Part 4

She began to wonder whether she had not really better break it off with him. If men would but realise how little was required from them. Only an outward gesture of romance: a touch sufficed, the rest would be supplied by woman’s powerful imagination. Not even so much. A mere abstention from the cruder forms of clumsiness, a surface effort to conceal one’s feeblest worst. A mere semblance of mastery, a glimpse of a will. In short, anything at all that would provide the least excuse for loving him as she so wished to do. A minute she stood, thinking. “A minimum. Hardly as much.” There passed along the man on high heels, the three girls with the pinched look, the Tyrolese basso with the long ruddy beard, the _jeune premier_ with whiskers and hair like a wig, whose look seemed to say, “Here am I”; then again the man on high heels, the three girls with the pinched look, the Tyrolese singer, and again the “jeune premier” whose look implied, “Here am I.” They walked round and round as if the park were a cage and there was nothing to do but walk round--with heads bent, lifeless, sullenly resolute. And again there came along the man on high heels. “The minimum of a minimum....”

The music resumed. She consulted her programme. Item 7. Potpourri from the operette _Die Fledermaus_ by Johann Strauss. She returned to the stand, prepared to give her fiancé another chance. Otto’s part, as before, was contemptible, more contemptible than before. He was inactive. He smiled shyly. She coloured. And, looking at him, she knew. She knew it was no use, her love could not bridge the chasm. He was despised by the rest of the band. A stick-in-the-mud. Not a man. A poor fish. Not for her....

The potpourri, as if suddenly turning the corner, broke out into a resounding march, and behold, the big drum now led the way. Bang! bang! bang! bang! Clearly he whacked, never once missing the chance; and the man with the cymbals, as if one heart and brain operated their limbs, clashed the cymbals in astounding unison, the big drum pounding away, pounding away, without cease or respite. And the trumpeters smiled, as who might say: “Good old big drum! You have come into your own at last!” Bang! bang! bang! bang! The big drum had got loud and excited. And all the people standing around looked as though a great joy had come into their lives; and if they had not been a little shy of each other they would have set out and marched in step with the music, taken up any cause and, if only because the music implied that all men were brothers, gone forth if need be and butchered another body of brothers, to the tearing, gladdening strains of the march, (since it is not known from what rational cause men could have marched to the war). And if in the park of the neighbouring town there were just such a band with just such a drum which played this same music, the people of the neighbouring town would have marched to this music and exterminated this town. The conductor, like a driver who, having urged his horse over the hill, leans back and leaves the rest to the horse, conceded the enterprise to the drummer, as if the hard, intricate work were now over and he was taking it easy; his baton moved perfunctorily in the wake of the drum, he looked round and acknowledged the greetings of friends with gay, informal salutes of the left hand, his bland smile freely admitting to all that it was no longer himself but the drum which led them to victory. Or rather, the hard fight had already been won and these, behold, were the happy results! Bang! bang! bang! bang! Strangers passed smiles of intimate recognition, old men nodded reminiscently, small boys gazed with rapt eyes, women looked sweet and bright-eyed, ready to oblige with a kiss; while the big drum, conscious of his splendid initiative, pounded away without cease or respite.

“Wonderful! Beautiful!” said the public surrounding them. And thought:

“Noise is a good thing.”

The band had described the first circle and was repeating it with added gusto and deliberation. The drum and the cymbals were pounding, pounding their due through the wholly inadequate blazing of brass. But these did not mind: “Every dog has his day”--and they followed the lead of the drum. He led them. He--Otto! Her Otto was leading them. God! Merciful Virgin! What had she done to deserve such happiness? Otto!... And she had doubted him, thought there was no “go” in him. No _go_! She burnt red with shame at the mere thought of it. He was all “go.” And didn’t he make them go, too, the whole lot of them? How he led them! Puffing, the sweat streaming down their purple faces, they blazed away till their cheeks seemed ready to burst, but Otto out-drummed them--annihilated their efforts. He--Otto! O, God! Watching him, people could hardly keep still. But that none of them stirred and all of them wanted to, added piquancy to the illusion of motion. They stood rooted--while the drum carried on for them: Bang! bang! bang! bang!

