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Paul Kelver

by Jerome K. Jerome · English · Gutenberg #1334 · 775,961 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Paul Kelver

Author: Jerome K. Jerome


        
Release date: June 1, 1998 [eBook #1334]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1334

Credits: Ron Burkey, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PAUL KELVER ***

PAUL KELVER

By Jerome K. Jerome

(Jerome Klapka), 1859-1927


Transcriber's Note: Items in [brackets] are editorial comments added
in proofing. Italicized text is delimited by _underscores_. The pound
(currency) symbol has been replaced by the word “pound”.




CONTENTS.

PROLOGUE

BOOK I

I. PAUL, ARRIVED IN A STRANGE LAND, LEARNS MANY THINGS, AND GOES TO MEET
THE MAN IN GREY

II. IN WHICH PAUL MAKES ACQUAINTANCE OF THE MAN WITH THE UGLY MOUTH

III. HOW GOOD LUCK KNOCKED AT THE DOOR OF THE MAN IN GREY

IV. PAUL, FALLING IN WITH A GOODLY COMPANY OF PILGRIMS, LEARNS OF THEM
THE ROAD THAT HE MUST TRAVEL, AND MEETS THE PRINCESS OF THE GOLDEN LOCKS

V. IN WHICH THERE COMES BY ONE BENT UPON PURSUING HIS OWN WAY

VI. OF THE SHADOW THAT CAME BETWEEN THE MAN IN GREY AND THE LADY OF THE
LOVE-LIT EYES

VII. OF THE PASSING OF THE SHADOW

VIII. HOW THE MAN IN GREY MADE READY FOR HIS GOING

IX. OF THE FASHIONING OF PAUL

X. IN WHICH PAUL IS SHIPWRECKED, AND CAST INTO DEEP WATERS




BOOK II.

I. DESCRIBES THE DESERT ISLAND TO WHICH PAUL WAS DRIFTED

II. PAUL, ESCAPING FROM HIS SOLITUDE, FALLS INTO STRANGE COMPANY, AND
BECOMES CAPTIVE TO ONE OF HAUGHTY MIEN

III. GOOD FRIENDS SHOW PAUL THE ROAD TO FREEDOM. BUT BEFORE SETTING OUT,
HE WILL GO A-VISITING

IV. LEADS TO A MEETING

V. HOW ON A SWEET GREY MORNING THE FUTURE CAME TO PAUL

VI. OF THE GLORY AND GOODNESS AND THE EVIL THAT GO TO THE MAKING OF LOVE

VII. HOW PAUL SET FORTH UPON A QUEST

VIII. AND HOW CAME BACK AGAIN

IX. THE PRINCESS OF THE GOLDEN LOCKS SENDS PAUL A RING

X. PAUL FINDS HIS WAY




PAUL KELVER




PROLOGUE.


IN WHICH THE AUTHOR SEEKS TO CAST THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THIS STORY UPON
ANOTHER.

At the corner of a long, straight, brick-built street in the far East
End of London--one of those lifeless streets, made of two drab walls
upon which the level lines, formed by the precisely even window-sills
and doorsteps, stretch in weary perspective from end to end, suggesting
petrified diagrams proving dead problems--stands a house that ever draws
me to it; so that often, when least conscious of my footsteps, I awake
to find myself hurrying through noisy, crowded thoroughfares, where
flaring naphtha lamps illumine fierce, patient, leaden-coloured faces;
through dim-lit, empty streets, where monstrous shadows come and go
upon the close-drawn blinds; through narrow, noisome streets, where the
gutters swarm with children, and each ever-open doorway vomits riot;
past reeking corners, and across waste places, till at last I reach the
dreary goal of my memory-driven desire, and, coming to a halt beside the
broken railings, find rest.

The house, larger than its fellows, built when the street was still
a country lane, edging the marshes, strikes a strange note of
individuality amid the surrounding harmony of hideousness. It is
encompassed on two sides by what was once a garden, though now but a
barren patch of stones and dust where clothes--it is odd any one should
have thought of washing--hang in perpetuity; while about the door
continue the remnants of a porch, which the stucco falling has left
exposed in all its naked insincerity.

Occasionally I drift hitherward in the day time, when slatternly women
gossip round the area gates, and the silence is broken by the
hoarse, wailing cry of “Coals--any coals--three and sixpence a
sack--co-o-o-als!” chanted in a tone that absence of response has
stamped with chronic melancholy; but then the street knows me not, and
my old friend of the corner, ashamed of its shabbiness in the unpitying
sunlight, turns its face away, and will not see me as I pass.

Not until the Night, merciful alone of all things to the ugly, draws her
veil across its sordid features will it, as some fond old nurse, sought
out in after years, open wide its arms to welcome me. Then the teeming
life it now shelters, hushed for a time within its walls, the flickering
flare from the “King of Prussia” opposite extinguished, will it talk
with me of the past, asking me many questions, reminding me of
many things I had forgotten. Then into the silent street come the
well-remembered footsteps; in and out the creaking gate pass, not seeing
me, the well-remembered faces; and we talk concerning them; as two
cronies, turning the torn leaves of some old album where the faded
portraits in forgotten fashions, speak together in low tones of those
now dead or scattered, with now a smile and now a sigh, and many an “Ah
me!” or “Dear, dear!”

This bent, worn man, coming towards us with quick impatient steps, which
yet cease every fifty yards or so, while he pauses, leaning heavily upon
his high Malacca cane: “It is a handsome face, is it not?” I ask, as I
gaze upon it, shadow framed.

“Aye, handsome enough,” answers the old House; “and handsomer still it
must have been before you and I knew it, before mean care had furrowed
it with fretful lines.”

“I never could make out,” continues the old House, musingly, “whom you
took after; for they were a handsome pair, your father and your mother,
though Lord! what a couple of children!”

“Children!” I say in surprise, for my father must have been past five
and thirty before the House could have known him, and my mother's face
is very close to mine, in the darkness, so that I see the many grey
hairs mingling with the bonny brown.

“Children,” repeats the old House, irritably, so it seems to me, not
liking, perhaps, its opinions questioned, a failing common to old folk;
“the most helpless pair of children I ever set eyes upon. Who but
a child, I should like to know, would have conceived the notion of
repairing his fortune by becoming a solicitor at thirty-eight, or,
having conceived such a notion, would have selected the outskirts of
Poplar as a likely centre in which to put up his door-plate?”

“It was considered to be a rising neighbourhood,” I reply, a little
resentful. No son cares to hear the family wisdom criticised, even
though at the bottom of his heart he may be in agreement with the
critic. “All sorts and conditions of men, whose affairs were in
connection with the sea would, it was thought, come to reside hereabout,
so as to be near to the new docks; and had they, it is not unreasonable
to suppose they would have quarrelled and disputed with one another,
much to the advantage of a cute solicitor, convenient to their hand.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” retorts the old House, shortly; “why, the mere
smell of the place would have been sufficient to keep a sensible man
away. And”--the grim brick face before me twists itself into a goblin
smile--“he, of all men in the world, as 'the cute solicitor,' giving
advice to shady clients, eager to get out of trouble by the shortest
way, can you fancy it! he who for two years starved himself, living on
five shillings a week--that was before you came to London, when he
was here alone. Even your mother knew nothing of it till years
afterwards--so that no man should be a penny the poorer for having
trusted his good name. Do you think the crew of chandlers and brokers,
dock hustlers and freight wreckers would have found him a useful man of
business, even had they come to settle here?”

I have no answer; nor does the old House wait for any, but talks on.

“And your mother! would any but a child have taken that soft-tongued
wanton to her bosom, and not have seen through acting so transparent?
Would any but the veriest child that never ought to have been let out
into the world by itself have thought to dree her weird in such folly?
Children! poor babies they were, both of them.”

“Tell me,” I say--for at such times all my stock of common sense is not
sufficient to convince me that the old House is but clay. From its walls
so full of voices, from its floors so thick with footsteps, surely it
has learned to live; as a violin, long played on, comes to learn at last
a music of its own. “Tell me, I was but a child to whom life speaks in a
strange tongue, was there any truth in the story?”

“Truth!” snaps out the old House; “just truth enough to plant a lie
upon; and Lord knows not much ground is needed for that weed. I saw
what I saw, and I know what I know. Your mother had a good man, and
your father a true wife, but it was the old story: a man's way is not a
woman's way, and a woman's way is not a man's way, so there lives ever
doubt between them.”

“But they came together in the end,” I say, remembering.

“Aye, in the end,” answers the House. “That is when you begin to
understand, you men and women, when you come to the end.”

The grave face of a not too recently washed angel peeps shyly at
me through the railings, then, as I turn my head, darts back and
disappears.

“What has become of her?” I ask.

“She? Oh, she is well enough,” replies the House. “She lives close here.
You must have passed the shop. You might have seen her had you looked
in. She weighs fourteen stone, about; and has nine children living. She
would be pleased to see you.”

“Thank you,” I say, with a laugh that is not wholly a laugh; “I do not
think I will call.” But I still hear the pit-pat of her tiny feet, dying
down the long street.

The faces thicken round me. A large looming, rubicund visage smiles
kindly on me, bringing back into my heart the old, odd mingling of
instinctive liking held in check by conscientious disapproval. I turn
from it, and see a massive, clean-shaven face, with the ugliest mouth
and the loveliest eyes I ever have known in a man.

“Was he as bad, do you think, as they said?” I ask of my ancient friend.

“Shouldn't wonder,” the old House answers. “I never knew a worse--nor a
better.”

The wind whisks it aside, leaving to view a little old woman, hobbling
nimbly by aid of a stick. Three corkscrew curls each side of her head
bob with each step she takes, and as she draws near to me, making the
most alarming grimaces, I hear her whisper, as though confiding to
herself some fascinating secret, “I'd like to skin 'em. I'd like to skin
'em all. I'd like to skin 'em all alive!”

It sounds a fiendish sentiment, yet I only laugh, and the little old
lady, with a final facial contortion surpassing all dreams, limps beyond
my ken.

Then, as though choosing contrasts, follows a fair, laughing face. I saw
it in the life only a few hours ago--at least, not it, but the poor daub
that Evil has painted over it, hating the sweetness underlying. And as
I stand gazing at it, wishing it were of the dead who change not, there
drifts back from the shadows that other face, the one of the wicked
mouth and the tender eyes, so that I stand again helpless between the
two I loved so well, he from whom I learned my first steps in manhood,
she from whom I caught my first glimpse of the beauty and the mystery of
woman. And again the cry rises from my heart, “Whose fault was it--yours
or hers?” And again I hear his mocking laugh as he answers, “Whose
fault? God made us.” And thinking of her and of the love I bore her,
which was as the love of a young pilgrim to a saint, it comes into my
blood to hate him. But when I look into his eyes and see the pain that
lives there, my pity grows stronger than my misery, and I can only echo
his words, “God made us.”

Merry faces and sad, fair faces and foul, they ride upon the wind; but
the centre round which they circle remains always the one: a little
lad with golden curls more suitable to a girl than to a boy, with shy,
awkward ways and a silent tongue, and a grave, old-fashioned face.

And, turning from him to my old brick friend, I ask: “Would he know me,
could he see me, do you think?”

“How should he,” answers the old House, “you are so different to what he
would expect. Would you recognise your own ghost, think you?”

“It is sad to think he would not recognise me,” I say.

“It might be sadder if he did,” grumbles the old House.

We both remained silent for awhile; but I know of what the old House is
thinking. Soon it speaks as I expected.

“You--writer of stories, why don't you write a book about him? There is
something that you know.”

It is the favourite theme of the old House. I never visit it but it
suggests to me this idea.

“But he has done nothing?” I say.

“He has lived,” answers the old House. “Is not that enough?”

“Aye, but only in London in these prosaic modern times,” I persist. “How
of such can one make a story that shall interest the people?”

The old House waxes impatient of me.

“'The people!'” it retorts, “what are you all but children in a dim-lit
room, waiting until one by one you are called out to sleep. And one
mounts upon a stool and tells a tale to the others who have gathered
round. Who shall say what will please them, what will not.”

Returning home with musing footsteps through the softly breathing
streets, I ponder the words of the old House. Is it but as some foolish
mother thinking all the world interested in her child, or may there lie
wisdom in its counsel? Then to my guidance or misguidance comes the
thought of a certain small section of the Public who often of an evening
commands of me a story; and who, when I have told her of the dreadful
giants and of the gallant youths who slay them, of the wood-cutter's
sons who rescue maidens from Ogre-guarded castles; of the Princesses the
most beautiful in all the world, of the Princes with magic swords, still
unsatisfied, creeps closer yet, saying: “Now tell me a real story,”
adding for my comprehending: “You know: about a little girl who lived in
a big house with her father and mother, and who was sometimes naughty,
you know.”

So perhaps among the many there may be some who for a moment will turn
aside from tales of haughty Heroes, ruffling it in Court and Camp, to
listen to the story of a very ordinary lad who lived with very ordinary
folk in a modern London street, and who grew up to be a very ordinary
sort of man, loving a little and grieving a little, helping a few and
harming a few, struggling and failing and hoping; and if any such there
be, let them come round me.

But let not those who come to me grow indignant as they listen, saying:
“This rascal tells us but a humdrum story, where nothing is as it should
be;” for I warn all beforehand that I tell but of things that I have
seen. My villains, I fear, are but poor sinners, not altogether bad;
and my good men but sorry saints. My princes do not always slay their
dragons; alas, sometimes, the dragon eats the prince. The wicked
fairies often prove more powerful than the good. The magic thread leads
sometimes wrong, and even the hero is not always brave and true.

So let those come round me only who will be content to hear but their
own story, told by another, saying as they listen, “So dreamt I. Ah,
yes, that is true, I remember.”




CHAPTER I

PAUL, ARRIVED IN A STRANGE LAND, LEARNS MANY THINGS, AND GOES TO MEET
THE MAN IN GREY.

Fate intended me for a singularly fortunate man. Properly, I ought to
have been born in June, which being, as is well known, the luckiest
month in all the year for such events, should, by thoughtful parents, be
more generally selected. How it was I came to be born in May, which is,
on the other hand, of all the twelve the most unlucky, as I have proved,
I leave to those more conversant with the subject to explain. An early
nurse, the first human being of whom I have any distinct recollection,
unhesitatingly attributed the unfortunate fact to my natural impatience;
which quality she at the same time predicted would lead me into even
greater trouble, a prophecy impressed by future events with the stamp of
prescience. It was from this same bony lady that I likewise learned the
manner of my coming. It seems that I arrived, quite unexpectedly, two
hours after news had reached the house of the ruin of my father's mines
through inundation; misfortunes, as it was expounded to me, never coming
singly in this world to any one. That all things might be of a piece,
my poor mother, attempting to reach the bell, fell against and broke the
cheval-glass, thus further saddening herself with the conviction--for
no amount of reasoning ever succeeded in purging her Welsh blood of
its natural superstition--that whatever might be the result of future
battles with my evil star, the first seven years of tiny existence had
been, by her act, doomed to disaster.

“And I must confess,” added the knobbly Mrs. Fursey, with a sigh, “it
does look as though there must be some truth in the saying, after all.”

“Then ain't I a lucky little boy?” I asked. For hitherto it had been
Mrs. Fursey's method to impress upon me my exceptional good fortune.
That I could and did, involuntarily, retire to bed at six, while less
happily placed children were deprived of their natural rest until eight
or nine o'clock, had always been held up to me as an astounding piece of
luck. Some little boys had not a bed at all; for the which, in my more
riotous moments, I envied them. Again, that at the first sign of a cold
it became my unavoidable privilege to lunch off linseed gruel and sup
off brimstone and treacle--a compound named with deliberate intent to
deceive the innocent, the treacle, so far as taste is concerned, being
wickedly subordinated to the brimstone--was another example of Fortune's
favouritism: other little boys were so astoundingly unlucky as to be
left alone when they felt ill. If further proof were needed to convince
that I had been signalled out by Providence as its especial protege,
there remained always the circumstance that I possessed Mrs. Fursey
for my nurse. The suggestion that I was not altogether the luckiest of
children was a new departure.

The good dame evidently perceived her error, and made haste to correct
it.

“Oh, you! You are lucky enough,” she replied; “I was thinking of your
poor mother.”

“Isn't mamma lucky?”

“Well, she hasn't been too lucky since you came.”

“Wasn't it lucky, her having me?”

“I can't say it was, at that particular time.”

“Didn't she want me?”

Mrs. Fursey was one of those well-meaning persons who are of opinion
that the only reasonable attitude of childhood should be that of
perpetual apology for its existence.

“Well, I daresay she could have done without you,” was the answer.

I can see the picture plainly still. I am sitting on a low chair before
the nursery fire, one knee supported in my locked hands, meanwhile Mrs.
Fursey's needle grated with monotonous regularity against her thimble.
At that moment knocked at my small soul for the first time the problem
of life.

Suddenly, without moving, I said:

“Then why did she take me in?”

The rasping click of the needle on the thimble ceased abruptly.

“Took you in! What's the child talking about? Who's took you in?”

“Why, mamma. If she didn't want me, why did she take me in?”

But even while, with heart full of dignified resentment, I propounded
this, as I proudly felt, logically unanswerable question, I was glad
that she had. The vision of my being refused at the bedroom window
presented itself to my imagination. I saw the stork, perplexed and
annoyed, looking as I had sometimes seen Tom Pinfold look when the fish
he had been holding out by the tail had been sniffed at by Anna, and
the kitchen door shut in his face. Would the stork also have gone away
thoughtfully scratching his head with one of those long, compass-like
legs of his, and muttering to himself. And here, incidentally, I fell
a-wondering how the stork had carried me. In the garden I had often
watched a blackbird carrying a worm, and the worm, though no doubt
really safe enough, had always appeared to me nervous and uncomfortable.
Had I wriggled and squirmed in like fashion? And where would the stork
have taken me to then? Possibly to Mrs. Fursey's: their cottage was the
nearest. But I felt sure Mrs. Fursey would not have taken me in; and
next to them, at the first house in the village, lived Mr. Chumdley,
the cobbler, who was lame, and who sat all day hammering boots with
very dirty hands, in a little cave half under the ground, his whole
appearance suggesting a poor-spirited ogre. I should have hated being
his little boy. Possibly nobody would have taken me in. I grew pensive,
thinking of myself as the rejected of all the village. What would the
stork have done with me, left on his hands, so to speak. The reflection
prompted a fresh question.

“Nurse, where did I come from?”

“Why, I've told you often. The stork brought you.”

“Yes, I know. But where did the stork get me from?” Mrs. Fursey paused
for quite a long while before replying. Possibly she was reflecting
whether such answer might not make me unduly conceited. Eventually she
must have decided to run that risk; other opportunities could be relied
upon for neutralising the effect.

“Oh, from Heaven.”

“But I thought Heaven was a place where you went to,” I answered; “not
where you comed from.” I know I said “comed,” for I remember that at
this period my irregular verbs were a bewildering anxiety to my poor
mother. “Comed” and “goned,” which I had worked out for myself, were
particular favourites of mine.

Mrs. Fursey passed over my grammar in dignified silence. She had
been pointedly requested not to trouble herself with that part of my
education, my mother holding that diverging opinions upon the same
subject only confused a child.

“You came from Heaven,” repeated Mrs. Fursey, “and you'll go to
Heaven--if you're good.”

“Do all little boys and girls come from Heaven?”

“So they say.” Mrs. Fursey's tone implied that she was stating what
might possibly be but a popular fallacy, for which she individually took
no responsibility.

“And did you come from Heaven, Mrs. Fursey?” Mrs. Fursey's reply to this
was decidedly more emphatic.

“Of course I did. Where do you think I came from?”

At once, I am ashamed to say, Heaven lost its exalted position in my
eyes. Even before this, it had puzzled me that everybody I knew should
be going there--for so I was always assured; now, connected as it
appeared to be with the origin of Mrs. Fursey, much of its charm
disappeared.

But this was not all. Mrs. Fursey's information had suggested to me a
fresh grief. I stopped not to console myself with the reflection that my
fate had been but the fate of all little boys and girls. With a child's
egoism I seized only upon my own particular case.

“Didn't they want me in Heaven then, either?” I asked. “Weren't they
fond of me up there?”

The misery in my voice must have penetrated even Mrs. Fursey's bosom,
for she answered more sympathetically than usual.

“Oh, they liked you well enough, I daresay. I like you, but I like to
get rid of you sometimes.” There could be no doubt as to this last. Even
at the time, I often doubted whether that six o'clock bedtime was not
occasionally half-past five.

The answer comforted me not. It remained clear that I was not wanted
either in Heaven nor upon the earth. God did not want me. He was glad
to get rid of me. My mother did not want me. She could have done without
me. Nobody wanted me. Why was I here?

And then, as the sudden opening and shutting of the door of a dark room,
came into my childish brain the feeling that Something, somewhere, must
have need of me, or I could not be, Something I felt I belonged to and
that belonged to me, Something that was as much a part of me as I of It.
The feeling came back to me more than once during my childhood, though I
could never put it into words. Years later the son of the Portuguese Jew
explained to me my thought. But all that I myself could have told was
that in that moment I knew for the first time that I lived, that I was
I.

