JIMMY.HISfull name was James Adolphus Carol, but everyone called him just Jimmy. He was Jimmy to all of us in the Inn; Jimmy to the music-hall managers and music-hall artistes.He was a little spindle-shanked fellow, like a jockey, but a bit too gentlemanly. He had bulging, gray-blue eyes and a sunken, heavily freckled face. His top hat was always very sleek and a little on one side, but the rest of his dress fell short of perfect finish. I’ve seen him with his shoe tied up with string and his collar pinned together in front because he’d lost his last stud.He was dreadfully hard up, but that is nothing. We resent a prosperous fellow. I don’t fancy he ever had any regular meals. Men stood him drinks, and he had a trick of turning up at your rooms about midnight, talking brilliantly and wildly for about half an hour, and then saying carelessly, “Have you got any bread and butter knocking about, oldman?” Fellows who didn’t know him very well would suggest a square meal—a chop, or a sausage and mashed at Mimm’s, just outside the gates—then Jimmy would be affronted.He was always being dunned and pretended that he liked it. Perhaps he really did. He was full of schemes for evading duns. He was an authority on judgment-summonses, pawnshops, shooting the moon, and obtaining credit. He would hold forth eloquently on the delights of being dunned. I forget the particular points he made, but they were very forcible—coming from him.He used to borrow unblushingly, but his gift in that way was restricted—very few of us had any money to lend.He had the finest private collection of pawn-tickets that I ever saw. His pockets were full of them. I remembered that he once went to a swell party—some musical affair. He was very polite, very strict on questions of etiquette. The day after the party he made the usual formal call at the house—it was some big place near Sloane Street. His hat was very sleek, he had a frock coat, a flower inhis button-hole—everything complete. He handed his card to the footman, and as he did so a couple of pawn-tickets fluttered gently to the door-mat. The flunkey stooped, picked them up, and handed them gracefully back to Jimmy—who took them with equal grace. He told me the whole performance was superb—in perfect style. It was done without a word, without a smile. They did not dare look at each other.Jimmy’s rooms were untidy and his style of housekeeping not to be commended. He never kept a laundress for very long—because he never paid her. Yet the women loved him and worked for nothing so long as they could. He used to chaff them lightly, explain the state of his exchequer. He took a personal interest in their family life. They told him their troubles; drunken husbands, big families, pugnacious lodgers on the next landing, the hard heart of the landlords when they came upstairs with their black books for the weekly rent.When Mrs. Morey was ill Jimmy went down Green Street to see her, with a couple of French novels—translations—under his arm. She hada gathering on her ankle which she showed him with pride, in spite of his courteous protest, but she declined the offer of the novels.“You’re very kind, sir,” she said. “But I don’t suppose as your books ’ud suit me. I was brought up very particular. I like something good—the Bible or the Common Prayer or the Sunday newspaper. I makes my ’usband read ‘When the wicked man turneth,’ in the ’opes it ’ll be a lesson to ’im. No, there’s nothin’ as the doctor’s ordered, thank you, sir—except to keep my strength up.”She took Jimmy’s last sixpence gratefully, and asked him to stop and share the half-quartern of gin which her youngest little girl but three ran to the public house to fetch. Very likely he stayed; it would have been just like him. He was a crank. Fancy a man offering Paul de Kock and Flaubert to an Inn of Court laundress! He paid for the gin, but he lightly ignored the two months’ money he owed her, and she never reminded him.His sitting room was full of books, on open shelves and thick with dust. They were the admiration of Mrs. Morey.“I thought Mr. Slobkins ’ad a lot,” she said, “’im as I worked for in Furnival’s. ’E’s a magistrate or a clerk or somethin’ o’ that sort, yer see. But, lor, this lot bangs ’is.”Stanch Mrs. Morey! She was a little roly-poly kind of woman, with eyes like ripe sloes, and she worked for Jimmy for six months without ever receiving a penny.“My ’usband ’ud kill me if ’e knowed,” she said, smiling plaintively as she scrubbed the boards. “’E’s bin out o’ work for nearly a year. It’s hard work for me to fill the kids’ mouths and keep ’im in grub and pocket money. But ’e’s a good ’usband when ’e aint drunk. I wish ’e ’ad more luck, that’s all.”“What is his trade?” asked Jimmy languidly—he was always languid until the gas lamps were lighted.The little woman tossed her head.“My ’usband aintthatsort, jest able to do one kind o’ work. ’E can turn ’is ’and to anythin’. But I wish ’e wasn’t quite so partikler.”She came to me privately when Jimmy’s healthbegan to break. She said that he didn’t eat enough to keep a sparrow alive, that it worried her awful, that she feared he was going off in a galloping decline.