The Arthur Morrison Mystery

by Arthur Morrison

  They were all little—the village, the brickfield, the farm, and the chandler’s shop; and the indolent traveller, if he could be got to think about them, might call Piker’s problems little, too. But in the total they meant a deal to Piker; and their successful little solutions were aiding, slowly but very surely, in the building up of the little fortune which most assuredly must some day crown Piker’s efforts. Further, there came a day when to the rest was added the problem of Piker’s aunt.

  Thorpe Dedham was not so very far from London, when you found it—after much trouble—on the map. It might have been twenty-five miles, as the crow flies, or it might even have been a little less; but the quickest journey between the two, on solid earth, took a lot out of a day. The nearest railway station to Thorpe Dedham was five miles away, and when you reached it you would not find it a very useful station. For most of the day it was shut up; and when a train did stop it was a discouraging train, which puffed and dawdled feebly along for eight miles at right angles to the direction favoured by the crow, till it reached the junction where you missed the London train.

  So that there was no great flow of traffic between London and Thorpe Dedham; and any person who had once performed the journey thought about it a good deal before he did it again. The place, in fact, was just too far from the capital for the suburban trains, and just too near for those on the main lines. It lay, moreover, between two of these lines, in a part of the country which some called deadly dull, and which was, without a doubt, commercially poor. Nevertheless, by a strict attention to his little problems, Daniel Piker was doing very well in his little way. The problem of getting men to work his brickfield and farm for lower wages than was usual he solved with comparative ease, for work was scarce thereabout; and the problem of making them return those wages at his chandler’s shop, buying articles of whatever quality he chose to give for whatever prices he chose to charge, was not so much more difficult as you might expect. This is a free country, and a man can always be discharged on the legal notice, though such extreme measures can be made unnecessary by a little foresight; for it needs no more than to be a bit easy with your credit for a week or two, and you get your man so far in debt that, with a little management, he never quite gets out again. And you can always keep him tame by threatening to stop his tick—a thing you have a perfect right to do in a free country.

  If Piker’s business had been transferred to America, and multiplied by about a million, it would have been called a Trust. As it was, its figures stopped a long way short of millions and even thousands, and Piker was too busy making it pay to bother about calling it anything in particular. His little projects were generally accomplished in good and paying terms; and none had involved actual defeat except that of getting the local doctor to pay a commission on his receipts from Piker’s men and their families. As to that, he never forgave the doctor. It wouldn’t have been much, and whatever it was might easily have been added to the bills. Clearly the doctor was no man of business.

  And now arose the question of Piker’s aunt. She was dying, and the problem, of course, was to make it pay. Piker’s aunt Sarah shared the common lot of aunts; being suspected, by her relations, of hidden wealth—cloudy, indefinite, speculative wealth, but wealth undoubtedly. She was the widow of a small tradesman in London, and she lived in lodgings in Wandsworth.

  In Piker’s family wealth was counted, as I have hinted, not in thousands, but in hundreds; and when Piker labelled his aunt with her probable figure—in his mind he labelled everybody with a probable figure—he never ventured beyond the higher hundreds, for he had a rather superstitious dread of expecting too much.

  The problem of making Aunt Sarah pay was exacerbated by a grand-niece of hers, a shop-girl in London, who had the advantage of being nearer the prey. It was because of this danger that Piker ventured the extravagance of two journeys to London, paying a return fare of four-and-sixpence each time. On the first of these journeys he found his aunt looking exceedingly pale, and feeling very bad, so that he returned quite happy, being especially encouraged by his aunt’s complaints that her grand-niece was neglecting her. For it seemed that the thoughtless girl failed to come and tend her relation, spite of having nearly an hour to herself every night from the shop only a few miles off, at Peckham.

  Piker expressed a proper and moral reprobation of such sinful callousness, and went away a good deal happier about his four-and-sixpence. A man of forty whose habits incline him to take a vast deal of trouble to gain a shilling does not gladly let slip four of them, and a sixpence over, except upon a clear probability of consequent profit.

  The second visit was more eventful. The old woman was very bad indeed now, and the doctor gave so little hope that Piker grew very hopeful. He was a most portentous doctor, who, if he rarely cured his patients, never failed to impress them.

