by George Moore
They were now at Hyde Park Corner. Thompson spoke of the improvements — the breaking up of the town into open spaces; but he doubted if anything would be gained by these imitations of Paris. His discourse was, however, interrupted by a porter from the Alexandra Hotel asking to be directed to a certain street. He had been sent to fetch a doctor immediately — a lady just come from an evening party had committed suicide.
“What was she like?” Harding asked.
“A tall woman.”
“Dark or fair?”
He couldn’t say, but thought she was something between the two. Prompted by a strange curiosity, feeling, they knew not why, but still feeling that it might be some one from Temple Gardens, they went to the hotel, and obtained a description of the suicide from the head-porter. The lady was very tall, with beautiful golden hair. For a description of her dress the housemaid was called.
“I hope,” said Mike, “she won’t say she was dressed in cream-pink, trimmed with olive ribbons.” She did. Then Harding told the porter he was afraid the lady was Lady Helen Seymour, a friend of theirs, whom they had seen that night in a party given in Temple Gardens by this gentleman, Mr. Frank Escott. They were conducted up the desert staircase of the hotel, for the lift did not begin working till seven o’clock. The door stood ajar, and servants were in charge. On the left was a large bed, with dark-green curtains, and in the middle of the room a round table. There were two windows. The toilette-table stood between bed and window, and in the bland twilight of closed Venetian blinds a handsome fire flared loudly, throwing changing shadows upon the ceiling, and a deep, glowing light upon the red panels of the wardrobe. So the room fixed itself for ever on their minds. They noted the crude colour of the Brussels carpet, and even the oilcloth around the toilette-table was remembered. They saw that the round table was covered with a red tablecloth, and that writing materials were there, a pair of stays, a pair of tan gloves, and some withering flowers. They saw the ball-dress that Lady Helen had worn thrown over the arm-chair; the silk stockings, the satin shoes — and a gleam of sunlight that found its way between the blinds fell upon a piece of white petticoat. Lady Helen lay in the bed, thrown back low down on the pillow, the chin raised high, emphasizing a line of strained white throat. She lay in shadow and firelight, her cheek touched by the light. Around her eyes the shadows gathered, and as a landscape retains for an hour some impression of the day which is gone, so a softened and hallowed trace of life lingered upon her.
Then the facts of the case were told. She had driven up to the hotel in a hansom. She had asked if No. 57 was occupied, and on being told it was not, said she would take it; mentioning at the same time that she had missed her train, and would not return home till late in the afternoon. She had told the housemaid to light a fire, and had then dismissed her. Nothing more was known; but as the porter explained, it was clear she had gone to bed so as to make sure of shooting herself through the heart.
“The pistol is still in her hand; we never disturb anything till after the doctor has completed his examination.”
Each felt the chill of steel against the naked side, and seeing the pair of stays on the table, they calculated its resisting force.
Harding mused on the ghastly ingenuity, withal so strangely reasonable. Thompson felt he would give his very life to make a sketch. Mike wondered what her lover was like. Frank was overwhelmed in sentimental sorrow. John’s soul was full of strife and suffering. He had sacrificed his poems, and had yet ventured in revels which had led to such results! Then as they went down-stairs, Harding gave the porter Lewis Seymour’s name and address, and said he should be sent for at once.
CHAPTER VI
“I DON’T SAY we have never had a suicide here before, sir,” said the porter in reply to Harding as they descended the steps of the hotel; “but I don’t see how we are to help it. Whenever the upper classes want to do away with themselves they chose one of the big hotels — the Grosvenor, the Langham, or ourselves. Indeed they say more has done the trick in the Langham than ’ere, I suppose because it is more central; but you can’t get behind the motives of such people. They never think of the trouble and the harm they do us; they only think of themselves.”
London was now awake; the streets were a-clatter with cabs; the pick of the navvy resounded; night loiterers were disappearing and giving place to hurrying early risers. In the resonant morning the young men walked together to the Corner. There they stopped to bid each other good-bye. John called a cab, and returned home in intense mental agitation.
