Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  The book purported to be fact, and was certainly not fiction, for which, indeed, our young author had no definite aptitude. It earned him an ambiguous compliment from various reviewers who insisted on dubbing him the English So-and-so; but it was lucky for Harry that the new humour was then an unmade phrase. His humour was not new, but that would not have saved it from the category. It was keen enough, however, in its way, and not too desperately subtle for the man on the knifeboard. Yet Harry’s first book, after “going” for a few weeks, showed a want of staying power, and was but a very moderate success after all. A few papers hailed Mr. Ringrose as the humorist for whom England had been sighing since the death of Charles Dickens, and predicted that his book would be the book of the season and of many seasons to come. Such enthusiasm was inevitable from organs which let loose at least one genius a week; but Harry did not realise the inevitability all at once. For a week or two he could not give his name in a shop without a wholly unnecessary blush; while he took his mother to look at empty houses in West End squares, thanks to indiscriminate praise from irresponsible quarters. On the whole, however, Harry had no reason to complain of the treatment accorded to his first-born; and, to descend to lower details, he sold the copyright for a small sum, which was, nevertheless, quite as much as the publishers could possibly have made out of it.

  But it was in indirect ways that this book did most for Harry Ringrose. It made new friends for him at a time when his acquaintance was badly in need of some fresh blood. Years of immersion in solitary work must narrow and may warp a man; and the almost exclusive companionship of his dear mother, whose only interest he was in the present, and who vastly overrated his merits, was a joy too great not to be purchased at a price. It kept the lad’s heart tender and his life of fair report, but it tended to monopolise his sympathies, and it did not increase his knowledge of the outside world. In the world of letters he had made but one friend in those first three years. This was a youth of Harry’s own age, who, with a board-school education, was on the staff of an evening paper, in a position which the public-school boy was certainly not competent to fill. Harry stormed this fortress with a little article on “Portuguese Africa” — which the Editor would label “By an Afrikander” — and the acquaintance was struck up outside that gentleman’s door. It ripened in a bar to which the young fellows used to repair whenever Harry was in the Strand. There, over a glass of bitter — or two — or three — he used to hear at first hand of the great novelists whom he longed to meet, but with whom his friend the journalist seemed on enviable terms. It was merely that the latter was in the heart of the big game, whereas Harry was playing a very little game of his own, in an exceedingly remote corner of the field.

  His book was not a huge success, but it succeeded well enough to take him out of his corner. His friend the journalist (who managed to review the thing himself in his paper) wrote to tell Harry of a distinguished lady who was so enchanted with it that she begged him to take the author to see her. Harry had no means of knowing that the lady’s enchantment was as chronic as the enthusiasm of the paper which had hailed him as a genius, and that the demand was not for himself, but for the latest name. He was still a very simple-minded person, and he waited on this lady with all alacrity, and under her wing made his bow in the sort of society of which he had heard with envy in the Gaiety bar. It cannot be said, however, that he did anybody much credit; he had been too long in his corner, and had an awkward manner when not perfectly at home. Yet a number of other ladies asked him to go and see them, and one invited him to dinner at her smart house — where the wretched Harry distinguished himself by freezing into a solid block of self-consciousness and hardly opening his mouth.

  But it was all very valuable experience, and, instead of two or three, he knew a good many people by the end of that winter. He became a member of a club, and got on intimate terms with men whose names and work had become familiar to him in these years. They enlarged his sympathies — they extended his boundaries on every side. And they made him know himself as he had not known himself before. All at once he realised that he had fewer interests than other men, that his nose had been too close to his own grindstone, that the mind he had been slaving to develop had grown narrow in the process. It was a rather bitter discovery, until one day it struck him there was another side to narrowness, and he sat down and began his “Plea for Narrow Minds” on the spot. This article secured a better place in the periodicals than anything Harry Ringrose had then written. It attracted some attention during the month of its appearance, and even on republication in his second book. But it was generally considered a frivolous adventure in mere paradox (on a par with a companion paper “On Enjoying Bad Health”), whereas it was really a reaction against the writer’s own self-criticism.

  “Cant is not necessarily humbug,” declared our scribe, “and there is probably less hypocrisy in the cant of breadth than in any other kind of cant. It may spring from a laudable ambition to be on the side of the good angels in all things. But it is apt to crystallise in a pose. For my part, when I meet a typically broad-minded man, who sees good in everybody and merit in everything, either I suspect his sincerity or I doubt his depth. I want to know if he is saying (a) what he thinks, or (b) what he thinks he ought to think. Either he is insincere and a prig, or he means what he says and is shallow. Those wonderfully wide sympathies are too often sympathy spread thin. The odds are against your being very deep as well as very broad.”

