If Winter Don't / A.B.C.D.E.F. Notsomuchinson

“I will walk,” said Luke. “I prefer it.” He wished to be alone.

He sat down on the first milestone in the road, and meditated with his head in his hands.

Mabel. His wife. He was very good to her. He had been perfectly faithful to her. And was it worth while? What did she think about him? How much did she care for him? There were two men after her. He seemed to visualize the situation as a scrap from the stop-press of a newspaper.

3

He recalled some of the things Jona had said to him in the tool-shed. She had been rather frank in speaking of her husband.

“Bill’s wonderful,” she said. “He caught the tiger last night. When the keeper couldn’t get it. He does everything well. He is the most fascinating man in the world—until you get used to him. I’ve got used to him. He fascinates all women. That would not matter so much, but nearly all women fascinate him. I pretend not to notice it. I think he does it partly to see how I will take it. I remain merry and bright. With a breaking heart, you understand. How much longer I shall be able to stand it, I do not know. Oh, my hands are so cold.”

He had noticed a pair of the gardener’s gloves lying on the lawn-mower. He handed them to her. She flung them away, a little petulantly it seemed to him.

He rose from the milestone and walked on. Certain words seemed to keep time with his footsteps. “She wants me to write to her. And I ought not. She wants me to write to her. And I ought not.”

He passed the post-office, and turned back to it again. Went on, and again turned back. This time he entered with his mind all bemused.

“Have you any nice stamps?” he asked.

CHAPTER VII

“Well, that was just absolute selfishness. All servants love to get swollen knees, and chilblains and chapped hands. They like to make a fuss about themselves. And to make their employer pay a substitute to do their work. They’re all like that. It was just the same before I married. Yes, every housemaid I employ. Contracts these swollen kneeses. They only do it to annoy. Because they know it teases.”

“But what are you going to do about it? Have you got medical advice? Do you think a nurse will be needed? When I had the measles the only things I fancied were——”

“Kate has not got measles. She’s got a cold compress, and she’s got the entire contents of the plate-chest to clean. And when she’s finished that, I’ll find her something else. If she thinks she can’t work sitting down, she will discover that she is mistaken.”

“Wait a minute. I’ve got a joke. A real one this time. Dot with a swollen knee. We shall have to call her Dot-and-go-one. See? Well, why don’t you laugh? I must go into the kitchen and tell them at once.”

Mabel sighed deeply. There were simply no words for him. He was right away outside, beyond the limit. In a few minutes he came back again.

“It certainly does look very pink,” he said.

“That’s the effect of the cold compress. Though why on earth you should——”

“I didn’t mean the knee, I meant the parasol. I’ll swear I did.”

“Well, whatever you meant, I wish you would keep out of the kitchen. I wish you wouldn’t address the servants by nicknames. I wish you wouldn’t be so abominably familiar with them.”

“Familiar? Well, hang it all, when a poor girl’s got a swollen knee it’s unfriendly not to show a little sympathy. It does no harm. I just chatted her on the peak——”

“You——?”

“As I said, I just patted her on the cheek, and asked her how she was getting on. No harm in that.”

“And now perhaps you’ll tell me what on earth I’m to do for a substitute. I don’t know of a single girl in this neighborhood who could come in and help.”

“I have it. I can save the situation. I have an idea. On the 16th inst., at Jawbones, Halfpenny Hole, Surrey, Mr. Luke Sharper, of an idea. Both doing well.”

“Would you mind telling me what you are talking about?”

“I’m talking about old Vessunt. He’s a foreman. Up at the factory. Fine old chap. Religious but quite honest. He’s got a daughter, Effie. Very superior girl. And she’s looking for a job. I can get her for you to-morrow morning. Effie Vessunt. Rather bright and sparkling, what?”

“At any rate, I can see her.”

“You can, even with the naked eye. But I say, you know, she really is rather superior. She’ll have to have her meals with us.”

“If I engage her, she will feed in the kitchen.”

“Mabel, must you always disagree with me? Have you no spirit of compromise? Can’t you meet me half way in a little thing like this?”

“If I met you half way the girl would have her meals in the passage. And I don’t suppose she’d like it, and anyhow she’d be in everybody’s way.”

“And this when I’ve just been of real use to you.”

“So you ought to be. You were indirectly responsible for the accident that gave Kate the swollen knee. It was your wretched old push-bike that she fell over.”

