Mr. Coombes was sick of life. He walked away from his unhappy home, and,
sick not only of his own existence but of everybody else's, turned aside
down Gaswork Lane to avoid the town, and, crossing the wooden bridge that
goes over the canal to Starling's Cottages, was presently alone in the
damp pine woods and out of sight and sound of human habitation. He would
stand it no longer. He repeated aloud with blasphemies unusual to him that
he would stand it no longer.
He was a pale-faced little man, with dark eyes and a fine and very black
moustache. He had a very stiff, upright collar slightly frayed, that gave
him an illusory double chin, and his overcoat (albeit shabby) was trimmed
with astrachan. His gloves were a bright brown with black stripes over the
knuckles, and split at the finger ends. His appearance, his wife had said
once in the dear, dead days beyond recall--before he married her, that
is--was military. But now she called him--it seems a dreadful thing to
tell of between husband and wife, but she called him "a little grub." It
wasn't the only thing she had called him, either.
The row had arisen about that beastly Jennie again. Jennie was his wife's
friend, and, by no invitation of Mr. Coombes, she came in every blessed
Sunday to dinner, and made a shindy all the afternoon. She was a big,
noisy girl, with a taste for loud colours and a strident laugh; and this
Sunday she had outdone all her previous intrusions by bringing in a fellow
with her, a chap as showy as herself. And Mr. Coombes, in a starchy, clean
collar and his Sunday frock-coat, had sat dumb and wrathful at his own
table, while his wife and her guests talked foolishly and undesirably, and
laughed aloud. Well, he stood that, and after dinner (which, "as usual,"
was late), what must Miss Jennie do but go to the piano and play banjo
tunes, for all the world as if it were a week-day! Flesh and blood could
not endure such goings on. They would hear next door, they would hear in
the road, it was a public announcement of their disrepute. He had to
speak.
He had felt himself go pale, and a kind of rigour had affected his
respiration as he delivered himself. He had been sitting on one of the
chairs by the window--the new guest had taken possession of the arm-chair.
He turned his head. "Sun Day!" he said over the collar, in the voice of
one who warns. "Sun Day!" What people call a "nasty" tone, it was.
Jennie had kept on playing, but his wife, who was looking through some
music that was piled on the top of the piano, had stared at him. "What's
wrong now?" she said; "can't people enjoy themselves?"
"I don't mind rational 'njoyment, at all," said little Coombes, "but I
ain't a-going to have week-day tunes playing on a Sunday in this house."
"What's wrong with my playing now?" said Jennie, stopping and twirling
round on the music-stool with a monstrous rustle of flounces.
Coombes saw it was going to be a row, and opened too vigorously, as is
common with your timid, nervous men all the world over. "Steady on with
that music-stool!" said he; "it ain't made for 'eavy-weights."
"Never you mind about weights," said Jennie, incensed. "What was you
saying behind my back about my playing?"
"Surely you don't 'old with not having a bit of music on a Sunday, Mr.
Coombes?" said the new guest, leaning back in the arm-chair, blowing a
cloud of cigarette smoke and smiling in a kind of pitying way. And
simultaneously his wife said something to Jennie about "Never mind 'im.
You go on, Jinny."
"I do," said Mr. Coombes, addressing the new guest.
"May I arst why?" said the new guest, evidently enjoying both his
cigarette and the prospect of an argument. He was, by-the-by, a lank young
man, very stylishly dressed in bright drab, with a white cravat and a
pearl and silver pin. It had been better taste to come in a black coat,
Mr. Coombes thought.
"Because," began Mr. Coombes, "it don't suit me. I'm a business man. I
'ave to study my connection. Rational 'njoyment--"
"His connection!" said Mrs. Coombes scornfully. "That's what he's always
a-saying. We got to do this, and we got to do that--"
"If you don't mean to study my connection," said Mr. Coombes, "what did
you marry me for?"
"I wonder," said Jennie, and turned back to the piano.
"I never saw such a man as you," said Mrs. Coombes.
"You've altered all round since we were married. Before--"
Then Jennie began at the turn, turn, turn again.
"Look here!" said Mr. Coombes, driven at last to revolt, standing up and
raising his voice. "I tell you I won't have that." The frock-coat heaved
with his indignation.
"No vi'lence, now," said the long young man in drab, sitting up.
"Who the juice are you?" said Mr. Coombes fiercely.
Whereupon they all began talking at once. The new guest said he was
Jennie's "intended," and meant to protect her, and Mr. Coombes said he was
welcome to do so anywhere but in his (Mr. Coombes') house; and Mrs.
