ROGUES AND VAGABONDS
The first thing that Bram and Nancy vowed to each other was that they
would never accept anything but a joint engagement. It sounded so easy
at first, but during the next four years many anxious moments were
caused by that rose-flushed resolution of early married life. However,
they did manage it, and not only that but they managed somehow to take
with them on tour the baby girl who was born on the sixteenth of July,
just a year and a month after they were married.
Letizia was born in a tiny cottage buried among the cherry orchards of
Kent. The original Letizia’s letter on being informed of the proposed
tribute to herself was characteristic:
Lebanon House
Brigham.
July 20th, 1890.
Dear Bram,
Why you should burden your wretched infant with the name that
nearly eighty years ago was so unsuitably bestowed upon her
great-grandmother I cannot imagine. I hope that the challenge you
offer to Fate by calling any child Gladness will not be vented on
her head.
Lying here in bed, for I am become a bedridden old bag of bones, I
look back at my wasted life and wonder why it should be prolonged in
this unreasonable manner. Letizia! Did either of you young people
realise that Letizia means gladness? However, as you insist on an
exchange of compliments between this poor infant and myself, why, let
your wife kiss her with her own fresh lips and tell her that once
the lips of another Letizia were as fresh. I have just picked up
the mirror and looked at myself. When I die, ah, _mon dieu_, when,
when ... let me be crumpled up and flung into the nearest wastepaper
basket.
Your affectionate ancestor,
Letizia the First.
By the way, I don’t think I’ve written since Master Caleb celebrated
his coming of age by sacking all of the older workmen in the factory
three months after they presented him with a token of esteem and
respect. I understand they were informed that he only took this step
for their own good, because he was afraid that they were getting too
old for the dangerous trade of making rockets! The Peculiars made an
attempt to recapture him from the Church of England (in which your
father had recently invested) by offering him a vacant apostolic
seat. Caleb replied that he could not see his way to occupy such a
position satisfactorily. True enough, for his behind has swollen like
a pumpkin in the sun. The pleasant-faced young woman who reads aloud
to me is a most capable gossip. I am getting a new insight into local
affairs.
Nancy wished that she could meet this strange old woman whose fierce
blood ran in the veins of the raspberry-coloured monkey at her breast
that was growing daily so much more like a human being. But she and
Bram agreed that it would be foolish to involve themselves in the
domesticity either of his family or of hers. They must only have one
aim, and that must be the joint engagement.
“Once we separate, things will never be the same again,” Nancy said.
“Oh, don’t I know it, dearest! But we won’t separate.”
Nor did they. Difficult though it was sometimes, they did always manage
to keep together, those rogues and vagabonds, and what is more they did
manage to keep Letizia with them.
“I wonder you don’t let your little girl stay with some relation while
you’re on tour,” a jealous mother would observe.
“I like to have her with me during these first years. Time enough to
lose her when she goes to school,” Nancy would reply.
“But surely the continual change and travelling cannot be good for so
young a child?” the critic would insist.
“I think change of air is good for everything,” Nancy would reply
firmly.
So, up and down the length of England, in and out of Wales, across
to Ireland and over the border to Scotland, for the next four years
Bram and Nancy wandered. In every new company the first thing they
pitched was Letizia’s canvas travelling-cot with its long poles and
short poles and cross pieces and canopy which all fitted ingeniously
together until the final business of lacing up the back like a pair
of stays was finished and Letizia was tucked away inside. Always the
same luggage—the tin bath packed so full of Nancy’s clothes that it
was a great struggle to fasten it—Bram’s second-hand portmanteau with
its flap like an elephant’s ear and bulging middle—the trim wicker
luncheon-basket, and big wicker theatrical-basket smelling of grease
paint and American cloth and old wigs. Endless journeys on Sundays in
trains without corridors and on some lines still lighted with oil-lamps
so that the baby Letizia, lying on the horsehair cushions of the
railway-carriage, would drop asleep to the rhythmic movement of the oil
swaying to and fro in the glass container. Long waits at stations like
York and Crewe, where the only Sabbath traffic in those days seemed to
be touring companies and all the compartments in all the trains were
labelled engaged. Long waits while stout men with red noses and blue
chins greeted old pals and ran up and down the length of the train,
and cracked jokes over flasks of whisky or brandy. Long waits in big
