Pretty creatures

VII

Next morning he despatched the vanity-bag, with a note, to Frau von Kranich, requesting her to hand it to the proper owner, and having done that he felt relieved, and even whistled. When he came back to lunch, he was informed that in his absence Herr Direktor Schulz had telephoned no less than half-a-dozen times, and that Frau von Kranich had also telephoned. “Aha!” he thought “They’ve smelt a rat! They’ve got the wind up!” He remembered the attitude of Frau von Kranich right from the beginning. He recalled the glib, glossy manner of Herr Schulz. A bag of vanity! What was he after? What was this indeed? An attempt at the eleventh hour to enmesh him, an American, into matrimonial entanglements. He pictured how they had prevailed on her, the dollars looming largely in their mind, to give up the student and to accept him before too late. Like a good American, he was afraid of being drawn into the dark jungles and tangles of European affairs—family affairs most of all—and, for the first time in his life, he perceived the deep significance, the traditional sacrosanctity of the Monroe Doctrine of uncompromising isolation and entrenchment. As he finished his soup, the maid came in to say that Herr Direktor Schulz was at the telephone and had also sent up his son with a message of an urgent kind. The blood rushed to his temples. “A plot!” he thought. “A finely laid snare!” Mr. Mackintosh Beck became that most scared of all things—a middle-aged gentleman afraid of being seduced. But he conquered these insidious thoughts. He held fast to his chair and spoke:

“My head is bloody, but unbowed.”

He packed in a frenzy, strapping up his bags before he was quite ready, and at the last shoving things into his pockets, and set off to the station, and as he crossed the bridge chucked The God Triumphant, unread, into the river. He was pacing the platform, muttering through his teeth—

when he heard a heavy puffing at his back, and turning, he perceived Herr Schulz in the square bowler hat and astrakhan coat (looking like an English lord), striding up to him in his pale-yellow boots. “Herr Doktor Mackintosh!” The man was holding out his arms. “Ach! how incredibly glad I am to have caught you!”

“Now he’ll begin throwing the girl at me when I don’t want her,” the American reflected, and steeled his heart, and bowed his head as if to meet the attack. Herr Schulz breathed heavily and wiped his brow. “It’s ... awful! On the one hand, this lovely weather—these mountains—lakes—the breaking rigour in the sky—when I look at nature I feel—I feel I want to go praying through the world! On the other hand, this other life, immediate, extravagant, calls on my nervous force.” He spoke on, with little wavy movements of the hand. “If I had some great sorrow, by God I would bear it—like a Lucifer, I would bear it! But these petty, senseless, dirty little pinpricks ... setbacks, bills, petty tyrannies, telephone calls, interruptions. At last, I could stand it no longer, I opened the door. When I’m angry I’m like a raging elephant. I’m a big man, and my family know that at such moments I am capable of anything; they are then like frightened mice—he, he! ‘I want Herr Doktor Mackintosh!’ I shouted. I felt that I must have a kindred soul to talk to—immediately, that very moment—if I was not to suffocate of rage and bitterness which rises—rises and boils here in my breast! My wife began undoing trunks and boxes, looking, if you please, for my old waterproof! I lost my temper. It’s not the act, the absurdity of looking for a raincoat when you crave the presence of a human soul: it’s the thought behind the act—or rather this sheer thoughtlessness and inattentiveness, this—this invidious meanness and perversity latent in mankind that stabs me. I said: Herr Doktor Mackintosh. There was no possible chance of misapprehension. Well, I had them telephone to you all morning—to Frau von Kranich. They couldn’t get you. They can never get anything. I slammed the door and went. Hellmuth ran up against me and said they’d told him you had gone straight to the station. And now I’m here. Well, how are you? Where are you going?”

“At first to Vienna. Then to Venice, Florence, Rome, Paris, London, and so home via New York.”

Herr Schulz looked at him, and down at his own pale-yellow boots, but with a vacant stare, obviously not perceiving either. “We poets need friends. Goethe had Schiller. I have nobody. I am alone, and the divine gift in me is dribbling to no purpose. There are no real people here. The professors—I tell them straight what I think of them—he, he! They don’t like me. Yes, we need friends. Even little poets,” Herr Schulz added, unexpectedly.

He listened to Herr Schulz. And he experienced an agreeable feeling of elation at his self-control. That he was able, for the time, to shelve his love and give attention to those other matters proved to him that he was stronger than his love, not then suspecting that, perhaps, his love itself had temporarily abated. “Been doing any work?” he asked.

“My head is full of ideas—for a novel—a philosophical work—a series of short stories—an epic—a drama—and a comedy. But what I lack is peace. Peace and the opportunity to collect my mood and spirits.”

Mr. Beck stood speechless, thinking hard what he could say. “Your book was wonderful,” he said at length.

“It was very well received.”

The guards were already slamming the doors, and Mr. Beck stepped inside, and let down the window and shook hands with Herr Schulz. The whistle went. The train moved. And Herr Schulz, waving his hat in the air, his long silver locks flying grotesquely in the wind, receded and glided away.

“She had not stirred at all then....” He felt a mild pang for his pride. He had adjusted his things on the rack. It was hot in the compartment, but he had not yet taken off his coat because the old lady next him was sitting on his coat buttons. Past glided the long yellow building, the barracks, the hills, the Café Schindler, the City Hall, the river—towers and pinnacles. “All the same,” he reflected, “I think I like the old duffer best.”

THE BIG DRUM

The brass band played Im Köpfle zwei Augle, and it seemed to her that the souls of these men were like notes of this music, crying for something elusive, for something in vain. To blare forth one’s love on a brass trumpet! An earnest of one’s high endeavour fallen short through the inadequate matter of brass; but withal in these abortive notes one felt the presence of the heights the instrument would reach, alas, if it but could!

It touched her to the heart. She would have liked her Otto to play the trumpet instead of the big drum. It seemed more romantic. Otto was not a bit romantic. He was a soldier all right, but he looked more like a man who had started life as a shoemaker’s apprentice, had grown old, and was still a shoemaker’s apprentice. The band played well—a compact synthetic body—but Otto was a forlorn figure who watched the proceedings with sustained and patient interest and was suffered by them, every now and then, to raise his drumstick and to give a solitary, judicious “Bang!” And he—a tall gaunt man—seemed as though he were ashamed of his small part. And as she watched him she felt a pang of pity for herself: wedded to him, she would be forgotten, while life, indifferent, strode by; and no one in the world would care whether she had her share of happiness before she died. And the music brought this out acutely, as if along the hard stone-paved indifference of life it dragged, dragged on excruciating its living bleeding soul. It spoke of loneliness, of laughter, of the pathos, pity and futility of life.

