The Riddle and Other Stories/The Three Friends

HE street was narrow; yet, looking up, the two old friends, bent on their accustomed I visit, could discern—beyond a yellow light that had suddenly shone out into the hushed gloom from an attic window—the vast, accumulated thunder-clouds that towered into the darkening zenith.

“That's just it,” continued Mr. Eaves, more emphatically, yet more confidentially, “it isn't my health, Sully. I'm not so much afraid of my health. It's—it's my …” He took off his hat and drew his hand over his tall, narrow head, but pushed on no further towards the completion of his sentence.

Mr. Sully eyed him stonily. “Don't worry, then,” he said. “Why worry? There's worry enough in the world, old sport, without dreaming about it.”

“I know,” said Mr. Eaves; “but then, you see, Sully” They had paused at the familiar swing-door, and now confronted one another in the opaque, sultry silence. And as Mr. Sully stood for an instant in close contact with his old crony in the accentuated darkness of the mock-marble porch, it was just as if a scared rabbit had scurried out of Mr. Eaves's long white face.

“Look here,” Mr. Sully exclaimed with sudden frivolity, “we'll ask Miss Lacey”; and was followed by his feebly protesting companion into the bar.

The long black stuffed bench and oblong mahogany table, darkened here and there by little circular pools of beer, stood close against the wall, and Mr. Sully began to divulge his friend's confidences even before Miss Lacey could bring them their glasses. A commissionaire sat in the further bar, nodding over an old newspaper; and Mr. Eaves kept his eyes fixed on his oblong lurching head, while he listened, fascinated and repelled, to his friend's facetiousness.

“Now, supposing, Miss Lacey, my dear,” began Mr. Sully shrewdly, half-closing his eyes as if to gloss over his finesse, “supposing a young man, a nice, curly-headed young man—just about our old friend's age here”—Miss Lacey, with a kind of arch and sympathetic good-nature, leaned a large, dark head to glance at Mr. Eaves—“supposing a nice young gentleman—just as it might be our old friend himself here—came, like an innocent, to entrust to your blessed bosom a secret—a sacred secret: what would you do?”

“Lor' bless me, Mr. Sully, sir, is that all you was coming to! A secret? Why, keep it, to be sure; and not the first time neether.” Miss Lacey advanced to the bar, black, precise and cheerful, with the two small, thick glasses in her hand.

“Good,” said Mr. Sully, with an almost professional abandon. “Good. So far. But step number two; supposing, my dear, you couldn't for the life and love of you help him in his little difficulty—dependent on his secret, let's say—what then?”

“Why, I'd keep it all the more,” cried Miss Lacey brightly.

“A woman's answer. Eaves; and none the worse for that,” said Mr. Sully. “But on the other hand, supposing you were a practical”—he paused with the little water-jug hovering an inch or two above his friend's glass—“supposing you were a practical, unromantic old blackguard like me—why, you'd go and tell it to the first lovely blooming creature that came along.” He eyed her steadily yet jocosely. “And that's why I'm going to tell it to you, my dear!”

“How you do tease, to be sure!” said Miss Lacey. “He's a real tease, isn't he, Mr. Eaves?”

Mr. Sully's eyes suddenly sobered with overwhelming completeness. He pointed coldly with his stick. “He's been dreaming of hell,” he said.

Mr. Eaves, on his part, withdrew large, weak, colourless eyes from the uneasy head of the commissionaire, and turned them on Miss Lacey. She glanced at him swiftly, then stooped, and took up a piece of sewing she had laid down on her wooden chair, in the little out-of-the-way bar.

“I don't approve of such subjecs,” she said, “treated frivolous.”

“Gracious goodness, Eaves,” said Mr. Sully, “she says 'frivolous.' Hell—'frivolous'!”

“Why,” said Miss Lacey lucidly, “I'm not so green as I look.”

“Well, you couldn't look younger, if being young's to be green,” said Mr. Sully; “and as sure, my dear, as that was a flash of lightning, it—it's the real thing.”

When the faint but cumulative ramble of thunder that followed had subsided, Miss Lacey seemed to have withdrawn her attention. Mr. Sully edged slowly round on his feet and faced his friend. “You old skeleton at the feast! You've alarmed the poor child,” he said.