Coombes said he ought to be ashamed of insulting his guests, and (as I
have already mentioned) that he was getting a regular little grub; and the
end was, that Mr. Coombes ordered his visitors out of the house, and they
wouldn't go, and so he said he would go himself. With his face burning and
tears of excitement in his eyes, he went into the passage, and as he
struggled with his overcoat--his frock-coat sleeves got concertinaed up
his arm--and gave a brush at his silk hat, Jennie began again at the
piano, and strummed him insultingly out of the house. Turn, turn, turn. He
slammed the shop door so that the house quivered. That, briefly, was the
immediate making of his mood. You will perhaps begin to understand his
disgust with existence.
As he walked along the muddy path under the firs,--it was late October,
and the ditches and heaps of fir needles were gorgeous with clumps of
fungi,--he recapitulated the melancholy history of his marriage. It was
brief and commonplace enough. He now perceived with sufficient clearness
that his wife had married him out of a natural curiosity and in order to
escape from her worrying, laborious, and uncertain life in the workroom;
and, like the majority of her class, she was far too stupid to realise
that it was her duty to co-operate with him in his business. She was
greedy of enjoyment, loquacious, and socially-minded, and evidently
disappointed to find the restraints of poverty still hanging about her.
His worries exasperated her, and the slightest attempt to control her
proceedings resulted in a charge of "grumbling." Why couldn't he be nice--
as he used to be? And Coombes was such a harmless little man, too,
nourished mentally on _Self-Help_, and with a meagre ambition of
self-denial and competition, that was to end in a "sufficiency." Then
Jennie came in as a female Mephistopheles, a gabbling chronicle of
"fellers," and was always wanting his wife to go to theatres, and "all
that." And in addition were aunts of his wife, and cousins (male and
female) to eat up capital, insult him personally, upset business
arrangements, annoy good customers, and generally blight his life. It was
not the first occasion by many that Mr. Coombes had fled his home in wrath
and indignation, and something like fear, vowing furiously and even aloud
that he wouldn't stand it, and so frothing away his energy along the line
of least resistance. But never before had he been quite so sick of life as
on this particular Sunday afternoon. The Sunday dinner may have had its
share in his despair--and the greyness of the sky. Perhaps, too, he was
beginning to realise his unendurable frustration as a business man as the
consequence of his marriage. Presently bankruptcy, and after that----
Perhaps she might have reason to repent when it was too late. And destiny,
as I have already intimated, had planted the path through the wood with
evil-smelling fungi, thickly and variously planted it, not only on the
right side, but on the left.
A small shopman is in such a melancholy position, if his wife turns out a
disloyal partner. His capital is all tied up in his business, and to leave
her means to join the unemployed in some strange part of the earth. The
luxuries of divorce are beyond him altogether. So that the good old
tradition of marriage for better or worse holds inexorably for him, and
things work up to tragic culminations. Bricklayers kick their wives to
death, and dukes betray theirs; but it is among the small clerks and
shopkeepers nowadays that it comes most often to a cutting of throats.
Under the circumstances it is not so very remarkable--and you must take it
as charitably as you can--that the mind of Mr. Coombes ran for a while on
some such glorious close to his disappointed hopes, and that he thought of
razors, pistols, bread-knives, and touching letters to the coroner
denouncing his enemies by name, and praying piously for forgiveness. After
a time his fierceness gave way to melancholia. He had been married in this
very overcoat, in his first and only frock-coat that was buttoned up
beneath it. He began to recall their courting along this very walk, his
years of penurious saving to get capital, and the bright hopefulness of
his marrying days. For it all to work out like this! Was there no
sympathetic ruler anywhere in the world? He reverted to death as a topic.
He thought of the canal he had just crossed, and doubted whether he
shouldn't stand with his head out, even in the middle, and it was while
drowning was in his mind that the purple pileus caught his eye. He looked
at it mechanically for a moment, and stopped and stooped towards it to
pick it up, under the impression that it was some such small leather
object as a purse. Then he saw that it was the purple top of a fungus, a
peculiarly poisonous-looking purple: slimy, shiny, and emitting a sour
odour. He hesitated with his hand an inch or so from it, and the thought
of poison crossed his mind. With that he picked the thing, and stood up
again with it in his hand.
The odour was certainly strong--acrid, but by no means disgusting. He
broke off a piece, and the fresh surface was a creamy white, that changed
like magic in the space of ten seconds to a yellowish-green colour. It was
even an inviting-looking change. He broke off two other pieces to see it
repeated. They were wonderful things these fungi, thought Mr. Coombes, and
all of them the deadliest poisons, as his father had often told him.
