Philadelphia. I knew him for what he was the minute he came into the
room. He was decently, even jauntily dressed, but there hung about him
the smell of stale cigars and whiskey, which always hangs about those of
our Beggars who do not fill our chambers with the sicklier smell of
drugs. Nor did I think much of his story. He related it at length with
elegance of manner and speech, but it was a poor one, inviting doubt.
The card he played was the one he sent in with a well-known Philadelphia
name on it, and he strengthened the effect by his talk of the artist
with whom he once shared rooms at Eleventh and Spruce streets. That
"fetched me." For Eleventh and Spruce streets must ever mean for me the
red brick house with the white marble steps and green shutters, the
pleasant garden opposite full of trees green and shady on hot summer
days, the leisurely horse-cars jingling slowly by,--the house that is so
big in all the memories of my childhood and youth. If I can help it,
nobody shall ever know what his having lived in its neighbourhood cost
me. I was foolish, no doubt, but I gave with my eyes open: sentiment
sometimes is not too dearly bought at the price of a little folly.
Were Covent Garden not within such easy reach of the Quarter I could
scarcely account for the trust which the needy musician places in us.
Certainly it is because of no effort or encouragement on our side. We
have small connection with the musical world, and whether because of the
size of the singers or the commercial atmosphere at Baireuth, J. since
we heard "Parsifal" there will not be induced to go to the opera
anywhere, or to venture upon a concert. Under the circumstances, the
most imaginative musician could not make believe in a professional bond
between us, though there is nothing to shake his faith in the kinship of
all the arts and, therefore, in our readiness to support the stray tenor
or violinist who cannot support himself. But imagination, anyway, is not
his strong point. He seldom displays the richness of fancy of our other
Beggars, and I can recall only one, a pianist who had grasped the
possibilities of "Who's Who." His use of it, however, went far to atone
for the neglect of the rest. With its aid he had discovered not only
that we were Philadelphians, but that Mr. David Bispham was also, and he
had to let off his enthusiasm over Philadelphia and "dear old Dave
Bispham" before he got down to business. There his originality
gave out. His was the same old story of a run of misfortunes and
disappointments--"it could never have happened if dear old Dave Bispham
had been in town"--and the climax was the dying wife for whom our
sympathy has been asked too often for a particle to be left. The only
difference was that she took rather longer in dying than usual, and the
pianist returned to report her removal from the shelter of a friend's
house to the hospital, from the hospital to lodgings, and from the
lodgings he threatened us with the spectacle of her drawing her last
breath in the gutter if we did not, then and there, pay his landlady and
his doctor and his friend to whom he was deeply in debt. We were spared
her death, probably because by that time the pianist saw the wisdom of
carrying the story of her sufferings to more responsive ears, though it
is not likely that he met with much success anywhere. He was too well
dressed for the part. With his brand-new frock coat and immaculate silk
hat, with his gold-mounted cane and Suede gloves, he was better equipped
for the _jeune premier_ warbling of love, than for the grief-stricken
husband watching in penniless desolation by the bedside of a dying wife.
