"Rare good sort," he said appreciatively. "Give us a splash of that soda, and pa.s.s those cigarettes, Jeff...." Then, lighting a cigarette, "Look here, you old scoundrel," he said, "I"ve got a crow to pluck with you! Guess what it is?"
I could not.
"Well," he leered. "I saw Mackie the other night."
You will remember what had happened the last time I myself had seen Mackie.
"So there!" he triumphed, after some recital or other that had for its point my single fit of intoxication. "_Now_ what about it, you old humbug?" he demanded.
I knew I must keep my face and smile. I did not know why I must do these things, but I did them, looking at him and noticing again how sallow and changed he was. Then I looked about the room, mentally commenting on the evidences of the patrimony that had done him so little good--his new dressing-gown, his silver-topped bottles, and a new travelling-case, these things thrown anyhow among his older belongings. One of the newer objects I held in my hand; it was the gold cigarette case I had pa.s.sed him; and I gazed smiling at it as he went on.
"Yes," he told me, with humorous accusation; "Mackie told me all about it--ha ha ha! What price the old puritan Jeff now? Eh? Sad dog, sad dog!"
I replied, quite calmly, that the dissipations of commissionaires were limited by their circ.u.mstances.
"And what the devil are you doing being a commissionaire?" he demanded.
"I"ll tell you what it was, Jeff," he continued familiarly, "that failure in Method seems to me to have broken you all up. What the d.i.c.kens made you fail?"
I was conscious of an interior stirring of hate. What, indeed, had made me fail!
"Oh, over-confidence, I suppose," I answered lightly.
And he continued to talk.
At last I rose and said good-night. He raised himself on one elbow in order to shake hands.
"Come in again and see a chap soon," he said. "It"s h.e.l.lish slow up here all alone."
I was already at the door, but I turned abruptly.
"What do you mean?" I said. "Do you mean you"re laid up? You said you weren"t."
But he only gave a confused little laugh. "Eh? Laid up? Of course not!
Can"t a chap turn in early once in a while?"
""Once in a while"?... But you said----"
"That you might come in and see me? Well, do. No harm in that, is there?
Say I"m going slow for a bit, that"s all," he added.
I agreed with him that to "go slow" for a bit was a course he might with advantage have adopted some time ago, and, though considerably puzzled, I turned slowly away.
My lamp, I discovered when I reached my dwelling again, had not exploded in my absence; but I did not light it. This was not, of course, through any actual fear; it was merely part of my general nervous condition. I remember, as still further explaining that condition, that I had pa.s.sed a Board School that day as the children had poured out for their morning recess of a quarter of an hour; I have said how more than commonly strident the heat seemed to make all noises; and at the sudden outburst of the children I had broken into a copious flood of perspiration. I was not much steadier now. Pushing the lamp aside I flung up my window as high as it would go, drew out my old string-mended chair, and, sitting down, began to stare at the "_Sarcey"s Fluid_" advertis.e.m.e.nt across the way.
The rippling of its incandescents had a trick that always fascinated and irritated me intensely. Before the last letter of the first word was an apostrophe, but its single bright spot always appeared out of its proper order. S--A--R--, and so on, the thing ran, but the whole legend was complete before that apostrophe started into its place. I used sometimes to watch as if I hoped the whole mechanism might suddenly alter, but, of course, it never did. I began to watch it again that night, while my ceiling and the wall above my bed became red and green, red and green, red and green....
I am afraid that what I am now about to say I shall have to ask you to take on trust. I have no evidence to offer of a phenomenon that, I am told, is shared by madness and genius alike. Nor will I trouble you either with any talk of prevision or of inner cert.i.tude, nor with the gradually deepening brooding that led up to this phenomenon--the brooding over the countless slights and slurs and rubs I had suffered from Archie Merridew"s reckless and ignorant tongue ever since I have known him--my appearance, my private affairs, the side-splitting joke of Jeffries being in love. I will pa.s.s straight to the sudden and complete illumination that, as I sat there, so irradiated my intelligence that I wondered why it had come to me now, an hour later, and not then, the moment I had seen him lying at that extraordinarily early hour in bed.
It came, this flash of illumination, in exactly the same manner as the changing of the electrograph before my eyes--and, as you will see in a moment, with the same b.l.o.o.d.y apostrophe. And with its coming my room was not more suffused with the crimson glare than my mind suddenly was with the same morbid and flaming and dangerous hue.
_I had suddenly realised what was really the matter with Archie._
Let me now tell you the kind of man I have sometimes, though possibly mistakenly, supposed myself to be.