Deadly poisons!
There is no time like the present for a rash resolve. Why not here and
now? thought Mr. Coombes. He tasted a little piece, a very little piece
indeed--a mere crumb. It was so pungent that he almost spat it out again,
then merely hot and full-flavoured: a kind of German mustard with a touch
of horse-radish and--well, mushroom. He swallowed it in the excitement of
the moment. Did he like it or did he not? His mind was curiously careless.
He would try another bit. It really wasn't bad--it was good. He forgot his
troubles in the interest of the immediate moment. Playing with death it
was. He took another bite, and then deliberately finished a mouthful. A
curious, tingling sensation began in his finger-tips and toes. His pulse
began to move faster. The blood in his ears sounded like a mill-race. "Try
bi' more," said Mr. Coombes. He turned and looked about him, and found his
feet unsteady. He saw, and struggled towards, a little patch of purple a
dozen yards away. "Jol' goo' stuff," said Mr. Coombes. "E--lomore ye'." He
pitched forward and fell on his face, his hands outstretched towards the
cluster of pilei. But he did not eat any more of them. He forgot
forthwith.
He rolled over and sat up with a look of astonishment on his face. His
carefully brushed silk hat had rolled away towards the ditch. He pressed
his hand to his brow. Something had happened, but he could not rightly
determine what it was. Anyhow, he was no longer dull--he felt bright,
cheerful. And his throat was afire. He laughed in the sudden gaiety of his
heart. Had he been dull? He did not know; but at any rate he would be dull
no longer. He got up and stood unsteadily, regarding the universe with an
agreeable smile. He began to remember. He could not remember very well,
because of a steam roundabout that was beginning in his head. And he knew
he had been disagreeable at home, just because they wanted to be happy.
They were quite right; life should be as gay as possible. He would go home
and make it up, and reassure them. And why not take some of this
delightful toadstool with him, for them to eat? A hatful, no less. Some of
those red ones with white spots as well, and a few yellow. He had been a
dull dog, an enemy to merriment; he would make up for it. It would be gay
to turn his coat-sleeves inside out, and stick some yellow gorse into his
waistcoat pockets. Then home--singing---for a jolly evening.
After the departure of Mr. Coombes, Jennie discontinued playing, and
turned round on the music-stool again. "What a fuss about nothing!" said
Jennie.
"You see, Mr. Clarence, what I've got to put up with," said Mrs. Coombes.
"He is a bit hasty," said Mr. Clarence judicially.
"He ain't got the slightest sense of our position," said Mrs. Coombes;
"that's what I complain of. He cares for nothing but his old shop; and if
I have a bit of company, or buy anything to keep myself decent, or get any
little thing I want out of the housekeeping money, there's disagreeables.
'Economy' he says; 'struggle for life,' and all that. He lies awake of
nights about it, worrying how he can screw me out of a shilling. He wanted
us to eat Dorset butter once. If once I was to give in to him--there!"
"Of course," said Jennie.
"If a man values a woman," said Mr. Clarence, lounging back in the
arm-chair, "he must be prepared to make sacrifices for her. For my own
part," said Mr. Clarence, with his eye on Jennie, "I shouldn't think of
marrying till I was in a position to do the thing in style. It's downright
selfishness. A man ought to go through the rough-and-tumble by himself,
and not drag her--"
"I don't agree altogether with that," said Jennie. "I don't see why a man
shouldn't have a woman's help, provided he doesn't treat her meanly, you
know. It's meanness--"
"You wouldn't believe," said Mrs. Coombes. "But I was a fool to 'ave 'im.
I might 'ave known. If it 'adn't been for my father, we shouldn't 'ave 'ad
not a carriage to our wedding."
"Lord! he didn't stick out at that?" said Mr. Clarence, quite shocked.
"Said he wanted the money for his stock, or some such rubbish. Why, he
wouldn't have a woman in to help me once a week if it wasn't for my
standing out plucky. And the fusses he makes about money--comes to me,
well, pretty near crying, with sheets of paper and figgers. 'If only we
can tide over this year,' he says, 'the business is bound to go.' 'If only
we can tide over this year,' I says; 'then it'll be, if only we can tide
over next year. I know you,' I says. 'And you don't catch me screwing
myself lean and ugly. Why didn't you marry a slavey?' I says, 'if you
wanted one--instead of a respectable girl,' I says."
