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Simon the jester / by William J. Locke ; with four illustrations by James Montgomery Flagg. | ||
I am a personage apart from humanity. I vary from the kindly ways of man. A curse is on me.
Surely no man has fought harder than I have done to convince himself of the deadly seriousness of existence; and surely before the feet of no man has Destiny cast such stumbling-blocks to faith. I might be an ancient dweller in the Thebaid struggling towards dreams of celestial habitations, and confronted only by grotesque visions of hell. No matter what I do, I'm baffled. I look upon sorrow and say, "Lo, this is tragedy!" and hey, presto! a trick of lightning turns it into farce. I cry aloud, in perfervid zeal, "Life is real, life is earnest, and the apotheosis of the fantastic is not its goal," and immediately a grinning irony comes to give the lie to my credo.
Or is it that, by inscrutable decree of the Almighty Powers, I am undergoing punishment for an old unregenerate point of view, being doomed to wear my detested motley for all eternity, to stretch out my hand for ever to grasp realities and find I can do nought but beat the air with my bladder; to listen with strained ear perpetually expectant of the music of the spheres, and catch nothing but the mocking jingle of the bells on my fool's cap?
I don't know. I give it up.
Such were my thoughts on the morning after my interview with Dale, when I had read a long, long letter from Lola, which she had despatched from Paris.
The letter lies before me now, many pages in a curious, half-formed foreign hand. Many would think it an ill-written letter--for there are faults of spelling and faults
". . . My dear, you must forgive me! My heart is breaking, but I know I'm doing right. There is nothing for it but to go out of your life for ever. It terrifies me to think of it, but it's the only way. I know you think you love me, dear; but you can't, you can't really love a woman so far beneath you, and I would sooner never see you again than marry you and wake up one day and find that you hated and scorned me. . . ."
Can you wonder that I shook my fist at Heaven and danced with rage?
And so forth, and so forth, in the most heartrending strain of insensate self-sacrifice and heroic self-abasement. The vainest and most heartless dog of a man stands abashed and helpless before such things in a woman.
She had not seen or written to me because she would not have her resolution weakened. After the great wrench, succeeding things were easier. She had taken Anastasius's cats and proposed to work them in the
At the fourth reading of the letter I stopped short at these words. God's good angel, indeed! Could anything have been more calculated to put a man into a frenzy? I seized my hat and stick and went in search of the nearest public telephone office. In less than ten minutes I had arranged an immediate interview with Eleanor Faversham at my sister Agatha's, and in less than half an hour I was pacing up and down Agatha's sitting-room waiting for her. God's good angel! The sound of the words made me choke with wrath. There are times when angelic interference in human destinies is entirely unwarrantable. I stamped and I fumed, and I composed a speech in which I told Eleanor exactly what I thought of angels.
As I had to wait a considerable time, however, before Eleanor appeared, the raging violence of my wrath abated, and when she did enter the room smiling and fresh, with the spring in her clear eyes and a flush on her cheek, I just said: "How d'ye do, Eleanor?" in the most commonplace way, and offered her a chair.
"I've come, you see. You were rather peremptory, so I thought it must be a matter of great importance."
"It is," said I. "You went to see Madame Brandt."
"I did," she replied, looking at me steadily, "and I have tried to write to you, but it is more difficult than I thought."
"Well," said I, "it's no use writing now, for you've managed to drive her out of the country."
She half rose in her chair and regarded me with wide-blue eyes.
"I've driven her out of the country?"
"Yes; with her maid and her belongings and Anastasius Papadopoulos's troupe of performing cats, and Anastasius Papadopoulos's late pupil and assistant Quast. She has given up her comfortable home in London and now proposes to be a wanderer among the music-halls of Europe."
"But that's not my fault! Indeed, it isn't."
"She says in a letter I received this morning bearing no address, that if you hadn't come to her like God's good angel, she would have remained in London."
Eleanor looked bewildered. "I thought I had made it perfectly clear to her."
"Made what clear?"
She blushed a furious red. "Can't you guess? You must be as stupid as she is. And, of course, you're wildly angry with me. Aren't you?"
"I certainly wish you hadn't gone to see her."
"Was it merely to tell me this that you ordered me to
I felt I had been wanting in tact; also that I had put myself--through an impetuosity foreign to what I had thought to be my character--in a foolish position. If I replied affirmatively to her question, she would have served me perfectly right by tossing her head in the air and marching indignantly out of the room. I temporised.
"In order to understand the extraordinary consequences of your interview, I should like to have some idea of what took place. I know, my dear Eleanor," I continued as gently as I could, "I know that you went to see her out of the very great kindness of your heart--"
"No, I didn't."
I made a little gesture in lieu of reply. There was a span of silence. Eleanor played with the silky ears of Agatha's little Yorkshire terrier which had somehow strayed into the room and taken possession of her lap.
"Don't you see, Simon?" she said at last, half tearfully, without taking her eyes off the dog, "don't you see that by accusing me in this way you make it almost impossible for me to speak? And I was going to be so loyal to you."
