Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “I was quite mistaken. One night in the following March he came to me with a haggard face, a beaming eye, and a stout, clean manuscript, which he brought down with a thud on my desk. It was the play he had sketched out to me eight or nine months before. I was horrified to hear he had been at work upon it alone from that night to this. He actually boasted that he hadn’t written another line in all that time, only each line of his play some ten times over.

  “I recollect looking curiously at his shabby clothes, and then reminding him that it was at his place, not mine, I was to have heard him read the play: and how he confessed that he had no chair for me there — that his room was practically dismantled — that he had sacrificed everything to the play and would do so again. I was extremely angry. I could have helped him so easily, independent as I was of the calling I loved to follow. But there was about him always an accursed unnecessary independence, which has since struck me — and I think I may say so after all these years — as the mark of a rather humble, deadly honest origin.

  “He read me the play, and I cried over the third act, and so did he. I thought then, and still think, that there was genius in that third act — it took you off your feet. And to me, certainly, it seemed as if the piece must act as well as it read, though indeed, as I took care to say and to repeat, my opinion was well-nigh valueless on that point. I only knew that I could see the thing playing itself, as I walked about the room (for this time I was the person who was too excited to sit still), and that was enough to make one sanguine. I became as enthusiastic about it as though the work were mine (which it never, never would or could have been), yet I was unable to suggest a single improvement, or to have so much as a finger-tip in the pie. Nor could I afterwards account for its invariable reception at the hands of managers, whose ways were then unknown to me. That night we talked only of one kind of reception. We were still talking when once more the sun came slanting up the river to my windows; you could hardly see them for tobacco-smoke, and this time we had emptied a bottle to the success of Pharazyn’s piece.

  “Oh, those nights — those nights once in a way! God forgive me, but I’d sacrifice many things to be young again and feel clever, and to know the man who would sit up all night with me to rule the world over a bottle of honest grog. In the light of after events I ought perhaps to be ashamed to recall such a night with that particular companion. But it is ridiculous, in my opinion, to fit some sort of consequence to every little solitary act; and I shall never admit that poor Pharazyn’s ultimate failing was in any appreciable degree founded or promoted by those our youthful full-souled orgies. I know very well that afterwards, when his life was spent in waylaying those aforesaid managers, in cold passages, on stage doorsteps, or in desperation under the public portico on the street; and when a hundred snubs and subterfuges would culminate in the return of his manuscript, ragged but unread; I know, and I knew then, that the wreck who would dodge me in Fleet Street, or cut me in the Strand, had taken to his glass more seriously and more steadily than a man should. But I am not sure that it matters much — much, you understand me — when that man’s heart is broken.

  “The last words I was ever to exchange with my poor old friend ring in my head to this day, whenever I think of him; and I can repeat them every one. It was years after our intimacy had ceased, and when I only knew that he had degenerated into a Fleet Street loafer of the most dilapidated type, that I caught sight of him one day outside a theatre. It was the theatre which was for some years a gold-mine to one Morton Morrison, of whom you may never have heard; but he was a public pet in his day, and his day was just then at its high noon. Well, there stood Pharazyn, with his hands in his pockets and a cutty-pipe sticking out between his ragged beard and moustache, and his shoulders against the pit door, so that for once he could not escape me. But he wouldn’t take a hand out of his pocket to shake mine; and when I asked him how he was, without thinking, he laughed in my face, and it made me feel cruel. He was dreadfully emaciated and almost in rags. And as I wondered what I ought to do, and what to say next, he gave a cough, and spat upon the pavement, and I could see the blood.

  “I don’t know what you would have done for him, but for all I knew what had brought him to this, I could think of nothing but a drink. It was mid-winter, and I tell you the man was in rags. I felt that if I could get him to a bar he might eat something, too, and that I should lay such a hold of him this time as I need never again let go. Judge of my surprise when he flatly refused to come with me even for a drink.

  “‘Can’t you see?’ he said in his hollow voice. ‘There’ll be a crowd here directly, and I want the best seat in the pit — the best in the house. I’ve been going dry for it these two days, and I’m going dry till I’ve seen the piece. No, I’ve been here an hour already, and I’m still the first; but I mightn’t be when I came back, and I’m not going to risk it, thanks all the same.’

  “By this I had remembered that Morton Morrison was to re-open that night with a new piece. Indeed, I ought not to have forgotten that, seeing that I had my order about me somewhere, and it meant a column from my pen between twelve and one in the morning. But this sudden sorry meeting had put all other thoughts out of my head.

  “‘My dear fellow,’ I said, with a sort of laugh, ‘are you a first-nighter, too?’

  “‘Only at this theatre.’

  “He looked me queerly in the face.

  “‘You admire Morrison as much as all that?’

  “‘I love him!’

  “I suppose my eyes thawed him, though God knows how hard I was trying not to hurt him with pitying looks. At all events he began to explain himself of his own accord, in one bitter, swift, impetuous outburst.

