THE BALLAD-MONGER--FETTER LANE
In Kensington Gardens, you will find romance. Many a real, many a
legendary, person has found it there. It will always be found there so
long as this great City of London remains a hive for the millions of
human bees that pass in and out of its doors, swarming or working,
idling or pursuing in silent and unconscious obedience to a law which
not one of them will ever live to understand.
Why it should be Kensington Gardens, more than any other place of the
kind, is not quite possible of explanation. Why not Regent's Park, or
St. James's Park? Why not those little gardens on the Embankment where
the band plays in the late mornings of summer and romances certainly do
find a setting? Why not any of these? But no--Kensington Gardens rule
_par excellence_, and there is no spot in this vast acreage of humanity
to touch them.
You will see there the romances that begin from both ends of a
perambulator and, from that onwards, Romance in all its countless
periods, infinitely more numerous than the seven ages of man; for
Romance is more wonderful than just life. It has a thousand more
variations, it plays a thousand more tricks with the understanding.
Life is real, they tell us--Life is earnest; but Romance is all that is
unreal besides; it is everything that is and is not, everything that has
been and will be, and you will find some of the strangest examples of it
under the boughs of those huge elms, on those uncomfortable little penny
seats in Kensington Gardens.
When those rooms of his in Fetter Lane became unbearable, John Grey
would betake himself to the Gardens, sitting by the round Pond where the
great ships make their perilous voyages, or he would find a seat under
the trees near that little one-storyed house which always shows so brave
a blaze of colour in the flower beds that circle it round.
Who lives in that little house? Of course, everybody knows--well,
everybody? I confess, I do not. But the rest of the world does, and so
what is the good of letting one's imagination run a-riot when the first
policeman would cheerfully give one the information. But if your
imagination did run riot, think of the tales you could tell yourself
about the owner of that little house in Kensington Gardens! I have never
asked a policeman, so I am at liberty to do what I like. It is really
the best way in this world; so much more interesting than knowledge.
Knowledge, after all, is only knowing things, facts, which next year may
not be facts at all. Facts die. But when you imagine, you create
something which can live forever. The whole secret of the matter being
that its life depends on you, not on Circumstance.
One Friday, three weeks or more after the slender incident of the last
candle in the Sardinia St. chapel, those rooms in number 39 Fetter Lane
became unbearable. When they did that, they got very small; the walls
closed in together and there was no room to move. Even the sounds in
the street had no meaning. They became so loud and jarring that they
lost meaning altogether.
Moreover, on Friday, the clarionet player came. It was his day; nothing
could alter that. If the calendar had not been moved on for weeks
together--and some calendars do suffer in that way--John at least knew
the Friday of the week. It is an ill wind, you know--even when it is
that which is blown through the reed of a clarionet.
But on this particular morning, the clarionet player was insufferable.
There is a day in nearly every week on which the things which one has
grown accustomed to, the sounds that one listens to without hearing, the
sights that one looks at without seeing, become blatant and jarring. It
is then that we hear these sounds twice as loudly as we should, that we
see those things twice as vividly as they are. It is then that the word
"unbearable" comes charged with the fullest of its meaning. And just
such a day was this Friday in the middle of April--it does not matter
how many years ago.
John had been working. He was writing a short story--a very tricksy
thing to try and do. It was nearly finished, the room was getting
smaller and smaller; the sounds in the street were becoming more and
more insistent. A barrel organ had just moved away, leaving a rent of
silence in all the noise of traffic, a rent of silence which was almost
as unbearable as the confused clattering of sounds; and then the
clarionet player struck up his tune.
"Oh, Charlie, he's my darling, my darling, my darling--
Oh, Charlie, he's my darling, my young Chevalier."
This was one of the only four tunes he knew. You may readily guess the
rest. He always played them through, one after the other, in
never-varying order. Charlie, he's my darling--the Arethusa--Sally in
our Alley and Come Lasses and Lads. He was a ballad-monger. He looked
a ballad-monger--only he was a ballad-monger on the clarionet. John
Leech has drawn him over and over again in the long ago pages of Punch;
drawn him with his baggy trousers that crease where they were never
intended to, with his faded black frock coat that was never cut for the
shoulders it adorned, with every article of clothing, which the picture
told you he would wear to the end of his days, inherited from a generous
charity that had only disposed of its gifts in the last moments of
decay.