“It’s jest the way my niece’s ’usband was took,” she concluded. “’E used to drive a vegetable cart, and ’e’s layin’ in the Brompton Simmetery. As nice a young man as ever you see, and played the flute bootiful. ’E was took bad in May and dead in December. He was indeed, and ’er with six little children—all babies, as you might say, and another on the road—if you’ll excuse my free way of speakin’. My niece she’s got the flute under a glass case in the parlor window, for the mountings is silver.”But Jimmy was too far gone for my care, or anyone else’s. No doubt he had been consumptive for years, and a constitution kept up principally on “nipping” never thrives. There was a doctor living in the Inn at the time—a very good fellow. He visited him and gave him medicine—don’t believe Jimmy ever took it. His cough got gradually worse and his face fell in more than ever. But hewas always full of jokes, rather grim jokes sometimes. I’ve seen girls shiver and scream with laughter at the same time. He went to a music hall every night, spending most of his time at the bar. He called the artistes by their Christian names—Queenie this, or Dan the other. The Queenies gave him their full confidence. Big, flashy girls, these music-hall girls, with free, not over-clean tongues and very good hearts. They would frighten you, but they don’t mean any harm. Jimmy used to write songs for them—which they very seldom bought. He did both words and music. His airs were most melodious and “catchy,” but his words were never quite vulgar enough. None of his songs “caught on.”I never knew a man with such a marvelous ear. If he went to a comic opera he would come straight home and play all the lyrics without a false note. He played Chopin by ear; he used to sit for hours extemporizing the most weird, fascinating, tantalizing music. He ought to have made his fortune. Instead of that, he went into consumption and died—for want of proper food.Now and again someone sent him a postal order. He never said who. He was a bit of a mystery. They were only small orders—under a pound, as if they had been scraped by some woman out of the housekeeping money, or her dress allowance. But I never knew. The last one he had was for fifteen shillings. He was on his last legs. The steward of the Inn, who was most forbearing—because it was Jimmy—had sent a deprecating note in to say that he must distrain if something, ever so little, was not paid on account of the year’s rent. Mrs. Morey had left him at last. Even his top hat was rough. Yet what do you think he did? Went out and bought a bath sponge for fifteen and six, promising to leave the sixpence next time he was passing.I met him on the stairs and he displayed the sponge proudly.“Only fifteen and six! Dirt cheap, isn’t it? It would be unpardonable extravagance to let a chance like that slip, wouldn’t it? And I wanted a bath sponge; the one I’ve got isn’t nearly big enough. Come up to my place. We’ll put it in water. Just you watch how it swells!”You may say bluntly that he was a fool. Of course he was. But it is the fools and the failures who win our hearts.We went up to his rooms. He put the sponge to swell and sat down to the piano and forgot all about it. I should like to hear Jimmy play music-hall songs again; nothing was ever so charming. He knew them all. He used to sing the refrains in a thin, shrill voice, accompanying in his own wonderful way. Everything he touched became classic.A week after he bought the sponge Harrowsmith—he was the young doctor—ordered him out of London. Fortunately I made a haul about that time, so we went together to Farthings Farm, as I’ll tell you later on.Farthings Farm was the last nail in Jimmy’s coffin. He never spent a more miserable month. He would be morose, half asleep all day. But at dusk, just when the theaters would be opening and the racket in the Strand at its flow, he’d be restless. All the sweet smells and sounds of the farm were a poor enough substitute. The country finished him. He was a pure Cockney. There is no half way withthe Cockney; either he loves the country passionately, or he hates it and chafes at it until it kills him. Saints and criminals are made by the country; it depends on how you take it. We hadn’t been back ten days before he broke a blood vessel and kept his bed. What was to be done with him?Henever bothered. He believed in taking things easy. He had a favorite axiom about never putting up your umbrella until it rained—and ended by not having an umbrella at all! He just drifted. He was dying. He hadn’t a penny in the world; he was up to his eyes in small debts.“Pack him off to the hospital,” advised Arnold rather brutally. “Poor devil! A fellow who earns a fiver and lives on it until it’s gone. I’ve no sympathy with that sort of thing. The hospital’s the place for him. I’ll pay the cab fare.”However, the rest of us decided to club together and keep him going, first telling Arnold that he did the invalid an injustice; Jimmy had never earned a five-pound note, in a lump sum, in his life. Harrowsmith had told us privately that his case was quite hopeless. We could pull along somehow.Nutting, the steward, would wait a little longer for his rent; when Jimmy was gone the piano alone would pay that. One or other of us could look in; Mrs. Morey must be got back. The only difficulty was with Jimmy himself—he was so deuced proud.A woman came to the rescue. Queenie La Belle was a regular brick. She bought up all his songs. Who but a woman would have thought of that? She’d come in, all sham diamonds and jolly voice, and sit down by his bed and tell him how well his songs were going at the halls. She said she was singing them at three nightly. She assured him that she was always encored. She begged him to take an extra ten pounds—the original price had been in shillings.“You see, I’ve made that girl,” Jimmy would say when she had gone. “I knew those songs would just fit her. She wants more. Give me a bit of paper and pencil, old chap. I’ll dot down another. Why does Harrowsmith keep me tied by the leg like this? I mean to get up next week and toddle down to the halls and hear my songs encored. They give Queenie a middle turn now. They usedto put her on at the end, to sing the audience out. I’m a made man. It’s just as well, with all the expenses of this illness. Are you going up Tottenham Court Road to-day? If so, look in and pay the fellow that sixpence owing on the sponge. I’ve never used it. Harrowsmith knocked me off my cold tub. You can’t mistake the shop. It’s nearly opposite Maple’s. I forget the name.”He put on tremendous airs. He was, as he proudly said, a made man. When he got better he was going to write songs at fabulous prices for all the leading music-hall singers. But Queenie La Belle should have them at a reasonable figure. She wasn’t a bad sort. She ought to be grateful to him. He had made her. He kept his money under his pillow with his tobacco pouch and cigarette papers. He said seriously to me:“If you’re a little short, old chap, there’s plenty of money in the bag. I’ve gone through the mill myself. I know what it is to come down to my last half-crown.”He might truthfully have said his last copper. To please him I took five shillings.Queenie came to see him regularly. He put the poor girl through a rigid cross-examination. Did the audience take up her two last lines, as he had intended? Were his songs on the barrel organs? The great ambition of his life had been to hear his songs on the barrel organs. But it was early days. It was just as well that they were not on yet. He wanted to hear them. Wanted to tip every grinder a bob. Queenie had to sing the songs to him; had to do the little kick at the end of each verse, pretend to throw the rose into the auditorium—that was Jimmy’s original trick.