Merrick Leonard
The Quaint Companions
CHAPTER VIII
In the first days of an intended tour he had taken a slight cold. He had to leave for Birmingham on the morrow, and he reached it chilled and shivering. To sing was out of the question. He remained in the hotel, and ordered hot drinks and additional blankets. Next morning he woke with a cough, and sent for a doctor; but the cough grew worse in spite of medical aid, and when he was joined by a companion whom he had been expecting, he was found in bed with pneumonia.
He was asleep when David arrived. In the sitting-room the companion was having dinner. David accepted her presence without astonishment. She said she supposed he must be hungry, and told him to ring the bell; he answered that he was not hungry in the least. She had peroxide-of-hydrogen hair, and painted cheeks, and a coarse voice. He sat in an armchair by the fire, and looked at her.
"How soon shall I be able to go in?" he asked, trembling.
"They'll tell 'im you're here when 'e wakes up," she said, with her mouth full. "You'd better have something to eat, you know. 'David' your name is, isn't it?"
"Yes. I couldn't eat anything, thank you. Who is taking care of him?" He knew already that the companion wasn't.
"The doctor sent round two nurses from the hospital – a day nurse and a night nurse. He's in a bad way. You should see how thin 'e's got."
"Will he – get well?" inquired his son, with a jerk.
"Let soap so," said the woman. She refilled her glass, and emptied the bottle. "Have some champagne?"
He shook his head. "I wish he'd wake."
"You better had," she rejoined; "there's nothing like champagne when you're feeling low." The waiter reappeared with the sweets. "Bring up another bottle," she said, "and a green chartrooze. I don't think I'll take any of those. What's that one – the floppy thing with the pink-and-white stuff on it?"
The waiter murmured that it was trifle.
"No, I don't want any." She made a wretched pun, and told him to pass her the cigarettes. The box was a silver one that belonged to the sick man; the boy winced to see her careless hand thrust in it. He wondered what the waiter thought of her, wondered that his father wasn't ashamed – and knew a gust of self-reproach for condemning him to-night. A lump rose suddenly in his throat, his eyeballs pricked; he stared hard at the fire in a struggle to keep back the tears that were starting… To his shame he felt one trickling down his cheek.
"Don't you smoke?" asked the woman.
"Not now," he muttered, and knew that his voice had betrayed him.
She turned to him surprised. "What's the matter with you?"
"Nothing," he said angrily; "what should there be?"
In the road, a piano-organ reeled out a cadenza, and then stopped short. After the sharp silence that ensued, the roll of the traffic seemed to fill the room. The cork popped, and he drank his wine at a draught.
"Go on."
"I don't want any more."
"Sure?" She tilted her glass. "Well, here's to Temperance, and down with champagne!"
Though he no longer watched her, he was intensely conscious of her presence; it weighed upon his senses, he resented it with every nerve. The odour of her cigarette permeated his thoughts while he waited, and he fancied that he could hear her breathe.
The nurse came in, and said that Lee was asking for him. She warned him not to remain more than a few minutes. The sight of her strengthened the boy. As he followed this clean-faced woman in her sober dress, a tinge of confidence lightened his apprehension.
Lee had altered painfully. His words were whispers. In the first moments there seemed something unreal in seeing him lying there so weak.
"Davie."
"Father."
"Sit down."
"Why didn't you wire before, father?"
"It was time enough."
"You're getting on nicely, they say."
"Perhaps."
"Do they know at home?"
Lee bent his head. "The papers. But I don't want her here. I told her she needn't come."
"But she may, and – "
"Oh no; she won't want to."
There was a pause. Then he said in firmer tones:
"This is a bad business, sonny."
"It'll be all right."
"Have you seen Julia?"
"The woman in there? Yes."
"She's a good sort, Julia – looks after everything. Most of 'em would have cleared out and left me."
David wondered what awaited her elsewhere. He turned very cold – the illusion frightened him, for in health Lee had had no illusions.
"A good sort," murmured the man, "eh?"
"Yes," said the boy, faintly.
"She's got a friend here now – comes in to see her sometimes – but it must be very slow for her; not many women would have stopped. See that she's comfortable, Davie."
"I'll see to it, father."