  Piker met him on the stairs, and in reply to his inquiries the doctor said—

  “Ha, hum, hum! This is not a case in which I can conscientiously give you any reasonable expectation of your aunt’s recovery—hum! When we have pernicious anaemia in a person of your aunt’s age, and when we also have concurrently an enlargement of the lymphatic glands of obscure causation—hum—then we have not far to look for the end. Hum! About a fortnight, I should say. Hum!”

  Piker, therefore, greeted his dear aunt with very great affection. She lay extraordinarily pale and languid, and talked feebly and peevishly. She was angrier than ever with her grand-niece, whom it seemed she now suspected of more affection for “the fellers” than for her invalid aunt; and, withal, she had grown suddenly sentimental on the subject of her birthplace.

  “I’d ’a’ liked to ’a’ seen Thorpe Dedham again ’fore I went,” she said. “But it ain’t to be. I ’eard the doctor talkin’ to you outside. ’E said a fortnight. I ’eard ’im. But it won’t be as long. That I’m sure of.”

  Piker said something quite dutiful, though not entirely true, about hoping it would be a great deal longer; but the old woman’s thin face shook in an emphatic negative.

  “No, no,” she said, “it won’t. People as bad as me knows well enough. I shan’t last much more’n a week, Dan, an’ p’raps I shan’t see you again. I want you to promise to do something when I’m gone.”

  Piker was ready to promise anything—a promise was perfectly safe.

  “I want to be put away in the churchyard at Thorpe Dedham. I’ve made a will for you to do it. What money I’ve got is to go to you, if you’ll have me buried decent at Thorpe Dedham. That’s all the conditions. You’ll do that, won’t you?”

  Piker promised, with something perilously like joyful alacrity.

  “There ain’t so much as there was,” the old woman went on, “but I don’t owe nothing out o’ what there is. Feel under the pillow.”

  Piker did so, and presently drew forth a grubby, dog-biscuit-coloured savings-bank book and a little canvas bag.

  “All right; put the bag back,” Aunt Sarah said. “That’s a pound or two loose just to pay for things. Look in the book. It ought to be jist over a ’undred and twenty now.”

  It was one hundred and twenty pounds fifteen shillings, in exact figures. Piker experienced mingled feelings—some gratification, for this was certainly an amount worth having; and some disappointment, for it was very low in the hundreds indeed. He resolved to do the funeral at the cheapest possible figure.

  “The will you’ll find all right,” Aunt Sarah concluded. “I’ll see about that. It’s what I said—all to you, provided you bury me at Thorpe Dedham, near mother. An’ now I’m tired; an’ I think I can sleep a little. Good-bye, Dan, my boy, an’ God bless ye.”

  Well, it seemed certain that there was to be a fair profit out of Aunt Sarah, after all, if not a vast one. Piker saw the landlady before he left, and intrusted her with six penny stamps. One was to be used to communicate with him as soon as it was clear that the old lady could last no more than twenty-four h
ours. But if the break-up came suddenly, then the landlady was authorised and empowered to squander the whole six on a telegram.

  Piker was most friendly and gracious with the landlady, but he did not mean to leave her alone with Aunt Sarah’s possessions if he could help it. Also there was the grand-niece to bear in mind.

  II.

  Piker began his journey home in a rather happy frame of mind, but he finished it in perplexity and alarm. As a prudent man of business he dropped in at the undertaker’s on the way to the railway station, to ascertain the very lowest, derry-down, rock-bottom cut price for a plain coffin and laying out, delivered complete, with corpse enclosed, free on rail at St. Pancras.

  The result made him very uncomfortable. At first he received the estimates with airy derision, explaining that he didn’t want gold lining and nails jewelled in four holes, but soon it grew plain that the thing really was going to run into money; and then his facetiousness turned to positive gloom. Moreover, not an undertaker of them all would even consider his proposal to give the corpse’s old clothes in whole or part payment, but themselves grew derisive—even indignant—at the suggestion.

