“Prop me up,” said the old man.
The box was full of small packages of paper, little sheaves tied together with string or cotton or even pieces of something that might once have been ribbon. They were mouldy, those papers; an odour of mildew and decay rose from them.
But the effect on the old man as he saw them was remarkable. The colour which had gone from his cheeks ever since he dropped the spoon, came back again. He breathed faster and his eyes lit up. As his gaze wandered over them he seemed to derive a strange, disordered joy.
It was only then that John Marco saw what they were. They were bank notes, pile upon pile of ancient, discoloured Bank of England notes. In that box was more money than he had ever seen; it was as much money as Mr. Morgan took over his counter in a month; enough money for him to marry Mary Kent at once and set up house in the style of house that he wanted to give her. There, inside that battered tin chest, was wealth and everything it stood for; power and a wife and a position in the world.
The old man was speaking again.
“It’s my gift to the Chapel,” he said. “It’s Mr. Tuke’s.”
John Marco looked at his watch. Mr. Tuke should be there at any moment now; he was probably walking down Clarence Gardens already.
But the old man had apparently given up all hope of him. “It’s in your keeping,” he said. “All of it. It belongs to the Chapel.” He paused for a moment, and dropped his voice still lower. “Don’t show it to the others,” he said. “They don’t know I’ve got all that. They’d try and stop me. They’d steal it.”
He had twisted himself so far forward off the bed that his arms were inside the box as he said it. Suddenly he began to scoop out armfuls of the notes, holding them to him like a child and crooning over them. He held them against his face so that he could feel the smooth surface of the paper on his skin; he tried to stuff them into the open collar of his nightshirt. He spread them out on the sheets and doted on them. He raised one bundle to his lips.
John Marco stood looking at him, without moving. His disgust was threatening at any moment to become master of him. He wanted to tear Mr. Trackett from his heap of dirty paper and remind him that he was a human being with a soul. But it was no use addressing the old man. He was living already in an insane Paradise of his own. Every moment he was snatching up fresh bundles of the notes; they now lay beside him in a great heap.
And as John Marco looked, Mr. Trackett heaved himself up in bed almost onto his knees and plunged his head and shoulders into the box. Having done so, he remained fixed there for a moment, his back bent into a high, unnatural arc. Then, quite slowly he began to roll over onto his side and fell backwards onto the bed with his feet in their massive pink bed-socks up on the pillow.
He did not move again and the bundle of notes in his arms slipped one by one out of his grasp and left him there, clasping nothing.
John Marco drew back a pace when he saw what had happened; he was afraid to approach any nearer. He wished that Mr. Tuke would come; Mr. Tuke was used to the dark places. The armour of Mr. Tuke’s faith was inviolable. Then his eyes again caught sight of that great pile of money on the bed. It was as though he had seen it for the first time, however; for he saw it now as though it were his. Everything that men struggle for a life-time to obtain was there, spread out in front of him; it was the future thrust into his open hands. It was the very stuff of life.
His heart began suddenly to storm with the excitement and the rush of blood within him made him feel faint and dizzy. He was helpless and possessed. His sweat—he must have started sweating in that instant when he first saw the money—was already congealing icily upon him. He felt sick and ill. But already he was slowly moving towards the bed.
When he reached it he paused. He was in a mood of exaltation he had never known before. He was intoxicated with this new madness that had taken hold of him. He prayed—wild snatches of words that came to him from nowhere. “The Lord is my shepherd,” he kept saying. “I shall not want.” He uttered Mary Kent’s name several times aloud. And all the time his heart was drumming inside him, sending the blood thundering past his ear drums. Then averting his eyes from the dead man’s face he began to gather up the notes. He had three bundles—there must be ten notes in each, he calculated—already in his hand, when the clamour of the front door-bell rang through the whole house. To John Marco’s ears at that moment it was like a peal sounding through all the halls of hell.
The next few seconds were swift and desperate. He was mad no longer. He was terribly and wickedly sane. He was cautious, too. He filled his pockets carefully so that the mass of paper that was in them should not betray him. When the front door-bell rang again, longer and more frantically than before, he was ready. The rest of the notes he flung higgledy-piggledy back into the box and turned the key. Then, pulling down the flaps of his pockets as he walked, he went down the stairs to let in Mr. Tuke.
Mr. Tuke, calm and majestic as he was, started when he saw the dead man. John Marco had warned him that he would not find Mr. Trackett alive, but he was not prepared for this huddled, twisted figure with one arm stuck out like a scarecrow’s and his feet in the gay, pink bed-socks where his head should have been.
“Horrible,” he said. “Horrible.”
“He had a stroke,” said John Marco quietly. “I didn’t move him.”
At that moment John Marco was calmer than his minister.
Mr. Tuke looked wonderingly towards the large black box. John Marco followed the direction of his eyes.
“That is yours now,” he said in the same flat voice. “It’s Mr. Trackett’s bequest. He left you everything.”
Mr. Tuke did not move. He appeared reluctant to approach the disordered death-bed.
“Give it to me,” he said. “What’s in it?”
“He told me that it was money,” said John Marco slowly. “Money that he had saved for God.”