She watched them. The bayonets at their side. The military badges of rank. The hard discipline. And the music seemed to say, “Stop! What are you doing? Why are you doing this?” And thoughts flowed into her mind. Of soldiers dreaming on a Sunday afternoon. A fierce old corporal, of whom everyone was afraid, talking to her of children and of daisies. Soldiers who, too, had dreams in long waves—of what? she did not know—but not this. And the men who stood up and blew the brass trumpets seemed to say, and the shining trumpets themselves seemed to say: “We were not born for the Army; we were born for something better—though Heaven only knows what it is!”

That was so. Undeniably so. Yet she wished it were otherwise. It helped to make allowances for Otto. Whatever else he lacked, it made her think at least he had a soul. But to be wedded for life to the big drum! She did not fancy the idea. It didn’t seem a proper career. But Otto showed no sign of wanting to “get on”—even in the orchestra. The most exasperating thing about it all was that Otto showed no sign of even trying! She had asked him if he would not, in time, “move on” and take over—say, the double-bass. He did not seem to think it either feasible or necessary. Or necessary! He had been with the big drum for close on twelve years. “It’s a good drum,” he had said. And that was all.

There was no ... “go” in him. That was it: no go. It was no use denying it. As she watched him—gaunt and spectacled—she wished Otto were more of a man and less of an old maid. The conductor, a boozer with a fat red face full of pimples, some dead and dried up, others still flourishing, was a gallant—every inch a man. He had the elasticity and suppleness and military alertness of the continental military man. She could not tell his rank from the stripes on his sleeves, but thought he must be a major. His heels were high and tipped with indiarubber, and so were straight and smart, but his trousers lacked the footstrap to keep them in position—poor dilapidated Austrian Army! How low it had sunk! Nevertheless they were tight and narrow and showed off the major’s calves to advantage. He wore a pince-nez, but a rimless kind, through which gazed a pair of not altogether innocent eyes. But a man and a leader of men. While Otto had no rubber on his heels. His heels looked eaten away. He wore a pair of spectacles through which he peered from afar at his neighbour’s music-stand, and at the appointed time—not one-tenth of a second too late or to early—down came the drumstick with the long-awaited “Bang!” So incidental, so contemptible was Otto’s part that, in addition to handling the drum, he had to turn the pages for the man who played the cymbals. It seemed to her humiliating. It was very wrong that Otto had no music-stand of his own.

He smiled shyly, and she turned away, annoyed. The little modiste walked on, meeting the stream of people who promenaded the path surrounding the bandstand; a man on high heels, three girls with a pinched look, a famous Tyrolese basso with a long ruddy beard, a jeune premier with whiskers and hair like a wig, whose look appeared to imply: “Here am I.” Innsbruck looked morose that Sunday morning, and the military band in the park executed music that was tattered, gross, a little common, yet compelling, even like the daily fare of life. Oh, why were there no heroes? Of course she would have loved to be dominated. That’s what men were for. She was a womanly woman. From Vienna. Exalted, brimming over with life. These men of the Tyrol! And as for Otto? Why, she could have only waved her hand!

She began to wonder whether she had not really better break it off with him. If men would but realise how little was required from them. Only an outward gesture of romance: a touch sufficed, the rest would be supplied by woman’s powerful imagination. Not even so much. A mere abstention from the cruder forms of clumsiness, a surface effort to conceal one’s feeblest worst. A mere semblance of mastery, a glimpse of a will. In short, anything at all that would provide the least excuse for loving him as she so wished to do. A minute she stood, thinking. “A minimum. Hardly as much.” There passed along the man on high heels, the three girls with the pinched look, the Tyrolese basso with the long ruddy beard, the jeune premier with whiskers and hair like a wig, whose look seemed to say, “Here am I”; then again the man on high heels, the three girls with the pinched look, the Tyrolese singer, and again the “jeune premier” whose look implied, “Here am I.” They walked round and round as if the park were a cage and there was nothing to do but walk round—with heads bent, lifeless, sullenly resolute. And again there came along the man on high heels. “The minimum of a minimum....”

The music resumed. She consulted her programme. Item 7. Potpourri from the operette Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss. She returned to the stand, prepared to give her fiancé another chance. Otto’s part, as before, was contemptible, more contemptible than before. He was inactive. He smiled shyly. She coloured. And, looking at him, she knew. She knew it was no use, her love could not bridge the chasm. He was despised by the rest of the band. A stick-in-the-mud. Not a man. A poor fish. Not for her....

The potpourri, as if suddenly turning the corner, broke out into a resounding march, and behold, the big drum now led the way. Bang! bang! bang! bang! Clearly he whacked, never once missing the chance; and the man with the cymbals, as if one heart and brain operated their limbs, clashed the cymbals in astounding unison, the big drum pounding away, pounding away, without cease or respite. And the trumpeters smiled, as who might say: “Good old big drum! You have come into your own at last!” Bang! bang! bang! bang! The big drum had got loud and excited. And all the people standing around looked as though a great joy had come into their lives; and if they had not been a little shy of each other they would have set out and marched in step with the music, taken up any cause and, if only because the music implied that all men were brothers, gone forth if need be and butchered another body of brothers, to the tearing, gladdening strains of the march, (since it is not known from what rational cause men could have marched to the war). And if in the park of the neighbouring town there were just such a band with just such a drum which played this same music, the people of the neighbouring town would have marched to this music and exterminated this town. The conductor, like a driver who, having urged his horse over the hill, leans back and leaves the rest to the horse, conceded the enterprise to the drummer, as if the hard, intricate work were now over and he was taking it easy; his baton moved perfunctorily in the wake of the drum, he looked round and acknowledged the greetings of friends with gay, informal salutes of the left hand, his bland smile freely admitting to all that it was no longer himself but the drum which led them to victory. Or rather, the hard fight had already been won and these, behold, were the happy results! Bang! bang! bang! bang! Strangers passed smiles of intimate recognition, old men nodded reminiscently, small boys gazed with rapt eyes, women looked sweet and bright-eyed, ready to oblige with a kiss; while the big drum, conscious of his splendid initiative, pounded away without cease or respite.

“Wonderful! Beautiful!” said the public surrounding them. And thought:

“Noise is a good thing.”

The band had described the first circle and was repeating it with added gusto and deliberation. The drum and the cymbals were pounding, pounding their due through the wholly inadequate blazing of brass. But these did not mind: “Every dog has his day”—and they followed the lead of the drum. He led them. He—Otto! Her Otto was leading them. God! Merciful Virgin! What had she done to deserve such happiness? Otto!... And she had doubted him, thought there was no “go” in him. No go! She burnt red with shame at the mere thought of it. He was all “go.” And didn’t he make them go, too, the whole lot of them? How he led them! Puffing, the sweat streaming down their purple faces, they blazed away till their cheeks seemed ready to burst, but Otto out-drummed them—annihilated their efforts. He—Otto! O, God! Watching him, people could hardly keep still. But that none of them stirred and all of them wanted to, added piquancy to the illusion of motion. They stood rooted—while the drum carried on for them: Bang! bang! bang! bang!

