by D. J. Taylor
Fast approaching four o’clock in Tite Street and the twilight is no longer a hint or a plausible speculation but an irrevocable fact. A few children, home early from the variety of select establishments in which the neighbourhood abounds, venture out to play at ninepins on the area steps or make cockshies in the corners of gloomy courtyards and are swiftly routed out and brought back by their nursemaids. A muffin man marches up Tite Street clanging his bell, to depart a few moments later with ever so few pence for his trouble. A mad old lady with a rolling eye and a ragged umbrella lingers before the door of the French milliner’s, thereby awakening all kinds of unreasonable hopes in the breast of its proprietress, before skipping girlishly away in the direction of Somers Town.
Within the walls of the back kitchen, now practically drowning in a sea of inky shadows, Mrs. Farthing, who has spent the past ten minutes staring very vigilantly into the fire, as if it formed an additional door to the premises, rises once more to her feet and begins to shake out her skirts in a way that suggests thoroughgoing ill-humour, one ear cocked like a bad-tempered old fox hearing the huntsman’s horn borne up on the wind. What is it that Mrs. Farthing hears? A footstep creaking this way and that on an uncarpeted floor? A voice—a female voice, by the sound of it—murmuring ever so softly somewhere? Whatever it is, Mrs. Farthing doesn’t mean to put up with it. Taking a last angry glance at the clock face, in whose powers she has long since ceased to believe, Mrs. Farthing steams off in the direction of the parlour door like a fearful old battleship, pushes it half open and stands balefully under the lintel.
“No good will come of it, ma’am.”
The noise, which might be that of a person—a female person—walking up and down, ceases abruptly. Surer now of her ground, Mrs. Farthing, in what she imagines—heaven knows why—to be a kindlier tone, extemporises further: “No good at all, ma’am, in taking on so. There is nothing to be done.” The silence is by now so absolute that the ticking of the grandfather clock a dozen feet distant, very tall and ominous in the dark, seems to run away like some mechanical demon capering off in pursuit of an inventor’s prize plate.
“Nothing to be done, ma’am,” Mrs. Farthing remarks, darting sharp little glances at the room’s interior, at the shadows wreathed around the principal armchair, and the solitary hand—very pale and delicate and tremulous—tapping restlessly away on its edge. “Will you take anything? A glass of sherry or a biscuit?”
The hand taps a little less feverishly, but there is no reply. Thoroughly disgusted, Mrs. Farthing bustles back into her kitchen, chivvies away the cat, which impetuous and foolhardy creature has taken possession of her rocking chair, seizes a taper and lights a pair of tall wax candles that very soon begin to gutter and fizz, and settles down to brood. There is a letter lying on the kitchen table with a scarlet seal on its reverse side, and Mrs. Farthing takes it up and reads for the thirtieth time the assurances of a certain legal gentleman that this day evening Mrs. F.’s services—for which his friend Mr. D. is very grateful—will be at an end. But what if Mr. D. don’t come? Mrs. Farthing wonders. What if nobody comes? These are disagreeable thoughts, and Mrs. Farthing doesn’t care to entertain them.
Outside in Tite Street the evening draws on. Lights go on in upstairs windows; smoke rises from the ancient chimneys to mingle with the darkening air. The faint melodious clatter of a pianoforte can be heard somewhere, as if to say “Why, d——, despite it all we can still be comfortable.” Cats begin to appear around the area steps and athwart the chimney pots, their eyes full of nocturnal purpose. Meek papas, thither conveyed from clerking offices in High Holborn and Fleet Street, are met at their front doors, relieved of their gloves and clerkly appurtenances, regaled with mutton chops brought in hot and hot and given babies to dandle while their supper beer is fetching. Such is the press of servant girls and stout matrons around the door of the Tite Arms and Refreshment Emporium that Little Sills, the celebrated comic tenor, engaged that evening to delight the company with the ballad “Villikins and His Dinah,” and arriving early in a tall hat and a sateen waistcoat, grows suddenly sanguine of his prospects and imagines a roseate future in which he is summoned to Windsor, appears before the Lord Mayor’s banquet and can introduce Mrs. Sills (at present with the children in Hoxton) to, as he puts it, “the kind of society that a woman of her refinement, sir, demands.”
