The Dead of Night, Page 3

  He worked carefully for five minutes, and then went into the kitchen for a hammer and chisel. Driving the chisel cautiously under the seat, he started the whole lid slightly. Again using the penknife, he cut along the hinged edge and outward along the ends; and then he fetched a wedge and a wooden mallet.

  ‘Now for our little mystery – ’ he said.

  The sound of the mallet on the wedge seemed, in that sweet and pale apartment, somehow a little brutal – nay, even shocking. The panelling rang and rattled and vibrated to the blows like a sounding-board. The whole house seemed to echo; from the roomy cellarage to the garrets above a flock of echoes seemed to awake; and the sound got a little on Oleron’s nerves. All at once he paused, fetched a duster, and muffled the mallet . . . When the edge was sufficiently raised he put his fingers under it and lifted. The paint flaked and starred a little; the rusty old nails squeaked and grunted; and the lid came up, laying open the box beneath. Oleron looked into it. Save for a couple of inches of scurf and mould and old cobwebs it was empty.

  ‘No treasure there,’ said Oleron, a little amused that he should have fancied there might have been. ‘Romilly will still have to be out by the autumn. Let’s have a look at the others.’

  He turned to the second window.

  The raising of the two remaining seats occupied him until well into the afternoon. That of the bedroom, like the first, was empty; but from the second seat of his sitting-room he drew out something yielding and folded and furred over an inch thick with dust. He carried the object into the kitchen, and having swept it over a bucket, took a duster to it.

  It was some sort of a large bag, of an ancient frieze-like material, and when unfolded it occupied the greater part of the small kitchen floor. In shape it was an irregular, a very irregular, triangle, and it had a couple of wide flaps, with the remains of straps and buckles. The patch that had been uppermost in the folding was of a faded yellowish brown; but the rest of it was of shades of crimson that varied according to the exposure of the parts of it.

  ‘Now whatever can that have been?’ Oleron mused as he stood surveying it . . . ‘I give it up. Whatever it is, it’s settled my work for today, I’m afraid –’

  He folded the object up carelessly and thrust it into a corner of the kitchen; then, taking pans and brushes and an old knife, he returned to the sitting-room and began to scrape and to wash and to line with paper his newly discovered receptacles. When he had finished, he put his spare boots and books and papers into them; and he closed the lids again, amused with his little adventure, but also a little anxious for the hour to come when he should settle fairly down to his work again.

  3

  It piqued Oleron a little that his friend, Miss Bengough, should dismiss with a glance the place he himself had found so singularly winning. Indeed she scarcely lifted her eyes to it. But then she had always been more or less like that – a little indifferent to the graces of life, careless of appearances, and perhaps a shade more herself when she ate biscuits from a paper bag than when she dined with greater observance of the convenances. She was an unattached journalist of thirty-four, large, showy, fair as butter, pink as a dog-rose, remind­ing one of a florist’s picked specimen bloom, and given to sudden and ample movements and moist and explosive utterances. She ‘pulled a better living out of the pool’ (as she expressed it) than Oleron did; and by cunningly disguised puffs of drapers and haber­dashers she ‘pulled’ also the greater part of her very varied wardrobe. She left small whirlwinds of air behind her when she moved, in which her veils and scarves fluttered and spun.

  Oleron heard the flurry of her skirts on his staircase and her single loud knock at his door when he had been a month in his new abode. Her garments brought in the outer air, and she flung a bundle of ladies’ journals down on a chair.

  ‘Don’t knock off for me,’ she said across a mouthful of large-headed hatpins as she removed her hat and veil. ‘I didn’t know whether you were straight yet, so I’ve brought some sandwiches for lunch. You’ve got coffee, I suppose? – No, don’t get up – I’ll find the kitchen –’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right, I’ll clear these things away. To tell the truth, I’m rather glad to be interrupted,’ said Oleron.

  He gathered his work together and put it away. She was already in the kitchen; he heard the running of water into the kettle. He joined her, and ten minutes later followed her back to the sitting-room with the coffee and sandwiches on a tray. They sat down, with the tray on a small table between them.

