Poor Hendy, pale and trembling, smeared across the face with pudding and staring at the decanter on the table without seeing it, started at that amazing string of rhetoric. Surely—surely the idiom was somehow familiar.
Mr. Baring Spencer came in at the door, and for the first time their eyes met in full light. Both were to some extent disguised in pudding, but Hendy knew his man at once. “Why,” he gasped, “Fitz—Fitz-Howard.”
“Eh?” grunted the other sharply. “What’s that?” for his own recollection was slower. But the name—
Hendy took a long breath, wiped the back of his hand across his face and sat down uninvited. “My name’s Hendy,” he said; “Joseph Hendy, juveniles, Trevor Fitz-Howard’s company, Leeds; Trevor Fitz-Howard’s company, Bristol. You’ve got your pudding back; give me my boots.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“All right, all right,” Hendy went on, now clear in mind and dangerous. “P’raps you might bluff it off with one stone broke busker, but there’s Miss Beaumont here, too; same company. You owe her a week or two salary, I think. An’ there’s Norton—Teddy Norton. Remember him? Walking gentleman. Trevor Fitz-Howard’s company, Leeds.”
Mr. Baring Spencer sat down. “Well?” he said, after a pause.
“Well,” Hendy went on slowly, “you seem to be doing pretty well now. P’raps you can afford to pay off those arrears.”
“Oh,” answered the other laconically, and there was another pause. “But suppose I won’t? Suppose I just call the Police and put you in jail? For, of course, I know nothing of all this nonsense you talk of.”
“Very well,” Hendy replied, rising wearily, “call ’em, but I’m afraid you’ll get county courted over those salaries. An’ when it begins—Lor’, when will it stop?”
This was quite true. For if all the unliquidated debts incurred in Mr. Trevor Fitz-Howard’s theatrical career were to be called up at once by creditors all over the country Mr. Baring Spencer would be squeezed very tight, indeed. And once the two names were identified the rush would begin. But there was another consideration. Mr. Baring Spencer was at a critical stage in his present operations, but his name just now stood good for anything; whereas, Mr. Trevor Fitz-Howard was a notorious swindler. So anything that might reveal the fact that the two names stood for one financial operator would mean a crash indeed. So Mr. Baring Spencer, like a man of business, went to the root of the matter straightway.
“Look here,” he said. “We’ll fool about no longer. How much do you want?”
Hendy sat down again.
“For me,” he said, “say four weeks at thirty bob, and say nothing about the boots. Miss Beaumont four weeks at thirty bob, too, an’ Teddy Norton a fortnight at the same. That’s fifteen quid.”
The sum seemed enormous in these lean days, but he was dealing with a capitalist and the estimate was honest enough. “An’ then,” he went on, “you might give poor old Leatherby a lift on the road—”
“Never mind all that,” the other said, unlocking a drawer. “You don’t expect to make me believe you’re interested in all those people, do you? Or that you’d give them a cent? I ain’t a baby; no more are you. See here.” He took a small parcel of notes and counted, “One, two, three, four, five—a pony; £25. Take it and clear out, and keep your mouth shut. As for getting the show on the road, do it anyhow you please and as soon as you like. Only mind”—and he raised his finger—“if any of those others get on the scent and come here I shall tell them you’ve got their money. Now you can go as soon as you like.”
* * * *
But, indeed, Mr. Baring Spencer was just a trifle too clever. He was much too clever, in fact, to suppose that Hendy—a man just caught stealing pudding—would not part with any of that money unless he were obliged. He assumed, of course, that Hendy would keep the money to himself, say nothing of the encounter, and, moreover, use every exertion to get the show out of the neighborhood, because of the threat to set the others after a share of the notes if he, Spencer, were troubled by them. Indeed, he judged it a very cunning shift to shut Hendy’s mouth and clear away the players from the town at one stroke. He was never safe from recognition among players.
