Part 9

“I think she is a trifle better,” he admitted, in a half-hearted way. “She won’t part with the servant; says she really hasn’t time and strength enough for housework. But she admits that a servant is inconsistent with her theories, and she looked quite happy when she added that she really believed I was beginning to see things in the right light. I’ve told her plainly that I’ll have no hypocrites in my home. Silver--her aunt left her some--flowers, Worcester tea-things, I wouldn’t stand. She murmured something about it being a duty with every citizen to keep up the graces of life, but she yielded in the end. She was crying a bit as she wrapped the silver--beautiful Georgian stuff--away in chamois-leather bags.

“I said that a drawing room gave the very lie to her theories. She’s turned the key of that room.

“The servant has given notice; of course she thinks the spoons are pawned. Lucinda is upset. But I said cheerily that it was so nice to be indifferent, to be supported by the consciousness of a worthy mission. I said that simplicity was the great thing. I suggested that we should sell the furniture--giving the proceeds to the Socialistic cause--and go to a boarding house. They board you in Gower Street for twenty-five shillings a week--with a reduction, no doubt, on married couples. I said that she would then be quite free from housekeeping and would be able to throw more soul into her political work. You should have seen her face! I think she’s beginning to be sorry that she converted me. Converts always go too far.

“But she’s not cured,” he concluded solemnly. “She went off this morning to Brentford, where some member of her party has his committee room.”

“Perhaps we had better play our trump card,” I said. “What time will she be back?”

“About nine.”

“Very well. I’ll look round with Smithers and Arnold. It’s a job that Jimmy would enjoy, but he’s so lantern-jawed she’d know him at once.”

At nine Gully, Smithers, Arnold, and I were in Lucinda’s drawing room, smoking very strong tobacco and drinking hot gin and water; it gave me heartburn for nearly a week. But it made a good steam and fume; effect was what we wanted. We all four looked--well, rough. A bristly chin and no collar alters a man immensely. As luck would have it, neither Smithers nor I had shaved that morning; nor the morning before, in my case. Arnold wore a false beard.

Why do absconding criminals take the trouble to disguise themselves--decent, middle-class criminals who are accustomed to razors and clean linen? A bristly chin and a neck without a collar would do the whole business, without trouble or expense. If, added to that, the criminal gets his “portrait” in the paper, he’s safe.

My feet were on the sofa. The gin bottle and a jug of beer stood on Lucinda’s pet polished table. Arnold was gently scraping his boots on the copper scuttle, and Smithers had his head well into the white curtains. The rugs were kicked up; there were spent matches all over the floor. It was an education to see how by a few well-thought-out touches we had wrecked the room.

Lucinda was pretty punctual. She stood on the threshold for one second before she fled. I looked round. There was blank tragedy on her face. Gully got up, appearing a little guilty. He went out to her. Judging by the direction of their voices he found her in the lobby, with her face buried in his overcoat. She was crying. We three in the untidy room, thick with smoke and stale with spirit, heard her say in a muffled way:

“This is too much. You’ve taken away the--s--silver--all the decencies of life. You talk to me of a cheap boarding house. I’ll never consent to it; I’d rather die or go back to papa. And you’ve brought those wretches into my drawing room.”

“But we agreed, darling, that it wasn’t to be a drawing room any longer. We said that we’d devote it to the people. Your own idea was a laundresses’ weekly tea, and----”

“You look disreputable. You look like--a--brigand. No collar--that tie. I never was so miserable. I never would have married you if----”

“My dearest, you wouldn’t have me wound the susceptibilities of those worthy fellows----”

“And one with his hateful great feet on the embroidered cushion my cousin Ethel sent from India, and another----”

“Lucinda, you surprise me. I thought you’d be so pleased. I arranged it as a delicate attention--a pleasant surprise party. Sons of toil, dear, all of them, and----”

“Dirty brutes! I hate the whole thing. I’m tired to death.” We heard her stamp her feet viciously on the oil-cloth. “The election is all going to pieces. Let it! _I_ don’t care. Just look at my new skirt--all mud and torn to ribbons. You never saw such a filthy place, such a set of roughs! I couldn’t even get a decent cup of tea. And--and--I went into the wrong committee room, and the man--the other man--laughed, the idiot! I wish I’d---- Oh, Tom! I never thought you could be so cruel, so unmanly. Do be yourself again. I can’t think what has come over you. It has worried me dreadfully. Let us be comfortable again. Send those monsters away.”

