Part 11

“_Ite missa est!_” he murmured, quoting some words of the Mass (he was a Catholic); and the moth fluttered and rose. Now, you may believe it or not; but there was a fire burning on the hearth, and straight for that fire went the moth, and seemed to go up with the smoke into the chimney. I was so astonished that I gasped; but Kelvin appeared serenely unconcerned as he faced round on me.

“Well,” I exploded, “if a man mayn’t kill, he may persuade to suicide, it seems.”

He answered good-humouredly, “All right; but it wasn’t suicide.”

Then he resumed his seat by me, and relighted his pipe. I sat stolidly, with an indefinable feeling of grievance, and said nothing. But the silence soon grew unbearable.

“Kelvin,” I said, suddenly and viciously; “what the deuce do you mean?”

“You wouldn’t believe,” he answered, at once and cheerily, “even if I told you.”

“Told me what?”

“Well, this. There was the soul of little Patsy that went up in the smoke.”

“The village child you are so attached to?”

“Yes; and who has lain dying these weeks past.”

“Why should it come to you?”

“It was a compact between us—if she were summoned, in a moment, without time for a good-bye. We were close friends.”

“Kelvin—excuse me—you are getting to be impossible.”

“All right. Look at your watch. Time was made for unbelievers. There’s no convincing a sceptic but by foot-rule. Look at your watch.”

“I did, I confess—covertly—in the instant of distraction caused by Kelvin’s little son, who came to bid his father good night. He was a quiet, winning little fellow, glowing with health and beauty.

“Good night, Bobo,” said Kelvin, kissing the child fondly. “Ask God to make little Patsy’s bed comfy, before you get into your own.”

I kissed the boy also; but awkwardly, for some reason, under his frank courteousness. After he was gone, I sank back in my chair and said, grudging the concession—

“Very well. It’s half-past eight.”

Kelvin nodded, and said nothing more for a long time. Then, all of a sudden, he broke out—

“I usen’t to believe in such things myself, once upon a time; but Bobo converted me. Would you like to hear the story?”

“O, yes!” I said, tolerantly superior. “Fire away!”

He laughed, filling his pipe—the laugh of a man too surely self-convinced to regard criticism of his faith.

“Patsy,” he said, “had no Ghost-Leech to touch her well. Poor little Patsy! But she’s better among the flowers.”

“Of Paradise, I suppose you mean? Well, if she is, she is,” I said, as if I were deprecating the inevitably undesirable. “But what is a Ghost-Leech?”

“A Ghost-Leech,” he said—“the sort, anyhow, that I’ve knowledge of—is one who has served seven years goal-keeper in the hurling-matches of the dead.”

I stared at him. Was he really going, or gone, off his head? He laughed again, waving his hand to reassure me.

“You may accept my proof or not. Anyhow, Bobo’s recovery was proof enough for me. A sense of humour, I admit, is outside our conception of the disembodied. We lay down laughter with life, don’t we? You’d count it heresy to believe otherwise. Yet have you ever considered how man’s one great distinctive faculty must be admitted into all evidence of his deeds upon earth, as minuted by the recording angel? It must be admitted, of course, and appreciatively by the final assessor. How could he judge laughter who had never laughed? The cachinnatory nerve is touched off from across the Styx—wireless telegraphy; and man will laugh still, though he be damned.”

“Kelvin! my good soul!”

“The dead, I tell you, do not put off their sense of humour with their flesh. They laugh beyond the grave. They are full of a sense of fun, and not necessarily the most transcendent.”

“No, indeed, by all the testimony of spiritualism.”

“Well; now listen. I was staying once in a village on the west coast of Ireland. The people of my hamlet were at deadly traditional feud with the people of a neighbouring hamlet. Traditional, I say, because the vendetta (it almost amounted to one) derived from the old days of rivalry between them in the ancient game of hurling, which was a sort of primitive violent “rugger” played with a wooden ball. The game itself was long fallen into disuse in the district, and had been supplanted, even in times out of memory, by sports of a gentler, more modern cast. But it, and the feud it had occasioned, were still continued unabated beyond the grave. How do I know this? Why, on the evidence of my Ghost-Leech.

