Over Bemerton's

CHAPTER XII

THESPIS SENDS ME TWO REPRESENTATIVES ON THE SAME DAY AND MONOPOLISES OUR ATTENTION

I was sitting in my room at half-past ten wondering whether I should go to the Oval or to Lord's when a brisk rap sounded at the door, it was flung open, and in burst a dazzling, rustling creature.

"Oh, I beg your pardon!" she said. "I have come to the wrong room. I thought this was Miss Lestrange's room."

I saw who it was in a flash—it was Azure Verity. I told her that Miss Lestrange dwelt in some remote region of this wonderful expanding house to which I had never penetrated, and that if she would wait a moment I would ring for Mrs. Duckie.

"Mrs. who?" she asked, with an air of such perfect ingenuousness that I was caught at once.

"Duckie," I said, and then she laughed, and I no doubt blushed.

"Not really?" she inquired, laughing again.

"It is absurd, isn't it?" I said.

It his long been my theory that some of the best friendships are based upon a good initial faux pas or ridiculous misunderstanding. The freemasonry of laughter gets to work at once and does in an instant what it otherwise might take days or weeks to achieve.

"May I tell you," I asked, "who you are, and then we can introduce each other?"

"Certainly," she said.

"You are Miss Azure Verity, now acting with unparalleled success at the Princess's Theatre in Mr. Operin's new play, and you have come to see your dresser, who calls herself Miss Lestrange but is really Miss Duckie."

"Wonderful!" she cried. "You are a Zanzig. But," she added, "so am I. You know there are always two of them. Let me now do my turn."

I had long since decided that I would not ring the bell before it was really necessary.

"You are the gentleman," she said, "from abroad who has the beautiful niece, and reads old books all night, and talks to mother in the mornings about what London used to be like thirty years ago—the gentleman who promises to go to the theatre to see Miss Verity but never gets nearer than a music hall. Am I right, sir?" she concluded, with an adorably mischievous smile.

"Quite right," I said. "We are very extraordinary people, it is clear, and we ought to succeed as duettists."

"Yes," she said, "Falconer and Verity—thought-readers and clairvoyants. That sounds all right."

"Verity is indeed an inspiration," I added. "It would make the fortune of a palmist."

"Oh," she said, "don't make any jokes about my name. I am so tired of them. Punch did it again only last week. Please ring for Mrs.—Mrs.—Duckie," she added, "but before I go I want you to promise me something. Promise me that if I send you a box you will not only come to the theatre but bring your niece too. Will you promise?"

I promised, and Mrs. Duckie appearing, the apparition disappeared.

Be-trice's illness brought me a second meeting with her illustrious brother Alf Pinto. He looked in to see if she was well enough to be driven to Epping, and by his mother's wish came into my room.

I told him that I had heard him at the Frivoli, and he seemed to be as gratified as any other kind of artist would be. "But I've got a better song than any of those," he assured me, and forthwith sang it. I suppose that to be as assured as that is half-way towards the conquest of the world; but for my part I could as easily undress in a crowded drawing-room as sing an unaccompanied song. He fixed me with his bold, roguish eye throughout three long coarse verses and three inane choruses. And without any shame, too; but indeed how could he have shame, for there was none over: I had it all. I had no notion where to look until he had done.

"That's a clinker, isn't it?" he said, and his words once more convinced me how needlessly we can suffer for others, for they proved him utterly oblivious to any confusion or want of appreciation on my part.

I temporised. "With proper costume and a full band it ought to go very well," I said; and I suppose it would, for the thing was as ugly and tawdry as the people want. Another exposure of marriage. The awakening after the raptures of courtship to the disenchantment of wedded life: the horror of crying twins and a bad-tempered wife and all the rest of it. The cruelty, the hateful ugliness, of this tireless delight in the ruin of the happiest of all human hopes!

"Why," I said, "do you always sing this kind of thing? Why is there no song about a happy marriage with some love and trust in it?"

"Where's the joke?" he asked.

"But surely," I said, "it could be made humorous or amusing enough. Surely there are families that have cheerfulness and gaiety as well as quarrels and poverty and drink. Look at your own father and mother."

"Not worth singing about," he said. "No fun in it."

I suppose this is so. People go to the music halls to laugh at, not smile with. They want a target, and apparently they are so constituted that they never relate the experiences in the songs to their own lives. The shilling at the pay-box absolves them from thought, releases them from fact; they, are in fairyland for the evening—or what stands for fairyland to them. Otherwise how could any member of the audience face marriage or paternity at all?

The odd thing is that, taking music-hall laughter as the test, the logical outcome is that if in England marriage were either abolished or became uniformly successful, and if we returned to a state of nature and called a spade a spade, there would be no humour left. Jokes came in with wives and clothes.

"Well," I said, "I'm sorry if cheerfulness is so impracticable. It would be new, at any rate, and novelty is said to be a great thing."

"Not in songs," replied Alf. "They don't want anything new in songs except the tune. They've all got to be about the same things for ever and ever."

But for all his ready-made cynicism and London brass, young Duckie is a decent fellow who seems to have character enough to be able to withstand the allurements of the bar. It is an odd way of making a living, but he works at it honestly and hard.