smoky junctions, sometimes catching sight of the _Dorothy_ company with
its pack of hounds—to the great excitement and joy of Letizia, who
would be held up to admire the barking of the bow-wows. Late arrivals
in smoky northern towns when the only fly at the station would be
collared by the manager and the humbler members of the company would
have to shoulder their light luggage and walk to their lodgings. Late
arrivals in snowstorm and rainstorm, in fog and frost, when the letter
ordering the meal had miscarried and the landlady was a gaunt stranger
who thoroughly enjoyed telling the weary vagabonds that, not having
heard from them, she had not lighted the fire in the sitting-room. Late
arrivals when the landlady was an old friend and came down the steps
to embrace both her lodgers and lead them into a toasting, glowing
room with the table laid and a smell of soup being wafted along the
little passage from the kitchen. Early morning starts when every lady
in Nancy’s carriage wanted a different corner and signified her choice
with an exaggerated and liverish politeness. Early morning starts when
some familiar little thing was left behind and the next lodgings did
not look like home until the missing article was forwarded on from the
last town. Every week a new town, and sometimes two or three small
towns in one week. Every Monday morning at eleven a music call, and
after that a walk round the new town to discover the best and cheapest
shops. Every day dinner at three o’clock and tea at six. Every evening
Letizia left to the guardianship of the landlady while Bram and Nancy
set out arm-in-arm to the theatre. Every night except Sunday the swing
of a dingy door and the immemorial smell of the theatre within. Our
modern young actors and actresses do not know that smell. It vanished
in its perfection when electric light took the place of gas, and
unretentive encaustic tiles lined the corridors instead of bare stone
or whitewashed bricks. It requires something more than the warmth of
hot-water pipes to ripen and conserve that smell. It may have lost
some of its quintessential peculiarity when gas supplemented candles;
but those gas-jets covered with wire guards, on which the ladies and
gentlemen of visiting companies were requested by the management not to
boil kettles, must have added a beautiful richness of their own.
Thou glorious ancient smell of the theatre, thou sublime pot-pourri of
grease-paint, wig-paste, vaseline, powder, perspiration, old clothes,
oranges, tobacco, gas, drains, hair, whitewash, hot metal, and dusty
canvas, where mayest thou still be savoured instead of that dull odour
of Condy’s fluid and fire extinguishers which faintly repels us as we
pass through the stage-doors of our contemporary palaces of amusement?
* * * * *
Our particular vagabonds found it easier to obtain joint engagements
in musical shows. Nancy’s contralto voice, untrained though it was,
grew better and better each year, and Bram had developed into a capital
comedian. In the third and fourth winters after they were married they
played together in pantomime, and for the Christmas season of 1894
they were engaged at the Theatre Royal, Greenwich—Bram as Idle Jack
in _Dick Whittington_ and Clown in the Harlequinade, Nancy as Fairy
Queen and Columbine. It was a pity that by now the Harlequinade was
already a moribund form of entertainment, for Bram had a genuine talent
for getting that fantastic street-life over the footlights. One may
be allowed a fleeting suspicion that the English stage has lost more
than it has gained by its banishment of the clown from its boards. The
French, who are dramatically so much superior, have preserved their
clowns.
Bram and Nancy found exceptionally pleasant lodgings in Greenwich.
Starboard Alley was a row of diminutive Georgian houses running down
to the river and overlooking at the back the grounds of the Trinity
Hospital. The bow windows which gave just such a peep of the wide
Thames as one may get of the sea itself in little streets that lead
down to ancient harbours, had no more than a genteel and unobtrusive
curve; it was the very place in which an outward-bound mariner would
have felt safe in leaving his wife to wait for his return. Starboard
Alley was too narrow for vehicles, so that there was never any sound
there but of the footsteps of people walking past on their way to
stroll along the embankment above the river—a pleasant place, that
embankment, even in this cold December weather, with the seagulls
wheeling and screaming overhead and the great ships coming home on
the tide, coming home for Christmas on the flowing tide. Not only was
the house in Starboard Alley itself attractive, but Mrs. Pottage, the
landlady, was as much a feature of it as the bow window, though, to say
truth, she had a more obtrusive curve. She was a widow of forty years’
standing, her husband, a gunner in one of Her Majesty’s ships having
been killed off Sebastopol; but she was still comely with her fresh
complexion and twinkling eyes, and her heart was young.
