'you're making the biggest mistake you ever made in your life. See?
Now you listen to me, Marth----'
"'You shut up!' said my brother. 'Mother's _my_ business first and
foremost.'
"'_Shut up!_' echoed my uncle. 'Wot manners! At a funeral. From a
chap not a third my age, a mere 'azardous empty boy. _Shut_ up! You
shut up yourself, my boy, and listen to those who know a bit more
about life than you do. I've smacked your 'ed before to-day. Not
once or twice either. And I warmed your 'ide when you stole them
peaches--and much good it did you! I oughter've took yer skin off!
You and me 'ave never got on much, and unless you keep a civil tongue
in your head we ain't going to get on now.'
"'Seeing which,' said brother Ernest with a dangerous calmness, 'the
sooner you make yourself scarce the better for all concerned.'
"'Not to leave my on'y sister's affairs in the 'ands of a cub like
you.'
"Again my mother essayed to speak, but the angry voices disregarded
her.
"'I tell you you're going to get out, and if you can't get out of
your own discretion I warn you I'll 'ave to 'elp you.'
"'Not when you're in mourning,' said my mother. 'Not wearing your
mourning. And besides----'
"But they were both too heated now to attend to her.
"'You're pretty big with your talk,' said my uncle, 'but don't you
preshume too far on my forbearance. I've 'ad about enough of this.'
"'So've I,' said my brother Ernest and stood up.
"My uncle stood up too and they glared at one another.
"'That's the door,' said my brother darkly.
"My uncle walked back to his wonted place on the hearthrug. 'Now
don't let's 'ave any quarrelling on a day like this,' he said. 'If
you 'aven't any consideration for your mother you might at least
think of 'im who has passed beyond. My objec' 'ere is simply to try
n'range things so's be best for all. And what I say is this, the
ideer of your mother going into a lodging-'ouse alone, without a
man's 'elp, is ridiculous, perfectly ridiculous, and only a
first-class inconsiderate young fool----'
"My brother Ernest went and stood close to my uncle. 'You've said
enough,' he remarked. 'This affair's between me and my mother and
your motto is Get Out. See?'
"Again my mother had something to say and again she was silenced.
"'This is man's work, mother,' said Ernest. 'Are you going to shift
it, uncle?'
"My uncle faced up to this threat of Ernest. 'I've a juty to my
sister----'
"And then I regret to say my brother laid hands on him. He took him
by the collar and by the wrist and for a moment the two black-clad
figures swayed.
"'Lea' go my coat,' said my uncle. 'Lea' go my coat collar.'
"But a thirst for violence had taken possession of Ernest. My mother
and Prue and I stood aghast.
"'Ernie!' cried my mother, 'You forget yourself!'
"'Sall _right_, mother,' said Ernie, and whirled my uncle violently
from the hearthrug to the bottom of the staircase. Then he shifted
his grip from my uncle's wrist to the seat of his tight black
trousers and partly lifted and partly impelled him up the staircase.
My uncle's arms waved wildly as if he clutched at his lost dignity.
"'John!' cried my mother. ''Ere's your 'at!'
"I had a glimpse of my uncle's eye as he vanished up the staircase.
He seemed to be looking for his hat. But he was now offering no
serious opposition to my brother Ernest's handling of him.
"'Give it 'im, 'Arry,' said my mother. 'And there's 'is gloves too.'
"I took the black hat and the black gloves and followed the struggle
upstairs. Astonished and unresisting, my uncle was propelled through
the front door into the street and stood there panting and regarding
my brother. His collar was torn from its stud and his black tie
disarranged. Ernest was breathing heavily. 'Now you be orf and mind
your own business,' said Ernie.
"Ernie turned with a start as I pushed past him. ''Ere's your 'at
and gloves, uncle,' I said, handing them to him. He took them
mechanically, his eyes still fixed on Ernest.
"'And you're the boy I trained to be 'onest,' said my uncle to my
brother Ernest, very bitterly. 'Leastways I tried to. You're the
young worm I fattened up at my gardens and showed such kindness to!
_Gratitood!_'
"He regarded the hat in his hand for a moment as though it was some
strange object, and then by a happy inspiration put it on his head.
