The Black Reaper

by Bernard Capes

  ‘I did you an ill deed in the past, Quinones, and it is written against me in your books. What is the use to tell you that I have repented it since in sackcloth and ashes? And yet let it be of use. O, in these mortal times, when all the world should be in one brotherhood of help and sympathy, let your resentment sleep – forgive, and prove by that nobility your true title to the greatness that all men allow you. I have bitten the hand, I confess it, that cherished me: let that hand retaliate in the finest spirit by ministering to the wound I inflicted, not first on you, but on my own miserable nature. Be generous to me, Quinones, for I have lived to know and suffer.’

  He paused; and in the pause there rose a melancholy cry from the darkening street: ‘Bring out your dead; bring out your dead!’ The sound seemed to goad him to a frenzy.

  ‘Listen, Quinones; I have learned to know, I say. Love, that in its purity can redeem the worst, has been my teacher. For love I would live – I, who until it transformed me, feared no death, refused no risks. Now, for its sake, I am a coward; I shrink in terror that this mortality may claim me – me, who have learned at last the glory and the fruitfulness of life. O save me, Quinones! You alone among all the Galenical masters can do so, if you will. Fortify my blood; render me immune; give me the secret of your plague-water, the one specific, as all admit, quite certain in its results. Give it to me and mine, and earn for evermore the name of saint, the gratitude of hearts that wait upon your bounty not to break.’

  The seated figure seemed, in the uncertain light, to stir and chuckle – or was it a sound of water gurgling in the basement. Still no response came from it; and, hearkening vainly through the thick silence, the mood of the man roared up in a moment from submission to deadly fury:

  ‘Inhuman, unforgiving! Not for you to forget, in your God-feigned aloofness, the least, the most paltry hurt to your vanity. You hear, but you will not answer. Answer to this, then. I came to appeal to the great in you, as other blind fools have certified it; but I came prepared with sharper weapons than entreaty, should, as I foresaw in my heart, the fools prove fools indeed. I am a desperate man, Quinones, and you are alone – quite alone with me, I do believe. It is either the secret yielded, or your life. Make your choice, and quickly. A poor revenge, will you not think it, to lie there in your blood while I am ranging free and unsuspected in this welter!’

  He half crouched, peering through the deepening twilight, a sudden blade in his hand, the tumult in his brain grown rabid – then, with a shriek, ‘Let your plague-water save you now!’ leapt on the unresponsive figure.

  It swayed, swung, and rolled stiffly to the floor, revealing a livid face, blotched and plague-stricken, and fangs – good Lord, they grinned!

  Quinones mortal had not half the sinister significance of Quinones dead and rigid. He had sat there, waiting his age-delayed but never-forgotten revenge – sat there a stiffening corpse, long after the rest of his household had fled.

  With a scream, the other rushed from the room, into the street – and so in a little for the cart and the plague-pit. Quinones was quits with him at last.

  THE GREEN BOTTLE

  My knowledge of Sewell was principally of a fox-nosed, weedy, scorbutic youth who wrote four-to-the-pound pars for the Daily Record. Further, I bore in mind his flaccid palms, his dropping underjaw, and the way in which in Fleet Street bars he would hang – looking, indeed, rather like a wet towel – on the words of any Captain Bobadil of his craft who would condescend to wipe his boots on him, or, for the matter of that, his foul mouth. He had no principles, I think. He was born lacking the sentiments of pride and decency. If he was kicked into the mud, he would make, before rising, a little conciliatory gift of mud pie for the kicker. On close terms with the petty ailments of his own body, the secret discoveries that delighted him were of similar weaknesses in others. The prescriptively unmentionable was his humour’s best inspiration; his belief in the real approval underlying the affected disgust of his hearers quite genuine. He was, in short, a sort of editors’ pimp, with all the taste and the instinct to procure ‘copy’, in the detestable sense.

  At one time he elected, to my sorrow, to attach himself to me, with this justification (from his point of view) that I then happened to be grinding my literary barrel-organ – always adaptable to the popular need – to the tune of a contemporary interest in the problems of criminology; and the mudlark, being himself of a Newgate complexion of mind, had the assurance in consequence to assume a sympathetic bond between us. Now, the difficulty being to convince Sewell that decency was ever anything but a diplomatic pose, and that one did not pursue vice, as dogs hunt foxes, because of the mere bestial attraction to an abominable scent, but with the sole purpose to reach and end the offence, I was led, more contemptuously than wisely, into allowing the assumption of claim by default, with the result that for some weeks the unsavoury thing stuck to me like a jigger. Then, at the climax of the annoyance, just when I had resolved, as an anthropological economy, upon dissecting my torment or himself as the closest possible illustration of my meaning, of a sudden the creature vanished – disappeared sans phrase; and Fleet Street and the Daily Record knew no more.