“He was a strange, moody, solitary man, pitied, though secretly dreaded, by his neighbours. They might have credited him with possession—particularly with a bad local form of possession; to suspect it was enough in itself to keep their mouths shut from questioning him, or their ears from inviting confession of his sufferings. For, so their surmise were correct, and he in the grip of the hurlers, a word wrung from him out of season would have brought the whole village under the curse of its dead.”

I broke in here. “Kelvin, for the Lord’s sake! you are too cimmerian. Titillate your glooms with a touch of that spiritual laughter.”

Agreeably to my banter, he smiled.

“There’s fun in it,” he said; “only it’s rather ghastly fun. What do you say to the rival teams meeting in one or other of the village graveyards, and whacking a skull about with long shank-bones?”

“I should say, It doesn’t surprise me in the least. Anything turning upon a more esoteric psychology would. What pitiful imaginations you Christmas-number seers are possessed of!”

“I dare say. But I’m not imagining. It’s you practical souls that imagine—that common sense, for instance, is reason; that the top-hat is the divinely-inspired shibboleth of the chosen; and so on. But you don’t disappoint me. Shall I go on?”

“O, yes! go on.”

“The hurlers meet under the full moon, they say, in one or other of the rival graveyards; _but they must have a living bachelor out of each parish to keep goal for them_.”

“I see! ‘They say’? I see!”

“The doom of the poor wretch thus chosen is, as you may suppose, an appalling one. He must go, or suffer terrors damning out of reason. There is no power on earth can save him. One night he is sitting, perhaps, in his cabin at any peaceful work. The moor, mystic under the moonlight, stretches from miles away up to his walls, surrounding and isolating them. His little home is an ark, anchored amid a waste and silent sea of flowers. Suddenly the latch clinks up, advances, falls. The night air breathing in passes a presence standing in the opening, and quivers and dies. Stealthily the door gapes, ever so little, ever so softly, and a face, like the gliding rim of the moon, creeps round its edge. It is the face, he recognizes appalled, of one long dead. The eyeplaces are black hollows; but there is a movement in them like the glint of water in a deep well. A hand lifts and beckons. The goal-keeper is chosen, and must go. For seven years, it is said, he must serve the hurling-matches of the dead.”

“State it for a fact. Don’t hedge on report.”

“I don’t. This man served his time. If he hadn’t, Bobo wouldn’t be here.”

“O? Poor Bobo!”

“This man, I say, survived the ghastly ordeal—one case out of a dozen that succumb. Then he got his fee.”

“O, a fee! What was that? A Rachel of the bogs?”

“The power to cure by touch any human sickness, even the most humanly baffling.”

“Really a royal reward. It’s easy to see a fortune in it.”

“He would have been welcome to mine; but he would take nothing. He made my little boy whole again.”

“Kelvin! I dare say I’m a brute. What had been the matter with him?”

“Ah, what! He simply moaned and wasted—moaned eternally. Atrophy; meningitis; cachexy—they gave it a dozen names, but not a single cure. He was dying under slow torture—a heavy sight for a father.

“One day an old Shaman of the moors called upon me. He was ancient, ancient—as dry as his staff, and so bent that, a little more, and he had tripped over his long beard in walking. I can’t reproduce his brogue; but this is the substance of what it conveyed to me:—

“Had I ever heard speak of Baruch of the lone shebeen—him that had once kept an illicit still, but that the ghosts had got hold of for his sins? No? Well, he, the Shaman, was come too near the end of his own living tether to fear ghoulish reprisals if he told me. And he told me.

“Baruch, he said, was suspected in the village of keeping the dead’s hurling-goal—had long been suspected—it was an old tale by now. But, och, wirrastrue! if, as he calculated, Baruch was nearing the close of his seven years’ service, Baruch was the man for me, and could do for my child what no other living man, barring a ghosts’ goal-keeper, could do likewise.

“I humoured him when he was present; laughed at him when he was gone; but—I went to see Baruch. It’s all right: you aren’t a father.”

“You went to see Baruch. Go on.”

“He lived remote in such a little cabin as I have described. Lord! what a thing it was!—a living trophy of damnation—a statue inhabiting the human vestment! His face was young enough; but sorrow stricken into stone—unearthly suffering carved out of a block. It is astonishing what expression can be conveyed without a line. There was not a wrinkle in Baruch’s face.