The Quarter is also within an easy stroll for actors who, when their
hard times come, show an unwarranted confidence in us, though J., if
anything, disdains the theatre more than the opera. They take advantage
of their training and bring the artist's zeal to the role of Beggars,
but I have known them to be shocked back suddenly into their natural
selves by J.'s blunt refusal to hear them out. One, giving the
aristocratic name of Mr. Vivian Stewart and further describing himself
on his card as "Lead Character late of the Lyceum," was so dismayed when
J. cut his lines short with a shilling that he lost his cue entirely and
whined, "Don't you think, sir, you could make it eighteenpence?" The
most accomplished in the role was a young actor from York. He had the
intelligence to suspect that _the_ profession does not monopolize the
interest of all the world and to pretend that it did not monopolize his
own. He therefore appeared in the double part of cyclist and actor. He
reminded J. of a cycling dinner at York several winters before at which
both were present. J. remembered the dinner, but not the cyclist, who
was not a bit put out but declaimed upon "the freemasonry of the wheel,"
and anticipated J.'s joy as fellow sportsman in hearing of the new
engagement just offered to him. It would be the making of him and his
reputation, but--no bad luck has ever yet robbed our Beggars of that
useful preposition--_but_, it depended upon his leaving London within
an hour, and the usual events over which our Beggars never have control,
found him with ten shillings less than his railway fare. A loan at this
critical point would save his career, and to-morrow the money would be
returned. His visit dates back to the early period, when our hospitality
had not out-grown the barbarous stage, and his career was saved,
temporarily. After six months' silence, the actor reappeared. With his
first word of greeting he took a half sovereign from his waistcoat
pocket and regretted his delay in paying it back. _But_, in the mean
while, much had happened. He had lost his promising engagement; he had
found a wife and was on the point of losing her, for she was another of
the many wives at death's door; he had found a more promising engagement
and was on the point of losing that too, for if he did not settle his
landlady's bill before the afternoon had passed she would seize his
possessions, stage properties and all, and again events beyond his
control had emptied his pockets. He would return the ten shillings,
_but_ we must now lend him a sovereign. And he was not merely surprised
but deeply hurt because we would not, and he stayed to argue it out that
if his wife died, and his landlady kept his possessions, and the
engagement was broken, and his career was at an end, the guilt would be
ours,--it was in our power to make him or to mar him. He was really
rather good at denunciation. On this occasion it was wasted. He did not
get the sovereign, but then neither did we get the half sovereign which
went back into his waistcoat pocket at the end of his visit and
disappeared with him, this time apparently forever.
We are scarcely in as great favour as we were with our Beggars. Their
courage now is apt to ooze from them at our door, which is no longer
held by a British servant, but by Augustine, whom tradition has not
taught to respect the top hat and frock coat, and before whom even the
prosperous quail. She recognizes the Beggar at a glance, for that glance
goes at once to his shoes, she having found out, unaided by Thackeray,
that poverty, beginning to take possession of a man, attacks his
extremities first. She has never been mistaken except when, in the dusk
of a winter evening, she shut one of our old friends out on the stairs
because she had looked at his hat instead of his shoes and mistrusted
the angle at which it was pulled down over his eyes. This blunder, for
an interval, weakened her reliance upon her own judgment, but she has
gradually recovered her confidence, and only the Beggars whose courage
is screwed to the sticking-point, and who sharpen their wits, succeed in
the skirmish to get past her. When they do get past it is not of much
use. The entertainment they gave us is of a kind that palls with
repetition. An inclination to listen to their stories, to save their
careers, to set them up on their feet, could survive their persecutions
in none but the epicure in charity, which we are not. The obligation of
politeness to Beggars under my roof weighs more lightly on my shoulders
with their every visit, while J., as the result of long experience and
to save bother, has reduced his treatment of them to a system and gives
a shilling indiscriminately to each and all who call to beg--when he
happens to have one himself. In vain I assure him that if his system has
the merit of simplicity, it is shocking bad political economy, and that
every shilling given is a shilling thrown away. In vain I remind him
that Augustine, shadowing our Beggars from our chambers, saw the man who
came to us solely because of the "good old days" in Philadelphia stop
and beg at every other door in the house; that she detected one of the
numerous heart-broken husbands hurrying back to his dying wife by way of
the first pub round the corner; that she caught the innocent defendant
in a lawsuit, whose solicitor was waiting downstairs, pounced upon by
two women instead and well scolded for the poor bargain he had made. In
vain I point out that a shilling to one is an invitation to every Beggar
on our beat, for by some wireless telegraphy of their own our Beggars
always manage to spread the news when shillings are in season at our
chambers. But J. is not to be moved. He has an argument as simple as his
system with which to answer mine. If, he says, the Beggar is a humbug, a
shilling can do no great harm; if the Beggar is genuine, it may pay for
a night's bed or for the day's bread; and he does not care if it is
right or wrong according to political economy, for he knows for himself
that the Beggar's story is sometimes true. The visits of Beggars who
once came to us as friends are vivid in his memory.
