CHAPTER VIII
ROGUES AND VAGABONDS
The first thing that Bram and Nancy vowed to each other was that they would never accept anything but a joint engagement. It sounded so easy at first, but during the next four years many anxious moments were caused by that rose-flushed resolution of early married life. However, they did manage it, and not only that but they managed somehow to take with them on tour the baby girl who was born on the sixteenth of July, just a year and a month after they were married.
Letizia was born in a tiny cottage buried among the cherry orchards of Kent. The original Letizia’s letter on being informed of the proposed tribute to herself was characteristic:
Lebanon HouseBrigham.July 20th, 1890.Dear Bram,Why you should burden your wretched infant with the name that nearly eighty years ago was so unsuitably bestowed upon her great-grandmother I cannot imagine. I hope that the challenge you offer to Fate by calling any child Gladness will not be vented on her head.Lying here in bed, for I am become a bedridden old bag of bones, I look back at my wasted life and wonder why it should be prolonged in this unreasonable manner. Letizia! Did either of you young people realise that Letizia means gladness? However, as you insist on an exchange of compliments between this poor infant and myself, why, let your wife kiss her with her own fresh lips and tell her that once the lips of another Letizia were as fresh. I have just pickedup the mirror and looked at myself. When I die, ah,mon dieu, when, when ... let me be crumpled up and flung into the nearest wastepaper basket.Your affectionate ancestor,Letizia the First.By the way, I don’t think I’ve written since Master Caleb celebrated his coming of age by sacking all of the older workmen in the factory three months after they presented him with a token of esteem and respect. I understand they were informed that he only took this step for their own good, because he was afraid that they were getting too old for the dangerous trade of making rockets! The Peculiars made an attempt to recapture him from the Church of England (in which your father had recently invested) by offering him a vacant apostolic seat. Caleb replied that he could not see his way to occupy such a position satisfactorily. True enough, for his behind has swollen like a pumpkin in the sun. The pleasant-faced young woman who reads aloud to me is a most capable gossip. I am getting a new insight into local affairs.
Lebanon HouseBrigham.July 20th, 1890.
Lebanon HouseBrigham.July 20th, 1890.
Lebanon House
Brigham.
July 20th, 1890.
Dear Bram,
Why you should burden your wretched infant with the name that nearly eighty years ago was so unsuitably bestowed upon her great-grandmother I cannot imagine. I hope that the challenge you offer to Fate by calling any child Gladness will not be vented on her head.
Lying here in bed, for I am become a bedridden old bag of bones, I look back at my wasted life and wonder why it should be prolonged in this unreasonable manner. Letizia! Did either of you young people realise that Letizia means gladness? However, as you insist on an exchange of compliments between this poor infant and myself, why, let your wife kiss her with her own fresh lips and tell her that once the lips of another Letizia were as fresh. I have just pickedup the mirror and looked at myself. When I die, ah,mon dieu, when, when ... let me be crumpled up and flung into the nearest wastepaper basket.
Your affectionate ancestor,Letizia the First.
By the way, I don’t think I’ve written since Master Caleb celebrated his coming of age by sacking all of the older workmen in the factory three months after they presented him with a token of esteem and respect. I understand they were informed that he only took this step for their own good, because he was afraid that they were getting too old for the dangerous trade of making rockets! The Peculiars made an attempt to recapture him from the Church of England (in which your father had recently invested) by offering him a vacant apostolic seat. Caleb replied that he could not see his way to occupy such a position satisfactorily. True enough, for his behind has swollen like a pumpkin in the sun. The pleasant-faced young woman who reads aloud to me is a most capable gossip. I am getting a new insight into local affairs.
Nancy wished that she could meet this strange old woman whose fierce blood ran in the veins of the raspberry-coloured monkey at her breast that was growing daily so much more like a human being. But she and Bram agreed that it would be foolish to involve themselves in the domesticity either of his family or of hers. They must only have one aim, and that must be the joint engagement.
