Chapter IV (1)

“Mem.: to go and see Mrs. Arne.” The doctor came across this note in his blotting-pad one day six weeks later. His daughter was out of town. He had heard nothing of the Arnes since her departure. He had promised to go and see her. He was a little conscience-stricken. Yet another week elapsed before he found time to call upon the daughter of his old tutor.

At the corner of Tite Street he met Mrs. Arne’s husband, and stopped. A doctor’s professional kindliness of manner is, or ought to be, independent of his personal likings and dislikings, and there was a pleasant cordiality about his greeting which should have provoked a corresponding fervour on the part of Edward Arne.

“How are you, Arne?” Graham said. “I was on my way to call on your wife.”

“Ah--yes!” said Edward Arne, with the ascending inflection of polite acquiescence. A ray of blue from his eyes, rested transitorily on the doctor’s face, and in that short moment the latter noted its intolerable vacuity, and for the first time in his life felt a sharp pang of sympathy for the wife of such a husband.

“I suppose you are off to your club?--er--good-bye!” he wound up abruptly. With the best will in the world he somehow found it almost impossible to carry on a conversation with Edward Arne, who raised his hand to his hat-brim in token of salutation, smiled sweetly, and walked on.

“He really is extraordinarily good-looking,” reflected the doctor, as he watched him down the street and safely over the crossing with a certain degree of solicitude for which he could not exactly account. “And yet one feels one’s vitality ebbing out at the finger-ends as one talks to him. I shall begin to believe in Esther’s absurd fancies about him soon. Ah, there’s the little girl!” he exclaimed, as he turned into Cheyne Walk and caught sight of her with her nurse, making violent demonstrations to attract his attention. “She is alive, at any rate. How is your mother, Dolly?” he asked.

“Quite well, thank you,” was the child’s reply. She added, “She’s crying. She sent me away because I looked at her. So I did. Her cheeks are quite red.”

“Run away--run away and play!” said the doctor nervously. He ascended the steps of the house, and rang the bell very gently and neatly.

“Not at----” began Foster, with the intonation of polite falsehood, but stopped on seeing the doctor, who, with his daughter, was a privileged person. “Mrs. Arne will see you, Sir.”

“Mrs. Arne is not alone?” he said interrogatively.

“Yes, Sir, quite alone. I have just taken tea in.”

Dr. Graham’s doubts were prompted by the low murmur as of a voice, or voices, which came to him through the open door of the room at the head of the stairs. He paused and listened while Foster stood by, merely remarking, “Mrs. Arne do talk to herself sometimes, Sir.”

It was Mrs. Arne’s voice--the doctor recognized it now. It was not the voice of a sane or healthy woman. He at once mentally removed his visit from the category of a morning call, and prepared for a semi-professional inquiry.

“Don’t announce me,” he said to Foster, and quietly entered the back drawing-room, which was separated by a heavy tapestry portiere from the room where Mrs. Arne sat, with an open book on the table before her, from which she had been apparently reading aloud. Her hands were now clasped tightly over her face, and when, presently, she removed them and began feverishly to turn page after page of her book, the crimson of her cheeks was seamed with white where her fingers had impressed themselves.

The doctor wondered if she saw him, for though her eyes were fixed in his direction, there was no apprehension in them. She went on reading, and it was the text, mingled with passionate interjection and fragmentary utterances, of the Burial Service that met his ears.

“‘For as in Adam all die!’ All die! It says all! For he must reign.… The last enemy that shall be destroyed is Death. What shall they do if the dead rise not at all!… I die daily…! Daily! No, no, better get it over… dead and buried… out of sight, out of mind… under a stone. Dead men don’t come back.… Go on! Get it over. I want to hear the earth rattle on the coffin, and then I shall know it is done. ‘Flesh and blood cannot inherit!’ Oh, what did I do? What have I done? Why did I wish it so fervently? Why did I pray for it so earnestly? God gave me my wish----”

“Alice! Alice!” groaned the doctor.

She looked up. “‘When this corruptible shall have put on incorruption----’ ‘Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, earth to earth----’ Yes, that is it. ‘After death, though worms destroy this body----’”

She flung the book aside and sobbed.

“That is what I was afraid of. My God! My God! Down there--in the dark--for ever and ever and ever! I could not bear to think of it! My Edward! And so I interfered… and prayed… and prayed till… Oh! I am punished. Flesh and blood could not inherit! I kept him there--I would not let him go.… I kept him.… I prayed.… I denied him Christian burial.… Oh, how could I know.…”

“Good heavens, Alice!” said Graham, coming sensibly forward, “what does this mean? I have heard of schoolgirls going through the marriage service by themselves, but the burial service----”

He laid down his hat and went on severely, “What have you to do with such things? Your child is flourishing--your husband alive and here----”

“And who kept him here?” interrupted Alice Arne fiercely, accepting the fact of his appearance without comment.

“You did,” he answered quickly, “with your care and tenderness. I believe the warmth of your body, as you lay beside him for that half-hour, maintained the vital heat during that extraordinary suspension of the heart’s action, which made us all give him up for dead. You were his best doctor, and brought him back to us.”

“Yes, it was I--it was I--you need not tell me it was I!”

“Come, be thankful!” he said cheerfully. “Put that book away, and give me some tea, I’m very cold.”