“I’d like to come down and hear you to-night at the Royal,” he sighed—and Queenie looked horribly frightened, until I reassured her by a dismal shake of the head. “But Harrowsmith is so particular. He keeps me in bed. Of course that makes a man weak. There’s nothing in the world the matter with me but weakness, through want of exercise.”Queenie put on her tremendous hat, all flyaway lace and wings. She stooped down and kissed him solemnly on his clammy forehead. I thought thebig, jolly girl, with her coarse voice and frank tongue, an angel at that moment. Jimmy looked scared and annoyed—suspicious of this unusual gentleness.She blubbered outside the bedroom door, growing purple in her efforts to choke her sobs lest he should hear.“It’s all a lie,” she said passionately. “I’m only on at one hall—last turn on the programme. His song don’t fetch even a grin. I’m expecting the manager to bully me on pay day. People don’t understand ’em—I don’t myself. It’s a lie. I was hissed—hissed! And there’s him, poor dear, talking of writing for Guy Blockley and Ada Fitz Clare. Oh! it’s all right about the ten pounds, I can run to that. Don’t you fret.”She colored, through her make-up—her daylight make-up, all careless smears of blue-white powder and burning smudges of red.Nearly every night, after the halls and the public houses were shut, one or two fellows would drop into Jimmy’s room and give him the evening’s news. They sang snatches of new songs to him, mimickedbits of “business.” They retailed the popular comedian’s latest gag, the story that was going the round of the clubs, the smart conundrum on public affairs or people.Jimmy used to join in weakly, drumming his claw-like fingers on the quilt. He talked of music-hall people of to-day; of five years ago; of men who had been lions and were content to take obscure turns in the provinces now, or who had gone in for the dramatic-agent business.They all ran off his glib tongue; the Sisters That, the Brothers So and So, the Something Troupe. He laughed at old wheezes, which had never lost their flavor for him. He spoke of this man’s pet mannerisms and that girl’s particular smile.He used to say:“Do you remember Joe Slashby’s trick with the pair of spectacles? That was killing,” or, “What’s become of the Manasteriotti girl? Never saw a woman juggle so well.”And he always condemned everyone else’s songs. He said it pained him to see the rot, the arrant, foolish drivel that went down with a music-hall audience.But he was going to alter all that. The public only wanted educating. The public knew a good thing when it heard it. That was proved by the success of his songs. How had his songs gone this evening? Queenie was a good sort, but he was a little nervous of her, afraid she didn’t quite do him justice. He added that she had treated him rather meanly; ten pounds was a poor price with which to buy success. She must be getting twenty pounds a week at the lowest. Three halls at twenty each. That would be sixty. He must speak to her.Success had not improved Jimmy. He was going the way of all successes. He actually spoke of starting a banking account when he got better, of giving a big order to his tailor. He probably would have decided on a house at Brixton and a brougham, if he had lived long enough. But—before he had time to tax Queenie over money matters—the end came.It was Saturday. Harrowsmith looked in about noon. He told me that Jimmy wouldn’t last another twenty-four hours. I went back to the bedroomand broke it. He was lying on his side, turning off another song. He took it very calmly, only hoping that he’d be able to get that third line in the second verse right before he went. It was very weak.Schultz, the great German composer, died the day before; it had been in the morning papers. Jimmy said composedly, when I mentioned it:“There’s another of us gone. Lucky devil!”He added a little rebelliously:“It’s rather rough to have to hand in your checks just when you’ve ‘arrived.’ I hope I shan’t be so long about it as the woman at Farthings Farm was. Queer old girl! You’ll make Harrowsmith send in his bill and pay up any little thing I owe. Get the money out of Queenie. That girl’s been a bit shabby. And just roll me a cigarette—there’s enough baccy in the pouch—and leave me alone to worry out this third line.”He was lying at the back; Orion, if you remember, had his bedroom in the front, but Jimmy had turned that into a bathroom.All the Saturday night bubble of the streets cameup into the little paneled room where he was dying. He liked it; asked me to open the window, so that he could hear the hoarse voices of the costers and the banter of the women. He liked the rattle of ’buses, the cries, the calls—all the feverish, struggling life.One by one the fellows dropped in as usual. He begged them not to put on such deathbed faces. How had his songs gone? He was afraid that he wouldn’t see Queenie any more. The fellows stayed; he begged them to. I’d asked him if he had any friends that he would like me to send for, and he returned airily that he hadn’t a relative in the world. His face never flinched when he said it.The night went on, and the