he had suddenly remembered something.
'Have you come to see . . . ?' He stopped abruptly.
'I haven't come to see anyone,' I answered, dropping my voice because I was conscious of Pengelly, as though his nasty spying presence were everywhere around us. 'I'm here entirely by chance. I'm jolly glad to see you, though. I've been hoping for years that I should run against you.'
I remember that he made then the movement that I recollected so well, sucking in his cheeks as though he were pulling at a straw, and his eyes narrowed as though he were suddenly suspicious of something.
'Glad to meet you too,' he said, also dropping his voice. 'Long time since we met, isn't it? Plenty happened since . . .' He broke off, listening.
'Look here,' I went on, 'I don't want to stop you now if you're busy, but I must have a talk with you, and to-night if it's possible.'
'Why, yes,' he said. He was looking around him, staring up the stairs and then at the flat-door.
'Course we'll have a talk--after all this time. Things are pressing a bit at the moment. Where are you staying?'
'Can't we eat together somewhere?' I remember saying that with a grand confidence, although my precious half-crown was all that I had. You must remember too that all this time I was ravenous with hunger.
'Fact is--afraid I'm booked. Let's know where to ring you.' I interrupted him. It seemed to me possible that Pengelly might appear at any moment.
'Wait a minute,' I said, 'I must tell you something. Why I'm here at all is that I followed Pengelly. I saw him downstairs, I followed him up. I kept sight of him as far as this landing and then I lost him.'
'Pengelly!' He stiffened like a terrier sighting a rat. 'Pengelly! Already--he's before his time. Did he see you?' he asked, coming nearer to me and dropping his voice yet lower, as though we'd become two conspirators.
'No,' I answered. 'What's he doing here? He wasn't up to any good.'
​

 

[Hawkins]

'He never is,' Charlie answered.
I noticed then that he was very different indeed from the man of earlier days. There was something in the glance of his eye, in his bodily posture, that set him apart not only from myself, but from all the rest of humanity. In the old days he hadn't given a thought to anything at all save the game or rascality of the moment; now he was neither furtive nor secretive--those are not the words--but suspicious of everybody and everything, as though at any moment someone would spring on him from a dark corner and collar him. Then in a flash I realized. It was prison that had made this difference, set him apart, like some member of a monastic order, given him a secret life that no one who had not suffered that experience could understand.
I might not understand, but I sympathized.
He seemed to have made up his mind. 'Well--so long,' he said, holding out his hand. 'We'll meet soon and have a crack.' I saw that my news about Pengelly had made him impatient. He had moved instinctively towards the door of the flat close to us. Someone was inside there to whom he must give information. But I couldn't lose sight of him without a clue to the others.
'Look here,' I said. 'Where are we going to meet and when?'
'What's your telephone number?' he answered, his eyes both on the staircase and the flat-door.
'I haven't got one. . . . I'm passing through London. But I could meet you anywhere.'
'All right.' I could see how urgent he was to be rid of me. 'Ring me up at the Regent Palace any time before eleven.'
I nodded, and then, without any warning, the roar of an angry sea was in my ears, a long cold serpent coiling tightly round my stomach, and Charlie Buller turned into a scarecrow. Also the electric light danced gaily about the floor. I tottered. He caught me in his arms.
'Hullo . . . what's up?' With all the strength that I had I tried to stiffen my spine, to beat down the lights, to stifle the roar. Through it all I could smell the rough tweed of Charlie's clothes.
'I can't--no food--' I muttered, and sank into a black well of infinite depth.
The first sight after that I had was of a magnificent old secretaire. This thing towered above me. Looking up I could take in all the details: its ancient black wood, the beautiful carving of the old brass handles, but especially the lovely little pictures in white and red ivory with which every one of its multitudinous little doors was faced. These pictures danced before my eyes, but with all the seriousness of semi-consciousness I was gravely tracing them out--there were scenes of hunts, men chasing the deer, of ladies in towering headdresses leaning over high balconies, of armoured knights jousting in tournament, of winding rivers and delicately shaped hills, and all toned to a lovely old richness that harmonized perfectly with the deep ebony of the wooden panels.
Then I looked further, half-raising myself, and stared straight into the eyes of Osmund.
He was standing high above me, watching me very gravely, in his hand a glass.
'Here, drink some more of this,' he said, giving me the glass; and the sound of his voice--deep, gentle, exceedingly harmonious--brought back the old days, the old events, until they seemed to be gathered crowding about me. Oh! but I was glad to see him!
I drank the brandy. My head cleared. My one thought then was that he shouldn't think that I had planned this faint as a ruse. 'I couldn't help it,' I said, sitting up; 'I didn't mean to. I've been so busy, I haven't eaten anything. Overtaxed myself.' I remember so well that ridiculous excuse, the poor effort of the remnants of my pride.
He put his hand on my shoulder.
'That's all right, Dick,' he said. 'We're very glad to see you. There's some food here at your side. Have some grub before you talk.'
With that I am free to confess that I forgot everything save the food. I can taste it still--the cold ham, the bread and butter, cold chicken, Gruyère. . . . They say that a starving man must eat penuriously. There wasn't, I fear, much caution about myself that evening. I swallowed the food like a wolf.
All the time Osmund stood watching me, not saying a word. I finished: I lay back on the sofa, my hands above my head, with a sigh of content. Then I looked up at him, smiling; then, at last, in full control of my faculties, I sat up, facing him.
'Thanks,' I said. 'Now I'll go. You're busy. But let me see you later on. I've been wanting to tumble against you for donkey's years.'
'Have you, Dick?' He stood there, still staring at me in that same odd, grave, contemplative way. 'Well, now you've found me, what's been happening to you?'
'Oh, I don't know,' I answered. 'One thing and another. It isn't too easy these days for a man of my age. . . .' But I wasn't going to expose my poverty. I remember feeling that I'd rather lose sight of Osmund and Helen at once and forever than that they should spy out my nakedness. I climbed to my feet. 'I'll be off,' I said. 'Thanks for the meal. We'll have dinner one night, shall we? Come and dine with me somewhere. We'll talk over old times.'
'Yes,' he said, still staring at me. 'I've had two years in jail, you know. That gives a man something to talk about. . . .' Then, as though he had just made up his mind to something, he put both his hands on my shoulders and pushed me down onto the sofa again. 'You stay here for a bit. I need your company.'
He gave me a cigarette and sat down on the sofa near to me. Then we looked at one another. He was vast as he lounged back sprawling on that sofa, his great legs stuck forward, his head up with that gesture that I remembered so well, his eyes half closed, staring at me from under the lids. His dark hair was flecked now with gray; his eyes were as beautiful, as large and clear, as audacious and courageous as ever they had been. At first I thought that there was nothing very much altered about him save his mouth. The change in that I noticed at once. It had been in the old days careless, casual and friendly. Now it was hard and would have been relentless and almost cruel had not the lips, even as I watched, moved a little and their lines shifted to uncertainty and hesitation. His eyes, too, shifted; after a short look from me they dropped and refused to meet mine. Where had I quite recently seen just that same shyness? Why, of course, Charlie Buller . . . and with that I knew also the reason of the similarity. He had also been making his inspection of me.
'Well, Dick--so you've turned up again. You're looking pretty fit whatever you've been doing. Hair a bit long, which it usedn't to be.'
Then, quite without warning, he gripped my hand. 'I'm damn glad to see you. I've missed you a lot.'
But he hadn't. I knew at once even as he spoke those words that he wasn't thinking of what he was saying, that when he had gripped my hand he was expressing some emotion that hadn't anything to do with myself. Even in the old days he had had the irritating habit of allowing his mind to run ahead of what he was actually saying. This had grown on him apparently. But suddenly he jumped up, walked about the room as though he were looking for something, then went to the door, glanced out of it, closed it very carefully, and came back to me.
'Sorry,' he said, sitting down beside me. 'But I'm half-expecting someone.'
'Yes, I told Buller--' I began. Then I stopped.
I wasn't going to be the first to mention Pengelly.
'Buller went out for a minute. He'll be back.' Then he tried to concentrate on me. 'Now, Dick,' he said. 'Fire away. Tell me all about yourself--all your adventures. You're as fat as ever, you old pig. Been doing yourself proud? Married yet?'
No, I was not married yet, but I didn't tell him the reason. I began a long rigmarole, but neither of us was attending. My nerves were on edge. For what? I don't know. Looking back, I try hard to recover every moment of that important half-hour. For one thing, I was, I fancy, expecting that at any moment Charlie Buller would enter, and for another I had the consciousness that that swine Pengelly was skulking behind the curtains somewhere.
Of course he wasn't. But I couldn't rid myself of the sense and smell of him. And all the time Osmund's fingers were tapping restlessly on the arm of the sofa.
'And so I've been living in Westminster lately,' I added at last, lamely. 'Quite a decent place. Nice woman--food not bad as those things go--'
Osmund nodded his head. 'I know,' he said. But he'd only caught the last words. 'As things go, but I tell you what, Dick, things go damnably. Damnably, that's the way they go. Wait a minute. Do you hear anything?'
He held up his hand. I must confess that what I heard was my heart beating like a pendulum clock. 'What do you expect me to hear?' I asked at last.
'The crowd,' he answered.
'The crowd?' I repeated feebly.
'Yes, the crowd,' he answered impatiently. With a swift movement he jumped up, went to the window, and flung it open.
'Now listen,' he said. There came up to us all the murmur of the Circus. Like the sea it was, coming in with a regular beat and rhythm, 'Tip-Top, Tip-Top, Tip-Top,' and this was broken into by the cry of a motor horn, the distant shout of the calling of the evening papers, the muffled ringing of a church bell--and I seemed to hear also a plaintive undertone as though some giant were whimpering.
He banged the window down again. He came back to me and stood in front of me.
'There you are,' he cried. 'You can't hear it with the windows shut, but I can--night and day. It never stops.'
'What do you live here for,' I asked him, 'if it bothers you so? There are plenty of quiet streets.'

 

[Hawkins]

'That wouldn't make any difference,' he answered. 'They'd be there just the same. It's the thought of them, all alike, all thinking the same things, all doing the same things, all dirty, diseased, making love, eating, drinking, sleeping--' He broke off. 'Don't think I've gone crazy. I haven't. But that time in prison gave me a turn about crowds. I always had it, in a way. Since I was a kid I've always wondered that people weren't better-looking, didn't care for themselves more. Yes, and why they didn't get rid of the unfit and all the rotters, just shove them into a lethal chamber. . . . I'm a rotter myself, of course. Deserve extinction as much as anybody. But I'm quite ready to be put away if someone decided. . . .' He broke off, and smiled in just his old charming way. 'Aren't I an ass, Dick? But I always was, and jail didn't improve me. I wonder you come near me.'
'No,' I answered him; 'but what I can't understand is why, if you feel like that, you've pitched on this place for a flat, in the very middle of all the racket.'
'Ah, you see,' he answered, nodding his head. 'But I wanted to beat it. When I first came out I tried to live in the country, but they all knew about me, and I felt as though I had the plague. So then I shifted to Spain. There I was quiet enough. A beautiful country--beautiful. . . . But I was an exile all the same. I had to come home. I had crazy notions about all sorts of things. And then I joined up, of course; changed my name, and by that time they wanted men so badly they didn't bother to ask whether I'd been in quod or no. I was in France two years. And not a thing touched me. Not a thing. I'd have been glad enough to die, but my life was charmed. Well in 'Eighteen I came home, and knowing how my feelings were, I set out to beat them. And sometimes I have. And then again--sometimes I haven't.'
I've tried here to recover an impression of the spirit behind the words rather than the words themselves. But that is hard indeed to recover. There was something so touching, so alarming, and yet, in spite of its indecision, so determined in the force with which Osmund spoke.
He spoke himself of 'nerves' and 'feelings,' and I felt as I listened that everything that had sensitiveness in him was on edge, straining at the leash (to mix my metaphors), for some crisis of dramatic action. But not an action unpremeditated. I realized that what he said about the 'crowd' and the rest was true enough, but that it was only a background behind some act that he was contemplating. I realized that I had, by a chance, tumbled in at this very hour upon some dramatic event.
Even the room that we were in seemed to encourage me in this belief. There was very little furniture in it. The superb secretaire with the pictured doors of red and white ivory, a long bare refectory table, three chairs with gilt backs, on the bare stained floor two rugs, ragged and torn, but of a lovely deep peach colour, an ancient silver stand for holding Bible or prayer book from some old church, two very old silver candlesticks--but the oddest thing about the room was the walls that were rough with uneven patches of white and gray on them, just as the workmen would leave them after preparing them for distemper. On one of the walls was a mirror of gilded wood, with that beautiful glimmer of rose-colour in it that the old Spanish wood-carving so often has. On another wall was a fine triptych in Limoges enamel, with deep burning blues and greens in it--on the other walls, nothing.
Over everything there was an odd air of dust, as though no one cared for the room properly, and this was strange, for Osmund had been always meticulously spruce and clean about himself and his surroundings. This led me to look at him more closely, and I realized that he was not now himself as smartly brushed and cared for as he used to be.
The collar of his coat was dusty, his tie a little crooked, his trousers a trifle baggy.
He had sat down beside me again and had his hand on my arm.
'I'll tell you something, Dick. In that cabinet there' (pointing to the secretaire) 'I've got a revolver, always loaded. And one day I shouldn't wonder but that I'll lean over the wall and look down into that damned Circus and take a pot at one or two of them. No, I'm not mad--far from it. It would be a sort of protest against this modern rush, noise, screaming and shrieking. Everything's gone from the world, Dick, that made it worth while--all beauty and repose, all craftsmanship and originality. Men move like sheep pushing after one another through the same hole in the same fence.
'It will be worse and worse unless someone makes an example, pulls things up for a moment. There they go, round and round the Circus, jumping the hoops, grinning the same silly grins. And the noise never stops, never stops. I lie awake at night listening to it. Rumble--rumble--rumble. Rustle--rustle--rustle, and the little man there was once, so grave, so quiet, working away in his room on a piece of wood or a fragment of stone, making something beautiful out of it, he's dead, Dick--dead and buried, and everyone's forgotten where his grave is.'
'All the same,' I said, 'I can't see that potting a few stray unfortunate people out of the window is going to help matters much.'
'No--neither it will.' He shook himself briskly, flung back his head as though he'd suddenly waked from a dream. 'Neither it will. I talk an awful lot of rot sometimes. I haven't seen you for so long. That's my excuse. Hullo! Here's Charlie!'
The door opened, and Buller came in. He started on seeing me. He hadn't expected, I suppose, to find me still there, and the words that he had intended to speak died on his lips.
We all three waited in silence. It was an awkward moment for me. Something was going on in which I had no part. So once more I said good-bye.
'Let's meet soon--'
Osmund stopped me. In those moments he had made up his mind. 'No, hang on a minute, Dick. I think you can help us.'
'What is it?' I asked.
'As a matter of fact, you've tumbled in on a little plot. Nothing much, but you may as well know.'
Buller made a movement.
'It's all right, Charlie. Dick's an old friend of the firm. You see, Dick, we're a bit excited this evening, Charlie and I, because in another hour or so we're hoping to have a little talk with our old friend, Mr. Pengelly.'
I nodded. 'I know. I saw Pengelly hanging about outside.'
'Yes. Exactly. He'd come up, I suppose, to see how the land lay. We've been waiting for this meeting a long time, Charlie and Hench and I. We owe Pengelly something--and the rum thing is that it's he who has asked for the meeting.'
He was another Osmund now, with no nonsense about revolvers and crowds. He was smiling, his eyes were dancing, the old boyish gaiety that I had found so attractive in former days was here again.
'Yes. Would you believe it? He had the cheek to write to Charlie three weeks ago--to suggest a meeting, said he had something important to suggest--that after the way he landed us! Well, Charlie brought the letter to me, and--I--I've arranged that he shall have a talk with all three of us.'
'What are you going to do to him?' I asked.
'Do? Oh, I don't know. We'll see. Frighten him a bit. He deserves it. He--'
Then we all stiffened. Someone was turning a key in the outer door.
We all looked round. There were steps, a pause, then the handle of the door of our room was turned.
Staring, I found myself looking, wonder of wonders at last, into the eyes of Helen Cameron.