“It really is terrible,” said Mike. “It isn’t like life at all, but some shocking nightmare. What could have induced her to do it?”
“That we shall probably never know,” said Thompson; “and she seemed brimming over with life and fun. How she did dance! …”
“That was nerves. I had a long talk with her, and I assure you she quite frightened me. She spoke about the weariness of living; — no, not as we talk of it, philosophically; there was a special accent of truth in what she said. You remember the porter mentioned that she asked if No. 57 was occupied. I believe that is the room where she used to meet her lover. I believe they had had a quarrel, and that she went there intent on reconciliation, and finding him gone determined to kill herself. She told me she had had a lover for the last four years. I don’t know why she told me — it was the first time I ever heard a lady admit she had had a lover; but she was in an awful state of nerve excitement, and I think hardly knew what she was saying. She took the letter out of her bosom and read it slowly. I couldn’t help seeing it was in a man’s handwriting; it began, ‘Ma chère amie!’ I heard her tell her husband to take the brougham; that she would come home in a cab. However, if my supposition is correct, I hope she burnt the letter.”
“Perhaps that’s what she lit the fire for. Did you notice if the writing materials had been used?”
“No, I didn’t notice,” said Mike. “And all so elaborately planned! Just fancy — shooting herself in a nice warm bed! She was determined to do it effectually. And she must have had the revolver in her pocket the whole time. I remember now, I had gone out of the room for a moment, and when I came back she was leaning over the chimney-piece, looking at something.”
“I have often thought,” said Harding, “that suicide is the culminating point of a state of mind long preparing. I think that the mind of the modern suicide is generally filled, saturated with the idea. I believe that he or she has been given for a long time preceding the act to considering, sometimes facetiously, sometimes sentimentally, the advantages of oblivion. For a long time an infiltration of desire of oblivion, and acute realization of the folly of living, precedes suicide, and, when the mind is thoroughly prepared, a slight shock or interruption in the course of life produces it, just as an odorous wind, a sight of the sea, results in the poem which has been collecting in the mind.”
“I think you might have the good feeling to forbear,” said Frank; “the present is hardly, I think, a time for epigrams or philosophy. I wonder how you can talk so….”
“I think Frank is quite right. What right have we to analyse her motives?”
“Her motives were simple enough; sad enough too, in all conscience. Why make her ridiculous by forcing her heart into the groove of your philosophy? The poor woman was miserably deceived; abominably deceived. You do not know what anguish of mind she suffered.”
“There is nothing to show that she went to the Alexandra to meet a lover beyond the fact of a statement made to Mike in a moment of acute nervous excitement. We have no reason to think that she ever had a lover. I never heard her name mentioned in any such way. Did you, Escott?”
“Yes; I have heard that you were her lover.”
“I assure you I never was; we have not even been on good terms for a long time past.”
“You said just now that the act was generally preceded by a state of feeling long preparing. It was you who taught her to read Schopenhauer.”
“I am not going to listen to nonsense at this
hour of the morning. I never take nonsense on an empty stomach. Come, Thompson, you are going my way.”
Mike and Frank walked home together. The clocks had struck six, and the milkmen were calling their ware; soon the shop-shutters would be coming down, and in this first flush of the day’s enterprise, a last belated vegetable-cart jolted towards the market. Mike’s thoughts flitted from the man who lay a-top taking his ease, his cap pulled over his eyes, to the scene that was now taking place in the twilight bedroom. What would Seymour say? Would he throw himself on his knees? Frank spoke from time to time; his thoughts growled like a savage dog, and his words bit at his friend. For Mike had incautiously given an account in particular detail of his tête-à-tête with Lady Helen.
“Then you are in a measure answerable for her death.”
“You said just now that Harding was answerable; we can’t both be culpable.”
