_THE CONSOLATIONS OF MRS. EBBAGE; WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF THE REV. PETER
BELPER_.
In the Vauxhall Bridge Road Gobion found a room in a lodging-house kept
by a Mrs. Ebbage. In the evening of the same day he went to the Temple,
but found Sturtevant's door shut, and he received no answer to his
knocks. As he was turning away he saw that something was written on a
piece of paper pinned to the door.
"To Y. G.,--Note for you at the 'Grecian' bar.
"M. S."
He went to the bar and got the letter, which ran:--
"MIDDLE TEMPLE.
"DEAR GOBION,--I have gone to the southern heat as we proposed,
and shall soon be sailing over the siren-haunted Mediterranean. I
enclose a ten-pound note in the hope that a period of enforced
sobriety may tend to a worthier life for you.
"Even a wise man is sometimes happy, and I should recommend
philosophy to you at this present juncture. As a matter of fact,
you may be quite sure that Ringwood won't make any move; but
still, as I intend, as you know, to practise at the bar, it may be
as well to go away for a time.
"If I were you I should stick to journalism; it will pay for bread
and butter. You might even write on subjects that you know
something about!
"With your appreciation of 'master-strokes' you cannot but admire
this my last move. To you, I am sure, the illustrious will now
become the august.
"MORDAUNT STURTEVANT."
"Yes," muttered Gobion, "he is cleverer than I am--ten pounds, out of a
thousand! Damn the scoundrel!" He swore under his breath for a minute or
two, but his quick wit soon grasped the humour of the situation. Though
it told against him, the joke was too good to be lost, and he could not
help a somewhat bitter laugh.
He went to bed when he got back, and, having nothing particular to do,
lay far into the morning, listening lazily to the sounds of the house.
He heard Mrs. Ebbage shouting angrily at her children, while in the
distance a tinkling piano spun out "Belle Mahone," and every half-hour
or so someone on the other side of the wall knocked his pipe out against
the mantelpiece.
A smell of steak and onions floated into the room.
He looked round. It was what is known as a "bed-sitter" on the
ground-floor at the end of the main passage. He got up and looked out of
the window, making the discovery that the landlady and her family lived
below him. Opposite the window, some four yards away, was the straight
wall of the next house, while below he looked down into a deep yard into
which the back door opened. It was entirely enclosed by the two houses,
forming a sort of pit or well. Some children were playing in the dirt,
while just below his window a rope was fastened, with some socks and a
flannel shirt drying on it.
His room was furnished with the bed, a jug and basin standing on an old
sugar-box painted green, an old armchair, a table, a wooden chair, and a
mirror over the fire, in which a crack down the middle was repaired by a
strip of paper gilded to match the frame. The walls were decorated with
a black japanned pipe-rack studded with pink and green stars, a
medallion of the Queen stamped in bronze cardboard, and a photograph of
the new Scotland Yard framed in shiny yellow wood.
For this he was to pay five-and-sixpence a week. Strangely enough the
utter sordidness of the place did not strike a jarring note. He felt
that he had dropped out of everything, that from henceforth he belonged
to this world of Mrs. Ebbage, this Vauxhall-Bridge-Road world. After
another lazy half-hour he got up and dressed, calling for the landlady
when he was ready. The woman came in, carrying a tray with his
breakfast. She was dirty and unkempt. Her face, where it was not black,
was yellow, and stray wisps of grizzled hair blew round it--a face lined
and shrewd.
"Thort you'd like an 'errin'," she said. "Ebbage 'ad one before 'e went
out. 'E's a pliceman, is Ebbage; 'as 'is beat down Kennington way."
"Oh, thanks very much; very nice," said Gobion, amused to see her making
the bed and lighting the fire while he ate.
"Better 'ave the window open," she said. "Gets a bit smelly in the
mornin', don't it?" She opened the window, breaking off her conversation
to shout at one of the children in the yard. "Leave off playin' with Mr.
Belper's socks, little nosey wretch yer; always nosin' about, little
devil."
