CHAPTER II.



IN WHICH PAUL MAKES ACQUAINTANCE OF THE MAN WITH THE UGLY MOUTH.



The case of my father and mother was not normal. You understand they

had been separated for some years, and though they were not young in

age--indeed, before my childish eyes they loomed quite ancient folk,

and in fact my father must have been nearly forty and my mother quit

of thirty--yet, as you will come to think yourself, no doubt, during

the course of my story, they were in all the essentials of life little

more than boy and girl. This I came to see later on, but at that

time, had I been consulted by enquiring maid or bachelor, I might

unwittingly have given wrong impressions concerning marriage in the

general. I should have described a husband as a man who could never

rest quite content unless his wife were by his side; who twenty times

a day would call from his office door: "Maggie, are you doing

anything important? I want to talk to you about a matter of

business." ... "Maggie, are you alone? Oh, all right, I'll come

down." Of a wife I should have said she was a woman whose eyes were

ever love-lit when resting on her man; who was glad where he was and

troubled where he was not. But in every case this might not have been

correct.



Also, I should have had something to say concerning the alarms and

excursions attending residence with any married couple. I should have

recommended the holding up of feet under the table lest, mistaken for

other feet, they should be trodden on and pressed. Also, I should

have advised against entry into any room unpreceded by what in

Stageland is termed "noise without." It is somewhat disconcerting to

the nervous incomer to be met, the door still in his hand, by a sound

as of people springing suddenly into the air, followed by a weird

scuttling of feet, and then to discover the occupants sitting stiffly

in opposite corners, deeply engaged in book or needlework. But, as I

have said, with regard to some households, such precautions might be

needless.



Personally, I fear, I exercised little or no controlling influence

upon my parents in this respect, my intrusions coming soon to be

greeted with: "Oh, it's only Spud," in a tone of relief, accompanied

generally by the sofa cushion; but of my aunt they stood more in awe.

Not that she ever said anything, and, indeed, to do her justice, in

her efforts to spare their feelings she erred, if at all, on the side

of excess. Never did she move a footstep about the house except to

the music of a sustained and penetrating cough. As my father once

remarked, ungratefully, I must confess, the volume of bark produced by

my aunt in a single day would have done credit to the dying efforts of

a hospital load of consumptives; to a robust and perfectly healthy

lady the cost in nervous force must have been prodigious. Also, that

no fear should live with them that her eyes had seen aught not

intended for them, she would invariably enter backwards any room in

which they might be, closing the door loudly and with difficulty

before turning round: and through dark passages she would walk

singing. No woman alive could have done more; yet--such is human

nature!--neither my father nor my mother was grateful to her, so far

as I could judge.



Indeed, strange as it may appear, the more sympathetic towards them

she showed herself, the more irritated against her did they become.



"I believe, Fanny, you hate seeing Luke and me happy together," said

my mother one day, coming up from the kitchen to find my aunt

preparing for entry into the drawing-room by dropping teaspoons at

five-second intervals outside the door: "Don't make yourself so

ridiculous." My mother spoke really quite unkindly.



"Hate it!" replied my aunt. "Why should I? Why shouldn't a pair of

turtle doves bill and coo, when their united age is only a little over

seventy, the pretty dears?" The mildness of my aunt's answers often

surprised me.



As for my father, he grew positively vindictive. I remember the

occasion well. It was the first, though not the last time I knew him

lose his temper. What brought up the subject I forget, but my father

stopped suddenly; we were walking by the canal bank.



"Your aunt"--my father may not have intended it, but his tone and

manner when speaking of my aunt always conveyed to me the impression

that he regarded me as personally responsible for her existence. This

used to weigh upon me. "Your aunt is the most cantankerous, the

most--" he broke off, and shook his fist towards the setting sun. "I

wish to God," said my father, "your aunt had a comfortable little

income of her own, with a freehold cottage in the country, by God I

do!" But the next moment, ashamed, I suppose, of his brutality: "Not

but what sometimes, of course, she can be very nice, you know," he

added; "don't tell your mother what I said just now."



Another who followed with sympathetic interest the domestic comedy was

Susan, our maid-of-all-work, the first of a long and varied series,

extending unto the advent of Amy, to whom the blessing of Heaven.

Susan was a stout and elderly female, liable to sudden fits of

sleepiness, the result, we were given to understand, of trouble; but

her heart, it was her own proud boast, was always in the right place.