Gully said impressively:

“Will you go to the Wigans’ ball? I’ve got my way to make in the world. Wigan’s wife is--well, you know her. Decent old charwoman; got sense enough to hold her tongue. Wigan is sensitive on that point. If we snub his wife it may be bad for me.”

“Will I go? What a question! Of course I will.”

“And committee rooms and mass-meetings and particularly that Socialist cad----”

“Don’t mention him. I’m sick, I tell you--sick, sick. He hardly spoke a civil word to me--after the way I’ve slaved. Go and send those men away, if you love me.”

“You don’t think a little friendly supper----”

“I won’t hear of it.”

We heard--well, we heard him kiss her--and then we heard her whisk away into the bedroom to bathe her eyes, and Gully came in with a wide grin to dismiss us. As we went through the passage we heard the vigorous splash of water in the basin.

Gully let us out. We went down the stone stairs, with stealthy handshakes and smothered chuckles, leaving him alone with Lucinda, and master once more.

BEYOND THE GRAY GATE.

POOR Nat Chaytor had this set once. It is very inconvenient--just two rooms and a nest of cupboards called a kitchen. You never saw such cupboards, such idiotic waste of space! Probably not. Every set is different. The old fellows who designed the place were freakish. It is small and inconvenient, but the best I can afford. I’m three quarters in arrears with the rent, as it is. Some day I shall have to shoot the moon and get the boys in the other sets to help me do it. We all hang together in adversity.

When Chaytor took it he was a clerk in the City at one hundred and eighty pounds a year. On one hundred and eighty pounds a year he married Minnie, who was the lady typewriting clerk in the same office. They lived here--just for a bit, as he always explained--until their ship came home. He was a most hopeful fellow. They pegged on pretty comfortably for a time. Minnie smartened up the rooms--that plush bracket on the wall above your head was hers. She turned up her nose pretty considerably at other ladies in the Inn. She routed Chaytor’s laundress. The poor old soul came and poured out her woes to me. She had everything her own way so long as Chaytor was a bachelor. I remember that he came home from the City one day in his lunch hour--which he usually stretched into two--and found her asleep on his bed. She had not even troubled to take off her battered black bonnet or the sacking apron whose narrow string kept her together at the waist. But Minnie, as she rather snappishly said, was not going to “put up with such ways. She would rather do the work herself.” So Mrs. Percival got a week’s notice.

“I’ve done for dozens of gentlemen in the Inn, as you knows, sir,” she said pathetically to me; “and then to be sacked by a hussy like her. An’ me the widow of a solicitor myself, and a lady by birth.”

Things went on well enough with the Chaytors for a few months. We did not see much of Nat; Minnie had a freezing, fine-lady manner with old bachelor friends, and liked her husband to go to bed when she did--punctually at eleven. Things went on well enough until he got discharged from his berth in the City. It was the usual story--business bad, reducing the staff, and so on. But I rather fancy that Nat’s easy hours had something to do with it. He always turned up half an hour late in the morning, took two hours for his lunch, another hour for afternoon tea, and went off at six every night, very often leaving the members of the firm at their desks. He had that fierce, sick hatred of City life which so many fellows have--nearly all the fellows who are good for anything. The dozens that I have seen chuck the accursed City! Some of these go up and some go under. But whichever way it is, they live--or die--free men.

He lost his berth. He was rather relieved than otherwise. He had been expecting it for a long time. A City clerk’s is a grim calling. He is never safe, and he knows that once out of a situation the chances are ten to one against his getting another. It is like losing your footing in a crowd--there is small chance of getting up again. Orion knew that; it egged him on to murder the old woman in Great Ormond Street.

