CHAPTER IX
THE CHEWING GUM OF DESTINY
Allured by a sign: “A Cut off the Joint for Sixpence,” I lunched in a little eating-house off Tottenham Court Road. I was at the tapioca pudding stage of the repast, and in a mood of singular complacency.
“Six weeks have gone,” I pondered. “I have spent nearly a third of the sum I realised from the sale of Guinivere’s engagement ring. In my ambition to fail in the world, already I have accomplished much. Behold! my boots are cracked across the uppers. Regard! the suggestive glossiness of my coat-sleeves. Observe! the bluey brilliancy of my celluloid collar. Oh, mighty Mammon, chain me to thine oar! Grind me, Oppression, ’neath thy ruthless heel! Minions of Monopoly, hound me to despair!—not all your powers combined in fell intent can so inspire me with the spirit of Democracy as can the sticky feel of this celluloid collar around my neck!”
With which sentiment I lit a cigarette, and took from my pocket a copy of the Gotham Gazette. I had seen it looking very foreign and forlorn in a news-agents, and had bought it out of pity for its loneliness. I was glancing through it when a name seemed to leap at me, and I felt my heart stand still. I read:
“Yesterday afternoon patrician Fifth Avenue was the scene of a saddening incident. It was almost opposite Tiffany’s, and the autos were passing in a continuous stream. At this time and this place it is almost as difficult to cross the Rubicon as to cross the Avenue; yet, taking advantage of a lull in the traffic, a well-dressed man—who has since been identified as Charles Fitzbarrington, an ex-army officer resident in Harlem—was observed to make the daring attempt. Half way over he was seen to stumble, and come to the ground. Those who saw the rash act held their breaths, and when the nearest spectators could reach him to rescue him from his perilous position, they found to their surprise that the man was dead....”
I dropped the paper with a groan. Captain Fitzbarrington dead! Mrs. Fitz free! My promise to marry her! The terrible twins! Oh, God....
“Alas!” I cried, “I am undone!—betrayed by an incurably romantic disposition; asphyxiated in the effervescence of my own folly; ignominiously undone!”
As if it were yesterday, I remembered the faded apartment in Harlem, my protests of undying devotion, the words that now seemed written in remorseless flame:
“If anything should happen to him, if by any chance we should find ourselves free, send for me, and I’ll come to you, even though the world lie between us. By my life, by my honour, I swear it.”
Had I really uttered that awful rot? Oh, what a fool I’d been! But it was too late now. I must make the best of it. Never yet have I gone back on my word (though I have put some very poetic constructions on it). But here there was no chance of evasion. She would certainly expect me to marry her. Farewell, ambitious dreams of struggle and privation! Farewell, O glorious independent poverty! Farewell, my schemes and dreams! Bohemia, adventure, all!—and for what? For an elderly woman for whom I did not care a rap, a faded woman with a ready-made family to boot. Truly life is one confounded scrape after another.
That night I dreamed of the terrible twins. I was a pirate ship, Ronnie, the captain, stood on my chest, while Lonnie, a naval lieutenant, tried to board me. Then they invented a new game, based on the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. It was tremendously exciting. They both got quite worked up over it. So did I—only more so. I was the horse. I awoke, bathed in perspiration, and hissing through my clenched teeth: “Never! Never!”
But really it seemed as if I must do something; so next day I began three different letters to Mrs. Fitz. I was sorely distracted. My work was suffering. There was the unfinished manuscript of The Microbe staring reproachfully at me. Then to crown all, just as I was sitting down in the early evening with grim determination to finish the letter, suddenly I was assailed by a Craving.
Indulgent Reader, up till now I have concealed it, but I must confess at last. I have one besetting weakness, a weakness that amounts to a vice. I am ashamed of it. Often I have tried to wean myself of it; often cursed the heredity that imposed it on me. Opium? Morphine? Cocaine? Nothing so fashionable. Absinthe? Brandy? Gin? Nothing so normal. Alas! let me whisper it in your ear: I am a Chewing Gum Fiend!
So feeling in my pocket for the stuff, and finding none, I straightway began to crave it as never before. Then, knowing there would be no peace for me, I left my letter and started desperately forth into that fog stifled city.
And that fog was now a FOG. It irked the lungs, and made the eye-balls tingle. Each street lamp was a sulphurous blur, each radiant shop-window a furtive blotch of light. It seemed something solid, something you could cut into slices, and serve between bread—a very Camembert cheese of a fog.
So into this woolly obscurity I plunged, and like a Mackinaw blanket it entangled me about. Bleary boxes of light the tramways crawled along. There were tootings of taxis, curses of cabbies, clanging of bells. The streets were lanes of mystery, the passers weird shadows; the shop-windows seemed to be made of horn instead of glass. Then the green and red lights of a chemist’s semaphored me, seemingly from a great distance, but really from just a few feet away. So there I bought six packets of chewing gum, and started home.