  The fact was that Mr Sewell had been left a competence, and had retired into private life.

  I did not see the fellow again for some eighteen months, when, one afternoon, he visited me quite unexpectedly at my lodgings. He accepted, as of old, the finger I committed to his clasp, and which I then – hardly covertly, under my desk – wrenched dry between my knees. He was scarcely altered in appearance. The only accent of difference that I could observe was in his tie, which was a spotted burglarious-looking token, in place of the rusty-black wisp that had been wont to depend, loosely knotted, from his neck. For the rest, he was the slack, unwholesome figure, with the sniggering and inward manner, of my knowledge. And yet, scanned again, there was something unusual about him after all – a suggestion, it might be, of excited nervousness, such as one might imagine in a very fulsome Paul Pry bursting, while fearing, to retail a ticklish piece of scandal.

  ‘Well,’ I said, after some indifferent commonplaces, ‘so you’ve got your ticket-of-leave? And aren’t your fingers itching, in a vacuous freedom, for oakum and the Fleet Street crank again?’

  ‘Oh, Mr Deering,’ says he, tittering and twisting, ‘I like that metaphor. I come to report myself to you, Mr Deering.’

  ‘H’mph!’ said I. ‘Well, when all’s said, how do you manage to kill time?’

  ‘Why, I kill it,’ says he, grinning, ‘and I lay it out. It’s only necessary to have an object in life, Mr Deering. Mine’s killing time, that I may lay it out. You’ll never guess what I’ve become.’

  ‘I’ll make one shot. A body-snatcher.’

  ‘Tee-hee! Not so far wrong. A collector, Mr Deering. I wish you’d come and see my museum. Will you have dinner with me tonight?’

  ‘Not to be thought of. See here and here! In fact, I’ve already given you longer than I can spare. Goodbye, till our next meeting. If I’m on the jury, I’ll try to forget the worst I know of you.’

  He rose, fidgeted, still lingered.

  ‘I do wish you’d dine with me.’

  ‘I tell you I can’t. Besides, I’m particular – it’s a fad of mine – about my alimentary atmosphere. An unwholesome one balks my digestion.’

  I began to be annoyed that the fellow would not go. Suddenly he turned upon me, with more decision than he had yet shown.

  ‘The fact is something – something very odd has happened; quite impossible, you’d say. I don’t know; if you’d only come and look.’

  I did look – at him – in surprise.

  ‘Odd – that concerns me? Why not tell me now, then?’

  ‘You’d never believe unless you saw.’

  ‘Saw! Saw what? Why, I’m hanged if, by the jaw of you, you aren’t thinking to come the supernatural over me!’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, fawningly persistent; ‘I want you to see. It’s a case of horrors or nothing. You’ll
be able to judge, as you’ve made it your line.’

  ‘I’ve done no such thing. I never raised a banshee yet that would deceive so much as a psychist.’

  ‘Well,’ said he, ‘that’s another inducement. You’d not be predisposed to the infection.’

  ‘Infection!’ I shouted. ‘What, the devil! You’ve not been laying-out in earnest!’

  He wriggled over a laugh.

  ‘No,’ said he. ‘I meant the infection of fear.’

  ‘Oh, trust me there!’ said I.

  This was so far a concession that, under the stimulus of a curiosity the creature had succeeded in arousing in me, I presently accepted, though grudgingly, his invitation. Then he took himself away, and I went on with my work – rather peevishly, for there was a bad taste in my mouth, that I endeavoured unsuccessfully to neutralise with tobacco.

  At seven o’clock I packed away and went, depressed, to keep my engagement. It was a July evening of that unsavoury closeness that paints faces with a metallic sweat, and vulgarises out of all picturesqueness the motley concerns of life; an evening when fat women are truculent at omnibus doors; when the brassy twang of piano-organs blends indescribably with the sour stench of the roads; when a dive into a sequestered bar brings no consequence as of virtue refreshed, but rather as of self-indulgence rebuked with an added dyspepsia. And, appropriate to the atmosphere, my goal was in that inferno of dreary unfulfilments, Notting Hill. Thither I made my way, and there in the end house of a stuccoed and lifeless-looking terrace, converted (by a Salvation Army missionary, one might, from its vulgarity, suppose) into flats, came presently to a stop.