“Once we separate, things will never be the same again,” Nancy said.
“Oh, don’t I know it, dearest! But we won’t separate.”
Nor did they. Difficult though it was sometimes, they did always manage to keep together, those rogues and vagabonds, and what is more they did manage to keep Letizia with them.
“I wonder you don’t let your little girl stay with some relation while you’re on tour,” a jealous mother would observe.
“I like to have her with me during these first years. Time enough to lose her when she goes to school,” Nancy would reply.
“But surely the continual change and travelling cannot be good for so young a child?” the critic would insist.
“I think change of air is good for everything,” Nancy would reply firmly.
So, up and down the length of England, in and out of Wales, across to Ireland and over the border to Scotland, for the next four years Bram and Nancy wandered. In every new company the first thing they pitched was Letizia’s canvas travelling-cot with its long poles and short poles and cross pieces and canopy which all fitted ingeniously together until the final business of lacing up the back like a pair of stays was finished and Letizia was tucked away inside. Always the same luggage—the tin bath packed so full of Nancy’s clothes that it was a great struggle to fasten it—Bram’s second-hand portmanteau with its flap like an elephant’s ear and bulging middle—the trim wicker luncheon-basket, and big wicker theatrical-basket smelling of grease paint and American cloth and old wigs. Endless journeys on Sundays in trains without corridors and on some lines still lighted with oil-lamps so that the baby Letizia, lying on the horsehair cushions of the railway-carriage, would drop asleep to the rhythmic movement of the oil swaying to and fro in the glass container. Long waits at stations like York and Crewe, where the only Sabbath traffic in those days seemed to be touring companies and all the compartments in all the trains were labelled engaged. Long waits while stout men with red noses and blue chins greeted old pals and ran up and down the length of the train, and cracked jokes over flasks of whisky or brandy. Long waits in big smoky junctions, sometimes catching sight of theDorothycompany with its pack of hounds—to the great excitement and joy of Letizia, who would be held up to admire the barking of the bow-wows. Late arrivals in smoky northern towns when the only fly at the stationwould be collared by the manager and the humbler members of the company would have to shoulder their light luggage and walk to their lodgings. Late arrivals in snowstorm and rainstorm, in fog and frost, when the letter ordering the meal had miscarried and the landlady was a gaunt stranger who thoroughly enjoyed telling the weary vagabonds that, not having heard from them, she had not lighted the fire in the sitting-room. Late arrivals when the landlady was an old friend and came down the steps to embrace both her lodgers and lead them into a toasting, glowing room with the table laid and a smell of soup being wafted along the little passage from the kitchen. Early morning starts when every lady in Nancy’s carriage wanted a different corner and signified her choice with an exaggerated and liverish politeness. Early morning starts when some familiar little thing was left behind and the next lodgings did not look like home until the missing article was forwarded on from the last town. Every week a new town, and sometimes two or three small towns in one week. Every Monday morning at eleven a music call, and after that a walk round the new town to discover the best and cheapest shops. Every day dinner at three o’clock and tea at six. Every evening Letizia left to the guardianship of the landlady while Bram and Nancy set out arm-in-arm to the theatre. Every night except Sunday the swing of a dingy door and the immemorial smell of the theatre within. Our modern young actors and actresses do not know that smell. It vanished in its perfection when electric light took the place of gas, and unretentive encaustic tiles lined the corridors instead of bare stone or whitewashed bricks. It requires something more than the warmth of hot-water pipes to ripen and conserve that smell. It may have lost some of its quintessential peculiarity when gas supplemented candles; but those gas-jets covered with wire guards, on which the ladies and gentlemen of visiting companies were requested by the management not to boilkettles, must have added a beautiful richness of their own.
Thou glorious ancient smell of the theatre, thou sublime pot-pourri of grease-paint, wig-paste, vaseline, powder, perspiration, old clothes, oranges, tobacco, gas, drains, hair, whitewash, hot metal, and dusty canvas, where mayest thou still be savoured instead of that dull odour of Condy’s fluid and fire extinguishers which faintly repels us as we pass through the stage-doors of our contemporary palaces of amusement?
