Men of Marlowe's

Title: Men of Marlowe's

Author: Mrs. Henry Dudeney

Release date: March 31, 2023 [eBook #70426]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Henry Holt and Company, 1900

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/70426

Credits: Paul Haxo from images generously made available by the New York Public Library, Google and the HathiTrust Digital Library.

BY MRS. HENRY DUDENEY

FOLLY CORNER

3d Impression 12mo $1.25

A STORY OF SUSSEX TO-DAY

“A work of art which is not only permeated with an extraordinarily sympathetic understanding of the human heart, but displays also from beginning to end the sort of vigor and sanity that can employ the most delicate instruments and the subtlest methods without becoming intellectually nearsighted and without losing even for a moment a sense of true proportion.... Mrs. Dudeney is the equal of Thomas Hardy, as she is his literary congener.”—Professor Harry Thurston Peck in the Bookman.

“It shows the same deep insight into the complications of the human soul [as did the author’s earlier novel].... This story from the opening page is tense with sustained power and is surely destined to be one of the most important contributions to this season’s fiction.”—N. Y. Commercial Advertiser.

MEN OF MARLOWE’S

12mo $1.25

CONTENTS.—Introductory—The One in Red—Arnold’s Laundress—Why?—Jimmy—Game Feathers—An Interlude—Mortgaged—A Political Woman—Beyond the Gray Gate—The Set at Seven—Hopkins.

These stories of residents in one of the English “Inns,” like those of “The Temple,” are so interrelated as almost to constitute a continuous novel. They show more humor than anything the author has done, and a variety of powers hardly foreshadowed even in “Folly Corner.”

HENRY HOLT & CO. NEW YORK

MEN OF MARLOWE’S

BY

MRS. HENRY DUDENEY

AUTHOR OF “FOLLY CORNER,” ETC.

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

1900

COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY HENRY HOLT & CO.

THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS RAHWAY, N. J.

[iii]

CONTENTS.

[1]

MEN OF MARLOWE’S.

INTRODUCTORY.

“AS a woman in search of sensation, you should not have come to me. I can tell you tales, but they are not exactly sensational—hardly a detective in them.”

“The detective is a slur on any story. He is merely the author’s fool.”

“But they are not even love stories of the kind you’re accustomed to.”

“Of course not. Here in an Inn of Court you have no opportunities—no conservatory, no ballroom, no garden parties. Gerald proposed to me on the Underground Railway—and deserved to be refused. But he had the grace to apologize.”

“Well, I’ll tell you all I know—or nearly. Some very droll things that I could tell would not interest you.”

“I don’t mind being startled. You promised not[2] to irritate me by being chivalrous. Chivalry! That subtle grip of the Middle Ages on my sex.”

“But a woman—don’t interrupt; I use the word in a superior sense—can never appreciate the fine humor of a tipsy man. She expects him to be obvious: to fall in the gutter, to be towed home by the policeman, or fined for being disorderly. Tales of buoyancy, funny from the man’s point of view, would bore you.”

“Humph!”

“There are other tales—quite of the feudal period—which Gerald would rather I did not tell. Merry tales, with an undercurrent of sadness: the most perfect form of humor.”

“I hope you don’t tax me with immodest prudery.”

“I tax your husband. Some of the tales may be rather mad.”

“Lunatics are the salt of the earth. Come and dine with us once a week. Tell me a story after dinner—Gerald goes to sleep.”

“I must tell them in the Inn or they’d lose their flavor.”

[3] “Here! Once a week—that is settled. I’ll come. Marlowe’s Inn is charming. These quiet squares, just off Holborn; these sedate houses, with their old staircases and sets of chambers, each with its stout black door, appeal to me. I like the archway, the porter at the gate. I never saw such a green garden. I love rooks. Everything is gay, cool, monastic; a most fascinating place. And such queer people! I met a man with the face of a mystic——”

“Probably Guy Blockley, the comedian.”

“There was another man with a striped waistcoat, closely cropped hair, and a bulldog jaw. He looked like a prizefighter.”

“That’s Paradale, the poet.”

“Good Heavens! Then I met a woman, very fat. She carried a pail of dirty water. No doubt she was a political hostess, famous for her parties, or a popular lady novelist.”

“She was only a charwoman—laundresses we call them in the Inn. She has probably ‘seen better days.’”

“Well—about the tales?”

[4] “Sad tales, remember—partly sad. But you’ll get a laugh out of them.”

