Bag and Baggage/The Corner House
THE CORNER HOUSE
SOME three years ago two men, both preoccupied in thought, went by one another on Vauxhall Bridge. The next instant, the one making for the Surrey side halted on a subconscious recognition, wheeled about, and, returning hurriedly on his tracks, accosted the back of the retreating figure:
"Is that you, Gethin?"
The other started, turned round, and uttered a pleased exclamation:
"O, Acheson! I didn't see you. What good luck!"
"Eh? O, yes, of course!"
"I'm on my way to look for lodgings. You can come and advise me."
The first speaker hesitated, glanced at his watch, and raised a lean anxious face, the lenses of whose spectacles, catching the just kindled lamplight at an angle, looked suddenly like dead, upturned eyes.
It was a dripping, sodden November evening. Rain fell drearily; every buttress and lamp-post had its fibrous reflection underfoot, as if the pavement had grown transparent, revealing the deep roots of the things embedded in it. The heavy air floated with umbrellas, like a last swarming of antediluvian bats; labouring omnibuses were packed to suffocation; to anyone looking over the parapet, the barges slowly forging through the arches below appeared like submarines crawling dim and phantom-like in abysmal waters. A dull depressing squalor characterised every- thing—the faces of passers-by, the sordid brick of the houses, the streaming windows of the cheap shop-fronts. In the dropping mist of the rain one could see myriads of blacks being slowly precipitated to the pavement. It seemed impossible that a feeling of solidity could ever be restored to the texture of things.
Acheson looked at his watch again before he returned it to his pocket.
"Why, the fact is," he said, "I—I was going home to tea."
He was a small spare man, more callow than clean-shaved, with a sensitive neurotic face and a hungry expression. He looked older than his friend, though, as a matter of fact, the two were much of an age, young men of twenty-five or thereabouts. He was as boneless as the other was compact and strong-ribbed. Friendship could not have offered a greater physical contrast. The handbag which Gethin carried with ease would have weighed Acheson to the earth. Holding that in one hand, and his umbrella in the other, the former had nothing but a foot to kick out in invitation.
"Come and have tea with me?" he said. "You won't abandon an ancient chum, unassisted, to these wildernesses?"
A vision of a cosy fireside in the Wandsworth Road, of a singing kettle, and a dish of hot poached eggs, to be discussed over a volume of Myers's Human Personality, passed wistfully for one moment before Acheson's consciousness. He yielded it, the next, with a sigh. Curiosity, after all, was a dominant factor in his being; and he wanted to hear what had brought Gethin so unexpectedly from his native Woking to seek lodgings in this unattractive quarter of London. He succumbed, with a feeble grace.
"O, certainly!" he said. "Where shall we go?"
The other shrugged his shoulders.
"Where?" he said. "I am a stranger—a country cousin. I leave myself in your hands."
Crossing to the Middlesex shore, and chatting somewhat spasmodically under the general weight of things, they soon found a humble caravanserai, which was at least good enough to offer them warmth, dryness, and a sufficiency of creature comfort. But they were both men of small means, and accustomed to accept the amenities of existence as they could afford them.
It had been in the mind of each, perhaps, to postpone all intimate discussion until they were thus snugly ensconced and isolated; but, now that the moment was come, a mutual consciousness of something difficult and rather barren in the situation stepped between. They talked, after the first brief exchange of enthusiasms, in that rather forced galvanic way which often characterises the re-meetings of once intimate friends, whose interests and sympathies have long ceased to be one. Goodwill could not quite restore a confidence which had been largely due to circumstance and environment; nor could the fire of an ancient devotion penetrate through this distance of time with more than a very qualified warmth. As they secretly recognised the shadow, Gethin and Acheson yielded themselves a little sarcastically to its chill.
They had once been fellow-draughtsmen in a local architect's office, and Acheson had been the first to break away. That was some five years since, when a measure of interest, together with his own personal tastes and qualifications, had procured him the post of free-librarian in an important London centre. That was the best he had coveted, or ever intended to covet. He had no ambitions, but a vast psychologic curiosity, and the post assured him a perpetual sufficiency of the means to feed his intellect, and keep his body going. Years of study had not tended, perhaps, to qualify him for the continued friendship of the athletic, somewhat grim young giant by his side. He was painfully conscious of the fact as he glanced furtively from time to time at Gethin's face, and calculated the effect upon it should he suddenly rise and declare the necessity of his getting on homewards.
