No doubt it has been surmised from what has gone before, that when Henry said to himself that he would go and see Aunt Tipping, he did not propose to himself a visit to the country seat of some quaint old lady of quality. Baronial towers and stately avenues of ancestral elm did not make a picturesque background for his thoughts as he recalled Aunt Tipping.
Poor kind Aunt Tipping, it is a shame to banter her memory even in so obvious a fashion; for if ever there was a kind heart, it was hers. In fact she possessed, in a degree that amounted to genius, one of the rarest of human qualities,--unconditional pity for the unhappy human creature. Within her narrow and squalid sphere, she was never known to fail of such succour as was hers to give to misfortune, however well-merited, or misery however self-made.
No religion or philosophy has ever yet been merciful enough to human weakness. Matilda Tipping repaired the lack so far as she went. In fact, she had unconsciously realised that weaknessishuman nature. It would be difficult to fix upon an offence that would disqualify you for Aunt Tipping's pity. To the prodigalities of the passions, and the appetites disastrously indulged, she was accustomed by a long succession of those sad and shady lodgers to whom it was part of her precarious livelihood to let her rooms, and, not infrequently, to forgive them their rent. That men and women should drink too much, and love too many, was, her experience told her, one of those laws of nature that seemed to make a good deal of unnecessary inconvenience in mortal affairs, but against which mere preaching or punishment availed nothing. All that was to be done was, so far as possible, to repair their ravages in particular instances, and heal the wounds of human passion with simple human kindness.
Of two vessels, one for honour and the other for dishonour, surely nature never made so complete a contrast as Matilda Tipping and her sister, Mary Mesurier. Both country girls, born in a humble, though defiantly respectable, stratum of society, the ways of the two sisters had already parted in childhood. Mary was studious, neat, and religious; Matilda was tomboyish, impatient of restraint, and fond of unedifying associates.
"Your aunt never aspired," Mrs. Mesurier would say of Aunt Tipping sometimes to her children; and, while still a child, she had often reproached her with her fondness for gossiping with companions "beneath her." Matilda could never be persuaded to care for books. She was naturally illiterate, and even late in life had a fixed aversion to writing her own letters; whereas, at the age of seven, Mary had been public scrivener for the whole village. But with these regrettable instincts, from the first Matilda had also manifested a whimsical liveliness, an unconquerable lightheartedness which made you forgive her anything, and for which, poor soul, she had use enough before she was done with life. At seventeen, added to good looks, of which at fifty there was scarcely a trace in the thin and meanly worn face, this vivacity had proved a tragic snare. A certain young capitalist--known as a great gentleman--of that countryside had pounced down on the gay and careless young Matilda, and had at once provided her life with its formative tragedy and its deathless romance. Even at fifty, hopelessly buried among the back streets and pawnshops of life, heaven still opened in the heart of Matilda Tipping at the mention of the name of William Allsopp. For several years she had lived with the Mesuriers, as general help to her sister, between whom and her, in spite of surface disparities, there was an indissoluble bond of affection; till, at thirty-five or so, she had suddenly won the heart of a sad old widower of fifty-five, named Samuel Tipping.
Samuel Tipping was no ordinary widower. As you looked at his severe, thoughtful face, surmounted by a shock of beautiful white hair, you instinctively respected him; and when you heard that he lived by cobbling shoes by day and playing a violin in the Theatre Royal orchestra by night, occasionally putting off his leather apron to give a music lesson in the front parlour of an afternoon, you respected him all the more. There had been but one thing against Mr. Tipping's eligibility for marriage, Matilda Tipping would tell you, even years after, with a lowering of her voice: he was said to be an "atheist," and a reader of strange books. Yet he seemed a quiet, manageable man, and likely--again in Mrs. Tipping's phrase--to prove a "good provider;" so she had risked his heterodoxy, which indeed was a somewhat fanciful objection on her part, and made him, as he declared with his dying breath, the best of wives.
It chanced that when Henry, in pursuance of his over-night resolve, made his way the following afternoon through a dingy little street, and knocked on the door of a dingy little house, bearing upon a brass plate the legend "Boots neatly repaired," Mr. Tipping was engaged in giving one of those very music lessons. A dingy little maid-of-all-work opened the door, and said that Mrs. Tipping was out shopping, but would be back soon. From the front parlour came the lifeless tum-tumming of the piano, and Mr. Tipping's voice gruffly counting time to the cheerless five-finger exercises of a very evident beginner.
"One--two--three! One--two--three! One--two--three!" went Mr. Tipping's voice, with an occasional infusion of savagery.
"But Mr. Tipping is at home?" said Henry. "I will wait till he is disengaged. I will make myself comfortable in the kitchen," (Henry knew his way about at Aunt Tipping's, and remembered there was only one front parlour) adding, with something of pride, "I'm Mrs. Tipping's nephew, you know."
Presently the torture in the front parlour was at an end; and, as Mr. Tipping was about to turn upstairs to the little back room where he mended his shoes, Henry emerged upon him from the kitchen. They had had some talks on books and the general misgovernment of the universe,--for Mr. Tipping really was something of an "atheist,"--on Henry's occasional visits, and were no strangers to each other.
