AN ADVENTURER
In one of the new cottages at the edge of the town beyond lives, or
tries to live, a man who fought for many years in one of the suburbs a
losing battle against London. His father had farmed land now covered by
streets. He himself was persuaded to sell all but his house and garden
to raise money for a business which promised his sons great wealth.
He retained barely enough to live upon; the business, an honest one,
failed; and in a short time misfortunes compelled him to open a shop.
He converted the house--that was once a farmhouse--into a shop, and not
five years ago it could still be seen at the end of a row of gaudy,
glittering windows, itself a village shop, having but a common house
window for the display of wares, the interior gloomy and approached
through a strip of garden where a lime-tree put on and shed its leaves
with the air of a princess of old romance. The back garden, half an
orchard, was bordered along a side street by a high wall, and over that
a broad cherry used to lean a gnarled branch and shower its blossoms
upon the asphalte; the foot-passengers complained of the tree which
had grown without foreknowledge of the fact that men would pass below
in silk hats, and the branch was lopped. In the shop itself everything
was for sale, everything that officious travellers could foist
upon the little weak-eyed half-farmer, half-gardener who kept the
shop--hosiery, leather bags, purses, cheap jewellery, fishing-tackle,
cricket-bats, umbrellas, walking-sticks. A staircase led out of the
shop to the bedrooms, just as it had done when the window on the narrow
landing looked over hay-fields to Banstead Downs. When the cat was
not lying upon the socks in the window, she had, very likely, been
kept away by a litter of kittens somewhere among the seldom disturbed
bundles of unfashionable ties, or she lay in the sun beneath the lime
and watched her kittens pursuing the spiral flight of the yellow leaves.
The owner made no concessions except such as he was forced to, as when
he bought the stock of jewellery because the traveller praised his cat;
or allowed the cherry tree to be mutilated because the new Borough
Council commanded. He dressed in breeches, gaiters and heavy boots, and
never wore a coat or took his pipe out of his mouth (except to play
with puss). Seldom did he leave the house, unless it was to go into
the garden or to take a walk down the emptied busy street at night,
when the only sound was the crickets’ song from the bakers’ shops. The
little old house rippled over by creeper was beautiful then--the lime
tree and the creeper trembling in the gusty moonlight, and the windows
and doorway hollow and dark and romantic as if a poet had made them to
sting men’s hearts with beauty and with regret.
No one can ever say what the old man thought as he slammed the door
after one of these walks and was alone with himself. Certainly he
regretted the big decorous high-gated houses that used to stand
opposite his, veiled by wistaria, passion flower and clematis; the
limes that used to run the whole length of his father’s land, but now
all gone, save this one (how lovely its fallen leaves looked in the as
yet untrodden streets in autumn mornings, lying flat and moistly golden
under the fog!); the balsam growing through the railings; the dark yew
tree that looked among bright lilac and laburnum like a negro among the
women in the _Arabian Nights_; the pathway through the churchyard, in
the days before they had to rail it in to preserve the decent turf--in
vain, for it was now littered with newspapers and tram-tickets among
the tombs of ---- Esquire, ---- Esquire, for they were all esquires. He
regretted the houses and gardens, but less than their people, the men
and women of some ease and state, of speech whose kindliness was thrice
kind through its careful dignity, so he thought. And then the children,
there were no such children now; and the young men and women, the men
a little alarming, the women strong and lovely and gentle enough to
supply him with incarnations at once of all those whom he read of in
the novels of Scott. They had gone long ago, except those who survived
vaguely in the novels. He remembered their houses better, for it was
not until after some years that they were pulled down, their orchards
grubbed up, and their rich mould carried away in sacks to the trumpery
villas round about--dragged along the road and spilt in a long black
trail. It was wonderful dark mould, and the thought of the apples, the
plums, the nectarines, the roses which had grown out of it made him
furious when it was taken to their gardens by people who would be gone
in a year or less, and would grow in it nothing but nasturtiums and
sunflowers.
