Part 9

His wife stood over him with the half-full glass in one hand and the little bottle in the other. Her eyes dilated… her chest heaved.…

“Edward!” she breathed. “Was it all so useless?”

“Was what useless? Yes, as I was telling you, I go as one in a dream--a bad, bad dream, like the dreams I used to have when I overworked at college. I was brilliant, Alice, brilliant, do you hear? At some cost, I expect! Now I hate people--my fellow creatures. I’ve left them. They come and go, jostling me, and pushing me, on the pavements as I go along, avoiding them. Do you know where they should be, really, in relation to me?”

He rose a little in his seat--she stepped nervously aside, made as if to put down the bottle and the glass she was holding, then thought better of it and continued to extend them mechanically.

“They should be over my head. I’ve already left them and their petty nonsense of living. They mean nothing to me, no more than if they were ghosts walking. Or perhaps it’s I who am a ghost to them?… You don’t understand it. It’s because I suppose you have no imagination. You just know what you want and do your best to get it. You blurt out your blessed petition to your Deity and the idea that you’re irrelevant never enters your head, soft, persistent, High Church thing that you are!…”

Alice Arne smiled, and balanced the objects she was holding. He motioned her to pour out the liquid from one to the other, but she took no heed; she was listening with all her ears. It was the nearest approach to the language of compliment, to anything in the way of loverlike personalities that she had heard fall from his lips since his illness. He went on, becoming as it were lukewarm to his subject--

“But the worst of it is that once break the cord that links you to humanity--it can’t be mended. Man doesn’t live by bread alone… or lives to disappoint you. What am I to you, without my own poor personality?… Don’t stare so, Alice! I haven’t talked so much or so intimately for ages, have I? Let me try and have it out.… Are you in any sort of hurry?”

“No, Edward.”

“Pour that stuff out and have done.… Well, Alice, it’s a queer feeling, I tell you. One goes about with one’s looks on the ground, like a man who eyes the bed he is going to lie down in, and longs for. Alice, the crust of the earth seems a barrier between me and my own place. I want to scratch the boardings with my nails and shriek something like this: ‘Let me get down to you all, there where I belong!’ It’s a horrible sensation, like a vampire reversed!…”

“Is that why you insisted on having this room in the basement?” she asked breathlessly.

“Yes, I can’t bear being upstairs, somehow. Here, with these barred windows and stone-cold floors… I can see the people’s feet walking above there in the street… one has some sort of illusion.…”

“Oh!” She shivered and her eyes travelled like those of a caged creature round the bare room and fluttered when they rested on the sombre windows imperiously barred. She dropped her gaze to the stone flags that showed beyond the oasis of Turkey carpet on which Arne’s chair stood.… Then to the door, the door that she had closed on entering. It had heavy bolts, but they were not drawn against her, though by the look of her eyes it seemed she half imagined they were.…

She made a step forward and moved her hands slightly. She looked down on them and what they held… then changed the relative positions of the two objects and held the bottle over the glass.…

“Yes, come along!” her husband said. “Are you going to be all day giving it me?”

With a jerk, she poured the liquid out into a glass and handed it to him. She looked away--towards the door.…

“Ah, your way of escape!” said he, following her eyes. Then he drank, painstakingly.

The empty bottle fell out of her hands. She wrung them, murmuring--

“Oh, if I had only known!”

“Known what? That I should go near to cursing you for bringing me back?”

He fixed his cold eyes on her, as the liquid passed slowly over his tongue.…

“--Or that you would end by taking back the gift you gave?”