It turns colder, and a flake or two of snow—grey snow, soiled by the reek of a thousand chimneys, but snow nonetheless—drifts down over the street, where it is seen from out of the window of the Tite Arms and Refreshment Emporium by Mr. Phelps as he descends to the kitchen to relay orders for beefsteaks and whisky-punch, and by the ancient proprietress of the milliner’s shop, now retired to a comfortable back bedroom with her hair done up in curl papers and a copy of the St. James’s Chronicle in her ancient hand, and by Mrs. Farthing, who, knowing that it means wet underfoot, and pattens and footbaths, and all manner of inconveniences which Mrs. Farthing isn’t prepared to countenance, drats it with all her heart.
The person concealed in Mrs. Farthing’s parlour sees it and twists her shawl more tightly around her shoulders and thinks—but who knows what she thinks?—of certain former passages in her life, in which predominate the figure of a pleasant-faced old gentleman wielding a quill pen above a sheet of paper quite as if he means to stab it through and through, until her thoughts altogether sail away with her, go running up the wallpaper of Mrs. Farthing’s parlour—which is all coy shepherdesses and their bucolic swains—to take sanctuary on the curtain pole.
It is at a late hour, unconscionably late for Tite Street—the meek papas, arrayed now in nightshirts and slippers, are yawning crossly for the candles while their wives wonder how it is that the winter nights do go on so; Little Sills, his engagement concluded and the landlord’s half sovereign clinking against the farthings in his breast pocket, is riding home to Hoxton on the top of a twopenny omnibus (it is a triumphal carriage in Little Sills’s imagination, with a phantom crowd huzzaing at the street corner)—when a cab comes briskly into view at that thoroughfare’s nearer end. So muted is its passage through the receding slush—the snow has vanished now, gone to fall on Clerkenwell and Whitechapel and Wapping Old Stairs—that no one in Tite Street hears it except Mrs. Farthing, who, like an old bloodhound taking the scent, sees it from her front door and steps out into the road almost before the vehicle pulls up and an oldish gentleman in a wide hat and an ulster begins to descend laboriously onto the pavement.
“D——d cold for the time of the year, I should say,” the gentleman remarks, and Mrs. Farthing bridles, as if to say, “This is not language I would use, but the sentiment is, at any rate, sound.” A casual observer, overhearing them, would perhaps deduce that the gentleman and Mrs. Farthing were formerly acquainted. Certainly, Mrs. Farthing gives a little bob, hinting at great things in the curtseying line were further encouragement to be offered, while the gentleman gives her a glance that might be interpreted to mean “I would not dream of being so impolite as to suggest that I never met you before.” This impression is reinforced in Mrs. Farthing’s hallway, an immensely gloomy passage lit by a single lantern. Here the gentleman, having declined Mrs. Farthing’s offer of refreshment, fixes her with a look and presumes that the patient—the young lady—has passed a pretty comfortable day.
“Pretty comfortable, sir,” Mrs. Farthing assures him. “Leastways, nothing I would complain of.”
“She has been quiet, has she?” the gentleman continues.
“Quite quiet, sir. Except that she took on once or twice, sir, which I never could abide, sir, and told her plainly that I would not.”
“Took on, has she?” The gentleman’s voice is very low now, very low and confidential.
“Crying, sir! Walking about the room! Not answering when spoken to!” Mrs. Farthing particularises these failings as if each of them should be dealt with at Snow Hill by Mr. Ketch in front of a baying crowd.
“Indeed? Well, I am obliged to you, Mrs….�
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“Farthing, sir,” says Mrs. Farthing eagerly, as if to say that she knows this game exactly. “And now, sir, perhaps you would care to come inside?”
The gentleman duly comes. The parlour door shuts behind him. Mrs. Farthing lingers hesitantly before it for a moment, like a duenna uncertain what the young people are up to, before stumping off to the kitchen with the thought that it is no business of hers, which indeed it is not. Presently the parlour door creaks open, the gentleman and his companion—her shawl drawn up very tight over her face—are borne away (it is very late now, and the lights in the surrounding houses are all but extinguished) and Mrs. Farthing slips out of our story and back into the cramped and melancholy annals of Tite Street.