Luke wagged his ears. “Indirectly,” he said. “There are many of us in it indirectly. Dunlop, for instance. Niggers in a rubber plantation. Factories in Coventry. A retail shop in High Holborn. And me. All working together. Combining and elaborating in order to give Dot a nasty one on the knee-cap. It’s rather a great thought when you come to think it out that way.”

“I can’t see why you want to ride that old job-lot of scrap-iron at all. You might just as well go by train, now that the new line is opened. All my friends do it. Why can’t you go by train?”

“I believe I know the answer to that one. Don’t tell me. I’ll go upstairs and think it out.”

He went up to the frowsty study-bedroom, and sat down at his table. Mechanically he drew from his pocket the sheet of thirty stamps with which, after a few disparaging remarks, the lady at the post-office had supplied him. He spread them out before him. Thirty stamps. Thirty letters to Jona. He felt inclined to kiss every one of them.

He did not do so. He reflected that in the ordinary course of affixing them to the envelope he would put them to his lips in any case. It was not sense to do the same piece of work twice over.

Jona.

Should he, or shouldn’t he? He knew that he shouldn’t. Mabel would not like it. He ought to put Jona out of his mind, and to burn those stamps. But that was not economical. It was possible to have thirty stamps, and yet to avoid writing thirty love-letters to Jona. He folded them up and put them back in his pocket.

What was it he had come up to do? He remembered. Mabel had asked him a question. He ran downstairs and rejoined her.

“Because of the season ticket,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you asked me why I couldn’t go by train. I could get a season ticket, but I should lose it the first day. Then they fine you forty shillings, and make you buy another. And that would go on, and on, and on until I was bankrupt and a beggar. And we should have to go down the High Street together, singing hymns. And you never did have any voice, and——”

“Oh, that’ll do,” said Mabel, wearily.

“Look here,” he said, brightly, “I’ve brought you a present, Mabel. I think you will find these useful.”

He produced the postage stamps from his pocket.

“Just a few stamps,” he said.

“All right,” said Mabel, not taking them. “Stick them down anywhere.”

“They should be stuck down in the top right-hand corner,” he said; “but I leave it all entirely to you.”

He went out. She had not even thanked him.

CHAPTER VIII

And so the months passed away. He completed another little monograph for the firm entitled “Pulp,” of which he said beautifully that it was the beginning of all jam and the end of all books. Then he remembered that Jona had rather seemed to encourage him in his idea of writing his biography. He planned it all out in his mind. He pictured himself wrongly suspected, loathed by everybody (except Jona), suffering horribly, terribly ill. He thoroughly enjoyed it.

He enjoyed it so much that he felt he had to tell Mabel about it. He did.

“Mabel,” he said, “have you ever realized that under certain circumstances the most awful things would happen to me that ever befell the hero of a melodrama? Just take the train of events. Effie has an illegitimate child. She writes and tells you about it.”

“But she wouldn’t,” said Mabel. “She was with me for a fortnight, and I always kept her in her place.”

“Well, she refuses to say who the father is.”

“Why?” asked Mabel.

“Because the story can’t possibly go on if she doesn’t. Please don’t interrupt me again until I’ve finished. Effie has no money. She goes to see her father, who will take her in, but not the child. It’s an accepted convention that the unmarried mother must be parted from her child. So Effie and the baby turn up here. I say that they shall stay. You say that in that case you’ll go, which you do, having previously dismissed Dot and Dash. In consequence, everybody in this neighborhood cuts me, I am turned out of my business, and as the dates agree, I am believed to be the father of the child. Effie has the housework to do as well as the baby to look after, and in consequence, I am horribly neglected. The handle of the front door is not polished, and when an old friend comes down from London to see me, I have nothing to give him for lunch except cold meat and a fruit tart that is no longer in its first youth. So I take a week-end at Brighton without Effie. She cleans my straw hat with oxalic acid, which I have bought for her. I throw away the hat and buy another. While I am at Brighton she kills herself and the baby with what is left of the oxalic acid. At the inquest I am unable to say anything except ‘Look here,’ am severely censured by the coroner’s jury, and nearly lynched by the crowd outside. I go back to the house and find a letter on the clock, which entirely clears me and tells me that the father of the child is the son of Dobson, the dirty dog who sneaked my partnership. So I go to see Dobson and find that he has just got the news that his son is dead. I therefore burn Effie’s letter so as to get the sole evidence of my innocence out of the way, and then have a hæmorrhage of the brain. And you divorce me, and then——”

“Look here, Luke, you’d better go and lie down for a little. You’ve been bicycling in the sun, you know.”

“What do you mean? Wouldn’t it happen so? Isn’t it all absolutely inevitable?”