He receives sometimes, he tells me, as many as a dozen songs a day, none of them any good at all. "Do you mean all of them worse than the one you have just sung?" I said, rather unkindly.

But he saw no sting. "Yes," he said simply. "It is not so easy as it looks," he went on, "to sing even a good song; and to make a bad song, and they're mostly bad, go, wants hours of practice not only alone but with the band. The difficult thing to get is movement all the time." (He meant what a more accomplished artist would call the rhythm.) "It's not only that you've got to have a voice, but you've got to drive every word home too, and also keep it going."

This, I gather, is where the value of being unashamed comes in. The music-hall singer must be ashamed of nothing.

Our evening at the Frivoli to hear Alf had been, I suppose, a success, for we were all in good enough spirits; but with exceptions so rare and far between as to constitute oases which only made the desert the more arid, the performance was dull and stupid. But we had one half-hour of the real thing, when a little Scotchman swung on to the stage and sang three Scotch songs, with every line and every syllable telling. Curious songs, too, to come from that dour northern country, songs with an almost Oriental warmth in them and an infectious and irresistible glee. I sounded Alf about this little rival. He had no jealousy; he recognised supremacy and honoured it. "Oh yes," he said, "Lauder—he's a genius. He can do what he likes. There's no need for him to sing the old stuff. But he's almost the only one. All the rest of us have got to give it to them. But," he added, "why do you bother about it, Mr. Falconer? Music-hall songs aren't written for you. Music-hall songs are written for the gallery and the pit, every one of them, and always will be."

"Well," I said, "that may be so, but I am interested none the less in improving them."

"Better leave it alone," he answered. "They're as good songs as the people deserve."

And perhaps he is right; but one's fingers get in the way of itching to alter so many things.

None the less I think that the music halls have improved since my young days. There are grimy-minded men still, but the double entendre is rarer than it was, and a measure of drollery has become important. Merely to roar out ugliness is not as sufficient as it used to be. The acrobatics, juggling, conjuring, and other exhibitions of skill are infinitely superior: so much so, indeed, that to see certain human gifts in perfection a visit to the music hall has become a necessity; while that curious modern extension of the illustrated newspaper—the cinematoscope—has also a real interest of its own, and takes the place of rubbish very satisfactorily.

Until this spring I had not been in an English music hall since January 1875. We made a final round of them just before I sailed for the Argentine. Thirty-three years ago! There were not so many then, nor were those that we had under such intensely business-like control. The singer when he had finished in those days would take his glass in the hall: no tearing off in a motor car to perform again elsewhere. It was now and then even possible to get an encore; there is no such thing to-day. Everything is now cut and dried, and each performer contrives to do as little as possible, and is supported by his Union in that praiseworthy ideal.

Alf was interested in hearing of the old easier system. "I'd often like to give encores," he said, "but there's no chance. It would throw out the whole time-table. But it's a loss the singer can feel quite as much as the audience—only they don't know it." I liked him for saying that.

My last music hall was, I remember, on a Monday night,—I sailed on the Wednesday and spent the Tuesday night at home,—and it was a very special occasion—the benefit of Sam Adams, the manager of the Royal, in Holborn. I have since been in the Royal as it is to-day—it is called the Holborn Empire—and how changed! Two performances nightly, and not a single thing the same except its site. Sam had a red, impetuous face and curly hair, and a shirt front that, one felt, would cover the Oval.

I asked Alf Pinto about him, and found that his name was not even known; but Trist tells me he is dead, and his own hall—the Trocadero, or Troc, as it was called by the bloods—has disappeared too, and is now a restaurant. Poor Sam! It is odd what flashes of insight one has. I remember thinking that night, in the midst of his triumph and all the jolly good-fellowship that sweltered round him, that he did not look as if marked out for happiness or longevity.

I cannot remember much of the evening, but George Leybourne was there with two or three slap-up songs, and Lieutenant Cole the ventriloquist, and Sam Redfern, a burnt-cork cynic, and Henri Clark, a comic singer, and an extraordinary couple named Ryley and Marie Barnum, who called themselves (to the total exclusion of George Fox) "the Original Quakers," the adjective made necessary, I imagine, by too successful imitation of their discreet yet mischievous caperings. Trist tells me that of these entertainers Leybourne is dead (to think that death should come also to Champagne Charley!), Henri Clark owns a music-hall in the Edgware Road, and Sam Redfern was recently in the bankruptcy court through inability to make a chicken farm pay. Well, well!

But if I can see no more of the performances of these variety stars, there are two or three actors still performing whom I saw that month during my farewell round of gaiety. Lionel Brough, who was then with Willie Edouin and Lydia Thompson in Blue Beard at the Globe, is still playing, and Wyndham, who was in Brighton at the Royal Court, is active almost as ever; but James Thorne, whom I laughed at in Our Boys at the Vaudeville, Irving who was in Hamlet at the Lyceum, Buckstone and Sothern in Our American Cousin at the Haymarket—where are they?