Miss Lacey spoke without raising her eyes, bent closely on her needle. “Not me,” she said; “but I don't hold with such ideas.”

“Tell her yourself,” said Mr. Sully to his friend; “tell her yourself: they never will believe me.”

Mr. Eaves shook his head.

“Why not?” said Mr. Sully.

“God bless me,” said Mr. Eaves, with sudden heat, “I'm old enough to be her father.”

Miss Lacey looked up over her sewing. “You'd scarcely believe me,” she said mysteriously; “but there was a young gentleman down Charles-street, where I used to be, that had dreams—well, there, shocking! Nobody but me had the patience to listen to him. But you can't give all your attention to one customer, can you? He,” she cast a curious glance into the shadows brooding over the commissionaire—“he got up out of his bed one night, just as you or me might—he was living in private apartments, too—struck a match, so they said, and cut his throat. Awful. From ear to ear!” Her thimbled finger made a demure half-circuit of the large pearls of her necklace.

Mr. Sully gazed roundly. “Did he, though? But there, you see,” and he leant in great confidence over the counter, “Mr. Eaves here doesn't shave!”

Mr. Eaves smiled vaguely, half-lifting his stick, as if in coquettish acknowledgment of his friend's jest.

“No, no, old friend,” he said, “not that, not that, I hope.”

“Gracious goodness,” said Mr. Sully cordially, “he mustn't take it to heart like that. A dream's a dream.”

“Why, of course, it is,” said Miss Lacey. “You ought to take more care of yourself, sir; didn't he, Mr. Sully?”

Mr. Eaves gazed dispassionately, and yet with some little dignity, in the isolation of attention he had evoked. He turned slowly towards the bar, and stooped a little—confidentially. “Not once, not twice,” he said ruminatingly, “but every blessed night. Every blessed night.”

Miss Lacey eyed him with searching friendliness.

“Tell her,” said Mr. Sully, walking slowly and circumspectly to the door, and peeping out through the cranny into the darkened street.

Mr. Eaves put his empty glass deliberately upon the counter, drew his hand slowly across his lips and shook his head. “It's nothing to tell, when you come to that. And …” he nodded a questioning head towards the solitary occupant of the other bar.

“Oh, fast; bless you,” said Miss Lacey. “As reg'lar as clockwork—you'd hardly believe it.”

“He'll break his neck, some day,” remarked Mr. Sully tersely, “with that jerking.”

“You see, my dear,” continued Mr. Eaves trustfully, “I don't mind my old friend, Mr. Sully, making a good deal of fun at my expense. He always has: eh, Sully? But he doesn't see. You don't see, Sully. There the thing is; and truth all over it. Facts are facts—in my belief.”

“But fire and brimstone, and suchlike; oh no!” said Miss Lacey with a dainty little shudder. “I can't credit it, reelly; oh no! And poor innocent infants, too! You may think of me what you like, but nothing 'll make me believe that.”

Mr. Sully looked over his shoulder at Mr. Eaves. “Oh, that,” said his old friend, “was only Mr. Sully's fun. He says it's Hell. I didn't. My dream was only—after; the state after death, as they call it.”

“I see,” said Miss Lacey, lucidly, summoning all her intelligence into her face.

Mr. Eaves leaned forward, and all but whispered the curious tidings into her ear. “It's—it's just the same," he said

“The same?” echoed Miss Lacey. “What?”

“The same,” repeated the old man, drawing back, and looking out of his long, grey, meaningless face at the little plump, bright, satiny woman.

“Hell?” breathed Miss Lacey.

“The state after death,” called Mr. Sully, still peering into the gloom—and stepped back rather hurriedly in the intense pale lilac illumination of a sudden flickering blaze of lightning.

Thunder now clanged directly overhead, and still Mr. Eaves gazed softly yet earnestly into nothingness, as if in deep thought.

