The Green Overcoat/Chapter 11

name of the lounger was James. That was his Christian name. What his family name might be it is impossible to discover at this distance of time, for he had been born in 1868, brought up in the workhouse, apprenticed to a ropemaker, passed various terms in jail under various aliases, gone to sea, naturalised as an American citizen, returned to England as valet in the service of a tourist, been dismissed a few years before for theft, and was at this moment a member of the New Bureaucracy, to wit, a Watcher and Checker under the Ormeston Labour Exchange. He was paid (by results, 2s. 6d. for each conviction) to see that the poor did not cheat the higher officials of that invaluable Public office, to worm out the true history of applicants at the Exchange and to provide secret evidence against them, that they might be imprisoned and black-listed if they concealed their past from the Secretary—a Valued Servant of the State.

James, then, wandered out into God's great world upon that happy morning with a bundle under his arm. Two conflicting thoughts disturbed him. First, where he might sell the content at the highest price, and. secondly, where he might sell it with the greatest security. Such divergent issues disturb the great men of our time as well as wandering men bearing alien coats; they are at the root of modern affairs.

The more he thought of it the more did James determine by the feel that the bundle was clothes; why, then, his market was a shop in the Lydgate, an old quarter of the town, now full of slums, wherein dwelt a certain Pole of the name of Lipsky. This man, by common repute, was well with the police, and in our English towns that, with the poor, is everything. Tippy would not give him full value, but he could give him full security. He would give him perhaps but a quarter of the value, but he would at least give him a free run with the money and no awkward questions for the men in blue.

Such an advantage is it to have assured the police of one's integrity.

Nevertheless, he thought it of advantage to discover of what value the bundle might be. Even if he was to get but a quarter of its value from the Pole, he would like to know what it was that he was to get a quarter of.

He lollopped lazily down the street. His time was his own. He peered through a neglected doorway into an empty yard, stepped into it, behind the screen of a hoarding, looking first up and down to see whether any of the tyrants were about. Seeing no helmet and therefore no tyrant, he untied the parcel and pulled out the coat within. He was agreeably surprised. He had expected slops, but this was not slops. He was no valuer, but he would imperil for ever the true end of man's soul and suffer the companionship of demons for eternity (such were the rash hazards he took) if it were not two quid, and played properly it might be three.

Wait a moment, there might be something in the pockets. He felt in the left-hand pocket—nothing; in the right-hand pocket, there nothing but that solid, oblong cheque book with four cheques torn out. At first he thought of throwing it away, for it identified the owner of the garment. Then he remembered things called "clues," and threw far from him the very idea instead of the cheque book. He tried to decipher the name, but could not. James could read and write when he had left school, but that was a long time ago. He had done more useful work since then.

Next he remembered the suspicious haste of Mr. Montague. He began to wonder whether the bundle was quite safe. He determined to hurry; and as for the price, why, he would take what he could get.

He fastened up the parcel again, and in a sobriety of mind which was new to him and not altogether pleasant, he took the road to the Lydgate. Mr. Montague might have spared his fears. The day was early, James had as yet no pence, he could not board a tram. But somehow or other the bundle was unnaturally clumsy or unnaturally heavy.

He felt a distaste for it. The distaste enlarged, something had gone wrong. As he went down that morning street alone, resolutely trudging, he heard within him the echoes of a voice he did not wish to hear. It was the voice of a woman, not sober, but holding to him. He thought he could not have remembered such a thing after ten years, and of a summer morning. It is odd that even the poor should mislike such memories; James misliked them abominably. Perhaps he was more sensitive for the moment than are most of the poor. …

Yes! How she did drink, damn her. … Why the Hell was he thinking of such things? And how clear her voice was. … Then he saw the name "Lipsky" over the way. He was at the Lydgate already. Could a man be drunk in the flush of morning and without liquor? Nay, drink dulled such things, and he had heard that voice awfully clear within him.

He trudged into the shop, shaking his mind free, and thinking of the sovereign—or two sovereigns at least.

The gentleman in charge—there was but one—exchanged mutual recognitions with James. The one was a Pole and the other an Englishman; but both were human, and therefore brethren. Then James untied the parcel. But when James had untied the parcel it was apparent that though both were human, Lipsky was a Pole and not a man of the Midlands, for he thrust it from him with his palms outward, sliding his wrists upon the counter, and moving his fingers like small snakes in the air. Lippy was not taking any. James looked at him, and did not understand.

"I got it straight, I did!" he said.

Lippy didn't want to look at it.