Frank did not reply. He brooded in silence, losing all perception of the truth in a stupid and harsh hatred of those whom he termed the villains that ruined women. When they reached Leicester Square, to escape from the obsession of the suicide, Mike said —
“I do not think that I told you that I have sketched out a trilogy on the life of Christ. The first play John, the second Christ, the third Peter. Of course I introduce Christ into the third play. You know the legend. When Peter is flying from Rome to escape crucifixion, he meets Christ carrying His cross.”
“Damn your trilogy — who cares! You have behaved abominably. I want you to understand that I cannot — that I do not hold with your practice of making love to every woman you meet. In the first place it is beastly, in the second it is not gentlemanly. Look at the result!”
“But I assure you I am in no wise to blame in this affair. I never was her lover.”
“But you made love to her.”
“No, I didn’t; we talked of love, that was all. I could see she was excited, and hardly knew what she was saying. You are most unjust. I think it quite as horrible as you do; it preys upon my mind, and if I talk of other things it is because I would save myself the pain of thinking of it. Can’t you understand that?”
The conversation fell, and Mike thrust both hands into the pockets of his overcoat.
At the end of a long silence, Frank said —
“We must have an article on this — or, I don’t know — I think I should like a poem. Could you write a poem on her death?”
“I think so. A prose poem. I was penetrated with the modern picturesqueness of the room — the Venetian blinds.”
“If that’s the way you are going to treat it, I would sooner not have it — the face in the glass, a lot of repetitions of words, sentences beginning with ‘And,’ then a mention of shoes and silk stockings. If you can’t write feelingly about her, you had better not write at all.”
“I don’t see that a string of colloquialisms constitute feelings,” said Mike.
Mike kept his temper; he did not intend to allow it to imperil his residence in Temple Gardens, or his position in the newspaper; but he couldn’t control his vanity, and ostentatiously threw Lady Helen’s handkerchief upon the table, and admitted to having picked it up in the hotel.
“What am I to do with it? I suppose I must keep it as a relic,” he added with a laugh, as he opened his wardrobe.
There were there ladies’ shoes, scarves, and neckties; there were there sachets and pincushions; there were there garters, necklaces, cotillion favours, and a tea-gown.
Again Frank boiled over with indignation, and having vented his sense of rectitude, he left the room without even bidding his friend good-night or good-morning. The next day he spent the entire afternoon with Lizzie, for Lady Helen’s suicide had set his nature in active ferment.
In the story of every soul there are times of dissolution and reconstruction in which only the generic forms are preserved. A new force had been introduced, and it was disintegrating that mass of social fibre which is modern man, and the decomposition teemed with ideas of duty, virtue, and love. He interrupted Lizzie’s chit-chat constantly with reflections concerning the necessity of religious belief in women.
About seven they went to eat in a restaurant close by. It was an old Italian chop-house that had been enlarged and modernized, but the original marble tables where customers ate chops and steaks at low prices were retained in a remote and distant corner. Lizzie proposed to sit there. They were just seated when a golden-haired girl of theatrical mien entered.
“That’s Lottie Rily,” exclaimed Lizzie. Then lowering her voice she whispered quickly, “She was in love with Mike once; he was the fellow she left her ‘ome for. She’s on the stage now, and gets four pounds a week. I haven’t seen her for the last couple of years. Lottie, come and sit down here.”
The girl turned hastily. “What, Lizzie, old pal, I have not seen you for ages.”
“Not for more than two years. Let me introduce you to my friend, Mr. Escott — Miss Lottie Rily of the Strand Theatre.”
“Very pleased to make your acquaintance, sir; the editor of the Pilgrim, I presume?”
Frank smiled with pleasure, and the waiter interposed with the bill of fare. Lottie ordered a plate of roast beef, and leaned across the table to talk to her friend.
“Have you seen Mike lately?” asked Lizzie.
“Swine!” she answered, tossing her head. “No; and don’t want to. You know how he treated me. He left me three months after my baby was born.”
“Have you had a baby?”
