I know our Beggars by their ring. When the front door-bell is pulled with insolent violence, "That," I say to myself, "is a Beggar," and I am usually right.
Ours are not the Beggars of whose decay Elia complained; though he could not have believed that the art of begging was in any more danger of being lost than the art of lying. His sort have still their place at the crowded crossing, at the corners of streets and turnings of alleys—they are always with us. I rarely go out that I do not meet the cripple who swings himself along on his crutches through the throngs at Charing Cross, or the blind man who taps his way down the Strand, or the paralytic in her little cart close to St. Martin's, and I too should complain were they to disappear. These are Beggars I do not mind. They have their picturesque uses. They carry on an old tradition. They are licensed to molest me, and their demands, with their thanks when I give and their curses when I do not, are the methods of a venerable and honoured calling. Besides, I can escape them if I choose. I can cross the street at the approach of the cripple, I can dodge the blind man, I can look away as I pass the paralytic, and so avoid the irritation of giving when I do not want to or the discomfort of hearing their opinion of me when I refuse. But to our Beggars I do object, and from them there is no escape. They belong to a new species, and have abandoned the earlier methods as crude and primitive. They make a profession neither of disease nor of deformity, but of having come down in the world. They scorn to stoop to "rags and the wallet," which they have exchanged for a top hat and frock coat. They take out no license, for they never beg in the streets; instead, they assault us at our door, where they do not ask for alms but claim the gift, they call a loan, as their right. They are bullies, brigands, who would thrust the virtue of charity upon us, and if, as the philosopher thinks, it is a test of manners to receive, they come out of it with dignity, for their fiction of a loan saves them, and us, from the professional profuseness of the Beggar's thanks.
It was only when I moved into chambers in the Quarter that they began to come to see me. Hitherto, my life in London had been spent in lodgings, where, if I was never free from Beggars in the form of those intimate friends who are always short of ten pounds to pay their rent or ten shillings to buy a hat, it was the landlady's affair when the Beggars who were strangers called.
Chambers, however, gave me a front door at which they could ring and an address in the Directory in which they could find out where the door was; and had my object been to make a study of them and their manners, I could not have hit upon a better place to collect my material.
Not that Beggars are encouraged in the Quarter, where more than one society devoted to their scientific suppression has, or has had, an office, and where the lady opposite does not wait for science, but sends them flying the minute she catches them in our streets. The man who loafs in front of our club, and who opens cab-doors for members, and as many more as he can capture, might be mistaken for a Beggar by anybody who did not know the Quarter, but we who do know it understand that he is loafing by special appointment. The small boy who has lately taken to selling his single box of matches on our Terrace does so officially, as the brass label on his arm explains. And nothing could be more exceptional than the cheerful person who the other day reeled after the Publisher and myself into one of our houses where there is an elevator—for to elevators we have come in the Quarter—the thin end of the modern wedge that threatens its destruction—and addressed the Publisher so affectionately as "Colonel" that we both retreated into the elevator and pressed the button for the top floor.
But the Beggars we keep off our streets, we cannot keep from our front doors. J. and I had hardly settled in chambers before we were besieged. People were immediately in need of our help who up till then had managed without it, and to our annoyance they have been in need of it ever since. They present themselves in so many different guises, by so many different methods, that it is impossible to be on our guard against them all. Some sneak in with the post, and our correspondence has doubled in bulk. Dukes, Earls, Marquises, Baronets, favour us with lithographed letters, signing their names at the bottom, writing ours at the top, and demanding our contribution to charities they approve, as the price of so amazing a condescension. Ladies of rank cannot give their benevolent balls and banquets unless we buy tickets, nor can they conceive of our dismissing their personal appeal. Clergymen start missions that we may finance them, bazaars are opened that we may fill the stalls with the free offering of the work by which we make our living, and albums are raffled that we may grace them with our autographs. We might think that the post was invented for the benefit of people whose idea of charity is to do the begging and get us to do the giving. Many of our Beggars like better to beg in person: sometimes as nurses with tickets to sell for a concert, or as Little Sisters of the Poor—whom I welcome, having preserved a sentiment for any variety of cap and veil since my own convent days; sometimes as people with things to sell at the biggest price, that we would not want at the lowest, or with patent inventions that we would not take as a gift, and who are indignant if we decline to be taxed for the privilege of not buying or subscribing. But the most numerous of our Beggars, the most persistent, the most liberal in their expectations, are the men, and more occasionally the women, who, having come down in the world, look to us to set them up again, and would be the first to resent it if our generosity ran to any such extravagant lengths.
Their patronage of the Quarter is doubtless due, partly to its being close to the Strand, which is an excellent centre for their line of business; partly to a convenient custom with us of leaving all street doors hospitably open and inscribing the names of tenants in big gilt letters on the wall just inside; partly to the fact that we are not five minutes from a Free Library, where they can agreeably fill their hours of leisure by the study of "Who's Who," "The Year's Art," and other books in which publishers obligingly supply the information about us which to them is as valuable an asset as a crutch to the cripple or a staff to the blind. Provided by the Directory with our address, they may already know where to look us up and how to establish an acquaintance by asking for us by name at our door; but it is this cramming in the facts of our life that enables them to talk to us familiarly about our work until acquaintance has ripened into intimacy and the business of begging is put on a personal and friendly footing. Great as is the good which Mr. Carnegie must have hoped to accomplish by his Free Libraries, even he could have had no idea of the boon they might prove to Beggars and the healthy stimulus to the art of begging which they develop.
In the beginning our Beggars had no great fault to find with us. Their frock coats and top hats, signs of real British respectability, carried them past the British porter and the British servant. When they crossed our threshold, some remnant of the barbarous instinct of hospitality compelled us to receive them with civility, if not with cordiality. We never went so far as, with the Spaniard, to offer them our house and all that is in it, another instinct warning us how little they would mind taking us at our word; nor did hospitality push us to the extreme of being hoodwinked by their tales. But in those days we seldom let them go without something, which was always more than they deserved since they deserved nothing. If there is such a thing as a Beggar's Bædeker, I am sure our chambers were specially recommended in earlier editions. In justice, I must confess that they gave us entertainment for our money, and that the very tricks of the trade were amusing—that is, while the novelty lasted. We liked the splendid assurance of their manner; the pretended carelessness with which a foot was quickly thrust through the opening of the door so they could be shut out only by force; the important air with which they asked for a few minutes' talk; the insinuating smile with which they presumed that we remembered them; their cool assumption that their burden was ours, and that the kindness was all on their side for permitting us the privilege of bearing it. And we liked no less their infinite trouble in inventing romances about themselves that Munchausen could not have beaten, their dramatic use of foggy nights and wild storms, their ingenuity in discovering a bond between us, and their plausibility in proving why it obliged us to meet their temporary difficulties which were never of course of their own making. Nor could we but admire their superiority to mere charity, their belief in the equal division of wealth, their indifference as to who did the work to create the wealth so long as they did not do it themselves, and their trust in the obligation imposed by a craft in common. Had they bestowed half the pains in practising this craft that they squandered in wheedling a few shillings from us on the strength of it, they must long since have been acknowledged its masters.
