by D. J. Taylor
“I daresay I’d have been out searching for a job. Or setting by my wife.”
“Who won’t miss you this once,” Grace asseverated, slapping one palm upon the other with such force that the very gulls scavenging beneath their tables backed away in alarm. “You’d best come along with me, Dewar, indeed you had.”
“Where should I come?” There was a plaintive note in Dewar’s voice. “And what would you have me do?”
“You ought to understand,” Grace said, grinning hugely, “that none of this is my doing. Indeed it’s not. Neither does it bear on the gentleman in Norfolk nor on anyone else. I want no favours returned, I tell you, for I’m a nice man that wants to stand easy with his fellow creatures. But if Mr. Pardew says to me, ‘Take this fellow Dewar, who owes us such a debt, down to Greenwich and introduce him to a couple of gentlemen as might be an advantage to him to know,’ then what am I to say? Only that I’m Mr. Pardew’s man.”
“But what is there at Greenwich?”
“You shall see. You shall indeed. At any rate, you shall come to no harm. There shan’t be no crocodiles to eat you if I’m there to prevent them. And a situation, too, as you might find agreeable.”
“A situation?”
“That’s right. For being a parrot as repeats everything that’s said to him. No, I’m only joking. I’m a nice feller, I tell you, not one of those stick-at-nothing characters that take advantage of men that don’t pay back what they owe.”
Taking Dewar’s mournful silence as an assent, Grace laughed his short laugh, beat another tattoo with his fork that would have had any military man in the vicinity snap to attention, and pushed his plate to one side. By degrees they made ready to leave. It would not be true to say, as these preparations were made, that Mr. Pardew’s clerk exactly stood guard over his companion as the latter got to his feet and wound a threadbare scarf around his throat, or that his eye altogether strayed over various gates and doorways through which an exit might have been effected. Neither would it be true to say that Dewar, very pale-faced and rheumy-eyed in the cold and casting anxious little glances about him, was altogether unaware of these attentions. Nevertheless, the two men made their departure from the pleasure garden without incident.
In the half hour that they had sat there it had grown colder, very much colder; the wind was dying down. Beside the gate of the pleasure garden there was a flight of ancient steps, very mottled and briny, leading down to an equally ancient and crumbling jetty, very much cluttered with rope ends, barrel staves, metal pins and other nautical accessories. Again, it would not be true to say that Grace positively propelled his companion, as the latter picked his way through this maritime debris, or that he altogether stood in the way of a second flight of steps that led back up to the tide wall. Neither would it be true to say that Dewar ignored this second pathway or that his eye didn’t rest somewhat longingly on its grey aspect. Reaching the water’s edge, where there was a pair of wooden posts and a chain suspended between them, they stood staring downriver. In the distance, towards Deptford Reach, mist was beginning to rise, giving the ships’ masts that crowded the foreshore an eerie particularity, as if their topmost points emerged out of nothing and were somehow suspended on the shifting air. Beyond, stray flashes of light broke intermittently out of the grey surround.
“Ha! They are firing the cannons down at the arsenal,” Grace remarked. “A mile downstream and we shall smell the powder.”
Presently a brisk little steam launch, very spruce and well burnished, with a white flag in its bow and a brace of streamers trailing from its stern, came toiling up to the jetty and, by means of a couple of planks laid lengthwise to form a gangway, disgorged a number of persons and a crate containing several live chickens from its front deck. Grace, leaning over the rail, took the most benevolent and scientific interest in this unloading. “The things people carry about with them,” he observed to Dewar. “See that old lady with the valise?—How are you, ma’am?—Must weigh three stone if it weighs an ounce. And the old gent with the mattress—A hand, sir, with your luggage?—You wouldn’t catch me carrying such stuff.” That Grace seemed altogether familiar with the boat and its navigators was confirmed by the practised way in which he bounded across the gangway, nodded at the attendant who stood by the cabin door and set his feet down easily on the listing surface of the deck.
