On a chill spring evening the sunset over London gave a brief radiance
of colour to the dull gray roof and smoke-stained chimneys of many
thoroughfares. Shadows thickened in the eastern skies as if fold after
fold of finest crape were drawn over the field of watery and opalescent
light the fallen sun had left behind it. In one great thoroughfare
running east and west the sky-line of the houses stood distinct, and
bathed in light of many colours; whilst down below there was a wall of
shadow. Two parallel walls of shadow rose from a shadowy level, and the
dusk had a thousand indistinguishable voices.
The shadowy lines became accented by twin rows of flickering fire, the
rear jets seen with a blurred halo of mist round each of them, the halo
crawling feebly within itself, tormented by a feeble wind. The long
vista of pavement became chequered like a chessboard, with patches of
light from shop windows. Gable Inn, staring at the growing darkness with
a single fiery eye, looked like a Rip Van Winkle. It had been old when
Chaucer and the knights and ladies of whom he sang were young; and
its hoary stunted angles and squat chimney cowls had the grave and
impassive aspect proper to great age. It has stood there now for over
seven hundred years hoarding a growing store of secrets. It is roughly
picturesque in every detail, and its every chamber is a triumph of
narrowness, obscurity, and inconvenience.
In the quadrangle the shadows climbed the sturdy walls as if they were
an exhalation from the paving-stones. The dim staircase sent down all
manner of muffled and echoing voices. Footsteps sounded, and the clang
of doors, and the shriek of unwilling keys in rusty locks, and
the hurrying traffic of the street without, softened by the moist
atmosphere, was like the fading echo of following feet upon the stairs.
Lights sprang up in the basement windows, telling of protractive legal
labours. Lights twinkled in the garrets, telling of lonely study or
noisy conviviality in the coming hours of darkness. At length one side
of the quadrangle viewed by a solitary watcher from a third-floor window
of the opposing side, winked with a hundred windows through the wet air
and deepening shadow like a blear-eyed Argus.
This watcher, lounging at his own window, was Mr. Philip Bommaney,
recently self-entitled the ‘Solitary of Gable Inn.’ He was
eight-and-twenty years of age or thereabouts, a broad-shouldered,
deep-chested, manly-looking fellow, with curling brown hair, and a face
expressive of pugnacity, good-humour, and many capacities. He was a
little weary now, after a long day of satisfactory work. He watched the
mounting shadows, and listened to the weird gamut of the wind among
the telegraph lines, until the outer voices made his own dull room seem
homely. One ruddy tongue of flame from the expiring fire in the
grate played on the narrow walls and low ceiling, and woke twinkling
reflections in the spare and battered furniture. A man’s dwelling-place
is always an index to his character when its arrangement depends upon
himself; and signs of Philip Bommaney’s nature and pursuits were visible
in plenty here. There were symmetrical rows of books on the shelves
flanking the fire-place. An orderly stack of newspapers occupied one
corner of the room, and a set of boxing-gloves lay on top of the pile,
and a pair of dumb-bells beside it. A shaded reading-lamp stood upon the
table in the midst of a great litter of papers. The barrels of a huge
elephant gun flashed dimly from the wall as the firelight played upon
them, and two or three lighter weapons were ranged together lower down.