Lee closed his eyes, and his thoughts wandered through the years to a morning when he followed a widow about Brighton, and overtook her on Marine Parade. The sun shone out to him again, and he heard the wash of the waves on the beach. He came back to David.
"If I don't pull through, it'll be an awful mess," he said. "God knows what I owe I I wish I'd put a bit by for you."
"You'll have plenty of time to put by in, father. Don't talk nonsense about not pulling through; in a month you'll be as strong as ever."
The woman who was called Julia opened the door, and whisked over to the dressing-table.
"Sorry to bother," she said; "there's another bill from the chemist's come in; I've got no money left."
"Take some," said the dying man. "Where do you keep the key?"
She unlocked the drawer, and whisked out again. There had been a rustle of bank-notes.
"A good sort, Julia," he repeated; "looks after everything. I must give her something, Davie… There's my scarf-pin somewhere about – it'll do for her tie."
David left him soon, mindful of the nurse's instructions, and at nine o'clock the doctor paid another visit.
"I should like to have a physician down from town, if you don't mind," stammered the lad; "the best we can get."
"Just as you please," said the practitioner, stiffly. "But the treatment in these cases – "
David felt shy, and was annoyed with himself for being so. The sense, inherited and acquired, of racial inferiority cowed him as he opposed his opinion to the authoritative stranger's.
"Yes, if you don't mind, I should like a physician," he insisted, after an inward struggle. Embarrassment lent a ring of defiance to his voice, and the doctor thought him a cub.
So the telegram was written, and the cub went out with it himself.
When he returned to the sitting-room, Julia was playing cards for coppers with a faded woman in shabby black, who was presented to him as "Mrs. Hayes." A brandy bottle and a syphon stood between the glasses on the table; and when Mrs. Hayes won a shilling she tittered: "Lucky at love, unlucky at cards, my dear!" As she put on her bonnet, she gave a start. "There! I meant to 'ave bought sixpenn'orth, against my being bad again in the night, dear," she exclaimed; "the pubs 'll be shut by now!" And then her hostess summoned the waiter, and Mrs. Hayes carried another bottle home under her cape.
It was in these surroundings, rather more than a week after the consultation, that the tenor died.
CHAPTER IX
And Ownie – in weeds for the second time in her life – sighed as she had sighed when she lost Harris, "I don't know what will become of me!" Though her youth was gone, her egoism remained, and even the solicitor was touched by the pathos of her helplessness. "I was a good wife," she said, having had a week to convince herself of it; "it's hard that he never made any provision for the future."
David did not return to school, and Vivian, who found his mother's lamentations wearisome when he was at home, began to thaw towards his half-brother, and discussed matters with him.
"The mater is selfish, you know," he said; "she only thinks of herself. It's deuced rough on you and me, but she never talks about that. I suppose we shall have to go into a poky little house somewhere, and pig along with one or two servants eh?" He was unconsciously picturing the environment in which he had been born.
"I suppose so," said David.
"Good Lord! When one remembers all the money that was made, you know, it's awful. They ought to have saved. The idea of spending every bob, and never thinking about to-morrow! I don't blame him any more than her, of course," he added hastily; "it was her fault too; but I wish they had let me go to the Cape. It isn't a lively look-out to live in a tin-pot house here, and come home to find the mater fretting over her lost splendours. That's what it will be – she isn't the woman to be cheerful when things go wrong. I shan't be able to stand it; I know I shan't. I shall cut it after a bit, and take a room up West."
"She won't let you. Besides, she may need your salary."
"What?"
"Well, who's going to keep her if we don't?"
"Oh, I say!" exclaimed Vivian, "do you mean to tell me we shall be as poor as all that?"
"I don't know. I hope we shan't. I'm sure I don't want to live at home either now; but it's likely enough, isn't it?"
Vivian pondered.
"There's her jewellery," he said at last; "that's worth a lump, you know. As to your not living at home either, one of us will have to, it's certain! She can't be left by herself; it wouldn't be right."
"I don't think that my going would trouble her; she has never wanted me. If she does, of course I'll stop. The thing is, I don't know what sort of berth I can expect to get. I'm afraid it won't be very easy for – for a fellow like me to get anything to do, will it?" He tried to force a laugh. "I've never been in demand so far."