But at this point I found the fog fuzzier than ever. I stumbled and fumbled, and wondered and blundered, till presently I found myself standing before the great doors of a theatre. For the moment I was too discouraged to go further, and the performance was about to begin. Ha! that was an idea! I would enter. Then I groaned in spirit, for I saw that the theatre was Drury Lane. Sensational melodrama! Ah, no! Better the cold and cruel street. But the fog was inexorable. Three times did I try to break through it; three times did it hurl me back on the melodramatic mercies of Drury Lane.
Hanging over the front of the gallery, I asked myself: “Who are these hundreds of well-dressed people who fill this great playhouse? To all appearance they are intelligent beings, yet I cannot imagine intelligent beings taking this kind of thing seriously. As burlesque it’s funny, and the more thrilling it gets the funnier it is. Yet, except myself, no one seems to laugh. How the author must have chuckled over his fabrication! However, let me credit him with one haunting line, one memorable sentiment, delivered by the heroine to a roar of applause:
Then suddenly a light flashed on me. It was these people who bought my books; it was this sort of thing I had been peddling to them so long. And they liked it. How they howled for more! “O ye gods of High Endeavour!” I groaned, “heap not my sins of melodrama on my head.”
Conscience-stricken I did not wait for the climax where two airships grapple in the sky, under the guns of a “Dreadnought,” while at a crossing an auto dashes into a night express. I sneaked out between the acts, and sought the solitude of the Thames Embankment.
The fog had cleared now, and the clock of St. Stephen’s pealed till I counted the stroke of midnight. The wall of the Embankment was a barrier of grime, the river a thing of mystery and mud. It was a gruesome night. Even the huge electrically-limned Highlandman on the opposite shore, who drinks whiskey with such enviable capacity, had ceased for the nonce his luminous libations.
A few human waifs shuffled past me, middle-aged men with faces pale as dough, and discouraged moustaches drooping over negligible chins. Their clothes, green with age and corroded with mud, seemed to flap emptily on their meagre frames. A woman separated herself from a mass of shadow, a miry-skirted scarecrow crowned with a broken bonnet. With one red claw she clutched a precious box of matches.
“For Gord’s syke buy it orf me, mister. I ain’t myde tupp’nce oipney orl dye.”
I left her staring at a silver coin and testing it with her teeth.
Yes, it was a bad night to be out in, a bad night to cower on these bitter benches waiting for the dawn. Yet I myself was conscious of the chauffage central of peripatetic philanthropy. Greedily I panted for other opportunities to enjoy the glow of giving. Then, as I was passing Cleopatra’s Needle, I heard the sound of a woman’s sob.
It came from the gloomy gruesomeness between the Needle and the Thames. I peered and listened. Below me the hideous river chuckled, and the lamplight fell lividly on the whiteness of a lifebuoy bound to the wall. Again I was sure I heard that sound of piteous sobbing.
Bravery is often a lack of imagination: I have imagination plus, so I hesitated. I had heard of men being lured into traps. Vividly enough I saw myself a cadaver drifting on the tide, and I liked not the picture. Yet after all it takes tremendous courage to be a coward, so I drew nearer. Strange! the sobbing, so low, so pitiful, had ceased. It was followed by a silence far more sinister. There was a vibrating agony in that silence, a horrible, heart-clutching suspense. What if I were to go down there and find—no one? Yet some one had been, I would swear; some one had sobbed, and now—silence.
Slowly, slowly I descended the steps. There in the black shadow of the Needle I made little noise, yet—suddenly I began to wonder if all the world could not hear the beating of my heart....
Heart be still! hand be steady! foot be swift! There, crouching on the top of the wall, gazing downward, ready for the leap, I see the figure of a woman. Will she jump before I can reach her? I hold my breath. Nearer I steal, nearer, nearer. Then—one swift rush—ah! I have her.
Even as I clutched I felt her weight sag towards the river. Another moment and I had dragged her back into safety. Tense and panting, I stared at her; then, as the lamplight fell on her ghastly face I uttered a cry of amazement. Heavens above! it was the girl of the entomological meal-ticket, the persistent pedestrian of Tavistock Square.
There she cowered, looking at me with great, terror dilated eyes. There I glowered, regarding her grimly enough. At last I broke the silence.
“Child! Child! why did you do it? You’ve gone and spoilt my story. I should never have met you like this. It’s coincidence. Coincidence, you know, can’t happen in fiction, only in real life. You can’t be fiction now. You’ll have to be real life.”
She gazed at me blankly. Against the green of the wall her face was a vague splash of white.
