The rumour spread through our street--where everybody rejoices in the knowledge of everything about everybody else who lives in it--that he had once been in the Civil Service, but had married beneath him and come down in the world. How the rumour originated I never asked, or never was told if I did ask; but it was so evident that he shrank from the practice of the carpenter"s trade that once we sent him with a letter to the Publisher--who shares our love of the neighbourhood to the point, not only of publishing from it, but of living in it--asking if some sort of place could not be found for him in the office. It was found, I am afraid to his disappointment, for he never made any effort to fill it, and was more diligent than ever in keeping out of our way. If he saw us coming, on the rare occasions when he stood at the front door, or the rarer when he cleaned the gas-bracket above it, he would run if there was time, or, if there was not, turn his head and stare fixedly in the other direction that he might escape speaking to us. As the months went on, he was never caught cleaning anything or doing anything in the shape of work, except sometimes, furtively, as if afraid of being detected in the act, shutting the front door when the clocks of the neighbourhood struck eleven. He was far less of a safeguard to us than I often fancied he thought we were to him.
Mrs. Haines was sufficiently unlike him to account for one part of the rumour. She was coa.r.s.e in appearance and disagreeable in manner, always on the defensive, always on the verge of flying into a temper. She had no objection to showing herself; on the contrary, she was perpetually about, hunting for faults to find; but she did object to showing herself with a broom or a duster, a pail or a scrubbing-brush in her hands. I shuddered sometimes at the thought of the shock to the Old Housekeeper if she were to see her hall and stairs. We could bring up coal now at any hour or all day long. And yet Mrs. Haines tyrannized over us in her own fashion, and her tyranny was the more unbearable because it had no end except to spare herself trouble. Her one thought was to do nothing and get paid for it. She resented extra exertion without extra compensation. We never had been so bullied about coal under the old regime as we were under hers about a drain-pipe with a trick of overflowing. It might have drowned us in our chambers and she would not have stirred to save us; but its outlet was in a little paved court back of her kitchen, which it was one of her duties to keep in order, and she considered every overflow a rank injustice. She held the tenants in turn responsible, and would descend upon us like a Fury upbraiding us for our carelessness. It would never have surprised me had she ordered us down to clean up the court for her.
I must in fairness add that when extra exertion meant extra money she did not shirk it. Nor was she without accomplishments. She was an excellent needlewoman: she altered and renovated more than one gown for me, she made me chair-covers, she mended my carpets. During the first years she was in the house she never refused any needlework, and often she asked me for more. She would come up and wait for me at table on the shortest notice. In an emergency she would even cook me a dinner which, in its colourless English way, was admirable. There is no denying that she could be useful, but her usefulness had a special tariff.
It was also in her favour that she was a lover of cats, and their regard for her was as good as a certificate. I came to be on the best of terms with hers, Bogie by name, a tall ungainly tabby, very much the worse for wear. He spent a large part of his time on the street, and often, as I came or went, he would be returning home and would ask me, in a way not to be resisted, to ring her door-bell for him. Sometimes I waited to exchange a few remarks with him, for, though his voice was husky and not one of his attractions, he had always plenty to say. On these occasions I was a witness of his pleasure in seeing his mistress again, though his absence might have been short, and of her enthusiasm in receiving him.
Unquestionably they understood each other, and cats are animals of discrimination.
She extended her affection to cats that did not belong to her, and ours came in for many of her attentions. Our Jimmy, who had the freedom of the streets, often paid her a visit on his way out or in, as I knew he would not have done if she had not made the time pa.s.s agreeably; for if he, like all cats, disliked to be bored, he knew better than most how to avoid the possibility. One of his favourite haunts was the near Strand, probably because he was sure to meet his friends there. It was a joy to him, if we had been out late in the evening, to run across us as we returned. With a fervent "mow" of greeting, he was at our side; and then, his tail high in the air, and singing a song of rapture, he would come with us to our front door, linger until he had seen us open it, when, his mind at rest for our safety, he would hurry back to his revels. We considered this a privilege, and our respect for Mrs. Haines was increased when he let her share it, even in the daytime. He was known to join her in the Strand, not far from Charing Cross, walk with her to Wellington Street, cross over, wait politely while she bought tickets at the Lyceum for one of the tenants, cross again, and walk back with her. He was also known to sit down in the middle of the Strand, and divert the traffic better than a "Bobby," until Mrs. Haines, when everybody else had failed, enticed him away. He deserved the tribute of her tears, and she shed many, when the Vet kindly released him from the physical ruin to which exposure and a life of dissipation had reduced him.
