The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  ‘What’s this, Brutus – a concertina?’ he suddenly asked, stopping before the collapsible case in which I kept my rather old dress suit.

  I told him what it was, and he hoisted up his shoulders.

  ‘And these things?’ he asked, moving to something else.

  They were a pair of boot-trees of which I had permitted myself the economy. I remember they cost me four shillings in the old Brompton Road.

  ‘And that’s your bath, I suppose . . . Dumb-bells too . . . And – oh, good Lord! . . . ’

  He had picked up, and dropped again as if it had been hot, some­body or other’s card with the date of a ‘day’ written across the corner of it . . .

  As I helped him on with his overcoat he made no secret of the condition of its armholes and lining. I don’t for one moment suppose that the garment was his. I took a candle to light him down as soon as it should please him to depart.

  ‘Well, so long, and joy to you on the high road to success,’ he said with another grin for which I could have bundled him down the stairs . . .

  In later days I never looked to Andriaovsky for tact; but I stared at him for his lack of it that night. And as I stared I noticed for the first time the broad and low pylon of his forehead, his handsome mouth and chin, and the fire and wit and scorn that smouldered behind his cheap spectacles. I looked again; and his smallness, his malice, his pathetic little braggings about his poverty, seemed all to disappear. He had strolled back to my hearthrug, wishing, I have no doubt now, to be able to exclaim suddenly that it was too late for the pint of beer for which he hadn’t the money, and to curse his luck; and the pigmy quality of his colossus-ship had somehow gone.

  As I watched him, a neighbouring clock struck the half-hour, and he did even as I had surmised – cursed the closing time of the English public-houses . . .

  I lighted him down. For one moment, under the hall gas, he almost dropped his jesting manner.

  ‘You do know better, Harrison, you know,’ he said. ‘But, of course, you’re going to be a famous author in almost no time. Oh, ça se voit! No garrets for you! It was a treat, the way you handled those fellows – really . . . Well don’t forget us others when you’re up there – I may want you to write my “Life” some day . . . ’

  I heard the slapping of the loose sole as he shuffled down the path. At the gate he turned for a moment.

  ‘Good night, Brutus,’ he called.

  When I had mounted to my garret again my eyes fell once more on that ridiculous assemblage of empty chairs, all solemnly talking to one another. I burst out into a laugh. Then I undressed, put my jacket on the hanger, took the morrow’s boots from the trees and treed those I had removed, changed the pair of trousers under my mattress, and went, still laughing at the chairs, to bed.

  This was Michael Andriaovsky, the Polish painter, who died four weeks ago.

  1

  I knew the reason of Maschka’s visit the moment she was announced. Even in the stressful moments of the funeral she had found time to whisper to me that she hoped to call upon me at an early date. I dismissed the amanuensis to whom I was dictating the last story of the fourth series of Martin Renard, gave a few hasty instructions to my secretary, and told the servant to show Miss Andriaovsky into the drawing-room, to ask her to be so good as to excuse me for five minutes, to order tea at once, and then to bring my visitor up to the library.

  A few minutes later she was shown into the room.

  She was dressed in the same plainly-cut costume of dead black she had worn at the funeral, and had pushed up her heavy veil over the close-fitting cap of black fur that accentuated her Sclavonic appear­ance. I noticed again with distress the pallor of her face and the bistred rings that weeks of nursing had put under her dark eyes. I noticed also her resemblance, in feature and stature, to her brother. I placed a chair for her; the tea-tray followed her in; and without more than a murmured greeting she peeled off her gloves and prepared to preside at the tray.

  She had filled the cups, and I had handed her toast, before she spoke. Then: ‘I suppose you know what I’ve come about,’ she said.

  I nodded.

  ‘Long, long ago you promised it. Nobody else can do it. The only question is “when”.’

  ‘That’s the only question,’ I agreed.

  ‘We, naturally,’ she continued, after a glance in which her eyes mutely thanked me for my implied promise, ‘are anxious that it should be as soon as possible; but, of course – I shall quite under­stand –’

  She gave a momentary glance round my library. I helped her out.

