Jimmy's original intention had been to take a couple of rooms of which
Douglas Kelly had told him. They were somewhere in that queer maze of
little streets and courts which lies at the back of Fleet Street, and
would have suited him admirably. But May had objected strongly to the
idea. No one they knew had ever dwelt in such a quarter; and both she
and Henry agreed that it was not the thing for any young man, especially
for a young man of Jimmy's temperament, to live in a place where nobody
would know what he was doing, or what hours he kept. So she had written
to a former maid of hers, who had married and settled in a South London
suburb, and arranged for her to board and lodge Jimmy for a fixed weekly
sum.
Jimmy had given in reluctantly, though he had not shown his reluctance
openly. Abroad, he had gone his own way, doing just as it seemed good to
him; but in England it was different. He was not afraid of his own
people; but he was anxious not to shock them in any way; and, at the
same time, contact with them had brought back much of his respect for
those conventions which had governed his boyhood. He was a Bohemian by
habit, and largely so by nature, yet when he was amongst those who lived
settled lives their influence and example seemed to revive some latent
instinct of staid respectability within himself, and, to a certain
extent, he came to see things with their eyes. True, the phase passed
quickly, so quickly that often during the ensuing months his own people
wondered whether he were not a hypocrite. They were used to men with
fixed temperaments, men you could rely upon to maintain a suitable
standard of propriety. The other kinds they ignored socially, as they
certainly would have ignored Jimmy, had he not been of their own blood;
but they belonged to a class which reckons family as second only to
property, which, though it may quarrel with its relations, always
remembers the relationship, and the sacred right of interference which
relationship gives.
Jimmy's new lodgings were half an hour's journey from the City. You
reached them by means of an uncleanly train, whose driver seemed to be
perpetually on the look-out for an excuse to stop with a jolt. You got
out--usually ten minutes late--at a smoke-grimed station, and emerged
into a wide thoroughfare, lined on either side with shops of the
margarine-and-spot-cash variety, and horrible with the screeching and
rattling of gigantic municipal trams, which appeared to run solely for
the pleasure of the motorman and conductor. The third turning on the
right and then the second on the left brought you to Mrs. Benn's house,
semidetached and severe looking, with heavy curtains and a brass plate
on a front door bearing the single word "Apartments."
Jimmy groaned inwardly as the cab drew up at the little iron gate, and
he wished, once more, that he had not given way to his sister. A band,
obviously the product of a happy and musical Fatherland, was just
packing up its music stands some fifty yards lower down the street;
whilst, as he mounted the steps of the house, two Dagos appeared round
the next corner, trundling a piano organ, on the top of which was seated
what was apparently a small and long-tailed relative of their own. His
rooms, however--two on the first floor--though small, were quite
cheerful for their kind, whilst the meat tea, which the landlady
presently brought up, was distinctly promising.
He had no stuff of his own, beyond the clothes in his trunks, not even a
book or a photograph; and during his wandering days the lack of such
things had never struck him; but now he found himself registering a
mental vow to buy some pictures as soon as possible, if only to have an
excuse for banishing the German reproductions of mid-Victorian art
which disfigured the walls of his sitting-room. The painters of the
originals had all borne great names, or at least had been accounted
great in their generation; but as he sat smoking after tea, and staring
at these glazed abominations, he wondered who had been the greater
sinner, the English artist or the Teutonic engraver; probably the
former, he told himself, for, after all, the latter had only spoiled
what detail there might have been; he had copied the smugness and the
false sentiment, perhaps rejoiced in them as being essentially the
products of Teutonic thought, but it had been the Englishman who had put
that smugness on to the canvas in the first case.
Unfortunately, it was easier to want new pictures than to get them, even
though they might cost but a few shillings apiece. Jimmy's total capital
amounted to a bare fifteen pounds, and his means of subsistence so far
appeared to consist of the introduction to Dodgson of the _Record_. Not
that the fact troubled him greatly. A more sanguine man would have been
haunted by the fear of his money giving out before any earnest of future
success came to him; a less experienced man would never have dreamed of
making the attempt at all; but Jimmy was used to being hard pressed for
cash, and had learnt in a rough school not to expect very much. He was
used to drifting, and, in any case, he had practically nothing to lose.
On the first morning Jimmy went out to have a look at the neighbourhood,
but after an hour's walk he had seen enough to kill any desire he might
have felt for further exploration. The whole district was prosaic and
unlovely, saturated with the spirit of municipal government. There were
rows and rows of jerry-built houses running at right angles to the High
Street, houses with small rooms and big rates, occupied by tired-looking
men who hurried to the station about half-past eight every morning, and
did not get back again till after seven in the evening, when you would
meet them walking homewards rather slowly, shuffling a little perhaps,
as overworked clerks are prone to do, and still carrying the halfpenny
paper which they had bought on their way to town. They had read every
word in it, and their wives would be too busy, or too worn-out, to give
it a glance; but still it had a value as fire-lighting material.
Halfpennies were not negligible factors in those desirable villa
residences. You could see that when the women folk went out to do their
morning shopping. Some of them were flashily-smart, some, most perhaps,
drab and weary like their husbands; but all had to pay cash to those
prosperous tradesmen in the High Street, every one of whom looked like
a councillor, or, at the very least, a guardian, having the air of
growing rich at the expense of the multitude.
