by D. J. Taylor
The lamp lit and the flames taking hold in the grate, he displayed his purchases to her.
“But I thought the gentleman had come after a debt?”
“Well…yes. In a manner of speaking. But there is money, too. And work, of a kind. Let me explain it to you.”
“Well, John!”
The fire rose in the hearth. With an effort, his wife hoisted herself from the bed and began to decant the shrimps into a saucer. Let it be hoped that, between them, the Dewars did not spend an altogether comfortless evening.
Somewhat to his surprise—for there was a part of him that still believed his dealings with Mr. Pardew’s clerk to have been entirely chimerical—Dewar discovered that the events of the succeeding days fell out largely as Grace had predicted. On the next morning he proceeded to an establishment in the Clerkenwell Road, with whose proprietor he had in recent weeks become exceedingly intimate, and for the sum of thirteen shillings and sixpence took his suit of clothes out of pawn. It was a good suit, purchased shortly before the end of his grocering days, and examining it as it lay on the brass bedstead in Clerkenwell Court—where it seemed to flaunt its superiority to every other garment in the room in a very vulgar and indiscreet way—Dewar thought that it would do. He was not sanguine enough, however, to imagine that this would be the limit of his expenditure. His boots, as he knew from his excursion to Primrose Hill on the previous afternoon, were falling into pieces, and his tall hat, run to earth in a cupboard that contained the fragments of a defunct mangle, proved to be rent nearly in two. Accordingly, taking one of the four sovereigns that remained, he went out again to an emporium in Rosamon Street and laid out a further ten shillings on a pair of shoes. A hat, seen in the window of a secondhand shop, subjected to the most devious negotiation and eventually knocked down to him for five shillings and ninepence, completed his wardrobe.
“How do I seem?” he demanded of his wife, having struggled into these garments and, finding no mirror, being forced to make do with his reflection in the teakettle.
“Indeed, John, you look very well.”
“A band for the hat? But no, that’s scarcely necessary. What about gloves?”
In the end it was decided that a pair of gloves could be procured from Mrs. Hook, a seamstress who inhabited the room above. Throughout this investiture Dewar’s expression, which he was careful to disguise from his wife, was of the most melancholic cast. He knew that, however ignorant he might be of the ultimate purpose of Grace’s scheme, he was engaged in what he had assured himself inwardly was some kind of “dodge.” This feeling was made doubly worse by the clothes in which he was now caparisoned and the silk hat that hung from his hand. It seemed to him that he could scarcely venture into the street beyond his house without risking exposure, that the very policemen who directed the traffic would look upon him with eager eyes. Gradually, by slow degrees, this feeling left him. He had, as far as he knew, not yet committed any crime. It might be—and to this hope he clung like a condemned man who has been offered one last hope of pardon—that the task before him was less suspicious—more honest—than it seemed.
It was inevitable that something of this disquiet should communicate itself to his wife, and on the evening of the day in which his sartorial transformation was complete, Mrs. Dewar observed somewhat gravely, “It does not seem to me, John, that you are happy about this work that you’ve to do.”
“Well…no. Perhaps I am not. Not very. You see,” he improvised, conscious of his inability to communicate any of the fears that burned within him, “it is such a deuce of a way. And of course I don’t like to leave you.”
“I shall do very well.” (Mrs. Dewar’s face, which was chalk-white, belied this assertion.) “Mrs. Hook has promised to see after my meals. And, you know, John, it is important that you should make a success of this chance.”
“Well, yes, there’s that of course.” But Dewar’s countenance, as he said this, did not make it appear as if he regarded success as a very probable outcome.
