VI

I found that the clerks at the Apollo Fire Office were much more

interesting than the work, and I told Mr. Blades so on an occasion when

with his usual great generosity he had given me some useful help,

because I was behind-hand and had forgotten what I ought to have

remembered. But that I should find the clerks more interesting than the

work did not please Mr. Blades, and he thought badly of the idea.

“If you are going to be an insurance clerk, the first thing is to master

the insurance business,” he said, very truly and wisely to me; and then

it was that I told him of my great ambition to become an actor in the

future. He instantly disapproved of it.

“There was a clerk in this office in the past, and he went on the stage

and did well,” he admitted; “but he was exceptional in every way. He was

older than you and had a very remarkably handsome face.”

“In tragedy,” I said, “a handsome face doesn’t matter so much.”

“When you talk of tragedy,” answered Mr. Blades, “you mention the

greatest heights of the profession. You are not built to play tragic

parts, being far too thin and long in the legs, in my opinion. Besides,

it is a calling in which only one in a thousand does any real good. I

should advise you to stick to insurance and try to master the principles

of it.”

Of course I was getting on, but the lower walks of the science of

insurance are tame, and it would not be interesting to explain rates and

risks and tariffs and the explosive point of mineral oils and other

important things, all of which have to be taken into account by the

beginner.

But the clerks were far more full of interest, and some were stern and

ambitious men, who were determined sooner or later to get to the top of

the office and become Secretary; and some were easy men without great

ambition, but full of ideas, though the ideas were not about the science

of risk from fire. There was one remarkable man, whose age was

thirty-two, and he lived at Clapham in lodgings all alone. This man,

whose name was Tomlinson, possessed enormous ability in the direction of

racehorses. His knowledge of these famous quadrupeds was most

extraordinary. If you looked into a paper and saw the name of a

racehorse, Tomlinson would instantly tell you whether it was a male or

female horse, and the name of its father and mother, or I should say

sire and dam. He would also tell you its age and its owner and its

trainer and the jockeys who had ridden it, and the races it had run and

was going to run, and the money, if any, it had earned in stakes during

its career.

In this singular man’s desk were evidences of his passion for the turf.

Nailed to the lid was the shoe or “racing plate” of a Derby winner, and

arranged round it were photographic portraits of racehorses extracted

from packets of cigarettes. A particular brand of cigarettes always

contained these portraits, and so, naturally, Tomlinson smoked them. He

seldom went to race-meetings himself, but read all the particulars of

each race with great perseverance, in order to guide his future betting

transactions. He had a Turf Agent and visited him frequently during the

luncheon hour, and on the occasion of the classic races, such as the

Derby and Oaks, or St. Leger, Tomlinson always arranged a sweepstake in

the Country Department of the Apollo Fire Office and was well thought of

for doing so.

He said that if he had been blessed with a good income he should have

become a “gentleman backer,” which is some particular order of

turf-specialist; and if he had been born with real wealth, he should

have been an owner of racehorses, and a member of the Jockey Club. As it

was, he knew several jockeys—though, curiously enough, jockeys are not

themselves members of this far-famed club.

Then I might mention Wardle, who was the chief of one of the divisions

of the Country Department, and a man of such varied mind that, while

very skillful in his profession of insurance, he yet found leisure to

develop the art of music to the very highest pitch. He was, in fact, a

professional organist on Sundays; and not contented with this, actually

composed music in the loftiest Gregorian manner, and played it on his

organ before the congregation. His way of work was a great revelation to

me, for while Tomlinson might be calculating the proper weights for a

handicap, or taking down names for a sweepstake, Wardle, with a piece of

music paper before him, which it always was in his spare moments, would

be arranging triumphs of thorough bass and counterpoint and so on—all to

delight his congregation some day, when the composition was finished. He

did not like Wagner, and told me that he was a charlatan and would soon

vanish forever; but Mozart he considered his own master, and said that

Mozart was the very spirit and essence and soul of religious music. He

spoke bitterly, but quite patiently, about the vicar of the church where

he played and said that the man, though a well-meaning and honourable

man, had never grasped the powers of music in religion.

“If he had,” said Wardle, “I should have had a new organ to play upon

long ago. Our instrument is very inferior and our choir a thing of

nought. As it is, the people come to hear me and not him.”