The next instant all was dark again, and I once more a puzzled little
boy, sitting by a nursery fire, asking of a village dame questions
concerning life.

Suddenly a new thought came to me, or rather the recollection of an old.

“Nurse, why haven't we got a husband?”

Mrs. Fursey left off her sewing, and stared at me.

“What maggot has the child got into its head now?” was her observation;
“who hasn't got a husband?”

“Why, mamma.”

“Don't talk nonsense, Master Paul; you know your mamma has got a
husband.”

“No, she ain't.”

“And don't contradict. Your mamma's husband is your papa, who lives in
London.”

“What's the good of _him_!”

Mrs. Fursey's reply appeared to me to be unnecessarily vehement.

“You wicked child, you; where's your commandments? Your father is in
London working hard to earn money to keep you in idleness, and you sit
there and say 'What's the good of him!' I'd be ashamed to be such an
ungrateful little brat.”

I had not meant to be ungrateful. My words were but the repetition of
a conversation I had overheard the day before between my mother and my
aunt.

Had said my aunt: “There she goes, moping again. Drat me if ever I saw
such a thing to mope as a woman.”

My aunt was entitled to preach on the subject. She herself grumbled all
day about all things, but she did it cheerfully.

My mother was standing with her hands clasped behind her--a favourite
attitude of hers--gazing through the high French window into the garden
beyond. It must have been spring time, for I remember the white and
yellow crocuses decking the grass.

“I want a husband,” had answered my mother, in a tone so ludicrously
childish that at sound of it I had looked up from the fairy story I was
reading, half expectant to find her changed into a little girl; “I hate
not having a husband.”

“Help us and save us,” my aunt had retorted; “how many more does a girl
want? She's got one.”

“What's the good of him all that way off,” had pouted my mother; “I want
him here where I can get at him.”

I had often heard of this father of mine, who lived far away in
London, and to whom we owed all the blessings of life; but my childish
endeavours to square information with reflection had resulted in my
assigning to him an entirely spiritual existence. I agreed with my
mother that such an one, however to be revered, was no substitute for
the flesh and blood father possessed by luckier folk--the big, strong,
masculine thing that would carry a fellow pig-a-back round the garden,
or take a chap to sail in boats.

“You don't understand me, nurse,” I explained; “what I mean is a husband
you can get at.”

“Well, and you'll 'get at him,' poor gentleman, one of these days,”
 answered Mrs. Fursey. “When he's ready for you he'll send for you, and
then you'll go to him in London.”

I felt that still Mrs. Fursey didn't understand. But I foresaw that
further explanation would only shock her, so contented myself with a
simple, matter-of-fact question.

“How do you get to London; do you have to die first?”

“I do think,” said Mrs. Fursey, in the voice of resigned despair rather
than of surprise, “that, without exception, you are the silliest little
boy I ever came across. I've no patience with you.”

“I am very sorry, nurse,” I answered; “I thought--”

“Then,” interrupted Mrs. Fursey, in the voice of many generations, “you
shouldn't think. London,” continued the good dame, her experience no
doubt suggesting that the shortest road to peace would be through my
understanding of this matter, “is a big town, and you go there in a
train. Some time--soon now--your father will write to your mother that
everything is ready. Then you and your mother and your aunt will leave
this place and go to London, and I shall be rid of you.”

“And shan't we come back here ever any more?”

“Never again.”

“And I'll never play in the garden again, never go down to the
pebble-ridge to tea, or to Jacob's tower?”

“Never again.” I think Mrs. Fursey took a pleasure in the phrase. It
sounded, as she said it, like something out of the prayer-book.

“And I'll never see Anna, or Tom Pinfold, or old Yeo, or Pincher, or
you, ever any more?” In this moment of the crumbling from under me of
all my footholds I would have clung even to that dry tuft, Mrs. Fursey
herself.

“Never any more. You'll go away and begin an entirely new life. And I do
hope, Master Paul,” added Mrs. Fursey, piously, “it may be a better one.
That you will make up your mind to--”

But Mrs. Fursey's well-meant exhortations, whatever they may have been,
fell upon deaf ears. Here was I face to face with yet another problem.
This life into which I had fallen: it was understandable! One went away,
leaving the pleasant places that one knew, never to return to them.
One left one's labour and one's play to enter upon a new existence in a
strange land. One parted from the friends one had always known, one saw
them never again. Life was indeed a strange thing; and, would a body
comprehend it, then must a body sit staring into the fire, thinking very
hard, unheedful of all idle chatter.

That night, when my mother came to kiss me good-night, I turned my
face to the wall and pretended to be asleep, for children as well as
grown-ups have their foolish moods; but when I felt the soft curls brush
my cheek, my pride gave way, and clasping my arms about her neck, and
drawing her face still closer down to mine; I voiced the question that
all the evening had been knocking at my heart:

“I suppose you couldn't send me back now, could you? You see, you've had
me so long.”

“Send you back?”

“Yes. I'd be too big for the stork to carry now, wouldn't I?”

My mother knelt down beside the bed so that her face and mine were on
a level, and looking into her eyes, the fear that had been haunting me
fell from me.

“Who has been talking foolishly to a foolish little boy?” asked my
mother, keeping my arms still clasped about her neck.

“Oh, nurse and I were discussing things, you know,” I answered, “and she
said you could have done without me.” Somehow, I did not mind repeating
the words now; clearly it could have been but Mrs. Fursey's fun.

My mother drew me closer to her.

“And what made her think that?”

“Well, you see,” I replied, “I came at a very awkward time, didn't I;
when you had a lot of other troubles.”

My mother laughed, but the next moment looked grave again.

“I did not know you thought about such things,” she said; “we must be
more together, you and I, Paul, and you shall tell me all you think,
because nurse does not quite understand you. It is true what she said
about the trouble; it came just at that time. But I could not have done
without you. I was very unhappy, and you were sent to comfort me and
help me to bear it.” I liked this explanation better.

“Then it was lucky, your having me?” I said. Again my mother laughed,
and again there followed that graver look upon her childish face.

“Will you remember what I am going to say?” She spoke so earnestly that
I, wriggling into a sitting posture, became earnest also.

“I'll try,” I answered; “but I ain't got a very good memory, have I?”

“Not very,” smiled my mother; “but if you think about it a good deal it
will not leave you. When you are a good boy, and later on, when you are
a good man, then I am the luckiest little mother in all the world. And
every time you fail, that means bad luck for me. You will remember that
after I'm gone, when you are a big man, won't you, Paul?”

So, both of us quite serious, I promised; and though I smile now when
I remember, seeing before me those two earnest, childish faces, yet I
think, however little success it may be I have to boast of, it would
perhaps have been still less had I entirely forgotten.

From that day my mother waxes in my memory; Mrs. Fursey, of the many
promontories, waning. There were sunny mornings in the neglected garden,
where the leaves played round us while we worked and read; twilight
evenings in the window seat where, half hidden by the dark red curtains,
we would talk in whispers, why I know not, of good men and noble women,
ogres, fairies, saints and demons; they were pleasant days.

Possibly our curriculum lacked method; maybe it was too varied and
extensive for my age, in consequence of which chronology became confused
within my brain, and fact and fiction more confounded than has usually
been considered permissible, even in history. I saw Aphrodite, ready
armed and risen from the sea, move with stately grace to meet King
Canute, who, throned upon the sand, bade her come no further lest
she should wet his feet. In forest glade I saw King Rufus fall from a
poisoned arrow shot by Robin Hood; but thanks to sweet Queen Eleanor,
who sucked the poison from his wound, I knew he lived. Oliver Cromwell,
having killed King Charles, married his widow, and was in turn stabbed
by Hamlet. Ulysses, in the Argo, it was fixed upon my mind, had
discovered America. Romulus and Remus had slain the wolf and rescued
Little Red Riding Hood. Good King Arthur, for letting the cakes burn,
had been murdered by his uncle in the Tower of London. Prometheus, bound
to the Rock, had been saved by good St. George. Paris had given the
apple to William Tell. What matter! the information was there. It needed
rearranging, that was all.

Sometimes, of an afternoon, we would climb the steep winding pathway
through the woods, past awful precipices, spirit-haunted, by grassy
swards where fairies danced o' nights, by briar and bracken sheltered
Caves where fearsome creatures lurked, till high above the creeping sea
we would reach the open plateau where rose old Jacob's ruined tower.
“Jacob's Folly” it was more often called about the country side, and by
some “The Devil's Tower;” for legend had it that there old Jacob and his
master, the Devil, had often met in windy weather to wave false wrecking
lights to troubled ships. Who “old Jacob” was, I never, that I can
remember, learned, nor how nor why he built the Tower. Certain only it
is his memory was unpopular, and the fisher folk would swear that
still on stormy nights strange lights would gleam and flash from the
ivy-curtained windows of his Folly.

But in day time no spot was more inviting, the short moss-grass before
its shattered door, the lichen on its crumbling stones. From its topmost
platform one saw the distant mountains, faint like spectres, and the
silent ships that came and vanished; and about one's feet the pleasant
farm lands and the grave, sweet river.

Smaller and poorer the world has grown since then. Now, behind those
hills lie naught but smoky towns and dingy villages; but then they
screened a land of wonder where princesses dwelt in castles, where the
cities were of gold. Now the ocean is but six days' journey wide, ending
at the New York Custom House. Then, had one set one's sail upon it, one
would have travelled far and far, beyond the golden moonlight, beyond
the gate of clouds; to the magic land of the blood red shore, t'other
side o' the sun. I never dreamt in those days a world could be so small.

Upon the topmost platform a wooden seat ran round within the parapet,
and sitting there hand in hand, sheltered from the wind which ever blew
about the tower, my mother would people for me all the earth and air
with the forms of myth and legend--perhaps unwisely, yet I do not
know. I took no harm from it, good rather, I think. They were beautiful
fancies, most of them; or so my mother turned them, making for love and
pity, as do all the tales that live, whether poems or old wives fables.
But at that time of course they had no meaning for me other than the
literal; so that my mother, looking into my eyes, would often hasten
to add: “But that, you know, is only an old superstition, and of course
there are no such things nowadays.” Yet, forgetful sometimes of the
time, and overtaken homeward by the shadows, we would hasten swiftly
through the darkening path, holding each other tightly by the hand.

Spring had waxed to summer, summer waned to autumn. Then my aunt and I
one morning, waiting at the breakfast table, saw through the open window
my mother skipping, dancing, pirouetting up the garden path. She held
a letter open in her hand, which as she drew near she waved about her
head, singing:

“Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, then comes Wednesday morning.”

She caught me to her and began dancing with me round the room.

Observed my aunt, who continued steadily to eat bread and butter:

“Just like 'em all. Goes mad with joy. What for? Because she's going to
leave a decent house, to live in a poky hole in the East End of London,
and keep one servant.”

To my aunt the second person ever remained a grammatical superfluity.
Invariably she spoke not to but of a person, throwing out her
conversation in the form of commentary. This had the advantage
of permitting the party intended to ignore it as mere impersonal
philosophy. Seeing it was generally uncomplimentary, most people
preferred so to regard it; but my mother had never succeeded in
schooling herself to indifference.

“It's not a poky hole,” she replied; “it's an old-fashioned house, near
the river.”

“Plaistow marshes!” ejaculated my aunt, “calls it the river!”

“So it is the river,” returned my mother; “the river is the other side
of the marshes.”

“Let's hope it will always stop there,” said my aunt.

“And it's got a garden,” continued my mother, ignoring my aunt's last
remark; “which is quite an unusual feature in a London house. And it
isn't the East End of London; it is a rising suburb. And you won't make
me miserable because I am too happy.”

“Drat the woman!” said my aunt, “why can't she sit down and give us our
tea before it's all cold?”

“You are a disagreeable thing!” said my mother.

“Not half milk,” said my aunt. My aunt was never in the least disturbed
by other people's opinion of her, which was perhaps well for her.

For three days my mother packed and sang; and a dozen times a day
unpacked and laughed, looking for things wanted that were always found
at the very bottom of the very last box looked into, so that Anna,
waiting for a certain undergarment of my aunt's which shall be nameless,
suggested a saving of time:

“If I were you, ma'am,” said Anna, “I'd look into the last box you're
going to look into first.”

But it was found eventually in the first box-the box, that is, my mother
had intended to search first, but which, acting on Anna's suggestion,
she had reserved till the last. This caused my mother to be quite short
with Anna, who she said had wasted her time. But by Tuesday afternoon
all stood ready: we were to start early Wednesday morning.

That evening, missing my mother in the house, I sought her in the garden
and found her, as I had expected, on her favourite seat under the great
lime tree; but to my surprise there were tears in her eyes.

“But I thought you were glad we were going,” I said.

“So I am,” answered my mother, drying her eyes only to make room for
fresh tears.

“Then why are you crying?”

“Because I'm sorry to leave here.”

Grown-up folks with their contradictory ways were a continual puzzle to
me in those days; I am not sure I quite understand them even now, myself
included.

We were up and off next day before the dawn. The sun rose as the wagon
reached the top of the hill; and there we paused and took our farewell
look at Old Jacob's Tower. My mother cried a little behind her veil; but
my aunt only said, “I never did care for earwigs in my tea;” and as
for myself I was too excited and expectant to feel much sentiment about
anything.

On the journey I sat next to an exceptionally large and heavy man, who
in his sleep--and he slept often--imagined me to be a piece of stuffing
out of place. Then, grunting and wriggling, he would endeavour to rub
me out, until the continued irritation of my head between the window
and his back would cause him to awake, when he would look down upon me
reprovingly but not unkindly, observing to the carriage generally: “It's
a funny thing, ain't it, nobody's ever made a boy yet that could keep
still for ten seconds.” After which he would pat me heartily on the
head, to show he was not vexed with me, and fall to sleep again upon me.
He was a good-tempered man.

My mother sat occupied chiefly with her own thoughts, and my aunt had
found a congenial companion in a lady who had had her cap basket sat
upon; so I was left mainly to my own resources. When I could get my head
free of the big man's back, I gazed out of the window, and watched the
flying fragments as we shed the world. Now a village would fall from us,
now the yellow corn-land would cling to us for awhile, or a wood catch
at our rushing feet, and sometimes a strong town would stop us, and hold
us, panting for a space. Or, my eyes weary, I would sit and listen to
the hoarse singing of the wheels beneath my feet. It was a monotonous
chaunt, ever the same two lines:

     “Here we suffer grief and pain,
     Here we meet to part again,”

followed by a low, rumbling laugh. Sometimes fortissimo, sometimes
pianissimo; now vivace, now largo; but ever those same two lines, and
ever followed by the same low, rumbling laugh; still to this day the
iron wheels sing to me that same song.

Later on I also must have slept, for I dreamt that as the result of my
having engaged in single combat with a dragon, the dragon, ignoring all
the rules of Fairyland, had swallowed me. It was hot and stuffy in the
dragon's stomach. He had, so it appeared to me, disgracefully overeaten
himself; there were hundreds of us there, entirely undigested, including
Mother Hubbard and a gentleman named Johnson, against whom, at that
period, I entertained a strong prejudice by reason of our divergent
views upon the subject of spelling. Even in this hour of our mutual
discomfort Johnson would not leave me alone, but persisted in asking me
how I spelt Jonah. Nobody was looking, so I kicked him. He sprang up
and came after me. I tried to run away, but became wedged between
Hop-o'-my-Thumb and Julius Caesar. I suppose our tearing about must
have hurt the dragon, for at that moment he gave vent to a most fearful
scream, and I awoke to find the fat man rubbing his left shin, while
we struggled slowly, with steps growing ever feebler, against a sea of
brick that every moment closed in closer round us.

We scrambled out of the carriage into a great echoing cave that
might have been the dragon's home, where, to my alarm, my mother was
immediately swooped down upon by a strange man in grey.

“Why's he do that?” I asked of my aunt.

“Because he's a fool,” answered my aunt; “they all are.”

He put my mother down and came towards us. He was a tall, thin man, with
eyes one felt one would never be afraid of; and instinctively even then
I associated him in my mind with windmills and a lank white horse.

“Why, how he's grown,” said the grey man, raising me in his arms until
my mother beside me appeared to me in a new light as quite a little
person; “and solid too.”

My mother whispered something. I think from her face, for I knew the
signs, it was praise of me.

“And he's going to be our new fortune,” she added aloud, as the grey man
lowered me.

“Then,” said my aunt, who had this while been sitting rigid upon a flat
black box, “don't drop him down a coal-mine. That's all I say.”

I wondered at the time why the grey man's pale face should flush so
crimson, and why my mother should whisper angrily:

“How can you be so wicked, Fanny? How dare you say such a thing?”

“I only said 'don't drop him down a coal-mine,'” returned my aunt,
apparently much surprised; “you don't want to drop him down a coal-mine,
do you?”

We passed through glittering, joyous streets, piled high each side with
all the good things of the earth; toys and baubles, jewels and gold,
things good to eat and good to drink, things good to wear and good to
see; through pleasant ways where fountains splashed and flowers bloomed.
The people wore bright clothes, had happy faces. They rode in beautiful
carriages, they strolled about, greeting one another with smiles. The
children ran and laughed. London, thought I to myself, is the city of
the fairies.

It passed, and we sank into a grim city of hoarse, roaring streets,
wherein the endless throngs swirled and surged as I had seen the yellow
waters curve and fret, contending, where the river pauses, rock-bound.
Here were no bright costumes, no bright faces, none stayed to greet
another; all was stern, and swift, and voiceless. London, then, said I
to myself, is the city of the giants. They must live in these towering
castles side by side, and these hurrying thousands are their driven
slaves.

But this passed also, and we sank lower yet until we reached a third
city, where a pale mist filled each sombre street. None of the beautiful
things of the world were to be seen here, but only the things coarse
and ugly. And wearily to and fro its sunless passages trudged with heavy
steps a weary people, coarse-clad, and with dull, listless faces. And
London, I knew, was the city of the gnomes who labour sadly all their
lives, imprisoned underground; and a terror seized me lest I, too,
should remain chained here, deep down below the fairy city that was
already but a dream.

We stopped at last in a long, unfinished street. I remember our pushing
our way through a group of dirty urchins, all of whom, my aunt remarked
in passing, ought to be skinned. It was my aunt's one prescription for
all to whom she took objection; but really in the present instance I
think it would have been of service; nothing else whatever could have
restored them to cleanliness. Then the door closed behind us with an
echoing clang, and the small, cold rooms came forward stiffly to greet
us.

The man in grey went to the one window and drew back the curtain; it
was growing dusk now. My aunt sat on a straight, hard chair and stared
fixedly at the three-armed gaselier. My mother stood in the centre of
the room with one small ungloved hand upon the table, and I noticed--for
I was very near--that the poor little one-legged thing was trembling.

“Of course it's not what you've been accustomed to, Maggie,” said the
man in grey; “but it's only for a little while.”

He spoke in a new, angry voice; but I could not see his face, his back
being to the light.

My mother drew his arms around us both.

“It is the best home in all the world,” she said; and thus we stayed for
awhile.

“Nonsense,” said my aunt, suddenly; and this aroused us; “it's a poky
hole, as I told her it would be. Let her thank the Lord she's got a
man clever enough to get her out of it. I know him; he never could rest
where he was put. Now he's at the bottom; he'll go up.”

It sounded to me a very disagreeable speech; but the grey man laughed--I
had not heard him laugh till then--and my mother ran to my aunt and
kissed her; and somehow the room seemed to become lighter.

For some reason I slept downstairs that night, on the floor, behind a
screen improvised out of a clothes horse and a blanket; and later in the
evening the clatter of knives and forks and the sound of subdued voices
awoke me. My aunt had apparently gone to bed; my mother and the man in
grey were talking together over their supper.

“We must buy land,” said the voice of the grey man; “London is coming
this way. The Somebodies” (I forget the name my father mentioned) “made
all their money by buying up land round New York for a mere song. Then,
as the city spread, they became worth millions.”

“But where will you get the money from, Luke?” asked the voice of my
mother.

The voice of the grey man answered airily:

“Oh, that's merely a matter of business. You grant a mortgage. The
property goes up in value. You borrow more. Then you buy more--and so
on.”

“I see,” said my mother.

“Being on the spot gives one such an advantage,” said the grey man. “I
shall know just when to buy. It's a great thing, being on the spot.”

“Of course, it must be,” said my mother.

I suppose I must have dozed, for the next words I heard the grey man say
were:

“Of course you have the park opposite, but then the house is small.”

“But shall we need a very large one?” asked my mother.

“One never knows,” said the grey man. “If I should go into Parliament--”

At this point a hissing sound arose from the neighbourhood of the fire.

“It _looks_,” said my mother, “as if it were done.”

“If you will hold the dish,” said the grey man, “I think I can pour it
in without spilling.”

Again I must have dozed.

“It depends,” said the grey man, “upon what he is going to be. For the
classics, of course, Oxford.”

“He's going to be very clever,” said my mother. She spoke as one who
knows.

“We'll hope so,” said the grey man.

“I shouldn't be surprised,” said my mother, “if he turned out a poet.”

The grey man said something in a low tone that I did not hear.