  There were those critics who remarked that the sapient essayist came under both his own categories, whereupon Harry lay awake all night wondering whether he did. And it was “A Plea for Narrow Minds” that drew from Miss Lowndes the letter which she never posted, but which came into Harry’s hands long afterwards. She agreed with him in part, but by no means on the whole; in fact, her letter was a remonstrance, written impulsively in a dainty boudoir of Berkeley Square, and found long afterwards in an escritoire. Harry often wondered whether the woman he loved ever read what he wrote. She read everything he signed, and would never have dropped Tommy Tiddler had she dreamt he was still a comic singer in its columns. But Harry saw nothing and heard but little of his quondam friends. He knew they lived in Berkeley Square — he knew they were very rich. He had heard of the dividend the Crofter Fisheries were paying, and what he would have to give now for the shares which he had committed to the flames. He had also read Truth’s opinion of the concern, and wondered why the action for so obvious a libel hung fire. He sometimes wondered, too, how it was that he never met either the father or the daughter from whom he had severed with such different emotions on the same thick November day. He did not know that the daughter once fled from a party on hearing he was expected — and was sorry afterwards.

  Curiously enough, the very article which failed to gain the good opinion he coveted most, was so fortunate as to secure that of Harry’s most severe and least respected critic. The Reverend Spencer Walthew read religion between the lines, and, having written to thank his nephew for his spirited though veiled attack on the Broad Church party, concluded by begging him to have a go at the Ritualists.

  “I have seldom had a more unexpected pleasure,” wrote the Evangelical divine, “than you have given me by this shrewd blow against the vice of tolerance and the ultra-charitable spirit which I regard as one of the great dangers of the age. We want no charity for the heretic and the ritualist — with whom I trust you will deal unmercifully without delay. I cannot conclude, Henry, without telling you what a relief it is to me to see you at last turning your attention to serious subjects. I feel sure that they are the only ones worthy of a Christian’s pen. I have never concealed from you my pain and disgust at the levity of almost all your writings hitherto, although I have tried to do justice to the literary quality, which, on the whole, has been distinctly better than might have been expected. It is the greater pleasure to me, therefore, to recognise the serious purpose and the lofty aim of your latest essay. May you never again descend to ‘humorous’ account
s of your ‘adventures,’ or to inferior versifying for papers which are not to be seen in respectable houses!”

  Harry, however, had never ceased his connection with the Tiddler, although it was not one of the things he mentioned to the notorious interviewer who came to patronise him in those days, and to whom he caught his mother showing the parody on Gray’s Elegy. T.T. had been a good friend to Harry at the foot of the hill, and he was not going to desert just yet, even if he could have afforded to do so. Of the £51 10s. 9d. which he managed to make in the first year, £34 4s. was from the Tiddler’s coffers; of the third year’s £223 14s. 6d. (a mighty leap from the intermediate year), £55 12s. was from the same genial source. And so we find him towards the end of the fourth year — not quite such a good one as the last — fighting hard to touch the second hundred for the second time, and writing verses in his pyjamas at midnight at the close of a long day’s work on an ungrateful book.

  The flat is no longer that in which Harry Ringrose found his mother; it is a slightly larger one in the same mansions on a higher floor; and instead of Weber’s Last Waltz, a lusty youth, who arrived there on the same night as Harry, supplies the unsolicited accompaniment inseparable from life in a flat.

  Only one room has been gained by the change; but in it sleeps a servant, an old retainer of the family; and the sitting-room is larger, so that there is ample room in it for the rather luxurious desk which Harry has bought himself, and at which we find him seated, his back to the books and his nose in his rhyming dictionary, taking his most trivial task seriously, as was ever his wont, on a warm night in the middle of September.

  He is a little altered — not much. He is thicker set; the legs in the pyjamas are less lean. His face is older, but still extremely young. He has tried to grow a moustache, but failed, and given it up; and the two blots of whisker show that he has no candid girl friend now; and the blue stubble on his chin means that his mother is away. His black hair inclines to length, not altogether because he thinks it looks interesting, but chiefly because he has been too busy to get it cut. He has not yet affected the pince-nez or the spectacles of the average literary man. But he is smoking at his desk; he will be smoking presently in his bed; and on a small table stand a bottle of whisky and a syphon.

  Suddenly a ring at the bell.

  At half-past twelve at night a prolonged tattoo on the little steel drum!

  Harry was greatly startled, as a man may easily be who is working at night after working all day. Yet he would have been much more startled the September before.

  Since then his books had come out, and he had made a number of friends. Only the night before a play-actor had looked in after his “show,” and they had sat up reading Keats against Shelley, and capping Swinburne with Rossetti, until the whisky was finished and daylight shamed them in their cups. Harry thoroughly enjoyed a Bohemian life in his mother’s absence, though indeed she let him do exactly as he liked when she was there. Was it the actor again, or was it....

  Not for months had the old fancy seized him with the ringing of the bell. It was only the lateness of the hour which brought it back to-night. Yet the look with which the young fellow rose was one that he wore often enough when there were none to see. It was a look of utter misery barbed with shame unspeakable and undying. Sometimes the mother had seen it — and taken the shame and the misery for his share of their common hidden grief. She little knew!

  The gas was burning in the passage, but lowered on the common landing outside. Harry could see nothing through the ground glass which formed the upper portion of the door. He flung it open. A tall man was standing on the mat.

  “Good evening, Mr. Ringrose,” said he, and took a tremendous pinch of snuff as Harry drew back in dismay.