“Greenwich Pier, I suppose, Mr. Grace?” said a tall man with a nautical beard and a metal hook in place of a hand, giving Grace the hook to shake.
“That’s about the size of it,” Grace agreed. “And my friend here too.”
There was an inner cabin where they were invited to sit, tenanted by an old woman with a small terrier in a basket. Here Grace’s good humour continued. He produced a green apple from the folds of his coat, polished it upon his shoulder and ate it with evident relish, following this refection with a short pipe, which he tamped down with macabaw and puffed in fragrant clouds, having first asked the old lady’s pardon if smoke offended her. The old lady said that she didn’t mind, but she would be obliged if they would close the window as it made her ear ache. This courtesy having been performed, Grace began to rally the old lady. That was a fine-looking dog she possessed; could he guard a house, and, if so, could Grace have the borrowing of him? The old lady replied that he was a fine dog and it was gratifying to her how many people remarked it. Not too sure of his sea legs, though, Grace deposed. Not sure of them at all, sir, the old lady replied with dignity, but then sea legs were not always an advantage to a dog.
In this way the half hour of their voyage passed very pleasantly, though I fear that the pleasure was mostly Grace’s. Dewar sat silently at his side, watching the mist steal up beyond the cabin window and the lanterns of the cargo ships signalling to each other in midstream. He had reached an interior state not unlike the one in which Grace had left him at their previous meeting, his mind full of random impressions through which Grace, though still sitting beside him, seemed to move in a very sinister manner, his eyes caught by the most peculiar details of the cabin and the dimly glimpsed world without. The basket in which the old lady kept her dog had a metal fastening that protruded in two great snaps, and he stared at them blindly until they seemed to grow to an enormous size and frighten him with their immensity. The dog itself had a habit of butting repeatedly at the material that confined it, and this he found recalled to him a mechanism he had once seen at a manufactory in the City, a revolving piston that had struck endlessly at some metal plate until it made him sick to look at it. In the end he decided to stand up, simply so that the physical act of rising to his feet might bring some less unpleasant sensation, but the sway of the boat defeated him, he rocked uncertainly on his heels for a moment and then fell back into his seat, thoroughly miserable and ashamed of himself.
“Your friend don’t say much,” the old lady observed, noticing him almost for the first time.
“Indeed he don’t,” Grace told her. “Now, what would you say if I told you I was taking him to Greenwich to get married in the morning?”
The old lady remarked very sapiently that he would be a-gammoning of her, whereupon Grace riposted that she was not so green as she was cabbage-looking and he was delighted to make her acquaintance.
By the time the launch came in sight of Greenwich, Grace had tired of the old lady. His good humour had given way to restlessness. He sat back with his hands clasped behind his head and his feet planted squarely before him and looked first at a clock that hung on the far wall and registered the time as ten minutes past three, then at an engraving of a whale spouting in some Arctic sea, then at the toes of his boots. Finally, these diversions altogether failing him, he turned to Dewar.
“You ever hear of a party named Dixey?”
“I should think I did.”
“Great house in the country, stuffed full of birds’ eggs. Big in the taxidermy line. That kind of thing.”
“Is he”—Dewar marvelled at his daring as he framed the words—“is he bound to
Mr. Pardew?”
“Dixey?” Grace drummed his feet, but with an oddly muted report, as if he feared what havoc they might wreak in this confined space. “There’s more there than I have the knowing of. But he and him have come across each other, and money owing and all, if you take my meaning. Here, you had better stir your stumps unless you mean to go on to Gravesend.”
