Read Ebook: Men of Marlowe's by Dudeney Henry Mrs

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Ebook has 845 lines and 47020 words, and 17 pages

k. He was like a woman; took these things to heart. I shall never forget how pleased he was when he came to tell me that he'd got a treasure at last.

She was very smart; a rather supercilious young married woman, with long earrings and a pert, white face. She came to the Inn wearing black kid gloves and a silver locket and chain; she carried a little reticule with her apron rolled up tightly inside. Things went very well for a week. She kept the place spotless. But when Arnold paid her on Saturday afternoon, she asked him civilly to "suit himself."

"The work's far too heavy," she said mincingly, "and the rooms is invested with beadles to an awful extent. It's not as if I was obliged to work, you see, sir. I only do it to occupy my time--not having any children--and to help pay back the money my husband's mother lent him. There's no hurry for that. She's in a good position. Got her own laundry, paid seven hundred down for it. My husband was in the army, and she bought him out before we were married. I couldn't think of marrying a soldier--all the refuge goes into the army. If only you could get a girl to come in and do the rough work for a hour every morning, my husband wouldn't object to me obliging you."

"What's a man to do?" Arnold asked dejectedly of me in the evening. "I'm half inclined to chuck the Inn and go back to diggings; the Common was good for the dog to run on. But then there's the landlady--she always objects to dogs. And some of them have principles--I call all principle prejudice--about the latch key."

"You'd better take back Mrs. Neaves. Give her a shilling a week more; that's all she was trying for. You'd save in the end. How many have you had altogether?"

He began to count on his fingers.

"You've told me lots of times. Now, take my advice and have Mrs. Neaves back. She wasn't a bad sort."

"She was very kind to Sol; used to bring him an apron full of bones," he said reflectively.

When he said that, I knew the thing was settled and that Mrs. Neaves would be reinstated. He was devoted to Sol, who was a beautiful, pure-bred deerhound, with the long, melancholy face and almost human eyes which these dogs have.

Poor Arnold! I don't know what has become of him. But I can make a good guess. He's living somewhere in the suburbs, very near the Common--for Sol's sake. He was a dapper little fellow. One of those men with a rather big head, neat calves, and a chain with a big seal. He wore loud check suits--four checks to the suit--when he went away on a holiday, and when he was at home he had an incorrigible habit of wasting his time at bars and chaffing the barmaid. That is nothing; every man is bachelor to the barmaid. But it led Arnold into complications.

Clarissa was an extraordinarily pretty girl. She had blue eyes set very far apart, and a striking profile. With her loose knot of hair, her delicate nose, and her short upper lip, she looked like a cameo--one of those pure, classic faces which middle-aged ladies used to wear in a brooch. Of course she was powdered, and she laced tightly and puffed her lovely hair out into one of those exaggerated erections which is the professional headgear of the barmaid. You never see such an arrangement anywhere else; perhaps the management provides it. But she was very lovely and demure. Also, she had the sense to be silent: an unusually pretty woman should never talk.

Arnold, who dropped into the "Worcester Arms" nightly, began to regard her as a woman--not merely a barmaid. Men sometimes talk dubiously to the barmaid, and she--figuratively speaking--ducks her head and lets the stream of insinuation flow over her. She is never affronted; takes it as a matter of course; customers pay for this privilege with their drinks.

Clarissa was lonely. She lived in a barracks somewhere off Greek Street, clubbing together with a lot of other young women. She never spoke of her relations. Arnold assumed that she was like so many other girls, alone in London--to sink or swim, according to her luck. He took her out and gave her harmless little treats whenever she could get away from the bar. But he never asked her to his rooms. He had a sort of reverence for her. He didn't wish to compromise her, and he took to glaring fiercely at any harmless simpleton who strolled into the "Worcester Arms" and chaffed Clarissa in the usual way.

He introduced her to Sol, telling her how the dog had saved his life on Dartmoor and adding that nothing on this earth would induce him to part with the animal.

"He's a pure-bred blue deerhound," he wound up enthusiastically. "I've got his pedigree for seven generations."

Clarissa said "really" in her demure way, and she stroked the thing's wiry coat and said what beautiful eyes he had, and that she supposed he must be worth a lot of money.

"Twenty pounds--I've been offered that," Arnold told her concisely. "It was a fellow who shows these dogs. He's got a whole kennel of them at his place in the country. I went down there; you never saw a more beautiful sight."

"Twenty pounds!" said Clarissa, drawing in her breath softly.

Things went on for a month or two. Then Arnold became more infatuated than ever. He asked Clarissa to marry him. Of course she jumped at it. The great ambition of these girls is to marry a gentleman. And Arnold would pass--with a barmaid. He was fairly well off, too, making, so he said, about six hundred a year on the Stock Exchange; it is always these stupid men who make money. It was a catch for Clarissa.

He took her away from the "Worcester Arms" and boarded her out with a decayed widowed lady at Clapham. He made an arrangement for Sol to board there too, and Clarissa promised to take the dog for long rambles on the Common while his master was in the City.