"Why, Henry, lad, whoever expected to see you! Your aunt's out at present; but she'll be back soon. Come into the parlour."
"If you don't mind, Uncle Tipping, I'd rather come upstairs with you. I love the smell of the leather and the sight of all those sharp little knives, and the black, shiny 'dubbin,' do you call it? And we can have a talk about books till aunt comes home."
"All right, lad. But it's a dusty place, and there's hardly a corner to sit down in."
So up they went to a little room where, in a chaos of boots mended on one hand, and boots to mend on the other, sheets of leather lying about, in one corner a great tubfull of water in which the leather was soaked,--an old boyish fascination of Henry's,--Mr. Tipping spent the greater part of his days. He sat on a low bench near a window, along which ran a broad sill full of tools. On this, too, lay an opened book, into which Mr. Tipping would dip now and again, when he could safely leave the boot he was engaged upon to the mechanical skill of his hands. At one end of the tool-shelf was a small collection of books, a dozen or so shabby volumes, though these were far from constituting Mr. Tipping's complete library.
Mr. Tipping belonged to that pathetic army of book-lovers who subsist on the refuse of the stalls, which he hunted not for rare editions, but for the sheer bread of life, or rather the stale crusts of knowledge. His tastes were not literary in the special sense of the word. For belles-lettres he had no fancy, and fine passages, except in so far as they were controversial, left him cold. His mind was primarily scientific, secondarily philosophic, and occasionally historic. Travels and books of physical science were the finds for which, mainly, he rummaged the stalls. At the moment his pet study was astronomy; and a curious apparatus in one of the corners, which Henry had noticed as he entered, was his sad attempt to rig up a telescope for himself.
"It's not so bad as it looks," he said, pointing it out; "but then," he added, with a smile half sad and half humorous, "there are not many stars to be seen from Tichborne Street."
It was a touching characteristic of the type of bookman to which Mr. Tipping belonged, that the astronomy from which he was reading by no means embodied the latest discoveries. In fact, it narrowly escaped being eighteenth-century science, for it was dated very early in the eighteen hundreds. But an astronomy was an astronomy to Mr. Tipping; and had Copernicus been born late enough, he would most certainly have imbibed Ptolemaic doctrines with grateful unsuspicion. Indeed, had it been put to him: "This astronomy after Copernicus at half-a-crown, and this after Ptolemy for sixpence," his means alone would have left him no choice. It is so the old clothes of the mind, like the old clothes of the body,--superseded science, forgotten philosophy,--find a market, and a book remains a book, with the power of comforting or diverting some indigent, poor soul, so long as the stitching holds it together.
Presently there was a knock at the front door.
"There's your aunt," said Mr. Tipping; and, as the door opened, the little maid-of-all-work was to be heard whispering her mistress that a young gentleman who said he was her nephew had come and was upstairs with "the master."
"Well, I never!" exclaimed Mrs. Tipping, immediately starting upstairs towards the open door of the cobblery.
Henry was standing on the threshold, and the warm-hearted little woman gave him a hearty hug of welcome.
"Well, Iamglad to see you! And how are they all at home?" and she ran over the list, name for name. "We mustn't forget your father. But he's a hard 'un and no mistake," said the aunt, putting on a mimic expression of severity.
"He's an upright man, is James Mesurier," said Mr. Tipping, rather severely.
"Oh, yes, yes; we know that, crosspatch. I'm saying nothing against him. He's good at heart, I know; but he's a little hard on the surface--like some other folks I know," making a face at her husband. "But you must come down and talk to me a bit, lad; you'll have had enough of him and his old books. You never saw the like of him! Here he sits day after day over his musty books, and you can hardly get him away for his meals. He's no company for any one."
"Talk of something you can understand, lass," retorted the husband, in a voice that took any unkindness from the words, rather like a father than a husband. "You don't ail much for lack of company, I'm sure."
"Now if it was only a good novel," his wife persisted; "but nothing but travels, geographies, and such like. Last thing he's taken up with is the stars. I suppose he's been telling you about them--" and she said this half as though it were a new form of lunacy Mr. Tipping had developed, and half as though he had been opening up new realms of knowledge--original but useless. She was far indeed from understanding that lonely mind and its tragedy, thirsting so hopelessly for knowledge, and to die athirst. She heard him knock, knock all day upstairs; but the knocking told her nothing of his loneliness. He was just a good, hard-working, rather cross old man, unaccountably fond of printed matter, whom she liked to be good to, and if in her time that knocking upstairs should stop for ever--well! she wasn't one to meet trouble half way, but she would miss it a good deal, old man as he was.
She was herself nearing fifty; but her slim little wiry body and her elfish, wrinkled face, never still, but ever alive with the same vivacity that years ago had attracted William Allsopp, made her seem younger than her years; and her husband treated her as though she were still a child, a wilful child.
"Eh, Matilda," he said, "you're just a child. No more nor less,--just a child. The years haven't tamed you one bit--"
"Get out with you and your old stars!" she said, laughing. "Henry, come along and have a talk with your old aunt."
