How pleasant it is to have money, heigho!
How pleasant it is to have money!
Sings (I think) Clough. Well, I had money, and more of it than I felt
any desire to spend; which is as much as any reasonable man can want.
My age was five-and-twenty, my health good, my conscience moderately
clean, and my appetite excellent: I had fame in some degree, and a fair
prospect of adding to it: and I was unmarried. In later life a man may
seek marriage for its own sake, but at five-and-twenty he marries against
his will--because he has fallen in love with a woman; and this had not yet
happened to me. I was a bachelor, and content to remain one.
To come to smaller matters--The month was early June, the weather perfect,
the solitude of my own choosing, and my posture comfortable enough to
invite drowsiness. I had bathed and, stretched supine in the shade of a
high sand-bank, was smoking the day's first cigarette. Behind me lay
Ambleteuse; before me, the sea. On the edge of it, their shrill
challenges softened by the distance to music, a score of children played
with spades and buckets, innocently composing a hundred pretty groups of
brown legs, fluttered hair, bright frocks and jerseys, and innocently
conspiring with morning to put a spirit of youth into the whole picture.
Beyond them the blue sea flashed with its own smiles, and the blue heaven
over them with the glancing wings of gulls. On this showing it is evident
that I, George Anthony Richardson, ought to have been happy; whereas, in
fact, Richardson was cheerful enough, but George Anthony restless and
ill-content: by reason that Richardson, remembering the past, enjoyed by
contrast the present, and knew himself to be jolly well off; while George
Anthony, likewise remembering the past, felt gravely concerned for the
future.
Let me explain. A year ago I had been a clerk in the Office of the Local
Government Board--a detested calling with a derisory stipend. It was all
that a University education (a second in Moderations and a third in
_Literae Humaniores_) had enabled me to win, and I stuck to it because I
possessed no patrimony and had no 'prospects' save one, which stood
precariously on the favour of an uncle--my mother's brother, Major-General
Allan Mclntosh, C.B. Now the General could not be called an indulgent
man. He had retired from active service to concentrate upon his kinsfolk
those military gifts which even on the wide plains of Hindostan had kept
him the terror of his country's foes and the bugbear of his own soldiery.
He had an iron sense of discipline and a passion for it; he detested all
forms of amusement; in religion he belonged to the sect of the Peculiar
People; and he owned a gloomy house near the western end of the Cromwell
Road, where he dwelt and had for butler, valet, and factotum a Peculiar
Person named Trewlove.
In those days I found my chief recreation in the theatre; and by-and-by,
when I essayed to write for it, and began to pester managers with
curtain-raisers, small vaudevilles, comic libretti and the like, you will
guess that in common prudence I called myself by a _nom de guerre_.
Dropping the 'Richardson,' I signed my productions 'George Anthony,' and
as 'George Anthony' the playgoing public now discusses me. For some
while, I will confess, the precaution was superfluous, the managers having
apparently entered into league to ensure me as much obscurity as I had any
use for. But at length in an unguarded moment the manager of the Duke of
Cornwall's Theatre (formerly the Euterpe) accepted a three-act farce.
It was poorly acted, yet for some reason it took the town. '_Larks in
Aspic_, a Farcical Comedy by George Anthony,' ran for a solid three
hundred nights; and before it ceased my unsuspecting uncle had closed his
earthly career, leaving me with seventy thousand pounds (the bulk of it
invested in India Government stock), the house in the Cromwell Road, and,
lastly, in sacred trust, his faithful body-servant, William John Trewlove.
Here let me pause to deplore man's weakness and the allurement of
splendid possessions. I had been happy enough in my lodgings in Jermyn
Street, and, thanks to _Larks in Aspic_, they were decently furnished.
At the prompting, surely, of some malignant spirit, I exchanged them for a
house too large for me in a street too long for life, for my uncle's
furniture (of the Great Exhibition period), and for the unnecessary and
detested services of Trewlove.
This man enjoyed, by my uncle's will, an annuity of fifty pounds.
He had the look, too, of one who denied himself small pleasures, not only
on religious grounds, but because they cost money. Somehow, I never
doubted that he owned a balance at the bank, or that, after a brief
interval spent in demonstrating that our ways were uncongenial, he would
retire on a competence and await translation to join my uncle in an equal
sky--equal, that is, within the fence of the elect. But not a bit of it!
I had been adjured in the will to look after him: and at first I supposed
that he clung to me against inclination, from a conscientious resolve to
give me every chance. By-and-by, however, I grew aware of a change in
him; or, rather, of some internal disquiet, suppressed but volcanic,
working towards a change. Once or twice he staggered me by answering some
casual question in a tone which, to say the least of it, suggested an
ungainly attempt at facetiousness. A look at his sepulchral face would
reassure me, but did not clear up the mystery. Something was amiss with
Trewlove.
The horrid truth broke upon me one day as we discussed the conduct of one
of my two housemaids. Trewlove, returning one evening (as I gathered)
from a small _reunion_ of his fellow-sectarians in the Earl's Court Road,
had caught her in the act of exchanging railleries from an upper window
with a trooper in the 2nd Life Guards, and had reported her.
"Most unbecoming," said I.
"Unwomanly," said Trewlove, with a sudden contortion of the face;
"unwomanly, sir!--but ah, how like a woman!"
I stared at him for one wild moment, and turned abruptly to the window.
The rascal had flung a quotation at me--out of _Larks in Aspic!_ He knew,
then! He had penetrated the disguise of "George Anthony," and, worse
still, he meant to forgive it. His eye had conveyed a dreadful promise of
complicity. Almost--I would have given worlds to know, and yet I dared
not face it--almost it had been essaying a wink!
I dismissed him with instructions--not very coherent, I fear--to give the
girl a talking-to, and sat down to think. How long had he known?--that
was my first question, and in justice to him it had to be considered:
since, had he known and kept the secret in my uncle's lifetime, beyond a
doubt, and unpleasant as the thought might be, I was enormously his
debtor. That stern warrior's attitude towards the playhouse had ever been
uncompromising. Stalls, pit, and circles--the very names suggested
Dantesque images and provided illustrations for many a discourse.
Themselves verbose, these discourses indicated A Short Way with
Stage-players, and it stood in no doubt that the authorship of _Larks in
Aspic_ had only to be disclosed to him to provide me with the shortest
possible cut out of seventy thousand pounds.
I might, and did, mentally consign Trewlove to all manner of painful
places, as, for instance, the bottom of the sea; but I could not will away
this obligation. After cogitating for awhile I rang for him.
"Trewlove," said I, "you know, it seems, that I have written a play."
"Yessir! _Larks in Aspic_, sir."