  ‘Well, what do you think of the new place?’ Oleron asked as she poured out coffee.

  ‘Hm! . . . Anybody’d think you were going to get married, Paul.’

  He laughed.

  ‘Oh no. But it’s an improvement on some of them, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it? I suppose it is; I don’t know. I liked the last place, in spite of the black ceiling and no watertap. How’s Romilly?’

  Oleron thumbed his chin.

  ‘Hm! I’m rather ashamed to tell you. The fact is, I’ve not got on very well with it. But it will be all right on the night, as you used to say.’

  ‘Stuck?’

  ‘Rather stuck.’

  ‘Got any of it you care to read to me? . . . ’

  Oleron had long been in the habit of reading portions of his work to Miss Bengough occasionally. Her comments were always quick and practical, sometimes directly useful, sometimes indirectly sugges­tive. She, in return for his confidence, always kept all mention of her own work sedulously from him. His, she said, was ‘real work’; hers merely filled space, not always even grammatically.

  ‘I’m afraid there isn’t,’ Oleron replied, still meditatively dry-shaving his chin. Then he added, with a little burst of candour, ‘The fact is, Elsie, I’ve not written – not actually written – very much more of it – any more of it, in fact. But, of course, that doesn’t mean I haven’t progressed. I’ve progressed, in one sense, rather alarmingly. I’m now thinking of reconstructing the whole thing.’

  Miss Bengough gave a gasp. ‘Reconstructing!’

  ‘Making Romilly herself a different type of woman. Somehow, I’ve begun to feel that I’m not getting the most out of her. As she stands, I’ve certainly lost interest in her to some extent.’

  ‘But – but – ’ Miss Bengough protested, ‘you had her so real, so living, Paul!’

  Oleron smiled faintly. He had been quite prepared for Miss Bengough’s disapproval. He wasn’t surprised that she liked Romilly as she at present existed; she would. Whether she realised it or not, there was much of herself in his fictitious creation. Naturally Romilly would seem ‘real’, ‘living’, to her . . .

  ‘But are you really serious, Paul?’ Miss Bengough asked presently, with a round-eyed stare.

  ‘Quite serious.’

  ‘You’re really going to scrap those fifteen chapters?’

  ‘I didn’t exactly say that.’

  ‘That fine, rich love-scene?’

  ‘I should only do it reluctantly, and for the sake of something I thought better.’

  ‘And that beautiful, beautiful description of Romilly on the shore?’

  ‘It wouldn’t necessarily be wasted,’ he said a little uneasily.

  But Miss Bengough made a large and windy gesture, and then let him have it.

  ‘Really, you are too trying!’ she broke out. ‘I do wish sometimes you’d remember you’re human, and live in a world! You know I’d be the last to wish you to lower your standard one inch, but it wouldn’t be lowering it to bring it within human comprehension. Oh, you’re sometimes altogether too godlike! . . . Why, it would be a wicked, criminal waste of your powers to destroy those fifteen chapters! Look at it reasonably, now. You’ve been working for nearly twenty years; you’ve now got what you’ve been working for almost within your grasp; your affairs are at a most critical s
tage (oh, don’t tell me; I know you’re about at the end of your money); and here you are, deliberately proposing to withdraw a thing that will probably make your name, and to substitute for it something that ten to one nobody on earth will ever want to read – and small blame to them! Really, you try my patience!’

  Oleron had shaken his head slowly as she had talked. It was an old story between them. The noisy, able, practical journalist was an admirable friend – up to a certain point; beyond that . . . well, each of us knows that point beyond which we stand alone. Elsie Bengough sometimes said that had she had one-tenth part of Oleron’s genius there were few things she could not have done – thus making that genius a quantitatively divisible thing, a sort of ingredient, to be added to or subtracted from in the admixture of his work. That it was a qualitative thing, essential, indivisible, informing, passed her comprehension. Their spirits parted company at that point. Oleron knew it. She did not appear to know it.

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said a little wearily, by and by, ‘practically you’re quite right, entirely right, and I haven’t a word to say. If I could only turn Romilly over to you you’d make an enormous success of her. But that can’t be, and I, for my part, am seriously doubting whether she’s worth my while. You know what that means.’

