The city of beautiful nonsense
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Title: The city of beautiful nonsense
Creator: E. Temple Thurston
Release date: January 1, 2013 [eBook #41752]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41752
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CITY OF BEAUTIFUL NONSENSE ***
Produced by Al Haines.
[Illustration: Cover]
THE CITY OF
BEAUTIFUL NONSENSE
BY
E. TEMPLE THURSTON
AUTHOR OF
"The Apple of Eden," "Mirage," etc.
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
1911
Copyright, 1900, by
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
_Published, September, 1909_
_Dedicated to_
ROSINA FILIPPI,
_to whom I am indebted for the gift of
laughter which I hope has crept its way
into the pages of this book._
LONDON, 18, 3, '09.
CONTENTS
BOOK I
THE ROAD TO THE CITY
CHAPTER
I. A Prelude on the Eve of St. Joseph's Day
II. The Last Candle
III. The Greengrocer's--Fetter Lane
IV. What to Call a Hero
V. The Ballad-Monger--Fetter Lane
VI. Of Kensington Gardens
VII. The Voyage of the Good Ship Albatross
VIII. The Fateful Ticket-Puncher
IX. The Art of Hieroglyphics
X. The Need for Intuition
XI. A Side-Light Upon Appearances
XII. The Chapel of Unredemption
XIII. The Inventory
XIV. The Way to Find Out
XV. What is Hidden by a Camisole
XVI. Easter Sunday
XVII. The Fly in the Amber
XVIII. The Nonsense-Maker
XIX. The Mr. Chesterton
XX. Why Jill Prayed To St. Joseph
XXI. The City Of Beautiful Nonsense
BOOK II
THE TUNNEL
XXII. The Heart of the Shadow
XXIII. Amber
BOOK III
THE CITY
XXIV. The Palazzo Capello
XXV. The Letter--Venice
XXVI. The Return--Venice
XXVII. The True Mother
XXVIII. The Treasure Shop
XXIX. The Candle for St. Anthony
XXX. The Qualities of Ignatia
XXXI. The Sacrifice
XXXII. The Departure--Venice
XXXIII. The 16th of February--London
XXXIV. The Dissoluble Bondage
XXXV. The Wonder of Belief
XXXVI. The Passing
XXXVII. The Circular Tour
XXXVIII. A Process of Honesty
XXXIX. The End of the Loom
BOOK I
THE ROAD TO THE CITY
The City of Beautiful Nonsense
CHAPTER I
A PRELUDE ON THE EVE OF ST. JOSEPH'S DAY
Of course, the eighteenth of March--but it is out of the question to say
upon which day of the week it fell.
It was half-past seven in the evening. At half-past seven it is dark,
the lamps are lighted, the houses huddle together in groups. They have
secrets to tell as soon as it is dark. Ah! If you knew the secrets
that houses are telling when the shadows draw them so close together!
But you never will know. They close their eyes and they whisper.
Around the fields of Lincoln's Inn it was as still as the grave. The
footsteps of a lawyer's clerk hurrying late away from chambers vibrated
through the intense quiet. You heard each step to the very last. So
long as you could see him, you heard them plainly; then he vanished
behind the curtain of shadows, the sounds became muffled, and at last
the silence crept back into the Fields--crept all round you, half eager,
half reluctant, like sleepy children drawn from their beds to hear the
end of a fairy story.
There was a fairy story to be told, too.
It began that night of the eighteenth of March--the Eve of St. Joseph's
day.
I don't know what it is about St. Joseph, but of all those saints who
crowd their hallowed names upon the calendar--and, good heavens! there
are so many--he seems most worthy of canonisation. In the fervent
fanaticism of faith, the virtue of a martyr's death is almost its own
reward; but to live on in the belief of that miracle which offers to
crush marital happiness, scattering family honour like dust before the
four winds of heaven--that surely was the noblest martyrdom of all.
There is probably enough faith left in some to-day to give up their
lives for their religion; but I know of no man who would allow his faith
to intercede for the honour of his wife's good name when once the hand
of circumstance had played so conjuring a trick upon him.
And so, amongst Roman Catholics, who, when it comes to matters of faith,
are like children at a fair, even the spirit of condolence seems to have
crept its way into their attitude towards this simple-minded man.
"Poor St. Joseph," they say--"I always get what I want from him. I've
never known him to fail."
Or--"Poor St. Joseph--he's not a bit of good to me. I always pray to
the Blessed Virgin for everything I want."
Could anything be more childlike, more ingenuous, more like a game in a
nursery--the only place in the world where things are really believed.
Every saint possesses his own separate quality, efficacious in its own
separate way. St. Rock holds the magic philtre of health; you pray to
St. Anthony to recover all those things that were lost--and how palpably
stand out the times when, rising from your knees, your search was
successful, how readily those times drop into oblivion when you failed.
It is impossible to enumerate all the saints and their qualities
crowding the pages of those many volumes of _Butler's Lives_. For
safety at sea, for instance, St. Gerald is unsurpassed; but St.
Joseph--poor St. Joseph!--from him flow all those good things which
money can buy--the children's toys, the woman's pin money and the
luxuries which are the necessities of the man.
Think, if you can--if you can conjure before your mind's eye--of all the
things that must happen on that eve of the feast day of St. Joseph. How
many thousands of knees are bent, how many thousand jaded bodies and
hungry souls whisper the name of poor St. Joseph? The prayers for that
glitter of gold, that shine of silver and that jangling of copper are
surely too numerous to count. What a busy day it must be where those
prayers are heard! What hopes must be born that night and what
responsibilities lightened! Try and count the candles that are lighted
before the shrine of St. Joseph! It is impossible.
It all resolves itself into a simple mathematical calculation. Tell me
how many poor there are--and I will tell you how many candles are burnt,
how many prayers are prayed, and how many hopes are born on the eve of
St. Joseph's day.
And how many poor are there in the world?
The bell was toning for eight o'clock Benediction at the Sardinia St.
Chapel on that evening of the eighteenth of March--Sardinia St. Chapel,
which stands so tremulously in the shadows of Lincoln's Inn
Fields--tremulously, because any day the decision of the council of a
few men may rase it ruthlessly to the ground.
Amongst all the figures kneeling there in the dim candle-light, their
shoulders hunched, their heads sinking deeply in their hands, there was
not one but on whose lips the name of poor St. Joseph lingered in
earnest or piteous appeal.
These were the poor of the earth, and who and what were they?
There was a stock-broker who paid a rent of some three hundred pounds a
year for his offices in the City, a rent of one hundred and fifty for
his chambers in Temple Gardens, and whose house in the country was kept
in all the splendour of wealth.
Behind him--he sat in a pew by himself--was a lady wearing a heavy fur
coat. She was young. Twenty-three at the utmost. There was nothing to
tell from her, but her bent head, that the need of money could ever
enter into her consideration. She also was in a pew alone. Behind her
sat three servant girls. On the other side of the aisle, parallel with
the lady in the fur coat, there was a young man--a writer--a
journalist--a driver of the pen, whose greatest source of poverty was
his ambition.
Kneeling behind him at various distances, there were a clerk, a bank
manager, a charwoman; and behind all these, at the end of the chapel,
devout, intent, and as earnest as the rest, were four Italian
organ-grinders.
These are the poor of the earth. They are not a class. They are every
class. Poverty is not a condition of some; it is a condition of all.
Those things we desire are so far removed from those which we obtain,
that all of us are paupers. And so, that simple arithmetical problem
must remain unsolved; for it is impossible to tell the poor of this
world and, therefore, just so impossible it is to count the candles that
are burnt, the prayers that are prayed or the hopes that are born on the
eve of St. Joseph's day.
CHAPTER II
THE LAST CANDLE
When the Benediction was over and the priest had passed in procession
with the acolytes into the mysterious shadows behind the altar, the
little congregation rose slowly to its feet.
One by one they approached the altar of St. Joseph. One by one their
pennies rattled into the brown wooden box as they took out their
candles, and soon the sconce before the painted image of that
simple-minded saint was ablaze with little points of light.
There is nature in everything; as much in lighting candles for poor St.
Joseph as you will find in the most momentous decision of a life-time.
The wealthy stock-broker, counting with care two pennies from amongst a
handful of silver, was servant to the impulses of his nature. It
crossed his mind that they must be only farthing candles--a penny,
therefore, was a very profitable return--the Church was too grasping.
He would buy no more than two. Why should the Church profit
seventy-five per cent. upon his faith? He gave generously to the
collection. It may be questioned, too, why St. Joseph should give him
what he had asked, a transaction which brought no apparent profit to St.
Joseph at all? He did not appreciate that side of it. He had prayed
that a speculation involving some thousands of pounds should prove
successful. If his prayer were granted, he would be the richer by
twenty per cent. upon his investment--but not seventy-five, oh, no--not
seventy-five! And so those two pennies assumed the proportions of an
exactment which he grudgingly bestowed. They rattled in his ear as they
fell.
After him followed the charwoman. Crossing herself, she bobbed before
the image. Her money was already in her hand. All through the service,
she had gripped it in a perspiring palm, fearing that it might be lost.
Three-penny-bits are mischievous little coins. She gave out a gentle
sigh of relief when at last she heard it tinkle in the box. It was safe
there. That was its destination. The three farthing candles became
hers. She lit them lovingly. Three children there were, waiting in
some tenement buildings for her return. As she put each candle in its
socket, she whispered each separate name--John--Mary--Michael. There
was not one for herself.
Then came the clerk. He lit four. They represented the sum of coppers
that he had. It might have bought a packet of cigarettes. He looked
pensively at the four candles he had lighted in the sconce, then turned,
fatalistically, on his heel. After all, what good could four farthing
candles do to poor St. Joseph? Perhaps he had been a fool--perhaps it
was a waste of money.
Following him was the bank manager. Six candles he took out of the
brown wooden box. Every year he lit six. He had never lit more; he had
never lit less. He lit them hurriedly, self-consciously, as though he
were ashamed of so many and, turning quickly away, did not notice that
the wick of one of them had burnt down and gone out.
The first servant girl who came after him, lifted it out of the socket
and lit it at another flame.
"I'm going to let that do for me," she whispered to the servant girl
behind her. "I lit it--it 'ud a' been like that to-morrow if I 'adn't
a' lit it."
Seeing her companion's expression of contempt, she giggled nervously.
She must have been glad to get away down into the shadows of the church.
There, she slipped into an empty pew and sank on to her knees.
"Please Gawd, forgive me," she whispered. "I know it was mean of me,"
and she tried to summon the courage to go back and light a new candle.
But the courage was not there. It requires more courage than you would
think.
At last all had gone but the lady in the heavy fur coat and the
writer--the journalist--the driver of the pen. There was a flood of
light from all the candles at the little altar, the church was empty,
everything was still; but there these two remained, kneeling silently in
their separate pews.
What need was there in the heart of her that kept her so patiently upon
her knees? Some pressing desire, you may be sure--some want that women
have and only women understand. And what was the need in him? Not
money! Nothing that St. Joseph could give. He had no money. One penny
was lying contentedly at the bottom of his pocket. That, at the moment,
was all he had in the world. It is mostly when you have many possessions
that you need the possession of more. To own one penny, knowing that
there is no immediate possibility of owning another, that is as near
contentment as one can well-nigh reach.
Then why did he wait on upon his knees? What was the need in the heart
of him? Nature again--human nature, too--simply the need to know the
need in her. That was all.
Ten minutes passed. He watched her through the interstices of his
fingers. But she did not move. At last, despairing of any further
discovery than that you may wear a fur coat costing thirty guineas and
still be poor, still pray to St. Joseph, he rose slowly to his feet.
Almost immediately afterwards, she followed him.
He walked directly to the altar and his penny had jangled in the box
before he became aware that there was only one candle left.
He looked back. The lady was waiting. The impulse came in a moment.
He stood aside and left the candle where it was. Then he slowly turned
away.
There are moments in life when playful Circumstance links hands with a
light-hearted Fate, and the two combined execute as dainty an impromptu
dance of events as would take the wit of a man some months of thought to
rehearse.
Here you have a man, a woman, and a candle destined for the altar of St.
Joseph, all flung together in an empty church by the playful hand of
Circumstance and out of so strange a medley comes a fairy story--the
story of the City of Beautiful Nonsense--a dream or a reality--they are
one and the same thing--a little piece of colour in the great patchwork
which views the souls still sleeping.
He knew, as he slowly turned away, that the matter did not end there.
You must not only be a student of human nature in order to drive a pen.
Circumstance must be anticipated as well. There may be nature in
everything, but it is the playful hand of Circumstance which brings it
to your eyes. So, he slowly turned away--oh, but very slowly--with just
so much show of action as was necessary to convey that he had no
intention to remain.
But every sense in him was ready for the moment when her voice arrested
him.
"You have not," said she, "taken the candle that you paid for." Her
voice was low to a whisper.
He came round on his heel at once.
"No--it's the last. I didn't notice that when I dropped my penny in."
"But you ought to take it."
"I left it for you."
"But why should you?"
"It seemed possible that you might want to light it more than I did."
What did he mean by that? That she was poor, poorer than he? That the
generosity of St. Joseph was of greater account to her? It was. It
must be surely. No one could need more sorely the assistance of the
powers of heaven than she did then.
But why should he know? Why should he think that? Had it been that
poor charwoman--oh, yes. But--she looked at his serviceable blue serge
suit, compared it instinctively with the luxury of her heavy fur
coat--why should he think that of her?
"I don't see why I should accept your generosity," she whispered.
He smiled.
"I offer it to St. Joseph," said he.
She took up the candle.
"I shouldn't be surprised if he found your offering the more acceptable
of the two."
He watched her light it; he watched her place it in an empty socket. He
noticed her hands--delicate--white--fingers that tapered to the dainty
finger nails. What could it have been that she had been praying for?
"Well--I don't suppose St. Joseph is very particular," he said with a
humorous twist of the lip.
"Don't you? Poor St. Joseph!"
She crossed herself and turned away from the altar.
"Now--I owe you a penny," she added.
She held out the coin, but he made no motion to take it.
"I'd rather not be robbed," said he, "of a fraction of my offer to St.
Joseph. Would you mind very much if you continued to owe?"
"As you wish." She withdrew her hand. "Then, thank you very much.
Good-night."
"Good-night."
He walked slowly after her down the church. It had been a delicate
stringing of moments on a slender thread of incident--that was all. It
had yielded nothing. She left him just as ignorant as before. He knew
no better why she had been praying so earnestly to poor St. Joseph.
But then, when you know what a woman prays for, you know the deepest
secret of her heart. And it is impossible to learn the deepest secret
of a woman's heart in ten minutes; though you may more likely arrive at
it then, than in a life-time.
CHAPTER III
THE GREENGROCER'S--FETTER LANE
Two or three years ago, there was a certain greengrocer's shop in Fetter
Lane. The front window had been removed, the better to expose the
display of fruits and vegetables which were arranged on gradually
ascending tiers, completely obstructing your vision into the shop
itself. Oranges, bananas, potatoes, apples, dates--all pressed together
in the condition in which they had arrived at the London docks, ballast
for the good ship that brought them--carrots and cauliflowers, all in
separate little compartments, were huddled together on the ascending
rows of shelves like colours that a painter leaves negligently upon his
palette.
At night, a double gas jet blew in the wind just outside, deepening the
contrasts, the oranges with the dull earth brown of the potatoes, the
bright yellow bananas with the sheen of blue on the green cabbages! Oh,
that sheen of blue on the green cabbages! It was all the more beautiful
for being an effect rather than a real colour. How an artist would have
loved it!
These greengrocers' shops and stalls are really most picturesque, so
much more savoury, too, than any other shop--except a chemist's. Of
course, there is nothing to equal that wholesome smell of brown Windsor
soap which pervades even the most cash of all cash chemist's! An
up-to-date fruiterer's in Piccadilly may have as fine an odour, perhaps;
but then an up-to-date fruiterer is not a greengrocer. He does not dream
of calling himself such. They are greengrocers in Fetter
Lane--greengrocers in the Edgware Road--greengrocers in old Drury, but
fruiterers in Piccadilly.
Compared, then, with the ham and beef shop, the fish-monger's, and the
inevitable oil shop, where, in such neighbourhoods as these, you buy
everything, this greengrocer's was a welcome oasis in a desert of
unsavoury smells and gloomy surroundings. The colours it displayed, the
brilliant flame of that pyramid of oranges, those rosy cheeks of the
apples, that glaring yellow cluster of bananas hanging from a hook in
the ceiling, and the soft green background of cabbages, cauliflowers and
every other green vegetable which chanced to be in season, with one last
touch of all, some beetroot, cut and bleeding, colour that an emperor
might wear, combined to make that little greengrocer's shop in Fetter
Lane the one saving clause in an otherwise dreary scheme. It cheered you
as you passed it by. You felt thankful for it. Those oranges looked
clean and wholesome. They shone in the light of that double gas jet.
They had every reason to shine. Mrs. Meakin rubbed them with her apron
every morning when she built up that perilous pyramid. She rubbed the
apples, too, until their faces glowed, glowed like children ready to
start for school. When you looked at them you thought of the country,
the orchards where they had been gathered, and Fetter Lane, with all its
hawkers' cries and screaming children, vanished from your senses. You
do not get that sort of an impression when you look in the window of a
ham and beef shop. A plate of sliced ham, on which two or three flies
crawl lazily, a pan of sausages, sizzling in their own fat, bear no
relation to anything higher than the unfastidious appetite of a hungry
man.
That sort of shop, you pass by quickly; but, even if you had not wished
to buy anything, you might have hesitated, then stopped before Mrs.
Meakin's little greengrocer's stall in Fetter Lane.
Mrs. Meakin was very fat. She had a face like an apple--not an apple
just picked, but one that has been lying on the straw in a loft through
the winter, well-preserved, losing none of its flavour, but the skin of
which is wrinkled and shrivelled with age. On a wooden chair without
any back to it, she sat in the shop all day long, inhaling that healthy,
cleanly smell of good mother earth which clung about the sacks of
potatoes. Here it was she waited for the advent of customers. Whenever
they appeared at the door, she paused for a moment, judging from their
attitude the likelihood of their custom, then, slapping both hands on
her knees, she would rise slowly to her feet.
She was a good woman of business, was Mrs. Meakin, with a capable way of
explaining how poor the season was for whatever fruit or vegetable her
customers wished to purchase. It must not be supposed that under this
pretence she demanded higher prices than were being asked elsewhere.
Oh--not at all! Honesty was written in her face. It was only that she
succeeded in persuading her customers that under the circumstances they
got their vegetables at a reasonable price and, going away quite
contented, they were willing to return again.
But what in the name, even of everything that is unreasonable have the
greengrocery business and the premises of Mrs. Meakin to do with the
City of Beautiful Nonsense? Is it part of the Nonsense to jump from a
trade in candles before the altar of St. Joseph to a trade in oranges in
Fetter Lane? Yet there is no nonsense in it. In this fairy story, the
two are intimately related.
This is how it happens. The house, in which Mrs. Meakin's shop was on
the ground floor, was three stories high and, on the first floor above
the shop itself, lived John Grey, the journalist, the writer, the driver
of the pen, the at-present unexplained figure in this story who offered
his gift of generosity to St. Joseph, in order that the other
as-yet-unexplained figure of the lady in the heavy fur coat should
gratify her desire to light the last candle and place it in the
sconce--a seal upon the deed of her supplication.
So then it is we have dealings with Mrs. Meakin and her greengrocery
business in Fetter Lane. This little shop, with such generous show of
brilliant colours in the midst of its drab grey surroundings, is part of
the atmosphere, all part of this fairy-tale romance which began on the
eighteenth of March--oh, how many years ago? Before Kingsway was built,
before Holywell Street bit the dust in which it had grovelled for so
long.
And so, I venture, that it is well you should see this small shop of
Mrs. Meakin's, with its splashes of orange and red, its daubs of crimson
and yellow--see it in your mind's eye--see it when the shadows of the
houses fall on it in the morning, when the sun touches it at
mid-day--when the double gas jet illuminates it at night, for you will
never see it in real life now. Mrs. Meakin gave up the business a year
or so ago. She went to live in the country, and there she has a kitchen
garden of her own; there she grows her own cabbages, her own potatoes
and her own beetroot. And her face is still like an apple--an older
apple to be sure--an apple that has lain in the straw in a large roomy
loft, lain there all through the winter and--been forgotten, left
behind.
