The Arthur Morrison Mystery

by Arthur Morrison

  He was the author of many contributions to the chief scientific journals, their inability to print which—for reasons they carelessly left unexplained—caused great regret to the editors; and his lecture explaining eclipses, before the Parson’s Green Debating Society, greatly stirred that learned body. On one occasion a daily newspaper had actually printed a letter from him giving the time and particulars of the appearances of a curious light in the sky, thought possibly to have been a manifestation of the Aurora Borealis; and there is every reason to believe that the same newspaper would also have published his account of his observation, through his large telescope, of an extraordinary ascending flight of meteors, if he had sent it; and he would undoubtedly have sent it but for a certain misgiving ensuing on his descent from the observatory and his reception of a report that the kitchen chimney had been on fire. “It’s a mercy the fire-engines haven’t been here, sir,” his housekeeper said; “the sparks were enough to bring ’em five miles.”

  It was to the management of this Mrs. Page, his housekeeper, that Mr. Charlwood owed the equable regularity of his life. He was wholly unconscious of the debt, and by years of use and habit he had grown to regard his household as a sort of unchanging, preordained Planetary System. Mrs. Page, the cook, the two housemaids, and the parlourmaid were all elderly and long-established servants, and so was the gardener and odd-man. They revolved decorously and punctually about himself, the sun of the system; the resulting phenomena of shaving-water, breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner, dusting, firefighting and lawn-mowing occurring with the exact and mechanical precision of the tides, the seasons, and the phases of the moon. There was an occasional eclipse, in the form of a chimney-sweeping or spring cleaning, and the kitchenmaid and the boot-boy came and went and changed erratically; but Mr. Charlwood saw little of them, and regarded them merely as irresponsible comets, with irregular orbits, striking in from outer space and away again, with no material disturbance to the solid planets about him. So he went his unchanging way, sleeping, rising, shaving, eating, reading, writing, astronomising, all to the tick of the clock, and one day and the next were as like as two full moons. Mrs. Page, visibly and invisibly, inspired and regulated the system throughout, and the smallest change in the exact order of the daily round would have affected Mr. Charlwood much as an astral catastrophe would have affected the tables in the Nautical Almanac. For many years, however, Mrs. Page saw that nothing so offensive as change of the smallest sort occurred in the Charlwood system.

  But at last things began to go wrong suddenly. Mr. Charlwood descended to the bathroom one morning, and there found the wrong soap. There was nothing to complain of in the soap itself—indeed, it was a cake of the same kind that had always occupied the soap-dish in his bedroom wash-stand—but it was not the sort of soap that ancient custom had sanctified for Mr. Charlwood’s bathroom use. That was in a square cake, and this was oval. That was white, and this was pink; moreover, the smell was altogether different. Mr. Charlwood did not discover the anomaly till he was in the bath, and it was too late to complain; and after he was dressed it slipped his memory till he beheld the same soap in the same place the next morning. It was annoying and distressing, but he somehow forgot it again.

  At any rate he forgot it till lunch, when the claret reminded him. It was cold—it positively chilled the teeth; and if one thing had been more regular than another in Mr. Charlwood’s house, it was the temperature of Mr. Charlwood’s claret. He reproved the parlour-maid, and sent it away, but his lunch was wholly ruined.

  Mrs. Page presented herself after lunch, and apologised. She had been in the habit of seeing to the proper warming of the claret, it seemed, but today something had distracted her attention, and she had forgotten it.

  Mr. Charlwood sat indignant, but far more amazed. It was as though the Pole Star had “forgotten” its correct place at the tip of the Little Bear’s tail. Cold claret—it seemed an impossibility; yet here it was. And at dinner that evening it came up—how do you think? Hot, sir, literally hot; parboiled! The whole thing was an outrage on the laws of nature. But even worse was to follow. When he demanded Mrs. Page, he was told that she had just “stepped out.” The chief planet of the system had just “stepped out” of its orbit—had gone swirling off into space in flat defiance of the law of gravitation! Mr. Charlwood bounced angrily into his study, and there found—no matches on the mantelpiece!