"You haven't told me yet," he said presently, in his high, rather strained voice, "what has brought you from home, looking for lodgings in this particular part of London?"
"Why not this as well as any other, Acheson?"
"O, well, if you put it that way, really I don't know."
Gethin laughed.
"As far as I know my London geography, it's handy for me."
"O!" said Acheson. "Why is it?"
Gethin laughed again annoyingly. He was rather inclined to that form of humour which sees fun in perfectly natural ignorances.
"Isn't Victoria Street in this neighbourhood?" he said.
"Yes; but"
"And isn't Wrexham's in Victoria Street? That's to be my office for the future—I hope."
"Architects?"
"Yes, architects."
"You've left Pettigrews, then?"
"Yes, I've left them. What was there to keep me, when a better berth offered? I've had to wait longer for one than you."
"Well, I can only hope it's as satisfactory, now it's come."
"O, as to that, old man, my ambitions always widen with my prospects! But I'm only on probation for the moment. It's an opportunity, and—well, I've got to find lodgings for a month."
"If you want an inexpensive quarter"
"I do."
"Then this is certainly as good as any."
"So I supposed. But there was just one other reason—ridiculous, but enough to influence me."
"What was that?"
Gethin leaned over the table, his arms crossed, a curious smile on his face.
"Acheson," said he, "do you still make a hobby of all that supernatural business?"
"I don't know what you mean by a hobby. I assume the necessary interest of the subject to any intelligent mind."
"I see. You are still a corresponding member of the Psychical Research Society?"
"O, yes!"
"Well, do you know you gave me quite a turn, meeting me on the bridge like that."
"Did I? Why?"
"Because, as it happens, a friend and neighbour was the last person who met my father before he disappeared for ever—and it was on Vauxhall Bridge."
Acheson nodded surprisedly, but he was patently not much impressed by the coincidence.
"O, I don't say there's anything in it," said Gethin; "only it struck me. It was the memory of that first meeting, in point of fact, which led me, absurdly enough, perhaps, to seek this way round to my improved fortunes. He was going to look for work, too. I dare say you remember something of the story."
"Something. Tell it me again."
"There's not much to tell. It's fifteen years ago, and I was a boy at the time—a boy at school. We had been in fair circumstances, and then it all stopped suddenly. Canstons, the big Army contractors, smashed up, and my father was in it, and his savings were in it. We were near ruined, in fact, and I don't think my mother took it very well. Between ourselves, there were scenes at home. He left that, at last, on the chance or offer of work in London—went off one day after tiffin, and never turned up again. From that moment to this we have never set eyes on him, or gathered by so much as a word a clue to his whereabouts. He just disappeared from mortal ken."
He paused, and there followed a short silence.
"They vanish sometimes," said Acheson presently. "There have been authentic cases."
"Relations came forward," continued Gethin, as if he had not heard him; "I had to put my young shoulder to the wheel, and we scraped along. But it was funny."
"Was he—have you any reason" began the librarian; but the other took him up.
"The last man in the world to commit suicide—a cheery soul, like his son; indomitable, I might call him, without conceit. Besides, the neighbour who saw him, who met him on that bridge, testified to his buoyant, hopeful mood. He was on his way then, like myself, to look for lodgings. Acheson"—he bent forward very earnestly, and touched his friend on the arm—"it was a wet November evening, like this."
He waited for the inevitable comment, a little surprised that his friend did not immediately respond, as expected. Acheson chewed the offered coincidence again, reflective; and his verdict once more was that it was untenable.
"If my studies teach me anything," he said, "it is the folly of jumping in such matters to hasty conclusions. A tempered scepticism is the first equipment of your rational psychist. Coming from Woking, if you don't go on to Waterloo, you must get out at Vauxhall. In electing deliberately to do so, you made your own coincidence."
"But the date and the weather, man?"
"Both suggested that course to you. Now, if some accident had turned you out at"
"And the meeting on the bridge?"
"No analogy whatever. You have asked me to help you to find lodgings, you see; and, if you are serious"
"You bet I am. I don't want to vanish, like the baseless fabric of a what-d'ye-call-it."