“Marvelous!” sighed the public around them.

Her Otto--cock of the walk! She could scarcely believe her eyes. Standing in front of the crowd, only a few paces from his side and raising herself on her toes ever so gently in rhythm with the music, so that by the very tininess of her movements she seemed to be sending added impetus into the band, as if, indeed, she were pressing with her little feet some invisible pump, she scanned his face with tenderness, in dumb adoration. And Otto at the drum must have felt it, for, at this turn, he put new life into his thundering whacks: _Bang! bang! bang! bang!_ he toiled, and the conductor, as if divining what was afoot, at that moment accelerated the pace of the march.

“Bravo, bravo!” said the people surrounding them.

There was no doubt about it. This was Art. The unerring precision. The wonderful touch. Otto!... Otto, as never before, whacked the big drum, whacked it in excitement, in a frenzy, in transcending exaltation. Thundering bangs! And now she knew--what she couldn’t have dreamed--she knew it by his face. Otto was a hero. A leader of men. Something fluttered in her breast, as though a bird had flown in, ready to fly out.

“Now it’s all over,” thought the people, “and we are going home to lunch.” And everyone smiled and felt very happy and gay. A sort of prolonged accelerated thundering of the big drum, and then one tremendous BANG!

The thing was over. The conductor raised a bent hand to the peak of his cap, acknowledging the applause. The bird in her fluttered more wildly than ever. She wanted to cry out, but her throat would not obey. She clutched at her heaving breast with trembling fingers. “My love,” she thought. “My king! My captain!----”

A BAD END

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; and that means that it is not the Lord Chief Justice’s.” --_Bernard Shaw._

It all began by their talking of love and hate, as they set out on a Sunday afternoon excursion to the moors. Mr. Proudfoot advocated love and forgiveness; Weaver maintained his faith in a good man’s hate. And Proudfoot hated Weaver and could not forgive him because Weaver would not love and forgive. On the way to the tramcar terminus Mr. Proudfoot called in at the grocer’s (it was Sunday, but the shop was surreptitiously open, and Betty, the twelve-year-old girl of the grocer, was reading assiduously a three-penny novelette, entitled--he strained forward to look--_Only a Mill Girl_). Having bought his usual cigarettes, “Get away with you!” rejoined Mr. Proudfoot, continuing the argument.

“Undoubtedly!” said Weaver stubbornly. He envied the other his command of the pen, but doubted if the author knew “life” as well as he, Weaver, knew it. “_I_ could give you material enough to fill a dozen novels if you asked me,” he would say, and tell him of a thirty-stone man eating enough for three; of a hangman in the neighbourhood who in his off-duty hours was an innkeeper. “I want you to meet him. A character for you. Bites off the heads of live rats if a customer will stand beer all round.” Mr. Weaver was a dentist. There was something provocative about all the dentists of Mr. Proudfoot’s experience. They all pretended to ambitions outside their profession. They had all wished to be writers, artists, poets, composers or statesmen, and now handled their surgical tools, extracted teeth, with a kind of embittered “_Tant pis!_” The very first day on which Mr. Proudfoot had called on Mr. Weaver in Gilbert Street, Pedlar-with-Thresham, and inquired if it hurt to have a tooth out, Weaver had said, “No. A second, and it’s out,” and holding it between his pincers (while his client rinsed his mouth with warm water and spat out blood), the dentist was already discoursing: “Now I’ve been reading about this Einstein fellow, you know, and I’ve me own ideas about this ’ere relativity business, if you know what I mean. I look at meself in the glass--and am satisfied with meself, metaphorically, don’t you know. But it does not follow, cosmically speaking like, that I present the same satisfactory appearance. In the same way, following the deductions of my--he, he--rather cynical philosophy, you’ll think, flies, I say, may be as trivial and at the same time as important units in the cosmos as ourselves, and in the end their souls go back to the world-soul from which they sprang. Open your mouth.”

