‘No, I’ve not chosen a book,’ he said gravely, and passed out into the entrance hall.
Here on the wall was a marble tablet; he read the name of a former Mayor, and for days afterwards it was ringing in his head. Children ran in from the street with loud cries. They had books under their arms. They pushed against him, and entered the door of the Children’s Department.
He walked up a passage that led to stairs, but he did not know where he was walking. In the ill-lighted tunnel he saw a shelf that was strongly made and well supported; on it stood huge, bound copies of The Times, and each thick volume comprised a year. In a spirit of anger he lifted one down, carrying it with surprising ease in his two arms; and at a table in the Reading Room he turned the yellow pages that had been as white as linen nearly fifty years back. He had not seen the announcement before. Had his mother kept it?—had her hands preserved it?—
WARRINGTON-COOMBE.—On August 10th, 1885, at 41 Durham Street, Fulham, to MARY, wife of R.H. Warrington-Coombe—a son.
At the foot of the Library steps, a baby in a perambulator scowled at him with its ugly, puckered face. The traffic deafened him and the sun blinded him as he pushed his way defiantly through the crowd. They were adding a wing to a general store, and he could hear the hammers as the workmen erected the scaffolding. When, at last, he entered the building that he had first contemplated, his knees were shaking, and he felt cold. The Police official, sitting at his desk in a bare room that smelt of ink, gazed at the man through blue and benevolent eyes. Then he stared at the hands and the tongue, and listened.
‘My name is John Warrington-Coombe,’ said the man from the Library. ‘I live in Durham Street. I have lived there all my life.’
He flicked his tongue over his lips, and the desk shook.
‘I have come to give myself up,’ he whispered harshly. ‘I have murdered my mother.’
Crescendo
MRS GROTE took me into the front bedroom, and then she closed the door upon us. Many parrots stood or climbed around us—ten of them, I remember, ten African parrots in ten bright cages; and as soon as Mrs Grote began to talk the creatures started murmuring, nibbling their grey breast-feathers and raking their red tails, and bowing low over their perches.
‘This is the room,’ she whispered, as though she were influenced by the purling and muttering of the birds. ‘Fifteen years ago that sailor come, and ’e ’ad this very room you’re standin’ up in. Yes, sir. ’Is name was Jack Bellow; and ’e come on a Toosday in winter and stayed three weeks.
‘ ’E left ’is photo standin’ on the mantelpiece, and I ’id it for a day or two from the p’lice officers, and two years later I tore it up and threw the bits away. It was a livin’ likeness, too: as you might say, it was Jack Bellow all over. Long brown face, ’igh cheek-bones, curl of ’air on the top of ’is forehead. Time and again I’ve boarded sailors, and I’ve always remembered the names of their ships, but I’ve clean forgotten the name of ’is. ’E come up from the docks one arternoon in late November, in a cab chocked fore and aft with parrot-cages. “Christ!” I says to Grote, starin’ out of the parlour winder, “jest you look at this sailor!” I’d known ’em bring a parrot or two before, but never as many as a dozen at one time! And when ’e went away, ’e left ’em ’ere.
‘First and last, ’e ’ad a reel sailor’s appetite. Nothin’ pleased ’im but the very best of everything—and ’e could well afford it, too. They always can.’ She smoothed her dress with her crumpled hands. ‘You never saw a chap so spry as what that sailor was. ’E kep’ us laughin’ most of the time. We give ’im this very room you’re standin’ in, sir, the best in the ’ouse. And as soon as ’e’d stowed them cages in it, down ’e ’opped, and joined us in a cup o’ tea, with rum in it—rum as ’e’d brought along in ’is luggage—and almost at once we bust out laughin’. We couldn’t ’elp it. ’E was like that. Laugh and the world laughs with yer. Ask me the names of the places ’e’d never been to, and you’d strike me dumb. ’E’d been to every mortal country under the sun! Chiney, ’Meriky, Afriky, ’Straley, Caribboo. . . .’
