rooms and a nest of cupboards called a kitchen. You never saw such
cupboards, such idiotic waste of space! Probably not. Every set is
different. The old fellows who designed the place were freakish. It is
small and inconvenient, but the best I can afford. I’m three quarters
in arrears with the rent, as it is. Some day I shall have to shoot the
moon and get the boys in the other sets to help me do it. We all hang
together in adversity.
When Chaytor took it he was a clerk in the City at one hundred and
eighty pounds a year. On one hundred and eighty pounds a year he
married Minnie, who was the lady typewriting clerk in the same office.
They lived here--just for a bit, as he always explained--until their
ship came home. He was a most hopeful fellow. They pegged on
pretty comfortably for a time. Minnie smartened up the rooms--that
plush bracket on the wall above your head was hers. She turned up her
nose pretty considerably at other ladies in the Inn. She routed
Chaytor’s laundress. The poor old soul came and poured out her woes to
me. She had everything her own way so long as Chaytor was a bachelor. I
remember that he came home from the City one day in his lunch
hour--which he usually stretched into two--and found her asleep on his
bed. She had not even troubled to take off her battered black bonnet or
the sacking apron whose narrow string kept her together at the waist.
But Minnie, as she rather snappishly said, was not going to “put up
with such ways. She would rather do the work herself.” So Mrs. Percival
got a week’s notice.
“I’ve done for dozens of gentlemen in the Inn, as you knows, sir,” she
said pathetically to me; “and then to be sacked by a hussy like her.
An’ me the widow of a solicitor myself, and a lady by birth.”
Things went on well enough with the Chaytors for a few months. We did
not see much of Nat; Minnie had a freezing, fine-lady manner with
old bachelor friends, and liked her husband to go to bed when she
did--punctually at eleven. Things went on well enough until he got
discharged from his berth in the City. It was the usual story--business
bad, reducing the staff, and so on. But I rather fancy that Nat’s easy
hours had something to do with it. He always turned up half an hour
late in the morning, took two hours for his lunch, another hour for
afternoon tea, and went off at six every night, very often leaving the
members of the firm at their desks. He had that fierce, sick hatred of
City life which so many fellows have--nearly all the fellows who are
good for anything. The dozens that I have seen chuck the accursed City!
Some of these go up and some go under. But whichever way it is, they
live--or die--free men.
He lost his berth. He was rather relieved than otherwise. He had been
expecting it for a long time. A City clerk’s is a grim calling. He is
never safe, and he knows that once out of a situation the chances are
ten to one against his getting another. It is like losing your footing
in a crowd--there is small chance of getting up again. Orion knew
that; it egged him on to murder the old woman in Great Ormond Street.
No doubt Nat had a hot time with Minnie when he told her the news. She
was one of those small, sharp-featured, rasping-voiced girls, with an
ineffaceable sneer on her lips. Her creed was getting on in the world.
She had been hoping that Nat would have a rise--two hundred a year, so
that they might have a house all to themselves in the suburbs, and a
little maidservant with a cap and apron. She said that the Inn wasn’t a
fit place for a respectable young woman, and very likely she was right.
But Chaytor, as usual, put a good face on the affair. I think he was
genuinely glad. The City fogs hurt his chest, he said; and was a man a
slave or a schoolboy, that he should mount the same confounded office
stool every morning, year in and year out!
“They only give us a fortnight’s holiday,” he added, “and then it is
always wet. Find me the City clerk who has ever had a fine fortnight
for his annual holiday!”
Minnie cried out savagely, “Stuff and nonsense!”
She asked him where he expected to find thirty-five pounds a year rent
and a pound a week housekeeping, to say nothing of extras such as
clothes.
“Easily enough,” Chaytor cried airily. “I’m going in for journalism.”
And then it began--the long, heart-breaking struggle--with a shrew at
his elbow thrown in. He used to sit at the window and wait for the last
post every evening. He watched the postman cross the square and fumble
at his bag.
“That article is sure to be accepted,” he would call into the room to
Minnie. “Here is the check coming upstairs. We’ll go down to your home
for a little holiday.”
But the check never came. It was always a long envelope addressed in
his own handwriting and containing his “copy” and the diabolically
polite regrets of the editor. Poor old Chaytor!
Minnie carefully cleaned and oiled her typewriter and put an
advertisement in a literary paper for copying work--quoting a penny
a thousand less than the other advertisers.
