"The W"s are things I and Meg and Aunt Juley know about and you don"t, so there!"
"I suppose that ours is a female house," said Margaret, "and one must just accept it. No, Aunt Juley, I don"t mean that this house is full of women. I am trying to say something much more clever. I mean that it was irrevocably feminine, even in father"s time. Now I"m sure you understand! Well, I"ll give you another example. It"ll shock you, but I don"t care. Suppose Queen Victoria gave a dinner-party, and that the guests had been Leighton, Millais, Swinburne, Rossetti, Meredith, Fitzgerald, etc. Do you suppose that the atmosphere of that dinner would have been artistic? Heavens, no! The very chairs on which they sat would have seen to that. So with out house--it must be feminine, and all we can do is to see that it isn"t effeminate. Just as another house that I can mention, but won"t, sounded irrevocably masculine, and all its inmates can do is to see that it isn"t brutal."
"That house being the W"s house, I presume," said Tibby.
"You"re not going to be told about the W"s, my child," Helen cried, "so don"t you think it. And on the other hand, I don"t the least mind if you find out, so don"t you think you"ve done anything clever, in either case. Give me a cigarette."
"You do what you can for the house," said Margaret. "The drawing-room reeks of smoke."
"If you smoked too, the house might suddenly turn masculine. Atmosphere is probably a question of touch and go. Even at Queen Victoria"s dinner-party--if something had been just a little Different--perhaps if she"d worn a clinging Liberty tea-gown instead of a magenta satin."
"With an India shawl over her shoulders--"
"Fastened at the bosom with a Cairngorm-pin."
Bursts of disloyal laughter--you must remember that they are half German--greeted these suggestions, and Margaret said pensively, "How inconceivable it would be if the Royal Family cared about Art." And the conversation drifted away and away, and Helen"s cigarette turned to a spot in the darkness, and the great flats opposite were sown with lighted windows which vanished and were refit again, and vanished incessantly. Beyond them the thoroughfare roared gently--a tide that could never be quiet, while in the east, invisible behind the smokes of Wapping, the moon was rising.
"That reminds me, Margaret. We might have taken that young man into the dining-room, at all events. Only the majolica plate--and that is so firmly set in the wall. I am really distressed that he had no tea."
For that little incident had impressed the three women more than might be supposed. It remained as a goblin footfall, as a hint that all is not for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and that beneath these superstructures of wealth and art there wanders an ill-fed boy, who has recovered his umbrella indeed, but who has left no address behind him, and no name.
CHAPTER VI
WE are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.
The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss, but he could see it, and at times people whom he knew had dropped in, and counted no more. He knew that he was poor, and would admit it; he would have died sooner than confess any inferiority to the rich. This may be splendid of him. But he was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it. He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food.
Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly coloured civilisations of the past, he would have had a definite status, his rank and his income would have corresponded. But in his day the angel of Democracy had arisen, enshadowing the cla.s.ses with leathern wings, and proclaiming, "All men are equal--all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas," and so he was obliged to a.s.sert gentility, lest he slip into the abyss where nothing counts, and the statements of Democracy are inaudible.
As he walked away from Wickham Place, his first care was to prove that he was as good as the Miss Schlegels. Obscurely wounded in his pride, he tried to wound them in return. They were probably not ladies. Would real ladies have asked him to tea? They were certainly ill-natured and cold.
At each step his feeling of superiority increased. Would a real lady have talked about stealing an umbrella? Perhaps they were thieves after all, and if he had gone into the house they would have clapped a chloroformed handkerchief over his face. He walked on complacently as far as the Houses of Parliament. There an empty stomach a.s.serted itself, and told him that he was a fool.
"Evening, Mr. Bast."
"Evening, Mr. Dealtry."
"Nice evening."
"Evening."
Mr. Dealtry, a fellow clerk, pa.s.sed on, and Leonard stood wondering whether he would take the tram as far as a penny would take him, or whether he would walk. He decided to walk--it is no good giving in, and he had spent money enough at Queen"s Hall--and he walked over Westminster Bridge, in front of St. Thomas"s Hospital, and through the immense tunnel that pa.s.ses under the South-Western main line at Vauxhall. In the tunnel he paused and listened to the roar of the trains. A sharp pain darted through his head, and he was conscious of the exact form of his eye sockets. He pushed on for another mile, and did not slacken speed until he stood at the entrance of a road called Camelia Road which was at present his home.
Here he stopped again, and glanced suspiciously to right and left, like a rabbit that is going to bolt into its hole. A block of flats, constructed with extreme cheapness, towered on either hand. Farther down the road two more blocks were being built, and beyond these an old house was being demolished to accommodate another pair. It was the kind of scene that may be observed all over London, whatever the locality--bricks and mortar rising and falling with the restlessness of the water in a fountain as the city receives more and more men upon her soil. Camelia Road would soon stand out like a fortress, and command, for a little, an extensive view. Only for a little. Plans were out for the erection of flats in Magnolia Road also. And again a few years, and all the flats in either road might be pulled down, and new buildings, of a vastness at present unimaginable, might arise where they had fallen.