After this the Inn did not see very much of Arnold. He used to go straight from the City to the suburbs--rushing to catch a particular train and joining the general exodus at Clapham Junction. Thousands of fellows do that; it would kill me. But he really liked it. He was always hankering after the suburbs; said the air was pure; told you vaingloriously that no one could ever build on the Common--it was sacred to the people. You know the way these people talk; the people who live in smart houses all red and white--the ideas of the suburban builder never go beyond a colored peppermint stick--fellows who work and sweat in back gardens the size of a tablecloth and go to the local theater.

Arnold used to have supper with Clarissa and the widowed lady--his ideas with regard to the girl were ludicrously proper ones. After supper he and she would be alone more or less for an hour or two, with Sol spread at their feet. Arnold would talk dogs, and Clarissa would look lovely and throw in a simper now and then. At ten he left: the widow lady liked to be in bed by half-past.

It was about this time that he took to criticising Mrs. Neaves. He found himself constantly watching her, speculating on her. Once, when he went into the kitchen on a Saturday afternoon to wash out an ink pot, he noticed how white her fat neck was. She was cleaning the lid of a tin saucepan with a bit of emery paper. Her head was bent and her fist circled energetically. Her face was streaming with perspiration and her flat toper's nose glowed like a poppy. Her bodice was open at the throat, and he saw that her neck, beneath the line of exposure, was delicately fine. It reminded him of Clarissa's milky skin. He stood swilling out the ink pot, taking more pains than was necessary and staring at fat, frowsy Mrs. Neaves and wondering how she would look with a finely-chiseled nose in place of the comical, red, flat one, which seemed to have been roughly trodden into her face by a careless foot. She looked up at him rather curiously, rather resentfully--evidently suspecting that he was spying on her. He noticed that her blue eyes were pensive, not twinkling. It was absurd to think of Clarissa in connection with that dirty, gin-drinking woman--her face all coarse rolls of flesh, her dress gaping, and her greasy bonnet-strings streaming back from her triple chin. Yet, when he went to Clapham that night, he amused himself by trying to fit Clarissa with a flat, blossom-like nose. And he was prepared to swear that her blue eyes were twin eyes to those pensive ones which were set in the laundress' head.

He couldn't for the life of him help watching Mrs. Neaves--in every attitude. He watched her as she rubbed the brush across his boots, swinging her big arm easily from the shoulder; as she knelt on the rug to coax the fire, her great, spread body bunched out and her pouch-like cheeks inflated. And in the evening when he sat in the widow's house he used to compare her with that porcelain slip of a girl Clarissa. At fifty--Mrs. Neaves couldn't be more--would Clarissa have such haunches, such pendulous cheeks!

He idealized the laundress--quite unconsciously; he was the most matter-of-fact little chap in the world. Yet, in spite of himself, he became imaginative, degenerate. He took to engaging Mrs. Neaves in long conversations--about the lady at the cats'-meat shop in Red Lion Passage, who had just given birth to twins, and whose husband was doing three months for stamping on her ; about the other lady who got mad drunk regularly every Saturday night and threw all the household china out of the window--about anything, or anyone, for the mere sake of seeing her talk, of watching the changes on her coarse face, and the quick movement of her mouth, which could only boast three front teeth.

Every wrinkle, every deeply-scored line on that woman's face, every watery light in her blue eyes, meant to Arnold the track of some youthful charm. Was Mrs. Neaves like Clarissa at eighteen? Would Clarissa be like Mrs. Neaves at fifty? I really think that he would have ended by marrying Mrs. Neaves, out of pure, involuntary fascination, if Clarissa had not been a woman and inquisitive.

She kept bothering him to take her to see his rooms. He was to leave them very soon, had sublet them to another man. He had taken a house at Clapham, a stone's throw from the Common, and with a back garden a little bigger than usual--but only for Sol's sake, Clarissa said. It was the first time she had shown a tinge of rebellion.

"A great dog like that will make an awful mess in a nice house with his dirty feet. Can't you keep him chained up?"

"Chain a deerhound!" cried Arnold, in holy horror. Sol was a religion to him. "You'd spoil his legs."

He arranged to bring Clarissa up to the Inn some Saturday afternoon. She was to have tea with him in his rooms, and go out to dine somewhere afterward. He gave Mrs. Neaves an extra shilling to stay late and get the tea. At least, he said it was to get tea; he tried to persuade himself that it was to get tea; but I'm certain that his real reason for keeping her was his odd desire to see those two together, to compare notes. He said to her with deprecating apology--she was the sort of voluble, violent woman to compel respect from a man of his character:

"I've a young lady coming here this afternoon to tea; the young lady--hum, hum--that I am going to marry. Can you stay a couple of hours later? I'll make it worth your while."

