(TO MR. AND MRS. WELCH)
Jim lent me a sovereign. He was working hard to make his home, and was
saving every penny. However, I took it, for I was really in sore straits.
If you have ever known what it is absolutely to need a sovereign, when you
have neither banking account nor employment, and your evening clothes are
no longer accessible for the last, you will be in a position to understand
the transfiguring properties of one small piece of gold. You leave your
friend's rooms a different man. Like the virtuous in the Buddhistic round,
you go in a beggar and come out a prince. To vary Carlyle's phrase, you
can pay for dinners, you can call hansoms, you can take stalls; in fact,
you are a prince--to the extent of a sovereign.
And oh! how wooingly does the world seem to nestle round you--the same
world that was so cold and haughty ten minutes ago. The world is a
courtesan, and has heard you have found a sovereign.
The gaslights seem beaming love at you. So near and bright are the
streets, you want to stay out in them all night; though you didn't relish
the prospect last evening. O sweet, sweet, siren London, with your golden
voice--I have a sovereign!
This, of course, was but the first rich impulse. The sovereign should
really be kept for the lodgings. But the snug little oyster-shops about
Booksellers' Row are so tempting, and there is nothing like oysters to
give one courage to open that giant oyster spoken of by Ancient Pistol.
I went in. I assured my conscience that it should only be
'Anglo-Portuguese,' and that I would forego the roll and butter. But
'Anglos' are not nice, Dutch are in every way to be preferred; and if you
are paying eighteenpence you might as well pay three shillings, and what's
the use of drawing the line at a roll and butter? No! we will repent after
the roll and butter. 'Roll and butter' shall be my Ebenezer. The 'r's'
have a notorious mnemonic quality. They will help me to remember.
So I sat down, and, fondling my sovereign in my pocket, fell into a dream.
When the oysters came I wished they had been 'Anglos' after all, because
my dream had grown beautiful and troublesome, and I had really forgotten
the oysters altogether. However, I ate them mechanically, and ordering
another half-dozen, so that the manager should not begrudge me my seat, I
turned again to my dream.
A young girl sat in a dainty room, writing at a quaint old escritoire, lit
by candles in shining brass sconces. She had a sweet blonde face, but more
character in it than usually falls to the lot of the English girl. There
was experience in the sensitive refinement of her features, a silver touch
of suffering: not wasting experience or bitter suffering, but just enough
to refine--she had waited. But she had been bravely happy all the time.
Pretty books filled a shelf above her escritoire, and between the
candlesticks was a photograph in a filigree silver frame. Towards this
she looked every now and then, in the pauses of her writing, with a happy,
trustful expression of quiet love. During one pause she noticed that her
little clock pointed to 8.30. 'Jim will just be going on,' she said to
herself. Yes, that photograph was 'Jim.'
A quaint little face it was, full of sweet wrinkles, and yet but a boy's
face. The wrinkles, you could see, were but so many threads of gold which
happy laughter had left there. Siss called him her Punchinello, likewise
her poet, for Jim is a poet who makes his poetry of his own bright face
and body, acts it night after night to an audience, and the people laugh
and cry as he plays, for his face is like a bubbling spring, full of
laughing eddies on the surface, but ever so deep with sweet freshness
beneath--and some catch sight of the deeps. The world knows him as a
comedian. Siss knows him as a poet, and because she knows what loving
tender tears are in him as well as laughter, she calls him her
Punchinello.
This is what she was writing: 'How near our home seems now, Jimmie boy!
Every night as you go on--and you are just going on now--I feel our home
draw nearer: and, do you know, all this week our star has seemed to grow
brighter and brighter. Can you see it in London? It comes out here about
six o'clock--first very pale, like a dream, and then fuller and fuller and
warmer and warmer. Sometimes I say that it is the sovereigns we are
putting into the bank that make it so much brighter; and I am sure it
_was_ brighter after that last ten pounds.... You are laughing at me,
aren't you? Never mind; you can be just as silly. Dear, dear, funny little
face!'
I had reached just so far in my dream when the oysters came, and that is
why I wished I had ordered 'Anglos' and no roll.
When I looked again, Siss had stopped writing, and was sitting with her
head in her hands dreaming. I looked into her eyes, felt ashamed for a
moment, and then stepped into her dream. I felt I was not worthy to walk
there, but I took off my hat and told myself that I was reverent.
It was a pretty flat, full of dainty rooms, and I followed her from one to
another, and one there was just like that in which I had seen her
writing, with the old escritoire, and the books, and the burning candles,
and the silver photograph shrine. She walked about very wistfully, and her
eyes were full. So were mine, and I wanted to sob, but feared lest she
should hear. Presently Jim joined her, and they walked together, and said
to each other, 'Think, this is our home at last'--'Think, this is our home
at last. O love, our home--together for evermore!'
This they said many times, and at length they came to a room that had a
door white as ivory, and I caught a breath of freshest flowers as they
opened and passed in.
Then I closed my eyes, and when I looked again I thought an angel stood on
the threshold, as I had seen it somewhere in Victor Hugo--a happy angel
with finger upon his lip.
And when the dream had gone, and I was once more alone, I said 'Jim is
working, Siss is waiting, and I--am eating borrowed oysters.'
Then I took out the sovereign and looked at it, for it was now symbolic.
Outside, above the street, a star was shining. I had filched a beam of
Siss's star. Was it less bright tonight? Had she missed this sovereign?
It had been symbolic before--a sovereign's-worth of the world, the flesh,
and the devil; now it was a sovereign's-worth of holy love and home. Every
penny I spent of it dimmed that star, delayed that home. In my pocket it
meant a sovereign's-worth more working and waiting. Pay it back again into
that star, and it was a sovereign nearer home. Yes, it was a
sovereign's-worth of that flat, of that escritoire, those books, those
burning candles, that photograph, that ivory-white door, those
sweet-smelling flowers, a sovereign's-worth of that angel, I was keeping
in my pocket.
Out on it! God forgive me. I had not thought it meant that to borrow a
sovereign from Jim, meant that to eat those borrowed oysters.
Nevertheless, they had not been all an immoral indulgence. Even oysters
may be the instruments of virtue in the hands of Providence.
The shopman knew me, so I 'confounded it' and told him I had come out
without my purse. It was all right. Pay next time, Jim's theatre was
close by, it was but a stone's-throw to the stage-door. Easy to leave him
a note. What will he think, I wonder, as he reads it, and the sovereign
rolls out: 'Dear old man, forgive me--I forgot it was a sovereign's-worth
of home.'
Yet, after all, it was the oysters that did this thing.