Smithers lay upstairs, with the feeling that his head was a large lump of dough traversed by a steam-propelled roller, but satisfied that heroism and hot rum were both excellent. He was soon asleep.
Glory reached its flood on the following day. An offering was brought from the mother of Emily Trimmins--a box encrusted without with small sh.e.l.ls and two pieces of looking-gla.s.s and lined with pink satin within.
The slip of paper which accompanied it was inscribed--"A mother"s tribute to her daughter"s presserver" (_sic_). The newspapers on the whole did well, though the _Times_ was quite outcla.s.sed in the race for news, having but two lines to the half column of the local organ. The magistrate cautioned Miss Trimmins with some severity, and handed her over to the care of her mother. He said that the loafers were not men.
He referred to the intrepid courage, cool head, strength wedded with skill, of Alfred Smithers--one of the men of whom England had good cause to be proud.
In the course of a week the postman had explained away the other lady and was _au mieux_ with Emily Trimmins, who, so far as this story is concerned, may now take a seat at the back.
A considerable number of Smithers" friends were waiting, when the magistrate had finished, to have the pleasure of shaking hands with Smithers, and congratulating him, and so on.
And that night one of the men of whom England had good cause to be proud went home most painfully and uncompromisingly drunk.
II
Alfred Smithers, as he made his modest breakfast of a cup of tea and two liver pills next morning, explained to his wife that it had not been the drink so much as the reaction.
She said that he needn"t have taken the reaction. She should overlook it this time and say no more, knowing what he was when not misled. But no amount of ironing would make that hat look anything again. He went to work feeling that the glory had been turned a little lower.
There were more newspaper cuttings, and later there was something on vellum. Smithers said rather bitterly that the Society seemed to do things on the cheap. A medal came at last, presented by the vicar on behalf of a few friends and local inhabitants. It was of silver and very large. It was kept on the mantelpiece and shown to everybody who would look at it.
But the excitement was dying down. Glory was on the ebb. Mrs Smithers would sometimes allow two days to pa.s.s without alluding to the act of heroism. Smithers watched the ebbing of the tide with inward rage and with many vain efforts to stay it. The neighbourhood sickened slowly of conversations on the different ways of rescuing the drowning--conversations initiated by Smithers in order to lead to the case of the poor girl, Emily Trimmins. But he had eaten praise-poison, and no other diet was rich enough for him now. The neighbourhood wearying of him and hinting as much, he would slip the medal into his pocket on Sat.u.r.day afternoons, get on his bicycle, and seek fresh fields. A little group and a bar-parlour sufficed. Whatever the group was discussing when Smithers first leaned his bicycle against the horse-trough outside, five minutes later they were listening while Smithers got in with "I remember once being on the Heath when some fool of a girl jumped into twenty feet of water. What did I do? Watched for the bubbles coming up and then dived. The devil of it was that there was a strong cross-current and--" etc. Later, the medal would be produced.
Poor Alfred Smithers! Nature"s low comedian, and yet smitten with a raging madness for the strut, the soliloquy, the limelight, the sympathetic music, the roar of applause!
In his new part of hero he invented business that was not good. He began to be, as he phrased it, "master in his own house." He interfered in matters which were the special province of Mrs Smithers. He gave detailed instructions in domestic subjects of which he was completely ignorant, and brought upon himself ridicule. He was rude to Mrs Smithers, and said that she needed to be driven with a firm hand. He told the eight-pound general that his word was law, and she forthwith gave notice on the ground that she could put up with anything except haughtiness.
Mrs Smithers told him with some frankness that she was glad to see his back when he went to business of a morning, for he was more nuisance in a house than a cartload of monkeys.
At business he had got, as a rule, just enough sense not to try any heroism. He was a good book-keeper and he had got a good place and he knew it. One day, however, as his mind strayed for a moment to high things, he made a small blunder affecting a large sum, and the sum got on to the wrong side of the book and caused trouble. In due course Mr Peter Begg said, "Send me Smithers." The clerk who took the message said to Smithers, "You"re going to get beans." And at this all the heroism in Smithers arose and boiled over, and he spluttered out that he thought it would be rather the other way.
"Look here," said Mr Begg, "how do you come to make such an infernal fool of yourself as this, Smithers?" Smithers was now well alight.
"Kindly understand once for all that there are some expressions I don"t permit to be used to me by any man."
Mr Begg gazed at Smithers pensively through his eye-gla.s.s and sighed.
"Get out," he said, "I"ll finish with you to-morrow morning. You may be sober by then. Get out, go on!"
Smithers got out, and a slight chill fell on him. Possibly he had gone too far. He was unusually civil to his wife at supper that night, and appeared somewhat preoccupied. After supper he asked his wife what she thought of Klondike.