She could never look at my father and mother sitting anywhere near

each other but she must flop down and weep awhile; the sight of

connubial bliss always reminding her, so she would explain, of the

past glories of her own married state.



Though an earnest enquirer, I was never able myself to grasp the ins

and outs of this past married life of Susan's. Whether her answers

were purposely framed to elude curiosity, or whether they were the

result of a naturally incoherent mind, I cannot say. Their tendency

was to convey confusion.



On Monday I have seen Susan shed tears of regret into the Brussels

sprouts, that she had been debarred by the pressure of other duties

from lately watering "his" grave, which, I gathered, was at Manor

Park. While on Tuesday I have listened, blood chilled, to the recital

of her intentions should she ever again enjoy the luxury of getting

her fingers near the scruff of his neck.



"But, I thought, Susan, he was dead," was my very natural comment upon

this outbreak.



"So did I, Master Paul," was Susan's rejoinder; "that was his

artfulness."



"Then he isn't buried in Manor Park Cemetery?"



"Not yet; but he'll wish he was, the half-baked monkey, when I get

hold of him."



"Then he wasn't a good man?"



"Who?"



"Your husband."



"Who says he ain't a good man?" It was Susan's flying leaps from

tense to tense that most bewildered me. "If anybody says he ain't

I'll gouge their eye out!"



I hastened to assure Susan that my observation had been intended in

the nature of enquiry, not of assertion.



"Brings me a bottle of gin--for my headaches--every time he comes

home," continued Susan, showing cause for opinion, "every blessed

time."



And at some such point as this I would retire to the clearer

atmosphere of German grammar or mixed fractions.



We suffered a good deal from Susan one way and another; for having

regard to the admirable position of her heart, we all felt it our duty

to overlook mere failings of the flesh--all but my aunt, that is, who

never made any pretence of being a sentimentalist.



"She's a lazy hussy," was the opinion expressed of her one morning by

my aunt, who was rinsing; "a gulping, snorting, lazy hussy, that's

what she is." There was some excuse for my aunt's indignation. It

was then eleven o'clock and Susan was still sleeping off an attack of

what she called "new-ralgy."



"She has seen a good deal of trouble," said my mother, who was wiping.



"And if she was my cook and housemaid," replied my aunt, "she would

see more, the slut!"



"She's not a good servant in many respects," admitted my mother, "but

I think she's good-hearted."



"Oh, drat her heart," was my aunt's retort. "The right place for that

heart of hers is on the doorstep. And that's where I'd put it, and

her and her box alongside it, if I had my way."



The departure of Susan did take place not long afterwards. It

occurred one Saturday night. My mother came upstairs looking pale.



"Luke," she said, "do please run for the doctor."



"What's the matter?" asked my father.



"Susan," gasped my mother, "she's lying on the kitchen floor breathing

in the strangest fashion and quite unable to speak."



"I'll go for Washburn," said my father; "if I am quick I shall catch

him at the dispensary."



Five minutes later my father came back panting, followed by the

doctor. This was a big, black-bearded man; added to which he had the

knack of looking bigger than even he really was. He came down the

kitchen stairs two at a time, shaking the whole house. He brushed my

mother aside, and bent over the unconscious Susan, who was on her back

with her mouth wide open. Then he rose and looked at my father and

mother, who were watching him with troubled faces; and then he opened

his mouth, and there came from it a roar of laughter, the like of

which sound I had never heard.



The next moment he had seized a pail half full of water and had flung

it over the woman. She opened her eyes and sat up.



"Feeling better?" said the doctor, with the pail still in his hand;

"have another dose?"



Susan began to gather herself together with the evident intention of

expressing her feelings; but before she could find the first word, he

had pushed the three of us outside and slammed the door behind us.



From the top of the stairs we could hear Susan's thick, rancorous

voice raging fiercer and fiercer, drowned every now and then by the

man's savage roar of laughter. And, when for want of breath she would

flag for a moment, he would yell out encouragement to her, shouting:

"Bravo! Go it, my beauty, give it tongue! Bark, bark! I love to

hear you," applauding her, clapping his hands and stamping his feet.



"What a beast of a man," said my mother.



"He is really a most interesting man when you come to know him,"

explained my father.



Replied my mother, stiffly: "I don't ever mean to know him." But it

is only concerning the past that we possess knowledge.