“Marvelous!” sighed the public around them.

Her Otto—cock of the walk! She could scarcely believe her eyes. Standing in front of the crowd, only a few paces from his side and raising herself on her toes ever so gently in rhythm with the music, so that by the very tininess of her movements she seemed to be sending added impetus into the band, as if, indeed, she were pressing with her little feet some invisible pump, she scanned his face with tenderness, in dumb adoration. And Otto at the drum must have felt it, for, at this turn, he put new life into his thundering whacks: Bang! bang! bang! bang! he toiled, and the conductor, as if divining what was afoot, at that moment accelerated the pace of the march.

“Bravo, bravo!” said the people surrounding them.

There was no doubt about it. This was Art. The unerring precision. The wonderful touch. Otto!... Otto, as never before, whacked the big drum, whacked it in excitement, in a frenzy, in transcending exaltation. Thundering bangs! And now she knew—what she couldn’t have dreamed—she knew it by his face. Otto was a hero. A leader of men. Something fluttered in her breast, as though a bird had flown in, ready to fly out.

“Now it’s all over,” thought the people, “and we are going home to lunch.” And everyone smiled and felt very happy and gay. A sort of prolonged accelerated thundering of the big drum, and then one tremendous BANG!

The thing was over. The conductor raised a bent hand to the peak of his cap, acknowledging the applause. The bird in her fluttered more wildly than ever. She wanted to cry out, but her throat would not obey. She clutched at her heaving breast with trembling fingers. “My love,” she thought. “My king! My captain!—--”

A BAD END

It all began by their talking of love and hate, as they set out on a Sunday afternoon excursion to the moors. Mr. Proudfoot advocated love and forgiveness; Weaver maintained his faith in a good man’s hate. And Proudfoot hated Weaver and could not forgive him because Weaver would not love and forgive. On the way to the tramcar terminus Mr. Proudfoot called in at the grocer’s (it was Sunday, but the shop was surreptitiously open, and Betty, the twelve-year-old girl of the grocer, was reading assiduously a three-penny novelette, entitled—he strained forward to look—Only a Mill Girl). Having bought his usual cigarettes, “Get away with you!” rejoined Mr. Proudfoot, continuing the argument.

“Undoubtedly!” said Weaver stubbornly. He envied the other his command of the pen, but doubted if the author knew “life” as well as he, Weaver, knew it. “I could give you material enough to fill a dozen novels if you asked me,” he would say, and tell him of a thirty-stone man eating enough for three; of a hangman in the neighbourhood who in his off-duty hours was an innkeeper. “I want you to meet him. A character for you. Bites off the heads of live rats if a customer will stand beer all round.” Mr. Weaver was a dentist. There was something provocative about all the dentists of Mr. Proudfoot’s experience. They all pretended to ambitions outside their profession. They had all wished to be writers, artists, poets, composers or statesmen, and now handled their surgical tools, extracted teeth, with a kind of embittered “Tant pis!” The very first day on which Mr. Proudfoot had called on Mr. Weaver in Gilbert Street, Pedlar-with-Thresham, and inquired if it hurt to have a tooth out, Weaver had said, “No. A second, and it’s out,” and holding it between his pincers (while his client rinsed his mouth with warm water and spat out blood), the dentist was already discoursing: “Now I’ve been reading about this Einstein fellow, you know, and I’ve me own ideas about this ’ere relativity business, if you know what I mean. I look at meself in the glass—and am satisfied with meself, metaphorically, don’t you know. But it does not follow, cosmically speaking like, that I present the same satisfactory appearance. In the same way, following the deductions of my—he, he—rather cynical philosophy, you’ll think, flies, I say, may be as trivial and at the same time as important units in the cosmos as ourselves, and in the end their souls go back to the world-soul from which they sprang. Open your mouth.”

“Is there a world-soul?”

“Undoubtedly!” A rotund little body, smartly arrayed, Mr. Weaver went on: “This afternoon was a bit slack. Lately I haven’t been feeling very well. And middle age is upon me. I thought of my past achievements. I had a look at my old medals—the one I got as a lad for swimming a race, and that other one for cycling, don’t you know, and those other two for amateur boxing. My mother, aye, she was proud of ’em! There.” He sprinkled them out of a tin box on to his palm. “And I thought—how shall I say?—it didn’t somehow seem as if it was ‘enough,’ if you know what I mean. Come, open your mouth.”

“You’re a cheerful old pessimist, aren’t you?” said Mr. Proudfoot, and opened his mouth.

“A cheerful pessimist? That’s what I call a contradiction in terms.”

Mr. Proudfoot smiled, and thought (because he could not speak) that Weaver was rather like a man who, having grasped with difficulty the four simple rules of arithmetic, is bewildered at being told that he can waive them utterly in Algebra. He was fond of using difficult words unnecessarily, and would trot out a cliché on the slightest pretext. Mr. Proudfoot might say that he preferred horses to motor-cars, only to hear Weaver ejaculate: “A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!” Or Mr. Proudfoot might say that he had served in the cavalry during the War, for Weaver to remark, with lingering relish, “Cavalleria Rusticana.” Or Mr. Proudfoot, perhaps in reference to the heavy rain, had only to let fall the word “deluge” for Weaver to comment: “Après nous le déluge, what?” looking at him with a self-complacent smile, to see if he had noticed his culture. “I had a Frenchy here as an assistant once, but had to kick him out: his gift of the gab was too much for me. But I’ve picked up things, and I think I’ve got the hang of the lingo all right, what?” But they had at once become friends, and in the evening Weaver would invite him to his house, push out his wife—a thin complacent woman with a long aquiline nose which Weaver thought aristocratic, and whose contribution to any conversation did not extend beyond the invariable affirmative: “That’s right.” “Out you go,” he would say, “we’re an old bachelor party to-night.—Now then,” rubbing his hands. “Now for it! I’ve been reading about this ’ere fellow Spinoza, you know....”

And so on till after midnight. Mr. Proudfoot remembered these nights afterwards: Weaver, tottering slightly after the beer, coming out into the open and standing hatless in the middle of the street and saying (in reply to Mr. Proudfoot desirous of making a professional appointment with him on the morrow), “Any day, old chap! any day!”

Arguing, they had reached the tramcar terminus and boarded the train which was to take them on their picnic out on to the moors. The world seemed transfigured that wet but happy afternoon. It seemed to Mr. Proudfoot that everything certainly was for the best in this best of all possible worlds. The tramcars were running smoothly and efficiently. The gay, handsome conductor performed his duty as if it were a pleasure. The policeman looked well fed, well paid, well satisfied. Even the rain fell satisfactorily from a dull but sober sky, and everybody was duly provided either with raincoat or umbrella—all was undoubtedly just as it should be. The world was well oiled and ran smoothly; everything was a wheel turning round easily on its axle, and God the Mechanic walked about his machinery and was well pleased.

