About a fortnight after this Philip, going home one evening after his
day's work at the hospital, knocked at the door of Cronshaw's room. He got
no answer and walked in. Cronshaw was lying huddled up on one side, and
Philip went up to the bed. He did not know whether Cronshaw was asleep or
merely lay there in one of his uncontrollable fits of irritability. He was
surprised to see that his mouth was open. He touched his shoulder. Philip
gave a cry of dismay. He slipped his hand under Cronshaw's shirt and felt
his heart; he did not know what to do; helplessly, because he had heard of
this being done, he held a looking-glass in front of his mouth. It
startled him to be alone with Cronshaw. He had his hat and coat still on,
and he ran down the stairs into the street; he hailed a cab and drove to
Harley Street. Dr. Tyrell was in.
"I say, would you mind coming at once? I think Cronshaw's dead."
"If he is it's not much good my coming, is it?"
"I should be awfully grateful if you would. I've got a cab at the door.
It'll only take half an hour."
Tyrell put on his hat. In the cab he asked him one or two questions.
"He seemed no worse than usual when I left this morning," said Philip. "It
gave me an awful shock when I went in just now. And the thought of his
dying all alone.... D'you think he knew he was going to die?"
Philip remembered what Cronshaw had said. He wondered whether at that last
moment he had been seized with the terror of death. Philip imagined
himself in such a plight, knowing it was inevitable and with no one, not
a soul, to give an encouraging word when the fear seized him.
"You're rather upset," said Dr. Tyrell.
He looked at him with his bright blue eyes. They were not unsympathetic.
When he saw Cronshaw, he said:
"He must have been dead for some hours. I should think he died in his
sleep. They do sometimes."
The body looked shrunk and ignoble. It was not like anything human. Dr.
Tyrell looked at it dispassionately. With a mechanical gesture he took out
his watch.
"Well, I must be getting along. I'll send the certificate round. I suppose
you'll communicate with the relatives."
"I don't think there are any," said Philip.
"How about the funeral?"
"Oh, I'll see to that."
Dr. Tyrell gave Philip a glance. He wondered whether he ought to offer a
couple of sovereigns towards it. He knew nothing of Philip's
circumstances; perhaps he could well afford the expense; Philip might
think it impertinent if he made any suggestion.
"Well, let me know if there's anything I can do," he said.
Philip and he went out together, parting on the doorstep, and Philip went
to a telegraph office in order to send a message to Leonard Upjohn. Then
he went to an undertaker whose shop he passed every day on his way to the
hospital. His attention had been drawn to it often by the three words in
silver lettering on a black cloth, which, with two model coffins, adorned
the window: Economy, Celerity, Propriety. They had always diverted him.
The undertaker was a little fat Jew with curly black hair, long and
greasy, in black, with a large diamond ring on a podgy finger. He received
Philip with a peculiar manner formed by the mingling of his natural
blatancy with the subdued air proper to his calling. He quickly saw that
Philip was very helpless and promised to send round a woman at once to
perform the needful offices. His suggestions for the funeral were very
magnificent; and Philip felt ashamed of himself when the undertaker seemed
to think his objections mean. It was horrible to haggle on such a matter,
and finally Philip consented to an expensiveness which he could ill
afford.
"I quite understand, sir," said the undertaker, "you don't want any show
and that--I'm not a believer in ostentation myself, mind you--but you want
it done gentlemanly-like. You leave it to me, I'll do it as cheap as it
can be done, 'aving regard to what's right and proper. I can't say more
than that, can I?"
Philip went home to eat his supper, and while he ate the woman came along
to lay out the corpse. Presently a telegram arrived from Leonard Upjohn.
Shocked and grieved beyond measure. Regret cannot come tonight. Dining
out. With you early tomorrow. Deepest sympathy. Upjohn.
In a little while the woman knocked at the door of the sitting-room.
"I've done now, sir. Will you come and look at 'im and see it's all
right?"
Philip followed her. Cronshaw was lying on his back, with his eyes closed
and his hands folded piously across his chest.
"You ought by rights to 'ave a few flowers, sir."
"I'll get some tomorrow."
She gave the body a glance of satisfaction. She had performed her job, and
now she rolled down her sleeves, took off her apron, and put on her
bonnet. Philip asked her how much he owed her.
"Well, sir, some give me two and sixpence and some give me five
shillings."
Philip was ashamed to give her less than the larger sum. She thanked him
with just so much effusiveness as was seemly in presence of the grief he
might be supposed to feel, and left him. Philip went back into his
sitting-room, cleared away the remains of his supper, and sat down to read
Walsham's Surgery. He found it difficult. He felt singularly nervous.