They are, I admit, visits not soon forgotten. The chance Beggar in the
street is impersonal in his appeal, and yet he makes us uncomfortable by
his mere presence, symbol as he is of the huge and pitiless waste of
life. Our laugh for the bare-faced impostor at our door has a sigh in
it, for proficiency in his trade is gained only through suffering and
degradation. But the laugh is lost in the sigh, the discomfort becomes
acute when the man who begs a few pence is one at whose table we once
sat, whom we once knew in positions of authority. He cannot be reduced
to a symbol nor disposed of by generalizations. Giving is always an
embarrassing business, but under these conditions it fills us with
shame, nor can we help it though oftener than not we see that the shame
is all ours. I am miserable during my interviews with the journalist
whom we met when he was at the top of the ladder of success, and who
slipped to the bottom after his promotion to an important editorship and
his carelessness in allowing himself to be found, on the first night of
his installation, asleep with his head and an empty bottle in the
wastepaper basket; but he seems to be quite enjoying himself, which
makes it the more tragic, as, with hand upraised, he assures me solemnly
that J. is a gentleman, this proud distinction accorded by him in return
for the practical working of J.'s system in his behalf. It is a trial to
receive the popular author who won his popularity by persevering in the
"'abits of a clerk," so he says, when he left the high office stool for
the comfortable chair in his own study, and whose face explains too well
what he has made of it; but it is evidently a pleasure to him, and
therefore the more pitiful to me, when he interrupts my mornings to
expose the critics and their iniquity in compelling him to come to me
for the bread they take out of his mouth. Worst of all were the visits
of the business man,--I am glad I can speak of them in the
past,--though he himself never seemed conscious of the ghastly figure he
made, for when his visible business vanished he had still his wonderful
schemes.
He was a man of wonderful schemes, but originally they led to results as
wonderful. When we first knew him he ruled in an office in Bond Street,
he had partners, he had clerks, he had a porter in livery at the door.
He embarked upon daring adventures and brought them off. He gave
interesting commissions, and he paid for them too, as we learned to our
profit. He had large ideas and a wide horizon; he shrank from the cheap
and popular, from what the people like. He was not above taking the
advice of others upon subjects of which he was broad-minded enough to
understand and to acknowledge his own ignorance, for he spared himself
no pains in his determination to secure the best. And he was full of go;
that was why we liked him. I look back to evenings when he came to
dinner to talk over some new scheme, and when he would sit on and talk
on after his last train--his home was in the suburbs--had long gone and,
as he told us afterwards, he would have to wait in one of the little
restaurants near Fleet Street that are open all night for journalists
until it was time to catch the earliest newspaper train. He would drop
in at any odd hour to discuss his latest enterprise. We were always
seeing him, and we were always delighted to see him, enthusiasm not
being so common a virtue in the Briton that we can afford not to make
the most of it when it happens. We found him, as a consequence, a
stimulating companion. I cannot say exactly when the change came; why it
came remains a mystery to us to this day. Probably it began long before
we realized it. The first symptoms were a trick of borrowing: at the
outset such trivial things as a daily paper to which he should have
subscribed, or books which he should have bought for himself. Then it
was a half crown here and a half crown there, because he had not time to
go back to the office before rushing to the station, or because he had
not a cab fare with him, or because of half a dozen other accidents as
plausible. We might not have given a second thought to all this but for
the rapidity with which the half crowns developed into five shillings,
and the five into ten, and the ten into a sovereign on evenings when the
cab, for which we had to take his word, had been waiting during the
hours of his stay. We could not help our suspicions, the more so because
that indefinable but rank odour of drugs, by which our Beggars too
frequently announce themselves, grew stronger as the amount of which he
was in need increased. And very soon he was confiding to us the details
of a quarrel which deprived him of his partners and their capital. Then
the Bond Street office was given up and his business was done in some
vague rooms, the whereabouts of which he never disclosed; only too soon
it seemed to be done entirely in the street. We would meet him at night
slinking along the Strand, one of the miserable shadows of humanity whom
the darkness lures out of the nameless holes and corners where they hide
during the day. At last came a period when he kept away from our
chambers altogether, sending his wife to us instead. Her visits were
after dark, usually towards midnight. She called for all sorts of
things,--a week's rent, medicine from the druggist in the Strand,
Sunday's dinner, her 'bus fare home, once I remember for an umbrella.