William Penn showed her the same friendliness, but from him it was not so marked, for he was a cat of democratic tastes and, next to his family, preferred the people who worked for them. He had not as much opportunity for his civilities as Jimmy, never being allowed to leave our chambers. But when Mrs. Haines was busy in our kitchen, he occupied more than a fair portion of her time, for which she made no reduction in the bill. William"s charms were so apt to distract me from my work that I could say nothing, and her last kindness of all when he died--in his case of too luxuriant living and too little exercise, the Vet said--would make me forgive her much worse. According to my friend, Miss Repplier, a cat "considers dying a strictly private affair." But William Penn"s death-bed was a public affair, at least for Augustine and myself, who sat up with him through the night of his agony. We were both exhausted by morning, unfit to cope with the problem of his funeral.
Chambers are without any convenient corner to serve as cemetery, and I could not trust the most important member of the family to the dust-man for burial. I do not know what I should have done but for Mrs. Haines.
It was she who arranged, by a bribe I would willingly have doubled, that during the dinner-hour, when the head-gardener was out of the way, William should be laid to rest in the garden below our windows. She was the only mourner with Augustine and myself,--J. was abroad,--when, from above, we watched the a.s.sistant gardener lower him into his little grave under the tree where the wood-pigeons have their nest.
If I try now to make the best of what was good in Mrs. Haines, at the time she did not give me much chance. Grumbling was such a habit with her that, even had the Socialists" Millennium come, she would have kept on, if only because it removed all other reason for her grumbles. Her prejudice against work of any kind did not lessen her displeasure with everybody who did not provide her with work of some kind to do. She treated me as if I imposed on her when I asked her to sew or to mend or to cook, and she abused the other tenants because they did not ask her.
This indeed was her princ.i.p.al grievance. She could not see why they were in the house if it were not to increase her income, and she hated the landlord for having led her to believe they would. She paid me innumerable visits, the object of which never varied. It was to borrow, which she did without shame or apology. She never hesitated in her demands, she never cringed. She ran short because the other tenants were not doing the fair and square thing by her, and she did not see why she should not draw upon me for help. One inexhaustible debt was the monthly bill for her furniture, bought on the instalment system and forfeited if any one instalment were not met. I do not remember how many pounds I advanced, but enough to suggest that she had furnished her rooms, of which she never gave me as much as a glimpse, in a style far beyond her means. I could afford to be amiable, for I knew I could make her pay me back in work, though my continual loans did so little to improve her financial affairs that after a while my patience gave out, and I refused to advance another penny.
It was not until the illness of her husband, after they had been in the house for some two years, that I realized the true condition of things behind the door they kept so carefully closed. The illness was sudden, so far as I knew. I had not seen Mr. Haines for long, but I was accustomed to not seeing him, and curiously, when Mrs. Haines"s need was greatest, she showed some reluctance in asking to be helped out of it.
Her husband was dying before she appealed to anybody, and then it was not to me, but to Mrs. Burden, my old charwoman, who was so poor that I had always fancied that to be poorer still meant to live in the streets or on the rates. But Mrs. Haines was so much worse off, that Mrs.
Burden, in telling me about it, thanked Our Lady that she had never fallen so low. It was cold winter and there was no fire, no coal, no wood, behind the closed door. The furniture for which I had advanced so many pounds consisted, I now found out, of two or three rickety chairs and a square of tattered carpet in the front room, a few pots and pans in the kitchen. In the dark bedroom between, the dying man lay on a hard board stretched on the top of a packing-box, shivering under his threadbare overcoat, so pitiful in his misery and suffering that Mrs.
