Naturally, the billycocks, seeing what might befall, thought things over again, and you heard the bonnets murmuring softly under the clink of the lager-glasses: “Not me, Bill. Not me! Now these things are basic and basaltic truths. Anybody can understand them. They are as old as Time. Perhaps the expression was occasionally what might be called coarse, but beer is beer, and best in a pewter, though you can, if you please, drink it from Venetian glass and call it something else. The halls give wisdom and not too lively entertainment for sixpence — ticket good for four pen’orth of refreshments, chiefly ink}’ porter — and the people who listen are respectable folk living under very grey skies who derive all the light side of their life, the food for their imagination and the crystallised expression of their views on Fate and Nemesis, from the affable ladies and gentlemen singers. They require a few green and gold maidens in short skirts to kick before them. Herein they are no better and no worse than folk who require fifty girls very much undressed, and a setting of music, or pictures that won’t let themselves be seen on account of their age and varnish, or statues and coins. All animals like salt, but some prefer rocksalt, red or black in lumps. But this is a digression.
Out of my many visits to the hall — I chose one hall, you understand, and frequented it till I could tell the mood it was in before I had passed the ticket-poll — was born the Great Idea. I served it as a slave for seven days. Thought was not sufficient; experience was necessary. I patrolled Westminster, Black- friars, Lambeth, the Old Kent Road, and many, many more miles of pitiless pavement to make sure of my subject. At even I drank my lager among the billycocks, and lost my heart to a bonnet. Goethe and Shakespeare were my precedents. I sympathised with them acutely, but I got my Message. A chance- caught refrain of a song which I understand is protected — to its maker I convey my most grateful acknowledgments — gave me what I sought. The rest was made up of four elementary truths, some humour, and, though I say it who should leave it to the press, pathos deep and genuine. I spent a penny on a paper which introduced me to a Great and Only who “wanted new songs.” The people desired them really. He was their ambassador, and taught me a great deal about the property-right in songs, concluding with a practical illustration, for he said my verses were just the thing and annexed them. It was long before he could hit on the step-dance which exactly elucidated the spirit of the text, and longer before he could jingle a pair of huge brass spurs as a dancing- girl jingles her anklets. That was my notion, and a good one.
The Great and Only possessed a voice like a bull, and nightly roared to the people at the heels of one who was winning triple encores with a priceless ballad beginning deep down in the bass: “We was shopmates — boozin’ shopmates.” I feared that song as Rachel feared Ristori. A greater than I had written it. It was a grim tragedy, lighted with lucid humour, wedded to music that maddened. But my “Great and Only” had faith in me, and I — I clung to the Great Heart of the People — my people — four hundred “when it’s all full, sir.” I had not studied them for nothing. I must reserve the description of my triumph for another “Turnover.”
There was no portent in the sky on the night of my triumph. A barrowful of onions, indeed, upset itself at the door, but that was a coincidence. The hall was crammed with billycocks waiting for “We was shopmates.” The great heart beat healthily. I went to my beer the equal of Shakespeare and Moliere at the wings in a first night. What would nty public say? Could anything live after the abandon of “We was shopmates”? What if the redcoats did not muster in their usual strength. O my friends, never in your songs and dramas forget the redcoat. He has sympathy and enormous boots.
I believed in the redcoat; in the great heart of the people: above all in myself. The conductor, who advertised that he “doctored bad songs,” had devised a pleasant little lilting air for my needs, but it struck me as weak and thin after the thunderous surge of the “Shop- mates.” I glanced at the gallery — the redcoats were there. The fiddle-bows creaked, and, with a jingle of brazen spurs, a foragecap over his left eye. my Great and Only began to “chuck it off his chest.” Thus:
“At the back o’ the Knightsbridge Barricks,
When the fog was a-gatherin’ dim,
The Lifeguard talked to the L’ndercook,
An’ the girl she talked to ‘im.”
“Twiddle - iddle - iddle-lum-tum-tumt” said the violins.
