The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story Part 55

And he added in a low voice: "It was the _Other_."

I paid off the cab, and we took a 'bus which pa.s.sed by the street where Barber lived. All the way I continued to reproach him. It was not enough for him to play the fool on his own account, but he must get me into a mess, too. I might lose my work through him.

I walked with him to his door. He looked extremely ill. His hand trembled so badly that he could not fit his latchkey. I opened the door for him.

"Come up and sit with a fellow," he ventured.

"Why?"

"I'm frightened.--"

"I believe," I said roughly, "that you've been drinking--or drugging."

I shoved him inside the house, pulled the door closed, and walked away down the street. I was very angry and disturbed, but I felt also the need to treat Barber with contempt so as to keep myself alive to the fact that he was really a mere nothing, a little sc.u.m on the surface of London, of no more importance than a piece of paper on the pavement.

For--shall I confess it?--I was even yet so much under the emotion of the scene back there in the concert hall that I could not help regarding him still with some mixture of respect and--yes, absurd as it may sound, of fear.

It was nearly a year before I saw Barber again. I heard that he had lost his place at his office. The cas.h.i.+er there, who told me this, said that although the young man was generally docile and a fair worker, he had in the last year become very irregular, and was often quarrelsome and impudent. He added that Barber could now and then influence the management--"when he was not himself," as the cas.h.i.+er put it--or they would not have tolerated him so long.

"But this was only momentary," said the cas.h.i.+er. "He was more often weak and feeble, and they took a good opportunity to get rid of him. He was uncanny," ended the cas.h.i.+er significantly.

I cannot imagine how Barber existed after he lost his place. Perhaps his mother was able to help a little. On the day I met him, by mere chance in the street, he looked sick and miserable; his sallow face was more blotchy than ever. Whether he saw me or not I don't know, but he was certainly making as if to go by when I stopped him. I told him he looked weak and unwell.

"Trust you to pa.s.s a cheery remark!" And he continued irritably:

"How can you expect a chap to look well if he has something inside him stronger than himself forcing him to do the silliest things? It _must_ wear him out. I never know when it will take me next. I'm here in London looking for a job today, but even if I find one, I'm sure to do some tom-fool thing that will get me the sack."

He pa.s.sed his hand across his face. "I'd rather not think about it."

I took pity on him, he looked so hara.s.sed, and I asked him to come on to a Lyons restaurant with me and have a bit of lunch. As we walked through the streets, we fell in with a great crowd, and then I remembered that some royal visitors were to proceed in great state to the Mansion House.

I proposed to Barber that we should go and look at the procession, and he agreed more readily than I expected.

In fact, after a while, the crowd, and the rumor, and stirring of troops as they fell into position, evidently wrought on him to a remarkable degree. He began to talk loud and rather haughtily, to study his gestures; there was infinite superiority and disdain in the looks he cast on the people. He attracted the attention and, I thought, the derision of those close to us, and I became rather ashamed and impatient of those ridiculous airs. Yet I could not help feeling sorry for him.

The poor creature evidently suffered from megalomania--that was the only way to account for his pretentious notions of his own importance, seeing that he was just a needy little clerk out of work.--

The place from which we were watching the procession was a corner of Piccadilly Circus. The street lay before our eyes bleached in the sun, wide and empty, looking about three times as large as usual, bordered with a line of soldiers and mounted police, and the black crowd ma.s.sed behind. In a few minutes the procession of princes would sweep by. There was a hush over all the people.

What followed happened so quickly that I can hardly separate the progressive steps. Barber continued to talk excitedly, but all my attention being on the scene before me, I took no heed of what he said.

Neither could I hear him very plainly. But it must have been the ceasing of his voice which made me look around, when I saw he was no longer by my side.

How he managed, at that moment, to get out there I never knew, but suddenly in the broad vacant s.p.a.ce, fringed by police and soldiery, I saw Barber walking alone in the sight of all the people.

I was thunderstruck. What a madman! I expected to hear the crowd roar at him, to see the police ride up and drag him away.

But n.o.body moved; there was a great stillness; and before I knew it my own feelings blended with the crowd's. It seemed to me that Barber was in his right place there: this mean shabby man, walking solitary, was what we had all come to see. For his pa.s.sage the street had been cleared, the guards deployed, the houses decked.

It all sounds wild, I know, but the whole scene made so deep an impression on my mind that I am perfectly certain as to what I felt while Barber was walking there. He walked slowly, with no trace of his usual shuffling uncertain gait, but with a balanced cadenced step, and as he turned his head calmly from side to side his face seemed transfigured. It was the face of a genius, an evil genius, unjust and ruthless--a brutal G.o.d. I felt, and no doubt everyone in the crowd felt, that between us and that lonely man there was some immense difference and distance of outlook and will and desire.

I could follow his progress for several yards. Then I lost sight of him.

Almost immediately afterward I heard a tumult--shouts and uproar--

Then the royal procession swept by.

I said to Mr. G.M., "Whether he was arrested that day, or knocked down by the cavalry and taken to a hospital, I don't know. I have not seen or heard of him till I got that letter on Wednesday."