"No, there is that," said Vivian. "She was talking about it yesterday."
"What did she say?"
"Only that. It won't be so easy as if you were – you know! You ought to have sung, Dave, then you'd have been all right. Fancy, if you'd had the governor's voice; by Jove, there would have been none of this bother at all! Of course, if you can write, it'll be better than nothing." He hesitated, and looked a little sheepish, for such confidences were new between them. "You want to go in for being an author, don't you?"
David nodded. "I've sent verses to magazines already; only, they weren't taken."
"I should peg away at it if I were you. I always told the mater it wasn't half a bad idea for you when she called it 'rot.' It doesn't matter what an author looks like, you see; if he's as hideous as the veiled Johnny in what's-its-name, it doesn't show in his books. Just you go on turning it out; that's my advice. I'd like to see some of your things one day."
"Still," said David, "I shall have to get a berth at first, you know. I shall give it up before long, of course, but I must have one at the start."
A sincere belief in oneself generally inspires conviction in somebody. That is why Ownie had never failed to find supporters. Vivian regarded his half-brother a shade enviously.
"It's my opinion you're not half such a fool as the mater thinks, old chap," he murmured. "I wish I could do something of the sort myself, though I can't say I'm nuts on poetry. Just you swot away. If you write enough, some of it's bound to bring in some coin sooner or later. Now, what have J got to look forward to? Why, nothing at all! I can stick on where I am for ever. If I'd gone to the Cape, I might have come back a millionaire; but how on earth can I hope to make any money in a billet in London?"
"I thought," David said, "that what you really wanted was to go into the Army?"
"Oh, well, I did – I was younger then; we all want to do something silly at that age. I've changed my mind about that. I want to make money, that's all I want; I'd like to be a manager. There's plenty of oof to be made in the musical business, I can tell you, even if you don't sing or play yourself. There are lots who do – and brains are as good as a voice, if it comes to that. Of course the swell artists get deuced big terms, but if you're smart you can get the others to pay you. I'm keeping my eyes open, what do you think? It isn't difficult to make a profit on a concert if your rent's not too high, and you go the right way to work; it's like making a book on a race. And, after a bit, you get cracked up in the papers for your 'services to musical art in England,' too. If I had something to start with, I'd have a shot at the game to-morrow."
He stroked an incipient moustache, and David looked at him with respect. Himself, he panted to be famous – fortune was a detail – but the flourish of qualities that he didn't possess impressed him.
Some little time passed before Vivian was relieved of his fear of having to contribute immediately towards his mother's support. Then, when light was shed, it was evident that if she sold her diamonds, she could withdraw from The Woodlands with a considerable sum, and the earliest idea was to remove to a villa at Balham or Wandsworth. On the advice of one of the decrepit foreigners, however, who promised her a clientèle, she talked presently of taking a boarding-house at Regent's Park as soon as she was able to sub-let. The fall was crushing, but at least it was better than solitude in a suburb and living on her capital. Privately, too, as she foresaw herself ministering to the palates of bachelors, with a red lampshade over the dinner-table, she considered the possibility of marrying again. She was prepared to view purple moustaches with a more lenient eye now, and she contemplated a business run on good lines with more complacence than she permitted to appear.
In the meantime, before a tenant was forthcoming, several attempts were made to find David employment. The decrepit, but faithful, rallied round her – the least deserving generally receive the most sympathy – and though a coloured boy of forbidding countenance was no acquisition, he at last obtained a clerkship at a music publisher's.
When he had been engaged at Panzetta's a few days, he broached to his mother his desire to live alone. He didn't allude to her lack of affection for him; he put the matter on grounds of expedience.
"I don't think my money would be any help to you, would it?" he said; "fares and lunches run away with a good deal. I couldn't give you any more out of a pound a week than it would cost you to keep me. If I took a bedroom near Panzetta's, there wouldn't be any fares to pay. I saw one advertised for seven shillings, quite close by; I might go and look at it, if you don't mind."
Now she had reflected already that he would be no acquisition to a boarding-house either, and in her heart she was relieved by his proposal. Still her hesitation was not wholly insincere.
"You're very young to go away by yourself, David," she demurred; "you're not seventeen, you know. I don't think you ought to do that yet."