"Oh, Charlie, he's my darling, my darling, my darling--"
He brought such a minor tone into it all; it might have been a dirge.
It was as he sang it. For these ballad-mongers are sad creatures.
Theirs is a hard, a miserable life, and it all comes out in their music.
The unhappy individual with a musical instrument who stands on the
curbstone in the pouring rain can find some depressing note to dwell on
in the liveliest of tunes. Art is most times only the cry of the
individual.
When the clarionet player began, John shut up his book, rose from his
chair, and went to the window. The windows wanted cleaning. It only
costs a shilling for four windows--the difficulty is sometimes to find
the man to do it--more often the difficulty is to find the shilling.
There is generally a man at the first street corner, but never a coin of
the realm.
Someone threw a penny into the street from an upper window. The music
stopped with a jerk. The ballad-monger chased the rolling coin to the
very edge of a drain, then stood erect with a red and grateful face.
He licked his lips, put the penny in his pocket and began again. That
penny had insured another five minutes at least. The sun was burning
down into the street. John got his hat, picked up his book and went
downstairs. Kensington Gardens was the only place left in the world.
Outside, he passed the ballad-monger as he was shaking the moisture out
of his reed. No wonder it is a thirsty business, this playing on the
clarionet. John was not in the mood to appreciate that very necessary
clearing of the instrument. At that moment all ballad-mongers were
unnecessary, and their habits loathsome. He stopped.
"Do you know no other tunes," he asked, "than those four you play here
every Friday?"
"No, sir." His voice was very deferential and as sad as his music.
"Well--don't you imagine we must all be very tired of them?"
"I often think that, sir. I often think that. But you only hear them
every Friday."
"You mean you hear them every day of the week?"
"That is what I mean, sir."
There is always the other person's point of view. You learn that as you
go along, and, in the street, you will learn it as quickly as anywhere.
The man who runs into you on the pavement is going in his direction as
well as you in yours, and it is always a nice point to decide whether
you ran into him or he into you. In any case, you may be certain that
he has his opinion on it.
John smiled.
"And you're sick of them too, eh?"
The ballad-monger fitted his mouthpiece carefully on to the instrument
that played the golden tunes.
"Well, I've what you might call passed that stage, sir. They're in the
blood, as you might say, by this time. They're always going on. When
I'm asleep, I hear bands playing them in the street. If it isn't
'Arethusa,' it's 'Come Lasses and Lads,' or 'Sally in Our Alley.' They
keep going on--and sometimes it's shocking to hear the way they play
them. You almost might say that's how I earned the money that people
give me, sir--not by playing them on this instrument here--I don't mind
that so much. It's the playing them in my head--that's the job I ought
to get paid for."
John looked at him. The man had a point of view. He could see the
nicer side of a matter. There are not so very many people who can. The
predominant idea when he came into the street, of telling the man he was
a nuisance, vanished from John's mind. He felt in his pockets. There
lay one sixpence. He fingered it for a moment, then brought it out.
"Buy yourself a penny score of another tune," he said, "and let's hear
it next Friday. It may drive the others out."
The man took it, looked at him, but said no word of thanks. No words
are so obsequious. No words can so spoil a gift. John walked away with
a sense of respect.
At the top of the Lane he remembered that he had no penny to pay for his
chair in Kensington Gardens. What was to be done? He walked back
again. The ballad-monger was at the last bars of the "Arethusa."
He looked round when he had finished.
John stammered. It occurred to him that he was begging for the first
time in his life and realised what an onerous profession it must be.
"Would you mind sparing me a penny out of that sixpence?" he asked; and
to make it sound a little bit better, he added: "I've run rather short."
The man produced the sixpence immediately.
"You'd better take it all, sir," he said quickly. "You'll want it more
than I shall."
John shook his head.
"Give me the penny," said he, "that you caught at the edge of the
drain."