We went to the Princess's—to the Royal Box, if you please—to see Miss Verity: Naomi and I, Lionel, and Dollie Heathcote with the very latest shirt and a dress suit watch no thicker than half a crown. Serious plays are as a rule not much in either Dollie's or Lionel's way: and Operin is now always serious, with his conscientious transcript of types from what is called real life (as if there were two kinds of life), who talk pedantic grammar and covet their neighbours' wives. Some day perhaps a playwright will arise observant enough to find other domestic difficulties as full of dramatic possibilities as this dreary formula of the tertium quid; but at present we are as much under its sway as the French nation are under that of their single joke. There are a thousand problems of daily life within the experience of every one that have as much drama in them as is needed. One would think that all England had nothing to do but break the seventh commandment; whereas those of us who do so are in a minute minority, and are not the especially interesting persons. Is there no material for drama in the lives of husbands who do not tire of their wives and wives who do not tire of their husbands—the most enviable people of all, when all is said?

Both Dollie and Lionel, as I say, would rather have been at a musical comedy, but they had a very real desire to meet the famous Azure, and the evening promised an opportunity. Naomi was very happy to be at the play and to wear a new dress, neither event being too common with her; and as for me, I did not much mind, for once, although had I been alone I should probably have faltered at the theatre portico. I have too many points in common with Wang Hiu-Chih, one of the illustrious persons in my Chinese book, and the occupier of a high place on the roll of honour of the diffident. "On one occasion," it is recorded, "he went in the snow to visit a friend, named Tai Ta-k'uei; but on reaching the door he turned round and went home again. Being asked the explanation of this behaviour, he replied, 'I started full of spirits; when they were exhausted, I came back.'" So is it very often with me; I start out full of spirits, and when they are exhausted I come back. Probably there are no persons in London at this moment who in the past few months have seen so many first acts, and first acts only, as I have. It needs a very engaging dramatist or very acceptable performers to make me forget the allurements of the word Exit.

But on the present occasion I was on duty and in perfect order. At the end of the second act a servant came summoning us to Miss Verity's dressing-room. Naomi would not go, try as I would to make her, but Dollie and Lionel hurried off with no attempts to conceal their pleasure. In a very few moments, however, they were back again, and Miss Verity with them—a rustle of femininity at high pressure. "If you don't come to see me, I must come to see you," she said very winningly to Naomi; and she sat down at the back of the box, well out of view, and talked away gaily and extremely well. Why she so wanted to make an impression on this quiet girl I did not understand; but I will venture the opinion that she had never worked harder to ingratiate herself with a man.

The entr'acte was not long, but long enough for her to wring from Naomi her consent to come to tea.

"You are very rude," she said to me as a parting shot. "You have never said how you like me in the play."

How I wish I was a better liar; or, in other words, less of an intellectual snob. I did not like her in the play, and I did not like the play. The simple natural thing under such conditions was to say, "You are absolutely delightful," but having a paltry vanity as to preserving pure one's twopenny-halfpenny critical sense, I said nothing, and instead was just awkward and offensive.

"Never mind, Mr. Falconer," said Azure, who divines swiftly, "don't say anything. Keep that conscience intact whatever happens."

And so saying she was gone, with Lionel and Dollie in attendance. Such is the vitality of her personality that it seemed for the moment as if she had taken all the air with her and we languished in a vacuum. But only for a moment or so.

"She is very attractive," said Naomi, with a little sigh. "It must be nice to have such power and be so popular."

I took her hand and stroked it.

Dollie and Lionel here came back, crushed their hats against their bosoms, and sat dawn.

"She's a ripper," said Lionel. "She's coming to see me play against Somerset to-morrow."

"Jolly awkward if you make a blob," said Dollie. "I've got her autograph."

"Where? I should like to see it," said Naomi.

"Here," he said, "on my shirt front. That means fifteen and six, for of course I shan't wear the shirt again. I shall have it framed. Isn't it jolly handwriting?"

CHAPTER XIII

I GO INTO BUSINESS PRO TEM, READ A GOOD POEM UNDER DIFFICULTY, AND LEARN SOMETHING OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A SECOND-HAND BOOKSELLER

I was writing letters at about noon, when Mrs. Duckie entered to see if I would be so good as to speak to Miss Wagstaff for a moment. Down I went, and found that bitter mercantile virgin all tears and trouble. She had a telegram to say that her mother was ill, and would she come at once; but Mr. Bemerton was in the country valuing a library, and who was to mind the shop? Could I make any suggestion?

I made the only natural one: I said I would mind it myself.

This apparently had not occurred to her, and it seemed to strike Mrs. Duckie (who is more jealous of the fair fame of what she calls gentlefolk than they themselves are likely ever to be) as an act of impropriety beyond pardon. But I had my way, and at last got Miss Wagstaff off in a hansom; but not before she had showered instructions upon me.

"The prices," she said, "are marked just inside. They are all net, but if any one bought several books you might knock something off. Don't ever knock anything off a cheap book."

"Be very careful," she said, "with people who look at the illustrations. Sometimes they pinch the plates."

"Whatever you do," she said, "don't buy any books."

"Keep an eye," she said, "on the outside shelves."

"Don't let any one," she said, "stand too long reading."

"See that they don't slip one book into their pocket while they buy another," she said.

"Watch them," she said, "to see that they don't rub out our price and put in another themselves."