  ‘What does it mean?’ she demanded bluntly.

  ‘Well,’ he said, smiling wanly, ‘what does it mean when you’re convinced a thing isn’t worth doing? You simply don’t do it.’

  Miss Bengough’s eyes swept the ceiling for assistance against this impossible man.

  ‘What utter rubbish!’ she broke out at last. ‘Why, when I saw you last you were simply oozing Romilly; you were turning her off at the rate of four chapters a week; if you hadn’t moved you’d have had her three-parts done by now. What on earth possessed you to move right in the middle of your most important work?’

  Oleron tried to put her off with a recital of inconveniences, but she wouldn’t have it. Perhaps in her heart she partly suspected the reason. He was simply mortally weary of the narrow circumstances of his life. He had had twenty years of it – twenty years of garrets and roof-chambers and dingy flats and shabby lodgings, and he was tired of dinginess and shabbiness. The reward was as far off as ever – or if it was not, he no longer cared as once he would have cared to put out his hand and take it. It is all very well to tell a man who is at the point of exhaustion that only another effort is required of him; if he cannot make it he is as far off as ever . . .

  ‘Anyway,’ Oleron summed up, ‘I’m happier here than I’ve been for a long time. That’s some sort of a justification.’

  ‘And doing no work,’ said Miss Bengough pointedly.

  At that a trifling petulance that had been gathering in Oleron came to a head.

  ‘And why should I do nothing but work?’ he demanded. ‘How much happier am I for it? I don’t say I don’t love my work – when it’s done; but I hate doing it. Sometimes it’s an intolerable burden that I simply long to be rid of. Once in many weeks it has a moment, one moment, of glow and thrill for me; I remember the days when it was all glow and thrill; and now I’m forty-four, and it’s becoming drudgery. Nobody wants it; I’m ceasing to want it myself; and if any ordinary sensible man were to ask me whether I didn’t think I was a fool to go on, I think I should agree that I was.’

  Miss Bengough’s comely pink face was serious.

  ‘But you knew all that, many, many years ago, Paul – and still you chose it,’ she said in a low voice.

  ‘Well, and how should I have known?’ he demanded. ‘I didn’t know. I was told so. My heart, if you like, told me so, and I thought I knew. Youth always thinks it knows; then one day it discovers that it is nearly fifty –’

  ‘Forty-four, Paul –’

  ‘ – forty-four, then – and it finds that the glamour isn’t in front, but behind. Yes, I knew and chose, if that’s knowing and choosing . . . but it’s a costly choice we’re called on to make when we’re young!’

  Miss Bengough’s eyes were on the floor. Without moving them she said, ‘You’re not regretting it, Paul?’

  ‘Am I not?’ he took her up. ‘Upon my word, I’ve lately thought I am! What do I get in return for it all?’

  ‘You know what you get,’ she replied.

  He might have known from her tone what else he could have had for the holding up of a finger – herself. She knew, but could not tell him, that he could have done no better thing for himself. Had he, any time these ten years, asked her to marry him, she would have replied quietly, ‘Very well; when?’ He had never thought of it . . .

  ‘Yours is the real work,’ she continued quietly. ‘Without you we jackals couldn’t exist. You and a few like you hold everything upon your shoulders.’

  For a minute there was a silence. Then it occurred to Oleron that this was common vulgar grumbling. It was not his habit. Suddenly he rose and began to stack cups and plates on the tray.

  ‘Sorry you catch me like this, Elsie,’ he said, with a little laugh . . . ‘No, I’ll take them out; then we’ll go for a walk, if you like . . . ’

  He carried out the tray, and then began to show Miss Bengough round his flat. She made few comments. In the kitchen she asked what an old faded square of reddish frieze was, that Mrs Barrett used as a cushion for her wooden chair.

  ‘That? I should be glad if you could tell me what it is,’ Oleron replied as he unfolded the bag and related the story of its finding in the window-seat.

  ‘I think I know what it is,’ said Miss Bengough. ‘It’s been used to wrap up a harp before putting it into its case.’

