Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 220
“I hope I haven’t caused a lot of disorganisation,” said Murrel. “I’m afraid my request was rather an unusual one. I suppose very few of your customers come to order dead pre-Raphaelites over the counter. Somehow it doesn’t seem to be the sort of place where one would drop in for a chat, merely to say you had a friend who was a friend of William Morris. It’s awfully good of you to bother.”
“Only too pleased,” replied the affable official, “only too pleased to give you a good impression of our system, I assure you. Well, I think I can give you a little information about this man Hendry. It appears that there was a man of that name at one time employed temporarily in this department. He seems to have applied for work, and appeared to have some knowledge of the business. The end of the experiment was very unsatisfactory. I believe the poor fellow was a little cracked; complained of pains in the head and so on. Anyhow he broke out one day and threw the manager of the department slap through a great picture on an easel. I can’t find anything about his being sent to prison or to an asylum, as one would naturally expect. As a matter of fact, I may tell you that we keep a pretty careful record of our employees’ mode of life, prosecutions by the police and so on; so I imagine that he simply ran away. Of course, he will never work for us again; no good trying to help people of that sort.”
“Do you know where he lives?” asked Murrel gloomily.
“No; I think that was part of the trouble,” replied the other. “Most of our people were living in at that time. They say he always lunched round at the Spotted Dog; and that alone looked bad, of course; We much prefer our people to use the regular restaurants provided for the purpose. It was probably drink that was really the matter with him; and that sort of man never comes up again.”
“I wonder,” said Murrel, “what became of his Illuminating Paints.”
“Oh methods have been very much improved, of course, since his time,” said the other. “Only too glad to be of any service to you, Mr. Murrel, and I hope you won’t think I’m trying to force a card. But as a matter of fact, you couldn’t do better than the Empire Illuminator that we always sell. It’s practically replaced all the others by now; you must have seen it everywhere. The whole apparatus compact and complete and everything much more convenient than the old process.”
He went across to one of the desks and took some printed and coloured leaflets which he handed to Murrel in an almost careless fashion. Murrel looked at them and his eyebrows went up in a mild and momentary surprise. On the prospectus he saw the name of the large and pompous manufacturer with whom Braintree had debated in the drawing-room; but the chief feature of the leaflet was a large photograph of Mr. Almeric Wister, the art expert, with his signature appended to a testimonial declaring that these colours alone could please the true instinct for beauty.
“Why, I know him,” said Murrel, “He’s the man who talks about the great Victorians. I wonder if he knows what happened to the friends of the great Victorians?”
“We can supply you immediately if you wish,” said Mr. Harker.
“Thank you,” said Murrel, in a rather dreamy fashion, “but I think I will only have a box of those children’s chalks that kind young lady offered me.”
And he did indeed go back in a grave and apologetic manner to the original counter and solemnly make his purchase.
“Is there nothing else I can do?” anxiously inquired the manager.
“Nothing,” said Murrel in an unusually sombre manner. “I quite recognise that there is nothing you can do. Damn it all, perhaps there is nothing to be done.”
“Is anything the matter?” asked Harker.
“I am beginning to have pains in my head,” said Murrel. “They are probably hereditary. They come on at intervals and produce frightful results. I shouldn’t like any repetition of unfortunate scenes . . . with all these easels standing about . . . thank you. Good-bye.”
And he betook himself, not for the first time, to the Spotted Dog. At this ancient house he had a stroke of unusual luck. He had led the talk to the attractive topic of broken glass, vaguely feeling that if a man like Hendry went to a public house often enough he would be sure sooner or later to break something. He was well received.
His commonplace and cheerful appearance soon created a social atmosphere in which memories were encouraged to bloom. The young lady in the bar did remember the gentleman who broke a glass; the publican remembered him in greater detail, having disputed about the payment for the glass. Between them they did shadow forth a hazy portrait; of fuzzy hair and shabby clothes and long, agitated fingers.
“Do you remember,” asked Murrel casually, “whether Mr. Hendry talked about where he was going next?”
“Dr. Hendry, he always called himself,” said the innkeeper, slowly. “I don’t know why, except that there was some chemistry mixed up with his paints and things. But he was no end proud of being a real doctor from the hospitals, though I’m damned if I’d like him to attend on me. Might poison you with his paints, I should think.”
“You mean by accident?” asked Murrel, mildly.
“By accident, yes,” conceded the publican very slowly, and added in a reasonable voice, “but you don’t want to be poisoned by accident any more than on purpose, do you?”
“No; I will frankly admit that I don’t,” said Murrel. “Wonder where he took all his paints or poisons to.”
It was at this point that the barmaid became suddenly communicative and conciliatory, and declared that she had distinctly heard Dr. Hendry mention the name of an extinct watering place on the coast. She had even a notion of the name of the street; and with this the hardy adventurer felt himself ready to act without further delay. He had permitted the conversation to trail away with all the traditional badinage and had then betaken himself to the road running to the coast. Before doing so, however, he paid two or three other visits, one to a bank, another to a business friend and a third to his solicitor; and came out on each occasion looking rather grim.