Though invincibly cheerful through it all, Aunt Tipping was always in trouble, if not for herself, for somebody else. To-day, it was for herself, though it was but a minor reverse in the guerilla warfare of her life. A distressed lodger who had just left had begged her to accept, in lieu of rent, the pawn-ticket of a handsome clock which had been hers in happier days; and Mrs. Tipping, moved as she always was by any tale of woe, however elaborate, had consented. Nor in her world was such a way of settling accounts very exceptional, for pawn-tickets were there looked upon as legitimately negotiable securities. Indeed, Aunt Tipping was seldom without a selection of such securities upon her hands; and, if a neighbour should chance to be in need, say, of a new set of chimney ornaments, as likely as not Aunt Tipping had in her purse a pledge for the very thing. This she would sell at a reasonable profit, which would probably amount to but a small proportion of the original debt for which she had accepted it. It was not a lucrative business, though there were occasional "bargains" in it.
In that word "bargains," all the active romance of Aunt Tipping's life was now centred. In all departments of the cast-off and the second-hand she was a daring speculator; and a spirited "auction" now and again exhilarated her as much as a fortnight by the sea. That house which she fought so desperately to keep tidy and respectable, had been furnished almost entirely in this way. There was hardly an article in it that had not already lived other lives in other houses, before it had been picked up, "dirt cheap," by Aunt Tipping.
But this afternoon her confidence in human nature had received a cruel wound. When, after an hour's weary drag to a remote end of the town, she had arrived at the pawnshop where was preserved the handsome clock of the distressed lady, and had confidently presented the ticket and the necessary money, the man had looked awhile perplexed. They had no such clock, he said. And then, as he further examined the ticket, a light broke in upon him.
"My dear lady," he said, "look here. The year on this ticket has been changed."
So indeed it had, and poor Aunt Tipping was at least a year too late.
"Did you ever hear of such treatment?" she said to Henry; "and such a nice lady she was. 'I shall never forget your goodness to me, Mrs. Tipping,' she said as she went away, 'never, if I live to be a hundred.' I'll 'goodness' her, if ever I catch her. Cheating honest folks like that! Such people oughtn't to be allowed. I don't know how people can behave so!"
Aunt Tipping's indignation seldom outlived a few plaintive words of this sort; and had the offending lady of the clock appeared next moment, and given some Arabian Nights' explanation, there is little doubt that Aunt Tipping would have forgiven her on the spot. A tendency to do so was already active in her next remark,--
"Well, poor soul, we mustn't be too hard on her. We never know what we may be brought to ourselves." For it was Aunt Tipping's unformulated axiom that, whatever cock-and-bull stories misfortune may tell, there is always some truth in human misery.
When Henry had told Aunt Tipping his story, and ventured to hint a suggestion that, if it should not be inconvenient for her, he would like to take sanctuary with her for a month or two, till he got his hopes into working order, her little sharp face fairly gleamed with delight. You would have thought that he was bringing her some great benefit, instead of proposing to take something from her. That he should have thought ofher, such a little humble aunt; that, added to the love she had for any one with any tincture of her family's blood running in their veins, plus her general weakness for any one in trouble, brought tears to her eyes that made her look quite young again.
"I should think so indeed!" she said. "The best your poor old auntie's got is yours with all her heart--Ah, your father never understood you. You've got too much of our side of the family in you. You're a bit wild, you know, lad; but you're none the worse for that, eh?"
There is no need to say that Aunt Tipping's understanding of the tastes and ambitions which had driven Henry momentarily to take refuge with her was of the vaguest; but all she needed to know of such a situation was that: here on the one hand was something somebody very much wanted to do, and here on the other were certain stern powers ranked against his doing it. That was enough for her. Her sympathy with all forms of revolt was instantaneous. For law and order, as such, she had an instinctive antipathy, as in all contests whatsoever her one general rule was: "Side with the weaker." And it cannot but have been perceived that so much sympathy with weakness could hardly have been in the gift of weakness. No; Aunt Tipping was entirely impersonal in these charities of feeling, and it was because there was so much sterling honesty and strength hidden in her little wiry frame, that she could afford so much succour to those who were neither honest nor strong.
"Well, it was nice of you to think of your poor old aunt," she repeated again and again; and then she remarked on the good fortune which had caused the vacation of the front room over the parlour, her grievance against the lady of the handsome clock quite forgotten.
"It's a nice airy room," she said; and then she began planning how she might best arrange it for his comfort.
"Dear little aunt," said Henry, taking the little wisp of a woman into his arms, "you're the salt of the earth."
"Why ever didn't I think of it before!" exclaimed Aunt Tipping, presently. "I've got the very gentleman to help you with your writing."
"Indeed," said Henry, somewhat sceptical.
"Yes; he's down there in the back parlour. They say he's a great writer," continued Aunt Tipping; "but he's not very well the last day or two, and doesn't see anybody. To tell the truth, poor gentleman," she confided, lowering her voice, "he's just a little too fond of his glass. But he's as good and kind a gentleman as ever stepped, and always regular with his rent every Monday morning."
There was usually something mysterious about Aunt Tipping's lodgers. At their best, she had known them as elaborately wronged bye-products of aristocracy. Many of them were lawful expectants of illegally delayed fortunes, and at the very least they always drank romantically.
