I MEET THE REV. JOHN HATTON
_(James Orlebar Cloyster’s narrative continued)_
I saw a great deal of Malim after that. He and Julian became my two
chief mainstays when I felt in need of society. Malim was a man of
delicate literary skill, a genuine lover of books, a severe critic of
modern fiction. Our tastes were in the main identical, though it was
always a blow to me that he could see nothing humorous in Mr. George
Ade, whose Fables I knew nearly by heart. The more robust type of
humour left him cold.
In all other respects we agreed.
There is a never-failing fascination in a man with a secret. It gave me
a pleasant feeling of being behind the scenes, to watch Malim, sitting
in his armchair, the essence of everything that was conventional and
respectable, with Eton and Oxford written all over him, and to think
that he was married all the while to an employee in a Tottenham Court
Road fried-fish shop.
Kit never appeared in the flat: but Malim went nearly every evening to
the little villa. Sometimes he took Julian and myself, more often
myself alone, Julian being ever disinclined to move far from his
hammock. The more I saw of Kit the more thoroughly I realized how
eminently fitted she was to be Malim’s wife. It was a union of
opposites. Except for the type of fiction provided by “penny libraries
of powerful stories.” Kit had probably not read more than half a dozen
books in her life. Grimm’s fairy stories she recollected dimly, and she
betrayed a surprising acquaintance with at least three of Ouida’s
novels. I fancy that Malim appeared to her as a sort of combination of
fairy prince and Ouida guardsman. He exhibited the Oxford manner at
times rather noticeably. Kit loved it.
Till I saw them together I had thought Kit’s accent and her incessant
mangling of the King’s English would have jarred upon Malim. But I soon
found that I was wrong. He did not appear to notice.
I learned from Kit, in the course of my first visit to the villa, some
further particulars respecting her brother Tom, the potato-thrower of
Covent Garden Market. Mr. Thomas Blake, it seemed, was the proprietor
and skipper of a barge. A pleasant enough fellow when sober, but too
much given to what Kit described as “his drop.” He had apparently left
home under something of a cloud, though whether this had anything to do
with “father’s trousers” I never knew. Kit said she had not seen him
for some years, though each had known the other’s address. It seemed
that the Blake family were not great correspondents.
“Have you ever met John Hatton?” asked Malim one night after dinner at
his flat.
“John Hatton?” I answered. “No. Who is he?”
“A parson. A very good fellow. You ought to know him. He’s a man with a
number of widely different interests. We were at Trinity together. He
jumps from one thing to another, but he’s frightfully keen about
whatever he does. Someone was saying that he was running a boys’ club
in the thickest part of Lambeth.”
“There might be copy in it,” I said.
“Or ideas for advertisements for Julian,” said Malim. “Anyway, I’ll
introduce you to him. Have you ever been in the Barrel?”
“What’s the Barrel?”
“The Barrel is a club. It gets the name from the fact that it’s the
only club in England that allows, and indeed urges, its members to sit
on a barrel. John Hatton is sometimes to be found there. Come round to
it tomorrow night.”
“All right,” I replied. “Where is it?”
“A hundred and fifty-three, York Street, Covent Garden. First floor.”
“Very well,” I said. “I’ll meet you there at twelve o’clock. I can’t
come sooner because I’ve got a story to write.”
Twelve had just struck when I walked up York Street looking for No.
153.
The house was brilliantly lighted on the first floor. The street door
opened on to a staircase, and as I mounted it the sound of a piano and
a singing voice reached me. At the top of the stairs I caught sight of
a waiter loaded with glasses. I called to him.
“Mr. Cloyster, sir? Yessir. I’ll find out whether Mr. Malim can see
you, sir.”
Malim came out to me. “Hatton’s not here,” he said, “but come in.
There’s a smoking concert going on.”
He took me into the room, the windows of which I had seen from the
street.
There was a burst of cheering as we entered the room. The song was
finished, and there was a movement among the audience. “It’s the
interval,” said Malim.
Men surged out of the packed front room into the passage, and then into
a sort of bar parlour. Malim and I also made our way there. “That’s the
fetish of the club,” said Malim, pointing to a barrel standing on end;
“and I’ll introduce you to the man who is sitting on it. He’s little
Michael, the musical critic. They once put on an operetta of his at the
Court. It ran about two nights, but he reckons all the events of the
world from the date of its production.”
