“Classy? You? Rats!”
“There you are— ‘rats’ is just what you’d say. You’ve got no polite savvy yerself, so you bloomin’ well can’t see mine. That’s your ignorance.”
BUSKERS AT BAY
Truly it seemed like to be what is called an old-fashioned Christmas in the matter of cold and snow. The weather had cheated all observers till as late as three days before the festival. Autumn had lingered long, ways weir dank, leaves still brown about boughs, and what little chill hung in the air was all pointless and in the main a mere effect of damp. But a night had changed all, and what had begun as drizzle turned to sleet and that to snow. All that day it fell, and toward evening, prevailing over the mire, it whitened the roads at last, even as it had already whitened fields and hedges and the housetops of the little town of Crowbridge. So that morning, the morning before Christmas, broke upon a muffled whiteness and, though the fall had ceased, the sky had an even grayness that promised another.
Of the townsfolk of Crowbridge the more robust looked out of window and called it reasonable, and others who had grumbled a week ago because of the mugginess, now that they had what they asked for, grumbled again. But there were visitors long past grumbling at anything, though the change hit them sorely. At the end of the town, nearest the railway station, on a piece of common ground given to fairs and markets, Leatherby’s Royal Victoria theatre stood forlorn and solitary. It was a dismal construction of canvas and wood, called an outdoor fit up, and it had stood almost unregarded for a week. Never had Leatherby’s so little encouragement to stay, never so grievous a lack of means to get away. Business had been bad, and worse than bad, even for a strolling company. And now —
The whole concern was fallen on evil times, and its early welfare was gone with its early paint. All show of salaries had been dropped months ago and equal division made of what poor sums might remain after expenses. But now it seemed that an end had come to all things. Once upon a time the show had been wont to travel by rail and the buskers to take cheap lodgings: now it moved as it might and sheltered the company itself. It had crawled into Crowbridge drawn by two angular horses, hired in the last town, but there seemed no possibility of its ever crawling out unless the company harnessed themselves and dragged it. The load of one van stood more or less erect, with a groan and a flap at each stir of wind, and was the theatre; in the other Leatherby himself and his wife had taken to lodge, with their daughter of seventeen, Lou, called in print in the days when it ran to bills, Miss Sibylla de Vere.
It was a horrible place, this Crowbridge: nobody would trust, nobody would support the drama. As for trust, a gallant effort had been made in the beginning, when Teddy Norton, general utility — all the company were general utility — was endued in the best mixture of clothes the show could get together and sent forth to pledge the credit of the concern with butcher and baker. He did it all with an air, poor fellow — somewhat the air of a private secretary conferring a royal appointment in person, and he was careful to stipulate for the punctual presentation of bills next Saturday. But the Crowbridge shopkeepers were a stony-hearted, even a stony-faced, lot, and they wanted money down and made no bones of saying so, without circumlocution. And as for the drama, they would have none of it. It would seem, indeed, that most of them judged it sinful, for Crowbridge was a most dull and proper place, and the money it sent to Leatherby’s doors scarce paid for lamp oil.
“Patronage,” too, failed utterly, and every cover was drawn blank. Chiefly and first, Leatherby attacked Baring Spencer, Esq., and attacked him again and again. Baring Spencer. Esq., would neither send his servants nor support a “special performance” nor presently permit Leatherby standing room on his doorstep. It seemed that something must be got out of Baring Spencer, Esq., if only he were pestered enough, for he was a man of vast projects in money and companies, and he was here at Crowbridge, where he had taken a furnished house for a few months, with schemes in bicycle factories that would make the place rich. Indeed, it was said that he was buying the house outright and would some day go to Parliament for the county. The local paper was full of Baring Spencer, Esq., his undertakings and his designs for the nourishment and glory of Crowbridge. He “patronized” everything, and his name was everywhere, so that it was doubly maddening to find him resolute not to patronize the drama as represented by Leatherby’s. There was his house, almost in sight of the “pitch,” and his fame and his glory pervaded Crow-bridge. It would seem that every applicant might tap him, if not for money, for his name, except Leatherby. Him he would not even see.