  ‘You mean that I’m a very important person nowadays, and that you’re afraid to trespass on my time. Never mind that. I shall find time for this. But tell me before we go any further exactly how you stand and precisely what it is you expect.’

  Briefly she did so. It did not in the least surprise me to learn that her brother had died penniless.

  ‘And if you hadn’t undertaken the “Life”,’ she said, ‘he might just as well not have worked in poverty all these years. You can, at least, see to his fame.’

  I nodded again gravely, and ruminated for a moment. Then I spoke.

  ‘I can write it, fully and in detail, up to five years ago,’ I said. ‘You know what happened then. I tried my best to help him, but he never would let me. Tell me, Maschka, why he wouldn’t sell me that portrait.’

  I knew instantly, from her quick confusion, that her brother had spoken to her about the portrait he had refused to sell me, and had probably told her the reason for his refusal. I watched her as she evaded the question as well as she could.

  ‘You know how – queer – he was about who he sold his things to. And as for those five years in which you saw less of him, Schofield will tell you all you want to know.’

  I relinquished the point. ‘Who’s Schofield?’ I asked instead.

  ‘He was a very good friend of Michael’s – of both of us. You can talk quite freely to him. I want to say at the beginning that I should like him to be associated with you in this.’

  I don’t know how I divined on the spot her relation to Schofield, whoever he was. She told me that he too was a painter.

  ‘Michael thought very highly of his things,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know them,’ I replied.

  ‘You probably wouldn’t,’ she returned . . .

  But I caught the quick drop of her eyes from their brief excursion round my library, and I felt something within me stiffen a little. It did not need Maschka Andriaovsky to remind me that I had not attained my position without – let us say – splitting certain differ­ences; the looseness of the expression can be corrected hereafter. Life consists very largely of compromises. You doubtless know my name, whichever country or hemisphere you happen to live in, as that of the creator of Martin Renard, the famous and popular detec­tive; and I was not at that moment disposed to apologise, either to Maschka or Schofield or anybody else, for having written the stories at the bidding of a gaping public. The moment the public showed that it wanted something better I was prepared to give it. In the meantime, I sat in my very comfortable library, securely shielded from distress by my balance at my banker’s.

  ‘Well,’ I said after a moment, ‘let’s see how we stand. And first as to what you’re likely to get out of this. It goes without saying, of course, that by writing the “Life” I can get you any amount of “fame” – advertisement, newspaper talk, and all the things that, it struck me, Michael always treated with especial scorn. My name alone, I say, will do that. But for anything else I’m by no means so sure. You see,’ I explained, ‘it doesn’t follow that because I can sell hundreds of thousands of . . . you know what . . . that I can sell anything I’ve a mind to sign.’ I said it, confident that she had not lived all those years with her brother without having learned the axiomatic nature of it. To
my discomfiture, she began to talk like a callow student.

  ‘I should have thought that it followed that if you could sell some­thing – ’ she hesitated only for a moment, then courageously gave the other stuff its proper adjective, ‘ – something rotten, you could have sold something good when you had the chance.’

  ‘Then if you thought that you were wrong,’ I replied briefly and concisely.

  ‘Michael couldn’t, of course,’ she said, putting Michael out of the question with a little wave of her hand, ‘because Michael was – I mean, Michael wasn’t a business man. You are.’

  ‘I’m speaking as one,’ I replied. ‘I don’t waste time in giving people what they don’t want. That is business. I don’t undertake your brother’s “Life” as a matter of business, but as an inestimable privilege. I repeat, it doesn’t follow that the public will buy it.’

  ‘But – but – ’ she stammered, ‘the public will buy a Pill if they see your name on the testimonial!’

  ‘A Pill – yes,’ I said sadly . . . Genius and a Pill were, alas, different things. ‘But,’ I added more cheerfully, ‘you can never tell what the public will do. They might buy it – there’s no telling except by trying –’

  ‘Well, Schofield thinks they will,’ she informed me with decision.

