"Rot, old man! you're only rather pippy. Don't you know you've always got me? Don't you remember how once for a joke in those Ship Street rooms you made me put my hands between yours and swear to be your man? Well, it wasn't a joke – to me. Don't you know how we all love you? Fancy your being here, you who used to lead us all. Damn it all, what gaudy nonsense I'm talking!"

His rather commonplace face shone strangely. He seemed to change the mean aspect of the room, to annihilate its sordidness.

Late at night Scott went back to his hotel, promising to be round first thing in the morning to take Gobion away. They parted at the door with a long hand-grip, and never met again in this world.

When he had gone Gobion went back to his room and fell like a log on to the floor, lying there motionless till the grey light crept into the court.

Then he got up and swiftly packed a small bag, his face white and drawn.

He went into the next room. The lamp was still burning, and old Mr. Belper lay in a drunken sleep on the bed. His mouth was open, and he breathed heavily.

Gobion woke him. "I've come to say good-bye," he said.

"What! has it come to that?"

"Yes."

The old man stared heavily. "Well, good-bye," he said. "I shan't be very long either. I'm glad we've met. I, ahem, I – er" – he coughed – "I congratulate you." He passed his dirty hand over his eyes. "Yes, I – er – congratulate you. I wish – I'll see you out."

He came to the front door. They shook hands. "Good-bye," he said, "good-bye, dear boy."

He stood on the steps, a fat, grotesque figure, and watched Gobion's slim form disappear in the fog – a dirty, shameless old man.

CHAPTER VIII
THE FINAL POSE

He felt that the time had come at last. What in his misery he had thought vaguely possible now loomed close before.

With the resolve to make an end of it all, to have done with pain, to cheat the inevitable, came a flood of relief. The torture of his brain was swept away as if it had not been, and its receding tide left only a shallow residuum of false sentiment.

The poor fool busied himself with details and accessories. Since he had come to the point, he resolved that he would pose to the last. He began to play his old trick of exciting a diseased duality of consciousness.

As he walked eastwards he was composing his farewell letters, he was picturing to himself the sorrow of his friends. They would talk of him wonderingly, as a brilliant life promising great things, gone with its work undone. They would recall his sweetness, the glow of his bright youth … the tears came into his eyes at the idea, it was so pathetic a picture.

His thoughts had run so long in the same groove, that though he felt dimly that there ought to be other and deeper feelings within him, he was unable to evoke them. He was conscious that this dainty picturing was utterly false; yet, try as he would, he could not stop it. Whether it was the last flicker of intense vanity, or merely that his mind was weakened by debauchery, it is impossible to say; but when a man plays unhealthy tricks with his mind, and is for ever feeling his spiritual muscles, the habit holds him fast as in a vice. His last hours possess a strange psychological interest.

He walked eastwards mechanically, but stopped when he had turned into Houndsditch, and the roar of the early traffic in Bishopsgate sounded less loudly.

From a card hanging in a pawnbroker's window he saw a bedroom was to let, and after paying the rent in advance, he was allowed to take possession. He lit the oil-stove that did duty for a fire, and lay down, falling into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

When he woke it was quite dark, and after washing his hands he went to a low eating-house for a last meal. The menu was pasted on the window in strips, while a cabbage-laden steam floated out of the half-open door. The room was long and low of ceiling, each table standing in a separate partition. A large woman, dressed in a scarlet silk blouse, walked up and down the centre gangway, taking the orders, which she shouted out in a hoarse voice to the open kitchen at the far end. "Pudding and peas!" "Roast, Yorkshire, and baked!"

The table at which Gobion sat was covered with oil-cloth, and as he moved a saucer full of salt out of the way of his elbow, a many-legged insect ran over it to a crack in the wall.

The woman brought him the food, not giving him a knife and fork till he had paid for what he had ordered. He noticed her hands were red and misshapen, with long, black nails.

He ate ravenously. Over the low partition he could see a Jew jerking some rich, steaming mess into his mouth with a curious twist of the wrist, and every now and again wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his coat. These details fascinated him.

When he had done, he asked for some paper, and with the roar of Whitechapel surging outside he began to write to Scott.

"My dear, dear old Man,

Forgive me for what I am going to do. Life seems to me – "

After writing a sentence or two he tore it up, as he found that he could not produce what he wanted. Time after time he tried, and only succeeded in being commonplace to the last degree. All his ideas of a tender farewell, a beautiful poetic letter, seemed impossible of realization; instead, he produced effusions which looked as if they might have been copied from the Family Herald.