room, although the month was August, got chilly. The sounds of the market died down, the omnibuses left off running, so did the trams; there was only a dying trundle of hansoms over the stones. Then all at once came a ringing howl from some slum at the back. They have pulled them nearly all down now. All the narrow courts I used to know, the tiny general shops, the row of almshouses, the big boiled-beefshop at the corner—gone. Residential flats are in their place and big shops with sky signs.It was some Saturday-night row. It came in plainly through the open window. Jimmy opened his eyes and listened with zest.You won’t understand the grim sentiment of those slum rows. They are simply part of the Saturday night’s programme—when the man gets his week’s money and the woman goes out shopping and they both are blind drunk by midnight. Simply part of Saturday night—that is all. It does not affect their relations for the rest of the week. The language they use to each other is awful—but what are words? We place too great a stress on mere words.Jimmy roused up a little, and grinned feebly.“Shouldn’t wonder if it’s Mrs. Morey,” he said.We sat and listened to the woman’s shrill, passionate invective—to adjectives which were foreign even to us. We heard the husband’s low, deprecating growl, and, after a little, the protesting bass of the policeman. The woman was infuriated at the interruption.“Has anybody complained?” she yelled, goingup half an octave at each word. “Well! Well! Everybody ’as their rows, don’t they? Move on yourself. Oh! youbrute!”Then we heard a scuffle, more words, a torrent of tears and abuse.But it was all quiet at last; the short spell of silence between the last cab and the venders of Sunday papers.“Referee!” “Lloyd’s!” “Weekly Dispatch!”The men went bawling along the pavements beneath. Jimmy, who had collapsed after the row, opened his eyes again.“Give me a whisky,” he said. “Fill up. I’ll say when.”As I was pouring the water, and waiting for him to stop me, he murmured enthusiastically:“How good Dot and Lottie Mack were in that laughing duet. Lottie married an earl. I wonder what became of Dot.”When I took the tumbler and whisky and water to the side of the bed, he was dead.We fetched Mrs. Morey to lay him out. She was ghoulishly curious about the funeral, and keptme half an hour while she told me about her father’s.“’E belonged to a club, don’t yer see, and when ’e died there was twenty pound. My Bill wanted to blow it. But I ses no. It was ’is and ’e should ’av it. We ’ad mourning coaches to fetch all the people from their own doors. There was mutes—yer don’t often see them now—and weepers, and feathers in the ’orses’ ’eads. An’ yer should ’a’ seen the tea we set down to when we come ’ome from the funeral! We ’ad thin bread and butter, and winkles and three sorts of cake. I felt so mad with Bill. ’E goes and clouts my little Jim’s ’ead, jest because the innercent child said as ’e wished grandfathers ’ud die every day, so as we might ’ave sich a bustin’ tea. It was only natural in the child. Rose Adkins—she’s my brother’s wife—took Bill’s part. I didn’t forgit it neither. A nice one to talk,shewur! We was ’avin’ a few words, months after, and I ses to ’er:“‘You ’ussy! ’Ow dare you talk to me?’ I ses. ‘’Ow many slices of thin bread and butter did you eat at my poor father’s funeral tea? I saw youtake ten with my own eyes.’Thatfetched ’er. ‘Be off,’ I ses, ‘and don’t ever show yer brazen face in my door agen.’”*****Well, we buried Jimmy. I rode with him, in a dreadful conveyance they call a Shillibeer, to Finchley. When I went back to the Inn and began to square up his affairs, the water bed was missing. We had clubbed together and hired that water bed for him before Queenie’s deception. I heard long afterward that Mrs. Morey had pawned it at the pawnbroker’s at the corner of Green Street. No doubt Bill, for once, was too strong for her.About two months afterward there was a faint tap at my door one night. When I opened it I saw a woman standing outside. How shall I describe her?She wasn’t young—your age, if you’ll forgive me, thirty or so—but there was a youthfulness and freshness about her which you seldom see in a girl out of her teens. She wasn’t pretty, not a bit. She didn’t even look clever. Yet I’ve never seen a more fascinating, a more delightful woman. She was alittle like Adeline, only not half so handsome, and there was not the mark of knowledge on her face. She said firmly, “Does Mr. James Carol live here?”Her voice was calm, but it was only the calmness of perfect breeding. There was none of a sister’s cold, lily-like air about her—no tepid, anxious touch of family concern. Jimmy had been her world.She was a lady, using the word in its old dignified, graceful sense, without modern abuse, without that vulgar, exasperating “i” which degrades it into “laidy.”“I’m sorry to say that Jimmy—Mr. Carol—is dead.”She didn’t wait for me to say any more. She dropped at my feet on the dirty boards of the landing; dropped without a cry, without a contortion of her charming, pure face.I got her round as well as I could. While I was fanning her with a doubled-up newspaper and trying to force brandy down her throat, I noticed the subtle refinements of her dress. And there was a haunting memory in that face. I thought that I must have seen it before, until I remembered FarthingsFarm and the old woman who tended Mrs. Covey. I remembered, too, Jimmy’s flicker of animation when he had seen that woman—and I understood. There was the same peculiar, fascinating sweetness of expression; an expression which would lure you to any madness at the start and cloy you to death long before the finish.I got her round. She went away, with beautifully expressed thanks—and not a flutter of her eyelids.That is all. The key to Jimmy’s love affair—if he had one—lies with him at Finchley.
HISfull name was James Adolphus Carol, but everyone called him just Jimmy. He was Jimmy to all of us in the Inn; Jimmy to the music-hall managers and music-hall artistes.