CHAPTER IX
THE MYSTERY OF A HANSOM CAB
A day later he stood in a seaside town where a steep street shot down to the sea; ridge below ridge of grey slate roofs looking like rings of a whirlpool as if that dreary town were being sucked into the sea. It was the dream of a suicide so a broken man might feel the wave of the world wash him away.
Looking down the descending curve of the dreary street Murrel could only see three distinct or detachable objects that could be said to suggest life. One was quite close to him; it was a milk can left outside the low door in an area. But it looked as if it had been left there for a hundred years. The second was a stray cat; the cat did not look sad so much as simply indifferent; it might have been a wild dog or any such wanderer prowling about a city of the dead. The third was more curious; it was a hansom cab standing outside one of the houses; but a hansom cab that partook of the same almost sinister antiquity. All this happened before the hansom cab had become an extinct creature to be reserved only in museums; but this hansom cab might well have been in a museum side by side with a Sedan chair. In fact it was rather like a Sedan chair. Being of a pattern still to be found here and there in provincial towns; made of brown polished wood and inlaid with other ornamental woods or woods once meant to be ornamental; tilted backwards at an unfamiliar angle and having two folding doors that gave the occupant the sensation of being locked up in an ancient eighteenth century cabinet. Still, with all its oddity, it was unmistakably a hansom cab; that unique vehicle which the alien eyes of a clever Jew saw as the gondola of London. Most of us know by this time that when we are told that the pattern of something has been much improved, it means that all its distinctive characters have disappeared. Everybody has motor cabs; but nobody ever thought of having such a thing as a motor hansom cab. With the old pattern vanished the particular romance of the gondola (to which Disraeli was perhaps referring), the fact that there is only room for two. Worse still there vanished something supremely special and striking and peculiar to England; the dizzy and almost divine elevation of the driver above his fare. Whatever we may say of Capitalism in England, there was at least one wild chariot or equestrian group in which the poor man sat above the rich as upon a throne. No more, and in no other vehicle, will the employer desperately lift a little door in the roof, as if he were imprisoned in a cell, and talk to the invisible proletarian as to an unknown god. In no other combination shall we ever feel again so symbolically and so truly our own dependence upon what we call the lower classes. Nobody could think of the men on those Olympian seats as a lower class. They were the manifest masters of our destiny, driving us from above, like the deities of the sky. There was always something distinctive about any man sitting on such a perch; and there was something quite distinctive even about the very back of the man sitting on the quaint old cab as Murrel approached it. He was a broad-shouldered person with side-whiskers of a sort that seemed to match the provincial remoteness of the whole scene.
Even as Murrel approached, the man, as if weary with waiting for his fare, laboriously descended from his lofty place and stood for a moment staring down the street at the scene. Murrel had by this time pretty well perfected his detective art of pumping the great democracy and he soon fell into a conversation with the cabman. It was the sort of conversation which he considered most suited to his purposes; that is it was a conversation of which the first three quarters had nothing whatever to do with anything that he wanted to know. That, he had long discovered, was so much the quickest way to his end as almost to deserve to be called a short cut.
At last, however, he began to discover things that were not without interest. He had found out that the cab was quite a historical antiquity in another way, and eminently worthy of a museum; for the cab belonged to the cabman. His thoughts went back vaguely to that first conversation, with Braintree and Olive Ashley, about the paint-box belonging to the painter and, by inference, the mine to the miner. He wondered whether the vague pleasure he felt in the present preposterous vehicle was not a tribute to some truth. But he also discovered other things. He found that the cabman was very much bored with his fare; but was also in a hazy way afraid of him. He was bored with that unknown gentleman because he kept him waiting outside one house after another in a tedious and interminable pilgrimage round the whole town. But he was also slightly in awe of him because he seemed to have some sort of official right to visit all these places and talked like somebody connected with the police. Though his progression was so slow it seemed that his manner was very hasty; or what is now called hustling. One felt that he had commandeered rather than called the cab. He was somebody who was in a frightful hurry and yet had a great deal of time to spare for each of his visits. It was therefore evident that he was either an American or a person connected with the Government.
Bit by bit, it came out that he was a doctor, a medical man having some sort of official claim to visit a variety of persons. The cabman, of course, did not know his name; but his name was the least important part of him. What was much more important was another name; a name that the cabman did happen to know. It seemed that the next stoppage of the crawling cab would be a little further down the street, outside the lodgings where lived a man whom the cabman had sometimes met in the neighbouring public house; a curious card by the name of Hendry.
Murrel having, by this circuitous route, at last reached his desire, almost leapt like an unleashed hound. He inquired the number in the street which was honoured by Mr. Hendry’s residence; and almost immediately after went striding down the steep street towards it.
Having knocked at the door, he waited; and after a considerable interval he heard the sounds of it being very slowly unlocked behind him.