He turned from the window and lit the lamp, and, wheeling round, held
up the light to a photograph, and studied it with a pleased face. It was
the portrait of a pretty girl, very sweetly grave, and looking as if it
could be very sweetly vivacious. When he had looked at it for a longish
time he nodded and smiled, as if the pictured lips had actually spoken
to him. There was a tumbler standing beside the photograph with a bunch
of hothouse flowers in it, the one bright spot of colour in the dingy
chamber. He took this in his disengaged hand, and nodding and smiling
anew at the pretty girl’s portrait, he turned about again, and walked
into a bedroom beyond a narrow and inconvenient little window. The
strident voice of the clock over the entrance of the old Hall, answered
or anticipated from multitudinous spires in the City far and near,
sounded as Philip entered his bedroom. He stood and listened, counting
six jarring strokes. The bedroom was a microscopic apartment, with as
many corners in it as any room of its size in London, and the bed itself
was a perfect triumph of littleness, so tucked under the sloping roof,
and so surrounded by projecting corners, as to make the entry to it or
the exit from it a gymnastic performance of considerable merit. The room
was not over-light at the best of times, the fourth part of the space
of one small window in the sloping wall was filled by its own heavy
framework, and for half its height it was shielded by a parapet, which
had at least its uses in hiding the occupant of the room from the
too-curious observation of those who dwelt in the upper stories of the
houses opposite. These houses opposite, compared with Gable Inn, are
of a mushroom modernness, and yet are old enough (having begun with
a debauched and sickly constitution) to have fallen into an almost
complete decrepitude. Their stately neighbour seems to be less grimy
with the London smoke than they are, has always been less susceptible to
outside evil influences, even of that unescapable sort, and drives them
to an added shabbiness of senility by contrast with its own hale old
age. The bedroom window was already open for the admission of such fresh
air as, disguised in London blacks, the exhalations of moist spring
pavements, and the reeking odours of the cuisine of Fleeter’s Rents,
might choose to wander thither. Philip, with the lamp in one hand and
the tumbler of flowers in the other, put out his head and looked into
the squalid depths below him, and having gazed there a while absently
and with no object, drew back with a vague touch of pity upon him for
the people who dwelt in so much squalor so near to healthy effort and
reasonable competence. He could hardly have told as much, perhaps, but
one pallid countenance, shining very dimly at an open window, was very
much answerable for that vague touch of pity. The face in the darkness
started away from the window as he looked at it, as if his own
robust health and the light that dwelt about him startled its pinched
shabbiness into solitude. He set the tumbler of flowers upon the
window-ledge, and closing the window, made his toilet and returned to
the sitting-room. Then, having banked up the fire, and set the matches
in such a position that he could easily find them, he blew out the lamp,
left his chambers, and ran down the tortuous stairs. As he turned the
last corner a door clanged noisily, and the next thing of which he was
conscious was that he was struggling in the embrace of a stranger whom
he had doubled up in an angle of the wall.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he said gaspingly; ‘I stumbled.’
‘You did,’ responded the stranger, gasping also. ‘Rather heavily. It was
lucky you had something soft to fall on.’
Philip began to make apologies. The stranger, breathless still, but
jovially polite, begged him not to mention it. He was a tallish
young man, broad set, and a little too fleshy for his years. He had a
cleanshaven face, healthily pallid, the whitest of teeth, and a most
frank, engaging, and contagious smile.
‘Pray don’t say anything more about it,’ he said in answer to Philip’s
reiterated apologies. ‘You are not hurt, I hope?’
‘No, thanks; but I’m afraid you are.’
‘Not at all. It was sharp for a minute; but I am all right now. The
stairs are very inconvenient, especially to strangers.’
‘I haven’t even that excuse for my clumsiness, said Philip; ‘for I am
living here.’
‘Indeed; then we are neighbours, and should know each other. Rather an
informal kind of introduction, eh?’ The stranger said this with a mellow
laugh and a flash of his white teeth. He opened his overcoat as
he spoke, and produced a card-case, Philip catching the gleam of a
gold-studded shirt-front as he did so. ‘That’s my name, John Barter;
and these are my offices.’ The outer oak, cracked and blistered to the
likeness of an ancient tar-barrel, bore an inscription, dim with long
years--‘Fellowship, Freemantle, and Barter’--and the names were repeated
on the doorpost at the entrance.
‘I have no card,’ said Philip, accepting the stranger’s. ‘My name is
Bommaney--Philip Bom-maney;’ Mr. Barter’s smiling face was unchanged,
though he gave a slight but perceptible start at the name, and repeated
it.
‘Do you know it?’ asked Philip. To the ears of his companion there was
something of a challenge in the tone. ‘It is not a common name.’
‘No. Not a common name. I think I have heard it somewhere.’
They were under the archway by this time, in the brief shelter of which
the sanguine-faced, red-waist-coated lodge-keeper was taking his nightly
constitutional. They answered the touch of the hat with which he saluted
them.
‘Which is your way?’ asked Mr. Barter.
‘Westward,’ said Phil.