“Not absolutely,” said Mabel. “The previous knowledge that one has of you would go for something. There was never any sign of an attachment of that kind between you and Effie. If you had been the father of the child you would most certainly not have left her alone, without any provision, at the time the child was born. I should be quite certain of that. So would the two maids here. Effie would apply to young Dobson, and failing him, to old Dobson. This is about the last house to which she would come. Her instinct would be to keep away from the neighborhood where she was known. If her own father agreed to take her in, it’s almost certain that he would take the baby as well. Your ideas about that convention are exaggerated, and old-fashioned. If she did come here, and you insisted on her staying, I should put up with it, though I should not like it, until some arrangement could be made for her to go elsewhere with her child. And that arrangement could be made easily and quickly. I do not see why I should dismiss the maids, and if I did they are paid with your money, and are much more devoted to you than they are to me. You would only have to speak and they would remain. No seducer would bring his victim and her child to the house where his wife was living. You would be thought quixotic but not guilty. If Effie saw that you were cut by everybody and that she had brought trouble on you, she would be particularly careful not to cause more serious trouble for you by committing suicide. And if she committed suicide, she would not implicate you in it by making you buy the poison. She would neither make fruit tart, nor clean a straw hat, because she simply would not have the time. You don’t know much about young babies, do you? I should not divorce you, and should have no evidence on which I could get a divorce. In fact, the whole thing’s skittles. By the way, when did Effie have her baby?”

“She never did,” said Luke despondently. “That’s always the way. Whenever I make a beautiful thing, some cow always gets it. It’s happened before. If I wrote my beautiful biography, some cow would parody it. The world’s full of cows.”

“Well, I’m sorry, of course,” said Mabel. “You can do most incredibly foolish things. You do frequently fail to say what you should say. But even with those advantages, I doubt if it would be possible for you to incur so much suffering and suspicion as you describe. I shall have to think out some other little martyrdom for you.”

CHAPTER IX

“Milk?”

“Thanks.”

“Sugar?”

“No.”

“Buns?”

“One.”

And then they sat and gazed at one another, slowly champing buns in which they took no interest whatever. After twenty minutes Lady Tyburn said: “My chauffeur has had no tea. He must drive to Gallows and have tea at once. Will you come too?”

“As far as the gates,” he said. “I’ll walk back. I’m not coming in.”

“Do,” she said. “Bill has borrowed a panther from the Mammoth Circus, and they’re having larks with it in the billiard-room.”

Luke shook his head. “I don’t like panthers,” he said wearily. “I don’t like anything much. Mabel looks like a panther sometimes.”

During the twenty minutes’ drive up to Gallows neither of them spoke.

When they reached the gate, Jona said: “Better come up to the house and finish our talk.”

“No,” said Luke; “stay here a little. There’s something I must say to you. I’ve been trying to say it for the last hour. It gets stuck. I shall pull it out somehow.”

Lady Tyburn sent the car away, and they sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree. He sat on one side, and she on the other, back to back. They could not bear to look one another in the face. Presently she said:

“You’re trembling, Lukie. I can feel it. Trembling. Like a jelly.”

“You’re another,” said Luke. “Oh, Jona. There’s something I’ve been trying to ask you for the last ten months, and perhaps there will never be another opportunity. Do you remember when you came to my office?”

She drove her elbow lightly into his ribs. It seemed to him to signify she did remember.

“There were things you said—‘Will you help yourself,’ with your hands out—‘magnet and tin-tack’—‘I made a mistake once.’ You said those things, Jona.”

“What a memory the young man has got,” said Jona, wistfully.

“Yes, but what did you mean?”

“Well, they were what is called conversation. You talk too, you know, sometimes.”

“But that doesn’t tell me what you meant.”

“They meant,” she said in a plain, matter-of-fact way, “that I ought not to have married Bill. I ought to have married you, Lukie. My mistake entirely. Don’t apologize.”

She jerked herself backward, and he fell off the tree. He lay on the grass moaning. “O crikey! O crikey! O crikey, crikey, crikey!”

2

He got up slowly. He was entirely covered with small pieces of dried grass. Jona came round the end of the tree and began picking pieces of grass off him.

“You’re in a mess,” she said.

“We’re both in a mess,” he said. “Right in. Up to the neck.”

“I don’t know how much longer I shall be able to stand it,” said Jona. “In London it was actresses. Down here it’s ladies from the Mammoth Circus. We have three equestriennes and a tight-rope dancer staying with us, and he makes love to them all. He’s not been sober—not noticeably—for the last six weeks. I still keep up the bright badinage, but it sometimes seems artificial. It’s wearing thin. Everything’s wearing thin. Very thin. Oh Lukie!”