And Mr. Proudfoot stood at once right inside and outside this astonishing world. He had a pointed beard, long hands, and shy manners. His name was said to have been “Proud-bottom.” There is a theory that an ancestor of his applied for royal permission to annul the unpalatable name, and the Sovereign had been graciously pleased to amend the “bottom” to “foot.” Now Weaver had felt from the first that Mr. Proudfoot was “different.” And he was right. Mr. Proudfoot was an author of standing. And as for his being immortal, who can tell? He wrote private letters with an eye to their post-humous publication, keeping a copy of each, in case his friends should lose or mislay them. He was a student of the old giants of literature, and he walked in their wake. He did not throw away his old sponge, for example, recalling that Goethe’s was on exhibition at his famous house in Weimar, and accordingly gave his own to his sister to put away. As for the critics, whenever Mr. Proudfoot published a new book, they wrote: “Very suggestive ... never a dull page ... the interest sustained to the end. Nevertheless, one wishes that the author would break new ground, express life from a new angle....” But if he did leap over the fence and explore new tracks, “Go back, go back,” they wrote in the newspapers, “get you back to the simple delights of your earlier books and we will listen to you till the crack of doom....” Mr. Proudfoot had arrived four months earlier in Pedlar-with-Thresham. And why, in God’s name? you will ask. And indeed it would be difficult to imagine why anyone should arrive there, if he were not cursed by having to be there from the beginning. At the last General Election a local magnate in welcoming the Liberal candidate to Pedlar-with-Thresham from the dais raised outside the town hall, exclaimed with patriotic emotion: “In Pedlar-with-Thresham we spin well and vote well!”

“Aye—and starve well!” came a voice from the audience.

Such a place was Pedlar-with-Thresham. Mr. Proudfoot went there to get “local colour” for a Lancashire novel he was then writing. Nor was this the only reason. He had read in the newspapers of the low deathrate of Pedlar-with-Thresham and so, as he was afraid of dying young, he went to live there.

The sun had come out as the two men walked up on to the moors, arguing heatedly, till Weaver, still maintaining his belief in hate, suggested good-naturedly, “Let’s sit down here and have a go at what we’ve brought with us, what? Open that basket. Come on, look out what you’re doing! See, you can’t handle your tools properly. Oh my! Watch me. That reminds me. I once captained a working men’s football team up North, and had to take the blighters to London, where they were being entertained—mighty lavishly too! They were the scum of the earth—no idea how to hold a tool or to behave in decent society. So I said to them, ‘Look here, you old blokes, watch me in everything, do just as I do, follow me, see? and you’ll be all right.’ And I took the serviette—or what you fellows would call the table-napkin, I s’pose—placed it carefully on me seat and sat down on it. And they all—the whole blinkin’ crew of ’em—got up, you know, placed their serviettes on their seats carefully and sat down on ’em. Makes me roar even now when I think of it. Have another beer. Look here, old chap, shall we run up and see the hangman I told you about who bites off the heads of live rats—eh? He has his inn down the road further up on the moors. Good material for you, what?”

“I wouldn’t go near one.”

“Why? he’s a necessary institution.”

“I question that. If it is impossible to prevent homicidal maniacs from killing their fellows, then by all means let them forfeit their lives painlessly at the hands of a doctor. So much mercy is shown to mad dogs.”

“You need a hangman to frighten folk with.”

“Get away with you!”

“Undoubtedly!” said Weaver passionately.

“Nonsense. It’s suffering to no purpose.”

“It contributes in a way to the experience of the world-soul,” said Weaver philosophically.

“Damn your world-soul! Damn your fanatical readiness to sacrifice real suffering units for the sake of God knows what misty and unfeeling generalities. You’ll burn human beings in furnaces as sacrifices for what-not tin gods. You’ll plunge into war for what-not shaky nationalist, imperialist, religious ideals. This fanatical laisser faire, this hapless surrender of the only vital feeling thing—individual human life—for an abstraction! It’s just here that you let in Beelzebub, in the name of what-not vague and void resplendence!”

“But there are compensations. Think of the pleasure a condemned man enjoys in knowing that the entire world is talking of him. They enjoy the vanity of it, without a doubt.”

“Get away with you!”

“Undoubtedly!” said Weaver, with tremendous emphasis, as he was wont to do when feeling his opponent to be full of scepticism and doubt.

“When I say you are a fool, Weaver, I really don’t mean to insult you: I merely wish to illustrate the word.”

“When I am landing you one on the chin, I do so entirely without malice. There,” he said.

Proudfoot blinked. “You are right. I congratulate you on admirably illustrating the incommensurable qualities of our respective weapons of offence. Still, allow me to doubt the amount of a condemned man’s enjoyment. An ex-warder told me once how out of ninety-eight executions he had witnessed there was not one case when the victim did not either collapse or was dragged fighting and screaming to the gallows. And the women, they cry and kick their heels as they are carried there. But the Press prints the official version that the prisoner ‘walked firmly to the scaffold’ and that it was all over in less than twenty-five seconds.”

“Still, I am in favour of hanging,” Weaver said, thoughtfully.

“No man has any right to be in favour of something the full horror of which he is, through his own defective imagination, incapable of realising.”

“Abolish capital punishment, and nobody’s life will be safe.”

“Stupidity,” said Mr. Proudfoot, “is in itself a hollow term: it is people like yourself who lend it meaning. Nobody’s life will be safe!” he mimicked derisively.

“Undoubtedly!”

“This is what they said of sheep-stealing at the time. ‘Abolish the death penalty for stealing sheep, and not a sheep will be left in this fair England of ours!’ And all those little boys and girls who, in Queen Victoria’s golden reign, were hanged for stealing a spoon. ‘Abolish hanging,’ the people said, ‘and there will not be left a single silver spoon in England.’ Oh, my God! I’m ashamed of humanity.... Little boys and girls ... in the condemned cell ... dragged out in the morning and hanged ... in Victoria’s complacent time—when Englishmen were ‘good.’”

“Serve ’em right, the brats! Teach ’em a lesson! We had a case recently——”

“Devil!” he said. “Devil!” Mr. Proudfoot clutched the stick in his shaking fist—he was not to blame that the other end of it shook at a far greater tangent—and thus shaking it at one end touched Weaver’s neck with the other. Even as he did so he had a feeling that he had overstepped the mark, and he was about to crave his friend’s pardon—when he saw that he had indeed overstepped it. Weaver leaned back and turned his face to his friend as who might say, “Hello, old chap, what’s up?” But the singular thing was that Weaver remained sitting there with just the same astonished look in his face. Only blood was now trickling from the corner of his mouth down his new light-grey suit.