The riot from below ceased at length, and was followed by a new voice,

speaking quietly and emphatically, and then we heard the doctor's step

again upon the stairs.



My mother held her purse open in her hand, and as the man entered the

room she went forward to meet him.



"How much do we owe you, Doctor?" said my mother. She spoke in a

voice trembling with severity.



He closed the purse and gently pushed it back towards her.



"A glass of beer and a chop, Mrs. Kelver," he answered, "which I am

coming back in an hour to cook for myself. And as you will be without

any servant," he continued, while my mother stood staring at him

incapable of utterance, "you had better let me cook some for you at

the same time. I am an expert at grilling chops."



"But, really, Doctor--" my mother began. He laid his huge hand upon

her shoulder, and my mother sat down upon the nearest chair.



"My dear lady," he said, "she's a person you never ought to have had

inside your house. She's promised me to be gone in half an hour, and

I'm coming back to see she keeps her word. Give her a month's wages,

and have a clear fire ready for me." And before my mother could

reply, he had slammed the front door.



"What a very odd sort of a man," said my mother, recovering herself.



"He's a character," said my father; "you might not think it, but he's

worshipped about here."



"I hardly know what to make of him," said my mother; "I suppose I had

better go out and get some chops;" which she did.



Susan went, as sober as a judge, on Friday, as the saying is, her

great anxiety being to get out of the house before the doctor

returned. The doctor himself arrived true to his time, and I lay

awake--for no human being ever slept or felt he wanted to sleep while

Dr. Washburn was anywhere near--and listened to the gusts of laughter

that swept continually through the house. Even my aunt laughed that

supper time, and when the doctor himself laughed it seemed to me that

the bed shook under me. Not liking to be out of it, I did what spoilt

little boys and even spoilt little girls sometimes will do under

similar stress of feeling, wrapped the blanket round my legs and

pattered down, with my face set to express the sudden desire of a

sensitive and possibly short-lived child for parents' love. My mother

pretended to be angry, but that I knew was only her company manners.

Besides, I really had, if not exactly a pain, an extremely

uncomfortable sensation (one common to me about that period) as of

having swallowed the dome of St. Paul's. The doctor said it was a

frequent complaint with children, the result of too early hours and

too much study; and, taking me on his knee, wrote then and there a

diet chart for me, which included one tablespoonful of golden syrup

four times a day, and one ounce of sherbet to be placed upon the

tongue and taken neat ten minutes before each meal.



That evening will always live in my remembrance. My mother was

brighter than I had ever seen her. A flush was on her cheek and a

sparkle in her eye, and looking across at her as she sat holding a

small painted screen to shield her face from the fire, the sense of

beauty became suddenly born within me, and answering an impulse I

could not have explained, I slipped down, still with my blanket around

me, from the doctor's knee, and squatted on the edge of the fender,

from where, when I thought no one was noticing me, I could steal

furtive glances up into her face.



So also my father seemed to me to have become all at once bigger and

more dignified, talking with a vigour and an enjoyment that sat newly

on him. Aunt Fan was quite witty and agreeable--for her; and even I

asked one or two questions, at which, for some reason or another,

everybody laughed; which determined me to remember and ask those same

questions again on some future occasion.



That was the great charm of the man, that by the magnetic spell of his

magnificent vitality he drew from everyone their best. In his company

clever people waxed intellectual giants, while the dull sat amazed at

their own originality. Conversing with him, Podsnap might have been

piquant, Dogberry incisive. But better than all else, I found it

listening to his own talk. Of what he spoke I could tell you no more

than could the children of Hamelin have told the tune the Pied Piper

played. I only know that at the tangled music of his strong voice the

walls of the mean room faded away, and that beyond I saw a brave,

laughing world that called to me; a world full of joyous fight, where

some won and some lost. But that mattered not a jot, because whatever

else came of it there was a right royal game for all; a world where

merry gentlemen feared neither life nor death, and Fate was but the

Master of the Revels.



Such was my first introduction to Dr. Washburn, or to give him the

name by which he was known in every slum and alley of that quarter,

Dr. Fighting Hal; and in a minor key that evening was an index to the

whole man. Often he would wrinkle his nose as a dog before it bites,

and then he was more brute than man--brutish in his instincts, in his

appetites, brutish in his pleasure, brutish in his fun. Or his deep

blue eyes would grow soft as a mother's, and then you might have

thought him an angel in a soft felt hat and a coat so loose-fitting as

to suggest the possibility of his wings being folded away underneath.

