The Victorian Mystery Megapack (43 page)

I did my best with the antimacassars, but on reflection I came to the conclusion that they would not help me very much. They certainly covered me, but a gentleman walking through South Kensington at 3 a.m. dressed in nothing whatever but antimacassars, with the snow two feet deep on the ground, would be sure to attract attention. I might pretend that I was doing it for a wager, but who would believe me? I grew very cold.

I looked out of window, and presently saw the bull’s-eye of a policeman who was wearily plodding through the snow. I felt that my only course was to surrender to him.

“Policeman,” said I, from the window, “one word.”

“Anything wrong, sir’?” said he.

“I have been committing a burglary in this house, and shall feel deeply obliged to you if you will kindly take me into custody.”

“Nonsense, sir,” said he; “you’d better go to bed.”

“There is nothing I should like better, but I live in Lincoln’s Inn, and I have nothing on but antimacassars. I am almost frozen. Pray take me into custody.”

“The street door’s open,” said he.

“Yes,” said I. “ Come in.”

He came in. I explained the circumstances to him, and with great difficulty I convinced him that I was in earnest. The good fellow put his own great coat over me, and lent me his own handcuffs. In ten minutes I was thawing myself in Walton Street police station. In ten days I was convicted at the Old Bailey. In ten years I returned from penal servitude.

I found that poor Mr. Davis had gone to his long home in Brompton Cemetery.

For many years I never passed his house without a shudder at the terrible hours I spent in it as his guest. I have often tried to forget the incident I have been relating, and for a long time I tried in vain. Perseverance, however, met with its reward. I continued to try. Gradually one detail after another slipped from memory, and one lovely evening last May I found, to my intense delight, that I had absolutely forgotten all about it.

CHEATING THE GALLOWS, by Israel Zangwill

Curious Couple

They say that a union of opposites makes the happiest marriage, and perhaps it is on the same principle that men who chum are always so oddly assorted. You shall find a man of letters sharing diggings with an auctioneer, and a medical student pigging with a stockbroker’s clerk. Perhaps each thus escapes the temptation to talk “shop” in his hours of leisure while he supplements his own experiences of life by his companion’s.

There could not be an odder couple than Tom Peters and Everard G. Roxdal—the contrast began with their names, and ran through the entire chapter. They had a bedroom and a sitting-room in common, but it would not be easy to find what else. To his landlady, worthy Mrs. Seacon, Tom Peters’ profession was a little vague, but everybody knew that Roxdal was the manager of the City and Suburban Bank, and it puzzled her to think why a bank manager should live with such a seedy-looking person, who smoked clay pipes and sipped whiskey and water all the evening when he was at home. For Roxdal was as spruce and erect as his fellow-lodger was round-shouldered and shabby; he never smoked, and he confined himself to a small glass of claret at dinner.

It is possible to live with a man and see very little of him. Where each of the partners lives his own life in his own way, with his own circle of friends and external amusements, days may go by without the men having five minutes together. Perhaps this explains why these partnerships jog along so much more peaceably than marriages, where the chain is drawn so much tighter, and galls the partners rather than links them. Diverse, however, as were the hours and habits of the chums, they often breakfasted together, and they agreed in one thing—they never stayed out at night. For the rest Peters sought his diversions in the company of journalists and frequented debating rooms, where he propounded the most iconoclastic views; while Roxdal had highly respectable houses open to him in the suburbs and was, in fact, engaged to be married to Clara Newell, the charming daughter of a retired corn merchant, a widower with no other child.

Clara naturally took up a good deal of Roxdal’s time, and he often dressed to go to a play with her, while Peters stayed at home in a faded dressing-gown and loose slippers. Mrs. Seacon liked to see gentlemen about the house in evening dress, and made comparisons not favourable to Peters. And this in spite of the fact that he gave her infinitely less trouble than the younger man.

It was Peters who first took the apartments, and it was characteristic of his easy-going temperament that he was so openly and naively delighted with the view of the Thames obtainable from the bedroom window that Mrs. Seacon was emboldened to ask twenty-five percent more than she had intended. She soon returned to her normal terms, however, when his friend Roxdal called the next day to inspect the rooms and overwhelmed her with a demonstration of their numerous shortcomings. He pointed out that their being on the ground floor was not an advantage, but a disadvantage, since they were nearer the noises of the street—in fact, the house being a corner one, the noises of two streets.

Roxdal continued to exhibit the same finicking temperament in the petty details of the
ménage
. His shirt fronts were never sufficiently starched, nor his boots sufficiently polished. Tom Peters, having no regard for rigid linen, was always good-tempered and satisfied and never acquired the respect of his landlady. He wore blue check shirts and loose ties even on Sundays. It is true he did not go to church, but slept on till Roxdal returned from morning service, and even then it was difficult to get him out of bed, or to make him hurry up his toilette operations. Often the mid-day meal would be smoking on the table while Peters would smoke in the bed, and Roxdal, with his head thrust through the folding doors that separated the bedroom from the sitting-room, would be adjuring the sluggard to arise and shake off his slumbers and threatening to sit down without him, lest the dinner be spoilt.

In revenge, Tom was usually up first on weekdays, sometimes at such un-earthly hours that Polly had not yet removed the boots from outside the bedroom door, and would bawl down to the kitchen for his shaving water. For Tom, lazy and indolent as he was, shaved with the unfailing regularity of a man to whom shaving has become an instinct. If he had not kept fairly regular hours, Mrs. Seacon would have set him down as an actor, so clean-shaven was he.

Roxdal did not shave. He wore a full beard and, being a fine figure of a man to boot, no uneasy investor could look upon him without being re-assured as to the stability of the bank he managed so successfully. And thus the two men lived in an economical comradeship, all the firmer, perhaps, for their mutual incongruities.

