"It is _really_ sixpence. And my income is twelve hundred a year. I
used to have a respectable half-guinea practice in Norfolk, and then I
was doing eight hundred, and spending it all on dog-carts and
dinner-parties. Here I have no expenses at all, except in the matter of
top-hats; they insist upon top-hats. And I like the place: I am charmed
with the people. Do you like smoked salmon and cold duck?"
"I do."
"Then come inside, and have some. And have a look at James. James will
do you good. James is unique. And I can give you a bed, and I can tell
you stories, and show you some fun, too--sideways sort of fun--at
sixpence a time."
"Sixpenny pieces," I suggested, as his key turned in the lock.
*II*
*CONCERNING JAMES*
I have confused impressions of that first visit to the house of Dr.
Brink. It was so late when we entered, you see, and all within the
house was strange and unexpected, and the duck and Burgundy were very
peace-provoking.
The sort of house which I had expected the doctor to inhabit was not at
all the sort of house he really lived in. I had, perhaps, no very
definite ideas at all. One knows the _ordinary_ doctor's house: a cool
and studious consulting-room, having leathern armchairs and a telephone
and a stethoscope and some framed engravings after Landseer and a silver
goblet which he won at tennis in the eighties and a case of text-books
and a mule canary and claret plush curtains and the centenary edition of
Sir Walter Scott. And a very quiet and lofty waiting-room, containing
all the illustrated papers for last April and a reading-glass and a
stereoscope, besides a decanter of water and three clean tumblers.
One knows that sort of house, I say, and likewise the gentle, murmuring
press of sufferers which lays siege to it. But the spot-cash
practitioners of Mile End Road are rather strange and foreign to us. We
do not go into their little, weird consulting-hatches nor sweat amid the
tumult of their vulgar patrons. We can imagine what the thing is like:
and there are some of us perhaps who imagine truthfully. I didn't.
My imagination did not run to Japanese colour prints and pastel studies,
and neatly framed examples of the art of Mr. Nicholson. And yet these
things were hung upon the white distempered walls of Dr. Brink's
infirmary. I figured the tumult as gazing speechlessly upon these
curious East End substitutes for Landseer. "What do they think of
them?" I asked the doctor.
"They are much amused," said he. We were standing before a pastel when
he spoke--a thing of heavy shadows with purple deeps, wherefrom there
stood forth dimly the figures of a crippled man and an old sick woman,
and the face of a child with brazen eyes. "Out Patients" was the title
of this drawing, and it preached of a divine torture. "They are much
amused," said the doctor.
But this was in the morning. That night we did not look at pictures,
nor at patients. We sat above and supped off duck and Burgundy. I saw
confusedly--it was a pleasant confusion--that there were many good
pictures in the house, and that books were everywhere--everywhere. And
the bottle was a full one. And we spoke of olives and the Norfolk
women.
Then he took me to a little brown room with more books in it, and a
bedstead which was of oak and carven.
"Good-night," said the doctor. "You shall see old James to-morrow. You
will like old James. Good-night."
* * * * *
When morning came, I had the pleasure of viewing Bovingdon Street in the
sunshine.
It was a queer sort of sunshine, to be sure--weak and uncertain and
rather dirty: a sort of actinic heel-taps. But I remember thinking that
any less shabby form of sunshine would have carried with it an air of
disrespect, as though it had come forth to mock at the gloom and
ugliness of the thing beneath it. A gloomier, sillier, dirtier street
than Bovingdon Street I do not wish to see. But I have seen such all the
same. Indeed, I have looked upon some filth and squalor beside which
Bovingdon Street is as the Mall compared to Worship Street. So much I
must admit in common fairness.
There was at least no actual squalor in the street on which I looked:
only dirt and gloom and ugliness. The houses which faced me were
comparatively new, and they were small and neat, and of a square and
thick-set build. But there happened to be one hundred and sixty of
them, each exactly like its neighbour, and having each before its
doorway a small pale or enclosure containing--cinders and rags and
pieces of paper and battered cans and smudgy babies and hungry cats.