Thus it was that to the somewhat amused surprise of his family, Henry came to take up his abode for a while with Aunt Tipping, and that his books and the cast of Dante, and the sketch of the young Dante done in sepia by Myrtilla Williamson's own fair hand, came to find themselves in the incongruous environment of Tichborne Street.
Aunt Tipping proved not so ludicrously out of it after all in regard to the literary gentleman in the back parlour. Henry had hardly known what to expect; but certainly he had pictured no one so interesting as Ashton Gerard proved to be. For a dark den smelling strongly of whisky and water, and some slovenly creature of the under-world crouched in a dirty armchair over the fire, he found instead a pleasant little room, very neatly kept, with books, two or three good pictures, and general evidence of cultivated tastes; and on Mr. Gerard's refined sad face, which, being shaven, and surmounted by a tuft of vigorous curly hair, once black but now curiously splashed with vivid flakes of white, retained something of boyish beauty even at forty, you looked in vain for the marks of one who was in the grip of an imperious vice. Only by the marked dimness and weariness of his blue eyes, which gave the face a rather helpless, dreamy expression, might the experienced observer have understood. So to speak, the ocular will had gone out of them; they no longer grasped the visible, but glided listlessly over it; nor did they seem to be looking on things invisible. They were the eyes of the drowned.
Mr. Gerard had exceedingly gentle manners. It was easy to understand that a landlady would worship him. He gave little trouble, asked for the most necessary service as though it were a courtesy, and never forgot an interest in Aunt Tipping's affairs. On bright days he revealed a vein of quite boyish gaiety; and in his talk with Henry he flashed out a strange paradoxical humour, too often morbid in its themes, which, as usually the case with such humour, was really sadness coming to the surface in a jest.
It soon transpired that a favourite subject of his talk was that very weakness which most men would have been at pains to hide.
"So you're going to be a poet, Mr. Mesurier," he said. "Well, so was I once, so was I--but," he continued, "all too early another Muse took hold of me, a terrible Muse--yet a Muse who never forsakes you--" and he laid his hand on a decanter which stood near him on the table,--"yes, Mr. Mesurier, the terrible Muse of Drink! You may be surprised to hear me talk so; yet were this laudanum instead of brandy, there would seem to you a certain element of the poetic in the service of such a Muse. Drinks with Oriental or unfamiliar names have a romantic sound. Thus Alfred de Musset as the slave to absinthe sounds much more poetic than, say, Alfred de Musset as a slave to rum or gin, or even this brandy here. Yet this, too, is no less the stuff that dreams are made of; and the opium-eater, the absinthe-sipper, the brandy-drinker, are all members of the same great brotherhood of tragic idealists--"
He talked deliberately; but there was a smile playing at the corners of the mouth which took from his talk the sense of a painful self-revelation, and gave it the air of a playful fantasia upon a paradox that for the moment amused him.
"Idealists! Yes," he continued; "for what few understand is that drink is an idealism--and," he presently added with a laugh, "and, of course, like all idealisms, it has its dangers."
With a monomaniac, conversation is apt to limit itself to monologue; so, while Henry was greatly interested in this odd talk, it left him but little to say.
"I'm afraid I shock you a little, Mr. Mesurier, perhaps even--disgust you," said Mr. Gerard.
"Indeed, no!" exclaimed Henry; "but both the subject and your way of treating it are, I confess, a little new to me."
"You are surprised to find one who is what is popularly known as a drunkard not so much ashamed of as interested in himself; isn't that it? Well, that comes of the introspective literary temperament. It is only the oyster fascinated by the pearl that is killing it."
"You should write some 'Confessions' after the manner of De Quincey," said Henry.
"Indeed, I've often thought of it, for there's so much that needs saying on the subject. There is nothing with which we are at once so familiar and of which we know so little. For example"--and now he was quite plainly off again--"for example, the passion for, I might say the dream of, drink is usually regarded as a sensual appetite, a physical indulgence. No doubt in its first crude stages it often is so; but soon it becomes something much more strange and abstract. It becomes a mysterious command, issuing we know not whence. It is hardly a desire, and it is not so much a joyless, as a quite colourless, obedience to an imperious necessity, decreed by some unknown will. You might well imagine that I like the taste of this brandy there, as a child is greedily fond of sweetstuff; but it would be quite a mistake. For my own personal taste, there is no drink like a cup of tea; it is the demon, the strange will that has imposed itself upon me, that has a taste for brandy.
"I sometimes wonder whether we poor drunkards are not the victims of disembodied powers of the air who, by some chance, have contracted a craving for earthly liquors, and can only satisfy that craving by fastening themselves upon some unhappy human organism. At times there comes an intermission of the command, as mysterious almost as the command itself. For weeks together we give no thought to our tyrant. We grow gay and young and innocent again. We are free,--so free, we seem to have forgotten that we were ever enslaved. Then suddenly one day we hear the call again. We cry for mercy; we throw ourselves on our knees in prayer. We clutch sacred relics; we conjure the aid of holy memories; we say over to ourselves the names of the dead we have loved: but it is all in vain--surely we are dragged to the feet of that inexorable will, surely we submit ourselves once more to the dark dominion."