But one of his pieces of music had been played by a friend on the organ

of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Wardle had heard it and been a good deal

moved to find how his composition came out amid the solemn and glorious

architecture of that sacred edifice. He hoped it would be played at

Westminster Abbey, when the regular organist was taking his holiday and

his locum tenens, as they call it, was in his place. Because this locum

tenens was known to Mr. Wardle and believed in his powers of

composition.

This genuine musician, on finding that every sort of art interested me a

good deal, became very friendly and was so good as to ask me to go to

his church one Sunday and hear him play, and have dinner with him

afterwards. It was a great compliment, and of course I went and was

deeply impressed to see the amazing ease with which Wardle, in surplice

and cassock, handled his organ and managed the pedals and pulled out

stops, and turned over the music and played psalms and hymns and

responses and so on,—all with unfailing success. During the collection

the hymn came to an end too soon, and doubtless, with a less complete

master of harmony than Wardle, an awkward pause would have ensued; but,

with a nerve begot of long practice, he permitted his fingers to stray

over the “Ivories,” as they call them, and his feet to stray over the

pedals, with a result both rich and harmonious. A solemn melody

reverberated through the aisles and rolled from the instrument, and

entirely concealed the mean sound of pennies and threepenny pieces

falling into the collecting dishes.

I praised this feat warmly after the service and Wardle was gratified

that I had noticed it. Then I asked him why he did not commit such an

improvisation to paper, so that it should not be lost, and he laughed

and said:

“Why, it was a music-hall tune: ‘_Father’s teeth are stopped with

zinc!_’”

He explained, to my great astonishment, that if you alter the time and

the general hang of a tune, and play it with all the solemn notes and

deep stops and flourishes of an organ, the most skillful ear is

deceived. It was only another tribute to the man’s amazing cleverness;

but somehow I felt disappointed that he should have done this thing. It

seemed unworthy of him. He had a piano of his own, secured on the hire

system; and upon this instrument, after dinner, he played me a great

deal of his own music, including many of the numbers from a beautiful

fairy opera that he had written with a friend—the words being by the

friend.

“The libretto is footle,” confessed Wardle; “but if I could only get a

libretto worth talking about, I should surprise some of us.”

I told him that he had already surprised me; but, of course, he meant

the outer world of opera-goers and enthusiasts of music, who abound in

London, and are to be seen thronging the great concert halls by night.

Another man of exceptional genius was Bassett—a volunteer and a crack

shot. He belonged to the Artists’ Corps and was, you might say, every

inch a soldier, in the complete disguise of an insurance clerk.

This martial man seemed always to be panting for bloodshed, and openly

hoped that England would go to war with some important nation—in fact,

one of the Great Powers for choice—before he was too old to participate

in the struggle. He knew as much of our military heroes as Tomlinson

knew of our racehorses. He was not content with being a sergeant in the

Artists’ Corps and one of their leading marksmen, but also went into the

deepest science of battle and tactics and strategy. He read war by day

and he dreamed of war by night, and he would have liked to see

conscription come in at any moment.

This fiery, but large-hearted man was very anxious for me to become a

volunteer, and it was a great sorrow to me to find that he did not feel

any further interest in me when I refused to do so, while thanking him

heartily for the idea. He said that drilling was far better and more

useful than going down to the L.A.C. to caper about half-naked, and that

if I did regular drills and so on, I should in time come to the Field

Days, and have all the joy of forced marches and maneuvers at Easter,

and sleeping under canvas, and going on sentry duty by night and waking

to the ringing sound of the trumpet at dawn.

But none of these things tempted me as much as Bassett expected. In

fact, I had already discovered in earlier life that the god Mars was

nothing to me. Bassett said that he didn’t know what the young

generation was coming to when I told him this, and he hinted, rather

openly, that I was unpatriotic. But I would not allow that I was. I

said:

“We can’t all be volunteers, any more than we can all be proper

soldiers.”

And Dicky Travers, who, though also quite dead to the martial spirit,

was a most patriotic man in sporting matters, called Bassett a

“dog-shooter”!

This, however, was merely repartee, of which Mr. Travers was a complete

master. In fact, he had invented a nickname for everybody in the

Department, and at his wish, having a slight turn for rhyming, I made up

a long poem of thirty-eight verses, being one verse for each man in the

Department. The mere poetry, which was nothing, was mine; but the rich

humour and subtle irony, not to say satire, was the work of Dicky

Travers. Each verse of this poem was arranged in the shape of a

“Limerick,” which is a simple sort of rhyme well suited to humour

combined with satire; and it showed the delicate skill of Mr. Travers

and his surprising knowledge of human nature, that each person who read

the poem invariably laughed very heartily at thirty-seven verses—in

fact, all except the verse about himself. I noticed this peculiar fact

and was rather astonished at it; but Travers was not astonished. He

said:

“My dear Corkey, when you are as old as I am, you will find that to see

your friends scored off is one of those trials in life which you can

always manage to get over. But the feeling is entirely different when

anybody scores off you.”