"I wouldn"t care to have much to do with it. Why?"
"Well, I had a few words with Begg to-day--Peter Begg, the old one. I was in the right, as it happened, but something I said seemed to sting him rather. I can"t say how it will end. I"ve as good as promised to see him again to-morrow morning, but he may not meet my views. And you know how it is when either the senior partner"s got to go or the book-keeper."
"You apologise and ask to be took on again," said Mrs Smithers, going right through the elegancies of her husband"s version and getting straight down to the bedrock facts. "That"s what you"ll do if you"re not silly. You don"t want to lose a good place."
"I don"t know," said Smithers, with an air of melancholy, "same old drudgery day after day, and what"s it all to come to? Nothing. I might strike it if we went to Klondike."
"You aren"t going to no Klondike," said Mrs Smithers.
"I"m not sure it wouldn"t be the right life for me. I"m naturally a man of action. I do the book-keeping well enough, but adventures and emergencies are more my line. You remember what the magistrate said when--"
"I remember how drunk you were that night."
"Little you know!" said Smithers, though conscious that the retort was somewhat vague. After some meditation he managed to supplement it as follows: "And little you care either--top b.u.t.ton"s been off my wescut for the last four days."
"You"ve got a tongue in your head to ask with, haven"t you? Give it here and don"t grumble."
And a little later Alfred Smithers, with a distinct chill on the heroism, went up to bed.
The chill was even more distinct when in the small hours of the morning Mrs Smithers shook him by the shoulder, awoke him, told him that there was a burglar in the kitchen, and asked him to go down.
In the small hours of the morning one"s vitality is low.
III
They had been unable to get any satisfactory sleep after the disturbance, and they breakfasted early. Mrs Smithers looked amused; Alfred Smithers looked conciliatory.
"I want you to understand how it was," he said pleadingly.
"I understand it all right. And how my poor sides do ache with laughing.
"Lock our door as quietly as you can," you says, "and don"t make a sound," you says, "for," you says, "if he knows we"ve discovered him he"ll have the lives of both of us." Sounds funnier still when it"s said over again by daylight. Oh, my poor sides!"
And even then Alfred Smithers did not become rebellious; on the contrary, in a mirthless and subservient way he smiled.
"I"m quite willing to own I blundered in what seems now rather a funny way. But it wasn"t in the way you think, my dear. My dear Agnes, it really wasn"t."
"Tell your own story," said Mrs Smithers, with a victor"s easiness.
"I was awoke sudden," said Smithers. "I don"t suppose I was more than half awake, which accounts for the error of judgment. I"m a man, and not a machine. We all blunder at times. I own I made a mistake, and I can afford to laugh at it." He managed to jerk up another semblance of a smile. "At first I said that what you"d heard was a rat, and what you"d seen was a shadow. Then when you made me look through the corner of the blind, and I saw the end of the man"s leg drawn inwardly through the downstairs window, I, being half asleep, supposed that it was a regular professional burglar. And if it had been that, my advice would have been correct. Professional burglars carry revolvers in their "ip-pockets, and they"ll shoot anybody--policeman or any man--to destroy evidence against them. Very well. What good was I unarmed against an armed burglar?
Foolhardiness isn"t courage. If you knew life as I know it you"d realise that. You didn"t agree with my ideas, and, as I was half asleep, I own you were right; you said--"
Mrs Smithers took up the story triumphantly.
"I said it was stuff and nonsense, and so it was. Burglars don"t come to a penny-farthing place like this; and if they did, they wouldn"t wake up the house opening a window. Two drops of ile, a shove with the knife, and a wad o" paper to deaden the sound of the spring when it comes back."
Smithers recovered himself sufficiently to ask how they put in the two drops of oil and the wad of paper.
"How should I know, not being a burglar myself? Anyhow, I was right. I said it was just some tramp new to the business, and hungry for a supper, and that he"d bolt as soon as he heard anybody moving. And didn"t he?"
"Yes," said Smithers, "he did. I was just thinking of getting out of bed and following you down the stairs. But he bolted as soon as he heard our door open, and was out of the house before you were half-way down.
That"s my point. It was an error of judgment on my part, not a want of courage. It"s a mercy he"d no time to take much."
"Well, "e"d got the cold beef out, and precious little he"d have left of it. The bottle of beer he knocked over and broke in his hurry. The only thing he actually got away with was that--er--that medal."
At this point Mrs Smithers" face became dark and inscrutable.
"That"s a sad pity," she added; "we shall miss it too, with that inscription, "For Gallantry and Courage; Presented by a Few Admirers of Alfred Smithers." But you"ll inquire of the police, of course, and as likely as not you"ll get it back. I believe I was right in saying you ought to have gone to the police there and then."