“I prefer sad tales; there is more strength in a sob than in a giggle. Anything, so long as they are not commonplace. So long as the people don’t marry in the last chapter. I’m so sick of sane, respectable people who do exactly what they ought to do. Gerald has a regular income—that blight on originality. I was doomed to middle-class ease from my very cradle.”

“I wonder if you really are broad-minded. I wonder! You are not very young——”

“Nowadays a woman only comes of age at thirty.”

“After thirty she is often a prude.”

“But I am not so very much after. Why waste time in parrying? Tell me a story at once. Let this be the first sitting.”

*****

“It was very stupid of me to clutch your arm like that—to scream. A scream is the admission of small intellect, of nerves, of everything that went out with smelling-bottles. But that noise startled[5] me—it was the prologue to your tale—too realistic. What was it? I think it came from that house across the way, from that open window on the third floor, with the blue window box.”

“From No. 7. Yes; of course.”

“How somber you look!”

“I must go and see what is up. Promise me to keep quite still. Don’t even look out of the window.”

“I promise. I’ll look at the album instead. That is a most harmless, a most creditable thing to do. My heart thumps still. Do you think it’s a suicide? I’d like a smelling-bottle, if you had one. But a drop of whisky is the modern substitute. Thank you. And in this little cup. How pretty!”

“It belonged to Kinsman. You will hear about him later. Here is the album. There are portraits of Adeline Pray and Minnie Chaytor—women whose acquaintance you’ll make. I won’t be long.”

*****

“What was it? Here, take the rest of the whisky; you look as if you wanted it.”

[6] “It was Dick Simpson. He’s shot himself. Let me take you out and put you in a hansom. This is our first installment; a melodramatic one.”

“Why did he shoot himself? How shocking! Love? There’s a girl going in at the door now.”

“Why? You will understand when I tell you about that set of chambers in which he lived. Poor Dick! He’s left a note, just saying that all his accounts are in order. He was in the City; some of the men of Marlowe’s are. The odd thing is—there is always a quip in our tragedies—that he had dressed for the occasion. Frock coat, flower in his buttonhole, new tie—he only bought it last night; showed it to me; asked if I admired the pattern. They’ll never let that set again; it is the most extraordinary thing—that’s the fifth man that I know of, counting Drummond and Jimmy.

“He was such a thrifty, cautious little chap, too! No debts, no difficult position. He wasn’t hard up—as most of us are. He lived within his income.”

“He seems to have been a commonplace person.”

[7] “Poor Dick! Here you are. Where shall I tell the man to drive to?”

“To the Circus. Good-by. I’ll come again, about this time this day week. Poor man! How shocking!”

[9]

THE ONE IN RED.

ORION was mean. He gave a party once. The whisky was watered. He came to me confidentially in the course of the evening and whispered angrily:

“You see that fellow Pearson? My word! how he’s helping himself to whisky. He’s drinking it neat. I’ve watched him. Don’t you call that confounded impudence?”

He was also one of those men whose brains never seem to develop; a weak-minded chap who, when he had his hair cut, allowed the barber to wheedle him into buying a bottle of hair wash—half a crown the small size, but only four-and-sixpence for one containing more than double. Brains! Men like that have only just enough to grub along with—just enough to see that they get their proper change across the counter, and are given the right brand of tobacco.

I knew a barmaid—a nice girl, without the least harm in her. I gave her flowers—a bangle once.[10] For some years she has been the mistress of a flourishing public-house off New Oxford Street; married a barman who had dropped in for a legacy. Doubtless by now she is the mother of an appallingly large family. Yet, whenever I met Orion, he used to snigger, bob his silly face forward, and chuckle:

“Well, old man, seen anything of Rosey lately? Fine girl, Rosey!”

I should have forgotten the girl’s very name, but Orion would not let me. He always said the same thing.

One Christmas Eve I took her to his rooms—it was the only time he ever met her. He was sitting by a tremendous fire cooking a fine turkey. The table was set out most elaborately, with flowers, crackers, serviettes folded into shape.

We sat and chatted; he basting the bird, Rosey dimpling about with appetite. He told us how much he had paid for that turkey in Smithfield market, he showed us the sausages that were to be eaten with it. He went to the cupboard and brought out a very dainty tin of fancy biscuits. Rosey half put out her plump hand and then drew[11] it back awkwardly. He lifted the rice paper so that we might admire the sugar on the top row. He pointed out bottles of ginger wine, boxes of preserved fruit—all sorts of things. They made poor Rosey’s blue eyes glisten. But he never offered her so much as a fig. What is more, I ascertained afterward, as a positive fact, that he never had a soul to dine with him that Christmas. That’s the sort of fellow Orion was.