I may give a glimpse of yet another first-class and original man before

concluding this short chapter and proceeding to more serious business.

In some ways Mr. Bent, who lived at Chislehurst, was among the most

naturally gifted of the staff of the Country Department of the Apollo.

His talent, or you might almost say “genius,” was purely horticultural;

and by dint of long and patient study, and devoting his entire spare

income and all his spare time to the subject, he had gradually arranged

and planted a garden that would undoubtedly have become historical, if

only it had been a little bit larger.

It was his custom to give the Department a taste of his great skill

during the summer months, for flowers were to him what a sporting paper

was to Tomlinson, or a rifle to Bassett—in fact, the breath of his

nostrils.

On his desk he had two vases, and in these vases always stood choice

blossoms during official hours. Sometimes I recognised them, and oftener

I did not; but when I did not, Mr. Bent, who was a man of mild

expression and thin and stooping appearance, told me the names, such as

Alströmeria and Carpentaria and Berberidopsis and Oncocyclus Iris and

Pardanthes and Calochortus and Magnolia and Mummy Pea and many another

horticultural triumph of the rarest sort. After the day was done, with

the generosity of the born gardener, he would give away these precious

things to anybody who wanted a buttonhole; but there were times when he

naturally expected some return for magnificent hothouse exotics, which

he brought to the office in the depths of winter or early spring, when

flowers were worth money. Such things as gardenias and Maréchal Niel

roses and Eucharis lilies he invariably raffled—not, as he told me, for

gain, but simply to pay, or help pay, for the expense of buying coke for

his hothouse, the temperature of which had to be kept up to fever heat,

as you might say, in order that the various tropical marvels grown by

Mr. Bent should survive the English winter.

Finding that I was very anxious to understand gardening, because I knew

that many famous actors had said in newspapers that they occupied their

leisure in their palatial gardens and orchid houses, Mr. Bent most

kindly allowed me to go down one afternoon after office hours, not only

to see his garden, but, better still, to watch him gardening in it.

“It is a pursuit that needs certain gifts,” he told me, as we rode in

the train to Chislehurst. “You must, of course, first have the

enthusiasm and love of the science for itself but that is not enough.

You must make sacrifices and read learned books and study the

life-history of plants and their various requirements. Some, for

instance, like lime and some die if you give them lime. A lily, or a

rhodo. or an azalea hates lime; a rose likes it. Some alpine plants must

have limestone chips to be prosperous; others, again, like granite

chips. My son, a child of tender age but already full of the gardening

instinct, once gave a choice saxifrage a pennyworth of cocoanut

chips—under the infantile hope that what pleased him so well would

please the plant. A touching story which does not in my opinion spoil by

repetition.”

In this improving way Mr. Bent talked, and when we reached his home he

disappeared instantly to don his gardening clothes, while his wife gave

me some tea. She, too, was a gardener and very kindly advised me to be

especially delighted with a plant called Mysotidium, which Mr. Bent had

flowered for the first time in his life. It was rather like a huge

forget-me-not with rhubarb leaves, and it came from New Zealand and cost

five shillings.

Then Mrs. Bent’s little boy arrived and she told me how he had given

cocoanut chips to the saxifrage; and he didn’t like me, unfortunately,

and wouldn’t go into the garden with me. And then Mr. Bent returned

accoutred in all the trappings of the professional gardener. He wore a

blue apron and leather gloves and a clump of bast sticking out of his

pocket; and his trousers and sleeves turned up and everything complete.

“I must be busy,” he said, “but my collection is completely labeled, and

you will have no difficulty in following the general scheme of the

garden.”

This was true, because of the great simplicity of the scheme. The

garden, in fact, ran down quite straight between two other gardens, and

finished at a brick wall.

“A howling wilderness you see on each side,” explained Mr. Bent, waving

his trowel to the right and left. By this he meant, of course, that the

other gardens only had roses and wallflowers and carnations and

larkspurs and lilac, and the common or garden flowers familiar to the

common or garden gardener. But it was no “side” on Mr. Bent’s part to

talk in this scornful way, because to him, from his eagle heights of

horticulture, so to speak, his neighbours’ gardens were barren wastes,

with nothing in them to detain the expert for a moment.