‘Mine is east,’ said Barter, ‘so we part here. We are bound to meet
again before long. Good-night.’
‘Good-night, and many thanks for taking my clumsiness in such good
part.’
Barter’s ready smile beamed out again. They shook hands before parting
like old acquaintances, and Philip walked on, through the incessant
noise of Holborn into quieter Bloomsbury Street, along the eastern side
of Bedford Square, where the bare trees were shivering in a bath of fog,
and into Gower Street. Half way down that hideous thoroughfare he came
upon a house, one of the few which still retain the old lamp-iron and
extinguisher before their doors, and knocking, was admitted by a trim
maid, with the smiling alacrity due to a frequent and favoured visitor,
and by her conducted to the drawing-room, where sat a young lady engaged
in a transparent pretence of being absorbed in a novel. The pretence
vanished as the door closed behind the handmaiden, and the young lady
jumped up and ran forward to meet him, with such a glad welcome in her
face as answered the appeal in his own. It does not need that we should
look at her with Philip’s eyes to pronounce her charmingly pretty, or
to admire the face, at once shy and frank, with which she nestled beside
him.
‘I thought you were never coming,’ she said.
‘Am I so late, then?’
‘It seemed so, and now you are come, tell me what you have been doing.’
‘Working, and thinking of you.’
‘You work too much, Phil.’ She did her best to ignore the second item
of his day’s occupation, but the deepened flush and her avoidance of her
lover’s eyes answered it more effectively than words could have done.
‘You are getting quite pale and thin. No wonder, sitting all alone all
day long in those musty old chambers.’
‘Well, you see, Patty, the more I work, the sooner I shall cease to be
all alone.’ The flush deepened again, and the hand trembled in his like
a caught bird. ‘And as for working too much, I don’t believe that’s
possible. Work never killed anybody yet, and idleness has killed a good
many. It’s better to work than sit still and wait for briefs which never
corns. There’s no sensation more delightful than that of looking at a
good day’s work, and thinking that every line and word has brought me
nearer to you.’
His tenderness conquered her shyness, and she nestled closer still,
looking up at him with a wholehearted admiration and affection. He felt
a little sad and unworthy under it, as almost any honest fellow would
have been sure to do, and yet it was wonderfully sweet to him, and more
than reward enough for any effort.
‘I wish I could help you, Phil. I wish I could do something for you,
when you have given up so much for me.’
‘Hush!’ he said, laying his hand lightly upon her lips. ‘We made up our
minds long ago that no more was to be said about that.’ He was tender
still--he could be nothing else with her--but there was a touch of
sternness in his manner, too--as if the theme pained him.
‘But I can’t help thinking of it. It was so noble of you, Phil.’
‘It was the only thing to be done--the only thing possible. It was----’
he paused for a second, and then went on resolutely--‘it was my father’s
act by which you suffered. I should have been a scoundrel if I had done
otherwise.’
‘And are you to do all? and am I to do nothing? It is selfish to keep
all the generosity to yourself.’
He laughed as if he found this female paradox a pleasant fancy, but she
was not to be put off so.
‘If the subject pains you, as I know it does, dear, please understand
why I speak of it I don’t want you to think I take your sacrifice as you
pretend to take it. It isn’t a matter of course, as you pretend it is;
and you may say what you like, Phil, but it isn’t a thing that everybody
would have done. Don’t grudge me my gratitude; you did it for the love
of me.’
‘I didn’t do it for the love of you,’ said Phil, laughing tenderly; ‘how
often am I to tell you that, you little mountain of obstinacy? I did it
because it was the right thing. I don’t say, mind you, that it wasn’t
easier to do it for you than it might have been for somebody I didn’t
know or care for; but that--as you will see quite clearly if you’ll
bring your naturally logical mind to bear upon it--makes the thing so
much the less creditable, provided there was any credit due to it at
all.’
The loving feminine scorn of this masculine process of reasoning was
expressed in a single glance, and was delightful to see.
‘It only means waiting a little longer before I claim you.’
The girl would fain have asked, ‘Why should you wait when I have enough
for both by your gift? What does it matter which of us it is who has the
money--you or I?’ But this question went unspoken, for obvious reasons.