“Oh, Dr. Graham, how thoughtless of me!” said Mrs. Arne, rallying at the slight imputation on her politeness he had purposely made. She tottered to the bell and rang it before he could anticipate her.

“Another cup,” she said quite calmly to Foster, who answered it. Then she sat down quivering all over with the suddenness of the constraint put upon her.

“Yes, sit down and tell me all about it,” said Dr. Graham good-humouredly, at the same time observing her with the closeness he gave to difficult cases.

“There is nothing to tell,” she said simply, shaking her head, and futilely altering the position of the tea-cups on the tray. “It all happened years ago. Nothing can be done now. Will you have sugar?”

He drank his tea and made conversation. He talked to her of some Dante lectures she was attending; of some details connected with her child’s Kindergarten classes. These subjects did not interest her. There was a subject she wished to discuss, he could see that a question trembled on her tongue, and tried to lead up to it.

She introduced it herself, quite quietly, over a second cup. “Sugar, Dr. Graham? I forget. Dr. Graham, tell me, do you believe that prayers--wicked unreasonable prayers--are granted?”

He helped himself to another slice of bread and butter before answering.

“Well,” he said slowly, “it seems hard to believe that every fool who has a voice to pray with, and a brain where to conceive idiotic requests with, should be permitted to interfere with the economy of the universe. As a rule, if people were long-sighted enough to see the result of their petitions, I fancy very few of us would venture to interfere.”

Mrs. Arne groaned.

She was a good Churchwoman, Graham knew, and he did not wish to sap her faith in any way, so he said no more, but inwardly wondered if a too rigid interpretation of some of the religious dogmas of the Vicar of St. Adhelm’s, her spiritual adviser, was not the clue to her distress. Then she put another question--

“Eh! What?” he said. “Do I believe in ghosts? I will believe you if you will tell me you have seen one.”

“You know, Doctor,” she went on, “I was always afraid of ghosts--of spirits--things unseen. I couldn’t ever read about them. I could not bear the idea of some one in the room with me that I could not see. There was a text that always frightened me that hung up in my room: ‘Thou, God, seest me!’ It frightened me when I was a child, whether I had been doing wrong or not. But now,” shuddering, “I think there are worse things than ghosts.”

“Well, now, what sort of things?” he asked good-humouredly. “Astral bodies----?”

She leaned forward and laid her hot hand on his.

“Oh, Doctor, tell me, if a spirit--without the body we know it by--is terrible, what of a body”--her voice sank to a whisper, “a body--senseless--lonely--stranded on this earth--without a spirit?”

She was watching his face anxiously. He was divided between a morbid inclination to laugh and the feeling of intense discomfort provoked by this wretched scene. He longed to give the conversation a more cheerful turn, yet did not wish to offend her by changing it too abruptly.

“I have heard of people not being able to keep body and soul together,” he replied at last, “but I am not aware that practically such a division of forces has ever been achieved. And if we could only accept the theory of the de-spiritualized body, what a number of antipathetic people now wandering about in the world it would account for!”

The piteous gaze of her eyes seemed to seek to ward off the blow of his misplaced jocularity. He left his seat and sat down on the couch beside her.

“Poor child! poor girl! you are ill, you are overexcited. What is it? Tell me,” he asked her as tenderly as the father she had lost in early life might have done. Her head sank on his shoulder.

“Are you unhappy?” he asked her gently.

“Yes!”

“You are too much alone. Get your mother or your sister to come and stay with you.”

“They won’t come,” she wailed. “They say the house is like a grave. Edward has made himself a study in the basement. It’s an impossible room--but he has moved all his things in, and I can’t--I won’t go to him there.…”

“You’re wrong. For it’s only a fad,” said Graham, “he’ll tire of it. And you must see more people somehow. It’s a pity my daughter is away. Had you any visitors to-day?”

“Not a soul has crossed the threshold for eighteen days.”

“We must change all that,” said the doctor vaguely. “Meantime you must cheer up. Why, you have no need to think of ghosts and graves--no need to be melancholy--you have your husband and your child----”

“I have my child--yes.”

The doctor took hold of Mrs. Arne by the shoulder, and held her a little away from him. He thought he had found the cause of her trouble--a more commonplace one than he had supposed.

“I have known you, Alice, since you were a child,” he said gravely. “Answer me! You love your husband, don’t you?”

“Yes.” It was as if she were answering futile prefatory questions in the witness-box. Yet he saw by the intense excitement in her eyes that he had come to the point she feared, and yet desired to bring forward.

“And he loves you?”

She was silent.

“Well, then, if you love each other, what more can you want? Why do you say you have only your child in that absurd way?”

She was still silent, and he gave her a little shake.

“Tell me, have you and he had any difference lately? Is there any--coldness--any--temporary estrangement between you?”

He was hardly prepared for the burst of foolish laughter that proceeded from the demure Mrs. Arne as she rose and confronted him, all the blood in her body seeming for the moment to rush to her usually pale cheeks.

“Coldness! Temporary estrangement! If that were all! Oh, is every one blind but me? There is all the world between us!--all the difference between this world and the next!”

She sat down again beside the doctor and whispered in his ear, and her words were like a breath of hot wind from some Gehenna of the soul.

“Oh, Doctor, I have borne it for six years, and I must speak. No other woman could bear what I have borne, and yet be alive! And I loved him so; you don’t know how I loved him! That was it--that was my crime----”

“Crime?” repeated the doctor.

