The King of Schnorrers: Grotesques and Fantasies

"Ah! but you will not meet her again," I said softly.

"No; but the feeling was the same. Of course, when I was thirty I did not know I should die before I was two. I had no more privilege of prescience than the ordinary mortal. But in everything else how enviable was my lot compared to his whom every day is sweeping towards Death, for whom no vision of renewed youth gleams behind the black hangings! Oh! the glory of growing old without dread, with the assurance that age, which is ripening you, is not ripening you for the Gleaner, that the years will add wisdom without eternally subtracting the capacity for joy, and that every tottering step is bringing you nearer, not the Grave, but the joyous resurrection of your youth!"

"And you have experienced that?" I cried, with envious incredulity.

"Yes," answered the baby solemnly. "Of course I prepared for the Great Change. Not that Nature did not herself smooth the metamorphosis. The loss of teeth, the gradual baldness, the feeble limbs, everything pointed to the proximity of my Second Childhood. I knew that my odd life had not much longer to run, that at any moment the transformation might take place and the even numbers begin. Giving out that I was going to explore the African deserts, and accompanied only by my faithful body-servant, Downton, I retired to Egypt to await the great event, having previously ordered baby-linen and the various requisites of infantile toilette. I had at one time meditated providing myself with parents, but ultimately concluded that they would prove too troublesome to manage, and that it would be better to trust myself entirely to the management of Downton, since I had already placed myself in his power by leaving him all my money."

"But what necessity was there for that?" I enquired.

"Every necessity," he replied gravely. "Do you not see that I had to arrange all my affairs and make my will before being born again, because afterwards I should not be of legal age for ten years. At first I thought of leaving all my money to myself and passing as my own child, but there would have been difficulties. I was unmarried and seventy-seven. Downton could easily pretend his septuagenarian master had died in the African deserts, but he could not so easily patch up a marriage there. I had no option, therefore, but to make Downton my heir, and I have never had occasion to regret it from the day of my rebirth to this, the day of my death. As soon as I was born we returned to England, and I wrote my obituary and drove to the Press Association with it. Downton took it into the office while I waited in Fleet Street in the hansom. I can scarcely hope to convey to you an idea of the intensity and agreeableness of my sensations at this unprecedented epoch. The variegated life of Fleet Street gave me the keenest joy: every sight and every sound – beautiful or sordid – thrilled my nerves to rapture. I was interested in everything. Imagine the delicious freshness of one's second year supervening upon the jaded sensibilities of seventy-seven. All my wide and varied knowledge of life lay in my soul as before, but transfigured. Over my large experience of men and things was shed a stream of sunshine which irradiated everything with divine light; every streak of cynicism faded. I had the wisdom of an old man and the heart of a little child. I believed in man again, and even in woman. I shed tears of pure ecstasy; and when I heard a female of the lower classes say: 'Poor little thing! What a shame to leave it crying in a cab!' I laughed aloud in glee. She exclaimed: 'Ah! now it's laughing, my petsy-wootsy!' Her conversation saddened me again, and I was glad I had not burdened myself with a mother, and that I took my milk from a bottle instead of a doting nurse. And how exquisite was this same apparently monotonous menu of milk to an epicurean who had ruined his digestion! I felt I was recuperating on a vegetarian diet, and I rejoiced to think some years must elapse before I would care for champagne or re-acquire a taste for full-flavoured Manillas. Perhaps somewhat unreasonably, I was proud of my strength of will, which had enabled me in one day to abandon tobacco without a pang, and seven-course dinners without repining. I slept a good deal, too, at this period, whereas I had previously been greatly exercised by insomnia. But these joys of the senses were as nothing to the joys of the intellect. An exquisite curiosity played like a sea-breeze about my long-stagnant soul. All my early interests revived; worldly propositions I had thought settled showed themselves unstable and volant; everything was shaken by the moving spirit of youth. Theology, poetry, and even metaphysics became alive; all sorts of unpractical questions became suddenly burning. I saw in myself the seeds of a great thinker: a felicitous congruity of opposite capacities that had never before met in a single man – the sobriety of age tempered by the audacity of youth, fire and water, judgment and inspiration. I was revolutionist and reactionary in one. I read all the new books, and agreed with all the old."