A woman is tongue-tied by the countless conventionalities of education.
She must often let her thoughts lie silent in her heart, though she
burns to express them, and find what answer she can to questions she
dare not offer. Philip had repaired her loss by beggaring himself. That
was noble. But now he persisted in deferring their marriage, and had
buried himself in that lofty sarcophagus in Gable Inn, resolved only to
claim her, though she was all his own already, when he had reinstated
his fortunes by his labour. That was noble also, perhaps, but in her
own heart she thought it a trifle foolish--say Quixotic, not to be too
severe. She would rather have seen his ardour find a more commonplace
expression. She had a general sort of belief that whatever Philip did
was bound to be right, and yet this actual experience rather jarred with
that assumption.
They found other themes in a while, and talked of the future and the
happiness it would bring. That Philip was going to be rich and famous
was a prime article in Patty’s creed, and he himself, though he had
soberer hopes, was not likely to miss any chance of success which labour
might bring him. He was more than modest enough in his conception of his
own powers, and was often doubtful as to the fulfilment of the higher
ambitions which are the necessary fuel of all artistic fires. Without
those fires the chill of modesty will fall to the frost of cowardice,
and in Art cowardice means indolence. In his moments of exultation--and
these came generally at their strongest when he was in his sweetheart’s
society--success looked easy enough. The memory of her undoubted
belief in him came upon him often with a glow reflected from those
magnificently hopeful moments. But then at times of depression it grew
to look no more than a foolish unattainable dream. All young artists
have times when they are going to be great--when the glory proper to
white hairs makes a halo round un-wrinkled fronts and curls, brown
or golden. They have times when the smartest turn of verse, the most
delightful inventions of narrative, the most exquisite contrast of
colour or mould of form their genius can compass are stricken through
and through with the horror of commonplace. But when a man of the
artistic _genus_ has once so far learned his own nature he has made a
great advance towards the fulfilment of his ambitions. He has to
learn that just as the hot fit is followed by the cold the cold fit
is succeeded by the hot. He knows how intermittent he is. He learns to
mistrust his own mistrust of himself. The periods of depression grow
less frequent, and the depression grows less lasting. And then, just
as the cold fit becomes less chilling to the one, the fit of exultation
grows less intoxicating. The halo beams less bright--loss near.
Yet Philip, with the girl’s eyes worshipping him, and her sweet voice
cooing hope and praise, and her hands knitted on his shoulder, and her
warm breath fanning his cheek, gave himself up to the vision, and felt
his heart warm with a world’s welcome as yet far away from him.
The prose of life will assert itself, even to visionary eight-and-twenty
and sweet eighteen in love with one another. On this occasion it came
as a summons to supper. The summoner was a stout and jovial elderly
gentleman, about whose somewhat commonplace British exterior there was,
to Philip’s mind, a reflection of the nimbus which glorified Patty to
his mind, for he was Patty’s father. He had been called Old Brown at
school when he was young--he had been called Old Brown in the country,
and the prefix had found him out in town without the need for anybody
to breathe a whisper of it. He was Old Brown to his new acquaintances in
London before a month had gone by. The name suggests a beverage which is
not unlike Old Brown himself--being mild and nutty to the taste as he
to the mental palate--ripe and genial. He had a moist twinkle of the
eye,--the look which bespeaks the kindly humorist,--and his slightly
protruding under lip seemed covertly to taste the flavour of unspoken
jokes. Old Brown’s jokes were mainly left unspoken, but he spent a
good part of his life in laughing without any very apparent reason for
laughter, and may have been internally the way he looked to be.
He shook hands with Philip, and chucked Patty under the chin with a
waggish aspect, which called an appealing blush into the girl’s
face. Perhaps the blush stayed the intended quip, but any way the old
gentleman contented himself with a beaming laugh, and led the way to the
supper table, rubbing his hands and chuckling.
The meal was quietly jovial, and if, after it, Old Brown was not quite
so fast asleep as he pretended to be, at least his patience gave the
lovers the shelter they needed. He snored in mellow murmurs from behind
his bandanna, and they sat and talked together in low tones lest they
might awaken him, until the time came for parting.