"'God 'elp your poor mother,' said my Uncle John Julip. 'God 'elp
'er.'
"He had nothing more to say. He looked up the street and down and
then turned as by a sort of necessity in the direction of the
_Wellington_ public-house. And in this manner was my Uncle John
Julip on the day of my father's funeral cast forth into the streets
of Cherry Gardens, a prospective widower and a most pathetic and
unhappy little man. That dingy little black figure in retreat still
haunts my memory. Even from the back he looked amazed. Never did a
man who has not been kicked look so like a man who has been. I never
saw him again. I have no doubt that he carried his sorrows down to
the _Wellington_ and got himself thoroughly drunk, and I have as
little doubt that he missed my father dreadfully all the time he was
doing so.
"My brother Ernest returned thoughtfully to the kitchen. He was
already a little abashed at his own violence. I followed him
respectfully.
"'You didn't ought t'ave done that,' said my mother.
'What right 'as 'e to plant 'imself on you to be kept and waited on?'
''E wouldn't 'ave planted 'imself on me,' my mother replied. 'You
get 'eated, Ernie, same as you used to do, and you won't listen to
anything.'
"'I never did fancy uncle,' said Ernie.
"'When you get 'eated, Ernie, you seem to forget everything,' said my
mother. 'You might've remembered 'e was my brother.'
"'Fine brother!' said Ernie. 'Why!--who started all that stealing?
Who led poor father to drink and bet?'
"'All the same,' said my mother, 'you 'adn't no right to 'andle 'im
as you did. And your poor father 'ardly cold in 'is grave!' She
wept. She produced a black-bordered handkerchief and mopped her
eyes. 'I did 'ope your poor father would 'ave a nice funeral--all
the trouble and expense--and now you've spoilt it. I'll never be
able to look back on this day with pleasure, not if I live to be a
'undred years. I'll always remember 'ow you spoilt your own father's
funeral--turning on your uncle like this.'
"Ernest had no answer for her reproaches. 'He shouldn't 've argued
and said what he did,' he objected.
"'And all so unnecessary! All along I've been trying to tell you you
needn't worry about me. I don't want no lodging-'ouse in
Cliffstone--_with_ your uncle or _without_ your uncle. I wrote to
Matilda Good a week come Tuesday and settled everything with
'er--everything. It's settled.'
"'What d'you mean?' asked Ernest.
"'Why, that 'ouse of hers in Pimlico. She's been wanting trusty 'elp
for a long time, what with her varicose veins up and downstairs and
one thing 'nother, and directly she got my letter about your poor
dear father she wrote orf to me. "You need never want a 'ome," she
says, "so long as I got a lodger. You and Prue are welcome," she
says, "welcome 'elp, and the boy can easy find work up 'ere--much
easier than 'e can in Cliffstone." All the time you was planning
lodging-'ouses and things for me I was trying to tell you----
"'You mean it's settled?'
"'It's settled.'
"'And what you going to do with your bits of furniture 'ere?'
"'Sell some and take some....'
"'It's feasible,' said Ernest after reflection.
"'And so we needn't reely 'ave 'ad that--bit of a' argument?' said
Ernest after a pause. 'Not me and uncle?'
"'Not on my account you needn't,' said my mother.
"'Well--we 'ad it,' said Ernest after another pause and without any
visible signs of regret."
§ 3
"If my dream was a dream," said Sarnac, "it was a most circumstantial
dream. I could tell you a hundred details of our journey to London
and how we disposed of the poor belongings that had furnished our
home in Cherry Gardens. Every detail would expose some odd and
illuminating difference between the ideas of those ancient days and
our own ideas. Brother Ernest was helpful, masterful and irascible.
He got a week's holiday from his employer to help mother to settle up
things, and among other things that were settled up I believe my
mother persuaded him and my uncle to 'shake hands,' but I do not know
the particulars of that great scene, I did not see it, it was merely
mentioned in my hearing during the train journey to London. I would
like to tell you also of the man who came round to buy most of our
furniture, including that red and black sofa I described to you, and
how he and my brother had a loud and heated argument about some
damage to one of its legs, and how Mr. Crosby produced a bill, that
my mother understood he had forgiven us on account of Fanny long ago.