But he miscalculated, for Leatherby’s company signalized Christmas by two dinners at the Crown, one at midday and one at 7, and Leatherby gave the health of Baring Spencer, founder of the feast, with great fervor and proclaimed him an ornament to the theatrical profession, which he had an lately left, for Hendy had made no secret of whence he had the money or of the debts it was to liquidate, and some of it he represented as a subscription toward a Leatherby benefit designed to set the show on its legs again in the next town. And the company called Mr. Baring Spencer a noble fellow and, moreover, insisted on tearing the butcher from the bosom of his family (the drover was not to be found) and making him drink Mr. Spencer’s health, too, a great many times, so that they were all mighty merry together that Christmas, and every hour was an hour of joy and feasting. And at last, to cap everything, all the male part of the company, with the butcher in the midst of them, stood in the early evening on Mr. Baring Spencer’s lawn roaring “For he’s a jolly good fellow!” at the top of their voices, to the amazement and scandal of all Crowbridge and the speechless fury of the jolly good fellow himself, till at Last he found his voice and, throwing open a window and shaking his fist, flung out such a shower of the rhetoric that Hendy so well remembered that the players went off mightily astonished.
“It is his modesty,” said Leatherby, outside, with tears of gratitude trembling in his eyes; “just his modesty. Truly he is a noble fellow!”
But the story spread about Crowbridge, and ere long it was very generally known that Mr. Baring Spencer was Mr. Trevor Fitz-Howard and that Mr. Trevor Fitz-Howard probably had half a dozen other names as well. And it was even said in the end that the thing hastened his arrest by three days. He had bought the house at Crowbridge, had managed to pay for it in worthless shares and had mortgaged it instantly for hard cash. His companies were timed to burst just after the new year, and he was laid by the heels just a day before his appointed steamer left Liverpool, a sad victim of his own excess of cunning and the misplaced gratitude of others.
.
A CHILD OF THE JAGO
A bestseller in its time, it recounts the brief life of Dicky Perrott, a child growing up in the “Old Jago”, a fictionalisation of the Old Nichol, a slum located between Shoreditch High Street and Bethnal Green Road in the East End of London.
…Woe unto the foolish prophets, that
follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing!…
Because, even because they have seduced
my people, saying, Peace; and there
was no peace; and one built up a
wall, and lo, others daubed it with untempered mortar:
Say unto them which daub it with untempered
mortar, that it shall fall:
there shall be an overflowing shower;
and ye, O great hailstones, shall fall;
and a stormy wind shall rend it.
Lo, when the wall is fallen, shall it not
be said unto you, Where is the daubing
wherewith ye have daubed it?—
Ezekiel xiii. 3…10 12.
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
I am glad to take this, the first available opportunity, to acknowledge the kindness with which A Child of the Jago has been received: both by the reading public, from which I have received many gratifying assurances that what I have tried to say has not altogether failed of its effect: and by the reviewers, the most of whom have written in very indulgent terms.
I think indeed, that I am the more gratified by the fact that this reception has not been unanimous: because an outcry and an opposition, even from an unimportant minority, are proofs that I have succeeded in saying, however imperfectly, something that was
worth being said. Under the conditions of life as we know it there is no truth worth telling that will not interfere with some hearer’s comfort. Various objections have been made to A Child of the Jago, and many of them had already been made to Tales of Mean Streets. And it has been the way of the objectors as well as the way of many among the kindest of my critics, to call me a ‘realist.’ The word has been used sometimes, it would seem, in praise; sometimes in mere indifference as one uses a phrase of convenient description; sometimes by way of an irremediable reproach. It is natural, then, not merely that I should wish to examine certain among the objections made to my work, but that I should feel some interest in the definition and description of a realist. A matter never made clear to me.
Now it is a fact that I have never called myself a ‘realist,’ and I have never put forth any work as ‘realism.’ I decline the labels of the schoolmen and the sophisters: being a simple writer of tales, who takes whatever means lie to his hand to present life as he sees it; who insists on no process; and who refuses to be bound by any formula or prescription prepared by the cataloguers and the pigeon-holers of literature.