  ‘I dare say he does, if he’s an artist. They mostly do,’ I replied.

  ‘He doesn’t think Michael will ever be popular,’ she emphasised the adjective slightly, ‘but he does think he has a considerable following if they could only be discovered.’

  I sighed. All artists think that. They will accept any compromise except the one that is offered to them . . . I tried to explain to Maschka that in this world we have to stand to the chances of all or nothing.

  ‘You’ve got to be one thing or the other – I don’t know that it matters very much which,’ I said. ‘There’s Michael’s way, and there’s . . . mine. That’s all. However, we’ll try it. All you can say to me, and more, I’ll say to a publisher for you. But he’ll probably wink at me.’

  For a moment she was silent. Then she said: ‘Schofield rather fancies one publisher.’

  ‘Oh? Who’s he?’ I asked.

  She mentioned a name. If I knew anything at all of business she might as well have offered The Life of Michael Andriaovsky to The Religious Tract Society at once . . .

  ‘Hm! . . . And has Mr Schofield any other suggestions?’ I en­quired.

  He had. Several. I saw that Schofield’s position would have to be defined before we went any further.

  ‘Hm!’ I said again. ‘Well, I shall have to rely on Schofield for those five years in which I saw little of Michael; but unless Schofield knows more of publishing than I do, and can enforce a better contract and a larger sum on account than I can, I really think, Maschka, that you’ll do better to leave things to me. For one thing, it’s only fair to me. My name hasn’t much of an artistic value nowadays, but it has a very considerable commercial one, and my worth to publishers isn’t as a writer of the Lives of Geniuses.’

  I could see she didn’t like it; but that couldn’t be helped. It had to be so. Then, as we sat for a time in silence over the fire, I noticed again how like her brother she was. She was not, it was true, much like him as he had been on that last visit of mine to him . . . and I sighed as I remembered that visit. The dreadful scene had come back to me . . .

  On account, I suppose, of the divergence of our paths, I had not even heard of his illness until almost the finish. Immediately I had hastened to the Hampstead ‘Home’, only to find him already in the agony. He had not been too far gone to recognise me, however, for he had muttered something brokenly about ‘knowing better’, that a spasm had interrupted. Besides myself, only Maschka had been there; and I had been thankful for the summons that had called her for a moment out of the room. I had still retained his already cold hand; his brow had worked with that dreadful struggle; and his eyes had been closed.

  But suddenly he had opened them, and the next moment had sat up on his pillow. He had striven to draw his hand from mine.

  ‘Who are you?’ he had suddenly demanded, not knowing me.

  I had come close to him. ‘You know me, Andriaovsky – Harrison?’ I had asked sorrowfully.

  I had been on the point of repeating my name but suddenly, after holding my eyes for a moment with a look the profundity and famil­iarity of which I cannot express, he had broken into the most ghastly haunting laugh I have ever heard.

  ‘Harrison?’ the words had broken throatily from him . . . ‘Oh yes; I know you! . . . You shall very soon know that I know you if . . . if . . . ’

  The cough and rattle had come as Maschka had rushed into the room. In ten seconds Andriaovsky had fallen back, dead.

  2

  That same evening I began to make notes for Andriaovsky’s ‘Life’. On the following day, the last of the fourth series of the Martin Renards occupied me until I was thankful to get to bed. But thereafter I could call rather more of my time my own, and I began in good earnest to devote myself to the ‘Life’.

  Maschka had spoken no more than the truth when she had said that of all men living none but I could write that ‘Life.’ His remain­ing behind in my Chelsea garret that evening after the others had left had been the beginning of a friendship that, barring that lapse of five years at the end, had been for twenty years one of completest intimacy. Whatever money there might or might not be in the book, I had seen my opportunity in it – the opportunity to make it the vehicle for all the aspirations, faiths, enthusiasms, and exaltations we had shared; and I myself did not realise until I began to note them down one tithe of the subtle links and associations that had welded our souls together.