Burden was moved to compa.s.sion and hurried home to fetch him the blankets from her own bed and buy him a pennyworth of milk on the way.
When the tenants knew how it was with Mrs. Haines and her husband, as now they could not help knowing, they remembered only that he was ill, and they sent for the doctor and paid for medicine, and did what they could to lighten the gloom of the two or three days left to him. And they arranged for a decent burial, feeling, I think, that a man who had been in the Civil Service should not lie in a pauper"s grave. For a week or so we wondered again who he was, why he kept so persistently out of sight; after that we thought as little of him as when he had skulked, a shadow, between his rooms and the street door on the stroke of eleven.
Hitherto everybody had been patient with Mrs. Haines, for the London housekeeper, though she has not got the tenants as completely in her power as the Paris _concierge_, can, if she wants, make things very disagreeable for them. Now that she was alone in the world, everybody was kind to her. The landlord overlooked his announced decision "to sack the pair," and retained her as housekeeper, though in losing her husband she had lost her princ.i.p.al recommendation. The tenants raised a fund to enable her to buy the mourning which is often a consolation in widowhood. Work was offered to her in chambers which she had never entered before, and I added to the tasks in ours. The housekeepers in the street with families to support must have envied her. She had her rooms rent free, wages from the landlord, plenty of extra work, and though this might not seem affluence to people who do not measure their income by pence or scramble for the odd shilling, it was wealth in housekeeping circles.
Mrs. Haines, however, did not see her position in that light. She had complained when work was not offered to her, she complained more bitterly when it was. Perhaps her husband had had some restraining influence upon her. I cannot say; but certainly once he was gone, she gave up all pretence of controlling her temper. She would sweep like a hurricane through the house, raging and raving, on the slightest provocation. She led us a worse life than ever over the drain-pipe. She left the house more and more to take care of itself, dust lying thick wherever dust could lie, the stairs turned to a dingy grey, the walls blackened with London smoke and grime. Once in a while she hired a forlorn, ragged old woman to wash the stairs and brush the front-door mat, for in London, more than anywhere else, "poverty is a comparative thing," and every degree has one below to "soothe" it. No matter how hard up Mrs. Haines was, she managed to sc.r.a.pe together a few pennies to pay to have the work done for her rather than do it herself. The greater part of her leisure she spent out of the house, and when I pa.s.sed her door I would see pinned up on it a bit of paper stating in neat, even elegant, writing, "Apply on the First Floor for the Housekeeper," or "Gone out. Back in ten minutes"; and hours, sometimes days, later the same notice would still be there. She became as neglectful of herself as of the house: her one dress grew shabbier and shabbier, her ap.r.o.n was discarded, no detail of her toilet was attended to except the frizzing of her coa.r.s.e black hair. All this came about not at once, but step by step, and things were very bad before J. and I admitted, even to each other, that she was a disgrace to the house. We would admit it to n.o.body else, and to my surprise the other tenants were as forbearing. I suppose it was because they understood, as well as we did, that at a word to the landlord she would be adrift in London, where for one vacant post of housekeeper there are a hundred applications. To banish her from our own chambers, however, was not to drive her to the workhouse, and I called for her services less and less often.
There was another reason for my not employing her to which I have not so far referred, the reason really of her slovenliness and bad temper and gradual deterioration. I shut my eyes as long as I could. But I was prepared for the whispers that began to be heard, not only in our house, but up and down our street. What started them I do not know, but the morning and evening gatherings of the housekeepers at their doors were not held for nothing, and presently it got about that Mrs. Haines had been seen stealing in and out of a public-house, and that this public-house was just beyond the border-line of the Quarter, which looked as if she were endeavouring to escape the vigilant eyes of our gossips. Then, as invariably happens, the whispers grew louder, the evidence against her circ.u.mstantial, and everybody was saying quite openly where her money disappeared and why she became shabbier, her rooms barer, and the house more disreputable. It leaked out that her husband also had been seen flitting from public-house to public-house; and, the game of concealment by this time being up, it was bluntly said that drink had killed him, as it would Mrs. Haines if she went on as she was going.