“Listen,” said Luke resolutely. “I’m going to be noble. This is little Lukie, underneath his straw hat, being noble. Some men would confess their love for you. They would pour out in words the passion that was consuming them. I shall not. In fact, you’ll have to guess. Only, if the time ever does come that you simply cannot stand it any longer, apply to me. Applications should be sent to the office address in care of Mabel. Write distinctly. Good-by, Jona.”

He tore himself from her, and reeled away, not knowing what direction he was taking.

After an hour he found himself standing in front of his own office. It was just as well. He had left his bicycle there.

Diggle came down the stairs into the street, and Luke walked up to him at once: “Can I have that partnership now?” said Luke.

Diggle glanced at his watch.

“Applications of this kind,” he said, “should be made in office hours. It is now after six. Good evening, Mr. Sharper.”

Mechanically, automatically, not knowing what he did, Luke prepared for his ride home to Jawbones. Then he became aware that he was pushing something along on the pavement. What was it? It was a bicycle. He pushed it into a policeman. The policeman asked him to take it into the road.

He walked along in the road now, still wheeling his bicycle, and looking all around him.

What a lot of shops seemed to be selling brooms. Yes, and soap. Long bars of yellow soap. There were big advertisements on the boardings. He read them aloud: “WASHO. WORKS BY ITSELF.”

And again: “PINGO FOR THE PAINT. A PENNY PACKET OF PINGO DOES THE TRICK.” There was a picture of a beautiful lady using Pingo, her face expressing rapture.

What did it all mean?

He did not know. But it meant that spring was coming. Spring, with its daffodils, its pretty little birds and all the other things.

He mounted and rode away. A meaningless string of words seemed to circle round and round in his brain.

“Jona. Washo. Crikey.”

At dinner that night, Mabel said: “We shall begin our spring-cleaning to-morrow. I intend that it shall be done particularly thoroughly this year. It will take some weeks and will probably cause you inconvenience. But you like suffering, don’t you?”

“Spring,” said Luke, thoughtfully. “Not all daffodils. No.”

3

A little later Mr. Alfred Jingle, solicitor, talking to his friend the artist, may be permitted to throw some light on events.

“Saw Sharper yesterday. Don’t like it. Awful. Went to his house. What? Yes, looking for lunch. Brass knob on the front door blazing fit to blind you. No curtains at any of the windows. Sound like a carpet being beaten from the garden at the back. Sharper himself leaning out of upstairs window. Face ashen grey. Ears twitching. ‘Don’t come in,’ he calls out, ‘I’ll come down. Lunch in Dilborough.’

“Terrific noise of Sharper falling downstairs. Out he comes, rubbing knee. Hat bashed in.

“‘Had a little accident,’ he says. ‘They took out the stair rods. Carpet loose. We’ll go in by train. Wouldn’t ask you to lunch here. Had dinner in the bath-room last night. Mabel’s got her head in a duster.’

“I asked him what was the matter. And if he spent the entire day leaning out of that window.

“‘Yes, Jingle,’ he said. ‘I have to lean out. Do you know the smell of size? They use it a good deal in spring-cleaning. It’s like glue and decayed fish. House is full of it. It hurts. Horribly. Damnably. I’m glad you’ve come, Jingle. I was to have had lunch in the housemaid’s cupboard. But Mabel is an excellent housekeeper. Thorough.’

“Tried to cheer him up. Told him it would soon be over. And Summer would come.

“‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but if Summer don’t! Size and spring-cleaning for ever and ever. Do you believe in eternal punishment?’

“Lunched at the ‘Crown.’ Stuffed a whiskey into him. Had six myself. No good. Said the cold beef tasted of size. Tried to switch him off; on to politics. Hadn’t anything to say on that subject, because there was no room in his house in which there was enough space left to open a paper.

“‘Everything’s put where everything else ought to be,’ he said. ‘Place for everything, and my foot in a pail of soapsuds. Did you know that Washo worked by itself? Have you tried Pingo for the paint? These pickles taste of Pingo. Had to do the walls of my study-room with it. Mabel made me. She’s an excellent housekeeper. But the world does seem to be entirely filled with dust, and the smell of decayed fish, don’t you think?’