CHAPTER IV
WHAT TO CALL A HERO
John Grey is scarcely the name for a hero; not the sort of name you
would choose of your own free will if the telling of a fairy story was
placed unreservedly in your hands. If every latitude were offered you,
quite possibly you would select the name of Raoul or Rudolfe--some name,
at least, that had a ring in it as it left the tongue. They say,
however, that by any other name a rose would smell as sweet. Oh--but I
cannot believe that is true--good heavens! think of the pleasure you
would lose if you had to call it a turnip!
And yet I lose no pleasure, no sense of mine is jarred when I call my
hero--John Grey. But if I do lose no pleasure, it is with a very good
reason. It is because I have no other alternative. John Grey was a real
person. He lived. He lived, too, over that identical little
greengrocer's shop of Mrs. Meakin's in Fetter Lane and, though there was
a private side entrance from the street, he often passed through the
shop in order to smell the wholesome smell of good mother earth, to look
at the rosy cheeks of the apples, to wish he was in the country, and to
say just a few words to the good lady of the shop.
To the rest of the inhabitants of the house, even to Mrs. Meakin
herself, he was a mystery. They never quite understood why he lived
there. The woman who looked after his rooms, waking him at nine o'clock
in the morning, making his cup of coffee, lingering with a duster in his
sitting-room until he was dressed, then lingering over the making of his
bed in the bedroom until it was eleven o'clock--the time of her
departure--even she was reticent about him.
There is a reticence amongst the lower classes which is a combination of
ignorance of facts and a supreme lack of imagination. This was the
reticence of Mrs. Rowse. She knew nothing; she could invent nothing; so
she said nothing. They plied her with questions in vain. He received a
lot of letters, she said, some with crests on the envelopes. She used to
look at these in wonder before she brought them into his bedroom. They
might have been coronets for the awe in which she held them; but in
themselves they explained nothing, merely added, in fact, to the mystery
which surrounded him. Who was he? What was he? He dressed well--not
always, but the clothes were there had he liked to wear them. Three
times a week, sometimes more, sometimes less, he donned evening dress,
stuck an opera hat on his head and Mrs. Meakin would see him pass down
the Lane in front of her shop. If she went to the door to watch him,
which quite frequently she did, it was ten chances to one that he would
stop a passing hansom, get into it, and drive away. The good lady would
watch it with her eyes as it wheeled round into Holborn, and then,
returning to her backless chair, exclaim:
"Well--my word--he's a puzzle, he is--there's no tellin' what he
mightn't be in disguise--" by which she conveyed to herself and anyone
who was there to listen, so wrapt, so entangled a sense of mystery as
would need the entire skill of Scotland Yard to unravel.
Then, finally, the rooms themselves, which he occupied--their
furnishing, their decoration--the last incomprehensible touch was added
with them. Mrs. Meakin, Mrs. Brown, the wife of the theatre cleaner on
the second floor, Mrs. Morrell, the wife of the plumber on the third
floor, they had all seen them, all marvelled at the rows of brass
candlesticks, the crucifixes and the brass incense burners, the real
pictures on the walls--pictures, mind you, that were painted, not
copied--the rows upon rows of books, the collection of old glass on the
mantle-piece, the collection of old china on the piano, the carpet--real
velvet pile--and the furniture all solid oak, with old brass fittings
which, so Mrs. Rowse told them, he insisted upon having kept as bright
as the brass candlesticks themselves. They had seen all this, and they
had wondered, wondered why a gentleman who could furnish rooms in such a
manner, who could put on evening dress at least three times a
week--evening dress, if you please, that was not hired, but his own--who
could as often drive away in a hansom, presumably up West, why he should
choose to live in such a place as Fetter Lane, over a greengrocer's
shop, in rooms the rent of which could not possibly be more than thirty
pounds a year.
To them, it remained a mystery; but surely to you who read this it is no
mystery at all.
John Grey was a writer, a journalist, a driver of the pen, a business
which brings with it more responsibilities than its remuneration can
reasonably afford. There is no real living to be made by literature
alone, if you have any ambitions and any respect for them. Most people
certainly have ambitions, but their respect for them is so
inconsiderable when compared with their desire of reward, that they only
keep them alive by talking of them. These are the people who know
thoroughly the meaning of that word Art, and can discuss it letter for
letter, beginning with the capital first.
But to have ambitions and to live up to them is only possible to the
extreme idealist--a man who, seeing God in everything, the world has not
yet learnt or perhaps forgotten to cater for.
So far everything is utilitarian--supplying the needs of the body which
can only see God in consecrated wine, and so it is that wise men build
churches for fools to pray in--the wise man in this world being he who
grows rich.
This, then, is the solution to the mystery of John Grey. He was an
idealist--the very type of person to live in a City of Beautiful
Nonsense, where the rarest things in the world cost nothing and the most
sordid necessities are dear. For example, the rent of number
thirty-nine was a gross exactment upon his purse. He could ill afford
that thirty pounds a year. He could ill afford the meals which
sometimes hunger compelled him to pay for. But when he bought a piece
of brass--the little brass man, for example, an old seal, that was of no
use to anybody in the world, and only stood passively inert upon his
mantel-piece--the price of it was as nothing when compared with the
cheap and vulgar necessities of existence.
But it must not be supposed that Fetter Lane and its environs constitute
the spires, the roofs and domes of that City of Beautiful Nonsense. It
is not so. Far away East, on the breast of the Adriatic, that wonderful
City lies. And we shall come to it--we shall come to it all too soon.
CHAPTER V
THE BALLAD-MONGER--FETTER LANE
In Kensington Gardens, you will find romance. Many a real, many a
legendary, person has found it there. It will always be found there so
long as this great City of London remains a hive for the millions of
human bees that pass in and out of its doors, swarming or working,
idling or pursuing in silent and unconscious obedience to a law which
not one of them will ever live to understand.
Why it should be Kensington Gardens, more than any other place of the
kind, is not quite possible of explanation. Why not Regent's Park, or
St. James's Park? Why not those little gardens on the Embankment where
the band plays in the late mornings of summer and romances certainly do
find a setting? Why not any of these? But no--Kensington Gardens rule
_par excellence_, and there is no spot in this vast acreage of humanity
to touch them.
You will see there the romances that begin from both ends of a
perambulator and, from that onwards, Romance in all its countless
periods, infinitely more numerous than the seven ages of man; for
Romance is more wonderful than just life. It has a thousand more
variations, it plays a thousand more tricks with the understanding.
Life is real, they tell us--Life is earnest; but Romance is all that is
unreal besides; it is everything that is and is not, everything that has
been and will be, and you will find some of the strangest examples of it
under the boughs of those huge elms, on those uncomfortable little penny
seats in Kensington Gardens.
When those rooms of his in Fetter Lane became unbearable, John Grey
would betake himself to the Gardens, sitting by the round Pond where the
great ships make their perilous voyages, or he would find a seat under
the trees near that little one-storyed house which always shows so brave
a blaze of colour in the flower beds that circle it round.
Who lives in that little house? Of course, everybody knows--well,
everybody? I confess, I do not. But the rest of the world does, and so
what is the good of letting one's imagination run a-riot when the first
policeman would cheerfully give one the information. But if your
imagination did run riot, think of the tales you could tell yourself
about the owner of that little house in Kensington Gardens! I have never
asked a policeman, so I am at liberty to do what I like. It is really
the best way in this world; so much more interesting than knowledge.
Knowledge, after all, is only knowing things, facts, which next year may
not be facts at all. Facts die. But when you imagine, you create
something which can live forever. The whole secret of the matter being
that its life depends on you, not on Circumstance.
One Friday, three weeks or more after the slender incident of the last
candle in the Sardinia St. chapel, those rooms in number 39 Fetter Lane
became unbearable. When they did that, they got very small; the walls
closed in together and there was no room to move. Even the sounds in
the street had no meaning. They became so loud and jarring that they
lost meaning altogether.
Moreover, on Friday, the clarionet player came. It was his day; nothing
could alter that. If the calendar had not been moved on for weeks
together--and some calendars do suffer in that way--John at least knew
the Friday of the week. It is an ill wind, you know--even when it is
that which is blown through the reed of a clarionet.
But on this particular morning, the clarionet player was insufferable.
There is a day in nearly every week on which the things which one has
grown accustomed to, the sounds that one listens to without hearing, the
sights that one looks at without seeing, become blatant and jarring. It
is then that we hear these sounds twice as loudly as we should, that we
see those things twice as vividly as they are. It is then that the word
"unbearable" comes charged with the fullest of its meaning. And just
such a day was this Friday in the middle of April--it does not matter
how many years ago.
John had been working. He was writing a short story--a very tricksy
thing to try and do. It was nearly finished, the room was getting
smaller and smaller; the sounds in the street were becoming more and
more insistent. A barrel organ had just moved away, leaving a rent of
silence in all the noise of traffic, a rent of silence which was almost
as unbearable as the confused clattering of sounds; and then the
clarionet player struck up his tune.
"Oh, Charlie, he's my darling, my darling, my darling--
Oh, Charlie, he's my darling, my young Chevalier."
This was one of the only four tunes he knew. You may readily guess the
rest. He always played them through, one after the other, in
never-varying order. Charlie, he's my darling--the Arethusa--Sally in
our Alley and Come Lasses and Lads. He was a ballad-monger. He looked
a ballad-monger--only he was a ballad-monger on the clarionet. John
Leech has drawn him over and over again in the long ago pages of Punch;
drawn him with his baggy trousers that crease where they were never
intended to, with his faded black frock coat that was never cut for the
shoulders it adorned, with every article of clothing, which the picture
told you he would wear to the end of his days, inherited from a generous
charity that had only disposed of its gifts in the last moments of
decay.
"Oh, Charlie, he's my darling, my darling, my darling--"
He brought such a minor tone into it all; it might have been a dirge.
It was as he sang it. For these ballad-mongers are sad creatures.
Theirs is a hard, a miserable life, and it all comes out in their music.
The unhappy individual with a musical instrument who stands on the
curbstone in the pouring rain can find some depressing note to dwell on
in the liveliest of tunes. Art is most times only the cry of the
individual.
When the clarionet player began, John shut up his book, rose from his
chair, and went to the window. The windows wanted cleaning. It only
costs a shilling for four windows--the difficulty is sometimes to find
the man to do it--more often the difficulty is to find the shilling.
There is generally a man at the first street corner, but never a coin of
the realm.
Someone threw a penny into the street from an upper window. The music
stopped with a jerk. The ballad-monger chased the rolling coin to the
very edge of a drain, then stood erect with a red and grateful face.
He licked his lips, put the penny in his pocket and began again. That
penny had insured another five minutes at least. The sun was burning
down into the street. John got his hat, picked up his book and went
downstairs. Kensington Gardens was the only place left in the world.
Outside, he passed the ballad-monger as he was shaking the moisture out
of his reed. No wonder it is a thirsty business, this playing on the
clarionet. John was not in the mood to appreciate that very necessary
clearing of the instrument. At that moment all ballad-mongers were
unnecessary, and their habits loathsome. He stopped.
"Do you know no other tunes," he asked, "than those four you play here
every Friday?"
"No, sir." His voice was very deferential and as sad as his music.
"Well--don't you imagine we must all be very tired of them?"
"I often think that, sir. I often think that. But you only hear them
every Friday."
"You mean you hear them every day of the week?"
"That is what I mean, sir."
There is always the other person's point of view. You learn that as you
go along, and, in the street, you will learn it as quickly as anywhere.
The man who runs into you on the pavement is going in his direction as
well as you in yours, and it is always a nice point to decide whether
you ran into him or he into you. In any case, you may be certain that
he has his opinion on it.
John smiled.
"And you're sick of them too, eh?"
The ballad-monger fitted his mouthpiece carefully on to the instrument
that played the golden tunes.
"Well, I've what you might call passed that stage, sir. They're in the
blood, as you might say, by this time. They're always going on. When
I'm asleep, I hear bands playing them in the street. If it isn't
'Arethusa,' it's 'Come Lasses and Lads,' or 'Sally in Our Alley.' They
keep going on--and sometimes it's shocking to hear the way they play
them. You almost might say that's how I earned the money that people
give me, sir--not by playing them on this instrument here--I don't mind
that so much. It's the playing them in my head--that's the job I ought
to get paid for."
John looked at him. The man had a point of view. He could see the
nicer side of a matter. There are not so very many people who can. The
predominant idea when he came into the street, of telling the man he was
a nuisance, vanished from John's mind. He felt in his pockets. There
lay one sixpence. He fingered it for a moment, then brought it out.
"Buy yourself a penny score of another tune," he said, "and let's hear
it next Friday. It may drive the others out."
The man took it, looked at him, but said no word of thanks. No words
are so obsequious. No words can so spoil a gift. John walked away with
a sense of respect.
At the top of the Lane he remembered that he had no penny to pay for his
chair in Kensington Gardens. What was to be done? He walked back
again. The ballad-monger was at the last bars of the "Arethusa."
He looked round when he had finished.
John stammered. It occurred to him that he was begging for the first
time in his life and realised what an onerous profession it must be.
"Would you mind sparing me a penny out of that sixpence?" he asked; and
to make it sound a little bit better, he added: "I've run rather short."
The man produced the sixpence immediately.
"You'd better take it all, sir," he said quickly. "You'll want it more
than I shall."
John shook his head.
"Give me the penny," said he, "that you caught at the edge of the
drain."
CHAPTER VI
OF KENSINGTON GARDENS
So strange a matter is this journey to the City of Beautiful Nonsense,
that one cannot be blamed if, at times, one takes the wrong turning,
finds oneself in the cul de sac of a digression and is compelled to
retrace one's steps. It was intended with the best of good faith that
the last chapter should be of Kensington Gardens. Quite honestly it
began with that purpose. In Kensington Gardens, you will find Romance.
What could be more open and above-board than that? Then up starts a
ballad-monger out of nowhere and he has to be reckoned with before
another step of the way can be taken.
But now we can proceed with our journey to that far city that lies so
slumberously on the breast of the Adriatic.
If you live in Fetter Lane, these are your instructions. Walk straight
up the Lane into Holborn; take your first turning on the left and
continue directly through Oxford Street and Bayswater, until you reach
Victoria Gate in the Park railings. This you enter. This is the very
portal of the way.
'Twas precisely this direction taken by John Grey on that Friday morning
in April, in such a year as history seems reticent to afford.
There is a means of travelling in London, you know, which is not exactly
in accordance with the strict principles of honesty, since it is worked
on the basis of false pretences; and if a hero of a modern day romance
should stoop to employ it as a means of helping him on his journey to
the City of Beautiful Nonsense, he must, on two grounds, be excused.
The first ground is, that he has but a penny in his pocket, which is
needed for the chair in Kensington Gardens; the second, that most human
of all excuses which allows that, when Circumstance drives, a man may
live by his wits, so long as he takes the risk of the whipping.
This, then, is the method, invented by John Grey in an inspired moment
of poverty. There may be hundreds of others catching inspiration from
the little street arabs, who have invented it too. Most probably there
are, and they may be the very first to exclaim against the flippant
treatment of so dishonest a practice. However that may be, out of his
own wits John Grey conceived this felonious means of inexpensive
travelling--absolutely the most inexpensive I ever knew.
You are going from Holborn to Victoria Gate in the Park railings--very
well. You must mount the first 'bus which you see going in the
direction you require; grasp the railings--and mount slowly to the top,
having first ascertained that the conductor himself is on the roof. By
the time you have reached the seat upstairs, if you have done it in a
masterly and approved-of fashion, the 'bus has travelled at least twenty
yards or so. Then, seeing the conductor, you ask him politely if his
'bus goes in a direction, which you are confident it does not. This,
for example, is the conversation that will take place.
"Do you go to Paddington Station?"
"No, sir, we don't; we go straight to Shepherd's Bush."
"But I thought these green 'busses went to Paddington?"
"There are green 'busses as does, but we don't."
"Oh, yes, I think I know now, haven't they a yellow stripe--you have a
red one."
"That's right."
You rise slowly, regretfully.
"Oh, then I'm sorry," and you begin slowly to descend the stairs.
"But we go by the Edgware Road, and you can get a 'bus to Paddington
there," says the conductor.
For a moment or two longer you stand on the steps and try
ineffectually--or effectually, it does not matter which, so long as you
take your time over it--to point out to him why you prefer the 'bus
which goes direct to its destination, rather than the one which does
not; then you descend with something like a hundred yards or so of your
journey accomplished. Repeat this _ad lib_ till the journey is fully
complete and you will find that you still possess your penny for the
chair in Kensington Gardens. The honesty which is amongst thieves
compels you--for the sake of the poor horses who have not done you
nearly so much harm as that conductor may have done--to mount and
descend the vehicle while in motion. This is the unwritten etiquette of
the practice. It also possesses that advantage of prohibiting all fat
people from its enjoyment, whose weight on the 'bus would perceptibly
increase the labour of the willing animals.
Beyond this, there is nothing to be said. The method must be left to
your own conscience, with this subtle criticism upon your choice, that
if you refuse to have anything to do with it, it will be because you
appreciate the delight of condemning those who have. So you stand to
gain anyhow by the possession of the secret. For myself, since John
Grey told me of it, I do both--strain a sheer delight in a condemnation
of those who use it, and use it myself on all those occasions when I
have but a penny in my pocket for the chair in Kensington Gardens. Of
course, you must pay for the chair.
By this method of progress, then, John Grey reached Kensington Gardens
on that Friday morning--that Friday morning in April which was to prove
so eventful in the making of this history.
The opening of the month had been too cold to admit of their beginning
the trade in tea under the fat mushroom umbrellas--that afternoon tea
which you and oh, I don't know how many sparrows and pigeons, all eat to
your heart's content for the modest sum of one shilling. But they might
have plied their trade that day with some success. There was a warm
breath of the Spring in every little puff of wind that danced down the
garden paths. The scarlet tulips nodded their heads to it, the
daffodils courteseyed, bowed and swayed, catching the infection of the
dancer's step. When Spring comes gladsomely to this country of ours,
there is no place in the world quite like it. Even Browning, in the
heart of the City of Beautiful Nonsense, must write:
"Oh to be in England,
Now that April's there."
From Fetter Lane to the flower-walk in Kensington Gardens, it is a far
cry. Ah, you do not know what continents might lie between that
wonderful flower-walk and Fetter Lane. Why, there are people in the
darksome little alleys which lie off that neighbourhood of Fleet Street,
who have never been further west than the Tottenham Court Road! Fetter
Lane, the Tottenham Court Road, and the flower-walk in Kensington
Gardens! It may be only three miles or so, but just as there is no such
thing as time in the ratio of Eternity, so there is no such thing as
distance in the ratio of Space. There is only contrast--and suffering.
They measure everything.
John made his way first to the flower-walk, just for the sight and the
scent of those wonderful growing things that bring their treasures of
inimitable colour up out of the secret breast of the dull brown earth.
Where, in that clod of earth, which does but soil the hands of him who
touches it, does the tulip get its red? Has the Persian Poet guessed
the secret? Is it the blood of a buried Caesar? Enhance it by calling
it a mystery--all the great things of the world are that. Wherever the
tulip does get its red, it is a brave thing to look at after the dull,
smoky bricks of the houses in Fetter Lane.
John stood at the top of the walk and filled his eyes with the varied
colours. There were tulips red, tulips yellow, tulips purple and
scarlet and mauve. The little hunchback was already there painting them,
hugging up close to his easel, taking much more into the heart of him
than he probably ever puts down upon his canvas.
He comes every season of every year, that little hunchback, and Spring
and Summer, and Autumn and Winter, he paints in Kensington Gardens; and
Spring and Summer, and Autumn and Winter, I have no doubt he will
continue to paint the Gardens that he loves. And then one day, the
Gardens will miss him. He will come no more. The dull brown earth will
have taken him as it takes the bulb of a tulip, and perhaps out of his
eyes--those eyes which have been drinking in the colours of the flowers
for so long, some tulip will one day get its red.
Surely there cannot be libel in such a statement as this? We must all
die. The little hunchback, if he reads this, will not approach me for
damages, unless he were of the order of Christian Scientists or some
such sect, who defy the ravages of Time. And how could he be that? He
must have seen the tulips wither.
From the flower-walk, John made his way to the round pond. The ships
were sailing. Sturdy mariners with long, thin, bamboo poles were
launching their craft in the teeth of the freshening breeze. Ah, those
brave ships, and those sturdy men with their young blue eyes, searching
across that vast expanse of water for the return of the _Daisy_ or the
_Kittywake_ or some such vessel with some such fanciful name!