So it happens that when those who use the word ‘realist’ use it with no unanimity of intent and with a loose, inapprehensive application, it is not easy for me, who repudiate it altogether, to make a guess at its meaning. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the man who is called a ‘realist’ is one who, seeing things with his own eyes, discards the conventions of the schools, and presents his matter in individual terms of art. For awhile the schoolmen abuse him as a realist; and in twenty years’ time, if his work have life in it, he becomes a classic. Constable was called a realist; so was Corot. Who calls these painters realists now? The history of Japanese art affords a continuous illustration. From the day when Iwasa Matahei impudently arose and dared to take his subjects from the daily life of the people, to the day when Hiroshigé, casting away the last rag of propriety, adventurously drew a cast shadow, in flat defiance of all the canons of Tosa and Kano—in all this time, and through all the crowded history of the School of Ukioyé, no artist bringing something of his own to his art but was damned for a realist. Even the classic Harunobu did not escape. Look now at the work of these men, and the label seems grotesque enough. So it goes through the making of all art. A man with the courage of his own vision interprets what he sees in fresh terms, and gives to things a new reality and an immediate presence. The schoolmen peer with dulled eyes from amid the heap of precedents and prescriptions about them, and, distracted by seeing a thing sanctioned neither by precedent nor by prescription, dub the man realist, and rail against him for that his work fits none of their pigeon-holes. And from without the schools many cry out and complain: for truth is strong meat, and the weakling stomach turns against it, except in minim doses smothered in treacle. Thus we hear the feeble plea that the function of imagination is the distortion of fact: the piteous demand that the artist should be shut up in a flower-garden, and forbidden to peep through the hedge into the world. And they who know nothing of beauty, who are innately incapable of comprehending it, mistake it for mere prettiness, and call aloud for comfits; and among them that cannot understand, such definitions of the aims of art are bandied, as mean, if they mean anything, that art finds its most perfect expression in pink lollipops and gilt boxes. But in the end the truth prevails, if it be well set forth; and the schoolmen, groaning in their infinite labour, wearily write another prescription, admit another precedent, and make another pigeon-hole.
I have been asked, in print, if I think that there is no phase of life which the artist may not touch. Most certainly I think this. More, I know it. It is the artist’s privilege to seek his material where he pleases, and it is no man’s privilege to say him nay. If the community have left horrible places and horrible lives before his eyes, then the fault is the community’s; and to picture these places and these lives becomes not merely his privilege, but his duty. It was my fate to encounter a place in Shoreditch, where children were born and reared in circumstances which gave them no reasonable chance of living decent lives: where they were born fore-damned to a criminal or semi-criminal career. It was my experience to learn the ways of this place, to know its inhabitants, to talk with them, eat, drink, and work with them. For the existence of this place, and for the evils it engendered, the community was, and is, responsible; so that every member of the community was, and is, responsible in his degree. If I had been a rich man I might have attempted to discharge my peculiar responsibility in one way; if I had been a statesman I might have tried another. Being neither of these things, but a mere writer of fiction, I sought to do my duty by writing a tale wherein I hoped to bring the conditions of this place within the apprehension of others. There are those who say that I should have turned away my eyes and passed by on the other side: on the very respectable precedent of the priest and the Levite in the parable.