He faced round and fortunately spoke at once. The door had opened by little more than a crack; and the first fact it revealed was that the chain was still up across it. Within, much more dimly, he began to discern inside that high and dark house the glimmering features and figure of a human being. The figure was slim and the features were both pointed and pallid. But something almost atmospheric told him that the figure was feminine and even young; and when he heard the voice, a moment later, it told him something else that was more of a surprise to him.
At first, however, there was no word but only a very swift and silent action. The young woman within having seen nothing but the shape and outline of Murrel’s hat and perceived that it was reasonably respectable, proceeded to shut the door again. She had relations already with people who appeared respectable, and even responsible. And that was, at the period in question, her answer to them. But Murrel had something of the promptitude of a fencer leaping and lunging at the only loophole in what seemed like a labyrinth of parry and defence. He thrust into the aperture the wedge of a word.
It was probably the only word that would have arrested the movement. The young woman, alas, was not acquainted with persons who had occasion in such cases to plant a foot in the doorway. She was not unacquainted with the art of slamming the door on it so as to pinch it or procure its prompt removal. But Murrel remembered things he had heard said in the public house and in the shop at the beginning of his journey; and he used the phrase that had never been heard in that street and had almost been forgotten by that woman. An instinct made him take off his hat and say: “Is Dr. Hendry in?”
Man does not live by bread alone, but mostly by etiquette and above all by consideration. It is by consideration that even the hungry live and by the lack of it that they die. It was a very determining detail that Hendry had once been proud of his doctor’s degree; and a yet more determining detail that none of his new neighbours were now in the least likely to give it him. And this was his daughter, who was just old enough to remember when it had been freely given. Her hair was in her eyes in an almost slatternly fashion and her apron was as stained and threadbare as any of the other rags in that street; but when she spoke, the stranger knew at once that she remembered; and that the things she remembered were things of tradition and of the mind.
Douglas Murrel found himself inside a tiny hall with nothing but an ugly umbrella stand devoid even of umbrellas. Soon after he found himself mounting a very steep and narrow flight of stairs in almost total darkness; and soon after that abruptly allowed to fall into a frowsy little room, littered with such articles as were just too worthless to sell or even to pawn; where sat the man for whom he had gone on his erratic journey to search, as Stanley went to search for Livingstone.
Dr. Hendry had a head of hair rather like the grey top of a withering thistle; one almost expected it to wither visibly before one’s eyes and the parts of the puff-ball to part and drift away drearily on the wind. But otherwise he was rather neater than might have been expected; though the effect may have been produced by his being very tightly and tidily buttoned up to the throat; as is said to be sometimes the habit of the hungry. After years of abstraction amid squalid surroundings, he was still rather perched than seated on his dusty chair, as if something dainty and disdainful even in his subconsciousness made him sit down on it gingerly. He was one of those men who can be so completely unconscious as to be outrageously rude; but who, the moment they are conscious, become almost painfully polite. The moment he became conscious of Murrel his politeness made him jump up with a jerk, like a very thin marionette hung on wires.
If he was staggered with the compliment of being called a doctor, he was still more intoxicated by the topic which his visitor put before him. Like all old men, and most fallen men, he lived in the past; and it seemed to him for one incredible moment that the past was again present. For that dark room, in which he was sealed up and forgotten like a dead man in a tomb, had heard once more a human voice asking for Hendry’s Illumination Colours.
He rose on his thin and wavering legs and went without a word to a shelf on which stood a number of highly incompatible objects, and took down an old tin box which he brought to the table and began rather tremulously to open. It contained two or three round and squat glass bottles covered with dust; and when he saw them it seemed as if his tongue was loosened.
“They should be used with the vehicle in the box,” he said. “Many people try to use them with oil or water, or all sorts of things”; though indeed it was at least thirty years since anybody had ever tried to use them with anything.
“I will tell my friend to be careful,” said Murrel, with a smile. “I know she wants to work on the old lines.”
“Ah, quite so,” said the old man, suddenly lifting his head with quite a consequential air. “I shall always be ready to give any advice . . . any advice that can be of any use, I’m sure.” He cleared his throat with quite a formidable return of fullness in his voice. “The thing to remember, first of all, of course, is that this type of colouring is in its nature opaque. So many people confuse the fact that it is brilliant with some notion of its being transparent. I myself have always seen that the confusion arose through the parallel of stained glass. Both, of course, were typically medieval crafts, and Morris was very keen on both of them. But I remember how wild he used to be if anybody forgot that glass is transparent. ‘If anybody paints a single thing in a window that looks really solid,’ he used to say, ‘he ought to be made to sit on it.’”
Murrel resumed his enquiry.
“I suppose, Dr. Hendry,” he said, “that your old chemical studies helped you a great deal in making these colours?”
The old gentleman shook his head thoughtfully.
“Chemistry alone would hardly have taught me all I know,” he said. “It is a question of optics. It is a question of physiology.” He suddenly thrust his beard across the table and said rapidly in a hissing voice, “It is even more a question of pathological psychology.”
“Oh,” said the visitor, and waited for what would happen next.
“Do you know,” said Hendry with a sudden sobriety of tone, “do you know why I lost all of my customers? Do you know why I have come down to this?”