That, I think, was her very last counsel. I sank down in a chair in a kind of stupor. I had not been prepared for such revelations of perfidy. I had thought of a second-hand bookshop as being off the main stream of human frailty and temptation; and behold it was the resort of the most abandoned! Is there no natural honesty? I wished that Mr. Bemerton would return and liberate me to walk upstairs out of life again and get on with my make-believe.

It gave me at the same time a new idea of Miss Wagstaff, and I found myself admiring her. How naturally she took these things; how simple and right it seemed to her that customers should be suspect; while I—I had been sunning myself in a comfortable sense of all-pervading virtue, and was now cowering beneath the discovery of the contrary—I, a man of fifty and more, who had some claims to be considered a cosmopolitan and citizen of the world, and she a Cockney spinster with no experience of anything but her home and this shop.

But a customer coming in, I had to suspend my reflections and attend to business, which in this case consisted in replying, with some decision, that we never bought last year's Whitaker's Almanack. The adaptability of man—how naturally I said "we"!

Apart from the necessity of replenishing his stock by attending sales and buying books; the wearing task of looking narrowly at larcenous fellow-creatures; the pangs that it must cost him to sell the books that he wants to keep; and the attacks made upon his tenderer feelings by unfortunate impoverished creatures with worthless books to sell; apart from these drawbacks, the life of a second-hand bookseller seems to me a happy one. I could myself lead it with considerable contentment. During my four hours of authority I took eleven shillings, met some entertaining people, discovered on the shelves a number of interesting books, and read at intervals a poem I had long known by repute but never had seen before—Walter Pope's "Wish."

A second-hand bookseller, I found, may read much in his time, but he cannot read continuously. My perusal of Walter Pope's poem was broken somewhat in the way I have attempted to describe. I got through the Horatian argument all right:—

"When I'm at Epsom or on Banstead Down,
Free from the Wine, and Smoke, and Noise o' th' Town,
When I those Waters drink and breathe that Air,
What are my Thoughts? What's my continual Prayer?"

and I was allowed to complete in peace the first stanza and the chorus:—

"If I live to be old, for I find I go down,
Let this be my fate in a country town:
May I have a warm house, with a stone at the gate,
And a cleanly young girl to rub my bald pate.

CHORUS

May I govern my passion with an absolute sway,
And grow wiser and better, as my strength wears away,
Without gout or stone, by a gentle decay."

But here entered a very small dirty boy to know if I could spare his mother a piece of stamp paper.

I said it was the one thing we didn't keep, and resumed the poem:—

"May my little house stand on the side of a hill,
With an easy descent to a mead and a mill,
That when I've a mind I may hear my boy read—
In the mill if it rains; if it's dry, in the mead.

Near a shady grove and a murmuring brook,
With the ocean at distance, whereon I may look,
With a spacious plain, without hedge or stile,
And an easy pad-nag to ride out a mile."

At this point there entered a rusty elderly man with a Cruden's Concordance, to know if I would buy it. I said we already had several, and I could not as a conscientious business man add to the stock. He sighed, surveyed me attentively, and went away, saying that he would bring something else. I implored him not to, but with an ineffable look of misfortune he shuffled away. I turned again to the page:—

"With Horace and Petrarch, and two or three more
Of the best wits that reign'd in the ages before;
With roast mutton, rather than ven'son or teal,
And clean, though coarse linen, at every meal.

With a pudding on Sundays, with stout humming liquor,
And remnants of Latin to welcome the vicar;
With Monte, Fiascone, or Burgundy wine,
To drink the king's health as oft as I dine.

May my wine be vermilion, may my malt drink be pale,
In neither extreme, or too mild or too stale;
In lieu of desserts, unwholesome and dear,
Let Lodi or Parmesan bring up the rear.

Nor Tory, or Whig, Observator, or Trimmer
May I be, nor against the law's torrent a swimmer;
May I mind what I speak, what I write, and hear read,
And with matters of State never trouble my head."

At this point a lady faltered in, saying she felt very faint, and might she sit down a moment. I gave her my chair, and called to Mrs. Duckie for some water. The lady told me her home was in Ashford, and she was only up for the day, having to get some things for her boy who was joining a merchant-ship, and did I know where Heronsgate Mansions were, because she had a cousin living there whom she would like to see, and was there a good dentist in this neighbourhood, and could I tell her if the 4.43 to Ashford was still running.

Having at length resumed my chair, I proceeded with Walter Pope:—

"Let the gods, who dispose of every king's crown,
Whomsoever they please, set up and pull down;
I'll pay the whole shilling impos'd on my head,
Tho' I go without claret that night to my bed....

Tho' I care not for riches, may I not be so poor
That the rich without shame cannot enter my door;
May they court my converse, may they take much delight
My old stories to hear in a winter's long night." ...

The rusty man here came in again, and after spending a moment at the shelves, offered me another book, and pitched such a tale of woe that I bought it for myself. Two days afterwards, I may here remark, Miss Wagstaff came up to ask me if I had sold a copy of Rogers' Italy with Turner's plates while I was in charge.

"No," I said, "but I bought one."

She examined it swiftly, and informed me that it was their own copy which had been sold to me.

"He spotted you for a greenhorn all right," she said. "And had a starving family, hadn't he? And was only just out of the Brompton Hospital?"

