Buried Alive: a Tale of These Days Part 14

All life gave him joy; all life was beautiful to him. He had his warm bath; the bath-room was not of the latest convenience, but Alice could have made a four-wheeler convenient. As he pa.s.sed to and fro on the first-floor he heard the calm, efficient activities below stairs. She was busy in the mornings; her eyes would seem to say to him, "Now, between my uprising and lunch-time please don't depend on me for intellectual or moral support. I am on the spot, but I am also at the wheel and must not be disturbed."

Then he descended, fresh as a boy, although the promontory which prevented a direct vision of his toes showed accretions. The front-room was a shrine for his breakfast. She served it herself, in her-white ap.r.o.n, promptly on his arrival! Eggs! Toast! Coffee! It was nothing, that breakfast; and yet it was everything. No breakfast could have been better. He had probably eaten about fifteen thousand hotel breakfasts before Alice taught him what a real breakfast was. After serving it she lingered for a moment, and then handed him the _Daily Telegraph_, which had been lying on a chair.

"Here's your _Telegraph_," she said cheerfully, tacitly disowning any property or interest in the _Telegraph_. For her, newspapers were men's toys. She never opened a paper, never wanted to know what was going on in the world. She was always intent upon her own affairs. Politics--and all that business of the mere machinery of living: she perfectly ignored it! She lived. She did nothing but live. She lived every hour. Priam felt truly that he had at last got down to the bed-rock of life.

There were twenty pages of the _Telegraph_, far more matter than a man could read in a day even if he read and read and neither ate nor slept.

And all of it so soothing in its rich variety! It gently lulled you; it was the ideal companion for a poached egg; upstanding against the coffee-pot, it stood for the solidity of England in the seas. Priam folded it large; he read all the articles down to the fold; then turned the thing over, and finished all of them. After communing with the _Telegraph_, he communed with his own secret nature, and wandered about, rolling a cigarette. Ah! The first cigarette! His wanderings led him to the kitchen, or at least as far as the threshold thereof. His wife was at work there. Upon every handle or article that might soil she put soft brown paper, and in addition she often wore house-gloves; so that her hands remained immaculate; thus during the earlier hours of the day the house, especially in the region of fireplaces, had the air of being in curl-papers.

"I'm going out now, Alice," he said, after he had drawn on his finely polished boots.

"Very well, love," she replied, preoccupied with her work. "Lunch as usual." She never demanded luxuriousness from him. She had got him. She was sure of him. That satisfied her. Sometimes, like a simple woman who has come into a set of pearls, she would, as it were, take him out of his drawer and look at him, and put him back.

At the gate he hesitated whether to turn to the left, towards High Street, or to the right, towards Oxford Road. He chose the right, but he would have enjoyed himself equally had he chosen the left. The streets through which he pa.s.sed were populated by domestic servants and tradesmen's boys. He saw white-capped girls cleaning door-k.n.o.bs or windows, or running along the streets, like escaped nuns, or staring in soft meditation from bedroom windows. And the tradesmen's boys were continually leaping in and out of carts, or off and on tricycles, busily distributing food and drink, as though Putney had been a beleaguered city. It was extremely interesting and mysterious--and what made it the most mysterious was that the oligarchy of superior persons for whom these boys and girls so a.s.siduously worked, remained invisible. He pa.s.sed a newspaper shop and found his customary delight in the placards.

This morning the _Daily Ill.u.s.trated_ announced nothing but: "Portrait of a boy aged 12 who weighs 20 stone." And the _Record_ whispered in scarlet: "What the German said to the King. Special." The _Journal_ cried: "Surrey's glorious finish." And the _Courier_ shouted: "The Unwritten Law in the United States. Another Scandal."

Not for gold would he have gone behind these placards to the organs themselves; he preferred to gather from the placards alone what wonders of yesterday the excellent staid _Telegraph_ had unaccountably missed.

