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Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
 One cheering thing happened on Thursday afternoon; a little girl
came in with a pattern of “print” and he was able to match it. He had
not been able to match anything out of his meagre stock before. He
went in and told Minnie. The incident is mentioned lest the reader
should imagine it was uniform despair with him.
The next morning, and the next, after the discovery, Winslow
opened shop late. When one has been awake most of the night, and
has no hope, what is the good of getting up punctually? But as he
went into the dark shop on Friday a strange event happened. He saw
something lying on the floor, something lit by the bright light that
came under the ill-fitting door—a black oblong. He stooped and
picked up an envelope with a deep mourning edge. It was addressed
to his wife. Clearly a death in her family—perhaps her uncle. He
knew the man too well to have expectations. And they would have to
get mourning and go to the funeral. The brutal cruelty of people
dying! He saw it all in a flash—he always visualised his thoughts.
Black trousers to get, black crape, black gloves,—none in stock,—the
railway fares, the shop closed for the day.
“I’m afraid there’s bad news, Minnie,” he said.
She was kneeling before the fireplace, blowing the fire. She had her
housemaid’s gloves on and the old country sun-bonnet she wore of a
morning, to keep the dust out of her hair. She turned, saw the
envelope, gave a gasp, and pressed two bloodless lips together.
“I’m afraid it’s uncle,” she said, holding the letter and staring with
eyes wide open into Winslow’s face. “It’s a strange hand!”
“The postmark’s Hull,” said Winslow.
“The postmark’s Hull.”
Minnie opened the letter slowly, drew it out, hesitated, turned it
over, saw the signature. “It’s Mr. Speight!”
“What does he say?” said Winslow.
Minnie began to read. “Oh!” she screamed. She dropped the letter,
collapsed into a crouching heap, her hands covering her eyes.
Winslow snatched at it. “A most terrible accident has occurred,” he
read; “Melchior’s chimney fell down yesterday evening right on the
top of your uncle’s house, and every living soul was killed—your
uncle, your cousin Mary, Will, and Ned, and the girl—every one of
them, and smashed—you would hardly know them. I’m writing to
you to break the news before you see it in the papers—.” The letter
fluttered from Winslow’s fingers. He put out his hand against the
mantel to steady himself.
All of them dead! Then he saw, as in a vision, a row of seven
cottages, each let at seven shillings a week, a timber yard, two villas,
and the ruins—still marketable—of the avuncular residence. He tried
to feel a sense of loss and could not. They were sure to have been left
to Minnie’s aunt. All dead! 7 × 7 × 52 ÷ 20 began insensibly to work
itself out in his mind, but discipline was ever weak in his mental
arithmetic; figures kept moving from one line to another, like
children playing at Widdy, Widdy Way. Was it two hundred pounds
about—or one hundred pounds? Presently he picked up the letter
again, and finished reading it. “You being the next of kin,” said Mr.
Speight.
“How awful!” said Minnie, in a horror-struck whisper, and looking
up at last. Winslow stared back at her, shaking his head solemnly.
There were a thousand things running through his mind, but none
that, even to his dull sense, seemed appropriate as a remark. “It was
the Lord’s will,” he said at last.
“It seems so very, very terrible,” said Minnie; “auntie, dear auntie
—Ted—poor, dear uncle—”
“It was the Lord’s will, Minnie,” said Winslow, with infinite feeling.
A long silence.
“Yes,” said Minnie, very slowly, staring thoughtfully at the
crackling black paper in the grate. The fire had gone out. “Yes,
perhaps it was the Lord’s will.”
They looked gravely at one another. Each would have been terribly
shocked at any mention of the property by the other. She turned to
the dark fireplace and began tearing up an old newspaper slowly.
Whatever our losses may be, the world’s work still waits for us.
Winslow gave a deep sigh and walked in a hushed manner towards
the front door. As he opened it a flood of sunlight came streaming
into the dark shadows of the closed shop. Brandersnatch, Helter,
Skelter, & Grab, had vanished out of his mind like the mists before
the rising sun.
Presently he was carrying in the shutters, and in the briskest way;
the fire in the kitchen was crackling exhilaratingly with a little
saucepan walloping above it, for Minnie was boiling two eggs—one
for herself this morning, as well as one for him—and Minnie herself
was audible, laying breakfast with the greatest éclat. The blow was a
sudden and terrible one—but it behoves us to face such things
bravely in this sad, unaccountable world. It was quite midday before
either of them mentioned the cottages.
 LE MARI TERRIBLE

“You are always so sympathetic,” she said; and added, reflectively,

“and one can talk of one’s troubles to you without any nonsense.”
