THE CHAPEL OF UNREDEMPTION
The next morning was one of promise. For half an hour before the time
appointed for his meeting, John was waiting, seated upon a penny chair,
thinking innumerable thoughts, smoking innumerable cigarettes.
Sometimes he felt the money that was in his pocket, running his finger
nail over the minted edge of the half crowns and florins to distinguish
them from the pennies. No woman, whatever franchise she may win, will
ever understand the delight of this. You must have a pocket in your
trousers and keep your money there--even gold when you possess it--to
appreciate the innocent joy of such an occupation as this. Men have
really a deal to be grateful for.
That morning, John had money. He even had gold. He had pawned his gold
watch-chain, intending, if the opportunity arose, to ask Jill to lunch.
The watch, as you know, was smashed up. That is a technical term in use
amongst all gentlemen and sensitive people, having this great advantage
that it may be taken literally or not, at will. No one who uses the
term has ever been so much in want of shame as to define it.
You may wonder why it is that the watch and not the chain should get
smashed up first. It is the watch that tells the time. But then, it is
the chain that tells you have got the watch that tells the time, and in
this life one has always to be considering that there would be no maiden
all forlorn if it were not for the house that Jack built. The chain
will always be the last to go, so long as those three brass balls
continue to hang over that suspicious-looking shop in the dingy side
street.
John's watch had been smashed up for some weeks; but little boys and
little girls in the street still flattered him by asking to be told the
time.
With one eye searching for a distant clock while your hand pulls out the
latch key which depends upon the chain, giving it the weight of a reason
to stay in the pocket, you can easily deceive the eyes of these
unsuspecting little people in the street. If you discover the distant
clock, all well and good. If not, then a hundred devices are left open
to you. You can guess--you can tell it by the sun, but, and if you are
conscientious, you can apologise and say your watch has stopped. And
last of all, if it is a nice little person with eyes in which a laugh is
always a-tip-toe, you may dangle the key in front of their face, and
with their merriment experience the clean pleasure of honesty.
A quality about John that was interesting, was his ability to anticipate
possibilities. Perhaps a man's mind runs instinctively to the future,
and it is the woman who lives in the past.
When Mrs. Rowse awakened him in the morning, he sat up in bed with the
glowing consciousness that something was to happen that day. Something
had been arranged; some appointment was to be kept; some new interest
had entered his life which was to take definite shape that very day.
He asked Mrs. Rowse the time--not as one who really wishes to know it,
but as it were a duty, which must sooner or later be accomplished.
Directly she said a quarter to nine, he remembered. Jill! The Lady of
St. Joseph! That morning she was going to tell him how much she liked
his story.
He sat up at once in bed.
"Mrs. Rowse! I shall want my coffee in half an hour. Less! Twenty
minutes!"
In twenty minutes, he was dressed. Allowance must be made if he chose a
sock that matched a tie or spent a moment of thought upon the selection
of a shirt to go with them. Vanity, it is, only to do these things for
your own approval; but when all consciously, you stand upon the very
threshold of romance, it may be excused you if you consider yourself in
the reflexion of the door. It is the man who, wandering aimlessly
through the streets in life, looks in at every mirror that he passes,
who is abominable. That is the vanity of which the prophet spoke. The
prophet, himself, would have been the first to set straight the tie, or
rearrange the 'kerchief of the lover who goes to meet his mistress.
Even John smiled at himself. The socks matched the tie so absolutely;
it was ludicrous how well they matched. There was no rough, blue serge
suit that day. Out of the depths of the wardrobe came a coat well
brushed and kept. Then he went in to breakfast.
During the meal, Mrs. Rowse lingered about in the sitting-room, dusting
things that might easily have escaped notice. John, reading his paper,
at last became aware of it with a rush of blood to his cheeks. She had
paid the day before for the washing--three and elevenpence.
If you go to a laundry in the environment of Fetter Lane, it is like
putting your clothes in pawn. You can't get them back again until the
bill is paid, and there are times when that is inconvenient.
That was why Mrs. Rowse was lingering. She had paid for the washing.
