Quixtus was still bowing his head over the dishonoured grave of “Quixtus and Son” when the second thunderbolt fell. The public disgrace drove a temperamentally hermit-like nature into more rigid seclusion. He resigned his presidency of the Anthropological Society. The Council met and unanimously refused to accept his resignation. They wrote in such terms that he could not do otherwise than yield. But he gave up his attendance at their meetings. To a man, his friends among the learned professed their sympathy. It hurt rather than healed. Those who wrote received courteous and formal replies. Those who knocked at his door were refused admittance. Even Clementina, repenting of her harshness and pitying the lonely and helpless man, pinned on a shameless thing that had once resembled a hat, and went up by omnibus to Russell Square, only to find the door closed against her. The woman thus scorned became the fury which, according to the poet, is unknown in Hades. She expressed her opinion of Quixtus pretty freely. But Quixtus shrank from her as he shrank from every one, as he even shrank from his own servants. These he dismissed, with the exception of Mrs. Pennycook, his housekeeper, who, since the death of his wife had held a high position of trust in his household, and a vague female of humble and heterogeneous appearance who lived out, and had the air of apologising for inability to squeeze through the wall when he passed by. In view of he knew not what changes in his immediate financial circumstances, economy, he said, was desirable. He also shut up the greater part of the big house, finding a dim sort of pleasure in such retrenchment. He lived in his museum at the back, ate his meals in the little dark room at the head of the kitchen stairs, and changed his luxurious bedroom for a murky, cheerless little chamber adjoining the museum. When a man takes misery for a bride he may be forgiven for exaggeration in his early transports. Only on Tuesday nights did he throw open dining-room and drawing-room, where he received Huckaby, Vandermeer, and Billiter as in the past. To them his smile and his old self were given. Indeed he found a newer sympathy with them. He, even as they, had been the victim of outrageous fortune. He, too, had suffered from the treachery of man and the insolence of office. The three found an extra guerdon in their great-coat pockets.
There were times, however, when the museum grew wearisome through familiarity, when he found no novelty in the Quaternary skull from Silesia, or the engraved reindeers on the neolithic axe-heads, or the necklet of the lady of the bronze age; when he craved things nearer to his own time which could give him some message of modernity. On such occasions he would either walk abroad, or if the weather were foul, take a childish pleasure in exploring the sealed chambers of the house. For, shut up a room, exclude from it the light of day, cover the furniture with dust-sheets till you get the semblance of a morgue of strange beasts, forget it for a while, and, on re-entering it, you will have all the elements of mystery which gradually and agreeably give place to little pleasant shocks of discovery of the familiar. The neglected pictures that have hung on the walls, the huddled knick-knacks on a table, the heap of books on the floor, all have messages of gentle reproach. A newspaper of years ago, wrapped round a cushion, once opened by eager hands and containing in its headlines world-shaking news (now so stale and forgotten) is a pathetic object. In drawers are garments out of date, preserved heaven knows why, keepsakes worked by fair hands, unused but negligently treasured, faded curtains which will never be rehung—a thousand old stimulating things, down to ends of sealing-wax and carefully rolled bits of twine. And some drawers are empty, and from them rises the odour of lavender poignant with memories of the things that are no more.
It was a large, old-fashioned house which had been his father’s before him, in which he had been born; and it was full of memories. In the recess of a dark cupboard in one of the attics he found a glass jar, which had escaped the vigilance or commanded the respect of generations of housemaids, covered with a parchment on which was written in his mother’s hand, “Damson Jam.” His mother had died a quarter of a century ago.
An old hair-trunk in the corner of the box-room, such a hair trunk as the boldest man during Quixtus’s lifetime would have shrunk from having attached to him on his travels, contained correspondence of his grandfather’s and old daguerreotypes and photographs of stiff, staring, faded people long since gone to a (let us hope) more becomingly attired world. There was a miniature on ivory, villainously painted, of a chubby red-cheeked child, and on the back was written “My Son Mathew, aged two years and six months.” Could the shrivelled, myriad-wrinkled, palsied old man whom Ephraim had visited but a short while since ever have remotely resembled this? The hair-trunk also contained a pistol with a label “Carried by my father at Waterloo.” That was the old gentleman who had lived to a hundred and four. Why had this relic of family honour remained hidden all his life?