I wondered dimly if she meant that as a challenge. I helped myself
to a biscuit thing that looked neither poisonous nor sandy. “You are
one of the most puzzling human beings I ever met,” I said,—a
perfectly safe remark to any woman under any circumstances.
“Do you find me so hard to understand?” she said.
“You are dreadfully complex.” I bit at the biscuit thing, and found
it full of a kind of creamy bird-lime. (I wonder why women will
arrange these unpleasant surprises for me—I sickened of sweets
twenty years ago.)
“How so?” she was saying, and smiling her most brilliant smile.
I have no doubt she thought we were talking rather nicely. “Oh!”
said I, and waved the cream biscuit thing. “You challenge me to
dissect you.”
“Well?”
“And that is precisely what I cannot do.”
“I’m afraid you are very satirical,” she said, with a touch of
disappointment. She is always saying that when our conversation has
become absolutely idiotic—as it invariably does. I felt an inevitable
desire to quote bogus Latin to her. It seemed the very language for
her.
“Malorum fiducia pars quosque libet,” I said, in a low voice,
looking meaningly into her eyes.
“Ah!” she said, colouring a little, and turned to pour hot water into
the teapot, looking very prettily at me over her arm as she did so.
 “That is one of the truest things that has ever been said of
sympathy,” I remarked. “Don’t you think so?”
“Sympathy,” she said, “is a very wonderful thing, and a very
precious thing.”
“You speak,” said I (with a cough behind my hand), “as though you
knew what it was to be lonely.”
“There is solitude even in a crowd,” she said, and looked round at
the six other people—three discreet pairs—who were in the room.
“I, too,” I was beginning, but Hopdangle came with a teacup, and
seemed inclined to linger. He belongs to the “Nice Boy” class, and
gives himself ridiculous airs of familiarity with grown-up people.
Then the Giffens went.
“Do you know, I always take such an interest in your work,” she
was saying to me, when her husband(confound him!) came into the
room.
He was a violent discord. He wore a short brown jacket and carpet
slippers, and three of his waistcoat buttons were (as usual) undone.
“Got any tea left, Millie?” he said, and came and sat down in the arm-
chair beside the table.
“How do, Delalune?” he said to the man in the corner. “Damned
hot, Bellows,” he remarked to me, subsiding creakily.
She poured some more hot water into the teapot. (Why must
charming married women always have these husbands?)
“It is very hot,” I said.
There was a perceptible pause. He is one of those rather adipose
people, who are not disconcerted by conversational gaps. “Are you,
too, working at Argon?” I said. He is some kind of chemical
investigator, I know.
He began at once to explain the most horribly complex things
about elements to me. She gave him his tea, and rose and went and
talked to the other people about autotypes. “Yes,” I said, not hearing
what he was saying.
“‘No’ would be more appropriate,” he said. “You are absent-
minded, Bellows. Not in love, I hope—at your age?”
Really, I am not thirty, but a certain perceptible thinness in my
hair may account for his invariably regarding me as a contemporary.
But he should understand that nowadays the beginnings of baldness
merely mark the virile epoch. “I say, Millie,” he said, out loud and
across the room, “you haven’t been collecting Bellows here—have
you?”
She looked round startled, and I saw a pained look come into her
eyes. “For the bazaar?” she said. “Not yet, dear.” It seemed to me that
she shot a glance of entreaty at him. Then she turned to the others
again.
“My wife,” he said, “has two distinctive traits. She is a born poetess
and a born collector. I ought to warn you.”
“I did not know,” said I, “that she rhymed.”
“I was speaking more of the imaginative quality, the temperament
that finds a splendour in the grass, a glory in the flower, that clothes
the whole world in a vestiture of interpretation.”
“Indeed!” I said. I felt she was watching us anxiously. He could
not, of course, suspect. But I was relieved to fancy he was simply
talking nonsense.
“The magnificent figures of heroic, worshipful, and mysterious
womanhood naturally appeal to her—Cleopatra, Messalina, Beatrice,
the Madonna, and so forth.”
“And she is writing—”
“No, she is acting. That is the real poetry of women and children. A
platonic Cleopatra of infinite variety, spotless reputation, and a large
following. Her make-believe is wonderful. She would use Falstaff for
Romeo without a twinge, if no one else was at hand. She could exert
herself to break the heart of a soldier. I assure you, Bellows—”
I heard her dress rustle behind me.
“I want some more tea,” he said to her. “You misunderstood me
about the collecting, Millie.”
“What were you saying about Cleopatra?” she said, trying, I think,
to look sternly at him.
