None Other Gods Part 52

"I don't care. I can't, and I won't."

Frank cast an eye at the door, beyond which dozed the Major in the chair before the fire.

"Well, what d'you want?"

"I want another dress, and ... and lots of things."

Frank stared at her resignedly.

"How much will it all come to?"

"I don't know. Two pounds--two pounds ten."

"Let's see: to-day's the twentieth. We must get you back before Christmas. If I let you have it to-morrow, will it do?--to-morrow night?"

She nodded. A sound came from beyond the door, and she fled.

I am not sure about the details of the manner in which Frank got the two pounds ten, but I know he got it, and without taking charity from a soul. I know that he managed somehow to draw his week's money two days before pay-day, and for the rest, I suspect the p.a.w.nshop. What is quite certain is that when his friends were able to take stock of his belongings a little later, the list of them was as follows:

One jacket, one s.h.i.+rt, one m.u.f.fler, a pair of trousers, a pair of socks, a pair of boots, one cap, one tooth-brush, and a rosary. There was absolutely nothing else. Even his razor was gone.

Things, therefore, were pretty bad with him on the morning of the twenty-second of December. I imagine that he still possessed a few pence, but out of this few pence he had to pay for his own and Gertie's journey to Chiswick, as well as keep himself alive for another week. At least, so he must have thought.

It must have been somewhere in Kensington High Street that he first had a hint of a possibility of food to be obtained free, for, although I find it impossible to follow all his movements during these days, it is quite certain that he partook of the hospitality of the Carmelite Fathers on this morning. He mentions it, with pleasure, in his diary.

It is a very curious and medieval sight--this feeding of the poor in the little deep pa.s.sage that runs along the outside of the cloister of the monastery in Church Street. The pa.s.sage is approached by a door at the back of the house, opening upon the lane behind, and at a certain hour on each morning of the year is thronged from end to end with the most astonis.h.i.+ng and deplorable collection of human beings to be seen in London. They are of all ages and sizes, from seventeen to seventy, and the one thing common to them all is extreme shabbiness and poverty.

A door opens at a given moment; the crowd surges a little towards a black-bearded man in a brown frock, with an ap.r.o.n over it, and five minutes later a deep silence, broken only by the sound of supping and swallowing, falls upon the crowd. There they stand, with the roar of London sounding overhead, the hooting of cars, the noise of innumerable feet, and the rain--at least, on this morning--falling dismally down the long well-like s.p.a.ce. And here stand between two and three hundred men, pinched, feeble, and yet wolfish, gulping down hot soup and bread, looking something like a herd of ragged prisoners pent in between the high walls.

Here, then, Frank stood in the midst of them, gulping his soup. His van and horses, strictly against orders, remained in Church Street, under the care of a pa.s.ser-by, whom Frank seems to have asked, quite openly, to do it for him for G.o.d's sake.

It is a dreary little scene in which to picture him, and yet, to myself, it is rather pleasant, too. I like to think of him, now for the second time within a few weeks, and all within the first six months of his Catholic life, depending upon his Church for the needs of the body as well as for the needs of the soul. There was nothing whatever to distinguish him from the rest; he, too, had now something of that lean look that is such a characteristic of that crowd, and his dress, too, was entirely suitable to his company. He spoke with none of his hosts; he took the basin in silence and gave it back in silence; then he wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and went out comforted.

CHAPTER V

(I)

d.i.c.k Guiseley sat over breakfast in his rooms off Oxford Street, entirely engrossed in a local Yorks.h.i.+re paper two days old.