  “‘Look here,’ he said, with his hoarse voice lowered: ‘I hoped never to see your face again. I hoped you’d never see mine. But now you are here, don’t go this minute, and I’ll tell you why I think so much of Morton Morrison. I don’t know him, mind you — he doesn’t know me from Adam — but once long ago I had something to do with him. And God bless him, but damn every other manager in London, for he was the only one of the lot to give me a civil hearing and a kind word!’

  “I knew what he was talking about, and he knew that I knew, for we had understood one another in the old days.

  “‘I took it to him last of all,’ he went on, wiping his damp lips with his hand. ‘When I began hawking it about he was an unknown man; when his turn came he was here. He let me read it to him. Then he asked me to leave it with him for a week; and when I went back to him, he said what they’d all said — that it would never act. But Morton Morrison said it nicely. And when he saw how it cut me up into little bits, he got me to tell him all about everything; and then he persuaded me to burn the play, instead of ruining my life for it; and I burnt it in his dressing-room fire, but the ruin was too far gone to mend. I wrote that thing with my heart’s blood — old man, you know I did! And none of them would think of it — my God! But Morrison was good about it — he’s a good soul — and that’s why you’ll see me at every first night of his until the drink does me.’

  “I had not followed him quite to the end. One thing had amazed me too much.

  “‘You burnt your play,’ I could only murmur, ‘when it would have turned into such a novel! Surely you have some draft of it still?’

  “‘I burnt the lot when I got home,’ says Pharazyn, ‘and before long I shall join ‘em and burn too.’

  “I had nothing to answer to that, and was, besides, tenacious of my point. ‘I don’t think much of the kindness that makes one man persuade another to burn his work and throw up the sponge,’ I said, with a good deal of indignation, for I did feel wroth with that fellow Morrison — a bread-and-butter drawing-room actor whose very vogue used to irritate me.

  “‘Then what do you think of this?’ asked Pharazyn, as he dipped a hand within his shabby coat, and cautiously unclenched it under my nose.

  “‘It’s a five-pound note.’

  “‘I know; but was
n’t that kind, then?’

  “‘So Morrison gave you this!’ I said.

  “Two or three persons had stopped to join us at the pit door, and Pharazyn hastily put the note back in his pocket. As he did so, his dreadfully shabby condition gave my heart a fresh cut.

  “‘Are you never going to spend that?’ I asked in a whisper; and in a whisper he answered, ‘Never. It’s all my play has brought me — all. It was given me as a charity, but I took it as my earnings — my earnings for all the work and waiting, and flesh and blood and self-respect, that one thing cost me. Spend it? Not I. It will bury me as decently as I deserve.’

  “We could converse no more. And the presence of other people prevented me from giving him my overcoat, though I spoke of it into his ear, begging and imploring him to come away and take it while there was still time for him to slip back and get a seat in the front row. But he would not hear of it, and the way he refused reminded me of his old stubborn independence; all I got was a promise that he would have a bite with me after the performance. And so I left him in the frosty dusk, ill-clad and unkempt, with the new-lit lamp over the pit door shining down upon the haggard mask that had once been the eager, memorable face of my cleverest friend.

  “I saw him next the moment I entered the theatre that evening, and I nodded my head to him, which he rebuked with the slightest shake of his own. So I looked no more at him before the play began, comprehending that he desired me not to do so. The temptation, however, was too strong to go on resisting, for while Pharazyn was in the very centre of the front row in the pit, I was at one end of the last row of the stalls; and I was very anxious about him, wanting to make sure that he was there and not going to escape me again, and nervous at having him out of my sight for five minutes together.

  “Thus I know more about the gradual change which came over Pharazyn’s poor face, as scene followed scene, than of the developments and merits of those scenes themselves. My mind was in any case running more on my lost friend than on the piece; but it was not till near the end of the first act that the growing oddity of his look first struck me.

  “His eyebrows were raised; it was a look of incredulity chiefly; yet I could see nothing improbable in the play as far as it had gone. I was but lightly attending, for my own purposes, as you youngsters skim your betters for review; but thus far the situation struck me as at once feasible and promising. Also it all seemed somehow familiar to me; I could not say just where or why, for watching Pharazyn’s face. And it was his face that told me at last, in the second act. By God, it was his own play!

  “It was Pharazyn’s play, superficially altered all through, nowhere substantially; but the only play for me, when I knew that, was being acted in the front row of the pit, and not on the stage, to which I had turned the side of my head. I watched my old friend’s face writhe and work until it stiffened in a savage calm; and watching, I thought of the ‘first night’ he had pictured jovially in the old days, when the bare idea of the piece was bursting his soul; and thinking, I wondered whether it could add a drop to his bitterness to remember that too.

  “Yet, through all my thoughts, I was listening, intently enough now. And in the third act I heard the very words my friend had written: they had not meddled with his lines in the great scene which had moved us both to tears long ago in my rooms. And this I swear to, whether you believe it or no — that at the crisis of that scene, which was just as Pharazyn made it, the quiet ferocity transfiguring his face died suddenly away, and I saw it shining as once before with the sweetest tears our eyes can shed — the tears of an artist over his own work.