Two days passed, at the conclusion of which Dewar’s nervousness had reached such a pitch that he had almost determined upon selling the suit and other appurtenances with a view to returning the five sovereigns. Then, on the morning of the third day after his encounter with Mr. Grace, the postman—not an official seen very often in the vicinity of Clerkenwell Court—could be heard ascending the rickety stairs to deliver a letter. Sent from an address in Carter Lane, it contained, as Grace had promised, a banknote for fifty pounds, a summary of the instructions previously tendered and an injunction to convey himself to Great Yarmouth as speedily as he could. The letter was received at nine in the morning. At ten, dressed with a punctiliousness that won the instant approval of Messrs. Bulstrode’s commissionaire, which gentleman swept open the vestibule door with a respectful flourish, Dewar presented himself at Lothbury. Nothing, it appeared to him from the warmth of his reception, could be easier than the opening of a bank account in the name of Mr. James Roper or the concluding of an agreement with Messrs. Bulstrode’s East Anglian agents, and by eleven he was on his way to the Shoreditch Railway Station. Here he paid eleven shillings and threepence for a return ticket to Great Yarmouth, surrendered his valise to a porter and was installed in a second-class carriage curiously impregnated with the scent of aniseed and containing an old woman with a Pekinese dog in a wire travelling basket.
“He’s a very good dog, sir,” this lady said. “Never bitten a person yet. Not even when he was a puppy.”
Dewar remarked that he was very glad to hear it.
“And yet it’s a fact, sir, that he can’t abide travelling. Never could, and never will yet.”
Dewar observed that this was very surprising.
Eventually, in a great hiss of vapour and disturbed air, the train bore them away out of Shoreditch into a queer hinterland of smoke-blackened chimney stacks and meandering tributaries of the river, their surface rainbow-hued with oil, past warehouses whose sombre frontages hung low in the water, and ancient manufactories whose windows had known no glass and whose roofs had known no slates, beneath great, black-bricked viaducts tilted monstrously against the sky, alongside immense, sprawling cemeteries where the gravestones lay all tumbled together under fantastic outgrowths of sooty foliage. Everything—the chimney stacks, the greeny-black skirts of the warehouses, the ledges of the viaducts and the gaunt palings of the cemeteries—dripped rainwater, off which the rays of a weak sun intermittently flashed, so that the effect was of a dozen little candles suddenly gleaming into life out of a fog of greyness and being just as suddenly extinguished. The old lady sucked caraway comfits for a while and then went to sleep with her mouth open, exposing a row of yellow teeth the colour of pianoforte keys, and the dog, howling a little at this abandonment, burrowed deep into his basket as if he genuinely believed that he might contrive an escape through the square of tin sheeting that constituted its base.
All this Dewar watched, without finding any salve for his dissatisfaction. There was a conspicuousness about his position that he wholly distrusted. It seemed to him that, clad in his black suit, silk hat balanced on his knees, he was a kind of exhibit at a public gallery that men might be invited to step forward and appraise. This self-consciousness preyed upon his mind and made him nervous. Were the guard to come tramping along the corridor, he would shrink into the corner of the carriage like a man pursued. Were, at the several stations along the line, an old woman to put her head in at the window offering newspapers and trays of hardbake, he started up in his seat in terror. At Ipswich the old lady woke up, pronounced a final encomium over her wire basket and was escorted away across the platform by a female relative, but her successor, a dark and silent man who trimmed his nails into a pocket handkerchief, Dewar did not like at all, believing him to be a police inspector travelling incognito who desired only the obscurity of a tunnel to leap up and apply a set of handcuffs.
It was no better at Norwich, where he was compelled to wait two hours for a connecting train and sk
ulked miserably around the city in the grasp of a zealous porter, examining an ancient cathedral and a castle-cum-prison whose gardens were tended by men in zebra clothes with equal indifference. It is a scant twenty miles from Norwich to Great Yarmouth, across a great bare flat covered by a myriad of windmills, and yet Dewar wished the distance were two hundred. However, on reaching his destination he was pleased to discover—something that would have seemed impossible to him four hours before—that he was at any rate alive, that no lions had eaten him, or attempted to eat him, and that the porters, railway men and tourist touts whom he encountered treated him with an agreeable civility. In this way his spirits improved, and carrying his valise out of the station—it was by now about four o’clock in the afternoon—he absolutely stopped to ask an old man in a smock holding the bridle of a dray horse where in Yarmouth he might stay and if, in addition, there were anything in the town worth seeing? Finding that persons of quality generally put up at Bates’s Hotel and that the beach contained a wonderful houseboat that Mr. Dickens had put into one of his novels, he determined to be taken instantly to the former and to spend a part of the next morning examining the latter.
