The Sailor Part 48

"You should go to the Old Bailey one day and hear a trial," said Edward Ambrose. "All things that are concerned with reality might help you just now. I dare say it will hurt you horribly; but if you are not unlucky in the judge, it may help to restore your faith in your country."

"Yes, sir, I'll go there one day, as you advise me to," said Henry Harper, as a boy in the fourth form who was young for his age might have said it; and then with curious simplicity: "But I won't much fancy going by myself."

"I'll come with you," said Edward Ambrose, "if that is how you feel about it."

Thus it was that one evening, about a fortnight later, Henry Harper received a postcard, which said:

Meet me outside O. B. 10.30 tomorrow. Murder trial: a strange and terrible drama of pa.s.sion for two students of the human comedy! E. A.

On the following morning, the Sailor had already mingled with the crowd outside the Old Bailey when, punctual to the minute, he was joined by his friend.

"It's brave of you to face it," was his greeting.

Mr. Ambrose little knew the things he had faced in the course of his five and twenty years of life, was the thought that ran in the mind of the Sailor.

They made their way in, and became witnesses of the drama that the law was preparing to unfold.

The judge began the proceedings, or rather the proceedings began themselves, with a kind of grotesque dignity. After the jury had been sworn, the prisoner was brought into the dock. Henry Harper gazed at him with an emotion of dull horror. In an instant, he had recognized Mr. Thompson, the mate of the _Margaret Carey_.

There could be no doubt it was he. Alexander Thompson was the name given in the indictment; besides, the Sailor would have known anywhere that s.h.a.ggy and hirsute man who had cast such a shadow across his youth. There he was, that grim figure! He had changed, and yet he had not changed. The long, lean, angular body was the same in every awkward line, but the deadly pallor of the face was horrible to see.

It was Mr. Thompson right enough, and yet it was not Mr. Thompson at all.

A surge of memories came upon Henry Harper as he sat in that court.

They were so terrible that he could hardly endure them. He did not hear a word that was being spoken by the barrister who, in even and impartial tones, was reciting the details of a savage but not ign.o.ble crime. The Sailor was thousands of miles away in the Pacific; the groves of the Island of San Pedro were rising through the morning mists; he could hear the plop-plop of the sharks in the water; he could hear the Old Man coming up on deck.

"That man looks capable of anything," whispered Edward Ambrose.

The Sailor had always been clear upon that point. There was the drive to the docks in a cab through the rain of the November night in his mind. Again he was a helpless waif of the streets seated opposite Jack the Ripper. He almost wanted to scream.

"Would you rather not stay?" whispered his friend.

"I'm not feeling very well," said Henry Harper; thereupon they left the court and went out into the street.

They walked along Holborn in complete silence. To the Sailor the fellowship, the security, the friendliness of that crowded street were a great relief. His soul was in the grip of awful memories. Even the man at his side could not dispel them. Mr. Ambrose was much farther away just now than the Old Man, the Island of San Pedro, and the savage and brutal murderer to whom he owed his life.

For days afterwards, the mind of the Sailor was dominated by Mr.

Thompson. He learned from the newspapers that the mate of the _Margaret Carey_ was condemned to death, and that he awaited the last office of the law in Dalston Prison. One day, an odd impulse came upon him. He bought some grapes and took them to the prison, and with a boldness far from his character at ordinary times, sought permission to see the condemned man.

As Mr. Thompson had only one day more to live, and not one of his friends had visited him for the simple reason that he had not a friend in the world, the governor of the prison, a humane man, gave the Sailor permission to see the mate of the _Margaret Carey_.

Behind iron bars and in the presence of a warder, Henry Harper was allowed to look upon Mr. Thompson, to speak to him, and to offer the grapes he had brought him. But a dreadful shock awaited the young man.

He saw at once that there was nothing human now in the man who was ranging his cell like a caged beast.

"Don't you know me, Mr. Thompson?" cried Henry Harper feebly, through the bars.

The mate of the _Margaret Carey_ paid no heed to his voice, but still paced up and down.

"Don't you know me, Mr. Thompson? I'm Sailor."

For a fraction of time, the condemned man turned savage, unutterable eyes upon him. They were those of a wild beast at bay.

"There's no G.o.d," he said.

He dashed his head against the wall of his cell.

XIX

Henry Harper was now in a universe of infinite complexity. The genie who lived in the wonderful lamp in his brain had taught him already that he knew nothing about whole stellar s.p.a.ces in this strange cosmos that he, the thing he called himself, inhabited. Moreover, it presented many problems. Of these the most instant and pressing was Cora.

It was no use mincing the matter: Cora and he were not getting on.

There was no bond of sympathy between them. His work and all that went with it were far more to him than the woman he had married. And when this fact came home to her, she began to resent it in a contemptuous way. It made it more difficult for both that his work only appealed to her in one aspect, and that the one which least appealed to him. The hard and continuous labor it involved meant nothing to her; the hopes and the fears of an awakening artistic sense were things beyond her power to grasp; if his work had not a definite commercial value, if it could not be rendered in pounds and shillings, it was a waste of time and worse than meaningless. Everything apart from that was a closed book as far as she was concerned. She began to despise his timidity and his ignorance, and the time soon came when she did not hesitate to sneer at him before her friends.

For one thing, she was bitterly resentful. It was useless to disguise that he was not merely indifferent to her physical charms, he positively disliked and even dreaded that aspect of their life together. Within a very short time after their marriage, he made the discovery that she drank.