The more he searched into odd corners the more did his discoveries stimulate his interest. Of his own life he found records in unexpected places. A bundle of school-reports. He opened it at random, and his eye fell upon the Headmaster’s Report at the foot of a sheet; “Studious but unpractical. It seems impossible to arouse in him a sense of ambition, or even of the responsibilities of life.” He smiled somewhat wistfully and put the bundle in his pocket with a view to the further acquisition of self-knowledge. A set of Cambridge college bills tied with red tape, a broken microscope, a case of geometrical drawing instruments, a manuscript book of early poems, mimetic echoes of Keats, Tennyson, Shelley, Swinburne, who were all clamouring together in his brain, his college blazer, much moth-eaten, his Heidelberg student’s cap, ditto. . . . Ah! qu’ils sont loin ces jours si regrettés! . . .
Of his wife, too, there were almost forgotten relics. An oak chest opened unexpectedly disclosed a pair of little pink satin slippers standing wistfully on the top of the tissue paper that protected the dresses beneath. The key was in the lock. He closed the lid reverently, locked the chest, and put the key in his pocket. They had had together five years of placid happiness. She was a sweet, white-winged soul— Angela. Her little boudoir on the second floor had not been used since her death, and was much as she had left it. Only the dust-sheets and the gloom invested it in a more ghostly atmosphere than other less sacred chambers. Her work-basket stood by the window. He opened it and found it still contained a reel of thread and a needle-case stuck full of rusty needles. On the wall hung an enlarged portrait of himself at the age of thirty—he was not quite so lantern-jawed then, and his hair was thicker on the top. A water-colour sketch of Angela hung over the oak bureau, at which she used to write her dinner-notes and puzzle her pretty head over household accounts. He drew up the blind so as to see the picture more clearly. Yes. It was like her. Dark-haired, fragile, with liquid brown eyes. There was just that dimple in her chin. . . . He remembered it so well; but, strangely, it had played no part in his customary mental picture of her. In the rediscovery of the dimple he found a vague melancholy pleasure. . . . Idly he drew down the slanting lids of the bureau, and pulled out the long narrow drawers that supported it underneath. The interior was empty. He recollected now that he had cleared it of its contents when settling Angela’s affairs after her death. He thrust up the slanting lid, pushed back the long right-hand drawer, pushed the left hand one. It stuck. He tried to ease it in, but it was jammed. He pulled it out with a jerk, and found that the cause of the jam was a letter flat against the end of the drawer with a corner turned over the edge. He took out the letter, closed the drawers, and smiled sadly, glad to have discovered a new relic of Angela in the bureau—probably a gossiping note from a friend, perhaps one from himself. He went to the light of the window.
“My adored heart’s dearest and most beloved angel”—so the letter began. He scanned the words bewildered. Certainly in his wildest dreams he had never imagined such a form of address. Besides, the handwriting was not his. He turned the sheet rapidly and glanced at the end; “God! How I love you. Will.”
Will? Will Hammersley. It was Will Hammersley’s handwriting. What did it mean? He paused for a few moments, breathing hard, looking with blind eyes through the window over the square. At last he read the letter. Then he thrust it, a crumpled ball, into his pocket and reeled out of the room like a drunken man, down the stairs of the lonely house, and flung himself into a chair in his museum, where he sat for hours staring before him, paralysed with an awful dismay.
At five o’clock his housekeeper entered with the tea-things. He did not want tea. At seven she came again into the large dark room lit only by the red glow of the fire.
“The gentlemen are here, sir.”
It was a Tuesday evening. He had forgotten.
He stumbled to his feet.
“All right,” he said.
Then he shivered, feeling a deadly sickness of soul. No, he could not meet his fellow creatures to-night.
