Part 8

“I should be a fool if I didn’t. You want my body after I am dead because it differs in some slight detail from other bodies, because, dead, I shall be to you medical fellows a curio. That’s grim.”

“A curio, exactly--to use your own fanciful term,” said Harrowsmith, professional enthusiasm lighting its cold taper in his eye. “And I, as you know, have made a special study of the thorax. Are you really serious?”

“Absolutely. I’ll give you my body when I’ve done with it if you’ll give me the cabinet at once.”

Harrowsmith looked at his watch and jumped up.

“It’s not quite four,” he said. “Kent, the commissioner for oaths, on the ground floor, has probably not gone. He stays late. You must sign a document of some sort. He’ll draw it up. I like to have things in form. In the event of your predeceasing me----”

“I’m yours. Yes; that’s all right. If I die first,” assented Kinsman carelessly. He was amused and scornful in his turn at an interest which was to him inexplicable.

He thought the doctor a fool. He was also positively grateful to his singular thorax. Men with normal organs could not always afford Tudor furniture. Over his enthusiastic face slid the expression of a personal greeting as he gave a full look at the cabinet and saluted it.

“You’ve got a bargain,” Harrowsmith said. “You’ll be able to sell the thing, when you are tired of it, at a profit.”

Kinsman winced. The first hint of shadow drew his brows together.

“Sell it! Why, I’d sell myself first. No joke intended. By Jove! I _have_ sold myself.”

They both laughed--laughter that tripped and tumbled down the old, wide stairs; laughter that was caught up by the rough wind outside and carried--whither?

* * * * *

For some weeks Kinsman had his silent chuckle against Harrowsmith. He told himself that this was mean and narrow. He struggled against his jubilation and his contemptuous reflection that the doctor was a fool. He tried to regard him as a fellow-enthusiast--with a different objective. He wished to avoid the narrow outlook of the average collector. He imagined that his flirtations with china, with Empire lounges and candelabra, with the tapering legs of Chippendale chairs had made him tolerant and broadly sympathetic. Evidently it was not so. He looked at his cabinet; he thought of his eccentric thorax--which, after all, Harrowsmith might never possess--and again, silently, in the seclusion of his own rooms, he chuckled.

After dinner each night, as he sat and smoked, he stole frequent moments for the cabinet. He jumped up now and then imagining that he had discovered some new minute detail in the work. Or he opened the doors and stuck his head far into the cavernous cupboards. They exhaled an aromatic perfume. Perhaps some woman had once kept Eastern embroideries there; this was a superficial speculation which he afterward discarded as being unworthy and improbable. He finally decided that it had been used as a linen press--linen folded away with lavender; or a thrifty housewife had stored within choice apples. It was the perfume of old orchards that teased his nostrils.

He tried to supply the cabinet with a history. Harrowsmith could tell him nothing except that his Uncle Bob had bought it at a sale. Sometimes he looked at it so long, so ardently, that he almost thought he was on the point of drawing from the massive brown thing the secrets of dead generations.

He could never tell me the exact momentous occasion when the first faint chill of repugnance struck him. He did remember the night when, as he came home tired from the City, and cast his eyes on the cabinet as usual, it seemed insufficient for the first time. What was it, after all, to make so much fuss about? Had he paid too great a price? Until that moment he had never given one thought to the price.

In the evenings, smoking his cigarette, one hand loose on his knee, he asked himself how that hand would look--dead. Involuntarily he stiffened it. Perhaps it was the slowly rising horror in him which made it appear whiter than it ever had been before. His hand! He was sorry for it. His body! What an injustice he had done it. Had any man the right to rob his body of the sanctity and superb solitude which come after death? The meanest wretch living retained the right to that majestic aloofness. He had mortgaged his. The first seeds of hate and fear sprouted in his heart.

He dashed out of his chambers and went down Chancery Lane into Fleet Street. He walked west to a theater. The play was a tragedy. As he sat in the pit he laughed when the other people thrilled. He then looked in amazement at the scandalized faces surrounding him.