“I'm not so sure,” answered my mother, “it's in the blood. I've often
thought that you, Luke, ought to have been a poet.”

“I never had the time,” said the grey man. “There were one or two little
things--”

“They were very beautiful,” interrupted my mother. The clatter of the
knives and forks continued undisturbed for a few moments. Then continued
the grey man:

“There would be no harm, provided I made enough. It's the law of nature.
One generation earns, the next spends. We must see. In any case, I think
I should prefer Oxford for him.”

“It will be so hard parting from him,” said my mother.

“There will be the vacations,” said the grey man, “when we shall
travel.”




CHAPTER II.

IN WHICH PAUL MAKES ACQUAINTANCE OF THE MAN WITH THE UGLY MOUTH.

The case of my father and mother was not normal. You understand they
had been separated for some years, and though they were not young in
age--indeed, before my childish eyes they loomed quite ancient folk,
and in fact my father must have been nearly forty and my mother quit of
thirty--yet, as you will come to think yourself, no doubt, during the
course of my story, they were in all the essentials of life little more
than boy and girl. This I came to see later on, but at that time, had I
been consulted by enquiring maid or bachelor, I might unwittingly have
given wrong impressions concerning marriage in the general. I should
have described a husband as a man who could never rest quite content
unless his wife were by his side; who twenty times a day would call from
his office door: “Maggie, are you doing anything important? I want to
talk to you about a matter of business.” ... “Maggie, are you alone? Oh,
all right, I'll come down.” Of a wife I should have said she was a woman
whose eyes were ever love-lit when resting on her man; who was glad
where he was and troubled where he was not. But in every case this might
not have been correct.

Also, I should have had something to say concerning the alarms and
excursions attending residence with any married couple. I should have
recommended the holding up of feet under the table lest, mistaken for
other feet, they should be trodden on and pressed. Also, I should have
advised against entry into any room unpreceded by what in Stageland
is termed “noise without.” It is somewhat disconcerting to the nervous
incomer to be met, the door still in his hand, by a sound as of people
springing suddenly into the air, followed by a weird scuttling of feet,
and then to discover the occupants sitting stiffly in opposite corners,
deeply engaged in book or needlework. But, as I have said, with regard
to some households, such precautions might be needless.

Personally, I fear, I exercised little or no controlling influence upon
my parents in this respect, my intrusions coming soon to be greeted
with: “Oh, it's only Spud,” in a tone of relief, accompanied generally
by the sofa cushion; but of my aunt they stood more in awe. Not that she
ever said anything, and, indeed, to do her justice, in her efforts to
spare their feelings she erred, if at all, on the side of excess.
Never did she move a footstep about the house except to the music of
a sustained and penetrating cough. As my father once remarked,
ungratefully, I must confess, the volume of bark produced by my aunt in
a single day would have done credit to the dying efforts of a hospital
load of consumptives; to a robust and perfectly healthy lady the cost in
nervous force must have been prodigious. Also, that no fear should live
with them that her eyes had seen aught not intended for them, she would
invariably enter backwards any room in which they might be, closing the
door loudly and with difficulty before turning round: and through dark
passages she would walk singing. No woman alive could have done more;
yet--such is human nature!--neither my father nor my mother was grateful
to her, so far as I could judge.

Indeed, strange as it may appear, the more sympathetic towards them she
showed herself, the more irritated against her did they become.

“I believe, Fanny, you hate seeing Luke and me happy together,” said my
mother one day, coming up from the kitchen to find my aunt preparing
for entry into the drawing-room by dropping teaspoons at five-second
intervals outside the door: “Don't make yourself so ridiculous.” My
mother spoke really quite unkindly.

“Hate it!” replied my aunt. “Why should I? Why shouldn't a pair of
turtle doves bill and coo, when their united age is only a little over
seventy, the pretty dears?” The mildness of my aunt's answers often
surprised me.

As for my father, he grew positively vindictive. I remember the occasion
well. It was the first, though not the last time I knew him lose his
temper. What brought up the subject I forget, but my father stopped
suddenly; we were walking by the canal bank.

“Your aunt”--my father may not have intended it, but his tone and manner
when speaking of my aunt always conveyed to me the impression that he
regarded me as personally responsible for her existence. This used to
weigh upon me. “Your aunt is the most cantankerous, the most--” he broke
off, and shook his fist towards the setting sun. “I wish to God,” said
my father, “your aunt had a comfortable little income of her own, with
a freehold cottage in the country, by God I do!” But the next moment,
ashamed, I suppose, of his brutality: “Not but what sometimes, of
course, she can be very nice, you know,” he added; “don't tell your
mother what I said just now.”

Another who followed with sympathetic interest the domestic comedy was
Susan, our maid-of-all-work, the first of a long and varied series,
extending unto the advent of Amy, to whom the blessing of Heaven. Susan
was a stout and elderly female, liable to sudden fits of sleepiness, the
result, we were given to understand, of trouble; but her heart, it was
her own proud boast, was always in the right place. She could never look
at my father and mother sitting anywhere near each other but she must
flop down and weep awhile; the sight of connubial bliss always reminding
her, so she would explain, of the past glories of her own married state.

Though an earnest enquirer, I was never able myself to grasp the ins
and outs of this past married life of Susan's. Whether her answers were
purposely framed to elude curiosity, or whether they were the result of
a naturally incoherent mind, I cannot say. Their tendency was to convey
confusion.

On Monday I have seen Susan shed tears of regret into the Brussels
sprouts, that she had been debarred by the pressure of other duties from
lately watering “his” grave, which, I gathered, was at Manor Park.
While on Tuesday I have listened, blood chilled, to the recital of her
intentions should she ever again enjoy the luxury of getting her fingers
near the scruff of his neck.

“But, I thought, Susan, he was dead,” was my very natural comment upon
this outbreak.

“So did I, Master Paul,” was Susan's rejoinder; “that was his
artfulness.”

“Then he isn't buried in Manor Park Cemetery?”

“Not yet; but he'll wish he was, the half-baked monkey, when I get hold
of him.”

“Then he wasn't a good man?”

“Who?”

“Your husband.”

“Who says he ain't a good man?” It was Susan's flying leaps from tense
to tense that most bewildered me. “If anybody says he ain't I'll gouge
their eye out!”

I hastened to assure Susan that my observation had been intended in the
nature of enquiry, not of assertion.

“Brings me a bottle of gin--for my headaches--every time he comes home,”
 continued Susan, showing cause for opinion, “every blessed time.”

And at some such point as this I would retire to the clearer atmosphere
of German grammar or mixed fractions.

We suffered a good deal from Susan one way and another; for having
regard to the admirable position of her heart, we all felt it our duty
to overlook mere failings of the flesh--all but my aunt, that is, who
never made any pretence of being a sentimentalist.

“She's a lazy hussy,” was the opinion expressed of her one morning by my
aunt, who was rinsing; “a gulping, snorting, lazy hussy, that's what she
is.” There was some excuse for my aunt's indignation. It was then eleven
o'clock and Susan was still sleeping off an attack of what she called
“new-ralgy.”

“She has seen a good deal of trouble,” said my mother, who was wiping.

“And if she was my cook and housemaid,” replied my aunt, “she would see
more, the slut!”

“She's not a good servant in many respects,” admitted my mother, “but I
think she's good-hearted.”

“Oh, drat her heart,” was my aunt's retort. “The right place for that
heart of hers is on the doorstep. And that's where I'd put it, and her
and her box alongside it, if I had my way.”

The departure of Susan did take place not long afterwards. It occurred
one Saturday night. My mother came upstairs looking pale.

“Luke,” she said, “do please run for the doctor.”

“What's the matter?” asked my father.

“Susan,” gasped my mother, “she's lying on the kitchen floor breathing
in the strangest fashion and quite unable to speak.”

“I'll go for Washburn,” said my father; “if I am quick I shall catch him
at the dispensary.”

Five minutes later my father came back panting, followed by the doctor.
This was a big, black-bearded man; added to which he had the knack of
looking bigger than even he really was. He came down the kitchen stairs
two at a time, shaking the whole house. He brushed my mother aside, and
bent over the unconscious Susan, who was on her back with her mouth wide
open. Then he rose and looked at my father and mother, who were watching
him with troubled faces; and then he opened his mouth, and there came
from it a roar of laughter, the like of which sound I had never heard.

The next moment he had seized a pail half full of water and had flung it
over the woman. She opened her eyes and sat up.

“Feeling better?” said the doctor, with the pail still in his hand;
“have another dose?”

Susan began to gather herself together with the evident intention of
expressing her feelings; but before she could find the first word, he
had pushed the three of us outside and slammed the door behind us.

From the top of the stairs we could hear Susan's thick, rancorous voice
raging fiercer and fiercer, drowned every now and then by the man's
savage roar of laughter. And, when for want of breath she would flag for
a moment, he would yell out encouragement to her, shouting: “Bravo!
Go it, my beauty, give it tongue! Bark, bark! I love to hear you,”
 applauding her, clapping his hands and stamping his feet.

“What a beast of a man,” said my mother.

“He is really a most interesting man when you come to know him,”
 explained my father.

Replied my mother, stiffly: “I don't ever mean to know him.” But it is
only concerning the past that we possess knowledge.

The riot from below ceased at length, and was followed by a new voice,
speaking quietly and emphatically, and then we heard the doctor's step
again upon the stairs.

My mother held her purse open in her hand, and as the man entered the
room she went forward to meet him.

“How much do we owe you, Doctor?” said my mother. She spoke in a voice
trembling with severity.

He closed the purse and gently pushed it back towards her.

“A glass of beer and a chop, Mrs. Kelver,” he answered, “which I am
coming back in an hour to cook for myself. And as you will be without
any servant,” he continued, while my mother stood staring at him
incapable of utterance, “you had better let me cook some for you at the
same time. I am an expert at grilling chops.”

“But, really, Doctor--” my mother began. He laid his huge hand upon her
shoulder, and my mother sat down upon the nearest chair.

“My dear lady,” he said, “she's a person you never ought to have had
inside your house. She's promised me to be gone in half an hour, and
I'm coming back to see she keeps her word. Give her a month's wages, and
have a clear fire ready for me.” And before my mother could reply, he
had slammed the front door.

“What a very odd sort of a man,” said my mother, recovering herself.

“He's a character,” said my father; “you might not think it, but he's
worshipped about here.”

“I hardly know what to make of him,” said my mother; “I suppose I had
better go out and get some chops;” which she did.

Susan went, as sober as a judge on Friday, as the saying is, her great
anxiety being to get out of the house before the doctor returned. The
doctor himself arrived true to his time, and I lay awake--for no human
being ever slept or felt he wanted to sleep while Dr. Washburn was
anywhere near--and listened to the gusts of laughter that swept
continually through the house. Even my aunt laughed that supper time,
and when the doctor himself laughed it seemed to me that the bed shook
under me. Not liking to be out of it, I did what spoilt little boys
and even spoilt little girls sometimes will do under similar stress of
feeling, wrapped the blanket round my legs and pattered down, with
my face set to express the sudden desire of a sensitive and possibly
short-lived child for parents' love. My mother pretended to be angry,
but that I knew was only her company manners. Besides, I really had, if
not exactly a pain, an extremely uncomfortable sensation (one common to
me about that period) as of having swallowed the dome of St. Paul's. The
doctor said it was a frequent complaint with children, the result of too
early hours and too much study; and, taking me on his knee, wrote then
and there a diet chart for me, which included one tablespoonful of
golden syrup four times a day, and one ounce of sherbet to be placed
upon the tongue and taken neat ten minutes before each meal.

That evening will always live in my remembrance. My mother was brighter
than I had ever seen her. A flush was on her cheek and a sparkle in her
eye, and looking across at her as she sat holding a small painted screen
to shield her face from the fire, the sense of beauty became suddenly
born within me, and answering an impulse I could not have explained, I
slipped down, still with my blanket around me, from the doctor's knee,
and squatted on the edge of the fender, from where, when I thought no
one was noticing me, I could steal furtive glances up into her face.

So also my father seemed to me to have become all at once bigger and
more dignified, talking with a vigour and an enjoyment that sat newly on
him. Aunt Fan was quite witty and agreeable--for her; and even I asked
one or two questions, at which, for some reason or another, everybody
laughed; which determined me to remember and ask those same questions
again on some future occasion.

That was the great charm of the man, that by the magnetic spell of his
magnificent vitality he drew from everyone their best. In his company
clever people waxed intellectual giants, while the dull sat amazed at
their own originality. Conversing with him, Podsnap might have been
piquant, Dogberry incisive. But better than all else, I found it
listening to his own talk. Of what he spoke I could tell you no more
than could the children of Hamelin have told the tune the Pied Piper
played. I only know that at the tangled music of his strong voice
the walls of the mean room faded away, and that beyond I saw a brave,
laughing world that called to me; a world full of joyous fight, where
some won and some lost. But that mattered not a jot, because whatever
else came of it there was a right royal game for all; a world where
merry gentlemen feared neither life nor death, and Fate was but the
Master of the Revels.

Such was my first introduction to Dr. Washburn, or to give him the
name by which he was known in every slum and alley of that quarter, Dr.
Fighting Hal; and in a minor key that evening was an index to the whole
man. Often he would wrinkle his nose as a dog before it bites, and then
he was more brute than man--brutish in his instincts, in his appetites,
brutish in his pleasure, brutish in his fun. Or his deep blue eyes would
grow soft as a mother's, and then you might have thought him an angel
in a soft felt hat and a coat so loose-fitting as to suggest the
possibility of his wings being folded away underneath. Often have I
tried to make up my mind whether it has been better for me or worse that
I ever came to know him; but as easy would it be for the tree to
say whether the rushing winds and the wild rains have shaped it or
mis-shaped.

Susan's place remained vacant for some time. My mother would explain
to the few friends who occasionally came from afar to see us, that her
“housemaid” she had been compelled to suddenly discharge, and that
we were waiting for the arrival of a new and better specimen. But the
months passed and we still waited, and my father on the rare days when
a client would ring the office bell, would, after pausing a decent
interval, open the front door himself, and then call downstairs
indignantly and loudly, to know why “Jane” or “Mary” could not attend to
their work. And my mother, that the bread-boy or the milkman might not
put it about the neighbourhood that the Kelvers in the big corner house
kept no servant, would hide herself behind a thick veil and fetch all
things herself from streets a long way off.

For this family of whom I am writing were, I confess, weak and human.
Their poverty they were ashamed of as though it were a crime, and in
consequence their life was more full of paltry and useless subterfuge
than should be perhaps the life of brave men and women. The larder,
I fancy, was very often bare, but the port and sherry with the sweet
biscuits stood always on the sideboard; and the fire had often to be low
in the grate that my father's tall hat might shine resplendent and my
mother's black silk rustle on Sundays.

But I would not have you sneer at them, thinking all pretence must
spring from snobbishness and never from mistaken self-respect. Some fine
gentleman writers there be--men whose world is bounded on the east by
Bond Street--who see in the struggles of poverty to hide its darns only
matter for jest. But myself, I cannot laugh at them. I know the long
hopes and fears that centre round the hired waiter; the long cost of the
cream and the ice jelly ordered the week before from the confectioner's.
But to me it is pathetic, not ridiculous. Heroism is not all of one
pattern. Dr. Washburn, had the Prince of Wales come to see him, would
have put his bread and cheese and jug of beer upon the table, and helped
His Royal Highness to half. But my father and mother's tea was very weak
that Mr. Jones or Mr. Smith might have a glass of wine should they come
to dinner. I remember the one egg for breakfast, my mother arguing that
my father should have it because he had his business to attend to; my
father insisting that my mother should eat it, she having to go out
shopping, a compromise being effected by their dividing it between them,
each clamouring for the white as the most nourishing. And I know however
little the meal looked upon the table when we started I always rose well
satisfied. These are small things to speak of, but then you must bear in
mind this is a story moving in narrow ways.

To me this life came as a good time. That I was encouraged to eat
treacle in preference to butter seemed to me admirable. Personally, I
preferred sausages for dinner; and a supper of fried fish and potatoes,
brought in stealthily in a carpet bag, was infinitely more enjoyable
than the set meal where nothing was of interest till one came to the
dessert. What fun there was about it all! The cleaning of the doorstep
by night, when from the ill-lit street a gentleman with a piece
of sacking round his legs might very well pass for a somewhat tall
charwoman. I would keep watch at the gate to give warning should any
one looking like a possible late caller turn the corner of the street,
coming back now and then in answer to a low whistle to help my father
grope about in the dark for the hearthstone; he was always mislaying
the hearthstone. How much better, helping to clean the knives or running
errands than wasting all one's morning dwelling upon the shocking
irregularity of certain classes of French verbs; or making useless
calculations as to how long X, walking four and a quarter miles an hour,
would be overtaking Y, whose powers were limited to three and a half,
but who had started two and three quarter hours sooner; the whole
argument being reduced to sheer pedantry by reason of no information
being afforded to the student concerning the respective thirstiness of X
and Y.

Even my father and mother were able to take it lightly with plenty of
laughter and no groaning that I ever heard. For over all lay the morning
light of hope, and what prisoner, escaping from his dungeon, ever stayed
to think of his torn hands and knees when beyond the distant opening he
could see the sunlight glinting through the brambles?

“I had no idea,” said my mother, “there was so much to do in a house.
In future I shall arrange for the servants to have regular hours, and a
little time to themselves, for rest. Don't you think it right, Luke?”

“Quite right,” replied my father; “and I'll tell you another thing we'll
do. I shall insist on the landlord's putting a marble doorstep to the
next house we take; you pass a sponge over marble and it is always
clean.”

“Or tesselated,” suggested my mother.

“Or tesselated,” agreed my father; “but marble is more uncommon.”

Only once, can I recall a cloud. That was one Sunday when my mother,
speaking across the table in the middle of dinner, said to my father,
“We might save the rest of that stew, Luke; there's an omelette coming.”

My father laid down the spoon. “An omelette!”

“Yes,” said my mother. “I thought I would like to try again.”

My father stepped into the back kitchen--we dined in the kitchen, as a
rule, it saved much carriage--returning with the wood chopper.

“What ever are you going to do, Luke, with the chopper?” said my mother.

“Divide the omelette,” replied my father.

My mother began to cry.

“Why, Maggie--!” said my father.

“I know the other one was leathery,” said my mother, “but it was the
fault of the oven, you know it was, Luke.”

“My dear,” said my father, “I only meant it as a joke.”

“I don't like that sort of joke,” said my mother; “it isn't nice of you,
Luke.”

I don't think, to be candid, my mother liked much any joke that was
against herself. Indeed, when I come to think of it, I have never met a
woman who did, nor man, either.

There had soon grown up a comradeship between my father and myself for
he was the youngest thing I had met with as yet. Sometimes my mother
seemed very young, and later I met boys and girls nearer to my own age
in years; but they grew, while my father remained always the same. The
hair about his temples was turning grey, and when you looked close you
saw many crow's feet and lines, especially about the mouth. But his eyes
were the eyes of a boy, his laugh the laugh of a boy, and his heart the
heart of a boy. So we were very close to each other.

In a narrow strip of ground we called our garden we would play a cricket
of our own, encompassed about by many novel rules, rendered necessary by
the locality. For instance, all hitting to leg was forbidden, as tending
to endanger neighbouring windows, while hitting to off was likewise not
to be encouraged, as causing a temporary adjournment of the game, while
batter and bowler went through the house and out into the street to
recover the ball from some predatory crowd of urchins to whom it had
evidently appeared as a gift direct from Heaven. Sometimes rising very
early we would walk across the marshes to bathe in a small creek that
led down to the river, but this was muddy work, necessitating much
washing of legs on the return home. And on rare days we would, taking
the train to Hackney and walking to the bridge, row up the river Lea,
perhaps as far as Ponder's End.

But these sports being hedged around with difficulties, more commonly
for recreation we would take long walks. There were pleasant nooks even
in the neighbourhood of Plaistow marshes in those days. Here and there
a graceful elm still clung to the troubled soil. Surrounded on all sides
by hideousness, picturesque inns still remained hidden within green
walls where, if you were careful not to pry too curiously, you might
sit and sip your glass of beer beneath the oak and dream yourself where
reeking chimneys and mean streets were not. During such walks my father
would talk to me as he would talk to my mother, telling me all his wild,
hopeful plans, discussing with me how I was to lodge at Oxford, to what
particular branches of study and of sport I was to give my preference,
speaking always with such catching confidence that I came to regard my
sojourn in this brick and mortar prison as only a question of months.

One day, talking of this future, and laughing as we walked briskly,
through the shrill streets, I told him the words my mother had
said--long ago, as it seemed to me, for life is as a stone rolling
down-hill, and moves but slowly at first; she and I sitting on the moss
at the foot of old “Jacob's Folly”--that he was our Prince fighting
to deliver us from the grim castle called “Hard Times,” guarded by the
dragon Poverty.

My father laughed and his boyish face flushed with pleasure.

“And she was right, Paul,” he whispered, pressing my small hand in
his--it was necessary to whisper, for the street where we were was very
crowded, but I knew that he wanted to shout. “I will fight him and I
will slay him.” My father made passes in the air with his walking-stick,
and it was evident from the way they drew aside that the people round
about fancied he was mad. “I will batter down the iron gates and she
shall be free. I will, God help me, I will.”