"You see? localised from the outset. No; depend upon it, Gethin—you'll forgive my saying it—there was some perfectly human and natural explanation of your father's conduct."
"O, of course, you mean some discreditable attachment. I shouldn't have believed it of him, but I confess that that's the view my mother took."
"H'm, I take it for granted that every enquiry"
"Yes, yes. O, yes; of course!"
He answered a little impatiently, and sat frowning, and drumming his fingers on the table.
"Well, if you are ready," he said suddenly, looking up.
"Quite ready," said Acheson, with a sigh of relief, and got to his feet.
Gethin paid the reckoning, lifted his bag thoughtfully, and they passed out into the street together. Swift darkness had descended while they loitered, and the rain was falling more hopelessly than ever. There was no wind, but the air was opaque with a very fog of water, through which the flare of the shops and the jets of the lamps burned with a dull miasmatic glow, which, in the light of passing vehicles, seemed to be constantly throwing off from itself a multitude of little travelling globes, which sped on like fen-candles into the murk, and were one by one extinguished. The houses looked gigantically tall and unreal; there was little human in suggestion about the shapes of the few foot-passengers, as they hurried past them, muffled, grey and dripping, into their dreary selves. Gethin gave a gasp of disgust.
"Look here," he said; "I'm lost. I hold by you to convoy me into some harbour of refuge."
Acheson considered a moment.
"There are plenty enough of every sort," he said, "both right and left. It's a heterogeneous quarter. Mansions rub shoulders with dosshouses hereabouts. But we must strike a line and take our chance. Your first point is a lodging for the night. If it doesn't suit, you can look again to-morrow. Supposing we turn down here for an experiment. It's sure, by its looks, to reveal a harvest of lodging-cards as thick as blackberries. Shall we go?"
"O, anywhere!" said Gethin, in a depressed voice.
They turned into a blank little street, making in the Horseferry Road direction. Quiet and dismality swallowed them almost on the instant. The sound of traffic died down behind them; their own footsteps spoke louder; the rain and the fog claimed them to complete isolation. Not a creature seemed to be abroad here; and the squalid ranks of houses they passed were, for the most part, lightless and lifeless in suggestion. They plodded along, painstakingly scrutinising the fronts. The crop of cards, if it had ever existed, was gathered or rotted away. Not a casual invitation greeted their groping eyes; but, one by one, as they advanced, the recurrent lamps brightened to a nucleus, made dismally emphatic the meanness of their surroundings, and drowsed and dulled again as they fell behind. They turned off at an inviting angle, and again turned, and yet once more.
"Where are we?" said Gethin suddenly.
His companion stopped.
"Why, that's the funny part of it," he said, in a most unhumorous voice.
"You don't know?"
"The rain and this obscurity are so very confusing," pleaded Acheson. "If we could only find a policeman, now"
They stood, as he spoke, at the corner opening of a frowsy, melancholy little square, with a patch of degraded garden in its midst—at least, so it looked. Opposite them was the blank side-wall of a house—the first, it seemed, of a terrace. A street-lamp diffused its melancholy halo at the kerb of the pavement hard by.
"Perhaps the name's written up there," said Gethin. "I'll go and look."
He crossed the splashy road, and went round to the front of the house.
"Here we are," he called across to Acheson. "Come over. A chance, anyway."
Acheson followed and stood beside him.
"Where?" he said.
The light from the lamp fell full upon the corner house. It was one of a four-square terrace, as they had supposed. A shallow flight of steps led up to its door; the sill of its ground-floor window stood about level with the tops of the area-railings in front.
"'Lodgings for a single gentleman,'" said Gethin, "and a reassuring light behind the blind. It doesn't look too pretentious. Shall I try?"
"Lodgings!" said Acheson stupidly. "There?"
"Can't you see it?" answered Gethin impatiently. "Shall I try, I say?"
"O, there's no harm in trying," said Acheson. His voice sounded quite strange to himself.
With something of a flounce, Gethin ran up the steps. As he did so, Acheson backed to the lamp-post, and put an arm involuntarily about it. Standing thus, the falling curtain of light dazzled his eyes, and blinded them for the moment to what followed. He was aroused by hearing his friend speak close beside him.