“All scepticism withered in me at the sight—all the desperate effrontery with which I had intended to challenge his gift. I asked him simply if he would cure my child.

“He answered, in a voice as hoarse and feeble as an old man’s, but with a queer little promise of joy in it, like a sound of unborn rain, ‘Asthore! for this I’ve lived me lone among the peats, and bid me time, and suffered what I know. In a good hour be it spoken! Wance more, and come again when the moon has passed its full.’

“I went, without another question, or the thought of one. That was a bad week for me—a mortal struggle for the child. The dead kept pulling him to draw him down; but he fought and held on, the little plucked one. On the day following the night of full moon, I carried him in my arms to the cabin—myself, all the way. I wouldn’t let on to a soul; I went roundabout, and I got to Baruch unnoticed. I knew it was kill or cure for Bobo. He couldn’t have survived another night.

“I tell you, it was a laughing spirit that greeted me. Have you ever seen Doré’s picture of the ‘Wandering Jew,’ at the end of his journey, having his boots pulled off? There is the same release depicted, the same sweet comedy of redemption—the same figure of fun, if you like, that Baruch presented.

“He put his hands on Bobo’s head, and——”

“Well?”

“Bobo walked home with me, that’s all.”

Kelvin got up from his chair to relight his pipe at the fire. As he moved, the door of the room opened, and a decent woman, his housekeeper, stood, with a grave face, in the entrance.

“Patsy’s dead?” said Kelvin.

“Ah, the poor mite!” answered the woman, with a burst of tears. “She passed but now, sir, at half after eight, in her little bed.”

POOR LUCY RIVERS

The following story was told to a friend—with leave, conditionally, to make it public—by a well-known physician who died last year.

I was in Paul’s type-writing exchange (says the professional narrator), seeing about some circulars I required, when a young lady came in bearing a box, the weight of which seemed to tax her strength severely. She was a very personable young woman, though looking ill, I fancied—in short, with those diathetic symptoms which point to a condition of hysteria. The manager, who had been engaged elsewhere, making towards me at the moment, I intimated to him that he should attend to the new-comer first. He turned to her.

“Now, madam?” said he.

“I bought this machine second-hand of you last week,” she began, after a little hesitation. He admitted his memory of the fact. “I want to know,” she said, “if you’ll change it for another.”

“Is there anything wrong with it, then?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said; “No!” she said; “Everything!” she said, in a crescendo of spasms, looking as if she were about to cry. The manager shrugged his shoulders.

“Very reprehensible of us,” said he; “and hardly our way. It is not customary; but, of course—if it doesn’t suit—to give satisfaction——” he cleared his throat.

“I don’t want to be unfair,” said the young woman. “It doesn’t suit _me_. It might another person.”

He had lifted, while speaking, its case off the type-writer, and now, placing the machine on a desk, inserted a sheet or two of paper, and ran his fingers deftly over the keys.

“Really, madam,” said he, removing and examining the slip, “I can detect nothing wrong.”

“I said—perhaps—only as regards myself.”

She was hanging her head, and spoke very low.

“But!” said he, and stopped—and could only add the emphasis of another deprecatory shrug.

“Will you do me the favour, madam, to try it in my presence?”

“No,” she murmured; “please don’t ask me. I’d really rather not.” Again the suggestion of strain—of suffering.

“At least,” said he, “oblige me by looking at this.”

He held before her the few lines he had typed. She had averted her head during the minute he had been at work; and it was now with evident reluctance, and some force put upon herself, that she acquiesced. But the moment she raised her eyes, her face brightened with a distinct expression of relief.

“Yes,” she said; “I know there’s nothing wrong with it. I’m sure it’s all my fault. But—but, if you don’t mind. So much depends on it.”

Well, the girl was pretty; the manager was human. There were a dozen young women, of a more or less pert type, at work in the front office. I dare say he had qualified in the illogic of feminine moods. At any rate, the visitor walked off in a little with a machine presumably another than that she had brought.

“Professional?” I asked, to the manager’s resigned smile addressed to me.

“So to speak,” said he. “She’s one of the ‘augment her income’ class. I fancy it’s little enough without. She’s done an occasional job for us. We’ve got her card somewhere.”

“Can you find it?”

He could find it, though he was evidently surprised at the request—scarce reasonably, I think, seeing how he himself had just given me an instance of that male inclination to the attractive, which is so calculated to impress woman in general with the injustice of our claims to impartiality.