"Evening, Mr. Bast."
"Evening, Mr. Cunningham."
"Very serious thing this decline of the birth-rate in Manchester."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Very serious thing this decline of the birth-rate in Manchester,"
repeated Mr. Cunningham, tapping the Sunday paper, in which the calamity in question had just been announced to him.
"Ah, yes," said Leonard, who was not going to let on that he had not bought a Sunday paper.
"If this kind of thing goes on the population of England will be stationary in 1960."
"You don"t say so."
"I call it a very serious thing, eh?"
"Good-evening, Mr. Cunningham."
"Good-evening, Mr. Bast."
Then Leonard entered Block B of the flats, and turned, not upstairs, but down, into what is known to house agents as a semi-bas.e.m.e.nt, and to other men as a cellar. He opened the door, and cried, "Hullo!" with the pseudo geniality of the c.o.c.kney. There was no reply. "Hullo!" he repeated. The sitting-room was empty, though the electric light had been left burning. A look of relief came over his face, and he flung himself into the armchair.
The sitting-room contained, besides the armchair, two other chairs, a piano, a three-legged table, and a cosy corner. Of the walls, one was occupied by the window, the other by a draped mantelshelf bristling with Cupids. Opposite the window was the door, and beside the door a bookcase, while over the piano there extended one of the masterpieces of Maud Goodman. It was an amorous and not unpleasant little hole when the curtains were drawn, and the lights turned on, and the gas-stove unlit.
But it struck that shallow makeshift note that is so often heard in the dwelling-place. It had been too easily gained, and could be relinquished too easily.
As Leonard was kicking off his boots he jarred the three-legged table, and a photograph frame, honourably poised upon it, slid sideways, fell off into the fireplace, and smashed. He swore in a colourless sort of way, and picked the photograph up. It represented a young lady called Jacky, and had been taken at the time when young ladies called Jacky were often photographed with their mouths open. Teeth of dazzling whiteness extended along either of Jacky"s jaw"s, and positively weighed her head sideways, so large were they and so numerous. Take my word for it, that smile was simply stunning, and it is only you and I who will be fastidious, and complain that true joy begins in the eyes, and that the eyes of Jacky did not accord with her smile, but were anxious and hungry.
Leonard tried to pull out the fragments of gla.s.s, and cut his fingers and swore again. A drop of blood fell on the frame, another followed, spilling over on to the exposed photograph. He swore more vigorously, and dashed into the kitchen, where he bathed his hands. The kitchen was the same size as the sitting-room; beyond it was a bedroom. This completed his home. He was renting the flat furnished; of all the objects that enc.u.mbered it none were his own except the photograph frame, the Cupids, and the books.
"d.a.m.n, d.a.m.n, d.a.m.nation!" he murmured, together with such other words as he had learnt from older men. Then he raised his hand to his forehead and said, "Oh, d.a.m.n it all--" which meant something different. He pulled himself together. He drank a little tea, black and silent, that still survived upon an upper shelf. He swallowed some dusty crumbs of a cake.
Then he went back to the sitting-room, settled himself anew, and began to read a volume of Ruskin.
"Seven miles to the north of Venice--"
How perfectly the famous chapter opens! How supreme its command of admonition and of poetry! The rich man is speaking to us from his gondola.
"Seven miles to the north of Venice the banks of sand which nearer the city rise little above low-water mark attain by degrees a higher level, and knit themselves at last into fields of salt mora.s.s, raised here and there into shapeless mounds, and intercepted by narrow creeks of sea."
Leonard was trying to form his style on Ruskin; he understood him to be the greatest master of English Prose. He read forward steadily, occasionally making a few notes.
"Let us consider a little each of these characters in succession, and first (for of the shafts enough has been said already), what is very peculiar to this church--its luminousness."
Was there anything to be learnt from this fine sentence? Could he adapt it to the needs of daily life? Could he introduce it, with modifications, when he next wrote a letter to his brother, the lay-reader? For example:
"Let us consider a little each of these characters in succession, and first (for of the absence of ventilation enough has been said already), what is very peculiar to this flat--its obscurity."
Something told him that the modifications would not do; and that something, had he known it, was the spirit of English Prose. "My flat is dark as well as stuffy." Those were the words for him.
And the voice in the gondola rolled on, piping melodiously of Effort and Self-Sacrifice, full of high purpose, full of beauty, full even of sympathy and the love of men, yet somehow eluding all that was actual and insistent in Leonard"s life. For it was the voice of one who had never been dirty or hungry, and had not guessed successfully what dirt and hunger are.