He has aspired, that man, I have sometimes supposed myself to be, to the stars; but his feet have also known the burning bottom of the pit. His heart has been lifted up until sometimes, through eyes drowned with tears, he has had his poor and fragmentary glimpse of a larger Fatherhood than earth knows; but he has also exchanged intelligence with the devil. His heart has flowered with loves and charities; but that same heart has also been a rock with a toad in it. He was born in heaven, but has lodged in h.e.l.l. So in him, according as he has been used, have opposites met.
And yet, as I say, I may be wrong in supposing that I am this man.
Yet the man who, in my red and green room that night, leaped up from his chair, and with a bursting, ringing cry shook his hand on high, was not the James Herbert Jeffries who now writes this feverish shorthand. He who writes the shorthand was not the same James Herbert Jeffries who stood, with those violent dyes flooding his face, vowing that if that sick young buyer of infected merchandise dreamed for one instant of doing that which it was sought to make him do, and which apparently he was ready to do, he should pay for it with the last thing he had to give. That James Herbert Jeffries was plunged in that hour into a place of stench and infernal brightness that G.o.d forbid was ever his destined abode.
I cried aloud, shaking my fist up at my cracked and blackened ceiling:
"_Though Christ died for man in vain ... let him but think of it ... let him ... let him ... and I...._"
After that I pa.s.sed into a curious state of mind. You have heard how I make, when I can, anger serviceable to me, but here was an anger past my bringing into control. Yet, as ordinarily I plan calmly, so was I calm up to a certain point now. The result of these two things was that my brain worked like a worn and cranky machine, sometimes doing more than it ought, sometimes less; sometimes jerking startlingly ahead, sometimes refusing to work at all. And as there was thus no continuity in my thought, and as my recollections are curiously a.s.sociated with that changing red and green that now for the first time seems to me to have run through my story like a fateful burden of jealousy and blood, I will set down such isolated reflections as rise of themselves out of the jumble of my mind.
_Crime_ (I realise that the word leaps with some suddenness into these pages) has suffered more at the hands of criminals than it has at the hands of justice. There are few perfect crimes. Most of them are accidental, the mere explosion of momentary pa.s.sion. And that is well, for the world wants few masterpieces in that sort. I have not read De Quincey"s essay on the subject, nor ever shall now; but if crime is to be considered as an artistic medium, it is the only medium in which bungling is better worth to the world than competence. Other arts one prefers to see superlatively practised or not at all; but it is only of the bungled crime that man can endure to think.
The ordinary criminal begins at the wrong end. Dull fellow that he is he does not recognise that his first task must be the creation of an att.i.tude of mind. Or if a glimmering of this does cross his inflamed consciousness, he thinks that it is the att.i.tude of his own mind that is of the first consequence. That is why he suffers either the retribution of justice or the visitings of his own conscience. In either of these cases his act is unsuccessfully committed. He pays in common with his victim.
It is not the injured man who knows the full quality of hate. It is the one who injures. The injurer has no refuge from his own transgression; he has him whom he has injured constantly upon his mind--perhaps upon his soul. Another is the lord of his peace of mind. Thus it is peculiarly the wronged man"s part to pardon, but when the wronged man would not pardon, but would avenge for another"s sake?
Could Archie be given a mind more sensitive than a stone? Could his weak and spongy nature be hardened to a point of view? Could such an att.i.tude be created in him that what otherwise would have been an a.s.sault would take on the stern justice of a punishment? Can any dull or egotistical mind be either punished or rewarded? Ultimately, can the G.o.d who created it do anything save quench it again? Wickedness may be vanquished at the last, but Ignorance----? And Conceit----?
But bah! Probably he was not even thinking of it. Perhaps he was even now seeking a way out. Well, I would help him. Ten words to him in private.... Faugh!
So _that_ was it.... And the world allows it! Could he be proved to be merely insane at the time of his marriage the world would not allow it; a mental insufficiency beyond his control would be a bar; but this other, that he had deliberately sought, would be allowed. And Evie....
That b.l.o.o.d.y apostrophe again!...
The criminal forgets too much in the moment of action. It is a sort of stage fright. Rehea.r.s.ed perfectly, however.... Not that the thing is not admittedly difficult. A b.u.t.ton, a fingerprint, a drop of blood, the resources of the laboratory, the microscope, the spectroscope--oh yes, it cannot be said that there is not a deal to watch. And a memory, a chance a.s.sociation years afterwards, an attack of debility rendering the eyes subject to deceits--any one of these things may at any moment throw him into the hands of the law as a fate more merciful than that which he has not been clever enough to forestall within himself. Yes, there is much to consider; but then, as all the world knows, masterpieces of crime or what not, are difficult of accomplishment.
Ten words, then, on the morrow, and he would never dare....