Whenever money was due to her, she lingered. It is a subtle method of
reproach, a gentle process of reminder which at first scarcely explains
itself.
On the first occasion when she had adopted it, John had thought she was
losing her memory, that her wits were gathering. Out of the corner of
his eye, he had nervously watched her going aimlessly about the room,
dusting the same object perhaps six separate times. When a woman is
paid seven shillings a week for keeping one's rooms tidy, such industry
as this might well be a sign of madness.
At length, unable to bear it any longer, John had said that he thought
she had done enough. Despairingly then, she had folded up the duster,
put it away, taken an unconscionable time in the pinning on of that
black, shabby hat, and finally, but only when at the door itself, she
had said:
"Do you think you could spare my wages to-day, sir?"
Now she was lingering again. But he had come to know the signs and
meanings of the process. This time, John knew it was the washing. He
watched her covertly from behind his paper, hoping against hope that she
might tire; for he had not got three and elevenpence, nor three
halfpence in the world. But a master in the art of lingering does not
know what it means to tire. Just when he thought she must have
finished, when she had done all the glass on the mantel-piece for the
second time, she went out of the room to the cupboard on the landing
where John kept his two-hundredweight of coal and returned with all the
rags and pots of paste necessary for the cleaning of the brass.
Here he gave in; the siege was over. Under cover of the newspaper, he
detached the latch key from his watch-chain, slipped it into his pocket
and rose, concealing the chain within his hand.
"I'm just going out," he said--"for a few moments. Can you wait till I
get back?"
She looked as though she could not, as if it were rather encroaching
upon the limit of her time to ask her to stay longer, but----
"I expect I can find one or two little things to do for a few moments,"
she said.
John left her doing them. They mainly consisted of putting the brass
polish and the rags back again in the cupboard from which she had taken
them.
It is here that you will see this quality interesting in John, this
ability to anticipate possibilities. It was not really the victory of
Mrs. Rowse that had impelled him to the sacrifice of his watch-chain.
It is not consistent with human nature for any man to pawn an article of
value--far less one which implies the possession of another--in order to
pay his washing bill. Washing, like the income tax, is one of those
indemnities in life which appear to have no justice in their existence.
It would always seem that your integrity were still preserved, that you
were still a man of honour if you could avoid paying them.
I know a man, who has eluded the income tax authorities for seven years,
and he is held in the highest esteem as a man of acumen, ability, and
the soul of honour. I admit that this opinion is only held of him by
those who are endeavouring to do the same as he. A man, for instance,
who belongs to the same club and pays his income tax to the last
shilling, thinks him to be a hopelessly immoral citizen and would
believe him capable of anything. But this is not fair. It would be far
more just to say that the man who pays his income tax to the uttermost
farthing is capable of nothing--invertebrate.
It was not, then, alone to pay his washing bill that John decided to
part with the gold watch-chain. He had, in a moment of inspiration,
conjured before him the possibility of asking Jill to lunch, and these
two motives, uniting from opposite quarters of the compass of suggestion
to one and the same end, he sacrificed the last pretentions he might
have claimed to the opulence conveyed by a gold watch-chain and repaired
to Payne and Welcome's.
With a bold and unconscious step, he strode into the little side
entrance, which is a feature of all these jeweller's shops displaying
the mystical sign of the three brass balls. Without the slightest sense
of shame, he pushed open one of the small doors that give admittance to
the little boxes--those little boxes where the confession of one's
poverty is made. And to no sympathetic ear of a gentle priest are those
terrible confessions to be whispered--the most terrible confession you
can make in this world. The man to whom you tell your story of shame is
greedy and willing to listen, eager and inexorable to make your penance
as heavy as he may. A bailiff is, perhaps, more stony of heart than a
pawnbroker; yet both are brothers in trade. The dearest things in the
life of anyone are their possessions, and both these tradesmen deal in
their heartless confiscation. The woman out at elbow, hollow-eyed, who
comes to pawn her wedding ring, the man--shabby--genteel--wearing, until
the nap is gone and the sleeves are frayed, the garment of his
self-respect, who comes to put away his best and Sunday coat; they are
all one to the pawnbroker. He beats them down to the last farthing,
well knowing that, having once determined to part with their
possessions, they will not willingly go away again without that for
which they came. He has them utterly at his mercy. They are all one to
him. The story in their faces is nothing to his eyes. He signs a
hundred death warrants in the tickets that he writes every day--death
warrants to possessions well-nigh as dear as life; but it means nothing
to him.