Our particular vagabonds found it easier to obtain joint engagements in musical shows. Nancy’s contralto voice, untrained though it was, grew better and better each year, and Bram had developed into a capital comedian. In the third and fourth winters after they were married they played together in pantomime, and for the Christmas season of 1894 they were engaged at the Theatre Royal, Greenwich—Bram as Idle Jack inDick Whittingtonand Clown in the Harlequinade, Nancy as Fairy Queen and Columbine. It was a pity that by now the Harlequinade was already a moribund form of entertainment, for Bram had a genuine talent for getting that fantastic street-life over the footlights. One may be allowed a fleeting suspicion that the English stage has lost more than it has gained by its banishment of the clown from its boards. The French, who are dramatically so much superior, have preserved their clowns.
Bram and Nancy found exceptionally pleasant lodgings in Greenwich. Starboard Alley was a row of diminutive Georgian houses running down to the river and overlooking at the back the grounds of the Trinity Hospital. The bow windows which gave just such a peep of the wide Thames as one may get of the sea itself in little streets that lead down to ancient harbours, had no more than a genteel and unobtrusive curve; it was the very place in which an outward-bound mariner would have felt safe in leaving his wife to wait for his return.Starboard Alley was too narrow for vehicles, so that there was never any sound there but of the footsteps of people walking past on their way to stroll along the embankment above the river—a pleasant place, that embankment, even in this cold December weather, with the seagulls wheeling and screaming overhead and the great ships coming home on the tide, coming home for Christmas on the flowing tide. Not only was the house in Starboard Alley itself attractive, but Mrs. Pottage, the landlady, was as much a feature of it as the bow window, though, to say truth, she had a more obtrusive curve. She was a widow of forty years’ standing, her husband, a gunner in one of Her Majesty’s ships having been killed off Sebastopol; but she was still comely with her fresh complexion and twinkling eyes, and her heart was young.
“I was hardly eighteen at the time my poor husband vanished out of this world,” she told her lodgers, “and the offers of marriage I’ve had since—well, I assure you the men have always been round me like flies after sugar. But I’ve never melted like sugar does in the heat. I said ‘no’ to the first in 1855 within four months of my pore William’s death—well, it was death and burial all in one as you might say, because he’d been talking to his mate as cheerful as a goldfinch the moment before and the next moment there was nothing of him left. It was his mate I said ‘no’ to, four months later, when he was invalided home with a wooden leg. He was the first, and I said ‘no’ to the last only yesterday afternoon just before tea—a Mr. Hopkins he is, a ship’s chandler in a small style of business with a head like the dome of the Observatory, but no more in it than an empty eggshell. Oh, I ashore you I gave him a very firm ‘no,’ and he went back to his chandling as dumb as a doornail. Yes, you might really call it quite a hobby of mine refusing eligibles. I used to put the dates down in the butcher’s book or the baker’s book as the case might be, but I got charged for them one year as extra loaves and ever since then I’ve kept the dates in my head. Off to rehearsal now, areyou? Well, fancy them having a rehearsal on Christmas Eve. I call that making a great demand on anybody’s good nature. In fact, if anybody didn’t mind being a bit vulgar, it’s what they might call blooming sauce. And you’ll leave your little girl with me? What’s her name, Letishyer? Said with a sneeze, I suppose? Never mind, I’ll enjoy having her hanging on to my skirts. I never had no children myself. Well, I was just getting over the first shyness and beginning to enjoy married life when all of a sudden that Crimeen war broke out and my poor William had to leave me. Well, it was a mean crime, and no mistake. Got to start off to the theatre now? Wrap yourselves up well, for it’s biting cold to-night. It’s my opinion we’re in for a real old-fashioned Christmas. Good job, too, I say, the size women are wearing their sleeves nowadays. Balloon sleeves they call them. Balloonatic sleeves I should say. Well, toora-loora!! I’ll pop your little girl into her cot and have the kettle on the boil for you when you come back. Ugh! What a perishing evening!”