“But that is a matter with which I can scarcely reproach you. What I would like to know is why were you on the top of that wall? Having severely strained my right arm, I conceive I am entitled to an explanation.”
She did not make an effort to supply one, so after a pause I continued:
“No doubt you will say it was because you were tired, hungry, homeless. Because you thought the river kinder than the cruel world. Because you said: ‘Death is better than dishonour!’”
The girl nodded vaguely.
“Ah no!” I said sadly; “you must not say these things, for if you do you will be quoting word for word the heroine of my novel A Shirtmaker’s Romance. You will be guilty of plagiarism, my child; and what’s worse, a thousand times worse, you will be guilty of melodrama.”
She looked at me as if she thought me mad, then a shudder convulsed her, and breaking away, she dashed down the steps to that black water. Just in time I caught her and dragged her back. She shrank against the wall, hiding her face, sobbing violently.
“Please don’t,” I entreated. “If you want to give me a chance of doing the rescuing hero business choose a less repellent evening, and water not so like an animated cesspool. Now, listen to me.”
Her sobbing ceased. She was a silent huddle of black against the wall.
“I am,” I said, “a waif like yourself, homeless, hungry, desperate. I came to this city to win fame and fortune. Poor dreaming fool! Little did I know that where one wins a thousand fail. Well, I’ve struggled, starved even as you’ve done; but I’ve made up my mind to suffer no more. And so to-night I’ve come down here, even as you’ve done, to end it all.”
I had her listening now. From the white mask of her face her big eyes devoured me.
“Yes, my poor girl,” I went on wearily, “you’re right. Life for such as us is better ended. Defeated, desperate, what is there left for us but death? Let us then die together; but not your way—no, that’s too primitive. I have another, more fascinating, more original. Ah! even in self-destruction, behold in me the artist. And I am going to allow you to share my doom. Nay! do not trouble to express your gratitude. I understand; it’s too deep for words. And now, just excuse me one moment: I will prepare.”
With that I went over to the base of the Needle and taking from my pocket the five remaining packets of chewing gum, I tore the paper from them. Then with the large piece I had been masticating, I welded them into a solid stick about six inches long. Eagerly I returned to her.
“There!” I cried triumphantly. “Do you know what this grey stick is? But why should you? Well, let me tell you. This dull, sugary-looking stuff is dynamite, dynamite in its most concentrated form. This is a stick of the terrific Pepsinite. It has moved more than any explosive known. Now do you understand?”
Her eyes were rivetted on the little grey stick.
“Ah, well may you shudder, girl! There’s enough in this tiny piece to blow a score of us to atoms, to bring this mighty monument careening down, to make the embankment look like an excavation for the underground railway. Oh, is it not glorious? Pepsinite!”
Still looking at it as if fascinated, she made a movement of utter alarm.
“Just think of it,” I whispered gloatingly; “in two more minutes we shall be launched into eternity. Does that not thrill you with rapture? And think of our revenge! Here with our death we will destroy their monument, hard as their hearts, black as their selfishness, sharp as their scorn. It, too, will be blown to pieces.”
She looked up at the black column almost as if she were sorry for it. I laughed harshly.
“Yes, I know. You do not hate the Needle, but just think of the people who are so proud of it, the devils who have goaded us to this. At first I thought that with my death I would destroy their Albert Memorial, and so break their philistine hearts. But that would have taken so much pepsinite, and I have only this pitiful piece. So it had to be the Needle.”
Again she seemed almost to regret its impending doom.
“And now,” I cried, “the time has come. Oh, curse you, curse you, vast vain-glorious city! Under the Upas window of your smoke what dreams have withered, what idols turned to clay! How many hearts of splendid pride have failed and fallen! How many poets cursed thy publishers and died! Oh heedless, heartless London!”
With a gesture full of noble scorn I shook my fist in the direction of the Savoy Hotel. Then I changed to another key.
“But no, let me not curse you, great city! Here at the gateway of death let me envisage you again, and from the depths of the heart you have broken say to you sadly: ‘London, ruthless, splendid London, I forgive!’”
My hand quivered as I laid the grey stick at the base of the monument; my hand trembled as I planted a large wax match in it; my hand positively shook as I struck another match and applied a light to the upright one. With eyes dilated I stared at the tiny flickering flame, and at that moment, so worked up was I, I will swear I thought I was looking at the very flame of death.
“Come closer, closer girl,” I gasped. “See it burning down, down. Soon it will reach the end and we will know nothing. Oh is it not glorious—nothing! Good-bye world, good-bye life ... see! it is nearly half way. Oh gracious flame, burn faster, faster yet! And now, girl, standing here in the shadow of death do not refuse my last request; let me kiss you once, just once upon your brow.”
For answer she stooped swiftly and blew out the match.