He had the third floor set at No. 7. We all wondered why he lived in the Inn at all. It held no advantages for him. His oak was never sported, except when he was out.

Perhaps you see nothing so very important, nothing, certainly, that is romantic, about that heavy black door on which my name stands white. But a man’s oak guards faithfully the secrets of his life. Generations of secrets, of sins, of sorrows are held by those stout doors—black and inscrutable, two by two on every landing. The oak shuts out duns; shuts in a pretty woman. The stories those black doors could tell! I wonder they never crack—with laughter or great, splitting sobs.

[12] The oak knows everything. It is like a fashionable woman’s toilet. I love to hear them clang to somberly at night; when a man goes out, when he creeps in late. The oak is the bachelor’s discreet parlor-maid. It says “not at home.” When we sport it—which is simply shutting it—we defy the world.

Yet Orion only used this potential thing, this sacred and confidential black door, to protect his electro plate. He had no debts, no compromising visitors, no delicate difficulties. What a man! What a mean, drab life!

We all chaffed him about his electro plate; the box in which he kept macaroons, the fish slice, the sugar tongs—all the useless things. He really ought to have lived in a neat villa. No doubt he would have done if his aunt had not happened to live in Great Ormond Street, close by.

He took me to dine with her once. It was a wet Sunday. The aunt, Mrs. Grigg, was a terrible woman of seventy or so. She was dressed in the height of fashion—as it had been in the fifties. No doubt you have seen mold-spotted fashion plates of[13] the period. She had a muslin chemisette, muslin under-sleeves, a wide skirt of some blinding, bright red stuff. Great rings stretched the lobes of her ears. On her neck she wore string after string of jet and on her bony wrist a hair bracelet. Her brooch was set with braids of sandy hair. I suppose it was Grigg’s.

How that ancient woman leered and bridled at me all through dinner! We had cold mutton and mint sauce, gooseberry tart and tapioca—cold water to drink. That leering, mincing meal! Those vapid gulps of plain water! There is nothing in this world more ghastly than the labored archness of an old coquette. For days afterward I never looked at a woman, except at my laundress—and they are hardly women.

Orion apologized for the water as we walked home.

“The old girl’s stingy,” he said with satisfaction. “But it suits me, my boy. When she kicks the bucket, I’m in for a good thing. And it can’t be long, can it? What did you make of her? I don’t like the way she wags her head about—paralysis.[14] She’ll go off like a champagne cork some day.”

“I suppose she will,” I said wearily.

“Of course she will. She can’t last long. She’s over seventy, and she was a beauty once; you wouldn’t think it.”

I groaned, remembering those old eyes with red, lashless lids; that mouth with the infantile, pearly false teeth.

We crossed Lamb’s Conduit Street. In Chapel Street, Wood, who was a decentish fellow and always in low water, had two back rooms on the second floor at No. 8.

“I’m going in here to get a whisky,” I said, none too graciously, to Orion.

He put out his hand. His face, with the weak mouth and watery eyes, looked quite haggard in the moonlight which speared down into the narrow street. He bore a horrible family likeness to Mrs. Grigg.

Did I mention that he was a thin fellow? He had a straggling, straw-colored mustache and his skin matched it. Everything about him was ill-hung[15] and undecided. With his yellow face, yellow hair, fawn-colored overcoat and soft hat, he looked as if he had been just flipped into a weak solution of saffron and drawn out again. Why will fair men persist in wearing fawn?

“When she dies,” he went on, “that house in Great Ormond Street will be mine; that and a snug bit—the old girl banks at Barclay’s. She hasn’t got a relation in the world but me. Some sort of second cousin of Grigg’s used to live with her, but they rowed; she’d row with an archangel. I don’t know where Clara Citron—that was the cousin’s name—is now.”

“Well, good-night, old fellow,” I said.

“Wait a bit. You see property’s going up at such a devil of a rate in Bloomsbury. The house alone will bring in a tidy income, let out in flats. I shall do it up and charge good rents and keep it select. Everything on the square, you know.”

He gave his suggestive grin and dropped my hand. I wiped it mechanically as I pulled Wood’s bell, and drummed on his knocker. The landlady kept me waiting; it was a trick she had. When at[16] last she opened the door she asked me acrimoniously:

“Aint the bell enough, but you must go playin’ on the knocker and bringing a person’s ’art into their mouths?”