"All you tell me only makes the pathos of your premature death more intolerable," I said in moved accents. "You are, like Keats and Chatterton, – only an earlier edition, – an inheritor of unfulfilled renown."

The little blue eyes smiled wistfully at me.

"Not at all," said the wee rose-lips, with a quiver. "Don't you see, I have already dodged Death? Evidently, if I had taken my second year in its natural order, I should have been cut short by croup at the outset. Apparently I had enough vital energy in me to have lasted till seventy-seven, if I could only get over the croup. I think one ought to be satisfied with having survived himself by thirty odd years."

"Yes, if you put it like that, the pathos lightens," I admitted. "Of course I saw from the first that you were considerably in advance of your age. Did you assure your life?" I asked, with a sudden thought.

"I did; but by an oversight I let the policy be invalidated by my imaginary expedition to the African deserts. Downton has, however, taken out a fresh policy for my new life."

"What a baffling complex of probabilities would be added to Life Assurances if your way of living were to become general!" I observed. "Downton will probably more than recoup himself for his first loss. Have you always been a bachelor, by the way?" I asked.

"Yes," said the baby, with a sigh. "I missed marriage; it probably fell in an even year."

"Poor child!" I cried, my eyes growing humid again. To think, too, of that beautiful young girl, that fond wife, waiting for him who would never come; that innocent maiden cheated of love and happiness because her appointed husband had not lived in the other alternate series of years, – to think of this tangled tragedy moved me to fresh tears, not a few of which were for the husband who never was.

"Nay, do not pity me," said the baby, and his tones were hushed and low, and in his heavenly blue eyes I seemed to read the high sorrowful wisdom of the ages; "for, since I have lain here on this bed of sickness with no spectacular whirl to claim my thoughts, with four walls for my horizon, and the agony of death in my throat, the darker side of my dual existence has been borne in upon me. I see the shadow cast by the sunshine of my privilege of double birth; I see the curse which is the obverse of the blessing my mother's prayers brought me; I see myself dissipating a youth which I knew would recur, throwing away a manhood which I knew would come again, and sinking into a sensual senility which I knew would pass into an innocent infancy. I see myself rejecting the best gifts and the highest duties of To-Day for the illusory felicities and the far-away virtues of the Day-After-To-Morrow. I see myself passing by Love with the reflection that I should be passing again; putting off Purity with the thought that I should be round that way presently; and waving to Duty an amicable salute of 'Expect me soon.' And in this moment of clear vision I see not only my past, I realise what my future would be if I lived. I see the influx of fresh feeling gradually exhausted, overcome, ousted, and finally replaced by a satiety more horrible than that of the septuagenarian, as I came to realise that life for me held no surprises, no lures to curiosity, that the future was no enchanted realm of mysterious possibilities, that the white clouds revealed no seraph shapes on the horizon, that Hope did not stand like a veiled bride with beckoning finger, that fairies were not lurking round every corner nor magic palaces waiting to start up at every turn. I see life stretching before me like old ground I had been over – in my mother's image like a street one side of which I had walked down. What could the other offer of fresh, of delightful? It is so rarely one side differs from the other: a church for a public-house, a grocer's instead of a bookshop. Conceive the horror of foreknowledge: of having no sensations to learn and few new emotions to feel; to have, moreover, the enthusiasm of youth sicklied over with the prescience of senile cynicism, and the healthy vigour of manhood made flaccid by anticipations of the dodderings of age! I foresee the ever-growing dismay at the leaps and bounds with which my youth was fleeting. I see myself, instead of profiting by my experience, feverishly clutching at every pleasure on my path, as a drowning man, borne along by a torrent, snatches at every scrap of flotsam and jetsam. I see manhood arrive only to pass away, as an express passes through a petty station, full speed for the terminus. I see a panic terror close upon me with every hurrying year at the knowledge that my hours were thirty minutes and my months virtually fortnights, and that I was leading the fastest life on record. Add to this the anguish of feeling myself torn from the bosom of the wife I loved and hurried away from the embraces of the children whose careers it would be my solicitude to watch over. Imagine the agony if I had been cruelly spared to my seventy-eighth year – the agony of a condemned criminal who does not know on what day he is to be execu – "

His voice failed suddenly. He had slightly raised himself on his pillow in his excitement, but now his head fell back, revealing the fatal white patches on the baby throat. I seized his hand quickly to feel his pulse. The little palm lay cold in mine. I started violently and sat up rigidly in my chair.