He was a little spindle-shanked fellow, like a jockey, but a bit too gentlemanly. He had bulging, gray-blue eyes and a sunken, heavily freckled face. His top hat was always very sleek and a little on one side, but the rest of his dress fell short of perfect finish. I’ve seen him with his shoe tied up with string and his collar pinned together in front because he’d lost his last stud.
He was dreadfully hard up, but that is nothing. We resent a prosperous fellow. I don’t fancy he ever had any regular meals. Men stood him drinks, and he had a trick of turning up at your rooms about midnight, talking brilliantly and wildly for about half an hour, and then saying carelessly, “Have you got any bread and butter knocking about, oldman?” Fellows who didn’t know him very well would suggest a square meal—a chop, or a sausage and mashed at Mimm’s, just outside the gates—then Jimmy would be affronted.
He was always being dunned and pretended that he liked it. Perhaps he really did. He was full of schemes for evading duns. He was an authority on judgment-summonses, pawnshops, shooting the moon, and obtaining credit. He would hold forth eloquently on the delights of being dunned. I forget the particular points he made, but they were very forcible—coming from him.
He used to borrow unblushingly, but his gift in that way was restricted—very few of us had any money to lend.
He had the finest private collection of pawn-tickets that I ever saw. His pockets were full of them. I remembered that he once went to a swell party—some musical affair. He was very polite, very strict on questions of etiquette. The day after the party he made the usual formal call at the house—it was some big place near Sloane Street. His hat was very sleek, he had a frock coat, a flower inhis button-hole—everything complete. He handed his card to the footman, and as he did so a couple of pawn-tickets fluttered gently to the door-mat. The flunkey stooped, picked them up, and handed them gracefully back to Jimmy—who took them with equal grace. He told me the whole performance was superb—in perfect style. It was done without a word, without a smile. They did not dare look at each other.
Jimmy’s rooms were untidy and his style of housekeeping not to be commended. He never kept a laundress for very long—because he never paid her. Yet the women loved him and worked for nothing so long as they could. He used to chaff them lightly, explain the state of his exchequer. He took a personal interest in their family life. They told him their troubles; drunken husbands, big families, pugnacious lodgers on the next landing, the hard heart of the landlords when they came upstairs with their black books for the weekly rent.
When Mrs. Morey was ill Jimmy went down Green Street to see her, with a couple of French novels—translations—under his arm. She hada gathering on her ankle which she showed him with pride, in spite of his courteous protest, but she declined the offer of the novels.
“You’re very kind, sir,” she said. “But I don’t suppose as your books ’ud suit me. I was brought up very particular. I like something good—the Bible or the Common Prayer or the Sunday newspaper. I makes my ’usband read ‘When the wicked man turneth,’ in the ’opes it ’ll be a lesson to ’im. No, there’s nothin’ as the doctor’s ordered, thank you, sir—except to keep my strength up.”
She took Jimmy’s last sixpence gratefully, and asked him to stop and share the half-quartern of gin which her youngest little girl but three ran to the public house to fetch. Very likely he stayed; it would have been just like him. He was a crank. Fancy a man offering Paul de Kock and Flaubert to an Inn of Court laundress! He paid for the gin, but he lightly ignored the two months’ money he owed her, and she never reminded him.
His sitting room was full of books, on open shelves and thick with dust. They were the admiration of Mrs. Morey.
“I thought Mr. Slobkins ’ad a lot,” she said, “’im as I worked for in Furnival’s. ’E’s a magistrate or a clerk or somethin’ o’ that sort, yer see. But, lor, this lot bangs ’is.”
Stanch Mrs. Morey! She was a little roly-poly kind of woman, with eyes like ripe sloes, and she worked for Jimmy for six months without ever receiving a penny.
“My ’usband ’ud kill me if ’e knowed,” she said, smiling plaintively as she scrubbed the boards. “’E’s bin out o’ work for nearly a year. It’s hard work for me to fill the kids’ mouths and keep ’im in grub and pocket money. But ’e’s a good ’usband when ’e aint drunk. I wish ’e ’ad more luck, that’s all.”
“What is his trade?” asked Jimmy languidly—he was always languid until the gas lamps were lighted.
The little woman tossed her head.
“My ’usband aintthatsort, jest able to do one kind o’ work. ’E can turn ’is ’and to anythin’. But I wish ’e wasn’t quite so partikler.”
She came to me privately when Jimmy’s healthbegan to break. She said that he didn’t eat enough to keep a sparrow alive, that it worried her awful, that she feared he was going off in a galloping decline.
“It’s jest the way my niece’s ’usband was took,” she concluded. “’E used to drive a vegetable cart, and ’e’s layin’ in the Brompton Simmetery. As nice a young man as ever you see, and played the flute bootiful. ’E was took bad in May and dead in December. He was indeed, and ’er with six little children—all babies, as you might say, and another on the road—if you’ll excuse my free way of speakin’. My niece she’s got the flute under a glass case in the parlor window, for the mountings is silver.”