A week later Orion came to my rooms. It was about nine in the evening—Saturday evening. I was just off to the “Oxford,” and told him so. But he caught me by the sleeve and said feverishly:

“Haven’t you heard?”

“What?”

“My aunt—Mrs. Grigg, you know. She—she’s murdered.”

He sat down in the saddlebag chair by the fire. Yes, the same saddlebag. That shabby old thing you are sitting in, with the fallen springs and the shiny mark of many fingers on the arms. Don’t get up. I brought out the bottle and gave him a nip of whisky. He was shaking all over like a little clay-tinted marionette.

“Murdered!” I said, the vivid image of the old woman coming back. “Murdered!”

[17] “Yes; just now.” He made a gesture for more whisky.

The glass he held was dancing a jig in his hand. I noticed—it seemed an odd thing to notice at such a time—how clean his hands were. One does notice unimportant things.

“The old woman—her servant—has just come round to tell me,” he continued. “Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard! How could I?”

“I forgot. Of course you couldn’t. It’s enough to confuse a fellow, isn’t it? Murdered!”

“Yes. But how?”

“I’m going to tell you. Is there any more whisky? Thanks. It is Saturday night and the servant had gone out to shop. She always shops late on Saturday—when she doesn’t do it on Sunday morning. On Sunday morning in the Lane you can get a very decent fowl cheap. My aunt was left alone in Great Ormond Street. Am I making myself quite clear? She must have been cooking some mess over the dining-room fire; a pot had boiled over on the hob. She was stabbed—just[18] above the heart. Isn’t it awful? Thanks, old man. It—it pulls me together. Come up to my place. The old woman’s waiting. I don’t know what to do first. She came straight to me. She—the other one, my aunt—is lying on the dining-room hearthrug. Well—thanks.”

I followed him upstairs. Late as it was, one of the Inn laundresses—those travesties of women, all flesh, sacking apron, and dusty hair—was scrubbing the third floor flight. Saturday is the great day for stair scrubbing. She moved her pail for us to pass and looked at Orion’s face curiously. As we went up we were followed by the rasping swish of her brush.

Mrs. Grigg’s servant was waiting in the sitting room. She had seated herself. Orion did not seem to like this.

It was such a swell room—all varnish, gewgaws, and rose-colored lights. He had stuck squares of leather paper on the panels of the walls and put white porcelain finger plates painted with roses on the doors. He burned gas in the grate instead of coal—it was cleaner. It looked like an old maid’s[19] room. I believe that he helped his laundress to clean it. She was a rather clean woman herself, who always wore a stiff bow of white muslin tied under her chin.

There was a shiny sideboard, on top of which was set out the electro plate. The looking-glass above the sideboard was cracked. Pearson, his nerves strung by the respectability and smugness of that room, had flung his glass at it on the night of the party—as a graceful return for watered whisky. Emily Higgins, a girl that Orion knew—she served in a fancy shop in Hampstead Road—had skillfully painted a cobweb and a trail of flowers across the crack. Orion never spoke to Pearson afterward.

“A fellow who will come into one’s rooms and do a thing like that is a dirty cad,” he would say in his thin, piping voice.

He was always saying it. He never said more than three things at the same period. He had attacks of sentences and worked them off. He said it every time you went to his set. He said it to all new acquaintances. He took them in to look at the[20] sideboard, and while they looked he enlarged on the rank villainy of Pearson. I actually waited for him to say it on that Saturday night. But he didn’t. He only lifted the old woman’s leg of mutton from the center table where she had set it. It was foreign meat and the blood had run out freely, pulping the newspaper and making a patch on the tablecloth. He carried it, with an air of reproof, to the cupboard and set it carefully on a dish.

The woman looked at him and then she looked at me. There was defiance and self-vindication and a lurking terror on her face. It was a long, horselike face, I remember. People of her class always look like that when anything suspicious occurs. She seemed to be saying in a terrified, insolent way:

“Don’t you think I did it, because I didn’t.”

It is pathetic; this perpetual assertion of innocence—before they are accused—of such people.

“It give me such a orful turn!” she burst out at last, addressing herself to me, as Orion remained half in the cupboard, carefully putting a wire cover over the joint. “I’ve never been mixed up in no sich thing before. I’ve never been to prison. Not[21] me! Nor any of my relations. It’s made my ’eart that bad—I suffers with the palpitations.”