was a bit of a mystery. They were only small orders--under a pound, as
if they had been scraped by some woman out of the housekeeping money,
or her dress allowance. But I never knew. The last one he had was for
fifteen shillings. He was on his last legs. The steward of the Inn, who
was most forbearing--because it was Jimmy--had sent a deprecating note
in to say that he must distrain if something, ever so little, was not
paid on account of the year’s rent. Mrs. Morey had left him at last.
Even his top hat was rough. Yet what do you think he did? Went out and
bought a bath sponge for fifteen and six, promising to leave the
sixpence next time he was passing.
I met him on the stairs and he displayed the sponge proudly.
“Only fifteen and six! Dirt cheap, isn’t it? It would be unpardonable
extravagance to let a chance like that slip, wouldn’t it? And I wanted
a bath sponge; the one I’ve got isn’t nearly big enough. Come up to my
place. We’ll put it in water. Just you watch how it swells!”
You may say bluntly that he was a fool. Of course he was. But it is the
fools and the failures who win our hearts.
We went up to his rooms. He put the sponge to swell and sat down to the
piano and forgot all about it. I should like to hear Jimmy play
music-hall songs again; nothing was ever so charming. He knew them all.
He used to sing the refrains in a thin, shrill voice, accompanying in
his own wonderful way. Everything he touched became classic.
A week after he bought the sponge Harrowsmith--he was the young
doctor--ordered him out of London. Fortunately I made a haul about that
time, so we went together to Farthings Farm, as I’ll tell you later on.
Farthings Farm was the last nail in Jimmy’s coffin. He never spent a
more miserable month. He would be morose, half asleep all day. But at
dusk, just when the theaters would be opening and the racket in the
Strand at its flow, he’d be restless. All the sweet smells and sounds
of the farm were a poor enough substitute. The country finished him. He
was a pure Cockney. There is no half way with the Cockney; either
he loves the country passionately, or he hates it and chafes at it
until it kills him. Saints and criminals are made by the country; it
depends on how you take it. We hadn’t been back ten days before he
broke a blood vessel and kept his bed. What was to be done with him?
_He_ never bothered. He believed in taking things easy. He had a
favorite axiom about never putting up your umbrella until it
rained--and ended by not having an umbrella at all! He just drifted. He
was dying. He hadn’t a penny in the world; he was up to his eyes in
small debts.
“Pack him off to the hospital,” advised Arnold rather brutally. “Poor
devil! A fellow who earns a fiver and lives on it until it’s gone. I’ve
no sympathy with that sort of thing. The hospital’s the place for him.
I’ll pay the cab fare.”
However, the rest of us decided to club together and keep him going,
first telling Arnold that he did the invalid an injustice; Jimmy had
never earned a five-pound note, in a lump sum, in his life. Harrowsmith
had told us privately that his case was quite hopeless. We could pull
along somehow. Nutting, the steward, would wait a little longer
for his rent; when Jimmy was gone the piano alone would pay that. One
or other of us could look in; Mrs. Morey must be got back. The only
difficulty was with Jimmy himself--he was so deuced proud.
A woman came to the rescue. Queenie La Belle was a regular brick. She
bought up all his songs. Who but a woman would have thought of that?
She’d come in, all sham diamonds and jolly voice, and sit down by his
bed and tell him how well his songs were going at the halls. She said
she was singing them at three nightly. She assured him that she was
always encored. She begged him to take an extra ten pounds--the
original price had been in shillings.
“You see, I’ve made that girl,” Jimmy would say when she had gone. “I
knew those songs would just fit her. She wants more. Give me a bit of
paper and pencil, old chap. I’ll dot down another. Why does Harrowsmith
keep me tied by the leg like this? I mean to get up next week and
toddle down to the halls and hear my songs encored. They give Queenie
a middle turn now. They used to put her on at the end, to sing the
audience out. I’m a made man. It’s just as well, with all the expenses
of this illness. Are you going up Tottenham Court Road to-day? If so,
look in and pay the fellow that sixpence owing on the sponge. I’ve
never used it. Harrowsmith knocked me off my cold tub. You can’t
mistake the shop. It’s nearly opposite Maple’s. I forget the name.”
He put on tremendous airs. He was, as he proudly said, a made man. When
he got better he was going to write songs at fabulous prices for all
the leading music-hall singers. But Queenie La Belle should have them
at a reasonable figure. She wasn’t a bad sort. She ought to be grateful
to him. He had made her. He kept his money under his pillow with his
tobacco pouch and cigarette papers. He said seriously to me:
“If you’re a little short, old chap, there’s plenty of money in the
bag. I’ve gone through the mill myself. I know what it is to come down
to my last half-crown.”