At last he wrote simply "Good-bye," adding his new address. He tried to think of someone else to write to, but could not. His father he hated and feared; there was no thrill in a letter to him. It all seemed very flat and commonplace. These last few hours were not at all as he had pictured to himself.

Then he went out into the Whitechapel High Street. The costermongers' stalls, lit with flaring naphtha lamps, made the street nearly as bright as in the day-time. The pavement was greasy to walk on, and it was thronged by a vast crowd walking slowly up and down. The fog was settling over the houses, and the place smelt like a stale sponge.

He wandered slowly down towards the church, picking his way among the mob.

Coarse Jewish women with false hair shouted to one another. Girls with high cheek-bones, smeared with red and white, caught hold of his arm, whispering evil suggestions to him, and cursing him for a fool when he turned away. There was a lurid glow in the air.

He stopped outside a stationer's window, gazing idly at the specimens of invitation cards in the window.

"Mr. and Mrs. Levenstein

"Request the pleasure of your company

"At the occasion of their son's circumcision."

In the brilliant light he saw the gutters littered with decayed vegetables, bones, and rags. Two old women stood at a corner of the Commercial Road. He heard one of them say, "Yes, it was still-born, so she said; but I 'eard it squeak before Annie come out of the room." He passed on. A piano-organ, with a cage of bedraggled birds on the top, struck up, the handle being turned by a boy, while his father went among the crowd showing a smooth white stump where his hand should have been.

The door of the Free Library stood open. He went in. The room was crowded with men standing about reading the evening papers. He walked up and down through the rows of stands, as if looking for someone, after a while coming out again into the street. A sailor knocked against him, and swore at him for a "bleeding fool."

He was passing a pillar-box, when he remembered his letter to Scott, and he posted it, hearing the hollow echo of its fall with the sense of a curious subjective disturbance in the air around. He felt something was by him in the noisy street, something waiting by him for the end. He looked hastily over his shoulder, and then laughed grimly.

After a time, when he had been among the crowd for nearly two hours, some impulse seemed to draw him away, and he went back towards Houndsditch. Before turning down the long narrow street, he went into the "Three Nuns," the big hotel at the corner, and spent his last shilling in three glasses of brandy.

As he closed the door of his lodgings, the noise of the streets sank suddenly into a distant hum, through which he could distinguish the far-off tinklings of the barrel-organ, which had moved higher up the street. When he got to his room he busied himself in making it clean and tidy, clearing up the hearth, putting his clothes neatly away into his bag.

Then he took a little bottle out of his pocket marked "Chloroform." Over the head of the bed he fixed up a sort of rack with two hatpins and some string, so that the bottle could swing exactly over his pillow. Then he pricked a hole in the cork in such a manner that if the phial was turned upside-down, every few minutes a drop of liquid would ooze through.

He lit a cigarette and sat down to think. He was not quite sober, but he felt a dull conviction that things were never more unsatisfactory. He felt no sadness, no pathos, stealing over him.

With a great effort he struggled to realize things, getting up and walking round the room, talking thickly to himself. "Here I am, young, clever, of a good family, a man who might have been good or even great; am I going to die like a rat in a hole? Oh, God!" He said it with all the force and yearning he could put into his voice, trying to force a note of pain, but the result was most ordinary. He looked at his face in a little strip of looking-glass above the fireplace. He saw nothing but the imprint of impurity and sin.

Then he lay back on the bed, and thought that he roared with laughter. The situation seemed irresistibly comic. He only chuckled feebly, but to him it seemed as if he were shrieking in an ecstasy of mirth.

Suddenly he got up and fell on his knees, praying aloud, "Oh, God, help me! God forgive me!" All the time that he knelt and tried to pour out an impassioned prayer for forgiveness he knew that it was only an attempt to bring some poetry, some pathos, into his last moments. Again he got up and laughed wildly. His face grew ashen grey and horribly drawn in his attempts to deceive himself, to pose once more.

"Is there nothing, NOTHING? Good God!.. why can't I feel? Why? why? Ah! ahh!" He tore at the bed-quilt wildly, snarling like a beast.

In the middle of his paroxysm he stopped suddenly and stiffened. Once more the weird horror of another presence in the room came over him. He whimpered like a dog, shrinking into a corner, with staring eyes, not knowing what he did, muttering "Mother – mother!" Then with a complete change of tone and manner, he said, "A nonentity with most seductive hair."