Henry listened, fascinated, and a little frightened.
"The longer I live, the more I grow convinced that this is no mere fancy, but actual science," Mr. Gerard continued; "for, again, you might well imagine that one drinks for the dreams or other illusory effects it is said to produce. At first, perhaps, yes; but such effects speedily pass away, they pass away indeed before the tyranny has established itself, while it would still be possible to shake it off. No, the dreams of drink are poor things, not worth having at the best. Indeed, there are no dreams worth having, believe me, but those of youth and health and spring-water."
And Mr. Gerard passed for awhile in silence into some hidden country of his lost dreams.
Henry gazed at him with a curious wonder. Here was a man evidently of considerable gifts, a man of ideals, of humour, a man witty and gentle, who surely could have easily made his mark in the world, and yet he had thrown all away for a mechanical habit which he himself did not pretend to be a passion,--a mere abstract attraction: as though a man should say, "I care not for the joys or successes of this world. My destiny is to sit alone all day and count my fingers and toes, count them over and over and over again. There is not much pleasure in it, and I should be glad to break off the habit,--but there it is. It is imposed upon me by a will stronger than mine which I must obey. It is my destiny."
"Yes, idealists!" said Mr. Gerard, presently coming back from his dreams to his great subject, with a laugh. "That reminds me of a story a business friend of mine told me the other day. A clerk in his office was an incorrigible drunkard. He was quite alone in the world, and had no one dependent upon him. The firm had been lenient to him, and again and again forgiven his outbreaks. But one morning they called him in and said: 'Look here, Jones, we have had a great deal of patience with you; but the time has come when you must choose between the drink and the office.' To their surprise, Jones, instead of eagerly promising reform, looked up gravely, and replied, 'Will you give me a week to think it over, sir? It is a very serious matter.' Drink was all the poor fellow had outside his drudgery; was it to be expected that he should thus lightly sacrifice it?--
"But, to talk about something else, your aunt, Mrs. Tipping, who has a great idea of my literary importance, has a notion that I may be of some help to you, Mr. Mesurier. Well, I'll tell you the whole extent of my present literary engagements, and you are perfectly at liberty to laugh. At the present time I do the sporting notes for theTyrian Daily Mail, and I write the theological reviews forThe Fleet Street Review. These apparently incongruous occupations are the relics of an old taste for sport, which as a boy in the country I had ample opportunity for indulging, and of an interrupted training for the Church--'twixt then and now there is an eventful gap which, if you don't mind, we won't sadden each other by filling--Let us fill our glasses and our pipes instead; and, having failed so entirely myself, I will give you minute directions how to succeed in literature."
Mr. Gerard's discourse on how to succeed in literature was partly practical and partly ironical, and probably too technical to interest the general reader, who has no intention of being a great or a little writer, and who perhaps has already found Mr. Gerard's previous discourse a little too special in its character. Suffice it that Henry heard much to remember, and much to laugh over, and that Mr. Gerard concluded with a practical offer of kindness.
"I don't know how much use it may be to you," he said; "but if you care to have it, I should be very glad to give you a letter to the editor ofThe Fleet Street Review. He has, I think, a certain regard for me, and he might send you a book to do now and again. At all events, it would be something."
Henry embraced the offer gratefully; and it occurred to him that in a day or two's time there was a five days' excursion running from Tyre to London and back, for half-a-guinea. Why not take it, and expend his last five pounds in a stimulating glimpse of the city he some day hoped to conquer? He could then see his friend the publisher, present his letter to the editor, and perhaps bring home with him some little work and a renewed stock of hopes.
So, before they parted that night, Mr. Gerard wrote him the letter.
Thus it was that, all unexpectedly, Henry found himself set down one autumn morning at the homeless hour of a quarter-to-seven, in Euston station. He was going to stay in some street off the Strand, and chartered a hansom to take him there. Few great cities are impressive in the neighbourhood of their railway termini. You enter them, so to speak, by the back door; and London waves no banners of bright welcome to the stranger who first enters it by the Euston Road.
But there was an interesting church presently, and on a dust-cart close by Henry read "Vestry of St. Pancras."
"Can that be the St. Pancras' Church," he said to himself, "where Mary Wollstonecraft lies buried, and Browning was married?"
Then as they drove along through Bloomsbury, the name "Great Coram Street" caught his eye, and he exclaimed with delight: "Why, that's where Thackeray lived for a time!"
Great Coram Street is little accustomed to create such excitement in the breast of the passer-by. But to the stranger London is necessarily first a museum, till he begins to love it as a home, and, in addition to dead men's associations, begins to people it with memories of his own. When you have lived awhile in Gray's Inn, you grow to forget that Bacon's ghost is your fellow-tenant; and it is the kind-hearted provincial who from time to time lays those flowers on Goldsmith's tomb. When you are caught in a block on Westminster Bridge, with only five minutes to get to Waterloo, you forget to say to yourself: "Ah, this is the bridge on which Wordsworth wrote his famous sonnet." You usually say something quite different.
The mere names of the streets,--how laden with immemorial poetry they were! "Chancery Lane!" How wonderful! Yet the poor wretch standing outside the public-house at the corner seemed to derive small consolation from the fact that he was starving in Chancery Lane.