  When he could consider these abnormities with some degree of calmness, it seemed clear enough that something must be wrong with Mrs. Page; and yet it could scarcely be her health, or she would not have gone out. He resolved to demand an explanation in the morning.

  In the morning, however, she forestalled him by asking for a few days’ leave. She got the question out—very anxiously and gulpily, it is true—before he had time to open his inquiries, and, having heard it, he was dumb for half a minute, losing all hold of his ideas. Imagine asking Jupiter to give an indefinite holiday to his largest moon!

  When he found his voice, it was a voice of scandalised protest. “Mrs. Page!” he said, “Mrs. Page! Really I don’t understand this extraordinary state of things. What do you mean by it?”

  Mrs. Page’s mouth screwed down at the corners, and her eyes—rather red and heavy, he noticed now—grew pleading and watery. “I—I don’t like to ask you, sir,” said Mrs. Page, “and I’ve put it off as long as I could, but I must ask you to let me go now. I’ll see the cook, and—”

  “But what, Mrs. Page—why—what is the reason of this extraordinary—this—in short, Mrs. Page, what is your explanation?”

  “Well, sir, I didn’t want to mention it, not wishing to trouble you, as you didn’t know; but it’s my mother.”

  “Your mother, Mrs. Page?”

  “Yes, sir.” Mrs. Page, tearful of eye, spoke with an air of meek apology for having been born of woman.

  Mr. Charlwood’s surprise was complete. Mrs. Page was certainly as old as himself, and his mother was no more than a recollection of childhood. There was something difficult to believe—something vaguely ridiculous—about Mrs. Page’s tardy retention of a mother.

  “Then, what is it, Mrs. Page? Why must you go because of your—your mother?”

  “She’s an invalid, sir, and—got nobody to look after her for the present, and I—I—oh, I don’t know what I shall do!” And here Mrs. Page broke down wholly and dabbed her red eyes with a fistful of wet pocket-handkerchief.

  Mr. Charlwood regarded his housekeeper with blank astonishment. She was exhibiting phenomena altogether foreign to his experience of planets. He asked more questions, and so the tale came out disconnectedly in sobs and jerks.

  Mrs. Page’s mother had been left a widow only a little earlier than Mrs. Page herself. Of late years she had become bedridden with spine trouble, and, to the worse of that, was nearly blind. Mrs. Page had taken lodgings for her, and a woman had been paid to give her attention; but now the small savings of mother and daughter had at length given out, and the attendant was gone; and it was Mrs. Page’s present care to move her mother to cheaper lodgings, if such could be found, and in some way to attempt the impossible in the way of providing attendance on her. This must be the work of a few days, and Mrs. Page humbly and tearfully, but with more insistence than she had ever dared to use to her employer before, protested that she really must go.

  So much Mr. Charlwood gathered from Mrs. Page’s faltering apologetics, but she said nothing of the weeks of deepening apprehension which had preceded the crisis, while the last few sovereigns, feebly reinforced by the last month’s wages, had been melting fast; nor of the sleepless, sore-eyed nights given to helpless scheming of hopeless expedients. And Mr. Charlwood was not the man to figure them in his imagination, for, in truth, that was not a quality wherewith he was vastly endowed. So he replied with dignified asperity.

  “Have you considered, Mrs. Page,” he said, “whatah—extreme difficulty and inconvenience, and, in fact, positive ann
oyance, your absence would cause to the—to me?”

  Yes, it seemed that Mrs. Page had considered this, and was very sorry. But she had made arrangements to mitigate the inconvenience as far as possible, andin short, she really must go. Mr. Charlwood’s amazement increased; he began to realise that his housekeeper was insisting—was growing firm—dictatorial. This was disconcerting—even alarming. Mr. Charlwood suddenly grew aware that a vast deal more of his habitual wellbeing than he could risk depended wholly on his housekeeper; he positively could not afford to offend her. What was to be done?