A siren hooted faintly from one of the ships in the docks; and I remembered that the fog all day had been as thick as a loggerhead. I stared at Mrs Grote, and she continued:
‘Jack Bellow took ’is meals with us whenever ’e didn’t ’ave ’em down town. ’E sat on the left-’and side of the table, facin’ the winder, and ’e kep’ us laughin’ all the time we was eatin’. Now and again ’e’d bring in sumpthin’ special for dinner or supper, and I’d ’ot it up for all of us, and sometimes in the middle of the meal ’e’d ’op upstairs with tit-bits for ’is birds. Them parrots didn’t often worry us, like some we’ve ’ad. They was mostly quiet and clickin’ their tongues and chucklin’, like what they are at this very moment. But now and again they’d scream that ’orrible, you couldn’t ’ear yerself think, let alone speak.’ She dropped her voice, and whispered, twitching her nose: ‘Yes, and one fine day ’e brought in an extra special tit-bit, only it wasn’t for us, or the birds. It was for ’imself. A smart young woman for ’imself.
‘A young woman. That’s right. Brought ’er ’ome with ’im one evenin’, near supper-time. That’s all right and nat’ral, isn’t it? Nothin’ odd in that! Pretty creature she was, too, dark and thin, with a mournful smile and the softest voice you ever ’eard. Pardon? Dark and thin, mournful smile—mournful! ’Eart-rendin’! Took ’er off to ’is room, Jack Bellow did; so I got down me best and biggest dish, and cooked ’em a supper of steak and carrots —no, sir, carrots—and carried it up to ’em, jest as I was, in me bed-slippers. “Thank ye, Mrs Grote!” ’e says. And then ’e turns to ’er and says: “Mrs Grote will end by chokin’ yer with kindness, Polly!” ’
She simpered at that, and twitched her nose.
‘Pardon? No, sir—that’s what ’e called ’er—Polly. And some days ’e’d call ’er Pretty Polly, or Pore Poll, same as the birds. ’E used to take ’er straight up to ’is room, amongst the parrot-cages. . . .’
‘Just a little louder, Mrs Grote!’
‘Parrots. Birds. Cages! Can’t you ’ear, sir?’
‘That’s much betterl’ I told her.
She twitched her nose, and continued, mouthing a little:
‘I don’t suppose we met ’er more than three times altogether, Grote and me! Not to speak to, I mean. We didn’t even know ’er reel name! We didn’t like to ask, I dunno why. We ’eard ’em laughing—love and laughter, as they say! But what with ’er mournful smile and ’is sailor’s laugh, we found it difficult to turn our ’earts against Jack Bellow and ’is young lady, and so we thought we’d ask ’em down sometime to take a bit of supper with us in the parlour, only—one night—’e killed ’er. . . .
‘Get that, sir? ’E killed ’er! Murdered ’er . . . done ’er in! The sailor done ’er in. Can’t you ’ear me? Yes—that’s right—’e done ’er in! We ’eard the parrots screamin’! Leastways, that’s what we thought at first. But it wasn’t only parrots, see? Not only parrots, see? Oh dear, can’t you ’ear me? . . . Parrots! Birds! A lot of screamin’ parrots! . . . No, sir, birds—not words—you couldn’t ’ear no words—no talkin’—jest screamin—screechin’! And it wasn’t only parrots, see? . . . Not only parrots, see? . . . Oh, dear! . . .’ She paused, and drew a breath, and continued, almost in despair: ‘ ’E must of been creepin’ after ’er then, ’olding out ’is fingers. Fingers! Fingers! Creepin’ and crouchin’! Screamin’ and screechin’! Can you ’ear me? Blast the swabs!’ she shouted, putting her fingers in her ears: and so she proceeded, her voice rising and falling until at length she had found an even pitch: ‘There was our little supper for ’em, cookin’ in the kitching! Pork and apple. Smell it all over the ’ouse! And when I’d dished it up for ’em I found that sailor gone, and there was ’er layin’ on ’er bed of withered roses, as you might say. Layin’ on this very bed you’re sittin’ on—with the prints of ’is fingers on ’er throat. Prints of ’is fingers! Strangled!
Can you ear me, sir? Did you get all that? ’ER BED OF WITHERED ROSES? The p’lice was on ’is track before you could say Jack Robinson—aye, or Jack Bellow, eether!—but they never found ’im! The fog was very thick that night, as thick as a loggerhead, as Bellow used to say! Couldn’t ’ardly see the lamp-posts in front of yer eyes, and it was thicker in the mornin’! All that day they ’unted ’igh and low for Jack, but what was the use of it? Like ’untin’ for a needle in a bloody ’aystack—’ She snatched her fingers from her ears, caught the sudden crash of sound, and twitched her nose. I remembered well that trick of hers. She hadn’t altered. My old landlady hadn’t altered. I swear she hadn’t altered in fifteen years.
She made a trumpet of her hands, and stood on the tips of her toes.