"Ah, you don't know what kids are, you don't. Ebbage gets cussing at
them sometimes. I sez to 'im, 'Touch the 'arp lightly, my deah! You want
yer ugly 'edd tappin',' I sez. It makes 'im fairly med. 'Cummere,' I
sez, 'call _your_self a man? Cummere if you want to knock anyone about.
I could make a better yuman man than you, art of a lump o' coal.' Ah, 'e
isn't what 'Olmes was, my first man. 'E _was_ a man--big, fat, fleshy
devil, makin' 'is three quid a week regular. 'E was always good to me;
'e was fond of women. I've 'eard 'im say as a man ort to ave as many
women as 'e could keep."
Gobion soon got used to the woman, and even began to like her. She was
kind to him in her way, saying she'd "had many a toff down on his luck
with her," and she "noo the brand." He made friends with the husband--a
big, black-haired man, stolid and obscene in his conversation, and they
used to go to the public-house at the corner for a "drop of Scotch." Mr.
Ebbage always called it "a drop," though it would have been better for
him if he had never exceeded the twopennorth that did duty for the
aforesaid generic name.
After a fortnight Gobion settled down to a dull cheerless time, sordid
and dreadful; and it was but rarely that a pain-flash disturbed his
torpor. He used to play the old cracked piano in the evenings to the
family. Mrs. Ebbage's nieces--giggling shop girls--would come in from
College Street, and he would sit, with no tie and a dirty shirt, making
vulgar love to "Trot" and "Fanny," while Ebbage read the football
_Star_, and his wife cooked the sausages for supper. Sometimes in the
long dull afternoons Lucy Ebbage, a girl of sixteen, used to come into
his room and sit on his knee. He took a diseased pleasure in lowering
himself to their level.
He was a man with a keen eye for beauty, a deep appreciation of the
poetry of things, and yet for a week or two, with a strange morbid
insensibility, he revelled in the manners of the vulgarest class in
London. "Human nature is much of a muchness," he said to himself. "Why
give myself airs? I should make Lucy a capital husband; we could keep a
fried-fish shop and be happy."
This went on for three weeks; then one evening--somewhat of the
suddenest--came the reaction.
He was sitting alone on the one comfortable chair drawn up close to the
fire. The dancing flames lit up the unmade bed, the remains of a chop, a
heap of clothes scattered over a chair, and a pair of muddy boots drying
in the fender.
It was again the after-dinner hour--an hour with the monopoly of some
effects. He sat lazily smoking a pipe, half dozing, when he became
conscious of a banjo playing a comic song: "And her golden hair was
hanging down her back." Gradually the air took greater hold of him. The
distant twanging seemed fraught with an undercurrent of sadness, a
sub-tone of regret.
Gradually the sordid message dispelled lassitude, and his vivid mind
began to preen itself, waking from its long sleep. First passed away
with the swing of the first line the dull December London. His mind put
on wings, flying through confused memories to the first night of term,
the little Oxford theatre crammed with men--all the old set, Fleming,
Taylor, Robertson, Raymond, Young, "Weggie" Dibb, Scott, even Condamine.
How they had applauded and joined in the choruses! how they had cheered
the fat principal boy, how bright and _young_ it was!... Then a moment's
hush, and the sharp-strung chords, when the orchestra dashed madly into
the song, "Oh, Flo, 'twas _very_ wrong, you know!" How all the men had
roared at the girl's conscious wink. From the first he had posed, but in
those early terms he had been innocent of great wrong ... and now?...
The twang stopped with a little penultimate flourish before the final
chord. The trams in the road rattled past. Mrs. Ebbage shouted in the
kitchen, opining that her spouse must be "off 'is blooming onion"; and
outside in the passage Trot and Lucy giggled, high in the palate, hoping
he would hear and ask them to come in.... He shook violently in his
chair. To his excited imagination it seemed as if strange lights passed
before him; he heard strange sounds. He shook, and it seemed as if the
scales fell from his eyes, letting all the horror of his life flash into
his ken. There was a sense of the finality of things; he saw dimly a
far-off purpose.