John took a chair to watch them. A couple of hoary sailors--men who had
vast dealings with ships and traffic on deep waters--passed by him with
their vessels tucked up under their arms.
"I sail for 'Frisco in five minutes," said one--"for 'Frisco with a
cargo of iron."
"What do you use for iron?" asked the other, with the solemnity that
such cargo deserved.
"My sister gave me some of her hairpins," was the stern reply.
This, if you like it, is romance! Bound for 'Frisco with a cargo of
iron! Think of it! The risk, the peril, the enormous fortune at stake!
His sister's hairpins! What a world, what a City of Beautiful Nonsense,
if one could only believe like this!
John spread out his short story on his knee, looked at the first lines
of it, then closed it with disgust. What was the good of writing
stories, when such adventures as these were afoot? Perhaps the little
hunchback felt that too. What was the good of painting with red paint
on a smooth canvas when God had painted those tulips on the rough brown
earth? Why had not he got a sister who would hazard her hairpins in his
keeping, so that he might join in the stern business of life and carry
cargoes of iron to far-off parts?
He sat idly watching the good ship start for 'Frisco. One push of the
thin bamboo pole and it was off--out upon the tossing of the waves. A
breath of Spring air blew into its sails, filled them--with the scent of
the tulips, perhaps--and bore it off upon its voyage, while the anxious
master, with hands shading his eyes, watched it as it dipped over the
horizon of all possible interference.
Where was it going to come to shore? The voyage lasted fully five
minutes and, at the last moment, a trade wind seizing it--surely it must
be a trade wind which seizes a vessel with a cargo such as this--it was
born direct for the shore near where John was sitting.
The captain came hurrying along the beach to receive it and, from a seat
under the elm trees, a girl came toward him.
"Do you think it's brought them safely?" she asked.
He looked up with a touch of manly pride.
"The _Albatross_ has never heaved her cargo overboard yet," he said with
a ringing voice.
So this was the sister. From that wonderful head of hair of hers had
come the cargo of the good ship _Albatross_. She turned that head away
to hide a smile of amusement. She looked in John's direction. Their
eyes met.
It was the lady of the heavy fur coat who had prayed to St. Joseph in
the Sardinia Street chapel.
CHAPTER VII
THE VOYAGE OF THE GOOD SHIP ALBATROSS
This is where Destiny and the long arm of Coincidence play a part in the
making of all Romance. One quality surely there must be in such matters,
far more essential than that happiness ever after which the
sentimentalist so clamours for. That quality, it is, of Destiny, which
makes one know that, whatever renunciation and despair may follow, such
things were meant to be. Coincidence combines to make them so, and, you
may be sure, for a very good reason. And is it so long a stretch of the
arm from Sardinia Street Chapel to Kensington Gardens? Hardly! In
fiction, and along the high-road, perhaps it might be; but then this is
not fiction. This is true.
Romance then--let us get an entirely new definition for it--is a chain
of Circumstances which out of the infinite chaos links two living things
together for a definite end--that end which is a pendant upon the chain
itself and may be a heart with a lock of hair inside, or it may be a
cross, or a dagger, or a crown--you never know till the last link is
forged.
When he looked into the eyes of the lady of St. Joseph--so he had, since
that incident, called her in his mind--John knew that Destiny had a hand
in the matter.
He told me afterwards----
"You only meet the people in this world whom you are meant to meet.
Whether you want to meet them or not is another matter, and has no power
to bribe the hand of Circumstance."
He was generalising certainly, but that is the cloak under which a man
speaks of himself.
However that may be, and whether the law holds good or not, they met.
He saw the look of recognition that passed across her eyes; then he rose
to his feet.
The knowledge that you are in the hands of Destiny gives you boldness.
John marched directly across to her and lifted his hat.
"My name is Grey," he said--"John Grey. I'm taking it for granted that
St. Joseph has already introduced us and forgotten to tell you who I
was. If I take too much for granted, say so, I shall perfectly
understand."
Well, what could she say? You may tell a man that he's presumptuous;
but hardly when he presumes like this. Besides, there was Destiny at
the back of him, putting the words into his mouth.
She smiled. It was impossible to do otherwise.
"Do you think St. Joseph would be recognised in our society?" she asked.
"I have no doubt of it," said he. "St. Joseph was a very proper man."
They turned to a cry of the master mariner as the good ship _Albatross_
touched the beach. Immediately she was unloaded and her cargo brought
triumphantly to the owner.
"This," said John, "is the cargo of iron. Then I presume we're in
'Frisco.
"How did you know?" she asked.
"I heard the sailing orders given in the Docks at London ten minutes
ago."
She looked down, concealing a smile, at her brother, then at John,
lastly at the good ship _Albatross_--beached until further orders. He
watched her. She was making up her mind.
"Ronald," said she, when the wandering of her eyes had found decision,
"this is a friend of mine, Mr. Grey."
Ronald held out a horny hand.
"How do you do, sir."
Surely that settled matters? St. Joseph was approved of. She had
said--this is a friend of mine.
They shook hands then with a heavy grip. It is the recognised way with
those who go down to the sea in ships.
"When do you take your next voyage?" asked John.
"As soon as we can ship a cargo of gravel."
"And where are you bound for?"
"Port of Lagos--West Africa."
"Dangerous country, isn't it? Fever? White man's grave, and all that
sort of thing?"
"Those are the orders," said Ronald staunchly, looking up to his sister
for approval.
"I suppose you couldn't execute a secret commission for me," said John.
He laid a gentle stress on the word secret. "You couldn't carry private
papers and run a blockade?"
Private papers! Secret commission! Run a blockade! Why the good ship
_Albatross_ was just built for such nefarious trade as that.
John took the short story out of his pocket.
"Well, I want you to take this to the port of Venice," said he. "The
port of Venice on the Adriatic, and deliver it yourself into the hands
of one--Thomas Grey. There is a fortune to be made if you keep secret
and talk to no one of your business. Are you willing to undertake it and
share profits?"
"We'll do our best, sir," said Ronald.
Then the secret papers were taken aboard--off started the good ship
_Albatross_.
The other mariner came up just as she had set sail.
"What cargo have you got this time?" he whispered.
Ronald walked away.
"Mustn't tell," he replied sternly, and by such ready confession of
mystery laid himself open to all the perils of attack. That other
mariner must know he was bound on secret service, and perhaps by playing
the part of Thomas Grey on the other side of the round pond, would
probably be admitted into confidence. There is no knowing. You can
never be sure of what may happen in a world of romantic adventure.
John watched their departure lest his eagerness to talk to her alone
should seem too apparent. Then he turned, suggested a seat under the
elm trees and, in silence, they walked across the grass to the two
little penny chairs that stood expectantly together.
There they sat, still in silence, watching the people who were
promenading on the path that circles the round pond. Nurses and babies
and perambulators, there were countless of these, for in the gardens of
Kensington the babies grow like the tulips--rows upon rows of them, in
endless numbers. Like the tulips, too, the sun brings them out and
their gardeners take them and plant them under the trees. Every second
passer-by that sunny morning in April was a gardener with her tulip or
tulips, as the case might be; some red, some white, some just in bud,
some fully blown. Oh, it is a wonderful place for things to grow in, is
Kensington Gardens.
But there were other pedestrians than these. There were Darbys and
Joans, Edwards and Angelinas.
Then there passed by two solemn nuns in white, who had crosses hanging
from their waists and wore high-heeled shoes.
The lady of St. Joseph looked at John. John looked at her.
She lifted her eyebrows to a question.
"Protestant?" she said.
John nodded with a smile.
That broke the silence. Then they talked. They talked first of St.
Joseph.
"You always pray to St. Joseph?" said he.
"No--not always--only for certain things. I'm awfully fond of him, but
St. Cecilia's my saint. I don't like the look of St. Joseph, somehow or
other. Of course, I know he's awfully good, but I don't like his beard.
They always give him a brown beard, and I hate a man with a brown
beard."
"I saw St. Joseph once with a grey beard," said John.
"Grey? But he wasn't old."
"No, but this one I saw was grey. It was in Ardmore, a wee fishing
village in the county of Waterford, in Ireland. Ah, you should see
Ardmore. Heaven comes nearer to the sea there than any place I know."
"But what about St. Joseph?"
"Oh, St. Joseph! Well, there was a lady there intent upon the cause of
temperance. She built little temperance cafes all about the country,
and had the pictures of Cruikshank's story of the Bottle, framed and put
on all the walls. To propitiate the Fates for the cafe in Ardmore, she
decided also to set up the statue of St. Daeclan, their patron saint in
those parts. So she sent up to Mulcahy's, in Cork, for a statue of St.
Daeclan. Now St. Daeclan, you know, is scarcely in popular demand."
"I've never heard of him," said the lady of St. Joseph.
"Neither had I till I went to Ardmore. Well, anyhow, Mulcahy had not
got a statue. Should he send away and see if he could order one?
Certainly he should send away. A week later came the reply. There is
not a statue of St. Daeclan to be procured anywhere. Will an image of
St. Joseph do as well? It would have to do. Very well, it came--St.
Joseph with his brown beard.
"'If only we could have got St. Daeclan,' they said as they stood in
front of it. 'But he's too young for St. Daeclan. St. Daeclan was an
old man.'
"I suppose it did not occur to them that St. Daeclan may not have been
born old; but they conceived of a notion just as wise. They got a pot
of paint from Foley's, the provision store, and, with judicious
applications, they made grey the brown beard of St. Joseph, then,
washing out the gold letters of his name, they painted in place of them
the name of St. Daeclan."
The lady of St. Joseph smiled.
"Are you making this up?" asked she.
He shook his head.
"Well, then, the cafe was opened, and a little choir of birds from the
chapel began to sing, and all the people round about who had no
intention to be temperate, but loved a ceremony, came to see the
opening. They trouped into the little hall and stood with gaping mouths
looking at that false image which bore the superscription of St.
Daeclan, and the old women held up their hands and they said:
"Oh, shure, glory be to God! 'tis just loike the pore man--it is indeed.
Faith, I never want to see a better loikeness of himself than that."
John turned and looked at her.
"And there he stands to this day," he added--"as fine an example of good
faith and bad painting as I have ever seen in my life."
"What a delightful little story," she said, and she looked at him with
that expression in the eyes when admiration mingles so charmingly with
bewilderment that one is compelled to take them both as a compliment.
"Do you know you surprise me," she added.
"So I see," said he.
"You see?"
"In your eyes."
"You saw that?"
"Yes, you were wondering how I came to be praying--probably for
money--to St. Joseph--praying in an old blue serge suit that looked as
if a little money could easily be spent on it, and yet can afford to sit
out here in the morning in Kensington Gardens and tell you what you are
so good as to call a delightful little story?"
"That's quite true. I was wondering that."
"And I," said John, "have been wondering just the same about you."
What might not such a conversation as this have led to? They were just
beginning to tread upon that virgin soil from which any fruit may be
born. It is a wonderful moment that, the moment when two personalities
just touch. You can feel the contact tingling to the tips of your
fingers.
What might they not have talked of then? She might even have told him
why she was praying to St. Joseph, but then the master mariner returned,
bearing papers in his hand.
"Are you one Thomas Grey?" said he.
"I am that man," replied John.
"These are secret papers which I am to deliver into your hands. There
is a fortune to be made if you keep secret."
John took the short story.
"Secrecy shall be observed," said he.
CHAPTER VIII
THE FATEFUL TICKET-PUNCHER
The master of the good ship _Albatross_ departed, chartered for another
voyage to the Port of Lagos with his cargo of gravel, gathered with the
sweat of the brow and the tearing of the finger nails from the paths in
Kensington Gardens.
John hid the short story away and lit a cigarette. She watched him take
it loose from his waistcoat pocket. Had he no cigarette case? She
watched him take a match--loose also--from the ticket pocket of his
coat. Had he no match-box? She watched him strike it upon the sole of
his boot, believing all the time that he was unaware of the direction of
her eyes.
But he knew. He knew well enough, and took as long over the business as
it was possible to be. When the apprehension of discovery made her turn
her head, he threw the match away. Well, it was a waste of time then.
"I thought," said she presently, "you had told me your name was John?"
"So it is."
"Then why did you tell Ronald to deliver the papers to Thomas Grey?"
"That is my father."
"And does he live in Venice?"
What a wonderful thing is curiosity in other people, when you yourself
are only too ready to divulge! Loth only to tell her it all too
quickly, John readily answered all she asked.
"Yes, he lives in Venice," he replied.
"Always?"
"Always now."
She gazed into a distance of her own--that distance in which nearly
every woman lives.
"What a wonderful place it must be to live in," said she.
He turned his head to look at her.
"You've never been there?"
"Never."
"Ah! there's a day in your life yet then."
Her forehead wrinkled. Ah, it may not sound pretty, but it was. The
daintiest things in life are not to be written in a sentence. You get
them sometimes in a single word; but oh, that word is so hard to find.
"How do you mean?" she asked.
"The day you go to Venice--if ever you do go--will be one day quite by
itself in your life. You will be alive that day."
"You love it?"
She knew he did. That was the attraction in asking the question--to
hear him say so. There is that in the voice of one confessing to the
emotion--for whatever object it may happen to be--which can thrill the
ear of a sensitive listener. A sense of envy comes tingling with it.
It is the note in the voice, perhaps. You may hear it sometimes in the
throat of a singer--that note which means the passion, the love of
something, and something within you thrills in answer to it.
"You love it?" she repeated.
"I know it," replied John--"that's more than loving."
"What does your father do there?"
"He's an artist--but he does very little work now. He's too old. His
heart is weak, also."
"Then does he live there by himself?"
"Oh, no--my mother lives with him. They have wonderful old rooms in the
Palazzo Capello in the Rio Marin. She is old, too. Well--she's over
sixty. They didn't marry until she was forty. And he's about ten years
older than she is."
"Are you the only child?"
"The only child--yes."
"How is it that they didn't marry until your mother was forty?"
She pattered on with her questions. Having accepted him as a friend,
the next thing to do was to get to know all about him. It is just as
well, in case people should ask; but in this huddle of houses where one
knows more of the life of one's next-door neighbour than one ever does
of one's friends, it really scarcely matters. She thought she wanted to
know because she ought to know. But that was not it at all. She had to
know. She was meant to know. There is a difference.
"Perhaps I'm being too inquisitive?" she suggested gently. This is only
another way of getting one's question answered. You might call it the
question circumspect and, by borrowing from another's wit, mark the
distinction between it and the question direct. But it is not so much
the name that matters, as its effectiveness.
In a moment, John was all apologies for his silence.
"Inquisitive? No! It's only the new sensation."
"What new sensation?"
"Somebody wanting to know something about oneself. On the other side of
the street where I live, there resides a parrot; and every Sunday they
put him outside on the window-sill, and there he keeps calling out--'Do
you want to know who I am? Do you want to know who I am?' And crowds
of little boys and little girls, and idle men and lazy women, stand down
below his cage in the street and imitate him in order to get him to say
it again. 'Do you want to know who I am, Polly?' they call out. And
oh, my goodness, it's so like life. They never reply--'Who are you,
then?' But every single one of them must ask him if he wants to know
who they are, just when he's longing to tell them all about himself. It
is like life you know."
"What nice little stories you tell. I believe you make them up as you
go along--but they're quite nice. So that's the new sensation?"
"Yes--that's it. Someone, at last, has said 'Who are you, then?' And I
hardly know where to begin."
"Well, I asked you why your father didn't marry till your mother was
forty. You said she was forty."
"Yes, I know--yes, that's quite right. You see he was married before to
a wealthy woman. They lived here in London. I'm afraid they didn't get
on well together. It was his fault. He says so, and I believe it was.
I can quite understand the way it all happened. You must love money
very much to be able to get on with it when it's not your own. He
didn't love it enough. Her money got between them. One never really
knows the ins and outs of these things. Nobody can possibly explain
them. I say I understand it, but I don't. They happen when people
marry. Only, it would appear, when they marry. She never threw it in
his face, I'm sure of that. He always speaks of her as a wonderful
woman; but it was just there--that's all. Gold's a strange metal, you
know--an uncanny metal, I think. They talk of the ill-luck of the opal,
it's nothing to the ill-luck of the gold the opal is set in. You must
realise the absolute valuelessness of it, that it's no more worth than
tin, or iron, or lead, or any other metal that the stray thrust of a
spade may dig up; if you don't think of it like that, if you haven't an
utter contempt for it, it's a poison, is gold. It's subtle, deadly
poison that finds its heavy way into the most sacred heart of human
beings and rots the dearest and the gentlest thoughts they have. They
say familiarity breeds contempt. In every case but that of gold, it's
true. But in gold it's just the reverse. The only way with gold, to
have contempt for it, is to have none and, when it does enter your
possession, give it away. You keep it, you struggle for it, you give it
a moment's place on your altar, and you'll find that your first-born
must be the burnt offering you will have to make to assuage its
insatiable lust."
The sense of humour saved him from saying more. Suddenly he turned and
looked at her, and laughed. The only way with gold, to have contempt for
it, is to have none and, when it does enter your possession, give it
away.
Glorious words to say when you have only a penny in your pocket to pay
for your chair in Kensington Gardens--such a fine sense of bravado in
them. As for the chance of money falling from the heavens or the elm
trees into your lap, it is so remote, that you can afford to voice your
preachings without fear of having to put them into immediate practice.
Seeing all this and, seeing the solemn expression on her face, John
laughed. All that fine parade of words of his was very human. He knew
it. There is not one amongst us but who does it every day. There never
is so fine an army of brave men as you will find in times of peace;
never so lavish a man with money as he who has none. These are the real
humours, the real comedies in this struggle for existence. And yet, it
is the only philosophy for the poor man who has nothing, to say he wants
less. So you cheat the little gods of their laughter, and whistle a tune
to show how little you care.
But to see through it all--there are so many who do it
unconsciously--that is a quality beyond philosophy. John laughed.
She looked up quickly.
"You laugh? Why?"
"You look so serious."
"I was. It's so true--quite true, all you said. But what is one to do
when everybody around one sets their standard in gold--when people are
only good-spirited when there is money to be had, and cross and
inconsiderate when there is none? What is one to do then?"
"Must you follow their lead?" asked John.
"What else? The community governs, doesn't it?"
"So they say. But even government is a thing that must be taught, and
someone must teach it to the community, so that the community may become
proficient at its job. When you get into a community of people like
that, all you have to do is to break away. It doesn't matter how
universally good a wrong may be, you can't make it right for the
individual."
"What did your father do?"
"Oh--he disobeyed the laws of the community. He went away. He deserted
her."
She stole a hurried glance at his face.
"Don't you speak rather hardly?"
"No--conventionally--that's all. That is the technical term. He
deserted her. Went and lived in the slums and worked. He was probably
no paragon, either, until he met my mother. No man is until he meets
_the_ woman with the great heart and God's good gift of understanding."
"Have you ever met her yet?"
"No--I'm only twenty-six."
"Do you think you ever will meet her?"
"Yes--one day."
"When?"
"Oh, the time that Fate allots for these things."
"When is that?"
"When it's too late."
"Isn't that pessimistic?"
"No--I'm only speaking of Time. Time's nothing--Time doesn't count.
You may count it--you generally do with a mechanical contrivance called
a clock--but it doesn't count itself. As the community looks at these
things it may be too late, but it's not too late to make all the
difference in life. The point is meeting her, knowing her. Nothing else
really matters. Once you know her, she is as much in your life as ever
marriage and all such little conventional ceremonies as that can make
her."
She looked up at him again.
"What strange ideas you have."
"Are they?"
"They are to me. Then your father didn't meet your mother too late?
How soon did he meet her after--after he went away?"
"Two years or so."
"Oh--he was quite old, then?"
"No--quite young."
"But I thought you said they didn't marry until she was forty."
"Yes--that is so. He couldn't marry her till then. They were both
Catholics, you see. Eighteen years went by before they married."
She made patterns on a bare piece of ground with the ferrule of her
umbrella, as she listened. When he came to this point of the story, she
carved the figure one and eight in the mould.
"Yes," said John, looking at them--"it was a long time to wait--wasn't
it?"
She nodded her head and slowly scratched the figures out.
"So the secret papers were sent to your father?" she said.
"Yes."
