Part 2

He was arraigned before two of the directors of Tauntons, and one of them finished a harangue by suggesting that “it might be more conformable to business methods if he would remove the traces of yesterday’s breakfast from the folds of his waistcoat.” The large man received these criticisms in apathetic silence. “Poor old Mapleson!” they said round in the bar of “The Monitor.” “I’ve never seen a chap cut up so about anything as he is about White,” and then abstract discussions on friendship would follow and remarkable instances of friendships formed in business.

Of course White would die--that was a settled and arranged thing, and curiously enough little sympathy was expressed, even by those to whom White had lent money. In spite of his charm of manner and his generosity, they all felt that there was something about White they didn’t understand. He was too clever, too secretive.

On Friday he was slightly better, but on Saturday he had a relapse, and on Sunday morning when Mapleson called at the hospital he was informed that White was sinking, and they didn’t expect him to last forty-eight hours.

Mapleson had inured himself to this thought; he had made up his mind to this conclusion from the first, and this last intimation hardly affected him. He went about like one stunned, without volition, without interest. He was only conscious of a vast unhappiness and misery, of which White was in some way a factor.

For five days the wire mattress agent lay on the verge of death, and then he began to rally slightly. The house surgeon said it was one of the most remarkable constitutions he had ever come up against. For three days there was a distinct improvement, followed by another relapse. But still White fought on. At the end of another week he was out of danger. But the convalescence was long and tedious.

When at the end of six weeks he was well enough to leave the hospital, the house-surgeon took him on one side and said, “Now, look here, my friend; we’re going to let you out. And there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get fairly well again. Only I want you quite to understand this: If you touch alcohol again in any form--in any case for years--well, you might as well put a bullet through your own head.” In another ten days White was back at business, looking exactly the same as ever, speaking in the same suave voice. He soon appeared in “The Monitor,” but with the utmost courtesy declined all offers of drinks except ginger ale. It need hardly be said that to Mapleson such an event seemed a miracle. He had sunk into a low morbid condition from which he had never hoped to rise.

Out of courtesy the first evening Mapleson insisted on drinking ginger ale himself so that his friend should not feel out of it.

And they sat and had a long discussion into the night; White giving luminous and precise details of the whole of his illness and operation, eulogizing hospital methods and discussing the whole aspect of society toward therapeutics in a calmly detached way.

But Mapleson was not happy. He was glad to have White back, but the element of fear that White had introduced him to was not eliminated. He felt ill himself, and there somehow seemed a great gap between White in the old days and White drinking ginger ale and talking medicine! For three nights Mapleson kept this up and then thought he would have “just a nightcap.”

It gradually developed into the position that Mapleson resumed his whisky and White stuck to his ginger ale. And it is a curious fact that this arrangement depressed Mapleson more than it did White. He drank copiously and more frequently to try and create an atmosphere of his own, but always there was White looking just the same, talking just the same.

The ginger ale got on Mapleson’s nerves. He felt that he couldn’t stand it, and a strange and enervating depression began to creep over him again. For days this arrangement held good, White seeming utterly indifferent as to what he drank, and Mapleson getting more and more depressed because White didn’t drink whisky. At length Mapleson suggested one evening that “surely just one” wouldn’t hurt White. But White said with the deepest tone of regret that he was afraid it would be rather unwise, and, as a matter of fact, he had got so used to doing without it that he really hardly missed it.

From that moment a settled gloom and depression took hold of Mapleson. He just stood there looking at White and listening to him, but hardly troubling to speak himself. He felt utterly wretched. He got into such a state that White began to show a sympathetic alarm, and one evening toward the end of February as they were sitting at their favorite table in “The Monitor” White said, “Well, I’ll just have a whisky and soda with you if you like.”

That was one of the happiest evenings of Mapleson’s life. Directly his friend began to drink some chord in his own nature responded, his eyes glowed, he became garrulous and entertaining.

