Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  The girl’s letters naturally were mentioned when they arrived, though they never, of course, contained a message. The nearest the pair came to joining hands over Evelyn was, however, in the matter of a letter from her. It came when the Bishop was busy; it begged him to send her a certain book of poems, and when nobody could find the book, the Bishop said rather testily: “Write, like a good fellow, and tell her it isn’t in the house. And you may as well say we’re all right, but too busy — well, that we’re busy.” The Bishop remembered what he was doing; yet he presently added, “Stay! If there’s anything to interest her, say it; it will save me a letter; and really I am very busy.” Nor was the inconsistency merely human this time; the Bishop was curious to see what notice would be taken of Follet’s letter. Would her next be nominally to Follet direct, in answer, or would she thank him in a message? There was justifiable occasion for the former course: but Evelyn did not seize the occasion: she took no notice at all. Whereupon the Bishop became vastly uneasy, and wished with all his heart that he did not know his daughter so well.

  This was not until the fourth month of Evelyn’s absence, and her friends in Sydney had been only too delighted to take her for the six; but long before that time had elapsed the Bishop was upset by a telegram announcing that she was already on her way home. No reason, no explanatory hint was given. He who knew her so well was prepared for anything. It was a two days’ journey, she could not arrive before the evening following the receipt of her telegram. In his perplexity the Bishop took the news straight to Sam Follet.

  The young man was now reading earnestly for Orders, He had, indeed, been intended for the Church from early years; but he was a clergyman’s son; he had disappointed, and been sent to the Colonies — to the dogs, in other words — for it is so with those who are sent out to be got rid of. But now Bishop Methuen was in communication with his rejoicing old schoolfellow, and the boy was to be ordained after all. The Bishop found him busy reading in his bedroom. This was the first time he had intruded on him there. Follet was seated at a little table touching the wall; from a peg high over the table depended a surprising collection of old garments, crowned by a gray felt wideawake. They interested the Bishop in spite of his errand; he was glad, besides, to curve round to the point; so, as Follet turned round in his chair, he greeted him extempore.

  “What in the name of fortune are those things over your head, my dear boy?”

  Follet blushed a little, tilted his chair backward, eyed the queer garments, and rather timorously answered:

  “They’re my old bush togs, sir. I keep them there to — to remind me — that is, so that I shan’t forget—”

  He stuck. The Bishop hastily changed the subject by coming to his point. In an instant Follet was on his legs, his face irradiated.

  “You’ll let me meet the coach, won’t you? —

  Oh, I forgot! One of us has to go to Stratford Downs to-morrow!”

  “You must be the one,” said the Bishop. “I must be the one to see Evelyn first,” he added, in a reminding tone. “I can’t divine what is fetching her home so suddenly as this!” And as he watched the summer lightning play of joy and anxiety over the young man’s face, his heart pained for him, for he did divine evil.

  He knew Evelyn only too well.

  “I am glad he is not in,” she said when she arrived. Her eyes and manner betrayed excitement with difficulty controlled. “And oh, father! how thankful I am you wouldn’t let me be engaged to him!”

  “Why?” asked the Bishop, sternly, as he instinctively put her hands from him.

  Miss Methuen tremblingly skinned the glove from her left hand, which she held up to her father’s eyes, only to dazzle them with the blaze of diamonds on the third finger. The sight hit him to the heart, stopping its beat

  “Yes, I never really loved him! I know it now — now that I really love! What will he do to me, do you think? Will he kill me? I thought I loved him, God knows I did, but I never really loved before! Father! why don’t you speak to me? I am engaged.

  You cannot prevent it — you will not want to when you know all, when you know him! Speak to me, father!”

  But the Bishop only stung her with his eye.

  “You’ll break it to him, father? Then I’ll see him myself. He’ll be more merciful than you! Oh! but you will be glad some day, when you know him. You will be glad when you see me happy. I never honestly loved before! And he is coming to see you as soon as ever he can leave his business.”

  “What is his business?” asked the Bishop.