The first of our Beggars, whom I probably remember the better because he was the first, flattered me by introducing himself as a fellow author at a time when I had published but one book and had won by it neither fame nor fortune. What he had published himself he did not think it worth while to mention, but the powers of imagination he revealed in his talk should have secured his reputation in print. I have rarely listened to anybody so fluent, I could not have got a word in had I wanted to. It never seemed to occur to him that I might not be as bent upon listening to his story as he upon telling it. He made it quite a personal matter between us. I would understand, he said, and the inference was that nobody else could, the bitterness of his awakening when the talented woman whom he had revered as the kindliest of her sex betrayed herself to him as the most cruel. For long, in her Florentine villa, he had been Secretary to Ouida, whom he found so charming and considerate that he could only marvel at all the gossip about her whims and fancies. Then, one morning, he was writing a letter at her dictation and by oversight he spelt disappointment with one p, a trifling error which, as I knew, any gentleman or scholar was liable to. She flew into a rage, she turned him out of the villa without hearing a word, she pursued him into the garden, she set her dogs—colossal staghounds—on him, he had to run for his life, had even to vault over the garden gate, I could picture to myself with what disastrous consequences to his coat and trousers. And she was so vindictive that she would neither send him his clothes nor pay him a penny she owed him. He had too fine a sense of gallantry to go to law with a lady, he dared not remain in Florence where the report was that he went in danger of his life. There was nothing to do but to return to England, and—well—here he was, with a new outfit to buy before he could accept the admirable position offered to him, for he had not to assure me that a man of his competency was everywhere in demand; it was very awkward, and—in short—he looked to me as a fellow author to tide him over the awkwardness. I can laugh now at my absurd embarrassment when finally he came to a full stop. I did not have to wait for his exposure in the next number of "The Author" to realize that he was "an unscrupulous impostor." But I was too shy to call him one to his face, and I actually murmured polite concern and "advanced" I have forgotten what, to be rid of him.
Out of compliment to J., our Beggars pose as artists no less frequently than as authors. If the artist himself, when accident or bad luck has got him into a tight place, likes best to come to his fellow artist to get him out of it, he is the first to pay his debts and the first debt he pays is to the artist who saw him through. But this has nothing to do with our Beggars who have chosen art as an unemployment and with whom accident or bad luck is deliberately chronic. They look upon art as a gilt-edged investment that should bring them in a dividend, however remote their connection with it. According to them, an artist entitles all his family, even to the second and third generation, to a share in J.'s modest income, though J. himself is not at all of their manner of thinking. Grandsons of famous wood-engravers, nephews of editors of illustrated papers, cousins of publishers of popular magazines, fathers of painters, brothers, sons, and uncles of every sort of artist, even sisters, daughters, and aunts who take advantage of their talent for pathos and "crocodile wisdom of shedding tears when they should devour,"—all have sought to impress upon him that the sole reason for their existence is to live at his expense. He may suggest meekly that he subscribes to benevolent institutions and societies founded for the relief of artists and artists' families in just their difficulties. They are glib in excuses for making their application to him instead, and they evidently think he ought to be grateful to them for putting him in the way of enjoying the blessing promised to those who give.
The most ambitious reckon their needs on a princely scale, as if determined to beg, when they have to, with all their might. One artist, distinguished in his youth, writes to J., from the Café Royal where, in his old age, he makes a habit of dining and finding himself towards midnight ridiculously without a penny in his pocket, an emergency in which a five-pound note by return of messenger will oblige. Another, whose business hours are as late, comes in person for a "fiver," his last train to his suburban home being on the point of starting and he as ridiculously penniless, except for a cheque for a hundred pounds just received from a publisher, which he cannot change at that time of night. The more humble have so much less lavish a standard that half a crown will meet their liabilities, or else a sum left to the generosity of the giver. A youth, frequent in his visits, never aspires above the fare of a hansom waiting below, while a painter of mature years appears only on occasions of public rejoicing or mourning when there is no telling to what extent emotion may loosen the purse strings. Some bring their pictures as security, or the pictures of famous ancestors who have become bewilderingly prolific since their death; some plead for their work to be taken out of pawn; some want to pose in a few days, and these J. recommends to the Keeper of the Royal Academy; and some are so subtle in their argument that we fail to follow it. We are still wondering what could have been the motive of the excited little man who burst in upon J. a few days ago with a breathless inquiry as to how much he charged for painting polo ponies for officers, and who bolted as precipitately when J. said that he knew nothing about polo, and had never painted a pony in his life. But for sheer irrelevance none has surpassed the American whom, in J.'s absence, I was called upon to interview, and who assured me that, having begun life as an artist and later turned model, he had tramped all the way from New Orleans to New York and then worked his way over on a cattleship to London with no other object in view than to sit to J. If I regret that my countrymen in England borrow the trick of begging from the native, it is some satisfaction to have them excel in it. When I represented to the model from New Orleans that J., as far as I could see, would have no use for him, he was quite ready to take a shilling in place of the sitting, and when I would not give him a shilling, he declared himself repaid by his pleasant chat with a compatriot. He must have thought better of it afterwards and decided that something more substantial was owing to him, for three weeks later his visit was followed by a letter:—
Madam,—I know how sorry you will be to hear that since my little talk with you I have been dangerously sick in a hospital. The doctors have now discharged me, but they say I must do no work of any kind for ten days, though an artist is waiting for me to sit to him for an important picture. They advise me to strengthen myself with nourishing food in the meanwhile. Will you therefore please send me
3 dozen new-laid eggs
1 lb. of fresh butter
1 lb. of coffee
1 lb. of tea
2 lbs. of sugar
1 dozen of oranges.
Thanking you in advance,
I am, Madam,
Gratefully yours.
There are periods when I am convinced that not art, not literature, but journalism is the most impecunious of the professions, and that all Fleet Street, to which the Quarter is fairly convenient, must be out of work. It is astonishing how often it depends upon our financial backing to get into work again, though dependence could not be more misplaced, for a certain little transaction with a guileless youth whose future hung on a journey to Russia has given us all the experience of the kind, or a great deal more than we want. As astonishing is the number of journalists who cherish as their happiest recollections the years they were with us on the staff of London, New York, or Philadelphia papers for which we never wrote a line. One even grew sentimental over the "good old days" on the Philadelphia "Public Ledger" with J.'s father who, to our knowledge, passed his life without as much as seeing the inside of a newspaper office. But the journalist persisted until J. vowed that he never had a father, that he never was in Philadelphia, that he never heard of the "Ledger": then the poor man fled. Astonishing, too, is the count they keep of the seasons. Disaster is most apt to overtake them at those holiday times when Dickens has taught that hearts are tender and purses overflow. For them Christmas spells catastrophe, and it has ceased to be a surprise to hear their ring on Christmas Eve. As a rule, a shilling will avert the catastrophe and enable them to exchange the cold streets for a warm fireside, hunger for feasting, though I recall a reporter for whom it could not be done under a ticket to Paris. The Paris edition of the "New York Herald" had engaged him on condition that he was in the office not later than Christmas morning. He was ready to start, but—there was the ticket, and, for no particular reason except that it was Christmas Eve, J. was to have the pleasure of paying for it.