Woman’s Instinct

It was on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of October, ten days after Roxdal had settled in his new rooms, that Clara Newell paid her first visit to him there. She enjoyed a good deal of liberty and did not mind accepting his invitation to tea. The corn merchant, himself indifferently educated, had an exaggerated sense of the value of culture, and so Clara, who had artistic tastes without much actual talent, had gone in for painting and might be seen, in pretty little toils, copying pictures in the Museum. At one time it looked as if she might be reduced to working seriously at her art, for Satan, who finds mischief still for idle hands to do, had persuaded her father to invest the fruits of years of work in bubble companies. However, things turned out not so bad as they might have been, a little was saved from the wreck, and the appearance of a suitor, in the person of Everard G. Roxdal, ensured her a future of competence, if not of the luxury she had been entitled to expect. She had a good deal of affection for Everard, who was unmistakably a clever man, as well as a good-looking one. The prospect seemed fair and cloudless.

Nothing presaged the terrible storm that was about to break over these two lives. Nothing had ever for a moment come to vex their mutual contentment till this Sunday afternoon. The October sky, blue and sunny, with an Indian summer sultriness, seemed an exact image of her life, with its aftermath of a happiness that had once seemed blighted.

Everard had always been so attentive, so solicitous, that she was as much surprised as chagrined to find that he had apparently forgotten the appointment. Hearing her astonished interrogation of Polly in the passage, Tom shambled from the sitting-room in his loose slippers and his blue check shirt, with his eternal clay pipe in his mouth, and informed her that Roxdal had gone out suddenly earlier in the afternoon.

“G-g-one out,” stammered poor Clara; all confused. “But he asked me to come to tea.”

“Oh, you’re Miss Newell, I suppose,” said Tom.

“Yes, I am Miss Newell.”

“He has told me a great deal about you, but I wasn’t able honestly to congratulate him on his choice till now.”

Clara blushed uneasily under the compliment, and under the ardour of his admiring gaze. Instinctively she distrusted the man. The very first tones of his deep bass voice gave her a peculiar shudder. And then his impoliteness in smoking that vile clay was so gratuitous.

“Oh, then you must be Mr. Peters,” she said in return. “He has often spoken to me of you.”

“Ah!” said Tom, laughingly, “I suppose he’s told you all my vices. That accounts for your not being surprised at my Sunday attire.”

She smiled a little, showing a row of pearly teeth. “Everard ascribes to you all the virtues,” she said.

“Now that’s what I call a friend!” he cried. “But won’t you come in? He must be back in a moment. He surely would not break an appointment with
you
.” The admiration latent in the accentuation of the last pronoun was almost offensive.

She shook her head. She had a just grievance against Everard and would punish him by going away indignantly.

“Do let me give you a cup of tea,” Tom pleaded. “You must be awfully thirsty this sultry weather. There! I will make a bargain with you! If you will come in now, I promise to clear out the moment Everard returns and not spoil your
tête-á-tête
.”

But Clara was obstinate; she did not at all relish this man’s society, and besides, she was not going to throw away her grievance against Everard.

“I know Everard will slang me dreadfully when he comes in if I let you go,” Tom urged. “Tell me at least where he can find you.”

“I am going to take the ’bus at Charing Cross, and I’m going straight home,” Clara announced determinedly.

She put up her parasol and went up the street into the Strand. A cold shadow seemed to have fallen over all things.

But just as she was getting into the ’bus, a hansom dashed down Trafalgar Square, and a well-known voice hailed her. The hansom cab stopped, and Everard got out and held out his hand.

“I’m so glad you’re a bit late,” he said. “I was called out unexpectedly and have been trying to rush back in time. You wouldn’t have found me if you had been punctual. But I thought,” he added, laughing, “I could rely on you as a woman.”

“I was punctual,” Clara said angrily. “I was not getting
out
of this ’bus, as you seem to imagine, but
into
it, and was going home.”

“My darling!” he cried remorsefully. “A thousand apologies.”

The regret on his handsome face soothed her. He took the rose he was wearing in the button-hole of his fashionably-cut coat and gave it to her.

“Why were you so cruel?” he murmured, as she nestled against him. “Think of my despair if I had come home to hear you had come and gone. Why didn’t you wait a moment?”

A shudder traversed her frame. “Not with that man, Peters!” she murmured.

“Not with that man, Peters!” he echoed sharply. “What is the matter with Peters?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t like him.”

“Clara,” he said, half-sternly, half-cajolingly, “I thought you were above these weaknesses; you are punctual, strive also to be reasonable. Tom is my best friend. From boyhood we have been always together. There is nothing Tom would not do for me, or I for Tom. You must like him, Clara; you must, if only for my sake.”

“I’ll try,” Clara promised, and then he kissed her in gratitude.

“You’ll be very nice to him at tea, won’t you?” he said anxiously. “I shouldn’t like you two to be bad friends.”

“I don’t want to be bad friends,” Clara protested; “only the moment I saw him a strange repulsion and mistrust came over me.”

“You are quite wrong about him—quite wrong,” he assured her earnestly. “When you know him better, you’ll find him the best of fellows. Oh, I know,” he said suddenly, “I suppose he was very untidy, and you women go so much by appearances!”

“Not at all,” Clara retorted. “’Tis you men who go by appearances.”

“Yes, you do. That’s why you care for me,” he said, smiling.

She assured him it wasn’t, and she didn’t care for him so much as he plumed himself, but he smiled on. His smile died away, however, when he entered his rooms and found Tom nowhere.

“I daresay you’ve made him run about hunting for me,” he grumbled.

“Perhaps he knew I’d come back, and went away to leave us together,” she answered. “He said he would when you came.”

“And yet you say you don’t like him!”