But Jimmy was too far gone for my care, or anyone else’s. No doubt he had been consumptive for years, and a constitution kept up principally on “nipping” never thrives. There was a doctor living in the Inn at the time—a very good fellow. He visited him and gave him medicine—don’t believe Jimmy ever took it. His cough got gradually worse and his face fell in more than ever. But hewas always full of jokes, rather grim jokes sometimes. I’ve seen girls shiver and scream with laughter at the same time. He went to a music hall every night, spending most of his time at the bar. He called the artistes by their Christian names—Queenie this, or Dan the other. The Queenies gave him their full confidence. Big, flashy girls, these music-hall girls, with free, not over-clean tongues and very good hearts. They would frighten you, but they don’t mean any harm. Jimmy used to write songs for them—which they very seldom bought. He did both words and music. His airs were most melodious and “catchy,” but his words were never quite vulgar enough. None of his songs “caught on.”
I never knew a man with such a marvelous ear. If he went to a comic opera he would come straight home and play all the lyrics without a false note. He played Chopin by ear; he used to sit for hours extemporizing the most weird, fascinating, tantalizing music. He ought to have made his fortune. Instead of that, he went into consumption and died—for want of proper food.
Now and again someone sent him a postal order. He never said who. He was a bit of a mystery. They were only small orders—under a pound, as if they had been scraped by some woman out of the housekeeping money, or her dress allowance. But I never knew. The last one he had was for fifteen shillings. He was on his last legs. The steward of the Inn, who was most forbearing—because it was Jimmy—had sent a deprecating note in to say that he must distrain if something, ever so little, was not paid on account of the year’s rent. Mrs. Morey had left him at last. Even his top hat was rough. Yet what do you think he did? Went out and bought a bath sponge for fifteen and six, promising to leave the sixpence next time he was passing.
I met him on the stairs and he displayed the sponge proudly.
“Only fifteen and six! Dirt cheap, isn’t it? It would be unpardonable extravagance to let a chance like that slip, wouldn’t it? And I wanted a bath sponge; the one I’ve got isn’t nearly big enough. Come up to my place. We’ll put it in water. Just you watch how it swells!”
You may say bluntly that he was a fool. Of course he was. But it is the fools and the failures who win our hearts.
We went up to his rooms. He put the sponge to swell and sat down to the piano and forgot all about it. I should like to hear Jimmy play music-hall songs again; nothing was ever so charming. He knew them all. He used to sing the refrains in a thin, shrill voice, accompanying in his own wonderful way. Everything he touched became classic.
A week after he bought the sponge Harrowsmith—he was the young doctor—ordered him out of London. Fortunately I made a haul about that time, so we went together to Farthings Farm, as I’ll tell you later on.
Farthings Farm was the last nail in Jimmy’s coffin. He never spent a more miserable month. He would be morose, half asleep all day. But at dusk, just when the theaters would be opening and the racket in the Strand at its flow, he’d be restless. All the sweet smells and sounds of the farm were a poor enough substitute. The country finished him. He was a pure Cockney. There is no half way withthe Cockney; either he loves the country passionately, or he hates it and chafes at it until it kills him. Saints and criminals are made by the country; it depends on how you take it. We hadn’t been back ten days before he broke a blood vessel and kept his bed. What was to be done with him?Henever bothered. He believed in taking things easy. He had a favorite axiom about never putting up your umbrella until it rained—and ended by not having an umbrella at all! He just drifted. He was dying. He hadn’t a penny in the world; he was up to his eyes in small debts.
“Pack him off to the hospital,” advised Arnold rather brutally. “Poor devil! A fellow who earns a fiver and lives on it until it’s gone. I’ve no sympathy with that sort of thing. The hospital’s the place for him. I’ll pay the cab fare.”
However, the rest of us decided to club together and keep him going, first telling Arnold that he did the invalid an injustice; Jimmy had never earned a five-pound note, in a lump sum, in his life. Harrowsmith had told us privately that his case was quite hopeless. We could pull along somehow.Nutting, the steward, would wait a little longer for his rent; when Jimmy was gone the piano alone would pay that. One or other of us could look in; Mrs. Morey must be got back. The only difficulty was with Jimmy himself—he was so deuced proud.
A woman came to the rescue. Queenie La Belle was a regular brick. She bought up all his songs. Who but a woman would have thought of that? She’d come in, all sham diamonds and jolly voice, and sit down by his bed and tell him how well his songs were going at the halls. She said she was singing them at three nightly. She assured him that she was always encored. She begged him to take an extra ten pounds—the original price had been in shillings.
“You see, I’ve made that girl,” Jimmy would say when she had gone. “I knew those songs would just fit her. She wants more. Give me a bit of paper and pencil, old chap. I’ll dot down another. Why does Harrowsmith keep me tied by the leg like this? I mean to get up next week and toddle down to the halls and hear my songs encored. They give Queenie a middle turn now. They usedto put her on at the end, to sing the audience out. I’m a made man. It’s just as well, with all the expenses of this illness. Are you going up Tottenham Court Road to-day? If so, look in and pay the fellow that sixpence owing on the sponge. I’ve never used it. Harrowsmith knocked me off my cold tub. You can’t mistake the shop. It’s nearly opposite Maple’s. I forget the name.”
He put on tremendous airs. He was, as he proudly said, a made man. When he got better he was going to write songs at fabulous prices for all the leading music-hall singers. But Queenie La Belle should have them at a reasonable figure. She wasn’t a bad sort. She ought to be grateful to him. He had made her. He kept his money under his pillow with his tobacco pouch and cigarette papers. He said seriously to me:
“If you’re a little short, old chap, there’s plenty of money in the bag. I’ve gone through the mill myself. I know what it is to come down to my last half-crown.”
