Part 15

At half-past one o’clock, it being Saturday, he—we were going to say “knocked off,” but the expression would be a libel on his methodical refinement. He took a hansom—selecting a personably horsed one—to his chambers in Adelphi Terrace; lunched off four _pâté de foie gras_ sandwiches, already awaiting him under a silver cover, and a glass of chablis; changed his dress for a river suit of sober-tinted flannel and a Panama hat; charged himself with a morocco handbag, also ready prepared; drove to Waterloo, and took a first-class ticket, and the train—he favoured the South-Western because it was the quieter line of two in this connexion—to Windsor. Arrived there, he was hailed and joined by a friend on the platform.

“Glad you’re come, Ned. I’m off colour a bit. You never are.”

It was hardly an attractive reception. Mr. Cantle glanced interrogatively at his companion, the Honourable Ivo Monk, son of Lord Prior.

“No?” he said. “What’s disturbing you, Monk?”

“O, the devil, I think!” said the young man peevishly. “Come along, do, out of this.”

Together they walked down to the river in almost absolute silence. Mr. Cantle had agreed to join his friend for an agreeable week-end on the water. It looked promising. He thought a little, and came to a characteristically uncompromising decision.

“Is it anything to do with Miss Varley?”

“Yes, it is.”

“She—they have a houseboat here, haven’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Close by?”

“More or less. Just above Datchet.”

“Then, I think, perhaps I’d better——”

“Then, I think, perhaps, you’d not. You don’t know anything about it. It’s not what you suppose.”

“O!”

A punt, in luxurious keeping with the tastes of its owner, awaited them at the steps. It was equipped with a number of little lockers for wine and food, a wealth of the downiest cushions, and an adjustable tilt with brass hoops for “roughing it” at nights on the water. For the Honourable Ivo was at the moment an aquatic gipsy, wandering at large and at whim, and scorning the effeminate pillow.

They loitered through Romney lock, talking commonplaces, and below relinquished their poles and sat and drifted until the reeds held them up. It was a fair, sweet afternoon, full of life and merriment, and, in view of the crowding craft, the remotest from ghostliness.

“Would you like to see her?” said Mr. Monk suddenly and unexpectedly.

Cantle was never to be taken off his guard.

“If it will please you, it will please me,” he said.

They resumed the poles and made forward. To their left a little sludgy creek went up among the osiers; and, anchored at its mouth, rocked the vulgarest little apology for a houseboat. It seemed just one cuddy, mounted on a craft like a bomb-ketch, which it filled from stem to stern; and what with its implied restrictedness, and dingy appearance, and stump of a chimney, one could not have imagined a less inviting prison in which to make out a holiday. Yet there was a lord to this squalid baby galliot, and to all appearance a very contented one, as he sat smoking a pipe, with his legs dangling over the side. Monk nodded to him, and the man nodded back with a grin.

“Who’s that?” asked Mr. Cantle, when out of earshot.

“O, a crank! You should recognize the breed better than I do.”

Mr. Cantle, thoughtfully nursing his jaw, with a frown on his face, had left off punting.

“Don’t you know him?” he said suddenly.

“We exchange civilities,” answered the other; “the freemasonry of the river, you understand. _There’s_ the Varleys’ boat.”

Forging under the Victoria Bridge, they had come in view of a long line of houseboats moored under the left bank against a withy bed, opposite the Home Park. At one of these, hight the “Mermaid,” very large and handsome, they came to, and fastening on, stepped aboard. A sound of murmuring ceased with their arrival, and Cantle had hardly become aware of two figures seated in the saloon, before he was being introduced to one of them.

Miss Varley was certainly “interesting”—tall and “English,” but with an exhausted air, and her eyes superhumanly large. She greeted the stranger sweetly, and her fiancé with a rather full, pathetic look.

“Mamma’s resting a little,” she said, in a bodiless voice, “and Nanna’s been reading to me. Papa comes down by the seven o’clock train.”

“And what’s Nanna been reading?” asked the young man.

The old nurse held up the volume. It was the Holy Book. Monk ground his teeth.

“Hush, Master Ivo!” whispered the woman. “You only distress her.”

“I’d rather see her reading a yellow-back on a July day on the river.”

