“Luney, my son,” said Mr. James Dodson in one of his moments of
expansiveness, as they walked together one evening down the Strand,
“there are only two rules to remember for this life, whatever there may
be for the next. The first is to know what you want; the second is to
see that you get it.”
“Have you yet discovered that which is necessary to yourself?” his
companion ventured to inquire.
“I have, my son,” said Mr. Dodson. “I have discovered that it is
necessary to myself to marry a little money. You see, my son, I have
come to an understanding with Chrissie. And between you and me and
the lamp-post, my son, I might go a deal farther and fare a good deal
worse. She knows her way about the earth, does Chrissie; she knows what
two and two make; she wasn’t born yesterday. She has an eye to the main
chance, has Chrissie; and that’s the wife for me. She has nearly a
hundred quid laid by, and her mother’s brother has a beer off-license
in the Borough. Literature is all right, Luney, and so is Art, and so
is Law, and so is the Army, and so is the Church, but give me Trade, my
son, vulgar and sordid Trade. I am about tired of Culture, my son; I am
about tired of the Office Manner. I was only thinking this afternoon
what I would pay down in hard cash to be able to cut the throat of
Octavius with a blunt razor a bit jagged at the edges.”
It was to be divined from the expression of this somewhat unchristian
desire, that even the eminent philosopher and man of the world from
whose lips it proceeded was approaching a crisis in his own mental
history. Yet it was hard to believe that one whose attitude towards
life was of a calm and all-seeing unconcern, could also be entering
upon his phase of _sturm und drang_.
Within a few days of being honoured by these confidences, William
Jordan, Junior, received a letter at 43 Milton Street, E.C. It
contained a piece of cardboard upon which was written, _Police-Sergeant
and Mrs. Dodson At Home, 21 February. 8 Gladstone Villas, Midlothian
Road, Peckham, S.E. Music and Progressive Games, 7.30. R.S.V.P._
This mysterious communication proved a source of great bewilderment
to its recipient, who for the first time during the twenty years that
comprised his terrestrial history, found himself approaching the magic
portals of social life. During the luncheon hour of the morning after
the arrival of this mandate, Mr. James Dodson, who had anticipated his
perplexity, was fain to enlighten it.
“You’ve got to turn up, you know,” said that gentleman. “We are having
a party of sorts to introduce Chrissie to a few old pals. You’ve got
to turn up, my son; we can’t do without you. It won’t be large, but it
will be select. There will be you and me and Joe Cox, who plays for
Surrey Second Eleven; and we are expecting John Dobbs, who plays the
third fiddle in the orchestra at the Alcazar Theatre--that is if he
can get a night off; if not, he will come on after the show--and then
there will be Chrissie, and her cousin Hermione Leigh, who is a stunner
and no mistake. She is engaged for the new ballet at the Alcazar. Then
there will be one or two quiet unassuming people who don’t much matter.
It doesn’t do, my son, to have a party that is all celebrities, any
more than it does to have a pudding that is all plums. I have half a
mind to ask young Davis, just to show that I bear him no ill-will for
being so tricky--his manner is a good deal above the average, and he’s
a bit of a vocalist--but he knows it, like the cocky young swine that
he is, and there’s no saying that he mightn’t get uppish and put on
side with the pater and mater. No, Luney, I don’t think it would be
safe to risk it. Oh, and then there will be my old Aunt Tabitha, my
guv’nor’s sister. The old girl is a corker, and no mistake. She was
lady’s-maid for years to the Dowager Lady Brigintop. She’s seen a bit
of life, I can tell you. It will make your hair curl to hear what she
has got to say about the British Aristocracy. I tell you, Luney, this
is going to be no mean affair. Evening clothes, of course.”
The enumeration of the ingredients which were to make up the evening
party to which William Jordan, Junior, had been bidden, and from whom
no refusal would be taken, filled him with consternation, surprise,
and dismay. Such an undertaking was so far outside his _milieu_, that
for the time being, a journey to the moon or a distant planet seemed a
light thing by comparison.
Yet at first, he had not the courage to damp the ardour of his friend,
Mr. Dodson, by explicitly stating that he had no wish to be present.
That innate courtesy, which the rebuffs to which he was subjected
hourly in the stern school of experience, did nothing to lessen, nor
a steadily ripening judgment to minimize, forbade the unhappy young
man from exposing his craven’s fears to his mentor. All the same, the
problem of how to escape from so dread an ordeal without wounding the
feelings of his friend, was never absent from his thoughts.
“I--I am afraid, Jimmy,” he plucked up the courage to confess on the
evening of the following day, “I--I cannot come to your p-p-party.”
“You have got to come to my p-p-party, my son,” said Jimmy Dodson, with
an amused absence of compromise. “I can take no refusal.”
“Oh, n-n-n-no!” said the young man in blank despair.