The quick clinkety-clank of the typewriter tortured Chaytor; he hated
machinery. He said mournfully that the world was rapidly becoming
machine-made. Of course Minnie asked acidly, “where would he be if it
were not for machines?”
Sometimes he got ten shillings, once a guinea, for an article, but it
was the copying work that kept them. I remember the day when he got the
guinea. He went out and spent two shillings on a plant in a pot for
Minnie. You should have seen the look on her face when he presented it!
I happened to be there. She went on clanking furiously, just spitting
out through the din of her keys:
“The baker came while you were out. I had to shut the oak and keep as
still as a mouse. We owe _him_ ten shillings. I don’t know where you
think it is coming from.”
I suppose she was right, but one couldn’t help being sorry for Chaytor.
He wasn’t really fit for this work-a-day world. I often had a queer
feeling that he did not mean to stop in it long.
One morning in early April he burst out laughing. He was sitting at a
table near the window polishing up one of his articles, and Minnie was
typing at another table in the middle of the room.
“What is the matter?” she asked sharply.
He looked at her across the machine in a dazed way.
“Oh, nothing!” he muttered, confused by her clear, business-like
glance. “I was only wondering why I am here--that’s all. It seemed
odd.”
“I wish you were not here,” she returned practically. “Go and hunt
round for a berth! There must be plenty. Why, if you began at £80 it
would be better than nothing.”
Then she got up, saying it was time to get something for dinner. She
came in with her hat and cape on to ask what he would like. The
shabbiness of that hat and cape struck his heart, although he had not
quite got rid of the dazed, unreal feeling which had come over him so
suddenly. He noticed too, that Minnie’s cheeks, so pink once, had
deepened to mottled purple, that her shallow eyes were hard and her
cheek-bones sharp. He worried himself by wondering where her old self
had gone. The girl he had courted under City gas lamps had left him and
put a shrewish woman in her place. But she must have gone somewhere,
that delicately tinted, coquettish girl. What became of cast-off selves?
“Well?” she said crisply, investigating the contents of her purse.
“Chops?”
“At thirteen pence a pound! No, thank you. A bit of beefsteak and a
spring cabbage. I shan’t be long. I shall just run down Red Lion
Street.”
She whisked off with her worn purse and her string bag. Chaytor began
to dream of the country, which he knew very well, although he had never
been more than ten miles from London since his childhood. But Minnie
was a Somersetshire girl. She was always scattering careless word
pictures. He knew just when you might find the first primroses, in
sheltered spots, what cherry blossom was like, how they carted home
hay. He knew the earliest date for the cuckoo, and how persistently the
wryneck called through April and May; knew that the first notes of the
nightingales were unsteady, that ladies’ smocks and king-cups only grew
in damp spots.
He laughed. He felt that the country was his own rich inheritance. It
really was ridiculous! A grim, rare, ripe joke that he--with such a
kingdom of earth and sky--should be going through this farce. Why was
he here? Why had he come? Why was he strangling himself slowly with
thick London smoke? Why was he driving himself half mad to make both
ends meet, to turn off articles suited to the popular taste--the
debased popular taste which he scorned! It was queer. He laughed again.
Then he thought he would go out. Minnie would be annoyed when he came
home and said that he had only been for a walk and not for a berth; but
when you are playing at life, just masquerading, a woman’s anger does
not matter very much. He went across the square. I saw him go. It was
such a spring-like morning--in the Inn--that I almost called out of the
window to say that I would come too. Instead of that, I watched him
from behind the curtain and noticed, for the first time, how slowly
he went, how hunched his shoulders were.
He went across to the Holborn Town Hall, where the trams start. He went
by one to Stamford Hill and got down and went crawling along a row of
new houses. They were villas of the sort that Minnie had been ambitious
for when there was some chance of his screw being raised to two hundred
pounds. They were semi-detached; between each pair was a narrow
passage, convenient for the carting of coal and refuse. He stopped at
one of these shoots; the passage was barred by a gate, an unpainted
gate of gray oak.
He pushed it open, shut it softly, gave a last look back, and then went
down the narrow entry. New walls of cheap brick rose on each side; the
April wind hooted softly after him. At the end of the passage was
another gate, which he went through. Beyond it was open common.