No doubt Nat had a hot time with Minnie when he told her the news. She was one of those small, sharp-featured, rasping-voiced girls, with an ineffaceable sneer on her lips. Her creed was getting on in the world. She had been hoping that Nat would have a rise--two hundred a year, so that they might have a house all to themselves in the suburbs, and a little maidservant with a cap and apron. She said that the Inn wasn’t a fit place for a respectable young woman, and very likely she was right.

But Chaytor, as usual, put a good face on the affair. I think he was genuinely glad. The City fogs hurt his chest, he said; and was a man a slave or a schoolboy, that he should mount the same confounded office stool every morning, year in and year out!

“They only give us a fortnight’s holiday,” he added, “and then it is always wet. Find me the City clerk who has ever had a fine fortnight for his annual holiday!”

Minnie cried out savagely, “Stuff and nonsense!”

She asked him where he expected to find thirty-five pounds a year rent and a pound a week housekeeping, to say nothing of extras such as clothes.

“Easily enough,” Chaytor cried airily. “I’m going in for journalism.”

And then it began--the long, heart-breaking struggle--with a shrew at his elbow thrown in. He used to sit at the window and wait for the last post every evening. He watched the postman cross the square and fumble at his bag.

“That article is sure to be accepted,” he would call into the room to Minnie. “Here is the check coming upstairs. We’ll go down to your home for a little holiday.”

But the check never came. It was always a long envelope addressed in his own handwriting and containing his “copy” and the diabolically polite regrets of the editor. Poor old Chaytor!

Minnie carefully cleaned and oiled her typewriter and put an advertisement in a literary paper for copying work--quoting a penny a thousand less than the other advertisers.

The quick clinkety-clank of the typewriter tortured Chaytor; he hated machinery. He said mournfully that the world was rapidly becoming machine-made. Of course Minnie asked acidly, “where would he be if it were not for machines?”

Sometimes he got ten shillings, once a guinea, for an article, but it was the copying work that kept them. I remember the day when he got the guinea. He went out and spent two shillings on a plant in a pot for Minnie. You should have seen the look on her face when he presented it! I happened to be there. She went on clanking furiously, just spitting out through the din of her keys:

“The baker came while you were out. I had to shut the oak and keep as still as a mouse. We owe _him_ ten shillings. I don’t know where you think it is coming from.”

I suppose she was right, but one couldn’t help being sorry for Chaytor. He wasn’t really fit for this work-a-day world. I often had a queer feeling that he did not mean to stop in it long.

One morning in early April he burst out laughing. He was sitting at a table near the window polishing up one of his articles, and Minnie was typing at another table in the middle of the room.

“What is the matter?” she asked sharply.

He looked at her across the machine in a dazed way.

“Oh, nothing!” he muttered, confused by her clear, business-like glance. “I was only wondering why I am here--that’s all. It seemed odd.”

“I wish you were not here,” she returned practically. “Go and hunt round for a berth! There must be plenty. Why, if you began at £80 it would be better than nothing.”

Then she got up, saying it was time to get something for dinner. She came in with her hat and cape on to ask what he would like. The shabbiness of that hat and cape struck his heart, although he had not quite got rid of the dazed, unreal feeling which had come over him so suddenly. He noticed too, that Minnie’s cheeks, so pink once, had deepened to mottled purple, that her shallow eyes were hard and her cheek-bones sharp. He worried himself by wondering where her old self had gone. The girl he had courted under City gas lamps had left him and put a shrewish woman in her place. But she must have gone somewhere, that delicately tinted, coquettish girl. What became of cast-off selves?

“Well?” she said crisply, investigating the contents of her purse.

“Chops?”

“At thirteen pence a pound! No, thank you. A bit of beefsteak and a spring cabbage. I shan’t be long. I shall just run down Red Lion Street.”

She whisked off with her worn purse and her string bag. Chaytor began to dream of the country, which he knew very well, although he had never been more than ten miles from London since his childhood. But Minnie was a Somersetshire girl. She was always scattering careless word pictures. He knew just when you might find the first primroses, in sheltered spots, what cherry blossom was like, how they carted home hay. He knew the earliest date for the cuckoo, and how persistently the wryneck called through April and May; knew that the first notes of the nightingales were unsteady, that ladies’ smocks and king-cups only grew in damp spots.