The vagabonds arm-in-arm set out toward the theatre, the north wind blowing fiercely up Starboard Alley across the Thames from Barking Flats—a searching wind, fierce and bitter.
TheDick Whittingtoncompany had been rehearsing hard during the previous week, and now two days before the production on Boxing Day it was seeming incredible that the management would ever have the impudence to demand the public’s money to see such a hopelessly inadequate performance.
“We’ve been in some bad shows, my dear,” Bram said to Nancy on their way to the theatre, “but I think this is the worst.”
“I’m too tired to know anything about it. But your songs will go all right, I’m sure.”
He shook his head doubtfully.
“Yes, but that fellow Sturt who plays the Dame is a naughty actor. He really is dire. I simply cannot gethim to work in with me. That’s the worst of taking a fellow from the Halls. He hasn’t an elementary notion how to help other people. He can’t see that it takes two people to make a scene funny.”
“Never mind,” said Nancy, yawning. “It’ll all be splendid, I expect, on Wednesday. Oh, dear, I am tired. They’ve given you a good trap-act in the Harlequinade.”
“Yes, that’s all right. But do you know, Nancy, it’s a queer thing, but I funk trap-acts. I’m never happy till I’ve gone through the last one.” He stopped short and struck his forehead. “Great Scott!”
“What is the matter?”
“We haven’t got anything for Letizia’s stocking?”
“Bram!”
“What time were we called again?”
“Six o’clock.”
“Look here,” he said, “you go round and collect some toys from a toyshop. I’ll make an excuse to Worsley if by any chance he wants the Fairy Queen at the beginning. But he won’t. He wants to get the shipwreck right. We shall probably be on that till nearly midnight.”
So Nancy left Bram at the stage-door and went on to do her shopping. The streets were crowded with people, and in spite of the cold wind everybody was looking cheerful. The shops, too, with their brightly lit windows all decorated with frosted cotton-wool and holly, exhaled that authentic Christmas glow, which touches all but hearts too long barren and heads too long empty. The man who sneers at Christmas is fair game for the Father of Lies.
Nancy revelled in the atmosphere, and for a while she allowed herself to drift with the throng—hearing in a dream the shrill excited cries of the children, the noise of toy instruments, the shouts of the salesmen offering turkeys and geese; smelling in a dream that peculiar odour of hung poultry mixed with crystallised fruit, oranges, and sawdust; and perceiving in a dream the accumulated emotion of people who were all thinking what they couldbuy for others, that strange and stirring emotion which long ago shepherds personified as a troop of angels crying, “Peace, good-will toward men.” She felt that she could have wandered happily along like this for hours, and she was filled with joy to think that in a short while she should be welcomed by some of these children as the Spirit of Good. The part of the Fairy Queen had never hitherto appealed to her; but now suddenly she was seized with a longing to wave her silver wand and vanquish the Demon King. She passed four ragged children who were staring at a heap of vivid sweets on the other side of a plate-glass window. She went into the shop and bought a bagful for each. It was wonderful to pass on and leave them standing there on the pavement in a rapture of slow degustation. But her time could not be spent in abandoning herself to these sudden impulses of sentimental self-indulgence. She entered a bazaar and filled her bag with small toys for Letizia’s stocking—a woolly lamb, a monkey-on-a-stick, a tin trumpet, a parti-coloured ball—all the time-honoured cargo of Santa Claus. She had already bought a case of pipes for Bram’s Christmas present. But now she was filled with ambition to give him some specially chosen gift that would commemorate this cold Greenwich Yuletide. What should it be? She longed to find something that would prove to him more intimately than words all that he had meant to her these years of their married life, all that he would mean to her on and on through the years to come. Bram was such a dear. He worked so hard. He was never jealous. He had nothing of the actor’s vanity, and all the actor’s good nature. What present would express what she felt about his dearness? Ash-trays, cigarette-holders, walking-sticks—what availed they to tell him how deep was her love? Pocket-books, card-cases, blotters—what eloquence did they possess? Then she saw on the counter a little silver key.