Proudfoot remembered how distinctly his senses registered the details of subsequent events. As he walked home one little boy out of a group of little boys and girls asked him for a cigarette card. He said he hadn’t any and passed along, but the little boy ran after him and shouted, “Give me a cigarette card!”

“Haven’t got any!” he bellowed in reply.

And the little boy, frightened, began to cry softly.

“You shouldn’t ask like that,” he was consoled by his little sisters. “You should ask properly.”

And suddenly Mr. Proudfoot felt that he was not the man to bellow now.

The tramcar was nearly empty. He would have preferred to have it full. A fat old woman was holding forth to the conductor, who punctuated her flowing narrative with periodical “Aye—aye”’s: “’Ad a real good time. Forty of us went to Blackpool in a sharry. It cost us ten bob a ’ead. Ee! but we did ’ave a fine h’outing. An’ such a dinner! We started wi’ lamb and green peas and fresh potatoes; after that we ’ed potato-pie, an’ ’alf a chicken for each one of us, and pop to drink. After dinner we went for a picnic and took us tea wi’ us. Eh, ’twas a treat! We ’ad three fine tongues all cut up an’ ready like and plenty o’ bread an’ butter. But th’ pity was as I was off me h’appetite an’ couldn’t manage me share. When we was coming w’home we called at a pub or two, as we was very dry. Ee! but it was a fine outing!”

Wasn’t life wonderful!

And suddenly Proudfoot remembered.

As he went down a narrow lane, a little girl said to a smaller one who had fallen on a stone, “Now ye’ve made a ’ole in yer leg.” And he felt that, in other circumstances, he might have smiled. Passing the grocer’s, where Betty was still reading Only a Mill Girl, he wondered whether he should go in as if nothing had occurred and buy his usual packet of cigarettes. Or better not be seen. One less witness at court. What had he better do? Now he was back in Pedlar-with-Thresham, and passing the familiar brass plate with “Gilbert French, Solicitor,” he wondered whether he should go in, remembering the pun he used to make that Gilbert was a French solicitor. He somehow wished he was. He wished he himself were away in France. But they would extradite him on a warrant. Oh, God! was there really no escape?

Then things moved very quickly. He went home. The sun was still shining. His father was sitting in the garden which gave upon the street. The two men lived silently beside each other. They had never had much to say to each other. The father, when the boy first showed signs of an independent mind and temper and of wanting to adopt an unconventional career, warned him solemnly: “You’ll come to a bad end, young feller-me-lad!” Now the old man was very old: so old that his thoughts—let alone his body—stirred with difficulty. He sat all day long in the sun and at intervals would make remarks such as: “Aye, she is a strong wench she is,” or “Aye, he is a big man he is that.” Then he would sit very still, staring ahead with his watery old eyes, munching with his empty loose mouth. Suddenly he would fall asleep, his mouth hanging wide open. One day when he would thus fall asleep they would nail him up in a coffin and drive him at great speed to the graveyard, and put him into a wet black hole and cover him up altogether with earth, and plant a great heavy stone on the top of him—and then come home and take tea.

“Just as well,” Proudfoot reflected. “Just as well now.”

The sun had gone; it was just beginning to drizzle. His father turned in. He sat by him and stared into the fire, waiting for the police to come and arrest him. They did not come, and unable to bear the suspense any longer he went out in order to give himself up at the police station. It was beginning to get dark and chilly out-of-doors; the polluted rain fell out of a soot-infested sky; and close to the door his courage failed him and he went away again. What could he do? Where could he go? It seemed all one. Mrs. Weaver knew that they had gone out together and even knew the place. Was it really possible that such a thing had befallen him? If it had befallen another man, if he had read about it in the papers, it would seem natural enough; but that it should have befallen him! It seemed impossible. The uncanny thing was that the others would not know how impossible it seemed to him and would require an intelligent account of it from him. Tired of walking, frustration on all sides staring him in the face, he turned home and was arrested by the two policemen who were already waiting for him.

The court next morning had no hesitation in charging him with wilful murder, and, in charge of two men, he was taken to Liverpool, where a grand jury brought in a true bill against him, and he was taken away to await trial at the Assizes. Here the matter was put elaborately before a grand jury, and he listened, bedraggled and bewildered, to his heinous deed being recounted in the hearing of the public and ably handled by the learned advocates; and he had a sense of clumsy unreality, as he had had when attending the performance of his plays or reading in a printed notice the reviewer’s brief narration of the plot of his own novel. All this, attributed to him, did not seem his, was not of his own making. But he was hopeful: there was time enough for despair later on. He watched the prosecution unbend itself. A sly old fox counsel for the Crown. He put it to them that the circumstances were most suspicious. Prisoner had decoyed his victim into a lonely wood away up on the moors. The wound witnessed that the blow had been inflicted with a blunt and heavy weapon. Prisoner confessed as much. What more proof was needed of his murderous intent? Mr. Proudfoot’s faith was in his counsel, as once upon a time when he visited the races it had been in his jockey. He had a reputation for an unbroken record of acquittals to sustain. He would fight for them both to the last breath. And the judge seemed a gentleman. Mr. Proudfoot had the same feeling of confidence in that presiding wigged figure as in the umpire when, as a boy, he took part in a lawn tennis tournament. But what was strange and uncanny was the smooth procedure of it: the deference and kindness shown to him on all sides. He was afraid that with that suave politeness, that unfailing legal gloss, in those beautifully modulated Oxford accents, they might bring him theoretically to within an inch of death, and then get the common churl to carry out the messy business.

The judge was really nice—and so witty. Mr. Proudfoot smiled good-naturedly at his remarks. He would have laughed, too, but that might seem uncanny, irresponsible; might be considered as bravado on his part; might even strike the judge as bordering on contempt of court. But the judge must know that Mr. Proudfoot was an author and critic of standing and might be flattered if he saw that his witticisms were appreciated by the critic even at a trying time. The judge was detached by virtue of his training. He pictured him as an elderly cultured bachelor who had an ancient library and tender nieces who adored him. Mr. Proudfoot and the judge would get on very well together. It was the jurymen he was afraid of. God only knew in what wise the particular machinery in their skulls manipulated thought. Counsel for the Crown was a little ratty, to say the least of it. He would ask incriminating questions: Who killed him? The devil killed him. He did not kill him. As if he, Joseph Proudfoot, would ever do such a thing. He had merely shaken his stick at him: the devil had operated the other end of it. But if he had now told them that it was the devil who had killed Weaver, the jury, being of the type who prided themselves on not being born yesterday, would all the sooner come to a conclusion of his guilt. But murder him, he didn’t—because murder had indeed never crossed his mind. But counsel for the Crown thought otherwise. He could see no trace of provocation to manslaughter, in the absence of which he saw murder, the possibility of self-defence not even being mentioned by the other side. And he suggested Mr. Proudfoot had murdered his friend for money.