And there was grime on all the windows, and in front of them a very
vulgar man was selling bloaters, loudly. Also, in all that soot-brown
avenue there was one white thing: a hawthorn tree in bloom, which
shuddered gently in the fog-shine like a discontented spectre. And
those ridiculous fat houses stood there stoutly, shoulder to shoulder,
one hundred and sixty of them, eyeing her with dolour. And a voice
beneath my window made speech, saying loudly: "You give me my daughter's
combings back, ye thievin' slut." So I left the window and lighted a
pipe and crawled back into bed.
* * * * *
And then, as the story writers say, a strange thing happened. There
came a sudden tap upon my bedroom door, and without further warning
there entered in a--a lady. She was rather a young lady, to be sure,
some fifteen years of age, perhaps. And she was wearing a petticoat--a
striped petticoat--and her hair was dressed into innumerable pigtails,
and her top was covered by--by a--a--don't they call it a camisole? And
she bade me "Good-morning," very calmly.
"G--G--Good-morning!" I responded. I hoped to heaven that I was not
blushing.
"Don't trouble to scream," said the lady, in an off-hand manner. "It is
all right: I have come for my stockings."
"Really," I began, a little hotly, "_I_ haven't ta----" And then I
stopped. A horrible thought presented itself to me.
Doctor Brink no doubt combined the practice of alienism with that of
spot-cash cures. And this lady was doubtless an "inmate." And----
The voice of the inmate interrupted me. "It's quite all right, really it
is. I'm not accusing you of theft or anything else. I only want to get
my stockings from this cupboard. Mrs. Gomm, our 'char,' she mixes
things up so. And I want a brown pair, because this is my day for being
respectable with my aunt at Ealing, and you wear your brown dress and a
neat toque for that sort of thing; and where the devil that woman
has--oh, here we are. Want darning, of course. Damn!"
Swearing seemed to be a widespread habit in this unusual household. I
coughed--the sort of cough you use when children are present and your
deaf Uncle David is reviving his recollections of India in the sixties.
"I say," protested my visitor, "you really needn't look so worried.
It's all right, really. This is my room, you know; theoretically, you
know. Only I always sleep in the bathroom (we've got a bath-room, you
know, and there's a lid to it, and I sleep on that), and I always sleep
there because it's a long way from Fatty, and I can't hear him raving
when the night-bell rings. And Fatty----"
"Pardon me," I cried, "but who is Fatty?"
The lady looked at me a little blankly. "Who is Fatty?" she repeated,
but then broke off, a light as of understanding in her eye. "I was
forgetting," she said. "Of course, you wouldn't know. Well, it is like
this, you see. This house belongs to a man called Brink, who is a
doctor and----"
"I know all that," I assured her.
"Oh, you do know all about it, then," quoth she; "I wasn't sure, you
know. Most of the strange people that I find in my bedroom if I happen
to look in for anything don't know anything at all about us. Fatty
finds them--gathers them up, you know--and brings them home and feeds
them and converts them to Socialism and puts them to bed, and when they
wake up in the morning they have to have it all explained to them.
Fatty is Dr. Brink, you know. One always calls him Fatty, because his
proper names are Theobald Henry de la Rue, and you simply haven't time
in the mumps season. You're a reformer, I suppose? What do you
reform?"
"Reform!" I cried, "what do _I_ reform? Why, I don't reform at all.
I've never reformed a blue-bottle."
"But surely you're against something or other. You _must_ be against
something!"
"Oh, well," I answered, "if it comes to that, I--I----"
"Just so," assented the lady. "Don't go into particulars. They _all_
particularise. I could stand much from you--more than usual, I
mean--because you are clean-shaven, and that is such a change from most
of the other powerful thinkers whom one finds here in the morning. They
are staunch, you know, and sound on the Education Question and all that
sort of thing, and they are a useful hobby for Fatty to take up; but
they're rather old and solemn, as a rule, you know. And they _do_ go
into details! Now _you_ seem rather jolly; and when you've got up and
we've been properly introduced and I've boiled your egg, I'll show you
my white rats. Do you like white rats?"
"I adore them," said your servant.
"Good. And, I say, I hope you won't mind, but you'll have to toilet
yourself in the kitchen sink. Our 'char's' such a rotter, you know, and
I see she hasn't filled your jug--she never does--and she doesn't come
till ten, and I've got to finish dressing, and Fatty's out on a call,
and there's all the breakfast to get; and when you've done your toilet
_do_ you mind just putting a match to the gas stove and sticking a
kettle on? Thanks awfully." ... My fair guest flung herself upon the
door. All of her, save a corner of the stripy petticoat, had
disappeared, when I put in _the_ important question.