“Scandal,” he said. “But about the collecting, Bellows—”
“You must come to this bazaar,” she interrupted.
“I shall be delighted,” I said, boldly. “Where is it, and when?”
“About this collecting,” he began.
 “It is in aid of that delightful orphanage at Wimblingham,” she
explained, and gave me an animated account of the charity. He
emptied his second cup of tea. “May I have a third cup?” he said.
The two girls signalled departure, and her attention was distracted.
“She collects—and I will confess she does it with extraordinary skill—
the surreptitious addresses—”
“John,” she said over her shoulder, “I wish you would tell Miss
Smithers all those interesting things about Argon.” He gulped down
his third cup, and rose with the easy obedience of the trained
husband. Presently she returned to the tea-things. “Cannot I fill your
cup?” she asked. “I really hope John was not telling you his queer
notions about me. He says the most remarkable things. Quite lately
he has got it into his head that he has a formula for my character.”
“I wish I had,” I said, with a sigh.
“And he goes about explaining me to people, as though I was a
mechanism. ‘Scalp collector,’ I think is the favourite phrase. Did he
tell you? Don’t you think it perfectly horrid of him?”
“But he doesn’t understand you,” I said, not grasping his meaning
quite at the minute.
She sighed.
“You have,” I said, with infinite meaning, “my sincere sympathy—”
I hesitated—“my whole sympathy.”
“Thank you so much,” she said, quite as meaningly. I rose
forthwith, and we clasped hands, like souls who strike a compact.
Yet, thinking over what he said afterwards, I was troubled by a
fancy that there was the faintest suggestion of a smile of triumph
about her lips and mouth. Possibly it was only an honourable pride. I
suppose he has poisoned my mind a little. Of course, I should not
like to think of myself as one of a fortuitously selected multitude
strung neatly together (if one may use the vulgarism) on a piece of
string,—a stringful like a boy’s string of chestnuts,—nice old
gentlemen, nice boys, sympathetic and humorous men of thirty, kind
fellows, gifted dreamers, and dashing blades, all trailing after her. It
is confoundedly bad form of him, anyhow, to guy her visitors. She
certainly took it like a saint. Of course, I shall see her again soon, and
we shall talk to one another about one another. Something or other
cropped up and prevented my going there on her last Tuesday.
 THE APPLE

“I must get rid of it,” said the man in the corner of the carriage,
abruptly breaking the silence.
Mr. Hinchcliff looked up, hearing imperfectly. He had been lost in
the rapt contemplation of the college cap tied by a string to his
portmanteau handles—the outward and visible sign of his newly-
gained pedagogic position—in the rapt appreciation of the college
cap and the pleasant anticipations it excited. For Mr. Hinchcliff had
just matriculated at London University, and was going to be junior
assistant at the Holmwood Grammar School—a very enviable
position. He stared across the carriage at his fellow-traveller.
“Why not give it away?” said this person. “Give it away! Why not?”
He was a tall, dark, sunburnt man with a pale face. His arms were
folded tightly, and his feet were on the seat in front of him. He was
pulling at a lank, black moustache. He stared hard at his toes.
“Why not?” he said.
Mr. Hinchcliff coughed.
The stranger lifted his eyes—they were curious, dark grey eyes—
and stared blankly at Mr. Hinchcliff for the best part of a minute,
perhaps. His expression grew to interest.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “Why not? And end it.”
“I don’t quite follow you, I’m afraid,” said Mr. Hinchcliff, with
another cough.
“You don’t quite follow me?” said the stranger, quite mechanically,
his singular eyes wandering from Mr. Hinchcliff to the bag with its
ostentatiously displayed cap, and back to Mr. Hinchcliff’s downy
face.
“You’re so abrupt, you know,” apologised Mr. Hinchcliff.
 “Why shouldn’t I?” said the stranger, following his thoughts. “You
are a student?” he said, addressing Mr. Hinchcliff.
“I am—by Correspondence—of the London University,” said Mr.
Hinchcliff, with irrepressible pride, and feeling nervously at his tie.
“In pursuit of knowledge,” said the stranger, and suddenly took his
feet off the seat, put his fist on his knees, and stared at Mr. Hinchcliff
as though he had never seen a student before. “Yes,” he said, and
flung out an index finger. Then he rose, took a bag from the hat-rack,
and unlocked it. Quite silently, he drew out something round and
wrapped in a quantity of silver-paper, and unfolded this carefully. He
held it out towards Mr. Hinchcliff,—a small, very smooth, golden-
yellow fruit.