‘THAT SAILOR SAILED TO CARIBOO AS SURE AS YOU’RE STANDIN’ THERE!’
A moment later, Mrs Grote’s face cracked into a hundred wrinkles, and she started silently laughing at the ridiculous figures that we both presented; I, too, joined her, I let myself go, I fairly bellowed; neither of us could hear the other; and amid the uproar of the parrots, that were now screaming and shrieking at full strength, Mrs Grote and I left the front bedroom, closing the door behind us.
Life and Death of the Princess Gertrude
AT Beeding village in Sussex, you will find a half-timbered house, or large cottage, with bay windows; and fifteen years ago the owner told me its secret while we sat in the parlour there. A writing-table stood between us; on it he had laid his thick spectacles; at his back was a shelf with all his published books. We were in the middle of summer. The street and the hawthorn hedges were white with dust. Across the fields a church spire twinkled in a grove of elms. Fifteen years is a long time, and my friend is now dead. What else could I expect? Even at that remote period he was an old man looking into the past.
I
Near sixty years ago, he said, I built a castle in my mind’s eye, filled it with great halls, lofty kitchens, intricate corridors, and tapestried mural chambers; threaded it with spiral stairs, and threw up bastions at strategic corners; pierced its walls with lancet windows, and postern gates from which rope ladders hung down into the ditch below.
Heavenward, it showed me the familiar silhouette of turrets and battlements—often against an amber, evening sky. I could see everything; I had it complete. Even to the curve and colour of the first bend of steep roadway, cut through the solid rock, that could be seen dropping out of sight whenever I peered down from a certain high-set window in the castle walls. Even to particular pictures; wood-carvings, pieces of ordnance, a lute lying idle in one of the galleries. It was to be, I thought, the mise en scène of some story that I intended to write, a story with which my youthful pen was to conquer the world. Also it was to be situated above one of those black, foreboding escarpments on which the eye opens leisurely when the riverboat has just turned some legendary corner of the Rhine. For this reason, I was soon in great difficulties concerning my ditch: I fancied that its presence in the picture was a little incongruous: then, looking about me, I discovered that it was no more than a natural groove, or channel, in the rocky and lichened heights behind the castle; and sometimes I would throw a bridge across it to where the road began. You will laugh when I tell you that this picture came to me on the top of the Peckham ’bus. And at that moment our own Thames was nowhere in sight. We were clattering gaily by Camberwell Green; children were calling; and the driver was flicking his whip on the horses’ backs.
But I clung to my romantic vision. It was too good to be thrown away, too clearly planned and too firmly substantiated within my mind; ‘one day,’ I said, ‘this castle must be soaring in pages of print.’ And in order that it might possess the first ingredient of a human story, I installed, as chatelaine of its halls and treasures, a fair-haired German girl. I think her name jumped to my mind in a moment, the Princess Gertrude von Arnholdt-Geyerstein. She was very young when I created her, a mere slip of a girl, as we say; a husband, whom she had never known, lay in the big cemetery at Düsseldorf, one year dead; and soon, no doubt, the mind of the forlorn widow began to turn to more important questions than the probable appearance of the sculptured angels, garlanded flowers, and verses on her husband’s tomb—I mean, of course, to the question of her raison d’être, of her immediate, enigmatical future. . . .
All day she must have been asking herself: ‘Why am I here? Why has he made me? What does he want me to do?’ And I had no projects for her. Poor Princess! How pitifully her life had begun! For what purpose had I put her there, in that castle where the shouts of the builders had scarcely faded from turret and battlement; where the sound of the hammer and the saw and the chisel was but recently the scratching of my pen upon the writing-paper? Did I wish her to sit patiently, in a richly carved chair, until something happened—to listen, until suddenly she might be permitted to hear the voice of somebody calling—calling over the water—to find her way into the kitchens—or to climb to the remoteness of a turret chamber, where shafts of sunlight sloped through narrow windows, and filled her with a greater longing for the forbidden country beyond?