  “He is in wholesale jewellery — wholesale.”

  Few would have recognised Dr. Methuen in the glance he cast at the resplendent diamond ring. He could have torn it from his daughter’s finger and stamped upon it under her eyes. Wholesale, indeed! There was scant need to insist on that extenuating word.

  That night the Bishop broke the blow: and Follet took it badly. Later, Miss Methuen had the strength of mind to insist on facing him herself; and from her he bore it even worse. Miss Methuen must have felt considerable contempt for his weakness. He locked himself in his room and would see no one else that night. The Bishop came to the door: no, in the morning. The Bishop came later; he was sobbing. Later still, however — much later — his breathing sounded easy and even. The Bishop crept away on tip-toe, and himself lay down, after intercessory prayer; but early in the morning he went again to the door; and there was no more sound of breathing within. The wind came through the keyhole, no other breath touched the ear; a thread of sunlight marked the bottom of the door. In sudden frenzy the Bishop burst it open, and stood panting in an empty room, his beard bisected by the draught between the open window and the broken door. The bushman’s clothes had vanished from their peg; those of the Reader lay neatly folded on the little table underneath.

  The wholesale jeweller was for some time prevented by the exigencies of a thriving business from following Evelyn up country.

  She had worn his grand ring upwards of a month, when, while driving with her father in the neighbourhood of the river, she descried a man lying on his face in the sun, with his hat off. Evelyn pointed with the finger of contempt to this self-evident case of drunkenness; and the Bishop also took characteristic action. He stopped the buggy, handed the reins to Evelyn, and jumped out. The man lay at a distance, which Bishop Methuen covered at the double. He found a flat stone, placed it under the sleeper’s fore. —

  head, and fixed the wideawake as securely as possible over the back of his head and neck. Then he returned to the buggy, again running, and drove homeward at an unusual rate.

  “How despicable!” Evelyn exclaimed.

  “Which of us?” asked her father, with a sarcasm he would not have employed towards her in former days.

  “That intoxicated wretch, of course!”

  Dr. Methuen lashed his horses. “Evelyn,” said he between the strokes, “I profoundly wish that you would be less free with your contempt. There are worse sins than drunkenness, which is chiefly shocking. You should pray to avoid those sins — mark me, they are so much the worse for not looking so bad — and try yourself to be becomingly humble.”

  Evelyn, not unnaturally, sulked during the remainder of that drive. She was too much offended to take notice even of the unwonted pace. On reaching the Lodge she went straight to her room. And the Bishop, saddling his riding horse with his own hands, galloped back to the spot where he had left the drunken sleeper. The man was gone. The Bishop had recognised him; he was unaware that the man was then in the recovering stage, and that he had himself been recognised.

  He scoured the country. Late in the evening, which was very dark, with a sandy wind, he rode slowly home, completely crestfallen. He bitterly upbraided himself for having spared Evelyn’s feelings with a result infinitely more deplorable than any scene she could have created on the road. He had imagined the poor fellow to be incapable for hours to come. Leaving the horse with the groom, he was following round the picket-fence to the front gate, as the night wa
s so dark, when a figure rose from the ground at his very feet. Dr. Methuen had no time to draw back. Strong arms embraced him, a heart thumped thrice against his own, and then the Bishop was left standing alone, peering into the darkness and dust, and listening to the dying beat of footsteps he should never overtake.

  And this was the last he saw of his old schoolfellow’s son. Some few weeks later came the noted night when the wholesale jeweller was at length known to be on his way inland to caress the hand that exhibited his merely representative ring. On that night the Bishop read in The Grazier of the violent death of Samuel Follet, by drowning, many miles higher up the river. It appeared that the young man’s condition had become such as to necessitate a constant supply of watchers; that from one of these he had broken away, jumping into the river and being drowned, as stated. This was all. The Bishop had been alone with it more than an hour when Evelyn came in to bid him goodnight. The paper was clenched tightly in his two hands. The pipe between his teeth had long been out.