  There was a bill ‘To Let’ in the ground-floor window, from which, by inference, my host was engaged to the upper rooms. He himself greeted me at the front door, to which I had mounted by a dozen of ill-laid steps. A second door within, set in a makeshift partition, opened straight upon the stairway that led up to his quarters.

  ‘I hope you won’t object to a cold collation, Mr Deering?’ said he.

  The stairs were so steep, and he looked so down upon me, twisting about from the height at which he led, that his white face seemed to hang like a clammy stone gargoyle from the gloom.

  ‘I wouldn’t suggest it’s what you’re accustomed to,’ he said; ‘but when one’s only slavey goes out with the daylight, and doesn’t return till the milk, it can’t be helped, you know.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said brusquely, and rudely enough, to be sure. ‘I never supposed you kept a retinue. You’re the only soul in the house, I conclude?’

  We had come to a landing, where the stairs gave a wheel and went up, carpetless, steeper than ever. Looking aloft, it was some unmeaning comfort to me to observe that a skylight, obscured by dirt, took the slope of the ceiling with a wan sheen as of phosphorescence.

  Two doorways, a step or so apart, faced us entering upon the landing. Through the nearest of these I caught glimpse of a white tablecloth and our meal set upon it. The second, and further, door, that was opposite the turn of the stairs, was shut.

  ‘Eh!’ said Sewell, with a curious intonation. ‘The only soul, eh? Well, upon my word, I won’t answer for that.’

  ‘What the devil do you mean?’ I exclaimed irritably.

  ‘Why,’ he answered, propitiatory at once, ‘the rooms below are tenantless, if that’s what you refer to.’

  ‘What else should I refer to?’

  ‘To be sure, to be sure,’ he answered. ‘Oh, yes; I’m the only one in possession! I don’t mind. Generally speaking – there may be something now and again that makes a difference, you know – but, generally speaking, I think I’ve got the collector’s love of solitude. We sort of hug ourselves over our finds, don’t we? and then it isn’t nice to have anybody else by, eh? That’s my museum – that second door. I’d like you, if you don’t mind, just to go cursorily round it now, before we sit down, and see what sort of an impression it makes on you.’

  ‘Is your rotten mystery connected with it?’

  ‘Well, yes, it is.’

  ‘Lead on, then, and let’s get it over.’

  He obeyed, opening the door gingerly to its full width before entering, as if he half expected something to be there before him. I uttered an instant grunt. A row of unclean faces, their upper prominences so covered with dust as to give one the impression of their posturing over some infernal kind of footlights, leered down upon us from the top of a high bookcase.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sewell, though I had not spoken to him, ‘they’re a pretty lot, aren’t they, Mr Deering? I picked ’em up at the Vandal sale – the lunatic specialist, don’t you remember, that went mad and cut his own throat in the end? I don’t know half their stories; but when I’m in the mood I sit here and try and piece ’em out of their faces. That fellow with the fat wale on his neck, now—’

  ‘Oh, shut your imagination, you anthropophagist! Here, we’ll hurry up with this. I see, I see. Absolutely characteristic; and I might have guessed the bent of your virtuosity.’

  I found a precursory inspection more than sufficient. The creature had only found himself out of independence. He was become logically an Old Bailey curioso. His collection, disposed about the shelves of that same bookless bookcase and on little tables and whatnots, ranged from housebreakers’ tools (miracles of vicious elegance) to a slip from a C.C. open spaces seat, on the branch of a tree above which a suicide had hanged himself. There were murderous revolvers, together with the bullets extracted from their victims. There were knives, lengths of Newgate rope, last confessions, photographs, and bloodstains. And, in inviting me to the discussion of this garbage, Sewell, I believe, was actuated by no inhumanity of malevolence. An unnatural appetite is normal to itself, I suppose.

  But all the time his manner was distrait – spasmodic – watchful, and not of me, I could have thought.

  All at once I felt myself constrained to rise from an examination, and to walk to the window. It looked across to the sordid backs of other converted houses; it looked down into a well of a garden, choked with rank grass, from the jungle of which stiff ears of dockweed stood up, as if picked to the French casement, that I could not see, in the room below. Now the tall buildings so blocked out the sunset that, although day still ruled, the room in which we stood was already appropriated to a livid twilight. I tugged at the window, striving to open it.