“Mr. Cloyster—Mr. Michael.”
The musician hopped down from the barrel and shook hands. He was a
dapper little person, and had a trick of punctuating every sentence
with a snigger.
“Cheer-o,” he said genially. “Is this your first visit?”
I said it was.
“Then sit on the barrel. We are the only club in London who can offer
you the privilege.” Accordingly I sat on the barrel, and through a
murmur of applause I could hear Michael telling someone that he’d first
seen that barrel five years before his operetta came out at the Court.
At that moment a venerable figure strode with dignity into the bar.
“Maundrell,” said Malim to me. “The last of the old Bohemians. An old
actor. Always wears the steeple hat and a long coat with skirts.”
The survivor of the days of Kean uttered a bellow for whisky-and-water.
“That barrel,” he said, “reminds me of Buckstone’s days at the
Haymarket. After the performance we used to meet at the Café de
l’Europe, a few yards from the theatre. Our secret society sat there.”
“What was the society called, Mr. Maundrell?” asked a new member with
unusual intrepidity.
“Its name,” replied the white-headed actor simply, “I shall not
divulge. It was not, however, altogether unconnected with the Pink Men
of the Blue Mountains. We used to sit, we who were initiated, in a
circle. We met to discuss the business of the society. Oh, we were the
observed of all observers, I can assure you. Our society was extensive.
It had its offshoots in foreign lands. Well, we at these meetings used
to sit round a barrel—a great big barrel, which had a hole in the top.
The barrel was not merely an ornament, for through the hole in the top
we threw any scraps and odds and ends we did not want. Bits of tobacco,
bread, marrow bones, the dregs of our glasses—anything and everything
went into the barrel. And so it happened, as the barrel became fuller
and fuller, strange animals made their appearance—animals of peculiar
shape and form crawled out of the barrel and would attempt to escape
across the floor. But we were on their tracks. We saw them. We headed
them off with our sticks, and we chased them back again to the place
where they had been born and bred. We poked them in, sir, with our
sticks.”
Mr. Maundrell emitted a placid chuckle at this reminiscence.
“A good many members of this club,” whispered Malim to me, “would have
gone back into that barrel.”
A bell sounded. “That’s for the second part to begin,” said Malim.
We herded back along the passage. A voice cried, “Be seated, please,
gentlemen.”
At the far end of the room was a table for the chairman and the
committee, and to the left stood a piano. Everyone had now sat down
except the chairman, who was apparently not in the room. There was a
pause. Then a man from the audience whooped sharply and clambered over
the table and into the place of the chairman. He tapped twice with the
mallet. “Get out of that chair,” yelled various voices.
“Gentlemen,” said the man in the chair. A howl of execration went up,
and simultaneously the door was flung open. A double file of
white-robed Druids came, chanting, into the room.
The Druids carried in with them a small portable tree which they
proceeded to set upright. The chant now became extremely topical. Each
Druid sang a verse in turn, while his fellow Druids danced a stately
measure round the tree. As the verse was being sung, an imitation
granite altar was hastily erected.
The man in the chair, who had so far smoked a cigarette in silence, now
tapped again with his mallet. “Gentlemen,” he observed.
The Druids ended their song abruptly, and made a dash at the occupant
of the chair. The audience stood up. “A victim for our ancient rites!”
screamed the Druids, falling upon the man and dragging him towards the
property altar.
The victim showed every sign of objection to early English rites; but
he was dislodged, and after being dragged, struggling, across the
table, subsided quickly on the floor. The mob surged about and around
him. He was hidden from view. His position, however, could be located
by a series of piercing shrieks.
The door again opened. Mr. Maundrell, the real chairman of the evening,
stood on the threshold. “Chair!” was now the word that arose on every
side, and at this signal the Druids disappeared at a trot past the
long-bearded, impassive Mr. Maundrell. Their victim followed them, but
before he did so he picked up his trousers which were lying on the
carpet.
All the time this scene had been going on, I fancied I recognised the
man in the chair. In a flash I remembered. It was Dawkins who had
coached First Trinity, and whom I, as a visitor once at the crew’s
training dinner, had last seen going through the ancient and honourable
process of de-bagging at the hands of his light-hearted boat.