The girl put a hand on his arm. “When the call has come? When my days are numbered, Ivo?” she said.

He almost burst out in an oath.

“I’d rather, if I were you, be recognized and called by my own name and nature,” he said bitterly. “But it’s all nonsense, Netta. Do, for God’s sake, believe it!”

He was so obviously overwrought, the situation was so painful, that his friend persuaded him, on personal grounds, to leave. They punted across, dropped down a distance, and brought up under the bank in a quiet spot.

“Very well,” said Cantle. “You’ll tell me, perhaps, what’s the matter?”

“Can’t you see? She’s dying.”

He dropped his face into his hands, with a groan of impotent suffering.

“There’s some mystery here,” said his friend quietly.

Monk looked up, and burst out in a sudden lost fury—

“There is, by God! Jack the Skipper!”

Cantle was rolling a cigarette imperturbably.

“Who’s—Jack the Skipper?” he drawled.

“I wish you could tell me,” cried the other. “I wish you could show these the way to his throat!” He held out his hands. “They’d fasten!” he whispered.

He came all of a sudden, quite quietly, and sat by his friend. “Its been going on for three weeks now,” he said rapidly. “They call him that about here—a sort of skit on the other—the other beast, you know. He appears at night—a sort of ghoulish, indescribable monster, black and huge and dripping, and utters one beastly sound and disappears. Nobody’s been able to trace him, or see where he comes from or goes to. He just appears in the night, in all sorts of unexpected places—houseboats, and bungalows, and shanties by the water—and terrifies some lonely child or woman, and is gone. The devil!—O, the devil! We’ve made parties and hunted him, to no good. It’s a regular reign of terror hereabouts. People don’t dare being left alone after dark. He frightened the little Cunningham child into a fit, and it’s not expected to recover. Mrs. Bancock died of an apoplexy after seeing it. And the worst of it is, a deadly superstition’s seized the place. Its visit’s got to be supposed to presage death, and——” He seized Cantle’s hand convulsively.

“Damn it! It’s unnatural, Ned! The river’s haunted—here, in Cockney Datchet—in the twentieth century! You don’t believe in such things—tell me you don’t! But Netta——”

His head sank on his breast. Cantle blew out a placid whiff of smoke.

“But—Miss Varley?” he said.

“You know—you’ve heard, at least,” said the other, “what she was. The _thing_ suddenly stood before her, when she was alone, one night. Well—you see what she is now.”

“I don’t see, nevertheless, why she don’t——”

“Pack and run? No more do I. Put it to her if you like. I’ve said _my_ say. But she’s in the grip—thinks she’s had her call—and there’s no moving her. Cantle, she’s just dying where she stands.”

Cantle’s cigarette made a tiny arc of light, and hissed in the river. He had heard of epidemic hysteria. The world was full of cranks.

“Now,” he said, “drop the subject, please. Shall I tell you of some fools I’ve come across in my time?”

He related some of his experiences in the Patent Office. The most impudent invention ever proposed, he said, was a burglar’s tool for snipping out and holding by suction in one movement a disk of window glass. His dry self-confidence had a curiously reassuring effect on the other. While they ate and drank and smoked and talked, the life of the river had become gradually attenuated and delivered to silence; a mist rose and hung above the water; sounds died down and ceased, concentrating themselves into the persistent dismal yelp of a dog somewhere on the bank above; the lights in the houseboats thinned to isolated sparks—twelve o’clock clanged from a distant tower.

Then, all at once, he was alert and quietly active.

“Monk, listen to me: I’m going to cure Miss Varley.”

“Ned!”

“Take the paddle and work up—up the river, do you hear? I’ll sit forward.”

The ghost of a red moon was rising in the east. They slipped on with scarce a sound. A sort of lurid glaze enamelled the water. All of a sudden a sleek bulk rose ahead right in their path, wallowed a moment like a porpoise, and disappeared.

“Good God!” cried Monk, in a choking voice, half rising from his seat.

“Keep down!” whispered his friend.

“Cantle! Did you see it? Cantle! It was he!”

“Keep down!”

They paddled on, past the last of the boats, through the bridge, on as far as the squat little bomb-ketch bulking black and menacing at the mouth of the creek.