She was never without an excuse for the emergency that forced her to
disturb us, and she was no less fine than he in keeping up the fiction
that it was an emergency, and that business prospered though removed
from Bond Street into the Unknown. I think it was after this loan of an
umbrella that he again came himself, nominally to return it and
incidentally to borrow something else. I had not seen him for several
months. It might have been years judging from his appearance, and I
wished, as I still wish, I had not seen him then. In the Bond Street
days he had the air of a man who lived well, and he was correct in
dress, "well groomed" as they say. And now? His face was as colourless
and emaciated as the faces from which I shrink in the "hunger line" on
the Embankment; he wore a brown tweed suit, torn and mended and torn
again, with a horrible patch of another colour on one knee that drew my
eyes irresistibly to it; his straw hat was as burned and battered as
days of tramping in the sun and nights of sleeping in the rain could
make it. He was the least embarrassed of the two. In fact, he was not
embarrassed at all, but sat in the chair where so often he had faced me
in irreproachable frock coat and spotless trousers, and explained as in
the old days his wonderful schemes, expressing again the hope that we
would second him and, with him, again achieve success. He might have
been a prince promising his patronage. And all the while I did not know
which way to look, so terrible was his face pinched and drawn with
hunger, so eloquent that staring patch on his knee. That was several
years ago, and it was the last visit either he or his wife ever made us.
I cannot imagine that anything was left to them except greater misery,
deeper degradation, and--the merciful end, which I hope came swiftly.
It is when I remember the business man and our other friends,
fortunately few, who have followed in the same path that I am unable to
deny the force of the argument by which J. defends his system. It may be
that all our Beggars began life with schemes as wonderful and ideas as
large, that their stories are as true, that the line between Tragedy and
Farce was never so fine drawn as when, stepping across it, they plunged
into the profession of having come down in the world.
_The Tenants_
[Illustration: THE LION BREWERY]
IX
THE TENANTS
It is impossible to live in chambers without knowing something of the
other tenants in the house. I know much even of several who were
centuries or generations before my time, and I could not help it if I
wanted to, for the London County Council has lately set up a plaque to
their memory on our front wall. Not that I want to help it. I take as
much pride in my direct descent from Pepys and Etty as others may in an
ancestor on the Mayflower or with the Conqueror, while if it had not
been for J. and his interest in the matter we might not yet boast the
plaque that gives us distinction in our shabby old street, though, to do
us full justice, its list of names should be lengthened by at least one,
perhaps the most distinguished.
I have never understood why Bacon was left out. Only the pedant would
disown so desirable a tenant for the poor reason that the house has
been rebuilt since his day. As it is, Pepys heads the list, and we do
not pretend to claim that the house is exactly as it was when he lived
in it. He never saw our Adam ceilings and fireplaces, we never saw his
row of gables along the River front except in Canaletto's drawing of the
old Watergate which our windows still overlook. However, except for the
loss of the gables, the outside has changed little, and if the inside
has been remodelled beyond recognition, we make all we can of the
Sixteenth-Century drain-pipe discovered when the London County Council,
in the early throes of reform, ordered our plumbing to be overhauled.
Their certified plumber made so much of it, feeling obliged to celebrate
his discovery with beer and in his hurry forgetting to blow out the bit
of candle he left amid the laths and plaster, that if J. had not arrived
just in time there would be no house now for the plaque to decorate.