I said it was so.

"Oh that Brompton Hospital!" she added. "Life would be quite simple if it had never been built. They've all got some one there when they want to sell a book."

I gave Miss Wagstaff the book again, and said I was very sorry.

"You'll always be taken in," she said, as she hurried off. "You go about asking for it."

Probably; but how can one say no to certain forms of distress, real or so well-managed as to seem real? After my experiences I know that it is not the disposal of books that presents the greatest difficulty to a bookseller, but the acquisition of them. At least I know that that would be the case with me. My difficulty would always be to refuse to buy the books which the unhappy persons brought in. A very little while after the shabby man had departed with his ill-gotten gains, a neat little old woman entered with a brown paper parcel which she undid with excessive deliberation and care, revealing at last a shabby copy of an odd volume of Rowe's Shakespeare. At the same time she took out of her purse a folded newspaper cutting and placed it in my hands. Then she looked at me with an expression in which excitement, hope, and fear were almost unbearably blended.

The wretched cutting, as I knew by inspired prevision, related to the sale of a first folio, which, after spirited bidding, was knocked down for £987. The pathetic figure before me had read the paper, had dimly remembered that among her dead husband's books was an old Shakespeare, and at last, with a beating heart, had found it and seen infinite possibilities of debt-paying and comfort before her.

What was I to do? She was manifestly so truthful, and the hope dying out of her poor eager face left it so wan and wintry.

A second-hand bookseller, I suppose, having chosen to be a second-hand bookseller and to live by his choice, has a short way with such clients. I know he must have. But I wondered what Mr. Bemerton would do, that is, if Miss Wagstaff permitted him to come on in that scene at all. The disparity between anything that I could give her and the sum she was expecting was clearly so immense that I did nothing at all. I merely said I was very sorry, and bowed her out, and returned once more to Walter Pope.

"May none whom I love to so great riches rise
As to slight their acquaintance and their old friends despise;
So low or so high may none of them be
As to move either pity or envy in me....

To outlive my senses may it not be my fate
To be blind, to be deaf, to know nothing at all;
But rather let death come before 'tis so late,
And while there's some sap in it may my tree fall...."

Here a little girl from a neighbouring shop ran in to ask for two sixpences for a shilling.

"You won't buy a nice set of Dickens, too?" I asked her, quite in the Wagstaffian manner, I thought.

"Not to-day," she said gravely, with perfect London readiness; "but mother'll be wanting the washing-book bound in morocco next week."

"With a courage undaunted may I face my last day,
And when I am dead may the better sort say:
In the morning when sober, in the evening when mellow,
He's gone, and not left behind him his fellow....

I care not whether under a turf or a stone,
With any inscription upon it or none,
If a thousand years hence, 'Here lies W.P.'
Shall be read on my tomb; what is it to me?"

Here entered a studious-looking youth who wished to know if I had a copy of Hoffding's Psychology. I said no; and almost immediately after came a commanding matron with her daughter for a complete set of Trollope for an invalid son who was going a voyage to the Cape. I said I was sorry, but I could not tell whether I had one or not: I was not the real bookseller, and knew nothing of the stock.

"I call it disgraceful," said the lady. "Mismanagement on all sides. We've only just been to the Stores, and failed to get a pocket sextant. I can't think what's coming to London. Where are the standard novels kept in this shop?" she asked sternly.

"I have no idea," I replied. "Let's hunt for them together."

"Certainly not," she said. "I have no time," and off she marched; but not before her daughter, who looked as if she wished to sink into the earth for shame, had thrown me a glance of sympathetic compassion which was a perfect balm for any wounds I might have received. And then I finished Walter Pope's poem:—

"Yet one wish I add, for the sake of those few
Who in reading those lines any pleasure shall take,
May I leave a good fame and a sweet-smelling name.—
Amen. Here an end of my wishes I make.

CHORUS

May I govern my passion with an absolute sway,
And grow wiser and better, as my strength wears away,
Without gout or stone, by a gentle decay."

That is the song which Benjamin Franklin sang, as he informed George Whately, a thousand times when he was young; "but now," he added, at fourscore, "I find that all three of the contraries have befallen me."

CHAPTER XIV

THE LINKEDNESS OF LIFE IS ILLUSTRATED, AND I BECOME A MONEY-LENDER

One of the strangest phenomena in this life of ours, I often think, is the way in which one thing leads to another. We million mortals may live alone, each in his sea of life enisled, but our influence on each other is continuous and remarkable, and—and this is the thought that pulls one up so suddenly—very often unconscious. It is not every pebble, so to speak, that we drop into the water that makes rings: the water is often already too restless to feel it; but the widening circumference of the rings that even an idler's stone can produce are almost terrifying to think of. The facile moralist would say that this being so, people of strong or attractive personality must be very careful: but to be careful is useless. A capricious fate more powerful than the vigilant self-protectiveness of any human being is in command.

I am led to these reflections by something that happened at Bemerton's in the afternoon on that summer day. It was about a quarter to three, and Mr. Bemerton was due back at three exactly, when a nice-looking schoolboy of about fourteen, with a frank and courageous countenance, walked in carrying a book.