“Cheerful talk for a luncheon party, wasn’t it? That man’s on the verge of a breakdown. Don’t like it at all. That wife of his is overdoing it. Shall look him up again next week. His mind’s not right. He forgot to pay for the lunch. I suggested that I should do it, and he let me. Something seriously wrong there. Seriously. Have a drink.”

4

Three days later Mr. Alfred Jingle resumed the subject.

“I told you things were bad with Sharper. They’re worse. Much. I was there this morning. Enquired at his business place. They said their Mr. Sharper had gone out. Took a cab to Halfpenny Hole. Halfway there spotted Sharper sitting on a bank by the roadside with his bicycle beside him. Face like a tortured hyena. I got out and asked him what he was doing there.

“‘Nowhere else to go,’ he said. ‘Spring-cleaning at home. And now they’ve started spring-cleaning at the office. All my dear little children piled up on the floor in the dust.’

“Told him I didn’t know he had a family.

“‘I mean my books. Lilac morocco. At my own expense. The firm wouldn’t stick it. Decorators were sending out for more size when I left. I can’t go back there. Even if there were no spring-cleaning I couldn’t go to Jawbones. Mabel gave me a list of things to buy in Dilborough. Glass soap and soft paper. I mean soft soap and glass paper. Lots of other things. I’ve forgotten to get any of them. All I can do is to sit here until the world comes to an end.’

“Well, I shoved him into my cab, and drove back to the ‘Crown’ at Dilborough. On the way I tried to buck him up a bit, but it was no use. He was absolutely broken-down. I asked him whose turn it was to pay for lunch, and he said he thought it was mine. Memory going. Well, I stuffed a drink into him and took nine myself. I can tell you I needed them. Then I got him to go back to business. Said he must save those lilac-bound children of his. Bright idea, what? Then I told him he could buy the things for his wife afterwards. He went like a lamb, too broken to resist. I confess I am worried about him. I must try to see him again if

5

a chance of doing so.”

(And that shows you again, how the number of a chapter-section may be used economically.)

CHAPTER X

“Darling Lukie,” she wrote, “I can bear it no more. Take me away, please. Shall I come along to your office, or will you call for the goods? Jona.”

He collapsed in a chair, his head buried in his hands.

Half-an-hour later the clerk came in to say that the messenger was still waiting.

“Sit down,” said Luke.

The clerk sat down for half-an-hour. Luke still meditated. Then the office boy came in to fetch the clerk. It was necessary to do something, to decide at once. His promise to Mabel had been quite definite. He would bring back the spring-cleaning requisites on his bicycle that evening. There had been a sardonic cruelty in sending him to purchase the materials for his own torture. Still, he had promised.

Drawing a sheet of the firm’s paper with the memo. head on it towards him, he wrote as follows:

“Jona: I can’t get away to elope with you to-day. My wife won’t let me. If you are still of the same mind on Saturday, the train I shall take for Brighton leaves Victoria at eleven.”

He sent the letter down to the messenger, and then Diggle entered.

“Do you want to see me about the partnership?” said Sharper.

“No. I wanted to see you about the full-page advertisement for the ‘Church Times.’ Have you written it?”

“I’ve not, so to speak, written it.”

“Well, Sharper, I’ve been talking to Dobson about you. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but our office space here is very limited. We are of the opinion that perhaps the amount of room you occupy here is intrinsically of more value than any services which you render to the business, or even the pleasure that your society naturally gives us. I don’t know if you take my meaning.”

“Do you want to turn me out?” said Sharper.

“Don’t put it like that. You don’t seem to know anything about business. You never do any work. You’re playing about with Lady Tyburn in a way that’ll bring scandal on the firm. But we don’t want to turn you out. We don’t want to do anything harsh. All we say is that we think it would be better for all concerned if you don’t come here again. I think that will be all. Good evening, Mr. Sharper.”

Luke went out and purchased the articles Mabel had asked him to buy. He then went to four different chemists, and at each one purchased a little oxalic acid, saying in each case that he wanted it to clean a straw hat.

With his bicycle laden considerably above the Plimsoll mark, he pedalled wearily homewards. He only fell off once, and it was a pity that this broke the bottle of turpentine, for he happened to be carrying it in the inside pocket of his coat.

CHAPTER XI

“Have they?” said Mabel. “Of course I knew they would. I’ve been expecting it for some time past. You see, you’re not fitted for business. I don’t know that you’re particularly fitted for anything. Well, when you talked to me about that Effie nonsense, I told you I’d arrange a little martyrdom for you if I could. Haven’t I done it?”

“You have. In the interest of my sanity——”

“In the interests of your what?”