There was also some point about something called 'tenant's fixtures'
that led my brother and the landlord, Mr. Bulstrode, to the verge of
violence. And Mr. Bulstrode, the landlord, brought accusations of
damage done to the fabric of his house that were false, and he made
extravagant claims for compensation based thereon and had to be
rebutted with warmth. There was also trouble over carting a parcel
of our goods to the railway station, and when we got to the terminus
of Victoria in London it was necessary, I gathered, that Ernest
should offer to fight a railway porter--you have read of railway
porters?--before we received proper attention.
"But I cannot tell you all these curious and typical incidents now
because at that rate I should never finish my story before our
holidays are over. I must go on now to tell you of this London, this
great city, the greatest city it was in the world in those days, to
which we had transferred our fates. All the rest of my story, except
for nearly two years and a half I spent in the training camp and in
France and Germany during the First World War, is set in the scenery
of London. You know already what a vast congestion of human beings
London was; you know that within a radius of fifteen miles a
population of seven and a half million people were gathered together,
people born out of due time into a world unready for them and born
mostly through the sheer ignorance of their procreators, gathered
together into an area of not very attractive clay country by an
urgent need to earn a living, and you know the terrible fate that at
last overwhelmed this sinfully crowded accumulation; you have read of
west-end and slums, and you have seen the cinema pictures of those
days showing crowded streets, crowds gaping at this queer ceremony or
that, a vast traffic of clumsy automobiles and distressed horses in
narrow unsuitable streets, and I suppose your general impression is a
nightmare of multitudes, a suffocating realisation of jostling
discomfort and uncleanness and of an unendurable strain on eye and
ear and attention. The history we learn in our childhood enforces
that lesson.
"But though the facts are just as we are taught they were, I do not
recall anything like the distress at London you would suppose me to
have felt, and I do remember vividly the sense of adventure, the
intellectual excitement and the discovery of beauty I experienced in
going there. You must remember that in this strange dream of mine I
had forgotten all our present standards; I accepted squalor and
confusion as being in the nature of things, and the aspects of this
city's greatness, the wonder of this limitless place and a certain
changing and evanescent beauty, rise out of a sea of struggle and
limitation as forgetfully as a silver birch rises out of the swamp
that bears it.
"The part of London in which we took up our abode was called Pimlico.
It bordered upon the river, and once there had been a wharf there to
which ships came across the Atlantic from America. This word Pimlico
had come with other trade in these ships; in my time it was the last
word left alive of the language of the Algonquin Red Indians, who had
otherwise altogether vanished from the earth. The Pimlico wharf had
gone, the American trade was forgotten, and Pimlico was now a great
wilderness of streets of dingy grey houses in which people lived and
let lodgings. These houses had never been designed for the
occupation of lodgers; they were faced with a lime-plaster called
stucco which made a sort of pretence of being stone; each one had a
sunken underground floor originally intended for servants, a door
with a portico and several floors above which were reached by a
staircase. Beside each portico was a railed pit that admitted light
to the front underground room. As you walked along these Pimlico
streets these porticos receded in long perspectives and each portico
of that endless series represented ten or a dozen misdirected,
incomplete and rather unclean inhabitants, infected mentally and
morally. Over the grey and dingy architecture rested a mist or a
fog, rarely was there a precious outbreak of sunlight; here and there
down the vista a grocer's boy or a greengrocer's boy or a fish hawker
would be handing in food over the railings to the subterranean
members of a household, or a cat (there was a multitude of cats)
would be peeping out of the railings alert for the danger of a
passing dog. There would be a few pedestrians, a passing cab or so,
and perhaps in the morning a dust-cart collecting refuse filth--set
out for the winds to play with in boxes and tin receptacles at the
pavement edge--or a man in a uniform cleaning the streets with a
hose. It seems to you that it must have been the most depressing of
spectacles. It wasn't, though I doubt if I can make clear to you
that it wasn't. I know I went about Pimlico thinking it rather a
fine place and endlessly interesting. I assure you that in the early
morning and by my poor standards it had a sort of grey spaciousness
and dignity. But afterwards I found the thing far better done, that
London architectural aquatint, in Belgravia and round about Regent's
Park.
