Part 12

“Now the dog,” whispered the chemist. The collie was very subdued, good dog, he gave no trouble at all, good dog, he was hustled into the big box, good dog, and quietly chloroformed. Later on, a countryman with his cart called for the body. The old woman who owned it was going to make a hearthrug with the skin. It was enveloped in a sack; the countryman carried it out on his shoulder like a butcher carrying the carcase of a sheep and flung it into the cart. The callousness of this struck Mr. Oddfellow so profoundly that he announced there and then, positively and finally, that he would undertake no more business of that kind, and doubly to insure this the lethal box was taken into the yard and chopped up.

Now, the poor old woman who owned the dog called next day at the chemist’s shop. Behind her walked the very collie. For a moment or two Oddfellow feared that he was to be haunted by the walking ghost of cats and dogs for evermore. Said the old woman: “Please, sir, you must do him again; he’s woke up!”

She described at great length the dog’s strange revival. It stood humbly enough in the background, a little drowsy, but not at all uneasy.

“No,” cried Oddfellow firmly; “can’t do it—destroyed my tackle. You take him home, ma’am; he’s all right. Dog that’s been through that ought to live a long life. Take him home again, ma’am,” he urged, “he’s all right.”

The woman was old; she was feeble and poor; she was not able to keep him now, he was such a big dog. Wasn’t it hard enough to get him food, things were so dear, and now there was the licence money due! She hadn’t got it; she never would have it; she really couldn’t afford it.

“You take him, sir, and keep him, sir.”

“No, I can’t keep a dog—no room.”

“Have him, sir,” she pleaded; “you’ll be kind to him.”

“No, no; ... but ... if it’s only his licence ... I’ll tell you what. I’ll pay for his licence rather than destroy him.”

Putting his hand into the till, he laid three half-crowns before her. The old woman stared at the chemist, but she stared still more at the money. Then, thanking him with quaint, confused dignity, she gathered it up, but again stood gazing meditatively at the three big coins, now lying, so unexpectedly, in her thin palm.

“Good dog,” said the chemist, giving him a final pat. “Good dog!”

Then the poor old woman, with tears in her eyes, turned out of Mr. Oddfellow’s shop and, followed by her dog, walked off to a quarter of the town where there was another chemist who kept a lethal chamber.

_The Wife of Ted Wickham_

Perhaps it is a mercy we can’t see ourselves as others see us. Molly Wickham was a remarkable pretty woman in days gone by; maybe she is wiser since she has aged, but when she was young she was foolish. She never seemed to realize it, but I wasn’t deceived.

So said the cattle-dealer, a healthy looking man, massive, morose, and bordering on fifty. He did not say it to anybody in particular, for it was said—it was to himself he said it—privately, musingly, as if to soothe the still embittered recollection of a beauty that was foolish, a fondness that was vain.

Ted Wickham himself was silly, too, when he married her. Must have been extraordinarily touched to marry a little soft, religious, teetotal party like her, and him a great sporting cock of a man, just come into a public-house business that his aunt had left him, “The Half Moon,” up on the Bath Road. He always ate like an elephant, but she’d only the appetite of a scorpion. And what was worse, he was a true blood conservative while all her family were a set of radicals that you couldn’t talk sense to: if you only so much as mentioned the name of Gladstone they would turn their eyes up to the ceiling as if he was a saint in glory. Blood is thicker than water, I know, but it’s unnatural stuff to drink so much of. Grant their name was. They christened her Pamela, and as if that wasn’t cruel enough they messed her initials up by giving her the middle name of Isabel.