"It's all right. She can take me in provisionally, anyhow. I'm about done, and I shall chance it. What's the matter with you? Has the tea got into your head?"
Acheson came away from his support, reeling a little.
"No, no," he said. "I'm glad—I won't detain you." And he fairly bolted away into the darkness.
Gethin looked after him a moment; then shrugged his shoulders, and turned to his new quarters. "Poor old Peter," he muttered. "What's come to him? I don't believe he's quite all there."
His landlady was waiting for him at the door. She was a little lean woman, haggard to deathliness. The wolf of hunger, it was evident, had gnawed her ribs and nozzled in the blue places of her eyes. She was all spoiled and drawn in appearance, and her voice was as lifeless as her face. She motioned him into the hall, coughing in a small distant way.
He entered, with a cheery stamp. Half-perished oilcloth was on the floor, and a cheap paraffin-lamp burned sickly on the wall.
"A beastly night," he said. "Which way, Mrs. Quennel?"
She took the lamp from the wall, and, holding it high, revealed the foot of a squalid stairway going up into darkness.
"On the first floor, Mr. Gethin," she said, holding her other hand before her mouth to cough.
He followed her up, commanding his nerves with an effort. Fatality had evidently appropriated to him a refuge in the last stage of decline. But it was a refuge, and cheap.
He was satisfied so far. The room was poor, and its appointments refined to attenuation. But the linen on the little iron bedstead was fresh, and the small grained washing-stand scrubbed to barrenness. There were a cane-bottomed chair or two, and some dingy lithographs on the walls.
"A sittin'-room?" said the landlady weakly, behind her hand.
"We'll discuss that to-morrow," answered Gethin.
"Meals?"
"Not now," said the lodger. "I'm going to turn in and go to sleep, early as it is. I've had a tiring day."
She went to strike a light and kindle a candle on the little dressing-table. Her movements were as bodiless as her voice. Gethin, watching her blankly, was urged to ask a question:
"Any other lodgers?"
She turned, with the lamp again in her hand. Her fragment of a face appeared, in its glow, to jerk and waver in the oddest way.
"One, Mr. Gethin," she said. "But he keeps to his room when he's at home, and locks it when he goes out. You won't be troubled by him."
He was about to disclaim any arrière pensée in his enquiry, but desisted in sheer depression. He wanted somehow to get rid of her, and be alone. She chilled him.
And, almost before he realised it, she was gone, and the door shut.
He undressed wearily, extracted his nightshirt from the bag, and dived under the sheets. They were thin but innocuous. Then, leaving, for some unconfessed reason, his candle burning by his side, he settled himself to sleep, and opened his eyes again suddenly, with a start.
"She called me by my name," he whispered, "and I'll swear I never told it her!"
In the discussion of that amazing problem, his mind swayed, flickered, and suddenly went out. Health and bodily fatigue were on his side, and he sank into a profound sleep.
He was awakened suddenly—it might have been after many hours—by a consciousness of voices murmuring in his neighbourhood. Alert on the instant, he sat up, in immediate possession of his full faculties, and waited, listening. Two people, he was convinced, were talking just outside his room door—one, his landlady; the second, by his full hoarse intonation, a man. Gethin held his breath.
"My God," the deep voice was saying, as he first realised it, "I daren't do it!"
"Be a man!" answered the other, shrill and sibilant, fearful in its tenseness. "Break it in before it's too late, and save us from death and ruin!"
"I daren't," repeated the former speaker. "It might happen on the moment. I'll go for the police. Come away, Martha, in God's name!"
"And leave the new lodger?"
"I'll wake him first."
Gethin sprang out of bed, as the door was flung wide; and there was the figure of a great, white-faced, shadowy man standing in the opening. Wild fear was in his eyes, entreaty in his shaking hands. The lodger had only time to notice that he was bulky in his build, in suggestion something like a respectable ex-butler, and that he was in hat and overcoat, when the figure had withdrawn, and was appealing to him from the outer darkness.
"Come along, sir, in God's name, and run for it!"
On the instant Gethin was out, and in the passage. Breathing, sobbing, palpitating forms seemed to urge and shoulder him this way and that.
"What is it?" he cried. "What's the matter? I don't know where I am—I don't know what you are talking about!"
"You'll soon know unless you hurry up," said the man's quavering voice in the darkness.