Often have I tried to make up my mind whether it has been better for

me or worse that I ever came to know him; but as easy would it be for

the tree to say whether the rushing winds and the wild rains have

shaped it or mis-shaped.



Susan's place remained vacant for some time. My mother would explain

to the few friends who occasionally came from afar to see us, that her

"housemaid" she had been compelled to suddenly discharge, and that we

were waiting for the arrival of a new and better specimen. But the

months passed and we still waited, and my father on the rare days when

a client would ring the office bell, would, after pausing a decent

interval, open the front door himself, and then call downstairs

indignantly and loudly, to know why "Jane" or "Mary" could not attend

to their work. And my mother, that the bread-boy or the milkman might

not put it about the neighbourhood that the Kelvers in the big corner

house kept no servant, would hide herself behind a thick veil and

fetch all things herself from streets a long way off.



For this family of whom I am writing were, I confess, weak and human.

Their poverty they were ashamed of as though it were a crime, and in

consequence their life was more full of paltry and useless subterfuge

than should be perhaps the life of brave men and women. The larder, I

fancy, was very often bare, but the port and sherry with the sweet

biscuits stood always on the sideboard; and the fire had often to be

low in the grate that my father's tall hat might shine resplendent and

my mother's black silk rustle on Sundays.



But I would not have you sneer at them, thinking all pretence must

spring from snobbishness and never from mistaken self-respect. Some

fine gentleman writers there be--men whose world is bounded on the

east by Bond Street--who see in the struggles of poverty to hide its

darns only matter for jest. But myself, I cannot laugh at them. I

know the long hopes and fears that centre round the hired waiter; the

long cost of the cream and the ice jelly ordered the week before from

the confectioner's. But to me it is pathetic, not ridiculous.

Heroism is not all of one pattern. Dr. Washburn, had the Prince of

Wales come to see him, would have put his bread and cheese and jug of

beer upon the table, and helped His Royal Highness to half. But my

father and mother's tea was very weak that Mr. Jones or Mr. Smith

might have a glass of wine should they come to dinner. I remember the

one egg for breakfast, my mother arguing that my father should have it

because he had his business to attend to; my father insisting that my

mother should eat it, she having to go out shopping, a compromise

being effected by their dividing it between them, each clamouring for

the white as the most nourishing. And I know however little the meal

looked upon the table when we started I always rose well satisfied.

These are small things to speak of, but then you must bear in mind

this is a story moving in narrow ways.



To me this life came as a good time. That I was encouraged to eat

treacle in preference to butter seemed to me admirable. Personally, I

preferred sausages for dinner; and a supper of fried fish and

potatoes, brought in stealthily in a carpet bag, was infinitely more

enjoyable than the set meal where nothing was of interest till one

came to the dessert. What fun there was about it all! The cleaning

of the doorstep by night, when from the ill-lit street a gentleman

with a piece of sacking round his legs might very well pass for a

somewhat tall charwoman. I would keep watch at the gate to give

warning should any one looking like a possible late caller turn the

corner of the street, coming back now and then in answer to a low

whistle to help my father grope about in the dark for the hearthstone;

he was always mislaying the hearthstone. How much better, helping to

clean the knives or running errands than wasting all one's morning

dwelling upon the shocking irregularity of certain classes of French

verbs; or making useless calculations as to how long X, walking four

and a quarter miles an hour, would be overtaking Y, whose powers were

limited to three and a half, but who had started two and three quarter

hours sooner; the whole argument being reduced to sheer pedantry by

reason of no information being afforded to the student concerning the

respective thirstiness of X and Y.



Even my father and mother were able to take it lightly with plenty of

laughter and no groaning that I ever heard. For over all lay the

morning light of hope, and what prisoner, escaping from his dungeon,

ever stayed to think of his torn hands and knees when beyond the

distant opening he could see the sunlight glinting through the

brambles?



"I had no idea," said my mother, "there was so much to do in a house.

In future I shall arrange for the servants to have regular hours, and

a little time to themselves, for rest. Don't you think it right,

Luke?"



"Quite right," replied my father; "and I'll tell you another thing

we'll do. I shall insist on the landlord's putting a marble doorstep

to the next house we take; you pass a sponge over marble and it is

always clean."