He might truthfully have said his last copper. To please him I took
five shillings.
Queenie came to see him regularly. He put the poor girl through a rigid
cross-examination. Did the audience take up her two last lines, as he
had intended? Were his songs on the barrel organs? The great ambition
of his life had been to hear his songs on the barrel organs. But it was
early days. It was just as well that they were not on yet. He wanted to
hear them. Wanted to tip every grinder a bob. Queenie had to sing the
songs to him; had to do the little kick at the end of each verse,
pretend to throw the rose into the auditorium--that was Jimmy’s
original trick.
“I’d like to come down and hear you to-night at the Royal,” he
sighed--and Queenie looked horribly frightened, until I reassured her
by a dismal shake of the head. “But Harrowsmith is so particular. He
keeps me in bed. Of course that makes a man weak. There’s nothing in
the world the matter with me but weakness, through want of exercise.”
Queenie put on her tremendous hat, all flyaway lace and wings. She
stooped down and kissed him solemnly on his clammy forehead. I thought
the big, jolly girl, with her coarse voice and frank tongue, an angel
at that moment. Jimmy looked scared and annoyed--suspicious of this
unusual gentleness.
She blubbered outside the bedroom door, growing purple in her efforts
to choke her sobs lest he should hear.
“It’s all a lie,” she said passionately. “I’m only on at one hall--last
turn on the programme. His song don’t fetch even a grin. I’m expecting
the manager to bully me on pay day. People don’t understand ’em--I
don’t myself. It’s a lie. I was hissed--hissed! And there’s him, poor
dear, talking of writing for Guy Blockley and Ada Fitz Clare. Oh! it’s
all right about the ten pounds, I can run to that. Don’t you fret.”
She colored, through her make-up--her daylight make-up, all careless
smears of blue-white powder and burning smudges of red.
Nearly every night, after the halls and the public houses were shut,
one or two fellows would drop into Jimmy’s room and give him the
evening’s news. They sang snatches of new songs to him, mimicked bits
of “business.” They retailed the popular comedian’s latest gag, the
story that was going the round of the clubs, the smart conundrum on
public affairs or people.
Jimmy used to join in weakly, drumming his claw-like fingers on the
quilt. He talked of music-hall people of to-day; of five years ago; of
men who had been lions and were content to take obscure turns in the
provinces now, or who had gone in for the dramatic-agent business.
They all ran off his glib tongue; the Sisters That, the Brothers So and
So, the Something Troupe. He laughed at old wheezes, which had never
lost their flavor for him. He spoke of this man’s pet mannerisms and
that girl’s particular smile.
He used to say:
“Do you remember Joe Slashby’s trick with the pair of spectacles? That
was killing,” or, “What’s become of the Manasteriotti girl? Never saw a
woman juggle so well.”
And he always condemned everyone else’s songs. He said it pained him to
see the rot, the arrant, foolish drivel that went down with a
music-hall audience. But he was going to alter all that. The public
only wanted educating. The public knew a good thing when it heard it.
That was proved by the success of his songs. How had his songs gone
this evening? Queenie was a good sort, but he was a little nervous of
her, afraid she didn’t quite do him justice. He added that she had
treated him rather meanly; ten pounds was a poor price with which to
buy success. She must be getting twenty pounds a week at the lowest.
Three halls at twenty each. That would be sixty. He must speak to her.
Success had not improved Jimmy. He was going the way of all successes.
He actually spoke of starting a banking account when he got better, of
giving a big order to his tailor. He probably would have decided on a
house at Brixton and a brougham, if he had lived long enough.
But--before he had time to tax Queenie over money matters--the end
came.
It was Saturday. Harrowsmith looked in about noon. He told me that
Jimmy wouldn’t last another twenty-four hours. I went back to the
bedroom and broke it. He was lying on his side, turning off another
song. He took it very calmly, only hoping that he’d be able to get that
third line in the second verse right before he went. It was very weak.
Schultz, the great German composer, died the day before; it had been in
the morning papers. Jimmy said composedly, when I mentioned it:
“There’s another of us gone. Lucky devil!”
He added a little rebelliously:
“It’s rather rough to have to hand in your checks just when you’ve
‘arrived.’ I hope I shan’t be so long about it as the woman at
Farthings Farm was. Queer old girl! You’ll make Harrowsmith send in his
bill and pay up any little thing I owe. Get the money out of Queenie.