 

[Hawkins]

CHAPTER IV


The Tea Shop

When I looked at her I felt such happiness surge up within me that I could be conscious of no other feeling whatever.
And here I must interpolate this--namely, that throughout all the extraordinary incidents that followed, horrible, ludicrous, terrifying, or beautiful, my own feeling was in the main one of happiness. If this chronicle does not treat death and the anticipation of death as seriously as it should do, I am sorry, and I make my apologies, but the fact is that, throughout this incredible evening, death seemed to me quite unimportant, just as, at certain great moments in the war, it had seemed quite unimportant.
But as you will see, it did not seem unimportant to Hench, for instance, nor at one moment to Pengelly.
In fact, the way that the imminence of it took us all in different fashion is one of the reasons for this narrative. For myself, there is just this to be said, that from this instant of meeting Helen again until that last mad moment among the roofs and chimneys, although I had many other emotions as well, my principal dominating one was of overwhelming, almost triumphant, happiness, although what I had for most of the time to be triumphant about, heaven only knows.
If I was surprised to see Helen, that was nothing to the surprise that she felt at seeing me.
'Dick!' she cried, and for a moment she could not move. Then she stepped forward and took my hand. We stood there looking at one another like two children, smiling, almost giggling.
The first thing she said was what Osmund had said.
'Dick! Your hair wants cutting.'
'That's what I told him,' Osmund said. At the sound of his deep, penetrating voice I was recalled to a wider consciousness of the world and its affairs. I was aware of a number of rather exciting things, as, for instance, that neither Osmund nor Charlie Buller had expected Helen to appear, that they were greatly disconcerted by her appearance, that Helen had not expected to find Charlie there and was annoyed at his company, and that every piece of furniture in that dusty room seemed to be aware of what was going on.
I took in something too of the change in Helen. She looked older, of course. That one must expect. She was slimmer even than before, so slim and slight that she was like the dark stem of some lovely flower--some pale slender flower, strong and reposing quietly in its beauty. She wore clothes of the same character as of old, altered to the times, of course, but dark, cut for efficiency and discipline, giving, in spite of all her femininity, almost the effect of uniform. In her face was all the kindliness and gentleness that I had so long treasured, but also the austerity, the irony, and now, added to these, a maturity, a sternness of self-discipline that had not been there before. And on her finger was a plain gold wedding ring. Helen Cameron no longer then--Helen Osmund. . . .
I had known that it must be so, but something--some wild unreasoned hope--sank in me now at the positive proof of it.
Osmund was watching her.
'Why, Helen,' he cried, 'how delightful to see you! What's brought you?'
She stood looking at all of us and smiling, taking off her gloves. Then she sat down and with a quiet, leisurely movement that showed she was quite at home there, pulled off her little soft mouse-gray hat.
'I'm only up for the night,' she said. 'But I was suddenly bored this afternoon. Mopsett can be boring, John, you know, and I thought that a little shopping to-morrow morning would do me good. Cheer me up. But don't you worry. Clare's in town. I rang her up from Mopsett. We're going to dine together--eight o'clock in her flat.'
Osmund, while she was speaking, seemed to have made up his mind. 'Right,' he said; 'that's fine.'
'Well, I'll go and wash.' But when she stood up she turned to me, her whole face glowing with pleasure at seeing me. I thought there was relief there, too, as though my presence were in some way going to help her.
'But you, Dick! That you should be here like this! It's incredible! I've wondered about you again and again, where you were, what you were doing. . . .' She broke off, I remember, at that, aware perhaps of all the strange and possibly terrible ways her life had been twisting since our last meeting, much aware, also, by bitter experience, that people did not now rush to 'meet' herself and Osmund--quite the contrary.
Nevertheless, she had only to look at me to see the wild tempestuous happiness I felt at finding her again. I didn't attempt to hide it. I should have been wiser, possibly, and later events might have been different if I had. Not that Osmund, at this time, saw anything; he was busy just now with quite other thoughts.
She moved to the door.
'You're not going at once, Dick, are you? We've got to have a tremendous talk. I've got to know about everything--your most intimate secrets.'
'You shall know everything,' I assured her.
When she was gone and the door closed behind her we three stood looking at one another.
Osmund swayed on his huge legs, frowning, then he turned to me. 'Look here, Dick. There isn't very much time. Helen's turning up unexpectedly has rather complicated things. Would you like to help us out?'
'In what way?' I asked him.
'It's like this. I was telling you about Pengelly when Helen came in. Our little interview with him won't be quite complete unless Hench is also there. Hench perhaps most of all, because he's suffered most.
'Now, I was to have met Hench at a tea place by the Omnibus Theatre at six-thirty. Helen is here, and I'd rather stay with her as things are turning out. Buller has a job on. Would you do that for us--go to the Green Plate, meet Hench there, and bring him here?'
'The Green Plate?' I asked.
'Yes, yes,' Osmund answered impatiently--I saw that he was on edge lest Helen should return--'it's just round the corner from the Circus, Lower Regent Street, next the Omnibus Theatre. There's an old man in fancy dress at the door with a placard on a pole--the tea shop is on the second floor. You can't miss it.'
'What am I to say to Hench?' I asked.
'Simply say that I couldn't come, that I'd been intending to bring him on here to tea instead of having it there.'
I remember that I asked then whether Hench had been told about Pengelly. Yes, Osmund said, he knew that this was something to do with Pengelly. He had been longing for years to meet him again and tell him what he thought of him, but at the same time he was frightened of him. Funny chap, Hench. Of course I remembered him. Well, he was funnier now--a lot funnier--especially since his wife died.
I said that I didn't know that he had a wife. Yes, Osmund said, a splendid woman. They had been devoted to one another. She had stuck to him all the time he'd been in prison, and then died a week after he came out.
​

 

[Hawkins]