  The sooner this nuisance was got rid of the better. He reflected that when a similar difficulty arose in a matter of astronomy—when one planet of a system was observed to be distracted from its proper orbit by the influence of some unknown object outside the system, every astronomer turned his telescope in the direction of the unknown object in the hope of seeing it. It was all he had to guide him, and time was precious. He pushed his chair back and rose.

  “Very well, Mrs. Page,” he said. “Get your bonnet at once. I will come with you and see this mother of yours!”

  Mrs. Page’s red eyes opened wide. Hers was the amazement now. She stammered the beginnings of protest and then was silent. Could it be that Mr. Charlwood doubted her word?

  “I will come and see this mother of yours, Mrs. Page!” he repeated.

  Mrs. Page left the room with something of a woebegone flounce.

  At the foot of the hill, where the houses stood smaller and thicker, a street led out of the main road, and another street led out of that. The end of this street was in another, wherein, if you turned to the right, you proceeded to I don’t know where, and if you turned to the left, you could get no farther, because the street ended in a blind wall. At the end little house, next the blind wall, in a back room up the one flight of stairs, Mrs. Page’s old mother lay pallid and helpless and all but blind on a clean little bed on an iron bedstead with thin and staggering legs. So Mr. Charlwood and his housekeeper found her half an hour after their morning conversation. Most things in the room were difficult to distinguish at first, for the blind was drawn; but the white of the bed was distinct enough, and on that another white—the old woman’s face, hard and sharp and shocking, with eyes all but closed by lids that trembled unceasingly.

  “Is that you, Martha?” came a querulous voice from the bed. “A nice time to leave me here like this, I must say, and not a soul to do a thing for me!”

  Mrs. Page bent and kissed the drawn face, quickly whispering something in which Mr. Charlwood could distinguish nothing but his own name. The twist of pain that abode ever on the grey face deepened at the words, and the old woman made what seemed a great effort to sit up, ending in a short groan.

  “And pray,” came the sharp voice again, “pray, may I ask why Mr. Charlwood is so good as to pay me this uninvited visit?”

  Mrs. Page stooped again and murmured some agonised entreaty, but the helpless woman in the bed went on.

  “I cannot pretend that the time is convenient,” she said. “And I hope it is not at your request, Martha. Mr. Charlwood is surely aware that the temporary circumstances which have induced you to accept a position in his household, and which have made it convenient for me to occupy these very inadequate lodgings, are not such as would warrant any attitude of patronage on his part.”

  Mrs. Page left the bed-head and returned to Mr. Charlwood by the door, pleading in whispers. “Please go, sir,” she begged. “She doesn’t know; she doesn’t understand—I’ve never told her quite how things are, and she’s been used to something different; pray forgive her, Mr. Charlwood, and—and don’t stay. You see it’s true—I must do something, though I don’t know what. Please leave me with her.”

  Mr. Charlwood found himself on the stairs, with some confused consciousness of a novel insignificance. He had been ordered out of the room by his own housekeeper, and had meekly obeyed her. His dignity being so far abused, it would suffer no more if he sat on the stairs to think it over; so he sat and tried. But through all he was oppressed by the memory of that grey-white face, with the trembling eyelids, that lay in the little room behind him. He had put himself in a false position, that was clear. And it would never do to part with Mrs. Page—that would mean a dislocation of the domestic system beyond the horror of dreams. But what could be done? He was unaccustomed to difficulties of this sort. Could any astronomical analogy help him? When the outer planet Uranus was observed to be disturbed in its orbit by something still beyond it, that something was straightway included in the community of the planets and given its proper place and name in the Solar System. Perhaps there might be a hint in that. And—really, he was oddly impressed by that white face with the near-closed eyes. Furthermore, he must no longer submit to the dictation of his housekeeper; he must retrieve his dignity and reassert his authority. As to that he was resolved.