“Is there a world-soul?”

“_Undoubtedly!_” A rotund little body, smartly arrayed, Mr. Weaver went on: “This afternoon was a bit slack. Lately I haven’t been feeling very well. And middle age is upon me. I thought of my past achievements. I had a look at my old medals--the one I got as a lad for swimming a race, and that other one for cycling, don’t you know, and those other two for amateur boxing. My mother, aye, she was proud of ’em! There.” He sprinkled them out of a tin box on to his palm. “And I thought--how shall I say?--it didn’t somehow seem as if it was ‘enough,’ if you know what I mean. Come, open your mouth.”

“You’re a cheerful old pessimist, aren’t you?” said Mr. Proudfoot, and opened his mouth.

“A cheerful pessimist? That’s what I call a contradiction in terms.”

Mr. Proudfoot smiled, and thought (because he could not speak) that Weaver was rather like a man who, having grasped with difficulty the four simple rules of arithmetic, is bewildered at being told that he can waive them utterly in Algebra. He was fond of using difficult words unnecessarily, and would trot out a _cliché_ on the slightest pretext. Mr. Proudfoot might say that he preferred horses to motor-cars, only to hear Weaver ejaculate: “A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!” Or Mr. Proudfoot might say that he had served in the cavalry during the War, for Weaver to remark, with lingering relish, “_Cavalleria Rusticana_.” Or Mr. Proudfoot, perhaps in reference to the heavy rain, had only to let fall the word “deluge” for Weaver to comment: “_Après nous le déluge_, what?” looking at him with a self-complacent smile, to see if he had noticed his culture. “I had a Frenchy here as an assistant once, but had to kick him out: his gift of the gab was too much for me. But I’ve picked up things, and I think I’ve got the hang of the lingo all right, what?” But they had at once become friends, and in the evening Weaver would invite him to his house, push out his wife--a thin complacent woman with a long aquiline nose which Weaver thought aristocratic, and whose contribution to any conversation did not extend beyond the invariable affirmative: “That’s right.” “Out you go,” he would say, “we’re an old bachelor party to-night.--Now then,” rubbing his hands. “Now for it! I’ve been reading about this ’ere fellow Spinoza, you know....”

And so on till after midnight. Mr. Proudfoot remembered these nights afterwards: Weaver, tottering slightly after the beer, coming out into the open and standing hatless in the middle of the street and saying (in reply to Mr. Proudfoot desirous of making a professional appointment with him on the morrow), “Any day, old chap! any day!”

Arguing, they had reached the tramcar terminus and boarded the train which was to take them on their picnic out on to the moors. The world seemed transfigured that wet but happy afternoon. It seemed to Mr. Proudfoot that everything certainly was for the best in this best of all possible worlds. The tramcars were running smoothly and efficiently. The gay, handsome conductor performed his duty as if it were a pleasure. The policeman looked well fed, well paid, well satisfied. Even the rain fell satisfactorily from a dull but sober sky, and everybody was duly provided either with raincoat or umbrella--all was undoubtedly just as it should be. The world was well oiled and ran smoothly; everything was a wheel turning round easily on its axle, and God the Mechanic walked about his machinery and was well pleased.

And Mr. Proudfoot stood at once right inside and outside this astonishing world. He had a pointed beard, long hands, and shy manners. His name was said to have been “Proud-bottom.” There is a theory that an ancestor of his applied for royal permission to annul the unpalatable name, and the Sovereign had been graciously pleased to amend the “bottom” to “foot.” Now Weaver had felt from the first that Mr. Proudfoot was “different.” And he was right. Mr. Proudfoot was an author of standing. And as for his being immortal, who can tell? He wrote private letters with an eye to their post-humous publication, keeping a copy of each, in case his friends should lose or mislay them. He was a student of the old giants of literature, and he walked in their wake. He did not throw away his old sponge, for example, recalling that Goethe’s was on exhibition at his famous house in Weimar, and accordingly gave his own to his sister to put away. As for the critics, whenever Mr. Proudfoot published a new book, they wrote: “Very suggestive ... never a dull page ... the interest sustained to the end. Nevertheless, one wishes that the author would break new ground, express life from a new angle....” But if he did leap over the fence and explore new tracks, “Go back, go back,” they wrote in the newspapers, “get you back to the simple delights of your earlier books and we will listen to you till the crack of doom....” Mr. Proudfoot had arrived four months earlier in Pedlar-with-Thresham. And why, in God’s name? you will ask. And indeed it would be difficult to imagine why anyone should arrive there, if he were not cursed by having to be there from the beginning. At the last General Election a local magnate in welcoming the Liberal candidate to Pedlar-with-Thresham from the dais raised outside the town hall, exclaimed with patriotic emotion: “In Pedlar-with-Thresham we spin well and vote well!”