“You’ll find Mr. Dixey an uncommonly peculiar gentleman,” Dunbar said, drawing the collar of his ulster close against the drizzle.
“Pecooliar?” Dewar rolled the word around his mouth and made a tentative step on the path before him. “In what way pecooliar?”
“Well, I don’t exactly know how to put it. Nothing out of the ordinary to look at, perhaps, but uncommon strange all the same.”
“Ten guineas is ten guineas,” Dewar suggested hopefully. “Pecooliar or not.”
They were standing on the verge of a small country back road, poorly surfaced, against which wound an ancient brick wall, very worn about its extremities, which rose to a point almost level with their heads. Above them, and to the right, tall trees—firs and spruces—hunched into near-impenetrable thickets, with only a glimpse or two of pathways running on into the wood. To the left the land sloped down through fields and pasture to a low-lying plain, apparently devoid of human habitation, on which the weak late-afternoon sun shone faintly. Save for the drip of rainwater from the trees and the receding jingle of the cart that had brought them from Watton—now on the point of vanishing beyond the bend in the road—all was silent.
“Will he be expecting us?” Dewar went on. His eyes were red and inflamed from want of sleep. “This Mr. Dixey.”
“There was a wire sent saying the goods shall be delivered,” Dunbar told him. “Just that. Rather neat, don’t you think? But, see, we must be getting on. There is a gate here, to my recollection. And have a care for that d——d casket.”
They passed on along the road under the high trees, to a point where a five-barred gate, secured to its stanchion with a piece of rope, broke the wall’s uneven course. Behind it a track, no more than a few feet wide, led away through the wood. Dewar would have climbed the gate, but Dunbar, gesturing at the burden he held under his arm, jerked at the rope and opened it to let him pass.
“I saw a man drop a sea eagle’s egg,” he explained, “on the doorstep of the clergyman that was booked to buy it.”
“This Mr. Dixey,” Dewar went on, whose curiosity had been pricked. “What does he do?”
“What does he do?” Dunbar stood for a moment with his hand on the topmost bar of the gate while he looped the rope-end around its post. “Why, he is a squire. Owns the land around here. That village where we put up our traps too, I shouldn’t wonder. What does any gentleman do? Why, he has his occupations like any other man. Mr. Dixey here is great in the dog-breeding line. Keeps a whole pack of them chained up in a barn—you shall hear the noise of them presently. Why, when I was here last a great mastiff jumped a four-foot hurdle and made fair to tear out my throat.”
“What did you do?” Dewar wondered nervously.
“Do? Why, I dealt it a blow on the nose that had it howling for a week, I shouldn’t wonder. I never could abide a venturesome dog. But see, we are getting well on into Dixey’s estate.”
Following the cast of his arm, his companion saw that the tall avenue of trees was thinning out into a more random assemblage of grass and outbuildings. In the distance, perhaps a half mile distant, the outlines of a substantial residence could be dimly glimpsed. To Dewar everything that he saw was possessed of great novelty, and yet he was conscious that there was something lacking in the vista that lay spread out before him. Great piles of green-coated timber lay on either side of the path, looking very much as if they wanted a woodman to come and take them away, and there was rank, knee-high grass in the paddock. Presently they passed a long, low barn, sheltered on three sides by banks of fir trees, from which, as Dunbar had promised, a cacophony of barking ascended to the pale sky.
“Grim kind of a place, ain’t it, though?” Dunbar remarked, as if following his thoughts. “But there is no one lives here, you know. Just a servant or so and a man to open the hedge gates to carriages. Not that there’s many of them. The gardeners have been sent away, I believe, for Dixey don’t care about the height of his grass. As for what he owes in London, why your guess is as good as mine.”
“And yet he’ll pay five guineas for an egg?”
“More than that sometimes. And not just eggs. Why, I brought him a pine marten last year, which I took in a wood in Carmarthenshire, that he paid twenty pounds for. There’s no accounting for the rarey things he delights in.”
“But he don’t keep up his estate, and the gardeners is all gone?” Dewar’s sense of propriety was offended.