A tear fell down her cheek on to the dog's back, and convicted me of unmitigated brutality.
"What else could you be but loyal?" I murmured. "Your attitude all through has shone it."
She flashed her hand angrily over her eyes, and looked at me. "And I wanted to be loyal to the end. If you had waited and she had waited, you would have seen. As soon as I could have conveyed it to you decently, I should have shown you---- Ah!" She broke off, put the Yorkshire terrier on the sofa beside her, and
"My dear," said I, when she had come to the end of this astonishing avowal, and stood looking at me somewhat defiantly and twisting her fingers nervously in front of her, "I don't know what in the world to say to you."
"You can tell me, at least, that my instinct was right."
"Which one? A woman has so many."
"That you love Lola Brandt."
I lifted my arms in a helpless gesture and let them drop to my sides.
"One is not one's own master in these things."
"Then you do?"
"Yes," said I in a low voice.
Eleanor drew a long breath, turned and sat down again on the sofa.
"And she knows it?"
"I have told her so."
"Then why in the world has she run away?"
"Because you two wonderful and divinely foolish people have been too big for each other. While you were impressed by one quality in her she was equally impressed by another in you. She departed, burning her ships, so as to go entirely out of my life for the simple reason, as she herself expresses it, that she was not fit to black your boots. So," said I, taking her left hand in mine and patting it gently, "between you two dear, divine angel fools, I fall to the ground."
A while later, just before we parted, she said in her frank way:
"I know many people would say I've behaved with shocking impropriety-- immodestly and all that. You don't, do you? I believe half the unhappiness in life comes from people being afraid to go straight at things. Perhaps I've gone too straight this time--but you'll forgive me?"
I smiled and squeezed her hand. "My dear," said I, "Lola Brandt was right. You are God's good angel." I went away in a chastened mood, no longer wrathful, for what could
woman do more for mortal man than what Eleanor Faversham had attempted? She had gone to see whether she should stand against her rival, and with a superb generosity, unprecedented in her sex,
Where would it end? What would happen next? Nothing was too outrageously, maniacally impossible. I walked up Sloane Street, a street for which impeccable respectability, security of life and person, comfortable, modern, twentieth-century, prosperous smugness has no superior in all the smug cities of the earth, and I was prepared to encounter with a smile of recognition
The only possible reason I can think of now is that the Almighty Powers did not consider it worth while to go to quite so much trouble on my account.
This, however, gives you some idea of my state of mind. But though it lasted for a considerable time, I would not have you believe that I fostered it unduly. Indeed, I repudiated it with some disgust. I took it out, examined it, and finding it preposterous, set to work to modify it into harmony with the circumstances of my every-day life. Even the most sorely tried of men cannot walk abroad shedding his exasperation around like pestilence. If he does, he is put into a lunatic asylum.
If a man cannot immediately assuage the hunger of his heart, he must meet starvation with a smiling face. In the meantime, he has to eat so as to satisfy the hunger of his body, to clothe himself with a certain discrimination, to attend to polite commerce with his fellow man and to put to some fair use the hours of his day. I did not doubt but that by means of intelligent inquiry which I determined to pursue in every possible direction I should sooner or later obtain news of Lola. A lady
As the affairs of one drunken tailor's family could not afford me complete occupation for my leisure hours, I began to find myself insensibly drawn by Campion's unreflecting enthusiasm into all kinds of small duties connected with Barbara's Building. Before I could realise that I had consented, I discovered myself in charge of an evening class of villainous-looking and uncleanly youths who assembled in one of the lecture-rooms to listen to my recollections of the history of England. I was to continue the course begun by a young Oxford man, who, for some reason or other, had migrated from Barbara's Building to Toynbee Hall.
"I've never done any schoolmastering in my life. Suppose," said I, with vivid recollections of my school days, "suppose they rag me?"
"They won't," said Campion, who had come to introduce me to the class.
And they did not. I found these five and twenty youthful members of the proletariat the most attentive, respectable, and intelligent audience that ever listened to a lecture. Gradually I came to perceive that they were not as villainous-looking and uncleanly as at first sight I had imagined. A great many of them took notes. When I came to the end of my dissertation on Henry VIII, I went among them, as I discovered the
Other things Campion off-handedly put into my charge. I went on tours of inspection round the houses of his competing housewives. I acted as his deputy at the police court when ladies and gentlemen with a good record at Barbara's got into trouble with the constabulary. I investigated cases for the charity of the institution. In quite a short time I realised with a gasp that I had become part of the machinery of Barbara's Building, and was remorselessly and helplessly whirled hither and thither with the rest of the force of the driving wheel which was Rex Campion.
The amazing, the astounding, the utterly incredible thing about the whole matter was that I not only liked it, but plunged into it heart and soul as I had never plunged into work before. I discovered sympathies that had hitherto lain undreamed of within me. In my
Also, for the first time in all my life, I had taken pain to be the companion of my soul. All my efforts to find Lola were fruitless. I became acquainted with the heartache, the longing for the unattainable, the agony of spirit. The only anodyne was a forgetfulness of self, the only compensation a glimmer of a hope and the shadow of a smile in the grey and leaden lives around me.