"I say," I cried, "who _are_ you?"
"Me," cried a voice from behind the door--"me? Oh ... I am James."
*III*
*FIRST IMPRESSIONS*
With breakfast came the opportunity of renewing my _entente_ with James.
That young lady appeared now fully clothed in the conventional garments
of her age, even to a pinafore with seven pockets.
"What do you put in all those pockets?" I inquired, as she tripped in
with the bacon.
"Most of them," she answered, "contain white rats.... I thought," she
added, eyeing me closely, as I drifted in a thoughtful manner to the far
end of the table, "I thought you _adored_ white rats?"
"That is quite so," I responded. "The dear, dumb creatures! I--I
idolise them."
"_Why_ do you idolise them?" demanded James, putting on a very subtile
smile.
"Because," I answered, "because they--they are so dumb and--and so
white."
"Then why do you shudder at them?"
I explained my attitude towards white rats. "It is not fear which makes
me seem to shrink," I pointed out, "only a sense of--of--well, you see,
the white rats which I have previously adored were confined within a
cage, which contained a sort of treadmill, which they worked with their
feet, and you watched this talented display from a distance, and
wondered if they never grew tired. But----"
"Those wheel-cages," interpolated James, "are the most damnable
contrivances which were ever invented. Whenever I see one I buy it and
burn it. That is one reason why I happen to have so many rats. I think
that the people who make those things ought to be devoured by locusts.
I----"
"You also have the spirit of reform, then?" I ventured to suggest.
"Reform!" echoed James, with a bitter laugh. "Because one hates to see
things tortured? _I_ call it common decency. All of Fatty's friends
have got some wonderful new name for being decent. One of Fatty's most
particular friends is a rather awful man named Boag, and he is a public
accountant, and he wears spats, and he calls himself a Conative
Meliorist; and if you ask him why, he says it is because he believes in
making people happy. 'Conative Meliorist'! Think of it! Sounds so
expensive, doesn't it? He pronounces his name in two jerks--Bo--ag, and
it always reminds me of Asheg, Mesheg, and Abednedgo.... He looks
exactly like them, too! 'Conative Meliorist'! It is much easier to
call yourself just James."
"Why _do_ you call yourself 'James,' by the way?"
"Let us stick to the point," responded James. "It is so like a man to
dodge your arguments when he can't upset them. What was the point?"
"Conative Meliorism," I suggested.
"That was merely a passing reference. There was something else which
reminded me of Mr. Boag. Something which reminded me of something which
reminded me of something which remind--I remember now. We were talking
of white rats. You were pretending not to hate them. You were trying
to deceive me. Your pretendings don't take me in the leastest bit, so
you may just as well chuck them up. Be honest. Be a man. Stand up
like an English gentleman. Say what you feel about them. Do not fear to
shock my virgin ears because----"
"How old are you, James?" I hoped that my simple, honest, obvious wonder
would disarm the question of its point.
The lady gazed upon me with an air of bland surprise. "That is a
question," she answered, with great gravity, "which I never discuss. It
isn't fair to Fatty. _Do_ sit down. Was it sugar and no milk, you said;
or milk and no sugar? And will you have hysterics if Sunshine joins the
circle? He always breakfasts with his mother. Oh, de minna, tinna,
tooney Sunshine, den."
Sunshine was a rat--the whitest and roundest and fattest of them all.
* * * * *
I, nevertheless, contrived to breakfast well. Sunshine's mistress was
thoughtful enough to curtail the radius of that minna, tinna, tooney
animal's accustomed beat: with the result that I was able to keep my
seat. And his mistress stayed him with dainties and prattled cheerfully
upon a variety of strange subjects. It was no good waiting breakfast
for Fatty, she explained, because Fatty's "call" was a "midder."
"And what in heaven's name," I demanded, "may a 'midder' be?"
"That," explained James, "is what Fatty calls an 'obstetric term.' When
people have babies, you know. Do you know what 'B.B.A.' means?"