It was the _staleness_, the torture of sin, not a sorrowful sense of
evil, that settled round him like a cloud. He had fed his appetites too
heavily, and a total apoplexy of mind and soul had ensued.
Then came a knock at the door, and a grotesque figure entered--a large,
gross old man, with heavy pouches under the eyes, with unsteady
dribbling lips, dressed in a long parti-coloured dressing-gown.
He said he lived on the other side of the passage, "and perhaps his
young friend would come in and smoke a pipe with him." They went into a
room much the same as Gobion's. A jug of steaming water stood on the
table by a bottle of gin.
"My name is Belper," said the old gentleman, "the Reverend Peter Belper,
though I no longer have a cure of souls. Will you have some Old Tom? I
never work, but it makes me very thirsty."
Gobion drank; he was not in a state of mind to be surprised at anything.
This leering old satyr seemed quite natural and in proper sequence.
"I won't ask you what you've done," he said to Gobion. "A gentleman
doesn't live here for no reason." He spoke with a wagging of his heavy
jaw, with a hoarse bleat, but an accent in which still lingered a trace
of culture.
"No," said Gobion; "I suppose we're a shady lot in this hole."
"We are, we are; I myself am not what I was. Good heavens! I was once a
vicar! I am now a moral object-lesson. I used to live by sermonizing,
now I sermonize by living. A university man, may I ask?"
"Yes--Oxford."
"Really, there are then two of us. Mrs. Ebbage ought to congratulate
herself."
"Have you been with her long?"
"Six years now. I have a moderate incompetence left; enough to be
constantly drunk on."
"You find it really does deaden thought?"
"My dear sir, if it wasn't for gin I should long since have been in
another hell!"
A shrill laugh floated up from the kitchen.
"I call her 'laughing water,'" said Mr. Belper.
"You are poetic."
"Yes, my father was Belper the minor poet. I am the least poetic of his
works."
He leered at the fire, shaking with drink--a shameless, dirty old man.
"I was a pretty fellow in my time," he said, licking the chops of
remotest memory. "I had a conscience, and wrote harvest festival hymns
with it."
Gobion filled his glass. "What do you do with yourself all day?"
"Drink and sleep, sleep and drink."
"Cheerful!"
"Yes, very; what else can I do? My mind is gone; if I think it's only
blurred pain. I used to try and philosophise, but I can't think now. I
don't believe in the nonsense people talk about the comforting powers of
philosophy."
"Nor I. Philosophy seems to me to be an attempt to eat one's own soul,
and indigestion generally results."
The old man filled his pipe anew, his face half in light half in shadow,
the gross imprint of vice showing more sharply for the contrast, and
suggesting still worse possibilities. Bad as it was, it had the
prepotency of lower depths.
They often sat together thus, spending the long-drawn evenings over the
gin-bottle, japing at society. Mr. Belper was ribald and cynical.
Nothing could shock either of them; their only prejudice was to persuade
themselves that they had none.
It was a dark, dull time, too sordid for the actors to accrue any
excitement at its lurid aspects. Night after night they sat till they
were too befuddled to talk, each in turn providing the necessary amount
of gin for the night's debauch. Belper punctuated the weary days by long
sleeps, and Gobion by caressing Lucy Ebbage.
His health began to go slowly, and the torture of insomnia was added to
his life.
One evening Mrs. Ebbage came into his room incoherently reminiscent, and
sitting on the bed, rambled of the past, giving Gobion a strange glimpse
of the habits of her class.
She told of her youth in a Westminster slum, of her mother who had been
kicked to death in a low public-house on the evening of the Derby. "'Er
face was like a bit of liver after they'd done with 'er, and when the
p'lice came in she was as dead as meat. I often think ovver."
She went on to talk of her daughter by her first marriage, who had died
at seventeen, her coarse voice trembling as she told how clever she had
been at crochet work, and what a small foot she had. She showed Gobion a
tiny white shoe the girl had worn. It was piteous to hear her--this
scraggy, hard woman--with tears in her eyes, talking of her dead
darling.