“Is this the key of anything?” she asked the shopman.
“No, miss, that is what they call a charm. We have alarge assortment this season. This silver puppy-dog, for instance. You’d really be surprised to know what a quantity of these silver puppy-dogs we’ve sold. They’re worn on bracelets or watch-chains. Quite the go, miss, I can assure you.”
“No, I like this key better. Could you let me have a box for it?”
“Certainly, miss.”
“And I want to write something on a card and put it inside if you’d kindly seal it for me.”
“With pleasure, miss.”
Nancy leant over the counter and wrote, with a blush for her folly:This is the key of my heart. Keep it always, my darling.
The key and the card were put inside the box; and she hurried off to the theatre, laughing to herself in an absurdly delicious excitement at the thought of hiding it under Bram’s pillow to-night.
The dress rehearsal was not over till three o’clock on Christmas morning. The ladies and gentlemen of the company were all so tired when at last they were dismissed that when they came out of the theatre and found Greenwich white and silent under a heavy fall of snow, not even the comedians had any energy to be funny with snowballs.
“What time’s the call to-morrow, dear?” one of the chorus called back to a friend in a weary voice.
“There’s no call to-morrow, duck. It’s Christmas Day.”
“Gard, so it is!”
“Don’t forget the curtain goes up for the matinée on Boxing Day at half-past one, dear.”
“Right-o!”
“Queenie’s got her boy staying at the ‘Ship,’” the chorus girl explained to Nancy. “And she’s the limit for forgetting everything when he’s about. She’s potty on him. Merry Christmas, Miss O’Finn.”
“Merry Christmas to you.”
All the way back up the court, at the end of which was the stage-door, the Christmas greetings of one to another floated thinly along the snowy air.
“A merry Christmas! A merry Christmas.”
Bram took Nancy’s arm, and they hurried away back as fast as they could to Starboard Alley, where they found Letizia safe in her cot, one of Mrs. Pottage’s stockings hanging like a coal-sack over the foot of it.
“You never told me which stocking to put out,” said the landlady. “So I hung up one of my own. Of course, I hung up one of hers as well, pore mite, but hers wouldn’t hold more than a couple of acid-drops. Mine is alittlemore convenient.”
“How kind of you to sit up for us, Mrs. Pottage,” the two vagabonds exclaimed.
“Oh, I’ve been thinking over old times. You know. On and off the doze, as you might say. My friend Mrs. Bugbird didn’t hop it till past midnight. She generally comes in for a chat of a Monday evening, and being Christmas Eve she stayed on a bit extra. She’s a real comic, is Mrs. Bugbird; but she had to be a bit careful how she laughed to-night, because last week she ricked the plate of her teeth laughing over a story I told her. Yes, the soup’s lovely and hot. But I did let the fire out in your sitting-room. So if you wouldn’t mind coming into my kitchen....”
“Was Letizia good?” the mother asked.
“She hasn’t moved an inch since I put her to bye-bye. I’ve popped up to look at her several times. In fact, Mrs. Bugbird and me both popped up, and Mrs. B. said a more sweetly pretty infant she never did wish to see. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘Mrs. Bugbird,’ I said, ‘that’s something for you to say with the fourteen you’ve had.’ Fancy, fourteen! Tut-tut-tut! Still if I’d accepted half my proposals, I’d have had more like forty by now.”
A canary stirred upon his perch and chirped.
“Hear that?” said Mrs. Pottage. “That blessed bird understands every word I say. Don’t you, my beauty?Now come along, drink up your soup, and do eat a little bit of the nice cold supper I’ve put out for you.”
While her lodgers were enjoying the cold roast beef, Mrs. Pottage examined the purchases made for Letizia’s stocking.