But she was a handsome creature, on the small side but sound as a roach and sweet as an apple tree in bloom. Pretty enough to convert Ted, and I thought she would convert him, but she was a cussed woman—never did what you would expect of her—and so she didn’t even try. She gave up religion herself, gave it up altogether and went to church no more. That was against her inclination, but of course it was only right, for Ted never could have put up with that. Wedlock’s one thing and religion’s two: that’s odd and even: a little is all very well if it don’t go a long ways. Parson Twamley kept calling on her for a year or two afterwards, trying to persuade her to return to the fold—he couldn’t have called oftener if she had owed him a hundred pound—but she would not hear of it, she would not go. He was not much of a parson, not one to wake anybody up, but he had a good delivery, and when he’d the luck to get hold of a sermon of any sense his delivery was very good, very good indeed. She would say: “No, sir, my feelings aren’t changed one bit, but I won’t come to church any more, I’ve my private reasons.” And the parson would glare across at old Ted as if he were a Belzeboob, for Ted always sat and listened to the parson chattering to her. Never said a word himself, always kept his pipe stuck in his jaw. Ted never persuaded her in the least, just left it to her, and she would come round to his manner of thinking in the end, for though he never actually said it, she always knew what his way of thinking was. A strange thing, it takes a real woman to do that, silly or no! At election times she would plaster the place all over with tory bills, do it with her own hands!

Still, there’s no stability in meekness of that sort, a weathervane can only go with wind and weather, and there was no sense in her giving in to Ted as she did, not in the long run, for he couldn’t help but despise her. A man wants something or other to whet the edge of his life on; and he did despise her, I know.

But she was a fine creature in her way, only her way wasn’t his. A beautiful woman, too, well-limbered up, with lovely hair, but always a very proper sort, a milksop—Ted told me once that he had never seen her naked. Well, can you wonder at the man? And always badgering him to do things that could not be done at the time. To have “The Half Moon” painted, or enlarged, or insured: she’d keep on badgering him, and he could not make her see that any god’s amount of money spent on paint wouldn’t improve the taste of liquor.

“I can see as far into a quart pot as the King of England,” he says, “and I know that if this bar was four times as big as ’tis a quart wouldn’t hold a drop more then than it does now.”

“No, of course,” she says.

“Nor a drop less neither,” says Ted. He showed her that all the money expended on improvements and insurance and such things were so much off something else. Ted was a generous chap—liked to see plenty of everything, even though he had to give some of it away. But you can’t make some women see some things.

“Not a roof to our heads, nor a floor to our feet, nor a pound to turn round on if a fire broke out,” Molly would say.

“But why should a fire break out?” he’d ask her. “There never has been a fire here, there never ought to be a fire here, and what’s more, there never will be a fire here, so why should there be a fire?”

And of course she let him have his own way, and they never had a fire there while he was alive, though I don’t know that any great harm would have been done anyways, for after a few years trade began to slacken off, and the place got dull, and what with the taxes it was not much more than a bread and cheese business. Still, there’s no matter of that: a man don’t ask for a bed of roses: a world without some disturbance or anxiety would be like a duckpond where the ducks sleep all day and are carried off at night by the foxes.

Molly was like that in many things, not really contrary, but no tact. After Ted died she kept on at “The Half Moon” for a year or two by herself, and regular as clockwork every month Pollock, the insurance manager, would drop in and try for to persuade her to insure the house or the stock or the furniture, any mortal thing. Well, believe you, when she had only got herself to please in the matter that woman wouldn’t have anything to say to that insurance—she never did insure, and never would.

“I wouldn’t run such a risk; upon my soul it’s flying in the face of possibilities, Mrs. Wickham”—he was a palavering chap, that Pollock; a tall fellow with sandy hair, and he always stunk of liniment for he had asthma on the chest—“A very grave risk, it is indeed,” he would say, “the Meazer’s family was burnt clean out of hearth and home last St. Valentine’s day, and if they hadn’t taken up a policy what would have become of those Meazers?”

“I dunno,” Molly says—that was the name Ted give her—“I dunno, and I’m sorry for unfortunate people, but I’ve my private reasons.”

She was always talking about her private reasons, and they must have been devilish private, for not a soul on God’s earth ever set eyes on them.

“Well, Mrs. Wickham,” says Pollock, “they’d have been a tidy ways up Queer Street, and ruin’s a long-lasting affair,” Pollock says. He was a rare palavering chap, and he used to talk about Gladstone, too, for he knew her family history; but that didn’t move her, and she did not insure.

“Yes, I quite agree,” she says, “but I’ve my private reasons.”