"I must admit that I tended to drift out of those roads and squares
of lodging-houses either into the streets where there were shops and
street-cars or southward to the Embankment along the Thames. It was
the shops and glares that drew me first as the lights began to fail
and, strange as it may seem to you, my memories of such times are
rich with beauty. We feeble children of that swarming age had, I
think, an almost morbid gregariousness; we found a subtle pleasure
and reassurance in crowds and a real disagreeableness in being alone;
and my impressions of London's strange interest and charm are, I
confess, very often crowded impressions of a kind this world no
longer produces, or impressions to which a crowded foreground or
background was essential. But they were beautiful.
"For example there was a great railway station, a terminus, within
perhaps half a mile of us. There was a great disorderly yard in
front of the station in which hackney automobiles and omnibuses
assembled and departed and arrived. In the late twilight of an
autumn day this yard was a mass of shifting black shadows and gleams
and lamps, across which streamed an incessant succession of bobbing
black heads, people on foot hurrying to catch the trains: as they
flitted by the lights one saw their faces gleam and vanish again.
Above this foreground rose the huge brown-grey shapes of the station
buildings and the façade of a big hotel, reflecting the flares below
and pierced here and there by a lit window; then very sharply came
the sky-line and a sky still blue and luminous, tranquil and aloof.
And the innumerable sounds of people and vehicles wove into a deep,
wonderful and continually varying drone. Even to my boyish mind
there was an irrational conviction of unity and purpose in this
spectacle.
"The streets where there were shops were also very wonderful and
lovely to me directly the too-lucid and expository daylight began to
fade. The variously coloured lights in the shop-windows which
displayed a great diversity of goods for sale splashed the most
extraordinary reflections upon the pavements and roadway, and these
were particularly gem-like if there had been rain or a mist to wet
the reflecting surfaces. One of these streets--it was called Lupus
Street, though why it had the name of an abominable skin disease that
has long since vanished from the earth I cannot imagine--was close to
our new home and I still remember it as full of romantic
effectiveness. By daylight it was an exceedingly sordid street, and
late at night empty and echoing, but in the magic hours of London it
was a bed of black and luminous flowers, the abounding people became
black imps and through it wallowed the great shining omnibuses, the
ships of the street, filled with light and reflecting lights.
"There were endless beauties along the river bank. The river was a
tidal one held in control by a stone embankment, and the roadway
along the embankment was planted at the footway edge with plane trees
and lit by large electric lights on tall standards. These planes
were among the few trees that could flourish in the murky London air,
but they were unsuitable trees to have in a crowded city because they
gave off minute specules that irritated people's throats. That,
however, I did not know; what I did know was that the shadows of the
leaves on the pavements thrown by the electric glares made the most
beautiful patternings I had ever seen. I would walk along on a warm
night rejoicing in them, more particularly if now and then a light
breeze set them dancing and quivering.
"One could walk from Pimlico along this Thames Embankment for some
miles towards the east. One passed little black jetties with
dangling oil lamps; there was a traffic of barges and steamers on the
river altogether mysterious and romantic to me; the frontages of the
houses varied incessantly, and ever and again were cleft by crowded
roadways that brought a shining and twinkling traffic up to the
bridges. Across the river was a coming and going of trains along a
railway viaduct; it contributed a restless _motif_ of clanks and
concussion to the general drone of London, and the engines sent puffs
of firelit steam and sudden furnace-glows into the night. One came
along this Embankment to the great buildings at Westminster, by
daylight a pile of imitation Gothic dominated by a tall clock-tower
with an illuminated dial, a pile which assumed a blue dignity with
the twilight and became a noble portent standing at attention, a
forest of spears, in the night. This was the Parliament House, and
in its chambers a formal King, an ignoble nobility and a fraudulently
elected gathering of lawyers, financiers and adventurers took upon
themselves, amidst the general mental obscurity of those days, a
semblance of wisdom and empire. As one went on beyond Westminster
along the Embankment came great grey-brown palaces and houses set
behind green gardens, a railway bridge and then two huge hotels,
standing high and far back, bulging with lit windows; there was some
sort of pit or waste beneath them, I forget what, very black, so that
at once they loomed over one and seemed magically remote. There was
an Egyptian obelisk here, for all the European capitals of my time,
being as honest as magpies and as original as monkeys, had adorned
themselves with obelisks stolen from Egypt. And farther along was
the best and noblest building in London, St. Paul's Cathedral; it was
invisible by night, but it was exceedingly serene and beautiful on a
clear, blue, windy day. And some of the bridges were very lovely
with gracious arches of smutty grey stone, though some were so clumsy
that only night could redeem them.