Gethin, groping out, felt the wall, and put his back against it.
"I'll not move," he said loudly, "until I know what all this means!"
The woman's thin hurried voice took up the tale, small and toneless, as if she were speaking the other side of glass:
"It's Danby, the lodger, sir. He's one of those dynamiters, it seems. We never knew or guessed—he kept himself so secret in his room, and locked it when he went out. He was arrested this very evening, with an infernal machine in his possession. George, my husband here, saw him taken with his own eyes."
The wall felt suddenly cold against Gethin's back.
"What dynamiters?" he said. "I didn't know there were any of them about now." He set his teeth. "But in any case," he added, "if he's taken, he's taken, and there's an end of him."
The woman trembled on:
"The thing, it seems, sir, went by clockwork—and there's a ticking going on in his room now. You can hear it quite plain if you put your ear to the door."
Gethin laughed—on a rather hollow note.
"Is that all? Why, you don't suppose, even if it was true, that he would go out and leave one of those things maturing in his absence?"
"Some accident may have started it, sir—a rat or a mouse. There's plenty hereabouts."
"Come," said Gethin decidedly; "we'll break in. That's nonsense, you know. If he was such a fool"
"They're all fools, sir."
"We'll break in, I say. Where's that big husband of yours? Now, Mr. Quennel?"
"I won't go near it!" said the hoarse frightened voice from the stairhead.
"Then, here goes," said Gethin. "Where's the room?"
He came away from the wall—felt himself quickly and softly induced, rather than directed, towards a door. Touching it, he bent his ear, and listened. Sure enough, a little sharp regular pulsation came from within, indefinite in quality, but quite appreciable in that still fog-ridden house.
"It's inconceivable," he whispered, "but we'll soon solve the mystery."
The lock was a cheap affair; the door, which opened inwards, of the flimsiest; the lodger muscular. He put his broad shoulder to the essay, and, getting purchase with his bare feet, bore on the wood with one mighty heave. There followed a crack, a ripping sound, and, to Gethin, a sudden wink of light and a jerk—nothing more. But the sensation was so instant, and so physically and mentally disintegrating, that, for the moment, he could conceive no thought of himself but as a sort of pyrotechnic bomb, which had been shot into mid-air, had burst, and was slowly dropping a multitude of coloured stars. These, as they fell, went out one by one, and, with the quenching of the last, consciousness in him ceased altogether.
••••••
Somebody was speaking to him; some application, distinctly physical in its nature, was being made to his body. It felt like a boot. He opened his eyes languidly, and encountered the vision of a face bent above him. It was an official face, and mature, surmounted by a blue helmet, and the expression on it was unsympathetic, not to say threatening.
"Come, sir, what are you doing here?" said the police sergeant. "You must get up, please, and give an account of yourself."
Gethin, accepting the offer of a proffered arm like a bolster, scrambled to his feet in a hurry. He understood on the instant what had happened. The bomb had actually exploded as he broke in the door, and he had been knocked insensible. A mercy, at least, that it was no worse. He clung on to his support a little, feeling somewhat dazed and shocked. It occurred to him, then, with a thrill of gratification, that he must have the constitution of a cat, not only to have survived that appalling experience, but to be standing, as he was, in his normal condition of body. And then something tickled him suddenly, and he lapsed into a shaking giggle. To have been asked to give an account of himself sounded so inexpressibly funny under the circumstances. It was as if he had manufactured the bomb. But, in the midst, the element of tragedy in the business struck and sobered him. He backed, and shook himself into reason.
"What about the other two?" he said. "Are they hurt?"
"Eh?" said the officer blankly.
"The others," persisted Gethin—"the landlord and his wife, who were with me when I broke open the door? Are they maimed—mutilated? Good God, man! they aren't killed?"
The sergeant, curiously contemplative of the speaker, stood, one thumb hooked into his belt, the other hand slowly fondling his chin.
"If I was you," he said at length, thoughtfully and oddly irrelevantly, "I'd take a red-herring and soda-water for my breakfast."
Gethin stared, flushed, and put the question a second time:
"I ask you, are they killed?"
"O, yes! They're dead all right—dead and buried, too."
"Buried!"