“Ling - a-ling-a-ling-a-ling-ting-ling!” said the spurs of the Great and Only, and through the roar in my ears I fancied I could catch a responsive hoof-beat in the gallery. The next four lines held the house to attention. Then came the chorus and the borrowed refrain. It took — it went home with a crisp click. My Great and Only saw his chance. Superbly waving his hand to embrace the whole audience, he invited them to join him in:
“You may make a mistake when you’re mashing a tart, But you’ll learn to be wise when you’re older, And don’t try for things that are out of your reach, And that’s what the girl told the soldier, soldier, soldier, And that’s what the girl told the soldier.”
I thought the gallery would never let go of the long-drawn howl on “soldier.” They clung to it as ringers to the kicking bell-rope. Then I envied no one — not even Shakespeare. I had my house hooked — gaffed under the gills, netted, speared, shot behind the shoulder — anything you please. That was pure joy! With each verse the chorus grew louder, and when my Great and Only had bellowed his way to the fall of the Lifeguard and the happy lot of the Undercook, the gallery rocked again, the reserved stalls shouted, and the pewters twinkled like the legs of the demented ballet-girls. The conductor waved the now frenzied orchestra to softer Lydian strains. My Great and Only warbled piano:
“At the back o’ Knightsbridge Barricks, When the fog’s a-gatherin’ dim, The Lifeguard waits for the Undercook, But she won’t wait for ‘im.”
“Ta-ra-rara-rara-ra-ra-rah!” rang a horn clear and fresh as a sword-cut. ‘Twas the apotheosis of virtue.
“She’s married a man in the poultry line That lives at ‘Ighgate ‘111, An’ the Lifeguard walks with the ‘ousemaid now, An’ (awful pause) she can’t foot the bill!”
Who shall tell the springs that move masses? I had builded better than I knew. Followed yells, shrieks and wildest applause. Then, as a wave gathers to the curl-over, singer and sung to fill their chests and heave the chorus through the quivering roof — alto, horns, basses drowned, and lost in the flood — to the beach-like boom of beating feet:
“Oh, think o’ my song when you’re gowin’ it strong An’ your boots is too little to ‘old yer; An’ don’t try for things that is out of your reach, An’ that’s what the girl told the soldier, soldier, so-holdier!”
Ow! Hi! Yi! Wha-hup! Phew! Whew! Pwhit! Bang! Wang! Crr-rash! There was ample time for variations as the horns uplifted themselves and ere the held voices came down in the foam of sound —
“That’s what the girl told the soldier”
Providence has sent me several joys, and I have helped myself to others, but that night, as I looked across the sea of tossing billycocks and rocking bonnets, my work, as I heard them give tongue, not once, but four times — their eyes sparkling, their mouths twisted with the taste of pleasure — I felt that I had secured Perfect Felicity. I am become greater than Shakespeare. I may even write plays for the Lyceum, but I never can recapture that first fine rapture that followed the Upheaval of the Anglo-Saxon four hundred of him and her. They do not call for authors on these occasions, but I desired no need of public recognition. I was placidly happy. The chorus bubbled up again and again throughout the evening, and a redcoat in the gallery insisted on singing solos about “a swine in the poultry line,” whereas I had written “man,” and the pewters began to fly, and afterwards the long streets were vocal with various versions of what the girl had really told the soldier, and I went to bed murmuring: “I have found my destiny.”
But it needs a more mighty intellect to write the Songs of the People. Some day a man will rise up from Bermondsey, Battersea or Bow,
and he will be coarse, but clearsighted, hard but infinitely and tenderly humorous, speaking the people’s tongue, steeped in their lives and telling them in swinging, urging, dinging verse what it is that their inarticulate lips would express. He will make them songs. Such songs! And all the little poets who pretend to sing to the people will scuttle away like rabbits, for the girl (which, as you have seen, of course, is wisdom) will tell that soldier (which is Hercules bowed under his labours) all that she knows of Life and Death and Love.
And the same, they say, is a Vulgarity!
“THE BETRAYAL OF CONFIDENCES”
THAT was its real name, and its nature was like unto it; but what else could I do? You must judge for me.