So Mrs. Coombes. But we will not follow this unedifying conversation
further. Suffice it that Mr. Coombes was very satisfactorily disposed of,
and they had a snug little time round the fire. Then Mrs. Coombes went to
get the tea, and Jennie sat coquettishly on the arm of Mr. Clarence's
chair until the tea-things clattered outside. "What was that I heard?"
asked Mrs. Coombes playfully, as she entered, and there was badinage about
kissing. They were just sitting down to the little circular table when the
first intimation of Mr. Coombes' return was heard.
This was a fumbling at the latch of the front door.
"'Ere's my lord," said Mrs. Coombes. "Went out like a lion and comes back
like a lamb, I'll lay."
Something fell over in the shop: a chair, it sounded like. Then there was
a sound as of some complicated step exercise in the passage. Then the door
opened and Coombes appeared. But it was Coombes transfigured. The
immaculate collar had been torn carelessly from his throat. His
carefully-brushed silk hat, half-full of a crush of fungi, was under one
arm; his coat was inside out, and his waistcoat adorned with bunches of
yellow-blossomed furze. These little eccentricities of Sunday costume,
however, were quite overshadowed by the change in his face; it was livid
white, his eyes were unnaturally large and bright, and his pale blue lips
were drawn back in a cheerless grin. "Merry!" he said. He had stopped
dancing to open the door. "Rational 'njoyment. Dance." He made three
fantastic steps into the room, and stood bowing.
"Jim!" shrieked Mrs. Coombes, and Mr. Clarence sat petrified, with a
dropping lower jaw.
"Tea," said Mr. Coombes. "Jol' thing, tea. Tose-stools, too. Brosher."
"He's drunk," said Jennie in a weak voice. Never before had she seen this
intense pallor in a drunken man, or such shining, dilated eyes.
Mr. Coombes held out a handful of scarlet agaric to Mr. Clarence. "Jo'
stuff," said he; "ta' some."
At that moment he was genial. Then at the sight of their startled faces he
changed, with the swift transition of insanity, into overbearing fury. And
it seemed as if he had suddenly recalled the quarrel of his departure. In
such a huge voice as Mrs. Coombes had never heard before, he shouted, "My
house. I'm master 'ere. Eat what I give yer!" He bawled this, as it
seemed, without an effort, without a violent gesture, standing there as
motionless as one who whispers, holding out a handful of fungus.
Clarence approved himself a coward. He could not meet the mad fury in
Coombes' eyes; he rose to his feet, pushing back his chair, and turned,
stooping. At that Coombes rushed at him. Jennie saw her opportunity, and,
with the ghost of a shriek, made for the door.
Mrs. Coombes followed her. Clarence tried to dodge. Over went the
tea-table with a smash as Coombes clutched him by the collar and tried to
thrust the fungus into his mouth. Clarence was content to leave his collar
behind him, and shot out into the passage with red patches of fly agaric
still adherent to his face. "Shut 'im in!" cried Mrs. Coombes, and would
have closed the door, but her supports deserted her; Jennie saw the shop
door open, and vanished thereby, locking it behind her, while Clarence
went on hastily into the kitchen. Mr. Coombes came heavily against the
door, and Mrs. Coombes, finding the key was inside, fled upstairs and
locked herself in the spare bedroom.
So the new convert to _joie de vivre_ emerged upon the passage, his
decorations a little scattered, but that respectable hatful of fungi still
under his arm. He hesitated at the three ways, and decided on the kitchen.
Whereupon Clarence, who was fumbling with the key, gave up the attempt to
imprison his host, and fled into the scullery, only to be captured before
he could open the door into the yard. Mr. Clarence is singularly reticent
of the details of what occurred. It seems that Mr. Coombes' transitory
irritation had vanished again, and he was once more a genial playfellow.
And as there were knives and meat choppers about, Clarence very generously
resolved to humour him and so avoid anything tragic. It is beyond dispute
that Mr. Coombes played with Mr. Clarence to his heart's content; they
could not have been more playful and familiar if they had known each other
for years. He insisted gaily on Clarence trying the fungi, and, after a
friendly tussle, was smitten with remorse at the mess he was making of his
guest's face. It also appears that Clarence was dragged under the sink and
his face scrubbed with the blacking brush--he being still resolved to
humour the lunatic at any cost--and that finally, in a somewhat
dishevelled, chipped, and discoloured condition, he was assisted to his
coat and shown out by the back door, the shopway being barred by Jennie.
Mr. Coombes' wandering thoughts then turned to Jennie. Jennie had been
unable to unfasten the shop door, but she shot the bolts against Mr.
Coombes' latch-key, and remained in possession of the shop for the rest of
the evening.