But to Henry, as yet, London was an extended Westminster Abbey, and every other street was Poet's Corner. He had hardly patience to breakfast, so eager was he to be out in the streets; and while he ate, his eyes were out of the windows all the time, and his ears drinking in all the London morning sounds like music. At the foot of the street ran the Thames; he had caught a thrilling glimpse of it as he stepped from his cab, and had had a childish impulse to rush down to it before entering his hotel.
At last, free of food and baggage, light of heart, and brimming over with youth, he stepped into the street. It was but little past eight o'clock. He had just heard the hour chimed, in various tones of sweetness and solemnity, from several mellow clocks, evidently hidden high in the air in his near vicinity. For two or three hours there would be no editor or publisher to be seen, and meanwhile he had London to himself. He stepped out into it as into a garden,--a garden of those old-time flowers in which antiquity has become a perfume full of pictures.
Yes, there was the Thames! "Sweet Themmes, run softly till I end my song!" he quoted to himself. Chaucer's, Spenser's, Elizabeth's Thames!
It was a bright morning and the river gleamed to advantage. The tall tower of Westminster glittered richly in the sun, and the long front of Somerset House wore a lordly smile. The embankment gardens sparkled and rustled in morning freshness. Henry drew in the air of London as though it had been a rose. Here was the Thames at the foot of the street, and there at the head was the Strand, a stream of omnibuses and cabs, and city-faring men and women. The Temple must be somewhere close by. Of course it was here to his left. But he would first walk quietly by the Thames side to Westminster, and then come back by the Strand. As he walked, he stepped lightly and gently, as though reverent to the very stones of so sacred a city, and all the time from every prospect and every other street-corner came streaming like strains of music magnetic memories,--"streets with the names of old kings, strong earls, and warrior saints." If for no other reason, how important for the future of a nation is it to preserve in such ancient cities as London and Oxford the energising spectacle of a noble and strenuous antiquity; for there are no such inspirers of young men as these old places! So much strength and youth went into them long ago that even yet they have strength and youth to give, and from them, as from the strong hills, pours out an inexhaustible potency of bracing influence.
At last Henry found himself back at the top-end of his street. He had walked the Strand with deliberate enjoyment. Fleet Street he still reserved, but, as according to the tower of Clement Danes it was only just ten o'clock, it seemed still a little early to attack his business. A florist's close by suggested a charming commonplace way of filling the time. He would buy some flowers and carry them to Goldsmith's grave. Why Goldsmith's grave should thus be specially honoured, he a little wondered. He was conscious of loving several writers quite as well. But it was a Johnsonian tradition to love Goldy, and the accessibility of his resting-place made sentiment easy.
He repented this momentary flippancy of thought as he stood in the cloistered corner where Goldsmith sleeps under the eye of the law; and, when he laid his little wreath on the worn stone, it was a genuine offering. From it he turned away to his own personal dreams.
By eleven he had found his friend the publisher, in a dainty little place of business crammed with pottery, Rowlandsons, and books, and more like a curiosity-shop than a publishing-house, for the publisher proved an enthusiast in everything that was beautiful or curious, and had indeed taken to publishing from that rare motive in a publisher,--the love of books, rather than the love of money. He was aiming to make his little shop the rallying-point of all the young talent of the day, and as young talent has never too many publishers on the look-out for it, his task was not difficult, though it was one of those real services to literature which such publishers and booksellers have occasionally done in our literary history, with but scant acknowledgment.
Henry was pleased to find that he looked upon him to make one of his little band of youth; and as the publisher understood the art of encouragement, Henry already felt it had been worth while to come to London just to see him. He knew the editor to whom Henry had a letter and volunteered him another. The afternoon would be the best time; meanwhile, they must lunch together. He smiled when Henry suggested the Cheshire Cheese. Henry had a sort of vague idea that literary men could hardly think of taking their meals anywhere else. There had been an attempt to bring it into fashion again, the publisher said; but it had come to nothing--though he, for one, loved those old chop-houses, with their tankards, and their sanded floors. So to the Cheshire Cheese they repaired, and drank to a long friendship in foaming pewters of porter.
"Alas!" said Henry, "we are fallen on smaller times. Once it was 'the poet's pint of port.' Now we must be content with the poetaster's half-a-pint of porter!"
"You must come to my rooms to-night," said the publisher, "and be introduced to some of our young men. I have one or two of our older critics coming too."
Henry's fortune was evidently made.
He found the editor in a dim back room at the top of a high building, so lost in a world of books and dust that at first Henry could hardly make him out, writing by a window with his back to the door. Then an alert head turned round to him, and a rather peevish gesture bade him be seated, while the editor resumed his work. This hardly came up to Henry's magnificent dreams of the editorial dignity. Perhaps he had a vague idea that editors lived in palaces, and sat on thrones.
Presently the editor put down his pen with an exclamation of satisfaction; and the first impression of peevishness vanished in the cordiality with which he now turned to his visitor.
"You must excuse my absorption. It was a rather tough piece of proof-reading. A subject I'm rather interested in,--new Welsh dictionary. Don't suppose it's in your line, eh, eh?"--and the tall, spare man laughed a boyish laugh like a mischievous bird, and tossed his head at the jest.
