When he walked he used to put out his hand like a blind man and grope with his long fingers—as if he hoped to feel something that he was not permitted to see. He was feeling for wood—for the gray gate. I met him once and took his arm and carried him off to have a drink.
He said to me quite seriously, as we stood at the bar:
“These bricks are killing me. Why the devil can’t people keep still? It is nothing but pulling down houses and putting up taller ones all over Bloomsbury. I tell you frankly, old fellow, I can’t breathe. My throat burns—as if they were stuffing their lime down it. Every scaffold pole knocks at my heart. It’s killing me. You haven’t any coppers about you, I suppose? The tram fare isn’t much. I could get down to Stamford Hill and back again before dusk.”
One night I saw Minnie run bareheaded across the square toward my door. I had the second floor at No. 7 in those days. She looked a little wild and frightened, but she was self-possessed enough to throw a look of stone at Sophia Dominy, who was going toward Kinsman’s set.
Presently I heard her on my stairs and went out.
“Come over to Nat,” she panted. “I think he is dying. The doctor told me that bit of lung he had would last for years, but it isn’t going to.”
He was lying in the bed. It stood under the window then. Near to his hand was a pile of those hateful long envelopes. The editorial regrets that had helped to break his heart peeped out from the open ends.
“I’ve been looking over some of these things,” he panted, touching the articles and smiling at me in the old droll, half-scornful way. “Some of them were bad and vulgar enough—Heaven knows. Yet they did not get accepted. ‘Does Cold Mutton Cause Gumboil?’—I thought that would be sure to go. ‘The Woman with the White Shoe Strings’—it is a most sensational detective story—and yet, one after the other, they threw my stuff back at me. I’ve written the title pages afresh ever so many times, so that the MS. should not look as if it had been hawked about.”
It was a very hot July night, the windows were open top and bottom. Jimmy, across the way, was singing the latest song from the “halls” in his feeble voice.
Poor Nat was quiet for a little. Then he turned his head suddenly and looked at Minnie. I’ve seen him look like that at her when they were courting. No doubt she remembered, for she bent down and softly shook up his pillows.