“I was hardly eighteen at the time my poor husband vanished out of
this world,” she told her lodgers, “and the offers of marriage I’ve
had since—well, I assure you the men have always been round me like
flies after sugar. But I’ve never melted like sugar does in the heat. I
said ‘no’ to the first in 1855 within four months of my pore William’s
death—well, it was death and burial all in one as you might say,
because he’d been talking to his mate as cheerful as a goldfinch the
moment before and the next moment there was nothing of him left. It
was his mate I said ‘no’ to, four months later, when he was invalided
home with a wooden leg. He was the first, and I said ‘no’ to the last
only yesterday afternoon just before tea—a Mr. Hopkins he is, a ship’s
chandler in a small style of business with a head like the dome of the
Observatory, but no more in it than an empty eggshell. Oh, I ashore
you I gave him a very firm ‘no,’ and he went back to his chandling as
dumb as a doornail. Yes, you might really call it quite a hobby of
mine refusing eligibles. I used to put the dates down in the butcher’s
book or the baker’s book as the case might be, but I got charged for
them one year as extra loaves and ever since then I’ve kept the dates
in my head. Off to rehearsal now, are you? Well, fancy them having
a rehearsal on Christmas Eve. I call that making a great demand on
anybody’s good nature. In fact, if anybody didn’t mind being a bit
vulgar, it’s what they might call blooming sauce. And you’ll leave your
little girl with me? What’s her name, Letishyer? Said with a sneeze, I
suppose? Never mind, I’ll enjoy having her hanging on to my skirts. I
never had no children myself. Well, I was just getting over the first
shyness and beginning to enjoy married life when all of a sudden that
Crimeen war broke out and my poor William had to leave me. Well, it
was a mean crime, and no mistake. Got to start off to the theatre now?
Wrap yourselves up well, for it’s biting cold to-night. It’s my opinion
we’re in for a real old-fashioned Christmas. Good job, too, I say, the
size women are wearing their sleeves nowadays. Balloon sleeves they
call them. Balloonatic sleeves I should say. Well, toora-loora!! I’ll
pop your little girl into her cot and have the kettle on the boil for
you when you come back. Ugh! What a perishing evening!”
The vagabonds arm-in-arm set out toward the theatre, the north wind
blowing fiercely up Starboard Alley across the Thames from Barking
Flats—a searching wind, fierce and bitter.
The _Dick Whittington_ company had been rehearsing hard during the
previous week, and now two days before the production on Boxing Day
it was seeming incredible that the management would ever have the
impudence to demand the public’s money to see such a hopelessly
inadequate performance.
“We’ve been in some bad shows, my dear,” Bram said to Nancy on their
way to the theatre, “but I think this is the worst.”
“I’m too tired to know anything about it. But your songs will go all
right, I’m sure.”
He shook his head doubtfully.
“Yes, but that fellow Sturt who plays the Dame is a naughty actor. He
really is dire. I simply cannot get him to work in with me. That’s the
worst of taking a fellow from the Halls. He hasn’t an elementary notion
how to help other people. He can’t see that it takes two people to make
a scene funny.”
“Never mind,” said Nancy, yawning. “It’ll all be splendid, I expect, on
Wednesday. Oh, dear, I am tired. They’ve given you a good trap-act in
the Harlequinade.”
“Yes, that’s all right. But do you know, Nancy, it’s a queer thing, but
I funk trap-acts. I’m never happy till I’ve gone through the last one.”
He stopped short and struck his forehead. “Great Scott!”
“What is the matter?”
“We haven’t got anything for Letizia’s stocking?”
“Bram!”
“What time were we called again?”
“Six o’clock.”
“Look here,” he said, “you go round and collect some toys from a
toyshop. I’ll make an excuse to Worsley if by any chance he wants
the Fairy Queen at the beginning. But he won’t. He wants to get the
shipwreck right. We shall probably be on that till nearly midnight.”
So Nancy left Bram at the stage-door and went on to do her shopping.
The streets were crowded with people, and in spite of the cold wind
everybody was looking cheerful. The shops, too, with their brightly lit
windows all decorated with frosted cotton-wool and holly, exhaled that
authentic Christmas glow, which touches all but hearts too long barren
and heads too long empty. The man who sneers at Christmas is fair game
for the Father of Lies.