  Of late there had been little enough in common between Evelyn and her father; but to-night she desired to say more than the customary three words. She was in great spirits, naturally; she wanted to talk. She shut the door and sat down; she sat down in the chair in which Follet had sat night after night for nearly five months.

  “Do not sit there, Evelyn.”

  Dr. Methuen had found his voice, but to Evelyn it seemed a new voice. It was harsh, yet it quavered. She rose hastily, and as she rose the diamonds on her finger lightened under the lamp.

  “Why not?”

  “Because — because I wish to be alone.”

  She stooped to kiss him.

  “Do not kiss me!” he cried, pushing back his chair.

  “Why — why ever not?”

  “I am smoking strong tobacco.”

  “You are not; your pipe is out.”

  “I don’t think so,” said the Bishop, pulling in quite good faith at cold tobacco. “Good-night, Evelyn.”

  “You are vexed with me!” exclaimed the girl, indignantly. “I shan’t go until you tell me the reason. Pray, what have I done?”

  Then the Bishop could contain it no longer; though he never forgave himself for what he did. He jumped up, holding out the paper, and answered with a trembling finger on the place:

  “This!”

  AN IDLE SINGER.

  I.

  “I HAVE it!” cried the Editor suddenly.

  Adeane, who was spoken to, looked up quickly, but a little mechanically, for his mind was inconveniently preoccupied with the sestett of an unwritten sonnet; and “it” was merely the subject of his prose contribution to the Christmas Number of the Spider. Still, as this contribution meant as many sovereigns in Adeane’s pocket as the sonnet would fetch shillings, he was compelled to roll down from poetic heights, to trump up a look of acute personal interest, and to ask what “it” was to be after all.

  The Editor of the Spider — who was the Spider — got up from his chair and went into a corner where a small table stood stacked with new books. He chuckled as he found the book he wanted, and he handed it to Adeane with an air of occult humour.

  “The Lesser Man” Adeane read aloud from the cover. “But I don’t see who it’s by?”

  “Anonymous — some woman, in spite of the title” Adeane glanced at the title-page, but it was innocent of previous record: this was a first conviction.

  “All right,” said he, tucking the volume under his arm, and letting his soul soar back to the sestett “I suppose you aren’t in a great hurry for the review?”

  “Review! I didn’t say anything about a review, did I?” The Spider spoke rather sharply; and really Adeane was very absent. “We were talking about your thing for the Christmas Number. I want you to fill a couple of pages with your smartest stuff — something in story shape, but topical. And you say you can’t get a subject. Very good, here’s your subject: write me a smart, tart skit on The Lesser Man, and it’ll be the very thing — the very thing!”

  “Is it so popular?” asked Adeane, who worked too hard to keep quite abreast of the literary current.

  “Now, my dear Mr. Adeane!” said the Spider, with a kind of fatherly compassion for his youthful contributor, “both press and public are idiotic about this book; I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it. I haven’t read it, but I’ve glanced at it, and it looks pretty good, though plainly feminine; it’s highly impassioned, and a little embittered; and the title’s ironical — one for us. There’s humour in the title before you touch it! I saw no humour anywhere else, but that’s all the better; you’ll extract lots. Popularity apart, from what I’ve seen and heard of it, the book was made to burlesque; some books are. Mind you mangle the title; it’s a pity there’s no author’s name to hash up as well; but you must just do your best, Mr. Adeane.”

  “I’ll certainly try to,” Adeane said earnestly, with the timorous humility with which he treated all his editors in those days. But he had just skimmed half a page of The Lesser Man and seen a phrase that pleased him, and he could not help adding, a little nervously: “It does seem a bit unkind, though!”