“Yes, crime! It was impious, don’t you see? But I have been punished. Oh, Doctor, you don’t know what my life is! Listen! Listen! I must tell you. To live with a---- At first before I guessed when I used to put my arms round him, and he merely submitted--and then it dawned on me what I was kissing! It is enough to turn a living woman into stone--for I am living, though sometimes I forget it. Yes, I am a live woman, though I live in a grave. Think what it is!--to wonder every night if you will be alive in the morning, to lie down every night in an open grave--to smell death in every corner--every room--to breathe death--to touch it.…”

The portiere in front of the door shook, a hoopstick parted it, a round white clad bundle supported on a pair of mottled red legs peeped in, pushing a hoop in front of her. The child made no noise. Mrs. Arne seemed to have heard her, however. She slewed round violently as she sat on the sofa beside Dr. Graham, leaving her hot hands clasped in his.

“You ask Dolly,” she exclaimed. “She knows it, too--she feels it.”

“No, no, Alice, this won’t do!” the doctor adjured her very low. Then he raised his voice and ordered the child from the room. He had managed to lift Mrs. Arne’s feet and laid her full length on the sofa by the time the maid reappeared. She had fainted.

He pulled down her eyelids and satisfied himself as to certain facts he had up till now dimly apprehended. When Mrs. Arne’s maid returned, he gave her mistress over to her care and proceeded to Edward Arne’s new study in the basement.

“Morphia!” he muttered to himself, as he stumbled and faltered through gaslit passages, where furtive servants eyed him and scuttled to their burrows.

“What is he burying himself down here for?” he thought. “Is it to get out of her way? They _are_ a nervous pair of them!”

* * * * * * *

Arne was sunk in a large arm-chair drawn up before the fire. There was no other light, except a faint reflection from the gas-lamp in the road, striking down past the iron bars of the window that was sunk below the level of the street. The room was comfortless and empty, there was little furniture in it except a large bookcase at Arne’s right hand and a table with a Tantalus on it standing some way off. There was a faded portrait in pastel of Alice Arne over the mantelpiece, and beside it, a poor pendant, a pen and ink sketch of the master of the house. They were quite discrepant, in size and medium, but they appeared to look at each other with the stolid attentiveness of newly married people.

“Seedy, Arne?” Graham said.

“Rather, to-day. Poke the fire for me, will you?”

“I’ve known you quite seven years,” said the doctor cheerfully, “so I presume I can do that.… There, now!… And I’ll presume further---- What have we got here?”

He took a small bottle smartly out of Edward Arne’s fingers and raised his eyebrows. Edward Arne had rendered it up agreeably; he did not seem upset or annoyed.

“Morphia. It isn’t a habit. I only got hold of the stuff yesterday--found it about the house. Alice was very jumpy all day, and communicated her nerves to me, I suppose. I’ve none as a rule, but do you know, Graham, I seem to be getting them--feel things a good deal more than I did, and want to talk about them.”

“What, are you growing a soul?” said the doctor carelessly, lighting a cigarette.

“Heaven forbid!” Arne answered equably. “I’ve done very well without it all these years. But I’m fond of old Alice, you know, in my own way. When I was a young man, I was quite different. I took things hardly and got excited about them. Yes, excited. I was wild about Alice, wild! Yes, by Jove! though she has forgotten all about it.”

“Not that, but still it’s natural she should long for some little demonstration of affection now and then… and she’d be awfully distressed if she saw you fooling with that bottle of morphia! You know, Arne, after that narrow squeak you had of it five years ago, Alice and I have a good right to consider that your life belongs to us!”

Edward Arne settled in his chair and replied, rather fretfully--

“All very well, but you didn’t manage to do the job thoroughly. You didn’t turn me out lively enough to please Alice. She’s annoyed because when I take her in my arms, I don’t hold her tight enough. I’m too quiet, too languid!… Hang it all, Graham, I believe she’d like me to stand for Parliament!… Why can’t she let me just go along my own way? Surely a man who’s come through an illness like mine can be let off parlour tricks? All this worry--it culminated the other day when I said I wanted to colonize a room down here, and did, with a spurt that took it out of me horribly,--all this worry, I say, seeing her upset and so on, keeps me low, and so I feel as if I wanted to take drugs to soothe me.”

“Soothe!” said Graham. “This stuff is more than soothing if you take enough of it. I’ll send you something more like what you want, and I’ll take this away, by your leave.”

“I really can’t argue!” replied Arne.… “If you see Alice, tell her you find me fairly comfortable and don’t put her off this room. I really like it best. She can come and see me here, I keep a good fire, tell her.… I feel as if I wanted to sleep…” he added brusquely.

“You have been indulging already,” said Graham softly. Arne had begun to doze off. His cushion had sagged down, the doctor stooped to rearrange it, carelessly laying the little phial for the moment in a crease of the rug covering the man’s knees.

* * * * * * *

Mrs. Arne in her mourning dress was crossing the hall as he came to the top of the basement steps and pushed open the swing door. She was giving some orders to Foster, the butler, who disappeared as the doctor advanced.

“You’re about again,” he said, “good girl!”

“Too silly of me,” she said, “to be hysterical! After all these years! One should be able to keep one’s own counsel. But it is over now, I promise I will never speak of it again.”

“We frightened poor Dolly dreadfully. I had to order her out like a regiment of soldiers.”