He had left his chambers without casting a farewell look at the cabinet, without murmuring some word of admiration. This had never happened before. He became grave. He reproached himself. He was tender with foolish little penitences--as one would be with a loved woman.

That night in his bed the grewsome fancy seized him to lie straight and still, hands folded and chin well up. That’s how he would lie when he was dead--the majesty of death. But in his case it would be a mere tinsel majesty--like the amusingly solemn antics of a gypsy monarch. He was not his own.

He got up and lit the light and smoked. He was ashamed of himself. He was afraid of himself, and of Harrowsmith and of the cabinet. They were a dread trio, banded in a terrible way.

The fire was quite dead. He felt his way across the room and put his unsteady hand on the thick oak panels of the cabinet. He put his head against one and groaned. The perfume--was it of lavender?--stole out and nauseated him.

He would sell it. He must sell it. He went back to bed. He considered. Which dealer would give the best price? He would sell it. He would take his annual holiday early; he evidently wanted a thorough change.

In the morning he wondered how he could have thought of selling it. The acquisitiveness, the unreasoning, improvident, ardent affection of the collector was strong in him again. Before he went to the City he examined the cabinet as usual, gloating and thrilling over its beauty.

But at night he was again seized with foreboding so dreadful that he dashed into the flowing streets. He went to a music hall. He grinned, a fixed, wide grin, that seemed to crack his cheeks. His face felt stiff. The faces of the dead were stiff.

He thought that he would ask Harrowsmith to break the compact, to take back his legacy. But the doctor had a professional ardor. He might bluntly refuse. Also--he could not part with the cabinet.

The next day was Saturday. All the afternoon he walked miserably about the London streets. He thought he’d enlist, get sent to the front, and be killed on a battlefield. So would he save his dead flesh from ribald attention. But perhaps Harrowsmith would not let him go.

He was afraid to go back to his chambers, afraid that he might meet Harrowsmith on the stairs, afraid of the cabinet. He turned into a tea shop and found with difficulty a vacant chair at one of the tables. The life and gayety and warmth of that tea shop reassured him. He despised himself for his morbid fears. He would be a fool if he threw up his berth and went to the front. Besides, if he went he must leave the cabinet. The touch and sight of the wonderful brown wood carved by hands that had so long been dust had become a daily necessity to him.

Next morning, when he awoke, he was feeling very ill. It was doubtless influenza. There was no danger in that if one took care. He would take care. He must. He dared not die. Death now had a bitterness double distilled. All that Sunday he lay miserably in bed. As the hours wore on he grew too ill to fear death--and after. He was too ill, even, to be haunted by his usual terror when dusk fell.

Next day his laundress came to light the fire. He sent her off with a telegram to the office, saying he could not come. She happened to meet Harrowsmith on the landing and sent him in on her own initiative.

The doctor was assiduous. He was good to us all, and only grew angry if we spoke of a fee. He muttered something about nervous breakdown. He provided a trained nurse; he paid professional visits twice a day.

With care and nursing Kinsman began to be himself again. Harrowsmith told him that he must get away for a rest. He added that he would go with him; a holiday together would be splendid. No doubt he wondered at the wild, leaping terror in the other’s eyes when he said that; said it in such a cheery, commonplace way, without any subtlety. But Kinsman was subtle and suspicious and mad. He thought the doctor wished to come too, so as to be sure of him. He read the most diabolical eagerness in his calm face. How afraid he was of Harrowsmith! And how afraid Harrowsmith was that he would be the loser on their strange compact. Afraid to let him go away alone in case he should die and be buried.