This he handed me, a little self-consciously, with a request to know if I could give him a shilling for it. It was Hall and Knight's Algebra, and inside was written Estabrook I.

Now I am no censor, but I have certain fixed theories as to the law of meum and tuum and the training of boys, and also some undimmed recollections of the financial straits of my own schooldays; moreover, I liked this boy's ingenuous face.

So I said, "The book is yours to sell, of course?"

"Oh yes," he replied.

"You bought it with your own money?" I continued Socratically.

"Well, I didn't exactly buy it with my own money," he admitted. "But it's mine: that's my name in it."

"A schoolbook," I said: "one that you use in your lessons?"

"I shan't want it again," he replied; "I go into another form next term."

"But you think you have a right to sell it, as it was brought for you and you only?"

"Oh yes, of course I do," he answered; "and I want a bob to-day most fearfully. We've got a half-holiday, and it's the Yorkshire match at the Oval."

"You think your father would like to know that you are raising money on a schoolbook to go to a cricket match?" I asked.

"But I've done with it," he repeated.

"You think your father would like to know? That is the whole point. If you can assure me that he would not mind your selling the school-book like this just for an afternoon's pleasure, I will give you a shilling for it at once."

He thought a little while and shuffled his feet, and his fine face clouded.

"No," he said at last, "he wouldn't like it," and he put out his hand to take the book back.

"How much pocket-money do you get?" I asked, as I gave it to him.

"Threepence a week," he said.

"Well," I said, "I will lend you the shilling, and you can pay me back as soon as it is convenient."

"Oh, I say, how frightfully decent of you!" he exclaimed.

So I handed him the shilling, and he crammed the book into his pocket and rushed off, being joined just outside by a smaller boy whom I guessed to be Estabrook II.

Estabrook! Now you see the conjunction of ideas, for one of my closest companions at school forty years ago had been an Estabrook, and it is not a common name. Could this boy, I wondered, be the son of my old friend? I had not long to wait to discover, for an unexpected tip from an uncle made it possible for him to discharge his debt quickly, and he was back within a week with the shilling in his hand.

Bemerton sent him upstairs to me, after having explained that I was not really the bookseller, but an eccentric gentleman masquerading as such; and I asked him at once about his father, and soon ascertained that it was really my old school-fellow; and so I gave Kenneth, which was the debtor's name, a message to the effect that I should give myself the pleasure of calling upon him next Sunday afternoon. We agreed that nothing should be said as to the circumstances under which Kenneth and I had originally met: all we were to say was that we had come upon each other accidentally in Bemerton's. This harmless compact of secrecy made, as must so often have been the case, a very firm foundation of our friendship—a friendship which led to some very agreeable afternoons.

But see how it came about. The Rev. Ephraim Pye-Lipwood, tiring of horses, buys a motor-car of one of his parishioners. He goes for his first ride and forgets to put on enough wraps. He catches a cold, which develops into double pneumonia, and he dies. His widow wishes to sell his library, and asks a friend to recommend a good dealer. The friend recommends Mr. Joseph Bemerton of Westminster, and Mr. Bemerton arranges to go down by the 10.7 from Victoria on Tuesday.

He does so, leaving the shop in the capable hands of Miss Ruth Wagstaff. Meanwhile what does Miss Wagstaff's mother do? For a long time she has not been quite herself: ever since, in fact, she ate that pork chop at her sister's husband's aunt's. Nothing somehow has seemed to agree with her since; and her dyspepsia came to a head this very morning, at about half-past ten, just as Mr. Bemerton in his third-class compartment had finished The Daily Telegraph.

Hence the summons to Miss Wagstaff, and cause of my finding myself stationed in the shop all ready to deal with Master Kenneth Estabrook, and thus resume acquaintance with an old friend and make acquaintance with a delightful family. We never know when we are moulding destiny.

The Estabrooks have six children, for they belong to a generation that was not afraid of such liabilities. Estabrook is a stockbroker in a comfortable way, and they live in a large house in the Cromwell Road almost opposite the Natural History Museum, which is a regular Sunday afternoon resort in winter. The children are four boys and two girls. Kenneth is the eldest; then comes John, who is at Osborne, and has the proud privilege of calling Prince Edward of York "Sardines" (which is, I am told, the very natural nickname of one destined later to take his title from Wales, i.e. whales in schoolboy humour); then comes Christopher, who is at Westminster (Estabrook II); then Norah, aged ten; Winifred, aged eight; and Sam, aged six.

They seem to me very nice children, but a shade over-sophisticated, and with the modern touch of mockery. In my innocence I offered the youngest a beautiful piece of silver paper from a packet of tobacco, such as would have made me, at his age, feel something like a millionaire. But it had no attractions for him. His toys are ready-made, I imagine, and cost money.

After Kenneth, I think that my favourite is Norah, whom the others rather impose upon (it is ill to be the first girl in a family that already numbers three boys), and Norah, I think, likes me. I have already taken her to the Hippodrome, to the Zoo, and to the Exhibition; and I don't in the least see why she should not have a pony and ride straddle-legged in the Park as the little girls now do. Little girls are little girls for so short a time: they have such a way of leaving the room frank, loving, uncalculating creatures, and returning in a few moments (so to speak) as women, with their hair up and their skirts down and views on art and music; that it behoves their elderly admirers to take advantage of all the opportunities of enjoying their society while they are still children.