"I don't want it, there!" burst out James (he could not for his life have told you why), and Lippy, leaning over familiarly but insolently, told him (in Polish English) that if he tried to sell it he would not long be a free man. James thought this treason, and in his heart he was determined on revenge. What had he done to Lippy to receive such a threat? The whole air about these men as they met, and as this lump of cloth lay between them, was unreal and fantastic. Each felt it, each in his utterly different mind. For such things, if you will excuse me, happen to the poor also, as we all know they do to the rich, whether through drink or what-not I can't tell, whether for drink or what-not it is for them to determine. There was fate, and there was compulsion, and there was the profound ill-ease of the soul hovering over that dirty counter in the slums as they hover over the tables of politicians when similar bargains are toward in a larger world. James tied his bundle up again and went out without a word.

One beefy part of him suggested that the coppers were too close on the trail and that Lippy knew it; but another part of him, more permanent, more real, deeper, smelt the truth. He himself had suffered dread; he felt vaguely that Lippy knew the cause of that dread, and that for both of them there was something strange about the Thing. The Soul was in trouble.

Oh! James knew it very well. The big bundle under his left arm so weighed upon that primal part of us, which is within, that all the things least desired and most carefully forgotten of his life returned again under its influence and maddened him. With the simplicity of his class, he thought the evil to be attached to the fact that the coat was stolen. Unlike his betters, he had never dreamt that stealing was right. He had always known that it was wrong. … He had a mind to put the Green Overcoat down in the thoroughfare and leave it there. In spite of the risk, he would have done so in another moment had he not heard shuffling footsteps coming up rapidly behind him and felt a soft Polish hand upon his shoulder. It was Lippy.

The Poles when they enter the Second Hand Clothes Trade prove themselves commercial. Their ancient chivalry seems to desert them in this line of business, and something material creeps into their gallant hearts. Lippy had reproached himself, Lippy had been tortured as he had seen the lounger's figure slowly and doubtfully receding burdened with a thing of so much value.

With the disappearance of the Green Overcoat the supernatural warnings (for which he despised himself) had disappeared, and he remembered only its very mundane value. He could not bear the loss, and he had followed.

The lounger James turned round startled, and instinctively thrust the bundle towards the man who, he instinctively knew, had repented of his first decision. Lippy seized it, guiltily, furtively, violently, and without a word he was on his way back to his shop. But as for James, he went his way noting suddenly the pleasantness of the morning; that excellent Watcher and Checker under the Labour Exchange of Ormeston, that Pillar of Free Labour, that Good Servant of the State, that member of our New Bureaucracy of Social Reform, was himself again. He went forward whistling, and he found it in a few moments quite easy to forget the Thing and all the memories that had cropped up with the Thing. He had passed it on, and Lippy was holding the baby.

In the few steps to his shop the Pole had no time to repent, though his mind was ill at ease. Mr. Montague was a strange man. He had strange wisdom. He could read strange books. And if Mr. Montague had come to warn him, well. …

Lippy dismissed the superstitious fear. He opened the bundle, he gazed on the Sacred Green Thing, he felt the pockets (of course), he saw the cheque book and the wealthy name. He shuddered—but he gloried. Then he fastened the whole up again, put the bundle into a great drawer under his counter, sighed a mechanical sigh of mechanical relief, and began to busy himself with the arranging and ticketing of his goods for the day.

But as that day wore on the Pole was not himself. He was too nervous, too snappy with customers, too much affected by slight sounds when the evening came, and all that night he lay but dozing, waking continually in starts from disordered dreams of unaccountable vengeance.

The next day, the Friday, Lippy was very ill. No movement of conscience disturbed him, he had not wronged his own; yet in his fever he suffered dreadfully from some unreasoning sense of evil.

The old woman who chared for him was for calling a doctor. All Monday Lippy, weakening in his sick-bed, fought against the expense. As it was, he had been compelled to pay a doubtful boy—a non-Pole, and therefore ill suited to commerce—to mind the shop, and twice he left his bed, at the risk of his life, and tottered down to see that no harm was coming to his business. On each occasion as he neared that counter with its drawer and its secreted bundle a more violent trouble had returned, and he had had to be helped up dazed and trembling to his wretched bed and room above.

So Monday passed, and what happened on the Tuesday and why, a return to others who had meddled with the Green Overcoat will explain: Why on the morning of Tuesday Lippy woke refreshed in body, but very weak; why he had an odd feeling that things were mending, how he could not tell; why it was that in the early afternoon of that day he heard in the shop below a voice addressing his assistant in an accent very unusual to such shops; why Lippy listened carefully at the door and thought he knew the voice.

The voice you will find, Readerkin, was that of Mr. Kirby, and Mr. Kirby was asking in the most direct fashion possible for the coat, for the Green Overcoat; he made no bones about it, he put it square. Very hurriedly did Lippy dress, and very hurriedly, weak as he was, did he totter down the stairs that Tuesday Morning.