“A solitary old gentleman he is. Why”—Dunbar’s eye searched for some point of comparison—“like one of those rooks up there on the fence. You shall see. Here, we are almost in sight. That is the servants’ hall, behind the long window. Dixey’s butler is a decent old fellow, but the housekeeper is a regular tartar, so no chaff, you know.”
They came now to a rectangle of bare, flattened earth, hedged around by currant bushes, that abutted the back parts of the house. Here some faint signs of human activity declared themselves. A man in a shabby suit of green, who might have been a gamekeeper, one foot braced against a tree stump, was sharpening the points of a trap with a little whetstone, while a maid with short yellow hair was taking in washing that had been spread to dry over the bushes. Dewar, staring about him, thought the scene a very dreary one—there were old harnesses piled up by the porch that seemed as if they had been there ever so many years, and what looked like a fox’s pelt nailed up on the barn door—but he approved of the servant girl, who nodded unblushingly to Dunbar as he went by.
“That’s a nice-looking girl,” Dunbar observed as they passed out of earshot. “And here is old Randall. How are you, Mr. Randall? Tolerably well, I take it?”
Dewar, still registering the first impressions of a dozen other things that he saw, could not separate the butler’s face from his surroundings. A row of pewter pots on the long sideboard behind him; a line of prints on the further wall, over which the soft rays of firelight played, a sheet of newspaper pale in the murk of an armchair—all these seemed to him elements of Mr. Randall’s being and his worn old face. An elderly woman with shiny black hair looked up from a chair by the fire, where she sat stitching a cushion cover, and Dewar, thinking that some gesture was expected from him, touched his hat. The woman turned her head away, whether pleased or offended he could not tell.
“Quite an adventure,” Dunbar was saying to Mr. Randall, as they proceeded into a wide, panelled hallway where portraits hung in dirty gilt frames. “But there is not much sport left in these isles. Why, Mr. Cumming says he thinks of taking his guns to Africa.” A tall footman carrying a tray before him came hurrying down the staircase, bobbed his head to Mr. Randall as he passed and disappeared into the silence they had left behind them, and Dewar thought of the grocer’s shop in Hoxton, with the great blinds drawn low over the window and the drift of white dust upon the lids of the flour barrels, and the two assistants all attentive behind the counter, and the pleasure it had been to command them.
A staircase of twenty-seven steps, a serpentine corridor whose lamps had not been lit, a man’s face, hard and accusing, staring out at him from a picture frame, a closed door from whose lintel soft light gleamed—all this Dewar saw, and did not see, for his mind was lost in the airiest speculations over what lay around him: the footman with his tray, the casket in his hand, the
murmur of a voice, whether above or beneath him he could not tell, elsewhere in the house. The door from behind which the soft light glowed having been wrested open for him by Mr. Randall, he tumbled into the room over a ridge in the carpet, regained his footing, assured himself that the casket was secure in his grasp and then looked around him.
Dunbar, in whom the strangeness of their surroundings produced no obvious disquiet, was already on his way towards the wide desk that lay at an angle to the fireplace. Dewar followed dutifully behind him. In the course of his commercial career he had attended upon many gentlemen in their studies—he had brought in his little bill, defended it, conceded alterations to it and negotiated its settlement—but he was conscious that he had attended upon no such person as Mr. Dixey and in no such surroundings. The gentlemen of Hoxton had sat, for the most part, in small, ill-favoured rooms with cash boxes on their desks, whose windows afforded a view of mean little gardens and stunted trees. Mr. Dixey, alternatively, sat in a great wide room before a high window affording glimpses of a receding gravel drive and an ornamental pool, around which the wind whistled and careened, and on his desk there lay not a cash box but what appeared to be a human skull. He was—and this could be inferred even from his seated position—a tall man, elderly but apparently vigorous, in a suit of black with a white stock tied around his throat and bony hands that, resting curiously on the desk before him, looked as if they might have concerns of their own and be about to go scuttling off across the veneer in defiance of their owner’s wishes. There was a little tuft of grey hair on the point of his chin, which, whether left there by chance or design, enhanced this singularity, and Dewar became instantly fascinated by it, watched it as its owner rose to his feet (he did this cautiously but in a manner that suggested much steadfastness of purpose) and marked it as it moved up and down in response to the opening and closing of his lips.