They brought a card — the housemaid with the fan-teeth held it gingerly between black finger and blacker thumb — and it carried the name Mr. R. H. Hoffer in old Gothic letters. A hasty rush through the file of bills showed me that I owed nothing to any Mr. Hoffer, and assuming my sweetest smile, I bade Fan of the Teeth show him up. Enter stumblingly an entirely canary-coloured young person about twenty years of age, with a suspicious bulge in the bosom of his coat. He had grown no hair on his face; his eyes were of a delicate water-green, and his hat was a brown billycock, which he fingered nervously. As the room was blue with tobacco- smoke (and Latakia at that) he coughed even more nervously, and began seeking for me. I hid behind the writing-table and took notes. What I most noted was the bulge in his bosom. When a man begins to bulge as to that portion of his anatomy, hit him in the eye, for reasons which will be apparent later on.
He saw me and advanced timidly. I invited him seductively to the only other chair, and “What’s the trouble?” said I.
“I wanted to see you,” said he.
“I am me,” said I.
“I — I — I thought you would be quite otherwise,” said he.
“I am, on the contrary, completely this way,” said I. “Sit still, take your time and tell me all about it.”
He wriggled tremulously for three minutes, and coughed again. I surveyed him, and waited developments. The bulge under the bosom crackled. Then I frowned. At the end of three minutes he began.
“I wanted to see what you were like,” said he.
I inclined my head stiffly, as though all London habitually climbed the storeys on the same errand and rather wearied me.
Then he delivered himself of a speech which he had evidently got by heart. He flushed painfully in the delivery.
“I am flattered,” I said at the conclusion. “It’s beastly gratifying. What do you want?”
“Advice, if you will be so good,” said the young man.
“Then you had better go somewhere else,” said I.
The young man turned pink. “But I thought, after I had read your works — all your works, on my word — I had hoped that you would understand me, and I really have come for advice.” The bulge crackled more ominously than ever.
“I understand perfectly,” said I. “You are oppressed with vague and nameless longings, are you not?”
“I am, terribly,” said he.
“You do not wish to be as other men are? You desire to emerge from the common herd, to make your mark, and so forth?”
“Yes,” said he in an awestricken whisper. “That is my desire.”
“Also,” said I, “you love, excessively, in several places at once cooks, housemaids, governesses, schoolgirls, and the aunts of other people.”
“But one only,” said he, and the pink deepened to beetroot.
“Consequently,” said I, “you have written much — you have written verses.”
“It was to teach me to write prose, only to teach me to write prose,” he murmured. “You do it yourself, because I have bought your works — all your works.”
He spoke as if he had purchased dunghills en bloc.
“We will waive that question,” I said loftily. “Produce the verses.”
“They — they aren’t exactly verses,” said the young man, plunging his hand into his bosom.
“I beg your pardon, I meant will you be good enough to read your five-act tragedy.”
“How — how in the world did you know?” said the young man, more impressed than ever.
He unearthed his tragedy, the title of which I have given, and began to read. I felt as though I were walking in a dream; having been till then ignorant of the fact that earth held young men who held five-act tragedies in their insides. The young man gave me the whole of the performance, from the preliminary scene, where nothing more than an eruption of Vesuvius occurs to mar the serenity of the manager, till the very end, where the Roman sentry of Pompeii is slowly banked up with ashes in the presence of the audience, and dies murmuring through his helmet-vizor: “S.P. Q.R.R.I.P.R.S.V.P.,” or words to that effect.
For three hours and one-half he read to me. And then I made a mistake.
“Sir,” said I, “who’s your Ma and Pa?”
“I haven’t got any,” said he, and his lower lip quivered.
“Where do you live?” I said.
“At the back of Tarporley Mews,” said he.
“How?” said I.
“On eleven shillings a week,” said he.
“I was pretty well educated, and if you don’t stay too long they will let you read the books in the Holywell Street stalls.”
“And you wasted your money buying my books,” said I with a lump the size of a bolster in my throat.
“I got them second-hand, four and sixpence,” said he, “and some I borrowed.”
Then I collapsed. I didn’t weep, but I took the tragedy and put it in the fire, and called myself every name that I knew.
This caused the young man to sob audibly, partly from emotion and partly from lack of food.
I took off my hat to him before I showed him out, and we went to a restaurant and I arranged things generally on a financial basis.