“Yes, I know. I’m going to her now.”

On his suggestion that she should look in on her husband first she looked askance.

“Down there!”

“Yes, that’s his fancy. Let him be. He is a good deal depressed about himself and you. He notices a great deal more than you think. He isn’t quite as apathetic as you describe him to be.… Come here!” He led her into the unlit dining-room a little way. “You expect too much, my dear. You do really! You make too many demands on the vitality you saved.”

“What did one save him for?” she asked fiercely. She continued more quietly, “I know. I am going to be different.”

“Not you,” said Graham fondly. He was very partial to Alice Arne in spite of her silliness. “You’ll worry about Edward till the end of the chapter. I know you. And”--he turned her round by the shoulder so that she fronted the light in the hall--“you elusive thing, let me have a good look at you.… Hum! Your eyes, they’re a bit starey.…”

He let her go again with a sigh of impotence. Something must be done… soon… he must think.… He got hold of his coat and began to get into it.…

Mrs. Arne smiled, buttoned a button for him and then opened the front door, like a good hostess, a very little way. With a quick flirt of his hat he was gone, and she heard the clap of his brougham door and the order “Home.”

* * * * * * *

“Been saying good-bye to that thief Graham?” said her husband gently, when she entered his room, her pale eyes staring a little, her thin hand busy at the front of her dress.…

“Thief? Why? One moment! Where’s your switch?”

She found it and turned on a blaze of light from which her husband seemed to shrink.

“Well, he carried off my drops. Afraid of my poisoning myself, I suppose?”

“Or acquiring the morphia habit,” said his wife in a dull level voice, “as I have.”

She paused. He made no comment. Then, picking up the little phial Dr. Graham had left in the crease of the rug, she spoke--

“You are the thief, Edward, as it happens, this is mine.”

“Is it? I found it knocking about: I didn’t know it was yours. Well, will you give me some?”

“I will, if you like.”

“Well, dear, decide. You know I am in your hands and Graham’s. He was rubbing that into me to-day.”

“Poor lamb!” she said derisively; “I’d not allow my doctor, or my wife either, to dictate to me whether I should put an end to myself, or not.”

“Ah, but you’ve got a spirit, you see!” Arne yawned. “However, let me have a go at the stuff and then you put it on top of a wardrobe or a shelf, where I shall know it is, but never reach out to get it, I promise you.”

“No, you wouldn’t reach out a hand to keep yourself alive, let alone kill yourself,” said she. “That is you all over, Edward.”

“And don’t you see that is why I did die,” he said, with earnestness unexpected by her. “And then, unfortunately, you and Graham bustled up and wouldn’t let Nature take its course.… I rather wish you hadn’t been so officious.”

“And let you stay dead,” said she carelessly. “But at the time I cared for you so much that I should have had to kill myself, or commit suttee like a Bengali widow. Ah, well!”

She reached out for a glass half-full of water that stood on the low ledge of a bookcase close by the arm of his chair.… “Will this glass do? What’s in it? Only water? How much morphia shall I give you? An over dose?”

“I don’t care if you do, and that’s a fact.”

“It was a joke, Edward,” she said piteously.

“No joke to me. This fag end of life I’ve clawed hold of, doesn’t interest me. And I’m bound to be interested in what I’m doing or I’m no good. I’m no earthly good now. I don’t enjoy life, I’ve nothing to enjoy it with--in here”--he struck his breast. “It’s like a dull party one goes to by accident. All I want to do is to get into a cab and go home.”

His wife stood over him with the half-full glass in one hand and the little bottle in the other. Her eyes dilated… her chest heaved.…

“Edward!” she breathed. “Was it all so useless?”

“Was what useless? Yes, as I was telling you, I go as one in a dream--a bad, bad dream, like the dreams I used to have when I overworked at college. I was brilliant, Alice, brilliant, do you hear? At some cost, I expect! Now I hate people--my fellow creatures. I’ve left them. They come and go, jostling me, and pushing me, on the pavements as I go along, avoiding them. Do you know where they should be, really, in relation to me?”

He rose a little in his seat--she stepped nervously aside, made as if to put down the bottle and the glass she was holding, then thought better of it and continued to extend them mechanically.

“They should be over my head. I’ve already left them and their petty nonsense of living. They mean nothing to me, no more than if they were ghosts walking. Or perhaps it’s I who am a ghost to them?… You don’t understand it. It’s because I suppose you have no imagination. You just know what you want and do your best to get it. You blurt out your blessed petition to your Deity and the idea that you’re irrelevant never enters your head, soft, persistent, High Church thing that you are!…”

Alice Arne smiled, and balanced the objects she was holding. He motioned her to pour out the liquid from one to the other, but she took no heed; she was listening with all her ears. It was the nearest approach to the language of compliment, to anything in the way of loverlike personalities that she had heard fall from his lips since his illness. He went on, becoming as it were lukewarm to his subject--

“But the worst of it is that once break the cord that links you to humanity--it can’t be mended. Man doesn’t live by bread alone… or lives to disappoint you. What am I to you, without my own poor personality?… Don’t stare so, Alice! I haven’t talked so much or so intimately for ages, have I? Let me try and have it out.… Are you in any sort of hurry?”

“No, Edward.”