His dread and hate grew and grew; it became distorted into a monster. He now hesitated before he swallowed each dose of medicine. His light head became the dwelling-place of a hundred wild thoughts. He lay with his face to the wall and saw it all as clearly as possible--with preternatural clearness. Harrowsmith wanted to kill him. He was impatient; that was only natural. But he _would_ not die. Sometimes, when the nurse came near, he desperately clutched at her hand to save him, to pull him back. 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 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. What was life but decent provision and the certainty of a long, undisturbed death? Things seemed simple and clear as he lay dozing through the days.

If he had sold himself for bread that would have been more understandable, less reprehensible. Starvation was a very terrible thing. But he had sold himself--for what? He thought with weird dread and passion of that solemn, shining brown thing through the wall--the mysterious piece of ancient furniture that was responsible for his misery.

And so, by desperate will, as he thought, he lived. He grew strong. The trained nurse went away. 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 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. He touched the cabinet. In his throat was a desperate sob.

He would sell it. Sell! That was just what he could never do. But if only he could; if only he might buy himself back.

Sell! He imagined the joy of the buyer--a collector, of course. What pure, undiluted ecstasy he would get out of it--that man who paid with gold and not with his own helpless flesh! No; he could never sell it. Beautiful, devilish, compelling thing! It must stay with him until the end.

He opened the door and smelt the smell--the clinging aroma which had always tantalized and piqued him. He traced with his finger the rude hinges of hammered iron. His face quivered in every muscle with varied emotions. How he loved this thing! How he hated and feared it! What moments of joy it had afforded him! What a fearful league it had lured him into making!

A terrible struggle was passing over him. His freakish brain had suggested a new extravagance. He was possessed with a desire to do this strange, this futile and dastardly act. He lifted his head and looked at the cabinet as he would have looked into human eyes--a long, wistful look; a look embodying a whole gamut of emotions. Then he crossed the room, stooped down to a box in one corner, and came back with a hammer.

“It will hurt you,” he said foolishly, the hammer already uplifted, his eyes drinking in the delicacy of that wonderful thing which had traveled down the past ages and drifted to him and been his tempter, “but not as it hurts me.”

He struck. All night he worked with the hammer, with every tool he had that could help him. He began to break it up, to hack it asunder--his cabinet. He threw it on the fire bit by bit. It blazed and crackled, this old dry wood. The splutter and crackle went to his heart. He thought they were agonized protests. He believed that it suffered as it died. In his long morbid communion with it he had grown to believe it human and something more.

It took him days and nights to kill the cabinet. It was so stoutly built. When he was exhausted he crept to bed, not forgetting to lock the door on that scene of strange disorder. But at last it was done. The wall behind was bare and dirty, festooned with cobwebs. On the floor was dust and chips and splinters. The fire burned with the glowing heat of a sacrificial fire.

Already he was calmer. Although he still belonged to Harrowsmith, although he had madly destroyed the one thing that might have redeemed him, although his days would now hold bitter moments, he was at peace.

He watched it burn. He saw the wondrous handicraft of cunning dead men disappear line by line, and turn to ash.

He was sitting so when his laundress came in at the widely flung door. It was the first time for days that she had been permitted to enter the sitting room. He nervously expected her to exclaim, to inquire. The blank wall was so obvious. The little room was hot like an oven, but she only flung her hands and cried out:

“Oh, lor’! what an awful thing this is about Mr. ’Arrersmith. To be knocked down by one o’ them cycles. The streets of London aint safe. And ’im a doctor, too, the cleverest doctor at the ’orspital.”

“What--_what_ about him?”

“Knocked down by a cycle and killed in Grays Inn Road, jest by the ’orspital,” she returned with flavor.

Kinsman staggered to his feet. The fire licked out from the grate and seemed to sear him, to dry the words in his throat and dam up the glad accursed tears in his eyes.

He was no longer a bondman. He was free. He could bear to look at his flesh, his own until death, and after. He looked at his hands, torn and soiled, hands that had destroyed the cabinet.

His eyes fell on the last panel, which the fire was greedily eating; on the heap of ash that had meant so much beauty.