“Hold on!” whispered Cantle. “Run her out of sight into the reeds. We must wade on board there.”

“There? That fellow Spindler’s boat?”

“Of course, now. That was his name.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll soon know.”

They accomplished the feat, though near mud-foundered by the way, and scrambled, dripping, on board. The door of the cuddy yielded to their touch. Monk was beginning to gather dim light.

“Don’t let me,” he whispered, almost sobbing. “Keep my hands off him.”

“Leave him to me,” said Cantle gravely.

Not a sound of life greeted them. They stole into the cabin and closed the door, almost, upon themselves.

“We must yield him to-night for the sake of to-morrow,” murmured Cantle.

“Ned! If he goes again——”

“Hush! It’s not probable he’d risk a second visit, knowing her watched.”

The crack brightened as the moon rose: glowed into a ribbon of light. Suddenly Cantle gripped the other’s wrist.

A stealthy puddling, sucking sound close by reached their ears. Over the side came swarming a great shapeless fishy creature, which settled with a sludgy wallop on the little triangle of foredeck almost at their feet. Monk gave a soft, awful gasp, and, with the sound, Cantle had dashed open the door and flung himself upon the monster.

“Quick!” he cried; “you’ve got matches! Light a candle—lamp—anything! Lie still, Mr. Spindler. It’s all up. I know you and your Marine Secret Service suit! A knife now, Monk! Out he comes.”

He was merciless with the blade when he got it, slashing and cutting at the oilskin suit, splitting it from top to toe. Mr. Spindler’s red beard and extravagant face came out of it like a death’s-head out of its chrysalis.

“There goes the proud monument of a lifetime,” said the madman. He had made no effort to resist. The first blow at this darling of his invention had seemed to hamstring him, morally and materially.

For he was just one of Mr. Cantle’s cranks—had once invented a submarine travelling suit, with which he had hoped to inaugurate a new system of Secret Service for the Admiralty. It was an ingenious enough device, with some scheme of floating valves through which to breathe; but the authorities, after holding him on and off, would have none of it. Then the fate of many inventors had befallen him. Between practical ruin and a moral sense of wrong, he had gone crazy, and vowed warfare on the mankind which had discarded him. It should comprehend, too late, the uses of instant appearance and disappearance to which his invention could be put. He went mad, and ended his days in an asylum.

On the Monday morning Mr. Cantle posted back to the Patent Office; on the Tuesday Miss Varley was reading De Maupassant’s “Mademoiselle Fifi” under the awning of the “Mermaid’s” roof; and on the Wednesday Mr. Ivo Monk got her to name the day.

A BUBBLE REPUTATION

One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name.

I had never suspected Sweeting of a desire to be “somebody.” Indeed, the _jeunesse dorée_, in whose ranks Nature had seemed unquestioningly to bestow him, is not subject to diffidence, or prone to the wisdom which justifies itself in a knowledge of its own limitations. I was familiar with his placid, cherubic face at a minor club or two, in the Park, in Strand restaurants and Gaiety stalls; and it had never once occurred to me to classify him as apart from his fellows of the exquisite guild. If, like Keats, he could appreciate the hell of conscious failure, its most poignant anguish, I could have sworn, would borrow from some too-late realization of the correctest “form” in a hat-brim or shirt-collar. I could have sworn it, I say, and I should have been, of course, mistaken. Keats may have claimed it as his poetical prerogative to go ill-dressed, and to object, though John, to be dubbed “Johnny.” It remained to Sweeting to prove that a man might be a very typical “Johnny” and a poet to boot. But I will explain.

One day I entered the reading-room of the Junior Winston and nodded to Sweeting, who was seated solitary at the newspaper-table. While I was hunting for the “Saturday Review”—which was conducting, I had been told, the vivisection of a friend of mine—my attention was attracted by something actually ostentatious in Sweeting’s perusal of _his_ sheet, and I glanced across. Judge my astonishment when I saw in his hands, not “Baily’s” or the “Pink ’Un,” but the very periodical I sought. I gasped; then grinned.

“Hullo!” I said. “Since when have you taken to that?”

He attempted to reply with a face of wondering hauteur, but gave up at the first twitch.