They moved Mr. Trackett between them and, when he was decently on his back again, Mr. Tuke passed his hand across his forehead.
“You poor boy,” he said. “What you must have endured. What you must have been through.”
Then he bent over the box and opened it like one who is in authority. And when he had seen what was inside—one of the bands had sprung open and the box seemed to be full almost to the brim with the cascade of notes—he turned to John Marco again.
“Jehovah is bountiful,” he said, raising his hands above his head. “Glory be to Jehovah.”
Chapter III
Punctually at Eight-Thirty next morning, John Marco was present behind his counter. He was there even before the young lady assistants; when they arrived, they found the dust sheets off and the top row of display brackets already arranged—it was an understood rule of the house that the man in charge of each department should arrange any goods which were set out so high that it necessitated standing on a chair to arrange them. So long as Mr. Morgan had supervised the retail side of his establishment, no young woman had ever publicly stood upon a chair.
The three young lady assistants, dressed most respectably in black, walked through to the ladies’ retiring-room leaving no trace of perfume or emotion behind them. They were workers; and they knew it. Mr. Morgan engaged only that sort. It was left to the more fashionable customers to introduce the scent and the excitement. Those—the fashionable ones—arrived during the afternoon. They were helped down from their carriages by the doorman, they swept into the shop with a kind of proprietary grace, bought half-a-yard of lace or a pair of twelve-and-eleven-penny gloves, had it put down to their account and swept out again, leaving the assistants with a sense of enlarged horizons and vicarious intimacy with wealth—Messrs. Morgan and Roberts were in the very best quarter of Bayswater.
After the three young ladies had filed past him and he had nodded good-morning, John Marco resumed his work of counter-dressing. It was moiré ribbon that he was arranging. He was expertly letting the flat roll uncoil between his fingers so that an elegant spiral was formed between the bras
s rail above and the counter. This done, he inserted a price ticket into the roll and stepped back. He swayed a little as he did so.
It was the first time he had ever arrived at work having had no sleep at all on the night before.
It had still been early when he had left Mr. Tuke in Mr. Trackett’s bedroom; Mr. Tuke had been comforting the niece by then; he had refused to believe that she was not broken-hearted. And he had not seemed to notice John Marco’s departure at all.
He had tiptoed out of the room, his heart still hammering. At that moment it had been the girl that he was afraid of. He did not want to pass under those eyes of hers a second time. They were such steady, inquisitive eyes; far steadier than his could ever be again. And as he had closed the door behind him, he had become aware of a strange feeling of isolation. The John Marco who began, slowly and sedately, to go downstairs again was a man of unchallengeable probity, a draper and a Sunday School teacher. But because of this thing that he had done, because of something that he would not have believed possible, he could never be the same as other men again. He was conscious as he went down the broad, twisting staircase that for the rest of his life he would have to walk alone; and the prospect frightened him. However often in the future he might stray back onto the path of virtue he knew now that he would never really belong there.
He had nearly reached the bottom of the stairs when he heard his name called out behind him. He started. But he steadied himself immediately, and told himself that above all things he must not act guiltily. There must be nothing in his manner or in his bearing which could betray him.
“You called me?” he asked.
The girl came down the stairs towards him. There was no emotion in her face, no sign of tears or agitation; simply those unsmiling dark eyes that seemed to be calculating everything about him. And when she spoke, it was still the same flat, unrevealing voice.
“I wanted to thank you,” she said. “There was no one else that I could have left. He trusted you.”
At the words John Marco started again. He raised his eyes to hers. But there was nothing concealed there; she knew nothing, suspected nothing. He smiled involuntarily at the relief, and then checked himself. Already he was behaving foolishly; people with free minds do not smile in the face of death.
“Good-night,” he said. “I shall pray for you.”
Then buttoning his coat around him—it felt tight and grotesque with those heavy wads of money beneath it—he crossed over to the front door and pulled it to after him.
He was conscious as he went down the steps of an enormous feeling of release. In escaping from that house it was as though for the moment he had escaped from himself as well. But the feeling passed off as suddenly as it had come. There was no escape for him: he knew that. Even though he was walking so fast that his lungs were hurting him, he wasn’t getting away from it. It was there—his private and neatly executed sin—lodged securely inside him for ever.
His mind now began playing strange tricks with him. He felt hunted, and kept glancing over his shoulder to see if he were being followed. But the road behind him was vague and empty. There was no threat in that long perspective of yellow street lamps that dwindled away, like lights seen in a double mirror, into the respectability of Bayswater. The feeling of pursuit remained, however. He could feel those hard wads of money pressing into him as he walked, and a sudden wave of terror hit him at the thought that he might be arrested as he was, his pockets loaded with his guilt. He would be the Ishmaelite then, the accursed one, the Baptist who had robbed the dead; because of that one moment of temptation which he had not resisted, he would become a legendary figure of iniquity, something with horns that the Amos Tabernacle would never be able to forget. He started trembling again and took an oath with himself that if once he got home undetected he would destroy the money utterly, burn the whole fortune into powder and unaccusing ashes; then mite by mite in the future he would pay back to God what he had stolen from Him.