Even before that knowledge came he had discerned something unwholesome about her. The blackened eyebrows, the rouged cheeks, the dyed hair, the overfine presence, the stealthy, cloying color of scent she exuded, the coa.r.s.e mouth, the apathetic eyes, had always been things that he dared not let his mind rest upon in detail even before he had taken them unto himself. And now that he had done so at the call of duty, and with even that to sustain him, he foresaw that he must come to dislike them more and more. It hardly needed a pervading reek of brandy in her bedroom to read the future.

Unluckily for Cora, the monotony of a "straight" life with such a humdrum young man was more than she could stand for any length of time.

The old fatal habit was soon upon her again. Years of yielding had weakened her will; and now she was beginning to grow contemptuous of her husband--perhaps as a requital of his apathy towards her--she began to a.s.sume a defiant carelessness, first of manner and then of conduct.

Disaster was foreshadowed by several quarrels. None of these were serious, but they showed the inevitable end towards which matters had begun to drift. Henry Harper was not the sort of man with whom it was easy to quarrel; he had no apt.i.tude for a form of reflex action quite alien to his nature. All the same, there were times when he was almost tempted to defend himself from Cora's perpetual sneers at his dullness, not only in her company, which was bad enough, but in that of her friends, which was worse.

Her chief complaint was his bearing in restaurants and public places.

He had not a word to say for himself; he let "the girls" and "the boys"--Cora included her whole exceedingly numerous acquaintance in these terms--"come it over him"; he took everything lying down; and she couldn't understand why a man who was as clever as he was supposed to be "didn't let himself out a bit now and again."

Harry's social maladroitness became a very sore subject. It annoyed Cora intensely that the boys and the girls should so consistently "make a mark of him." His inability to hit back seemed to be a grave reflection upon her judgment and good taste in marrying him. The time soon came when she told him that if he couldn't show himself a little brighter in company, he could either stay at home of an evening or go his way, and she would go hers.

As a fact, neither alternative was irksome to Henry Harper. But the ultimatum hurt him very much. The odd thing was that in spite of the nipping atmosphere to which his sensitiveness was exposed, it seemed to grow more acute. He had a very real sense of inferiority in the presence of others. Not only did he suffer from a lack of any kind of social training, but even the few counters he was painfully acquiring in a difficult game he had not the art of playing to advantage. Thus he was only too glad to accept Cora's ukase. It was a merciful relief to sit at home in the evening and eat the meager cold supper that Royal Daylight provided, and then go on with his work to what hour he chose, instead of being haled abroad at the heels of a superfashionable and therefore hyperdisdainful Cora to public places, where he was always at a miserable disadvantage.

She thus formed a habit of sallying forth alone in the evening.

Although she sometimes returned after midnight in a slightly elevated condition, or in her own words, "inclined to be market merry," her husband had too little knowledge of life to be really suspicious or even deeply resentful.

Under the new arrangement, which suited the young man so well, he was able to attend public lectures at various places, the Polytechnic in Regent Street, the British Museum, the London Inst.i.tution, the South Kensington Museum, and other centers of light. These helped him in certain ways. He was no dry-as-dust. Already his eyes were set towards the mountain peaks, yet with a humility that was perhaps his chief a.s.set, he felt it to be in the power of all men to help him upon his journey.

Twice a week, now, after an early supper, he would go to a lecture.

When it was over, he would often take a stroll about the streets in order to observe the phantasmagoria around him of which he knew so little. Yet his eager mind was looking forward to a time when all should be made clear by the play of the light that shines in darkness.

As a rule, he would finish his evening's excursion with a cup of coffee and a sandwich at Appenrodt's in Oxford Circus. And then thinking his wonderful thoughts, he would take a final enchanted stroll homewards to the Avenue, to No. 106, King John's Mansions, where his work and his books awaited him. Sometimes, however, he was greatly troubled with the thought of Cora. It was idle to disguise the ever growing sense of antagonism that was arising between them. But she went her way and he went his. The financial arrangement they had now come to was that he should pay the rent of the flat and all household expenses, and as Cora had apparently no money of her own, he also allowed her half of what remained of his income.

One evening in the summer, as he was walking slowly down Regent Street, a man and a woman pa.s.sed him in an open taxi. The woman was Cora, and the man, who was in evening dress, appeared to have his arm around her waist. The sight was like a blow in the face. And yet it was a thing so far outside his ken that it was impossible to know exactly what it meant. For a moment he was dazed. He did not know how to regard it, or in what way to deal with it. To begin with, and perhaps oddly, it did not make him particularly angry. Why he was not more angry, he didn't know. No doubt it was because he was growing to dislike Cora so intensely. But as he walked slowly to King John's Mansions he still had the curious feeling of being half stunned by a blow.

He went to bed without awaiting her return. She had recently taken to coming home very late. Partly because of this, and partly in consequence of the condition in which she often returned, he had insisted for some little time past upon a bedroom of his own. This she had been very unwilling to concede, but he had fought for it and had in the end won; and tonight as he turned in and locked the door, he determined that no power on earth should cause him to yield the spoils of victory. He got into bed with hideous phantoms in his mind. But the thought uppermost was that he had turned yet another page of experience. And there suddenly in the midst of the flow and eddy of his fancies, the awful face of Mr. Thompson emerged at the foot of the bed. He could almost hear the mate of the _Margaret Carey_ dash his head against the wall of his cell.

He put forth all his power of will in the hope of inducing sleep, but before it showed signs of coming, he heard Cora's latchkey fumbling at the front door of the flat. She opened it with a rattle, and closed it with a bang; and then he heard her come stumbling along the pa.s.sage, her fuddled voice uplifted in the mirthless strain of a music hall ditty.