“I suggest,” he said, “that you murdered him for his money and took it.”

“I repudiate your suggestion,” Mr. Proudfoot said, very pale.

Counsel for the defence was stipulating for manslaughter under provocation, the provocation being Weaver’s inhuman attitude to those poor children who, in Victoria’s crass time, had been suffered by a callous public to forfeit their young lives at the hands of the hangman, a dastardly crime which Weaver had offensively condoned; and this general attitude to juvenile capital punishment raised a tremendous controversy between the two sides, involving the merits of capital punishment as a whole, the defence representing it as a barbarous relic of a bygone age still lingering among us, and to which indeed his client may fall a ready victim if the jury did not do their duty by him; till the judge, resenting such round-about intimidation of the jury, said that they were not here to debate whether the death penalty was right or wrong in principle, but that the question which the jury had to keep before them was whether prisoner had murdered Weaver or killed him under justifiable provocation, in which latter case it might be said it was manslaughter. Whereupon counsel for the defence respectfully submitted to his lordship that the degree of provocation would seem to be intimately bound up with his client’s sensitive and all-too-human—perhaps over-sensitive, but he would hesitate to call it over-human—attitude to a practice which to-day all right-thinking people (“Hear, hear!” from the audience, the judge interrupting to say that at the repetition of outside comments he would clear the court)—yes, he repeated it advisedly, all right-thinking people could but recall with a shudder of horror and disgust; and the learned judge (the point at issue having crystallised itself by now) allowed the argument to stand, limiting it strictly to the merits of the death penalty as applied to children for stealing silver spoons at a particular period in social history. Prosecuting counsel, in his turn, submitted that if there was any provocation at all, even of a kind that some people—though he himself was far from doing so—might find, if not a ground, at least an extenuating circumstance for taking the life of another human being, they had only the prisoner’s word for it. It was a matter of credulity. He repeated the assertion of the learned counsel for the defence in a faintly ironic tone, and added that he would ask the jury to please declare the prisoner innocent of murder—if they could honestly believe it. (He implied by a shade of sarcasm, if they were really simple enough to believe such a wild thing.) Mr. Proudfoot cast a quick glance at the jury. Two jurymen, looking singularly like Messrs. Asquith and Lloyd George, he thought, mingled their locks in contemptuous mirth. They seemed men with “no nonsense about them,” men who would ask, “Do you see any green in my eye?” men who were prone to believe that “there is no smoke without fire,” men who had sent saints to the stake; men of whom Mr. Proudfoot all of a sudden had become immoderately afraid. If they could believe such a thing, the prosecution argued, there was an end of it and he had nothing further to say. But if they did not, indeed could not believe it, and there was no provocation, he said (suddenly jumping one peg), then, he submitted, it was murder pure and simple.

The proceedings made a web of rather illiberal quibbles, difficult for any but a trained mind to unravel, but through all the crude, inaccurate and intellectually dishonest cross-examinations there ran two threads: the black thread of the prosecution and the white thread of the defence, which the jury hoped the judge would disentangle for them in his summing-up. Unable to sustain the charge that prisoner had taken any of the victim’s money (though producing witnesses to show that Proudfoot was in financial embarrassment), prosecuting counsel modified it to saying that he would have taken it, but in the horror of the crime itself forgot the object of the crime. The defence thereon came forward with a challenge to the prosecution either to substantiate the charge or to withdraw it—a challenge which the prosecution met with a subversive question: Indeed what other rational cause could have prompted prisoner to commit the murder? A question retorted to by the defence with the suggestion that the absence of all rational motive precisely pointed to the view that apparently it was not murder, but manslaughter under some sharp and instantaneous provocation, which tallied with his client’s story. But prosecuting counsel knew his jurymen, and questioning whether the expression of a contradictory opinion on some event in history could be described as provocation, and questioning further whether prisoner could be believed to tell the truth, he wound up his case with a pseudo-generous invitation to the jury to exercise their credulity, if they possessed enough of it, in believing the case for the defence. Again Mr. Proudfoot glanced at the jury: hard-faced business men all, “with no nonsense about them,” and one meagre “emancipated” woman who looked as though she would not lag behind the men. “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”

He stared in front of him. Now they seemed very near, and now they seemed very far, as if he were looking at them through the other end of a pair of binocular glasses. He started from his trance: Good God! he was actually in court, being tried, in fact, for his life!

He found the final speech for the defence inadequate. These lawyers were all so suave and satisfied with one another: his man, while fighting for his life, seemed so mindful of the prosecution, so gentlemanly, so aware of his opponent’s high character and diverse gifts that Mr. Proudfoot felt his barrister might easily betray him to his foe out of gracious deference and general drawing-room politeness. So on the declaration of a war, the signal for the indiscriminate butchery all round of human flesh, ambassadors who had demanded the return of their credentials will cordially shake hands with the immaculate kid-gloved Foreign Secretary, before departing to the country with which the realm is “in a state of war.” “This,” said Sir Frederick, laying down his brief, “concludes the case for the defence.”

And now he felt there was only God between him and his doom.

Among men, who was his friend? Not the judge, you would think any more, if you followed the hostile tone of his summing-up: the arguments themselves were far too intricate for any layman not specially versed in legal ways to follow. And Proudfoot wondered which of all his friends he would want to help him in his present plight; and he thought that of all men he wanted the good, fat, cheery, smiling Weaver. And a laugh broke from his mouth and tears came to his eyes as he remembered that all the present trouble hinged on Weaver.

There was a moment during the judge’s summing-up when something in Proudfoot protested. What right had they to sit in judgment on him? “I have understanding as well as you. I am not inferior to you. Yea, who knoweth not such things as these?” That ridiculous wigged figure, immune from insult, sitting aloft impersonating the divine justice. He felt like telling it, “You old cuckoo, you wouldn’t be sitting there if it weren’t that you are only half a man.”

The jury retired. How very long! It seemed as though they would never come to a unanimous decision. He had hopes of disagreement, procrastination, a new trial. But at last they came back, headed by the foreman. He heard the clerk’s fateful question. He heard the answering “Guilty.” There was no recommendation for mercy. Before he could take it in he saw the “black cap” on the judge’s wig. “ ... hanged by the neck until you are dead....” The judge and all of them seemed very far off in the electric light, as if at the far end of a long hall. He could not believe it, he did not believe it. Absurd! They were wanting to despatch him, to liquidate his existence: whereas he was the world spirit itself, the world spirit that descends into each living creature whole and unsplit: as if each creature only mattered by itself and no other creature. To be told that you are to be killed is therefore like being told that the end of the world has come: impossible to fathom. They must be under some error. They had forgotten that he was the world spirit incapable of being quenched by a judge of that kind. The judge’s slender hand moving up, the clerk removed the piece of black cloth from his lordship’s wig. It seemed that all was over. The judge was thanking the jury for the commendable manner in which they had carried out their duties and was absolving them from further service for the next fifteen years. He felt the warder’s hand on his shoulder; they led him down to the cells; afterwards out into a taxi, the two warders inside with him. He looked out of the window as they were wafted down busy streets; past door porters at picture palaces who looked like major-generals; then through shabbier streets. He still looked out. An auctioneer was holding forth with gusto outside his shop, talking vociferously but apparently to himself.