“Pour that stuff out and have done.… Well, Alice, it’s a queer feeling, I tell you. One goes about with one’s looks on the ground, like a man who eyes the bed he is going to lie down in, and longs for. Alice, the crust of the earth seems a barrier between me and my own place. I want to scratch the boardings with my nails and shriek something like this: ‘Let me get down to you all, there where I belong!’ It’s a horrible sensation, like a vampire reversed!…”

“Is that why you insisted on having this room in the basement?” she asked breathlessly.

“Yes, I can’t bear being upstairs, somehow. Here, with these barred windows and stone-cold floors… I can see the people’s feet walking above there in the street… one has some sort of illusion.…”

“Oh!” She shivered and her eyes travelled like those of a caged creature round the bare room and fluttered when they rested on the sombre windows imperiously barred. She dropped her gaze to the stone flags that showed beyond the oasis of Turkey carpet on which Arne’s chair stood.… Then to the door, the door that she had closed on entering. It had heavy bolts, but they were not drawn against her, though by the look of her eyes it seemed she half imagined they were.…

She made a step forward and moved her hands slightly. She looked down on them and what they held… then changed the relative positions of the two objects and held the bottle over the glass.…

“Yes, come along!” her husband said. “Are you going to be all day giving it me?”

With a jerk, she poured the liquid out into a glass and handed it to him. She looked away--towards the door.…

“Ah, your way of escape!” said he, following her eyes. Then he drank, painstakingly.

The empty bottle fell out of her hands. She wrung them, murmuring--

“Oh, if I had only known!”

“Known what? That I should go near to cursing you for bringing me back?”

He fixed his cold eyes on her, as the liquid passed slowly over his tongue.…

“--Or that you would end by taking back the gift you gave?”

THE COACH

It was a lonely part of the country, far north, where the summer nights are pale and light and scant of shade. This summer night there was no moon, and yet it was not dark. For hours the flat, deprecating earth had lain prone under a storm of wind and rain. Its patient surface was drenched, blanched, smitten into blindness. The tumbled waters of the Firth splashed on the edges of the plain, their wild commotion dwarfed by the noise of the wind-driven showers, whose gloomy drops tapped the waters into sullen acquiescence. Half a mile inland the road to the north was laid. Clear and straight it ran, with never a house or homestead to break it, viscous with clay here, shining with quartz there, uncompromising, exact, like the lists of old, dressed for a tourney. Its sides were bare, scantily garnished with grass. This was nearly a hedgeless country. In places the undeviating line of it passed through a little coppice or clump of gnarled, ill-conditioned, nameless trees. They seemed to lean forward vindictively on either side, snapping their horny fingers at each other, waving their cantankerous branches as the gusts took them, broke them, and whirled the fragments of their ruin far away and out of ken, like a flapping, unruly kite which a child has allowed to pass beyond his control. The broad white surface of the road was not suffered to be blotted for a single moment. Nothing could rest for the play of the intriguing air-currents, surging backwards and forwards, blind, stupid and swelled with pride, till they had got completely out of hand and defied the archers of the middle sky. They staggered hither and thither like ineffectual giants; they buffeted all impartially; they instigated the hapless branches at their mercy to wild lashings of each other, to useless accesses of the spirit of self-destruction. Bending slavishly under the heavy gusts, each shabby blade of grass by the roadside rose again and was on the _qui vive_ after the rustling tyrant had passed.

It was then, in the succeeding moments of comparative peace, when the directors of the passionate aerial revolt had managed to call their panting rabble off for the time, that great perpendicular sheets of rain, like stage films slung evenly from heavenly temples, descended and began moving continuously sideways, like a wall, across the level track. A sheet of whole water, blotting out the tangled borders of herbage that grew sparsely round the heaps of stones with which the margin was set at intervals, placed there ready for breaking. When the slab of rain had moved on again, the broad road, shining out sturdily with its embedded quartz and milky kneaded clay, lay clear once more. Calm, ordered and tranquil in the midst of tumult and discord, it pursued its appointed course, edging off from its evenly bevelled sides the noisy moorland streams, that had come jostling each other in their haste to reach it, only to be relegated, noisily complaining, to the swollen, unrecognizable gutter.

At a certain point on the line of way, a tall, spare, respectable-looking man in a well-fitting grey frock coat stood waiting. The rain ran down the back of his coat collar, and dripped off the rim of his tall hat. His attitude suggested some weary foredone clerk waiting at the corner of the city street for the omnibus that was to carry him home to his slippered comfort and sober pipe of peace. He wore no muffler, but then it was summer--St. John’s Eve. He leaned on an ivory-headed ebony stick of which he seemed fond, and peered, not very eagerly, along the road, which now lay in dazzling rain-washed clarity under the struggling moon. There was a lull in the storm. He had no luggage, no umbrella, yet his grey coat looked neat, and his hat shiny.

Far in the distance, from the south, a black clumsy object appeared, labouring slowly along. It was a coach, of heavy and antique pattern. As soon as he had sighted it, the passenger’s faint interest seemed diminished. With a bored air of fulfilment, he dropped his eyes and looked down disapprovingly at the clayey mud at his feet, although, indeed, the sticky substance did not appear to have marred the exquisite polish of his shoes. His palm settled composedly on the ivory knob of his trusty stick, as though it were the hand of an old friend.