The child was dead. Downton was sobbing at my side.

As I was writing out the certificate, an odd thought came into my head. I scribbled what I thought an appropriate epitaph and showed it to Downton, but he glared at me furiously. I hastened home to bed.

My epitaph ran:

HERE LIESWILLIAM ("WILLY") STREETSIDE,WHO LED A DOUBLE LIFE,AND DIED IN BLAMELESS REPUTE,AT THE AVERAGE AGEOF 39 YEARS"And in their death they were not divided."

Cheating the Gallows

CHAPTER I

A CURIOUS COUPLE

They say that a union of opposites makes the happiest marriage, and perhaps it is on the same principle that men who chum together are always so oddly assorted. You shall find a man of letters sharing diggings with an auctioneer, and a medical student pigging with a stockbroker's clerk. Perhaps each thus escapes the temptation to talk "shop" in his hours of leisure, while he supplements his own experiences of life by his companion's.

There could not be an odder couple than Tom Peters and Everard G. Roxdal – the contrast began with their names, and ran through the entire chapter. They had a bedroom and a sitting-room in common, but it would not be easy to find what else. To his landlady, worthy Mrs. Seacon, Tom Peters's profession was a little vague, but everybody knew that Roxdal was the manager of the City and Suburban Bank, and it puzzled her to think why a bank manager should live with such a seedy-looking person, who smoked clay pipes and sipped whisky-and-water all the evening when he was at home. For Roxdal was as spruce and erect as his fellow-lodger was round-shouldered and shabby; he never smoked, and he confined himself to a small glass of claret at dinner.

It is possible to live with a man and see very little of him. Where each of the partners lives his own life in his own way, with his own circle of friends and external amusements, days may go by without the men having five minutes together. Perhaps this explains why these partnerships jog along so much more peaceably than marriages, where the chain is drawn so much tighter, and galls the partners rather than links them. Diverse, however, as were the hours and habits of the chums, they often breakfasted together, and they agreed in one thing – they never stayed out at night. For the rest Peters sought his diversions in the company of journalists, and frequented debating rooms, where he propounded the most iconoclastic views; while Roxdal had highly respectable houses open to him in the suburbs, and was, in fact, engaged to be married to Clara Newell, the charming daughter of a retired corn factor, a widower with no other child.

Clara naturally took up a good deal of Roxdal's time, and he often dressed to go to the play with her, while Peters stayed at home in a faded dressing-gown and loose slippers. Mrs. Seacon liked to see gentlemen about the house in evening dress, and made comparisons not favourable to Peters. And this in spite of the fact that he gave her infinitely less trouble than the younger man. It was Peters who first took the apartments, and it was characteristic of his easy-going temperament that he was so openly and naïvely delighted with the view of the Thames obtainable from the bedroom window, that Mrs. Seacon was emboldened to ask twenty-five per cent more than she had intended. She soon returned to her normal terms, however, when his friend Roxdal called the next day to inspect the rooms, and overwhelmed her with a demonstration of their numerous shortcomings. He pointed out that their being on the ground floor was not an advantage, but a disadvantage, since they were nearer the noises of the street – in fact, the house being a corner one, the noises of two streets. Roxdal continued to exhibit the same finicking temperament in the petty details of the ménage. His shirt fronts were never sufficiently starched, nor his boots sufficiently polished. Tom Peters, having no regard for rigid linen, was always good-tempered and satisfied, and never acquired the respect of his landlady. He wore blue check shirts and loose ties even on Sundays. It is true he did not go to church, but slept on till Roxdal returned from morning service, and even then it was difficult to get him out of bed, or to make him hurry up his toilette operations. Often the mid-day meal would be smoking on the table while Peters would be still reading in bed, and Roxdal, with his head thrust through the folding-doors that separated the bedroom from the sitting-room, would be adjuring the sluggard to arise and shake off his slumbers, and threatening to sit down without him, lest the dinner be spoilt. In revenge, Tom was usually up first on week-days, sometimes at such unearthly hours that Polly had not yet removed the boots from outside the bedroom door, and would bawl down to the kitchen for his shaving-water. For Tom, lazy and indolent as he was, shaved with the unfailing regularity of a man to whom shaving has become an instinct. If he had not kept fairly regular hours, Mrs. Seacon would have set him down as an actor, so clean shaven was he. Roxdal did not shave. He wore a full beard, and, being a fine figure of a man to boot, no uneasy investor could look upon him without being reassured as to the stability of the bank he managed so successfully. And thus the two men lived in an economical comradeship, all the firmer, perhaps, for their mutual incongruities.