The gallant gentleman! How long and how bravely he fought! But in the
end it was the Dragon triumphed, the Knight that lay upon the ground,
his great heart still. I have read how, with the sword of Honest
Industry, one may always conquer this grim Dragon. But such was in
foolish books. In truth, only with the sword of Chicanery and the stout
buckler of Unscrupulousness shall you be certain of victory over him. If
you care not to use these, pray to your Gods, and take what comes with a
stout heart.




CHAPTER III.

HOW GOOD LUCK KNOCKED AT THE DOOR OF THE MAN IN GREY.

“Louisa!” roared my father down the kitchen stairs, “are you all asleep?
Here have I had to answer the front door myself.” Then my father strode
into his office, and the door slammed. My father could be very angry
when nobody was by.

Quarter of an hour later his bell rang with a quick, authoritative
jangle. My mother, who was peeling potatoes with difficulty in
wash-leather gloves, looked at my aunt who was shelling peas. The bell
rang again louder still this time.

“Once for Louisa, twice for James, isn't it?” enquired my aunt.

“You go, Paul,” said my mother; “say that Louisa--” but with the words a
sudden flush overspread my mother's face, and before I could lay down
my slate she had drawn off her gloves and had passed me. “No, don't stop
your lessons, I'll go myself,” she said, and ran out.

A few minutes later the kitchen door opened softly, and my mother's
hand, appearing through the jar, beckoned to me mysteriously.

“Walk on your toes,” whispered my mother, setting the example as she
led the way up the stairs; which after the manner of stairs showed their
disapproval of deception by creaking louder and more often than under
any other circumstances; and in this manner we reached my parents'
bedroom, where, in the old-fashioned wardrobe, relic of better days,
reposed my best suit of clothes, or, to be strictly grammatical, my
better.

Never before had I worn these on a week-day morning, but all
conversation not germane to the question of getting into them quickly
my mother swept aside; and when I was complete, down even to the new
shoes--Bluchers, we called them in those days--took me by the hand, and
together we crept down as we had crept up, silent, stealthy and alert.
My mother led me to the street door and opened it.

“Shan't I want my cap?” I whispered. But my mother only shook her
head and closed the door with a bang; and then the explanation of the
pantomime came to me, for with such “business”--comic, shall I call
it, or tragic?--I was becoming familiar; and, my mother's hand upon my
shoulder, we entered my father's office.

Whether from the fact that so often of an evening--our drawing-room
being reserved always as a show-room in case of chance visitors;
Cowper's poems, open face-downwards on the wobbly loo table; the
half-finished crochet work, suggestive of elegant leisure, thrown
carelessly over the arm of the smaller easy-chair--this office would
become our sitting-room, its books and papers, as things of no account,
being huddled out of sight; or whether from the readiness with which my
father would come out of it at all times to play at something else--at
cricket in the back garden on dry days or ninepins in the passage on
wet, charging back into it again whenever a knock sounded at the front
door, I cannot say. But I know that as a child it never occurred to
me to regard my father's profession as a serious affair. To me he was
merely playing there, surrounded by big books and bundles of documents,
labelled profusely but consisting only of blank papers; by japanned
tin boxes, lettered imposingly, but for the most part empty. “Sutton
Hampden, Esq.,” I remember was practically my mother's work-box. The
“Drayton Estates” yielded apparently nothing but apples, a fruit of
which my father was fond; while “Mortgages” it was not until later in
life I discovered had no connection with poems in manuscript, some in
course of correction, others completed.

Now, as the door opened, he rose and came towards us. His hair stood up
from his head, for it was a habit of his to rumple it as he talked; and
this added to his evident efforts to compose his face into an expression
of businesslike gravity, added emphasis, if such were needed, to the
suggestion of the over long schoolboy making believe.

“This is the youngster,” said my father, taking me from my mother, and
passing me on. “Tall for his age, isn't he?”

With a twist of his thick lips, he rolled the evil-smelling cigar he was
smoking from the left corner of his mouth to the right; and held out a
fat and not too clean hand, which, as it closed round mine, brought to
my mind the picture of the walrus in my natural history book; with the
other he flapped me kindly on the head.

“Like 'is mother, wonderfully like 'is mother, ain't 'e?” he observed,
still holding my hand. “And that,” he added with a wink of one of his
small eyes towards my father, “is about the 'ighest compliment I can pay
'im, eh?”

His eyes were remarkably small, but marvellously bright and piercing; so
much so that when he turned them again upon me I tried to think quickly
of something nice about him, feeling sure that he could see right into
me.

“And where are you thinkin' of sendin' 'im?” he continued; “Eton or
'Arrow?”

“We haven't quite made up our minds as yet,” replied my father; “at
present we are educating him at home.”

“You take my tip,” said the fat man, “and learn all you can. Look at
me! If I'd 'ad the opportunity of being a schollard I wouldn't be here
offering your father an extravagant price for doin' my work; I'd be able
to do it myself.”

“You seem to have got on very well without it,” laughed my father;
and in truth his air of prosperity might have justified greater
self-complacency. Rings sparkled on his blunt fingers, and upon the
swelling billows of his waistcoat rose and sank a massive gold cable.

“I'd 'ave done better with it,” he grunted.

“But you look very clever,” I said; and though divining with a child's
cuteness that it was desired I should make a favourable impression upon
him, I hoped this would please him, the words were yet spontaneous.

He laughed heartily, his whole body shaking like some huge jelly.

“Well, old Noel Hasluck's not exactly a fool,” he assented, “but I'd
like myself better if I could talk about something else than business,
and didn't drop my aitches. And so would my little gell.”

“You have a daughter?” asked my mother, with whom a child, as a bond
of sympathy with the stranger took the place assigned by most women to
disrespectful cooks and incompetent housemaids.

“I won't tell you about 'er. But I'll just bring 'er to see you now and
then, ma'am, if you don't mind,” answered Mr. Hasluck. “She don't often
meet gentle-folks, an' it'll do 'er good.”

My mother glanced across at my father, but the man, intercepting her
question, replied to it himself.

“You needn't be afraid, ma'am, that she's anything like me,” he assured
her quite good-temperedly; “nobody ever believes she's my daughter,
except me and the old woman. She's a little lady, she is. Freak o'
nature, I call it.”

“We shall be delighted,” explained my mother.

“Well, you will when you see 'er,” replied Mr. Hasluck, quite
contentedly.

He pushed half-a-crown into my hand, overriding my parents'
susceptibilities with the easy good-temper of a man accustomed to have
his way in all things.

“No squanderin' it on the 'eathen,” was his parting injunction as I left
the room; “you spend that on a Christian tradesman.”

It was the first money I ever remember having to spend, that half-crown
of old Hasluck's; suggestions of the delights to be derived from a new
pair of gloves for Sunday, from a Latin grammar, which would then be all
my own, and so on, having hitherto displaced all less exalted visions
concerning the disposal of chance coins coming into my small hands. But
on this occasion I was left free to decide for myself.

The anxiety it gave me! the long tossing hours in bed! the tramping of
the bewildering streets! Even advice when asked for was denied me.

“You must learn to think for yourself,” said my father, who spoke
eloquently on the necessity of early acquiring sound judgment and what
he called “commercial aptitude.”

“No, dear,” said my mother, “Mr. Hasluck wanted you to spend it as you
like. If I told you, that would be spending it as I liked. Your father
and I want to see what you will do with it.”

The good little boys in the books bought presents or gave away to people
in distress. For this I hated them with the malignity the lower nature
ever feels towards the higher. I consulted my aunt Fan.

“If somebody gave you half-a-crown,” I put it to her, “what would you
buy with it?”

“Side-combs,” said my aunt; she was always losing or breaking her
side-combs.

“But I mean if you were me,” I explained.

“Drat the child!” said my aunt; “how do I know what he wants if he don't
know himself? Idiot!”

The shop windows into which I stared, my nose glued to the pane! The
things I asked the price of! The things I made up my mind to buy and
then decided that I wouldn't buy! Even my patient mother began to show
signs of irritation. It was rapidly assuming the dimensions of a family
curse, was old Hasluck's half-crown.

Then one day I made up my mind, and so ended the trouble. In the window
of a small plumber's shop in a back street near, stood on view among
brass taps, rolls of lead piping and cistern requisites, various squares
of coloured glass, the sort of thing chiefly used, I believe, for
lavatory doors and staircase windows. Some had stars in the centre,
and others, more elaborate, were enriched with designs, severe but
inoffensive. I purchased a dozen of these, the plumber, an affable
man who appeared glad to see me, throwing in two extra out of sheer
generosity.

Why I bought them I did not know at the time, and I do not know now.
My mother cried when she saw them. My father could get no further than:
“But what are you going to do with them?” to which I was unable to
reply. My aunt, alone, attempted comfort.

“If a person fancies coloured glass,” said my aunt, “then he's a fool
not to buy coloured glass when he gets the chance. We haven't all the
same tastes.”

In the end, I cut myself badly with them and consented to their being
thrown into the dust-bin. But looking back, I have come to regard myself
rather as the victim of Fate than of Folly. Many folks have I met since,
recipients of Hasluck's half-crowns--many a man who has slapped his
pocket and blessed the day he first met that “Napoleon of Finance,”
 as later he came to be known among his friends--but it ever ended so;
coloured glass and cut fingers. Is it fairy gold that he and his kind
fling round? It would seem to be.

Next time old Hasluck knocked at our front door a maid in cap and apron
opened it to him, and this was but the beginning of change. New oilcloth
glistened in the passage. Lace curtains, such as in that neighbourhood
were the hall-mark of the plutocrat, advertised our rising fortunes to
the street, and greatest marvel of all, at least to my awed eyes, my
father's Sunday clothes came into weekday wear, new ones taking their
place in the great wardrobe that hitherto had been the stronghold of
our gentility; to which we had ever turned for comfort when rendered
despondent by contemplation of the weakness of our outer walls. “Seeing
that everything was all right” is how my mother would explain it. She
would lay the lilac silk upon the bed, fondly soothing down its rustling
undulations, lingering lovingly over its deep frosted flounces of rich
Honiton. Maybe she had entered the room weary looking and depressed, but
soon there would proceed from her a gentle humming as from some small
winged thing when the sun first touches it and warms it, and sometimes
by the time the Indian shawl, which could go through a wedding ring, but
never would when it was wanted to, had been refolded and fastened again
with the great cameo brooch, and the poke bonnet, like some fractious
child, shaken and petted into good condition, she would be singing
softly to herself, nodding her head to the words: which were generally
to the effect that somebody was too old and somebody else too bold and
another too cold, “so he wouldn't do for me;” and stepping lightly as
though the burden of the years had fallen from her.

One evening--it was before the advent of this Hasluck--I remember
climbing out of bed, for trouble was within me. Creatures, indescribable
but heavy, had sat upon my chest, after which I had fallen downstairs,
slowly and reasonably for the first few hundred flights, then with haste
for the next million miles or so, until I found myself in the street
with nothing on but my nightshirt. Personally, I was shocked, but nobody
else seemed to mind, and I hailed a two-penny 'bus and climbed in. But
when I tried to pay I found I hadn't any pockets, so I jumped out and
ran away and the conductor came after me. My feet were like lead, and
with every step he gained on me, till with a scream I made one mighty
effort and awoke.

Feeling the need of comfort after these unpleasant but by no means
unfamiliar experiences, I wrapped some clothes round me and crept
downstairs. The “office” was dark, but to my surprise a light shone from
under the drawing-room door, and I opened it.

The candles in the silver candlesticks were lighted, and in state,
one in each easy-chair, sat my father and mother, both in their best
clothes; my father in the buckled shoes and the frilled shirt that I had
never seen him wear before, my mother with the Indian shawl about her
shoulders, and upon her head the cap of ceremony that reposed three
hundred and sixty days out of the year in its round wicker-work nest
lined with silk. They started guiltily as I pushed open the door, but I
congratulate myself that I had sense enough--or was it instinct--to ask
no questions.

The last time I had seen them, three hours ago, they had been engaged,
the lights carefully extinguished, cleaning the ground floor windows,
my father the outside, my mother within, and it astonished me the change
not only in their appearance, but in their manner and bearing, and even
in their very voices. My father brought over from the sideboard the
sherry and sweet biscuits and poured out and handed a glass to my
mother, and he and my mother drank to each other, while I between them
ate the biscuits, and the conversation was of Byron's poems and the
great glass palace in Hyde Park.

I wonder am I disloyal setting this down? Maybe to others it shows but
a foolish man and woman, and that is far from my intention. I dwell
upon such trifles because to me the memory of them is very tender. The
virtues of our loved ones we admire, yet after all 'tis but what we
expected of them: how could they do otherwise? Their failings we would
forget; no one of us is perfect. But over their follies we love to
linger, smiling.

To me personally, old Hasluck's coming and all that followed thereupon
made perhaps more difference than to any one else. My father now was
busy all the day; if not in his office, then away in the grim city of
the giants, as I still thought of it; while to my mother came every day
more social and domestic duties; so that for a time I was left much to
my own resources.

Rambling--“bummelling,” as the Germans term it--was my bent. This my
mother would have checked, but my father said:

“Don't molly-coddle him. Let him learn to be smart.”

“I don't think the smart people are always the nicest,” demurred my
mother. “I don't call you at all 'smart,' Luke.”

My father appeared surprised, but reflected.

“I should call myself smart--in a sense,” he explained, after
consideration.

“Perhaps you are right, dear,” replied my mother; “and of course boys
are different from girls.”

Sometimes I would wander Victoria Park way, which was then surrounded by
many small cottages in leafy gardens; or even reach as far as Clapton,
where old red brick Georgian houses still stood behind high palings, and
tall elms gave to the wide road on sunny afternoons an old-world air of
peace. But such excursions were the exception, for strange though it may
read, the narrow, squalid streets had greater hold on me. Not the few
main thoroughfares, filled ever with a dull, deep throbbing as of some
tireless iron machine; where the endless human files, streaming ever up
and down, crossing and recrossing, seemed mere rushing chains of flesh
and blood, working upon unseen wheels; but the dim, weary, lifeless
streets--the dark, tortuous roots, as I fancied them, of that grim
forest of entangled brick. Mystery lurked in their gloom. Fear whispered
from behind their silence. Dumb figures flitted swiftly to and fro,
never pausing, never glancing right nor left. Far-off footsteps, rising
swiftly into sound, as swiftly fading, echoed round their lonely comers.
Dreading, yet drawn on, I would creep along their pavements as through
some city of the dead, thinking of the eyes I saw not watching from the
thousand windows; starting at each muffled sound penetrating the long,
dreary walls, behind which that close-packed, writhing life lay hid.

One day there came a cry from behind a curtained window. I stood still
for a moment and then ran; but before I could get far enough away I
heard it again, a long, piercing cry, growing fiercer before it ceased;
so that I ran faster still, not heeding where I went, till I found
myself in a raw, unfinished street, ending in black waste land,
bordering the river. I stopped, panting, wondering how I should find
my way again. To recover myself and think I sat upon the doorstep of
an empty house, and there came dancing down the road with a curious,
half-running, half-hopping step--something like a water wagtail's--a
child, a boy about my own age, who, after eyeing me strangely sat down
beside me.

We watched each other for a few minutes; and I noticed that his mouth
kept opening and shutting, though he said nothing. Suddenly, edging
closer to me, he spoke in a thick whisper. It sounded as though his
mouth were full of wool.

“Wot 'appens to yer when yer dead?”

“If you're good you go to Heaven. If you're bad you go to Hell.”

“Long way off, both of 'em, ain't they?”

“Yes. Millions of miles.”

“They can't come after yer? Can't fetch yer back again?”

“No, never.”

The doorstep that we occupied was the last. A yard beyond began the
black waste of mud. From the other end of the street, now growing dark,
he never took his staring eyes for an instant.

“Ever seen a stiff 'un--a dead 'un?”

“No.”

“I 'ave--stuck a pin into 'im. 'E never felt it. Don't feel anything
when yer dead, do yer?”

All the while he kept swaying his body to and fro, twisting his arms
and legs, and making faces. Comical figures made of ginger-bread, with
quaintly curved limbs and grinning features, were to be bought then in
bakers' shops: he made me hungry, reminding me of such.

“Of course not. When you are dead you're not there, you know. Our bodies
are but senseless clay.” I was glad I remembered that line. I tried to
think of the next one, which was about food for worms; but it evaded me.

“I like you,” he said; and making a fist, he gave me a punch in
the chest. It was the token of palship among the youth of that
neighbourhood, and gravely I returned it, meaning it, for friendship
with children is an affair of the instant, or not at all, and I knew him
for my first chum.

He wormed himself up.

“Yer won't tell?” he said.

I had no notion what I was not to tell, but our compact demanded that I
should agree.

“Say 'I swear.'”

“I swear.”

The heroes of my favourite fiction bound themselves by such like secret
oaths. Here evidently was a comrade after my own heart.

“Good-bye, cockey.”

But he turned again, and taking from his pocket an old knife, thrust it
into my hand. Then with that extraordinary hopping movement of his ran
off across the mud.

I stood watching him, wondering where he could be going. He stumbled
a little further, where the mud began to get softer and deeper, but
struggling up again, went hopping on towards the river.

I shouted to him, but he never looked back. At every few yards he would
sink down almost to his knees in the black mud, but wrenching himself
free would flounder forward. Then, still some distance from the river,
he fell upon his face, and did not rise again. I saw his arms beating
feebler and feebler as he sank till at last the oily slime closed over
him, and I could detect nothing but a faint heaving underneath the mud.
And after a time even that ceased.

It was late before I reached home, and fortunately my father and mother
were still out. I did not tell any one what I had seen, having sworn not
to; and as time went on the incident haunted me less and less until
it became subservient to my will. But of my fancy for those silent,
lifeless streets it cured me for the time. From behind their still walls
I would hear that long cry; down their narrow vistas see that writhing
figure, like some animated ginger-bread, hopping, springing, falling.

Yet in the more crowded streets another trouble awaited me, one more
tangible.

Have you ever noticed a pack of sparrows round some crumbs perchance
that you have thrown out from your window? Suddenly the rest of the
flock will set upon one. There is a tremendous Lilliputian hubbub,
a tossing of tiny wings and heads, a babel of shrill chirps. It is
comical.

“Spiteful little imps they are,” you say to yourself, much amused.

So I have heard good-tempered men and women calling out to one another
with a laugh.

“There go those young devils chivvying that poor little beggar again;
ought to be ashamed of theirselves.”

But, oh! the anguish of the poor little beggar! Can any one who has not
been through it imagine it! Reduced to its actualities, what was it?
Gibes and jeers that, after all, break no bones. A few pinches,
kicks and slaps; at worst a few hard knocks. But the dreading of it
beforehand! Terror lived in every street, hid, waiting for me, round
each corner. The half-dozen wrangling over their marbles--had they seen
me? The boy whistling as he stood staring into the print shop, would I
get past him without his noticing me; or would he, swinging round upon
his heel, raise the shrill whoop that brought them from every doorway to
hunt me?

The shame, when caught at last and cornered: the grinning face that
would stop to watch; the careless jokes of passers-by, regarding the
whole thing but as a sparrows' squabble: worst of all, perhaps, the rare
pity! The after humiliation when, finally released, I would dart away,
followed by shouted taunts and laughter; every eye turned to watch me,
shrinking by; my whole small carcass shaking with dry sobs of bitterness
and rage!

If only I could have turned and faced them! So far as the mere bearing
of pain was concerned, I knew myself brave. The physical suffering
resulting from any number of stand-up fights would have been trivial
compared with the mental agony I endured. That I, the comrade of a
hundred heroes--I, who nightly rode with Richard Coeur de Lion,
who against Sir Lancelot himself had couched a lance, and that not
altogether unsuccessful, I to whom all damsels in distress were wont to
look for succour--that I should run from varlets such as these!

My friend, my bosom friend, good Robin Hood! how would he have behaved
under similar circumstances? how Ivanhoe, my chosen companion in all
quests of knightly enterprise? how--to come to modern times--Jack
Harkaway, mere schoolboy though he might be? Would not one and all
have welcomed such incident with a joyous shout, and in a trice have
scattered to the winds the worthless herd?

But, alas! upon my pale lips the joyous shout sank into an unheard
whisper, and the thing that became scattered to the wind was myself, the
first opening that occurred.

Sometimes, the blood boiling in my veins, I would turn, thinking to go
back and at all risk defying my tormentors, prove to myself I was no
coward. But before I had retraced my steps a dozen paces, I would see
in imagination the whole scene again before me: the laughing crowd,
the halting passers-by, the spiteful, mocking little faces every way I
turned; and so instead would creep on home, and climbing stealthily up
into my own room, cry my heart out in the dark upon my bed.

Until one blessed day, when a blessed Fairy, in the form of a small
kitten, lifted the spell that bound me, and set free my limbs.

I have always had a passionate affection for the dumb world, if it be
dumb. My first playmate, I remember, was a water rat. A stream ran at
the bottom of our garden; and sometimes, escaping the vigilant eye of
Mrs. Fursey, I would steal out with my supper and join him on the banks.
There, hidden behind the osiers, we would play at banquets, he, it is
true, doing most of the banqueting, and I the make-believe. But it was
a good game; added to which it was the only game I could ever get him to
play, though I tried. He was a one-ideaed rat.