With all the signs of difficult going, but no noise of straining or grinding, the coach at last drew up in front of the expectant passenger. He looked up quietly, and recognized it as the vehicle wherein it was appointed that he should travel in this unsuitable weather for a stage or two, maybe. All was correct, the coachman, grave, business-like, headless as of usage, the horses long-tailed, black, conventional.…

The door opened noiselessly, and the step was let down. The passenger shook his head as he delicately put his foot on to it, and observed for the benefit, doubtless, of the person or persons inside--

“I see old Joe on the box in his official trim. Rather unnecessary, all this ceremony, I venture to think! A few yokels and old women to impress, if indeed, any one not positively obliged is abroad on a night like this! For form’s sake, I suppose!”

He took his seat next the window. There were four occupants of the coach beside himself. They all nodded formally, but not unkindly. He returned their salutations with old-fashioned courtesy, though unacquainted seemingly with any of them.

Sitting next to him was a woman evidently of fashion. Her heavy and valuable furs were negligently cast on one side, to show a plastron covered with jewels. She wore at least two enamelled and jewel-encrusted watches pinned to her bosom as a mark for thieves to covet. It was foolish of her. So at least thought the man in the grey frock coat. Her yellow wig was much awry. Her eyes were weak, strained, and fearful, and she aided their vision with a diamond-beset pince-nez. Now and again she glanced over her left shoulder as if in some alarm, and at such times she always grasped her gold-net reticule feverishly. She was obviously a rich woman in the world, a first-class train-de-luxe passenger.

The woman opposite her belonged as unmistakably to the people. She was hard-featured, worn with a life of sordid toil and calculation, but withal stout and motherly, a figure to inspire the fullest confidence. She wore a black bonnet with strings, and black silk gloves heavily darned. Round her sunken white collar, a golden gleam of watch-chain was now and then discernible.

At the other end of the coach, squeezed up into the corner where the vacillating light of the lamp hung from the roof least penetrated, a neat, sharp-featured man nestled and hid. His forehead retreated, and his bowler hat was set unnecessarily far back, lending him an air of folly and congenital weakness which his long, cold, clever nose could not dissipate. He was white as old enamel.

But the man whom the gentleman in the frock coat took to among his casual fellow-travellers was the one sitting directly opposite him, a rough, hearty creature, who alone of all the taciturn coachful seemed disposed to enter into a casual conversation, which might go some way to enliven the dreariness entailed by this somewhat old-fashioned mode of travelling. Gay talk might help to drown the dashing of the waters of the Firth lying close on the right hand of the section of road they were even now traversing, and the ugly roar of the wind and rain against the windows. This--by comparison--cheerful fellow was dressed like a working man, in a shabby suit of corduroys. He wore no collar, but a twisted red cotton handkerchief was wound tightly round his thick squat neck. His little mean eyes, swinish, but twinkling good-humouredly, stared enviously at the neat gentleman’s stiff collar and the delicate grey tones of his suiting. Crossing and uncrossing his creasy legs, in the unusual effort of an attempt at conviviality, the man in corduroys addressed the man in the frock coat awkwardly enough, but still civilly.

“Well, mate! They’ve chosen a rare rough night to shift us on! Orders from headquarters, I suppose? I’ve been here nigh on a year and never set eyes on my boss!”

“We used to call him God the Father,” said the elder man slowly.… “But whoever it is that orders our ways here, there is no earthly sense in questioning His arrangements, we can only fall in with them. As you admit, you are fairly new, and perhaps you do not as yet conceive fully of the silent impelling force that sways us. It is the same in the world we have left, only that there we were only concerned with the titles and standing of our ‘boss,’ as you call Him, and obeyed His laws not a whit. I must say I consider this particular system of soul transference that we have to submit to, very unsettling and productive of restlessness among us--a mere survival and tiresome superstition, to my mind. It has one merit; one sees something of the under world, travelling about as we do, and meeting chance, perhaps kindred spirits on the road. One realizes, too, that Hades is not quite as grey, shall I say, as it is painted! But perhaps,” he added, with a slight touch of class hauteur, “you do not quite follow me?”

“Oh yes, Master, I do,” eagerly replied the fellow-traveller to whom he chose to address his monologue. “Since I’ve been dead, I have learned the meaning of many things. I turn up my nose at nothing these days. I always neglected my schooling, but now I tell you I try to make up for lost time. From a rough sort of fellow that I was, with not an idea in my head beyond my beer and my prog, I have come to take my part in the whole of knowledge. It was all mine before, so to speak, but I didn’t trouble to put my hand out for it. Didn’t care, didn’t listen to Miss that taught me, or to Parson, either. He had some good ideas too, as I’ve come to know, though Vice isn’t Vice exactly with us here, now, in a manner of speaking. If God Almighty made us, why did He make us, even in parts, bad? That’s what I want to know, and I’ll know that when I’ve been dead a bit longer. Why did He give me rotten teeth so that I couldn’t chew properly and didn’t care for my food and liked drink better? It’s dirt and digestion makes drinking and devilry, I say.”

The smart woman interrupted him with a kind of languid eagerness, exclaiming--

“I must say I agree with you. Since the pestle fell on my shoulder in that lonely villa at Monte, I have realized what the dreadful gambling fever may lead to. It had made those two who treated me so ill, quite inhuman. They had become wild beasts. I ought never to have accepted their treacherous invitation to luncheon, never tempted them with my outrageous display of jewels! And look here, I was tarred with the same stick, I gambled too----”

She rummaged in her reticule and fished out a ticket for the rooms at Monte Carlo.