With the piece of pasteboard in my hand, I walked off then and there to commission “Miss Phillida Gray” with the job I had intended for Paul’s. Psychologically, I suppose, the case interested me. Here was a young person who seemed, for no _practical_ reason, to have quarrelled with her unexceptionable means to a livelihood.

It raised more than one question; the incompleteness of woman as a wage earner, so long as she was emancipated from all but her fancifulness; the possibility of the spontaneous generation of soul—the _divina particula auræ_—in man-made mechanisms, in the construction of which their makers had invested their whole of mental capital. Frankenstein loathed the abortion of his genius. Who shall say that the soul of the inventor may not speak antipathetically, through the instrument which records it, to that soul’s natural antagonist? Locomotives have moods, as any engine-driver will tell you; and any shaver, that his razor, after maltreating in some fit of perversity one side of his face, will repent, and caress the other as gently as any sucking-dove.

I laughed at this point of my reflections. Had Miss Gray’s type-writer, embodying the soul of a blasphemer, taken to swearing at her?

It was a bitterly cold day. Snow, which had fallen heavily in November, was yet lying compact and unthawed in January. One had the novel experience in London of passing between piled ramparts of it. Traffic for some two months had been at a discount; and walking, for one of my years, was still so perilous a business that I was long in getting to Miss Gray’s door.

She lived West Kensington way, in a “converted flat,” whose title, like that of a familiar type of Christian exhibited on platforms, did not convince of anything but a sort of paying opportunism. That is to say, at the cost of some internal match-boarding, roughly fitted and stained, an unlettable private residence, of the estimated yearly rental of forty pounds, had been divided into two “sets” at thirty-five apiece—whereby fashion, let us hope, profited as greatly as the landlord.

Miss Gray inhabited the upper section, the door to which was opened by a little Cockney drab, very smutty, and smelling of gas stoves.

“Yes, she was in.” (For all her burden, “Phillida,” with her young limbs, had outstripped me.) “Would I please to walk up?”

It was the dismallest room I was shown into—really the most unattractive setting for the personable little body I had seen. She was not there at the moment, so that I could take stock without rudeness. The one curtainless window stared, under a lid of fog, at the factory-like rear of houses in the next street. Within was scarce an evidence of dainty feminine occupation. It was all an illustration of the empty larder and the wolf at the door. How long would the bolt withstand him? The very walls, it seemed, had been stripped for sops to his ravening—stripped so nervously, so hurriedly, that ribbons of paper had been flayed here and there from the plaster. The ceiling was falling; the common grate cold; there was a rag of old carpet on the floor—a dreary, deadly place! The type-writer—the new one—laid upon a little table placed ready for its use, was, in its varnished case, the one prominent object, quite healthy by contrast. How would the wolf moan and scratch to hear it desperately busy, with click and clang, building up its paper rampart against his besieging!

I had fallen of a sudden so depressed, into a spirit of such premonitory haunting, that for a moment I almost thought I could hear the brute of my own fancy snuffling outside. Surely there was something breathing, rustling near me—something——

I grunted, shook myself, and walked to the mantelpiece. There was nothing to remark on it but a copy of some verses on a sheet of notepaper; but the printed address at the top, and the signature at the foot of this, immediately caught my attention. I trust, under the circumstances (there was a coincidence here), that it was not dishonest, but I took out my glasses, and read those verses—or, to be strictly accurate, the gallant opening quatrain—with a laudable coolness. But inasmuch as the matter of the second and third stanzas, which I had an opportunity of perusing later, bears upon one aspect of my story, I may as well quote the whole poem here for what it is worth.

Phyllis, I cannot woo in rhyme, As courtlier gallants woo, With utterances sweet as thyme And melting as the dew.

An arm to serve; true eyes to see; Honour surpassing love; These, for all song, my vouchers be, Dear love, so thou’lt them prove.

Bid me—and though the rhyming art I may not thee contrive— I’ll print upon thy lips, sweetheart, A poem that shall live.

It may have been derivative; it seemed to me, when I came to read the complete copy, passable. At the first, even, I was certainly conscious of a thrill of secret gratification. But, as I said, I had mastered no more than the first four lines, when a rustle at the door informed me that I was detected.