“Oh, y-y-y-yes! you old lunatic,” said his mentor indulgently. “They
all know you are coming, and you don’t know how keen they are to meet
you. When I told Joe Cox you could speak Greek like a native, you
should have seen his face.”
“Oh, b-b-but,” said the young man desperately, “I--I--I am not what you
call--I--I am not what you call ‘up’ in these things!”
“Up, be blowed!” said Mr. Dodson. “You have got to develop your social
instinct a bit. You old lunatic, what have you got to be so serious
about? Haven’t you ever been to a party before?”
“Oh, n-n-no,” said William Jordan, Junior, with a scared face.
“Then it is time you broke the ice,” said his mentor sternly. “Every
chap has got to go out into society. You can’t get on in the world
without you do.”
“Oh, n-n-n-no,” protested the young man feebly.
“It will be good for you, my son,” said his inexorable mentor; “do you
a power of good. You want bringing out badly. You are a regular D’Orsay
to what you were; when I knew you first, I never met your equal for
greenness. Of course you are not very bright now; but if you only form
the habit of going out into society a bit, you are quite likely to walk
away from one or two of the more fancied performers who are making the
running at present. The other day when I told young Davis that you
could speak Greek like a native, he as good as called me a liar. I’ll
tell you what it is, my son; if only you could be got to think a bit
more of yourself; if only you would cultivate the habit of putting on a
reasonable amount of side; if only you would pull up your socks a bit,
you might easily, in your small way, make a bit of a mark. Of course
you will never be Number One in anything; you will never see your name
in large type; you’ll never be a James Dodson, my son, if you live to
be as old as Methuselah, for the very good reason that you haven’t got
it in you. But my advice to you is, form the habit of going out into
society and see what it will do for you. I’ll guarantee that in one
year your old aunt at Hither Green won’t know her own nephew.”
William Jordan, Junior, however, was not to be shorn of his terrors by
words so suave as these. Yet Mr. James Dodson had quite made up his
mind that the party to be given in honour of his _fiancée_ should not
be baulked of its chief lion, whose surprising attainment in a dead
language Mr. Dodson had published abroad to an equally surprising
extent.
However, as the young man continued to persist in his unreasonable
attempts to evade his responsibilities, a ray of meaning suddenly
suffused the already sufficiently bright intelligence of Mr. James
Dodson.
“Of course, my son, I see, I see!” he exclaimed; “if you have never
been to a party before, you are wondering about your kit. I think I
know you well enough by now, old boy, to ask whether you have got an
evening suit?”
Mr. Jordan was fain to confess that although he was not thinking about
an evening suit--whatever such an article of attire might be--he did
not think he had got an evening suit.
“Own up, if you haven’t,” said Mr. Dodson. “It is nothing to be ashamed
of. Some chaps might think so, but I am not the least bit snobbish
myself. Own up and I shall not think the worse of you.”
Upon this encouraging assurance the young man inquired if there was
any substantial difference between an evening suit and an ordinary
night-gown in which one went to bed.
When in all good faith the young man sought this information, he
and his mentor chanced to be passing the brightly-illumined window
of a Fleet Street tailor. Mr. James Dodson stopped abruptly. With
great earnestness he peered into his companion’s wan and troubled
countenance. For the first time in their intercourse the _bona fides_
of William Jordan, Junior, were seriously called in question.
“If I thought you were trying it on with me, Luney, my son,” said Mr.
Dodson, with that truculence which he always seemed to hold in reserve
for instant use; “if I thought you were pulling my leg, I should hit
you as hard as I used to before I knew you spoke Greek. But no, Luney,”
Mr. Dodson added, with a sigh of relief, as he continued to peer into
that strange and pale countenance, “you haven’t got it about you to
try it on with _me_.”
In an admirably practical fashion Mr. James Dodson proceeded there and
then to demonstrate what an evening suit really was by pointing out
that article of attire as displayed on a dummy in the tailor’s window.
“There you are, my son, there it is, all complete with a white tie and
patent leather shoes,” he said, indicating this mirror of fashion and
mould of form.
William Jordan, Junior, confessed without shame or confusion that he
had neither an evening suit, nor a white tie, nor a pair of patent
leather shoes in his possession.
“If such is really the case,” said Mr. Dodson, “your up-bringing has
been disgracefully neglected. I don’t know what your people can have
been about; but it can be remedied. My young cousin Harry is about
your size, although he is a good deal fatter; I shall get him to lend
you his. Fortunately he has not been asked to the party; he is only a
junior clerk in the insurance, and I thought he could be kept until the
eleventh hour in case any of the swells dropped out. I expect he will
be only too proud to lend you his suit, although you will have to get a
couple of tucks put in the waistcoat and trousers.”
The next day, however, Mr. Dodson had to confess that as far as his
cousin Harry was concerned his expectations were disappointed.