Then the bath at the prison. The kindness of the warders. It was like a working men’s hotel. He could smile—and there was plenty of time—two weeks yet or more. He now lived in the hope that the High Court of Criminal Appeal would revoke the sentence. But the day came, and the Lord Chief Justice gave it out as his opinion that he could find no fault with the proceedings at the trial, and, speaking ex cathedra, added some mordant comments of his own upon the class of novelists now generally perverting the public. The friend who brought this news to him consoled him with the lame remark that it was better to be hanged once than to be imprisoned for a period of twenty years. After all, hanging was more merciful.

“If it is,” exclaimed Mr. Proudfoot, feeling chilly at his friend’s taking his death so philosophically, “if it is, and they are so solicitous as to what is better for me, why don’t they let me make my choice? I know what I would choose.”

“What?”

“Life imprisonment, of course. I am locked up, but I can still think, my thoughts can still roam, my mind is still free and unfettered.”

“That is the cowardly choice, not the good choice.”

“I am only human,” said Proudfoot—and faltered.

There came a time, after the High Court had dismissed his appeal, when he felt quite light and cheery in the confident anticipation of the Home Secretary’s intervention. He thought of the Home Secretary as a man with a soft grey moustache and kind eyes. But just as he had feared the suave punctilio of the trial, he began to fear the sensitive, kindhearted men, who, wincing in their sensibilities, would turn aside and leave it to the other men to deal with the raw places. He read of the Home Secretary going off for his customary week-end; he learnt of his solicitor travelling to him with a batch of signatures, and coming back, ambiguous in the extreme, only saying that the Home Secretary’s decision would be duly published after his return to London from his week-end holiday. Then he saw it in the morning papers. The Home Secretary could see no ground for advising his Majesty to intervene with the normal course of the sentence, and the papers further stated that the sheriff had arranged for the execution to take place on the 22nd of this month, and that on the morning of the 21st Hanbury, the executioner, would travel to Liverpool to put up the gallows.

And then he asked—it was a desperate afterthought—that they should let him finish his new novel. It was all but ready; he only asked two weeks’ respite. Secretly he hoped that it might be found so good that all the writers and critics in the world and the Great British (Reading) Public would see to it that he was granted life. It was an application truly without precedent. But there was nothing lost by trying. There was still time, and his solicitor got busy. The petition was drawn up and had appended to it a long list of signatures from all the leading lights in letters, music, art and science, some from the dramatic stage, and not a few illustrious foreigners from France and Italy, even one from Poland and Czecho-Slovakia. A German writer’s name was intentionally omitted from the list, as it was feared that a certain daily paper would be sure to cry out that opinion in this country was being dictated from Berlin, and that the convalescent mind of our post-war public might echo the cry, and the Government would find it difficult to grant the application.

However, the respite was granted. It was his first success after a long series of reverses. He had another two weeks clear to finish his book in. Some newspapers, of the howling kind, duly howled against it. “What Can Murders Teach Us?” was the headline of a certain Sunday paper. “Why, to murder,” he could almost hear the responding voice of certain readers. “Writers are worse than some other folk,” he could just hear them saying it in Pedlar-with-Thresham. “Aye, they are a bad lot.” And Mrs. Weaver answering, “That’s right.”

He remembered how she had sat in court, saying in reply to a question put to her by counsel, “That’s right,” and never once looked up at him.

The book was got out with all haste. Three days before the execution it was published, and his publisher sent him the first batch of reviews. The stimulus given to it by his impending execution was tremendous. His publisher recognised it as an invaluable advertisement and rose to the occasion. For the first time in his life Mr. Proudfoot was a rich man, and he made generous provisions for his father, for the few years that he could yet be expected to survive. But the integrity of the British reviewer is proverbial. The mere fact of Proudfoot’s impending death could not influence their critical opinion of his work one way or another. One critic wrote: “This book, while quite pleasant and readable, is in no way remarkable.” And another critic, ignorant, it would seem, of the fate involved, pleaded: “Go back, get you back to your former style, and we shall listen to you till the crack of doom.” He had gone back; he had deliberately gone back on the advice of that same critic, and in any case there was no looking forward now. But still another critic wrote: “One would wish the author had begun to break new ground, express life from a new angle....” The Great British Public was silent as the grave.

The last hope had gone, and the last full day of his remaining life was beginning to unfold itself. The warders, like old friends, played cards with him all day to take off his mind from the event. In the little intervals he wondered whether Hanbury who was to hang him on the morrow was not perchance the man who bit off the heads of live rats whom he and Weaver should have visited that fatal Sunday. Weaver had not disclosed his name. But there were few hangmen, he knew, and this might very well be the man in question. “Where does Hanbury, the hangman, come from?” he inquired from the warder.

“Up Manchester way.”

It was the man!

What emotions, what a multitude of moods he experienced in those few brief hours. Till twelve he was sprightly and not very nervous. The hangman, peeping at him through the observation hole, to decide what “drop” to give him, saw him pacing up and down in the cell, puffing calmly at a cigarette. But as, at midnight, the prison clock boomed out the hours, he got agitated, threw away the cigarette and began counting the remaining hours on his fingers. He tried to think of the noble souls who went before him:—of Anton Chehov, who, after gravely saying to the doctor who had been called to him during the night, “I am dying,” drinking the glass of champagne prescribed to him to the bottom and remarking, with a smile, to his wife, “It’s a long while since I have had champagne,” turning over on one side, and presently being quiet for ever;—of Goethe asking that the window might be opened to admit of more air and more light, and the faithful Eckermann coming to look at him, lying dead. “And I turned aside,” he records, “to give a free run to my tears.” And with a shudder he recalled that his body would fall into lime to be instantly consumed like a foul thing. He must go not knowing why he lived, and nobody in those bleak immensities would know or care: no father, no mother, no love in the world would intervene on his behalf; not even memory would be left him to recall his single spell of life, as if he never had been, as if indeed he was never meant to matter. There was but to “curse God and die.”