I had kept my suspicions to myself, but she had never come to our chambers at the hour of lunch or dinner that there was not an unusual drain upon our modest wine-cellar. I could not fancy that it was merely a coincidence, that friends dining with us were invariably thirstier when she waited or cooked; but her appearance had been the invariable signal for the disappearance of our wine at a rate that made my employment of her a costly luxury. I never saw her when I could declare she had been drinking, but drink she did, and there was no use my beating about the bush and calling it by another name. It would have been less hopeless had she occasionally betrayed herself, had her speech thickened and her walk become unsteady. But hers was the deadliest form of the evil, because it gave no sign. There was nothing to check it except every now and then a mysterious attack of illness,--which she said defied the doctor though it defied n.o.body in the house,--or the want of money; but a housekeeper must be far gone if she cannot pick up a shilling here and a half-crown there. I was the last of the old tenants to employ her, but after I abandoned her she still had another chance with a newcomer who took the chambers below ours, and, finding them too small to keep more than one servant, engaged her for a liberal amount of work. She bought ap.r.o.ns and a new black blouse and skirt, and she was so spruce and neat in them that I was encouraged to hope. But before the end of the first week, she was met on the stairs coming down from his room to hers with a bottle under her ap.r.o.n; at the end of the second she was dismissed.
I hardly dare think how she lived after this. With every Christmas there was a short period of prosperity, though it dwindled as the tenants began to realize where their money went. For a time J. and I got her to keep our bicycles, other people in the house followed suit, and during several months she was paid rent for as many as six, keeping them in the empty sitting-room from which even the rickety chairs had disappeared, and where the floor now was thick with grease and stained with oil. If we had trunks to store or boxes to unpack, she would let us the same room for as long as we wanted, and so she managed, one way or the other, by hook or by crook. But it was a makeshift existence, all the more so when her habits began to tell on her physically. She was ill half the time, and by the end of her fourth year in the house, I do not believe she could have sewed or waited or cooked, had she had the chance. She had no friends, no companions, save her cat. They were a grim pair, she with hungry, shifty eyes glowing like fires in the pallor of her face, he more gaunt and ungainly than ever: for a witch and her familiar they would have been burnt not so many hundred years ago.
Then we heard that she was taking in lodgers, that women with the look of hunted creatures stole into her rooms at strange hours of the night.
Some said they were waifs and strays from the "Halls," others that they were wanderers from the Strand; all agreed that, whoever they were, they must be as desperately poor as she, to seek shelter where the only bed was the floor. Much had been pa.s.sed over, but I knew that such lodgers were more than landlord and tenants could endure, and I had not to be a prophet to foresee that the end was approaching.
It came more speedily than I thought, though the manner of it was not left to landlord and tenants. Christmas, her fifth in the house, had filled her purse again. Tenants were less liberal, it is true, but she must have had at least five or six pounds, to which a turkey and plum pudding had been added by our neighbour across the hall, who was of a generous turn. She had therefore the essentials of what pa.s.ses for a merry Christmas, but how much merriment there was in hers I had no way of telling. On holidays in London I keep indoors if I can, not caring to face the sadness of the streets or the dreariness of house-parties, and I did not go downstairs on Christmas Day, nor on Boxing Day which is the day after. Mrs. Haines, if she came up, did not present herself at our chambers. I trust she was gay because, as it turned out, it was her last chance for gaiety at this or any other season. In the middle of the night following Boxing Day she was seized with one of her mysterious attacks. A lodger was with her, but, from fright, or stupidity, or perhaps worse, called no one till dawn, when she rang up the housekeeper next door and vanished. The housekeeper next door went at once for the doctor who attends to us all in the Quarter. It was too late. Mrs.
Haines was dead when he reached the house.