There had been rain. He saw stretches of dim brown and bleached yellow,
broken here and there by the bright mustard tint of fully blown broom
and patched with little pools on which the sun shone, turning them
into irregular plates of turquoise. There was a tethered goat with a
little kid by her side. Haughty geese, with their newly hatched
families behind them, strutted proudly. There were ever so many young
things; humpy, clumsy calves, ducklings trying to swim in the pools
with all the dignity and address of their elders; a colt, set on long,
stick-like, squarely placed legs--like a toy wooden horse--and with a
funny tail like a hearth brush. Chaytor laughed heartily with
recollection of this colt when he was telling us his experiences.
The heather sprang up after his feet had crushed it. Everything was
whole and sweet. He sniffed at a delicious, intangible smell. He sat
down, the ground yielded to his body like a pillow. He gave his aching
lungs, clogged with so many years of smoke and fog, their fill. There
was no house in sight, no, not one. No chimney speared the sky. The
sky! He looked up, and the blue and yellow blinded him. He looked down
and saw only wide clean common, patched by broom and gorse, spread with
withered heather. A bird flew up singing, as if its throat would burst.
Across the common came a jerky, regular call. Something tight came up
in his neck and his eyes grew hot and dry. He had heard the lark. He
had heard the cuckoo. He had ceased to masquerade, to play the fool. He
had come to his own. He jumped up with a tremendous feeling of strength
and exhilaration and went on. He swung his shoulders with a grand free
swing. He looked about him, intently, critically, as a man looks at his
inheritance.
The common seemed to be garnering itself and the face of the country
was changing. He was approaching a pastoral district. He crossed a
bridge; on one side was an iron railing, on the other a low coping of
stone. He climbed over a stile. It had easy steps and a broad top--a
good stile to linger on. It led into a little copse; merely a copse
fringed with hazel, with a thick carpet of rotting leaves, with
primroses and oxlips holding up their starry heads, with bluebells
making a powdery haze.
There were lovers in the copse. They stared at him furtively, then
scuttled into the shadow like timid birds. But he saw both the man and
the girl grin sheepishly.
Beyond the copse was luscious, elastic pasture land. He went lightly
along, noticing everything with microscopic fidelity. Women in the
distance were bent double as they rooted out the flaming charlock from
a field of barley.
Presently he saw an empty cottage, with broken windows and dropping
roof of thatch. He wandered round it, looking in at rooms which were
low-pitched and floored with flagstones, and which had yawning hearths
for a wood fire. He stood in the orchard, where a red cow who had come
in through a gap in the hedge was munching rank grass. The apple trees,
with lichened, twisted trunks, were beginning to bloom. He walked round
each tree slowly, as if he were some ancient priest intent on sacred
rites. Then he wondered idly if there were any Quarranden apples.
Minnie’s mother, the Somersetshire wife, had sent her daughter up a
basket of those once. They were like Minnie’s own cheeks, and the red
tinge went faintly through. When you took a big, rough bite, you saw
pink bubbles of juice. It was like biting human flesh. He never forgot
that basket of apples. Their arrival set a white stone in his life.
They brought him into actual touch with his kingdom.
After a while he came out on a dusty road. Two boys, tow-headed and in
picturesque rags, were looking after two lean cows who grazed by the
waste. These children grinned at him broadly, as the lovers in the
copse had done--though, like the lovers, they made no sound. It was a
very silent world, except for the sing and cry of birds and animals.
The boys grinned, evidently finding him much more diverting than
the scarecrow three fields off, which was hanging its limp head and
waving its fantastic arms. Chaytor felt uncomfortable; he was always a
sensitive chap.
“They are laughing at my top hat and black coat,” he said to himself.
“One ought to have a tweed suit for the country. That article on ‘Why
Wear a White Shirt?’ is certainly in the popular style and will be
taken. I’ll turn off two or three more in the same vein and then get
some tweeds. Minnie and I can come here often. It won’t cost much. We
can always run to the tram fare.”