There seemed to be a council school, aggressive in its hideousness, up
every second side street; the grinding whirr of the municipal trams was
always in your ears, to remind you of the poverty of the neighbourhood
in case our eyes should play you false, that worst form of poverty which
has to wear a decent black suit and possesses the mockery of a vote;
whilst the only alternative to the pavements--laid by a
councillor-contractor, and kept in repair by means of a special
rate--was the recreation ground, in which a plethoric and guardian-like
official spent his days in keeping the embryo ratepayers off the
sacrosanct municipal grass. You felt you were in the clutch of a
horrible machine, or rather of two machines, unallied perhaps, yet very
similar in operation, for both took as much as possible and grudged
giving anything in return. From nine till six you were part of the
mechanism of the City, wearing yourself out for the bare means of
subsistence, often without the slightest hope of further advancement,
always with the dread of dismissal as soon as your hair began to turn
grey, when a younger, cheaper man, or a German volunteer, would take
your place. There was nothing in the present, save the eternal
necessity for economy; nothing in the future, save the fear of
unemployment. At night, you returned home, to be gripped by the
municipal Frankenstein's monster, which you and your fellows had helped
to make. You were never free man, you never could be free; because in
London the price of freedom is usually starvation for your children and
prison for yourself, if you cannot satisfy the demands of the "Guardians
of the Poor."
Jimmy smiled grimly to himself as he noted the new Town Hall. He had met
a good many robber-politicians during his wanderings in the Dago
Republics; but all of them had, at least, the saving grace of frankness.
The aim and end of their policy was to arrive safely in Paris, with the
contents of the national treasury as their baggage. They did not hunger
after honours, such as knighthoods, or aspire to speak at Sunday
afternoon gathering in pseudo-places of worship. Certainly, they told a
number of flamboyant falsehoods before getting into office, but that was
the only respect in which they copied civilised political methods; and
they did run a risk from which their English counterparts would have
shrunk in a cold sweat of fear. The price of failure was death.
The one tour of inspection satisfied Jimmy. He saw the tragedy
underlying the lives of these people, saw it far more clearly, perhaps,
than they did themselves, for he had known so many other phases, whilst
they were inured to the drab monotony, most had been born to it, and so
its full meaning was mercifully hidden from them. They would have waxed
wrath at hearing it called a poor locality, in fact it was not one,
being eminently respectable, as any house agent could tell you. Why, the
late mayor, who died during his third term of office, had left nearly a
hundred thousand pounds.
For three days Jimmy wrote steadily, doing no less than five articles of
the type which the _Record_ had accepted. One he sent to Dodgson, the
others to papers which Douglas Kelly had mentioned, and then, suddenly,
inspiration seemed to fail him. He could not write a line, could not
even think of a subject; and, for a whole day, he felt something nearly
akin to dismay. If his ideas ran out as quickly as this his prospects
were small indeed; and when the postman brought back two of his
manuscripts, with printed slips conveying the editor's thanks and
regrets, he began to curse his own folly in ever coming home.
That evening, the craving for companionship he had felt in the hotel the
night he landed came back to him again. He had spoken to no one, save
his landlady, for the better part of a week, and the loneliness seemed
unbearable. He sent his supper away, practically untasted, then, without
giving Mrs. Benn a chance to come up and comment on the smallness of his
appetite, took his hat and went out.
It was Early Closing Day, and the High Street was thronged, mainly with
the liberated shop assistants. Jimmy walked slowly, and, owing perhaps
to that fact, he got more than one glance, encouraging him to begin an
acquaintance with young ladies in cheap and showy raiment. But none of
them made the slightest appeal to him. He had no taste for an insipid
flirtation with a girl who would probably play havoc with the aspirates.
He had met many women far less innocent than these, and there had been
more than one passage in his life which he did not recall with pride;
and yet, withal, he was still fastidious where women were concerned. The
only one who had interested him since his return home was the girl whom
he had seen entering the cab in the Strand. Somehow, her face remained
fixed in his memory, and many times since that evening he had found
himself wondering who she was, what her story could be.
He walked down to the bottom of the High Street, to where the trams
swerved round a corner with a whirr and a jolt into the domain of the
next borough council. There was a large public house at that point, with
much brass work and mahogany about its swing doors, and he turned in,
not so much because he wanted anything to drink, but because it seemed
the obvious alternative to the dreariness of his own rooms or the
boredom of the street.
The presiding deity welcomed him with the smile she reserved for new
customers. Trade was not very brisk in the saloon bar--there were eight
other licensed houses in the street--and she tossed her peroxide-dyed
curls and flashed her new teeth at him as she poured out his whisky.
"You look pretty doleful about something," she remarked.
Jimmy laughed. "I was till I came in here." Then he began to chat to
her, about nothing in particular, and somehow the time passed so quickly
that it was closing time before he took his leave. She had not
interested him in the least; but she was someone to talk to, and the
five or six drinks he had taken had cheered him up temporarily. It was
only when he got out into the now-emptying street that he remembered
that he had not got a latchkey.
Mrs. Benn was sitting up for him, and received him with a rather sour
face.
"I didn't know you was going to be late, sir," she said severely. "Mrs.
Marlow wrote that you would always be in in good time."
Jimmy muttered an apology and took his candle. On the top stair of the
first flight he caught his foot in a loose piece of carpet, and
stumbled, dropping the candlestick, which broke off at the base. In
silence, Mrs. Benn fetched another, and handed it to him with an air of
resignation, then, "You'll be sure and put it out safe, sir," she said.
Jimmy saw what was in her mind, and laughed, though there was a note of
annoyance in his voice as he attempted to reassure her; but his
annoyance would have changed to wrath had he known that the early post
next morning carried a letter to May describing how he returned home the
worse for liquor.