She communed with herself for a few moments. She was very curious to
know the secret of those papers; just as curious as that other mariner
had been. But when you get beyond a certain age, they tell you it is
rude to be curious--more's the pity! It takes away half the pleasure
from life. She wanted so much to know. The mystery that surrounded
John Grey in Fetter Lane was clinging to him here in Kensington Gardens.
She felt just as curious about him as did Mrs. Meakin, and Mrs. Rowse;
and Mrs. Morrell, and, like them, she was afraid to show it to him.
Presently she left off scratching her patterns in the mould and raised
her head, looking out wistfully across the pond.
"Ronald was delighted to be carrying secret papers," she said pensively.
"Was he?"
"Yes--he's been reading Stevenson, and Henty, and all those books--the
idea of secret papers was just what he loved."
John's eyes twinkled.
"Do you think he told that other boy?" he asked.
"Oh--no--I'm sure he wouldn't."
"Not if he got the other boy to play the part of Thomas Grey--and
satisfied his conscience like that?"
"No--because he delivered them to you. I'm sure he never looked at
them. You're the only one who knows the secret."
John's eyes twinkled again. She was so curious to know.
"It's a terrible thing to be the only possessor of a secret like that,"
he said solemnly.
She glanced quickly at his face.
"It is, if it's something you mustn't tell," said she. And you could
hear the question in that; just the faint lingering note of it; but it
was there. Of course, if he could not tell, the sooner she knew it the
better. You can waste upon a person even so poor a sentiment as
curiosity, and when a woman gets proud, she will give you none of it.
If he had kept his secret another moment longer, she would undoubtedly
have got proud; but just then, there came into view the insignificant
little figure of a man in faded, dirty livery, a peaked cap, a
sleuth-like, watchful air and, hidden in the grasping of his hand, there
was a fateful ticket puncher. Two seats, and John had only a penny!
What can one do under such circumstances as these? He looked helplessly
through his mind for a way out of the dilemma. He even looked on the
ground to see whether some former charitable person had thrown away
their tickets when they left--he always did as much for the cause of
unknown humanity himself. You never know how many people there are in
London with only a penny in their pockets. But he looked in vain. There
were only the figures that she had carved and scratched out in the
mould.
He thought of saying that he had bought a ticket and lost it. One of
those little gusts of wind that were dancing under the elm trees would
readily vouch for the truth of his story in such a predicament as this.
But then this might be the only ticket puncher in the gardens at that
time of the year, and he would know. He thought of going through all
his pockets and simulating the despair of a man who has lost his last
piece of gold. And the slouching figure of the chair man drew nearer
and nearer. And oh, he came so cunningly, as if he had nothing whatever
to do with this crushing tax upon the impoverished resources of those
who seek Romance.
Yes, John rather liked that last idea. Anyone might lose their last
piece of gold. It is not even a paradox to say it would be the first
they would lose. But it would be acting the lie to her as well as to
the chairman. Was that fair? The chairman would only look
imperturbably at him with a stony eye--it was more than likely he would
have heard that story before, and a chair man will not be baulked of his
prey. Then she would have to pay. No--that would not be fair.
Then----
"I'm going to pay for my seat," said the Lady of St. Joseph.
"Oh, no!" said John vehemently--"Why should you?"
Couldn't he get up and say he was only sitting there by accident; had
never meant to sit down at all?
"Yes--I'm going to pay," she said--"I owe you a penny for the candle to
St. Joseph."
Ah! That was the way out of it! You see, if you only pray earnestly
enough, St. Joseph is bound to answer your prayer. This was his return
for John's offer of generosity. There is not a doubt of it in my mind.
There was not a doubt of it in his.
CHAPTER IX
THE ART OF HIEROGLYPHICS
The bell of the ticket-puncher rang, the tiny slips of paper were torn
off the roll and exchanged hands. For that day, at least--so long as
they chose to sit there--the little penny chairs belonged to them;
indisputably to them.
You feel you have bought something when you pay for it with your last
penny. John leant back with a breath of relief as the chair man walked
away. It had been a terrible moment. In this life, you never lose that
sense that it is only the one friend in the world who does not judge you
by the contents of your pocket; and when an acquaintance is but of a few
moment's standing--even if it be a Lady of St. Joseph--it is hazarding
everything to have to admit to the possession of only one penny.
Do you wonder his breath was of relief? Would you wonder if, wrapped up
in that breath, there had been a prayer of thanks to St. Joseph? Only a
little prayer, not even spoken in the breath, hardly expressed in the
thought that accompanied it--but still a prayer--as much a prayer in his
heart, as you might say there was a butterfly in the heart of a cocoon.
We know that there is only a chrysalis--sluggish, inert, incapable of
the light and dainty flight of a butterfly's wings--but still it will be
a butterfly one day. That was just about the relation of John's breath
to a prayer.
Under his eyes, he stole a look at her. She was not thinking of
pennies! Not she! Once you make a woman curious--pennies won't buy
back her peace of mind. She was beginning her tricks again with the
ferrule of her umbrella. Why is it that a woman can so much better
express herself with the toe of an elegant shoe or the point of a
fifteen and six-penny umbrella? Nothing less dainty than this will
serve her. Give her speech and she ties herself into a knot with it
like a ball of worsted and then complains that she is not understood.
But with the toe of an elegant shoe--mind you, if it is not elegant, you
must give her something else--she will explain a whole world of emotion.
She had begun scratching up the mould again. John watched the
unconscious expression of her mind with the point of that umbrella. One
figure after another she scratched and then crossed out. First it was a
ship, rigged as no ship has ever been rigged before or since. The
_Albatross_, of course. Then a dome, the dome of a building. He could
not follow that. He would have had to know that she had once had a
picture book in which was a picture of Santa Maria della
Salute--otherwise the meaning of that dome was impossible to follow. He
thought it was a beehive. Really, of course, you understood this from
the first yourself, it meant Venice. Then she began carving letters.
The first was G. The second was R. She thought she felt him looking,
glanced up quickly, but he was gazing far away across the round pond.
It is always as well not to look. Women are very shy when they are
expressing their emotions. It is always as well not to look; but you
will be thought a dullard if you do not see. John was gazing across the
pond. But nevertheless, she scratched those first two letters out. When
he saw that, he took pity.
"Shall I tell you what the secret papers are?" said he, with a smile.
Ah, the gratitude in her eyes.
"Do!" she replied.
"It's a short story."
"A short story! You write? Why didn't you tell me that before?"
"But it's only a short story," said John, "that no one'll ever read."
"Won't it be published?"
"No--never."
"Why?"
"Because people won't like it."
"How do you know?"
"I'm sure of it. I know what they like."
"Read it to me and I'll tell you if I like it."
Read it to her! Sit in Kensington Gardens and have his work listened to
by the Lady of St. Joseph! He took it out of his pocket without another
word and read it then and there.
This is it.
AN IDYLL OF SCIENCE
The world has grown some few of its grey hairs in search of the secret
of perpetual motion. How many, with their ingeniously contrived keys,
have not worn old and feeble in their efforts to open this Bluebeard's
chamber: until their curiosity sank exhausted within them? You count
them, from the dilettante Marquis of Worcester, playing with his
mechanical toy before a king and his court, Jackson, Orffyreus, Bishop
Wilkins, Addeley, with the rest of them, and, beyond arriving at the
decision of the French Academy--"that the only perpetual motion possible
... would be useless for the purpose of the devisers," you are drawn to
the conclusion that mankind shares curiosity with the beasts below him
and calls it science lest the world should laugh.
You have now in this idyll here offered you, the story of one who found
the secret, and showed it to me alone. Have patience to let your
imagination wander through Irish country lanes, strolling hither and
thither, drawn to no definite end, led by no ultimate hope, and the
history of the blind beggar, who discovered the secret of perpetual
motion, shall be disclosed for you; all the curiosity that ever thrilled
you shall be appeased, feasted, satiated.
There was not one in the country-side who knew his name. Name a man in
Ireland and you locate him; Murphy, and he comes from Cork--Power, and
he comes from Waterford. Why enumerate them all? But this blind beggar
had no name. There was no place that claimed him. With that tall silk
hat of his which some parish priest had yielded him, with his long black
coat which exposure to the sorrowful rains of a sad country had stained
a faded green; with his long, crooked stick that tapped its wearisome,
monotonous dirge and his colourless, red 'kerchief knotted round his
neck, he was a figure well-known in three or four counties.
No village owned him. At Clonmel, they denied him, at Dungarvan, they
disowned him; yet the whole country-side, at certain seasons of the
year, had heard that well-known tapping of the crooked stick, had seen
those sightless eyes blinking under the twisted rim of the old silk hat.
For a day or so in the place, he was a well-known figure; for a day or
so they slipped odd pennies into his sensitively opened palm, but the
next morning would find him missing. Where had he gone? Who had seen
him go? Not a soul! The rounded cobbles and the uneven pavements that
had resounded to the old crooked stick would be silent of that tapping
noise for another year, at least.
But had chance taken you out into the surrounding country, and had it
taken you in the right direction, you would have found him toiling along
by the hedges--oh, but so infinitely slowly!--his shoulders bent, and
his hand nodding like some mechanical toy that had escaped the clutches
of its inventor and was wandering aimlessly wherever its mechanism
directed.
How it came to be known that he sought the secret of perpetual motion,
is beyond me. It was one of those facts about him which seem as
inseparable from a man as the clothes that belie his trade. You saw him
coming up the road towards you and the words "perpetual motion" rushed,
whispering, to your mind. About the matter himself, he was sensitively
reticent; yet he must have told someone--someone must have told me. Who
was it? Some inhabitant of the village of Rathmore must have spread the
story. Whom could it have been? Foley, the carpenter? Burke, the
fisherman? Fitzgerald, the publican--Troy, the farmer? I can trace it
to none of these. I cannot remember who told me: and yet, when each
year he came round for the ceremonies of the Pattern day, when they
honoured the patron saint, I said as I saw him: "Here is the blind
beggar who tried to invent perpetual motion." The idea became
inseparable from the man.
With each succeeding year his movements became more feeble, his head
hung lower as he walked. You could see Death stalking behind him in his
footsteps, gaining on him, inch by inch, until the shadow of it fell
before him as he walked.
There were times when I had struggled to draw him into conversation;
moments when I had thought that I had won his confidence; but at the
critical juncture, those sightless eyes would search me through and
through and he would pass me by. There must have been a time when the
world had treated him ill. I fancy, in fact, that I have heard such
account of him; for he trusted no one. Year after year he came to
Rathmore for the festival of the Pattern and, year after year, I
remained in ignorance of his secret.
At last, when I saw the hand of Death stretched out almost to touch his
shoulder, I spoke--straight to the pith of the matter, lest another year
should bring him there no more.
He was walking down from the Holy Well where for the last hour, upon his
tremulous knees, he had been making his devotions to a saint whose
shrine his unseeing eyes had never beheld. This was the opportunity I
seized. For a length of many moments, when first I had seen his bent
and ill-fed figure, rocking to and fro with the steps he took, I had
made up my mind to it.
As he reached my side, I slipped a shilling into his half-concealed
palm. So do we assess our fellow-kind! The instinct is bestial, but
ingrained. Honour, virtue and the like--we only call them priceless to
ourselves; yet it takes a great deal to convince us that they are not
priceless to others. I priced my blind beggar at a shilling! I watched
his withered fingers close over it, rubbing against the minted edge that
he might know its worth!
"That has won him," I thought.
Ah! What a brutal conception of God's handicraft! A shilling to buy the
secret of perpetual motion! Surely I could not have thought that Nature
would have sold her mysteries for that! I did. There is the naked truth
of it.
"Who gives me this?" he asked, still fingering it as though it yet might
burn his hand.
"A friend," said I.
"God's blessing on ye," he answered and his fingers finally held it
tight. There he kept it, clutched within his hand. No pocket was safe
in the clothes he wore to store such fortune as that. "You're leaving
Rathmore after the Pattern, I suppose?" I began.
His head nodded as he tapped his stick.
"There's something I want to ask you before you go," I continued.
He stopped, I with him, watching the suspicions pass across his face.
"Someone has told me----" I sought desperately, clumsily, for my
satisfaction now. "Someone has told me that you have found the secret
of perpetual motion. Is that true?"
The milk-white, sightless eyes rushed querulously to mine. All the
expression of yearning to see seemed to lie hidden behind them. A flame
that was not a flame--the ghost of a flame burnt there, intense with
questioning. He could not see; I knew he could not see; yet those
vacant globes of matter were charged with unerring perception. In that
moment, his soul was looking into mine, searching it for integrity,
scouring the very corners of it for the true reason of my question.
I met his gaze. It seemed then to me, that if I failed and my eyes fell
before his, he would have weighed and found me wanting. It is one of
the few things in this world which I count to my credit, that those
empty sockets found me worthy of the trust.
"Who told ye that?" he asked.
I answered him truthfully that I did not know.
"But is it the case?" I added.
He shifted his position. I could see that he was listening.
"There is no one on the road," I said--"We are quite alone."
He coughed nervously.
"'Tis a matter of fifteen years since I first thought the thing out at
all. Shure, I dunno what made it come into me head; but 'twas the way I
used to be working in a forge before I lost the sight of my eyes. I
thought of it there, I suppose."
He stopped and I prompted him.
"What principle did you go on?" I asked--"Was it magnetism? How did you
set to work to avoid friction?"
This time, as he looked at me, his eyes were expressionless. I felt
that he was blind. He had not understood a word I had said.
"Are ye trying to get the secret out av me?" he asked at length.
"Shure, there's many have done that. They all try and get it out av me.
The blacksmith--him that was working at the forge where I was myself
before I lost the sight in me eyes--he wanted to make the machine for
me. But I'd known him before I was blind and I hadn't lost the
knowledge with me eyesight."
"Are you making it yourself, then?"
He nodded his head.
"As well as I can," he continued--"but, shure, what can these fingers do
with feeling alone--I must see what I'm doing. Faith, I've all the
pieces here now in me pocket, only for the putting of 'em together, and
glory be to God, I've tried and tried, but they won't go. Ye can't do
it with feelin' alone."
Some lump threatened to rise in my throat.
"Good God!" I thought--"this is tragedy----" And I looked in vain for
sight in his eyes.
"Would ye like to see the pieces?" he asked.
I assured him that the secret would be safe in my keeping were he so
generous.
"No one about?" he asked.
"Not a soul!"
Then, from his pocket--one by one--he took them out and laid them down
on a grass bank by our side. I watched each piece as he produced it
and, with the placing of them on the bank of grass, I watched his face.
These were the parts in the construction of his intricate mechanism that
he showed to me--a foot of rod iron, a small tin pot that once perhaps
had held its pound of coffee, a strip of hoop iron and an injured lock.
"There," he said proudly--"but if I were to give these to that
blacksmith, he'd steal the secret before my face. I wouldn't trust him
with 'em and I working these fifteen years."
I thanked God he could not see my face then. The foot of rod iron! The
small tin pot! The injured lock! They stared at me in derision. Only
they and I knew the secret--only they and I could tell it, as they
themselves had told it me. His wits were gone. Perpetual motion! The
wretched man was mad.
Perpetual motion out of these rusty old things--rusting for fifteen
years in the corners of his pockets! Perpetual motion!
But here the reality of it all broke upon me--burst out with its
thundering sense of truth. Mad the blind beggar might be; yet there,
before my very eyes, in those motionless objects, was the secret of
perpetual motion. Rust, decay, change--the obstinate metal of the iron
rod, the flimsy substance of the tin pot, always under the condition of
change; rusting in his pocket where they had lain for fifteen
years--never quiescent, never still, always moving--moving--moving--in
obedience to the inviolable law of change, as we all, in servile
obedience to that law as well, are moving continually, from childhood
into youth, youth to middle-age--middle-age to senility--then death, the
last change of all. All this giant structure of manhood, the very
essence of complicated intricacy compared to that piece of rod iron,
passing into the dust from which the thousands of years had contrived to
make it. What more could one want of perpetual motion than that?
I looked up into his face again.
"You've taught me a wonderful lesson," I said quietly.
"Ah," he replied--"it's all there--all there--the whole secret of it; if
only I had the eyes to put it together."
If he only had the eyes? Have _any_ of us the eyes? Have any of us the
eyes?
When he had finished, he folded it slowly and put it back in his pocket.
"Well----?" he said.
His heart was beating with anticipation, with apprehension, with
exaltation. With one beat he knew she must think it was good. It was
his best. He had just done it and, when you have just done it, you are
apt to think that. But with another beat, he felt she was going to say
the conventional thing--to call it charming--to say--"But how nice." It
would be far better if she said it was all wrong, that it struck a wrong
note, that its composition was ill. One can believe that about one's
work--but that it is charming, that it is nice--never!
For that moment Destiny swung in a balance, poised upon the agate of
chance. What was she going to say? It all depended upon that. But she
was so silent. She sat so still. Mice are still when you startle them;
then, when they collect their wits, they scamper away.
Suddenly she rose to her feet.
"Will you be here in the Gardens to-morrow morning at this time," she
said--"Then I'll tell you how very much I liked it."
CHAPTER X
THE NEED FOR INTUITION
In such a world as this, anything which is wholly sane is entirely
uninteresting. But--thank heaven for it!--madness is everywhere, in
every corner, at every turning. You will not even find complete sanity
in a Unitarian; in fact, some of the maddest people I have ever met have
been Unitarians. Yet theirs is an aggravating madness. You can have no
sympathy with a man who believes himself sane.
But anything more utterly irresponsible than this sudden, impulsive
departure of the Lady of St. Joseph can scarcely be imagined. John did
not even know her name and, what is more, did not even realise the fact
until she and Ronald had crossed the stretch of grass and reached the
Broad Walk. Then he ran after them.
Ronald turned first as he heard the hurrying footsteps. Anything
running will arrest the attention of a boy, while a woman hears, just as
quickly, but keeps her head rigid. Evidently, Ronald had told her. She
turned as well. John suddenly found himself face to face with her.
Then the impossible delicacy of the situation and his question came home
to him.
How, before Ronald, to whom he had just been introduced as a friend,
could he ask her name? Simplicity of mind is proverbial in those who
traffic in deep waters; but could the master of the good ship
_Albatross_ ever be so simple as not to find the suggestion of something
peculiar in such a question as this?
And so when he reached her side, he stood there despairingly dumb.
"You wanted to say something?" said she.
He looked helplessly at Ronald. Ronald looked helplessly at him. Then,
when he looked at her, he saw the helplessness in her eyes as well.
"What is it you want?" said her eyes--"I can't get rid of him. He's as
cunning as he can be."
And his eyes replied--"I want to know your name--I want to know who you
are." Which is a foolish thing to say with one's eyes, because no one
could possibly understand it. It might mean anything.
Then he launched a question at a venture. If she had any intuition, she
could guide it safe to port.
"I just wanted to ask," said John--"if you were any relation to
the--the----" At that moment the only name that entered his head was
Wrigglesworth, who kept a little eating-house in Fetter
Lane--"the--oh--what is their name!--the Merediths of Wrotham?"
He had just been reading "The Amazing Marriage." But where on earth was
Wrotham? Well, it must do.
She looked at him in amazement. She had not understood. Who could
blame her?
"The Merediths?" she repeated--"But why should you think----"
"Oh, yes--I know,"--he interposed quickly--"It's not the same
name--but--they--they have relations of your name--they told me
so--cousins or something like that, and I just wondered if--well, it
doesn't matter--you're not. Good-bye."
He lifted his hat and departed. For a moment there was a quite
unreasonable sense of disappointment in his mind. She was wanting in
intuition. She ought to have understood. Of course, in her bewilderment
at his question she had looked charming and that made up for a great
deal. How intensely charming she had looked! Her forehead when she
frowned--the eyes alight with questions. Anyhow, she had understood
that what he had really wanted to say could not be said before Ronald
and, into her confidence she had taken him--closing the door quite
softly behind them. Without question, without understanding, she had
done that. Perhaps it made up for everything.
Presently, he heard the hurrying of feet, and turned at once. How
wonderfully she ran--like a boy of twelve, with a clean stride and a
sure foot.
"I'm so sorry," she said in little breaths. "I didn't understand. The
Merediths and the Wrotham put me all out. It's Dealtry--Julie
Dealtry--they call me Jill. We live in Prince of Wales' Terrace." She
said the number. "Do they call you Jack? Good-bye--to-morrow." And
she was off.