His face was small and sallow and tired; but the dark eyes were full of fun and kindness. Presently, he rose and began to walk up and down the room with a curious, prancing walk, rolling himself a cigarette, and talking away in a rapid, jerky fashion with his continual, "eh, eh?" coming in all the time.
"Poor Gerard! So you know him? How is he now?" and he lowered his voice with the suggestion of a mutual confidence, and stopped in his walk till Henry should answer. "Poor Gerard! And he might have been--well, well,--never mind. We were together at King's. Brilliant fellow. So you know Gerard. Dear me! Dear me!"
Then he turned to the subject of Henry's visit.
"Well, my poor boy, nothing will satisfy you but literature? You are determined to be a literary man, eh, eh?" Then he stopped in front of Henry and laid his hand kindly on his shoulder, "Is it too late to say, 'Go back while there is yet time'? Perhaps--of course--you're going to be a very great man," and he broke off into his walk again, with one of his mischievous laughs. "But unless you are, take my word, it's a poor game--Yet, I suppose, it's no use talking. I know, wasted breath, wasted breath--Well, now, what can you do? and, by the way, you won't grow fat onThe Fleet Street Review. Ten shillings a column is our magnificent rate of payment, and we can hardly afford that--"
Then he began pulling out one book and another from the piles of all sorts that lay around him. "I suppose, like the rest, you'd better begin on poetry. There's a tableful over there--go and take your pick of it, unless, of course, you've got some special subject. You're not, I suppose, an authority on Assyriology, eh, eh?"
Henry feared not, and then a new fit of industry came upon the editor, and he begged Henry to take a look at the books while he ran through another proof for the post.
That dusty table--evidently the rubbish-heap of the room--was Henry's first object-lesson in the half tragical, half farcical, over-production of modern literature. Such a mass of foolishness and ineptitude he had never conceived of; such pretentiousness too--and while he made various melancholy reflections upon human vanity, what should he unearth suddenly from the heap, but his own little volume. He could but half suppress a cry of recognition.
"What's that?" asked the editor, not turning round. "Found anything?"
"No," said Henry; "nothing--for a moment I thought I had."
Presently he had made a small pile of the most promising volumes, and turned to take his leave. The editor took up one or two of them carelessly.
"Not much here, I'm afraid," he said. "Never mind; see what you can make of them. Not more than three columns at the most, you know. And come and see me again. I'm glad to have seen you."
"Oh," said Henry, on the point of leaving, and laying his hand on his own little book, "may I take this one too? It's not worth reviewing, but it rather interested me just now."
"God bless me, yes, certainly," said the editor; "you're welcome to the lot, if you care to bring a hand-cart. Good-bye, good-bye."
And Henry slipped his poor little neglected volume into his pocket. On how many dusty tables, he wondered, was it then lying ignominiously disregarded. Well, the day would come! Meanwhile, he had his first batch of books for review.
There now remained the gathering of wits fixed for the evening. His publisher had asked him to dinner, but he had declined, from a secret and absurd desire to dine at "The Cock." This he gratified, and with his mind full of the spacious times of the early Victorians, he turned into the publisher's little room about nine o'clock to meet some of the later.
There was no great muster as yet. Some half-a-dozen rather shy young men spasmodically picked up strange drawings or odd-looking books, lying about on the publisher's tables, struggled maidenly with cigars, sipped a little whisky and soda; but little was said.
Among them a pale-faced lad of about fifteen, miraculously self-possessed, stood with his back to the chimney-piece. But soon others began to turn in, and by ten the room was as full of chatter and smoke as it could hold. Not least conspicuous among the talkers was the pale-faced boy of fifteen. Henry had been sitting near to him, and had been suddenly startled by his unexpectedly breaking out into a volley of learning, delivered in a voice impressively deliberate and sententious.
"What a remarkable boy that is!" said Henry, innocently, to the publisher.
"Yes; but he's not quite a boy,--though he's young enough. A curious little creature, morbidly learned. A friend of mine says that he would like to catch him and keep him in a bottle, and label it 'the learned homunculus.'"
"What dialect is it he is talking in?" said Henry; "I don't remember to have heard it before."
The publisher smiled: "My dear fellow, you must be careful what you say. That is what we call 'the Oxford voice.'"
"How remarkable!" said Henry, his attention called off by a being with a face that half suggested a faun, and half suggested a flower,--a small, olive-skinned face crowned with purply black hair, that kept falling in an elflock over his forehead, and violet eyes set slant-wise. He was talking earnestly of fairies, in a beautiful Irish accent, and Henry liked him. The attraction seemed mutual, and Henry found himself drawn into a remarkable relation about a fairy-hill in Connemara, and fairy lights that for several nights had been seen glimmering about it; and how at last he--that is, the narrator--and a particularly hard-headed friend of his had kept watch one moonlit night, with the result that they had actually seen and talked with the queen of the fairies and learned many secrets of the ----. The narrator here made use of a long, unpronounceable Irish word, which Henry could not catch.