When they arrived at Greenwich, where the old lady and her dog were met and driven off by an equally old man in a donkey cart, Grace’s manner became sweetly proprietorial. Taking Dewar by the arm, he showed him the naval buildings and the tall ships with such gravity that he might have designed them himself, regretted that the lateness of the hour prevented a walk up the hill to the observatory, spoke of half a dozen amenities that the place possessed and which he, Dewar, would no doubt come to relish. Then, with Dewar’s arm still firmly pinioned in his, so firmly that Dewar, try as he might, could not detach it, he led his companion off along the high road, where from the doors of public houses and billiard rooms nautical gentlemen in striped jackets and top boots regarded them incuriously, and away into a region of mean little streets where the houses came crammed so tightly together that it seemed a wonder that some of them were not altogether squeezed out of existence by their more overbearing neighbours.
It was by now late afternoon, with the wind altogether quelled and the fog altogether descending, so that the lights from the riverbank, now steadily receding from view, seemed muffled and innocuous in the haze. Dewar, loping along at Grace’s side, his tendency to saunter instantly corrected by a jerk from Grace’s wrist, was subject to the most terrible premonitions. He was conscious that he was bidden he knew not where, that the only person who knew his destination was Grace, and that additionally he was bound to Grace and beyond him to the unseen Mr. Pardew without at all knowing how this binding might be unravelled. These fears worked within him to such an extent that when, reaching a crossroads where several streets converged, Grace made a sudden movement away to his right, he altogether shrank from the man and came within an inch of crying out. Curiously, Grace appeared not to notice this distress. He was in high good humour still, stamping his feet down smartly on the cobbled stone, darting inquisitive glances into the windows and doorways that they passed and whistling little fragments of tunes through his teeth.
At length they stopped in front of a mean little house with a door all tilted to one side and a plaster covering a crack in its gloomy front window. Here Grace halted, relinquished Dewar’s arm, which the latter immediately found he had to rub to restore its circulation, and delved elaborately in his trouser pocket for a key. Extricating this implement from a heap of coins, pieces of wire and paper fragments, he turned it in the lock and admitted them into a dirty, dusty vestibule, very sparsely furnished and so dimly lit that the eye, travelling towards the rooms that it abutted, could discern nothing but the grey outlines of furniture, altogether ghostly and phantasmal in the murk. Some thought seemed to have occurred to Grace as he stood in the hallway, for he waited for a moment with his head half-cocked as if trying to make out some sound amidst the enveloping silence. Finally, he shuffled his feet once or twice on the exceedingly shabby carpet and remarked, a shade less high-spiritedly than before, “My mother is very bad about lighting the lamps, you know. She positively won’t attend to them until it’s pitch-dark.”
Stepping gingerly into the body of the house, he called out suddenly, “Mother! Here, Mother, there is company come.”
After what seemed an eternity of waiting a little old woman, attired in what appeared to be a dress of black crepe with a black bonnet secured to her head by strings under her chin and little black boots sticking out from beneath her skirts, came silently down a staircase that rose from the rear part of the vestibule. So silent was her descent that Dewar, not looking up and not apprehending her until she had reached a point three-quarters of the way downstairs, shrank back a second time. Grace, on the other hand, regarded his parent warmly.
“Company? Nothing was said about company.”
“This is Mr. Dewar, Mother, of whom I spoke, come for his supper.”
“Well, he shall have to take such luck as he finds.”
Having made this speech of welcome, the old lady put out her hand, prompting Grace, with a great show of dexterity and good nature, to convey her from the bottommost step of the stair to the hall carpet. Having reached level ground and reconnoitred it once or twice with the toe of her boot, she said, “In my day lamps were never lit until dusk. But it is all very different now.”
With the old lady leading, Grace darting occasionally before her to open a door or to implore her to watch her tread on the carpet, they negotiated a long, gloomy corridor and went down a flight of steps to a subterranean kitchen, very low-ceilinged and inconvenient, with the pots and cauldrons hung from hooks along the far wall. As they drew closer Dewar became aware that he could hear the sound of violent movement, as of some live thing beating itself against something else that was unquestionably inanimate. On the further side of the kitchen, quite shrouded in the half-dark, a tall window looked out onto a grim little garden of bushes and stunted trees. Here, on the kitchen side of the frame, a blackbird was dashing itself repeatedly against the glass.