Sheer female cussedness! But where her own husband couldn’t persuade her Pollock had no chance at all. And then, of course, two years after Ted died she did go and have a fire there. “The Half Moon” was burnt clean out, rafter and railings, and she had to give it up and shift into the little bullseye business where she is now, selling bullseyes to infants and ginger beer to boy scholars on bicycles. And what does it all amount to? Why, it don’t keep her in hairpins. She had the most beautiful hair once. But that’s telling the story back foremost.

Ted was a smart chap, a particular friend of mine (so was Molly), and he could have made something of himself and of his business, perhaps, if it hadn’t been for her. He was a sportsman to the backbone; cricket, shooting, fishing, always game for a bit of life, any mortal thing—what was there he couldn’t do? And a perfect demon with women, I’ve never seen the like. If there was a woman for miles around as he couldn’t come at, then you could bet a crown no one else could. He had the gift. Well, when one woman ain’t enough for a man, twenty ain’t too many. He and me were in a tight corner together more than once, but he never went back on a friend, his word was his Bible oath. And there was he all the while tied up to this soft wife of his, who never once let on she knew of it at all, though she knowed much. And never would she cast the blink of her eyes—splendid eyes they were, too—on any willing stranger, nor even a friend, say, like myself; it was all Ted this and Ted that, though I was just her own age and Ted was twelve years ahead of us both. She didn’t know her own value, wouldn’t take her opportunities, hadn’t the sense, as I say, though she had got everything else. Ah, she was a woman to be looking at once, and none so bad now; she wears well.

But she was too pious and proper, it aggravated him, but Ted never once laid a finger on her and never uttered one word of reproach though he despised her; never grudged her a thing in reason when things were going well with him. It’s God Almighty’s own true gospel—they never had a quarrel in all the twelve years they was wed, and I don’t believe they ever had an angry word, but how he kept his hands off her I don’t know. I couldn’t have done it, but I was never married—I was too independent for that work. He’d contradict her sometimes, for she _would_ talk, and Ted was one of your silent sorts, but _she_—she would talk for ever more. She was so artful that she used to invent all manners of tomfoolery on purpose to make him contradict her; believe you, she did, even on his death-bed.

I used to go and sit with him when he was going, poor Ted, for I knew he was done for; and on the day he died, she said to him—and I was there and I heard it: “Is there anything you would like me to do, dear?” And he said, “No.” He was almost at his last gasp, he had strained his heart, but she was for ever on at him, even then, an unresting woman. It was in May, I remember it, a grand bright afternoon outside, but the room itself was dreadful, it didn’t seem to be afternoon at all; it was unbearable for a strong man to be dying in such fine weather, and the carts going by, and though we were a watching him, it seemed more as if something was watching us.

And she says to him again: “Isn’t there anything you would like me to do?”

Ted says to her: “Ah! I’d like to hear you give one downright good damn curse. Swear, my dear!”

“At what?” she says.

“Me, if you like.”

“What for?” she says. I can see her now, staring at him.

“For my sins.”

“What sins?” she says.

Now did you ever hear anything like that? What sins! After a while she began at him once more.

“Ted, if anything happens to you I’ll never marry again.”

“Do what you like,” says he.

“I’ll not do that,” she says, and she put her arms round him, “for you’d not rest quiet in your grave, would you, Ted?”

“Leave me alone,” he says, for he was a very crusty sick man, very crusty, poor Ted, but could you wonder? “You leave me alone and I’ll rest sure enough.”

“You can be certain,” she cries, “that I’d never, never do that, I’d never look at another man after you, Ted, never; I promise it solemnly.”

“Don’t bother me, don’t bother at all.” And poor Ted give a grunt and turned over on his side to get away from her.

At that moment some gruel boiled over on the hob—gruel and brandy was all he could take. She turned to look after it, and just then old Ted gave a breath and was gone, dead. She turned like a flash, with the steaming pot in her hand, bewildered for a moment. She saw he had gone. Then she put the pot back gently on the fender, walked over to the window and pulled down the blind. Never dropped a tear, not one tear.