“O,” he said rather defiantly, “you lit’ary professionals think no one’s in it but yourselves.”

“In what?”

“Why, this sort of thing,” he said, tapping the “Saturday”; “the real stuff, you know.”

“Indeed,” I said, “we don’t. You’re always welcome to the reversion of my place in it for one.”

“O, me!” he said airily. “It don’t positively apply there, you see, being a sort of a kind of a professional myself.”

“My Sweet!” I exclaimed. “A professional—you?”

“O, yes,” he said. “Didn’t you know? Write for the ‘Argonaut.’ Little thing of mine in it last number.”

I felt faint.

“May I see it?” I murmured. “If I don’t mistake, it’s under your elbow at this moment.”

“Is it?” he answered, blushing flagrantly, “Lor’ bless me, so it is!”

I took it from his hand, opened it, and read, over his undoubted signature—Marmaduke Sweeting—the title, “The Fool of the Family.”

“Ah!” I thought, “of course. Like title like author.”

But I was wrong. The tale, a veritable _conte drolatique_, was as keen and strong as a Maupassant. I had no choice but to take it at a draught, smacking my lips after. Then I put the paper softly down and looked across at him. His harmless features were set in a sort of hypnotic smile, his hat was tilted over his eyes, and he was making constant mouthfuls of the large silver knob of his stick. My eyes travelled to and fro between this figure and the figures of print _that were he_. What possible connexion could there be between the two? I thought of Buffon writing in lace ruffles, and all at once recognized a virtue in immaculate shirt-cuffs, and decided to consult some fashionable hosier about raising my price per thousand words. In the meantime my respect for Sweeting was born.

“So,” I said, “you are somebody after all?”

“Am I?” he answered, grinning bucolic. “Glad you’ve found it out.”

“Why,” I said, “honestly there’s genius in this story; but nothing to what you’ve shown in concealing that you had any. There must be much more to come out of the same bin.”

He flushed and laughed and wriggled, as I walked over and sat beside him.

“O, I dare say!” he said. “Hope so, anyhow.”

“Not a doubt. What made you think of it, now?”

“O! I thought of it,” he said; and, after all, there was no better reply to an idiotic question. I was beginning humbly to appraise intellectual self-sufficiency at its value, and to appreciate the hundred disguises of reason.

I saw a good deal of Sweeting, on his own initiative, after this. He would visit me in my rooms, and discuss—none too sapiently, I may have thought in other circumstances, and with the most ingenuous admiration for his own abilities—the values of certain characters as portrayed by him in a brilliant series, “The Love-Letters of a Nonconformist,” which had immediately followed in the “Argonaut” “The Fool of the Family,” and was taking the town by storm. Thus, “What d’ee think of that old Lupin, last number,” he would chuckle, “with his calling virtue an ‘emu,’ don’tcherknow?”

“Ha, yes!” I would correct him, with a nervous laugh. “‘Anæmia’ was the word. You meant it, of course.”

“Why, didn’t I say it?” he would answer. “It’s got a big swallow anyhow”; and then he would check himself suddenly, and, without further explanation, eye me, and begin to whistle.

Now I might recall the passage to which he referred (to wit, that every red blood corpuscle, being a seed peccancy, so to speak, made virtue an anæmia) and try to puzzle out a quite new significance in it. Suspecting that its author’s apparent naïveté was only assumed, I was respectfully guarded in my answers, and, when he was gone, would curiously ponder the perspicacious uses to which he would put them. He did not consult me, I felt, as an oracle; but rather drew upon me for the vulgar currency of thought, to which his exclusiveness was a stranger. He was very secret about his own affairs; though I understood that he was becoming quite an important “name” in the literary world. Ostensibly he was not, after that first essay, to be identified with the “Argonaut,” though any one, having an ounce of the proper appreciation, could scarcely fail to mark in the “Love-Letters” the right succession of qualities which had made the earlier story notable. Indeed, he suffered more than any man I knew from the penalties attaching to the popular author. The number of communications, both signed and anonymous, which he received from admirers was astonishing. Scarce a day passed but he brought me specimens of them to discuss and laugh over. I did not, I must admit, think his comments always in good taste; but then I was not personally subject to the flattering pursuit, and so may have been no more constituted to judge than a monk is of a worldling.