Mr. Hinchcliff’s eyes and mouth were open. He did not offer to
take this object—if he was intended to take it.
“That,” said this fantastic stranger, speaking very slowly, “is the
Apple of the Tree of Knowledge. Look at it—small, and bright, and
wonderful—Knowledge—and I am going to give it to you.”
Mr. Hinchcliff’s mind worked painfully for a minute, and then the
sufficient explanation, “Mad!” flashed across his brain, and
illuminated the whole situation. One humoured madmen. He put his
head a little on one side.
“The Apple of the Tree of Knowledge, eigh!” said Mr. Hinchcliff,
regarding it with a finely assumed air of interest, and then looking at
the interlocutor. “But don’t you want to eat it yourself? And besides—
how did you come by it?”
“It never fades. I have had it now three months. And it is ever
bright and smooth and ripe and desirable, as you see it.” He laid his
hand on his knee and regarded the fruit musingly. Then he began to
wrap it again in the papers, as though he had abandoned his
intention of giving it away.
“But how did you come by it?” said Mr. Hinchcliff, who had his
argumentative side. “And how do you know that it is the Fruit of the
Tree?”
“I bought this fruit,” said the stranger, “three months ago—for a
drink of water and a crust of bread. The man who gave it to me—
because I kept the life in him—was an Armenian. Armenia! that
wonderful country, the first of all countries, where the ark of the
Flood remains to this day, buried in the glaciers of Mount Ararat.
This man, I say, fleeing with others from the Kurds who had come
upon them, went up into desolate places among the mountains—
places beyond the common knowledge of men. And fleeing from
imminent pursuit, they came to a slope high among the mountain-
peaks, green with a grass like knife-blades, that cut and slashed most
pitilessly at any one who went into it. The Kurds were close behind,
and there was nothing for it but to plunge in, and the worst of it was
that the paths they made through it at the price of their blood served
for the Kurds to follow. Every one of the fugitives was killed save this
Armenian and another. He heard the screams and cries of his
friends, and the swish of the grass about those who were pursuing
them—it was tall grass rising overhead. And then a shouting and
answers, and when presently he paused, everything was still. He
pushed out again, not understanding, cut and bleeding, until he
came out on a steep slope of rocks below a precipice, and then he saw
the grass was all on fire, and the smoke of it rose like a veil between
him and his enemies.”
The stranger paused. “Yes?” said Mr. Hinchcliff. “Yes?”
“There he was, all torn and bloody from the knife-blades of the
grass, the rocks blazing under the afternoon sun,—the sky molten
brass,—and the smoke of the fire driving towards him. He dared not
stay there. Death he did not mind, but torture! Far away beyond the
smoke he heard shouts and cries. Women screaming. So he went
clambering up a gorge in the rocks—everywhere were bushes with
dry branches that stuck out like thorns among the leaves—until he
clambered over the brow of a ridge that hid him. And then he met his
companion, a shepherd, who had also escaped. And, counting cold
and famine and thirst as nothing against the Kurds, they went on
into the heights, and among the snow and ice. They wandered three
whole days.
“The third day came the vision. I suppose hungry men often do see
visions, but then there is this fruit.” He lifted the wrapped globe in
his hand. “And I have heard it, too, from other mountaineers who
have known something of the legend. It was in the evening time,
when the stars were increasing, that they came down a slope of
polished rock into a huge, dark valley all set about with strange,
contorted trees, and in these trees hung little globes like glow-worm
spheres, strange, round, yellow lights.
“Suddenly this valley was lit far away, many miles away, far down
it, with a golden flame marching slowly athwart it, that made the
stunted trees against it black as night, and turned the slopes all about
them and their figures to the likeness of fiery gold. And at the vision
they, knowing the legends of the mountains, instantly knew that it
was Eden they saw, or the sentinel of Eden, and they fell upon their
faces like men struck dead.
“When they dared to look again, the valley was dark for a space,
and then the light came again—returning, a burning amber.
“At that the shepherd sprang to his feet, and with a shout began to
run down towards the light; but the other man was too fearful to
follow him. He stood stunned, amazed, and terrified, watching his
companion recede towards the marching glare. And hardly had the
shepherd set out when there came a noise like thunder, the beating
of invisible wings hurrying up the valley, and a great and terrible
fear; and at that the man who gave me the fruit turned—if he might
still escape. And hurrying headlong up the slope again, with that
tumult sweeping after him, he stumbled against one of these stunted
bushes, and a ripe fruit came off it into his hand. This fruit.