“In the interests of my sanity I shall go to Brighton for the week-end.”

“Do,” said Mabel. “You’re terribly in the way here. It’s about the first sensible idea you’ve had for this last year.”

By half-past ten next morning he was on the platform at Victoria station. Would Jona be there?

Apparently not. He caught a distant glimpse of Lord Tyburn, but it was not with him that he was proposing to elope. Besides, Tyburn was accompanied by a somewhat highly painted and decorated young lady. Luke waited till the last moment, and waited in vain. He stepped into the train just as it was moving off.

2

At this point we will ask our Mr. Alfred Jingle to oblige again.

“Tell you what,” he said to his artist friend. “I was wrong about Sharper again. I thought he’d reached the limit of human mess and martyrdom. He hadn’t. He’d not got within a street of it. He’s there now. Right up to the limit and leaning over the edge.

“Down at Brighton this week-end with my old missus. Sitting out on the pier. Sunday morning. Listening to the band. Overture to ‘William Tell.’ Always is. Whenever I strike a band, it’s ‘William Tell’ or ‘Zampa.’ Every time.

“Suddenly the missus says to me, ‘Who’s that old chap over there with a face like a turnip?’

“I looked up. It was Luke Sharper. Looking ghastly. His hair was grey. His face was grey. Even his flannel trousers were grey. All grey and worn. I don’t mean the trousers particularly. General effect, you know. Ears drooping down with no life or motion in them. I went up to him and asked him what brought him down to Brighton.

“‘Go away,’ he said. ‘I’m a leper. I’m an outcast. I’m a pariah dog. Go before I bring misery on you.’

“I told him I’d chance it, and asked him again what he was doing at Brighton.

“‘I’ve eloped,’ he said.

“‘With whom?’ I asked.

“‘Nobody. She never turned up. That’s not my fault. In the sight of Heaven we are all equal, and I’m an eloper. I’m a faithless hound. That’s not all, Jingle. They’ve thrown me out of the business. And that’s not all. I bought four packets of oxalic acid. I’ve put them down where Mabel is bound to see them. There’s one on her pillow, one on the clock, one on the piano, and one on the mantelpiece. You see? I’m a murderer. Mabel will take the hint, and will commit suicide. That will upset Dot and Dash, and they will commit suicide too. I only hope the man who spilt whitewash over my bookcase will commit suicide as well. Don’t come and see me in the condemned cell. I don’t want to see anybody any more. That’s why I’m sitting on Brighton pier on a warm Sunday morning.’

“‘You’ve got this wrong, Sharper,’ I said. ‘I know your wife. She won’t commit suicide because you’ve gone. She possibly might have done it if you had stopped. So your maids won’t be upset, and they won’t commit suicide either. And the painter’s man who spilt the whitewash over your books will be enjoying the joke over his Sunday dinner. You’re no good at the leper-and-pariah business. Come over and be introduced to my missus.’

“‘What you say might be true if I were a real man, but I have horrible doubts. I don’t feel like a real man.’

“‘Come off it,’ I said. ‘What do you feel like, then?’

“‘I feel like a lot of tripe out of some damn-silly book.’

“Well, I took him over to the missus, and she got on the buzz. She’s an energetic talkist. He never got time to say he was a leper once. Then some pals of hers came up to talk to her, and he and I escaped. I asked him what he was going to do. He said he was going back to Halfpenny Hole directly, in order to save the coroner’s officer the trouble of fetching him. Then he asked me to have a drink. We had three each. He rushed off to the station, and left me to pay. A man in that state is not fit to be alone. And it’s not too safe for anybody who happens to be with him. I let him go.”

3

It was half-past five when Luke got back to Jawbones again. He rang the bell. As the door was not opened, he rang again.

Then from the garden behind the house he heard the sound of voices and laughter. He recognized the laugh. It was Dot’s. It was a full-bodied, fruity laugh. Luke walked round the house and into the garden to see what was happening.

On the lawn sat Dot, Dash, and the first and second footmen from Gallows. A table showed that tea, including bottled beer, had been served with some profusion. But the banquet was over and all four reclined in deck-chairs, smoking cigarettes.

Luke stared at them blankly. “Afraid I’m rather interrupting,” he stammered.

“Well, old bean,” said Dot. “You do come as a bit of a surprise. We’d not expected you before Tuesday. But our two gentlemen friends—Albert and Hector—I think you’ve met them—have to be back at their job at six. So we shan’t keep you long. The kitchen door’s open if you care to slip into the house and wait.”