"I should have explained some of these phenomena to you," whispered the publisher presently, noticing that Henry looked a little bewildered. "This is a young Irish poet, who, in the intervals of his raising the devil, writes very beautiful lyrics that he may well have learned from the fairies. It is his method to seem mad on magic and such things. You will meet with many strange methods here to-night. Don't be alarmed if some one comes and talks to you about strange sins. You have come to London in the 'strange sins' period. I will explain afterwards."
He had hardly spoken when a pallid young man, with a preternatural length and narrowness of face, began to talk to him about the sins of the Borgias.
"I suppose you never committed a murder yourself?" he asked Henry, languidly.
"No," said Henry, catching the spirit of the foolishness; "no, not yet. I am keeping that--" implying that he was reserving so extreme a stimulant till all his other vices failed him.
Presently there entered a tall young man with a long, thin face, curtained on either side with enormous masses of black hair, like a slip of the young moon glimmering through a pine-wood.
At the same moment there entered, as if by design, his very antithesis: a short, firmly built, clerkly fellow, with a head like a billiard-ball in need of a shave, a big brown moustache, and enormous spectacles.
"That," said the publisher, referring to the moon-in-the-pine-wood young man, "is our young apostle of sentiment, our new man of feeling, the best-hated man we have; and the other is our young apostle of blood. He is all for muscle and brutality--and he makes all the money. It is one of our many fashions just now to sing 'Britain and Brutality.' But my impression is that our young man of feeling will have his day,--though he will have to wait for it. He would hasten it if he would cut his hair; but that, he says, he will never do. His hair, he says, is his battle-cry. Well, he enjoys himself--and loves a fight, though you mightn't think it to look at him."
A supercilious young man, with pink cheeks, and a voice which his admirers compared to Shelley's, then came up to Henry and asked him what he thought of Mallarmé's latest sonnet; but finding Henry confessedly at sea, turned the conversation to the Empire ballet, of which, unfortunately, Henry knew as little. The conversation then languished, and the Shelley-voiced young man turned elsewhere for sympathy, with a shrug at your country bumpkins who know nothing later than Rossetti.
In the thick of the conversational turmoil, Henry's attention had from time to time been attracted by the noise proceeding from a blustering, red-headed man, with a face of fire.
"Who is that?" at last he found opportunity to ask his friend.
"That is our greatest critic," said the publisher.
"Oh!" said Henry, "I must try and hear what he is saying. It seems important from the way he is listened to."
So Henry listened, and heard how the fire-faced man said the word "damn" with great volubility and variety of cadence, and other words to the same effect, and how the little group around him hung upon his words and said to each other, "How brilliant!" "How absolute!"
Henry turned to his friend. "The only word I can catch is the word 'damn,'" he said.
"That," said the publisher, with a laugh, "is the master-word of fashionable criticism."
Presently a little talkative man came up, and said that he hoped Mr. Mesurier was an adherent of the rightful king.
"Oh, of course!" said Henry.
"And do you belong to any secret society?" asked the little man.
Henry couldn't say that he did.
"Well, you must join us!" he said.
"I suppose there won't be a rising just yet?" asked Henry, realising that this was the Jacobite method.
"Not just yet," said the little man, reassuringly. So Henry was enrolled.
And so it went on till past midnight, when Henry at last escaped, to talk it all over with the stars. The evening had naturally puzzled him, as a man will always be puzzled who has developed under the influence of the main tendencies of his generation, and who finds himself suddenly in a backwater of fanciful reaction. Henry, in his simple way, was a thinker and a radical, and he had nourished himself on the great main-road masters of English literature. He had followed the lead of modern philosophers and scientists, and had arrived at a mystical agnosticism,--the first step of which was to banish the dogmas of the church as old wives' tales. He considered that he had inherited the hard-won gains of the rationalists. But he came to London and found young men feebly playing with the fire of that Romanism which he regarded as at once the most childish and the most dangerous of all intellectual obsessions. In an age of great biologists and electricians, he came upon children prettily talking about fairies and the philosopher's stone. In one of the greatest ages of English poetry, he came to London to find young English poets falling on their knees to the metrical mathematicians of France. In the great age of democracy, a fool had come and asked him if he were not a supporter of the house of Stuart, a Jacobite of charades. But only once had he heard the name of Milton; it was the learned boy of fifteen who had quoted him,--a lifelong debt of gratitude; and never once had he heard the voice of simple human feeling, nor heard one speak of beauty, simply, passionately, with his heart in his mouth; nor of love with his heart upon his sleeve. Much cleverness, much learning, much charm, there had been, but he had missed the generous human impulse. No one seemed to be doing anything because he must. These were pleasant eddies, dainty with lilies and curiously starred water-grasses, but the great warm stream of English literature was not flowing here.
As he neared his hotel, he thought of his morning visit to Goldsmith's tomb, and ten-fold he repented the little half-sneer with which he had bought the flowers. In a boyish impulse, he rang the Temple bell, and found his way again to the lonely corner. His flowers were lying there in the moonlight, and again he read: "Here lies Oliver Goldsmith."
"Forgive me, Goldy," he murmured. "Well may men bring you flowers,--for you wrote, not as those yonder; you wrote for the human heart."