"I'm quite old enough to take care of myself. If you have no objection, I should prefer to go." He spoke in the tone that was natural to him when he addressed his mother, and it sounded as if he were resigning a situation. It pierced even her coldness. She flushed, and looked down.
"I know you've never been very fond of me, of course," she faltered. "Now your father is dead, I suppose there's nothing to keep you with me?"
"I never said that," replied David. But she observed that he did not deny it. "I don't see what use there is in stopping here – and in a boarding-house you would find me in the way, too."
She was startled. It came upon her as a shock, to discover how well she was understood by the son to whom she had voluntarily revealed herself so little. For almost the first time she felt remorseful; something of tenderness moved her towards the boy whom she had taught to regard her as a stranger.
"If you'll be happier away, go," she returned, in a low voice; "only don't forget there's always your home if you want to come back." One cannot undo the past by a mood; missing the confirmation of response, she was never keenly aware of it herself, but there was a stir of appeal within her as she added the last words.
"Thank you," said David politely.
He went to look at the room during the luncheon hour next day. It was in. Soho: the ordinary lodging-house attic, with a rickety chest of drawers, a white paraffin lamp, and a low ceiling that dipped to a window which commanded a fairly extensive view of neighbouring chimneys. However, he was not dissatisfied. The window, indeed, rather attracted him by reason of a resemblance it bore to the one in the familiar prints of Chatterton. He settled to move in on the following Monday, and left a half-crown as deposit. Ownie, duly informed of his arrangements, said little but that she should expect him to come to see her on Sundays, wherever she might be. Not so Vivian; Vivian said that he would be very short on a pound a week, but that he was to be envied all the same. As for himself, he had thrown out hints of taking diggings too, and "the mater had sat on him promptly. Considering she meant to run a hash-house, her opposition was distinct rot, you know, because she would have plenty of people to talk to there without him!"
It would have been becoming for David to feel sentimental when he packed his books, and his clothes, and went to bed in his little room in The Woodlands for the last time; but he did not. He was vaguely surprised at the absence of appropriate emotions. A profound relief was in his heart, the relief with which the unwelcome embrace solitude. There is none deeper.
He had grown in fetters. The burden of knowledge had weighted his soul, hampered his speech, even cramped his gait; and he was to be free. His spirit stretched itself. The only love that had been given to him had passed away, and he expected life to yield no other, was resigned to know no other; he wasn't seventeen. To be alone, to be famous! as yet he asked no more. And he looked forward boldly. No suspicion of the disappointments, the disillusions that lay before him, no inkling of the difficulties that throng the path of the literary idealist, leavened his mood.
When he drew up the blind next morning, the sky was fair; the garden of his childhood glistened in the sunshine. Ownie was not an early riser, and when he had breakfasted, he went upstairs again to say good-bye to her. "Well! – don't forget to come on Sunday," she said, and he nodded assent. His trunk was to be called for and delivered at the lodging during the day, so he walked with Vivian to the station. Hampstead was alive with young men walking to the station, young men recently introduced into their fathers' businesses and proudly conscious of their first silk hats, and their gold watch-chains. No overcoats hid the watch-chains, though it was freezing. David marked the youths pityingly: to have no other prospect than an office all one's life!
He took his seat in Panzetta's with a new exhilaration. The hopes of glory that have faded on an office-stool might have provided him with another theme, but he did not think of that. Mentally he examined his manuscripts, and decided which of them to submit to an editor next. Nine-tenths of the journals published in London were unknown to him, his verse was as yet imitative, he believed that the best work was the easiest to sell. But the road was hidden from him, and he smiled.
A small fire was smoking in the attic when he reached it. His box had arrived. He lit the lamp, and produced from his pocket a purchase that he had just made – it was a penny bottle of ink. When he had had a cup of tea and some bread-and-butter, he put his clothes in the rickety chest of drawers, and arranged his books on the top of it. Then he took from the trunk pens and foolscap, drew the one chair to the table with infinite zest, and brushed the crumbs out of his way.
But he did not write. Memories flocked thick and fast. After awhile he got up and looked out over the chimney-pots. The view was very cold; under the moon the roofs shone white, and snow was falling. He thought of it falling on a grave. The poignancy of sorrow overcame him, and he sat huddled by the window, the tears dripping down his face.