But in the _Financial Times_ he saw: "Cohoon's Annual Meeting. Stormy Scenes." And he bought the _Financial Times_ and put it into his pocket for his wife, because she had an interest in Cohoon's Brewery, and he conceived the possibility of her caring to glance at the report.

_The Simple Joy of Life_

After crossing the South-Western Railway he got into the Upper Richmond Road, a thoroughfare which always diverted and amused him. It was such a street of contrasts. Any one could see that, not many years before, it had been a sacred street, trod only by feet genteel, and made up of houses each christened with its own name and each standing in its own garden. And now energetic persons had put churches into it, vast red things with gigantic bells, and large drapery shops, with blouses at six-and-eleven, and court photographers, and banks, and cigar-stores, and auctioneers' offices. And all kinds of omnibuses ran along it. And yet somehow it remained meditative and superior. In every available s.p.a.ce gigantic posters were exhibited. They all had to do with food or pleasure. There were York hams eight feet high, that a regiment could not have eaten in a month; s.h.a.ggy and ferocious oxen peeping out of monstrous teacups in their anxiety to be consumed; spouting bottles of ale whose froth alone would have floated the mail steamers pictured on an adjoining sheet; and forty different decoctions for imparting strength. Then after a few score yards of invitation to debauch there came, with characteristic admirable English common sense, a cure for indigestion, so large that it would have given ease to a mastodon who had by inadvertence swallowed an elephant. And then there were the calls to pleasure. Astonishing, the quant.i.ty of palaces that offered you exactly the same entertainment twice over on the same night!

Astonishing, the reliance on number in this matter of amus.e.m.e.nt!

Authenticated statements that a certain performer had done a certain thing in a certain way a thousand and one times without interruption were stuck all over the Upper Richmond Road, apparently in the sure hope that you would rush to see the thousand and second performance. These performances were invariably styled original and novel. All the remainder of free wall s.p.a.ce was occupied by philanthropists who were ready to give away cigarettes at the nominal price of a penny a packet.

Priam Farll never tired of the phantasmagoria of Upper Richmond Road.

The interminable, intermittent vision of food dead and alive, and of performers performing the same performance from everlasting to everlasting, and of millions and millions of cigarettes ascending from the mouths of handsome young men in incense to heaven--this rare vision, of which in all his wanderings he had never seen the like, had the singular effect of lulling his soul into a profound content. Not once did he arrive at the end of the vision. No! when he reached Barnes Station he could see the vision still stretching on and on; but, filled to the brim, he would get into an omnibus and return. The omnibus awoke him to other issues: the omnibus was an antidote. In the omnibus cleanliness was nigh to G.o.dliness. On one pane a soap was extolled, and on another the exordium, "For this is a true saying and worthy of all acceptation," was followed by the statement of a religious dogma; while on another pane was an urgent appeal not to do in the omnibus what you would not do in a drawing-room. Yes, Priam Farll had seen the world, but he had never seen a city so incredibly strange, so packed with curious and rare psychological interest as London. And he regretted that he had not discovered London earlier in his life-long search after romance.

At the corner of the High Street he left the omnibus and stopped a moment to chat with his tobacconist. His tobacconist was a stout man in a white ap.r.o.n, who stood for ever behind a counter and sold tobacco to the most respected residents of Putney. All his ideas were connected either with tobacco or with Putney. A murder in the Strand to that tobacconist was less than the breakdown of a motor bus opposite Putney Station; and a change of government less than a change of programme at the Putney Empire. A rather pessimistic tobacconist, not inclined to believe in a First Cause, until one day a drunken man smashed Salmon and Gluckstein's window down the High Street, whereupon his opinion of Providence went up for several days! Priam enjoyed talking to him, though the tobacconist was utterly impervious to ideas and never gave out ideas. This morning the tobacconist was at his door. At the other corner was the st.u.r.dy old woman whom Priam had observed from his window.

She sold flowers.

"Fine old woman, that!" said Priam heartily, after he and the tobacconist had agreed upon the fact that it was a glorious morning.

"She used to be at the opposite corner by the station until last May but one, when the police shifted her," said the tobacconist.

"Why did the police shift her?" asked Priam.

"I don't know as I can tell you," said the tobacconist. "But I remember her this twelve year."

"I only noticed her this morning," said Priam. "I saw her from my bedroom window, coming down the Werter Road. I said to myself, 'She's the finest old woman I ever saw in my life!'"

"Did you now!" murmured the tobacconist. "She's rare and dirty."

"I like her to be dirty," said Priam stoutly. "She ought to be dirty.

She wouldn't be the same if she were clean."

"I don't hold with dirt," said the tobacconist calmly. "She'd be better if she had a bath of a Sat.u.r.day night like other folks."

"Well," said Priam, "I want an ounce of the usual."

"Thank _you_, sir," said the tobacconist, putting down three-halfpence change out of sixpence as Priam thanked him for the packet.

Nothing whatever in such a dialogue! Yet Priam left the shop with a distinct feeling that life was good. And he plunged into High Street, lost himself in crowds of perambulators and nice womanly women who were bustling honestly about in search of food or raiment. Many of them carried little red books full of long lists of things which they and their admirers and the offspring of mutual affection had eaten or would shortly eat. In the High Street all was luxury: not a necessary in the street. Even the bakers' shops were a ma.s.s of sultana and Berlin pancakes. Illuminated calendars, gramophones, corsets, picture postcards, Manilla cigars, bridge-scorers, chocolate, exotic fruit, and commodious mansions--these seemed to be the princ.i.p.al objects offered for sale in High Street. Priam bought a sixpenny edition of Herbert Spencer's _Essays_ for four-pence-halfpenny, and pa.s.sed on to Putney Bridge, whose n.o.ble arches divided a first storey of vans and omnibuses from a ground-floor of barges and racing eights. And he gazed at the broad river and its hanging gardens, and dreamed; and was wakened by the roar of an electric train shooting across the stream on a red causeway a few yards below him. And, miles off, he could descry the twin towers of the Crystal Palace, more marvellous than mosques!

"Astounding!" he murmured joyously. He had not a care in the world; and Putney was all that Alice had painted it. In due time, when bells had pealed to right and to left of him, he went home to her.

_Collapse of the Putney System_

Now, just at the end of lunch, over the last stage of which they usually sat a long time, Alice got up quickly, in the midst of her Stilton, and, going to the mantelpiece, took a letter therefrom.

"I wish you'd look at that, Henry," she said, handing him the letter.

"It came this morning, but of course I can't be bothered with that sort of thing in the morning. So I put it aside."

He accepted the letter, and unfolded it with the professional all-knowing air which even the biggest male fool will quite successfully put on in the presence of a woman if consulted about business. When he had unfolded the thing--it was typed on stiff, expensive, quarto paper--he read it. In the lives of beings like Priam Farll and Alice a letter such as that letter is a terrible event, unique, earth-arresting; simple recipients are apt, on receiving it, to imagine that the Christian era has come to an end. But tens of thousands of similar letters are sent out from the City every day, and the City thinks nothing of them.

The letter was about Cohoon's Brewery Company, Limited, and it was signed by a firm of solicitors. It referred to the verbatim report, which it said would be found in the financial papers, of the annual meeting of the company held at the Cannon Street Hotel on the previous day, and to the exceedingly unsatisfactory nature of the Chairman's statement. It regretted the absence of Mrs. Alice Challice (her change of condition had not yet reached the heart of Cohoon's) from the meeting, and asked her whether she would be prepared to support the action of a committee which had been formed to eject the existing board and which had already a following of 385,000 votes. It finished by a.s.serting that unless the committee was immediately lifted to absolute power the company would be quite ruined.

Priam re-read the letter aloud.