"Why not apply to the 'New York Herald' office here?" J. asked.
The reporter beamed: "My dear sir, the very thing, the very thing. Why didn't I think of it before? I will go at once. Thank you, sir, thank you!"
He was back in an hour, radiant, the ticket in his hand, but held tight, so that just one end showed, as if he was afraid of losing it. "You see, sir, it was the right tip, but I must have some coffee at Dieppe, and I haven't one penny over. I can manage with a shilling, sir, and if you would be so kind a couple more for a cab in Paris."
He did not know his man. J. would go, or rather he has gone, without breakfast or dinner and any distance on foot when work was at stake. But the reporter was so startled by the suggestion of such hardships for himself that he dropped the ticket on the floor, and before he could snatch it up again J. had seen that it was good not for Paris, but for a 'bus in the Strand.
I wish I had been half as stern with the assistant editor from Philadelphia. I knew him for what he was the minute he came into the room. He was decently, even jauntily dressed, but there hung about him the smell of stale cigars and whiskey, which always hangs about those of our Beggars who do not fill our chambers with the sicklier smell of drugs. Nor did I think much of his story. He related it at length with elegance of manner and speech, but it was a poor one, inviting doubt. The card he played was the one he sent in with a well-known Philadelphia name on it, and he strengthened the effect by his talk of the artist with whom he once shared rooms at Eleventh and Spruce streets. That "fetched me." For Eleventh and Spruce streets must ever mean for me the red brick house with the white marble steps and green shutters, the pleasant garden opposite full of trees green and shady on hot summer days, the leisurely horse-cars jingling slowly by,—the house that is so big in all the memories of my childhood and youth. If I can help it, nobody shall ever know what his having lived in its neighbourhood cost me. I was foolish, no doubt, but I gave with my eyes open: sentiment sometimes is not too dearly bought at the price of a little folly.
Were Covent Garden not within such easy reach of the Quarter I could scarcely account for the trust which the needy musician places in us. Certainly it is because of no effort or encouragement on our side. We have small connection with the musical world, and whether because of the size of the singers or the commercial atmosphere at Baireuth, J. since we heard "Parsifal" there will not be induced to go to the opera anywhere, or to venture upon a concert. Under the circumstances, the most imaginative musician could not make believe in a professional bond between us, though there is nothing to shake his faith in the kinship of all the arts and, therefore, in our readiness to support the stray tenor or violinist who cannot support himself. But imagination, anyway, is not his strong point. He seldom displays the richness of fancy of our other Beggars, and I can recall only one, a pianist who had grasped the possibilities of "Who's Who." His use of it, however, went far to atone for the neglect of the rest. With its aid he had discovered not only that we were Philadelphians, but that Mr. David Bispham was also, and he had to let off his enthusiasm over Philadelphia and "dear old Dave Bispham" before he got down to business. There his originality gave out. His was the same old story of a run of misfortunes and disappointments—"it could never have happened if dear old Dave Bispham had been in town"—and the climax was the dying wife for whom our sympathy has been asked too often for a particle to be left. The only difference was that she took rather longer in dying than usual, and the pianist returned to report her removal from the shelter of a friend's house to the hospital, from the hospital to lodgings, and from the lodgings he threatened us with the spectacle of her drawing her last breath in the gutter if we did not, then and there, pay his landlady and his doctor and his friend to whom he was deeply in debt. We were spared her death, probably because by that time the pianist saw the wisdom of carrying the story of her sufferings to more responsive ears, though it is not likely that he met with much success anywhere. He was too well dressed for the part. With his brand-new frock coat and immaculate silk hat, with his gold-mounted cane and Suède gloves, he was better equipped for the jeune premier warbling of love, than for the grief-stricken husband watching in penniless desolation by the bedside of a dying wife.
The Quarter is also within an easy stroll for actors who, when their hard times come, show an unwarranted confidence in us, though J., if anything, disdains the theatre more than the opera. They take advantage of their training and bring the artist's zeal to the rôle of Beggars, but I have known them to be shocked back suddenly into their natural selves by J.'s blunt refusal to hear them out. One, giving the aristocratic name of Mr. Vivian Stewart and further describing himself on his card as "Lead Character late of the Lyceum," was so dismayed when J. cut his lines short with a shilling that he lost his cue entirely and whined, "Don't you think, sir, you could make it eighteenpence?" The most accomplished in the rôle was a young actor from York. He had the intelligence to suspect that the profession does not monopolize the interest of all the world and to pretend that it did not monopolize his own. He therefore appeared in the double part of cyclist and actor. He reminded J. of a cycling dinner at York several winters before at which both were present. J. remembered the dinner, but not the cyclist, who was not a bit put out but declaimed upon "the freemasonry of the wheel," and anticipated J.'s joy as fellow sportsman in hearing of the new engagement just offered to him. It would be the making of him and his reputation, but—no bad luck has ever yet robbed our Beggars of that useful preposition—but, it depended upon his leaving London within an hour, and the usual events over which our Beggars never have control, found him with ten shillings less than his railway fare. A loan at this critical point would save his career, and to-morrow the money would be returned. His visit dates back to the early period, when our hospitality had not out-grown the barbarous stage, and his career was saved, temporarily. After six months' silence, the actor reappeared. With his first word of greeting he took a half sovereign from his waistcoat pocket and regretted his delay in paying it back. But, in the mean while, much had happened. He had lost his promising engagement; he had found a wife and was on the point of losing her, for she was another of the many wives at death's door; he had found a more promising engagement and was on the point of losing that too, for if he did not settle his landlady's bill before the afternoon had passed she would seize his possessions, stage properties and all, and again events beyond his control had emptied his pockets. He would return the ten shillings, but we must now lend him a sovereign. And he was not merely surprised but deeply hurt because we would not, and he stayed to argue it out that if his wife died, and his landlady kept his possessions, and the engagement was broken, and his career was at an end, the guilt would be ours,—it was in our power to make him or to mar him. He was really rather good at denunciation. On this occasion it was wasted. He did not get the sovereign, but then neither did we get the half sovereign which went back into his waistcoat pocket at the end of his visit and disappeared with him, this time apparently forever.
