by D. J. Taylor
“What, pray, do you think of your neighbour Mr. Crawley?”
“Mr. Crawley of Lower Easton? A very amiable young man, I should say. But I believe I should congratulate you, Mr. Dean.”
“Congratulate me? Why should you want to do that?”
A bishop would probably have quailed before the look in Mr. Marjoribanks’s eye. Mr. Dalrymple, being a parish clergyman with a stipend of four hundred a year, looked as if he wished the ground would swallow him up.
“I am very sorry if I have spoken incorrectly, Mr. Dean. But I heard that there was an engagement.”
“There is no engagement, Mr. Dalrymple, and you will oblige me by not referring to it again.”
“Certainly. If that is what you wish.”
Then Mr. Marjoribanks knew that he had been discourteous, that this was not the way in which Deans spoke to clergymen of their diocese, nor indeed the way in which gentlemen spoke to other gentlemen, and he felt ashamed of himself. He would have liked to be alone with his resentments, which now extended to his daughter, Mr. Crawley and the quidnuncs of the cathedral close, but he was conscious that Mr. Dalrymple still sat timorously on the further side of his study desk and so he raised his hands in front of him in a gesture of mock exasperation.
“You must forgive me, Mr. Dalrymple, for speaking as I did.” The Dean was a subtle man, who usually got what he wanted in conversation or debate, but on this occasion he had only the vaguest notion of how to proceed. “That is…” he began again. Still Mr. Dalrymple sat silently watching him. “We were talking of Mr. Crawley.”
Mr. Dalrymple, too, was a subtle man in his way, who, additionally, had no great love for Mr. Crawley. “A very amiable young man,” he repeated. “And well thought of in his parish. I believe he is an intimate of Mr. Dixey’s.”
“Mr. Dixey?”
“Mr. Dixey of Easton Hall.”
“Oh indeed, Mr. Dixey,” said the Dean, who knew a great deal about Mr. Dixey, none of which he imagined to redound to that gentleman’s credit. “Well, as you say, Mr. Dalrymple, a very amiable young man. And now perhaps I could ask your opinion of the plans for Hiram’s Hospital?”
Mr. Dalrymple had enough wit to be able to see what was expected of him and said what he thought of the plans for Hiram’s Hospital, Mr. Marjoribanks listening to him the while. And thus their interview concluded on a much more harmonious note than it had begun.
MISS A. MARJORIBANKS
C/o Mrs. Browning
18 Wimpole Street
London W.
My dear Miss Marjoribanks,
On the occasion of our last meeting you were kind enough to suggest that I might enliven your stay in the metropolis with some account of our undertakings here in your absence. Alas, I fear there is little that can be rated enlivening, for we have all of us been horribly dull. To particularise: this morning I preached on Isaiah to three dozen slumbering rustics, my discourse latterly punctuated by snores, returned to my lodgings to eat a dinner that I think no man ever ate before, so meagre was its extent, thereafter presiding at a Sunday school at which I daresay many surreptitious apples were consumed by my youthful auditors but very little wisdom. Or perhaps I am mistaken, and you are just as dull in London as we are in our rural fastness. Do your fashionable London congregations lie asleep in church with their mouths wide open, I wonder, crowd out the porch with hay-carts, wagonettes and the like and then go home to dine off fat pork and parsnips—this being the only vegetable obtainable at this time of year? I think not.
And yet not all has been rank tedium and solitary rumination. Yesterday, for example, I dined with Mr. Dixey, of whom I believe you have heard me speak. Mr. Dixey lives at Easton Hall, where I don’t think you ever went, three miles from here: a spacious house, though I think not kept up with the punctiliousness that its interiors warrant. Knowing that feminine mania for precision in the matter of describing gentlemen’s appearances, demeanour, &c., I realise that it behoves me to give some account of Mr. Dixey, and yet I am not sure that I can do him justice. He is a tall, spare man, perhaps sixty years of age, rather stooped and grey about the temples, but still vigorous: very kind, obliging and courteous, but, in consequence of his living out of the world, somewhat rough-edged. Of ladies’ society, I should judge, he sees only a very little. Mr. Dixey’s great interest is the natural world. Certainly his study, in which I have been received on more than one occasion, is very like a taxidermist’s shop—one hardly dare lay down one’s arm for fear of what one may find beneath it.