He might truthfully have said his last copper. To please him I took five shillings.
Queenie came to see him regularly. He put the poor girl through a rigid cross-examination. Did the audience take up her two last lines, as he had intended? Were his songs on the barrel organs? The great ambition of his life had been to hear his songs on the barrel organs. But it was early days. It was just as well that they were not on yet. He wanted to hear them. Wanted to tip every grinder a bob. Queenie had to sing the songs to him; had to do the little kick at the end of each verse, pretend to throw the rose into the auditorium—that was Jimmy’s original trick.
“I’d like to come down and hear you to-night at the Royal,” he sighed—and Queenie looked horribly frightened, until I reassured her by a dismal shake of the head. “But Harrowsmith is so particular. He keeps me in bed. Of course that makes a man weak. There’s nothing in the world the matter with me but weakness, through want of exercise.”
Queenie put on her tremendous hat, all flyaway lace and wings. She stooped down and kissed him solemnly on his clammy forehead. I thought thebig, jolly girl, with her coarse voice and frank tongue, an angel at that moment. Jimmy looked scared and annoyed—suspicious of this unusual gentleness.
She blubbered outside the bedroom door, growing purple in her efforts to choke her sobs lest he should hear.
“It’s all a lie,” she said passionately. “I’m only on at one hall—last turn on the programme. His song don’t fetch even a grin. I’m expecting the manager to bully me on pay day. People don’t understand ’em—I don’t myself. It’s a lie. I was hissed—hissed! And there’s him, poor dear, talking of writing for Guy Blockley and Ada Fitz Clare. Oh! it’s all right about the ten pounds, I can run to that. Don’t you fret.”
She colored, through her make-up—her daylight make-up, all careless smears of blue-white powder and burning smudges of red.
Nearly every night, after the halls and the public houses were shut, one or two fellows would drop into Jimmy’s room and give him the evening’s news. They sang snatches of new songs to him, mimickedbits of “business.” They retailed the popular comedian’s latest gag, the story that was going the round of the clubs, the smart conundrum on public affairs or people.
Jimmy used to join in weakly, drumming his claw-like fingers on the quilt. He talked of music-hall people of to-day; of five years ago; of men who had been lions and were content to take obscure turns in the provinces now, or who had gone in for the dramatic-agent business.
They all ran off his glib tongue; the Sisters That, the Brothers So and So, the Something Troupe. He laughed at old wheezes, which had never lost their flavor for him. He spoke of this man’s pet mannerisms and that girl’s particular smile.
He used to say:
“Do you remember Joe Slashby’s trick with the pair of spectacles? That was killing,” or, “What’s become of the Manasteriotti girl? Never saw a woman juggle so well.”
And he always condemned everyone else’s songs. He said it pained him to see the rot, the arrant, foolish drivel that went down with a music-hall audience.But he was going to alter all that. The public only wanted educating. The public knew a good thing when it heard it. That was proved by the success of his songs. How had his songs gone this evening? Queenie was a good sort, but he was a little nervous of her, afraid she didn’t quite do him justice. He added that she had treated him rather meanly; ten pounds was a poor price with which to buy success. She must be getting twenty pounds a week at the lowest. Three halls at twenty each. That would be sixty. He must speak to her.
Success had not improved Jimmy. He was going the way of all successes. He actually spoke of starting a banking account when he got better, of giving a big order to his tailor. He probably would have decided on a house at Brixton and a brougham, if he had lived long enough. But—before he had time to tax Queenie over money matters—the end came.
It was Saturday. Harrowsmith looked in about noon. He told me that Jimmy wouldn’t last another twenty-four hours. I went back to the bedroomand broke it. He was lying on his side, turning off another song. He took it very calmly, only hoping that he’d be able to get that third line in the second verse right before he went. It was very weak.
Schultz, the great German composer, died the day before; it had been in the morning papers. Jimmy said composedly, when I mentioned it:
“There’s another of us gone. Lucky devil!”
He added a little rebelliously:
“It’s rather rough to have to hand in your checks just when you’ve ‘arrived.’ I hope I shan’t be so long about it as the woman at Farthings Farm was. Queer old girl! You’ll make Harrowsmith send in his bill and pay up any little thing I owe. Get the money out of Queenie. That girl’s been a bit shabby. And just roll me a cigarette—there’s enough baccy in the pouch—and leave me alone to worry out this third line.”
He was lying at the back; Orion, if you remember, had his bedroom in the front, but Jimmy had turned that into a bathroom.
All the Saturday night bubble of the streets cameup into the little paneled room where he was dying. He liked it; asked me to open the window, so that he could hear the hoarse voices of the costers and the banter of the women. He liked the rattle of ’buses, the cries, the calls—all the feverish, struggling life.
One by one the fellows dropped in as usual. He begged them not to put on such deathbed faces. How had his songs gone? He was afraid that he wouldn’t see Queenie any more. The fellows stayed; he begged them to. I’d asked him if he had any friends that he would like me to send for, and he returned airily that he hadn’t a relative in the world. His face never flinched when he said it.