Mr. G.M., who is now one of the managers of a well-known tobacconist firm, had been in the same office as Barber, and notwithstanding the disparity of age and position, had always shown a kindly interest in him and befriended him when he could. Accordingly, when I received a letter from Barber begging in very lamentable terms to visit him at an address in Kent, I thought it prudent to consult this gentleman before sending any reply. He proposed very amiably that we should meet at Charing Cross Station on the following Sat.u.r.day afternoon and travel in to Kent together. In the train we discussed Barber's case. I related all I knew of the young man and we compared our observations.

"Certainly," said Mr. G.M., "what you tell me is rather astonis.h.i.+ng. But the explanation is simple as far as poor Barber is concerned. You say he has been often ill lately? Naturally, this has affected his brain and spirits. What is a little more difficult to explain is the impression left by his acts on you and other spectators. But the anger you always experienced may have clouded your faculties for the time being. Have you inquired of anybody else who was present on these occasions?"

I replied that I had not. I had shrunk from being identified in any way with Barber. I had to think of my wife and children. I could not afford to lose my post.

"No," rejoined Mr. G.M., "I can quite understand that. I should probably have acted myself as you did. Still, the effect his performances have had on you, and apparently on others, is the strangest element in Barber's case. Otherwise, I don't see that it offers anything inexplicable. You say that Barber acts against his will--against his better judgment. We all do that. All men and women who look back over their lives must perceive the number of things they have done which they had no intention of doing. We obey some secret command; we sail under sealed orders. We pa.s.s by without noticing it some tiny fact which, years later, perhaps, influences the rest of our lives. And for all our thinking, we seldom can trace this tiny fact. I myself cannot tell to this day why I did not become a Baptist minister. It seems to me I always intended to do this, but one fine afternoon I found I had ended my first day's work in a house of business.

"Much of our life is unconscious; even the most wide-awake of us pa.s.s much of our lives in dreams. Several hours out of every twenty-four we pa.s.s in a dream state we cannot help carrying some of those happy or sinister adventures into our waking hours. It is really as much our habit to dream as to be awake. Perhaps we are always dreaming. Haven't you ever for a moment, under some powerful exterior shock, become half conscious that you should be doing something else from what you are actually doing? But with us this does not last; and as life goes on such intimations become dimmer and dimmer. With subjects like Barber, on the other hand, the intimations become stronger and stronger, till at last they attempt to carry their dreams into action. That is the way I explain this case."

"Perhaps you are right."

The house where Barber was lodging stood high up on the side of a hill.

We reached it after a rather breathless climb in the rain. It was a shepherd's cottage, standing quite lonely. Far down below the village could be seen with the smoke above the red roofs.

The woman told us that Barber was in, but she thought he might be asleep. He slept a lot.

"I don't know how he lives," she said. "He pays us scarce anything. We can't keep him much longer."

He was fast asleep, lying back in a chair with his mouth half open, wrapped in a shabby overcoat. He looked very mean; and when he awoke it was only one long wail on his hard luck. He couldn't get any work.

People had a prejudice against him; they looked at him askance. He had a great desire for sleep--couldn't somehow keep awake.

"If I could tell you the dreams I have!" he cried fretfully. "Silliest rotten stuff. I try to tell 'em to the woman here or her husband sometimes, but they won't listen. Shouldn't be surprised if they think I'm a bit off. They say I'm always talking to myself. I'm sure I'm not.--I wish I could get out of here. Can't you get me a job?" he asked, turning to Mr. G.M.

"Well, Gus, I'll see. I'll do my best."

"Lummy!" exclaimed Barber excitedly, "you ought to see the things I dream. I can't think where the bloomin' pictures come from. And yet I've seen it all before. I know all those faces. They are not all white. Some are brown like Egyptians, and some are quite black. I've seen them somewhere. Those long terraces and statues and fountains and marble courts, and the blue sky and the sun, and those dancing girls with the nails of their hands and feet stained red, and the boy in whose hair I wipe my fingers, and the slave I struck dead last night--"

His eyes were delirious, terrible to see.

"Ah," he cried hoa.r.s.ely, "I am stifling here. Let us go into the air."

And indeed he was changing so much--not essentially in his person, though his face had become broader, intolerant, domineering and cruel--but there was pouring from him so great an emanation of power that it seemed to crack and break down the poor little room. Mr. G.M.

and myself had no desire to thwart him, and it never occurred to us to do so. We should as soon have thought of stopping a thunderstorm. We followed him outside on to the s.p.a.ce of level ground before the house and listened humbly while he spoke.

As well as I can recollect, he was lamenting some hindrance to his impulses, some flaw in his power. "To have the instincts of the ruler and no slaves to carry out my will. To wish to reward and punish and to be deprived of the means. To be the master of the world, but only in my own breast--Oh, fury! The ploughboy there is happy, for he has no longings outside of his simple round life. While I--if I had the earth in my hand, I should want a star. Misery! Misery!"

He leaned upon a low stonewall and looked down on the town, over the pastures blurred with rain.

"And those wretches down there," he p.r.o.nounced slowly, "who jeer at me when I pa.s.s and insult me with impunity, whose heads should be struck off, and I cannot strike them off! I loathe that town. How ugly it is!

It offends my eyes."

He turned and looked us full in the face and our hearts became as water.

"Burn it," he said.