I MEET MR. THOMAS BLAKE
_(James Orlebar Cloyster’s narrative continued)_
Someone had told me that, the glory of Covent Garden Ball had departed.
It may be so. Yet the floor, with its strange conglomeration of
music-hall artists, callow university men, shady horse-dealers, and
raucous military infants, had an atmosphere of more than meretricious
gaiety. The close of an old year and the birth of a new one touch the
toughest.
The band was working away with a strident brassiness which filled the
room with noise. The women’s dresses were a shriek of colour. The
vulgarity of the scene was so immense as to be almost admirable. It was
certainly interesting.
Watching his opportunity, Julian presently drew me aside into the
smoking-room.
“Malim,” he said, “has paid you a great compliment.”
“Really,” I said, rather surprised, for Julian’s acquaintance had done
nothing more, to my knowledge, than give me a cigar and a
whiskey-and-soda.
“He’s introduced you to his wife.”
“Very good of him, I’m sure.”
“You don’t understand. You see Kit for what she is: a pretty,
good-natured creature bred in the gutter. But Malim—well, he’s in the
Foreign Office and is secretary to Sir George Grant.”
“Then what in Heaven’s name,” I cried, “induced him to marry——”
“My dear Jimmy,” said Julian, adroitly avoiding the arm of an exuberant
lady impersonating Winter, and making fair practice with her detachable
icicles, “it was Kit or no one. Just consider Malim’s position, which
was that of thousands of other men of his type. They are the cleverest
men of their schools; they are the intellectual stars of their
Varsities. I was at Oxford with Malim. He was a sort of tin god.
Double-first and all that. Just like all the rest of them. They get
what is looked upon as a splendid appointment under Government. They
come to London, hire comfortable chambers or a flat, go off to their
office in the morning, leave it in the evening, and are given a salary
which increases by regular gradations from an initial two hundred a
year. Say that a man begins this kind of work at twenty-four. What are
his matrimonial prospects? His office work occupies his entire
attention (the idea that Government clerks don’t work is a fiction
preserved merely for the writers of burlesque) from the moment he wakes
in the morning until dinner. His leisure extends, roughly speaking,
from eight-thirty until twelve. The man whom I am discussing, and of
whom Malim is a type, is, as I have already proved, intellectual. He
has, therefore, ambitions. The more intellectual he is the more he
loathes the stupid routine of his daily task. Thus his leisure is his
most valuable possession. There are books he wants to read—those which
he liked in the days previous to his slavery—and new ones which he sees
published every day. There are plays he wants to see performed. And
there are subjects on which he would like to write—would give his left
hand to write, if the loss of that limb wouldn’t disqualify him for his
post. Where is his social chance? It surely exists only in the utter
abandonment of his personal projects. And to go out when one is tied to
the clock is a poor sort of game. But suppose he _does_ seek the
society of what friends he can muster in London. Is he made much of,
fussed over? Not a bit of it. Brainless subalterns, ridiculous
midshipmen, have, in the eyes of the girl whom he has come to see, a
reputation that he can never win. They’re in the Service; they’re so
dashing; they’re so charmingly extravagant; they’re so tremendous in
face of an emergency that their conversational limitations of “Yes” and
“No” are hailed as brilliant flights of genius. Their inane anecdotes,
their pointless observations are positively courted. It is they who
retire to the conservatory with the divine Violet, whose face is like
the Venus of Milo’s, whose hair (one hears) reaches to her knees, whose
eyes are like blue saucers, and whose complexion is a pink poem. It is
Jane, the stumpy, the flat-footed—Jane, who wears glasses and has all
the virtues which are supposed to go with indigestion: big hands and an
enormous waist—Jane, I repeat, who is told off to talk to a man like
Malim. If, on the other hand, he and his fellows refuse to put on
evening clothes and be bored to death of an evening, who can blame
them? If they deliberately find enough satisfaction for their needs in
the company of a circle of men friends and the casual pleasures of the
town, selfishness is the last epithet with which their behaviour can be
charged. Unselfishness has been their curse. No sane person would, of
his own accord, become the automaton that a Government office requires.