Then she said, "My 'ands are all mucky, and I've gone and soiled the
shoe. Pore 'Arriet, it don't matter to 'er now."
She wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron, and with a change of
manner--a somewhat futile arrogation of gaiety--"We're goin' to 'ave a
bit of supper. Ebbage said as 'e could swallow a Welsh rarebit and a
drop of something 'ot; come down and 'ave a bit."
"Yes," said Gobion slowly, "let us eat, drink, and be merry, for
to-morrow----"
Mr. Belper came in and made coarse jokes, to Mr. Ebbage's huge delight.
Gobion in his loneliness sat and became one of them, eating with his
knife to avoid the appearance of eccentricity.
About eleven o'clock he went out with a jug to get some beer. The
streets were heavy with fog, but he had not far to go, as the
public-house he frequented was just round the corner. He chatted with
the barmaid while she was drawing the beer, noticing with a smile the
notice painted on the wall:
"WHERE ELSE CAN YOU GET
Such fine MELLOW 4d. RUM!
Such pure OLD 6d. WHISKEY!
Such luscious 4-1/2d. GIN!
Such MATCHLESS 6d. BRANDY!"
As he was going back a man in evening dress knocked against him.
"I beg pardon," he said. "I don't see--good God! Gobion!"
It was Scott.
Gobion took him into his room, and lit the little alabaster lamp, rich
in gaudy flower work. The door opened, and the Reverend Peter Belper
came in. The light shone on him, and he looked more Silenus-like than
ever. "Beg pardon," he said, "thought you were alone." Gobion seized the
momentary diversion of his coming to put on a tie and push his dirty
cuffs under the sleeves of his coat.
"Oh! my dear old man," said Scott, looking round the room, "have you
come to this? Why didn't you tell me?"
He put his arm on his shoulder, and Gobion drew nearer, shaking with
emotion.
"I've been always thinking of you," said Scott. "It's been so lonely
without you--so dull and lonely--we all miss you so. They said at Oxford
that you'd been mixed up in some beastly newspaper scandal, but I knew
of course that you'd rather die than do anything like that. I've been
horribly afraid for you. You see, I couldn't find out where you'd got to
or anything. You look terribly ill, old man; you must come out of this
hole. Come away with me to-morrow, and when you're better you can make a
new start."
"It's no use," said Gobion, "I'm finished--mind and body."
"Rot, old man! you're only rather pippy. Don't you know you've _always_
got me? Don't you remember how once for a joke in those Ship Street
rooms you made me put my hands between yours and swear to be your man?
Well, it wasn't a joke--to me. Don't you know how we all love you? Fancy
your being here, you who used to lead us all. Damn it all, what gaudy
nonsense I'm talking!"
His rather commonplace face shone strangely. He seemed to change the
mean aspect of the room, to annihilate its sordidness.
Late at night Scott went back to his hotel, promising to be round first
thing in the morning to take Gobion away. They parted at the door with a
long hand-grip, and never met again in this world.
When he had gone Gobion went back to his room and fell like a log on to
the floor, lying there motionless till the grey light crept into the
court.
Then he got up and swiftly packed a small bag, his face white and drawn.
He went into the next room. The lamp was still burning, and old Mr.
Belper lay in a drunken sleep on the bed. His mouth was open, and he
breathed heavily.
Gobion woke him. "I've come to say good-bye," he said.
"What! has it come to that?"
"Yes."
The old man stared heavily. "Well, good-bye," he said. "I shan't be very
long either. I'm glad we've met. I, ahem, I--er"--he coughed--"I
congratulate you." He passed his dirty hand over his eyes. "Yes,
I--er--congratulate you. I wish--I'll see you out."
He came to the front door. They shook hands. "Good-bye," he said,
"good-bye, dear boy."
He stood on the steps, a fat, grotesque figure, and watched Gobion's
slim form disappear in the fog--a dirty, shameless old man.