“Give them my compliments and apologies, and say I am unwell and unable to dine with them this evening. See that they have all they want, as usual.”
“Very good, sir—but yourself? I’m sorry you are ill, sir. What can I bring you?”
“Nothing,” said Quixtus harshly. “Nothing. And please don’t trouble me any more.”
Mrs. Pennycook regarded him in some astonishment, not having heard him speak in such a tone before. Probably no one else had, since he had learned to speak.
“If you’re not better in the morning, sir, I might fetch the doctor.”
He turned in his chair. “Go. I tell you. Go. Leave me alone.”
Later he rose and switched on the light and, mechanically descending to the hall, like a sleep-walker, deposited his usual largesse in the pockets of the three seedy, familiar overcoats. Then he went up to his museum again. The effort, however, had cleared his mind. He reflected. He had not been very well of late. There were such things as hallucinations, to which men broken down by mental strain were subject. Let him read the letter through once more. He took the crumpled paper from his pocket, smoothed it out and read. No. There was no delusion. The whole story was there—the treachery, the faithlessness, the guilty passion that gloried in its repeated consummation. His wife Angela, his friend Will Hammersley—the only woman and the only man he had ever loved. A sudden memory smote him. He had entrusted her to Hammersley’s keeping times out of number.
“My God!” said he, beating his forehead with a clenched fist. “My God!”
And so fell the second thunderbolt.
Towards midnight there came a heavy knocking at his door. Startled by the unusual sound he cried:
“What’s that? Who’s there?”
The door opened and Eustace Huckaby lurched solemnly into the room. His ruffled hair stood up on end like a cockatoo’s crest, and his watery eyes glistened. He pulled his straggling beard.
“Sorry ole’ man to hear you’re seedy. Came to know—how—getting on.”
Quixtus rose, a new sternness on his face, and confronted the intruder.
“Huckaby, you’re drunk.”
Huckaby laughed and waved a protesting hand, thereby nearly losing his balance.
“No,” said he. “Rid’klous. I’m not drunk. Other fellows are—drunk ash owls—tha’s why—couldn’t come see you. They’re not qui’ sort of men been acushtomed to assochate with—I’m—University man—like you, Quishtus—sometime Fellow Corpus Christi College, Cambridge—I first gave motto for club—didn’t I? Procul, O procul este profani—tha’s Latin. Other two lobsters don’t know word of Latin—ignorant as lobsters—lobsters—tha’s wha’ I call ’em.” He lurched heavily into a chair. “Awful thirsty. Got a drink, old f’la?”
“No,” said Quixtus. “I haven’t. And if I had, I wouldn’t give it to you.”
The reprobate pondered darkly over the announcement. Then he hiccoughed, and his face brightened.
“Look here, dear old frien’——”
Quixtus interrupted him.
“Do you mean to tell me those other men are drunk too?”
“As owls—you go down—see ’em.”
He threw back his head and broke out into sudden shrill laughter. Then, checking himself, he said with an awful gravity;
“I beg your pardon, Quishtus. Their conduc’s disgrace—humanity.”
“You three have dined in this house once a week for years, and no one has left it the worse for liquor. And now, the first time I leave you to yourselves—I was really not able to join you to-night—you take advantage of my absence, and——”
Huckaby staggered to his feet and tried to lay his hand on Quixtus’s shoulder. Having recovered himself, he put it on top of a case of prehistoric implements.
“Tha’s just what I want—explain to you. They’re lobsters, dear ole’ friend—just lobsters—all claw and belly and no heart. I’m a University man like you. Corpush Christi College, Cambridge—They’re not friends of yours. They’re lobsters. Ruddy lobsters. I’m not drunk you know. I’m all right. I’m telling you——”
Quixtus took him by the arm. “I think you had better go away, Huckaby.”
“No. Send other fellows away. I’m your frien’,” said he, pointing a shaky forefinger. “I want to tell you. I’m a University man and so are you, and I don’t care how much you made out of it. You’re all right, Quishtus. I’m your frien’. Other lobsters said at dinner that if justice were done you’d be in quod.”
