"It's no use," said Gobion, "I'm finished--mind and body."

"Rot, old man! you're only rather pippy. Don't you know you've _always_ got me? Don't you remember how once for a joke in those Ship Street rooms you made me put my hands between yours and swear to be your man?

Well, it wasn't a joke--to me. Don't you know how we all love you? Fancy your being here, you who used to lead us all. d.a.m.n it all, what gaudy nonsense I'm talking!"

His rather commonplace face shone strangely. He seemed to change the mean aspect of the room, to annihilate its sordidness.

Late at night Scott went back to his hotel, promising to be round first thing in the morning to take Gobion away. They parted at the door with a long hand-grip, and never met again in this world.

When he had gone Gobion went back to his room and fell like a log on to the floor, lying there motionless till the grey light crept into the court.

Then he got up and swiftly packed a small bag, his face white and drawn.

He went into the next room. The lamp was still burning, and old Mr.

Belper lay in a drunken sleep on the bed. His mouth was open, and he breathed heavily.

Gobion woke him. "I've come to say good-bye," he said.

"What! has it come to that?"

"Yes."

The old man stared heavily. "Well, good-bye," he said. "I shan't be very long either. I'm glad we've met. I, ahem, I--er"--he coughed--"I congratulate you." He pa.s.sed his dirty hand over his eyes. "Yes, I--er--congratulate you. I wish--I'll see you out."

He came to the front door. They shook hands. "Good-bye," he said, "good-bye, dear boy."

He stood on the steps, a fat, grotesque figure, and watched Gobion's slim form disappear in the fog--a dirty, shameless old man.

CHAPTER VIII.

_THE FINAL POSE._

He felt that the time had come at last. What in his misery he had thought vaguely possible now loomed close before.

With the resolve to make an end of it all, to have done with pain, to cheat the inevitable, came a flood of relief. The torture of his brain was swept away as if it had not been, and its receding tide left only a shallow residuum of false sentiment.

The poor fool busied himself with details and accessories. Since he had come to the point, he resolved that he would pose to the last. He began to play his old trick of exciting a diseased duality of consciousness.

As he walked eastwards he was composing his farewell letters, he was picturing to himself the sorrow of his friends. They would talk of him wonderingly, as a brilliant life promising great things, gone with its work undone. They would recall his sweetness, the glow of his bright youth ... the tears came into his eyes at the idea, it was so pathetic a picture.

His thoughts had run so long in the same groove, that though he felt dimly that there ought to be other and deeper feelings within him, he was unable to evoke them. He was conscious that this dainty picturing was utterly false; yet, try as he would, he could not stop it. Whether it was the last flicker of intense vanity, or merely that his mind was weakened by debauchery, it is impossible to say; but when a man plays unhealthy tricks with his mind, and is for ever feeling his spiritual muscles, the habit holds him fast as in a vice. His last hours possess a strange psychological interest.

He walked eastwards mechanically, but stopped when he had turned into Houndsditch, and the roar of the early traffic in Bishopsgate sounded less loudly.

From a card hanging in a p.a.w.nbroker's window he saw a bedroom was to let, and after paying the rent in advance, he was allowed to take possession. He lit the oil-stove that did duty for a fire, and lay down, falling into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

When he woke it was quite dark, and after washing his hands he went to a low eating-house for a last meal. The _menu_ was pasted on the window in strips, while a cabbage-laden steam floated out of the half-open door.

The room was long and low of ceiling, each table standing in a separate part.i.tion. A large woman, dressed in a scarlet silk blouse, walked up and down the centre gangway, taking the orders, which she shouted out in a hoa.r.s.e voice to the open kitchen at the far end. "Pudding and peas!"

"Roast, Yorkshire, and baked!"

The table at which Gobion sat was covered with oil-cloth, and as he moved a saucer full of salt out of the way of his elbow, a many-legged insect ran over it to a crack in the wall.

The woman brought him the food, not giving him a knife and fork till he had paid for what he had ordered. He noticed her hands were red and misshapen, with long, black nails.