That girl’s been a bit shabby. And just roll me a cigarette--there’s
enough baccy in the pouch--and leave me alone to worry out this third
line.”
He was lying at the back; Orion, if you remember, had his bedroom in
the front, but Jimmy had turned that into a bathroom.
All the Saturday night bubble of the streets came up into the little
paneled room where he was dying. He liked it; asked me to open the
window, so that he could hear the hoarse voices of the costers and the
banter of the women. He liked the rattle of ’buses, the cries, the
calls--all the feverish, struggling life.
One by one the fellows dropped in as usual. He begged them not to put
on such deathbed faces. How had his songs gone? He was afraid that he
wouldn’t see Queenie any more. The fellows stayed; he begged them to.
I’d asked him if he had any friends that he would like me to send for,
and he returned airily that he hadn’t a relative in the world. His face
never flinched when he said it.
The night went on, and the room, although the month was August, got
chilly. The sounds of the market died down, the omnibuses left off
running, so did the trams; there was only a dying trundle of hansoms
over the stones. Then all at once came a ringing howl from some slum at
the back. They have pulled them nearly all down now. All the narrow
courts I used to know, the tiny general shops, the row of almshouses,
the big boiled-beef shop at the corner--gone. Residential flats are
in their place and big shops with sky signs.
It was some Saturday-night row. It came in plainly through the open
window. Jimmy opened his eyes and listened with zest.
You won’t understand the grim sentiment of those slum rows. They are
simply part of the Saturday night’s programme--when the man gets his
week’s money and the woman goes out shopping and they both are blind
drunk by midnight. Simply part of Saturday night--that is all. It does
not affect their relations for the rest of the week. The language they
use to each other is awful--but what are words? We place too great a
stress on mere words.
Jimmy roused up a little, and grinned feebly.
“Shouldn’t wonder if it’s Mrs. Morey,” he said.
We sat and listened to the woman’s shrill, passionate invective--to
adjectives which were foreign even to us. We heard the husband’s low,
deprecating growl, and, after a little, the protesting bass of the
policeman. The woman was infuriated at the interruption.
“Has anybody complained?” she yelled, going up half an octave at
each word. “Well! Well! Everybody ’as their rows, don’t they? Move on
yourself. Oh! you _brute!_”
Then we heard a scuffle, more words, a torrent of tears and abuse.
But it was all quiet at last; the short spell of silence between the
last cab and the venders of Sunday papers.
_“Referee!” “Lloyd’s!” “Weekly Dispatch!”_
The men went bawling along the pavements beneath. Jimmy, who had
collapsed after the row, opened his eyes again.
“Give me a whisky,” he said. “Fill up. I’ll say when.”
As I was pouring the water, and waiting for him to stop me, he murmured
enthusiastically:
“How good Dot and Lottie Mack were in that laughing duet. Lottie
married an earl. I wonder what became of Dot.”
When I took the tumbler and whisky and water to the side of the bed, he
was dead.
We fetched Mrs. Morey to lay him out. She was ghoulishly curious about
the funeral, and kept me half an hour while she told me about her
father’s.
“’E belonged to a club, don’t yer see, and when ’e died there was
twenty pound. My Bill wanted to blow it. But I ses no. It was ’is and
’e should ’av it. We ’ad mourning coaches to fetch all the people from
their own doors. There was mutes--yer don’t often see them now--and
weepers, and feathers in the ’orses’ ’eads. An’ yer should ’a’ seen the
tea we set down to when we come ’ome from the funeral! We ’ad thin
bread and butter, and winkles and three sorts of cake. I felt so mad
with Bill. ’E goes and clouts my little Jim’s ’ead, jest because the
innercent child said as ’e wished grandfathers ’ud die every day, so as
we might ’ave sich a bustin’ tea. It was only natural in the child.
Rose Adkins--she’s my brother’s wife--took Bill’s part. I didn’t forgit
it neither. A nice one to talk, _she_ wur! We was ’avin’ a few words,
months after, and I ses to ’er:
“‘You ’ussy! ’Ow dare you talk to me?’ I ses. ‘’Ow many slices of thin
bread and butter did you eat at my poor father’s funeral tea? I saw
you take ten with my own eyes.’ _That_ fetched ’er. ‘Be off,’ I ses,
‘and don’t ever show yer brazen face in my door agen.’”