Last night had been bad indeed at the show. They had tried a wonderful version of “The Courier of Lyons,” slashed and battered out of all recognition to fit the five male and three female members of the company and the only two scenes available, and the “house” (2s. 4d. and a few passed in loafers) had merely sniggered and rattled its feet. To-morrow would be Christmas and unless something occurred desperately like a miracle the festival must be celebrated by a total fast. What could be done? A desperate suggestion of carol singing had bean considered and abandoned early. There were already two parties each night, one from the church and one from the chapel, each with its harmonium and each audible to the other at intervals even from opposite ends of the town. And it was plain, as Sam Davis (general utility) observed, that outside competition was useless when the regular crowd worked for nix.
Mrs. Leatherby, her daughter and Mrs. Hendy sat about a little coke fire behind the stage mending and darning, a task that grew day by day — grew in difficulty as well as magnitude. The girl was haggard an sharp beyond her years, and already her complexion was rough and unwholesome because of the nightly paint: perhaps it was worse today from overnight weeping. Even her mother, staunch through a hundred ups and downs, made but a poor face of it, try as she might, and the widening bulk that had long led her, with rare frankness, to abandon juvenile parts, was now merely recorded by a slackness of clothes. As for Mrs. Hendy, who was also Miss Beaumont, leading lady, she almost wept as she sewed. She lamented aloud, in season and out, the fate that had brought her to such a pass, for she would have it known that she, above all the rest, had known better things and had played Pauline to the great Kedgerton’s Claude Melnotte at Liverpool. She was at great pains to impress these things on anybody who would listen, and she made them a ghastly affliction to her husband, into whose misfortunes she had married, and little thanks she got for it, as she was insistent to remind him.
For his part it was his habit to receive her reproaches sometimes with querulous retort, but mostly with mild deprecation, and to make his escape, when it was possible, in the direction of the nearest liquid refreshment he was aware of.
So that now be was one of the first of the men, furtive and ill clad, to sneak across toward the bar of the Crown. Not because he or they had money to spend there, but, if truth must be confessed, because they had fallen low, and very low — so low that not a man of them but was glad to take a drink at the invitation of any free handed bar lounger who might offer it.
A drover was in the bar and a butcher — a butcher who had declined the honor of Leatherby’s custom as offered by Teddy Norton. Norton and Hendy pushed open the door and stared about the bar with a poor pretence of looking for some of the others — whom they had left at the show. They stared as long as possible, and were making a reluctant show of withdrawal when the butcher, with a wink and a grin at the drover, sang out “Come along — come along in! There ain’t no charge for comin’ in!”
They pushed the door wider, mumbling something about “looking for a friend,” with expectant eyes.
“Ah, your friend’s bin sailed out unexpected to his gran’mother’s funeral. ‘Ave a drink?”
They let the door swing to and came sheepishly in. The drinks were ordered and brought, and then the butcher, pulling out a handful of silver, said abstractedly, with another wink at the drover, “Let’s see: we toss odd man out for these, don’t we?”
The drover gr
inned, and Teddy Norton made a ghastly show of feeling about his pockets for money. But Hendy only flushed and paled and frowned at the door. He had his feelings yet.
The silence endured for three seconds, and then the butcher flung the money on the counter, with a coarse laugh. “All right,” he said: “my show.” And presently they were all talkative together for, after all, there were the drinks, and the poor players had learned not to be too thin skinned.
Sam Davis and Billy Mack found their way across soon, and the drover was good for another round of drinks on their entrance.
“Trade in your line doesn’t seem fust rate,” said the butcher, happy in many Christmas orders. “Ain’t overcrowded, are you?”
The buskers looked at one another and shook their heads. There could be no concealment. “Beastly business,” Davis answered—”’orrid!”
“Not a very payin’ game, eh?” said the drover.