CHAPTER II

A WOMAN'S INSTINCT

It was on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of October, ten days after Roxdal had settled in his new rooms, that Clara Newell paid her first visit to him there. She enjoyed a good deal of liberty, and did not mind accepting his invitation to tea. The corn factor, himself indifferently educated, had an exaggerated sense of the value of culture, and so Clara, who had artistic tastes without much actual talent, had gone in for painting, and might be seen, in pretty toilettes, copying pictures in the Museum. At one time it looked as if she might be reduced to working seriously at her art, for Satan, who finds mischief still for idle hands to do, had persuaded her father to embark the fruits of years of toil in bubble companies. However, things turned out not so bad as they might have been, a little was saved from the wreck, and the appearance of a suitor, in the person of Everard G. Roxdal, ensured her a future of competence, if not of the luxury she had been entitled to expect. She had a good deal of affection for Everard, who was unmistakably a clever man, as well as a good-looking one. The prospect seemed fair and cloudless. Nothing presaged the terrible storm that was about to break over these two lives. Nothing had ever for a moment come to vex their mutual contentment, till this Sunday afternoon. The October sky, blue and sunny, with an Indian summer sultriness, seemed an exact image of her life, with its aftermath of a happiness that had once seemed blighted.

Everard had always been so attentive, so solicitous, that she was as much surprised as chagrined to find that he had apparently forgotten the appointment. Hearing her astonished interrogation of Polly in the passage, Tom shambled from the sitting-room in his loose slippers and his blue check shirt, with his eternal clay pipe in his mouth, and informed her that Roxdal had gone out suddenly earlier in the afternoon.

"G-g-one out?" stammered poor Clara, all confused. "But he asked me to come to tea."

"Oh, you're Miss Newell, I suppose," said Tom.

"Yes, I am Miss Newell."

"He has told me a great deal about you, but I wasn't able honestly to congratulate him on his choice till now."

Clara blushed uneasily under the compliment, and under the ardour of his admiring gaze. Instinctively she distrusted the man. The very first tones of his deep bass voice gave her a peculiar shudder. And then his impoliteness in smoking that vile clay was so gratuitous.

"Oh, then you must be Mr. Peters," she said in return. "He has often spoken to me of you."

"Ah!" said Tom laughingly, "I suppose he's told you all my vices. That accounts for your not being surprised at my Sunday attire."

She smiled a little, showing a row of pearly teeth. "Everard ascribes to you all the virtues," she said.

"Now that's what I call a friend!" he cried ecstatically. "But won't you come in? He must be back in a moment. He surely would not break an appointment with you." The admiration latent in the accentuation of the last pronoun was almost offensive.

She shook her head. She had a just grievance against Everard, and would punish him by going away indignantly.

"Do let me give you a cup of tea," Tom pleaded. "You must be awfully thirsty this sultry weather. There! I will make a bargain with you! If you will come in now, I promise to clear out the moment Everard returns, and not spoil your tête-à-tête." But Clara was obstinate; she did not at all relish this man's society, and besides, she was not going to throw away her grievance against Everard. "I know Everard will slang me dreadfully when he comes in if I let you go," Tom urged. "Tell me at least where he can find you."