Very bad luck.
Very bad luck, I repeated.
Well, there it was. Osmund didn't want to waste time with stories about Hench's wife. The point was, would I go?
Then once more I asked my great question. I remember that I dropped my voice as though all the world were at my elbow.
'Look here,' I asked, 'what do you mean to do to Pengelly?'
'Do?' repeated Osmund. 'Nothing. Only give him a fright.' Then he added, in a low monotone as though he were speaking to himself, 'I want to know--we all want to know--why he did what he did.'
His words seemed to have an echo--the furniture--the beautiful secretaire, the old silver candlesticks, the gilt chairs seemed to repeat:
'We all want to know--why he did what he did.'
And even--it wasn't at the time too fanciful a notion--it seemed to me that the Circus itself rose up to the windows and repeated--'We all want to know--why he did what he did.'
Well, I wanted also to know--I wanted to know that and a great many other things as well. I said I would go to meet Hench.
When I was outside the flat and starting down the dark staircase I found that I was incredibly refreshed. Now this was odd. I had been on my legs all day. I had been worried and troubled almost to insanity. Only an hour ago I had fainted from hunger, and yet, as I went down that staircase, I seemed to have wings.
I was fancying that I was taking Helen with me, and that thought, untrue in every sense though it was, gave me a fiery elation so that I was ready for anyone or anything.
It was this light-headedness that made me step out of the building into the street as though I were going to strike off, swimming with my head up, through a glorious sea of shining waters. I had not at the time considered it, but in looking back now, I suddenly realized that Osmund's room had been lit only by candles in the silver candlesticks. The staircase had been dimly dark, and now I was almost, for a moment, blinded by the lights of the Circus.
I had reached the moment--it always seems to me a moment, as though some vast dominant giant had snapped out a word of command--when all the shops close their doors and thousands and thousands of human beings pour out into the streets.
London suddenly, after being a place of mystery where every sort of transaction, dangerous, evil, generous, impulsive, cruel, foolish, disastrous, helpful, is carried through in coloured caves defended by dark doors, is turned upside down, inside out, and everything that was hidden and mysterious is open and mysterious instead.
The same game is played as before, but now all the rules are different, and these engagements, these contracts, these purchases and agreements, these plots and duels, are worked out in the open, under blazing lights, before everyone's eyes, and the rule is that everyone must keep moving, no one must be still for a single moment. Perhaps it is that which decides who shall be the masters of the world--those clever ones who are able to get their way as easily in the enclosed corner as in the shining, blazing open. Life, indeed, if it is to be conquered, demands every kind of clever trick.
I felt at that moment, for the first time for many months, that I could conquer it.
There they all were, out in the open, making the Circus ring with their tramping. It was no longer a dim pool to which the animals came to drink their fill, but rather, under the dazzling and jumping lights, a hard and shining arena, upon whose stage everyone was engaged in attempting to win the game. The game that I was out to win, I realized with a start of surprise, was Osmund's. I can't possibly convey to you with how extraordinary a force, as I hesitated on the edge of the kerb--brushed on every side by these hurrying eager phantoms--I seemed to feel his body, dark, gigantic, winged, careen with its spreading shadow over all the Circus. He hung like a great bird over us all, watching me to see that I did his bidding. At that, I remember that just before I stepped out into the centre of the arena I did for a moment hesitate and wonder what I was doing in this affair. What was it that Buller and Osmund were planning? Why was the miserable Pengelly skulking about those stairs? Would it not be better for me to leave the whole mysterious business and go my own way? Then I thought of Helen--Helen in that flat with Osmund who did not want her, alone, unwitting, Pengelly round the corner. That decided me, and I went forward.
As I pushed ahead and touched shoulders with the crowd I recovered my normal health. It was as though I had a moment before been sickening for influenza. Now, stopping once again--What, I asked myself, have I been making all this fuss about? Yes, I said, staring into the round rosy faces of two old women who, both short and fat, looked as though in another instant they would roll themselves like barrels through the crowd, what has there been in all this but the fact that, by accident, I have stumbled into a group of old friends and (thank God, thank God) am in touch once more with the woman I love. 'The woman I love!' I might have shouted out loud, so exalted and excited was I at the thought of Helen--'The woman I love,' I said, and plunged into the arena like a gladiator, my sword flashing, my buckler agleam, while all the thumbs at all the upper windows prepared to turn themselves down!
At the Omnibus Theatre they were playing a comedy called Good-night, Charlie, and there they were, rows of photographs with Charlie in pajamas and a pillowcase, and two ladies in two beds, and an old gentleman in a Bath chair--all doing the most natural things with that complete air of unreality that theatrical photographs always present. Out of the twirling door of the Omnibus Restaurant came two young men arguing, I most clearly remember, about some hair-restorer. They were quite vexed with one another, and then, in through the twirling door there pushed a disdainful stout lady with bright yellow hair, and a very thin old man, who was shivering with the cold. And it was cold. The snow, very gently, very softly, very kindly, was beginning to fall again.
Still on fire with my strange and unnatural happiness, I turned the corner and very easily found the Green Plate.
In the doorway was a sort of Father Christmas, a peaked hat of dirty gray on his head, his woolly beard a little askew, and the hand that held the advertising sign extremely dirty.
On the sign was printed 'YE GREENE PLATE,' and then a picture of the same. As I passed the old man he dug out from the pocket of his very shabby gown a very dirty handkerchief and proceeded to lift his beard that he might the better blow his nose. You say that I cannot after these years remember that old man's beard? Wait and see whether I had not cause to remember it!
I climbed the staircase and found myself inside a room that was littered with little tables and quite empty save for two waitresses who sat together in a corner like wax figures from Madame Tussaud's.
It was, of course, not the hour for any sort of meal. Here the cave was empty. All the action of life had passed into the open. I sat down at a table near the window. One of the automata approached me, yawning behind her hand. I ordered a pot of tea and a muffin. She passed, still yawning, to a hole in the wall and, galvanized into a sudden almost unearthly excitement (as though I had whispered in her ear that the Last Trump was about to sound), shouted down it, 'Pototeamuffin--ONE,' then wandered back to her chair, where she took on again the waxen immobility of a dummy.
I looked through my window on to walls that were like rough and jagged rocks. Here the light was dim, figures passed like shades, and you might see at any moment old Charon approach with his boat. The prehistoric monsters played up the hill, and at the edge of the rocky cliffs you could hear the dim 'flap-flap' of the sluggish waters.
Then the door was pushed open and Hench came in. He was not difficult to recognize--that big flabby misshapen body like a bolster, with the small round head set on the top of it, and on the head perched a bowler ridiculously minute. It was characteristic of him that he should carry an umbrella, untidily folded, that bulged like a cabbage. He exactly resembled, as he stood there, a figure of the music halls, stout in the wrong places, unhappy, bewildered, about to burst into a piping and desperate little song.
He looked about him, opened his mouth at the sight of the two waitresses, shut it again, then saw me. Like Charlie Buller he failed to recognize me. He was moving towards another place. I got up and came to meet him, and we stood together in the middle of the desert of the little tables like Stanley meeting Livingstone.
'Hullo, Hench!' I cried. 'Don't you remember me?'
He stared, gaped, dropped his umbrella, picked it up again:
'No,' he said in his funny emasculated voice. 'I'm afraid . . .'
'Dick Gunn,' I said.
He jumped almost out of his fat skin then, was as shy, confused, pleased and apprehensive as a girl at her first party. I could see at once that he wasn't sure (that he hadn't been sure, poor devil, for many a day) whether I or anyone else would care to be found speaking to him in public. So I reassured him by catching his arm and pulling him with me over to my table by the window. He sat down without a word; the automaton appeared, and I ordered tea and a muffin for him.
'Are you hungry? Would you like a poached egg or something?' I asked him.
'No, no,' he said hurriedly. 'Indeed, no. Not at all.'
I proceeded at once (because he was shaking with apprehension) to explain things to him. He had been expecting to meet Osmund here, but Osmund was detained and wanted me to take him on to the flat--only a yard away, across the Circus.
He was, it seemed, completely overwhelmed by my appearance. I was the very last person he had expected to see. He had been in two minds whether he would come at all.
'Yes--you see, Gunn, meeting Osmund again after all this time--what I mean to say--it's bringing back unhappy memories, very unhappy indeed.'
'Haven't you seen him, then,' I asked, 'since--' I paused.
'No,' Hench broke in hurriedly. 'Not for five years--that is, for nearly five. The last time was at Eastbourne, quite by accident--on the Front. We had a little talk. I mean, you couldn't call that a real meeting--'
'No, you couldn't,' I agreed seriously.
To give any real impression of Hench's conversation is very difficult. It was the oddest, strangest kind of twittering, as though a canary had escaped from its cage and were trying to tell one about his imprisonment. But this small, shrill, wandering, little voice came out of a body that might have been magnificent had it been properly cared for.
Hench was, I suppose, every bit of six foot, and broad with it, but he was made of that dull white doughy kind of fat that runs into little rolls of flesh at the back of the neck, under the eyes, between the fingers. His hair also was so light coloured as to be almost invisible. In his bath he must have looked like an enormous upright bolster. Yet his was not an unpleasant face; it was kindly, honest, genuine. Now, with his many troubles, it was overclouded with a shadow of nervous unhappiness. And he moved, as I had already noticed in Osmund and Buller, as though he belonged to some sect apart from the common race of men.

 

[Hawkins]

As a matter of fact, I saw in another moment an expression that transformed him.
'What does Osmund ask me for?'
'He wants you to meet Pengelly,' I answered shortly.
Then I saw a change!
He became in a flash a dangerous animal. His body seemed to stiffen, his hand straightened out, hard and taut, against the table.
'Pengelly . . .' he repeated. 'At last . . . he's turned up again.'
He forgot me, I think, for a moment or two; just sat there, his head bent forward, thinking, remembering. The waitress brought us our food. I busied myself with it. Hench swallowed his tea blindly, without knowing what he was doing. Then he began in a strange, trembling monotone, staring before him out beyond the window to those dark rocky cliffs and the flowing Styx. Once and again he dropped an 'h,' once and again he muddled a word, but, as I remember it, it flowed on in a scarcely hindered stream, as though I had turned a handle and this were a recorded disc.
'You were always a good friend to me, Gunn, or I think you were. What I mean to say, it's hard to know after all that's happened who you can trust. But I don't care--you can't do me any 'arm now. Nobody can. I mean to say, it's too late now for anything to matter much.'
He went back then to the very beginning of the story, how he and his wife and kid had been up against things, didn't know where to turn for a job.
'You can't judge me, Gunn,' I remember his saying, 'because you've never been up against it, and until a fellow has been it isn't fair to talk.' (Lord, if he only knew!) Well, then, he met Charlie Buller, an old acquaintance, and Buller invited him down to the seaside to talk things over. Down he went, and soon he saw what Buller was after. Now the thing that he most urgently wanted to explain to me was that neither Buller nor himself had intended to 'do anything really dirty.' It had begun with some grudge that Buller had against Borlass. He wanted to give the conceited swine a bit of a fright. Hench had to admit that after a while it became something much more concrete than that. He couldn't deny, when I put it to him, that they had intended to rob Lady Borlass of some of her jewels, and then, driven into a corner, he fell back on the old 'Robin Hood' line of argument that the Borlass party was rich and disgusting and mean, and that here was he with his wife and kid starving. . . .
'All right,' I broke in. 'We can cut all that, Hench. I'm not saying that I wouldn't have robbed Lady Borlass myself if I'd had the chance. Drop the excuses.'
But he wouldn't and he couldn't. I could see that this had been, for years now, with him a constant and persistent preoccupation, that he had gone over the same ground again and again and again, that in the long sleepless nights his soul, alone with its Maker in the bitter dark, wailed out its excuses and found in that wailing no possible sort of comfort. No, he was not a villain, poor Hench, nor ever intended for one.
I moved him on at last, and it was plain enough that his final action had been determined by Buller's highly coloured picture of Borlass's villainy (for Borlass was no villain, only a fool), his consciousness of the hunger of his wife and child, and, by far the strongest influence, quite outweighing all the rest, his worship of Osmund.
Yes, worship, it seems, was not too strong a word for his feeling for Osmund at that time. Osmund had seemed to him simply the most miraculous creation, a kind of God in human form. Osmund was everything that Hench was not, a gentleman, of magnificent physique, of superb courage, infinite wisdom--and so on, and so on.
When Hench learnt that Osmund was also of the venture he hesitated no longer. He realized, of course, that Osmund was going into it from no common motives of burglary, that it was from hatred of Borlass, and from a kind of mad, wild desire 'to do him one in the eye.' Hench had always afterwards believed (and in this he was, I daresay, correct) that Osmund would have prevented any real robbery and would have turned the whole affair into some wild, desperate practical joke, stripping Borlass naked and throwing him into the garden pond, or tying him to the dining-table, something crazy, childish and vain.
In any case the theme changed to Pengelly, and here I saw at once that on this subject Hench was not sane. He became now strangely unreal as though the true normal Hench had jumped out of the window into the Styx and his place had been taken by a quivering madman whose brain was quietly boiling with insanities.
He considered, you see, that Pengelly was the murderer of his wife.
At the mention of his wife his face, pale in any case, was drained of all shadow of colour.
'You see, Gunn, she was a wonderful woman. You never saw her. What I mean to say, you couldn't really appreciate her without seeing her. She was one of those women who, the worse things are, the fonder they get of you. She didn't want to marry me at first, and I'm sure I couldn't blame 'er. I asked her six times over before she'd listen, and then it was to escape her stepmother as much as anything. What I mean is, she wasn't really happy at home--not likely to be, with her father giving in to his second wife over everything and never considering his children.
'Anyway, she came to me the sixth time I asked her, and from that moment we were the happiest pair in England. Never a cross word. She was an angel if ever there was one.'
He paused to wipe his forehead, on which there were beads of perspiration. His appearance was no longer ludicrous to me. I knew again that there was something here deeply real, and something close to me, for which I could feel, in my own way, a sort of protective affection.
'You see, Gunn, she believed in me right away from the very beginning when nobody else did. I wouldn't be where I am now, wouldn't 'ave 'ad any of that special printing knowledge I got if she hadn't urged me on and seen where my tastes lay. What I mean is there's nothing like a woman whom you're in love with for making a man believe in himself if she wants to. . . . And she made me believe in myself. Then we had our kid, the prettiest little girl, Gunn, she was, and after that everything went wrong.
'I lost my job at the printing works in Reading through no fault of my own, both the wife and child fell ill, and I got sort of desperate. It wouldn't 'ave been so bad if Clara had been up and about, but with her sick and the child not having enough to eat--what I mean is that it would drive any man sort of desperate--and I never was as strong a character as Clara wanted me to be--'
No, he wasn't a strong character, and he was a good deal weaker now than he had been then. Kindliness and friendliness had been, I daresay, his undoing. Anything to make people pleased with him. A despicable desire, the sterner ironist may declare, but all the nicest people suffer from it.
Yes, he was off his head with worry, and so the rest easily followed. He went down to Howlett and fell under the influence first of Buller and then, far more thoroughly, of Osmund. One of the chief attractions that Osmund had for him was that his wife, Clara, would have thought the world of him.
He was exactly the kind of man that she had always been hoping Hench would one day have as a friend. His imagination united Clara and Osmund together in a sort of sentimental embrace--his wife and his best friend--all three of them passing blissfully to the Elysian Fields together!
Poor Hench! It turned out for him far otherwise. First Osmund, then Pengelly, and ruin in their train.
He made no excuses for himself save this poor futile argument that he and Charlie Buller had never really intended 'to do anything dirty.' But the villainy of Pengelly left him bewildered. Like Osmund, he wanted to know what made him do it. Certainly not a love of law and order, for a more abandoned scoundrel than Pengelly you couldn't find anywhere. He had been betraying them, it seemed, from the very first, urging Buller on, making it all easy, arranging with someone to take the stuff after it had been stolen. It was not greed of money that attracted him, it was not even hatred of Osmund, whom from the first moment he detested: he had, it seemed, arranged to betray Buller and Hench long before he knew that Osmund was to be in the affair.
All incredible, all motiveless. 'What I mean,' said Hench, 'is that we weren't worth all his trouble--we weren't important enough. Anyway, that's how it was . . . and Clara stuck to me all the time I was in prison and died a week after I came out.'
She died thinking that Pengelly was still pursuing them. She was haunted by the face and voice of Pengelly, and she would cry out his name in her sleep and shiver with terror of him in her last delirium.
After her death Hench simply waited for the day when he would meet Pengelly again. All through his regular quiet life--for he found work with people who trusted him, and rose steadily in their esteem, all through the unvarying loneliness of his days--his child had died when he was in prison--this thought had persisted, that the time would come when he would meet Pengelly face to face and tell him what he thought of him. But for years he never heard of him nor of Buller, and had only that one meeting with Osmund at Eastbourne. Then had come a line from Osmund asking for this rendezvous, and at last from my lips he had learnt the reason of it.
Now, as I sat opposite him at this shabby little table, some of the hatred that he had for Pengelly passed to myself. I had always loathed him, but now it was as though I, too, had been betrayed by him, and I, too, had waited all these years to repay a little of what I owed.
And I felt also some of that struggle that was going on in Hench's heart, the struggle between his natural sentimental love for his fellow human beings, his desire to be liked by them and to like them in return, and this hot, corroding hatred that never left him, that turned and turned in his heart like a wild animal lying uneasily there.
'Well, I'll come,' said Hench, staring beyond me into space. 'I'll see Osmund again--yes, and Pengelly too.'
Then, as I rose up to pay the bill, I knew that I was at last being drawn into their affair, that there was no escape for me. I had an odd breathlessness as though I had been running.
Yes, there was no doubt about it. I was in it now--up to the neck.