Forthwith, the wings and the thunder rolled all about him. He fell
and fainted, and when he came to his senses, he was back among the
blackened ruins of his own village, and I and the others were
attending to the wounded. A vision? But the golden fruit of the tree
was still clutched in his hand. There were others there who knew the
legend, knew what that strange fruit might be.” He paused. “And this
is it,” he said.
It was a most extraordinary story to be told in a third-class
carriage on a Sussex railway. It was as if the real was a mere veil to
the fantastic, and here was the fantastic poking through. “Is it?” was
all Mr. Hinchcliff could say.
“The legend,” said the stranger, “tells that those thickets of
dwarfed trees growing about the garden sprang from the apple that
Adam carried in his hand when he and Eve were driven forth. He felt
something in his hand, saw the half-eaten apple, and flung it
petulantly aside. And there they grow, in that desolate valley, girdled
round with the everlasting snows; and there the fiery swords keep
ward against the Judgment Day.”
“But I thought these things were—” Mr. Hinchcliff paused—“fables
—parables rather. Do you mean to tell me that there in Armenia—”
The stranger answered the unfinished question with the fruit in his
open hand.
“But you don’t know,” said Mr. Hinchcliff, “that that is the fruit of
the Tree of Knowledge. The man may have had—a sort of mirage,
say. Suppose—”
“Look at it,” said the stranger.
It was certainly a strange-looking globe, not really an apple, Mr.
Hinchcliff saw, and a curious glowing golden colour, almost as
though light itself was wrought into its substance. As he looked at it,
he began to see more vividly the desolate valley among the
mountains, the guarding swords of fire, the strange antiquities of the
story he had just heard. He rubbed a knuckle into his eye. “But—”
said he.
“It has kept like that, smooth and full, three months. Longer than
that it is now by some days. No drying, no withering, no decay.”
“And you yourself,” said Mr. Hinchcliff, “really believe that—”
“Is the Forbidden Fruit.”
There was no mistaking the earnestness of the man’s manner and
his perfect sanity. “The Fruit of Knowledge,” he said.
“Suppose it was?” said Mr. Hinchcliff, after a pause, still staring at
it. “But after all,” said Mr. Hinchcliff, “it’s not my kind of knowledge
—not the sort of knowledge. I mean, Adam and Eve have eaten it
already.”
“We inherit their sins—not their knowledge,” said the stranger.
“That would make it all clear and bright again. We should see into
everything, through everything, into the deepest meaning of
everything—”
“Why don’t you eat it, then?” said Mr. Hinchcliff, with an
inspiration.
“I took it intending to eat it,” said the stranger. “Man has fallen.
Merely to eat again could scarcely—”
“Knowledge is power,” said Mr. Hinchcliff.
 “But is it happiness? I am older than you—more than twice as old.
Time after time I have held this in my hand, and my heart has failed
me at the thought of all that one might know, that terrible lucidity—
Suppose suddenly all the world became pitilessly clear?”
“That, I think, would be a great advantage,” said Mr. Hinchcliff,
“on the whole.”
“Suppose you saw into the hearts and minds of every one about
you, into their most secret recesses—people you loved, whose love
you valued?”
“You’d soon find out the humbugs,” said Mr. Hinchcliff, greatly
struck by the idea.
“And worse—to know yourself, bare of your most intimate
illusions. To see yourself in your place. All that your lusts and
weaknesses prevented your doing. No merciful perspective.”
“That might be an excellent thing too. ‘Know thyself,’ you know.”
“You are young,” said the stranger.
“If you don’t care to eat it, and it bothers you, why don’t you throw
it away?”
“There again, perhaps, you will not understand me. To me, how
could one throw away a thing like that, glowing, wonderful? Once
one has it, one is bound. But, on the other hand, to give it away! To
give it away to some one who thirsted after knowledge, who found no
terror in the thought of that clear perception—”
“Of course,” said Mr. Hinchcliff, thoughtfully, “it might be some
sort of poisonous fruit.”
And then his eye caught something motionless, the end of a white
board black-lettered outside the carriage-window. “—MWOOD,” he
saw. He started convulsively. “Gracious!” said Mr. Hinchcliff.
“Holmwood!”—and the practical present blotted out the mystic
realisations that had been stealing upon him.
In another moment he was opening the carriage-door,
portmanteau in hand. The guard was already fluttering his green
flag. Mr. Hinchcliff jumped out. “Here!” said a voice behind him, and
he saw the dark eyes of the stranger shining and the golden fruit,
bright and bare, held out of the open carriage-door. He took it
instinctively, the train was already moving.
 “No!” shouted the stranger, and made a snatch at it as if to take it
back.