He took the little bottle from the table, and hung it mouth downwards in the sling.

He took off his coat and waistcoat, mechanically winding up his watch and placing it on the mantel.

"This is not at all what I had hoped. It is most unsatisfactory, quite commonplace, in fact," he said as he lay down on the bed.

He felt a little splash on his cheek, and moved his face out of the direct course of the liquid, which now began to fall more rapidly.

CHAPTER IX
TWENTY YEARS AFTER. AN EPILOGUE IN TWO PICTURES

THE FIRST PICTURE

The Art of Religion

The church was very full. It was the vigil of All Saints, and Father Scott was to preach.

Far away, the culminating point of the long vista of shadowy arches, stood the High Altar, blazing with lights. The choir had just taken their stalls, and every head was bent low.

An orchestra was reinforcing the organ, and the long silver trumpets, loved of old Purcell, shouted jubilantly, echoing away down the dim clerestory.

Father Scott felt a strange thrill, an uplifting of the heart, at the melody. He stood up in his stall with the rest, a man whose face still showed a trend to the commonplace, but sweetened, almost refined away by something else.

The little sisters of St. Cecily, sweet souls with whom he worked, said among themselves that he had had a dear friend once whom he had loved, and for whom he still mourned and prayed, and that it was this that made him such an eminently lovable man.

Indeed, Sister Eliza had even read a novel he had written in his early days, a mystic romance of a glorious youth who had never come to prime.

The music of the stately anthem swelled up in a burst of praise, the trumpets singing high over all with keen vibratory notes that told of an inner mystery to ears initiate. Then, when Father Gray, an old priest whose days were nearly done, read the lesson, Scott leant back with crossed hands, thinking of old times, of his youth. It seemed to him on this great night of the Church that other and less earthly forms and voices thronged the building. In the Creed, the words "communion of saints" touched him strangely, as they always did; but to-night they came home to him with a deeper meaning.

"God is so good," he thought simply. "Surely He has pardoned him for that one sin. He was so pure and beautiful – very pleasant hast thou been to me." His thoughts wandered disconnectedly, recalling sentences that had struck him, old scenes and scraps of verse. The smell of the incense brought back Cowley or the Sunday evening services at St. Barnabas. He rejoiced in his heart at the stateliness and circumstance of worship around him, and he recalled some old articles in the Church Chimes, defending eloquently the "true ritual of holy Church." He had thought them so good, he remembered, such a dignified answer to the other side.

The prayers began, each with its deep harmonized "Amen," which seemed to him in his excited mind long-drawn gasps of thankfulness and worship. He bent his head low in his hands, and prayed humbly for the Church's welfare, and then, with an uplifting of his heart and a great passionate yearning, for his dead friend. He felt very near to him on this feast of the departed.

The time came for him to speak to the long rows of faces. He mounted to the high pulpit in the sweep of the chancel arch, and looked down on the congregation.

He began quietly enough, but gathered power and sonance as his feelings swayed him, drawing for them a picture, an ideal, to which they might all attain, telling them of the sweetness that comes with goodness. He thought of the friend of his youth, and drew an exalted picture of him, while the people sat breathless at the beauty of his words.

Then he said in a hushed voice how he had thought, and liked to think, that round them to-night were the dear ones who had died, that they were watching over them and praying with them that holy night.

Everyone felt the spell of the hour and the voice of the priest, it was most unearthly, dramatic, and effective. Sister Eliza wiped her eyes and thought of the novel, and only poor old Father Gray, worthy man, was fast asleep in the chancel, tired by the long ceremonial day.

Then came the great procession round the church, with its acolytes and crosses, Father Scott walking last in flowered cope. They sang, "For all the saints who from their labours rest," waking a responsive echo in every heart.

Last, and most impressive of all, the long spell of silent prayer, broken at last by the crashing music, and the shuffling feet of the congregation as they left the building. Sister Eliza, as she went out into the cutting night wind, could not help thinking of the novel. It was not a bad novel, but this is the true account.

THE SECOND PICTURE

A dinner in honour of the law

"Well, my dear, and who have you got?" said the duchess.

"First of all there's Mr. Mordaunt Sturtevant, the new Q.C., quite a nice person."

"He is," said the duchess, "I've met him. Such eyes! Eliza Facinorious said that he made her 'feel quite funny when he looked at her.' You know the sort of person – makes you feel b-r-r-r-r-r! like that."