  Even the outward and visible signs of these had been wonderful. Setting out from one or other of the score of garrets and cheap lodgings we had in our time inhabited, we had wandered together, day after day, night after night, far down East, where, as we had threaded our way among the barrels of soused herrings and the stalls and barrows of unleavened bread, he had taught me scraps of Hebrew and Polish and Yiddish; up into the bright West, where he could never walk a quarter of a mile without meeting one of his extraordinary acquaintances – furred music-hall managers, hawkers of bootlaces, commercial magnates of his own Faith, touts, crossing-sweepers, painted women; into Soho, where he had names for the very horses on the cab-ranks and the dogs who slumbered under the counters of the sellers of French literature; out to the naphtha-lights and cries of the Saturday night street markets of Islington and the North End Road; into City churches on wintry afternoons, into the studios of famous artists full of handsomely dressed women, into the studios of artists not famous, at the ends of dark and break-neck corridors; to tea at the suburban homes of barmaids and chorus girls, to dinner in the stables of a cavalry-barracks, to supper in cabmen’s shelters. He was possessed in some mysterious way of the passwords to doors in hoardings behind which excavations were in progress; he knew by name the butchers of the Deptford yards, the men in the blood-caked clothes, so inured to blood that they may not with safety to their lives swear at one another; he took me into an opium-cellar within a stone’s-throw of Oxford Street, and into a roof-chamber to call upon certain friends of his . . . well, they said they were fire extinguishers, so I’d better not say they were bombs. Up, down; here, there; good report, but more frequently evil . . . we had known this side of our London as well as two men may. And our other adventures and peregrinations, not of the body, but of the spirit . . . but these must be spoken of in their proper place.

  I had arranged with Maschka that Schofield should bring me the whole of the work Andriaovsky had left behind him; and he arrived late one afternoon in a fourwheeler, with four great pack­ages done up in brown paper. I found him to be a big, shaggy-browed, red-haired, raw-boned Lancashire man of five-and-thirty, given to confidential demonstrations at the
length of a button-shank, quite unconscious of the gulf between his words and his right to employ them, and bent on asserting an equality that I did not dispute by a rather aggressive use of my surname. Andriaovsky had appointed him his executor, and he had ever the air of suspecting that the appointment was going to be challenged.

  ‘A’m glad to be associated with ye in this melancholy duty, Harri­son,’ he said. ‘Now we won’t waste words. Miss Andriaovsky has told me precisely how matters stand. I had, as ye know, the honour to be poor Michael’s close friend for a period of five years, and my knowledge of him is entirely at your disposal.’

  I answered that I should be seriously handicapped without it.

  ‘Just so. It is Miss Andriaovsky’s desire that we should pull together. Now, in the firrst place, what is your idea about the forrm the book should take?’

  ‘In the first place, if you don’t mind,’ I replied, ‘perhaps we’d better run over together the things you’ve brought. The daylight will be gone soon.’

  ‘Just as ye like, Harrison,’ he said, ‘just as ye like. It’s all the same to me . . . ’

  I cleared a space about my writing-table at the window, and we turned to the artistic remains of Michael Andriaovsky.

  I was astonished, first, at the enormous quantity of the stuff, and next at its utter and complete revelation of the man. In a flash I realised how superb that portion at least of the book was going to be. And Schofield explained that the work he had brought represented but a fraction of the whole that was at our disposal.

  ‘Ye’ll know with what foolish generosity poor Michael always gave his things away,’ he said. ‘Hallard has a grand set; so has Connolly; and from time to time he behaved varry handsomely to myself. Artists of varry considerable talents both Hallard and Connolly are; Michael thought varry highly of their abilities. They express the deepest interest in the shape your worrk will take; and that reminds me. I myself have drafted a rough scenario of the forrm it appeared to me the “Life” might with advantage be cast in. A purely private opinion, ye’ll understand, Harrison, which ye’ll be entirely at liberty to disregard . . . ’