"I am going to take the 'bus at Charing Cross, and I'm going straight home," Clara announced determinedly. She put up her parasol in a pet, and went up the street into the Strand. A cold shadow seemed to have fallen over all things. But just as she was getting into the 'bus, a hansom dashed down Trafalgar Square, and a well-known voice hailed her. The hansom stopped, and Everard got out and held out his hand.

"I'm so glad you're a bit late," he said. "I was called out unexpectedly, and have been trying to rush back in time. You wouldn't have found me if you had been punctual. But I thought," he added, laughing, "I could rely on you as a woman."

"I was punctual," Clara said angrily. "I was not getting out of this 'bus, as you seem to imagine, but into it, and was going home."

"My darling!" he cried remorsefully. "A thousand apologies." The regret on his handsome face soothed her. He took the rose he was wearing in the buttonhole of his fashionably cut coat and gave it to her.

"Why were you so cruel?" he murmured, as she nestled against him in the hansom. "Think of my despair if I had come home to hear you had come and gone. Why didn't you wait a moment?"

A shudder traversed her frame. "Not with that man, Peters!" she murmured.

"Not with that man, Peters!" he echoed sharply. "What is the matter with Peters?"

"I don't know," she said. "I don't like him."

"Clara," he said, half sternly, half cajolingly, "I thought you were above these feminine weaknesses; you are punctual, strive also to be reasonable. Tom is my best friend. From boyhood we have been always together. There is nothing Tom would not do for me, or I for Tom. You must like him, Clara; you must, if only for my sake."

"I'll try," Clara promised, and then he kissed her in gratitude and broad daylight.

"You'll be very nice to him at tea, won't you?" he said anxiously. "I shouldn't like you two to be bad friends."

"I don't want to be bad friends," Clara protested; "only the moment I saw him a strange repulsion and mistrust came over me."

"You are quite wrong about him – quite wrong," he assured her earnestly. "When you know him better, you'll find him the best of fellows. Oh, I know," he said suddenly, "I suppose he was very untidy, and you women go so much by appearances!"

"Not at all," Clara retorted. "'Tis you men who go by appearances."

"Yes, you do. That's why you care for me," he said, smiling.

She assured him it wasn't, and she didn't care for him so much as he plumed himself, but he smiled on. His smile died away, however, when he entered his rooms and found Tom nowhere.

"I daresay you've made him run about hunting for me," he grumbled.

"Perhaps he knew I'd come back, and went away to leave us together," she answered. "He said he would when you came."

"And yet you say you don't like him!"

She smiled reassuringly. Inwardly, however, she felt pleased at the man's absence.

CHAPTER III

POLLY RECEIVES A PROPOSAL

If Clara Newell could have seen Tom Peters carrying on with Polly in the passage, she might have felt justified in her prejudice against him. It must be confessed, though, that Everard also carried on with Polly. Alas! it is to be feared that men are much of a muchness where women are concerned; shabby men and smart men, bank managers and journalists, bachelors and semi-detached bachelors. Perhaps it was a mistake after all to say the chums had nothing patently in common. Everard, I am afraid, kissed Polly rather more often than Clara, and although it was because he respected her less, the reason would perhaps not have been sufficiently consoling to his affianced wife. For Polly was pretty, especially on alternate Sunday afternoons, and she liked to receive the homage of real gentlemen, setting her white cap at all indifferently. Thus, just before Clara knocked on that memorable Sunday afternoon, Polly, being confined to the house by the unwritten code regulating the lives of servants, was amusing herself by flirting with Peters.

"You are fond of me a little bit," the graceless Tom whispered, "aren't you?"

"You know I am, sir," Polly replied.

"You don't care for anyone else in the house?"

"Oh no, sir. I wonder how it is, sir?" Polly replied ingenuously.

And that very evening, when Clara was gone and Tom still out, Polly turned without the faintest atom of scrupulosity, or even jealousy, to the more fascinating Roxdal. If it would seem at first sight that Everard had less excuse for such frivolity than his friend, perhaps the seriousness he showed in this interview may throw a different light upon the complex character of the man.

"You're quite sure you don't care for anyone but me?" he asked earnestly.

"Of course not, sir!" Polly replied indignantly. "How could I?"

"But you care for that soldier I saw you out with last Sunday?"

"Oh no, sir, he's only my young man," she said apologetically.