“I always call that the ticket for my execution. Though my executioners were rather unnecessarily brutal. They will attain unto this place more easily than I did. Hardly any pain. The hand of the law is gentle, compared with the methods of----”

The man in the grey frock coat raised his finger warningly. “No names, I beg. One of our conventions…!”

“Have a drop?” said the calm motherly woman to the excited fine lady. “Your wound is recent, isn’t it? Yours was a very severe case! A bloody murder, I call it, if ever there was one, and clumsy at that! And you only passive, which is always so much harder, they say! I can’t tell, for I was what you may call an active party. They don’t seem to mind mixing, they that look after us here! They lump us all together--travelling, at any rate! Though when I think of what I was actually turned off for, well--the way I look at it, what I did was a positive benefit to Society, and some sections of Society knew it, too, and would have liked to preserve my life.”

“But what, Madam, if I may ask, was your little difficulty?”

“It is called, I believe, Baby Farming,” she replied off-handedly, receiving her flask back from the smart woman and stowing it away in a capacious pocket. As she spoke, a shudder like a transitory ripple on a rain-swept stream passed over her hearers, with the exception of the thin man in the far corner, who preserved his serenity. Raising his sunken chin, he observed the last speaker with some slight show of interest.

The man in grey apologized.

“Excuse us, Madam. A remnant of old-world squeamishness, uncontrollable by us for the moment. Though perhaps, if you will, you might a little dissipate our preconceived notions of your profession, by explaining clearly your point of view.”

“Delighted, I’m sure,” she answered. “Funny, though, how seriously you all take it, even here! The feeling against my profession seems absurdly strong below as well as above. I was hooted as I left the court, I recollect. It annoyed me then considerably. I thought that those that hooted had more need to be grateful to me if all was known and paid for. I saved their pockets for them and their lovely honour too. They knew they owed all that to me. For the rest, they did not care. They went on, bless ’em, raising up seed for me to mow down as soon as its head came above ground, and welcome! Sly dogs, no thanks from them! But those shivering, shrinking women that came to me, some of them hardly out of their teens, some of them so delicate they had no right to have a baby at all!--Ah, if only I hadn’t let myself take their money it would have been a work of pure philanthropy. But I had to live, then! Now that that tax has been taken off, one has time to think it out all round. But Lord!--Society, to cry shame on me for it! They might as well hang any other useful public servant, like dustmen, rat-catchers, and such-like ridders of pests. Good old Herod, that I used to hear about at school, knew what he was doing when he cleared off all those useless Innocents! He was the first baby farmer, I guess.”

“You take large ground, Madam,” said the man in the frock coat, a trifle huffily.

“And I have the right,” said she, her large determined chin emerging from its rolls of fat in her eagerness. “You men ought to know it, and you do well enough, when you’re honest. I was only the ’scapegoat, and took on me the little sins of the race. It’s an easy job enough, what I did, but there’s few have the stomach for it, even then. You couldn’t call it dirty work either. You just stand by and leave ’em alone--to girn and bleat and squinny and die.”

“No blood, eh?” the man in the corner said suddenly. “I like blood.”

“What a fine night it has turned!” said the man in the grey frock coat, raising the sash and putting his head out of the window.… “Something rather uncanny, eh, about that man?” he remarked under his breath, half to himself, half to the man in brown corduroys.

“Take your head in,” said the latter, almost affectionately, “or you’ll be catching cold, and you’ve a nasty scar on your neck that I could see as you leaned forward, and which you oughtn’t to go getting the cold into.”

“Oh, that!” said the other complacently, sitting down again, but averting his gaze carefully from the man in the corner, for whom he seemed to feel a repulsion as marked as was his preference for his cheerful _vis-à-vis_. “That! That’s actually the scar of the blow that killed me. A fearful gash! He was a powerful man that dealt it. He got me, of course, from behind. I never even saw him. I was drafted off here at once, his hand had been so sure.” He felt nervously in his pockets. “I have a foulard somewhere, but I am apt to mislay it.”

“You should do like me, have a good strong handkercher and knot it round your neck firm. I’ve got a mark of sorts on my neck too, but it isn’t an open wound--never was,” the bluff man sniggered. “It is sheer vanity with me, but I don’t care to have it seen. It goes well all round, mine does--done by a rope, eh!”

He paused and nodded slyly. “For killing a toff. Nice old gentleman he seemed, too, but I hadn’t much time to look at him. Had to get to work----”

He was rudely interrupted by a screech from the baby farmer.

“Lord!” she cried, “do I see another conveyance coming on this lonely road? I do ’ope so. I’m one for seeing plenty of people. I always like a crowd, and I must tell you, this sort of humdrum jogging along was beginning to get on my nerves.”

They all jerked themselves round, and peered through the glass panes behind them. The taciturn man alone reserved his attention.

Sure enough, a dark object, plainly outlined in the strong moonlight which now lit up the heavens, where heavy masses of cloud had until now obscured its effulgence, was plainly visible. It blotted the ribbon of white that lay in front of them.… Nearer and nearer it came. All heads were at the windows of the coach.… Now it was seen to be a high-hung dog-cart, of the most modern pattern, drawn by a smart little mettled pony, and containing two slight young girls.… The one that drove held the ribbons in hands that were covered with white dog-skin gloves, and which looked immense in the pallid moonshine.