Later I came into the possession of a white specimen all my own. He
lived chiefly in the outside breast pocket of my jacket, in company with
my handkerchief, so that glancing down I could generally see his little
pink eyes gleaming up at me, except on very cold days, when it would be
only his tail that I could see; and when I felt miserable, somehow he
would know it, and, swarming up, push his little cold snout against
my ear. He died just so, clinging round my neck; and from many of my
fellow-men and women have I parted with less pain. It sounds callous to
say so; but, after all, our feelings are not under our own control; and
I have never been able to understand the use of pretending to emotions
one has not. All this, however, comes later. Let me return now to my
fairy kitten.

I heard its cry of pain from afar, and instinctively hastened my steps.
Three or four times I heard it again, and at each call I ran faster,
till, breathless, I arrived upon the scene, the opening of a narrow
court, leading out of a by-street. At first I saw nothing but the backs
of a small mob of urchins. Then from the centre of them came another
wailing appeal for help, and without waiting for any invitation, I
pushed my way into the group.

What I saw was Hecuba to me--gave me the motive and the cue for passion,
transformed me from the dull and muddy-mettled little John-a-dreams I
had been into a small, blind Fury. Pale Thought, that mental emetic,
banished from my system, I became the healthy, unreasoning animal, and
acted as such.

From my methods, I frankly admit, science was absent. In simple,
primitive fashion that would have charmed a Darwinian disciple to
observe, I “went for” the whole crowd. To employ the expressive idiom of
the neighbourhood, I was “all over it and inside.” Something clung about
my feet. By kicking myself free and then standing on it I gained the
advantage of quite an extra foot in height; I don't know what it was and
didn't care. I fought with my arms and I fought with my legs; where I
could get in with my head I did. I fought whatever came to hand in
a spirit of simple thankfulness, grateful for what I could reach and
indifferent to what was beyond me.

That the “show”--if again I may be permitted the local idiom--was not
entirely mine I was well aware. That not alone my person but my property
also was being damaged in the rear became dimly conveyed to me through
the sensation of draught. Already the world to the left of me was mere
picturesque perspective, while the growing importance of my nose was
threatening the absorption of all my other features. These things did
not trouble me. I merely noted them as phenomena and continued to punch
steadily.

Until I found that I was punching something soft and yet unyielding.
I looked up to see what this foreign matter that thus mysteriously had
entered into the mixture might be, and discovered it to be a policeman.
Still I did not care. The felon's dock! the prison cell! a fig for such
mere bogies. An impudent word, an insulting look, and I would have gone
for the Law itself. Pale Thought--it must have been a livid green by
this time--still trembled at respectful distance from me.

Fortunately for all of us, he was not impertinent, and though he spoke
the language of his order, his tone disarmed offence.

“Now, then. Now, then. What is all this about?”

There was no need for me to answer. A dozen voluble tongues were ready
to explain to him; and to explain wholly in my favour. This time the
crowd was with me. Let a man school himself to bear dispraise, for
thereby alone shall he call his soul his own. But let no man lie, saying
he is indifferent to popular opinion. That was my first taste of public
applause. The public was not select, and the applause might, by the
sticklers for English pure and undefiled, have been deemed ill-worded,
but to me it was the sweetest music I had ever heard, or have heard
since. I was called a “plucky little devil,” a “fair 'ot 'un,” not only
a “good 'un,” but a “good 'un” preceded by the adjective that in
the East bestows upon its principal every admirable quality that can
possibly apply. Under the circumstances it likewise fitted me literally;
but I knew it was intended rather in its complimentary sense.

Kind, if dirty, hands wiped my face. A neighbouring butcher presented me
with a choice morsel of steak, not to eat but to wear; and I found it,
if I may so express myself without infringing copyright, “grateful and
comforting.” My enemies had long since scooted, some of them, I had
rejoiced to notice, with lame and halting steps. The mutilated kitten
had been restored to its owner, a lady of ample bosom, who, carried
beyond judgment by emotion, publicly offered to adopt me on the spot.
The Law suggested, not for the first time, that everybody should now
move on; and slowly, followed by feminine commendation mingled with
masculine advice as to improved methods for the future, I was allowed to
drift away.

My bones ached, my flesh stung me, yet I walked as upon air. Gradually
I became conscious that I was not alone. A light, pattering step was
trying to keep pace with me. Graciously I slacked my speed, and the
pattering step settled down beside me. Every now and again she would run
ahead and then turn round to look up into my face, much as your small
dog does when he happens not to be misbehaving himself and desires you
to note the fact. Evidently she approved of me. I was not at my best,
as far as appearance was concerned, but women are kittle cattle, and
I think she preferred me so. Thus we walked for quite a long distance
without speaking, I drinking in the tribute of her worship and enjoying
it. Then gaining confidence, she shyly put her hand into mine, and
finding I did not repel her, promptly assumed possession of me,
according to woman's way.

For her age and station she must have been a person of means, for having
tried in vain various methods to make me more acceptable to followers
and such as having passed would turn their heads, she said:

“I know, gelatines;” and disappearing into a sweetstuff shop, returned
with quite a quantity. With these, first sucked till glutinous, we
joined my many tatters. I still attracted attention, but felt warmer.

She informed me that her name was Cissy, and that her father's shop was
in Three Colt Street. I informed her that my name was Paul, and that
my father was a lawyer. I also pointed out to her that a lawyer is much
superior in social position to a shopkeeper, which she acknowledged
cheerfully. We parted at the corner of the Stainsby Road, and I let her
kiss me once. It was understood that in the Stainsby Road we might meet
again.

I left Eliza gaping after me, the front door in her hand, and ran
straight up into my own room. Robinson Crusoe, King Arthur, The Last of
the Barons, Rob Roy! I looked them all in the face and was not ashamed.
I also was a gentleman.

My mother was much troubled when she saw me, but my father, hearing the
story, approved.

“But he looks so awful,” said my mother. “In this world,” said my
father, “one must occasionally be aggressive--if necessary, brutal.”

My father would at times be quite savage in his sentiments.




CHAPTER IV.

PAUL, FALLING IN WITH A GOODLY COMPANY OF PILGRIMS, LEARNS OF THEM THE
ROAD THAT HE MUST TRAVEL. AND MEETS THE PRINCESS OF THE GOLDEN LOCKS.

The East India Dock Road is nowadays a busy, crowded thoroughfare. The
jingle of the tram-bell and the rattle of the omnibus and cart mingle
continuously with the rain of many feet, beating ceaselessly upon its
pavements. But at the time of which I write it was an empty, voiceless
way, bounded on the one side by the long, echoing wall of the docks and
on the other by occasional small houses isolated amid market gardens,
drying grounds and rubbish heaps. Only one thing remains--or did remain
last time I passed along it, connecting it with its former self--and
that is the one-storeyed brick cottage at the commencement of the
bridge, and which was formerly the toll-house. I remember this
toll-house so well because it was there that my childhood fell from me,
and sad and frightened I saw the world beyond.

I cannot explain it better. I had been that afternoon to Plaistow on a
visit to the family dentist. It was an out-of-the-way place in which to
keep him, but there existed advantages of a counterbalancing nature.

“Have the half-crown in your hand,” my mother would direct me, while
making herself sure that the purse containing it was safe at the bottom
of my knickerbocker pocket; “but of course if he won't take it, why, you
must bring it home again.”

I am not sure, but I think he was some distant connection of ours; at
all events, I know he was a kind friend. I, seated in the velvet chair
of state, he would unroll his case of instruments before me, and ask me
to choose, recommending with affectionate eulogisms the most murderous
looking.

But on my opening my mouth to discuss the fearful topic, lo! a pair
would shoot from under his coat-sleeve, and almost before I knew what
had happened, the trouble would be over. After that we would have
tea together. He was an old bachelor, and his house stood in a great
garden--for Plaistow in those days was a picturesque village--and out of
the plentiful fruit thereof his housekeeper made the most wonderful
of jams and jellies. Oh, they were good, those teas! Generally our
conversation was of my mother who, it appeared, was once a little girl:
not at all the sort of little girl I should have imagined her; on the
contrary, a prankish, wilful little girl, though good company, I should
say, if all the tales he told of her were true. And I am inclined to
think they were, in spite of the fact that my mother, when I repeated
them to her, would laugh, saying she was sure she had no recollection of
anything of the kind, adding severely that it was a pity he and I could
not find something better to gossip about. Yet her next question would
be:

“And what else did he say, if you please?” explaining impatiently when
my answer was not of the kind expected: “No, no, I mean about me.”

The tea things cleared away, he would bring out his great microscope.
To me it was a peep-hole into a fairy world where dwelt strange dragons,
mighty monsters, so that I came to regard him as a sort of harmless
magician. It was his pet study, and looking back, I cannot help
associating his enthusiasm for all things microscopical with the fact
that he was an exceptionally little man himself, but one of the biggest
hearted that ever breathed.

On leaving I would formally hand him my half-crown, “with mamma's
compliments,” and he would formally accept it. But on putting my hand
into my jacket pocket when outside the gate I would invariably find
it there. The first time I took it back to him, but unblushingly he
repudiated all knowledge.

“Must be another half-crown,” he suggested; “such things do happen.
One puts change into a pocket and overlooks it. Slippery things,
half-crowns.”

Returning home on this particular day of days, I paused upon the bridge,
and watched for awhile the lazy barges manoeuvring their way between the
piers. It was one of those hushed summer evenings when the air even of
grim cities is full of whispering voices; and as, turning away from the
river, I passed through the white toll-gate, I had a sense of leaving
myself behind me on the bridge. So vivid was the impression, that I
looked back, half expecting to see myself still leaning over the iron
parapet, looking down into the sunlit water.

It sounds foolish, but I leave it standing, wondering if to others a
like experience has ever come. The little chap never came back to me.
He passed away from me as a man's body may possibly pass away from him,
leaving him only remembrance and regret. For a time I tried to play his
games, to dream his dreams, but the substance was wanting. I was only a
thin ghost, making believe.

It troubled me for quite a spell of time, even to the point of tears,
this feeling that my childhood lay behind me, this sudden realisation
that I was travelling swiftly the strange road called growing up. I did
not want to grow up; could nothing be done to stop it? Rather would I
be always as I had been, playing, dreaming. The dark way frightened me.
Must I go forward?

Then gradually, but very slowly, with the long months and years, came
to me the consciousness of a new being, new pulsations, sensories,
throbbings, rooted in but differing widely from the old; and little
Paul, the Paul of whom I have hitherto spoken, faded from my life.

So likewise must I let him fade with sorrow from this book. But before
I part with him entirely, let me recall what else I can remember of him.
Thus we shall be quit of him, and he will interfere with us no more.

Chief among the pictures that I see is that of my aunt Fan, crouching
over the kitchen fire; her skirt and crinoline rolled up round her
waist, leaving as sacrifice to custom only her petticoat. Up and down
her body sways in rhythmic motion, her hands stroking affectionately
her own knees; the while I, with paper knife for sword, or horse of
broomstick, stand opposite her, flourishing and declaiming. Sometimes I
am a knight and she a wicked ogre. She is slain, growling and swearing,
and at once becomes the beautiful princess that I secure and bear away
with me upon the prancing broomstick. So long as the princess is merely
holding sweet converse with me from her high-barred window, the scene
is realistic, at least, to sufficiency; but the bearing away has to be
make-believe; for my aunt cannot be persuaded to leave her chair before
the fire, and the everlasting rubbing of her knees.

At other times, with the assistance of the meat chopper, I am an Indian
brave, and then she is Laughing Water or Singing Sunshine, and we go out
scalping together; or in less bloodthirsty moods I am the Fairy Prince
and she the Sleeping Beauty. But in such parts she is not at her best.
Better, when seated in the centre of the up-turned table, I am Captain
Cook, and she the Cannibal Chief.

“I shall skin him and hang him in the larder till Sunday week,” says my
aunt, smacking her lips, “then he'll be just in right condition; not too
tough and not too high.” She was always strong in detail, was my aunt
Fan.

I do not wish to deprive my aunt of any credit due to her, but the more
I exercise my memory for evidence, the more I am convinced that her
compliance on these occasions was not conceived entirely in the spirit
of self-sacrifice. Often would she suggest the game and even the theme;
in such case, casting herself invariably for what, in old theatrical
parlance, would have been termed the heavy lead, the dragons and the
wicked uncles, the fussy necromancers and the uninvited fairies. As
authoress of a new cookery book for use in giant-land, my aunt, I am
sure, would have been successful. Most recipes that one reads are so
monotonously meagre: “Boil him,” “Put her on the spit and roast her for
supper,” “Cook 'em in a pie--with plenty of gravy;” but my aunt into the
domestic economy of Ogredom introduced variety and daintiness.

“I think, my dear,” my aunt would direct, “we'll have him stuffed with
chestnuts and served on toast. And don't forget the giblets. They make
such excellent sauce.”

With regard to the diet of imprisoned maidens she would advise:

“Not too much fish--it spoils the flesh for roasting.”

The things that she would turn people into--king's sons, rightful
princesses, such sort of people--people who after a time, one would
think, must have quite forgotten what they started as. To let her
have her way was a lesson to me in natural history both present and
pre-historic. The most beautiful damsel that ever lived she would
without a moment's hesitation turn into a Glyptodon or a Hippocrepian.
Afterwards, when I could guess at the spelling, I would look these
creatures up in the illustrated dictionary, and feel that under no
circumstances could I have loved the lady ever again. Warriors and kings
she would delight in transforming into plaice or prawns, and haughty
queens into Brussels sprouts.

With gusto would she plan a complicated slaughter, paying heed to every
detail: the sharpening of the knives, the having ready of mops and pails
of water for purposes of after cleaning up. As a writer she would have
followed the realistic school.

Her death, with which we invariably wound up the afternoon, was another
conscientious effort. Indeed, her groans and writhings would sometimes
frighten me. I always welcomed the last gurgle. That finished, but not a
moment before, my aunt would let down her skirt--in this way suggesting
the fall of the curtain upon our play--and set to work to get the tea.

Another frequently recurring picture that I see is of myself in
glazed-peaked cap explaining many things the while we walk through dingy
streets to yet a smaller figure curly haired and open eyed. Still every
now and then she runs ahead to turn and look admiringly into my face as
on the day she first became captive to the praise and fame of me.

I was glad of her company for more reasons than she knew of. For one,
she protected me against my baser self. With her beside me I should
not have dared to flee from sudden foes. Indeed, together we courted
adventure; for once you get used to it this standing hazard of attack
adds a charm to outdoor exercise that older folk in districts better
policed enjoy not. So possibly my dog feels when together we take the
air. To me it is a simple walk, maybe a little tiresome, suggested
rather by contemplation of my waistband than by desire for walking for
mere walking's sake; to him an expedition full of danger and surprises:
“The gentleman asleep with one eye open on The Chequer's doorstep!
will he greet me with a friendly sniff or try to bite my head off? This
cross-eyed, lop-eared loafer, lurching against the lamp-post! shall we
pass with a careless wag and a 'how-do,' or become locked in a life and
death struggle? Impossible to say. This coming corner, now, 'Ware! Is
anybody waiting round there to kill me, or not?”

But the trusting face beside me nerved me. As reward in lonely places I
would let her hold my hand.

A second advantage I derived from her company was that of being less
trampled on, less walked over, less swept aside into doorway or gutter
than when alone. A pretty, winsome face had this little maid, if Memory
plays me not kindly false; but also she had a vocabulary; and when the
blind idiot, male or female, instead of passing us by walking round us,
would, after the custom of the blind idiot, seek to gain the other side
of us by walking through us, she would use it.

“Now, then, where yer coming to, old glass-eye? We ain't sperrits. Can't
yer see us?”

And if they attempted reply, her child's treble, so strangely at
variance with her dainty appearance, would only rise more shrill.

“Garn! They'd run out of 'eads when they was making you. That's only a
turnip wot you've got stuck on top of yer!” I offer but specimens.

Nor was it of the slightest use attempting personal chastisement, as
sometimes an irate lady or gentleman would be foolish enough to do. As
well might an hippopotamus attempt to reprove a terrier. The only result
was to provide comedy for the entire street.

On these occasions our positions were reversed, I being the admiring
spectator of her prowess. Yet to me she was ever meek, almost
irritatingly submissive. She found out where I lived and would often
come and wait for me for hours, her little face pressed tight against
the iron railings, until either I came out or shook my head at her from
my bedroom window, when she would run off, the dying away into silence
of her pattering feet leaving me a little sad.

I think I cared for her in a way, yet she never entered into my
day-dreams, which means that she existed for me only in the outer world
of shadows that lay round about me and was not of my real life.

Also, I think she was unwise, introducing me to the shop, for children
and dogs--one seems unconsciously to bracket them in one's thoughts--are
snobbish little wretches. If only her father had been a dealer in
firewood I could have soothed myself by imagining mistakes. It was
a common occurrence, as I well knew, for children of quite the
best families to be brought up by wood choppers. Fairies, the best
intentioned in the world, but born muddlers, were generally responsible
for these mishaps, which, however, always became righted in time for the
wedding. Or even had he been a pork butcher, and there were many in the
neighbourhood, I could have thought of him as a swineherd, and so found
precedent for hope.

But a fishmonger--from six in the evening a fried fishmonger! I searched
history in vain. Fried fishmongers were without the pale.

So gradually our meetings became less frequent, though I knew that
every afternoon she waited in the quiet Stainsby Road, where dwelt in
semi-detached, six-roomed villas the aristocracy of Poplar, and that
after awhile, for arriving late at times I have been witness to the
sad fact, tears would trace pathetic patterns upon her dust-besprinkled
cheeks; and with the advent of the world-illuminating Barbara, to which
event I am drawing near, they ceased altogether.

So began and ended my first romance. One of these days--some quiet
summer's afternoon, when even the air of Pigott Street vibrates with
tenderness beneath the whispered sighs of Memory, I shall walk into the
little grocer's shop and boldly ask to see her. So far have I already
gone as to trace her, and often have I tried to catch sight of her
through the glass door, but hitherto in vain. I know she is the more
or less troubled mother of a numerous progeny. I am told she has grown
stout, and probable enough it is that her tongue has gained rather than
lost in sharpness. Yet under all the unrealities the clumsy-handed world
has built about her, I shall see, I know, the lithesome little maid with
fond, admiring eyes. What help they were to me I never knew till I had
lost them. How hard to gain such eyes I have learned since. Were we to
write the truth in our confession books, should we not admit the quality
we most admire in others is admiration of ourselves? And is it not a
wise selection? If you would have me admirable, my friend, admire me,
and speak your commendation without stint that in the sunshine of your
praises I may wax. For indifference maketh an indifferent man, and
contempt a contemptible man. Come, is it not true? Does not all that is
worthy in us grow best by honour?

Chief among the remaining figures on my childhood's stage were the many
servants of our house, the “generals,” as they were termed. So rapid,
as a rule, was their transit through our kitchen that only one or two,
conspicuous by reason of their lingering, remain upon my view. It was a
neighbourhood in which domestic servants were not much required. Those
intending to take up the calling seriously went westward. The local
ranks were recruited mainly from the discontented or the disappointed,
from those who, unappreciated at home, hoped from the stranger more
discernment; or from the love-lorn, the jilted and the jealous, who took
the cap and apron as in an earlier age their like would have taken the
veil. Maybe, to the comparative seclusion of our basement, as contrasted
with the alternative frivolity of shop or factory, they felt in such
mood more attuned. With the advent of the new or the recovery of the old
young man they would plunge again into the vain world, leaving my poor
mother to search afresh amid the legions of the cursed.

With these I made such comradeship as I could, for I had no child
friends. Kind creatures were most of them, at least so I found them.
They were poor at “making believe,” but would always squeeze ten minutes
from their work to romp with me, and that, perhaps, was healthier for
me. What, perhaps, was not so good for me was that, staggered at
the amount of “book-learning” implied by my conversation (for the
journalistic instinct, I am inclined to think, was early displayed in
me), they would listen open-mouthed to all my information, regarding me
as a precocious oracle. Sometimes they would obtain permission to take
me home with them to tea, generously eager that their friends should
also profit by me. Then, encouraged by admiring, grinning faces, I would
“hold forth,” keenly enjoying the sound of my own proud piping.

“As good as a book, ain't he?” was the tribute most often paid to me.

“As good as a play,” one enthusiastic listener, an old greengrocer, went
so far as to say.

Already I regarded myself as among the Immortals.

One girl, a dear, wholesome creature named Janet, stayed with us for
months and might have stayed years, but for her addiction to strong
language. The only and well-beloved child of the captain of the
barge “Nancy Jane,” trading between Purfleet and Ponder's End, her
conversation was at once my terror and delight.

“Janet,” my mother would exclaim in agony, her hands going up
instinctively to guard her ears, “how can you use such words?”

“What words, mum?”

“The things you have just called the gas man.”