  At first he had even indulged the hope that an undertaker might exist from whom actual cash profit might be derived in the matter of those old clothes, over and above the cost of the coffin, seeing that the coffin itself might be of any quality or none; but now it grew clear that, on the contrary, the coffin was going to cost a good deal more than it seemed to be worth. Piker fell to calculating prime costs with such results that he set aside for future consideration the idea of adding a little undertaking trade to the brickfield, the farm, and the chandler’s shop.

  As if the undertaker’s estimates were not sufficiently alarming, another blow awaited Piker at the railway station. He had assumed that a corpse, properly packed in a coffin, would travel at goods rates; but an inquiry elicited the staggering information that the carriage would come to thirty-three shillings!

  The thing seemed so absurd that Piker ventured to reprove the official for his obvious ignorance of the company’s regulations, since he, Piker, alive and well, could travel the distance for exactly one-twelfth of the sum, with a liability on the company in case of accident, which, for obvious reasons, they need not fear in the case of a corpse. But all for naught; for the impatient official, thrusting his finger into the midst of a great printed column of charges and regulations, withdrew to his work, and left the dismayed Piker to face the indubitable, printed, exorbitant black-and-white fact that the unblushing charge for the conveyance of a corpse was truly and actually a shilling a mile.

  Poor Piker entered the train a gloomy and soured legatee; and he reached Thorpe Dedham at last to find occasion for more sourness and increased gloom. For he there ascertained that though the burial fees for a person dying in the parish were moderate, those for an imported corpse were a very different matter. Altogether it would seem that Aunt Sarah was bent on dying with every circumstance of wicked extravagance. It was a cruel thing that the brutal undertaker, the bloated and callous railway company, and now the very parson and churchwardens, should thus conspire to oppress the bereaved. Daniel Piker was wrung to the heart.

  He poured out his griefs before his wife, but got no sympathy of practical value. Mrs. Piker was not a woman of intellect, and Piker had married her because it came cheaper than keeping a servant. Still, it is a hard thing if a man’s wife cannot lighten his afflictions; and Piker realised it sadly now, when the rapacity of his fellow-men grieved his soul.

  But light was coming—light in the depths of Piker’s darkness. In the midst of his gloomy cogitations there came an idea—a flash of inspiration. Like all great ideas, it seemed so simple that he marvelled it had not come sooner. Why not bring Aunt Sarah alive? Her fare as a corpse would be thirty-three shillings; as a living person, two and ninepence—a clear saving of one pound ten and threepence to begin with. Even allowing three shillings for a cab to the station, the saving would be one pound seven and threepence. Then she would die in Thorpe Dedham parish, and down would come the burial fees to a mere fraction. And again, those ravening harpies the London undertakers would be bilked completely. And the carpenter at Thorpe Dedham could do a very nice coffin to set off against his bill for groceries, or should have his credit stopped forthwith.

  Nothing troubled Piker but his unaccountable slowness in perceiving this brilliant way out of his difficulties. At any rate, no more time should be lost, for now his sole fear was lest it might be found wholly impossible to move the old lady. So he sent off a letter by the evening post, and prepared to follow it in the morning. This was the letter:—

  MY DEAR AUNT,—

  It grieved me much to see you so low today, and I been thinking particular about your wanting to see Thorpe Dedham once more. Dear aunt leave it all to me and I will come tomorrow first train, and I have no doubt the change will restore you to health as it leaves me at present. The best cab in London is not too good for you, dear aunt, and money will never be no object to me when you are consumed. So no more as it leaves me at present hoping to see you first rate tomorrow,—

  Your affectnt. nephew,

  DANIEL

  This letter, read to her by the landlady, at first prostrated and then amazingly inspirited Aunt Sarah; so much so that although she began by protesting it would be instant death if she moved, when Piker arrived he was astonished—one would not say disconcerted—to find her sitting up in a mummy-like roll of shawls and blankets, wherein she had been endued, under her own imperative orders, by the landlady.

  The cab may not have been the best in London, but it was good enough; and the invalid’s transfer to the train was effected with no greater disorder than Piker’s inevitable dispute with the cabman. But the journey, as a whole, was rather too much for the old lady, and she collapsed alarmingly ere the train reached its destination.