 

[Hawkins]

CHAPTER V


Pengelly on Earth

As we passed by Father Christmas into the open air, I realized that it had become, during this last half-hour, very much colder.
Snow was now falling with a soft determination, settling against the cheek like the touch of a dove's wing, touching the hand with an intimacy that seemed to be the privilege of oneself alone.
The air was colder, and the arena wore now a fiercer colour. Through the snow all the sky signs danced in a fresh activity, and the white surface that began thinly to encrust the paths and borders made the walls and roofs velvet in a dim and gentle dusk. The hour of release from the caves had completely passed, and now the arena was filled with figures all bent upon the warfare of the evening--warfare of all kinds, duels between man and woman, between woman and woman, dog and rat, elephant and spider, boa-constrictor and rhinoceros. All the combatants could be seen moving to their especial places, and over everything there was the pause and hush of preparation.
I had my own drama to prepare for, but at the moment my particular care was that Hench should come to no harm. I was aware that his nerves were in no very controlled state, that a talk with Pengelly, after brooding on that very thing for so long, might swing him easily into a world of uncontrolled melodrama. We had, in fact, almost immediately an instance of his nervousness.
As we passed the doors of the Omnibus Restaurant three young men in evening dress came hurrying out, very happy, very noisy, having started what would surely be a jolly evening in exactly the proper spirit.
Beyond the spinning doors they joined arm-in-arm and, their top-hats a trifle tilted, came surging into us.
'Sorry, old top,' someone shouted.
Hench staggered back. He turned, trembling, onto them.
'Why can't you look where you're going?' he called out in his funny, tremulous, piping voice. 'Do you call that manners not to--'
But they were far beyond him, halfway across the Circus, gay, defiant gladiators, raising their swords to the emperor and the thronging audience, ready, eager to meet with every challenger.
I caught his arm.
'All right, Hench,' I said, 'they are only a bit jolly.'
He was trembling all over. I caught suddenly some sense of his own fear. The Circus seemed to be, at that instant, crowded with shining, ferocious, determined figures resolved that we should not pass. I caught his arm, feeling an odd tenderness and affection for him.
'It's all right, Hench,' I repeated, 'it's all right,' as though he had been a child. I conveyed him across and brought him safely to the door.
Going up the dark, twisting staircase he explained. 'You see, Gunn, it means a good bit to me, this does. What I mean to say is that meeting Osmund and Buller again, well, it's like old times, and not very pleasant old times either.'
Halfway up, at the very spot where I had watched Pengelly listening, he paused, catching my arm.
'Look here, Gunn,' he said, 'I don't think I'll go on, if you don't mind. I'm not quite myself to-night, and seeing Pengelly again I don't know what I mightn't do and say. I don't, really. What I mean is that I'm not in proper control of myself. I'm not, really.'
I quieted and soothed him. I assured him that nobody was going to harm Pengelly (I wasn't at all sure of this myself), that it would do him good to see his old friends again, that he had given his word to Osmund that he would see him. I persuaded him, and a moment later I rang the bell of Osmund's flat.
It was Buller who opened the door. Buller and Hench seemed glad to see one another.
'Hullo, Charlie.'
'Well, Percy, how are you? Come along in.'
We came in. Buller led Hench into the sitting-room, then came back to me, while I was hanging up my coat. He dropped his voice.
'I say, Gunn, wait a minute.' I paused. He told me then that Osmund had gone out with his wife. Osmund was very anxious that his wife should not meet Pengelly. 'A man's affair this,' I remember Buller's saying. 'We don't want any women around.' So Osmund had seen his wife safely to her destination. Osmund also did not want Hench to meet Pengelly before Osmund returned, so he, Buller, was going to take Hench out with him for half an hour to have a drink.
And that was where I came in. I was, after all, thoroughly 'in' this by this time. I had proved myself their friend--would I help them yet further? Would I stay in Osmund's flat and receive Pengelly when he came, see that he didn't get away?
'We don't want to frighten him,' Charlie Buller said. 'Just when he's been so kind as to like to see us again.'
'Look here, Charlie,' I said. 'I must get this clear. What are you and Osmund planning to do to Pengelly?'
'Nothing,' Buller answered. 'Nothing at all. We want to have a little talk with him, that's all.' He stood, his legs planted, sucking an imaginary straw. He grinned, came close to me, put his hand on my shoulder.
'You'd like to have a look at him yourself, wouldn't you?' he asked me.
'All right,' I said. 'I'll wait.'
A moment later Hench came out smiling. He seemed to have lost all his nervousness.
'Charlie and I are going out for a drink.' He nodded at me.
'All right,' I said.
​

 

[Hawkins]

But my word, it was funny when I was left alone in that flat! I don't know that ever before in my life I had experienced a queerer sensation. It isn't nearly enough to say that it was queer, because of what I was expecting would shortly occur there, although there was something of that in it, nor that it was queer because of the effect that Osmund's personality cast over it, nor that it was queer because I was in any case wildly excited, a little lightheaded with my starving, poverty, and joy that I had found Helen again. There was something besides these. I started a tour of inspection, and the first thing that I saw was my volume of Quixote lying demurely on the gaunt refectory table. And wasn't I glad to see it! It was a reminder that this fantastic adventure into which I had plunged was only one facet of a life that was on the whole always normal and sane.
Sancho Panza's joy at seeing his ass returning to him again was not greater than mine at seeing Sancho Panza once more. It was a small flat; the sitting-room, two bedrooms, the bathroom and a minute kitchen. The smaller bedroom was plainly a servant's room from the photograph of a young woman all smiles and flowers on the dressing-table.
The larger bedroom was monastic in its simplicity. It led directly out of the sitting-room, an important fact, as I was to discover later on in the evening. The floor was stained, and its only covering was a Persian rug, a dull biscuit-gold in colour, with little trees of a dark purple worked round the border. There was a small, very hard-looking bed of black wood, a chest of drawers with twisted handles of brass, a mirror of dark wood lined with silver and some very old silver hairbrushes, badly dented. There was a cupboard, and there were two cane-bottomed chairs. There were no pictures on the walls. The point of the room was that on the bed was lying a woman's hat, and on one of the chairs a pair of woman's gloves. Helen's! I picked up the gloves and put them in my pocket. It was so instinctive an act that now, looking back, I believe that I was unaware that I did it.
It was one of the many silly acts of my very silly life, and I was to repent it sufficiently before all was over.
I went back to the sitting-room and stood in admiration before that secretaire of which I have already spoken. It was one of the loveliest things! The little red and white panels were as fresh as though they had been painted only yesterday, the pictures enchanting in their gaiety and fun, the whole effect of colour was so deep and rich that it seemed to stain all the room to a finer glow.
The thick purple curtains were not drawn. I went to the windows and looked out. The snow had for a moment ceased to fall. Although its covering of the Circus must have been very slight the white glow gave an iridescent shine to the air, and all the little black figures hurried like dolls pulled by hidden strings about the scene. How self-important they all were! I could fancy myself standing in the shadow of those curtains and, with a rifle, picking them off one after another. How ludicrous the sudden starts they would give, how silently they would lie like blots of ink against the snow, while over them the lights of the advertisements, the stars--the golden flask, the appearing and disappearing letters would move, the only live things in all the world.
Not that I was bloodthirsty--far, far from it--but from the height where I was nothing below me had human life. So God, yawning up on His lonely cloud, must so often feel!
The bell rang. It broke into the flat like a menacing tap on the shoulder. I went to the hall door, opened it, and there stood Pengelly.
It was my fate that evening to surprise my old friends, but I can have surprised none of them more than Pengelly. I thought for a moment that he was going to turn and run. He did, indeed, step back into the passage.
'Come in, Mr. Pengelly,' I said. 'You're expected.'
He looked me all over. How I detested him at that moment! Then he shrugged his shoulders.
'I hadn't expected to see you, Mr. Gunn,' he said. 'It's quite a long time since we last met.'
So long, in fact, that I had forgotten a peculiarity in his voice, a way that he had of sucking in a word every once and again, as though it had escaped him by accident and he only caught it just in time.
'Yes,' I answered, standing aside to let him in. 'Better late than never.'
He gave me another look--malevolent, inquisitive and puzzled--then came inside.
He took off his hat and coat and stepped into the sitting-room. He moved always, as well I remembered, as though at any moment he might have to hide behind a curtain or a door. Now he stood there, his bony head bent forward, his thin arms and legs a little spread, as though they too were listening.
'Doesn't Osmund keep any servants?' he asked.
'I really don't know,' I answered. 'But at the moment I'm the only person in the flat. You are a little early for your appointment.'
He said nothing to that, but looked all round the room like a dog sniffing.
'Funny thing. No electric light. Only candles.'
'Osmund's fancy, I daresay,' I answered. 'I expect he thinks his things look better in candlelight.'
Pengelly then picked up my Quixote from the table, and it was all I could do not to shout out that he was to leave it alone. However, he gave a contemptuous sniff and put it down again. Then he settled himself into the Spanish armchair, and his thin, mean little body seemed to curl itself up like an animal's, into a bony heap, and from this his head, with protuberant, naked forehead and greedy, quivering nostrils, jutted out.
'Now, Mr. Gunn, I'd like to know what you're doing here,' he said.
I smiled. 'That's all right, Pengelly,' I answered. 'I'm Osmund's guest, for the moment.'
'Well, it isn't all right,' he answered. 'I'm here on business with Buller and Osmund, and it's nobody else's affair.'
'Quite so,' I answered. 'It certainly isn't my affair, and I won't stay if I'm not wanted. But it will be twenty minutes or so before Osmund comes back, so we may as well put up with one another until then.'
He looked at me with scornful patronage.
'Fancy you turning up again. I've heard of you once or twice. Not been doing too well, have you?'
But it wasn't my purpose to quarrel with him just then. I wanted to know one or two things.
'No,' I answered. 'To tell you the truth, I haven't. As a matter of fact, that's what I wanted to speak to you about. When I heard that you were coming I hoped that there would be a chance of a word with you privately. I don't know what it is you're suggesting to Osmund and Buller, but I don't see why, if it's a good thing, I shouldn't be in on it too.'
Amazing is the vanity of man! A moment earlier he had been regarding me with the deepest suspicion--now, so deep and rooted was his conceit that, at one word from me, his suspicions vanished. His contempt for me, however, only deepened.
He rubbed his thin long fingers together.
'So you're down and out, are you? Well, I'm not surprised. . . .' He became suddenly confidential. 'Look here. You can tell me something. I was taking a bit of a risk suggesting this meeting. Of course, Osmund and Buller only got what they were asking for over that burglary business. They'd have been caught anyway. But I couldn't expect them to feel especially friendly to me over it. Yes, it was a bit bold, suggesting a meeting, but that's why I'm where I am to-day. I've taken risks all my life long, and they've always come off. But you can tell me, Gunn. Ain't they sore about that old business?'
'They were a bit sore,' I answered, 'for a while. Naturally. They've always been puzzled why you let them in as you did.'
'I had my own reasons,' he answered, with immense self-satisfaction. 'As a matter of fact, I didn't do them any harm. They'd have been caught anyway. They were babies at it. And I did myself a bit of good--rather necessary for me just then, as it happened, to be in with the police.'
'I see,' I answered, nodding my head. 'Very clever of you.'
'And you think they're not sore any longer?'
'Oh, well,' I replied. 'It was all a long while ago. It's no use bearing grudges all your life.' He seemed to be greatly relieved.
'That's what I thought,' he said, sucking his words down his throat.
'All the same,' I went on, 'I'm not sure that they'll be eager to trust you again.'
'Oh, they needn't be afraid,' he said. 'I won't let them down this time. If they like, they're in for a good thing--a very good thing indeed.'
'What kind of a thing?' I asked, a trifle too eagerly, perhaps.
He looked at me through his narrow, evil eyes, then shook his wicked head.
'Not quite so fast,' he answered. 'I haven't said that you're in on this, have I?' He nodded his self-satisfaction. 'I'm glad they're sensible. They need someone with a brain to advise them. Buller's no fool if he's started in the right direction, but Osmund--I never had any opinion of Osmund's intelligence. Always in the air. Never knows what he's doing. But he'll have to know this time and do what he's told.'
I've tried to give you some idea of the way that this conversation went, but if I hadn't heard it with my own ears I never would have believed it. I perceived that with Pengelly, as with all true criminals, self-pride, conceit, arrogance amounted to insanity. This self-confidence, this conviction that they are not as other men but are made altogether of another clay, is the spring of all their actions, the reason, too, of their inevitable defeat. It is true, perhaps, that they are beings of another mould from the rest of mankind, that the rules and motives of their daily lives, of their ambitions, desires, conquests and defeats belong mentally, spiritually, physically, to another planet, a planet dark and separate, burning with its own baleful secret fire.
True motiveless wickedness, however, is so rare that Pengelly was a fascinating object to me. So rare and not rare at all. By that I mean that any evil human being who is without conscience or any sense of shame attracts us because it seems to us that we might so easily be like him. Throw over one little scruple, one little moral hesitation, and there we are, and what a fine time we might be having. The real characteristic of this post-war world of ours is not that it is especially amoral or bold or advanced, but that the reasons against our acting foolishly, badly or ruinously are so many fewer than they used to be.
As Pengelly continued to talk there were parts of me that rose like awakening animals in response to him. Parts of me were like that, and there were more parts of me that could be like that were they given any encouragement. It was not the remoteness of Pengelly's evil mind and life that, in retrospect, horrified one, but rather its closeness and intimacy. It is absurd to pretend that evil is not infective; it is as infective as measles or scarlet fever, and often as fascinating as a full meal to a hungry man.
Pengelly would never have been as confidential in this little talk of ours had he not despised me so thoroughly, but I was a poor, weak fool of a failure, and there is nothing that a man like Pengelly values so highly as an audience that is so far below him that it can admire without danger of retaliation.
So he let himself go. He told me a little of what he had been doing during these last years. His favourite game was blackmail, his favourite game and, I gathered, his principal source of income. He assured me that I had no idea how simple and easy it was--even, he implied, for a poor, silly, soft fool like myself. Everyone had his or her secret, and all you had to do was to discover it and then play with the victim as you would with a trout.
As he spoke, the world began to take colour from his stories, and soon I saw it in groups of cowering, quivering men and women, bending their backs, falling onto their knees, raising their hands for pity while Pengelly stole in and out among them, his bony head a little thrust forward, his hands crossed behind his back.
Men had hanged themselves to escape him, women suffered the last ignominy, even children had been betrayed. But the astonishing thing was that it became clear, as he proceeded, that he regarded himself as an entirely virtuous being.
It was the whole race of men that was at fault. The fools that men were who, for some lust of the body or mean desire of gain or cheap revenge, put themselves so naively, so simply into his hands.
He saw himself as a kind of immortal judge walking about among men and punishing justly follies.
Of his own cleverness also he never could have enough. He had, I am sure, learnt a good deal about the different weaknesses of mankind. Even during this short time that we were together I learnt some surprising things, and I have no doubt that he was speaking truthfully enough.
But very soon his voice and personality pervaded all the room; it crawled like a snake here and there, its little sharp, bright eyes peering into every corner as it dragged its sluggish, gleaming coils from corner to corner. It seemed to me that the Circus below us was soon aware of its presence, and that all those little manikin figures hastened into the shadows that they might escape it; the white shining surface of the Circus was bare and naked. Everywhere there was a breathless silence, and from the roofs that bordered it the sharp eyes looked down, piercing every shadow. . . .

