Mrs. Henry Dudeney

“ Harrowsmith shrugged and said, “I shall get a dealer in. Can you recommend one? You’re hand in glove with all those fellows. I hate the thing. It’s too heavy. It dwarfs the room.”
Kinsman with his finger was tracing the panels. He threw a look of desperation, of pleading even, at the oak, as if he thought that a thing which had been so long in the world and had witnessed the perplexities of so many generations was really sentient and could suggest. As he looked, his cheeks flushed, his lips smiled, and his whole attitude became suddenly débonnaire. ”

“ You should have seen Murphy’s face! A strange silence like a pall settled over the table; to me the news seemed to creep round those silent walls which had reflected Adeline’s shadow so often. It was the effect of Murphy’s frozen expression.
But a man cannot live with a dead woman, especially when she belonged to someone else. I touched Carrie’s foot under the table. She was too young and pretty for a fossil like Murphy. ”

“ There is a very reprehensible feeling of respectability and decorum about. Most of the fellows have smart young women to clean their rooms. I see them tripping gingerly across the square in the mornings, with loose cotton blouses, curly hair, and artificial flowers in their big hats.
But the good old laundress, all fat and dirt and impudence, contents me. She has a draggled skirt with a deep hem of dried mud, a flat pancake of a bonnet, all melancholy jet and brown ribbon that once was black. She wobbles when she moves; she is a half-set jelly in a greasy bag. ”

“ He was Jimmy to all of us in the Inn; Jimmy to the music-hall managers and music-hall artistes.
He was a little spindle-shanked fellow, like a jockey, but a bit too gentlemanly. He had bulging, gray-blue eyes and a sunken, heavily freckled face. His top hat was always very sleek and a little on one side, but the rest of his dress fell short of perfect finish. I’ve seen him with his shoe tied up with string and his collar pinned together in front because he’d lost his last stud.
He was dreadfully hard up, but that is nothing. We resent a prosperous fellow. ”

“ Jimmy had crawled up in the sun and dust to the public house, where they had a crazy piano in the bar parlor. The layer-out, the Vulture, as I had grown to call her to myself, came slipping down the stairs again in easy list slippers of drab and green.
“Some dies hard,” she said sententiously to the two sons, twisting the corner of her apron, shaking her wavy white head, and eying me.
“It’s they game feathers she’s a-layin’ on,” she continued. “You can’t die easy on game feathers, and there’s a plenty in the bed. Game feathers! They skeer off Death—but her time’s come, poor love. ”

“ It was Sophia’s voice, and Sophia was the worst tease of them all. He began to clear his throat directly he thought of her. He would not go downstairs to Kinsman. He would wait until he could find him alone. He would go upstairs and get his hat and bag, and put on his boots and be off to Dulwich. It was evening. Augusta—dear, tender little Augusta—would have on her evening gown—red nun’s veiling.
As ill-luck would have it, there was a light under Murphy’s door. And Murphy’s oak was hospitably black, and the inner door with its gleaming brass knocker seemed to wink an invitation. ”

“ He must live. He must spare his flesh—his poor flesh, at which he looked yearningly as it lay against the bed linen, wan and veined.
Once he thought desperately that rather than die [178] he would kill Harrowsmith first—with the last spurt of energy left him. Yes. In any case, when he grew strong, he would certainly kill him as a safeguard; a man could not live in such perpetual terror.
His face to the wall, he reproached himself bitterly with his headlong passion for the cabinet. What was there in old oak to lure a man to such madness? It added nothing to life. ”

“ He wore loud check suits—four checks to the suit—when he went away on a holiday, and when he was at home he had an incorrigible habit of wasting his time at bars and chaffing the barmaid. That is nothing; every man is bachelor to the barmaid. But it led Arnold into complications.
Clarissa was an extraordinarily pretty girl. She had blue eyes set very far apart, and a striking profile. With her loose knot of hair, her delicate nose, and her short upper lip, she looked like a cameo—one of those pure, classic faces which middle-aged ladies used to wear in a brooch. ”