THE COACH

It was a lonely part of the country, far north, where the summer nights are pale and light and scant of shade. This summer night there was no moon, and yet it was not dark. For hours the flat, deprecating earth had lain prone under a storm of wind and rain. Its patient surface was drenched, blanched, smitten into blindness. The tumbled waters of the Firth splashed on the edges of the plain, their wild commotion dwarfed by the noise of the wind-driven showers, whose gloomy drops tapped the waters into sullen acquiescence. Half a mile inland the road to the north was laid. Clear and straight it ran, with never a house or homestead to break it, viscous with clay here, shining with quartz there, uncompromising, exact, like the lists of old, dressed for a tourney. Its sides were bare, scantily garnished with grass. This was nearly a hedgeless country. In places the undeviating line of it passed through a little coppice or clump of gnarled, ill-conditioned, nameless trees. They seemed to lean forward vindictively on either side, snapping their horny fingers at each other, waving their cantankerous branches as the gusts took them, broke them, and whirled the fragments of their ruin far away and out of ken, like a flapping, unruly kite which a child has allowed to pass beyond his control. The broad white surface of the road was not suffered to be blotted for a single moment. Nothing could rest for the play of the intriguing air-currents, surging backwards and forwards, blind, stupid and swelled with pride, till they had got completely out of hand and defied the archers of the middle sky. They staggered hither and thither like ineffectual giants; they buffeted all impartially; they instigated the hapless branches at their mercy to wild lashings of each other, to useless accesses of the spirit of self-destruction. Bending slavishly under the heavy gusts, each shabby blade of grass by the roadside rose again and was on the _qui vive_ after the rustling tyrant had passed.

It was then, in the succeeding moments of comparative peace, when the directors of the passionate aerial revolt had managed to call their panting rabble off for the time, that great perpendicular sheets of rain, like stage films slung evenly from heavenly temples, descended and began moving continuously sideways, like a wall, across the level track. A sheet of whole water, blotting out the tangled borders of herbage that grew sparsely round the heaps of stones with which the margin was set at intervals, placed there ready for breaking. When the slab of rain had moved on again, the broad road, shining out sturdily with its embedded quartz and milky kneaded clay, lay clear once more. Calm, ordered and tranquil in the midst of tumult and discord, it pursued its appointed course, edging off from its evenly bevelled sides the noisy moorland streams, that had come jostling each other in their haste to reach it, only to be relegated, noisily complaining, to the swollen, unrecognizable gutter.

At a certain point on the line of way, a tall, spare, respectable-looking man in a well-fitting grey frock coat stood waiting. The rain ran down the back of his coat collar, and dripped off the rim of his tall hat. His attitude suggested some weary foredone clerk waiting at the corner of the city street for the omnibus that was to carry him home to his slippered comfort and sober pipe of peace. He wore no muffler, but then it was summer--St. John’s Eve. He leaned on an ivory-headed ebony stick of which he seemed fond, and peered, not very eagerly, along the road, which now lay in dazzling rain-washed clarity under the struggling moon. There was a lull in the storm. He had no luggage, no umbrella, yet his grey coat looked neat, and his hat shiny.

Far in the distance, from the south, a black clumsy object appeared, labouring slowly along. It was a coach, of heavy and antique pattern. As soon as he had sighted it, the passenger’s faint interest seemed diminished. With a bored air of fulfilment, he dropped his eyes and looked down disapprovingly at the clayey mud at his feet, although, indeed, the sticky substance did not appear to have marred the exquisite polish of his shoes. His palm settled composedly on the ivory knob of his trusty stick, as though it were the hand of an old friend.

With all the signs of difficult going, but no noise of straining or grinding, the coach at last drew up in front of the expectant passenger. He looked up quietly, and recognized it as the vehicle wherein it was appointed that he should travel in this unsuitable weather for a stage or two, maybe. All was correct, the coachman, grave, business-like, headless as of usage, the horses long-tailed, black, conventional.…

The door opened noiselessly, and the step was let down. The passenger shook his head as he delicately put his foot on to it, and observed for the benefit, doubtless, of the person or persons inside--

“I see old Joe on the box in his official trim. Rather unnecessary, all this ceremony, I venture to think! A few yokels and old women to impress, if indeed, any one not positively obliged is abroad on a night like this! For form’s sake, I suppose!”

He took his seat next the window. There were four occupants of the coach beside himself. They all nodded formally, but not unkindly. He returned their salutations with old-fashioned courtesy, though unacquainted seemingly with any of them.