“The confounded youth has arranged to go to a subscription ball on the
same night,” said Mr. Dodson, with an aggrieved air. “Like his cheek
when he knew that I was having a party. I don’t know what we shall do
now, my son. We might have tried young Davis, only unfortunately in a
weak moment I have asked him to come to the party.”
After a brief period of contemplation, in which Mr. Dodson thoughtfully
reviewed the situation from every point of view, he said, “I am afraid,
my son, there is only one thing to be done. You will have to get an
evening suit of your own. It will be money well invested if you take to
going out into society a great deal.”
That evening Mr. William Jordan received an introduction to the
gentleman who had the felicity of providing Mr. Dodson with his own
immaculate outfit.
“Something neat, you know, Mr. Mosenthal, but not gaudy,” said Mr.
Dodson, as this artist approached his subject in his shirt sleeves,
with a piece of chalk in his mouth and a tape measure in his long
slender fingers. “You have got a difficult subject, Mr. Mosenthal,
but with a bit of tact I expect you will be able to turn him out a
gentleman.”
Mr. Mosenthal assured Mr. Dodson very earnestly that he had not the
least doubt on that score. Armed with this assurance Mr. Dodson
accompanied William Jordan into the shop of the haberdasher next door
for the purpose of buying him a white evening tie.
“If you were left to yourself, my son, I would bet a penny,” said Mr.
Dodson, “that you would buy one of those ties that are tied already;
and if you did, my son, I don’t mind telling you that socially you
would do for yourself at once.”
Having by the exercise of this highly commendable foresight delivered
William Jordan, Junior, from the toils of this imminent and deadly
peril, Mr. Dodson fortified this social neophyte with further sound
advice in regard to his deportment on the devious and narrow path he
was about to tread, and finally committed him to the care of his green
’bus in Ludgate Circus.
“It is a dangerous experiment,” mused Mr. Dodson, as the ’bus was lost
amid the traffic; “but that young fellow wants bringing out badly. It
will do him no end of good. But how it comes about that he can read
Greek like a native beats me entirely.”
As the fateful twenty-first of February drew near, William Jordan’s
agitation became so great that he would lie sleepless at night, imaging
the ordeal that lay before him in the multiform shapes of a nightmare.
During the last few months he had gained so much knowledge and hard-won
experience that he was no longer so susceptible to the terrors which
had seemed to render his childhood one long and intricate tissue of
horrors. He had begun to understand that the hordes of “street-persons”
were his fellow creatures. He had gained an insight into their ways,
their speech, and even to some extent into their modes of thought.
Such knowledge had rendered an incomparable service to his sense of
security. He was even gaining a measure of self-confidence. He could
even frame whole sentences of their language on the spur of the moment,
and utter them in such a fashion that they were intelligible to those
with whom he had to consort.
Yet his anticipation that he would be cast among a number of strange
people in a strange place, all of whom would be engaged upon a
business in which he also would have to engage without in the least
comprehending its nature, re-summoned a good deal of his former state
of mind. It was clear from his friend’s attitude towards it, that “a
party” was an affair of some peculiar and special significance. He
divined from his friend’s manner that this was something far removed
from the routine of tying brown-paper parcels with double knots of
string, pasting labels upon them, and dabbing them with splotches
of coloured wax. No, the duties that would be exacted of him were
evidently far other than these, in which he felt he had already
attained to some measure of proficiency.
It was not until the eve of the dread ordeal, when the tailor delivered
his mysterious parcel to 43, Milton Street, E.C., that he took the
white-haired man, his father, into his confidence. Then it was that,
worn out with a distress that he knew to be contemptible, he asked that
guide and comforter to whom he was wont to repair in all emergencies,
whose wisdom was never at fault, whether he could escape from his
ordeal with his own honour inviolate and without giving pain to one
among the street-persons to whom he owed a debt of gratitude, and
towards whom he already felt himself to be linked in a curious bond of
affection.
The white-haired man, his father, did not repress a faint smile, which,
however, was melancholy.
“Thou wilt cease to be Achilles, beloved one,” said his father, “unless
trial is constantly made of thy quality. Thou canst retain thy nobility
only at the point of the sword. Wert thou not Achilles I would say to
thee, shun all such ordeals as these. Being Achilles I would say to
thee, follow in the steps of thy guide wheresoever they may lead thee
through the many and devious purlieus of the out-of-doors world.”
“Thy wisdom sustains me, my father,” said the young man. “It searches
my veins and exorcises the coldness of my faint spirit almost like
the living breath of the great book itself. I would beseech thee, my
father, to reveal to me a passage that is proper to my pass.”
The young man took down the mighty tome from the shelf, and the aged
man his father opened it at a page worn thin by the intercourse of many
generations. After the young man had perused it in deep silence for a
little while, he knelt for many hours with his scarred forehead bent
upon the faded vellum.