He dropped back in the chair. He laughed--laughter that gurgled with water as it fought its way through his throat. He could not see the blank wall for tears, whether for the cabinet, the dead man, or himself he did not know.

A POLITICAL WOMAN.

GULLY and his wife had one of the new sets just inside the gates. These sets are more expensive, more convenient, more respectable than the old ones. Lucinda--she was Gully’s wife--would never have consented to an old set. She set her face sternly against Bohemianism when it took a certain form. She didn’t object to it in the form of Liberty tea-gowns and discreet flirtations in the name of art and literature. Gully was a journalist. He found the Inn convenient, but Lucinda was always hoping plaintively that some day they would be able to afford a house in Bloomsbury, or, better still, a modest place in the country.

She had six rooms, every convenience, and a most superior maidservant, the long streamers of whose cap, when she ran out to post a letter, lent a certain _cachet_ to the Inn.

Lucinda was nice enough. Her struggles for a conventional manner of life were amusing. She never gave Gully any peace. She dragged him about to social functions. She made him use his influence to get her portrait in the ladies’ papers, as assistant at a charity concert or exhibitor at a cat show--she kept a couple of wild-looking Persians. She always had her photograph taken in evening dress. She was one of those coarse women--commonly called fine--who are disfigured by a big neck and big arms.

She had her “At-Home” day, of course. She displayed a card bowl on a prominent table in the pleasant room overlooking the gardens which she called her drawing room. She peppered the conversation with references to dinners and receptions that she had been invited to.

We were never allowed to smoke in the drawing room, nor to bring in our whisky. It was a modern drawing room, all white paint, cheap china, and cushion frills. She had a standard lamp with an amazing amber shade. She spent sixpence twice a week on cut flowers, and sold Gully’s old clothes for palms. It was a very fair attempt at Maida Vale--Lucinda and her drawing room.

Therefore it was a surprise to me when Gully came round one night and said despondently:

“I wish you could help me with Lucinda. She’s going all to pieces.”

“Going to pieces!”

I thought of dressmakers’ bills, of the minor journalists who sometimes dropped in to tea. Yet Lucinda was a safe woman. She was far too respectable to run into debt or to compromise herself. Gully proceeded to explain.

“You know she makes me walk in the Park every Sunday afternoon. She wants to go in the morning when the fashionable frocks are about. But I draw the line at that. We compromise with the afternoon--when there is only the band and pretty shop girls I don’t so much mind. We were there six weeks ago, and we stopped to listen to a Socialist spouter--one of those rabid enthusiasts in a red tie. We had listened to them all--the religious ones, the atheists, the philosophers. Sometimes you get good copy out of fellows like that.

“I wouldn’t let her stand about long. Her chest is weak, and the Wigans’ fancy-dress ball is coming on. It is to be a grand affair; they’ve talked of it for months. Lucinda was to go as a--blest if I can remember as what--but her bodice was to be the merest apology. You can’t blame a fine woman for showing off her neck and arms. Old Wigan is the proprietor of my paper, a very wealthy man, a very influential one too. It is to my interest to keep in with him. It would never do for us to snub him by keeping away. You’re never safe in journalism. Get a post as editor, and begin to bound on your so many hundreds a year. Phew! the paper changes hands or politics--where are you? Get regular weekly features, make yourself an authority on some subject or other. The public doesn’t want your subject--or you. Journalism is rotten, I tell you, rotten. Only the absolutely unscrupulous, or the totally ignorant, have the least chance. I know men in journalism who are making five pounds a week and more by writing gutter stuff. And I know clever men who barely scrape a hundred and fifty a year.

“Where was I? Oh! Lucinda. I know that her bronchial attacks last half through the winter, so I pulled her away out of the crowd. It was a bitterly cold day.

“We walked off. She drew up the collar of her coat. I said that it had been foolish of us to stand about in the cold and risk bronchitis, with the Wigans’ fancy-dress ball coming on.

“‘I don’t care a bit about the ball,’ she said. ‘I’m not going.’