“Stand away,” cried a country porter, thrusting forward to close
the door. The stranger shouted something Mr. Hinchcliff did not
catch, head and arm thrust excitedly out of the window, and then the
shadow of the bridge fell on him, and in a trice he was hidden. Mr.
Hinchcliff stood astonished, staring at the end of the last waggon
receding round the bend, and with the wonderful fruit in his hand.
For the fraction of a minute his mind was confused, and then he
became aware that two or three people on the platform were
regarding him with interest. Was he not the new Grammar School
master making his début? It occurred to him that, so far as they
could tell, the fruit might very well be the naïve refreshment of an
orange. He flushed at the thought, and thrust the fruit into his side
pocket, where it bulged undesirably. But there was no help for it, so
he went towards them, awkwardly concealing his sense of
awkwardness, to ask the way to the Grammar School, and the means
of getting his portmanteau and the two tin boxes which lay up the
platform thither. Of all the odd and fantastic yarns to tell a fellow!
His luggage could be taken on a truck for sixpence, he found, and
he could precede it on foot He fancied an ironical note in the voices.
He was painfully aware of his contour.
The curious earnestness of the man in the train, and the glamour
of the story he told, had, for a time, diverted the current of Mr.
Hinchcliff’s thoughts. It drove like a mist before his immediate
concerns. Fires that went to and fro! But the preoccupation of his
new position, and the impression he was to produce upon Holmwood
generally, and the school people in particular, returned upon him
with reinvigorating power before he left the station and cleared his
mental atmosphere. But it is extraordinary what an inconvenient
thing the addition of a soft and rather brightly-golden fruit, not three
inches in diameter, prove to a sensitive youth on his best appearance.
In the pocket of his black jacket it bulged dreadfully, spoilt the lines
altogether. He passed a little old lady in black, and he felt her eye
drop upon the excrescence at once. He was wearing one glove and
carrying the other, together with his stick, so that to bear the fruit
openly was impossible. In one place, where the road into the town
seemed suitably secluded, he took his encumbrance out of his pocket
and tried it in his hat. It was just too large, the hat wobbled
ludicrously, and just as he was taking it out again, a butcher’s boy
came driving round the corner.
“Confound it!” said Mr. Hinchcliff.
He would have eaten the thing, and attained omniscience there
and then, but it would seem so silly to go into the town sucking a
juicy fruit—and it certainly felt juicy. If one of the boys should come
by, it might do him a serious injury with his discipline so to be seen.
And the juice might make his face sticky and get upon his cuffs—or it
might be an acid juice as potent as lemon, and take all the colour out
of his clothes.
Then round a bend in the lane came two pleasant, sunlit, girlish
figures. They were walking slowly towards the town and chattering—
at any moment they might look round and see a hot-faced young
man behind them carrying a kind of phosphorescent yellow tomato!
They would be sure to laugh.
“Hang!” said Mr. Hinchcliff, and with a swift jerk sent the
encumbrance flying over the stone wall of an orchard that there
abutted on the road. As it vanished, he felt a faint twinge of loss that
lasted scarcely a moment. He adjusted the stick and glove in his
hand, and walked on, erect and self-conscious, to pass the girls.

But in the darkness of the night Mr. Hinchcliff had a dream, and
saw the valley, and the flaming swords, and the contorted trees, and
knew that it really was the Apple of the Tree of Knowledge that he
had thrown regardlessly away. And he awoke very unhappy.
In the morning his regret had passed, but afterwards it returned
and troubled him; never, however, when he was happy or busily
occupied. At last, one moonlight night about eleven, when all
Holmwood was quiet, his regrets returned with redoubled force, and
therewith an impulse to adventure. He slipped out of the house and
over the playground wall, went through the silent town to Station
Lane, and climbed into the orchard where he had thrown the fruit.
But nothing was to be found of it there among the dewy grass and the
faint intangible globes of dandelion down.
 THE SAD STORY OF A DRAMATIC CRITIC

I was—you shall hear immediately why I am not now—Egbert

Craddock Cummins. The name remains. I am still (Heaven help me!)
Dramatic Critic to the “Fiery Cross.” What I shall be in a little while I
do not know. I write in great trouble and confusion of mind. I will do
what I can to make myself clear in the face of terrible difficulties. You
must bear with me a little. When a man is rapidly losing his own
identity, he naturally finds a difficulty in expressing himself. I will
make it perfectly plain in a minute, when once I get my grip upon the
story. Let me see—where am I? I wish I knew. Ah, I have it! Dead
self! Egbert Craddock Cummins!