It would appear that Mr. Coombes then returned to the kitchen, still in
pursuit of gaiety, and, albeit a strict Good Templar, drank (or spilt down
the front of the first and only frock-coat) no less than five bottles of
the stout Mrs. Coombes insisted upon having for her health's sake. He made
cheerful noises by breaking off the necks of the bottles with several of
his wife's wedding-present dinner-plates, and during the earlier part of
this great drunk he sang divers merry ballads. He cut his finger rather
badly with one of the bottles--the only bloodshed in this story--and what
with that, and the systematic convulsion of his inexperienced physiology
by the liquorish brand of Mrs. Coombes' stout, it may be the evil of the
fungus poison was somehow allayed. But we prefer to draw a veil over the
concluding incidents of this Sunday afternoon. They ended in the coal
cellar, in a deep and healing sleep.
An interval of five years elapsed. Again it was a Sunday afternoon in
October, and again Mr. Coombes walked through the pine wood beyond the
canal. He was still the same dark-eyed, black-moustached little man that
he was at the outset of the story, but his double chin was now scarcely so
illusory as it had been. His overcoat was new, with a velvet lapel, and a
stylish collar with turn-down corners, free of any coarse starchiness, had
replaced the original all-round article. His hat was glossy, his gloves
newish--though one finger had split and been carefully mended. And a
casual observer would have noticed about him a certain rectitude of
bearing, a certain erectness of head that marks the man who thinks well of
himself. He was a master now, with three assistants. Beside him walked a
larger sunburnt parody of himself, his brother Tom, just back from
Australia. They were recapitulating their early struggles, and Mr. Coombes
had just been making a financial statement.
"It's a very nice little business, Jim," said brother Tom. "In these days
of competition you're jolly lucky to have worked it up so. And you're
jolly lucky, too, to have a wife who's willing to help like yours does."
"Between ourselves," said Mr. Coombes, "it wasn't always so. It wasn't
always like this. To begin with, the missus was a bit giddy. Girls are
funny creatures."
"Dear me!"
"Yes. You'd hardly think it, but she was downright extravagant, and always
having slaps at me. I was a bit too easy and loving, and all that, and she
thought the whole blessed show was run for her. Turned the 'ouse into a
regular caravansery, always having her relations and girls from business
in, and their chaps. Comic songs a' Sunday, it was getting to, and driving
trade away. And she was making eyes at the chaps, too! I tell you, Tom,
the place wasn't my own."
"Shouldn't 'a' thought it."
"It was so. Well--I reasoned with her. I said, 'I ain't a duke, to keep a
wife like a pet animal. I married you for 'elp and company.' I said, 'You
got to 'elp and pull the business through.' She wouldn't 'ear of it. 'Very
well,' I says?? 'I'm a mild man till I'm roused,' I says, 'and it's
getting to that.' But she wouldn't 'ear of no warnings."
"Well?"
"It's the way with women. She didn't think I 'ad it in me to be roused.
Women of her sort (between ourselves, Tom) don't respect a man until
they're a bit afraid of him. So I just broke out to show her. In comes a
girl named Jennie, that used to work with her, and her chap. We 'ad a bit
of a row, and I came out 'ere--it was just such another day as this--and I
thought it all out. Then I went back and pitched into them."
"You did?"
"I did. I was mad, I can tell you. I wasn't going to 'it 'er if I could
'elp it, so I went back and licked into this chap, just to show 'er what I
could do. 'E was a big chap, too. Well, I chucked him, and smashed things
about, and gave 'er a scaring, and she ran up and locked 'erself into the
spare room."
"Well?"
"That's all. I says to 'er the next morning, 'Now you know,' I says, 'what
I'm like when I'm roused.' And I didn't have to say anything more."
"And you've been happy ever after, eh?"
"So to speak. There's nothing like putting your foot down with them. If it
'adn't been for that afternoon I should 'a' been tramping the roads now,
and she'd 'a' been grumbling at me, and all her family grumbling for
bringing her to poverty--I know their little ways. But we're all right
now. And it's a very decent little business, as you say."
They proceeded on their way meditatively. "Women are funny creatures,"
said Brother Tom.
"They want a firm hand," says Coombes.
"What a lot of these funguses there are about here!" remarked Brother Tom
presently. "I can't see what use they are in the world."
Mr. Coombes looked. "I dessay they're sent for some wise purpose," said
Mr. Coombes.
And that was as much thanks as the purple pileus ever got for maddening
this absurd little man to the pitch of decisive action, and so altering
the whole course of his life.
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