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 _passe_ 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.
CHAPTER 8
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 Cafe 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.
Chapter 9
JULIAN LEARNS MY SECRET
_(James Orlebar Cloyster's narrative continued)_
A difficulty in the life of a literary man in London is the question of
getting systematic exercise. At school and college I had been
accustomed to play games every day, and now I felt the change acutely.
It was through this that I first became really intimate with John
Hatton, and incidentally with Sidney Price, of the Moon Assurance
Company. I happened to mention my trouble one night in Hatton's rooms.
I had been there frequently since my first visit.
"None of my waistcoats fit," I remarked.
"My dear fellow," said Hatton, "I'll give you exercise and to spare;
that is to say, if you can box."
"I'm not a champion," I said; "but I'm fond of it. I shouldn't mind
taking up boxing again. There's nothing like it for exercise."
"Quite right, James," he replied; "and exercise, as I often tell my
boys, is essential."
"What boys?" I asked.
"My club boys," said Hatton. "They belong to the most dingy quarter of
the whole of London - South Lambeth. They are not hooligans. They are
not so interesting as that. They represent the class of youth that is a
stratum or two above hooliganism. Frightful weeds. They lack the robust
animalism of the class below them, and they lack the intelligence of
the class above them. The fellows at my club are mostly hard-working
mechanics and under-paid office boys. They have nothing approaching a
sense of humour or the instinct of sport."
"Not very encouraging," I said.
"Nor picturesque," said Hatton; "and that is why they've been so
neglected. There is romance in an out-and-out hooligan. It interests
people to reform him. But to the outsider my boys are dull. I don't
find them so. But then I know them. Boxing lessons are just what they
want. In fact, I was telling Sidney Price, an insurance clerk who lives
in Lambeth and helps me at the club, only yesterday how much I wished
we could teach them to use the gloves."
"I'll take it on, then, Hatton, if you like," I said. "It ought to keep
me in form."
I found that it did. I ceased to be aware of my liver. That winter I
was able to work to good purpose, and the result was that I arrived. It
dawned upon me at last that the "precarious" idea was played out. One
could see too plainly the white sheet and phosphorus.
And I was happy. Happier, perhaps, than I had ever hoped to be.
Happier, in a sense, than I can hope to be again. I had congenial work,
and, what is more, I had congenial friends.
What friends they were!
Julian - I seem to see him now sprawling in his hammock, sucking his
pipe, planning an advertisement, or propounding some whimsical theory
of life; and in his eyes he bears the pain of one whose love and life
are spoilt. Julian - no longer my friend.
Kit and Malim - what evenings are suggested by those names.
Evenings alone with Malim at his flat in Vernon Place. An unimpeachable
dinner, a hand at picquet, midnight talk with the blue smoke wreathing
round our heads.
Well, Malim and I are unlikely to meet again in Vernon Place. Nor shall
we foregather at the little house in the Hampstead Road, the house
which Kit enveloped in an inimitable air of domesticity. Her past had
not been unconnected with the minor stage. She could play on the piano
from ear, and sing the songs of the street with a charming cockney
twang. But there was nothing of the stage about her now. She was born
for domesticity and, as the wife of Malim, she wished to forget all
that had gone before. She even hesitated to give us her wonderful
imitations of the customers at the fried fish shop, because in her
heart she did not think such impersonations altogether suitable for a
respectable married woman.
It was Malim who got me elected to the Barrel Club. I take it that I
shall pay few more visits there.
I have mentioned at this point the love of my old friends who made my
first years in London a period of happiness, since it was in this month
of April that I had a momentous conversation with Julian about
Margaret.
He had come to Walpole Street to use my typewriter, and seemed amazed
to find that I was still living in much the same style as I had always
done.
"Let me see," he said. "How long is it since I was here last?"
"You came some time before Christmas."
"Ah, yes," he said reminiscently. "I was doing a lot of travelling just
then." And he added, thoughtfully, "What a curious fellow you are,
Jimmy. Here are you making - - " He glanced at me.
"Oh, say a thousand a year."
" - Fifteen hundred a year, and you live in precisely the same shoddy
surroundings as you did when your manuscripts were responsible for an
extra size in waste-paper baskets. I was surprised to hear that you
were still in Walpole Street. I supposed that, at any rate, you had
taken the whole house."
His eyes raked the little sitting-room from the sham marble mantelpiece
to the bamboo cabinet. I surveyed it, too, and suddenly it did seem
unnecessarily wretched and depressing.
Julian looked at me curiously.
"There's some mystery here," he said.
"Don't be an ass, Julian," I replied weakly.
"It's no good denying it," he retorted; "there's some mystery. You're a
materialist. You don't live like this from choice. If you were to
follow your own inclinations, you'd do things in the best style you
could run to. You'd be in Jermyn Street; you'd have your man, a cottage
in Surrey; you'd entertain, go out a good deal. You'd certainly give up
these dingy quarters. My friendship for you deplores a mammoth skeleton
in your cupboard, James. My study of advertising tells me that this
paltry existence of yours does not adequately push your name before the
public. You're losing money, you're - - "
"Stop, Julian," I exclaimed.
"_Cherchez_," he continued, "_cherchez_ - - "
"Stop! Confound you, stop! I tell you - - "
"Come," he said laughing. "I mustn't force your confidence; but I can't
help feeling it's odd - - "