And suddenly his soul stirred within him, as if it had wings. “It’s the end here,” he thought. “But it’s not the end there.” Weaver believed in the world-soul—which meant that in a while he and Weaver would be one. It was night, but he could not sleep. Perhaps now, all over the world, there were people who could not sleep on his account and lay thinking of him. As by imponderable wireless waves he, alone in the dark cell with the gallows adjoining, felt himself linked to all compassionate souls; and to them he sent greetings—his desperate greetings.... At last he slept.

His sleep was troubled. He dreamt he had shrunk back from the pale gate of death, a bleak coldness in his chest and limbs, and was going past a park where there were children playing and people lounging wearily after their strenuous day’s work. And he thought that the trivialities of living were manna compared with death. But by the faces of the people who came out of the park he knew that they, not realising it, could not enjoy the gift of life. He walked on, and suddenly found himself in a beautiful, totally unfamiliar part of the town, the existence of which he had not even suspected. And he told himself how he would come home and tell his father of it. He woke—and there was nothing to tell but that he had dreamt it. And at once an incredible coldness invaded his heart.

Besides, it was cold in the cell. Our courage is at its lowest ebb in the early morning: it is wicked to hang people at dawn, he reflected. The warder came in. “Get up. Here is your suit.” His old suit that knew him in different circumstances. No collar to-day. “I’ll go and fetch you yer breakfast now.”

Perhaps at the last minute the Home Secretary might ...? He remembered seeing a film where also at the last moment, also the Home Secretary.... How cold. They wouldn’t tell his father. Or would they? The warder brought in a tray with some cocoa and porridge and an apple. He could not eat. He nibbled at the apple, and the savoury juice reminded him of some utopian land of fruit and flowers, like Italy, which he had never known. And he thought that when they had done their worst, and he was left in peace, perhaps in dreamland he would fly to such a land.

He looked strangely at the warder. “Is it very bad? Does it ... hurt?” he asked uneasily.

“No. A second—and it’s all over. Like having yer tooth out—no more. All over in a wink.”

The chaplain, a young man, was more confused than he—and more miserable. “Perhaps some spiritual consolation?” he stammered.

“I don’t understand,” said Mr. Proudfoot. “The indivisible universe speaks and lives only through each separate creature, as if no other creature existed at all. But it is the same indivisible universe which so expresses itself. And they—absurd—they want to do away with me—that means with the universe.”

“Perhaps a last communion....”

“Why?”

“Or a confession? After all, you’ve killed a human being.”

He thought of Weaver, and would have felt sorry for him if he did not feel so overwhelmingly sorry for himself. If they’d let him off now he’d put back what he had taken, put back into the spiritual cosmos what he’d taken from it. If they would leave it to him, he’d see that humanity did not lose.

He was brave, resigned. But a quarter of an hour before time, suddenly he felt he wanted to live, love, breathe in through these nostrils the fresh air of, not this, but other, future mornings, when he would be no more.... He remembered a windy day when the big chestnuts swayed and lashed their branches like drunken things, and nuts and sticks fell off like missiles aimed at passers-by. A little boy had turned round to his mother, hiding his eyes from the dust and the wind in the folds of her skirt. This had moved him then somehow. And now an intolerable thought obsessed him that, when, in a few minutes from now, he would be buried in a pool of lime, he would feel the wind no more. And he thought that if this life he was leaving was the only life in a bleak universe, then he could not face the anguish of leaving it. But if there was another life, he wanted to hide his face in the lap of his Maker, hide from the missiles that fell all about him and hurt him, weep on His breast, and be quiet for ever....

But perhaps—two minutes yet—perhaps the Home Secretary ...? And before he could realise it the hangman stood in the cell. Was this it? Was it this? Was this, then, what he had to come to? Could mother but have known! But the warder, who up to this had been like a friend and confidant, suddenly began to shout at the executioner, “Come on, you there, get a move on and get about it quick!” (as though anxious to get the nasty job over). And Mr. Proudfoot felt almost as though his friend the warder had betrayed him to that other man. That other man had a soft, drooping, yellow moustache and glassy eyes, and seemed slow and good-natured. You wouldn’t think by the mild look of him that he bit off the heads of live rats. Somehow Mr. Proudfoot wanted to claim acquaintance: to tell him about Weaver: that Weaver and himself were about to call on him that fatal Sunday: if they had called he would not now be here. But the man with his assistants and the warder were resolutely coming up to him as if they were intent on making a swift end of him, the governor, the chaplain and the doctor looking on. Yes, yes, he would die—if they would leave him alone, or do it—handsomely. He killed Weaver—however inadvertently, he killed him, and he would forfeit his life, on his word of honour he would. But not so—— The hangman and his assistant were trying to pinion him; and suddenly he put up a fight for his life. What right had they? All nonsense apart, what right? A glimpse of the jurymen all back in their homes, and at breakfast, flashed through his brain. What right? Where he got the strength from he did not know, but the prison bell was already tolling for the soul departing, and its last stroke had boomed its melancholy message across the yard into the streets, but Mr. Proudfoot was still alive and struggling desperately with the executioner and three warders, who only knew that they had to despatch him: he should have been liquidated ten minutes ago: there was no document to account for his unwarranted existence after 8 a.m. They were shocked: it was improper in the extreme. “Don’t! Oh!” He wanted to tell them—if they would only stop to listen—he wanted to tell them that—yes—he was a soul, a universe with things in it which had nothing to do with that devil in him they were intent on destroying. It was unjust. A whole universe. “Stop! Think: what are you doing?... No!” he cried, struggling in their grip and realising that nothing save his poor physical exertion now stood between him and their grim determination to do away with him. “No! You mustn’t!” he pleaded, his soul filled with a sickening animal fear. But they dragged him on without respite, the chaplain leading the way, reading words from the Bible. And if—he thought—there was a God in heaven, why did He stand aside? What God was He to stand aside? “No! No!... Oh! ...” But they were dragging him on none the less, dragging him on to his doom. Swiftly he looked at each of them, for a spark of compassion. But they were all men who valued their duty before everything else. He was in the open. And suddenly a wave of awe came over him, standing as he did on the brink of eternity or extinction: so that the hangman at his neck seemed like a friend who was assisting at a parting, and those others, too, seemed as if they’d come to see him off at the railway station as he was about to step into the train on his awful journey; and he clung to them with fraternal, desperate farewell. But they only looked as though they had no time for that, but wanted to get the nasty business, long overdue, over at last. It seemed minutes before he toed the chalk line on the drop—when suddenly he fell, it seemed minutes, he expected it with drawn breath, the pulling up—when snap! it came!

And all was darkness.

The great harbour was awakening in the cold fog. From the terminus a tramcar set off half empty. The conductor strode inside and began collecting the fare. Then newspapers appeared on the street corners, and posters announced in red and black letters:

“Special Edition.
“Proudfoot Executed.”

They were eagerly snapped up by busy hurrying people, who stopped and read: