The Yellow Book Volume II Part 6

Thirty Bob a Week

By John Davidson

I couldn't touch a stop and turn a screw, And set the blooming world a-work for me, Like such as cut their teeth--I hope, like you-- On the handle of a skeleton gold key.

I cut mine on leek, which I eat it every week: I'm a clerk at thirty bob, as you can see.

But I don't allow it's luck and all a toss; There's no such thing as being starred and crossed; It's just the power of some to be a boss, And the bally power of others to be bossed: I face the music, sir; you bet I ain't a cur!

Strike me lucky if I don't believe I'm lost!

For like a mole I journey in the dark, A-travelling along the underground From my Pillar'd Halls and broad suburban Park To come the daily dull official round; And home again at night with my pipe all alight A-scheming how to count ten bob a pound.

And it's often very cold and very wet; And my missis st.i.tches towels for a hunks; And the Pillar'd Halls is half of it to let-- Three rooms about the size of travelling trunks.

And we cough, the wife and I, to dislocate a sigh, When the noisy little kids are in their bunks.

But you'll never hear _her_ do a growl, or whine, For she's made of flint and roses very odd; And I've got to cut my meaning rather fine Or I'd blubber, for _I'm_ made of greens and sod: So p'rhaps we are in h.e.l.l for all that I can tell, And lost and d.a.m.ned and served up hot to G.o.d.

I ain't blaspheming, Mr. Silvertongue; I'm saying things a bit beyond your art: Of all the rummy starts you ever sprung Thirty bob a week's the rummiest start!

With your science and your books and your the'ries about spooks, Did you ever hear of looking in your heart?

I didn't mean your pocket, Mr.; no!

I mean that having children and a wife With thirty bob on which to come and go Isn't dancing to the tabor and the fife; When it doesn't make you drink, by Heaven, it makes you think, And notice curious items about life!

I step into my heart and there I meet A G.o.d-almighty devil singing small, Who would like to shout and whistle in the street, And squelch the pa.s.sers flat against the wall; If the whole world was a cake he had the power to take, He would take it, ask for more, and eat it all.

And I meet a sort of simpleton beside-- The kind that life is always giving beans; With thirty bob a week to keep a bride He fell in love and married in his teens; At thirty bob he stuck, but he knows it isn't luck; He knows the seas are deeper than tureens.

And the G.o.d-almighty devil and the fool That meet me in the High Street on the strike, When I walk about my heart a-gathering wool, Are my good and evil angels if you like; And both of them together in every kind of weather Ride me like a double-seated "bike."

That's rough a bit and needs its meaning curled; But I have a high old hot un in my mind, A most engrugious notion of the world That leaves your lightning 'rithmetic behind: I give it at a glance when I say "There ain't no chance, Nor nothing of the lucky-lottery kind."

And it's this way that I make it out to be: No fathers, mothers, countries, climates--none!-- Not Adam was responsible for me; Nor society, nor systems, nary one!

A little sleeping seed, I woke--I did indeed-- A million years before the blooming sun.

I woke because I thought the time had come; Beyond my will there was no other cause: And everywhere I found myself at home Because I chose to be the thing I was; And in whatever shape, of mollusc, or of ape, I always went according to the laws.

_I_ was the love that chose my mother out; _I_ joined two lives and from the union burst; My weakness and my strength without a doubt Are mine alone for ever from the first.

It's just the very same with a difference in the name As "Thy will be done." You say it if you durst!

They say it daily up and down the land As easy as you take a drink, it's true; But the difficultest go to understand, And the difficultest job a man can do, Is to come it brave and meek with thirty bob a week, And feel that that's the proper thing for you.

It's a naked child against a hungry wolf; It's playing bowls upon a splitting wreck; It's walking on a string across a gulf With millstones fore-and-aft about your neck: But the thing is daily done by many and many a one....

And we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck.

A Responsibility

By Henry Harland

It has been an episode like a German sentence, with its predicate at the end. Trifling incidents occurred at haphazard, as it seemed, and I never guessed they were by way of making sense. Then, this morning, somewhat of the suddenest, came the verb and the full stop.

Yesterday I should have said there was nothing to tell; to-day there is too much. The announcement of his death has caused me to review our relations, with the result of discovering my own part to have been that of an accessory before the fact. I did not kill him (though, even there, I'm not sure I didn't lend a hand), but I might have saved his life. It is certain that he made me signals of distress--faint, shy, tentative, but unmistakable--and that I pretended not to understand: just barely dipped my colours, and kept my course. Oh, if I had dreamed that his distress was extreme--that he was on the point of foundering and going down! However, that doesn't exonerate me: I ought to have turned aside to find out. It was a case of criminal negligence. That he, poor man, probably never blamed me, only adds to the burden on my conscience. He had got past blaming people, I dare say, and doubtless merely lumped me with the rest--with the sum-total of things that made life unsupportable. Yet, for a moment, when we first met, his face showed a distinct glimmering of hope; so perhaps there was a distinct disappointment. He must have had so many disappointments, before it came to--what it came to; but it wouldn't have come to that if he had got hardened to them. Possibly they had lost their outlines, and merged into one dull general disappointment that was too hard to bear. I wonder whether the Priest and the Levite were smitten with remorse after they had pa.s.sed on. Unfortunately, in this instance, no Good Samaritan followed.

The bottom of our long _table d'hote_ was held by a Frenchman, a Normand, a giant, but a pallid and rather flabby giant, whose name, if he had another than Monsieur, I never heard. He professed to be a painter, used to sketch birds and profiles on the back of his menu-card between the courses, wore shamelessly the multi-coloured rosette of a foreign order in his b.u.t.tonhole, and talked with a good deal of physiognomy. I had the corner seat at his right, and was flanked in turn by Miss Etta J. Hicks, a bouncing young person from Chicago, beyond whom, like rabbits in a company of foxes, cowered Mr.

and Mrs. Jordan P. Hicks, two broken-spirited American parents. At Monsieur's left, and facing me, sat Colonel Escott, very red and cheerful; then a young man who called the Colonel Cornel, and came from Dublin, proclaiming himself a barr'ster, and giving his name as Flarty, though on his card it was written Flaherty; and then Sir Richard Maistre. After him, a diminis.h.i.+ng perspective of busy diners--for purposes of conversation, so far as we were concerned, inhabitants of the Fourth Dimension.

Of our immediate constellation Sir Richard Maistre was the only member on whom the eye was tempted to linger. The others were obvious--simple equations, soluble "in the head." But he called for slate and pencil, offered materials for doubt and speculation, though it would not have been easy to tell wherein they lay. What displayed itself to a cursory inspection was quite unremarkable: simply a decent-looking young Englishman, of medium stature, with square-cut plain features, reddish-brown hair, grey eyes, and clothes and manners of the usual pattern. Yet, showing through this ordinary surface, there was something cryptic. For me, at any rate, it required a constant effort not to stare at him. I felt it from the beginning, and I felt it till the end: a teasing curiosity, a sort of magnetism that drew my eyes in his direction. I was always on my guard to resist it, and that was really the inception of my neglect of him. From I don't know what stupid motive of pride, I was anxious that he shouldn't discern the interest he had excited in me; so I paid less ostensible attention to him than to the others, who excited none at all. I tried to appear unconscious of him as a detached personality, to treat him as merely a part of the group as a whole. Then I improved such occasions as presented themselves to steal glances at him, to study him _a la derobee_--groping after the quality, whatever it was, that made him a puzzle--seeking to formulate, to cla.s.sify him.

Already, at the end of my first dinner, he had singled himself out and left an impression. I went into the smoking-room, and began to wonder, over a cup of coffee and a cigarette, who he was. I had not heard his voice; he hadn't talked much, and his few observations had been murmured into the ears of his next neighbours. All the same, he had left an impression, and I found myself wondering who he was, the young man with the square-cut features and the reddish-brown hair. I have said that his features were square-cut and plain, but they were small and carefully finished, and as far as possible from being common. And his grey eyes, though not conspicuous for size or beauty, had a character, an expression. They _said_ something, something I couldn't perfectly translate, something shrewd, humorous, even perhaps a little caustic, and yet sad; not violently, not rebelliously sad (I should never have dreamed that it was a sadness which would drive him to desperate remedies), but rather resignedly, submissively sad, as if he had made up his mind to put the best face on a sorry business. This was carried out by a certain abruptness, a slight lack of suavity, in his movements, in his manner of turning his head, of using his hands.

It hinted a degree of determination which, in the circ.u.mstances, seemed superfluous. He had unfolded his napkin and attacked his dinner with an air of resolution, like a man with a task before him, who mutters, "Well, it's got to be done, and I'll do it." At a hazard, he was two- or three-and-thirty, but below his neck he looked older. He was dressed like everybody, but his costume had, somehow, an effect of soberness beyond his years. It was decidedly not smart, and smartness was the dominant note at the Hotel d'Angleterre.

I was still more or less vaguely ruminating him, in a corner of the smoking-room, on that first evening, when I became aware that he was standing near me. As I looked up, our eyes met, and for the fraction of a second fixed each other. It was barely the fraction of a second, but it was time enough for the transmission of a message. I knew as certainly as if he had said so that he wanted to speak, to break the ice, to sc.r.a.pe an acquaintance; I knew that he had approached me and was loitering in my neighbourhood for that specific purpose. I _don't_ know, I have studied the psychology of the moment in vain to understand, why I felt a perverse impulse to put him off. I was interested in him, I was curious about him; and there he stood, testifying that the interest was reciprocal, ready to make the advances, only waiting for a glance or a motion of encouragement; and I deliberately secluded myself behind my coffee-cup and my cigarette smoke. I suppose it was the working of some obscure mannish vanity--of what in a woman would have defined itself as coyness and coquetry. If he wanted to speak--well, let him speak; I wouldn't help him. I could realise the processes of _his_ mind even more clearly than those of my own--his desire, his hesitancy. He was too timid to leap the barriers; I must open a gate for him. He hovered near me for a minute longer, and then drifted away. I felt his disappointment, his spiritual shrug of the shoulders; and I perceived rather suddenly that I was disappointed myself. I must have been hoping all along that he would speak _quand meme_, and now I was moved to run after him, to call him back. That, however, would imply a consciousness of guilt, an admission that my att.i.tude had been intentional; so I kept my seat, making a mental rendezvous with him for the morrow.

Between my Irish _vis-a-vis_ Flaherty and myself there existed no such strain. He presently sauntered up to me, and dropped into conversation as easily as if we had been old friends.

"Well, and are you here for your health or your entertainment?" he began. "But I don't need to ask that of a man who's drinking black coffee and smoking tobacco at this hour of the night. I'm the only invalid at our end of the table, and I'm no better than an amateur meself. It's a barrister's throat I have--I caught it waiting for briefs in me chambers at Doblin."

We chatted together for a half-hour or so, and before we parted he had given me a good deal of general information--about the town, the natives, the visitors, the sands, the golf-links, the hunting, and, with the rest, about our neighbours at table.

"Did ye notice the pink-faced bald little man at me right? That's Cornel Escott, C.B., retired. He takes a sea-bath every morning, to live up to the letters; and faith, it's an act of heroism, no less, in weather the like of this. Three weeks have I been here, and but wan day of suns.h.i.+ne, and the mercury never above fifty. The other fellow, him at me left, is what you'd be slow to suspect by the look of him, I'll go bail; and that's a bar'net, Sir Richard Maistre, with a place in Hamps.h.i.+re, and ten thousand a year if he's a penny. The young lady beside yourself rejoices in the euphonious name of Hicks, and trains her Popper and Mommer behind her like slaves in a Roman triumph.

They're Americans, if you must have the truth, though I oughtn't to tell it on them, for I'm an Irishman myself, and its not for the pot to be bearing tales of the kettle. However, their tongues bewray them; so I've violated no confidence."

The knowledge that my young man was a baronet with a place in Hamps.h.i.+re somewhat disenchanted me. A baronet with a place in Hamps.h.i.+re left too little to the imagination. The description seemed to curtail his potentialities, to prescribe his...o...b..t, to connote turnip-fields, house-parties, and a whole system of British commonplace. Yet, when, the next day at luncheon, I again had him before me in the flesh, my interest revived. Its lapse had been due to an a.s.sociation of ideas which I now recognised as unscientific. A baronet with twenty places in Hamps.h.i.+re would remain at the end of them all a human being; and no human being could be finished off in a formula of half a dozen words. Sir Richard Maistre, anyhow, couldn't be. He was enigmatic, and his effect upon me was enigmatic too. Why did I feel that tantalising inclination to stare at him, coupled with that reluctance frankly to engage in talk with him? Why did he attack his luncheon with that appearance of grim resolution? For a minute, after he had taken his seat, he eyed his knife, fork, and napkin, as a labourer might a load that he had to lift, measuring the difficulties he must cope with; then he gave his head a resolute nod, and set to work. To-day, as yesterday, he said very little, murmured an occasional remark into the ear of Flaherty, accompanying it usually with a sudden short smile: but he listened to everything, and did so with apparent appreciation.

Our proceedings were opened by Miss Hicks, who asked Colonel Escott, "Well, Colonel, have you had your bath this morning?"

The Colonel chuckled, and answered, "Oh, yes--yes, yes--couldn't forego my bath, you know--couldn't possibly forego my bath."

"And what was the temperature of the water?" she continued.

"Fifty-two--fifty-two--three degrees warmer than the air--three degrees," responded the Colonel, still chuckling, as if the whole affair had been extremely funny.

"And you, Mr. Flaherty, I suppose you've been to Bayonne?"

"No, I've broken me habit, and not left the hotel."

Subsequent experience taught me that these were conventional modes by which the conversation was launched every day, like the preliminary moves in chess. We had another ritual for dinner: Miss Hicks then inquired if the Colonel had taken his ride, and Flaherty played his game of golf. The next inevitable step was common to both meals.

Colonel Escott would pour himself a gla.s.s of the _vin ordinaire_, a jug of which was set by every plate, and holding it up to the light, exclaim with simulated gusto, "Ah! Fine old wine! Remarkably full rich flavour!" At this pleasantry we would all gently laugh; and the word was free.

Sir Richard, as I have said, appeared to be an attentive and appreciative listener, not above smiling at our mildest sallies; but watching him out of the corner of an eye, I noticed that my own observations seemed to strike him with peculiar force--which led me to talk _at_ him. Why not to him, with him? The interest was reciprocal; he would have liked a dialogue; he would have welcomed a chance to commence one; and I could at any instant have given him such a chance.

I talked _at_ him, it is true; but I talked _with_ Flaherty or Miss Hicks, or _to_ the company at large. Of his separate ident.i.ty he had no reason to believe me conscious. From a mixture of motives, in which I'm not sure that a certain heathenish enjoyment of his embarra.s.sment didn't count for something, I was determined that if he wanted to know me he must come the whole distance; I wouldn't meet him halfway. Of course I had no idea that it could be a matter of the faintest real importance to the man. I judged _his_ feelings by my own; and though I was interested in him, I shall have conveyed an altogether exaggerated notion of my interest if you fancy it kept me awake at night. How was I to guess that his case was more serious--that he was not simply desirous of a little amusing talk, but starving, starving for a little human sympathy, a little brotherly love and comrades.h.i.+p?--that he was in an abnormally sensitive condition of mind, where mere negative unresponsiveness could hurt him like a slight or a rebuff?