“Him! Well, did you see what he did, mum? Walked straight into my clean
kitchen, without even wiping his boots, the--” And before my mother
could stop her, Janet had relieved her feelings by calling him it--or
rather them--again, without any idea that she had done aught else than
express in fitting phraseology a natural human emotion.

We were good friends, Janet and I, and therefore it was that I
personally undertook her reformation. It was not an occasion for mincing
one's words. The stake at issue was, I felt, too important. I told
her bluntly that if she persisted in using such language she would
inevitably go to hell.

“Then where's my father going?” demanded Janet.

“Does he use language?”

I gathered from Janet that no one who had enjoyed the privilege of
hearing her father could ever again take interest in the feeble efforts
of herself.

“I am afraid, Janet,” I explained, “that if he doesn't give it up--”

“But it's the only way he can talk,” interrupted Janet. “He don't mean
anything by it.”

I sighed, yet set my face against weakness. “You see, Janet, people who
swear do go there.”

But Janet would not believe.

“God send my dear, kind father to hell just because he can't talk like
the gentlefolks! Don't you believe it of Him, Master Paul. He's got more
sense.”

I hope I pain no one by quoting Janet's common sense. For that I should
be sorry. I remember her words because so often, when sinking in sloughs
of childish despond, they afforded me firm foothold. More often than
I can tell, when compelled to listen to the sententious voice of
immeasurable Folly glibly explaining the eternal mysteries, has it
comforted me to whisper to myself: “I don't believe it of Him. He's got
more sense.”

And about that period I had need of all the comfort I could get. As
we descend the road of life, the journey, demanding so much of our
attention, becomes of more importance than the journey's end; but to the
child, standing at the valley's gate, the terminating hills are
clearly visible. What lies beyond them is his constant wonder. I never
questioned my parents directly on the subject, shrinking as so strangely
we all do, both young and old, from discussion of the very matters
of most moment to us; and they, on their part, not guessing my need,
contented themselves with the vague generalities with which we seek
to hide even from ourselves the poverty of our beliefs. But there were
foolish voices about me less reticent; while the literature, illustrated
and otherwise, provided in those days for serious-minded youth, answered
all questionings with blunt brutality. If you did wrong you burnt in a
fiery furnace for ever and ever. Were your imagination weak you could
turn to the accompanying illustration, and see at a glance how you
yourself would writhe and shrink and scream, while cheerful devils, well
organised, were busy stoking. I had been burnt once, rather badly, in
consequence of live coals, in course of transit on a shovel, being let
fall upon me. I imagined these burning coals, not confined to a mere
part of my body, but pressing upon me everywhere, not snatched swiftly
off by loving hands, the pain assuaged by applications of soft soap and
the blue bag, but left there, eating into my flesh and veins. And this
continued for eternity. You suffered for an hour, a day, a thousand
years, and were no nearer to the end; ten thousand, a million years, and
yet, as at the very first, it was for ever, and for ever still it would
always be for ever! I suffered also from insomnia about this period.

“Then be good,” replied the foolish voices round me; “never do wrong,
and so avoid this endless agony.”

But it was so easy to do wrong. There were so many wrong things to do,
and the doing of them was so natural.

“Then repent,” said the voices, always ready.

But how did one repent? What was repentance? Did I “hate my sin,” as I
was instructed I must, or merely hate the idea of going to hell for
it? Because the latter, even my child's sense told me, was no true
repentance. Yet how could one know the difference?

Above all else there haunted me the fear of the “Unforgivable Sin.” What
this was I was never able to discover. I dreaded to enquire too closely,
lest I should find I had committed it. Day and night the terror of it
clung to me.

“Believe,” said the voices; “so only shall you be saved.” How believe?
How know you did believe? Hours would I kneel in the dark, repeating in
a whispered scream:

“I believe, I believe. Oh, I do believe!” and then rise with white
knuckles, wondering if I really did believe.

Another question rose to trouble me. In the course of my meanderings I
had made the acquaintance of an old sailor, one of the most disreputable
specimens possible to find; and had learned to love him. Our first
meeting had been outside a confectioner's window, in the Commercial
Road, where he had discovered me standing, my nose against the glass, a
mere palpitating Appetite on legs. He had seized me by the collar, and
hauled me into the shop. There, dropping me upon a stool, he bade me
eat. Pride of race prompted me politely to decline, but his language
became so awful that in fear and trembling I obeyed. So soon as I was
finished--it cost him two and fourpence, I remember--we walked down to
the docks together, and he told me stories of the sea and land that made
my blood run cold. Altogether, in the course of three weeks or a month,
we met about half a dozen times, when much the same programme was gone
through. I think I was a fairly frank child, but I said nothing about
him at home, feeling instinctively that if I did there would be an end
of our comradeship, which was dear to me: not merely by reason of
the pastry, though I admit that was a consideration, but also for his
wondrous tales. I believed them all implicitly, and so came to regard
him as one of the most interesting criminals as yet unhanged: and what
was sad about the case, as I felt myself, was that his recital of his
many iniquities, instead of repelling, attracted me to him. If ever
there existed a sinner, here was one. He chewed tobacco--one of the
hundred or so deadly sins, according to my theological library--and was
generally more or less drunk. Not that a stranger would have
noticed this; the only difference being that when sober he appeared
constrained--was less his natural, genial self. In a burst of confidence
he once admitted to me that he was the biggest blackguard in the
merchant service. Unacquainted with the merchant service, as at the time
I was, I saw no reason to doubt him.

One night in a state of intoxication he walked over a gangway and was
drowned. Our mutual friend, the confectioner, seeing me pass the window,
came out to tell me so; and having heard, I walked on, heavy of heart,
and pondering.

About his eternal destination there could be no question. The known
facts precluded the least ray of hope. How could I be happy in heaven,
supposing I eventually did succeed in slipping in, knowing that he, the
lovable old scamp, was burning for ever in hell?

How could Janet, taking it that she reformed and thus escaped damnation,
be contented, knowing the father she loved doomed to torment? The
heavenly hosts, so I argued, could be composed only of the callous and
indifferent.

I wondered how people could go about their business, eat, drink and
be merry, with tremendous fate hanging thus ever suspended over their
heads. When for a little space I myself forgot it, always it fell back
upon me with increased weight.

Nor was the contemplation of heaven itself particularly attractive to
me, for it was a foolish paradise these foolish voices had fashioned out
of their folly. You stood about and sang hymns--for ever! I was assured
that my fear of finding the programme monotonous was due only to my
state of original sin, that when I got there I should discover I liked
it. But I would have given much for the hope of avoiding both their
heaven and their hell.

Fortunately for my sanity I was not left long to brood unoccupied upon
such themes. Our worldly affairs, under the sunshine of old Hasluck's
round red face, prospered--for awhile; and one afternoon my father, who
had been away from home since breakfast time, calling me into his office
where also sat my mother, informed me that the long-talked-of school was
become at last a concrete thing.

“The term commences next week,” explained my father. “It is not exactly
what I had intended, but it will do--for the present. Later, of course,
you will go to one of the big public schools; your mother and I have not
yet quite decided which.”

“You will meet other boys there, good and bad,” said my mother, who
sat clasping and unclasping her hands. “Be very careful, dear, how you
choose your companions.”

“You will learn to take your own part,” said my father. “School is an
epitome of the world. One must assert oneself, or one is sat upon.”

I knew not what to reply, the vista thus opened out to me was so
unexpected. My blood rejoiced, but my heart sank.

“Take one of your long walks,” said my father, smiling, “and think it
over.”

“And if you are in any doubt, you know where to go for guidance, don't
you?” whispered my mother, who was very grave.

Yet I went to bed, dreaming of quite other things that night: of
Queens of Beauty bending down to crown my brows with laurel: of wronged
Princesses for whose cause I rode to death or victory. For on my
return home, being called into the drawing-room by my father, I stood
transfixed, my cap in hand, staring with all my eyes at the vision that
I saw.

No such wonder had I ever seen before, at all events, not to my
remembrance. The maidens that one meets in Poplar streets may be fair
enough in their way, but their millinery displays them not to advantage;
and the few lady visitors that came to us were of a staid and matronly
appearance. Only out of pictures hitherto had such witchery looked upon
me; and from these the spell faded as one gazed.

I heard old Hasluck's smoky voice saying, “My little gell, Barbara,” and
I went nearer to her, moving unconsciously.

“You can kiss 'er,” said the smoky voice again; “she won't bite.” But I
did not kiss her. Nor ever felt I wanted to, upon the mouth.

I suppose she must have been about fourteen, and I a little over ten,
though tall for my age. Later I came to know she had that rare gold
hair that holds the light, so that upon her face, which seemed of dainty
porcelain, there ever fell a softened radiance as from some shining
aureole; those blue eyes where dwell mysteries, shadow veiled. At the
time I knew nothing, but that it seemed to me as though the fairy-tales
had all come true.

She smiled, understanding and well pleased with my confusion. Child
though I was--little more than child though she was, it flattered her
vanity.

Fair and sweet, you had but that one fault. Would it had been another,
less cruel to you yourself.




CHAPTER V.

IN WHICH THERE COMES BY ONE BENT UPON PURSUING HIS OWN WAY.

“Correct” is, I think, the adjective by which I can best describe
Doctor Florret and all his attributes. He was a large man, but not
too large--just the size one would select for the head-master of an
important middle-class school; stout, not fat, suggesting comfort, not
grossness. His hands were white and well shaped. On the left he wore
a fine diamond ring, but it shone rather than sparkled. He spoke of
commonplace things in a voice that lent dignity even to the weather. His
face, which was clean-shaven, radiated benignity tempered by discretion.

So likewise all about him: his wife, the feminine counterpart of
himself. Seeing them side by side one felt tempted to believe that
for his special benefit original methods had been reverted to, and she
fashioned, as his particular helpmeet, out of one of his own ribs.
His furniture was solid, meant for use, not decoration. His pictures,
following the rule laid down for dress, graced without drawing attention
to his walls. He ever said the correct thing at the correct time in the
correct manner. Doubtful of the correct thing to do, one could always
learn it by waiting till he did it; when one at once felt that nothing
else could possibly have been correct. He held on all matters
the correct views. To differ from him was to discover oneself a
revolutionary.

In practice, as I learned at the cost of four more or less wasted
years, he of course followed the methods considered correct by English
schoolmen from the days of Edward VI. onwards.

Heaven knows I worked hard. I wanted to learn. Ambition--the all
containing ambition of a boy that “has its centre everywhere nor cares
to fix itself to form” stirred within me. Did I pass a speaker at some
corner, hatless, perspiring, pointing Utopias in the air to restless
hungry eyes, at once I saw myself, a Demosthenes swaying multitudes, a
statesman holding the House of Commons spellbound, the Prime Minister of
England, worshipped by the entire country. Even the Opposition papers,
had I known of them, I should have imagined forced to reluctant
admiration. Did the echo of a distant drum fall upon my ear, then before
me rose picturesque fields of carnage, one figure ever conspicuous:
Myself, well to the front, isolated. Promotion in the British army of
my dream being a matter purely of merit, I returned Commander-in-Chief.
Vast crowds thronged every flag-decked street. I saw white waving hands
from every roof and window. I heard the dull, deep roar of welcome, as
with superb seat upon my snow-white charger--or should it be coal-black?
The point cost me much consideration, so anxious was I that the day
should be without a flaw--I slowly paced at the head of my victorious
troops, between wild waves of upturned faces: walked into a lamp-post
or on to the toes of some irascible old gentleman, and awoke. A drunken
sailor stormed from between swing doors and tacked tumultuously down the
street: the factory chimney belching smoke became a swaying mast. The
costers round about me shouted “Ay, ay, sir. 'Ready, ay, ready.” I
was Christopher Columbus, Drake, Nelson, rolled into one. Spurning
the presumption of modern geographers, I discovered new continents.
I defeated the French--those useful French! I died in the moment of
victory. A nation mourned me and I was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Also I lived and was created a Duke. Either alternative had its charm:
personally I was indifferent. Boys who on November the ninth, as
explained by letters from their mothers, read by Doctor Florret with a
snort, were suffering from a severe toothache, told me on November
the tenth of the glories of Lord Mayor's Shows. I heard their chatter
fainter and fainter as from an ever-increasing distance. The bells of
Bow were ringing in my ears. I saw myself a merchant prince, though
still young. Nobles crowded my counting house. I lent them millions
and married their daughters. I listened, unobserved in a corner, to
discussion on some new book. Immediately I was a famous author. All men
praised me: for of reviewers and their density I, in those days, knew
nothing. Poetry, fiction, history, I wrote them all; and all men read,
and wondered. Only here was a crumpled rose leaf in the pillow on which
I laid my swelling head: penmanship was vexation to me, and spelling
puzzled me, so that I wrote with sorrow and many blots and scratchings
out. Almost I put aside the idea of becoming an author.

But along whichever road I might fight my way to the Elysian Fields
of fame, education, I dimly but most certainly comprehended, was a
necessary weapon to my hand. And so, with aching heart and aching head,
I pored over my many books. I see myself now in my small bedroom, my
elbows planted on the shaky, one-legged table, startled every now and
again by the frizzling of my hair coming in contact with the solitary
candle. On cold nights I wear my overcoat, turned up about the neck, a
blanket round my legs, and often I must sit with my fingers in my ears,
the better to shut out the sounds of life, rising importunately from
below. “A song, Of a song, To a song, A song, O! song!” “I love, Thou
lovest, He she or it loves. I should or would love” over and over again,
till my own voice seems some strange buzzing thing about me, while
my head grows smaller and smaller till I put my hands up frightened,
wondering if it still be entire upon my shoulders.

Was I more stupid than the average, or is a boy's brain physically
incapable of the work our educational system demands of it?

“Latin and Greek” I hear repeating the suave tones of Doctor Florret,
echoing as ever the solemn croak of Correctness, “are useful as mental
gymnastics.” My dear Doctor Florret and Co., cannot you, out of the vast
storehouse of really necessary knowledge, select apparatus better fitted
to strengthen and not overstrain the mental muscles of ten-to-fourteen?
You, gentle reader, with brain fully grown, trained by years of practice
to its subtlest uses, take me from your bookshelf, say, your Browning or
even your Shakespeare. Come, you know this language well. You have not
merely learned: it is your mother tongue. Construe for me this short
passage, these few verses: parse, analyse, resolve into component parts!
And now, will you maintain that it is good for Tommy, tear-stained,
ink-bespattered little brat, to be given AEsop's Fables, Ovid's
Metamorphoses to treat in like manner? Would it not be just as sensible
to insist upon his practising his skinny little arms with hundred pounds
dumb-bells?

We were the sons of City men, of not well-to-do professional men, of
minor officials, clerks, shopkeepers, our roads leading through the
workaday world. Yet quite half our time was taken up in studies utterly
useless to us. How I hated them, these youth-tormenting Shades. Homer!
how I wished the fishermen had asked him that absurd riddle earlier.
Horace! why could not that shipwreck have succeeded: it would have in
the case of any one but a classic.

Until one blessed day there fell into my hands a wondrous talisman.

Hearken unto me, ye heavy burdened little brethren of mine. Waste not
your substance upon tops and marbles, nor yet upon tuck (Do ye still
call it “tuck”?), but scrape and save. For in the neighbourhood of
Paternoster Row there dwells a good magician who for silver will provide
you with a “Key” that shall open wide for you the gates of Hades.

By its aid, the Frogs of Aristophanes became my merry friends. With
Ulysses I wandered eagerly through Wonderland. Doctor Florret was
charmed with my progress, which was real, for now, at last, I was
studying according to the laws of common sense, understanding first,
explaining afterwards. Let Youth, that the folly of Age would imprison
in ignorance, provide itself with “Keys.”

But let me not seem to claim credit due to another. Dan it was--Dan of
the strong arm and the soft smile, Dan the wise hater of all useless
labour, sharp-witted, easy-going Dan, who made this grand discovery.

Dan followed me a term later into the Lower Fourth, but before he had
been there a week was handling Latin verse with an ease and dexterity
suggestive of unholy dealings with the Devil. In a lonely corner of
Regent's Park, first making sure no one was within earshot, he revealed
to me his magic.

“Don't tell the others,” he commanded; “or it will get out, and then
nobody will be any the better.”

“But is it right?” I asked.

“Look here, young 'un,” said Dan; “what are you here for--what's
your father paying school fees for (it was the appeal to our
conscientiousness most often employed by Dr. Florret himself), for you
to play a silly game, or to learn something?

“Because if it's only a game--we boys against the masters,” continued
Dan, “then let's play according to rule. If we're here to learn--well,
you've been in the class four months and I've just come, and I bet I
know more Ovid than you do already.” Which was true.

So I thanked Dan and shared with him his key; and all the Latin I
remember, for whatever good it may be to me, I take it I owe to him.

And knowledge of yet greater value do I owe to the good fortune that
his sound mother wit was ever at my disposal to correct my dreamy
unfeasibility; for from first to last he was my friend; and to have
been the chosen friend of Dan, shrewd judge of man and boy, I deem no
unimportant feather in my cap. He “took to” me, he said, because I was
so “jolly green”--“such a rummy little mug.” No other reason would he
ever give me, save only a sweet smile and a tumbling of my hair with his
great hand; but I think I understood. And I loved him because he was
big and strong and handsome and kind; no one but a little boy knows
how brutal or how kind a big boy can be. I was still somewhat of an
effeminate little chap, nervous and shy, with a pink and white face, and
hair that no amount of wetting would make straight. I was growing too
fast, which took what strength I had, and my journey every day, added
to school work and home work, maybe was too much for my years. Every
morning I had to be up at six, leaving the house before seven to catch
the seven fifteen from Poplar station; and from Chalk Farm I had to walk
yet another couple of miles. But that I did not mind, for at Chalk Farm
station Dan was always waiting for me. In the afternoon we walked back
together also; and when I was tired and my back ached--just as if some
one had cut a piece out of it, I felt--he would put his arm round
me, for he always knew, and oh, how strong and restful it was to lean
against, so that one walked as in an easy-chair.

It seems to me, remembering how I would walk thus by his side, looking
up shyly into his face, thinking how strong and good he was, feeling so
glad he liked me, I can understand a little how a woman loves. He was so
solid. With his arm round me, it was good to feel weak.

At first we were in the same class, the Lower Third. He had no business
there. He was head and shoulders taller than any of us and years older.
It was a disgrace to him that he was not in the Upper Fourth. The Doctor
would tell him so before us all twenty times a week. Old Waterhouse
(I call him “Old Waterhouse” because “Mister Waterhouse, M.A.,”
 would convey no meaning to me, and I should not know about whom I
was speaking) who cordially liked him, was honestly grieved. We, his
friends, though it was pleasant to have him among us, suffered in our
pride of him. The only person quite contented was Dan himself. It was
his way in all things. Others had their opinion of what was good
for him. He had his own, and his own was the only opinion that ever
influenced him. The Lower Third suited him. For him personally the Upper
Fourth had no attraction.

And even in the Lower Third he was always at the bottom. He preferred
it. He selected the seat and kept it, in spite of all allurements, in
spite of all reproaches. It was nearest to the door. It enabled him
to be first out and last in. Also it afforded a certain sense of
retirement. Its occupant, to an extent screened from observation,
became in the course of time almost forgotten. To Dan's philosophical
temperament its practical advantages outweighed all sentimental
objection.

Only on one occasion do I remember his losing it. As a rule, tiresome
questions, concerning past participles, square roots, or meridians never
reached him, being snapped up in transit by arm-waving lovers of such
trifles. The few that by chance trickled so far he took no notice of.
They possessed no interest for him, and he never pretended that they
did. But one day, taken off his guard, he gave voice quite unconsciously
to a correct reply, with the immediate result of finding himself in an
exposed position on the front bench. I had never seen Dan out of
temper before, but that moment had any of us ventured upon a whispered
congratulation we would have had our head punched, I feel confident.

Old Waterhouse thought that here at last was reformation. “Come, Brian,”
he cried, rubbing his long thin hands together with delight, “after all,
you're not such a fool as you pretend.”

“Never said I was,” muttered Dan to himself, with a backward glance of
regret towards his lost seclusion; and before the day was out he had
worked his way back to it again.

As we were going out together, old Waterhouse passed us on the stairs:
“Haven't you any sense of shame, my boy?” he asked sorrowfully, laying
his hand kindly on Dan's shoulder.

“Yes, sir,” answered Dan, with his frank smile; “plenty. It isn't yours,
that's all.”

He was an excellent fighter. In the whole school of over two hundred
boys, not half a dozen, and those only Upper Sixth boys--fellows who
came in top hats with umbrellas, and who wouldn't out of regard to their
own dignity--could have challenged him with any chance of success. Yet
he fought very seldom, and then always in a bored, lazy fashion, as
though he were doing it purely to oblige the other fellow.

One afternoon, just as we were about to enter Regent's Park by the
wicket opposite Hanover Gate, a biggish boy, an errand boy carrying an
empty basket, and supported by two smaller boys, barred our way.

“Can't come in here,” said the boy with the basket.

“Why not?” inquired Dan.

“'Cos if you do I shall kick you,” was the simple explanation.

