"Kin yer write a letter?"
"More or less," I said. I did not rate myself with Madame DE STAËL nor
with EDWARD FITZGERALD, but I forebore to mention these names because I
thought that they would not be familiar to my questioner. If you happen
to know Paradise Rents, Fulham, you will realise that neither Madame DE
STAËL, nor FITZGERALD is much read there. Moreover, the type that
addressed me had not the aspect of a literary man.
He was a man of some seven years, maybe, in company with a younger man,
perhaps of five. He was hatless, coatless, waistcoatless, but he had a
pair of trousers, short in the leg, precariously held by one brace. That
is the fashion in Paradise Rents. I had come upon these two young men
about Fulham as they were staring with absorbed interest into the
undertaker's shop advantageously situated for custom at the corner of
the Rents and the main street. Certainly it was a pleasant window.
Besides the legends and texts, the artificial wreaths and the pictures
of tombs and tombstones, there was a number of model coffins in
miniature. It was these that had fascinated the attention of the two
young men.
"I should like one o' them to ply with," said the elder covetously.
"What would yer do with it, Bill?" the younger asked.
"I'd put the old KAYSER in it, along wi' Farver."
It is rude to laugh at other people's conversation, particularly if you
have not been introduced to them, but I caught myself in an audible
chuckle over this fine blend of patriotic and filial sentiment. Then I
pulled myself but not in time; I had been detected.
If you wish to know what it is to be stared at, you should interrupt, as
I had, a conversation between two young men of about this age in Fulham
or elsewhere. They stared in unison and in silence until the tension
became unbearable, and one of them, the elder, whose name was Bill,
relieved it with the above quest on, "Kin yer write a letter?"
Perhaps my answer was a little modest. He regarded me doubtfully, then
asked--
"'Ow soon kin yer write a letter?"
"You mean, how long does it take me to write a letter?"
He nodded his head vehemently.
"Well," I began, "it rather depends, you know, on what there is to say."
I saw dissatisfaction cloud his face, and hastened to add, "Oh, well,
about ten minutes."
At that his expression cleared to astonishment. Passing that emotion, it
went to incredulity. It was a beautifully legible face, though
everything but clean. He made up his mind.
"Will yer come," he asked, "and write a letter for my granmother?"
We were on the heels of adventure now; no one could say what new country
this might lead to.
"Where does she live?" I asked.
"Just round the corner, two doors from my Great-aunt Maria's," he said,
astonished that I should not know,
"Lead on," I said, concealing my ignorance of the residence of
great-aunt Maria.
He took me by the hand, which I could not in courtesy decline, and led
me down Paradise Rents.
As a rule, in Paradise Rents, front doors stand open to the street, but
the door of Number 5, the abode of Bill's grandmother, was shut. On
tip-toe and with a strenuous effort Bill reached the latch. The door
opened and Bill shouted through it, by way of introduction:--
"She says she kin write a letter in ten minutes."
The person addressed, whom I understood to be the grandmother, was
engaged in scrubbing with a duster a deal table already clean enough to
make Bill's face much ashamed of itself. She was a large heavy old
woman, with a round colourless visage that suggested the full moon by
daylight, and wispy grey locks like a nimbus about it.
"Lor bless the child, Mum!" she exclaimed. "Bill, whatever d'yer mean by
it?"
"Says she kin write a letter in ten minutes," Bill repeated, with the
emphasis of grave doubt on the "says."
"Bless the child, Mum! I don't know whatever 'e's been saying. It's
truth as I did say as I wished I 'ad someone as could write a letter for
me to my son Frank, it being 'is birthday Tuesday and 'im out at the
Front. But there, it's not to say, as I can't write a letter myself if
I'm so minded, but I'm no great scholard and it do take me a long time
to finish--each day a word or two. About a week it take me to write a
letter, such a letter as I'd wish to write to Frank out at the Front,
for 'is birthday, to cheer 'im up."
"Frank's Bill's father, I suppose?" I said, by way of filling an
asthmatic pause.
"Lor bless yer, no, Mum. Bill's father wouldn't never go into no more
danger than what 'e'd find at the Red Lion. Married my pore daughter 'e
did, as died--a mercy for 'er, pore thing! That's 'ow it is Bill's
living along o' me."
"I see," I said. "Well, now--about the letter?"
A space more liberal than the operation strictly needed was cleared for
me on the polished deal table; a penny ink-bottle and a pen with a rusty
but still useful nib set upon it, and from a special drawer, with a
solemnity that of the character of sacred ritual, Mrs. Watt, as Bill's
grandmother informed me she was called, drew forth a single sheet of
notepaper. Its dimensions had been heavily curtailed by the deepest
border of mourning black that I ever had seen on English writing-paper.
Other nations surpass us in this evidence of respect, but Mrs. Watt's
paper was calculated to raise the national standard.
"Isn't this," I said, "rather--I mean is it quite suited for a birthday
letter, to cheer up Frank in the trenches?"
Mrs. Watt took the suggestion in quite good part, but gave it a decided
negative.
"'E would wish respect showed to 'is Aunt Maria, as died Wednesday was a
fortnight. You might tell 'im that, if you please, Mum."
I started off, as bidden, with this mournful communication, under the
eye, at first severely critical, then frankly admiring, of Bill's
grandmother.
"Lor," she exclaimed, "you be one to write the words quick!"
"What shall we say now?" I asked brightly.
"Wednesday was a fortnight as she died, sister Maria did, that's Frank's
aunt, and was buried a Saturday--what's too soon, as you'd say, but no
disrespect meant, the undertaker arranging first for the Monday--only
'aving a bigger job, with 'orses and plumes, give'im for the Monday, and
so putting my pore sister forward to the Saturday. 'Ave you got that
down, Mum?"
"Oh," I said, scribbling briskly, "am I to write all that?" It occupied,
even with much compression, space far into the second side of the
restricted paper.
"An' my only relative surviving," she resumed, "being brother George, as
is eighty-two, and crotchety at that, lives out 'Oxton way, so I wrote
to him about the funeral for a Monday, and when the undertaker puts it
forward to the Saturday I didn't have no one to send all that way, so
brother George--'e's eighty-two, and crotchety at that--'e didn't get no
notice for the funeral on Saturday at all, so o' course 'e didn't come.
You'll make all that clear to Frank, won't you, Mum?"