The night went on, and the room, although the month was August, got chilly. The sounds of the market died down, the omnibuses left off running, so did the trams; there was only a dying trundle of hansoms over the stones. Then all at once came a ringing howl from some slum at the back. They have pulled them nearly all down now. All the narrow courts I used to know, the tiny general shops, the row of almshouses, the big boiled-beefshop at the corner—gone. Residential flats are in their place and big shops with sky signs.
It was some Saturday-night row. It came in plainly through the open window. Jimmy opened his eyes and listened with zest.
You won’t understand the grim sentiment of those slum rows. They are simply part of the Saturday night’s programme—when the man gets his week’s money and the woman goes out shopping and they both are blind drunk by midnight. Simply part of Saturday night—that is all. It does not affect their relations for the rest of the week. The language they use to each other is awful—but what are words? We place too great a stress on mere words.
Jimmy roused up a little, and grinned feebly.
“Shouldn’t wonder if it’s Mrs. Morey,” he said.
We sat and listened to the woman’s shrill, passionate invective—to adjectives which were foreign even to us. We heard the husband’s low, deprecating growl, and, after a little, the protesting bass of the policeman. The woman was infuriated at the interruption.
“Has anybody complained?” she yelled, goingup half an octave at each word. “Well! Well! Everybody ’as their rows, don’t they? Move on yourself. Oh! youbrute!”
Then we heard a scuffle, more words, a torrent of tears and abuse.
But it was all quiet at last; the short spell of silence between the last cab and the venders of Sunday papers.
“Referee!” “Lloyd’s!” “Weekly Dispatch!”
The men went bawling along the pavements beneath. Jimmy, who had collapsed after the row, opened his eyes again.
“Give me a whisky,” he said. “Fill up. I’ll say when.”
As I was pouring the water, and waiting for him to stop me, he murmured enthusiastically:
“How good Dot and Lottie Mack were in that laughing duet. Lottie married an earl. I wonder what became of Dot.”
When I took the tumbler and whisky and water to the side of the bed, he was dead.
We fetched Mrs. Morey to lay him out. She was ghoulishly curious about the funeral, and keptme half an hour while she told me about her father’s.
“’E belonged to a club, don’t yer see, and when ’e died there was twenty pound. My Bill wanted to blow it. But I ses no. It was ’is and ’e should ’av it. We ’ad mourning coaches to fetch all the people from their own doors. There was mutes—yer don’t often see them now—and weepers, and feathers in the ’orses’ ’eads. An’ yer should ’a’ seen the tea we set down to when we come ’ome from the funeral! We ’ad thin bread and butter, and winkles and three sorts of cake. I felt so mad with Bill. ’E goes and clouts my little Jim’s ’ead, jest because the innercent child said as ’e wished grandfathers ’ud die every day, so as we might ’ave sich a bustin’ tea. It was only natural in the child. Rose Adkins—she’s my brother’s wife—took Bill’s part. I didn’t forgit it neither. A nice one to talk,shewur! We was ’avin’ a few words, months after, and I ses to ’er:
“‘You ’ussy! ’Ow dare you talk to me?’ I ses. ‘’Ow many slices of thin bread and butter did you eat at my poor father’s funeral tea? I saw youtake ten with my own eyes.’Thatfetched ’er. ‘Be off,’ I ses, ‘and don’t ever show yer brazen face in my door agen.’”
*****
Well, we buried Jimmy. I rode with him, in a dreadful conveyance they call a Shillibeer, to Finchley. When I went back to the Inn and began to square up his affairs, the water bed was missing. We had clubbed together and hired that water bed for him before Queenie’s deception. I heard long afterward that Mrs. Morey had pawned it at the pawnbroker’s at the corner of Green Street. No doubt Bill, for once, was too strong for her.
About two months afterward there was a faint tap at my door one night. When I opened it I saw a woman standing outside. How shall I describe her?
She wasn’t young—your age, if you’ll forgive me, thirty or so—but there was a youthfulness and freshness about her which you seldom see in a girl out of her teens. She wasn’t pretty, not a bit. She didn’t even look clever. Yet I’ve never seen a more fascinating, a more delightful woman. She was alittle like Adeline, only not half so handsome, and there was not the mark of knowledge on her face. She said firmly, “Does Mr. James Carol live here?”
Her voice was calm, but it was only the calmness of perfect breeding. There was none of a sister’s cold, lily-like air about her—no tepid, anxious touch of family concern. Jimmy had been her world.
She was a lady, using the word in its old dignified, graceful sense, without modern abuse, without that vulgar, exasperating “i” which degrades it into “laidy.”
“I’m sorry to say that Jimmy—Mr. Carol—is dead.”
She didn’t wait for me to say any more. She dropped at my feet on the dirty boards of the landing; dropped without a cry, without a contortion of her charming, pure face.
I got her round as well as I could. While I was fanning her with a doubled-up newspaper and trying to force brandy down her throat, I noticed the subtle refinements of her dress. And there was a haunting memory in that face. I thought that I must have seen it before, until I remembered FarthingsFarm and the old woman who tended Mrs. Covey. I remembered, too, Jimmy’s flicker of animation when he had seen that woman—and I understood. There was the same peculiar, fascinating sweetness of expression; an expression which would lure you to any madness at the start and cloy you to death long before the finish.
I got her round. She went away, with beautifully expressed thanks—and not a flutter of her eyelids.
That is all. The key to Jimmy’s love affair—if he had one—lies with him at Finchley.