“Oh, dear, how they do get things up nowadays!” she exclaimed, holding at admiring arm’s length the monkey-on-a-stick. “Lifelike, isn’t it? You’ll want an orange and an apple, don’t forget. And I wouldn’t put in too many lollipops if I was you, or she won’t be able to eat any turkey. I got you a lovely little turkey. Nine pounds. Well, you don’t want to sit down to an elephant. I remember one Christmas I invited my sister to come up from Essex, and I thought she’d appreciate some turkey, so I told the fishmonger to send in a really nice dainty little one. Well, by mistake his boy brought round one that weighed thirty-two pounds and which had won the prize for the biggest turkey in Greenwich that year. In fact, it come round to me with a red and white rosette stuck in its how-d’ye-do as big as a sunflower. Well, it didn’t arrive till past eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve, and I was down at the ‘Nelson’s Head’ with my sister till closing time, and there it was waiting for us when we got back, tied onto the knocker. It gave me a bit of a start, because I’d had one or two for old sake’s sake, and I thought for the minute some pore fellow had gone and suicided himself on my front door. Well, there was nothing to be done but cook it, and my sister’s a small-made woman, and when we sat down to dinner with that turkey between us she might have been sitting one side of St. Paul’s and me the other. I give you my word that turkey lasted me for weeks. Well, the wish-bone was as big as a church window, and I could have hung my washing out on the drumsticks. Itwasa bird. Oh, dear, oh, dear! Well, I know when I threw the head out to the cat the pore beast had convulsions in the backyard, and as for the parson’s nose, well, as I said to my sister, the parson as had a nose like that must have been a Jewishrabbit. What a set out it was, to be sure! And my turkey which I ought to have had was sent up to a large family gathering in the Shooter’s Hill Road, and half the party never tasted turkey at all that Christmas.”
Mrs. Pottage continued in a strain of jovial reminiscence until her lodgers had finished supper, after which she wanted to accompany them upstairs to their room that she might help in the filling of Letizia’s stocking.
“The fact is,” she whispered hoarsely, “I put that stocking of mine out, because I’d bought a few odds and ends for her myself.”
She dived into the pockets of her voluminous skirt. “Here we are, a bouncing dog with a chube at the end of it to squeeze. She can’t swallow it unless she swallows the dog too, and I don’t think she’ll do that. TheStory of the Three Bears, warranted untearable, which it isn’t, for I tore up two in the shop with my own hands just to show the young man he didn’t know what he was talking about. A toy violing. She won’t be able to play on it, but the varnish won’t hurt her. A drum—well, it was really that drum which decided me to use one of my own stockings. My calves have grown whopping. In fact, I’ve often said jokingly to Mrs. Bugbird that I ought to call them cows nowadays. That’s the lot, I think. Well, I shan’t wake you in the morning till you ring. Just one tinkle will be enough. There’s no need to turn it round as if you was playing a barrel organ, which is what the fellow who played the villain inHis Life for Herdid last November. He wound up all the wire somewhere inside the wall. A nice set out we had, and then he grumbled because I charged him in the bill for the work the plumber did to get it right again. Well, good night, and a merry Christmas.”
When the sound of Mrs. Pottage’s hoarse whispering had departed, the little candlelit room glowed in the solemn hush of the great white world, of which it seemed to be the warm and beating heart. Mother and father bent low over the cot and listened to the faint breathingof Letizia, watching lovingly those dark tangled curls and red-rose cheeks. The father bent lower to touch them with his lips.
“No, no, don’t kiss her, boy,” said the mother. “You might wake her, and she’ll be having such an exciting day to-morrow.”
Nancy blew out the candle on the table by the bed, and slipped her silver key beneath Bram’s pillow. A shaft of moonlight pierced the drawn curtains and struck the canopy of Letizia’s cot. The radiance vanished as gathering snow-clouds obscured the face of the moon. Nancy fell asleep to the sound of Bram’s watch carrying on a fairy conversation amid the echoes of Mrs. Pottage’s absurd stories.