CHAPTER XI
A SIDE-LIGHT UPON APPEARANCES
He watched the last sway of her skirt, the last toss of her head, as she
ran down the hill of the Broad Walk, then, repeating mechanically to
himself:
_Jack and Jill went up the hill_
_To fetch a pail of water,_
_Jack fell down and broke his crown_
_And Jill came tumbling after,_
and, wondering what it all meant, wondering if, after all, those nursery
rhymes were really charged with subtle meaning, he made his way to
Victoria Gate in the Park Railings.
In the high road, he saw a man he knew, a member of his club, top-hatted
and befrocked. The silk hat gleamed in the sunlight. It looked just
like a silk hat you would draw, catching the light in two brilliant
lines from crown to brim. The frock coat was caught with one button at
the waist. Immaculate is the word. John hesitated. They were friends,
casual friends, but he hesitated. There might be two opinions about the
soft felt hat he was wearing. He found it comfortable; but one gets
biased in one's opinions about one's hats. Even the fact that the
evening before he had driven with this friend in a hansom for which he
had paid as the friend had no money on him at the time--even this did
not give him courage. He decided to keep to his, the Park side of the
Bayswater Road.
But presently the friend saw him, lifted his stick, and shook it
amicably in greeting. He even crossed the road. Well, after all, he
could scarcely do anything else. John had paid for his hansom only the
evening before. He remembered vividly how, on the suggestion that they
should drive, his friend had dived his hand into his pocket, shaken his
bunch of keys and said, with obvious embarrassment, that he had run
rather short of change. It always is change that one runs short of.
Capital is never wanting. There is always a balance at the poor man's
bank, and the greater his pride the bigger the balance. But at that
moment, John had been rich in change--that is to say, he had half a
crown.
"Oh--I've got heaps," he had said. It is permissible to talk of heaps
when you have enough. And he had paid for the whole journey. It was
not to be wondered at then, that his friend came amicably across the
road.
John greeted him lightly.
"Going up to town?"
"Yes--are you?"
John nodded. "Are you lunching at the Club?"
"No--I've got to meet some people at the Carlton--How's the time--my
watch is being mended."
"I don't know," said John--"my watch is all smashed up. It's just on
one I should think."
"As much as that? I must be moving on. Shall we get on a 'bus?"
The very thing. John acquiesced readily. He had nothing; a careful
calculation of what he had spent that morning will account for that.
But his friend could pay. It was his turn.
They mounted the stairs and took a front seat behind the driver.
"You'll have to pay for me to-day," said John. "My pockets are empty
till I get a cheque changed."
The blood mounted to the face of his friend. For a moment he looked as
though his beautiful hat were too tight for his head. He felt in his
pocket. Then he produced a little stamp case, with gold mounted corners
and one penny stamp inside.
"I'm awfully sorry," said he--"I--I've only got a penny stamp." He rose
quickly to his feet.
John laughed--laughed loudly.
"What are you going to do?" said he.
"Well--get off," said his friend.
"Sit down," said John--"there's no hurry."
"Have you got twopence, then?"
"No--not a farthing. But we're getting into Town, aren't we? We've got
nothing to grumble at."
When the 'bus had travelled another hundred yards or so, John stood up.
"Now, you come downstairs," said he. The friend followed obediently.
The conductor was inside punching tickets. John looked in.
"Does this 'bus go to Paddington Station?" he asked inquiringly.
"No--Piccadilly Circus, Haymarket, and Strand."
"What a nuisance," said John--"Come on--we'd better get off."
They descended on to the road, and the friend, immaculate, top-hatted
and befrocked, took his arm.
"I see," he said, and he looked back to measure the distance with his
eye.
There are more people in London with only a penny in their pockets than
you would imagine.
CHAPTER XII
THE CHAPEL OF UNREDEMPTION
The next morning was one of promise. For half an hour before the time
appointed for his meeting, John was waiting, seated upon a penny chair,
thinking innumerable thoughts, smoking innumerable cigarettes.
Sometimes he felt the money that was in his pocket, running his finger
nail over the minted edge of the half crowns and florins to distinguish
them from the pennies. No woman, whatever franchise she may win, will
ever understand the delight of this. You must have a pocket in your
trousers and keep your money there--even gold when you possess it--to
appreciate the innocent joy of such an occupation as this. Men have
really a deal to be grateful for.
That morning, John had money. He even had gold. He had pawned his gold
watch-chain, intending, if the opportunity arose, to ask Jill to lunch.
The watch, as you know, was smashed up. That is a technical term in use
amongst all gentlemen and sensitive people, having this great advantage
that it may be taken literally or not, at will. No one who uses the
term has ever been so much in want of shame as to define it.
You may wonder why it is that the watch and not the chain should get
smashed up first. It is the watch that tells the time. But then, it is
the chain that tells you have got the watch that tells the time, and in
this life one has always to be considering that there would be no maiden
all forlorn if it were not for the house that Jack built. The chain
will always be the last to go, so long as those three brass balls
continue to hang over that suspicious-looking shop in the dingy side
street.
John's watch had been smashed up for some weeks; but little boys and
little girls in the street still flattered him by asking to be told the
time.
With one eye searching for a distant clock while your hand pulls out the
latch key which depends upon the chain, giving it the weight of a reason
to stay in the pocket, you can easily deceive the eyes of these
unsuspecting little people in the street. If you discover the distant
clock, all well and good. If not, then a hundred devices are left open
to you. You can guess--you can tell it by the sun, but, and if you are
conscientious, you can apologise and say your watch has stopped. And
last of all, if it is a nice little person with eyes in which a laugh is
always a-tip-toe, you may dangle the key in front of their face, and
with their merriment experience the clean pleasure of honesty.
A quality about John that was interesting, was his ability to anticipate
possibilities. Perhaps a man's mind runs instinctively to the future,
and it is the woman who lives in the past.
When Mrs. Rowse awakened him in the morning, he sat up in bed with the
glowing consciousness that something was to happen that day. Something
had been arranged; some appointment was to be kept; some new interest
had entered his life which was to take definite shape that very day.
He asked Mrs. Rowse the time--not as one who really wishes to know it,
but as it were a duty, which must sooner or later be accomplished.
Directly she said a quarter to nine, he remembered. Jill! The Lady of
St. Joseph! That morning she was going to tell him how much she liked
his story.
He sat up at once in bed.
"Mrs. Rowse! I shall want my coffee in half an hour. Less! Twenty
minutes!"
In twenty minutes, he was dressed. Allowance must be made if he chose a
sock that matched a tie or spent a moment of thought upon the selection
of a shirt to go with them. Vanity, it is, only to do these things for
your own approval; but when all consciously, you stand upon the very
threshold of romance, it may be excused you if you consider yourself in
the reflexion of the door. It is the man who, wandering aimlessly
through the streets in life, looks in at every mirror that he passes,
who is abominable. That is the vanity of which the prophet spoke. The
prophet, himself, would have been the first to set straight the tie, or
rearrange the 'kerchief of the lover who goes to meet his mistress.
Even John smiled at himself. The socks matched the tie so absolutely;
it was ludicrous how well they matched. There was no rough, blue serge
suit that day. Out of the depths of the wardrobe came a coat well
brushed and kept. Then he went in to breakfast.
During the meal, Mrs. Rowse lingered about in the sitting-room, dusting
things that might easily have escaped notice. John, reading his paper,
at last became aware of it with a rush of blood to his cheeks. She had
paid the day before for the washing--three and elevenpence.
If you go to a laundry in the environment of Fetter Lane, it is like
putting your clothes in pawn. You can't get them back again until the
bill is paid, and there are times when that is inconvenient.
That was why Mrs. Rowse was lingering. She had paid for the washing.
Whenever money was due to her, she lingered. It is a subtle method of
reproach, a gentle process of reminder which at first scarcely explains
itself.
On the first occasion when she had adopted it, John had thought she was
losing her memory, that her wits were gathering. Out of the corner of
his eye, he had nervously watched her going aimlessly about the room,
dusting the same object perhaps six separate times. When a woman is
paid seven shillings a week for keeping one's rooms tidy, such industry
as this might well be a sign of madness.
At length, unable to bear it any longer, John had said that he thought
she had done enough. Despairingly then, she had folded up the duster,
put it away, taken an unconscionable time in the pinning on of that
black, shabby hat, and finally, but only when at the door itself, she
had said:
"Do you think you could spare my wages to-day, sir?"
Now she was lingering again. But he had come to know the signs and
meanings of the process. This time, John knew it was the washing. He
watched her covertly from behind his paper, hoping against hope that she
might tire; for he had not got three and elevenpence, nor three
halfpence in the world. But a master in the art of lingering does not
know what it means to tire. Just when he thought she must have
finished, when she had done all the glass on the mantel-piece for the
second time, she went out of the room to the cupboard on the landing
where John kept his two-hundredweight of coal and returned with all the
rags and pots of paste necessary for the cleaning of the brass.
Here he gave in; the siege was over. Under cover of the newspaper, he
detached the latch key from his watch-chain, slipped it into his pocket
and rose, concealing the chain within his hand.
"I'm just going out," he said--"for a few moments. Can you wait till I
get back?"
She looked as though she could not, as if it were rather encroaching
upon the limit of her time to ask her to stay longer, but----
"I expect I can find one or two little things to do for a few moments,"
she said.
John left her doing them. They mainly consisted of putting the brass
polish and the rags back again in the cupboard from which she had taken
them.
It is here that you will see this quality interesting in John, this
ability to anticipate possibilities. It was not really the victory of
Mrs. Rowse that had impelled him to the sacrifice of his watch-chain.
It is not consistent with human nature for any man to pawn an article of
value--far less one which implies the possession of another--in order to
pay his washing bill. Washing, like the income tax, is one of those
indemnities in life which appear to have no justice in their existence.
It would always seem that your integrity were still preserved, that you
were still a man of honour if you could avoid paying them.
I know a man, who has eluded the income tax authorities for seven years,
and he is held in the highest esteem as a man of acumen, ability, and
the soul of honour. I admit that this opinion is only held of him by
those who are endeavouring to do the same as he. A man, for instance,
who belongs to the same club and pays his income tax to the last
shilling, thinks him to be a hopelessly immoral citizen and would
believe him capable of anything. But this is not fair. It would be far
more just to say that the man who pays his income tax to the uttermost
farthing is capable of nothing--invertebrate.
It was not, then, alone to pay his washing bill that John decided to
part with the gold watch-chain. He had, in a moment of inspiration,
conjured before him the possibility of asking Jill to lunch, and these
two motives, uniting from opposite quarters of the compass of suggestion
to one and the same end, he sacrificed the last pretentions he might
have claimed to the opulence conveyed by a gold watch-chain and repaired
to Payne and Welcome's.
With a bold and unconscious step, he strode into the little side
entrance, which is a feature of all these jeweller's shops displaying
the mystical sign of the three brass balls. Without the slightest sense
of shame, he pushed open one of the small doors that give admittance to
the little boxes--those little boxes where the confession of one's
poverty is made. And to no sympathetic ear of a gentle priest are those
terrible confessions to be whispered--the most terrible confession you
can make in this world. The man to whom you tell your story of shame is
greedy and willing to listen, eager and inexorable to make your penance
as heavy as he may. A bailiff is, perhaps, more stony of heart than a
pawnbroker; yet both are brothers in trade. The dearest things in the
life of anyone are their possessions, and both these tradesmen deal in
their heartless confiscation. The woman out at elbow, hollow-eyed, who
comes to pawn her wedding ring, the man--shabby--genteel--wearing, until
the nap is gone and the sleeves are frayed, the garment of his
self-respect, who comes to put away his best and Sunday coat; they are
all one to the pawnbroker. He beats them down to the last farthing,
well knowing that, having once determined to part with their
possessions, they will not willingly go away again without that for
which they came. He has them utterly at his mercy. They are all one to
him. The story in their faces is nothing to his eyes. He signs a
hundred death warrants in the tickets that he writes every day--death
warrants to possessions well-nigh as dear as life; but it means nothing
to him.
The awful thought about it all, is to consider the ease with which one
loses the sense of shame which, upon a first transaction of the kind, is
a hot wind blowing on the face, burning the cheeks to scarlet.
On the first occasion that John was driven to such dealing, he passed
that guilty side entrance many times before he finally summoned courage
to enter. Every time that he essayed the fatal step, the street became
full of people whom he knew. There was that editor who was considering
his last short story! He turned swiftly, his heel a sudden pivot, and
scrutinised the objects in the jeweller's window, then harried away up
the street, as though he were ashamed of wasting his time. A glance
over the shoulder, satisfied him that the editor was out of sight and
back he slowly came. This time he had got within a foot of the door--a
foot of it. One step more and he would have been in the sheltering
seclusion of that narrow little passage! There was the girl who sold
him stamps in the post-office--the girl who smiled at him and said she
had read a beautiful story of his in one of the magazines! He had
looked up quickly as though he had mistaken the number on the door, then
marched into the next shop on the left, as if that were the one he had
been looking for. When he had got in, he realised that it was a
butcher's.
The butcher, in a blithe voice, had said:
"And what this morning, sir?"
"I want--can you tell me the time?" said John.
In about half an hour there came a moment when the street was empty.
John had seized it and vanished up the little passage. But the ordeal
was not over then. He had had to face the high priest of poverty--to
tell to him the unforgivable, the mortal crime of penury. And there had
been someone in the next confessional--someone hardened in sin--who
could hear every single word that he said, and even so far over-stepped
the bounds of decency as to look round the corner of their partition.
"How much will you give me for this?" said John, laying his watch upon
the counter. It was the watch his mother had given him, the watch for
which she had lovingly stinted herself of ten pounds in order to mark,
with degree, his twenty-first birthday.
The high priest had picked it up superciliously.
"D'you want to sell it?"
"No--oh, no! Only--pawn it."
"Well, how much d'you want?"
"I'd rather you said," replied John meekly.
The high priest shrugged his shoulders. It was a wasting of his time,
he said, to go on with nonsense like that.
"How much do you want?" he repeated.
"Five pounds," said John, and suddenly, without knowing how, found the
watch back again in his possession. The high priest had turned to the
hardened sinner in the next confessional, and he was left there looking
at it blankly in the palm of his open hand. He scarcely knew how he had
come by it again. In the midst of the other transaction, the pawnbroker
presently addressed him over his shoulder--loudly, so that all in the
shop could hear:
"I'll give you two pounds," he had said--"And that's about as much as I
could sell it for myself."
Two pounds! It was an insult to that dear, little, old, white-haired
lady who had scraped and saved to buy him the best she knew.
"It cost ten pounds!" John said boldly.
"Ten pounds!" The laugh he gave was like the breaking of glass. "The
person who gave ten pounds for that must have wanted to get rid of money
in a hurry."
Wanted to get rid of money in a hurry! If he could have seen the number
of dainty shawls the thin white fingers had knitted and the trembling
hands had sold in order to amass the fortune of that ten pounds, he
would not have talked of hurry.
"I'll give you two pounds five," he had added. "Not a farthing more and
if you take it away somewhere else and then bring it back here again,
I'll only give you two pounds, what I said at first."
When the blood is mounting to your forehead, when it seems you are
crushed about by those watching your discomfort till the warmth of their
pressing, phantom bodies brings the perspiration out in beads upon your
face, you will take anything to get away.
The pawnbroker had made out the ticket as John mumbled his name and
address.
"Got a penny--a penny for the ticket?" said the man.
To be compelled to make this confession--the most unabsolvable of
all--that he had nothing in his pocket, was the crisis to his suffering.
The high priest sniffed, smiled and counted out two pounds four and
elevenpence. Then John had turned and fled.
Out in the street again, he had breathed once more. The air was purer
there. The passers-by, hearing the money jingle in his pocket, held him
in higher esteem than did those devotees in the chapel of unredemption.
He could even stop and look in the windows of the jeweller's shop--that
open, smiling face of a shop window which, beneath its smug and shiny
respectability, concealed all the secret, sordid crimes of poverty--the
polished pledges unredeemed, that lay deceptively upon the glass shelves
as though they had come just new from the maker's hands.
It was then, gazing in the window, on that memorable day when he had
made his first confession, that John had seen the little brass man. He
stood there on a glass shelf along with dozens of other unredeemed
trinkets, his low-crowned top-hat, his long-tailed, slim-waisted,
Georgian coat and many-buttoned vest, giving him an air of distinction
which none of the other objects around him possessed. His attitude, his
pose, was that of a _Chevalier d'honneur_--a chivalrous, courteous,
proud old gentleman. The one hand resting on the hip, was full of
dignity. The other stretched out as though to reach something, John came
later, on acquaintance, to learn the fuller significance of that. But
though all the features of his face were worn away by hands that had
held him, gripping him as they pressed him down, a seal upon the molten
wax, it had no power to lessen his undeniable dignity. For all his
shapelessness of eyes and nose and mouth, there was not an inch thereby
detracted from his stature. From the first moment that he had seen him,
the little brass man had taken his stand in John's mind as the figure of
all nobility, all honour, and all cleanliness and generosity of heart.
To see that little figure in brass was to covet him. John walked back
without hesitation into the shop; but this time it was through the
jeweller's entrance--this time it was with the confidence of one who
comes to buy, not to sell, with the self-righteousness of the virtue of
two pounds four and eleven-pence, not with the shame of the sin of
poverty.
Ah, they treat you differently on this side of the counter. If you were
ordering a High Mass to be sung, the priest of poverty could treat you
with no greater deference. They may have thought he was mad--most
probably they did. It is not characteristic of the man who comes
without a penny to pay for the ticket as he pawns his watch, to
immediately purchase, haphazard, a little trinket that is of no use to
anyone. The high priest of poverty, himself, will tell you that the sin
must weigh heavy with need upon the mind before the tongue can bring
itself to confess.
They had looked at him in no little surprise as he re-entered; but when
he had asked to be shown the little brass man, they cast glances from
one to another, as people do when they think they are in the presence of
a wandering mind.
"How much do you want for it?" John had asked.
"Seven and six. It's very good--an old seal, you know, quite an
antique."
John considered the one pound fifteen which he owed out of that two
pounds four and elevenpence.
"I'm afraid that's too much," said he.
"Ah--it's worth it. Why, that's over a hundred years old--quite
unique."
"I'm afraid it's too much," John repeated.
"Well--look here--I'll tell you what we'll do. You can have it for seven
shillings, and we'll give you six on it any day you like to bring it
back."
They could have offered no greater proof than that of the value in which
they held it. If a pawnbroker will buy back an article at almost the
same price that he sells it, he must indeed be letting you have it
cheap. This offering to take back the little brass man at only a
shilling less than he was asking for it, was the highest expression of
honesty with which he could defend his demands.
John accepted the conditions--paid out his seven shillings and bore the
little _Chevalier d'honneur_ in brass away.
It was three months later, he had only had breakfast for two
days--breakfast, which consisted of toast made from a loaf that was ten
days old, bloater paste which keeps for ever, and coffee which can--if
you know where to get it--be obtained on credit. It was winter-time and
the cold had made him hungry. Coals had run out. The last few
scrapings of dust had been gathered out of that cupboard on the landing.
Then depression set in. Depression is a heartless jade. She always pays
you a visit when both stomach and pocket are empty. Putting his face in
his hands, John had leant on the mantel-piece. There was nothing to
pawn just then. Everything had gone! Suddenly, he became aware that he
was gazing at the little brass man, and that the little brass man had
got one hand aristocratically upon his hip, whilst the other was holding
out something as though secretly to bestow it as a gift. John looked,
and looked again. Then he saw what it was. The little brass man was
offering him six shillings and a spasm of hunger creaking through
him--he had taken it.
CHAPTER XIII
THE INVENTORY
All this had happened more than a year ago, and the sense of shame,
accompanying that first confession, had been worn to the dull surface,
incapable of reflecting the finer feelings of the mind. Under the very
nose of that editor who was considering his last short story, John would
have stepped boldly into the suspicious-looking little passage;
returning the smile of the girl who sold him stamps in the post-office,
he would have entered shamelessly the chapel of unredemption. Such is
the reward of the perpetual sin of poverty. It brings with it the
soothing narcotic of callousness, of indifference--and that perhaps is
the saddest sin of all.
The watch-chain went that morning with the ease of a transaction
constantly performed. There was no need to haggle over the price this
time. The same price had been paid many times before. It came last but
one on the list of things to be pawned. Last of all was the little brass
man--the last to be pledged, the first to be redeemed. There is always
an order in these things and it never varies. When pledging, you go
from top to bottom of the list; when redeeming, it is just the reverse.
