WHAT TO CALL A HERO
John Grey is scarcely the name for a hero; not the sort of name you
would choose of your own free will if the telling of a fairy story was
placed unreservedly in your hands. If every latitude were offered you,
quite possibly you would select the name of Raoul or Rudolfe--some name,
at least, that had a ring in it as it left the tongue. They say,
however, that by any other name a rose would smell as sweet. Oh--but I
cannot believe that is true--good heavens! think of the pleasure you
would lose if you had to call it a turnip!
And yet I lose no pleasure, no sense of mine is jarred when I call my
hero--John Grey. But if I do lose no pleasure, it is with a very good
reason. It is because I have no other alternative. John Grey was a real
person. He lived. He lived, too, over that identical little
greengrocer's shop of Mrs. Meakin's in Fetter Lane and, though there was
a private side entrance from the street, he often passed through the
shop in order to smell the wholesome smell of good mother earth, to look
at the rosy cheeks of the apples, to wish he was in the country, and to
say just a few words to the good lady of the shop.
To the rest of the inhabitants of the house, even to Mrs. Meakin
herself, he was a mystery. They never quite understood why he lived
there. The woman who looked after his rooms, waking him at nine o'clock
in the morning, making his cup of coffee, lingering with a duster in his
sitting-room until he was dressed, then lingering over the making of his
bed in the bedroom until it was eleven o'clock--the time of her
departure--even she was reticent about him.
There is a reticence amongst the lower classes which is a combination of
ignorance of facts and a supreme lack of imagination. This was the
reticence of Mrs. Rowse. She knew nothing; she could invent nothing; so
she said nothing. They plied her with questions in vain. He received a
lot of letters, she said, some with crests on the envelopes. She used to
look at these in wonder before she brought them into his bedroom. They
might have been coronets for the awe in which she held them; but in
themselves they explained nothing, merely added, in fact, to the mystery
which surrounded him. Who was he? What was he? He dressed well--not
always, but the clothes were there had he liked to wear them. Three
times a week, sometimes more, sometimes less, he donned evening dress,
stuck an opera hat on his head and Mrs. Meakin would see him pass down
the Lane in front of her shop. If she went to the door to watch him,
which quite frequently she did, it was ten chances to one that he would
stop a passing hansom, get into it, and drive away. The good lady would
watch it with her eyes as it wheeled round into Holborn, and then,
returning to her backless chair, exclaim:
"Well--my word--he's a puzzle, he is--there's no tellin' what he
mightn't be in disguise--" by which she conveyed to herself and anyone
who was there to listen, so wrapt, so entangled a sense of mystery as
would need the entire skill of Scotland Yard to unravel.
Then, finally, the rooms themselves, which he occupied--their
furnishing, their decoration--the last incomprehensible touch was added
with them. Mrs. Meakin, Mrs. Brown, the wife of the theatre cleaner on
the second floor, Mrs. Morrell, the wife of the plumber on the third
floor, they had all seen them, all marvelled at the rows of brass
candlesticks, the crucifixes and the brass incense burners, the real
pictures on the walls--pictures, mind you, that were painted, not
copied--the rows upon rows of books, the collection of old glass on the
mantle-piece, the collection of old china on the piano, the carpet--real
velvet pile--and the furniture all solid oak, with old brass fittings
which, so Mrs. Rowse told them, he insisted upon having kept as bright
as the brass candlesticks themselves. They had seen all this, and they
had wondered, wondered why a gentleman who could furnish rooms in such a
manner, who could put on evening dress at least three times a
week--evening dress, if you please, that was not hired, but his own--who
could as often drive away in a hansom, presumably up West, why he should
choose to live in such a place as Fetter Lane, over a greengrocer's
shop, in rooms the rent of which could not possibly be more than thirty
pounds a year.
To them, it remained a mystery; but surely to you who read this it is no
mystery at all.
John Grey was a writer, a journalist, a driver of the pen, a business
which brings with it more responsibilities than its remuneration can
reasonably afford. There is no real living to be made by literature
alone, if you have any ambitions and any respect for them. Most people
certainly have ambitions, but their respect for them is so
inconsiderable when compared with their desire of reward, that they only
keep them alive by talking of them. These are the people who know
thoroughly the meaning of that word Art, and can discuss it letter for
letter, beginning with the capital first.
But to have ambitions and to live up to them is only possible to the
extreme idealist--a man who, seeing God in everything, the world has not
yet learnt or perhaps forgotten to cater for.
So far everything is utilitarian--supplying the needs of the body which
can only see God in consecrated wine, and so it is that wise men build
churches for fools to pray in--the wise man in this world being he who
grows rich.
This, then, is the solution to the mystery of John Grey. He was an
idealist--the very type of person to live in a City of Beautiful
Nonsense, where the rarest things in the world cost nothing and the most
sordid necessities are dear. For example, the rent of number
thirty-nine was a gross exactment upon his purse. He could ill afford
that thirty pounds a year. He could ill afford the meals which
sometimes hunger compelled him to pay for. But when he bought a piece
of brass--the little brass man, for example, an old seal, that was of no
use to anybody in the world, and only stood passively inert upon his
mantel-piece--the price of it was as nothing when compared with the
cheap and vulgar necessities of existence.
But it must not be supposed that Fetter Lane and its environs constitute
the spires, the roofs and domes of that City of Beautiful Nonsense. It
is not so. Far away East, on the breast of the Adriatic, that wonderful
City lies. And we shall come to it--we shall come to it all too soon.