Luke’s powerful mind made a rapid deduction. This could never have happened if Mabel had not been powerless to prevent it. So Mabel must have ... Yes, the oxalic acid.

“Can you tell me,” he said in sepulchral tones, “where I shall find the body of my poor wife?”

“Afraid I can’t,” said Dot. Her laughter jarred on him.

“Let us,” he said, “be reverent. When did she die?”

Here Dash, under the pink parasol, broke in, “But she’s alive. And I’ll bet she’s a good deal livelier than she’s been for years past. I helped her pack, and it was some trousseau. The old girl’s done a bunk. See? Skipped it with a gentleman friend of hers.”

“You might have mentioned that before,” said Luke, aggrieved. “I quite thought that something was the matter.”

“Well, she’s left a letter for you in your almost-silver cigarette case. You’ll find it in the bath-room, balanced on the hot-water tap. You run along and read it. You’re the least little bit in the way at this tea party.”

4

Seated on the edge of the bath, Luke read as follows:

“You could always see every point of view except one, and that was your wife’s.

“Once or twice the sting of your jelly-fish of a conscience made you try to be nice to me. There are words and acts from a man to a woman which may be lovely to the woman if they come spontaneously and naturally. If they are produced as by a force-pump, they are an insult. If you tried to hide the pump, it was a poor effort.

“When you took up with that Tyburn minx, I thought that you had realized the situation, that you saw that I found life with you detestable and intolerable, and that you meant to give me a chance to divorce you. I employed a private detective with what I had saved out of the house-money, and had you watched. The detective reported that there was nothing good enough—or bad enough——for the High Court, and that the woman seemed to be doing most of the work.

“So as the mixture of cowardice and selfishness which you call your conscience would not let you give me a chance to divorce you, I determined to make you divorce me. The first thing to do was to get you out of the way. It is so trying and undignified to elope if a husband is looking on, and possibly interfering. So I adopted a system of intensive spring-cleaning. I don’t think I left out anything which could inconvenience and annoy you. It went on and on. No house has been spring-cleaned like this since the world began. I fancy it was the whitewash over your books that finally shunted you. You left in the early morning. I packed at leisure and left in the evening, taking with me a gentleman who financed that great success, Doom Dagshaw’s Mammoth Circus.

“As he is not in the book, I may mention that he is a Mr. Nathan Samuel. But no matter. A nose by any other name would smell as efficiently. He is a true Christian with no fault except his love for me.

“The necessary particulars will be sent to your solicitors, and I hope you will then get busy.

“Ta-ta, old crock. Yours, Mabel.

“P.S.—You shouldn’t leave oxalic acid about like that. Don’t you know it’s a poison? I’ve hidden it underneath your dress-shirts, in case of accidents.”

Luke put the letter down. There was a step outside the door and Dot entered.

“Thought I should find you here,” said Dot. “Everything all right?”

“Couldn’t be better. But why did she leave the letter on the hot-water tap?”

“Oh, that was just a little joke of hers. She said you always got into any hot water that might be going about, and so you’d be sure to find it there.”

“Do you see what this means, Dot? It means that in future we can play at boats without any fear of interruption.”

“M’yes,” said Dot. “It’s not the very devil of a game, is it? Been over the house yet? I must say it does look nice, now all the cleaning and decorating’s finished. Albert and Hector both noticed it.”

“Yes, very nice. I suppose you and Dash would like to be getting dinner for me.”

“That’s what we’re panting after. But it can’t be done, because there’s nothing to eat. At least, there’s nothing for you. Besides, after this afternoon we are both emotionally worn-out. And that’s not all. Albert and Hector brought us a bit of news from Gallows. Just you take my tip and ask no questions. You take the train into Dilborough and dine at the ‘Crown.’ You might—I don’t say you will, but you might—get a bit of a surprise. If you hurry you’ll catch the 7.5.”

Luke thrust his wife’s letter into his pocket, and hurried.

5

“No,” said the sad-eyed waiter, in reply to Luke’s enquiry. “No, we do not serve the dinner on Sunday night. In Dilborough Sunday night, there is what you call, nothing doing. You can have a nice chop.”

“I hate chops,” said Luke moodily. “All right, get me a chop.”

“The lady who stay here, she have a chop too. She also say she hate chops. You have to wait a little time perhaps, because the chef is out Sunday evening. You wait in the drawing-room. It is very nice. Very comfortable. There is a newspaper of last Friday evening.”