Alas, Great Yarmouth out of season is a dreary place—at least I have always found it so. There is a promenade, running in parallel to the sea for nearly a mile, over which the spray gusts with unappeasable ardour; there is a north wind which blows directly down from Jutland; there are a couple of theatres which, though displaying the most inviting notices of past and forthcoming attractions, are always shut up; and a Thursday bazaar, always threatening to break out into a rash of “sixpenny sales,” “shilling auctions” and the like, but, in point of fact, closed on all seven days of the week. Quite how the inhabitants of the town may be thought to occupy themselves between the months of October and March I do not know, for the shops are always shut and the streets always empty.
Having risen early the next morning, proceeded to the telegraph office, where he communicated his address to Carter Lane, investigated the sailors’ reading room, which contained a rheumy-eyed copy of the Yarmouth Mercury and a cannonball supposedly discharged at Trafalgar, and examined the exterior of the houseboat on the beach that Mr. Dickens had put into one of his novels (the interior proving unnavigable as it contained a family of nine persons), Dewar felt that he had exhausted the town’s possibilities.
On the next day, however, there came a further letter from Carter Lane. This he examined with great alarm, for it disclosed to him the precise nature of his business in Great Yarmouth. Specifically, he was to visit that morning in the character of Mr. Roper the offices of two of the town’s solicitors. At each he was to represent himself as the creditor of a gentleman named Nokes, living at an address in Peckham, and request that a letter be written soliciting the payment of debts to the value of £150. He was then to retire to his hotel and wait until such time as the solicitors communicated with him. All this—and in truth there was not much more than a page of it—Dewar read half a dozen or even a dozen times, so anxious was he to commit these instructions to memory.
Then, with his hat in his hand and the gravest foreboding in his heart, he stepped out into the high street with the aim of executing his commissions. Again, though, as with the bank at Lothbury, nothing could have exceeded the civility that greeted his appearance at these legal portals. In each case he was swiftly admitted, inducted with the merest delay into the presence of a partner in the firm, heard respectfully and assured that the letter would be written forthwith. He was staying at Bates’s Hotel? Well, it would be their pleasure to communicate with him there. At the second of these offices discreet mention was made of the need for a reference. Dewar, though he felt sure that the beating of his heart could be heard by passersby outside in the street, gritted his teeth, referred the questioner in his blandest manner to Messrs. Gurney, with whom he believed his own bankers corresponded, and was bowed out onto the staircase in the manner of a modern Croesus. All in all, Dewar reflected, as he made his way back to his hotel, through air that now seemed to carry a rank odour of fish, it could all have been a great deal worse. Again, no lion had eaten him, or even attempted to eat him. In all his undertakings he had met only lambs.
It was in this spirit that, stepping out of the hotel after luncheon with the aim of taking another turn along the beach, he met with a calamity of such a nature as to send all his former fears flying once more about his head. Idling in the lobby, having transacted some minor piece of business with the desk clerk—a certain shovel of coals that might or might not have been added to his fire, a certain dish that might or might not have been added to his supper menu—he became aware that a man who had just entered the vestibule was regarding him with the keenest of looks. Dewar turned aside, intending to return immediately to his room, but in an instant the man, whose features Dewar now believed that he half-remembered, was at his elbow.
“Now here’s chance. I said to myself when I came into the place that it was you, and d——d if I wasn’t right.”
“Well, yes indeed. How are you?”
Searching the man’s face, Dewar recognised a commercial traveller with whom he had had dealings in his Islington days, one, moreover, to whom every detail of his commercial misfortunes would be known. Striving vainly to compose himself—for he was conscious that he had gone very red in the face—he became aware that the commercial traveller was observing him with more than usual interest.