"I know," said the hostess. "Then Marjorie Burness is coming – such a dear! knows all the latest stories about everyone."

"I don't think I've met her," said the duchess, "is she quite?"

"Not exactly; she was a Miss Lovibond – Lovering – some name like that. Parson's daughter, Kensington people, dontcherknow; but so amusin' – fat, too, she is."

"Oh!" said the duchess.

"Then there's a Mr. Sanderson Tom asked. He keeps a school board, or wants the poor to live noble lives in Hackney – somethin' of that sort. Eliza Facinorious and the Baron, Lady Darwin Swift, Mr. Justice Coll, Bradley Bere, the new writin' boy, Lord Saul Horridge, and of course the girls. That's all, I think."

"Oh!" said the duchess again.

She was rather a damaged duchess, and very impertinent, but Mrs. Chitters was exceedingly glad to get her. She really was a duchess, which, if a woman has no brains, money, or comeliness, is the best thing she can be. She was staying for a week with Colonel Chitters and his wife.

The dinner was for the joy of Mr. Mordaunt Sturtevant, who had just taken silk. The most eminent member of the criminal bar, he would have been Queen's Counsel long ago if it had not been for some vague rumours of his early life.

A footman opened the door, the duchess her eye-glasses, and Mrs. Chitters the conversation. Mr. Bradley Bere was announced, a youth apparently of seventeen, but of a great name; the rich uncleanness of his life almost rivalling his stories, and both being given undue prominence by his friends on the weekly press. Then came Lord Saul Horridge, a tall melancholy man, whose life was crushed by an energetic mother, whose forte was teetotalism, and whose weakness was omniscience.

Mr. and Mrs. Robert Burness came in, were effusively greeted by the hostess, and passed on to amuse the duchess. Mrs. Burness, nèe Marjorie Lovering, had grown too stout for flirtation, and feeling the want of a mètier, had turned her thoughts to scandal, and achieved a great success. Her husband, a clerk in the War Office, used to say that his wife had a higher regard for truth than anyone he knew – she used it so economically.

Mordaunt Sturtevant and Mr. Justice Coll came in arm in arm, and soon after they went down to dinner.

Sturtevant had grown two small whiskers, and his keen eyes, shaded by bushy brows, made the duchess want to say "B-r-r-r-r-r!" several times during the evening.

The Baroness Facinorious, an ample and various lady, was taken down by Mr. Sanderson, the education person from Hackney, and they discussed the latest thing in Chelsea churches.

Bradley Bere told Miss Chitters that poetry was the pursuit of the unattainable by the unbearable, hoping she would repeat it as having come from him.

Mr. Justice Coll alone was silent, his whole mind, no large part of him, being given up to the business in hand.

When the gentlemen came up to the drawing-room Sturtevant sat down by Mrs. Burness, and they discussed their host and hostess, both of them telling Mrs. Chitters what the other had said later on in the evening.

When they got tired of scandal Mrs. Burness mentioned that her son had just gone up to Oxford. "To Exeter, you know. Robert says it's an excellent college. We went up for the 'Torgids,' I think they call them – boatin' races, you know – and we had lunch in Bernard's rooms. Such nice rooms, all panelled in oak, and only next door to the Hall, which must be so convenient in wet weather, don't you think?"

"Have they a high-barred window in the corner looking out into B. N. C. Lane?" said Sturtevant.

"Yes! do you know them?"

"I think so. I believe I used to know a man who had them years ago. He's dead now."

"Oh, how romantic! I must tell Bernard! Perhaps his ghost haunts them! Do tell me his name."

"A rather uncommon name – Yardly Gobion."

Mrs. Burness grew pale.

"I knew him when I was a girl," she said faintly.

The man gripped a little ornamental knob on the arm of the chair. The people who were coming after the dinner were being announced. He heard Sir Lionel and Lady Picton's names shouted from the door. It was a curious evening.

"Were you a Miss Lovering before you married?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Then you're Marjorie!"

"Yes," she said with a little smile, "I was Marjorie."

They were silent for a time, and their faces changed a little.

"Rather a fool, wasn't he?" Sturtevant forced himself to say at last.

"Oh, yes, we flirted a little, don't you know, but I always thought him rather poor fun."

"Yes, he wasn't much. I remember when I was reading for the Bar I did him a service, for which he was not in the least grateful."

"Yes, he was quite that sort of person."

"But still," said Sturtevant, "he was a man possessed of considerable personal charm."