They had another and then went to the Oxford Music Hall into the lounge, but there was such a crowd that they could not see the stage so they went to the bar at the back, and had another drink and a talk. How they talked that night! They talked about business, and about dogs, and conscription, and women, and the Empire, and tobacco, and the staff of Tauntons. They had a wild orgy of talk and drink. That night White drank eleven whiskies and sodas, and Mapleson got cheerfully and gloriously drunk.

It was perhaps as well that the friends enjoyed this bacchanale for it was the last time they met. By four o’clock the next afternoon White was dead....

Mapleson heard of it the following night. He was leaning against the fireplace in “The Monitor,” expatiating upon the wonderful improvement in White and extolling his virtues, when young Howard Aldridge, the junior salesman to Mr. Vincent Pelt, of Tauntons, came in to say that White’s brother-in-law had just rung up Mr. Pelt to say that White was dead. When Mapleson heard this he muttered, “My Christ!”

These were the last words that Mapleson ever uttered in the bar of “The Monitor.”

He picked up his hat and went out into the street. It was the same feeling of numbed terror and physical sickness that assailed him. With no plan of action arranged, he surprised his wife by arriving home before ten o’clock, and by going to bed. He was shivering. She took him up a hot-water bottle and she said, “I’m sorry to hear about White.” Mapleson didn’t answer, but his teeth chattered. He lay awake half the night thinking of Death....

The next day he got up and went to business as usual. But for the second time the head of the firm felt it his duty to point out one or two cases of negligence to Mapleson and to warn him that “these things must not happen in the future.”

Two days later Mapleson received a postcard signed by “F. Peabody” to say that the funeral of the late G. L. White would take place at such and such a church at East Acton and would leave the “Elms” Castlereach Road, Acton, at 12 o’clock, and it was intimated that a seat for Mr. Mapleson would be found in a carriage.

A fine driving rain out of a leaden sky greeted Mapleson when he set out for White’s funeral on the Saturday. His wife tried to persuade him not to go, for he was really ill. But he made no comment. He fiddled about with a Cassell’s time-table and could come to no satisfactory decision about the way to get there. His wife ultimately looked him up a train to Hammersmith from which terminus he could get a train. Before reaching Hammersmith a strange revulsion came over him. Why, after all, should he go to this funeral! White wouldn’t know about it, and what did he know of White’s relations? A strange choking and giddiness came over him, and at Hammersmith he found a comfortable refreshment room, where he partook himself, and decided that after refreshing he would go on to business.

After having two whiskies, however, he changed his mind. “No,” he muttered to himself, “I’ll see it through.” He boarded a tram that went in the direction of Acton. He found that he had to change trams at one point. It seemed an interminable journey. He kept wondering how White managed to get home at night from Oxford Street at 12 o’clock. He felt cold and wretched. The effect of the whisky wore off.

At last he reached Acton and asked for Castlereach Road. Nobody seemed to know it. He was directed first in one direction and then in another; at last a postman put him on the right track, but suggested that as it was some way he might get a ’bus to Gaddes Green and then it was only about fifteen minutes’ walk.

Mapleson set off, keeping a sharp lookout for a place of refreshment, for the reactionary spirit was once more upon him. The ’bus put him down at a forlorn looking corner where there was only a sort of workman’s alehouse. “I expect I’ll pass one on the way,” he thought, and taking his directions from the assistant of a greengrocer’s shop he set out once more through the rain.

The farther he went the meaner and more sordid did the streets become. He did not pass a single public house that he felt he could approach. “I expect the neighborhood will change soon,” he thought. “I expect I’ve come the wrong way. Why, every one said White must be making at least eight hundred a year! He wouldn’t live in a place like this.”

At length he came to a break in the neighborhood where some newly built villas crowded each other on the heels of the more ancient squalor. An errand boy told him that “Castlereach Road was the second turning on the right off Goldsmith’s havenue.” He found Goldsmith’s Avenue where a barrel organ was vomiting lugubrious music to an audience listening from the shelter of their windows, and swarms of dirty children were hurrying through the rain on nameless errands. A slice of bread and jam was thrown from a second story window to a little boy in the street and missed Mapleson’s hat by inches. His progress was in any case the source of considerable mirth to the inhabitants.

