09 Not George Washington Read online

  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 l
ike 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 hardworking 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–-“

  “When I came to London,” I said, firmly, “I was most desperately in love. I was to make a fortune, incidentally my name, marry, and live happily ever after. There seemed last year nothing complex about that programme. It seemed almost too simple. I even, like a fool, thought to add an extra touch of piquancy to it by endeavouring to be a Bohemian. I then discovered that what I was attempting was not so simple as I had imagined. To begin with, Bohemians diffuse their brains in every direction except that where bread-and-butter comes from. I found, too, that unless one earns bread-and-butter, one has to sprint very fast to the workhouse door to prevent oneself starving before one gets there; so I dropped Bohemia and I dropped many other pleasant fictions as well. I took to examining pavements, saw how hard they were, had a look at the gutters, and saw how broad they were. I noticed the accumulation of dirt on the house fronts, the actual proportions of industrial buildings. I observed closely the price of food, clothes, and roofs.”

  “You became a realist.”

  “Yes; I read a good deal of Gissing about then, and it scared me. I pitied myself. And after that came pity for the girl I loved. I swore that I would never let her come to my side in the ring where the monster Poverty and I were fighting. If you’ve been there you’ve been in hell. And if you come out with your soul alive you can’t tell other people what it felt like. They couldn’t understand.”

  Julian nodded. “I understand, you know,” he said gravely.

  “Yes, you’ve been there,” I said. “Well, you’ve seen that my little turn-up with the monster was short and sharp. It wasn’t one of the old-fashioned, forty-round, most-of-a-lifetime, feint-for-an-opening, in-and-out affairs. Our pace was too fast for that. We went at it both hands, fighting all the time. I was going for the knock-out in the first round. Not your method, Julian.”

  “No,” said Julian; “it’s not my method. I treat the monster rather as a wild animal than as a hooligan; and hearing that wild animals won’t do more than sniff at you if you lie perfectly still, I adopted that ruse towards him to save myself the trouble of a conflict. But the effect of lying perfectly still was that I used to fall asleep; and that works satisfactorily.”

  “Julian,” I said, “I detect a touch of envy in your voice. You try to keep it out, but you can’t. Wait a bit, though. I haven’t finished.

  “As you know, I had the monster down in less than no time. I said to myself, ‘I’ve won. I’ll write to Margaret, and tell her so!’ Do you know I had actually begun to write the letter when another thought struck me. One that started me sweating and shaking. ‘The monster,’ I said again to myself, ‘the monster is devilish cunning. Perhaps he’s only shamming! It looks as if he were beaten. Suppose it’s only a feint to get me off my guard. Suppose he just wants me to take my eyes off him so that he may get at me again as soon as I’v
e begun to look for a comfortable chair and a mantelpiece to rest my feet on!’ I told myself that I wouldn’t risk bringing Margaret over. I didn’t dare chance her being with me if ever I had to go back into the ring. So I kept jumping and stamping on the monster. The referee had given me the fight and had gone away; and, with no one to stop me, I kicked the life out of him.”

  “No, you didn’t,” interrupted Julian. “Excuse me, I’m sure you didn’t. I often wake up and hear him prowling about.”

  “Yes; but there’s a separate monster set apart for each of us. It’s Fate who arranges the programme, and, by stress of business, Fate postpones many contests so late that before they can take place the man has died. Those who die before their fight comes on are called rich men. To return, however, to my own monster: I was at last convinced that he was dead a thousand times–-“

  “How long have you had this conviction?” asked Julian.

  “The absolute certainty that my monster has ceased to exist came to me this morning whilst I brushed my hair.”

  “Ah,” said Julian; “and now, I suppose, you really will write to Miss Margaret–-” He paused.

  “Goodwin?”

  “To Miss Margaret Goodwin,” he repeated.

  “Look here, Julian,” I said irritably; “it’s no use your repeating every observation I make as though you were Massa Johnson on Margate Sands.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  I was silent for a moment. Then I confessed.

  “Julian,” I said, “I can’t write to her. You need neither say that I’m a blackguard nor that you’re sorry for us both. At this present moment I’ve no more affection for Margaret than I have for this chair. When precisely I left off caring for her I don’t know. Why I ever thought I loved her I don’t know, either. But ever since I came to London all the love I did have for her has been ebbing away every day.”