  It was Jeremiah Scrafton.

  CHAPTER XXV.

  SCRAFTON’S STORY.

  Harry had not heard of him for nearly four years, had not set eyes on him since their scuffle at the school. But only a few days later Leonard Bickersteth had called at the flat with strange news of Scrafton. He had never returned to the Hollies; he had disappeared from his lodgings; it was impossible to trace his whereabouts. The motive of his flight, on the other hand, seemed pretty clear. Mrs. Bickersteth had been questioning the boys, with the result that Harry’s charges were sufficiently proved, as Scrafton must have known they would be, and hence his sudden desertion. Leonard Bickersteth had proceeded, on his mother’s behalf, to make Harry an apology and an offer which did that lady equal credit. But the younger man was too perturbed either to accept the one or to decline the other as cordially or as civilly as he desired. He had his own explanation of Scrafton’s flight. It had been a nightmare to him ever since. And here was the central figure of that nightmare standing before him in the flesh, with his snuff-box in his hand, and the old ferocious grin upon his pallid glistening face.

  “Surprised to see me, are you?” cried Scrafton, taking another pinch.

  “I am,” said Harry, looking the other in the face, and yet reflecting its pallor.

  “You’ll be still more surprised when you hear what I’ve come to tell you. Ain’t you going to ask me in?”

  “Come in by all means, if you wish,” said Harry, coldly.

  “I do wish,” was the answer. “Are you alone?”

  “Absolutely,” said Harry, as he closed the door and led the way into the sitting-room.

  “I thought you lived with your mother?”

  “She is away.”

  “Do you keep a servant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not next door, I hope?” said Scrafton, tapping the wall to gauge its thickness.

  “No, at the other end of the flat; and she’s used to late comers.”

  Scrafton glanced at Harry obliquely out of his light-blue eyes. Then they fell on the whisky bottle, and he favoured Harry with a different look.

  “Help yourself.”

  Scrafton did so with his left hand so clasped about the glass that it was impossible to see how much he took. His hand seemed bonier than formerly, but it was no less grimy, and the fingernails were still rimmed with black. He was dressed as of old, only better. It was a moderately new frock-coat, and as he sat down with his glass Harry saw that he did wear socks. His beard and moustache were whiter; they showed the snuff-stains all the more.

  It was the rocking-chair this man was desecrating with his pestilent person; while Harry, having shut the door, had reseated himself at his desk, but turned his chair so that he sat facing Scrafton, with an elbow on his blotting-pad.

  “I have come,” said the visitor, putting his glass down empty, “to tell you the truth about your father.”

  “I thought as much.”

  “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” continued Scrafton, eying the bottle wistfully. “Do you suppose now that he is living or dead?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “He is dead.”

  Harry did not open his mouth. He could not appreciate the news of his father’s death, but then he would have been equally slow to realise that he was alive. So completely had the missing ironmaster passed out of the world of ascertainable fact and of positive statement; so dead was he already to his son.

  “When did he die?” asked the latter presently; and his voice was unmoved.

  “On the night between Good Friday and Easter Day.”

  “This year?”

  “No; over four years ago.”

  Harry leapt to his feet.

  “Where was it he died?”

  “At sea — —”

  “At sea!”

  “Between Newhaven and Dieppe.”

  “But how — how?”

  “He was murdered.”

  Harry seemed to have known it all along. He could not utter another syllable. But his wild eyes and his outstretched hands asked their question plainly.

  “By your friend Gordon Lowndes,” said Scrafton coolly.

  Harry came down heavily in his chair, and his hands lay on t
he desk, and his face lay in his hands; but he was acutely conscious, and he heard the furtive trickle as Scrafton seized the opportunity of replenishing his glass. The man drank. To anybody but an innocent it might have been obvious four years ago. He was one of those whom drink made pallid and ferocious; to get more from him while still sober, Harry started up as suddenly as he had subsided, causing the other to spill some liquor in his beard.

  “Take all you want,” cried Harry, “only tell me everything first. I must know everything now. I have suspected it so long.”

  He leant forward to listen, this time with an elbow on each knee, but with his face again buried in his hands. Scrafton kept a gleaming eye upon him, as he dried his beard with his coat-sleeve, and supplemented the spirit with a couple of his most sickening inhalations.

  “I will begin at the beginning,” said he; “but you needn’t have any fears about my not reaching the end, for I’ve never had less than a bottle a night when I could get it, and the man doesn’t breathe who ever saw Jeremiah Scrafton the worse. What you have here is only enough to make me thirsty, and I may want another bottle broached before I’m done. Meanwhile, to begin at the beginning, you must know that it is some years now since I made our friend’s acquaintance at Richmond. We spotted each other one night by the river, and though he was old enough to be your father, and I was old enough to be his, I’m hanged if it wasn’t like a man and a woman! He took to me, and I took to him. We were both clever men, and we were both poor men. His head was full of ways of making his pile, and my head was full of one way worth all his put together. You’re a dunce at mathematics, Master Ringrose. Have you ever played roulette?”