Our companion at luncheon was Mr. Conolly, of whose reputation you may perhaps know, formerly superintendent of the asylum at Hanwell: a polite gentleman, some years older than Mr. Dixey, I should say, but owing nothing to him in point of intellectual vigour. The extent and substance of my host’s connection with Mr. Conolly I can only guess at, but I should say that they had known each other for some years, for Mr. Conolly has a habit of referring to “that case in ’59,” or “that fellow I had taken out of irons against his father’s wish,” as if he expected Mr. Dixey to know all about it. Certainly Mr. Conolly is a walking casebook of the afflictions to which many of our most noble families are subject: to hear him talk, one could sometimes believe that there is scarce a marquis in the country who does not have some weak-minded son living in ghastly seclusion with his keeper, whose only concern is that his wine at dinner shall not be diluted. All this may suggest that Mr. Conolly is merely a professional man, whose profession happens to be mad-doctoring, and yet I confess I find him very sympathetic, sensible of the pathos of his charges, alive to the individual tragedies that had brought them into his care and the misery of the homes they left behind them.
But all this is by the way, and I should not have served you this preamble had it not some bearing on what was to come. Dixey’s dining room is very large: a great, high-ceilinged chamber with an elliptical dining table taking up nearly the length of the room. Naturally the three of us made a poor show at filling this immensity. In fact we arranged ourselves comfortably at the further end, leaving perhaps seven-eighths of the table in disuse. It was a gaunt, miserable day outside—though cheerful within—the wind beating against the panes, the trees bending ceaselessly over Dixey’s wild gardens. (They are all overgrown, with no one to keep them up.) Indeed, such was the continual interruption from beyond the glass that my senses were not at first alerted to a crashing sound coming from the upper part of the house. Nonetheless, the noise was repeated not once but twice, as if a giant had commenced to hurl items of furniture around in a corridor. At first I imagined that Dixey, who is somewhat deaf, was unaware of this disturbance. Then I divined that he was contriving to appear oblivious to it, drumming his fingers on the table top, enquiring loudly of Conolly if he would have any more wine, &c. Conolly, too, I noticed, saw that there was something amiss, glanced once or twice at the door, thereafter addressing to me some very inconsequential remark.
Eventually, the sounds died away, to be replaced only by the soughing of the wind. Indeed our conversation had all but resumed its even tenor when suddenly there was a determined rattling at the door handle. Dixey was on his feet in an instant, but before he could proceed more than a couple of steps the door burst open to admit a wild-eyed and dishevelled young woman, her face ablaze, her hair very much disarranged, who moved towards us in a kind of paroxysm of distress, beating her arms against her sides and talking very loudly as she came. I at first assumed this apparition to be one of the maidservants, yet concluded that I did not recollect her, and that indeed her voice—though I could not decipher many of the words she spoke—was genteel. Whosoever this person was, and whatever her complaint, Dixey was equal to the occasion. In a trice he had seized her firmly by the forearms, imploring her all the while to contain herself, and propelled her out of the room; she meanwhile conveying the most imploring glances back to where Conolly and I sat transfixed. He (and she) were gone a long time, full half an hour. In their absence, Mr. Conolly, who seemed not a whit abashed by t
he disturbance, explained that the young woman was a relative of Mr. Dixey, in plain fact deranged and living in his care, who through some mischance had evaded her keeper. Though, being naturally interested, I pressed him further, he would say no more, the two of us lapsing into an uncomfortable silence, after which we were joined once more by Mr. Dixey, who remarked that he was sorry, very sorry indeed, and called for a bottle of port. The afternoon was by now well advanced, and being somewhat disquieted by these events I very soon took my leave.
In sending this account of lunch at Easton Hall, Mr. Crawley omitted only two particulars. One was that the young woman who burst into the room with her face blazing and her hair awry was, in addition, stark naked. The other was that in the brief second when she brushed against him he felt the pressure of her hand in his, discovering subsequently that she had pushed into it a crumpled scrap of paper, on which had been printed two words: help me.
XV
DOWNRIVER
To: The Directors
South-Eastern Railway Company
Dear Sirs,
It is my regrettable duty to inform you that Joseph Pearce, formerly a ticket printer at the London Bridge office, has been dismissed from the company’s service with immediate effect.