Life is strangely suspicious and impatient of youth and candour and innocence and naïveté. Hardly does it perceive these exquisite qualities to exist than it rubs away their bloom with a rough finger. How often one longs for an arrested progress—for a little girl to go on being a little girl a little longer; for the perpetual kitten of our dreams! But no; the Creator is not that kind of artist.

I took upstairs with me a fine copy of Paterson's Roads, a book I had not seen since the sixties, when I used often to pore over my father's copy and set forth on imaginary journeys from London to Truro, London to Norwich, London to Dover, London to Everywhere, with Paterson's aid. I remember how proud I used to be to find our own ancestor in the margin—John Murray Falconer, Esq., of West Wolves House, Long Melton, five miles north of Cirencester, my father's grandfather; and Wilmington Oakes, Esq., of Masters Hall, just to the west of Evesham, grandfather of my mother. I had, indeed, an ambition at that time some day to be in Paterson myself, not knowing that the book was already outmoded, and that I was doomed to spend most of my life in a country where roads are chiefly tracks.

Paterson's noble book, once in every country house and most town houses, is now rare, but it remains the best outline account of England in existence. Publishers may vie with each other in bringing out guide-books, and highway-and-byway books, and atlases and gazetteers; but Paterson's Roads still conquers. Everything about the best edition of it is right: its arrangement, its type, its spaciousness, its interest in gentlemen's places, its little pictures of turnpike gates, its careful information; but most of all its period, before rails came in, when horses were still honoured, and postboys never died, and innkeepers flourished.

Paterson may be said to pair off with Fielding. He is Fielding's courier, so to speak. Fielding has the romance; Paterson finds the roads and looks after the luggage and the horses. He is a companion to Pickwick, too: a serious, methodical Sam Weller. Spend an hour with Paterson, and you will have the England of Tom Jones and Samuel Pickwick before you; you will know it through and through. The period between these two books was Paterson's period. Tom Jones was published in 1749, Pickwick in 1837; Daniel Paterson was born in 1739 and died in 1825, living towards the end so quietly that Edward Mogg, who brought out a sixteenth edition in 1822 and dedicated it to George iv., referred to its true author as "the late."

Of Daniel Paterson little—far too little—is known, save that he was an officer and a gentleman. I have been looking him up. He was successively ensign, lieutenant, captain, major, and lieutenant-colonel of infantry. For a long time he was assistant to the Quartermaster-General at the Horse Guards, and in 1771 his road book was first published and dedicated to his superior officer. In 1812 he was made Lieutenant-Governor of Quebec, a post he still held at his death. There's a melancholy fate for the author of the best English road book. Quebec! It was probably due to this enforced exile that to Edward Mogg fell the task of bringing the great work up to date; but he certainly ought to have known that its author was still living. Daniel Paterson's grave is at Clewer, near Windsor; but where he was born I know not.

One can open Paterson at random, sure to alight on some name that will quicken and kindle the memory. For example, I opened it last night at page 524—and had good luck, coming at once upon the great name of John Warde. Page 524 is in the Cross-Roads section, and the gallant Colonel (assisted by Edward Mogg) is taking us from Maidstone to Guildford, by Westerham, Reigate, and Dorking. Against Westerham, a quiet Kentish town with some significance for himself, since it was there that Wolfe was born,—destined in time to make Quebec a city requiring a Lieutenant-Governor,—against Westerham he draws our attention to Squerryes, the seat of John Warde, Esq.; and is not John Warde of Squerryes one of Nimrod's heroes? "Whoever," says that large-hearted man, "heard him utter an ill-natured word respecting any one, living or dead? Where was there a kinder friend or a better neighbour? And, above all things, where was his equal as a companion?" That was the whole-hearted way in which sportsmen used to write of each other in the forties, before Paterson's Roads was quite out of date. "Rough as was his exterior, Mr. Warde was accomplished and well informed, and capable of adapting his conversation to any society into which he might be thrown. In short, it is a matter of doubt whether there has existed a man whose name has not been long before the public either in the capacity of a senator, a soldier, a sailor, or an author, so universally known as Mr. Warde of Squerryes, in Kent, was to all Englishmen in all quarters of the globe." Such was John Warde, for fifty-seven years a Master of Foxhounds, and known as "The Father of the Field."

Mr. Warde did a little in the way of La Rochefoucauld and Vauvenargues, but his maxims rarely departed from sport, although, of course, a man who is qualified to write sound maxims for sportsmen is automatically qualified also to sum up life. Here are some of the sententiæ of John Warde, Esq., of Squerryes, Master of the Pytchley and other Hunts, as reported by Nimrod's pen:—

"Half the goodness of a horse goes in at his mouth."

"Never buy a horse from a rich man who hunts, or from a poor man till you have tried him."

"Never believe a word any man says about a horse he wishes to sell—not even a bishop."

"Never refuse a good dinner from home, unless you have a better at home."

"Never keep a drinking man—nor a very pretty maid-servant."

Most of the successful conduct of life could be secured by careful obedience to these five counsels.