Mrs. Neaves said condescendingly that she'd come back in time to get the tray ready, after she'd "done for the gent at 6." As for Arnold's remark about marrying the young lady visitor, no doubt she put her own valuation on it--being seasoned to remarks of that sort from giddy tenants. The laundress is a true skeptic. She does not believe in married couples in the Inn--this land of ephemeral affections--doesn't approve of them. I knew a sensitive fellow who had his marriage certificate framed and hung up in the sitting room.

At four o'clock Arnold and Clarissa came in. Mrs. Neaves had just arrived. She was in a state of much disorder, as a protest against Clarissa. There was a warm, sour smell of dishwater; a dustpan half full of flue tripped Arnold up on the threshold.

"This is my bedroom," he said to Clarissa. "And that is my sitting room. And here's a little den for Sol--he's allowed to have bones there--and there's the kitchen."

"Oh! that's the kitchen."

Clarissa looked in and Mrs. Neaves looked up.

"I'll go and take my hat off," the girl said suddenly, slipping in at the open bedroom door--it was exactly opposite the kitchen.

Arnold went into the sitting room at the end of the passage. There was a cupboard. He used it as a hanging closet. At the back of this cupboard there was a tiny window which looked into the kitchen. The sets are full of oddities, surprises like that; windows, ledges, steps, in the most unlikely places.

Some sets have a dunscope. It is a little grating, opening out of a cupboard in the passage. You steal into the cupboard, shut the door, and peep onto the staircase. The same idea is carried out in places where polite people live. In that case it is a looking-glass which reflects into the dining room the figure of the caller on the door-step. When people have a good balance at the bank, and no particular skeleton, the idea is snobbish; when a man in the Inn hasn't a penny it is pathetic. He looks out, sees his washerwoman, the tax collector, the man who lent him a fiver--and keeps the oak rigorously sported.

The dunscope was often used by industrious students, who looked out to see if the visitor would be helpful to their studies or the reverse.

No doubt the man who put in that little window at the back of Arnold's cupboard chuckled as he did it--recognizing that it also had dramatic possibilities.

Where was I? Oh! Arnold was changing his coat. As he felt for the loop at the neck, he heard someone say softly--it was a whisper of terrified recognition:

"Mother!"

Then he heard another voice, which seemed to come thickly through layers of flesh.

That was all. But you'll admit that the square, dusty window at the back of the cupboard had justified its existence--doubtless not for the first time, if the paneled walls had been capable of crying out.

Arnold put his eye cautiously to that dim pane of glass. He saw Clarissa in her spring finery; dainty, fresh, from the jaunty little lace hat, with the trembling cornflowers, which was perched on her elaborately dressed hair, to the pointed, shiny shoe sticking out from the frill of her skirt. He saw her beautiful, classic face; her blue eyes, a trifle frightened and guilty and disgusted, but not in the least affectionate. He saw her frown and make a warning movement with her gloved fingers and jerk her head toward the sitting room.

Mrs. Neaves had her dirty hands on her spread hips; her dreadful working dress of brownish-gray wool was slopped with dish water and patched with grease. It had parted from its lining under the arms, at the waist, at the back--everywhere, as her exuberant rolls of flesh broke through. She wasn't a woman; she was an unsavory bundle of rags which you would take gingerly by one corner and pitch onto a dust heap. And she was Clarissa's mother. The likeness was unmistakable, even if he had not heard the girl's quick, frightened word, which gave away the situation. He understood now the uncanny attraction which had lately impelled him to observe Mrs. Neaves. The two pairs of blue eyes, one looking out from a delicate frame of chalk, the other from a shiny band of perspiration, were the same. One pair a little bleared by gin, by labor and years--but that was the only difference.

He didn't catch the rest of their conversation; he did not want to. He watched them; their gestures were enough. He sneaked away from the cupboard at last and sat down by the window. Sol, understanding, put his damp nose into his master's loosely doubled palm. His brown eyes said wistfully, "I could have told you so. Why want a woman? Isn't my devotion enough?"

Arnold wasn't angry with Clarissa, wasn't contemptuous of her. He didn't see the humor of the situation, nor the degradation of it. He didn't want to put on his hat and get out of the place, leaving the women to squabble over him as they liked. He had none of the sensations that I should have had, that you would have had if you were a man. I know your womanly sensations; boiling wrath and contempt for Clarissa, mingled with intense sympathy and a little irritation with her for being fool enough to give away everything by that one nervous word.

"Thank you. I shall want a little more milk," to her mother, was superb.

Mrs. Neaves had made no attempt to dress for the occasion; she hadn't even taken off the sacking apron which was strained tightly across her big waist; her down-at-heel shoes went flip-flap as she crossed the room. Both Arnold and Clarissa could see, as the hem of the skirt kicked up, a circle of discolored skin where the stocking was torn. But Clarissa's face remained cold and unmoved, like the cameo, as usual. Her expression rarely altered. She was the most apathetic, the most impenetrable-looking girl in the world. Her cheeks had never flushed and her eye had never faltered when men in the bar made doubtful remarks; she never flushed nor faltered now, with her poor, degraded old mother's bare heel under her eyes.

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