At last he came to Castlereach Road. After the noise and bustle of Goldsmith’s Avenue it seemed like the end of the world. It was a long straight road of buff-colored villas with stucco facings and slate roofs, all identically the same. From the end where Mapleson entered it, it looked interminably and utterly deserted. Doubtless if it had been a fine day the gutters would have been crowded with children, but with the pouring rain there was not a soul in sight.

Mapleson blundered on in search of number 227, and as he did so a thought occurred to him that he and White had a common secret apart. He always had felt in his inmost heart a little ashamed of his red-brick villa in Willesden Green, and that was one reason why he had always kept business well apart from domestic affairs, and White had casually referred to “his place at Acton.” His place at Acton! Mapleson entered it, horribly tired, horribly sober, horribly wretched. All the blinds were down. It had taken so long to get there he half hoped that he was too late.

A tall, gaunt woman in black with a slight down on her upper lip opened the door. She seemed surprised to see him.

He explained who he was.

She said, “Oh, yes. My! you are early. It’s only half-past twelve!”

“Half-past twelve!” said Mapleson, “but I thought the funeral was to be at twelve.”

Then the gaunt woman called into a little side room, “’Ere, Uncle Frank, what ’ave you been up to? Did you tell Mr. Maple that the funeral was at twelve?”

“Oh, don’t sye that! don’t sye that!” came a voice from the room, and a small man with sandy hair and wizened features and small, dark, greedy eyes came out into the hall. “Oh, don’t sye that, Mr. Mapleson; I’m Peabody. I quite thought I said two o’clock!”

Mapleson had a wild impulse to whistle for a cab or a fire-engine and to drive away from this, anywhere. But the utter helplessness of his position held him fast. Before he had time to give the matter serious thought he was being shown into the drawing-room, a small stuffy room with a blue floral wall paper and bamboo furniture, and many framed photographs, and the gaunt woman was saying, “Oh, Uncle Frank, how could you have made that mistyke!” And Uncle Frank was explaining how it might have occurred and at the same time saying that they must make the best of it, that Mr. Mapleson would have a bit of lunch, “there was a nice cut of cold leg of mutton and of course no one under circumstances like this would expect an _elaborate_ meal; in fact no one would _feel_ like it apart from anything else.” And then the gaunt woman left the room, and Mapleson was alone with Uncle Frank.

Mapleson could not recollect ever having met any one whom he so cordially hated at sight. He had a sort of smug perpetual grin, a habit of running his hands down his thighs as far as his knees, and giving vent to a curious clicking noise with his cheeks. “Well, this is a very sad hoccasion, Mr. Mapleson,” he said; “very sad indeed. Poor George, did you know him well? Eva, his wife, you know, she’s upstairs quite prostrate; that was her sister who showed you in. Yes, yes, well, how true it is that in the Midst of Life we are in Death! I’m afraid poor George was careless, you know. Very careless! Clever, mind you, clever as they make ’em, but careless. Do you know, Mr. Mapleson, he hadn’t even insured his life! And he’s left no will! There isn’t enough to pay his funeral expenses! Fortunately Eva’s clever, oh, yes, she’s clever with her fingers; they say there’s no one in the neighborhood can touch her in the millinery. Oh, yes, she’s been at it some time! Why, bless my soul, do you know she’s paid the rent of this ’ouse for the last four years. Oh, she’s a clever woman! Poor soul though, her great consolation is that George didn’t die in the ’orspital. Yes, Mr. Mapleson, he died upstairs quiet as a lamb. She was there at the end--it was a great consolation!”

And Uncle Frank nodded his head and his little eyes sparkled, but the grin never left his lips. Mapleson said nothing, but the two men sat there in a somber silence, Uncle Frank occasionally nodding his head and muttering, “it’s a sad hoccasion.”