And the order itself depends entirely upon that degree of sentiment with
which each object is regarded.
The following was the list, in its correct order, of those things which
from time to time left the world of John's possession, and were hidden
in the seclusion of pledged retreat:--
FUR COAT.
CUFF LINKS.
CIGARETTE CASE.
TIE PIN.
MATCH BOX.
WATCH.
CHAIN.
LITTLE BRASS MAN.
Reverse the order of this and you arrive at the sequence in which they
returned. And here follows a detailed account of the history of each
object--detailed, where details are possible and of interest.
_Fur Coat_. This pretentious-looking article was bought by John as a
bargain. One day, when paying his rent to the landlord--a man who
smelted and refined the gold that has an acquaintance with false
teeth--he was asked if he would like to buy something very cheap.
Well--you know what a temptation that is. So great a temptation is it,
that you ask first "How much?" and only when you have heard the price,
do you inquire the nature of the article. Four pounds ten, he was told.
Then what was it? A fur-lined overcoat with astrachan collar and cuffs!
There must be a presumption on the part of the seller that you know
nothing of fur coats, or he will not talk to you like this. Certainly it
was cheap, but even then, it would not have been bought had John not
overheard the former possessor offering to buy it back at four pounds
five. Such a circumstance as this doubles the temptation. So seldom is
it that one comes across a bargain when one has any money in one's
pocket, that it is impossible, when one does, to let it go to another
man. John bought it. It would be a useful thing to visit editors in
when he had no money.
But you would scarcely credit the treachery of a fur-lined coat with
astrachan collar and cuffs. John had no idea of it. It played fiendish
tricks upon him. Just as he determined to mount upon a 'bus, it
whispered in his ear--"You can't do this--you really can't. If you want
to drive, you'd better get a hansom. If not, then you'd better walk."
It was of no avail that he complained of not being able to afford a
hansom and of being in too great a hurry to walk. That heavy astrachan
collar whispered again:
"You can't ride on a 'bus anyway--look at that man laughing at you
already----"
And with a fiendish joy, it gave him sudden and magical insight into the
jeering minds of all those people in the 'bus. He relinquished the 'bus
then. He called a hansom; he was in a hurry and he drove away, while the
astrachan collar preens itself with pride and delight as it looks in the
little oblong mirror.
And this is not the only treachery which the fur coat played upon him.
As he descended from the cab, a man rushed out of nowhere to protect
that coat from the wheels, and overcome with pleasure, the fur coat
whispered in his ear once more--"Give him twopence--you can't ignore
him."
"I could have kept my coat off the wheel quite easily myself," John
replied--"He was really only in the way."
"Never mind," exclaimed the astrachan collar--"If you're going to be
seen about with me, you'll have to give him twopence."
Reluctantly John took the twopence out.
And then, all the while that he was fumbling in his pocket for the
shilling which should have been more than his legal fare, seeing the
distance he had come, only that it cannot be less, the astrachan collar
was still at him.
"Can't you hear," it says suggestively--"can't you hear what the cabman
is going to say when you only give him a shilling!"
Then it imitated his voice, just in the very way John knew he would say
it, and he felt the blood tingling to the roots of his hair. Of course,
he gave him one and six, for by this time he was the slave of that
fur-lined coat. It dominated his life. It ran up bills in his name and
he had to pay them. For myself, I would sooner live with an extravagant
wife than with a fur-lined coat.
And so was it with John. That bargain he had purchased with the
astrachan collar and cuffs treated him shamefully. It was insatiable in
its demands, and all under false pretences; for there came one terrible
day when John, who knew nothing about these things, learnt that it was
only imitation astrachan. Then he asserted himself. He refused to take
it out, and one freezing day in the month of February pawned it for two
pounds five. Some three months later, on a blazing day in May, he
received a notice from the pawnbroker, who said that he must redeem it
immediately, for he could not hold himself responsible for the fur.
Now, even an extravagant wife would have more consideration for you,
more idea of the true fitness of things than that. Eventually that fur
coat was pawned in order to save a lady from the last, the most extreme
sentence that the law can pass upon the sin of poverty. There comes a
time when the sin of poverty can be dealt no longer with by the high
priest in the chapel of unredemption. Then it comes into the hands of
the law. To save her from this, was a debt of honour and perhaps the
most generous action that that fur coat ever did in its life, was to pay
that debt: for the three months went by, and on one of the coldest days
in winter, it passed silently and unwept into the possession of the high
priest.
_Cuff Links_. No history is attached to these. They realised ten
shillings many times, till the ticket was lost, and then, since, under
these circumstances, an affidavit must be made, and cuff links not being
worth the swearing about, they were lost sight of.
_The Watch_. For this is the next article on the inventory, of which
any substance can be written, and its history is practically known
already. John's mother had given it to him. It represented the many
times those two bright eyes were tired with counting the stitches of the
white lace shawls. It represented the thousands of times that those
slender, sensitive fingers had rested in weariness from their ceaseless
passing to and fro. It represented almost the last lace-work she had
done, before those fingers had at length been held motionless in the
cold grip of paralysis. But, above all, it stood for the love of that
gentle heart that beat with so much pride and so much pleasure, to see
the little boy, whose head her breast had fondled, come to the stern and
mighty age of twenty-one. And two pounds five was the value they put
upon it all.
_The Little Brass Man_,--the _Chevalier d'honneur_. His story has
already been told--his life, so far as it concerns this history. But of
what he had lived through in the hundred years that had gone
before--nobody knows. One can only assume, without fear of inaccuracy,
that it was the life of a gentleman.
CHAPTER XIV
THE WAY TO FIND OUT
These were the thoughts passing and re-passing idly through John's mind
as he sat, waiting, upon the stiff little iron chair in Kensington
Gardens, and felt the minted edge of the half-crowns and the florins
that lay so comfortably at the bottom of his pocket.
And then came Jill. She came alone.
He saw her in the distance, coming up that sudden rise of the Broad Walk
down which hoops roll so splendidly--become so realistically restive,
and prance and rear beneath the blow of the stick in the circus-master's
hand. And--she was walking alone.
Then, in a moment, the Gardens became empty. John was not conscious of
their becoming so. They were--just empty. Down a long road, tapering
to the infinite point of distance, on which her figure moved alone, she
might have been coming--slowly, gradually, to their ultimate meeting.
He felt no wonder, realised no surprise at their sudden solitude. When
in the midst of Romance, you are not conscious of the miracles it
performs. You do not marvel at the wonders of its magic carpets which,
in the whisk of a lamb's tail, transport you thousands of miles away;
you are not amazed at the wizardry of its coats of invisibility which
can hide you two from the whole world, or hide the whole world from you.
All these you take for granted; for Romance, when it does come to you,
comes, just plainly and without ceremony, in the everyday garments of
life and you never know the magician you have been entertaining until he
is gone.
Even John himself, whose business in life it was to see the romance in
the life of others, could not recognise it now in his own. There were
women he had met, there were women he had loved; but this was romance
and he never knew it.
With pulses that beat warmly in a strange, quick way, he rose from his
chair, thinking to go and meet her. But she might resent that. She
might have changed her mind. She might not be coming to meet him at
all. Perhaps, as she lay awake that morning--it was a presumption to
think she had lain awake at all--perhaps she had altered her opinion
about the propriety of an introduction afforded by St. Joseph. It were
better, he thought, to see her hand held out, before he took it.
So he sat back again in his chair and watched her as she stepped over
the railings--those little railings scarcely a foot high, over which, if
you know what it is to be six, you know the grand delight of leaping;
you know the thrill of pleasure when you look back, surveying the height
you have cleared.
She was coming in his direction. Her skirt was brushing the short grass
stems. Her head was down. She raised it and--she had seen him!
Those were the most poignant, the most conscious moments of all when,
after their eyes had met, there were still some forty yards or so to be
covered before they met. She smiled and looked up at the elm trees; he
smiled and looked down at the grass. They could not call out to each
other, saying--"How-do-you-do." Inexorably, without pity, Circumstance
decreed that they must cross those forty yards of silence before they
could speak. She felt the blood rising in a tide to her cheeks. He
became conscious that he had hands and feet; that his head was set upon
his shoulders and could not, without the accompaniment of his body, face
round the other way. The correct term for these excruciating tortures of
the mind--so I am assured--is platt. When there is such a distance
between yourself and the person whom you are approaching to meet, you
are known, if you have any sensitiveness at all, to have a platt.
Now, if ever people had a platt, it was these two. That distance was
measured in their mind, yard by yard.
At last he held her hand.
"I was," she began at once, "going to write. But I didn't know your
address."
"You were going to write----?"
He pulled forward a chair for her, near to his.
"Yes--I was going to write and tell you--I'm terribly sorry, but I can't
come this morning----" and she sat down.
A look of deepest disappointment was so plainly written in his face as
he seated himself beside her. He made no effort to render it illegible
to those eyes of hers.
"Why not?" said he, despondently. "Why can't you come?"
"Oh--you wouldn't understand if I told you."
This was the moment for the ferrule of an umbrella, or the point of an
elegant shoe. But she had not brought the umbrella, and her shoes,
well--she was unable to come that morning, so it had scarcely mattered
what she had put on. The toe of the shoe did peep out for a moment from
under the skirt, but not being approved of for elegance, it withdrew.
She was forced to fall back upon words; so she just repeated herself to
emphasise them.
"You wouldn't understand if I told you," she said again.
"Is it fair to say that," said John, "before you've found me wanting in
understanding?"
"No, but I know you wouldn't understand. Besides--it's about you."
"The reason why you can't come?"
"Yes."
"What is it?"
"I'll tell you another time, perhaps."
Ah, but that would never do. You can't tell people another time. They
don't want to hear it then.
"You can tell me now," persisted John.
She shook her head.
"There's only one time to tell things," he said.
"When?"
"Now."
She just began. Her lips parted. She took the breath for speech. The
words came into her eyes.
"No--I can't tell you--don't ask me."
But he asked. He kept on asking. Whenever there was a pause, he gently
asked again. He began putting the words into her mouth, and when he'd
half said it for her, he asked once more.
"Why do you keep on asking?" she said with a smile.
"Because I know," said John.
"You know?"
"Yes."
"Then why----"
"Because I want you to tell me, and because I only know a little. I
don't know it all. I don't know why your mother objects to me, except
that she doesn't approve of the introduction of St. Joseph. I don't know
whether she's said you're not to see me again."
That look of amazement in her eyes was a just and fair reward for his
simple hazard. Girls of twenty-one have mothers--more's the pity. He
had only guessed it. And a mother who has a daughter of twenty-one has
just reached that age when life lies in a groove and she would drag all
within it if she could. She is forty-eight, perhaps, and knowing her
husband as an obedient child knows its collect on a Sunday, she judges
all men by him. Now, all men, fortunately for them, fortunately for
everybody, are not husbands. Husbands are a type, a class by
themselves; no other man is quite like them. They have irritating ways,
and no wife should judge other men by their standards. When she would
quarrel, theirs is the patience of Job. When she would be amiable,
there is nothing to please them. They are seldom honest; they are
scarcely ever truthful. For marriage will often bring out of a man the
worst qualities that he has, as the washing-tub will sometimes only
intensify the strain upon the linen.
In the back of his mind, John felt the unseen judgment of some woman
upon him, and from this very standpoint. When he saw the look of
amazement in Jill's eyes, he knew he was right.
"Why do you look so surprised?" he said, smiling.
"Because--well--why did you ask if you knew?"
"Do you think I should ask if I didn't know?"
"Wouldn't you?"
"Oh, no. It's no good asking a woman questions when you don't know,
when you haven't the faintest idea of what her answer is going to be.
She knows very well just how ignorant you are and, by a subtle process
of the mind, she superimposes that ignorance upon herself. And if you
go on asking her direct questions, there comes a moment when she really
doesn't know either. Then she makes it up or tells you she has
forgotten. Isn't that true?"
She watched him all the time he spoke. He might have been talking
nonsense. He probably was; but there seemed to be some echo of the
truth of it far away in the hidden recesses of her mind. She seemed to
remember many times when just such a process had taken place within her.
But how had he known that, when she had never realised it before?
"What do you do, then, when you don't know, if you don't ask questions?"
He took a loose cigarette from his pocket and slowly lit it.
"Ah--then you have recourse to that wonderful method of finding out.
It's so difficult, so almost impossible, and that's why it's so
wonderful. To begin with, you pretend you don't want to know. That must
be the first step. All others--and there are hundreds--follow after
that; but you must pretend you don't want to know, or she'll never tell
you. But I am sure your mother's been saying something to you about me,
and I really want to know what it is. How did she come to hear about
me?"
He knew it would be easy for her to begin with that. No woman will tell
unless it is easy.
"Did you tell her?" he suggested gently, knowing that she did not.
"Oh, no--I didn't. It was Ronald."
"Ah--he said something?"
"Yes--at lunch--something about the papers."
"And you had to explain?"
"Yes."
"Was she vexed?"
"Yes--rather. Well--I suppose it did sound rather funny, you know."
"You told her about St. Joseph?"
"I said where I'd met you, in the Sardinia St. Chapel." She smiled up
at him incredulously. "You didn't think I'd tell her that St. Joseph
had introduced us, did you?"
"Why not? St. Joseph's a very proper man."
"Yes--on his altar, but not in Kensington."
"Well--what did she say?"
"She asked where you lived."
"Oh----"
It is impossible to make comparison between Fetter Lane and Prince of
Wales' Terrace without a face longer than is your wont--especially if it
is you who live in Fetter Lane.
"And you told her you didn't know."
"Of course."
She said it so expectantly, so hopefully that he would divulge the
terrible secret which meant so much to the continuation of their
acquaintance.
"And what did she say to that?"
"She said, of course, that it was impossible for me to know you until
you had come properly as a visitor to the house, and that she couldn't
ask you until she knew where you lived. And I suppose that's quite
right."
"I suppose it is," said John. "At any rate you agree with her?"
"I suppose so."
It meant she didn't. One never does the thing one supposes to be right;
there's no satisfaction in it.
"Well--the Martyrs' Club will always find me."
This was John's club; that club, to become a member of which, he had
been despoiled of the amount of a whole year's rent. He was still
staggering financially under the blow.
"Do you live there?" she asked.
"No--no one lives there. Members go to sleep there, but they never go
to bed. There are no beds."
"Then where do you live?"
He turned and looked full in her eyes. If she were to have sympathy, if
she were to have confidence and understanding, it must be now.
"I can't tell you where I live," said John.
The clock of St. Mary Abbot's chimed the hour of midday. He watched her
face to see if she heard.
One--two--three--four--five--six--seven--eight
nine--ten--eleven--twelve! She had not heard a single stroke of it, and
they had been sitting there for an hour.
CHAPTER XV
WHAT IS HIDDEN BY A CAMISOLE
Add but the flavour of secrecy to the making of Romance; allow that
every meeting be clandestine and every letter written sealed, and
matters will so thrive apace that, before you can, with the children in
the nursery, say Jack Robinson, the fire will be kindled and the flames
of it leaping through your every pulse.
When, with tacit consent, Jill asked no further questions as to where
John lived, and yet continued clandestinely to meet him, listening to
the work he read aloud to her, offering her opinion, giving her
approval, she was unconsciously, unwillingly, too, perhaps, had she
known, hastening towards the ultimate and the inevitable end.
It must not be supposed that after this second interview in Kensington
Gardens, when John had plainly said that he could not tell her where he
lived, she had wilfully disobeyed the unyielding commands of her mother
not to see him again. The fulfilment of destiny does not ask for
disobedience. With the shuttles of circumstance and coincidence to its
fingers, Destiny can weave a pattern in defiance of every law but that
of Nature.
Jill had said that morning:
"Then we mustn't meet again."
"You mean that?" said John.
"I can't help it," she replied distressfully. "After all, I'm living
with my people; I must respect their wishes to a certain degree. If you
would only tell me----"
"But I can't," John had interposed. "It's no good. It's much better
that I leave you in ignorance. Why won't the Martyrs' Club satisfy you?
There are men at the Martyrs' Club who live on Carlton House Terrace.
That is a part of their martyrdom. Is it beyond the stretch of your
imagination for you to suppose that I might have an abode
in--in--Bedford Park or Shepherd's Bush?"
She laughed, and then, as that stiff social figure of her mother rose
before her eyes and she recalled to her mind remarks about a dressmaker
who happened to live in Shepherd's Bush--"Poor thing--she lives at
Shepherd's Bush--Life treats some people in a shameful way--" an
expression of charity that went no further, for the dressmaker's work
was not considered good enough or cheap enough, and she was given
nothing more to do--when she remembered that, the laugh vanished from
her eyes.
"Isn't it as good as Shepherd's Bush?" she had asked quite simply.
Well, when, in your more opulent moments, you have thought of such a
thing as a better address at Shepherd's Bush, and have a question such
as this put to you, you have little desire left to reveal the locality
of the abode you do occupy. It takes the pride out of you. It silenced
John. He recalled to his mind a remark of Mrs. Meakin's when, having
invited him to take a rosy-cheeked apple from that little partition
where the rosy-cheeked apples lay, she had thought by this subtle bribe
to draw him into conversation about himself.
"Don't you find it very dull livin' 'ere all alone by yourself?" she had
asked.
"Wherever you live," said John evasively, "you're by yourself. You're
as much alone in a crowd as in an empty church."
She had nodded her head, picked up a large Spanish onion, and peeled off
the outer skin to make it look more fresh.
"But I should have thought," she had added pensively--"I should have
thought as 'ow you'd have found this such a very low-cality."
And so, perhaps it was--very low. And if Mrs. Meakin had thought so,
and Jill herself could talk thus deprecatingly of Shepherd's Bush, where
he had hoped to better his address, then it were as well to leave Fetter
Lane alone.
"So you have made up your mind," he had said quietly. "You've made up
your mind not to see me again?"
"It's not I who have made it up," she answered.
"But you're going to obey?"
"I must."
"You won't be here to-morrow morning, at this hour?"
"No--I can't--I mustn't."
"Not to tell me how you liked my short story?"
"You know I liked it--awfully."
"And you won't come and hear another that's better than that?"
"How can I? You don't understand. If you came and lived at Prince of
Wales' Terrace, you'd understand then."
"Then it's no good my coming to-morrow?"
"Not if you want to see me."
"Then good-bye."
John stood up and held out his hand.
If you know the full value of coercion in renunciation; if you realise
the full power of persuasion in the saying of good-bye, you have command
of that weapon which is the surest and the most subtle in all the
armament of Destiny. It is only when they have said good-bye that two
people really come together.
"But why must you go now?" Jill had said regretfully.
John smiled.
"Well--first, because you said you couldn't come this morning, and we've
been here for an hour and a half; and secondly, because if, as you say,
we are to see no more of each other, then hadn't I better go now? I
think it's better. Good-bye."
He held out his hand again. She took it reluctantly, and he was gone.
The next morning, Jill had wakened an hour earlier--an hour earlier than
was her wont--an hour earlier, with the weight of a sense of loss
pressing on her mind. It is that hour in bed before rising that a woman
thinks all the truest things in her day; is most honest with herself,
and least subtle in the expression of her thoughts. Then she gets
up--bathes--does her hair and, by the time a dainty camisole is
concealing those garments that prove her to be a true woman--all honesty
is gone; she assumes the mystery of her sex.
In that hour earlier before her rising, Jill honestly admitted her
disgust with life. Romance is well-nigh everything to a woman--for
Romance is the Prelude, full of the most sonorous of chords, breathing
with the most wonderful of cadences--a Prelude to the great Duty which
she must inevitably perform. And this had been Romance. She had just
touched it, just set in motion the unseen fingers that play with such
divine inspiration upon the whole gamut of the strings, and now, it had
been put away.
Mind you, she knew nothing of the evolution of the Prelude; she knew
little of the history of the Duty to perform. It was not the conscious
loss of these that brought the disgust of life into the complaining
heart of her; for Romance, when first it comes to a woman, is like the
peak of a mountain whose head is lifted above the clouds. It has
nothing of this earth; means no such mundane phrase as--falling in love.
To the girl of twenty-one, Romance is the spirit of things beautiful,
and, therefore, the spirit of all things good. And Jill had lost it.
They were not to meet again. She was never to hear another of his
stories. He was not coming to Kensington Gardens any more.