  Piker’s spring-cart was waiting, however, and the day was fine; Aunt Sarah, a helpless bundle, was hoisted into the bottom of the cart, and there propped and wedged among sacks, shawls, and pillows, limp and silent.

  But a mile or two of jolting so far roused her that presently she asked faintly: “Dan! Is that the old Blue Lion I can see the roof of, just in front?”

  “Yes,” Piker answered, a little surprised; “that’s the Blue Lion right enough.”

  “An’ do they still ’ave Bingham’s Old Stingo there?”

  “Why, yes, I b’lieve so.”

  “Pull up, Dan! I’ll ’ave a pint o’ Bingham’s Old Stingo if I die in this ’ere cart for it!”

  Now there is no end to this little story. For it is within a fortnight of two years ago since his Aunt Sarah came to stay with Piker at Thorpe Dedham, and he now faces the appalling fact that at this moment she is the very healthiest and toughest old lady in that very healthy village.

  Whether it was the mere change of air and diet that did it, the escape from the London doctor, the return to her native surroundings, Bingham’s Old Stingo, or something of all four together, are problems with which Piker is only vaguely concerned; for the solid problem which never leaves his mind is: what on earth is he to do?

  The will is still in his favour, with the old proviso; but he calculates that his aunt’s visit has cost him very nearly the value of the legacy already. Yet if he does anything which may offend the old lady—let alone turning her out—that legacy will go at once, of course, and the whole transaction will stand a dead loss.

  On the other hand, Aunt Sarah has a most enormous appetite, and may live for twenty years. The problem is one requiring thought, and Piker gives it so much that it is only at rare intervals that he has time to remember, with an added pang, that the Wandsworth landlady never returned those six stamps.

  STATEMENT OF EDWARD CHALONER

  First published in Pall Mall Magazine, Vol. 36, 1905, pp 711-717)

  At the time of your visit to this institution, I
promised you, sir, that I would write a simple statement of my case, and you on your part promised to read it attentively, with a view to supplementing your judgment upon my state of mind. I fear that I cannot be certain that it will reach you, since one of the chief torments of my horrible position is, that anything I propose, or any wish I may express, is met with a soothing verbal compliance, which means nothing in practice, and is merely designed to keep me quiet. I make no doubt that such procedure is humane and politic in the cases of the unfortunate people about me, but to myself, a sane man (are there no words by which I can convince my fellow-creatures of this fact?) it is so great an aggravation of my torture that I sometimes fear that it alone will drive me into that state of lunacy of which I am wrongly accused. For it places me as a man is placed in a nightmare, who sees objects which recede everywhere from his touch, so that he seems to be cut off and insulated wholly from the universe about him by some impalpable (and yet how fearfully palpable!) vapour or atmosphere; something that yields everywhere, but is none the less impenetrable. But I rely on your promise to read my statement, and in the last resort on your friendship with Dr. Wilsey, which may induce you to ask for the paper if merely as a matter of curiosity. And if the fact may be, sir, that you have read so far purely from such motives of idle curiosity, I do now most earnestly implore you to give me better attention for the rest; for I do assure you that for me more depends on it than man may express: a matter far beyond a mere affair of life and death, as you will presently understand.

  It is one of the worst torments of a man in my position that the more frequently and the more earnestly he protests his sanity the less attention he receives. His very protestations are taken merely as so many additional proofs of the supposed disease of his mind, and the desperate vehemence of his appeals is regarded as evidence of the severity of his affliction. So that I shall endeavour to refrain from such protestations and appeals, so far as the natural impulses of a wronged man may be controlled. But I will ask you to search your recollection with care, and find, if you can, one single evidence of insanity in my part of the long conversation we had together a few days back. Indeed, you virtually admitted, at the time, that you could detect nothing of the sort. But I know well enough what is said—what was told you, I have no doubt, out of my hearing. It is said that I am afflicted with monomania; that I am sane enough in all matters but one—that of my own identity. I am held to be some unknown person who has taken the name of Edward Chaloner. But that is my name, my own given name, and the name I was born to bear. I have been dispossessed, thrust out of the very life my Maker gave me, by a devilry which I cannot explain, nor even comprehend; and a creature, a thing, a something, is walking the earth free, in my place and with my name.