Nancy revelled in the atmosphere, and for a while she allowed herself
to drift with the throng—hearing in a dream the shrill excited cries of
the children, the noise of toy instruments, the shouts of the salesmen
offering turkeys and geese; smelling in a dream that peculiar odour of
hung poultry mixed with crystallised fruit, oranges, and sawdust; and
perceiving in a dream the accumulated emotion of people who were all
thinking what they could buy for others, that strange and stirring
emotion which long ago shepherds personified as a troop of angels
crying, “Peace, good-will toward men.” She felt that she could have
wandered happily along like this for hours, and she was filled with
joy to think that in a short while she should be welcomed by some of
these children as the Spirit of Good. The part of the Fairy Queen had
never hitherto appealed to her; but now suddenly she was seized with
a longing to wave her silver wand and vanquish the Demon King. She
passed four ragged children who were staring at a heap of vivid sweets
on the other side of a plate-glass window. She went into the shop and
bought a bagful for each. It was wonderful to pass on and leave them
standing there on the pavement in a rapture of slow degustation. But
her time could not be spent in abandoning herself to these sudden
impulses of sentimental self-indulgence. She entered a bazaar and
filled her bag with small toys for Letizia’s stocking—a woolly lamb,
a monkey-on-a-stick, a tin trumpet, a parti-coloured ball—all the
time-honoured cargo of Santa Claus. She had already bought a case
of pipes for Bram’s Christmas present. But now she was filled with
ambition to give him some specially chosen gift that would commemorate
this cold Greenwich Yuletide. What should it be? She longed to find
something that would prove to him more intimately than words all that
he had meant to her these years of their married life, all that he
would mean to her on and on through the years to come. Bram was such a
dear. He worked so hard. He was never jealous. He had nothing of the
actor’s vanity, and all the actor’s good nature. What present would
express what she felt about his dearness? Ash-trays, cigarette-holders,
walking-sticks—what availed they to tell him how deep was her love?
Pocket-books, card-cases, blotters—what eloquence did they possess?
Then she saw on the counter a little silver key.
“Is this the key of anything?” she asked the shopman.
“No, miss, that is what they call a charm. We have a large assortment
this season. This silver puppy-dog, for instance. You’d really be
surprised to know what a quantity of these silver puppy-dogs we’ve
sold. They’re worn on bracelets or watch-chains. Quite the go, miss, I
can assure you.”
“No, I like this key better. Could you let me have a box for it?”
“Certainly, miss.”
“And I want to write something on a card and put it inside if you’d
kindly seal it for me.”
“With pleasure, miss.”
Nancy leant over the counter and wrote, with a blush for her folly:
_This is the key of my heart. Keep it always, my darling._
The key and the card were put inside the box; and she hurried off to
the theatre, laughing to herself in an absurdly delicious excitement at
the thought of hiding it under Bram’s pillow to-night.
The dress rehearsal was not over till three o’clock on Christmas
morning. The ladies and gentlemen of the company were all so tired when
at last they were dismissed that when they came out of the theatre and
found Greenwich white and silent under a heavy fall of snow, not even
the comedians had any energy to be funny with snowballs.
“What time’s the call to-morrow, dear?” one of the chorus called back
to a friend in a weary voice.
“There’s no call to-morrow, duck. It’s Christmas Day.”
“Gard, so it is!”
“Don’t forget the curtain goes up for the matinée on Boxing Day at
half-past one, dear.”
“Right-o!”
“Queenie’s got her boy staying at the ‘Ship,’” the chorus girl
explained to Nancy. “And she’s the limit for forgetting everything when
he’s about. She’s potty on him. Merry Christmas, Miss O’Finn.”
“Merry Christmas to you.”
All the way back up the court, at the end of which was the stage-door,
the Christmas greetings of one to another floated thinly along the
snowy air.
“A merry Christmas! A merry Christmas.”
Bram took Nancy’s arm, and they hurried away back as fast as they could
to Starboard Alley, where they found Letizia safe in her cot, one of
Mrs. Pottage’s stockings hanging like a coal-sack over the foot of it.
“You never told me which stocking to put out,” said the landlady. “So I
hung up one of my own. Of course, I hung up one of hers as well, pore
mite, but hers wouldn’t hold more than a couple of acid-drops. Mine is
a _little_ more convenient.”
“How kind of you to sit up for us, Mrs. Pottage,” the two vagabonds
exclaimed.
“Oh, I’ve been thinking over old times. You know. On and off the doze,
as you might say. My friend Mrs. Bugbird didn’t hop it till past
midnight. She generally comes in for a chat of a Monday evening, and
being Christmas Eve she stayed on a bit extra. She’s a real comic, is
Mrs. Bugbird; but she had to be a bit careful how she laughed to-night,
because last week she ricked the plate of her teeth laughing over a
story I told her. Yes, the soup’s lovely and hot. But I did let the
fire out in your sitting-room. So if you wouldn’t mind coming into my
kitchen....”
“Was Letizia good?” the mother asked.
“She hasn’t moved an inch since I put her to bye-bye. I’ve popped up
to look at her several times. In fact, Mrs. Bugbird and me both popped
up, and Mrs. B. said a more sweetly pretty infant she never did wish
to see. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘Mrs. Bugbird,’ I said, ‘that’s something for
you to say with the fourteen you’ve had.’ Fancy, fourteen! Tut-tut-tut!