In the past I should have disliked writing anything quite so full of
“I” as this story must be. It is full of “I’s” before and behind, like the
beast in Revelation—the one with a head like a calf, I am afraid. But
my tastes have changed since I became a Dramatic Critic and studied
the masters—G.R.S., G.B.S., G.A.S., and the others. Everything has
changed since then. At least the story is about myself—so that there
is some excuse for me. And it is really not egotism, because, as I say,
since those days my identity has undergone an entire alteration.
That past!—I was—in those days—rather a nice fellow, rather shy—
taste for grey in my clothes, weedy little moustache, face
“interesting,” slight stutter which I had caught in early life from a
schoolfellow. Engaged to a very nice girl, named Delia. Fairly new,
she was—cigarettes—liked me because I was human and original.
Considered I was like Lamb—on the strength of the stutter, I believe.
Father, an eminent authority on postage stamps. She read a great
deal in the British Museum. (A perfect pairing ground for literary
people, that British Museum—you should read George Egerton and
Justin Huntly M’Carthy and Gissing and the rest of them.) We loved
in our intellectual way, and shared the brightest hopes. (All gone
now.) And her father liked me because I seemed honestly eager to
hear about stamps. She had no mother. Indeed, I had the happiest
prospects a young man could have. I never went to the theatres in
those days. My Aunt Charlotte before she died had told me not to.
Then Barnaby, the editor of the “Fiery Cross,” made me—in spite
of my spasmodic efforts to escape—Dramatic Critic. He is a fine,
healthy man, Barnaby, with an enormous head of frizzy black hair
and a convincing manner; and he caught me on the staircase going to
see Wembly. He had been dining, and was more than usually
buoyant. “Hullo, Cummins!” he said. “The very man I want!” He
caught me by the shoulder or the collar or something, ran me up the
little passage, and flung me over the waste-paper basket into the
arm-chair in his office. “Pray be seated,” he said, as he did so. Then
he ran across the room and came back with some pink and yellow
tickets and pushed them into my hand. “Opera Comique,” he said,
“Thursday; Friday, the Surrey; Saturday, the Frivolity. That’s all, I
think.”
“But—” I began.
“Glad you’re free,” he said, snatching some proofs off the desk and
beginning to read.
“I don’t quite understand,” I said.
“Eigh?” he said, at the top of his voice, as though he thought I had
gone, and was startled at my remark.
“Do you want me to criticise these plays?”
“Do something with ’em— Did you think it was a treat?”
“But I can’t.”
“Did you call me a fool?”
“Well, I’ve never been to a theatre in my life.”
“Virgin soil.”
“But I don’t know anything about it, you know.”
“That’s just it. New view. No habits. No clichés in stock. Ours is a
live paper, not a bag of tricks. None of your clockwork, professional
journalism in this office. And I can rely on your integrity—”
“But I’ve conscientious scruples—”
 He caught me up suddenly and put me outside his door. “Go and
talk to Wembly about that,” he said. “He’ll explain.”
As I stood perplexed, he opened the door again, said, “I forgot
this,” thrust a fourth ticket into my hand (it was for that night—in
twenty minutes’ time), and slammed the door upon me. His
expression was quite calm, but I caught his eye.
I hate arguments. I decided that I would take his hint and become
(to my own destruction) a Dramatic Critic. I walked slowly down the
passage to Wembly. That Barnaby has a remarkably persuasive way.
He has made few suggestions during our very pleasant intercourse of
four years that he has not ultimately won me round to adopting. It
may be, of course, that I am of a yielding disposition; certainly I am
too apt to take my colour from my circumstances. It is, indeed, to my
unfortunate susceptibility to vivid impressions that all my
misfortunes are due. I have already alluded to the slight stammer I
had acquired from a schoolfellow in my youth. However, this is a
digression—I went home in a cab to dress.
I will not trouble the reader with my thoughts about the first-night
audience, strange assembly as it is,—those I reserve for my Memoirs,
—nor the humiliating story of how I got lost during the entr’acte in a
lot of red plush passages, and saw the third act from the gallery. The
only point upon which I wish to lay stress was the remarkable effect
of the acting upon me. You must remember I had lived a quiet and
retired life, and had never been to the theatre before, and that I am
extremely sensitive to vivid impressions. At the risk of repetition I
must insist upon these points.