“ I expected a thousand at least,” grumbled Harrowsmith.
Kinsman was still ardently drinking in the solid beauty of the cabinet—with its linen-patterned panels. One never saw carving of that pattern save on Tudor work. The thing was late Tudor. It was unique—and yet this materialistic doctor was not satisfied. He gazed at the glowing brown wood, at the slim posts supporting the upper cupboard, at the cunning hinges of iron. Never had he thrown at a woman so heart-whole a glance.
“I wish a rich uncle would leave me such a thing,” he sighed. “Why, man, money won’t buy it. ”

“ Puttick was a very old man, older than Mrs. Covey, and his devotion to her had been the mild jest of the neighbors. He did her chivalrous service: carried down the refuse of his allotment garden for her pigs; pea haulm, cabbage stumps, turnip tops too tough for the pot, spinach that had bolted. He was always begging refuse “for t’ old gell’s pig.” “T’ old gell” he invariably called her—behind her back—with an indulgent mixture of tenderness and contempt for her as a lone widow woman, with natural, womanly ways of scraping and nagging. ”

“ That is all. As Murphy shouted out and fell, Stapley went, quick and silent like a panther, up the stairs—quick and silent, with the cunning of a wild animal, just as Barbara, a few weeks later, stole up after him. He softly shut his oak—the oak is always [261] discreet—and sat shivering, almost breathless, in the dark, listening to the tramp of feet and the anxious buzz of tongues underneath.
When everything was still he stole out and went to Dulwich.
Augusta had a blue gown—it was the Boat Race day—and Stapley was a Cambridge man. ”

“ I never saw a woman swell so. The red dress, Groome; the dress she wore at dinner on Sunday week! The one she always wore in the evening, the one she died in. Oh! can’t you two see her? Can’t you turn her out? The coach is all growing red.”
“Do you mean Mrs. Grigg?” Clara Citron asked crisply. “I can’t see anything.” She bounced to the other side as if to convince him. “But then,” she added significantly, “I didn’t murder her.”
“You see, I did,” Orion returned with a foolish smile and the tremendous simple relief of a child who gets something off his mind. ”

“ He watched them; their gestures (Clarissa’s tragic, the mother’s amazed) were enough. He sneaked away from the cupboard at last and sat down by the window. Sol, understanding, put his damp nose into his master’s loosely doubled palm. His brown eyes said wistfully, “I could have told you so. Why want a woman? Isn’t my devotion enough?”
Arnold wasn’t angry with Clarissa, wasn’t contemptuous [58] of her. He didn’t see the humor of the situation, nor the degradation of it. He didn’t want to put on his hat and get out of the place, leaving the women to squabble over him as they liked. ”

“ The Common! It is sacred to the people. No builder will ever be allowed to devirginate it. Arnold was fond of talking like that. He used to swell out proudly when he said it, as if that stretch of sad brown grass and cracking earth belonged to him. The sanctity of the people! Preserve me from it! Give me the [68] stately gardens of the Inn, with elms, rooks, the terrace, and memories.
Well, he was walking on the Common, sorrowfully and slowly, not caring a rush whether Clarissa was waiting for him or not. ”

“ The looking-glass above the sideboard was cracked. Pearson, his nerves strung by the respectability and smugness of that room, had flung his glass at it on the night of the party—as a graceful return for watered whisky. Emily Higgins, a girl that Orion knew—she served in a fancy shop in Hampstead Road—had skillfully painted a cobweb and a trail of flowers across the crack. Orion never spoke to Pearson afterward.
“A fellow who will come into one’s rooms and do a thing like that is a dirty cad,” he would say in his thin, piping voice. ”

“ It was then I remembered that when Orchard had said casually, “There’s his violin,” I had not noticed one, that I had never heard a violin, or a strange voice, or a second pair of feet in the set immediately above my own. I remembered, too, that when Orchard had said, with annoyance, “Hopkins [276] is an untidy chap; he leaves his things about,” the room had been in perfect order. I had never seen the collection of books on Italian art—the man was a delusion, the product of an excited brain. Orchard was in a bad way. I repeated, “Come up to No. 2 and see Harrowsmith.” ”