“What an excitement!” said the stout woman. “We shall pass them. Some member of one of the country families about here, I suppose.”

“I hope--for all things considering, I’m not a blood-thirsty man,” the man in corduroys muttered anxiously under his breath, “that we’re not a-going to give them a shock! Bound to, when we meet them plumb like this! ’Orses can’t abide the sight of us, mostly, no more than they could those nasty motors when they first came in. And we’re worse than motors--they seem to smell us out at once for what we are!”

“If you do really think that pony is likely to swerve,” said the man in the grey suit, anxiously, “would it be of any use our asking old Diggory to drive more slowly and humour them?”

“Couldn’t go no slower than we are!” replied the man in corduroys. “Besides, it’s not the pace that kills! I’ll bet you that pony’s all of a sweat already!”

The dog-cart approached. The faces of the two young women were discernible. They were white--blanched with fear, or it may have been the effect of the strong moonlight. There was no doubt that they were disturbed, and that the girl who was driving fully realized the necessity of controlling the horse, whose nostrils were quivering, and on whose sides foam was already appearing in white swathes.…

“It won’t pass us!” said the man in the corner, speaking suddenly. He rubbed his hands slowly one over the other. “There will be blood!”

“For goodness’ sake stop gloating like that!” said the stout woman. “It turns my stomach to hear you. Wherever can you have come from, I wonder? ’Tisn’t manners.… I say, can’t we hail them?” she inquired of the man in grey. “All give them one big shout?”

“They wouldn’t be able to hear us,” he replied, shaking his head sadly. “You must not forget that we are ghosts. We are not really here.”

“Ay, and that’s what the beasts know!” cried the man in corduroys. He jumped about. “That ’oss won’t be able to stand it. The kid’ll not be able to hold him in.…”

“They’re on us!” screamed the smart woman. “Oh, my God! Do we have to sit still and see it?” She covered her eyes with her hand.

“Yes, Missus, I reckon you have, and what’s more, run away after like any shoffer that’s killed his man and left him lying in the roadside. Old Diggory’s got his orders.”

The snorting of the pony was now audible. The coachful of ghosts distinctly saw the lather of foam dropping from its jaws. They were able, some of them, to realize the agonized tension of one girl’s hands, pulling for all she was worth, and the scared sideways twist of her forcedly inactive companion. Alone the face of the yellow carriage-lamp glared, immovable.…

Then it flew down, and was extinguished. There was a crash, a convulsion--and the great road to the north lay clear again.

The Coach of Death rolled on remorselessly past a black heap that filled the ditch on one side. It lay quite still, after that almost human leap and heave.…

The smart woman fainted, or appeared to do so. The baby farmer sat silent.

“It’s iniquitous!” exclaimed the man in grey, turning round from the window--his eyes wet, “to leave them behind like that without a word of inquiry, when it’s our conveyance has done all the mischief!”

He groaned and fidgeted.…

The man in corduroys tried to soothe him. “We ain’t to blame, Sir, don’t you think it!” he repeated. “As you said before to the lady, we aren’t really here!”

“That is little consolation to a man of honour,” the old man said sadly. “Still, as you say, we are but tools----”

He devoted himself to the smart woman, who revived a little under his civil ministrations.

“After all,” she said, “aren’t we somehow or other all in the same boat? I shouldn’t be surprised if those two nice girls didn’t join us at the next stage. If they do, we’ll make them tell us how they felt, when they first saw the coachful of ghosts coming down on them. They’re certainly dead, for they were both pitched into the ditch with the cart and horse on top of them. Did anybody see what became of the horse? No.… Well, we must settle down to dulness again, I am afraid, or, suppose, to while away the time we all started to tell each other the story of how we came to be here? A lively tale might cheer us all up, after the accident.”

“Agreed, Madam, heartily for my part,” said the man in grey, “though my own story is very humdrum, and not in the least amusing. You want, of course, an account of the particular accident that sent me here. Very well! But, ladies first! Will not you begin, Madam?”

She tossed her head, with an affected air.

“My story, perhaps,” she insinuated with modesty, “might not be very new to you. It was in all the papers so recently.”

“That will not affect me,” he answered, “for if, as I presume, it was a murder case, I never read them.”

“I read yours then, Missus, I expect,” said the man in corduroys. “I generally get the wife to read them out to me--anything spicy.”

“And yet the people that did it are not hanged yet, if, indeed, they ever are, poor souls! I am quite anxious,” said the smart woman, “to see how it goes. If the pair are really sent here, I suppose I shall be running up against them some night or other, on one of these transference parties. It will be very interesting. But”--she leaned across to the baby farmer--“could we not persuade you to give us some of your--nursery experiences, Madam?”

“There’s not much story about the drowning of a litter of squalling puppies or whining kittens,” said that lady shortly, “we want something livelier--more personal, if I may say so. From a remark that gentleman in the corner let drop a while ago, I fancy his reminiscences would be quite worth hearing, as good as a shilling shocker.”

“My story,” replied the individual thus pointedly addressed, “is impossible, frankly impossible.”

“Indecent, do you mean?” The smart woman’s eyes shone. “Oh, let us have it. You can veil it, can’t you?”

“Have you ever heard of mental degenerates?” he asked her compassionately. “I was one. I was called mad--a simple way of expressing it. I was a chemist. I dissected neatly enough, too, like a regular butcher. They did quite right to exterminate me.”