"What does it all mean?" asked Alice quietly.

"Well," said he, "that's what it means."

"Does it mean--?" she began.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed, "I forgot. I saw something on a placard this morning about Cohoon's, and I thought it might interest you, so I bought it." So saying, he drew from his pocket the _Financial Times_, which he had entirely forgotten. There it was: a column and a quarter of the Chairman's speech, and nearly two columns of stormy scenes. The Chairman was the Marquis of Drumgaldy, but his rank had apparently not shielded him from the violence of expletives such as "Liar!" "Humbug!" and even "Rogue!" The Marquis had merely stated, with every formula of apology, that, owing to the extraordinary depreciation in licensed property, the directors had not felt justified in declaring any dividend at all on the Ordinary Shares of the company. He had made this quite simple a.s.sertion, and instantly a body of shareholders, less reasonable and more avaricious even than shareholders usually are, had begun to turn the historic hall of the Cannon Street Hotel into a bear garden. One might have imagined that the sole aim of brewery companies was to make money, and that the patriotism of old-world brewers, that patriotism which impelled them to supply an honest English beer to the honest English working-man at a purely nominal price, was scorned and forgotten. One was, indeed, forced to imagine this. In vain the Marquis pointed out that the shareholders had received a fifteen per cent, dividend for years and years past, and that really, for once in a way, they ought to be prepared to sacrifice a temporary advantage for the sake of future prosperity. The thought of those regular high dividends gave rise to no grat.i.tude in shareholding hearts; it seemed merely to render them the more furious. The baser pa.s.sions had been let loose in the Cannon Street Hotel. The directors had possibly been expecting the baser pa.s.sions, for a posse of policemen was handy at the door, and one shareholder, to save him from having the blood of Marquises on his soul, was ejected.

Ultimately, according to the picturesque phrases of the _Financial Times_ report, the meeting broke up in confusion.

"How much have you got in Cohoon's?" Priam asked Alice, after they had looked through the report together.

"All I have is in Cohoon's," said she, "except this house. Father left it like that. He always said there was nothing like a brewery. I've heard him say many and many a time a brewery was better than consols. I think there's 200 5 shares. Yes, that's it. But of course they're worth much more than that. They're worth about 12 each. All I know is they bring me in 150 a year as regular as the clock. What's that there, after 'broke up in confusion'?"

She pointed with her finger to a paragraph, and he read in a low voice the fluctuations of Cohoon's Ordinary Shares during the afternoon. They had finished at 6 5s. Mrs. Henry Leek had lost over 1,000 in about half-a-day.

"They've always brought me in 150 a year," she insisted, as though she had been saying: "It's always been Christmas Day on the 25th of December, and of course it will be the same this year."

"It doesn't look as if they'd bring you in anything this time," said he.

"Oh, but Henry!" she protested.

Beer had failed! That was the truth of it. Beer had failed. Who would have guessed that beer could fail in England? The wisest, the most prudent men in Lombard Street had put their trust in beer, as the last grand bulwark of the nation; and even beer had failed. The foundations of England's greatness were, if not gone, going. Insufficient to argue bad management, indiscreet purchases of licences at inflated prices! In the excellent old days a brewery would stand an indefinite amount of bad management! Times were changed. The British workman, caught in a wave of temperance, could no longer be relied upon to drink! It was the crown of his sins against society. Trade unions were nothing to this latest caprice of his, which spread desolation in a thousand genteel homes.

Alice wondered what her father would have said, had he lived. On the whole, she was glad that he did not happen to be alive. The shock to him would have been too rude. The floor seemed to be giving way under Alice, melting into a sort of bog that would swallow up her and her husband.

For years, without any precise information, but merely by instinct, she had felt that England, beneath the surface, was not quite the island it had been--and here was the awful proof.

She gazed at her husband, as a wife ought to gaze at her husband in a crisis. His thoughts were much vaguer than hers, his thoughts about money being always extremely vague.