“Whatever you like to call it,” he began again steadily pushing his way, “that's how I take it. I sit with my wife, just the same; cap and 'front' and all, just the same; gas burning, decanter on the table, books in the case, marble clock on the mantelpiece, just the same. Or perhaps I'm walking in the street, just the same; carts and shops and dogs, all just the same. Or perhaps I'm here, same as I might be now; with Sully there, and you there, and him there,” he nodded towards the commissionaire. “All just the same. For ever, and ever, and ever.” He raised his empty glass to his lips, and glanced almost apologetically towards his old friend. “For ever, and ever,” he said, and put it down again.

“He means,” said Mr. Sully, “no change: like one of those blessed things on the movies; over and over again, click, click, click, click, click; you know. I tell him it's his sentence, my dear.”

“But if it's the same,” Miss Lacey interposed, with a little docile frown of confusion, “what's different?”

“Mark me, Eaves, my boy,” cried Mr. Sully softly at the door; “it's the ladies for brains, after all. That's what they call a poser. 'What's different,' eh?”

Mr. Eaves pondered in a profound internal silence in the bar. And beyond the windows, the rain streamed steadily in a long-drawn gush of coolness and peace. “What's different?” repeated Mr. Sully, rocking infinitesimally on his heels.

“Why,” said Mr. Eaves, “it seems as if there I can't change; can't. If you were to ask me how I know—why, I couldn't say. It's a dream. But that's what's the difference. There's nothing to come. Now: why! I might change in a score of ways; just take them as they come. I might fall ill; or Mrs. Eaves might; I might come into some money; marry again. God bless me, I might die! But there, that's all over; endless; no escape; nothing. I can't even die. I'm just meself, Miss Lacey; Sully, old friend. Just meself, for ever, and ever. Nothing but me looking on at it all, if you take me—just what I've made of it. It's my”—his large pale eyes roved aimlessly—“it's just what Mr. Sully says, I suppose; it's my sentence. Eh, Sully? wasn't that it? My sentence?” He smiled courageously.

“Sentence, oh no! Sentence? You!” cried Miss Lacey incredulously. “How could you, Mr. Sully? Sentence! Whatever for, sir?”

Mr. Eaves again glanced vaguely at the sleeper, and then at his friend's round substantial shoulders, rigidly turned on him. He fixed his eyes on the clock.

“You've never done no harm, Mr. Eaves!” cried Miss Lacey, almost as if in entreaty.

“You see,” said the old gentleman, glancing over his shoulder, “it isn't what you do: so I seem to take it.” Mr. Sully half turned from the door, as if to listen. “It's what you are,” said Mr. Eaves, as if to himself.

“Why, according to that,” said Miss Lacey, in generous indignation, “who's safe?”

A day of close and tepid weather followed the storm. But it was on the evening of the next day after that—an evening of limpid sunshine and peace, the sparrows chirping shrilly in the narrow lights and shadows of the lane, that Mr. Sully came in to see Miss Lacey.

She was alone: and singing a little quiet tune to herself as she went about her business. He shook his head when she held up two glasses; and raised just one forefinger.

“He's dead,” he said.

“Oh, no!” cried Miss Lacey.

“This morning .… in his sleep.” He gazed at her with an unusual—with a curiously fish-like concentration.

“Poor poor, gentleman,” said Miss Lacey. "He was a gentleman, too; and no mistake. Never a hard word for nobody; man, woman, or child. Always the same. But it's shocking. Well, well. But how dreadfully sudden, Mr. Sully, sir!”

“Well, I don't know,” said Mr. Sully almost irritably. “And if so, where's the change?” His round shoulders seemed with slight effort almost to shrug themselves.

“Goodness gracious,” Miss Lacey cried, “you don't mean—you don't mean to think—you don't say it's true? What he was telling us, Mr. Sully?”

“I'm not so sure,” her visitor replied vaguely, almost stubbornly. “Where else, after all, knowing all that, why, where else could he go?”

“Mr. Eaves, Mr. Sully? Him? oh, no!”

Mr. Sully, in the intense clear quiet of the bar, continued to stare at her in a manner something like that of an over-glutted vulture. He nodded.

Miss Lacey's kind brown eyes suddenly darkened as if with a gust of storm. “But, then, what about us?” she cried piteously, and yet with the tenderest generosity.

“Well,” said Mr. Sully, opening the door, and looking out into the sunny evening air, “if you ask me, that's merely a question of time.”