But suppose he did come! Suppose there were the sense of regret in the
heart of him, as it was with her, and suppose he came to see the place
where they had sat together! If she could only know that he cared
enough to do that! It would make the renunciation more bearable if she
could only know that. How could she find out? Send Ronald to the
Gardens at about that hour? He would say if he had seen him. But if
Ronald went to the Gardens, he would be voyaging on the good ship
_Albatross_, far away out at sea, out of sight of land, in the dim
distance of make-belief. But if she went herself--just casually--just
for a walk--just to see, only to see. And, if he were there, she could
easily escape; she could easily creep away unnoticed. Well--not quite
unnoticed, perhaps. He might see her in the distance, just before she
passed out of sight.
She got up quickly from her bed. She bathed; she did her hair; she
dressed; she put on that dainty camisole with its pale blue ribbon
twined through intricate meshes and concealed those little garments
which proved her to be a true woman--concealed them with the camisole
and the mystery of her sex.
At breakfast, she talked of having her hair washed that morning. There
was no gloss in it, she said. Ronald cast a glance at it, sniffed and
then went on with his hasty mouthfuls of porridge. What fools were
girls! As if it mattered! As if anyone noticed whether there were
gloss or not! The good ship _Albatross_ wanted a new spinnaker, and from
whose under-linen that was to be stolen without detection was a far more
delicate matter. He had petitioned for white linen shirts for himself
for the last six months--white linen shirts are always valuable to a
sailor--but he had not got them as yet. This deprivation naturally led
to nefarious dealings with the tails of his father's old white shirts.
It was impossible to use his own. You cannot have flannel sails to your
ship, if she sails on the Round Pond. On the other waters--the
Atlantic, for example--it doesn't matter so much. There were one or two
things he had begun to fancy he would never be able to get.
Quite simply, quite pensively, he had said one day at dinner:
"I wonder if I shall ever eat the wing of a chicken."
They permitted him to wonder--he and his drumstick. One cannot be
surprised, then, that he sniggered when Jill talked about the gloss of
her hair.
"Well, don't go to this place in the High Street," said her mother.
"They're terribly exorbitant."
"I shall go up to town," said Jill. And, up to town she started.
There are various ways of going up to town. She chose to cross the Broad
Walk with the intention of going by Bayswater. She even made a detour
of the Round Pond. It was nicer to walk on the grass--more comfortable
under foot. It was not even an uncomfortable sensation to feel her
heart beating as a lark's wings beat the air when it soars.
Then the rushing of the wings subsided. He was not there. From that
mighty altitude to which it had risen, her heart began to
descend--slowly, slowly, slowly to earth. He was not there!
But oh! you would never know, until you yourself had played there, the
games of hide-and-seek that the big elms afford in Kensington Gardens.
On the far side of a huge tree-trunk, she came suddenly upon him, and
the slowly fluttering wings of her heart were struck to stillness.
There he was, seated upon his chair with a smile upon his lips, in his
eyes--spreading and spreading till it soon must be a laugh.
And--"Oh!" said she.
Then it was that the smile became a laugh.
"What are you doing here at this time in the morning?" he asked.
"I--I was just going up to town. I--I wanted to go to Bayswater first."
How much had he guessed? How long had he seen her looking here and
there, and all about her?
"What are _you_ doing?" She had as much a right to ask him.
"I've been waiting to see you go by," said he.
"But----"
"I knew you were coming."
"How?"
"We've been thinking just exactly the same things ever since I said
good-bye yesterday. I woke up early this morning wondering what had
happened."
"So did I," she whispered in an awed voice.
"Then--before I'd got my coat on, I came to the conclusion that I had to
live somewhere, and that the only thing that mattered was whether I did
it honestly--not where I did it. Then, I sort of felt you might come to
the Gardens this morning."
She set her lips. Once that camisole is on, every woman has her
dignity. It is a thing to play with, much as a child plays with its box
of bricks. She makes wonderful patterns with it--noble
ladies--imperious dames, who put dignity before humanity as you put the
cart before the horse.
"Why should you think I would come to the Gardens?" she asked.
John steadied his eyes.
"Well, I presume you go up to town sometimes," he said.
"Yes--but one can get up to town by Knightsbridge."
"Of--course. I forgot that. But when you might be wanting to go to
Bayswater first."
She looked very steadily into his eyes. How long had he seen her before
she had seen him?
"Perhaps you're under the impression that I came to see you," she said,
and she began walking towards the Bayswater Road.
He followed quietly by her side. This needed careful treatment. She
was incensed. He ought not to have thought that, of course.
"I never said so," he replied quietly.
Then they fought--all the way over to the Bayswater side. Each little
stroke was like velvet, but beneath it all was the passion of the claw.
"I expect it's as well we're not going to see each other any more," she
said one moment and, when he agreed, repented it bitterly the next. He
cursed himself for agreeing. But you must agree. Dignity, you know.
Dignity before humanity.
And then he called her a hansom--helped her within.
"Are you going back to the Gardens?" she asked from inside, not shutting
the doors.
"No--I'm going up to town."
"Well----" She pushed the bricks away. "Can't--can't I drive you up?"
He stepped inside, and the cab rolled off.
"Were you going to have walked?" she asked presently, after a long, long
silence.
"No," said John. "I was going to drive--with you."
CHAPTER XVI
EASTER SUNDAY
One Easter Sunday, soon after his first clandestine meeting with Jill,
John was seated alone in his room in Fetter Lane. The family of Morrell
and the family of Brown--the plumber and the theatre cleaner--had united
in a party and gone off to the country--what was the country to them.
He had heard them discussing it as they descended the flights of
uncarpeted wooden stairs and passed outside his door.
"As long as we get back to the Bull and Bush by five," Mr. Morrell had
said emphatically, and Mr. Brown had said, "Make it half-past four."
Then Mrs. Morrell had caught up the snatch of a song:
"I've a tickly feelin' in the bottom of me 'eart
For you--for you,"
and Mrs. Brown has echoed it with her uncertain notes. Finally the door
into the street had opened--had banged--their voices had faded away into
the distance, and John had been left alone listening to the amorous
frolics on the stairs of the sandy cat which belonged to Mrs. Morrell,
and the tortoise-shell, the property of Mrs. Brown.
Unless it be that you are an ardent churchman, and of that persuasion
which calls you to the kirk three times within the twenty-four hours,
Easter Sunday, for all its traditions, is a gladless day in London.
There is positively nothing to do. Even Mass, if you attend it, is over
at a quarter to one, and then the rest of the hours stretch monotonously
before you. The oppressive knowledge that the Bank Holiday follows so
closely on its heels, overburdens you with the sense of desolation.
There will be no cheerful shops open on the morrow, no busy hurrying to
and fro. The streets of the great city will be the streets of a city of
the dead and, as you contemplate all this, the bells of your
neighbourhood peal out in strains that are meant to be cheerful, yet
really are inexpressibly doleful and sad. You know very well, when you
come to think about it, why they are so importunate and so loud. They
are only ringing so persistently, tumbling sounds one upon another, in
order to draw people to the fulfilment of a duty that many would shirk
if they dared.
The bells of a city church have need to be loud, they have to rise above
the greater distractions of life. Listen to the bells of St.
Martin's-in-the-Fields. The bell-ringers there know only too well the
sounds they have to drown before they can induce a wandering pedestrian
within. It was just the same in Fetter Lane. John listened to them
clanging and jangling--each bell so intent and eager in its effort to
make itself heard.
He thought of the country to which the families upstairs had departed;
but in the country it is different. In the country, you would go to
church were there no bell at all, and that gentle, sonorous note that
does ring across the fields and down the river becomes one of the most
soothing sounds in the world. You have only to hear it to see the old
lych-gate swinging to and fro as the folk make their way up the gravel
path to the church door. You have only to listen to it stealing through
the meadows where the browsing cattle are steeping their noses in the
dew, to see with the eye of your mind that pale, faint flicker of
candle-light that creeps through the stained glass windows out into the
heavy-laden air of a summer evening. A church bell is very different in
the country. There is an unsophisticated note about it, a sound so far
removed from the egotistical hawker crying the virtue of his wares as to
make the one incomparable with the other. John envied Mrs. Brown and
Mr. Morrell from the bottom of his heart--envied them at least till
half-past four.
For an hour, after breakfast was finished, he sat staring into the fire
he had lighted, too lonely even to work. That heartless jade,
depression, one can not call her company.
Then came Mrs. Rowse to clear away the breakfast things and make his
bed. He looked up with a smile as she entered.
"What sort of a day is it outside?" he asked.
"Cold, sir; and looks as if we was going to have rain."
She caught up the breakfast things, the china clattered in her fingers.
He turned round a little in his chair and watched her clear away. This
is loneliness--to find a sense of companionship in the woman who comes
to look after one's rooms.
"Whenever a man is lonely," wrote Lamartine, "God sends him a dog." But
that is not always so. Some men are not so fortunate as others. It
happens sometimes that a dog is not available and then, God sends a Mrs.
Rowse to clear away the breakfast things.
But Mrs. Rowse was in a hurry that morning. There was no money due to
her. You would not have found the faintest suspicion of lingering in
anything that she did then. Even the topic that interested her
most--her daughters--had no power to distract her attention.
She was going to take them out to the country--they were going down to
Denham to see her sister, as soon as her work was done--Lizzie, who
stuck labels on the jam-jars in Crosse and Blackwell's, and Maud, who
packed cigarettes in Lambert and Butler's.
There were those living in Peabody Buildings, who said that Lizzie would
have a beautiful voice, if she'd only practise. She could sing, "Love
Me and the World Is Mine." She could sing that lovely. And Maud--well,
Mrs. Rowse had even got a piano in their little tenement rooms for Maud
to learn on, but Maud would never practise neither. True, she could pick
up just anything she heard, pick it up quite easy with the right hand,
though she could only vamp, foolish-like, with the left.
Yet upon these portentous matters, Mrs. Rowse would say nothing that
morning. They were going to catch a mid-day train from Marylebone down
to Denham, and she had no time to waste.
"Would you mind me coming with you, Mrs. Rowse?" said John suddenly. As
suddenly he regretted it, but only because of its impossibility.
There is some sort of unwritten law which says that when you accompany
ladies on a journey by train, you must pay for their tickets, and all
women are ladies if they do not swear or spit on the ground. You should
take off your hat to everyone of them you know when in the street. It
may be that they are charwomen, that they stick labels upon jam-jars in
their spare hours, that they pack up little boxes of cigarettes when
there is nothing else to do, but in the street, they are women--and all
women, with the restrictions here mentioned, are ladies.
Now John could not possibly pay for their tickets. He could ill-afford
to pay for his own. It would mean no meal the next day if he did. And
here let it be said--lest any should think that his poverty is harped
upon--John was always poor, except for five minutes after an excursion
to the pawn-shop, and perhaps five days after the receipt of the
royalties upon his work. You may be sure at least of this, that John
will jingle the money in his pocket and run his finger-nail over the
minted edge of the silver when he has any. If he has gold, you will see
him take it out under the light of a lamp-post when it is dark, in order
to make sure that the sovereign is not a shilling. On all other
occasions than these, assume that he is poor,--nay, more than assume,
take it for granted.
Accordingly, directly he had made this offer to accompany Mrs. Rowse and
her daughters to Denham, he had to withdraw it.
"No," said he, "I wish I could come--but I'm afraid it's impossible.
I've got work to do."
Quite soon after that Mrs. Rowse departed.
"Hope you'll enjoy yourselves," said he.
"We always do in the country," replied she as she put on her hat outside
the door. And then--"Good-morning, sir,"--and she too had gone; the
door into the street had banged again, and the whole house, from floor
to roof, was empty but for the sandy cat, the tortoiseshell cat and
John.
He sat on there in the stillness. Even the cats grew tired of play and
were still. Then came the rain, rain that turned to sleet, that drove
against the roofs outside and tried, by hiding in the corners of the
chimneys, to look like snow. John thought of the tulips in Kensington
Gardens. Spring can come gladsomely to England--it can come bitterly,
too. Those poor people in the country! But would the country ever
permit such weather as this? Even supposing it did, they would not be
lonely as he was. Mr. Morrell had Mrs. Brown to talk to, and Mr. Brown
had the company of Mrs. Morrell. There were Lizzie and Maud for Mrs.
Rowse. Perhaps going down in the train, they would get a carriage to
themselves and Lizzie would sing, "Love Me and the World Is Mine," and
Maud would count cigarettes in her mind, and pack them up in her mind,
or more probably forget that there ever were such things as cigarettes
in the fresh delight of seeing the country with bread and cheese on all
the hedges. Those young green buds on the hawthorn hedges are the
pedestrian's bread and cheese. But you know that, every bit as well as
I.
Well, it seemed that everyone had company but John. He took out of his
pocket the last letter his mother had written him from Venice--took it
out and spread it before him. If only she were there! If only her
bright brown eyes were looking at him, what thousands of things there
would be to say! What short stories and beginnings of new books would
there not be to read her! And how sympathetically would she not listen.
How frequently would she not place those dear paralysed hands of hers in
his, as he read, at some new passage that she liked!
"_My darling boy----_"
He could hear that gentle voice of hers--like the sound you may hear in
the ring of an old china tea-cup--he could hear it, as she had dictated
it to his father to write----
"_This is where I begin counting the days to your visit. I dare not
begin sooner--too many figures always bewildered me. It is now just
about three months. Your father is much better than he was, and is
doing a little work these days._"
And here was added in a quaint little parenthesis of his father's: "_She
calls it work, my dear boy, just to please me--but when old men play,
they like to hear it called work. You've got to do my work. And she is
so quick--she has seen I have been writing more than she has said. I
shall persuade her to let this stay in nevertheless._"
Then, uninterrupted for a space the letter continued.
"_I'm so pleased that your work is going on so well. I thought your
last story was too sad, though. Must stories end unhappily? Yours
always seem to. But I think I guess. They won't always end like that.
But your father says I am not to worry you on that point; that you can't
paint in a tone of gold what you see in a tone of grey, and that what
you see now in a tone of grey, you will as likely as not see one day in
a tone of gold._"
Then, here, another parenthesis.
"_You will understand what I mean, my dear boy. I've read the story, and
I don't think it ought to end sadly, and you will no doubt say, 'Oh,
he's quite old-fashioned; he does not know that a sad ending is an
artistic ending.' But that is not because I am old-fashioned. It is
simply because I am old. When you are young, you see unhappy endings
because you are young enough to bear the pain of them. It is only when
you get older that you see otherwise. When you have had your sorrow,
which, you know, only as an artist I wish for you, then you will write
in another strain. Go on with your unhappy endings. Don't take any
notice of us. All your work will be happy one day, and remember, you
are not writing for but because of us. By the way, I think you spelt
paregoric wrong._"
Now again the dictation.
"_Well, anyhow, though I know nothing about it, I feel you write as
though you loved. You would tell me, would you not, if you did? I am
sure it must be the way to write, the way, in fact, to do everything.
Your father says the pictures he paints now lack strength and vigour;
but I find them just as beautiful; they are so gentle._"
Parenthesis.
"_One can't always love as one did at twenty-six--T.G. That sounds like
reverential gratitude for the fact, but you understand it is only my
initials._"
"_He has written something again, John--and he won't tell me what it is.
If he has said he is getting too old to love, don't believe him. He has
just leant forward and kissed me on my forehead. I have insisted upon
his writing this down. Your story about the girl in the chapel and the
last candle amused us very much. It interested me especially. If it
had been me, I should have fallen in love with you then and there for
being so considerate. What was she like? Have you ever seen her since?
I can't feel that you were meant to meet her for nothing. I have tried
to think, too, what she could have been praying to St. Joseph for, but
it is beyond me. It is not like a woman to pray for money for herself.
Perhaps some of her relations have money troubles. That is all I can
imagine, though I have thought over it every day since I got your
letter. God bless you, my darling. We are waiting eagerly for the
reviews of your new book. When will it be out--the exact date? I want
to say a novena for it, so let me know in good time. And if you meet
the Lady of St. Joseph--as you call her--again, you must promise to tell
me all about it. Your father wants the rest of the sheet of note-paper
on which to say something to you--so, God bless you always._"
"_Don't read the reviews when they come out, John. Send them along to
me, and I'll sort out the best ones and send them back to you to read.
As far as I can see, there are so many critics who get the personal note
into their criticisms, and to read these, whether praising or blaming,
won't do you any good; so send them all along to me before you look at
them. The first moment you can send me a copy, of course, you will.
Your loving father._"
Here the letter ended. Long as it was, it might well have been longer.
They were good company, those two old people, talking to him through
those thin sheets of foreign paper, one breaking in upon the other with
all due courtesy, just as they might with a "Finish what you have to
say, my dear," in ordinary conversation.
And now they had gone to the country, too--they had left him alone.
When he had folded up the letter, it was almost as if he could hear the
door bang again for the third time.
He leant back in his chair with an involuntary sigh. What a few people,
after all, there were in the world whom he really knew! What a few
people who would seek out his company on such a day as this! He stood
up and stretched out his arms above his head--it was----
He stopped. A sound had struck to his heart and set it beating, as when
the bull's-eye of a target is hit.
The bell had rung! His electric bell! The electric bell which had
raised him immeasureably in station above Mrs. Morrell and Mrs. Brown,
who had only a knocker common to the whole house--one, in fact, of the
landlord's fixtures! It had rung, and his heart was beating to the
echoes of it.
In another second, he had opened his door; in another moment, he was
flying down the uncarpeted wooden stairs, five at a time. At the door
itself, he paused, playing with the sensation of uncertainty. Who could
it be? If the honest truth be known, it scarcely mattered. Someone!
Someone had come out of nowhere to keep him company. A few
personalities rushed to his mind. It might be the man who sometimes
illustrated his stories, an untidy individual who had a single phrase
that he always introduced into every conversation--it was, "Lend me
half-a-crown till to-morrow, will you?" It would be splendid if it were
him. They could lunch together on the half-crown. It might be the
traveller from the wholesale tailor's--a man whom he had found begging
in the street, and told to come round to Number 39 whenever he was at
his wit's end for a meal. That would be better still; he was a man full
of experiences, full of stories from the various sleeping-houses where
he spent his nights.
Supposing it were Jill! A foolish, a hopeless thought to enter the
mind. She did not know where he lived. She might, though, by some
freak of
CHAPTER XVII
THE FLY IN THE AMBER
The sleet had driven honestly into snow by the time John had finished
his lunch and, there being but two old original members in the Martyrs'
Club, who were congratulating each other upon having put on their fur
coats, stayed in town and not gone to the country, he left as soon as
his meal was over.
The hall-porter stood reluctantly to his feet as he passed out,--so
reluctantly that John felt as though he should apologise for the
etiquette of the club. In the street, he turned up the collar of his
coat and set off with determination, intended to show the hall-porter
that he had a definite destination and but little time in which to reach
it.
Round the corner and out of sight, he began counting to himself the
people he might go and see. Each name, as he reviewed it in his mind,
presented some difficulty either of approval or of place. At last, he
found himself wandering in the direction of Holborn. In a side street
of that neighbourhood lived his little typewriter, who had promised to
finish two short stories over Easter. She would be as glad of company
as he. She would willingly cease from pounding the symphony of the one
monotonous note on those lifeless keys. They would talk together of
wonderful works yet to be typed. He would strum on her hired piano.
The minutes would slip by and she would get tea, would boil the kettle
on that miniature gas-stove, situated in her bedroom, where he had often
imagined her saying her prayers in the morning while a piece of bacon
was frying in the pan by her side--prayers, the Amen of which would be
hastened and emphasised by the boiling over of the milk. Those are the
prayers that reach Heaven. They are so human. And a burnt sacrifice of
burnt milk accompanying them, they are consistent with all the ritual of
the Old Testament.
To the little typewriter's, then, he decided to go. It did not matter so
very much if his stories were not finished over Easter. They could
wait.
He rang the bell, wondering if her heart was leaping as his had done but
an hour or so before. His ears were alert for the scurrying of feet on
her uncarpeted, wooden stairs. He bent his head sideways to the door.
There was no sound. He rang again. Then he heard the creaking of the
stairs. She was coming--oh, but so slowly! Annoyed, perhaps, by the
disturbance, just as she was getting into work.
The door was opened. His heart dropped. He saw an old woman with
red-rimmed eyes which peered at him suspiciously from the half-opened
space.
"Is Miss Gerrard in?" he asked.
"Gone to the country--won't be back till Tuesday," was the reply.