  “And when the act was over he sat with his head on his hand for some minutes, drinking in the applause, as I well knew; then he left his seat and squeezed out on my side of the house, and I made sure he was coming to speak to me over the barrier, and got up to speak to him; but he would not see me, but stood against the barrier with a face as white and set as chiselled marble.

  “What followed on the first fall of the curtain I can tell you as quickly as it happened. Louder call for an author I never heard, and I turned my eyes to the stage in my intense curiosity to see who would come forward; for the piece had been brought out anonymously; and I divined that Morrison himself was about to father it. And so he did: but as the lie passed his lips, and in the interval before the applause — the breathless interval between flash and peal — the lie was given him in a roar of fury from my left: there was a thud at my side, and Pharazyn was over the barrier and bolting down the gangway towards the stage. I think he was near making a leap for the footlights and confronting Morrison on his own boards; but the orchestra came between, and the fiddlers rose in their places. Then he turned wildly to us pressmen, and I will say he had our ear, if not that of the whole house besides, for the few words he was allowed to utter.

  “‘Gentlemen!’ he cried at the top of his voice— ‘Gentlemen, I’m one of you! I’m a writing man like yourselves, and I wrote this play that you’ve seen. That man never wrote it at all — I wrote it myself! That man has only altered it. I read it to him two years ago — two years ago, gentlemen! He kept it for a week, and then got me to burn it as rubbish — when he had made a copy of it! And he gave me this, gentlemen — this — this — that I give him back!’

  “It was a matter of only a few seconds, but not till my own last hour shall I forget Morrison’s painted face on the stage, or that sweating white one beneath the boxes; or the fluttering from Pharazyn’s poor fingers of the five-pound note he had treasured for two years; or the hush all over the house until the first hand was laid upon his dirty collar.

  “‘What!’ he screamed, ‘do none of you believe me? Will none of you stand by me — isn’t there a man — not one man — —’

  “And they threw him out with my name on his lips. And I followed, and floored a brute who was handling him roughly. And nothing happened to me — because of what happened to Pharazyn.”

  The dear old boy sat silent, his grey head on his hand. Presently he went on, more to himself than to me: “What could I do? What proof had I? He had burnt them every one. And as long as the public would stand him, Morrison kept his good name at least. And that play was his great success!”

  I ventured gently to inquire what had happened to Pharazyn.

  “He died in my arms,” my old friend cried, throwing up his head with an oath and a tear. “He died in a few minutes outside the theatre. I could hear them clapping after he was dead — clapping his piece.”

  THE WIDOW OF PIPER’S POINT

  On the green shores of Sydney harbour, in a garden bounded by the beach, there sat long ago a wizened, elderly gentleman and a middle-aged, sweet-faced woman in widow’s weeds. It was a glaring afternoon in early summer, but a bank of ferns protected the couple from the sun, the blue waters of Port Jackson frothed coolly upon the ribbon of golden sand at their feet, and the gentleman at all events was suitably attired. He wore a pair of nankeen trousers, fitting very close and strapped under the instep, with a surtout of the same material. A very tall, very narrow-brimmed hat rested on the ground between his chair and that of the lady; and his card, still lying in her lap, proclaimed a first visit on the part of Major Thomas Blacker, late of the Royal Artillery, but now relegated to Rose Bay, New South Wales.

  Mrs. Astley was, in fact, a new and interesting arrival in the settlement, who, having found the cottage to the south-east of Point Piper untenanted when she landed, had taken it within a week of that time, as if to eschew her new world as she had fled the old. Her nearest neighbour was the major himself, who lived on the opposite shore of Rose Bay, a mile away by land and half that distance by water. He had not been five minutes in the widow’s garden when he pointed across the bay with his cane, and called her attention to a sunlit window blazing among the trees.

  “That’s my place, madam,” said the major in an impressive voice. “You can’t see it properly for the scrub; but that’s where you’ll find me when you require my services. I’m afraid you�
��ll have trouble with your convict servants; if you don’t you’ll be different from everybody else; when you do, you come to me.”

  The widow bowed and smiled, and asked her visitor whether it was long since he had been in England. It was seven years: there had been sad changes in the time. George the Fourth was gone, and poor dear Edmund Kean; the stalls would never look upon his like again. No, the theatre in Sydney was of the poorest description; madam must not dream of going there, at least not without the major’s protection. Madam had entertained no such dream; she was merely making talk. A green-backed, paper-covered book lay on her lap with the major’s card; she handed him the book, and asked him whether he had heard of it. He had not, nor of the author either. “Posthumous Papers,” eh? Melancholy sound about it: was it worth reading?

  “Worth reading?” said Mrs. Astley, with a pardonable smile. “Well, it is considered so in England; but I doubt whether anybody ever found any book so well worth reading as I have found this: it has made me forget a great sorrow when nothing else could — forget it by the hour together! It is still appearing in monthly parts. I am going to have the remaining numbers sent out to me, and I can lend you the early ones.”