Would that I could let the tale stop here. But I cannot.
Three days later a man came to see me on business, an objectionable man of uncompromising truth. Just before he departed he said: “D’ you know anything about the struggling author of a tragedy called ‘The Betrayal of Confidences’?”
“Yes,” said I. “One of the few poor souls who in the teeth of grinding poverty keep alight.”
“At the back of Tarporley Mews,” said he. “On eleven shillings a week.”
“On the mischief!” said I.
“He didn’t happen to tell you that he considered you the finest, subtlest, truest, and so forth of all the living so forths, did he?”
“He may have said something out of the fulness of an overladen heart. You know how unbridled is the enthusiasm of”
“Young gentlemen who buy your books with their last farthing. You didn’t soak it all in by any chance, give him a good meal and half a sovereign as well, did you?”
“I own up,” I said. “I did all that and more. But how do you know?”
“Because he victimised me in the same way a fortnight ago.”
“Thank you for that,” I said, “but I burned his disgusting manuscripts. And he wept.”
“There, unless he keeps a duplicate, you have scored one.”
But considering the matter impartially, it seems to me that the game is not more than “fifteen all” in any light.
It makes me blush to think about it.
THE NEW DISPENSATION — I
LONDON IN A FOG NOVEMBER
THINGS have happened — but that is neither here nor there. What I urgently require is a servant — a nice, fat Mussulman khitmatgar, who is not above doing bearer’s work on occasion. Such a man I would go down to Southampton or Tilbury to meet, would usher tenderly into a first-class carriage (I always go third myself), and wrap in the warmest of flannel. He should be “Jenab “ and I-would be “O Turn.” When he died, as he assuredly would in this weather, I would bury him in my best back garden and write mortuary verses for publication in the Koh-i-Nur, or whatever vernacular paper he
might read. I want, in short, a servant; and this is why I am writing to you.
The English, who, by the way, are unmitigated barbarians, maintain cotton-print housemaids to do work which is the manifest portion of a man. Besides which, no properly constructed person cares to see a white woman waiting upon his needs, filling coal-scuttles (these are very mysterious beasts) and tidying rooms. The young homebred Englishman does not object, and one of the most tantalising sights in the world is that of the young man of the house — the son newly introduced to shaving-water and great on the subject of maintaining authority — it is tantalising, I say, to see this young cub hectoring a miserable little slavey for not having lighted a fire or put his slippers in their proper place. The next time a big, bold man from the frontier comes home I shall hire him to kick a few young gentlemen of my acquaintance all round their own drawing-rooms while I lecture on my theory that this sort of thing accounts for the perceptible lack of chivalry in the modern Englishman. Now, if you or I or anybody else raved over and lectured at Kadir Baksh, or Ram Singh, or Jagesa on the necessity of obeying orders and the beauty of reverencing our noble selves, our men would laugh; or if the lecture struck them as too long-winded would ask us if our livers were out of order and recommend dawai. The housemaid must stand with her eyes on the ground while the young whelp sticks his hands under the tail of his dressing-gown and explains her duty to her. This makes me ill and sick — sick for Kadir Baksh, who rose from the earth when I called him, who knew the sequence of my papers and the ordering of my paltry garments, and, I verily believed, loved me not altogether for the sake of lucre. He said he would come with me to Belait because, “though the sahib says he will never return to India, yet I know, and all the other nauker log know, that return is his fate.”
Being a fool, I left Kadir Baksh behind, and now I am alone with housemaids, who will under 110 circumstances sleep on the mat outside the door. Even as I write, one of these persons is cleaning up my room. Kadir Baksh would have done his work without noise. She tramps and scuffles; and, what is much worse, snuffles horribly. Kadir Baksh would have saluted me cheerfully and began some sort of a yarn of the “It hath reached me, O Auspicious King!” order, and perhaps we should have debated over the worthlessness of Dunni, the sals,, or the chances of a little cold-weather expedition, or the wisdom of retaining a fresh chaprassi — some intimate friend of Kadir Baksh. But now I have no horses and no chaprassisj and this smutty-faced girl glares at me across the room as though she expected I was going to eat her.
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 448