These testimonies to his fame were from every sort of individual—the soldier, the divine, the poet, the painter, the actor (and more especially the actress), the young person with views, the social butterfly, the gushling late of the schoolroom, the woman of sensibility late of the latest lifelong passion for art or religion, and finding, as usual, the taste of life sour on her lips after a recent debauch of sentiment. They all found something in the “Love-Letters” to meet their particular cases—some note of subtle sympathy, some first intimation to their misunderstood spirits of a kindred emotion which had _felt_, and could lay its finger with divine solace on the spot. No longer would they suffer a barren grievance—that hair-shirt which not a soul suspected but to giggle over. To take, for example, from the series a typical sentence which served so many for a text—

“_To whom does the materialist cry his defiance—to whom but to God? He cannot rest from baiting a Deity whose existence he denies. He forgets that irony can wring no response from a vacuum._” A propos of which wrote the following:—

A Half-pay General.—Don’t tell me, Sir, but you’ve served, like me, a confounded ungrateful country, and learned your lesson! Memorialize the devil rather than the War Office. You’ve hit it off in your last sentence to a T.

A Chorus Girl.—Dear Sir,—You mean me to understand, I know, and you’re quite right. The British public has no more ears than a ass, or they’d reconise who ought to be playing Lotta in “The Belle of Battersea.” It’s such a comfort you can’t tell. Please forgive this presumptious letter from a stranger.—Yours very affectionately,

Dolly.

An Apostolic Fisherman.—I like your metaphor. I would suggest only “ground-baiting a Deity” as more subtly applicable to the tactics of a worldling. Note: “And Simon Peter said, ‘I go a-fishing.’”

Take, again, this excerpt: “_Doctors’ advice to certain patients to occupy their minds recalls the Irishman’s receipt for making a cannon, ‘Take a hole and pour brass round it._’” Of which a “True Hibernian” wrote—

Sir,—I’ve always maintained that the genuine “bull,” fathered on my suffering country, came from the loins of the English lion. Murder, now! How could a patient occupy his doctor’s mind as well as his own, unless he was beside himself? And then he’d have no mind at all.

Or take, once more and to end, the sentence: “_The Past is that paradoxical possession, a Shadow which we would not drop for the Substance_”; which evoked the following from “One who has felt the Weariness, the Fever, and the Fret”—

How strangely and exquisitely phrased! It brings, I know not how, the memory of the Channel before me. I have only crossed it once; but, O! the recollection! the solemn moving waters to which my soul went out!

These are specimens, but a few, of the responses wrung by Sweeting from the human chords he touched. There were, in addition, prayers innumerable for autographs, requests for the reading of manuscripts, petitions for gratis copies of his works, to be sold for any and every charity but the betterment of impecunious authors. He fairly basked in the sunshine of a great reputation. There was only one flaw in his enormous self-satisfaction. By a singular perversity and most inexplicable coincidence, every one of these signed documents was without an address. But, after all, coincidence, which is only another name for the favouritism of Fate, must occasionally glut itself on an approved subject. Sweeting was in favour with the gods, and enjoyed “a high old time of it,” principally, perhaps, because he did not appear to be ambitious of impressing any “set” but that with which he was wont to forgather, and above which he made no affectation now of rising superior.

I had an example one evening of this intellectual modesty, when casually visiting the Earl’s Court grounds. There I encountered my friend, the centre and protagonist of a select company in the enclosure. All exquisitely wore exquisite evening dress (for myself I always scornfully eschewed the livery), and all gravitated about Sweeting with the unconscious homage which imbecility pays to brains—“the desire of the moth for the star.” I could see at once that he was become their Sirius, their bright particular glory, reflecting credit upon their order. And he, who might have commanded the suffrages of the erudite, seemed content with his little conquest—to have reached, indeed, the apogee of his ambition—a one-eyed king among the blind. These suffered my introduction with some condescension, as a mere larva of Grub Street. They knew themselves now as the stock from which was generated this real genius. As for me, I was Gil Blas’s playwright at the supper of comedians. And then, at somebody’s initiative, we were all swaggering off together along the walks.