Well, that was the end of Ted. We buried him, one or two of us. There was an insurance on his life for fifty pounds, but Ted had long before mortgaged the policy and so there was next to nothing for her. But what else could the man do? (Molly always swore the bank defrauded her!) She put a death notice in the paper, how he was dead, and the date, and what he died of: “after a long illness, nobly and patiently borne.” Of course, that was sarcasm, she never meant one word of it, for he was a terror to nurse, the worst that ever was; a strong man on his back is like a wasp in a bottle. But every year, when the day comes round—and it’s ten years now since he died—she puts a memorial notice in the same paper about her loving faithful husband and the long illness nobly and patiently borne!

And then, as I said, the insurance man and the parson began to call again on that foolish woman, but she would not alter her ways for any of them. Not one bit. The things she had once enjoyed before her marriage, the things she had wanted her own husband to do but were all against his grain, these she could nohow bring herself to do when he was dead and gone and she was alone and free to do them. What a farce human nature can be! There was an Italian hawker came along with rings in his ears and a coloured cart full of these little statues of Cupid, and churches with spires a yard long and red glass in them, and heads of some of the great people like the Queen and General Gordon.

“Have you got a head of Lord Beaconsfield?” Molly asks him.

He goes and searches in his cart and brings her out a beautiful head on a stand, all white and new, and charges her half a crown for it. Few days later the parson calls on the job of persuading her to return to his flock now that she was free to go once more. But no. She says: “I can never change now, sir, it may be all wrong of me, but what my man thought was good enough for me, and I somehow cling to that. It’s all wrong, I suppose, and you can’t understand it, sir, but it’s all my life.”

Well, Twamley chumbled over an argument or two, but he couldn’t move her; there’s no mortal man could ever more that woman except Ted—and he didn’t give a damn.

“Well,” says parson, “I have hopes, Mrs. Wickham, that you will come to see the matter in a new light, a little later on perhaps. In fact, I’m sure you will, for look, there’s that bust,” he says, and he points to it on the mantelpiece. “I thought you and he were all against Gladstone, but now you’ve got his bust upon your shelf; it’s a new one, I see.”

“No, no, that isn’t Gladstone,” cried Molly, all of a tremble, “that isn’t Gladstone, it’s Lord Beaconsfield!”

“Indeed, but pardon me, Mrs. Wickham, that is certainly a bust of Mr. Gladstone.”

So it was. This Italian chap had deceived the silly creature and palmed her off with any bust that come handy, and it happened to be Gladstone. She went white to the teeth, and gave a sort of scream, and dashed the little bust in a hundred pieces on the hearth in front of the minister there. O, he had a very vexing time with her.

That was years ago. And then came the fire, and then the bullseye shop. For ten years now I’ve prayed that woman to marry me, and she just tells me: No. She says she pledged her solemn word to Ted as he lay a-dying that she would not wed again. It was his last wish—she says. But it’s a lie, a lie, for I heard them both. Such a lie! She’s a mad woman, but fond of him still in her way, I suppose. She liked to see Ted make a fool of himself, liked him better so. Perhaps that’s what she don’t see in me. And what I see in her—I can’t imagine. But it’s a something, something in her that sways me now just as it swayed me then, and I doubt but it will sway me for ever.

_Tanil_

A Great while ago a man in a stripéd jacket went travelling almost to the verge of the world, and there he came upon a region of green fertility, quiet sounds, and sharp colour; save for one tiny green mound it was all smooth and even, as level as the moon’s face, so flat that you could see the sky rising up out of the end of everything like a blue dim cliff. He passed into a city very populous and powerful, and entered the shop of a man who sold birds in traps of wicker, birds of rare kinds, the flame-winged antillomeneus and kriffs with green eyes.

“Sir,” said he to the hawker of birds, “this should be a city of great occasions, it has the smell of opulence. But it is all unknown to me, I have not heard the story of its arts and policy, or of its people and their governors. What annalists have you recording all its magnificence and glory, or what poets to tell if its record be just?”

The hawker of birds replied: “There are tales and the tellers of tales.”

“I have not heard of these,” said the other, “tell me, tell me.”

The bird man drew finger and thumb downwards from the bridge of his long nose to its extremity, and sliding the finger across his pliant nostrils said: “I will tell you.” They both sat down upon a coffer of wheat. “I will tell you,” repeated the bird man, and he asked the other if he had heard of the tomb in which none could lie, nor die, nor mortify.