“Here on business, I suppose? Well, you look as if the world was treating you pretty comfortably. By the way,” the other continued, “didn’t I hear the fellow at the desk call you Roper or some such name?”
It was an innocent enquiry, but to one of Dewar’s febrile state of mind sufficient to goad him almost to frenzy. Stammering some excuse—he could not subsequently remember what he had said—he rushed from the vestibule into the street and, having ascertained that he was not being followed, took himself off to the promenade. Here, aided by cool air and the absence of onlookers, his head became clearer. He had met with a misfortune, he assured himself, but there was no reason why it should prove fatal. Doubtless he could no longer remain in a hotel where his assumed name might come to be generally known, but there were other establishments where the name “Mr. Roper” would attract no such suspicion. Accordingly, having allowed the greater part of an hour to elapse, he returned to Bates’s Hotel and, having made sure that the commercial traveller was nowhere to be seen, presented himself at the desk with the intelligence that a letter recently received required him to leave town instantly. Five minutes saw the matter concluded, and Dewar found himself out in the street once more with his valise in his hand. Fear, he now perceived, had made him cunning. Rather than transferring himself to a rival hotel—the thoroughfare in which Bates’s lay contained two or three—he walked to a rather out-of-the-way part of the town, somewhat beyond St. Nicholas’s Church, and engaged a room in the house of a fisherman and his wife. Here he straightaway wrote to the two solicitors’ firms and to Carter Lane informing them of his removal, though not, in the final letter, offering any explanation for it. He spent the remainder of the day walking the shoreline (a presentiment having told him to avoid any region where he might chance upon the commercial traveller) and eating the frugal supper of sprats with which his landlady had seen fit to provide him.
Alas, Dewar’s troubles were far from vanished. Time hung heavy on his hands. Dull, rainswept mornings, which might have been tolerable in a commercial hotel, with a fire and the society of other men, were infinitely tedious to him in a fisherman’s cottage in Southtown. He took to wandering the beach, far down by the water’s edge beneath the flight tracks of the gulls and the murky sky, and in this way walked solitary miles along the coast path. There was a town to the south named Gorleston, full of picturesque cottages built of stone from the beach, and a lonely lake—the Breydon Water—populated only by herons and silent trees, but in neither of them did he find any solace. He had got into the habit—he remarked it during th
e course of these excursions—of muttering to himself as he walked, and the realisation was not pleasant to him. At the same time, labouring through the wind with his collar turned against his face, hands plunged deep into the pocket of his coat, he assured himself that his ordeal was nearly at an end, that another day—two days—would see him home. The tenement in Clerkenwell Court now seemed a kind of Elysian field and the clanging of the bells of St. James’s was celestial music when set against the endless sand and the harsh cries of the gulls. He was a Londoner, he told himself, and the placid Norfolk faces that dogged his every step mystified him.
On the third day of his sojourn in the Southtown cottage, two letters arrived for him by the first of the morning’s posts. Each was from one of the firms of Yarmouth solicitors he had engaged. Each begged to inform him that £150 had been received from his debtor, Mr. Nokes of Peckham, and that the money, less the firm’s commission, was there for him to collect. This intelligence, which Dewar had calculated would only raise his spirits, had, curiously enough, the effect of deflating them still further for they offered proof—if further proof were needed—that the scheme in which he was engaged was altogether fraudulent. No creditor, he reasoned, having experience of creditors in his own line of business, would remit a sum of such magnitude in such a brief space of time. Surely such rapidity would arouse the deepest suspicion in those he had employed to collect it. There was nothing to be done, however, save to obey the summons, and into the town, carrying himself very circumspectly and with his hat pulled down over his eyes, Dewar went. Again, at both establishments, he—or rather Mr. Roper—was greeted with the greatest deference. In each case he was invited to read a letter in a fine italic hand, signed by Mr. Nokes of Peckham, berating him for his exigence but nevertheless acknowledging the extent of his obligations. In each case he quitted the premises with a cheque, drawn on the firm’s account, for slightly less than £150.