Pressure on the part of relations, of parents, has been brought to bear
on them. The steady employment, the graduated income, the pension—that
fatal pension—has been danced by their fathers and their mothers and
their Uncle Johns before their eyes. Appeals have been made to them on
filial, not to say religious, grounds. Threats would have availed
nothing; but appeals—downright tearful appeals from mamma, husky,
hand-gripping appeals from papa—that is what has made escape
impossible. A huge act of unselfishness has been compelled; a lifetime
of reactionary egotism is inevitable and legitimate. I was wrong when I
said Malim was typical. He has to the good an ingenuity which assists
naturally in the solution of the problem of self and circumstance. A
year or two ago chance brought him in contact with Kit. They struck up
a friendship. He became an habitué at the Fried Fish Shop in Tottenham
Court Road. Whenever we questioned his taste he said that a physician
recommended fish as a tonic for the brain. But it was not his brain
that took Malim to the fried fish shop. It was his heart. He loved Kit,
and presently he married her. One would have said this was an
impossible step. Misery for Malim’s people, his friends, himself, and
afterwards for Kit. But Nature has endowed both Malim and Kit with
extraordinary commonsense. He kept to his flat; she kept to her job in
the fried fish shop. Only, instead of living in, she was able to retire
after her day’s work to a little house which he hired for her in the
Hampstead Road. Her work, for which she is eminently fitted, keeps her
out of mischief. His flat gives the impression to his family and the
head of his department that he is still a bachelor. Thus, all goes
well.”
“I’ve often read in the police reports,” I said, “of persons who lead
double lives, and I’m much interested in——”
Malim and Kit bore down upon us. We rose.
“It’s the march past,” observed the former. “Come upstairs.”
“Kiddie,” said Kit, “give me your arm.”
At half-past four we were in Wellington Street. It was a fine, mild
morning, and in the queer light of the false dawn we betook ourselves
to the Old Hummums for breakfast. Other couples had done the same. The
steps of the Hummums facing the market harboured already a waiting
crowd. The doors were to be opened at five. We also found places on the
stone steps. The market was alive with porters, who hailed our
appearance with every profession of delight. Early hours would seem to
lend a certain acidity to their badinage. By-and-by a more personal
note crept into their facetious comments. Two guardsmen on the top step
suddenly displayed, in return, a very creditable gift of repartee.
Covent Garden market was delighted. It felt the stern joy which
warriors feel with foemen worthy of their steel. It suspended its
juggling feats with vegetable baskets, and devoted itself exclusively
to the task of silencing our guns. Porters, costers, and the riff-raff
of the streets crowded in a semicircle around us. Just then it was
borne in on us how small our number was. A solid phalanx of the
toughest customers in London faced us. Behind this semicircle a line of
carts had been drawn up. Unseen enemies from behind this laager now
began to amuse themselves by bombarding us with the product of the
market garden. Tomatoes, cauliflowers, and potatoes came hurtling into
our midst. I saw Julian consulting his watch. “Five minutes more,” he
said. I had noticed some minutes back that the ardour of the attack
seemed to centre round one man in particular—a short, very burly man in
a costume that seemed somehow vaguely nautical. His face wore the
expression of one cheerfully conscious of being well on the road to
intoxication. He was the ringleader. It was he who threw the largest
cabbage, the most _passé_ tomato. I don’t suppose he had ever enjoyed
himself so much in his life. He was standing now on a cart full of
potatoes, and firing them in with tremendous force.
Kit saw him too.
“Why, there’s that blackguard Tom!” she cried.
She had been told to sit down behind Malim for safety. Before anyone
could stop her, or had guessed her intention, she had pushed her way
through us and stepped out into the road.
It was so unexpected that there was an involuntary lull in the
proceedings.
“Tom!”
She pointed an accusing finger at the man, who gaped beerily.
“Tom, who pinched farver’s best trousers, and popped them?”
There was a roar of laughter. A moment before, and Tom had been the pet
of the market, the energetic leader, the champion potato-slinger. Now
he was a thing of derision. His friends took up the question. Keen
anxiety was expressed on all sides as to the fate of father’s trousers.
He was requested to be a man and speak up.
The uproar died away as it was seen that Kit had not yet finished.
“Cheese it, some of yer,” shouted a voice. “The lady wants to orsk him
somefin’ else.”
“Tom,” said Kit, “who was sent with tuppence to buy postage-stamps and
spent it on beer?”
The question was well received by the audience. Tom was beaten. A
potato, vast and nobbly, fell from his palsied hand. He was speechless.
Then he began to stammer.
“Just you stop it, Tom,” shouted Kit triumphantly. “Just you stop it,
d’you ’ear, you stop it.”
She turned towards us on the steps, and, taking us all into her
confidence, added: “’E’s a nice thing to ’ave for a bruvver, anyway.”
Then she rejoined Malim, amid peals of laughter from both armies. It
was a Homeric incident.
Only a half-hearted attempt was made to renew the attack. And when the
door of the Hummums at last opened, Malim observed to Julian and me, as
we squashed our way in, that if a man’s wife’s relations were always as
opportune as Kit’s, the greatest objection to them would be removed.