Having the honour to remain your most obedient servant, I am, sirs, yours most faithfully,
JAMES HARKER
Secretary to the Board
To: The Directors
South-Eastern Railway Company
Dear Sirs,
I am disturbed to learn that the man Pearce, recently dismissed from the company’s service, should have compounded his original offence by presuming to address—both by letter and, I gather, in person—individual members of the board.
The facts of the case may be briefly stated. Pearce had been known for keeping bad company. Indeed, Mr. Sellings informed me that he had himself observed Pearce entering a public house of low repute in Tooley Street. On another occasion it was reported among the clerks that he claimed to have won a substantial sum of money betting on the St. Leger. A month previously Pearce absented himself from his duties without leave. The clerk despatched to his lodgings alleged that, such was his poverty, he had been obliged to pawn his work clothes.
Clearly, such behaviour could not be thought compatible with the discharge of an office of trust, and Pearce was dismissed forthwith.
Having the honour to remain your most obedient servant, I am, sirs, yours most faithfully,
JAMES HARKER
Secretary to the Board
To: Joseph Pearce, Esq.
Roupell Street SE
Dear Sir,
I am instructed by the directors of the South-Eastern Railway Company to inform you that they can entertain no further communications from you either in the matter of your dismissal or indeed on any other subject.
Yours faithfully,
JAMES HARKER
Secretary to the Board
And always there is the river.
Just at this moment—two of the clock on an afternoon in March—the river is at slack tide. Very sluggish around Temple Pier, somnolent at Blackfriars and at London Bridge positively sedate, so that an intrepid boatman paddling east in the shadow of the Tower might think that he had strayed by accident into a lagoon, a kind of Sargasso Sea of murky water, cast-off rubbish bobbing on the swell from the lighters and the cargo boats in midstream, old hawsers washed up on the Middlesex shore, gulls swinging south towards the factory chimneys of Bermondsey and Deptford. On the further side from the Tower, a few mudlarks digging in the ooze and bringing forth who knows what stained and inky treasures. At the Tower itself a general air of battening down, of three-quarter-closed doors, feet hastening away lest they be called upon to perform some duty and a preponderance of ravens ambling this way and that across the stone pavement and wondering to themselves, like landlords in a holiday town out of season, where all the people have gone. Very cold, very flat and dull, with a raw east wind ruffling the pennants that hang in the Tower gardens and the awnings of the refreshments shops that stand now tenantless and empty, for the season of visitors has not yet come. A few tall ships in the middle distance sliding inexorably out of view, so that each glance sees another mast and another mainsail vanish over the horizon. Rowboats, cutters and launches clustering around the wharfs whose blackened fronts hang down low in the water like the skirts of bombazine-clad old ladies. Grey sky above, brown water beneath, so that Fauntleroy, RA, whom the fashionable world admires, setting up his easel by the Tower gateway, would despair at the chance of intruding a little colour into his composition.
A little further downstream—were that intrepid boatman still bent on making his way east—much the same conditions prevailing. At Wapping Old Stairs, where a swirl of black water washes around the grey steps, a man hanging out of a police launch with a boat hook to prod at something unidentifiable in the depths below. The cherry gardens on the further side very cheerless and cherryless and desolate, the trees huddled up against the wind as if no blossom would ever flourish there again. Then in quick, or rather slow, succession—for nothing moves here with any rapidity—a patch of waste ground with a fence and a little shed and a sign saying T. Myerson, Merchant, no clue at all being offered by these bare appurtenances as to what it is in which T. Myerson, Merchant, deals, a street of fantastically tiny houses in pink stucco, so small that you might wonder how the people squeeze themselves in through their exiguous front doors, and finally a dismal-looking pleasure garden, somewhat retired and secluded, with a gaunt refreshment room and a disconsolate proprietress seated in its window and a general air of having opened its gates this raw March afternoon in defiance of its best interests and judgement and of being about to shut them up again.