"As I talk I remember," said Sarnac. "Before employment robbed me of
my days I pushed my boyish explorations far and wide, wandering all
day and often going without any meal, or, if I was in pocket, getting
a bun and a glass of milk in some small shop for a couple of pennies.
The shop-windows of London were an unending marvel to me; and they
would be to you too if you could remember them as I do; there must
have been hundreds of miles of them, possibly thousands of miles. In
the poorer parts they were chiefly food-shops and cheap clothing
shops and the like, and one could exhaust their interest, but there
were thoroughfares like Regent Street and Piccadilly and narrow Bond
Street and Oxford Street crammed with all the furnishings of the life
of the lucky minority, the people who could spend freely. You will
find it difficult to imagine how important a matter the mere buying
of things was in the lives of those people. In their houses there
was a vast congestion of objects neither ornamental nor useful;
purchases in fact; and the women spent large portions of every
week-day in buying things, clothes, table-litter, floor-litter,
wall-litter. They had no work; they were too ignorant to be
interested in any real thing; they had nothing else to do. That was
the world's reward, the substance of success--purchases. Through
them you realised your well-being. As a shabby half-grown boy I
pushed my way among these spenders, crowds of women dressed, wrapped
up rather, in layer after layer of purchases, scented, painted. Most
of them were painted to suggest a health-flushed face, the nose
powdered a leprous white.
"There is one thing to be said for the old fashion of abundant
clothing; in that crowded jostling world it saved people from
actually touching each other.
"I would push through these streets eastward to less prosperous
crowds in Oxford Street and to a different multitude in Holborn. As
you went eastward the influence of women diminished and that of young
men increased. Cheapside gave you all the material for building up a
twentieth-century young man from the nude. In the shop-windows he
was disarticulated and priced: hat five and sixpence, trousers
eighteen shillings, tie one and six; cigarettes tenpence an ounce;
newspaper a half-penny, cheap novel sevenpence; on the pavement
outside there he was put together and complete and the cigarette
burning, under the impression that he was a unique immortal creature
and that the ideas in his head were altogether his own. And beyond
Cheapside there was Clerkenwell with curious little shops that sold
scarcely anything but old keys or the parts of broken-up watches or
the like detached objects. Then there were great food markets at
Leadenhall Street and Smithfield and Covent Garden, incredible
accumulations of raw stuff. At Covent Garden they sold fruits and
flowers that we should think poor and undeveloped, but which everyone
in those days regarded as beautiful and delicious. And in Caledonian
Market were innumerable barrows where people actually bought and took
away every sort of broken and second-hand rubbish, broken ornaments,
decaying books with torn pages, second-hand clothing--a wonderland of
litter for any boy with curiosity in his blood....
"But I could go on talking endlessly about this old London of mine
and you want me to get on with my story. I have tried to give you
something of its endless, incessant, multitudinous glittering quality
and the way in which it yielded a thousand strange and lovely effects
to its changing lights and atmosphere. I found even its fogs, those
dreaded fogs of which the books tell, romantic. But then I was a boy
at the adventurous age. The fog was often very thick in Pimlico. It
was normally a soft creamy obscurity that turned even lights close at
hand into luminous blurs. People came out of nothingness within six
yards of you, were riddles and silhouettes before they became real.
One could go out and lose oneself within ten minutes of home and
perhaps pick up with a distressed automobile driver and walk by his
headlights, signalling to him where the pavement ended. That was one
sort of fog, the dry fog. But there were many sorts. There was a
sort of yellow darkness, like blackened bronze, that hovered about
you and did not embrace you and left a clear nearer world of deep
browns and blacks. And there was an unclean wet mist that presently
turned to drizzle and made every surface a mirror."
"And there was daylight," said Willow, "sometimes surely there was
daylight."