Gone to the country! And his work would never be finished over Easter!
Oh, it was not quite fair!
"Any message?" said the old housekeeper.
"No," said John; "nothing," and he walked away.
Circumstance was conspiring that he should work--circumstance was
driving him back to Fetter Lane. Yet the loneliness of it all was
intolerable. It was, moreover, a loneliness that he could not explain.
There had been other Easter Sundays; there had been other days of snow
and sleet and rain, but he had never felt this description of loneliness
before. It was not depression. Depression sat there, certainly, as it
were upon the doorstep, ready to enter at the faintest sound of
invitation. But as yet, she was on the doorstep only, and this--this
leaden weight at the heart, this chain upon all the energies--was
loneliness that he was entertaining, a condition of loneliness that he
had never known before.
Why had he gone to see the little typewriter? Why had he not chosen the
man who illustrated his stories, or many of the other men whom he knew
would be in town that day and any day--men who never went into the
country from one year's end to the other?
It had been the company of a woman he had wanted. Why was that? Why
that, suddenly, rather than the company he knew he could find? What was
there in the companionship of a woman that he had so unexpectedly
discovered the need of it? Why had he envied Mr. Brown who had Mrs.
Morrell to talk to, or Mr. Morrell who could unburden himself to Mrs.
Brown? Why had he been glad when Mrs. Rowse came and unutterably lonely
when she left? Why had he suggested going to the country with her,
pleased at the thought that Lizzie would sing, "Love Me and the World Is
Mine," and that Maud would be counting and packing cigarettes in her
mind?
The questions poured into his thoughts, rushing by, not waiting for an
answer, until they all culminated in one overwhelming realisation. It
was Jill.
Morning after morning, for a whole week, they had met in secret, not in
Kensington Gardens alone, but in the most extraordinary of places--once
even at Wrigglesworth's, the obscure eating-house in Fetter Lane, she
little knowing how near they were to where he lived. He had read her
his stories; he had given her copies of the two books that bore his name
upon their covers. They had discussed them together. She had said she
was sure he was going to be a great man, and that is always so
consoling, because its utter impossibility prevents you from questioning
it for a moment.
Then it was Jill. And all the disappointment, all the loneliness of
this Easter Sunday had been leading up to this.
Common sense--except in that mad moment when he had hoped the bell had
been rung by her--had debarred him from thinking of seeking her out.
But away in the deep corners of his mind, it was her company he was
looking for--her company he had sought to find, first in Mrs. Rowse and
then in the little typewriter.
Shutting the door of his room, he went across to the chair by the fire.
What did it mean? What did it mean? Here and there he had fallen in
love; but this was not the same sort of thing. This was not falling in
love. Falling in love was quick, sudden, a flash that burnt up all
desire to work, flared out in a moment, obliterating everything else.
But this was slow, stealthy, a growing thing that asked, not for sudden
satisfaction, but for wonderful, untellable things.
All the attributes common to love, as he had understood it, had no place
in this sensation. As he had thought of it, love found its expression
in the gratification of the need with which it had begun, or it ended,
like his stories--unhappily. Then this could not be love. There was no
ending of gratification and no ending of unhappiness to this. It was
unending. Was that what his mother had meant he would learn?
Then, as he sat before the fire, wondering what new thing he had found,
the bell rang again. It found no echo on this occasion. He slowly
turned his head. They were not going to deceive him a second time. He
rose quietly from his chair, crossed to the window, silently raised it
and, as silently, looked out. There, below him, he saw a woman's hat--a
hat with fur in it, cunningly twined through grey velvet,--a hat that he
knew, a hat that he had often seen before.
He closed the window quietly and slowly made his way downstairs. Before
he reached the end of the passage, the bell rang again. Then he opened
the door.
It was the lady on whose behalf the fur coat had discharged the debt of
honour.
She stepped right in with a little laugh of pleasure at finding him
there; turned and waited while he closed the door behind them, then
linked her arm in his as they mounted the stairs.
"I came," said she, "on chance. Aren't you glad to see me?"
There was just that fraction's pause before he replied--that pause into
which a woman's mind leaps for answer. And how accurately she makes
that leap, how surely she reaches the mental ground upon which you take
your place, you will never be able truly to anticipate.
"Yes," said John, "I'm very glad."
"Then what is it?" she said quickly. "Are you writing?"
"No, I'm not. I've tried to, but I can't."
"Then are you expecting someone?"
He looked up at her, smiled, opened the door of his room, and bid her
pass through.
"And is all this," said he, "because I paused a moment when you asked me
if I was glad to see you?"
She seated herself easily in the chair to which she was accustomed. She
began drawing the pins out of her hat, as a woman does when she feels at
home. When the hat was free of her heaps of brown-red hair, she threw
it carelessly upon the table, shook her head and lifted the hair from
her forehead with her fingers. And John stood by with a smile, thinking
how the faintest shadow of a word of question would make that hat fly
back on to the head of brown-red hair, the hat-pins pierce the crown
with hasty pride, and the little purse that lay upon the table alongside
of them be clutched in an eager, scornful hand, as she would rise, full
of dignity, to depart.
He let the smile fade away, and repeated his question.
"Yes," she said. "I thought when you didn't answer at once that you
weren't very keen to see me."
"And if I said I wasn't very keen, would you go at once?"
Her eyebrows lifted high. She made a movement in her chair. One hand
was already beginning to stretch out for the grey velvet hat.
"Like a shot!" she answered.
He nodded his head.
"That's what I thought," said John.
She rose quickly to her feet.
"If you want me to go, why don't you say so?"
He put his hands on her shoulders and seated her gently back again in
the chair.
"But I don't want you to go," he replied. "I've got a lot of things I
want to say to you."
"If you're going to talk evolution----" she began.
He laughed.
"It's something very like it," said he.
She gave a sigh of resignation, took out a packet of cigarettes,
extracted one, lit it and inhaled the first breath deep--deep into her
lungs.
"Well, go on," she said.
"Have you got plenty of cigarettes?"
"Yes, plenty to-day."
"Hadn't you yesterday?"
"No, Mother and I raked up all the cigarette ends out of the fireplaces,
and I just had a penny for a packet of cigarette papers." She laughed.
This is the honesty of poverty. She would take no money from any man.
For just as the virtue of wealth will bring out the evil of avarice, so
will the evil of poverty bring out the virtue of self-respect. In this
world, there is as much good that comes out of evil as ever stands by
itself alone. This, in fact, is the need of evil, that out of it may
lift the good.
"Well, what have you got to say?" she continued. "Get it over as quick
as you can. I shan't understand half of it."
"You'll understand it all," said John. "You may not admit it. You
don't admit your own honesty--you probably won't admit mine."
She screwed up her eyes at him. He said the most incomprehensible
things. Of course, he was a crank. She knew that--took it for
granted--but what did he mean by her honesty?
"I don't steal," she said. "But I owe fifteen pounds to my dressmaker,
and thirteen to Derry & Toms, and six somewhere else, and I don't
suppose they'll ever get paid. Do you call that honest?"
"I don't mean that sort of honesty. That's the sort of honesty that a
dishonest man shields behind. You'd pay them if I gave you the money to
pay them, or if anybody else gave you the money, or if you made the
money. You meant to pay them, you probably thought you could pay them
when you ordered the things."
She looked up at him and laughed.
"You poor old dear! I don't suppose you've got twopence in your pocket.
You couldn't give it to me."
"I've got one and nine," said John. "But the point is, if I could give
it you, you wouldn't take it. That's the honesty I'm talking about.
From the standard at which you rate life, that's honesty, and you never
depart from it. And, in a way, my standard has been much about the
same--till now."
"Till now?" She echoed it in a little note of apprehension.
"Yes--till now. I thought these things were honest--now I've changed my
standard, and I find them different, too."
"What do you mean?"
Her eyes looked far into his, and he stood there looking far back into
hers.
"You don't love me, do you?" he said presently.
A pause preceded her answer.
"No," she said.
"And I've never told you I loved you?"
"No--never."
"And yet, does it strike you that there may be such a thing?"
"Oh, I suppose there is. Some people pretend they know all about it. I
think you're the kindest and the best person I've ever met--that's
enough for me."
"Would you marry me?" said John.
"No--never."
"Why not?"
"Because directly people marry--directly they find themselves bound,
they look at each other in a different light. The question of whether
it can last begins to creep in. With us, it doesn't matter. I come and
see you whenever you want me to. If it doesn't last, then nobody's hurt
by it--if it does, let it last as long as it can. I don't want it to
end to-day--I might to-morrow. I might see someone I liked better."
"And then you'd go?"
"Most certainly."
"Well--suppose you came across someone with whom you knew it must last;
from whom you expected to find those things which go on past time and
all measuring of clocks, would you marry them?"
She came up close to him and laid her hands upon his shoulders.
"You can tell me straight out," she said gently. "One of us was bound to
find it one of these days. I only hoped it would be me. You can tell me
who she is. Go on."
John told her. This was what he had wanted the woman for--first his
mother, then Mrs. Rowse, then the little typewriter, then even Jill
herself. For it is a woman to whom a man must tell these things--nobody
else will do; nobody else will understand.
And when she had heard it all, she looked up with the suspicion of tears
in her eyes and smiled.
"Then I guess I'm the fly in the amber," she said. "It won't be a clear
bit of stone till I'm gone. Isn't that what you mean?"
And, taking his face in her hands, she kissed his forehead. "You're a
funny little boy," she said with a wry smile.
This was the box of bricks, the playing at her dignity. Every woman has
them, and while some throw them at your head, the best make
patterns--patterns of fine ladies and noble dames. It was a fine lady
who would call him a funny little boy. It was a noble dame who would
show him that she was not hurt. He had wanted her in his way, in their
way--the way she wanted him as well. All men want some woman like that,
and there are as good women to supply the need as there are bad ones who
would shrink from it. And now, he wanted her no longer. She knew she
had to bow her head to something that she could not understand,
something that she could not supply. He loved. And they had so easily
avoided it.
"Are you going to be married?" she enquired. She longed to ask what the
other one was like.
John shrugged his shoulders.
"You don't know?"
"No, I don't know."
"Does she love you?"
"I couldn't tell you."
"You haven't asked her?"
"No--we haven't said a word about it."
She smiled.
"Then why do you send me away?"
"Because--I know, myself. There comes a time--I didn't know it--when
you know--a time when you don't excuse yourself with the plea of
humanity--when you wish to offer no excuse--when there is only one way,
the way I'm choosing. I'm a crank, of course. I know you've called me
that before. To you I'm a crank,--to heaps of other people as well. But
in the back of this muddled head of mine, I've got an ideal--so has
everyone else--so have you. But now I've found a means of expressing it.
You say I'm in love--that's what you call it. I prefer just to say, I
love--which is another matter altogether. People fall in and out of
love like an india-rubber ball dancing on a spray of water. But this
sort of thing must be always, and it may be only once or twice in your
life that you find a means of expressing it. But it's there all the
time. And one time it's a woman with dark hair and another it's a woman
with gold--but the emotion--the heart of it is just the same. It's the
same love--the love of the good--the love of the beautiful--the love of
the thing which is clean through and through and through. And when you
meet it, you'll sacrifice everything for it. And if you don't meet it,
you'll go on hunting for it your life through--unless you lose heart, or
lose character, or lose strength--then this wonderful ideal vanishes.
You come to look for it less and less and less till at last you only
seek for the other thing--what you call--falling in love."
"Do you think we all have this ideal?" she asked.
"Yes, every one of us."
"Then have I lost it?"
"No, I don't believe so. I saw tears in your eyes just now."
CHAPTER XVIII
THE NONSENSE-MAKER
John took a box at the opera. There is some sense in taking a box at
the opera when you owe two quarters of your rent of thirty pounds a
year. To have a box all the year round with your visiting-card pinned
to the door, that is needless, unforgiveable extravagance, for it does
not then belong to you, but to your friends.
When John took the stage-box on the third tier, it was bread and butter,
dinners and teas, that he laid down in payment for the little slip of
paper. They did not know that. The clerk at the office thought it was
three guineas. He brushed off the money carelessly into the palm of his
hand without thinking that it could be anything but coin of the realm.
Who ever would go to the box-office of Covent Garden, and, tendering
ingenuously bread and butter, expect to get a ticket for the stage-box
on the third tier in return? But they are not observant, these
box-office clerks, for heaps of people do it.
There was an old lady just behind John, who handed in all her warm
spring under-clothing and a nice little embroidered lace cap that would
have looked delightful on her white head in the evenings of the summer
that was to come.
"I want a stall," said she, "for Tuesday night."
And in just the same inconsequent and unobservant way, the clerk,
without the slightest embarrassment, swept all the warm spring
under-clothing and the little lace cap into his hand and gave it her
without a word, but heavens! how insulted he would have been if you had
told him that he was simply a dealer in second-hand under-linen! It
would not have appeased him a bit, to tell him that the under-linen had
never been worn, that, in fact, it had never even been bought.
Just in this way, he took John's bread and butter, and gave him the
stage-box on the third tier. It was for the night of _La Boheme_.
On that same night, Jill was going to a dance, chaperoned by an older
school-friend of hers--one who had married--a Mrs. Crossthwaite. And
Mrs. Crossthwaite knew everything; not because she had been told it.
That is not the way amongst women. They tell each other what they are
pretending to believe, and both of them know all about it all the time.
There was the invitation to the dance--one known as a subscription.
Mrs. Dealtry could not go. She had a dinner party. Jill nominated Mrs.
Crossthwaite as her chaperon, and went to tea with her that day, having
seen John in the morning.
First, she spoke of the dance. Mrs. Crossthwaite was delighted. She
had been stepping it in the heart of her ever since she was married; but
only in the heart of her, and the heart of a woman is an impossible
floor to dance upon. It makes the heart, not the feet, tired.
Having won her consent--an easy matter, not lasting more than five
minutes--Jill began gently, unobtrusively, to speak of the work of an
author called John Grey. Mrs. Crossthwaite had read one of the books,
thought it distinctly above the average, but very sad. She did not like
sad books. There was quite enough sadness in real life, and so on. All
of which is very, very true, if people would only realise it, as well as
say it.
From there, with that adroitness which only women have the fine fingers
for, Jill led on the conversation to her acquaintance with John. Oh, it
was all very difficult to do, for a school-friend, once she has married,
may have become a very different sort of person from the girl who was
ready to swarm down the drain-pipe to meet the boy with the fair hair
and the cap far on the back of his head, who passed her a note concealed
between the pages of the Burial Service in the Prayer-book. Marriage is
apt to rob your school-friend of this courage; for, though she never did
climb down the drain-pipe, she made you think she was going to. She had
one leg on the window-sill and would soon have been outside, only that
she heard the voice of the mistress in the corridor just in time. And
she sometimes loses this courage when she marries. Jill, therefore, had
to proceed with caution.
They merely talked about his work. He was very interesting. His ideas
were strange. Of course, it was a terrible pity that he would not say
where he lived, but Mrs. Crossthwaite did not seem to consider that.
For a moment, she had expressed surprise and approval of Mrs. Dealtry's
action; but he was a member of the Martyrs' Club, and Mr. Crossthwaite's
greatest friend was a member there as well, and Mr. Crossthwaite's
greatest friend was naturally nearly as wonderful a person as Mr.
Crossthwaite himself. So what did it really matter where he lived? The
position of man was his club. She even had no curiosity about his
residence.
Again, Jill had never seen _Boheme_. Her people were not musical. They
hated it. She loved it. This was the opportunity of her life. He would
bring her back to the dance, of course, and no one need ever know that
she had not been there all the time. And in the intervals of the opera
they would talk about his work. That was all they ever did talk about.
She knew all his ambitions, all his hopes. Once or twice he had
accepted her suggestions, when really she knew nothing about it. It was
only what she felt; but he had felt it too, and the alteration had been
made. He said she helped him, and that was all that was between them.
The main fact of importance was that she had never seen _La Boheme_, and
might never see it, if she refused this opportunity.
All these specious arguments she put forward in a gentle, enticing,
winning way--full of simplicity--full of honesty; but the principal
reason that Mrs. Crossthwaite consented to become a party to this
collusion was that she did not believe a single word of it.
Romance! it is a word in itself, a thing in itself--a piece of
fine-worked lace that must catch the eye of every woman, and which every
woman would stitch to the Garment of maternity if she could.
So it was arranged. In the vestibule of the rooms where the dance was
held, John was formally introduced to the chaperon before he bore her
charge away. Then they stepped into a hansom.
"The Opera," said John, through the trap-door, carelessly, as though he
went there most evenings of his life; for when you give your bread and
butter to get a box at Covent Garden, hunger makes you talk like that.
This is all part of the delight which you miss in having a box all the
year round.
And when they had got far away into the traffic--that passing to and fro
of people, which is all a thumb-nail illustration of the stream of
life--and when her heart had begun to beat a little less like a lark's
wings in a six-inch cage, Jill broke the silence.
"What did Mrs. Crossthwaite say to you while I went to get my cloak?"
she asked.
"She was good enough to hope that I would call on her."
"Oh! I'm so glad she's asked you. Did she say anything else?"
"She asked me if I lived in London all the year round. I said I
did--except for a month in the year, when I went to Venice. Then she
asked me what part of London I lived in."
"She asked you that?"
"Yes."
Jill was silent for a few moments. It is always an interesting moment
in a woman's life when she learns something about her sex.
"And what did you say?" she asked.
John laughed. He thought he had said it rather neatly.
"Oh, I've got rooms," he had said, "just between St. Paul's and the
Strand." Which might be the Inner Temple, if you had a nice mind with
which to look at it. He told Jill this answer. She smiled.
"And is it between St. Paul's and the Strand?" she asked.
"Roughly speaking--yes--but very roughly speaking."
Again she was silent. Could it be that he was poor--at least, not well
enough off to live at a good-sounding address? Could that have been why
he was praying to St. Joseph on the eighteenth of March? Yet he was a
member of the Martyrs' Club, and here he was taking her to a box at
Covent Garden. She looked up quickly into his face. This was more
mystery than her desire for knowledge could afford.
"Do you remember what you said to me once," she began, "about the woman
with the gift of understanding?"
"Yes--the first day that we met in Kensington Gardens."
"Well--do you think I am absolutely ungifted that way?"
John closely searched her eyes. Did she remember all he had said about
the woman with God's good gift of understanding? Did she realise the
confession it would entail if he admitted--as he believed--that she was?
She was young, perhaps--a girl, a child, a baby--just twenty-one. But
the understanding which is the gift of God, comes independently of
experience. Like genius, it is a gift and of just such a nature.
Absolute simplicity is the source of it, and with it, it brings the
reward of youth, keeping the heart young no matter the years. Experience
will show you that the world is full of evil--evil motives and evil
deeds; it will teach you that evil is said of everyone, even the best.
But with God's good gift of understanding, you have the heart of a
child, knowing nothing yet finding the good in everything.
To such a one, no secrets are possible, no deeds can lie hid; for no man
does evil because he would, but because it rises stronger against the
innermost will of him. And so few are there with the gift to understand
this, that confession is seldom made.
And for John to tell her that she had this gift, was to make admission
of all he had learnt that Easter Sunday. Could it be that she asked for
that reason? Did she wish to know? In his own way, he had meant to
tell her; but not like this. And so he searched her eyes; but searched
in vain.
"Why do you ask?" he said at length.
"Because--if you think I have any understanding at all, don't you think
I should understand, even if you told me you lived at----" She could
not think of a poor enough neighbourhood where people might live. She
scarcely knew any.
"Shepherd's Bush?" he suggested.
"Well--yes--Shepherd's Bush."
"And so you want to know where I do live?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
She looked up at him quite honestly.
"Well--pride, I suppose. We're good friends. I hope we are. I've
never had a friend before. I think I should tell you everything, and I
expect I feel hurt because you don't tell me. I'm sure you have a good
reason for not letting my people know, but that hasn't prevented me from
keeping you as my friend against all their wishes. They don't
understand, I admit. But I believe I should. I'm sure I should."
Her hand in its white glove was resting on the door of the hansom in
front of her. For a moment he looked at it, and then, with heart
beating, in fear, joy, apprehension--a thousand emotions all flowing
into one--he took it in his and pressed it reverently, then let it go.
"I know you would," he replied in his breath. And then he told her.
Did she remember Wrigglesworth's? Would she ever forget it? Those
high-backed seats, the sawdust on the floor, the poll-parrot in its cage
in the middle of the room!
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