§ 3
After our midday dinner—it was a potato-pie, mostly potato with some
scraps of cabbage and bacon—I put on my overcoat and got it out of the
house while my mother was in the scullery at the back.
A scullery in the old world was, in the case of such houses as ours, a
damp, unsavory, mainly subterranean region behind the dark living-room
kitchen, that was rendered more than typically dirty in our case by the
fact that into it the coal-cellar, a yawning pit of black uncleanness,
opened, and diffused small crunchable particles about the uneven brick
floor. It was the region of “washing-up,” that greasy, damp function
that followed every meal; its atmosphere had ever a cooling steaminess
and the memory of boiled cabbage, and the sooty black stains where
saucepan or kettle had been put down for a minute, scraps of
potato-peel caught by the strainer of the escape-pipe, and rags of a
quite indescribable horribleness of acquisition, called “dish-clouts,”
rise in my memory at the name. The altar of this place was the “sink,”
a tank of stone, revolting to a refined touch, grease-filmed and
unpleasant to see, and above this was a tap for cold water, so arranged
that when the water descended it splashed and wetted whoever had turned
it on. This tap was our water supply. And in such a place you must
fancy a little old woman, rather incompetent and very gentle, a soul of
unselfishness and sacrifice, in dirty clothes, all come from their
original colors to a common dusty dark gray, in worn, ill-fitting
boots, with hands distorted by ill use, and untidy graying hair—my
mother. In the winter her hands would be “chapped,” and she would have
a cough. And while she washes up I go out, to sell my overcoat and
watch in order that I may desert her.
I gave way to queer hesitations in pawning my two negotiable articles.
A weakly indisposition to pawn in Clayton, where the pawnbroker knew
me, carried me to the door of the place in Lynch Street, Swathinglea,
where I had bought my revolver. Then came an idea that I was giving too
many facts about myself to one man, and I came back to Clayton after
all. I forget how much money I got, but I remember that it was rather
less than the sum I had made out to be the single fare to Shaphambury.
Still deliberate, I went back to the Public Library to find out whether
it was possible, by walking for ten or twelve miles anywhere, to
shorten the journey. My boots were in a dreadful state, the sole of the
left one also was now peeling off, and I could not help perceiving that
all my plans might be wrecked if at this crisis I went on shoe leather
in which I could only shuffle. So long as I went softly they would
serve, but not for hard walking. I went to the shoemaker in Hacker
Street, but he would not promise any repairs for me under forty-eight
hours.
I got back home about five minutes to three, resolved to start by the
five train for Birmingham in any case, but still dissatisfied about my
money. I thought of pawning a book or something of that sort, but I
could think of nothing of obvious value in the house. My mother’s
silver—two gravy-spoons and a salt-cellar—had been pawned for some
weeks, since, in fact, the June quarter day. But my mind was full of
hypothetical opportunities.
As I came up the steps to our door, I remarked that Mr. Gabbitas looked
at me suddenly round his dull red curtains with a sort of alarmed
resolution in his eye and vanished, and as I walked along the passage
he opened his door upon me suddenly and intercepted me.
You are figuring me, I hope, as a dark and sullen lout in shabby,
cheap, old-world clothes that are shiny at all the wearing surfaces,
and with a discolored red tie and frayed linen. My left hand keeps in
my pocket as though there is something it prefers to keep a grip upon
there. Mr. Gabbitas was shorter than I, and the first note he struck in
the impression he made upon any one was of something bright and
birdlike. I think he wanted to be birdlike, he possessed the
possibility of an avian charm, but, as a matter of fact, there was
nothing of the glowing vitality of the bird in his being. And a bird is
never out of breath and with an open mouth. He was in the clerical
dress of that time, that costume that seems now almost the strangest of
all our old-world clothing, and he presented it in its cheapest
form—black of a poor texture, ill-fitting, strangely cut. Its long
skirts accentuated the tubbiness of his body, the shortness of his
legs. The white tie below his all-round collar, beneath his innocent
large-spectacled face, was a little grubby, and between his not very
clean teeth he held a briar pipe. His complexion was whitish, and
although he was only thirty-three or four perhaps, his sandy hair was
already thinning from the top of his head.
To your eye, now, he would seem the strangest figure, in the utter
disregard of all physical beauty or dignity about him. You would find
him extraordinarily odd, but in the old days he met not only with
acceptance but respect. He was alive until within a year or so ago, but
his later appearance changed. As I saw him that afternoon he was a very
slovenly, ungainly little human being indeed, not only was his clothing
altogether ugly and queer, but had you stripped the man stark, you
would certainly have seen in the bulging paunch that comes from flabby
muscles and flabbily controlled appetites, and in the rounded shoulders
and flawed and yellowish skin, the same failure of any effort toward
clean beauty. You had an instinctive sense that so he had been from the
beginning. You felt he was not only drifting through life, eating what
came in his way, believing what came in his way, doing without any
vigor what came in his way, but that _into_ life also he had drifted.
You could not believe him the child of pride and high resolve, or of
any splendid passion of love. He had just _happened_. . . But we all
happened then. Why am I taking this tone over this poor little curate
in particular?
“Hello!” he said, with an assumption of friendly ease. “Haven’t seen
you for weeks! Come in and have a gossip.”
An invitation from the drawing-room lodger was in the nature of a
command. I would have liked very greatly to have refused it, never was
invitation more inopportune, but I had not the wit to think of an
excuse. “All right,” I said awkwardly, and he held the door open for
me.
“I’d be very glad if you would,” he amplified. “One doesn’t get much
opportunity of intelligent talk in this parish.”
What the devil was he up to, was my secret preoccupation. He fussed
about me with a nervous hospitality, talking in jumpy fragments,
rubbing his hands together, and taking peeps at me over and round his
glasses. As I sat down in his leather-covered armchair, I had an odd
memory of the one in the Clayton dentist’s operating-room—I know not
why.
“They’re going to give us trouble in the North Sea, it seems,” he
remarked with a sort of innocent zest. “I’m glad they mean fighting.”
There was an air of culture about his room that always cowed me, and
that made me constrained even on this occasion. The table under the
window was littered with photographic material and the later albums of
his continental souvenirs, and on the American cloth trimmed shelves
that filled the recesses on either side of the fireplace were what I
used to think in those days a quite incredible number of books—perhaps
eight hundred altogether, including the reverend gentleman’s photograph
albums and college and school text-books. This suggestion of learning
was enforced by the little wooden shield bearing a college coat-of-arms
that hung over the looking-glass, and by a photograph of Mr. Gabbitas
in cap and gown in an Oxford frame that adorned the opposite wall. And
in the middle of that wall stood his writing-desk, which I knew to have
pigeon-holes when it was open, and which made him seem not merely
cultured but literary. At that he wrote sermons, composing them
himself!
“Yes,” he said, taking possession of the hearthrug, “the war had to
come sooner or later. If we smash their fleet for them now; well,
there’s an end to the matter!”
He stood on his toes and then bumped down on his heels, and looked
blandly through his spectacles at a water-color by his sister—the
subject was a bunch of violets—above the sideboard which was his pantry
and tea-chest and cellar. “Yes,” he said as he did so.