Pepys, I regret to say, waited to move in until after the Diary ended,
so that we do not figure in its pages. Nor, during his tenancy, does he
figure anywhere except in the parish accounts, which is more to his
credit than our entertainment.
Etty was considerate and left a record of his "peace and happiness" in
our chambers, but I have no proof that he appreciated their beauty. If
he liked to walk on our leads in the evening and watch the sun set
behind Westminster, he turned his back on the River at the loveliest
hour of all. It was his habit as Academician to work like a student at
night in the Royal Academy Schools, then in Trafalgar Square,--an
admirable habit, but one that took him away just when he should have
stayed. For when evening transformed the Thames and its banks into
Whistler's "Fairyland" he, like Paul Revere, hung out a lantern from his
studio window as a signal for the porter, with a big stick, to come and
fetch him and protect him from the robbers of the Quarter, which had not
then the best of reputations. Three generations of artists climbed our
stairs to drink tea and eat muffins with Etty, but they showed the same
ignorance of the Thames, all except Turner, who thought there was no
finer scenery on any river in Italy, and who wanted to capture our
windows from Etty and make them his own, but who, possibly because he
could not get them, never painted the Thames as it was and is. One other
painter did actually capture the windows on the first floor, and, in the
chambers that are now the Professor's, Stanfield manufactured his
marines, and there too, they say, Humphry Davy made his safety lamp.
We do not depend solely upon the past for our famous tenants. Some of
the names which in my time have been gorgeously gilded inside our
vestibule, later generations may find in the list we make a parade of on
our outer wall. For a while, in the chambers just below ours, we had the
pleasure of knowing that Mr. Edmund Gosse was carrying on for us the
traditions of Bacon and Pepys. Then we have had a Novelist or two, whose
greatness I shrink from putting to the test by reading their novels, and
also one or more Actors, but fame fades from the mummer on the wrong
side of the footlights. We still have the Architect who, if the tenants
were taken at his valuation, would, I fancy, head our new list.
He is not only an architect but, like Etty,--like J. for that
matter,--an Academician. He carries off the dignity with great
stateliness, conscious of the vast gulf fixed between him and tenants
with no initials after their name. Moreover, he belongs to that
extraordinary generation of now elderly Academicians who were apparently
chosen for their good looks, as Frederick's soldiers were for their
size. The stoop that has come to his shoulder with years but adds to the
impressiveness of his carriage. His air of superiority is a continual
reminder of his condescension in having his office under our modest
roof. His "Aoh, good-mornin'," as he passes, is a kindness, a few words
from him a favour rarely granted, and there is no insolent familiar in
the house who would dare approach him. Royalty, Archbishops, University
dignitaries are his clients, and it would seem presumption for the mere
untitled to approach him with a commission. His office is run on
dignified lines in keeping with the exalted sphere in which he
practises. A parson of the Church of England is his chief assistant. A
notice on his front door warns the unwary that "No Commercial
Travellers need Apply," and implies that others had better not.
William Penn is probably the only creature in the house who ever had the
courage to enter the Academic precincts unbidden. William was a cat of
infinite humour, and one of his favourite jests was to dash out of our
chambers and down the stairs whenever he had a chance; not because he
wanted to escape,--he did not, for he loved his family as he
should,--but because he knew that one or all of us would dash after him.
If he was not caught in time he added to the jest by pushing through the
Academician's open door and hiding somewhere under the Academic nose,
and I am certain that nobody had a keener sense of the audacity of it
than William himself. More than once a young assistant, trying to
repress a grin and to look as serious as if he were handing us a design
for a Deanery, restored William to his family; and once, on a famous
occasion when, already late, we were starting for the Law Courts and the
Witness-box, the Architect relaxed so far as to pull William out from
among the Academic drawing-boards and to smile as he presented him to
J. who was following in pursuit. Even Jove sometimes unbends, but when
Jove is a near neighbour it is wiser not to presume upon his unbending,
and we have never given the Architect reason to regret his moment of
weakness.