The rain increased and it seemed unnaturally dark in the blue drawing-room, and Mapleson felt that he had sat there an eternity, consumed by desire to get away, when there was another knock at the door, and a youth was let in.

Uncle Frank called him “Chris,” and he seemed to be a cousin or some near relation of White’s. He was a raw youth who had just gone to business and was very conscious of his collars and cuffs. He seemed to take to Mapleson and he sat watching him furtively. Mapleson seemed so very much man of the world, so very desirable a personality. He made many advances to draw the large man out, but the latter felt a repugnance for him in only a slight less degree than in the case of Uncle Frank.

At length the gaunt sister asked them all into the dining-room, which was a room on the other side of the passage that seemed even smaller and stuffier than the drawing-room. It was papered with a dark red paper and the woodwork painted chocolate. As they crossed the hall they passed Mrs. White, who had apparently been persuaded by her sister “to try and take something.” She was a little shriveled person with white cheeks and her eyes were red with weeping.

She hurried by the men without speaking, and a curious thought struck Mapleson. During the twenty years or so that he had known White, he could not recollect him speaking of his wife. He probably had done so, but he could not recollect it. He remembered him talking about “his place at Acton” but never of his wife. He did not feel entirely surprised. White was probably ashamed.

In the window of the dining-room were several bird-cages containing two canaries, a bull-finch, and a small, highly colored bird, that hopped from the floor of its cage on to a perch and kept up a toneless squeak, with monotonous regularity. Uncle Frank went up to the cage and tapped the wires and called out, “Ah, there he is! cheep! cheep! This is our little Orstrylian bird, Mr. Mapleson! Isn’t he! Yes, yes, he’s our clever little Orstrylian bird!” and during the course of the hurried meal of cold mutton and cheese, the birds formed a constant diversion. Uncle Frank would continually jump up and call out, “Oh, yes, he’s our little Orstrylian bird!”

Mapleson tried to recall whether he had ever discussed birds with White, and he felt convinced that he had not. And yet it seemed a strange thing, White apparently had had these birds for some time, three different varieties in his own house! Mapleson would have enjoyed talking about birds with White; he could almost hear White’s voice, and his precise and suave manner of discussing their ways and peculiarities. And the terrible thought came to him that he would never hear White talk about birds, never, never.

This breach of confidence on White’s part of never telling him that he kept birds upset Mapleson even more than his breach of confidence in not talking about his wife.

“Oh, yes, he’s a clever little Orstrylian bird!” A terrible desire came to Mapleson to throw Uncle Frank through the window the next time he heard this remark.

Before they had finished the meal three other male relations appeared, and a craving came over Mapleson for a drink. Then the sister came down with a decanter of sherry and said that perhaps the gentlemen would like some. Uncle Frank poured out a glass all round. It was thin sickly stuff and to the brass bed manager like a thimbleful of dew in a parched desert. A horrible feeling of repugnance came over him; of repugnance against all these people, against the discomfort he found himself in.

After all, who was White? When all was said and done White was really nothing to him, only a man he’d met in the course of business and had a lot of drinks and talked with. At that moment he felt he disliked White and all his sniveling relations.

He wanted to go, to get away from it all, but he couldn’t see how. There was half a glass of sherry left in the decanter. He unblushingly took it as the funeral cortège arrived. There were two ramshackle carriages and a hearse and a crowd of dirty children had collected. He tried to mumble some excuse for not going, to Uncle Frank, but his words were lost by an intensely painful scene that took place in the hall as the coffin was being brought down. He did not notice that the sister with the down on her upper lip became an inspired creature for a few moments, and her face became almost beautiful....

He felt that he was an alien element among all these people, that they were nothing to him, and that he was nothing to them, and he felt an intense, insatiable desire for a drink. If he couldn’t get a drink he felt he would go mad.

Some one touched him on the arm and said, “Will you come with us in the second carriage, Mr. Mapleson?” He felt himself walking out of the house and through a row of dirty children. For a moment he contemplated bolting up the street and out of sight, but the feeling that the children would probably follow him and jeer paralyzed this action, and then he was in the carriage, with Chris and another male relation who was patently moved by the solemnity of the occasion.