“Well,” Teddy Norton replied, “I’d be pretty well off if I had all that’s owin’ me, anyhow.”
“Ah, but then suppose you had to pay all you owe?” rejoined the butcher and guffawed joyously at his own wit.
“Owing?” cried Hendy, with excitement. “Why, the money in salaries I haven’t had ‘ud start a bank!”
“Yus — no doubt,” said the butcher, and laughed again. “What I ain’t got ‘ud sink a ship.”
“Let’s see,” said Davis, “you was in Trevor Fits-Howard’s crowd, wasn’t you, when it left ‘em stranded at Leeds?”
“I was that, my boy, an’ Teddy Norton here, an’ my missis — before I married her. That was the second time he put me in the cart, too,” Hendy went on, with bitter reminiscence. “He dropped a company at Bristol once after three weeks, an’ I was in that, an’ that second time at Leeds he collared a bag o’ mine to put the plunder in, with a new pair o’ boots in it!”
“I bet you’d like to have ‘em now,” observed the butcher, with a glance at the actor’s dilapidated shoes.
“I didn’t know Fitz-Howard,” ventured Davis, “but I’ve known some pretty near as hot. There was Digby, that called himself Stuart, an’ Waldegrave an’—”
So the talk went, and each poor player fell to a computation of what he had lost in shortages by reason of “bad business” and by the robberies of rascally managers, so that if debts were but assets here would sit a company of affluent persons sponging for drinks in the Crown. Scarce a town in the kingdom but one or other had been stranded in it. They counted it a successful engagement that brought first to last half the stipulated salary and, though it was held “too bad” when a manager bolted with the money bags, the thing was so common as scarce to seem worse than a piece of rather sharp practice.
Last, poor old Leatherby himself, a stout figure of a stout man worried thin, joined the group and drew another round of drinks. It was hard, very hard, to maintain the dignity proper to a proprietor and manager conscious the while that he, even he, had fallen to “press” for a drink among strangers, though in truth he did his best.
That night they played “The Ticket of Leave Man” — played it with the energy of despair. Whatever that performance might bring was as all that lay between them and the lack of a Christmas dinner, and worse lack than that, Hendy played Bob Brierly to his wife’s May Edwards. Leatherby doubled Melter Moss and Mr. Gibson, with a rush round the back and a change of coat in the office scene, played with a cottage interior. Billy Mack doubly, too — Maltby and Green Jones — and Leatherby’s daughter was Sam Willoughby and Miss St. Evremond by turns, while Mrs. Leatherby as Mrs. Willoughby, Teddy Norton as Hackshaw the detective and Davis as Dalton had only one part apiece to think about. So that on the whole the play was fairly complete and regular, save for a cut or a botch in rare places and a lack of crowds here and there. It was not a comforting play altogether for the players. Money had to be flourished recklessly in some scenes, and a basket of trotters made of rolled rags, and once Hendy had to pretend that he couldn’t eat a biscuit.
But the house — well, it was better than last might, by eighteen pence. The butcher come and brought a friend. He was not so bad a fellow after all in his own way, and he did his best to applaud for the whole house. But half the rest were boys, disciples of the local wit, a hostler from the Crown, and these made the night’s work harder. Hawkshaw was called “Lockjaw” or “Lockjaw the Defective,” and the sally drew yells of delight at every repetition. A certain frock coat that from time to time adorned a different character, in accordance with necessity, was greeted with cheerful recognition at each reappearance, and “Garn, it ain’t your turn — you’ve ‘ad it on twice!” was the indignant reproof that met Mr. Gibson in the office scene. And toward the end Leatherby (as Melter Moss) came forward with injured dignity and a large potato, which he protested that no gentleman would have thrown.
All was done that Leatherby’s could do, and all was done in vain or very near it. A few pence apiece was all the poor strollers had to see them through Christmas and to get them away from this abhorrent town. The men shared a screw of tobacco and turned in as best they might. Mrs. Hendy was near to tears as she left the stage, and she indulged in a passionate and reproachful outburst as soon as she and her husband were alone. For his part, he could but feebly protest that it wasn’t his fault.
