Buried Alive: a Tale of These Days Part 24

_Money-getting_

He stood on the kerb of the monument, talking to himself savagely. At any rate he was safely outside the monument, with its pullulating population of midgets creeping over its carpets and lounging insignificant on its couches. He could not remember clearly what had occurred since the moment of his getting up from the table; he could not remember seeing anything or anyone on his way out; but he could remember the persuasive, deferential voice of Mr. Oxford following him persistently as far as the giant's door. In recollection that club was like an abode of black magic to him; it seemed so hideously alive in its deadness, and its doings were so absurd and mysterious. "Silence, silence!" commanded the white papers in one vast chamber, and, in another, babel existed! And then that terrible mute dining-room, with the high, unscalable mantelpieces that no midget could ever reach! He kept uttering the most dreadful judgments on the club and on Mr. Oxford, in quite audible tones, oblivious of the street. He was aroused by a rather scared man saluting him. It was Mr. Oxford's chauffeur, waiting patiently till his master should be ready to re-enter the wheeled salon.

The chauffeur apparently thought him either demented or inebriated, but his sole duty was to salute, and he did nothing else.

Quite forgetting that this chauffeur was a fellow-creature, Priam immediately turned upon his heel, and hurried down the street. At the corner of the street was a large bank, and Priam, acquiring the reckless courage of the soldier in battle, entered the bank. He had never been in a London bank before. At first it reminded him of the club, with the addition of an enormous placard giving the day of the month as a mystical number--14--and other placards displaying solitary letters of the alphabet. Then he saw that it was a huge menagerie in which highly trained young men of a.s.sorted sizes and years were confined in stout cages of wire and mahogany. He stamped straight to a cage with a hole in it, and threw down the cheque for five hundred pounds--defiantly.

"Next desk, please," said a mouth over a high collar and a green tie, behind the grating, and a disdainful hand pushed the cheque back towards Priam.

"Next desk!" repeated Priam, dashed but furious.

"This is the A to M desk," said the mouth.

Then Priam understood the solitary letters, and he rushed, with a new accession of fury, to the adjoining cage, where another disdainful hand picked up the cheque and turned it over, with an air of saying, "Fishy, this!"

And, "It isn't endorsed!" said another mouth over another high collar and green tie. The second disdainful hand pushed the cheque back again to Priam, as though it had been a begging circular.

"Oh, if that's all!" said Priam, almost speechless from anger. "Have you got such a thing as a pen?"

He was behaving in an extremely unreasonable manner. He had no right to visit his spleen on a perfectly innocent bank that paid twenty-five per cent to its shareholders and a thousand a year each to its directors, and what trifle was left over to its men in rages. But Priam was not like you or me. He did not invariably act according to reason. He could not be angry with one man at once, nor even with one building at once.

When he was angry he was inclusively and miscellaneously angry; and the sun, moon, and stars did not escape.

After he had endorsed the cheque the disdainful hand clawed it up once more, and directed upon its obverse and upon its reverse a battery of suspicions; then a pair of eyes glanced with critical distrust at so much of Priam's person as was visible. Then the eyes moved back, the mouth opened, in a brief word, and lo! there were four eyes and two mouths over the cheque, and four for an instant on Priam. Priam expected some one to call for a policeman; in spite of himself he felt guilty--or anyhow dubious. It was the grossest insult to him to throw doubt on the cheque and to examine him in that frigid, shamelessly disillusioned manner.

"You _are_ Mr. Leek?" a mouth moved.

"Yes" (very slowly).

"How would you like this?"

"I'll thank you to give it me in notes," answered Priam haughtily.

When the disdainful hand had counted twice every corner of a pile of notes, and had dropped the notes one by one, with a peculiar snapping sound of paper, in front of Priam, Priam crushed them together and crammed them without any ceremony and without grat.i.tude to the giver, into the right pocket of his trousers. And he stamped out of the building with curses on his lips.

Still, he felt better, he felt a.s.suaged. To cultivate and nourish a grievance when you have five hundred pounds in your pocket, in cash, is the most difficult thing in the world.

_A Visit to the Tailors'_

He gradually grew calmer by dint of walking--aimless, fast walking, with a rapt expression of the eyes that on crowded pavements cleared the way for him more effectually than a shouting footman. And then he debouched unexpectedly on to the Embankment. Dusk was already falling on the n.o.ble curve of the Thames, and the mighty panorama stretched before him in a manner mysteriously impressive which has made poets of less poetic men than Priam Farll. Grand hotels, offices of millionaires and of governments, grand hotels, swards and mullioned windows of the law, grand hotels, the terrific arches of termini, cathedral domes, houses of parliament, and grand hotels, rose darkly around him on the arc of the river, against the dark violet murk of the sky. Huge trams swam past him like gla.s.s houses, and hansoms shot past the trams and automobiles past the hansoms; and phantom barges swirled down on the full ebb, threading holes in bridges as cotton threads a needle. It was London, and the roar of London, majestic, imperial, super-Roman. And lo! earlier than the earliest munic.i.p.al light, an unseen hand, the hand of destiny, printed a writing on the wall of vague gloom that was beginning to hide the opposite bank. And the writing said that Shipton's tea was the best. And then the hand wiped largely out that message and wrote in another spot that Macdonnell's whisky was the best; and so these two doctrines, in their intermittent pyrotechnics, continued to give the lie to each other under the deepening night. Quite five minutes pa.s.sed before Priam perceived, between the altercating doctrines, the high scaffold-clad summit of a building which was unfamiliar to him. It looked serenely and immaterially beautiful in the evening twilight, and as he was close to Waterloo Bridge, his curiosity concerning beauty took him over to the south bank of the Thames.

