THE MR. CHESTERTON
It was always a strain when July came round, for John to amass those
seventeen odd pounds for the journey to Venice. But it was a greater
strain when, having amassed it, he had some days before him in which to
walk about the streets before he departed--it was a greater strain,
then, not to spend it. For money, to those who have none, is merely
water and it percolates through the toughest pigskin purse, finds it way
somehow or other into the pocket and, once there, is in a sieve with as
broad a mesh as you could need to find.
It was always in these few days before his yearly exodus, that John ran
across the things that one most desires to buy. Shop-keepers had a bad
habit of placing their most alluring bargains in the very fore-front of
the window. Everything, in fact, seemed cheaper in July, and seventeen
pounds was a sum which had all the appearance of being so immense, that
the detraction of thirty shillings from the hoard would make but little
material difference to the bulk of it.
But John had learnt by experience that if you take thirty shillings from
seventeen pounds, it leaves fifteen pounds ten, an odd amount, demanding
that those ten shillings be spent also to equalise matters. Then the
fifteen pounds which is left is still immense and the process beginning
all over again, there is finally left but a quota of what had been at
first. With fifteen pounds in bank notes in his letter-case and two
pounds in gold in his pocket, he found himself looking in the window of
Payne and Welcome's, where a little Nankin milk jug of some
unimpeachable dynasty was standing in all expectation, just waiting to
catch the eye of such a person as himself who might chance to pass by.
That afternoon, Jill was coming to tea--her first visit to Fetter Lane,
made, as he thought, simply in honour of his departure. And that little
milk jug was begging to come, too.
He stood for a while and stared at it. It would not be more than
fifteen shillings--expensive, too, at that. Fifteen shillings would
make no impression upon so vast a sum as seventeen pounds. A voice
whispered it in his ear, from behind his back,--just over his shoulder.
"You want a milk jug," said the voice, "and it's a beautiful blue. It
will go wonderfully with the teapot and the little blue and white cups
and saucers. Get it, man! Get it!" and it reminded him in a joking way,
with a subtle, cunning laugh, of his philosophy when he was a boy.
"What are sweets for, but to eat?" "What is money for, but to spend?"
With sudden decision, he walked in; but it was not through the entrance
of the jeweller's shop. He marched into the confessional box in the
chapel of unredemption. There, pulling out his three five-pound notes
and his two sovereigns, he planked them down upon the counter.
"I want ten shillings on those," said he.
They were used to John's eccentricities there, but they never thought
him so mad as this.
"Why, it's seventeen pounds," said the man.
"That's quite right," said John. "I counted it myself. And I want ten
shillings on it."
Ten shillings would feed him for a week. He strode out of the shop
again with the ten shillings in his pocket and the seventeen pounds safe
in the keeping of the high priest. There was a man who owed him
fourteen shillings, and who, when the time came to go to Venice, might
possibly be induced to part with that necessary ten, if he were asked
for it as a loan. A man will willingly lend you ten shillings if he
owes you fourteen; it is the paying you back that he does not like.
As he passed out into the street, John kept his face rigidly averted
from the little Nankin milk jug. He had played that milk jug a sly, and
a nasty trick. It was really nothing to be proud about.
When he returned to Number 39, there was a man waiting outside his door,
a man dressed in a light-brown tweed, the colour of ripening corn. He
had on a shiny-red silk tie, adorned with a pin--a horseshoe set with
pearls. His face was round, fat and solemn--the solemnity that made you
laugh. He put John in good spirits from the loss of the Nankin milk
jug, the moment he saw him. Someone had left the door into the street
open and so he had come upstairs.
"Who are you?" asked John.
"Well--my name's Chesterton, sir, Arthur Chesterton."
John opened his door with the innocence of a babe, and the man followed
him into the room, closely at his heels.
"And what do you want?" asked John.
Mr. Chesterton handed him a paper. John looked it through.
"Yes--of course--my two quarter's rent. They shall be paid," he said
easily. "There's money due to me next month."