His rooms were very characteristic of himself. They were five in number--a dining-room, two bedrooms, and two sitting-rooms divided by curtains, as well as a little entrance-hall that opened on to the landing, close beside the lift that served all the flats. They were furnished in a peculiarly restrained style--so restrained, in fact, that it was almost impossible to remember what was in them. One was just conscious of a sense of extreme comfort and convenience. There was nothing in particular that arrested the attention or caught the eye, except here and there a s.p.a.ce or a patch of wall about which d.i.c.k had not yet made up his mind. He had been in them two years, indeed, but he had not nearly finished furnis.h.i.+ng. From time to time a new piece of furniture appeared, or a new picture--always exceedingly good of its kind, and even conspicuous. Yet, somehow or other, so excellent was his taste, as soon as the thing was in place its conspicuousness (so to speak) vanished amidst the protective coloring, and it looked as if it had been there for ever. The colors were chosen with the same superfine skill: singly they were brilliant, or at least remarkable (the ceilings, for instance, were of a rich b.u.t.tercup yellow); collectively they were subdued and unnoticeable. And I suppose this is exactly what rooms ought to be.

The breakfast-table at which he sat was a good instance of his taste.

The silver-plate on it was really remarkable. There was a delightful Caroline tankard in the middle, placed there for the sheer pleasure of looking at it; there was a large silver cow with a lid in its back; there were four rat-tail spoons; the china was an extremely cheap Venetian crockery of brilliant designs and thick make. The coffee-pot and milk-pot were early Georgian, with very peculiar marks; but these vessels were at present hidden under the folded newspaper. There were four chrysanthemums in four several vases of an exceptional kind of gla.s.s. It sounds startling, I know, but the effect was not startling, though I cannot imagine why not. Here again one was just conscious of freshness and suitability and comfort.

But d.i.c.k was taking no pleasure in it all this morning. He was feeling almost physically sick, and the little spirit-heated silver dish of kidneys on his Queen Anne sideboard was undisturbed. He had cut off the top of an egg which was now rapidly cooling, and a milky surface resembling thin ice was forming on the contents of his coffee-cup. And meanwhile he read.

The column he was reading described the wedding of his uncle with Miss Jenny Launton, and journalese surpa.s.sed itself. There was a great deal about the fine old English appearance of the bridegroom, who, it appeared, had been married in a black frock-coat and gray trousers, with white spats, and who had worn a chrysanthemum in his b.u.t.ton-hole (d.i.c.k cast an almost venomous glance upon the lovely blossom just beside the paper), and the beautiful youthful dignity of the bride, "so popular among the humble denizens of the country-side." The bride's father, it seemed, had officiated at the wedding in the "st.u.r.dy old church," and had been greatly affected--a.s.sisted by the Rev. Matthieson. The wedding, it seemed, had been unusually quiet, and had been celebrated by special license: few of the family had been present, "owing," said the discreet reporter, "to the express wish of the bridegroom." (d.i.c.k reflected sardonically upon his own convenient attack of influenza from which he was now completely recovered.) Then there was a great deal more about the ancient home of the Guiseleys, and the aristocratic appearance of Viscount Merefield, the young and popular heir to the earldom, who, it appeared, had a.s.sisted at the wedding in another black frock-coat.

General Mainwaring had acted as best man. Finally, there was a short description of the presents of the bridegroom to the bride, which included a set of amethysts, etc....

d.i.c.k read it all through to the luxuriant end, down to the peals of the bells and the rejoicings in the evening. He ate several pieces of dry toast while he read, crumbling them quickly with his left hand, and when he had finished, drank his coffee straight off at one draught. Then he got up, still with the paper, sat down in the easy-chair nearest to the fire and read the whole thing through once more. Then he pushed the paper off his knee and leaned back.

It would need a complete psychological treatise to a.n.a.lyze properly all the emotions he had recently gone through--emotions which had been, so to say, developed and "fixed" by the newspaper column he had just read.

He was a man who was accustomed to pride himself secretly upon the speed with which he faced each new turn of fortune, and the correctness of the att.i.tude he a.s.sumed. Perhaps it would be fair to say that the Artistic Stoic was the ideal towards which he strove. But, somehow, those emotions would not sort themselves. There they all were--fury, indignation, contempt, wounded pride, resignation, pity--there were no more to be added or subtracted; each had its place and its object, yet they would not coalesce. Now fury against his uncle, now pity for himself, now a poisonous kind of contempt of Jenny. Or, again, a primitive kind of longing for Jenny, a disregard of his uncle, an abas.e.m.e.nt of himself. The emotions whirled and twisted, and he sat quite still, with his eyes closed, watching them.