  ‘What are you trying?’ cried Sewell. ‘What are you up to? What’s the matter with you?’

  He hurried across the room. He looked curiously into my face, as if for confirmation of some hope or fear of his own.

  ‘You can’t do it,’ he said. ‘It’s been nailed up. Look here, Mr Deering, we’ll feed, shall we?’

  ‘Yes,’ I snarled. I was furious with myself. I walked out of the room as still as, and bristling like, a baited cat. For the moment I was exalted above the impulse to put my tail between my legs.

  Sewell’s cold collation was vile. I swear it, though no sybarite, in some explanation of a subsequent nightmare. Macbeth hadn’t supped when he saw the ghost of Banquo. How many ghosts he would have seen after a slice of Sewell’s steak pie is conjectural. At the fourth mouthful I put down (I might have, dietetically, with scarce more discomfort to myself) my knife and fork.

  ‘Is that beastly door shut?’ I said crossly.

  He knew, without my explaining, that I meant the door of the museum.

  ‘Yes,’ he answered, impervious to my rudeness, and offered no further remark. But, perhaps from a like sentiment of oppression, he turned up the gas above the table.

  I made another effort at the pie, and finally desisted.

  ‘Look here,’ I said, falling back in my chair, and streaking down the damp hair on my forehead, ‘I’m not a fool. D’you hear? I’m not a fool, I say. I want to know, that’s all. What the devil’s the matter with that bottle?’

  ‘Ah!’ he breathed out, with a curious under-inflexion of relief, of triumph. ‘The bottle; yes; I thought you’d come to it.’

  ‘
Did you, indeed? So that’s your Asian mystery?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it,’ he said quietly. ‘You’ve found it out, Mr Deering, and I wasn’t mistaken, it seems.’

  ‘Mistaken? I don’t know. What’s the matter with it? What infernal trick have you been planning? Take care!’ I said bullyingly.

  ‘Shall we go and look at it again?’

  He only answered with the soft question.

  I half rose, fought with myself, yielded, and dropped back.

  ‘I’m damned if I do,’ I said, ‘until you’ve told me.’

  ‘Very well,’ he replied, slinkingly moved to govern and applaud me in a breath. ‘I’ll tell you at once, Mr Deering.’

  He felt in his inner breast-pocket, produced a memorandum-book, withdrew a newspaper cutting from it, rose, and crossing to me, placed the slip in my hand. Accepting it sullenly, and taking my reason by the ears, I forced that to focus itself on the lines. They were headed and ran as follows:

  THE LAMBETH TRAGEDY

  Mr Hobbins, the south-western district coroner, held an inquest yesterday on the body of Ephraim Ellis, glass-blower, who, as has been stated, fell down dead at the very moment that the officers of justice entered the premises of his employers, Messrs Mackay, to arrest him on suspicion of having caused the death of Francis Riddick, a fellow-workman. Ellis, it will be remembered, was actually engaged in blowing bottles at the moment of his arrest. A verdict of death from syncope, resulting on shock, was returned.

  Sewell stood behind me as I read. His long, ropy claw slid over my shoulder, and a finger of it traced along the words ‘it will be remembered’.

  ‘Yes,’ I muttered, in response to the unspoken query, ‘I recollect reading something about it. What then?’

  Sewell’s finger went on five – six letters, and stopped.

  ‘He was “blowing bottles”,’ he said. ‘He was, Mr Deering. I was standing by him at the time, and he was blowing that very green bottle you saw on the table in the next room. Do you know how they do it? They dip the end of their pipe into the melting-pot that sits in the furnace, and then, having rolled the little knob they’ve fished up tube-shaped on an iron plate, and pinched it for a neck, they take and blow it into a brass mould until it fits out the shape of the thing. Then they open the mould, and the bottle comes free, but stuck to the pipe, until a touch with a cold iron snaps the two apart. That’s the way; but this bottle, you’ll say, has a neck like a retort. I’ll tell you why, Mr Deering. Ellis had just blown the thing complete, when the policeman put a hand on his shoulder. The pipe was at his mouth. He gave a last gasp into it and went down, the soft bottle-neck bending and sealing itself as the falling pipe dragged it over. Very well; I’d known the man and something of his story, and I brought away the green bottle, just as he’d left it, for a memento. But, Mr Deering, I brought away that in it that I hadn’t bargained for. Can’t you guess what it was?’