We are scarcely in as great favour as we were with our Beggars. Their courage now is apt to ooze from them at our door, which is no longer held by a British servant, but by Augustine, whom tradition has not taught to respect the top hat and frock coat, and before whom even the prosperous quail. She recognizes the Beggar at a glance, for that glance goes at once to his shoes, she having found out, unaided by Thackeray, that poverty, beginning to take possession of a man, attacks his extremities first. She has never been mistaken except when, in the dusk of a winter evening, she shut one of our old friends out on the stairs because she had looked at his hat instead of his shoes and mistrusted the angle at which it was pulled down over his eyes. This blunder, for an interval, weakened her reliance upon her own judgment, but she has gradually recovered her confidence, and only the Beggars whose courage is screwed to the sticking-point, and who sharpen their wits, succeed in the skirmish to get past her. When they do get past it is not of much use. The entertainment they gave us is of a kind that palls with repetition. An inclination to listen to their stories, to save their careers, to set them up on their feet, could survive their persecutions in none but the epicure in charity, which we are not. The obligation of politeness to Beggars under my roof weighs more lightly on my shoulders with their every visit, while J., as the result of long experience and to save bother, has reduced his treatment of them to a system and gives a shilling indiscriminately to each and all who call to beg—when he happens to have one himself. In vain I assure him that if his system has the merit of simplicity, it is shocking bad political economy, and that every shilling given is a shilling thrown away. In vain I remind him that Augustine, shadowing our Beggars from our chambers, saw the man who came to us solely because of the "good old days" in Philadelphia stop and beg at every other door in the house; that she detected one of the numerous heart-broken husbands hurrying back to his dying wife by way of the first pub round the corner; that she caught the innocent defendant in a lawsuit, whose solicitor was waiting downstairs, pounced upon by two women instead and well scolded for the poor bargain he had made. In vain I point out that a shilling to one is an invitation to every Beggar on our beat, for by some wireless telegraphy of their own our Beggars always manage to spread the news when shillings are in season at our chambers. But J. is not to be moved. He has an argument as simple as his system with which to answer mine. If, he says, the Beggar is a humbug, a shilling can do no great harm; if the Beggar is genuine, it may pay for a night's bed or for the day's bread; and he does not care if it is right or wrong according to political economy, for he knows for himself that the Beggar's story is sometimes true. The visits of Beggars who once came to us as friends are vivid in his memory.
They are, I admit, visits not soon forgotten. The chance Beggar in the street is impersonal in his appeal, and yet he makes us uncomfortable by his mere presence, symbol as he is of the huge and pitiless waste of life. Our laugh for the bare-faced impostor at our door has a sigh in it, for proficiency in his trade is gained only through suffering and degradation. But the laugh is lost in the sigh, the discomfort becomes acute when the man who begs a few pence is one at whose table we once sat, whom we once knew in positions of authority. He cannot be reduced to a symbol nor disposed of by generalizations. Giving is always an embarrassing business, but under these conditions it fills us with shame, nor can we help it though oftener than not we see that the shame is all ours. I am miserable during my interviews with the journalist whom we met when he was at the top of the ladder of success, and who slipped to the bottom after his promotion to an important editorship and his carelessness in allowing himself to be found, on the first night of his installation, asleep with his head and an empty bottle in the wastepaper basket; but he seems to be quite enjoying himself, which makes it the more tragic, as, with hand upraised, he assures me solemnly that J. is a gentleman, this proud distinction accorded by him in return for the practical working of J.'s system in his behalf. It is a trial to receive the popular author who won his popularity by persevering in the "'abits of a clerk," so he says, when he left the high office stool for the comfortable chair in his own study, and whose face explains too well what he has made of it; but it is evidently a pleasure to him, and therefore the more pitiful to me, when he interrupts my mornings to expose the critics and their iniquity in compelling him to come to me for the bread they take out of his mouth. Worst of all were the visits of the business man,—I am glad I can speak of them in the past,—though he himself never seemed conscious of the ghastly figure he made, for when his visible business vanished he had still his wonderful schemes.
He was a man of wonderful schemes, but originally they led to results as wonderful. When we first knew him he ruled in an office in Bond Street, he had partners, he had clerks, he had a porter in livery at the door. He embarked upon daring adventures and brought them off. He gave interesting commissions, and he paid for them too, as we learned to our profit. He had large ideas and a wide horizon; he shrank from the cheap and popular, from what the people like. He was not above taking the advice of others upon subjects of which he was broad-minded enough to understand and to acknowledge his own ignorance, for he spared himself no pains in his determination to secure the best. And he was full of go; that was why we liked him. I look back to evenings when he came to dinner to talk over some new scheme, and when he would sit on and talk on after his last train—his home was in the suburbs—had long gone and, as he told us afterwards, he would have to wait in one of the little restaurants near Fleet Street that are open all night for journalists until it was time to catch the earliest newspaper train. He would drop in at any odd hour to discuss his latest enterprise. We were always seeing him, and we were always delighted to see him, enthusiasm not being so common a virtue in the Briton that we can afford not to make the most of it when it happens. We found him, as a consequence, a stimulating companion. I cannot say exactly when the change came; why it came remains a mystery to us to this day. Probably it began long before we realized it. The first symptoms were a trick of borrowing: at the outset such trivial things as a daily paper to which he should have subscribed, or books which he should have bought for himself. Then it was a half crown here and a half crown there, because he had not time to go back to the office before rushing to the station, or because he had not a cab fare with him, or because of half a dozen other accidents as plausible. We might not have given a second thought to all this but for the rapidity with which the half crowns developed into five shillings, and the five into ten, and the ten into a sovereign on evenings when the cab, for which we had to take his word, had been waiting during the hours of his stay. We could not help our suspicions, the more so because that indefinable but rank odour of drugs, by which our Beggars too frequently announce themselves, grew stronger as the amount of which he was in need increased. And very soon he was confiding to us the details of a quarrel which deprived him of his partners and their capital. Then the Bond Street office was given up and his business was done in some vague rooms, the whereabouts of which he never disclosed; only too soon it seemed to be done entirely in the street. We would meet him at night slinking along the Strand, one of the miserable shadows of humanity whom the darkness lures out of the nameless holes and corners where they hide during the day. At last came a period when he kept away from our chambers altogether, sending his wife to us instead. Her visits were after dark, usually towards midnight. She called for all sorts of things,—a week's rent, medicine from the druggist in the Strand, Sunday's dinner, her 'bus fare home, once I remember for an umbrella. She was never without an excuse for the emergency that forced her to disturb us, and she was no less fine than he in keeping up the fiction that it was an emergency, and that business prospered though removed from Bond Street into the Unknown. I think it was after this loan of an umbrella that he again came himself, nominally to return it and incidentally to borrow something else. I had not seen him for several months. It might have been years judging from his appearance, and I wished, as I still wish, I had not seen him then. In the Bond Street days he had the air of a man who lived well, and he was correct in dress, "well groomed" as they say. And now? His face was as colourless and emaciated as the faces from which I shrink in the "hunger line" on the Embankment; he wore a brown tweed suit, torn and mended and torn again, with a horrible patch of another colour on one knee that drew my eyes irresistibly to it; his straw hat was as burned and battered as days of tramping in the sun and nights of sleeping in the rain could make it. He was the least embarrassed of the two. In fact, he was not embarrassed at all, but sat in the chair where so often he had faced me in irreproachable frock coat and spotless trousers, and explained as in the old days his wonderful schemes, expressing again the hope that we would second him and, with him, again achieve success. He might have been a prince promising his patronage. And all the while I did not know which way to look, so terrible was his face pinched and drawn with hunger, so eloquent that staring patch on his knee. That was several years ago, and it was the last visit either he or his wife ever made us. I cannot imagine that anything was left to them except greater misery, deeper degradation, and—the merciful end, which I hope came swiftly.