Now, when the tale was written and published it was found, as I have said, to cause discomfort to some persons. It is needless to say more of the schoolmen. Needless, too, to say much of the merely genteel: who were shocked to read of low creatures, as Kiddo Cook and Pigeony Poll, and to find my pages nowhere illuminated by a marquis. Of such are they who delight to read of two men in velvet and feathers perforating each other’s stomachs with swords; while Josh Perrott and Billy Leary, punching each other’s heads, present a scene too sickening and brutal to consider without disgust. And it was in defiance of the maunderings of such as these that Charles Lamb wrote much of his essay On the Genius and Character of Hogarth. But chiefly this book of mine disturbed those who had done nothing, and preferred to do nothing, by way of discharging their responsibility toward the Jago and the people in it. The consciousness of duty neglected is discomforting, and personal comfort is the god of their kind. They firmly believe it to be the sole function of art to minister to their personal comfort—as upholstery does. They find it comfortable to shirk consideration of the fate of the Jago children, to shut their eyes to it, to say that all is well and the whole world virtuous and happy. And this mental attitude they nickname optimism, and vaunt it—exult in it as a quality. So that they cry out at the suggestion that it is no more than a selfish vice; and finding truth where they had looked for the materials of another debauch of self-delusion, they moan aloud: they protest, and they demand as their sacred right that the bitter cup be taken from before them. They have moaned and protested at A Child of the Jago, and, craven and bewildered, any protest seemed good enough to them. And herein they have not wanted for allies among them that sit in committee-rooms, and tinker. For your professed philanthropist, following his own spirit, and seeing nothing, honestly resents the demonstration that his tinkering profits little. There is a story current in the East End of London, of a distracted lady who, being assailed with a request for the loan of a saucepan, defended herself in these words:—‘Tell yer mother I can’t lend ’er the saucepan, consekince o’ ’avin’ lent it to Mrs Brown, besides which I’m a-usin’ of it meself, an’ moreover it’s gone to be mended, an’ what’s more I ain’t got one.’ In a like spirit of lavish objection it has been proclaimed in a breath that I transgress:—because (1) I should not have written of the Jago in all the nakedness of truth; (2) my description is not in the least like; (3) moreover, it is exaggerated; (4) though it may be true, it is quite unnecessary, because the Jago was already quite familiar, and everybody knew all about it; (5) the Jago houses have been pulled down; and (6) there never was any such place as the Jago at all.
To objections thus handsomely variegated it is not easy to reply with the tripping brevity wherewith they may be stated; and truly it is little reply that they call for, except, perhaps, in so far as they may be taken to impugn the sincerity of my work and the accuracy of my picture. A few of the objectors have caught up enough of their wits to strive after a war in my own country. They take hold of my technical method, and accuse me of lack of ‘sympathy’; they claim that if I write of the Jago I shou
ld do so ‘even weeping.’ Now, my technical method is my own, and is deliberately designed to achieve a certain result, as is the method of every man—painter, poet, sculptor, or novelist—who is not the slave and the plaything of his material. My tale is the tale of my characters, and I have learned better than to thrust myself and my emotions between them and my reader. The cant of the charge stares all too plainly from the face of it. It is not that these good people wish me to write ‘even weeping’: for how do they know whether I weep or not? No: their wish is, not that I shall weep, but that I shall weep obscenely in the public gaze. In other words, that I shall do their weeping for them, as a sort of emotional bedesman: that I shall make public parade of sympathy in their behalf, so that they may keep their own sympathy for themselves, and win comfort from the belief that they are eased of their just responsibility by vicarious snivelling.
But the protest, that my picture of the Jago is untrue, is another thing. For the most part it has found very vague expression, but there are instances of rash excursion into definiteness. Certain passages have been denoted as exaggerations—as impossibilities. Now, I must confess that, foreseeing such adventurous indiscretions, I had, for my own diversion, set A Child of the Jago with traps. For certain years I have lived in the East End of London, and have been, not an occasional visitor, but a familiar and equal friend in the house of the East-Ender in all his degrees; for, though the steps between be smaller, there are more social degrees in the East End than ever in the West. In this experience I have seen and I have heard things that persons sitting in committee-rooms would call diabolical fable; nevertheless, I have seen them, and heard them. But it was none of my design to write of extreme instances: typical facts were all I wanted; these, I knew, would be met—or shirked—with incredulity; so that, whenever I saw reason to anticipate a charge of exaggeration—as for instance, in the matter of faction fighting—I made my typical incident the cold transcript of a simple fact, an ordinary, easy-going fact, a fact notorious in the neighbourhood, and capable of any amount of reasonable proof. If I touched my fact at all, it was to subdue it; that and no more. The traps worked well. Not one definite charge of exaggeration has been flung but it has been aimed at one of the normal facts I had provided as a target: not one. Sometimes the effect has had a humour of its own; as when a critic in a literary journal, beginning by selecting two of my norms as instances of ‘palpable exaggeration,’ went on to assure me that there was no need to describe such life as the life in the Jago, because it was already perfectly familiar to everybody.
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