CHAPTER X
Thus began the second book of David's life, where so many books of life have begun, and where so many are fated to end – in a garret of a lodging-house. Now, too, began his acquaintance with larger London, no longer the capital of concerts and cafés to him, but the London of grim, inhospitable streets, of dull-faced, tramping crowds, the London that the millions know, sordid and unsmiling – cheerful only for a consideration, a niggard even of its light. There were many evenings when he could not write – in the first months many evenings when he did not attempt to write – and, drifting from Soho, he would rove about the city till late, rove west and east, tempted to unfamiliar quarters by the promise of their names, storing impressions. He supped at coffee-stalls and heard the vagrants talk, and rose at dawn to breakfast among the workers and the wastrels in the five-o'clock public-houses near the markets. On Sundays when it did not rain, and he didn't go to see his mother, he explored the parks, or wandered beyond the stretching tentacles of London in woodland which the monster had not yet absorbed. He journeyed among holiday-makers who were boisterous, but never gay, who shouted, but who never laughed. The outskirts that he found were beautiful, and he yearned to read the hearts of these excursionists who, whether they covered the miles in dreary silence, or shrieked the burden of a cockney song, had always the same vacant gaze, the same sad, hopeless air. He saw that look on everyone, in varying degrees – the London look, bred of the dismal climate and the gloomy streets; he thought that he would recognise a Londoner anywhere, by his eyes. And when he returned, he noted how the fairness of England was disfigured where Englishmen began to build.
The love of London which some men have felt, was never born in David. He could not grow to love it though he tried. In time he came to wonder if he was blind – if something was lacking in him – when he read word-pictures of its "beauty," and knew that he found it execrable. True, there were many nights when the river mesmerised him and he hung rapt upon the bridges, but then the lamps shone only on the water, and the spell lay in the vast suggestiveness of a great city that he did not see.
Occasionally he went to the gallery of a theatre; more often he saved the shilling and bought a book that he coveted. Because he realised that he was not eating enough to feel very strong, he pawned his watch and chain when he had been in Soho about six months. It was a severe pang to him to part with what had been his father's present, even to part with it temporarily, and only the knowledge that his father, if he could advise, would bid him "pop it for all he could get," enabled him to make the sacrifice. A week afterwards, however, his diet had dwindled to its original proportions, and his library had much increased.
Meanwhile his manuscripts came back just as often as he enclosed a stamped and directed envelope. The word "regrets" grew odious to him; in the work of David Lee the word was seldom to be found, and he never wrote it without reluctance. Nobody wanted his poetry, nobody thought it worth printing. The rose-colour gradually faded from, his reveries; at the end of a year the boastfulness of boyhood had passed. He began to realise how stupendous was the task that he had approached so confidently. To attack London with a pen! he felt as if he were throwing sea-shells at a fortress. By degrees, too, he came to understand that a poet must be either celebrated, or ridiculous; the pennies that he spent in a news-room showed him that the poet in adversity appealed to the national sense of humour every week.
He derived encouragement from reading the biographies of great writers of the past – and was depressed when he scanned the reminiscences of successful authors of the day, for these always seemed to have "arrived" so gracefully. It surprised him to note that poverty and disdain had been the portion of only those who were dead.
It happened on a morning in April, the event that he never forgot, a morning when the sky across the chimney-pots was blue, and the sparrows hopped in a strange, yellow light which the oldest bird on the slates told them was called "sunshine." David woke up to find – not that he was famous, but that his jug of hot water supported a communication by which an editor offered him a guinea for a sonnet. And his behaviour was less original than his verse. He burned to impart the news to the drudge in curling-pins who brought in his tea and haddock, he wanted to pat the heads of the children who were playing tip-cat in the roads. In Soho it is never too early nor too late for the children who fill the roads to play tip-cat. In Bloomsbury they incline to roller-skates; in Bayswater – that happy hunting-ground of the organ-grinder and the street-arab – they "Follow my leader," yelling; but the passion of Soho is tip-cat. He bought a bunch of daffodils on his way to the office, and stuck them on his desk. He was still at Panzetta's – his salary had been raised ten shillings by this time – and the prospect of tendering his resignation shone out to his eager eyes again. The clouds had hidden it so long that he was dazzled. There was the gladness of summer in the sunlight that slanted through the dusty windows; all the temptations of the country lurked in the pennyworth of daffodils beside the ink-pot; he panted to be in the open, free to loose the extravagance of joy that swelled his heart.