It is when I remember the business man and our other friends, fortunately few, who have followed in the same path that I am unable to deny the force of the argument by which J. defends his system. It may be that all our Beggars began life with schemes as wonderful and ideas as large, that their stories are as true, that the line between Tragedy and Farce was never so fine drawn as when, stepping across it, they plunged into the profession of having come down in the world.
It is impossible to live in chambers without knowing something of the other tenants in the house. I know much even of several who were centuries or generations before my time, and I could not help it if I wanted to, for the London County Council has lately set up a plaque to their memory on our front wall. Not that I want to help it. I take as much pride in my direct descent from Pepys and Etty as others may in an ancestor on the Mayflower or with the Conqueror, while if it had not been for J. and his interest in the matter we might not yet boast the plaque that gives us distinction in our shabby old street, though, to do us full justice, its list of names should be lengthened by at least one, perhaps the most distinguished.
I have never understood why Bacon was left out. Only the pedant would disown so desirable a tenant for the poor reason that the house has been rebuilt since his day. As it is, Pepys heads the list, and we do not pretend to claim that the house is exactly as it was when he lived in it. He never saw our Adam ceilings and fireplaces, we never saw his row of gables along the River front except in Canaletto's drawing of the old Watergate which our windows still overlook. However, except for the loss of the gables, the outside has changed little, and if the inside has been remodelled beyond recognition, we make all we can of the Sixteenth-Century drain-pipe discovered when the London County Council, in the early throes of reform, ordered our plumbing to be overhauled. Their certified plumber made so much of it, feeling obliged to celebrate his discovery with beer and in his hurry forgetting to blow out the bit of candle he left amid the laths and plaster, that if J. had not arrived just in time there would be no house now for the plaque to decorate. Pepys, I regret to say, waited to move in until after the Diary ended, so that we do not figure in its pages. Nor, during his tenancy, does he figure anywhere except in the parish accounts, which is more to his credit than our entertainment.
Etty was considerate and left a record of his "peace and happiness" in our chambers, but I have no proof that he appreciated their beauty. If he liked to walk on our leads in the evening and watch the sun set behind Westminster, he turned his back on the River at the loveliest hour of all. It was his habit as Academician to work like a student at night in the Royal Academy Schools, then in Trafalgar Square,—an admirable habit, but one that took him away just when he should have stayed. For when evening transformed the Thames and its banks into Whistler's "Fairyland" he, like Paul Revere, hung out a lantern from his studio window as a signal for the porter, with a big stick, to come and fetch him and protect him from the robbers of the Quarter, which had not then the best of reputations. Three generations of artists climbed our stairs to drink tea and eat muffins with Etty, but they showed the same ignorance of the Thames, all except Turner, who thought there was no finer scenery on any river in Italy, and who wanted to capture our windows from Etty and make them his own, but who, possibly because he could not get them, never painted the Thames as it was and is. One other painter did actually capture the windows on the first floor, and, in the chambers that are now the Professor's, Stanfield manufactured his marines, and there too, they say, Humphry Davy made his safety lamp.
We do not depend solely upon the past for our famous tenants. Some of the names which in my time have been gorgeously gilded inside our vestibule, later generations may find in the list we make a parade of on our outer wall. For a while, in the chambers just below ours, we had the pleasure of knowing that Mr. Edmund Gosse was carrying on for us the traditions of Bacon and Pepys. Then we have had a Novelist or two, whose greatness I shrink from putting to the test by reading their novels, and also one or more Actors, but fame fades from the mummer on the wrong side of the footlights. We still have the Architect who, if the tenants were taken at his valuation, would, I fancy, head our new list.
He is not only an architect but, like Etty,—like J. for that matter,—an Academician. He carries off the dignity with great stateliness, conscious of the vast gulf fixed between him and tenants with no initials after their name. Moreover, he belongs to that extraordinary generation of now elderly Academicians who were apparently chosen for their good looks, as Frederick's soldiers were for their size. The stoop that has come to his shoulder with years but adds to the impressiveness of his carriage. His air of superiority is a continual reminder of his condescension in having his office under our modest roof. His "Aoh, good-mornin'," as he passes, is a kindness, a few words from him a favour rarely granted, and there is no insolent familiar in the house who would dare approach him. Royalty, Archbishops, University dignitaries are his clients, and it would seem presumption for the mere untitled to approach him with a commission. His office is run on dignified lines in keeping with the exalted sphere in which he practises. A parson of the Church of England is his chief assistant. A notice on his front door warns the unwary that "No Commercial Travellers need Apply," and implies that others had better not.
William Penn is probably the only creature in the house who ever had the courage to enter the Academic precincts unbidden. William was a cat of infinite humour, and one of his favourite jests was to dash out of our chambers and down the stairs whenever he had a chance; not because he wanted to escape,—he did not, for he loved his family as he should,—but because he knew that one or all of us would dash after him. If he was not caught in time he added to the jest by pushing through the Academician's open door and hiding somewhere under the Academic nose, and I am certain that nobody had a keener sense of the audacity of it than William himself. More than once a young assistant, trying to repress a grin and to look as serious as if he were handing us a design for a Deanery, restored William to his family; and once, on a famous occasion when, already late, we were starting for the Law Courts and the Witness-box, the Architect relaxed so far as to pull William out from among the Academic drawing-boards and to smile as he presented him to J. who was following in pursuit. Even Jove sometimes unbends, but when Jove is a near neighbour it is wiser not to presume upon his unbending, and we have never given the Architect reason to regret his moment of weakness.
Whatever the Architect thinks of himself, the other tenants think more of Mr. Square, whose front door faces ours on the Third Floor. Mr. Square is under no necessity of assuming an air of superiority, so patent to everybody in the house is his right to it. If anything, he shrinks from asserting himself. He had been in his chambers a year, coming a few months "after the fire," before I knew him by sight, though by reputation he is known to everybody from one end of the country to the other. Not only is there excitement in our house when the police officer appears on our staircase with a warrant for his arrest for murder, but the United Kingdom thrills and waits with us for the afternoon's Police Report. In the neighbourhood I am treated with almost as much respect as when I played a leading part in the Law Courts myself. The milkman and the postman stop me in the street, the little fruiterer round the corner and the young ladies at the Temple of Pomona in the Strand detain me in giving me my change as if I were an accessory to the crime. What if the murder is only technical, Mr. Square's arrest a matter of form, his discharge immediate? The glory is in his position which makes the technical murder an achievement to be envied by every true-born Briton. For he is Referee at the Imperial Boxing Club, and therefore the most important person in the Empire, except, perhaps, the winning jockey at the Derby or the Captain of the winning Football Team. The Prime Minister, Royalty itself, would not shed a brighter lustre on our ancient house, and there could be no event of greater interest than the fatal "accident" in the ring for which Mr. Square has been so many times held technically responsible.