Luke submitted and entered the fly-haunted drawing-room. He sat down with his head in his hands. Mabel’s letter had been characteristically unlike her. Her letters were never in the least bit like herself. That was perhaps their only attraction. It was only in the postscript that he seemed actually to hear her speak.

“Poor Nathan Samuel!” he said to himself. “Poor Moses Nathan Modecai Samuel!”

The door opened and Jona came in, clad in a betrayed-heroine tea-gown. She looked beautiful but tragic.

“Jona,” he cried, springing to his feet.

She shrank back, covering her face with her hands.

“Don’t speak to me,” she said. “Don’t come near me. I’m a leper, a pariah, and an outcast.”

“Oh, look here, hang it all, you can’t, you know. That’s mine. If there’s any lepering to be done, I do that. Outcast? How do you mean outcast?”

“Haven’t you heard?” she said.

“No,” said Luke. “Come and sit on my knee, and tell me all your troubles.”

“I oughtn’t,” she said, but she did.

“You didn’t turn up at Victoria yesterday. Couldn’t you leave your husband?”

“I couldn’t,” she said. “I couldn’t, because I’ve not got a husband. And have never had a husband. One of Bill’s previous wives started to make a fuss, and he made a clean breast of it to me. He’d married in two different names before he married me, and both wives are still living. He went to Brighton on Saturday to marry one more. Because he wants to get his picture, as the peer convicted of trigamy, on the back page of the ‘Daily Mail,’ with the fourth wife inset. So you see what has happened. It was my fault, but that’s how I come to be in the pariah class. Can you bear me any longer?”

“Yes,” said Luke, “you’re not heavy.”

And then the sad-eyed waiter came in without knocking, and they broke away.

“I beg pardon,” said the waiter. “Perhaps I interrupt a little. I come to say the chops is ready. Shall I put the two places close together?”

“Very close together,” said Luke.

6

They entered the dining-room.

“You needn’t remain,” said Luke to the waiter. “We’ll help ourselves.”

“Ver’ good,” said the waiter. “I understand. I am since three years of experience in the week-end business. I come when you ring—not before.”

Luke and Jona talked together earnestly for an hour. Then they remembered they had been intending to dine. Luke removed the cover from the dish and looked at two large melancholy chops, frozen hard.

“Can we?” said Luke.

“Not in this life,” said Jona. “Get it removed.”

Luke produced a visiting-card, and wrote on the back of it: “A Present for a Good Dog. From Jona and Lukie!” He put the card in the dish and replaced the cover. Then he investigated the wine list, rang the bell, and ordered champagne and dry biscuits to be put in the drawing-room.

(The reader is requested to look out. Once more the numbers of the section will be used as a part of the sections. The price of paper is still very high.)

“Just imagine,” said Luke. “Only this morning I was convinced that life was hell. Absolute hell.”

“And now?” asked Jona, shyly.

“Now I know that it’s

7,”

he said, and kissed her.

Luke walked back. It was some time in the small hours that he entered his house burglariously by forcing open the window of a room that had once been called a den.

As he sat at breakfast the next morning, Dot said: “Hope they gave you a good dinner at the ‘Crown’ last night.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t really remember what we

8.”

“All love and honey, what?” suggested Dot.

“Dot,” said Luke, “don’t be asi—

9.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Dot “You don’t need to pay any at—

10

tion to my chaff.”

EPILOGUE

Our friend, Mr. Alfred Jingle, solicitor, arranged everything splendidly. He prevented Luke from inserting, in a moment of enthusiasm, an advertisement under the Fashionable Intelligence in the daily press that a divorce had been arranged and would shortly take place, between Luke Sharper, Esq., formerly of Jawbones, Halfpenny Hole, and Mabel, his wife. The case was undefended, and the day after the decree was made absolute Luke married Jona.

Nor did Mr. Alfred Jingle forget, when he made out his bill of costs, to include in his out-of-pocket expenses, the cost of certain luncheons and drinks which Mr. Sharper would, no doubt, have defrayed had he not at that time been in a condition of absent-mindedness induced by martyrdom.

Not only did Lord Tyburn succeed in getting his photograph on to the back page of the “Daily Mail.” There was also another photograph of the four ladies whom he had married, reading from left to right. He did everything well.

THE END

Transcriber's Notes:

1. This book is a parody on the biographies of it's times; as a result, very few changes have been made, other than obvious typesetter errors.

2. On the title page, there were two lines of words that were typeset with "strikethroughs"; these have been indicated by the addition of "=" before and after the lines.

3. The original book had no Table of Contents; this e-text has added one for the reader’s convenience.