  He rose straightway and knocked at the door of the bedroom. The door opened a little way, and Mrs. Page’s face appeared.

  “Just come here, if you please, Mrs. Page,” said Mr. Charlwood, with firm authority; “and shut the door behind you.”

  Mrs. Page complied, fearful and pleading of eye as ever.

  “I cannot waste more time waiting here, Mrs. Page.”

  “N-no, sir.”

  “Therefore you will be so good as take certain instructions before I go; instructions which I must insist on your carrying out without delaying longer here. Now as to the second spare bedroom, next your own, I wish a fire to be lighted there instantly, to air the room.”

  “Yes, sir—but won’t you please tell—”

  “I’ll tell nobody but you, Mrs. Page, and I expect you to see that my orders are obeyed. Next, now, I wish you to take a note, which I will write, to Dr. Greig.”

  “Y-yes, sir.”

  “In pursuance of instructions conveyed in that note, Dr. Greig will send a trained nurse up to the house, who will stay there, and whom I shall expect you to accommodate suitably. Also he will send here an invalid carriage, with attendants, which you must meet, and see without fail that your mother is placed in it with every care. You understand—with every care.”

  “My mother, sir? O Mr. Charlwood, you—don’t—don’t mean—”

  “I mean, Mrs. Page, that you are not to have the leave you applied for, to attend to your mother. I refuse it, utterly. I require your attendance at my house, and in order that you shall have no excuse for leaving it, your mother is to occupy the room which I have requested you to have aired at once. That is all, Mrs. Page, except that I shall be glad of pen and ink, if I am to write the note to Dr. Greig.”

  “O Mr. Charlwood—Mr. Charlwood, I shall pray for you night and day!”

  “I shall need it—I shall need it, Mrs. Page, if my claret is to be frozen and boiled alternately, and the wrong soap put in the bath-room, while you are running about visiting your mother!”

  “And oh, sir, after what she said, too—”

  “Said? What she said? She never spoke to me, Mrs. Page, as you must know. And as to anything she may have said to you, do you suppose I should listen, or should remember it if I heard it? Really, Mrs. Page—really, you—ah—now where is that pen and ink?”

  That day the Charlwood system was worse disturbed than ever, and every orbit was irregular. No stellar system can endure the sudden introduction of two new planets and a frequent comet—Dr. Greig was surprisingly like a comet—without some temporary disturbance of its arrangements. So that Mr. Charlwood found the observatory a welcome refuge from the turmoil, and went there early. He went there early, looked up, and saw a marvel.

  For there in the heavens stood and twinkled a new star—a star where no star had been before. Truly indeed it was a new star—one of those stars that open out suddenly in the vastness above and there remain to puzzle the learned.

  If I were an astronomer like Mr. Charlwood I would offer you
some theory of these new stars: as it is, I can only tell you the facts of this, Mr. Charlwood’s one scientific discovery.

  Of course other astronomers saw the star too, that night, and carefully noted its exact position; but it was Mr. Charlwood who got his letter into the newspapers first—he took a cab to all the offices and himself dropped a report at each—and so they called the star after him. It was strictly called Charlwood with a number which I cannot tell you, being no astronomer, but generally it was Charlwood, simply; and it was Mr. Charlwood’s joy to know that he had not lived in vain.

  Mrs. Page’s mother died not very long after her removal, and the nurse went away. And now I believe even Mr. Charlwood himself has been dead some time; but his star twinkles steadily in the place where it first added its tiny light to the sparkling sky.

  A POOR BARGAIN

  First published in The World & His Wife: A Monthly Magazine for Gentlewomen, July 1905

  I.

  The indolent traveller might not have guessed the village in which Daniel Piker lived and considered his problems—they called it Thorpe Dedham—to be a place where problems were bred; but if he had had Piker’s brickfield to manage, as well as his little farm and his chandler’s shop, he would have learned better.