When there was a sound on the stairs he jumped, and his heart beat
violently. That thing in the adjoining room, which had been a man and now
was nothing, frightened him. The silence seemed alive, as if some
mysterious movement were taking place within it; the presence of death
weighed upon these rooms, unearthly and terrifying: Philip felt a sudden
horror for what had once been his friend. He tried to force himself to
read, but presently pushed away his book in despair. What troubled him was
the absolute futility of the life which had just ended. It did not matter
if Cronshaw was alive or dead. It would have been just as well if he had
never lived. Philip thought of Cronshaw young; and it needed an effort of
imagination to picture him slender, with a springing step, and with hair
on his head, buoyant and hopeful. Philip's rule of life, to follow one's
instincts with due regard to the policeman round the corner, had not acted
very well there: it was because Cronshaw had done this that he had made
such a lamentable failure of existence. It seemed that the instincts could
not be trusted. Philip was puzzled, and he asked himself what rule of life
was there, if that one was useless, and why people acted in one way rather
than in another. They acted according to their emotions, but their
emotions might be good or bad; it seemed just a chance whether they led to
triumph or disaster. Life seemed an inextricable confusion. Men hurried
hither and thither, urged by forces they knew not; and the purpose of it
all escaped them; they seemed to hurry just for hurrying's sake.
Next morning Leonard Upjohn appeared with a small wreath of laurel. He was
pleased with his idea of crowning the dead poet with this; and attempted,
notwithstanding Philip's disapproving silence, to fix it on the bald head;
but the wreath fitted grotesquely. It looked like the brim of a hat worn
by a low comedian in a music-hall.
"I'll put it over his heart instead," said Upjohn.
"You've put it on his stomach," remarked Philip.
Upjohn gave a thin smile.
"Only a poet knows where lies a poet's heart," he answered.
They went back into the sitting-room, and Philip told him what
arrangements he had made for the funeral.
"I hoped you've spared no expense. I should like the hearse to be followed
by a long string of empty coaches, and I should like the horses to wear
tall nodding plumes, and there should be a vast number of mutes with long
streamers on their hats. I like the thought of all those empty coaches."
"As the cost of the funeral will apparently fall on me and I'm not over
flush just now, I've tried to make it as moderate as possible."
"But, my dear fellow, in that case, why didn't you get him a pauper's
funeral? There would have been something poetic in that. You have an
unerring instinct for mediocrity."
Philip flushed a little, but did not answer; and next day he and Upjohn
followed the hearse in the one carriage which Philip had ordered. Lawson,
unable to come, had sent a wreath; and Philip, so that the coffin should
not seem too neglected, had bought a couple. On the way back the coachman
whipped up his horses. Philip was dog-tired and presently went to sleep.
He was awakened by Upjohn's voice.
"It's rather lucky the poems haven't come out yet. I think we'd better
hold them back a bit and I'll write a preface. I began thinking of it
during the drive to the cemetery. I believe I can do something rather
good. Anyhow I'll start with an article in The Saturday."
Philip did not reply, and there was silence between them. At last Upjohn
said:
"I daresay I'd be wiser not to whittle away my copy. I think I'll do an
article for one of the reviews, and then I can just print it afterwards as
a preface."
Philip kept his eye on the monthlies, and a few weeks later it appeared.
The article made something of a stir, and extracts from it were printed in
many of the papers. It was a very good article, vaguely biographical, for
no one knew much of Cronshaw's early life, but delicate, tender, and
picturesque. Leonard Upjohn in his intricate style drew graceful little
pictures of Cronshaw in the Latin Quarter, talking, writing poetry:
Cronshaw became a picturesque figure, an English Verlaine; and Leonard
Upjohn's coloured phrases took on a tremulous dignity, a more pathetic
grandiloquence, as he described the sordid end, the shabby little room in
Soho; and, with a reticence which was wholly charming and suggested a much
greater generosity than modesty allowed him to state, the efforts he made
to transport the Poet to some cottage embowered with honeysuckle amid a
flowering orchard. And the lack of sympathy, well-meaning but so tactless,
which had taken the poet instead to the vulgar respectability of
Kennington! Leonard Upjohn described Kennington with that restrained
humour which a strict adherence to the vocabulary of Sir Thomas Browne
necessitated. With delicate sarcasm he narrated the last weeks, the
patience with which Cronshaw bore the well-meaning clumsiness of the young
student who had appointed himself his nurse, and the pitifulness of that
divine vagabond in those hopelessly middle-class surroundings. Beauty from
ashes, he quoted from Isaiah. It was a triumph of irony for that outcast
poet to die amid the trappings of vulgar respectability; it reminded
Leonard Upjohn of Christ among the Pharisees, and the analogy gave him
opportunity for an exquisite passage. And then he told how a friend--his
good taste did not suffer him more than to hint subtly who the friend was
with such gracious fancies--had laid a laurel wreath on the dead poet's
heart; and the beautiful dead hands had seemed to rest with a voluptuous
passion upon Apollo's leaves, fragrant with the fragrance of art, and more
green than jade brought by swart mariners from the manifold, inexplicable
China. And, an admirable contrast, the article ended with a description of
the middle-class, ordinary, prosaic funeral of him who should have been
buried like a prince or like a pauper. It was the crowning buffet, the
final victory of Philistia over art, beauty, and immaterial things.
Leonard Upjohn had never written anything better. It was a miracle of
charm, grace, and pity. He printed all Cronshaw's best poems in the course
of the article, so that when the volume appeared much of its point was
gone; but he advanced his own position a good deal. He was thenceforth a
critic to be reckoned with. He had seemed before a little aloof; but there
was a warm humanity about this article which was infinitely attractive.
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