“Aye--and starve well!” came a voice from the audience.

Such a place was Pedlar-with-Thresham. Mr. Proudfoot went there to get “local colour” for a Lancashire novel he was then writing. Nor was this the only reason. He had read in the newspapers of the low deathrate of Pedlar-with-Thresham and so, as he was afraid of dying young, he went to live there.

The sun had come out as the two men walked up on to the moors, arguing heatedly, till Weaver, still maintaining his belief in hate, suggested good-naturedly, “Let’s sit down here and have a go at what we’ve brought with us, what? Open that basket. Come on, look out what you’re doing! See, you can’t handle your tools properly. Oh my! Watch me. That reminds me. I once captained a working men’s football team up North, and had to take the blighters to London, where they were being entertained--mighty lavishly too! They were the scum of the earth--no idea how to hold a tool or to behave in decent society. So I said to them, ‘Look here, you old blokes, watch me in everything, do just as I do, follow me, see? and you’ll be all right.’ And I took the serviette--or what you fellows would call the table-napkin, I s’pose--placed it carefully on me seat and sat down on it. And they all--the whole blinkin’ crew of ’em--got up, you know, placed their serviettes on their seats carefully and sat down on ’em. Makes me roar even now when I think of it. Have another beer. Look here, old chap, shall we run up and see the hangman I told you about who bites off the heads of live rats--eh? He has his inn down the road further up on the moors. Good material for you, what?”

“I wouldn’t go near one.”

“Why? he’s a necessary institution.”

“I question that. If it is impossible to prevent homicidal maniacs from killing their fellows, then by all means let them forfeit their lives painlessly at the hands of a doctor. So much mercy is shown to mad dogs.”

“You need a hangman to frighten folk with.”

“Get away with you!”

“Undoubtedly!” said Weaver passionately.

“Nonsense. It’s suffering to no purpose.”

“It contributes in a way to the experience of the world-soul,” said Weaver philosophically.

“Damn your world-soul! Damn your fanatical readiness to sacrifice real suffering units for the sake of God knows what misty and unfeeling generalities. You’ll burn human beings in furnaces as sacrifices for what-not tin gods. You’ll plunge into war for what-not shaky nationalist, imperialist, religious ideals. This fanatical _laisser faire_, this hapless surrender of the only vital feeling thing--individual human life--for an abstraction! It’s just here that you let in Beelzebub, in the name of what-not vague and void resplendence!”

“But there are compensations. Think of the pleasure a condemned man enjoys in knowing that the entire world is talking of him. They enjoy the vanity of it, without a doubt.”

“Get away with you!”

“_Undoubtedly!_” said Weaver, with tremendous emphasis, as he was wont to do when feeling his opponent to be full of scepticism and doubt.

“When I say you are a fool, Weaver, I really don’t mean to insult you: I merely wish to illustrate the word.”

“When I am landing you one on the chin, I do so entirely without malice. There,” he said.

Proudfoot blinked. “You are right. I congratulate you on admirably illustrating the incommensurable qualities of our respective weapons of offence. Still, allow me to doubt the amount of a condemned man’s enjoyment. An ex-warder told me once how out of ninety-eight executions he had witnessed there was not one case when the victim did not either collapse or was dragged fighting and screaming to the gallows. And the women, they cry and kick their heels as they are carried there. But the Press prints the official version that the prisoner ‘walked firmly to the scaffold’ and that it was all over in less than twenty-five seconds.”