Paterson's was by no means the first road-book; but it is the best. Mr. Bemerton showed me the other day Ogilvy's, a delightful series of copper-plates, fourth edition, dated 1753. Every word in it is engraved, which makes reading sometimes a little difficult, but the effort is worth making. The great charm of the book is that all the journeys start from London, and the road is pictured the whole way. Every mile is marked. Thus the journey from London to Berwick, 260 computed and 339 measured miles, takes ten pages of three columns each. Nothing is needed but gradients and a few technical particulars to make it still perfect for the motorist. It would be an agreeable task to bring one of these books into line with the present day of machinery and petrol,—agreeable, although tinged with melancholy.

CHAPTER XV

MR. DUCKIE, WITH HIS NAPKIN ON HIS ARM, SUGGESTS A SCHEME FOR HUMAN HAPPINESS

To-day I carried out my promise of lunching at the Golden Horn and testing the quality not only of the house's famous saddle, but also of Mr. Duckie's skill as a waiter. He had reserved a corner seat in one of the pews, and had evidently given orders to his assistant that I was to be well looked after: an agreeable attention, but carrying with it the necessary corollary, in an English eating-house, that other guests were neglected.

I was amused by a father and son who occupied the same compartment. This father was evidently of the Temple—a man of about fifty, and intensely proud of his son, a youth from Oxford, who, however, no matter what learning his head might hold, was too callow to fancy exhibitions of paternal interest—young enough to be self-conscious and vigilant as to form, and even, I am afraid, the least little bit in doubt as to his father's satisfactoriness as a judge of life. He would grow out of such foibles, I think, for he had a good face. The core of the little comedy lay in the father's desire to let me, a stranger, into the secret of his son's success. He stood sufficiently in fear of the boy to refrain from talking to me about him, or indeed talking to me at all. Young Oxford, he knew instinctively, would not like that, and the honest fellow, who was clearly of a sociable communicative cast, with a very agreeable vein of naïve snobbishness, had to content himself by making such remarks to his son as carried important information with them.

His great chance, however, came at the end of the meal, at which the boy hitherto had been drinking water. "Will you have a glass of port, old man?" the proud father asked. Young Oxford consented, and when their glasses were filled, the father, with half a glance towards me to see that I was attentive, gave the toast, "Well, old man, here's to another First!"

After they had gone I was alone in the pew, and as the other customers' needs grew fewer, Mr. Duckie paused now and then by the table and talked to me. He had been there, he said, for twenty-four years.

"Then you have seen many changes?" I asked him.

No, he said, not there. Everything was the same. It was their strength to be the same. The young governor, he'd tried some new notions, such as a foreign waiter or two, but it was a mistake. Gentlemen didn't like it. Gentlemen liked what they'd been accustomed to. Foreign waiters might be nippier with the plates, but gentlemen didn't like to have to teach them English. It was not that gentlemen wanted to talk much; but when they did talk they wanted to be understood and replied to in their own language.

Mr. Duckie was now head-waiter and proud of his post. I asked him if he was satisfied generally with his life.

He said that he was, except for tired feet; and now and then, he added, he could not help wishing that some one would invent a new joint. Beef and mutton, pork and veal, he said, that's all there is. When he first came there they had had venison once a week, but it had gone right out of favour. Gentlemen never inquired for it any more.

I asked him how he kept his temper when customers were unreasonable.

"Oh, that's all in the day's work," he said. "I know they don't mean it. It's not the gentlemen who are snappish, it's their empty stomachs. But there's less grumbling here than in any other eating-house in London," he said; "and I'll tell you for why. I know how to deal with them. All my men have instructions to take the order for drinks with the food, and execute it at once. That's the way to soothe them. In the ordinary restaurant, gentlemen aren't asked what they'll drink until they've got their food, and even then there's a delay. It's that that sours them. They can't bear waiting. It's just the same with little crying babies. Give them the bottle and they're all right. Gentlemen aren't really difficult if you think a little."

"But I suppose," I said, "that there are always a few who can't be satisfied any way."

"Of course there are," said Mr. Duckie (who, by the way, sinks familiarly here to plain John); "but, Lor' bless you, we don't mind them. That's their way. If it wasn't—if they really meant all they said—they'd go somewhere else. But they don't, and so we just put up with it. Why, there's gentlemen so much in love with grumbling that they'd call for a toothpick after eating clear soup. It's their nature.

"It is not the gentlemen," he went on, "that break a waiter's heart; it's the kitchen. That's where our trouble is. It's cooks that ruin eating-houses. A cook who has a grudge against a head-waiter can cost his governor pounds and pounds a day. It's all in his hands; he can spoil things, or he can keep them back till the customers bang out in a fury. Just now we've got as nice a lot in the kitchen as you'd wish to meet in a day's march, but we have had some fair terrors. Gentlemen who blame waiters for being slow don't remember that the food has got to be cooked and served up, and that the waiter doesn't do either.

"But there;" Mr. Duckie said, "an empty stomach can't remember everything. I often think this would be a better-tempered and happier world if we ate a little all the time instead of saving up our appetites for real meals. But speaking as a waiter, I can see it's best as it is."

"Does your son ever come and see you here?" I asked.