She started, I could see, as I turned round. I was not at the trouble of apologizing for my inquisitiveness.

“Yes,” I said; “I saw you at Paul’s Exchange, got your address, and came on here. I want some circulars typed. No doubt you will undertake the job?”

I was conning her narrowly while I spoke. It was obviously a case of neurasthenia—the tendril shooting in the sunless vault. But she had more spirit than I calculated on. She just walked across to the empty fireplace, collared those verses, and put them into her pocket. I rather admired her for it.

“Yes, with pleasure,” she said, sweetening the rebuke with a blush, and stultifying it by affecting to look on the mantelpiece for a card, which eventually she produced from another place. “These are my terms.”

“Thank you,” I replied. “What do you say to a contra account—you to do my work, and I to set my professional attendance against it? I am a doctor.”

She looked at me mute and amazed.

“But there is nothing the matter with me,” she murmured, and broke into a nervous smile.

“O, I beg your pardon!” I said. “Then it was only your instrument which was out of sorts?”

Her face fell at once.

“You heard me—of course,” she said. “Yes, I—it was out of sorts, as you say. One gets fancies, perhaps, living alone, and typing—typing.”

I thought of the discordant clack going on hour by hour—the dead words of others made brassily vociferous, until one’s own individuality would become merged in the infernal harmonics.

“And so,” I said, “like the dog’s master in the fable, you quarrelled with an old servant.”

“O, no!” she answered. “I had only had it for a week—since I came here.”

“You have only been here a week?”

“Little more,” she replied. “I had to move from my old rooms. It is very kind of you to take such an interest in me. Will you tell me what I can do for you?”

My instructions were soon given. The morrow would see them attended to. No, she need not send the copies on. I would myself call for them in the afternoon.

“I hope _this_ machine will be more to the purpose,” I said.

“_I_ hope so, too,” she answered.

“Well, she seems a lady,” I thought, as I walked home; “a little anæmic flower of gentility.” But sentiment was not to the point.

That evening, “over the walnuts and the wine,” I tackled Master Jack, my second son. He was a promising youth; was reading for the Bar, and, for all I knew, might have contributed to the “Gownsman.”

“Jack,” I said, when we were alone, “I never knew till to-day that you considered yourself a poet.”

He looked at me coolly and inquiringly, but said nothing.

“Do you consider yourself a marrying man, too?” I asked.

He shook his head, with a little amazed smile.

“Then what the devil do you mean by addressing a copy of love verses to Miss Phillida Gray?”

He was on his feet in a moment, as pale as death.

“If you were not my father”—he began.

“But I am, my boy,” I answered, “and an indulgent one, I think you’ll grant.”

He turned, and stalked out of the room; returned in a minute, and flung down a duplicate draft of _the_ poem on the table before me. I put down the crackers, took up the paper, and finished my reading of it.

“Jack,” I said, “I beg your pardon. It does credit to your heart—you understand the emphasis? You are a young gentleman of some prospects. Miss Gray is a young lady of none.”

He hesitated a moment; then flung himself on his knees before me. He was only a great boy.

“Dad,” he said; “dear old Dad; you’ve seen them—you’ve seen her?”

I admitted the facts. “But that is not at all an answer to me,” I said.

“Where is she?” he entreated, pawing me.

“You don’t know?”

“Not from Adam. I drove her hard, and she ran away from me. She said she would, if I insisted—not to kill those same prospects of mine. My prospects! Good God! What are they without her? She left her old rooms, and no address. How did you get to see her—and my stuff?”

I could satisfy him on these points.

“But it’s true,” he said; “and—and I’m in love, Dad—Dad, I’m in love.”

He leaned his arms on the table, and his head on his arms.

“Well,” I said, “how did _you_ get to know her?”

“Business,” he muttered, “pure business. I just answered her advertisement—took her some of my twaddle. She’s an orphan—daughter of a Captain Gray, navy man; and—and she’s an angel.”

“I hope he is,” I answered. “But anyhow, that settles it. There’s no marrying and giving in marriage in heaven.”

He looked up.

“You don’t mean it? No! you dearest and most indulgent of old Dads! Tell me where she is.”

I rose.

“I may be all that; but I’m not such a fool. I shall see her to-morrow. Give me till after then.”

“O, you perfect saint!”