Mr. Chesterton coughed behind his hand.
"It must be now," he said quietly. "That is to say--I must wait here
till I get it."
A bailiff! And Jill was coming to tea! In another half hour she would
be there! She knew he was poor; she thought Fetter Lane a terrible
neighbourhood; but with all her imagination, she had not conceived
anything as terrible as this.
There was only one way; to explain everything. He had a lady coming to
tea with him that afternoon--a lady--did he understand? Anyhow, he
nodded his head. Well--it was quite impossible for her to find him
there--a bailiff! It was not his fault, of course, that he was a
bailiff, but he must see how impossible the position was. The little
man nodded his head again. Well, would he go away; just for a short
time, till they had had tea. He could return then, John promised he
would let him in. He knew that once a bailiff was out of possession, he
was powerless; but this was a matter of honour. On his honour he would
let him in again.
Mr. Chesterton blinked his eyes.
"Sometimes," he replied quietly--"Sometimes they tell me it's their
father as is comin'--then again, if it's a woman, she says her
husband'll be back in a minute and her husband's always a man with an
'orrible bad temper what's liable to do dangerous things. And
sometimes, they say it's a girl they're sweet on--same as you."
"But I'll swear it's true!" cried John wildly.
Mr. Chesterton smiled.
"Wouldn't payin' the money be better than swearin'?" said he. "It's
only fifteen pounds. Sometimes they gets rid of me that way--and it's
the only successful way of doin' it. You see I'm inside now. I'm the
nine points of the law now. If I was outside, I'd be only one--you'd be
the nine, then--see. You'd be able to lock your door and make a long
nose at me out of the window. Lord! the times I've said that to
people--and they don't seem to see the truth of it--not they."
John had every sympathy with their obtuseness. If he saw the point of it
himself, it was only because he knew it would not be so in his instance.
"Then you won't go?" he said.
Mr. Chesterton shook his head, quite patiently.
"Do you ever get kicked out of a place into the street?" asked John.
The man was so small that the question would rise naturally to the minds
of quite a lot of people.
He smiled amiably.
"Yes--they do that sometimes. But two months, without the option, for
assault ain't pleasant, you know. I shouldn't care for it myself. I'd
sooner 'ave the assault, it's over quicker."
There are some tragedies in life in which, if you do not find place for
laughter, you become melodramatic--a sin which is unforgivable.
John just saved the position in time. He sat down in a chair and
laughed aloud.
"And till I've paid this money," he said. "I've got to put you up.
Where are you going to sleep? I've only got a bedroom besides this and a
cupboard that holds two hundredweight of coal on the landing."
Mr. Chesterton looked about him.
"That settle looks comfortable enough," said he. "I've slep' worse than
that." He crossed the room and felt the springs of it with his fist.
"But it's a small place. I'm afraid I shall be a bit in the way."
"My Lord!" John jumped up again. "You will this afternoon." He was to
have told Jill many things that afternoon. Now this ruined everything.
They would have to go out to tea, because there was no paying of the
money. He could not redeem his seventeen pounds and settle it with
that. There would be nothing left with which to go to Venice and the
calculations of that little old white-haired lady who was waiting for
him to put his arms about her neck had become so small, so infinitely
small, that he had not the heart to add to them by so much as a figure
of seven.
"And you don't believe that a lady's coming to tea with me?" he said
excitedly.
Mr. Chesterton spread out a pair of dirty hands.
"I know that lady so well," he said. "She's always every inch a lady
who wouldn't understand the likes of me. But I'm quite easy to
understand. Tell her I'm a friend of yours. I won't give the game
away."
Oh! It was ludicrous! The laugh came again quickly to John's lips, but
as soon it died away. So much was at stake. He had pictured it all so
plainly. She would be disappointed when she heard he was going. He
would ask her why that look had passed across her eyes. Her answer
would be evasive, and then, word by word, look by look, he would lead
her to the very door of his heart until the cry--"I love you"--the most
wonderful words to say--the most terribly wonderful words to mean, would
be wrung from his lips into her ears.