"It's the sort of morning," he said in a burst to the accountant, who sat opposite, "that makes you think it's hot out-of-doors and want to go and pick poppies, and hear the rye rustle!"
The accountant lived at Ealing, and travelled by the same train as a distinguished counsel every day. He often mentioned vaingloriously that Sir Edward Jennings had nodded to him on the platform.
"Ah!" he rhapsodised. "With a carriage-and-pair to come and fetch you!"
David was a little less than nineteen when his first verses were accepted; he was a little less than twenty when they were paid for. Thus the thoughtfulness of the Editor provided him with two distinct occasions for rejoicing. He sent several other sonnets to the journal, and some of these were taken also, but a guinea is the professional Pons asinorum, and it was a long time before he cashed a cheque for any larger sum. The bright prospect of resigning the clerkship receded from him like a will-o'-the-wisp, and by-and-by he even smiled at his youthfulness, in remembering how happy that first acceptance of his work had made him feel.
And still he wrote. Sometimes he sat writing poetry, in front of the washhand-stand, until the lamp-flame waned and bobbed, and went out. So grew the manuscripts which were to be submitted to the publishers. Excepting the boarding-house, where Ownie reigned on in widowhood, he visited no one; excepting Vivian, who made his way to the attic at long intervals, no one visited him. Few among the millions in London were more utterly alone than this young man who alternately hoped and despaired, and, whether he was elated or despondent, had never an ear to heed him, heard never a voice that said "Cheer up." Vivian and Ownie were the only persons who ever inquired about his work, and to a dejected man the inquiries of the uncongenial are worse than none at all. No strangers could have been more foreign to each other than were the half-brothers, although they had a myriad memories in common. It is not time that enables people to understand one another, it is temperament. The world is heavy with couples who have sat opposite each other for forty years and are still tone deaf to each other's humour, and stone blind to each other's moods; and a recent acquaintance may say the right things to both. Vivian had encouraged poetry while he thought it might pay; since it didn't pay, he explained that the proper line of action was to deal in something else instead. There was nothing unpractical about the son of the late Mr. Harris; he was the kind of young fellow of whom it may be predicted, even while his pockets are empty, that he will rise somehow, and throw a few of his scruples overboard in the process. He was an occasional caller, but never a companion.
And slowly there crept into David's life a dull resentment of the solitude that had once been a relief, a longing for sympathy, for tenderness – a sense of bitter oppression as he looked in the glass and knew that he must never expect to find these things. And the face of every girl became a glass to him, and he winced before it. When his resources were low, he took his mid-day meal in a vegetarian restaurant, a place with a faint distinctive smell, and a three-course dinner for sixpence. One of the waitresses there was very pretty, and all had arch glances and undertones for the regular customers who cheated hunger with scones and "coffee," or some dish with an attractive name and a strangely nasty taste. Only with David none was ever arch. Once he summoned courage to say more to the pretty waitress than "Two poached eggs, please," and the haughtiness of her eyebrows slew him before she turned away. Often in the streets he saw a negro – black as Elisha had been – and across the crowd the gaze of the aliens would meet for a moment – drawn together by something deeper than curiosity. But neither could lift his silk hat and say to the other, "We are both damned, so let us be friends!" because the influence of civilisation prevented their acting like that, although their skins were the wrong colour.
Woman, impalpable, insistent, shared the garret with David now. And sometimes she was fair, and sometimes she was dark, but always she was beautiful; for at twenty the gift that man counts best in woman is loveliness; and at thirty it is wit; and at forty it is a keen appreciation of his own. From the dream-women who let him woo them, David heard many odes. At first his visitors were cold – mere Beauties from a hair-dresser's window – and he could only watch them timidly. But by degrees he found his voice, and told them how empty the attic had been before they came; and while he talked, the forms took flesh and blood, the lips whispered love words back to him; they made him confidences, and uttered sweet conceits, and then – Why then, the drudge in curling-pins banged, with a rejected poem, and the room was bare again.