I have, in fact, not the slightest doubt that she did these things: and that, having accomplished them, she felt no happier than before: and I fancy that her only consolation was to be found in those moments when, at the close of some particularly irksome morning or afternoon, or in the red of evening, the Princess Gertrude von Arnholdt-Geyerstein jumped up from the chair or embroidered couch in which she had been so foolishly waiting, urged by the sudden thought that it did not matter what her actions might be—that her animated existence was the sole object of her creation—that nothing concerned her save the all-important fact that she could move. She could move, and in no uncertain manner, for she had legs, and they were young; whereupon, I do believe that she used to dance in front of the mirrors, or form plans to hold some kind of gymkhana for herself in the larger rooms and corridors of the castle. But, of course, she would have to go warily, lest somebody for whose appearance she was not ready should surprise her at the corners of staircases, or when she jumped or ran or danced in the high-roofed banqueting hall (I had often an impression that the castle resembled in many particulars a baronial mansion of Tudor times)—should leave her standing with open mouth, whence no words could come because I had not taught her the words that she must say. And I had nothing, nothing whatever for her to do.
The road—it was more correctly a precipitous path—never showed her the shape of a human figure, nor rang with the sound of a footfall, on the one short length of it that was visible to her when she peered down almost daily from an upper window. Did she open one of the postern gates, there was nothing but the rope ladder dropping idly beneath her, with its taut rungs never trodden by human feet, and the ditch below sweeping in a slow curve to the right and to the left, where a garrison of men could have been gathered for a sortie under cover of the further ramparts, but wherein now there were nothing but massive forms of light and shadow marching to the baton of the sun; where, sometimes, according to my mood, in imagination I could see the dry bottom of the ditch, and sometimes motionless, twinkling water that made it unnecessary for me to look up into the cloud-puffed depths of the sky. She lived on, peeping out of the windows, wistful-eyed, nourished only by my own conscience, by the same energy that had created her and the vast building in which she lived; and there she lay, upon my desk, she and her castle, awaiting the time when I might have need of her, and could send her adventuring into the world.
And the pity of it was that for many years the poor girl had nothing to do. . . . I hope you don’t think me very whimsical? These whimsical ideas of mine. . . . Why, from the very beginning, I was intensely practical! Was it not for purely practical reasons that I had created her? Afterwards, as you know, through the tremendous sale of the ‘von Geyerstein’ books, it was she who created me. But at first I was very dilatory. I had schemes for her, oh yes, draughted them roughly into note-books, on the backs of letters, on any odd sc
rap of paper, you know how one works; then I tore them up; and how many times used I to wake in the night, with my thoughts turning at once in her direction, to visualise her as sleeping now in this room of the castle, now in that, or possibly walking some narrow corridor that I had planned to the minutest detail—that corridor, for instance, which led to the oriel window (the only one of its kind in the place) overlooking the distant town of Mainz (then shining brightly beneath the moon) through which she was about to gaze in an endeavour to drive away the troubles that had wakened her from her sleep? Naturally, I had good reasons for my dilatoriness. My own life—my literary life—was in the making, and I had to go carefully before I leapt; and there were other stories to be started and finished, and there was plenty of time. Also I drew a certain confidence from the fact that the Princess Gertrude was young and exceedingly lusty; her face, her neck, her arms rippled with as much glow and vigour as my mind was able to shower upon them, and very often her hair would be caught by the sweet wind that blew across the river from the vineyards beyond. Surely she never tired of gazing down, from her turret, upon the rocky terraces, trembling to think that one day she might walk among them!
When, at last, I hit upon a story for her, she was already getting on in years. That is to say, she was no longer a young girl. You see how conscientiously, and how consistently, I was planning the whole work? Her life—her body—was to age naturally, in an actual manner, from that moment when I had brought her into being. The Princess Gertrude von Arnholdt-Geyerstein. A woman in the prime of her life. With the calendar lying on the desk before me—it was June, I remember . . . and the year? . . . hm . . . hm . . . 1875—I looked over my study, deep in thought. At that time, I was living in one of the poorer parts of Kensington. There was a ruler at my elbow, and I took it up, beating it lightly into my flattened palm. She would have grown, perhaps, a trifle thinner; for I believed her constitution to be of that kind which knits the muscles, pulling the frame together; and she was always rather bigly-boned. Yes, decidedly a potential heroine for the series of stories that I had in contemplation—stories of a somewhat fast and sensational kind. Call me, if you like, almost the first of the modern sensationalists. What a splendid adventuress the woman would make! And I began—quaintly enough, I suppose—to contract her name to the diminutive ‘Trude’. I liked the sound of that final ‘e’, with its tiny upward turn. I could see that it might carry her far in her enterprises. It could answer no purpose if I were to tell you her first story, which I began to write with great vehemence there and then. I started the long series quite ambitiously, with political intrigue, and much familiarity of conduct in Berlin society.
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