“Come on,” said Malim. “Godfrey Lane’s going to sing a patriotic song.
They _will_ let him do it. We’ll go down to the Temple and find John
Hatton.”
We left the Barrel at about one o’clock. It was a typical London late
autumn night. Quiet with the peace of a humming top; warm with the heat
generated from mellow asphalt and resinous wood-paving.
We turned from Bedford Street eastwards along the Strand.
Between one and two the Strand is as empty as it ever is. It is given
over to lurchers and policemen. Fleet Street reproduces for this one
hour the Sahara.
“When I knock at the Temple gate late at night,” said Malim, “and am
admitted by the night porter, I always feel a pleasantly archaic
touch.”
I agreed with him. The process seemed a quaint admixture of an Oxford
or Cambridge college, Gottingen, and a feudal keep. And after the gate
had been closed behind one, it was difficult to realise that within a
few yards of an academic system of lawns and buildings full of living
traditions and associations which wainscoting and winding stairs
engender, lay the modern world, its American invaders, its new humour,
its women’s clubs, its long firms, its musical comedies, its Park Lane,
and its Strand with the hub of the universe projecting from the roadway
at Charing Cross, plain for Englishmen to gloat over and for foreigners
to envy.
Sixty-two Harcourt Buildings is emblazoned with many names, including
that of the Rev. John Hatton. The oak was not sported, and our rap at
the inner door was immediately answered by a shout of “Come in!” As we
opened it we heard a peculiar whirring sound. “Road skates,” said
Hatton, gracefully circling the table and then coming to a standstill.
I was introduced. “I’m very glad to see you both,” he said. “The two
other men I share these rooms with have gone away, so I’m killing time
by training for my road-skate tour abroad. It’s trying for one’s
ankles.”
“Could you go downstairs on them?” said Malim.
“Certainly,” he replied, “I’ll do so now. And when we’re down, I’ll
have a little practice in the open.”
Whereupon he skated to the landing, scrambled down the stairs, sped up
Middle Temple Lane, and called the porter to let us out into Fleet
Street. He struck me as a man who differed in some respects from the
popular conception of a curate.
“I’ll race you to Ludgate Circus and back,” said the clergyman.
“You’re too fast,” said Malim; “it must be a handicap.”
“We might do it level in a cab,” said I, for I saw a hansom crawling
towards us.
“Done,” said the Rev. John Hatton. “Done, for half-a-crown!”
I climbed into the hansom, and Malim, about to follow me, found that a
constable, to whom the soil of the City had given spontaneous birth,
was standing at his shoulder. “Wot’s the game?” inquired the officer,
with tender solicitude.
“A fine night, Perkins,” remarked Hatton.
“A fine morning, beggin’ your pardon, sir,” said the policeman
facetiously. He seemed to be an acquaintance of the skater.
“Reliability trials,” continued Hatton. “Be good enough to start us,
Perkins.”
“Very good, sir,” said Perkins.
“Drive to Ludgate Circus and back, and beat the gentleman on the
skates,” said Malim to our driver, who was taking the race as though he
assisted at such events in the course of his daily duty.
“Hi shall say, ‘Are you ready? Horf!’”
“We shall have Perkins applying to the Jockey Club for Ernest
Willoughby’s job,” whispered Malim.
“Are you ready? Horf!”
Hatton was first off the mark. He raced down the incline to the Circus
at a tremendous speed. He was just in sight as he swung laboriously
round and headed for home. But meeting him on our outward journey, we
noticed that the upward slope was distressing him. “Shall we do it?” we
asked.
“Yessir,” said our driver. And now we, too, were on the up grade. We
went up the hill at a gallop: were equal with Hatton at Fetter Lane,
and reached the Temple Gate yards to the good.
The ancient driver of a four-wheeler had been the witness of the
finish.
He gazed with displeasure upon us.
“This ’ere’s a nice use ter put Fleet Street to, I don’t think,” he
said coldly.
This sarcastic rebuke rather damped us, and after Hatton had paid Malim
his half-crown, and had invited me to visit him, we departed.
“Queer chap, Hatton,” said Malim as we walked up the Strand.
I was to discover at no distant date that he was distinctly a
many-sided man. I have met a good many clergymen in my time, but I have
never come across one quite like the Rev. John Hatton.