MR TORRANCE THE CHEERFUL MAN
Mr Torrance openly objected to Ann’s epitaph for David Morgan,
preferring his own choice of one from Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”:
“And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind’s imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?”
“But” said Mr Morgan, “Shelley was born only a hundred years ago, and
died at thirty, I think that in the matter of mountains an older man is
better.”
“But, father,” said Roland, “how do you know that Jeremiah was not
drowned at thirty with a copy of ‘Ecclesiastes’ clasped to his bosom?”
“You read and see, my son,” answered Mr Morgan. “Shelley could not pass
himself off as an old man, though you know he did once claim to be
eighty-nine, and Jeremiah would not have pretended to be thirty. That
is only my opinion. I prefer the prophet, like Ann.”
Mr Torrance muttered that anyone who preferred Jeremiah to Shelley had
no right to an opinion. It was just like Mr Torrance. He was always
saying foolish things and fairly often doing them, and yet we felt, and
Mr Morgan once declared, that he had in him the imperishable fire of a
divine, mysterious wisdom. After walking the full length of the Abbey
Road, where he lived, to discover him smiling in his dark study, was
sufficient proof that he had a wisdom past understanding.
Abbey Road was over two miles long. At its south end was a double
signboard, pointing north “To London,” south “To Forden, Field, and
Cowmore”; at its north end it ran into pure London. Every year the
horse-chestnut branches had to be shortened in May because their new
leaf smothered the signboard. As if anyone who had reached that point
could wish to be directed to London! Almost as few could wish to know
the way in order to avoid it. But the horse-chestnut had to suffer. It
was fortunate in not being cut down altogether and carried away. The
cemetery saved it. The acute angle between the Abbey Road and another
was filled by a large new cemetery, and the tree was the first of a
long line within its railings. Even had the signboard been on the
other side of the road it would have been as badly off among the tall
thorns and stunted elms of the hedges. Behind this hedge was a waste,
wet field, grazed over by a sad horse or two all through the year;
for on account partly of the cemetery, partly of the factory which
manufactured nobody quite knew what except stench, this field could
not be let or sold. Along its far side ran a river which had no sooner
begun to rejoice in its freedom to make rush and reed at pleasure
on the border of the field than it found itself at the walls of the
factory. Northward, past the cemetery and the factory, began the houses
of Abbey Road, first a new house, occupied but with a deserted though
not wild garden, and next to it a twin house, left empty. Then followed
a sluttery of a few pairs or blocks of small houses, also new, on both
sides of the road--new and yet old, with the faces of children who are
smeared, soiled, and doomed, at two. They bordered on the old inn,
“The Woodman’s Arms,” formerly the first house, having a large kitchen
garden, and masses of dahlias and sunflowers behind. It lay back a good
space from the road, and this space was gravel up to the porch, and in
the middle of it stood a stone drinking trough. Often a Gypsy’s cart
and a couple of long dogs panting in the sun were to be seen outside,
helping the inn to a country look, a little dingy and decidedly
private and homely, so that what with the distance between the road
and the front door, and the Gypsy’s cart, the passer-by was apt to go
on until he came to an ordinary building erected for the sale of beer
and spirits, and for nothing else. Such a one lay not much further
on, beyond a row of cottages contemporary with “The Woodman’s Arms.”