 

[Hawkins]

Meanwhile time was passing, and I was beginning to wonder why they had not returned.
Pengelly also began to wonder.
'Look here,' he said, taking out his watch and suddenly looking up at me with renewed suspicion. 'You're not having a game, are you?'
'Game?' I asked. 'What kind of a game?'
'Well, it's time Osmund was turning up. I haven't all the evening to waste, you know.'
'Oh, he'll turn up,' I said. 'You were early. And I'm very glad you were. See here, Pengelly. Can't you let me in on this plan of yours?'
'What use would you be?' he asked contemptuously. 'You're too soft.'
'Oh, I don't know,' I answered. 'I'm not so soft as I used to be, you know. I've had a pretty rough time these last years, and that changes a man.'
'We'll see,' he replied. 'Of course, you talk and behave like a gentleman. That's in your favour. There's nobody like a gentleman for taking people in.'
'Is that so?' I answered innocently. 'Why's that?'
'Well, with women, for instance,' Pengelly answered with immense satisfacton. 'Women always trust a gentleman more. Can't think why they should, but there it is. I should think women might like you if you smartened yourself up a bit.'
'Yes,' I said ruefully, 'I want a hair-cut, and, to be frank with you, I haven't had a decent meal for days.'
His suspicions were now entirely quieted. I could see that I was just the kind of help that he needed, a fool, a gentleman, down and out, ready to fill my belly at anybody's cost, very quickly succumbing to all his wishes and demands.
That was a knowledge that I don't doubt he had to the full--how to subdue weaklings to his slightest word with a swift and subtle course of training. No wonder that he should think poorly of the human race when he had seen so many of them so quickly surrender!
In fact, he had a kind of power, even for a moment, over myself, although I sat there loathing him, deriding him, thinking myself vastly his superior. It is strange when you consider how, just then, each of us thought himself infinitely the king of the other!
There followed the oddest ten minutes--I was going to say 'of my life,' but there were to be other strange ten minutes before this odd evening was over. He got up and began to creep about the room. 'Creep' is a true word; he moved so softly, with his head forward, his hands clasped like twisting tentacles behind his back. His walk was, I think, a kind of triumphant march. I don't doubt but that he had determined on this move into the enemy's camp after a great deal of doubt and hesitation. I shouldn't wonder if he had been spying round the place all day. I myself, you will remember, had caught him on the stairs earlier in the evening. He had come here with many fears and misgivings, and it must have been a pretty important scheme that led him to such dangerous methods.
He argued, I suppose, that Osmund and Buller would be in fierce need of some help, and he hoped, perhaps, to add some gentle blackmail to his scheme. Gentlemen, rash gentlemen, like Osmund, who have served their time in jail, are often open to blackmail. Life isn't easy for a gentleman who has done time.
But against all this were the tempers and possible violence of his old friends. He couldn't be sure that they wouldn't be very disagreeable before he had time to explain to them how good his scheme for them was. Once they gave him time, the rest was easy, and I expect that he had some very pretty pictures before his eyes of the helpless and useless tools that Osmund and Buller would become.
My reassurance, therefore, was extremely welcome to him. This was exactly what he had hoped he might find--the poor fools, crushed and hungry, all sight lost of any silly vengeance, ready for anything that he might propose--and added to them, quite unexpectedly, myself, an admirable 'extra.'
So he crept about the room, humming to himself in a little whining undertone, an unrecognizable tune. This sound was exactly like the hum or sibilant whisper of some animal hiding expectantly in the jungle undergrowth. Thin, reedy, just not in tune, hissing through the teeth. Softly he inspected everything--the secretaire, the triptych, the Spanish carving, the chairs. They seemed to rouse in him only the deepest contempt.
Then he came to the window, and, pausing there, pressed his nose against the glass and stared out. Although other more striking things were to happen in connection with him later in the evening, that is the pose in which I shall always remember him. His thin shabbily clad body (his clothes had an especial shiny shabbiness. They had been always, ever since I first knew him, in exactly that same condition) perched on its toes and his head pressed forward right into the glass while he looked down, finding in the Circus, I don't doubt, numbers of prospective victims.
And once again I had, from my chair, the vision of the white surface covered with little figures scurrying into the safe shadows, then the white virginal expanse, empty of all life.
The candles in their old silver holders blew a little in some mysterious breeze. He turned round and looked at me--looked at me, I felt, with both triumph and contempt.
'So you'd like to come in with me, would you?' he asked. 'Ever had any experience?'
'Experience of what?' I asked.
'Why, of playing on people's feelings . . . having a game with them.'
'You mean blackmail?' I asked.
'Well, no. . . .' His tongue flickered out for a moment between his teeth. 'That's putting it too strong. I don't like the word, and the less it's used the better for everybody.'
He left the window and came close to me, his eyes appraising every part of me. 'Remember Robin Hood?'
'Remember him?' I asked. 'I never met him, if that's what you mean.'
But facetiousness did not please him. I recollect very clearly the savage, mean look he then gave me. It was a look that, I am sure, many of his friends in trouble had grown accustomed to.
'No need to be funny,' he said. 'No time for it if you're coming in with me. . . . Well, what did Robin Hood do? He went about taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor, righting wrongs, so to speak. He and his band were proper for his time; I and mine are proper for this. Same methods exactly.'
'I see,' I answered.' And do you give your profits to the poor?'
He shot at me again a look of swift suspicion.
'Never you mind what I give to the poor,' he said. 'You'll see soon enough.' He began then, standing in front of me, as strange a glory-song as ever man uttered--a Song of Triumph proclaimed by a king among men, of his cleverness and brilliance and knowledge, of his victims and their follies and pitiful cries for mercy and silly foolish humiliations, of his remorselessness and relentless pursuit, of his power and subtlety and superiority to all other conquerors . . . and I saw, as he triumphed in front of me, that he really did consider himself a glory and a wonder, that he did not know what remorse or repentance might be, that nothing could touch any softness in him, for there was no softness, nor rouse any shame, for there was no shame . . . and I felt that possibly in this at least he was right--that he was, in the completeness of his purpose, in the absence of all decency, sensitiveness, moral perception, unique in the world, and so in his own order, and citizen from his own dark planet, a king among men.
He touched my arm with his finger.' You shall be in on this,' he said. 'You should be useful. But mind--once you're in you're never out again. I'll never let you go once I've my touch on you. You'll be mine. . . .'
But how I was to be his I was never to know, for at that moment we both heard the click of the outside door, and from the sound of voices I knew that Buller and Hench had returned.

 

[Hawkins]

CHAPTER VI


Pengelly in Heaven

The other day, after I had begun this narrative, I found this paragraph in a memoir of William Morris: 'I have found that my memory is, on many occasions, subject to what seems to be a sort of "illumination" or "inspiration." Thus when I have fixed my mind on one, say, of the incidents in these chapters, the scene has begun to unfold itself, perhaps slowly at first but afterwards rapidly and clearly. Meditating upon it for a time, I have lifted my pen and begun to write, then to my surprise the conversations, long buried or hidden somewhere in my memory, have come back to me sometimes with the greatest fullness, word for word, as we say. Nay, not only the words, but the tones, the pauses and the gestures of the speaker.'
This is so apt to my present business that I cannot avoid quoting it; it is true of the whole of my experience in this narrative but especially true of the scene, so decisive in the lives of some of us, that now occurred.
Buller and Hench came in and stood in the doorway looking at Pengelly. You can understand that he was a vision of some dramatic importance to them. They had not set eyes on him since the trial. How many harsh and bitter experiences had come to them in the intervening years! Buller was not a man of imagination. He took things very much as they came to him. He was no sentimentalist, no enthusiast either--but when an idea nested in his hair there it remained, and the idea that he had about Pengelly was 'that he owed him one.'
But with Hench it was different. He saw Pengelly as the devil himself, tail and all. He had, I am inclined to think from what afterwards occurred, a sense that he had almost supernatural powers of evil and malevolence--gave Pengelly, in fact, a good deal more than his due.
They stood at the doorway looking at him, and Pengelly looked at them back again. He had received from me too certain a reassurance of his security with them to feel any alarm. Instead of alarm, indeed, he was filled with a triumphant and overwhelming patronage.
He nodded to them.
'Hullo, Buller. Glad to see you. Hullo, Hench, how are you?' Then he felt in his pocket and produced a very flamboyant gold cigarette case from which he extracted a cigarette. Then he handed it to Buller.
'Have one?' he said. Buller was mechanically about to accept, then something seemed to occur to him. He shook his head.
'No, thanks. I'm not smoking.' We all sat down. Buller sat near the door, as though he were guarding it. Pengelly took charge of the proceedings; indeed, so entirely was he at home that he went to the windows and drew the curtains across.
'Cosier,' he said, 'much cosier.' Then he sat down in the Spanish armchair, crossing his spindly legs. 'How have you been?' he asked Buller.
'All right. . . . How's yourself?'
'All right,' said Buller, sucking his imaginary straw.
'Cold, isn't it?' continued Pengelly affably. 'Shouldn't wonder if we have a heap of snow before the night's out.'
'Shouldn't wonder,' said Buller.
There was a little pause, and I remember how I noticed that Hench, sitting in a chair by the window, was trembling from head to foot.
'Osmund be long?' asked Pengelly.
'Come in any moment,' said Buller. 'Nice little place he's got, hasn't he?'
'It's all right,' said Pengelly. 'You should see a little place I've got Maidenhead way. Pretty as a picture. Five minutes from the river. Garden and everything.'
'I'd like to,' said Buller.
'What's his idea,' asked Pengelly, 'only having candles? Bit old-fashioned, isn't it?'
'Don't know,' said Buller. 'Prefer electric light myself.'
Then we all heard the outside door. A moment afterwards Osmund came in.
How I wish that I had the power to solve Osmund's secret! Only Dostoevski perhaps could do that; he was beyond question one of Dostoevski's 'sick men.' And yet he was not at all a Dostoevski figure, in no way at all Russian or semi-Asiatic. He was English--English in his bodily strength, frankness, honesty, lack of subtlety. But, like so many Englishmen, he was always at war with his imagination, feeling that it was something dangerous and that he would be better without it. But he could not be without it. The catastrophe that ended in his imprisonment increased it, and the war (as again with so many Englishmen) gave him a malaise of revolt and disgust and a passionate desire to do something that 'would change everything.' This revolt made him a spiritual exile from his own country. There are no spiritual exiles so unfortunate as the English because there is no other country possible for them with whatever pugnacity they may determine to acquire one.
He had really come to feel, I believe, in these post-war years, that England was 'lost,' that she was going down and down into an abyss, and this because rogues were everywhere in charge of her and the land was filled with devils. There were very many men in the country at this time who felt as he did. But his sense of it was the more dangerous because there was a fire in his blood, a ferocity and impatience over which he never got control.
He was filled with nobility, warm affection, a childish belief in the possibility of right, but I think his sense that he had 'ruined' himself spiritually over that silly and so disastrous episode of the burglary fiasco, that both he and his country were doomed, this worked in his brain like a fever. His loathing of Pengelly had its root, I don't doubt, in his loathing of himself.
At any rate, I saw quite clearly when he came into that room, where we were waiting for him, that he was pitched at that moment to a point of disgust at the evil both in himself and the world around him that was not far from madness.
I would put it this way. If, at that instant, out of the snowy Circus, there had risen before his window a hero who had called to him to follow him to some glorious crusade, Osmund would have been in that second translated into a triumphantly happy man for whom Pengelly was too low a worm to be considered.
He needed only some campaign, some knight-errantry towards the ennobling of the world, with a chance in it for himself to win some glorious redemption, and all would have been magnificently well with him. But alas, all that there was, was the rosy volume of Quixote, lying by itself on the bare refectory table.
He was quiet enough when he came in. I could never see him, as I think I have already said, without feeling him to be of different clay from the rest of us. It was not only his height and the noble carriage of his head, but something spiritual that set him apart from us. His disgust at his own failures, perhaps, or his vision of horizons wider and grander than any that we could see. When he saw Pengelly he nodded to him.
'Sorry I'm late,' he said. He sat down on the sofa near to me. I fancy that Pengelly's assurance was a little dimmed by Osmund's presence, but if it was, he had no consciousness of the possibility of any danger to himself.
​