“Still, I am in favour of hanging,” Weaver said, thoughtfully.

“No man has any right to be in favour of something the full horror of which he is, through his own defective imagination, incapable of realising.”

“Abolish capital punishment, and nobody’s life will be safe.”

“Stupidity,” said Mr. Proudfoot, “is in itself a hollow term: it is people like yourself who lend it meaning. Nobody’s life will be safe!” he mimicked derisively.

“Undoubtedly!”

“This is what they said of sheep-stealing at the time. ‘Abolish the death penalty for stealing sheep, and not a sheep will be left in this fair England of ours!’ And all those little boys and girls who, in Queen Victoria’s golden reign, were hanged for stealing a spoon. ‘Abolish hanging,’ the people said, ‘and there will not be left a single silver spoon in England.’ Oh, my God! I’m ashamed of humanity.... Little boys and girls ... in the condemned cell ... dragged out in the morning and hanged ... in Victoria’s complacent time--when Englishmen were ‘good.’”

“Serve ’em right, the brats! Teach ’em a lesson! We had a case recently----”

“Devil!” he said. “Devil!” Mr. Proudfoot clutched the stick in his shaking fist--he was not to blame that the other end of it shook at a far greater tangent--and thus shaking it at one end touched Weaver’s neck with the other. Even as he did so he had a feeling that he had overstepped the mark, and he was about to crave his friend’s pardon--when he saw that he had indeed overstepped it. Weaver leaned back and turned his face to his friend as who might say, “Hello, old chap, what’s up?” But the singular thing was that Weaver remained sitting there with just the same astonished look in his face. Only blood was now trickling from the corner of his mouth down his new light-grey suit.

* * * * *

Proudfoot remembered how distinctly his senses registered the details of subsequent events. As he walked home one little boy out of a group of little boys and girls asked him for a cigarette card. He said he hadn’t any and passed along, but the little boy ran after him and shouted, “Give me a cigarette card!”

“_Haven’t got any!_” he bellowed in reply.

And the little boy, frightened, began to cry softly.

“You shouldn’t ask like that,” he was consoled by his little sisters. “You should ask properly.”

And suddenly Mr. Proudfoot felt that he was not the man to bellow now.

The tramcar was nearly empty. He would have preferred to have it full. A fat old woman was holding forth to the conductor, who punctuated her flowing narrative with periodical “Aye--aye”’s: “’Ad a real good time. Forty of us went to Blackpool in a sharry. It cost us ten bob a ’ead. Ee! but we did ’ave a fine h’outing. An’ such a dinner! We started wi’ lamb and green peas and fresh potatoes; after that we ’ed potato-pie, an’ ’alf a chicken for each one of us, and pop to drink. After dinner we went for a picnic and took us tea wi’ us. Eh, _’twas_ a treat! We ’ad three fine tongues all cut up an’ ready like and plenty o’ bread an’ butter. But th’ pity was as I was off me h’appetite an’ couldn’t manage me share. When we was coming w’home we called at a pub or two, as we was very dry. Ee! but it _was_ a fine outing!”

Wasn’t life wonderful!

And suddenly Proudfoot remembered.

As he went down a narrow lane, a little girl said to a smaller one who had fallen on a stone, “Now ye’ve made a ’ole in yer leg.” And he felt that, in other circumstances, he might have smiled. Passing the grocer’s, where Betty was still reading _Only a Mill Girl_, he wondered whether he should go in as if nothing had occurred and buy his usual packet of cigarettes. Or better not be seen. One less witness at court. What had he better do? Now he was back in Pedlar-with-Thresham, and passing the familiar brass plate with “Gilbert French, Solicitor,” he wondered whether he should go in, remembering the pun he used to make that Gilbert was a French solicitor. He somehow wished he was. He wished he himself were away in France. But they would extradite him on a warrant. Oh, God! was there really no escape?