In his private capacity Mr. Square strikes me as in no way remarkable. He is a medium-sized man with sandy hair and moustache, as like as two peas to the other men of medium height with sandy hair and moustache who are met by the thousand in the Strand. He shares his chambers with Mr. Savage, who is something in the Bankruptcy Court. Both are retiring and modest, they never obtrude themselves, and either their domestic life is quiet beyond reproach, or else the old builders had the secret of soundless walls, for no sound from their chambers disturbs us. With them we have not so much as the undesirable intimacy that comes from mutual complaint, and such is their amiability that William, in his most outrageous intrusions, never roused from them a remonstrance.
I am forced to admit that William was at times ill-advised in the hours and places he chose for his adventures. He often beguiled me at midnight upon the leads that he might enjoy my vain endeavours to entice him home with the furry monkey tied to the end of a string, which during the day never failed to bring him captive to my feet. By his mysterious disappearances he often drove J., whose heart is tender and who adored him, out of his bed at unseemly hours and down into the street where, in pyjamas and slippers, and the door banged to behind him, he became an object of suspicion. On one of these occasions, a policeman materializing suddenly from nowhere and turning a bull's-eye on him,—
"Have you seen a cat about?" J. asked.
"Seen a cat? Oi've seen millions on 'em," said the policeman. "Wot sort o' cat?" he added.
"A common tabby cat," said J.
"Look 'ere," said the policeman, "where do you live any'ow?"
"Here," said J., who had retained his presence of mind with his latch-key.
"Aoh, Oi begs your parding, sir," said the policeman. "Oi didn't see you, sir, in the dim light, sir, but you know, sir, there's billions o' tabby cats about 'ere of a night, sir. But if Oi find yours, sir, Oi'll fetch 'im 'ome to you, sir. S'noight, sir. Thank e' sir."
When the kitchen door was opened the next morning, William was discovered innocently curled up in his blanket. And yet, when he again disappeared at bedtime a week or two later, J. was again up before daybreak, sure that he was on the doorstep breaking his heart because he could not get in. This time I followed into our little hall, and Augustine after me. She was not then as used to our ways as she is now, and I still remember her sleepy bewilderment when she looked at J., who had varied his costume for the search by putting on knickerbockers and long stockings, and her appeal to me: "Mais pourquoi en bicyclette?" Why indeed? But there was no time for explanation. We were interrupted by an angry but welcome wail from behind the opposite door, and we understood that William was holding us responsible for having got himself locked up in Mr. Square's chambers. We had to wake up Mr. Square's old servant before he could be released, but it was not until the next morning that the full extent of his iniquity was revealed. A brand-new, pale-pink silk quilt on Mr. Square's bed having appealed to him as more luxurious than his own blanket, he had profited by Mr. Square's absence to spend half the night on it, leaving behind him a faint impression of his dear grimy little body. Even then, Mr. Square remained as magnanimously silent as if he shared our love for William and pride in his performances.
All we know of Mr. Square and Mr. Savage, in addition to their fame and modesty, we have learned from their old man, Tom. He is a sailor by profession, and for long steward on Mr. Savage's yacht. He clings to his uniform in town, and when we see him pottering about in his blue reefer and brass buttons, Mr. Savage's little top floor that adjoins ours and opens out on the leads we share between us looks more than ever like a ship's quarter-deck. He is sociable by nature, and overflows with kindliness for everybody. He is always smiling, whatever he may be doing or wherever I may meet him, and he has a child's fondness for sweet things. He is never without a lemon-drop in his mouth, and he keeps his pockets full of candy. As often as the opportunity presents itself, he presses handfuls upon Augustine, whom he and his wife ceremoniously call "Madam," and to whom he confides the secrets of the household.
It is through him, by way of Augustine, that we follow the movements of the yacht, and know what "his gentlemen" have for dinner and how many people come to see them. At times I have feared that his confidences to Augustine and the tenderness of his attentions were too marked, and that his old wife, who is less liberal with her smiles, disapproved. Over the grille that separates our leads from his, he gossips by the hour with Augustine, when she lets him, and once or twice, meeting her in the street, he has gallantly invited her into a near public to "'ave a drink," an invitation which she, with French scorn for the British substitute of the café, would disdain to accept. To other tributes of his affection, however, she does not object. On summer evenings he sometimes lays a plate of salad or stewed fruit at our door, rings, runs, and then from out a porthole of a window by his front door, watches the effect when she finds it, and is horribly embarrassed if I find it by mistake. In winter his offering takes the shape of a British mince-pie or a slice of plum pudding, and, on a foggy morning when she comes home from market, he will bring her a glass of port from Mr. Square's cellar. He is always ready to lend her a little oil, or milk, or sugar, in an emergency. Often he is useful in a more urgent crisis. In a sudden thunder-storm he will leap over the grille, shut our door on the leads, and make everything ship-shape almost before I know it is raining. He has even broken in for me when I have come home late without a key, and by my knocking and ringing have roused up everybody in the whole house except Augustine. Mrs. Tom, much as she may disapprove, is as kindly in her own fashion; she is quite learned in medicine, and knows an old-fashioned remedy for every ailment. She has seen Augustine triumphantly through an accident, she has cured Marcel, Augustine's husband, of a quinsy, and she rather likes to be called upon for advice. She is full of little amiabilities. She never gets a supply of eggs fresh from the country at a reasonable price without giving me a chance to secure a dozen or so, and when her son, a fisherman, comes up to London, she always reserves a portion of his present of fish for me. I could not ask for kindlier neighbours, and they are the only friends I have made in the house.
I was very near having friendship thrust upon me, however, by the First Floor Back, Mrs. Eliza Short. She is an elderly lady of generous proportions and flamboyant tastes, "gowned" elaborately by Jay and as elaborately "wigged" by Truefitt. The latest fashions and golden hair cannot conceal the ravages of time, and, as a result of her labours, she looks tragically like the unwilling wreck of a Lydia Thompson Blonde. I may be wrong; she may never have trod the boards, and yet I know of nothing save the theatre that could account for her appearance. The most assiduous of her visitors, as I meet them on the stairs, is an old gentleman as carefully made up in his way, an amazing little dandy, whom I fancy as somebody in the front row applauding rapturously when Mrs. Eliza Short, in tights and golden locks, came pirouetting down the stage. I should have been inclined to weave a pretty romance about them as the modern edition of Philemon and Baucis if, knowing Mrs. Short, it did not become impossible to associate romance of any kind with her.