 

[Hawkins]

He continued to take command of the situation.
'Well,' he said. 'Here we all are.' Then, smirking a little. 'What about a drink? Not very hospitable, are you, Osmund? And why not a cigar while you're about it?'
Osmund nodded to Buller, who got up and went out. We all sat quite silently while he was away. He returned with whisky, soda-water, some glasses, a box of cigars. He put them down on the table. I stretched my hand out.
'I'll take that book,' I said. 'It will be out of the way.' He handed me the Quixote. His legs a little spread, his face very serious, he poured out some whisky.
'Say when,' he said to Pengelly.
'Right you are,' said Pengelly. 'Not too much soda.' The glass was passed to him and the box of cigars. Each of us in turn was offered then a drink, and each of us refused. Pengelly looked at us, and that was, I think, the first moment when it occurred to him that we were not, perhaps, quite so friendly as we ought to be.
'Hullo!' he said. 'Nobody drinking?'
The others said nothing. I muttered: 'Have one later.'
Osmund turned to Pengelly.
'Mr. Pengelly,' he said, 'you wrote to Charlie Buller saying that you would like to meet him and myself and Hench again and that you had something to propose. Here we are--at your service.'
I knew then one of the many reasons why Pengelly detested Osmund. Osmund was absolutely polite, but he conveyed, in spite of himself, the sense that he was of altogether another order. It was not conceit, nor pride, nor arrogance, it was something that was so true that no good manners could keep it back.
I could see how, at the sound of his voice, Pengelly's hatred of him, already strong enough, was strengthened a hundredfold.
'All right, Osmund,' said Pengelly, lighting his cigar, as though he were king of the world. 'All in good time. Not too fast now. I have got something to suggest--something that might be useful to you, but there's no hurry. Here we are, all friends together, and I must say,' he added, finishing his whisky at a gulp and stretching his glass out, with great familiarity, to Buller for more, 'that I'm glad there's no malice felt on either side. Tell you the truth, I thought there might have been. I was sorry I had to do as I did, but you were in for it anyhow. You went about it like infants in arms--you did really--'
He leaned back puffing at his cigar, while his little legs, crossed knee over knee, jerked convulsively in the air.
'If you don't mind,' said Osmund quietly, 'we've all been very curious to know--why exactly you did let us in. You owed us no grudge--or did you?'
'Well, now,' said Pengelly, evidently enjoying himself, 'as to grudge--that's scarcely the word. You see, Osmund, you're a bit above yourself at times--you don't mean it, I daresay, but I'm sensitive, always was from a kid. What my father used to say ever since I was a little nipper was, "Do as you would be done by." He always said that was a safe motto, and there's a lot in it. Let anyone treat me as man to man, and it's my hand in theirs every time, but sort of looking down your nose--well, that never did anyone any good, if you get me. Of course I don't suppose you knew you were so stuck-up as you were, but there it was. I've got a skin less than most men, my mother always said so, and I feel things. Things can hurt me surprisingly, and I don't mind telling you, Osmund, now that the past is past, that you hurt me quite a lot the way you cut me short and didn't consider I was a human being with feelings just like anyone else. Of course, it's silly to be sensitive, I know, but there it is--it's the way one's made. . . . One can't help oneself. . . .'
I remember that we listened to this long rigmarole which might have continued quite indefinitely had he not buried his face in his glass, in complete silence.
Then Osmund said:
'Yes, I see. . . . But why Buller and Hench? They hadn't done you any harm?'
Here Pengelly sat forward and looked at both his old friends with a very considering glance.
'Well, now, I'll tell you,' he said at last. 'It's a funny thing--funny, I mean, the way little actions lead to big results. But Charlie Buller there--I dare say he's quite forgot something, something that altered the whole of his existence, as you may say--'
'What's that?' said Buller, leaning forward and staring at Pengelly.
'Throw your mind back a bit, Charlie, it'll interest you.' I could see that Pengelly was now most thoroughly enjoying himself, his eyes almost closed, one leg kicking on the other, his long spidery fingers tip-meeting-tip as though in prayer.' Don't you remember a girl at the pub down there, a girl with red hair, called Amy?'
'I do,' said Buller.
'And do you remember that she was quite sweet on me until you told her lies about me?'
'I don't remember telling her anything about you.'
'No, you wouldn't. But you did all the same. I don't know just what you told her, but she was shy of me after that--a fine girl, she was, with a fine figure.'
'It's a long time ago,' murmured Buller.
'It is,' cried Pengelly triumphantly. 'So you may think, but I don't forget quite so easily. It isn't my nature to. I haven't got along in this world by forgetting everything, I can tell you. No, sir. You were real nasty, Charlie Buller, about that girl. It wasn't as though you wanted her yourself either. I don't know what you were so mean for. Anyway, she cost you two years in jail, that girl did. It's a pity you've forgotten--important she was, as it turned out.'
Buller said nothing. We none of us said anything.
'And Hench?' at last Osmund asked quietly.
'Hench?' Pengelly asked contemptuously. 'Oh, I'd nothing against him. He was in it, so he went with the rest.'
A cry, a strange, bitter, agonizing cry, so foreign to us that it was as though someone besides ourselves were in the room, broke on to us.
'And it was for nothing--for no reason--that you . . . that you . . . my wife . . .'
Even Pengelly seemed to feel something then.
'Well,' he said at last, 'you were trying to crack a crib, weren't you? You deserved what you got, didn't you? It would have been the same even though I hadn't let them in on you.'
'And those were all your reasons?' Osmund asked at last.
'Oh, not at all,' Pengelly answered, finishing his second glass. 'I had to be in with the police just then. Had a little affair of my own on hand. All the weeks I was covering you I was playing my own game as well. . . .' He puffed at his cigar confidently. 'What I was hoping you'd see, and what I'm glad to find you have seen, is that I hadn't anything to do with it, so to speak. It would have been the same thing whether I'd been there or no. And you've had your lesson and taken it well. Now we're all good friends again, and I'm glad of it.'
I remember noticing at this point that he was a little uneasy about Hench. That moment's outcry had disturbed him a trifle. He threw him furtive, half-questioning glances.
Osmund was sitting up straight on the sofa now, his legs drawn in, his great back set. I wondered how Pengelly could be as completely unconscious of the sinister force behind that quiet voice as he was.
At last he said: 'So much for the past. Now what of the present? You suggested that we could be of use to one another. What's your plan?'
'I'm not sure,' Pengelly answered, looking at each one of us in turn, 'that there are not too many in on this. I've had a little talk with our friend here,' nodding at me, 'and he seems to want to share in the fun--but about Mr. Hench now. . . .'
He paused, suddenly shooting his bony forehead forward in Hench's direction.
'Fun?' said Osmund. 'We've got to know what kind of fun it is before we come in with you. That's quite fair, isn't it?'
'Have you?' said Pengelly, smiling in what he must have considered a very sly manner. 'That's just the question.'
Osmund, Buller and Hench all made a movement together as though they were closing in. Then Buller said:
'How do you mean--the question? You asked us to meet you here, didn't you?'
'That's right,' said Pengelly. 'But I'd like to know a bit more about all of you first. You see, it's quite a time since we met. I know you're all pretty well on your uppers. I've found that out, at any rate.'
No one said anything.
Pengelly began to be a little irritated.

 

[Hawkins]

'Well, now, aren't you? There's Osmund here--him and his wife. This is a fine fresh flat, I'll allow, but how much longer is he going to be able to stay here? What about that last job you had, Osmund--secretary to Edward Hoskins, Esq., wasn't it? Someone suddenly peached on you, didn't he, told Mr. Hoskins a few things? And you--Charlie Buller--things haven't been quite so dandy with you lately, have they?'
Osmund spoke.
'We don't want this to last forever. If you have a plan to put in front of us let's have it--otherwise--'
'Yes--otherwise?' said Pengelly.
'Otherwise--we are only wasting time.'
'Not at all,' said Pengelly. 'You've got it all wrong. What I want you fellows to realize is that I can do what I like with you--so to speak. I can stop your settling in any place where you're comfortable--if I want to. Not that I bear you any sort of malice. I'm not one to bear malice. Not at all. But I wouldn't have you think, the four of you, that you do me a favour if you come into my little scheme. Quite the contrary. I'm doing the favour, you understand.'
Osmund jumped up. For an instant I was in doubt as to what he would do. His movement was so sudden, his stature so great when he got to his feet, that Pengelly shrank back into his chair and raised his hand, then covered his awkwardness with a nervous laugh. Osmund had gone to the window. With a sharp tearing sound he jerked back the curtains. We could see now beyond the windows the shadowed glow of the lighted sky, and faintly, as though jerked there by a drunken hand, the reflection from a leaping sky-sign marked the wall above the fireplace.
Osmund turned from looking out, and stood with his back to the window, facing the room.
'All right,' he said quietly. 'You are doing us a favour. We realize your generosity. We are broken and ruined--at your feet, Pengelly. What will you do with us?'
Pengelly's eyes sparkled.
'Now you're kidding me. You don't truly feel like that. All the same, I take it that you're pretty desperate, all of you, and ready to come in on any sensible scheme--that is, if it's really sensible.'
'Yes, if it's really sensible,' repeated Osmund.
'This is sensible, all right,' said Pengelly, triumphantly. He sunk his voice and leaned forward in confidence towards us. 'The fact is that there are a lot of folk in this world who've funny habits, or are fond of someone they shouldn't be, or have been in a mess sometime and want to forget it. You can recognize that yourselves, having had the experience you have. . . .'
(As he spoke I could see the glittering expanse of the Circus, and, staring from the caves on every side of it, hundreds of eyes, furry with anxious fear.)
'Well--what I say is that if a man's made a slip he oughtn't to grumble if he has to pay for it. Why, you wouldn't believe the dirty things men do and the nasty ways they have. Why should they get off scot-free and the rest of us suffer? Here are you three, for instance--made one little mistake and had two years in jail for it. Don't you feel a bit sore at all these folk dancing around, wine, women, and song and all the rest of it, and never a penny the worse for it? That's where I come in,' he added.
'That's where you come in,' Osmund repeated.
'Yes, and where you'll come in too, if you join us, Osmund. You see' (he became with every word more confidential, more sure of himself and of us), 'what I'm in need of is gentlemen. Real pukka gentlemen that look right and talk right and eat their food right and make love to women right. Now you're a gentleman, Osmund, and so's Gunn. I can't tell you what an advantage a gentleman is at this game, especially with women. I'd give you quite a decent share of the profits, as long as you played straight with me--and there are some profits, I can tell you.'
Buller sucked straws; Hench half rose as though he would speak, then sat down again.
Osmund nodded his head.
'I understand,' he said. 'What's commonly known as blackmail.'
Pengelly shrugged his bony shoulders.
'That's a silly word, to my thinking. After all, what isn't blackmail when you come to think of it? Who is there isn't forever bribing his friend to keep quiet about him, if you understand what I mean? Everybody's got a secret somewhere, and if his friends didn't look after him where'd he be? I tell you, Osmund, this is the grandest game in the universe. There isn't anything else to touch it for fun and excitement. You never know what you're up against, and you should see the way folks squeal. Why, I've got a woman now--' He stopped. 'No, that's telling. But you four come in with me and you'll have the time of your lives. I'll do the directing. I've got quite a bunch under me as it is, and I make it worth their while too. . . . What do you say?'
Buller stretched his legs and arms and yawned. 'It sounds a good enough scheme,' he said--'for the right kind of man.'
'Of course,' said Pengelly, looking round on us rather as a trainer looks round on his animals, 'you'd have to do what you're told, you know.'
It was then that, looking round and catching sight of Osmund's face, I suddenly became myself frightened. An immense disgust, contempt and, oddly mixed with it, a sort of pity rose in me toward Pengelly.
I believed him. I know now that there had been no original plan in their minds about him. They had pictured him, perhaps, as at last at their mercy, and so, in very utter contempt of him, they would have told him so. But what they had never pictured was this arrogance and patronage, this confident proposal to them of the vilest schemes open to mankind. It was, I think, his certain belief that we would agree to his foul purposes that drove us to the climax. For we were driven; driven if you like by other things than Pengelly, driven by the ivory pictures of the secretaire, the silver candlesticks, by the gleaming light beyond the windowpanes.
But it happened that I looked up and caught the moment when Osmund passed from calm to tempest. His rages had always been like that, descending on him as swiftly as a squall falling from the hills across a lake. He was the only human being I have ever known who seemed to be inhabited by a devil at such times--not an evil devil, nothing mean or vile, but a spirit of tempest, ready to be gone as swiftly as he came.
I wondered that Pengelly felt nothing of the change. For a moment he did not. He went on as confidently as before.
'It's a paying game--there's no doubt about that. It's marvellous how they pay up when you've got them by the throat. It's very seldom they cut up rough, and if they do there's lots of ways of dealing with them.
'Of course, you'd want a bit of training, but I expect it would come natural enough after a time. Some take to it like second nature. I wouldn't wonder if you did, Gunn! I bet you'd be one of the smartest--'
He broke off. He was aware of our silence. He recognized that it was different from our earlier attitude. Our eyes were on him too. He was suddenly suspicious that perhaps he had gone too far. Those whiskies had unsealed his tongue too readily. He drew back into his chair, and I noticed that that convention of melodrama was in this instance true; he was gathered together like an animal ready to spring.
Then Osmund's voice, deep, shaking with emotion, broke our silence.
'You filthy little swine!' I heard Hench draw a deep sigh. But Pengelly was quick. He knew instantly that our whole attitude had been bluff, that he was in the presence of his enemies, and that he had been a fool to give himself away.
Lord! How he hated us then! He half rose, resting his thin hands on the arms of the chair.
'So that's your game, is it?' he said. 'You've tried to trick me, have you? Well, you've bitten off more than you can chew, the lot of you. I wasn't such a fool as to come here unprotected, and don't you think it. If anything happens to me you're in for it--the lot of you. I should have thought you'd had enough of jail--'
'It's possible,' said Osmund, 'that we don't care what the consequences are.' Then he came forward a little and stood staring at Pengelly as though he were delivering judgment on him.
'Understand us, Pengelly, this isn't any business of revenge. You were right in that. We let ourselves into a dirty business and were punished for it--justly punished, I daresay. Our point is quite different. You're a nuisance to society, vile, foul. . . . There's no goodness in you anywhere. You are the cause of misery and wretchedness to everyone you touch. You've proved it again and again by your own words. There's nothing to be said for you--absolutely nothing at all. That's our case. We've heard you and we've condemned you.'
Pengelly's eyes went straight for the door. He knew his danger by now.
'Oh, shut your mouth--!' he screamed and leapt from his chair across the floor. Then things happened quickly. Buller was in front of the door, but before Pengelly got to him Osmund was onto him. I saw Osmund rise to his height and spread his shoulders. He had his hands about Pengelly's throat. Pengelly kicked. A chair fell. Then Osmund had him hanging in air, his thin spidery legs, his long bony arms struggling. Osmund's huge hands pressed. There came from Pengelly throttled broken little screams like a rabbit's. Once he seemed to have his head free, and he let out a yell of terror, sheer naked animal terror.
Then Osmund swung him like a dummy and brought him down with a thud on the table. There was a little moan, a convulsive kick of the legs.
Buller murmured: 'My God, you've killed him.'
From his chair Hench began to whimper like a child.