And now this imperturbable fiend of a bailiff, with his very natural
incredulity and his simple way of expressing it, had come to wreck the
greatest moment of his life.
John looked him up and down.
"What sort of a friend do you think I could introduce you as?" he asked.
"Do you think you look like a friend of mine?"
The little man glanced down at his boots, at the light-brown tweed
trousers, upturned and showing a pair of woollen socks not far removed
in colour from that of his tie.
"Well--you never know," said he, looking up again. "I'm stayin' here,
aren't I? They said you was a writer--that you wrote books. Well, have
you never seen a person who wrote books, like me? Why there was a woman
I 'ad to get the rent from once--a journalist, she called herself.
She'd got a bit of a beard and a fair tidy moustache--and by gum, she
dressed queerer than anything my old woman would ever put on. I felt
quite ashamed to be stoppin' with her."
John laughed again; laughed uproariously. Mr. Chesterton was so amused
at the remembrance of it, that he laughed as well. Suddenly their
laughter snapped, as you break a slate pencil. There came a gentle, a
timid knock on the door.
"This is she," whispered John. "The door below was open. She's come
upstairs. What the devil am I going to do?"
At last the little man believed him. He really was going to see the
lady this time, the lady who would never understand the likes of him,
and he began to feel quite nervous. He began to feel ashamed of being a
bailiff.
"Introduce me as a friend," he whispered--"It'll be all right--introduce
me as a friend."
"Sit down there, then--on that settle."
Then John opened the door and Jill stepped hesitatingly into the room.
Mr. Chesterton rose awkwardly to his feet.
This was the lady, materialised at last. From long habit of summing up
in a glance the people with whom he had to deal, he made his estimation
of Jill in a moment. The quietness of her voice as she said--"I was
rather afraid to knock, for fear I had made a mistake"--that gentleness
in the depth of the eyes which admits of no sudden understanding, yet as
gently asks for it--the firm repose of the lips already moulded for the
strength which comes with maturity, and all set in a face whose whole
expression was that innocence of a mind which knows and has put aside
until such moment when life shall demand contemplation. This--there was
no doubt of it--was the lady who would not understand the likes of him.
John shook hands with her. Mr. Chesterton took it all in with his
little solemn eyes. He was in the way. Never had he been so much in
the way before. As their hands touched, he felt that John was telling
her just how much in the way he was.
"May I introduce you," said John, turning, when that touching of the
hands was done with. "This is my friend--Mr. Chesterton. Miss----" he
paused. It seemed sacrilege to give her name to a bailiff, and the
little man felt sensitively, in his boots every moment of that pause.
His red socks were burning him. He could see the colour of his tie in
every reflection. It was even creeping up into his cheeks.
"Miss Dealtry."
He was going to come forward and shake hands, but she bowed. Then, when
she saw his confusion, out, generously, came her hand.
"Are you a writer, too?" she asked.
John was about to interpose; but the little man wanted to stand well
with her. He felt that his socks and his tie and his corn-coloured suit
ought all to be explained, and what more lucid or more natural
explanation than this.
"Oh, yes, I'm a writer," he said quickly. "Books, you know--and a
little journalism--just to--to keep me goin'--to amuse myself like.
Journalism's a change, you know--what you might call a rest, when your
always writin' books----" Then he remembered a quotation, but where
from, he could not say, "Of the writin' of books, you know--at least, so
they say--there's no end." And he smiled with pleasure to think how
colloquially he had delivered the phrase.
"Why, of course, I know your work," said Jill--"Aren't you _the_ Mr.
Chesterton?"
The little man's face beamed. That was just what they all called
him--_the_ Mr. Chesterton.
"That's right," said he delightedly, "the one and only." And under the
mantle of genius and celebrity his quaintnesses became witticisms, his
merest phrase a paradox.