After losing himself in the purlieus of Waterloo Station, he at last discovered the rear of the building. Yes, it was a beautiful thing; its tower climbed in several coloured storeys, diminishing till it expired in a winged figure on the sky. And below, the building was broad and ma.s.sive, with a frontage of pillars over great arched windows. Two cranes stuck their arms out from the general ma.s.s, and the whole enterprise was guarded in a hedge of h.o.a.rdings. Through the narrow doorway in the h.o.a.rding came the flare and the hissing of a Wells's light. Priam Farll glanced timidly within. The interior was immense. In a sort of court of honour a group of muscular, hairy males, silhouetted against an illuminated latticework of scaffolding, were chipping and paring at huge blocks of stone. It was a subject for a Rembrandt.

A fat untidy man meditatively approached the doorway. He had a roll of tracing papers in his hand, and the end of a long, thick pencil in his mouth. He was the man who interpreted the dreams of the architect to the dreamy British artisan. Experience of life had made him somewhat brusque.

"Look here," he said to Priam; "what the devil do you want?"

"What the devil do I want?" repeated Priam, who had not yet altogether fallen away from his mood of universal defiance. "I only want to know what the h-ll this building is."

The fat man was a little startled. He took his pencil from his mouth, and spit.

"It's the new Picture Gallery, built under the will of that there Priam Farll. I should ha' thought you'd ha' known that." Priam's lips trembled on the verge of an exclamation. "See that?" the fat man pursued, pointing to a small board on the h.o.a.rding. The board said, "No hands wanted."

The fat man coldly scrutinized Priam's appearance, from his greenish hat to his baggy creased boots.

Priam walked away.

He was dumbfounded. Then he was furious again. He perfectly saw the humour of the situation, but it was not the kind of humour that induced rollicking laughter. He was furious, and employed the language of fury, when it is not overheard. Absorbed by his craft of painting, as in the old Continental days, he had long since ceased to read the newspapers, and though he had not forgotten his bequest to the nation, he had never thought of it as taking architectural shape. He was not aware of his cousin Duncan's activities for the perpetuation of the family name. The thing staggered him. The probabilities of the strange consequences of dead actions swept against him and overwhelmed him. Once, years ago and years ago, in a resentful mood, he had written a few lines on a piece of paper, and signed them in the presence of witnesses. Then nothing--nothing whatever--for two decades! The paper slept... and now this--this tremendous concrete result in the heart of London! It was incredible. It pa.s.sed the bounds even of lawful magic.

His palace, his museum! The fruit of a captious hour!

Ah! But he was furious. Like every ageing artist of genuine accomplishment, he knew--none better--that there is no satisfaction save the satisfaction of fatigue after honest endeavour. He knew--none better--that wealth and glory and fine clothes are nought, and that striving is all. He had never been happier than during the last two years. Yet the finest souls have their reactions, their rebellions against wise reason. And Priam's soul was in insurrection then. He wanted wealth and glory and fine clothes once more. It seemed to him that he was out of the world and that he must return to it. The covert insults of Mr. Oxford rankled and stung. And the fat foreman had mistaken him for a workman cadging for a job.

He walked rapidly to the bridge and took a cab to Conduit Street, where dwelt a firm of tailors with whose Paris branch he had had dealings in his dandiacal past.

An odd impulse perhaps, but natural.

A lighted clock-tower--far to his left as the cab rolled across the bridge--showed that a legislative providence was watching over Israel.

_Alice on the Situation_

"I bet the building alone won't cost less than seventy thousand pounds,"

he said.

He was back again with Alice in the intimacy of Werter Road, and relating to her, in part, the adventures of the latter portion of the day. He had reached home long after tea-time; she, with her natural sagacity, had not waited tea for him. Now she had prepared a rather special tea for the adventurer, and she was sitting opposite to him at the little table, with nothing to do but listen and refill his cup.

"Well," she said mildly, and without the least surprise at his figures, "I don't know what he could have been thinking of--your Priam Farll! I call it just silly. It isn't as if there wasn't enough picture-galleries already. When what there are are so full that you can't get in--then it will be time enough to think about fresh ones. I've been to the National Gallery twice, and upon my word I was almost the only person there! And it's free too! People don't _want_ picture-galleries. If they did they'd go. Who ever saw a public-house empty, or Peter Robinson's? And you have to pay there! Silly, I call it! Why couldn't he have left his money to you, or at any rate to the hospitals or something of that? No, it isn't silly. It's scandalous! It ought to be stopped!"

Now Priam had resolved that evening to make a serious, gallant attempt to convince his wife of his own ident.i.ty. He was approaching the critical point. This speech of hers intimidated him, rather complicated his difficulties, but he determined to proceed bravely.

"Have you put sugar in this?" he asked.

"Yes," she said. "But you've forgotten to stir it. I'll stir it for you."

A charming wifely attention! It enheartened him.

"I say, Alice," he said, as she stirred, "you remember when first I told you I could paint?"

"Yes," she said.

"Well, at first you thought I was daft. You thought my mind was wandering, didn't you?"

"No," she said, "I only thought you'd got a bee in your bonnet." She smiled demurely.

"Well, I hadn't, had I?"