* * * * *
Well, we buried Jimmy. I rode with him, in a dreadful conveyance they
call a Shillibeer, to Finchley. When I went back to the Inn and began
to square up his affairs, the water bed was missing. We had clubbed
together and hired that water bed for him before Queenie’s deception. I
heard long afterward that Mrs. Morey had pawned it at the pawnbroker’s
at the corner of Green Street. No doubt Bill, for once, was too strong
for her.
About two months afterward there was a faint tap at my door one night.
When I opened it I saw a woman standing outside. How shall I describe
her?
She wasn’t young--your age, if you’ll forgive me, thirty or so--but
there was a youthfulness and freshness about her which you seldom see
in a girl out of her teens. She wasn’t pretty, not a bit. She didn’t
even look clever. Yet I’ve never seen a more fascinating, a more
delightful woman. She was a little like Adeline, only not half so
handsome, and there was not the mark of knowledge on her face. She said
firmly, “Does Mr. James Carol live here?”
Her voice was calm, but it was only the calmness of perfect breeding.
There was none of a sister’s cold, lily-like air about her--no tepid,
anxious touch of family concern. Jimmy had been her world.
She was a lady, using the word in its old dignified, graceful sense,
without modern abuse, without that vulgar, exasperating “i” which
degrades it into “laidy.”
“I’m sorry to say that Jimmy--Mr. Carol--is dead.”
She didn’t wait for me to say any more. She dropped at my feet on the
dirty boards of the landing; dropped without a cry, without a
contortion of her charming, pure face.
I got her round as well as I could. While I was fanning her with a
doubled-up newspaper and trying to force brandy down her throat, I
noticed the subtle refinements of her dress. And there was a haunting
memory in that face. I thought that I must have seen it before, until I
remembered Farthings Farm and the old woman who tended Mrs. Covey. I
remembered, too, Jimmy’s flicker of animation when he had seen that
woman--and I understood. There was the same peculiar, fascinating
sweetness of expression; an expression which would lure you to any
madness at the start and cloy you to death long before the finish.
I got her round. She went away, with beautifully expressed thanks--and
not a flutter of her eyelids.
That is all. The key to Jimmy’s love affair--if he had one--lies with
him at Finchley.
GAME FEATHERS.
JIMMY and I once spent a month in the country together. The doctor had
ordered him fresh air and good diet. We went to Farthings Farm in
Sussex and boarded with old Mrs. Covey. She was an extraordinary
character--narrowly religious, as these half-educated rustics so often
are. You could see hell fire in the hard lines of her mouth and the
cunning screw of her little gray eyes. Yet she wasn’t a bad sort. Her
pious cant was amusing and quite harmless. She talked seriously to
Jimmy, knowing, as she must have done, that he had not long to live.
She used to say, with a half-groaning, half-chuckling sort of breath:
“Ah! sir, I believe in the sacrifice in _this_ world.”
Jimmy returned, very politely--he was always polite:
“I’m afraid I don’t quite gather your meaning.”
Mrs. Covey would look at him despairingly, raise her eyes to the
ceiling, shake her head, and ejaculate a long, solemn “Ah--ah!” which
was very convincing.
She was up at daybreak every morning; we used to hear her scolding and
swilling or throwing a pet word to her cats--she had five. But on
Sundays she used to lie very late--until half-past seven. She took a
bath--as a pious duty. When breakfast was over, she sat in the living
room, with the big Bible in front of her and her spectacles on the open
page, until it was time to go to chapel. She drove there regularly
every Sunday. It was a rich sight to see her with her two sons, in the
shabby wagonette, sitting bolt upright in widow’s weeds, with black kid
gloves, purple in the palms and much too long in the fingers. Sunday
was a day of days. We fed on cold meat and salad; it was the one day on
which she refused to sell milk or to spud about in her garden. In the
afternoon she would walk solemnly through her meadows, never
speculating on the crops or allowing her sons to do so, but holding up
her black silk skirt carefully, and drawing her sour Sabbath lip.
She was very kind to Jimmy--taking good care of his body, although
she despaired of his soul. In her young days she had been a cook, and
she tempted his flagging appetite with many dainties. There was one
particular dish of candied red currants.
If anyone called on her--say, between three and half-past--for milk,
for advice about a sick baby, for herbal treatment of a wound, or for
the simple loan of a black crock, Jib or Zak would be lurching at the
house door. They were grotesquely alike, those sons of hers, with the
Biblical names of Jabez and Zachary. She always called them Jib and Zak
on week days; Jabez and Zachary on Sundays. They had an odd way of
greeting you. They gave a nod--half sheepish, half jovial--or they
raised a broad, dingy thumb to a sun-baked straw hat, according to
their mood or the social status of the visitor.