On Whit Monday evening I was walking along the Thames Embankment on my way home from Waterloo Station, wet through, tired out, disappointed, and looking forward to the dry, soft raiment, the warm, cosy room, the excellent dinner that awaited me in my flat. I--with several others-- had been helping Campion with his annual outing of factory girls and young hooligans. The weather, which had been perfect on Saturday, Sunday, and when we had started, a gay and astonishing army, at seven o'clock, had broken before ten. It had rained, dully miserable, insistently all day long. The happy day in the New Forest had been a damp and dismal fiasco. I was returning home, thinking I might walk off an incipient chill, as depressed as no one but the baffled philanthropist can be, when I perceived a tattered and dejected man sitting on a bench, a clothes-basket between his feet, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and sobbing as if his
"You seem to be pretty miserable. What's wrong?"
He turned bleared, yet honest-looking eyes upon me.
"The whole blasted show!" said he. "There's nothing right in it, s'welp me Gawd."
I gave a modified assent to the proposition and drew my coat-collar over my eyes. "Being wet through doesn't make it any better," said I.
"Who would ha' thought it would come down as it has to-day? Tell me that. It's enough to make a man cut his throat!"
I was somewhat surprised. "You're not in such a great distress just because it has been a rainy day!"
"Ain't I just!" he exclaimed. "It's been and gone and ruined me, this day has. Look 'ere, guv'nor, I'll tell you all about it. I've been out of work, see? I was in 'orspital for three months and I couldn't get nothing regular to do when I come out. I'm a packer by trade. I did odd jobs, see, and the wife she earned a little, too, and we managed to keep things going and to scrape together five shillings, that's three months' savings, against Whitsun Bank Holiday. And as the weather was so fine, I laid it all out in paper windmills to sell to the kids on 'Amstead 'Eath. And I started out this morning with the basket full of them all so fine and pretty, and no sooner do I get on the 'Eath than the rain comes down and wipes out the whole blooming lot, before I could sell one. Look 'ere!"
He drew a bedraggled sheet of newspaper from the clothes-basket and displayed a piteous sodden welter of
"And there's not a bite in the 'ouse, nor not likely to be for days; and I daren't go home and face the missus and the kids--and I wish I was dead."
I had already seen many pitiful tragedies during my brief experience with Campion; but the peculiar pitifulness of this one wrung my heart. It taught me as nothing had done before how desperately humble are the aspirations of the poor. I thought of the cosy comfort that awaited me in my own home; the despair that awaited him in his.
I put my hand in my pocket.
"You seem to be a good chap," said I.
He shrugged his shoulders. The consciousness of applauded virtue offered no consolation. I drew out a couple of half-crowns and threw them into the basket.
"For the missus and the kids," said I.
He picked them out of the welter, and holding them in his hand, looked at me stupidly.
"Can you afford it, guv'nor?"
At first I thought this remark was some kind of ill-conditioned sarcasm; but suddenly I realised that dripping wet and covered with mud from head to foot, with a shapeless, old, green, Homburg hat drooping forlornly about my ears, I did not fulfil his conception of the benevolent millionaire. I laughed, and rose from the bench.
"Yes. Quite well. Better luck next time."
I nodded a good-bye, and walked away. After a minute, he came running after me.
"'Ere," said he, "I ain't thanked yer. Gawd knows how I'm going to do it. I can't! But, 'ere--would you mind if I chucked a lot of the stuff into the river and told the missus I had sold it, and just got back my money? She's proud, she is, and has never accepted a
He looked at me with such earnest appeal that I saw that the saving of his wife's pride was a serious matter.
"Of course," said I, "and here's a few ha'pence to add to it, so as to give colour to the story."
He saw that I understood. "Thank you kindly, sir," said he.
"Tell me," said I, "do you love your wife?"
He gaped at me for a moment; obviously the question had never been put to him either by himself or anybody else. Then, seeing that my interest was genuine, he spat and scratched his head.
"We've been together twenty years," he said, in a low voice, emotion struggling with self-consciousness, "and I've 'ad nothing agin her all that time. She's a bloomin' wonder, I tell you straight."
I held out my hand. "At any rate, you've got what I haven't," said I. "A woman who loves you to welcome you home."
And I went away, longing, longing for Lola's arms and the deep love in her voice.
Now that I come to view my actions in some sort of perspective, it seems to me that it was the underlying poignancy of this trumpery incident--a poignancy which, nevertheless, bit deep into my soul, that finally determined the current of my life.
A short while afterwards, Campion, who for some time past had found the organisation of Barbara's Building had far outgrown his individual power of control, came to me with a proposal that I should undertake the management of the institution under his general directorship. As he knew of my financial affairs and of my praiseworthy but futile efforts to live on two hundred a year, he offered me another two hundred by way of salary and quarters in the Building. I
When I told Agatha, she nearly fainted.
Simon the jester / by William J. Locke ; with four illustrations by James Montgomery Flagg. | ||