The house was in darkness when he got there. He looked up and down Chapel Villas to see if he were observed—this fantasy of people watching him still remained—and went inside. As the door closed behind him he felt his strength go from him; he simply sagged up against the panel, holding onto the handle. The relief of knowing that he was safe, that as soon as he had destroyed the money he would be a free man again, overcame him.
When he had recovered he walked upstairs, silently and with caution, not pausing even to light the candle that old Mrs. Marco had left for him. And when he reached his room he locked the door, and drew the curtains closely together, pressing them into the window-frame at the corners, so that not a chink was left. There might be eyes anywhere, he told himself; the whole night was full of them. Then he lit the gas—the match jumped about in his hand, jabbing dangerously at the mantle as he held it—and pulled the money out of his pocket. The three thick wads stared up at him. He tore open the string that bound them and began to count. The notes filled his hands. He made little piles of them and went on counting. As his fingers ran across the surface of the paper, the same unaccountable exhilaration rose within him that he had ever known when he had first seen money. He began breathing deeper again. There was £150 of it; enough for a man to buy himself a place in the world, to be independent, to marry. And as he stood there, looking down on it and trembling, he knew in his heart that he had not the strength to destroy the money; knew that the vow which he had just made was broken already.
Already, he even knew minutely and exactly how to dispose of the money until it should be safe for him to spend: he would deposit the sum not in one bank but in several, and there would then be nothing to connect those humble, scattered accounts with the fortune that accused him.
“Your hair, Mr. Marco, is all brushed up at the back.”
It was Mr. Morgan who had spoken. He was standing in front of his assistant, regarding him with a pained, dis-esteeming eye. So far as he could remember, this was the first occasion on which he had ever had to speak to the young man about his appearance.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
John Marco flushed as he said it. He was conscious of what the rebuke meant and was only glad that the young ladies had not emerged from their retiring-room to hear it. But he was aware also of a new emotion: he found himself despising Mr. Morgan instead of respecting him. There now seemed something contemptible about the idiotic narrowness of his life, its senseless regularity. There Mr. Morgan was in the presence of someone who had risked everything; someone who had chosen with his eyes open to walk a tight-rope slung between hell and heaven—and looked even like getting to the further side; and all that Mr. Morgan could think of to say to this astonishing person was that his hair was brushed up the wrong way.
But he went obediently and tidied himself in the cold, back lavatory. When he emerged he was the copper-plate assistant again. His paleness rather added to his appearance. And he was as attentive and efficient in his work as ever. He reprimanded one of the young ladies for her roughness in drawing a pair of the thin suede gloves over the fingers of a wax hand that stood on the counter (he had told her before that the pressure should be on the side of the fingers and not on the front where the wear would subsequently come); and he was inspired in the presence of a difficult customer who had already had half the shop turned out without seeing what she wanted. From a shelf in the stock room marked “Discards” he had got down a roll of dubious sateen that Mr. Morgan had reluctantly regarded as unsaleable, and sold the customer the whole length. Mr. Morgan, who overheard the whole transaction, almost apologised for having criticised his star assistant.
But at seven o’clock when the shop closed, John Marco was already fainting with fatigue. When he had covered everything on the counter with the enshrouding dust-sheets he said good-night to Mr. Morgan who stood at the door like a benign and white-haired sentinel, waiting to pounce on any one of the minutiae of the business that had been left unattended to, and stepped out into the coldness of the street. The sh
arpness of the air braced him. He walked home briskly and steadily. A new feeling of calm had descended on him. He saw now that London, despite his crime, was going on very much as before. It was unaware of him. But when he got inside his own front door he found Mr. Tuke sitting by the empty grate in the parlour. He had been there ever since half past six, waiting for John Macro’s return.
The air of suspense was heavy in the room when he entered it. His mother was there, covered up in shawls and dangling all over with jet and tippets, assiduously endeavouring to entertain Mr. Tuke. She was doing her best. In her high strained voice—she was so deaf that it was years since she herself had heard it—she was telling Mr. Tuke what a model son she had.
“But he didn’t seem himself this morning,” John Marco heard her saying as he stood in the doorway. “He said someone had died. I couldn’t find out who.”
“It was Mr. Trackett,” Mr. Tuke said loudly.
Mrs. Marco looked surprised.
“What about him?” she said. “You keep on mentioning his name. I don’t know him.
But Mr. Tuke had already seen John Marco. He got up, towering impressively.
“I have something to say to you,” he said.
John Marco’s heart betrayed him for a moment, and he wondered if he had gone pale. But he took the large, pink hand that Mr. Tuke held out to him, and tried to look his Minister in the eyes.
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” he said.
Then Mrs. Marco saw her son.
“You didn’t tell me where you’d been last night,” she complained. “I sat up for you until I went to sleep.”
“I went to see Mr. Trackett,” he said. “I told you.”
“I thought you were going to the Immersion,” she said.
“Mr. Trackett was taken ill,” John Marco explained. “He died.”
Mrs. Marco paused, her mouth working.
“Everybody seems to have died,” she said. “It wasn’t always like this.”
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