Death was merciful, freeing her from the evil fate that threatened, for she was at the end of everything. She went out of the world as naked as she came into it. Her rooms were empty, there was not so much as a crust of bread in her kitchen, in her purse were two farthings. Her only clothes were those she had just taken off and the few rags wrapped about her for the night. Dest.i.tution could not be more complete, and the horror was to find it, not round the corner, not at the door, but in the very house, and, worse, to know that it deserved no pity. As she had sown, so had she reaped, and the grave was the kindliest shelter for the harvest.
The day after, her sister appeared, from where, summoned by whom, I do not know. She was a decent, serious woman, who attended to everything, and when the funeral was over, called on all the tenants. She wanted, she told me, to thank us for all our kindness to her sister, whom kindness had so little helped. She volunteered no explanation, she only sighed her regrets. She could not understand, she said.
Nor could I. No doubt, daily in the slums, many women die as dest.i.tute.
But they never had their chance. Mrs. Haines had hers, and a fair one as these things go. Her tragedy has shaken my confidence in the reformers to-day who would work the miracle, and, with equal chances for all men, transform this sad world of ours into Utopia.
_Our Beggars_
[Ill.u.s.tration: CLEOPATRA"S NEEDLE FROM OUR WINDOWS]
VIII
OUR BEGGARS
I know our Beggars by their ring. When the front door-bell is pulled with insolent violence, "That," I say to myself, "is a Beggar," and I am usually right.
Ours are not the Beggars of whose decay Elia complained; though he could not have believed that the art of begging was in any more danger of being lost than the art of lying. His sort have still their place at the crowded crossing, at the corners of streets and turnings of alleys--they are always with us. I rarely go out that I do not meet the cripple who swings himself along on his crutches through the throngs at Charing Cross, or the blind man who taps his way down the Strand, or the paralytic in her little cart close to St. Martin"s, and I too should complain were they to disappear. These are Beggars I do not mind. They have their picturesque uses. They carry on an old tradition. They are licensed to molest me, and their demands, with their thanks when I give and their curses when I do not, are the methods of a venerable and honoured calling. Besides, I can escape them if I choose. I can cross the street at the approach of the cripple, I can dodge the blind man, I can look away as I pa.s.s the paralytic, and so avoid the irritation of giving when I do not want to or the discomfort of hearing their opinion of me when I refuse. But to our Beggars I do object, and from them there is no escape. They belong to a new species, and have abandoned the earlier methods as crude and primitive. They make a profession neither of disease nor of deformity, but of having come down in the world. They scorn to stoop to "rags and the wallet," which they have exchanged for a top hat and frock coat. They take out no license, for they never beg in the streets; instead, they a.s.sault us at our door, where they do not ask for alms but claim the gift, they call a loan, as their right. They are bullies, brigands, who would thrust the virtue of charity upon us, and if, as the philosopher thinks, it is a test of manners to receive, they come out of it with dignity, for their fiction of a loan saves them, and us, from the professional profuseness of the Beggar"s thanks.
It was only when I moved into chambers in the Quarter that they began to come to see me. Hitherto, my life in London had been spent in lodgings, where, if I was never free from Beggars in the form of those intimate friends who are always short of ten pounds to pay their rent or ten shillings to buy a hat, it was the landlady"s affair when the Beggars who were strangers called.
Chambers, however, gave me a front door at which they could ring and an address in the Directory in which they could find out where the door was; and had my object been to make a study of them and their manners, I could not have hit upon a better place to collect my material.
Not that Beggars are encouraged in the Quarter, where more than one society devoted to their scientific suppression has, or has had, an office, and where the lady opposite does not wait for science, but sends them flying the minute she catches them in our streets. The man who loafs in front of our club, and who opens cab-doors for members, and as many more as he can capture, might be mistaken for a Beggar by anybody who did not know the Quarter, but we who do know it understand that he is loafing by special appointment. The small boy who has lately taken to selling his single box of matches on our Terrace does so officially, as the bra.s.s label on his arm explains. And nothing could be more exceptional than the cheerful person who the other day reeled after the Publisher and myself into one of our houses where there is an elevator--for to elevators we have come in the Quarter--the thin end of the modern wedge that threatens its destruction--and addressed the Publisher so affectionately as "Colonel" that we both retreated into the elevator and pressed the b.u.t.ton for the top floor.