"Or tesselated," suggested my mother.



"Or tesselated," agreed my father; "but marble is more uncommon."



Only once, can I recall a cloud. That was one Sunday when my mother,

speaking across the table in the middle of dinner, said to my father,

"We might save the rest of that stew, Luke; there's an omelette

coming."



My father laid down the spoon. "An omelette!"



"Yes," said my mother. "I thought I would like to try again."



My father stepped into the back kitchen--we dined in the kitchen, as a

rule, it saved much carriage--returning with the wood chopper.



"What ever are you going to do, Luke, with the chopper?" said my

mother.



"Divide the omelette," replied my father.



My mother began to cry.



"Why, Maggie--!" said my father.



"I know the other one was leathery," said my mother, "but it was the

fault of the oven, you know it was, Luke."



"My dear," said my father, "I only meant it as a joke."



"I don't like that sort of joke," said my mother; "it isn't nice of

you, Luke."



I don't think, to be candid, my mother liked much any joke that was

against herself. Indeed, when I come to think of it, I have never met

a woman who did, nor man, either.



There had soon grown up a comradeship between my father and myself for

he was the youngest thing I had met with as yet. Sometimes my mother

seemed very young, and later I met boys and girls nearer to my own age

in years; but they grew, while my father remained always the same.

The hair about his temples was turning grey, and when you looked close

you saw many crow's feet and lines, especially about the mouth. But

his eyes were the eyes of a boy, his laugh the laugh of a boy, and his

heart the heart of a boy. So we were very close to each other.



In a narrow strip of ground we called our garden we would play a

cricket of our own, encompassed about by many novel rules, rendered

necessary by the locality. For instance, all hitting to leg was

forbidden, as tending to endanger neighbouring windows, while hitting

to off was likewise not to be encouraged, as causing a temporary

adjournment of the game, while batter and bowler went through the

house and out into the street to recover the ball from some predatory

crowd of urchins to whom it had evidently appeared as a gift direct

from Heaven. Sometimes rising very early we would walk across the

marshes to bathe in a small creek that led down to the river, but this

was muddy work, necessitating much washing of legs on the return home.

And on rare days we would, taking the train to Hackney and walking to

the bridge, row up the river Lea, perhaps as far as Ponder's End.



But these sports being hedged around with difficulties, more commonly

for recreation we would take long walks. There were pleasant nooks

even in the neighbourhood of Plaistow marshes in those days. Here and

there a graceful elm still clung to the troubled soil. Surrounded on

all sides by hideousness, picturesque inns still remained hidden

within green walls where, if you were careful not to pry too

curiously, you might sit and sip your glass of beer beneath the oak

and dream yourself where reeking chimneys and mean streets were not.

During such walks my father would talk to me as he would talk to my

mother, telling me all his wild, hopeful plans, discussing with me how

I was to lodge at Oxford, to what particular branches of study and of

sport I was to give my preference, speaking always with such catching

confidence that I came to regard my sojourn in this brick and mortar

prison as only a question of months.



One day, talking of this future, and laughing as we walked briskly.

through the shrill streets, I told him the words my mother had

said--long ago, as it seemed to me, for life is as a stone rolling

down-hill, and moves but slowly at first; she and I sitting on the

moss at the foot of old "Jacob's Folly"--that he was our Prince

fighting to deliver us from the grim castle called "Hard Times,"

guarded by the dragon Poverty.



My father laughed and his boyish face flushed with pleasure.



"And she was right, Paul," he whispered, pressing my small hand in

his--it was necessary to whisper, for the street where we were was

very crowded, but I knew that he wanted to shout. "I will fight him

and I will slay him." My father made passes in the air with his

walking-stick, and it was evident from the way they drew aside that

the people round about fancied he was mad. "I will batter down the

iron gates and she shall be free. I will, God help me, I will."



The gallant gentleman! How long and how bravely he fought! But in

the end it was the Dragon triumphed, the Knight that lay upon the

ground, his great heart still. I have read how, with the sword of

Honest Industry, one may always conquer this grim Dragon. But such

was in foolish books. In truth, only with the sword of Chicanery and

the stout buckler of Unscrupulousness shall you be certain of victory

over him. If you care not to use these, pray to your Gods, and take

what comes with a stout heart.