Chris wriggled about and tried to engage him in banal conversation with an air that suggested, “Of course, Mr. Mapleson, this is a sad affair, but we men of the world know how to behave.”

The dismal cortège proceeded at an ambling trot, occasionally stopping. Chris gave up for the moment trying to be entertaining, and the forlorn relation talked about funeral services and the comfort of sympathy in time of bereavement. They crawled past rows of congested villas and miles of indescribable domesticity of every kind, till as they were turning round a rather broader avenue than usual where there were shops, the forlorn relation said, “We shall be in the cemetery in five minutes.”

And then Mapleson had an inspiration. They were ambling along this dreary thoroughfare, when his eye suddenly caught a large and resplendent public house. It was picked out in two shades of green and displayed a gilt signboard denoting, “The Men of Kent.”

Almost without thinking and certainly in less time than it takes to chronicle, Mapleson muttered something to his two companions and called out of the window to the driver to stop. He jumped out and called out to the driver of the hearse and the other carriage to stop, and then, before any one realized what it was all about, he darted into the saloon bar of “The Men of Kent.”

The bar was fortunately empty, but through the little glass shutters two women and a man in the private bar watched the performance.

There was a moment of dazed surprise followed by a high shriek of laughter and a woman’s voice in strident crescendo, “Oh, Gawd! He’s stopped the funeral to come in an’ ’ave a drink! Oh, my Gawd!” Mapleson’s tongue seemed to cling to the roof of his mouth but he gasped out an order for a whisky and soda. To the barman these incidents were nothing and he served the drink instantly, but to the three in the private bar it was a matter of intense enjoyment. The other woman took it up. “Well, I’m damned! That’s the first time I’ve known that ’appen--Gawd! fancy stoppin’ a funeral to come and ’ave a drink!” and then the other woman, “Lap it up, Charlie! won’t you let me ’ave a drop, old bird?” and the man bawled out, “’Ere, I sye, ain’t the others comin’ in! Let’s make a dye of it!”

The women continued shrieking with laughter, and the appalling ignominy of his position came home to him. He knew that he was damned in the eyes of White’s friends.

Curiously enough the thought of White had passed out of his mind altogether. He was a thing in revolt against Society, without feelings, and without principles.

Yet when the whisky was put in front of him, his hand trembled and he could not drink it. He fumbled with the glass, threw down sixpence and darted out of the bar again.

In the meanwhile, Uncle Frank and other members of the funeral party had got out of the carriages and were having a whispered consultation on the curb. Instructions had evidently been given for the cortège to proceed, for Uncle Frank was talking to the driver of the hearse when Mapleson appeared.

As they all got back into the carriages, the three people came out of the bar and raised a cheer, and one of the women called out, “Oh, don’t go, dearie! come back and fondle me!” and the other two started a song and dance on the pavement. Mapleson lay all of a heap in the corner of the carriage and he noticed that he was alone with Chris. The forlorn relation had gone into the other carriage.

In a few minutes they arrived at a church, a large new building with early Victorian Gothic arches and a profusion of colored glass. The funeral party huddled together in the gloom of the large church, and somehow the paucity of their numbers seemed even more depressing than the wretchedness of their appearance.

Mapleson sat a little way back, and curiously enough his mind kept reverting during the service to the little birds. He felt a distinct grievance against White on account of the little birds. Why hadn’t White told him? especially about the small Australian bird? It would have made a distinctly interesting subject of conversation.

The service seemed interminably long, and it was a relief when the tall, rather good-looking young clergyman led the way out into the cemetery. The rain was still driving in penetrating gusts, and as they stood by the graveside the relations looked askance at each other, uncertain whether it was the proper thing to do to hold up an umbrella. As to Mapleson, he was indifferent. For one thing he had not brought an umbrella. But it seemed frightfully cold.