“What, didn’t you know that? It is seven months old; ’tis a boy, that’s one good job. And he hasn’t paid me one penny piece. I have been up to Barber and Barber’s, but they advised me to do nothing. They said that he owed them money, and that they couldn’t get what he owed them — a poor look-out for me. They said that if I cared to summons him for the support of the child, that the magistrate would grant me an order at once.”
“And why don’t you?” said Frank; “you don’t like the exposé in the newspapers.”
“That’s it.”
“Do you care for him still?”
“I don’t know whether I do, or don’t. I shall never love another man, I know that. I saw him in front about a month ago. He was in the stalls, and he fixed his eyes upon me; I didn’t take the least notice, he was so cross. He came behind after the first act. He said, ‘How old you are looking!’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ I was very nicely made up too, and he said, ‘Under the eyes.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ and he said, ‘You are all wrinkles.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ and he went down-stairs…. Swine!”
“He isn’t good-looking,” said Frank, reflectively, “a broken nose, a chin thrust forward, and a mop of brown curls twisted over his forehead. Give me a pencil, and I’ll do his caricature.”
“Every one says the same thing. The girls in the theatre all say, ‘What in the world do you see in him?’ I tell them that if he chose — if he were to make up to them a bit, they’d go after him just the same as I did. There’s a little girl in the chorus, and she trots about after him; she can’t help it. There are times when I don’t care for him. What riles me is to see other women messing him about.”
“I suppose it is some sort of magnetism, electro-biology, and he can’t help exercising it any more than you women can resist it. Tell me, how did he leave you?”
“Without a word or a penny. One night he didn’t come home, and I sat up for him, and I don’t know how many nights after. I used to doze off and awake up with a start, thinking I heard his footstep on the landing. I went down to Waterloo Bridge to drown myself. I don’t know why I didn’t; I almost wish I had, although I have got on pretty well since, and get a pretty tidy weekly screw.”
“What do you get?”
“Three ten. Mine’s a singing part. Waiter, some cheese and celery.”
“What a blackguard he is! I’ll never speak to him again; he shall edit my paper no more. To-night I’ll give him the dirty kick-out.”
Mike rema
ined the topic of conversation until Lottie said —
“Good Lord, I must be ‘getting’ — it is past seven o’clock.”
Frank paid her modest bill, and still discussing Mike, they walked to the stage-door. Quick with desire to possess Lizzie wholly beyond recall, and obfuscated with notions concerning the necessity of placing women in surroundings in harmony with their natural goodness, Frank walked by his mistress’s side. At the end of a long silence, she said —
“That’s the way you’ll desert me one of these days. All men are brutes.”
“No, darling, they are not. If you’ll act fairly by me, I will by you — I’ll never desert you.”
Lizzie did not answer.
“You don’t think me a brute like that fellow Fletcher, do you?”
“I don’t think there’s much difference between any of you.”
Frank ground his teeth, and at that moment he only desired one thing — to prove to Lizzie that men were not all vile and worthless. They had turned into the Temple; the old places seemed dozing in the murmuring quietude of the evening. Mike was coming up the pathway, his dress-clothes distinct in the delicate gray light, his light-gray overcoat hanging over his arm.
“What a toff he is!” said Lizzie. His appearance and what it symbolized — an evening in a boudoir or at the gaming-table — jarred on Frank, suggesting as it did a difference in condition from that of the wretched girl he had abandoned; and as Mike prided himself that scandalous stories never followed upon his loves, the unearthing of this mean and obscure liaison annoyed him exceedingly. Above all, the accusation of paternity was disagreeable; but determined to avoid a quarrel, he was about to pass by, when Frank noticed Lady Helen’s pocket-handkerchief sticking out of his pocket.
“You blackguard,” he said, “you are taking that handkerchief to a gambling hell.”
Then realizing that the game was up, he turned and would have struck his friend had not Lizzie interposed. She threw herself between the men, and called a policeman, and the quarrel ended in Mike’s dismissal from the staff of the Pilgrim.