“Dratted thing,” said the old lady.
Dewar moved towards the window and reached for the fastening, but Grace stayed his arm.
“No indeed, that would never do. Here, light this lamp and don’t trouble about what doesn’t concern you.”
Doing as Grace had bidden, Dewar now saw that a tiny chain was fastened to the bird’s leg, the other end secured to a metal ring sunk into the wall, and that additionally a wooden birdcage hung from the ceiling among the pots and pans.
Eventually, the lamps were lit and the kitchen fire stoked into life and some faint beam of conviviality illuminated the place. The old lady clattered mournfully among sundry utensils, all of which had a habit of falling to the floor at a second’s notice, while her son sat himself down at the kitchen table, took off his hat and looked about him with a satisfied air. Even the blackbird, whom Grace addressed as Sammy, ceased to fling itself against the window and consented to perch on the back of a chair and be fed a sugar lump which Grace crumbled for him in a saucer.
“Now, Mother,” Grace said, drumming with his feet on the floor, “what have you got for us, eh? Something good and hot, I’ll be bound.”
There being no reply from the range, where the old lady now struck two saucepans together as if they surrounded some invisible enemy whose escape she was very anxious to prevent, Grace murmured in an undertone, “Mother is quite remarkable for her age. Why, would you believe that she cleans and dusts the place herself with no thought for any help? She says it would shame her to have a girl sweeping dust under the carpet. And she is much respected. You won’t hardly credit it, perhaps, but only the other week an alderman of the borough with a carriage and a house on the hill proposed that she should come to him as housekeeper.”
Grace’s respect for his parent was beautiful to see. As they sat at the broad table, with the firelight casting monstrous shadows on the wall behind them and the blackbird chittering on his perch, he continued to dilate on her virtues: the excellence of her temper, the sagacity of her views and the impartiality of her judgement. “Why,” he explained, “a year ago last Michaelmas there was a young woman as I was keeping company with. As nice a piece of brisket as a man ever stuck a knife into. The banns was to have been read in church on Christmas Day. But Mother wouldn’t stand for it. And I don’t doubt, having weighed the matter and considered the young woman’s points—which were excellent ones, no doubt about that—that she was right!”
However extensive the list of Mrs. Grace’s accomplishments, culinary skill was not amongst them. They dined very frugally off a plate of sardines and some boiled cabbage into which an unconscionably large quantity of vinegar had for some reason been mixed. Their repast ended and the plates stacked upon the wooden square nex
t to the sink, where the old lady belaboured them with a stiff brush as if they were young women who had designs on her son, Grace took an envelope from his inner pocket, a very elegant envelope on whose back there might even have lurked the suspicion of a coronet, and stared at it suggestively.
“Now,” he said, “a fish supper and pickled cabbage with it is all very well, but there is business to attend to. Mr. Pardew, through me—and I’m Mr. Pardew’s man, which is something I urge you never to forget—has a proposition to make. This here”—he tapped the envelope, which now lay on the table before them—“is a testimonial to your character from a dook, no less. Take a look at it if you like.”
Wondering, Dewar examined the sheet of foolscap that fell into his grasp. Here he read that His Grace the Duke of——, having had occasion to employ Mr. J. Dewar in his service, initially as valet de chambre, latterly as underbutler, was pleased to recommend him for any position for which his undoubted talents might cause him to apply.
“Who is this Duke of——?”
“Never you mind. That’s down to Mr. Pardew, who has dukes and earls enough to fill a dinner table if such is wanted. Now, tomorrow you’re to go to the London Bridge Station, which is the office of the South-Eastern Railway Company. Know of them? Good. There you are to ask for Mr. Smiles, as is the supervisor, and you’re to give him this. There is a vacancy there, and you shall fill it.”