Still if I’d accepted half my proposals, I’d have had more like forty
by now.”
A canary stirred upon his perch and chirped.
“Hear that?” said Mrs. Pottage. “That blessed bird understands every
word I say. Don’t you, my beauty? Now come along, drink up your soup,
and do eat a little bit of the nice cold supper I’ve put out for you.”
While her lodgers were enjoying the cold roast beef, Mrs. Pottage
examined the purchases made for Letizia’s stocking.
“Oh, dear, how they do get things up nowadays!” she exclaimed, holding
at admiring arm’s length the monkey-on-a-stick. “Lifelike, isn’t it?
You’ll want an orange and an apple, don’t forget. And I wouldn’t put
in too many lollipops if I was you, or she won’t be able to eat any
turkey. I got you a lovely little turkey. Nine pounds. Well, you don’t
want to sit down to an elephant. I remember one Christmas I invited
my sister to come up from Essex, and I thought she’d appreciate some
turkey, so I told the fishmonger to send in a really nice dainty
little one. Well, by mistake his boy brought round one that weighed
thirty-two pounds and which had won the prize for the biggest turkey
in Greenwich that year. In fact, it come round to me with a red and
white rosette stuck in its how-d’ye-do as big as a sunflower. Well, it
didn’t arrive till past eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve, and I was down
at the ‘Nelson’s Head’ with my sister till closing time, and there it
was waiting for us when we got back, tied onto the knocker. It gave
me a bit of a start, because I’d had one or two for old sake’s sake,
and I thought for the minute some pore fellow had gone and suicided
himself on my front door. Well, there was nothing to be done but cook
it, and my sister’s a small-made woman, and when we sat down to dinner
with that turkey between us she might have been sitting one side of
St. Paul’s and me the other. I give you my word that turkey lasted me
for weeks. Well, the wish-bone was as big as a church window, and I
could have hung my washing out on the drumsticks. It _was_ a bird. Oh,
dear, oh, dear! Well, I know when I threw the head out to the cat the
pore beast had convulsions in the backyard, and as for the parson’s
nose, well, as I said to my sister, the parson as had a nose like that
must have been a Jewish rabbit. What a set out it was, to be sure!
And my turkey which I ought to have had was sent up to a large family
gathering in the Shooter’s Hill Road, and half the party never tasted
turkey at all that Christmas.”
Mrs. Pottage continued in a strain of jovial reminiscence until her
lodgers had finished supper, after which she wanted to accompany them
upstairs to their room that she might help in the filling of Letizia’s
stocking.
“The fact is,” she whispered hoarsely, “I put that stocking of mine
out, because I’d bought a few odds and ends for her myself.”
She dived into the pockets of her voluminous skirt. “Here we are,
a bouncing dog with a chube at the end of it to squeeze. She can’t
swallow it unless she swallows the dog too, and I don’t think she’ll
do that. The _Story of the Three Bears_, warranted untearable, which
it isn’t, for I tore up two in the shop with my own hands just to show
the young man he didn’t know what he was talking about. A toy violing.
She won’t be able to play on it, but the varnish won’t hurt her. A
drum—well, it was really that drum which decided me to use one of my
own stockings. My calves have grown whopping. In fact, I’ve often said
jokingly to Mrs. Bugbird that I ought to call them cows nowadays.
That’s the lot, I think. Well, I shan’t wake you in the morning till
you ring. Just one tinkle will be enough. There’s no need to turn it
round as if you was playing a barrel organ, which is what the fellow
who played the villain in _His Life for Her_ did last November. He
wound up all the wire somewhere inside the wall. A nice set out we had,
and then he grumbled because I charged him in the bill for the work
the plumber did to get it right again. Well, good night, and a merry
Christmas.”
When the sound of Mrs. Pottage’s hoarse whispering had departed, the
little candlelit room glowed in the solemn hush of the great white
world, of which it seemed to be the warm and beating heart. Mother
and father bent low over the cot and listened to the faint breathing
of Letizia, watching lovingly those dark tangled curls and red-rose
cheeks. The father bent lower to touch them with his lips.
“No, no, don’t kiss her, boy,” said the mother. “You might wake her,
and she’ll be having such an exciting day to-morrow.”
Nancy blew out the candle on the table by the bed, and slipped her
silver key beneath Bram’s pillow. A shaft of moonlight pierced the
drawn curtains and struck the canopy of Letizia’s cot. The radiance
vanished as gathering snow-clouds obscured the face of the moon.
Nancy fell asleep to the sound of Bram’s watch carrying on a fairy
conversation amid the echoes of Mrs. Pottage’s absurd stories.