Sitting next to him was a woman evidently of fashion. Her heavy and valuable furs were negligently cast on one side, to show a plastron covered with jewels. She wore at least two enamelled and jewel-encrusted watches pinned to her bosom as a mark for thieves to covet. It was foolish of her. So at least thought the man in the grey frock coat. Her yellow wig was much awry. Her eyes were weak, strained, and fearful, and she aided their vision with a diamond-beset pince-nez. Now and again she glanced over her left shoulder as if in some alarm, and at such times she always grasped her gold-net reticule feverishly. She was obviously a rich woman in the world, a first-class train-de-luxe passenger.

The woman opposite her belonged as unmistakably to the people. She was hard-featured, worn with a life of sordid toil and calculation, but withal stout and motherly, a figure to inspire the fullest confidence. She wore a black bonnet with strings, and black silk gloves heavily darned. Round her sunken white collar, a golden gleam of watch-chain was now and then discernible.

At the other end of the coach, squeezed up into the corner where the vacillating light of the lamp hung from the roof least penetrated, a neat, sharp-featured man nestled and hid. His forehead retreated, and his bowler hat was set unnecessarily far back, lending him an air of folly and congenital weakness which his long, cold, clever nose could not dissipate. He was white as old enamel.

But the man whom the gentleman in the frock coat took to among his casual fellow-travellers was the one sitting directly opposite him, a rough, hearty creature, who alone of all the taciturn coachful seemed disposed to enter into a casual conversation, which might go some way to enliven the dreariness entailed by this somewhat old-fashioned mode of travelling. Gay talk might help to drown the dashing of the waters of the Firth lying close on the right hand of the section of road they were even now traversing, and the ugly roar of the wind and rain against the windows. This--by comparison--cheerful fellow was dressed like a working man, in a shabby suit of corduroys. He wore no collar, but a twisted red cotton handkerchief was wound tightly round his thick squat neck. His little mean eyes, swinish, but twinkling good-humouredly, stared enviously at the neat gentleman’s stiff collar and the delicate grey tones of his suiting. Crossing and uncrossing his creasy legs, in the unusual effort of an attempt at conviviality, the man in corduroys addressed the man in the frock coat awkwardly enough, but still civilly.

“Well, mate! They’ve chosen a rare rough night to shift us on! Orders from headquarters, I suppose? I’ve been here nigh on a year and never set eyes on my boss!”

“We used to call him God the Father,” said the elder man slowly.… “But whoever it is that orders our ways here, there is no earthly sense in questioning His arrangements, we can only fall in with them. As you admit, you are fairly new, and perhaps you do not as yet conceive fully of the silent impelling force that sways us. It is the same in the world we have left, only that there we were only concerned with the titles and standing of our ‘boss,’ as you call Him, and obeyed His laws not a whit. I must say I consider this particular system of soul transference that we have to submit to, very unsettling and productive of restlessness among us--a mere survival and tiresome superstition, to my mind. It has one merit; one sees something of the under world, travelling about as we do, and meeting chance, perhaps kindred spirits on the road. One realizes, too, that Hades is not quite as grey, shall I say, as it is painted! But perhaps,” he added, with a slight touch of class hauteur, “you do not quite follow me?”

“Oh yes, Master, I do,” eagerly replied the fellow-traveller to whom he chose to address his monologue. “Since I’ve been dead, I have learned the meaning of many things. I turn up my nose at nothing these days. I always neglected my schooling, but now I tell you I try to make up for lost time. From a rough sort of fellow that I was, with not an idea in my head beyond my beer and my prog, I have come to take my part in the whole of knowledge. It was all mine before, so to speak, but I didn’t trouble to put my hand out for it. Didn’t care, didn’t listen to Miss that taught me, or to Parson, either. He had some good ideas too, as I’ve come to know, though Vice isn’t Vice exactly with us here, now, in a manner of speaking. If God Almighty made us, why did He make us, even in parts, bad? That’s what I want to know, and I’ll know that when I’ve been dead a bit longer. Why did He give me rotten teeth so that I couldn’t chew properly and didn’t care for my food and liked drink better? It’s dirt and digestion makes drinking and devilry, I say.”