There followed a period when, the old attitudes, the things that had
been handed down from the last revolution, having been broken up, the
gardens became a possession of nettles and docks, and fewer and fewer
were the crown-imperials and hollyhocks to survive the fall of the
houses. The scaffold-poles, the harsh blocks of stone, the rasping
piles of bricks, the scores of cold earthenware and iron articles
belonging to the rows of villas about to replace the old houses, looked
more like ruin than preparation as they lay stark and hideous among
the misty grass and still blue elms. There were days when the thrushes
still sang well among the rioting undisturbed shrubberies. But soon
men felled the elms and drove away their shadows for ever, and all
that dwelled or could be imagined therein. No more would the trees be
enchanted by the drunken early songs of blackbirds. The heavenly beauty
of earthly things went away upon the timber carriages and was stamped
with mud. The butts of the trees were used to decorate the gardens of
the new houses. Two, indeed, were spared by some one’s folly, and a
main bough fell in the night and crushed through a whole fortnight’s
brickwork.
Those elms had come unconsciously to be part of the real religion
of men in that neighbourhood, and certainly of that old man. Their
cool green voices as they swayed, their masses motionless against
the evening or the summer storms, created a sense of pomp and awe.
They gave mystic invitations that stirred his blood if not his slowly
working humble brain, and helped to build and to keep firm that
sanctuary of beauty to which we must be able to retire if we are to be
more than eaters and drinkers and newspaper readers. When they were
gone he wondered, still humbly, what would do their work in the minds
of the newcomers. Looking at the features of the younger people, held
in a vice of reserve or pallidly leering, and hearing the snarl of
their voices, he was not surprised. They had not been given a chance.
How could they have the ease, the state, the kindliness of the old
inhabitants? They had no gods, only a brand-new Gothic church. Often
they supported this or that new movement, or bought a brave new book,
but they continued to sneer timidly or brutally at everything else.
They were satisfied with a little safe departure from the common way,
some mental or spiritual equivalent to the door-knocker of imitation
hammered copper. They did not care very much for trees though they
planted them in every street, where the grammar-school boys and
errand-boys mutilated them one by one in the dark; they cut off the
heads of a score of tall poplars, lest perchance the west wind should
one day do the same thing when one of the million was passing below.
The new people were a mysterious, black-liveried host, the
grandchildren of peers, thieves, gutter-snipes, agricultural labourers,
artisans, shopkeepers, professional men, farmers, foreign financiers,
an unrelated multitude. They were an endless riddle to the old man. He
used to stare at their houses as one might stare at a corpse in the
hope of discovering that there was something alive there. They were as
impenetrable as their houses, when at night the blinds of the lighted
rooms were drawn and figures or parts of figures shot fantastically by.
He read of their bankruptcies, their appointments, their crimes, their
successes, unwittingly, in the newspapers. He could never take it as a
matter of course to pass, to be continually surrounded by, thousands of
whom he knew nothing, to whom he was nothing. Well did they keep their
secrets, this blank or shamefaced crowd of discreetly dressed people
who might be anywhere to-morrow.
He turned from them to his garden and cherry-tree, and thinking of
those who had walked there, and in the long garden on the other side
of the fence, he felt at home again, with his cat and her long line
of descendants. That long garden had survived the big house to which
it had belonged. A merchant had lived there with his family of four
daughters, dark, tall women, whose pride and tender speech the old
trees in their garden often recalled. All were beautiful, and they were
most beautiful together. They walked, they rode, they played and read
in the garden, and the old man could see them there. They were said
to be clever and their father was wealthy. They were nearly always
together, and as often as possible with him. They were a tribe apart,
of extraordinary perfection of strength and grace, holding their own
against the world. And yet, as the old man thought to himself, looking
at their garden in the rain, not one of them was ever married. They had
moved right into London after selling their house and land. They had
come to his shop once or twice after and made an excuse for going into
the garden: they looked into their own as if they had lost something
there. Thinking of them he went into his shop and opened a book. A
minute black insect, disturbed from among the leaves, crawled over
and over the white page as he pretended to read; it went in zigzags
half-an-inch long, lost in the black and white desert, sometimes
turning the sharp edge and going to the other side of the page; but as
a rule the edge alarmed it and it retreated; it was never still. It
reminded him of himself. They were both lost upon the vast surface of
the earth.
But, of course, that was not why he left. Nobody knew why he left. In
his seventieth year he ran away, bursting out of the crowd as one sheep
no braver than the rest will do sometimes, inexplicably. He has brought
his cats with him, and he has money enough to last until he is dead.
Being considered by his niece as of unsound mind, he is free to do as
he will and is happy when he is alone.