Our acquaintance was begun by my drinking tea in her chambers the morning "after the fire," of which she profited unfairly by putting me on her visiting-list. She was not at all of Montaigne's opinion that "incuriosity" is a soft and sound pillow to rest a well-composed head upon. On the contrary, it was evident that for hers to rest in comfort she must first see every room in our chambers and examine into all my domestic arrangements. I have never been exposed to such a battery of questions. I must say for her that she was more than ready to pay me in kind. Between her questions she gave me a vast amount of information for which I had no possible use. She told me the exact amount of her income and the manner of its investment. She explained her objection to servants and her preference for having "somebody in" to do the rough work. She confided to me that she dealt at the Stores where she could always get a cold chicken and a bit of ham at a pinch, and the "pinch" at once presented itself to my mind as an occasion when the old dandy was to be her guest. She edified me by her habit of going to bed with the lambs, and getting up with the larks to do her own dusting. The one ray of hope she allowed me was the fact that her winters were spent at Monte Carlo. She could not pass me on the stairs, or in the hall, or on the street, where much of her time was lost, without buttonholing me to ask on what amount of rent I was rated, or how much milk I took in of a morning, or if the butcher sent me tough meat, or other things that were as little her business. I positively dreaded to go out or to come home, and the situation was already strained when Jimmy rushed to the rescue. Elia regretted the agreeable intimacies broken off by the dogs whom he loved less than their owners, but I found it useful to have a cat Mrs. Short could not endure, to break off my intimacy with her, and he did it so effectually that I could never believe it was not done on purpose. One day, when she had been out since ten o'clock in the morning, she returned to find Jimmy locked up in her chambers alone with her bird. That the bird was still hopping about its cage was to me the most mysterious feature in the whole affair, for Jimmy was a splendid sportsman. After his prowls in the garden he only too often left behind him a trail of feathers and blood-stains all the way up the three flights of our stairs. But if the bird had not escaped, Mrs. Short could hardly have been more furious. She demanded Jimmy's life, and when it was refused, insisted on his banishment. She threatened him with poison and me with exposure to the Landlord. For days the Housekeeper was sent flying backwards and forwards between Mrs. Short's chambers and ours, bearing threats and defiances. Jimmy, who knew as well as I did what was going on, rejoiced, and from then until his untimely death never ran downstairs or up—and he was always running down or up—without stopping in front of her door, giving one unearthly howl, and then flying; and never by chance did he pay the same little attention to any one of the other tenants.
Mrs. Short does not allow me to forget her. As her voice is deep and harsh and thunders through the house when she buttonholes somebody else, or says good-bye to a friend at her door, I hear her far more frequently than I care to; as she has a passion for strong scent, I often smell her when I do not see her at all; and as in the Quarter we all patronize the same tradesmen, I am apt to run into her not only on our stairs, but in the dairy, or the Temple of Pomona, or further afield at the Post Office. Then, however, we both stare stonily into vacancy, failing to see each other, and during the sixteen years since that first burst of confidence, we have exchanged not a word, not as much as a glance: an admirable arrangement which I owe wholly to Jimmy.
With her neighbours on the other side of the hall, Mrs. Short has nothing in common except permanency as tenant. Her name and the sign of the Church League faced each other on the First Floor when we came to our chambers; they face each other still. Her golden wig is not oftener seen on our stairs than the gaiters and aprons of the Bishops who rely upon the League for a periodical cup of tea; her voice is not oftener heard than the discreet whispers of the ladies who attend the Bishops in adoring crowds. But Jimmy's intervention was not required to maintain the impersonality of my relations with the League. It has never shown an interest in my affairs nor a desire to confide its own to me. Save for one encounter we have kept between us the distance which it should be the object of all tenants to cultivate, and I might never have looked upon it as more than a name had I not witnessed its power to attract some of the clergy and to enrage others. Nothing has happened in our house to astound me more than the angry passions it kindled in two of our friends who are clergymen. One vows that he will never come to see us again so long as to reach our chambers he must pass the League's door; the second reproaches us for having invited him, his mere presence in the same house being sufficient to ruin his clerical reputation. As the League is diligently working for the Church of which both my friends are distinguished lights, I feel that in these matters there are fine shades beyond my unorthodox intelligence. It is also astounding that the League should inflame laymen of no religious tendencies whatever to more violent antagonism. Friends altogether without the pale have taken offence at what they call the League's arrogance in hanging up its signs not only at its front door, but downstairs in the vestibule, and again on the railings without, and they destroyed promptly the poster it once ventured to put upon the stairs, assuring us that theirs was righteous wrath, and then, in the manner of friends, leaving us to face the consequences.
For myself I bear no ill-will to the League. I may object to the success with which it fills our stairs on the days of its meetings and tea-parties, but I cannot turn this into a pretext for quarrelling, while I can only admire the spirit of progress that has made it the first in the house to do its spring-cleaning by a vacuum cleaner and to set up a private letter-box. I can only congratulate it on the prosperity that has caused the overflow of its offices into the next house, and so led indirectly to the one personal encounter I have referred to. A few of the rooms were to let, and J.'s proposal to set up his printing-press in one of them involved us in a correspondence with the Secretary. Then I called, as by letter we were unable to agree upon details. The League, with a display of hospitality that should put the Architect to shame, bids everybody enter without knocking. But when I accepted this Christian invitation, I was confronted by a tall, solemn-faced young man, who informed me that the Secretary was "engaged in prayer," and I got no further than the inner hall. As I failed to catch the Secretary in his less professional moments, and as his devotions did not soften his heart to the extent of meeting us halfway, we quickly resumed the usual impersonality of our relations.
I cannot imagine our house without the Church League and Mrs. Eliza Short, the Architect and Mr. Square. Were their names to vanish from the doors where I have seen them for the last sixteen years, it would give me the same sense of insecurity as if I suddenly looked out of my window to a Thames run dry, or to a domeless city in the distance. With this older group of tenants, who show their respect for a house of venerable age and traditions by staying in it, I think we are to be included and also the Solicitor of the Ground Floor Front. He has been with us a short time, it is true, but he succeeded our old Insurance Agent whom nothing save death could have removed, and for years before he lived no further away than Peter the Great's house across the street, where he would be still, had it not been torn down over his head to make way for the gaudy, new, grey stone building which foretells the beginning of the end of our ancient street. The Solicitor cloisters himself in his chambers more successfully even than the Architect or the Church League, and I have never yet laid eyes on him or detected a client at his door.