The country echoed with weak bleats; it was the month when young
lambs are dropped. He went on. The sky kept changing. Sometimes it was
reminiscent of towns. He dreaded to see some foul gust of smoke break
over the misty hills which belted him. Then it was dappled, then clear
blue. It sloped to the horizon in streaks, as if swept by a
broad-lipped brush. The earth changed too; it was green, purple,
spice-colored, or hot red. Clumps of elms rose here and there, usually
marking a homestead. Their black branches waved like the straggling
feathers in Minnie’s Sunday hat. There was no sound--but the sound of
the cuckoo and of sheep. He seemed to actually hear the silence. He was
away from machines at last; not even the shriek of a railway engine
disturbed him. He was away from the clack of praiseworthy Minnie’s
typewriter. He let it flood his ears--this stillness. These were the
restful, silent moments he had often longed for. Everything was
stationary. There was no fierce struggle to get on, to grab more than
your neighbor.
He drank in all the wonder of the hedgerows; the tight, shy fronds
of the male fern--all the marvelous secrecy of the curved bank. He
saw primroses, the dapple of pale lilac where milkmaid bloomed.
Dandelions, like dropped guineas, rose from the grass.
He came to another house, and stared at the long wasteful slope of the
red roof, at narrow windows lurking under heavy eaves, at the tracery
of oak beams across greenish-white plaster walls. A tremendous pear
tree just in bloom shaded the house door. A patch of kitchen garden had
been turned up roughly in autumn; there were black heaps of manure, the
size and shape of haycocks, on the ridged earth. Clothes hung on a
line--dim colors, patched garments of outlandish shape. The bloom of
the pear tree was falling; it was gray on the stone path.
A young woman came out to the gate and stared at him curiously. He
asked her for a drink of water. She led the way into the dairy, never
saying a word. He thought the silence of country people very strange.
He had become accustomed to the restless loquacity of the eager
Cockney.
She was a fresh-faced young woman and seemed fragrant, just as
everything else was. A robust woman! Her arms beneath her rolled-up
sleeves were quite brawny--rosy, round arms, dented at the elbows and
a deeper red. He watched her dip the milk. The dairy was cool; he
thought of a sweet, intensely still grave. There were shallow bowls
full of cream. There was a slab of slate on which was butter in firm
pounds, all marked with the same mark. She gave him the milk and shook
her head when he offered to pay. Their hands touched round the mug,
which was striped blue and white. Hers was strong and dry and very cold.
When he went away he looked back once. She was at the gate, watching
him with a slow, speculative glance in which he fancied he detected a
touch of fear. He took away a vivid impression of her. She was a
ruddy-faced young woman in a lilac cotton gown. It was short-waisted,
and her linen apron was tied very high, almost under her arms. She
seemed oddly shaped--a creature with a minimum of body; all curly head,
round, big bust, and long limbs.
* * * * *
He sidled out at the oak gate stealthily. He was so afraid that he
would be seen, that someone else would find that walk; someone tainted
with the horrible modern idea of Progress; someone who would build and
bring machinery. He took the first tram home. The people who also rode
on it had never seemed more cadaverous, more fusty. They exhaled an
odor of wardrobe shops.
I met him in the square almost at his own doorway. The deep hollows in
his face were filled with red. His long hands were quivering with
excitement.
“Come up to my rooms,” he said hastily. “I’ve something to tell you,
I’ve had a most wonderful experience.”
We went up. He opened the door with his key. Minnie was cooking the
dinner, her bit of beefsteak fizzled and sputtered savagely in the pan.
Her pretty little pinched face was like a thundercloud.
“Never mind the dinner,” Chaytor said, going up to the fire and kissing
her effusively. “My darling! I’ve had such a find. We might go and live
there; rent would be next to nothing. My articles would keep the pot
boiling. I should insist on your selling your typewriter--no cursed
machinery there! I should have to be careful going in and out of the
gray gate--that is all. If anyone else spotted it we should be ruined.”
He sat down in the first chair, panting a little. Minnie said
impatiently:
“What on earth does he mean?”
She dished up her steak and pressed me none too graciously to have some
with them. So we three sat round the little table, and Chaytor told us
all he had seen. He told it so vividly--I have repeated it to you
almost word for word--that he really flung a glamour over this mean
little London room. He sat just there, with his back to the cupboard
where they kept their bundles of wood--where I still keep mine. Poor
Chaytor! The smell of the country seemed to blow over us all. Even
Minnie grew faintly excited.
“But it is impossible,” she said. “Why, I know Stamford Hill; an aunt
of mine lived there once. She had a house standing in its own grounds.”
She glanced at me to see if this fact impressed me. “But there is no
country there. I’m certain of it. I used to spend my Sundays with Aunt
Jane. The last old house was pulled down years ago. Six streets of
villas stand on the site. I’ve seen them.”