These had long narrow gardens behind wooden posts and rails--gardens
where everything tall, old-fashioned, and thick grew at their own
sweet will, almost hiding the cottages of wood covered in creeper. You
could just see that some were empty, their windows smashed or roughly
boarded up, and that others were waiting for some old woman to die
before they also had their windows smashed or boarded up. The dahlias,
the rose-of-Sharon, the sweet rocket, the snow-on-the-mountains, the
nasturtiums, the sunflowers, flourished too thick for weeds to make
headway, and so probably with small help from the inhabitants, the
gardens earned many a wave of the whip from passing drivers. The row of
cottages meant “the first bit of country,” with a sweep at one end, a
rat-catcher at the other, announced in modest lettering. Between the
last of them and the new public-house a puddled lane ran up along old
and thick, but much broken, hedges to the horse-slaughterer’s. “The
Victoria Hotel” was built in the Jubilee year of that sovereign, and
was a broad-faced edifice of brick with too conspicuous stone work
round the windows and doorways and at the corners. The doors were many
and mostly of glass. The landlord of “The Victoria” had no time to
stand on his doorstep--whichever was his--like the landlord of “The
Woodman”; moreover, all his doorsteps were right on the road, and he
could have seen only the long row of cottages, by the same builder,
which looked as if cut off from a longer, perhaps an endless row, with
a pair of shears; while from the old inn could be seen grass sloping
to the willows of the river, and a clump of elms hiding the factory
chimneys. All the glass and brass of the “Victoria” shone spotless as
if each customer out of the regiments in the crowded straight streets
gave it a rub on entering and leaving.
Beyond the “Victoria” the road straightened itself after a twist, and
was now lined by a hundred houses of one pattern but broken by several
branch streets. These were older houses of gray stucco, possessing
porches, short flights of steps up to the doors, basements, and the
smallest of front gardens packed with neglected laurel, privet,
marigold, and chickweed. At the end of the hundred--at No. 367--a man
walking “To London” would begin to feel tired, and would turn off the
pavement into the road, or else cross to the other side where the
scattered new shops and half-built houses had as yet no footway except
uneven bare earth. On this side the turnings were full of new houses
and pavements, and admitted the eye to views of the welter of slate
roofs crowding about the artificial banks of the river which ran as
in a pit. Of the branch streets interrupting the stucco hundred, one
showed a wide, desolate, untouched field of more and more thistles in
the middle, more and more nettles at the edge, and, facing it, a paltry
miracle of brand-new villas newly risen out of a similar field; the
second was the straight line of a new street, with kerb-stones neat
and new, but not a house yet among the nettles; another, an old lane,
was still bordered by tender-leafed lime trees, preserved to deck the
gardens of houses to come. The lane now and then had a Gypsy’s fire in
it for a few hours, and somebody had told the story that Aurelius was
born under one of the trees; to which Aurelius answered, “The trees and
I were born about the same time, but a hundred miles apart.”
The stucco line gave way to a short row of brick houses, low and as
plain as possible, lying well back from the road behind their split-oak
fences, thorn hedges, laburnums and other fancy trees. Ivy climbed
over all; each was neat and cheerful, but the group had an exclusive
expression. Yet they had to look upon half-built shops and houses,
varied by a stretch of tarred and barbed fence protecting the playing
ground of some football club, whose notice board stood side by side
with an advertisement of the land for building on leasehold; over the
fence leaned an old cart-horse with his hair between his eyes.
There followed repetitions and variations of these things--inhabited
houses, empty houses, houses being erected, fields threatened by
houses--and finally a long, gloomy unbroken cliff of stained stucco.
The tall houses, each with a basement and a long flight of steps up to
a pillared porch, curved away to the number 593, and the celebrated
“Horse-shoe Hotel” next door, which looked with dignity and still more
ostentation, above its potted bay-trees, on the junction of Abbey Road
and two busy thoroughfares. Opposite the tall stucco cliff a continuous
but uneven line of newish mean shops of every kind and not more than
half the height of the private houses, curved to a public-house as
large as the “Horse-shoe” which it faced.
As each rook knows its nest among the scores on the straight uniform
beeches, so doubtless each inhabitant could after a time distinguish
his own house in this monotonous series, even without looking at the
number, provided that there was light and that he was not drunk. Each
house had three storeys, the first of them bay-windowed, above the
basement. Probably each was divided between two, or, like No. 497,
between three, families. Who had the upper storeys I never knew, except
that there was an old woman who groaned on the stairs, a crying baby
and its mother, and some men. I heard them speak, or cry, or tread
the stairs lightly or heavily, but never happened to see any of them,
unless that woman was one who was going to enter the gate at the same
time as I one evening, but at the sight of me went past with a jug of
something half hid under her black jacket. The basement, the floor
above, and the garden, were rented to one family, viz., Mr Torrance,
his wife and four children.
The garden was a square containing one permanent living thing, and one
only, an apple tree which bore large fluted apples of palest yellow on
the one bough remaining green among the grey barkless ones. All round
the tree the muddy gravel had been trodden, by children playing, so
hard that not a weed or blade of grass ever pierced it. Up to it and
down to it led two narrow and steep flights of steps, the lower for the
children and the mother ascending from the kitchen or living room, the
upper for Mr Torrance who used to sit in the back room writing books,
except in the mornings when he taught drawing at several schools.
He wrote at an aged and time-worn black bureau, from which he could
sometimes see the sunlight embracing the apple tree. But into that room
the sunlight could not enter without a miracle, or by what so seldom
happened as to seem one--the standing open of an opposite window just
so that it threw a reflection of the late sun for about three minutes.
Even supposing that the sunlight came that way, little could have
penetrated that study; for the French windows were ponderously draped
by tapestry of dark green with a black pattern, and on one side the
bureau, on the other a bookcase, stood partly before the panes. No
natural light could reach the ceiling or the corners. Instead of light,
books covered the walls, books in a number of black-stained bookcases
of various widths, all equal in height with the room, except one that
was cut short by a grate in which I never saw a fire. The other few
interspaces held small old pictures or prints in dark frames, and
a dismal canvas darkened, probably, by some friendly hand. Most of
the books were old, many were very old. The huge, blackened slabs of
theology and drama emitted nothing but gloom. The red bindings which
make some libraries tolerable had been exorcised from his shelves by
the spirits of black and of darkest brown.
The sullen host of books left little room for furniture. Nevertheless,
there was a massive table of ancient oak, always laden with books,
and apparently supported by still other books. Six chairs of similar
character had long succeeded in retaining places in front of the books,
justifying themselves by bearing each a pile or a chaos of books. Dark
as wintry heather were the visible portions of the carpet. The door was
hung with the same black and green tapestry as the windows; if opened,
it disclosed the mere blackness of a passage crowded with more books
and ancestral furniture.
Yet Mr Torrance smiled whenever a visitor, or his wife, or one or
all of his children, but, above all, when Aurelius entered the room.
No doubt he did not always smile when he was alone writing; for he
wrote what he was both reluctant and incompetent to write, at the
request of a firm of publishers whose ambition was to have a bad,
but nice-looking, book on everything and everybody, written by some
young university man with private means, by some vegetarian spinster,
or a doomed hack like Mr Torrance. Had he owned copies of all these
works they would have made a long row of greens and reds decorated by
patterns and lettering in gold. He did not speak of his work, or of
himself, but listened, smiled, or--with the children--laughed, and
allowed himself at worst the remark that things were not so bad as
they seemed. He was full of laughter, but all clever people thought
him devoid of humour. In his turn, he admired all clever people, but
was uninfluenced by them, except that he read the books which they
praised and at once forgot them--he had read Sir Thomas Browne’s
“Quincunx,” but could not say what a Quincunx was. Aurelius used to
tease him sometimes, I think, in order to prove that the smile was
invincible. Mr Torrance was one of the slowest and ungainliest of men,
but he was never out of love or even out of patience with Aurelius,
the most lightsome of men, or of the superfluous race. He had fine
wavy hair like silk fresh from the cocoon, and blue eyes of perfect
innocence and fearlessness placed well apart in a square, bony, and
big-nosed face that was always colourless. As he wrote, one or all of
the children were likely to cry until they were brought into his study,
where he had frequently to leave them to avoid being submerged in the
chaos set moving by their play. He smiled at it, or if he could not
smile, he laughed. If the children were silent for more than a little
time he would go out into the passage and call downstairs to make sure
that all was well, whereupon at least one must cry, and his wife must
shriek to him in that high, sour voice which was always at the edge of
tears. Often she came before he called, to stand at his door, talking,
complaining, despairing, weeping; and though very sorry, Mr Torrance
smiled, and as soon as she had slammed the door he went on with his
exquisite small handwriting, or, at most, he went out and counted
the apples again. One or more of the children was always ill, nor was
any ever well. They were untidy, graceless, and querulous, in looks
resembling their mother, whose face seemed to have grown and shaped
itself to music--a music that would set the teeth of a corpse on edge.
She was never at the end of her work, but often of her strength. She
was cruel to all in her impatience, and in her swift, giddy remorse
cruel to herself also. She seemed to love and enjoy nothing, yet she
would not leave the house on any account, and seldom her work. Whatever
she did she could not ruffle her husband or wring from him anything but
a smile and a slow, kind sentence. Not that he was content, or dull,
or made of lead or wood. He would have liked to dress his wife and
children as prettily as they could choose, to ride easily everywhere,
anywhere, all over the world if it pleased them, seeing, hearing,
tasting nothing but what they thought best on earth. But save in verse
he never did so. It was one of his pains that seldom more than once or
twice a year came the mood for doing what seemed to him the highest
he could, namely, write verses. Also he had bad health; his pipe, of
the smallest size, half filled with the most harmless and tasteless
tobacco, lay cold on the bureau, just tasted and then allowed to go
out. Ale he loved, partly for its own sake, partly to please Aurelius,
but it did not love him. It was one of the jokes concerning him, that
he could not stand the cold of his morning bath unless he repeated the
words,
“Up with me, up with me, into the sky,
For thy song, lark, is strong.”
He said them rapidly, and in an agony of solemnity, as he squeezed the
sponge, and though this fact had become very widely known indeed, he
did not give up the habit. Had he given up every kind of food condemned
by himself or his doctors, he would have lived solely on love in that
dark, that cold, that dead room. He was fond of company, but he knew
nobody in all those thronged streets, unless it was an old woman or
two, and their decrepit, needy husbands. He was a farmer’s son, and
knew little more of London than Ann, since he had moved into Abbey
Road shortly after his first child was born, and had not been able to
extricate himself from the books and furniture.
I see him, as soon as I have sat down by the window, swing round in his
chair and look grim as he lights his tobacco with difficulty--then
smile and let the smoke pour out of his mouth before beginning to
talk, which means that in a few minutes he has laid down the pipe
unconsciously, and that it will remain untouched. The children come
in; he opens the French windows, and goes down the steps to the apple
tree, carrying half the children, followed by the other half. Up he
climbs, awkwardly in his black clothes, and getting that grim look
under the strain, but smiling at last. He picks all of the seven apples
and descends with them. The children are perfectly silent. “This one,”
he begins, “is for Annie because she is so small. And this for Jack
because he is a good boy. And this for Claude because he is bad and we
are all sorry for him. And this for Dorothy because she is so big.” He
gives me one, and Dorothy another to take down to her mother, and the
last he stows away.
Mr Torrance was often fanciful, and as most people said, affected,
in speech. He was full of what appeared to be slight fancies that
made others blush uncomfortably. He had rash admirations for more
conspicuously fanciful persons, who wore extraordinary clothes or
ate or drank in some extraordinary manner. He never said an unkind
thing. By what aid, in addition to the various brown breads to which he
condemned himself, did he live, and move, and have his being with such
gladness?
His books are not the man. They are known only to students at the
British Museum who get them out once and no more, for they discover
hasty compilations, ill-arranged, inaccurate, and incomplete, and
swollen to a ridiculous size for the sake of gain. They contain not one
mention of the house under the hill where he was born.