“No,” said he.

“Or of the oracle that destroys its interpreter?”

“No,” answered the man in the stripéd jacket, and a talking bird in a cage screamed: “No, no, no, no!” The traveller whistled caressingly to the bird, tapping his finger nail along the rods of its cage, while the bird man continued: “Or of Fax, Mint, and Bombassor, the three faithful brothers?”

“No,” replied he again.

“They had a sister of beauty, of beauty indeed, beyond imagination. (_Soo-eet! soo-eet!_ chirped the oracular bird.) It smote even the hearts of kings like a reaping hook among grass, and her favour was a ransom from death itself, as I will tell you.”

“Friend,” said he of the stripéd jacket, “tell me of that woman.”

“I will tell you,” answered the other; and he told him, and this was the way of it.

* * * * *

There was once a king of this country, mighty with riches and homage, with tribute from his enemies—for he was a great warrior—and the favour of many excellent queens. His ancestors were numberless as the hairs of his black beard; so ancient was his lineage that he may have sprung from divinity itself, but he had a heart of brass, his bowels were of lead, and at times he was afflicted with madness.

One day he called for his captain of the guard, Tanil, a valiant, debonair man of much courtesy, and delivered to him his commands.

Tanil took a company of the guard and they marched to that green hill on the plain—it is but a league away. At the foot of the hill they crossed a stream; beyond that was a white dwelling and a garden; at the gate of the garden was a stumbling stone; a flock grazed on the hill. The soldiers threw down the stone and, coming into the vineyard, they hacked down the vines until they heard a voice call to them. They saw at the door of the white dwelling a woman so beautiful that the weapons slid from their hands at the wonder of it. “Friends, friends!” said she. Tanil told her the King’s bidding, how they must destroy the vineyard, the dwelling, and the flock, and turn Fax, Mint, and Bombassor, with the foster sister Flaune, out from the kingdom of Cumac.

“You have denied the King tribute,” said he.

“We are wanderers from the eastern world,” Flaune answered. “Is not the mountain a free mountain? Does not this stream divide it from Cumac’s country?”

She took Tanil into the white dwelling and gave a pitcher of wine to his men.

“Sir,” said she to Tanil, “I will go to your King. Take me to your King.”

And when Tanil agreed to do this she sent a message secretly to her brothers to drive the flock away into a hiding-place. So while Flaune was gone a-journeying to the palace with Tanil’s troup, Fax, Mint, and Bombassor set back the stumbling stone and took away the sheep.

The King was resting in his palace garden, throwing crumbs into the lake, and beans to his peacocks, but when Flaune was brought to him he rose and bowed himself to the pavement at her feet. The woman said nothing, she walked to and fro before him, and he was content to let his gaze rest upon her. The carp under the fountain watched them, the rose drooped on its envious briar, the heart of King Cumac was like a tree full of chirping birds.

Tanil confessed his fault; might the King be merciful and forgive him! but the lady had taken their trespass with a soft temper and policy that had overcome both his loyalty and his mind. It was unpardonable, but it was not guilt, it was infirmity, she had bewitched him. Cumac grinned and nodded. He bade Tanil return to the vineyard and restore the vines, bade him requite the brothers and confirm them in those pastures for ever. But as to this Flaune he would not let her go.

She paces before him, or she dips her palm into the fountain, spilling its drops upon the ground; she smiles and she is silent.

Cumac gave her into the care of his groom of the women, Yali, the sister of Tanil, and thereafter, every day and many a day, the King courted and coveted Flaune. But he could not take her; her pride, her cunning words, and her lustre bore her like an anchored boat upon the tide of his purpose. At one moment full of pride and gloom, and in the next full of humility and love, he would bring gifts and praises.

“I will cover you,” he whispered, “with green garnets and jargoons. A collar of onyx and ruby, that is for you; breastknots of beryl, and rings for the finger, wrist, and ear. Take them, take them! For you I would tear the moon asunder.”

But all her desire was only to return to the green mountain and her brothers and the flock by the stumbling stone. The King was merged in anger and in grief.