Gethin clapped a hand to his head. Had he been insensible longer than he supposed? But, in that case"
"When?" he asked faintly.
"It will have been in '85," said the officer, watchful of him.
Gethin's brain seemed to stagger, and recover itself with a crick. For the first time a sense of something unspeakable in his surroundings was beginning to penetrate it. Weak dawn, while he lay, had come into the house, revealing its structure. Now, in a moment, he understood that there was more of that visible than was compatible with decency or reason. The whole interior of the building, seen from his place in the passage, seemed a shattered ruin. Walls were broken, ceilings torn, doors sprawling dismembered, lights blown out of windows, stair-rails snapped, black abysses formed in the flooring. All that, in itself, was comprehensible. The odd thing was that an indescribable air of antiquity seemed to characterise the wholesale dilapidations.
"This house was blown to pieces," was all he could think of saying.
"Blown to pieces," echoed the sergeant; and added remonstrantly: "Come now, sir, pull your wits together!"
"When?" said Gethin.
"Fifteen years ago, to a day."
"To a day?"
"To a day. I ought to remember. I was on duty hard by at the time."
Gethin felt suddenly sick. He leaned back against the wall.
"I suppose I got muddled up in the fog," he said faintly, "and took refuge in this house, and went to sleep and had a dream."
"That was it, sir, no doubt," said the sergeant encouragingly.
"Untenanted, eh?" said Gethin.
"Avoided like," said the sergeant. "It's never got cured of its bad name."
"For fifteen years? Great God!"
He came away from the wall.
"I think I should like to get out of it—into the air," he said.
"There's your bag and umbrella," said the officer, "at the door of that room. Ain't you going to take them?"
He accompanied Gethin down the stairs. In the lower quarters, age-long dust and grime showed visible on all sides. The very edges of the shattered panes were green with decay; canopies of cobweb festooned the ceilings. Gethin breathed out a volume of relief as he found himself in the square, looking up awestruck at the blackened deserted building.
"How did you suspect me?" he asked the sergeant.
"Saw the front door ajar, and muddy footsteps going through the hall and up the stairs."
"You think I was drunk, don't you?"
"We'll call it a bit taken, sir."
"A small offence?"
"Very like," said the officer drily. "I hope you enjoyed yourself."
Gethin, biting his lip, looked at him a little pallidly.
"I wish you'd tell me," he said. "Who was it blew that up?"
"Name of Danby," said the sergeant promptly, relieving his throat and coming erect again: "a dynamiter, one of the 'eighties lot. He was the cause of it, anyway—left a charged machine working in his room there, while he went out to deposit another, a blind one, which he'd picked up by mistake. They arrested him with it on him."
Gethin found a momentary difficulty in asking his next question:
"Any lives lost—here, I mean?"
"They accounted for three," said the sergeant; "those two Quennels that you spoke of, and a third, unidentified. He was supposed a chance lodger; but he was mutilated beyond recognition, and none ever claimed him. They say you can see the marks of his blood on the wall now. I don't know; I never had the curiosity to look."
"Thanks," said Gethin. He turned away, quite white. "I don't know where I am," he said. "I suppose you won't mind taking half a crown to put me on my way, and in recognition of your services?"
••••••
Weeks later, Gethin ran across Acheson in Victoria Street, and accosted him. Acheson had a queer look to greet him with, guilty and anxious in one.
"Probation satisfactorily over?" he asked.
"That's all right," said Gethin. "I stopped you to tell you something, and to ask a question. I've found out what became of my father."
Acheson gasped, and murmured something inarticulate.
"Acheson," said his friend, "what was the matter with that corner house the other night?"
The large spectacles seemed to disc as Acheson looked up.
"Don't you know, Gethin?"
"What did you see in it, I say?"
"Why—why, I didn't see what you saw, that's all."
"Not the lights and the bill? Well, good-bye, Acheson."
The librarian ran after him.
"Gethin! Would you mind telling me? The P.R.S.—I'm a corresponding member—I"
Gethin shook him off good-humouredly:
"Not a bit of it, my friend. You lost a rare chance of securing evidence at first-hand when you deserted me so basely that time. You're not a practical psychist, Acheson—too much of the tea-and-crumpet ghost-seer about you. You prefer to take your spirits on trust. Besides, you libelled my father. Good-bye!"