The smart woman interrupted him with a kind of languid eagerness, exclaiming--

“I must say I agree with you. Since the pestle fell on my shoulder in that lonely villa at Monte, I have realized what the dreadful gambling fever may lead to. It had made those two who treated me so ill, quite inhuman. They had become wild beasts. I ought never to have accepted their treacherous invitation to luncheon, never tempted them with my outrageous display of jewels! And look here, I was tarred with the same stick, I gambled too----”

She rummaged in her reticule and fished out a ticket for the rooms at Monte Carlo.

“I always call that the ticket for my execution. Though my executioners were rather unnecessarily brutal. They will attain unto this place more easily than I did. Hardly any pain. The hand of the law is gentle, compared with the methods of----”

The man in the grey frock coat raised his finger warningly. “No names, I beg. One of our conventions…!”

“Have a drop?” said the calm motherly woman to the excited fine lady. “Your wound is recent, isn’t it? Yours was a very severe case! A bloody murder, I call it, if ever there was one, and clumsy at that! And you only passive, which is always so much harder, they say! I can’t tell, for I was what you may call an active party. They don’t seem to mind mixing, they that look after us here! They lump us all together--travelling, at any rate! Though when I think of what I was actually turned off for, well--the way I look at it, what I did was a positive benefit to Society, and some sections of Society knew it, too, and would have liked to preserve my life.”

“But what, Madam, if I may ask, was your little difficulty?”

“It is called, I believe, Baby Farming,” she replied off-handedly, receiving her flask back from the smart woman and stowing it away in a capacious pocket. As she spoke, a shudder like a transitory ripple on a rain-swept stream passed over her hearers, with the exception of the thin man in the far corner, who preserved his serenity. Raising his sunken chin, he observed the last speaker with some slight show of interest.

The man in grey apologized.

“Excuse us, Madam. A remnant of old-world squeamishness, uncontrollable by us for the moment. Though perhaps, if you will, you might a little dissipate our preconceived notions of your profession, by explaining clearly your point of view.”

“Delighted, I’m sure,” she answered. “Funny, though, how seriously you all take it, even here! The feeling against my profession seems absurdly strong below as well as above. I was hooted as I left the court, I recollect. It annoyed me then considerably. I thought that those that hooted had more need to be grateful to me if all was known and paid for. I saved their pockets for them and their lovely honour too. They knew they owed all that to me. For the rest, they did not care. They went on, bless ’em, raising up seed for me to mow down as soon as its head came above ground, and welcome! Sly dogs, no thanks from them! But those shivering, shrinking women that came to me, some of them hardly out of their teens, some of them so delicate they had no right to have a baby at all!--Ah, if only I hadn’t let myself take their money it would have been a work of pure philanthropy. But I had to live, then! Now that that tax has been taken off, one has time to think it out all round. But Lord!--Society, to cry shame on me for it! They might as well hang any other useful public servant, like dustmen, rat-catchers, and such-like ridders of pests. Good old Herod, that I used to hear about at school, knew what he was doing when he cleared off all those useless Innocents! He was the first baby farmer, I guess.”

“You take large ground, Madam,” said the man in the frock coat, a trifle huffily.

“And I have the right,” said she, her large determined chin emerging from its rolls of fat in her eagerness. “You men ought to know it, and you do well enough, when you’re honest. I was only the ’scapegoat, and took on me the little sins of the race. It’s an easy job enough, what I did, but there’s few have the stomach for it, even then. You couldn’t call it dirty work either. You just stand by and leave ’em alone--to girn and bleat and squinny and die.”

“No blood, eh?” the man in the corner said suddenly. “I like blood.”

“What a fine night it has turned!” said the man in the grey frock coat, raising the sash and putting his head out of the window.… “Something rather uncanny, eh, about that man?” he remarked under his breath, half to himself, half to the man in brown corduroys.

“Take your head in,” said the latter, almost affectionately, “or you’ll be catching cold, and you’ve a nasty scar on your neck that I could see as you leaned forward, and which you oughtn’t to go getting the cold into.”