His garden was literally stuffed with rare and curious things. He

admitted that some of them were not beautiful; but they were rare and in

some cases he doubted if anybody else in Kent had them. It never

occurred to him that nobody else in Kent might want them. Everything was

beautifully labelled with metal labels, and many of the rarer and more

precious alpine plants had zinc guards put round them to keep away

garden pests, such as slugs and snails.

I couldn’t believe that a snail would have dared to show his face in

that garden; but Mr. Bent said he always had to be fighting them, and

that sometimes they conquered and managed to scale a zinc guard and

devour a small choice alpine in a single night!

He had most beautiful flowers to show me; or rather he let me walk up

and down among them while he gardened. It was very interesting to see

the sure professional touch of Mr. Bent. He never hesitated or doubted

what to do. He knew exactly what to cut off a plant, or how much water

to give it, or how to tie up a trailer. He planted out a few seedling

zinnias to show me. Then he watered them in and removed the seed boxes,

and all was neat and tidy in a moment.

He handled long and difficult Latin names with the consummate ease of a

native, and he showed me piles of gardeners’ catalogues. Once he had

raised a begonia from seed, which they accepted at Kew Gardens, and the

Director of Kew gave him something in exchange for his hothouse.

“It died,” said Mr. Bent, “and that through no fault of mine; but the

distinction and the compliment have not died and never will.”

He was a member of the R.H.S., or Royal Horticultural Society, and he

had shown a plant now and again at their meetings, but without any

honour falling to it.

Before supper I was allowed to help Mr. Bent with a garden hose on the

grass; and while we were at work a man from next-door looked over the

wall and wished Mr. Bent “good-evening” and asked for some advice.

Seeing me, he told me the story of Mr. Bent’s little boy and the

cocoanut chips for the third time; then he explained to Mr. Bent that

his sweet peas were curling up rather oddly and said that he would thank

him to go and have a look at them.

“Good Lord, the peas a failure!” said Mr. Bent; then with his usual

kindness he instantly hastened to see if anything could be done. When he

returned I could see that he was troubled.

“His peas have failed,” he said. “It is one of those disasters that come

upon even good gardeners sometimes. Not that Mason is a good gardener,

or, in fact, a gardener at all in the real sense. I don’t know what has

happened to his peas—the trouble is below ground and might be one of

five different things; but all is over with the peas. I have told him to

give up hope about them. I may be able to spare him some annuals later.”

Mrs. Bent, who was a most perfect woman for a gardener’s wife, insisted

on picking me a bunch of good and sweet flowers before I went away, and

then, just as I was going, Mr. Bent’s brother-in-law walked past the

gate and stopped to ask a horticultural question. He was a beginner, but

such was Mr. Bent’s fire and genius in these matters that he inspired

everybody with his own passion for the science and, as he truly said, no

one could know him intimately without sooner or later becoming a

gardener.

I am sure I was full of enthusiastic joy about it after supper, and if

my Aunt Augusta had had enough garden to grow a blade of grass, I should

have planted one. Even as it was, I planned a box for bulbs and things

during the next autumn.

Mr. Bent’s brother-in-law happened to be going to the tobacconist’s, and

he walked as far as the station with me after he had bought half a pound

of coarse tobacco to fumigate his greenhouse, which was bursting with

green-fly and other pests. Thus I heard the story of Mr. Bent’s little

boy and the cocoanut chips for the fourth time, and it was rather

instructive in its way to find how the fun of it had waned. In fact,

such was my feeling to the story, that I didn’t even tell it to Aunt

Augusta when I got home; though, coming fresh to her, it might have

faintly amused her.

As an example of the poem that I had written with Dicky Travers, I may

here quote the verse upon Mr. Bent. It ran as follows:

“A middle-aged wonder called Bent,

Made the deuce of a garden in Kent,

And his roses and lilies

And daffadown dillies

All helped with the gentleman’s rent.”

Here, you see, was humour combined with satire. But the peculiarity of

the poem held in the case of this verse, as it did in all the others.

While everybody else thought it good, Mr. Bent considered it vulgar and

didn’t like it in the least, because of the ironic allusion to raffles.

He never asked me to see his garden again, though I entered for raffle

after raffle of his choice exotics and once won four fine gardenias, at

the ridiculous cost of a penny, and took them home to Aunt Augusta.