“Nice situation this is for me,” she scolded; “and then to be told it’s not your fault!” Here she wept afresh. “Of course you put it on to me — like a man. Oh, oh, to think I ever was such a fool as to bring it on to myself!”
“But, my dear,” Hendy began, with entreaty in his voice —
“Oh, don’t talk to me!” she answered, pushing away the hand he had put on her shoulder. “To think I should come to this! And then you tell me it’s my fault!”
Hendy drew off to sulk alone. Weak characters both, their sentiment (like most sentiment) was rooted in self pity, and this, their one remaining luxury, was best concentrated when they quarrelled. The last embers of the coke fire gave the sole light, and the woman sat before them with her face upon her knees.
Suddenly a loud burst of singing startled the pair, for the sound came, as it were, out of nothing, and it was close to their ears:
“The first good joy that Mary had,
It was the joy of one.
To see the blessed Jesus Christ
When he was first her son.
When he was first her Son, Good Lord,
And happy may we be!
Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost
To all eternity!”
The carolers had come over the snow unheard and now choirboys’ voices were uplifted lustily, while the bass of a large and healthy curate went booming below them.
“The next good joy that Mary had
It was the joy of two,
To see her own Son, Jesus Christ,
Making the lame to go —
Making the lame to go, Good Lord,
And happy may we be!
Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost
To all eternity!”
At the first shock man and wife lifted their eyes toward each other. Then something took the woman at the throat, and she dropped her head in a fit of sobbing. If Hendy had come to her now, he would have been repulsed no more. But he was sulky and resentful and peevishly conscious that the advance was due from her. More, this carol sung at his very shoulder, this sign of merriment in the world about him, gave flavor to his self-pity. So the woman sobbed herself quiet again, and the carol went verse after verse to its end:
“The next good joy that Mary had,
It was the joy of seven,
To see her own Son, Jesus Christ,
Ascending into heaven.
Ascending into heaven, good Lord,
And happy may we be!
Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost
To all eternity!”
There was silence and then the shouts of the carollers as they went their way by the street corner. “A merry Christmas!” It was the final
touch of irony.
For a while neither spoke, but sat as they were. Then Hendy said roughly: “I’m going to sleep. That’s cheap enough anyhow.” And he reached for an old rug that made part of their bed.
His wife made no answer. It irritated him. “For heaven’s sake, Polly,” he said, “don’t sit there sulking!”
That roused her, and she fell to reproaches bitterer than all, for she was the angrier because he had let her cry alone and had made no overtures toward conciliation — overtures she had been expecting as her right. Rejoinder followed quick and cruel on reply, and at last, when he talked desperately of sleeping outside, she answered with a gesture borrowed of her trade: “Go, then! Go! If you can’t give me food and shelter, as other women’s husbands do, go and let me earn them for myself! I can do without you!”
“And you shall, too,” he retorted throwing down the rug and snatching his hat. “You shall, too.” And in a second he had flung out into the night and the snow.
They had done it all before, and it was scarce more than another kind of acting. But this time the quarrel was a trifle sharper than common, and he could not go back and make it up with any self-respect for an hour at least. Meantime it was a cold night and a snowy one, so he turned up his collar and strode off straight ahead to be an ill used and homeless outcast for a hour, or, at any rate, for three-quarters of an hour.
Another snowfall had begun, though it was sparse and light, making itself felt now and again by a moist spot upon the face. The carollers had struck up “Noel” some little distance away, and between their verses the chapel party could be heard at the farther end of the town. Indeed, it was scarce the best possible night for Hendy’s petulant adventure. The snow declared itself in the weak spots of his shoes ere he had gone 200 yards and the wind was in his teeth, spiting his face and coming little short of cutting off his nose.
Delphi Complete Works of Arthur Morrison Page 281