  ‘By Jove, that’s probably just what it was,’ said Oleron. ‘I could make neither head nor tail of it . . . ’

  They finished the tour of the flat, and returned to the sitting-room.

  ‘And who lives in the rest of the house?’ Miss Bengough asked.

  ‘I dare say a tramp sleeps in the cellar occasionally. Nobody else.’

  ‘Hm! . . . Well, I’ll tell you what I think about it, if you like.’

  ‘I should like.’

  ‘You’ll never work here.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Oleron quickly. ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’ll never finish Romilly here. Why, I don’t know, but you won’t. I know it. You’ll have to leave before you get on with that book.’

  He mused for a moment, and then said:

  ‘Isn’t that a little – prejudiced, Elsie?’

  ‘Perfectly ridiculous. As an argument it hasn’t a leg to stand on. But there it is,’ she replied, her mouth once more full of the large-headed hat pins.

  Oleron was reaching down his hat and coat. He laughed.

  ‘I can only hope you’re entirely wrong,’ he said, ‘for I shall be in a serious mess if Romilly isn’t out in the autumn.’

  4

  As Oleron sat by his fire that evening, pondering Miss Bengough’s prognostication that difficulties awaited him in his work, he came to the conclusion that it would have been far better had she kept her beliefs to herself. No man does a thing better for having his confidence damped at the outset, and to speak of difficulties is in a sense to make them. Speech itself becomes a deterrent act, to which other discouragements accrete until the very event of which warning is given is as likely as not to come to pass. He heartily confounded her. An influence hostile to the completion of Romilly had been born.

  And in some illogical, dogmatic way women seem to have, she had attached this antagonistic influence to his new abode. Was ever anything so absurd! ‘You’ll never finish Romilly here.’ . . . Why not? Was this her idea of the luxury that saps the springs of action and brings a man down to indolence and dropping out of the race? The place was well enough – it was entirely charming, for that matter – but it was not so demoralising as all that! No; Elsie had missed the mark that time . . .
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  He moved his chair to look round the room that smiled, positively smiled, in the firelight. He too smiled, as if pity was to be entertained for a maligned apartment. Even that slight lack of robust colour he had remarked was not noticeable in the soft glow. The drawn chintz curtains – they had a flowered and trellised pattern, with baskets and oaten pipes – fell in long quiet folds to the window-seats; the rows of bindings in old bookcases took the light richly; the last trace of sallowness had gone with the daylight; and, if the truth must be told, it had been Elsie herself who had seemed a little out of the picture.

  That reflection struck him a little, and presently he returned to it. Yes, the room had, quite accidentally, done Miss Bengough a disservice that afternoon. It had, in some subtle but unmistakable way, placed her, marked a contrast of qualities. Assuming for the sake of argument the slightly ridiculous proposition that the room in which Oleron sat was characterised by a certain sparsity and lack of vigour; so much the worse for Miss Bengough; she certainly erred on the side of redundancy and general muchness. And if one must contrast abstract qualities, Oleron inclined to the austere in taste . . .

  Yes, here Oleron had made a distinct discovery; he wondered he had not made it before. He pictured Miss Bengough again as she had appeared that afternoon – large, showy, moistly pink, with that quality of the prize bloom exuding, as it were, from her; and instantly she suffered in his thought. He even recognised now that he had noticed something odd at the time, and that uncon­sciously his attitude, even while she had been there, had been one of criticism. The mechanism of her was a little obvious; her melting humidity was the result of analysable processes; and behind her there had seemed to lurk some dim shape emblematic of mortality. He had never, during the ten years of their intimacy, dreamed for a moment of asking her to marry him; none the less, he now felt for the first time a thankfulness that he had not done so . . .

  Then, suddenly and swiftly, his face flamed that he should be thinking thus of his friend. What! Elsie Bengough, with whom he had spent weeks and weeks of afternoons – she, the good chum, on whose help he would have counted had all the rest of the world failed him – she, whose loyalty to him would not, he knew, swerve as long as there was breath in her – Elsie to be even in thought dissected thus! He was an ingrate and a cad . . .