“Oh, that!” said the other complacently, sitting down again, but averting his gaze carefully from the man in the corner, for whom he seemed to feel a repulsion as marked as was his preference for his cheerful _vis-à-vis_. “That! That’s actually the scar of the blow that killed me. A fearful gash! He was a powerful man that dealt it. He got me, of course, from behind. I never even saw him. I was drafted off here at once, his hand had been so sure.” He felt nervously in his pockets. “I have a foulard somewhere, but I am apt to mislay it.”

“You should do like me, have a good strong handkercher and knot it round your neck firm. I’ve got a mark of sorts on my neck too, but it isn’t an open wound--never was,” the bluff man sniggered. “It is sheer vanity with me, but I don’t care to have it seen. It goes well all round, mine does--done by a rope, eh!”

He paused and nodded slyly. “For killing a toff. Nice old gentleman he seemed, too, but I hadn’t much time to look at him. Had to get to work----”

He was rudely interrupted by a screech from the baby farmer.

“Lord!” she cried, “do I see another conveyance coming on this lonely road? I do ’ope so. I’m one for seeing plenty of people. I always like a crowd, and I must tell you, this sort of humdrum jogging along was beginning to get on my nerves.”

They all jerked themselves round, and peered through the glass panes behind them. The taciturn man alone reserved his attention.

Sure enough, a dark object, plainly outlined in the strong moonlight which now lit up the heavens, where heavy masses of cloud had until now obscured its effulgence, was plainly visible. It blotted the ribbon of white that lay in front of them.… Nearer and nearer it came. All heads were at the windows of the coach.… Now it was seen to be a high-hung dog-cart, of the most modern pattern, drawn by a smart little mettled pony, and containing two slight young girls.… The one that drove held the ribbons in hands that were covered with white dog-skin gloves, and which looked immense in the pallid moonshine.

“What an excitement!” said the stout woman. “We shall pass them. Some member of one of the country families about here, I suppose.”

“I hope--for all things considering, I’m not a blood-thirsty man,” the man in corduroys muttered anxiously under his breath, “that we’re not a-going to give them a shock! Bound to, when we meet them plumb like this! ’Orses can’t abide the sight of us, mostly, no more than they could those nasty motors when they first came in. And we’re worse than motors--they seem to smell us out at once for what we are!”

“If you do really think that pony is likely to swerve,” said the man in the grey suit, anxiously, “would it be of any use our asking old Diggory to drive more slowly and humour them?”

“Couldn’t go no slower than we are!” replied the man in corduroys. “Besides, it’s not the pace that kills! I’ll bet you that pony’s all of a sweat already!”

The dog-cart approached. The faces of the two young women were discernible. They were white--blanched with fear, or it may have been the effect of the strong moonlight. There was no doubt that they were disturbed, and that the girl who was driving fully realized the necessity of controlling the horse, whose nostrils were quivering, and on whose sides foam was already appearing in white swathes.…

“It won’t pass us!” said the man in the corner, speaking suddenly. He rubbed his hands slowly one over the other. “There will be blood!”

“For goodness’ sake stop gloating like that!” said the stout woman. “It turns my stomach to hear you. Wherever can you have come from, I wonder? ’Tisn’t manners.… I say, can’t we hail them?” she inquired of the man in grey. “All give them one big shout?”

“They wouldn’t be able to hear us,” he replied, shaking his head sadly. “You must not forget that we are ghosts. We are not really here.”

“Ay, and that’s what the beasts know!” cried the man in corduroys. He jumped about. “That ’oss won’t be able to stand it. The kid’ll not be able to hold him in.…”

“They’re on us!” screamed the smart woman. “Oh, my God! Do we have to sit still and see it?” She covered her eyes with her hand.

“Yes, Missus, I reckon you have, and what’s more, run away after like any shoffer that’s killed his man and left him lying in the roadside. Old Diggory’s got his orders.”

The snorting of the pony was now audible. The coachful of ghosts distinctly saw the lather of foam dropping from its jaws. They were able, some of them, to realize the agonized tension of one girl’s hands, pulling for all she was worth, and the scared sideways twist of her forcedly inactive companion. Alone the face of the yellow carriage-lamp glared, immovable.…

Then it flew down, and was extinguished. There was a crash, a convulsion--and the great road to the north lay clear again.