He laughed. He felt that the country was his own rich inheritance. It really was ridiculous! A grim, rare, ripe joke that he--with such a kingdom of earth and sky--should be going through this farce. Why was he here? Why had he come? Why was he strangling himself slowly with thick London smoke? Why was he driving himself half mad to make both ends meet, to turn off articles suited to the popular taste--the debased popular taste which he scorned! It was queer. He laughed again.

Then he thought he would go out. Minnie would be annoyed when he came home and said that he had only been for a walk and not for a berth; but when you are playing at life, just masquerading, a woman’s anger does not matter very much. He went across the square. I saw him go. It was such a spring-like morning--in the Inn--that I almost called out of the window to say that I would come too. Instead of that, I watched him from behind the curtain and noticed, for the first time, how slowly he went, how hunched his shoulders were.

He went across to the Holborn Town Hall, where the trams start. He went by one to Stamford Hill and got down and went crawling along a row of new houses. They were villas of the sort that Minnie had been ambitious for when there was some chance of his screw being raised to two hundred pounds. They were semi-detached; between each pair was a narrow passage, convenient for the carting of coal and refuse. He stopped at one of these shoots; the passage was barred by a gate, an unpainted gate of gray oak.

He pushed it open, shut it softly, gave a last look back, and then went down the narrow entry. New walls of cheap brick rose on each side; the April wind hooted softly after him. At the end of the passage was another gate, which he went through. Beyond it was open common.

There had been rain. He saw stretches of dim brown and bleached yellow, broken here and there by the bright mustard tint of fully blown broom and patched with little pools on which the sun shone, turning them into irregular plates of turquoise. There was a tethered goat with a little kid by her side. Haughty geese, with their newly hatched families behind them, strutted proudly. There were ever so many young things; humpy, clumsy calves, ducklings trying to swim in the pools with all the dignity and address of their elders; a colt, set on long, stick-like, squarely placed legs--like a toy wooden horse--and with a funny tail like a hearth brush. Chaytor laughed heartily with recollection of this colt when he was telling us his experiences.

The heather sprang up after his feet had crushed it. Everything was whole and sweet. He sniffed at a delicious, intangible smell. He sat down, the ground yielded to his body like a pillow. He gave his aching lungs, clogged with so many years of smoke and fog, their fill. There was no house in sight, no, not one. No chimney speared the sky. The sky! He looked up, and the blue and yellow blinded him. He looked down and saw only wide clean common, patched by broom and gorse, spread with withered heather. A bird flew up singing, as if its throat would burst. Across the common came a jerky, regular call. Something tight came up in his neck and his eyes grew hot and dry. He had heard the lark. He had heard the cuckoo. He had ceased to masquerade, to play the fool. He had come to his own. He jumped up with a tremendous feeling of strength and exhilaration and went on. He swung his shoulders with a grand free swing. He looked about him, intently, critically, as a man looks at his inheritance.

The common seemed to be garnering itself and the face of the country was changing. He was approaching a pastoral district. He crossed a bridge; on one side was an iron railing, on the other a low coping of stone. He climbed over a stile. It had easy steps and a broad top--a good stile to linger on. It led into a little copse; merely a copse fringed with hazel, with a thick carpet of rotting leaves, with primroses and oxlips holding up their starry heads, with bluebells making a powdery haze.

There were lovers in the copse. They stared at him furtively, then scuttled into the shadow like timid birds. But he saw both the man and the girl grin sheepishly.

Beyond the copse was luscious, elastic pasture land. He went lightly along, noticing everything with microscopic fidelity. Women in the distance were bent double as they rooted out the flaming charlock from a field of barley.