Without a word Dan turned away, prepared to walk on to the next opening.
The boy with the basket, evidently encouraged, followed us: “Now, I'm
going to give you your coward's blow,” he said, stepping in front of us;
“will you take it quietly?” It is a lonely way, the Outer Circle, on a
winter's afternoon.

“I'll tell you afterwards,” said Dan, stopping short.

The boy gave him a slight slap on the cheek. It could not have hurt, but
the indignity, of course, was great. No boy of honour, according to our
code, could have accepted it without retaliating.

“Is that all?” asked Dan.

“That's all--for the present,” replied the boy with the basket.

“Good-bye,” said Dan, and walked on.

“Glad he didn't insist on fighting,” remarked Dan, cheerfully, as we
proceeded; “I'm going to a party tonight.”

Yet on another occasion, in a street off Lisson Grove, he insisted
on fighting a young rough half again his own weight, who, brushing up
against him, had knocked his hat off into the mud.

“I wouldn't have said anything about his knocking it off,” explained
Dan afterwards, tenderly brushing the poor bruised thing with his coat
sleeve, “if he hadn't kicked it.”

On another occasion I remember, three or four of us, Dan among the
number, were on our way one broiling summer's afternoon to Hadley Woods.
As we turned off from the highroad just beyond Barnet and struck into
the fields, Dan drew from his pocket an enormous juicy-looking pear.

“Where did you get that from?” inquired one, Dudley.

“From that big greengrocer's opposite Barnet Church,” answered Dan.
“Have a bit?”

“You told me you hadn't any more money,” retorted Dudley, in reproachful
tones.

“No more I had,” replied Dan, holding out a tempting slice at the end of
his pocket-knife.

“You must have had some, or you couldn't have bought that pear,” argued
Dudley, accepting.

“Didn't buy it.”

“Do you mean to say you stole it?”

“Yes.”

“You're a thief,” denounced Dudley, wiping his mouth and throwing away a
pip.

“I know it. So are you.”

“No, I'm not.”

“What's the good of talking nonsense. You robbed an orchard only last
Wednesday at Mill Hill, and gave yourself the stomach-ache.”

“That isn't stealing.”

“What is it?”

“It isn't the same thing.”

“What's the difference?”

And nothing could make Dan comprehend the difference. “Stealing is
stealing,” he would have it, “whether you take it off a tree or out of a
basket. You're a thief, Dudley; so am I. Anybody else say a piece?”

The thermometer was at that point where morals become slack. We all had
a piece; but we were all of us shocked at Dan, and told him so. It did
not agitate him in the least.

To Dan I could speak my inmost thoughts, knowing he would understand me,
and sometimes from him I received assistance and sometimes confusion.
The yearly examination was approaching. My father and mother said
nothing, but I knew how anxiously each of them awaited the result; my
father, to see how much I had accomplished; my mother, how much I had
endeavoured. I had worked hard, but was doubtful, knowing that prizes
depend less upon what you know than upon what you can make others
believe you know; which applies to prizes beyond those of school.

“Are you going in for anything, Dan?” I asked him. We were discussing
the subject, crossing Primrose Hill, one bright June morning.

I knew the question absurd. I asked it of him because I wanted him to
ask it of me.

“They're not giving away anything I particularly want,” murmured Dan, in
his lazy drawl: looked at from that point of view, school prizes are, it
must be confessed, not worth their cost.

“You're sweating yourself, young 'un, of course?” he asked next, as I
expected.

“I mean to have a shot at the History,” I admitted. “Wish I was better
at dates.”

“It's always two-thirds dates,” Dan assured me, to my discouragement.
“Old Florret thinks you can't eat a potato until you know the date that
chap Raleigh was born.”

“I've prayed so hard that I may win the History prize,” I explained to
him. I never felt shy with Dan. He never laughed at me.

“You oughtn't to have done that,” he said. I stared. “It isn't fair to
the other fellows. That won't be your winning the prize; that will be
your getting it through favouritism.”

“But they can pray, too,” I reminded him.

“If you all pray for it,” answered Dan, “then it will go, not to the
fellow that knows most history, but to the fellow that's prayed the
hardest. That isn't old Florret's idea, I'm sure.”

“But we are told to pray for things we want,” I insisted.

“Beastly mean way of getting 'em,” retorted Dan. And no argument that
came to me, neither then nor at any future time, brought him to right
thinking on this point.

He would judge all matters for himself. In his opinion Achilles was a
coward, not a hero.

“He ought to have told the Trojans that they couldn't hurt any part of
him except his heel, and let them have a shot at that,” he argued;
“King Arthur and all the rest of them with their magic swords, it wasn't
playing the game. There's no pluck in fighting if you know you're bound
to win. Beastly cads, I call them all.”

I won no prize that year. Oddly enough, Dan did, for arithmetic; the
only subject studied in the Lower Fourth that interested him. He liked
to see things coming right, he explained.

My father shut himself up with me for half an hour and examined me
himself.

“It's very curious, Paul,” he said, “you seem to know a good deal.”

“They asked me all the things I didn't know. They seemed to do it on
purpose,” I blurted out, and laid my head upon my arm. My father crossed
the room and sat down beside me.

“Spud!” he said--it was a long time since he had called me by that
childish nickname--“perhaps you are going to be with me, one of the
unlucky ones.”

“Are you unlucky?” I asked.

“Invariably,” answered my father, rumpling his hair. “I don't know why.
I try hard--I do the right thing, but it turns out wrong. It always
does.”

“But I thought Mr. Hasluck was bringing us such good fortune,” I said,
looking up in surprise. “We're getting on, aren't we?”

“I have thought so before, so often,” said my father, “and it has always
ended in a--in a collapse.”

I put my arms round his neck, for I always felt to my father as to
another boy; bigger than myself and older, but not so very much.

“You see, when I married your mother,” he went on, “I was a rich man.
She had everything she wanted.”

“But you will get it all back,” I cried.

“I try to think so,” he answered. “I do think so--generally speaking.
But there are times--you would not understand--they come to you.”

“But she is happy,” I persisted; “we are all happy.”

He shook his head.

“I watch her,” he said. “Women suffer more than we do. They live more
in the present. I see my hopes, but she--she sees only me, and I have
always been a failure. She has lost faith in me.”

I could say nothing. I understood but dimly.

“That is why I want you to be an educated man, Paul,” he continued after
a silence. “You can't think what a help education is to a man. I don't
mean it helps you to get on in the world; I think for that it rather
hampers you. But it helps you to bear adversity. To a man with a
well-stored mind, life is interesting on a piece of bread and a cup
of tea. I know. If it were not for you and your mother I should not
trouble.”

And yet at that time our fortunes were at their brightest, so far as I
remember them; and when they were dark again he was full of fresh hope,
planning, scheming, dreaming again. It was never acting. A worse actor
never trod this stage on which we fret. His occasional attempts at a
cheerfulness he did not feel inevitably resulted in our all three crying
in one another's arms. No; it was only when things were going well
that experience came to his injury. Child of misfortune, he ever rose,
Antaeus-like, renewed in strength from contact with his mother.

Nor must it be understood that his despondent moods, even in time of
prosperity, were oft recurring. Generally speaking, as he himself said,
he was full of confidence. Already had he fixed upon our new house in
Guilford Street, then still a good residential quarter; while at the
same time, as he would explain to my mother, sufficiently central for
office purposes, close as it was to Lincoln and Grey's Inn and Bedford
Row, pavements long worn with the weary footsteps of the Law's sad
courtiers.

“Poplar,” said my father, “has disappointed me. It seemed a good idea--a
rapidly rising district, singularly destitute of solicitors. It ought to
have turned out well, and yet somehow it hasn't.”

“There have been a few come,” my mother reminded him.

“Of a sort,” admitted my father; “a criminal lawyer might gather
something of a practice here, I have no doubt. But for general work,
of course, you must be in a central position. Now, in Guilford Street
people will come to me.”

“It should certainly be a pleasanter neighbourhood to live in,” agreed
my mother.

“Later on,” said my father, “in case I want the whole house for offices,
we could live ourselves in Regent's Park. It is quite near to the Park.”

“Of course you have consulted Mr. Hasluck?” asked my mother, who of the
two was by far the more practical.

“For Hasluck,” replied my father, “it will be much more convenient. He
grumbles every time at the distance.”

“I have never been quite able to understand,” said my mother, “why Mr.
Hasluck should have come so far out of his way. There must surely be
plenty of solicitors in the City.”

“He had heard of me,” explained my father. “A curious old
fellow--likes his own way of doing things. It's not everyone who would
care for him as a client. But I seem able to manage him.”

Often we would go together, my father and I, to Guilford Street. It was
a large corner house that had taken his fancy, half creeper covered,
with a balcony, and pleasantly situated, overlooking the gardens of the
Foundling Hospital. The wizened old caretaker knew us well, and having
opened the door, would leave us to wander through the empty, echoing
rooms at our own will. We furnished them handsomely in later Queen
Anne style, of which my father was a connoisseur, sparing no necessary
expense; for, as my father observed, good furniture is always worth its
price, while to buy cheap is pure waste of money.

“This,” said my father, on the second floor, stepping from the bedroom
into the smaller room adjoining, “I shall make your mother's boudoir.
We will have the walls in lavender and maple green--she is fond of soft
tones--and the window looks out upon the gardens. There we will put her
writing-table.”

My own bedroom was on the third floor, a sunny little room.

“You will be quiet here,” said my father, “and we can shut out the bed
and the washstand with a screen.”

Later, I came to occupy it; though its rent--eight and sixpence a week,
including attendance--was somewhat more than at the time I ought to have
afforded. Nevertheless, I adventured it, taking the opportunity of being
an inmate of the house to refurnish it, unknown to my stout landlady, in
later Queen Anne style, putting a neat brass plate with my father's name
upon the door. “Luke Kelver, Solicitor. Office hours, 10 till 4.” A
medical student thought he occupied my mother's boudoir. He was a dull
dog, full of tiresome talk. But I made acquaintanceship with him; and
often of an evening would smoke my pipe there in silence while
pretending to be listening to his monotonous brag.

The poor thing! he had no idea that he was only a foolish ghost;
that his walls, seemingly covered with coarse-coloured prints
of wooden-looking horses, simpering ballet girls and petrified
prize-fighters, were in reality a delicate tone of lavender and maple
green; that at her writing-table in the sunlit window sat my mother, her
soft curls curtaining her quiet face.




CHAPTER VI.

OF THE SHADOW THAT CAME BETWEEN THE MAN IN GREY AND THE LADY OF THE
LOVE-LIT EYES.

“There's nothing missing,” said my mother, “so far as I can find out.
Depend upon it, that's the explanation: she has got frightened and has
run away.

“But what was there to frighten her?” said my father, pausing with a
decanter in one hand and the bottle in the other.

“It was the idea of the thing,” replied my mother. “She has never been
used to waiting at table. She was actually crying about it only last
night.”

“But what's to be done?” said my father. “They will be here in less than
an hour.”

“There will be no dinner for them,” said my mother, “unless I put on an
apron and bring it up myself.”

“Where does she live?” asked my father.

“At Ilford,” answered my mother.

“We must make a joke of it,” said my father.

My mother, sitting down, began to cry. It had been a trying week for my
mother. A party to dinner--to a real dinner, beginning with anchovies
and ending with ices from the confectioner's; if only they would remain
ices and not, giving way to unaccustomed influences, present themselves
as cold custard--was an extraordinary departure from the even tenor of
our narrow domestic way; indeed, I recollect none previous. First there
had been the house to clean and rearrange almost from top to bottom;
endless small purchases to be made of articles that Need never misses,
but which Ostentation, if ever you let her sneering nose inside the
door, at once demands. Then the kitchen range--it goes without saying:
one might imagine them all members of a stove union, controlled by some
agitating old boiler out of work--had taken the opportunity to strike,
refusing to bake another dish except under permanently improved
conditions, necessitating weary days with plumbers. Fat cookery books,
long neglected on their shelf, had been consulted, argued with and
abused; experiments made, failures sighed over, successes noted; cost
calculated anxiously; means and ways adjusted, hope finally achieved,
shadowed by fear.

And now with victory practically won, to have the reward thus dashed
from her hand at the last moment! Downstairs in the kitchen would be
the dinner, waiting for the guests; upstairs round the glittering table
would be the assembled guests, waiting for their dinner. But between the
two yawned an impassable gulf. The bridge, without a word of warning,
had bolted--was probably by this time well on its way to Ilford. There
was excuse for my mother's tears.

“Isn't it possible to get somebody else?” asked my father.

“Impossible, in the time,” said my mother. “I had been training her for
the whole week. We had rehearsed it perfectly.”

“Have it in the kitchen,” suggested my aunt, who was folding napkins to
look like ships, which they didn't in the least, “and call it a picnic.”
 Really it seemed the only practical solution.

There came a light knock at the front door.

“It can't be anybody yet, surely,” exclaimed my father in alarm, making
for his coat.

“It's Barbara, I expect,” explained my mother. “She promised to come
round and help me dress. But now, of course, I shan't want her.” My
mother's nature was pessimistic.

But with the words Barbara ran into the room, for I had taken it upon
myself to admit her, knowing that shadows slipped out through the window
when Barbara came in at the door--in those days, I mean.

She kissed them all three, though it seemed but one movement, she was so
quick. And at once they saw the humour of the thing.

“There's going to be no dinner,” laughed my father. “We are going to
look surprised and pretend that it was yesterday. It will be fun to see
their faces.”

“There will be a very nice dinner,” smiled my mother, “but it will be
in the kitchen, and there's no way of getting it upstairs.” And they
explained to her the situation.

She stood for an instant, her sweet face the gravest in the group. Then
a light broke upon it.

“I'll get you someone,” she said.

“My dear, you don't even know the neighbourhood,” began my mother. But
Barbara had snatched the latchkey from its nail and was gone.

With her disappearance, shadow fell again upon us. “If there were only
an hotel in this beastly neighbourhood,” said my father.

“You must entertain them by yourself, Luke,” said my mother; “and I must
wait--that's all.”

“Don't be absurd, Maggie,” cried my father, getting angry. “Can't cook
bring it in?”

“No one can cook a dinner and serve it, too,” answered my mother,
impatiently. “Besides, she's not presentable.”

“What about Fan?” whispered my father.

My mother merely looked. It was sufficient.

“Paul?” suggested my father.

“Thank you,” retorted my mother. “I don't choose to have my son turned
into a footman, if you do.”

“Well, hadn't you better go and dress?” was my father's next remark.

“It won't take me long to put on an apron,” was my mother's reply.

“I was looking forward to seeing you in that new frock,” said my father.
In the case of another, one might have attributed such a speech to tact;
in the case of my father, one felt it was a happy accident.

My mother confessed--speaking with a certain indulgence, as one does of
one's own follies when past--that she herself also had looked forward to
seeing herself therein. Threatening discord melted into mutual sympathy.

“I so wanted everything to be all right, for your sake, Luke,” said my
mother; “I know you were hoping it would help on the business.”

“I was only thinking of you, Maggie, dear,” answered my father. “You are
my business.”

“I know, dear,” said my mother. “It is hard.”

The key turned in the lock, and we all stood quiet to listen.

“She's come back alone,” said my mother. “I knew it was hopeless.”

The door opened.

“Please, ma'am,” said the new parlour-maid, “will I do?”

She stood there, framed by the lintel, in the daintiest of aprons, the
daintiest of caps upon her golden hair; and every objection she swept
aside with the wind of her merry wilfulness. No one ever had their way
with her, nor wanted it.

“You shall be footman,” she ordered, turning to me--but this time my
mother only laughed. “Wait here till I come down again.” Then to my
mother: “Now, ma'am, are you ready?”

It was the first time I had seen my mother, or, indeed, any other flesh
and blood woman, in evening dress, and to tell the truth I was a little
shocked. Nay, more than a little, and showed it, I suppose; for my
mother flushed and drew her shawl over the gleaming whiteness of her
shoulders, pleading coldness. But Barbara cried out against this, saying
it was a sin such beauty should be hid; and my father, filching a shawl
with a quick hand, so dextrously indeed as to suggest some previous
practice in the feat, dropped on one knee--as though the world were some
sweet picture book--and raised my mother's hand with grave reverence to
his lips; and Barbara, standing behind my mother's chair, insisted on
my following suit, saying the Queen was receiving. So I knelt also,
glancing up shyly as towards the gracious face of some fair lady
hitherto unknown, thus Catching my first glimpse of the philosophy of
clothes.

My memory lingers upon this scene by contrast with the sad, changed
days that swiftly followed, when my mother's eyes would flash towards
my father angry gleams, and her voice ring cruel and hard; though the
moment he was gone her lips would tremble and her eyes grow soft again
and fill with tears; when my father would sit with averted face and
sullen lips tight pressed, or worse, would open them only to pour forth
a rapid flood of savage speech; and fling out of the room, slamming the
door behind him, and I would find him hours afterwards, sitting alone in
the dark, with bowed head between his hands.

Wretched, I would lie awake, hearing through the flimsy walls their
passionate tones, now rising high, now fiercely forced into cold
whispers; and then their words to each other sounded even crueller.

In their estrangement from each other, so new to them, both clung closer
to me, though they would tell me nothing, nor should I have understood
if they had. When my mother was sobbing softly, her arms clasping me
tighter and tighter with each quivering throb, then I hated my father,
who I felt had inflicted this sorrow upon her. Yet when my father drew
me down upon his knee, and I looked into his kind eyes so full of pain,
then I felt angry with my mother, remembering her bitter tongue.

It seemed to me as though some cruel, unseen thing had crept into the
house to stand ever between them, so that they might never look into
each other's loving eyes but only into the eyes of this evil shadow. The
idea grew upon me until at times I could almost detect its outline in
the air, feel a chillness as it passed me. It trod silently through the
pokey rooms, always alert to thrust its grinning face before them.
Now beside my mother it would whisper in her ear; and the next moment,
stealing across to my father, answer for him with his voice, but
strangely different. I used to think I could hear it laughing to itself
as it stepped back into enfolding space.

To this day I seem to see it, ever following with noiseless footsteps
man and woman, waiting patiently its opportunity to thrust its face
between them. So that I can read no love tale, but, glancing round, I
see its mocking eyes behind my shoulder, reading also, with a silent
laugh. So that never can I meet with boy and girl, whispering in the
twilight, but I see it lurking amid the half lights, just behind them,
creeping after them with stealthy tread, as hand in hand they pass me in
quiet ways.

Shall any of us escape, or lies the road of all through this dark
valley of the shadow of dead love? Is it Love's ordeal? testing the
feeble-hearted from the strong in faith, who shall find each other yet
again, the darkness passed?

Of the dinner itself, until time of dessert, I can give no consecutive
account, for as footman, under the orders of this enthusiastic
parlour-maid, my place was no sinecure, and but few opportunities of
observation through the crack of the door were afforded me. All that
was clear to me was that the chief guest was a Mr. Teidelmann--or
Tiedelmann, I cannot now remember which--a snuffy, mumbling old frump,
with whose name then, however, I was familiar by reason of seeing it
so often in huge letters, though with a Co. added, on dreary long blank
walls, bordering the Limehouse reach. He sat at my mother's right hand;
and I wondered, noticing him so ugly and so foolish seeming, how she
could be so interested in him, shouting much and often to him; for added
to his other disattractions he was very deaf, which necessitated his
putting his hand up to his ear at every other observation made to
him, crying querulously: “Eh, what? What are you talking about? Say it
again,”--smiling upon him and paying close attention to his every want.
Even old Hasluck, opposite to him, and who, though pleasant enough
in his careless way, was far from being a slave to politeness, roared
himself purple, praising some new disinfectant of which this same
Teidelmann appeared to be the proprietor.

“My wife swears by it,” bellowed Hasluck, leaning across the table.

“Our drains!” chimed in Mrs. Hasluck, who was a homely soul; “well,
you'd hardly know there was any in the house since I've took to using
it.”

“What are they talking about?” asked Teidelmann, appealing to my mother.
“What's he say his wife does?”

“Your disinfectant,” explained my mother; “Mrs. Hasluck swears by it.”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Hasluck.”

“Does she? Delighted to hear it,” grunted the old gentleman, evidently
bored.

“Nothing like it for a sick-room,” persisted Hasluck; “might almost call
it a scent.”

“Makes one quite anxious to be ill,” remarked my aunt, addressing no one
in particular.

“Reminds me of cocoanuts,” continued Hasluck.

Its proprietor appeared not to hear, but Hasluck was determined his
flattery should not be lost.

“I say it reminds me of cocoanuts.” He screamed it this time.

“Oh, does it?” was the reply.

“Doesn't it you?”

“Can't say it does,” answered Teidelmann. “As a matter of fact, don't
know much about it myself. Never use it.”

Old Teidelmann went on with his dinner, but Hasluck was still full of
the subject.

“Take my advice,” he shouted, “and buy a bottle.”

“Buy a what?”

“A bottle,” roared the other, with an effort palpably beyond his
strength.

“What's he say? What's he talking about now?” asked Teidelmann, again
appealing to my mother.

“He says you ought to buy a bottle,” again explained my mother.

“What of?”

“Of your own disinfectant.”

“Silly fool!”