But there was one more emotion which had made its appearance entirely unexpectedly as soon as he had heard the news, that now, greatly to his surprise, was beginning to take a considerable place amongst the rest--and this was an extraordinarily warm sense of affection towards Frank--of all people. It was composed partly of compa.s.sion, and partly of an inexplicable sort of respect for which he could perceive no reason. It was curious, he thought later, why this one figure should have pushed its way to the front just now, when his uncle and Jenny and, secondarily, that Rector ("so visibly affected by the ceremony") should have occupied all the field. Frank had never meant very much to d.i.c.k; he had stood for the undignified and the boyish in the midst of those other stately elements of which Merefield, and, indeed, all truly admirable life, was composed.

Yet now this figure stood out before him with startling distinctness.

First there was the fact that both Frank and himself had suffered cruelly at the hands of the same woman, though Frank incomparably the more cruelly of the two. d.i.c.k had the honesty to confess that Jenny had at least never actually broken faith with himself; but he had also the perspicuity to see that it came to very nearly the same thing. He knew with the kind of cert.i.tude that neither needs nor appeals to evidence that Jenny would certainly have accepted him if it had not been that Lord Talgarth had already dawned on her horizon, and that she put him off for a while simply to see whether this elderly sun would rise yet higher in the heavens. It was the same consideration, no doubt, that had caused her to throw Frank over a month or two earlier. A Lord Talgarth in the bush was worth two cadets in the hand. That was where her sensibleness had come in, and certainly it had served her well.

It was this community of injury, then, that primarily drew d.i.c.k's attention to Frank; and, when once it lead been so drawn, it lingered on other points in his personality. Artistic Stoicism is a very satisfying ideal so long as things go tolerably well. It affords an excellent protection against such misfortunes as those of not being appreciated or of losing money or just missing a big position--against all such ills as affect bodily or mental conveniences. But when the heart is touched, Artistic Stoicism peels off like rusted armour. d.i.c.k had seriously began to consider, during the last few days, whether the exact opposite of Artistic Stoicism (let us call it Natural Impulsiveness) is not almost as good an equipment. He began to see something admirable in Frank's att.i.tude to life, and the more he regarded it the more admirable it seemed.

Frank, therefore, had begun to wear to him the appearance of something really moving and pathetic. He had had a communication or two from Jack Kirkby that had given him a glimpse of what Frank was going through, and his own extremely artificial self was beginning to be affected by it.

He looked round his room now, once or twice, wondering whether it was all worth while. He had put his whole soul into these rooms--there was that Jacobean press with the grotesque heads--ah! how long he had agonized over that in the shop in the King's Road, Chelsea, wondering whether or not it would do just what he wanted, in that s.p.a.ce between the two doors. There was that small statue of a Tudor lady in a square head-dress that he had bought in Oxford: he had occupied at least a week in deciding exactly from what point she was to smile on him; there was the new curtain dividing the two rooms: he had had half a dozen patterns, gradually eliminated down to two, lying over his sofa-back for ten days before he could make up his mind. (How lovely it looked, by the way, just now, with that patch of mellow London sunlight lying across the folds!)

But was it all worth it?... He argued the point with himself, almost pa.s.sively, stroking his brown beard meditatively; but the fact that he could argue it at all showed that the foundations of his philosophy were shaken.

Well, then ... Frank ... What about him? Where was he?

(II)

About eleven o'clock a key turned in his outer door and a very smart-looking page-boy came through, after tapping, with a telegram on a salver.

d.i.c.k was writing to Hamilton's, in Berners Street, about a question of gray mats for the spare bedroom, and he took the telegram and tore open the envelope with a preoccupied air. Then he uttered a small exclamation.

"Any answer, sir?"

"No. Yes.... Wait a second."

He took a telegraph-form with almost indecent haste, addressed it to John Kirkby, Barham, Yorks, and wrote below:

"_Certainly; will expect you dinner and sleep_.--RICHARD GUISELEY."