But the Beggars we keep off our streets, we cannot keep from our front doors. J. and I had hardly settled in chambers before we were besieged.
People were immediately in need of our help who up till then had managed without it, and to our annoyance they have been in need of it ever since. They present themselves in so many different guises, by so many different methods, that it is impossible to be on our guard against them all. Some sneak in with the post, and our correspondence has doubled in bulk. Dukes, Earls, Marquises, Baronets, favour us with lithographed letters, signing their names at the bottom, writing ours at the top, and demanding our contribution to charities they approve, as the price of so amazing a condescension. Ladies of rank cannot give their benevolent b.a.l.l.s and banquets unless we buy tickets, nor can they conceive of our dismissing their personal appeal. Clergymen start missions that we may finance them, bazaars are opened that we may fill the stalls with the free offering of the work by which we make our living, and alb.u.ms are raffled that we may grace them with our autographs. We might think that the post was invented for the benefit of people whose idea of charity is to do the begging and get us to do the giving. Many of our Beggars like better to beg in person: sometimes as nurses with tickets to sell for a concert, or as Little Sisters of the Poor--whom I welcome, having preserved a sentiment for any variety of cap and veil since my own convent days; sometimes as people with things to sell at the biggest price, that we would not want at the lowest, or with patent inventions that we would not take as a gift, and who are indignant if we decline to be taxed for the privilege of not buying or subscribing. But the most numerous of our Beggars, the most persistent, the most liberal in their expectations, are the men, and more occasionally the women, who, having come down in the world, look to us to set them up again, and would be the first to resent it if our generosity ran to any such extravagant lengths.
Their patronage of the Quarter is doubtless due, partly to its being close to the Strand, which is an excellent centre for their line of business; partly to a convenient custom with us of leaving all street doors hospitably open and inscribing the names of tenants in big gilt letters on the wall just inside; partly to the fact that we are not five minutes from a Free Library, where they can agreeably fill their hours of leisure by the study of "Who"s Who," "The Year"s Art," and other books in which publishers obligingly supply the information about us which to them is as valuable an a.s.set as a crutch to the cripple or a staff to the blind. Provided by the Directory with our address, they may already know where to look us up and how to establish an acquaintance by asking for us by name at our door; but it is this cramming in the facts of our life that enables them to talk to us familiarly about our work until acquaintance has ripened into intimacy and the business of begging is put on a personal and friendly footing. Great as is the good which Mr. Carnegie must have hoped to accomplish by his Free Libraries, even he could have had no idea of the boon they might prove to Beggars and the healthy stimulus to the art of begging which they develop.
In the beginning our Beggars had no great fault to find with us. Their frock coats and top hats, signs of real British respectability, carried them past the British porter and the British servant. When they crossed our threshold, some remnant of the barbarous instinct of hospitality compelled us to receive them with civility, if not with cordiality. We never went so far as, with the Spaniard, to offer them our house and all that is in it, another instinct warning us how little they would mind taking us at our word; nor did hospitality push us to the extreme of being hoodwinked by their tales. But in those days we seldom let them go without something, which was always more than they deserved since they deserved nothing. If there is such a thing as a Beggar"s Baedeker, I am sure our chambers were specially recommended in earlier editions. In justice, I must confess that they gave us entertainment for our money, and that the very tricks of the trade were amusing--that is, while the novelty lasted. We liked the splendid a.s.surance of their manner; the pretended carelessness with which a foot was quickly thrust through the opening of the door so they could be shut out only by force; the important air with which they asked for a few minutes" talk; the insinuating smile with which they presumed that we remembered them; their cool a.s.sumption that their burden was ours, and that the kindness was all on their side for permitting us the privilege of bearing it. And we liked no less their infinite trouble in inventing romances about themselves that Munchausen could not have beaten, their dramatic use of foggy nights and wild storms, their ingenuity in discovering a bond between us, and their plausibility in proving why it obliged us to meet their temporary difficulties which were never of course of their own making. Nor could we but admire their superiority to mere charity, their belief in the equal division of wealth, their indifference as to who did the work to create the wealth so long as they did not do it themselves, and their trust in the obligation imposed by a craft in common. Had they bestowed half the pains in practising this craft that they squandered in wheedling a few shillings from us on the strength of it, they must long since have been acknowledged its masters.