 

[Hawkins]

CHAPTER VII

​

Extraordinary Adventures of a Corpse

From an infinite distance came the sound of Hench's whimpering. It went on and on, something between a sniffle and a strangled breath. Otherwise the silence in the room was profound, and it seemed endless.
The body was crumpled in a heap on the floor; a leg crooked back had its trouser hitched up, and pale mottled skin showed above a shabby sock. The head hung forward onto the breast.
At last Osmund bent down, picked up the body, and laid it down on the sofa, the face away from us, but, as he moved it, I caught a glimpse of the pale untidy face, the tongue protruding, and it was in that moment that I had my conviction which the evening was to strengthen; namely, that Pengelly wasn't there, that he had escaped us at the instant when Osmund banged his head on the table, that he was at this minute jeering at us somewhere in the background. If I seem to show a certain levity or casualness towards this corpse you must remember that I had this conviction. I recollect also that I had a mingled sense of congratulation and pity towards the corpse: congratulation because it had at last escaped from the odiousness of Pengelly's personality; pity because it was now so helpless.
Osmund bent down and felt beneath the body's waistcoat. Then he straightened himself.
'Yes, he's gone,' he said.
Charlie Buller, who seemed in no kind of way discomposed, nodded his head.
'And a damned good thing too, filthy swine! . . . And what are we going to do with it?'
Osmund stood there, his legs spread, looking out through the window. He talked softly, as though to himself.
'I didn't mean to. It was my temper again. His taking it for granted that we were like himself. That's the mistake he always made. Our mistake too--we were partly responsible. . . . My damnable temper.'
Buller broke in. 'All right. Never mind whose fault it was. We're all in it now, and what we've got to decide is what we're going to do with it. We can't leave it here all night.' Nobody said anything. He went on: 'Somebody may come after him. It isn't likely he'd trust himself into our hands without warning one of his pals. We may have got rid of him, but we aren't rid of his gang.'
Then Hench broke in. He jumped up from his chair and began to wave his hands in an absurd manner. 'You aren't rid of him! You aren't rid of him!' he cried out in his shrill, piping voice. 'You don't get rid of him by killing him. You've done the one thing that'll never rid us of him. Don't you see? Oh, my God, don't you see? . . . What I mean to say is, he isn't dead at all and never will be now. Never, never!'
He was going to scream or shout or do something equally silly, so I stepped in then, went over to him, caught his fat shoulders, forced him down into his chair.
'Look here, Hench--if you don't behave decently we'll have to knock you on the head just to keep you quiet. We're not going to have the whole of the Circus in here.' Then I told Buller to give him a stiff whisky, which he did. Hench drank it, then turned his face from us all, hiding it in his arms, one shudder passing over his body after another.
I remember then that I became as urgent as Charlie Buller that something must be done immediately. I couldn't bear to see the thing lying there, as though it were shamming sleep, with its trouser still hitched up and the bare flesh showing. The whole room seemed stained and beastly so long as that crumpled thing lay there, and I felt as I suppose many a murderer has felt, that if only the body were removed out of sight all would be well.
Osmund's immobility irritated me. He just stood there, looking out of the window, lost apparently in his own thoughts. I shook him by the arm.
'See here, Osmund, Buller's right. We've got to do something about this. Either you can telephone to the police and tell them all about it, or we must put this away somewhere--and quickly.'
Buller broke in.
'Telephone the police? Hang by the neck for that swine? No, thank you. I can deal with it. I've got the car parked round the corner. I'll take it in the car to the river behind Dirk's. They won't find the body for two days after that, and when they do they won't recognize it.'
Somehow the thought of the outside world made me shiver. I didn't know who or what Dirk's might be, but I had stepped suddenly into the unreal pantomime of detective novels where police officers and newspaper men and dope fiends jostle one another, puppet-fashion, on a mathematical staircase constructed of algebraical formulæ.
'How are you going to get it to the car this time of day with everybody about?' I asked.
'Someone will have to help me. The stairs are dark. We'll take him down between us as though he were tight. Once it's in the car I can manage alone.'
Osmund nodded his head.
'Yes, if you like. It won't make any difference in the end. Not for me, anyway. I'm caught all right.' Then added to himself in a sort of whisper, 'Yes, he's caught me.'
Then he threw up his head and was quite suddenly practical. 'But I'm not going to have any of you spoiling your lives for my mess. It's my affair. I'll deal with it.'
'No, you won't,' said Buller abruptly. 'Not this bit of it, anyway. With your height and everything you'd attract attention at once. Gunn and I will manage this. There's no difficulty. Shove his hat over his eyes, put his waterproof on him. There's no risk at all.'
He stopped abruptly and drew his breath in. He had heard a sound. We all had. The opening of the outer door.
The funny thing then was that, at that moment, when we all of us were stiffened by the sound into immobility (even Hench ceased his shudder), the corpse rolled over onto its back, one leg tumbling off the sofa, exactly as though it had heard the opening door. There it lay, eyes staring, tongue hanging out, the head indecently crooked. We waited. There were steps in the outer hall. Osmund looked at me.
'Helen!' he said. 'She is the only one who has a key.'
I went as though he had ordered me. Looking back now, I think that the truth was that I instantly felt that I was the only person in the whole world to come in between her and Pengelly's body. She, at least, must be kept away from this. . . .
So I went straight out of the room into the little hall. Here there was electric light (Osmund's æsthetic prejudices didn't extend apparently to coat racks and umbrella-stands), and just inside the door Helen was standing, staring in front of her and taking off her gloves. It is all very well to reduce everything to chemical formulæ, but you are not going to tell me that the look that Helen and I gave one another at that moment, a look so much more searching, involving so much more of recognition of the eternal bond between us than any physical attraction, had anything chemical about it.
In that awful moment, when I was sick in the stomach and blind in the eyes from the reaction from all that had just occurred, I saw Helen with more clarity and justice, saw the beauty of her spirit and the generous nobility of her heart more vividly than I had ever done before, even in my most romantic dreams of her (and I had had many). We always afterwards admitted that it was that glance of recognition in the little hall that pledged us to one another.
All that she said was: 'Oh, Dick . . . I'm so glad you're still here. I hoped you would be.'
There was something ironical in her greetings even with those she loved the most, irony, if you understand, turned towards herself, an implication that she always found life, and her place in it, a little absurd.
'What's brought you back? Was the dinner off?' (I can't tell you how unexpected I found the absence of all noise in that other room to be. My ears, all this time, were straining for every sound.)
'Well . . .' She looked at me, smiling. I smiled back. 'My friend's young man turned up--unexpectedly, of course. They wanted me to stay, but I'm much too tactful. They wanted the three of us to go out to a restaurant. I detest restaurants. Then--I hadn't seen you for so long--you're so elusive, you know, Dick. I might never have set eyes on you again. I had expected that you and John would have gone out to dine somewhere. I thought I'd make myself a cup of tea here and wait--in case he brought you back.'
All the time that she was talking, she was listening. I realized that the silence was forcing itself upon her. She took off her hat, looked at herself in the glass, patted her hair, then moved forward a little. But I didn't stir.
​

 

[Hawkins]