I wish the same could be said of our other newcomers who, with rare exceptions, exhibit a restlessness singularly unbecoming in a house that has stood for centuries. In the Ground Floor Back change for long was continued. It was the home of a Theatrical Agent and his family, and babyish prattle filled our once silent halls; it was the office of a Music Hall Syndicate, and strange noises from stranger instruments came floating out and up our stairs, and blonde young ladies in towering hats blocked the door. Then a Newspaper Correspondent drifted in and drifted out again; and next a publisher piled his books in the windows, and made it look so like the shop which is against the rules of the house that his disappearance seemed his just reward.
After this a Steamship Company took possession, bringing suggestions of sunshine and spice with the exotic names of its vessels and the far-away Southern ports for which they sailed,—bringing, too, the spirit of youth, for it employed many young men and women whom I would meet in couples whispering on the stairs or going home at dusk hand in hand. Tender little idyls sprang up in our sober midst. But the staff of young lovers hit upon the roof as trysting-place at the luncheon hour, running races and playing tag up there, and almost tumbling through our skylight. Cupid, sporting overhead with wings exchanged for hob-nailed boots, was unendurable, and I had to call in the Landlord's Agent. He is the unfortunate go-between in all the tenants' differences and difficulties: a kind, weary, sympathetic man, designed by Nature for amiable, good-natured communication with his fellow men, and decreed by Fate and his calling to communicate with them constantly in their most disagreeable moods and phases. Half my fury evaporated at sight of his troubled face, and I might have endured the races and games of tag could I have foreseen that, almost as soon as he put a stop to them, the Steamship Company would take its departure.
The Professor who then came in is so exemplary a tenant that I hope there will be no more changes in the Ground Floor Back. He is a tall, ruddy, well-built man of the type supposed to be essentially British by those who have never seen the other type far more general in the provincial town or, nearer still, in the East of London. He is of middle-age and should therefore have out-grown the idyllic stage, and his position as Professor at the University is a guarantee of sobriety and decorum. I do not know what he professes, but I can answer for his conscientiousness in professing it by the regularity with which, from our windows, I see him of a morning crossing the garden below on his way to his classes. His household is a model of British propriety. He is cared for by a motherly housekeeper, an eminently correct man-servant, and a large hound of dignified demeanour and a sense of duty that leads him to suspect an enemy in everybody who passes his master's door. His violence in protesting against unobjectionable tenants like ourselves reconciles me to dispensing with a dog, especially as it ends with his bark. It was in his master's chambers that our only burglar was discovered,—a forlorn makeshift of a burglar who got away with nothing, and was in such an agony of fright when, in the small hours of the morning, he was pulled out from under the dining-room table, that the Professor let him go as he might have set free a fly found straying in his jam-pot.
The Professor, as is to be expected of anybody so unmistakably British, cultivates a love for sport. I suspect him of making his amusements his chief business in life, as it is said a man should and as the Briton certainly does. He hunts in the season, and, as he motors down to the meet, he is apt to put on his red coat and white breeches before he starts, and they give the last touch of respectability to our respectable house. He is an ardent automobilist, and his big motor at our door suggests wealth as well as respectability. This would have brought us into close acquaintance had he had his way. Sport is supposed to make brothers of all men who believe in it, but from this category I must except J. at those anxious moments which sport does not spare its followers. He was preparing to start somewhere on his fiery motor bicycle, and the Professor, who had never seen one before, wanted to know all about it. J., deeper than he cared to be in carburettors and other mysterious matters, was not disposed to be instructive, and I think the Professor was ashamed of having been beaten in the game of reserve by an American, for he has made no further advances. His most ambitious achievement is ballooning, to which he owes a fame in the Quarter only less than Mr. Square's. We all watch eagerly, with a feeling of proprietorship, for the balloons on the afternoons when balloon races and trials start from the Crystal Palace or Ranelagh. I have caught our little fruiterer in the act of pointing out the Professor's windows to chance customers; and on those days I am absorbed in the sporting columns of the afternoon paper, which, at other times, I pass over unread. He has now but to fly to complete his triumph and the pride of our house in him.
Restlessness also prevails in the Second Floor Back, and as we are immediately above, we suffer the more. Hardly a tenant has remained there over a year, or a couple of years at most, and all in succession have developed a talent for interfering with our comfort. First, an Honourable occupied the chambers. His title was an unfailing satisfaction to Mrs. Haines, the Housekeeper, who dwelt upon it unctuously every time she mentioned him. I am not learned in Debrett and Burke and may not have appreciated its value, but he might have been Honourable ten times over and it would not have reconciled me to him as neighbour. He was quite sure, if I was not, that he was a great deal better than anybody else, and he had the Briton's independent way of asserting it. He slammed behind him every door he opened, and when the stairs were barricaded by himself, his friends, or his parcels, and we wanted to pass, he failed to see us as completely as if we had been Mr. Wells's Invisible Man. He went to the City in the morning and was away all day, even an Honourable being sometimes compelled to pretend to work. But this was no relief. During his absence his servants availed themselves of the opportunity to assert their independence, which they did with much vigour. When they were not slamming doors they were singing hymns, until Mrs. Eliza Short from her chambers below and we from ours above, in accord the first and only time for years, joined in protest, and drove Mrs. Haines to the unpleasant task of remonstrating with an Honourable.
The Honourable who had come down from the aristocracy was followed by a Maître d'Hôtel who was rapidly rising in rank, and was therefore under as urgent necessity to impress us with his importance. Adolf was an Anglicized German, with moustaches like the Kaiser's, and the swagger of a drum-major. He treated our house as if it was the dining-room under his command, locking and unlocking the street door, turning on and out the lights on the stairs at any hour that suited him, however inconvenient to the rest of us. He littered up the hall with his children and his children's perambulators and hobby-horses, just where we all had to stumble over them to get in or out. Nobody's taxi tooted so loud as his, not even the Honourable's door had shut with such a bang. Augustine's husband being also something in the same profession, they both despised the Adolfs for putting on airs though no better than themselves, while the Adolfs despised them for not having attained the same splendid heights, and the shaking of my rugs out of the back windows was seized upon as the excuse for open warfare. Augustine said it was there they should be shaken according to the law in Paris, which she thought good enough for London. Mrs. Adolf protested that the shaking sent all the dust into her rooms. Augustine, whose English is small and what there is of it not beyond reproach, called Mrs. Adolf "silly fou," which must have been annoying, or harangued her in French when Mrs. Adolf, who could not understand, suspected an offence in every word.
Mrs. Adolf wrote to the Agent, to the Landlord, to me; she declared she would summons me to the County Court. Between letters she watched at her window for the rugs, and there both her servant and her charwoman made faces at Augustine, who has a nice sense of justice and a temper that does not permit her, with Elizabeth Bennet's father, to be satisfied by laughing in her turn at those who have made sport of her. I trembled for the consequences. But at the critical moment, Adolf was promoted to the more splendid height of Manager and a larger salary; the taxi was replaced by a motor-car of his own; Mrs. Adolf arrayed herself in muslin and lace for the washtub, in nothing less elegant than velvet for the street, and they left our old-fashioned chambers for the marble halls and gilded gorgeousness of the modern mansion.