The awful thought about it all, is to consider the ease with which one
loses the sense of shame which, upon a first transaction of the kind, is
a hot wind blowing on the face, burning the cheeks to scarlet.
On the first occasion that John was driven to such dealing, he passed
that guilty side entrance many times before he finally summoned courage
to enter. Every time that he essayed the fatal step, the street became
full of people whom he knew. There was that editor who was considering
his last short story! He turned swiftly, his heel a sudden pivot, and
scrutinised the objects in the jeweller's window, then harried away up
the street, as though he were ashamed of wasting his time. A glance
over the shoulder, satisfied him that the editor was out of sight and
back he slowly came. This time he had got within a foot of the door--a
foot of it. One step more and he would have been in the sheltering
seclusion of that narrow little passage! There was the girl who sold
him stamps in the post-office--the girl who smiled at him and said she
had read a beautiful story of his in one of the magazines! He had
looked up quickly as though he had mistaken the number on the door, then
marched into the next shop on the left, as if that were the one he had
been looking for. When he had got in, he realised that it was a
butcher's.
The butcher, in a blithe voice, had said:
"And what this morning, sir?"
"I want--can you tell me the time?" said John.
In about half an hour there came a moment when the street was empty.
John had seized it and vanished up the little passage. But the ordeal
was not over then. He had had to face the high priest of poverty--to
tell to him the unforgivable, the mortal crime of penury. And there had
been someone in the next confessional--someone hardened in sin--who
could hear every single word that he said, and even so far over-stepped
the bounds of decency as to look round the corner of their partition.
"How much will you give me for this?" said John, laying his watch upon
the counter. It was the watch his mother had given him, the watch for
which she had lovingly stinted herself of ten pounds in order to mark,
with degree, his twenty-first birthday.
The high priest had picked it up superciliously.
"D'you want to sell it?"
"No--oh, no! Only--pawn it."
"Well, how much d'you want?"
"I'd rather you said," replied John meekly.
The high priest shrugged his shoulders. It was a wasting of his time,
he said, to go on with nonsense like that.
"How much do you want?" he repeated.
"Five pounds," said John, and suddenly, without knowing how, found the
watch back again in his possession. The high priest had turned to the
hardened sinner in the next confessional, and he was left there looking
at it blankly in the palm of his open hand. He scarcely knew how he had
come by it again. In the midst of the other transaction, the pawnbroker
presently addressed him over his shoulder--loudly, so that all in the
shop could hear:
"I'll give you two pounds," he had said--"And that's about as much as I
could sell it for myself."
Two pounds! It was an insult to that dear, little, old, white-haired
lady who had scraped and saved to buy him the best she knew.
"It cost ten pounds!" John said boldly.
"Ten pounds!" The laugh he gave was like the breaking of glass. "The
person who gave ten pounds for that must have wanted to get rid of money
in a hurry."
Wanted to get rid of money in a hurry! If he could have seen the number
of dainty shawls the thin white fingers had knitted and the trembling
hands had sold in order to amass the fortune of that ten pounds, he
would not have talked of hurry.
"I'll give you two pounds five," he had added. "Not a farthing more and
if you take it away somewhere else and then bring it back here again,
I'll only give you two pounds, what I said at first."
When the blood is mounting to your forehead, when it seems you are
crushed about by those watching your discomfort till the warmth of their
pressing, phantom bodies brings the perspiration out in beads upon your
face, you will take anything to get away.
The pawnbroker had made out the ticket as John mumbled his name and
address.
"Got a penny--a penny for the ticket?" said the man.
To be compelled to make this confession--the most unabsolvable of
all--that he had nothing in his pocket, was the crisis to his suffering.
The high priest sniffed, smiled and counted out two pounds four and
elevenpence. Then John had turned and fled.