“‘Not care! not going! But your dress? You’ve bought the silk. It cost a pretty penny.’

“‘Brocade. Twelve and six a yard,’ she groaned.

“‘It seemed to me a little stiff. But so long as you are happy----’

“‘Happy! Did you hear what he said? It is dreadful.’

“‘Awful. The police ought to put a stop to----’

“It was Lucinda who stopped--on the edge of the Serpentine.

“‘Do you know what you are saying?’ she demanded.

“I didn’t like the contemptuous curl of her lip, and returned with some pique:

“‘I know what _he_ was saying. Extravagant balderdash! I ought to know something about politics. I take an interest in them--an intelligent interest. I write about them. There’s my weekly letter to the Midland daily, isn’t there? I vote Radical, I’m a Progressive. I’m for the amelioration of--all sorts of things.’

“I wound up vaguely. You can’t talk sane, serious politics to your wife; the true political woman has yet to be born.

“‘When we retire to the country in our ripe middle age,’ I went on, ‘I shall take an active interest in local affairs. I shall become a member of the parish council; shall look after rights of way and be down on barbed wire. I’ve my own ideas on the game laws--we shall never have enough money to preserve--and lots of things. I won’t dilate on them. You wouldn’t understand.’

“It was getting dusk. In the distance the crowd--all the little crowds--were melting away. A soldier sat with a girl on a seat. His red coat was warm against the shadows.

“‘There!’ broke out Lucinda passionately, before we were out of hearing. ‘Did you see those two on the seat?’

“‘I did. I thought, so far as I could judge, you know, that they looked uncommonly happy.’

“‘Happy! a soldier! a servant girl! What have they done? Surely you, as a practical politician, can tell me. Why should they be born to such a life? I ask you. No gleam of brightness to lighten the impenetrable gloo----’

“‘Come now. You are quoting the maniac in the red tie.’

“We got out of the Park and went along Oxford Street in silence until we were near the Circus. Then Lucinda burst out suddenly:

“‘Two thousand acres of land----’

“‘If you are going to tackle the agricultural problem----’

“‘One third of the available capital----’

“‘Don’t start on statistics; nothing more treacherous.’

“‘How many families did he say lived in one room?’

“‘Wasn’t listening.’

“‘That is just it. People like you never do listen. People like you content themselves with reading stupid, woolly, political speeches. For my part, I always skip such things, and am thankful when Parliament adjourns and they put something really interesting in the papers.’”

Gully stopped and knocked the ashes out of his pipe.

“From that day,” he said solemnly, when he had refilled and lighted up, “she has given me no peace. She’ll compromise herself seriously--that’s what I’m afraid of. She’s been making election rosettes. She actually met a fellow by appointment in Broad Street. One of these Social Democrats; she wants me to review his book, ‘The Fall of the Capitalist.’ I put my foot down when it came to appointments--the scoundrel!

“She’s always hurling Socialistic bricks at me. I’ve tried to convince her of her errors with a pencil and a bit of paper. I worked out a sum in proportion, with a landowner and a man with a patent who had a certain amount of capital to start with. She said she didn’t care a fig for my stupid landowner.

“I’m afflicted with a wife who has ideas of her own and means to live up to them. It’s hard. I never counted on taking brains--of the bran-new sort--when I took Lucinda. I object to a clever woman. I work hard. I’ve got brains enough for both, and over. I ask for a pretty face, a fresh frock, good cooking--that’s all. I can get the rest from the papers, or I can drop in at the club.”

“Look here, old man,” I said soothingly, “get her on facts. Never use pencil and paper to a woman--logic only irritates them. Make her live up to her doctrines--she’ll be sick of them in a week.”

Women soon tire; all froth and no ballast. (I’m forgetting that you’re a woman, but you like the complete story.)

He went away after I had given him a few tips. At the end of the week he came back.

“Well?” I said optimistically, as he sat down and took out his pipe.