Quixtus took the gaunt sot by the shoulders and shook him.
“What the devil do you mean?”
“Don’t, don’t—don’t upset good dinner,” said Huckaby wriggling away. “You won’t believe I’m your friend. Van and Billiter say you were in with Parable—Paramour—wha’s his name? all the time, and it’s just your rosy luck that you weren’t doing time too. Now I don’t care if you did stand in with Parachute—‘tisn’t my business. But I’ll stan’ by you. I, Eustace Huckaby, Master of Arts, sometime Fellow of Corpush Christi College, Cambridge. There’sh my hand.”
He extended it, but Quixtus regarded it not.
“The three of you have not contented yourselves with getting drunk, but you’ve been slandering me behind my back—foully slandering me.”
He went to the door and flung it open.
“I think it’s time, Huckaby, that we joined the others.”
Huckaby shambled down the stairs, murmuring of lobsters and parables, and turning every now and then to assure his host that adverse circumstances made no difference to his imperishable affection; and so they reached the dining-room. Huckaby had spoken truly. Billiter was sprawling back in his chair, his coat and waistcoat covered with cigar-ash; his bald head was crowned by the truncated cone of a candle-shade (a jest of Huckaby’s) which gave him an appearance that would have been comic to a casual observer, but to Quixtus was peculiarly obscene. His dazed eyes were fixed stupidly on Vandermeer who, the picture of woe, was weeping bitterly because he had no one to love him. At the sight of Quixtus, Billiter made an effort to rise, but fell back heavily on to his seat, the candle-shade falling likewise. He muttered hoarsely and incoherently that it was the confounded gout again in his ankles. Then he expressed a desire to slumber. Vandermeer raised a maudlin face.
“No one to love me,” he whined, and tried to pour from an empty decanter; it slipped from his hand and broke a glass. “Not even a drop of consolation left,” he said.
“Disgrashful, isn’t it?” said Huckaby with a hiccough.
Quixtus eyed them with disgust. Humanity was revolting. He turned to Huckaby and said with a shudder; “For God’s sake, take them away.”
Huckaby summed them up with an unsteady but practised eye. “Can’t walk. Ruddy lobsters. Must have cabs.”
Quixtus went to the street-door and whistled up a couple of four-wheelers from the rank; and eventually, by the aid of Huckaby and the cabmen whom he had to bribe heavily to drive the wretches home, they were deposited in some sort of sitting posture each in a separate vehicle. As soon as the sound of the departing wheels died away, Quixtus held out Huckaby’s overcoat.
“You’re sober enough to walk,” said he, helping him on with it. “Good-night.”
Huckaby turned on the doorstep.
“Want you to remember—don’t care damn what a frien’ has done—ever want help, come to me, sometime Fellow of Corp——”
Quixtus closed the street door in his face and heard no more. These were his friends; these the men who had lived on his bounty, who, for years, for what they could get, had controlled their knavery, their hypocrisy. These were the men for whom he had striven, these sots, these dogs, these vulgar-hearted, slandering knaves! His very soul was sick. He paused at the dining-room door and for a moment looked at the scene of the debauch. Wine and coffee were spilled; glasses broken; a lighted stump of cigar had burned a great brown hole in the tablecloth. He grimly imagined the tipsy scene. If he had been with them, there would have been smug faces, deprecating hands upheld at the second round of the port, talk on art, literature, religion, and what-not, and, at parting, whispered blessings and fervent hand-shakes; and all the time there would have been slanderous venom in their hearts, and the raging beast of drink within them cursing him for his repressing presence.
“The canting rogues,” he murmured as he went back to his museum. “The canting rogues!”
He thrust his hands, in a gesture of anger and disgust, deep into his jacket-pockets. His knuckles came against the crumpled letter. He turned faint and clung to the newel-post on the landing for support. The smaller treachery coming close before his eyes had for the time eclipsed the greater.
“My God,” he said, “is all the world against me?”
Unfortunately there was a thunderbolt or two yet to fall.