Outside the mist had given place to a dull persistent rain, and a
peevish wind was complaining in area and chimney cowl. Philip turned to
the street with a pleasantly haunting vision of Patty’s vivacious face
outlined against the warmth and brightness of the hall. The touch of her
good-night kiss lingered on his lips like live velvet, and he carried
warmth and brightness enough within him to defy all the rain that ever
rained, and all the wind that ever blew on smoky London.
The rain had cleared the streets, and the occasional gleam of a
policeman’s cape or a furtive figure seeking the shelter of a doorway
against the drifting showers was all he saw as he bored his way against
the rising wind to the corner of Holborn. He was so absorbed by that
fancy of music to which his own quick tread kept time that a shuffling
step behind him rapidly drawing nearer failed to reach his sense. But as
he came to the corner, a hand clutched his arm.
He turned, with the quick defensive gesture natural to a man so accosted
at such a time, and faced the unexpected figure. An old man, clad in
filthy fluttering rags, stood staring at him, with both hands stretched
out. The rags shook as much with the horrible cough that tore him as
with the cruel wind. He was a dreadful creature, with watery eyes, and a
head and moustache of dirty gray. His long and unvenerable hairs strayed
loose beneath the dunghill relic which crowned them. The rain was in his
hair and beard, and had so soaked his tattered dress that it clung
to him like the feathers of a drenched fowl. He shook and wheezed and
panted, and gripped the air with tremulous fingers, and through the
rents in his clothing his white flesh gleamed in the gaslight.
The look of surprise and pity which Philip bent upon this unclean
apparition was startled into one of sudden fear and horror. In the
very instant when these emotions struck him, they were reflected in the
other’s face. The man made a motion to run, but Philip clutched his arm,
and he stood cowering and unresisting.
‘You! Here in London?’
‘Phil,’ said the spectre imploringly, ‘for God’s sake help me. I didn’t
know it was you, when I followed you. I thought----’ his voice trailed
into silence.
‘You have come to this?’
‘Yes, Phil; this is what I’ve come to.’ The cough took him here again,
and tore him so that he was fain to lean against the shutters of a shop
near at hand.
‘Why do you come back here? Are you mad?’
‘I am--almost. What could I do? I’m as safe here as I am anywhere.
Who would know me? or, if they did, who would hurt a wretch like me?
I haven’t slept in a bed for weeks, Phil. I haven’t eaten a morsel for
three days. For God’s sake! give me some money. I’ll--I’ll go away; I’ll
never trouble you again.’
‘I’ll give you all I can. But you must go away from London.’
Philip thrust his hand into his pocket and brought up all the pocket’s
contents. He took his keys and an unvalued trifle or two from the
handful, and held the rest out towards his father. The old man shrunk
from him with a terrible appeal and shamefaced gratitude which cut the
son’s heart like a knife.
‘Where can I go to?’
‘Anywhere out of London. You are not--safe here. Go away. Write to me
here.’ He thrust an envelope on which his name and address were written
into the old man’s dirty trembling hand. ‘You must never come to see me.
Promise me that.’
‘I promise,’ he said; and, thrusting the money and the envelope
somewhere among his rags, stood silent for a while. ‘I’m afraid,’ he
said, ‘I acted very foolishly and very----’
Then his voice trailed away again.
‘God help you!’ said Philip with a choking voice.
‘You’ll shake hands, won’t you, Phil? ‘said the old man. Phil took the
proffered hand. ‘It’s something,’ said Bommaney the elder, clinging
to him, ‘to feel an honest man’s hand again, God bless you, Phil!--God
bless you!’
Philip stood silent, and the old man, with another shame-stricken glance
upon him, moved away. His son watched him for a second or two, as he
slunk, coughing and shivering, along the gleaming pavement, and then
turned and went his own way heavily.
Bommaney senior, discerning the welcome beacon of a public-house,
shuffled eagerly towards it, hugging beneath his rags the money his son
had given him.
‘I beg your pardon, Mr. Bommaney; if you please, sir.’ He started at
the sound of a voice which had been familiar to him for years. ‘I should
like a word with you, sir; if you please.’