Out in the street again, he had breathed once more. The air was purer
there. The passers-by, hearing the money jingle in his pocket, held him
in higher esteem than did those devotees in the chapel of unredemption.
He could even stop and look in the windows of the jeweller's shop--that
open, smiling face of a shop window which, beneath its smug and shiny
respectability, concealed all the secret, sordid crimes of poverty--the
polished pledges unredeemed, that lay deceptively upon the glass shelves
as though they had come just new from the maker's hands.
It was then, gazing in the window, on that memorable day when he had
made his first confession, that John had seen the little brass man. He
stood there on a glass shelf along with dozens of other unredeemed
trinkets, his low-crowned top-hat, his long-tailed, slim-waisted,
Georgian coat and many-buttoned vest, giving him an air of distinction
which none of the other objects around him possessed. His attitude, his
pose, was that of a _Chevalier d'honneur_--a chivalrous, courteous,
proud old gentleman. The one hand resting on the hip, was full of
dignity. The other stretched out as though to reach something, John came
later, on acquaintance, to learn the fuller significance of that. But
though all the features of his face were worn away by hands that had
held him, gripping him as they pressed him down, a seal upon the molten
wax, it had no power to lessen his undeniable dignity. For all his
shapelessness of eyes and nose and mouth, there was not an inch thereby
detracted from his stature. From the first moment that he had seen him,
the little brass man had taken his stand in John's mind as the figure of
all nobility, all honour, and all cleanliness and generosity of heart.
To see that little figure in brass was to covet him. John walked back
without hesitation into the shop; but this time it was through the
jeweller's entrance--this time it was with the confidence of one who
comes to buy, not to sell, with the self-righteousness of the virtue of
two pounds four and eleven-pence, not with the shame of the sin of
poverty.
Ah, they treat you differently on this side of the counter. If you were
ordering a High Mass to be sung, the priest of poverty could treat you
with no greater deference. They may have thought he was mad--most
probably they did. It is not characteristic of the man who comes
without a penny to pay for the ticket as he pawns his watch, to
immediately purchase, haphazard, a little trinket that is of no use to
anyone. The high priest of poverty, himself, will tell you that the sin
must weigh heavy with need upon the mind before the tongue can bring
itself to confess.
They had looked at him in no little surprise as he re-entered; but when
he had asked to be shown the little brass man, they cast glances from
one to another, as people do when they think they are in the presence of
a wandering mind.
"How much do you want for it?" John had asked.
"Seven and six. It's very good--an old seal, you know, quite an
antique."
John considered the one pound fifteen which he owed out of that two
pounds four and elevenpence.
"I'm afraid that's too much," said he.
"Ah--it's worth it. Why, that's over a hundred years old--quite
unique."
"I'm afraid it's too much," John repeated.
"Well--look here--I'll tell you what we'll do. You can have it for seven
shillings, and we'll give you six on it any day you like to bring it
back."
They could have offered no greater proof than that of the value in which
they held it. If a pawnbroker will buy back an article at almost the
same price that he sells it, he must indeed be letting you have it
cheap. This offering to take back the little brass man at only a
shilling less than he was asking for it, was the highest expression of
honesty with which he could defend his demands.
John accepted the conditions--paid out his seven shillings and bore the
little _Chevalier d'honneur_ in brass away.
It was three months later, he had only had breakfast for two
days--breakfast, which consisted of toast made from a loaf that was ten
days old, bloater paste which keeps for ever, and coffee which can--if
you know where to get it--be obtained on credit. It was winter-time and
the cold had made him hungry. Coals had run out. The last few
scrapings of dust had been gathered out of that cupboard on the landing.
Then depression set in. Depression is a heartless jade. She always pays
you a visit when both stomach and pocket are empty. Putting his face in
his hands, John had leant on the mantel-piece. There was nothing to
pawn just then. Everything had gone! Suddenly, he became aware that he
was gazing at the little brass man, and that the little brass man had
got one hand aristocratically upon his hip, whilst the other was holding
out something as though secretly to bestow it as a gift. John looked,
and looked again. Then he saw what it was. The little brass man was
offering him six shillings and a spasm of hunger creaking through
him--he had taken it.