Here on a windswept terrace, at a solitary table whose four legs had been fastened to the ground—perhaps with the idea of preventing the wind from spiriting them away—two figures sat, with whom we have some slight acquaintance. The former, very big and burly in a thick topcoat, was eating zealously at a plate of shrimps; the latter stared at a pot of beer from which he did not drink. The first man, pausing occasionally in his negotiations with the shrimps to take a pull at his own tankard, seemed in high good humour; the second, casting wary glances at his companion and into the gloomy sky beyond them, seemed thoroughly miserable.
“’Pon my word,” Bob Grace remarked, with his fork half out of his mouth and a brace of shrimps snaggled up in his teeth, “I never saw such a chap for not eating his vittles. Just say the word now and the girl shall bring you anything you fancy.”
“Indeed, I ain’t hungry.”
“Some of these shrimps now, or a pie brought up hot and hot. No? Well, a man’s the best judge of his own appetites, I suppose. Did they feed you in Yarmouth? I wonder.”
“I hadn’t anything to complain of.”
Grace seemed to find the rejoinder amusing, for he put the fork down on his plate with a clatter and guffawed loudly. “No? I don’t suppose you did.” Fork in hand once more, he speared another shrimp from the plate, inspected it closely and fondly decapitated it with his teeth. “Nothing to complain of! Tell me now, how are things at home? Have you been in work?”
Dewar, who had been following the motion of his companion’s jaw with a fascinated horror, hunched his shoulders more deeply into the folds of his flimsy jacket.
“I…I had two days at an eating house in Drury Lane. But it is casual work, you know, and if you aren’t a favourite with the head waiter you are pretty soon discharged.”
“And you weren’t a favourite, I suppose. Well, never mind. And how is Mrs. Dewar?”
“No better. It’s all she can do to rise from her bed.”
“Can’t get out of bed, eh?” Grace said affably. “Sounds to me as if you had a deal to complain of. Sounds to me as if your life was one long round of misery. But then Mr. Pardew has something to complain of too, wouldn’t you say?”
Dewar said nothing.
“Bless
you! You needn’t look at me as if I meant to eat you. Oh no. It’s nothing to me. What do I care as long as I gets my wages and the time to spend them? But Mr. Pardew now, he cares a great deal. Indeed he does. You might not think it, but the business at Yarmouth with you not remembering your right name took an unconscionable time to set straight. Why Mr. Pardew had to send a feller into the bank at Lothbury pretending to be you, and all the time was feared that Gurney’s in Yarmouth might have written saying what had come about. In which case there’d have been the devil to pay, indeed there would, for there’s a police captain, name of McTurk, as is very down on the likes of us.”
The look on Dewar’s face registering only blank incomprehension, Grace beat a little martial tattoo with his fork on the bare plate and struck his other hand on the tabletop.
“Bless us! You mean to say you weren’t up to the dodge? You are a green ‘un and no mistake. Let us say that a man has been put in the way of some cheques he’d like to put into ready money. No good just presenting them to a London bank, no good at all. The clerks these days have eyes like hawks. No, the trick is to get a man to go to some lawyer—some lawyer a good way out of town if you can find one—and tell him he means to recover a debt. The lawyer writes the letter to the debtor, only the debtor’s you, if you take my meaning? You send the cheque, signed in the name as the lawyer wrote to. After a bit the lawyer takes off his commission and pays your man. If it’s cash, well and good. If it’s by cheque, with a signature, well there’s another little game to begin. Mr. Pardew knows all about it. Now do you understand me?”
“I believe I do.” The wretched expression on Dewar’s face insisted that he understood all too well.
“That’s the spirit! Debt collecting in the provinces—there’s nothing like it! But see here”—and Grace bent his head low over the table—“there’s another debt owing, and that’s from you to us. Don’t look at me! I’m a nice man, I am. I won’t see you come to any harm. But Mr. Pardew, he’s a regular tartar. He’ll chew you up and spit out the bones if he’s a mind. Others too. Why, there’s a gentleman in Norfolk with ever so many acres who’s beholden to us, and whose paper we have and other knowledge that I won’t speak of. And if Mr. Pardew asks him for a thing, why he’ll give it.” And here Grace gave a short laugh as if by this he intended to make Dewar understand that a thing had been asked from this gentleman and that this gentleman had produced it. “Now, I make it half past two of the clock. What might you have been a-doing, eh, if I hadn’t come to Islington and ferreted you out from that reading room where you’d gone to hide?”