He ate ravenously. Over the low part.i.tion he could see a Jew jerking some rich, steaming mess into his mouth with a curious twist of the wrist, and every now and again wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his coat. These details fascinated him.

When he had done, he asked for some paper, and with the roar of Whitechapel surging outside he began to write to Scott.

"MY DEAR, DEAR OLD MAN,

Forgive me for what I am going to do. Life seems to me----"

After writing a sentence or two he tore it up, as he found that he could not produce what he wanted. Time after time he tried, and only succeeded in being commonplace to the last degree. All his ideas of a tender farewell, a beautiful poetic letter, seemed impossible of realization; instead, he produced effusions which looked as if they might have been copied from the _Family Herald_.

At last he wrote simply "Good-bye," adding his new address. He tried to think of someone else to write to, but could not. His father he hated and feared; there was no thrill in a letter to him. It all seemed very flat and commonplace. These last few hours were not at all as he had pictured to himself.

Then he went out into the Whitechapel High Street. The costermongers'

stalls, lit with flaring naphtha lamps, made the street nearly as bright as in the day-time. The pavement was greasy to walk on, and it was thronged by a vast crowd walking slowly up and down. The fog was settling over the houses, and the place smelt like a stale sponge.

He wandered slowly down towards the church, picking his way among the mob.

Coa.r.s.e Jewish women with false hair shouted to one another. Girls with high cheek-bones, smeared with red and white, caught hold of his arm, whispering evil suggestions to him, and cursing him for a fool when he turned away. There was a lurid glow in the air.

He stopped outside a stationer's window, gazing idly at the specimens of invitation cards in the window.

"_Mr. and Mrs. Levenstein Request the pleasure of your company At the occasion of their son's circ.u.mcision._"

In the brilliant light he saw the gutters littered with decayed vegetables, bones, and rags. Two old women stood at a corner of the Commercial Road. He heard one of them say, "Yes, it was still-born, so she _said_; but I 'eard it squeak before Annie come out of the room." He pa.s.sed on. A piano-organ, with a cage of bedraggled birds on the top, struck up, the handle being turned by a boy, while his father went among the crowd showing a smooth white stump where his hand should have been.

The door of the Free Library stood open. He went in. The room was crowded with men standing about reading the evening papers. He walked up and down through the rows of stands, as if looking for someone, after a while coming out again into the street. A sailor knocked against him, and swore at him for a "bleeding fool."

He was pa.s.sing a pillar-box, when he remembered his letter to Scott, and he posted it, hearing the hollow echo of its fall with the sense of a curious subjective disturbance in the air around. He felt something was by him in the noisy street, something waiting by him for the end. He looked hastily over his shoulder, and then laughed grimly.

After a time, when he had been among the crowd for nearly two hours, some impulse seemed to draw him away, and he went back towards Houndsditch. Before turning down the long narrow street, he went into the "Three Nuns," the big hotel at the corner, and spent his last shilling in three gla.s.ses of brandy.

As he closed the door of his lodgings, the noise of the streets sank suddenly into a distant hum, through which he could distinguish the far-off tinklings of the barrel-organ, which had moved higher up the street. When he got to his room he busied himself in making it clean and tidy, clearing up the hearth, putting his clothes neatly away into his bag.

Then he took a little bottle out of his pocket marked "Chloroform."

Over the head of the bed he fixed up a sort of rack with two hatpins and some string, so that the bottle could swing exactly over his pillow.

Then he p.r.i.c.ked a hole in the cork in such a manner that if the phial was turned upside-down, every few minutes a drop of liquid would ooze through.

He lit a cigarette and sat down to think. He was not quite sober, but he felt a dull conviction that things were never more unsatisfactory. He felt no sadness, no pathos, stealing over him.

With a great effort he struggled to realize things, getting up and walking round the room, talking thickly to himself. "Here I am, young, clever, of a good family, a man who might have been good or even great; am I going to die like a rat in a hole? Oh, G.o.d!" He said it with all the force and yearning he could put into his voice, trying to force a note of pain, but the result was most ordinary. He looked at his face in a little strip of looking-gla.s.s above the fireplace. He saw nothing but the imprint of impurity and sin.