'Well--where is John? Why haven't you gone out? It's a quarter-past eight.'
'Some friends have come,' I said. 'They've kept him.'
'Friends? . . . Who?'
'Charlie Buller. Mr. Hench.'
She nodded.
'I knew he wanted me out of the way. I'm not such a fool--' She stopped suddenly. We both heard it--Hench crying something out, shrilly, like a child's cry.
'Dick, what's the matter? Something's been going on. What is it?'
'There has been a bit of a row,' I acknowledged. 'That was Hench. Ever since his wife died he's been queer. I never saw such a change in a man. But it's nothing. Buller and Osmund have got him in hand all right.'
Her voice softened. 'Poor Hench! I'm sorrier for him than for any of them. Are you mixed up in this?'
'Not a bit, I came quite by chance.'
'Go in and tell John that you're taking me out for an hour. It's such ages since we've met. I have a thousand things to ask you; John won't mind. He can join us later.'
She smiled. Her eyes were bright with something that I did not dare to connect as yet with myself. She turned once more to the bedroom, then drew back. She put her hand out to steady herself on the door handle and whispered:
'Pengelly!'
I followed her gaze and saw that she was staring at a hat and a waterproof hanging on the rack. Together they were unmistakable. I myself, after all these years, would have recognized them anywhere. There were, I don't doubt, hundreds of other poor mortals in this city to whom that hat and waterproof were insignia of shame and torture.
I nodded.
'Yes, he's been here. He's gone.'
'He's gone? . . . Why are you hiding something? Something's happened? I don't believe he's gone--the vile . . .'
She was interrupted, because the door opened and Osmund came out.
She went straight up to him and, looking him in the face, said:
'What's been going on? Dick's hiding something. Pengelly's been here. What about?'
Osmund nodded his head.
'Yes, he's been here--but he's gone.'
'I don't believe it. He's still here. His hat and coat are there.'
She pushed past him and went into the room.
She stopped just inside the door. One of the candles was flickering and rivalled in its jumping shadows the reflections of the sky-signs on the wall. Pengelly was lying, straightened out on the sofa, a handkerchief over his face.
'He's dead,' she said.
'Yes,' said Osmund. 'I killed him.'
She swayed ever so little, put her hand for a moment in front of her eyes, and gave her husband the strangest look. It was a look of terror. She turned and glanced at all of us; then she left the room without another word. Osmund followed her, closing the door behind him.
Buller shook his head. 'What a shame!' he said. 'What a damned shame! Couldn't you have stopped her coming? It's worse now. It was bad enough, but now it's worse.'
He looked round at Hench and saw that he was of no use at all. He was sitting staring in front of him, his hands hanging.
Then he appealed to me.
'Look here, Gunn, you're the only one who's any good. It's bad luck on you; you had nothing to do with this. You oughtn't to have been in this at all. We must get it away. Osmund's gone a bit queer; Hench is no good. We've got to get busy.'
At that moment a clock tinkled the quarter past somewhere.
'Quarter-past eight. Will you help me?'
At his direct appeal I found that I had been thinking only of Helen, seeing her and Osmund outside that door, wanting to be with her, longing. . . .
But at the urgency of his voice I swung right round. I, as it were, jerked myself, my brain, my consciousness, my determination into another position.
'Yes,' I said, 'I'll help you.'
'There's only one thing to do. We've got to get it into the car. It isn't very pleasant, but we must manage it. Wait--I'll go out and get his hat and coat.'
He opened the door, peered out, then went, closing the door behind him.
I had been standing near the window while he was speaking to me, and the moment he was gone Hench sprang up and laid his trembling hand on me.
'Don't go,' he said. 'Don't go, Gunn. It's nothing to do with you. And we can't get rid of him that way. Don't you see--he's outside, waiting on the staircase. That isn't him there. We must tell everybody. That's the only way to get clear.'
I saw that he was on the edge of the wildest hysteria. I felt an odd tenderness for him; in fact, at that moment I felt an extraordinary tenderness and compassion for the whole world, as though all human beings had shared in this deed, as though all human fates had been altered by it.
I put my arm round him.
'Wait a minute, Hench. Take this calmly. Pull yourself up a bit. Remember this: Pengelly was the dirtiest, rottenest fellow there's ever been. There's never been anyone worse. He was a blackmailer, and there's nothing rottener than that--nothing. He's made hundreds of men and women wretched, frightening them, bullying them. He had no remorse, no mercy. He wanted to make us as bad as himself. And he was responsible for your wife's death.'
He broke in.
'But she wouldn't have wanted to kill him. She didn't wish anyone harm. However bad he was, she wouldn't have hurt him. And we haven't killed him. He's more alive than ever he was. He'll be with us always now. Oh, God, God . . . if only I hadn't come. . . .'
Buller came in, carrying the hat and coat. At the sight of them I was suddenly practical, resolved.
'Sorry I was so long,' Buller whispered (we were all speaking in whispers). 'I went out into the passage to see if anyone was there. It's all clear.'
'Is Osmund there?' I asked.
'No. They've gone into the bedroom. You see, I want us to get away before he's back. Osmund is so damned funny. You never know what he'll do--impulsive. . . . Here--catch his arm while I slip the coat on.'
I put my arm round the body's waist, and it leaned its lolling head against my chest as though it loved me. I raised the hand, and it was warm to my touch. We slipped the waterproof on and pushed the hat down onto the head.
As we raised the body away from the sofa I had a brief attack of nausea. Everything in the room began to swim round me, the silver candlesticks were trebled, and the windows gaped like pools of water. It passed. I was quite steady. Buller held the body firmly round the waist. I clutched one arm. It made quite a passable figure between us, very like a drunken man, the head sunk, the feet dragging, the shoes tapping on the floor.
There was no sign of Osmund and Helen--no sign or sound of anyone or anything. Then, as I opened the flat-door with my spare hand, I saw that someone had at the same moment switched on the staircase light from below. It was too late to turn back. Even as we came out, the door closing behind us, I saw a large, stout, red-faced woman mounting the stairs towards us.
She paused on the top step, panting for breath. She was one of those strange women, not, I suppose, peculiar to our times, who, well over forty in age, nevertheless dress like girls of twenty. She had a little black shining hat pulled tightly over her shingled hair, but she was wearing evening dress, her shoulders covered with a very gaily coloured Spanish shawl; her skirts were extremely short, and her legs, in black silk stockings, immense.
Buller and I had both instinctively moved forward a little to cover our burden. She was at first occupied with the recovery of her breath and saw nothing at all. Then, realizing us, she gasped:
'Major Escott?'
(So vividly did this awful moment drive that name into me that, when only a few weeks ago I encountered the name in a newspaper, I could not for a minute or two read the paragraph that followed.)

 

[Hawkins]

'I beg your pardon?' asked Buller.
'Oh, no--it's all right.' (Her hand was against her panting breast.) 'I saw you come out of that door. I thought it might be Major Escott's. He's in this building somewhere.'
'Higher up, madam,' said Buller.
'Oh, thank you.' She moved on to the foot of the next staircase. Then she turned. Her silly, round, rather sheepish eyes were like saucers. She had one of the stupidest faces possible to woman, and a very coquettish manner.
'You're sure it's higher up?' she said. 'Because I thought it was number three. . . .' Then she saw the lolling figure between us. She gave a little gasp.
'Oh! . . . Is your friend ill?'
Buller smiled grimly. 'We have been celebrating. . . .'
'Oh, yes. . . .' She hesitated. 'Because I have my car. The chauffeur could fetch a doctor. . . .'
'You are very kind,' Buller answered. 'It is nothing--a little fresh air. . . .'
She looked again. I had an agonizing sense that she suspected something; my own knees went, and the body hanging on my arm weighed suddenly a ton.
'Oh, if that's all--' She gave us another look and went up, disappearing round the corner. We waited until her steps died away. I leant back against the door of Osmund's flat.
'I'm sorry, Buller--I'm going to be sick.' Indeed, the floor and the stairs were heaving and dancing, the thin glass globe of the electric light swelled and retracted.
Buller was disgusted. He jerked at the body. 'Here, give me the thing. I thought you were up to this. Go back and be sick in the flat. I'll manage it alone.'
I was ashamed. I shook my head.
'No, I'm all right.'
'Remember he was a beast,' Buller went on rapidly. 'The rankest ever. If anyone deserved a knock on the head . . .'
The words with which I had tried to strengthen Hench; and at the thought of Hench and his hysteria I pulled myself together.
'Come on,' I said, and we moved forward.
As we moved down that flight of stairs I became convinced that Pengelly was still alive. After all, it might be so. No one had made any very careful examination.
It seemed to me that he was grinning under his hat, but it was especially the rolling of the head that had a horrible life in it. I felt that at all cost I must stop and steady that head with my hand. My own fingers slipped and came into contact with those fingers that were still warm.
'Buller, wait. . . .' We were halfway down that section of the staircase. 'I don't think he's dead . . . the way his head rolls. . . .'
'He's dead,' said Charlie,--'Stone,' and went on. It seemed to me that those fingers were trying to catch mine, and that roused in me a nasty vindictiveness. My hand tightened on the arm, and it was as though I said: 'If you are grinning, there's nothing to grin about. If you play any tricks I'll finish you off properly.' The heels of the shoes tap-tapped at every step.
On the next landing there was nobody. We moved forward. There was only one more flight of stairs, and we were on the ground floor. We passed the barber's door, now dark and dead! What months ago that visit to that barber seemed! There was a very dim light here, and no sound at all. We might have been stepping down into a well without bottom.
Halfway down this last flight Buller paused. 'Now it's going to be a bit difficult,' he whispered. 'This is the only risky bit, but there's nothing else for it. The car's parked round the corner. I've got to fetch it, and you've got to wait here. It's all right. We'll stick it down in this corner--you stand over it. I'll only be a minute or two, but when I've got the car we can't leave it outside more than a moment. It's almost certain no one will come, and if they do they won't notice anything.'
I had a wild impulse of refusal. To wait alone in this dark corner, alone with Pengelly . . . But there was something about Buller, a courage, an indifference to all emotionalism, that shamed me. He added: 'After all, there were lots of worse things in the war. . . .'
He took the body in his arms, propped it up on the last step in the corner against the wall, nodded to me, and was gone. I stood there, the nausea still with me.
Impossible now not to believe that Pengelly was alive! He sat there, his head forward, huddled, his legs jutting out. I had to push his legs back, and, as I did so, one of his hands, colder surely than a moment ago, touched mine. When did rigor mortis set in? The time of it differed, didn't it? In any case, not yet for a while. But why think of that when he was alive? At any moment he might lean forward and clutch me round the knees. My own knees were trembling. It wouldn't be very difficult to pull me down and then, with those cold hands, to strangle me. . . . Every kind of wild idea flew to my brain, and every sound in the world began to be audible to me. . . . The whole building stirred with a life of its own, a life altogether independent of the human beings who inhabited it. A small inquisitive wind came creeping down the stairs wondering what I had got there. In the corner beside me were a broom and a bucket, and they seemed also to share the same inquisitiveness. But there were more positive sounds than these. A vibration like a silly malicious giggle seemed to tremble through the building. This was almost out of earshot, but not quite. If I listened with all my attention, I caught the quiver of it just as though someone were laughing at me behind the door. Then, at constant intervals, the whole place moved (possibly certain vibrations of the traffic shook it), but it was a movement so like the other sounds of derision and menace, as though the place knew that I was a fool and hated me for my presence and for the thing that I had with me.
Somewhere a door blew to, and this puzzled me, because it must be some inside door, and yet it was close to my ear and more sharply menacing than any other sound.
Soon, however, all my sensations rolled into one, my consciousness of the cold. I had neither hat nor coat with me. I was (you will remember) dirty and unshaven. Every draught in the world was circling about me, blowing round my forehead, creeping up my legs, stroking my arms.
Cold and hunger, as everyone has at some time experienced, have a personal force. When they are felt intensely enough they become individuals and wear, for the person who is confronted by them, physical aspects.
So now it seemed to me that the cold came down from the stairs, and crept in from under the street door, and began to flap a wet freezing cloak about my face. I was tired, overstrung, and it was not long before my imagination conceived for me that Pengelly also felt the cold and crept closer to me for warmth, but that he was colder than any cold, and that I was conscious of his stiff naked body beneath his thin clothes.
Oh, yes, those minutes at the foot of that staircase were of themselves extremely uncomfortable for me, but now something was to happen which made them infinitely worse.
The street door was pushed open--the noise of the outside traffic was suddenly a roar, the door was closed again, and a little man in evening dress was facing me. The light here was very dim, and he would not have seen me at all had he not held the door open for a moment and let the outside glare in upon me.
But he did see me, and he stopped with a gasp. He stood swaying a little on his feet, and when he spoke I realized that he was slightly tipsy.
'Hullo,' he said. 'Who's there?'
I must have been frightening, standing there, stiff and straight, in the shadow against the wall.
'It's all right,' I answered. 'I'm waiting for a friend.'
He was reassured, I suppose, by my voice, and he took it at once for granted that I was waiting for a woman.
'All right,' he said; 'won't spoil sport.' He swayed forward so that he touched me. 'Damned dark here.'
'There's a light on the next landing,' I said.
'Right O!' I could see his face, and it was very young and very weak. 'Hope I'll get up there all right. Been drinking a bit. Too many cocktails.'
'Yes,' I said. For the life of me I could not keep my teeth from chattering. It was then, I think, that it struck him that there was something unusual about my immobility. He peered a little closer.
'Cold spot you've chosen. No business of mine.'
I didn't reply. I was at this moment so badly overwrought and nervously alarmed that for tuppence I would have caught him by the scruff of his neck and thrown him up the stairs. Buller might return at any moment. What if the young fool were still here and insisted on remaining?
'Well,' he repeated. 'No business of mine. Late already. Major Escott's flat. Number three. Next floor, isn't it?'
'Yes,' I answered sharply, having a wild hysterical desire to laugh. Suppose this ass climbed up and rank the bell of Osmund's flat and in his drunken humour insisted that it was the one he wanted! Oh, well, I had the body here--that was one comfort.
But it was no comfort at all, for, with another lurch, he peered into the dusk and saw the huddled shadow at my feet.
'Hul-lo!' he whistled. 'What have you got there?'
'That's what I'm waiting for,' I answered quickly. 'If you want to know, it's a pal of mine drunk himself silly. Someone's gone to fetch his car--it's parked round the corner--we'll put him into it and take him home.'
'My word!' The young ass was deeply interested. 'And I thought it was a girl you were waiting for. By Jove, he does look bad! Too many cocktails, that's what I've been having--and before the party's even started. We're going to make a night of it. It's Escott's birthday--lots of people coming in later on, but we're dining . . .'
He broke off. Something seemed to tell him that Pengelly's immobility was rather remarkable.
'He is bad. Gone off in a sort of stupor or something.'
My nerves were at breaking point.
'He'll be all right,' I snapped out, 'once we get him home.'
Then the most terrible thing happened. He fumbled in his pocket, produced a cigarette case and a lighter. He took out a cigarette, then there was a flare of light. He looked over the little flame--straight into Pengelly's face. The head had rolled back, the hat tumbled sideways, the face with staring eyes, the tip of the tongue jutting out between the teeth, the cheeks a dead yellow--this was what the young man saw. The light went out. The cigarette dropped to the ground.
'My God!' he whispered. 'He's dead!'
Had he, in that moment of illumination, looked at my face? I didn't know.
I moved forward. He turned, as though he thought I was going to strike him, up the staircase.
'Rot!' I said. 'He's only dead drunk. He fell and struck his head. He'll be as right as anything in the morning.'
But the young man was gone. I was alone once more.
Only for a moment. The door opened, and, to my intense relief, this time it was Buller.
Without a word we had Pengelly between us, had passed into the brilliant light of the street, had placed Pengelly in the dark corner of the back seat, the head once more lowered, the hat once more obscuring the face.
No one noticed us. The crowd was now thick, and to my eyes and ears, after that awful ten minutes, seemed to have the vitality and colour of a flaming, shouting miracle.
I had one glimpse of Buller as, his face sternly set, his thick strong bullet head stiff with courage and resolve, he stared to see that his path was clear.
Then the car moved forward, and I was alone.