The first effect was a profound amazement, not untinctured by
alarm. The phenomenal unnaturalness of acting is a thing discounted
in the minds of most people by early visits to the theatre. They get
used to the fantastic gestures, the flamboyant emotions, the weird
mouthings, melodious snortings, agonising yelps, lip-gnawings,
glaring horrors, and other emotional symbolism of the stage. It
becomes at last a mere deaf-and-dumb language to them, which they
read intelligently pari passu with the hearing of the dialogue. But all
this was new to me. The thing was called a modern comedy; the
people were supposed to be English and were dressed like
fashionable Americans of the current epoch, and I fell into the
natural error of supposing that the actors were trying to represent
human beings. I looked round on my first-night audience with a kind
of wonder, discovered—as all new Dramatic Critics do—that it rested
with me to reform the Drama, and, after a supper choked with
emotion, went off to the office to write a column, piebald with “new
paragraphs” (as all my stuff is—it fills out so) and purple with
indignation. Barnaby was delighted.
But I could not sleep that night. I dreamt of actors,—actors glaring,
actors smiting their chests, actors flinging out a handful of extended
fingers, actors smiling bitterly, laughing despairingly, falling
hopelessly, dying idiotically. I got up at eleven with a slight
headache, read my notice in the “Fiery Cross,” breakfasted, and went
back to my room to shave. (It’s my habit to do so.) Then an odd thing
happened. I could not find my razor. Suddenly it occurred to me that
I had not unpacked it the day before.
“Ah!” said I, in front of the looking-glass. Then “Hullo!”
Quite involuntarily, when I had thought of my portmanteau, I had
flung up the left arm (fingers fully extended) and clutched at my
diaphragm with my right hand. I am an acutely self-conscious man at
all times. The gesture struck me as absolutely novel for me. I
repeated it, for my own satisfaction. “Odd!” Then (rather puzzled) I
turned to my portmanteau.
After shaving, my mind reverted to the acting I had seen, and I
entertained myself before the cheval glass with some imitations of
Jafferay’s more exaggerated gestures. “Really, one might think it a
disease,”—I said,—“Stage-Walkitis!” (There’s many a truth spoken in
jest.) Then, if I remember rightly, I went off to see Wembly, and
afterwards lunched at the British Museum with Delia. We actually
spoke about our prospects, in the light of my new appointment.
But that appointment was the beginning of my downfall. From
that day I necessarily became a persistent theatre-goer, and almost
insensibly I began to change. The next thing I noticed after the
gesture about the razor, was to catch myself bowing ineffably when I
met Delia, and stooping in an old-fashioned, courtly way over her
hand. Directly I caught myself, I straightened myself up and became
very uncomfortable. I remember she looked at me curiously. Then, in
the office, I found myself doing “nervous business,” fingers on teeth,
when Barnaby asked me a question I could not very well answer.
Then, in some trifling difference with Delia, I clasped my hand to my
brow. And I pranced through my social transactions at times
singularly like an actor! I tried not to—no one could be more keenly
alive to the arrant absurdity of the histrionic bearing. And I did!
It began to dawn on me what it all meant. The acting, I saw, was
too much for my delicatelystrung nervous system. I have always, I
know, been too amenable to the suggestions of my circumstances.
Night after night of concentrated attention to the conventional
attitudes and intonation of the English stage was gradually affecting
my speech and carriage. I was giving way to the infection of
sympathetic imitation. Night after night my plastic nervous system
took the print of some new amazing gesture, some new emotional
exaggeration—and retained it. A kind of theatrical veneer threatened
to plate over and obliterate my private individuality altogether. I saw
myself in a kind of vision. Sitting by myself one night, my new self
seemed to me to glide, posing and gesticulating, across the room. He
clutched his throat, he opened his fingers, he opened his legs in
walking like a high-class marionette. He went from attitude to
attitude. He might have been clockwork. Directly after this I made an
ineffectual attempt to resign my theatrical work. But Barnaby
persisted in talking about the Polywhiddle Divorce all the time I was
with him, and I could get no opportunity of saying what I wished.
And then Delia’s manner began to change towards me. The ease of
our intercourse vanished. I felt she was learning to dislike me. I
grinned, and capered, and scowled, and posed at her in a thousand
ways, and knew—with what a voiceless agony!—that I did it all the
time. I tried to resign again; and Barnaby talked about “X” and “Z”
and “Y” in the “New Review,” and gave me a strong cigar to smoke,
and so routed me. And then I walked up the Assyrian Gallery in the
manner of Irving to meet Delia, and so precipitated the crisis.
“Ah!—Dear!” I said, with more sprightliness and emotion in my
voice than had ever been in all my life before I became (to my own
undoing) a Dramatic Critic.
She held out her hand rather coldly, scrutinising my face as she did
so. I prepared, with a new-won grace, to walk by her side.
“Egbert,” she said, standing still, and thought. Then she looked at
me.
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