Whether he intended the remark to be heard and thus to close the topic
(which it did), or whether, as deaf people are apt to, merely misjudged
the audibility of an intended sotto vocalism, I cannot say. I only know
that outside in the passage I heard the words distinctly, and therefore
assume they reached round the table also.

A lull in the conversation followed, but Hasluck was not thin-skinned,
and the next thing I distinguished was his cheery laugh.

“He's quite right,” was Hasluck's comment; “that's what I am
undoubtedly. Because I can't talk about anything but shop myself, I
think everybody else is the same sort of fool.”

But he was doing himself an injustice, for on my next arrival in the
passage he was again shouting across the table, and this time Teidelmann
was evidently interested.

“Well, if you could spare the time, I'd be more obliged than I can tell
you,” Hasluck was saying. “I know absolutely nothing about pictures
myself, and Pearsall says you are one of the best judges in Europe.”

“He ought to know,” chuckled old Teidelmann. “He's tried often enough to
palm off rubbish onto me.”

“That last purchase of yours must have been a good thing for young--”
 Hasluck mentioned the name of a painter since world famous; “been the
making of him, I should say.”

“I gave him two thousand for the six,” replied Teidelmann, “and they'll
sell for twenty thousand.”

“But you'll never sell them?” exclaimed my father.

“No,” grunted old Teidelmann, “but my widow will.” There came a soft,
low laugh from a corner of the table I could not see.

“It's Anderson's great disappointment,” followed a languid, caressing
voice (the musical laugh translated into prose, it seemed), “that he has
never been able to educate me to a proper appreciation of art. He'll pay
thousands of pounds for a child in rags or a badly dressed Madonna. Such
a waste of money, it appears to me.”

“But you would pay thousands for a diamond to hang upon your neck,”
 argued my father's voice.

“It would enhance the beauty of my neck,” replied the musical voice.

“An even more absolute waste of money,” was my father's answer, spoken
low. And I heard again the musical, soft laugh.

“Who is she?” I asked Barbara.

“The second Mrs. Teidelmann,” whispered Barbara. “She is quite a swell.
Married him for his money--I don't like her myself, but she's very
beautiful.”

“As beautiful as you?” I asked incredulously. We were sitting on the
stairs, sharing a jelly.

“Oh, me!” answered Barbara. “I'm only a child. Nobody takes any notice
of me--except other kids, like you.” For some reason she appeared out of
conceit with herself, which was not her usual state of mind.

“But everybody thinks you beautiful,” I maintained.

“Who?” she asked quickly.

“Dr. Hal,” I answered.

We were with our backs to the light, so that I could not see her face.

“What did he say?” she asked, and her voice had more of contentment in
it.

I could not remember his exact words, but about the sense of them I was
positive.

“Ask him what he thinks of me, as if you wanted to know yourself,”
 Barbara instructed me, “and don't forget what he says this time. I'm
curious.” And though it seemed to me a foolish command--for what could
he say of her more than I myself could tell her--I never questioned
Barbara's wishes.

Yet if I am right in thinking that jealousy of Mrs. Teidelmann may have
clouded for a moment Barbara's sunny nature, surely there was no reason
for this, seeing that no one attracted greater attention throughout the
dinner than the parlour-maid.

“Where ever did you get her from?” asked Mrs. Florret, Barbara having
just descended the kitchen stairs.

“A neat-handed Phillis,” commented Dr. Florret with approval.

“I'll take good care she never waits at my table,” laughed the wife
of our minister, the Rev. Cottle, a broad-built, breezy-voiced woman,
mother of eleven, eight of them boys.

“To tell the truth,” said my mother, “she's only here temporarily.”

“As a matter of fact,” said my father, “we have to thank Mrs. Hasluck
for her.”

“Don't leave me out of it,” laughed Hasluck; “can't let the old girl
take all the credit.”

Later my father absent-mindedly addressed her as “My dear,” at which
Mrs. Cottle shot a swift glance towards my mother; and before that
incident could have been forgotten, Hasluck, when no one was
looking, pinched her elbow, which would not have mattered had not the
unexpectedness of it drawn from her an involuntary “augh,” upon which,
for the reputation of the house, and the dinner being then towards
its end; my mother deemed it better to take the whole company into
her confidence. Naturally the story gained for Barbara still greater
admiration, so that when with the dessert, discarding the apron but
still wearing the dainty cap, which showed wisdom, she and the footman
took their places among the guests, she was even more than before the
centre of attention and remark.

“It was very nice of you,” said Mrs. Cottle, thus completing the circle
of compliments, “and, as I always tell my girls, that is better than
being beautiful.”

“Kind hearts,” added Dr. Florret, summing up the case, “are more than
coronets.” Dr. Florret had ever ready for the occasion the correct
quotation, but from him, somehow, it never irritated; rather it fell
upon the ear as a necessary rounding and completing of the theme; like
the Amen in church.

Only to my aunt would further observations have occurred.

“When I was a girl,” said my aunt, breaking suddenly upon the passing
silence, “I used to look into the glass and say to myself: 'Fanny,
you've got to be amiable,' and I was amiable,” added my aunt,
challenging contradiction with a look; “nobody can say that I wasn't,
for years.”

“It didn't pay?” suggested Hasluck.

“It attracted,” replied my aunt, “no attention whatever.”

Hasluck had changed places with my mother, and having after many
experiments learned the correct pitch for conversation with old
Teidelmann, talked with him as much aside as the circumstances of the
case would permit. Hasluck never wasted time on anything else than
business. It was in his opera box on the first night of Verdi's Aida (I
am speaking of course of days then to come) that he arranged the details
of his celebrated deal in guano; and even his very religion, so I have
been told and can believe, he varied to suit the enterprise of the
moment, once during the protracted preliminaries of a cocoa scheme
becoming converted to Quakerism.

But for the most of us interest lay in a discussion between Washburn and
Florret concerning the superior advantages attaching to residence in the
East End.

As a rule, incorrect opinion found itself unable to exist in Dr.
Florret's presence. As no bird, it is said, can continue its song once
looked at by an owl, so all originality grew silent under the cold stare
of his disapproving eye. But Dr. “Fighting Hal” was no gentle warbler
of thought. Vehement, direct, indifferent, he swept through all polite
argument as a strong wind through a murmuring wood, carrying his
partisans with him further than they meant to go, and quite unable to
turn back; leaving his opponents clinging desperately--upside down,
anyhow--to their perches, angry, their feathers much ruffled.

“Life!” flung out Washburn--Dr. Florret had just laid down unimpeachable
rules for the conduct of all mankind on all occasions--“what do you
respectable folk know of life? You are not men and women, you are
marionettes. You don't move to your natural emotions implanted by God;
you dance according to the latest book of etiquette. You live and love,
laugh and weep and sin by rule. Only one moment do you come face to face
with life; that is in the moment when you die, leaving the other puppets
to be dressed in black and make believe to cry.”

It was a favourite subject of denunciation with him, the artificiality
of us all.

“Little doll,” he had once called me, and I had resented the term.

“That's all you are, little Paul,” he had persisted, “a good little
hard-working doll, that does what it's made to do, and thinks what
it's made to think. We are all dolls. Your father is a gallant-hearted,
soft-headed little doll; your mother the sweetest and primmest of dolls.
And I'm a silly, dissatisfied doll that longs to be a man, but hasn't
the pluck. We are only dolls, little Paul.”

“He's a trifle--a trifle whimsical on some subjects,” explained my
father, on my repeating this conversation.

“There are a certain class of men,” explained my mother--“you will meet
with them more as you grow up--who talk for talking's sake. They don't
know what they mean. And nobody else does either.”

“But what would you have?” argued Dr. Florret, “that every man should do
that which is right in his own eyes?”

“Far better than, like the old man in the fable, he should do what every
other fool thinks right,” retorted Washburn. “The other day I called
to see whether a patient of mine was still alive or not. His wife was
washing clothes in the front room. 'How's your husband?' I asked. 'I
think he's dead,' replied the woman. Then, without leaving off her work,
'Jim,' she shouted, 'are you there?' No answer came from the inner room.
'He's a goner,' she said, wringing out a stocking.”

“But surely,” said Dr. Florret, “you don't admire a woman for being
indifferent to the death of her husband?”

“I don't admire her for that,” replied Washburn, “and I don't blame her.
I didn't make the world and I'm not responsible for it. What I do admire
her for is not pretending a grief she didn't feel. In Berkeley Square
she'd have met me at the door with an agonised face and a handkerchief
to her eyes.

“Assume a virtue, if you have it not,” murmured Dr. Florret.

“Go on,” said Washburn. “How does it run? 'That monster, custom, who all
sense doth eat, of devil's habit, is angel yet in this, that to the use
of actions fair and good he gives a frock that aptly is put on.' So was
the lion's skin by the ass, but it showed him only the more an ass. Here
asses go about as asses, but there are lions also. I had a woman under
my hands only a little while ago. I could have cured her easily. Why she
got worse every day instead of better I could not understand. Then by
accident learned the truth: instead of helping me she was doing all
she could to kill herself. 'I must, Doctor,' she cried. 'I must. I have
promised. If I get well he will only leave me, and if I die now he has
sworn to be good to the children.' Here, I tell you, they live--think
their thoughts, work their will, kill those they hate, die for those
they love; savages if you like, but savage men and women, not bloodless
dolls.”

“I prefer the dolls,” concluded Dr. Florret.

“I admit they are pretty,” answered Washburn.

“I remember,” said my father, “the first masked ball I ever went to when
I was a student in Paris. It struck me just as you say, Hal; everybody
was so exactly alike. I was glad to get out into the street and see
faces.”

“But I thought they always unmasked at midnight,” said the second Mrs.
Teidelmann in her soft, languid tones.

“I did not wait,” explained my father.

“That was a pity,” she replied. “I should have been interested to see
what they were like, underneath.”

“I might have been disappointed,” answered my father. “I agree with Dr.
Florret that sometimes the mask is an improvement.”

Barbara was right. She was a beautiful woman, with a face that would
have been singularly winning if one could have avoided the hard cold
eyes ever restless behind the half-closed lids.

Always she was very kind to me. Moreover, since the disappearance of
Cissy she was the first to bestow again upon me a good opinion of my
small self. My mother praised me when I was good, which to her was the
one thing needful; but few of us, I fear, child or grown-up, take much
pride in our solid virtues, finding them generally hindrances to our
desires: like the oyster's pearl, of more comfort to the world than to
ourselves. If others there were who admired me, very guardedly must they
have kept the secret I would so gladly have shared with them. But this
new friend of ours--or had I not better at once say enemy--made me feel
when in her presence a person of importance. How it was accomplished
I cannot explain. No word of flattery nor even of mere approval ever
passed her lips. Her charm to me was not that she admired me, but that
she led me by some mysterious process to admire myself.

And yet in spite of this and many lesser kindnesses she showed to me,
I never really liked her; but rather feared her, dreading always the
sudden raising of those ever half-closed eyelids.

She sat next to my father at the corner of the table, her chin resting
on her long white hands, her sweet lips parted, and as often as his
eyes were turned away from her, her soft low voice would draw them back
again. Once she laid her hand on his, laughing the while at some light
jest of his, and I saw that he flushed; and following his quick glance,
saw that my mother's eyes were watching also.

I have spoken of my father only as he then appeared to me, a child--an
older chum with many lines about his mobile mouth, the tumbled hair
edged round with grey; but looking back with older eyes, I see him a
slightly stooping, yet still tall and graceful man, with the face of a
poet--the face I mean a poet ought to possess but rarely does, nature
apparently abhorring the obvious--with the shy eyes of a boy, and a
voice tender as a woman's. Never the dingiest little drab that entered
the kitchen but adored him, speaking always of “the master” in tones of
fond proprietorship, for to the most slatternly his “orders” had ever
the air of requests for favours. Women, I so often read, can care for
only masterful men. But may there not be variety in women as in other
species? Or perhaps--if the suggestion be not over-daring--the many
writers, deeming themselves authorities upon this subject of woman, may
in this one particular have erred? I only know my father spoke to
few women whose eyes did not brighten. Yet hardly should I call him a
masterful man.

“I think it's all right,” whispered Hasluck to my father in the
passage--they were the last to go. “What does she think of it, eh?”

“I think she'll be with us,” answered my father.

“Nothing like food for bringing people together,” said Hasluck.
“Good-night.”

The door closed, but Something had crept into the house. It stood
between my father and mother. It followed them silently up the narrow
creaking stairs.




CHAPTER VII.

OF THE PASSING OF THE SHADOW.

Better is little, than treasure and trouble therewith. Better a dinner
of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith. None
but a great man would have dared to utter such a glaring commonplace as
that. Not only on Sundays now, but all the week, came the hot joint to
table, and on every day there was pudding, till a body grew indifferent
to pudding; thus a joy-giving luxury of life being lost and but another
item added to the long list of uninteresting needs. Now we could eat and
drink without stint. No need now to organise for the morrow's hash.
No need now to cut one's bread instead of breaking it, thinking of
Saturday's bread pudding. But there the saying fails, for never now were
we merry. A silent unseen guest sat with us at the board, so that no
longer we laughed and teased as over the half pound of sausages or the
two sweet-scented herrings; but talked constrainedly of empty things
that lay outside us.

Easy enough would it have been for us to move to Guilford Street.
Occasionally in the spiritless tones in which they now spoke on all
subjects save the one, my mother and father would discuss the project;
but always into the conversation would fall, sooner or later, some
loosened thought to stir it to anger, and so the aching months went by,
and the cloud grew.

Then one day the news came that old Teidelmann had died suddenly in his
counting house.

“You are going to her?” said my mother.

“I have been sent for,” said my father; “I must--it may mean business.”

My mother laughed bitterly; why, at the time, I could not understand;
and my father flung out of the house. During the many hours that he was
away my mother remained locked in her room, and, stealing sometimes to
the door, I was sure I heard her crying; and that she should grieve so
at old Teidelmann's death puzzled me.

She came oftener to our house after that. Her mourning added, I think,
to her beauty, softening--or seeming to soften--the hardness of her
eyes. Always she was very sweet to my mother, who by contrast beside her
appeared witless and ungracious; and to me, whatever her motive, she was
kindness itself; hardly ever arriving without some trifling gift or plan
for affording me some childish treat. By instinct she understood exactly
what I desired and liked, the books that would appeal to me as those my
mother gave me never did, the pleasures that did please me as opposed to
the pleasures that should have pleased me. Often my mother, talking
to me, would chill me with the vista of the life that lay before me:
a narrow, viewless way between twin endless walls of “Must” and “Must
not.” This soft-voiced lady set me dreaming of life as of sunny fields
through which one wandered laughing, along the winding path of Will; so
that, although as I have said, there lurked at the bottom of my thoughts
a fear of her; yet something within me I seemed unable to control went
out to her, drawn by her subtle sympathy and understanding of it.

“Has he ever seen a pantomime?” she asked of my father one morning,
looking at me the while with a whimsical screwing of her mouth.

My heart leaped within me. My father raised his eyebrows: “What would
your mother say, do you think?” he asked. My heart sank.

“She thinks,” I replied, “that theatres are very wicked places.” It
was the first time that any doubt as to the correctness of my mother's
judgments had ever crossed my mind.

Mrs. Teidelmann's smile strengthened my doubt. “Dear me,” she said, “I
am afraid I must be very wicked. I have always regarded a pantomime as
quite a moral entertainment. All the bad people go down so very straight
to--well, to the fit and proper place for them. And we could promise to
leave before the Clown stole the sausages, couldn't we, Paul?”

My mother was called and came; and I could not help thinking how
insignificant she looked with her pale face and plain dark frock,
standing stiffly beside this shining lady in her rustling clothes.

“You will let him come, Mrs. Kelver,” she pleaded in her soft caressing
tones; “it's Dick Whittington, you know--such an excellent moral.”

My mother had stood silent, clasping and unclasping her hands, a
childish trick she had when troubled; and her lips were trembling.
Important as the matter loomed before my own eyes, I wondered at her
agitation.

“I am very sorry,” said my mother, “it is very kind of you. But I would
rather he did not go.”

“Just this once,” persisted Mrs. Teidelmann. “It is holiday time.”

A ray of sunlight fell into the room, lighting upon her coaxing face,
making where my mother stood seem shadow.

“I would rather he did not go,” repeated my mother, and her voice
sounded harsh and grating. “When he is older others must judge for him,
but for the present he must be guided by me--alone.”

“I really don't think there could be any harm, Maggie,” urged my father.
“Things have changed since we were young.”

“That may be,” answered my mother, still in the same harsh voice; “it is
long ago since then.”

“I didn't intend it that way,” said my father with a short laugh.

“I merely meant that I may be wrong,” answered my mother. “I seem so old
among you all--so out of place. I have tried to change, but I cannot.”

“We will say no more about it,” said Mrs. Teidelmann, sweetly. “I merely
thought it would give him pleasure; and he has worked so hard this last
term, his father tells me.”

She laid her hand caressingly on my shoulder, drawing me a little closer
to her; and it remained there.

“It was very kind of you,” said my mother, “I would do anything to give
him pleasure, anything--I could. He knows that. He understands.”

My mother's hand, I knew, was seeking mine, but I was angry and would
not see; and without another word she left the room.

My mother did not allude again to the subject; but the very next
afternoon she took me herself to a hall in the neighbourhood, where we
saw a magic-lantern, followed by a conjurer. She had dressed herself in
a prettier frock than she had worn for many a long day, and was brighter
and gayer in herself than had lately been her wont, laughing and talking
merrily. But I, nursing my wrongs, remained moody and sulky. At any
other time such rare amusement would have overjoyed me; but the wonders
of the great theatre that from other boys I had heard so much of, that
from gaudy-coloured posters I had built up for myself, were floating
vague and undefined before me in the air; and neither the open-mouthed
sleeper, swallowing his endless chain of rats; nor even the live rabbit
found in the stout old gentleman's hat--the last sort of person in whose
hat one would have expected to find such a thing--could draw away my
mind from the joy I had caught a glimpse of only to lose.

So we walked home through the muddy, darkening streets, speaking but
little; and that night, waking--or rather half waking, as children do--I
thought I saw a figure in white crouching at the foot of my bed. I must
have gone to sleep again; and later, though I cannot say whether the
intervening time was short or long, I opened my eyes to see it still
there; and frightened, I cried out; and my mother rose from her knees.

She laughed, a curious broken laugh, in answer to my questions. “It was
a silly dream I had,” she explained “I must have been thinking of the
conjurer we saw. I dreamt that a wicked Magician had spirited you away
from me. I could not find you and was all alone in the world.”

She put her arms around me, so tight as almost to hurt me. And thus we
remained until again I must have fallen asleep.

It was towards the close of these same holidays that my mother and I
called upon Mrs. Teidelmann in her great stone-built house at Clapton.
She had sent a note round that morning, saying she was suffering from
terrible headaches that quite took her senses away, so that she was
unable to come out. She would be leaving England in a few days to
travel. Would my mother come and see her, she would like to say good-bye
to her before she went. My mother handed the letter across the table to
my father.

“Of course you will go,” said my father. “Poor girl, I wonder what the
cause can be. She used to be so free from everything of the kind.”

“Do you think it well for me to go?” said my mother. “What can she have
to say to me?”

“Oh, just to say good-bye,” answered my father. “It would look so
pointed not to go.”

It was a dull, sombre house without, but one entered through its
commonplace door as through the weed-grown rock into Aladdin's cave. Old
Teidelmann had been a great collector all his life, and his treasures,
now scattered through a dozen galleries, were then heaped there in
curious confusion. Pictures filled every inch of wall, stood propped
against the wonderful old furniture, were even stretched unframed across
the ceilings. Statues gleamed from every corner (a few of the statues
were, I remember, the only things out of the entire collection that Mrs.
Teidelmann kept for herself), carvings, embroideries, priceless china,
miniatures framed in gems, illuminated missals and gorgeously bound
books crowded the room. The ugly little thick-lipped man had surrounded
himself with the beauty of every age, brought from every land. He
himself must have been the only thing cheap and uninteresting to be
found within his own walls; and now he lay shrivelled up in his coffin,
under a monument by means of which an unknown cemetery became quite
famous.

Instructions had been given that my mother was to be shown up into Mrs.
Teidelmann's boudoir. She was lying on a sofa near the fire when we
entered, asleep, dressed in a loose lace robe that fell away, showing
her thin but snow-white arms, her rich dark hair falling loose about
her. In sleep she looked less beautiful: harder and with a suggestion of
coarseness about the face, of which at other times it showed no trace.
My mother said she would wait, perhaps Mrs. Teidelmann would awake; and
the servant, closing the door softly, left us alone with her.

An old French clock standing on the mantelpiece, a heart supported by
Cupids, ticked with a muffled, soothing sound. My mother, choosing a
chair by the window, sat with her eyes fixed on the sleeping woman's
face, and it seemed to me--though this may have been but my fancy born
of after-thought--that a faint smile relaxed for a moment the sleeping
woman's pained, pressed lips. Neither I nor my mother spoke, the only
sound in the room being the hushed ticking of the great gilt clock.
Until the other woman after a few slight movements of unrest began to
talk in her sleep.

Only confused murmurs escaped her at first, and then I heard her whis

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