Presently he saw an empty cottage, with broken windows and dropping roof of thatch. He wandered round it, looking in at rooms which were low-pitched and floored with flagstones, and which had yawning hearths for a wood fire. He stood in the orchard, where a red cow who had come in through a gap in the hedge was munching rank grass. The apple trees, with lichened, twisted trunks, were beginning to bloom. He walked round each tree slowly, as if he were some ancient priest intent on sacred rites. Then he wondered idly if there were any Quarranden apples. Minnie’s mother, the Somersetshire wife, had sent her daughter up a basket of those once. They were like Minnie’s own cheeks, and the red tinge went faintly through. When you took a big, rough bite, you saw pink bubbles of juice. It was like biting human flesh. He never forgot that basket of apples. Their arrival set a white stone in his life. They brought him into actual touch with his kingdom.

After a while he came out on a dusty road. Two boys, tow-headed and in picturesque rags, were looking after two lean cows who grazed by the waste. These children grinned at him broadly, as the lovers in the copse had done--though, like the lovers, they made no sound. It was a very silent world, except for the sing and cry of birds and animals. The boys grinned, evidently finding him much more diverting than the scarecrow three fields off, which was hanging its limp head and waving its fantastic arms. Chaytor felt uncomfortable; he was always a sensitive chap.

“They are laughing at my top hat and black coat,” he said to himself. “One ought to have a tweed suit for the country. That article on ‘Why Wear a White Shirt?’ is certainly in the popular style and will be taken. I’ll turn off two or three more in the same vein and then get some tweeds. Minnie and I can come here often. It won’t cost much. We can always run to the tram fare.”

The country echoed with weak bleats; it was the month when young lambs are dropped. He went on. The sky kept changing. Sometimes it was reminiscent of towns. He dreaded to see some foul gust of smoke break over the misty hills which belted him. Then it was dappled, then clear blue. It sloped to the horizon in streaks, as if swept by a broad-lipped brush. The earth changed too; it was green, purple, spice-colored, or hot red. Clumps of elms rose here and there, usually marking a homestead. Their black branches waved like the straggling feathers in Minnie’s Sunday hat. There was no sound--but the sound of the cuckoo and of sheep. He seemed to actually hear the silence. He was away from machines at last; not even the shriek of a railway engine disturbed him. He was away from the clack of praiseworthy Minnie’s typewriter. He let it flood his ears--this stillness. These were the restful, silent moments he had often longed for. Everything was stationary. There was no fierce struggle to get on, to grab more than your neighbor.

He drank in all the wonder of the hedgerows; the tight, shy fronds of the male fern--all the marvelous secrecy of the curved bank. He saw primroses, the dapple of pale lilac where milkmaid bloomed. Dandelions, like dropped guineas, rose from the grass.

He came to another house, and stared at the long wasteful slope of the red roof, at narrow windows lurking under heavy eaves, at the tracery of oak beams across greenish-white plaster walls. A tremendous pear tree just in bloom shaded the house door. A patch of kitchen garden had been turned up roughly in autumn; there were black heaps of manure, the size and shape of haycocks, on the ridged earth. Clothes hung on a line--dim colors, patched garments of outlandish shape. The bloom of the pear tree was falling; it was gray on the stone path.

A young woman came out to the gate and stared at him curiously. He asked her for a drink of water. She led the way into the dairy, never saying a word. He thought the silence of country people very strange. He had become accustomed to the restless loquacity of the eager Cockney.

She was a fresh-faced young woman and seemed fragrant, just as everything else was. A robust woman! Her arms beneath her rolled-up sleeves were quite brawny--rosy, round arms, dented at the elbows and a deeper red. He watched her dip the milk. The dairy was cool; he thought of a sweet, intensely still grave. There were shallow bowls full of cream. There was a slab of slate on which was butter in firm pounds, all marked with the same mark. She gave him the milk and shook her head when he offered to pay. Their hands touched round the mug, which was striped blue and white. Hers was strong and dry and very cold.

When he went away he looked back once. She was at the gate, watching him with a slow, speculative glance in which he fancied he detected a touch of fear. He took away a vivid impression of her. She was a ruddy-faced young woman in a lilac cotton gown. It was short-waisted, and her linen apron was tied very high, almost under her arms. She seemed oddly shaped--a creature with a minimum of body; all curly head, round, big bust, and long limbs.

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