The first of our Beggars, whom I probably remember the better because he was the first, flattered me by introducing himself as a fellow author at a time when I had published but one book and had won by it neither fame nor fortune. What he had published himself he did not think it worth while to mention, but the powers of imagination he revealed in his talk should have secured his reputation in print. I have rarely listened to anybody so fluent, I could not have got a word in had I wanted to. It never seemed to occur to him that I might not be as bent upon listening to his story as he upon telling it. He made it quite a personal matter between us. I would understand, he said, and the inference was that n.o.body else could, the bitterness of his awakening when the talented woman whom he had revered as the kindliest of her s.e.x betrayed herself to him as the most cruel. For long, in her Florentine villa, he had been Secretary to Ouida, whom he found so charming and considerate that he could only marvel at all the gossip about her whims and fancies. Then, one morning, he was writing a letter at her dictation and by oversight he spelt disappointment with one p, a trifling error which, as I knew, any gentleman or scholar was liable to. She flew into a rage, she turned him out of the villa without hearing a word, she pursued him into the garden, she set her dogs--colossal staghounds--on him, he had to run for his life, had even to vault over the garden gate, I could picture to myself with what disastrous consequences to his coat and trousers. And she was so vindictive that she would neither send him his clothes nor pay him a penny she owed him. He had too fine a sense of gallantry to go to law with a lady, he dared not remain in Florence where the report was that he went in danger of his life. There was nothing to do but to return to England, and--well--here he was, with a new outfit to buy before he could accept the admirable position offered to him, for he had not to a.s.sure me that a man of his competency was everywhere in demand; it was very awkward, and--in short--he looked to me as a fellow author to tide him over the awkwardness. I can laugh now at my absurd embarra.s.sment when finally he came to a full stop. I did not have to wait for his exposure in the next number of "The Author" to realize that he was "an unscrupulous impostor." But I was too shy to call him one to his face, and I actually murmured polite concern and "advanced" I have forgotten what, to be rid of him.
Out of compliment to J., our Beggars pose as artists no less frequently than as authors. If the artist himself, when accident or bad luck has got him into a tight place, likes best to come to his fellow artist to get him out of it, he is the first to pay his debts and the first debt he pays is to the artist who saw him through. But this has nothing to do with our Beggars who have chosen art as an unemployment and with whom accident or bad luck is deliberately chronic. They look upon art as a gilt-edged investment that should bring them in a dividend, however remote their connection with it. According to them, an artist ent.i.tles all his family, even to the second and third generation, to a share in J."s modest income, though J. himself is not at all of their manner of thinking. Grandsons of famous wood-engravers, nephews of editors of ill.u.s.trated papers, cousins of publishers of popular magazines, fathers of painters, brothers, sons, and uncles of every sort of artist, even sisters, daughters, and aunts who take advantage of their talent for pathos and "crocodile wisdom of shedding tears when they should devour,"--all have sought to impress upon him that the sole reason for their existence is to live at his expense. He may suggest meekly that he subscribes to benevolent inst.i.tutions and societies founded for the relief of artists and artists" families in just their difficulties. They are glib in excuses for making their application to him instead, and they evidently think he ought to be grateful to them for putting him in the way of enjoying the blessing promised to those who give.
The most ambitious reckon their needs on a princely scale, as if determined to beg, when they have to, with all their might. One artist, distinguished in his youth, writes to J., from the Cafe Royal where, in his old age, he makes a habit of dining and finding himself towards midnight ridiculously without a penny in his pocket, an emergency in which a five-pound note by return of messenger will oblige. Another, whose business hours are as late, comes in person for a "fiver," his last train to his suburban home being on the point of starting and he as ridiculously penniless, except for a cheque for a hundred pounds just received from a publisher, which he cannot change at that time of night.