“ I went with him to the station, and after that I went down to Norwood and broke the news to Barbara.
I never believe in those women who, when trouble [243] comes, sit at home and weep and wait and pray. They are fools, or callous. Your true woman must be doing something. Barbara never shed a single tear. She didn’t wring her hands or scream or faint. She only kept saying, with pitiful monotony, that it was her wicked vanity and extravagance which had got Bob in a mess, and that she meant to get him out of it. ”

“ An old lawn and a clipped yew tree were as essential, more essential, than water pipes. The house must cultivate a ghost. It must have a peacock with a spread tail, a fish pond, full of hoary carp, a raven that would say “nevermore.”
He was full of amusing sentiment. He bought his bread at Mackary’s, the confectioner’s near Bernard Street. It was a queer old shop. Orchard said that it reminded him of Hogarth. Of course he had the greatest possible contempt for Hogarth—but he liked the faint flavor of hoops and beauty patches which hung about Mackary’s. ”

“ She routed Chaytor’s laundress. The poor old soul came and poured out her woes to me. She had everything her own way so long as Chaytor was a bachelor. I remember that he came home from the City one day in his lunch hour—which he usually stretched into two—and found her asleep on his bed. She had not even troubled to take off her battered black bonnet or the sacking apron whose narrow string kept her together at the waist. But Minnie, as she rather snappishly said, was not going to “put up with such ways. She would rather do the work herself.” ”

“ He rather admired her for her independence. He saw the whole thing; the natural transition from Clara Neaves to Clarissa Eve, the genteel tastes instilled by the board school and kept up by the dainty dressing insisted on by the bar. Two rooms in North Street off Theobalds Road, gin and onions for supper, fist fights with other lady lodgers on the smallest pretext, frequent black eyes, noisy troops of dirty children—all the things which were part of her mother’s daily life—would [59] speedily become intolerable to the daughter. ”

“ Mrs. Neaves had made no attempt to dress for the occasion; she hadn’t even taken off the sacking apron which was strained tightly across her big waist; her down-at-heel shoes went flip-flap as she crossed the room. Both Arnold and Clarissa could see, as the hem of the skirt kicked up, a circle of discolored skin where the stocking was torn. But [60] Clarissa’s face remained cold and unmoved, like the cameo, as usual. Her expression rarely altered. She was the most apathetic, the most impenetrable-looking girl in the world. ”

“ The last bottle of medicine was empty.
He was alone and would be until the morning. This was the first evening he had been alone since [179] his illness. At dusk the old familiar terror gripped him. He was beginning to be afraid, and this time he could not dart like a hunted creature into the streets and join his fellow-men—men whose bodies belonged to them; men who had not mortgaged their last sad majesty. He was alone, alone. On the shawl which wrapped his knees his folded hands looked oddly pale.
He walked across the room and touched the cabinet. Long stay in bed had numbed his feet. ”

“ What an impulsive, delightful, compromising fool a true woman is! I only met her twice—for a minute, by accident—with Kinsman—and yet she came to me to-night. Put herself absolutely in my power. I might blackmail her as Kinsman did. I might tell Conifer. ”

“ She used to creep about at all hours; used to listen on the stairs, peep into sets if a door happened to be open, watch men and girls in and out with the air of a hungry cat. But everybody understood and everybody sympathized. The little light-haired woman in black, with the sad, inquisitive glances, became our Deity. ”

“ Halfway down the path Orion clutched my arm. It was the despairing mad clutch of a doomed man. He clutched my arm and looked hurriedly behind him.
We had reached the coach. The undertaker’s men climbed to their box with an air of business. [31] Some sat on the roof of the hearse, their legs dangling jovially.
“We shall get back faster than we came,” Clara Citron said, getting in and looking round, half in disappointment, because there was no longer such a crowd. “I’m dying for a cup of tea.” ”

“ Farthings Farm was the last nail in Jimmy’s coffin. He never spent a more miserable month. He would be morose, half asleep all day. But at dusk, just when the theaters would be opening and the racket in the Strand at its flow, he’d be restless. All the sweet smells and sounds of the farm were a poor enough substitute. The country finished him. He was a pure Cockney. There is no half way with [102] the Cockney; either he loves the country passionately, or he hates it and chafes at it until it kills him. ”