But Chaytor babbled on of his lilac woman.
“It’s all nonsense,” Minnie said more clinchingly. “You dreamt it--I
believe you’re asleep more than half your time. And even if you weren’t
asleep, everyone knows that consumptives have queer fancies. It’s no
good wriggling on your chair like that when you know very well that the
doctor told you ever so long ago that you had only one lung.”
“It was real,” he insisted, flinching a little at her candor. “So real
that I seemed to have been there before.”
“I know,” I said soothingly. “We all have that feeling sometimes.
Bloater paste serves me like that; makes me think of a red-haired
fellow in a punt. These things are odd. Murphy used to feel the same
over ripe plums--only _his_ was an empty barn and a thunderstorm.”
I’ve always tried hard to be practical, you know. I’m convinced that
money is the secret of all happiness--though I’ve never had the
peculiar quality that makes it. For once I thought that I’d be
business-like.
“If you should be right,” I said to Chaytor, “there is a fortune in it.
I think I know a man who would finance us. By what you say the land is
ripe for development; we could cut it up into estates--plant shrubs and
rows of horse chestnuts--you know the sort of thing. We’d call it the
Marlowe estate, after the Inn.”
Chaytor flinched; then he said with a droll smile:
“If I thought you meant that I would cut my throat rather than take you
there. But you never were a money-grubber, old fellow. Come and see for
yourself. Everything will be as I have told you--the bridge, the empty
house, the little wood. And the woman at the dairy--we’ll get her to
give us some milk.”
Minnie was staring at him with round, cold eyes. Her elbows were on the
table.
He touched her hand.
“Come on,” he said tenderly.
She got up, looked at her machine, hesitated, and then said, “It’s a
fine afternoon and a blow will do me good. I’ve finished that MS. We
may as well.”
She put on her best blouse and a pair of new gloves. It was a beautiful
afternoon, and we were all gay as we trundled along on the roof of the
tram.
Chaytor led us to the row of semi-detached villas. Minnie eyed them
admiringly.
“That is the sort of house I should like,” she said with a sigh. “There
is every convenience.”
Chaytor was going along very slowly, looking intently at the mouth of
every passage. He went to the very end of the row. We followed, feeling
half excited and half foolish. I said with sudden suspicion to Minnie:
“It isn’t the first of April, is it?”
She returned with dangerous brevity:
“No. The sixth.”
She was eying Chaytor with a look that boded a row. He suddenly wheeled
round sharply; even she was startled, I think, by the change in his
face--it was gray, like the gate of which he talked.
“It isn’t here,” he said in a quavering voice. “It’s gone--the gray
gate. Gone!”
He looked at us with panic-stricken eyes. Then he started eagerly back,
peering into every passage. When he reached the last he turned again.
“It’s gone,” he repeated. “Oh, my God! it’s gone. I’ve lost it!”
He let his head drop, and leaned helplessly against the railings of the
next house. Minnie glanced at me eloquently, raising her nose and brows
and shoulders.
“Let’s get him home,” she said in an agony for appearances. “There is a
tram at the corner. Hurry up. Don’t be such a fool, Nat. I never was so
ashamed in my life. There was nothing--I never expected there would be.
Just see how that woman across the way is staring. Well she may! I knew
there would not be anything. How could there be? You can see the
back-garden palings and the dust hole at the end of every one.”
We had reached the tram. She bundled Chaytor up the steps and followed
him, not seeming to care whether I came or not.
He was never the same afterward. He never wrote an article. He talked
of nothing but the gray gate. He used to beg Minnie piteously for his
tram fare. Sometimes she gave the coppers just to be rid of him.
“He’s going ‘dotty,’” she said fiercely to me, beating the inanimate
type with her quick fingers.
Sometimes he would wake up in the morning and sing as he
dressed--putting on his clothes with feverish, jerking hands, she used
to come and tell me. He said he had made a mistake in the row--those
cursed villas were so much alike. Would she come too? He was sure of
finding it this time. He wouldn’t bother her for any more tram fares.
He was very sorry.
When he walked he used to put out his hand like a blind man and grope
with his long fingers--as if he hoped to feel something that he was not
permitted to see. He was feeling for wood--for the gray gate. I met him
once and took his arm and carried him off to have a drink.
He said to me quite seriously, as we stood at the bar: