I VISIT CLAPHAM
On the second morning after its seizure, the body of the old
ex-governor was carried away in a hearse to Footover Station, thence
to be conveyed to its London home. I had avoided the house in the
interval, being jealous of the least suggestion of intrusion; but I
hung about the drive on the day of the removal, and threw a little
spray of thyme upon the hearse as it passed. So much for a beggar’s
remembrance! He had always accepted me fairly, old prosperous
worldling as he was, on equal terms. Then I put him resolutely out of
my thoughts, and went back to my hermitage, there to mature a little
scheme of adventure which I had had in my mind ever since that moment
when Mr Pugsley had confessed to me the theatre (presumptive) of a
certain event in which I was interested.
An American humourist relates somewhere of a prisoner who had been
confined for thirty years in a loathsome dungeon, when a bright idea
struck him--he opened the window and got out. Now some such
inspiration had seized me all in an instant. Why, in the name of
perversity, was I eating my heart out in an aggrieved solitude, when
simply at will I might be a traveller--a tentative explorer, at
least--and be learning to ride my own destinies instead of being
ridden by them? I had not yet sat, like the mythological gentleman, so
long upon a rock that I had grown to it. I had means, and certainly at
least a definite object in breaking into them. I would wing my test
flight for that Clapham suburb which Pugsley had mentioned, and
examine the ground there, at least, for subsequent exploiting.
A tingle of adventure was in this as well as a vengeful resolution. It
would be something, after all, to breathe a novel air into my stagnant
lungs. I had lived so long remote and self-contained, that the
prospect of even a Cockney suburb was a prospect potential of romance
to me. No one would note my absence, and, if anyone did, how would it
concern me? I was free, and my own master.
And so, the very next morning, valise in hand, I strode away, walking
determinedly, with no effort at concealment. I went out by the wicket,
and took the road to Footover, and thence a train to Waterloo. I was
young, green, gullible, no doubt; but a certain hardness of muscle and
disposition was always at my service and that of others. Few minor
mishaps of the way have befallen me through life, and I was early in
expanding to the practical knowledge which overrides difficulties. I
mention this merely to explain the ease with which my inexperience
resolved these first small problems of self-dependence--my
introduction to the roaring traffics of existence, to the wiles and
hypocrisies of men. I spent that night at an hotel in the Waterloo
Bridge Road; and my initiation into its ways profited me.
Early on the following day I walked through the seethe of the streets
to the Victoria Station, and so, by the local service, reached Clapham
Road. I will not say that I greeted this goal to my adventure,
shapeless as that was, without a certain excitement and hurrying of
the blood. Here, somehow and somewhere, had been enacted the prologue
to my young unprofitable life. This same busy street, going up
southward through a dull avenue of bricks and windows, had housed,
perhaps, the germ of that secret, which, dark and poignant a one as it
appeared to me, was nevertheless of the commonest breed of secrets all
the world over. And, indeed, its setting here seemed prosy
enough--monotonous, respectable, unlovely--houses built for the most
part in the sober chocolate hue of a century earlier; staid rows of
shops; moderate traffic of omnibuses passing back and
forth--everything betokening a condition of decent prosperity.
But, coming presently into a sort of little open place or circus,
where the single road split out into a fan of three, I was
refreshingly struck by some more definite suggestion there of an
atmosphere which had already thinly appealed to me. This atmosphere
was faintly redolent of past coaching days. It breathed from the
tavern doors of the old “Plough Inn,” about which were congregated a
half dozen or so of the very legitimate descendants of Tony Veller,
but fallen, alas! upon degenerate times. The omnibuses, which they
drove in these, stood ranked, yellow and green and red, by the kerb.
When any one of the loiterers, detaching himself rubicundly from his
fellows, would mount a box, and gather the greasy ribbons into his
gloved hands, a whiff of Henry Alken, of his coachmen and stable-tubs
and ostlers, would seem irresistibly borne into one’s senses. So, too,
the rows of white posts and rails, skirting that side of the common
which made for Tooting (Tooting! What suggestion in the very word of
windy horns and galloping mails!), seemed to carry one into far
perspectives of dead and past adventure. It was this way--though I did
not know it then--streamed the enormous traffic of the Derby week, a
page snatched out of the Regency eld, and still keeping the gay
characteristics of that reckless hard-drinking era. But now the road
appeared peaceful enough--a sunny road skirting a great sunny common,
where lazy gipsy men, of the true Romany Chal type, kept a paddock of
donkeys for hire, and little rookeries of crazy tenements marked at
intervals the camping-grounds of dead and gone squatters.
Perhaps it was the result of my reading, or of a purposeless
sentiment, or of Fate--let it be what you will; but I was moved to
take that road, in an easy sauntering mood. Its freedom, its inviting
openness appealed to me. I am no believer in the divinity which hedges
kings or exacts its wages of sin; but I _am_ a believer in Luck. Luck
is the only power, so it seems to me, who can reconcile the discordant
claims of the creeds. Some men--most, one may say--pray to him in
vain. I have an idea that he was the nameless, the unknown God of the
Greeks.
And, no doubt, of his nature, it is fruitless to appeal to Luck.
Perversity is his rule of Godhead--his rules prove the exception. He
smiles not on his votaries, nor frowns on his maligners. Incuriousness
about him is the only way--but by no means the inevitable one--to
attract his notice. Whereby, I really think I became his casual
protégé. In all these days my creed was never other than a creed of
indifferent and independent fatalism--if to fatalism can be applied
such a term of belief. In any case it was near enough to aggravate
Luck into seeking to win me to _his_ worship instead. He made a first
tentative bid for my suffrage on the present occasion.
I had sauntered a half mile, perhaps, up this pleasant old coaching
way, the open common, with its ponds and trees and gorse thickets, to
my right hand, to my left a long rank of houses, comfortable, mellow,
prosperous, having for the great part bushy gardens in front, when my
eye was caught by vision of a cosy tavern, standing across the way in
a copse of elm-trees, and bearing in its every appointment and
circumstance the tokens of a vanished era. The little paddock of turf
in front, planted with the sign of the “Windmill,” and having its own
private posts and rails, round which the drive swept; the wooden horse
trough; the brown of the walls and the gold and grass-green canvas
hung up on them, inviting irresistibly to somebody’s “Entire”--here
was the right Regency travellers’ rest-and-be-thankful. It was mild
bright weather, and a water cart went by sprinkling up an aromatic
scent of dust. I thought of beer, beer in a glass, amber and
sparkling, with a kiss of foam at the lip, and I crossed the road to
the tavern. _And there, over its door, stuck up before my eyes, was
the legend_ “_Richard Gaskett, licensed dealer in beer, tobacco and
spirits._”
A sort of catalepsy seized me, as I looked and gaped. The coincidence,
of course, _might_ be just a coincidence. Yet Gaskett was not what one
might call an everyday name--and then _Richard_ Gaskett, and to occur
in this place of all places!
Suddenly the thought rushed into me, as if a plug had been taken out
of my brain: “Gaskett! Was it, perhaps, after all, my mother’s maiden
name, and my dishonoured grandfather a publican?”
Here, indeed, would be discovery, though not the most flattering
possible to myself. I came out of my trance with a little gasp and
giggle. “_Noblesse oblige_,” I thought again. “Very likely I am suited
above all things to be a potman. But in any case I must set this at
rest.”
I drove open the door of the private bar and entered. There was no one
there but, behind the counter, a plump short man of the conventional
Boniface type. He was a bleary, rather unctuous-looking fellow, with a
mole near his mouth like a faded patch, an obvious wig (both
suggesting anachronisms on an earlier date), and a snow-white apron
bent about his portly form. He, also, it appeared, was in right
succession from the Regency, though he might not have been more than
sixty or so. I looked at him with a fearful speculation, as he lifted
a pot or two to wipe the counter underneath. Was there a family
likeness here? Who could say? Lady Skene was a teetotaller.
“Richard Gaskett,” I murmured, hardly articulate.
“That’s me,” he said, going on with his work.
“That’s _me_, too,” I said, snatching at resolution.
He glanced up a moment.
“O!” he said. “Then that makes three of us.”
“Three?”
“My name, your name--and the other chap’s,” said he. “I shouldn’t a’
thought it in reason, and all to happen here. But it seems it is. Now,
sir?”
The last was an invitation to me to order something. He drew me my
beer from an engine whose handle was worn from his oozy grip.
“Who _is_ the other chap?” I asked him. “Do you mind telling me?”
“Why not?” he said, and crossed his legs and leaned one elbow on the
counter, like a pottle-bodied Leicester Square Shakespeare.
“Leastways,” he continued, “I will and I won’t, and I can and I can’t,
seeing as how he was christened, _if_ he were, a matter of what--why
it must be twenty year ago.”
“Who was christened?” I asked.
“The other one,” he answered. “Let me think now.”
He crossed and tapped together ruminative the fat forefinger of each
hand, as if he were numbering up a score of notches in his memory.
“I misremember the exact date,” he said suddenly: “but the old lady
she stands as clear as a Pepper’s Ghost in my mind. Mother Carey they
called her; and she lived in White Square down there; and every
morning, reg’lar as the postman, she’d come in here at eleven o’clock
for her gill of gin and peppermint, like a very particler old duchess.
She’d been on the stage in her time, I understood, and wasn’t to be
put off with anything lower than the genuine London Old Tom. God bless
me! How she comes back!”
He basked a little, in a glow of memory, before he continued
luminously:
“I recollect the very day she bought it of me--just as plain I do as
if it was print.”
“Bought what?” I ventured.
“My name, sir,” he said. “She come in here, as excited as Punch; and
we got talking together. ‘Mr Gaskett,’ she says, ‘I want a name.’
‘Well,’ I answers, ‘there’s plenty agoing for choice. What do you want
it for?’ ‘For a babby,’ she says, ‘as hasn’t got one of his own.’
‘O-ho!’ I says: ‘that’s the game is it? Well, shall I sell you mine
for a pint?’ ‘Done,’ she says; and done it was. She’d a superstition,
she said, about giving him one that wasn’t his by right of birth or
purchase, and that settled the matter. I don’t know if he was
christened that way. If he was, you’re the third; and that makes it
funny.”
Not so odd, nevertheless, I thought, by two-thirds of its oddity, if
the tremendous suspicion sprung suddenly into my mind were justified.
But anyhow it was a certain relief to find that this beery Amphitryon
was not my grandfather.
“And you--you never saw your godson, so to call him?” I asked.
“Not I,” said Mr Gaskett stoutly. “But, whoever he was, he might ha’
been worse called--that I _will_ say. I never see the old lady again
neither, and that fixes it in me. Now you yourself, sir. I suppose you
was called after your father?”
I detected a sudden insolent curiosity in his eye. To be sure, what
with my age and inquisitiveness, there seemed a certain coincidence
here. But I kept my nerve, and put his question aside with another.
“Where _is_ this White Square?”
“Down yonder,” he said coolly--“off the High Street. But she won’t be
living there now.”
“Won’t she?” I answered, as coolly for my part. “But I don’t know that
it matters to me whether she is or isn’t.”
“Nor to me,” said the landlord, moving away with a sudden repudiation
of me and all my concerns. I had offended him, and was not sorry to
have done so. He scowled at me balefully as I finished my beer and
left the bar.
Once outside, I retraced my steps, with a very sombre mind. I had an
overpowering suspicion that there was only one legitimate Richard
Gaskett after all. The other two had been resolved into one, and he
with nothing but a “pint-pot” claim to the title. Well, so far so
good, at least, for romance. Luck had brought me something.
I strolled down again by way of the posts and the rails and the busy
old-air circus. Going for a short distance down the High Street
beyond, I encountered a policeman and questioned him.
“White Square?” said he; and wheeling stolidly, signified the very
passage by which he was standing.
I looked down the gully curiously. It went, on a basis of trampled
filth, into an open space a hundred yards beyond, whence came a sound
of quarrelling women and squalling children.
“O!” I said. “Do you happen to know if a Mrs Carey lives there?”
He conned me a moment, as if speculating on my possible purpose in
asking; then hailed authoritatively an ancient inhabitant who was at
that moment shuffling up the lane.
“You, Mullins! Anybody of the name of Carey living in the Square?”
Mr Mullins leered up, fondling his hands obsequiously. The privileges
of this Alsatia, it was evident, ended at the passage mouth. He was an
obscene-looking old rascal, with a face like a half-blind sheep, and
the gaunt framework of once powerful shoulders.
“Carey is it, sir?” said he--“Carey, your honour? I remimber a lady of
the name. Mither Carey we’d be afther callin’ her; but she’s gone long
sin.”
“When gone?” demanded the officer.
“It’ll be a matther of twinty year, maybe,” said the old man. “My
mimiry’s bad.”
“That’s it,” I put in hurriedly, seeing the law about to protest.
“It’s of her I want to know.”
Mr Mullins considered me astutely from under his lids. Honour amongst
thieves, sure enough; but wasn’t there such a thing as a statute of
limitations to the duties one owed? Besides, a reward might be in the
air. I pride myself so far on my worldly precocity, that I tipped him,
moderately, on the spot. The act refreshed his memory wonderfully.
“I recall she came into money, did the ould lady,” he said; “and tuk
herself away. There was a daughter she’d be owning; a fine handsome
girl, that had her throuble and married a lord despite. He saw her on
the stage, twas said, a young jule of a thing, and lost his heart to
her. But there was a parson in them days up at the tin chapel
yander--Pugsley was his name, the heretic--and he made her
religious--Musha! the scoundrel--and brought her ould lord to terms,
and married them.”
He stopped, and covertly bit the coin I had given him to test it.
“And what became of the mother?” I asked, seeing that he proffered no
more.
“She tuk herself arrf, your honour,” said he.
“You don’t know where?”
“No, by the powers, I don’t; and that’s the thruth,” he said; and
indeed there could be no purpose in his lying.
Then I had only one other question to ask, and out it came:
“Do you remember who was her partner in that--that little trouble you
mentioned?”
Mr Mullins leered horribly.
“There was quare tales,” he said--“I recollect that same. One would
call him here, and another there; and a third would be whispering of a
master in the Grammar School beyant. But that was just talking. Mother
Carey could be close, when she wanted.”
“What was _his_ name--the master’s?”
“It’s clane gone from me,” said Mr Mullins, blankly.
“One might trace it out at the school itself, perhaps?”
I turned to the policeman.
“Gone, too,” he said. “It was all closed before my time. There’s shops
there now.”
So I was temporarily baffled; but, as, having invented something
plausible to the men to account to them for my curiosity, I went on my
way, I was taking a fierce oath in my heart that not stone nor briar,
nor water nor fire should turn me now from a pursuit to which
accident, or Luck if you like, had already hallooed me so promisingly.
If this Mother Carey lived, she was my quarry. But where and how to
find her!