Their answer to all inquiries was:
“Mother ’ull be down directly. Would you care to step inside out o’ the
sun and set down, till you hear her draw up the clock?”
That was her rule. For forty years, except when stopped by
trivialities--such as a confinement--she had drawn up the thirty-hour
clock the moment before she came down from her afternoon’s cleaning.
That afternoon black dress, with jet buttons! I remember the tiny,
shiny silk apron, with the bead edging and the prim pockets. She never
put in her false teeth until the afternoon, nor pinned on her false
hair, which was three shades too light. In the mornings she slipped
about the kitchen and dairy in an old skirt, a nondescript bodice, and
a shawl--thick or thin, according to the direction of the wind.
I remember the particular morning when she was taken ill. It was a
tremendously hot day in June. Jimmy was sitting on the wooden bench by
the garden door, with his thin hands spread out on his knees to bake in
the sun. I was hanging about the garden, and longing to get back to the
Inn. Mrs. Covey came out from the dairy with a dish clout in her hand.
She began to vigorously “shoo” a fine cock from the strawberry bed. I
can see her now, with her bent back in the brownish bodice and
triangular-folded scarlet shawl. She went back to the house between
rows of podded broad beans. When she cried out to the cock--who was
a gay fellow, all brown and burnish--it was a queer, unwomanly cry.
No doubt she knew the note with which to scare him. He went racing back
to the yard, all tail feathers, swinging comb, and indignant cackle.
An hour afterward she fell on the flagstones by the back door. She had
been very busy making jelly of windfall apples. Apoplexy gripped her,
and she fell, a droll-looking, lop-sided heap, on the stones.
That was a long, hot, empty day. Jimmy was fretful and selfish, after
the manner of chronic invalids. He missed his egg and milk, his jelly,
the dozen little dainties that she prepared for him. And I think he was
a trifle scared, poor chap, by the very mention of Death--Death, that
unpleasant personage, with whom he already had a bowing acquaintance.
The doctor came--a hearty country man, in a high, rakish-looking trap.
He said there was no hope for her. A woman came in and got her to bed.
Her world waited breathlessly, soberly for her to go. Her world--of
forty acres or so--was waiting stolidly. Birds in the wood--metallic
finches, throaty wood pigeons, the persistent cuckoo, called across the
branches and the long, rank grass of her. She had known so many
generations of birds.
Out by the back door everything was eloquent of her: pans of unskimmed
milk in the dairy, the preserving pan, with a wooden skimmer set in
syrup.
Jimmy crawled up the white road in the sun to the public house. But I
stayed behind. I was fond of the queer old woman, and I thought that
perhaps I might come in useful. Zak said moodily that it was an awkward
time of the year for illness. He didn’t put it in words, but I knew his
thought--that it was inconsiderate of her to take to dying in the
middle of haymaking. In the orchard was the awning which she had
roughly rigged up for the haymakers--but who was to get the men’s tea?
The grass in the eight-acre meadow had been left until the last. There
was a merry jingle as the machine rattled and rocked along.
Jib and Zak, so much alike, with eyes and mouths twisted in consequence
of life-long opposition to the glare of the sun, came into the parlor
where I sat reading the local paper. They had been clumping hopelessly
about in the garden. I had watched them, finding them more interesting
than the price of store pigs and the sale of underwood. They had looked
out wistfully at the eight-acre field, half lush, half shorn. They had
looked up at Mrs. Covey’s window--a tiny window, set high in the
brown thatch roof; a window with dim, greenish panes and the spectral
suggestion of a limp calico curtain.
We heard the slipping, soft sound of feet. The stairs opened out from
the sitting room. A beautiful old woman of forty-five or less--work in
the fields and so many children make them old long before that--sidled
up to the brothers, as they sat heavily in the Windsor chairs by the
empty hearth. She was the village layer-out; once she had been the
village coquette. Five shillings a corpse, and shillings hard to earn!
Zak had run to her cottage and fetched her directly his mother fell.
She was always called to deathbeds. She gave a sidelong look at me and
courtesied with charming grace; some of these rustic women are queens
of grace. Then she spoke to the brothers, the greedy look of a vulture
creeping into her violet eyes.
“I’m jest slipping home now to look after my lodger. There’s no change
in her. She won’t go, bless your hearts, for pretty nigh twenty-four
hour. I’ll look round after tea agen; no doubt you’ll make it worth my
while.”