The more humble have so much less lavish a standard that half a crown will meet their liabilities, or else a sum left to the generosity of the giver. A youth, frequent in his visits, never aspires above the fare of a hansom waiting below, while a painter of mature years appears only on occasions of public rejoicing or mourning when there is no telling to what extent emotion may loosen the purse strings. Some bring their pictures as security, or the pictures of famous ancestors who have become bewilderingly prolific since their death; some plead for their work to be taken out of p.a.w.n; some want to pose in a few days, and these J. recommends to the Keeper of the Royal Academy; and some are so subtle in their argument that we fail to follow it. We are still wondering what could have been the motive of the excited little man who burst in upon J. a few days ago with a breathless inquiry as to how much he charged for painting polo ponies for officers, and who bolted as precipitately when J. said that he knew nothing about polo, and had never painted a pony in his life. But for sheer irrelevance none has surpa.s.sed the American whom, in J."s absence, I was called upon to interview, and who a.s.sured me that, having begun life as an artist and later turned model, he had tramped all the way from New Orleans to New York and then worked his way over on a cattleship to London with no other object in view than to sit to J. If I regret that my countrymen in England borrow the trick of begging from the native, it is some satisfaction to have them excel in it. When I represented to the model from New Orleans that J., as far as I could see, would have no use for him, he was quite ready to take a shilling in place of the sitting, and when I would not give him a shilling, he declared himself repaid by his pleasant chat with a compatriot. He must have thought better of it afterwards and decided that something more substantial was owing to him, for three weeks later his visit was followed by a letter:--
MADAM,--I know how sorry you will be to hear that since my little talk with you I have been dangerously sick in a hospital. The doctors have now discharged me, but they say I must do no work of any kind for ten days, though an artist is waiting for me to sit to him for an important picture. They advise me to strengthen myself with nourishing food in the meanwhile. Will you therefore please send me
3 dozen new-laid eggs 1 lb. of fresh b.u.t.ter 1 lb. of coffee 1 lb. of tea 2 lbs. of sugar 1 dozen of oranges.
Thanking you in advance, I am, Madam, Gratefully yours.
There are periods when I am convinced that not art, not literature, but journalism is the most impecunious of the professions, and that all Fleet Street, to which the Quarter is fairly convenient, must be out of work. It is astonishing how often it depends upon our financial backing to get into work again, though dependence could not be more misplaced, for a certain little transaction with a guileless youth whose future hung on a journey to Russia has given us all the experience of the kind, or a great deal more than we want. As astonishing is the number of journalists who cherish as their happiest recollections the years they were with us on the staff of London, New York, or Philadelphia papers for which we never wrote a line. One even grew sentimental over the "good old days" on the Philadelphia "Public Ledger" with J."s father who, to our knowledge, pa.s.sed his life without as much as seeing the inside of a newspaper office. But the journalist persisted until J.
vowed that he never had a father, that he never was in Philadelphia, that he never heard of the "Ledger": then the poor man fled.
Astonishing, too, is the count they keep of the seasons. Disaster is most apt to overtake them at those holiday times when d.i.c.kens has taught that hearts are tender and purses overflow. For them Christmas spells catastrophe, and it has ceased to be a surprise to hear their ring on Christmas Eve. As a rule, a shilling will avert the catastrophe and enable them to exchange the cold streets for a warm fireside, hunger for feasting, though I recall a reporter for whom it could not be done under a ticket to Paris. The Paris edition of the "New York Herald" had engaged him on condition that he was in the office not later than Christmas morning. He was ready to start, but--there was the ticket, and, for no particular reason except that it was Christmas Eve, J. was to have the pleasure of paying for it.
"Why not apply to the "New York Herald" office here?" J. asked.
The reporter beamed: "My dear sir, the very thing, the very thing. Why didn"t I think of it before? I will go at once. Thank you, sir, thank you!"