  “Unkind!” The Spider seized on the word with evident glee. “That’s it exactly; you must make it so. Unkindness is the soul of parody, and we may as well own it. Good nature is insipid, Mr. Adeane, too insipid for the Spider. As for parody, why it is the greatest flattery there is, and a far sincerer sort than imitation; besides which, it’s the best advertisement a book can have. But don’t try to do the thing by halves. Laugh loud if you laugh at all. Make fun of the whole thing, and of the public that reads it. That’s it. Show up the British public and their precious taste. That’s the touch! Copy by the twentieth, and your weekly stuff as usual. Good afternoon, Mr. Adeane, and glad to have seen you.”

  Those were the days of Adeane’s apprenticeship. The particular day on which he carried home a copy of The Lesser Man, for what he euphemistically described to a man in the street as “a professional purpose,” occurred in the second year of Adeane’s sojourn in London, and in the twenty-third of his age. He was at this time beating round the financial Horn, and not yet out of dangerous waters; in fact, his income was trembling between two and three figures a year. He was a literary free-lance, and more or less a poet; more by inclination, by necessity less. At present he could afford to mix very little verse with his assorted prose. Verse supplied but a doubtful tithe of that extremely doubtful hundred a year. On the other hand, more than half of this income was derived from the Spider.

  There is little to be said about the Spider. It dealt with most things, and it seldom dealt gently. It cost a piece of silver, it was nicely printed, its wrapper suggested respectability and good taste, and from some points of view the paper may have justified its publication. Certainly the Christmas and Summer Numbers were in fair demand; but these were something special. In the ordinary way it was written by a clever, if a slightly lawless, crew; and Adeane was glad enough to be one of them; though if he found one paper absolutely unreadable (with the exception of his own things, over which he was inclined to gloat when they were in type) that paper was the Spider.

  Now Adeane was a curious compound, or rather, he would have been a curious compound if he had not been a poet. Being a poet it was no more than his duty to be peculiar; it showed that he did not look upon himself as superior to his position, or to other poets. Yet his peculiarities were not on the surface. His hair was not long. His coat was not velvet. His neck-tie did not flow, neither did his hat slouch. He shaved himself at least as regularly as other young men whose beards have not yet arrived at their full strength. He even did without glasses, that sure sign of ink, if not of poetry. Externally, in a word, Adeane was the most incomplete of all poets. But internally —

  Well, he might have been worse. He was self centred, but not self-seeking; he was hard-working, and wonderfully persevering, though in many ways weak; and if he was not always quite admirable, he was very lovable — which is something. It is true that he
had lofty ideals which he made no earnest effort to realise, and principles which he did not exert himself to live up to personally; and his intimate friend, Digby Willock, who had a legal mind, but no principles and no ideals, had certainly the advantage of him here; but for all that there was some good in Adeane, quite apart from his brains.

  He carried The Lesser Man between two and three miles to his lodging, which so far consisted of one room only. But he forgot about the book as he walked; he had got back to his sestett, and his mind did not quit it again for some time. The words seemed very nearly to have sorted themselves by the time he reached his room. He sat down for a minute to write them roughly; and the minute lasted a couple of hours. For it is one thing to get a poem into your head, and another thing to get it out again, on paper. The fitting together of any form of verse is the most soul-possessing employment to be found; but its hard-and-fast requirements render the sonnet the greatest strain of all. Adeane did not even smoke during those two hours, nor pause to put on his slippers; yet he was a terrible fellow for his slippers and his pipe. But when he did rise he had not only ground the thing out at last but rewritten it, and enclosed it in an envelope, with an “accompanying note.” Moreover, he took that sonnet to the post before either looking at his slippers or smelling tobacco; and after many days it brought back ten-and-sixpence.

  Rid at last of the sonnet, which had been with him all day, Adeane washed his mind of it with bird’s-eye, relit the fire (versifying invariably put it out) and carelessly cut open The Lesser Man, An hour later Adeane’s landlady came up with tea and eggs, the poet’s repast. She kept him very comfortable up in his garret; there was nothing she would not do for him. The gas was lit, and the poet was lying on his bed reading. The landlady introduced the tea in a word or two of rather timid entreaty, received no answer, and discreetly retired. Her young man was reading much too attentively to look up from his book or to speak to her.